Maternalism & the Female in My Favorite Wife (1940) and Meet Me in St. Louis (1944)

The following discussion is the second in a series of writings designed to broaden my filmic horizons. The first segment of this particular series looked at Modern Times as one representative of the silent film era. The focus this time around is on "classic Hollywood cinema." As defined by David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson in Film Art, classic Hollywood cinema's "conception of narrative depends on the assumption that the action will spring primarily from individual characters as causal agents" and that "the narrative centers on personal psychological causes: decisions, choices, and traits of character." [1] A character has a desire, there's some sort of goal; but, naturally, a counterforce always lies in waits to foible and block the character and make him or her our hero...

In My Favorite Wife and Meet Me in St. Louis the female characters possess what might be considered an unusual amount of strength given the time. Ellen Wagstaff Arden and Esther Smith each exude a strong maternal affection so naturally that it appears to be a given of a desirable woman of the day. Contextual cues also serve to negotiate these gender roles in a way indicative of the call for women, as Lynn Spigel observed, "by popular media to enter traditionally male occupations during the war." [2] Both Mrs. Arden and Ms. Smith were designed to appeal to women of the same class in an adventurousness that still allows room for the boy next door but not without some remediation. The way in each film approaches that design, however, varies considerably as will be seen.

A revisitation of the on-screen charisma exhibited by Cary Grant and Irene Dunne in The Awful Truth (1937) presents the audience yet again with two protagonists. When Ellen Arden turns out not to be dead and lost at sea, the recently remarried Nick Arden finds himself flummoxed and unsure what to do. While Ellen desires to have her husband and her family back, Nick's character holds the flaw that must be ground down and polished: wishy-washiness. By disguising Ellen as the antagonist to Nick's desire to have everything turn out well for everybody (without having to make any decisions), the writers (McCarey, Spewack, McClain and Kanin) reinforce the image of an ideal wife and mother who is essentially perfect, capable of the same things as her male counterparts and only awaiting for her man to grow a little backbone. He must find a classy way to annul his second marriage while she must find a way to re-enter the lives of her husband and children. In order to establish a sense of balance another man also gets thrown into the mix, someone with whom Ellen spent her years "lost at sea." By leveling the romantic playing field, the love story becomes more believable as the audience witnesses how much the idea of his wife spending seven years alone on an island with a strange man pains Nick, who subsequently all but forgets about his new bride.

While Meet Me in St. Louis uses a far more traditional context, its approach to conflict renders it unique and even strange perhaps to anyone unfamiliar with the semi-autobiographical novel by Sally Benson, upon which it is based, or the fascinating history of the city of St. Louis itself. Garland's character is the second of three older daughters hoping to marry the literal boy next door and subject ostensibly to the conflict of the Smith family's possible move to New York City for economic reasons. The move could break the tenuous love affair blossoming between Esther and John. Moods and romantic suggestions color the film through song and dance routines and that same ideal image of womanhood shines through as the men slowly but surely realize that they must speak up in order to get the girl. More importantly, Esther Smith shares an uncommon bond with an uncommon little sister whose psychological havoc with traditional gender roles scores darker notes in this otherwise light fare. While Esther dreams of first kisses and Christmas balls, Tootie executes her toy dolls stoically, even grimly, in an expression quite against the characteristic grain of the future mother, housekeeper or matriarch.

Most interestingly, nobody notices these odd quirks of the youngest daughter's nature, not even in a house with little breathing room and close female relationships. In this way, Tootie's actions symbolize a definite, closeted change in gender roles with a cloudy and indefinite future--a threat to the film's ideology as identified by Bordwell and Thompson. "...Meet Me in St. Louis, like most Hollywood films, seeks to uphold what are conceived as characteristically American values of family unity and life." Pointing out that the film's motif is one of static preservation, they further note that that "the home appears to be a self-sufficient place; other social institutions become peripheral, even threatening." It is also interesting to note that these acts on Tootie's part represent a deep unrest and a rift between the women of the family, a direct result of the external forces at play because of males actions--or inaction. While the outside world prepares for the advent of the 1904 World's Fair (i.e., the Louisiana Purchase Exposition) and horse-drawn carriages give the right of way to motorized vehicles, inside the Smith home "...women are portrayed as the agents of stability. The action in the story constantly returns to the kitchen, where Mrs. Smith and the maid, Katie, work calmly in the midst of small crises. The men present the threat to the family's unity."

