Realism in fiction

It's not often that a month goes by without anything showing up here, but it is in fact one whole month since the last post. Part of it is that I've been spending most of my writing time at Dystopia.ink. But another part is that we haven't been at the theater very often in the last couple months because there hasn't been much to see. I don't know if it's just a dearth of releases caused by the writers' strike a couple years ago or if the new approach of "Marquee Arts" (the new face of the Michigan Theater non-profit) is to emphasize stuff that makes money (mainstream films) over the smaller returns of the art films that were the reason we joined up in the first place. I really hope the latter is just idle speculation. But tonight we made it back for a film I didn't have tremendously high hopes for, but which turned out to be a solid effort. In a way, my perspective was like the outlook of the main character, Agathe (Camille Rutherford) in Jane Austen Wrecked My Life.

Agathe is an introverted bookseller at Shakespeare and Company (an actual bookstore on the Left Bank in Paris) and an aspiring novelist. She also has no relationships with anyone but her sister and nephew whom she lives with and her best friend and co-worker, Félix (Pablo Pauly.) When she finally gets inspiration from a sake cup in a local Chinese restaurant, she writes the first couple chapters of a romantic novel, which Félix likes and secretly sends to the Jane Austen Residency in England. Agathe reluctantly attends while she tries to sort out her own romantic interactions with Félix and Oliver (Charlie Anson), the son of the people who run the residency. It's not a complex plot, but there's enough depth to the characters and their quite human foibles and exchanges that it was sufficient to keep Story Guy interested in what was coming next, rather than sighing as I predicted the next five minutes from scene to scene. Agathe isn't an especially compelling character, but the story is genuine enough that she doesn't have to be.

This is a mixed-language film, which is nominally French, but spends about half the runtime with the characters speaking English. I'm not sure whether that was a nod to its inspiration (Austen) or just a demonstration of its modernist perspective, in that a significant portion of Western Europe can speak English (or, at least, that's been the case in our ventures into places like Germany, Portugal, and Liverpool.) There's still a certain level of romance (naturally) attached to the French language and I think that may have been part of writer/director Laura Piani's intent. It was billed as a "rom com", but there wasn't much about it that felt comedic, per se. As Jaime pointed out when we were leaving, it felt more like a drama that didn't take itself too seriously and left its characters in several situations that didn't approach the level of tragedy (using the old Greek dramatic split here (comedy/tragedy)), but were emotional enough to not have everyone laughing the whole way through. Stick in the mud that I am, I didn't laugh at all, but did appreciate the humor in several moments; most of them driven by the blessed European forthrightness of the dialogue. I always enjoy the fact that European films with modern characters don't shade their dialogue for the horrible crisis that might be a child walking into the theater. If they're talking about sex, they're not doing it on stage. They're doing it in real life and expressing themselves like real people do.

Of course, given that this film is largely about the crisis of confidence of a writer, I was also instantly interested in that, in the same way I have been with others. We've all been there before. We all will be again. I can say that I've been spending so much time on Dystopia because of that same struggle to put things into words that don't seem to want to cooperate. In Agathe's case, it was also about speaking those words to the people around her and taking the risk of being directly connected to someone. That's an introvert's regular challenge and it's part of why I found her character so believable. I have to say that I tend to share Oliver's initial perspective that Jane Austen is mildly overrated, but I also appreciated Agathe's assertion that Austen was the first Western writer to represent women as human beings, rather than plot devices, some of them "even with a sense of humor." There are points where the film drags a bit, but that may just be the nature of how Piani wanted to tell the story. The best word possible for both the main character and the story, in general, is "thoughtful." The other word that all of us emerged from the theater with is "cute." Again, that's not tremendously compelling, but it could have been a bog-standard, three act comedy, too, and this was elevated some way past that. Worthwhile.

Deep burn

I had an odd delay with Portrait of a Lady on Fire. We saw it last week and I haven't gotten around to writing about it until now; not for any particular reason, like disinterest, but because I simply haven't. But I was writing something for ThereWillBe.Games about women in gaming and it occurred to me that I hadn't actually put down any thoughts about this film that's about as "woman-centric" as any major release is going to get.

In most cases, I make an effort to not get any of these reviews hung up on questions of identity, unless that topic is central to the story of the film, as it was in Les Misérables. I don't want to call out Portrait as a film about women because it really isn't that broad in its approach. It's a very simple story about a love affair that just happens to be between two women. Whether the discussion of its quality should be identity-focused seems to veer somewhere between irrelevant (it doesn't matter what kind of people it's about if it's a good story and a good film) and stilted (Are we talking about it being good because it's so unusual (all female cast, vast majority of the crew including writer, director, and producers also women)?) I think the former distracts from the quality of the film and the latter possibly detracts from it. People should be looking at Portrait as a work on its own merits, rather than whom it was created by. But the other thing that occurs to me is that this is a film that would often be derided as a "chick flick" and, notably, I think I, as the only male in our little film-going group, was the one who liked it best.

Now, again, that shouldn't determine or predetermine anything. The fact that I identify as male and the movie was made by women shouldn't affect anything about how I feel about it. It's either a good story and/or a good film or it isn't. But in our typically aggressive, masculine society, the phrase "chick flick" is usually meant to dismiss things that "guys aren't supposed to like" and it struck me as funny that all three women that I watched it with seemed to have reservations and I really didn't, aside from the usual French tendency to make little things have dramatic import when they often don't need to. It makes me wonder if my delay in writing about it was a subconscious instinct not to talk about those "non-male" things like (gasp!) emotion and how I felt it was the basis of a good film whereas everyone else I was with (i.e. three women) felt it was less so. The popular concept is that women generally engage their positive emotions more often than men do and are more comfortable expressing themselves in that fashion. Is that an implicit bias? Am I assuming something on the part of my girlfriend and friends that may be doing them a disservice simply because they didn't think a movie was as good as I did?

The story is set in the 18th century, as a painter (Marianne; Noémie Merlant) is hired to create a portrait of a young woman of Brittany (Héloise; Adèle Haenel) who is being married off to a Milanese noble. Héloise isn't interested in this whole transaction and, over the course of Marianne's attempts to complete her contract, the two have a brief and intense affair. The story doesn't need to be more complicated than that and director Céline Sciamma does a good job of keeping the focus on the intensity between Merlant and Haenel, as they explore life outside of 'adult' supervision (Héloise's pragmatic and traditional mother, The Countess; Valeria Golino), around the studiously indifferent glances of the housemaid, Sophie (Luâna Bajrami), and from altered perspectives (recreational opium.) The most important aspect to any tragic romance is that the audience go away not feeling like it was a completely downbeat tale, but appreciating it for the time that was spent enjoying it, whether in sympathy with the main characters or simply because it was a good story. One can hearken back to the basis of modern Western literature and Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet as a case example of this. Again, I think Sciamma does a good job of keeping the audience aware that the story is simple, but allowing the emotion to play out in any number of ways; from the obvious to the mildly surreal. One moment that was especially poignant was when Sophie had traveled to a local wise woman for an abortion and had to lie in a bed waiting for it to take effect while the woman's adorable infant crawled over her.

Those are the small moments that I thought brought depth and feeling and a realistic veneer to an occasionally phantasmagoric story (Marianne seeing ghostly images of her lover in a wedding dress throughout the house.) They were moments that resonated with me because of the ability to tie them to moments in my own life, even if they were based on scenarios that I have never encountered and, very likely won't, such as Sophie's abortion. That speaks to me of the essential humanity of the picture and the players, which I think was the central premise of the film: Even these people not like you are still like you and they inhabit a scenario that you'll know, even if it initially feels like a far off painting of a woman in flames.