Review: Birds of Paradise (Prime, 2021)

Written and directed by Sarah Adina Smith, Birds of Paradise is a seductive YA drama about entering into a strange new world to become the best ballet dancer. Set both on the stage of the Paris Opera Ballet School and in a surreal nightclub/dance space called Jungle, the film has beautiful colors and stark, moody atmospheres that set it inside the canon of movies like Black Swan or Suspiria. 

Kate (Diana Silvers), an American ballet student who has been given a brand new scholarship to the Paris Opera Ballet, is tasked with beating out all the other female students to be part of the cast. Surrounded by the French youth elite and unable to speak any French, she quickly learns that not only did she accidentally receive the dead-brother-of-the-meanest-girl-in-school scholarship to attend, but also it does not cover expenses. Just the school and a shared room (which just so happens to be with said mean girl queen, Marine).

After a difficult first day, Kate finds herself not only rooming with Marine (Kristine Froseth), but having to share the same bed due to the size of the house where all the ballerinas live. As a challenge, Marine takes Kate to the hidden, exotically neon dance club, Jungle. But, in order to win the respect of Marine and her onlooking peers, she must swallow a (drugged) worm and compete in a dance-off. Whoever stops first, drops out of the school. As they collapse into a glittery, luminescent, Suspiria-esque frenzy, both Marine and Kate quickly realize they can’t maintain more than a few minutes of sustained, extremely zonked dancing and agree to stop together.

Back home, thanks to drugs and the power of dancing, they become fast friends and agree to make a pact. They will be the first female/female winners of the competition, which is meant to produce a male/female pair.

Birds of Paradise is a young adult drama in the style of many popular series at the moment. It has a highly charged, sexually active school, where all genders are living down the hall from each other. It has competition and an underdog protagonist, it has mean girls who become friends, and it has an evil (mother-type) headmaster. But where the film succeeds most is in its look. Playing with very stark contrasts - the performance room, where they all audition and practice, is blindingly bright, while the waiting area, where they all watch and prepare for their names to be called, is dark and moody - the cinematography does a lot of work to separate the modes of reality. Where it is dark, things are real and catty. Where it is light, performance is expected at a high standard. Clean movement, watchful eyes. Many moments in the film are surreal - in the first shot, before the movie really starts, there is a glittery, ethereal dancer in a dark forest, wearing a silver bird mask, which will come back many times as an echo of the drugged out jungle club night.

This choice, to play with what is and is not real, elevated the film from a pretty typical mean girl plot, to something with a bit more feeling and interest. There are class disparities between Kate and the rest of the students, which is used to strengthen the relationship between Kate and Marine (who is the daughter of the French Ambassador to the United States), but it feels thought through. Though, it is still part of what makes Kate the underdog (along with her American-style of ballet, which is described as rigid and lacking grace).

By the end, the film rushes to tie up the disparities between its choices, perhaps spending too little time on its final sequence and allowing it to devolve into a spoken mythology or folk story instead of letting the story naturally progress into abstraction as a metaphor.

Birds of Paradise is toned-down Suspiria and more-often-weird Black Swan. It is a fine film to add to the sexy, strange ballet canon.

Review: The Voyeurs (Prime, 2021)

The Voyeurs is a sexy thriller that hits a few bumps along the way. Starring Sydney Sweeney and Justice Smith, the film has all the potential to be a campy, moody drama about what we see in the lives of other people’s windows. Lust, infidelity, and struggling relationships are all on the table from the beginning of The Voyeurs. But, despite plenty of twists in the plot, what happens is tonally lackluster and comes close to what a CW show would look like if it were made by HBO.

