Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 04/16/20

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Thursday, April 16, 2020

When Worlds Collide (Rudolph Maté, 1951)

Richard Derr and Barbara Rush in When Worlds Collide

Cast: Richard Derr, Barbara Rush, Peter Hansen, John Hoyt, Larry Keating, Rachel Ames, Stephen Chase, Frank Cady, Hayden Rorke, Sandro Giglio. Screenplay: Sidney Boehm, based on a novel by Edwin Balmer and Philip Wylie. Cinematography: W. Howard Greene, John F. Seitz. Art direction: Albert Nozaki, Hal Pereira. Film editing: Arthur P. Schmidt. Music: Leith Stevens.

This is the way the world ends: not with a bang but with a bunch of white folks rocketing off to another planet that looks like it was painted by Chesley Bonestell. Well, that's the way it ended in 1951. Today, one hopes that the survivors would be a good deal more diverse and the preparations for their flight a good deal better organized. (Actually, today it looks like it will end with a lot of coughing and political posturing.) When Worlds Collide is very much of its era, sacrificing plausibility for sentiment (small boys and puppies) and romance (tinged with much self-sacrifice). It's a movie that can't be taken seriously for a minute, which is part of its enduring charm for many people. I find that, after many years of serious science fiction, the charm has worn thin. I hunger for some serious treatment of science and for some semblance of actual human behavior. Even though I was 11 years old in 1951, I can't believe that we were dumb enough to swallow what the movie gives us.

The Handmaiden (Park Chang-wook, 2016)

Kim Min-hee and Kim Tae-ri in The Handmaiden

Cast: Kim Min-hee, Kim Tae-ri, Ha Jung-woo, Cho Jin-woong, Kim Hae-sook, Moon So-Ri. Screenplay: Jeong Seo-kyeong, Park Chan-wook, based on a novel by Sarah Waters. Cinematography: Chung Chung-hoon. Production design: Ryu Seong-hie. Film editing: Kim Jae-Bum, Kim Sang-beom. Music: Jo Yeon-wook.

The fine line between explication and exploitation is carefully negotiated by Park Chan-wook in The Handmaiden. To one critic, Laura Miller, comparing Park's film to the Sarah Waters novel, Fingersmith, on which it's based, the film's scenes of Lady Hideko and Sook-he in sexual congress are "disappointingly boilerplate" and filled with "the tired visual clichés of pornographic lesbianism." But to Jia Tolentino, they're expressive of the liberation of the female characters: "The effect is thrilling -- it's the most satisfying bit of wish-fulfillment and fantasy in a movie that is pornographic in more ways than one." Pornography, as Justice Potter Stewart once ruled, lies in the eye of the beholder; you can't define it but you know it when you see it. I, for one, don't see it in The Handmaiden: The scenes that disappointed Laura Miller and satisfied Jia Tolentino seem to me more athletic than erotic, though I side with Tolentino's conclusion that they're integral to the film's portrayal of a kind of liberation. Lady Hideko and Sook-he have freed themselves from the demands of men, from the creepy audience at Hideko's readings from her uncle's collection of sadistic erotica, and from the faux Count Fujiwara's manipulations of both women. In the end, The Handmaiden seems to me more successful as an ingenious erotic thriller than as a tribute to female liberation, but perhaps the truth is that the film is neither one nor the other, but rather a finely articulated blend of both.