Future family values: Dogtooth on DVD

Sea, Motorway, Excursion, Carbine. At least three of the four “new words of the day” to be learned by the three children at the start of Dogtooth (Kynodontas) could be associated with escape, while the word “escape” is itself unlikely to have entered their vocabulary. These children are actually adults, or at least on the cusp of adulthood, though they behave like pre-pubescents and have apparently never in their lives set foot beyond the confines of their family’s home, located somewhere in rural Greece, a clean, middle class fortress of self-imposed seclusion, complete with swimming pool, and nearly devoid of anything that denotes the contaminating influence of contemporary culture, which for some reason includes any consumer technology produced after about 1986. The parents have informed the children that they would have no chance of survival should they leave the property, and have taken a totalitarian approach to home-schooling, right down to the essentials of language acquisition. Sea, for example, is a leather armchair. Excursion is a very resistant material. A pussy is a big light. Dogtooth is a very strange, darkly hilarious, and rather ingenious movie. At least it seems strange while you’re watching it. Once it’s over, you may find yourself thinking it’s one of the most lucid studies of family life you’ve seen.

Why is that woman being driven blindfolded along a freeway at dusk? Why is that couple having sex while they both wear headphones? Dogtooth is crafted in such a way that context is rarely explicit. This extends to the composition of the frames, which will often depict only the torsos or legs of characters, or reveal only one speaker in a conversation. (I’ve already told you more than you’d probably ascertain in the first 20 minutes.) But the movie is far too playful, attentive, and mischievous to label as withholding. What it does, and does very well, is allow us to gradually understand the rules of its cloistered world largely from the limited perspective of its inhabitants. There’s what we might call an anthropological rigour to Dogtooth. It’s about a kind of social experiment with unintentional yet deeply sinister implications. The family property even resembles a cult compound. Where our story goes is, I think, eerily logical, though it’s also, I think, oddly hopeful.

In a video interview included on Kino’s new DVD, director and co-writer Yorgos Lanthimos, explains that the initial impulse behind Dogtooth was to make a science-fiction film that imagines life in a future where families are becoming extinct, so the parents at the centre of our story must go to extremes to preserve theirs. The movie Lanthimos made no longer bears the trappings of sci-fi, but it’s certainly easy enough to locate the essentially primal urges that motivate the parents: a desire to protect the clan at all costs; a desire to maintain a sense of (false) purity for as long as possible; and most of all a desire to redesign the world to your liking and raise your children within it. Such desires inevitably lead to disaster, but they’re still not that hard to identify with.

Winner of the Prix Un Certain Regard at Cannes 2009 and easily the biggest surprise among this year’s Oscar nods—it’s been nominated for Best Foreign Language Film—Dogtooth has clearly made an impression. It’s as entertaining as it is insightful and twisted, climaxing with a living room talent show in which the eldest child (the fearless and inventive Aggeliki Papoulia) reinterprets a sequence of Flashdance while her brother plays bad classical guitar—having no one to compare himself to, he probably thinks he’s a prodigy. The performances are uniformly detailed and focused, founded in regulated behaviour rather than conventional character development. You’d never guess these were actually normal people. I saw two of them at a party during the 2009 Toronto Film Festival, where Dogtooth had its Canadian premiere, and I was amazed to see them chatting and laughing and sipping cocktails. If they can go through all that and come out of it so seemingly civilized, there may truly be hope for all of us.

Aside from being newly available on DVD, Dogtooth is also playing at Toronto's Royal Cinema, where it can be enjoyed on a double-bill with Attenberg, the likeminded film which stars Lanthimos and was directed by Dogtooth's co-producer Athina Racehl Tsangari

Open House: The Kids Are All Right

For having been together for the better part of two decades, the ever-searching-for-organic-harmony aspiring garden designer Jules (Julianne Moore) and her no-nonsense Dr Nic (Annette Bening) are faring well. We meet them during what seems like a spell of marital routine fatigue, yet there’s a sense that neither is willing to go too long without attending to the other’s needs, whether that manifest through Nic giving Jules space to work through her spiritual issues or Jules performing cunnilingus on Nic while she watches hunky guy-on-guy porn, a quirk that makes for what’s surely the movies’ funniest lesbian love scene.