Pippa (Sydney Sweeney) and Thomas (Justice Smith), move into a Montreal highrise apartment, which happens to have wall-to-ceiling, gorgeous windows. Having dinner on their freshly unpacked living room floor, they notice their neighbors having a photoshoot in the building directly across from them. Devolving quickly into sex, Pippa and Thomas debate the ethics of watching another couple, who happen to leave their curtains wide open all of the time. This, of course, escalates throughout the film into an increasingly obsessive exchange between the “unwitting” neighbors, who have a very active sexual life (involving infidelity), and our protagonist couple. Thomas thinks they should mind their own business and Pippa needs the fire of voyeurism to keep her, perhaps slightly dulled, relationship alive. 

Despite many fairly graphic and showy sex scenes, the drama of Pippa and Thomas’ relationship doesn not escalate believably, until he catches her interfering with the neighbor’s relationship by sending printed notes to the wife, Julia (Natasha Liu Bordizzo), via her wifi printer. He freaks out and breaks the binoculars she bought to spy on them before going back to bed, alone. In the morning, over coffee, they make up and Pippa promises to never spy on them again. As they embrace, Now that all this weirdness is behind them, but Pippa sees that Julia has committed suicide. Convinced she had something to do with it, and justifiably pretty freaked, Thomas leaves to stay with his sister. They break up.

If this were the last turn in the plot, if it devolved into obsessive what if’s, and if Pippa were to seek help for her broken, stalker brain, the film would have been only okay. What happens though, is many thriller-style twists and turns - sometimes for better, but often for worse. When Thomas leaves to stay with his sister, it seems the story is at its lowest point. The neighbor’s wife has committed suicide after finding out about his infidelity, thanks to Pippa. Thomas, the loving partner who is concerned about his obsessive girlfriend, leaves, maybe forever. Pippa learns a hard lesson about spying on your neighbors through their open, giant, well-lit windows. The end.

But the film is only half over.

[Note: Spoilers after this point, also content warning: Suicide]

The Voyeurs use of suicide as a plot device is not out of the ordinary for this kind of thriller, but unfortunate. While it does do some work to embody depression and the trauma of losing a partner, it does not quite make up for the fact that in the end it was all a game. The photographer neighbor had been filming Pippa and Thomas the whole time, for art purposes. At the debut of his new exhibit, it turns out that everything is on display for the audience: Pippa, who in a moment of weakness and lingering obsession after Thomas left went to the neighbor’s place and had sex with him, is pictured naked, posing for a portrait awkwardly. Photos of Pippa and Thomas moving in together, photos of them spying, photos of them fighting, and even a shocking photo of Thomas’s body hanging from the living room rafter. It was a setup.

A lot of work is made to set up the different elements that will come to play in the final third of the movie. Pippa is an optometrist, which she has spent the last decade going to school for, an element that has perhaps made her relationship lose some steam and delay a happy romance, and will ultimately use her training to blind her artist nemesis as a final act of revenge. Her optometrist mentor gives her a Japanese bird feeder, which is meant to hold water, but later reveals that the special water Thomas often drinks had been poisoned, rendering his suicide a murder by the photographer neighbors. And the extravagantly sexualized life of the neighbors was all a ruse, put on to be enticing to watch from across the way, which they describe in an interview as being “no different” than what we do on social media to each other: stalk, watch, put on a show. A window is just a screen, after all. And, of course, they did sign a waiver, which had been conveniently placed on the final page of their long lease agreement (which the artists describe as, again, “no different” than failing to read the Terms of Service for any website or device).

Overall the film was just fine. It could have been much shorter, and spent more time developing the drama and obsessions of its characters. Many scenes were filled with completely unnecessary dialogue: “look over there, through the window”, “I don’t think we should be doing this”, “don’t you feel guilty”, etc., which could have been much more effective in silent character or camera work. The soundtrack, which is generally good, interrupts many moments of emotional drama to bring a sad tune or a tense lofi beat, which is well within the modern style of films in 2021, but annoying and needless. 

In the end, the movie pays off all its promises. Voyeurism is at the heart of the film and it is sexy, but also it comes with a mile of guilt and judgement. The acting is good, but the writing is only serviceable for them to work with. Everything wraps up in the end. Bad guys get what they deserve. The protagonist walks away with a little bit of vengeance.

