Monday, May 18, 2015

Picnic (1955)

A stranger comes to town and causes great upheaval. The stranger's arrival sets old conflicts in motion; old wounds are re-opened and repressed tensions come to the surface. This can be said to be a genre of its own in Hollywood movies, regardless of whether the stranger is a cowboy, a criminal or a don juan. Joshua Logan's Picnic is a comedy/romance/drama rolled into one, an unabashedly melodramatic tale about small-town neuroses. The elusive stranger is a drifter called Hal who jumps off the fright train in a town somewhere in Kansas to look for his old college chum. He's there to visit an old pal but one thing leads to another and Hal ends up in the storm's eye, at the center of social conflict and dramas involving business and romance. Hal is the cheerful guy who wants to be liked by everybody. The climax of the film is a picnic featuring rowdy drunks, dancing and fierce jealousy. Picnic could almost have been directed by Nicholas Ray - the same focus on social upheaval. Another point of reference is Arthur Penn's outrageous (but rather funny) The Chase from 1966. Completely over-the-top, but I must confess I enjoyed this rather clunky story (along with the wooden and/or overwrought acting) about the drifter and the beatiful girl and her mother. - - Good trash.

Saturday, May 16, 2015

Rabbit hole (2010)

Rabbit hole (dir. John Cameron Mitchell) is a well-made and subdued film about grief and its effect on close relationships. It's a film without frills or big gestures, almost as far as you can get from Mitchell's Hedwig and the Angry Inch. It features some good acting - Nicole Kidman makes a good performance - and generally, the worst kinds of dramatic clichés are averted. The two main characters, a married couple in the suburbs, have lost their small child in a car accident. They do what they can to restore the routines and normalcy of everyday life. The film focuses on the distance between them and their inability to share their grief. They find fault with one another's attempts to be intimate with another and the communication between them constantly misfires (in this way, the film bears some similarities with another great performance by Kidman, Revolutionary Road). Kidman's character nurses a fascination for the boy who run over their child. The couple attend group therapy that the wife constantly questions the value of. The husband grows increasingly impatient with the marriage and finds a sympathetic friend in the therapy group. - - - This set-up may sound terribly formulaic and one can blame the film for not taking any risks, for sticking to the mature-film-about-life-pattern. Nonetheless, some scenes managed to capture the emptiness of the couple's life and the spouses' attempt to find a way out with a sort of emotional rawness. 

Friday, May 15, 2015

Pride (2014)

Pride (dir. Matthew Warchus) has sometimes been dismissed as a lighthearted feel-good comedy, a sugar-coated crowdpleaser. To me, it was so much more than this. To be honest, I have seen very few movies that express political hope the way this film does. It is true that the story about solidarity is couched within some genre conventions, but these don't in any way compromise or displace the urgency of this film. In fact, I thought the use of genre, the use of comedy and feel-good formulae, worked in a similar way as in Little Miss Sunshine. In these two cases, the familiarity of certain plot developments stands against the backdrop of a ever-difficult questions about hope and love. When people call a film 'uplifting' I usually respond with unease, but here I have nothing against that label: these two movies are uplifting, but not in a bad way: these film don't make me feel uplifted in a fuzzy way so that it simultaneously sneaks in lots of questionable baggage.

Pride celebrates the alliance between gay activists and coal miners in the eighties. A coal strike was struggling to overthrow the thatcherite policies. A group of gay activists decide that they should take part in the miners' struggle. After all, the characters in the film argue, they have a lot in common: their resisitance has similar features.The gang - in which friction is not completely non-present - heads off to Wales, where they meet their miners' and their families. In one sense the ensuing story chronicles the awkward encounter between urban and rural, but at the same time, the film shows the instability of these categories, and the ways encounters are much too unruly than we would expect in our gloomy preconceived ideas about differences and 'different interests'. What I liked best is perhaps how the film shows that this unruliness is something hopeful. A very limited part of the film's funny moments center around the clash between macho hicks and streetsmart gays. When we see such clashs, the aim is to reveal not the clash itself (haha, hicks and gays!!) but rather, the fragilities, secrets and hostilities at hand. Often, we see situations in which that type of clash never appears, and how people deal with this, to them, surprising openness.

One of the threads is the story about Gethin, who has left his homophobic village a long time ago. The film follows the struggle he goes through upon returning to Wales, and making an effort to talk to his family again. Small things matter. In one scene, the head of the committee in the village supported by the activists makes a phonecall and expects to talk to Gethin's boyfriend. But when she hears that she is talking to Gethin, she gently wishes him merry Christmas in Welsch.

I particularly appreciated the way the gender divisions both within the queer movement and the miners' community was dealt with. Perhaps the really good descriptions are of the wives of the miners, and the way they have formed a crucial part of the political struggle, while still being in a way subjected to a role in the shadows. The scenes in which the ladies from Wales head off to London to celebrate are marvellously moving in bringing out a sense of rebellion and freedom - but not freedom here described as 'the freedom of the city against the freedom of the narrow-minded village' but rather freedom as a celebration of life. Strangely, I come to think of the Ealing comedy Whisky Galore! (1949) and its representation of community, mischief and resistance.

Some reviewers have suggested that Pride is a nostalgic yearning for a time where things were more black and white. I disagree quite strongly with this. For me, the film represents a moral possibility with us now more than ever. A possibility of solidarity beyond identity, of politics beyond identity politics. Pride does not turn a blind eye to the difficulties such solidarity meets: smugness, self-interested indifference or internal rivaries. But it also shows that things C A N be easy, and that holding on to the idea that things MUST be difficult is extremely dangerous.