Their teenage kids, meanwhile, are more than all right. Sure, Laser (Josh Hutcherson) hasn’t yet found his calling and is into homoerotic wrestling with a homophobic moron, while seemingly straight-laced Joni (Mia Wasikowska), readying herself for college, goes behind the moms’ backs to track down the siblings’ biological dad, but such minor transgressions reveal a perfectly healthy curiosity and robust sense of good will. So the stakes in The Kids Are All Right arise not through perilous character flaws or insurmountable familial feuds, but rather through the accumulation of smaller tensions as its story builds, specifically from the introduction of mystery sperm donor Paul (Mark Ruffalo) into the family dynamic. A sexy, scruffy restaurateur with a habit of avoiding interpersonal commitments, Paul’s intrigued by his new friends, by the unexpected possibility of being a genuine dad, and, just maybe, by the even stranger possibility of luring Jules away.

Director/co-writer Lisa Cholodenko chronicled women shedding off stolid conventional lifestyles to explore the cultural fringe in High Art and Laurel Canyon. With The Kids Are All Right she now seems interested in seeing what happens when seemingly unconventional lifestyles have become entirely domesticated. Make no mistake, this is a movie about family values that actually values family. Beautifully captured through sinuous, sun-soaked, hand-held photography that seems always alert to the nuances of its superb ensemble, this film’s group portrait is warm, fun, and complicated, its politics left entirely implicit so that these characters can behave like real people instead of mouthpieces—if the film can do anything to persuade its opponents that gay marriage represents any sort of scourge to society, it’s by letting this particular gay marriage simply exist up there on screen, warts and all.

Moore and Bening are so good together that they can be bad to each other without our feeling as though their conflicts are dramaturgical conceits. When called upon to explain the kick they get from guy-on-guy porn, Moore mumbles something about the inauthenticy of most ostensible lesbian porn being an unsexy distraction, but there’s no such distractions to be found in the employment of these two famous actresses, both of them married to men, playing a lesbian couple. Like Hutcherson and Wasikowska, they graciously fail to comment on their sexuality. They focus rather on enriching the storytelling by giving the fullest possible life to these characters, whose dialogue, it must be said, isn’t always very good, and occasionally slips into cliché. It’s no slight to say that Cholodenko’s casting often trumps her writing since this story’s eloquence is in the unspoken aspects of its interactions.

Ruffalo is wonderfully passive-aggressive as the interloper, soft-spoken, entirely sympathetic, yet often on the defense. “I’m a doer,” he says in response to his lack of education. “I’m funny that way, I guess.” It’s unfortunate that Paul gets sort of abandoned in the final act, because in the first two-thirds he’s treated as an equal within the film’s ensemble, developing, making discoveries, and having scenes all his own, entirely outside of those pertaining directly to the family. Moving as gracefully as it does from one busy, diverting and thorny sequence to another, The Kids Are All Right only starts to reveal its shortcomings in this last section, when it starts to abruptly, somewhat forcedly shut all those doors it previously left wide-open as it searches for resolutions that aren’t entirely needed. So we should see this film not to anticipate closure but to bask in its transitory pleasures, which are plentiful. Kids grow up and leave home, bachelors get middle-aged and anxious, marriages get knocked around and need time to regain their senses. Sometimes you just have to enjoy the fleeting chaos before it all passes you by.

Tripping over clues, while dreams go up in smoke: Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice

Speaking of the end of the sixties (see preceding film review)... When we catch up with the Southern California counterculture at the start of Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice (Penguin, $35) the rust has already started to eat away at the carburetor. It must be early 1970 from the sound of things. Manson’s going to trail. Cambodia’s getting pummeled. Drugs are getting uglier. Funkier Los Angeles is well on route to becoming a grid of massive real estate developments. Permanently groovy Gordita Beach private investigator Larry “Doc” Sportello, meanwhile, is getting a visit from his past that will prove more tumultuous than a mere flashback, however extended. His ex-girlfriend Shasta appears at his door one night with something like a job, something about a billionaire named Mickey Wolfmann who she appears to be in love with, who takes a lion’s share of the responsibility for the aforementioned real estate development binge, and who might just be about to get kidnapped. The whole thing makes Doc instantly nervous despite his wealth of first-hand experience with danger. “Doc had outrun souped-up Rolles full of indignant smack dealers on the Pasadena Freeway, doing a hundred in the fog and trying to steer through all those crudely engineered curves, he’s walked up back alleys east of the L.A. River with nothing but a borrowed ’fro pick in his baggies for protection, been in and out of the Hall of Justice while holding a small fortune in Vietnamese weed…” But still. If hippy telepathy counts for anything he’d better steel himself for some unusually not-so-good vibrations, a process which, like every other process in Doc’s daily doings, generally involves getting high. Perhaps a horoscope will be consulted.

