Irasj Asanti | Knus meg (Break Me) / 2018

in a cage

by Douglas Messerli

 

Nina Anderson and Irasj Asanti (screenplay), Irasj Asanti (director) Knus meg (Break Me) / 2018 [15 minutes]

 

The title of Norwegian director—born in Norway of Kurdish Iranian parents—Irasj Asanti’s Break Me is a blatant challenge to the forces which would take his central character, Iranian-born Mansour (Singh Bajwa) back into a world of complete control over his behavior and sexuality.

     Mansour is a cage-boxer, a brutal fighter coached by his own father, Farzad (played by the director). Despite his traditional family, however, Mansour—like many a young immigrant—has adapted comfortably to his new Norwegian homeland. He regularly parties and has fallen in love with a young boy Andreas (Fredrik Skogsrud), who also is his sparring partner.

      To please his father, however, and perhaps to prove to himself that he is merely bisexual, as opposed to being gay, Mansour keeps sleeping with women, pulling him away from his secret lover’s life.

     Even worse, Farzad has determined that his son will marry a Koranic-educated woman, Sjasmin (Ronahi Afsari), without allowing Mansour any say in the matter.

     In the cage, the young man increasingly takes out his anger on his opponents, violently beating them beyond the simple fighting dominance the cage boxing demands. Several times he has to be

pulled off his opponents. It also seems to himself be exploring cutting and other self-destructive acts. At one point Andreas notices the scars from the cuts Mansour has made in the side of his torso.

 

    Yet his friends appear to recognize Mansour’s attraction to Andreas, and even good-naturedly tease him in the locker room about staring at his ass. His world at home, as opposed to his relationship to Norwegian society in general are oppositional, and the struggle to find a balance is nearly impossible.

      When his father observes his son and Andreas on the streets mock-wrestling, recognizes the joy they take in touching one another, and sees them entering a tanning-salon together, he grows more than suspicious. Consulting with his religious leader, he decides to take his son’s passport away and force him into marriage.

       By this point, it appears that Mansour is even willing to kill himself as he stands on a pedestrian bridge over a highway, leaning into what might be a fall or jump. Andreas reports that he’s applied to a police academy in Northern Norway, and assures Mansour that he can get him a job there as well.

      But it is too late. Mansour demands that Andreas stop leaving him messages, and when his lover suggests he’ll talk with his father, Mansour grows violent. The cultures do not comprehend each other. There is no talking with a traditional Iranian father. When Farzad sees a picture of Andreas on his son’s cellphone, he confiscates it and demands his son come sit on the couch with him and his mother. He is told that his mother is soon packing his suitcase, that he will be returning to Iran with his father since his grandfather is terribly ill.

      Looking out his window, he sees his friend Andreas begging to see him, but Mansour no longer has any hope. He pulls down the black blind. His parents have broken him.

 

Los Angeles, February 9, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2024).

Tom Stoppard | Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead / 1990

the moment to say no

by Douglas Messerli

 

Tom Stoppard (screenwriter, based on his play, and director) Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead / 1990

Stoppard’s brilliant 1967 play takes the two minor characters of Hamlet through an existentialist journey made up of language, a world in which these two anti-heroes, inexplicably called into being by a court messenger, can participate only through linguistic games as they try to explain their existence and purpose. The marvel of this play was its youthful wit as the two original actors, Brian Murray and John Wood, attempted to best each other with rapid-fire language games:

 

                      Ros: We were sent for.

                      Guil: Yes.

                      Ros: That’s why we’re here (He looks round, seems doubtful.

                                     then the explanation) Travelling

                      Guil: Yes.

                      Ros: (Dramatically) It was urgent—a matter of extreme urgency,

                                     a royal summons, his very words: official business and

                                     no questions asked—lights in the stable-yard, saddle up

                                     and off headlong and hotfoot across the land, our guides

                                     outstripped us in breakneck pursuit of our duty! Fearful

                                     lest we come too late!

 

                                                      (Small pause)

                      Guil: Too late for what?

                      Ros: How do I know? We haven’t got there yet.

                      Guil: Then what are we doing here, I ask myself.

                      Ros: You might well ask.

                      Guil: We better get on.

