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 …’