Each of these films employ a mixture of perceptual and mental subjectivity. After witnessing the physical prowess of the man with which his wife lived on an island, Nick Arden's mental torture manifests itself in a hallucinatory image at once funny and indicative of his state of mind. Many of Minnelli's musical numbers could be construed as mental subjectivity as the audience listens to Esther's thoughts and ruminations through song. It might be said that while Meet Me in St. Louis relies heavily on mental subjectivity and My Favorite Wife upon perceptual subjectivity that each operate differently within their largely omniscient point of view. The audience almost always knows more than the Ardens at any given time, which is just part of the fun, but these two characters catch up on the facts as the story unfolds. The Smith sisters and their family and beaus are considerably more vague; the audience sees into each private life, but the web never quite connects on the screen. If the audience only considers the desires of Esther, though, the narration then becomes more restricted to her character's viewpoint, waiting with her to see if John Truett will make up his mind and things will work out somewhere between St. Louis and New York. In this sense, the omniscient view point reinforces the use of each character in its distinct position within the framework of the film's ideology and ostensible recipe for romance.

"Straight musicals," Bordwell and Thompson write of films like Meet Me in St. Louis, "are often romantic comedies, in which characters typically trace the progress of their courtship by breaking into song to express their fears, longings, and joys." Bordwell and Thomspon also note the connection between musicals and children's fare, a decidedly good point looking at Minnelli's film as a whole. Not only do children appear in the film prominently, but the recurrent idea of resistance to change conjures a romantic perception of childhood innocence and youth in general as something to be preserved and cherished lest it be lost forever. It often feels that musicals and love stories go so hand-in-hand because of the imperfect nature of words when trying to express strong feelings. Actions always speak louder than words, but what satisfaction can an audience derive from a love story in which no words connoting love or intimacy are exchanged? By the same token musicals provide more than a means to that expression; they also allow for intrigue between the characters to build as the audience becomes ever more privy to the character's desires and ever more aware of the growing love interest's ignorance. This romantic plot line insinuates itself naturally into the musical form--even when dealing with supposedly revolutionary characters in Hair (1979) or a platonic historical figure in Jesus Christ Superstar (1973) or a desperate and ultimately doomed love affair the likes of Moulin Rouge! (2001).

Bereft of musical numbers, romantic comedies--particularly the "screwball" comedy--employ more plot twists and devices to keep the audience intrigued. In order for a love story to be believable, both parties (according to Hollywood) must hold more than a passing interest in each other; they must each at least try to make the relationship work, even if only the audience can fully appreciate their attempts. Or, to quote the authors yet again, "The screwball comedy traditionally sets up a thematic opposition between a stiff, unyielding social milieu and characters' urges for freedom and innocent zaniness." The judge in the courtroom represents the law and authority and an indifference to the qualities that make this romance work--love, forgiveness and spontaneity--a recurring obstacle in comedies from His Girl Friday (1940) to Some Like it Hot (1959). The use of certain Foley sounds, such as pings that sound when something racy has been implied, also seem to be the sole province of the screwball comedy; and, unlike the musical genre, the story determines the film's general reception as the audience relies more on the character's interaction rather than their ability to emote through song and dance routines.

To return to Spigel's words concerning the changing gender roles in World War II's America for a moment, it seems a good bet that a lot of the dialogue in My Favorite Wife was crafted with that shift in mind. The judge/authority figure frowns upon Ellen Arden's role, but is more confused than condemning. She retains her maiden name (Ellen Wagstaff Arden) perhaps as part of her role as a former Southern belle, but probably also symptomatically of a new way of viewing the woman's role in a marriage. Her role as a mother demonstrates itself as an egalitarian negotiation between her and her husband that keeps what's best for the children in mind but does not usurp the romantic ideal of being a woman first and a mother second--despite the twin beds in the marital chamber. [3] In other words, explicitly a woman has to grapple with her various roles but implicitly a woman's strength of reason and resolve create a home in which a man can either snuggle up or leave to find a new mate. In contrast, the maternal strength in Meet Me in St. Louis manifests itself much differently. If the outside forces of the world--a world run by men--present a threat to that strength, the period piece musical acquires a new dimension non-existent in the screwball comedy, a defiance of a perceived societal shift. Where the screwball comedy interacts with that shift, the musical seeks to trap and distill it--crystallize it--and let the world see what it is that they will be forever missing.

