Thoughts on Hard Truths

 

    Last week, I went to the Angelika Film Centre to see Hard Truths, Mike Leigh's 2024 British film starring Marianne Jean-Baptiste and Michele Austin as sisters in London, whose personalities greatly contrast. Pansy (Jean-Baptiste) is a woman who is struggling with anxiety and depression, and is angry all of the time, to an uncontrollable degree, looking for any excuse with her short temper to lecture or chastise someone about why they're wrong or how they've hurt or offended her. She yells at her meek plumber husband Curtley (David Webber), who is resigned to taking her verbal blows and doesn't argue or fight back with her. She yells at her son, Moses (Tuwaine Barrett), who she sees as a lazy layabout at 22, telling him not to go outside for walks or people will say he's "loitering with intent," and he stays quiet and keeps his headphones on to stay in his own world. And Pansy picks fights with everyone she comes across, arguing with salespeople, the dentist, random shoppers, everyone who she antagonizes and looks for an excuse to feel like the victim. She rants at animals and flowers, despising the pigeons in her backyard, and it's clear that her anger is unhealthy, and she isn't managing well with the grief of her mother's death, now five years past.

    Chantelle (Austin), on the other hand, is a jovial, friendly hairdresser with two adult daughters, who jokes with her clients, teases her kids, who are both healthy and talk about having active social lives and busy careers, and who all live more full lives than the grief and sadness that hangs over Pansy's house. 

    Chantelle puts up with Pansy's complaining and temper, in a scene where she is trying to do her hair but Pansy keeps picking everyone apart and going on long-winded rants (especially in an earlier dinner table where the camera holds on Jean-Baptiste delivering long monologues criticizing everyone she comes across while her husband and son sit silently at their plates, practically dissociating in the moment), and Chantelle is more good-natured and still loves her sister, and is trying to get her to join her on Mother's Day to visit their mother's grave, which Pansy is hesitant to do for obvious reasons.

    The film's trailer marketed it more as a comedy, with out-of-context moments of Pansy making fun of people (like calling a random woman an ostrich or questioning why a baby's clothes would have pockets), but it's much more of an intense drama, about a woman who is hurting so much that she lashes out at everyone, wants to just stay in bed and sleep (and whenever she is woken up, she rouses up like she's being attacked), and is sick of hating everything but can't stop. The film is an incredible character study about a person who rants a lot, but is unable to talk about what is really troubling her, because it's too sensitive and raw for her to address.

    Bobby Finger in his Letterboxed review brought up a great point about how the film's characters will seem very honest, but will omit the "hard truths" from their interactions. As Pansy doesn't want to talk about her trauma and grief, Chantelle's two daughters will put on happy faces when talking to each other about their day, but leave out the less cheerful details. "What about every thought that hasn’t spewed from her mouth like acid? There’s so fucking much of it hidden beneath all of those hard, shouted truths. And if that weren’t enough (because maybe no one can do juxtaposition as elegantly as Mike Leigh), he gives us that scene of Chantelle’s daughters, the two brightest lights in the whole movie, discussing their days with each other and leaving out all the dreariness… keeping the painful details from each other while somehow maintaining something honest and real." It's an astute point about how excellent Leigh is at writing realistic characters who are complex and messy and interesting.

    The film takes a slower pace in the second half, as the characters are sitting more with their grief, and Pansy is exhausted by her anger and is just silent and sad. Her character hasn't been diagnosed, but it's possible she may have manic-depressive disorder, as it fits with her symptoms, but the film doesn't go into those questions. It leaves unanswered questions, like just stepping into someone's life and not having everything fixed or wrapped up by the end, and while it is an emotional heavyweight of a film to watch, I thought it was fantastic, and incredibly relatable for anyone who has felt immense grief and anger at the same time.

