Sacred Feminine - Film Review: Coco avant Chanel

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single celebrity in possession of a good legend, must be in want of a biopic.  

Another a truth that may not be so universally acknowledged is that a successful biopic must dedicate itself to not so much showing the protaganist doing what made him famous, but rather showing why the protaganist arrived at the destination that made him famous.  One of the more fascinating biopics of the last decade -- albeit one whose subject is fictional -- is Christopher Nolan's 2005 Batman Begins.  Nolan grasped what separates the Batman origin myth from other comic heroes -- he's not an alien from another planet, he hasn't been exposed to massive radiation doses, nor is he the disgruntled victim of an ultra-secret government experiment.  No, he's just a child of privilege who suffers an unimaginable tragedy who then projects the pain borne of that trauma into devoting his life (and wealth) to the cause of striking fear into the hearts of predators who prey on the weak and defenseless.  Batman's superpower is his mortality; underneath the mask he is but Bruce Wayne.  Ergo, every scene of sequel The Dark Knight sans Heath Ledger descends into fuggy cartoonishness.

The filmmakers behind Coco avant Chanel, director Anne Fontaine co-wrote the script with her sister Camille, masterfully unfurl the why of Coco Chanel with muted detachment.  We don't see gamine Audrey Tautou performing the quintessential Coco Chanel posture -- overseeing her own fashion show with detailed intensity -- until the closing moments of the film.  Instead the film focuses on Chanel's early life adventures while quietly stitching the identity garment she would ultimately slip into.

After the prerequisite opening sequences of a miserable childhood (is it a coincidence that seemingly every great man and woman in history began life as an orphan, an abuse victim, a friendless loner, or hopelessly destitute?) we're introduced to Gabrielle Chanel busking in a seedy early-20th century French version of a nightclub/brothel.  After an uber-wealthy sexual suitor nicknames her Coco for the ditty she performs, Chanel instantly establishes herself as a headstrong individualist who spits at convention (and the men who perpetrate them).  

Tautou scowls, glares, and snaps at everyone around her, in this case conformist hedonistic Parisian bluebloods while criticizing their dresses, their hats, and their mores.  Shrewdly maneuvering herself into a high-class world doggedly devoted to exclusion, the film slowly consecrates Chanel as not simply the first fashion superstar, but the first woman of the 20th century.  From her refutation of corsets to her simple and dark livery, Chanel's philosophy was to accentuate femininity through adoption of masculine style.

Fontaine did such a wonderful job of establishing Chanel's revolutionary spirit that the second half of the film takes a most disturbing turn.  Suddenly, this beacon of feminist strength succumbs to a weakness that undoes all the goodwill she had earned.  Let's just say the nickname of the man she falls in love with is Boy. Yea...

Coco avant Chanel is a very likable film.  It draws you in, it makes you care about the characters, and it's technically proficient, but I suspect the lasting sourness I felt is the result of philistine studio bosses diluting a perfectly artistic film for the purpose of American marketability, for a French-speaking film this new world encroachment is surely an unpleasant surprise.  Sacrebleu! 

unKindle: An Argument Against Digital Reading Devices

I love my fifth-generation iPod.  It's 30-gigs, black, named Othello.  I take it practically everywhere, often to the chagrin of my companions.  But their groans of protest matter little to me.  Othello has improved my quality of life dramatically.  Since it's acquisition, my bench-press weight has increased fantastically, no more suffering through Hall & Oates in the supermarket, and in the evenings, Al Green is a scroll away.  Of course there is a downside:  my driving record has endured a precipitous blow.

My point being that I'm decidedly not an anti-technology guy.  I dig my 21st century toys, and as I make clear above, I fetishise my digital music player.  That said, I am impassionedly against digital readers of any kind (at least for those with better than 20/200 eyesight).  Devices such as Amazon Kindle represent the dark side of technological advance.  Eviscerating the romance from the loins of literature is something I will never quietly let slide.  Amazon Kindle is an abomination.

A quick story.  I attended a book festival recently.  Forget the "featured author readings" or the gratuitous literary wares; I go for the rare/used book flea market.  There are few more satisfying experiences than digging through the sandpit of Emeril Lagasse cookbooks, Tony Robbins motivational tomes, and twenty editions of The Devil Wears Prada to find buried underneath a true pearl.  In this particular case, it was a hardcover edition Elbert Hubbard's Little Journeys to the Homes of English Authors:  Robert Burns.  

The pages are as thick as impecunious wedding invitations, the binding smells of the 19th century.  It contains no publication date but research revealed that Hubbard perished on the Lusitania.  At the latest, this book's origins coincide with my late grandmother's birth.  Who knows whose hands this book has passed through, what history it's seen.  The imagination trembles.  And now, in 2009, the book is mine (for an outrageous $2) to possess into posterity.  How can Amazon Kindle ever stand up to that?  It doesn't, it can't, it won't.  Thank goodness!

I leave with you with the first page of Little Journeys:  Robert Burns:

The business of Robert Burns was love-making.

