MOVIE DIARY 2023: YOU ARE A SAD PERSON.
Oh wow it’s a good one this week, I can sense it in my bones! This week’s special guest is cartoonist, marathon runner, and former MOVIE DIARY 2018 contributor Tom McHenry! I think Tom is just brilliant, so obviously I’m glad he agreed to get back in here for MOVIE DIARY 2023. I haven’t seen the movie that Tom’s writing about, but it’s possibly the first X-rated movie we’ve got on MOVIE DIARY? I looked it up and they chose to release it in the US as Unrated rather than X-rated (clever marketing decision) but it would have qualified for the X-rating, so I’m just gonna run with that.
The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989) - dir. Peter Greenaway
SPECIAL GUEST WRITER: TOM MCHENRY
THE COOK, THE THIEF, HIS WIFE & HER LOVER (1989) opens with a group of gangsters stripping a creditor naked, beating him, rubbing dog shit in his mouth, then pissing on him to wash it down. With this violent scatology, Peter Greenaway immediately connects consumption and excretion; the sumptuous facades of luxury and the violence that maintains it; and hunger and the cruelty required to sate that hunger. Monologuing over this attack is English gangster Albert (THE THIEF), whose running torrent of words soundtracks the entire film -- even the scenes that don't include his unceasing prattle of trivia, threats, flirtations, orders, grievances, and worries become about the blessed absence of his conversational diarrhea.
The assault is at the loading dock of Le Hollandais, a high-end restaurant run by Richard (THE COOK) until he was forced to take on boorish Albert as a partner. Albert delights in his access to fine-dining society and wants to relish it, but his braying obscenity drives away the sophistication he imagined he stole. Also driven away is Georgina (HIS WIFE), who begins to have an affair with a bookish regular at the restaurant (& HER LOVER). Albert can't comprehend the affair when he’s told: What could someone want that’s not him?
Of course, what makes two hours of his blather, whining, threats, and insinuations tolerable is how Greenaway reveals Albert’s bellows are the thrashing of a man who wants to be literally anyone else. Le Hollandais died as an institution the moment Albert became a partner. His marriage has been over for years. Every underling around him is only flattering him like a child until they get paid. Albert is the boss of a crew of gangsters, but the title identifies him as not “THE BOSS” but the lower “THE THIEF.” Even when enthroned each night in the dining room of Le Hollandais, he’s imprisoned each day as Albert, the street-thing he loathes but has to keep announcing he loves or his fragile identity will shatter.
"I am an artist in the way I combine my business and my pleasure," Albert boasts. Money is his business and eating and Georgina are his pleasures, he says, but he lacks the palate to enjoy fine food, and the vulnerability to enjoy his wife. You can't buy cool or taste or empathy or love. He has spoken nearly all the film’s script, and yet he cannot wrest away the things that others give each other for free. By wanting, he is condemned to never have, to starve in the best restaurant in town.
The movie uses naked theatricality to cackle at our world’s actual absurdity: a place run by preening thieves just like Albert at every level from your workplace to your nation. Theirs is a regime of blunt cruelty, and we, like the staff of Le Hollandais, have to nod along with their obvious jokes and vulgar outbursts in order to get a paycheck to keep ourselves alive to be bullied again tomorrow doing the real labor of the world: flattering petty kings.
When Michael and Georgina's affair is discovered, Richard sneaks the lovers out in a refrigerator truck full of rotted meat. Nude, retching, shivering, they cling to each other and sob, surrounded by the decay that will be the endpoint of their love, of all love. All X-rated eroticism is shattered by another truth we keep coquettishly hidden: we won't be so beautiful soon.
The heart of the movie comes just after: when Michael and Georgina hose off this death-filth in the street. Their first passion has all been flayed away, and the raw love that's left is a contorted blessing. They laugh, a little: What can be hidden now after abject surrender to the horror of death? This is the secret loss that Albert can never fathom, that power will never understand: a place of true acceptance only accessible in powerlessness. They can’t buy it, but they suspect we must have it, and they hate us for it.
