Madrid after Franco and before Colonel Tejero’s attempted coup in 1981. Filmed for a noir, El Crack (1981) so the bleakness is expected. Still, the decrepitude of the buildings, the dirt, speak of a certain legacy of the dictatorship, now overcome and at the risk of being forgotten. The run-down-ness of it all is evident in other — lighter, comedic — works of the era such as Almodóvar’s What Have I Done to Deserve This or Trailer for Lovers of the Forbidden. This is just a supercut, which I hope to do more with at some point, but here just as a record.
A friend of mine commented that what he saw in the film didn’t look that bad to him. But the film shows us the grandest parts of the city and still one sees about 30 years of grime on all the official building. Then there’s the cars, the garbage on the streets, the relative lack of traffic, etc. It’s the sight of a once imperial city reduced to ‘second world’ status. It’s all glossier now. See for example below in the background the Cine Doré on left side of the street near the centre of the frame:
..and see how it is today (and how it appears in Almodóvar’s Talk To Her. It’s where Benigno goes to see The Incredible Shrinking Lover:
Images from the great ‘Delphine Seyrig Defiant Muses ‘exhibition. The greatness of the exhibition is in conveying a range of feminist practices, collective and social, international, ranging from issues on abortion to sex work to trans performances of classic American plays, to the liberation of video as form, to the value even of unproduced feminist film projects (Calamity Jane). And a range of relationships between women (Duras, Ulrike Ottinger, Agnès Varda, Simone de Beauvoir and so many more whose names don´t mean as much to me. I was delighted to see Jean Genet speaking up for Angela Davis and the Black Panthers as part of the work produced by Seyrig and the feminist collectives she was a part of.
Here is the program:
Plus some more images and text I thought some of you might find interesting:
The English title refers partly to the Insoumuses, the women’s video collective collective consisting of Carole Roussopoulos, Delphine Seyrig, and Ioana Wieder. And the Insoumuses itself referenced the Insoumises, which Kate Lister’s wonderful book, Harlots, Whores and Hackabouts: A History of Sex for Sale, informs us is the name for unregistered sex workers in Paris: ‘The French system of regulation was clearly successful in gathering data, but it was a a failure, nonetheless. The restrictions were so severe, and the compulsory gynaecological examinations so unpopular, that many women simply did not register. Unregistered sex workers , or insoumises, sold sex on the street, in bars, in hotels or in unregistered brothels known as maisons de rendez-vous. The police regularly raided addresses they suspected of operating illegaly and had powers to arrest women suspected of being insoumise. If caught, women would be automatically registered and forcibly examined for sings of disease. Once registered, it was very difficult to become unregistered. (p.201).
Eugenio (Manuel Vignau) drives into a small town. Martin (Mateo Chiarino) knocks door-to door trying to find work. Eventually, Martin knocks on Eugenio’s door. The premise is almost that of a porn film: the handyman knocks on the door, the householder eyes him up and before you can say ‘Bob’s your uncle’, cut to the bedroom.
looking through doors, windows, bars
What Hawaii does that extends this basic premise is to offer social context, background, and to dramatise the partial perceptions, lack of knowledge, and barriers to communication that impede romance and act as blocks to the fulfilment of desire.
outside, looking in, not quite in focus
Martin’s mother died when he was 13 and he went off to live with his grandmother in Uruguay. The grandmother’s now died and it turns out she didn’t own the house they shared. The current owner, a distant relation, let him stay on three months longer. But eventually Martin had to leave. He’s got a promise of a job in Buenos Aires in the Autumn. He’s left his few boxes of belongings in the garage of a cousin but said cousin has barely room in his place for his wife and his three children and Martin doesn’t want to impose. He’s returned to the rural village in Argentina where he grew up to kill time in familiar surroundings whilst enduring scraping a living. He’s homeless. He’s been living outside in the woods, though Eugenio doesn’t know this yet. Martin’s been lying to him about this. He’s a childhood friend but also a homeless migrant. His nickname’s ‘The Russian’, only partly due to his colouring.
