Just an hour ago, MIA released a preview of a track entitled “Come Walk With Me” on her YouTube account, and again, it is equally a declaration of her artistic identity as it is an off-kilter club banger. It begins and ends with glitchy, trippy psychedelic instrumental breakdowns heavily reminiscent of her work on 2010’s Vicki Leekx Mixtape (a few of the beats here are lifted off of it too, but there are like 6 different beats in this 1 and a half minute preview alone), except they’re sped up and far more haphazard for extra weirdness, which is really ironic (OMG hipsters are going to freak) considering the song has a bubblegum tune that sounds almost like a Katy Perry or Ke$ha cut — which, among other things, cement MIA’s embrace of the anti-popstar identity she so defiantly reinvented herself as 2 years ago with /\/\/\Y/\.
Just for kicks, there is a self-knowing stab at self-empowerment here (“There’s nothing that can touch me now/You can’t even break me now”), which feels vaguely like a sarcastic parody of Perry’s “Part of Me”. She even deliberately, squarely subverts the recent trend of club-oriented lyrics in pop music with an ironic declaration of hipster unity (“You ain’t gotta shake it just to be with me/You ain’t gotta throw your hands in the air/Cuz tonight we ain’t actin like we don’t care”).
The “Birthday Song”-esque, poppy vibe of the song almost confirms tepid or at best lukewarm reviews from Pitchfork again, but then again Pitchfork-worshipping hipsters don’t make up much of the market; pop-lovers and music-lovers do. M.I.A. here combines the straightforward catchiness of “XXXO” with the outright weirdness of her less accessible tracks like “Meds and Feds” to produce one of the most addictive, ironic and baffling pop tracks in recent history. If this track is any indication of what to expect from her new album, be prepared for M.I.A. to take the pop charts and perhaps even the Grammys by storm. I mean, if the two are more than ready to embrace Katy Perry, why not her weirder, infinitely more talented, pop-parodying counterpart?
Starring: Giorgio Albertazzi, as X, Delphine Seyrig, as A, Sacha Pitoëff, as M (The characters are actually unnamed in the film, but they were labelled as such in the published screenplay. M is A’s presumptive husband, and X is A’s illicit lover)
So I just watched the trailer for the first time now, and it’s almost alarmingly funny how commercial the distribution company makes the film seem. “THESE ARE THE QUESTIONS THAT YOU, THE AUDIENCE, MUST ANSWER!” LOLS. It’s glaringly obvious that no one really knows how to market a film like this. Yet at the same time, perhaps it’s better to approach this film knowing that it’s supposed to be a mystery. When I first watched this movie, I had absolutely no prior knowledge of the plot or of Resnais’ cinematic oeuvre, and suffice to say, I felt extremely stupid for the first half of the film, in which nothing really happens, and I was convinced that I was missing out on some larger significance (which is probably true, actually, but at least everyone feels the same way).
Alain Resnais’ magnum opus Last Year in Marienbad won the Golden Lion at the 1961 Venice Film Festival (a.k.a. the quintessential embodiment of arthouse-chicness), and earned an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay, but the critical plaudits pretty much stop there, and in all frankness, it is unsurprising as to why. This film, by far, is the weirdest film I have ever watched – and this coming from one who has watched 4 David Lynch films (albeit reluctantly, because Lynch is stupid and annoying) and who has spent numerous Christmases watching old experimental films (and eating copious amounts of chocolate, but I guess this detail would only lend credibility if I ever decided to be a professional connoisseur of cheap candies).
