In Which We Return To Montana For Horses And The Law

Survival Gear

by ALEX CARNEVALE

Certain Women
dir. Kelly Reichardt
107 minutes

The setting for the new film by Kelly Reichardt (Night Moves) is rural Montana. The landscape in this place explodes with color along a narrow scale. Darkness is almost complete, but there is never any morning – just a freezing day that plops down without warning. There is no music in Certain Women until about ten minutes before the movie ends, when it seems like the farmhand played by Lily Gladstone is on the verge of potentially displaying an emotion. She never does.

Earlier, Laura Dern has intercourse with Michelle Williams' husband, who is portrayed by James Le Gros. He breaks it off with Dern for reasons we never really understand. It reminds me of when Billy Bob Thornton married Angelina Jolie. "My boyfriend left to do a movie," Dern explained later, "and he never came back." Both Dern and Williams do an incredible job making us forget who they actually are. Reichardt has a true gift for bringing natural performances out of famous actors whose notoriety might otherwise be inclined to overwhelm the diegesis.

Dern is a lawyer with a difficult client (the English actor Jared Harris). Like all three of the short stories Reichardt has adapted here from Maile Meloy, the actual events are very slight. The psychology revolves around a similar type of relationship in which one party can't get away from the other; until she does. Dern achieves this separation by getting her client arrested. He forgives her, even though she does not ask to be forgiven. Reichardt's moral point is that no relationship can exist unless both parties ask for something from the other.

Along those lines Michelle Williams purchases a batch of sandstone from an old man (Rene Auberjonois). He eventually permits her to take it away; she intends to use it in construction of her new house. We see in her conversation with the older man why her husband may have disrespected her by straying from her marriage. Also, she is a smoker with a teenaged daughter. As she enters her late thirties, Williams has become so much fun to watch – here she is a tightly wound ball of anger and persona, expressed as softly as the character can manage.

Visually, Reichardt always knows the correct angle. She is the master of using walls and confined, normal spaces and turning them into subtle psychological aspects in a scene. The clothing that these certain women wear also tells so much of the story. Certain Women begins with Laura Dern in a bra in bed, and as we watch her slowly accumulate enough professional clothing for her job at the law firm, we see how fabric itself is used as protective gear. I mean, Jesus, Kristen Stewart's vest.

Certain Women concludes with its disturbing centerpiece, a story about Lily Gladstone falling in unrequited love with a teacher in a night class (Kristen Stewart). Stewart's lesbian outerwear is truly magnificent, but we get the vague sense that Gladstone is actually the more attractive, complete person as they sit across from each other at the only place in town to get a meal at 10 p.m.

There is one scene where Gladstone's farmhand is brushing her hair in particular where we see the kind of care she could give herself if she only had the inclination or reason to do so. Reichardt falls in love with Gladstone's movements, replaying her routines as she takes care of a beautiful group of horses, circling a pasture to drop hay in the snow. It feels like it has taken her the entire running time to find something she really adores.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording.

In Which We Learn To Say Yes To Maybe

A Shaft of Sunlight

by TRACY WAN

Take This Waltz
dir. Sarah Polley
116 minutes

There is always a prospective age, nominated arbitrarily and instinctively, at which we firmly believe we’ll have made it as adults. This number is fluid — it grows with us — but always tucked into a mental pocket. At first, we look forward to it sleeplessly (sixteen, eighteen, twenty-one). Eventually (twenty-five for some, thirty for others, add a decade from that point on), it becomes a threat, a threshold that our failures should not dare to cross. Of course, a fluid number never makes an indelible mark: you never know when you’ve crossed into this realm. We wonder for most of our twenties; somewhere down the line, we get too busy to wonder.

In Sarah Polley’s new film, Take This Waltz, Margot (Michelle Williams) straddles this delimitation, painfully pulled in both directions. Twenty-eight and married for five of those years, she’s an adult by many definitions: employed, settled, committed. She lives in a colorful, tailored-for-two house in Toronto’s Parkdale, with her husband, Lou (a subtle performance by the often burlesque Seth Rogen). He is a cookbook author. He specializes in chicken. Their marriage, at first anyway, seems enviable; they wake up together, eat together, host parties for their loved ones — all evidence of a consonant life. “I love you”s are exchanged, sincerely and frequently, never to fill a conversational void.

