In Which It Is A Vicious Cycle Really

Can't Start A Fire Without A Face Tattoo

by SHELBY SHAW 
 
The Place Beyond the Pines  
dir. Derek Cianfrance
140 minutes

The opening scene of The Place Beyond The Pines is a long take travelling from inside a trailer to inside a metal cage of death, three stunt motorcyclists speeding in arcs of physical defiance around one another. This is their job, day in and day out, from city to city. They are entertainers, risk-takers, vagabonds. They thrill to please for a few hours’ time until they make their long-awaited return the next year.

Like clichéd rock stars without any of the status or benefits or names, this is the never-ending cycle – albeit an unpredictable one set amidst a predictable string of domestic cities – in which Luke (Ryan Gosling) thrives.

The traditional tattoos adorning Luke’s blonde and innocently tough demeanor were co-designed by Gosling and Ben Shields, and all of them are fake – but that didn’t stop Gosling from telling director Derek Cianfrance that he felt like the face tattoo he originally insisted on, a small dagger with a drop of blood, was a tad overboard. “That's what happens when you get a face tattoo. You regret it and now you have to regret it for the whole movie,” Cianfrance had replied. And so we have our theme: living in post, dealing with past, coping in the present and seeming fine.

In Schenectady (which translates roughly from Mohawk to “the place beyond the pines”) Romina (Eva Mendes) cares for Luke’s unknown-to-him son, Jason. When Cianfrance reveals this, he lets the camera linger past the moment, Romina's mother Malena (Olga Merediz) eagerly offering Luke to Jason. He gravely cradles the baby, protective and proud and determined; he is quickly becoming a father in the doorway between entering Romina and Jason’s life and the porch that will lead Luke back to the carnival, back to leaving again for at least another year.

Romina is either always crying or trying to be the mature one in control of her conversations with Luke, who doesn’t show so much emotion with his face as with his actions. Could there be ladies like Romina all over the country for this traveling man?

We never find out exactly what happened between Romina and Luke – was it a one-night fling, a week long, a repeat during summers for years, just one day? At first this is frustrating because it could have been a major telling point in how they reacted with each other, or why they didn’t act in certain ways, but then I realized that it doesn’t matter. What matters is everything after he left, which is only coming together because Luke is back for a few hours by fate. The dialogue feels as if it may have been caught candidly on camera and polished up by a colorist. The longer takes let the story unravel as if – for once – we really were there.

Accomplice Robin (Ben Mendelsohn) understands that Luke needs money so he offers a resolution: rob a bank. He’s done it four times twelve years ago and stopped when suspicion started to come his way. He is nonchalant. He is serious. So he teaches the curious Luke how to do it: go for the oldest female bank clerk, then the meekest, don’t take out your gun. “I did four banks with a note,” Robin says.

Luke disregards the advice on his first heist. It’s humorous, but at the same time it’s not for laughing at as we watch the entire process slowly, wincing at how Luke doesn’t know what he’s doing. Yet these people are still scared as he kicks around their desks, shouting hoarsely. I’m surprised that no one really ever reacts during the hold-ups other than to remain calm and obey Luke. Wouldn’t cops start to notice his motorcycle escapes?

After the successful hold-up, he vomits in the back of Robin’s truck. He may be a stuntman by profession, but he isn’t a con artist. They’re about as excited as school boys who scored the hottest dates to the dance. At Robin’s they party to Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark,” a scene that feels almost awkwardly too long to watch, but that’s because it is. This is all these guys have to celebrate.

Luke is only ever dangerous twice: once lashing out on Romina’s boyfriend, Kofi (Mahershala Ali), in an almost expressionless state, and once in a passively aggressive move on Robin to get his money for a new bike. Violence doesn’t seem to be a part of baby-faced Luke, biker outlaw. When he sets out on the most fateful robbery yet, everything goes wrong before he even goes into the bank – you wince with every slip of his plan. 

This time delays allow the cops to catch up to him as he’s leaving, and a long pursuit ensues through the town, the cemetery, side streets. Luke is getting worse and worse at this game as it goes on, the camera transcending the viewer into a virtual reality, Luke getting trapped and banged up until on foot, running into the closest home. Avery (Bradley Cooper) is eager to take down the bad guy and is clearly on edge with Luke trapped on the top floor.

