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Archive for the ‘Elle Fanning’ Category

20th Century Women

24 Jan

20th Century Womendirected by Mike Mills. Dramedy 119 minutes Color 2017

★★★★★

The Story: The mother of a teenage son enlists the help of her friends to rear him.

~

When we are teenagers we become secretive to our parents. If we are not secretive already, still we pull away into the unknown experiment called independence.

Annette Bening does not understand this about her son because she does not remember that she did the selfsame thing in adolescence. She does not remember and she is not aware that she does not remember.

This makes her character a gem to watch. Because it means we who watch it can fit into her ordinariness and her error. We can fit into it by means of seeing how disordered her hair often is and how unaware she is of that disorder. And how she, most of the time, is unconscious of any notion of being aware of it to begin with.

How we live our actual lives seldom gets to the screen. Movies are often about tying things up. From the very first reel they aim in that direction. And it is a fine direction to aim for, because wrap-up is one good way to end a story.

I liked the way the story unfolds. I liked the this-and-that of it. The foolishness of the endeavor. I liked what Bening found in this woman. I liked what the writer put in the woman to begin with. Such a woman allows us to forgive everyone we ever met, including our difficult mothers. Forgive them, and forgive ourselves, for they, like us, lived their hours and days in untidy life. Not silly. Not without purport. Not without accomplishment. But not camera-ready.

I tend to adore Annette Bening.

 

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE, Annette Bening: ACTING GODDESS, Billy Crudup, DRAMEDY, Elle Fanning, FAMILY DRAMA

 

The Neon Demon

26 Jun

The Neon Demon ­– directed by Nicholas Winding Refn. Drama. 117 minutes Color 2106.

★★★★

The Story: A naïve adolescent girl on her way to be the world’s top fashion model.

~

The difference between the A Star Is Born with Janet Gaynor and Judy Garland is that the Garland version shows the talent involved, the Gaynor does not. Gaynor just stands there.

Likewise, the talent involved in the Neon Demon is that the young woman on her way to superstardom just stands there, because all she is is particularly pretty. So she stands there as a medium with which others’ talents paint. They paint her to film her. They dress her to film her. They pose her up as an artist picks up a paintbrush and, with the ruthlessness proper to paintbrush selection, makes something with her.

Elle Fanning’s character, Jesse, is the perfect instrument for the artistry of others. She is entirely without artistic expression of her own as a model – except irony in her slight smile as to how others use themselves using her. And in the power she holds just standing there.

The predominant color of the director’s pallet, the red of dried blood, along with a ruthless camera style, well-suited to the ruthless business of modeling, entertain and hold us almost as a story in itself.

But the story itself decays before our eyes as it enters the realm of allegory.

Allegory is a delicate mode. It is a narrative of internal drama wholly. Its external characters and action are the machinery inside the human: psychological contraptions such as temptation, loyalty, veracity.

When Una in Spencer’s The Fairy Queen enters on a white mule, veiled, and led by a dwarf, we are actually in the presence of human essence pure inside any human. When Duessa appears looking exactly like Una, we are actually in the presence of an imposture of human essence pure, which we lead ourselves to believe is the real McCoy. Looks tasty. Is poison. Lies that lie like truth.

When this sixteen year old, wearing a dress of fantastic beauty, is chosen to climax a major fashion show, she is turned from a cherubim into a demon before our eyes. Wonderful.

But ever afterwards her hair formerly something painted by Botticelli becomes ordinary cover-girl hair. And the story is lost.

The story is the demonstration that fashion modeling is not done to adorn and present the female body to men – for romance or marriage or love or trophy. No, it is clear and it is also true that high fashion is created only to crush other women with it.

So this story is badly undermined by the entry into it of a lesbian character.

In fact, the desire of women to crush other women with the battle-axe of high fashion is one with no sexual content of any kind. In humans, admiration is followed by love is followed by a desire to be the desired one, is followed by hatred, and it all peters out in the exhaustion which the obsession to hatred leaves one with. No sex is involved.

Particularly as in this case, evil lesbianism. Lesbianism which kills what it can’t have or be or conquer. And if lesbianism, why evil? A wrong allegory move anhow. Human envy does the job. The other models are sufficient. Sex is miscast.

So the story collapses with its own false version of itself. Until then and even after it is watchable. Arresting. And special.

Keanu Reeves plays a seedy motel owner well. And the magnificent Christina Hendricks grants us her executive confidence as The Great Model Agent Of The World.

How beautiful Christina Hendricks is. How interesting. What a subtle and distinguished actress. How noble in bearing. And what is the story to be filmed to encompass all this more valuable than anything in this film?

So many gifted actresses among us! So many actresses of rich character and talent! Did we really need this story of modeling? What is high fashion, after all, but gold lamé trash?

No elegant woman ever got her elegance out of a fashion magazine.

 

 

Ginger And Rosa

18 Apr

Ginger and Rosa –– directed by Sally Potter. Drama. Two young best friends enter the arena of adolescent betrayal. 90 minutes Color 2012.

★★★

I went to it because Sally Potter directed Yes, one of my great movies.

But this one – oh, dear.

The problem is that it is based on an unrecovered resentment, a form of autobiography which always lacks penetration and balance. The author/director has not gotten over it, whatever it was. She’s still getting back at the one that done her wrong. The consequence is that a load of approval falls on the shoulders of one girl, Ginger, and scants the other, Rosa. Emptiness results.

It all ends with a confrontation scene, identical to the one at the end of another current film, The Company You Keep, in which the love-object justifies her miscreance by spouting liberal political boilerplate. Neither scene is well directed. And in this film the actor with the liberal agenda, simply does not go for it enough to make us realize what a hollow old lie he is telling.

I also went because Annette Bening and Christina Hendricks are in it, and, yet the picture is not about them. Christina Hendricks proves once again what a magnificent actress she is. Annette Bening, of course, by now doesn’t have to prove it at all. Timothy Spall and Oliver Platt circle around the proceedings and are in fine fettle, but their parts are shelved largely because of the imbalance of attention give to Ginger (ably played by Elle Fanning).

I can only say that I await Sally Potter’s next film with abated interest.

 
 
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