Monthly Archives: July 2024

Naked                          Mike Leigh (UK; 1993;) David Thewlis, Lesley Sharp

viewed Star and Shadow Cinema Newcastle 25 July 2024; ticket £7

Made in those times before actors had to whiten their teeth to get work

The opening shot of Leigh’s ‘Naked’ is a night time tracking shot down a dark barely lit dirty back ally, which shot develops into a hand held sequence in the ally in which we see a man screwing a woman – it looks like rape. The woman pushes him off and the man, who turns out to be protagonist Johnny runs off, gets in a car and drives to London. In many ways the film fails to develop anything beyond the this initial scene, except for Leigh’s script to present Johnny’s thinking as a range of scatter gun cosmic ideas delivered to his hearers as combative aggressive monologues. Johnny doesn’t do dialogue any more than he lets anything get in the way of his sexual proclivities.

Leigh is one of a group of UK film makers in the ‘80’s and ‘90’s who were grounding their scenarios in what was becoming a post industrial society, with traditional male employment closing down and employment seen by a disenchanted post punk working class generation as a degrading scam designed to suppress and kill them.

The core of the script is Leigh’s representation of his two male characters, Johnny and the ‘Landlord’, as living in a ‘male fuckosphere’.

Outside of Johnny’s cosmic rap, sex and sexual exploitation are the focus of the script. The portrayal of sexual relations between women and men is bleak in its unremitting repetition of the tropes of male fantasy. In the scenario every time a woman looks at one of the men, it’s interpreted as being a ‘come on’, an excuse for the ‘Landlord’ to rape and for Johnny to use his aggressively honed ideas to manipulate the situation between himself and his female target. Leigh’s world in ‘Naked’ is centred around sex as death. Johnny at one point asks Sophie: “Do you think women enjoy being raped?” Sophie is not scripted with a reply, which just about sums up the film, in which Leigh gives full expression to a male obsession that women exist to serve and service men. ‘Naked’ communicates itself as a precursor of the Andrew Tait’s blogs as one woman after another is victim to either Johnny or the ‘Landlord’s’ intents and desires.

It’s difficult to make sense of the ‘Landlord’ character who in Leigh’s scenario is a psychopathic serial rapist. What’s he doing in the film? Is he a purely symbolic entity who’s role is to symbolise the amorality of the male British ruling class, who own most of the land? If so his behaviour including rapes are the symptomatic actions of an engrained masculine historic entitlement. But if this sort of arch symbolism was intended by Leigh, it doesn’t sit easily with either his use of everyday settings or his directorial naturalist acting style. Perhaps symbolic gender personation of class wasn’t the purpose of the character, who otherwise can only be understood as a representation of evil in the world, a bad ass presence who’s proclivities are exploited by a script that feeds him a series of suitable women incapable of resistance. In fact given the prominence of the ‘Landlord’ in the film and the violent nature of his role, Leigh’s scripting and direction fail to make any sense of the purpose for the inclusion of this character in the film, besides arbitrary sensationalism or a particular need to express hateful violence towards women on the part of Leigh.

Johnny has two facets to his persona in ‘Naked’. The compulsive womaniser who exploits his penchant for quick acidic repartee to try to beat down or cajole women into bending to his will. Again this type of patter has been elaborated as a softening up technique adumbrated by the current generation of misogynists. Johnny’s style of repartee is generally a sort of assault on the woman victim aimed at asserting male dominance having the last word and breaking resistance.

Johnny’s intellectual/philosophical interests are expressed in ‘Naked’ in the form of long dull monologues. This is most tediously evidenced in the long scene at night in the empty building with the security guard. Johnny’s ideas are drawn from sources such as Vonnegut Boroughs and Ken Campbell’s Science Fiction Theatre of Liverpool to name only sources that come immediately to mind: there were many other sources skimming about the alt world of the ‘80’s and ‘90’s. It is difficult to get monologues to work well in film.   Leigh obviously has no idea how to do it. In particular Johnny’s rapid fire delivery of his chains of thought quickly loses off audience interest leaving little for them to do except, much like listening out the pub bore, waiting for the torture of being talked at, to end.

Looking at ‘Naked’ it presents a picture of a film maker who has come to a dead end. In thought and word and deed. ‘Naked’ feels like a man in crisis using film and the power it gave him as a director/writer to work out and through his inner hidden ambivalences towards women. ‘Naked’ looks like nothing more than the expression of Leigh’s need for some sort of personal catharsis, exploiting his actors for his own purposes.   ‘Naked’ has nothing to say, except to actors who should: beware Film Makers bearing gifts.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

 

 

 

 

Kinds of Kindness     Yorgos Lanthimos; screenplay – Efthimis Filipou (2024; USA) Emma Stone, Jesse Plemens, Willem Dafoe

viewed Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle, 2^nd July 24; ticket £12.25

little ideas on the widescreen

Lanthimos’ ‘Kinds of Kindness’ (KoK) comprises three short films. All the stories have similar and familiar all-American settings, they are all filled out with the same players, but each revolves about a different situation. The three separate scenarios sort of pick up on the ideas realm suggested by the lyrics of Eurythmics number ‘Sweet Dreams’ referencing abuse and manipulation. This rollocking pre-title track is laid over the opening image of a typical aspirational American suburban house/home, complete with its mock classical white portico.

