"Afternoon Delight"

Author's note: This review was written three years before director Joey Soloway came out as non-binary and genderqueer. Out of respect, the first paragraph has been modified in accordance with their desire to be referred to by gender-neutral pronouns.

Additional note: It has been brought to my attention that the director's first name is now Joey. I have made additional modifications to reflect this.

Depicting the social contradictions of middle-class suburban life is something of a national pastime in American cinema, as famously demonstrated by Sam Mendes’s American Beauty and Revolutionary Road, Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko and much of Todd Solondz’s career. In that respect, Afternoon Delight is not particularly original. What makes it somewhat refreshing – and separates it from the main flaws of American Beauty and Donnie Darko – is the consistent compassion writer-director Joey Soloway has for their main characters.

On paper, the premise sounds ripe for cliché and convention: A bored, sexually frustrated Jewish housewife meets a young stripper whom she takes under her wing, ostensibly out of kindness but with the underlying hope that it will help her spice up her marriage and escape the dreariness of attending meetings with irritating fellow Jewish housewives and putting up with their vanity and falseness.

While some supporting characters, such as ringleader Jennie (Michaela Watkins) remain firmly two-dimensional at best, the film’s strength lies in the complicated relationship between protagonist Rachel (Kathryn Hahn) and stripper McKenna (Juno Temple). They meet when Rachel’s best friend Stephanie (Jessica St. Clair) takes her to a strip club, where McKenna gives Rachel a private lap-dance. Troubled by her youth and sexual confidence, Rachel meets her again in the street the following week, and they become friends. When McKenna finds herself homeless following an incident with a borrowed car, Rachel allows her to stay in the house, much to the chagrin of her husband Jeff (Josh Radnor).

Over the course of these events, Rachel has learned that McKenna never knew her father, is 55 days sober and, to top it all, an independent prostitute. What shocks and frightens her best friend and husband also frightens her, yet it also gives her further purpose in interacting with her. “I want to help her out”, she tells herself and her husband, despite McKenna giving no sign that she takes anything but joy and satisfaction out of her job. In spite of their friendship, Rachel hides McKenna’s true profession by claiming to her friends that she’s her 5 year-old son’s new nanny. Inevitably, she trips over it when the wives suggest McKenna look after their daughters during a trip. Despite trusting her with babysitting their son, the couple makes an excuse to get someone else to do it instead. But none of these mixed signals of rejection and affection appear to faze McKenna. She acknowledges them but does not voice any complaints to Rachel.

The ambiguity of the two women’s interactions reaches a peak point when McKenna offers an exhausted Rachel a foot massage that escalates to her thighs and chest. While McKenna’s intentions are clearly innocuous, Rachel experiences the massage with such frightening sensuality that she ends it by suddenly rising, pushing McKenna to the side and getting on top of her – to hit her or have sex with her? The tension remains unquestioned as Rachel just sits down on the edge of her bed and McKenna leaves. It is then comically exacerbated when Rachel calls Jeff from his work and the two proceed to have their first quasi-satisfying sexual experience in six months. McKenna’s presence has officially begun to affect their life.

From this point on, the film’s screenplay could take an easy way and teach its characters a lesson about how the pitied prostitute leads a more fulfilling and happier life than the respectable suburbanites. Mercifully, it chooses instead to stay focused on Rachel’s self-searching quest for happiness. After a day spent at a boring children’s party with her “friends”, during which Jeff escapes to go surfing with the other husbands, Rachel decides to accompany McKenna to meet one of her clients and watch them have sex. What follows is one of the film’s most emotionally complex sequences, confronting Rachel to both her prejudices about sex work and her own sexual insecurities and desires.

The sight of McKenna’s client – an ageing overweight man – would likely provoke discomfort if not outright disgust, as he is old enough to be McKenna’s father and one would easily be quick to label him a dirty old pervert. Any possible feelings of disgust are instantly challenged by the friendly and polite rapport that is established between himself and McKenna; they interact in the same way a physical therapist might interact with a long-time patient at his home. He greets the two women with respect, offers them a drink and demonstrates great sensitivity to Rachel’s nervousness and uneasiness. He assures her that she is perfectly free to leave should the situation prove too much for her.

In the bedroom, the tryst begins with McKenna performing fellatio on the man. Rachel initially interrupts the proceeding with nervous falsely-casual small talk, then forces herself to silence. Kathryn Hahn’s performance in this scene is the key to its power. Her face is a mask of confused emotions throughout the entire session. Apart from McKenna’s body, which we crucially see relatively little of, everything about the situation should invite disgust and it does to a certain extent. Yet Rachel’s eyes also convey a mixture of fear and arousal, particularly when the sex turns penetrative and the man asks her to hold his hand while he orgasms. For the first time, Rachel is the spectator of sexual intercourse in a way that she has never experienced before, between two people whose relationship is both cordial and commercial. That, more than the sight of a flabby-chested old man having sex with a 24 year-old woman, is what disturbs Rachel the most.

