The House of Yes

THE HOUSE OF YES            B+                  

USA  (90 mi)  1997  d:  Mark Waters

A wacky, outrageously acerbic black comedy with Genevieve Bujold as the matriarch over an extraordinarily dysfunctional family, uttering lines like “conversation only leads to trouble,” adapted from Wendy MacLeod’s play We Are Living in a House of Yes, though perhaps loosely based upon Edgar Allen Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher, as this is basically a Gothic haunted house story, where all the inhabitants are forever tainted by family secrets, not the least of which includes ongoing incestual relations between a twin brother Marty (Josh Hamilton) and his sister Jackie (Parker Posey) playing JFK and Jackie-O, both obsessed with the Kennedy family since their father walked out on the day of JFK's assassination, where their mother reminds us “Jackie was holding Marty's penis when they came out of the womb.  The doctors swore to me it’s in some medical journal somewhere.”  The brilliant Parker Posey shines in her role as the recently de-institutionalized, still mentally unstable sister who becomes completely obsessed as Jackie-O, right down to wearing a string of pearls around her neck, the pink Chanel suit along with the pillbox hat that the First Lady was wearing when JFK was shot and killed in Dallas.  Played by a younger actress (Rachael Leigh Cook) as Jackie at age 14, the film opens with iconic, interchangeable images The House of Yes - Young Jackie-O Tour Videos. - YouTube (4:57) over the opening credits of Jackie-O (in color) showing off her stately home and the real Jacquelyn Kennedy (in Black and White) leading a televised guided tour of the White House A Tour of the White House with Mrs. John F. Kennedy - YouTube (57:37), which aired on CBS to enormous TV ratings on February 14, 1962, though here it resembles parody.  The film makes no bones about its air of pretension, becoming a savagely dark, dialogue-laced, screwball comedy where Posey literally steals the show, as the audience can’t take their eyes off her every moment she’s onscreen, as she’s utterly captivating in a delightfully sick and macabre kind of way, perhaps the defining role of her career.

The terrific, sarcastically biting dialogue intermixes overdramatic yet stinging remarks with a weird hilarity, maintaining a frenetic pace over the course of 24 hours on a dark and stormy Thanksgiving Day, where a torrent of rain sets the tone for interior, claustrophobic fun and games, especially when the power goes off and the darkness is lit only by candlelight, luminously shot by Michael Stiller.  The characters themselves couldn’t be more memorable, as the acting is outstanding, each playing off the other with surprising skill, where there is more quotable dialogue here than virtually any other film of its era, a movie that plays well to repeated viewings, set in 1983 in an enormously empty Virginian mansion during the Reagan years, a last gasp of aristocracy where the world of privilege is a given, as they know no other way, a place with no rules, where Jackie is defined as a person who can’t take no for an answer, where the film title came from bathroom wall graffiti seen by the director:  “We are living in a house of yes.”  According to her mother, if there’s anything she knows and understands, it’s that “Jackie and Marty belong to each other.”  So when Marty arrives home from college with his fiancée Lesly (Tori Spelling), her presence sends the house into turmoil, as they’ve never had a guest before, wonderfully expressed in a flurry of Marx Brothers style dialogue seen here:  House of Yes - YouTube (1:49).  Other than Marty, the inhabitants, including the ever inquisitive younger brother Anthony (Freddie Prinze Jr.), are all shut-ins who rarely if ever venture to the outside world, preferring the comforts of home, where like Poe’s story, the house itself seems filled with the secret mysteries of its own family history, where nothing normal ever happens, perhaps best expressed by the mother who brazenly tells her children “I look at you people and wonder, how did you ever fit in my womb?” 

Posey’s manic edge couldn’t be more brilliantly original, but Bujold is the anchor of the family, where the two get all the best lines, where Bujold’s understatement perfectly contrasts with Posey’s frenetic energy.  The question is whether any of the family’s secrets will be revealed, whether Marty will be allowed to run away with the perfectly ordinary Lesly and lead some semblance of a normal life, or whether the house of horrors will somehow manage to take its toll on the inhabitants.  Jackie is always walking on eggshells, reminiscent of the outrageous and highly exaggerated restraint required in Guy Maddin’s CAREFUL (1992), where people speak in whispers lest they be overcome by a looming avalanche, where anything can potentially trigger her violent tendencies, where the quick and abrupt mood changes are startlingly effective, always matched by the music of Rolfe Kent, beautifully expressed in a scene where Marty and Lesly play chopsticks on the piano together, until Jackie butts in and the brother and sister team play an astoundingly difficult four-hand piano concerto that immediately drives Lesly out of the picture, eventually breaking into free form jazz that opens the door to a few family secrets:  The House of Yes --- Big Reveal --- SPOILERS - YouTube  (3:51).  While the emotions displayed onscreen are surprisingly real, never resorting to the artificiality of camp, this is a film about revealing emotional truths, however twisted they may be, like jealousy, love, shame, obsession, humiliation, disbelief, or possessiveness, where the non-naturalistic manner in which they’re expressed is part of the film’s free-wheeling charm, as this allows Parker’s wonderfully over-the-top performance, “But I’m not crazy now, I’m better.  I watch soap operas, I bake brownies, normalcy is coursing through my veins,” but also lends itself to the unthinkable, such as Marty and Jackie-O lovingly reenacting the Kennedy assassination as foreplay.  This is a surprisingly demented American version of THE RULES OF THE GAME (1939), lured by indulgence and the self-centered spell of the Me Generation, thinking the love you want to believe in is strong enough to lift you outside societal norms, not just above conventionality, but also morality, where in fact anything goes.  To get lost in this delusional rhapsodic flight is like Icarus flying too close to the sun. 

