Ephemeral Waves
I'm thirsty....water me Carl.
Founded in 1993, Miu Miu is a high fashion brand founded by Miuccia Prada in Italy. In context for this review, since 2011 the company has commissioned a series of short film into the modern day. All of them are directed by female directors from around the world, where the films use their fashions within the production but they have carte blanche for the content inside the films. With two films a year, one for the summer line and the other for the winter line, this review is effectively an anthology project, hence why it is for the better to make the introduction this slight and just establish their origins. If this seems curt for the significance of the productions, in both mind to Miu Miu and that these are all female voices tackling films all about women, do not be afraid as the later products especially will have a lot to talk about.
The 2011 Films
For the first year of productions, there was Zoe Cassavetes' The Powder Room and Lucretia Martel's Muta. The daughter of the legendary filmmaker and actor John Cassavetes and actress Gena Rowlands, Zoe Cassavetes is not the only next generation member of the family who took to film making, her own sister Alexandra "Xan" Cassavetes the director of the horror film Kiss of the Damned (2012). To be completely blunt, The Powder Room presents an immediate problem with the earlier films, many of which were shorter, in that this three minute piece does not really have an impact. Set in London’s Claridges hotel, it presents a world of women in a lounge, set to a synth score, powdering themselves in an ultra-feminine environment. The film is three minutes of style, but not a lasting one. In mind to its context, funded by Miu Miu with their costumes on display, it looks like a generic commercial.
In contrast, Lucrecia Martel's Muta is a curious piece. Hiring Lucrecia Martel is a curious choice in general, but also presenting another side of these films, which is great, where you both see talented female auteurs get involved alongside new faces for someone like myself or the readers to be interested in. The Argentinean director has helmed films like The Headless Woman (2008) which have helped placed her in high regard, but even in mind of how unconventional her films are, Muta was unexpectedly weird. Not abstract enough to separate in its own context, but a pleasantly odd surprise, in which we follow a boat populated by mysterious twitchy catwalk models in extravagant dresses. We never see their faces, figures not truly human in their own rituals on the boat. One, almost like a butterfly in a chrysalis, escapes from her "skin" and dissipates into thin air, leaving her clothes and jewellery behind. Men are never mentioned, though I suspect the hand which we briefly see out of the water cling to the edge was such a figure known as a man, only to disappear and flee. This short was a pleasant surprise in terms of Martel, a very sombre filmmaker, almost become surreal, not the first time thankfully this will appear where a good filmmaker will show an unexpected side to her craft which suggests new potentials.
The 2012 Films
Thankfully continuing this surreal path is The Woman Dress. Giada Colagrande, its director, is someone I had no knowledge of prior to this short, a director/actress who has done a bit of work with the conceptual and performance artist Marina Abramovic. She is also the wife of actor Willem Dafoe, meaning they have worked together in films as well including Abel Ferrara's Pasolini (2014). The Woman Dress itself, whilst short, is at least idiosyncratic, where underground we see witches reinterpreted through high fashion. Thus, the cauldron is reinterpreted as a dyeing pool, and the main ritual of the title involves another woman being ritually undressed, placed in a bath, and transformed, after her finger being pricked and the blood entering the water, into a blood red dress to hang next to other dresses on the wall. The likelihood is that all the other dresses we see were presumably once women too. These earlier films in the Miu Miu series were also clearly designed not to revolve around dialogue, which changes in the later productions, here getting over this with through backwards talking incantations. It is a shame that Colagrande's work as a director is not as easily available, as this was an interesting introduction for me to her.
Massy Tadjedin's It's Getting Late (2012) unfortunately returns back to these shorts being of style but an average form of it. In mind that advertisements themselves are an art form at their best, making a reference to them earlier in the review to them should not be seen as a detrimental comment. The issue instead, a huge factor to consider, is that especially through the 2010s when these shorts came to be, advertisements started to borrow more techniques from mainstream cinema until they reached a level of slickness that is a high quality. Unfortunately that also means techniques they use undermine films which use the same techniques, It's Getting Late unfortunately a case where a lot of its style could be found in an advertisement, and is probably more impactful in ads when done there then here. A montage set to music where a group of women - an older video editor, a housewife, a business executive - get ready and dressed for a night out at a concert, you could have easily seen this as a brazen advertisement for the Miu Miu fashion label, but one which does not really impact even if it was openly such a production. An Iranian-American director/screenwriter, Massy Tadjedin is again someone I had no prior knowledge of beforehand, baring that she is the screenwriter of The Jacket (2005), a curious mindbender involving time travel starring Adrien Brody from the category of intriguing films that managed to sneak through Hollywood production in the 2000. It's Getting Late, unfortunate again being blunt, really does not stand out at all though.
