Nine Lives. Dir. Rodrigo García.  Nine women’s lives are shown in separate segments.  In each segment the director uses only one shot to tell the story.  Now this violates everything I teach in my introductory film class—because I believe films require cutting.  Editing has a magical component, as when we cut to the reaction shot, or cut to the point of view shot, or parallel edit between characters in a scene of conflict.  In this case the director creates reaction shots by whipping the camera around 360 degrees from a point of view shot or vice versa.  In essence, this is an experimental film exploiting the power of point of view and reaction shots.  As a whole, I got tired of the experiment. But oh, there were moments.  I thought some of the best use of this one-shot technique was in his first two films—because he needed long and narrow walkways to create the movement and point of view / reaction shots that were his mainstay.  In the first film, he had prison hallways and cell blocks to work with; in the second he had the aisles of a grocery store.  In both, the women moved freely up and down the halls or aisles, and yet both women were trapped—one by a penal system and the other by the suddenly invoked memory of a love affair—when her former lover walks into the store and they are reunited after a five-year separation. In the fourth he utilizes long hallways in a condo, and in the third and fourth he moves characters from room to room and in one case a character explores the entire backyard. Camera movement, then, is less metaphoric than it is exploitive.  He has to move characters (and Steadicam) in order to compensate for the lack of editing. In these segments women are at the mercy of men and at the mercy of the past.  The third story is a shocker, because a prodigal daughter shows up and demands to see her father—who is at work.  Finally, he shows up; and he’s the prison guard from the first segment.  Holly is the second woman obsessed with the past (as was the women in segment two).  She pulls out a gun!  She holds it to her head—then points it at her father—then puts it in her mouth—and then lowers the gun.  These films end abruptly, in media res, and we are forced to make our endings. The fourth film includes the husband from the second segment, and we meet his wife Lisa.  Immediately we are suspicious, because he was hitting on his old flame in that segment.  Now we see him as part of a rich couple, and the talk turns to having children (when we know he is sterile), and the couple that are the guests self-destruct in front of us.  The fifth segment, Samantha, shows another woman stuck.  This time this young woman is stuck between two parents, a father with ALS and a mother who wants her to get away.  She is also a kind of tennis ball—always bouncing from one parent to the next, as each parents tries to get information out of her on what the other parent is up to. Lots of camera movement again—because she moves from the kitchen, where the father sits in his wheelchair, to her room, and then to the other room, where her mother is ironing. Her mother urges her to escape the nest: “Everything becomes today, not later, not tomorrow.”  But she has a great rapport with her gimpy father—and the affection does seem to flow evenly between them.  Even he tells her she should go off to college—but she is not persuaded by it.  No resolution here.  The mother in this segment, Sissy Spacek, returns in the seventh segment.  She goes to a motel with her daughter’s guidance counselor from school—Mr. Stanton!   For her it is a form of escape and respite from her disabled husband.  Her male friend is a lovely man, perhaps one of the nicest in the film, and the two talk easily and show a real warmth and affecdtion for each other.  At one point he articulates one of the film’s themes: “We are linked to everything and everyone on the planet.”  They come close to having that sexual liaison.  But then the mother notices the police have picked up a woman from another motel room—and we find out it is the woman from the first segment—having escaped in order to try to see her daughter. Now the Spacek character feels a bond with this mother, and she returns to her room and calls her daughter.  When Stanton returns, she kisses him on the forehead and leaves.  In the eighth segment Kathy Baker and Joe Mantegna play a couple in the hospital.  She is waiting for her call to surgery—for a mastectomy. This is a tender scene between two people that actually function as a unit—and our second segment with an interesting and un-villainous man.  The last segment shows Glenn Close at a cemetery with her granddaughter.  Here we have one of the ultimate connections in our lives—we are all connected to the dead. The old woman has a wonderful time visiting her grandchild.  But at the end of the scene, we see her putting away her blanket and setting a bunch of grapes (her grannddaughter’s favorite) on the grave.  We don’t need to see the gravestone to know that it may be her granddaughter’s grave and that she may have visited it alone.  This is the only segment without a man in it—and it is the one segment with the oldest character. Women at the mercy of men survive their men; I think that’s what we have here.  In total, the film remains an experiment to me.  I would much rather have seen it without the self-imposed burden of doing every segment in one shot.  Why not just choose one segment to play that kind of game?  But it remains a film worth seeing.  It has much to offer.