Kathryn Hahn’s rich and impeccably-timed performance is one of the film’s greatest assets. She runs a wide gamut of human emotions – often simultaneously, as the aforementioned scene attests – and never overacts once. This stays consistent even during the film’s climactic alternating montage of husbands’ night and wives’ night. The latter gives an inebriated Rachel the chance to both finally vent her repressed distaste for her friends’ habits and lament her ruined dream of becoming a war journalist due to an abortion in college that concurrently ended her pregnancy, her college education and her years of promiscuity. It’s the kind of scene in which overacting is almost inevitable, but Hahn never goes further than she needs to.

Meanwhile, the husbands are left to smoke pot and play poker. Their evening is troubled when McKenna, having cracked under the pressure of the exhaustion and downed half a bottle of vodka, gets in on the fun. Save an embarrassed Jeff, the husbands are ecstatic at the prospect of a sexy young woman joining their party. Pretty soon, they’re all dancing to the music they record in their spare time. Their enthusiasm soon turns to discomfort, however, as McKenna dances more and more seductively until she’s back at doing what she does best – stripping erotically. The men are made uncomfortable by behaviour that should normally arouse them. By being in control of her own sexuality and asserting its power over them on her own terms, McKenna challenges the husbands’ masculinity.

Both scenes involve the main characters upsetting their respective parties by making their fellow guests increasingly uncomfortable with their frankness. It’s a fairly common trope in suburban dramas, but whose treatment deftly avoids cliché thanks to the actresses’ performances and cinematographer Jim Frohna’s superb camerawork. Both scenes are filmed in close shots that pan across the characters’ faces and bodies and long focal lenses that blur much of the background. Most importantly, the camera never gets too lost in the scene’s rhythm and the temptation to show off too much of the actors’ skills for their own sake is not obeyed. The audience is pulled away or cut away just in time so that the essential is not lost.

Long focal lens shots and close framing constitute many of the film’s most important scenes. These include the previously discussed scenes but its first important occurrence is in the lap-dance scene where Rachel and McKenna first meet. When it’s not focused on McKenna’s face or butt, the camera is guided by her seductive dance moves towards Rachel, making the atmosphere as intimate and disquieting as many first-time sexual experiences tend to be.

After the alternating montage culminates dramatically, the film begins to lose water and fall back into familiar formula territory: McKenna leaves the house and Rachel is excommunicated from her group of so-called friends. Her marriage with Jeff appears to crumble as he decides to leave the house as well, and her psychiatrist (Jane Lynch, giving a decent performance in a superficial role), after spending most of their sessions citing her own relationship with her female partner as an example, ends up crying in her arms about their own recent breakup. This is the weakest, most predictable and conventional part of the film, where Rachel has to face the decisions of her actions and learn from the film’s events lest she never find happiness. One can almost see the words “Dark Night Of The Soul” pasted on the screen after being ripped from Blake Snyder’s wretched Save The Cat! book.

Yet the ending itself is not without its strengths. It seems the screenplay itself is aware that the crux of what it had to say about people has been said. There isn’t anything inherently new in its exposure of the inner crises that result from the contradiction between finding and being one’s self and wanting to please people. Yet it draws its value by investing itself in its characters, not as representatives of talking points but as full and complete human beings. That Kathryn Hahn was not even considered by the Academy as a potential nominee for Best Actress in a Leading Role says much about its member’s lack of touch with humanity. Her portrayal of Rachel ranks as one of the most authentic human beings put to the big screen in 2013.

Much commendation must also be given to Juno Temple, a bold and versatile actress who never ceases to surprise and excite. First noticed as a gutsy British sexpot in Gregg Araki’s 2010 apocalyptic sex comedy “Kaboom”, she often plays women with a very open and strong sexuality but never reduces them to just that and always gives each one a distinct soul. If any recognition for exceptional actors remains, she should be a major star by the end of the decade. Her casual, almost innocent sex appeal, recalls Shirley MacLaine’s titular performance in Billy Wilder’s “Irma La Douce”. But McKenna goes beyond the enduring hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold archetype. No matter how tempting it may be to further reinforce the story’s point, she is not idealized or held up as an example. She may be more free-spirited, more comfortable with her sexuality and less concerned about what other people think of her than Rachel, Jeff or their friends, but she has problems and flaws of her own. She may have been, as Rachel put it, “a bomb in their family” but she had to happen in order for their plights to be exposed. While a less decisive ending in the manner of “Un Air De Famille” would have been preferable, sitting through the final act is made worth it by the film’s final, beautiful scene: A reunited Rachel and Jeff, having talked things through and decided to give their marriage a second chance, make real tender love for the first time in a long time, culminating in Rachel crying tears of joy and pleasure as she orgasms before the credits roll. That final image embodies both the film and Kathryn Hahn’s performance throughout it: An uneven but tremendously satisfying rollercoaster of confused emotions.