Mouchette

MOUCHETTE            A-                  

France  (78 mi)  1967  d:  Robert Bresson

MOUCHETTE has always suffered from coming so close on the heels to Au Hasard Balthazar (1966), sharing so many of the downbeat aspects of the human condition, where unfortunately it will always remain second fiddle in that regard, as MOUCHETTE explores human misery while BALTHAZAR defines poetic grace.  Adapted from a novel by Catholic writer Georges Bernanos, who also wrote Diary of a Country Priest, it’s as if Bresson decided to make a film accentuating a world without God, coinciding, perhaps, with Ingmar Bergman’s Trilogy (1961 – 1963) of chamber dramas, Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light, and The Silence, exploring a crisis of faith in the modern age, each deeply personal films utilizing little dialog, isolated settings, and searing performances from an exceptional group of actors. 

Bresson creates perhaps his bleakest film, nothing less than the descent of Man, a heartbreakingly sad portrait of human suffering as seen through the life of a young 14-year old girl, the beautifully expressive non-professional Nadine Nortier, the only film she ever made, whose descent into abject hopelessness becomes a parable for the absence of God, as she has nowhere to turn, no friend to call upon, and no way to stop the bleeding without taking her own life.  What’s particularly devastating is the way she is beaten down into submission, a brutal exposé of the torment of an innocent soul, an interesting comment on the similar treatment of Christ, but Bresson’s film offers no transcendence from Calvary, no ascension into heaven, no spiritual relief, only the portrayal of a human crucifixion.

Using unrelentingly raw detail in a world stripped of artifice, much of the film plays out like a crime scene, as if we in the audience are implicated for the sin we are about to witness, as in Catholicism, suicide is a sin, where we must collectively bear responsibility, each of us in our own way.  This plays out like a kind of living theater, where having born witness to this kind of earthly torment, the audience must find a way to be reborn and find spiritual renewal.  Do we relapse into the same old bad habits, showing indifference to the suffering of others, or does this film literally touch the soul? 

Opening and closing with sacred music from Monteverdi’s “Magnificat” Monteverdi "Magnificat" fragment (Vespers of 1610) on YouTube (11:19), Bresson frames the film in the beauty of Renaissance classicism and what would be considered the heart of European civilization.  The startling opening question is asked by Mouchette's dying mother even before the credits appear, “What will they become without me?”  Much like BALTHAZAR, we return to the same rural countryside setting, focus on another teenage girl’s experience, and follow another path of human mistreatment and cruelty.  However in this film, Mouchette is already an outcast, mistreated by her dysfunctional parents, excluded by others at school, the object of namecalling and derision, even mistreated by her teacher, driven to tears, seen here:  Mouchette on YouTube (2:14) in a lamenting song of despair aboard the ship of Columbus, believing they are lost at sea and doomed, crying out “Hope, Hope Is Dead.”  

Relentlessly dour, the portrait of an unsympathetic world, there are dual narratives, the rape of nature and man, where one metaphorically comments upon the rabbit hunting sequence from Renoir’s THE RULES OF THE GAME (1939), where a gamekeeper and a poacher are at odds, where the matter of justice in the wild is seen as a violation against nature, where hunters can be seen shooting rabbits at will, where overpowering force tips the balance of man against nature, while the other allows a troubled and wayward girl to get lost in a storm and lose her way, never managing to find her way back, showing events taking place over the course of a 24-hour day. 

Making her way through life friendless and alone, Bresson’s narrative is uncompromising throughout, where Nortier’s face is the picture of bewilderment, continually used to hardship and solitude and abuse, as nothing else exists for her in the harsh conditions of rural life, where the influence of traditional support from family and church are absent.  While she’s something of a tomboy forced to fend for herself, she also exhibits moments of tenderness and fragility, where her need for human contact is so overwhelming that she confuses physical abuse with compassion, where the person offering her the most kindness also rapes her.  Where does one turn when there is no one?  Without faith, her life is a spiraling descent into the void of worthlessness.  If faith is to be found in this film, it must come from the audience.    

