Monthly Archives: July 2018

  • Summer 1993

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Estiu 1993

    Carla Simón (2017)

    Following the death of her parents, six-year-old Frida (Laia Artigas) is sent to live with her uncle Esteve (David Verdaguer), his wife Marga (Bruna Cusí) and their infant daughter Anna (Paula Robles) in the Catalonian countryside.  In a few weeks’ time, Frida will start school there.  Things happen in Summer 1993 but the writer-director Carla Simón describes a situation – and the behaviour of a single individual within that situation – as much as she tells a story.  It takes a little time to adjust to this but Simón’s film (in Catalan) builds, engages and impresses – all the more in retrospect.

    Both Frida’s parents have died of AIDS, her father first.  While her mother is dying, the child is cared for by her maternal grandparents (Isabel Rocatti and Fermí Reixach) in their Barcelona apartment.  After Frida moves, the grandparents pay more than one visit to their son Esteve’s home and the grandmother especially is anxious for Frida to spend more time with them back in Barcelona.  Esteve and Marga resist, determined to do all they can to help Frida get used to her new surroundings.  She calls Marga and Esteve mummy and daddy but she knows they’re not:  the poignancy of the child’s unhappiness and isolation is increased by the adults trying their best while being aware that they can’t make everything fine – and by Frida’s natural liveliness, her frequent smiles and laughter.  Although her presence in the household creates friction, particularly with Marga, her new parents understand the importance of having difficult conversations out of earshot of Frida, even if they don’t always succeed.   The visually paradisal setting also makes things better and worse for her.  As photographed by Santiago Racaj, the landscape of woodland and water has a lush, new-minted quality.  It invites enchanted exploration at the same time as it heightens Frida’s strangerhood.

    In what is her first feature, Carla Simón shows a sure touch.  She illustrates very well a fine line between the unremarkable and the extraordinary aspects of Frida’s circumstances.  She cuts her knee while playing:  the mother of another child, knowing how Frida’s parents died, drags her daughter away in panic.   Anna, after having her own pretend conversation on the telephone, hands it to Frida and asks if she wants to call her mother.  The summer heat is palpable, in the silence as well as the chirping crickets, and Simón suggests its various emotional effects, sometimes making Frida more restlessly bored, sometimes acting as a kind of anaesthetic.  The exasperated Marga complains to Esteve that ‘the child has no morals’, a phrase that sticks in your mind.  Frida more than once causes trouble, knowing that she doesn’t belong in the way that Anna belongs.  At one point, when they go to play in woodland near the family home, Frida abandons Anna, supposedly as part of their game.  Marga comes out to check on the girls and is soon searching anxiously for Anna.  The next that we see of the younger child, her lower arm is in plaster.  Later, in a public bathing area, Frida, while Esteve’s back is turned, lets the eagerly curious Anna come into the water until she slips beneath it.  Esteve hears the splash, jumps in and rescues Anna, shouting angrily at Frida, ‘Are you trying to kill her or something?’  It’s a strong moment:  partly because Esteve is, for the most part, calm and quiet (sometimes determinedly so); partly because the truthful answer to his question, to which the shocked Frida doesn’t reply, may not be an unequivocal no.

    There are no flashbacks – no picture, in other words, of Frida’s life with her mother (one assumes she’s too young to remember her father).  The lack of any comparison of Frida’s past and present might seem to limit the film.  In fact, it proves an effective way of reflecting the painful inaccessibility of her former world.  The accidents involving Anna depend on inattention that’s uncharacteristic of Marga and Esteve.  Otherwise, nothing in the film rings at all false and the closing stages are extraordinarily well put together.  After having to be dragged from her grandparents’ car as they prepare to leave, Frida decides to return to Barcelona under her own steam.  She sets out late one night, while Marga and Esteve are asleep, but not before Anna has woken up and asked what she’s doing.  The younger child obviously lets her parents know and Frida doesn’t get far.  As the family returns home, she says matter of factly, ‘It’s too dark:  I’ll go tomorrow’.  She doesn’t, though, and this crisis is something of a turning point.  Simón cuts to a local carnival, in which Frida has a key role in the parade:  she looks up euphorically at Esteve, Marga and Anna, watching in the stands.  The final scene takes place on the eve of Frida’s starting her new school.   She and Anna giggle and bounce on their bed as hard as they can; Esteve joins in the fooling around; Marga looks on, smiling.  Frida’s laughter suddenly turns to sobs.  The parents ask what’s wrong and if she’s hurt herself.  She shakes her head and insists she’s fine, knowing that she is and she isn’t.  Her bursting into tears is mixture of persisting grief and relief at having become part of the family to the extent that she now has.  This makes for a very moving ending.

