Ephemeral Waves
I'm not sure how to include the MIU MIU clothes in the movie yet.
The 2018 Films
In terms of figures giving a chance at creating a film through the Miu Miu Women's Tale project, former child actor Dakota Fanning is a distinct choice, particular as her career has also included modelling, a perfectly apt choice to have Fanning direct a short called Hello Apartment for them as a result. It does admittedly cause me to feel old when, despite not that much age difference between us, the image I have of Fanning is as said child actor starring in the likes of Tony Scott's Man On Fire (2004), not the adult actress in films like Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019).
Hello Apartment for a first time filmmaker is well made. Entirely based around an apartment, where a young woman buys it and furnishes the walls, we see a life within the environment which is not an original idea but always an effective one nonetheless. We see all that transpires including the house warning and romance, but also the eventual breakup. Also many split liquids on the wooden flooring like wine, the marks and stains as part of the personality of the apartment as an entity. It is not the best of the series, but assured as a debut, said debut is a good one you could build from if Fanning ever wanted to make more films.
In the same boat, but for other reasons, is Haifaa Al-Mansour's The Wedding Singer's Daughter, the first female Saudi Arabian filmmaker with a segment which is okay but in context is still well made. Having made Wadjda (2012), Al-Mansour would eventually immigrate to the United States, and this comes to mind with the fact impossible to ignore of Saudi Arabia's history of gender politics even into the modern day1, something the short touches upon. Set in Rigadh in 1980s Saudi Arabia, we follow the young daughter of a wedding singer, the main narrative that, in the midst of a performance of her mother for a wedding, suddenly the electric cable for her microphone is disconnected and her daughter goes to find it. This is inherently political in regards to Saudi Arabian attitudes to women's behaviour, a vast contrast in the Miu Miu designed costumes when the women by themselves are uncovered, and when they have to cover up when the men appear. (Or when her daughter overhears someone saying all singers go to Hell from a random speaker). It is a solidly made film, not one of the best for me, but in terms of taking this project and allowing all voices to speak, Al-Mansour's is a distinct contrast, particularly in terms of back-story as the film was shot in the United States. She would return to her homeland for The Perfect Candidate (2019), but she has immersed herself in American cinema and television for the most part in her career.
The 2019 Films
At first, Hailey Gates' Shako Mako suggests another film set in the Middle East, another tale of life from the perspective of women in that region only from a country where the US military are based at and bombings are frequent, as what happens in the street for a female bread seller in the opening. Things are not what they seem, as this was actually a staged performance, a phantom zone for training US military where the bread seller is actually an extra who we then see behind the scenes, at lunch awkwardly contemplating with an amputee actor whether to get one of her own limbs removed to get more work. No one speaks Arabic on location, and the costumes as she points out are from the wrong country. It is a fascinating little drama, of a lead who, in who spare moments has a scene filmed of her in a Miu Miu brand dress for an acting reel, other times is training soldiers to learn of the environments they will be placed in including practice by the women to pickpocket objects off them. It is a film which I am glad is here, an interesting film, and also with the unexpected delight of Free's All Right Now being sung in Arabic, which is delightful as a cover.
Lynne Ramsay's Brigitte, in vast contrast, is probably the curveball of the series because it is a documentary short of French photographer Brigitte Lacombe. Shot in black-and-white, this is unconventional including the pre-shoot interview being spliced over the images in audio. It also has the inspired image (bookending the film) of Bridgette facing the film camera Ramsay has, taking pictures of it with her camera as it dolly moves towards her. And it is odd to realise, with her Scottish accent, Lynne Ramsey herself is an ordinary person who just happens to have helmed the likes of Ratcatcher (1999), a film I saw as a young adult late on British television and leaving a lasting mark as a result, just as this documentary is humanising Lacombe, an acclaimed photographer, itself apt as a Women's Tale but for more than one person. Lacombe talks of herself and her own work as an ordinary woman despite being an acclaimed artist. Miu Miu is still clearly contributing as, when we see her at work, the costumes of the models are theirs. Reflections of family, art, love and also her sister are casually dealt with, even the reflections of models in the photo shoots themselves, intermingling with the ambient score by Paul Davies adding the perfect tone. This was a good inclusion, and as someone who has not quite found his decision on Ramsay, loving a lot of her work but finding You Were Never Really Here (2017) on the first viewing a disappointment, this was a nice reminder of her skill as a filmmaker.
