FILM: Portrait of a Lady on Fire

Portrait of a Lady on Fire is a lustrously gorgeous period tale of passion between a painter and her elusive subject, the daughter of a countess on a remote island in Brittany. Héloïse (Adèle Haenel) refuses to sit for a portrait, hoping to forestall the inevitable arranged marriage it will lead to. Marianne (Noémie Merlant) is a painter summoned to pretend to be a walking companion for Héloïse, so she can study her and paint her furtively. The dialog is incisive but spare, and much is communicated with looks instead of words, which seems appropriate since one of the themes is how to capture someone in paint. While 8k film is not paint, it’s close, and director Céline Sciamma and cinematographer Claire Mathon use it exquisitely to capture the extraordinary actresses in an atmospheric and almost painterly way. It seems that what parts of the film were not filmed by candlelight were filmed at that golden hour before sunset when sunlight creates a magical glow on skin. The broody skies and dramatic island cliffs above tempestuous seas adeptly underscore the suspicion that turns to passion between these women who themselves could have stepped out of a Vermeer or Rembrandt painting. The myth of Orpheus and Eurydice is an intriguing motif through the film – why did he look back? Did he make a poetic choice of memory over life? Did she ask him to turn around? And underlying that is the whole question of choice. The aristocratic daughter resents the lack of choice she has about the course of her life, while the painter seems in some ways to have more freedom, and even the servant girl has some choice about an unwanted pregnancy. (If Vermeer had ever painted a “maker of angels”, it would have looked like the stunning scene in this film.) But the most remarkable through line is the gaze between painter and model, between lover and lover. The gaze is so distinctively female in this work of art written and directed by a woman, and realized by a predominantly female cast and crew. When Héloïse asks Marianne to paint her a self-portrait to remember her by, the scene is itself an unforgettable portrait.

STAGE: What the Constitution Means to Me

Our Constitution, written over 200 years ago, is the most long-lived written constitution in history, and remains perhaps one of the few things nearly all Americans can agree on revering, even as we disagree sometimes vehemently on the specifics of its interpretation. That reverence and that tension are at the heart of the show What the Constitution Means to Me, an autobiographical memoir by Heidi Schreck, who recreates her experience as 15-year old girl delivering competitive speeches on the Constitution at VFW halls for scholarship prizes, then breaks into her present-day 45-year old self to make some more mature reflections on our founding document. Schreck performed her own play for a highly-regarded run in New York, while actress Maria Dizzia has very capably stepped into the role of “Heidi Schreck” for the touring production that we saw at the Mark Taper. In the first part, 15-year old Heidi breathlessly and enthusiastically expounds on her favorite amendments, the Ninth and the Fourteenth (admittedly some of my favorites too), and makes a personal connection (as was required by the contest rules) to her great-grandmother, a German immigrant mail-order bride. There is little to none of a “fourth wall” in this play. Heidi begins by addressing the audience, Shakespeare prologue style, asking us to engage in the re-enactment by pretending to be elderly men in a late 1980s VFW hall. While being “15-year old Heidi”, she occasionally pops out of character for a bit of commentary. This happens more and more, until at some point she drops the 15-year old altogether, and just talks to us directly as herself with 30 years more life experience. (There is some amusing playfulness with theatrical conventions around these transitions, like pointing out that she forgot to include a door in her recreation of the VFW stage, and poking fun at a secondary character who is stranded on the doorless stage when she decides, seemingly impromptu, to drop the fourth wall.) Here is where it gets more interesting as idealization of the Constitution gives way to a more mature realization of its imperfections and limitations as she confronts her own reproductive decisions, as she learns some shocking history of abuse endured by her mother, aunt, and grandmother, and as she rethinks what may really have befallen her immigrant great-grandmother who died at 36 of “melancholia”. The mature Heidi comes to question how well a 232-year old document can give women and other unprotected groups their due when the document doesn’t even mention them, and didn’t even originally envision them as included as citizens nor even as “the people”. At this point, the only logical next step is to stage a debate on the proposition to keep the Constitution or to abolish it and start over. A precocious actual 14-year old girl then comes on stage to engage in a lively debate with Heidi for the final part of the show, but not before putting the audience into the right frame of mind by dividing us with a thought-provoking show of hands. The debate is rapid-fire and compelling, and the winner, as judged by a random audience member, could be different on any given night. It certainly leaves you with something to think about. My favorite quote: "Justice Scalia said that he couldn't tell you what the Ninth Amendment meant if his life depended on it. And I guess it didn't." (The line is an early comic toss-off but with more profound meaning in the larger context of the play.)