Thoughts on The Last Showgirl

    I went to the Angelika Film Center in NYC and saw The Last Showgirl, a 2024 film directed by Gia Coppola and written by Kate Gersten. The film stars Pamela Anderson as Shelly, a Las Vegas showgirl in her fifties who has performed in a revue for thirty years, then faces uncertainty when she finds out it's closing due to low ticket sales and being outdated and passe.

    As the oldest performer with the most seniority in the show, Shelly values the old-fashioned style of the show, seeing it as classier than other Vegas shows (to her own detriment, as she often slut-shames other shows while defending the topless revue as artistic and "French"), she denigrates the burlesque-style circus show that is replacing them as the "dirty" circus show, and is a mother figure to the other dancers, Mary-Anne (Brenda Song) and Jodie (Kiernan Shipka). She is also close with Annette (Jamie Lee Curtis), a cocktail waitress at the casino who was ousted from the show six years prior.

    Eddie (Dave Bautista), the show's producer, breaks the news to Shelly and her friends that the show is closing in two weeks, and it sends Shelly into a spiral, as she barely has a pension or any retirement plan, had always lived for the show and the glamour, and doesn't have any backup plans for other survival day jobs.

    Shelly reaches out to her semi-estranged daughter, Hannah (Billie Lourd), who has largely grown up with family friends and her surrogate mom, and is graduating from an Arizona college with a degree in photography. She is emotionally distant from her mother, who wasn't there for her during her childhood, valuing the glory of being beautiful and feeling alive in the stage show over being a reliable parent, and Hannah is more realistic and blunt while Shelly, in Pamela Anderson's trademark soft breathy voice, had her head more in the clouds.

    It had some good needle drop moments, like Annette doing an impromptu dance in the casino floor area to Bonnie Tyler's "Total Eclipse of the Heart," or Shelly cueing Pat Benatar's "Shadows of the Night" for an audition for another show. And I kept picturing Jamie Lee Curtis as having worked on this film in between her appearances on The Bear, especially when her character is in the kitchen and getting flustered, making me think of Carmy's mom and her unchecked mental health issues.

    I thought the movie had a good lead performance with Anderson, who is given the chance to shine in an artsy indie drama, but the rest of the film felt lacking. It kept following similar beats to Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler (2008), with the aging performer refusing to accept that their time in the spotlight was over, being overly romantic about their glory days. and both having an estranged relationship with their daughter. It made it hard to see the movie as its own story, and Shelly often came off as unrealistic and self-centered, beyond her sweet-natured demeanor. The movie feels like it just abruptly ends, when it didn't really feel complete, and I wanted the story to feel more fleshed out. So I liked it OK, but felt it could have been stronger and less of hitting predictable emotional beats in a drama.

Thoughts on Daughters of Darkness

    On Metrograph’s streaming page for members, I watched Daughters of Darkness, a 1971 European erotic horror film directed by Harry Kümel and starring Delphine Seyrig, John Karlen, and Danielle Ouimet.

    The film centers on a newlywed couple, Stefan (Karlen) and Valerie (Ouimet) traveling through Europe. They stay at a Belgian seaside hotel, and at nightfall, the Hungarian countess Elizabeth Báthory arrives, with her “secretary” Ilona (Andrea Rau). The middle-aged concierge remarks that he had seen the countess forty years ago at the hotel when he was a child, but that she has not aged. She takes the suite next to the couple, and Valerie, translating Flemish from her fluency in German, reads of a series of child murders in the area, each a girl whose throat was slashed.

    Elizabeth makes the acquaintance of the couple, being mysterious and seductive, having a Marlene Dietrich-like glamour to her with her pencil-thin eyebrows and platinum bob. She takes a fixation on the couple, particularly Valerie, while Ilona works on seducing Stefan. Elizabeth is most likely a vampire, and her charm takes hold over Valerie.

    The film has a high art feel to the vampire film, not over the top campy, and Seyrig brings a lot of grace and elegance combined with a quiet threatening presence to her role as Elizabeth. The film takes advantage of the now-debunked myth that the real-life Elizabeth Báthory was a vampiric serial killer who bled young women to stay young, as that it is now considered a blasphemous rumor.

