Hit Me With Your Best Shot: Double Indemnity

Part of the Hit Me With Your Best Shot series at The Film Experience.

I’ve always considered Double Indemnity a rather ugly film. And I don’t mean that in terms of the narrative and thematic content, though the scheming and distrust and manipulation and murder certainly is rather ugly. I mean in terms of the features of the film itself – something about the combination of the dark, non-descript apartment, Fred MacMurray’s bland face and that iconic but horrific wig Barbara Stanwyck has on adds up to a film that seems determined to be physically repulsive. I wouldn’t be surprised if Billy Wilder was doing this on purpose, placing the maliciousness of the crime amongst the bland milieu of MacMurray’s insurance salesroom and a Los Angelean house that Phyllis doesn’t belong in – even if she does walk around in it like a prowling feline.

That said, Double Indemnity naturally features the same sort of chiaroscuro-esque film noir lighting of the genre’s 1940s heyday, and it makes for some glowing compositions. The sequence late in the film where MacMurray and Stanwyck have their final showdown of barbs and gunshots is probably the apex for this effect, and my favourite shot comes where a flash of light cracks through the calm dark, a pause, a little consideration. Phyllis readies a cigarette, and hearing Walter approaching gives her the tiniest pause, before she coolly continues and the flame of her match illuminates her face and the caustic, measured expression upon it.

Motifs in Cinema: Man Against Society

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The following article contains vague spoilers for Elles, Laurence Anyways and ParaNorman, and fairly crucial spoilers for Silver Linings Playbook and Wanderlust.

‘Motifs in Cinema‘ is a discourse across 22 film blogs, assessing the way in which various thematic elements have been used in the 2012 cinematic landscape. How does a common theme vary in use from a comedy to a drama? Are filmmakers working from a similar canvas when they assess the issue of death or the dynamics of revenge? Like most things, a film begins with an idea – ‘Motifs in Cinema‘ assesses how the use of a common theme across various films changes when utilised by different artists.

‘The Crowd’
Photo © MGM

Cinematic protagonists are, by and large, unusual individuals. They might be outspokenly individual, charging against political injustice, or the quieter, essentially more ordinary Everyman who nevertheless finds themselves in opposition to something. King Vidor’s silent classic The Crowd provides an emblematic image for cinema’s automatic mode of storytelling where it cannot help but find the individual in the society, silently suffering in the machinery of the world around him. John (James Murray) isn’t so much a man against society as a man engulfed by society, but the individualistic focus of cinema is still evident from the very first decades of the medium. Films telling the story of society as a whole are practically non-existent, and those where men work for society are pretty much the domain of actioners, war movies, and various other masculine genres. The Dark Knight Rises might guise itself in glumly decadent intellectualism, but ultimately its peculiar characterisation of the city crowds fighting against Bane’s takeover of the city betrays a herd mentality to restore society to its former, satisfactory glory.

Adult cinema – that is, cinema made for conscious and discerning adults – invariably comes motivated by a desire to reflect societal injustices and repressions. As political and social change is ongoing, so is the requirement of art to feed those changes, to suggest different ways of existing and interacting. Cinema might not directly change society but by reflecting and commenting on the world, it can shift public feeling towards certain issues and contribute, for better or worse, to more general social changes. The cinema of 2012 included stories of man fighting against society from a manner of different approaches.

Mads Mikkelsen, Mikkel Boe Følsgaard & Alicia Vikander in ‘A Royal Affair’
Photo © 2012 Metrodome Distribution

