The Eternal Daughter

 

THE ETERNAL DAUGHTER         B                                                                                   Great Britain  USA  (96 mi)  2022  d: Joana Hogg

I have a husband I neglect completely and I don’t have that much time left, and I don’t have a family beyond you.  I don’t have any children, I’m not going to have anybody to fuss over me when I’m your age.                                                                                                                        —Julie Harte talking to her mother Rosalind (both played by Tilda Swinton)

“No one wants to talk about mortality, and I regret to this day that I was never able to have that conversation with my mother,” Hogg confesses. “I was too fearful of it … I didn’t want to upset her by bringing it up.  But it would have been on her mind, and it would have maybe been a relief to have a conversation about it.  But it just didn’t happen.” (No One Wants to Talk About Mortality - The Atlantic).  From the maker of The Souvenir (2019) and THE SOUVENIR Part II (2021), with Tilda Swinton taking on a more grownup version of the role her daughter Honor Swinton Byrne played in those films, a fictionalized version of the director herself, with Tilda playing the mother, while this one features Tilda in both roles, playing mother and daughter, where you get to watch Tilda Swinton talk to Tilda Swinton in what amounts to a one-woman show.  Hogg collaborated with Swinton on her 1986 short graduation thesis film, Caprice, having known her since they were both ten year old boarding school students at the West Heath Girls’ School in 1971, the former boarding school of Princess Diana, while Hogg is also the godmother of Swinton’s daughter, each mentored by artist, poet, and filmmaker Derek Jarman, loaning Hogg her very first Super 8 camera which she used to make that first short film, only to collaborate again with Swinton on The Souvenir films, with this viewed as a finalizing coda, blurring the line between fiction and memoir.  This becomes a self-reflective memory piece on family and the limits of artistry, as sometimes the process of creating art trespasses into the personal and may have an unintended consequence, exposing family secrets that when released publicly take on a whole other life, creating open wounds that may never heal.  Martin Scorsese is an executive producer on all three films, where there is a printed conversation between them when this film was released, MARTIN SCORSESE AND JOANNA HOGG IN ....  Essentially a two woman film, with Swinton in both roles, this defies audience expectations, creating something minimalist, yet immediately recognizable, as it looks like something we’ve seen before, resembling the Gothic imagination of Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940), but without the nastiness.  In fact, the two women couldn’t be more polite, which has a way of smoothing over the rough edges, but the atmospheric surroundings constantly remind us of something deeply unsettling.  With a dark and moody opening, a car arrives in the darkness, as if immersing viewers onto the foggy moors of Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights (Arnold) (2011), resembling the somnambulistic quality of a Guy Maddin film, as it has that same neon green color scheme and melodramatic yet overly somber musical score, which happens to be Béla Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta, Béla Bartók - Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, I YouTube (9:02), part of the background music used in Kubrick’s THE SHINING (1980), though the two films use different parts of it.  Yet it’s a haunted house movie, told in the old Gothic style, with a minimum of characters onscreen, mostly a woman and her elderly mother along with their dog (Tilda Swinton’s own Springer Spaniel), where they are seemingly the only guests staying at this old gargoyle-covered countryside hotel that seems tucked under bare trees in a foreboding landscape of dim lights and everpresent fog.  Shot during the isolation of the Covid pandemic on Super 16mm by Ed Rutherford, who also shot two of her earlier works, actually filmed at Soughton Hall in Wales, a 15-bedroom Georgian estate built in 1714 which has never been used in cinema before, though judging by all the peripheral noises and an everpresent camera exploring all the nooks and crannies, this eerily empty hotel appears to be haunted, as if something is constantly lurking nearby, where the omnipresent fog raises certain expectations, creating an environment that overwhelms so completely that it amounts to a character of its own.  But this is simply the framework of a story Hogg wishes to tell, which may be her most personal effort yet, but it’s concealed within a claustrophobic environment that is as telling as anything the characters have to say, literally sweeping viewers into this cacophony of discordant sounds and ominous imagery that is always shrouded in darkness, where the bottom line is that memories haunt us, creating a unique experience that couldn’t be more eerie and ominous, as if plunging us into the depths of the subconscious, out of which emanates a film about loss or impending loss, and an exploration of grief.    