"The Children's Hour"

Little Rosaline’s composure decreases visibly as a high close-up of her blackmailer’s face reminds her not-so-subtly of the threat to be carried out should she not back up her malicious lie. Her teacher Martha (Shirley MacLaine), one of the two objects of said lie, puts her hands on her shoulders and urges her to tell the truth. Fellow teacher and lie victim Karen (Audrey Hepburn), in a perfectly centralized medium-close-up, looks uneasily as the child reaches boiling point. Seeing the girl’s discomfort, blackmailer Mary (Karen Balkin) rises from the sofa to address her puritan grandmother (Fay Bainter), in two medium shots connected by Mary’s movement. At that moment, Rosaline jumps up from the sofa in a sudden-close up and hysterically screams that everything Mary said was true. The two female teachers of the all-girl school they both attend are indeed having a homosexual affair.

This narratively crucial moment serves as a representative of the film’s overall tone, its strengths and its weaknesses. William Wyler’s adaptation of Lillian Hellman’s play “The Children’s Hour” came out in 1961 – coincidentally the same year in which Basil Dearden’s equally groundbreaking yet vastly inferior “Victim” became the first mainstream film to use the word “homosexual” – and it shows in both its endeavor to tackle a previously unmentionable subject and its stylistic appearance. The film’s modern French New Wave-inspired look seems to be made as a conscious parallel to the attempt at breaking the taboo of homosexuality in a Hollywood film yet, much like the treatment of the subject itself, it is often clumsy but undeniably sincere.

Unlike Dearden’s tedious, academic Hitchcock thriller counterfeit, “The Children’s Hour” feels alive and alert. The close shots, sudden cuts and at times uncertain continuity echo Wyler’s mixture of courage and fear in his address of the subject matter. The film may be uneven and occasionally stumble but it avoids the aesthetic mistake “Victim” made by not falling back on old ways to show something new, opting instead to blaze a trail into the future using new tools, even if it means burning itself in the process.

The film indeed suffers mainly from its lack of subtlety. It’s the kind of Tennessee Williams-inspired play-based melodrama in which characters can go into hysterical monologues and speeches rather than let the camera speak for them by capturing unspoken feelings on their faces. This, thankfully, is achieved and lead actresses Audrey Hepburn and Shirley Maclaine are to be commended for their performances, even if the latter – much like her dialogue – can find herself prone to unnecessary hysterics. They are both at their best in conveying their feelings through their eyes.

So good, in particular, is Audrey Hepburn’s performance that it raises a question that the screenplay never dares to voice: What if the lie affected her so much that she might have started to turn it into truth? Having lost a libel case and their jobs, the two women have been made outcasts by all but Karen’s devoted fiancée Joe (James Garner) yet the experience has overwhelmed her. In one of the film’s harshest scenes, she demands that he ask her the question he has suppressed all this time: Is it true? The answer is no, but the very fact that the question occurred to him is enough for her to break off the engagement. Just after that, Martha tearfully admits that she has indeed been repressing romantic and sexual feelings for her friend.

On their own, these two scenes need not have gone any further than what is shown, but Audrey Hepburn’s conflicted performance, intentionally or not, leads one to wonder the extent of the changes brought upon by the lie. If a rumour were to be spread that you were gay, particularly in a time when homosexuality was still considered wrong and sinful by a vast majority of Americans, and everybody but two or three people close to you believed it, would you not start wondering if it were true after a while? The power of public consensus is an insidious thing, particularly if it involves questioning your own reality. That the film does not delve any further into that possibility is understandable given the ground already covered, but one cannot help but feel there may be an even better film struggling to get out through that avenue.

The film’s major weakness in the character of Mary and the bad hamminess of her actress Karen Balkin. She is simply too one-dimensional to be taken seriously as a human being. She is established as a cruel bullying selfish liar from the beginning and never wavers. Thomas Vinterberg’s excellent “The Hunt” was more subtle and nuanced. The film was also about a lie told by a child about a teacher’s sexuality; a lie that also ruins his life, except the charges are far more serious since he is accused of child molestation. In that film, the little girl’s lie was the product of a series of specific events and circumstances, and was told with neither real malice nor true realization of its implications and consequences.

Still, “The Children’s Hour” should be accepted for the good and flawed work of art that it is, not merely for being one of the first Hollywood films to attempt to portray homosexuality both openly and with something approaching sympathy. As is the case with human beings, its weaknesses make it all the more beautiful by their honesty.