[1] Bordwell, David and Kristin Thompson. Film Art: An Introduction. Eighth Ed. McGraw Hill: University of Wisconsin. 2006.

[2] Spigel, Lynn. Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America. The University of Chicago Press: 1992. (All excerpts Chapter 2: Television in the Family Circle)

[3] This ideal female image would re-prioritize those roles in the post-war era. Spigel discusses the reaction to the undermining of the male's assumed authority in the household and workplace thus: "...women were given a highly constraining solution to the changing roles of gender and sexual identity...Marynia Farnham and Ferdinand Lundberg's The Modern Woman: The Lost Sex (1947) gave professional, psychological status to the housewife image, claiming that the essential function of women was that of caretaker, mother, and sexual partner. Those women who took paid employment in the outside world would defy the natural order of things and become neurotics...The domestic woman needed to save her energy for housekeeping, childrearing, and an active (monagamous) sex life with her husband."

Modern Times & The Post-Industrial American Dream

The following discussion falls into a series of writings which I will be posting between now and May. It incorporates language that I have used very little of in the past. I am expanding my filmic horizons, a lot of which will be informed by the eighth edition of David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson's Film Art. (That's the one with a still from Caché on the cover, for those interested.) I expect that as this educational experience progresses the language will become less foreign and more a fluent part of my writing.

This is the first entry. The second is a look at maternalism in the '40s classic films My Favorite Wife and Meet Me in St. Louis...

If you polled an informed film audience as to which Chaplin film was the best, you'd invariably meet with obstinant answers pointing to Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd as the more talented comedians of the day. Luckily, I'm not interested in anything hued with hissing hyperbole, especially not regarding the bygone days of silent film and its attunement to mass culture. What does interest me, though, are general impressions of this particular take of Chaplin's. Often labeled as prescient or foreshadowing, a note that I barely brushed upon in my initial, synoptic review, this film has summoned me back for a closer look. I invite you to do the same with me, keeping in mind that the film was made by a man who, for better or for worse, outshone his peers and engraved himself indelibly upon mass consciousness as a classic character and filmmaker--a feat a lot of people have wasted good money to learn.

Perhaps right from the get-go, Chaplin aimed to do just that. Modern Times' initial placement of the Tramp in a factory, working hard--a lot of elbow grease--just to keep up with a gargantuan and largely symbolic machine conjures an instant contrast of the film's broader, diegetic look at the world. This is the world of the blue collar worker, the entry-level serf in general, but focused upon the specific events of the Tramp's life in each particular setting. As the scenarios shift, it's important to remember that Chaplin keeps the action and the camera specific. As a result, we care when the Tramp's unable to keep pace with the inhumanly fast machine and loses his job and must find another or face starvation. It's not just his antics that render him sympathetic, even loveable. In this instance, the Tramp could have left his job forlorn and sweetly helpless, but he chooses instead to fight back.

By returning to that essential conflict between the dehumanizing setting of the industrialized labor force and the privations of a costly "freedom" from the workplace, Chaplin eliminates the need to hammer home the lack of a happy medium. Our hero is a hero because no matter what he tries, he will fail, and yet he doesn't give up--an understatement about the inability to be truly happy indeed, and perhaps the strongest evidence of the Tramp's threat to capitalism. The story's carefully chosen boundaries cue the audience; contextually, we understand that whether a pursuant of the American dream works in a steel mill, a shipyard, a department store, a machinist's or a restaurant that the dream he chases operates as a relentless and teasing pahntom--as elusive as the "happily ever after" ideal it connotes.

