Monthly Archives: November 2020

  • I’m Thinking of Ending Things

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Charlie Kaufman (2020)

    This is the first time since 2002 that Charlie Kaufman has drawn on someone else’s work for a script.  Like his adaptation for Adaptation, however, I’m Thinking of Ending Things, based on the 2016 novel of the same name by the Canadian writer Iain Reid, seems as quintessentially a Kaufman piece as any of his original screenplays.  It’s the latest iteration of his by now familiar themes.  The title has a double meaning.  More obviously, it refers to what’s in the mind of a young woman as she and Jake, her boyfriend of several weeks, set out on a long drive to the remote farmhouse home of his parents, whom she’s to meet for the first time even though she’s already considering breaking up with their son.  A plot synopsis on Wikipedia suggests that the other, deathly meaning of the title of Reid’s novel (which I’ve not read) emerges in the book’s closing stages.  In the film, Kaufman’s depressive tendencies are soon giving the phrase ‘I’m thinking of ending things’ an existential heft.  During their long journey on the road, through increasingly heavy snowfall, the two people in the car engage in discussion of subjects cultural and philosophical, including Wordsworth’s ‘Ode:  Intimations of Immortality…’  But as in Synecdoche, New York (2008), it’s mortality with which Charlie Kaufman is more concerned.

    There’s very little that’s stable in I’m Thinking of Ending Things.  The main female character’s name changes from Lucy to Louisa to Lucia to Ames.  (She’s played by Jessie Buckley so I’ll call her Jessie for simplicity.). Her clothes sometimes change, too, even though the action appears to be happening continuously, in close to real time.  Whenever Jessie or Jake (Jesse Plemons) mentions her college studies, she’s doing a different subject.  Whenever the talk turns to their first meeting, there’s a fresh explanation of how and where it happened.  Jake’s parents (Toni Collette and David Thewlis) undergo dramatic changes in age and state of health during the younger couple’s farmhouse visit, switching from aggressively sociable fifty-somethings to senile dementia and back again.  In the last part of the film – after the return car trip has got no further than Jake’s old high school, which he, then Jessie, enters – the characters’ metamorphoses are more fantastic and alarming.  The only thing that stays pretty well the same across the 134 minutes of I’m Thinking of Ending Things is an atmosphere of impending doom and disintegration, expressed through Łukasz Żal’s ingenious lighting as well as Kaufman’s abundant wordage.

    Early on, Jake shows an occasional, disconcerting ability to read Jessie’s thoughts.  Wordsworth enters the conversation when Jake ‘hears’ her say to herself, ‘The child is father of the man’.  Jessie’s a poet, too.  En route to his parents’, Jake persuades her to recite one of her latest compositions, called ‘Bonedog’.  In what used to be Jake’s room at the farmhouse, Jessie finds a book containing the poem, which is actually taken from a collection, Rotten Perfect Mouth, by the Toronto writer Eva HD.  Jessie also paints landscapes:  she’s encouraged to show images of her work, on her phone, to Jake’s parents.  She later finds larger images of ‘her’ paintings elsewhere in the house.  Not knowing of Eva HD, I didn’t recognise ‘Bonedog’ (and, for all I know, Jessie’s paintings may be those of a famous artist).  I did recognise the words spoken by Jessie as she and Jake start their journey back, and discuss John Cassavetes’s A Woman Under the Influence:  she’s quoting Pauline Kael’s review of the film verbatim.  (In Jake’s room, a copy of Kael’s For Keeps is fatly conspicuous on the bookshelves – not that the Woman Under the Influence piece was included in that anthology.)

    Kaufman repeatedly punctuates the couple’s drive out to the wilds with short sequences inside what’s later confirmed as Jake’s alma mater.  In the car, he tells Jessie of his enthusiasm for musical theatre and reels off the names of numerous shows.  He makes special reference to Oklahoma!, which he says his high school puts on every few years.   We see the cast rehearsing ‘Many a New Day’ on stage, watched by an elderly janitor (Guy Boyd) who’s also shown at work around the school.  In spite of the terrible weather, Jake insists, on arrival at the farm, on giving Jessie a tour of the outbuildings.  This supplies an opportunity for a lament on the pointlessness of ovine existence, for a shot of pigs that have frozen to death, and for Jake to tell Jessie about another pig whose corpse was eaten away by maggots.  Oklahoma!, the janitor and the dead pig story all return to dominate the final act of I’m Thinking of Ending Things.

