Funny Ha Ha

Most of my friends are sick of hearing me talk about Andrew Bujalski, so now dear readers, it’s your turn.  Andrew Bujalski makes the kind of films I would like to make.  They’re funny, low-fi and at the same time beautifully shot, with hand held cameras and a spare composition style reminiscent of Eric Rohmer.  His characters meander, fumbling with endless possibilities, not quite sure what to do with all that privilege their college educations have afforded them.  Their problems are problems of the heart, of communication, of trying to articulate their desires, of trying to be honest with one another while finding that in order to be kind, it’s easier to lie.

 

Funny Ha Ha (2002) was Bujalski’s first feature.  Marnie is 23 and making stumbling steps at life after college.  She is in love with Alex (Christian Rudder), but Alex isn’t in love with her.  The film begins with Marnie stumbling into a tattoo parlour, although she has no idea what kind of tattoo she wants.  She has been fired from her job, and takes up a temping position, where she meets Mitchell (Andrew Bujalski) a nice boy without much self-esteem, who immediately falls in love with her.  They fall into a stilted friendship, while Alex gets married to his ex-girlfriend Nina (Vanessa Bertozzi), and Dave (Myles Paige) who has a seemingly stable and loving relationship with Rachel (Jennifer Schaper), also finds himself attracted to Marnie.

While this sounds like the stock synopsis for the twenty-something relationship indie, Funny Ha Ha differentiates itself through its wandering dialogue and understated performances.  The characters are awkward and daggy, they dress as people I know really dress – in holey t-shirts, ill-fitting jeans, and worn down sneakers.  They have messy hair, and look just as unpolished when they dress up for work or a party.  Their conversations are stilted, and the jokes that are made to dampen the awkwardness of relating never quite succeed in filling in the lulls.  The acting is spare, with most of the emotion passed on through the flickering facial expressions and hand gestures.  Shot on 16mm, the grainy, high contrast qualities of the film stock mirror the uncomfortable period of becoming the characters are living through.

 

Time in Funny Ha Ha goes slowly.  Marnie’s life unfolds in a series of unprepared moments as she struggles to find out where it is she fits.  It’s not that she doesn’t know her own feelings, she just doesn’t know how to articulate or act on them.  Mitchell tries to act by pursuing Marnie even though he realizes she isn’t interested, resulting in a frustrating stalemate of a friendship.  In one scene Mitchell attempts to break the pace of the stagnant afternoon by throwing a bottle of beer off the balcony into the courtyard below, but the ensuing argument fails to illuminate the real source of tension and quickly trails off, leaving everything as vague as it was before.  In almost every situation, the characters find their emotions blanked with politeness, and avoidance assists in keeping the peace.  When Marnie runs into the recently married Alex and Nina in the supermarket, they fall into a banal conversation about eggplant, sidestepping Marnie’s obvious unease.  While their inner desires are exploding, outwardly the characters are stuck, paralysed by social niceties and too much choice.  This is reflected in the editing.  Interstitial time skips forward, in the gaps between the jump cuts hours, days or weeks have passed, but during the scenes time lags, and a few minutes can seem like hours.  It’s both a reflection of how the pace of life feels when you’re in your early twenties, and an assault on the speed and structure of Hollywood cinema. 

 

The film ends as it begins, in media res, with Marnie and Alex having lunch together in a park and making fun of a pair of nerdy boys playing frisbee.  It’s a truthful ending – life never presents conclusions like films often do.  Relationships and careers drift, successes come in unexpected ways, joys are fleeting and often missed, and all we can do is to just keep doing.

I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone

Today I wished Edward Said were alive.  Browsing through the responses of those the New York Times calls ‘Middle East Experts’, to Obama’s speech in Cairo yesterday, I found myself wondering what Said would have to say about it all.  Primarily the subject of the Palestinian/Israeli conflict and Obama’s assertion that both sides have equal rights over the territory.  Obama is in a position of having to walk a very fine line here as he expresses the desire for a peaceful resolution where both sides feel satisfied.  As someone outside the conflict, I think he is right in taking a bi-partisan position, and I think that as much as he could, he did.  There has been some unease in the blogosphere that in calling for a two state resolution Obama is unaware of the Palestinians premier occupation of the land, and consequently some questioning of his ability to fully understand the conflict.  What all this throws up for me is the question of communication and understanding between two parties, between different nations, races, languages and cultures, and the possibility or impossibility of finding common ground.