"The War Is Over"

On the 1^st of March 2014, Cinema lost one of its most fearless adventurers at the age of 91. The director of such important milestones as “Hiroshima Mon Amour” and “Nuit Et Brouillard” (“Night And Fog”), Alain Resnais spent his long and fruitful career reinventing his craft and pursuing new ways to push the boundaries of cinematic language. While “La Guerre Est Finie” (“The War Is Over”) does not quite reach the heights of “Mon Oncle D’Amérique” (“My American Uncle”), “Providence” or “L’Année Dernière À Marienbad” (“Last Year At Marienbad”), it remains a significant work of art both as a representation of the radical politics of 1960s Europe – both stylistically and thematically – and as an introduction to Resnais’s films for uninitiated beginners. I still have too much to learn to truly do justice to the richness of the film, but I shall do my best anyway.

 

The film stars Italian-French actor Yves Montand as a Spanish communist agent sneaking back and forth from Spain to France to meet fellow party members and distribute propaganda. This is the first of several films - including Costa-Gavras’s masterful “L’Aveu” (“The Confession”) – in which Montand would play a communist confronted with the party’s unpleasant realities, mirroring his own political journey from ardent communist to moderate leftist. “La Guerre Est Finie” is not so much a criticism of the communist ideology so much as the portrait of a man whose personal experience of reality conflicts with his fellow travelers’ blind and dangerous idealism.

The film opens with Diego Mora (Yves Montand) sneaking back to France under one of his many aliases in order to warn his superiors of a recent sting operation in Madrid that resulted in the capture and killing of many fellow agents. The scene alternates between shots of Diego and his accomplice in the car exchanging dialogue, point-of-view shots of the car’s exterior surroundings and seemingly incongruous shots representing, among other things:

-          Diego running from an airport to the very car he’s in.

-          A man opening an apartment door from the point of view of his unseen visitor.

-          The same man coming out of a door next to another door in which another man had previously gone through.

-          Diego running towards a queue.

-          Diego running in a train.

-          Diego running to catch a train.

-          Diego missing a train.

-          Diego running out of a car and into a train station.

-          Diego meeting the previously-mentioned man and embracing him.

 

All of this is set to Diego’s accomplice complaining about Spain’s lack of petrol stations and how he’d be indulging in tourist activities if it weren’t for him. This gives the audience a taste of what the rest of the film’s experience will be: A constant voyage in time and the mind, the present reality frequently interrupted by brief trips into Diego’s mind as he flashes to the past, the future or his imagining of past, future or present events elsewhere. Some shots – such as individual women each shown walking towards the same bar – do not make sense until later scenes connect with them – in the aforementioned case, when Diego goes to said bar to spy on the naive idealistic young daughter (Geneviève Bujold) of a man who has willingly lent him his identity.

These flashes are frequently related to Diego’s central problem: He has returned to Paris to warn his superiors about the sting operation, only for them to chastise him for leaving just as fellow agent Juan (Jean-François Rémi) was on his way to Madrid to meet him. Worsening his comrade’s dangerous situation is the refusal of the party leaders to take the threat seriously and their insistence in going along with a planned general strike. The flashes – as well as the aliases – illustrate Diego’s fragmented, wandering state of mind, but they also represent one of the major recurring themes in Alain Resnais’s work: The relationship between time and one’s personal perception of it, often in the form of real or imagined memories. This makes certain scenes particularly ambiguous, such as the scene in Diego’s apartment after his long-time lover Marianne (the exquisitely androgynous Ingrid Thulin) tells him she wants a child from him. Diego is shown entering a room to check on a sleeping boy. We naturally assume it to be Marianne’s child from a previous relationship and the clear sounds of Diego’s movements and activity – as opposed to the silence of the flashes – encourage us to perceive it as real. Yet the child is never mentioned again. Whether he exists or not, the connection is clear.

 

In that respect “La Guerre Est Finie”, in defiance of its seemingly optimistic title – taken from fascist General Francisco Franco’s own words at the end of the Spanish Civil War – is a bittersweet portrait of a lost cause known only to its protagonist as such. Diego communicates his thoughts in the form of highly literary voice-overs that resemble prose poems – another recurring element of Resnais’s work. In these, Diego gives the viewer a summary of the events the pictures hint at, all while referring to himself in the second person, as if consciously trying to remind himself of what he has experienced and what he is currently experiencing. Diego’s self-talk conveys bitterness and disillusion combined with envy for his fellow travelers’ idealism.

This gradual political disenchantment is matched by his relationship with the film’s major female characters, Ingrid Thulin’s Marianne and Geneviève Bujold’s Nadine. Diego spends his first night in Paris with the latter, enjoying a one-night-stand with her just after she remarks that he is indeed old enough to be her father – a statement and sequence made more disturbing today in light of Montand’s real-life stepdaughter Catherine Allégret’s allegations that he sexually abused her from the age of five until adulthood.

