In Which We Would Rather Be A Carey Than An Edith

Burn Things

by JULIA CLARKE

Suffragette
dir. Sarah Gavron
109 minutes

In an ill-advised effort to promote Suffragette, Meryl Streep and Carey Mulligan wore t-shirts that said “I’d rather be a rebel than a slave” — a line from Emmeline Pankhurst’s 1913 speech that, clearly, it’s best to forget rather than flaunt. I was immediately reminded of Patricia Arquette’s cringe-worthy Oscar speech dismissing the race problem in favor of women getting equal pay in Hollywood. Just because you’re teaming up for one movement doesn’t mean you need to dismiss another. Suffragette brings up a major problem with revolution, though: it’s hard to fight for everything at once.

East London in 1912 was pretty rough. Director Sarah Gavron depicts an atmosphere that’s grey and gritty: mysterious liquids pool on cobblestone streets, sunless skies drape over poorly maintained buildings, and smog infiltrates every corner. The narrative of Suffragette centers upon Maud Watts (Carey Mulligan), who works unbearably long hours in a laundry facility earning very little pay and daily risking her health due to the chemical fumes inhaled, somewhat ironically, in the name of cleanliness. Maud wants to be “respectable,” a euphemism for doing exactly what any man says without question.

Things shake up when Violet (Anne-Marie Duff), Maud’s co-worker and an unapologetic suffragette, wants to give a testimony to Parliament but can’t because she’s been battered, undoubtedly by her husband. Maud’s introduction into the suffragette movement, then, comes quite by accident: she is there to support her co-worker and winds up giving her own testimony, which, as is the case in most power-of-the-human-spirit films, lights a fire within that manifests in numerous teary, conviction-laden speeches about how women and men deserve the same rights.

What’s interesting about Suffragette is that it poses questions about the nature of social change. This is not just a film about votes for women; it’s a film about the complicated nuances of revolution. Emmeline Pankhurst (played by Meryl Streep) the leader of the votes for women movement in England at the turn of the century, encouraged “deeds, not words” in order to get the point across because, she argued, words historically proved futile, at least in the case of the women’s movement. Suffragettes in London at this time would throw bricks in windows, fashion small explosives and commit to hunger strikes in order to get their message out: actions Pankhurst insisted would get the vote.

In one particularly arresting scene, Edith Ellyn (Helena Bonham Carter), a pharmacist who is the most adamant about the “deeds, not words” aspect of the women’s suffrage movement, wants to bomb a politician’s house that is supposedly empty.

Edith’s husband urges her not to go to such lengths, and Violet, newly pregnant, says it is too far. The explosion goes off without harming anyone, but the women find out later that a maid had come back for her gloves, and had she come back two minutes earlier, she would have died. “We break windows; we burn things; because war’s the only language men listen to” Maud tells Steed (Brendan Gleeson), an officer out to stop the group. I’m not into violence, but I saw her point.

A part of me felt the inevitable guilt one feels when watching a film about how much worse the world was for women back in the day, but the story also deliberately points to unresolved issues of equality now. It doesn’t end in a celebratory mood: the climax involves one of the suffragettes throwing herself in front of a horse at a highly publicized race and becoming the martyr for the movement, a move that, the movie argues, is the only means for change.

The grim reality is that violence did work to get the vote, but it didn’t work to make the world fair. There are a lot of things that confirm there’s still a pretty strong patriarchy, at least in my American life: Ryan Adams smugly covering Taylor Swift, the movie Pixels, everyone applauding Amy Schumer’s feminism when all she talks about is how she’s fat, that guy mansplaining the Biblical apocalypse to me at a party (he actually got it wrong), the fact that I have to lean in, the fact that I really do feel uncomfortable talking about my period, catcalls. It’s a hard road.  

“Sister Suffragette” — the song Mrs. Banks sings at the beginning of Disney’s Mary Poppins — is the song, for better or worse, that I found ringing in the back of my head as I watched Suffragette. Mrs. Banks cares nothing for her wifely duties; instead, she’s interested in the pomp and circumstance of fighting for a cause, and the song she sings about it is pretty silly (as, I suppose we are supposed to think, is Mrs. Banks). “You should have been there!” she squeals at the maid, because incarceration is apparently a gas. “Take heart, for Mrs. Pankhurst has been cast in irons again!” she belts, shimmying on her carpeted stairs.

