Jessica Hausner’s Lourdes, a starkly designed inquiry into the nature of miracles, exists in a lineage of films that includes Alain Cavalier’s Thérèse, Jacques Rivette’s The Nun, Robert Bresson’s The Trial of Joan of Arc, and professed inspiration, Carl Dreyer’s Ordet. In each, purity of form (often lazily labeled “minimalism” or even more erroneously “transcendentalism”) dovetails with the main character or filmmaker’s intensity of belief. Aesthetically, Lourdes, with its often unadorned and static compositions, fits in with this group nicely. Yet Hausner, for all the honesty of her investigation, and the asceticism of her visuals, approaches the idea of miracles with a detached, quizzical eye.
Her protagonist, Christine, a wheelchair-bound quadriplegic pilgrim to France’s Lourdes shrine (famous for Virgin Mary visitations and miraculous healing), even though often shown alone, seems an afterthought within the frame, so regularly is she viewed from behind, or off to the side. Subtle zooms and compositions that bustle like those of Tati suggest a somewhat askance view of the proceedings, an interest less in miracles themselves than the skepticism and procedural morass that surrounds their certification; flashes of arid humor suggest Hausner might be the type who’d seek out a Virgin Mary toast on auction for fun, or even make one herself. Read Jeff Reichert’s review of Lourdes.
Whatever suspense Julio DePietro’s The Good Guy seems to think it’s generating is predicated upon the supposedly surprising twist that its central Wall Street wannabe tycoon is not, in fact, a standup guy. Though all of the details of his cretinous behavior come as a slap in the face to the film’s central looking-for-love character, Beth (Alexis Bledel), it’s doubtful they’ll pull the rug out from under any viewer who may have previously seen a film about hotshot traders fast-talking whilst pressing a phone to each ear—or indeed anyone who may have previously seen a film. The bullish dude in question (who’s decidedly not the “good guy” of the title) is Tommy (Scott Porter), whose adorable overbite and gym-toned torso conceal a sexually dissatisfied, little lost boy who underhandedly takes his professional aggression out on women and coworkers.
Though Tommy’s loutishness is clear from the beginning (thanks, perhaps, to something in Porter’s blank stare, which convincingly reeks of privilege and which, for desperate lack of a better analogy, can be called Mark-Paul Gosselaar-esque), the film devises a pointless flashback structure and a misguided, puzzlingly intermittent voice-over from Tommy to lead us off the scent. First seen sorrowful and seemingly repentant in the rain, begging for understanding from a blase, unmoved Beth, Tommy is at first The Good Guy‘s nominal protagonist. After all, the likeability factor is relative, depending on who’s watching; those who get off on watching cameras whip and rush around investment bankers’ offices while hot-tempered guys bark and cajole each other might find themselves on Tommy’s side, especially when he finds himself dressed down by his swaggering, nut-munching boss, played by an appropriately supercilious Andrew McCarthy, reduced to shouting things like, “Where the fuck is my latte?!” Meanwhile, Beth, a good-hearted urban conservationist (her profession naturally placed in complete contrast to Tommy’s), has doubts, but besides the occasional book club party, also seems to have few interests other than finding the right man to settle down with.
The type of introspective, intimate domestic American nonfiction that has sprouted up so much in art-house theaters in the wake of the success of Capturing the Friedmans has come to typify documentary filmmaking of the past decade. Itself somewhat of an acolyte of the far more sensitive Crumb, which at least foregrounded its inevitable grotesquerie, Andrew Jarecki’s sensational depiction of an upper-middle-class Jewish family torn apart by intimations of child molestation tried to pass off its essentially exploitative nature as an investigation into American suburbia. Plus, with its tacked-on faux reconciliation ending and lack of aesthetic engagement, the film played as more of a very special 20/20 episode. Filmmakers Michael Palmieri and Donal Mosher correct Jarecki’s inelegance with their surprisingly stirring new film October Country, a visually remarkable and thematically unpretentious peek behind the doors of one upstate New York family.
The fact that the clan in question is that of co-director and photographer Mosher makes October Country much less patronizing than it might have been, as well as situates it somewhere in the high end of the subgenre of personal diary films (think Jonathan Caouette’s Tarnation). Mosher, however, does not make himself a character. Instead he surveys with detached beauty and expressive melancholy all the other members of the working-class family, creating a multigenerational portrait of cycles of disappointment and frustration. There’s no one dreaded event lying at the heart of the film, which instead casually captures twelve months in the Moshers’ existence, from one Halloween to the next, through interviews and voice-over touching upon the years of custody battles, abandonment, financial woes, and war scars the family has endured. Rather than trumping up any of this as uncommon tragedy, October Country pensively takes them as givens. Read Michael Koresky’s review of October Country.
In 2001, British satirist Chris Morris drew a great deal of fire from the government and popular press for an episode of his mockumentary series Brass Eye entitled “Paedogeddon!” [The program in question mockingly pondered such matters as why Britain was so completely overrun with pedophiles (some disguising themselves, absurdly, as schoolhouses) and what measures could be taken to protect children from being lured into their clutches (including locking the children up in cabinets, and corralling them in stadiums for the night). With the doleful, self-serious tones of a news broadcaster, Morris ingenuously asked, “Why can we no longer think of the British Isles without the word ‘pedoph’ in front of them?”
Of course the point of Morris’s program—which is both brilliant and in incredibly bad taste—was not to poke fun at the idea of “interfering with children,” but at the mass hysteria, hypocritical moralizing, and even seemingly perverse attraction that the subject causes. And while it might be a stretch to say that there’s something weirdly, specifically British about this medley of confused reactions, the United Kingdom does seem to boast more freakish high-profile sex-criminals and child-murderers than most. The existence of Moors Murderers Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, Fred and Rosemary West, Jon Venables and Robert Thompson, and all the various rippers and stranglers over the years explains the country’s peculiar flair for the mythologization of monsters, fueled by conservative ideologues and red-top tabloids, and met with rubber-necking fascination by the general public.
Enter David Peace, a Yorkshireman self-exiled in Tokyo, with a debut quartet of novels—Nineteen Seventy-Four (1999), Nineteen Seventy-Seven (2000), Nineteen Eighty (2001) and Nineteen Eighty-Three (2002)—that track a legacy of corruption, ennui, and, yes, pedophilia in the Leeds-Bradford area over the span of those titular years. Read Leo Goldsmith’s review of the Red Riding trilogy.
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