 

Ugly hindsight aside, Nadine’s youth and candid enthusiasm for Diego’s work acts as a counterpoint to both his own lassitude and his superiors’ stubborn denial of reality, as well as a bittersweet reminder of his own obsolescence. More importantly, she solidifies her position as Marianne’s opposite number – despite the two never meeting or, indeed, seeming aware of each other’s existence. Marianne believes in communism implicitly, and shares the party’s optimism about a glorious general strike that will bring down Franco’s fascist regime; so much so that she is begging Diego to cease his life of lies and absences, and to take her with him to Spain so that they can raise a child there together.

Diego’s love for Marianne is indisputable. However, he is all too aware that her dream, much like his boss’s, is impossible. And while he is more open with her about his frustrations than with most other characters, she is as incapable to convince as they are. The only thing Diego can truly do is take as much advantage as he can of what little bursts of happiness and pleasure he has left. The most remarkable of such bursts is one of the most beautiful and erotic sex scenes ever put to film, set after Marianne’s friend Bill (Gérard Séty) and his annoyingly inquisitive wife Agnès (Annie Fargue) have finally left the two alone together. The scene is edited in close shots of Marianne’s body parts – feet, back, face, head & torso – and different steps in the progress of their sexual act, with little obvious continuity. Ingrid Thulin’s magnificent acting deserves to be credited for this scene’s beauty: Equally overwhelmed with bliss and sadness, halfway across tears and pleasure, she vividly captures a scary and mysterious emotional place seldom seen in the depiction of sexual relations between two lovers. The scene is reminiscent of the stunning post-opening credits close-ups of Emmanuelle Riva and Eiji Okada’s mingled bodies in “Hiroshima Mon Amour”.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Like his aforementioned masterpiece, Resnais creates a parallel between love and politics, in this case connecting romantic/sexual desire with political desire, the love of a woman and the love of a cause. Just as he knows that any attempt to replace Franco’s regime with a communist regime is doomed to failure, Diego also knows that Marianne’s dream for them will surely result in his death. Yet he remains committed to both of them. The film ends with him going to Spain both as a concession to out-of-touch party leaders in order to save his endangered friend and as a concession to Marianne’s desire to start a new life with him. His doom is made all the more certain by the police’s discovery of Nadine’s real father’s real passport. No matter what course of action he takes, the only issue for Diego, as for communism, is death. As indeed, 25 years later, History would confirm.

"Un Air De Famille"

 

There exists a particular sub-genre of films – many of them based on plays – that involves a reunion of family and/or friends in which secrets and hitherto unspoken and mostly unpleasant feelings come out in the open. Among the most notable are Thomas Vinterberg’s disturbing masterwork “The Celebration”, Ingmar Bergman’s even greater film “Through A Glass Darkly”, John Wells’ recent adaptation of Tracy Letts’ “August: Osage County” – unseen by me as I type these lines – and Robert Altman’s little-seen gem “Come Back To The Five And Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean”. In the latter film, a circle of James Dean female fans gathered in a bar for their annual celebration of the legendary actor who filmed a few scenes of “Giant” near them and supposedly impregnated one of them with his illegitimate son.

 

I evoke this film because Cédric Klapisch’s 1996 dramedy “Un Air De Famille” – “Family Resemblances” in English – is at many times reminiscent of it, not only in its bar setting, family reunion plot and unity of time, but also because Klapisch similarly displays a careful observation of human behaviour that successfully overcomes occasionally facile characterization, a talent that manifests itself in his framing and filming of characters as well as his actors’ performances.

This is exemplified in one of the film’s strongest moments as well as its dramatic game-setter: Upstart Philippe Ménard – who has just been interviewed on the regional TV news channel to promote his company –, his frosty mother (Claire Maurier) and his meek, submissive wife Yolande (Catherine Frot) have joined his rebellious sister Betty (Agnès Jaoui) at the bar run by his sullen brother Henri (Jean-Pierre Bacri), ostensibly to celebrate Yolande’s birthday. They are all waiting for Henri’s wife Arlette to join them. She is late. An increasingly agitated Henri has sent his friendly bartender Denis (Jean-Pierre Darroussin) up to get her. He returns to announce that she isn’t there. The film reacts to this new development in an almost Bergmanian way; Klapisch’s camera examines his characters’ reactions in a series of close and medium shots as their surroundings communicate their discomfort with the paradoxical harmony of their paralyzed dog’s quick breaths and a passing train’s loud rumble. Yolande’s timid face turns towards the grillage of a neon light in which a fly has trapped itself. The others shift in their seats, avoiding each other’s gazes. The pot is not quite boiling over, but it cannot contain its contents much longer.

