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Tag: gothic mystery

  • “There’s No Remedy For Memory”…Other Than to Drown In It: Joanna Hogg’s The Eternal Daughter

    “There’s No Remedy For Memory”…Other Than to Drown In It: Joanna Hogg’s The Eternal Daughter

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    Joanna Hogg’s entire film career has been about going against the grain. Defying the expectation that a movie needs to be “big” in order to be effective. This is something Martin Scorsese understands despite his own predilection for “big” films. Hence, the reason he reached out to Hogg after seeing her 2010 sophomore film, Archipelago, about wanting to collaborate as a producer with her. After all, Scorsese started out “quietly” as well, with Who’s That Knocking At My Door, and, despite his increasingly grandiose movies, has always appreciated the medium for what it was made for: storytelling. More specifically, telling one’s own story. No matter how personal or “specialized.” For, as Lana Del Rey’s thinking went with “The Grants,” there’s (usually) bound to be general resonance in the specific. In contrast to Del Rey, however, Hogg is aware there’s something self-indulgent to trying to make a piece of art about her relationship with her family. Namely, her mother. To capture it as she experienced it.

    And yet, if one is going to try to capture an essence or feeling, Tilda Swinton is inarguably among the best actresses one can try to express it through. So confident in her former boarding school classmate’s abilities, in fact, Hogg cast Swinton in both the roles of mother and daughter, Rosalind and Julie (also the name of the lead character played by Swinton’s own daughter in The Souvenir), respectively. It is by embodying both mother and daughter that Swinton fuses the part into one dicephalous entity. Billed as a “Gothic mystery drama,” it’s apparent from the outset that there’s something slightly sinister about the remote hotel Julie takes her mother to in some quintessentially gray and eerie British countryside (the movie was actually shot in Wales).

    As the pair rides along in the back of a taxi with Rosalind’s show-stealing Springer Spaniel, Louis (Swinton’s dog in actuality), the driver recounts a story of seeing a ghost at the hotel, called Moet Famau Hall (in real life, the hotel is named Soughton Hall). According to his account, “But there was something strange though, because a few months later, we were looking through our wedding photographs, and there was a picture of myself and my wife at the front of the hotel and you could see just behind us a figure of someone looking out of the window. Staring at us. Really quite scary at the time…” A side note re: the man’s wedding photos: Soughton Hall is typically a wedding venue. Best suited to such a purpose as a result of its secluded, idyllic nature. Yet, during the pandemic lockdown in 2020, such a venue was left unoccupied, making it the perfect chance to wield the milieu as Hogg and her crew’s own private shooting location (complete with building director Sarah Ramsbottom noting, “Whole rooms were being repurposed, one of the bedrooms became a prosthetics room for example. You just couldn’t do that with weddings going on”). And yes, the rich-person’s-house-turned-hotel does become a character unto itself, a key part of the haunting that Julie experiences. At first, however, it’s merely a feeling of “slight unease,” portended by the driver concluding of his ghost sighting, “So I avoid the place on dark winter nights.” And yet, lo and behold, that’s just the kind of night it is when he drops Julie and Rosalind off at the hotel.

    Things get off to a rocky start when Julie proceeds to have a tense interaction with the hotel’s lone front desk receptionist (played by Carla-Sophia Davies). One in which Julie insists she telephoned well in advance to ensure she would have a first-floor room facing the “formal gardens.” The receptionist informs her that no such indication was left with her reservation, and that all they can offer her for tonight is a ground-floor room. Julie is skeptical of the receptionist’s information, remarking upon all the openly-displayed keys to presently unoccupied rooms. Indeed, it often feels as though Julie can’t tell just how much of the receptionist’s attitude stems from outright sadism or the general irritation that comes with working in hospitality and having no patience left for what Rosalind would call “fusspots.” In this manner, the receptionist is an indispensable source for building on the tension that already palpably exists between Julie and her proverbial id-meets-super-ego, Rosalind. In the end, the receptionist, who is never given a name (adding to the spectral quality of the only other “presences” on the property), capitulates to giving her a room called “Rosebud” on the first floor. Of course, it won’t be lost on cinephiles that said word is the anchor of Orson Welles’ masterpiece, Citizen Kane. A word/object that ultimately symbolized Charles Foster Kane’s (Welles) lost youth. So it is that this hotel represents both Rosalind and Julie’s lost youth, though more so the former, as it was a family residence she spent her childhood in.