Pablo Lorrain’s No, the final third of his loose trilogy set against the backdrop of Pinochet’s regime, brightly recounts a crucial blow against the General, the ‘no’ vote in the 1988 general plebiscite. Denmark’s A Royal Affair also delves into the history books to tell its story of Queen Caroline (Alicia Vikander), whose affair with royal doctor Johann Struensee (Mads Mikkelsen) is the undoing of their collaboration to manipulate King Christian VII (Mikkel Boe Følsgaard) to bring about social progression in the kingdom. Both incidentally nominated for Best Foreign Film at the upcoming Oscars, No and A Royal Affair bring vivid and idiosyncratic life to their disparate historical periods. No uses 35mm film to resemble archive video footage, immersing itself in the colourful, eccentric realm of the advertising that won the ‘no’ campaign its success. A Royal Affair is coolly, crisply photographed, but its loose, open approach to the routines of court life give the film a similar feeling of immediacy and briskness. Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained too uses a historical period to enervate social discourse, notably provoking a great deal of debate even though its narrative quirks are invented and typically flamboyant of this director. He satirises and mocks some of the darkest human interactions, conflating the horrors of slavery with the merciless, dark pleasures of violence.

David Costabile, Daniel Day-Lewis & David Strathairn in ‘Lincoln’
Photo © 2012 20th Century Fox

Lincoln, rather more staid in its form, also brings energetic life to discourses of slavery, though the man working against society is, fascinatingly, the man at its head. Tony Kushner’s script makes evident how individuals form into the mass society that must be fought against, at one point particularly examining the individual motivations behind some of the politicians who intend to keep slavery enforced. Change is, of course, achieved, but Lincoln is not shy about showing the shady methods employed to reach these changes – the backdoors and tricks to railing against society from within. In their style and form, these films interpolate their political opinion into the very fibre of their being, openly existing as left-wing celebrations of historical periods that had markedly different outcomes. Simultaneously, they provoke questions about our modern society and how the embers and repercussions of these narrativised realities might be affecting us now.

Anaïs Demoustier in ‘Elles’
Photo © 2012 Artificial Eye

But then there are the inherent outsiders – the obnoxious, the righteous, the freedom fighters, the progressive, the lonely and the brave. The teenage subjects (Anaïs Demoustier and Joanna Kulig) of Elles, Malgoska Szumowska’s underseen feature, are students prostituting themselves for more than mere financial reasons, and their interaction with the film’s journalist protagonist (Juliette Binoche) leads her to question her comfortable existence and causes large ructions in her family. Alicja (Kulig) is particularly fierce in her convictions of the thrill and emotional solace of her unexpected profession, and Elles laudably ends without any judgment on the girls’ decisions. There’s is a societal conflict both unexpected and unintentional – they aren’t fighting anything, merely trying to survive. Likewise, Pat Solitano Jr. (Bradley Cooper) in Silver Linings Playbook is simply trying to make his way through life without his mental illness repeatedly compounding his status as an outsider – in the final event, he’s essentially (though not literally) healed by finding love with a fellow outsider in Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence). Cinema’s happy resolutions are so often found by outsiders forming their own societies outside of the ones that have rejected them.

Or they might try and fix them, as ParaNorman‘s Norman (Kodi Smit-McPhee) does, exposing the rotten core of the judgmental local town which is rooted deep in its pilgrim history and using his individualism to ensure the contentment of the entire society. Sightseers‘ Chris (Steve Oram) takes a darker approach, violently working against the myriad of sins he sees people committing. His girlfriend Tina (Alice Lowe) starts their journey unconsciously aloof, with her provocative knitwear and pasta sauce, but by the end has become so fully possessed by Chris’ social tirades that she fails to recognise its limitations, surpassing Chris’ pointedly political reasoning and genuflecting against society for the sheer giddy thrill. Her unknowing, and seemingly uncaring opposition to society is a greater threat than Chris’ focused anger.

Melvin Poupaud & Suzanne Clément in ‘Laurence Anyways’
Photo © Lyla Films / MK2 Productions

