MVFF32: 'Precious'

There is a lot of buzz around Lee Daniel's Precious:based on the novel Push by Sapphire, no doubt stoked by Oprah's ringing endorsement ("it split me open") and the presence of pop celebrities Mariah Carey (without makeup everybody) and Lenny Kravitz, but the film is ultimately just another formulaic mainstream product tricked out to look 'different' with its contrived juxtapositions of hard-core domestic violence and schmaltzy teenage glamour-pop musical fantasies. The film is entertaining, and will be a hit with audiences who prefer to contemplate what life should be like, but isn't. There are some good performances, most notably by Mo'Nique as the terrifyingly abusive and ultimately pathetic mother, but they cannot rescue the film from its horribly conventional narrative arc which, given the seriousness of the subject matter, is inappropriate, even exploitative. I haven't read the book, so the problem might begin there, but my sense is that this is an entertainment industry crime.

The story focuses on the character of Clareece "Precious" Jones, a terrifically overweight, illiterate and disenfranchised teenage kid from Harlem, pregnant for the second time with her father's baby, living on welfare with her wretched, foul-mouthed and abusive mother, and newly ejected by the New York Public School system. Things begin to look up for Precious when she enrolls in a special school where, under the compassionate tutelage of the beautiful Ms. Rain (an angel in disguise, an urban myth, or an African American fairy princess) she begins to learn to read and express herself, even talk about college. Her classmates rally around - the schoolgirls' scenes are the funniest in the film - and she finally breaks away from home after the birth of her son, who she is determined to raise herself. She is aided in this transition by her social worker Ms. Weiss (well played by Mariah Carey) and the aforementioned Ms. Rain, who moves bureaucratic mountains to get Precious situated, taking her into her own home in the interim. Precious is finally reunited with her first-born and exits the stage with both children on her way towards a new and hopeful future.

As if! This grotesquely unrealistic but entertaining film will resonate with audiences who need to believe that poverty, illiteracy, morbid obesity, incest, rape, and child abuse do not destroy souls, damage minds, and irrevocably distort people's chances for happiness in this world, that people like Ms. Rain can pluck hapless, emotionally and educationally catatonic children off the streets and 'turn them around', that life isn't so bad, we are all good people inside, and all we need is a bit more love. There are a lot of people who have good reasons for needing to believe in stuff like this, but they aren't the people behind this film, who, on their way to the bank, have swooped in on the poorest members of our society and shoved them blinking onto the runway to Never Never Land, producers and entertainment moguls who will no doubt express for a short while their deep belief in the resilience of humanity while ignoring the ways in which society continues to marginalize its weakest links and grind them down. Ignore the hype about this film, or go for the thrill of Mariah Carey without makeup, but don't think girls like Precious will come through without a sea-change in political and social consciousness. And that means, without us.

MVFF32: 'Fish Tank'

British writer-director Andrea Arnold took the film world by storm with her feature debut Red Road, a singularly realistic if slightly spooky meditation on loss, grief, and the female psyche set in Glasgow's notorious Red Road flats and featuring actors supplied by Lars Von Trier's experimental Advance Party film project. Her second feature, Fish Tank, opening in next week's Mill Valley Film Festival, considers the even more complex territory of dysfunctional family dynamics and the way in which they distort and stifle human, specifically female, development. Set in a bleak and decaying housing project in Essex, the film works sociological territory closer to home for the Dartford-born director, and it shows; the look and feel is grittier, more authentic than any of the social-realist dramas it could be compared to, more powerful by far than anything by Mike Leigh, for example, whose films are descending further and further into a pit of sentimentalized 'ordinary' heroics, and outflanking the much more gloves-off Nil by Mouth which, remarkable though that film was, cannot match the depth and subtlety of Arnold's treatment.

