Baby Doll

We really enjoyed Yorgos Lanthimos’ POOR THINGS. The story of an adult woman with a baby’s brain discovering sex. Emma Stone is particularly good at landing the funny-peculiar-ha-ha moments in consistently surprising ways. As it unfolded in all its weirdness and wonderfulness I did have, at the back of my mind, Daniel Riccuito of The Chiseler’s objection that this was a film about child rape, dressed up in science fiction to provoke sniggery laughs.

It never felt true. I did feel that screenwriter Tony McNamara, adapting Alasdair Gray’s novel — he also co-wrote Lanthimos’ THE FAVOURITE — enjoys writing misogyny and swearing and sweaty misogyny perhaps a little too much to make the film’s gender politics critique quite as sincere as it would like to be. But why ISN’T it a film about the rape of an infant, when on the face of it, it seems to be?

Arguing that Emma Stone’s Bella Baxter is proactively sexual isn’t enough, because there’s the concept of an age of consent. I think the film’s best defence is one of metaphor. The film can’t REALLY be about a baby’s brain transplanted into an adult’s body, since that isn’t a real thing in this world. So I take it to be about a woman discovering sex and male attitudes to sex, with the sci-fi angle as a making strange technique. Stone herself, no dummy, has said it’s about “a woman without shame.”

Of course there’s no logical reason, even within the film’s fantasy scenario, why Bella develops mentally at an accelerated pace, why shame doesn’t impact her the way it impacts the rest of us when we first, more or less traumatically, encounter it. We’re just expected to go with all that, and the florid and unreal environments and costumes help guide us in not being too literally or logically-minded.

It is perfectly clear that Mark Ruffalo’s sleazy rake is an exploiter, and that Ramy Youssef and Willem Dafoe’s characters would like to think they’re behaving ethically but don’t quite know how — Dafoe’s Baxter has some really bad examples of parenting to draw upon, and Youssef’s McCandles is young and naive in thrall to him. We might or might not find this pair forgivable: the movie can still work either way. McCandles reacts to Bella’s burgeoning sex drive with Victorian nicety and the slight squeamishness accorded to the sex drives of people with learning difficulties even when they might outwardly attractive: this behaviour feels not quite age-appropriate because we’re used to thinking of such people as childlike. Which they’re not, in key ways. Of course Bella supposedly IS. But she’s a kind of child that doesn’t exist. For the story to work, she could just as easily be a robot built from some lifelike material or grown from a seed. She’s a movie innocent on a picaresque journey — no more an infant than Candide.

(I guess I’m saying that if you don’t think about the film, it isn’t offensive, and if you overthink it, it isn’t offensive, but if you stop in the middle ground you’d be entitled to find it very offensive indeed.)

And the film looks extraordinary — the design is ludicrously rich — here are production designers and team chatting about it:

Every time I see these folks talking I realise there’s even more STUFF in the film that I hadn’t notice — mostly I was overwhelmed by the shapes and impression of crazy detail. The mostly-horseless carriage is the thing I keep thinking of when I try to recall the film’s inventiveness.

How this thing got made is in itself a wonder, and one that should give hope to lovers of mad film.

Places to Go

Over at The Chiseler, an old piece of mine has rotated back to the front page — it’s about ACT OF VIOLENCE, one of Fred Zinneman’s progressive MGM noirs.

The Sunday Intertitle: Dye Another Day

Having watched, for research purposes, Asta Nielsen’s 1923 film of Frank Wedekind’s ERDGEIST (directed by Leopold Jessner) as part of our research for our PANDORA’S BOX pieces (Pabst adapted and fused together both plays in Wedekind’s Lulu cycle), I had come to think of Nielsen as a big overcooked hambone, narcissistic and too too much for the screen, but of course with a more careful director, not in love with her every move — like Pabst himself on JOYLESS STREET — she could dial it down and be effective.

DIRNENTRAGODIE (PROSTITUTE TRAGEDY – well, it’s blunt — 1927), directed by Bruno Rahn, also keeps the excessive tendencies in check and is startlingly hardboiled and realistic. The first we see of Nielsen, she’s doing her roots, an unexpected image showing she could set aside vanity when required.

I suppose it shouldn’t be surprising to me, and yet it is, that the technique remains unchanged even if the chemicals have evolved. The destruction of the movie star beauty ideal extends even to using the mirror’s edge to give her a double set of eyeballs.

The movie also delivers a nubile Oscar Homolka as a pimp. I wondered how recognizable the old golem would be — the answer is, VERY recognisable, instantly so.

Rahn made KLEINSTADTSUNDER the same year, with Nielsen again playing a sex worker. Then he died, only 39. Nielsen would retire from movies in 1932 — good on her, great timing — and happily live until the age of 90.

Rahn’s direction is quite effective — this kind of realist drama still depends on constructed sets — how else are you going to do a street night scene in 1927 — and the sets still have a toe in the world of expressionism — buildings lean forwards like intimidating drunks.

The climax calls back to Jack the Ripper, whose crimes seem to have made almost a bigger impression in Germany than in his homeland — and we watch closeups of feet, walking on paths that will surely intersect with destiny. The killer’s feet following the prey is the first serial killer cinematic trope, before the handheld POV shot was thought of. This might be its origin.

In later films, the fancy footwork would be used to conceal the killer’s identity, a very conventional, plot-based motivation. But here, we KNOW who everyone is. The feet reduce them to abstractions, treating a grim and ugly subject with sensitive discretion, and somehow suggesting that the characters are following the dance steps of a higher fate (like Bruno and Guy at the outset of STRANGERS ON A TRAIN, another pair of oblivious sets of footwear on the path to an appointment at their own Samarra.

As Asta joins the chase, Rahn lets rip with his own handy-heldy frenzy, with the star breaking up into blurry jolts as she frantically searches, trying to call off the tragedy she’s set in motion. Pretty strong stuff.

Of course, the hand-held camera does not yet have a popular association with documentary realism — documentaries were still trying to resemble the less imaginative films, which meant bolting the tripod down. So Rahn’s shakicam ruckus is a form of expressionism, trying to make the shots SEEM LIKE the emotion of the scene. Then he reverts to even more traditional expressionist means for the murder —

Can’t beat a big old menacing shadow. Even the spatial confusion caused by the victim looking off screen right while the shadow is screen left, works — anyway, it’s perfectly sensible in realist terms, no doubt she’s looking at where Homolka really stood to cast the shadow. For graphic logic, she should really look left. But then the shadow moves, aligning itself with her gaze and swallowing her tiny figure in its voidoid dark…

Quite a piece of cinema!