Codependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same finally made it to Boston via the LGBT Film Festival and it is really the first queer comedy flick I’ve laughed aloud to in years. Apparently working with, shall we say, limited resources, writer/director Madeleine Olnek creates a race of bald-headed, over-emotional aliens who are sent to Earth to expend the excess emotions that are threatening their planet with overheating.
Stiff with candor, the alien Zoinx (Susan Ziegler) meets up with Jane (Lisa Haas), a shy, lonely stationary store clerk and the unlikely pair fall in love. In her own way, Jane too is able to be open with Zoinx, as they rub the hell out of each other’s noses in an alien sign of affection.
They do not realize that they are being stalked by two government agents, but in the end the aliens are called back to their planet and the lovers are in a quandary. They don’t want a bi-planet relationship now that they have finally found each other.
The 76 minute film is ripe with queer subtexts and in-jokes, but is I’m sure accessible to fun-lovers of any persuasion.
Madeleine Olnek ,who has only previously been involved in a few shorts, does a wonderful job of creating a shimmery spaceship and of utilizing the charms of New York City to frame her story. The acting is seamless, but Lisa Haas’ work is particularly endearing and nuanced. She seems to have few acting credits, but her portrayal of Jane is tone perfect. So too did Dennis Davis give a warm and winning performance as the frustrated senior agent.
Lately I just don’t want to see films full of violence and exploitation – there is just too much of it in real life. While I’m anything but a sci-fi fan, this was the perfect Saturday night bauble and I hope it gets greater exposure. It’s nice to know that lesbian culture is intergalactic.
This movie has no plot, no action, no character development, no content, and absolutely no justification to exist. There's no eye candy or food for thought, no rhyme and certainly no reason.
I could just bemoan the loss of 2 precious hours of the twilight of my life, if I wasn't so infuriated by all the fine films by women, people of color, working class directors, and radicals that don't get funded and don't get distributed. The writer/director Whit Stillman, a pale male with a reputed film pedigree, must have downed a large steaming cup of bland while doing this one.
I went to see it with two friends at the noon showing for seniors (just $4, thank gawd) and afterwards we understood why we were the only patrons in the house.
I know that Miss Representation is an important film and I feel bad that I didn’t love it more. Its mission is to explore “how the media’s misrepresentations of women contribute to the under-representation of women in positions of power and influence.” And it makes a strong case. Miss Representation is getting a lot of play at a lot of film festivals as well as through the educational campaign built around it. I just question how crucial the dream of “power and influence” is to most women today.
It is an excellent would-be-mainstream vehicle, what with its high profile talking heads, top production values, and some gut-wrenching statistics: “[T]he United States is still 90th in the world for women in national legislatures, women hold only 3% of clout positions in mainstream media, and 65% of women and girls have disordered eating behaviors.” The stats on violence and abuse are, as always, a never-ending nightmare since we first exposed them in the late 60s. I’m very glad there’s a piece of celluloid trying to get all these points across. But today most women are struggling hard just to secure the basics: the glass ceiling is visible to only a very few at the top.
How did Jennifer Siebel Newsom (at left), the filmmaker, and her team approach their challenge? They began by interviewing some politicians (Condoleezza Rice, Nancy Pelosi), celebrities (Margaret Cho, Jane Fonda), TV stars (Katie Couric, Rachel Maddow), feminists (Jennifer Pozner, Gloria Steinem), a gaggle of CEOs, and a handful of unnecessarily talkative men. One of the featured men is Newsom’s husband, the Lt Governor of California, with whom she lives, according to Wikipedia, in a $2.145 million house in Kentfield, CA with “direct views of Mt Tamalpais.” I mention this personal information as partial explanation of the existence and distribution of this film, as opposed to the many other feminist films - especially by women of color, working class or poor women, gender outlaws – that struggle painfully and at length to be made.
Miss Representation includes the views of some precocious, well-spoken young people with good teeth. It is all bracketed with Newsom’s motivation. She is having a baby, she says in the opening, and wants to make a film that exposes the incredible sexism of the media. At the end of the film, we meet her adorable little child for whom we can only wish a new and better world. The film itself hopes that each girl can dream of being, well, a CEO, a celebrity, or a politician. This focus is lost on me. All this ambition to be women CEOs of corporations or high-ranking politicians is not a goal I can really care about. This is the point at which the film forgets that most girls will be hoping for a union job and a safe car, will be fighting to keep the schools and social security public, and will be trying to convince workplaces to offer childcare to employees.