Separate Lies. Dir. Julian Fellowes. (UK). In only a few minutes this film caught my attention: a first-rate set of actors, including Rupert Everett, Emily Watson, and Tom Wikinson.  The latter two are married, and Wilkinson is a high-class lawyer, James Manning, in London.  His wife Anne seems to suffer from memory lapses, and she seems unfulfilled in their weekend country life.  Everett plays one of his typically ruthless roles as an amoral divorced man, Bill, who is certainly going to have an affair with Anne.  But the film begins with a car accident—a man on a bicycle is struck by a passing car and killed.  Ten minutes into the film Anne picks her husband up at the railway station in the country, and she seems distracted and upset.  Bill is with her—and she makes an excuse that she couldn’t find her keys—so Bill drove her. And the next morning comes the phone call: there’s been an accident, and their housekeeper’s husband was knocked down by a passing car.  It doesn’t take rocket science to figure out that either Anne or Rupert was driving that car—and that they were probably returning from a drunken tryst at the time.  So James goes to work on a theory: he thinks Bill was the driver.  He considers the man a brute—rude, self-centered, and lacking in moral fibre.  And as for James.  “I like to do the right thing,” he says—but that inflexible high moral ground he likes to occupy will be his undoing.  As a righteous man, he does his detective work and then invites the evil-doer to lunch and accuses him of killing the housekeeper’s husband.  Of course, Bill denies it.  But he insinuates that he does have an excuse—but one that he would not like to reveal.  (Let’s see: could he have been with James’ wife?).  So our good man trots home and tells his wife about his meeting with Bill.  Now this is one magnificent scene.  As the two interact, Anne is preparing a lavish dish of vegetables.  Everything is perfection.  The standards are high in this household—and of course James is the arbiter of all standards.  The more he talks, the more she criticizes him for now ruining several lives.  After all, since it was an accident, it is unlikely that Bill will strike again anytime soon.  But James does not get it.  Finally, she admits that Bill and she were in the car—and that she was driving.  (We see the scene briefly from her point of view then—and Bill comes across as the more sensible of the two).  Back to the kitchen.  James is in the dark now, in silhouette, on the edge of the frame.  So what to do now?  He asks her what she wants to do, but the real question is what does Bill want to do.  After all, his high position would be threatened if she were convicted of manslaughter.  Then, James makes an offhand remark.  “Are you going to use that plate?” (another criticism from the master of criticism)—and Anne drops it to the counter and smashes it.  What a great release of energy.  Anne is brilliant here as the wife who knows that the world revolves around James’ navel—and yet at the same time she feels guilty and feels she should be punished.  Then her first revelation is exceeded by her second, when she admits that she and Bill are having an affair. 

Now James, having realized that his life as he knew it is broken, takes some time off (a rare thing for such a busy and important man) and off Anne and he go to a holiday.  At one point, when he cannot grasp why Anne chose to have an affair, she sums it up nicely: “Bill is easy to be with.  He doesn’t seem to want anything from me.”  You have to love a character likes James who has such high standards, but at the same time is so naïve emotionally about what really matters between two people. Finally, after a few days away, Anne sums up the next steps: we return to London, we carry on with our lives, I drop Bill, and we rebuild our marriage.  When they return to their country house for a weekend, her husband tells her, “Don’t punish yourself.”  Her response: “Somebody’s got to.”

