Sunday, December 31, 2017

Happy-go-lucky - Mike Leigh (2008) - A film protocol-cum-review.

 


Impish Poppy rides into town modeling openness. Either she has not been in it before or she's forgotten. Enchanted with the world, and her own enchantment
, she discovers novelty at very turn. When life conspires to throw the odd bit of nastiness her way, she deflects it with alacrity. In a bookseller she attempts small talk with a taciturn clerk who refuses to be implicated by her chatty solicitude. Exiting after a final attempt to compel reciprocity, she quips: “I ain’t nicked nothin'. Honest, guv’nor.” Even when her bicycle goes missing she can only blithely regret not having had the chance to say good-bye.

Indiscriminately agreeable, Poppy is comfortable with the spectrum of ethnicities. (Only neurotics are intolerant; "healthy" types indiscriminately inclusive.) She covers her students' heads with paper bags and encourages them to crow and flap their wings. It's all about spontaneity. Main thing--no one takes themselves too seriously. Could lead to disagreeableness.

A
sequence where she bounces on a trampoline drives home her preternatural levity.

At their first lesson instructor Scott is all business. From the unconsumated introductory hand-shake it's obvious theirs will be a relationship of failed reciprocity.
 

Dyspeptic Scott has no time for flaky friskiness, deploying his ‘pig parent’ ego state with a vehemence bordering on caricature. He does everything in his power to deflate Poppy's irrepressible ebullience. If there is any doubt with whom our sympathy should lie--Scott's teeth are yellow and misaligned.

Juxtaposing temperaments is Leigh's specialty, but pitting choleric Scott against sanguine Poppy really ups the dispositional ante. If the distinct hue of each character in his dramatic quilt lends their conflicts a certain inevitability, it also makes them feel--for all their specificity of milieu and motivation--feel almost allegorical. Leigh is not just staging friction between antipathetic personalities, but a full-on civil-war between ideological factions: the poster-child of inclusive egalitarianism vs. the clannish defender of the Realm-under-siege. By embodying political orientations in personality types, he offers both an etiology and critique of their respective angles on the world. Though it's never less than obvious with whom his ultimate sympathy--and that of any card-carrying progressive--must lie.


Having revealed herself as a simple primary school teacher, Poppy asks Scott if he's a Satanist. “No," he replies, "in fact I’m exactly the opposite.” “Are you the Pope, then?” she guffaws. “That’s the same thing!” he snorts. The exchange suggests that for all their disparate ideological commitments, they are each, at heart, ideological brawlers well-versed in trading intellectual clichés.


After the lesson she tells her room-mate her instructor was a funny sort: “a bit uptight.” Lacking Poppy's rose-colored perspective we know him as the force of pure evil. H
er understatement gives us pause to admire the magnanimity of her unfailingly affirmative attitude. Even as we secretly desire to see her resilience put to the severest of tests.

Poppy visits a chiropractor—a huge African who releases a joint jammed during trampoline practice. Poppy's sense of common humanity doesn’t miss a beat. Leigh frames the scene in such a way as to compel recognition of this 'self-explanatory' fact by, paradoxically, emphasizing his disorienting foreignness.


Scott complains
about a rude student who'd been “over-indulged and encouraged to express himselfe," with with whom he had a confrontation. 


Seeing two African men pass on bicycles he tells Poppy to lock her door. “Are you taking the piss?” she protests. (Only
paranoid types are wary of males of North African extraction.)

Scott can’t believe Poppy is a primary school teacher, seething: “You have no respect for order. You are arrogant, you are disruptive, and you celebrate chaos.”


From the perspective of Scott’s fear of encroaching social dissolution, Poppy’s light-heartedness seems reprehensibly oblivious. If suffering “is the modality of taking the world seriously” (E. Cioran), her will-to-good-cheer largely obviates it's assumption of any consequence. Life is an endlessly amusing curiosity. Her glibly engaged disengagement keeping all options in play as so many juggling pins. Scott, on the other hand, in perpetual crisis-mode, demands a final verdict. His defeat is as pre-programmed as her float to the top. 


Poppy's presumptuous "arrogance" manifests as an indiscriminate affability that assumes everyone can be gotten on the same jaunty wave-length. She establishes rapport of a certain kind by default, while Scott seems to resent the need to engage at all. Whence the paradox of his vehement devaluation and simultaneous desire for Poppy.  

Scott's possessiveness has more of hatred than tenderness. He could only love Poppy if she submitted to his control. But cutting Poppy down to size proves to be a bit like attempting catching a fish barehanded. To succeed would annul the very basis of genuine intimacy--its incalculable, open-ended mutuality. Unable to internalize without being displaced by her, there is no relational path forward for him. 

Walking through a blighted neighborhood, Poppy is lured off the street by the inchoate rambling of a schizophrenic. Not put-off by his unkempt appearance and wild expression, she strikes up an oddly playful conversation. He turns down her offer of money before reciprocating her inquisitive gaze with an incredulous one of his own, puzzled by her unlikely solicitude. He makes as if to stroke her hair, then pulls back and trudges off into the night. Engaging the stranger without fear, Poppy assumes the role of the innocent fool
enlightened by compassion--Leigh's understanding of Christ.

