“I can’t conceive of any more misery” Lennon/McCartney
(1962)
Review by Ken Burke
Applause
Be forewarned that this grim Danish film takes you into emotionally-barren Ingmar Bergman-style territory in a story about an actress whose life is tragic on- and off-stage.
Be forewarned that this grim Danish film takes you into emotionally-barren Ingmar Bergman-style territory in a story about an actress whose life is tragic on- and off-stage.
Bully
Hard to watch because it shows life's cruelty rather than a fictionalized version of it in a documentary about the endless horrors for some in their adolescent years.
Hard to watch because it shows life's cruelty rather than a fictionalized version of it in a documentary about the endless horrors for some in their adolescent years.
In
my last posting I cited the Rolling Stones’ song “Time Waits for No One” as the
likely reason why I wouldn’t have any option for posting in what has and
continues to be a very busy week for me in the non-blog (that is, actual paid
employment) world. However, I come
to you anyway with a determined attempt to get in some filmic commentary after
all, on two very adult films (rather than the more popcorn-munching material
such as Think Like a Man [Tim Story],
The Lucky One [Scott Hicks], The Three Stooges [the Farrelly brothers]
and The Cabin in the Woods [Drew
Goddard], which I’ll leave to their box-office wars because the ones I’m
interested in aren’t drawing in much cash, which is a real shame but
unfortunately not unexpected). So,
on to some quick (for me) comments on Applause
and Bully.
For
those of you familiar with the Beatles’ catalogue you might wonder why (or you
might even “Ask Me Why,” the song from which the leadoff quote comes) if I wanted
to emphasize one of their songs with the word “misery” in the review title that
I didn’t just use “Misery” (1963), where the singer laments about lost love and
its awful aftermath. I chose the
other song instead because of the irony of application, in that the line I’ve
cited isn’t about being in misery (as the protagonists of these reviewed films
are) but about NOT being in that
condition because of entering a state of bliss that comes with successful
romance (the next lines are “Ask me why, I’ll say I love you, And I’m always
thinking of you”). That’s the
emotional and mental state that our films’ primary characters are seeking, the
relief that comes from not being able to “conceive of any more misery,” but
that’s not really an option available to any of them, making their lives as
consciously displaced as my intentional edited use of the Lennon/McCartney
lyrics. The first of our desperate
souls is Thea Barfoed (played by the spicily-named Paprika Steen) in the Danish
film Applause (Applaus) directed by
Martin Pieter Zandvilet, released in Denmark in 2009 but just now getting to
us. Thea’s got everything you could want regarding “the fuzzy end of the lollipop”
(to quote Sugar Kane [Marilyn Monroe] in Billy Wilder’s 1959 comedy classic Some Like It Hot): alcoholism, divorce,
estrangement from her children, and a stage actress career where she’s now
performing as Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf so she has to channel
emotional turmoil on a regular basis in public even as she’s trying to purge it
from her private life. That’s
really about all you need to know concerning this film’s plot because it’s
essentially another piece of Photographic Realism (like Jean-Pierre and Luc
Dardenne’s The Kid with a Bike,
review posted here on April 12, 2012) seemingly shot in mid-def video with
images that focus on Thea’s hard times in a very intense, unflattering manner
done with frequent closeups on her uncompromising face, a tactic that is
simultaneously riveting and overwhelming in the widescreen format of the film’s
visualization.
All
Thea wants is to be close to her kids, but her previous failures as wife,
mother, and sociable human being make it hard for those she’d like to have
share in her personal life to see her as anything but raging, unpredictable
Martha off stage as well. Whether it’s possible pick-up German guy at a bar,
her dresser at the theatre, or her ex-husband Christian (Michael Falch),
she’s consistently hostile and even seems to have no rapport with her kids on a
rare visit until she gets out some Viking toys and they all have a whooping
good time simulating wanton destruction.
Yet when the time arrives for a family meeting with the social worker
counselor that she’s arranged she doesn’t even show up, leading to a fight with
her ex that once again channels the confrontations in Virginia
Woolf. By the time that she
take her sons to a picnic by the lake you wouldn’t be a bit surprised if she
decided to drown them and commit suicide (which I wasn’t eager to see but felt
properly prepared for), but fortunately she just decides to disengage from her
obsessions with her kids and stay away from them in an attempt to work on her
own problems. This may all sound
too much like being burdened with a distant relative’s miserable story at a
holiday dinner gathering, but Steen’s performance is so mesmerizing, so
dramatically on target that it’s hard to look away from the car wreck that has
become her life and hope with her that she's able to rebuild it.
