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. 

Number Seventeen

NUMBER SEVENTEEN        C+            

Great Britain  (63 mi)  1932  d:  Alfred Hitchcock

Ya don’t have to do nothin’ in this ‘ere house — ya stand still and things happen! 

—Ben Tramp (Leon M. Lion)

This is something of a creaky, old-fashioned drama, the likes of which we never see anymore and quite unlike anything else in the Hitchcock repertoire.  However, that is not necessarily a good thing, as this is an early 30’s Hitchcock film that one would least likely recommend, where it may actually work better as a silent film, as it has all the characteristics, including a highly visual German Expressionist style.  But as is, with dialogue, this is one of the more unengaging films Hitchcock ever made, with no connection to any of the characters, many of whom are interchangeable, where you can’t tell the good guys from the bad.  This abysmal disconnect strikes one as an egregious error on Hitchcock’s part, but one has to acknowledge that this was simply not the director’s area of expertise, and it crops up again and again throughout his entire body of work, as Hitchcock was notoriously hard on actors, where just prior to his arrival in Hollywood he was quoted as saying “all actors are cattle,” quickly clarifying his position, “I didn't say actors are cattle.  What I said was, actors should be treated like cattle.”  Carole Lombard reacted to this comment during the making of MR. AND MRS. SMITH (1941), a divorce comedy where the director acknowledged, “Since I really didn’t understand the type of people who were portrayed in the film, all I did was to photograph the scenes as written.”  Lombard played a famous practical joke on Hitchcock, which he describes, “When I arrived on the set, the first day of shooting, Carole Lombard had had a corral built, with three sections, and in each one there was a live young cow.  Round the neck of each of them there was a white disk tied with a ribbon, with three names:  Carole Lombard, Robert Montgomery, and the name of a third member of the cast, Gene Raymond.”  In his autobiography, Elia Kazan goes over the ways that different directors handle/respond to actors, where in his view:  “Hitchcock told his screen stories as much as possible without help from his actors’ performances.  When Cary Grant, going into a film, asked him how he should play his part, Hitchcock answered, ‘Just do what you always do.’  Hitchcock relied on his camera angles and his montage…to do what on stage we relied on the actors for.”  As for a final word on the subject, Hitchcock recalls, “When an actor comes to me and wants to discuss his character, I say, ‘It’s in the script.’  If he says, ‘But what’s my motivation?,’ I say, ‘Your salary.’”

While this was actually filmed nearly a year “before” Rich and Strange (1931), it was not released until afterwards, supposedly as inflicted punishment for the poor box office showing of Hitchcock’s more favored film, with the director calling it a “quota quickie,” fulfilling his obligation as the final film for British International Pictures.  Another adaptation of a stage play, this time by J. Jefferson Farjeon, which for all practical purposes is two different films, where the overly stagy first half is set in what appears to be an old haunted mansion with the camera fixed on a steep spiraling staircase, while the second half opens up into an action chase sequence taking place on a rapidly moving train.  The staircase and the train are the two main characters of the film, both explored through a cinematic experimentation and curiosity, as all the rest is purely incidental.  The logic of the first half combines Hitchcock’s obsession with old dark houses that were gloomy and oppressive, where the Bates family mansion in Psycho (1960) is virtually a parody of a haunted house, while Hitchcock also had an obsession with stairways, where the director was meticulously picky on every single thing used in his movies, so he made sure the props in his films were as he envisioned, where he was deeply involved in creating the sets for the movies he produced.  According to Alan Vanneman in Bright Lights Journal, November 2003, Bright Lights Film Journal :: Alfred Hitchcock Photo Study: 

Staircases in Hitchcock’s films almost always lead to trouble.  For Hitchcock, the simple act of going up a staircase seemed to be a disorienting experience, taking you away from safety towards the unknown.  Spiral staircases were particularly threatening.  In Hitchcock's films, circular movement — the swirling vortex — implies a loss of control, usually with sexual overtones, and often leading to death.

Hitchcock often used stairs as the place of the most suspenseful and climactic scenes of his movies, a place where something horrible usually happened.  They all had something in common, which was terrible things occurred and were always depicted in a scary fashion.  Borrowing from an outline for a Hitchcock educational course by Dr. Glen Johnson, Spring 2013, Stairs, staircases & levels, several instances are listed.  Some of the more infamous uses of staircases in Hitchcock films would include The Lodger (1927), as it figures prominently in the arrival of the Lodger (suspected as a serial killer of women), where he immediately goes up the stairs, bypassing the main level where the normal family congregates; The 39 Steps (1935), where Richard Hannay descends the stairs after discovering the corpse in his upper-level apartment, later dragging a resistant Pamela, who is handcuffed to him, to the upper-level bedroom, while Pamela eavesdrops at the top of the stairs and hears key information that confirms Hannay’s innocence; Rebecca (1940), the heroine makes a grand entrance to the ball, wearing a costume modeled on a portrait at the top of the stairs that she is tricked into wearing by the malicious housemaid, knowing it is the same costume the dead Rebecca wore, thoroughly disgracing and humiliating her in front of her angry husband, fleeing back up the same stairs; Suspicion (1941), Johnnie climbs the stairs with a possibly-poisoned glass of milk for his wife, using a light bulb in the glass as an exclamation point:  is he or is he not a murderer?; Vertigo (1958), the most famous Hitchcock staircase, the bell tower that Scotty anxiously ascends where Madeleine falls to her death; and Psycho (1960), Detective Arbogast makes his fateful climb upstairs to the fateful domain of Norman Bates’ mother, while later, Lila can't resist descending the cellar steps.  Other films would include DOWNHILL (1927), Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Dial M for Murder (1954), REAR WINDOW (1954), The Birds (1963), and FRENZY (1972). 