Poppy is curious rather than repulsed by the manifestations of disgruntlement around her. With the exception of her pregnant sister, all disagreeable types (social evil to her allocentric mind) are male. When she's not gliding nonchalantly past their unspoken despair she becomes a fully three dimensional human being. Yet for all her good cheer and fellow-feeling, she doesn't attempt to rescue them. Men aren't surrogate children, but 'mates'--fellow travelers who more often than not fail to forge for themselves the fortune which smiles so benignly upon her.   

To help her with the bully at school Poppy engages a social worker who exudes health and civility. He gives her his phone number and they hook up for joyful genitality. (They are not sadomasochists.)



At her next driving lesson Poppy’s flippancy riles Scott. He sternly admonishes her, saying she will have an accident and die laughing if she can't pull herself together and be serious. He will not have her endangering people for her own amusement. 

Scott diagnoses and indicts the forces threatening Britannia: "the disease of multiculturalism…is non-culturalism." Desired because "they want to reduce collective will.” (Only failed souls question that diversity entails the unalloyed enrichment of society. To enjoy human rights means no person can be illegal, the only just community must be indiscriminately inclusive.) 


In a fit of rage Scott expounds his paranoid numerological theory about the Washington Monument. (Dig deep enough in any racist’s mind and you will find a conspiratorial faith.) For once Poppy seems at a loss, though the shadow of a bemused smirk never quite leaves her face. “Are you an only child, Scott?” she asks tendentiously. For a brief moment her pilot light seems extinguished.


Returning from a weekend outing with friends, Poppy spots Marc. He recognizes her and takes off in comical desperation. Later, in a misguided attempt to disown his maddening curiosity about Poppy, he denies having been there. 
  


During what will be their final lesson, Scott explodes.
Poppy tells him he needs professional help, taking his car-keys to prevent him driving in his agitated state. Hilarity ensues when she refuses to give them back. He pulls her hair. She shrieks in disbelief. They chase one another around the car like over-sized children. 

Scott inadvertently betrays the depth of his sexual envy: “This is all about you—the world has to revolve around you....You got in that car with one thing in mind—to reel me in. ..Because you have to be adored...And you drink it in. And you leave me with a spring in your step and you go off and you fuck your boyfriend and you fuck your girlfriend…”

Calming down, he turns pensive. But for Poppy the situation is beyond mending. “I’m sorry if I upset you Scott. I wish I could make you happy.” Marc misunderstands
her generosity as an attempt to conciliate, insisting “I'm a good driving instructor."

In the final scene Poppy and her room-mate row a boat over a large pond. “We’re lucky, aren’t we?” her friend muses. “Yeah, we are. Well, you make your own luck in life, don’t you?”  

 The film ends with an upward pan encompassing the park's bucolic grounds, Poppy's half-truth hanging in the air. 

Monday, November 20, 2017


La Meilleure Façon de Marcher (The Best Way to Walk) (1975) - Claude Miller

“…some little private madness…"


The Best Way to Walk's brutal thematic seemed the unlikeliest of subjects for filmic realization when I saw it as a teen-ager. 40 years later its unsparing exploration of heretofore unclaimed psycho-sexual territory--at once shocking and oddly liberating--continues to define the permanent future of cinema's thematic avant-garde. 

Miller's film takes place at a boys camp over the course of the summer of 1960. Eschewing the kind of fussy curatorial outfitting that often drowns period films in nostalgia, Miller focuses on the dynamic between his protagonists: the sensitive and taciturn camp director's son Phillipe (Patrick Bouchity), who oversees theatrical activities, and robust Marc (Patrick Dewaere), in charge of athletic contests.


At the juncture of boy- vs. manhood--a boundary separating the unfinished business of being vs. having a maternal matrix from the attainment of masculine distinction and heterosexual object choice--some waver while others attack.

While Phillipe is mired in divided loyalties, Marc has advanced with lucid transparency to his sense of self, his public and private identity seamlessly cohering. Yet the very unambiguousness of Marc's masculine identity will reveal itself as oddly vulnerable confronted by Phillipe's agonizingly anomalous identification-in-progress

As a storm rages Phillipe and two fellow counselors watch Bergman's Wild Strawberries on television. Uninterested in the arty fare, Marc and his companions play a rowdy game of cards. The volatility of misaligned temperaments--oblivious vulgarians vs. high-brow sophisticates--threatens to combust into physical violence, but ends with minor feather-ruffling. Tired of interruptions, Phillipe withdraws. The storm triggers an electrical surge that blows out the lights. The ensuing darkness sets the stage for the revelation which will propel a hidden difference into open antagonism. 

Looking for candles with a flashlight, Marc knocks on Phillipe’s door. Phillipe asks him to wait, but straight-forward Marc enters anyway. To his shock he discovers Phillipe in front of a mirror wearing a dress and wig, his face heavily made up. Phillipe pulls off the fake hair and wipes the back of his hand across his mouth, smearing the lipstick as the light goes dark. 


Mark gazes back in perplexity. Then remembers why he came and asks for candles. His complexion sooty against the candle-light, Phillipe glares back, his mascaraed eyes frozen wide with apprehension. For a brief moment Marc's shock matches Phillipe’s mortification. The rest of the film charts the ramifications of this primal scene of unwitting exposure, and the unwanted intimacy it creates between virtual strangers. 