Not much actually happens in this film, requiring a great deal of patience, offering only the barest outlines of a story, and much of that is filled with benevolently perfunctory conversations between mother and daughter, where you really have to dig deep to find meaningful material here, as so much of it plays out on the surface level, leaving plenty to the imagination, yet what’s unseen seems to haunt the living.  Julie is a middle-aged filmmaker taking her elderly mother Rosalind to Wales for her birthday (the same characters in The Souvenir), booking several days in an isolated old manor, a place her mother used to frequent, as it was once owned by her Aunt Jocelyn, spending plenty of her childhood there during an evacuation from the war while attempting to escape the bombs targeting nearby Liverpool, revisiting it many times even as a young woman.  But like many of these old homes in postwar Britain, due to taxes and increased expenses, they’ve been converted to country hotels, and while they promise peace and quiet in the comforts of the countryside, they immediately feel anxious when the chilly desk clerk, Carly Sophia-Davies, has no record of their reservation, or their request for a specific room overlooking the garden, instead she seems completely indifferent, having difficulty finding any available room, claiming the hotel is full of guests, even though they seem to be the only ones there.  Having the dining room to themselves, and the full run of the place, the clerk is equally disinterested about Julie’s request to close the windows and shutters in the rooms above them that seem to be continually banging from the wind, keeping her up all night, as she roams the empty corridors, with the clerk claiming none of the other guests have complained.  Immediately we question our perception of reality, as there’s obviously something going on behind the scenes, with the deadpan clerk absurdly adding a bit of levity to an overly somber film, as she seems constantly annoyed and reluctant to accommodate any of Julie’s requests, caught up, apparently, in her own personal struggles, occasionally seen arguing with a partner that is picking her up in a red sports car with the techno music cranked up as they are leaving the grounds.  While she brought her mother to an old familiar place in hopes it would trigger her memories for the film she wants to make, with each room reminding Rosalind of personal anecdotes she would never have thought of otherwise, she hopes to memorialize her mother before she dies by secretly recording their conversations.  Feeling guilty that this is done without asking consent, Rosalind is reluctant to share, finding herself easily distracted, not really providing the answers she is looking for, carrying a white plastic bag of letters and photographs that she intends to go through, while Julie spends her time working in the attic, the only place with a reliable Wi-Fi signal, making no headway at all on writing a screenplay, obscured by her own challenges, as she’s continually kept up all night, left ruminating on questions swirling in her head about the ghostly events that surround her in a lonely hotel without guests, becoming a film about the creative process and the emotional turmoil it involves.  Much of this is shot through mirror reflections, or long shots down empty hallways, with a spectral figure seen peering through the window, where it’s more suggestive than real, offering various versions of the self, never really addressing any of Rosalind’s concerns openly, as memories aren’t always clear and concise, and can feel muddled, as if lost in a haze, with only moments of clarity.  Nonetheless, Julie only wishes for her mother’s happiness, growing deeply distressed when she learns of so many sorrowful recollections, with memories of war and tragic loss, including a miscarriage, leaving her filled with regret, unaware of the heavy weight she’s been carrying, which may explain her writer’s block, growing deeply uncomfortable, a manifestation of something a younger version of her character Julie says in SOUVENIR II, “I don’t want to see life as it was.  I want to see life as I imagine it to be.”  Filtering someone else’s life through our own existential prism, it only accentuates what we don’t know or understand about those we love, as reality often conflicts with our ideas of the truth.             