    Alas, while the reason that Julie decided to bring Rosalind here was because she assumed she had so many happy memories at Moet Famau Hall, Rosalind has no trouble reminding her of the many painful memories she also had while inhabiting the space. This tears Julie apart inside, due to a more than somewhat unhealthy obsession with wanting to ensure her mother is always happy and “pleased.” A state that no one can exist in, as the human condition is founded upon a far more complex spectrum of emotions. Nonetheless, this unnatural fixation on wanting to make her mother happy inevitably leads to few emotional breakdowns on Julie’s part, with one big one toward the end as she starts sobbing after her mother says she doesn’t want to eat anything for her birthday dinner. Her attachment to her mother is so strong, yet so rooted in resentment, that she finally bursts out with, “I just want you to be happy, I just—I’m trying all the time to make you happy. I can’t keep guessing. Can’t you just tell me, you just, you’re like a sort of mystery person to me. And I’ve spent all my life doing this. Trying to figure out how to make you happy.” Obviously, this is Error of the Child’s Ways 101 in terms of seeking parental approval and knowing full well it will never come. Unless you’re, say, Taylor Swift. Julie continues, “I don’t have a family beyond you. I don’t have any children [ergo, she is “The Eternal Daughter”]. And I’m not going to have anybody to fuss over me when I’m your age.” This being a dig at how she spent so much time focused on her mother that she didn’t spend enough time nurturing her own personal life, or plans for starting a family (although she does have a husband she often neglects).

    The metatextual tapestry of everything collides by this moment, stemming not just from Honor Swinton Byrne playing a character called Julie in The Souvenir, but from the fact that Rosalind is rehashing all of her memories to Julie as Julie herself is experiencing these rehashings as her “memories,” or rather, hauntings. The way Julie in The Souvenir is haunted in her own way by the memory of Anthony (Tom Burke). Thus, her attempt to constantly recapture what happened between them by making a film about it. Just as the Julie of The Eternal Daughter is trying to do. For if you can document something in that way, then you can hold on to it as long as you live, even after the person is gone.

    This much is mentioned when she talks to one of the hotel’s few employees, Bill (Joseph Mydell), over a glass of soothing alcohol by the fire and tells him, “I’m a filmmaker and I came here, um, with my mother to, um, to try and write a film about my mother and I. But, not easy. I—I can’t even get started.” “Why is that?” he inquires. “I think I’m not sure I feel I have a right to do such a thing. It feels like trespassing.” He assures, “I can understand you wanting to make a film about your mother to keep that sense of that relationship with her.” This said during a brief flash to her linking hands with her mother’s, markedly more aged in this particular scene to indicate that it’s another memory from a different part of their stay at the hotel together. And that Rosalind is the old woman in the window, the one the taxi driver saw haunting the place in his wedding photo.  

    It is by this point in the film that we can see how drinking of memory is almost like inhaling too deeply the scent of the poppy flower, getting high on its intoxicating fumes only to become perilously addicted. The past is so intermingled with the present in The Eternal Daughter that part of the “horror” of it comes from not being able to distinguish where the past ends and the present begins, hence an aphorism like, “What’s past is present.” When Julie is finally forced to acknowledge that, in her present, Rosalind isn’t really there, she’s finally able to work on the script she couldn’t start for the majority of her trip. The one that will presumably become the very film we’re watching (more meta-ness, of course).

