Life Is Sweet

LIFE IS SWEET                    B                    

Great Britain  (103 mi)  1990  d:  Mike Leigh

Cinema of discomfort by way of comedic farce, striking a wonderful balance between despair and comedy, this is Mike Leigh’s third film, mostly working in theater and television at the time, introducing his own Third Man production company which is the vehicle for all his future film releases.  Relying upon a stalwart cast, anchored by his own wife at the time, Alison Steadman as Wendy, the irrepressible matriarch of a middle-class suburban family, seen in an amusing prologue introduction, featuring that rare thing never shown in Mike Leigh films – young children.  It’s a bubbly, upbeat intro filled with a kind of colorful joie de vivre from the always sunny Wendy, encouraging young primary school kids to shake their bums and raise their arms in joyous motion, letting off a little steam, where they need a little persuasion, not easily letting themselves go.  Made at the end of the Margaret Thatcher era of British conservatism, with Leigh at the time branded as “The Scourge of the Middle Classes,” the film is anything but sunny, with people stuck in dead-end lives, not exactly miserable, just hating the way their lives turned out.  A young Jim Broadbent is Wendy’s husband Andy, a professional cook in an industrial kitchen, who takes a lot of flak at home for not carrying out a few home improvement projects, never really motivated to take the time, preferring to hang out in pubs with his exasperatingly manipulative friend Patsy (Stephen Rea), who plies him with alcohol before surprising him with supposedly cheap deals on retail items for sale, which includes a broken down mobile snack bar that he might convert to a food truck, but it needs a lot of work.  Nonetheless, his dreams of getting out from under the horrible weight of his present job inspires him to dream of something better, hoping a food truck is the way to go, but it simply sits outside his front door like a broken down boat with a hole in it forever anchored on land, never once making it out to sea.  Basically a good-natured guy, he’s too polite to admit he’s been snookered, yet every scene together with Patsy produces the same irrepressible gullibility, as he always falls for the latest swindle.  Their children are twins in their early 20’s, two girls at opposite ends of the spectrum, Natalie (Claire Skinner), bookish and clear-headed, easily mistaken for a boy, yet quite comfortable working as a plumber, saving up for a vacation trip to America, and Nicola (Jane Horrocks), an ill-tempered layabout with an acerbic tongue, contemptuously dismissive of others, quick to call people “Capitalists” or “Fascists,” fancying herself as an ardent feminist, yet her everpresent dour mood is unshakeable, completely isolating herself in self-destructive behavior, smoking excessively to suppress the appetite, but showing signs of bulimia, refusing to eat all day, then stuffing herself with sweets in the late night hours, retching into the night, while her sister in the room next door overhears all. 

A typical working family (Wendy works as a clerk in a maternity clothing store), three of them are off to work in the morning while the disgruntled Nicola shows no signs of ambition, refusing to be an exploited worker, so she does no work at all, remaining aimless and bored for the most part, yet perfectly miserable, anxiously filled with nervous twitches, hair drawn down over her face, hiding behind her glasses, sneaking in a boyfriend during the day to have sex when everyone else is out, who turns out to be David Thewlis in a thankless role, always asked to leave immediately afterwards, never sticking around for anything more.  Making a rather eccentric entrance is Timothy Spall as Aubrey, seemingly an old friend of the family, viewing himself as a Bohemian cool cat from the 50’s, yet he’s always restless and overanxious, flirting inappropriately with Nicola before making his way to the back yard.  Andy and Aubrey share something in common, both food chefs aspiring to work for themselves, but going about it very differently.  Both are hampered by the realities of life, stuck with who they are, limited and constrained, with a narrowing window of opportunity to realize their dreams.  Andy dreams of a life away from the boring routine, stupidly investing in a broken-down food truck, while Aubrey’s plan is to open a nouveau cuisine restaurant, thinking he’s a “genius” chef, that if he builds it they will come in droves.  So he opens the Regret Rien restaurant in the heart of town, asking Wendy to come waitress for him, as his regular waitress skipped off to Prague with her boyfriend, working with the ever dour sous-chef Paula (Moya Brady), who would be out of place in any environment, whose glum hangdog expression suggests a life of woe, the picture of the downtrodden, with no apparent concerns for health violations.  Opening night has a customary anticipation to it, yet the unappetizing menu that Aubrey reads sounds utterly unthinkable, as it’s completely inedible, yet Aubrey is so confident of his culinary expertise.  As Aubrey and Wendy share a glass of wine to help calm the nerves, Aubrey never stops drinking, first making the moves on the sous-chef in the kitchen, whose face never changes expression, before drinking himself into a stupor, making a complete ass of himself, screaming at the top of his lungs on the street in utter contempt for all the customers who never showed up before stripping off his clothes and expressing his lustful desires for Wendy.  While she fends him off, he goes into grotesque mode, thoroughly exaggerated, destroying all the tables, turning them upside down, creating a chaotic mess as the night turns into an unmitigated disaster, with Aubrey left passed out on the restaurant floor (mumbling the name of Nicola) while Wendy makes a hasty exit, attempting to save Paula as well, but she’s clearly fixated on earlier fictitious promises made by Aubrey, both apparent soulmates of delusion and dysfunction.

