Tag: Amanda Kramer

Please Baby Please

Posted on by John Bleasdale

QUICK SNAP : LIVE FROM ROTTERDAM

I think I counted three major film references in the first three minutes of Amanda Kramer’s Please Baby Please which opened Rotterdam International Film Festival. There’s a West Side Story gang dances-advances on a couple on a studio bound New York street. They Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick, 1970) a couple to death before the horrified eyes of Arthur and Suze (Harry Melling and Andrea Riseborough), who like Janet and Brad from The Rocky Horror Picture Show (Jim Sharman, 1975), find themselves and their relationship transformed as they open themselves up to the possibilities of transgression. Arthur is particularly struck by Teddy (Karl Glusman), one of the Young Gents – as the gang is called – who dresses like Marlon Brando in The Wild One (László Benedek, 1953). Maybe four references.

Obviously camp is about exactly this. Taking on popular culture, reviving, restyling, parodying, pastiching, subverting and celebrating. It hovers constantly between a smirk and an embrace, over the top jumping for joy and bursting into floods of tears, but always with a slight ironic detachment. Phew. Arthur and Suze are in the process already of transformation. They live in apartment 2B, daring someone to add a Hamlet quote to the address. They hold intellectual discussions about gender identity with their poetry beatnik friends. They weigh up the benefits patriarchy bestows on a man against the horseshit indoctrination you have to go through as a boy. Upstairs lives Maureen, played by a lavishly served Demi Moore: “I ought to be famous, but I’m just married,” as she succinctly puts it. Gifted with household appliances she uses as sex aids, she fantasizes about being choked by her ‘daddy’ and gives Suze another possible identity to slip into.

This is a New York of dive bars and alleyways, streets wet with neon: more Herbert Selby Jr than Don Draper. The music has that grungy riff on 50s style that Angelo Badalamenti gave David Lynch’s weirder neighbourhoods. It’s a place lit by late Rainer Werner Fassbinder and early John Waters. And yet for all that there’s something almost too tasteful and restrained about Kramer’s approach. It’s erotic but not sexy. There’s no grit in the vaseline; no pain to the violence. And going back to Don Draper, there actually is a smoothness to this whole exercise, the distinct whiff of footnotes. You’re waiting for a moment to let rip but it doesn’t really come. Despite its musical feel, there are no real numbers – by far the highlight comes with a sad croon from Cole Escola dressed in drag in a phone booth. Towards the end Melling has a bit of a dance but it doesn’t exactly burst from the screen. Riseborough once again proves a daring and constantly fascinating performer. She’s also credited as an executive producer on the project. She is all energy and danger, gradually turning into a howling prowling gender fluid force of nature – a brundlefly combination of Teddy and Maureen.

Paradoxically for all its palimpsest of allusions Please Baby Please is like nothing being made at the moment and on that alone richly deserves an audience. It looks beautiful, with the production design and costumes specifically deserving mention. One wonders though: will it be the kind of film that a few decades down the line another film like this would be alluding to?

The International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) is an online edition running from 26 January to 6 February.

Ladyworld

Posted on by victorfraga

Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight (2015) resembled something more of a play than a film. Set in the wooden confines that a stagecoach lodge sheltered eight strangers, the indulgent run time devalued a compelling premise which otherwise could have granted Tarantino a winner. That’s where Ladyworld comes in, composing an eerily similar premise, but mindfully keeps the viewers attention long enough to enjoy the stellar powerhouse ensemble.

This is a film by women, about women and for women. It understands them in an unconstrained way. The characters, not a man among them, find themselves in various points of dress, undress and duress as they try to navigate themselves in a situation which has literally locked them into the party. Between them, they fight to see who should lead the group to safety. Piper (Annalise Basso) with all her Machiavellian qualities, finds the more grounded Olivia (Ariela Barer) a competitor for the title, while the others struggle with the natural fears of adolescence and the will to survive.

Amanda Kramer has a theatrical background, easily discernible in her style of filmmaking. Characters are more important than the camera. The director does, however, offer moments of directorial inventiveness, not least with some slow Gilliam style close-ups detailing the mass claustrophobia settling in.

Through a thick impasto of cuts, we watch the heroines huddle from doorways to hallways before perching in a tautened, orderly nest on the cupboards. There is an unnerving acidity at play as viewers and actors nestle in the hurried house, with food, nerves and water on short supply. This is trick of discomfort has been traditionally kept for the theatre stage, as actors and punters join each other in gaped breath as they ask of each other their will to survive.

And then there’s that gut punch of an ending as we watch the characters wade in the bathed sunlight of fiery despair. Silently, the credits roll over the tattered leads as the single moment induces the varied tear filled responses each of us finds on our life’s journey.

If Quentin Tarantino isn’t green with envy, he should be! Ladyworld is in cinemas on Friday, October 18th. On VoD Monday, October 28th.