Certain Women

Director Kelly Reichardt shooting on location

CERTAIN WOMEN         B             

USA  (107 mi)  2016  d:  Kelly Reichardt

About as minimalist and low-key as you can get, as this threadbare portrait in three sections of women in small town Montana offers a positively enthralling view of Montana, shot in and around Livingston and Bozeman in the southeastern corner of the state by Christopher Blauvelt on 16mm (as the digital test shoots revealed a flatness and startling lack of detail in the images of snow), yet the delicate insight into the qualities of being a woman reveals hidden attributes rarely seen in movies, as there’s nothing particularly sexy or dramatic about their lives, never rising to any elevating moments, where instead the focus seems to be on the commonplace, the everyday, ordinary aspect of their lives where ambitions and relationships remain unfulfilled, with unappreciated work viewed as monotonous or even meaningless to the point of drudgery, with little expectation that they will ever rise above to some other level.  This harkens back to an earlier Soderbergh film BUBBLE (2005), a technical exercise in detached evasiveness, where an indescribable loneliness seems to be the shared common denominator.  By creating more relatable characters, Reichardt is deflating the expectations of the audience, changing the stereotype, altering the mythological focus on surface artificiality like beauty and sensuality, instead probing under the surface, providing a window into more realistic women’s lives that typically go unnoticed by television or Hollywood.  While the director’s intent appears clear, described by Cinema Scope: Blake Williams  as “simple portraits of women trying to live their lives, fulfill their desires, and maintain or manufacture some idea of happiness—may be nothing more or less than an object of pure dignity, a film about the joys and virtues of being a woman,” she’s also removed any lingering sense of drama or passion, where this feels like a kind of anti-cinema, so inert and narratively loose that it barely feels like a film, more like fragments in time, scenes from a diary, or even a literary work, adapted from two of Maile Meloy’s 2002 collection of fourteen short stories from Half in Love, Tome and Native Sandstone, and one, Travis, B, from the eleven short stories in Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It, which was named one of the Ten Best Books of 2009 by The New York Times.  While it may have been motivated by Altman’s Short Cuts (1993), though not nearly on the same grand scale, the film is basically a merging of both Kelly Reichardt’s and Maile Meloy’s unique voices and vision, as both focus upon marginal or disenfranchised women who usually go unnoticed, whose struggles against the banality of their routines reflect a growing compulsion for more, yet whose lives often end up in disappointment, highlighted by emotional disconnection or some unseen human failure, leading to no comfortable resolution. 

Tome

The maker of River of Grass (1994), Old Joy (2006), Wendy and Lucy (2008), Meek’s Cutoff (2010), and Night Moves (2013), the film opens with a long and winding freight train moving through the vastness of the landscape, where one constant throughout the opening segment of the film is the recurrent sound of train horns that are sounded as they move past small towns.  In the first sequence, Laura Dern stars as Laura Wells, a Livingston lawyer seen having an affair with a married man (James Le Gros) before heading back to the office where her most hopeless client awaits her, Mr. Fuller (Jared Harris), a man who suffered a serious workplace accident landing on his head leaving him with permanent double vision and possible brain damage, but as he accepted an initial insurance payment from the company, they are no longer liable for additional damages, leaving him destitute and out of options.  While he repeatedly visits the woman he calls “his lawyer,” she can only sympathize, as there is nothing she can do for him.  She does arrange a meeting with another male lawyer, to offer a second opinion, and when he offers an identical assessment, Mr. Fuller seems to accept his explanation, leaving Laura to fret about how much easier it is to be a male attorney.  But the guy falls off the rails shortly afterwards, abducting a night watchman in a hostage situation at the employer where he used to work, with “his lawyer” being called to the scene, prepped by officers before being sent alone into the building to peacefully talk him out.  The man being held hostage is of Samoan descent (Joshua T. Fonokalafi), indicating that in his country, he’s only 14 people removed from assuming leadership, adding a note of levity, where Fuller wants to hear the company file on his case, quickly learning that he was cheated out of a larger settlement.  His escape plans go awry and he is quickly arrested by the police, where Laura is seen at the prison some time later in a kind gesture, where she ends up being his only visitor, urging her to write more, about absolutely anything, even the weather, as it wears on inmates never receiving any mail. 