But those who grow into adulthood together can also regress into childlike behaviour together. Their rapport, which seems to have congealed in pre-adolescence, reveals itself through playfights, baby talk and repetitive funny voices. It is colored all the more infantile when Margot’s neighbour, Daniel (Luke Kirby), comes into the picture. To say that they develop a relationship that conflicts with her marriage isn’t a spoiler — that decision opens the film. But it is a delight to observe the minute but visible pains of someone caught in between these dimensions of life, projected by a facial palette as nuanced as Michelle Williams’s.

To much relief, Polley never succumbs to polarities. Daniel does not possess what Lou lacks; the deprivation that Margot experiences in her marriage is not in love or attention. Lou, for all intents and purposes, is a perfect husband — but sometimes perfection is not what one is seeking, merely the change.

Daniel’s attractiveness lies within his otherness. From the moment they meet, he undermines Margot, confronts her, calls her out on her lies. He is acute and frank, aggressive but tender; most importantly, his dynamic with her never allows for childishness. Together, they are unreserved, combative, and it is something that we want Margot to have, if only to see her behave with the sobriety of her age. With Lou, Margot exchanges pet names; with Daniel, an unwavering description of exactly how he’d fuck her (harder than he wanted to).  When she tells him that she’s married, he replies: “That’s too bad.” It had only been hours.

One of the many things that Margot confesses to Daniel is her fear of connections: she can’t stand “being in between things.” This film is marked by these liminal spaces, both theoretical and physical, in which decisions are made. On the sidewalks that separate Daniel’s house from Lou’s, Margot and Daniel run into, then plan for, each other. In two instances, Margot sits inside her house, and Lou watches her from their porch — on the first occasion, they make up and kiss through the windowpane; on the second, he tells her to leave, and she does.

“Sometimes I’m walking along the street, and a shaft of sunlight falls in a certain way across the pavement and I just wanna cry. And a second later it’s over. And I decide, because I am an adult, to not succumb to the momentary melancholy.” Sadness can be chosen or it can be denied. In this moment and in many other ways, Margot’s character resonates with me, and with so many of the women that I know. The difference between herself and her niece, she tells Daniel, is that the toddler chooses the melancholy. He isn’t so sure — what if Margot just can’t figure it out? And in the grander scheme of things, she doesn’t. She’s in between, and hates it there.

More than a story about new love and old love’s loss, Take This Waltz explores our ability to make that decision — to not crave a different shade of happiness when life casts its bluer shadows. When Margot leaves Lou for Daniel (again, not a surprise), the film goes through a montage of utopian adult scenarios: they make love in different positions, then with different people. When Margot says “I wuv you,” Daniel does not reciprocate in the same language. She finally cooks for herself. It would be easy to think that she’s crossed the threshold, armed with this new adulthood that her previous life lacked. The new gets old, too.

As it turns out, the most adult realization that we can have is that we will never have it — this idea that happiness is hidden somewhere, in someone, for us to pick from our lives’ branches and call our own. With each new person, we can only learn to love the imperfect yearnings in our old selves. This film’s biggest feat is that it doesn’t start or end anywhere conclusive. It ends in a gap. It decided upon it.

Tracy Wan is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Montreal. She last wrote in these pages about Steve McQueen's Shame. She twitters here. You can find her website here. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

"Golden Cage" - Whitest Boy Alive (mp3)

"Bizarre Love Triangle" - New Order (mp3)

In Which Birds Flying High You Know How She Feels

Tough-Looking Female

by ELISABETH REINKORDT

The portentous opening shots of trains in Wendy & Lucy leave no doubt exactly where Wendy Carroll (Michelle Williams) is headed, but the hour and twenty minutes we spend with her over the few days she spends in an unnamed Oregon town are no less entrancing.

(Un)necessary brief plot synopsis: A 20-something woman named Wendy is en route from Indiana with her dog Lucy in search of seasonal cannery work in Alaska. She's got short hair, wears a blue hoodie, western shirt & cut-off corduroy shorts, drives an '88 Honda Accord, and it breaks down in a town in Oregon. This is one of a few things that do not go well and leave a major dent in the sum at the bottom of the page in the meticulously kept notebook in which she tracks her dwindling finances.