In Xavier Dolan’s Laurence Anyways, Laurence (Melvin Poupaud) is inherently against society from the moment he reveals his desire to transition to life as a woman. His initial, bold steps with female costume in his daily life as a teacher demonstrate a commendable desire to allow society to accept him as he is. The interior conflicts of a society are shown within the microcosm of the school, where the students are largely nonplussed by the change in their teacher, but the fear of the parents and the cowardice of the faculty soon finds Laurence let go. Still, he continues to display remarkable comfort in his exterior shift, powered by the progress towards interior happiness. It’s Fred (Suzanne Clement), his girlfriend and support system, who is the sight of the crisis here – fighting for equality, driven by empowerment, but aggrieved by the attention and wounded by the difficulty of the situation. She’s matched, perhaps, by George Gergenblatt (Paul Rudd) in Wanderlust, pulled between his wife Linda’s (Jennifer Aniston) affection for their new home of Elysian, an idyllic commune, his discomfort with it, and their joint fatigue with the consumerism, shallow world they lived in. The revelation that Elysian is headed by as corrupt a man as they’d found in their cosmopolitan lives seems, despite the film’s content denouement, to betray an ultimate truth: society can never be perfect. Fight against it for the sliver, that silver lining of happiness you might be able to get from it, or be prepared to remain on the outside. Hey, it isn’t so bad out here, you know.

Paul Rudd & Jennifer Aniston in ‘Wanderlust’
Photo © 2012 Universal Pictures International

Head over to Encore Entertainment to read the other contributions to the ‘Motifs in Cinema‘ event.

Laurence, stylistically

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Melvin Poupaud in ‘Laurence Anyways’
Photo © Lyla Films / MK2 Productions

Québécois wunderkind Xavier Dolan has been a favourite of mine since my encounter with the Wong Kar-wai-esque longeurs of Les amours imaginaires, and my subsequent hunting of his even better debut feature J’ai tué ma mère. Both films crib quite considerably from other filmmakers, but they still vibrate with the pungency and moodiness of Dolan’s youth (it pains this writer to admit that Dolan is both younger and prettier than he). Laurence Anyways, Dolan’s first to not star himself, is still a distinctively Dolanian (too soon for an adjective?) picture, but a much bolder conception. The narrative stretches across an entire decade to tell the story of Laurence (Melvin Poupaud), a teacher in his mid-thirties who suddenly reveals he’s always known he was meant to be a woman and announces his intention to make the transition. Shocked but devoted, his girlfriend Fred (Suzanne Clément) decides to stick by her brave companion, declaring that “our generation is ready for this”. Though Laurence remains happy in his changing skin, the social scrutiny makes Fred’s negotiation of the situation begin to strain, but the intrinsic attraction and deep love keeps them connected across the decade.

Suzanne Clément in ‘Laurence Anyways’
Photo © Lyla Films / MK2 Productions

Dolan’s familiar conception of imagery and soundtrack operates on a breathtaking level of emotional largess. Images of brightly coloured coats raining down on Laurence’s striding figure, or Clément’s firebranded hair flicking water back in slow-motion, all soundtracked to striking, resonant pieces of music, do not emit any subtext – they are directly emotional constructions, breathtaking moments of immediate cinema, capturing the essence of the feeling of the moment. It’s surely cinema that Susan Sontag, who insisted that “[i]nterpretation makes art manageable, conformable”[1] and decried the tendency for the burgeoning film criticism of the 1960s to constantly enact this process, would approve of. Dolan does slip with the rather flamboyant, fantastical metaphorical image of a butterfly emerging from Laurence’s mouth, but for the most part his images are vibrant colour, effervescent exaltation.

Clément’s performance – the centre of the film, and my choice for the best actress of 2012 – is similarly physical, a nova of her fiery red hair and her explosive outbursts. Progression in the film frequently occurs as the result of such blasts of emotion. When Fred reads Laurence’s book of poetry, her reaction is vividly realised in the first imaginary interior flood I’ve seen since Julianne Moore visited a hotel in The Hours. (Sure, it’s a niche. But what a niche!)

Dolan’s style of filmmaking works because it winds complex emotional and social conflicts into his bright, contemporary, carefully attuned stylistic decisions. Fever Ray’s ‘If I Had A Heart’ opens the film, despite the contextual foreignness, simply because it is a striking piece of music to set the tone of the film. Dolan’s decisions seem impulsive and intuitive, providing his filmmaking with an inherent liveliness that many filmmakers desperately reach for.