I want to laud this documentary, but what can I do with my sense that this was made by and for privileged women? Without talking about class and race – and I mean really talking about them, not throwing in the phrase “women of color” at the end of a couple of comments – how is it possible to understand the enormous scoop of shit dumped on poor and working class woman every day? I was grateful for the perspective of a couple of commentators who talked about capitalism and about how the consolidation of media ownership following deregulation is a disaster for all but well-oiled pale males.
Why some of the men were given so much face time is a mystery, especially as some repeated their rather theoretical blah-blah more than once. In fact, the skills of a strict editor could have improved this film by shortening it by 30 minutes. Cory Booker, the mayor of Newark, New Jersey, had insightful things to say and seemed to really understand what life is like for women. Margaret Cho was good, as always, about the intersection of difference and gender. Jennifer Pozner, author of Reality Bites Back: The Troubling Truth About Guilty Pleasure TV, was spot on. She’s been providing important analysis of the misogyny of media for some years. It’s neither a surprise nor unusual that the film reflects the interests of the filmmaker and is created in her own image to some degree.
I am a talking head in another feminist film called Left on Pearl. The filmmakers and unpaid production collective have been working on it for ten years because they don’t have the political and celebrity contacts to raise sufficient money, and because their stars are the women who were actually involved in the rather revolutionary act of occupying a Harvard building in the early 70s in order to demand, among other things, a women’s center. The Cambridge Women’s Center that came into being soon after is now the longest-running such institution in the country. But Left on Pearl is not quite finished because of the difficulty of pulling in a dime for such grass-roots projects. Eventually, it hopes to be a vehicle used by schools and libraries to educate young people about the history of this feminist movement.
There were a lot of young people in the audience when I saw Miss Representation and I realized from their gasps that they were hearing some oft-repeated stats (1 in 4 women will be raped in their lifetime) and quotes (hello Pat Robinson) for the first time. It was cool to be reminded of those initial “clicks” of comprehension we all experienced when we came to understand the misrepresentation of women on every level.
I have a posse who gathers together at my place for my single annual party to watch the Academy Awards. These are friends from different parts of my life – dance, union, justice struggle, work, the old days – who have jelled into an Oscars machine over many years. Here’s my takeaway from the night.
GETTING CRAP OFF MY CHEST I wasn’t one of those who moaned that Billy Crystal was too old and too old school to be dragged back to replace the originally scheduled Eddie Murphy (who quit in solidarity when his producer buddy was kicked off the Oscars for homophobic bigotry). In fact, I looked forward to Crystal’s brand of Jewish liberal humor – sometimes he really nails it.
But why oh why did he dredge up his blackface imitation of Sammy Davis Jr., a schtick he used to do in the 1980s on Saturday Night Live - albiet with Sammy's blessing apparently? How many people even remember Sammy Davis Jr. (on left) and how many are aware of the role of blackface in Hollywood? In Billy’s mind, he was injecting Sammy into the tribute to “Midnight in Paris,” in which lots of celebrity artists were brought back from the dead. It was tasteless.
And then there were the very personal “fatty” jokes. It was inexplicably boorish and unacceptable to humiliate an Oscar nominee in front of a global audience, or anyone or anywhere else for that matter. Under-eating seemed like a much more prevalent issue in that crowd – and not because of the poverty that is damaging 25% of American children. Shame on you, Billy.
As for the political, topical jokes, ahhh, I must’ve missed them. While it is true that Billy made us laugh, here at my “do,” it is also the case that we are a group that likes to laugh together. He did not make us guffaw until we choked – as Whoopi has done in the past and Ellen did the year she hosted. We had adored Ellen’s work that night and to this day I can’t figure out why she was panned.
Anyway, back to 2012. There was a lot of ageist garbage about Christopher Plummer too, especially on the Red Carpet where the dim lot of interviewers seemed more excited about his being four score than about his talent. How annoying. I missed the moment when he got a little testy with some such Red Carpet mic-thruster.
“THE YEAR OF THE LADIES” Then there were all these male commentators going on and on about this being the “year of the ladies.” Do me a favor. Look at what the top roles for women were about: suffering race/class exploitation; being raped; whitewashing the life of a despised union-busting rightwing leader; living a miserable life as a cross-dresser; playing Marilyn. Talk to me about “the year of the ladies” when a woman is playing the general manager of a big-league baseball team – based on real life.