    The film is strongly autobiographical and Carla Simón dedicates it to her mother (whether her birth mother or her adoptive mother, I don’t know).  The signs of autobiography are present throughout – in the lack of contrived incident, the focus on a single character’s moods and perspective, the precise date of the title.  (There’s very little in the film that’s comparably time-specific:  the attitudes towards AIDS place the story in the past but not in a particular year.  The title also suggests that Simón is still only in her very early thirties.)  Simón has not assumed, as writer-directors often seem to assume, that putting your personal history on the screen is a necessary guarantee of authenticity, a proof that all is true.  Summer 1993 is refreshing in that recreating her own experience hasn’t at all stifled the film-maker’s imagination.  What she gets from the two young children, especially Laia Artigas, is magically natural and expressive:  I can’t begin to think how Simón achieved this.  This film probably had to be made by a woman:  it’s hard to avoid the suspicion that some of the bathtime and bedtime sequences, which are proof of how much trust Simón built in her cast, would have been less kindly reviewed if the gaze behind the camera had been a male one.  All the adults are good but David Verdaguer’s subtle naturalistic performance is outstanding.  As well as being great with the children, Verdaguer beautifully conveys the stresses and sadness that Esteve is trying to contain.

    26 July 2018

  • Generation Wealth

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Lauren Greenfield (2018)

    The documentary photographer and film-maker Lauren Greenfield’s The Queen of Versailles (2012) left you wondering what it would have amounted to without the dramatically helpful intervention of the global financial crisis of 2008.  The discursive Generation Wealth, Greenfield’s first feature-length film since, gives a clue.  The title, while suggesting a potentially large subject, implies a reasonably clear thematic focus.  The documentary that follows is all over the place.   Greenfield’s ‘generation’ turns out to be a collection of people of widely varying ages, whose aspirations and attitudes she has looked into since the early 1990s.  Generation Wealth is also, in large part, an autobiographical piece even though Greenfield’s personal priorities are seemingly very different from those of most of her subjects.  About halfway through, she justifies her meandering approach, explaining in voiceover that she’s come to realise that ‘wealth’ is whatever a person feels confers ‘value’ on their lives.  According to this specious and, from Greenfield’s point of view, convenient definition, wealth can mean earning megabucks or having a body makeover or (as in her own case) being addicted to your work.

    Near the start of Generation Wealth, Greenfield says:

    ‘I’ve been a photographer for twenty-five years, with my lens focused on wealth.  I noticed that no matter how much people had, they still want more.  … I want to figure out why our obsession with wealth has grown.’

    This is an early example of one of her most persistent and exasperating narrative traits:  use of the undefined first-person plural.  Does ‘we’ mean humankind?   In the course of its travels, Generation Wealth drops in on Russia and China, to glean evidence that a tradition of totalitarian socialism has served to increase materialistic appetite.  (The Chinese vignettes, while supplying ludicrous comedy, focus predominantly on social pretension rather than avarice.  At an etiquette school, the students learn the correct pronunciation of designer labels – Dolce & Gabbana, Louis Vuitton – or how to eat a banana or an orange ‘elegantly’; ie with a knife and fork.)   In Iceland, Greenfield talks with a fisherman who became a banker during the country’s short-lived economic boom and, after the crash, went back to fishing.  There are (far too) many interviews with Florian Homm, the disgraced former business tycoon and investment banker now back in his native Germany.  I can’t bring to mind any other coverage of western Europe, let alone Africa or most of Asia.  But even if ‘we’ refers exclusively to America, the definition is obviously way too broad.

    In spite of her later expansion of the meaning of her film’s key word, Greenfield has evidently majored in examining acquisitive natures.  She has chosen to have her ‘lens focused on wealth’:  a different focus would have produced a different picture.  Her own father is an immediate case in point.  Early in Generation Wealth, Sheldon Greenfield, an academic in the field of health services, confirms to his daughter that, when he got a place at Harvard, it was, for his immigrant parents, ‘the fulfilment of the American Dream’.  The moral education he received from his father stayed with Sheldon:  trying to improve the lot of other people is still important to him, in spite of what he sees as cultural shifts in the reverse direction since the 1980s.  Greenfield’s father appears only once more in the film – much less often than her mother, the academic psychologist Patricia Marks Greenfield.  There seem to be two main reasons for Sheldon’s relatively minor role.  First, his altruism is unhelpful to the main thrust of Generation Wealth (muddled as it is).  Second, Patricia (whose perma-smile is increasingly defensive) matters more:  her devotion to research at the expense of time spent with her daughter predicts Lauren’s own guilty conscience about neglecting her two sons.   When Sheldon does finally reappear, it’s only to say that, while he recognises there’s no such thing as a perfect balance, he thinks Lauren errs too much on the side of film-making rather than family.

