“The Pool” is a magical and wry cinematic meditation by director Chris Smith on the differences between the Western notion of transformation and the Eastern idea of destiny. Based on a story by his long-time collaborator Randy Russell, “The Pool” was relocated by Smith to Goa, in southern India, from its original setting in the American Midwest. The transposition not only ornaments this tale externally with the imagery and customs of a fabled place half a world away, but also reshapes the story’s internal dimensions by juxtaposing and interweaving Western and Eastern cultural sensibilities.
In the overgrown garden of a seemingly uninhabited house, the pool is the potent center of the film to which each character relates in his or her own way.
Venkatesh seeks out the pool in the moments when he is not on duty cleaning rooms at a small hotel. Every day he climbs a tree outside the property wall that overlooks the tranquil water of the pool, wondering if anyone ever swims in it and what it would be like to go in. He knows what he is looking at, but not what he is looking for.
Jhangir is an 11 year old orphan street urchin who does menial work in a café near the hotel where Venkatesh works. Though Venkatesh necessarily functions as an older brother figure to Jhangir, theirs is a bond of circumstance more than love. The two have become sidekicks and share a side-business reselling plastic bags at the local market.
Jhangir’s aim in the world is being constantly aware of how each moment might yield him an advantage. Sentiment and sentimentality are luxuries he cannot afford. To him, the pool is just one other place in the world, whatever stories or imaginings may accompany it offer no help with the needs of the moment; he is amused by his friend’s wasted time spent staring at the pool.
Eventually a man appears in the garden. Pretending to work, he mostly wanders, moving chairs and picking at dead leaves, always circling back to sit for long hours gazing into the pool. His sullen and bristling late-teenage daughter, Ayesha, spends long hours poolside, reading.
For the father, owner and occasional resident of the property, the pool is an accusatory center for self-recrimination, the constant reminder of a moment a decade earlier when his young son drowned. Frozen at this window into the past, he has neglected and abused his living family.
Ayesha has dutifully, if resentfully, accompanied her father to this property. However improbable, she was, as a 7 year old, briefly responsible for her 4 year old brother in the water the day he died. Unable to prevent the tragedy, the girl’s fault was to survive. Her father has nothing to offer her beside financial support; they barely tolerate each others’ existence.
For her, the pool is a place to while away the boring hours. Once she is interrupted there, she goes off to the anonymity of a small public park. The pool offers her neither magic nor memory, only the certainty that she can never matter enough to her father to be loved or even to be seen apart from the obliterating specter of her dead sibling. She exists but cannot live.
Venkatesh is as fascinated by the new arrivals as he is by the pool itself and soon insinuates himself into the garden, gradually becoming a de-facto assistant to the father in his labors to rejuvenate the long-abandoned garden.
Meanwhile, impervious to the girl’s rebuffs and always with Jhangir in tow, Venkatesh goes to great effort to befriend Ayesha. Any idea that the young man is operating from a sly scheme toward worldly gain is finally and utterly dashed when he tells Ayesha that he is betrothed to a girl now only 10 years old in a marriage arranged by his mother. Ayesha coyly suggests that he may not like her once she is old enough to marry and he eclipses her suggestion and viewpoint by explaining that their romance will begin after the marriage.
In realizing that she is of no interest to Venkatesh as an imagined or potential mate or conquest, Ayesha slowly warms to the odd pair, basking in, if not truly understanding, the glow of being seen for herself, neither as a means to an end, a blank screen or the insignificant part of a bad memory.
In the course of their work together in the garden, the father tests Venkatesh in various ways and gradually comes to see him as a potential replacement son. One day the father tells a parable about generosity as prelude to his offer for the young man to accompany him back to Bombay where he will receive an education. Suddenly, Venkatesh has a completely unanticipated opportunity: choice- he can stay where he is, return to his village, or go to Bombay. In confronting the question of what he actually wants for himself, he discovers his true relationship to the pool, that of gaining perspective.