  

In his book The Differend, the French philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard argues that there is a point at which no understanding between two opposing parties can be made – a place where their language (and by language he means not only verbal language but cultural/experiential/historical language) is so different that communication cannot happen.  This he terms the differend.  He illustrates with an example of court trials where for some reason or other, the plaintiff is asked to provide evidence which by it’s very nature cannot be given, thereby taking away the rights of the plaintiff to defend himself against the charges.  He writes, ‘I would call a differend the case where the plaintiff is divested of the means to argue and becomes for that reason a victim.’  He presents as examples having ‘to prove rape in a language and culture that has no conception of what this could be’ or ‘to be asked to provide physical evidence of the absolute destruction of something’.  Guantanamo is a good example of the differend - where those judging are so far removed from those being judged in language and ideology that there is no possibility of discussion or reply, where the tortured cannot produce evidence of their torture, and cannot produce evidence of their innocence for those who accuse them of crimes, whose crimes are hazy and indistinct rather than quantifiable acts.  Thus the judged are silenced and the whole system operates on hearsay and conjecture.

I often wonder if Lyotard is right about the differend, and, if such a degree of miscommunication does exist, can it ever be bridged?  Furthermore, can cinema play a part in bridging the differend?

Tsai Ming-Liang’s first film shot in his homeland, Malaysia, is the enigmatic I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone (2003).  I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone is banned in Malaysia, presumably for its depiction of its poverty stricken protagonists – at least one of whom is an illegal immigrant – who live in a vast unfinished mall in the middle of KL.  The mall, like its inhabitants, is a remnant of the Asian economic crisis.  The three main characters speak different languages and have different sexualities, yet find a common bond in their displacement.

I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone is a strange film.  Like Liang’s previous films it is punctuated by long still shots where the characters are overwhelmed by the space around them, and slightly surreal imagery; like the shot at the end of the film where the three protagonists float on a tattered mattress on the lake that has formed in the centre of the abandoned mall.  There is a scene where one of the men sits fishing in this lake – although there can’t be any fish in it – quietly being, unperturbed by the stasis.  There is no internal existential crisis here, it is the world outside the mall that questions these characters existence.

Liang’s narrative structure reflects the lives of his characters.  There is very little dialogue, after all, the characters have no common verbal language, and no concrete plot.  Instead the film is a string of scenes marked by stasis and silence.  This style makes the film an equivalent of its subjects, an abject citizen of the film world, relegated to the festival circuit where it can be seen and applauded by those who have made it their business to watch such discomforting sights from the safe distance of their cinema seats.

But still, as Malaysia attempts to conceal the image of its scattered poor by banning the film, I think its very presence pulls them into the light.  Does this narrow the gap between two incompatible modes of living?  I don’t know.  It’s a tenuous proposition, but because I am a hopeful, naïve person who lives a comfortable middle class life and thus is at liberty to believe in the power of art, I like to think it might.

Starting Out in the Evening

I missed this film when it played at MIFF last year, but a friend urged me to see it – the plot, he insisted, was written for me. Indeed. Starting Out in the Evening’s protagonist is an ambitious young masters student who likens men her own age to chewing gum (ten minutes of flavour, followed by bland repetition) and longs to be another ‘Joan Didion, Joni Mitchell, or Joan of Arc’. !?! Oh dear. I’m really not that bad, am I?