games people play whilst they’re trying to hide what they want
Eugenio is a writer trying to write a novel called ‘The Germ’ about the conflict between a landowner and the young daughter who questions how come it is that he owns the land rather than someone else. Eugenio is a couple of years older than Martin but he’s the baby in his own family, younger than his brothers: Flor by five years; Santi by 7. His family is extensive and they are close: an uncle bought his childhood home so he and his brothers could enjoy the money it brought but also continue to enjoy the use of the house. In the beginning we see him pictured reading, writing, doing yoga, typing away in the dining room on his mac, at a handsome table on which rests piles of books, a soup tureen and other signifiers of bourgeois respectability.
the body outside, looking in, both object an subject of desire
What separates Eugenio and Martin is class and this is depicted in the starkest of terms. But throughout the first part of the film what keeps them apart is also the uncertainty about the other’s sexual orientation, the false clues they give each other regarding their sexuality, the insecurity that their own desire will not be returned. They play peekaboo games with each other. But what they hope to win by doing this is at the cost of real understanding and becomes a block.
Longing, partial and distorted
Eugenio leaves pictures of himself with a naked woman for Martin to find. What does he hope Martin will think of this? He asks Martin to not be a faggot and feel free to undress in front of him. But where is this leading? Eugenio’s desire for Martin is shown palpably, even as he gives all these mixed signals to Martin. Martin’s desire is less clear, though at one point we do see him going into Eugenio’s room, sniffing his shirt à la Brokeback..and well.
Anticipatory space in a narrative that’s full of anticipation and barriers to consummation
All this is brought to a head when one of Eugenio’s brothers comes to visit, quickly assesses the situation and is not shy to share it: ‘You like him. Do you think I’m an idiot? You gave him work because you fancy him. What are you going to do? Are you going to fuck him and then are you going to tell him, ‘Hey sorry, I gave you a job because you turned me on?’ Do you want to be his boyfriend? Did something happen already? Does he know? And if you fuck him and the summer ends, what are you going to do. You’ll take him to Buenos Aires, to a Levi’s store you buy him some clothes. You take him to Palermo and support him? Or you’ll send him to work on a construction site and you’ll wait for him at six with tea prepared at yours?’ A bourgeois’ perception of the horrors of cross-class elected affinities of any kind.
Just when you think you understand….wrong!
The brother’s choices are stark and brutish. But it’s the first time in the narrative that we’re certain that Eugenio is gay and out to everyone but Martin. And this spins the story onto another level. Martin is only certain of Eugenio when he’s helping him move things, a bunch of explicit homoerotic drawings drops on the floor, and they’re clearly ones that Eugenio has been doing of Martin on the sly since the beginning. But then the plot gets complicated further because Eugenio then interprets Martin’s coming onto him for all kinds of reasons that have little to do with simple shared desire. And Eugenio’s rejection is so frustrating and hurtful to Martin that he leaves.
the game of childhood
Eugenio wins him back by finding viewfinder slides of a shared childhood experience of marvelling at images of Hawaii, fixing the old machine, and leaving it in the woods where Martin previously took shelter so he may find them. And it’s this shared love of being in accord and at ease doing things they’ve enjoyed since childhood that finally brings them together at the end.
Hawaii as symbol of childhood and fitting together
Hawaii, though in a way less successful than Plan B, has deepened my love of Marco Berger’s films. The way the viewer is always shown things at a distance, through a corner, via bars, glass, windows. The way the protagonists’ own mode of looking becomes a barrier to seeing and understanding. The way sexual reverie means the sound goes off, one isn’t listening, and thus one doesn’t understand anything other than one’s own want.
What Eugenio’s been drawing. A revelation that results in a misunderstanding
I love the the kindness evident throughout; the confident gazing on people’s faces so that they might reveal; the intermingling of fear of rejection with desire. In other words, whilst his films provide quite a bit to incite desire in the viewer – these are handsome and charming men, gazed at longingly – the desire for going deeper, for finding character and understanding in people, over-rules and subsumes the libidinal desire that drives the narrative. Sexual desire is seen and dramatised but also put in its place. It’s only carnal, and carnality is not all there is to people in Berger’s films. There’s hugging and sharing and trust and companionship, and all those marvellous things that continue to glow in memories of childhood companions. I have two quibbles: a) the music is better than in Plan B but not good enough and the film ends too abruptly.