The song is cute, as is its interpretation of the cause. Meaningfully, Mrs. Banks provides the suffragette sash to serve as a tail for the kite the Banks children fly in the closing scene. Though Mary Poppins came out some decades after women’s suffrage in Britain, it nonetheless reinforces the idea that though women can vote, they really ought to stay at home.

Julia Clarke is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Manhattan.

"I Do What I Love" - Ellie Goulding (mp3)

In Which Carey Mulligan As A Brunette Interests Several Parties

Not A Word Of This To Anyone

by ALEX CARNEVALE

Far From The Madding Crowd
dir. Thomas Vinterburg
119 minutes

Carey Mulligan's hair resembles the flailing forelock of a horse. She rides one lying on her back to look at a forest canopy. A man named Gabriel (Matthias Schoenaerts) watches her and masturbates next to his dog, Old George. He is a terrible sheepherder, and all of his sheep commit suicide by jumping off a cliff. Some survive the fall, but he pretends they do not.

Carey Mulligan is not especially turned on by this man. She harbors no more affection for another who seeks her attention, one Mr. William Boldwood (Michael Sheen). Sheen uses the various perspicacity of his forehead to signify the relative levels of saneness embodied by the winsome idiots he usually portrays. He makes unintelligence and unawareness into a personal and civic virtue. He asks Carey to marry him and she laughs.

In contrast to these face-making, opulent waifs, Mulligan eschews her own piquishness for a world-weary, deliberating, entirely predictable heroine. She finally does something surprising about ninety minutes into Far From the Madding Crowd. It is to get married, after just one hot bang, to the unscrupulous Frank Troy (Tom Sturridge). Sturridge's clearly homosexual energy is only hinted at — after all, Thomas Hardy's idea of a gay old time is to put Mulligan's suitors in closer proximity to each other than they are to her.

The film's best scene takes place when Sheen happens upon Schoenaerts' Gabriel in what appears to be a sort of manger. He praises the man for saving Carey Mulligan's farm, Weatherby, in what might have been a devastating lightning storm. "You're a good man, Gabriel," he announces, stating, "She's lucky to have you." He simpers at the younger, more virile man and finally cries. "Not a word of this to Miss Everdeen," he peeps after his catharsis. Instead of appearing bewildered by the tycoon's bizarre display of emotion, Gabriel displays the beginnings of an erection.

This makes the part of Bathsheba Everdeen rather dismal to play. Despite this handicap, Mulligan is so much better looking as a brunette, and she has a natural playfulness that suits what would in other hands be a too serious character. Her intimate scenes with Sturridge have all the erotic flavor of a yogurt cup. Sturridge's austere good looks don't suit the role of a malingering husband — he seems incapable of projecting any subtlety at all, which is the only thing that attracts a powerful woman. We can barely believe her when she tells him she has never been kissed. In the end Sturridge is entirely miscast in the part of soldier Frank Troy.

Director Thomas Vinterburg creates a few beautiful sets for Carey to prance around in, including a full sheep bath. Dorset is magnificent country, and sweeping shots of manors attempt to display it in a positive light. Unfortunately they show Hardy's novel for what it is actually is — an empty husk of a story about emotionally unavailable people who happen to be in proximity within a vast and nearly deserted world.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording.

In Which We Cannot Offer Him Sympathy

Mere Presence

by TRACY WAN

Shame
dir. Steve McQueen
123 minutes

Those who haven’t seen Shame utilize curiously identical vocabulary to describe it. “Sex, right? With that actor in X-Men.” In some ways, it’s an advertising home run. The truth is, Shame, directed by British filmmaker Steve McQueen, has resuscitated the MacGuffin. Yes, it highlights sex (and often), and yes, Michael Fassbender takes on his role with rigor, but McQueen’s latest feature pushes in one direction and pulls in another. Addiction takes on many facades — the ferity, the desperation, the inability to withstand lack — and yet, for want of being a film about a sex addict, Shame reveals itself to be a precise, manicured portrayal of control, not its loss.

