Please Give

      In the unwritten rules of narrative, every story must fit a form. Writer-Director Nicole Holofcener has chosen the moral fable as her form for her new film Please Give. In this fable, we are introduced to Cate (Katherine Keener), an embodiment of a few key contradictions. She is a furniture salesperson catering to upper-middle class city folks, but can think of nothing better to do than give away money or food to any homeless person she meets. She is a neurotic Manhattanite besotten with enough guilt to impulsively volunteer for causes aiding the sick or retarted, but has no problem buying an dying 91-year old curmudgeon’s apartment, desperately waiting for her to pass on. She is, in short, not a person, but an embodiment of themes; Charity, Guilt and Hypocrisy.

            She is joined by a few other representations. Andra (Ann Morgan Guilbert), the elderly neighbor whose apartment has been bought, is Cynicism. A woman who can’t help but voice her (usually) negative opinion about everything, she has mistreated so many people by her crotchety old age that she has no chance of redemption. Then there are her granddaughters; Rebecca and Mary. Mary, the older one, is Narcissism and Catiness. She has taken after her grandmother in ways she can’t possibly realize, and casually abuses her sister to no end. Her sister, Rebecca (Rebecca Hall) is something like the moral balance in the story. She works as a nurse who does mammograms at a city hospital. She is shy yet charming and rather sane; lonely but trying to keep the peace with everybody else.

How these characters collide with the three opposing characters—Cate, her Materialist daughter Cathy (Elizabeth Keener) and hapless husband Alex (Oliver Platt) – is intended as the source of development in this story. Throwing two sets of characters together to watch what happens is vaguely theatrical in nature, and perhaps Holofcener crafted her film this way in order to let the actors roam free. They do; one thing that should be said is that there isn’t an unaccomplished performance in the film. Alex, who does not represent much of anything, is the standout character in this feminine film; Oliver Platt plays him as a quiet burn of an outwardly personable man exasperated by his marriage.

            The performances themselves, however, ultimately clash with the film’s moral leanings. Cate, for one, has been written as such a ridiculous person that she is impossible to believe—she provides a homeless man with enough money to buy outrageous clothing and apparently thinks it’s cute; she is so righteous in her concern for others that it’s difficult believe that a grown woman—especially one played by the mature-seeming Keener-- could act so  grossly politically correct and never have been forced to tone it down. Conversely, the sniggering Mary is so wicked that we lose all faith in her as the force of wickedness in the film. She becomes predictably, boringly mean. Andra provides some cranky humor, but we find ourselves just waiting for her to die, like everybody else. The moral center, Rebecca, remains sympathetic, but what is she left to do that surprises us? Stumble upon good fortune? The guy of her dreams maybe?

            If this sounds like a lot of reductionist griping about a film that’s earnestly trying to make a few points about human interaction, then let’s return to the rules of narrative. Every writing teacher will tell you that a character must want something and that at the end of the story they must change. Holofcener abides by these rules, but makes such a point of her characters wanting something that she reduces the film for us. Please Give becomes a chess game of character A wanting something and characters B and C getting in the way. She is so intent on making her characters change, that a single line has to be the turning point for characters who we don’t believe will change anytime soon. Much of the dialogue is overflowing with implication and suggestion; it felt as though a Creative Writing professor should be reading the script and explaining why the various elements work. By the end, when the inevitable “arc” of the story is coming to its conclusion, a teary Cathy has to tell a teary Rebecca; “you’re a good person.” It’s not that I disagree, per se. I just wish these were good people who sprang from a complex reality and not from a writing workshop. 

Doing it blindly; Broken Embraces

The most blatant and self-evident image that has ever passed through a film camera’s aperture is a close up of the human eye. Directors use this image with regularity, and Pedro Almodovar uses it in Broken Embraces. Unsurprisingly, each individual eye looks basically the same, and almost always have the same connotations when appearing in a film; connotations relating to voyeurism, intrusion, lust and mystery. The difference between Almodovar’s new film Broken Embraces and most other films with eyes, is that Almodovar is aiming for cinematic routine and obvious reference. Broken Embraces is all about voyeurism, intrusion, lust and mystery. It is all about the way different people percieve different images and, obviously, about the struggle of the artist. It is an excitingly conventional film.

One convention employed is the storytelling method of time-shifting, which frames the first third of the film. We begin in Madrid in 2008. A blind director, Mateo ( Luis Homar), learns of the death of a rich arch-nemesis named Ernesto Martel (Jose Luis Gomez), which brings back a set of memories from the early nineties, surrounding the production of Mateo’s film Girls and Suitcases. Then Martel’s son shows up at Mateo’s door, calling himself ‘Ray X’ and proposing a new film he wants to make with the director. But Mateo recognizes the voice, and this in turn brings back memories of Lena (Penelope Cruz), who was Ernesto Martel’s lover, but who ended up having an affair with Mateo, who’s film she was starring in. Almodovar chooses to lock us in to the past for the majority of the film after Mateo sits down with his producer and ex-lover’s son (Tomar Novas), who has just experienced a drug-induced health scare, and is treated to a story of how it all happened; how Martel made his son videotape Mateo and Lena, how he succeeded in destrorying Mateo’s film, and how Mateo tragically lost his sight. The bulk of the film is this story, which occurs in 1994. With this story, Almodovar utilizes the fractured time narrative in a way that does Tarantino’s tired schtick one better; but he wouldn’t have been able to utilize it at all if one didn’t get the sense that the film is a sly disclosure of a mature director looking back on his past, his regrets, and the mysteries of his films.

Broken Embraces ultimately wraps all it’s themes, obsessions and plot turns in to a frenzied meditation on-- what else-- cinema. Running throughout the film is an allusion to Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960), about a psychopathic cameramen who films girls and then murders them. More subtle references to Antonioni’s Blow Up  (1966) are also discernable, but the largest film reference is to Almodovar’s own Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988) on which Mateo’s film Girls and Suitcases is based. If this sounds like a needlessly smarmy amount of cine-literate allusions, then it can’t possibly be, because it comprises large and crucial chunks of the film. But again, the film is, in terms of form, a film of cinematic conventions. This is both for better and for worse; there are steamy sex scenes, a hilarious genre plot within Mateo’s film about drug smuggling, and a typically ironic, yet still unexpected, car crash. There are also several stunningly predictable plot twists and an emphasis on color that makes it look like the film might have been hell for the cinematographer, Rodrigo Pieto. The most interesting choices Almodovar has made in the film, though, are one’s where it is impossible to tell whether they are directorial laziness or directorial trickery. Mateo is blind in the present day, but he never looks blind. Why? And furthermore, why do we still believe his blindness? Early in the film, our first introduction to Lena comes as a flashback, yet not one that can possibly be a memory of Mateo’s. Did Almodovar think we wouldn’t notice, or did he mean to suggest something else about what Mateo knows and remembers? These are several examples of Almodovar’s iffiness, and they are examples that appear in films all across the cinematic spectrum. But after a point, as Almodovar surely knows, intent and mishap make no difference, because it’s all an illusion anyway.

(Pedro Almodovar with Penelope Cruz on the set of Broken Embraces)