Review: Wolves In The Throne Room "Primordial Arcana"

Primordial Arcana is an album that flows so effortlessly between tracks that it is nearly half over by the time you realize it. The transitions, where the discordant and the serene meet, are so important to how immersive the album becomes - not only in scope, or size, or brightness, but in theme. In the second track, for example, there is a persistent plucking sound (banjo, or nylon-stringed guitar, or something I can’t place immediately) that weaves the sections together if only because it is present, and when it goes, discordance seeps in and the journey darkens. But then it returns, and the rhythm settles into a catchy groove, and the song stabilizes. But it’s not just this simple pluck, the transitions throughout the album are designed in such a way that make the path unknowingly easy for the listener.

Returning to Thrice Woven, Wolves In The Throne Room’s last full length album, the transitions were not as smooth. They weren’t bad or wrong or incredibly jarring, but it definitely felt like the precise cohesion of Primordial Arcana (especially when you compare a track like “Spirit of Lightning” to “Born From The Serpents Eye,” which I feel are similar in structure and epic scope). They feel blunt and shocking, as if the discordance between the brutal and trashing blast beat segments were at war with the quiet, slower sections. This is not a problem, but a key difference that struck me as I travelled between the albums. 

The mixing (including sound and tone design), which the band took on entirely in their own studio for the first time, is so much clearer than previous releases. There is a classic feel to some of the instrument intonations, especially in tracks like “Masters of Rain and Storm,” where the synthesizers remind of early For All Tid by Dimmu Borgir (still one of my favorite and most frequently returned to albums), or on “Primal Chasm (Gift of Fire),” where a catchy, thrashy guitar riff is purpose-built for headbanging for hours. Throughout many segments of the album, which I grew to see as many movements in the same palette, I was amazed by how much space and diversity there was in the mix. It’s huge, but also clear. Each track feels like it grew from the bones of what came before it, but is still entirely in it’s own carve out on the album.

Kody Keyworth, who has been in the band for a while but is not often involved in the writing process from the start of an album, brings a large amount of influence to the overall cosmic feel to the album. The energy is different - not only in the transitions and the mixing, which play a big role I’m sure, but in the way the synthesizers and other elements are fronted in the composition. Celestite, from 2014, was primarily a dungeon synth album from Wolves In The Throne Room, but for me Primordial Arcana is the full picture for how those interests and ideas can be integrated into something that feels classically beautiful in the way For All Tid does, or Il Etait Une Forêt… by Gris.

So often new Black Metal falls into a compositional rut, especially in the DSBM space that I often find myself drawn to, where the riffs go on forever. There’s a special kind of conceptual and physical suffering that is meant to be implied - the riff is so brutal that it must go on until the point you just can’t fucking stand it anymore, and then the track breaks into the halftime beat and it’s epic. This often works, but when you listen to as much black metal as I do, it gets very exhausting. Primordial Arcana does a lot of work to make sure this never happens. By varying the compositions and by keeping each section only as long as it is needed, the songs move with emotion and character - they rise further than you think they can, but they also fall quickly into silence. A guitar heavy, blasting section will often transition into something bigger and more melodic without losing its fierceness.

In “Masters of Rain and Storm,” which is immediately furious, there is a change about every 30 seconds (even if it is small), until the first real breakdown happens at two minutes. Everything falls away and is built back again slowly. Big crashes. Guitar riff. Nice Bass line. Then, when the double bass comes back things fall away again and the synth takes over. There is almost no guitar at all. It’s very quiet. But no energy is lost! It’s wild. Yet, it feels cohesive, even when the neofolk-esque acoustic guitar takes the forefront at the sixth minute, and again things fall away into a cavernous stillness. It feels like one emotional stake in the earth built up around this album.