All love is good, but some kinds of love are better than others. Through Burns' penchant for falling in love we have his songs.  A Burns bibliography is simply a record of love affairs, and the spasms of repentance that followed his lapses are made manifest in religious verse.

Poetry is the very earliest form of literature, and is the natural expression of a person in love; and I suppose we might as well admit the fact at once, that without love there would be no poetry.

Poetry is the bill and coo of sex.  All poets are lovers, and all lovers, either actual or potential, are poets.  Potential poets are the people who read poetry; and so without lovers the poet would never have a market for his wares. 

Obscure Writer Series: Sergei Dovlatov

A feature of this blog I'm introducing today may at first glance seem self-serving.  A title such as "Obscure (Anything) Series" denotes a certain kind of intellectual arrogance, namely, patronization.  But let me assure you that my aim here is completely innocuous, and based solely on my desire to share artistic wonders typically hidden from public view.  And yes, I'm fully aware that this introduction only further reinforces that which I'm trying to avoid.  On with the show:

Sergei Dovlatov was born to a Jewish father and an Armenian mother just two months after Hitler broke his Non-Aggression Pact with Stalin.  His parents, foreseeing the hardships a young man with a Jewish last name would endure in an increasingly anti-Semitic nation, gave him his mother's maiden name - a common tactic employed in mixed marriages during the Soviet regime.  Clearly, being Armenian was slightly better than being Jewish.
 
In spite of his parents best efforts, Dovlatov had an especially nasty anti-authoritarian streak in him, and had tremendous difficulty getting published throughout his life in the Soviet Union.  Due to his unyielding nature, he was relegated to menial jobs just to get by.  Eventually, he immigrated to New York in 1979 after some of his stories had been published in Western magazines causing his expulsion from the USSR.  Upon arrival, he quickly made a name for himself by publishing in The New Yorker.  
 
In The Compromise, Dovlatov's "bite my thumb at the man" quality is in full display.  It relays a series of eleven miniscule articles he wrote for the party newspaper in Tallinn, Soviet Estonia.  Beginning each chapter with a reprint of these articles, Dovlatov follows with a balladeer's voice the tale behind how that particular article came to be, and how he was forced to compromise his original vision - hence the title.  

His writing is jumpy and jocular, melodic yet scathing.  In one instance, he's sent by his editor to a Tallinn hospital to commemorate the impending birth of the city's 400,000th resident.  Given strict instructions to choose a proper baby (married parents, Party member father, etc.), Dovlatov first chooses a baby of half-African extraction (the father is a student from Ethiopia, and a Party member!), then a Jewish baby, all to the extreme consternation of his long-suffering fully interpellated editor, Turonok, who berates him over the phone, "Dovlatov, [he] says in a voice choked with torment, 'Dovlatov, I'll fire you...for attempting to discredit the very best...Leave me in peace with your rotten Ethiopian! Wait for a normal - do you hear me? - normal human baby!"

The book is surfeited with such comic moments, usually beginning and ending with Turonok's accusation, "Are you crazy? What are you drunk?"  Usually he was.  

Dovlatov's writing delivers great pleasure on a personal level, laughs abound,  and his style, simultaneously elusive and embracing, is wholly original.  But the geopolitical implications of such work is inexorable. While the Soviet Union, and Communism in general, provoked paranoid nightmares in the West of nuclear war, foreign invasion, and even flouridation, the view from inside the juggernaut exposed a nation whose core foundation was gnarled rotten.
 
The "Brezhnev Stagnation" wasn't just a cute term used in lecture halls during political science courses in the West, it was a real phenomenon.  Repression was rampant, beauracracy dominated over society, and defeatism became a virtue worn on one's sleeve like a merit badge.  While the powers that be inside the Pentagon, the State Department, and the White House fetishistically focused on the USSR's bulging surplus of nuclear arms, they failed to recognize that the guy manning the fort, so to speak, barely had enough in his coffers for a bottle of vodka per week, was forced to share a bathroom with three of his slovenly neighbours and their equally slovenly families, and, most distressingly, saw nothing in the works to think his son's or daughter's life would be any better.

"Are you crazy?  Have you been drinking?"


 

Maryland-Pennsylvania Tomato Challenge 2009

In most American workplaces, "the office," as it is so reverentially called is where most American residents of legal working age spend the majority of their lifetime energy.  A minimum eight hours per day, 5 days a week, 40 hours per week, with a staggeringly low two weeks of paid vacation per year.  And here we all thought middle school was painful.  And so, a workplace culture, replete with its own customs, traditions, mores, came into being.

I come into the office and am offered the honour of being the inaugural taste-tester in the Maryland-Pennsylvania Tomato Challenge.  Pennsylvania's moderate real estate market has attracted half of my office's workforce to make their home there.  Two tomatoes, two neighboring states, one passionate rivalry.

Each side claims their tomatoes are the best...and so I was picked to blindly point out which one I preferred.  I examined them, palmed them, smelled them, and then cut them.  At first I sprinkled salt on them but it made both taste so delicious I couldn't tell the difference.  And then I ate them straight up, chewed them, savoured them, analysed my own taste buds, and finally was ready with my decision.

I point to the one I like (its color is a darker shade of red, and the taste is richer)....Maryland's rich soil prevails!

The victor raises her arms in exultation:  victory is sweet!  sweeter than the tomato even!  The defeated drops his head away in disappointment...tomato is a cruel mistress.  Bitter is the taste of defeat.

In an unprecedented show of her gratitude, the triumphant offers up her best tomatoes for me to choose from as a reward for my favourable palate.  The vanquished returns to his desk, vowing to challenge another day, with another vegetable.

Inglourious Basterds Redux - The Grace Paley Connection

I return briefly to Inglourious Basterds to illustrate further the genius that permeates even the smallest details of Tarantino's work.

There's an insignificant scene showcasing Tarantino's literary prowess:

Brigdet Von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger):  There have been two recent developments regarding Operation Kino. One, the venue has been changed from the Ritz to a much smaller venue.

Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt):   Enormous changes at the last minute? That's not very "Germatic."

It's a malapropism line played for laughs, but buried within is a reference to Jewish-American short story writer Grace Paley (who recently died) and her famous book, Enormous Changes At The Last Minute, hence the added meaning of not being very "Germatic." Ha-ha!

Brilliant stuff, Quentin.   

Review of Inglourious Basterds

Fans of Quentin Tarantino have come to expect one thing from his films:  the unexpected.  The ear-slashing, the Gimp, a raged Robert De Niro, all of Kill Bill, have become staples of the Tarantino ouevre, and of current cinema as we know it, and as future generations will remember it.  

Inglourious Basterds delivers the unexpected in droves.  The film's marketing suggested a Kill Bill-esque 'Jewish-Americans mercilessly slaughtering Nazis' bloodbath, instead, Tarantino gave us a deeply cerebral picture smattered with bursts of relatively mild violence.

With his wordy script and the eye-opening performance of "Jew-Hunter" Christoph Waltz, Tarantino shrewdly captured the true terror of the Nazis.  It wasn't the cattle-car deportation to death camps -- horrible as they were -- but rather the corruptibility of otherwise good people, of the ever-present fear of being found out, whether you were hiding Jews, sympathetic to Jews, a partisan, a spy, or a Jew.  The Jew-Hunter's subtle innuendos, probing questions, suspicious gestures, and discomforting good humour would drive even the stoutest resistance fighter to his breaking point wondering, "How much does he know?" and "How do I escape this man?"


Inglourious Basterds is a fantasy.  In a reality where the majority of the literature, fiction and nonfiction, portrays the Jewish people, helpless and crippled, enduring unimaginable horror from the hyper-aggressive Juggernaut of the Third Reich, Tarantino imagines an alternative where the victims not only have a voice, but a baseball bat as it were, as a vehicle of vengence.


It has become marvelously clear that Tarantino's capacity for innovative storytelling has eclipsed the standard 2-3 hour feature film format (ahem, Kill Bill). Basterds clocked in at 153 minutes, and yet the film felt like it breezed by, with multiple plotlines and asides that begged for proper exposition.  Tarantino has entered the realm of eminent Polish auteur, Krzysztof Kieślowski, who required multiple films (10 to be exact for the appropriately titled Dekalog) to fully express his vision.

With Tarantino you never know what to expect, except this:  he'll keep on keeping on with films that make our palms sweat, our heads shake, and our mouths go, "Oh!"

Patron Saint of Cinema - St. Quentin Tarantino

The evening was moving along swimmingly: South American wine, richly prepared surf-and-turf cuisine, surfeit of bon mots. Just settling into our respective digestifs, the dinner party suddenly careened off a cliff hovering above the River Hades.

Someone had unwittingly committed the grievous garrulous sin that will certainly ruin any social gathering wherein participants aren't intimately acquainted: initiating a discussion on the merits of Quentin Tarantino. It matters little if that first remark is favourable, the mere mention of his Latinate name will spark a wildfire in a docile conversational stream.

I had to straddle the index finger and thumb of my right hand upon my forehead and cheekbone as I anticipated the tremendous headache I would momentarily suffer in my eye. When the requisite irrationally reasoned criticism was inadvisedly and recklessly announced, my eyes were already closed in full-throttled paroxysm.

"Can we talk about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?" I groused, "Or maybe the pros and cons of abortion if you prefer?" This was not my attempt at inappropriate humour. This was my plea to maintain some semblance of sanity. I'd rather delve into the fiery quicksand of those aforementioned issues than writhe in the indignity of having to defend the merits of this generation's greatest cineaste, the current patron saint of cinema.

Coming Attraction: The Found Generation will elucidate why St. Quentin Tarantino is a monstre sacré. Also, a review of Inglourious Basterds, which looks to be the ultimate Jewish revenge fantasy film.