Last year, I awoke up bleary-eyed and dehydrated in a beaded ball gown on New Year’s Day. I rolled over onto my computer, only to read someone on the internet proclaiming that how you spend your January 1 is the way you’ll spend the rest of your year. The thought made me particularly nauseous, as I fully intended to spend the day in my pajamas cuddling a party-size bag of pretzel M&Ms and watching Hal Ashby’s Being There between naps. It was an emotionally confusing time in my life, and alcohol is nothing is if not a psychologically vicious next day depressant.
However, I’d just recently discovered the key to letting go of a sadness that had been holding me captive as I kept it draped over my shoulders like a protective shawl for the last six months. I felt naked—exposed and frighteningly vulnerable—but I felt free and excited in a way that I hadn’t felt in forever. But what to do with that freedom? Where to go with that new sense of feeling like a member of the living? I panicked. So I thought I’d take to my bed with an overdose of sugar to figure it out.
And in the 12 months since, that person under the sheets that day feels an entire lifetime ago, and although although the exterior changes are obvious, I still can’t pinpoint what exactly about me has transformed. Needless to say, last New Year’s Day did not set the precedent for the year, but if it was indicative of anything, it was in my viewing of Being There, just one of the 300 films I would come to consume in 2014—about 200 of them new to me. Spending a good portion of my year existing between theatrical screenings of old movies and personal viewings surrounded by my Christmas lights, I can safely say this year has been another chapter in my cinematic education. But not only that, it’s been a lesson in love, a lesson in what I want from art, what I want from movies, and what I want from my life.
In recent months, like a tic, I keep unconsciously repeating a Zora Neale Hurston quote to myself: “There are years that ask questions and years that answer.” And this year, for all its great changes and incredible people that have entered my life, has certainly been a time that has asked far more questions than answered. The past two months have felt like a ticking time bomb as I desperately search for that intangible thing with no name before another year begins. But the more I learn to listen to myself and the more time I take to breathe and mute the incessant jabbering of fear, I realize that I may not have those answers for a long time—and for now, I’m fine with that. So in the meantime, here are three cinematic revelations amongst this mess of a year that have made me wonderfully, unquestionably happy.
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Bob Fosse’s ALL THAT JAZZ
“No, nothing I ever do is good enough. Not beautiful enough, it’s not funny enough, it’s not deep enough, it’s not anything enough. Now, when I see a rose, that’s perfect. I mean, that’s perfect. I want to look up to God and say, “How the hell did you do that? And why the hell can’t I do that?”
From the haze of my college graduation night, I particularly remember one exchange between friends. We were sitting in a dark nook at The Double Down when someone from Texas told me that they’d never seen Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas. Naturally, I began berating him as to why, before another friend told me to calm down. “This is a good thing, he’s lucky. Now he has something wonderful to look forward to,” he said to me.
Since then, I’ve kept that sentiment with me, purposely not allowing myself to watch certain movies until I needed them—as if they were a kind of healing lozenge I could uncover and swallow when I needed them, when I was ready for them. And for me, Bob Fosse’s sweat and sequined musical death drama All That Jazz was always one of those films. I knew I would love it, had no doubt I’d get that perfect fiery feeling in my chest while watching it, and would subsequently obsess about it for weeks after.
So when I did finally watch All That Jazz a few months ago, I was elated to discover that my instincts were correct. Fosse’s exhausting, sensual, feverish, self-destructive, and smoky world is a fascinating place to encounter, I ached to have been there myself. When he took the semi-autobiographical film to Cannes in 1979, he addressed questions about the film being self-indulgent by saying: “20 minutes dedicated to Joe Gideon’s death? If I were to choreograph my own I think it would be longer.”
Ever the perfectionist , when it came to casting extras to serve drinks in his movies, he would only hire actual waiters to do the job—because who else knows how to properly put a glass down on a table? But what I find so fascinating about Fosse’s films is the way in which that pulsating heart of incredibly influential and beautifully clever choreography translates into his directorial style upon the screen. His movies, the way they’re edited and textured, mirror the seductive, frantic, aggressive, quick-witted, and inside-out rhythm of his signature dance style—and I can’t get enough of it.
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KINGS AND QUEEN, Arnaud Desplechin
“There are four men I loved. I killed two of them.”