    As for those who can’t see beyond the “boring” or “quiet” nature of a Hogg film, they would do well to remember that she once said, “I wanted to make a film doing everything I was told not to do in television.” This inferring the TV expectation to be constantly “dynamic” and/or offer too much “telling” instead of “showing.”

    Blending elements of The Others with The Sixth Sense, but with more sentimentality, The Eternal Daughter is, in one regard, about the horrors of being haunted by memory, and, in another, about the comfort it can bring to know that a person you love—no matter how complicated your relationship with them—will live on in your mind, and perhaps come out of it to be further immortalized through art. For, as Del Rey once said, “There’s no remedy for memory.” It’s the disease and the cure.

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    Genna Rivieccio

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  • Revenge Is A Dish Best Served In Subterfuge: The Pale Blue Eye

    Revenge Is A Dish Best Served In Subterfuge: The Pale Blue Eye

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    It’s easy to forget about Edgar Allan Poe’s “lost months” at West Point. For any cursory knowledge of the author would never lead one to guess he was much of a military man (which he, of course, really wasn’t). And yet, so much of that brief time at the Academy was certain to solidify his confirmed identity as a “thinking man.” More specifically, a morbid thinking man. While Scott Cooper’s The Pale Blue Eye is entirely fictional (and based on Louis Bayard’s 2003 novel of the same name, which itself won an Edgar Allan Poe Award), the one fact it’s grounded in is Poe’s attendance at West Point circa 1830. Prior to that, it was in 1827 that Poe enlisted in the U.S. Army after struggling to pay for his education. So yes, it was a case of desperate times calling for desperate measures, and it didn’t take long for Poe to rally for being discharged and sent to the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, New York instead. It is perhaps this snowy, bleak setting (read: Upstate New York) that gives The Pale Blue Eye its Sleepy Hollow-esque quality. Except with far more seriousness than Tim Burton is usually wont to offer in his movies.

    Indeed, by commencing with a Poe quote from “The Premature Burial,” (“The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?”), followed by the stark image of a man hanging from a tree, Cooper delves right into the macabre and doesn’t relent. For, going beyond just the one-trick pony note of “macabre” (as Burton also showed again in the softcore gloom of Wednesday), Cooper weaves the insidiousness of the murders of cadets that begin with that hanged man into a larger, more profound message about oppressive patriarchal institutions that churn out “Men” with The System’s seal of approval.

    But The Pale Blue Eye is hardly any kind of “stylized biopic” about Poe, for his character is but an auxiliary one to the lead: retired detective Augustus Landor (Christian Bale). Summoned to the Academy after Cadet Leroy Fry’s (Steven Maier) body is discovered at that tree, Landor is plucked out of said retirement by Captain Hitchcock (Simon McBurney) and Superintendent Thayer (the perpetually sour-faced Timothy Spall). The latter being known as the real-life “Father of West Point.” Detective Landor was a father once, too—though his daughter, Mathilde a.k.a. “Mattie” (Hadley Robinson), has been gone for some time, described as having “run off” somewhere. This would be lonely and heartbreaking for a father under any circumstances, but Detective Landor’s sentiments are made all the more pronounced by the fact that he has been a widower for the past two years. Granted, that hasn’t meant his bed has been cold, with a local barmaid named Patsy (Charlotte Gainsbourg, too underused in this role) often spending her nights in his cottage. It’s at the bar she works where Detective Landor makes further acquaintance with Poe (Harry Melling, in the part he was born to play), who previously advised him that the murderer he’s looking for is surely a poet.

