Greta Gerwig’s Beautiful “Lady Bird”

Simply put, Greta Gerwig’s second feature as a director (and her first as sole director), as well as the sixth feature she’s written, Lady Bird, displays a sharp perception and emanates a warm tenderness to an uncommon degree in contemporary movies. This may not be surprising, and yet is something remarkable, because Gerwig has conceived of and executed a story rooted in her own experiences and linked to her own biography. Filmmakers often find new sides to their artistry when filming something from their own experiences, but many of them — perhaps to protect the parts of themselves they see as most vulnerable — end up coating their vision in hazy nostalgia, easy and stereotypical preconceptions, or rigid and unyielding methods of representation. Gerwig avoids these pitfalls, and arrives at a work of authentic and probing thought as well as exquisite emotional insight. If we’re to count it as a directorial début, it’s certainly one of the great ones of recent years, along with Jordan Peele’s in Get Out, and Yance Ford’s in Strong Island. Her work is more than remarkable: it’s beautiful, and accomplished with the whimsical charm and presence, and practically Mozartian grace that we have come to expect from her as an artist.

Lady Bird follows a student named Christine (Saoirse Ronan) — who has given herself the nickname “Lady Bird” — through her final year of high school at a Catholic girls school in Sacramento, California, from the start of her senior year in the autumn of 2002 through to the start of the next year when she arrives at college in the autumn of 2003. It’s not strictly or literally autobiographical, according to Gerwig — none of the events in the film are taken directly from her life — but the connection to actual experiences is both conspicuous and touching. Like Lady Bird, Gerwig grew up in Sacramento, went to a Catholic girls school, exhibited “a performative streak” as she grew up, and went to college in New York City. (Christine is also Gerwig’s mother’s name.) What’s touching is the deep personal care with which she has crafted each of her characters as well as the atmosphere surrounding them and the events they go through. Lady Bird’s relationship and interactions with her mother (Laurie Metcalf) — a nurse, as Gerwig’s mother was — are central to the plot, though scenes with her classmates, her friends, her romantic interests, her father, her brother, and her teachers are not merely subplots, but integral to the main thrust of the story.

Critic’s-Eye View: “Catching Feelings”

A new South African romantic comedy is opening this weekend, comedian Kagiso Lediga’s Catching Feelings, which he wrote, directed, and stars in. I have not yet seen it, but here are other views on the film that I found in various publications. Let me know of any I may have missed and should add here.

Read The Back Row’s review of Catching Feelings here.

In her Channel24 review, Gabi Zietsman awards the film three stars out of five and says that Lediga “goes for a more refined style” than the slapstick gags and vulgar jokes used by other comedians entering movies, “that deals intimately with race relations in South Africa and how fragile masculinity can kill love.”

Lediga … has a smooth approach to such touchy subjects and manages to create a safe space where he can explore these issues without really offending the audience. Both sides are shown to have flaws and strengths, and the story actually follows a tasteful debate around the issues without trying to hide away from the harsh truths …

Although these issues [of white privilege and fragile masculinity] are not unique to South Africa (especially in the US context), Lediga places it heavily in a local context that rings true for our audiences without being offensive. It does come packaged in an academic setting … but Lediga still managed to touch on the educational divide … The jokes sometimes fell a bit flat or came too many at once, which may be a result of Lediga’s comedic background.

I also feel like he could have cast a stronger actress than Pearl Thusi, whose main purpose seems to be to look pretty in underwear … It almost feels like Lediga derides his female characters and makes them far less substantial than the supporting male characters (Andrew Buckland and Akin Omotoso were brilliant), despite being very aware of what toxic and fragile masculinity is.

