Film review

  • Support the Girls

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Andrew Bujalski (2018)

    This time last year I hadn’t heard of either Regina Hall or Regina King (though I had, without realising it, seen King in small roles in Boyz n the Hood, Jerry Maguire and Ray).  Both actresses, who are in their late forties, received plenty of praise and prizes for 2018 films.  For me, Regina King’s gongs for If Beale Street Could Talk, culminating in a Supporting Actress Oscar, amounted to the most mystifying run of acting awards success since Patricia Arquette swept the board for Boyhood a few years back.  Although King was good in Beale Street, I didn’t think she gave even the year’s best performance by an actress called Regina in a supporting role:  that came from Regina Hall in The Hate U Give.  The latter also made her mark by becoming the first ever African-American winner of the New York Film Critics Circle award for Best Actress, for her work in the writer-director Andrew Bujalski’s Support the Girls.

    The film, set in Texas, is a workplace comedy-drama.  Since the workplace is one that doesn’t (as far as I know) exist in Britain, it takes a little while to get your bearings.  Regina Hall plays Lisa, the manager of a ‘breastaurant’, a sports bar staffed by scantily clad waitresses.  The place is called ‘Double Whammies’ – a fictional name but credible enough:  as the IMDb ‘Trivia’ notes for Support the Girls confirm, across the road from ‘Double Whammies’ is a rival outlet called ‘Twin Peaks’ – an actual breastaurant chain.  Lisa is not only affable and competent putting out one fire after another; she’s also tenaciously, almost delusionally upbeat about the set-up where she works.  Her self-appointed role as den mother for the young waitresses has brought her into repeated conflict with her incompetent boss Cubby (James LeGros).  Most of the movie’s action takes place within the space of a few hours that bring tensions to a head and Lisa’s determined optimism to breaking point.

    The names in the opening credits appear in Day-Glo colours and are written in many different hands – presumably the cast’s and crew’s own.  The brightness and variety of the titles contrast sharply with the grey impersonality of the Texan highway against which they appear, alongside which Double Whammies is situated.  The contrast predicts the film’s tonal range.  Support the Girls is never short of humour and the tacky setting is hard to take seriously but there’s less and less to laugh about.  House rules are posted on the wall of the bar.  The first of these is ‘NO DRAMA’ and the problems and conflicts Andrew Bujalski describes don’t at first seem big enough to sustain a feature-length story (though this isn’t a long film:  91 minutes).  Yet Bujalski uses the framework of a single working day – a day both typical and exceptional – very effectively.  He does develop a drama and he expands its themes.  What starts as an agreeably observant comedy grows into a more troubling cultural picture.

    The team of waitresses includes bubbly Maci (Haley Lu Richardson), clueless new recruit Jennelle (Dylan Gelula) and single mother Danyelle (the rapper Junglepussy – real name Shayna McHayle), who brings her unwell son McKray (Jermichael Grey) to work with her.  With white waitresses in a majority, it seems reasonable to assume that Bujalski is concerned with economic rather than racial issues until we learn that Double Whammies regulations stipulate no more than one black waitress on any one shift.  What’s more, Regina Hall’s unactressy command and Junglepussy’s distinctive presence combine to ensure the story is principally about working women of colour.

    The boy McKray is probably the most positively drawn male character (Jermichael Grey is good in his scene with Hall), followed by two police officers who are bar regulars (Jesse Marshall and Luis Olmeda).  Others include – as well as the foolish, irascible Cubby – Lisa’s miserable, uncommitted partner Cameron (Lawrence Varnado) and Chris (Sam Stinson), the brutish boyfriend of a waitress called Shaina (Jana Kramer).  Double Whammies’ passing trade includes a fair share of male ‘deplorables’ but Bujalski doesn’t give the men in the story an unfair deal.   He implies their lifestyle, like the women’s line of work, is largely dictated and constrained by economics.

