Safe

SAFE              B+                  

USA  Great Britain  (119 mi)  1995  d:  Todd Haynes         

A subversive horror film on everyday life with a nightmarish impact that creeps up on you, suggesting invisible toxins are all around us, where there’s little we can do to combat their sinister presence.  Voted the best film of the 90’s in a poll by the Village Voice, still reeling from the residue of the AIDS epidemic in the 80’s, Haynes has made the ultimate satire on the health kick du jour, like the latest diet or self-help cure, viewed as just another fad in the Southern California atmosphere where fads are everything, creating an off-putting, anti-propaganda film that is in itself propaganda, becoming a mystifyingly weird comment on modern life in the San Fernando Valley in 1987.  One of the few films given a contemporary setting, as most other Haynes films are period pieces, this most certainly can be considered a comment on our times, but the jury is still out on what exactly it intends to say.  What it does do is create a baffling take on modern existence, as we are strangely cut off from each other, strangers in a strange land, so distanced from ourselves that we’re no longer able to even communicate how we feel.  Much like Monica Vitti in Antonioni’s RED DESERT (1964), Carol White (Julianne Moore) is filled with doubt and existential dread about the surrounding world, disarmed and even disabled by its corrosive effects, where inexplicably the body reacts in horror to the unseen presence of toxins in the air, perhaps chemical pollutants, or other environmental effects, where the enemy is an invisible force from which there is no easy remedy.  What this film does is elevate the debilitating physical effects, using a surreal electronic soundtrack from Ed Tomney including hovering helicopters and garbled conversations that couldn’t feel more eerie and disorienting, as if the world is closing in, offering the experience of horror throughout.  Expanding on themes introduced in the middle section of his prior film Poison (1991), an allegory for the AIDS generation, this is given a broader context, turning this into a woman’s film, filtered through the living and breathing embodiment of Carol White, who more often than not comes across like the airhead Sissy Spacek in Altman’s 3 Women (1977), yet seemingly lives the idyllic life, mundane but affluent.  Her immaculate house could make the cover of Architecture Digest, with a museum-like modern interior where nothing is out of place, creating a décors of perfection, yet it’s a completely sterile existence, like the white room at the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).  The opening shot through the window of their Mercedes Benz reveals the upscale neighborhood, manicured lawns with electronic gates, a picture of the American Dream, as it caters exclusively to the white wealthy class, with no one out of place, keeping all the unwanted elements out, as the only non-white figures are landscapers, maids, or house painters, non-threatening people hired to make the lives of the owners that much easier.  This is a Stepford Wives habitat, passive and submissive women whose every whim is catered to by a minority class, while she pampers herself in the latest styles in order to make herself beautiful and demure for the master of the house. 