Here the movie folds into the second third of its triptych setup. By the time we meet Avery I’m surprised to start finding more screen time with the cop and his corrupt co-officers – the film could easily have finished out with Luke and Romina’s story. But Cianfrance keeps Luke in your mind not only because of his history and impact on the rest of the film, but because of what we’ve learned of Luke so far, which is enough to bring us so close we remember him even when he’s gone. Moving into the second part feels almost like a betrayal.

Cianfrance’s story isn’t so much three different stories as it is simply three parts along the timeline of one tale. He brings us into each part deep enough to become invested, and when we move on it’s jarring in an emotional way, missing the characters and stories we had been seeing. We are in the company of wolves with Avery now, and it is only the beginning; he takes an honorable risk to dismantle the corrupt police force and becomes assistant district attorney.

We then resume the story fifteen years later, which seems more like today, which is a beautiful thing Cianfrance has done from the beginning: he doesn’t lay out the opening year for you. Everything seems contemporary but with a strange twist – no smart phones, no hi-tech security in the banks, no fancy Apple computers there either, a disposable camera at the ice cream shop, and clothing that makes you wonder if they’re being hip – but they’re just living in the 90s, with no money, and not concerned over clothing trends. The only concern I have with the jump is the lack of change between Avery and wife Jennifer (Rose Byrne) then, and now. Fifteen years, a divorce and a kid don’t seem to have left any impression.

Avery’s son, AJ, now grown up as a high school senior with slicked hair, exposed chest hair, and a permanent scowl that looks like he could be wearing a mouth guard, moves in with Avery, now a successful man in the DA office, going after politics. We are not surprised to learn, at Avery's father's funeral, that he and Jennifer split up. AJ is careless in regards to school or life. Dad’s got a nice house and that’s all he needs. But he doesn’t have friends in Schenectady – still, it’s hard to feel bad for this kid who clearly just wants to cause moody trouble.

At lunch one day, the familiar cliché of the new kid without a table to sit at, you feel a little pity for AJ. He is a bitter standout among cliques of teens who don’t gel their hair or wear white tank tops. He sits across from a lanky boy, sitting alone, content with eating, looking sly though, a loner but not because he’s a rebel, a loner because he is meek in the company of his peers. He seems a little uncomfortable with AJ – clearly not the type of kid he would take for a friend – but admits he too does drugs, sure, we can leave right now to go smoke. It’s an adventure for them, bonding over whatever they can. As they get high in a tunnel the sound is distorted through marijuana and the façade of thinking they might have just made friends. AJ later has his friend get him ecstasy from a shabby run-down house on a dark town road. Leaving the dealer’s, the cops immediately bust the kids.

Coming to bail out his son, Avery asks about the other boy. His name is Jason Glanton, Luke and Romina’s son. Avery goes into the holding room where AJ tries to apologize, but Avery has him up against the wall, rough, “you can have anything you want but I don’t want you to fucking touch that kid.” AJ has no idea what’s going on, but Avery is terrifying. After AJ questions Jason about Kofi, Jason uncovers suppressed questions regarding his father, getting Kofi to tell him Luke’s name for the first time, which he then takes to Google to find out about Luke the outlaw and Avery the hero who killed him.

After Jason finds out Avery is AJ’s dad, he goes to his dealer’s house that night for a gun, bluntly giving us the foreshadowing for when he shows up in the mirror of AJ’s room the next morning, gun pointed, firing. When Avery comes home, unknowing of any of this, he stops on the stairs, as if suspecting something is wrong with his son – but he then backs down the stairs, Jason pointing the gun at him, giving commands. No word on AJ. Avery drives them into the woods where he and Jason have one of the tensest moments, the camera trailing slowly from the gun down Avery’s back, never knowing when, if it will go off. Jason is not a killer. Neither was his father. But we may have had the least amount of time with this character in this end of the triptych – maybe we don’t know him the way we thought.