Working for the first time with cinematographer Dick Pope, who would go on to shoot all of Leigh’s subsequent films, this is the first film to reach an international audience, establishing Leigh’s realist, working class style, where the rhythms of this family’s existence are informed by a dull routine, by a repetition of trained habits, which leads to a certain stagnation, feeling stifled by the banality of it all.  Leigh resorts to comic exaggerations in how characters are depicted, yet this is a theatrical device that hides and often overshadows the humanity contained within.  While the musical score is written by Rachel Portman, it repeats with a monotonous omnipresence, growing deliriously repetitive, which may have your brain seeking an alternative refuge, but it drives in the discomfort associated with this film, which Leigh has described as his least favorite.  In contrast, Wendy always looks at the bright side, possessing an ability to turn any disaster into a positive experience.   Unashamedly cheerful, she and the perpetually disillusioned Andy make a happy couple, proud of both of their girls, even as they are routinely the targets of Nicola’s ire.  She receives her own comeuppance in the form of her boyfriend’s refusal to engage in the same sex routine, standing his ground, insisting on having a decent conversation instead, challenging Nicola to articulate her feelings and utter coherent thoughts in sentences instead of bitter critiques that sound more like slogans.  This catches her offguard, even humiliated, which he takes full advantage of, finding herself at the end of a mercilessly critical tirade, which leaves her flummoxed.  Even after the disastrous restaurant opening, Wendy comforts her daughter that she finds in tears, talking some sense into her, confronting how joyless and unhappy she has become (in stark contrast to that opening dance sequence with the kids), becoming the dramatic center of the film, as it’s done with such tender and loving care, urging her to rejoin the human race and become part of the living, none of whom have it easy, but at least they’re trying.  Somehow countering all her deeply troubled, self-loathing critiques, Wendy’s affectionate concern for others is the star of the show, becoming an emotional revelation that reverberates with heartfelt intimacy.  Embracing flaws and inadequacies as part of the human character, Wendy offers the thoughts of a mature being, someone who has lived through and survived her own share of personal crises, yet maintains a sweet optimism that includes an affirmation for life.  As it turns out, more disasters are lurking, as if part of the life cycle, yet the manner in which you address these inevitable setbacks determines one’s quality of life, where you can become paralyzed and easily give up, griping over every issue and calling it all unfair, or you can roll with the punches and give yourself another shot at experiencing joy and happiness, embracing it when it comes, knowing how fleeting it can be, where what ultimately matters is a willingness to accept the bitter with the sweet.  

Manakamana

MANAKAMANA           B                

Nepal  USA  (118 mi)  2013  d:  Pacho Velez and Stephanie Spray      Official site

Along with SWEETGRASS (2009), LEVIATHAN (2012), and The Iron Ministry (2104), this is another film to come out of the Sensory Ethnography Lab :: Harvard University (SEL), a unique collaboration between the Department of Anthropology and the Department of Visual & Environmental Studies programs established in 2006, which is distinct from other graduate visual anthropology programs in the United States in that it promotes experimentation with culturally inflected, nonfiction film.  The Lab is comprised of graduate students mostly making films that are not for exhibition, but are seen only among themselves, but a surprising number of acclaimed documentaries have come out of the Lab.  The subjects can be traced back to the works of Robert J. Flaherty, considered the forefather of ethnographic film, the maker of the first feature length documentary film, NANOOK OF THE NORTH (1922), which was an attempt to realistically portray Inuit people in northern Canada, though it required quite a bit of staging before the camera.  The same could be said for these films, which lend themselves to stark realism, shot in real time, using raw footage, unedited and unadorned, using no explanatory talking heads, where the films aren’t meant to explain what we’re seeing, but to simply take the viewer into a mysterious world where they’ve likely never been and allow them to fully experience what it’s like.  To this end, like Flaherty, they succeed brilliantly, as they are a time capsule documentation of an existing reality in some faraway small corner of the globe.  This notion of capturing reality has haunted filmmakers from the beginning, where according to French film critic, film theorist, and longtime editor of Cahiers du Cinéma, André Bazin, each era looks for its own realism, its own technique and aesthetic which can best capture it, where there may be numerous realisms, but there is also past realities, present realities and future realities — all of which cinema creates or mediates and explores continuously, while another Cahiers editor, Jean-Louis Comolli, offers his own views:  

The basic deception of direct cinema is really its claim to transcribe truly the truth of life, to begin the position of witness in relation to that truth so that the film simply records objects and events mechanically.  In reality the very fact of filming is of course already a productive intervention which modifies and transforms the material recorded.  From the moment the camera intervenes a form of manipulation begins.

