Category: Blog

I love films about two strangers who meet and feel a connection to one another and take the time to explore that connection. Solange Martin’s À cran (released in English as On the Edge) is one such film. It’s about Clara, a woman who goes to pick up her husband at the airport, but he isn’t there.  She phones the hotel where he is staying and finds out that he is with another woman. She is shattered. This is a story told countless times in film: a woman discovers she’s being cheated on and either stays with the man or leaves him. However, À cran takes a unique approach. Clara decides to engage in her own infidelity not as a way to “get back” at her husband but to feel an authentic bond with another person and reconnect with her sexuality.

At the airport, Clara meets a young man named Robert, and the two of them immediately feel an attraction. The movie is brilliant in how it prolongs that attraction and withholds sexual consummation until the very end. Most of the film centers around Clara and Robert driving around the streets of Paris, stopping at bars, and interacting with the immigrants who make up the working class of the city. Martin provides a sensitive and humane portrait of these immigrants. A gas station attendant gives them tea and flowers. A hotel clerk sings along to a film in his language. This is a chance for Clara to leave the confines of her upper class, comfortable life, and have a more authentic experience of Paris. Robert himself is working class, a rugby player who got injured and now works at the airport.

The movie is very playful, which makes it a delight to watch. At one bar, Clara tries to tell a joke, but it bombs. Later, they run around the streets like teenagers and Robert hurts his hand, forcing them to stop by the hospital. There is a freedom that they feel in each other’s presence, the freedom to be silly or to tell bad jokes, even to cry and be sad, as Clara is when she talks about her husband and the pain she feels over his betrayal. Being together makes them happy.

While Clara and Robert are attracted to each other, the majority of the film focuses not on sex but on conversation. It’s a profoundly romantic movie in that regard because it’s interested in looking at how two people make a connection, how they build trust and intimacy. When they finally do make love at a hotel, it’s all the more intense due to that emotional connection they have nurtured. They luxuriate in one another’s bodies, making the scene more erotic than purely sexual. Afterwards, Clara says that she’s never made love like that, implying that she has no real connection with her husband. She declares that she is born on the day she and Robert made love. For her, sex with Robert is like an awakening, a kind of salvation because she has found a man to whom she can give all of herself, both body and soul.

But the morning comes and Clara has to return to her children and her home. She’s so different when she enters the domestic sphere of her apartment. Gone is the Clara of the night before with her laugh and her playfulness, her confidence and wildness. This Clara is prim in her cardigan, her hair immaculate. She returns to her roles as wife and mother, but Robert isn’t prepared to let her go. He shows up and makes a declaration of love. He wants them to be together. They’ve known each other only a few hours, but what they’ve felt and what they’ve revealed has sparked a deep and powerful passion. Like Clara, he feels reborn by their love.

It’s a happy ending. The film gives the impression that Clara will leave her husband to be with Robert, that she will make the courageous choice to escape a loveless marriage in order to plunge into a new relationship that holds the promise of true and lasting love. In this way, I see À cran as a feminist film that centers female pleasure and agency. I felt so much pleasure myself watching this movie because I think many women want to hear the words that Robert says, they want to be loved without conditions, they want a passionate connection.

I love the idea that one night can change your life, that meeting one person can transform you, that it’s never too late to find love, that when you feel broken and shattered you can find hope, you can be saved. I don’t always feel these things in my real life, but when I see them in a film, I believe in them for a little while, I believe in the possibilities of life again.

I wanted to render silence. A rich, living silence. Like something you might have been able to hear.

***

In my films I don’t gloss over or suppress those things that aren’t functional or organic to the expressive unity of the fiction—they are made up of a material that’s lacerated, superimposed, offset in time; there are gaps and breaks—that whole imaginary that’s meant to render the heterogeneity and irreducibility of life.

***

As for Jeanne, since the time of Moderato Cantabile I’ve been aware of the extraordinary intelligence in her eyes, the seriousness with which she entered into her roles.

— Marguerite Duras, The Suspended Passion: Interviews

This is my first real review for the website. The essays before this one were conceived for other reasons, before I thought of creating herheadinfilms.com, before I envisioned a space specifically for my film reviews.

