Ephemeral Waves
Chicken coop, catwalk.
The 2015 Films
Continuing on with the Miu Miu Women's Tales series, where the Italian fashion company commissioned short films from female directors, legends and new figures, each year for their summer and winter season, we get for me two the strongest of the series in 2015. I will factor in that, whilst there are a few which I was not fond of still, by this point something changed for the better as the shorts were allowed to be longer and have dialogue, which made them actual short films.
I will start with the second of the shorts though, notably from the late Agnès Varda. Varda is a legend in French cinema, the one woman in among the legendary French New Wave directors, who stood out as a great humane filmmaker. Here, even with this being a commission by a fashion company to sell their products, you can see why. Following Jasmine, a young teen on a farm, who milks goats in her normal life's day, a delivery comes to her of a giant dress, not only too large for her but enormous, big enough that it can be entered through to find oneself in a giant cave. There is not a great deal to say of the short, Les 3 Boutons, but Varda does deliberately contrast this high fashion with an ordinary person, an anti-fairy tale atmosphere shot on the normal urban streets of France which still has a fantasy element, including the titular three buttons which drop and grant wishes. Set to a jazz score, this whimsical production just leaves one feeling happy, whether meeting the older man who collects buttons found on the street, organised in a collection with the date and circumstances of their discovery, to the young boy who plants a button in the soil, waters it and grows a flower. This is a sweet production and grows Varda's reputation for me further as a tiny fragment.
Even with her work like Happy as Lazzaro (2018) being magical realistic and idiosyncratic, I was not expecting the Italian director Alice Rohrwacher to get as gleefully strange and playful for her short from this year. De Djess did however. It says what the film's intention are when, in a throwback to the older commissions having no dialogue, this informs you as a viewer in onscreen text that this has an imaginary language in the dialogue, even if you can pick up snippets that sound like real words in various languages. A nun, with her male assistants, rescues dresses in protective bags from the sea. These dresses are for blonde models to wear, to pose in front of a giant posse of male photographers. In among them is a maid, who usually has to just take the outfits to the stars, who finds herself with one of the dresses, bonding together when they meet. This is a curious choice of language until you get to the touch which, even for the director of Happy as Lazzaro, added a new and unexpected side to this director who started in the 2010s - that she has stop motion sequences with the clothes, the dress rejected by its model and finding the maid. This needs to be emphasised in italics in this text how delightfully surreal this touch was from a director.
In the films I have seen within her filmography, Rohrwacher is a very naturalistic filmmaker even when she has un-aging characters travel forwards in time in her work, of natural Italian environments and the working class. This, alongside the percussion based score by Cleaning Woman, shows she has the capacity to play fully imaginative and inventive stories, here even having the dress able to not only move but also add new patterns to itself. And, bluntly, it is of note in terms of a commentary that, with Caucasian models in blonde wigs or dyed hair, our sympathetic protagonists in the end are for a black female maid and a rejected dress, which stands out as more glamorous and above the hordes of male photographers even in a short commissioned by a fashion brand. By this point, Rohrwacher had not even made Happy as Lazzaro, which was a breakout film for her, but only two feature films with her debut Heavenly Body (2011) completely grounded in reality. This makes this short even more pleasing and meaningful in hindsight.
The 2016 Films
Starting with a woman walking over a bridge, Naomi Kawase's Seed could be seen as slight, but emphasises Kawase's talent in terms of having a film with energy. A director who has gained a growing status, though sadly with early films like the magnificent Shara (2003) not easily available, her short is closer to the earlier productions but you can, even with its musical video moments, see that it comes from a veteran Seed with some wiser creative decisions. Hiring a dancer expressing the emotions through her movements as the lead was a sound idea, playing as well with the speed and frame rate of the film itself to make it more than a generic promotional piece. It is a playful piece, very simplistic of the figure completely free in wildlife and nature being placed in the crowded urban environment of modern Japan, as she arches and stands with an immensely giant red apple and sticks out considerably among the bustle of the crowds. It still works as a theme however. Set to a very playfully poppy soundtrack by Sakanaction, it also still shows her own humane sense of connection just in when, meeting a homeless man, a figure you do not see a lot of in Japanese culture, she exchanges the apple for cloth.
With Seed, you see that with the importance of these shorts being the "Women's Tales", heightening a sense of portraits of women's lives and ideals in subtext, these shorts by an Italian fashion design company at their best for me also are the ones which feel like the creators were less drawn to the company's resources, barring some aesthetic gained from the costumes, but their own idiosyncratic creations. Films which feel important as "women's tales" without pretence but something more emotionally connecting, which is completely witnessed in Crystal Moselle's That One Day, which was used as a prototype to her feature film Skate Kitchen (2018), feels like it merely used this collaboration for one memorable scene. About a young woman trying to ingratiate herself to a skate park, it feels completely alien to Miu Miu entirely set in working class urban America and skateboard culture, drastically contrasting the lavishness of other shorts with its own form of down-to-earth form of this.