“Call Me By Your Name”’s Gratifications and Fantasies

As E.L. James arrived at the premise of an extravagant women’s fantasy of romance, sex, luxury, and the accompanying pain, meant to heighten the effects of its pleasures, so Luca Gaudagnino has set up a sumptuous gay fantasy, in the northern Italian countryside, with summer’s sun and ripe fruits replacing handcuffs and riding crops. (In fact, Fifty Shades of Grey director Sam Taylor-Johnson was at one point considered to direct this adaptation of André Aciman’s novel.) But the money is still there, and a lot of it, and even more so the characters’ supposed cultural sophistication. In the place of the self-assured and knowingly desirous Christian Grey, we have Oliver (Armie Hammer), a history scholar who has come to Italy from America to work as the assistant of a distinguished archaeologist named Perlman (Michael Stuhlbarg); the ingénue on whom he sets his sights is Perlman’s son, the precocious twink Elio (Timothée Chalamet). They skirt past each other, and initial romantic prospects are obscured by Oliver’s inscrutable furtiveness and Elio’s self-absorbed self-loathing, but, eventually, a romance buds and blooms, and, for the somewhat isolated and unenlightened 17-year-old Elio, of age becomes just as inevitable a place to come as anywhere else.

Gaudagnino, James Ivory (who wrote the script), and Aciman fill out the fantasy with a huge inherited estate in the northern Italian countryside, a loving family, truly liberal parents, lithe and bare-skinned youths, promiscuous teenagers, constant sunshine, food and drink, old-world architecture, impressionist music, modernist music, Euro pop music, and a freeing period setting of the early 1980s, skirting the arrival in Italy of the AIDS crisis and Thatcher/Reaganite shame. Gaudagnino has meticulously constructed a tone and a mood to serve this fantasy: His carefully selected film stock (just grainy enough to remind you of a sunnier, simpler time), matted colours, attentive and shrewd framing of shots, clever and purposeful cuts, appropriately brooding looks from his actors, and a well-practiced naturalism and simulated playfulness among his young actors are all precisely calibrated to stoke an emotional effect in the audience. The images serve nostalgia and easy desire, and seem almost deliberately devised not to convey ideas. Gaudagnino and Ivory may have had their artistic differences (which is why Ivory ended up not directing, as he had intended to), yet, in Gaudagnino’s canny fabrication of a faux-haute delicacy, Call Me By Your Name seems to have a lot in common with Ivory’s films — Gaudagnino merely deploys a more contemporary (and typically European) art-house consciousness to mitigate any overt romantic indulgences.

My Oscar Ballot – 2018

The Oscars remain the least important thing to happen each year, and not only in the movie calendar. Oscar night is like a depression in significance, except for the cultural and aesthetic value of the fashion exhibited and meme fodder generated on the evening. The results are worthless except in practical ways to the winners: If you win an Oscar, the advancement of your career becomes easier in Hollywood. Okay, maybe there’s another important effect: If a movie wins an Oscar, the industry and its aspirants are likely to try make more just like it. But Academy Awards and actual artistic importance only ever align coincidentally.

My Oscar ballot is the selection of films that I think are most likely to win, not necessarily my favourites — in fact, hardly ever my favourites. I haven’t seen most of the nominated films yet, anyway; the only ones I have seen are Call Me By Your Name, Get Out, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, The Post, The Shape of Water, and Strong Island. Read my own selection of what I found to be the greatest films of 2017.

Ryan Coogler’s Strikingly Personal “Black Panther”

This post won’t focus very much on the significant cultural, sociological, or political aspects of the release and reception of the new Marvel film, Black Panther, which have been set out by a number of writers for other publications in South Africa (and, indeed, across the world). My position of privilege in this regard notwithstanding, I had my own reasons to be excited for the movie when I heard about it: Having seen Ryan Coogler’s previous film, Creed, I judge him to be one of the finest directors of his generation, and I was tremendously eager to see what he would do with the hundreds of millions of dollars that Disney was willing to give him — since other fine filmmakers, such as Peyton Reed and David Lowery, had done wonderful things with similar amounts, and I’m excited for Ava DuVernay’s upcoming A Wrinkle in Time for the same reason.

It’s no news to anyone who’s seen it — nor to anyone who’s heard from anyone who’s seen it — that just what Coogler did in fact do with it is something fantastic. I surmise that it’s particularly difficult for a director to make a strikingly personal work of art within the ultra-budget blockbuster strictures of a studio (and I have no idea whether having made two smaller works previously would make it any easier or more difficult), but Coogler has managed it, and offered up a terrific entertainment together with it.

Critic’s-Eye View: “Inxeba”

Though South African moviegoers are now regrettably unable to see John Trengrove’s isiXhosa-language film Inxeba (perhaps even more so because of it), I’ve thought it worthwhile to collect local reviews of the film so that readers can get a broader view of the responses to it (I haven’t done the same with international reviews, since there’re already very good sites that do that).