Oh, and I forgot to mention the bonus: everyone in the audience was given a pocket Constitution to keep!

FILM: The Two Popes

I’m arguably a bit of a Catholophile, following with more-than-due interest for an atheist in what Popes have to say about things, perhaps because of how historically consequential the Catholic church has been, and how much weight it puts on reason in moral argument. Thus I watched with great interest the film The Two Popes (for which actors Anthony Hopkins and Jonathan Pryce were both justifiably nominated for Oscars), an imaginative portrayal of conversations that could have happened between Pope Benedict XVI and then-Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio (now Pope Francis). The Catholic Church, like most denominations today, is torn between traditionalists who fear change and modernists who would embrace it, and accordingly most followers of the Popes are generally either Benedict fans or Francis fans. It is not hard to guess where the filmmakers’ sympathies lie. Nonetheless, what I found most remarkable about the film is how it humanized both men. Benedict was portrayed complexly, as “God’s Rottweiler” (an earned reputation) and a gruff loner, but also as a man of real faith and concern for the future of his church, and with a capacity for humility and humanity in his own way. I liked that that came through even in small details, like Benedict’s instinct to kneel for confession, or his concern for long-waiting tourists when his presence in the Sistine Chapel threatens to delay its scheduled opening time. Bergoglio’s admirable humility was shown generously, but then he was knocked off his pedestal with an unflinching reckoning with his complicity in Argentina’s Dirty War and its desaparecidos. It is fitting and moving that a central theme in this film is confession and forgiveness, between these two, but also in one of the most moving Eucharists you may ever see. When you cut through all the theology and the debates, forgiveness is the crux of it, as it should be. Confession, better mutual understanding, forgiveness, and ultimately the forging of an unlikely but genuine friendship. I thank the film for offering me a more charitable view of Benedict, for whom I’ll confess to having a hardness in my heart. Like the late Justice Scalia, Benedict is a master of impressive scholarly arguments, but with just a few flaws and blind spots that turn out to make all the difference. How many times I dissected his edicts, finding myself in agreement with 95% of his logic, but coming to the opposite conclusion. Hopkins’ performance as Benedict was extraordinary, capturing him in nuance and complexity, and Pryce was excellent in embodying the humble but self-assured cardinal. The film was beautifully made, exploiting the grandeur of the Vatican and Castel Gandolfo, as well as many authentic locations in Argentina. The Sistine Chapel (or at least an exquisite facsimile created in Cinecitta Studios in Rome) is featured prominently and to great effect, both in long shots and cuts to close-up details. The gravity of its ancient majesty serves as foil for Bergoglio’s very different style. In an early scene, when Benedict (then Cardinal Ratzinger) and Bergoglio are both in the washroom about to go into conclave, Ratzinger asks in Latin, “what is that hymn you’re whistling?”, and Bergoglio replies, also in Latin, “Regina Chorus… per Abba” (Dancing Queen). This introduces the other major theme that runs through the film, modernity vs tradition, and on this score the film is faithful to both though partial to one. Whether these events really happened is pure speculation and imagination, though the writers maintained a fidelity to the characters, and much of their substantive dialog with each other about the place for change in the church is drawn from actual speeches and quotes, elegantly encapsulated. “If God doesn’t stay in one place, if He is moving, how can we find him?” Benedict asks. The search for God, how to know when you hear His voice, how to recognize His signs, is another running theme, beautifully discussed by both. In the end, it is gently suggested that the voice of God might just be found in a smart watch that prompts old men, for the sake of their heart health, “Beep-beep, don’t stop now! Keep moving! Keep moving!”

