Tenderness: (2009. dir: John Polson) It's an atmospheric thriller: the suspense starts building straightaway and never lets up despite an unhurried pace. A killer is being released; a teenaged girl with a messed-up life seeks him out, associating him with the possibility of tenderness.
The tenderness of the title refers most obviously to a description of the killer's motive by Russell Crowe's police detective, a man determined to keep the boy from killing again. Having made a long study of it, he thinks the boy is addicted to the tenderness of the kill, the intimacy of sharing that last moment of breath. The siren call of tenderness, though, reaches far and wide beneath everything in this film, a thick vein of ore running just under the dirt.
In bookend narrations at the beginning and end, Crowe's character says (I paraphrase): "My wife always says there are two kinds of people: the ones who are looking for pleasure, and the ones who are running from pain." With two possible exceptions (the abusive stepfather-to-be, and Laura Dern as the boy's aunt, who seems healthier than everyone else but still lost and amazed at the anguish around her), even the characters who just duck on for a moment are all running from pain and, as a constant adjunct, seeking tenderness. Securing an ongoing source for-- not even love, which seems an impossible thing,-- just some tenderness, is the chthonic force behind nearly every decision made. There's a moment when a boy awkwardly approaches Sophie Traub's Lori at a carnival and offers to escort her around so that other boys don't hit on her. She cuts him coldly, but we recognize it as an echo of her own recent, heart-rending plea to the killer, with whom she is travelling: "Use me for whatever you want. Think of it as practice for when you find someone important." In fact, the movie is jam-packed full of moments of proferred tenderness, intimately captured by Tom Stern's unhurried camera, but I can't think of one which is experienced as such by two people simultaneously. Always the offer is either consciously rebuffed or goes unrecognized. Even Lori's boss, who we watch masturbating behind his desk while she expressionlessly lifts her shirt, looks on with a sort of melancholy longing as he lets her steal a CD.
You know from the beginning that not everyone is going to make it through to the end credits, but the story unfolds with gentle surprises, and the editing (by Lisa Zeno Churgin and Andrew Marcus) is spot-on, encouraging the space for introspection without letting the story lag. Even after having followed it with a classic like Beehive, this is the film I can't keep out of my head today.
The Spirit of the Beehive: (1973. dir: Victor Erice) This is what they call a visual "tone poem". It's gorgeous and filled with space and has no interest in spelling things out. Most commentaries will tell you that there are oblique, underground critiques here of Franco's regime, most prominently in the image of the family patriarch's experiment with a round beehive, which seems to inspire a mad chaos of fruitless activity amongst his bees.
All that is not the thrust, though, not the important part: Erice shows us his world through the eyes of two sisters, both very young. It is 1940. They live in a somewhat decrepit mansion in a tiny, isolated village in Spain with their mother, a remote and aging beauty who keeps for the most part aloof from her family and spends her time writing letters to a lover who is away at war, and their father, a keeper of bees and hunter of mushrooms, a man interested in the natural world around him but seemingly divorced from the larger world of humans.
There is a special showing of Frankenstein in town and Ana, the younger of the two girls, becomes obsessed with knowing why the monster killed the little girl. Her older sister says it's a trick: the monster did not kill the girl and the monster himself is not dead. She knows this because she has spoken to its spirit and knows where it lives. This knowledge unleashes something in Ana and she begins pursuing an intimacy with the monster's spirit. There is a strong suggestion that the pull toward understanding the monster is the evolutionary force which pulls us all out of childhood toward adulthood, particularly after she watches from the sidelines while her older sister's friends leap over a fire in a coming-of-age pagan May Day ritual.
The climactic episode with the meeting of the monster is a gorgeous, timeless thing, and the easy denouement is ambiguous but in a good way, in the way that childhood becoming prepubescence is an ambiguous process.
2 comments:
Always loved Erice's film. Reminds me of Malick in some ways--importance of landscape to the characters, the use of long takes, and the feeling of a metaphysical realm conveyed through naturalism. Would make a great double-bill with either of Guillermo Del Toro's Spanish Civil War dark fantasy films, The Devil's Backbone or Pan's Labyrinth. Unlike fakes such as the filmmakers behind the recent A Siberian Film, who claim political reasoning behind their questionable attempts at shock, Erice was the real deal and the political underpinnings are there, although for me less interesting than the humanistic/emotional content. Haven't seen the film in almost 20 years. Will have to rent it now.
That scene with the monster returns often to haunt me, but in a really great way.
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