“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.

“Vuil Wasgoed” Doesn’t Remove Stains

Vuil Wasgoed, the new film by Morné du Toit, who also directed this year’s Nul is nie niks nie, is a particular cinematic experience that is peculiar to summarise and describe. It’s an enjoyment without joy, a stylishness without style, a sentimentality of little sentiment, an assured thought with no thinking, calibration without precision, and velocity without force. It is, in other words, the best of South African cinema. So obsessed are so many of our country’s filmmakers with the dazzle and the cultural and commercial heft of the international mainstream that most of their efforts seem like dizzy attempts for them to either match up to or ostentatiously remove themselves from the treads and territories of general Hollywood fare.

Read what others had to say about Vuil Wasgoed.

Du Toit is in the aspirational camp. The script was written by Bennie Fourie and Bouwer Bosch, who also both star in the film, and du Toit finds just the right cinematic cliché to match the bathos and banality of every gag and every signifier they give him. The script does not develop much of its threads beyond their initial conception, and the direction doesn’t find or even look for anything beneath its colourful surfaces. Production values on South African movies are on the up, and have been over the past decade, and there’s a terrific professional gloss to this film; every scene is brightly lit, each character is fastidiously dressed and made up, each setting is meticulously prepared, hard work obviously went into creating a sound design and musical soundtrack to support the images, and the various production assistants and teams have paid clear attention to much of the detail included in the film. Each scene is diligently calibrated to fill out a mood, convey a plot point, or thrash out a few self-satisfied wisecracks and pratfalls.

Beauties and Beasts

“Moonlight”

Watching Barry Jenkins’s new feature film Moonlight is like being present at the very creation of the film – not just watching the scenes and performances being captured on camera, but witnessing the conception of it inside the director’s mind. He has filmed and presented it with such spontaneity, and with so thorough a transference of deep subjectivity, that, as François Truffaut once wrote of the films of Renoir, I had to watch it in a theatre a second time just to see if it would turn out the same way. Each shot we see is not merely the canny illustration of burning experiences being depicted and fierce emotions being expressed, but is itself the very expression of them, wrenched from the director’s mind, and arising naturally and spontaneously out of the situation of it being filmed and edited.

Take, for example, the scene playing about halfway through the middle of the film’s three chapters, in which the mother of the main character, Chiron, played by the remarkable British actor Naomie Harris, anxiously greets her son when he gets home one afternoon, and asks him for money (the implication is clear that it’s for more drugs, to feed her addiction). Jenkins has made clear in a large number of interviews and press statements that Harris’s character, Paula, as written by him and his co-writer Tarell Alvin McCraney and as filmed by him, is based in large part on his own mother. Her scenes in the film play with an especial and tremulous immediacy, and this particular one stands out for a peculiar visual invention as well – Jenkins, in the moment of filming the actor’s performance, got her to play it looking straight into the lens, and shot it at the higher rate of 48 frames per second. (Almost all video you see is shot at 24 frames a second; the heightened speed is a new industrial technological advance, notably used to shoot Peter Jackson’s recent Hobbit trilogy.) The result has the effect of an unnerving and rare proximity to the figure onscreen, intensifying her essence while simultaneously rendering it more opaque. Indeed, throughout the film, Harris’s performance is perhaps the most intricate (while Janelle Monáe takes the crown for distinctiveness, Trevante Rhodes for tender sensitivity, and Mahershala Ali for grandeur).

Money matters

I was shocked to read that Kalushi: The Story of Solomon Mahlangu, Mandla Dube’s directorial debut, cost more than R20 million to make. This was reported in an article from January by Gali Mbele in the Sunday Times. The figure is particularly dismaying because I know that no narrative South African film has ever grossed that much money at the box office; Kalushi, which is by no means a record-breaking film, couldn’t hope to gross that much, and, since many deductions have to be made for expenses and other agreed costs, as well as the distributor’s and theatres’ portions of the income, will never make back that huge budget. (So far, Kalushi has grossed about R1.2 million in theatres.)