Upon that rusty spindle winds this comedy and love story between the Tramp and a feisty street urchin. By keeping the Tramp and his girl's predicaments and foibles (and their reactions) in the present, Chaplin also syncopates the audience's emotional responses with the events on screen. Partly through the use of fantastic sequences (such as the Tramp finally succumbing to the machine's pull and being rolled through it, the suspension of disbelief takes on a new dimension that allows the fact of the Tramp's firing to retain some element of surprise.

The balletic execution of the scene inside the machine strikes an iconic chord that renders the metaphor of the workingman's doldrum days from birth to death laughable and poignant at once; and so, even though the Tramp's job loss itself could be construed as perfectly logical, the subsequent disappointment is delicate, manifold. More importantly, none of the co-workers (and certainly not the boss) witness this swan dive into the machine. At this juncture, the relationship between the Tramp and the audience becomes sacrosanct; all other characters within the film are of secondary importance to his plight. The audience wants the Tramp to win the day.

After having taken such pains to elicit audience loyalty through cinematography and story choices, several other factors serve to reinforce some very simple distinctions. The sensitive Tramp has no qualms about giving the street urchin a fur coat in which to snuggle; but he is still a poor man, and he wears the implication even as he roller skates in the department store late at night. The camera employs wide-angle shots to impart a sense of danger, of precariousness, as he skates ever closer to the edge of the unguarded balcony, a sign that the hero is brave and perhaps in need of a little protection from himself. That sense of danger plays throughout the film, though, and it often lies outside of the Tramp's means to tame it: the factory owner's Big Brother-like monitoring and pushing of his machine to full production capacity; the Tramp's nervous breakdown that places him yet again in the care of mental and social workers and inadvertently triggers a jailbreak; and the peril of working in a department store while it's being robbed by men on the verge of starvation themselves. To these scenes Chaplin entrusts the Tramp's relative ignorance of the world against which he is defenseless, cueing the audience yet again not only with plot points (one of the robbers is a former steel mill co-woker) but also with character blinds.

The explicit meaning derivates from the film's surface scouring of the American dream, acting in accordance with its referential meaning--that working hard and saving pennies will earn enough to make such a dream a reality. The implicit meaning, though, speaks of a deep restlessness obscured by society but ever-present and ultimately a real threat to the happiness of anyone who buys into such a dream as truth. In fact, by equating the "happily ever after" scenario with that dream, Chaplin seems to be suggesting that all such idealistic pursuits should be understood to be the stuff of films and storybooks, and not the larger reality of America's working class. If so, he nearly got away with it cleanly.

In tune with the atmosphere of the Industrialized Depression, Modern Times feels symptomatic of the concern about the exponential growth of the middle classes. Only thirteen years after the film's release, George Orwell would publish 1984 and ergonomics would officially become an applied science. While Orwell's text would be considerably darker than Chaplin's fare, both stem from a conflict between individual freedom and the ever-narrowing alternative in a society purporting to be free yet camouflaging what precisely that means. As ever, it is up to the protagonist to define it for himself.

On one last note, while looking for parallels between Modern Times and more contemporary media, several suggestions bubble to the surface. The Norma Raes and Gung Hos of this world aside, perhaps my favorite connection would be Laverne & Shirley. The parody of two working women chasing the Tramp's unattainable dream of freedom through labor and equality seems likely, especially with Lenny and Squiggy as the only love interests in sight. American dream, what?

Mardi Gras Marilyn

She floats a little higher than the rest...

Happy Mardi Gras, New Orleans.

I hope you fare a little better as time goes by. I don't when I can return, but I will sometime.

Bayou country does wonders for the soul.


If you're looking for some online action, why don't you check out Andy Horbal's neat listing of upcoming blogathans, eh?

Paris, Je t'Aime Poster

Constantly wallowing in ignorance about the best films, I naturally hadn't heard of this one until someone emailed me the poster.

But this is much comelier than Heraclitus' sour old bust, and there's a much better chance of me seeing something like this now that I've posted it.

If you've seen the film and want to leave a comment, that's fine. Just try not to ruin too much of it if you can help it...

Who Says Textbooks Can't Be Funny?