This emotionality is key to what makes the album feel like it fits within the Cascadian Black Metal sub genre, where the post-metal and shoegaze influences bring space and diversity, and allow the album to expand further. Ritualistic Black Metal, Dungeon Synth, Cascadian Black Metal, whatever it is, I love it. It will always core me out and bring me back to life. The album ends with an instrumental track, “Eostre,” where the running water leads us out of the forest, into the mountains, and further on our journey, away.

In the “Wolves In The Throne Room recommends” section of the Bandcamp page, is Bell Witch’s Mirror Reaper. A perfect pairing for anyone new to either band.

Primordial Arcana is out now on Relapse Records.

Jumbo, Or: How to Waste An Absurd Plot

Jumbo is a film I first heard about in the early months of 2020. As it made its rounds at Sundance and other film festivals pre-pandemic, the noise was: it’s a strange film where a young woman has a relationship with an inanimate object and has one of the actresses from Portrait of a Lady on Fire, who is phenomenal. This was enough for me to insist that my partner not look up anything about this film and that we should both avoid trailers, spoilers, reviews, etc. until it came out (which happened finally in May).

Here is my spoiler free plot summary and review before we get to the issues I have with the film and how I’d fix it:

Jeanne lives at home with her single mother and is suffering from some pretty acute anxiety. Having finally reached the age where she is allowed to work, she’s decided she has always loved the amusement park in town and that it would mean a lot to her if she worked there. As a night-shift custodian, she is left alone in the park with all the rides. Fascinated by the big new tilt-a-whirl the amusement park recently acquired, she decides to climb its arm to clean the light bulbs and marvel at its mechanisms. She’s enamored by the machine and the machine, it seems, is enamored by her. It starts to respond and “speak” to her through a series of flashing lights and movements. She names it Jumbo.

Her mother, who has her own troubles and also works odd hours, is determined to get her a date with the park manager, who is young and handsome. The park manager is invited over to their house, he drives her home in the morning, and goes out of his way to talk to her. Her mother, who has also taken a new partner, thinks things are moving in the right direction for them both. But Jeanne’s love and further exploration of her own sexuality and romantic interests with Jumbo get in the way.

Unfortunately, despite it’s rather interesting premise, Jumbo fails to create believable character actions and wastes a lot of the thrust of the film’s absurdity on a rote and uninteresting story about a troubled daughter and her mother. Released in a time when films like Swallow and Under The Skin are taking body/object/horror to new levels, Jumbo falls more in the tone of an afterschool special than a film with anything meaningful to say about love and the ways in which emotion can sometimes be shelved into objects we find thrilling or attractive. Noémie Merlant, who plays Jeanne in the film, does a serviceable job embodying a poorly written and depthless character - but, and this will be a big part of what I would change about the film in a rewrite - barely speaks to anyone about anything. Because the character is alone for large parts of the film, falling in love with a silent object that communicates through flashing lights and big mechanical movements, Jeanne becomes shallow. Her actions don’t mean anything, especially towards the climax, and when the film ended I was left with the feeling that nothing mattered. The conclusion was predictable instead of inevitable. 

Here is where the spoilers and re-write start:

The problems I had with Jumbo can largely be summed up as: The plot choices made by the writer/director were not explored deeply and, as the audience, we were not given someone to discover Jeanne through. It is obvious that the anxious main character, who has spent a lot of her life in her room building models of the theme park rides, is lonely. It is obvious she lives with her mother, who is a broken person after a recent (?) divorce, and that they don’t really know each other. 

The predictable nature of the plot rolls out like this: While her mother is proud that she is now working and out of the house, she wishes her daughter were normal. Jeanne, who has happily found love with Jumbo and is fulfilled for the first time in her life, exposes this relationship to her mother (who she thought she could trust for some reason). Her mother rejects it, destroys her room and causes her to run away (kind of). She returns and her mother accepts her thanks to the new happiness/relationship she also has recently found. Jeanne and Jumbo get “married” while the mom’s boyfriend beats up some kids who were teasing her. The end. The moral being: people find happiness differently than you and you can’t help who or what you love.