Two related movies. In director Robert Altman and screenwriter Leigh Brackett’s iconoclastic and satirical adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s greatest novel, The Long Goodbye (1973), private detective Philip Marlowe finds himself transplanted from the 1950s to the 1970s, where his once unshakable code of ethics dissolves in a post-hippy haze. In the Coen Brothers’ The Big Lebowski (98), a wildly imaginative pastiche that leans heavily on Chandler’s legacy, a pothead bowling fanatic and relic of the 1970s who actually calls himself the Dude finds he’s roped into playing private detective after the theft of his favourite rug during the 1990s. Pynchon’s Doc exists in a curious realm somewhere between these two film-based-on-literary protagonists. He lives in nearly the same the milieu of the former while guiding his actions by what feels like virtually the same philosophy as the latter. Unlike either he’s not an anachronism but is rather perfectly in keeping with the spirit of his age, and that spirit and its sticky residue are to a considerable extent the real subject of Inherent Vice, Pynchon’s first and, to say the very least, irreverent attempt at the mystery genre. From what I could keep track of in my reading the mystery plot does basically hold together, but it’s gleefully obscured by a tangled web of cultural observation and critique manifesting in near constant digressions. It’s pleasantly meandering, obsessively detailed, probably over-written, at times poetic, and quite often extremely funny. Funny in that zany, busy, baffling, conspiracy-laden, pop culture-crazed Thomas Pynchon kind of way. (If you’ve read him—greatest hits include V. and Gravity’s Rainbow—you know what I mean.)

The elusive Mister Pynchon, circa a hell of a long time ago

Doc covers a lot of ground, not only in Los Angeles but Las Vegas, too. He visits a massage parlour called Chick Planet, where queries about certain sought after figures are responded to with counter-questions such as “Far out. Does he eat pussy?” He patronizes several disparate restaurants where the servers seem always to be warning their customers against eating the food. He visits his cousin Scott Oof, drummer in a band called Beer, and a friend who’s on the verge of discovering the internet in its nascent form. He visits a luxury home with lighting design by James Wong Howe. He gets into a car driven by an insane young woman named Japonica he was once paid to find and is pulled over by cops belonging to a special squad called Cultwatch. He enjoys a rare sighting of the Golden Fang, a schooner that miraculously survived the Halifax Explosion, was later purchased by a blacklisted Hollywood movie star, was later still used for anti-communist activities in the Third World. All the while there is this ongoing tension with regards to Doc’s autonomy—is he picking up clues or simply being led along a path designed by unseen agencies? Of course Doc’s paranoid, but often with reason. He’s a private dick—not a gumshoe but, as one character suggests, a “gumsandal”—and thus a natural outsider, and maybe a pawn of the LAPD, who’ve taken to farming out their dirty work. In any case, Doc’s being perpetually adrift in fogs both literal and figurative is the running joke of Inherent Vice, but it’s also the meat of it. As Endless Summer turns into endless bummer Doc slowly emerges as a lonesome, damaged emblem for a generation whose dreams of fun, freedom, tolerance and respect for privacy, however wishful or misguided they may be, are exploited and finally dashed altogether by the rise of corporate power and ubiquity. Pynchon has a great old time poking fun at Doc’s lifestyle and philosophy, but under all the farce lies a genuine melancholy nostalgia for a time when such dreams could even by conceived.