At first he decides to accept the unexpected offer of Bombay, but later alters his choice into an amalgam that is both all and none of the above; he will stay behind, go to a local school and continue as caretaker of the garden, house and pool. The father regrets but accepts his final decision, asking what made him change his mind? It was the story about generosity. Then I should not have told it, the father laments, thinking his lesson had gone misunderstood.
The difference between West and East is beautifully described in a simple scene between Ayesha and Venkatesh in the small park where he first befriended the lonely girl. He offers her the parting gift of a kitten. Surprised and dismayed, Ayesha rejects the offer, seeing only the unwanted burden of a needy, vulnerable creature. Alright; he casually pushes the animal aside. You can’t just leave it here, she accuses, though she has no intention of changing her mind. He disagrees; it is life. He found the kitten alone in a dark and filthy alley- at least here it is better off than before.
She does not understand that his friendship to her was a free, generous and genuine response to her neediness- nothing she deserved or was owed- and that in offering her the kitten, he offers her herself. In rejecting the cat she rejects life, unable to feel or see that first she needs someplace to begin the slow movement toward connection. Life, like the kitten, is always the opportunity at hand, not necessarily the one imagined or desired, and it must always be paid for in some kind of coin. Here, now, is the only place to live; how she responds to the moment is her choice.
Father and daughter depart and, surprisingly, Venkatesh returns to working at the hotel. He takes the father’s offer to subsidize his education and passes it on to Jhangir, whom he sends to the local school in his own place, even with his own name. Jhangir, who carries no familial identity, can go on with the ruse of the name change to ultimately enter society as someone. The trick has every chance of working in the world. Even the father, once he finds out, will not only be amused, but will come to see that he was the one who did not fully understand his own parable and that Venkatesh has rightly chosen the better vessel in which to plant the father’s generosity.
Venkatesh never approaches the moment from a place of desire. He knows that he will go through with his long-ago arranged marriage. He takes for granted his performance of all traditional duties toward his mother. He has seen from what has just transpired that, simply by being alive, experiences occur and that following them where they lead is his task. When he extends himself outward, as with the father, Ayesha and Jhangir, it is neither for reward nor gratification of desire, but entirely in the service of being on the ground which he is overlooking. For him, every encounter in the world is a way of deepening the feeling of being alive. It is thus no surprise that the end of the film finds him sitting alone beside the pool, looking deep into its depth, searching the mirror of its surface. He is on a spiritual journey and carries on his slender frame the ancient wisdom that life is about understanding, the soul’s journey, not the ego’s.
Friday, September 12, 2008
Sunday, September 7, 2008
Before I Forget (Avant que j'oublie)
Jacques Nolot’s “Before I Forget” begins with an arresting and compelling visual prologue: upon a brilliant, stark white screen a small black dot suddenly appears and slowly begins to enlarge.
Is the black dot an oculus into an infinite star-less future on the other side of all this whiteness- the round opening increasing in size as we approach and the view beyond the portal broadens? Or is it, rather, a small hard-edged dark planet aimed and headed straight toward us, gaining girth as it hurtles smoothly, effortlessly through an utterly empty atmosphere?
The absolute lack of articulation within each extreme- white and black- becomes entirely unnerving as the speed and size suddenly increase out of proportion, until the entire screen is filled with blackness.
The prologue imitates and is a 2-dimensional diagram of the experience of life. The initial uniformly smooth and slow pacing of the increase in size of the black dot is easily comprehended and magically- though logically- creates an assumption that this rate and ratio will naturally continue until darkness prevails and the light is entirely gone- nothing shocking, almost a pre-nostalgic response to the inevitable. The sudden change in tempo alters the point of view, destroying the complacency of presumed understanding, creating an anxiety that reverses the previous perception of outcome: what was inevitable in its time now comes frighteningly too soon. What is also entirely absent from both prologue and film is the notion of transformation- alternate possibility.