Mark walks back to resume his card game as Phillipe languidly wipes the makeup from his face, gazing at his reflection less enchanted than bewildered. The spell of his clandestine disguise has been broken, its mesmerizing reality displaced by the realization of undeniable oddness. 

Hell, Sartre famously demonstrated, is the intrusion of others on our private "madness"--aspirations, vanities, and illusions. Foiling the totality of immanence, the other becomes the agent of disenchantment through whom being and appearance, counting and being counted, are rendered eternally disjunctive. 

Whether as Creator crashing his creatures’ dyadic bliss beyond good and evil, or the unwitting neighbor forced into the witness role, each brings a sudden scrutiny which turns innocent play to self-conscious antics. That is, perhaps, the price of self-awareness in its recognitive duplication--nothing is gained without losing something. 

For Phillipe's private ontological game of virtual reality any recognition--the ticket to self-substantiation--constitutes a fatal disruption. Rather than being confirmed through recognition, the result feels like a confusion of selves. His dispossession and exile from make-believe eventually opens up the path to owning whom he would be--yet only by way of a tortuous, in no way virtual master-slave altercation from which he will be lucky to emerge alive.

Reappearing in his pajamas with a candle, Phillipe declares himself unable to sleep. Marc invites him to join the card game, but he declines. Before returning to his dark lair, he asks Marc, as if in after-thought, if he has anything special to tell him. “What do you want me to say?” Mark replies, tapping his fingers against his temple in a show of bafflement nervously validated by his 
chuckling comrades. 

To know an other’s obsessions violates their right not to be seen before they are ready. Remaining hidden essentially supports inviolability of individual dignity. In this way private sphere acts as a cocoon in whose anonymity unfinished selves are carried to term. For some the process of birthing a self that can withstand scrutiny never ends. 

Discovering an other's secrets invests with power. But exposure cuts both ways. Phillipe's accidental unmasking virtually burdens Marc with his shame. Marc appears to hold the upper hand, but becomes Phillipe's captive despite himself. This may explain why our sympathy is no less with Marc, the exposer, than with his 'victim.' 


Complicit in Phillipe's project of face-saving, Marc' test is to resist the temptation to abuse his power. What it what he fails spectacularly. Phillipe, on the other hand, who wanted his "private madness" to remain sacrosanct, will be forced into the role of seducer--the object of Marc's disavowed fascination. In the denouement the tables turn as social freak Phillipe transforms into the fully-fledged agent-of-desire. 

The film emplots Phillipe’s humiliation at the hands of Mark with sordid detail, interrupted by episodes of oddly respectful sensitivity. Passing him at the suggestion box, Marc
pledges with chivalrous solicitude to return the borrowed candles. Eventually he brings them to Phillipe's room accompanied by a friend. Full of mischief, he takes a photo of Phillipe’s fiancée Chantal from the window, draws near and slaps shut Phillipe's book, saying that excessive reading is like masturbation. In a gross violation of personal space, he taps his fist against Phillipe’s jaw, declaring his contempt for “bookworms.”
 

Later insomniac Phillipe knocks on Marc’s door and gets invited in. He would like to broach a subject “difficult to talk about.” In a roundabout attempt at rapprochement, he says he feels the groups of boys are too isolated, therewith diagnosing the dilemma at the heart of his own disruption: exclusion of the middle ground through which alternatives--here warring factions--would be mediated, if not reconciled. His declaration of intent merely states the problem, namely that isolation engenders and sustains antagonism. 

Phillipe insists he wants the groups to work closer together.“That’s what’s been keeping you up?” Mark inquires incredulously. Discouraged, Phillipe rises to go as Marc restrains him by his shirt sleeve and accuses him of being touchy. In what what he hopes will be a decisive example of candor, Phillipe says he's been guilty of not letting his boys do sports. “Excuse me?” Marc enjoins, increasingly wary of Phillipe’s oblique communication

Don’t other people have problems? Phillipe inquires. With characteristic directness Mark asks why he is the recipient of such disclosures. “It’s only normal,” Phillipe replies unctuously, “I’m confiding in you because everyone admires you.”



Phillipe's desperation to forge a bond of mutual respect out of fear for his reputation necessitates flattering diplomacy. Marc sees through his greasy stratagem, but plays along. With the balance of power shifted, it amuses him to watch Phillipe squirm to re-establish a level playing field. Phillipe realizes he can no longer afford his mildly disdainful superiority, now that the terms of repaying his debt have shifted. 

“I’d like us to be friends,” he coyly suggests, pouring wine till his glass overflows. “What about favors?” Marc inquires mysteriously. Mopping up on all fours, Phillipe asks for specifics. Marc remains vague, saying only that as a ‘friend’ he might need a favor.

Though it has the elements of one, The Best Way to Walk is not a ‘gay’ film so much as one about power and manipulation.
Which is not to suggest the erotic excludes exploitation. As Oscar Wilde quipped:

"Everything is about sex, except sex. Sex is about power."

The Best Way explores how, in seeking recognition as the basic satisfaction of their individuality, people are placed at each other's mercy. Even positions of advantage engender dependence. 