Oh, the beauty of film! Shot on Super-16, Wendy & Lucy is full of impeccable colors, especially in forest scenes, gorgeously done night scenes full of all the grain that results from an optical blow-up to 35mm, and depth of field simply not possible on video.

As Lucy (played by Reichardt's dog) makes friends with a group of crust-punk types around a bonfire and Wendy follows to retrieve her, Reichardt's camera seems to become perspectival, focussing from face to face as if Wendy is gauging trustworthiness.

It is the fact that this is a female eye (lens) tracing the path of the female protagonist's eye that makes this scene work; were the camera to float away from the person speaking (a drifter played by Will Oldham) to other faces around the bonfire -- including lingering shots on the only other and very tough-looking female of the group -- without the distinct sense that we are engaged in the self-aware nature of Wendy's position as a solo female traveler, this would appear a sloppily edited sequence. In a far more dramatic echoing of the sense in this scene later in the film, I began to think that I had never seen such material shot in that manner before.

There are simply so few women making films that it is hard to make a compelling case that the gaze of the female director is different, but this film makes solid strides in that direction.

Furthering its minimalism, the film eschews a score, opting instead for a repeated theme -- composed by Oldham and played slighlty amplified -- of Wendy humming. The overt pathos of dramatic orchestral elements would ruin the pain we feel, slowly & experientially, for Wendy's predicament. Reichardt lets moments happen. Birds fly by, high in the air, and it is clear from the focus-pulling that this was a shot taken because it just happened. It is downright beautiful.


Reichardt is a gifted, principled director. (The full text of a fantastic interview done by Slant Magazine is worth the read.) A professor at Bard College, she gives solid pushback when the interviewers begin asking questions about how her filmmaking might change with the onset of "success."

Slant: You've talked before about wanting to continue working at these sensationally low-budget levels. Isn't that something filmmakers tend to say and then disregard once they meet with a certain level of success?

KR: Well, what's your definition of success? I find that to be a fucking annoying question, I have to say.

Slant: Why is that?

KR: This constant implication that success has one picture is so limited—and talk about American! I'm constantly asked this, as if teaching is some loser profession, or an uninteresting place to be. I've been out in L.A. for five days with my film, just doing stuff that I've never done before, press junkets and stuff, and I'm like—this is it? This is what everybody thinks is the most special fucking thing on the planet? Are you kidding me? It melts your brain. It's really hard to stay small, actually. That I've been able to make these last two films without anybody paying any fucking attention and just go off and have complete artistic freedom—what are you gonna trade that for? What do you consider success, since you're asking me that question?

Slant: I think I was just suggesting that if you were to raise more, you'd probably spend it wisely. There's no discernable difference between the scale of your films and a Woody Allen film, but he can spend 20 million and the money buys access to more filmmaking tools and sought-after actors and so forth.

KR: Give me an example of a woman who can do that.

Slant: A woman who can insist on creative control and still raise 20 million?

KR: Yes.

Slant: I can't name any, but I have a reason why I can't.

KR: I have a reason too—there aren't any! Okay, forget about 20 million. Name a woman at the level of Gus Van Sant or Todd Haynes. Give me a female example of that.

Slant: Allison Anders. In 1996. I can't think of any on the spot, but in that category I know there are some.

KR: And she wasn't getting 20 million, by the way. She was living off a grant. Please. The idea that we're struggling to think of one that might have existed at some point—maybe that's why that question pisses me off. I'll also say that I can't think of a woman who has this benefit either: Lars von Trier and Terrence Malick can put out films and not have to go out and talk about them. If I want to think about what real success would be, it would be to be able to make a film without anyone breathing down my back and then not have to go out and talk about the film after you've gone to great lengths in your film to not over-explain everything. To not have to go out, that would be true success, but then you're just screwing over your distributor or your investors.

Amen.

Elisabeth Reinkordt is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a filmmaker living in Nebraska, and she writes here.

"It's Always Sunday Around Here" - Lacrosse (mp3)

"We Are Kids" - Lacrosse (mp3)

"Song in the Morning" - Lacrosse (mp3) highly recommended

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