 

     Their “getting on,” however is harder than one might expect as they encounter, in a play within a play, a group of performing actors who attempt to play out a play very similar to the play they are living within. Once they do reach Elsinore, moreover, Hamlet himself is playing with “words, words, words,” as large groups of people come and go, vaguely ordering the pair to note Hamlet’s behavior and comments. Yet, since these minor figures have few encounters with the Danish Prince, most of what they observe is “offstage,” through the cracks of walls, leaving them more confused than ever.

      One of the great delights of Stoppard’s play is that despite this couple’s inability to know even which of them is Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, what their relationship is to each other—they are simply a “couple,” although the playwright in determining that suggests perhaps something more than a deep friendship—or what their true relationship is to Hamlet; they are simply told they are old school friends.

      The irony, of course, is that the audience already knows their fate—the fate of nearly everyone within the play and everyone sitting in the audience as well, which the playwright (just in case someone may have never read Hamlet) announces in the title itself. Consequently, the substance of the play depends upon their not-knowing, despite their intense cleverness, revealed, particularly, in their philosophical and scientific thinking. The great pleasure of Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, in short, is its Beckett-like representation of two clueless everymen who trip through the language like clowns in their attempts to comprehend their imposed reality.

     It may be a basic trope—played out in numerous characters from Bouvard and Pecuchet, Vladimir and Estragon, and even Abbott and Costello—but it works, at least on stage and page, because of its basic dialogical rhythms, which is at the heart of theater.

     

     At the heart of film, however, is the image, and transforming a work of “words, words, words,” despite the fact that the playwright remained in complete control of this film, is most difficult. While the play begins immediately with the toss of a coin (reinstating the themes of game and chance), Stoppard’s movie version begins with a long ride through time and space, with an even longer vertical dip by Guildenstern to reach down for a coin he has spotted upon the ground. In these visual maneuvers, everything changes, and what once was clever and witty—what once was based on “timing”—is slowed down in narrative pace. By the time Rosencrantz and Guildenstern get into their dialogue, the audience has lost attention, and the characters seem leaden.

     I never saw the original production (my companion, Howard, did see it, however, at the Alvin Theater in New York), but I am certain behind the verbal gymnastics of the original actors was a great deal of joy; in the film, although Gary Oldman (as Rosencrantz) and Tim Roth (as Guildenstern) are fine actors, but they seem to approach their verbal roles so diffidently that they appear more as dolts rather than swordsmen of language.

     The busy costumes and sets of the players, moreover, distract us from any comments with which the two may joust. The abused child-actor Alfred is converted into a knowledgeable drag-queen, removing some of the naughty sting of the original. And by the time the couple reaches Elsinore, with its cavernous spaces, almost any linguistic arousal has been dampened.

   Strangely, Stoppard encourages this even further by having the seemingly less intelligent Guildenstern express his intelligence in a series of visual puns surrounding various physical principles such as Newton’s cradle, Newton’s law of universal gravitation, the Greek principle of steam power, and the creation of a bi-wing plane. At moments, these actions seem entertaining, but once more they slow down the language which is the essential engine of Stoppard’s play.

         Several critics have argued that the film failed because of its attempt to bring such a high level of language to the screen. But I would argue just the opposite; it is almost as if the playwright, determining to make the work a visual manifestation of his story, pulled the plug on the very source of its energy.

       In fact, what Stoppard does is to turn the play Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, inside out. Instead of allowing the obscure figures to become the focus of the play, his cinematic intrusions of time and space refocus our attentions onto Hamlet. Richard Dreyfuss and the Lead Player, Iain Glen as Prince Hamlet, Ian Richards as Polonius, and Joanna Miles as Gertrude are such fine actors that, speaking Shakespeare’s lines, they dominate the play, and like this Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, we are more attracted to the action going on “onstage” (which might have been described as “offstage” in the original) than we are the shenanigans of the sparring couple. In short, the movie entirely loses the focus of the original play, ending up with in the dead center of what was once a vortex, where, as Wyndham Lewis described it, art becomes abstract.

   Accordingly, I believe the language-bound original was less abstract than Stoppard’s visualization of his work, which is far more representational than the very human rendering of complex ideas of the original.

    By comparison with the “still-lives” portrayed by Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, the lightness of Iain Glen’s acting seems anything but morose. Even Polonius seems lighter on his feet that the two actors at the center of this filmed version.

