Bill Cunningham New York + Michael Clayton

Double feature: “I’m not the enemy,” the eponymous protagonist of “Michael Clayton” tells his unravelling coworker in an attempt to distance himself from the compromising agenda of his profession.  The latter, not skipping a beat, shoots back: “Then who are you?”  It is this exchange – the sharpest in a film of sharp exchanges – that links “Michael Clayton” to the endearing and moving documentary “Bill Cunningham New York.”

Both films examine the complicated relationship between job/career and identity.   Where the documentary profiles someone whose career and identity are inextricably intertwined, the narrative film shows a character struggling to keep the two as separate as possible, and realizing how difficult that can be.

In fact, both of these extremes are problematic.  If who you are entirely overlaps with what you do, what relief do you have from a bad day at the office?  On the other hand, distance yourself too much from your job and you won’t have enough skin in either game.   And if you’re ambitious, you’ll feel guilty and trapped in either of these positions.

Michael Clayton’s triumph is his extrication; Bill Cunningham’s his involvement.  Both have a cost.

For a marathon:  ”MIchael Clayton”‘s protagonist and “Bill Cunningham New York”‘s subject are both Manhattanites in cutthroat industries.  The former has the bravado you would expect of his borough and profession, whereas much is made of the latter’s modest temperament and lifestyle.  For another real-life paragon of humbleness, check out “Searching for Sugar Man.”  No doubt you’ll be inspired by both of these characters.  But you may also be tempted to ask: is there such a thing as too much self-effacement?

“The Hurt Locker” presents another character who not only fully inhabits his professional responsibilities, but loses himself in them.

(Creative Commons licensed original images courtesy of “Mitchell Bartlett” and “Food Stories” at Flickr)

Nobody Knows + Kes

Double feature: “Nobody Knows” and “Kes” are two quietly devastating films that can also serve as markers of their viewers’ progress on the spectrum of adult maturity.

Both involve resourceful children in bleak circumstances.  In both, young protagonists must snatch their own succor when and where they can, from environments always indifferent – and frequently hostile – to their physical and emotional comfort.

Some might say the above description applies to all of us.  And therein lies these films’ shared litmus test for maturity: will viewers’ reactions tilt in favor of (a) sympathy for, or (b) empathy with, the bright-eyed children navigating these grey worlds? Where younger/still-growing souls will identify with the protagonists’ abandonment and forced self-reliance, the real adults in the audience will feel a steward’s obligation to right the wrongs accumulating against them.  The former group will want a hug after these films; the latter will want to give one.  Many viewers will likely want both.

With patient pacing, both films hypnotize as they break your heart.  Simultaneously detached and sympathetic, objective and condemning, both films present nightmarish events grounded in elements of reality. ”Nobody Knows” is based on a true story; the remarkable “Kes” features a cast of non-professionals (and social conditions) local to its setting.

One interesting difference between the two films is the relative secrecy of their protagonists’ misery.  In “Nobody Knows,” it is a private shame revealed to as few outsiders as possible; in “Kes,” a bundle of domestic and educational hurts openly acknowledged by the community.  Both films make the point that just because others know about a bad situation doesn’t mean that they will, or can, do anything about it.

For a marathon: Both of these films share what one might call an “existential” view of childhood – in which even the youngest must confront the harsh truths of the universe – with “Fanny and Alexander” and “My Life as a Dog.”

Compare and contrast the hermeticism of the family in “Nobody Knows” with the expansiveness of that in “Yi Yi.”  Secrecy and boundaries of privacy are implied values in the former, but come off as insupportable vices in the latter.  Is this difference a structural or cultural one?

The deep perceptiveness, unadorned beauty, and bildungsroman narrative of “Kes” link it to the extraordinary “The Spirit of the Beehive.”  Its depiction of a constrained set of social and economic choices – and, of course, its bird-raising – brings to mind “On the Waterfront.”  Both films unfold beneath a cloud of moral reproach, and both feature fighters of a kind, at different points in the match of their lives.

What lingers longest after “Kes”‘s bleakness is the spirited twinkle in its protagonist’s eye.  Imagine this resourceful boy in the gentler, but still class-conscious, academic environment of “Rushmore.” Would he have co-founded a falconry club with Max Fischer?  Or is the apter comparison – in the inarticulate contrariness of their preservation of spirit – to the protagonist of “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner”?  Both need convincing that society is a forum for, rather than a threat to, their hopes.