Sounds interesting enough. Typical story. We all want acceptance. But where this movie fails is in creating an environment or any character where the change from not-accepted to accepted is felt to be a monumental shift between the two parties. The absurdity of falling in love with a big tilt-a-whirl (and having sex with it) is wasted by an after-school level of character depth and action. There was never a point where I felt it was necessary that the mother accept Jeanne’s odd behavior or love, so when it finally happened the impact was very low on the emotional relevance scale. 

How do you fix this?

There are two big problems with the writing of this film: 1) The main character is almost always alone (especially at the park at night), and 2) the absurd elements happen in act one, which deflates the actual crisis/climax of the film when it happens. If your pitch is: troubled young woman falls in love for the first time, but it’s with a machine! I expect that to be the emotional crisis of the film. What the hell is going to happen? How will she live her life in love with a ride at a seasonal theme park? What if the town finds out? What if her MOM finds out? To be fair, some of the climax revolves around “what if the town finds out,” but because the plot is very rote it also becomes “will my mom be convinced that I am in love?” and “will Jeanne be sent to a mental institution?”

Problem #1: the main character is almost always alone

One of the elements of this film that I think would be fairly easy to fix, if you were doing a page 1 rewrite, would be to add a character who also works at the park to help explain some of the things that are poorly shown, or briefly mentioned, about Jeanne. By adding a friend you create a vehicle for late night conversations and a springboard for tension. A character can still be anxious and troubled and lonely while not always being alone. So you have a few options of course, but in order to accelerate this film into the artsy emotional film it wants so badly to be, I believe this friend character needs to be: a) a best friend from school who Jeanne is secretly romantic for but has never pursued and b) someone who leaves suddenly. By making this new character someone who is already a friend you create the opportunity for deeper conversations (or any conversation at all) that don’t need to fully explain why Jeanne is the way she is. It creates space to talk about the troubles she is having without having to explain their origin. As someone who she feels great affection for, this character could become the romantic interest of Jeanne that is unrequited - forbidden, uninterested, lusted after. So when the new character leaves, all of that pent up pubescent energy can be suddenly transferred to the object - the exciting new, flashing, and powerful Jumbo. By removing the object of her affection and replacing it with a literal object, the absurdity has purpose. The lonely, troubled young person, who is perhaps waking for the first time to her own intimacy, misdirects her love/sex/lust onto something wild. Something weird and exciting. 

Problem #2: The absurd elements happen in act one, which deflates the actual crisis/climax of the film when it happens.

The crisis/climax of the first act (which becomes the thrust for the inciting incident of the second act) is: Will Jeanne actually have sex with this machine, which has somehow come alive? Yes. She strips. She licks the machine oil from the hydraulic joints. She enters a white portal where she is slowly covered with black goo (very similar to Under The Skin). She masterbates while being held up by the machine, high into the sky with the city lights in the background. Yes, she has sex with the machine. 

After this happens in the first ~20 min or so you think: holy shit. This movie is going to be wiiiiiilllldddd if they’re doing this early in the plot. But it’s not. Afterwards we return to the human world filled with very common human problems. After the park manager finds out that she is literally making out with this machine, he announces in front of the entire town that the machine is being sold away. Jeanne shows her mom her “boyfriend” and her mom is confused and pissed - threatens to send her to an institution. Jeanne has sex with the park manager to try to experience what real love/sex is, but it’s terrible. But none of that really matters because in the end all Jeanne needs is the acceptance of her mother and to be literally married to this machine (before it is sold off...). 

Okay. So how do you fix this?