While this film made plenty of Best of the Year lists, listed at #3 by Reverse Shot, Best Films of 2022 Reverse Shot, and #5 by the Film Comment poll, Film Comment Announces 2022 Best-of-Year Lists, it’s not an easy watch, particularly finding something substantive out of it, as it definitely loses something if not seen in theaters, where it might otherwise feel overly dark, with so much hidden underneath the tapestry of spooky images, borrowing heavily from the British horror tradition, including Jacques Tourneur’s fog-shrouded NIGHT OF THE DEMON (1957), Jack Clayton’s superb adaptation of the Henry James ghost story The Turn of the Screw in The Innocents (1961), Herbert Wise’s ghost story THE WOMAN IN BLACK (1989), and of course Stanley Kubrick’s haunted house thriller THE SHINING (1980), which was shot in England.  The use of horror recalls the deeply buried resentments in Ingmar Bergman’s Bergman, Two from the 70's: Autumn Sonata (Höstsonaten) (1978), featuring Ingrid Bergman and Liv Ullmann as mother and daughter, veering into shockingly unexpected emotional outbursts, while this is a portrait of Hogg’s relationship with her own mother, who died while she was editing the film, leaving her plagued by guilt, associating the film with her death, making this her version of Chantal Akerman’s No Home Movie (2015).  Essentially a film about women whose problems manifest as failures of expression, suppressed desires, and thwarted ambitions, the idea began back in 2008 when Hogg was planning a film about her relationship with her mother, but she was too close at the time, unnerved by the idea of poking around exploring very painful memories, but the passage of time allowed her to consider a different way of approaching the subject, knowing she would make a film about it one day, recalling “We often went on trips together to stay at hotels, sometimes near relatives, and so it was very directly taken from that experience with her.”  Swinton is understated throughout, providing the needed believability in each character, a stabilizing force in stark contrast to the impressionistic maze of Gothic horror that is a constant visual motif, with suggestions of a supernatural presence hovering nearby, which may be a metaphor for death, and while nothing jumps out of the dark striking fear in anyone’s heart, the horror of memory is everpresent here.  While Julie tries her best to care for her mother, she is shocked at her mother’s reactions to a return to what was a family estate, flooding her memories with an overwhelming rush of sad emotions, leaving Julie disheartened, wondering what she’s done bringing her there, but her mother is more firmly grounded, reminding her daughter, “That’s what rooms do.  They hold these stories.”  From an imagination perspective, this film is wonderfully impressionistic, offering fleeting memories, but also long-forgotten correspondences, worn-out paperbacks, long walks with the dog, and formal dining in an empty room, with only four things on the menu, catered to by the disinterested desk clerk who always seems to intrude at the exact wrong moment, invariably interrupting their train of thought, though they always insist they are having a “very lovely time,” leaving things in a state of paralysis, as if stuck in time.  The birthday dinner itself is surreal, with Julie meticulously wanting things done a certain way, becoming anxiously exact, but when the moment arrives the film swerves in a different direction, altering the look of reality, challenging our perceptions, and infusing a different understanding of the mother/daughter relationship which is at the heart of the film.  It’s clear that you can know someone without really knowing them, as evidenced by this family home that was once filled with importance and life, but transformed over time to an empty vessel, a decaying remnant of what it once was, where the physical space of the building is a ghostly presence.  Looking upon our pasts, and the people that matter to us, an emotional chasm exists between how we remember the past and the present, with all its complications.  Memory is fluid, as it comes and goes, never straightforward, which may explain the multiple shots of mirror reflections, working with more close-ups, allowing the characters’ reactions to be observed in greater detail, adding an existential element, and a different version of autobiographical filmmaking, as there’s something unknowable about this hotel and its inhabitants, and a tremendous gulf between the conversations we would like to have with our mothers and daughters, and the ones we actually end up having. 

Sleep Furiously

SLEEP FURIOUSLY                B                   

Great Britain  (94 mi)  2008  d:  Gideon Koppel

In Wales there are jewels
To gather, but with the eye
Only. A hill lights up
Suddenly; a field trembles
With colour and goes out
In its turn; in one day
You can witness the extent
Of the spectrum and grow rich
With looking. Have a care;
The wealth is for the few
And chosen. Those who crowd
A small window dirty it
With their breathing, though sublime
And inexhaustible the view.

—The Small Window, by R.S. Thomas, from Selected Poems, 1946-1968, published in 1973

It is only when I sense the end of things that I find the courage to speak, the courage, but not the words.    —anonymous

It’s hard to know why a film like this, which is obviously a well-made and seriously thought out documentary, takes 3 years or more to cross the Atlantic, as a British DVD has been available for over a year, yet it is just now finding an American theatrical audience.  While much of the intimate details may escape the initial viewer, as no one is introduced and nothing is ever explained, instead there’s simply a natural flow of events that are caught on camera, all centering around a small farming community in Wales called Trefeurig.  Here we witness the birth of several livestock animals, a woman walking her dog along the winding roads, sheep shearing and a sheep auction, or herder dogs bringing back home the sheep in the early evening, the barking of the dogs heard first before small forms can be seen coming over a faraway hill.  But lest anyone think this is a pastoral reverie, we also have kitchen scenes baking a cake, while there are also scenes requiring subtitles due to the Welsh language they’re speaking, of elderly people discussing their concerns now that the local school has closed, or views of a school bus converted to a traveling library on wheels that makes monthly visits to seniors, where the librarian picks out books he thinks they’d like, or takes notes about their collective interests.  What you don’t see here are computers or cell phones, no one is ever watching television, though there is one house where we see a TV, but it’s not turned on.  No one even listens to the radio.  There is simply no evidence of modernity anywhere to be seen, where what we see resembles the way life was lived going back half a century or more. 