Read The Back Row’s review of Inxeba here.

In her review on the Afrikaans culture site LitNet, Reney Warrington calls Inxeba “transformative,” and affirms her seriousness in that description:

With great care and respect, John Trengrove and his team disconnect you from your world, and walk alongside you into a world foreign to most. You are made to wince, to care deeply, even for loathsome characters, and, ultimately, you are left winded by the weight of the patriarchy and the tragic, yet perfect, end. The wide angles and close-ups, the lush landscape and cicadas buzzing, Xolani’s gentle soul versus Vija’s rage, the men singing and telling tales, the silences and cacophony all blend together in a perfectly balanced piece of art. The one element does not overshadow the other – the sign of a great film.

What adds gravitas to the film is Trengrove’s mode of storytelling, what he chose to show or not show. He could thrust patriarchy in your face. He could shock you with blood and guts and shattered bodies. That would be the easy way. Instead, he draws you in, shows you something beautiful and fragile and worth caring for, and then crushes it. It is a sucker punch of note.

John Trengrove’s Highly Tactile “Inxeba”

If the primary worth of direction is to deliver, through images, a work and an experience beyond the dimensions of the script, then John Trengrove’s direction of the isiXhosa-language film Inxeba has significant merit, and is distinguished among South African films for that very reason. The writers — Malusi Bengu, Trengrove, and Thando Mgqolozana, from whose novel A Man Who is Not a Man the film was adapted — indeed supplied a deft and earnestly emotional script, but the final product is far from a mere illustration or fawning enactment; in my view, it’s a brazen, intimate, and personal film, marked with an invigorated visual imagination.

Read other review of Inxeba here.

Trengrove directs in tension with the script somewhat: Where the Xhosa writers (and actors, who surely contributed, if with nothing more than their resourcefulness and spontaneity on set) have something to say about their experiences of the Xhosa initiation camps and upbringing in Xhosa society in general, Trengrove’s priority is on the specific and universal dimensions of the central characters’ story. Though I’m not sure whether it can be called a love story, since true romantic love seems more or less absent from it to me, it has many of the same vectors of experience: illicit desire, sexual attraction, emotional dependence, repression, tenderness, contempt, rage, and the pained tensions of frustrated lives. Trengrove brings an open, forthright, and appreciative outsider’s view to the Xhosa customs he depicts, and films the central characters’ story through a prism of fully realised and keenly felt emotion. The result is a small and tightly wound world of inner and outer experience that threatens to unravel, as the story threatens the characters with the encroachment of outside forces and agents on their individual lives.

The Repugnant Capitulation in the Film and Publication Board’s Rating of “Inxeba”

I hadn’t expected to begin my response to a new local film with more consternation against our state bodies and their interference in South African cinema, but the recent opprobrium of the Film and Publication Board’s ferociously unjust censorship of Inxeba has angered me in excess of my expectations. I wasn’t very much bothered by those protesting the film’s screenings in the Eastern Cape and Western Cape, though I was disappointed to find that theatre managers were caving in to intimidation — but the actions of the national classification and censorship authority were so cowardly, so unjust, and bore such harsh implications for the artists involved in the making of Inxeba as well as other South African artists that I cannot go without declaiming their repugnance here.

The Man and Boy Foundation (MBF) and the Congress of Traditional Leaders of South Africa (CONTRALESA) made an appeal to the Film and Publication Board (FPB) to change its rating of Inxeba with an age restriction of 16 to one of X18 — effectively a classification of the film as pornography. The FPB acquiesced and Inxeba, which was playing at multiplex and independent screening venues across the country, as well as reportedly having been bought by Multichoice to show on BoxOffice, Showmax, and M-Net, is now only allowed to be distributed by licenced pornography merchants and screened at designated “adult” venues. The only explanation that has been offered by the FPB so far comes along with its sudden announcement on its Twitter account, and it’s as repulsively evasive as the method of communication was brusque:

Steven Spielberg’s “The Post” Suits Meryl Streep Too Well

Steven Spielberg’s new film The Post slots neatly into the establishment it purports to monitor, in a routine that belies the processes of journalistic inquiry it supposedly commends. It’s loved by critics, who are, after all, journalists themselves, and who appreciate too readily an assured and accomplished approval of the system. The System in the story is the American presidency, in particular the administrations of Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon; the System within which the story is presented is that of the very hub of Hollywood industry. Spielberg’s style is cultivated from the mechanised forms and procedures of the studio era of movie-making; his methods are faithful to the conventions of the industry; he himself, together with the stars of the film, Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep, represents the core of its establishment; the story itself points to the ostensibly great deed of the head individual of a commercial and political system of its own, who is part of nothing if not of the élite of privilege and power in American society.