In an excerpt from Meaghan Walsh Gerard, Hitchcock and Stairs - Meaghan Walsh Gerard (pdf format): 

In Number Seventeen (1932), a man, chasing his blowing hat down the windy street arrives at an empty home, with a ‘to let’ sign.  As he dusts off his hat,  he sees a figure moving in the windows and becomes suspicious.  When he walks up to the front door, it blows open and reveals a long, curving staircase—the central focus of the film.  We follow him into the home, innocent of what awaits.  He cautiously pokes around, then looks up.  The camera  follows his gaze by sliding the shot up the bannister to an oval opening before returning to the man at the bottom, who slowly begins to climb the steps.  As he creeps to the top he finds the moving figure, and a dead body.  At the beginning of the ascent the man is innocent.  He knows nothing of what he will find.  His only purpose seems harmless—to investigate strange activity.  But the moment he decides to climb the stairs he is accepting an encounter with the unknown.  When this happens he agrees to exchange his innocence for knowledge—good or bad.  The entire course of the evening has changed.  Almost all of the action throughout the film centers around this staircase.  Low-key lighting shines through it, making slatted shadows cut across walls and faces.  Worn shoes trod on it.  Heads peek and dead hands flop between the rails.  In this early film of Hitchcock, one can see the beginning of his obsession with the architecture of stairs. 

In what appears to be an immersion into vertical space, this film is a monument to Hitchcock’s obsession with stairways, three floors connected by a central staircase, with a smaller staircase behind that is unseen by the viewer and only made available to various characters, making it hard to distinguish between them.  The film starts off with Detective Barton (John Stuart) arriving at a house, the number 17 of the film's title, marked for sale or rent, though he never identifies himself as such, so the audience is clueless to his identity, calling himself Forsythe until the end, where he could simply be any ordinary man wandering in out of curiosity.  Ben (Leon M. Lion) is a Cockney tramp who keeps his pockets stuffed with food and remains blind drunk throughout, where his speech is near impossible, though he appears to have wandered into this old abandoned building purely by chance, as is their discovery of a dead body near the top of the stairs, lighting a candle to see more clearly, where Hitchcock blends plenty of shadows on the wall into the mix, altering reality and disorienting the audience, where a similar technique was used to much greater effect the same year by Carl Theodor Dreyer in VAMPYR (1932), creating an existing netherworld, a kind of shadow world unseen by humans where vampires roam.  A stream of people arrive on the scene creating utter chaos and confusion, with the camera continually moving back and forth between them, where there’s not a whit of difference between any of them, except Ben, who’s completely unintelligible and dead drunk all the time.  First Rose (Ann Casson) arrives, and then her father (Henry Caine) with some telegram alluding to a stolen necklace, followed by a trio of jewel thieves looking for the necklace, including a deaf and dumb girl Nora (Anne Grey) who later reveals she hears and speaks perfectly, suddenly trying to help them when they’re taken prisoner, a device used later in The Lady Vanishes (1938), while the corpse disappears only to return very much alive as Sheldrake (Garry Marsh), coincidentally Fred MacMurray’s name in Billy Wilder’s The Apartment (1960). 

Much of the black humor is lost in this film, becoming a series of nonstop acts of misdirection and concealed identities, where the true detective is only revealed at the end, with people continually coming and going, subject to poorly staged fisticuffs, locking people in rooms, prisoners being tied up, a few harrowing escapes, and what amounts to changes of allegiance, where the thieves escape through a cellar door that leads down a very long flight of stone steps to a train station.  The film finally amps up the manic pace for a runaway train sequence, where thieves hijack a train while following in close pursuit is a commandeered bus, where Hitchcock achieves the desired  effects though quick edits and his clever use of miniatures and scaled down models of a train, bus, and ferry designed by William K. Everson.  This sequence has silent film written all over it, cutting back and forth between the speeding bus and the train barreling down the track, with a transport train ferry waiting at the end of the line, where the frenetic pace achieved is an example of pure cinema, though the ridiculous story throughout couldn’t be more absurd.  Instead it appears Hitchcock is playing around with toys, having fun with his new train set that he got for Christmas, where it lacks the cohesiveness of a finished work, but appears to have captured his interest for only a short duration.  Perhaps he needed to tinker with a film like this in order to make The Lady Vanishes (1938), which mirrors the chase scene exactly, though with a far different outcome, showing a certain railway expertise behind the camera, combining Hitchcock’s fascination with trains and his ability to tell a good story.  This film, on the other hand, is an example of the difficulty Hitchcock had making the adjustment from the silent era to talking pictures, taking him at least five years before he made the successful transition with The 39 Steps (1935), where these earlier more experimental films are reminiscent in some way to technological achievement films, which today include many Hollywood blockbusters, where the entertainment factor is an explosion of special effects which are achieved at the expense of overall character development and human understanding.  The film was a box office disaster, though it is notable for being the first use of a Hitchcock MacGuffin, in this case using the stolen necklace as a decoy in the overall plot twists. 

Note – There is no confirmed Hitchcock cameo in this film, but just after the fifty-one minute mark, there is a quick glimpse of a passenger on a speeding bus filled with other panic stricken passengers, but this one is wearing a dark coat and hat, facing away from the camera, bouncing up and down from the bumpy ride for about four seconds.