Old Yorker

  • Blue Eyelids

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Párpados azules

    Ernesto Contreras (2007)

    In a prologue, the elderly Señora Lulita tells how, forty-seven years previously, she was offered her ‘last chance of happiness’ – implying that youth, or something like it, is a precondition of happiness.  In order to take her chance, Lulita had to be able to sew.  Bemoaning her inability to do so, she was told by a little bird that she would receive the gift of being able to make clothes for many different kinds of working people.  So came about the creation of ‘Lulita’s Uniforms’, a Mexico City clothing company.  Every year since the original visitation, Lulita has run a prize draw for her employees – the winning ticket is drawn by a little bird, who hops out of its cage to do the necessary, then hops back in.   At the start of Blue Eyelids, Lulita announces the winner of the forty-seventh annual draw.  She explains to her staff that winning – the prize is a holiday for two at the luxury resort of Playa Salamandra – is their chance of happiness.  (Lulita evidently assumes that none of the workforce is acquainted with happiness – and that it’s unlikely to enter their lives in any shape or form other than a posh holiday.)   The winner is quiet, dark-haired Marina Farfán, who seems to have no contact with any of her co-workers and who, we soon learn, is virtually friendless in the world outside.  In the absence of candidates to accompany her to Playa Salamandra, Marina offers to take her sister Lucía but the plan disintegrates when the latter tries to persuade Marina to give up her own ticket so that Lucía can use the holiday as an attempt to repair her failing marriage.     Then Marina bumps into an awkwardly affable man called Victor Mina, who introduces himself as a former classmate.  Although she doesn’t remember him, Marina fastens on Victor as a prospective partner on the dream holiday.

    In terms of the events of the story, Blue Eyelids is about two singletons, brought together by their loneliness.  The movie describes the ups and downs of their developing relationship, framed within the quasi-fairytale told by Señora Lulita.  In fact the film, the first feature directed by Ernesto Contreras and written by his brother Carlos, is much less conventional than that implies.  Marina and Victor may both be solitary but they’re far from made for each other.  At first sight, he looks older than her; you look closer and can believe they were at school together.  (It’s hard to tell their ages – presumably mid-thirties: the Contreras are saying that lives like these may have progressed a fair way in years without much happening in them or anyone noticing.)  The early stages of the courtship are torturously slow-moving. (The narrative is also becalmed by repeated still-life interiors, with or without Marina or Victor in them – these compositions are held so long they become self-consciously inert.)  Contreras cuts between the two characters, doing the same things in their separate apartments – masturbating, showering, quoting lines from ‘Blue Eyelids’, the romantic film they’ve recently seen together (and with Marina applying blue eyeshadow as part of her preparations for their next date).  These juxtapositions are odd – pat in conception but unsettling because they don’t give a sense that Marina and Victor are on the same wavelength.  In one other and major respect, the two protagonists certainly don’t match up.  The man’s part is better written and, partly as a consequence, better played than the woman’s.

    Enrique Arreola makes Victor’s isolation very convincing – and alarming because there’s no obvious reason for it.  This man is shy but amiable, evidently thoughtful.  In his halting conversations with Marina, Victor, who works for an insurance company, keeps asking if she remembers high-school contemporaries.  He mentions at one point that in those days he had a girlfriend and friends among the boys too – now there’s no one.  Victor invokes schooldays with a baffled awareness that that’s where social and sexual possibilities stopped for him.  Victor is nothing special to look at, credibly forgettable – yet Arreola, a powerful naturalistic actor, illuminates his ordinariness.  He shows you the sad disjuncture between Victor’s strong sexual desire and his lack of the social skills needed to build a relationship.  Victor is not just short of things to talk about; he’s hideously aware of the abysmal silences that keep opening up as a result.  Arreola gives a superb performance.