 

 

 

The character’s slowly surfacing feelings are consistently treated with the same compassionate acuteness, brought on by performances that, while sometimes threatening to veer into caricature – Catherine Frot’s at-times overdone doe-eyed girlishness and Jean-Pierre Bacri’s intermittently forced grouching come to mind – never stray too far. The scene in which Yolande asks Denis for another drink before talking pitiably about their paralyzed dog is another strong point. Frot’s eyes convey a call for help that her voice only hints at. Klapisch films their faces in mid-to-long focals, sometimes changing the focus back-and-forth from one face to the other, as if trying to uncover the emotional masks his characters wear.

 

 

 

The use of mirrors to reflect characters in moments of transition is reminiscent of “Come Back To The Five And Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean”’s similar use of the bar mirror but less beautiful. The other close-up shots of character’s faces reflected in glasses lack subtlety, distract rather than enhance. But the most important thing it shares with Robert Altman’s films is its screenplay’s general refusal to take the easy road and satisfy the audience’s expectations. The initially idyllic-looking transitory slow-motion flashback of the three children waking their parents up and jumping on the bed with them to the tune of Dalida’s Come Prima – turns, by the third transition, into an ugly censored scene of their angry father verbally and physically abusing them. A perhaps simplistic and unnecessary explanation of their current state, but nevertheless indicative of the script’s well-managed backflips. By the end of the film, most of the characters still have their problems and the only thing we know for sure is that they aren’t pretending they’re not there anymore.

 

 

Exceptions, however, are made. They undermine the ending’s power and are to blame on the screenplay’s major weakness: Denis the bartender. Throughout the film, his status as a non-family member makes him an audience surrogate. The knowledge that Betty, with whom he had a non-serious fling, has feelings for him that he was not aware of until now but that she forcefully denies, further encourages the audience’s sympathy. This clear positioning of the screenplay in favour of him makes him seem less human than the rest of the characters; he’s treated as a role rather than a full and complete person. The screenplay designates him as the “good guy”, and as such he gets the happiest ending – the beginning of a serious relationship with Betty. Betraying the unexpected failure of his earlier advice to Henri to go and talk to his estranged wife, the film ends with Henri receiving a phone call from her and a subsequent second chance for their marriage. All thanks to the designated “hero”.

 

 

But in spite of these concessions to sentiment, “Un Air De Famille” remains a very solid character study. Klapisch’s dynamic camerawork emancipates it from its theatrical roots and nature, and with the help of his skill with actors, enhances its acute perception of humanity beneath two-dimensional appearances.

"A Christmas Story"

Since its release in 1983, Bob Clark’s A Christmas Story has not only become one of the classic American Christmas movies but one of the classic American movies altogether. Just 15 minutes into the film, it is particularly easy to see why: It portrays an idealized past America that only exists in the minds of people who grew up in it and filtered it through their nostalgia goggles. A 1930s America in which black children and white children share the same classroom in the same school and no effects of the Great Depression can be seen; no homeless people or unemployment lines in sight, and no spending worries when it comes to Christmas. Indeed, at the end of the film, the father (Darren McGavin) remarks upon the huge pile of wrapping paper left at the foot of the tree, in which the youngest child idyllically sleeps.

While idealizing one’s past –or indeed present – in cinematic and televisual works of fiction can present a number of problems, the whimsicality of A Christmas Story’s pre-WWII Cleveland finds justification in its placement through the eyes of child protagonist Ralphie Parker (Peter Billingsley). Ralphie stands in for author Jean Shepherd, on whose book “In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash” this film is based. Though Peter Billingsley is present in almost every scene, he vocalizes very little of Ralphie’s thoughts and feelings. Most of those are provided by Jean Shepherd himself, fondly recalling the various troubles he went through that Christmas season in his relentless quest to get a Red Ryder BB gun.

This provides an interesting perspective on the unfolding events: Just about everything is seen from the point of view of both a 9 year-old boy and his older self, yet there is no fundamental difference of approach between the two. Older Ralphie rarely ever uses the potential benefit of hindsight to see these events in a slightly different light. He just smiles reminiscently at himself, his family and his friends, informs the audience of what was going on in his head at precise moments – such as his first attempt to convince his mother to get him the toy or the cathartic moment he finally stands up to bully Scud Farkas (Zack Ward) and gives him a bloody nose – but never does he give any kind of deep insight into his mindset at those times that he couldn’t have had then.

This is the very definition of nostalgia, and the fact that it happens to be childhood nostalgia allows the audience to give the film’s whitewashed romanticizing of history a pass. The film not only recreates a sentimentalized environment as a child would perceive it, it fully adopts that child’s point of view, right down to soft-focus-shot daydreams and wide-angle lens views of a disgruntled mall Santa Claus.