The entire film is essentially an extended dream sequence. Characters are placed in one setting and suddenly, inexplicably, they appear in another. The palatial mansion is littered with richly costumed socialites, but they don’t even seem real; sometimes they talk, sometimes they are suspended in inaction, sometimes they turn to stare blankly, judgmentally at the lead characters, sometimes they aren’t even there. The script is brimming with gorgeous imagery, boasts a poetic vocabulary usually reserved for critically-acclaimed novels, and often reveals an undeniable, ineffable emotional poignancy, yet, when considered in the context of the film, it almost doesn’t even makes sense. The same lines are repeated over and over again, and often even by different characters. Generic proclamations are woven into emotional scenes, but we don’t really understand how they connect. Some objects cast no shadows; others cast disproportionately, frighteningly long ones. The same music plays softly in the background. Suddenly, it lurches to the foreground and blares with a vengeance, then it stops, and all is terrifyingly quiet. The camera examines the same places languidly, over and over again, yet they remain no less impenetrable, no less enigmatic, no less haunting. At times, shadows threaten to disengage themselves from their hosts, but this isn’t a film with CGI, so that’s impossible — so why is it that one is convinced they might…? MIND BLOWN.
And I could wax lyrical about how breathtaking the visuals are (this is, hands down, the most gorgeous film I’ve ever seen, maybe right behind Bergman’s The Silence or Kubrick’s The Shining), or about how gorgeous the script is, but any attempt at description or explanation would simply diminish their beauty and desecrate the gift of subjectivity. Besides, the best arthouse filmmakers don’t depend solely on stylistic inventiveness; that’s just a sidenote, and they know it. Arthouse films must too wield visceral impact, and must be emotionally relatable, because without these, they are simply empty, sadistic exercises in unintelligibility. Here, Resnais makes a powerful case for his place among arthouse gods; despite radical leaps in plot progression, opaque lead characters and impenetrable use of symbolism, he still manages to render his film’s central themes and issues comprehensible, which is something beautifully rare in the world of art film. Undoubtedly, there are vastly differing interpretations of what this film really means, but just to prove my case for Resnais’ intelligibility, I’ll just put mine out there:
The film is an extended erotic fantasy that A creates to escape from her suffocating marriage (or long-term relationship, at the very least) to M. This is why the central narrator and relationship explored is between A and X. M here is an uninvited, unappreciated presence, who appears presumably because his domineering nature precludes escape, or because A is projecting his possessive need to drive all thoughts of other men from her mind. Alternatively, he could possibly be a personification of her guilt for being an unfaithful wife, or at least thinking of being an unfaithful wife. X could be a real one-night stand that A had, or perhaps he is simply a personification of her desire to escape. Either way, he serves the same purpose; he provides her with the love and (awesome) sex that M does not. The central conflict is derived from A’s negotiation between her reluctance to cheat and her desire to escape, and Marienbad is the imaginary platform on which this negotiation occurs. The game of Nim that M and X play parallels a larger tug-of-war struggle to occupy a place in A’s imagination. M constantly wins, but X is given infinite opportunities to try again because A refuses to allow M’s authority to undermine her own, which is absolute in her own dream; the power that M wields (as exemplified in the scene where A ‘kills’ X in a bid to prevent M from hurting him) is more a manifestation of her guilt rather than a reflection of his actual authority. The richly ornate but empty corridors in Marienbad reflect the contradiction between the image and reality of marriage. Alternatively, perhaps it reflects that inherent in any relationship, which is why A is so reluctant to ‘run away’ with X. Ultimately, I see this film as a deconstructionist take on marriage; feminists would probably enthusiastically declare it a lamentation of androcentric culture, but I try not to go that far. In any case, it is clear that this isn’t just an empty exercise in strangeness; it has something to say about marriage, something to say about relationships, and does so with unabashed, incomparable style.
Part of me wishes Last Year In Marienbad were shorter and/or had more focus, but part of what makes this film so brilliant is that it takes a potentially legendary short film and boldly, defiantly expands it into a full-length feature film. Short films thrive on its brand of inventiveness and experimentalism, and it undoubtedly would be much easier for Resnais as a director if he had less scenes to work with, less time to fill, but instead he takes his time, allowing the audience to revel in the film’s many visual pleasures while allowing the central tensions of the films to naturally, gradually unravel themselves. With supreme confidence, I can say that absolutely no other revered director (I’m ignoring Francis Ford Coppola and his gloriously awful Youth Without Youth here) would have the balls to make a full-length with a script that reads like a documentary-esque monologue, and with a premise this powerfully sophisticated. Besides, every second is another opportunity to marvel at Resnais’ inexhaustible bag of visual invention, to frown inexorably in reticent decipherment — and that kind of wonder I decidedly would not trade for any irrelevant stab at in-your-face comprehensibility. The stranger the film gets, the more intoxicating the sense of helplessness, the more palpable the enigma of the human psyche, the more viscerally powerful the effect.
