Old Yorker

  • Sugar

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck (2008)

    The two writer-directors had a well-deserved success with Half Nelson in 2006.  (On that occasion Ryan Fleck had a single credit for direction; Anna Boden and he shared the writing credit.)   They certainly can’t be accused of trying for a repeat by offering more of the same but the diametrically different Sugar is disappointing.  The main character in Half Nelson, played by Ryan Gosling, was clever and superficially charming but Fleck and Boden set themselves an interesting challenge in trying to engage our sympathies with a protagonist who seemed to have no excuses for trashing his life.   Thanks to Gosling’s acting and the incisive detail which their writing and direction supplied, they succeeded.    The eponymous hero of their new film – Sugar is his nickname, Miguel Santos his real one – is a twenty-year-old from a village in the Dominican Republic.  Playing baseball at a professional academy, he’s already a local hero but his big chance comes when he’s signed up for training with a team in the North American minor league.

    Miguel is impossible to dislike but not much easier to get interested in:  he’s a victim – without a will of his own (or, it has to be said, much personality) – of economic circumstance and culturally-conditioned aspiration.  Algenis Perez Soto – not a professional actor when Boden and Fleck discovered him (playing baseball with friends, according to Wikipedia) – is almost too aptly cast in the main role.  He is strikingly handsome, a fine camera subject (in purely visual terms) and suggests a genuinely sweet nature;  but Boden and Fleck’s decision to make Sugar as passive a figure as this makes the moral of their story too obvious.   Although they’re not strongly individualised, some of the other actors playing Dominican baseball hopefuls have an extrovert self-confidence which might have supplied dramatically compelling resistance to the cultural forces conspiring to thwart the characters in the story.  Miguel has a meekly unassertive quality from the outset – there’s no friction between a vigorous ambition and the circumstances which inexorably overpower him.

    What happens to Miguel feels preconceived.  Nothing that he does makes any difference.  (I assume this is how Boden and Fleck see the situation of Dominicans migrating to what they hope will be big-time baseball.)  In the last scene of Sugar, Miguel – eventually acclimatising to a life in New York where he’s anonymous and can barely make ends meet – goes to a baseball field, named for his hero in the sport, the Puerto Rican Roberto Clemente.  Miguel takes part in an amateur knockabout, watched by a handful of spectators.  All the other players introduce themselves to him by their place of origin (they’re a mixture of Puerto Ricans, Mexicans and other Dominicans) and by the particular North American team they’ve failed to make the grade in.   The moment is instantaneously effective in making the film’s point but the implication is that Miguel epitomises dreams of glory which inevitably result in failure – an implication which Clemente’s own achievements (in an era in which, as the film elsewhere acknowledges, racial barriers to advancement were high) contradict.

    The Wikipedia article on the film explains that Boden and Fleck:

    ‘… wrote the screenplay after researching about many Dominican immigrants who arrive in America to play in minor league towns, saying: “The stories we heard were so fascinating that it became what we were writing before we’d even decided it was our next project”.’

    It seems Boden and Fleck got so interested in their subject that they lost sight of the need to animate it dramatically.  The fact that they’re dealing with a socially responsible, worthy theme may have made matters worse (this also explains why some critics overlook Sugar’s inadequacies).  The people and locations in Sugar are sometimes filmed as if they were part of a documentary – but the film-makers still fall back unimaginatively on the required elements of a price-of-fame story.  Miguel makes an inauspicious start to his first match for Kansas City Knights but, by the end of it, he’s a new star – in just the way that an aspiring singer in a rags-to-riches picture will falter initially but wow the audience by the end of their debut number.  The sexual misunderstandings, the drug use, the phone calls back to his loyal mother and girlfriend in the Dominican Republic are all part of a familiar menu – so familiar that Sugar doesn’t have any surprise or momentum.  (I felt differently about a sequence in which Miguel,m newly arrived in New York, can’t get his subway ticket to work in the machine – but only because of complete empathy with that particular experience.)

    Many of the performances in the smaller parts suggest that the actors have been encouraged to play hyper-naturalistically – but without the material they need to get inside their character.  As a result, the line readings sound artificially dulled – as if the instinct to act in a more conventional style is merely being suppressed.   Although their roles aren’t freshly conceived, Michael Gaston (as the Kansas City Knights coach) and Jaime Tirelli (the Puerto Rican carpenter whom Miguel befriends in New York) are unusual among the large cast in creating characters that seem real and in drawing us in by their skill as performers.  In visual terms (the cinematographer was Andrij Parekh), Sugar often seems merely pictorial.  The shots of landscapes, for example, don’t mean much because they never seem connected to how Miguel (or anyone else) is looking at or feeling in them.   Michael Brook’s score is similarly impersonal – although Boden and Fleck give an emotional lift to the closing stages of the film by playing ‘Hallelujah’ (sung in Spanish) and, especially, the Moby song ‘In This World’ over the closing credits.   Even allowing for the fact that I’m not au fait with or interested in baseball, the sequences of the game being played are uninvolving and don’t build.   Boden and Fleck are clearly concerned to make something more than a sports film – so much so that they don’t bother to provide the visceral excitement that a sports film is naturally so well-equipped to supply.