By the end of Inherent Vice, even mellow old Doc might be getting hardened to the way the tide is turning. “I should trust only good people?” he asks his pal Denis (pronounced, incidentally, to rhyme with penis). “Man, good people get bought and sold every day. Might as well trust somebody evil once in a while, it makes no more or less sense.” But Pynchon at least mercilessly leaves Doc in a state of meditative suspension, of unknowingness that’s relatively comfortable, driving in yet another fog, singing along to ‘God Only Knows’ on the radio, with more than a half a tank of gas and an almost full pack of Kools, feeling ready enough for whatever might happen.

The road to parturition: Away We Go

A welcome entry into the surely under-explored subgenre of the bulgingly pregnant road movie, Away We Go begins with considerable brio, its first act’s chain of clipped, zingy, well-sculpted scenes just bouncing along, unburdened by preciousness or ponderousness. There is, initially, so much here to like. The dinner scene featuring a fizzy Catherine O’Hara as doting hippy grandma-to-be and a hilariously over-boisterous Jeff Daniels as the absent-minded old dad who’s really big of affirmative adjectives. The warm, inviting photography, courtesy of Ellen Kuras. The final line in the establishing scene of comic cunnilingus, which begins “From what I’ve read about vaginal flavour…”

As Burt and Verona, John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph are exceptionally relaxed, lived-in, and appealing as the shaggy thirtysomething couple setting out via plane, train and rusted-out Volvo on a slightly loopy quest for an ideal family upon which to model their impending one, for a new place to call home, or, shit, maybe even a new country. Their first stop is Phoenix, where Allison Janney sparkles as Lily, Verona’s old workmate, recently condemned to middle America’s desert suburbs with her shrunken, paranoid husband and pudgy, tormented children. Loud, crass and funny as all hell, Lily, in an especially memorable scene, completes with the PA at the dog track to describe how her children slowly drained the life from her once tremendous tits. I believe “old man’s hairy nut sack,” was how she described their current state. But Janney’s brief appearance in Away We Go finally constitutes, however prematurely, all that’s best in the film. She offers both its comic peak and its most elegantly rendered moment of pathos, a wordless exchange where she lingers too long over a goodnight kiss to Burt. The moment billows with sad desperation in the arid Arizona night, playing out beautifully in a single, uncut wide-shot. From here, it’s all downhill.

Janney, to be sure, gives a broad performance, but she still manages to bring specificity and nuance to a stereotype. Despite some valiant efforts, the same cannot be said of the grotesque Wisconsinite New Age shrew and her sniveling pony-tailed husband played by Maggie Gyllenhaal and Josh Hamilton. Their characters are so simultaneously imbecilic and condescending that it’s all too easy for us to go along with Burt when he finally explodes and insults them. There’s no real tension building in the scene because nothing’s at stake. Things get only worse when our errant heroes visit old friends now living in Montreal, a handsome, happy couple with a gaggle of adorable and conspicuously adopted tykes running free in their warmly messy house. Everything seems peachy until the four adults go to amateur strip night at some hipster joint and, in what must be the most dreadfully gag-inducing scene of the year if not the decade, the barren matriarch of the clan suddenly takes the stage to perform a painfully mopey pole dance while her husband explains to Burt how devastated the couple feel because she can’t seem to bear children. All of this to the decidedly unsubtle tune of ‘Oh! Sweet Nuthin.’’ (You remember the one, the closer both to Loaded and the Velvet Underground’s career? The one where Lou Reed sings “She ain’t got nuthin’ at all” about 90 times?) And she doesn’t even strip!

This is probably a good time to mention that Away We Go was directed by Sam Mendes, who even when helming material far breezier than the likes of Revolutionary Road or The Road to Perdition still manages to display a heavy hand, one made more leaden still by his irritatingly reverent use of songs by Alex Murdoch, which sound like they were designed for long distance commercials and sap the juice from scene after scene by turning it into some lame-ass precession. I had to rush home and slap ‘Oh! Sweet Nuthin’’ on the turntable just to squeeze the stuff out. It’s hard to know whether to lay more blame for the film’s weaker passages on Mendes or his screenwriters, novelists/spouses Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida, though its easy to imagine how another director less inclined to pomp and more trusting of his actors to carry a scene could have kept things relatively buoyant. Either way, Away We Go winds up frustratingly uneven, a patchwork of some nearly sublime humour and some genuinely touching moments laced with too many clichés for its sometimes superior air and to many scenes that are facile and over-explanatory.

