Right Now, Wrong Then
Hong Sang-soo, 2015
#11, 2016 Skandies
Back to Korea for #11, and as with #10, we have a film that revisits early scenes with a twist the second time around. The difference is that the scenes in The Handmaiden were generally pretty interesting the first time through and often compelling the second time around. In Right Now, Wrong Then, the scenes are deathly dull the first time through and then the second time around are deathly dull in a slightly different way. I know that I praised Margaret for breaking with convention by compressing scenes less than the average film, but gyah—this movie is about a film director, violating Pattern 43 by being in a film, who spends a day hitting on a young woman he randomly encounters, and every single one of these conversations seems to last roughly this long:
Robert Eggers, 2015
#12, 2016 Skandies
I try to know as little as possible about these movies going into them, which paid off in the case of The Handmaiden, but I actually had heard at least a little bit about this one: namely, that it was set in colonial New England and that the filmmakers had the characters approximate linguists’ best reconstruction of what a colonial New England accent would have sounded like. Very interesting! And to the extent that this film gives us a realistic look at the day-to-day life of an exiled family trying to scratch out an existence in the wilds of Massachusetts, I really enjoyed it. I enjoyed it both in the general—what kind of chores did each family member do from day to day? what was a typical dinner like?—and in the specific: How did this particular girl get along with her younger brother? How did both of them get along with their younger siblings, a pair of bratty boy-girl twins? How did the dad’s relationship with his daughter differ from that with his son? Etc., etc.? And I thought the main girl was great. (It always makes me melancholy to watch a movie and see someone like her, or Julie from 20th Century Women, and think about how, dang, if only the Photopia screenplay had gone into production, she could have been Alley.)
To the extent that this is a not a realistic look at the day-to-day life of a family in colonial New England and is instead a horror film, it left me pretty cold. And of course the fact that it is specifically religious horror, featuring pacts with the devil and whatnot, left me even colder. I recognize that my interest in history is at odds with my antipathy toward religion; not only is religion obviously a big part of history, but as Yuval Noah Harari emphasizes in Sapiens, so much of what we think of as real and important—money, nations, honor, etc.—exist solely inside the human mind. Insofar as my primary interest in history is in what it was like to live in a particular time and place, how people saw the world will of course be a huge part of that. If they viewed the world through a religious lens, as most people throughout recorded history have and as people today continue to do, then I should find religious thinking fascinating. Instead:
Efthymis Filippou and Yorgos Lanthimos, 2015
#13, 2016 Skandies
At first this was starting to look like a hypertrophic Black Mirror episode, a darker version of “Hang the DJ”: the premise is that we’re looking at a world in which society does not tolerate single adults and thus goes to great lengths to pair them up, locking them up in a hotel for 45 days and transforming them into animals if they don’t find a new partner by then. Some people do escape the authorities to live as singles in the forest—though this requires some commitment, as the singles declare that joining their number means foreswearing romance forevermore, and penalties are harsh— but the hotel inmates are regularly sent into the forest with tranq guns to hunt the “loners” down. The Lobster diverged in tone from Black Mirror pretty quickly, with the absurdism and mean-spiritedness cranked up to a level that series flirted with but usually stayed a half-step away from. (This is by the people behind Dogtooth, for which it is a near-perfect tonal match.) Part of the tonal mismatch has to do with the artificial intonation of the dialogue—the stress patterns are leveled out and given too high a baseline. Characters bark out their lines even before they’ve been turned into dogs.
Speaking of which: one of the things that threw me off about this film is that it bears all the markings of a satire, but a satire of what? I guess the idea is something along the lines of “misery loves company”? Those trapped in failing relationships demand that everyone else settle down, while bitter singles declare that anyone who finds love is the enemy? But what about that other wrinkle to The Lobster, that which comes to dominate the movie: the notion, taken by all characters as a given, that they must pair up with someone who happens to share their “defining characteristic”? A characteristic which is generally quite minor and peripheral to who a person is: a limp, nearsightedness, a susceptibility to nosebleeds? I honestly have no idea what the filmmakers were going for there, but I did find it suggestive. I remember lamenting to my friend Karen back in college that finding one’s soulmate was such a impossible task: Newt Gingrich called the public school system “the most expensive dating service in America”, but even allowing that for most people going to college means being surrounded by people of roughly your own age and intellectual caliber, how many candidates were we really talking about? I went to a large school and there were probably around seven thousand straight undergraduate women enrolled along with me. I was on speaking terms with, what, maybe a hundred, if that? Meanwhile, the number of straight women considered of an acceptable age for me to date was somewhere in the neighborhood of four million in the U.S. alone. That’s a lot of prospects chucked out the window! Maybe the perfect girl for me was living in South Dakota or something and I would never have any idea. What we really needed, I argued, was some kind of giant database for single people so we could all expand our searches by a factor of 40,000 or so and thus make correspondingly better matches. A decade or so later, online dating services actually were a thing. I’ve poked at them a handful of times over the years: once for research, and a couple of times to actually try to get a date. And one of the things that struck me, especially back in 2005 or so before the Tinder model took over the world, was that, yes, some of these sites actually did try to collect a huge amount of data on people to try to find deep compatibility. Do you genuinely see the world the same way? Do you share a philosophy on how to raise children? Will you be able to have interesting conversations for the next fifty years? And then you’d look at the actual profiles, and the things people were concerned about seemed like they were indeed on a par with “Do you get nosebleeds a lot? OMG ME TOO!!” Things like “I’m a matcha fiend! Don’t even bother to message me if you don’t like matcha!” “My fandoms are Percy Jackson and Dragon Ball Super!” “DO YOU LIKE DOGS?” Even profiles that did hint at looking for compatibility that went beyond trivia tended to put their faith in personality tests that were barely a step above astrology. (Okay, that’s unfair. Everything is at least two steps above astrology.) So maybe the filmmakers were attempting to satirize the inane things people do focus on in finding a mate, or maybe they were just being quirky. Either way, it’s no way to find your lobster.
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