the female gaze: proof and good dick

Proof: (1991. dir: Jocelyn Moorhouse) It's a strange movie, and well worth watching. A blind man (Hugo Weaving) deifies truth, photographing his world so others will verify through their eyes what he has experienced through his other senses. He endures a dysfunctional (like, Eugene O'Neill levels of dysfunction) relationship with his housekeeper (Genevieve Picot), who is in love with him and spurned at every show of vulnerability. "I know she wants me," he explains, "and as long as she can't have me, she won't pity me." In punishment, she silently leaves ashtrays and coat-stands where he will trip over them and uses his beloved dog as a pawn in their power-games. Their lives are bounded in circles of longing, fear, and cruelty, until he meets an amiable and ingenuous dishwasher (Russell Crowe), whose friendship catalyzes growth, disruption, and endgame.

If it's the nineties, it barely is. Everything except the digital camera looks like the eighties, including an ill-judged musical montage of photographs and perky music designed to communicate to us the first night our two heroes bond. Mostly, it's an interesting portrait of how spurned love can lead to petty cruelties and power trips, and how impossible it is to learn trust, except to relax into it as a necessary part of existing amongst other humans. Moorhouse communicates beautifully the sensual experience that is the blind man's world, the acting is very good, and Russell Crowe is impossibly young and charismatic.

photo courtesy of Fanzone50 (http://fanzone50.com/Hugo/Proof2.html)

Good Dick: (2008. dir: Marianna Palka) This movie reminds me of two things: first, the Ballad of Tam Lin, in which a woman whose lover has fallen under a fair-folk enchantment must cling fast to him as he turns into all manner of creature and thing, and, in succeeding, the enchantment is broken and he is again hers. The second is a dream I had in my twenties, in which the guy I was seeing at the time tried to walk across a room and touch me, and I had to execute a complex series of dance-steps to freeze him. It worked, but each time I did it he'd be frozen for a shorter period, and the dance-steps took just as long, so it was inevitable that soon enough he was going to succeed in his approach. I woke up in a cold sweat before he did.

Palka has written and directed a bold character study in which an unassuming and well-intentioned video-store clerk stalks, lies to, and manipulates a woman who rents porn at his store until he insinuates himself into her life, then loves her in subservience, withstanding her violent torrents of abuse, until she takes charge of fixing her damaged life and in doing so finds the power to love him back. You've got to admire the guts of it: Palka doesn't so much defy the (sometimes, let's be honest, increasingly fascistic) boundaries of Political Correctness, she ignores them completely in her search for emotional truth, crossing over and back without seeming to notice.

It looks and feels exactly like what you think "quirky indie film" should look and feel like: short scenes, indeterminate time passages, indie-rock transitions, pauses and medium-shot to emphasize emotional distance, eccentric conversation between a group of male friends. It's hard to believe this is her first film, and that she directed herself in the lead. She avoids that fall into loss of perspective and vanity to which 99% of novice self-directors succumb. And, somehow, despite the dark subject matter, Palka and her co-star Jason Ritter manage to infuse the piece with a sweetness which prevails in the end.