The closest the film comes to a storyline is the recurring on-the-road motif of the library on wheels, as the elderly people he visits continually chatter away in small talk, absorbed in the minutia of their own lives, though it’s hard to say this holds much interest across the ocean, and this film is extremely chatty, where much of it isn’t even subtitled, but is just the sound of voices droning on.  But the film is also beautifully meditative, using a static camera, filling the screen with the green rolling hills, perhaps a solitary tree viewed through various seasons, or a carefully composed single line of sheep forming at the top of the screen, while slowly, another line forms on the bottom, where the viewer waits for them to intersect.  If you are a Kiarostami aficionado and recall the final shots of his Earthquake Trilogy which seemingly last forever, each one telling their own story, Koppel will likely disappoint, as he doesn’t hold his shots long enough.  The outstanding music used in the film is from Aphex Twin, an Irish born musician with two Welsh parents, the creator of extremely atmospheric piano or electronic music, often sounding hypnotizing, but in perfect harmony with the images onscreen.  Again, despite the haunting beauty of the music, this director is prone to making jarring edits, ensuring there are no seamless transitions here.  It’s only afterwards, if we’re curious enough to find out, that we discover these are shots of the director’s mother, though she is never named, but she’s the one walking the dog, and one of the familiar settings is his own family farm, where his parents found refuge escaping the Holocaust half a century ago.  The title of the film, a provocative phrase suggesting words with opposite energy, comes from a nonsensical phrase that also has perfect grammar from Noam Chomsky in his 1957 Syntactic Structures:  “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.”  Trefeurig apparently is a place where one should not have pre-conceived notions about how people are supposed to live.  They just do.    

The film was initially shot by the director on Super 16 mm without using artificial light, so the idea of darkness creeping in is a prevailing theme in nearly every shot.  Often the natural colors appear washed out from the mist or cloud cover, or even in sunlit shots people may appear to be standing in the shade.  There is simply an exquisite seasonal change when the entire hillside is snow covered, offering a kind of visual poetry in silhouettes, where only the branches can be seen in barren trees.  Not everything filmed is beautiful, where we may examine old rusted out objects sitting in a pile waiting to be auctioned, or a filthy window with old curtains and plenty of dust gathering on the windowsill.  What becomes clear after awhile is that this way of life is seasonal as well, where only four parishioners are seen at one point in a near empty church service, but they are still singing the hymns, where this picture of old world values will live out its course, replaced by something new.  Perhaps the sequence of the film is unlike the rest, a night shot where unseen spectators are shooting off fireworks and holding sparklers and dayglo wands in their hands, where the colors blur in fast speed motion, giving this a dizzyingly experimental feel, perhaps an expression of the unseen next generation.  Everything this film cherishes may be gone by the next generation, the quiet kindness between neighbors, the helpfulness offered in one another's personal struggles, the utter isolation from the rest of the world, where reading books may be the only social contact many of them have for weeks on end.  But there’s also the livestock continually replenishing itself at a much faster rate than humans, where except for a fast speed shot of a baby sleeping at night, few, if any, children are seen except in photos.  Instead it’s a portrait of the elderly living in a world that hasn’t changed at all during their lifetimes, but will likely be far different once they’re gone.  Not only are the people dying, but their community is dying as well.  In the end, families will be forced to sell their farms.  The film is an intensely personal time capsule of the director’s family, expressing a way of life where the ramifications beautifully unfold through mesmerizing music and images.  If viewed only as a travelogue, an essay without words, this beguiling film would still appear haunting.  After the final credits end, which contains perhaps the most sublime music in the entire film, there is a final still shot of the image of a recurring tree, stunning, now, in glorious color.