While these documentary films offer the appearance of truth, the ultimate question is always finding the best way to achieve it.  Once more, Bazin claims in his book What is Cinema? - Volume 2 - Page 26 - Google Books Result that realism in art can only be achieved in one way — through artifice — that every form of aesthetic must necessarily choose between what is worth preserving and what should be discarded, and what should not even be considered.  MANAKAMANA is set in Chitwan, Nepal, where the filmmakers set up a Super 16mm camera in a fixed position inside a gondola lift cable car that takes passengers up to and from the Manakamana Temple, with the filmmakers themselves riding in the same cars recording the various passages in real time, relying upon a strict formal precision of a series of unbroken shots, in this case 11 shots, each about 10-minutes in length, each trip containing a different group of passengers.  The trips alternate between ascents and descents, with blackout periods where the car goes through a turnaround at each of the terminal points, allowing for an undetected editing process, creating the illusion that the whole film was done in a single take.  Curiously, in a discussion with the filmmakers afterwards, we learn that there were 35 shots in all, that the original cut was 3 and a half to 4 hours, eventually edited down to 11 shots.  People in the film were not chosen at random, as one might presume, but were selected ahead of time and rehearsed by the directors and their team so they’d feel comfortable in front of a large and cumbersome 16 mm camera staring at them for the duration.  So exactly like Flaherty, there was a certain amount of staging incorporated into the realist aesthetic, though the extreme minimalistic approach makes it appear completely naturalistic.  As the film does not provide any narration, there is no history provided of how the cable system was installed, as previously the only way to reach the 17th century Manakamana temple, the sacred place of the Hindu Goddess Bhagwati (who has the ability to grant pilgrim’s wishes), was by walking uphill for over three hours.  The modernistic cable car system of 31 passenger cars and 3 cargo cars was imported from Austria in 1998 and incorporates its own generators and hydraulic emergency drive in the case of a power failure.

What sustains our interest is the unique characteristics of each passenger, most of whom are from the Nepal region, offering a cross-section of people who would come to visit the temple, some of whom sit in complete silence, their attention drifting off into the mountainside below, while others may hold continuous conversations throughout, many dressed in hats and colorful attire, some bringing a variety of objects with them, including musical instruments or animals.  The film opens in complete darkness, where only the mechanical sounds, mixed with the noise of people stirring about, can be heard, as movement can be detected by signs of light until there’s an abrupt lift into the sky, offering a rare vantage point of the lush green foliage below, where there’s a sign of dirt roads and smaller trails carved out in the mountainsides, clusters of houses clinging to hillsides, and terraced farming on the foothills of the Himalayas.  The sky is everpresent, where one can see the lines the cable cars travel upon strung out into the distant horizon, often seeing many cars coming in the opposite direction, where it’s a quiet ride, like floating on air, until they hit one of the stabilizing towers, which makes a jarring noise.  The ride uphill is slower, requires more power, and takes a bit longer, while the descent is quicker, though during the filming one often can’t tell if they’re moving up or down, where we’re lost in an optical illusion.  Of note, we never actually see the temple, the object of the passengers’ destination, but are instead stuck in a series of continually linked sequences that automatically recycles before the next journey begins. 

Anyone who has ridden in a similar contraption realizes that initially there is an element of fear, where it takes awhile to feel safe while hoisted up into the air like this, as there is no way out until you reach the final destination, where the initial passengers of an elderly man and a young child sit in silence, where no one speaks at all in the opening twenty minutes.  But people carry offerings, like flowers in a basket, or a live rooster, while three Asian metal rockers bring a weeks-old kitten with them that keeps wailing throughout while they humorously take a series of selfies, talking excitedly about making a music video here before complaining that there’s no a/c.  In another instant we’re in the presence of several bleating goats in a cart, where initially it appears they could anxiously leap out of the car in a panic until we see they’re all tied together.  Midway through is a shot in total darkness, where all you hear are the screeching mechanical noises associated with turning the car around, where the stereo sound design has front and back speakers that add to the sensuousness of the moment.  Two women attempting to eat ice cream bars turns into a comedy of errors as one has it smudged all over her face while the other simply can’t stop the constant dripping all over herself, while afterwards two seasoned musicians heading for the temple tune and play their stringed sarangis.  One of them recalls hiking up the mountain in earlier times.  While one never knows what to expect and there is an element of anticipation waiting to see who or what comes next, there’s some question whether this is enough, as this remains a smaller film about subtle distinctions where some viewers may feel trapped seeking cultural insights through such a self-contained, claustrophobic environment, where it remains an open question whether any liberating or transcendent moments are achieved in this manner.