As I work frantically on an essay due in an hour and twenty minutes, I take the luxury of pausing to highlight a phrase that caught my attention that seems pertinent to any frustrated bloggers out there in need of a good laugh:

"...but who believed that fire, not water or air, is the chief stuff of the world. In that view, his style was seen as an incidental idiosyncracy, to be explained by a pathological mental condition or (more plausibly) by his contemptuous desire to make it very difficult for stupid humanity to understand him."

-- Merrill Ring on the philosopher Heraclitus

Audience, Meet Screen; Screen, Meet Audience...

Prologue

The title of this post notwithstanding, the subject I'm about to broach has more to do with real life than cinema. It seems that we are at a crossroads of sorts on the blogosphere. A lot of debate and vacillation has been taking place on the act of film criticism and what it means to people, why we do it and how we can do it better. And if you happen to be Andy Horbal, then the days that film reviews excited you as a cool, new way of getting to know a medium may have been relegated to the past as somewhat flat and ersatz-whether this is temporary or not remains to be seen. In a couple of startlingly similar veins, local filmmaker Lucas McNelly not long ago expressed interest in the audience/screen relationship that turned out to be one of his biggest challenges in life by his own admission in a blogathan that he launched to sort of explore why it is that men and women have such a difficult time understanding each other; and, perhaps almost as importantly, why that seems to be the gist of so many gems from male filmmakers from Truffaut to Linklater. What startled me most about this was that I had been looking at the same thing. After looking at this from several different angles, a very simple but solid fact revealed itself through blogathan discussions: We spend so much time wishing our love lives were like movies that we end up using the art form itself to try and figure out why they are not.

So what? This is news? Please, you say, picking up the tea kettle. I learn more in an average morning from my cat.

The discussion started a long time ago, though, at the Unspoken Cinema blog, where many gathered to discuss what HarryTuttle has dubbed contemplative cinema and lots of subjects effervesced to the surface, among which the relationship between the audience and the screen impressed me the most. Cineboy raised the question first: why is it that we watch contemplative cinema in the first place? But I would like to take this a step further and pose what seems to me to be the larger question and, currently, a slightly more salient one (if for no other reason, then for the sake of all those feeling disenchanted with writing about film) which is: why do we engage in deconstruction of film through criticism in the first place? The act of critique is arguably a contemplative act in and of itself. Yet the undercurrent suggests that this is not enough. When Harry first described our scope he cautioned us that simple capsule reviews would not suffice and that we should reconfigure our minds toward something more comprehensive and engaging, an open forum to make Jurgen Habermas weep for delight. That sort of atmosphere seems to have led to unrest in several quarters; or, at least, that's certainly not impossible.

Qui en sait? Having tasted honey, saccharine often simply will not do.

Why I Watch Films
(Mes Raisons Pour Regardant Le Cinema)

I really don't know. Vraiment. That might sound like a polite or trite refusal to dig deeply into my psyche, but let's face it-if I had procured a fancy but accessible reason, I think we both know that I would be lying. If there's anything I've learned from Socrates, it's that knowing myself is as likely a thing as my own common sense. Sometimes on a specific night, I know that I'm avoiding or resisting something that I should be attending to, and I may tell myself that I'll write about the film afterward, as if that really salves my conscience or improves my self-control...and let's do be clear: It's not like this is work, per se. I've never been paid to write about a film, only asked. I received a complementary copy of a film that I was asked to review in exchange last August. I was thanked as I was contacted-via email-for being "thorough and thoughtful" and haven't heard back since. That may have been my fifteen minutes, and you know what? I'm okay with that.

I know also that I enjoy several things about film that I've identified with over the years-learning about other cultures, grasping insights about complex familial and romantic relationships-but suddenly and without any really clear and relayable indicators as to why, I feel bereft of a lot of the reasons I thought I once had clearly defined and could consider not only a part of who I am as a person, but my ethos as a budding film critic and a partial scholar. Where once I felt safe and secure in the knowledge that I was learning about life from film while also taking notes on the medium itself, I now feel uncertain that I've ever really believed that and, oddly enough, that perhaps the only practical use for film and film critique is as a method of de-bugging. This infatuation, after all, began while I was still a child. I was a two-year-old in a basket at Star Wars and a walking, talking four-year-old who watched the ice skaters in Rockefeller Center after a large screen showing of Cinderella in an old 5th Avenue theatre that probably no longer exists. I was essentially kidnapped by film and held for ransom by my own consciousness, which was too young, nascent and unequipped to deal with all of the many texts that film shares with all of us so freely, so innocently. So heartbreakingly.

