Post-Concussion Syndrome

In the wake of this review of Concussion (2013)

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12 June

* Contains spoilers *

In the wake of this review of Concussion (2013)

One can just imagine it* !

They’ve got on set, they’ve filmed fifteen set-ups, and suddenly realize that – apart from a discussion at the party, with its idle prurience about how one ‘becomes a lesbian’ – they have overlooked something…

At stages such as script-meetings, revisions, read-throughs, etc., it is incredible that no one spotted the panther on the porch, the slug in the sauna – undetected, because noticeable only by not being present** : Concussion (2013) had missed an element.

Or it is later on, after other stages such as rushes, previews, re-edits, focus-groups, that a film almost totally peopled by undressing, de-stressing, caressing, congressing… is seen, despite all this, to have a flaw : who is divorced from all the sybaritic intensity, thereby making this not a State-side Blue is the Warmest Colour (La vie d’Adèle – Chapitres 1 et 2) (2013), but more like Jeune et Jolie (2013) – which no one*** should call Young and Beautiful.

Yet it is, say, Jeune et Jolie meets the world of (the far less successful, but French) Bright Days Ahead (Les Beaux Jours) (2013), for this is more comedic… In fact, it has all the fluffiness of films such as Pretty Woman (1990) – but between women. Whence 'the marketing problem' : No key token man in sight !

For the lecherously nosy guy at the party is just a libidinous cameo (with a plot-purpose to sate our priapic needs about Abby), and Abby’s partner Kate’s (Julie Fain Lawrence’s) divorcing client, desirous of a ‘shitty’ loft (as Justin calls it), barely registers - alongside Lawrence - in their brief scenes. Even with Justin (Johnathan Tchaikovsky), Abby’s (Robin Weigert’s) handy friend with tools, there is nothing about him that compellingly foregrounds him.

Yes, in terms of the plot, he is not inconsequential – though we have to credit that, when he suddenly suggests sleeping with other women for money, it is somehow passed off as natural that he does so now, but without seemingly having referred to such things before. For all that, he has no presence as any sort of ‘arranger’ of Abby’s liaisons, because he is really only an intermediate between the matter-of-fact, but barely mysterious, The Girl (Emily Kinney) and her.


So, the question arises :

Could Justin have been made into a male part, at the last minute, to make this less like an all-female film, as Stranger by the Lake (L’inconnu du lac) (2013) is - and is happy to be - an all-male one… ?

What are the dynamics that makes that role necessarily that of a man (just as it was asked before whether it matters that Abby’s partner is not a man****) ?


End-notes

* Well, at any rate, @THEAGENTAPSLEY did.

** Like the universe’s missing anti-matter ?

*** Since ‘jolie’ means pretty (feminine form), not beautiful (and Marine Vacth, lovely and accomplished though she is, is not (yet) beautiful...

**** Some reviewers assume, because of some comment about Kate’s surname, that Abby and she are married – unlikely, perhaps, since a court only ruled in New Jersey at the end of last year that gay marriage must be allowed.


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

A blow to the head

This is a review of Concussion (2013)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014
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26 May

This is a review of Concussion (2013)

* Contains spoilers *


Look, empty sex is better than no sex, right ?

Shelly [groupie] to Sandy Bates
(Stardust Memories (1980))

Advertising ! The most subtle form of which can be posters, those images (and words) that you take in, in passing, every time you go to the cinema – even on the way to the desk to buy a ticket for something else – is a huge part of cinema (for good or ill). Obviously, we know that the best star-rating will be chosen (even if the publication, say Good Housekeeping (or Gardener’s Weekly), then has to be credited in tiny and dark lettering), and the choicest praise :

So what do we make of an Internet-based reviewer having called Concussion (2013) 'like a feminised American Beauty' and being quoted ? Cynically, the reviewer may have hoped that, by alluding to the pretty famous collaboration between Sam Mendes and Kevin Spacey in that feature from 1999, there would be some interest in his words. However, not perhaps as if the film’s distributor cared (too much) about the relevance of the comparison when deciding to put them across the centre of the poster (with the film-title colour-highlighted), the resemblances hardly seem patent…