Native Sandstone

In the least compelling segment, Michelle Williams as Gina Lewis dominates the middle section, which is all about her blind ambition, where other people barely register in her quest to obtain what she wants.  While she has an obstinate teenage daughter (Sara Rodier) that defies her at every turn, her husband Ryan is the same man seen in the first segment having an affair.  They’re camped out in a tent on a plot of land where they intend to build a house, with Gina scolding her husband for constantly undermining her efforts with their daughter.  Ryan is a get along kind of guy who simply wants to be everyone’s friend.  They pay a visit to an elderly man Albert, René Auberjonois, brilliant as the barkeep in Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) forty five years ago, with Gina trying to talk him out of some sandstone rocks heaped in front of his house for years.  At 83, Albert has always refused to part with these rocks, as they are his link to history, reminding her that they come from the old schoolhouse that was built before the railways.  She doesn’t care, she’s willing to pay, but her visit is clearly having an effect on Albert, whose mind seems to be fading, launching into near-incoherent soliloquys that she simply waits out before reminding him again of her intentions, as she wants to use it in building her house, “It’s beautiful stone.  We want native stone to build with, railroad ties, things that fit in.”  Ryan attempts to interject, sensing the old man’s unease and how important the rocks are to him, but Gina again dominates the discussion until she gets her way, scolding her husband afterwards for offering the man a way out.  Obtaining what she needs appears to be her sole objective.  As they load it into a truck, Albert can be seen staring out the window, where she waves, but he doesn’t wave back, now completely cut off from his past. 

Travis, B.

Though the interior world of women dominate the film, Albert’s silence speaks volumes, which leads into the final segment where Reichardt has changed a male character in the story to a female character, Jamie, played by Lily Gladstone, who is easily the most affecting character in the film.  A grown up version of Ally Sheedy from THE BREAKFAST CLUB (1985), who wanders aimlessly into a Saturday high school detention session because she has nothing better to do, while here Jamie, a native of the Blackfeet Reservation in northwestern Montana, is a ranch hand in rural Belfry who lives and works in isolation during the winter, but sees cars pulling into a rural school parking lot gathering for a meeting, so she curiously walks in as well.  Beth Travis (Kristen Stewart) is a harried young female lawyer teaching an evening class on school law twice a week, suggesting students have a right to due process and a hearing before they can be expelled, yet the teachers seem more interested in what to do with kids that interrupt their classrooms, how to more easily expel them.  As the others leave afterwards, Jamie accompanies Beth to the local diner, rarely uttering a word, instead watching her eat while listening to her complain about how it’s a difficult 4-hour ride one-way to Belfry, which she mistakenly thought was Belgrade, which is nearby, driving through wretched conditions of ice and snow and then she has return home to Livingston the same way, another 4-hours, just to get up early the next morning for work.  Despite having no connection to her class, Jamie returns week after week, even riding a horse to the café one week, until one day, without word, someone else has permanently taken over Beth’s teaching duties.  While we see Jamie dutifully perform her work in complete isolation feeding the horses with snowy mountains looming in the distance, we also see her walk out of that class and take the 4-hour trek to Livingston searching the next morning for the law firm where Beth works, surprising her in the parking lot.  Few words are spoken in a heartbreaking encounter, but Jamie mentions if she hadn’t done this, she would never see her again, leaving Beth a bit startled, not knowing what to say, so, not intending to cause a scene, Jamie leaves just as abruptly.  Somehow caught in the places in between, this film thrives on the tenuous threads holding us together, featuring characters who go to unusual lengths to pursue what they want, often feeling shortchanged and emptyhanded. 

Images

IMAGES                     B+         
USA   Great Britain  Ireland  (101 mi)  1972  ‘Scope  d:  Robert Altman

I’m not really making love with him.  That will make anything all right. 

