Monthly Archives: July 2015

  • Ghost World

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Terry Zwigoff  (2001)

    Enid:  Only stupid people have good relationships anyway.

    Seymour:  That’s the spirit.

    As Enid, Thora Birch has a young woman’s body but the truculent gait of a pre-adolescent.    She’s dissatisfied with the way things are but fearful that they’re going to change.  Ghost World – based on a comic novel by Daniel Clowes, who wrote the screenplay with the director, Terry Zwigoff – is about Enid and her increasingly strained relationship with her best and, it seems, only friend Becky (Scarlett Johansson), in the weeks immediately after their high school graduation.  I don’t know of another film which deals with ‘growing up’ the way this one does.    Zwigoff and Clowes dramatise the spiteful but heartwarming reassurance you can get from being part of a group – in this case only a duo, so there’s a built-in fragility to the esprit de corps – that makes smart, unkind fun of everyone within the relative safety of school; and the desolating and disorienting process of finding your power crumble in the world outside that closed order.

    Enid is stuck in a limbo between school and post-school but Becky adapts to a normal life in the real world with – as Enid sees it – dismaying facility and docility.   (Emotionally, I’m with Enid that only stupid people wouldn’t be dismayed by this.)   Becky gets a job in a coffee shop, starts earning enough money to move into an apartment without needing Enid to pay a share of the rent.  Scarlett Johansson is perfectly cast as Becky – she complements Thora Birch both physically and temperamentally.  In the early scenes, the two girls are convincing as contemporaries; as the story develops, the combination of Johansson’s easy sensual authority and the placidity of her mind – compared with Birch’s frictional intelligence – makes Becky’s growing into conventionality and away from Enid inevitable.   By the end, they seem to belong to different generations. The flair that Thora Birch showed for deadpan wit in American Beauty is developed really inventively in this lead role.   The wit never deserts her but it becomes more nuanced, as Enid’s situation gets more complicated and unhappy.  At the start, the pleasure she takes in clever derision is palpable (and infectious – she’s very funny).  Later on, her wit seems sometimes to be what Enid’s hanging onto, at other times what she’s stuck with whether she wants it or not.

    The day after they leave school, the two girls decide to make a hoax call in response to a personal ad placed by a man called Seymour.  Enid pretends to be the woman with whom Seymour, as he reveals in the ad, is infatuated.  They make an assignation and, once Enid sees the fortyish Seymour, she starts to feel sorry for him.  She and Becky go to a garage sale and Enid makes a purchase from Seymour’s vintage record collection.  This is the start of the relationship between them, which is the heart of the film.  Getting into each other’s lives has the effect of disturbing Enid’s and Seymour’s isolated but in some ways comfortable routines.  Steve Buscemi plays Seymour brilliantly:  with his pasty complexion and lank hair and his brownish wardrobe, he’s nerdiness incarnate but that’s only the starting point of the rounded character that he creates.   Seymour isn’t the only character in Ghost World who seems simply ridiculous at first but then reveals different, surprising aspects that make you think again:  Roberta Allsworth (Illeana Douglas), the teacher of the art class that Enid starts attending, is another.  The audience’s experience of these characters – it seems natural and enjoyable to deride them then things get more complicated – chimes with Enid’s apprehension of a larger, unsettling world.

    All the actors are good:  Bob Balaban as Enid’s father; Teri Garr, in an uncredited cameo, as his lady friend Maxine; Brad Renfro as Josh, the pleasant, relentlessly discomfited ex-classmate of Enid and Becky; Brian George as the harassed owner of the convenience store where Josh has a holiday job; Dave Sheridan as the store’s most reliably eccentric customer; Stacey Travis, as Seymour’s super-conventional, short-lived girlfriend; Tom McGowan as his desperate housemate; Ezra Buzzington as the waiter whom Enid and Becky make fun of in the coffee place they go to; and, as two other girls in their high school class, Rini Bell (a wheelchair-bound speaker at the graduation ceremony) and Debra Azar (a gushing would-be actress called Melorra).  The film’s music is entertainingly disorienting too – a mixture of Seymour’s 78 RPM classics and Bollywood dance numbers (with an original score by David Kitay).

    Seymour’s day job is as a middle manager with a fast food franchise called Cook’s Chicken.  He tells Enid about the outfit’s racist history – it was originally known as ‘Coon Chicken’ – and she takes an old advertising poster in Seymour’s possession, depicting a grotesque black caricature, to the art class.  She presents it as ‘found art’, aware that this is a term of approbation in Roberta Allsworth’s vocabulary, and, sure enough, Roberta is intrigued and, eventually, impressed enough to offer Enid an art school scholarship.   This all turns sour when the racist poster causes a scandal at the class’s end of term show and the scholarship offer is withdrawn – although that climax isn’t convincing:  it’s incredible that someone as PC-aware as Roberta wouldn’t realise in advance what kind of reactions the poster would get.  A recurring shot in the film is of a solitary old man sitting on a bench waiting for a bus that never comes – because the service has long been discontinued.   When, near the end of the picture, a bus unexpectedly appears and the old man gets on it, it’s effective as the removal of another  certainty in Enid’s life but when, finally, she herself gets on a bus and it drives out of town, the moment feels over-resolved.   Seymour’s last appearance too, in a session with a therapist which characterises him as a hopeless middle-aged mother’s boy, is too neatly reductive.  But if the ending of Ghost World is a little disappointing, it’s largely because the journey up to the closing stages has been such a dynamic and elating one.   You’re much more conscious of the few bits that don’t work because nearly all the others do.  Ghost World is one of the most enjoyable and original American films of the last decade.