It drew my attention to the financial matters of film-making in South Africa. How easy is it for a first-time director, such as Dube, to secure the resources he needs to make his film? Does it differ between different kinds of films? How much easier is it for experienced directors with careers and reputations behind them? Perhaps even more importantly, how does this supposed struggle for funding and whatever sources for funding as may be found affect what ends up on the screen? Mbele reports that the main institutions that film-makers can apply to for financial support are the National Film and Video Foundation, the Department of Trade and Industry, the National Lottery Commission, the Industrial Development Corporation, and the Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal film commissions. So far as I can tell, each of these entities is owned and operated by the state; to what extent is the state being allowed – by grim financial necessity – to intervene in the works of local film-makers?

The Already-Tame Shrew

“Mrs Right Guy”

One will have noticed a new candour and delight regarding life’s amatory pursuits at the cinema this week. It is, however, unfortunate for South Africans that this carnal interest should be taken up on their screens when daytime thermometer readings in Gauteng drop to 20°C – well below what is considered acceptable in Pretoria, and certainly not the kinds of temperature at which young men and women are itching to cast off their clothing. The two films that opened on Friday, the 3^rd of June, that are so keen on the tactile particulars of love seem to have only that in common, though; their differences are vast and the diversity of cinema seems just as healthy nowadays as its sexual drive.

The first of the two is a new South African romcom (the other is Luca Guadagnino’s A Bigger Splash, but more about it later), starring Dineo Moeketsi (from e.tv’s Scandal) as the shrew Gugu who was abandoned on her honeymoon by a ratbag husband and left to settle, by way of menial labour, his massive hotel bill. The script of Mrs Right Guy, by Pusetso Thibedi and Cati Weinek, runs us through the usual complaints of men only wanting one thing from a woman, and women wanting everything else from a man. Gugu feels that dating is being forced to choose between compromising herself and alienating all romantic prospects. It’s a sorry state, in short, and Gugu only exacerbates matters as she tears into the men who hit on her in the street, and swings at the hopefuls making eyes at her best friend, Anna (Thando Thabethe). Enter the decent and strapping Joe (Lehasa Moloi), a chicken farmer and neighbour who helps Gugu by repairing her car, and the polished and cocksure Dumile (Thapelo Mokoena), the new boss at the advertising firm where Gugu and Anna work. The discerning reader knows where this script is headed, and could also plot fairly accurately the route it’ll take to get there without any further description from me.

The Year in Movies – 2015

“Trainwreck,” The Back Row’s film of 2015

The year 2015 may be remembered in future decades as a hinge between previous years’ suppressed but rising unease throughout society, and the movements of turmoil and upheaval in local spheres as well as on a global scale. The importance of the UN Summit in Paris for our global environment has been stressed, and the crises that broke out in the latter part of the year reminded us of how far our world is from where we’d like it to be. There are reportedly more refugees now than there have ever been since the end of World War II, and the threat of attacks from ISIL, or Daesh, has stoked terror and reckless urgency in any number of the world’s democracies. In America, a handful of presidential candidates (largely but not solely Donald Trump) have succeeded in stirring up the most sickening strains of racism and fascism in numerous enduringly racist pockets of the West; and in South Africa, we face our own turmoil in a clear low point in satisfaction with and confidence in a disappointing government controlled by what was once an ardent liberation organisation – a discontent whose definitive moment of 2015 can probably be identified as the student protests in October and November, shutting down universities and government systems nationwide in an outpouring of frustration with the ruling political factions and a fervent desire for change.

This blog has not turned into my political column – my chief concern here is still the movies and their aesthetic considerations – but it’s important, I feel, to provide some historical context when reflecting on the year as it’s represented in its movies. The cinema, across all its disparate subject matters and radically diverse styles and treatments, is about life itself, and something of the world and the time often finds its way into the very best of art, whether by design or not. Here I give my selection of the best films of this year – noting that there’s a great deal I didn’t see – and hopefully, if you’ve seen them as well, you’ll recognise the intimations of life contained in them.

