At the beginning of Shame, the overhead shot is of Fassbender's character in bed, hand over lower abdomen, on his back in a turquoise sheeted set. Breathing so loudly it promotes a recalculation of looking. He gets up and he is in the 28th street 1 train station. The sound design is staccato ticks, clockwise, or how a traffic light sounds. Colors are subdued. Shots break up rather quickly, but that is not to say a lot of time has elapsed because it hasn't.
He goes from bed to bed. Or perhaps he remains at home and has romantic guest to romantic guest coming to his bed.
Whichever is true, it doesn't matter. Pacing, in films with comedic bents, doesn't equate with narrative movement. Another way to say this is it doesn't mean that more things occur or more time passed just because things feel quicker. Melancholic is a register, not an adjective or film style. Both absurdity and tragedy encompass the same amount of time and space but remain varied; because of tenor.
I recently saw Meatballs 3. Here the laughs are based on a tone that a group onscreen and one off accepts: bawdiness, male hormonal fears and fantasies, and sexual images of women as rewards. Agreeing to these terms, those of us watching get to enter inside a privileged place where fun is had, sexual desires are not judged and are not too serious, and the unthinkable can be achieved -- a virgin nerd gets laid with a babe. Scenarios do not follow realism, and what takes a teen a summer to surmise elapses in under two hours. Time is something to keep up with, faster than the humor.
This movie was comedic, in a ridiculous way.
I recently saw The Tribe. (Plemya), 2014. Typical of 1990s Eastern European Bleak Tales, but artful and transgressive, if not transparent in its appeal to the abyss. This turns out to be another film concerning teens and their hormones and identity, but here identity is explicit as a key to narrative. The exclusivity of their club is twofold:
deafness and also membership in a gang/ private circle of thugs, what have you. The privilege of entering is the doom of not hearing and the blindness of not seeing that the need to belong condemns one here to loss of self.
A different sort of community, and one matching in pace, yet events take longer and words linger more before either are fully formed.
I recently saw The Worst Person in the World. The enclosure here is a spectator's nightmare of overly determined narrative choices that parade as the opposite. The exclusivity of the tough gang within the world of The Tribe finds its backwards reflection in the world of this smug female protagonist. Her life choices invent her circumstances; devoid of any other influence, she exists in a vacuum, not unlike the one the girl in The Tribe's pregnancy died in.
Summer of Soul, another recent watch, tracks the expansion of a community no longer so enclosed.
The only two movies capable of conveying optimism were Meatballs 3 and Summer of Soul. Both look forward to success by way of community. Summer connects a larger community within new york city by way of rallied pride and expression through art. Unlike Worst Person..., the endless combination of people and influences converge and create harmony; visually and aurally.
The community of camp and oddball bonding within Meatballs 3 is what we are denied in The Tribe. Meatballs' nerds peacefully accompany babes and bros. The virgins get laid; the desired is achievable; the journey benign. The Tribe and Worst Person both incorporate subjects who make subjectively poor choices about other people. That is to say that their choices are depicted as direct links to subsequent miseries.
