Marketed as a “mysterious comedy-drama”, Richard Linklater’s 20th features a short- and dark-haired hairy version of Cate Blanchett, starring as an architect long past her prime time who finds a very peculiar way of spicing up her life and her career, thereby challenging a mid-life crisis. It is based on the eponymous runaway bestseller by American novelist Maria Semple.
In the second trailer 0f Where’d You Go Bernadette (you can see the first one here, launched last December), we see our protagonist Bernadette Fox (Blanchett), a doting mother and wife, increasingly frustrated at her petty problems, particularly a feud with a woman living next door. When the situation spirals out of control and the neighbourly relationship collapses (alongside with the wall between the two houses), Bernadette simply “disappears”. We soon learn that she taken up a new career challenge… in Antarctica!
This looks like a major step away from director’s previous endeavour, the sombre and meditative Last Flag Flying (2017), while still dealing with confusion and turmoil in the average American family. Cathartic fun for the bored and embittered middle-aged American professional, who has created a loving family and encountered enough financial stability, and yet remains keen to “break free”, however unorthodox the solution might be!
Where’d You Go Bernadette is out in cinemas across the UK in the second half of 2019. The exact release date is yet to be confirmed.
I absolutely love Carol, and I have watched it twice with my eyes glued to the screen and my heart pounding with emotions. The movie is thoroughly delectable, and indeed an impeccable masterpiece. But something inside me also found this immaculacy a little awkward. How can a film be so perfect? So I decided to watch it yet again and concluded: Carol is a very clean film, and it does not fit in very well with our concept of a dirty movie.
This is by no means a bad achievement. It’s a natural step in the ascension of a previously marginalised culture within a capitalistic society. The incredibly beautiful Cate Blanchett’s impeccable clothes, hairdo and lifestyle are, in many ways, the epitome of the LGBT bourgeois ideal. The American conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg described this as “a concept subversive to both liberals and conservatives” in his LA Times column in 2010. But a lot has changed since, and LGBT culture has become so pervasive that it’s no longer subversive. In other words, Carol has pushed LGBT culture into the mainstream. Or the other way around (it pushed the mainstream into LGBT culture).
Carol and Therese’s beauty is very mainstream, and not a departure from Hollywood’s strict standards
Despite the fact that Carol suffers with discrimination and sees her life turned upside down, she still comes across as enviable sample of a human being – from both an attitude and an aesthetical perspective. Plus she’s modelled after the great Hollywood actresses, a very conventional beauty standard. She therefore represents the replication and the perpetuation of long-established role models and ideals: very feminine, plush and preened. And this is not subversive. The same applies to her lover Therese, delivered by Rooney Mara.
The aspiration to live a high life in New York is also central to the movie. There is no doubt that the American metropolis is a mecca for gay people, and a hub for LGBT activism, but also a very mainstream one. In many ways, the shop where Therese works, the restaurants that the lovers visit and even their dwellings represent the concretisation of the American dream. A dream that has now become broader and more inclusive of various sexualities, but which remains extremely restrictive from an economic perspective. A dream that is either unattainable or undesired by the majority of LGBT people around the globe.
Victor Fraga believes that Fassbinder’s LGBT The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant is more subversive than Carol
Let me emphasise once again that I do like Carol, and that I think it’s an urgent step in the history of LGBT activism. But I don’t think that it’s the greatest LGBT film of all times because it lacks subversive elements. It doesn’t have the controversial streak of Fassbinder, the provocative genius of John Waters or even the shocking antics of Todd Haynes himself in his early films. Carol is not Pink Flamingos (1972), the Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1974) and Poison (1991), respectively by the three aforementioned filmmakers.
A champion of change in cinema has to punch viewers in the face, as that’s the only way of cracking the pink glass ceiling. In Carol, Haynes instead gently caresses audiences. Fortunately, other films have previously shattered this glass ceiling. The repressive structure of discrimination just needs a gentle shake before it collapses – and this is what Carol and also this year’s the Best Picture Award winner Moonlight (by Barry Jenkins) are doing right now. The glass ceiling isn’t gone yet, but we are certainly moving in the right direction.
Do you miss the chameleonic David Bowie? Are you a fan of Lady Gaga? Do you like the avant-garde side of artistic manifestations? Well, then don’t you dare missing Manifesto when it comes to your town. Cate Blanchett is a hybrid of Bowie and Gaga. She impersonates 13 characters in order to renew the meaning of the word “manifesto”. Even if she has nothing to say, as her opening line states, you will be mesmerised by her emotional and accomplished personas. In reality, she has tons to communicate.
French writer André Breton once wrote “When the time comes, when we can submit the dream to a methodical examination, when by methods yet to be determined we succeed in realising the dream in its entirety, when the dream’s curve is developed with an unequalled breadth and regularity, then we can hope that mysteries which are not really mysteries will give way to the great Mystery”. And this is exactly what Blanchett does.
The film is a collage of quotes taken from artistic and historical manifestos that reframe art itself in contemporary days. Filmmaker and visual artist Rosefeldt brings an innovative concept, by transporting the location of the manifestos. So to say, Cate’s first persona is Karl Marx, who appears in the shape of a loitering homeless person in a concrete and desolate urban ambient. Further on, she magnificently recites the Dada painters and poets words dressed as a widow in a funeral. And so on… There is a pinch of salt and surprise in each and every character.
The script does what every good art or literature teacher knows. It exemplifies and transposes history to present days with situations that are part of the pupil’s universe. By melting words from the past with images of our world now, the film delivers a dissonant layer of meaning. The manifestos made sense in the past, and they continue to do so. It is not by chance that since 2001 Rosefeldt has been a professor of media at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. He commands his craft.
The handcrafted props and wardrobe will also catch your attention. There are puppets, wigs and heavy make-up in order to help Blanchett in her masterclass. All contribute to entertain and enable transformation. And sometimes they can be very funny, too.
This is a very rich production with a creative cinematography. There is something fresh in recreating those manifestos. The imagery is gentle on the eyes because Rosefeldt handles his slow motion camera very well. In a nutshell, he conveys a sense of disruption in a soft and tender manner.
Manifesto premiered at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, when this piece was originally written. It’s out in UK cinemas on Friday, November 24th. On all major VoD platforms in April.
