Thoughts on Passages, Killers of the Flower Moon and Girlfriends
On the 'other', bad characters and negotiating the Times We Live In Now.
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It feels like we live in such obscene, incomprehensible times. Every time I go on Instagram or Twitter/X (my occasionally pop-ins have increased a little lately) I see images from Gaza that I’m worried have become normalised: grey, dusty, flattened homes; people frantically searching for their loved ones; broken concrete pillars and walls being lifted to see if anyone alive lies beneath.
When you see something often you get used to it. We’re seeing death and destruction on a massive scale and it’s just becoming part of our day. And the ‘we’ I’m talking about are those of us here in Ireland watching on knowing that we’re safe from what’s happening to the people living in Gaza, and to the Israeli hostages and their families. Many of us carry the guilt of being onlookers, observing through a screen. But there are also people here watching on while worrying about their loved ones caught up in all this, or about their own identity, history or religion and how this all affects them.
It seems trite to say ‘I feel terrible about this and still I go about my day’, but that seems to be the place we’re all in right now (Jeanne Sutton’s latest newsletter sums it up well, that uncomfortable divide we’re all trying to navigate). I know this is a hugely worrying time for people on so many fronts, and that people are doing all they can to try and help or contribute in some way. There’s a gig for Gaza in Vicar St on 28 November - I’m in the west of Ireland that week so I sadly can’t attend, but click here for the details.
A ceasefire seems like the absolute minimum we can wish for now, and yet it feels so far away.
Yesterday I took advantage of what I call Freelancer Privileges1 and went to a 4pm showing of Killers of the Flower Moon. It was timely in that Martin Scorsese’s latest is about power struggles between two communities, and about people being forced from one part of a country to another; what it means to have a deep connection to the land; and the short journey between acceptance and exploitation when it comes to ‘the other’.
I’m still making sense of what I saw, but I felt the darkness of capitalism in there too, of Scorsese interrogating what money makes people do. Leonardo Di Caprio’s character Ernest Buckhart is a man who splits himself in two, who occupies a pair of totally different lives with totally different aims, and barely even tries to justify it to himself. It’s just the way things have to be for him to make it in the world. Lily Gladstone is a revelation as Ernest’s wife Molly, an Osage woman who holds the heaviness of her culture, her history, and her losses inside her in a visceral way.
I left feeling a little annoyed at myself for getting a bit antsy towards the end, as if I couldn’t appreciate the 3+ hours of cinema Scorsese had made. But I also left feeling a deep sadness about how people justify their behaviour towards others.
Another - radically different - film I watched this week was Passages, directed by Ira Sachs (it’s on Mubi). I’d missed it in the cinema but it’s perfect for streaming. Though this contemporary, Paris-set indie film seems on the face of it to have nothing to do with Scorsese’s epic Western, Passages actually does share something similar: incredibly selfish characters. Or rather, one very selfish character called Tomas, played by the magnetic German actor Franz Rogowski (if you see his name in the credits of a film, just watch it - he’s always so good).
Tomas is, in a word, AWFUL. But he’s the main character in the film, the person we’re typically supposed to root for. And we’re primed to expect him to go on some form of a hero’s journey. If he’s awful, we anticipate he will become in some way ‘better’ by the end, or at least have an epiphany about how awful he is. Sachs and his co-writers Mauricio Zacharias and Arlette Langmann subvert all our expectations, which I’d imagine leaves some viewers furious. I found it delicious.
I won’t spoil the plot too much, but to say that it’s about a married couple (Tomas’ partner Martin is played by a nervy and weary Ben Whishaw) whose relationship implodes when Tomas sleeps with a woman, Agathe (played by the sparky but eventually weary Adèle Exarchopoulos).
It’s not a film about discovering your sexuality, but one striking part of it - besides Tomas’ incredible wardrobe - is the sex scenes. They are much longer than your typical sex scene these days (probably one to know if you find it embarrassing watching any sex scenes with certain people) and even though we feel like voyeurs in a way (there are no close-ups) they are startlingly intimate.
They’re just so incredibly real, but not only that, they have a point. They advance the plot. They tell us something about the characters and their desires outside of the bedroom. They’re erotic, but not shoehorned in to titillate. The camera remains static during one scene between Martin and Tomas in bed, and we don’t even see their faces, yet can sense from what they’re doing what sort of dynamic is being played out. And then the following scene makes you reassess everything you just saw.
I thought afterwards of this study about teenagers and their views on sex on screen. The headlines can make it out like young people are prudish, but as the results bear out it’s not about this, it’s about what sort of sex scenes they actually are shown. They want a range of different sex scenes, but they also want a range of different relationships and friendships depicted on screen. Passages would be mortifying to watch with your parents, but you can’t say that the intimacy in it is unbelievable or traumatic, or that it’s glamourised. Film is partly about fantasy, but even within that fantasy we can find damaging tropes and it’s so great to see young people push against that.
Finally, the film Girlfriends is even further removed from Passages or Killers of the Flower Moon, but I’d be remiss not to mention watching it a few weeks ago in the IFI. It’s an independent directed by Claudia Weill (also a documentarian) and made in 1978, and has recently been released on Blu-Ray by Criterion for the first time. It’s such a warm, funny, emotional watch, about two female friends in 1970s New York and how they negotiate their relationship and their own relationships with men (including a young Christopher Guest as a boyfriend who 100% would be a Twitter reply guy).
But, crucially, there’s a lot in this about the lead character Susan Weinblatt’s career aspirations, and how she’s determined to make it as a photographer while having no contacts in the industry. I really empathised with her story, and how she had to fight against wavering confidence and learn how to get past the gatekeepers.
It shouldn’t feel remarkable to watch a film about being a young woman creating your own career, and yet 45 years after it was made, Girlfriends still felt remarkable.
A real treat.
Thanks for reading, and mind yourselves.
The thing about freelancer privileges is they’re balanced with thinking about work 24/7.