No rose-petals, only a momentary scene (in actual sleep after sex, not of someone luxuriating in those roses) that resembles Spacey’s (Lester Burnham’s) fantasies of said under-age Beauty* – and who, if Lester’s character has been feminized, is he in this film** ? Presumably, Robin Weigert (as Abby), though it is not immediately clear how, when she does not die, grooms no one, etc. (although it does fall out that she gets to sleep with someone whom she already thinks cute).

The reality of this film is that, as is so often the case, it may seem to look the other way in the face of the specific meaning of the medical term ‘concussion’ (even if that meaning may be different in the States, as with how ‘psychotic’ is used there to denote ‘psychopathic’ (so causing much misunderstanding here)). According to NHS Choices :

Concussion is the sudden but short-lived loss of mental function that occurs after a blow or other injury to the head. Concussion is the most common but least serious type of brain injury.

At the beginning of this film, Abby has not hit her head by falling off a bicycle, for example, but, at best, been hit by a ball that she did not see coming (and hit on the face just above the cheek). Who knows what that means to Stacie Passon, as the screenwriter, whereas the word is popularly used to characterize a symptom, and so Abby, after the event, describes the few days after her accident as hazy.

Nothing new, we learn, in her deciding to do up what her usual collaborator Justin calls a shit-hole (in the form of a loft in the city of New York, work on which she commutes in to supervise from Jersey), because she has done so half-a-dozen times before***. Suddenly, probably conveniently attributable to this concussion, she tells Justin (Johnathan Tchaikovsky (sic)) that she is unsure whether she should tell her partner Kate that she has slept with a prostitute (another woman) there : as he seems quite casual, which becomes readily apparent is true, there is no knowing whether confiding in him - rather than in one of her actual friends - is normal.

In any event, as if Abby did not have enough understanding of him to know how he would take what she says, Justin seems to know more about what the ground rules might be of her relationship with Kate (Julie Fain Lawrence) than Abby does herself, asking (not in these words) whether it is agreed that it is all right to stray in search of sex, or that it is agreed, but not to be talked about : Abby seems floored by the very question, not to mention momentarily so when he follows up, hearing how it had not even been that good for her, with his suggestion that she should try another woman whose details he has…

So begins a Nymphomaniac-(2013)-like slippery-slope slide into more and more of the same, for slimmer and slimmer reasons (the original one just evaporates)****. Or is it in homage to the aspects of boredom in Belle du Jour (1967) – although there is no real sense of a compulsive or addictive behaviour, let alone S&M ? In this respect, Concussion fits better with Jeune et Jolie (2013), though there the much younger protagonist Isabelle’s (Marine Vacth’s) motives remain deliberately opaque.

Abby’s homosexual version of what Isabelle embarks on begins with the useful fact that Justin is dating The Girl (Emily Kinney), and that she, both needing the money for law school, and having to conceal how she has got it for the same reason*****, has this undertaking that he just comes right out and mentions. Yet, apart from the fact that Jolie offers relatively little sense of danger in what Isabelle is about (whereas Abby clearly needs to veto ‘number five’ wishing to meet again), the set-up, and François Ozon’s direction of it, is otherwise unquestionably far more interesting :

Abby’s engagement with her ‘clients’, when it is not more like mothering or soft counselling, resembles – and even sometimes is – sex with friends. Yes, we like it that she is allowing herself something that she was lacking and needed, and there is that familiar model of ‘the tart with a heart’, but there is ever the sense that she is riding for some sort of fall, that she is a Walter Mitty without a happy landing.

For here, unlike Isabelle’s initial and ambiguous desire to get losing her virginity out of the way, the roots of what Abby does plainly lie in her partner : whilst Abby has little to do other than vacuum whilst reading a book (as if either would really get the necessary attention) and other things domestic, Kate seems, by contrast, far too focused on work, and other practicalities, even to think of intimacy.

