Film review

  • The Art of Self-Defense

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Riley Stearns (2019)

    Mild-mannered office worker Casey Davies (Jesse Eisenberg) is brutally attacked one night by a gang of masked motorcyclists.  He recovers from his injuries and returns to work but decides he needs to be better able to protect himself.  His first thought is a firearm:  he goes to a gunsmith and puts in an application for permission to buy a weapon.  He then happens to see a notice for karate lessons outside a building and inquires within.  For a young American man in Casey’s situation, karate seems a constructive and morally preferable alternative to gun ownership but the black (belt) comedy The Art of Self-Defense, which had its UK premiere at this year’s Edinburgh International Film Festival (EIFF), gradually reveals the dojo to be a hotbed of toxic masculinity.  And although that discovery shocks Casey, it’s not completely antithetical to what he wanted.  As he explains to the quietly charismatic Sensei (Alessandro Nivola) at an early stage of their acquaintance, ‘I’m intimidated by men – I want to become what intimidates me’.

    Casey, the accountant for a small business, is shunned by macho colleagues in the office and almost totally isolated outside of it.  In his mid-thirties, he’s single and seems to have no friends or family.  He shares his apartment with his dachshund.  When he returns there after his stay in hospital, the only message on the answering machine is from his boss, hoping that Casey’s on the mend and reminding him of the strict time limit of full sick pay entitlement.  Casey is teaching himself French and likes the idea of going to Paris.  His music of choice is adult contemporary.  Sensei firmly advises that all this must change if Casey is to become a real man.  He should abandon AC for heavy metal and align himself with a country whose image is more militaristic than that of France – like Germany.  Casey fancies he has a head start because he owns a Teutonic breed of dog but, of course, it’s not the right kind:  a dachshund, Sensei tells him, is a poor substitute for a German Shepherd.  A diligent pupil, Casey is soon learning the language of his master’s choice.  He instructs the barista at the café he frequents, ‘I’ve got a new usual:  coffee – black – with nothing to eat’.  He tells the dachshund, ‘I won’t be petting you any more’.  His decisive, aggressive manner at work startles the colleagues who once treated him with contempt.

    Sensei regrets Casey’s unisex name – ‘very feminine’ – though he doesn’t suggest changing that too.  He takes a shine to Casey from the moment he first enters the dojo, in spite of his standing out as physically unprepossessing beside the other karate students.  Sensei’s faith in the newcomer’s potential isn’t misplaced and it’s a pleasant surprise that the writer-director Riley Stearns (this is his second feature, after Faults (2014)) doesn’t waste much time showing the protagonist as comically inept:  Casey is determined to make a success of the karate lessons and he soon shows aptitude.  (When he proudly earns a yellow belt, he becomes obsessed with wearing one all the time, with jeans as well as his training outfit.  Keen to ingratiate himself with Sensei, he places a bulk order of differently coloured belts so that everyone in the group can follow suit.)  Sensei runs a day class and a night class, and the participants in both are male – with the sole exception of highly proficient, conscientious Anna (Imogen Poots).  Sensei lets her run a regular class for youngsters – boys and girls – but Anna has been waiting a long time for promotion to black belt.  In due course, Sensei confides to Casey that her wait will never be over.

    The basic set-up naturally calls to mind Fight Club (1999); one of the most significant lines in Stearns’s film also somewhat echoes the famous ‘The first rule of Fight Club …’ mantra of David Fincher’s.  When Casey joins the karate class, the camera lingers on a list of eleven rules posted on the wall of the training room but it’s an additional dictum that proves just as important.  Early on, we watch Casey watching a gangster film on television; one man stands with a shotgun over the corpse of another and declares, ‘I didn’t play by the rules … but there never were any rules’.  Once the extent and consequences of Sensei’s lethal tyranny have fully emerged, Casey challenges his teacher to a karate fight to the death.  They face and bow to each other; Casey then pulls out the gun he’s now acquired, shoots Sensei dead and repeats the words from the gangster movie.