One of the more ferocious takes on the noxious air quality engulfing smog-ridden Los Angeles, the feeling that something is amiss is communicated almost immediately, as the first utterance from Carol as she steps out of the car is a brief sniffle.  While there are no emotional signs of intimacy in her relatively aloof marriage to Greg (Xander Berkeley) and her stepson, she remains a stay-at-home wife, with indispensable help from her Hispanic maid, Fulvia (Martha Velez), where she has a habit of drinking a full glass of milk every day.  Her day consists of ordinary routines, like gardening, taking clothes to the dry cleaners, or working out with other women in an aerobics class, with no full-fledged friendships, only casual acquaintances where she’s considered one of the girls.  The first noticeable disturbance happens while driving behind a truck spewing exhaust fumes, causing her to cough uncontrollably, exaggerated into a hysterical fit that continues even after she exits into a parking garage, finally coming to a stop in a supposedly safe place.  While she complains of headaches and constant fatigue, developing a nose bleed while getting a perm at a hair salon, then can’t breathe, having an uncontrollable asthma attack at a baby shower (one of the better staged scenes for all the decorative pastoral colors and overflowing hair styles, like a party of Barbie dolls), her dilemma is that no one will listen to her or believe her, especially her male doctor, thinking it’s all in her head, referring her for a psychological exam, which consists of a man behind a huge desk staring at her, waiting for her to say something significant.  Carol isn’t really capable of explaining herself and instead spends her time apologizing all the time, where she’s well-mannered and polite to a fault.  One of the funnier moments occurs after the husband gets ready for work, including deodorant and cologne, adding hairspray as a finishing touch, but when he reaches out to his wife, she vomits on the floor, as if she’s allergic to him.  This is a mixed message that offers plenty of underlying implications, yet Haynes allows nothing definitive.  Picking up a flyer, she starts attending a seminar for people afflicted with 20th century environmental illnesses, as if allergic to modern life, where she begins to repeat the catch phrases, as she comes to believe that a sofa she recently purchased is “totally toxic,” expressing this view with surprising surety.  In fact, her mysterious ailment becomes her personal identity, what she believes in the most, becoming addicted to it, as it not just overwhelms her, but she becomes obsessed by her otherwise inexplicable descent into weakness and frailty, for which there is no remedy, leaving her ostracized from society, away from all the damaging influences, like everyday household chemicals, forced to live in a supposedly safe yet imprisoning environment.  By blocking out all outside reality, one supposedly insulates oneself from worldly harm, but feels more like a retreat from life itself.  

Watching an advertisement on television describing a refuge for people who are particularly sensitive to environmental pollutants, Carol packs her bags, hauling along her oxygen tank, making her way for the cleaner desert air of the Wrenwood Center in New Mexico, a new age haven treating those experiencing the harmful and invasive effects of what’s described as Multiple Chemical Sensitivity (MCS).  Her arrival is hilarious, as a woman wearing a surgical mask starts screaming at the taxi driver to turn around, as the car fumes are toxic, where it’s as if she was invaded by zombies.  The fear and panic is something of a surprise, yet it feels contagious, as if all are afflicted by it, where many on the premises still wear surgical masks and carry oxygen tanks, so Wrenwood is apparently a work in progress.  Similarly, the majority of those afflicted seem to be women, who dominate the patient count, though the founder of the center is Peter Dunning (Peter Friedman), who is himself afflicted, described sympathetically as “He’s a chemically sensitive person with AIDS, so his perspective is incredibly vast.”  After a stream of messages about the power of love and folk songs of inner peace, where a fabulous Kate Wolf song (an iconic West coast songwriter/musician who died tragically young from leukemia) becomes a self-healing mantra, Give Yourself to Love (Live) - Kate Wolf - YouTube (3:54), we quickly realize this place is little more than a brainwashed cult, where the self-help guru is a sham, living in a giant estate on a hill overlooking the puny cabins of the residents, but the patients are so desperate to believe in something, that they’re willing to buy in.  Filled with empty platitudes and tearful group sessions, along with an cognitively unbalanced man running around in an alien space suit, “The only person that can make you sick is you,” the guru holds each and every patient responsible, which really amounts to blame, as if everyone is in charge of building up their own positive energy field that allows their debilitating immune systems to better combat invasive illnesses.  While this is preposterous, this is actually one of the inspirations behind the film, as it comes from one of the best sellers of the time, Louise Hay’s The AIDS Book:  Creating a Positive Approach, published in 1988, which professes the power of positive thinking, and according to Haynes (Todd Haynes by Alison MacLean - BOMB Magazine) “literally states that if we loved ourselves more we wouldn’t get sick with this illness...That’s scary.”  Rather than getting better, Carol descends into immune failure, noticeably thinner, with lesions on her face, attached to her everpresent oxygen tank, eventually moving into a biologically secure, sealed-off existence in what amounts to her safe space, like living in a bubble, going to the extremes while pledging to love herself more.  This is one of the strangest portraits of life in sunny Southern California, turning it into a rabidly polluted toxic zone, what amounts to a death trap, with wealthy blissed-out residents at their wits end searching to find the magical elixir for all that ails them.  They may as well be searching for life on another planet.  Or she could move to Vermont. 