Brandon (Fassbender) has a tasteful apartment in Chelsea, a friendly albeit sleazy boss (James Badge Dale) in a nondescript corporate job, and effortless attention from women. All of this is unsurprising, intentionally uninteresting. Kindred in spirit to Patrick Bateman’s, this formulaic universe dims in light of Brandon’s bodily needs — if not a prostitute, a cam session; if not in the shower, then in the bathroom at work. McQueen visually ascertains this consistent boredom: like Brandon’s routine, the camera jumps from work to home, ass to tits, one impending orgasm to another. The cyclical pulsations of his needs are always clear: all ironies observed, Brandon is a clean addict.

Despite his libidinous nature, the face Brandon presents is charismatic. When an overwhelming amount of porn is found on his work computer, a vengeful intern is immediately blamed. Out in bars with Dave, his boss, he is observant, quiet. As such, he succeeds where Dave’s insistent, desperate approaches fail.

This veneer pleases Marianne (Nicole Beharie), his coworker, and they go on a date. He is a perfect gentleman, makes her laugh, doesn’t even try to kiss her. Instead, a request for second helpings: for a moment, there is a glimmer of his emotional desires. He likes her. He throws out his porn collection for her.

Sadly, a bad habit cannot be turned to one’s liking. When he tempts Marianne with an afternoon in a hotel room, Brandon finds himself unable to rise to the occasion. Like foreign objects, his emotions are rejected and replaced, with the help of another nameless body. He and Marianne never speak again, and they don’t have to: averse to sentimental complications, the carnal realm requires no such elaboration. Sex, no longer seminal, becomes excremental.

Brandon’s pace syncopates when Sissy (Carey Mulligan), the sister whose messages are deleted before they end, surprises him in his own apartment for a crash stay. She’s in New York for music gigs, is used to fucking up, cuts out of boredom and fucks for the same reasons. They are altered manifestations of the same character, but this nuance is made differential. Their relationship is intensely confrontational, and ambiguously physical. She makes the conventional mistakes: sleeps with his boss, lives messily. But these mistakes break the controlled sterility of his environment and for that, he cannot stand her — her mere presence reminds him of things that he has not learned to classify, repress, deny.

In her presence Brandon’s frustrated venereal energy escalates, and when the narrative crest breaks, it’s expected, almost insultingly so. After a particular tense fight with Sissy, Brandon implodes — he lewdly propositions a girl at a bar, gets beat up by her boyfriend, and in a self-punitive blur of events, travels all over Manhattan in search of release. One, a club, where he is recognized (“Not tonight, man”) and turned away. Two, a gay club. Three, a brothel.

Then, of course, a watershed suicide attempt. He returns home to find Sissy’s veins slashed, a crimson body in his previously pristine bathroom. When he weeps uncontrollably, clutching her wrists to stop the blood flow, the sound is muted — even the rawest moments have to be pasteurized. After he checks on her at the hospital, Brandon collapses into sobs outside the building. Again, our protagonist’s climatic sobbing is moderated, paced, and perfectly framed. Where Brandon disintegrates, McQueen congeals.

with the director

Unlike films such as A Single Man, which also rely on self-aware, stylistic cinematography to dress the story, Shame does not wear its beauty well. Like a poorly-chosen perfume, its presence does not flatter, but distracts instead. This is true for both micro- and macrocosm — the film’s potential heaviness is fluffed by its clean compositions and lambent pans over Manhattan, just as Fassbender’s attractiveness complicates the viewer’s distance from the topic at hand.

The most complex questions, as expected, are eschewed. Take Sissy’s final plea, for example: “We’re not bad people, Brandon, we just come from a bad place.” How perfectly vague. Just enough to denote tragedy, but not entirely evocative. For the filmmaker, this hint of turbulence is enough, in that it is chaos contained — never removed far enough from him to surrender to the viewer’s curiosity. It is a formulaic set-up. Wave the cape, and the bull will charge into air.

It’s a pity — the tensions between Brandon and Sissy were too evident to be overlooked, but neglected by the director all the same. Their bodily confrontations were in perfect sync with the film’s interests, but were deemed earth to leave unturned. Again, the delineations of Brandon’s addiction must persist. No one dares speak of incest, and yet, it speaks. In his obsession with forcing our gaze, McQueen struggled to extract Shame’s beauty, but it was unwise of him to ignore the beast.

Tracy Wan is the senior contributor to This Recording. She twitters here. You can find her website here. She last wrote in these pages about Keira Knightley. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

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