It does feel like one short where "Women's Tale" truly applies, as this young woman has to deal with being the only woman at the skate park among male skateboarders, including figures who are completely sexist and even succeed in knocking her off her skateboard out of spite. By way of fantasy after this fall, and in reality, she meets fellow female skateboarders, and if any of these shorts qualify as feminist, That One Day is whilst being perversely so at odds with the Miu Miu company in how this is done. Both in its distinct naturalistic aesthetic in the middle of a metropolis and having Rebel Girl by Bikini Kill on the soundtrack, which is if anything unexpected in context to the backers but makes perfect sense in the film (alongside a pretty awesome song too(. Everyone is wearing jeans, t-shirts and nothing remotely next to the costumes we see in previous shorts, baring one inspired scene of skateboarding in dresses, which is difficult and visibly limits the female skaters movements, but is why you take part in a project like this, indulging with whims and inspired moments when you have carte blanche too. Emotionally too it fits the scene, taken like a ritual for these female skateboarders when they bond.
This was arguably one of the reasons why watching this series was a reward in the end, particularly as now, having never heard of Crystal Moselle beforehand, I am completely enticed to see her work, which is a success. Knowing that this short was adapted in the feature length Skate Kitchen, with these same actors and characters, is even more enticing to see where she expands the material too from an already credible short.
The 2017 Films
Regardless of my thoughts on Carmen, I am a huge admirer of Chloë Sevigny. With a career with numerous idiosyncratic productions - with figures as diverse of Harmony Korine, Werner Herzog, Lars von Trier, and even the notorious Vincent Gallo film The Brown Bunny (2003) not a black mark on her career despite its notorious final scene - she is a good actress. Carmen is interesting, following the real titular stand up comedian Carmen Lynch, going through her routine in the first scenes with no laughter or crowd. It comes off as morbid as a result as she talks of imagining friends dead or date night being a sign of a married couple are on the skids. Stand-up for me, coming from the United Kingdom where it has become part of regular late night television, is interesting if something neutered for me. A short like this is also intentionally pointing out how much of it is based on a person willingly exposing their anxieties, neurosis and their darkest thoughts, the few exceptions optimistic pranksters or Christian stand ups. It says a lot that, mentioned the later, one of the few jokes I have remembered over the years from whole shows or snippets is not a figure like George Carlin in his many rants, but Christian comedian Bone Hampton's tale of the bootleg Rick James Holy Bible, which when most sketch comedy is either light hearted or rants, feels more to my humour from being from the least expected place, i.e. someone who will not be profane, but is still surreal and funny. And I say this as someone who was once obsessed with Bill Hicks, as profane and up for political rants as he was wishing people to learn to swim when Arizona Bay was created.
As a result of these reasons, it does feel clichéd, and a bit an dip when so many good shorts have appeared, but at the same it is that is more because stand up comedy does not have a sparkle for me in all honestly. That this is about a female comedia is something not to ignore, as we see her regular life of the lonely time a bar, or being hounded by two guys for no reason in a convenience store, so I do not want to downplay the clear meaningful content of Sevigny's film or Lynch participating, including seeing her sets with an actual audience. It is just that stand up comedy has never been my thing with a lot of it which is predictable or easy to deflate if you could write an argument about it.
The short also feels conventional to Celia Rowlson-Hall's (The [End) of History Illusion], which with its curious appearance in just the title, despite making it awkward to write down, immediately informs you of how odd it will be. In a world where nuclear obliteration or the Cold War is happening, this short is set up with a commercial showing an idyllic underground nuclear bunker with immaculate interior decorating and servants, only to show us over time in the bunker the servants start to lose their sanity. That and the numerous time the warning system goes off, with a red light and "This is a Comrad radio alert" being repeated that everyone has to stand up for. The cast in this production are dancers, from a pair of sibling tap dancers as butlers and a ballet dancer in the kitchen pirouetting to the freshly baked croissants. This odd little film won me over immediately; it is a strange short, proudly so, where in the nuclear holocaust only carrots will grow and carrots alone, where when everything goes off the rails it is signposted by a painting being put in the oven or finding an apple growing in the soil.
Whilst I have not even ended the Miu Miu Tales series, this short does immediately raise points worth carefully going over. One that, yes, my taste is clearly for the weirder and idiosyncratic titles, which is a subjective taste. Secondly however, it is strange to think that, between all these shorts that one like The Door, without taking into considerable director Ava DuVernay's other, is from a director who has done very well with a mainstream career but is very generic, whilst Rowlson-Hall is someone I had never heard of but, again, stood out and would be the kind of person I would fund money to if I was a film producer. Rowlson-Hall herself from the sound of her other work suggests experimental work rather than anything financially successful mind, an American dancer/choreographer/filmmaker who makes very unconventional titles like Ma (2015), a modern day reinterpretation of the Virgin Mary, where Rowlson-Hall herself plays the stand-in Ma, venturing on her way to Las Vegas for the spiritual task of giving birth to a saviour, alongside surreal touches like giving birth to Him in a sparsely appointed mansion for showgirls1. Certainly at this point, these are some very strong films within the Miu Miu Women's Tales series, but it is noticeable how many for me are from either the directors who are arthouse films known for idiosyncratic work, or the dark horses behind really unconventional work as here.
To Be Continued...
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1) As detailed of HERE.
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