    Jessie and Jake’s conversation on the way back to the city is more and more fractious, thanks to her growing anxiety that they’ll be snowbound and his disruptive whims of iron.  They also disagree as to whether the lyrics of ‘Baby, It’s Cold Outside’ make it an ode to rape.  Despite blizzard conditions and a huge helping of his mother’s chocolate dessert inside him, Jake is determined to stop for more sugar at a ‘Tulsey Town’ ice cream parlour.  This is one of the film’s most striking sequences.  Images of the parlour from outside, with a trio of girl employees seen through its windows, give the place the lonesome look and allure of an Edward Hopper picture.  Two of the three girls are familiar from the high-school Oklahoma! rehearsals, where they played Laurey (Hadley Robinson) and Aunt Eller (Gus Birney).  In the ice cream parlour, they’re unhelpful, giggling scornfully at their gauchely obliging co-worker (Abby Quinn).   The sympathetic exchange between Jessie and this last girl is a rare engaging moment, and not just because, while it lasts, the sinister pall is briefly lifted.  The encounter starts to hint, too, at the mystery of a human being’s ability to imagine the unknown life of another human being, fleetingly met.

    Charlie Kaufman is as keen as ever to confirm how well read he is, combining with this an oddly naïve conviction that his insights must be original.  (Synecdoche, New York sometimes gave the impression that he thought he’d discovered paralysing fear of time and death.)  In an interview with Jonathan Romney for Sight & Sound (October 2020), Kaufman says of Oklahoma!:

    ‘The character of Judd [sic], who also appears in my movie, is a really damaged, dark, scary, tragic person.  You think of Oklahoma! and people singing and dancing dressed as cowboys, but there’s a lot of other stuff going on there.’

    Perhaps Kaufman had never seen Fred Zinnemann’s film version of Oklahoma!  Many people who have will already have been struck by the incongruous but unignorable weight in the story of malign, disturbed Jud Fry (memorably played by Rod Steiger).  Needless to say, ‘Many a New Day’’s perky resilience isn’t typical of the selection of Oklahoma! elements in I’m Thinking of Ending Things.  (You wouldn’t expect Kaufman to reiterate Aunt Eller’s injunction that ‘You gotta be hearty’.)  In the high-school climax, once Jessie finds Jake, they become spectators of a reworking of the Oklahoma! dream ballet.  Figures dressed exactly like themselves play Laurey (Unity Phelan) and Curly (Ryan Laughtner Steele).  The knife-wielding Jud is now a version of the school janitor (Frederick E Wodin), who kills the Jake figure.

    This is the last seen of Jake and Jessie until the closing sequence, in which they’re both old people in deliberately unconvincing ageing make-up.  On the stage of the school auditorium, Jake receives a Nobel Prize and delivers the acceptance speech that John Nash gives at the end of A Beautiful Mind.  The significance of this isn’t clear, beyond the fact that Charlie Kaufman probably doesn’t think much of Ron Howard’s film.  Jake then sings a song, ‘Lonesome Room’, a solo for Jud in the stage show of Oklahoma! (omitted from the Zinnemann film).  In the audience, Jessie leads the standing ovation.  In the meantime, the elderly janitor has had the film nearly to himself.  At the end of his shift, he sits in his car outside the school and begins to hallucinate (Jake’s parents, a cartoon Tulsey Town jingle).  He undresses and goes back into the school, led by another hallucination – a speaking pig.  The animal’s and the overweight janitor’s naked flesh looks consubstantial.  The difference between them, a small mercy, is that only the animated pig’s body is maggot-infested.

    In Synecdoche, New York, the protagonist, Caden Cotard, attempts to recreate as a piece of theatre the entirety of his life, a project ever-expanding and increasingly uncontrollable.  As you watched the film, you sometimes wondered if Charlie Kaufman was painting himself into a similar corner but Synecdoche, for all its digressions, was held together by Caden’s persisting hang-ups about illness and annihilation.  The differently ambitious Anomalisa (2015) was coherent, too – ditto the plot of Iain Reid’s I’m Thinking of Ending Things, according to the Wikipedia synopsis.  The same can’t be said for this film of the book, which Kaufman struggles to shape and resolve.  (Most of his divergences from Reid’s plot seem to be in the closing stages.)  Besides, the abandon-all-hope-of-human-happiness theme doesn’t work as effectively here.  Since it doesn’t obviously express the state of mind of either leading character it’s more obviously imposed by Kaufman.  The connection between the futurelessness of Jake and Jessie’s relationship and the futility of existence generally feels forced.  Although there’s strong acting all round, the main pleasure comes less from any of the performances than from seeing Jesse Plemons get an overdue leading role.

