Grey Gardens (1975)

Edith and Little Edie (she is not so little, she is 56), mother and daughter live in a dilapidated mansion on the country. They are both artistic souls with a taste for the extravagant (they love music) and their entire demanor has an air of poise. But that doesn't prevent the house from being cluttered by things and being in an overall state of negligence. Racoons live in the attic and there are cats everywhere. A few years before the documentary was made, the house was fixed up by their relative Jackie Onassis. Grey Gardens (dir. Maysles brothers, Ellen Hovde) is one of the most peculiar documentaries I've seen - pecualiar and, somehow, both funny and deeply sad. Edith and Edie are presented as reclusives who, mostly, live in the past. The documentary follows them in what for them is ordinary life; they sing, they dance, they argue, they tell stories. The presence of the camera makes a huge difference. It is clear that both of these women love the attention they get, and they enjoy embarking on tales about how it used to be back in the days and in Little Edie's case, what life could have been like. She constantly blames her mother for holding her back, for luring her back to her twenty years ago, interrupting her successful and glamorous life in New York. But the truth seems to be more complicated. Grey Gardens explores a relation of co-dependency, but where none of the parties is ready to really acknowledge in what way she is dependent on the other. This turns out to be one of the sources of conflict. It's rare to see a movie about people who know each other so intimately, and whose relation is so close (some scenes evoke a sense of claustrophobia) but there are also things they don't see, or want to see, in each other, there are moments when they try to keep up the distance between themselves (keeping up appearences is all-important, but in these women, one is not so sure what is a pose and what is, you know, something else). It's hard to explain the brilliance of the film. Is it the pleasure of watching two eccentrics who don't care much about the external world - or, for that matter, the state of the household (as one of them says in a rare moment of reflection, 'mother is not much of a cleaner' and in another scene, Edith calmly watches a cat pissing behind the portait of her younger self standing next to the bed)? No, it's not the kind of pleasure where you take some kind of comfort in other people's weird activities. Because as I said, Grey Garden is also sad. Of course I was amused by the ladies' constant singing, their weird clothes and broken story-telling (sometimes they both talk at the same time), but most of all I was disturbed by the self-deception shown in the film, a form of delusion expressed as an escape into an inner sphere, a sphere where you revel in sweet memories, fantasies or in outbursts of ressentiment. I was also tempted to read the film on a more metaphorical level, as a story about aristocracy and decay, but I don't know. Edith and Edie used to belong to high society, and that is also how they think of themselves now (in the documentary). In one of the few scenes involving other people, they receive guests who come to celebrate Edith's birthday. The fancy-looking, uncomfortable guests are placed around the kitchen table but the chairs are so dirty that they get a bundle of newspapers to sit on so that their clothes are not soiled. A while passes, Edith and Edie talks, and then the guests are gone, leaving to house to its usual rhythm.