Let alone desiring (or feeling the need for) sexual closeness / release (and, in that stereotype of the homosexual couple, Kate is portrayed as much more masculine than Abby (on which, more below)). It is this situation that – with almost no relation to the head injury (which must, chronologically, be some way ago, since Abby has had time to find, buy and start working on the property) – drives the opening move in the plot.

It also represents wanting something other than the (safe) functionality of her life : even an actual treadmill is there, in the hall, as a symbol of daily joining the regular group of women – putting themselves through it, with some fervour, on exercise-bikes, for Pilates, during the school-run... It’s almost a wonder that the Lou Reed track ‘Take a walk on the wild side’ was not used in the soundtrack, for the film cannot resist an excitable man at a party, who drapes himself over the stairs, quizzing Abby about how she first realized that she was a lesbian (as if, with his salaciousness, the moment has not arisen before – as if she, being so cheery about talking about it, would not have told him).

Yet, at the end of this film, it is as if Prospero thumps his staff, and declares Our revels now are ended, when Kate somehow gets access to the loft and surprises Abby there, naked and asleep. The space that Abby has created is no longer hers, and she may have stolen a frolic, but she is become a cringeing, guilty Caliban again, saying I’ll do anything you want. For, with a powerful family lawyer for a partner, and the risk of losing her part in their children’s lives, she knows that she is no better placed than when the trio who torment Malvoglio are caught, and she capitulates.


And we are left with that title Concussion, and what it was that writer / director Stacie Passon thought that this film was saying :

Or is it that concussion will be the couple’s unspoken excuse for Abby’s ‘aberrant’, ‘family-neglectful’ behaviour, which is in the past now – except that, as she alludes to, she will still see Sam around. Is that where she is Beauty’s Lester, that she dreams herself outside the humdrum, which she cannot ultimately avoid… ?


And there are now some speculations about the film's cinematic genesis - of a spoilery nature - here...


End-notes

* Although it is not a fantasy (other than on the part of the film-maker), and it is greeted, when witnessed, with some rather curt directions ‘to cover up’ (clever play on words, there, from someone prepared to forgive in return for some sort of forgetfulness : almost in the vein of, say, some bargain for life purposed by a Hardy character, which is not so much trivially selling a wife as securing her safe purchase !).

** Or is the feminization, at any rate, that the couple under strain is a lesbian one ? and what difference would it really have made, if it had not been, but Kate had been a man ?

*** Nothing exactly tells us when that last was, or why – except impliedly to be home for Maren and Micah (as, according to IMDb, the children are called) – she has not been undertaking this activity recently.

**** And self-destructively neglecting the school-run.

***** The privileged pragmatism of the legal practitioner : founding a career in a supposedly upright profession on the proceeds of crime...


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Six short films from Watersprite 2014

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19 May

This is a review of a screening at the bar of The Arts Picturehouse of the top films from Watersprite (the international festival for student film-makers, @WaterspriteCam) – it fell in two parts, the first being on Monday 12 May 2014


1. Wind [link to the film on Vimeo]

Much has been written about this inventive film already by TAKE ONE, which covered the Watersprite Festival. As with the one that followed at this screening, it plays with being the wrong side of safe, and some have said that it is about adapting to extreme conditions.

Yet, although one can have a stylized haircut that depends on the wind blowing, one gets one’s nose cut off, it is not. The adaptation itself seems to be to something that is of these people’s own making, for we see shifts being changed at the plant where the wind is being generated, and where the outgoing worker has had time to grow a lengthy beard before being relieved : a symbolic depiction, but we need reminding that we sometimes create a problem, sometimes psychologically, and then learn to live with it, rather than seeking a proper solution.



2. Border Patrol [link to the film’s IMDb page]

This is a story that does not quite take one where it might, when it has the potential of the older officer Franz having ‘got one over’ on his dismissive younger colleague Carl, but instead settling on a relatively modest and benign punch-line (if at the cost of an unfortunate victim).