(Creative Commons licensed original images courtesy of “TheFoodJunk” and “DimSum!” at Flickr)

Bright Star + The Earrings of Madame de…

Double feature: Here are two ravishingly beautiful, radiantly intelligent films whose beauty and brains are in large part due to their shared attention to the details of domestic life.

Both “Bright Star” and “The Earrings of Madame de…” draw you into their rarefied worlds by offering an intimacy – immediate, deepening, but ever discreet – with the atomized components of their characters’ homes. From the start, the closet interiors and staircases that both films linger over are presented as not just background to, but actors in, their unfolding stories.

The importance that both filmmakers place on these inanimate objects is mirrored by the importance their protagonists place on them.  In both films, characters invest not only the actual artifacts of their romantic relationships (jewelry, love letters,) but even the quotidian objects a degree or more removed from them (walls, doors) with profound emotional value.  In both films, these objects become substitutes for the absent beloved; passive recipients (and receptacles) of un-dammed, un-dammable affections.

Despite their swoon-inducing visuals, both films do justice to their literary origins with their wit, attention to structure, and steadily accumulating power.  Like a classic novel or a thoughtful letter, they break their bad news indirectly and verbally, even though their medium would allow them to show it in head-on imagery.

Like a masterpiece, they are sensitive – and thus inspire our sensitivity – to their minor characters as well as their protagonists.  That some of their minor characters happen to be things rather than people makes these films even more extraordinary.

For a marathon: Jean Cocteau’s “Beauty and the Beast” shares with “The Earrings of Madame de…” detailed visual splendor and a similar tone of simultaneously witty and melancholy wisdom. “Mysteries of Lisbon” shares with it an acute attention to narrative structure.

Follow both films’ (over)investiture of objects with importance to its logical extreme with “2001: A Space Odyssey.” Visually dazzling in a completely different way, it is, among many other things, a thought experiment about placing too much on the shoulders of the inanimate.

(Creative Commons licensed original images courtesy of “arguer” and “Chiot’s Run” at Flickr)

The Last Days of Disco + Hannah and Her Sisters

Double feature: There isn’t much to argue about/with the assertion that New York is a city of cultural, as well as financial, wealth.  The enviably literate, well-spoken characters in “The Last Days of Disco” and “Hannah and Her Sisters” are socially and temperamentally positioned to take advantage of both.  In traveling the seams where money, art, breeding, and beauty meet in various combinations, they let us vicariously do so as well.

Speaking of various combinations: both films put their characters through a square-dance of rotating romantic allegiances.  Both address the ease with which the mild at heart can be taken for granted, or underestimated by, the ranks of the ambitious who inevitably outnumber them in the urban jungle.

The characters in both films are surprisingly forthright about their emotional fragility.  Their sophistication and savviness, thick skin and endurance of disappointment, allow this seemingly rampant delicacy to be treated as just another subject for their eloquent commentary.

In the same measured tone with which they rhapsodize about the facade of a favorite building, or delve into the subtext of a children’s film, they lay bare the workings of their hearts and minds to each other – then button up their overcoats, hop into a cab, and head off to their next sociocultural encounter, just a few blocks away.  Leaving you jealous, breathless, and hopeful.

For a marathon: A viewing of “When Harry Met Sally…” would be appropriate after either of the above films, but especially so after “Hannah and Her Sisters.”  Both trace the journey of two neurotics from annoyance to friendship to love, with the city’s retail, culinary, and cultural institutions backdropping this evolution.

(Creative Commons licensed original images courtesy of “Barney909″ and “rnav1234″ at Flickr)

Lost in Translation + Ship of Fools

Double feature: Although they make for markedly different viewing experiences, “Lost in Translation”    and “Ship of Fools“ share a fair amount of narrative DNA.

Both films highlight the emotional dislocations of travel: how it loosens the grip of home’s quotidian circumstances while never completely freeing you from them.  How it positions you at a 45° angle from your own life, affording you startling perspective on it.  How it makes you more porous to experience.

Both films ask what it means to make a connection with someone new when you’ve already given your heart to someone else.  Or rather, what kinds of connections are left to make, and where they can fit into relatively gelled lives.

Contemporary viewers may have a hard time with the melodrama of “Ship of Fools.”  And mid-1960s viewers might not have known what to make of the restraint and dreamy minimalism of “Lost in Translation,” whose fuzzy edges might not have been emphatic enough to move them.

Nevertheless, the former film is at least an implicit narrative inspiration for the latter.  ”Lost in Translation” extracts two storylines from its predecessor’s whirlpool of drama – the new couple’s and the doctor’s/Condesa’s – then combines and distills them into an exploration of drifting and fame, sudden intimacy and poignant farewells.