Songs My Brothers Taught Me

Director Chloé Zhao

Director Chloé Zhao with Sundance producer Forest Whitaker

SONGS MY BROTHERS TAUGHT ME                B+                  

USA  (98 mi)  2015  d:  Chloé Zhao

Anything that runs wild got something bad in them.  You wanna leave some of that in there.  Cause they need it to survive out here.

―Johnny Winters (John Reddy)

Premiering at Sundance in 2015, the film was also invited to Director’s Fortnight at Cannes, receiving a nomination for the Camera d’Or award for best first feature film.   It may have been an article just like this one (Pine Ridge Indian Reservation Struggles With Suicides Among Its ...  Julie Bosman from The New York Times, May 3, 2015) about an epidemic of suicides among teenagers on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation, one of the largest communities of Lakota Sioux people in the United States, that initially grabbed her attention, revealing that more than 100 young people on the reservation attempted suicide in just four months.  Initially writing a script entitled Lee that would follow a Lakota boy who committed suicide in 2013, Zhao had just finished her degree at New York University’s Graduate Film Program, spending three years moving back and forth between Manhattan and Pine Ridge, knocking on doors, meeting young people, familiarizing herself with Lakota culture, its communities, and indigenous history, eventually spending seventeen months living there.  Inhabiting the poorest region of the country, there is no industry, technology, or commercial infrastructure on the reservation to provide employment, where 97% of the population live below the federal poverty line, with a median annual income from $2,600 to $3,500, the unemployment rate vacillates from 85% to 95%, school dropout rates are over 70%, with a teacher turnover rate that is 800% higher than the U.S. national average, alcoholism affects eight out of ten families, 50% of the adults over the age of 40 have diabetes, infant mortality rates are the highest anywhere on the continent, and at least 60% of the homes are severely substandard, without water, electricity, telephone service, adequate insulation, and sewage systems  Many homes lack stoves, refrigerators, beds, and/or basic furniture, with many sleeping on dirt floors in a region that commonly reaches winter temperatures of 50 below, while there are no banks, motels, discount stores, or movie theaters, and half the adults battle addiction and disease, yet alcoholism, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and malnutrition are rampant (Pine Ridge Reservation - American Indian Humanitarian Foundation).  On one of her return visits home, Zhao found her apartment had been broken into, with film equipment missing, including computers that stored various versions of the changing script, not to mention losing all footage previously shot, forcing her to start all over again from scratch, but doing it cheaper, changing the title and revising the story, becoming less narrative oriented and more improvisational, where the film is an impressionistic, stream-of-conscious mosaic of life on the reservation.    

