#especially for her fans who ARE larries who now feel bad for drawing the OBVIOUS PARALLELS between Larry and the plot

[nooelgallagher]

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[kindawriter-blog]

Retrograde - Part 11

(a/n: It’s been forever and a day since I’ve posted so character pics and parts 1-10 are here: https://kindawriter.tumblr.com/Retrograde 

Should I start marking whose POV it is? I’ve tried to make it obvious but I don’t want to be confusing. I didn’t expect to switch so often when I started this. If it helps, *** = setting & probably POV change; --- = setting change but not POV change; and -*- = POV but NOT setting change (a POV change within a scene). This Part starts with Tina’s POV. Feedback always wanted!)

Part 11

I watch Larry leave from my bedroom, digging my nails into the window frame. The paint chips off, lodging under my fingernail and I jerk my hand back. I quickly dig it out with another nail and look out the window again. I watch his back move down the street.

‘He’s not walking toward Marienne’s,’ I think with a sigh. I’m about to turn away when I see him stumble toward the side of the apartment building down the street, leaning against it. After a few moments he steadies himself, pulling his coat tighter and dragging his feet until they fall into step.

 Turning around, I look over my room. It’s a shrine to misplaced hopes and dreams.  A box of fabric overflows in the corner, my desk has stacks of filled sketchpads, and posters for Spirited Away, The Paris Opera Ballet, and poster boards covered in magazine cutouts of Couture gowns cover the entire wall around it. And fragments of Larry’s and my relationship are hidden in enough places that I’m reminded of him when I usually don’t want to be.

 The little white teddy bear he silently handed me one day hiding under the pillows at the foot of my bed. The hoodie in the back of my closet that he thought he lost, but it smelled like him; like ash and honey. So sweet you’d choke on it.

 Larry and I met officially at a party. I knew who he was, because rumors of the “hot pot head” got around. I’d seen him at one other party before, and I noticed his pattern. He was the candyman. He went from person to person, helping them feel good. He would tell girls he loved their smile, and boys that their hand-me-down kicks with sharpie-drawn designs were dope, he’d make sure to find the quiet people in the corners and make jokes until they laughed enough to draw a crowd. Then he’d turn and walk away as his toothy grin faded to the slightest hint at the corners of his mouth. I’d watch his eyes then; I could tell there was something bearing down on him. He looked lost.

 Finally, at the next party, he noticed me. I was quietly sipping a Sprite on the couch because I agreed to help my friend Izzy get home at the end of the night. I had just set it down and taken out my sketchbook when his skinny but surprisingly heavy body dropped onto the cushion next to me.

 He grabbed the back of his letterman jacket and pulled it roughly over his head, knocking off his snapback. The hat landed on my sketchbook and I grabbed it and tapped him on the arm with it. For some reason it took him a second to notice me. I was watching the way his thin arms suddenly made their muscles known as he pulled his arms free of his jacket. I considered trying to draw them but quickly snapped out of that when he took the hat from my hand.

 “Thank you.” He smiled. “What are you doing over here, all alone?” he asked as he attached his hat to his belt loop and ran his hands through his twists.

 “I just don’t feel like dancing tonight.”

 “What do you feel like doing?” he looked like he actually wanted to know.

 I shrugged. “I was thinking about drawing for a bit.”

 “You draw? Can you show me?” he scooted in the seat a bit until he was turned completely toward me, resting his elbow on the back of the couch and his head on his hand.

 “Um. Sure. What do you want me to draw?”

 “A fox.” He grinned, tapping on the paper. “Like... a magic fox.”

 “You’re going to have to help me with this.” I laughed, moving my pencil carefully along the page. I started with the ears and moved carefully down the silhouette, and ended with a wispy tail.

 “You’re really good at this,” he said, “but it doesn’t look very magical yet.”

 “I think that’s the part I need help with.”

 “Yeah, everyone knows magical foxes need a lot of tails.” He grinned, holding his hand up with his fingers fanned out.

 “Well, since you’re the expert...” I held the pencil out to him.