How do I want to write about film? I’ve been thinking about this question for a long time. Films are not separate from my life; they are deeply embedded in it. I want to convey that embeddedness, the way cinema is intertwined with every aspect of my existence. I’m not sure how to do this. I’m learning as I go, creating a language that is my own and that makes room for the subjective, the emotional, the elusive.

I’d prefer for my reviews to be conceived in the afterglow of seeing a film. I’d like them to be personal, impressionistic, a blur of thoughts and emotions. I want to write intuitively, from the heart and in the moment. They might be rough around the edges, not so polished or perfect, but that’s okay. Often, I don’t know what I want to say before I start writing. I find my words as I write them. I discover my thoughts and feelings as they appear in the act of writing.

I wish I could write about every film I watch, but time won’t allow me to do that. However, I’ll write about as many films as I can, and, in the process, I hope to capture memories and parts of my life in these words so that I don’t forget them.

***

I watched Nathalie Granger on a Saturday. It was a particularly difficult day. I’d been crying so much that my eyes were burning. I wanted my eyes to do more than cry. I wanted to watch my first Marguerite Duras film. I’ve read many of Duras’s books: The Lover, The Ravishing of Lol Stein, her script for Hiroshima Mon Amour, her war diaries, several of her interviews. Duras is a crucial figure in my life, and her fragmented writing style is one that I admire and that I am inspired by. It seemed only natural to start exploring her cinema.

***

Nathalie Granger feels like a Marguerite Duras creation. It has the fragmented and non-linear narrative that characterizes her novels. I could tell that she directed this film. Her touch is all over it. It’s like her writing has come to life on the screen.

***

Nathalie Granger is a little girl who is so violent that she needs to be put into a different school. We’re not told much about Nathalie’s violent tendencies, only that she is aggressive towards other children her age and acts out. We never see her violence. In fact, she is rarely in the film. The film is really about Nathalie’s mother, Isabelle, (Lucia Bosé) and her close friend, an unnamed woman played by Jeanne Moreau.

***

Like Duras, Moreau is an important figure in my life. She was present in many of the first art house films I ever watched. There was her vivacity in Jules et Jim, her sensuality in The Lovers, her yearning in Elevator to the Gallows, her addiction in Bay of Angels. In those films, she was glamorous and always defined by her relationship to men, whether it was the male directors who were in love with her or the male co-stars who fawned over her. In Nathalie Granger, she is just herself, wearing simple shirts and slightly-flared jeans. The style is more casual and natural. The two women are not sexualized or objectified by Duras’s camera. They are allowed to just be.

***

I rented this film through Netflix’s DVD service. As I held the DVD, I thought about the other people who had laid it beside their beds and then picked it up and watched it. I was touching something they had touched, and someone, one day, would receive the DVD I had touched and we would be connected in some small but unknown way. All these people watching one Marguerite Duras film.

***

Nathalie Granger is almost a silent film. The dialogue must have covered only a few pages of the original script. There are few words. Instead, there are looks and empty rooms. Much of the story takes place in one house. We see windows and couches and cats. We watch two women move through this domestic space. They clear the table after lunch and wash the dishes. They look out of windows, their faces and bodies are reflected in mirrors. Their day is punctuated by a radio broadcast that updates listeners on two teenage killers who have been caught by the police. Perhaps a reminder of what Nathalie could become one day if her violence escalates. Within this calm domestic realm, violence strikes in subtle ways–through the radio and the information about Nathalie’s outbursts. Nathalie’s mother, Isabelle, conveys a quiet turmoil; you can tell she is grappling with her daughter’s violence. She packs Nathalie’s clothes into a suitcase in preparation for the move to the new school, but, at the last minute, she refuses to let Nathalie leave. Nathalie’s fate is unresolved by the end of the film, perhaps implying that there are no easy solutions when it comes to dealing with a violent child, that the problem of violence itself is never easily solved.

***

This film is only 1 hour and 20 minutes, but it took me hours to watch it. This always happens to me. I constantly pause films, maybe I want to prolong them. This film is slow and silent, the kind of film many people don’t like watching. They need action and plot, and I need those things sometimes, too, but I’ve increasingly opened myself to the beauty of meandering, meditative films that are more about immersing the viewer in a cinematic world that is slower and closer to everyday life. Nathalie Granger is populated by ordinary tasks performed by ordinary women who feel more than they can speak. Their silence is infused with meaning.