Lady Chatterly: corporeal and class liberation, this time nice and slow

Based on John Thomas and Lady Jane, an earlier draft of D.H. Lawrence’s scandalous 1928 novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover –a draft most notable for being less didactic than its successor– French wrier/director Pascale Ferran’s Lady Chatterley certainly trumps all earlier attempts at adapting Lawrence’s tale of corporeal and class liberation. Pleasurably languorous in its unraveling, Ferran’s approach accounts for a broad spectrum of the sensuality and natural atonement Lawrence was championing. Landscape, seasons, weather and time; phallic, intricate flora; measured sexual exploration; a careful recognition of how closely environmental and spiritual disintegration are linked: all of these elements are woven into the mix here in what is a surprisingly absorbing two-and-a-half-hours of period adultery and unadulterated splendour in the grass.

“The body behaves in strange ways” is a conspicuous snippet from a conversation between several men near the start of Lady Chatterley, a film as much about the mutilation and emasculation of men by war and exploitive labour as it is about the oppression of social mores upon our erotic impulses. Clifford (Hippolyte Girardot) survived the trenches but lost the use of the lower half of his body. His impotence is poorly concealed by his authority over a mine and its underpaid workers. His wife Constance (the extraordinary Marina Hands) is, strictly speaking, surviving bourgeois wifedom, but is morbidly losing her sense of self-knowledge and vivacity. Thus its something of a miracle that she’s accidentally granted a glimpse of the gamekeeper Parkin (Jean-Louis Coulloc’h) as he bathes his naked, muscular torso out near his cabin in an isolated clearing on the couple’s property. One look was all it took –from here onward, it’s a seductively gradual progression toward a chain of secret consummation.

Broad-cheeked and freckled, Hands’ Constance conveys her awakening in graceful moments of distraction, curious private examinations of her own naked body, and a captivatingly lucid series of exchanges with Coulloc’h’s touchingly vulnerable Parkin, who resembles something of a more hawkish, work-hardened Brando. Whether it’s a simple cradling of a breast through crimson velvet, the gentle stroking of cotton-covered cock with the back of a hand, a vast palm spreading over a thigh quivering in stark white stockings, some frantic thrusting against the base of a tree, or the utter abandon of the lovers running naked and finally collapsing into sex in the warm summer rain, director and actors alike have conspired here to express freedom with an immediacy that binds raw experience with philosophical nuance. It’s also, needlessly to say, pretty sexy stuff.

Through the basic story here is of course the outline of 400,000 impossibly banal porn and soft-core Euro-skin-flicks –not to mention the era-spanning trilogy of forbidden love masterpieces composed of All That Heaven Allows (1955), Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (74) and Far From Heaven (2002)– Ferran manages to imbue it with thoughtful complications without burdening her film with too much polemic. Constance’s carnal desire is complicated by an equal desire to get pregnant. Parkin’s romantic needs are complicated by the irresistible call of his own solitude. Clifford’s role as the repressed master figure is complicated by his own tragedy. The viewer is able to find sympathy for each of these characters and still become swept up in the thrust of Lawrence’s argument for a balance between the dictates of the body and the mind, an accomplishment to be applauded.

Hello

The quote is from Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke. Haven't actually finished reading it yet. It's a big one. But this particular phrase I found to be quite arresting. Turns out he won the National Book Award.

I freelance, mostly writing about films and books. This blog is a response to friendly strangers or pals who say hey, where can I read your stuff? Because I freelance, a lot of it is spread out over different sites and print publications and even under different names, so I'm going to try and post some of it here, at least the stuff those publications will tolerate the doubling of, so that it's all in one handy place.

Long ago I was trained to be an actor in a place called Red Deer, where there were many horses and trucks and a beautiful river. There was a pretty girl who had mono. The sky was enormous. There was a sun-filled room with a piano where I worked on monologues and made out with a different girl, one who didn't have mono, but whose boyfriend was seeking a vocation in the ministry. It was the place where I lost my teenage hair. I never lived there before this training and have not returned since.