    Double Whammies is an apt name for the place, beyond the sexual innuendo.  The girls are expected to show themselves off but according to the ‘four B’s’ – ‘Be responsible, be informed, be friendly, be sexy’.   That means no relationships with the clientele – a rule that Maci disobeys by going with a much older man (Gerald Brodin).   The rules also prescribe no tattoos on employees:  Krista (A J Michalka) flouts that one with a large, prominent image of the basketball player Steph Curry on her exposed ribcage.  The sporting highlight in the bar on the day in question is a televised boxing match, though the cable TV is on the blink.  When Danyelle sashays over to an overweight, late-middle-aged man and sits beside him as he eats his meal, he sharply tells her to ‘stop shaking that thing – I’m here for the burger and the fight’.  She gets up and moves off sheepishly.  It’s one thing having to flaunt yourself for a living – a double whammy to be told, when you do, that you’re getting in the way.

    By this stage, Lisa is no longer in charge.  Cubby fires her for organising an off-the-books car wash (with the slogan ‘support the girls’) to raise legal funds for Shaina, who has hit the abusive Chris with her car and is now taking refuge at Lisa’s house.  When Lisa returns there, she learns from Shaina – it’s a series of last straws – that Cameron has moved out, Chris has moved in and Shaina will use the car-wash proceeds to pay her boyfriend’s hospital bills.   After retrieving the money, in spite of Chris’s threats, Lisa returns to Double Whammies to say her goodbyes.  Maci and Danyelle, shocked and angry that she’s lost her job, sabotage the cable and the boxing coverage, and get themselves sacked too.  Fights break out.  A gun is fired.  The après-Lisa-le-déluge chaos is a bit overdone but Bujalski, by biding his time, just about earns this injection of incident.  Throughout the film, some gags work better than others but his direction is alert and well judged.

    Double Whammies is under increasing pressure from the developing ‘ManCave’ chain.  In the skilfully ambiguous conclusion to Support the Girls – it’s a postscript and a climax – Lisa, Maci and Danyelle go for job interviews with this growing force within the brestaurant industry.  It’s both heartening and depressing that Lisa’s chirpy, numbingly corporate interviewer (Brooklyn Decker) reveals that she herself has graduated from the ManCave waitress corps to power-dressed executive status.  Lisa, Maci and Danyelle trying to stick together as a team might seem to be pushing the working girl camaraderie theme too far but Bujalski undercuts this incisively.  After they leave the ManCave offices, Lisa apologises to the two younger women for bringing their previous employment to an end.  Danyelle replies, ‘It’s not your fault we’ve lost our shitty jobs – anyway, there are plenty of other shitty jobs out there, like the ones we’ve just been interviewed for’.  All in all, this is one of the best original screenplays of the last couple of years.

    The trio sit out on a rooftop overlooking the highway, and drink from a bottle that Maci nicked from Double Whammies.  Dutch courage enables Lisa finally to join the other two in cathartic screams in the direction of the highway.  This is getting to be a popular device in the films I’m currently seeing (cf Cronofobia) but it has to be said these screams are impressively loud and sustained.  The distant traffic is no competition.

    2 July 2019

  • La Cérémonie

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Claude Chabrol (1995)

    An adaptation of the 1977 novel A Judgement in Stone, La Cérémonie appears to be the first piece of cinema based on a Ruth Rendell work to be made by a continental European director.  (Pedro Almodóvar’s Live Flesh followed a couple of years later.)  Alongside George Baker’s characterisation of Inspector Wexford in the long-running television series, Claude Chabrol’s film is also one of the few screen interpretations of her work that Rendell publicly commended.  The screenplay, by Chabrol and Caroline Eliacheff, relocates the story in rural Brittany.  It also adjusts the relative size of the main roles.

