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November 6, 2011

Obscurity: Martha Marcy May Marlene & Sleeping Beauty

I was talking to a friend the other day about Sean Durkin's Martha Marcy May Marlene and discussing whether its very methodical structure and faux-subjectivity was the correct approach to the particular story. The crux of our conversation pivoted upon the same umbrage Richard Brody had with the film in The New Yorker:

It’s exactly this canny dosing of information that makes it seem as if Durkin is pushing buttons—not ineffectively, but un-affectingly ... By holding back on what Martha knows and playing it out as what he’s willing to divulge, Durkin trades the potential depth of her dark and strange experiences for cheap, if clever, thrills.

This assessment is basically correct, except that the trade-off Brody suggests Durkin made is not for a better film, but a different film altogether. What he did make is indeed a thriller, an expertly crafted one which, in that it even suggests the depths which Brody wishes it fully plumbed, has the bonus of being more than the sum of its well-calibrated parts. That its structure doesn't completely mirror the psyche of its subject doesn't bother me. I'll wait for another film to do that, and enjoy what this one does so well.

A day or two later, I watched Julia Leigh's lush debut feature Sleeping Beauty, also the story of a young woman with personality troubles and one which takes precisely the opposite approach to its subject as Martha. Just as Durkin carefully regulates information in order to wring out the suspense and mystery, Leigh openly defuses her scenario's inherent tension. Within the story of a girl who willingly allows herself to be drugged and prostituted, and who is gradually overcome by her curiosity about what transpires while she's unconscious, there is an exquisite opportunity for a mystery: a protagonist who must fill in the blanks. This is not what Leigh is after, however, just as she is not out to titillate us with explicit nudity or mortify us with unpleasant sex. From the very first time her heroine, Lucy, goes under, we are made privy to precisely what information her circumstances deny her. These circumstances are presented in a highly formal and emblematic manner (three encounters, each representing a different phylum not just of masculinity but castrated masculinity), and from this structure we can infer Leigh's intentions. Take it or leave it.

The risk of this model is that, if the viewer is not on board with the director's thesis, or if that thesis is not completely thorough, or if it is presented in a manner that is too obscure, the film potentially fails. The viewer leaves it. In so much as that this is a riskier route, perhaps Durkin was hedging his bets by not taking it, but I doubt it. I don't believe he overestimates his work. He chose the type of film he wanted to make, and hit that very particular nail on the head.

Postscript: I watched Almodovar's The Skin I Live In this evening and during the first hour or so considered working its structure into this discussion, before realizing shortly thereafter that I would be biting off more than I could chew in a few paragraphs. Here's a movie which confounds expectations concerning not simply what information to reveal, but when, and how, and through whom. It makes the famous expository sequence in Vertigo seem like an offhand line of dialogue, thrown out midsentence to keep us on track; Almodovar, conversely, takes great delight in not even letting us know we're on a train, much less that it's about to crash.

Posted by David Lowery at November 6, 2011 7:24 PM