The prologue also describes the trajectory of the story “Before I Forget” which follows Pierre, a 60ish HIV+ gay man, his small circle of contemporaries and the young hustlers they ardently seek out and support with repetitive rounds of sexual episodes more reminiscent of Sisyphus’ labors than spontaneous journeys of desire.
The story that unfolds is a captivating amalgam of unrelenting banality and touching humanity, describing a world in which nothing is strong enough to break through or counter the lethargy of status quo. Both the young and old characters are stuck in patterns so predictable their lives come to look more like the orbits of celestial clusters of inorganic matter, each distinctly different, yet carelessly and powerlessly caught in a magnetic pull, circling the Big Cock.
Really, this world is a binary solar system revolving around two opposite stars that each appear in the form of a literary statement. The Dark Star is a long cerebral quote about stupidity and man’s propensity for making wrong choices because of choosing form over content, marvelously conveyed over Pierre’s car-radio as he is about to set off for an afternoon’s saunter through the local porn theater. The Bright Star is a glorious re-found love-letter from the youthful Pierre’s old sugar daddy, Toutounne, crammed with the scrappy and radiant overflow of exacting particulars that leave no doubt about the real-life love and desire still pouring off the page fifteen years after the fact.
Pierre’s circle includes a claustrophobic and vain colleague whose only interest in Pierre is comparing the price of hustlers- his fantasies of vibrancy revolve around forbidden blow-jobs with armed policemen; George, the married lawyer whose slim, occasional chances for sexual tidbits on the side seem always to be thwarted by chance; and Paul, a former convict with a much darker past and more practical tastes. Paul was the heir of his sugar daddy Gaston and Paul, unlike Pierre, achieved the means to live as he wanted. Paul exemplifies in purist form life lived moment to moment solely with the aim of advantage. He stands for the aspect of rampant capitalism under which there is nothing not for sale and someone is always going to benefit. The challenge for economic man is never to lose sight of how the game is played; a winner will always hit the jackpot. Being the winner is not just all that counts, it is all there is.
Money and time are inextricably linked and honored above all else. At one extreme, the aim is automatic prolongation of life, lived or unlived; at the other extreme lies the unrelenting and unforgiving finitude of the pay-per-view “professional hour”- whether with the hustler or the psychologist- always commanding: ”Now/NotNow” and equally unable to conform to life as experience rather than schedule.
When Pierre climbs- with surprising alacrity- over an ivy-covered wall in the deep dark of a moonless night, we imagine that he is out for another round of half-hearted sexual encounters. It is rather a memory of the Bright Star now absent from his world that draws Pierre like a pilgrim into the shadows of the cemetery for a brief visit at Toutounne’s grave.
Perhaps this gives an idea for the film’s title; the cluster of preening and self-regarding, aging narcissists is more like a gaggle of old house pets, exotic spoiled cats, running after each delectably cute mouse, dangling the captured creature but no longer in the game for blood or potency. They have forgotten what it was they were after, what deep inner needs jumpstarted the pattern of desire while being unable to see it through. Pattern and aging have taken the place of encounter. They cannot move on. What unites them all is a narrowness of vision. Will they ever meet life with an openness to widening the spectrum of observation? The opportunity afforded Pierre by Toutounne’s letter may have been his last chance to remember- or be led into an appreciation- that a moment of real meeting has the unique capacity to alter the ultimate trajectory of the Sisyphean boulder’s path. Once the ability to be affected by felt experience disappears, repetition alone remains, along with the entrapment of pointless searches and yearned for degradations.
Pierre is infantile and obvious, with a matter-of-fact and contradictory presence that belies someone who has been loved for nothing more than being himself; he is quick to point out that he will not be so generous with the next generation.
