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 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.

"Stolen Dog" - Burial (mp3)

"The World Is Ours" - Tokimonsta (mp3)

"She Just Likes To Fight" - Four Tet (mp3)

In Which We Watch Her Hands For Clues

Cheating on Keira Knightley

by TRACY WAN

Last Night
dir. Massy Tadjedin
90 minutes

In many ways, Massy Tadjedin's Last Night is an exercise in how to make cheating look like the right thing to do. After all, a cast anchored by such unblemished actors — Keira Knightley, Sam Worthington, Eva Mendes and Guillaume Canet — clouds the film with a perfumed haze, leading us to contemplate their couplings agreeably, if not approvingly. There are no reinforced protagonists or antagonists, only choices amongst the beautiful.

Knightley and Worthington play a married couple - Joanna and Michael Reed - who met in college and married a few years down the line. Canet plays Alex, the guy who came in between the two stages of the Reeds' relationship; Mendes plays Laura, a designer for Michael's real estate development projects, and an attractive wedge in their otherwise quotidian marriage. The film centers around the various shades of cheating that arise when husband and wife are separated by a business trip, and both parties are confronted with an excess of desire.

Exploring a theme painfully common to relationship-oriented dramas, a film on infidelity often finds tropes hard to eschew. Secretive, erotic, unnecessarily elaborate — to our relief, Last Night is none of these things. It's straightforward, simple and, although predictable, surprisingly insightful. Most notably, it's — to the extent that still allows for unfaithfulness — honest.

Joanna dissects the impossibility of a relationship with Alex: "Oh, what I wouldn’t give to tire of you." She is frank in ways that are almost cruel; the film is stitched with these moments of disclosure. The characters’ respective bearings give depth to the otherwise routine plot. Instead of exploring the infidelity landscape, Tadjedin opts for a macro lens, a study of the minutiae. This sense of privacy, like the kind of bond forged after a confession, incites our empathy.

Last Night operates upon this surplus of information: although the four main characters are all astute, earnest and admirably introspective, they are also overdetermined. If happiness is not to exclude temptation, honesty does not prescribe morality. Being earnest does not mean knowing what to do with that honesty, if the choice is yours at all. Their frankness means unfaithfulness is discussed and resisted before being consciously and deliberately carried out. Last Night reveals the often-eclipsed ramifications of infidelity: awareness, acknowledgement, history, isolation, circumstance. Nothing is disavowed.

A film so visually interested by the personalized gestures between individuals certainly does not fail to utilize them as delineations as well. There are many complementary shades of affection in this movie: the almost-had-you embrace and the almost-lost-you reconciliation; the contemplative bleariness of guilt, and that of love's loss. Her guilt is manifested in the nervousness of her hands; his guilt is revealed by his taciturn responses.

The love between Joanna and Michael is a love that has aged into a refined rapport, an understanding of each other’s motivations no longer requiring demonstration. Much of their relationship has been internalized, and as such, there is ritualistic intimacy in everything: brushing teeth, snacking at midnight, taking the time to say "I love you." He intuits her silences as his own shortcoming. She reminds herself not to forgive easily. Their impulsions towards each other, as with gravity, have reached weightlessness.

No two bodies respond to each other with the same motions, and Joanna's relationships are no different. Her relationship with Michael exists in its own affective dimension, as does her relationship with Alex — with few overlaps.

She is aware of the polarity of her relationships, if not grateful for its perpetuation; it invites multiplicity, an alternative reality. Despite condemning Michael for craving novelty, she adorns herself in his absence: for Alex, she puts on lipstick, moisturizes, dons a pair of heels.

As that alternative, Alex and Joanna share an intimacy that is equally enviable, something that the director portrays beautifully. They have retained the cuteness of a new couple: the compulsion to smile, the inability to keep your hands off each other.

Alex knows Joanna through states of retrospective permanence: fixed addresses, memorized phone numbers, the writer's propensity for coffee in the morning. The frames of their relationship, developed in sparse windows of time across years — an e-mail here, a party there  — are welded to nostalgia. Their affection is most salient through reminiscence; after all, memory has always been a trigger for dormant desire. She tells him that their love is "something that doesn't change", something to hold on to. It doesn't lessen, doesn't become diaphanous with time. But how could it? There is no escape: a photograph kept in the dark barely fades.

the director with her stars

What Last Night exposes is not a series of acts of infidelity, but the rueful choices of individuals plagued with another reality, what Joanna astutely calls "the in-between", the episodes in which one can live outside of oneself. Its sadness lies in the inability of these characters to be content with a singular possibility, to put their decisions to bed and lie in it, unclothed, undisturbed.

As a result, the sting of Joanna and Alex’s night together is soothed by its own tenderness; the carnal grace of Michael and Laura's night is obstructed by his guilt.

There are instances of this life that we will into being, and those that materialize as consequence. As Joanne acutely confesses to Alex, "I don’t know that this would be what it is on its own." And really, what is? Her word is true of this and all stories, and all that we do. What we wouldn’t give to tire of the impossible, to accept the future without referencing the past, to be contented with the everyday without the unexpected to punctuate it? But we can't: we need absence to be sure of presence. Love only exists in comparison.

Tracy Wan is a contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Montreal. This is her first appearance in these pages. She tumbls here.

"Green Grass" - Tom Waits (mp3)

"Motel Blues" - Bombay Bicycle Club (mp3)

"Modern, Normal" - Memoryhouse (mp3)