 He had been leaning closer and closer to watch me, but when I offered the pencil he immediately pulled back and shook his head.

 “I don’t draw. I can’t draw.”

 “That just means you need practice.”

 “I can’t, my-I tried. I’m really bad.” He stammered over his words. It was the first time I’d seen him uncomfortable talking with someone. He usually charmed his way through every conversation.

 I couldn’t remember the last time a guy talked to me and I definitely couldn’t remember ever feeling like the most confident one in the conversation. I wasn’t about to let go of that feeling.

 “Here, it’s not that hard, okay? You’re right handed?”

 He nodded.

 I placed the pencil in his hand and put mine over his, guiding us to the page.

 “Now, you just think of how you want it to look and go with it. I’ll try to help it come out how you want it to. It’s ‘magic’ so it can look like anything you want.” I smiled at him and our hands began to move.

 I could tell he was going for graceful designs and I tried to help them happen. I showed him how we could lay the pencil down to use the side of the lead to make broad ribbons. Eventually our picture looked like a fox sitting in a swirling night sky, with several tails curling and waving behind it.

 He looked at our picture for a moment then gave me a guarded smile. Then someone across the room called for him and I didn’t see him again the rest of the night.

  The next week Larry’s shadow fell on me in the courtyard at school. I was sitting against a low brick wall, sketching between bites of cafeteria chicken nuggets.

 “So what are you drawing today?” he asked. I could only squint up at his silhouette, I couldn’t see if he was smiling. Then he dropped to the ground in front of me, and his bright smile almost made me search for my sunglasses.

 I had pulled my knees up to hide my sketchbook out of habit, and I glanced down at it.

“Well… I’m trying to design clothing. Your fox started it. I’m trying to put fairy tales and city life together. I don’t know what to call it.” I relaxed my legs and angled the pad so he could see it. The outfit was a sort of 1950s style deep blue dress, with a crescent moon pattern on the skirt, and sunflowers drooping in the moonlight along the hem. The dress was sleeveless with a deep red faux fox around the collar, made to look like he was curled up sleeping.

 “This is art,” he murmured so softly I almost didn’t hear it. “The colors and the flowers make me think of that painter? The one who went crazy and sent his ear to some girl?”

 He glanced at me and I almost snapped to correct him (he was right about the story but the way he said it bothered me) but he turned back to the page too quickly. His rough finger traced cautiously over my lines. He didn’t smudge it even a little.

 “Van Gogh,” I said, watching as he studied my work. He nodded without looking away from the page.

 “Do you have more?” he asked as he reached to turn the page but he stopped and waited for me to answer.

 “I don’t have a lot more drawings, but I have ideas.”

 I told him about how I wanted to incorporate a shawl that looked like chain link fence into an outfit, and think of a way to use snails and garden snakes. I turned the page to show him a sketch of a girl in a rain coat patterned after a yellow taxi.  

 “You should make an umbrella for her that’s a leaf. You know Totoro?” He glanced away from the drawing to look at me. I felt my smile spring across my face.

 “Yes. Yeah I totally know what you’re talking about.” I nodded enthusiastically and he laughed lightly.

 “Try it,” he said, and gestured at the page. He watched silently as I drew the oversized leaf and began to add drops of rain.

 The sound of rain hitting my bedroom window takes me out of my memory. I look outside; there’s no trace of him on the street. I worry about him. I can’t help it.

 ***

 When Larry walked out the door, Laurent didn’t react how I expected. Mostly because he hasn’t reacted to anything how I’d expect. I thought he’d get quiet, and close off or go to sleep; the way he’s been this whole time. Instead his anxiety follows the form of Larry’s just moments ago.

 He’s pacing, and pulling at his hair and his eyes keep darting around.

 “Mari, we have to go after him. Where would he go?”

 “Lau, we can’t leave, we have to wait for him. I’m not going out alone right now, and neither are you, especially if that guy who threatened you is out there. He just needs to cool off. He’ll be back,” I grab Laurent’s hands from his hair and find his brown eyes with my own, “I promise.”