So off Anne goes to tell Bill it’s over (or do we trust that she can say that to him?) and back in London a police inspector shows up as part of the investigation of this case of manslaughter. And one of the prime suspects is Maggie, the housekeeper, the man’s wife—because of her criminal record. But as this plot twist is introduced, it becomes evident that Anne is having some of the expected psychological problems with such a trauma.  She has flashbacks and nightmares associated with it.  She wonders if she can “go through with this.”  But James and his wife are trapped in their desire to maintain their upper-class bubble existence.  Meanwhile, in a chance encounter, James spots his wife with Bill in their car.  She has not ended the affair after all. So he confronts her about this point: he is very good at confronting people and then having the tables turned on him.  And here again, that’s exactly what Anne does.  She admits that she is still seeing Bill—and she doesn’t know if it’s love or lust or neurosis.  But she can’t give him up.  Later, as the evidence begins to close in on Bill, the latter pleads with James to make up a story that he contacted Bill at a certain time—which would preclude Bill being at the accident site.   While the two men argue, Anne puts in, “Unless we tell the truth and take the consequences.”  I’m beginning to think she is the moral one in this ménage-a-trois.

When you watch a film like this you realize how little control individuals may have upon their destiny—especially when the wheels of law are involved.  Our solicitor should have known better, but then he is a flawed man, too, and so he charges forward into the breach—to save his life as he knows it, to keep his little Eden, and what really happens is that everything unravels in front of him.  There is a witness who will say it was Bule’s car that struck the man.  And that witness is their housekeeper.  At this point in the film Anne separates from her husband and spends time with Bill there.  Alone at his country estate, James talks with his housekeeper Maggie, and she assures him it was Bill’s car she saw.  And she assumes Bill was driving the car.  She cannot believe Anne had anything to do with the crime.  “Before I met Anne, I hadn’t worked in eight years.”  She was passed over because of her criminal record.  (By the way, Bill was the primary accuser of her when she was convicted.  Do you think it is possible that Bill stole that money and blamed it on Maggie?  Amoral people always sleep the sleep of innocence.)  What was Anne’s response to Maggie’s criminal record? “We’ve all got stuff in our past that wasn’t too clever.” 

Finally, we head to the climax. And what does Anne finally do?  She snaps, she goes to Maggie, and she confesses.  By this time Bill has called James, and the two men arrive upon the scene just as Maggie seems unable to believe a word of anything.  Even when Anne confesses directly to her that she killed her husband, Maggie refuses to believe it. She turns on Bill and accuses him of manipulating Anne. Again Anne yells, “I promise you I was driving.’  And guess what?  There’s a knock on the door and it’s the police.  Everyone comes out to the front door, and Maggie is brilliant.  Sorry “for dragging you out here for nothing.”  The inspector knows she is lying, but he can do nothing about it. What a brilliant move on this old woman’s part. 

Cut to the ménage-a-trois in James’ car.  They are free of the law—scot free! And just when it looks like James and Anne may return to their marriage and begin again, after a few months a chance encounter leads James to find out that Bill is riddled with cancer.  He visits him—and of course Bill tells him not to tell Anne.  But at the same time he realizes that James must tell Anne.  It would be cheating not to tell her—to have the power to keep her away from Bill. Now all of this has to happen—because James’ life needs one more tweaking before he is a complete character.  And that comes when he finally realizes what a good woman Anne is, and how much she has meant to Bill and to Bill’s father for being his primary caregiver for the next two years.  James visits her once before Bill dies, and he tries to tell her that he has changed—that all he wants now is for her to feel good about herself and to feel good about the relationship the two of them once had.  Thus, their last meeting, at Bill’s funeral, is merely perfunctory.  She is going back to a flat in London, and they are not going to be together.  She is free of James—finally—and James is freer than he has ever been in his life. 