When
you think of brooding Scandinavian directors and the powerful women that
they’ve shared with the world on screen you probably first come to Ingmar
Bergman, with such haunting interpersonal investigations as Persona (1966), Cries and Whispers (1972), and Autumn
Sonata (1978, all of which feature the stunning Liv Ullman, in concern with
Bibi Anderson in the first, Harriet Andersson, Kari Sylwan, and Ingrid Thulin
in the second, and Ingrid Bergman in the third) or Lars von Trier whose
penetrating work in such emotional attacks on the audience as Breaking the Waves (1996, with Emily
Watson), Dancer in the Dark (2000,
with Björk), and Melancholia (2011,
with Kirsten Dunst) stand as arguments for him as Bergman’s successor—although
if you’re more historically aware you’d likely start any such Scandinavian
remembrances with Carl Theodor Dreyer’s magnificent 1928 The Passion of Joan of Arc (definitely one of my all-time Top 10)
in which Renee Falconetti embodies enlightened reserve and attendant suffering as
the heretic-turned-saint, with her fiery end in the film mellowed to
canonization over the centuries—but Zandvilet proves himself capable of adding
to that canon with Applause, which is
likely all this film will get much of rather than profits because it’s an
admittedly melancholy tale that’s not likely to tear many away from The Hunger Games (Gary Ross) or Titanic (James Cameron) in 3-D, but if
you’re willing to sacrifice a bit of your own comfort to share the enthralling
discomfort of another you couldn’t do much better in the current cinema than to
see Applause (although you may find
the subtitles a bit strange at times if your print is similar to mine because
the English translation was occasionally joined by an additional version,
seemingly in Swedish based on what I’ve seen in Bergman films).
If you’re really up for a challenge, though, look no further (but please look at,
because this film desperately needs the exposure) than Lee Hirsch’s Bully. Even with all of the free press this documentary got over
its ratings battle to come down from the restricted-attendance R category
(which finally resulted in the coveted PG-13 needed to more easily reach its
target audience with some last-minute edits of the dreaded f-word, which
seemingly is more shocking and offensive for our national Ratings Board members
than it is for the kids who live with this language every day) it’s not raking
in much at the theatres so I can only hope that it will endure long enough for
an audience to build, or maybe it will eventually be shown in schools, at least
ones in more enlightened districts than the ones depicted in the film where
hesitation and denial on the part of school authorities helped contribute to
the suicides of two of the profiled youngsters. As the camera roams around the South and Midwest to focus on
five particular victims of uninvited repression we see the shocking ease with
which the cruelty happens and the even more shocking blasé attitude of some of
the attackers who don’t even seem to care that they’re being caught on camera
physically and verbally harassing 12 year-old Alex Libby in Iowa just because
he’s unattractive enough (“fish face” is one of their nicer choices) to be
noticed and not hulky enough to fight off his oppressors, so he keeps rationalizing
as often as he can that what’s happening to him isn’t really so bad. For Georgian Tyler Long, though, the
inability to stop the constant taunts at 17 became so overwhelming that he
finally committed suicide, which at least brought about a public outcry and
pleas from his parents and few friends (especially traumatized but
outspoken Devon who admits that as a very young boy he used to be a bully
himself) for this type of cruelty to be better monitored and stopped before
others embrace the only escape they can imagine from their constant torture, as
evidenced further in Bully by another
suicide, this time of Kirk Smalley, an 11 year-old Oklahoma boy, whose
heart-broken parents formed the anti-bullying group Stand for the Silent to
rally support for those unfortunate kids who are constantly menaced by their
peers.
