Cinema Club #18 (April, 2024)
Prepare for trouble! / And make it double!
Editor’s Note: Beginning May 2024 our Cinema Club will either be a bi-weekly or monthly double feature selection curated by our staff. This month is a “soft launch” of this new format. Also, a friendly reminder that our paid subscriptions are currently discounted.
Veronica’s March Double Feature Recommendation
Ninja Thyberg’s Pleasure (2021)
Pleasure follows Bella Cherry (Sofia Kappel), a nineteen year old woman beginning her foray into the modern pornography scene. Director Ninja Thyberg, an ex-anti-porn advocate, included intricate on-set details and talent from the actual porn industry in an attempt to invoke a sense of hyperrealism. But the very same real life adult performers involved stated that they felt misrepresented and misled by aspects of Pleasure shortly after its release. Less of the cinéma vérité statement on porn that it claims to be, and more of an interesting and perhaps voyeuristic reflection on some of our current cultural fears and desires surrounding modern sexuality, commodification, and work, Pleasure is worth the watch for the energy it captures, though its“realism”, much like pornography itself, must be taken with a fantasy-ridden grain of salt.
Molly Walker Manning’s How to Have Sex (2023)
Teenaged Tara (Mia McKenna-Bruce) is desperate to lose her virginity on her summer holiday. This is the larger goal amongst a collection of smaller other adolescent goals — to look pretty while dancing, to get drunk with her friends, to joyously scream in the cab and in the hotel and on the club floor. But Tara’s desperation to have a traditionally “good time” – both in the present moment of the trip and in the larger vision of her life — constantly pushes her into dissonance and discomfort. The pursuit of the idea of something matters more than whether or not it actually would be even remotely, fleetingly enjoyable to her. Like Pleasure, How to Have Sex is less about whether you’ve actually specifically been where Tara has, and instead is a more a pseudo-realism-oriented exploration of the ways in which we are constantly mediated and asked to perform in manners so slyly socially regulated that it’s sometimes impossible to even place or speak our sense of alienation or displeasure.
Alisha’s March Double Feature Recommendation: See for yourself
A first-person point of view has by now become common fare in the found footage mode of horror, its rudimentary function being that of having audiences perceive the frightful with a sense of immediacy and conviction. See for yourself, this is real, the found-footage film seems to assert with a sort of trembling tenacity. The camera, a conduit for the perspective, is often worked into the narrative as a sort of peripheral character — here a shield, there a torch, always a witness — so that its presence might be warranted and justified. Serving up proof is one among the first-person point of view’s many goals in horror.
I was surprised and giddily excited, therefore, to find the mode sprouting up in two noir films from 1946 and 1947: Robert Montgomery’s Lady in the Lake and Delmer Daves’ Dark Passage, respectively. In these two films, the first-person point of view, or the subjective lens, lends itself so easily to the brooding aims and pathos of noir that one wonders why there isn’t more excitement about the mode’s potential, not so much as the witness it plays in horror, but as emotional culvert, or an embroiling agent: See for yourself, for you, too, are responsible.
While Montgomery’s endeavor was seen as less successful by critics than Daves’ attempt (it was outright panned), I feel that both films, when watched as a double feature on a moody evening, speak to the immense creative possibility of the first-person point of view in film broadly, and in noir specifically, where it might shine for its ability to frustrate and obfuscate and upset. Though the subjective view first appeared in cinema in 1927, used then by French director Abel Gance, and then in 1931, employed by Rouben Mamoulian, it is here put to such compelling and unique work by both Montgomery and Daves within noir scaffolding, and I feel that they each yield noteworthy and mesmerizing results.
Lady in the Lake (1946)
This film is based on my favorite Raymond Chandler book: The Lady in the Lake, a Philip Marlowe hard-boiled mystery. It seems almost intuitively necessary, makes a sort of innate sense, that Montgomery employs the first-person point of view here. Chandler is an inimitably stunning writer who thoroughly, for better or for worse, mires readers in Marlowe’s soul and mind, so much so that it’s jarring to emerge from any Marlowe mystery at its end; when one does, it’s tough to shake off Marlowe’s cynical and sardonic understanding of the world, tough to shake off culpability. With Lady in the Lake, which MGM marketed as the first of its kind for the talkies, Montgomery, who plays Marlowe, places us behind Marlowe’s eyes for the duration of the film, appearing as Marlowe only in voice and in mirror reflections and in asides, in direct addresses to audiences. In other words, we are wholly and inextricably immersed in Marlowe. The point of view plays a unique role in this film, working to make a meal of setting by availing it to viewers, who become active participants in the mystery: we become detectives alongside Marlowe, sifting through scenes for clues. But more curious and challenging of the perspective’s achievements is its staining: we take on, through proximity, the burden of Marlowe’s trespasses, moral and legal.
Though Montgomery’s iteration of Marlowe isn’t my favorite – he is, and by extension we are, just a bit too mean, too fast-talking, not contemplative or kind enough, because Marlowe can be very kind, sometimes – I do believe the film is a marvel for what its style necessitates, or elicits, of the film’s other actors. The film’s dual femmes fatale – Audrey Totter as Adrienne Fromsett and the captivating Jayne Meadows as Murial – are both so endlessly beguiling and hypnotic as they in turn are forced into corners by Marlowe. We watch the femmes squirm under his fixed stare almost in real time, trying on different masks, working to determine which one might allow them to survive the camera’s incisive and unrelenting, judgemental, gaze. Both women show off their towering prowesses as actors through their ability to shine during obstinately long, search-beam-like takes. Indeed, this film is brilliantly handled by all actors involved, as so much of it, because of the point of view, is made up of tracking shots or long takes that necessitate sustained and pitch-perfect performances of the actors; but the women are truly unignorable. Though the film and its critical failure at the time were blamed for the end of Montgomery’s career, I do believe that it’s a fascinating work of art that challenges us through its utilization of a skewed and unflinching point of view, which becomes less a looking glass and more a warped magnifying glass, a tool and medium that makes the action immediate and the stakes so much higher.
Dark Passage (1947)
The subjective view here is much more kinetic than it is in Montgomery’s film, and its function so interesting in its fitness to the narrative’s aims. Humphrey Bogart is Vincent Parry, though we don’t learn this until halfway into the film. Vincent is a fugitive on the run from prison after having been convicted of his wife’s murder. For the film’s first half, we reside behind Vincent’s eyes as he works to find safe refuge and trustworthy allies. When he undergoes plastic surgery to avoid apprehension and to be better placed to find the person behind his wife’s death, we are allowed to exit the subjective view. We only ever see Vincent’s pre-surgery face in photographs; we don’t even see his reflection until after the bandages come off.
This film feels much more cohesive and fluidly integrated than Lady in the Lake, though it is just as equally poignant in the way it, armed with the same perspective, accomplishes a feat opposite to Lady: because of Vincent’s harried gaze, the lens skillfully rations the amount of information we, as viewers, get. It’s fascinating to watch the swift evolution of the subjective view — while in Montgomery’s hands, the view is something stiff, steadily watchful as it roves over action and collates clues, in Daves’ hands it is furtive and jerking, necessitated by Vincent’s need to be surreptitious. Accordingly, Daves’ lens has a tendency to feel more modern in its subjective view (more like present-day found footage films), for its eloquent handling and honing, which, to an extent, is arrived at under guidance of the narrative’s needs. But I wouldn’t write off Montgomery’s consuming direction altogether, which, after this double feature and through comparison, I hope will emerge just as confident in its trailblazing subjectivity that, like Marlowe’s eyes, searches for the stories it knows our surroundings conceal.