3 posts tagged “film”

This weekend, we went to see Notes On A Scandal, starring Judi Densch and Cate Blanchett. I must admit that I wanted to see Perfume, but I was outvoted. However, I enjoyed the film and thought it to be wonderfully acted and presented. I've not read the book, but I think that the screenplay was well-crafted. It's a bit early in the morning to compose a review, but I'll just discuss one observation.

There was one odd background bit about Blanchett's character that I hope has been further investigated in the book, because it was the movie only glosses over something of her past that seemed very interesting. Early in the movie, there is an old photo that shows her hair mercilessly teased and she's in full post-punk garb, complete with heavy eyeliner. Later in the movie, she's showing her early 80's punk and post-punk lp's to the boy. He flips past a Siouxsie and the Banshees album and kinda sneers at it. Siouxsie, of course, is playing on the soundtrack. But I didn't recognize the album, nor did I recognize the song. In the credits, Siouxsie and the Banshees are noted for their track "Dizzy", which came out in '02, and is on their "Best of" release - something, sadly, I do not yet own. The character would not have listened to this song in her teens, but that's an obscure point for only a fan of the band and of little interest. But the song was good.

Another quick observation: I really enjoyed watching Sheba, Blanchett's character, deal with the matter of age. She's a woman married to an older man, she's having an affair with a child, and she's the object of desire by a woman on the verge on retirement. She wants to recapture something from her youth, obviously. The wild artchild in the post-punk heyday. There was an underlying tension, but I wish it been explored more deeply.

Altogether, this is a very good film and I highly recommend it.

Recently, we watched Jim Jarmusch's Broken Flowers starring Bill Murray. I enjoyed this movie. The plot is simple. A man is told he has a son, but he doesn't know who the mother is. Being a bit of a ladies' man in his younger days, he travels across the country to each of his ex-girlfriends to ask if she is, indeed, the mother.

I tentively put this film in the same category as Groundhog Day, my favorite Bill Murray movie of all time. In both films, Murray plays an unhappy, unsatisfied man who has a nagging itch and who goes through great lengths to scratch it. In both films, Bill Murray is a man who is going through the rigors of atonement.

In Groundhog Day, as a curmudgeon local news reporter, Bill Murray lives Nietzsche's Eternal Recurrence until finally realizing his greatest happiness is living in this infinite repetition. His atonement is not to God or even some impartial universe. His atonement is to himself. And when he finds his reconciliation and happiness with his life, his life continues on February 3rd.

In Broken Flowers, as a lone wealthy bachelor, Bill Murray meets with four of his ex-girlfriends twenty years later and asks them if they have a typewriter and a son. Bill Murray's encounters go from strange to worse: He sleeps with one, has an awkward dinner with another and her husband, has a tense conversation with a third, and gets thrown out by the fourth. He visits his fifth, and possibly favorite, at her grave site, where he sits alone for a long time. Her tombstone reads "Beloved sister and daughter." There is no mention of "wife."

His atonement is not with the past women in his life, but with himself. When he believes he has found his son, who asks him for some philosophical advice, Bill Murray says, drawing from his journey, that the past cannot be changed, so what does it matter? The future cannot be changed, so what does it matter? There is only the present. And with those words, we find that Bill Murray has atoned to himself.

He never sought to reconcile with the women in his life, but only to satisfy his own curiosity of potential paternity. In the process of that quest, he learns what the women in his life have become after twenty years. He is already well aware of what he has become - or how he has never changed. When he realizes the permanence and intrangence of the past, he becomes resolved to it and accepts it. When he realizes the unknowability of the future, he becomes resolved to it and accepts it. He only has the present on/with/by which to live. Once he realizes this, he is free to live in the present - and wake up on February 3rd, so to speak.

The twist is that though he has determined to live in the present, the present does not work out for him so well. Here is the missing scene from Groundhog Day, within which everyone lives happily ever after. In Broken Flowers, our protagonist reaches the apex of presence in the present and finds emptiness and lack. More specificly, there are hundreds of young men wearing trackshirts with stripes. Bill Murray has reached his now and is finally at peace with his now, but his now is as empty as his now ever was.

As existential examinations, Broken Flowers serves as a nice bookend begun with Groundhog Day. Both films portray a man wrestling with a past that has become a present that just won't quit. He finds self-discovery and learns what his life could mean in the process of reliving the past over and over again. His enlightenment comes at the realization that there is only the present to live for while one still can. A bouquet of flowers is only pretty in the present. They have been cut from their past and will soon lose their petals and die. Thus, live fully. But Broken Flowers warns us to live fully carefully lest we attach ourselves to something that really isn't us.