The Squid and the Whale.  Dir. Noah Baumbach.  Talk about a dysfunctional family.  In this film, about a mother, father, and their two sons (one in high school, and the other in grade school), the source of the dysfunction is in an insufferable pompous ass of a father, Bernard, played by Jeff Daniels, a creative writing teacher in college who once wrote some novels and since then has done nothing to build upon his creativity.  Compared to Bernard, his wife Joan is an up and coming writer, and midway through the film we learn that she has had a story published in the New Yorker.  It is difficult enough for spouses to deal with contrasting arcs of their careers (one heading downward, the other upward); but add to that mix the egocentricity, vanity, intense need to dominate, and the warped sense of the superiority of the intellectual—all ingredients of Bernard’s character, and you get a sense of what goes wrong with this family.  Daniels’ performance is essential to this film.  He is a loose cannon, over-competitive, all-knowing, controlling, with a warped sense of the superiority of the intellectual.  The worst thing in the world, to him, is to be a philistine—which he defines as someone who does not read good literature and go to good movies.  But Bernard is in no position to think he is superior to anyone else.  He is a dangerous person because he has power over the lives of other people.  For years his wife let him go, gave him rope, and suffered the consequences.  Thus, early in the film she dumps him.  She files for a divorce, and after a family conference (where the younger boy breaks down and sobs), she stays put and Bernard has to rent a house outside the ring of this gentrified section of Brooklyn.  Now we begin the dance of joint custody. 

Although Bernard’s wife has escaped the grip of his ogre-ish personality, his older son Walter adamantly takes his father’s side in this affair, and even parrots his father’s asinine pseudo-intellectual commentary on modern life.  He accuses his mother of being the villain in the piece, and when he meets an interesting girl at school and begins to date her, he ruins that relationship by treating her the way his father treats women.  This film clearly is a version of the director’s own family dynamics.  Is he the Walter of the piece?  Viewers get frustrated with Walter, because he seems like a figure controlled by his puppeteer father.  While Walter works on his emotional development, attention turns to the younger boy of the family.  Frank takes his mother’s side in this conflict; but even more so he takes a stand against his father’s position.  Frank finds a substitute father figure in the easygoing tennis pro that tutors him for his weekly lessons.  This pro has a favorite phrase: “That’s okay, brother.”  He is loosey-goosey compared to Franks’ father’s mighty-tighty type of personality.  But the more Frank gravitates toward him, the more Bernard denigrates the tennis pro.  The poor kid is really thrown for a loop when he finds the tennis pro alone in the house with his mother.  Now he hits cognitive-dissonance big-time.  He can’t process why his surrogate father is sleeping with his mother, and Frank goes off the rails emotionally.  He begins to spread semen on books in the library, or on a girl’s locker.  He begins to curse exactly like his father.

But this has to be Walter’s film.  When Walter is called in to talk to a school psychologist, he is able for the first time to reconnect to the happiness of his childhood.  And that happiness was directly connected to his relationship with his mother.  He tells the story of the time she took him  to a science museum and he saw an exhibit of a giant squid attacking a whale.  He was terrified of this image.  He tells the psychologist that when they got home, his mother explained to him more information about that the meaning of that exhibit, and “it was less scary.”  Where was his father at this time in his life?  Walter realizes that he was absent—that his mother was the primary parent in the relationship.  She took responsibility and spent the time to nurture him.

Later, Walter visits his mother on his own and they have a wonderful chat about the old days.  Mom’s great line is, “In Columbus there was no one like your Dad.”  In other words, in New York, Bernard was just a small fish in a big pond.  And he could not handle that diminution of his glory.

All things come to a head in a delicious crisis scene where Bernard shows up at their former house and confronts Joan and wonders if they could have saved their marriage if he had cooked more meals.  All falls down here—and every member of the family (including the gray cat) gets into the act.  The film ends abruptly with a key scene for Walter—who is now ready to forge ahead and find out how he has a separate identity from his father. Good thing for him.  It’s bad enough that there is one Bernard.