Phillipe is subjugated by his need for Marc's discretion. After initially savoring his authority, Marc finds himself repulsed by Phillipe's undignified groveling. 


In Marc’s eyes impersonating a woman for one's own beguilement forfeits masculine honor. Manliness is traditionally exclusive of the project of female vanity--the anticipatory reduction of self to the alluring surface over a repertoire of exploits; identification with the prerogatives of the mother, and with the 'exciting-rejecting object,' etc. 

Phillipe's exorcism-by-impersonation of the female suspends him between two forms of participation—being vs. having. As the Miller's film will show, these are not exclusive alternatives.* For Marc, no one who wants to be treated as a woman can genuinely desire to possess one, and that desire largely defines what masculinity is a matter of.  

*A female identification in the male is wholly compatible with heterosexual object-choice, for the relation between desire and identification is not orthogonal, as was assumed by the earliest modern investigators of homosexuality (viz. Karl Heinrich Ulrichs). 


Is the personification of the female meant to celebrate women or divest them of their power? The theory behind this framing is that transvestism is a denial of separation from the mother, therewith a failure to mourn. Impersonation attempts to elide the difference that makes possible the relationship, and with it the desire and longing for its continuation. This would make cross-dressing a curious mix of denial and restoration. 

Male transvestites tend to fixate on, and impersonate, woman as the exciting-rejecting object. This renders the impersonation a kind of usurpation of the female's biological prerogative in the realm of sexual selection, where she chooses, and by the same token, rejects inferior suitors. It is this function which renders the plainest hen the Queen of her line, compared to which the preening of the cock must appear slightly ridiculous, if not tragic, in its futile exorbitance. 

(Men are, of course, tragic in another way, viz. qua the disposable sex: as producers of a glut of available sperm (compared to the single female egg) and as the so-called canon-fodder of war.)

One may interpret transvestism in a number of ways: as a refusal to choose or divided loyalties; a tragic failure of individuation; the playful affirmation of possibilities; the rejection of exclusive identification; or the resolute embrace of inclusive non-differentiation. There is some validity in each.

The identificatory project of maleness precludes openness to alternatives. As a project based in separation and sacrifice, it's foundation is the acceptance of radical in-equality. But the rejection of the failure to discriminate, and a concurrent embrace of homophily, is characteristic of the project of gender identity per se. One can see in toddlers of both sexes that the correct identification of others is a non-negotiable, normative dimension of their experience. 

While gender-narcissism is not the unique prerogative of either sex, it assumes an existential exigence in the male which is does not in the female, who's original pole of identification--the mother--remains, while for the male she must become 'other.' This suggest a third way in which the male is the tragic sex--as the one who's object-choice is fraught with danger. 

The need to stand separate constrains choice. The male who pretends to be, or fancies himself, female, on the other hand, seeks to remain free of alternatives. He wants to be at liberty not to exclude. In this way his ambi-valence mirrors the socio-political practice of non-exclusion. Yet such inclusive freedom from constraint is more virtual than real--a being free akin to the ironist's, who experiences an absolute if purely subjective freedom in avowing the opposite of what he really means. It is a satisfaction ostensibly based on fooling others, though in reality completely dependent upon being recognized as duplicitous. 

Is the gratification of the cross-dresser premised on his exposure? Or is his pretending it's own reward--a form of masturbation? Given that recognition is the common currency of social beings, I can't imagine cross-dressing to be a project conducted without the anticipation of the resonance which gives an end to all cultural practices.

Perhaps the transvestite wants it both ways––to fool and to be exposed. To successfully pass denies him the satisfaction of one form of recognition while granting him another. To have it both ways would mean to succeed in failure and fail in success: recognized as accomplished female impersonator and simultaneously as the beguiling (if finally rejecting, hence self-sufficient/narcissistic) faux-male, one 'moment' shading into the other. 

Exactly the kind of ambiguity which developing gender-projecting children find so 'wrong'. The public female impersonator, I conclude, desires precisely this shimmering state, in which one hue passes into the other; the foreground into the background, the frame into the picture, and back. He is, in this capacity as unifier of opposites, the original sorcerer.

If play-acting is not affirmed re-cognitively, it remains a private potential. To recognize (or validate) the identifications of the cross-dresser would mean to tolerate his gender indeterminacy as such. To turn a blind eye to it rather than to affirm it. For how could we really affirm as a valid and estimable alternative what we would not consider as such for ourselves? This state of affairs perfectly describes the condition that makes toleration--or forbearance--requisite. And this brings us to the paradox of tolerance, which would accept what it rejects. 

This state of affairs is intolerable for the transvestite, who would be recognized in his shimmering duality. Assuming the end of his cross-dressing really is to count as female, he compels recognition of his femaleness while prohibiting awareness of his biological gender, making his public witness complicit in his private illusion. He is playing at appearance rather than embracing reality. Yet this state-of-affairs only presents  the surface of the 'transaction' between the transvestite and his audience. It does not consider the possibility that exposure (as biological male, or, what is the same thing--as artist) is what he is after. To be found out and acknowledged as artist means to be recognized as the source of enchantment. An enchantment not incompatible with cognitive dissonance.