    The film also challenges Stefan’s gender identity as a man and his view of women, like how he refuses to call his mother in England and sees his wife, who he married after a short time knowing her, as his trophy wife and property, while Elizabeth, though she preys on Valerie, values her as more of an individual and kindred spirit.

    Bryan White of the Bring Me The Axe! podcast writes: “Gender stands at the center of the movie. It’s the entire operating principle. Stefan, as the film’s lone male character of consequence, regards Valerie as a thing to be owned or mastered. Through the first half of the movie, the matter of Stefan’s mother looms heavily over everything. He is uncomfortable at the very mention of her. He bribes the man at the hotel’s desk to aid him in his avoidance of his mother."

    I liked this movie. I normally am not into these kind of 70s lesbian vampire movies, but I saved the recommendation from the YouTuber Be Kind Rewind, and it was lovely to watch the great Delphine Seyrig drink up this role.

Thoughts on Romeo is Bleeding

    On Tubi, I watched Romeo is Bleeding, a 1993 noir film directed by Peter Medak (The Changeling) and written by Hilary Henkin (Wag the Dog), where Gary Oldman played a corrupt cop named Jack who is on the take by the mob (he gives tips to them for cash and gets informants killed), and gets entangled with a Russian assassin, Mona (Lena Olin, who is clearly having a lot of fun playing a hot psychopathic killer); cheats on his wife with his mistress, and has this cliched New York City film noir voiceover throughout the whole movie that feels way too heavy handed to me.

    On the plus side, I liked watching depictions of pre-gentrification Brooklyn and Queens, of empty, sparse neighborhoods in the Coney Island area and far reaches of Queens under the elevated trains, with a great cast lineup: Oldman, Olin, Juliette Lewis (albeit with a stereotypical Brooklyn accent), Annabella Sciorra, Roy Scheider, Michael Wincott, and cameos from Dennis Farina and Ron Perlman. The movie is fun to watch even as it gets more over the top and ridiculous.

    One of the funniest moments in the movie to me was likely unintentional. Natalie (Sciorra), as Jack’s wife, is talking to him about how their marriage is falling apart and suspects he’s cheating on her and involved in questionable activities. She goes, “I don’t know what you’re doing, Jack, but whatever it is, don’t bring it back here.” The next time she sees him is after he gets two of his toes cut off by the mob because he didn’t kill Mona by a certain time, and he bursts into the house, all bloody and dirty, and goes “Honey, I fucked up! Pack your suitcase, we have to leave!” I just lost it laughing at that, picturing her mental reaction after telling him not to bring his corrupt drama and seeing him come in like that.

A Tribute to David Lynch

     The film director and auteur David Lynch passed away today at age 78, after retiring in 2024 due to health problems from being diagnosed with emphysema. His style of directing with surreal, dreamlike images became so iconic that any other filmmaker who was inspired by him was called "Lynchian." His body of work was expansive, in film, art, photography, and music. There will be many tributes to him, and he helped launch the careers of actors like Laura Dern, Kyle MacLachlan, Naomi Watts, Lara Flynn Boyle, Heather Graham, Sherilyn Fenn, Mädchen Amick, Sheryl Lee, Justin Theorux, and many others.

    I had heard of Twin Peaks as a child, but was too young to watch it at the time. I had seen it for the first time in my freshman year of college in 2002-2003, when I paired up with a classmate for a school project to pick a piece of pop culture media and how it greatly influenced culture and society. He was a big fan of Twin Peaks, so I watched the show on DVD and liked it, though I didn't absorb everything in my viewing back then. I did like the Angelo Badalamenti score, the way the show had a moody, slow pace, an odd sense of humor, mixing soap opera drama with dreamlike images, and how the teenagers seemed to dress both like 1950s teenagers and 1990s teenagers at the same time. I especially liked the character of Audrey Horne (Sherilyn Fenn), just found her captivating. In the project, we discussed how the show, though only on for two seasons, greatly influenced television and the mainstream audience being more open to seeing more out-there, unusual television shows, opening the door for shows like The X-Files, American Gothic, and Millennium, as well as prestige TV like The Sopranos (which occasionally went into surreal imagery), Six Feet Under, and, past the year of our project, shows with mystery like Lost. 