“Ship of Fools” had those elements first, but sank them under pancake makeup and fist-biting theatricality.  It also didn’t have top-form Bill Murray going for it.  Incomparably charming, deeply felt, simultaneously open and deflecting, his performance is a significant gap for any film to fill – especially retrospectively.

For a marathon: Both “Lost in Translation” and “Ship of Fools” end with a renunciation of immediate happiness, answering to something more than the audience’s wish fulfillment.  So do “Brief Encounter” and “Roman Holiday” (incidentally, an apt comfort film for sick days at home.)

Like “Lost in Translation,” “Beginners” features small-scale escapades in a big city hotel and gently accretive charm.

(Creative Commons licensed original images courtesy of “superfem” and “Skaynsa Mattupplevelser” at Flickr)

Designing Women + The Golden Girls

Double feature: The easy parallel between these two series is the quartet of shared archetypes leading up their respective casts.  In both “The Golden Girls” and “Designing Women,” you’ll find: the sweet one (Rose, Charlene;) the brainy one (Dorothy, Julia;) the sexy one (Blanche, Suzanne;) and the quirky one (Sophia, Mary Jo.)   Also, but less to the point, a semi-emasculated male drifting in and out of the frame (Stanley, Anthony.)

Somehow, this “four humors” approach to female character development (heart, head, libido, nerves) both flirts with and undercuts reductiveness.  With time, the elements in all (4×2) leads mix and swirl until they resemble the surface of one of “The Golden Girls”‘s beloved marble cheesecakes.  Turns out that Mary Jo is brainy too.  Rose isn’t not quirky.  You get the point.

But there is another, more important parallel that both links these shows together and sets them apart from most other sitcom fare.  Namely, the fact that the “action” in both of these series is primarily synonymous with their leads telling stories about events that have already occurred offscreen.

Plot advancement through full, classical storytelling. A respect not only for words but for narrative technique – the setups (in “Designing Women,” this is often the slamming of the front door as another lead enters the Sugarbaker house in a huff; in “The Golden Girls,” it’s more likely the nighttime kitchen gathering,) the tropes (Sophia’s “Picture it…”,) the rhetorical devices (Julia’s preference for striding through the room with her coffee cup dangling from her hand.)

Think of how different this shared approach is from the content delivery and sources of humor in most other sitcoms.  Postmodern shows like “30 Rock” and “Arrested Development” take us along on their characters’ adventures, then expand upon them with flashbacks, flashforwards, and quick cuts to additional information (often juxtapositions of characters’ truths with actual fact.)  Instead, “The Golden Girls” and “Desiging Women” prefer to tell rather than show.

Maybe this is what naysayers mean when they criticize these shows as “too talky” or “too feminine.”  I’d say that the most feminine thing about them is that when one of their leads tells a story, all the other ones actually listen to it.

(Creative Commons licensed original images courtesy of “Big Yellow House” and “texascooking” at Flickr)

Casino Royale + Trouble in Paradise

Double feature: After an hour or so of jaw-clenched globetrotting, “Casino Royale” evolves from a movie that has nothing whatsoever to do with the lighthearted, technique-heavy “Trouble in Paradise” to one whose parallels with that early confection become increasingly pronounced.

It’s the introduction of the Vesper Lynd character that does this.  Her Pandora’s box of backstory, banter, and charge blows open the stone-faced, commentary-free “business travel” of the first act and steers the film toward meeting “Trouble in Paradise” in the middle.

While remaining far apart in overall tone, the two movies converge upon the following common ground:
*inherently elegant protagonists exchanging rapid-fire dialogue in slinky evening dress
*machinations whose cool-headed pragmatics conceal fiercely emotional motives
*pleasantly jarring pacing, jerking forward in time and twisting until the last minute
*healthy lack of concern for narrative logic.

After their champagne has gone flat and their formalwear has wrinkled, what stays with you from these films is their shared triumph of original loyalties over new ones.  In both, primary allegiances are tested, perhaps even altered – but, crucially, ultimately unconquered – by new ones.

For a marathon: Keep traversing ”Casino Royale”‘s intersection between romance and geopolitical ends with both “Inglourious Basterds” and “Fiorile.”

“Trouble in Paradise” shares “Paper Moon”‘s jauntiness and blithe con artists’ morality, and “The Lady  Vanishes”‘s witty whimsy and showy technique.

(Creative Commons licensed original images courtesy of “ReeseCLloyd” and “Muy Yum” at Flickr)