That's the culture we live in, breathe in and move in. If you're not tapped into some kind of medium-be it film, video games, music or books-you're probably not interacting with many people. And if, for some reason, you're only sticking to one of those-books, say-then you may be dangerous or rather anti-social. A writer, perhaps; but, just as possibly the next Ted Kazinsky. On the same page, but coming from a different angle, if you are so steeped in technology and the media that it facilitates, you may be considered to be somehow malnourished culturally. That's what local filmmaker and communications preofessor Allen Larson tells me upon return from the Academy of Motion Picture Television Arts & Sciences. They're tired of receiving intern applicants who aren't literate, who don't even know the basics about literature and art history. Youngsters today seem to know a lot about various filmmaking technology without having the faintest grasp of content and theory.

When he tells me this, my ego's momentarily bolstered that I don't suffer from that acute disorder, but after a moment I shrug. I'm not really convinced, although I don't mention it, that knowing about literature and art history and the like has ever done very much for me as a person. Somehow discovering so late in the game that I can profit from it monetarily is anti-climactic. It may take a couple months' lateness on the rent for me to see the true value in that one.

Why I Will Continue to Watch and Learn
(Mes Raisons Pour Continuant avec la Critique du Cinema)

An old writing colleague of mine going back to my freshman year of college used to describe the reasons for incompatibility between the sexes in a very Machiavellian way. "There's a poison that's been handed down to us by our fathers," Jeremy would start, and everybody would look at his hunched shoulders and protruding eyeballs and back away a few steps. He meant well, but he often didn't make it very far into his theory. If I may be so bold, I think that what he was trying desperately to talk about applies more to culture and its artifacts than anything or anyone else-but, specifically to the aritifacts of human communication. Basically, what we have here is a chicken and an egg, but to stay true a moment to a fine writer who is today a father of three, let's think of it as the poison and the apothecary. It's practically impossible for me to define myself outside of my own culture without studying every last moment in my life-most of which can not be recaptured-and yet, I am captive to all of those images and words. Perhaps you can relate. Born without immunity to all of the forces that shape us, we are the products of every interaction that we have ever had. It's a little bit freaky and exciting if you think about it from a backwards gazing perspective on your own character and what has brought you to this precise moment in time. Or, as a girlfriend of mine put it after she had her first child: "I can't believe how much influence I have over this person's life. It's really scary." In a way, it seems that in order to gain any immunity to the poison, we must drink up. The hair of the dog as it were, day by day.

We have all of these images impacting us in ways that we don't understand and won't necessarily ever understand, and we don't even have to go out of our way to consume them. Between ambient sound and light, it's nearly impossible to get away from media. You'd almost have to shut yourself in a log cabin in northern Montana; but, even Ted had to leave the hut to mail things. So as I sit and wonder why it is that life often feels so disappointing, I am led back to my original co-conspirator, Theodor Adorno, who is no longer with the living, but whose thoughts have come back to haunt many over the last twenty to thirty years. Reading the collection of essays bound into The Culture Industry conveys the sense of helplessness in our subjection to media, that we are promised things that are an illusion that can never possibly become reality. And how does the media get away with it? Why, because we let them. Stomp the Yard made the money that it did because people spent money to see it without first deconstructing the publicity campaign or the motives behind neither the film itself nor the rap culture it portrays and co-feeds. Perhaps these consumers thought that they were investing in stock?