    2 August 2008

  • La grande bouffe

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Marco Ferreri (1973)

    According to T S Eliot’s Sweeney in ‘Fragment of a Prologue’:

    ‘Birth, copulation and death.
    That’s all the facts when you come to brass tacks … ‘

    Marco Ferreri in La grande bouffe adds what might seem to be a fourth essential ingredient – food.  But it soon becomes clear that eating and drinking in the film aren’t really an independent activity.  They are part of, or auxiliary to, sex and death.  A succès de scandale (and winner of the FIPRESCI prize at Cannes) in 1973, La grande bouffe has recently been restored and re-released.   Ferreri and Rafael Azcona, who co-wrote the screenplay with him, tell the story of four middle-aged men, who get together for the weekend, at a villa on the outskirts of Paris.   Their purpose is to end their lives, by gorging themselves to death.   Ugo (Ugo Tognazzi) is a restaurateur and chef, who hates his wife (her brief appearance in the prologue makes clear the feeling’s mutual).  Michel (Michel Piccoli) is a jaded television producer, whose marriage ended some time ago.   Marcello (Marcello Mastroianni) is an airline pilot, a womaniser dismayed by the onset of impotence.  Philippe (Philippe Noiret) is a judge, and the owner of the villa.  He shares his other home in Paris with the childhood nanny who still treats him like a little boy, except that she also wants sex with him.  The four men are joined for the second night of the weekend by three prostitutes they’ve hired for the occasion and by Andréa (Andréa Ferréol), a young schoolteacher who that morning has brought her class on an educational visit to the grounds of the villa.  (The grounds contain a lime tree – ‘le tilleul de Boileau’, in the shade of which the famous poet is said to have sat, in order to find inspiration.  According to IMDB, La grande bouffe was filmed on location in the Rue Boileau in Paris.)  The prostitutes leave the following morning but Andréa stays for the duration.  She alone survives the weekend.

    A lot gets stuffed into mouths and other orifices in the course of the film’s 135 minutes.  (There’s also a censored version, twelve minutes shorter.)  In a briefly amusing variation on this theme, Ugo does an impression of Marlon Brando in The Godfather and the others laugh.  His characters evidently know what’s on at the pictures and Marco Ferreri must have been well aware of the ‘gastronomic’ cinema of Luis Bunuel:  not only the previous year’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, where the characters, although some of them manage to grab a bit of sex, find their quest for a decent meal repeatedly frustrated and eventually unconsummated;  but also The Exterminating Angel (1962), in which the guests at a posh dinner party find themselves unable to leave it.  (When they do eventually get out, they meet a sticky end.)   The basic scheme of La grande bouffe doesn’t, in the light of these progenitors, seem that original or ‘shocking’.  Since the starting point of the story is that Ferreri’s principals are all intending to commit suicide, the film doesn’t really function either as a satire of over-consumption.  The four men are resolved already to act on feelings of having had too much of life; they recognise overindulgence as a means to its end.  La grande bouffe’s reputation rests on its supposed disgusting exuberance, on Ferreri’s success in continually upping the scatological ante.

    I guess it’s possible that my own appetite for the outrageous has been more than satisfied by decades of cinema since La grande bouffe‘s original release and that I would have found it unprecedentedly and hilariously excessive in 1973, but I doubt it.  The joke isn’t enough to sustain a film well over two hours long, especially if the director is as uninventive as Ferreri is here.  He falls back repeatedly on things like Michel’s serious flatulence problem.  This may be the result of repression (as a child, he was told not to fart) and the noise of his breaking wind may be the longest-lasting of its kind in film soundtrack history.  But this is still a fart joke, as the shit-splattering explosion of a toilet in the villa is still a toilet joke.  The impotent libertine pilot Marcello, having earlier invited a woman to join him ‘in the cockpit’, struggles to get a vintage Bugatti motor to start up.  A fair amount of La grande bouffe is at this level.  Of course, there are plenty of extravagant images too – of sexual as well as gastronomic debauchery, including a good deal of naked flesh, most of it female.   That can no doubt be justified as an expression of the four greedy men’s attitudes towards women although it’s hard not to think of as expressing also the tendency of many male film directors, including art film directors, of the period in which La grande bouffe was made.  (The nearly contemporaneous Last Tango in Paris is an example.)   You might think Ferreri balances things by presenting the men (not the women) as buffoons but I didn’t like this either.  Their creator gives his characters no credit for having thought enough about their lives to decide to end them.

    It’s ironic – how intentionally ironic I wasn’t sure – that the food that appears in the film is its most attractive element.  This is rarely because you want to eat it, more often because of its wittily elaborate, sometimes beautiful design.  Ugo, who naturally prepares most of the dishes, dies eating the triple liver pâté that he’s constructed in the shape of the Dome of Saint Peter’s.  It’s only when it’s being demolished, in both senses of the word, that the food becomes disgusting.  As their names suggest, two of the men are French and two Italian.  Both national cuisines feature on the menu for the weekend and La grande bouffe could be seen as Franco-Italian fusion cooking – as a bawdy Latin perversion of the philosophie of fine dining (there’s at least one reference to the gastronomic essayist Brillat-Savarin) and the adage ‘Il faut manger pour vivre, et non pas vivre pour manger’.  As will also be clear from the above, this is one of those pieces where the characters share names with the actors playing them – something that almost always annoys me because it spuriously suggests a ‘significance’ beyond the story and because it’s lazy.   Philippe, the always-indulged nanny’s boy who’s not up to sexual competition with the other three men and often sulks, is the most clearly-defined character and Philippe Noiret’s dextrous performance is the only one in the film that gives any real pleasure.

    15 July 2015

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