 -*-

 Looking at Mari I’m trapped between wanting to wrench my hands from hers and letting her hug me. Instead I gently squeeze her hands and let them fall, and turn away to walk into the bathroom.

 My breath comes out in a shudder and I turn on the sink to hide the noise. Steam starts to build up and I rinse my hands. The cut from the glass is healing. There’s so much I wish I could burn away from my skin. The fog shifts over my reflection and for a second I see Larry. But then I blink and I see what Larry has been seeing. I’m too skinny. My hair is wiry and dull, too lifeless to really call it an afro, despite Marienne’s best efforts. I don’t think about the rest of my body. I know what I’ll see there. I know every pattern of every bruise, flowering like poison roses crawling up my skin.

 Shutting off the hot water; I use my uninjured hand to scoop some cool water to my mouth. The motion makes my ribs twinge and I gasp, holding my side and gripping the sink until my knuckles ache. No. I don’t want to think about it. I can’t, I can’t. Fuck. I drop to the floor, and he’s delivering the first of many soul stealing kicks to any exposed part of me. He stops when Warren tells him to. They always do what Warren tells them to. I jolt back to reality with Mari’s knock.

 -*-

 Lau finally comes out of the bathroom and he’s not okay. I was hoping giving him a little bit of space, safely inside, would help him. But it had been like ten minutes when I heard that thud and I had to check on him.

 Now he still looks anxious but he also looks exhausted.

 “Lau,” I start, and he reluctantly makes eye contact, “I promise. I promise he’s coming back.”

 Laurent takes a deep breath and looks toward the windows. Suddenly lightning flashes across the sky and he jumps, “Shit!” he gasps and shuts his eyes tight.

 “Hey, hey, it’s okay. C’mere.” I pull him to the couch and rest his head on my lap, brushing my hand over his hair. “I’m sorry, it’s going to be okay.” But he gently takes my hand in his, and holds it still over his chest.

 “Please; please don’t do that.”

 “Oh, I didn’t even mean to do it, sorry. It’s habit, I thought it would help.”

 “I-It does, it used to,” he sighs, absentmindedly touching my braided bracelet on my wrist, still trapped in his grip, “Marcus used to do that to calm me down.”

 I watch him and he glances at me before quickly looking away. I push away everything telling me to interrogate him, find out who Marcus was and where he’s been. It’s not time. It’s not my place. I settle for not changing the subject, but also not digging deeper.

 “Did it work? Did it help you feel better?”

 “Sometimes. But I don’t… I can’t think about him right now.”

 “Okay.”

 Eventually Lau falls asleep and ends up on the opposite side of the couch. I don’t think he even does it on purpose. He’s so uncomfortable with touch, even in his sleep.

 I wait up for Larry until eleven, but I wasn’t lying to Laurent. I completely believe Larry is fine and he’s coming home. I finally brush my teeth and climb into my bed at eleven-thirty. By twelve-thirty I hear the front door open and shut. After some shuffling through the apartment I feel the bed dip behind me. His arm wraps around me so tight it’s hard to turn to face him. When I turn over he hugs me tighter and hides his face in the pillow.

 He’s in a dry t-shirt and shorts, but his twists are cold and damp. I run my hand over his hair. I smell the air between us out of habit, but I get nothing. “Did you drink?” I whisper. He shakes his head, still not looking at me. My hand moves to his cheek. “But you wanted to.” He nods barely and his shoulders start to shake. I hold him tighter and let him fall apart, cradling his head to my chest.

 I’m glad my comforting instincts can help someone. I have no idea what I’m doing anymore.

[healthcaretipsblog]

Black Level

Not too long ago, a colleague chastised me, blind-item style, for writing about a film festival based on the use of screeners instead of going to the festival and attending the event in person. (In current parlance, I was “subtweeted,” although not on Twitter.) The argument was that by conducting my film criticism in “armchair mode,” I was missing out on lively discussion, camaraderie, and a good deal of atmospheric context that makes a festival more than just a collection of individual films. (Whether or not any given film is necessarily improved by having a discussion with its maker, particularly if critics are supposed to remain relatively objective in our evaluations, is an open question.) 