    It’s clear from what he says in the Sight & Sound interview that Kaufman makes films to explore ideas that interest him more than engaging with his audience does.  When (‘laughing’) he tells Jonathan Romney, ‘That’s always my goal, to put people off’, he can only be half-joking.  Charlie Kaufman is well aware not only of what he’s doing but also of the viewer reactions it’s liable to trigger.  So you disparage a film of his feeling he probably knew that’s what you were going to say.  My increasing problem with his work is that I think I know what Kaufman’s going to say, too – the same things he said last time.

    3 November 2020

  • Summer of 85

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Été 85

    François Ozon (2020)

    Twenty-three colours blue?  Maybe even fifty shades of it.  In François Ozon’s new film, set in Dieppe, the combinations of azure sky, sea, clothes and eyes are beautifully differentiated.  Hichame Alaouié’s pellucid cinematography gives you the blues and the effect is elating.  The same can’t quite be said for the picture as a whole, which tells the story of death-obsessed sixteen-year-old Alexis Robin (Félix Lefebvre), his brief affair with David Gorman (Benjamin Voisin) and the aftermath to David’s fatal road accident.  But Summer of 85 is far from heavy going, thanks to the fluent superficiality of the man who made it.  After the strikingly, often impressively, different By the Grace of God (2019), this film sees normal Ozon service resumed.

    Because normal in the Ozon oeuvre means sexually and psychologically unorthodox, the central love affair and what might be termed Alexis’s post-mortem behaviour feel familiar and unchallenging.  The source of Ozon’s screenplay must have been a different matter when first published, in 1982:  British author Aidan Chambers’s novel Dance on My Grave is described on Wikipedia as ‘one of the first few [sic] young adult books published by a major publisher that depicts homosexuality without being judgmental’.  In contrast, the film’s amalgam of school-summer-holidays romance, visual allure and a soundtrack of pop hits of the mid-70s and early 80s, gives it a nostalgic feel.  Ozon was himself still a teenager in 1985.

    The lack of surprise in Summer of 85 is compounded by its narrative structure.  Alexis’s voiceover explains at the outset his deathly preoccupations and introduces David as ‘the future corpse’.  Ozon then switches back and forth between the protagonist’s recollections of the summer, culminating in his reactions to David’s death, and the present, in which a counsellor (Aurore Broutin) interviews Alexis ahead of a judicial hearing.  Has he been accused of his lover’s homicide?  It seems possible until the circumstances of David’s demise become clear and the claims of his grief-stricken mother (Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi) that Alexis is responsible for her son’s death are explained.  It’s immediately after a major falling out with Alexis that David motorcycles to his death but Alexis wasn’t directly involved.  He’s been charged with a lesser offence, committed by way of keeping a promise to David.

    They first meet when the borrowed boat that Alexis has taken out to sea off the Normandy coast capsizes and David rescues him.  Over the course of the next few weeks, the two boys become companions then lovers.  Alexis has been in two minds about whether or not to leave school.  His literature teacher, M Lefèvre (Melvil Poupaud), thinks he’s a promising student and encourages Alexis to stay on.  His dockworker father (Laurent Fernandez) wants his son to get a job; his housewife mother (Isabelle Nanty) wants Alexis ‘to be happy’.  David, a couple of years older, has left school, and helps his widowed mother run her chandler’s shop.  Alexis starts working there in order that he and David see even more of each other.  At the height of their affair, they make a pact, proposed by David.  Whichever of them dies first, the survivor will dance on his grave.

    This element presumably derives from Aidan Chambers’s novel but the way it’s handled in Summer of 85 is highly characteristic of Ozon.  The particular nature of the boys’ pact, given his pre-existing obsession with death, should mean more to Alexis than it does.  It’s merely absorbed into the film’s kinky-macabre surface, which covers plenty of ground.  Bathing at the Gorman home after the sea rescue, Alexis, in voiceover, recalls that the bath seemed to him like a coffin, the bathroom like a pharaoh’s funerary chamber.  Determined to say an intimate final farewell to David, he turns up at the morgue in drag, pretending to be the deceased’s devoted girlfriend.  The morgue supervisor (Bruno Lochet) is persuaded to let him see David’s body:  Alexis gets up close and personal with it.  These sound like very different illustrations of morbid infatuation – a trivial thought and a melodramatic deed respectively.  As such, they might seem to correspond to what Alexis says introducing the story, that the brutal reality of David’s end transformed his feelings about death.  In Ozon’s hands, however, the bathroom musing and the morgue histrionics share a humorous weightlessness.  There’s an upside to this lack of earnestness.  After David’s death, Alexis flirts with the idea of suicide.  A montage of what he gets up to with tablets, razor blades, and so on, doesn’t make you flinch.  The exquisitely listless attempts to end his life make the montage almost funny.  Yet the longer the film goes on, the more you suspect death is a cinematically diverting subject for Ozon as much as a hang-up for Alexis.