The 2013 Films
Immediately out of the gate, without having seen any of her work beforehand, Ava DuVernay is a pretty well known name especially after her contribution was made. A year later from this short film, The Door, DuVernay would helm Selma (2014), a film depicting the 1965 Selma to Montgomery voting rights marches which would make her name. One of the few prominent African-American female directors, as in likely to be known in the mainstream, one side of her career is through theatrical and documentary work depicting the history of African Americans in American history, the other a taste for the flamboyant if A Wrinkle in Time (2018) is a film to go by, produced by Disney but curiosity of interest. The Door is unfortunate another of these shorts which really does not stand out. Set to what is at first a nice jazz score, until it sadly leads to some bland R'n'B, this presents a very lonely woman in a very modernist designed home, all style but hollow, lost in depression only for a friend to enter and bring her out of herself into positivity. No dialogue, just the music, propels the film but it never really leads to something. In fact, I really wished that instead of what we got, an alternative narrative existed where these two characters were a gay couple rather than friends, as that might have added an emotional essence that does not exist.
Hiam Abbass' Le Donne Della Vucciria (2013) sadly is also in the same boat of lacking an emotional resonance. Promising something different, set at the Vucciria Market of Palermo in Italy, we are introduced to an older woman making dresses on an old sewing machine for a puppet maker, immediately intriguing in suggesting the idea of Miu Miu, the costume designers for these productions, creating designs specifically for puppets to show their skill. Instead, it cuts to the nightlife, below their apartment, of dancing and music which is charming but ultimately bland too. An Israelli-born Arab actress, Abbass has an extensive filmograpy where, in the same year for an example, she starred in Hany Abu-Assad's Paradise Now (2005) and Steven Spielberg's Munich (2005). She also has a small role in Jin Jarmusch's The Limits of Control (2009) which is a pleasant surprise to contrast sadly another disappointing short.
The 2014 Films
By 2014, a change is clearly transpiring with the Miu Miu films, in terms of length but also many more story based narratives with dialogue transpiring. For So Yong Kim's Spark & Light (2014), we have a small drama of a young woman stuck in a car in the icy countryside as her car has stopped. It is a simple drama, where she finds a house. This does not turn into a horror film, but the film plays with the viewer's emotions nonetheless. It is a film which at first suggests something cosy like hot chocolate, only to have a sad ending where we witness the lead's memories and dreams drift through, including the knowledge that she was meant to be getting to a mother who is seriously ill or may have already passed, the complicated emotions involved seen in the short. Born in South Korea, but moving to the United States as a teenager, So Yong Kim is someone I was aware of through the drama Treeless Mountain (2008), helming mostly films and television series mostly in the United States. This particular short is not one of the best, but it is solidly made and does interest me in her filmography, which is the best thing possible as an introduction.
If the reviews have been somewhat anticlimactic, as in slight, thankfully I have Miranda July's Somebody next to follow up with and conclude this part of these reviews. July is, in context of this review, someone I had not seen any work of beforehand, a figure who made a name for herself with Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005), and even becoming a renaissance woman in all the areas of art she has worked in throughout her career so far. Somebody was a delight, set in a world of phone messaging apps which allow you to hire people to communicate your texts in the right emotional tone to others, such as a giant man named Paul having to let a boyfriend of a woman known, in the park, that she is breaking up with him and even offer a hug to help him through the moment. Where, with two women arguing, one asks for an elderly woman to reconcile with her friend just next to her. The costumes here from Miu Miu actually stand out, because July clearly embraces the whimsical and eccentric in the look of the film as much as the content, a film gleefully about its amusing premise and getting the most out of it with the costumes and aesthetic adding a brightness to everything. You could easily imagine a film which fleshed out this premise, but even as a short, this does enough that you have a premise depicted without the risk of being overstretched, such as a restaurant staff member proposing for a man to his girlfriend (played by July herself) at her table. The music as well, chirpy lounge-like music given names like "Hollywood Dream Trip" is also a delight for this.
It does present a nice contrast to what are, barring a few good shorts, a lot which did not stick with me at all in the early years of the Women's Tales, as July is here clearly someone taking advantage of this good offer from Miu Miu to create something of her own voice. I did not expect, when seeing this short, not to be talking about these films about women, directed by women, but instead that plants apparently have the ability to text. In probably the funniest moment of the entire series, completely unexpected and catching me off guard, you witness a policeman, who has already been revealed to have proposed to his girlfriend but is also cheating on her, to be in a weird erotic relationship with the fern in his office too. Where he is asked to "test" its soil in what is clearly role-play for the plant, named Anthony and played by Lee Noble in the end credits. It is completely unexpected but a hoot that has actually succeeded beyond the pleasure of the film, as I am now completely enticed into looking into Miranda July's work as a result.
To Be Continued...
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