TIFF '09: "To exist clearly, and to do so without thinking about it..." Two films about beautiful and mysterious women

Okay, beautiful, mysterious, and wearing great shoes!

When Manoel de Oliveira’s Belle Toujours began making the rounds a few years ago it was met with a resurgence of interest in the world’s oldest filmmaker. The homage, or rather sequel, to Luis Buñuel’s Belle de jour, in which Michel Piccoli revisits his role as Henri Husson, worked as an introduction to Oliveira’s work for an uninitiated generation of filmgoers. But its investment in its source material was at times as slight, or even superficial, as it was basically lovely. The appearance of his latest film, Eccentricities of a Blond Hair Girl, at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, as well as the Cinematheque Ontario’s upcoming Oliveira program is an encouraging sign that Belle Toujours wasn’t a mere one-off in terms of the 100-year-old auteur’s circulation. This new work, while featuring numerous similarities to Belle—including a framing device that might even be a very subtle homage to Buñuel’s That Obscure Object of Desire—is arguably more indicative of the particularity and breadth of Oliveira’s aesthetic and thematic concerns. It’s also an absolute delight.


A young man begins to recount a tale of personal tumult to a woman on a train, who incidentally may be blind, given that she always seems to be staring blankly off to the side of the young man’s face. He speaks of a beautiful young woman whose figure he first found fondling a flamboyant oriental fan in the upstairs window across the street from his office. There is a seduction, buoyed by a harpist and the recitation of a poem by Pessoa. Somehow the girl responds and encourages him while remaining always distant and mysterious. The young man falls in love, but his uncle and employer won’t give their marriage this blessing, and the young man is without savings of his own. As the story unfolds with Oliveira’s characteristic economy, a great deal of pleasure is to be taken in the simple act of looking, through windows and doorways, through mirrors, at grand vistas of the city under sunlight and shadow. But Eccentricities of a Blond Hair Girl distrusts appearances just as it celebrates the undeniable pleasure appearances give. The eccentricities turn out to be perilous. And perhaps the woman on the train makes an ideal audience for the young man’s tale, since, if she is blind, she’s less likely to be seduced by the visible.


Equally mysterious to those around her, virtually all of whom adore her, is the titular character of Rebecca Miller’s The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, though the film makes her somewhat less so for those of us privy to Pippa’s inner world. Swaying between the present and the past, Miller, adapting her own novel, displays her almost singular gift for crafting portraits of women with secrets, with a quiet yet tremendous capacity for change and adventure, and who can act impulsively, even audaciously or cruelly, without apologies.


The present-tense Pippa is brilliantly portrayed by Robin Wright Penn, who does a remarkable job of containing herself around others while also exposing fragments of her true self for the camera alone. The way director and star collaborate here is a wonder in itself, as is the performance Miller gets out of the top-of-his-game Alan Arkin, here playing Pippa’s much older husband. But the film still suffers somewhat from the neglect of supporting characters—Winona Ryder’s part is a comic shambles, Maria Bello’s is gravely overwrought—and a glib finale that promises freedom without complication. It reaffirms that I’ll happily watch anything Miller does, but I’m still holding out for something from her that takes this refreshing approach to character and pushes it to its fullest extent. Watch for an odd little cameo from Princeton philosopher Cornell West.

Eight speakers in search of an author

Early in Examined Life writer/director Astra Taylor appears onscreen to address the problem of approaching philosophy in a movie as opposed to a book. With a book we’re able to set our own pace, to comb over the material at will. Ideas receive more exhaustive treatment than can be granted in a movie, especially one in which eight subjects receive only ten minutes each to speak. Taylor’s wise to confess from the outset her awareness of her project’s limitations, that she can perhaps strive to, above all, as Samuel Beckett would have had it, fail better. Yet even within the constraints imposed upon Examined Life, one can’t help but consider how much more dynamically this movie could have failed.

As with Taylor’s Zizek!, what makes Examined Life a sympathetic and engaging yet finally frustrating experience is a sensibility that feels star-struck and easily sated. The problem with Taylor’s subjects—which include of course the flamboyant Slavoj Zizek—isn’t so much that they’re only given ten minutes as they’re too often speaking so generally as to provide only superficial impressions of their individual philosophical proposals. Avital Ronell for example, charged with kicking things off, gives us a good taste of her personality—she makes a cheeky comment about the injustice of her not being allowed more screen-time that her colleagues—but conveys almost nothing of the particularity of her insights or arguments. Likewise, Cornel West, a self-described “bluesman of the life of the mind,” is a rant-master flash whose championing of dissatisfaction and contagious enthusiasm for music, art and literature is hugely entertaining. But he leaves us with little more than a blur of references, and really, what the hell is a “Chekhovian Christian”?

Peter Singer by contrast turns his ten minutes into a concise mini-lecture, yet the way he addresses applied ethics, questioning consumer choices while strolling along New York’s Fifth Avenue, feels facile, using pretty flimsy analogies aimed at stimulating our guilt rather than our critical faculties while working under the assumption that what constitutes the common good is unambiguous. Zizek’s segment works much better, partly because of his knack for provocative one-liners—“We should become more artificial!” he declares, sweating furiously before a backdrop of towering trash—yet he still has a hard time approaching something like full coherence.

Examined Life is handicapped by its paucity of dialogue. Everyone’s given their podium but, with one exception, no one to interact with. Taylor appears fleetingly but, opening statement aside, is literally just smiling and nodding. For this reason, the segment featuring Judith Butler and activist Sunaura Taylor is in many regards the most successful. They wander through San Francisco, discussing body difference and interdependency, at one point entering a thrift store to buy a sweater for Sunaura—the very act of doing so going some distance to elucidating their subject. Sunaura, the director’s sister, is a high-functioning disabled person, confronted daily with the discomforts and limitations of her community.

The movie that Examined Life reminded me of most wasn’t another documentary but rather Richard Linklater’s animated feature Waking Life, and I have to say that Waking Life is in some ways more philosophically engaging for inviting not only monologues and dialogues about ideas, but also fantasy sequences that embody and dramatize these ideas. Let me say that I really love how Taylor had her subjects walking as they spoke—except for West, who does his thing in the backseat of Taylor’s car, and Michael Hardt, who rows a little boat in Central Park—evoking the timeless relationship between walking and thought. But walking also implies movement and exploration, and, for all the critical heavyweights onscreen, by the time Examined Life is over we’re left feeling like we should have gotten a little farther.