It is this perfectly assumed lack of critical distance that distinguishes it from Federico Fellini’s 1973 masterpiece Amarcord, of which it is reminiscent due to its colourful characters and episodic format. While it is precisely Amarcord’s political acuity – its casual but caustic observation of the rise of fascism during Fellini’s childhood – that made its affectionate characters resonate more than Bob Clark’s less personal film (he was born 20 years later than Shepherd), both share a capacity for transporting their audience to an immaterial place that exists only in the author’s memory yet never loses a sense of emotional authenticity.

"The Wolf Of Wall Street"

After almost a decade spent mired in Hollywoodian academicism that produced average, unexceptional efforts like Hugo at best and empty cinematic blunt instruments like Shutter Island at worst, Martin Scorsese has finally returned to top form with another criminal perversion of the American Self-Made Man myth. Following the footsteps of Casino and Goodfellas, the audience is sucked into a world of easy money, corruption and toxic ultra-masculinity. It shares the same format as these films, to the point where one could consider all three a trilogy of sorts: Each is the biography of a real-life criminal who narrates his life to the audience, from his entry in a glamorous masculine world of crime, sex, drugs and greed, his shallow, superficial relationship with a woman whom he then cheats on and abuses, to the precipitation of his downfall by a short, rotund and unpredictable best friend.

What separates The Wolf Of Wall Street from its two predecessors is of course the lack of importance of the characters’ socioeconomic backgrounds and the nature of their criminal organization. Sociopathic protagonist Jordan Belfort came from a fairly modest background in Queens, New York – like Scorsese himself – but, aside from sleazy drug pusher Brad (Jon Bernthal), he mostly surrounds himself with dim-witted impressionable middle-class Jewish Americans as well as Asian-American Chester Ming (Kenneth Choi). Gone is the working-class Italian-American sense of community and codes of honour, in which the invariably non-Italian-American (Irish in Goodfellas, Jewish in Casino) would try to fit. Gone is Scorsese’s famous recurring theme of Catholic guilt first introduced in Who’s That Knocking At My Door?

This is apparent from the very beginning of the film, in which Jordan Belfort goes one step beyond in the traditional voice-over to the audience by actually talking to the camera like a grown-up Ferris Bueller, as he describes the various drugs he uses every day all while taking them. This theatrical process of creating an artificial complicity between Jordan and his audience by making him directly address them immediately establishes him as a shameless narcissist, and thus distances him from Henry Hill and Sam Rothstein. Their voice-overs, while informal and subjective, did not acknowledge the presence of a particular audience, and thus did not establish them as anything else but people telling their stories. Rather than Belfort’s smug unrepentant autobiography, they suggested a lengthy interview bearing the weight of years of experience and hard times.

Thus Scorsese presents us with his most immoral protagonist yet, a man whose greed and superficiality would have earned him little else but contempt from the likes of Hill and Rothstein. He and his associates are not held together by a sense of family or shared values, but by a common need to satisfy their most primal urges quickly and easily. And they all know Jordan is the man who can help satisfy them better, quicker and easier than anyone else. They are, in other words, frat boys.

This is where the ingenious casting of Jonah Hill – made famous by frat boy comedy Superbad comes in. As Donnie Azoff, the hedonistic and unpredictable best friend character that would have been played by Joe Pesci in the 90s, Hill provides the film’s corrupt heart to DiCaprio’s brain. A crude, shallow, immature misogynist who married his own cousin so that nobody else could have sex with her, Donnie Azoff becomes rich through little effort and in little time, and the only thing that wealth does to him is give him the possibility to take larger quantities of more expensive drugs, and an inflated sense of his own importance. He is a natural magnet for Jordan’s schemes and the perfect example of their consequences: As Jordan himself puts it, they’re making more money than they know what to do with, and Donnie knows only to do one thing with it: Get away with regressing to pure animalistic id, whether it’s verbally or physically insulting people whom he feels have disrespected him, or publicly humiliating an unfortunate subordinate by swallowing his goldfish or engaging in public sexual activity in front of – or with – employees.

This brings in one of the film’s most interesting aspects, particularly given Scorsese’s previous explorations of masculinity and male camaraderie: Its homoeroticism. Such a subtext was never really present in Scorsese’s previous films but it permeates The Wolf Of Wall Street. The male characters do not identify as gay nor do they actually have sex with each other, but they continually yell sexual insults and slurs at each other, have sex with women in front of each other, talk openly about their penises and sexual habits, engage in lewd, obscene sexual conduct in front of each other. Donnie Azoff embodies this in three crucial scenes:

-          The first is during a party in which Jordan is introduced to the beautiful lingerie model Naomi Lapaglia (Margot Robbie, one of 2013’s revelations). Despite the fact that she is accompanied by her boyfriend and that he is himself married, Jordan instantly falls in lust and starts flirting with her. This flirtation is interrupted by the shocking spectacle of Donnie publicly masturbating – at the sight of Naomi. He thus cock-blocks Jordan by exposing himself and graphically exposing him to his erect penis.

