timeless, jobless, loveless: TIME OUT (L'EMPLOI DU TEMPS)

I'm thinking of Laurent Cantet's TIME OUT, (2001) and how it stole unexpected tears from me when i went to see it one uncrowded early morning at Angelika Film Center (if memory serves me right.)  The film was about a man who escapes from his life of responsibility, all the while keeping up the fraudulent sense that he is a normal person who has somewhere to work and someplace to go.
The time that he spends away from his responsibilites (work) soon broadens to the world of love and family, where he becomes less and less present, living in a free space and time that are seemingly safe from the consequences of the real world.
The joy exhibited early in his time away soon becomes sadder as his world closes in around him.
The loneliness and lies, like the false world of a using addict in denial, are what impacted me like a mac truck.
 Cantet's film progresses , as does the disease of addiction, and the isolation of this world he 's remained in too long becomes more difficult to leave. 
I'm reading a passage written by James McGahern, in an introduction to John Williams novel STONER (1965.)  The following passage pushed me erect in my seat, startled, as I  reflected back to TIME OUT, a film that had been percolating in my mind in recent weeks.
"STONER is also a novel about work, the hard unyielding work of the farms;  the work of living within a destructive marriage and bringing up a daughter with patient mutability in a poisoned household;  the work of teaching literature to mostly unresponsive students.  How Williams manages to dramatize this almost impossible material is itself a small miracle.  In a rare interview given late in life, John Williams says of Stoner:
           'I think he's a real hero...He was a witness to values that are important...The important thing in the novel to me is Stoner's sense of a job.   Teaching to him is a job -- a job in hte good and honorable sense of the word.  His job gave him a particular kind of identity and also made him what he was...It's the love of something, the thing that's essential."
             Reading this made me realize, more than ever, how connected the escape of responsibility in adulthood/work and the escape of responsibility in love are intertwined in Cantet's film.
Love is the only thing, in the end, that can slap Cantet's protag in the face, waking him up to his illness of isolation and falsehood.

Lost In Emotion by Lisa Lisa or BEHIND THE CANDELABRA - The Cinema of Disappointment by Steven Soderbergh

Mired more in disappointment than in desire, Steven Soderbergh's reportedly final film is also thick with intense emotion.

BEHIND THE CANDELABRA opens with  explosions of hope.  Summer and Moroder throb as a disco styled HBO logo brights the screen.  Action commences with  an expectation of pleasure:  Bob (Scott Bakula) and Scott (Matt Damon) exchange gazes across a (gay) bar, Summer and Moroder still feeling love in the background.  Bob approaches and first names are shared; the synth pop phantasm faded, the quick scene already over, intensity of  expectations deflated.

The promise of passion and adoration is renewed when Bob introduces Scott to his newest fan, Liberace (Michael Douglas.)

As Scott and Lee become enmeshed, the story is revealed in a series of physical and emotional changes unleashed in Scott.  He pursues plastic surgery, he stops actively working in his field, he develops a drug problem and he is emotionally all over the fucking map.
 Lee, on the other hand, is unchanged gloss. We learn little about him besides a few calmly revealed anecdotes. His mother (Debbie Reynolds) is present yet unknowable under a thick Polish accent and a preoccupation with being given money.

Scott and Lee remain together while Lee is protected and Scott descends into a loss of identity.

Watching their relationship on film is like watching a bird fly into a mirror.  Time and time again the bird thinks it is looking at a possible mate, unable to understand there is only a glass that can not be entered.

The love of Liberace is studied less for homosexuality than as a love of co dependency.
These lacks are measures of unmet expectations; of images that lie, and surfaces that  can't be permeated.

 Scott seeks in Lee a  promise of love, personal beauty and protection, and he is disappointed on all fronts.

Perhaps Soderbergh  is evoking, by way of heightened emotions and sexy disco soap opera, the failures he sees reflected back in his own creations.

FOOL ME TWICE

I'm thinking about Rabbit Angstrom and how luck and desperation convened on this unimpressive prick.

He could cheat, disappear and run out on Janice, but she would fall in love with him each time, and she would take him back.

