My 2006 top-ten ranking: 8
Risk of spoilers: Let’s just assume, okay?
“Everybody fucking fantasizes about it!” screams Bill Nighy as Richard Hart to Kate Blanchett as Sheba Hart after finding out about her indiscretions with a student, “that’s why they call it a fantasy!” In this film, everybody does fantasize about it — it being the thought of consuming younger people sexually as a balm for your troubles. Richard was once Sheba’s teacher and is 20 years her senior, although that fantasy seems to have calmed into average domestication with an unaverage (developmentally disabled) son.
Judi Dench as Barbara Covett (get it?) fantasizes about it, maneuvering Sheba into trusting her and awaiting her moment to strike, playing her manipulative hand with smooth aplomb.
And of course Sheba fantasizes about it, and then acts on that fantasy by the train tracks in a moment of adolescent adoration, a reliving of a romance that only a high schooler would find romantic. Nothing like the smell of creosote to trigger cupid and his piercing shafts.
Barbara is the pivot in this, playing a mother superior figure in her own mind, with unkind secret words written on the paper she uses to filter and scold the world. Her secreted derision and insults to the people around her obviously a defense to keep closed the gap of despair and loneliness felt by rejection and repressed sexuality. That she is both hateful and sympathetic on more than one level is a nod to Dench’s mastery of performance.
Blanchett — dressed up like a doe-eyed British clone of my hometown tabloidizoid Mary Kay Letourneau — is great in her blankness, her just-approaching-middle-age sadness. Sheba remembers fondly her teenage days at the Batcave listening to Siouxsie. Ironically she tries to introduce her young lover to the Banshees, a band from before he was born. A band her husband might have found juvenile and after his time.
Barbara plays Sheba off as a trust fund baby of no taste and no class — someone who has rejected the privilege wealth provided her to play the pseudo-bohemian, while still owning a handsome house with an art studio room-of-one’s-one in the back. That room is the heart of Sheba Hart — an artist who is facing the awful truth that creation itself doesn’t make you a better person, or even a whole person. She takes up teaching because of that, and look where that ends up.
It ends up in Barbara’s journal, where she parses every intention and plotline with a sneering self-satisfaction. The brilliance is in letting us see her heart on her face at the same time as the poison in her pen. This movie seems to be about the clash at the intersection of those two. It is, and about how a wealthy British woman can have an illicit affair with an underage lower class Irish kid.
But then it’s also about how these things happen and get moved past. Barbara finds a new target to swing her gaping desires at. Sheba finds a humility in just returning home. It’s almost as if nothing has happened. Almost.
My 2006 top-ten ranking: 9.
Risk of spoilers? Let me put it this way:
At Versailles there once was a Queen
Married into the court at fifteen
One misquoted line
She was asked to resign
By a very polite guillotine
Angular guitars spike over the end of the Annette Bening Columbia logo. Awkward pink monospaced text on black as the drums kick in. The screen goes totally black. John King of Gang of Four sings “The problem with pleasure / What to do for leisure? / Ideal love a new purchase / A market of the sense” Cut to Marie Antoinette as we have always imagined her — a representation of luxury, lassitude and boredom. She’s elaborately dressed in vibrant glimmering silky whites, feathers in her hair. A maid affixes a shoe to her foot. Cakes surround her in her powder blue Versailles drawing room. She reaches over lazily and swipes her finger across the icing of a cake, and then inserts her finger into her mouth to lick it off. Only then does she notice us watching her, and seems does a double take upon noticing us. She looks right at us. Her surprise softens into a light, wry smile, and she leans back and closes her eyes, fully aware of our presence.
Is this the Marie Antoinette — forever held in the mythic populist French mind, trapped in the layers of misconception and politicization — that has been waiting in luxurious hibernation for a more unbiased telling of her story? Maybe this is the classical French queen, the one that the crowds expected to find eating cake as they stormed the Versailles, the one that is indifferent to human life — even her own?
It cuts again to black and we have the pink ripped paper credits evoking Never Mind the Bullocks here’s the Sex Pistols (“God Save the Queen” anyone?). The message is clear: this movie is not about supporting history or historical film as we have come to know it. This film is defying that history. It’s about subverting genre. It’s about subverting our previous visions of Marie Antoinette (the clearest modern analog I can think of is Florida’s Katherine Harris, with her “Let them eat prayer” attitude).
It subverts genre by re-imagining the genre. Instead of falling on the trite and expected classical scores, Coppola brings — seemingly — her own musical tastes from the part of her life when she was the age of Antoinette. By bringing in New Order and Gang of Four, the woman who was a teenager in the 80s when this music was new finds a way to connect to a very teenage feeling. She brings a sensation of human developmental age to Antoinette. The usual mode is to imagine the young and regal as wise and cultured.
This movie, about a teenage queen reacting to the great forces of will and power around her, barely cracked the top tens this year. I suspect that has a lot to do with the filmmaker, whose past and whose family apparently overshadow any of her successes. But I’m not interested in talking about the director in any context but her work. Anything less, I say, smacks of sexism and the gofugyourselfification of our nation. I personally don’t care about canned champagne and I certainly don’t think that Godfather III was her fault (for that, I blame her father). I don’t care what she wears or who she dates. Worse yet, mocking her on these levels without fully considering her work apart from them is ridiculous.