Submarine

SUBMARINE                         B                     

Great Britain  USA  (97 mi)  2010  d:  Richard Ayoade

Taking your shirt off can lead to an atavistic response.        —Lloyd Tate (Noah Taylor)

Don’t get cocky.          —Jordana Bevan (Yasmin Paige)

Something of a deeply melancholic, male anguished, brooding teenage view of the Brave New World, as Oliver (Craig Roberts), a glum and morose but independently bright kid shares his daily experiences as he enters into his first relationship with the opposite sex, plunging ahead, as it were, without a clue how to use the rudder.  With parents who have the worst social skills of any couple in recent memory, the ever dour Noah Taylor and the usually perky Sally Hawkins, where they haven’t had sex in seven months, barely speak, and are on the verge of separation, which is happening simultaneously to his discovery of first love.  While the dialogue is above and beyond the teenage years, it hardly matters due to the continual self-deprecating humor where this friendless teen is as detached from the rest of the world of kids his age as he can get, where his lifeline is the equally moody and downbeat Jordana, Yasmin Paige, something of a revelation.  While this is pretty much seen as an all-in, all or nothing gamble, as if his entire future depends on it, this over-the-top drama is essential, as all teenagers feel they are drowning in a world of dysfunction and social misfits, which adds color and bit of flair to his otherwise humorless life.  Set in Wales, of all places, where there’s an introductory word of thanks showing gratitude to America for never having invaded the country, the gray, cloudy atmosphere adds to the glum reality of these kid’s lives.  Always dressed in heavy coats, Oliver tends to wear the same hang dog, sad sack expression on his face even in the best of times, as if he never actually trusts happiness, something that has occurred so infrequently in his life he’s not sure it actually exists. 

Adding to the home drama is the presence of Paddy Considine, a psychically gifted, self-help guru with supposed mystical connections to a non-existent, feel good transcendental world, something of a hoax, a phony and a fraud, like the Patrick Swayze role in DONNIE DARKO (2001), but also an old flame of his mother who moves in next door.  When she starts taking an interest, with his Dad feebly pretending not to notice, Oliver quickly takes up the reigns as the aggressive interloper, a sleuth with intentions to drive them apart.  Simultaneous to his intoxicated love interest, where he’s literally out of his head, he’s also attempting to stay grounded by holding his parent’s together, something he can’t share with Jordana, as her parent’s problems trump his own.  While the film provides plenty of observation of small town life, people who keep to themselves and mind their own business, where over the years the repressed layers of holding it all in only leads to the inevitable medical breakdown, it also reveals an unusual tenderness from his parents, especially when they learn he has a girlfriend, which may be more significant than graduating high school or even going to college, as his self-absorbed life was leading them towards thoughts of a serial killer or a potentially abusing Catholic priest.  His father lovingly makes him a mixed tape of the songs that mattered to him when he fell in love, cleverly adding some breakup songs at the end, just in case.  Well, of course, these songs inevitably comprise the inner themes of the film, composed by Arctic Monkeys singer/songwriter Alex Turner, always seemingly playing in the background while he spends endless hours at the beach, bringing Jordana along to share his favorite spots, but oftentimes alone commiserating on life’s futility. 

The couple share a kind of smart ass relationship, where their shrewd sensibility continues to uplift them from the mediocrity of the tedious world around them, even as it is heavily dosed in miserablism.  Not sure if this coded sarcasm is enough to survive, as when a few real life issues come their way, both are ill-prepared to handle what life offers, as they’ve spent the majority of their lives burrowing their heads in the sand.  Quirkiness is one thing, and this film has plenty of it which it handles with aplomb, but there’s also this thread of reality where unlike the separation issues in many teenage angst pictures, these kids still feel connected to their parents and are afraid to let go.  Oliver feels perfectly happy reading the dictionary, discovering new words, while Jordana seems to delight in lighting things on fire, where she constantly reigns in a noticeable aggressive streak.  Their passive-aggressive relationship does not exactly set the world on fire, as both barely ever reveal any feelings whatsoever, as they have to learn to survive in this closed-in world where no one shows emotions and all the town’s citizens are endlessly suffocating.  In this atmosphere, the arrogant and pompous Considine stands out, offering a delusional elixir of magical potions guaranteed to show you the light.  There’s a comfortable, nostalgia-tinged setting of the 1980’s, where kids pass notes instead of text, take Polaroid snapshots and keep diaries instead of posting messages on Facebook, where there’s an interesting Super 8 dream sequence, the use of cassette tapes, and even a few messages sent by a typewriter.  Despite the timelessness of this self-contained world, filled with irreverence and self-conscious mockery, there’s an unsentimentalized tone throughout, not even a trace of glitz or glamor, where these two kids are fairly grounded in their separate worlds.  The age-old boy/girl question lurking in every era is wondering if they will connect.   And here, the film does not disappoint.