According to Wikipedia, Lanthimos’s original title for the film was ‘RMF’. Which title Lanthimos has said is meaningless in itself and not in reference to anything. Anything, that is, other than empty meaninglessness of such referent signs where multifarious initials (initialism) and acronyms have insinuated themselves into our consciousness as a daily part of our language, effecting even the way we think, or perhaps even the way we are able to think. These semantic ‘shortcuts’ often replace full nomenclature, allowing in a sense a sort of bypassing of the actual or, a dislocation between what is said and what is represented. Any way these shortcuts are very much part of the way we communicate, and each of Lanthimos’ shorts is preceded by the use of the initials RMF as part of the title, each of which titles incorporates the absurd ethos.

So far so good; obscure but witty titles wrapped around a perception. The same cannot be said of the rest of the movie which fails to lead us further into any of the places that Lanthimos and Filipou haven’t already explored, and doesn’t even approach the calibre of ideation expressed in either ‘Lobster’ or ‘Killing of the Sacred Deer’. To the extent that by the time (a rather long time given the length of the movie) Lanthimos presents the last story the impression is of a dull mono–paced experience.

A short intercalcatory note: Lanthimos and Filipou as Greeks have a certain fascination with America in relation to the Founding Fathers huge admiration for classical Greek political and philosophical thought which they incorporated into their constitution. They wrought a constitution based on rationality and democracy and prided themselves, contumaciously, on founding a nation where these attributes would become governing virtues. Of course, the Greeks saw no essential conflict between slavery and these central features of their political culture which of course suited the writers of the American Constitution who were in a similar position and like the Greeks could well rationalise the contradiction. The Greek love affair was further affirmed in American architecture. But what seems to interest Lanthimos and Filipou is the selective nature of the American espousal of Hellenic culture. The Greeks were committed to reason as a principle but the obverse side of their culture was the myth and extent to which mythology and the power of Myth was also embedded in the Greek culture and psyche, a state attested to by Greek dramatists such as Aeschylus and Euripides. In myth there is no reason; simply surrender to fate. The Americans were never able to come to terms with myth as the Greek twin shadow of reason. But it is a necessary shadow.

‘The Lobster’ at least its first half, revolved about the strange representation of distinctly separate areas of the social matrix being compressed into one expressive module. The key idea is that formulaic conformist coupledom (that underlies the moral strictures of suburban USA) is made subject to a regulatory corporate ethos, which in itself is characterised by a absurdist consequential framework reminiscent of Lewis Carroll. Failure to graduate with a partner is ‘punished’ by being transformed into a creature of one’s choice. Hence the title. The second half of ‘The Lobster’ moves into a different narrative prescription, but the first half set within the walls of the shadowy corporate organisation charged with implementing this tortuous partnering regime, is a superb parody and play out of core satirical ideas, wonderfully marshalled by the deadpan acting style.

‘The Killing of the Sacred Deer’ comprises a skilfully contrived scenario in which the main character, heart surgeon Steven Murphy, finds himself being subsumed into myth. In the heart land of the American Dream, the land of the brave and the free, the symbolic home of individuality, the protagonist finds himself drawn down the same ineluctable path that saw Agamemnon kill Iphigenia at Aulis as punishment for killing a deer sacred to Artemis. We in the West have the illusion we are free; but our destiny is to be folded into mythology and variously and in different ways live out the old archetypal responses to life. Myth is not just a story. It is a psychic reality; Lanthimos and Filipou transpose this perception to the sweetly manicured lawns of mid-America.

The short stories that comprise KoK have nothing of the depths of insight of these two earlier movies from the same team. They are light weight re-visitings of similar thematics that all have a derivative element of content. The first story is a parody of Corporate Power – it reprises the core proposition of ‘Lobster’ namely the intertwining of the personal and the corporate in a skein of warped power relations. There are the now familiar absurdist trappings bolted into the scenario but the whole plays out as one dimensional thesis with the acting, locked into functional representation of an idea spectrum, eventually loses conviction, a tendency that pervades all of the three stories.

The second of the three stories like ‘Sacred Deer’ has a mythic resonance.  But in contrast to ‘Sacred Deer’ it is a garbled ramble through its material which is set in the broken life of a cop as he experiences complete mental disintegration. Through its tangled imagery it presents as a potpourri of different fairy tale like themes such as the idea of the double (the form shifting witch) and the allure of human flesh; divine hunger as a compulsive act of either restoration or revenge. It calls to mind old tales such as The Juniper Tree or Hansel and Gretel.

The third story titled ‘RMF Eats a Sandwich’ comes across as merely confused. The action follows the obscure meanderings of two members of a religious cult intent on finding a particular woman who has (unbeknownst to herself) the power to resurrect the dead. The effect intended is parody, which works up to a point, the point being that cults are already parodies of belief systems, and the oppositional humour starts to lose its edge. Otherwise the story struggles to find the conceptual unity that usually underpins the short form and the scenario flails about desperately seeking ‘Susan’, so to speak. At thispoint, the film and in particular the acting, with its use of the same cast who are all locked into representation mode, starts to pale and Lanthimos’ short film tryst looks more a more like a series of little ideas fleshed out beyond their own value.

KoK is to an extent carried by Lanthimos’ understanding of way in which the vistas setting and architecture that characterise suburban America, psychologically mould their populations. Lanthimos’ camera films the main settings, the office suites, the medical and suburban zones as dis-connected from the human characteristics that should define them. The interiors record the flat nature of the interfaces and surfaces: the long corridors the vast interiors have the effect of deflating the personal and inflating the impersonal. The opening shot over which the Eurythmics track is played sees a suburban exterior a house of the American dream, vast with a white columned portico. This is a house of myth, not the house individual achievement.

 Lanthimos fails to match his acute optical perception of American with a script of equal insight.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk