Beyond the Lights

BEYOND THE LIGHTS         B+                  

USA  (116 mi)  2014  d:  Gina Prince-Bythewood

Why you wanna fly Blackbird you ain't ever gonna fly
No place big enough for holding all the tears you're gonna cry
Cos your mama's name was lonely and your daddy's name was pain
And they call you little sorrow cos you'll never love again

So why you wanna fly Blackbird you ain't ever gonna fly
You ain't got no one to hold you you ain't got no one to care
If you'd only understand dear nobody wants you anywhere
So why you wanna fly Blackbird you ain't ever gonna fly

—Nina Simone “Blackbird,” 1966, Nina Simone - Blackbird - YouTube (3:51)

While women made up roughly half of the directors at this year’s independent Sundance Film Festival, yet they still struggle when it comes to films receiving a wide release, where of the Hollywood studio releases originally slated for the summer of 2014, 37 are directed by white men, 2 by black men and 1 by a woman, according to a recent analysis by Lucas Shaw at The Wrap.  That one film, JUPITER ASCENDING, co-written and directed by Lana Wachowski along with her brother Andy, was pushed back to 2015, reducing the summer’s total to zero.  Black American director Gina Prince-Bythewood struggled for four years to get this film made, where the first draft was written in 2007, as Sony Pictures originally agreed to produce and distribute the picture, but dropped out when the director insisted upon casting a then unproven talent, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, in the starring role.  While she trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, specializing in musical theater where song and dance is her forte, but Sony wasn’t convinced she was destined to become a star and were more interested in names like Rihanna or Beyoncé.  As it turns out, the actress received plenty of acclaim in an earlier release, BELLE (2013), and she’s easily the best thing in this picture as a rising pop star singer named Noni.  The fact that we haven’t seen her face plastered on billboards, cosmetics advertisements, or music videos suggests she can offer a fresh perspective about the difficulties young women are subjected to when attempting to break into a sexist, male-dominated music industry, where the N-word and the B-word are routinely thrown around in hip-hop lyrics, a business where women have routinely been objectified as sex objects since the advent of music videos on MTV, with images only growing raunchier and more graphic, like the controversial cover to Nicki Minaj’s new release Anaconda, Nicki Minaj "Anaconda" Unaltered Cover Art, Memes, Music ..., where the racy video, Nicki Minaj - Anaconda - YouTube (4:49), is a parody of the exaggerated hypersexualization required by women.  This cultural demand for sexist artificiality is at the heart of the film, which plays with the contrasting ideas of image and real black aspirations. 

  

While this female written and directed $7 million dollar black indie film is wrapped in a cliché-driven Hollywood romance that resembles Whitney Houston in THE BODYGUARD (`1992), the film also pays tribute to that troubled artist, one of the great voices of our time who died a tragically premature death, reminding us that the pathway to real success is paved with plenty of inner obstacles along the way.  In an introductory prologue, Noni as a young 10-year old girl (India Jean-Jacques), prodded on by her obsessively driven stage mother (Minnie Driver in one of her best performances in ages), finds a black hairdresser just as she’s about to close, desperate to do something with her daughter’s hair before a talent competition.  At the performance she sings a song well beyond her years, Nina Simone’s ultra serious 1966 anthem to the black consciousness of the times, “Blackbird,” Nina Simone - Blackbird - YouTube (3:51), winning second prize to an obviously inferior Shirley Temple imitator.  Storming out in disgust, her mother orders her to toss out the trophy, barking out “You wanna be a runner-up?  Or you wanna be a winner?”  Cut to an adult version of Noni starring in the background of a music video for white rapper Kid Culprit (rapper Machine Gun Kelly), where she’s dressed in a skimpy bondage outfit waiting for him to make her one of his many sexual conquests.  This, however, is the image of success, appearing on three consecutive #1 hits for the Kid, as she’s soon awarded a Billboard Music Award as a rising star, where her upcoming first album release is all but guaranteed to be a sensation, making her an overnight superstar.  No one cares that she can sing, however, but are bowled over by the heat of the sexually suggestive imagery she sells.  When she returns to the penthouse suite with her bottle of champagne, she hires a moonlighting cop at the door, keeping everybody else out.  When her mother insists on going inside, Noni is about to plunge off the balcony, rescued by the quick thinking of the local policeman Kaz Nicol, Nate Parker, so strong in Denzel Washington’s THE GREAT DEBATERS (2007), who instantly becomes a tabloid hero, rescuing the fair maiden in distress.  Except for the cop, who deals with crisis situations every day, no one else senses the extent of her emotional descent, literally drowning in the image she has created, where she feels suffocated and imprisoned.  For the camera, however, still pushed by her hard-nosed mother, now her manager, she maintains all professional appearances while behind the scenes she is literally driven into dysfunction and despair. 

While the critique of the music business is probably the film’s greatest strength, nonetheless the means by which the message is carried is through the traditional vehicle of a boy meets girl Hollywood romance, seemingly preposterous and yet there it is bigger than life, where the scenes between the star and her protector are exquisitely understated, quiet, disarmingly honest and intense, feeling authentic and natural, while surrounded by a swarming throng of tabloid photographers that follow them both wherever they go.  Kaz has his own pressures, as his father is none other than Danny Glover, a highly decorated retired cop, where he’s following in his father’s footsteps, trying to make the most of the opportunities he’s been given, perhaps heading into politics where he thinks he could make a difference.  The trust factor and conservative stability of politics however do not go hand in hand with tabloid fanaticism and the cultural obsession with celebrity worship, where both appear headed in different directions, yet there’s a natural chemistry between them, where perhaps what they need the most is the kind of honesty they have with each other. The pressures of fame, ambition, and career have them both on edge, where each is told by friends and handlers that the other is bad for business, that their career would be derailed, so they simply get away for awhile, heading for an isolated beach in Mexico where the media circus around them can stop spinning for a moment.  In one of the most beautifully written scenes of the film, shot with such utter simplicity, Noni stands in front of a bathroom mirror and removes her infamous hair extensions, a chic fashion style synonymous with her reputation and fame.  While we don’t realize it at the time, it’s the first step of removing herself from the shackles of the past, as she still has to find that familiarity of living in her own skin, which is expressed beautifully at a small karaoke bar when she returns to Nina Simone, a hauntingly powerful moment that transcends any of the over-produced crap that sells millions, yet it’s an intimate, quietly anonymous moment that couldn’t be more captivating.  It’s a hint of what’s to come, as it’s not like the music industry allows the players free reign to do what they want when they’re just breaking into the business, as that’s reserved for established stars.  However, it’s a small step in the right direction, an act of healing and empowerment, where despite being overwhelmed by the frightening prospects of what lies ahead, she is for the first time in her life truly happy.  Doing her own singing, Mbatha-Raw literally inhabits the role with a stunning effectiveness, a breakthrough moment in her career, where her own personal transformation seems to be taking place right before our eyes.  

Fading Gigolo

FADING GIGOLO        B-         
USA  (90 mi)  2013  d:  John Turturro

While this is a John Turturro film, one that he writes and directs, it’s also one of the few appearances by Woody Allen in a film someone else directs, where one gets the distinct feeling that Woody Allen was the ghost writer behind the project, as so much behind his screen character feels tailor made for his early kind of Jewish guilt shtick humor, where there’s even a Hasidic neighborhood patrol watch hauling his ass in before the learned rabbi’s in a kind of mock trial, something one might imagine happens before gaining admittance to heaven, a Last Judgment where you have to answer to a panel of questioning rabbi’s.  While this is meant to be all in good fun, the sexual tone is problematic when it involves Woody Allen, now age 78, but with a history of child sex abuse allegations that have never gone away, but more importantly, in 1997 after a difficult separation from Mia Farrow, he married one of his own adopted foster children who is 35 years younger than he is, which reeks in the eyes of the public, making him guilty of some Kafkaesque morals charge, even if none actually exists, where at the very least, it still makes people feel uncomfortable.  It’s impossible not to think of these issues when thinking of Woody Allen, which are only exacerbated when his movies make fun of sex, as they have always done from the beginning of his career.  More than anything else, the premise of the movie sends out flares of bad taste warnings bordering on the ridiculous, as an aging Woody Allen as Murray Schwarz, a rare bookstore owner going out of business, decides he can earn some extra cash by pimping out his best friend Fioravante (John Turturro), a florist who works part-time in a flower store.   While Turturro is never anything less than a gentleman, maintaining a sense of decency and a bit of flair throughout, the same cannot be said for Allen, who’s something of a sleazy instigator here, continually getting into other people’s business.  Nonetheless, the film does have its charms, not the least of which is the wall-to-wall 50’s jazz soundtrack that mostly features the lush, sensuous tones of alto saxophonist Gene Ammons, a local Chicago jazz giant. 

Despite one’s initial reservations with the premise, where it’s hard to imagine Woody Allen at near 80 pimping out his friends, it’s a strange mixture of modern era fantasy and old world reality, where despite the sex comedy aspects, this is more of an old-fashioned love story.  From the outset, Murray has a proposition for his friend, claiming his dermatologist Dr. Parker, none other than Sharon Stone (Only in Hollywood can you still make a living off of one’s image as a sex symbol some twenty years earlier, complete with visual reference to 1992’s BASIC INSTINCT), suggested to him supposedly out of the blue that she was interested in an upscale menage-a-trois with her girlfriend, where Murray immediately thought of Fioravante as his Don Juan to fill the void.  While he had some initial reservations on his own, the incentive of $1000 in cash was too much to resist, making this not only a sex farce, but a capitalist fantasy as well in an era of economic deprivation, where Murray would get a cut acting as his opportunistic manager sending clients his way, a notion that also brings to mind Woody Allen’s own turn as manager extraordinaire in Broadway Danny Rose (1984).  Even the musical selection of Dean Martin’s version of “Sway” Dean Martin - Sway ^_^ - YouTube (2:43) has the mocking tone of a “Dino Latino” heartthrob.  Parker decides to sample the merchandise first, just to get a taste, and by all accounts it’s a great success, with the men seen divvying up the generous tip afterwards, where he also has the vivacious girlfriend Selima (Sofía Vergara) chomping at the bit.  While this is going on, we see Murray’s home life, a crazy reference to Mia Farrow’s horde of adopted children, as he’s living with a black wife, Tonya Pinkins as Othella, and three black sons, one of whom has lice in his afro hair.   This calls for the expertise of a neighborhood lice specialist, Vanessa Paradis as Avigail, a Hasidic widow with six kids of her own whose gentle prowess with hair belies her own personal need for a spiritual healer, where Murray suggests sometimes you have to go “beyond the rabbi,” of course, introducing her to his friend Fioravante, whose services to aid the distressed can be obtained for a small fee.

The mixing of the two ethnic cultures, black and Hasidic Jewish, especially through the innocence of Murray and Avigail’s kids, where there’s a pronounced lack of athletic coordination along with those twisted Payot curls, but watching them try to play baseball in the park is hilarious, as the orthodox Hasidic culture is such an unusual target for humor, made even more ridiculous by the nebbish Woody Allen acting as our guide through this cultural mishmash of opposite ethnic groups.  Adding to this element of mystery is the presence of Liev Schreiber as Dovi, a Hasidic Shomrim neighborhood watch guard, an interesting phenomenon that resembles the Guardian Angels in urban environments, as both are civilian watch groups in their neighborhoods as a supplement to the police force.  Dovi has had a thing for Avigail since childhood days, and now that she’s been a grieving widow for two years, he thinks it’s about time to make his move, awkwardly meeting her on the street and confessing his undying love.  Dovi grows suspicious when she continually avoids him, but she’s struck with Fioravante fever, where she plays such a gentle spirit that her fragility becomes the film’s guiding light.  It’s quite a contrast to the crassness of the goings-on between Stone and Vergara, but the unique tenderness of Paradis leaves her imprint on this picture, as she tries to remain true to her faith, yet she comes from an over-controlling, orthodox Hasidic community where women are expected to behave as if we are still in the Stone Age.  Perhaps the funniest scene in the film is when Murray goes out for a loaf of bread but is surrounded by the Hasidic mafia and kidnapped, thrown into the back of a van, where he is hauled before a sacred tribunal of ultra-conservative Hasidic rabbi’s that resembles Peter Lorre’s trial in M (1931), where this surreal gathering of the morality police question the authenticity of his Jewishness, which is something that has always plagued Allen, as it’s a constant point of reference in his own existential evolution throughout his entire career.  The movie is a comedy of errors, an exaggerated farce that expresses the particular constraints of faith and how it often interferes with one’s best interests, making it especially difficult developing relations with the opposite sex.  While this is unusual territory for a movie, Paradis is especially convincing as a woman whose emotional core remains unreachable, even to herself since the death of her husband, still feeling frozen in time, where the first signs of thaw are painfully difficult to navigate, offering rare insight in a movie that otherwise treats women as caricatures of Hollywood sex objects.    

Under the Skin (2013)

