The Obscure Object Of Desire

Saw The Obscure Object Of Desire, a film by Luis Buñuel, famed absurdist director.  The film is frustrating and sexy, a good culmination of Buñuel's career.  It tells the story of a mutually exploitative, mutually abusive relationship between Mathieu and Conchita.  Mathieu is a wealthy man who falls in love with Conchita, a novice maid who he believes he can have some no-strings fun with.  She out-maneuvers him however, by never succumbing to his advances, but always teasing him, giving him just a taste, never giving him what he really wants.

Neither one of these people are blameless: the girl is quite cruel to this sentimental old man, flagrantly carrying on with boyfriends while pretending to be a shrinking virgin, afraid to have sex with Mathieu.  Then again, Mathieu really has a lot of the cards here: he's got the money and the influence and he's able to wreck some serious damage to her too.  In the manner of a toxic relationship, they are both ambiguously addicted to the other, damaging and enabling in turns.  He keeps coming back either out of sentimentality or to see if she's finally been beaten down enough to let him bed her, and she returns either out of guilt or to feed her ego; to see if she can flirt her way out of this last one.  They are both eagerly participating in this toxic relationship however and both are somewhat to blame.

The film works well as an allegory for class struggle, a frequent theme of Buñuel's work.  The girl is the underclass whom the upper class eagerly seeks to screw over and exploit.  She gallantly exploits right back, stealing and humiliating and celebrating in her successes over the upper class man.  The older Mathieu has all the power and no honorable intentions (at one point he's asked why he doesn't marry her.  Answer: Then I'll be giving up my strongest weapon!) however he is only powerful as a result of his network of servants and frequently he's made pathetic by hold-ups when he's on his own.

Surely the right move for these two is to break up and not see each other again.  In the class struggle reading of this however, this is impossible.  How can the upper class "break up" with the proletariat?  This thought brings coherency to all of the random terrorist bombings and violence depicted in the film: they are trying to break it all up, to tear it all down.

This is a somewhat unpleasant film.  It's interesting to decode, but the characters and the world it depicts are unpleasant.  It's a depiction of life and inter-class struggle under capitalism, and is therefore necessarily unpleasant, but it's unpleasant nonetheless.  Further, the central struggle of whether or not this old guy will get into this pretty lady's pants is tawdry and kind of exploitative in its own right.  Which, maybe there's something there too.

Finally: I was streaming this film and the streaming service kept freezing and buffering, coyly denying me what I wanted.  I felt exploited.

The Lighthouse (2019)

Saw The Lighthouse, a striking black and white film from the same guy who directed The Witch.  As with that film, this one is a supernaturally-tinged psycho-horror about two lighthouse keepers slowly driving each other mad.  In one corner is a quiet but stern Robert Pattinson and in the other corner is hoary sea-dog Willem Defoe.  It's quite the film!

I generally like psychodramas however this one didn't thrill me the way they often do.  It's very glum and serious and keeps us the audience in the dark right up unto the ambiguous ending.  Several times we are shown dreams and visions which may be real.  It's left to us to puzzle and guess at what really happened; how much magic we're willing to indulge in.  The result is frustrating, tantalizing.  I enjoyed the ambiguity, but I also wish I understood more of the characters' insanity or powers.  I wish I knew what was "really" going on.

The central horror of the film in this case is the madness of isolation.  The two men's pasts and their power struggles curdle into mythic fantasies and mad cavorting as they try to stave off madness that roars like the sea storm, right outside their door.

There's a lot going on in this film.  It's drawing a lot from old sea stories of the 1800s, so we get the didactic moralizing, gods and monsters, sublimated homoeroticism.  It all spirals more and more out of hand until frankly murder-suicide begins to seem like a pretty reasonable option.  Kudos all around!

I Was Born, But… (1932)

Saw I Was Born, But…  It was a fairly cute film about two kid brothers whose family moves into a suburb.  There, there's a new school and bullies to contend with as well as, most troublingly, their father's boss's kid.  The film is silent and mostly follows the kids, however we dip into their father's life here and there a little.  It's very cute and observational.

The film felt a little staid to me, but I often struggle a little with silent films.  There's something about the sound of the actor's voice that allows me to connect and enter into the film a little more easily.  That said, this film reminded me a lot of the Sazae-san comic strip, or My Neighbors the Yamadas, mostly concerned with the small foibles of small domesticity.  The dramatic climax of the film however is quite serious.  It's handled with a somewhat light touch but is a portrayal of a significant familial earthquake.  I was surprised it got that serious, but it makes the rest of the proceedings feel all the sweeter in contrast.

Other surprising elements: we see the boys performing military drills at school and hear that they dream of becoming great generals.  This film was prior to Japan's de-militarization and it's strange to see it.  We also get to see a film-within-the-film in the form of some home movies.  Their father is made to look a little foolish in these home movies, which upsets the boys, however this film (ie: I Was Born, But …) has been making everyone look a little silly the whole time, so there's an interesting thought to think about fiction vs reality, about observing vs living an experience.