I’m amazed that this was a Kickstarter project, delighted to see Manuel Vignault again. It’s a slow film in which nothing seems to happen unless you concentrate and look. But look; at the faces, the shots, the composition, the way things come and in go out of focus, the way spaces are places for feelings, and looks a way of suturing not only space but hearts and minds. A film that I liked the first time but learned to love by looking and looking better, the second time around.
My favourite of the recent art exhibitions I’ve seen, the one where I feel I learned the most. One forgets that Picasso was already a figure in Belle Epoque Paris. He painted the same people as Lautrec (La Goulou, Jane Avril), was obsessed by the same themes and milieus (Bohemianism, the Underworld, Brothrels, The Circus). Picasso also undertook advertising in this period. Seeing the work side by side on the same themes, with Picasso painting in a style that seems a combination of the recent Post-Impressionism mixed in with the emerging style seen recently in the Portrait in Vienna style at the National Gallery (Klimt, Schiele, Kokoschka), was a revelation. Brilliant exhibition, which will surely travel and which I urge you to see if you get the opportunity.
I had an exhilarating moment last night; no, not one of those; a movie moment, one cinephiles will recognise. I went to the Cine Doré my first evening in Madrid. It’s an iconic cinema that people who’ve never been there might nonetheless recognise from the movies; it’s where Javier Cámara goes to see ‘The Shrinking Lover’ in Talk to Her/ Hable con ella. I like going there because they take great care in what they show and how they show it and I don’t really care what’s on: I’m either discovering something new or seeing something again but often in a better condition than I’ve ever seen it before. It’s a neighbourhood repertory cinema. They charge two euros and you get to see treasures by the likes of Renoir, Kurosawa, Erice and many others. The cinema functions both institutionally as part of the Filmoteca in Madrid but it is also a local cinema, and because of the prices it means anyone can afford to be there. There’s a very mixed audience, young and old, couples out on a date, cinephiles eager to see La règle du jeu projected on 35mm or just people wanting to be out of the house.
The ceiling of the Cine Doré
The cinema itself is beautiful. A 1912 art nouveau fantasy of dark Arabian nights, gold gilt stars on a dark blue sky, public dreams next to private alcoves as in theatres of old where you can sit around a table with your loved one or guests to see the movie in front and be seen by the hoi polloi below. The cinema I suppose had its own class divisions, ones which no longer apply because of the fixed price but which were interesting to observe nonetheless because the display of such class divisions are at the core of what the film we were all watching was about.
The thrill of seeing La règle du jeu in such a place and with such an audience was to experience a film from another era and from another culture enthrall and captivate an audience as if it had just been made now, about the world we live in and especially for us. The audience responded to everything in the film and one moment in particular that simply rocked the house: it’s where, upon finding that his childhood friend, the Marquise de la Chenyest (Nora Grégor) is crushed that her husband has a mistress and has been lying to her for the past three years, Jean Renoir himself as Octave tells her ‘But Christine, we’re in an era where everybody lies, pharmacist’s prospectus, governments, radio, cinema, newspapers; so how could you possibly expect for us simple and ordinary people not to lie?” The sense that we expect so little of our rulers and our institutions and forgive so little in each other when really we should expect so much more of our governments and be so much kinder and forgiving about each other. It’s a moment with particular resonance in a Madrid still in the grip of an economic crisis and it felt like the film as a whole was carrying the audience on its wings. It felt like magic about what was real and true. At the end, there was wild and grateful applause, maybe for members of the audience to communicate joy and appreciation to each other, more like a needed release after a kind of exaltation. It was thrilling to be there, to experience, to share in that experience.
Worth noting that we saw a scratched, slightly muddy print, one where the clarity seemed to change from reel to reel and the projection ground to a halt three quarters of the way through, presumably for a change of reels. One could get too hung up on technical perfection. Here it really did not mater. Again, magical.