However, it occurred to me that, before any given film exhibition or festival, the works contained therein exist as precisely that: just a collection of individual films. It’s only through selection and programming choices that they are expected to stand for anything other than themselves. And I also began to think about the incredible faith we place in programmers, to sift through hundreds upon hundred of films made every year. We trust them (and a host of unsung pre-screeners) to separate the wheat from the chaff, to set the agenda for the year in cinema by their inclusions and exclusions. For the most part, we go along with their decisions, and as critics we make our own judgments as a subset of theirs. 

But we know full well that taste is nebulous and fallible, prone to the vagaries of history and fashion. How many worthy films slip through the cracks each year, each decade? This question prompted me to embark on an experiment.

The online screener service Festival Scope is filled with thousands of films, from the well-known and –travelled to the utterly obscure. Mostly I have used the service to catch up with festival films I’ve missed along the way. But I got an idea. What about all those films I’d never even heard of? Could there be major discoveries right there for the taking? So I devised a system whereby I could sample some of those films by random selection. I chose twelve films by this method, which had to do with randomizing the number of pages in Festival Scope’s 2017 features listing, and the number of films per page. I decided to call it the 2018 Random Film Festival. 

Granted, this was not a “film festival” as such. I was watching a collection of screeners from home, so a lot of the pleasures of attending an actual festival—meeting up with friends, post-film discussions, hustling from venue to venue, last-minute schedule changes, and of course, the big screen experience—were all missing here. Then of course, so were the random diet, sleep deprivation, and the exorbitant cost of attendance. But it’s often said the certain films look better (or worse) in a festival context, and that element was not in play here. I was watching about two films a day, not four or five, so I had the chance to let things percolate in my mind a bit more than usual. As you’ll see, that didn’t necessarily help.

That’s because what I found is that most films are simply average, regardless of where they come from. Take a film like Nobody Sleep by Spanish documentarian Mateo Cabeza. It starts out promisingly enough, showing us in meticulous detail how four men set about building a dance piece from extended rehearsals, movement by movement and gesture by gesture. The fact that two of the dancers are men with Down syndrome is an interesting element, but one that is pointedly not remarked upon. But then, Cabeza stops his observational mode to “widen the frame,” telling us that the work is part of an arts initiative for individuals with Downs and emphasizing that, yes, these are people who should be treated like everyone else. This is of course a worthy message. However, prior to the film making that message so explicit, Nobody Sleep was embodying it by simply showing the four men dancing. Cabeza chooses to deliver a moral when an object lesson is what’s called for. Likewise, Pedro Neves’ documentary Tarrafal is essentially a Pedro Costa film without any of the mastery or aesthetic value, choosing instead to provide endless, redundant interviews with former residents of the bulldozed low-income neighborhood in Porto, Portugal. In the interest of “giving voice,” Neves makes a film that is lifeless and near-impossible to listen to.

Somewhat more compelling, and likely to pop up on the festival circuit, were two slightly flawed entries that nevertheless fit squarely into the usual mode of festival filmmaking. February, by South Korea’s Kim Joonghyun, is a kind of existentialist mood piece, vaguely in the mold of Agnès Varda’s Vagabond. It focuses on Minkyung (Minkyung Jo), an attractive but affectless young woman in desperate straits. Her father is in prison and has bankrupted her with legal liability claims. She wants to take a social service exam but cannot afford the review classes. And, now four months behind on her rent, she has been forced to take up residence in a metal shipping container. Minkyung goes out of her way to destroy every situation in which someone shows her any goodwill, determined to self-destruct in grand style. Despite its comically hateful protagonist, February seems a bit rote, especially in the context of recent Korean cinema. Similarly, even though Valentyn Vasyanovych’s Black Level is highly original on its face—a portrait of a depressive wedding photographer in Kiev, a film in which no one ever utters a word—there’s something eerily familiar in its dark humor and meticulous staging—a little Ulrich Seidl here, a little Roy Andersson there.