Starting Out in the Evening is flawed, but enjoyable. Heather (Lauren Ambrose) is writing her thesis on Leonard Schiller (Frank Langella), an ageing novelist whose books have been out of print for the past ten years. Schiller’s first book ‘Tenderness’ is a favourite of Heather’s, as she considers it the catalyst for her current pursuit of academic fame. Schiller is initially reluctant to help Heather find the thread that will hang her thesis together, but after a publisher friend tells him, ‘literary fiction is just so hard to sell these days’, he agrees to be interviewed. The interviews rapidly slide into button pushing matches, as Heather questions Schiller about the autobiographical elements of his work. After spending some time together, they kiss. That’s as far as their physical relationship goes – Leonard is far too aware of his rapidly decaying body to embark on a rampant affair with a fit young thing like Heather. A secondary story involves Schiller’s daughter Ariel (Lili Taylor) and her longing for both love and family, neither of which she seems able to find in the same man. Of course, the intersections are confounded by the past – Ariel’s relationship with the man she loves mirrors her relationship with her father, Heather is like a young Leonard, and the moral issues that inform Leonard’s books spill into the lives of the film’s characters.

The problem with all this is that although the characters lives, problems and motives are realistic, something about the film itself just doesn’t ring true. The plot points are perhaps a little structured, they feel contrived rather than organic, and cinematically, while it looks lovely, Starting Out in the Evening could just as well have been a short story. I couldn’t find any pressing visual/aural/thematic reason for this to be a film.

Despite this slight hollowness, I liked the characters and themes. Heather comes across as driven, pushy and ambivalent – her feelings toward Leonard flip between genuine respect and arrogant disdain. Her disappointment at the difference between Leonard’s writing and his reality is both personal and career-oriented. She wants to find the man she has imagined behind his words, and write a thesis that will simultaneously bring him back from the dead and further her own career. But I liked her – as I see it, her behaviour isn’t calculated, but happens because she feels unsure about following her own path. As she reveals early in the film, ‘Tenderness’ sparked her decision to leave her ‘very talented, very brilliant’ boyfriend in order to become very talented and very brilliant herself. Having made that choice, there’s an urgency in her desire to succeed. I’ve never been quite as decisive as Heather in making that split – I’ve always wanted both love and work – but at the same time I’m always worried that in trying to balance them I might end up with a mediocre version of both. Who knows, perhaps the idea that you have to sacrifice one thing for another is simply social conditioning, but on the other, it might be true that you can only be really good at one thing.

Starting Out in the Evening isn’t the life changing opus that Schiller’s ‘Tenderness’ is for Heather, but it made me think about stuff that I already think about some more. And for that, I’m glad.

On a Rainy Afternoon

While hunting around for some bright-young-things to promote on Portable’s new blog, I came across Kim Spurlock, the maker of several gentle, elegiac shorts.  My favourite so far is the atmospheric Buou Chieu (Afternoon, 2005).  Shot on 16mm, it’s a tale of a lost ghost who, on a rainy afternoon finds her way across the world to her family.

It’s 1985 – ten years after the fall of Saigon. Somewhere in America, a young girl plays at fishing with her grandfather.  They attach paperclips to coloured paper fish and then catch them with rods made of string and magnets.  Outside it’s raining, and the shots of the house are close – heavy with the feeling of being indoors all day.  A row of incense sticks quiver in the breeze, empty slippers sit waiting in a row and the girl and her sister curl in tight around their mother for an afternoon nap. This opening is one of the truest images of home I’ve seen in a long time – a whole sensory atmosphere is created in just a few short shots – the rain outside, the smell of the incense burning, the quiet neatness of the sideboard, and the warm sleepy feeling in the overhead close-up of the two girls on either side of their mother.  Everything is close and slow and tender – the characters even move slowly, as if half awake.  The camera is near without being intrusive.  When the father/grandfather dies, the scene is shown with a single still shot looking down on the daughter from behind as she realizes her father has passed.  No frontal shots are needed, all the love and sadness is shown in the way she leans forward to press her face against his.  Big ideas are alluded to, while the images themselves are clean and clear – lovely.

Fish (2003) also hangs on an intergenerational connection.  In this black and white film, a young boy wants to rescue a fish from the fish market.  He has just enough money, but his mother pulls him away, sending the coin flying.  An old man witnesses the boy’s desire, retrieves the coin, and buys the fish.  He packs the fish into his briefcase, takes it to the river, and lets it swim free.  I’m not sure how long the fish is going to survive the muddy tides of the Hudson, but that’s beside the point.  The beauty of the film is in the way the story unfolds shot by shot, without any need for explanation or dialogue.