Spielberg’s film centres on Katharine Graham’s (Streep) decision to publish reporting on the classified Pentagon Papers in the newspaper her family owned, The Washington Post. Hanks is the headstrong and hardy editor who organises the investigation and reporting, and pushes strongly to publish. Richard Nixon steps in as the villain; his actual recordings from the Oval Office are used on the soundtrack (an actor named Curzon Dobell provides Nixon’s silhouette), and manipulated to cast Nixon in his own archetypal role. The exaggerations and fictions of the film’s plot are obviously formulated to directly connect the story to a comment on the Trump administration and commonplaces about the press’s role in relation to it.

“The Shape of Water” is a Hollywood Classic With Contemporary Politics

The experience of watching Guillermo del Toro’s new film The Shape of Water is like that of buying and eating an elaborately manufactured and fussily packaged epicurean dessert, the kind that upmarket department stores promote in their northern-suburbs branches over Christmas. The lavish presentation may resemble that of haute cuisine, but the formula conforms to industry staples and packs heady dosages of sugar and fat, for immediate gratification and easy consumption.

That comparison is somewhat unfair: Del Toro’s film involved many conscientious craftsmen and many hours of labour, and even the most pedestrian of Hollywood studio productions deal in narrative and concepts, human emotions and ideas — the stuff of which Woolworths doesn’t generally construct its weekly food catalogues. And del Toro knows how to mix in ideas with his sweetener; the only other of his films that I’ve seen is Pan’s Labyrinth (and about half an hour of Hellboy II: The Golden Army), which ran its narrative course through a prismatic view of fascism as well as the full gamut of psychoanalytical insights on childhood fantasies.

Though Pan’s Labyrinth is the film that took a stark view of particular brutalities during the Spanish Civil War and The Shape of Water is the one that centres on a fairytale romance between a dewy-eyed innocent and a colourful water creature, it’s the former which played as an ingenuous Freudian expedition through the preoccupations of childhood, while The Shape of Water has the feel of a more tempered and more adult look at things.

“A Quiet Passion” is the Great Biopic Emily Dickinson Deserves

Emily Dickinson is my favourite poet apart from Shakespeare, and, in my estimation, also happens to be the greatest poet beside Shakespeare. The differences between the Bard and the Belle of Amherst are multitudinous and immense, but they are connected in how I see each of them by two common traits: a Herculean, colossal cognitive struggle with (and, in some ways, triumph over) the cosmos, which marks the distinct originality and greatness of their poetry; and the shockingly (yet, somehow, aptly) minute amount we know of each of their outer lives, as well as the regrettable absence of a chronicle of their monumental inner lives. The character of Shakespeare has already been featured in a small handful of films, sometimes not totally in earnest, but Terence Davies’s assuredly masterful and astoundingly emotional biopic A Quiet Passion features the first appearance of Dickinson on the screen. And, as befits the greatest poet of her continent and one of the greatest in the language, the film is an exquisite and unforgettable masterpiece that — I note bitterly as awards season is underway — has not received the recognition it certainly merits. If it had been released in theatres in South Africa last year, I may well have placed it right at the top of my list of favourite films of the year.

I have only seen one other film by Davies, his first, Distant Voices, Still Lives, from 1988. If that film and this one, his latest, are anything to go by, he is undoubtedly one of the great artists of the time, and has also been unduly neglected and forgotten in the popular media. I had at least hoped we would hear of some or other Best Actress nomination for Cynthia Nixon, who plays Emily Dickinson in the film, and in doing so gives one of the most intense and insightful biopic performances in recent years; alas, the film has been unjustly sidelined. Yet, as frustrating as this may be for those who worked on it, this suits the story of the determined artist who craved acknowledgement and vindication and never got it while she was alive.