The 2020 Films
Małgorzata Szumowska's Nightwalk in idea is a noble piece. A young woman of an affluent background is contrasted by a young man from the opposite, though his apparent at one point, with a tiger mural painting on the wall, does evoke a film you might have gotten from Something Weird Video. The man is seen applying lipstick, the women wearing no makeup, the man dressing up as a woman as he walks outside, as the woman dresses down into a tracksuit. Set to Symphony No. 2 in A major op. Allegretto by Beethoven, this dialogueless piece is sweet in its transgender politics, but unfortunately this is marred by the fact commercials screened on television and cinema screens as previews do have this same aesthetic style, this level of basic quality, which complicates how you react to the film when they are made to sell a product in the end. This is in the same unfortunate boat, as this was produced by the Miu Miu group, and especially when other films on the series managed to step away from this to be their own distinct (and progressive) piece, Nightwalk is noble but with this issue and the fact that it is not a inherently spectacular production baring that message.
Finally, we have Mati Diop's In My Room, where things in the real world drastically changed how this film would be made. Even Miu Miu as a company had to exist in the real world where, from 2020 onwards, the COVID-19 pandemic completely changed the globe in terms of its effect, and Diop, whilst in isolation in a lockdown in Paris, made this film in isolation in her home. This drastically contrasts Nightwalk in not looking or sounding commercial in structure in the slightest, and cannot be argued against in terms of its emotional sincerity having greater depth.
What she made was a film which, whilst the dresses are there, is completely alien to the producers' background, a story based on interview recordings with her own passed grandmother Maji, who had been isolated in her home over twenty years, a figure who loved opera who was yet left in an apartment before most people had to by law. Recording from Maji's living room apartment, there is content which is uncomfortably real as much as there are moments of reflection, memories of being a child growing up in the war contrasted by memories of her own mother, contrasted by the reality of an old woman who distrusts her home carer, who comes off as cold in voice recording, and the threat of memory loss threatening to take her life away in meaning alongside the word of a care home being evoked. Contrasting this with Diop herself isolated in her apartment, filming the apartments around her and straying through windows of people stuck in France in the lockdown with her camera. It is a befitting reminder that, whilst law and safety locked many of us in our homes, Maji was tragically someone stuck in her apartment by forces that could have been dealt with, juxtaposed with people including the director herself being in her grandmother's place.
The context that reality itself has affected these productions is even found in how the film is as much about its own making, seeing an email being typed to Miu Miu about what the short film is meant to be about on a computer. When the dresses do appear, they are a miniscule part of a film which has had to tackle greater content or at least provide the moments of levity when Diop dresses up in her own home for a nocturnal play or to lip synch opera. Contrasting the meditative and frankly beautiful images of the world outside, where even the lockdown is unable to stop the beautiful sunsets as vast orange skylines and the birds floating between buildings, In My Room whilst not a personal favourite was itself a perfect end to the Miu Miu Women's Tales into the 2020s. The entire project is a bundle with a variety of potential opinions, but what cannot be ignored is that, alongside the many that buckled against their origins, I found many new figures as much as admiration for those I already liked. In My Room by the events of the world had to be different, but in itself, alongside Diop clearly having a project like this in mind before, it is the perfect encapsulation of these reviews and a fitting conclusion for viewing all the films.
========
1) Such as a brief snippet of her testimony, for various reasons, of the struggles in making Wadjda in the first place you can read HERE.
No comments:
Post a Comment