    Half Nelson was developed from a much shorter piece which had done well on an independent film festival circuit.  As I understand it, the short focused on the episode, retained and pivotal in the longer film, when the teenage girl discovers her teacher taking drugs – and described the complex bond which develops between them from sharing his guilty secret.  As a feature, Half Nelson is stretched pretty thin; it’s certainly no surprise to learn how the material originated.  But the kernel of the picture is strong enough to act as a stiffening agent to the padding.  Sugar is flaccid primarily because it lacks this kind of centre (the fact that the film-makers are working with a bigger budget – and cautiously as a result – may also be a factor).  I’d still go to see whatever Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck come up with next but I hope they realise from this failure that they need to dramatise themes and individualise characters in a film that’s well-meaning social critique just as much as when they’re presenting the portrait of a wilfully self-destructive egoist.

    9 June 2009

  • Stranger by the Lake

    Old YorkerFilm review

    L’inconnu du lac

    Alain Guiraudie (2013)

    All the action takes place in the waters and on the shores of the lake of the title (which is in Provence), or in the adjoining car park and woodland.  It’s early summer but few people come to the lake.   None of them is female.  The men visit to sunbathe and swim and cruise for sex.   The writer-director Alain Guiraudie builds up a strong sense of routine and occasionally suggests a code of conduct.  One man, lying on the shore with another, doesn’t like the way that the main character Franck says ‘Hi’.  He reminds Franck that cruising should take place in the woods, not on the lakeside – not that Franck is trying to pick up the man or his companion anyway.   The two men lying together are both nude:  a high proportion of the visitors to the lake are naturists and most of the characters spend much of the film entirely naked, as they lie in the sun or have sex.   Watching Stranger by the Lake made me realise that the only film I think I’ve seen that’s genre-classified as porn is the first Emmanuelle movie.  I don’t really understand the definitions of hard, soft and intermediate grades of porn but there is more naked flesh and there are more explicit sex scenes in the ninety-odd minutes of Alain Guiraudie’s film than in any other movie I’ve seen[1].  (Perhaps more than in any other movie to date which has enjoyed success on the international arthouse circuit?  There’s certainly more sex here than in Blue is the Warmest Colour, in spite of the greater controversy the latter has aroused.)   Between the bouts of screwing, Guiraudie favours holding a shot for a long time and at some distance from the characters.  (He uses this technique to record the crucial event in the film.)  There is no music – only the sound of the water and, more noticeably, the sound of wind through the trees above the shore.  The confident, unhurried rhythm of the film, in combination with this soundtrack and the images of beautiful landscape, lakescape and skyscape (the cinematography is by Claire Mathon), are absorbing.  Yet it’s the physical and sexual candour of Stranger by the Lake that is its most distinctive quality.

    This is also the first film I’ve seen that realises the frank promiscuity of gay life as described in the novels of Alan Hollinghurst (Andrew Davies’s BBC television adaptation of The Line of Beauty was relatively discreet in this respect).  In spite of their shared watery element, the locale of Stranger by the Lake is, however, nothing like as convivial as that of Hollinghurst’s first novel The Swimming-Pool Library.  Along with Franck (Pierre Deladonchamps), the two most important characters are Michel (Christophe Paou) and Henri (Patrick d’Assumçao).  Franck is immediately attracted to Michel and pursues him successfully.   The sad, heavy, middle-aged Henri is an incongruous figure among the sleek, unclothed bodies around him on the lakeside.  (Henri takes his tee-shirt off a couple of times but never his shorts.)   He also tells Franck that he was married to a woman, who has recently left him.  For all the physical and, in the case of Franck and Henri, conversational intimacy, the men’s relationships don’t exist beyond the lake and its immediate vicinity.  Other than what Franck says to Henri (and, to a greater extent, vice versa) you know next to nothing about the background of the characters.  Franck and Henri, in turn, invite each other for a drink, then they’re going to have dinner together but none of these things actually happens.  (I don’t remember seeing anyone eat or drink during the film.  It’s as if Alain Guiraudie wants to emphasise that sex is the only real satiation of appetite.)   Although you might assume that some of the partners lying on the shore are partners beyond the woodland and the car park, you don’t see evidence of this.  Michel resists Franck’s attempts to see him away from the lake, even when Franck says he wants them to spend the night together.

