Movie notebook #3

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in May 2000)

I’ve been thinking for a while that I’d like to do an article on my ten favourite films, but it always comes up against a practical problem – I can’t decide what they are. And even if I could, I should really check out the contenders again before committing myself in print. I think Bonnie and Clyde and That Obscure Object of Desire are on the list, but I haven’t watched either of them for a few years, and I never seem to get round to it. A sign perhaps, that they don’t belong on the list.

I think John Cassavetes’ Love Streams must be a major contender, for I watched it only last week, and would happily start all over again. Note that I was only talking above about my ten favourite films – a wantonly subjective criterion. Cassavetes’ two-and-a-half hour film is obsessive, obscure, self-indulgent; it often seems to be talking only to itself. But I adore it.

Love Streams

The film revolves around two characters. The first is a writer, played by Cassavetes, who lives in a vaguely explained harem-like situation, through which he wanders in a tuxedo and a cloud of cigarette smoke. He represents a highly narcissistic, defensive, formalized view of love and relationships, never yielding the truth about himself, regardless that he insists that a beautiful woman must give up her secrets.

This contrasts with his sister, played by Gena Rowlands, whose marriage has crashed under the strain of her highly fluid notion of love as a stream that never stops flowing, whatever the ups and downs of relationships; she almost cracks in her attempt to implement this vague philosophy. Even if I didn’t find the film artistically scintillating, I think I’d still love it just for the ambition. Love Streams has a story, with a resolution, but it feels more like a feverishly molded sculpture than a narrative. Cassavetes, as an actor, had a uniquely aggressive stylized quality about him, yet as a director he was devoted to a notion of discovery and exposure. I think the balance shifted over the years toward the actor in him, for whereas his early work (Shadows) was naturalistic, Love Streams is essentially a spacy, distended fantasy, swooping across moods and tones. A passage where Rowlands buys him a mini menagerie and brings it home in a cab is one of the most delightful deadpan scenes of the last twenty years; at other times the film is so raw that it bleeds.

Well, Cassavetes has been dead for some fifteen years now, and I still miss him. Of course, one occasionally sees films that evoke elements of his style – the Dogme 95 group for example – but they don’t have his showmanship or his blazing vision. I remember Vincent Gallo’s Buffalo 66 a few years ago as being unusually satisfying in that kind of vein – but I’d need to watch it again to know for sure (I must get around to that).

Miss Julie

I was thinking about this again recently as I watched Mike Figgis’ latest film Miss Julie. Figgis is the director of Leaving Las Vegas and Internal Affairs – a likely candidate for the Hollywood A-list if he were interested. But he’s taken to blasting big-budget money as being inconsistent with good work, and says he’s tired of conventional filmmaking. His last, The Loss of Sexual Innocence, was a freeform scrap book of images, widely regarded as ludicrous (I liked it more than not). His next is apparently a thriller shot in a single ninety-minute take, or something like that.

Miss Julie is an adaptation of a Strindberg play, confined almost entirely to a single set, dealing with the fleeting but disastrous relationship between an aristocratic young woman (Saffron Burrows) and her father’s footman (Peter Mullan). It’s powerful, savage material – fiercely laying bare the hypocritical, self-deluding niceties of relationships across class and sexual lines. Figgis’ film is appropriately corrosive and disquieting; he gets a fine performance from Burrows (his girlfriend and apparent muse).

For the most part Figgis plays things fairly straight, but a couple of times near the start of the film, he engages in shot selections that seem ludicrously artificial and jarring (the footman viewed from the point-of-view of the wine glass he holds in his hand; a disorienting one-take shift of focus from one character to another, then again to another), and at one point he uses a split screen. I took these devices as deliberate attempts to force us beyond mere identification with the characters, to make us think about the events depicted within the broader context in which we watch the film (text book kind of stuff), but whatever the intention, they’re very strained, not particularly interesting.

Being unconventional

I was more intrigued by a sequence when the rest of the servants briefly take over the kitchen; drunk and giddy from a Midsummer celebration, they dance and chant and spew vulgarities about their masters, while Burrows listens from a corner. There’s an odd disembodied feeling to this sequence; the servants don’t register as characters, merely as a shambling yet vaguely menacing mass, ritualistically venting its scorn – the sequence seems like a momentarily much more imaginative evocation of the intractability of the class system, and its placement forms a significant meridian in the central relationship.

But since that’s only one sequence, I’m really only saying that Figgis isn’t actually offering up an awful lot, relative to all the fuss he’s making about steering clear of the mainstream for the sake of a higher calling. Miss Julie is certainly very different from The Loss of Sexual Innocence, but you almost wonder if that isn’t the whole point. With both films, you might be up on one piece of it and down on another, but it’s a pretty fragmented kind of response either way. And of course, the films aren’t massively different from the mainstream – they still have actors, recognizable plot strands; they don’t run upside down or backward. Looking at Figgis’ attempts so far at “unconventional” filmmaking, you just feel like you’re missing the frame of reference. Mike, what did you say was broken? And just tell me again, how exactly are you fixing it?

Personally, I thought Figgis’ most distinctive film was his 1997 commercial flop One Night Stand, but that’s a minority view. It’s certainly ironic that almost as soon as he embarked on his mission, a number of fine unconventional movies emerged from within the wretched Hollywood system. But whether Figgis chooses to work within or outside the system, I hope he manages to forge a persuasive case for our continued interest in his work. He seems to have the ambition of a Cassavetes. But Cassavetes was a visionary whereas Figgis, at present, merely reacts.

(2018 footnote – here’s an article I wrote subsequently on my top ten films)