263. Desperately Seeking Susan

Song - Susie Q  (Creedence Clearwater Revival)

Movie: Desperately Seeking Susan (Susan Seidelman, 1985)

Remember Barbara Loden? After making Wanda, a very good film exposing all her potential vulnerabilities and weaknesses, she never got another opportunity to direct. Such examples should probably inform a bit more (the correct) criticisms of Beyonce's butchering of Jolene. Purely as a piece of music, I actually like Beyonce's version more than Dolly Parton's. but rewriting that song to present yourself as a badass queen who will wreck Jolene is rather pathetic and does indeed highlight that Beyonce is more interestend in being her own brand manager than in being an interesting artist. I have never cared much for her, but it is worth asking whether she would have been as big if she didn't present herself so forcefully as a strong powerful woman. Probably not, but Dolly Parton's (who is of course white) career is no slouch despite openly fearing Jolene's competition. 

Anyhow, I've never much cared for Madonna for similar reasons. By the time I got into pop culture, she was already an institution, who seemed mostly interested in highlighting how much of an institution she was. Desperately Seeking Susan, in which she plays Susan, does make you understand how she could have become the biggest star in the world - it is not by projecting indestructible power. Madonna plays a cocky confident woman with a great sense of style, who knows her way around men and always comes and most charismatic and assertive person in the room. She is however also poor and on the run from criminals with guns. The police are not her friends and neither are the rich businessmen with expensive home decoration. Her people are her charming aimleslly drifting boyfriend Jim (Robert Joy), movie projectionist Dez (Aidan Quinn) who lives in a half-empty loft above the cinema he works in, desperate housewife Roberta (Rosanna Arquette, the film's actual lead), and Crystal (Anna Thomson), who is not even able to keep a job as a magician's assistant in a dingy magic club. In other words, Madonna is placed among the vagabonds and misfits of New York and presented as one of them,, always one stroke of bad luck away from the gutter. That makes her coolness and bravado come through more than any context in which she is presented as the effortlessly all-conquering queen of the world. I have mostly registered her songs as background noise, but her appeal here inspired a YoiuTube Madonna session. It appears Vogue, Material Girl (decidedly not a song presenting Madonna as an underdog) and Into the Groove are rather great!

Desperately Seeking Susan is a mistaken identity film in which various colorful New Yorkers, led by Roberta, desperately search the city streets without ever having the full or the correct information to find what they are looking for. Shenanigans and misunderstandings ensue, and because the audience is always one step ahead of the characters, all of this is often very funny, This the kind of film that I will always like, but for it to be truly great, it needs to either take its surreal absurdity up a notch or have a screenplay that is tight as a rock. As it is, Desperately Seeking Susan finds itself in the unenviable position of being the perfect companion piece to After Hours, without ever being able to measure up to it. It does have though absolutely exceptional costume and set design. One reason its screenplay is not as sharp as it could have been is because it features a lot of scenes which exist mostly to geek at Madonna and her outfits. Madonna released Like A Virgin during filming, and although the film was rewritten to cash in on her success, these scenes do have a purpose beyond just that. The film's fun  comes from putting New Yorkers with different attitudes and of different walks of life together, and Seidelman is clearly interested in how the aesthetics of these attitudes and walks of life clash and contrast. You may not be surprised to find whose aesthethics are presented as the way of the future, but you may reflect on how long it's been since a mainstream film/tv show presented such a progressive, loving and colorful view of life on the New York streets.

262. Wanda

Song - I Would Stay (Krezip)

Movie: Wanda (Barbara Loden, 1970)

When done right, there are few things in American cinema better than a romanticised outlaws-on-the-run movie. However, folks who can express themselves colorfully, who can present themselves as cool and attractively distinct individuals, and who are crafty enough to be able to conjure a vision of a better life, and to subvert authority in ingeniously nifty ways, aren't the kind of folks that need to become outlaws on the run in the first place. That's more likely to be the fate of people like Wanda (Barbara Loden), who lasts only two days at the sewing factory. She is too slow, according to her boss. We haven't seen her at the job, but the film never even tries to give the impression that he could have been wrong. Wanda is slow, both mentally and physically, and it's no surprise that when she ends up, almost by accident, in cahoots with a petty criminal she goes along for the ride. She lacks the (financial and intellectual) capacity/imagination to make active choices about her life. 

I had been under the impression that this is a film about a woman who, tired of being a submissive housewife, abandons her family for an adventurous life on the road where she can assert her independence. Barbara Loden was married to Elia Kazan, who was by some accounts, patronizing, lealous and dismissive of her ambitions. Despite that. Loden became one of the few women to direct, write and star in an American movie; having read that the film had some autobiographic elements, I expected it to be a reflection of her attitude and intelligence. Moreover, the film is considered a landmark of American feminist cinema, and contemporary American feminist cinema, with some exeptions, doesn't have much room for portrayals of women who are not primarily strong and independent. 