    The longer the film goes on the more it illustrates another form of self-indulgence on the part of the woman who made it.  Greenfield says she wanted to understand why she was drawn to exploring wealth.  She grew up in the seventies and early eighties in Venice, Los Angeles, a place with a strong cultural, even bohemian, image but not the most ‘exclusive’ area of LA in terms of the price of the houses its citizens lived in or the cars they drove.  Her parents paid for Lauren to go to a high school most of whose pupils enjoyed a more lavish lifestyle.  Having made this connection, Greenfield lets it go, impatient to get on to the drama of her personal vs professional life dilemma.

    Her sons Noah and Gabriel, fifteen and ten respectively, are likeable and, in different ways, highly articulate about both the effects of their mother’s frequent absences and the competitive legacy of having, like her, two Harvard-educated parents.  Other elements of this domestic set-up, at least with hindsight, are inadvertent self-satire.  Frank Evers, to whom Greenfield is married, is shown to have supported her from the very beginnings of her career.  As that career has developed, Evers appears to have become a selfless homemaker, looking after the boys, enabling his wife to realise her creative interests, keeping the family together (Greenfield’s own parents separated while she was still at school).  On the way back from the cinema I googled Frank Evers, just as a matter of interest.  His Wikipedia entry describes him as ‘an American businessman, the CEO of INSTITUTE/The Story Institute and the President of Evergreen Pictures’ (who produced this film).  That doesn’t mean he isn’t a fantastic husband and father too but the omission of any reference in Generation Wealth to Evers’s commercial activities hints at how much the people behind it take for granted their extraordinary socioeconomic privilege.  In her most egregious ‘our’, Lauren Greenfield refers back explicitly to The Queen of Versailles and says that she saw the collapse of David and Jackie Siegel’s project as a ‘symbol of our collective greed’.  You feel like shouting ‘Speak for yourself!’ even before Greenfield puts up a bit of footage of people whose properties were repossessed following the 2008 crash.  These are people who, unlike the Siegels, simply wanted to own a home to provide security for their family.

    For all her expansive understanding of ‘wealth’, Lauren Greenfield, as in her previous film, seems preoccupied with ostentation, whether it’s the gold-covered penthouse in Trump Tower or the results of a working-class woman’s cosmetic surgery.  To an extent, that’s a natural consequence of working in a visual medium and, to be fair to Greenfield, she herself seems to like a good number of her interviewees.  She must know, however, that a high proportion of the audience that goes to see Generation Wealth will find what’s on display, whether in the form of property or self-realisation, ‘obscene’ – because of what it signifies, yes, but also because it looks cheap and nasty.   As in The Queen of Versailles, there’s a pathetic quality to much of what we see and hear – right from the moment at the very start of the film when the Chinese etiquette teacher fails to get her tongue round ‘Vuitton’.  In most cases, the results of spending a fortune on improving personal appearance or décor are awful to behold.  This emphasis on the external runs the risk of reducing the ‘obsession with wealth’ to a matter of taste.

    These visual examples, of course, can also be read as emblems of decadence.  One of Greenfield’s estimable interviewees is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and journalist Chris Hedges (a quote from whose book War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning supplied the epigraph to Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker).  According to Hedges, ‘societies accrue their greatest wealth at the moment they face death’.  For a while, Greenfield looks set to pursue the theme Hedges has suggested.  Trump puts in a couple of appearances (in one of them, we see the Siegels, late of Versailles, leading the cheers at one his rallies).  The score, by Jeff Beals, reinforces the apocalyptic mood.  Perhaps the most bizarre feature of Generation Wealth (though the competition is keen) is that, in the closing stages, Greenfield is at pains to suggest that several of her subjects have learned there’s more to life than money, usually in the form of children.   Examples include the mad-eyed but eventually moist-eyed Florian Homm (though his son doesn’t seem so sure that his father’s a reformed character); an alarming woman financier who thinks it ‘un-American’ to discourage rampant selfishness but whose priorities, she says, are very different now that she’s finally (also tearfully) a parent.  Even the mother of Eden Wood, the infant star of a reality television show called Toddlers & Tiaras, has seen the error of her ways now that little Eden has proved such a money-spinner.  The accompanying music obligingly switches to green-shoots-of-hope trills.  Lauren Greenfield, having given her own conscience a good workout, seems to have decided that all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.

    24 July 2018

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