Two in the Wave

TWO IN THE WAVE                     B-             

France  (91 mi)  2010  d:  Emmanuel Laurent

This is a delightful romp through the archives of the late 50’s and early 60’s French New Wave films, specifically referencing François Truffaut, whose landmark film 400 BLOWS starring a young 14-year old Jean-Pierre Léaud was a sensation at the Cannes Film Festival in 1959.  Simultaneously, a fellow writer from the Parisian film magazine Cahiers du cinema, Jean-Luc Godard, was busy readying his first film BREATHLESS, which opened nearly a year later also to resounding success, elevating both young novices to becoming spokespersons for the nouvelle vague.  Since both were erudite and educated, used to expressing their thoughts on paper, they did not shy away from the cameras which followed them everywhere, plastering them on magazine covers, making them an international sensation.  Breaking all the rules about rigid narrative filmmaking, much of it just copying traditional formulas guided more by economics than genuine inspiration, this brash group of young guns broke away from film studios and invented a new art, preferring to shoot on location where their editing and visual style expressed a new sense of urgency and personal expression, inventing new rules as they went along.  The trip down memory lane guided by clips of their early films is a real treat, as they play out like personal photo albums or favorite songs, as so many audience members will recollect seeing these films and recalling what a vital part they played in transforming their own attitudes about art and cinema. 

Both Truffaut and Godard are seen in clips as documentary interviewers as well, where Truffaut wrote a legendary book from his Hitchcock interviews, while Godard wrote a film CONTEMPT (1963) that was largely inspired by his interviews with Fritz Lang.  The young novices idealized directors who exhibited a flair for cinematic art and imagination, like Renoir, Hawks or Hitchcock, or who could express emotions through an unabashed realism, like Nicholas Ray.  Unfortunately, many of their compatriots were left out of this venture, as there is no mention of Chabrol’s LE BEAU SERGE (1958), oftentimes cited as the first New Wave film, or Eric Rohmer who built a career around character observations and dialogue, or the brilliant contributions of Jacques Rivette, who they all admired as perhaps the most radical artist among them, while including clips from Agnès Varda’s shorts, where we see a playful side of Godard in front of the camera, and Jacques Demy’s LOLA (1961).  This oversight streamlines the density of the subject matter, which is not so much a historical account of the New Wave, something the public appears clamoring for, but focuses instead on just two contributors, and barely makes a dent on their films, really only exploring their early years where each suffered box office casualties along with their successes.  Interestingly, despite noting their radical artistic achievements, the film doesn’t weigh in with any historical analysis or perspective on either man’s career.  In fact, there is no one onscreen who disputes the film’s findings or who offers a dissenting view.  In an interesting foreshadowing of events to come, both men are seen rallying the troops in 1968 and consolidating their combined voices against the French ministry’s firing of legendary film archivist Henri Langois from the Cinémathèque Française, even halting the Cannes Film Festival that year, which led to the turbulent street demonstrations that reinstated not only his position but the needed funding.      

Activism and artistic differences eventually leads to a permanent artistic rift between the two men in 1973, where Godard embraces radical politics as an essential ingredient to any socially relevant art, while Truffaut believes art transcends politics.  Truffaut’s DAY FOR NIGHT (1973), absent any politics, provokes an excoriating public denunciation from Godard, calling it irrelevant and nothing more than a bourgeois trifle, while Truffaut countered with the publishing of a twenty-three page personal critique of Godard, calling him a sham, an illegitimate spokesperson for the working class as he lives a typically bourgeois lifestyle surrounded by wealth and riches.  The two men never spoke again for the rest of their lives, like something out of CITIZEN KANE (1941) when Orson Welles stopped speaking to Joseph Cotton.  Earlier in the film, Godard relished a Welles quote:  “Art as a moral stance against tyranny.”  Under the circumstances, however, considering the contributions both have made to cinema, their public spat seems petty and childish, even if their respective views both happen to be true and offer the best analytic film criticism this movie has to offer.  What is especially sad is seeing both men competitively vie for the personal allegiance of Jean-Pierre Léaud, the poster child of the New Wave, who feels compelled to continue to work for both directors while being pushed and pulled from both ends, like a child in a divorce custody case.  While this documentary only skims the surface, using ridiculous images of actress Isild Le Besco paging through old copies of Cahiers, the real interest lies in reviewing clips from the early films which come alive onscreen, beautifully capturing the vibrant energy of youth, a timeless moment in cinema history when the world stopped to watch and listen as the medium playfully spit out the past while rejuvenating itself.