ART: Zoe Walsh and Milo Matthieu at M+B Gallery

After a lovely summer lunch on the beautiful patio at Gracias Madre in West Hollywood, we stepped in to the M+B Gallery to see “When the breezes start”, an exhibit of Zoe Walsh. I was intrigued by a description of this non-binary Los Angeles artist as “interrogating notions of what it means to both look at and live in a queer body.”  Walsh starts with inspiration found in the ONE Institute gay and lesbian archives, looking at 1960s photos of amorous men in places like Griffith Park. Using layered silk-screening technique that superimposes silhouettes in negative or alternate color space, they have created large canvases with a collation of Los Angeles parkscapes and bodies, some obvious and some more concealed (which of course is a perfect analogy of what all goes on in Griffith Park), in muted dream-like color.

M+B has two spaces a couple of blocks apart, so we wandered over to the other space to see “A Note to Self”, the exhibit of Milo Matthieu, a New York artist whose Haitian roots inspired his latest works. These are more abstract than his earlier works, but evocative in color and form. Some of the shapes may suggest certain objects or ideas, not literally but more like a Rorschach test, in an intriguing way. You can only describe them the way we talk about wine, by analogies to flavors suggested but not really present. In The Rebirth with a few green shoots growing out of bold reds, it has “notes” of a boat, a bird, and a wedge of citrus. In The Exchange, I’m comforted by the cool aqua, and I might be in a kitchen with a teapot on stove looking out a window toward a neighbor’s window. But then the teapot might be a boat, and there’s a palm tree in the kitchen. Not sure what it means, but I enjoyed contemplating it.

FILM: Asteroid City

Last weekend we had the pleasure of seeing Asteroid City. Filmmaker Wes Anderson has a distinctive style that you either love or you just scratch your head wondering what was that. Each of his films have their own unique sense of time, place, color, and mood, and yet each is unequivocally Anderson. Here we’re in the 1950s, in a southwest roadside rest stop of a town somewhere along some Route 66-like highway. The color palette is ripped from the tailfins of 1950s cars. Even the sky seems airbrushed turquoise. Jason Schwartzman plays a newly widowed man driving with his four young children to move in with their grandfather when their car breaks down in Asteroid City, a wide spot in the desert road where an asteroid landed years ago, and which hosts a sort of “space camp” for nerdy young kids, with nuclear test explosions going off occasionally in the distance. The whole place goes on military lockdown when an actual alien shows up to repossess the asteroid. For a normal movie, that might have required a spoiler alert, but in a Wes Anderson film, the plot is tentative at best, so there’s little to spoil. As usual, there’s a whole cast of familiar actors including Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hanks, Tilda Swinton, Steve Carrell, Edward Norton, Matt Dillon, Margot Robbie, Adrian Brody, Willem Dafoe, and even Jeff Goldblum makes a cameo as the alien. Everyone wants to have a part in Anderson’s fertile imagination. None of them act normally, but deliver their lines as if they’re all a little bit on the spectrum, unexpressive and unfiltered, like cartoon characters speaking their captions and their thought bubbles at the same volume. What they say is always deadpan, sometimes clever, and sometimes made me laugh out loud, as they move through a series of beautifully crafted scenes. Even emotional aspects are handled in a detached and unconventional way (like Jason Scharzman waiting three weeks to inform his children that their mother has died). It was quirky and odd, but I thoroughly enjoyed it, although I couldn’t for the life of me tell you why.

We had a special treat going to see the film in its first week. Landmark Theatres have taken over the Sunset Five cinema and not only done a very nice job renovating it, but they created a full premiere experience for this film including several of the actual sets and costumes in and around the lobby. They had also created special Asteroid City Instagram filters that we were invited to play with while waiting for the film to start. We sorely miss the Arclight, lost to the pandemic, which was a movie-lover’s dream theatre and used to do that sort of thing regularly. We’re delighted to see that Landmark seems to be stepping in to fill that void. Bravo!

STAGE: A Transparent Musical

A Transparent Musical, playing at the Mark Taper through June 25, bills itself as a “timely new musical that’s delightfully queer, unapologetically Jewish, and radically joyful.” I think we’d agree with all of that. It was a fitting part of celebrating Pride month. The story (based on characters from the Amazon Prime series “Transparent”, which we never saw) starts with a father summoning her three adult children to come out to them as transgender woman, and the family dynamics that ensue when she comes out publicly at the Jewish Community Center’s Purim spiel. The play really pops in the second act, when multiple characters reveal secret challenges, uncles are lost, nephews are found, and the ghost of Magnus Hirschfeld is summoned. (Hirschfeld was a German physician/researcher and pioneering advocate for sexual minorities in pre-WWII Germany.) Some uncomfortable parallels between Weimar Germany and our present are drawn, as the story takes some unexpected turns to a more joyful and hopeful end. I really appreciated the illumination of some of the transgender experience, like the songs “I’m Here, But Not In My Body” and “What’s In A Name?”  What really gave the play some great color and power was the array of actual trans and non-binary actors performing in both trans and cisgender roles. The Playbill was a panoply of pronouns and it gave the show an extra dimension that underscored its message. We were very happy to have caught this show before it ends.

FILM: Past Lives

Past Lives is a charming and beautiful film about childhood sweethearts who intermittently reconnect over very long gaps. Na Young / Nora is still a little girl when her family emigrates from Seoul to Toronto, and as an adult she moves on to New York. Hae Sung never forgets her, even as both he and she go on to find other partners. But their encounters are electric when they briefly reconnect twelve years later and twelve more years later. The whole film is a beautiful meditation on love and fate and life choices, and the Korean concept called “in yeon”, which is like a karmic ripple through reincarnations of chance encounters. And only the fate could have them reconnect at ages 12, 24, and 36 in sync with the Korean zodiac calendar. The chemistry between Nora (Greta Lee) and Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) is palpable, and the actors convey so much without words. The film is gorgeously written and directed by Celine Song, somehow fusing impressionism and realism, with cuts of close and long, faces and scenes, like stream of consciousness, letting awkward silences be pregnant and electricity flow. The theme, texture, and time element are reminiscent of Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy, but with an added element of shifting identities with immigration, having to leave things behind for the opportunity to gain new things. This is Song’s directorial debut. I’ll look forward to more from her.