From a different angle, spirituality has been conceived as the process of uniting opposites. Lao-Tzu observed: “He who, being a man, remains a woman, becomes a universal channel.” The ideal being the  balance of polarities. Whether this is what your average cross-dresser is up to is open to debate. And conditional upon the agenda one is pursuing. One certainly cannot rule out that transvestites are are seeking totality. Whether this is considered regressive will depend on one’s view of the proper end of masculine identification in biological males. Either way it may be interpreted as a station on the convoluted journey to individuation. 

Even in the age of gender-gerrymandering,
male identity in western cultures is defined against the female by a frequently emphatic, even violent process of self-differentiation. And though a diversity of motives must be allowed the transvestite, what matters here is not the validity of a psychological theory, but the consequence of one character’s perception. 

Marc has not been sensitized to the now self-explanatory right to be shamelessly different, specifically the right not to choose in his blurring boundaries. Hailing from a period before gender relativism, he responds to what threatens his identity with self-defensive aversion: rejecting a masculinity insufficiently exclusive of effeminate tendencies. The playful, school-boyish spiritedness in which he expresses his loathing for Phillipe, and his denial of being discomfited, may seem to belie the notion that he is threatened, though in light of his panicked response in the final act, he is clearly unnerved by Phillipe's militant 'otherness'.


Phillipe’s group try their hand at dodgeball, while Marc’s participate in the theater, only to turn a mock battle into a real one. Phillipe accuses Marc of planning the fiasco for his amusement. “You’re baiting me because you saw me that time in my room” “I don’t give a fuck about all that,” Marc insists. 
 
Masturbation represents he paradigm of the shameful where the social imperative is shared mutuality:

Phillipe: “If I snuck into your room at night I’d catch you at...
some private little madness.”
Marc: “As my grandmother would say—you’ve got bats upstairs.”

“All this was your idea,” Mark continues, “out of fear, you romanced me. Afraid I would tell everyone
...I want no part of you.”

Phillipe writes his girlfriend, begging her to visit. After some vulgar joking in the cafeteria from which Marc appears to protect him, Phillipe barges into Marc’s room where he is washing his feet in a sink, and demands he stop the harassment. Marc assures him he has not told anyone. Then makes lewd insinuations about Chantal. Phillipe doesn’t respond. 

“If someone had said that to me I would already have busted his face. You didn’t even flinch. You are repulsive.” Mark throws Phillipe forcefully out of his room. 


As social deviant, Phillipe must appeal to Marc for recognition. But the kind of recognition he seeks--the restoration of his respectability and masculine honor--isn't parceled out on the basis of need or a right to dignity. Marc must be compelled to acknowledge it by a show of force demonstrating shamelessness. In a show-down pitting desirer against desired, each will dare the other to blink first. 



At a restaurant Phillipe tells his luminous love-interest Chantal he’s rented a room. She wonders why. They drive into the forest and lay in a fern framed meadow where Phillipe attempts to make love to her. The sequence is handled with Bressonian efficiency.† 
 
Both are naked. Phillipe rolls off. Cut to her facing away as he stands, still naked, in the foreground. Next she is kneeling in the foreground in undergarments, her arms folded like some modern-day Eve covering her nakedness as he ties his belt. Cut to them exiting the forest. Sitting pensively in a desolate cafe, she takes his pen and writes: “It doesn’t matter. I love you.” As they part she reassures him the first time is a flop for lots of people. 
 
† Albeit a style that renders the jointure of the montage self-consciously conspicuous--its 'seams' facing outward.



Watching the boys play soccer, Phillipe asks Marc about the favor he wanted. “I’ll suck your cock, if that’s it.” Bemused, Marc insists he doesn’t want anything. Phillipe, at wits’ end, threatens to kill himself. Marc apologizes for ‘screwing him around’ and extends his hand. Phillipe shakes it and thanks him. “My pleasure,” Marc responds somewhat disingenuously: “It’s always a pleasure to shake the hand of a gentleman.” 

Their rapprochement doesn’t last, of course. Offering to put oneself at someone's sexual disposal is neither dignified nor honorable. Phillipe must find some other way to secure Mark's confidence.


He picks Chantal up at the station. Marc and his squad appear. He invites them to a swimming match he’s set up. “Do we have a choice, Officer?” Chantal asks with annoyance. 


Changing in his room, Phillipe looks down to watch Marc entertain Chantal with his antics. Finding himself locked in his room when the door handle comes off in his hand, Phillipe has to climb down through the window, tearing his blazer pocket. Chantal later assures him Marc represents everything she loathes: “I find him cheap and pretentious.”




At a swimming event they reluctantly attend, Deloux is officially expelled for having pornography in his room. Asked to say a few words he throws a tantrum and is escorted out. In the pandemonium Marc rushes over to Phillipe and throws him into the pool, then dives in to retrieve him at Chantal’s insistence. Phillipe feels like throwing-up.


On the pretext of helping him, Mark forces Phillipe to put two fingers in his mouth, then pushes Phillipe’s face into the sink, ordering him to “eat your shit.” Phillipe screams. Chantal enters. “I was helping him puke,” Marc insists.

