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Around the corner:Five |
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A ghostly tennis match translated as unanswered letters by Jeroen Peeters & Jack Hauser.
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Dear Jack,
Back in Brussels, I went to see Ben Affleck’s The Town, a classic gangster movie set in today’s Charlestown, a neighborhood in Boston. Already in the opening minutes it shows that a microwave oven is useful for destroying hard drives containing surveillance video footage of a bank heist. The film revolves for a great deal around empathy issues, from the negotiations and collaboration among clan members, to interrogation by the police, to friendship and a love affair, with the viewer being engaged in all of it through efficient storytelling, camera work and editing. It furthermore includes all the features one can expect from a genre film, such as several hold-ups, violent car chases in narrow streets, a quarrel between the local police and the FBI, and, inevitably it seems, an armed potlatch that takes all the tension out of the film. It is well-crafted mainstream cinema, but nothing more: at no point does an explicit perspective on cinema occur, let alone one on the cinematic celebration of violence.
In that respect the film is somewhat naïve, though it shuns the fake retro aesthetics and nostalgia that often comes with genre films. During their hold-ups, the gang are wearing death masks, nun faces and veils, or appear as cops with macho shades – perhaps this carnivalesque use of costume pushes the violent acts onto the brink of the grotesque, if not the obscene, yet it doesn’t disturb the cinematic experience. What these grotesque costumes symbolize is the alternative space, say the heterotopia, these Mafiosi carved out for themselves within society – between the overt joy of being the bad guys that time and again escape law’s grasp, and the attempt at total mimicry when living under the radar. Now that I’m thinking of it, this particular “costumeness” appears also literally as a space in the flower shop where the kingpin lives, manages the gang and distributes the plans. In one brilliant scene at the end of the film, the mafia boss gets killed in his own flower shop by one of his own men, and he simply cannot believe what happens to him. The way actor Pete Postlethwaite goes down in slow motion, grimacing and withering if not swooning among his flowers, is nothing less than expressionist choreography.
Two more scenes caught my attention in that they condense a lot of meaning and imaginary space into a few moments revolving around body parts. The first is during the bank heist that opens the film, when a camera travels along the legs of bank manager Claire Keesey (Rebecca Hall), in which instant we know that she is the one who pushed the alarm button with her toes or so, and also that one of the gangsters will be enraptured and develop a heavy crush on her later on – a double bind that keeps up the tension. When gang leader Doug MacRay (Ben Affleck) has eventually fallen in love with her, they have lunch on a terrace, and again it’s a camera moving along body parts that tells most of the scene, putting the empathies and ties under pressure. The scene is really extended and wallows in confessional talk about a brother that died, but it gives me a good amount of time to follow the camera up Hall’s long, slender neck, and I’m gone, I start to fantasize about Italian Renaissance painting, Ghirlandaio especially:
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When Keesey is gone to the bathroom, Jem, a fellow gangster with a James Cagney-like explosiveness stumbles onto the scene, and we’re reminded of his Irish neck tattoo (!), which Keesey has seen during the heist but didn’t report to the police. She knows and MacRay knows, and they know that the other knows, and they know that the other knows that the other knows, and then the camera knows and we as spectators also know, and all this knowledge floats in between two necks. Only Jem doesn’t know, but he reveals the uncanny truth of the film while laughing at his friend having a pizza Hawaii – I guess Irish mobsters are not supposed to eat Italian stuff, but then still, what could be more prosaic or grotesque than pizza Hawaii? Eventually MacRay will escape to a different world, out of the narrow space of the clan and the “town”, to wait until the end of his days for his beloved Claire, who will probably spend the rest of her days managing a bank or gardening or indeed eating pizza Hawaii – her lack of imagination is what makes her a truly tragic figure.
Now I’m reminded of Claire Denis’ L’intrus (2004), which opened her retrospective at Arsenal in Berlin a good week ago in the director’s presence. It is a complex film inspired by Jean-Luc Nancy’s eponymous essay on his heart transplantation. Like a dark fable, Denis’ L’intrus proposes a tropological wandering initiated by Agnès Godard’s intimate camera work, skirting naked bodies or following in the wake of dogs or horses, a view thick with lust, literally on the hunt, fueled by dark, primal drives. It gradually widens the perspective from one’s veins and skin onto the whole world, to again speak about the impossibility of escaping one’s condition, not with a new heart, not by traveling to the end of the world. One will at best become a tourist in one’s own life, in the case of Denis’ French cinema a reality haunted by colonialism. Each gesture is political, and the corporeal provides weight as the film crosses borders and trespasses into contemporary and worldly realities – things boiling under the surface that have no existence whatsoever in a film like The Town, which only lives on the screen, at surface level.
Speaking about body parts, the Keira posters have now yielded to Diane Kruger posing in an ad for Calvin Klein perfume. The image shows her full body in a long, white dress, except for her feet, which are cut off by the frame – yet, for completing the image, one only needs to reminisce of Quentin Tarantino’s famous foot fetishism in Inglourious Basterds.
Best,
Jeroen |
To Be Continued
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