The Place Beyond the Pines is not a straightforward narrative about fathers and sons – Cianfrance has made a film worth seeing because it’s more than just a story, it’s a complex layering of affairs, one set in a reality with which we are all familiar. He introduces us to an array of characters who could all be people we know, or ourselves. The cast doesn’t need to convince us of anything – we’re with them all the time, as they morph into dysfunctional families who have found ways of coping and living in routine, and as they deal with the secrets any family has.

Cianfrance’s pacing feels natural in the triptych story, revealing key points embedded in each scene, long and observant on the characters where the emotions are the actions. Sure, there are some thrilling chase scenes, some suspense, but the film isn’t so much about what the characters are doing as much as it is about how the consequences are affecting them; we learn what they do as they do, we put together the pieces as they do, in ways that leave us thinking it over again and again, taking it personally to try to figure out each character.

Cianfrance doesn’t have plot holes in his story, he has room for us to consider these people on levels beyond just script-deep. They aren’t flat at all, they’re fully dimensional like anyone else we know in our lives, neighbors we might see daily or people we share a commute with: we know who they are, what they do, we might know a little about their family or what they like, we might know a secret or two, but we don’t know everything about them. We can try to sympathize, and some of us might empathize, and for that we are brought a little closer to these characters. They move us, more than any other film ensemble of the year.

Shelby Shaw is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer and artist living in Chicago. You can find her website here. She twitters here and tumbls here.

"Post Nostalgia Withdrawal" - Mentalease (mp3)

"False Positive" - Mentalease (mp3)

In Which The Style Takes Over Completely

Perspective

by SHELBY SHAW 
 
Spring Breakers  
dir. Harmony Korine
94 minutes

In a strange way, I want to get to a point where the next movies are even more random and more incidental without them being overly arty. I just want things to become a succession of scenes, images, and sounds. I was thinking about the gallery show – the problem you run into doing multimedia projection is that a lot of the time, the style takes over. It threatens and reduces the content. It becomes almost like a music video – mixing all these forms for no reason.

– Harmony Korine, interviewed by Mike Kelley following the release of Gummo

For anyone who doesn’t know the name Harmony Korine, but has gone to see Spring Breakers, it is worth noting that this new generational movie is about as big in the film world as it is for moviegoers who can’t stop talking about Disney stars doing drugs in bikinis – on camera now.

Coming from the man who tried to do away with narrative, openly dismissing a threaded plot, Spring Breakers does just the opposite: four “college-aged” girls rob a fast food joint to fund their spring break. You might think they’re lethargic high schoolers upon meeting them, Brit (Ashley Benson) and Candy (Vanessa Hudgens) drawing penises and enacting air-fellatio during a lecture on Jim Crow laws, but the generic campus setting of the unnamed school somewhere in the south tells us these girls slog through in a bored haze and are most likely pursuing an Undecided major. The lack of characters and/or activity at their school can only be explained by the fact that we learn it is spring break (although why are they still attending and complaining about classes then?). Either way, we buy it: girls who don’t dress to impress anyone but their bed sheets, flip-flopping down fluorescent hallways and spending most of their time lounging aimlessly – passed out or getting high or both.

Apparently Christianity can be an extracurricular activity though, as Faith (Selena Gomez) happily claps in a prayer circle with her co-Christians. We get a few shots of her face though, pensively watching the leader without the same level of enthusiasm or belief as her peers. Regardless, she wears a sideways cross necklace throughout the movie to say “I’m Christian” without having to talk to strangers. If Selena Gomez actually looked like she were in the throes of college, it might be harder to pin Faith’s character, but considering Gomez’s face could today be mistaken for that of a child pageant contestant, round like an infant’s and without any sign of growing bone structure, the chaste and pure qualities that we learn are part of Faith don’t come through from the script – they come through our expectations of Faith. As if her name were not enough to clue us in, “Oh, she’s religious.”

Brit is the most pointless character, never actually saying much once they get down to Florida. She’s the natural-ish blonde quipping on the backs of her cohorts’ innuendos, laments for drugs and booze, and celebratory philosophies over being on spring break, ie the colloquial tagline of the film, “spring break forever bitches.”  Other than that, she is merely an object, just another body, and basically a prop good for threesomes in a pool and marketing bikini culture. I can’t help but wonder if Benson read the script and felt “attached” to the character (as actors are wont to gush), considering she doesn’t have a personality or set of opinions except that college is dumb and spring break is the eternal answer no matter what. At one point, after things take some turns for the weirder and worse, Candy and Brit both make phone calls to their mothers, leaving voicemails that sound like lies so much I hope that their characters were meant to lie and that Benson and Hudgens weren’t trying to act sincerely. Brit tells her mom that she thinks she has figured out the secret to having a good life: being a good person. If you think this foreshadows something then you may or may not be right.