    As Marina, Cecilia Suárez is no one’s idea of a plain Jane and she makes Marina too magnetic.  This woman isn’t mousily inconspicuous – she’s closed off in a rather disturbing way.  When they go dancing, Victor is very believably overeager.  He’s so out of practice socially that he completely mistimes what he thinks are the right things to do.  Marina, in contrast, seems relatively relaxed and remote – more easily able to watch other people having a good time, at a distance from them and from Victor.  The Contreras brothers tend to cut away from scenes at the point at which they become challenging to develop:  when the couple have an unplanned hour to kill at the cinema; in the interval between their dancing together for the first time and going back to Victor’s apartment; most crucially, when Marina eventually decides to go to Playa Salamandra alone, leaving Victor behind.  Because Enrique Arreola has made Victor’s loneliness so compelling, the fact that we don’t see Marina away on holiday isn’t too much of an omission:  Victor is the main focus of our interest by this stage.  But when she asks him to forgive her and he meets her at Mexico City airport, it’s a copout to have Marina voice an explanation without our hearing it.  Why does Marina remember nothing from her and Victor’s schooldays?  Is she concealing memories or has she always been so disengaged that she’s in effect amnesiac?   Marina remains opaque for most of the film:  she seems to be an idea in the Contreras brothers’ mind rather than a developed character.  It’s not surprising that Cecilia Suárez is continuously striking rather than believable.

    Señora Lulita is wittily played by Ana Orfelia Murguía.  (There are good performances too from Emma Dib as her nurse and Luisa Huertas as an old woman who shows Victor round an apartment that he timorously decides not to take.)  The framing device of Lulita’s story, which seems designed to give Blue Eyelids the quality of a fable, is, however, whimsically artificial.  This is especially so in the climax to this element of the film.  Lulita is so sick of life and its repetitions that she’s stimulated by wetting the bed – at least it’s something new.  She asks the nurse to free all the birds in her aviary and one of the released birds lands on Victor’s windowsill.  (The appearance of this winged harbinger of the possibility of happiness, just at the moment when he thinks his relationship with Maria is over, causes Victor to think again.)   The film needs the Lulita dimension.  Although it’s soft-headed, it supplies a bit of spine in narrative terms; without it, the picture might be too downbeat to get any kind of audience.   Yet it’s the dark elements of Blue Eyelids that make it absorbing – they’re reflected in the chilly, bluish lighting which Conteras favours (the cinematographer is Tonatiuh Martínez) and, especially, in his judicious use of Ray Davies’ ‘This Strange Effect’, sung by Dave Berry, as the virtual theme song.

    The final scene pulls things together very effectively.  When Victor asks Marina to marry him, she accepts with the same curious affectlessness that’s characterised her throughout.  This happy ending is at best a relief – that the next stage of unhappy lives has been postponed and we won’t see it when it comes.  If you take these characters seriously you can’t believe their marriage will work out any more successfully than the aborted holiday for two, and Marina and Victor know it.  When, early on, she resists her sister’s scheme for depriving her of her prize, we get a blast of Marina’s determination to have what she thinks is rightfully hers – whether or not she’s likely to enjoy it.  There’s a sense that, in saying yes to Victor’s proposal, she’s driven by the same impulse.  This is one moment where we get a coherent (uncomfortable) sense of what makes Marina tick.  As for Victor, he’s clinging to the wreckage and pragmatic enough to realise it makes no sense to let go.  It may be the weaker parts of his film – the artifice and evasions – that Ernesto Contreras has to thank for its success.  It’s still good to see the international breakthrough of the picture, which has been showing throughout this month at BFI.  It’s a genuinely unusual description of the psychic consequences of solitude.