Pierre can always be relied upon to do exactly what he says he won’t, so the film ends with a scene as slow as the prologue of the black dot. Dressed in drag, like an old suburban mall beer hall waitress out for a fancy dinner in the city, complete with a long and merciless raven-black wig and simple shift with lace trim, Pierre goes off to the sex club/porn theater with one of his regular hustlers. At last he turns and enters the theater, slowly swallowed into the pitch black that describes the future, both literally and figuratively, near and far.
Is the black dot an oculus into an infinite star-less future on the other side of all this whiteness- the round opening increasing in size as we approach and the view beyond the portal broadens? Or is it, rather, a small hard-edged dark planet aimed and headed straight toward us, gaining girth as it hurtles smoothly, effortlessly through an utterly empty atmosphere?
The absolute lack of articulation within each extreme- white and black- becomes entirely unnerving as the speed and size suddenly increase out of proportion, until the entire screen is filled with blackness.
The prologue imitates and is a 2-dimensional diagram of the experience of life. The initial uniformly smooth and slow pacing of the increase in size of the black dot is easily comprehended and magically- though logically- creates an assumption that this rate and ratio will naturally continue until darkness prevails and the light is entirely gone- nothing shocking, almost a pre-nostalgic response to the inevitable. The sudden change in tempo alters the point of view, destroying the complacency of presumed understanding, creating an anxiety that reverses the previous perception of outcome: what was inevitable in its time now comes frighteningly too soon. What is also entirely absent from both prologue and film is the notion of transformation- alternate possibility.
The prologue also describes the trajectory of the story “Before I Forget” which follows Pierre, a 60ish HIV+ gay man, his small circle of contemporaries and the young hustlers they ardently seek out and support with repetitive rounds of sexual episodes more reminiscent of Sisyphus’ labors than spontaneous journeys of desire.
The story that unfolds is a captivating amalgam of unrelenting banality and touching humanity, describing a world in which nothing is strong enough to break through or counter the lethargy of status quo. Both the young and old characters are stuck in patterns so predictable their lives come to look more like the orbits of celestial clusters of inorganic matter, each distinctly different, yet carelessly and powerlessly caught in a magnetic pull, circling the Big Cock.
Really, this world is a binary solar system revolving around two opposite stars that each appear in the form of a literary statement. The Dark Star is a long cerebral quote about stupidity and man’s propensity for making wrong choices because of choosing form over content, marvelously conveyed over Pierre’s car-radio as he is about to set off for an afternoon’s saunter through the local porn theater. The Bright Star is a glorious re-found love-letter from the youthful Pierre’s old sugar daddy, Toutounne, crammed with the scrappy and radiant overflow of exacting particulars that leave no doubt about the real-life love and desire still pouring off the page fifteen years after the fact.
Pierre’s circle includes a claustrophobic and vain colleague whose only interest in Pierre is comparing the price of hustlers- his fantasies of vibrancy revolve around forbidden blow-jobs with armed policemen; George, the married lawyer whose slim, occasional chances for sexual tidbits on the side seem always to be thwarted by chance; and Paul, a former convict with a much darker past and more practical tastes. Paul was the heir of his sugar daddy Gaston and Paul, unlike Pierre, achieved the means to live as he wanted. Paul exemplifies in purist form life lived moment to moment solely with the aim of advantage. He stands for the aspect of rampant capitalism under which there is nothing not for sale and someone is always going to benefit. The challenge for economic man is never to lose sight of how the game is played; a winner will always hit the jackpot. Being the winner is not just all that counts, it is all there is.
Money and time are inextricably linked and honored above all else. At one extreme, the aim is automatic prolongation of life, lived or unlived; at the other extreme lies the unrelenting and unforgiving finitude of the pay-per-view “professional hour”- whether with the hustler or the psychologist- always commanding: ”Now/NotNow” and equally unable to conform to life as experience rather than schedule.
When Pierre climbs- with surprising alacrity- over an ivy-covered wall in the deep dark of a moonless night, we imagine that he is out for another round of half-hearted sexual encounters. It is rather a memory of the Bright Star now absent from his world that draws Pierre like a pilgrim into the shadows of the cemetery for a brief visit at Toutounne’s grave.