FASHION Angelina Jolie’s disturbing pose when she was presenting an Oscar – she awkwardly thrust her leg out of her skirt slit – was so weird that one of the guys who received that Oscar stood in comic imitation of her stance. Everyone later had an opinion on it, but why weren’t folks talking about the real visual anomaly: her terrifying skinniness. Her arms were wasted and her skull-like-face loomed large above a reduced body. I found all the talk about her beauty grotesque.
Viola Davis won the too-gorgeous-for-words award hands-down (not to mention the prize for the buffest arms). She was not the only one to wear her hair naturally, but she was also the most photographed. Allison Samuels wrote an interesting piece called “Why Viola Davis Ditched the Wig at the Oscars,” which talks about how the “star's bold statement blew the lid off the complicated politics of black women’s hair.” Chris Rock (a presenter) grew out his Afro 70s style and made some funny, insightful comments (photo at left), but singer Esperanza Spalding’s halo proved that size does matter! (see her photo below)
I was glad they didn’t excise J-Lo’s areola which many of us with nipple-radar spotted immediately. I see that she issued a denial on American Idol when teased about it, but hey, I’ve always strongly believed that if men can show their breasts without incurring criminal charges, women should be able to as well.
All the nasty chatter about how old-fashioned and unchallenging it was to re-draft Billy Crystal could better have been focused on a main aspect of the Oscars culture. Gender fashion stereotypes are more rigid every year. Look at how uniformly everyone was dressed. What a snoozefest. Why do all the women have to wear prom dresses? Remember in the 70s when you’d see an occasional short skirt, a pair of slacks, or something vaguely cutting edge? Now it’s all just full-length, girlish fabrics puddling at one’s stilettos. Any differences were in quantity (more sparkle, two-shoulder drape instead of one) not quality. Yawn. Where was the leather onesy? The woman in a tuxedo? The guy in a tutu?
THE JC PENNY COMMERCIALS I’m the kind of person who, if I can’t TIVO a show in order to fast forward the commercials, then I mute them. My crowd had no idea that JC Penny was going to introduce a gaggle of their surprisingly entertaining ads starring Ellen. Go to google to catch up if you missed the whole controversy in which right-wing Xtians tried to strong-arm JC Penny into dumping the queer, but JC Penny wasn’t having any of it, and then Ellen talked about it straight up on her TV show. The ads are a hoot and in my house they were probably the highlight of the evening.
THE RATINGS So ancient Billy Crystal doesn’t appeal to the youth demographic, eh? Remember last year’s youth-appeal MCs – Mr Comatose and Ms Five-Hour-Energy drink? Here are the comparative figures:
“The Nielsen Co. estimated Monday that 39.3 million people watched the Oscars on ABC Sunday night, up from the 37.9 million viewers during the much-panned 2011 show where James Franco and Anne Hathaway shared hosting duties.”
I don’t have a horse in the Academy Awards race other than the desire to be entertained. The reason I don’t talk here about the winners and losers is because I don’t care that much about the Academy’s choices. This year the LA Times backed our long-held assumption with hard research in their piece “Oscar voters overwhelmingly white, male.” This may explain why the fabulous film “Pariah” was not nominated, not to mention my favorite film of the year, Almodovar’s “The Skin I Live In.” I watched all the awards shows this year – from the Golden Globes to the BAFTA (British Oscars) to the Independent Spirit Awards. But I only have my party posse over for this grand one. I try to keep the expectations for the show low and let my chicken salad and techina be the stars.
Watching the four documentary shorts in one program is a pretty intense experience, because at least the first three are difficult subjects with problematic treatments. Here are my quickie reviews:
1. Incident at New Baghdad Ethan McCord managed to repress his memories of his time as a US Army soldier in Iraq. Until, that is, he turned on the TV one day to see himself in footage of an atrocity that had been released by Wikileaks. He is now a public speaker about the war and about PTSD. We meet him with his kids and he describes himself as an “almost single dad.” He has his closest Army buddy’s dog tags tattooed on his arm after that friend is killed by an IED and he has a lot of guilt to discharge. The film is full of horrible images – stills and video – of that gruesome incident in which innocent people were blown away followed by more innocent people who came in a van to help the first victims. Bring a very strong stomach with you to see this one.
2. Saving Face In Pakistan, hundreds of husbands each year burn their wives faces off by throwing battery acid at them, sometimes dousing them in gasoline to add flames to the torture. Even women who turn down a marriage proposal have found their faces burned off by rejected suitors. The acid eats the bones from their noses and the eyeballs from their skulls. This film follows several such women, the organizations they have formed to fight for a law to punish these brutal men, and the Pakistani-born American plastic surgeon who decides to “give back” by working on some of their faces. The man is almost a caricature of the arrogant American surgeon, high-fiving his patients, but baffled by these crimes. He has no analysis of the gendered nature of this violence and of the general place of women in society. I wanted to scream at the screen.
