Resplendently Ditzy

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Is the value of story paling before cinematic muscle?

Prowess has been a key ingredient in cinema, thickening watery storytelling with Herculean feats in formal tropes. In view of some recent productions, one wonders whom does it benefit to have films with such conspicuous missing blocks in their narratives as they go on to dazzle us with artifice.

Guess what is the locus of that lack? If you named the motivation of female characters, you hit the bulls' eye.

Victoria, Phoenix, and Love. Though they sound more like a collection of progressive rock album titles, they have come to form the triumvirate of lost opportunity for key female characters.

All of these films have enormous merits, but putting them aside for now, I will focus on the ramifications of their lacunae.

Phoenix, a post-war drama by Christian Petzold, requires a huge leap of faith when we accept that Johnny does not recognize his ex in her smell, voice or figure due to a facial disfiguration. The whole film hinges on us buying this premise, so it's no small wrinkle. It makes you wonder if before war broke out Johnny ever spent any quality time with Nelly, or just her nostrils. In any case, Nelly's unshakeable resolve to play along with his plan to obtain her inheritance is supposedly justified by the denouement at the end of the film, when she finally calls his bluff. So we could retroactively put together that Nelly is giving him rope to hang himself in, which would make her calculating and vengeful. There is little in Nina Hoss's performance to support this though. Her little girl lost gaze leaves us to grapple for her motivation. We are alone to guess why she would continue to adore a Johnny that forsakes her.

Victoria, which is comprised of a single 134-minute shot, gives its protagonist multiple opportunities to jump off a boat clearly going nowhere. As she is recruited into a half-baked scheme to rob a bank, its director, Sebastian Schipper, sketches some possible justifications for her pursuing the wild-goose chase. She is lonesome, as established by her attempt to engage with the bartender early on. She is a lost soul who is dignified by the gaze of flirt-du-jour Sonne over the piano scene. She is foreign and not as fully situated in present day Berlin. I beg of you, who isn't lonesome, lost or feels alienated in this day and age? Doesn't that come with the human condition membership package?

The flaky hook lends little credibility to a story that will end up taking us to dark and consequential places. It's a fascinating trip into the rabbit hole once you fall, but the stumble precipitating us downwards seems so contrived that one wonders: why is she, like Nelly, so easily pliable into other people's precarious plans? Don't they spend any quality time with their sense of reason?

Then there's Love. Glorious Love. Thriving on images of the explicit, non-prettified version of physical love in 3D, Gaspar Noé's polarizing film gives us a chance to dust off épater-la-bourgeouisie from the attic of our vocabulary to use it freely when pondering this film. The two female characters in the love triangle grounding this film stay so squarely in the realm of the reckless siren that, in hindsight, when the smoke of inconsequence blows over, I can barely tell who they are, what they do. Except of course, when it helps to strong-arm the plot where the director wants them to go. So when Kristin, the interloper, professes her fervent religious faith, it becomes clear why she does not terminate the resulting pregnancy. This is the beginning of the end for Elecktra and Murphy. Little room is given to explore how Kristin negotiates her sybaritic activity and her faith, which would've helped our empathy towards that character. Elecktra's failure to simply mourn and bounce back from her breakup with Murphy infers that the woman who heretofore seemed to lead a multifaceted, rich life, drags everything into the abyss of self-effacement when Murphy-less. After the breakup we neither see nor hear her on camera, except in flashback. Thus, once abandoned by Murphy, she is pictorially non-existent, trapped in the part of ghost of sex past.

Is it really that difficult to differentiate between having an irrational intuition in the toolbox from being a perpetual bystander of one's destiny, doomed to be poked, displayed, swayed and bent over? While these directors play their game of who can shoot the longest (Schipper with the two hour trial of endurance, Noé with the tridimensional ejaculation money shot), the onscreen women remain resplendently ditzy, until it becomes convenient for the director to put them at the service of a turning point in the narrative. From then on, all forthrightness is permitted to the ladies. Victoria pulls off the baby-shield act like a pro, Nelly sings her way into the finale with great aplomb and Elecktra, well, did I mention the fury of her uterus in the cervix-cam shot? You do not want to be caught dead in her speculum.

Talent abounds here and these three films are well worth the admission ticket. Had they worked harder at bridging the female credibility gap, they would have been worthy of the popcorn and soda as well.

The opening scene in Noé's film, brings us a static, long-lasting, rather non-flattering medium shot of a couple in the act, repeating the same physical movement ad nauseaum, in a consuming effort to get somewhere. It is a valuable reminder of how hard it can be for two bodies to sync up and get on the same wavelength. The elusive two-way engagement that leads to release is often the fruit of hard labor, but also the feast of connection. The challenge of meeting at a higher level, be it on the screen, as spectators and storytellers, or in closed quarters in Mitte or Marais, is no small task. Should one succeed, enhanced descents into the rabbit hole await.

" You've got to get in to get out."
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