Marc's casual abusiveness seems more a reflection of his disdain for effeminate males than for those who have sex with other men.* What makes Phillipe the enemy is not his desire, but his vulnerability as a failed project of identification. 
 

*Towards a more spirited homosexual Marc could not respond with unalloyed disgust. The self-acceptance and passion of the agent of desire compels respect. As author of recognition in his own right, he would be a force to be reckoned with. Recognition is not a gratuitous gift, but something compelled by the other’s self-possession and entitlement to recognition.º For Marc to give it there needs to be a level playing field—the very agonistic pitch which Phillipe’s wound disqualifies him from occupying. It is not a matter of indifference whether the person from whom recognition is sought is himself estimable. Recognition is not egalitarian but inherently partial and hierarchic.

º Where recognition has to be compelled, respect has not been earned. Recognition as a form of honoring is risked and won in traditionally homo-social institutions such as the military, medicine, law, and politics. In aristocratic cultures equality, in the form of an equality of the best (aristos) and inter paresis as essential as it is in egalitarian regimes, where dignity largely supplants honorA level playing field is the presupposition of any agonistic society where honor secures the arena of commonality through mutual recognition. This very fact precludes honor from being a universal right, i.e., as has been claimed for 'dignity.'

When the suggestion box is emptied it contains nothing useful in the way of a season end's activity. Finally, Phillipe, fully recovered from his ordeal, suggests a costume party, as “everyone likes dressing up.” 

He asks Chantal not to come, but she insists. She wants to know what Phillipe wants--all his secrets: “To understand and love them, to show you mine,” she declares in voice-over, finally materializing in a mirror sporting a fake mustache.
As festive music strikes up Marc enters as a suave and sovereign Matador.


Abrupt cut to heavily made-up Phillipe in a red dress casting a defiant gaze. Assuming the tone of Marc's superciliousness he invites him to dance. Marc smirks and looks at Chantal.  “What do they call the dark Lady?” “They call me La Upa.” Mark claps his hands, bending to jig before offering himself to Phillipe. 
 
“I’m in a strange mood,” Phillipe tells Mark, “ready for anything. I find you more appealing than usual.” Marc shakes his head, grinning. “And you are a real beauty tonight. You are always a beauty.” 

Phillipe draws nearer, “You bitch,” he whispers into his ear. Marc gives warning that they are being watched. “Let them look, my sweet, mad thing!”


“Tonight I only want to dance with Marc!” Phillipe declares. “Okay, but this is the last one.” Phillipe becomes aggressively tender, stroking the back of Marc’s neck. Mark looses is patience and pushes away. “Quit or I’ll punch you.” Phillipe looks at him with mock innocence. 

Marc tries to dance with a woman until Phillipe breaks them up: “You’re dancing with my lover, Jezebel.” Phillipe grabs his buttocks. Marc is furious, yet paralyzed with shock. “Marc, my little one, where do you hide them?” he asks, his hand coming round to his crotch. “Here, Marc, it’s here. What are you afraid of?” he says, moving Marc’s hand to his loins. He brings his lips to Marc’s and kisses him until Marc breaks away, screaming and slaps Phillipe. “Fists won’t do Marc. I’m ashamed. I’m just ashamed. I feel those needles in the same places you do,” he rages. 

They roll about on the ground as the band plays on. Phillipe grabs a knife from the table and plunges it into Marc’s thigh. The music stops as Marc bends over in shock. “He pricked me!” he declares to the dumbfounded revelers-- “he’s nuts.” Phillipe sits back on a table, exhausted. “Excuse me,” he whispers.

 
The awkward, almost burlesque climactic scene feels genuinely subversive. In coming out of hiding--the inferior place to which shame, inhibiting his self-assertion, confined him--Phillipe owns his ambivalent gender-identity, deploying it to turn Marc’s worst nightmare into his moment of truth.


Cut to a panoramic view of Paris “quelques années plus tard.” The camera pan ends on Phillipe looking out a window. A beaming Chantal appears. “Shall we take it?” she asks. As they duck inside a realtor asks if they like it. It’s Marc, his hair longer and mustache bushier, all convivial professional. He tells Phillipe since it’s him they can work something out about the fee. Phillipe doesn't respond to his query about how many years have passed. Unlike Marc, he hasn't married, though he and Chantal appear to be a couple. 

Exiting the apartment Marc politely enjoins “after you.” Phillipe insists Marc precede. Back and forth they defer, Phillipe’s hand resting amiably on Marc’s shoulder. “After you,” Marc insists one final time, gazing demurely at Phillipe. The frame freezes and credits roll.  


The abrupt end on a note of cordiality resolves the old struggle for recognition in the mutuality of a somewhat awkward civility. That the intervening years should have healed the old wounds, feels miraculous. Marc’s exquisite politeness may be dictated by his role as realtor, but we sense genuine esteem for the new Phillipe who once risked all to become a subject of desire. 