After the girls have a serious discussion about totally getting out of this place where they’re so the last ones on campus, they decide to steal a professor’s car with the help of Cotty (Rachel Korine, wife of Harmony and mother of their child, Lefty Belle). Once stolen (the act unseen), Cotty drives Brit and Candy to The Chicken Shack, lets them out, and drives around the sad restaurant in a genius way of letting us see the two rob the inside with fake guns and ski masks on with baggy sweaters. We hear nothing but can tell it’s aggressively successful.

Cotty is the most promiscuous girl of the bunch, as Korine was the only one out of the four who appears topless –  and is topless plenty, drunkenly getting into crowds of horny bros and teasing them as she writhes, topless, on the floor of a bathroom, that they are not getting any of her pussy. The Korines met during the filming of Harmony’s 2007 film Mister Lonely, in which she played Little Red Riding Hood and was 17 at the time.

The girls convince Faith to come with them on their dream spring break to Florida, and Faith goes against the advice of her co-Christians who warn her that Brit and Candy are scary. “Pray super hard,” one girl advises. Faith smokes a cigarette on the way home. Strangely enough, she doesn’t smoke a cigarette once on spring break. I guess the pot she tries for the first time (and only time) is enough.

We never find out how much money the girls were able to rob from The Chicken Shack, but we do know they started out with $325 when they pooled all four of their cash stashes they had all been saving since the beginning of the year. They never mention where exactly they are or where they are going (you learn later they go vacay in St. Petersburg, FL) except that this sum is about as much as one night at the place they want to stay. After the burglary they not only have enough to go via the pre-gaming party bus, but stay at the hotel/resort/crackhouse party. We never find out how long they plan to be down there for either, as they continually declare that they never want to go back. “Fuck school!” Is this spring noir?

The film could almost act as a “love your body”  campaign; there might have been more skin than you’ve seen all year, but they certainly weren’t all the prettiest, and this is a reminder that cellulite is increasingly common, particularly when viewed in slow-motion.

Candy, with Hudgens’ dyed hair and tired eyes, seems the most desperate of the quartet when it comes to partying, or even enjoying each other as the girls are wont to do. Candy is insecure and often feels upstaged; she needs attention; she is a tease. To get over this, she is physically the loudest and flaunts herself suggestively the most, using words that sound like the epitome of a degrading sexual partner to frighten both Alien (James Franco) and the audience. The tense music helps as she and Brit shove loaded guns into Alien’s face, talking quietly and provocatively about the gun innuendo, the mood dissolving into resolution as Alien takes everyone by surprise and takes the gun shaft into his mouth, clearly enjoying it. The girls giggle in high pitches that seem to resonate throughout the film. Serious time is totes over.

Yet despite the bikinis as the only wardrobe (save for the matching pink unicorn-embellished ski masks and “DTF”  – or, “down to fuck” – sweatpants the girls don as unexplained uniforms around Alien), the near-naked gyrating in drunken and drugged-out hazes with men, women, and plenty of mouth action, there is sexuality painted all over these girls but it doesn’t ooze. They’re a canvas for sex; but they aren’t interactive pieces. It’s performance. Drinking, batting lashes, thrusting every body part into adjacent bodies, come-hither eyes and doing coke lines together… it never leads to anything sexual. When you fear for Cotty, she doesn’t need your worries, and Faith’s closest encounter with the other kind – in a moment of Alien trying to persuade her to stay on spring break with him – has her standing her guard that she wants to go home. Brit and Candy seem more into each other than any of the guys.

This is not a movie about sex. And that is comforting, after expecting a near porno, but at the same time it’s unsettling, and I would bet most viewers who identify with these girls and totally love them don’t realize that there is a farce to these girls’  purposes and that is exactly what the film is commenting on.

