SHAME: Pain is beautiful

There is nothing “scandalous” in “Shame”. Nothing prude, no audiovisual Viagra of any kind.

As “Shame” talks about Thanatos, rather than about Eros.
It does not follow love, it does vow death.
And it shows just how much wish for death does exist in that obsession of love (and of sex, of flesh, of climax, of pleasure…)…., in the wishes and obsessions that dominate our society.

The title is to remind us the biblical meaning of sex - as shame, in the process of losing one’s innocence.
The one for which its progenitors – according to the catholic faith- will be kicked out of the Terrestrial Paradise.

Steve McQueen, the Director, has defined the film as an enquiry on the sex addiction.




Brandon – in his thirties, rich and gorgeous- is the prisoner of his own sexual compulsion. He is an elegant professional in a perfect physical shape.

Yet underneath this perfect picture he nests a compulsive and solitary sex addict. He lives for sex.
He is not a joyful Don Giovanni, though: stimulated by cheap porn that fills up his computer or by chance encounters, Brandon practices a sort of mortuary sex, consumed without joy.
For him, sex is an action to effectuate with maximum efficiency.





It is efficiency that has turned him into a very successful professional; efficiency is what turned his apartment into a very well oiled machine, where everything functions, where nothing is misplaced, and where his sexual behavior must also be extremely efficient.

During his sex acts his partners are just objects to be paid, as they execute well aimed orders.
Or then there is just someone who agrees for a quickie after dinner, in a dark corner of the city streets.
It is a behavior that comes from far…

Would it be from an exaggerated fear of confronting women? We do not know.
Brandon disappears at the bathroom masturbating even during working hours. Or he incessantly follows erotic chats (with the help of technique, masturbation has become even virtual).

Giving pleasure has become to him unbearable. He unleashes himself into exaggerated nocturnal trips, in order to tire up and avoid to think about it.
McQueen offers also an artful threesome sex scene where the effects of vagueness are preventing it from looking vulgar.

If we consider “Shame” to be a documentary, we have to recognize its high formal achievement and the very sharp choice of the main actor, a handsome and striking Fassbender in a state of grace, with a body that rules over the sex scenes.

But “Shame” is rather a sort of prison movie.
Just that here prison exists in Brandon’s head and it is filled with sex, naked bodies, out of control impulses and ferociously chasen coituses.


The climax never offers him the requited pleasure, though. He lives those moments at the border of a terrible pain, a nameless and solitary suffering that plunges him nearer to Death than to Love.
A broken evolution that intertwines with the broken body and soul of his sister.

Her character, Sissy, played by Carey Mulligan, is a sort of singer with high sensibility, reinventing in a blues version “New York, New York” (in fact the only moment of authentic seduction in this film).
How could she be so blind as to look for help near a person so bluntly insensitive?
And especially how could she be as deluded by her unfortunate choice as to cut her veins?
The vivid red of her blood shines a light of death over the imperial grey of the film…


The very dangerous border between fraternal behavior and the shadows of incest is never really explained, but repeatedly whispered...
It is violently suggested, though, here and then, as the tip of an iceberg, by several looks, or gestures, or through the framing of the two, often filmed from behind, or by very intense fragments of dialogue such as: “..We aren’t really bad, we just come from a very uggly place”...

The void of significants makes us believe it is all about the tragedy of the relationships between men and women. Would then the sexphobia of the Bible be triumphing after two thousand years?...

And what about the other women? Young women who excite him in the subway; sex workers that come home during the short lapses of time between two masturbations…

The only woman that is really drown to him, moved by a genuine interest in his persona, a work colleague, will have to bear the lack of success of a bad sex and the shame of disappearing as fast as possible.
Ashamed by an aborted sex act that is instead appreciated by the spectator, given that Brandon had made an effort with her, to the point of caring for her too much as to get violent…

With a painfull, desperate and sublime New York as a background, McQueen directs a sort of pain that has the smell and the taste of sex, a realistic kind of sex that becomes narrative, meaningfull and able to tell the story of the encounter between Eros and Thanatos. The two forces of Life, that explode on the face of Fassbender, deformed by orgasm, at the border of life and death, of pain and pleasure.

Giulia DOBRE

February 2012/July 2012

TOURNEE, director: Mathieu Amalric (most moving french movie seen in past years)

The film of Mathieu Amalric, the actor, the writer and the director, breaths off the melancholia of a cinema telling of theatre and shows.

TOURNEE suggests an Altmanian tone and warmth, in a marvelous film that induces dispersion and chaos.

Reality here is only described through contrasts.

It is a wild, poetical, diverting, exhilarating, desperate, insolent and miraculous filmic gesture!

Joachim the Producer lived far from France ever since he decided to abandon all and change life. He is now back with a New Burlesque theatre company, which gathers 5 charismatic strippers  that inflame their public with ironical inventions and sympathetic sensuality.

 

They tour around coastal French towns, while Joachim races to find a Parisian theatre and his own lost life.

Their trip is full of colorless “no-places” which make their life peculiar and a lot less glamorous than one could think. 

The voice is almost of a documentary, and it allows the director to note at the same time the joy of those performances, and that other France, one  that is not on the postcards.

Between two cities, between two shows, pop out the anxieties of this man. A man for whom it is impossible to rehabilitate with his past, including with his sons.

A man  happy with his new family that allows him to live without remorse and which asks for so little in exchange. Just for another place where to evolve.

 As Amalric knows it very well: that is the life of a performer.

The invisible landscape of this tour, devoured by the gloomy nights filled with alochool and with casual and saddening sex, tell us about the unpredictable dynamics of these characters.

Their living space is always an equal amount of trains, cars and hotels, that repeat themselves ab infinitum.