    When you first see – from Franck’s distantly voyeuristic point of view (he’s high above the lakeside) – Michel and his current boyfriend Pascal (François Labarthe) locked together in the waters of the lake, you assume at first this is another sexual episode.  Even when one of the men calls out ‘Laisse moi!’, you don’t take it as a cry for help – until the pair disappear underwater and only one of them reappears.  Then Michel swims back to the shore, dries himself with his towel, and calmly gets dressed.  The drowning of Pascal is a remarkable sequence:  Guiraudie’s holding the shot throughout manages to reflect both Michel’s chilling composure and Franck’s willingness, so strongly does he want to be Michel’s sexual partner, to continue to watch unmoving.   Alain Guiraudie has said that Franck is something of an alter ego and that he wanted in the film to explore going all the way with a lover.  Michel, a cold-blooded killer, is the embodiment of dark, dangerous attraction.  Franck saw what he did to Pascal but still wants to get closer to Michel.

    The ending of the film is intentionally ambiguous:  Michel has murdered twice more, with a knife, and Franck wanders through the woods calling out his name, frightened but perhaps, even now, still desiring Michel physically.  One of the two knife victims is Henri, who rumbled Michel even without seeing what Franck saw and who, once the police have come to investigate the drowning, tells Michel as much.   When Franck discovers Henri with his throat cut, the latter gasps with his dying breath that this is what he wanted.   In one of their chats, Henri had talked to Franck about different kinds of attraction but it’s a striking feature of this film (as of much of Alan Hollinghurst’s work) that the characters express themselves almost entirely through their sexual drives.  It’s striking too that, even today, a gay artist like Alain Guiraudie seems to want to suggest that playing with fire is an essential and exciting element of male homosexuality.

    The other most significant character in Stranger by the Lake is the detective Damroder (Jérôme Chappatte), who leads the police investigation into the death of Pascal.   Damroder really is a gatecrasher.  He’s always fully clothed (he seems to wear the same clothes every day) and, apart from some eccentric hand movements, is physically quite unremarkable.   Questioned by Damroder, Franck seems much more scared than he ever appears to be about Michel.   When Michel fatally stabs Damroder it’s the film’s most shocking moment but it also makes sense:  he doesn’t fit – he has to go.   By taking out the police officer then the suspicious Henri, Michel is in effect eliminating the main threats to the survival of a sealed-off sexual paradise and this seemed to me the strongest, most subversive element of the film.  Stranger by the Lake isn’t believable in realistic terms.  The prevailing promiscuity of the characters naturally implies that partners are swapped quickly:  if Michel wants to be rid of Pascal why doesn’t he just leave him?   There will be other cops to replace Damroder too and Michel, who’s known to have been Pascal’s partner, is already being questioned about the death in the lake.  Even so, Guiraudie’s single location is very effective in creating the illusion of a distinct, self-contained world.  As I watched Stranger by the Lake, I was conscious of this illusion and felt that it was sustained entirely by the quality of the film-making.  Thinking about it afterwards, the picture felt more lastingly convincing than I’d expected.  (I’m not sure which of those feelings I should place more faith in.)

    Although there are some witty, barbed exchanges along the way, the film depends for its humour chiefly on the less prepossessing but no less hopeful habitués of the lake and woods.  One man (Mathieu Vervisch), after getting what he wants by sucking off Franck, takes his leave with formal politeness.  You don’t feel embarrassed for the naked actors because the bodies most displayed are in good shape and Alain Guiraudie never exposes less prepossessing ones to ridicule.  The nicely underplayed performances by Pierre Deladonchamps, Christophe Paou and the excellent Patrick d’Assumçao complement very effectively the potential luridness of the sex-and-death theme.   At the start, I was worried that it would be impossible to read the white subtitles against the whitish shores of the lake but your eyes adjust.  The English title is much less rich than the French original.  One meaning of inconnu is a freshwater food and game fish:  in their first conversation, Henri tells Franck about a fifteen-foot catfish that’s rumoured to inhabit the lake.  The word inconnu also suggests, of course, not only a human stranger but the larger quality of ‘the unknown’.

    26 February 2014

    [1]  Afternote:  I had, unaccountably, forgotten Derek Jarman’s and Paul Humfress’s Sebastiane when I wrote this.

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