That's not to say that the "democratized" sphere of film writers should be held responsible; probably, an education factor and an understanding of basic logic concerning how money flows should be the larger reasoning for divining why it is that people gravitate toward complementary copy, as Gloria Steinem might say. Or, as J.M. Bernstein put it, paraphrasing Adorno, "The culture industry is the societal realization of the defeat of reflection; it is the realization of subsumptive reason, the unification of the many under the one." What an onus Adorno has bequeathed the modern writer! It's easy to see how someone might feel the pressure of the ages bearing down upon his vertebrae, overwhelmed with and confused by the various tugs-of success at the writing profession, whether it pays well or not; of acceptance into some strata of peership; of personal responsibility and its seeming eternal interplay with larger societal obligations. Are we or are we not always seeking to fuse the two, to make our responsibilities those of our community and government and social setting at large?

It seems that we are. It seems that we should. The question remains, though, how much of ourselves do we have to give in order to feel that we're making a difference, and not just passing the time?



This article will continue in a second segment regarding the fun of film and audience expectations. Date TBD.

Good night, world, I hope your day was better than mine.

Love & Loss, Jane Campion-Style

While airing the old gray matter, trying to recall good love stories written and directed by women for the Lovesick Blogathan, I came across many that could have made for a post rivaling Yonge Street and the Nile in length. Rather than digress upon all of these terrific films, which included Randa Haines' Children of a Lesser God (1986), Sally Potter's Yes (2005) and even unheard-of Canadian director Holly Dale's little-known Blood & Donuts (1995), it seems the smarter idea to tap the one recurring theme that nearly all of these films had, especially the better ones, and try and talk about that instead. Understanding that conflict is vital to almost all writing involving human interaction, it feels a natural course to discover that some major dynamic hurdle exists in these writings on love. Sacrifice, pain and loss seem to be the staples of the humble pie that often accompanies affairs of the heart. Whether at the beginning or at the end or somewhere along the way, it's almost necessary to the real fulfillment of love to experience a loss of some kind. Sometimes that loss prepares Cupid's pathetic victim for what might be the best thing that ever happened to her or him...and sometimes, it sends us to a quieter stage to lie in wait for the next.

Jane Campion seems to understand a lot about love and its partnership with loss and she has a special talent for really peeling away the layers of familial relations to augment the rawness and scariness, the abject loneliness, that can surround and even overwhelm two people who are trying to make a go of it. She did that jarringly, but wonderfully in Sweetie (1989), about (among other things) a woman afraid of trees who co-plants an alder sapling with her new sweetheart as a metaphor for their relationship, and then promptly steals the tree, hides it and pretends to know nothing about the event whatsoever despite the angst it causes her lover . In 1993's more celebrated work The Piano, she takes the idea of loss and gives it a new path that practically begs for close inspection. The technical challenge alone of writing for a heroine who speaks only through a musical instrument -- and by choice -- comes off at first not like a loss, but a study in stubborness, the brand of which can certainly be found among the women embracing the shores of a former penal colony, if it can be found anywhere. That underlying sense of pioneering background colors this work perhaps most of all, imbuing the main character with real spark, but also perhaps alienating some who simply wish to find the love story between Ada (Hunter) and George Baines (Harvey Keitel) tender, romantic and passionate.

Campion uses the film's New Zealand setting well. By opening and ending on the beach upon which Ada's piano is deposited and left to soak in ocean spray, she hinges the entire story upon a place where change is constant, where give and take simply exist. Within the first few minutes, underscored by surf, we are invited to understand the depth of Ada's inner struggle. Her father has sold her in marriage to the Reverend Alisdair Stewart; her very entrance is a glum and unflattering sacrifice. She raises a daughter from a previous marriage, a constant and lonely reminder of her past. When her new husband won't allow the piano to weigh down their caravan, small notepad and sign language between Ada and Flora aside, she loses her voice. Physically, she could speak, yes, but as she tells us right from the start, she has not since she was six or seven and even she does not know why. In a world of films which seem to lean upon the convention of men figuring women out, the admission that a woman can be a perplexing mystery to herself is more than just a departure from the norm. That tiny detail allows us to explore Ada's love affair with life through her piano as true seers, not knowing any more or less than she does at any given moment. We hear only the piano notes and this very fleeting voice that sounds like writing in a journal.