Centering around Indian youth, using non-professional actors, actual residents who live on the reservation, the focus is on a brother and sister, Johnny Winters (John Reddy) is finishing his final year in high school, living with his curiously adorable 11-year-old sister Jashaun (Jashaun St. John, the real star of the film) and their alcoholic single mother, Lisa (Irene Bedard, the only working professional), a woman trapped by her surroundings and culture, while troubled older brother Cody is in prison.  Without telling anyone yet (except his brother, who urges him to get away from the Rez as quickly as possible), Johnny intends to leave Pine Ridge with his girlfriend Aurelia (Taysha Fuller), who plans to attend college in Los Angeles, with thoughts of becoming a lawyer.   Meanwhile, he spends his time training horses and distributing illegal liquor on the reservation, breaking a tribal law that prohibits alcohol, a self-defeating job that only feeds into the overwhelming presence of addiction, a destroyer of lives for generations.  Opening with Johnny training a beautiful white horse, offering words of wisdom in voiceover, “Anything that runs wild got something bad in them.  You wanna leave some of that in there.  Cause they need it to survive out here,” shifting to a panoramic vista with miles of undisturbed prairie grass and endless open sky, the film quickly establishes the conundrum of freedom and imprisonment that its characters inherently feel on the reservation.  One of the side stories is Johnny working for Bill (Allen Reddy), an older man with a young rough-edged white wife, Angie (Eleonore Hendricks), an outsider who photographs him on his horse (perhaps a stand-in for the director), spending more time alone with her, smoking weed together, gathering the bottles needed for home deliveries, where an unspoken intimacy develops, usually given a suggested sexual charge, like the bad girl on the edge of town, in complete contrast with his smart and meticulously well organized girlfriend.  Early on Lisa is informed about the death of her husband Karl who dies in a fire, likely drunk at the time, unable to escape.  A famous rodeo cowboy with nine wives and 25 kids, he’s the father they never met, with unknown half-siblings suddenly thrust into their lives at the funeral, most with more human contact with their father than they ever had, including Cat Clifford, following in his father’s footsteps as a bull rider.  One of the more poignant scenes of the film features Jashaun scavenging through the rubble of the fire (in this case, it was her actual home destroyed by a fire), gathering things that look important, including her father’s championship rodeo jacket which she wears like a badge of honor.   

An intimate portrait of a marginalized community, there are visits into the heart of the Badlands, with its desolate, harsh beauty of weathered erosion, featuring dramatic landscapes with layered rock formations, including steep canyons and towering spires, yet also an eerie emptiness, integrated into Indian history and lore as a sacred and mystical place, treated as elegiac grounds by cinematographer Joshua James Richards.  Peter Golub’s melancholy score adds another level of haunting complexity, giving this film a poetic resonance.  Zhao prefers a more restrained, observational approach, which is particularly revealing in the delicate relationship between the more emboldened Johnny and a concerned Jashaun, who literally lights up the screen, stealing the film from her older sibling, as what viewers see is largely through her eyes.  It’s a coming-of-age film for both, each searching for their own identity, with Johnny thinking it’s got to be better far away from here, and Jashaun perfectly comfortable with the way things are.  Overhearing her brother speak of taking a trip to LA with Aurelia, she’s naturally hurt, thinking he’s going to run out on her, just like their father, where abandonment is such a cruel reality.  Their mother tries to get her struggling life in order, staying sober, attending church, becoming a Christian, finding solace in what the gospel teaches, even paying a visit to Cody in prison, but his reaction is a stark reminder of all that came before, “Just don’t make God another man you abandoned your children for.”  Among the more fascinating characters is Travis (Travis Lone Hill), a heavily tattooed ex-con with a thing for rap music, who accentuates the color green and the number seven in the clothes he designs, becoming Jashaun’s father figure when she needs it, as he’s a guy that doesn’t mince words.  In hopes that he’ll make her a Pow-Wow dress, she agrees to go into business with him, as she knows arithmetic and can count out the change, selling his wares out of his car on the street, one of the few active means of employment shown in the film.  The other is Johnny buying alcohol from liquor stores in Whiteclay, a border town in Nebraska that sells alcohol exclusively to Indians on the reservation.  Many of the elders or reformed Lakota Sioux disparage the place, hold protests out front, and condemn it for the sickness and evil it has brought to the reservation, describing it as liquid genocide.  While Zhao provides an unvarnished glimpse into life on Pine Ridge, the sounds of the wind blowing in from the plains and lightning flashing in the faraway hills is etched into the naturalistic backdrop, yet strangely permeating throughout is the sound of “Achy Breaky Heart” style cowboy music, where redneck themes of bawdy nights, jilted love, and broken hearts provide their own narrative, with Indians forced to embrace this seemingly incongruous cultural reality as it’s the only thing available on the radio in such remote and isolated settings.  While Jashaun sees magical things about this place that elude Johnny, in the end, he discovers it’s harder to leave than he thinks, as it’s really all he’s ever known.