Tom McHenry (he/him) is a writer, cartoonist, and video game developer living in Chicago, IL. He sometimes writes about the movies he’s watching on Letterboxd and can’t seem to fully quit Twitter yet (@tommchenry). He’s trying to go easier on himself lately.
Women Talking (2022) - dir. Sarah Polley
SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS
I had kind of a difficult time with this one, I think. Women Talking is about a group of women in a patriarchal religious colony who learn that the men of the colony have been drugging and raping the women. They gather together while all the men in town are away, and they talk about how they can respond. They can remain and do nothing, and thus still be eligible to go to the kingdom of heaven according to their beliefs; they can stay and fight the men, which would result in them going against their pacifist beliefs and potentially becoming murderers; or they can gather all the women and children and leave to start a new life and a new society in an unfamiliar and dangerous world.
I think my trouble with this movie came with the fact that so much of this movie is rooted in blunt ideas being argued to the point that it feels like less a movie and more a thought experiment. Each woman has a very clear point of view and a line of argument, and we cycle through them all, with the intention being that now we must ask ourselves, How do we feel about it? What would we do? Are we actually that far removed from this seemingly outlandish situation? Couldn’t something like this happen in our world? (The movie pretty explicitly answers this last one with the reveal that this is happening somewhere in America in 2010, so yes, while I was sleeping in my car in between partying into the night and working an opening shift at Starbucks, these women were making a difficult, life-changing decision to leave behind everything they’ve known and form a new society.) At times it felt almost instructional, like some sort of hypothetical case study that you’d have to debate about with a bunch of poli sci majors in an undergrad Humanities course (you’re taking it because it’s a GE requirement and you figure you can just knock those out while you’re deciding what your major’s going to be).
I think approaching the movie like that would make it pretty easy to write off entirely, but what really makes me kind of wrestle with this movie is that there are some really top notch performances in here that end up making it worthwhile. There’s some real meaty acting going on in this movie, particularly with Claire Foy and Jessie Buckley. Both play their roles with a deep anger in their hearts that is directed in different ways. Salome (Foy) rages at the men, wanting a fight, promising to do whatever it would take to protect her children from these men, even becoming a murderer. Mariche (Buckley) rages against the women who want to leave, but we learn her rage is really at herself for standing by while this abuse carries on. Everyone plays off each other really well, which helps make the relationships between the women feel lived-in and complicated. The arguments for staying vs. fighting vs. leaving are pretty straightforward, but I think what’s actually interesting is the way that these women interact with each other and the way that their personal histories and their feelings toward each other influence their ongoing debate and the decision each of them eventually makes.
Return To Seoul (2023) - dir. Davy Chou
SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS
Return To Seoul follows Freddie, a French woman who has found herself in Seoul, the place of her birth. After she was born, she was given up for adoption to a French family, so Freddie grew up in Paris, never knowing her Korean family and never being exposed to her Korean culture. Now that she’s found herself in Seoul, she decides to try to find her birth parents. She finds herself grappling with her identity and her relationship with a country that is a part of her despite her never really getting to know it.
A few years ago I went to the Philippines with my parents. I’d never been before, and while I had a great time seeing my parents’ old neighborhoods and their old schools and meeting family I’d never met before, it was also kind of a strange experience being a Filipino-American in the Philippines. I felt a weird tension in looking like any other Filipino in the Philippines but not being the same in a cultural sense. You look like you belong and the people around you act like you belong, but you know in your heart that you can’t really belong, at least not in that deeply connected way that comes through shared history and common cultural touchstones. Maybe at one point you could have fit right in with these people who look just like you, but you’ve spent too much of your life away, learning to be something else.