Other films are just average examples of their type, and it’s easy to see why festival programmers might pass on them for better examples, since they’re plentiful. The Albanian film Daybreak is about a domestic worker with a young child who has to make questionably ethical choices to survive. The Dardennes influence is obvious. The grandiloquently titled Denmark is a kind of troubled-youth film that gradually morphs into unlikely humanism, starting out in scuzzy Larry Clark partyville and ending up like a Lukas Moodysson cuddle. And Law of the Land, starring veteran Finnish actor Ville Vertanen, is a snowmobile-Western, not exactly festival fare to begin with. It could easily be remade by Liam Neeson and Jaume Collet-Serra for release during next year’s January doldrums. 

Since most films fall somewhere in that soft middle-zone of “nothing special, but not a complete waste of time,” it seems only fitting that the major discoveries from the Random Film Festival were films on either side of the equation: something very special, and an utter, utter waste of time. From the Good Place: Annika Berg’s Team Hurricane, from Denmark (which played Critics’ Week at Venice). A film with so much color and energy that the screen can barely contain it, Team Hurricane is a blast of direct address filtered through a searing high-key video aesthetic that achieves a stark, unexpected beauty and juices the nerve centers like a sunlamp.  

Berg somehow remains true to the lifeworld of the eight teen girls who are the focus of Team Hurricane, partly by allowing them to shoot a lot of the footage themselves on their phones. But it’s also in the jumpy, anything-goes editing style, which partakes easily of the dominant modes of YouTube vlogs and teen video diaries without the slightest hint of condescension. But mostly this is a hanging-out movie, with cutaways zeroing in on the inner lives on individual girls, spoken to the camera in Sadie Benning-like autobiographical art-video interludes. These are girls who are bright, funny, imperfect, sad, and vital. This is a film for now.

From the Bad Place: Ideka Akira’s Ambiguous Places. Sometimes Random hurts. I thought that the Fickle Finger of Fate had picked me a winner once I discovered that Ambiguous Places had been selected for the Bright Future section of this year’s International Film Festival Rotterdam. Had a randomly stumbled upon a significant new voice in cinema? Well, I will say this for Akira—he is doggedly pursuing his own vision. Ambiguous Places is his second feature, and it bears all the excruciating hallmarks of a film convinced of its own future cult status. It makes no sense from scene to scene, even though particular “characters” carry through the entire thing like semi-human running gags.  

The closest parallel I can draw is to the leaden pseudo-Surrealism of Quentin Dupieux’s post-Rubber output. Someone has a sea bug stuck in her head. She has to go to a barber to get it removed. But the barber is an udon shop. Meanwhile, the pharmacist and his wife are expecting, so as per custom, they need to make celebratory gloves. Akira seems to think that just throwing any silly idea into the film, and then calling it back every ten minutes or so, equals comedy gold. He also deploys an equally grating verbal style. Every other interaction devolves into two deadpan performers monotone-arguing the same lines of dialogue back and forth to each other. “You’re troublesome.” “I’m sorry.” “You’re troublesome.” “I’m sorry.” Five more times. (I have to wonder whether this kind of broken-record nonsense has a particular comic valence in the Japanese language, the nuance of which is nails-on-the-chalkboard lost in English.) 

It’s a given that something this aggressively weird will have its fans. But I venture to say that for most people, watching Ambiguous Places will feel like being the only guy at the party who didn’t take the mushrooms. You’re all ostensibly in the same place, but clearly the others are somewhere else.

So in the end, the Random Film Festival is a success, depending on how you look at it. I saw one great film for my trouble, and two fairly interesting ones—three if you count Ambiguous Spaces, which is certainly “interesting.” This batting average doesn’t seem that far off from a festival like Toronto, with its sprawling collection of unknown quantities. (And I didn’t have to fly anywhere or pay for lodging.) By the same token, I have a new appreciation for the job of pre-screeners, who have to sift through the dross only to find one or two fairly decent entries. (With my innate curiosity and sense that “everything is kind of worthwhile,” I think that’s a job I’d be good at.)

The verdict: festivals generally work, but critics need to supplement our viewing with spadework of our own. Why just be passengers when we can drive?

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