Barbara Loden is quite merciless in depicting how men abuse Wanda. Almost every man we meet uses her for sexual and/or material gain and the film is quite clear-eyed about the societal structures that make such exploitation possible. However, Loden is equally merciless in depicting the intrinsic negative qualities of Wanda, leaving little doubt that independently from whichever patriarchal structures exist, Wanda would be incapable of building a better life for herself. Those two ideas rarley live side by side in (American) movies these days - movies that present themselves as feminist are mostly about celebrating the great succeses of specific women who have overcome the hurdles on their way, but rarely question/depict what happens if you are simply incapable of doing that. Too many people refuse to acknowledge that individuals can fail for their own personal reasons regardless of whether existing societal structures are advantaging or disadvantaging them. 

It's an understatement to say that Loden doesn't depict its society as advantageous. Most of the film takes place in crumbling rural areas, crummy hotelrooms with barely anything beyond a bed, and on lonely highways. Everything looks so drab, grey and plainly unispiring that it almost feels too pessimistic to call it naturalistic. But the faces on display indicate that what we are seeing is indeed as depressing as it seems. Almost everyone in the film looks as broken down, defeated and disheveled as possible. Still, even within this context Loden manages to find moments of humanity, levity and dark self-deprecating humor - if the film was paced a bit faster it could have been a crime comedy. It's ultimately about two people who fumble crimes because they don't realise they are way in over their heads. I quite liked it and it does indeed feel as an indictment of American cinema that this is the only thing Loden got to direct.  

261. My Fair Lady

Song - Geef Mij Je Angst (Andre Hazes)

Movie: My Fair Lady (George Cukor, 1964)

This is the first Audrey Hepburn film I've seen and it's easy to see why she was so beloved. She essentially plays four different iterations of her character here - a coarse flower girl, a sincere pupil grappling with proper language and etiquette, an aristocrat, and an educated, confident working class woman. She is always effortlessly charming and likable, which is in this case more important than being effortlessly convincing. Eliza Doolittle's supposedly unadorned working class accent at the beginning is, even within the theatrical needs of the film, so over the top that it comes off as more affected than the posh speech of Henry Higgins (Rex Harrison), a linguistics professor who has bet his 'friend' Colonel Pickering (Wilfrid Hide-Whyte) that in just a couple of weeks he can pass off common Eliza as a duchess of wealth and sophistication.

Hepburn's performance is further challenged by the studio's demands, against her wishes, to dub most of the songs. As the camera is pointed straight at Eliza (often in close-up) during many of her songs, Hepburn's lyp sincing is extremely obvious and distracting. The dubbing however works in the film's favor during its greatest sequence at the Ascot race course, where the highest of Brtish high society meets to observe each other, solidify their place in the hierarchy and occasionally watch a horse race, This crowd is introduced in a series of still shots that are made to look like Impressionist paintings. All people are dressed in similar, yet distinctly different costumes in various shades of grey, black and white. The interplay of various colors and shapes creates some of the most impressive compositions I've ever seen in a film, and things only get better when Cukor introduces movement to these shots. The movement is however deliberately stiff and mechanical, as if we are watching diorama theatre, or one of those museum experiments where they take a classical painting and use the latest technology to stimulate/re-imagine the movements of the work's subjects. 

The sequence is not only a technical and stylistic wonder, it also completely re-arranges how we are supposed to see this film. Up until then Henry Higgins is presented as an obviously intelligent person who is comfortable with his position at the center of the London upper class. There are some jabs at his arrogance and chauvinism, but the film mostly doesn't seem to doubt the idea that it is just and right that this man is supposed to teach Eliza the ways of the world and that she will be obviously better off if she listens to him. In the process, it reproduces some, generously called, old-fashioned (even for 1964) ideas about class and gneder. In combination with the comfortably traditional musical theatre songs, it's easy to get the impression that beyond Audrey Hepburn, the movie doesn't have a lot going for it, especially if you are not a fan of populist American musical theatre. However, even before we get to Ascot, there is a fantasy sequence where Eliza dreams of the King murdering Henry, and an unexpected aside in which the house staff bursts into song demanding better working conditions. By the time Henry Higgins shows up at the horse races wearing a discordant brown suit, and is almost shunned by his mother for his lack of manners, you have to admit the movie is actually doing stuff.

What the movie is doing, among other things, is show how language, class and appearance are being used to hide more uncomfortable truths about both individuals and society as a whole. It is succesful in part thanks to the great performance of Rex Harrison who allows you to interpret Henry Higgins' posh, self-centered intellectualism as the defence mechanism of either a ragingly insecure charlatan mysoginist or a deeply closeted homosexual, without ever tipping his hand as to what interpretation should be correct (he is helped by the brilliantly ambigous song "Why Can't A Woman Be More Like A Man?"). It's worth noting too that even if you ignore the satirical subtext, Higgins succesfully passing off Eliza as a duchess is in itself quite a pointed criticicsm of the Britisch class system.  Unfortunately, as this was a major, highly expensive, studio film it can't end on the note it's been building up to and tacks on an entirely unfitting happy ending. It's as if The Social Network would have included a final frame showing that Zuckerberg's friend request is accepted.