E for Effort: 3 Things From December
(I’ve finally settled on a name for these capsule reviews that I do - E for Effort and E for me, Ellen Lee, the ones who writes all these things. I had a notebook filled with reviews from November when I went to Jakarta, but I’ve misplaced it and now I don’t know where it is. So, having skipped November, here’s three things from December.)
[Film] May December, dir. Todd Haynes. Netflix.
May December lands rather heavily on the side of men. So heavily, in fact, that it makes me wonder whether something is shifting in the culture — whether we’re finally emerging from the long drudgery of the #MeToo era and its perfunctory Bechdel Test-passing dialogue and diversity casting and girlbossery slay-queennery, and entering into a new era where it’s become more profitable to make an anti-woman movie because more people would be drawn to the controversy of it. Because there’s a Netflix way to make any kind of movie, even this kind of movie. If May December was Netflix’s litmus test for how the culture would respond to something like this, they did well in picking Todd Haynes to be the director, because he has a brutally critical eye towards feminine machinations.
Juliane Moore plays Gracie, a middle-aged convicted sex offender who entrapped her husband Joe (Charles Melton) when he was only 12 years old. She went to jail, she got out, the story was all over the news, but now they’re living a superficially happy life with two twin teenaged kids who are just about to graduate and leave to college. Natalie Portman plays the spanner in the works in the form of Elizabeth, a B-list TV actress who’s arrived to interview Gracie and study her day-to-day mannerisms for a movie adaptation of the controversial romance. Elizabeth’s arrival — salacious intrigue-hunting masquerading as diligent “research” — inspires tensions within the home that haven’t been addressed in the entirety of Gracie and Joe’s relationship.
The film overall presents a very cutting and critical look at female behaviour and the ways that women couch their manipulative tendencies within affected naïveté and the good faith of men. It’s testament to great feats of acting (on the part of all three main actors) and scriptwriting that Haynes manages to achieve such a subtle yet totally realistic and convincing portrait of women. He doesn’t default to the usual trope of lesser movies, where the two actresses would end up having a catfight at the climax where they tear at each other’s faces and call each other out using words like "toxic", etc. Cat-fighting doesn’t actually happen in real life, you know — women don’t actually ever confront each other. They’d much rather silently seethe and progressively wear each other down through low-grade emotional warfare for the rest of their lives rather than ever break composure in front of another (especially younger, prettier) woman.
But like I said at the beginning - it hits its mark heavy, so deep is its point driven that it makes you a little suspicious about whether something’s up. Did the mixed reviews to Barbie perhaps mark a kind of watershed moment — the tipping point for good guy slander? There’s almost a didacticism in the way May December plays out that feels less cinematic and more cultural-moment-artefact. It will probably be remembered the way Wilde’s plays are, as a comedy of manners of this particular moment in time, and perhaps students of the future will study it as a reflection of shifting attitudes between the sexes in the early 2020s. Rebuffing Barbie’s fusty feminist you-go-girl messaging—a sentiment by now as stale and untrendy as dirty Birkenstocks—May December introduces instead the provocative premise that the greatest battle for women has always been the rivalry they have with other women, a rivalry that was only ever nominally, or tangentially, about men.
[Art] Kanitha Tith, Moel Knong @ A+ Works of Art
Maybe because she’s a foreigner, maybe because the works are sculpted with a medium that we’re not used to seeing worked with in Malaysia, maybe because the Malaysian art-going public lacks the vocabulary and comprehension to appreciate minimalist sculpture: this show feels as if it’s trying so hard to help you understand it, hence the inclusion of multiple series of works though the wire sculptures are truly the only remarkable works and hence the lengthy exhibition catalogue with an interview between the artist and curator that doesn’t really say much. It’s untranslatable. The curatorial essay begins with a quote from Tith saying that she “can’t really explain what [her art] is exactly”, and the rest of the essay seems to struggle with this void that Tith leaves her curator with, ending with a rather roundabout suggestion that the works might be about the Khmer Rouge genocide, though they are not. I still don’t know what ‘moel knong’ means but I don’t need to. This might be one of the nicest shows I’ve seen all year. It’s spacious and elegant. From some angles, the wire sculptures look pendulous and significant, and from yet other angles they appear slight and weightless. The one in the centre of the first room of the gallery is hung by a single wire, and bunched all up at the end, and the tension between this low-hanging object of indeterminate weight and the glass-encased drawings below is very nice. The larger, more three-dimensional sculptures were my favourite ones, but I also liked the flatter ones — the ones that appeared more like conventional “textiles” — that played with lightness simply by stretching the wires out in the middle and leaving them naturally bunched up at the fringes. The wire ‘drawings’ look alright but feel like a concession to the market by providing a collectable, frame-able work for Malaysian collectors to buy since most won’t buy sculpture (especially not sculptures created with common materials such as wires). When viewed at an angle and in photographs, the wire sculptures already give a striking impression of resembling pencil scratchings; why literalise it by making the drawings? The watercolour paintings felt even more concessionary and interested me not at all.
[1 thing I can’t get out of my head] Playtime, 1967, dir. Jacques Tati
I was recommended this by an artist friend (Jerome Kugan) and I can’t remember why. When I was watching it, I felt a little bored - so many of the movie’s antics take what feels like ages to my Internet-fried mind to unfold, and the volume of most of the dialogue happens at a decibel too low for the ear to register, and anyway nobody’s even talking about anything important! But at some point while watching the movie, I realised “Oh, this is like Mr Bean but in Paris” and when that clicked, I started to appreciate it immensely. It’s a gorgeously made film, with tons of beautiful steel and glass and neon lights, and tons of beautiful black leather that looks like new roads in the rain, and heavy woollen jackets, and beautifully made-up women. It’s a movie that holds so esteem for the modern city - despite its regimented uniformity, despite its apparent critique of snotty class envy and commodity fetishism - the movie is just so completely enthralled and enamoured by urban life and the idiosyncrasies of everyday people. And it doesn’t wax poetic about this love either - it’s light, breezy, takes everything in stride like it’s all just… playtime.
It’s in the spirit of playtime that I wish to leave 2023 and enter 2024. Happy new year.