3. The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom This film opens with a lengthy clip taken by survivors of the Japanese tsunami from the top of a hill where they watch the water approach from very far away up to, virtually, their feet. Their horror is recorded, not the least as they scream to people running toward their hill to hurry. Some descend to try to help and are swept away along with the fleeing figures. The contents of the human world below – their houses and cars and papers and tools – are churned up and deposited miles away. We meet a number of them just a month later and their state of shock is palpable. Suddenly the film switches to an ode to the cherry blossom and a demonstration of its symbolic importance as the Japanese calendar’s highest moment of hope and beauty. We visit a 1,000 year-old cherry blossom tree and the caretakers point to the lowered numbers of visitors because of the aftermath of the tragedy. In the end there is an attempted reconciliation of these two aspects of the film, not fully successful, but quite interesting.
4. The Barber of Birmingham The most likable of the documentary shorts is the story of Mr. Armstrong, 85 years old, the subtitled “Foot Soldier of the Civil Rights Movement.” A famous barber, he has even cut Martin Luther King Jr’s hair several times and tells us that the crowds at his windows then were just as big as the crowds that assembled when he barbered his first white clients. Having been arrested several times during the civil rights movement, having put his children out front during the school integration struggles, and having fought for the vote for Black people, the election of Barack Obama was truly a dream come true. It is a major set-back for him when he falls ill the day before he is to take a bus with his friends to DC for the inauguration. He is well-loved in the community and his children and grand-children follow his example. This selection has my vote to be the Oscar winner.
So the Oakland Athletics baseball general manager named Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) loses big at the beginning of this decade. What does he do? He finds a young white college grad named Peter Brand (Jonah Hill) who is more into numbers and stats than he is into baseball and immediately trusts every single word the kid says. In the process, he poops all over his long-time team of scouts, managers and trainers, explains nothing to nobody, and completely re-builds his team by eliminating all human or emotional elements from the choice. And then he eventually gains a record winning streak.
This process is not a pretty sight. While Brad Pitt looks more and more like an aging Robert Redford’s physical clone, he is a study in the absence of nuance. He is not convincing as a baseball figure. In contrast, Phillip Seymour Hoffman hits it out of the ballpark (you anticipated that, right?) as the field manager who is forced against everything he’s been taught to go with Beane’s decisions, not the least because if he puts someone into the lineup that Beane hasn’t specified, Beane trades the player on the spot. Brand is a bewildered geek at first, but quickly gets into the ways of power and agrees to inform veteran players that they’ve been dropped without notice – reminding me of that college experiment in the 60s in which college students, in the context of a supposed science research project, gave electric shocks amounting to torture to subjects writhing before them – just because some teacher told them to.
I found no one to love in this film. I found the film’s time frame – just a few years ago –about actual people a bit discombobulating. And I missed the feeling, like we had back in 1960, with Roberto Clemente, Bill Mazeroski and Smokey Burgess, when the Pittsburgh Pirates won the World Series and we all danced in the streets. The gains of this team came out of rudeness and arrogance and it was hard to give a damn.
Pariah is a very special film. I saw it with my movie maven friend Stan who said it was the best film he’s seen all year. And I couldn’t take my eyes off the screen. While the concept – a coming (out)-of-age story – is classic, the family and friendship circle are ones we rarely get to pierce at our local movie houses. For how often does an actual commercial cinema show a film written and directed by a woman of color about African American lesbians? This wasn’t a specialized film festival. Nor a group DVD viewing. But a place that sells popcorn.
No, mostly crap white boy productions get the marquee. Shooting and raping and politicking and drinking and blowing up things – fantasies that reflect little that I understand in my kishkes, as my dad would’ve said, in my guts. Pariah is showing at only one theater in the whole Boston area. It has enjoyed little paid publicity or flashy marketing. Sundance supported it, as did many individuals who contributed some pennies to its Kickstarter campaign.
Alike (Adepero Oduye), a high school junior in Brooklyn, uses poetry to try to sort her identity, her sexuality, and her sense of truth. She knows that she is attracted to women, although she hasn’t yet stepped out with a girl. Her best friend Laura (Pernell Walker - photo at left) is openly gay, and as a result has been thrown out by her own parents. Alike doesn’t want to be alienated from her family, but struggles with the tension of changing her clothes (butching up on the way out, returning to girl’s clothes on the way home) on buses and in bathrooms. Her mother (Kim Wayans - photo at left) is a realistic combo of cold and loving, and wants only to mold her sullen daughter into a church-going lady she can dress up in skirts. Lacking any control in her own relationship with her husband, the mother would prefer to pretend the world is as she would wish it, than to cope with reality. The mother feels disconcertingly familiar.
Alike’s father (Charles Parnell) is rarely home, busy cheating on his wife and working a job he resents. Alike is his favorite and he thinks he is defending her by denying the obvious. Although at the end of the film he is seen to be the good guy, for me he remains a handsome cad, whose charm does not disguise that he is an absentee father and an unfeeling husband who practices his own sense of delusion. He fails to defend Alike at a crucial moment in their unpleasant family dynamic.
Young love can be such a mixed bag and Alike’s first romantic touch is fraught with betrayal and confusion. The line between friendship and desire is a hard one to navigate in those hormone-fueled years. A generalized air of danger and threat out on the streets is palpable. In the end, Alike’s literary commitment pulls her through these rough times, a lifeline writers and artists of every age can imagine.
There is an authenticity to this film that is so superior to the glossy, 3D, hyper-edited jerky work that passes as blockbusters. It’s important to remember how many excellent directors are failing to get their amazing films made. And even when they are made, how few are making it past the festivals and into our newspaper listings.
As funding for the arts gets sliced to bits, the voices of those who are not white men with connections are left unamplified. As it grapples with the secrets and lies of characters I care about and can identify with, Pariah affects me much more profoundly than mainstream fluff. Kudos to writer-director-producer Dee Rees (photo at left): the efforts just to get this film funded were probably more exhausting than the actual creation and execution of this fine film itself. But ultimately it is a beautifully acted coming-of-age story that is both sweet and bittersweet.
We decided to break tradition for Jewish xmas eve and instead of going to an early Chinese meal, we went to the movies. “The Artist” had, at last, arrived in the area and was playing at Dedham Community Theater, in a middle class suburb of Boston. The last showing was at 4:45 and we assumed that we’d have a more or less empty theater to stretch out in. After a fabulous hot chocolate at the Mocha Java cafe next door, we entered the movie in time to watch it fill up – with other Jews. I even ran into a couple of my senior fitness students.
(David Moss poster via Lucinda Marshall)
“The Artist” is a black and white silent film, a Belgium/France production, about Hollywood’s transition to talkies and a romance that weathers the change. In fact, there is a lot of loyalty in this film – between the leading man George Valentin (Jean Dujardin) who refuses to adapt to talkies and the ascending young Peppy Miller (Berenice Bejo, wife of the director) he discovered; between Valentin and his life-saving doggie; between Valentin and his driver Clifton (James Cromwell); and, even on a gruff level, the producer Al Zimmer (John Goodman) and his stars.
The original music by Ludovic Bource is tone perfect – building the plot but never intrusive, and allowing for powerful silences. The actors are just over-expressive enough not to flounder without dialogue, but never over-hysterical. Berenice Bejo’s confident star turn is so full of irrepressible energy and joyful smiles that you would think the film was conceived to melt the winter chill.
The shimmery photography, the superb acting, the magical score, and the bow to a long-past form of artistry makes this just the flick to see when you want an upbeat, visually handsome experience.
The Artist trailer:
We came home, still in the movie mood, and decided to catch up on things we missed this season, by browsing the On Demand availables. “The Debt” was something I avoided, since I’m never keen on inviting the Mossad into my home. But like so many, my interest in Helen Mirren – the nominal star – ultimately became a consideration, despite my repugnance for security forces.
I will be brief. The film sounds like one in which every actor was told to do an accent, any accent, and pretend it was a Hebrew accent. What a load of goofy –sounding dialogue, almost comical in the range of manglings permitted, if not encouraged. The multiple timelines felt more like a function of very bad writing and directing than of sophisticated depth. We were constantly saying, “Wait. When is this? Where are we?”
The “moral dilemmas” were a bit silly and self-serving. The only intensity was in awful scenes of women being abused that I looked away from. And the idea that kidnappers would sit around listening to the manipulations of their hostage, a disgusting war criminal, beggars belief.
