STATE OF THE ART.

It’s not since before World War One that we’ve had a situation like the one today where the forms, content and particularly duration of movies have been so fluid.  

The traditional two hour dramatic production, modeled on live theatre, no longer dominates. The take home version of it and other items hang around in forms like disk viewing and set time Free To Air programing, sustained by events like news and sports broadcasts, and the smart money is going into Streaming Series which, despite the celebrated removal of restraints like length and censorship seem to be settling into a rigid form,  the one hour episode format of the first features and the thirteen chapters of the theatrical serials that only petered out in the fifties.

Streamed dramatic series have developed built-in faults. All the best ideas go into the first episode to get the audience in, this is followed by repetition and reworking till an inconclusive ending which leaves another series possible. Addictive watching, not new, is now codified as binging.

I watch all this a little bemused. I’m not the target audience for what is being produced and I find a lot of it unsatisfying. I recognise the familiar generation gap which published criticism has never mastered. Movie critics in particular have been decades older than the people for whom who their stock in trade was made and who frequently knew it better than they did. 

 Where does this leave the old film freak with his allegiances to Soviet Montage, John Ford and giallo?

One effort which consciously attempted to merge its markets was Marvel’s Jessica Jones serieses (2015-2019) now already in the rear view mirror.

Jessica Jones - Krysten Ritter

Lead Krysten Ritter plays a character inherited from a minor strip cartoon original, a private eye who used to be a super hero(ine). They reveal her setup in stages. Jessica Hecht, as a character who bears a grudge, after the Mighty Marching Marvel Super Heroes  trashed New York in a previous chapter, puts a round into Ritter’s arm and seeing the blood comments - “Hm - not bulletproof!” 

Jessica Jones - Coulter and Ritter.

Our heroine has a drinking problem, at one stage getting thrown out with the bar garbage. She is indifferent to her appearance and surroundings, taking the first few episodes to get the smashed glass repaired in her “Alias Investigations” office door and having Rosario Dawson, guesting in the  (2015) Smile episode where she has to tend to injured Mike Coulter’s Luke Cage in Jones/ Ritter’s flat and comment “Your girl friend’s a slob!” Jessica ridicules Susie Abromeit‘s print dress and is told she’s being rude to her, coming back “I’m rude to everyone.” At one stage, she holds a helpless woman in the path of an oncoming subway train - Anyone remember Union Station? One of their devices is to give her a perpetual scowl. When the plot finally calls for her to smile the effect is starting.

They place Ritter in a studied film noir night time city, with heavy leanings towards Edward Hopper, and against deep focus Naked City-scapes for the day time. Interiors are shot deliberately without gelling the windows, so that the characters’ faces are darker than the the ones we sometimes see  in the mirrors. One episode goes all Cameron Menzies on us with large areas of the screen left black. This is not a series TV look.

Adult elements are piled in. Carrie Anne Moss (at last a familiar face) is our heroine’s lesbian lawyer involved in her own messy divorce. Rape and abortion are plot elements as is drug addiction. Eka Darville’s habit misleadingly indicates him as a lesser character but he gets a surprise, and not all that convincing, instant cure half way through. Particularly striking is beat cop Wil Traval who comes on as a bit player there to do a bit of biffo with Ritter but re-appears in one of the series strongest scenes, where he shows up at her friend radio talk show host Rachael Taylor’s fortified flat, proving to have brought a weapon for her protection, and they have a conversation through the intercom with him on the other side of the foyer gradually winning her trust and having her open her door to him. The writing allows her and Ritter to have different perceptions of the character.

Unlike the traditional mini-series with all the exposition jammed into episode one, they introduce key elements down the track, We don’t get a good look at Svengali villain David Tennant till Ep. 3. or hear about Ritter/Jones's childhood till the end. Impressively built Mike Coulter comes on as Ritter’s series squeeze but a plot development removes him from the action early on with the question of what he’s up to hanging over the next episodes.

All this tampering with the form - and the content - suggest Marvel are trying to break the mold to produce something that will satisfy their old fan base and the Twenty-First Century viewers. However they make compromised choices. The characters may find themselves in adult situations and curse but they never do full frontals. One of Jessica Jones super powers is having sex with her pants on. I can’t see admirers of Sidney Lumet or Alex De Iglesia coming away from this one satisfied. Maybe there are surprises in the later seasons but what I’ve seen has been run up to appeal to twelve-year-old boys who are curious about elements found in films for Big People - or Big People more at ease with material for twelve-year-old boys.