They have nowhere to go in life – they live mundane lives because they don’t apply themselves and they don’t care in school; they don’t seem to branch out to other people (they’ve known each other since kindergarten); they rarely speak to their family and they lie about what they’re doing when they finally do; they don’t act sexually in the hopes of acquiring sex, but rather for inclusion and attention; they compare hold-up at The Chicken Shack to playing a video game or pretending to be in a movie. They don’t accept reality, but make covers for it. They have no motivations and their sentiments have no groundings, even for Faith, who leaves a voicemail for her grandma and praises this place where she is, calling it the most spiritual place ever, with so many new friends, and a magical place of paradise she never wants to leave. We don’t know what she’s referring to as spiritual, and certainly this culture isn’t what she was a part of on her own campus (which doesn’t seem believable if she’s on spring break with the other three girls) unless she isn’t quite so innocent (she has no problem standing around in tiny bikinis). We don’t know exactly who she’s referring to as her new friends, since everyone in any shot is simply an un-identified partier, and the credits of the film only include “SPRING BREAK GIRL 1” and “SPRING BREAK GIRL 2” along with “CHEERLEADER TYPE,” and “JOCK 1” and “JOCK 2.” Everyone else is some variation of “MOTEL JOCK” and “BIKINI PARTY GIRL” and they are all uncredited spring breakers. Is this an extension of the farce? That today these people, this generation of American college students aren’t even people at all but just descriptors for each other in the age of Twitter-brevity?

The point is that the girls latch onto this unknown place as a place of salvation, which Faith points out to them during one of her few meta-physical musings which gets her laughs from her “friends.” She tells Alien, before leaving, that she came because she wanted to leave where she was and find where she belongs. That is all of their goals: to finally discover who they are, consciously, while on spring break. None of them seem to make any attempt to actually do this, and only really mention it when they seem to have second thoughts – or no thoughts at all – about what they’re really doing out in St. Pete’s with Alien after he bails them out of jail.

One by one they leave: if you can’t stand the heat, get out of the sun. Yet we don’t know how they get the money or what exactly they do once they’re gone. And for Candy and Brit, who are the last remaining relics of Spring Break, their takeover of Alien’s gangster drug-dealing business is so “let’s just do it!” it’s almost unnerving that they are invincible when raiding Alien’s nemesis, Archie (Guccie Mane), shooting everyone dead and not getting shot once. Just pretend like it’s a video game and you can get through. After they shoot the big boss and win the game, they drive away through the sunrise in their shiny new prize car, looks of utter boredom on their faces. Did they find themselves? Or is this a cliff hanger where the car is supposed to now give them the means to literally go after who they are really meant to be?

 

I cannot tell if Korine has written one giant metaphor on American youth culture – party culture – or if Spring Breakers is really just what it is on the surface: tits and drugs set to Skrillex with way too many unnecessary gun sound effects, enough slow-motion party scenes to make up a whole hour’s worth of music video footage, and cinematography that fits Korine’s instructions to his DP: make it look like every scene was soaked in Skittles. Casting famed Disney stars to do the opposite of what they’ve been given all their life isn’t throwing them Oscars (the dialogue was consistently either too flat and unnecessary, unbelievable, or downright too expository), and I doubt it really shocked any audience members. Is the joke on them, exploited as the very girls they probably appeal to? If so, is it possible that Rachel was in on some form of personally gathering notes on this lifestyle? The four girls did, after all, share a trailer to get that tight bffs vibe, and Rachel was raised in a strictly conservative, no-spring-break household. There is a lot she could learn from child actors grown into her own age bracket. Besides, Korine is known to leave the camera rolling and capturing “candid” footage to use, or as in the case of Gummo, leave the set completely. Is this a caught-on-camera look at American party youth?

Harmony Korine is a director to know, whether or not Spring Breakers ever came out. For those who are familiar with him, it’s worth watching to see where he’s taken his usual use of multimedia capture formats and repetitive shots, cutting up his chronology closely without regards to time. Consider what it means to make Spring Breakers after using cat torture, anti-narrative, and trash humping as memorable calling cards to your directorial force. Or, you can do what I did and call upon the memories of Spring Breakers-esque culture from your high school past to try to figure out the mentalities of these girls. I’ll never know if I figured them out, but maybe that’s because we weren’t bffz and didn’t go on ~*~spring break~*~ together.