    Benjamin Voisin’s interpretation of David is another aspect of Summer of 85 where lack of depth pays dividends.  It’s quickly evident that Alexis is no more than a passing fancy for David, who makes the running but will soon move on to a different partner.  As you watch the relationship run its course, Voisin’s photogenic David seems excessively lacking in human texture.  In retrospect, this works very well.  It’s suggested to Alexis, late in the story, that he fell in love with David not as a person but as an idea – a dream lover.  It’s a plausible explanation that makes sense of the impression given by Benjamin Voisin:  recalling David, the viewer can now see him through Alexis’s idealising eyes.  The dream lover theory is advanced by Kate (Philippine Velge), an English au pair whom Alexis and David meet one day on the beach.  Speaking in conscientious schoolgirl French (including the subjunctive), Philippine Velge is vivid and likeable:  Kate is also a pleasingly lightweight feature of the film, even though she causes the rift between the boys, as David turns his attention to her and Alexis gets jealous.  There’s a rapprochement after David’s death, when Alexis confides in Kate.  She thinks up the cross-dressing plan, lends Alexis the wherewithal for it from her own wardrobe, and goes along with him to the morgue.

    Ozon’s shallowness grates in a detail like the Gormans’ Jewishness, which seems to be included mainly for the sake of giving his family’s mourning of David a more distinctive look.  Also jarring is a moment that may be intended as wryly comical but which has disturbing weight.  When David brings Alexis home after the boating mishap, Mme Gorman insists not only that the young guest have a hot bath but that she undress him for it.  His embarrassment seems meant to contrast amusingly with her brisk obliviousness to what she’s doing.  Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi’s strong presence turns Mme Gorman’s keen-eyed approval of Alexis’s naked body into a queasy abuse of authority.

    In due course, Bruni-Tedeschi also overdoes things as the bereaved mother.  She stands out like a sore thumb in a film that is otherwise well cast.  Félix Lefebvre, nineteen when Summer of 85 was shot, makes a fine job of holding it together.  He’s fresh-faced and quite short, so that Alexis seems poised between childhood and adulthood.  Yet he’s never innocent (except, it seems, of David’s motives).  Lefebvre gives Alexis a wilful determination and his face ages remarkably between the immediate past and present, which helps to justify the film’s structure.  With an abundant curly wig and thick-framed spectacles, Melvil Poupaud is almost unrecognisable as M Lefèvre but gives a nicely suggestive performance.  (In response to a question from Alexis, the teacher eventually admits that David once seduced him, too.)  Alexis’s parents, well played by Isabelle Nanty and Laurent Fernandez, are seldom seen together; when they talk to Alexis, each is in the habit of deferring to the other.  This seems to apply only to Mme Robin, nervous of what her husband will think of their less than macho son, until an almost touching exchange between Alexis and his father.  M Robin, under the mistaken impression that Kate is a girlfriend in the traditional sense, is cheered by this but says it’s for his wife to decide if Alexis can invite Kate to the Robins’ home.

    After getting into a fight with other boys at a fairground, Alexis and David make their escape on the latter’s motor bike.  When they get back to his house, they clean up each other’s cuts and bruises then sit together in silence.  Ozon holds the camera on the boys and on their reflections in the mirror behind them.  The figures in the foreground seem to be motionless; the figures in the mirror are moving gradually closer to each other.  This ingenious shot was for me a reminder of why I’ve come to look forward to each new Ozon film (having disliked the first ones I saw, especially Potiche).   His work may not be deep but it’s highly and reliably entertaining.  The sheer facility of his film-making makes it a pleasure to watch – even if facileness is the other side of the same coin.  When Alexis gets into the cemetery under cover of darkness to dance on David’s grave, he attracts the attention of two police officers by playing as accompaniment a cassette of the theme song of his summer of love.  A pity this is Rod Stewart’s ‘Sailing’ rather than Bananarama’s ‘Cruel Summer’, which is also on the film’s playlist, and Alexis’s dancing is pretty hopeless.  It still makes for a beguiling climax to Summer of 85 that encapsulates François Ozon’s peculiar talent.  He fuses genuine feeling and posing, the frivolous with the grave.

    29 October 2020

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