Let’s consider the movie in terms of visuals — the eye popping and sensual costumes, the amazing privilege of actually filming in Versailles. About Coppola’s understated and quite effective ways of portraying a beheading and the sacking of Versailles. The food, as richly decorated as the gilt walls and silked stockings, looked sumptuous, magnificent and delicious. Coppola surrounded herself with craftspeople of amazing skill and gave them an opportunity to do their best work.
But the thing she did most successfully was take modern music, layer it onto the 18th Century story without it being ironic. The movie itself is remarkably earnest, and she uses the music much better than other directors acclaimed for this (Cameron Crowe, I’m thinking of you — your music always breaks my suspension of disbelief because it outweighs the film its scoring). I felt a connection between the music and the queen’s emotional state that felt connected and real to me, unburdened by the snark of sarcasm.
And maybe that’s what confused some people about this. Coppola knows irony — see Lost in Translation, starring the modern crown king of it; see one of her first jobs behind the scene, costuming the pretty funny Spirit of ‘76 — but refrains from using it to spoil the moments in this film.
All that said, I didn’t completely emotionally connect with Dunst as Antoinette, but I discount that because I don’t know if it would be possible for me to do so on any deep level. How can we experience, really, the emotional landscape of Versailles in a time of revolution? In modern terms the appropriation of wealth by the very few while the country literally starved around them is horrible to consider. Antonia Fraser in her book, and Coppola in this film ask us to consider the teenage queen from another perspective, but just because Antoinette didn’t speak her infamous line, or if said line was taken out of context, doesn’t excuse the excesses that defined the time. Maybe she didn’t deserve her fate, but history is what history is. Or, as Alec Baldwin said in State and Main “So…that happened.”
Anyway…what’s so great about being royalty? The Queen asked that same question this year. It brings to mind the last line of the Gang of Four song that opened the movie: “This heaven gives me migraines.”
My 2006 top-ten ranking: 10.
Risk of spoilers: definite.
As Jim Emerson pointed out, this movie is about putting adults in the same mind space that they were as children listening to fairy tales. Is that what Terry Gilliam was trying with Brother’s Grimm? If it is, then Guillermo del Toro has shown him the proper way, and it has to do with putting myth — which typically does not scare adults — up against reality, which typically does scare adults.
It’s a movie about fascism. About absoulteness. About the idea that there is one true path held up against the idea that the paths are what we create. Pan, after all, wants Ofelia to follow one true path. She does for most of the movie, until she confronts choice and desire. In one case she learns about consequence. In another, she learns about sacrifice.
Both of which Capitán Vidal, played with greasy sinisterness by Sergi López, know about. Although the latter he disregards. After he kills the doctor for crossing him, he says “You could have obeyed me!” The doctor replies “But captain, obey for obey’s sake…without questioning…. That’s something only people like you do.” The name of the character is Capitán Vidal, sans first name. His rank is his name. It’s where he begins.
So the movie gives us a child’s escape — or mystical experience — in a time and place where there is absolutely no escaping. It’s about the old world on the cusp of modernism, and the people who faced that cusp looking forwards, and the people who faced it looking backwards.
The Pan of this movie is not a playful, sexual nymph, he is a large and disconcerting force. He towers over the small Ofelia, who may — like Shakespeare’s Ophelia — represent the sane mind going mad. A bug becomes a fairy, a terrifying goat nymph becomes a delight. A delight that moves like an insect, and seems aligned more with the darkness in the world.
Maribel Verdú plays the true mother figure, since Ofelia’s mother is sick — metaphorically from the implication or idea that the Capitán killed her husband to have her, and physically from the child of that murder she carries. Verdú is the voice of reason in the chorus of madness — keep quick, she says, and steal your chance when it arrives.
What sells this movie are the sounds — the creaking house, the clicking insect-fairy, the lumbering eyeless beast. Gunshots and rain fall, chalk on stone, squelching mud and poured water.
The end of this movie is about birthing the future. It’s the choice to live in the tumult of the past, which some fear losing, and the choice to live in the hope of the future, which some fear gaining. It’s about choosing what to obey and what to let die.
Once upon a time I wrote here about every movie that I saw. The idea was that I could record them. I added a quip just for the fun of it, and then spent a year writing more in-depth pieces. But, sad to say, I found myself avoiding seeing movies because it meant I would have to write about them, which is hell when you’re Netflix list is hovering about 500.
So, I just stopped. My last post here was a wrap up of movies I’d seen, around last April sometime. Since then I have been keeping track of movies I’ve watched via del.icio.us (under the tags seenIn2006, and seenIn2007). So why write now? A few reasons.
1. KZA left the Hellbox fold, for reasons it seems he doesn’t know himself, and began writing more of his great posts about movies elsewhhere. When he goes long form and gets in depth, he’s at his best, in my view. So, I got inspired.
2. I took part in a neat and nascent awards thing, and was forced to rate the movies I’ve seen in the past year. During the voting, I was writing short blurbs about the movies. I’ve decided that I’ll expand those and write about my top ten here, just for the fun of it.
Look for those coming up over the next week or so, and more info on the awards thing when there is more to share.