Spurlock is a wonderful visual storyteller who makes clear shot choices – no shot is superfluous, gratuitous or there just because it looks cool.  It’s a motion of dissent to make quiet films in this noisy world, and I love her for it.

The Last Days of Chez Nous

One of the lovely things about going back to study is that I’ve discovered films I would probably not have otherwise watched. One of these is The Last Days of Chez Nous (Gillian Armstrong, 1992), a film that has shot whatever-used-to-be-my-favourite-Australian-film off the list to become my favourite Australian film. Yay! And it’s not hard to see why – writing in the online journal Bright Lights, Richard Armstrong likens the emotional tone to Cassavetes and Woody Allen. With a script by Helen Garner, The Last Days of Chez Nous is a quietly shot urban drama with the breakdown of a marriage at its core.

Set in a labyrinthine terrace in Sydney’s inner west the film is visually arresting, and the elusive structure – the house is constructed as a series of interlinking rooms, one space opening into the next as the characters move through them – reflects the twisting, intersecting relationships of its inhabitants. Just as we never get a feel for the layout of the house, the film refuses to provide an easy to read map of the characters. The tensions between Beth (Lisa Harrow), JP (Bruno Ganz) and Beth’s sister Vicki (Kerry Fox) sizzle like an electric wire, but the film refuses to give them any resolution. Ian Craven observes that the characters are ‘caught in a complex network of drives,’ all desiring things that don’t seem to be able to live together. Beth, a writer, wants to maintain her autonomy, and at the same time have her marriage, while JP feels neglected and unloved by her strong, dominant way of managing things. Vicki wants to become a writer like Beth, but lacks the discipline to actually sit down and write. I was reminded here of Woody Allen’s Hannah and her Sisters, where Hannah (Mia Farrow) takes care of everyone and everything so well that the other characters drift away from her, wanting to feel needed.

Armstrong accentuates the tension with the use of high angle shots and off kilter close-ups where the characters faces sit awkwardly in the frame, reflecting their unease. Armstrong loves close-ups, and she uses them well, drawing attention to the domestic details of her characters lives to give them breath. A pen, a desk, a bed, the food they eat, the bowls they use are all lovingly shown. We catch glimpses of their interior spaces through doorways and windows. Beth’s study is frequently observed like this, and it is a sacred room in Vicki’s eyes; Beth’s space, where Beth creates. More than anything Vicki wants what Beth has, and in the end she gets JP. However the listless way she begins cleaning their new apartment suggests that what she thought she wanted may not be what she wants at all.

Armstrong’s most recent film is the disappointing Death Defying Acts, but I hope she makes more films like The Last Days of Chez Nous – stories where we are dropped into the lives of others, where we watch them struggle and grow as they learn something about themselves, where we recognise ourselves, where we wonder what we would do and how we are, because after all, we are always traveling.

The Reader

I saw The Reader last night and was sadly, unimpressed. Maybe it’s my Cassavetes obsession or my love for the kind of adhoc aesthetic of the Maysles brothers, but I couldn’t help feeling disappointed by the Hollywood conventional-ness of it all.

Adapted from Bernard Schlink’s excellent novel, the story follows a teenage boy’s sexual awakening and subsequent discovery of his older lover’s Nazi past. Michael (David Kross) meets Hanna (Kate Winslet) when he throws up outside her house one afternoon. She takes him home (he has scarlet fever) and once he is better the two embark on an affair.  Hanna likes being read to, and the two spend a lovely summer of books and sex, after which Hanna disappears. After the affair, Michael goes around steeped in a Goethe-like melancholy. As the adult Michael Ralph Fiennes does a sterling job of this – he even somehow looks German, a trick which Kate Winslet never manages, despite her floral dresses and sturdy sandals. Years later, Michael attends the trial of some Nazi guards as part of his University studies. Hanna is one of the women being tried, and despite the fact it could affect the outcome of her sentence, she refuses to reveal her illiteracy. She is found guilty of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. After some years, Michael begins to send her tapes of the books he read to her the summer of the affair, and slowly, she learns to read.