So many surrealist filmmakers (I’m blaming you, Luis Bunuel, whose infamous short Un Chien Andalou remains the perennial inspiration of unoriginal but erudite film students since the dawn of avant-garde experimentalism) have attempted to capture the magic of dreams, but none have quite as adroitly distilled their impenetrability, whimsicality and emotional power without once descending into all-out absurdity or cringe-inducing preciosity. So dedicated are Resnais and Robbe-Grillet to the enigma of their film that it never once feels contrived or even deliberate. They immerse themselves in it, they believe everything in it, they feel everything in it, and we too are drawn into the suffocating power of its magic. So expansive is their passion for cinema and poetry, so bold is their desire to explore the stranger, uncharted depths of relationships and love that we are left, limp and helpless, unwitting instruments of their insanity. After watching the standard Lynch fare (RE: Lost Highway, Blue Velvet), one still isn’t any closer to understanding the meaning behind it; his works are so often self-indulgent exercises in aimless opacity that the only praise-worthy feat is his cinematography – but too is the case with most arthouse films; it’s nothing special. After watching Last Year In Marienbad, though, one is imbued with an intoxicating sense of wonder, a refreshed awareness of cinematic possibility. If one is lucky enough, one might even understand why.
KevinScale Rating: 5/5
Also, in defense of my taste in films, which is bound to be deemed ‘pretentious’ by anyone who has ever watched Last Year In Marienbad and hated it (and there, quite understandably, are many): I hate almost everything from the French New Wave, and I think Godard films, while occasionally stylistically interesting, are tiresome and endlessly trite. Resnais films make up a large proportion of the few exceptions, and what I love about his films is not just their bold sense of experimentalism (a common praise for any film from the movement), but their poetic fascination with life and love, and his astounding passion for films. His oeuvre, more than that of any other director, more than Bergman, more than Welles, more than Kubrick, embodies the magic of cinema; it reflects an artist that approaches film with child-like wonder at its possibilities, and that recklessly, unthinkingly immerses himself in them, because in the face of something so magical, something so great, he doesn’t know how else to react.
Starring: Miranda July as Sophie, Hamish Linklater as Jason, David Warshofsky as Marshall
Me and You and Everyone We Know, July’s debut feature-length film, is a fearlessly original take on the indie drama. A pre-pubescent boy with an odd view of sex (“I want to poop back and forth. Forever.”), a man who sets his hand on fire to entertain his two indifferent children and a performance artist who goes to extreme measures to pursue a stranger she is convinced is her soulmate are just a few of the characters that populate her wildly idiosyncratic world. In her new film The Future, the characters too are incredibly strange. I mean, in the first half of the film, Sophie spends most of her screentime watching amateur dancers on YouTube and attempting to choreograph a genuinely atrocious-looking dance of her own. She also has a magical pet T-shirt (yes, literally, like, a yellow T-shirt named “Shirty”). Her husband, Jason, on the other hand, stops time, talks to the moon and discovers life-changing revelations in meaningless everyday encounters.
But for all its strangeness, The Future, like Me and You and Everyone We Know before it, is relatable, truthful, humane. Sophie loves Jason, but his meekness and gentleness has left her with a fuckton of pent-up sexual frustration, which she recklessly channels into an affair predicated on her desire to feel needed and wanted. She knows that there really isn’t anything wrong about her marriage, but she can’t help but accuse her husband of not wanting her the way she would like. Jason loves his wife and their “boring” life together, and accepts all of her idiosyncrasies, but so badly wishes for something extraordinary to happen that he is perpetually suspended in his own extraordinary imagination. Above all, this is a film about a couple who really do love each other (or at least, I would like to think so), but who are struggling to discover what they want in life — and don’t really know where to start but from each other.