All this is to say that I really felt a connection to Freddie’s story. Park Ji-min plays Freddie with such depth, and she does such a wonderful job of conveying the tension between the alienation and the bemused affection that Freddie feels while she’s in Korea. It’s particularly interesting watching how Freddie’s feelings develop over the years and over several visits to Korea. The balance between her feelings of alienation and affection is always in flux, but there’s a constant undercurrent of longing beneath all of it that Park Ji-min reveals with a certain quiet stare or a distinct slouch. I was especially moved by seeing Freddie become more confident with herself and with navigating Korea with each visit, only to get completely thrown off by the emotional weight of her birth family and her intrinsic connection to this country looming like a dark cloud over her heart.
Freddie treats Korea with a stubborn resistance in her first visit, pushing back at any notion of Korea laying claim to her. She actively ignores Korean manners and customs, she drives away the Korean boy who she’s been hooking up with while on her vacation, and shortly after finding her birth father and staying with his family for a few days, she’s ready to never see him again.
When she returns three years later, she’s more self-assured, determined to assert herself and to gain her own control over Korea. This takes the shape of a cool and severe fashion makeover, a tattoo artist boyfriend, casual sex with strangers, and a lot of hard partying. In a way it seems like she’s trying to conquer the idea of Korea, hoping to never feel small or out of place in this country again. She’s even taken another child of adoption under her wing, advising her on how to navigate the process of finding her own birth parents. She seems like she’s in control, but she’s still haunted by the fact that her birth mother refused to meet with her at the end of her first last visit to Korea.
On her third visit to Korea, this time a business trip, she seems more put together, more balanced. She has a long term boyfriend, she’s stopped drinking and eating meat, she does yoga in the morning, and she’s also got a high-paying job as an arms dealer (functionally acting as a parallel to the project of colonialism that paved the way for her adoption to France, she returns to the colonized this time as a tool of the colonizer— the metaphor is there, I guess, but it’s still kind of a weird choice to just have her selling missiles to the South Korean government). She acknowledges that being in Korea is difficult for her, but she is ready to meet Korea on its own terms. She’s in a good enough space that she feels like she can finally sit down to dinner with her birth father again. However, at the end of the dinner, her father gets weirdly cagey with her, rushing her and her boyfriend into a cab before unceremoniously saying goodbye. Perhaps he was feeling the pain of finally understanding that he would never be able to truly connect with his daughter and become family again like he wanted, but to Freddie it comes as the latest in a long line of rejections from her birth father, and by extension, Korea.
There are so many heartbreaking moments in this movie that stem from trying to make a personal connection and failing or being let down. Freddie will never find the acceptance or closure that she’s trying to find, and every time she fails it sends her spiraling. That she picks herself up again and returns a stronger and more fully realized version of herself only to be broken again adds to the tragedy. On the other side of it, Freddie’s birth father and his family are also tragic. Her birth father feels such guilt over the decision to give Freddie up for adoption, but he can never make amends, and they can never be a family no matter how many misguided attempts he makes. They can’t even speak to each other without a translator in between them, and whenever they do speak to each other via a translator (first a friend of Freddie’s then Freddie’s birth father’s sister) so much meaning gets lost in translation. Freddie and her birth father are both looking to each other for something that neither of them can offer.
Two Lovers (2008) - dir. James Gray
Two Lovers operates on that classic sitcom premise of juggling two girlfriends, but instead of awkward encounters and dumb punchlines, it’s played in a completely straight and unsettling way. Joaquin Phoenix is perfect for this kind of thing. Watching him in this movie is like watching a toddler with a knife. It starts off kind of funny for a second, then panic sets in and you won’t feel better until that kid stops running around with that knife. Joaquin Phoenix does not put down the knife.
I felt like I had a stomachache during the entire movie. From the beginning of the movie we know we’re supposed to be worried about Leonard (Phoenix) because the first thing we see him do is try to kill himself by jumping from a pier. He hasn’t been well mentally since he and his fiancé split, and he’s been staying with his parents in an apartment in Brighton Beach. This informs every moment that we spend with Leonard, constantly making us (and his parents!) wonder if he’s about to breakdown, even when things seem to be going well with him. And that’s part of what makes following Leonard around so harrowing— most of the time he seems fine and sometimes he’s kind of charming and funny (there are some weird body and movement things that he does that kind of remind of John C. Reilly and Will Ferrell in Step Brothers (2008), which is enough to make me think that 2008 was a big year for grown men moving around like a bored 12 year old), but it always kind of feels like he’s just teetering on the edge of something bad happening.