  Perhaps a “staged” film might have generated more excitement than this camera-busy “representation” of what once was a verbal delight. The death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, unfortunately, does not occur at the end of Stoppard’s film, but in its very earliest scenes, and we can only wonder, as does the comic couple of the title, whether there was a time at the beginning when they might have said “no” to their excruciating voyage.

 

Los Angeles, July 4, 2013

Reprinted from International Cinema Review (July 2013).

 

Barbet Schroeder | Reversal of Fortune / 1990

the dead speak

by Douglas Messerli

 

Nicolas Kazan (screenplay, based on the book by Alan M. Dershowitz), Barbet Schroeder (director) Reversal of Fortune / 1990

 

Early in Barbet Schroeder's taut and beautifully filmed drama of the rich and haunted, the wealthy socialite Sunny von Bülow narrates:

 

               I never woke from this coma, and I never will. I am what doctors call

               "persistent vegetative"—a vegetable. According to medical experts, I could

               stay like this for a very long time—brain dead, body better than ever.

 

     This voice, speaking from the dead, reminds one, somewhat, of the voice of dead man lying face-down in the pool in Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard. But at the time of these lines, delivered in the 1990 film by actress Glenn Close, Sunny was still living in her vegetative state, and the haunting reality of her being a narrative ghost did not end until 2008, 28 years after she fell into that coma.

     Schroeder's film, like Sunny's audacious statement, is, in fact, less a simple recounting of the events that led to Sunny's husband, Claus von Bülow, of being accused and found guilty of attempted murder—actually two attempted murders—as it is a study in warring realities, an ironic yet respectful investigation into what it means to be alive.

      On the surface any couple might wish to have been blessed as magnificently as the von Bülow's. Claus, a self-made socialite who took the name of his maternal grandfather, former Danish Minister of Justice, adding the "von" at a later date, was assistant to J. Paul Getty when he married Sunny in 1966.

     Sunny, (born Martha Sharp Crawford) was nicknamed according to the manner of her personality. And why shouldn't she be "sunny"? She had inherited some 75 million dollars from her father, Robert Warmack, and upon her mother's death came into possession of Clarendon Court, the Newport Rhode Island mansion depicted in the film musical High Society (starring Grace Kelly, with whom Sunny was often compared).

     From a former marriage with Austrian Prince Alfred von Auersperg, Sunny had two children, Annie Laurie "Ala" Isham and Alexander von Auersperg; and with Claus, Sunny produced another daughter Cosima Pavoncelli. The three children were said to have been close until their mother's overdose/attempted murder, when Cosima took the side of her father, the two other children accusing Claus.

      As Schroeder portrays family life at Clarendon, the children, always formally dressed, are packed away in a formal living room, quietly watching television, while Claus and his wife fight a nearly silent war in the bedroom, icily arguing at times, but mostly keeping to themselves, Claus, following a strict pattern of daily behavior, the now "unsunny" Sunny, drowning her sorrows in alcohol and drugs. The tension between them is palpable, even as they pass in the night. They are both ghosts, both speaking from the dead.

      Schroeder brilliantly characterizes the lavishness of their home, their possessions, their potential pleasures, yet despite the glitter, there is no gayness. Everything, as rich as it appears, is on the surface. The lives within this prison are indeed dark, and the viewer finds it difficult to comprehend what is occurring inside these seemingly blessèd folk. As Claus admits to lawyer Dershowitz's comment, "You are a very strange man": "You have no idea." And one can only wonder what he means. Gay? S&M? Something truly perverse beyond even the societal bounds of what we now recognize?

     Jeremy Irons plays Claus von Bülow with a mannered reserve that allows this character, despite his despicably smug surface, a great deal of inner humor, which, in turn, allows us to imagine this "villain" as possibly innocent. When a discussion between von Bülow and Dershowitz turns to the testimony of a priest, the lawyer quips, "A priest? Well, a priest is the ideal witness: it's like getting the word of God." Claus quickly betters him: "I checked. God is unavailable." To Dershowitz's bleak assessment of his client, "You do have one thing in your favor: everybody hates you," von Bülow retorts: "Well, that's a start."