    This coup de théâtre has terrific instant impact but its implications are troubling.  Rule 11 on the dojo wall is that ‘Guns are for weaklings’.  Casey knows he hasn’t a hope of matching Sensei’s technical skill in unarmed combat – he takes the weakling’s way out – but there’s more to it than that.  It’s hard to avoid thinking here of the NRA notion that ‘the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is with a good guy with a gun’.  That Sensei is a bad guy without a gun might seem a crucial difference – but the film has by now demolished the idea that martial arts, at least with males in charge, are a morally superior means of looking after yourself.  At this stage in The Art of Self-Defense, we know that the bikers who mugged and beat up Casey were members of the karate night class, with Sensei the main assailant.

    ‘I didn’t play by the rules … but there never were any rules’ turns out to be Riley Stearns’s film-making motto here.  To make the points he wants to make, Stearns jumps outside the hitherto realistic frame of the story.  Sensei’s black robe in the training room and matching biker leathers are two sides of the same coin of corrosive machismo – but the attack on Casey amounts to no more than a demonstration of this.   Stearns relies on the old it’s-a-comedy-don’t-take-it-seriously defence against objections that certain things in the film which make us laugh don’t make sense [1].  Yet he’s alert to the need to deliver a politically acceptable conclusion to which people seriously subscribe.  After Sensei’s death, it’s somehow in Casey’s gift to confer on Anna a black belt and the leadership of the karate class.  The art of self-defence was a lost cause with a man calling the tune but it’s a woman’s turn now.  Anna tells the class that there ‘will be changes round here’ and that it’s possible to be ‘brutally tolerant or savagely peaceful’ (which sounds as densely gnomic as some of Sensei’s pronouncements).

    There’s no doubt that The Art of Self-Defense is clever and entertaining.  I’m damning with faint praise to describe it as the best of the four new films I saw at EIFF but its margin of superiority over the other three (The Captor, Cronofobia and Balance, Not Symmetry) is wide.  Stearns negotiates very adroitly the tonal shifts of his narrative, moving from funny to uncomfortably funny, to horrifying, and back to uncomfortably funny.  It’s only the ending that feels weak.  There are good illustrations of relatively low-grade but still hurtful male aggression:  in the behaviour of Casey’s work colleagues; and in an upsetting scene, shortly after Casey has started karate, when he’s abused and threatened by a thug neighbour, hasn’t the nerve to fight back using the new skills he’s acquiring, and privately weeps in shame.  Even pacifists in the audience will want to see him get his own back on the boor-next-door and it’s a happy moment when he does – especially since it’s the neighbour’s car, rather than the man himself, that’s on the receiving end.

    Jesse Eisenberg is almost too perfectly cast as the nervous, nerdy physical underdog but it’s churlish to complain:  hard to think that anyone could have played Casey better.  Eisenberg is well partnered by Alessandro Nivola:  he’s so meticulously alpha male and in control that it’s very amusing when Casey discovers and utters, to his face, Sensei’s real, very feminine name:  Leslie.  Well though Imogen Poots plays Anna, the character is kept virtually on ice until it’s time for her to serve her final purpose.  It’s not easy to believe that Riley Stearns was making another gender-political point by severely underwriting the only significant female role.

    23 June 2019

    [1] A review of the film by Nathaniel Beller-Brimmer on  the website Edinburgh 49 (at https://edinburgh49.org/2019/06/27/eiff-the-art-of-self-defense/)  supplies a good example of the reaction Stearns wants:  ‘Some of these moments do have some lightly questionable implications … but Stearns deftly stops short of making anything too serious [for these] to be an issue …’

  • Flowers from Another World

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Flores de otro mundo

    Icíar Bollaín (1999)