It is well resourced and acted, and there is tension, but director Peter Baumann seems to have reckoned that the latter is dissipated by the film ending as it does, whereas it really ends as a sick comment on people in authority passing the buck (and at the expense of the person who suffered).



3. Echo [link to a ‘teaser trailer’ on Vimeo]

There was disagreement, following the screening, whether Caroline ends, through having cried wolf, in a different place from where she began. Even if she did, it is not obvious enough that she is not just ‘up to her old tricks’, and they are really what is more interesting, for she reminds of Jeune et Jolie (2013)’s Isabelle (Marine Vacth) in acting / seeming to act immorally.

At first, Caroline appears to be the one in danger, because she has strewn the contents of her bag on the floor and we fear that she may come to regret being so trusting. As things develop, and, when she is at home, it is clear that her mother had no message from her, it seems like a scam on her part, but maybe one to which she is addicted as Isabelle is. It turns out to be rooted in truth, whatever weight the ending bears : is Caroline, as Lady Macbeth does, repeating the distressing experience over again, because she can do nothing else, and not for gain ?



* * * * *



4. How to Count Sheep [link to the trailer on Vimeo]

After the interval came what felt the least effective film – not for the visual quality, or for the imagery of such moments (which spoke volumes) of tracks going towards and right up to a tree (a disappearance seemed implied, rather than a tree-climbing sheep), but for the lack of overall coherence.

Maybe it came from being in the invidious position of the first after the break, when concentration was not at its greatest, but it never seemed to come together to say something : was it life striving to imitate dreams, or dreams that were too rooted in the over-worked idiom of the folklore of going to sleep – or did we, despite its title, mistake, if we though that it had either aim in mind ? The title may simply have been an over-reaching claim, for it seemed like exploring being awake, but with a forced notion of what dream and its elements are…



5. Born Positive [link to the trailer on Vimeo]

Forget who mimes best to the real voices*, who have been disguised by having actors stand in for them : this is a powerful piece of film-making, well edited and treating of the three stand-in actors together and individually. It is a way of engaging with people who want to speak, but remain hidden, that proves very impressive here, not just because of the subject-matter.

At first, the three actors are on a roof-top space together (as can be seen in the trailer, talking in turns (and a place to which we return)), and we become used to them as a group with the unfamiliarity that this face is not really speaking these words – though all that links those speaking is having found out that HIV had been passed on to them (and the film ends with remarkable figures about how low the incidence now is amongst babies born to mothers in the UK with HIV).

One suspects that no more than with exact age that the ethnic origin may not have been kept the same as that of the speaker, to add a greater level of making the voices difficult to recognize, for Zachariah Fletcher (as Mark) did not sound as he looked, and Trevon Paddy (as Blake) seems older as an actor than the role that he was playing. The important thing about the film is, of course, what it tells us, but that it has Zachariah owning an outdoor location gives a vividness to what his character is telling us.

Blaming others for what happened, then finding, with reflection, that maybe they had guessed at what they did not know when a parent had not been around to ask, and working out how to tell others that they have HIV, and who needs to know – these strong questions that people ask about themselves and their identity in all sorts of contexts have a special poignancy in the context of statistics given at the end.



6. A Man Came From The Sea [link to the film at The University of York]

This was another film that seemed less strong : it is preceded by the incongruity of a tango reconstructed in arrangement (score by Kattguldet), a cynical evaluation by the well-played pair who find The Man unconscious, and a beautiful location, but – unless it meant to draw attention to itself – also a title-song in no way as convincing as those are in The Wicker Man (1973).

Here, because there was not the uncertainty inherent in How To Count Sheep, it was evident that the plot was wafer thin, dwelling on the theme of the refugee, and what makes, or does not make, someone worth while in the eyes of those who do not know him or her : not a skit on Yorkshire hospitality, but on all forces that will have someone ‘sent back’ because his or her ‘story’ has been discredited (albeit in an impressive long shot, and to what is now the stridency of tango-writing).