 

    Against this bleak, hidden world, Schroeder counterposes the open, light-filled existence of lawyer Alan Dershowitz (played by Ron Silver), who, in a rambling Victorian-like house that might have been the home of the family of Meet Me in St. Louis, is surrounded at all times by legions of arguing students, people willing to do nearly anything for him just to further learn how the legal system works. Dershowitz and his students argue perpetually, but it is a friendly and nearly incessant chatter, filled with humor and, more importantly, an attempt at honesty.

 

                     Sarah: He had a gorgeous mistress and he went with an ugly

                         whore?

                     Raj: You know, there are some things even mistresses won't do.

                     Alan Dershowitz: Like what?

                     Raj: I am not telling.

 

    Dershowitz's is an active world, filled with quick basketball games, fast-food chow-downs, loud discussions, and, almost always, light. The rooms of this house are sometimes even shabby, crowded with cheap desks, corners stacked with papers. But it is Dershowitz's world that can save individuals, perhaps even the guilty. And it is this noisy, open space, rather than the marble, hidden one that can redeem lives.

     That Dershowitz’s own life later became clouded with the clients and situations in which he was involved seems almost inevitable. The hero of one film is never that of the next.

     As we are told, over and over, throughout the film, no one will ever know perhaps whether or not Claus von Bülow attempted to kill his wife. But everyone will remember that he was found innocent through the efforts of Dershowitz and others. Far more convincingly than Sidney Lumet's 12 Angry Men, Schroeder reveals that the American judicial system can work—albeit with substantial financial resources—that guilt cannot be presumed even for those who appear most guilty.

 

Los Angeles, Easter 2010

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2010) and Reading Films: My International Cinema (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2012).

João Pedro Rodrigues | O Fantasma / 2000, USA 2001

dark pleasure

by Douglas Messerli

 

Alexandre Melo and José Neves (screenplay), João Pedro Rodrigues (director) O Fantasma / 2000, USA 2001

 

Most US critics commenting on João Pedro Rodrigues’ 2000 film O Fantasma describe it as a film where the hero, a late-night Lisbon trashman, goes on a slow decline into depravity, what critic Rebecca Flint Marx, for example, portrays as “a phantasmic odyssey of sexual dysfunction and cruelty.” His nearly daily sexual encounters with anonymous male partners, has been viewed, primarily, as obscene and cruel. 

       In part, I would argue, these critics perceive it that way because Sergio (the handsome Ricardo Meneses) is into light S&M, and does, at moments, appear cruel, particularly when his female trash worker friend, Fatima (Beatriz Torcato) comes on to him and in a bathroom scene where Sergio pushes away a man attempting to fellate him because Sergio can’t get sexually aroused. Moreover, Rodrigues actually dares to show us erect penises and focuses for a few seconds on Sergio’s well-shaped ass. Yet, I doubt anyone would comment on scenes like these if they were performed by a man and woman, which suggests that gay sex, even if viewers don’t mind the idea of it, is still fairly verboten on screen; and I’d argue that Rodrigues’ several sex scenes are far more chaste that those in hundreds of heterosexual films. 

        As other critics have correctly noted, Sergio is also something of a beast, made quite apparent early on in the film when he brings his beloved dog, Lorde, a bone to eat, getting down on his hands and knees and sniffing much like the dog, repeating the sniffs when Fatima, covering his eyes with her hands, demands he guess who she might be, soon after licking her hands, and later moaning in a manner that a beaten dog might. Throughout the film, shot mostly at night, dogs howl through the streets as the garbage men make their rounds.

     A.O. Scott, of The New York Times, wrote of the major character: “He is, from the start, pointedly viewed as an animal who responds to others with either cruelty or desire, and so his descent into crime and then into a state of overt animality is neither surprising nor interesting.”

     Rodrigues’ point, however, is precisely related to these critics’ complaints: the beautiful young gay, trash collector is basically an animal because the society perceives him that way. Because of both his menial job and his sexuality (which he obviously hides from his macho coworkers) Sergio has already been treated by the society-at-large as a kind of animal, a being at the very bottom of the societal totem pole. All he has going for him is his beauty, and it is only in sexual domination, obviously, that he senses any power over others, even, at moments, over the police, one of whom apparently waits for him in a parked car, tape over his mouth and handcuffed, so that the young man may jack him off.