Shelby Shaw is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer and artist living in Chicago. You can find her website here. She twitters here and tumbls here.

"Pretty Me" - Laura Jansen (mp3)

In Which We Go On After It Happens

What She Doesn't Know

by SHELBY SHAW

Red Widow
creator Melissa Rosenberg

ABC’s new series, Red Widow, is the American redo of a Dutch show called Penoza. Aside from this version being shot in well-to-do Northern California and the need to constantly introduce tropes of American family values, the plot remains between the two versions of the show: Marta Walraven (Radha Mitchell) must take over the business of her husband (Anson Mount) after he is murdered.

By “business” it isn’t his work at the marina per se, but the Russian mafia drug-trading he was roped into by marrying Marta in the first place, she a sort-of mafia whose suspicious brother Irwin (Wil Traval) had convinced Evan to join. 

For one thing, Marta seems strangely clueless about anything involving her own family’s trade. Her father is some big mobster who hangs in a dark place called Café Russiya, but apparently he cannot really protect her and her family when she wants to be disconnected.

We never really learn the extent of her father’s power in the mob, or why he isn’t more powerful. If anything, Marta seems like more of an outsider. She doesn’t entirely know what Evan and Irwin are ever doing for business, and she has no idea about the details involving their protection and relations with the cops. She seems to think that if Evan fails to pull them out of the business and she left with their three children, that she would be safe even without a husband. He gently reminds her often that she doesn’t understand, which is painfully evident.

It isn’t clear what Marta does while Evan is at the marina doing business and the kids are at school. At one point, a police officer states that she’s a housewife and I realize that without this statement I may not have known – Marta is always somewhere or at an event, like her sister Kat’s (Jaime Ray Newman) wedding.

But that’s just it – everything moves so quickly, it’s hard to get a grounding on who these people really are. Sure, we get just enough facts to put together a family portrait, and of course we are left in the dark about most things because a series needs to reveal information weekly, but in terms of the characters as real people… there just seems to be something amiss with each of them, something that doesn’t make them fully human or three-dimensional.

Take their youngest child, Boris (Jakob Salvati), who acts as the catalyst for Marta wanting out of the business in the first place. He brings Evan’s gun to school one day in an attempt to defy his bully, and to be honest, the foreshortened camera angle on the cocked and loaded gun is kind of terrifying because I am not ready to see this kind of gore. But after the scene promptly ends with a cut to the principal’s office, followed by Marta warning Evan that she’ll leave him, the entire thing is forgotten and never mentioned again. Nobody seems fazed that Boris almost killed another child, in public at school, or that he even got a hold of Evan’s gun. Nobody seems to be concerned about what Boris is going through, about the bully, or about whether he learned his lesson.

After Evan dies close to the end of the pilot (for a show called Red Widow I wouldn’t consider this to be a spoiler alert), the necessary montage of crying family members at the hospital is a nice slowness that gets you to feel something after nearly 30 minutes of exposition. But again, the next day hardly feels like the father of these children, the husband of this woman, the friend to his coworkers, has not only died (in front of Boris) but was murdered. Wouldn’t you take a break from your life, mafia or not? It’s only when Marta comes home to find the police ransacking their house that she reminds them (and us) that her husband is barely cold, as she puts it. As much as the dialogue is exposition for our sake as third-party viewers, I feel as if the entire episode is composed purely of self-conscious wording, not genuine lines to tell each other but to tell the viewers.

I don’t want to find out what happens to these people. I’m guided by tropes left and right and can’t begin to imagine how any plot-twist might surface (and would it really surprise us?), not to mention the music tells you everything before it even happens. From this sampling of the series, I’ve learned that nobody really knows anything, the family is dysfunctional because they don’t really interact much on screen, and anything that could be considered devastating might very well not even change the characters’ interiors.

Shelby Shaw is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer and artist living in Chicago. You can find her website here. She twitters here and tumbls here.

"My Home" - Soul Square ft. Racecar (mp3)

"Another Breath" - Soul Square ft. Racecar (mp3)