Of course, another way life finds itself reflected in the good movies of the year – usually far more obvious to viewers – is when directors include details and experiences of their own personal lives in their films. My selection of the best movies of 2015 are all made by directors who bravely and deftly created personal images in their work, often unconsciously finding expression of the deeper and more tender parts of their inner selves. What makes cinema into an awe-inspiring art form, and what makes a film great, is the discovery of inner lives, psychic murmurings, and emotional and intellectual stirrings in physical detail, visualised and captured with both perception and skill. The great movies are the ones that reveal the essence of a creator’s distinctive personality, the ones where style is not an art-conscious gimmick or ideological tactic, but the exterior protraction of an artistic identity.

Off the Rails

“Trainwreck”

Subway smooches

Having been newly appointed as a journalist for the Entertainment section of Perdeby (the campus newspaper for the University of Pretoria), when I watched Judd Apatow's new film Trainwreck, I was delighted to have finally found a mainstream movie with a main character to whose career I could relate, in more than an entirely broad and admittedly minimal sense. Though I have certainly seen movies before now that feature journalists - and loved some, such as All About Eve, which features a journalist doing pretty much the job I shall be doing (a little less sardonically than he, I hope) - I wasn’t a journalist when I watched them. Now, having started a blog and having been assigned the task of writing articles on certain topics by certain dates, I have a new appreciation for the work done by Amy Townsend (the protagonist of Trainwreck, played by Amy Schumer), and some sympathy for the difficulties she faces doing it.

I definitely must state, for the shorthand record, that my delight in Trainwreck is not mainly because of this coincidence in job titles, nor was it the main source of my excitement to see the film. That would be, firstly, that it is directed by Judd Apatow, one of my favourite and one of the finest filmmakers active in mainstream cinema today, and, secondly, because it stars - and was written by - Schumer, no doubt the funniest and most talented young lady currently working in American comedy. And the film delivers on the expectations of his and her breathlessly ardent fans: Trainwreck is crafted and polished throughout with Apatow’s remarkable good sense and flair for tone, placing the camera in an optimal position and keeping it there until the frame is filled with his ideas and his images; and the crisp, tremendously funny dialogue and one-liners is worthy of the best of Schumer’s routines and sketches on her Comedy Central show, Inside Amy Schumer.

This is Life

DVD Notes: "This is 40"

Leslie Mann and Paul Rudd in "This is 40"

This is 40 is the “sort-of sequel” to writer-director Judd Apatow’s 2007 feature, Knocked Up. That very funny film stars Katherine Heigl and Seth Rogen as a young, just-promoted television personality and a slacker, respectively, dealing with a pregnancy as a result of a drunken one-night stand. It uses much profanity and dirty-talk to mask great tenderness and unease, and pokes fun at certain aspects of contemporary society, like the bromance, and the fear that young, immature men have of self-possessed women. But Apatow reaches far deeper into a person's life, and into life itself, and this is what often goes unnoticed by most viewers and critics as well.

Paul Rudd and Leslie Mann (Apatow’s wife) reprise their roles of "the other couple" from Knocked Up, Pete and Debbie. A few other characters also reappear, like Jason (Jason Segel), who still openly hits on Debbie, Jodi (Charlyne Yi), one of the girlfriends in Knocked Up and now an employee at Debbie’s boutique, Dr Pellegrino (Tim Bagley), Debbie’s gynaecologist, and Pete and Debbie’s daughters, Sadie and Charlotte (played by Apatow and Mann’s real-life daughters, Maude and Iris Apatow). The film also features performances by other brilliant comics, including Melissa McCarthy, Chris O'Dowd (both of Bridesmaids fame), Lena Dunham (from Girls), John Lithgow (Lord Farquaad in Shrek) and Albert Brooks (Marlin in Finding Nemo) as Pete’s dad. In a category on her own, for reasons known to everyone who’s seen her – which, incidentally, are the same reasons she’s been used in the film – is Megan Fox as Desi, Debbie’s other boutique employee, who works on the side as an escort.