So, it was an okay film.  It was a little dry, a little precious, but sweet and not difficult and from a culture which is different enough to my own to be interesting.  I wouldn't recommend it highly, but I've seen worse.

Tick, Tick … BOOM! (2021)

Saw Tick, Tick … BOOM!, a movie that I feel suffered somewhat from my never having seen the musical Rent.  This film is a biopic about Jon Larson,  the writer of that musical, Rent.  It follows his struggles to make it in the overcrowded world of Broadway musical theater as his resources dwindle and the aids crisis looms.  The film is one of these films that's sort of about following passions vs giving in an taking the easy, mediocre road.  I didn't like it very much.

In order to be really fantastically successful, it's not enough to be talented.  You also have to have such faith and confidence in yourself that you are able to shut up your own self-doubt and keep on striving, even in the face of reality.  The plot of this film is about Jon coming very close to a reality in which he  just does not make it.  He keep sacrificing more and more of his life to his talent but, you know, maybe the sacrifice won't wind up being worth it.

Unfortunately, as he alienates the other characters, they accurately call him out for being selfish and self-absorbed.  He's not just sacrificing his own life to his art, but he's also sacrificing pieces of the lives of those around him, stranding and abandoning people who want to abandon this quest.

I think the film is meant to be uplifting, but I started to really turn against Jon part-way through.  There's a confrontation where he's scolded for abandoning one of his friends and it ends up with him dashing off into Central Park to cry by himself.  He's just so upset, you see, that someone might be upset with him.  This is the moment, for me, where he shifted from "loveable guy with a dream" to "narcissist making everything about him."  This moment happens shortly before the love-fest ending where we celebrate the heck out of his legacy.

So, this film was not for me.  I am maybe too old and mediocre to be uplifted by a "follow your dreams, even in hard times" kind of message.  Maybe I would have liked it better if I had known and loved Rent, I don't know.  Not for me.

Nostalghia (1983)

Saw Nostalghia, a fairly crazy film from Andrei Tarkovsky.  It follows a Russian male poet and an Itallian woman travelling to Bologna Italy to research a Russian composer who lived there for a while.  Early on in the film, the poet scolds the woman for reading a book of translated poetry.  Poetry is untranslatable, like all art, he claims.  The Italian woman counters: if Russian poetry cannot be translated into Italian, how can they ever hope to understand each other?  This is the question at the heart of the film: how can we ever understand each other?

The poet's attitude is that people are too fundamentally different to understand each other perfectly.  We are so caught up in our own understanding of the world, that we cannot fully understand anyone else's.  Contrasted with this, there's the philosophy of a mad-man that he runs into which can be summed up with 1+1=1.  We are all the same, claims the mad-man, understanding is consensus.

The film is much more on the poet's side of this debate.  The nature of his relationship with the Italian woman is understood differently by both of them, to disastrous results.  Also, the mad-man once imprisoned his family in their house for 7 years.  If we are all one, why is he locking himself away like this?

The poet's name is Andrei and I believe he's supposed to be a Tarkovsky self-insert, hence why the film takes his side.  It also makes a lot of sense that someone involved in creating art for others to consume would quickly run up against the subjective nature of art.  The film is also filled with Tarkovsky-isms: endless slow of water in still pools, or raining down, flowing down window panes, German shepherd dogs, religious iconography, moss-eaten stones.  It feels like he's reinforcing his point with this self-indulgence: these symbols mean so much to him.  Do you see them how he does?  Do they do anything for you?

The film concludes by examining how the poet and the mad-man try to communicate with the world: one in an explosive spectacle which moves no one, and the other quietly and intimately in a way which also seems to reach no one, but which seems profoundly meaningful to the communicator if to no one else.

It's an interesting film, however a little slow.  It's not the most entertaining film to watch, but it's interesting to think about and sort of decode.  Even when the imagery is inscrutable, it's striking.

In Fabric (2018)

Saw In Fabric, a strange, somewhat funny horror film about an evil red dress that brings disaster to the people who wear it.  The film includes great sequences and deep weirdness, but also a hefty dose of the absurd.  It's an interesting film, but sort of a curiosity - more camp than bravura.

The film is not set in any particular time, but looks very 70s-ish.  It's a throwback not only to colorful horror like Suspiria, but also to the sillier giallo films.  There's wonderfully creepy scenes of the dress floating above the beds of the character, like a cat balefully gloating over its prey, but there are also other scenes where the dress "creeps" along the ground, obviously tugged by someone offscreen, in a way that evokes Death Bed: The Bed That Eats.  There's also more obviously intentionally funny moments, such as a running gag where a washing machine repairman's jargon hypnotizes his listeners.

A major location for the film is the department store that sells the dress in the first place.  It's a deeply creepy and brightly-lit place populated by witchy women in black dresses who speak in a dense jargon of consumerism and marketing consultancy: "Did the transaction validate your paradigm of consumerism?"  They are fairly funny but deeply strange and creepy.

The film mines the strangeness of retail fashion: selling the idea of a more glamorous vision of you, but also predatory; seductive, hypnotic, fetishistic, and artificial.  A commercial for the store is shown many times, with the store worker women eternally beckoning you in.  Delightfully weird!

