Film review

  • Black Bear

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Lawrence Michael Levine (2020)

    I was interested in seeing Black Bear because of Aubrey Plaza, in light of her impressive lead performance in Matt Spicer’s Ingrid Goes West (2017).  Not interested enough, it transpired, to watch writer-director Lawrence Michael Levine’s film through to the end.

    At the start of Black Bear, Plaza’s character Allison sits thoughtful on a dock beside a lake.  The screen announces ‘Part One: The Bear in the Road’.  We learn that Allison is a scenarist-director and former actress.  She has come to a creatives’ retreat in the Adirondack Mountains, run by Gabe (Christopher Abbott) and his pregnant wife Blair (Sarah Gadon), where Allison is looking to kick-start her next screenplay.  On her first evening at the retreat, needling conversation between her hosts develops into verbally violent arguments that also involve their only guest – the wife accuses the husband of being sexually attracted to Allison.  Not long after Blair has gone to bed, her suspicions are realised:  Gabe and Allison go for a swim in the lake then start making love.  They’re interrupted by Blair, who attacks Gabe and tells Allison to leave.  Gabe retaliates by shoving Blair to the ground, causing her to bleed.  Gabe orders Allison to drive them to a hospital.  On the way, Allison is startled by a black bear that looms up on the road.  The car swerves to avoid the animal and crashes into a tree.

    Throughout this gruesome evening, Allison keeps professing views and giving biographical details that she then withdraws – leaving Gabe and Blair uncertain of what she really thinks or who she really is.  Blair reasonably finds this vexing but doesn’t seem to suspect, as vexed viewers may do, that the instability of Allison’s identity is connected to her purpose in attending the retreat.  On-screen creative writers of the present day, unlike their predecessors, don’t usually work on a manual typewriter or chain smoke.  They may not even be hard drinkers.  So they’re no longer able to pound the keys, rip a page of manuscript from the typewriter, scrunch it into a ball, chuck the ball at a waste paper bin already full of the things, furiously stub out their cigarette, light up again and reach for the bottle.  A would-be writer in a film will still, almost certainly, be suffering from writer’s block but the loss of those visual clichés leaves a gap.  It’s increasingly conventional for this to be filled by expanding another venerable trope:  the writer overcomes their block by making shameless use of the lives of people around them.  In a film with meta tendencies, this can also entail making the audience unsure whether events occurring on screen are objectively real or only taking place within the writer character’s mind.

    It’s pretty soon clear that Black Bear is that way inclined and Lawrence Michael Levine removes any doubt about it after the road crash.  He gives notice of ‘Part Two: The Bear by the Boat House’; in my case, this turned out to be notice to quit after a few more minutes.  The same trio features but now Allison and Gabe are married, and she’s suspicious that he’s having an affair with Blair.  In this scenario, Gabe is a movie director; the two women are both actresses in his movie.   Gabe may not actually be having an affair with Blair but wants his wife to think he is in order to make Allison’s acting more ‘authentic’.  In other words, the art-imitating-life-or-is-it-all-in-the-writer’s-head stuff isn’t enough for Levine to stretch to feature length; he needs another over-familiar conceit to get there.  The fractious exchanges in Part One, for as long as they remain socially plausible, are intriguing, and well played by all three actors, especially Plaza and Gadon.  In the early stages of Part Two, Abbott, perhaps encouraged by Levine, overdoes the manipulative director’s nastiness, which hastened my exit (from BFI Player).  There’s a detailed plot synopsis on Wikipedia.  Suffice to say, it’s no surprise to learn that the film eventually ‘cuts back to the opening scene, with Allison alone looking at the foggy lake. She returns to the cabin to write, but this time she is seen writing “Black Bear” on the notepad before looking at the viewer’.

    25 August 2021

  • Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!

    Old YorkerFilm review

    ¡Átame!

    Pedro Almodóvar (1989)

    It’s an essential of romcom that the two characters made for each other must get through initial spats and conflicts before heading for their destiny.  In Pedro Almodóvar’s Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! – a singular romantic comedy – there are unusually compelling reasons for the female protagonist to start off loathing the male one.  In the doorway of her Madrid apartment, Marina (Victoria Abril), actress, former porn star and recovering drug addict, is confronted by Ricky (Antonio Banderas), recently released from a mental institution and obsessed with her.  He forces his way into the apartment, tells Marina not to scream and, when she does, headbutts her into silence.  He then tapes her mouth, binds her wrists and ankles, and holds her hostage.  Ricky insists that, once she gets to know him, Marina will reciprocate his feelings for her.  He’s proved right.