I didn’t mind spending a little over an hour in their world, watching them dry the dishes and look out of windows and play the piano. My mind drifted at times, but that’s okay. I think these films create a space for thinking; they inspire the mind to wander. The film isn’t trying to do anything or say anything; it simply is. It exists. It pulls us in without telling us what to think or how to interpret it. We make the film our own. I think what will stay with me most are those quiet moments that suggest the rich interior life of the women in the film.

As I write it I do not know myself, I forget myself. The I who appears in this book is not I. It is not autobiographical, you all know nothing of me. I never have told you and never shall tell you who I am. I am all of yourselves.

***

I feel within me a subterranean violence, a violence that only comes to the surface during the act of writing.

–Clarice Lispector, A Breath of Life

Writing scares me. I’m scared of what might come out of me, and I’m scared of what can’t come out, what is forever trapped in my own mind. It’s cliché to say it, but, for me, writing is bleeding. When I write, I open a wound. I’m not a creative writer. I’m not all that imaginative. Instead, I want to write my insides. I want to write unspeakable things. My life is my subject, my muse. Everything that I feel must be translated into words.

Does writing make a woman a monster? By that, I mean the kind of woman who,  like me, blatantly writes about her own life, who uses her family and friends as subjects and inspiration? I asked myself this question as I watched Ana Urushadze’s debut feature film, Scary Mother. It’s about Manana, a woman obsessed with writing. Each day, she locks herself away from her husband and three children and writes her book. She’s so consumed by writing that she scrawls words all over her arms; her body becomes a kind of page covered in language.

No one appreciates Manana’s writing. When she gathers the courage to read it aloud to her husband and children, they are horrified by what they hear. The protagonist of Manana’s book hates her family and has sex with the  neighbor. Manana’s family cannot separate her from her creation. The woman is and is not Manana, just as Esther Greenwood is and is not Sylvia Plath. The work of women writers is all too often reduced to autobiography. The woman’s life determines how the work of art is received and interpreted. All writers borrow from their real lives. The great writers take that personal source material and transform it into a work of art.

The only person who thinks Manana has created art is Nukri, the owner of the local stationery shop. To him, Manana is a genius. In his stationery shop, Nukri creates a room for Manana; it’s a room of her own, bathed in red light. The space resembles a womb or a wound. When Manana leaves her family for this room, she defies the expectations of a mother and a wife. Instead of cooking dinner and washing clothes, she walks around the city and writes on her arms. Her scariness lies in her intensity, her strangeness, and her subversion of gender norms. She is an outsider, haunted by childhood trauma and an absent parent.

Does writing make a woman monstrous? It makes Manana selfish, obsessed, absent. Manana prioritizes her creative vision. Words consume her. As I watched Manana scribble all over her arms, I recalled learning about a disorder–it’s called hypergraphia–that causes sufferers to obsessively write. I either read an article or saw a news segment about the disorder. I remember that one of the sufferers even wrote on the walls of their shower. In Scary Mother, there’s a scene of Manana showering with her arm hanging outside the curtain; she doesn’t want the water to wash away her words. In another scene, Manana sees shapes in the shower tiles, imagining stories about them. Her husband thinks she is going mad and even threatens to commit her. One woman refuses to publish Manana’s book because she thinks Manana is a psychopath.

Is Manana writing or is she bleeding? Do her words make sense beyond the page of her own skin? How do you make the world understand writing that speaks the unspeakable, that articulates troubling emotions? Is Manana a bad writer or are people not able to comprehend what she has written? Manana is not a monster. She lives  in a world that prefers a silent woman to a writing woman, a world with no place for a woman who writes on her arms and explores disturbing desires, a woman who, at times, prefers writing to mothering and will never stop being punished for it.

Manana’s family is supportive of her work to a point, but when they disapprove of her book they burn it. They tolerate her writing as long as they can dictate what she expresses, denying her the right to her own creative vision. Manana is nothing like me. She isn’t scared of what comes out of her. She is ready to capture it on the page or on her skin. She writes even when nobody will publish her unconventional text. She writes even when her family denigrates her work. She is fearless and maybe that’s what makes her scariest of all. She won’t stop writing no matter what.

