Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 12/23/21

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, December 23, 2021

In the Pink

Movie: Ma Vie en Rose (Alain Berliner, 1997) (TCM).

TV: Holiday Wars: Santa's New Ride (Food Network); The Rachel Maddow Show (MSNBC); Hawkeye: So This Is Christmas? (Disney+); Maid: Sky Blue (Netflix).

Gender dysfunction has become such a familiar topic that Ma Vie en Rose (aka My Life in Pink, mainly to keep American audiences from confusing it with the 2007 Edith Piaf biopic) sometimes seems tonally off-base, frequently taking a humorous view of matters that we now commonly regard more seriously -- particularly the treatment of young Ludovic Fabre (Georges Du Fresne) by his parents. Would any movie made today, for example, treat Ludovic's suicide attempt as casually as this film does -- i.e., more as misbehavior than as a lacerating cry for help? The ending, in which Ludovic, the boy who wants to be a girl, meets a girl who wants to be a boy, and his family unites behind him after moving to a less pretentiously affluent neighborhood, seems a little cooked-up. Still, Ma Vie en Rose mostly succeeds as satire on bourgeois convention and homophobia because of its exaggerated characterizations and its pop-culture fantasy sequences. And there are often some funny-sad moments, as when Alex decides he must really be a girl because he has a stomach ache, which he has learned is something that girls have when they get their periods.

Georges Du Fresne in Ma Vie en Rose (Alain Berliner, 1997)

About the only thing Ma Vie en Rose has in common with Maid is the sometimes uneasy balance of substance and style. The ninth and penultimate episode, titled "Sky Blue," is not so wildly eventful or soap operatic as the previous one. It begins with Alex back where she began: a captive of Sean. What follows is a recapitulation of the beginning of the series: flight, refuge, rehabilitation. While the episode is mostly a triumph for Alex, it ends with a disturbing note, as Alex, rejoicing in her anticipated escape from Sean and move to the writing program in Montana, discovers that her mother is apparently living in her truck. Tune in tomorrow.

I liked Hawkeye, the latest Marvel miniseries on Disney+, though not as much as I did WandaVision or Loki, with their fantastical and often wacky settings. I find that some of my own fun is spoiled by all of the series catering to the fanboys, the Marvel mavens, with in-jokes, Easter eggs, and surprise characters that I don't get because I'm not steeped in the lore of the movies and the comic books. When did pop culture become so esoteric?