1.Sontag, Susan. ‘Against Interpretation’, Against Interpretation and Other Essays, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1961, p.6

“It was death. I chose life.”: Julianne Moore in The Hours

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My relative absence from blogging last year was for a variety of reasons, but chief among them was my concentration on the dissertation I was writing for my Masters in Film Studies. The final title was ‘Julianne Moore: Queer Identification and Disconnection’. This post on Moore’s performance in The Hours, written in conjunction with The Film Experience’s tenth anniversary celebration of the film, draws on ideas from that dissertation, though is mostly original work.

Julianne Moore as Laura Brown in ‘The Hours’
Photo © 2002 Paramount Pictures / Miramax Films

“You’re Laura Brown.”

Clarissa’s (Meryl Streep) words on being confronted with the figure of Laura Brown seem to be a mixture of disbelief and judgement. It’s also yet another unintentional imposition on the visitor, a reiteration of the performance she must play. In this late appearance, it’s that of the “monster” (as Clarissa’s daughter Julia (Claire Danes) notes), the selfish woman who abandoned her children in their youth and absently dominated the tortured life of her son Richard (Jack Rovello as a child; Ed Harris as an adult). Clarissa’s instruction is probably easier to forgive than Laura’s husband’s kindly repression of his wife. When Dan (John C. Reilly) warmly reminisces about how he and Laura came to be married, his effusive tones mask the oddness of the story – his wartime obsession with the quiet girl he’d never spoken to, his dream of “bringing her to a life”, his “idea of our happiness”. Dan’s description of Laura as a girl “you find sitting mostly on her own” is easy to locate in Julianne Moore’s soft, disconnected performance, but Dan seems to overlook that Laura might like to be on her own. Or at least that she might want to take her own path to a life, find her own happiness. Even in her final speech to Clarissa, after years of potential regret and pain over her decisions, Laura clearly expresses her discontent with the maternal life she was forced into. “It would be wonderful to say you regretted it.”

Julianne Moore in 'The Hours'Photo © 2002 Paramount Pictures / Miramax Films

Laura Brown is but one example of the continued tendency in Moore’s career towards characters who are oppositional, ostracized and unpopular. This impulse either created or initiated a distinctive quality in Moore’s performance style – what can be referred to as her insularity. The characters across her filmography seem typified by a tendency to act against what is expected of them, whether by others or by themselves. More often than not, these characters are not outsiders but women trapped within social boundaries – as put by Kate Summerscale, Moore’s characters “are suffused with desires that they can barely contain”[1]. This attempt at self-containment effectively turns the characters in on themselves, disconnecting them from other characters. Laura is possibly the most striking example of this – much more self-aware than Far From Heaven’s Cathy Whitaker, and much softer and timid than Savage Grace’s Barbara Baekeland, Laura can often barely maintain the performance, often slipping sentences that reveal her true despair into otherwise guarded conversations. “I’m terrified,” she admits to Dan from the bathroom, leaving him momentarily speechless.

Moore’s voice is probably the most vivid part of her performance in The Hours; a soft, mousy whisper, wavering with indecision and reticence. When she puts on a front of confidence, it momentarily strengthens, a striking declaration of her uncharacteristic decisiveness – “I’m gonna make a cake. That’s what I’m gonna do.” Poignantly, though, it also strengthens when Laura shows genuine concern for Kitty (Toni Collette) on the latter’s revelation of her medical troubles – perhaps the sole demonstration of some inner steel inside Laura, some instinctual protectiveness towards her friendly neighbour.

Jack Rovello and Julianne Moore in 'The Hours'Photo © 2002 Paramount Pictures / Miramax Films

Laura’s fooling no one with her performance, though – her description of Mrs. Dalloway to Kitty provokes a fading smile on Laura’s face as she recognises the parallels (“And maybe because she’s confident, everyone thinks she’s fine… but she isn’t.”), but it’s immediately clear that Kitty is the one who matches the description, and that Laura’s self-recognition in the story is a rather vain fallacy. Even Richie can see through the weak façade his mother puts up as she leaves him with Mrs. Latch (Margo Martindale), bursting from the babysitter’s arms and running after the car, sensing that something is wrong. Richie has inherited his mother’s awkward disposition, staring eerily up at her and drawing an unnerved, hopeless whisper of “What? What do you want?”.