Perhaps because vocal communication can be such a frustratingly limited means of expressing ourselves and making ourselves understood and known to each other, the centrifugal force of Campion's story does most of the work for her. Her husband and his friend are each curious about her in different ways. The former, wishing his wife to like him, attempts to appease her; but George Baines -- the more relaxed man who spends more time among the Maoris than the whiter folks -- wishes her to love him. In an unlikely trade, Baines becomes the proprietor of the piano in order to receive "lessons" and before long is trading romantic gestures for Ada's increasingly clandestine visits. Love has become a negotiation.

(...a very intense and erotic negotiation performed by textured compositions and a terrific full-nude shot of Harvey Keitel that I've never been convinced didn't help Hunter win the Oscar*, despite her apparent talents.)

Yet despite all of this hardship and loss -- a basic disrespect for a property that means much to Ada, far beyond the value of its ebony and ivory -- Campion also seems to be saying that people who have no way of communicating and who may not even know about love from lack of experience can find true happiness under even the most grotesque or bizarre of circumstances. Witness when the good Reverend cuts off Ada's finger in a fit of jealous rage, an attempt to wound the part of her that makes love to his indifferent neighbor so effortlessly, using only a housing of wood and some string. It feels like he provides the fulfillment of Ada and George's love in many ways by severing her finger. That violent culmination of a life spent in silence doesn't force Ada to shout out like you might expect it to, but to gather herself in a new way with a fresh outlook.

Were I to discover that I had the love of a man like George Baines, I'd be willing to lose a finger to that end, too.




*Probably one of the best examples among Oscar moments regarding the magic of film and the suspension of disbelief. We all love Holly Hunter, even those who could do without most of her films, but when she spoke in that lovely cagey drawl of hers to accept the award, The Piano lost a bit of its charm.

Storyville

While I ruminate upon my chosen subject for the Lovesick Blogathan, let me leave you with this picture, taken in the old Red Light District of New Orleans, not far from where Louis Armstrong and his ilk played jazz for horny women.

El Laberinto del Fauno (2006)

Dir/Writ. Guillermo del Toro

w/ Ariadna Gil, Ivana Baquero, Sergi López, Maribel Verdú

First thing's first with a movie like Pan's Labyrinth (2006): You have to see it to believe it, and if you haven't already seen it, you'll need to remedy that as soon as possible.

It's very hard to go wrong when Alfonso Cuarón is involved with a project, but Guillermo del Toro (who directed this particular project) goes the extra mile to ensure that from beginning to end it is a work of integrity worthy of the passions and innocence of youth, the foibles of tyranny and the eternal struggle to find something pure and safe and lasting.

In short, he has created a classic film.

Those familiar with the fantasy genre will recognize that this film lies somewhere outside of the standard categorization, both in content and in context: set up like a folk tale that could easily have been taken from For Whom the Bell Tolls, our young heroine must brave the tasks set for her by a faun of the underworld despite the brewing storm of Francisco Franco's Spain. Caught between a stepfather whose fanatic loyalty to Franco's dictatorship parallels his indifference to his new wife in everything but to produce a male heir, Ofelia must accomplish what Pan sets her to do or face the consequences of her own mortality. And when the daughter of the king of the underworld has been charged with duties to prove her identity, she must arise to the occasion.

The terrific thing about a film like this is its universal scope. At all levels, it registers with deep and hidden truths about childhood and growing up and the constancy of humanity to maintain a struggle between good and evil, despite ages of evidence arguing that we should give it up. The allegory of the labyrinth operates not in the mists, though, but in the reality of never knowing what's right around the bend. Like any good coming-of-age tale, that's the abiding rule.

Fans of the fantasy genre may need to adjust their expectations a bit. Legend, The Dark Crystal and The Lord of the Rings -- even The Chronicles of Narnia (although the PBS version of that story still carries the brass ring) -- each have their specific places in the movie-going consciousness. Even films with varying production values and themes, such as Conan the Barbarian, Conan the Destroyer, Red Sonja, Krull and Clash of the Titans can say roughly the same thing. This film, imbued with life by incredible writing prowess and a childlike savvy, leaves the clichés and typicalities to the past, beating a new path for the international scene.

And while one well-made film's not enough to go on -- to get your hopes up that this will start a cultural revolution -- it's still some pretty exciting stuff.

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