Frameline 34: 'Plan B' and 'From Beginning to End'

I can't say the idea of men falling in love with one another has occupied much of my mind until now, but Plan B has changed all that forever! This playful, smart, sexy film from Argentinian director Marco Berger is like a hormone injection for languishing humans everywhere, but perhaps especially for uninitiated straight folks who might not know that young men in love are a force of nature! I am not talking about tolerance, which is boring despite its being essential to the project of civilization and modern identity blah blah blah. I'm talking about mirror-neuron activation, physical, sexual (if vicarious) delight! The plot involves two straight men who fall in love despite themselves. If you are a conscious human being you will recognize these people, you will identify with them and wish them well, and in the context of this story, that means you will hope and then actively want them to get over themselves and get it on. This is a testament to the film's sophisticated understanding of the dynamics of desire, gay, straight, or otherwise. It patiently explores the erotic charge that accumulates around obstruction, the way in which unattainability translates to sensation, and what is more unattainable for a young straight man than another young straight man? He must overcome, quite literally, himself. That takes some doing - and Plan B shows how. Actors Manuel Vignau and Lucas Ferraro are luminous, brilliant; pacing is unhurried, confident, masterly even; soundscape is by turns haunting, permissive, intriguing; cinematography seductive, gorgeous, with painterly flourishes reminiscent of Dutch masters, and sudden urban still-lives like modern photographs that connect obscurely to the action - cracks in stucco, holes in buildings, giftwrapped boxes; script as consistently real, up-to-date, and provocative as anything out there, anchored in the culture of contemporary Buenos Aires; plot funny and sweet and satisfying ... there really is nothing wrong with this picture. See it and know; you have nothing to lose but your habits and assumptions!


As fate would have it, I watched Plan B in double bill with Brazilian director Aluizo Abranches' utterly abysmal From Beginning to End, so the whole experience was one of total antithesis. From Beginning to End might actually be the worst film I've ever seen. It matches its wretchedness point for point with Plan B's delights; both films feature beautiful young men, and From Beginning to End actually takes its protaganists for a quick romp in Argentina; both plots hinge on a twist in the ordinary configuration of male desire, but where Plan B gives us something rapturously fresh, From Beginning to End serves up the most unlikely coagulated nonsense it has ever been my misfortune to see. Francisco and Thomas are not just lovers, but half-brothers whose relationship has developed since infancy; their saccharine-sweet love, like a thick layer of frosting over a cardboard cake, consists entirely in appearance; never once confronting the least opposition from reality, it is on the contrary nourished by the wealth and generosity of family and friends alike, all of whom seem to move in the viscous medium of some other idealized world parallel to ours, an atmosphere reminiscent of glossy magazines, where Calvin Klein models who double as doctors and Olympic swimmers read passages of Hilda Hilst to one another in faux defiance of a script. It is so ludicrously inert and contrived it could be a delirious farce given different treatment, but as it stands, solemn and romantic and ridiculous, it is beyond a joke.

Frameline 34: The Man Who Loved Yngve

This sweet, fresh, funny debut feature from Norwegian director Stian Kristiansen about a teenaged boy's reversal of fortune after he falls in love with another boy is a pure delight from beginning to end, the sort that is intensified, like the experience of being a teenager itself, by passionate bursts of music from bands we haven't been listening to lately but used to, a lot - the year is 1989, the Berlin wall has come down, a sense of novelty has seized the imagination of Europe's youth, and the lavish promises of pop music, promises to do with freedom, power, sex, and knowledge, begin to expand as young, alienated, pissed-off Jarle makes new friends, joins a punk band, gets a hot girlfriend, and starts to flex his identity generally. The twists and turns of his journey are accompanied by the lush sounds of Joy Division, Jesus and Mary Chain, The Cure, REM, Japan, The Stone Roses, etc. - and, as is probably appropriate to this time, this music, and this stage of human development, the effect is ironic, but not cruelly so - we still laugh with rather than at these characters, who are cheeky kids trying to be ironic themselves in ways they do not yet see are entirely conditioned by the culture anyway. That is, the film celebrates youth without taking it seriously, which is a happy way to reminisce about our own - similarities. And since the soundtrack makes reminiscing virtually compulsory, the light touch of this film is a real blessing.

Actors Rolf Kristian Larson as Jarle and Arthur Berning as his best friend Helge are so perfect their characters are unthinkable otherwise, a fact even writer Tore Renberg, whose novel of the same name is the basis of the screenplay, feels to be true now the film is completed. This 10-minute excerpt says more than I can about the film's very positive charge, about its inspired casting and bright energy. It doesn't cover the challenges that arise when Jarle falls in love with the new boy in class, the dreamy, tennis-playing, cloud-watching Yngve, nor the poignancy of the conclusion, but suffice to say the film just gets better and better. It has already won every award going in Norway since its release in 2008, and it deserves a lot more attention over here.
(NB trailer substituted for original clip because of legal shenanigans with youtube)