    The ‘Once Upon a Time in Spain’ strand at this year’s Edinburgh International Film Festival (EIFF) included films by Icíar Bollaín, whose best-known work is Take My Eyes (2003).  Her surprise appearance at the screening of Flowers from Another World was a real bonus.  In a Q&A with the exceedingly enthusiastic Niall Greig Fulton (an EIFF programmer as well as a familiar acting face), Bollaín summarised the dual real-life inspiration for her film.  First, an article she read about a community in rural Spain whose marriageable females were so few that the locals organised a ‘bachelor festival’ – a group of urban women were bussed in for a kind of speed-dating holiday.  Second, a photo Bollaín saw in a magazine of a South American immigrant woman, standing alone, and as if lost, in the Spanish countryside:  how did she get there?  Bollaín also mentioned that the depopulation of rural Spain, especially through migration of women to cities, has continued apace since she made Flowers from Another World.  We often hear that the issues treated in a film of yesteryear are-just-as-relevant-today.  In this case, it seems to be true; but Bollaín uses an important socio-economic phenomenon as the basis for exploring particular (though illustrative) human relationships, rather than in order to make obvious political points.

    She sets her story in Santa Eulalia, a small town in the northern Spanish province of Guadalajara, and focuses on three pairings there.  Marirossi (Elena Irureta) is a nurse in Bilbao, in her forties, divorced with an adult son.  She embarks on a relationship with Alfonso (Chete Lera), a mildly eccentric country mouse who runs a plant nursery.  They start seeing each other at weekends but both are reluctant to abandon the place and lifestyle they’re accustomed to.  Patricia (Lissete Mejía), an illegal immigrant from the Dominican Republic who’s struggling to find steady employment in Madrid, needs stability and immigration papers for herself and her two young children.  Damián (Luis Tosar), a hardworking young farmer who lives with his widowed mother Gregoria (Amparo Valle), is just what Patricia is looking for.  She and Marirossi are among the coach party of women that arrives in Santa Eulalia at the start of the film.  The third featured relationship is rather different.   Local builder Carmelo (José Sancho) regularly spends time in Cuba.  He brings Milady (Marilyn Torres) from there as a kind of trophy fiancée.  Milady is keen to experience life in Europe, less keen on sharing it with the distinctly senior Carmelo, in spite of the all-mod-cons house on offer.

    The film gets off to an excellent start.  As the women’s coach heads to its destination, the conversation and arrangement of the passengers neatly introduce social differences within the group and ethnic hierarchy, with the Dominican women in the back seats.  It’s high summer and the people of Santa Eulalia are out in force:  their exuberant, jubilant reaction to the coach’s arrival is amusingly mystifying unless you know in advance (I didn’t) why the women have come.  The following sequence – a welcoming reception, followed by music and dancing – makes things clearer.  It also includes the first exchanges between Marirossi and Alfonso, and Patricia and Damián.  After a short scene in the Dominican women’s bedroom, which tells us there’s already another man in Patricia’s life, Bollaín moves on at rather startling speed.  In the next scene, Patricia and her two children are living at the farmhouse with Damián and his grimly possessive, distinctly inhospitable mother.

    Agile, economical storytelling is one of the sustained strengths of Flowers from Another World.  The screenplay – by Bollaín and Julio Llamazares, a poet, novelist and essayist whose persisting concerns include the gradual decline of Spain’s rural cultural heritage – is simply and efficiently structured.  The action covers a year, moving through the various seasons and ending with the arrival of the next summer’s coachload of women.   Thanks largely to fine, naturalistic ensemble acting, the film is never less than engaging.  Even so, the episodic narrative is a little underpowered until each of the three central relationships is in crisis.  And because so much here is thoroughly believable, the engineered parts of the plot stick out more.  They accumulate in the tale of Patricia and Damián.