By solving Problem #1, you create a solution for Problem #2. The crisis / climax of the first act becomes the crisis / climax for the entire film instead (or even the ending - she finally goes off the deep end, she finally has sex with the hot twirly machine). The absurdity is pushed to the climax because it is where all the tension lies in the pitch. The entire time you’re thinking: when is this lady going to make love to that machine? It’s in the description. It’s the one thing this movie is about. But what if it wasn’t? What if the movie was actually about how we harbor feelings and when those feelings are unrequited we push ourselves further into our existing insecurities and pains? What if instead of a missing father we had a missing early crush? What if instead of a troubled mother leading us into a troubled daughter we had the secret actions of a troubled young person who was just trying to find love, goddamnit!? Remove the mom’s performative sexuality and crude jabs; remove the stand-in father figure (mom’s boyfriend); and develop the main character so that when she is naked in the very first scene, and then later has sex with a machine, we know why. We are there, as awkward as it is, in repulsion or rejoicing, with her. By seeding in the absurd implications of the pitch throughout the film, instead of all at once, we create tension and mystery. Is she imagining it? Is the machine really responding to her? 

Horse Girl, written by Jeff Baena and Allison Brie, creates a similar plot and executes it really well. At many points in the film the main character is wondering: Is this real? Am I losing it? Does anybody hear me? As the audience, we’re there the whole time. We see what Allison Brie’s character sees. We are given small glimpses into the absurd in each act, escalating in length and excessiveness, until: boom, the story climax - full tilt insanity (maybe?). The tensions are reserved, built up, then released slightly, then doubled back on even harder. 

In the end, Jumbo is a fine movie that I had high hopes for. It uses an absurd premise to bring in an audience but fails to deliver on an impactful plot. It definitely delivers on the absurd premise, but for what reason? If the first act were a short film, it would be slightly better.

Jumbo is a french drama film from 2020, which was written and directed by Zoé Wittock, stars Noémie Merlant, Emmanuelle Bercot, and Bastien Bouillon, and can be found on VOD.  

The Camera's Point of View in "Pieces of a Woman" (Review, Writing Craft)

“Pieces of a Woman” (2021, Netflix)

Pieces of a Woman is a film about the grief of a failed home birth, where the cause is not quite clear. All of the characters struggle with the incident in different, diverse ways - ranging from anger, to revenge, to relapsed drug and alcohol addiction, to the cold isolation of our protagonist, Martha (Venessa Kirby). While this plot is not at all unfamiliar, the film excels in delivering emotion through the camera. Lengthy, single-shot sequences move through rooms, seemingly pausing on where the emotion is most felt. Running water in a sink filled with old dishes, a dead plant in the window, and someone setting a table in the background of a more dominant conversation are all examples of moments when the person talking is not the focus of drama. The camera has its own point of view.

The third film from Hungarian writer/director team Kata Wéber and Kornél Mundruczó, Pieces of a Woman falls into the lineage of modern-traditional dramas like Non-Fiction, Burning, and The Meyerowitz Stories, where classic filmmaking techniques meet modern pace and themes. It’s not afraid to be slow in moments where the emotional state of the story feels endless. The focus surrounds characters instead of centralizes them, reserving the hard-cut, close-in style shots for when the tension is the highest. Like a play, the actors move through rooms as if there were no camera at all, seamlessly interrupting and then re-starting conversations. Each character has their own motivations and internal logic, which gives the world tension even though it surrounds a very personal, and deeply internal theme. The actions never feel out of character, or brash, even when they have every reason to be. In a lesser movie drinking glasses would have been thrown through living room windows, but instead the protagonist stands in silence, trying to internalize what was just said to her, and then leaves, because the reality of what you or I would probably do in that situation is: we’d just leave.