    I haven't seen the show since then, nor have I seen Twin Peaks: The Return in 2017, but on Criterion, I did watch the 1992 prequel film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, and thought it was sad and tragic and horrifying. It can be haunting and beautiful in some parts, but the whole tragedy of Laura Palmer being abused and used and murdered is very visceral and terrifying, and seemed to be overlooked when talking about horror films.

    When I was 12, I watched Tank Girl on video, the 1995 comic book action hero film starring Lori Petty as a post-apocalyptic punk heroine in the desert, and while the movie was a major flop, I found it a lot of fun. One of the standouts in the movie was Jet Girl, a mechanic played by a then-unknown Naomi Watts. With dyed brown hair and glasses, she is made to look meeker next to Lori Petty's Rebecca/Tank Girl, but I quickly found her stunning and charismatic to watch onscreen. For several years after that, I never heard of her again, so I just assumed she wouldn't become a star, until I went to see Lynch's Mulholland Drive in theaters in 2001, and was mesmerized by his masterpiece of a film, assembled from an unsold TV pilot with more scenes added in. I had long forgotten about Watts by then, so it was a revelation when, midway through the film, I recognized Watts from Tank Girl, despite her now having blonde hair and no glasses. Watts was excellent in this star-making role, so great that, when her character shifts as one person to another, I had thought another actress had taken over. Watts would blow up as a A-List actress after this film, and continues to be a celebrated actor to this day.

    I loved the sharp division of fantasy and reality in the film, the theme of characters with double identities, and how beautiful and painful the film felt. Afterwards, I had looked up an analysis of the film on Salon.com to understand it more, as Lynch has famously not explained the mysteries of his films, preferring to let his audiences come to their own interpretations.

    One last memory is of watching The Elephant Man on TV with my brother many years ago. I didn't know that Lynch had directed the 1980 film, or that Mel Brooks had produced it. We had just watched it by chance, and I thought it was so gorgeous with its black and white cinematography and late 19th century setting, but that it was one of the saddest films I had ever seen, that the film just gutted me. I was touched by how Anne Bancroft's actress character showed such grace toward John Merrick (portrayed by John Hurt, and named Joseph Merrick in real life), giving him the dignity that he deserved as a man with a facial abnormality, for lack of a better term. Their scenes were incredibly touching, and the finale made me want to cry inside. Though David Lynch was known for "weird" films, he was also known for portraying humanity with a lot of nuance and understanding, especially for the more misunderstood characters, be they John Merrick, Laura Palmer, or Betty.

    I had also enjoyed watching films like 1997's Lost Highway (especially for the soundtrack featuring Nine Inch Nails, David Bowie, and Smashing Pumpkins) and 1990's Wild at Heart, and while I had seen Inland Empire (2006) in theaters and couldn't understand it well, I at least respected that Lynch and Laura Dern really went for a three-hour long movie that can be interpreted in its own way. David Lynch will be remembered as one of the most influential film auteurs in recent history, and his passing is truly a loss to the arts and culture.

Thoughts on The Big Clock

 On Criterion, I watched the 1948 thriller The Big Clock, directed by John Farrow, and starring Ray Milland, Charles Laughton, and Maureen O'Sullivan. I watched this because of the Amoeba Records "What's in my Bag" video with Bill Hader, and he recommended this movie and did impressions of the male leads. He mentioned that John Farrow was Mia Farrow's father, and I forgot that Mia Farrow's mother was Maureen O'Sullivan, though I knew that her mother was a famous actress.