    When her Dominican friends arrive from Madrid for the weekend, their visit brings to a head the increasing tensions between Patricia and her de facto mother-in-law.   It’s hard to believe that Gregoria, well aware of the impending visit, wouldn’t have raised objections beforehand.  After the friends have left, there’s a showdown; from this point on, the older woman starts gradually to warm to the younger.  There’s no stopping this process once it’s begun – even when Patricia is forced eventually to confess to Damián that she’s already married (to a fellow Dominican, the father of her children, who turns up again and demands hush money).  This revelation would have provoked the Gregoria of the film’s first half to vindictive schadenfreude.  But the plot requires that she comes to accept Patricia and her children – so much so that when the understandably aggrieved Damián tells them to leave, it’s his mother who persuades him to change his mind in the nick of time.  The moment when he stops her friend’s car just as Patricia is about to leave, is affecting because the characters have come to matter to us.  But it belongs in a more familiar and formulaic type of screen love story.

    In other respects, though, the relationship is convincing.  Damián is smitten with Patricia from the start.  When she confesses that she’s married, she admits too that she’s been living with him for reasons of practical necessity rather than love, which of course offends Damián all the more.  His rejection of her is upsetting both because his sense of being betrayed is justified and because we believe that, as Patricia insists, she has gradually fallen in love with him.  Bollaín’s judicious treatment of the material’s racial aspect pays off too.  The friendship between Patricia and Milady – women of colour in a white community, one more experienced in Europe than the other – is credible; so too the casual racism directed at Milady in a local bar.  We can speculate that Gregoria’s hostility towards Patricia also has a racist element but Bollaín does well not to make this explicit.  If she’d done so, the mother’s transformation would have been even more implausible.  Patricia and Damián are the only one of the three couples still together at the end of the story.  Patricia’s daughter is seen taking her first communion – with her younger brother, mother, Damián and his mother in the congregation.  They all pose together for a family photograph.

    Rangy Marilyn Torres has an amazing figure and Milady would cut a spectacular one in metropolitan Spain, let alone a rural backwater:  her trademark outfit is a stars-and-stripes Lycra number (one long leg of the pants is all stars, the other all stripes).  College-educated and relatively liberated, Milady spends plenty of time on the phone, talking tearfully to her mother in Cuba and hopefully to a boyfriend in Italy, which is where she wants to get to.  Anywhere outside the small town will do in the meantime.  She hitches a lift to Valencia with a lorry driver (Antonio de la Torre) and stays there overnight.  When she returns to Santa Eulalia, Carmelo beats her up.  She eventually escapes the place thanks to an adoring young admirer (Rubén Ochandiano) but she has no intention of staying with him either, though she flees their hotel room rather guiltily.  That’s the last see of Milady:  she disappears to somewhere in Europe, which makes sense. The Marirossi-Alfonso thread is relatively slender and undramatic but it complements the other two effectively.  They eventually break off contact much more in sorrow than in anger.  The break is inevitable and Bollaín doesn’t try to make it anything else.  As a result, it’s dramatically satisfying too.

    The cast are a mix of professional and non-professional actors – and Bollaín, in what was only her second feature, orchestrates them admirably.  Despite the patchy writing of the Patricia-Damián element, the performances in it are outstanding.  It’s incredible that Lissete Mejía had never acted before; the child who plays her daughter is equally expressive[1].  Bollaín had a good story about the casting of this little girl.  The main child’s part was to be a boy’s but the kid playing him decided after the first day of shooting that was enough so the girl was promoted – a great piece of luck.  In what was his first significant cinema role, you can’t take your eyes off Luis Tosar:  the combination of the actor’s powerful presence and his character’s modesty and shyness, which Tosar plays beautifully, makes you understand Patricia’s deepening fascination with and attachment to Damián.  This film marked the start of Tosar’s rapid progress to becoming one of Spain’s leading actors (he worked again with Bollaín on both Take My Eyes and Even the Rain (2010)).  He’s been joined in that category by Antonio de la Torre who, as the lorry driver that gives Milady a lift, has only a couple of minutes on screen here but still registers strongly.  Pascal Gaigne’s excellent score captures the considerable range of moods and Icíar Bollaín’s enriching sympathy for the people whose lives she describes.

    22 June 2019

    [1] She’s probably not uncredited but I’ve tried and failed to work out from the IMDb cast list her character’s name.  The same goes for Patricia’s friends and husband.

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