-          The second comes in one of the film’s best sequences. Jordan – having been caught cheating by his unfortunate wife Teresa (Cristin Milioti) – has now moved in a penthouse with Naomi. The couple is assisted by a gay butler Nicholas (Jon Spinogatti), who hosts a gay orgy in their absence. Jordan and Naomi unexpectedly walk in on it and order the guests to leave. They then try to settle on a sofa, where Naomi points out some gay sexual activity took place. This disgusts Jordan so much that he refuses to even sit there. The next day, Naomi finds a large sum of money missing. Jordan, Donnie and others then proceed to interrogate Nicholas on its whereabouts. Nicholas brings up one of the guests as a possible suspect, whom he says goes to a gay bar where he claims to have once spotted Donnie. After embarrassed protests, Donnie’s defensiveness turns violent as he and a friend proceed to beat Nicholas and suspend him by his legs from the top of the building.

-          The third scene is the climax of the film’s most memorable sequence, in which Jordan and Donnie are both temporarily struck with cerebral palsy after swallowing out-of-date Quaaludes. After triumphantly consuming cocaine – hilariously intercut with shots of the television playing Popeye eating spinach– Jordan gives Donnie the kiss of life to save him from choking to death on a piece of ham (ironic considering Donnie’s name implies he is Jewish). It’s the climax of both the scene and of Scorsese’s portrayal of masculine camaraderie; male-dominated worlds in which women are only there to serve the men’s needs, including the need to physically vent out their frustrations. In this particularly sexualized male-dominated world defined by the never-ending need to satisfy basic impulses – summed up early in the film by Jordan’s Wall Street mentor Mark Hanna (Matthew McConaughey in a brief but unforgettable performance whose shadow looms over the rest of the film), when he advises Jordan to masturbate and do cocaine to remain functional all day – such unconscious or latent homoeroticism would seem a logical conclusion.

The film’s depiction of Belfort’s lifestyle and crimes has led many people – including one of his victims, Christina McDowell – to accuse Martin Scorsese of glamourizing them and potentially inviting copycats. Such concerns – particularly McDowell’s due to her personal experience – are justifiable and understandable. Scorsese has always been one of the world’s liveliest filmmakers, and it is not the first time he has been accused of glamourizing crime (again, Goodfellas and Casino). As far as I’m concerned, Scorsese is aware himself of the tight rope he walks on in the film. He makes a notably more liberal use of outright humour than most of his previous films, using it both to laugh at the characters’ stupidity and to defuse some uncomfortable situations. The aforementioned Quaaludes sequence – the start of which sees DiCaprio perform remarkable feats of physical comedy as he struggles to make it to his car while convulsing and twisting all over the floor – exemplifies this approach. The film lets the audience have fun at the characters’ expense but often runs the risk of making them enjoy the very same things they do. This is prevented by subtle moments in which Scorsese allows the audience to feel discomfort he has been holding back from them. Moments such as the head-shaving of a female employee for a $10 000 bet, or the quiet rape of Naomi by her zonked-out husband before she decides to divorce him.

It’s a delicate balance that Scorsese pulls off by challenging the audience with his characters’ barefaced immorality and exposing the emptiness and futility of their existences just when they might start to get appealing. Take the scene in which Belfort and his friends discuss the ethics of dwarf-tossing, in preparation for the wild party that opens the film. They refer to them as “it”, objects of entertainment and explicitly advise each other not to think of them as human beings, yet caution against physically hurting them or openly insulting them. Their objectification of dwarfs isn’t the most shocking part of the scene – it’s their hypocritical pretense to limits.

Likewise, the orgies of sex and drugs are given a certain artificial appeal so that we understand why Jordan and his friends are the way they are, but never to the point where that lifestyle is fully glamorized. We are brought in close, but not quite close enough. We touch, but we do not taste.

As Jordan Belfort, Leonardo DiCaprio gives perhaps his best performance to date – though I still haven’t seen What’s Eating Gilbert Grape. With a near-unrecognizable Queens accent and energy that makes me wish John Cassavetes were still alive to direct him, he explodes on the screen without giving the impression of demanding attention. His character demands some, but DiCaprio never substitutes that need for his own. He is as energetic and absorbing as Scorsese’s camera and Schoonmaker’s editing. The three form a symbiosis that results in Martin Scorsese’s best film since his vastly underrated Bringing Out The Dead from 1999.