Friday, November 10, 2017

Another Year - Mike Leigh (2010)

 

To Have and Have not

Mike Leigh’s ‘atypical’ characters often feel like illustrations of clinical categories. Another Year is no exception. His interest seems to lie as much in making us squirm as inducing catharsis. A sense of discomfort not discernibly distinct from annoyance or mild disgust. He achieves this substitution by stuffing his frame with buzzing, twitching, lived-in personifications of socially maladjusted types typically presenting some combination of hysterical conversion, neurasthenia, and plain old grumpy slovenliness. All this should be well-familiar to anyone who's watched previous efforts. What's unexpected is the amount of self-examination the carefully calibrated squirming induces

The moral core of the film is a comfortably situated couple near retirement. Smugly content with their lot, Tom Hepple (Jim Broadbent) and wife Gerri (the elfin Ruth Sheen) tend their patch in a local community garden and drink a lot of wine when not professionally engaged. 


The voice of civility and reason, Gerri is a social worker; husband Tom, grounded and affable, a geologist. Paradigms of mental health (progressiveness and prosperity), they represent the pole of sanity anchoring our normative identification. A tale of two gracious hosts put upon by uncouth manipulators and emerging with their dignity in tact may not sound like the stuff of compelling drama, but Leigh and his cast devise to pull us irresistibly into the gently churning vortex of breached social mores and almost predictably missed queues. 
 

       Moral incommensurability is the focus of Leigh's cinema of domestic ill-manners.
 
The power of the good to diminish us, ubiquitous in life, is rarely explored cinematically. Leigh's emplotment of it comes with the territory of domestic drama. The felicity of the fortune-favored and the unequal distribution of the capacity for contentment is more corrosive of the soul than any economic disparity. In Another Year Mary (Lesley Manville), embodies the self-frustrating vacuum invidious comparison never fails to engender

Gerri periodically invites her unattached co-worker Mary to dinner, less out of genuine interest for her professional inferior than a sense of obligation. It's never in doubt that the privilege is Mary's. As her increasingly disordering neuroticism—self-absorption, neediness and general over-acting—become too much to handle, the Hepples must confront the film's pivotal dilemma. 

Thrusting herself into the center of conversation, drinking to inebriation, and over-staying her welcome, Mary avails herself of the Hepple's hospitality to turn them into parent-surrogates. Though they partly bring it on themselves with their ‘motivational’ solicitude. In her regressed states they become unwitting auditors of her interminable grievances. Our sympathy is with the Hepples, yet their neighborliness appears to know no boundaries. They wise-up in due course, but in the meantime we don't know whether to applaud or descry their long-suffering accommodation. 


The discrepancy of provision gives the Hepples a power that must offend egalitarian sensibilities. We feel sorry that they are put-upon by Mary's self-involved desperation, yet the very fact that they are forced to forbear gives them a superiority that belies that friendship is the motive of their hospitality. Not the friendship of equals, in any case, but of dependents seeking charity. 

Their influence is burdensome rather than empowering, investing them with a sense of real responsibility towards Mary. It's painful to watch their bond of friendship erode beyond the point of no-return under the corrosive action of the supplicant's unconstrained need and the host's growing resentment. 

Mary becomes convinced the Hepple's son Joe (Oliver Maltman) would make a promising prospect, a notion she is quickly disabused of when his preternaturally chipper new girl-friend Katie (Karina Fernandez) turns up, becoming the constant trigger of Mary’s 'sorrow' and our annoyance. 


Enthusing with the same manic ebullience of Poppy in Happy-Go-Lucky, Katie's good cheer gratifies the Hepples but repels Mary. What makes Katie and Poppy so irritating is the irrepressibility of their lightheartedness, which deflects all contrary affective modality like a shield. If sympathy is the social grace that greases the skids of intercourse by proportioning levels of affect, unbending good-cheer must count as selfish, even anti-social. Though diametrically opposed to ill-humor, it is comparably disruptive,
isolating as often as it affiliates, even as it promotes itself as uniquely conducive to concord
 



Manville’s furtive impersonation of a discombobulated hysteric comes with all the bells and whistles we expect of a Mike Leigh production, its scene-clawing theatricality bringing to mind Miriam Hopkins’ rivalry with Bette Davis in Old Acquaintance. Unfortunately, it feels only marginally more organic than that performance. Her studied depiction of inebriated dejection makes us all too aware that a thespian is plying her craft. Excesses may be the whole point of her hysterical character, yet Leigh overindulges Manville. As if we could not be trusted to appreciate that Mary is pathetic short of being completely submerged in her vacuous turbulence. 

Had Mary been less drastically personified our loyalties might have been more evenly divided. More inclusive framing would also have fostered ambiguity—the psychological corollary of the plot that keeps on giving by keeping the audience guessing. In Another Year we are less in suspense about than dreading the embarrassments certain to be visited upon us by Mary's characterologically begotten faux-pas.
 


Just when we’ve had our fill of overbearing quirkiness, bumptious chub Ken (Peter Wight) makes his appearance. A compulsive snacker, he barely has time to breath as he gorges himself on Gerri’s home-cooking, slugging back alcoholic beverages with the same abandon Mary brings to the practice. His gluttony and her furtive emptiness may seem destined for symbiosis, but she spurns his graceless overtures. 

After the bleak funeral and wake of Tom's sister-in-law, Mary makes the acquaintance of her surviving husband, stoic Ronnie (David Bradley), who, though barely able to connect, has the virtue of not inducing envy in her.  

Leigh ought to try his hand at comedy given his fascination with inferior types. Yet to ascribe satirical intent to Leigh would be to misunderstand his profoundly moral vision. His focus on the implosions of disagreeable and damaged people is but a means to challenge our capacity--or preparedness--to sustain sympathy with losers. His marathons of ill-manners become trials of our capacity for object-constancy. 

Charity is a Bitch
 
At its deepest level Another Year grapples with the issue of whether we have a duty to exercise charity towards those who abuse it. It’s easy to be compassionate in good times towards congenial people. The test is to exercise hospitality towards those whose manipulative neediness puts them beyond the pale. 
 
When Mary turns up unannounced the evening Joe and Katie are expected, Gerri is confronted with a dilemma of conscience. She is anything but glad to see her, and conveys it by her matter-of-fact comportment. Her displeasure is not lost on Mary, who grows distraught. Conferring with Tom, Gerri decides she can't just “chuck her out” given her state. Besides, she concludes, “I’ve got enough food.” Their bounty obliges the Hepples to provide, however begrudgingly. 

Fearing the worst and hoping for the best, they resign themselves to including Mary., overcoming in an intimate conference their aversion to a damaged soul despite her exploitative neediness



Leigh stands in the English tradition that gave us the works of Austen, Elliot, and Dickens, as well as socio-realist 'kitchen-sink' cinema. A moral  tradition first and foremost--in contradistinction to the more cynical French realist unmasking of convention (mores) and the nouvelle vague's celebration of individual rebellion. It demonstrates that struggles of conscience are no less basic to narrative art than the unmasking of hypocrisy. Though the risk of tendentiousness comes with the territory, the payoffs in emotional and moral depth far outweigh it. 


The final scene exposes Mary's sad fate. It's tempting to call it her comeuppance, yet Leigh seems less intent on punishment that on revealing her shame at its point of consummation. It's hard to imagine anything more damning than to expose a character's social parasitism. 
 
In a drawn-out pan about the table revealing one guest after another, Leigh leaves us in the dark whether Mary has decided to stay or, in what would be her act of charity, cut her loses and left. We are given time to hope she's fled with her shred of dignity. That hope is dashed as she is finally revealed--(ecce homo!)--eyes downward cast, twitching in dumb dejection on the outer margins of Good Life. 

Leigh's study of bourgeois mores is a tragedy because it emplots how the unequal distribution of the capacity for happiness--and the moral incommensurability that results--manifest where the liabilities of temperament intersect with the vagaries of fortune. Sandwiched between the extremes of the involuntary, the individual 'forges his fortune'. Such is Mary's--and everyone's--assignment and hazard in life. Even filtered through the lens of the cleverest interpretive effort, non-negotiable circumstances--character and Fortune--ever defy the capacity of the individual to bend them to his will. 

Postscript:
 
It's been suggested the Heppel's generosity is a power-play to gratify their need to feel superior. Far from being exploited by Mary, they are in fact exploiting her. This extrapolation is not one that seems compelling without a) a commitment to a notion of social justice that sees the leveling all distinctions of class and privilege, regardless of individual accomplishment and responsibility, as mandatory, and b) adherence to an unmasking interpretive strategy that contradicts all manifest meanings by turning them into their opposite, usually by tracing them back to illicit strategies of domination. These interpretive agendas are intimately connected, the first availing itself of the second to redeem Mary from her self-enfeeblement and social inferiority--her oppression by an unjust system. 

Such an interpretive approach does violence to the depth of meaning conveyed on the surface of the film. The implication that Leigh’s point is not that there are inequities in society, but to reveal the fate—and guilt—of one individual eviscerated by sorrow, longing and resentment. 
 
The final shot reveals Mary isolated by her self-absorption and enviousness, unable to enter into free exchange and interpersonally irrelevant. Her anger about being excluded from the good is on everyone’s radar. Mary’s moral corruption has been made plain, her hostility disarmed. She has nowhere to hide and nothing to contribute. Is there a more searing violation of personal dignity? 

Whether Mary is Leigh’s victim raises the question of culpability: can one victimize oneself or does it take a village? Do we need to make society safe for people who invidiously compare themselves to others? Or does a therapeutic welfare state, at some point, respect that there must be limits to its ministry and leave people to their own enlightened self-interest?


Other motivations for such a retributive interpretation are, paradoxically, the Christian spiritual motif of raising up (redeeming) the lowly, as well as the currently ubiquitous conviction—the creed  of our feministically sensitized culture—that women are emblematically victims. The new orthodoxy can be observed in all facets of social life. Its goal of a just society—which amalgamates political with therapeutic, public with private, ends—is one in which guilt and shame have been banished and the right to ‘self-esteem’ trumps all other goods. Most perversely of all, envy becomes an index of social injustice, because, as we all know, society corrupts and no individual, all things being equal, would choose to feel mortified by the aspect of superior good fortune…

In one sense Mary is Leigh’s victim--as Antigone was Sophocles’, Gretchen Goethe’s, Madame Bovary Flaubert’s, Anna Karenina Tolstoy’s, etc. Authors have been sacrificing women for generations. Which suggests that it is the fate of female characters to be victims. What is a tragedy for the individual personage, is
an incalculable enrichment for culture