Perhaps this gives an idea for the film’s title; the cluster of preening and self-regarding, aging narcissists is more like a gaggle of old house pets, exotic spoiled cats, running after each delectably cute mouse, dangling the captured creature but no longer in the game for blood or potency. They have forgotten what it was they were after, what deep inner needs jumpstarted the pattern of desire while being unable to see it through. Pattern and aging have taken the place of encounter. They cannot move on. What unites them all is a narrowness of vision. Will they ever meet life with an openness to widening the spectrum of observation? The opportunity afforded Pierre by Toutounne’s letter may have been his last chance to remember- or be led into an appreciation- that a moment of real meeting has the unique capacity to alter the ultimate trajectory of the Sisyphean boulder’s path. Once the ability to be affected by felt experience disappears, repetition alone remains, along with the entrapment of pointless searches and yearned for degradations.
Pierre is infantile and obvious, with a matter-of-fact and contradictory presence that belies someone who has been loved for nothing more than being himself; he is quick to point out that he will not be so generous with the next generation.
Pierre can always be relied upon to do exactly what he says he won’t, so the film ends with a scene as slow as the prologue of the black dot. Dressed in drag, like an old suburban mall beer hall waitress out for a fancy dinner in the city, complete with a long and merciless raven-black wig and simple shift with lace trim, Pierre goes off to the sex club/porn theater with one of his regular hustlers. At last he turns and enters the theater, slowly swallowed into the pitch black that describes the future, both literally and figuratively, near and far.
Monday, September 1, 2008
Vicky Cristina Barcelona
The narrator alone would have us believe that “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” is a comedy- and the first twenty minutes appear to be a glorious send-up of Woody Allen by Woody Allen. But something does not connect, even in these first scenes, between the dead stares of the two beautiful, youthful heroines and the unrelenting overflow of chatty and comical soundbites. Allen plays both sides of the cinematic/dramatic coin- not trusting us to simply watch the screen without micro-managing our observations and response, and tipping his hat that, perhaps, the narrator doth protest too much. The all-too-familiar too-true-to-life stereotypes that haunt all of Allen’s films must be constantly re-packaged with a barker’s sleight of tongue.
Vicky and Cristina, collegiate buddies with two months to kill set their sights on Barcelona, staying at the home of a distant relative, Judy, and her hedge fund husband, Mark. Vicky, the dark, serious scholarly one- engaged to be married- turns out (surprise!) to fall for the suave native artist. Mums the word as Cristina, the capricious blond- uninformed on all levels, including her best friend’s outré caprice- beds and eventually moves in with same suave native artist, Juan Antonio. Soon his ex-wife, Maria Elena, shows up as a caricature of creativity and danger.
A totally unexpected and creatively productive ménage a trois ensues at the artist’s very artistic abode until, predictably, Cristina’s inner alarm goes off, unilaterally signaling the end of their joint artistic harmony- her tank is full, time to drive on. The Europeans are hurt, outraged and dismayed, and can only revert to their historic and histrionic bickering. The Europeans cannot find fulfillment among themselves; they can remember and recognize something they can no longer produce.
Meanwhile Judy, the Barcelona surrogate Mom/hostess is revealed to be having an affair, unhappy and somehow unfulfilled in her marriage to the older model of Vicky’s fiancé. Vicky confides her secret and feelings for Juan Antonio to Judy, who tries to warn the younger woman away from the fate she continues to embrace. Too late for me, she laments, but not for Vicky. The possible truth of this view is lost in the attractively deep cushion of very good upholstery.
Really, Vicky’s plans for an elaborate social wedding in the Fall and the house in Bedford Hills need not be perturbed by finding out not only that she may not love the man she’s marrying, but that she may not even know what love is.