Schlink’s book is full of powerful imagery, and considering Germany’s rich cinematic history it seems almost wasteful to have the film made by an Englishman whose contributions (despite his repeated Oscar nominations) to cinema have been solid at best. ‘Solid’ is a good way to describe The Reader. Shot with pleasant lighting, a blue-grey colour palette, bland mise-en-scene, and driven along by a manipulative syrup of a score, the fact that it is a ‘good’ movie is perhaps its worst flaw. I was simply underwhelmed by the blandness of it all. Wim Wenders writes that there are films that open your eyes and films that gummy them up, noting that the best films make you think differently, while the rest reinforce a kind of status quo.

The Reader is one of the latter, when it ought to be one of the former. Schlink’s story explores the moral and emotional ambiguities of post Nazi Germany, but the film never really gives us a good idea of the climate in which it’s set. The characters ask, ‘Given the circumstances of our lives, how do we best live?’ Questions of complicity, guilt, shame and responsibility are twisted together like a Celtic love-knot, but the film waters all this turgid emotion into one and a half hours of flaccid drivel. It plays to the audience in the crudest cinematic way, and while it works on this level – the two lovely women on either side of me were in tears – I’d forgotten it by the time I got home.

True Blood

There has been a lot of vampire hype around lately, what with Twilight, True Blood, and now the Swedish teen fang flick, Let The Right One In.  Over the Christmas holidays I was finally able to watch the whole first season of True Blood, and I am addicted.  Addicted in the I-can’t-stop-thinking-about-it-three-months-later-and-even-Mad Men-can’t-distract-me-from-hanging-out-for-the-second-season way.  Last week at the supermarket I saw a bottle of dark red juice and was struck by a restless desire to skull the thick sticky stuff and float off into a hallucinatory heaven.  Cadillac is also smitten, and what male of the Bruno Kirby variety wouldn’t be when Anna Paquin saunters through each episode in a variety of short shorts and little white singlets.  Phwoar!  To top things off, she is a psychic of sorts, able to listen in to the thoughts of the people around her.  What more could anyone want?

 

There is blood, sex and supernatural goings on in abundance, but the absolute best thing about True Blood is the credit sequence.  With Jace Everrett’s Bad Things setting up the rhythms, a rattlesnake rears its head, a child smears berry around his mouth, a gospel choir rouses a soul, and a dog’s carcass decays before our eyes.  It’s a heady mix of sensation and contradiction, evoking a place where emotions are amplified and chaos is the order of the day.

The sequence was put together by Digital Kitchen, and opens with a tracking shot across the Mississippi, through the reeds and trees, down a wire lined highway and into the fickle heart of southern America.  Historical stock footage is cut together with images Alan Ball and Matt Mulder filmed on super eight cameras on a road trip around Louisiana.  This mix of the old and new works to create a mood – a shot of a young boy in Klu Klux Klan headgear is followed by a man rocking in a chair in a strange juxtaposition that gives the image of the man a sinister edge.  Momentary shots of naked bodies are spliced beside church goers gyrating with the ecstasy of the lord.  Linked by movement, it’s a lovely co-existence of the sacred and profane.  In the south, it suggests, there is god and there is sex.

 

These credits create a space for the drama to unfold.  Even before the episode begins, the images draw you into the world of the series, and very effectively too.  It’s not just having a title sequence that doesn’t recycle images from within the show – there are plenty of shows with art designed openings – it’s that the credits complement and add to the episodes that follow.  You might not be a fan of schlocky vampire trash, but watch the titles – they’re awesome.

The Woman in the Dunes

Master of Ikebana, installation artist, director of operas and Noh theatre, Hiroshi Teshigahara was a man devoted to the aesthetic, and this is reflected in the powerful visuality of his films. I didn’t know Teshigahara until a boy who likes beautiful business cards lent me his crisp white box set, and although I’m scared to touch the covers for fear of making them dirty, I’m glad he did.