    In Rendell’s novel, the illiterate maid Eunice murders her employers with the help of an accomplice who, as a social misfit, is also a kindred spirit.  In La Cérémonie, the Eunice character and the accomplice character – Sophie (Sandrine Bonnaire) and Jeanne (Isabelle Huppert) respectively – are more of a double act.  Chabrol’s equalising of the roles and description of the pair’s behaviour behind closed doors combine to give La Cérémonie a faint whiff of Jean Genet’s The Maids.  Jeanne is not, however, a domestic servant but the local postmistress and Isabelle Huppert is significantly older than Sandrine Bonnaire – factors that turn Jeanne, rather than Sophie, into the prime mover in their relationship and actions.

    The acting is strong and the story told with verve but the film has a flippancy that’s most unlike Ruth Rendell and which makes her admiration for La Cérémonie something of a mystery in itself.  Chabrol skewers the entitled complacency of Sophie’s employers, the Lelièvres, but the climactic killing of all four family members doesn’t amount to subversion of the social order.  The businessman paterfamilias Georges (Jean-Pierre Cassel) is such a prat that he wears an evening suit and bow tie in his living room to watch a TV transmission of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, with his wife Catherine (Jacqueline Bisset) and their late-teenage children Melinda (Virginie Ledoyen) and Gilles (Valentin Merlet).  (In fact, Gilles is Catherine’s son and Melinda Georges’s daughter from previous marriages.)  The opera music drowns out the noise that Jeanne and Sophie are making in the kitchen.  Their intention seems to be to trash a few of the Lelièvres’ possessions rather than the people themselves:  when they start mucking around with Georges’s guns in the kitchen, they’re not intending to use them.  The first of the homicides – the killing of Georges – is spur-of-the-moment.  The remaining three are a matter of consequential action.

    According to Wikipedia, Chabrol ‘jokingly called [La Cérémonie] the last Marxist film’ and jokingly is all too right.  What comes across more than a political message is the arbitrary nature of key events in the plot.  In the first scene, Catherine, who runs an art gallery, meets Sophie in a café to interview her for the maid position.  Sophie’s stiff, laconic answers to questions are so disquieting that I was never clear why she got the job.  It seemed Catherine must be desperate to get a live-in maid without delay but that didn’t fit with the later revelation that the family hadn’t had one before (and aren’t sure even what to call Sophie).  A moderately amusing subplot revolves around Jeanne’s involvement in the local church, and attitude towards the pompous priest (Jean-François Perrier) and his acolyte Mme Lantier (Dominique Frot), whom Jeanne especially reviles.  After killing the Lelièvres, Jeanne leaves the family’s mansion ahead of Sophie and is killed by the priest’s car, in which Mme Lantier is a passenger.  The driver solemnly informs the police ‘it was fate’.  It’s hard to see that this amounts to more than an ironic flourish.

    At this distance in time, Isabelle Huppert’s theatricality seems uncharacteristic but her trademark speed and impatience are in evidence and repeatedly deliver.  With large, soulful eyes in a gaunt, pale face, Sandrine Bonnaire is a compelling camera subject.  She makes Sophie largely affectless – almost android – except in registering shame at her illiteracy.  The two leads are strongly complementary.  Sophie and Jeanne are given matching pasts.  Each was suspected of responsibility for a death – Jeanne her child’s, Sophie her disabled father’s – but there wasn’t enough evidence to convict either.  Their backstory naturally sets up expectations but the narrative, entertaining as it is, isn’t going anywhere exciting until the shocking finale.

    At one point, Catherine and Gilles watch a film on television – ‘a good one’, she assures him.  Someone in the NFT3 audience laughed emphatically when the TV screen images appeared – to tell the rest of us he could identify the movie and that it was one of Chabrol’s.  I didn’t recognise the film but I could see Michel Piccoli was in it and knew he’d worked with Chabrol – so that the one-upmanship laughter was confirmatory rather than excluding.  I’m not sure whether Chabrol meant this in-joke as a tongue-in-cheek suggestion that his work is part of the same self-satisfied haute bourgeoisie culture as Don Giovanni or whether he was being more thoughtlessly ‘playful’.   Whichever, I think the inclusion of the clip (from Red Wedding (1973)) epitomises what I dislike about La Cérémonie.

    28 June 2019

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