The film spotlights newcomer Katie Jarvis as Mia, the sullen adolescent child of a desperately indifferent mother, Joanne, played by Keirston Wareing. Recently expelled from school, alienated from her friends and drifting in and out of the chaotic, abusive home, Mia is rigid with disappointment and pain, locked up behind a wall of disgust occasionally demolished by fits of defiance. For all her despicable qualities, the phenomenally bad mother Joanne is clearly reeling in a sort of hell of her own, a no-exit loop of hyper-sexualized immaturity which conditions the developing predicament of her daughter. This is where Arnold's compassionate understanding of damaged feminine psyche comes into its own. Joanne's retarded, narcissistic sexual identity remains fixed at a level barely above that of her 15 year-old daughter; she is incapable of assuming the responsibilities that come with motherhood, and so leaves both her daughters pathetically exposed to the sort of sexual predation that no doubt infected her own childhood. What we see in the mother-daughter dynamic is a snapshot of one sick, malfunctioning feminine ego at war with itself, dividing at a traumatic point of entry into two armed camps, the rejecting, defiant adolescent whose ignorance leads her to reach for love in the wrong place, and the defeated, slatternly woman whose damaged sexuality condemns her to a life of hopeless, eternal return. If we despise Joanne and root for Mia, we miss the point, for Joanne is Mia on some crucial level. This is how dysfunctional dynamics operate over generations. Other filmmakers have trodden this path, but Arnold does it with exceptional assurance, confidently walking a line between truth and sensation. There are no villains, only victims who enter moral stasis. There are no rapes, no knock-down, drag-out fights, no murders or other catastrophes, though the film is constantly skirting these conventions. The character of Connor, Joanne's boyfriend who encourages the affection of Mia and then betrays it one night on the couch while her mother is passed out upstairs, is sensitively played (by Michael Fassbender) as a gentle, humorous, attractive man whose kindness to the family is like a tank of oxygen come at a critical moment. His sexual advance to Mia proceeds according to the inexorable logic of the family, quietly, inevitably. It is as though the family is one body, expanding and contracting with Joanne's short-lived love affairs. Nobody escapes the scenario, nobody gets to define a self that is distinct from the whole. Hence the fish tank analogy, which I think denotes no escape.


For all that, the film is strangely hopeful, or at the very least, ambiguous. Its rigorous authenticity puts us in mind of what we know, experientially, to be true - that people can and do break negative patterns and escape their conditioned legacies. Mia's courage and sometimes outrageous acts of defiance point to a spirit which might be capable of achieving this. And the film's beautiful photography is a subtle reminder in itself of something slightly to one side of the grim facts, something delicate, displaced, but existent nevertheless. We might call this thing hope, if only because it is beautiful. Shots of wind-ravaged grass, or twilit, empty rooms where Mia dances by herself, of brilliant, light-filled shirts on the washing line, or the crenellated edge of a shell in a stirred wind-chime, all speak to this dimension of possibility. But it has to said that hope is more of a spectre than a real presence, perhaps conjured from a girl's imagination in order that its betrayal be rendered visible. This is the heartbreaking aspect of Mia's trajectory, her will to escape, her innocent, ignorant, absolute need to love and be loved, barely conscious of itself, groping blindly in a shrunken, booby-trapped world. There are metaphors that suggest complete hopelessness - the skewering of the fish on the river bank, the death of the traveller's horse - and then there are scenes of such poignant, breathtaking redemptive force near the end of the film, when Mia seeks revenge and encounters how close she is coming to a point of no return, that clearly reveal the potential in this embattled, confused, and lonely character. The scene where Mia takes Connor's small child into the fields and nearly loses her confounds narrative expectation in every way, cleaving so closely to the truth of its character's desperate state of mind it exposes the viewer's own conventional assumptions about what is about to happen, and what, to the filmmaker's credit, doesn't happen. It is one of cinema's extraordinary moments to be sure. Arnold's flawless decisions about where to take her characters and where not to take them brings her vision right into the center of our own similar lives. We are manipulated by cinema so often we hardly know it is happening until a director like this comes along and appeals to the terrible drama of the ordinary, our ordinary. Because most of us Thank God don't really know much about rapes and murders and such, but we do know the sort of blunt, relentless injuries real life can inflict; the raised temperature of family dysfunction, the blind acts of faith that meet with intransigence, the occasional wild gesture, the undying if inconstant nature of hope, the possibility of growth springing up in unforeseen ways. Fish Tank is about these things, and because it never swerves into conventional territory it stands alone as a masterpiece of originality, the work of what is surely one of the best and most exciting filmmakers working today.