This was a lot of fun to watch. Ray Milland works as an editor at a crime magazine where he and the staff are reporters that solve sensationalist crimes for tabloid headlines, it's very ahead of its time as them being true crime junkies and wannabe detectives. Things get more tricky when Milland gets framed for murder by his boss Charles Laughton (who is excellent at playing quietly malevolent and conniving in a hammy, theatrical kind of way), and the staff is trying to solve the murder, and Milland realizes he's being set up, and trying to clear his name before anyone suspects him. The movie is meant to be a thriller, but it also just feels like a lot of fun, and kind of proto-Columbo-ish in that the audience already knows who the killer is long before anyone else does.

One of my favorite parts of the film was Elsa Lanchester as a kooky artist whose artwork proves crucial to the case. She plays it up with a trilling voice, feeling like a possible inspiration to Madeleine Kahn's performances decades later, and shines as a character actress who is delightful in this movie. I couldn't find individual scenes of her online, but I really liked this photo of her when she's in her apartment with several kids by past dead husbands and being questioned by one of the reporters.

Thoughts on Girls of the Night

     On Criterion, I watched the 1961 Japanese film Girls of the Night, also known as Girls of Dark, directed by Kinuyo Tanaka and written by Sumie Tanaka. The film is a drama that is an indictment of the criminalization of sex work, and the moral judging by society of women who are sex workers, putting a stigma on them, refusing to let them move on from their past, and forever marking them with a scarlet letter. The film is set after the passing of the real-life Prostitution Prevention Law, a Japanese law passed in 1956 to to prevent prostitution, and to protect and rehabilitate sex workers, where in the film, former sex workers are sent to a reformatory to learn new skills and to start their lives over. While the law is not meant to punish sex workers, it is an anti-sex work law, and the law doesn't prevent women from being stigmatized for their past work.

    The film centers on Kuniko (Chisako Hara), a former sex worker who is trying to build a new life for herself after staying in the reformatory. She goes through a cycle of jobs, working in a grocery store, a factory, and a rose garden, but each time her past is uncovered, both men and women either treat her like a threat or a target of abuse. In one scene, three men go for a walk with her, expecting to run a train on her, but she scares them off when she asserts herself like a businesswoman, demanding that they pay her, before they run off and she collapses into tears at the disappointment of being treated like a whore again. She's abused by a group of women who want to "teach her a lesson," thinking she's haughty or stuck-up. Or when she feels like she's found love, only for his family to shun her and say that they come from a lineage of great samurais and that their son marrying an ex-prostitute would ruin their family legacy.

    Tanaka's film takes a remarkably sensitive approach to addressing the plight of sex workers in Japan, whose careers were suddenly made illegal, and not condemning them for their lives. The headmistress at the reformatory, Nogami (Chikage Awashima), notes how the women had entered sex work for their survival due to poverty, lack of opportunities, or a man leading them into it, and she has great sympathy for the women she works with, and does believe that they should not be criminalized for their past livelihoods in an unfair society.

    Kinuyo Tanaka was an actress and director, and worked with the director Kenji Mizoguchi, on 15 films including The Life of Oharu (1952) and Ugetsu (1953). With her 1953 directorial debut, Love Letter, she became the second Japanese woman to direct a film, after Tazuko Sakane. Similarly, Sumie Tanaka was a screenwriter and playwright with a feminist agenda, who collaborated with Kinuyo Tanaka on several films, and was acclaimed for her career.

    Hara was fantastic in this film, playing Kuniko with a lot of strength and dignity, and refusing to be beaten down no matter how many times others try to shame or denigrate her for her sex worker past. She sees herself as her own heroine, finding redemption in herself and not from other people, and the film ends on a hopeful note with her being her own woman on her own journey, feeling like Giulietta Masina's sex worker character in La Strada, always moving forward with her own sense of optimism despite what others may say.