—Cathryn (Susannah York)

Made at the peak of his creative powers between McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) and The Long Goodbye (1973), two of the director’s most memorable works, Altman made this strange little film about schizophrenia, the second of his “Female Subjectivity” Trilogy, coming between That Cold Day In the Park (1969) and 3 Women (1977).  While it’s not hard to imagine a little girl living in a fantasy world of fairy tales and dreams, viewed as the picture of innocence, yet here’s it’s a beautiful grown woman who appears equally stuck in an imaginary world, a strange and haunting place where the world is not as it seems, where reality comes and goes with the whims of the imagination, all running together creating a peculiar netherworld, much like the macabre and sinister universe of Carl Dreyer’s VAMPYR (1932), but this is the world as she sees it, where she seemingly floats in and out of both worlds, as the film takes place almost entirely inside a woman’s subconscious.  It’s interestingly one of the least Altmanesque films the director has ever made, where it doesn’t feature overlapping dialogue, a multitude of characters, multiple themes, several events happening simultaneously within the same frame, or an improvisational feel, instead it has a narrow focus, perhaps his most complete foray into the horror genre with its array of creepy effects, venturing into the Dario Argento art house horror genre to reveal one woman’s descent into madness.  Susannah York won the Best Actress Award at the premiere in Cannes, where Sandra Dennis in That Cold Day In the Park is a direct link to Susannah York here, offering a striking performance as the central character Cathryn, where the camera never leaves her, as Altman uses a more experimental style to capture a woman caught between two worlds, both merging into one another, with a brilliant sound design by musical composer John Williams and Japanese percussionist Stomu Yamash’ta, mixing wind chimes fluttering in the breeze with special sound effects to reflect her altered state of consciousness, where the audience is continually questioning what is real and what isn’t.  Cathryn has a complacently bourgeois husband Hugh, René Auberjonois, who sees the world as it is, representing one reality, combined with the world as it appears to her, where the majority of the film is reflective of her continuously fluctuating interior moods.  When viewed as a cultural oppression of women, there seems to be little fallback position, as Cathryn both rebels against and then withdraws from her real husband, inventing alternative options only through an abnormal psychology, perhaps viewed as unfathomable by men, where throughout the trilogy Altman deals with the crises of women through various internalized neuroses.  On the other hand, it’s not too far fetched to see the film as a portrait of an artist, seeing the world much as Cathryn does, where the jagged edges of creative artistry continually fluctuate and evolve over time.      

Originating from an Altman idea, the film is brilliantly shot in Ireland around a lakeland location of Lough Bray, County Wicklow by cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond, with breathtaking panoramic vistas capturing a wintry desolation, where much of this film has a painterly appearance, beautifully mixing the natural pastoral beauty outside, occasionally delving into fantasy, with exquisitely designed interior sets by Leon Ericksen that reflect a super modern look, where each door or room leads to another world, all feeding into Cathryn’s psychosis.  Opening with a story that she’s writing that at the same time is taking her into a world that is frightening, the entire film is layered in a children’s book called In Search of Unicorns, a children’s fantasy novel actually written by Susannah York that she narrates throughout, where the story is her escapism from her twisted sense of reality, finding comfort in the safety of children’s images, where things the audience sees appear to be other things to her.  Throughout the film, the presence of the camera gives the viewer the intimate effect of being outside looking in, where there are strange incongruities throughout, becoming a fascinating portrait of mental instability, much of it captured with dreamlike imagery.  The audience is immediately struck by her distorted sense of reality, where she suspects her husband of sexual indiscretions that exist only in her own mind, which is probably her way of avoiding her own indiscretions.  Perhaps the biggest jolt is when her husband Hugh turns into someone who isn’t there, René (Marcel Bozzuffi), a ghost from the past who has come to pay a visit, where the “visitor” remains to her just as real as anything else.  While she tries to ignore the reappearance of these haunting apparitions, knowing in some instances (a dead lover) they’re not really there, but they inevitably lure her into their sexual fantasies where she relives past experiences in her life that are most likely based on real occurrences, where for her, the present and the past exist simultaneously, like a kind of involuntary time traveling, which is especially evident in a scene when she stands atop a hill overlooking a view of herself pulling into a driveway below.  It’s not a stretch to think this influenced Stanley Kubrick’s THE SHINING (1980), with Jack Nicholson similarly gazing down into the maze at the Overlook Hotel, tracking his wife and son as they navigate its corridors. 