Quote: Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari

"It is not the sleep of reason that produces monsters but more than anything else rationality, vigilant and unsleeping."
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus

Driftwood

Kim Addonizio 'what is this thing called love'

Personal truth is not an easy thing to nail down, though most writers are trying to do it, whether by allusion, extension, negation, indirection, or some other means. But it doesn't yield readily to a straightforward gaze, perhaps because under interrogation it tends to break up into multiple truths. When this happens, fractured meanings can disperse quickly in all directions, even evaporate altogether, and if it is not the writer's purpose to simply underscore the instability of all meanings then the work will lose some of the power of its intention. This weakened effect can be more noticeable in poetry, which is generally more volatile than prose, more friable, and therefore more likely to disintegrate under any but the most delicate handling. A poem is so much closer to the edge of whatever it is in us that discriminates between meaning and meaninglessness - it easily exceeds its own limits, spills from a state of coherence into what sounds merely deranged, incomprehensible - at least, to the ordinary reader, certainly to those of us not ordinarily readers at all. But it is to these quotidian souls that Kim Addonizio pitches her work, in the confidence that her personal truths will resonate in their (her/our) experience. She locates herself squarely in the middle of the ordinary, contemporary world. Her gaze is unflinching, clear-eyed, and direct, unforgiving even, and the experiences she is able to articulate do not shatter or divide under the pressure of her attention but remain intact. Each poem articulates a movement towards singularity, not away from it: it gathers and concentrates its meanings into one perfectly translucent gesture, a sort of snapshot of contemporary reality, a polaroid. She aims always, and with astonishing precision, for the naked fact, the simply true. It was the photographer Lisette Model who said the most mysterious thing is a fact clearly stated, and her student Diane Arbus who so famously achieved this effect in her work, but Addonizio's best poems are like this too. They are deceptively simple, if deception is a word which can be associated with poems as raw and as honest as this. I found myself dazzled by the subtlety of her ambiguous, unclassifiable tone - it is detached but immediate, unsentimental in the extreme, but delicate, suffused with light. The work telegraphs a kind of profound disillusion, but is not hopeless on account of that. It is rather in the vein of something James Ellroy of all people wrote in his harrowing memoir, something I scrawled once in capital letters in a notebook - disillusionment was enlightenment. There is a sense in these wry, fragile, beautiful poems about sex and booze and cancer and video games and fashion magazines and loneliness and failed relationships, of awakening to something absolute about life. Perhaps it is acceptance, of a fact of life achieved through accepting it, which as anybody knows is quite an achievement, and especially so in language, which is so often deployed in the service of subterfuge. I should illustrate, but it is the pristine wholeness of the poems I want to emphasize, so rather than dissect an assortment I will just quote one in full, one of my favorites obviously, and urge readers to buy the book and test for themselves the truth of these poems against their own experience.


ON KNOCKING OVER MY GLASS WHILE READING SHARON OLDS

The milk spread,
a translucent stain
covering the word milk,

snaking down toward come,
and womb and penis, toward gashes
and swiveled, toward the graceful

grey flower and the infelicitous
errless digit, so that suddenly
the page seemed to be weeping,

the way a statue of the Virgin
in some poor but devout parish
might begin to weep, ichor streaming

from the eyes, the open palms,
so that when the girl kneeling
in the rain of the convent yard

touches the mottled white
folds of the stone robe
her lupus disappears. And I felt

as that girl must have felt,
that the Holy Mother herself
had come to reveal

the true nature of the real,
goddess in the statue,
bread in each word's

black flowering, and I rose
and went to the kitchen -
sacristy of the cupboards

tabernacle of the fridge -
to refill my glass
with her wild and holy blood.