Frameline 34: Grown Up Movie Star

It's hard to describe the impression this brilliant film has made on me without feeling I have still somehow understated its merits. It is the debut feature of little-known (in these parts) Canadian writer and director Adriana Maggs, a low-budget production shot on remote Newfoundland, and starring (for the most part) local actors. A confident and unapologetic look at family life gone awry, it is extremely energetic, unflinching, non-judgmental, funny, and true. Its highly dramatic and somewhat breathless narrative sends us hurtling through a few weeks in the life of disgraced ex-hockey star Ray (played by Shawn Doyle) whose struggles with pot and alcohol and most importantly with his closeted homosexual life contribute to the slapdash, at worst completely neglectful nature of his parenting style after his wife has left. The eldest of his two daughters is beginning to explore her sexuality in misguided and ever more hazardous ways, flirting with her father's best friend and pushing her limits in the small community as she tries to patch together an identity from the shreds of her absent mother's dreams of stardom. The look and feel of the film is raw, messy, and unbeautiful, with its dirty, half-melted piles of snow, its convenience stores, parking lots, pick-up trucks and broken ovens - it's not a film that seeks to distinguish itself in visual/poetic terms. What makes it so extraordinary (I'll get to the stand-out performances in a minute) is the non-stop rollercoaster of its script. Actually, performance and script come together in such an incredible way it's impossible to prioritize one over the other. They are one organic phenomenon, a complete powerhouse. Characters are highly differentiated, thoroughly themselves, which makes for some interesting conflict right off the bat, and the acting is so pitch-perfect you feel like giving thanks. There is something immediate and approachable about the cast, something familiar and yet unusual - perhaps a reflection of their background in Canadian television and theatre. Tatiana Maslany, who plays the sexually precocious 13 year-old Ruby (and who won the Special Jury prize at Sundance 2010) is nothing short of a revelation. The film is unimaginable without her. But the dialogue is a force of nature, an electric current surging through every scene, binding and searing its characters into a physical, fighting knot - these are people who love and defy each other fiercely, who crash into one another head on, or fall over one another in their attempt to back off, and who never stop verbalizing the experience. Whether sarcastic or seductive, desperate, defiant, hilarious, imploring, or plagued with expletives, their exchanges come to define the very space in which they struggle and develop. It is language as a (specifically human) element, and it saturates the film, magnetizing us to it completely. It is as delirious an experience as anything out there in film or print. Add to this the fact that the humor of the situation is always front and center, even when, or especially when, things get rough (and Ruby's vulnerable sexuality doesn't fail to stir up trouble) and the film seems like something of a miracle, delightful and disturbing at once, something that gets close to a perfect essence of people.

Jane Smiley 'Private Life'

Jane Smiley won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992 with her dazzling Shakespearean novel A Thousand Acres, but you would never guess she is capable of such a feat if all you knew of her work was the abominably dull Private Life, published in May. It picks up towards the end, but fully two-thirds of the novel is insufferably dreary, despite it's encompassing the Chicago World's Fair, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, the First World War, and the stock market crash; Einstein, Japanese art, poker, and astronomy; the US Navy and the FBI; scholars in the University of Chicago and writers and editors at the San Francisco Examiner, gambling mothers, Russian anarchists, and lesbians who run around Europe with people like Henri Bergson. Perhaps if she had chosen to write from the perspective of someone for whom such matters were critical, or even significant, we might have had a more lively book, but her central character, the unfailingly decent and conventional Margaret Early is as boring and unimaginative as a person who is not actually brain-dead can be, so everything just chugs by her in a curiously meaningless way. Her unlived life might be poignant or even tragic given the right treatment, but Smiley gives us so little in the way of psychological exposition it's difficult to ascertain whether Margaret even registers her own disadvantages. The novel is mainly a story of loveless marriage, but there are several relationships besides which are described in enough detail to become tedious, since they all partake of Margaret Early's inexplicable absenteeism of the heart. Friends, cousins, neighbors all come and go without impact, without development, difficulty, commitment, or joy ... there is even a lover who falls back into the wings as quickly as he appears; their single tryst is disposed of in one short paragraph and described as "perfect", whatever that means. Margaret's one seeming bright patch is a tentatively explored aesthetic curiosity about Hokusai and other Japanese artists, but even this is undeveloped, insignificant either literally or metaphorically. The characters with whom her forays into art are associated are so poorly imagined they come across as embodiments of some Japanese design motif that Margaret, or possibly the author herself, has encountered in a magazine. Things start to get interesting in the last 70 pages or so, when Margaret acknowledges feelings of hatred for her foolish, bombastic husband, and we learn of his paranoid betrayals; the ending is surprising, moving because deeply felt (at last) and simply put, a sudden access of consciousness and memory which obliquely references her general condition - but it is too little and far too late.

If I have to imagine what Smiley is trying to achieve with this material, I would guess she is probing the restriction and inertia experienced by 'good' women whose options in 19th and early 20th Century America were so limited; also the consequences of enabling pompous and entitled men out of a misplaced sense of virtue; stylistically, she might be aiming for subtlety, minimalism, the drama of the ordinary (within extraordinary times). But she has imagined her dead-zone rather too well, so that in place of sympathy for any of these characters readers are left puzzling over why they were created at all. From a writer bold enough to update King Lear and pull it off with style, this novel about nobody and nothing in particular is a great disappointment.

Quote: Martin Luther King Jr.

"Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted"