Let the Corpses Tan
Jean-Patrick Manchette, Jean-Pierre Bastid, Hélène Cattet, and Bruno Forzani, 2017
#8, 2018 Skandies
At first I was thrown off because my copy of the movie didn’t come with subtitles, so I had to get a third-party set. Then I was thrown off because the movie turned out to use a very different cinematic language from that employed by most films. Way more close-ups, and many of those extreme close-ups. Close-ups of smoking, weapons, ants, meat. Not much emphasis on conveying what is actually going on. I was at least able to follow the sequence in which a gang of thieves kill the occupants and escorts of an armored truck and steal the box of gold bars inside, but after twenty-five minutes I was done with this.
Tamara Jenkins, 2018
#7, 2018 Skandies
This is a good one, though! It’s a good example of the sort of genre blending I mention in Pattern 13: from moment to moment it’s a comedy, because like a lot of people (including me and pretty much everyone I can relate to) the characters spend about 90% of any conversation trying to crack jokes, but when you take a step back it’s a drama, because they’re going through some heavy stuff. The main characters are a married couple in their forties who have belatedly decided that they would like to be parents, but the adoption system has been an emotionally draining dead end and their fertility treatments haven’t worked out either. Their doctor at the clinic suggests that their best bet, given the wife’s age, is to go the egg donor route. The wife is dubious about carrying the genetic material of some rando from the Internet in her womb, and wishes she had a younger sister or a cousin or someone she could ask. Then the husband’s cell phone rings. It’s his brother’s stepdaughter. She’s just left college and is looking for a place to stay for a while. A plan is hatched.
My boss at the movie production company used to say that the two big questions to ask about a script are “Is it real?” and “Is it interesting?” Private Life succeeds on both counts. It doesn’t feel scripted; the story follows the often anticlimactic rhythms of life, and there’s a refreshing lack of a sense of some studio exec insisting, “You gotta raise the stakes! Let’s add a ticking clock!” But while a lot of slice-of-life stuff tends to leave me asking “Why slice this life?”, this movie presents an unusual enough situation for that question never to arise.
About a month ago, someone emailed me to ask whether I ever read the work of any movie critics aside from Mike D’Angelo. Frequent visitors to this site may have noted that I do mention Outlaw Vern fairly often. The best film writing I’ve encountered is by Tim Krieder, but there’s just so little of it. And… many years ago I stumbled across the film review section of the World Socialist Web Site, and found it oddly compelling. Any survey of literary theory will include a chapter about political criticism, but there aren’t many venues for it outside of academia. So it was interesting to see some cranked out in real time. I don’t visit often, but I will pop by on occasion if I see it show up on a Rotten Tomatoes list of reviews—even though the review is invariably negative. Seriously, they don’t like anything. Here is the conclusion of the WSWS review of Private Life:
There is nothing much to object to here, but still the picture of life seems small and somewhat self-absorbed. Aside from one reference to an “idiot” friend who has told Richard and Rachel that “having a baby is an immoral act” because of “overpopulation, climate change [… and the] rise of neo-fascism,” larger events or processes hardly make an appearance. The couple, Private Life hints, once led more artistically or even politically provocative lives, but either the times have made that no longer possible or they have simply “grown up”.
Jenkins, like Taylor and Payne, is obviously capable and sensitive. Is there nothing she finds more pressing, perhaps more tragic and profound than the stories she has recounted so far?
Aside from the annoying “Stop writing about what you care about and start writing about what I care about!” ethos of these remarks, they also struck me as off base insofar as Private Life addresses socioeconomic strata more than most films. Its characters are privileged, both in terms of finances and cultural capital; they live in Manhattan, and name-check stage dramatists and old indie films without worrying whether viewers will get the references. But there are levels of privilege. Life is very different on the 90th percentile from on the 99th, and life actually gets increasingly dissimilar as we move from the 99th percentile to the 99.9th, to the 99.99th, and so on. Viewers struggling to pay the bills might well find it hard to summon a lot of sympathy for a couple whose lives are full of bougie dinner parties and relatives they can hit up for a $10,000 check on the spot. But to the step-niece, this couple is riding the struggle bus right along with those viewers. As she puts it, complaining about the “entitled” kids in her creative writing program: “It’s like, everyone is so self-promoting and convinced of their own artistic promise and I’m like, hey, my uncle is an award-winning theater genius, and my aunt is a real-life playwright and author who gets invited to Yaddo and gets her stories published in well-known periodicals that normal people have actually ever heard of, like The New Yorker, for instance. And they’re over forty and still have to live in a rent-stabilized apartment on Avenue A with, like, drunks and graffiti in the front. So don’t talk to me about the sacrifices you’re making to be an artist, okay?” This misguided attempt at praise for their “sacrifices” doesn’t go over well. But there’s something to be said for the notion that we should acknowledge the differing limits of different people’s privilege, rather than acting like it’s something you either have or don’t. After all, while the song says that if you can make it in New York you can make it anywhere, so long as you have to pound on the ceiling to get the people upstairs to turn down the music, you haven’t really made it.
V. S. Naipaul, 1971
This collection of three novellas won the Booker Prize for 1971. I am now less interested in reading Booker Prize winners.
The first story is the best by a good margin, though that isn’t saying much. It’s about the servant of an Indian politician who gets posted to Washington; since his salary is paid in rupees, the cost of living in D.C. makes him essentially a slave. Mild comedy ensues as this hapless bumpkin tries to wrap his head around hippies and race riots.
The second story has a lot less to it; it’s a lot of pages to tell the tale of a Trinidadian guy whose younger brother—the one who looks like he has a future—moves to England, ostensibly to study computer programming. The older brother follows him there and works soul-crushing hours at multiple jobs in order to support him, only to discover that the younger brother spends his days killing time in town rather than attending classes. What a slacker! I mean, it’s true that Fortran code doesn’t make for a fun read, but neither does this and I saw it through.
The final story, from which the collection draws its name, is the worst. I read this book because Naipaul is a Nobel laureate and I saw that this is widely considered his best work, and on top of that, it sounded really interesting: a story set during a coup in a newly independent African nation! Intriguing! Except our viewpoint character turns out to be a misogynistic British bureaucrat whose main concern is trying to arrange paid trysts with the young African men he encounters. I get the thematic link among the three stories—in the first two we have characters moving from the “developing” to the “developed” world and finding their freedom curtailed, and now we see how a move in the opposite direction allows the protagonist to more freely indulge his proclivity for gay sex with African prostitutes than he could in 1960s London… until suddenly he finds himself in a war zone and unable to freely move beyond the next checkpoint. But one thing that always bothered me about most criticism is that it focuses solely on these sorts of takeaways and not on the experience of making your way through the book. And for me… well, there’s a bit in which some of the soldiers involved in the coup drag this guy’s face across a concrete floor, and that’s what spending 100+ pages with Bobby and Linda felt like.
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