Jessie Tu 
                 JOURNALIST | WRITER  

Love, and Lovelessness, may be two very close things | LOVELESS (2017)
May 7, 2020

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After books, my other great passion is film, mostly because it provides comfort and solace for that other side of me that wants something easy to grasp. When it comes to films, my tastes and selection process follow a different set of criteria. For books, I only read something that is well written, where the author has spent a long time thinking about how to craft a good sentence, and plot is not the underlying driving force.

When it comes to films however, I reach for Marvel blockbusters as eagerly as I reach for avant-garde Bulgarian comedies from the 50s. If I had to put a percentage on it, I’d say that more than fifty percent of my film diet consists of stories about exploitative, misogynistic attempts to ‘claim’ a woman (Matthew McConaughey, I’m looking at you), pixie-dream-girl-school-deliriums (erm, anything on Netflix these days) or a bunch of white people swooshing around in their latex body suits, fighting to save the world (Marvel, and erm, is there anyone else?)

But as Wesley Morris once said, sometimes, we want the movies to show us the chaos, mess, risk and failure that are normal for a lot of us, which is what most movies hide. I usually watch films in the evening (an old, un-killable habit) but this week, during a lunch-break, I logged onto SBS’s On Demand and re-watched Andrey Zvyagintsev’s 2017 drama ‘Loveless’. I was in the mood to return to films I’ve loved in the last few years, and thought I’d kill two birds with one stone; I’m currently learning Russian. 

The story appears simple enough. Boris and Zhenya are in the middle of divorcing. They have a boy from their marriage. Both have moved on to new partners; Zhenya with a successful and striking 47-year old man, Boris with a young woman, who is already severely pregnant with his child. 

They are moving on with their lives and the boy is an irritating reminder of their past union. Their marriage has not only disintegrated — both parties have decayed into a chilling contempt for each other. Every time they are forced to share a space, their vitriol and bitterness is so visceral, so violent, so familiar. Here are two people whose hearts have rotted into something shamelessly ugly, derelict and unfulfilled.

The distain they have for each other is palpable and vital to the film’s dark tenor. Zhenya’s rage is so impressive and hungry. Boris’ anger is so repressed and cloaked it has deformed him. He is utterly unable to show any other expression than a vacuous impassivity through the two hour film.

Zhenya runs a salon. She gets waxed between her legs, and her hair washed and styled. Boris goes shopping for groceries with his new lover. They return to her apartment and make love in one of the best sex scenes done of a heavily pregnant woman in recent, and therefore entire, film history. The lighting is exquisitely framed; Zvyagintsev said in an interview that he was inspired by the photographs by Annie Leibovitz.

Like all my favourite films, I felt as though I was walking in and out of rooms where these characters live; I’m privy to their most private moments. I was watching real life unfold.

Soon after, the school calls Zhenya to inform her that her son has not attended school in the past two days. The film glides into the narrative we think we’ve come here for —two parents looking for their missing child. But this is not a film about a search. This is a film about the nature of dysfunction; of a decayed society, a scorching planet, and the ultimate death of the patriarchal unit in society — the heterosexual marriage. 

Throughout the film, we’re in the car with a character, listening to the radio; climate change reports and political unrest are colonising the airwaves. It’s the end of the world. When a marriage falls apart, the entire family comes crumbling down with it. Perhaps the director is critiquing how so much is predicated on the stability and endurance of a relationship between a man and a woman, both of whom always begin with the best of intentions. Sometimes (more often than not) they end up damaging each other in momentous, unexpected ways.

Many shots are taken behind a window, door, inside a car, creating the illusion of always being on the outside, or inside, or, just, detached from where we can to be, which is to be near the characters in their genuine, honest grieving.

Watching this film is engrossing. Although it sounds depressing, I am never left feeling existential or depressed. Zvyagintsev wants us to see female hunger as a dark and visceral thing. The female characters are agonised in their yearning for validation from a man; Boris’ new lover expresses her insecurities about his commitment (“Will you leave us, like you left your ex-wife?”) and Zhenya to her new partner, after a very steamy, very athletic session of love-making (“Do you love me?”).

In both instances, their questions are left unanswered by their male lovers. The reach of a woman. The itch needing to be scratched. Why do women so fundamentally and incorrigibly pine for the love of a man? Don’t ask me. Sure, I’m a woman, but years of trying to answer this question has left my mind (and heart) disfigured. I am still interested in the question, but the answer requires something I currently don’t have (endless un-interrupted hours of free-thinking). 