    Before taking her prisoner in her own home, Ricky has been stalking Marina at the studios where shooting of her latest film is nearing completion:  ‘The Midnight Phantom’ is a horror movie in which a masked (to hide his mutilated face) and muscle-bound hulk is desperate to win the character played by Marina.  Ricky also tries to attract her – or, at least, her attention.  Wearing a long black wig he’s stolen from the studio props room, he plays air guitar and performs a handstand; Marina is unsurprisingly unimpressed.  He reminds her that, a year or so ago, after he’d absconded from the psychiatric hospital, they met and enjoyed one wonderful night together; she doesn’t remember it or him.  Marina is in pain even before Ricky’s violent arrival in her home.  She has toothache and her addiction to stronger stuff renders conventional painkillers ineffective.  Ricky agrees to take her, handcuffed to him, to a doctor.  After failing to get her prescription at a pharmacy (and tying up Marina once more), he acquires the drugs on the street, assaulting and stealing from a female dealer (Rossy de Palma).  The next time he goes out, the dealer spots Ricky and pursues him on her motorbike.  Her two male companions then beat him up.  On this occasion while Ricky’s absent, Marina manages partly to free herself.  When he returns, his sudden vulnerability is the turning point in their relationship.  She helps to bathe his wounds and they make love.  Instantly and ecstatically, the experience restores Marina’s memory of their previous encounter.

    More than thirty years on, Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! is a dated film in one important respect:  it couldn’t be made now.  Not, at least, without the man who made it getting a very bad, potentially career-ending press.  Even if Almodóvar was cut a bit of slack by virtue of his gay rather than straight male gaze, it would be rope with which to hang himself.  The abusive nature of the set-up and of Ricky’s behaviour is compounded by the camera’s repeated scrutiny of the female star’s exposed body, including a sequence (before the kidnapping) of Marina pleasuring herself in the bath with a toy scuba diver.  The film sharply divided critical opinion even at the time of its original release, and was much more sympathetically received in Spain than elsewhere – as BFI’s handout for this screening, an excerpt from Paul Julian Smith’s biography of Almodóvar, published in 1994, made clear.

    Some of Almodóvar’s own statements about the film, as quoted by Smith, are questionable.  For example:

    ‘When you have nothing, like my main character, you have to force … everything, including love … the character played by Antonio Banderas, is a boy who has spent his life in public institutions.  Orphaned at age three, his whole life [sic] has been an unending trek through orphanages, borstals and mental homes.  When they let him out on the street, Ricki[1] has only (as the flamenco singers say) the night, the day, and the vitality of an animal.’

    And one other thing:  the dazzling charm of the actor playing him.  BFI’s website terms the film an ‘imaginative contemporary variation on the Beauty and the Beast story’.  Wikipedia’s article, echoing this, also places Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! in the tradition of tales, including King Kong and the Spanish Golden Age play Life is a Dream by Calderón de la Barca, in which ‘ the savagery of the Beast is, in the presence of Beauty, tamed by gentler feelings’.  Antonio Banderas’s ‘boy’ (he’s actually twenty-three) is physically very different, however, from these other leading men (and from the title character in ‘The Midnight Phantom’).  His exterior isn’t remotely bestial – this is more a ‘Beauty and the Beauty’ fable – and Ricky, right from the start, is presented as cheerfully, likeably amoral.

    There are echoes of The Collector in his single-minded determination to possess Marina but he’s only a distant relation of Freddie Clegg.  For a start, Ricky has no difficulty attracting women.  In the amusing opening sequences in the psychiatric hospital, he’s summoned to the office of the director (Lola Cardona).  She tells him, solemnly then tearfully, that he’s been judged fit to be discharged.  Her sorrow is immediately explained – Ricky has been her lover during his time as a patient.  His persisting obsession with Marina has had, at one level, a salutary outcome.  After their one-night-stand, as he later explains to his hostage, all his thoughts were about her – a  preoccupation that eliminated his delinquent behaviour.  This impressed the hospital authorities and brought about his release.  His conviction that Marina will return his love, which smacks of typical psycho delusion, turns out to be well-founded because Marina finds him irresistible:  Almodóvar, in effect, asks the question, how could she not, since he’s Antonio Banderas?  As a romantic hero, Ricky is strongly subversive, and the writer-director’s attitude towards him scarcely less so.  Almodóvar is disingenuous in suggesting that he came up with Ricky Banderas in a spirit of social conscience.