For these modern and yet anachronic women it is impossible to resist the temptation of breaking the schemata and filling up their inner voids with new voices and theatrical gestures.

TOURNEE circles amazingly subjects as the solitude of middle aged people, the solitude of performers, or what happens when falling out of love, out of interest, out of success, or out of life.  Of what happens when the lights are turned off and you are alone in your room, facing yourself, facing the void...

It tells of the mechanism of desire, of its origins and its evolution.  Of its (im)possible fullfilement...

 It borders feelings and meere phisicality, first or second degree, the full understanding of "what you see is what you (don't) get"!....

It paints the limits between youth and adult age, between a fit body and a body with history, between home and elsewhere, between existing in the present or holding back to the past....

TOURNEE is  a film about the intimate and visionary story of several men  women, fathers, wives or mothers, show people, aging men and women, who try to run their life using the context.

A context that do not match their children anymore, of whom they do not remember birthdays or addresses, to which they do not know to tell stories anymore, at night.

They are out of match with their friends, who end up by abandoning them. They are out of match with money, too, missing when they need to achieve their dreams.

In this exaggerated rhythm of life, the background music or the TV screens become the sign of an indistinct reality, where none of these characters could recognize themselves.

So they prefer to turn them off, and try to change, for a night, for yet another night, the colors of their surrounding world.

 In a heartbreaking attempt to make the show go on, to arrive at their next theater and evolve in their next show, until the lights will eventually be turned off….

Giulia Dobre

remastered on July 14th 2012

de rouille et d'os (rust and bone), c.2012/ Director: Jacques Audiard

 DE ROUILLE ET D'OS is a love story.  Hardly gentle, it tracks an unlikely love affair between contrasting people hurled together by harsh fates: a legless young woman and a second-rate boxer.

A study of two disabled people -- one physically, the other emotionally -- and the extreme states to which they must be pushed in order to connect.

 Ali (Matthias Schoenaerts), homeless and poor, with a five year old son he barely knows, moves from grim, urban northern France to the sunny Provence.

Working as a night-club bouncer, the muscular Ali rescues Stephanie (Marion Cotillard) from a drunken brawl.

Attractive and seemingly confident, she trains killer Orca whales who perform for the public at Marineland. But one show goes badly wrong; she is attacked, loses both legs (convincingly, thanks to remarkable special effects), and is left wheelchair-bound.

After a while, she calls Ali.

At this point Audiard’s main theme — physicality in various forms — emerges.

Ali is fighting, and wins money from bloody, illegal bouts. He also enjoys fast, casual love-making.

Yet  he is very considerate with Stephanie, helps her rediscover the joy of swimming and   the consolations of sex.

She responds to the giddy euphoria of infectious pop music, bopping in her wheelchair to the B-52s’ Love Shack, and rehearsing upper-body whale-training moves to Katy Perry’s Firework.

The couple negotiate their relationship clumsily (Ali is not an emotionally literate man) and it takes more crises to advance it.

 Audiard shoots largely in a series of jagged, startling images.

Cotillard and Schoenaerts give heavily internalized performances marked by sporadic physical outbursts involving athletics and a lot of exciting sex.

But one scene is quietly breath-taking: Stephanie returns to work, summons a whale to her through an aquarium’s glass wall, and coaxes it to follow the movements of her body.

Parallels can be drawn with Javier Bardem’s Biuitiful :  both show the  underbelly of their chosen settings, both deal with a devastating bodily trauma for central characters, and both also have a visceral nature to them that is profoundly affecting.

(Biutiful was one of my favorite films, and certainly one of my favorite performances.)...

This is a film of genuine power. Rust and Bone may not be for everyone. But it is a complex and  assured piece. 

giulia d

july 2012

El Lenguaje de los machetes

 

With The Language of Machetes (El Lenguaje de los machetes), Kyzza Terrazas brings a film that has been long awaited by several successive generations. Generations that were waiting for an artist, and especially a filmmaker, to express so properly, and without any judgement, the terrible ‘mal de vivre’ that we/they all experience.

Tarrazas’ film circles around a couple composed of a troubled journalist and a sado-masochist punk rock singer.

They have a grueling time finding out who they are, if they really care about their professions, and how much they can expect from society and also give back to it.

Where does their own fight (both with themselves and with the existing powers) start and how long should it last?

Both characters feel a deep unease, as if the skins they inhabit were too limiting.

They sound and act like apocalyptic spirits. As the director puts it:

“Love, the desire to transform reality and failure in both are thus the main themes of “El Lenguaje de los machetes”.

It is a film of traces. Of disheveled gestures…Of frontal war. A case of nostalgia for utopia…”

Therefore, though very in love with each other, the couple swings between extreme passion and annulment, between profound declarations, projects, and solitude.

There is a lot of suffering for these characters, a lot of failure, both as spectators of a society where violence is omnipresent, and as persons unable to take a major step in their relationship.

They suffer to such an extent that they decide to play a final act in the comedy/tragedy of their life, attacking one of the most important symbols of Mexico and its colonization.

El Lenguaje de los machetes is a film that softly swings around the opposition between Mexicans of white/European origin, the direct and financially privileged descendents of blond and blue-eyed colonizers, and the local populations who still live a sort of slavery.

But it also expresses the miscommunication between urban and rural mentalities. For the latter, all change should come through bloodshed, through a heavy violence that fills the air.

Music is perfectly employed in El Lenguaje de los machetes, for sheer emphasis in some key moments.

The camera work is all built on the contrast of lights, colors and tones.

It is without a doubt a film that has touched its public, and we can only salute the emergence of an original and breezy filmic philosopher such as Mr. Tarrazas (already the author of two volumes of short stories).