Based on Kobo Abe’s award winning book, The Woman in the Dunes is an existential story with a ridiculous plot, but it’s more about the metaphor than the reality. Jumpei (Eiji Okada) is a teacher and amateur entomologist. On a bug collecting trip in the dunes, he mistakenly accepts the hospitality of the seaside villagers, only to find himself trapped in a hollow with a lonely widower. Forced to shovel sand by night in order to keep the rickety hut from being buried, he at first resists, but after the woman falls pregnant, succumbs to his fate.

What makes the film so stunning is the incredible images. Opening with shots of abstract drawings based on the lines of the dunes, we then see a shot of the sand hills, stretching across the screen in a vast abstract design. I’d forgotten how striking a perfectly lit and exposed film can look. Every shot in The Woman in the Dunes has a full range of mid tones, and the slightly different skin colour of the two characters is perfectly balanced whenever they are on screen together. Teshigahara cuts cleanly between extreme, almost macro close-ups and long wide shots. The camera comes in close to the gritty, sand covered skin of the characters, creating abstract images out of their hair and the lines of their bodies. 

There is no escape from the ever shifting sand that cascades across the frame. At first, being stuck in the claustrophobic hut made the film difficult viewing for me, but the cinematic innovation overrode my initial discomfort. Just as Jumpei develops an eye for the details of the world around him, Teshigahara comes up with an incredible array of different shots from such a restricted location. It’s a beautiful lesson in filmmaking – now I want to use a macro lens.

Rachel Getting Married

For the first time in my life on Wednesday afternoon, I wanted a wedding cake. Not the wedding itself, just the cake. You see, the cake in Rachel Getting Married is a deep blue Indian elephant, decorated with little white flowers, as if the brush of an Indian miniature painter had conjured it up. It is an incredible creation that steals the screen during its brief minutes of fame. If I ever do get married, I intend have this cake – a quote cake. However I will not ever, under any circumstances, wear a purple sari. I depend on you to hold me to that.

Films structured around weddings don’t usually grab me, as they more often than not seem to be stomach churning romantic comedies that use the wedding as a device to get a whole lot of mismatched people in the one room. Thankfully, Rachel Getting Married is in a different league; more Monsoon Wedding than My Best Friend’s Wedding. Kim (Anne Hathaway) returns from rehab for her sister Rachel’s (Rosemarie DeWitt) wedding. Kim hasn’t been home for nine months, hasn’t met Rachel’s husband to be Sidney (Tunde Adebimpe), and to a certain extent, hasn’t been included in the plans for the wedding. This, and the unresolved familial issues between Rachel, Kim and their parents over the death of a younger brother give the film its emotional core. The family is a sprawling, multicultural and musical. Paul (Bill Irwin) is over protective and Abby (Debra Winger) struggles with the idea of family. She is distant and clearly finds the expectations of her daughters difficult. In the end she leaves the wedding early to fly to Washington for a business meeting in the morning. Her absence is accentuated by stepmother Carol’s (Anna Deveare Smith) warmth. Carol remains kind even when she is being pushed to the outer, and is clearly the heart of the home.

You can see hints of Jonathan Demme’s previous films in the psychological struggles, the jealousies and attempts at manipulation that occur between the characters. It’s gentler than the mind games of Hannibal Lecter, however Demme’s skill at teasing out the way people push each other creates a wonderful tension. Not only do Rachel and Kim have unresolved sibling rivalries, Kim and Rachel’s best friend Emma (Anisa George) jostle for the position of maid of honour, Kim believing that as Rachel’s sister, the role should be hers.

This Kim/Emma struggle is particularly poignant. Right from the moment Kim arrives home and bursts into the room where Emma is pinning Rachel’s dress, Emma’s reservations about Kim are clear. As Kim and Rachel babble about the past, Emma looks on with a wary expression. Later, at the rehearsal dinner, Emma begins her speech by explaining that she has known Rachel her whole life, hinting that although they aren’t related, she knows Rachel better than Kim. The other guests fit in around the nervy ensemble, providing the film with its light. Sidney’s musician friends play constantly throughout the film, in a doodling background of random improvisation that I found hilarious. This is probably a personal thing though, and those of you without friends who play improvised world music/jazz might just find it annoying without the funny.