The progressive complications in this film is that the protagonist’s family, specifically the mother, is pressuring her to pursue, and testify to, legal action against the midwife at her home birth - a conversation made even more complicated by the quiet antagonism of their relationship. In a single shot, which lasts seven minutes and thirty-five seconds, we see this tension come to a breaking point. Conversations start with small talk in the living room, which acts as a hub between a few rooms that the camera flows in and out of freely. For a while, our point-of-view follows the most dominant part of the conversation. The mother holds the floor, momentarily, to tell them about how she’s been arranging furniture for friend’s houses, then the brother-in-law makes small talk about playing music. The sister gets bored and leaves to set the table, away in the background by the window the scene began in (not gone entirely), transitioning back to the living room only when Sean (Martha’s partner, Shia LaBeouf) asks if she needs help. Martha lingers, isolated in the kitchen with her mother, not talking, and then in the sitting room alone, getting a drink. She wanders through the main conversation and then to the record player to put on music, which embodies well the listless feeling of being at a family gathering with nothing to do. Until the conversation turns to how the brother-in-law’s friend quit making music because he wanted to have a child. Then the camera stops on Martha only. Closer in. No longer fluid. She interrupts them, but the camera stays on her - even when the tension in the room is bubbling up, even when people are back-peddling and apologizing, or trying to shake it off as not a big deal. “Why are we even here?” Martha says. 

“Pieces of a Woman” (2021, Netflix)

Her mother takes the floor to answer, still in the same shot but moving again as the brother-in-law storms out of the room (in just the corner of the frame). A cousin, who is the lawyer for the civil case against the midwife, stands next to the mother for backup, but the rest of the characters splinter - adding their two cents before leaving. The sister goes off to her husband, yelling “you need therapy!” Sean disappears into the sitting room out of frame to pour another drink. The cousin stops the music Martha put on earlier and then leaves the frame too. Only the mother and Martha remain, to break the underlying conversational tension into plain, outright speak, at the window where the entire scene began. 

This kind of setting and scene choreography is crucial to the mood of the film. In a climate where tension and actions rely heavily on quick-cutting scenes and reaction shots, Pieces of a Woman lingers. Steadily building atmosphere and mood, until the moment to cut away is unbearable. This happens a few times in the film, but even when the shots are tighter and cuts are more frequent, the point of view is always conscious. Crossing over store shelves, following the meandering protagonist in her grief, we’re shown the image of Martha through the other side of a produce shelf. Almost voyeuristically watching as she picks up an apple, smells it, then puts it down to move on to the next apple, until finally we cut to a close up when she’s found the apple she wants.

“Pieces of a Woman” (2021, Netflix)

This lingering, distracted point of view, can help to give dimensionality to prose and dialogue. One of the techniques I’ve been working on in my writing this year has been what Robert McKee calls Trialogue, in his book Dialogue: The Art of Verbal Action on the Page…, which is defined as “the triangular relationship between two characters and the third thing through which they funnel their struggle.” When we talk to someone on more than just a superficial level, there is often something between us that may or may not come to the abrupt surface of a conversation. Whether that’s an object that interrupts the conversation (as in Marriage Story, when a kitchen wall is between a tense exchange that the characters must navigate when they want to see one another’s face in the other room), or a pre-occupation (as in Private Life, when reviewing a nearly pornographic piece of fiction from their niece highlights the vulgarity and oddity of a couple’s struggle to conceive and copulate). The third thing can provide a way to say something direct without the writing feeling too on-the-nose or obvious. Pieces of a Woman’s third thing is grief. Characters often go to great lengths to avoid dealing with their own grief (offering to move to a different state and start life over, insisting legal action be taken and justice be served, or returning to work before properly dealing with the damage done both mentally and physically to the body), often resulting in even greater unhappiness. The characters and the plot are more immense because they are preoccupied and struggling.

Pieces of a Woman is a beautiful study on grief and time film by Kata Wéber and Kornél Mundruczó out now on Netflix.

"Black Bear" and How to Externalize Drafting in Film (review)

[Please Note: If you are sensitive to spoilers, this review contains minor plot spoilers and full structural spoilers. But! I don’t think this will at all ruin your experience seeing the film. Part One is discussed in detail.]

Lawrence Michael Levine’s new film, Black Bear, is a visualization of the creative process. Starring Aubrey Plaza, Sarah Gadon (Elisa from True Detective Season 3), and Christopher Abbott (Will from It Comes at Night), the film externalizes what it’s like to write rough drafts; twisting them further into a meta and emotional narrative. 