He is written as a bit of a louse, a crotchety, bitter yet unflappable guy.   Modern sensibilities tinged with a vaguely racist and  reactionary worldview.  He is likeable because he is authentic and he is terribly flawed, and it is reasonable to accept that women love and forgive and fall for him, and that this is a pattern that repeats itself.



It is less believable to see the women who refuse to fall.

That is why PRETTY WOMAN is as realistic as the RABBIT books.  Only the movie hides some of the humiliation, though it is directly inferred, since the relationship begins as transactional.

In MS. 45 the trauma of repeated male to female harm (rape by a street attacker) is tempered by the revenge murders the victim begins to carry out; once transformed, fantastically,  into a super sexualized killer.

In reality women are no strangers to repeated humiliation.
They are disgusting yet recognizable and they have no one to blame but themselves.

MS. 45

breaking free

"Children know normal better than anyone"

Dell Parsons, 15 yr old narrator of Richard Ford' CANADA.


"I'm so tired of seeing the same thing, every single day"

Faith, late teen or ear 20something played by Selena Gomez in Harmony Korine's SPRING BREAKERS







This weekend i finished reading CANADA at about the same time i went out to see the premiere of SPRING BREAKERS.

Both are about protagonists who are trying to escape the prison of the present.

Both the film and book feature a life changing robbery. in the first third of the story.

The unseemly Charley and Arthur are the criminals in Canada that lead Dell into transgression.  He was brought to Canada to escape something else, and here he lives in monotony , though always intrigued by the fantasy of what criminal otherness Charley and Arthur belong to.


SPRING BREAKERS takes more time to illustrate how the dream of this other place leads them gradually to cross over into a moral no mans land.  CANADA, once the protag Dell is in Canada, is about surviving by a dream of moving on, growing older, moving away and moving past something.
the dream sustains both the group of girls and our young guy, though dreams become reality in SPRING BREAKERS.

Both the film and the book  express a young person's attempts at creating and recreating oneself, and playing a role to survive the prison of adolescence.


http://www.youtube.com/user/SpringBreakersMovie1?v=ouVDDB-Oo90

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuY62NVMF3Q

how to film a recovering addict 's meditation: by abel ferrara

                                           quiet the mind

                                             feel the fantasy to destroy. pick up..but pick up a bat to hit a tree     

                                            fantasy changes color. action enables the rage

                                              let the thoughts die a natural death.

my OTHER place

henry james had the THE OTHER PLACE, Rivette's films may take place on surreal estates, and in Abel Ferrara's 4:44 LAST DAY ON EARTH  NYC is ground zero for the end of days.


NYC, where i live, is like the end of days on any given day. 


Here is MY other place, a place i have been to once before.

(Snaefellsnes Peninsula, Iceland)

finding the love in SAVAGES

SAVAGES (Oliver Stone)

SAVAGES  parallels and deflates the moral compass in modern day SoCal culture with the drug mafia in modern day Mexico.
Just like in Insane Clown Posse (ICP), "family" is the key concept, and here it is also a macguffin.
With the Mexicans, looked down at as "Savages" by the free spirited californians, loyalty and blood ties are  things one may savagely kill for.
The Californians come off vapid, self obsessed and loyal to noone, highlighted in the pleasure seeking  and consumerist culture embodied by good-looking threesome Taylor Kitsch, Blake Lively and Aaron Johnson.


 The love that binds those three together is clearly one where are all three participants are victims to their own narcissism. They are each cut off from their families, venture capitalists in hippie garb and at the hippest restaurants, lost in their own pursuits of beauty and self sufficiency.  Their pursuits exist isolated on an island of their own  imagining.  A life path without a sense of history, and a romantic love without context.

The love that binds the Mexican drug crew, helmed by billionaire drug boss Salma Hayek, are based on family, never leaving the one who made you and loved you.  God forbid you cross Salma's Savage Elena; her love of money is solid but not as tainted by self absorption as the Americans.  Undo her blood ties, imagined or otherwise, and she will calmly rip open your heart...with a machete...or a chainsaw.