Alright folks, pile in, pile in. This week saw my household running through a gauntlet of classic films, ranging from neo-noir highlights to Kubrickian nightmares, with a bonus pair of recent favorites tossed in for seasoning. As quarantine stretches on and time continues to lose any sense of meaning, I’ve begun measuring my life more in films than in weeks, meaning a day without a film basically ceases to exist. This is probably not good for my sense of self or long-term health, but I think we’re all doing the best we can at the moment, and if my coping mechanisms can be turned into Content, I’m happy to indulge them. Let’s see how I survived the last few days, as we storm through another Week in Review!
Having been seriously impressed by Jack Nicholson’s early performance in Easy Rider, I decided to check out one of his most acclaimed leading man roles – Chinatown, where he plays hardboiled detective Jake Gittes, who uncovers a vast conspiracy regarding L.A.’s water supply. Having mostly seen Nicholson play more deranged or older roles, it was fun to see him essentially play The Coolest Guy Around – Gittes basically embodies all the style and romance of a classic gumshoe, haunted by a dark past and far more of a romantic than he’d like to admit. Aside from Nicholson, I was most impressed by Chinatown’s script – the story is incredibly tightly written and escalates naturally, with each new twist feeling first momentarily shocking and then inevitable, and the ending serving as a brutal critique of Gittes’ ego and style of justice. I didn’t find Chinatown particularly revelatory in any emotional sense, but it’s a damn fine noir thriller.
I also checked out A Clockwork Orange, one of the few Kubrick films I haven’t already seen, and almost certainly his most difficult film. The first half hour or so of Orange is frankly pretty tough to stomach; the protagonist Alex and his friends are unapologetic rapists and murderers, and the opening act of Orange sees them raping and murdering across the unguarded homes of their town, until Alex is finally brought in by the state for correction.
Still, even as the film’s on-screen content is grotesque, its form is utterly beautiful. Kubrick’s beauty of staging is like little else in film, and Alex’s internal monologue, built on a mixture of Shakespearian mannerisms and invented future slang, has an incredible lyricism and playfulness to it. Every set feels both claustrophobic and tacky in its intended design, yet all are also made into tiny temples of beauty through Kubrick’s masterful layouts and use of color. The ultimate effect brings to mind a phrase one of my professors used to describe Lolita: “beautiful trash,” an exercise in finding transcendent beauty in the ugliest of places.
The black comedy of Strangelove is also present in Orange, though here it takes a bleaker and less playful form, letting the audience draw their own conclusions regarding Alex’s devilish actions and hellish rehabilitation. Orange’s preoccupation with a future defined by violent crime might feel a little quaint given our modern problems, but its critique of the carceral state is as searing as ever, with Alex’s fundamental vileness and ultimately unrepentant nature serving as a damning indictment of our attempts to paper over both individuals’ and society at large’s violent tendencies. All in all, Orange certainly isn’t an easy viewing experience, but it’s a phenomenal film – just not one I’m sure I’ll be able to stomach a second time.
The classics continued with Bonnie and Clyde, the story of two young bank robbers who somewhat inadvertently became folk heroes. In its time, Bonnie and Clyde was renowned as one of the New Hollywood tentpoles, which saw dynamic young directors telling stories of unusual narrative forms, and embracing a greater degree of sex and violence in their filmmaking. Bonnie and Clyde’s violence won’t shock today’s audiences, but the desperate longing of its leads still comes through clearly, and the film’s “sex scenes” are actually a very intimate portrayal of a man dealing with impotence and shame, and a woman who’s not really sure how she can help him. It’s a little funny to me that Bonnie and Clyde have become such iconic bank robbers, because the overarching impression left by this film is that they’re two kids who got in way over their heads, sympathetic young fools with no way to escape their choices. The distinct chemistry and often awkward intimacy between the leads is Bonnie and Clyde’s strongest feature, but this is a solid “love on the run” entry on all counts.
I also checked out The Handmaiden, an ambitious 2018 romantic thriller by Park Chan-wook, the director of Old Boy and Lady Vengeance. My impression of The Handmaiden before watching was that it was a stately, quietly erotic thriller with masterful visual storytelling, which made me kinda wonder whether Chan-wook had gotten all of the live octopus eating and multigenerational incest and ritual murder out of his system in his previous films – but as it turns out, The Handmaiden is still brimming with lustful imagery and brutal violence and erotic poetry readings, it just packages all that nastiness inside a beautiful estate and a tidy thriller shell.
Reflections on power dynamics and the nature of control are threaded gracefully into a narrative that sees characters shifting from predator to prey at a moment’s notice. And every scene is elevated through cinematography so sumptuous that it essentially makes the argument of the film’s cast: that anything can be made rich or poor, beautiful or squalid, depending on how you dress and stage it. Chan-wook is an incredibly indulgent filmmaker, almost Tarantino-esque in his seeming desire to make high low art, and The Handmaiden articulates his vision with glee, while also serving as a triumphant cry of personal and sexual liberation.
Finally, Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You was also on my list, and turned out to be an energetic and very funny satire that felt two parts modern Office Space, one part Get Out. The soul-draining doldrums of telemarketing and robocalling makes for plenty of easy comedy, but Sorry to Bother You is as prescriptive as it is sharp; the dehumanization of capitalism is here set in a racial and class-conscious context, with the necessity of unionizing and true face of modern, “we’re all friends here” corporate culture placed front and center. The film gets a bit messy in its final act, but it’s funny and thematically sharp throughout, and elevated by a terrific cast, with Lakeith Stanfield once again turning in a fantastic leading performance.