Moore’s disconnected insularity is also realised through a particular focus on the physical to heighten awareness of the formation of personal interactions, thereby exaggerating their awkwardness. It also involves great preponderance on the face, suggesting a certain intellectual quality to Moore’s performance choices – a playing of characters that are lost in their own headspaces and are therefore distanced from the world around them. Her eyes are wide, conspicuous orbs, and in The Hours, are particularly black – eerie, vacated black holes. She paws repeatedly at her hair and her stomach, uncomfortable with the reconfirmation of maternity growing in her belly, and by the slightly imposing crimp of her haircut.

Unlike Safe’s Carol White – an ‘80s housewife, but quite possibly more suffocated by domesticity than any other Moore character – Laura can hold other people’s gazes, although she does so with almost ferocious awkwardness before looking away with a demure shame. Moore’s performance choices cohere to make Laura almost one of the dispossessed, padding quietly into rooms of her own house as if she has no right to be in them. Moore’s trademark red hair has been dulled to a wan brown, which matches both her outfit and her bag when she checks into the hotel – Laura is a woman faded of her individual character by the imposition of domestic suburban life.

Laura’s crime is her failure at mothering – something that connects her with fellow ‘50s wives and mothers Barbara Baekeland and Cathy Whitaker. “They say it’s the worst thing a mother can do,” says Laura of her abandonment, and clearly, Laura’s absence made her a “monster” even in the joyfully queer history we infer from Clarissa and Richard’s remarks. Where Laura is never sure how to treat her child – alternately her “guy” and a bewildering figure crouched on the floor – Barbara imbues an uncomfortable amount of sexuality into her relationship with young Tony (Barney Clark), and Cathy treats her stereotypical children as another task on her domestic schedule. All three reflex against the ‘American Dream’, an pressurising idea that overwhelms both Laura and Cathy. Their choices are not necessarily wrong, but they are wrong within the definitions of normative society. Laura Brown’s is perhaps the most tragic of the three stories in The Hours; she is a woman who, unlike Virginia and Clarissa, can find no ounce of happiness in their daily life, and in the people that love them.

“It was death. I chose life.”

1.Summerscale, Kate. ‘Julianne Moore: beneath the skin’, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/3668526/Julianne-Moore-beneath-the-skin.html

The misérable vacuum

Stoking the fires of anticipation

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Nicole Kidman & Mia Wasikowska in 'Stoker'Photo © Fox Searchlight Pictures

High among the most promising films of 2013 is Stoker, the first English-language film from South Korean auteur Chan-wook Park. The trailer promises to smash the glassy demeanours of Nicole Kidman and Mia Wasikowska with the dark, magnetic, Hitchcockian sexual drawl of Matthew Goode (who will hopefully prove worthy of the obsession, as Hollywood hasn’t yet found much use for him). It looks like a slightly depraved, frosty, spindly kind of film. The first preview of the soundtrack has arrived, and it seems obvious the music will be instrumental in deepening the mood of the piece. Clint Mansell is quite possibly the finest composer working in cinema today – his majestic, devastating score for The Fountain still receives regular plays from me, while his twisting of Tchaikovsky for Black Swan dances with psychoses that may prefigure Wasikowska’s pencil-stabbing impulses here. ‘In Full Bloom’, below, puts me in mind of Philip Glass, who has also composed some music for Stoker, and, of course, previously accompanied Nicole Kidman for the tremulous timbres of The Hours. May Stoker, too, be full of such sexual indecision and maternal strife!

Victim of the Time

Now taking more hostages

Hit Me With Your Best Shot: Double Indemnity

Motifs in Cinema: Man Against Society

Laurence, stylistically

“It was death. I chose life.”: Julianne Moore in The Hours

The misérable vacuum

Stoking the fires of anticipation

Follow “Victim of the Time”