UNDER THE SKIN                A-                                           

Great Britain  (108 mi)  2013  d:  Jonathan Glazer             Official Site

Scarlett Johansson has finally learned to play roles that take advantage of how she’s perceived by a largely testosterone-laden male public, as a sex object where beauty is only skin deep, and they are infatuated by what they see.  In Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s Don Jon (2013), she plays the voluptuous tease, believing she’s the ultimate in beauty and sex, as she’s molded herself to match the perfect fantasy image of what guys want, while in Spike Jonze’s Her (2013), she lacks human and physical form and exists only as a voice of virtual reality perfection.  Jonathan Glazer’s film takes the same title from Carine Adler’s first and only feature film, the one that features a sizzling breakout performance from Samantha Morton, a largely unheralded yet small gem of a film.  Glazer resorts to the sci-fi genre to freely adapt the Dutch-born Michel Faber novel about an extraterrestrial who comes to earth, much like Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), though what plot there is plays out more along the lines of Claire Denis’s Trouble Every Day (2001), but with a different twist, where unlike the book, the film is far more ambiguous and less explanative, leaving the audience in the dark without many clues to figure out just what’s going on.  The opening credit sequence, in something of an homage to Kubrick, reveals intergalactic origins, including the abstract atonal symphonic composition by Mica Levi, aka Micachu, which is equally otherworldly, where in something of a wordless visual splendor, a speck of light in an enveloping darkness approaches the viewer, eventually becoming a blinding shot of light, where the connection to humanity is complete when after a few planetary transfigurations the light becomes a reflection of a human eye. Without a hint of backdrop, the extraterrestrials have arrived in the form of Scarlett Johansson in a black wig, who along with a motorcycle helper, retrieves a dead body, and in a remarkable white screen with no recognizable floor, we see her pull the clothes off the dead woman and place them on her own simulated body, where the transformation is complete, as she passes unrecognizably through the crowded streets of Scotland.       

Returning to filmmaking for the first time since BIRTH (2004), Glazer, in a screenplay co-authored with Walter Campbell, turns Faber’s extraterrestrial perspective into a feminist view of female objectification, where women are judged and valued through surface artificiality, and what’s inside hardly matters.  That’s the central premise of the film as an unnamed Scarlett Johansson trolls for unattached men whose absence won’t be missed by anyone, cruising the streets of Glasgow, initially asking innocent questions, asking for directions, eventually luring men into a white van.  Of interest, the director had hidden cameras installed in the van and only informed various male bystanders caught off guard afterwards that they were in a movie.  While she speaks a vague British accent, most of the men have thick Scottish accents that make what they have to say incomprehensible.  Wearing ankle boots, tight jeans, and a fur jacket, with a thick layer of red lipstick, Johansson has a Sirenesque sexual quality from her insinuations, asking if they’re alone, if they have a girlfriend, if they like what they see, etc.  In this way she lures men to a secret apartment that has a hypnotic effect upon them, set to an unsettling score, where they both undress as they enter and she lures them (and their erections) ahead into a black pit of doom, “Dreaming, dreaming,” one man murmurs, to which she answers, “Yes, yes we are.”  While she’s able to walk over it, they obviously have no idea even as they are quickly submerged in a sea of thick, oily black water, left to some strange Hellish fate where they’re done for.  In the book they’re fattened up and eventually harvested for food back on their planet, which is in need of food, but here, without a word of exposition, the intentions are more darkly obscure.   

While the film taps into cultural superficialities, what is clear is that Scarlett Johansson is undeniably beautiful, again representing herself as an ideal feminine object, seen in what resembles naked human form early on, where obtaining her sexually, from a male point of view, is ostensibly the epitome of cultural acquisition, where regardless of what might be under her skin, and here she is entirely alien, she is considered the ultimate prize or male achievement within the context of the film and modern day culture.  Despite any intuitive analysis, however, only a bare minimum is revealed, where the film is an eye-opening slap to the face with an impeccable look, nearly wordless and driven by such meticulous composition and visual stylization from cinematographer Daniel Landin.  What’s interesting is that the viewer is lured into this unexpectedly haunting and inexplicable world in much the same way as the men are lured to Scarlett, where for most of the picture we haven’t a clue where this is going, where we are as much in the dark as Scarlett appears to be, a stranger in a strange land, as she has a robotic assignment, but she begins to recognize something more beyond her mission.  The first sign of this is a peculiar change in the routine, where after a prolonged reflection of herself in a mirror, we realize she has released one of her victims, seen running away off in the distance, still naked.  Rather than preying on unsusceptible men, she herself becomes the prey, suddenly the target of her own accompanying motorcycle team who begin searching for her, as if she’s somehow malfunctioned.  After spending some time sheltered by a stranger who asks no questions and treats her with kindness and respect, but introduces her to earthly sex, she is somewhat stupefied and retreats deeper into the woods.  In a film about the artifice of surface realities, the natural beauty of the woods takes on darker hidden impulses, where the world is not as it seems, yet she is immersed, like her previous victims, in this primeval darkness that all but envelops her, exposing her for what she is.  One cannot ascribe human emotions and feelings to this non-human entity, who has her own peculiar eccentricities and curiosities about her, but it’s an interesting transformation from being all powerful to becoming powerless, subject to the baser elements of man.  It’s a mystifyingly beautiful and strangely puzzling little film that does wonders with an absolute minimum, much like the non-narrative, abstract idealizations in Terrence Malick’s To the Wonder (2012), where Glazer offers a similar philosophical quest for meaning.