The music is sparse, modern, minimalist. The composers, brothers Evgueni and Sacha Galperine wrote the score without seeing the film or reading the script. The hypnotic stirrings of the repetitive, off-metre single note played by the piano is so compelling and addictive, the motif grew into an ear-worm for several days after I watched the film. This must be what it’s like to experience a missing person; the anxiety and terror thrumming against the thick walls of the skull, eating you alive.

Our two characters hover at the centre of the film, their hostility depicted in a searing realism as only Zvyagintsev can pull off. The still shots of denuded trees among a snow-covered landscape, accompanied by the bleak minimalist soundtrack reminded me of one of the best films made in the last decade — Alejandro Iñárritu’s ‘Biutiful’, specifically, the heart-shatteringly final scene, perfectly scored to the second movement of Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G (If you haven’t yet watched it, make that a priority this week; that Ravel movement is oceanic in his purity and depth of humanity).

Despite remarks made by some critics, Zvyagintsev is more interested in examining the poison within a patriarchal family unit than making any statement about modern-day Russia. His achievement lies in his careful direction combined with the well crafted script, so that by the end, neither Zhenya nor Boris are completely contemptible or unlikeable. We hate them both equally and we pity them both equally too. 

One of the best scenes in the film comes at the one hour mark, when the estranged couple drive to visit Zhenya’s mother, who lives alone in a cottage three hours drive from Moscow. Her mother, played by an incredible Natalya Potapova, believes her daughter is lying about her missing son to gain sympathy points. Her daughter receives none.

“You were a mistake,” her mother says, straight faced. For Zhenya, her husband is a “miserable heap of shit”. For Boris, his wife is a “cold bitch”.  There is a lot of pain expelled in just over two hours.

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Ultimately however, it’s the women’s anger that makes the deepest grooves. Zhenya, her mother, the woman who cuts Zhenya’s hair, the woman who rips the hair between Zhenya’s legs. The only time we see a woman smile in the film (outside of Zhenya’s date with Anton, her new partner) is a Skype call between Anton and his daughter, who is not in Russia, but studying in Portugal.

Zvyagintsev said in an interview that family is where people open up and take off all the masks and show their real suffering. He has also said that the film was inspired many other stories about the collapse of a marriage, including Ingmar Bergman’s 1973 Scenes from a Marriage, which is the narrative seed of Noah Baumbach’s 2019 Netflix hit Marriage Story.

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This film is different, not just because it is made by a Russian director, and is thus crafted with unique, cultural sensitivities. It heaves with a delicate bleakness that made my head knead together memories of past altercations with people I love, and the shame I still feel by the actions of my own behaviour.

There’s enough compassionate shown by a quiet few to carry the film forward with the right balance of humanity; Ivan, the search-party volunteer coordinator, Anton, and of course, the entire group of search party volunteers, who help day and night to find the boy, scouring destitute landscapes of snow and abandoned buildings.

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By the end of the film, I felt my jaw ache and realised I had clenched it the whole time. The film seems to centre on the plot of the search for a missing child; but the actual question we’re interested in answering has nothing to do with the boy’s location. That question falls to the way side. We’re interested in how these two humans deal with their dysfunctional hearts. And what could be a better question than that?

Any story about moral detachment is a good story, because it’s often in the worst versions of ourselves are we able to confront the truest versions of ourselves.
 

Writing a novel is fun, because I get to watch movies from the 90s | SINGLE WHITE FEMALE (1992) 
May 1, 2020

Alison Jones is an unremarkable, ambitious young woman living in New York City. In the first few minutes of Barbet Schroeder’s 1992 Single White Female, Alison, played by Bridget Fonda, discovers that her fiancé has cheated on her with his ex-wife. She breaks up with him, despite his efforts to patch things up.

New York City is a lonely place when you’re single and completely friendless, which is what Alison seems to be, now, save for her gay male friend Graham, who’s not really a friend, but an overly friendly neighbour, whose cat (of course, he needs to have a cat because he’s gay) Alison sometimes looks after when he’s out of town.

Alison decides to put an ad in the paper. A flatmate might be the solution to all her problems. (She really doesn’t have any friends?) 

I made the mistake again of watching the trailer before the film, which gave away the entire plot.

Lonely woman meets another lonely woman. They develop a friendship. Lonely woman partners up with a man. Other lonely woman becomes jealous. Her jealousy makes her commit violence (because women always turn to violence when they get jealous). Former lonely woman fights back and kills the other lonely woman. All hail, the restoration of the hetro-normative, patriarchal universe! Huzzah!