The mobile camera and the understated performances give the film a cinema verite feel. It’s like being dropped in the middle of a real family. At moments the scene in the car after Paul and Carol pick Kim up slips into documentary-style casualness. The camera rides in the car with them, mostly watching Kim as she banters with her father, only turning to the front where Carol is driving when Carol asks, ‘What’s nachtmare? I don’t know that one.’ ‘It’s a nightmare so bad it’s in German’, Paul reveals. The characters and their relations with each other emerge through small moments like this. Throwaway comments, asides and in-jokes pervade the naturalistic script, creating tensions and then moving on, so that the audience is only shown hints of the greater story. This is what keeps you watching, wanting to know more about these people, who, with their enigmatic pettiness and hidden anger are both familiar and strange.

Revolutionary Road

Adapted from Richard Yates’ autobiographical novel, Revolutionary Road drops the audience into the thick of a young couple’s failing marriage. Both Frank (Leonardo DiCaprio) and April (Kate Winslet) are approaching thirty and struggling to make peace with their unfulfilled dreams.  They have two young children, a house in the suburbs and a bevy of stifled friends who have already given themselves over to the disappointments of their lives.  Feeling trapped and sensing Frank’s own unhappiness with his work, April devises a plan to move to Paris, a place that promises the excitement of the unknown.  There is both joy and naivety to the plan – April believes they can break out of the rut they have fallen into, and in her desperation she fails to see that what Frank really wants, he already has.  It’s an engaging premise because like most dramas that question the value of the status quo, the material promises to reflect and magnify the lives of its audience.

 

The execution here however, seems both unwieldy and at the same time a little heavy handed.  The disintegration of Frank and April’s relationship and April’s utter frustration when her desire for a different life isn’t realized happens predictably, and while there is something of the inevitable about the events, (one could argue the film is more about the how than the what) the dialogue often becomes explanatory and the characters are more general than individual.  It’s true that people really do overtalk things as they struggle to communicate in the heat of an argument, but for me, the words took the affective experience out of the film, and I became aware of the construct. 

In John Cassavetes’ exploration of suburban marriage in A Woman Under the Influence, the mise-en-scene creates labyrinths out of the hallways and rooms the characters inhabit, enclosing them both physically and mentally.  The camera will zoom in close on a face, only to back out and turn, passing over a ceiling as the subject moves, re – enters the frame for a moment, then slips away again.  This way of filming is like a dance between character and camera, and the audience is physically involved – through the movement and disorientation the viewer has the sensation of getting under the character’s skin.  It’s this kind of affective experience that is missing from Revolutionary Road.  Here, Mendes’ shoots in a static way, with lots of medium close ups, square framing and fixed cameras.  The stillness of the frame made the film feel like a play, and as a result the emotion feels a little contrived.  As April begins to break down, screaming at Frank ‘Get away from me, don’t you touch me,’ I longed for Gena Rowlands.  No one does a breakdown quite like Cassavetes.

 

It’s the idea of masculinity, and the trouble Frank has trying to feel comfortable in a society that both valorized and stifled its men that I found most interesting here, and I wanted to see more of it.  Early in the film there is a quote-worthy moment when April tells Frank, ‘You’re the most beautiful and wonderful thing in the world, a man.’ In April’s eyes Frank’s maleness means he can take the world in his hands and throw convention to the winds in a way that she as a woman can’t do on her own.  But in the claustrophobic world of middle class America in the 1950’s, the pressures on Frank to fit a certain mould are just as strong.  Even while there is scope for Frank to go out into the city, have affairs with secretaries and complain about work over lunch with his friends, he comes up against brutal disapproval when he toys with the idea of actually leaving.  In Revolutionary Road Frank finds himself a place within the big machine, stumbling across a field he finds interesting.  But I wonder if this is the contentment of acceptance or merely the resignation of being unwilling to fight.