What I find incredibly alluring about July’s films is how the supporting characters form a network of symbols and metaphors that reveals an added dimension to the psychology of the protagonists. Marshall’s daughter and Paw-Paw are Sophie’s doppelgangers of sorts; the former wades into the ‘wild’ (ironically, despite Sophie’s protests) and rediscovers the warmth of ‘tame’ shelter, while the latter dies waiting for someone else to rescue her from the cold, long nights (a metaphor for Sophie’s fear of being alone and of not being wanted). The yellow pet T-shirt acts as a reminder of Sophie’s real identity — the one unburdened and unconfused by her fears — and symbolically envelops Sophie in a painfully awkward moment of self-awakening. The old man represents Jason’s superego and guide to self-awakening, thus convinces Jason that the uncertainty and frustration he feels is merely temporary. What is wonderful too is how these characters have wonderful bursts of dialogue that are both delightful in their over-the-top dramaticism and poetic in their spot-on propheticism. In Me and You and Everyone We Know, there is this particularly awesome sequence where Peter Swersey and Sylvie are lying down on the floor in Sylvie’s room, staring up at the ceiling, and the dialogue goes something like:
Peter: I’d live up there, if I could. If there wasn’t gravity.
Sylvie: Yeah…But if you lived up there, then all this stuff, all this stuff in my room, will fall on you and crush you. And you’d die.
In The Future, there are too many moments (though not really as quotable) where the supporting characters suddenly and unexpectedly spit out lines that tear at the very core of central emotional tensions. However, what makes the dialogue in The Future rather different from Me and You and Everyone We Know is its occasional, startling, self-reflective candidness. The most heartbreaking scene in the film, I think, is when Jason freezes time at 3.14am because he is frightened of life without Sophie:
Jason: I move my hand and she’s fucking him. I know exactly what’s going to happen at 3.15. At 3.15, we aren’t going to get back in bed together. And she isn’t going to wrap her legs around my legs. And we aren’t gonna fall asleep. And then in the morning she isn’t gonna say “Hi, person” and then we aren’t gonna have another day, just an ordinary, boring day, and then we aren’t gonna have any kids, and then we aren’t gonna grow old together. And we aren’t gonna look back at our lives, because we wouldn’t even know each other. That’s what’s going to happen at 3.15.
Moments like these make the occasional impenetrability suddenly profound and meaningful. Often, life is impenetrable too, but for every nonsensical whirlwind of shit, there’s something worth celebrating and loving and looking forward to; and that’s the beauty that July really seeks to extol here.
The only major objection I have with this film is the ‘cat’ voice-overs, which I’m assuming — in its similarity to the performance art pieces featured in Me and You and Everyone We Know — is one of the performance pieces that inspired the film. The inclusion feels awkward, out of place, pretentious and unnecessary. For something that features so prominently and that takes up so much screentime, it never adds anything to the film. I understand that Paw-Paw is supposed to be a metaphor for Sophie’s ‘wild’ side waiting to be tamed, but the opening ‘cat’ sequence alone already provides adequate explanation. The film succeeds on so many levels because of its unpredictability, its over-the-top poeticism and its lovable whimsicality. The ‘cat’ scenes, however, are aimless, obvious and often, quite tiresome. There is a very fine line between genius and preciosity, and this is a rare instance where July unwittingly finds herself on the wrong side of the threshold. Still, this film is too fearless for one to be bogged down by the occasional missteps.
Ultimately, this is a major artistic leap forward for July, who completely embraces the more idiosyncratic elements of her debut and produces a magical thing that is occasionally an impenetrable mindfuck, occasionally an abstract philosophical/existential meditation, but also that is always triumphant, always gorgeous, and always resolutely original. It’s definitely not for everyone, and its in-your-face eccentricity can easily (unfortunately) be dismissed as kitsch, but if you love avant-garde arthouse films, you’ll definitely love this.
therein, Therin. 