BOOKS: Find Me

We listened to André Aciman’s novel Find Me on a long road trip this weekend. We had both loved the film Call Me By Your Name, and I then read Aciman’s novel on which the film was based. This new novel is a sequel to the first (and there’s also buzz about a film sequel). I came to it having read some reviews, which were pointedly divergent, with some who loved it and some who found it very disappointing. In the end, I may agree with both. In this latest work, three separate sections visit Elio’s father Samuel, then Elio, then Oliver, at consequential points in their lives many years after the summer of the first novel, and, as with the first novel, there’s a coda where Elio and Oliver meet again. Time and timing is a running theme throughout, with ruminations on past roads not taken, and with romance across large age differences explored, with their inevitable “if I had met you when…”. Aciman keenly observes how certain events mark us, such that we may come back to them repeatedly, and may even observe “vigils” of certain places that we physically revisit because of their deep association with important memories. At one point, a peripheral character, a retired professor who still helps
students edit their theses, goes into a long tangent on his current project, a thesis about time. It’s an excuse to tell a series of short ironic vignettes about people who should have connected and might have connected but for the cruel tricks of time. The professor tells us that the student is really on to something, but they can’t quite figure out how to put it all together and conclude it. In retrospect, I think Aciman’s novel was even more like that thesis than he intended. There are beguiling characters here that mostly ring true, as well as lovely settings and references to classical arts and music that will delight the academically inclined. But those codas. I think with both novels, I would have loved them more perfectly if I’d have stopped short and not read the epilogs. But they just go so much against my own character, and against how I wanted his characters to be. I’m not one to dwell on roads not taken and things I can’t change, but Aciman and his characters thrive on it, it’s what animates them. I can’t deny the beautiful wistfulness of their Proustian meditations, nor can I deny that such characters can be true to life. I have known people whose early romantic experiences carved such deep grooves in them that they never recover. It’s strange that these two endings, so different from each other, both leave me with a nagging dissatisfaction. I’ve sometimes mused that perhaps an older and happier Shakespeare wrote A Winter’s Tale as a way to revisit Othello with an alternate ending. Each is satisfying and dissatisfying on different levels. Perhaps it’s the same with an older Aciman as he revisits his characters later in their lives.

FILM: 2020 Oscar-Nominated Shorts

Yesterday we enjoyed our tradition of screening the Oscar-nominated short films, both the live action and animated categories, and this year proved an enjoyable batch of nominees in both categories. On the live action front, unlike some years that have been unbearably heavy, we had a nice mix of heavy and light, thoughtful and funny. Une Soeur (A Sister) (Belgium) found us holding our collective breath as an emergency dispatch operator tries to help a woman who is being abducted. Brotherhood (Tunisia) explores the tensions in a rural family when a son who went off to fight with ISIS returns home from Syria with a pregnant and heavily-veiled bride. While the traditional family way of life is unfamiliar to most of us, the emotional dynamics of fathers, sons, mothers, and brothers are universal, as is the despair of the father when he realizes the consequences of a choice has made, in a twist worthy of O Henry. The Neighbors’ Window (USA) is funny and ultimately poignant, as a young couple in Brooklyn struggling to raise two small children find distraction in watching neighbors across the way who never bother to cover their windows. It too has its own great twists, and ultimately leaves you thinking about the “windows” of our lives that we reveal to the outside world, and how different that view can be to the life inside. (This was probably our group’s favorite.) Saria (USA) dramatizes a ripped-from-the-news story about a mass break-out from a Guatemalan orphanage and its tragic aftermath. Another dimension is added to an already serious film when closing credits inform us that all the teen actors in this film were all actual residents from a Guatemalan orphanage (though not the same one). Finally Nefta Football Club (Tunisia) follow a series of funny turns to a hilarious denouement, all beginning with a donkey sent off into the desert by itself with a load of heroin and a pair of headphones playing Tunisian music.

In the animated category, we also had a variety of funny and moving films. Hair Love (USA) was a sweet tale of a father trying to learn how to tame his daughter’s mass of nappy hair, in lovely digital animation. The project started as a wildly successful Kickstarter. Dcera (Daughter) (Czech) was an obscure story of a father and daughter struggling to find connection, with dark mottled clay figures moving through a cramped and dark world. One of us loved it, but the rest of us were just puzzled. Mémorable (France) was a poignant and beautifully animated depiction of an elderly artist and his wife, with a subjective view of the artist increasingly becoming lost to dementia. The stop-motion animation was beautiful, multi-colored, and painterly. In Sister (China) (family was a big theme this year), the son in a family of stop-action felt figures talks about growing up with his little sister, ultimately making a pointed commentary on China’s one-child policy of population control that was in effect from 1979-2015. Kitbull was a sweet story from Pixar animation about a feral kitten who befriends an abused pit bull. As usual, because the animations are shorter, we got treated to three bonus “highly regarded” films beyond the five nominees. Henrietta Bulkowski tells the story of a young woman determined to overcome her severe hunched back and fly an airplane to see the world, with her stop-motion character moving awkwardly through a dystopian steampunk world until brighter colors break through in the end. The Bird and the Whale (Ireland) had just a few brushstrokes of a storyline, but lovely and at times luminous watercolor-painted animation. Hors Piste (France) gives us a digitally illustrated adventure of two intrepid ski patrollers rescuing a stranded skier, a rescue which goes hilariously awry. Nice to wrap up the double feature laughing out loud.