In 1928, Romanian writer, Max Blecher, was diagnosed with Pott’s disease–a type of tuberculosis that affects the spine. Over the next ten years, Blecher frequented sanitariums across Europe but was mainly bedridden. In his lifetime, Blecher was a well-respected writer, publishing novels and poems, corresponding with famous figures, like André Breton and André Gide. He died in 1938 at the age of 28. Before his death, he wrote a novel about his experience of illness and confinement. Entitled Scarred Hearts, it focuses on the patients of a sanitarium in France. In 2016, Romanian director, Radu Jude, adapted this novel into a film by the same name. It’s a film that is visually gorgeous but also unflinching in its depiction of physical suffering and disability. The coexistence of beauty and pain is part of the film’s strength, so too is the way in which it asks viewers to reflect on the precariousness of health and the vulnerability of the human body.

The film is set in 1937 and centers on a Blecher-like character named Emanuel who is also stricken with Pott’s disease and enters a sanitarium. This is a meticulously constructed period drama with cinematography so lush that scenes feel like vintage photographs come to life. The beautiful seaside location belies both the brutal content–sickness, death, the body’s disintegration–and the looming threat of the Second World War that will officially begin two years later. There are subtle allusions to the tension that permeates the region. Emanuel is Jewish and, in one scene, recalls a time when people shouted at him that Jews should die. During a party attended by the patients, one young man does a dramatic impersonation of Adolf Hitler, mimicking his exaggerated gestures and strident speaking voice. All the patients laugh, unaware of the horror that will be unleashed just a few years later.

The film is devoid of reverse shots or close-ups. Jude keeps us at a distance, eschewing the individual face for the glorious ocean vistas and richly colored interiors of the sanitarium. This distance allows us to look at the whole scene, not just at Emanuel himself but at how he is positioned within his environment, in the world around him.  It’s also a reminder that we can never know what it’s like to inhabit another person’s body, especially a body enduring pain. Emanuel’s entire torso is encased in a hard, white cast; he has pus extracted from his stomach; he is confined in bed almost all of the time. He leads a life of stasis and immobility, and the camera shots themselves are long, static, unmoving. The camera is confined, just as Emanuel is confined in his body, at the mercy of an illness that will claim his life, just as it claimed Blecher’s life.

Despite Emanuel’s immobility and pain, he lives as fully as he can. The patients at the hospital gather together at night and listen to music and make out. They crack jokes and recite poetry. Emanuel falls in love with a young woman named Solange. She wears a brace on her leg that makes it difficult to walk, but she isn’t bedridden like Emanuel. The two of them like to lie together and kiss. Emanuel’s cast is no impediment to love-making, and they force their bodies into positions that create pleasure and release. The patients at the sanitarium are not in need of pity. They are not one-dimensional, and they are not defined solely by their disability or their pain. They are raucous and well-rounded, seizing life while they still have it, always aware that death could be around the corner.

While the film is steadfast in showing the vitality of the patients, it also doesn’t shy away from pain and the limited medical options for alleviating it in the early 20th century. Emanuel has no privacy. He is a specimen to be looked at by doctors. For almost the entire film, Emanuel is horizontal, lying in his bed, encased in a cast that will not let him move. He cannot walk. He is dependent on nurses to wheel him around.  He cannot do anything for himself. The brief moments of joy do not cancel out the anguish of his loneliness and the excruciating torment of his condition. Throughout the film, quotes from Blecher’s own writings flash across the screen. They are short, poetic, and honest in their description of what it’s like to live such an isolated life, to confront the deterioration of the body, to cope with the reality of death at an early age.

As I watched the film, I thought about how vulnerable we really are, how illness happens to all of us eventually, how scary it is that, one day, our bodies can just stop working and there might be no cure for what ails us. One minute, we are healthy and the next we’re not. The membrane separating those two states of being–that of health and that of illness–is hauntingly thin. Blecher wrote from a place of pain and vulnerability, and Jude’s film takes us deeper into it, capturing the fear, the loneliness, and the unsettling truth of our own mortality.