Jessica Jones - Sin Bin ep. - Moss

In all this group effort (nine writers are credited on the final episode of series one) we have to wonder what the contribution of directors, traditionally the auteurs of movies, may be. Well, I couldn’t avoid noticing the upswing in tension of episode 12 - which is the one credited to John Dahl (1994’s The Last Seduction). Is Carrie Anne Moss going to unleash David Tennant’s evil power there? Dahl has been devoting himself to TV eps. including characteristically Dexter.  Is it still possible for directorial style to assert?

By comparison look at the new Wes Anderson The French Dispatch, aimed at people old enough to remember Bill Murray or even Luis Feuillade. It pivots on the idea of publishing a little-read supplement to the Kansas Evening Sun (we get a pullback through a corn field) which bears a peculiar resemblance to The New Yorker Magazine and covers events in France’s Ennui sur Blazé community. It tries for funny rather than puzzling. 

There is something you could consider order and form concerning a final edition, where sections of the film seem to correspond to recognisable magazine features - an obituary, a travel guide, and three lead articles, as dictated in the last wishes of Editor Murray (“He brought the world to Kansas"), whose advice to his journalists was “Make it sound as if you wrote it that way on purpose” Murray operates out of an office with a “No Crying” sign on the wall. 

The French Dispatch - Wolodarsky, Murray, Wilson at work.

Owen Wilson bicycling on a treadmill gives an introductory tourist coverage to the town as scenery is pulled past him, highlighting the Le Sans Blague Café, and the pickpocket’s alley then (staged B&W photos) and now.

The first feature story is commentated in full colour by a glamorous Tilda Swinton at the lectern as a writer and art expert giving a straight-faced slide lecture entitled "The Concrete Masterpiece” about Moses Rosenthaler / Benecio del Toro, a genius modern artist serving a life sentence for murder and dismemberment. In prison, he goes on working and Lea Sedoux his full frontal model doubles as his severe, uniformed prison guard, who slaps him when he gets touchy-feely.

French Dispatch - Seydoux, Del Toro

Dodgy Art Dealer Adrien Brody concocts a scheme where he buys Del Toro’s output (“You can see the girl in it” they comment on an abstract) only to be frustrated by the painter working on the masonry wall of the recreation area. It gets the whole Ken Russel treatment, cutting to colour shots of the art we’ve only seen in B&W.

Next item "Revisions to a Manifesto" deals with student revolt where young activist - chess master Zeffirelli (Timothee Chalamet) pairs with the paper’s correspondent Lucinda Krementz (Frances McDormand), who is soon completing her piece from his bed while Chalamet wears a gas mask.

Third up "The Private Dining Room of the Police Commissioner" gives us writer Roebuck Wright (Jeffrey Wright) guesting on a Talk Show where host Liev Schreiber has nothing to do. In the 1970's. Wright / Wright was a James Balwyn having total recall on every line he'd written. He recites an episode in the career of famous chef Nescaffier, played by Steve Park who we see sustaining Commisaire Mathieu Almaric during the gang abduction of his young son.

Deliberately perverse, Anderson uses recognisable celebrities in walk-ons. It’s the opposite of
Adam McKay's new Don’t Look Up, where its well-known cast are there lured by each one getting a big scene (Tyler Perry was stiffed). Here Elizabeth Moss is only glimpsed at an editorial meeting correcting syntax and jailbird Willem Dafoe complains that he’s being neglected.

Not only does the screen shape and use of colour change for no obvious reason but the climax action of the police siege, accommodating a circus strong man, goes to full animation.

The elimination of perspective with sideways movements of camera and scenery, the irrational changes in format seem to go against film form but there is nothing uncinematic about the piece.

It’s impossible to imagine a major film like this emerging from Hollywood up to this time. Hellzapoppin' or Norm Abbott’s 1966 The Last of the Secret Agents edge towards it, like Zazie dans le métro or the 1975 Grand Magic Circus movie La fille du garde-barrière but this one is the extension of Anderson's previous experiments, the full enchilada unapologetic. It’s where Anderson has been going for all his career and it will be interesting to see if he can get even further - and he does it in single feature running time to be shown in theaters.

Maybe the morphing form is going to be as interesting as the productions themselves.



Wes Anderson

 

Barrie Pattison 2022