    20 May 2009

     

  • Blow Up

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Michelangelo Antonioni (1966)

    Most of the time, it’s hard to get beneath the thick patina of forty years of celebritised permissive society in order to realise why Blow Up was notorious, either for sexual explicitness or for Antonioni’s lofty condemnation of the disengaged hedonistic ethos of Swinging London.  Only one of the sexual encounters has any real force at this distance in time – the one between the celebrity-photographer protagonist Thomas (David Hemmings) and Jane (Vanessa Redgrave), a young woman he’s taken pictures of in a park, kissing and larking with an older man.  Jane comes to Thomas’s studio later on the same day and anxious to retrieve the film.  The strength of the scene derives mainly from Vanessa Redgrave’s odd, unpredictable tension – Jane becomes almost threatening once she’s semi-undressed – but also, perhaps, from the fact that a sequence like this, because it was so relatively rare in 1966, was likely to be more carefully conceived.  The image of Jane, wearing a skirt but topless except for a scarf, is unusually erotic.  (The other side of this carefulness is that Redgrave’s breasts are protected from the camera more than those of lesser-known actresses in the cast.)    Blow Up seems to have aged best as an interesting record of contemporary sidestreets and the people walking in them – or at least the passers-by who are incidental rather than consciously part of the design.

    The film remains a puzzle in various ways.  The meticulous visual compositions – the cinematographer was Carlo Di Palma – often draw attention to themselves as just that (and only that).  Is this supposed somehow to reinforce the presentation of the photographer as an amorally egocentric voyeur; or is Antonioni suffering from the same condition as Thomas to such an extent that he doesn’t see the irony?   Is the disconnection between the actors’ magnetism as images and their neutered, awkward vocals – they often sound dubbed – an integral part of the glittering-on-the-outside-dead-on-the-inside scheme of Blow Up?  Or is it that the director lacks an ear for the nuances of spoken English and can’t hear how wooden many of the line readings are?    This is a problem to some extent even with Hemmings – although he’s physically very convincing as the photographer at work and on the move, and he’s strong enough to carry the film.  In retrospect, his physical suitability for the part not only makes Thomas an iconic image of the time but also has a sad ephemerality – given how heavy Hemmings got in middle age and how young he was when he died (sixty-two).   A sub-mystery is that Sarah Miles, as one of the girls in Thomas’s life, gives a performance that’s tolerable – perhaps because her inherently loony quality (never enough to help her interpret a proper hysteric) gives a pleasing edge to her zombified role here.

    Whether or not these elements are intentional, they’re effective in unifying the material.    The famous core of the film – Thomas enlarging photos of what he accidentally caught on camera in the park until the images reveal nothing – is a long time coming but worth waiting for.  It’s absorbing and scary.   From the point at which he goes back to the scene of the crime and finds a (false-looking) corpse, Blow Up seems to go off course in a way that surely isn’t intentional.  The discovery of the body seems to fracture the smooth surface of Thomas’s dispassion.  When he returns home to find the Sarah Miles character having sex, he’s rattled all the more.  This anxiety continues through a tedious episode involving a pop group (played by the Yardbirds), the smashing of a guitar and Thomas being set upon by hordes of clubbers grasping for fragments of the holy relic.  (The sequence redeems itself somewhat when Thomas drops part of the guitar in the street outside, someone else picks it up and then, uninterested, drops it again.)    Thomas eventually gets to find his agent at a stoned party and tells him about the corpse – but when Thomas then says, ‘We’ve got to get a photo of this’, he seems to have reverted to his heartlessly voyeuristic self and you wonder why he didn’t take shots when he found the (shot) man.  On his return to the park the following morning, the corpse has disappeared.  This is presented as if deepening the elusiveness at the heart of the film but it seems a reasonable thing to have happened in what is, as Jane reminds Thomas the previous day, a public place.   There can be no excuse for the reappearance in the closing minutes of a cartload of white-faced mime artists (whom Thomas also encounters at the start of the film).  The use of this lot may be eloquently symbolic but says only, ‘Quiet:  continental European art film genius at work’.

    The supporting cast includes Janet Street Porter in an uncredited role – but she was far from the only one here to fail (or decide not to try) to progress with an acting career.    Among the proper actors are Peter Bowles (rather good as the agent), John Castle and Jane Birkin.   Antonioni wrote the screenplay, ‘inspired by’ a short story by Julio Cortázar, with Tonino Guerra and Edward Bond.  The music is by Herbie (in those days, according to the credits, Herbert) Hancock.

    10 September 2008

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