This is a long-unfinished review of Mistress America (2015)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2017 (19 to 26 October)
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18 March
This is a long-unfinished review of Mistress America (2015)
Spirit says ‘Five feet to the left and unhappy (not dropped into body)’ ~
Dr Yang (Alice (1990))
That Blondie track contains a pertinent reference, but ‘Souvenir’ by Orchestral Manœuvres in the Dark (or OMD) is actually part of the soundtrack : a perfect (but British²) single for a skittish take on the ways of New York City [though, for some reason, Wikipedia® styles the band ‘English’] – even for someone who lived through those times, redolent of that era, but maybe less easily placeable (one first thought of Gary Numan…) ? :
My obsession
It's my creation
You'll understand
It's not important now
'Souvenir' (by Paul Humphreys and Martin Cooper)
Personnel (in order of appearance) :
* Lola Kirke ~ Tracy [Fishlock ?]
* Greta Gerwig ~ Brooke Cardinas
* Cindy Cheung ~ Karen / tax attorney
Its fast-talking quipping is exhausting - for them, as well as for us ? - before they settle to it. Till it mellows, and slackens the pace, more like the imaginary game of billiards in Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, which is a conversation, cannoning off another one, that is quite parallel :
The film is a lot like the strands that go on, at the same time, in Deconstructing Harry (1997), with a hooker, an old friend who dies, and an abducted son - all in the car with Harry Block on his way to be honoured by his old college. Except that Woody Allen (a) knows to keep it short, and (b) to have the lines better complement each other than the height of intricate Renaissance polyphony, where the text, even if one has it before one, can often barely be followed.
Deconstructing Harry is the apt film to think of, not only because of its stranded nature (in one sense), but because the characters become stranded (in another) in a situation of difficulty that is almost wholly of their making (or, in Harry’s case, of his). Brooke, who barely knows Tracy (but who is impressionable, not to say suggestible), has insisted to her³ :
You have to chase down the things that you say
Tracy, though she protests Me ? I don’t know anything !, is the willing participant on this Möbius-strip of a ride, However, she is as when Ben Stiller, embarrassingly, tries to make a pitch in While We’re Young - out of her depth with what she is doing.
When Greta Gerwig and he co-wrote Frances Ha (20??), which Noah Baumbach directed, it was delightfully knowing in its allusions to Woody Allen of the 1970s, and it was a delightful film. In life, as in film, you have to Know what you’re selling, and What you’re buying, and Mistress America does not…
A note on lighting :
In the use of light and dark, towards the end of the film, Greta Gerwig is in the darker part of the room, which is not just as it happens that way, but to reflect that another character is much more brightly lit – at what distance can we imagine them to be that there is such a gradient that the former is in shadow, the latter brightly lit ?
As was seen in While We’re Young (2014), although much more subtly than there, where insight and gullibility / naivety / self-deception (the recurring themes here) are also vividly pictured by extremes of lighting (Ben Stiller in darkness, Adam Driver iluminated)…
End-notes
¹ From 'Picture This', by Debbie Harry, Jimmy Destri, and Chris Stein.
²
Hope Springs (2012), too,
pleasantly surprised with the Scottish strains of Annie Lennox.
³ Which is self-referential to the story, though not in the rather patent and unsatisfying way of Martin McDonagh’s
Seven Psychopaths (2012). One related, difficult element (to joking with 'psychopathy') of
Mistress America was mention of a mother with bi-polar experience (or diagnosis ) – talking about
someone as if that person is a creature from a fairy-tale or myth...
Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