     If Sergio is cruel it is because he has been treated so cruelly himself, forced to live in a small room with a bed, work all night on garbage truck, and hide his true identity. It is the world that has made him somewhat cruel, but we recognize if only from his loving identity with Lorde that what he really seeking is love.

      This young man’s biggest mistake comes out of the blue, as he and workers are picking up furniture, appliances, and clothing tagged for pickup in what is obviously a fairly wealthy neighborhood. There, in a house garage Sergio comes across a tall, ruggedly handsome swimmer working on his expensive motorcycle—and falls immediately in love. The swimmer (Andre Barbosa) is so obviously superior to the men Sergio has been daily consorting with, that he can hardly return to work, dragging on their meaningless encounter by questions about the motorcycle before he is dragged back into his reality by a friend.

      We never discover whether or not this hunk is also gay; in his inability to comprehend why, when he later discovers the fact that Sergio is stalking him, it appears he is not particularly aware of his own beauty and why someone else might be attracted to him. Because of Sergio’s job, in any event, he does not even seem to gaze back at the trashman’s beauty.

      The swimmer, João, lives still at home with his mother, and, apparently, given what the obsessed Sergio discovers as he peeps into João’s window, to be a fan of monster movies, since his room contains a small statue of Godzilla.

      For Sergio, he simply represents everything he might like to possess: money, social acceptance, beauty, and, of course, that expensive motorbike. He is a true insider, and it is only natural that this total outsider prowls day and night to find his way in, not only keeping a close watch on the house, going through the family garbage in which he discovers a pair of his would-be lover’s ripped speedos, but also follows him to the gym where he swims, and even humps the man’s motorcycle, an act interrupted by the police.

       Clearly, it is not just the man he wants, but his life. And to declare his attentions to himself, he masturbates in the shower wearing the speedos, enters the swimmer’s bedroom, peeing, like a dog, on his bed to mark the territory, and eventually, and quite shockingly dresses up in black latex body garment and rapes the man, presumably the scene with which the film begins. He has become the swimmer-boy’s personal Godzilla; but after that act he is, of course, doomed with nowhere else to go.

      His domain is the world of trash, and he returns to that world which nearly every morning the trucks he rides go to dump their contents. He is no longer at home in the everyday world, having taken an action that has surely barred him forever from the “normal” world. He is, in the true meaning of that word, now a monster.

       Scott also argued that Rodrigues “may be fascinated by perversity, but he seems utterly indifferent to pleasure.” I might suggest that, in fact, the reason that Godzilla was so popular, in part, was the fact that this beast finally got his revenge. So is Sergio’s revenge, while shocking, also a kind of dark pleasure.

 

Los Angeles, November 1, 2017

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2017).

Joel Coen and Ethan Coen | True Grit / 2010

out there

by Douglas Messerli

 

Joel and Ethan Coen (screenwriters and directors) (based on a novel by Charles Portis) True Grit / 2010

 

If I have several times in these pages chided the Coen brothers for their sophomoric cynicism and exaggerated characterizations of the human species, I have also noted time and again their brilliant gifts as directors, particularly when they work, as they have here and as they did in No Country for Old Men, with pre-existing sources. In both cases the sensibilities of the authors nicely match the Coens’ viewpoints. But the darkness of these films is far more profound than the shallow nose-thumbings that often occur in the Coens' more comic works.

     Indeed, I believe True Grit—despite Los Angeles Times critic Betsy Sharkey's proclamation in today’s paper that this film (as well as others this year) is far “nicer” than No Country for Old Men—is their most horrifying work to date. For in the earlier film, chaos and destruction was meted out by the evil villain; in last year’s A Serious Man, the sufferings endured by the hero were obviously the "gift" of a wrathful God. But in True Grit it is the so called “good people,” as well as the villains, who kill.

     True, the evil Tom Chaney (Josh Brolin) begins it, killing Mattie Ross’ father. But we soon recognize that in this   Arkansas frontier world of an "eye for an eye" philosophy, death or, at least, its image, is something no one can escape. From the moment the grieving 14-year-old daughter enters the town to identify her father’s body and send the corpse on its way back to her home, Mattie (excellently realized by Hallie Steinfeld) is faced with death. Having to pay almost everything she has for the embalming and shipping of the body, she is forced to sleep the first night, like Oliver Twist, in a coffin, sleeping beside three cadaverous criminals who, a few minutes after her arrival in town, are hung in the main square. When she finally does find other lodging, she must share the bed with an old woman whose dead sleep reveals that she is soon to become a corpse herself.