Allison, played by Aubrey Plaza, is introduced on a dock, looking out into a foggy lake. She’s searching for a way to execute the central plot she has in mind for her new film. Returning to a lake house, which is central to every part in the film, she sits at a table and begins to write, titling the top of the page: Part One: The Bear In The Road. Placing herself in the scene, she cuts to Allison arriving at the lake house’s long driveway, where Gabe is waiting to help with her bag. Gabe and Claire are a young couple and the lake house has been in Gabe’s family for a long time. Allison, in Part One, is an indie film writer and director, searching for a place to get away - to maybe start her new work (a writer writing about a writer who may be writing, the meta begins).

Upon arriving, Allison finds that Claire and Gabe are on rocky ground with each other. They’ve left their lives in the city to see if the lake house will help them become a better couple for their soon to be expected child. Allison sees there is tension and pretty quickly does everything she can to tighten the screw on their relationship. She’s purposefully obtuse, which causes the couple to disagree at almost every turn in the discussion, she leans in to the obvious attraction Gabe has for her, and things get more tense from there forward. 

Then, once Part One comes to a tragic, but perhaps too-sudden resolution, there is a black screen - Part Two: The Bear In The Boat House. The second draft begins.

If the film stopped at the end of Part One, which runs about 45 minutes, it would be fine. Not great, pretty good. Fine. The acting is great, the writing is solid, but the plot is a little easy and you see the end coming from a ways away. This is the first draft any writer will be familiar with. You have some things to say, you know roughly where they land in the plot arcs, and then you execute a kind of almost there not so good but serviceable finish. 

Then you start over. The process begins again and here is where the film rewards you for paying attention. Elements return, they’re blown out into the meta narrative of the film and then woven carefully into the non-meta narrative. Characters have shuffled roles (retaining their names), personalities are slightly mixed, but still familiar. Draft Two learned a lot from the tension and plot of draft one. The screw turns tighter in and we start over.

Aside from being the exact kind of heady, personal drama I crave in films these days, Black Bear is exceedingly dependent on its characters and the actors who play them. Aubrey Plaza, from Parks and Recreation to Ingrid Goes West, has become a powerhouse of an actor. It’s been so enjoyable to see TV actors, who may have been easily type-cast into nearly identical roles, break out into such devastatingly talented performances (Allison Brie in Horse Girl, Kristen Stewart in Personal Shopper, Kristen Wiig in Welcome to Me, to name a few). In an interview for Interview Magazine, Plaza said they shot this film chronologically, which, after you’ve seen the film, should make you very concerned. She talks briefly about the emotional state of the character and how it breaks you down as a person for a while, which comes through in the film’s second part and was probably a careful, and wise, choice by the writer/director. Her performance is strong, confident, and unhinged. Deeply felt, deeply personal. It certainly didn’t hurt that her co-stars were also wildly talented and believable characters. As a couple fighting, and then as two people in a different situation entirely, the awkward, long-lasting tension of being in a strained relationship was expertly shown by Sarah Gadon and Christopher Abbott. Other supporting actors, who I won’t spoil, also play an important part in building and releasing tensions in the second part. Without them, I fear this film would have been too intense. They brought support and balance to the background and made space for the heavy scenes to fall into. Great casting all around.

When the film comes crashing to an end, Part One is gone (integrated), Part Two is finished. The black screen returns. Then we’re back at the lake with Allison. Looking out into the fog. She returns to the chair and the notebook to write. Starting again. 

As a device to show the process of creativity, this film really hits home. It can easily externalize the drafting and then the turning of a plot in an author’s head. Some beats repeat, almost identical. Certainly themes repeat. Metaphorical objects come from Part One and then go into Part Two. It’s all about working it out. But on top of that, it’s a damn good film. If you are looking for a film closer to Adaptation than Synecdoche, New York, I highly recommend Black Bear.

Black Bear is available now for purchase or rental on VOD.