I enjoyed the film for the most part.  I didn't understand its sense of humor, but the horror elements were effective.  It contains a fair helping of silliness, but is a creepy, sensual, psychedelic exploration of clothing stores first and foremost.

Muriel (1963)

Saw Muriel, a challenging film that opens one a woman visiting an antiques store.  The banal dialogue plays out over a rapid-fire series of close-ups, of the proprietress smoking, a coffee maker bubbling, the woman crossing her ankles, a ring on a finger.  This is a disconcerting introduction to a disconcerting film.  The entire film feels like glimpses and missing reels from a different, longer film which is more coherent, but which is also perhaps more boring.

The plot of the film centers around the woman who runs the antique shop, her (maybe) ex-boyfriend, the boyfriend's current girlfriend, and her son.  The antiques owner and her son have both been impacted heavily by the recent Algerian war.  She missed her opportunity to marry her ex-boyfriend.  Obsessed with what could have been, she surrounds herself with the objects of the past, to preserve and dream.  Her son meanwhile, is haunted by the war, and obsessively collects documentary materials as "evidence".  Both are obsessed with the past, but the mother's obsession centers on what could have been while the son's centers on what was.

The themes of the film are interesting, but you need to pay very close attention to the film to avoid getting lost.  Many times there was a blink-and-you-miss-it shot, coupled with a sudden musical sting which indicates an important scene in a normal film, but here we're rapidly moving on and whatever it was that was dropped, I missed entirely!  After an hour or so of feeling confused and paying close close attention just to figure out what's going on, I got very tired.

The film is too difficult for me.  It's shot like a short story: full of little scenes and observations.  Unlike a short story however, we can't linger on the scene to understand it.  We're always rushing along to something else ergodic and evocative.  The same director directed Last Year at Marienbad, another film that was too inaccessible for me to enjoy very much.

So, this film got the better of me.  Under all of its strange editing, the story is relatively straightforward, but the editing is something to contend with.  This film may benefit from multiple viewings, or perhaps from none at all: the editing is all in the script, written by a poet.  It might be better to read than to view.

The Florida Project

Saw The Florida Project, a film about a little girl living with her single mother in a long-stay hotel on the strip outside of Disneyland.  It's a sweet although sort of sad film about this girl finding fun and life and existence on the margins of society.  It's similar in theme to Beasts of the Southern Wild, but this film is somewhat more tame both in terms of style (there's no apocalyptic CGI boars in this one) and in terms of the characters' poverty (the adults here can afford a hotel room.)  But both films are a child's-eye view of the effects of poverty and how they do and don't impact these kids.

The child acting is amazing.  Apparently a lot of the children's dialogue was improvised which helped it feel more natural and more strange and creative and kid-ish.  There's a few scenes in the climax of the film where you can hear a script-writer's words coming out of the kids' mouths, but this is understandable, given the importance of the climax of the film!  Also, that climax is still very raw and moving.  We see the hard shell that this little girl built up crumble, crushed under the weight of poverty and forces outside her control.

The film also takes place in the shadow of Disneyland, an expensive resort that the kids don't even dream about attending.  Nonetheless, they are often seen walking under giant Disney signs, past novelty shops with garish mascots and frequently interact with tourists on their way to the Magic Kingdom.  The main character herself lives in the Magic Palace hotel, a castle-themed hotel painted an eye-searing pink.  She has friends in Future-land, another hotel with statues of rockets in the parking lot.

The contrast between the fantastical names of the hotels vs the poverty of the residents is cutting and ironic, but the film is generally kind to its characters, so it never feels cruel, this juxtaposition.  There's also poignant parallel to the children's imaginary lives.  To them, this is a magic palace, a future-land.  They uncritically accept their surroundings and do their best to have fun, make friends, and go on adventures.  The childhood wonder on sale at Disney only a few miles away is alive and well, even in the ghettos of the magic kingdom.  It's sort of sad but also sort of hopeful.

It's a Gift

Saw It's a Gift, a W C Fields comedy about a grocer who wants to move out to the sunny orange groves of California.  In the manner of comedies, the plot is secondary to vignettes of relatable suffering and bad behavior.  The film is okay, but prepare for some tame, old-timey fun.

The main drawback of this film is just how unpleasant every character is.  I'm used to seeing W C Fields as a sort of rogue character, a con man or grifter.  Here he's the straight man, humorously under-reacting to his proud wife, his flirty daughter, his bratty son.  But absolutely everything goes wrong in this guy's life.  Simply trying to shave becomes a test of ingenuity and dexterity as he dances around his family's interruptions.  A day at work leaves the grocery in a ruin.  This is all played for laughs, but I began wondering why this grocer guy didn't just leave.  Just walk down the road and continue until he died from exhaustion.  Surely that would be better than being perpetually tormented like this.

The film is okay, but a little aged.  There's nothing very objectionable about it, but it leans heavily on the comedy of enduring through suffering, which I get tired of pretty quickly.  I enjoyed the film okay, but it was a little tame and staid by modern standards.