     None of this, however, truly fazes this intense moppet, and we soon discover that like most of those around her, when it comes to facing annihilation, she has a heart of stone. For Mattie is determined to get revenge, to track down the man who killed her father, presumed now to be in Indian Territory, a jurisdiction of federal marshals who are few in number and busy with larger crimes.  Spouting the gospel as if she were a child-preacher out a Flannery O’Connor tale, Mattie doesn’t even blink in her forward motion of righteous wrath. Unlike the 1969 movie version of True Grit, which significantly softened this figure’s indignation, the Coens transform her into a pint-sized prophet utterly determined to accomplish what she believes she is destined to do.

      When told that US Marshall Rooster Cogburn (played in the original by John Wayne, and here by Jeff Bridges) is the meanest of men she might chose to lead her on the chase, Mattie checks out a local trial wherein she hears testimony to his murderous ways. Cogburn, however, is not just a murderer—or, as some might prefer to describe him, a successful sheriff—but he is a serious drunk (ridiculously euphemized by suggesting he likes to “pop a cork”), and Mattie has not only to get around his reluctance to the chase but his questionable ability to accomplish it. Part of the film’s humor lies in her stubborn maneuvering of Cogburn and in his determination to keep her from attempting to join him in the task. Against her desire, Cogburn teams up with another man, LaBoeuf (hilariously played by Matt Damon), a roughly mustachioed and spur-jangling Texas Ranger who is after Chaney for a different murder and a large reward. Both try to sneak away early in the morning before Mattie can join them, but she is soon hot on their trail and thoroughly demonstrates her “true grit” by fording the river on horseback.

    In the Coens' telling, the three potential killers—thoroughly revealing, as The New York Times critic Manhola Dargis pointed out, D. H. Lawrence’s postulate that “the essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic and a killer”—now come face to face with an even greater emblem of death, the vast “out there,” the frontier itself. This is not the lush green or even picturesquely rocky landscape of most Westerns, but a bleached-out and barren world stripped of nearly everything, including the Indians. At the best the trio come across an occasional cabin or an eccentric loner such as Bear Man (Ed Corbin), a wilderness doctor cloaked in the entire pelt of a bear with head attached. In this world, death looms everywhere. And, as the two men—the grumpy and always woozy Cogburn and the bragging, self-centered LaBoeuf—inevitably turn against one another, Mattie is put into the position of a scolding, cajoling guide, leading them, as much as they lead her, into harm’s way.

      I don’t know how anyone might describe a film that shows a villain’s fingers being cut off, the knife then thrust into his heart, and presents a scene a few minutes later in which Cogburn shoots not only the robbers but LaBoeuf (it is debatable, given his obvious skill with a gun combined with his limited vision—he has only one eye—whether it was intentional or not) as being “nice.” But the directors have gotten to the heart of Portis’ fiction and come closer to the truth of the American west than most Westerns other than those by director Budd Boetticher. Without the controls of society, it is not a nice world, and Mattie, despite her determination and her own killer instincts—it is she who finally must face down her father’s murder and shoot him dead—ultimately learns that such an unforgiving world can only end in loss.

      While both LaBoeuf and Cogburn take bullets, surviving nonetheless, Mattie, falling down into a sink hole, must face nature itself, in the form of a true symbol of the evil of her and the others' acts, by being bitten by a poisonous snake. Even a mad rush across the starlit plane cannot entirely make her whole again; she loses her horse and one arm. We later discover that her strong-willed ways perhaps also left her in a life of loneliness, for she never marries.

      Although Mattie does not question her acts or attempt to justify her mad determination to gun down her father’s killer, we must, at some point, judge her, just as the people of the city had judged Rooster Cogburn earlier in the film. And we realize that in her fanatical grittiness there is something heroic yet ridiculous, that she is a figure at once comic and tragic, similar to US history.

 

Los Angeles, New Year’s Day, 2011

Reprinted from International Cinema Review (January 2011).