A new year and new resolutions: I here do vow to write one blog post a day Monday to Friday for all of 2010. For this to actually happen I'm sure enough going to have to loosen up, chill out and just let the words flow out of me like some grand old linguistic spigot. I love films, so I no doubt will write about them. But there's so much more to life than the movies! Great literature, music, art, photography, architecture, and then there's travel and fashion and women and money and all the other Sunday supplement titles you find in the newspaper. Then of course there are my friends and my family and Sophie, who I will also no doubt write about. When I started this blog a long while back I did a lovely introductory statement and then clammed up for a good month, so fuck that shit and let's get rolling:
I'm still not able to shake the sadness of Leo McCarey's Make Way For Tomorrow, a film that's so beautifully and achingly upsetting that I don't know if I can bear to watch it again. How often do you encounter a Hollywood film (or any film for that matter) that treats aging and the aged as a serious subject for enquiry? There's Tokyo Story (which I'm really excited to watch again this month during the BFI's Ozu retrospective, partly to see how these movies connect) and Up that spring immediately to mind, but after that I'm struggling. This is a work of art which feels utterly out of time in its approach, a film for all times in highlighting the horror and the inevitability of how the young forget their elders. Bark and Lucy are an old, loving couple who are forced to move out of their house due to debts (there's a wonderful and amusing subplot hinted at throughout about how the guy who's evicting them is doing so out of spite because Lucy loved Bark instead of him - man I would have loved to see that film too in McCarey screwball style a la The Awful Truth!), but none of their five children are willing to take them both in at the same time. They split up into different homes, and spend time being shifted round to their very ordinary, but utterly selfish children and their families. What's remarkable is how the audience (likely youngish) are also shifted into the position of being irked by Bark and Lucy, especially in the extremely uncomfortable scene when Lucy persistently swings in her squeaking rocking chair that disturbs the bridge class her son George's wife is hosting. This scene really understands the horror that the presence of the old bring out in the young.
That annoyance the audience feels with this doddering old woman is part of what makes it hurt so much when in the final half hour the pair meet for what looks like one final time (of course the pain of this film also stems from the world-beating acting from the two leads). Bark is being sent to the other side of the country to one of the children in California whereas Lucy will be sent knowingly but without her husband's knowledge to an old person's home after he gets on the train. (It's interesting and crucial that the reason she's being sent isn't due to her frame of mind or even her health, but because her son George and his wife have convinced themselves that their own kids wayward impulses are due to Lucy's presence in the house).
There's a great moment in the restaurant that they visit before they say goodbye to each other where it seems as if they're about to kiss, but then Lucy turns round and gives a wry smile (to the camera?) before they back away. So many great elements to this scene e.g. how Lucy and Bark are playing along with the disdain they assume is felt towards them by the characters/the audience, but of course it's a real funny and witty reflexive moment too.
I never used to be much for the way objects and paintings and music placed in the background of films (or paintings etc.) are used to symbolise what's taking place in the foreground, but that's all changed after reading Edward Snow's magisterial book on Vermeer, where he really gets in deep to his paintings and demonstrates the necessity of taking everything into account. Maybe for that reason, the most hardhitting and heartrending moment for me was in the penultimate scene when the kids are all gathered round worrying about why Bark and Lucy haven't returned for a farewell dinner (they decided to forget their children for once and enjoy themselves alone). They begin to realise how much they've neglected their parents and right there, just above their heads is Jean-Francois Millet's The Gleaners:
I first became aware of this wonderful painting in Agnes Varda's documentary The Gleaners and I, then last October I was lucky enough to stumble on it without prior knowledge of its location in the Musee D'Orsay in Paris (I'd mainly gone to see the Courbet's). Bam!
This painting is a stunner and it relates so perfectly to Lucy and Bark and the way the viewer responds to the film - first you glance at the painting and they look crippled, like hunchbacks even. But then you really get into the painting and you see the strength in their posture, strong backs and arms, sturdy and proud. Then you imagine these women out in the field every day, gleaning wheat, and they appear as if heroic statues. They're just like Lucy and Bark, oscillating in the viewer's mind between pathetic and heroic, all dependent on the way that you look at them. The great achievement of Make Way For Tomorrow is in showing us the right way to look.