When her husband Hugh takes her out to their country estate, a dream cottage beautifully located on a lake and within walking distance of a majestic waterfall in what appears to be a magical forest with a herd of sheep running free, Cathryn continues to see visions, having violent episodes often when she’s left alone, where the world closes in on her much like Catherine Deneuve’s hallucinations in Roman Polanski’s REPULSION (1965).  Haunted by unwelcome memories that she tries to suppress, and the thought of a lonely childhood where she was often forced to “invent” friends, we’re never told specifically what is ailing Cathryn, or if the frequency and intensity of her schizophrenic episodes have grown more acute.  Instead, alone with the subjective point of view of the central figure, the audience is reeled into the same claustrophobic existence where these episodes are conspiring against her.  Hugh also brings home a creepy old friend, Marcel (Hugh Millais), who has recently obtained custody of his 12-year old daughter Susannah (Cathryn Harrison), who bears a striking resemblance to a young Cathryn.  The lecherous Marcel instantly hits on Cathryn, much like René, with both characters (along with her husband) feeling almost interchangeable, where they obviously have some history, though it’s Susannah that attracts the attention of Cathryn, where they’re both seen attempting to piece together a jigsaw puzzle of what turns out to be the country house where they live, where it’s clear in Susannah she sees a younger version of herself, fused together in a mirror image out of Bergman’s PERSONA (1966), where the lines of reality are blurred, mixed with the fantasy elements of the story and the nearby magical forest.  Marcel’s perceived sexual aggressiveness is fended off while at the same time succumbed to, where he tells her, “You know what you are?  You’re a schizo one minute fighting like a tiger and the next all love and kisses.”  Because she imagines characters that don’t exist, she can’t distinguish whether his sexual advances are real, though she eventually confronts her “visitors,” awakening something deeply unsettling inside that resembles a madness within, where eventually the dead mix with what’s real, and she’s left questioning what she’s done.  Cathryn is always quick to invent fictitious scenarios to explain what otherwise resembles a catastrophe, as schizophrenics that live with this condition are used to covering up their hallucinations, where they routinely invent excuses or lies to convince others that everything’s all right, even as they are slipping further into the void. 

By the end, Altman’s film resembles the surreal landscape of David Lynch’s LOST HIGHWAY (1997) with its infamous identity schism.  Cathryn drives along the road at night returning back to the city for what she believes is her waiting husband, where she encounters along the way, among other things, haunting images of ghosts, including one of herself beckoning for help, “Let me in Cathryn.  What’s the matter with you?” where she is literally fighting for control of her own soul, which appears fragile and easily lost in the mist.  She thinks she has a handle on her visions, growing elated at the thought all the ghosts are gone, leaving her feeling somewhat euphoric, driving ecstatically through a phantasmagorical world of brightly saturated colors, illusion and hallucination, where Altman loves to use shots through glass, odd camera angles, zoom in and out of focus, or use mirrored images that serve as reflections of the past, providing an altered expression of reality, where the camera sees what Cathryn sees throughout, a window into schizophrenia.  The entire film plays out like a nightmarish fever dream that literally breathes psychological intensity, using eerie and atmospheric sounds of percussion along with weird images that seem to offer a view of the occult.  The film is an impressionistic drama that takes us on a mysterious journey into the maze of a mental labyrinth, where each twist and turn leaves us even further removed from where we started.  By the end, Cathryn remains an Alice down the rabbit hole enigma and has only retreated further into her stories, where her grip on reality is even less tenuous, relying upon the kindness of others, “Hugh will be here in a moment and we’ll see who’s here and who isn’t.”  The complex and smartly thought-out film is well acted, beautifully constructed, and not like anything else Altman has ever done, where he presents the fear and isolation associated with a personality disorder, showing how little support and actual communication is offered, reflecting the depths of alienation and trauma.  One of the clever touches is Altman creating characters using the real names of the actors, where Cathryn is played by Susannah York, Susannah is played by Cathryn Harrison, René is played by Marcel Bozzuffi, Marcel is played by Hugh Millais, and Hugh is played by René Auberjonois.  The film was originally released in Chicago at the Biograph Theater on a double bill with Nicolas Roeg’s Don't Look Now (1973), both emotionally cold films, but dreamy, psychologically obtuse thrillers having much in common, particularly in the extraordinary visual compositions and artful expression of a fractured reality, but this is one of the few Altman films that actually excels in weaving a tightly constructed narrative.