By David Elliott
APPETIZER (reviews of The Fits and Microbe and Gasoline)
From over 40 years of reviewing, it’s the bold surprises that best hold memory. Some were anticipated (like The Long Goodbye, Last Tango in Paris, Capote), many others were sneak-ups that zapped me (like American Graffiti, The Whole Wide World, Mike’s Murder, Oblomov, The Cruise, The Straight Story). Into that second bunch I pleasurably add Anna Rose Holmer’s debut feature The Fits, which in 72 minutes is among the most vivid, lyrical and feminist movies you will see in 2016.
It
happens in Cincinnati, at a sleek recreation center where pre-teen Toni (finely
named Royalty Hightower) dabbles in boxing while her older brother trains.
Facing puberty, the future beauty can’t quite grasp or fit the male milieu, and
she envies the fiercely energized, mostly older girls who practice nearby as
the Lincoln Lionesses, an acrobatic dance team. She loves their flash, style,
teen talk and show-bizzy costumes. Though Toni bonds with a funny little scamp,
Beezi (Alexis Neblett), whose hair is cut like Mouseketeer ears, she’s facing a
big growth surge. Soon she attempts the hot steps, and pierces her earlobes to
insert her first rings. She smiles more, and her plank body, in motion, seems
to predict emerging curves.
Then
one girl falls down, in what seems like a swooning or spasmic collapse. And later
another, and another. Discipline falters, and officials (barely seen) try to blame
the water (hints of Flint). Breezy little Beezi has a keen intuition: “Some kind of boyfriend disease?”
Without turning clinical or creepy, writer and director Holmer has found a shape-shifting
metaphor for pubescent fire, for the shock wave of natural and social chemisty that
can send girls into giggle storms, or into depression, anorexia, bulimia, panic.
She does not preach or teach, nor lose her clear-eyed fascination with young,
still faces and expressive, kinetic bodies, and life-shifting moods.
Shot
almost entirely in the rec spaces, where clean, spare lines supportively frame every
motion and emotion, Paul Yee’s imagery beautifully uses long takes and varied
focal effects. The Fits risks showing
much more than it says. There is lucid enigma here, on the divide between
fiction and documentation. Hightower is an ace find, no flirty poser. Holmer,
for sure, needs to keep making movies.
Microbe and Gasoline
Director
Michel Gondry rang the bell with Eternal
Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, went flat with The Green Hornet, hit a sweet spot of Gallic whimsy with The Science of Sleep. His delight in
textures, colors, dreams and the ability of film to pull rabbits from invisible
hats has a wit that signatures his addition to a French movie tradition going
back to Lumiere, Tati, Louis Malle’s gag-driven whirligig Zazie dans le Métro and the odd, provocative buddy comedies of
Bertrand Blier. In Microbe and Gasoline
he examines the new friendship of pubescent schoolboys Daniel (Ange Dargent)
and Théo (Theophile Baquet), the first called Microbe because of his pre-growth
size, the second Gasoline because of his gassy, gimmick-laden motor bike.
Microbe,
still beardless and (he thinks) sperm-less, develops a shy crush on a bemused girl. Impudent Gasoline
contrives a small car disguised as a shed on wheels. Their Tom & Huck journey
of escape includes a soulful lament for Gypsies, a funny diss of cellphones, an
art contest, an oddly porny hair salon run by Koreans, and many bewildered
adults. Don’t take it seriously, except in its genuine feeling for adolescent
aches and confusions, and the young
actors will show you a good time. If not, blame the French.
SALAD (A List)
My
choices of 12 Top Movies About Adolescents (and their
directors): The Last Picture Show
(Peter Bogdanovich), Murmur of the Heart
(Louis Malle), The Member of the Wedding (Fred
Zinnemann), American Graffiti (George
Lucas/Francis Coppola), Rebel Without a
Cause (Nicholas Ray), Zebrahead (Anthony
Drazan), Les Enfants Terribles (J-P
Melville, Jean Cocteau), Catarina in the
Big City (Paolo Virzi), Romeo and
Juliet (Franco Zeffirelli), Election
(Alexander Payne), Dazed and Confused
(Richard Linklater) and Heavenly
Creatures (Peter Jackson). WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)
Citizen Welles admired John Ford, but not so piously as Peter Bogdanovich did: “I was in Peter’s house one night, he ran some John Ford pictures. During the first reel I said, ‘Isn’t it funny how incapable even Ford, and all American directors, are of making women look in period?’ I said, ‘Look at those two girls who are supposed to be in the covered wagon. Their hairdos and costumes are really what the actresses in the Fifties thought was good taste.’ … Peter flew into a rage, turned off the projector and wouldn’t let us see the rest of the movie because I didn’t have enough respect for Ford.” (From My Lunches With Orson by Henry Jaglom, with Peter Biskind).
ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)
No other
writer-director so provocatively employs the “n-word” in his dialog like
Quentin Tarantino, who “exploits and exposes the word with Elizabethan
succulence. He delves, said Stanley Crouch, into ‘the artistic challenges of
the many misceginations that shape the goulash of American culture,’ and by his
skill ‘the human nuances and surprises in the writing provide fresh alterations
of meaning.” (From the Pam Grier/Jackie
Brown chapter of my book Starlight
Rising: Acting Up in Movies, available on Amazon, Nook and Kindle).
DESSERT (An Image)
A great movie image is more than a still,
it’s a distillation.
Paulette Dubost and Nora Gregor in The Rules of the Game (France, 1939; director Jean Renoir, cinematographers Jean Bachelet and J.P. Alphen)
For previous Flix Nosh meals, scroll
below.
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