Okay, so it doesn’t pan out exactly like this. But most of that is an accurate summary of the film, which I’d turned to for research purposes. I’m working on a novel about female desire, set in the 90s. The main character of the novel experiences the world through films, and so I’m watching films from the 90s to get inside her head. The back catalogue of films in the 90s centring a woman who wants something; love, companionship, intimacy, can be loosely divided into 2 categories; Conniving Mendacious Charmer, or Lascivious Crazy Woman Killer. Both categories are different iterations of the femme fatale; and both types of women are dangerous. 

SWF belongs in the latter. Firmly. Jennifer Jason Leigh joins the ranks of psychopathic women killers who kill because they can’t control their emotions or lust; Glenn Close, Sharon Stone, Nicole Kidman, Rebecca De Mornay.

Imagine growing up watching these films where you’re told either a woman is emotionally lecherous or she’s a crazy killer if she doesn’t get what she wants. I’d say on average, more men kill when they don’t get what they want than women, but hey, that’s just my opinion.

I watched large portions of this film with no sound, because the filmmakers have done an incredible job at making me think it’s not uncommon for a woman to do creepy, violent things to a woman she’s jealous of, or in love with. When I get spooked, which I do, very easily, I turn off the sound. Can’t do this when I’m watching a film at the cinemas - something I sorely miss.

Female friendship in films from the 90s is depicted as this lethal thing, either entirely possessive and proprietorial (from one party) or charged with an unhealthy dose of potential violence. Which is to say, I have never been in a same-sex relationship like the one depicted in SWF; I have never been the lover (Hedy) or the loved (Allie), though, obviously, that’s not to say these relationships don’t exist.

But if movies are a kind of education about the world (which they are, for me) then you’d think that a lonely girl with beta-looks is a very dangerous thing. She’ll kill, just to be loved!

The creepiness builds up incrementally in this film, and the discoveries we make about Hedy’s past are vaguely bread-crumb-adminstered. Mid-way through, Allie is assaulted by a ‘boss’ figure in a very uncomfortable scene (I’d put a trigger warning if I were recommending this film to my female friends) and Hedy comes to the rescue by making a threatening phone call to the perpetrator in the middle of the night. We see that this lonely woman has every intention of showing care and tenderness to her no-longer-lonely friend (by this stage of the film, Allie has reunited with her beau, Sam, played by Steven Weber).

Another trigger warning; there’s a gruesome death of an animal. A very cute, loveable, perfect animal. It seems that Hollywood wants us to think women in a state of ‘crazy’ cannot resist murdering very cute pets; see Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction. 

Things get weird, weirder and then weirder still when Allie discovers Hedy has filled her wardrobe with the same items of clothing from her own. Then she gets a hairstyle change; exactly like Allie’s, and now, we spend the rest of the film staring at two ginger-hair boy-cut faces trying to tip toe around one another; one of them trying her best to act ‘normal’, the other, trying her best to get the other the fuck out of her apartment.

Eventually, and this is no spoiler, Hedy kills two men before dying from a nasty stab to the back by a sharp, long object. (I can’t tell you exactly what it was, a screwdriver? A hook? Some spade? I didn’t look. I couldn’t.) Our heroine, Allie, is victorious in the end, though she’s alone again, staring out of her apartment window, reflecting on how much she misses her dead fiancé.

It’s an impressive window-scape. Jesus, how on earth did I get through this piece without yet mentioning the apartment? The apartment is the eye-candy of this film; the thing I’d go to bed tonight and dream about. Bridget Fonda’s face is annoyingly pretty, Jennifer Jason Leigh’s, too plain, Steven Weber’s, too generic (also, he gets a very sharp heel impaled in his eye, so I can’t really ever see him again without this image in my head) and Peter Friedman is beautiful, but doesn’t occupy enough screen time for me to memorise the symmetry of his face.

The apartment is worth its weight in gold. If there’s one outstanding performance in this film, it is she; high ceilings, parquet floors, French doors, a kitchen that fits more than two human beings. (This is New York City we’re talking about here, okay?) A bathtub in the bathroom. Like, a real bathtub?! You get my drift. To live in New York is to be inconveniently possessed by something, be it a man, a woman, or a very spacious apartment. The problem with this film as I see it was that none of the characters could appreciate what they got.