However,
16 year-old Kelby, an Oklahoma lesbian girl who at least has a circle of
supportive friends to help somewhat in repelling the unthinking monsters in her
life, tried suicide three times herself and still has to live in the Bible-belt
environment she shared with Kirk, where many in her community and even some of
her teachers condemn her homosexuality, while Ja’Maya, a 14 year-old black Mississippi
girl, gets so fed up with it that she takes a handgun from her home and uses it
as a prop threat (there’s no indication that she ever intended to actually
shoot anyone) to try to keep her bullies at bay on yet another hell-bound
school bus. She understands that
what she did was wrong and fortunately did not have to serve extensive jail
time for her bad decision, but you can clearly see through testimony from her
and her family how anyone so abused by such constant mockery from her fellow
students would decide at some point that she had to do something to get her
tormenters to back off, even if it was just a dramatic bluff. Hirsch’s camera can’t possibly be in position
to capture most of what is reported about these tormented kids (although we do
see Ja’Maya’s “crime” on surveillance video; Alex could use such monitoring on
his bus for the many usual days when the attacks on him aren’t being recorded
by Hirsch) so most of the film consists of interviews with these kids, their
parents, their school authorities and other ineffective law-enforcers in their
communities, but this is not stagnant talking-heads footage; rather, it’s
revealing, powerful, and ultimately atrocious evidence that anyone would have
to live so many of their formative years in daily fear of abuse simply because
“boys will be boys” (and girls aren’t innocent either, as we’ve seen in news
stories about cyber-bullying that parallel and enhance what’s being forced into
mainstream conversation by this compelling film). Boys may also be good sons if they live long enough, but Tyler
and Kirk just couldn’t go on waiting for relief from their daily traumas so
they chose to exit the constant cruelty rained down on them. Both of their fathers deliver memorable
eulogies in various ways with loving memories of their departed children.
Tyler’s
dad is powerfully plain spoken, but Kirk’s—an ordinary, humble working man—is
the most eloquent of all, in his private statements to Hirsch and in his public
speech at a huge rally intended to honor young Kirk’s memory and challenge his
son’s community to rise above hate (ironically, a catch phrase for WWE wrestler
John Cena, promoted as a hero [despite all the “Cena sucks!” chants that are
gleefully shouted by the bullies at the “sport’s” televised events] by an
organization that has honorably embraced the national anti-bullying campaign
but still presents hours of weekly footage of arrogant jerks who intimidate the
more decent athletes in the company, constantly carry out sneak attacks—at
times with weapons—and rarely face any confrontation or condemnation from the
fictionalized management figures in the scripted stories, so that retribution
for such acts comes only occasionally, most often on expensive pay-per-view
events that are constantly hyped on the weekly cable shows that aren’t
regulated by FCC standards for the regular violence they dish out for profit). I had some problems myself with being
bullied in grade school (where the Catholic morality lessons didn’t always
carry over to the playground) and junior high (where I learned to hang around
the periphery of a gang of toughs, never joining in with their periodic raids
on our cross-town rivals but being familiar enough to them that when they were
hunting for someone to punch they released me on my own recognizance), but
nothing like what the sad, desperate kids in this film must endure. This is not a comfortable viewing
experience—really, it’s shameful that this bullying problem is so widespread,
but what can we expect in a culture where it happens on the sports fields, in
political campaigns, and in corporate skyscrapers all over America. However, this exposé demands to be
seen, if only to give the bullied some hope, the bulliers some shame, and the
absent adults in these kids’ lives some insights into what their own aggressive
offspring are doing to their fellow classmates, the undeserving victims of
these junior tyrants whose social swagger may unfortunately result one day in
them becoming the principals and police who turn a blind eye toward these
hostile taunts as the children of their weaker neighbors again pay the price of
simply not knowing how to avoid the cruel ones whose empty lives are filled up
with their vicious acts of terror on the weaker members of the disparate herd. You may not want to watch what Bully is trying to reveal, but if this
message doesn’t get out to the millions (and millions, as another WWE favorite,
The Rock, would say) of kids who are perpetrators, victims, or silent
bystanders of this ongoing reign of terror then all we can expect is more of
the same, handed down from generation to generation.
If
you’d like to know more about Applause
please consider the following links:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4lKETR6JT48&feature=results_main&playnext=1&list=PLCE5C434E4E91C2B3
(Applause star Paprika Steen answers
an audience question, then just let it run at the end for auto flow of five
more questions and answers)
If
you’d like to know more about Bully
please consider the following links:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6RDpOGqeCg
(15 min. clip of Ellen Degeneres interviewing David and Tina Long, parents of
Tyler who committed suicide in 2009)
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