    At the bar, Poe elaborates that because of the nature of the crime (a man’s heart being ripped out after his death), the man Landor is looking for simply has to be a poet for, “The heart is a symbol or it is nothing. Now take away the symbol and what do you have? It’s a fistful of muscle of no more aesthetic interest than a bladder. Now to remove a man’s heart is to traffic in symbol. And who better equipped for such labor than a poet?” Landor briefly indulges him before moving on in his search for a culprit, eventually deciding that Poe could be very useful to assisting in the case. For his soft-spoken, unimposing demeanor makes him ideal for hiding among the shadows and gathering intel about potential suspects. It is in this way that Cooper’s underlying theme about such institutions as the U.S. Military Academy gradually comes into the spotlight. For, soon enough, when Poe becomes a suspect himself, he laments to Landor, “If I were to kill every cadet who had abused me during my tenure here, I’m afraid you would find the Corps of Cadets reduced to less than a dozen. Now, if you must know, I’ve been a figure of fun from my very first day here. My manner, my age, my person. My…aesthetics. If I had a thousand lifetimes, I could not begin to address all the injuries that have been done to me.”

    Thus, we have a prime example of a “fraternalistic” institution established in the United States’ early history serving as one of the most germinal paragons of how patriarchy deliberately seeks to quash men like Poe. Those gentle, delicate spirits that the “desirable” meathead archetype can’t understand, therefore must mock and subdue. Fittingly enough, a review for the novel version of this tale from The New York Times commented of this oppressive landscape marking Poe’s earlier years, “The regimented, gloomy world of West Point, with all its staring eyes and missing hearts, forms a perfectly plausible back story to the real-life Poe’s penchant for tintinnabulation, morbidity and pale young women, first initial L.” That woman, in this instance, being Lea Marquis (Lucy Boynton, the Anya Taylor-Joy to Melling’s erstwhile Harry Beltik role in The Queen’s Gambit). A pale girl, to be sure, for she is afflicted with some mysterious illness that makes her cough a lot and go into arbitrary seizures that make her look decidedly “possessed by the devil.” Her brother, Cadet Artemus Marquis (Harry Lawtey), is of the meathead variety at the Academy. A real ringleader, of sorts—as Poe finds out after being invited to a secret society-type meeting by Artemus after curfew.

    The boys (posing as men) at this little gathering consist of people like Cadet Randy Ballinger (Fred Hechinger), parading an antagonistic air toward anyone perceived as weak, such as Poe. It is in moments like these that Landor’s contempt for an institution of West Point’s nature proves what he says to Captain Hitchcock when the latter demands, “Mr. Landor, do you harbor a latent hostility toward this Academy?” Landor replies, “I am risking my life on behalf of your precious institution. But yes. I do believe that the Academy takes away a young man’s will. It fences him with regulations and rules. Deprives him of reason. It makes him less human.” Hitchcock, offended, asks, “Are you implying the Academy is to blame for these deaths?” Landor assents, “Someone connected to the Academy, yes. Hence, the Academy itself.” Hitchcock decries, “Well that’s absurd. By your standard, every crime committed by a Christian will be a stain on Christ.” Landor confirms solemnly, “And so it is.”

    As we learn more about why Landor is so disgusted with how such an institution as the Academy does stamp out the will (and heart) of many a young man, turning them cold and unfeeling, we see Poe’s own heart growing fonder of Lea. But even she has her special machinations when it comes to stringing Poe along, never knowing that, in this alternate account of his history, she will be the true inspiration for “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Landor, in his own way, as well. In point of fact, this entire cutthroat milieu is what Cooper wants to reiterate helped to form Poe as an author. As Cooper himself remarked, “…it’s these events that occur in our film that shaped his worldview and helped him become the writer that he became—with the recurring themes that deal with the questions of death and the effects of decomposition and reanimation of the dead and mourning; all those are considered part of his dark romanticism.”

    His worldview was also undeniably shaped by having been subjected to the “frat boy fuckery” of both the U.S. Military and its West Point Academy, where, like Landor, Poe no doubt learned something about the cruelty of most men, ready to take their repressed urges and latent rage on someone else more powerless—in this case, an innocent girl.

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    Genna Rivieccio

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