In February I went to screening of Arnaud Desplechin’s Jimmy P at IFC Center. I remember wearing my boyfriend’s salmon-colored oxford and sharing a bag of peanut M&Ms, but not much of the movie—save the moment when Mathieu Amalric pops onscreen in a haze of jazz, smoke, and scintillating manic energy, which I would later come to think of as so Desplechin. But that’s not to say the film wasn’t great, rather, in the time since, having fallen totally in love with the French filmmaker’s work, it’s resonance simply hasn’t stayed with me in the way his others have.
After seeing Jimmy P my boyfriend and I stood on the L train platform as he spoke of Desplechin with the fervor of one of the director’s characters, exclaiming what made the films so human and honest, beautifully-crafted and uniquely unspired. Considering this was early in our relationship and his emphatic nature was something I immediately fell in love with, I took that for what it was but was interested to just see the movies for myself. A couple days later, in a bout of 4am insomnia, I began watching Kings and Queen.
Somewhere between Mathieu Amalric breakdancing in the psyche ward, Emmanuelle Devos watching her father’s swift decline to death, and Amalric having the most wonderful and intelligent interaction between an adult and a child while wandering through a museum, my heart was swooning and totally won over, my sheets were covered in tears. In the time since, I’ve had multiple viewing of Kings and Queen, My Sex Life…Or How I Got Into an Argument, A Christmas Tale, and La Vie des morts, and throughout his work, that initial sense of devastating pleasure has hit me each time. All I ask for in a movie is to have some physiological reaction, to be tickled with excitement at the artistry and to take something away from the film that will enrich my life and provide some psychological insight into the relationships in my life and the world around me—is that so much to ask for?
Apparently not for Desplechin, whose work always leaves those sparks behind in me for days. Through the bizarre and brilliant ways he builds sight and sound atop one another and allows his actors to completely bare themselves in their roles, he elevates even the most mundane moments of life into a storybook realm, while somehow maintaining the most accurate representations of genuine emotion and relationships I’ve ever seen. “Each time I’m starting to work on a film, even if I love to settle the plot in the real world, I start to think about the plot as a fairy tale, or a dream, or a nightmare…,” Desplechin once said. And whichever one it is, it’s always a world I want to be a part of.
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THE HEARTBREAK KID, Elaine May
“I had my doubts in Virginia, I was pretty sure in Georgia, you have really settled things for me in Florida. I’ve been waiting for a girl like you all my life. I just timed it wrong. Here’s the plan. I’m definitely getting out. I just have to figure a way to let her down easy. It kinda complicates things this being our honeymoon and everything.”
I spent my Thanksgiving evening soaking in a warm, candlelit bath reading Charles Grodin’s memoir, It Would Be So Nice If You Weren’t Here. The next day my mother, waiting for hours in a cold emergency room bed, would get a great laugh out of seeing its cover. I hadn’t really thought much of Grodin until this year—actually I just didn’t think about him at all. Sure, I’d seen Heaven Can Wait, Rosemary’s Baby, and of course Beethoven, but he was never someone I thought I’d take great joy in knowing anything about. I’d never been aware of his extensive and grueling days in theater, the films and television specials he’d written and directed, or how incredibly hard he worked to get there.
So by the time I watched The Heartbreak Kid this year, I wasn’t only enamored with the fact that Elaine May—one of the only women to direct a studio movie in the 1970s—had made such a wonderful film, but I felt this swelling pride for Grodin. It was strange. Early on in the memoir, he mentions a time in his early days studying with Lee Strasberg, when fellow up-and-comer Dustin Hoffman waited for hours outside his doorstep just to ask him if he’d star in some Church basement production he was directing. Grodin turned him down, but in the following years Hoffman would go on to snag Grodin’s role in The Graduate, one that would have been his had he not, amicably, clashed with Nichols surrounding the film’s test shoot.
Yet while filming The Heart Kid down in Miami Beach, Grodin caught word that Hoffman had been seen down there. He could have been shooting Lenny, he could have been on a vacation, he could have been on a layover on his way to wherever, but Grodin felt threatened and panicked, assuming May had summoned Hoffman down there to replace him. Obviously, such was not the case and Grodin would go on to receive his first critical praise for the role as man who leaves his wife of a few days for a blonde teenager he meets on the beach. Although he’d been slowly gaining esteem in his career, May had always been a champion of his comic brilliance. The first time they met she said to him, “Gene Wilder says the most wonderful things about you.” Grodin’s response: “Boy, you’re really coming on, aren’t you?” It was awkward.
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