Mirren doesn’t do much of anything except sport a scar and look despairing. Jessica Chastain who plays the youthful version of the Mirren character and has much more facetime in this movie is stuck in a kind of innocent depression that eventually gets on the nerves. In fact, there is not a single light moment in this gray and annoying “thriller.”
The one piece of praise that I can give with conviction and some personal expertise is that the fight scenes are beautifully choreographed and very convincingly executed. I would bet that Chastain is a real-life martial artist – or else they brought in a skilled stuntwoman.
I’m so sorry to once again have a minority view of a popular film, but I found “Hugo” by Martin Scorsese boring and sentimental. It is slow-moving and enamored of itself. The Salon.com reviewer, among many other salivating fans of Scorsese, just about had a case of the vapors over the 3-D. “I have seen the future of 3-D moviemaking, and it belongs to Martin Scorsese,” he trembled, crowning it “the best movie anyone will make in the current post-“Avatar” 3-D wave.” I guess if you loved “Avatar” you may find this the next step up. Not me. I concede that the 3-D was an interesting gimmick, here and there – especially in the exciting chase scenes, done from a kid’s-eye-view waist-high, but mostly the “cute” Scorsese-style black-framed 3-D glasses were heavy on the nose and a strain to the eyes. I trust that those children who are able to stay awake during this ponderous brilliant-orphan-sticks-to-his-guns saga enjoy the effect.
I’m sorry too to observe that Asa Butterfield (who plays the lead orphan Hugo Cabret ) lacks the chops to hold up a film in which he appears in virtually every shot. He has the wide-eyed startled deer-in-the-headlights look down pat, but little else. Thankfully, his childhood partner, Isabelle (played by Chloe Moretz), is charming and sympathetic as she garners her first real life “adventure” by assisting poor little Hugo. Branded a thief - he really only takes what he needs: food and tools – until he gets caught going for the mechanical mouse from the stall of Georges Méliès (Ben Kingsley), Isabelle’s godfather.
When a film is made by someone called Scorsese, one expects that a few celebrities will drop into the production. Sacha Baron Cohen plays the evil station inspector; the lovely Helen McCrory plays Isabelle’s godmother; and Jude Law is Hugo’s prematurely-dead dad. Johnny Depp, a producer of the film, is a well-oiled band leader who turns up fleetingly in disconnected flashes.
One also expects Scorsese to weave in a plethora of artistic references and he doesn’t disappoint. In fact, he seems to have won over the film reviewers to such an astounding degree that the collective score by the two dozen reviewers (of them, one is a woman) blurbed on Rotten Tomatoes is a stratospheric 97%. I find this profoundly puzzling for a sappy film that takes place in a Paris train station where the characters have French names and English accents and where the emotions run from trying-to-be-poignant all the way to still-trying-to-be-poignant. The film is crying out for an editor willing to slice the flab from what is, under the razzle-dazzle, a very thin work.
Waiting in line outside the Harvard Square theater with the rest of the excited crowd before we could be seated, one matriarch told her family about an interview Jon Stewart conducted with Martin Scorsese in which the director explained that he wanted to make one film that his 12-year-old daughter could see. It is a modest goal and I congratulate him for reaching it.
Pedro Almodóvar has done it again. The Skin I Live In, full of eye candy and horror, blew my mind.
If you know the work of Pedro Almodóvar, you know to expect the unexpected. You know to expect gender elasticity, human transformation and sexual sleight of eye and hand. You know there will be a steaming cup of desire along with something to twist that desire. You’ll anticipate at least one heart-stoppingly gorgeous character. Almodovar never masks his queer sensibility, his outsider point of view, or his fascination with morphing – and I never miss his films.
The Skin I Live In, however, came as a shock to me. For added to all the usual elements was a dark, noir attitude that pounced on one’s imagination and patience. Transformation becomes the product of torturous revenge and there is no one to love.
As a matter of psychic self-defense, I avoid all movies that include rape. When I inadvertently see such a scene it haunts me and distorts the rest of my viewing experience. But there are (at least) two such moments in The Skin I Live In, one almost sickly comical and another disturbingly ambiguous. The plot consequences of these rapes are profound, although the rapes themselves are founded on mistaken identity, passionate illusion and emotional misreading – not on the use of sexual violence to establish power. I was not distressed, but I’m still unraveling it all in my mind.
If you want your eyes and thoughts to be tickled, see this thriller with a friend or two who feel the same way, who have some consciousness and comfort with gender and sexuality in motion, and who will sit with you afterwards to pick through this exciting, complicated film. I just loved it and was lucky to see it with three of my very favorite brains and bodies.
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