Cristina returns from a successful quick side trip to France intended to shake off the last effects of her multi-valent/partnered romance with the handsome European Art couple. Vicky finally tells Cristina of her single night of fallen love. Cristina reveals just how little affected she is from her great experience with Juan Antonio and Maria Elena by professing that, had she only known, she would gladly have stood aside for her best friend, as if her entire experience were little more in substance and meaning than another azure cashmere cardigan on sale at Bergdorf’s.
In the almost cluelessly unhappy world of “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” the narrator never shuts up; unrelenting good cheer wears away the fragile remnants of love and courage, like a cruel partner who giggles at the exact moment that wordlessly indicates you are, at best, having sex, not making love. Nothing is strong enough to break through or counter the lethargy of status quo and style; no encounter or revelation need interfere with habit, one’s preferred self-image or any long-booked social calendar.
This nightmare of McLuhanesque socially appropriate “traffic flow” cannot rightly be called tragic, for no one is awake or responsive to life; no one actually exercises choice; no one admits to a power greater than their own convenience, will or illusion; no touch leaves an impression; no call makes them stop and turn, irrevocably, into a life uncharted.
Exactly on schedule, as planned, the Americans go home.
Vicky and Cristina, collegiate buddies with two months to kill set their sights on Barcelona, staying at the home of a distant relative, Judy, and her hedge fund husband, Mark. Vicky, the dark, serious scholarly one- engaged to be married- turns out (surprise!) to fall for the suave native artist. Mums the word as Cristina, the capricious blond- uninformed on all levels, including her best friend’s outré caprice- beds and eventually moves in with same suave native artist, Juan Antonio. Soon his ex-wife, Maria Elena, shows up as a caricature of creativity and danger.
A totally unexpected and creatively productive ménage a trois ensues at the artist’s very artistic abode until, predictably, Cristina’s inner alarm goes off, unilaterally signaling the end of their joint artistic harmony- her tank is full, time to drive on. The Europeans are hurt, outraged and dismayed, and can only revert to their historic and histrionic bickering. The Europeans cannot find fulfillment among themselves; they can remember and recognize something they can no longer produce.
Meanwhile Judy, the Barcelona surrogate Mom/hostess is revealed to be having an affair, unhappy and somehow unfulfilled in her marriage to the older model of Vicky’s fiancé. Vicky confides her secret and feelings for Juan Antonio to Judy, who tries to warn the younger woman away from the fate she continues to embrace. Too late for me, she laments, but not for Vicky. The possible truth of this view is lost in the attractively deep cushion of very good upholstery.
Really, Vicky’s plans for an elaborate social wedding in the Fall and the house in Bedford Hills need not be perturbed by finding out not only that she may not love the man she’s marrying, but that she may not even know what love is.
Cristina returns from a successful quick side trip to France intended to shake off the last effects of her multi-valent/partnered romance with the handsome European Art couple. Vicky finally tells Cristina of her single night of fallen love. Cristina reveals just how little affected she is from her great experience with Juan Antonio and Maria Elena by professing that, had she only known, she would gladly have stood aside for her best friend, as if her entire experience were little more in substance and meaning than another azure cashmere cardigan on sale at Bergdorf’s.
In the almost cluelessly unhappy world of “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” the narrator never shuts up; unrelenting good cheer wears away the fragile remnants of love and courage, like a cruel partner who giggles at the exact moment that wordlessly indicates you are, at best, having sex, not making love. Nothing is strong enough to break through or counter the lethargy of status quo and style; no encounter or revelation need interfere with habit, one’s preferred self-image or any long-booked social calendar.
This nightmare of McLuhanesque socially appropriate “traffic flow” cannot rightly be called tragic, for no one is awake or responsive to life; no one actually exercises choice; no one admits to a power greater than their own convenience, will or illusion; no touch leaves an impression; no call makes them stop and turn, irrevocably, into a life uncharted.
Exactly on schedule, as planned, the Americans go home.
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