Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 10/27/24

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

Sunday, October 27, 2024

Queen of Earth (Alex Ross Perry, 2015)

Elisabeth Moss in Queen of Earth

Cast: Elisabeth Moss, Katherine Waterston, Patrick Fugit, Kentucker Audley, Keith Poulson, Kate Lynn Sheil, Craig Butta. Screenplay: Alex Ross Perry. Cinematography: Sean Price Williams. Production design: Anna Bak-Kvapil. Film editor: Robert Greene. Music: Keegan DeWitt.

Alex Ross Perry's Queen of Earth is about a breakdown. And just by virtue of being about a breakdown, it's going to be a showcase for an actor, in this case Elisabeth Moss, who has made her career by playing young women on the brink. Moss is Catherine, an artist whom we see at the beginning of the film with her eye makeup smeared, so that it looks like she has two black eyes. She has just learned that her marriage is over, her husband (Kentucker Audley) having confessed to an affair with another woman. This blow is added to another, her father's suicide, so that she retreats to a house in the country with her best friend, Virginia (Katherine Waterston), to recover. But companionship and isolation don't help soothe Catherine's troubled psyche, especially when it's violated (from her point of view) by the presence of Rich (Patrick Fugit), a young man who's staying at a neighboring house and feels happy just wandering into theirs occasionally. It gets worse when Rich and Virginia start seeing more of each other. You can guess the rest. The problem with Queen of Earth is that it's not much more than a showcase for Moss, even though Waterston gets some good scenes too. Perry steadfastly refuses to give us much more about Catherine's background than what we can glean from conversations with Rich and Virginia: There are no revelatory scenes from her married life, and only hints at her relationship with her father, a celebrated artist and her mentor, and what drove him to suicide. The ending of the film, too, hints at more than it tells. So what we are left with is a chronicle of disintegration, some artful use of Keegan DeWitt's eerie minimalist score, and a demonstration that Moss is a fearlessly inventive performer. That may be enough for some viewers, but I wanted more.