Unfortunately we’re right to be concerned because some bad things do happen, and I’m not sure that Leonard handles any of it in the best way. Leonard’s parents are setting him up with Sandra (Vinessa Shaw), the daughter of Leonard’s father’s business partner. She likes Leonard and the two of them hit it off, but Leonard is still understandably guarded around her. He later meets his neighbor Michelle (Gwyneth Paltrow) and he’s head over heels for her, despite her already being involved (obvious red flag)— with a married man (extreme red flag). A lot of the tension in this movie comes from watching Leonard make some questionable decisions out of wanting to finally follow his heart. And who could blame him, given that his split with his fiancé happened because a genetics screening revealed that if they were to have a child, they’d be born with severe birth defects? The split was forced on them by his fiancé’s parents, and now his own parents, though they have good intentions, are kind of forcing him into this new relationship with Sandra. To Leonard, Michelle represents an opportunity to be ruled by his own passion and to make his own choice. Even though he’s making some poor choices, we have sympathy for him because we know he’s hurting.
The way the movie builds to its ending is a lot like how a horror story unfolds. The tension keeps building and building, with Leonard escalating his feelings for Michelle, making himself vulnerable to this woman who is an obviously wrong choice, and then coming up with a plan to propose to her and for them to leave everything behind and move to San Francisco. When it predictably doesn’t play out that way, it does feel like we’re going to see what we’ve been dreading and bracing ourselves for the entire movie— Leonard having a nervous breakdown. In a way that’d be kind of cathartic, but what we get instead is something different. Leonard takes the engagement ring meant for Michelle and then brings it to Sandra. He proposes to Sandra, they embrace, and it’s anything but a cathartic moment for us or Leonard. One of the final shots of the movie is Leonard embracing Sandra, then with one eye looking up, he looks directly into the camera, directly at us. Leonard’s embrace with Sandra is less a moment of him making the right choice and more a moment of resignation for him that signals that even after all this, we’re still going to have to be concerned about what Leonard is going to do, especially now that he’s dragged poor Sandra into all of this. The tension will never lift. We have to live with it just like Leonard does every day.
Rewatches
History of the World, Part I (1981) - dir. Mel Brooks
Not all of it holds up, but there are still some parts that are so fucking funny to me. I watched this to get pumped up for the History of the World, Part II Hulu show. I’m only two episodes in, but unfortunately I’m thinking that it’s mostly bad with a couple very funny moments per episode. I will keep on going out of respect for hero and legend Mel Brooks.
Tár (2022) - dir. Todd Field
I love this movie and I truly hope that its legacy will not be that it inspired some of the most moronic takes I’ve ever seen on the internet.
Hey who do you have for MARCH MADNESS?? I absolutely do not pay attention to college basketball except for this time of year, but every year I like to latch onto a college I’ve just heard about via MARCH MADNESS brackets, and this year it’s Florida Atlantic University. GO OWLS. I have them beating No. 1 seeded Purdue in the second round, then advancing up to the Elite 8, where they will fall to Kentucky, but be proud that they were the first FAU team to make it this far. Good job, Owls! I’m so proud of you! is what I’ll say when this exact scenario plays out.
That’s it for this week, but be sure to pop into the MOVIE DIARY 2023 Discord for more stuff! Give me your thoughts/comments on this post, recommend some movies, talk about what you’re up to these days (hopefully not running your own blog called like MOVIE JOURNAL 2023 or some bullshit like that), you know, whatever!
Come through next week, ok? I just watched Amateur (1994), so I’ll probably have something up on that. A movie for some real freaks. See you then!