This film isn't yet available on DVD so I made do and watched on Youtube here. The image and sound quality are fairly strong, but as you'd expect it's a soft image and there's occasional grain. Afterwards I was reading about the film online and whaddayaknow it's actually going to be released by Criterion next month with lovely cover art by cartoonist Seth (the pic at the top of this post). Maybe I'll buy it if I can bear the pain a second time, but you, if you haven't seen it, you must!
I'm still not able to shake the sadness of Leo McCarey's Make Way For Tomorrow, a film that's so beautifully and achingly upsetting that I don't know if I can bear to watch it again. How often do you encounter a Hollywood film (or any film for that matter) that treats aging and the aged as a serious subject for enquiry? There's Tokyo Story (which I'm really excited to watch again this month during the BFI's Ozu retrospective, partly to see how these movies connect) and Up that spring immediately to mind, but after that I'm struggling. This is a work of art which feels utterly out of time in its approach, a film for all times in highlighting the horror and the inevitability of how the young forget their elders. Bark and Lucy are an old, loving couple who are forced to move out of their house due to debts (there's a wonderful and amusing subplot hinted at throughout about how the guy who's evicting them is doing so out of spite because Lucy loved Bark instead of him - man I would have loved to see that film too in McCarey screwball style a la The Awful Truth!), but none of their five children are willing to take them both in at the same time. They split up into different homes, and spend time being shifted round to their very ordinary, but utterly selfish children and their families. What's remarkable is how the audience (likely youngish) are also shifted into the position of being irked by Bark and Lucy, especially in the extremely uncomfortable scene when Lucy persistently swings in her squeaking rocking chair that disturbs the bridge class her son George's wife is hosting. This scene really understands the horror that the presence of the old bring out in the young.
That annoyance the audience feels with this doddering old woman is part of what makes it hurt so much when in the final half hour the pair meet for what looks like one final time (of course the pain of this film also stems from the world-beating acting from the two leads). Bark is being sent to the other side of the country to one of the children in California whereas Lucy will be sent knowingly but without her husband's knowledge to an old person's home after he gets on the train. (It's interesting and crucial that the reason she's being sent isn't due to her frame of mind or even her health, but because her son George and his wife have convinced themselves that their own kids wayward impulses are due to Lucy's presence in the house).
There's a great moment in the restaurant that they visit before they say goodbye to each other where it seems as if they're about to kiss, but then Lucy turns round and gives a wry smile (to the camera?) before they back away. So many great elements to this scene e.g. how Lucy and Bark are playing along with the disdain they assume is felt towards them by the characters/the audience, but of course it's a real funny and witty reflexive moment too.
I never used to be much for the way objects and paintings and music placed in the background of films (or paintings etc.) are used to symbolise what's taking place in the foreground, but that's all changed after reading Edward Snow's magisterial book on Vermeer, where he really gets in deep to his paintings and demonstrates the necessity of taking everything into account. Maybe for that reason, the most hardhitting and heartrending moment for me was in the penultimate scene when the kids are all gathered round worrying about why Bark and Lucy haven't returned for a farewell dinner (they decided to forget their children for once and enjoy themselves alone). They begin to realise how much they've neglected their parents and right there, just above their heads is Jean-Francois Millet's The Gleaners:
I first became aware of this wonderful painting in Agnes Varda's documentary The Gleaners and I, then last October I was lucky enough to stumble on it without prior knowledge of its location in the Musee D'Orsay in Paris (I'd mainly gone to see the Courbet's). Bam!
This painting is a stunner and it relates so perfectly to Lucy and Bark and the way the viewer responds to the film - first you glance at the painting and they look crippled, like hunchbacks even. But then you really get into the painting and you see the strength in their posture, strong backs and arms, sturdy and proud. Then you imagine these women out in the field every day, gleaning wheat, and they appear as if heroic statues. They're just like Lucy and Bark, oscillating in the viewer's mind between pathetic and heroic, all dependent on the way that you look at them. The great achievement of Make Way For Tomorrow is in showing us the right way to look.
This film isn't yet available on DVD so I made do and watched on Youtube here. The image and sound quality are fairly strong, but as you'd expect it's a soft image and there's occasional grain. Afterwards I was reading about the film online and whaddayaknow it's actually going to be released by Criterion next month with lovely cover art by cartoonist Seth (the pic at the top of this post). Maybe I'll buy it if I can bear the pain a second time, but you, if you haven't seen it, you must!
No comments:
Post a Comment