Unfortunately, the political staginess of a man made welcome and as soon rejected, was matched by the inevitability of what happened. With opening and closing sequences so long (1:23 and 1:34, respectively, out of an overall 10:28), and so no time for conflict where we might feel something more for this man with Scandinavian tones, we might just condemn the instance, but can overlook it as happening there – as if it could never happen / does not happen here.


End-notes

* After all, there must have been some matching of lip-movements to the target audio in the editing process. (One may also fear for the speakers that, from his or her voice alone, someone might know who he or she is, and so know things about him or her that were only being shared anonymously – one hopes not…)


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

More Haneke than Buñuel ?

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
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5 December

Jeune et Jolie (2013) was screened at The Little Theatre as part of Bath Film Festival 2013


How many reviews of Jeune et Jolie (2013) am I going to have to read where its uninspired writer references the completely irrelevant Belle de Jour (1967), just because - whatever the fit - it is the only film that, in each case, he or she can think of where a woman works as a prostitute ?

* Tim Robey* in The Telegraph

* Ian Freer in Empire

* James Mottram in Total Film

* Nigel Andrews in The Financial Times

* Andrew Nickolds at TAKE ONE

And so on...


Have they never seen Natalie (2003) or even Sleeping Beauty (2011), which have far more in common for how the topos is treated ? What, in fact, does a married woman with sadomasochistic fantasies have to do with a seventeen-year-old, who has just uncomfortably lost her virginity ?

Sooner that, though, than being smugly dismissive (Mark Kermode in The Observer) or claiming that Blue is the Warmest Colour (2013) is indisputably better (Brian Viner, Mail Online : Viner says that Jeune et Jolie 'is in no way a match for' the other film, but they are very different films, no more capable of being compared than Superman and Bambi just because both (of J&J and Blue) feature sex.


Reviewers tediously also want a motivation for what Isabelle does. As i** carps :

Ozon's motives in making this film are as inscrutable as those of his teenage heroine Isabelle (Marine Vacth) [...] who, for reasons Ozon doesn't even begin to make clear, decided to embark on a part-time career as a teenage prostitute

They see (as the quotation shows) the fact that no motivation is stated is a flaw, which it might be in a world of perfect rationality, but that is not our world. So, Nigel Floyd (for Film4) reports :

“I didn't really try and understand psychologically who [Isabelle] was," Vacth has said. "I wasn't interested in knowing exactly. And anyway I couldn't, because François didn't tell me anything about her psychology.” The second half of this statement is more revealing than the first. Given that their creative collaboration was so one-sided, it's not surprising that the film suffers from an atmosphere of uncontrolled, unrevealing salaciousness.


Has Floyd even seen the film, if he thinks it salacious, one might wonder.

All this business about motivation is ultimately a dead end, a red herring, and would have one interrogate Amour (2012), when Michael Haneke is on record here, and in relation to other films, that it is up to us how we view them, and there is no one way.

What more do we want, and why, than what the films tells us : that Isabelle's friend Claire and she were approached in the street (Claire previously alludes to this encounter in talking to Isabelle), and the man said his number. Do we need spelt out what impulse led Isabelle to follow up a man interested in her ? Obviously, most girls of her age would do nothing with it, but why should she not register the number and act on it ?


In fact, an answer to why she did is utterly boring, when the fact is that she did, and we see her approaching room 6598 where not her first client awaits her, but Georges, with nothing of what preceded. There is something seriously wrong with the idea of cinema-going if that does not suffice, and critics are unhappy not to be told more.


End-notes

* At least Robey goes on to make this (necessary) observation : 'The film makes more sense if you see it as a companion piece to Ozon’s last one, In the House, which had a 16-year-old male schemer insinuating himself into a series of power plays'.

** In the edition on 29 November 2013.


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)