    The title of Paul Julian Smith’s biography is Desire Unlimited: The Cinema of Pedro Almodóvar.  The name of the production company set up by Pedro and his brother Agustín in the mid-1980s is El Deseo (Desire).  The first picture they made under the El Deseo banner was Law of Desire.  The unarguable primacy of desire and its essential unscrupulousness, whatever the desirer may pretend, are recurring themes in Almodóvar’s work and just about ubiquitous in Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!   People are sexually needy however much they may otherwise be in charge.  The comically bereft director of the mental institution is followed onto the screen by Máximo Espejo (Francisco Rabal), the aging director of ‘The Midnight Phantom’, who’s confined to a wheelchair following a stroke.  Espejo seems paternally protective of Marina as he bawls out a journalist for uttering the words ‘porn’ and ‘junkie’ in her presence.  It’s not long, though, before we watch Espejo privately and excitedly watching Marina’s porn movies; his dignified wife (Julieta Serrano) is regretfully resigned to her husband’s habit.  As so often, Almodóvar’s décor and costume choices are vivid and exhilarating; the members of his cast, whether or not conventionally good-looking, are all fascinating camera subjects.  The combination of these elements is visually and sensuously engaging – it’s an apt and a potent means of drawing the viewer into Almodóvar’s world of appetency. 

    There’s nothing in the Paul Julian Smith piece to suggest that Almodóvar also claimed to have intended an earnest exploration of Stockholm syndrome.  He, rather, makes Marina a subversive figure, too, through her ambivalence – often implied in Victoria Abril’s ingenious portrayal of her, and fully realised in the film’s climax.  Once they’ve become lovers, Marina agrees to leave Madrid with Ricky and head for the village in which he was born.  When he goes out to steal a car for the purpose, Marina tells him to tie her up again to ensure she doesn’t try to escape.  Her sister Lola (Loles León), who works as a production assistant to Máximo Espejo and has been trying to get to the bottom of Marina’s disappearance, arrives on the scene.  She’s shocked to find Marina bound and gagged – and to learn that she’s fallen in love with the man responsible.

    Loles León’s Lola has an appealing, game-for-anything pragmatism.  It makes sense that, when Ricky doesn’t return to the apartment, she agrees to drive Marina to the village where they assume he has headed.  They assume correctly:  Almodóvar needs Marina to find Ricky mooching sadly around the ruins of the house he was born in.  She runs to him and they embrace, as they would in the final moments of a standard-issue romcom.  This last-minute conventionalising is also reflected, to great comic effect, in Lola’s first remarks to Ricky.  She doesn’t condemn his unusual courtship strategy – as long as ‘You make sure it doesn’t happen again’, and there’s not a word about it to her and Marina’s mother.

    BFI is screening Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! as part of their Ennio Morricone season but the score isn’t one of his best.  Morricone pastiches Bernard Herrmann’s music for Hitchcock pictures so obviously that the result is soon tediously roguish.  The gradually developing romantic theme is pleasant enough but unhelpfully redolent of Cinema Paradiso, which Morricone had scored the previous year.  His contributions are eclipsed by the film’s other musical elements:  Lola’s show-stopping bolero number (‘Canción del Alma’) at the wrap party for ‘The Midnight Phantom’; and the concluding ‘Resistire’, a 1960s Spanish pop song, which plays on the car radio as Lola drives Marina and Ricky back to Madrid to start a new life together.  While Lola and Ricky sing along, Marina just smiles quietly:  she’s no longer well placed to join in with a song whose title and main lyric assert resistance.  This finale is elating, thanks to the enthusiastic singing of Antonio Banderas and, for the second time in the film, Loles León.  Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! is problematic but it’s even more enjoyable.  For the first time in the era of Covid-cinema-going, I kept being aware of grinning under my face mask.

    19 August 2021

    [1] I’ve spelt the name as ‘Ricky’, following the IMDb cast of characters.

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