Leaving Scarsdale

Some people may have Defoe like fantasies of being stranded on a desert island and igniting a hot affair with their Friday and others might dream of going to Bangkok or Vegas (a la Leaving Las Vegas) to live out their ultimate fantasy of dissipation. "Chacun a son gout" as the French say. Everyone has their little kink and with Passover for some Jewish guys and gals it relates to the fantasy of the unfettered enjoyment of matzo and butter. The movie might be called Leaving Scarsdale and it requires only a motel room and one of those large family packs of Streit's Matzo and a platoon sized supply of Breakstone’s. Remember the famous butter scene in Last Tango, well this one is a combination of the wonderful moment between Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider in the Bertolucci classic and l973 Philippe Noirot movie La Grand Bouffe in which a group of aristocrats take a vow of gluttony in which they will eat themselves to death. Imagine all that matzo slathered with butter with no stop signs in the form of family, friends or employers to report to. What a way to die surrounded by sheets of crispy unleavened bread bathed in the oily golden substance which lubricates our carbohydrate dreams. Fyvush Finkel could played the Nicholas Cage role, with matzoh substituted for alcohol as the addictive substance of choice.

Gaspar Noe’s Love

At one point in Gaspar Noe’s Love, his male lead Murphy (Karl Glusman), a would be director studying filmmaking in Paris, announces “my biggest dream is to make a film that depicts sentimental sex.” Audiences who see Love may ask why it isn’t simply called Sex, since the sex is graphic, and so ubiquitous that the brazenness becomes almost routine. During the Q &A the followed one of the opening night screenings of the film Noe remarked “I don’t see why there aren’t more genitals in movies. They’re everywhere.” But make no mistake about it Love is not  porn. Noe whose contribution to civilized society may lie in reintroducing the now almost extinct cosmetic notion of pubic hair into a world intent on Brazilian waxing, tips his hat to Courbet, particularly with respects to the painter’s famed “The Origin of the World,” whose wanton sexuality negotiates a fine line between beauty and provocation. From the first scene of mutual masturbation between Murphy and Electra (Aomi Muyock), the film uses sex to communicate states of emotion and being. A later threesome with a next door neighbor Omi (Klara Kristin) is a set piece. It’s not the climax of a dramatic scene, it's the scene. As in Blue is the Warmest Color, the sex itself tells the story. It’s the language of the film. The problem, in the case of Love, is that  the result creates a kind of schizophrenia that was not apparent in its predecessor, which was a seamless melding of sex and talk. With Love, the sex is more intelligent than any of the words iterated by the characters. Here for instance are a few examples of Murphy’s lines: “I’m just a loser, a dick and a dick has no brains,” “living with a woman is like sleeping with the C.I.A.; nothing is secret,” “I want to make movies that are blood, sperm and tears” “it’s raining, it’s cold and maybe we’re not the great artists we once dreamt we were.” None of this does justice to the complexities of the physicality the director portrays or from his singular view of sex a mixture of pain and babies. And the dialogue has caused some critics to ask how a film that’s shot in 3-D could have such bi-dimensional characters (though commenting on Noe’s use of erotic 3-D one audience member remarked that it was the first time she’d been cummed on by a movie). All this being said, it must be pointed out that Noe carries on the tradition of the European directors he obviously admires. Electra whose appearance recalls the vampish Jeanne (Maria Schneider) of Last Tango  disappears much like Antonioni’s Anna (Lea Massari) in L’avventura. His male lead wears a Fassbinder tee shirt and there’s a Salo poster on the wall of his apartment. And the notion of the outlaw as artist or in this case the artist as outlaw recalls the world of Godard’s Breathless. Noe, who made his reputation as the infant terrible of art house cinema with Irreversible and Enter the Void, has followed in the footsteps of giants while developing a cinematic vocabulary that’s all his own. N.B: If words fail, why not just use movement? Remember  The Joy of Sex? Why not produce a  graphic dance piece called The Pain and Joy of Sex? Such a work would undoubtedly play to sell out crowds.

Pornosophy: Loving Sex?

Is loving sex all that it’s cracked up to be? Or is it the province of bad movies like Love Story (1970) or another sixties classic A Man and a Woman (1966). One of the nice things about a film like Richard Linklater’s Before Midnight (2013) is that it shies away from loving sex. One of the film’s great scenes is an enormous argument that breaks out in an elegant hotel room which a couple has been treated to as a gift. Instead of passionate lovemaking the time away from the kids turns into a massive back and forth in which mutual recriminations almost end in a breakup. Another classic depiction of non-loving sex occurs in Antonioni’s L’avventura (1960) when Claudia (Monica Vitti) discovers Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti) in the arms of the American whore Gloria Perkins (Dorothy De Polioli). It’s a scene of almost orgasmic disenchantment in which everything that is wrong with the universe is concentrated in one spectacularly revolting embrace. David Lean’s version of Noel Cowards’s Brief Encounter had love, but the encounter was too brief to turn into sex. And then there is the case of the second to the last film John Holmes ever made, The Rise of the Roman Empress (1987). At this point in his career, Holmes already knew he was HIV positive yet he proceeded to have unprotected sex with the Italian porn star and politician La Cicciolina. If there were an award given for malevolently intentioned unloving sex or “loving porking," this film could very well get it. These days loving sex is literally the talk of the town. It’s the only way for students to indulge their promiscuous desires in California under the new “Affirmative Consent” statute which is one of the biggest challenges to the pleasures of the hate fuck. Last Tango in Paris (1972) contained some sex scenes which epitomized the misery of the human condition and are the perfect antidote to the virus of sentimentalism which is on the verge of infecting both cinema and life. The monologue of the nurse, Alma (Bibi Andersson), in Bergman’s Persona (1966) is also an effective remedy for romantic daydreams, along with the old locker room adage, “tell ‘em you love ‘em and you lay ‘em."

Survival of the Fittest?

Dwight Garner starts his Times review of the fourth volume Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle by citing Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 49 (“Review: Karl Ove Knausgaard’s: ‘My Struggle: Book Four’”, NYT, 4/20/15). My Struggle or Min Kamp is naturally an intentional and provocative allusion to Hitler’s infamous ars poetica. Garner remarks “ There’s a special kind of despair, Thomas Pynchon observed…that can arrive ‘when nobody around has any sexual relevance to you.'” Garner discountenances the kind of despair Pynchon is talking about in the case of the “quasi-autobiographical”18 year old character depicted in the novel. However, that sounds precisely what he's suffering from to the extent that he's a virgin and gifted with a mind that easily makes fictions out of everyday reality. In our day and age when varying sexual styles--transgender, transvestite, homosexual, lesbian, bisexual, pre-op transexual--are openly flaunted and politicized, it’s hard to imagine one finding the equivalent for the thrilling shame of a secret and transgressive obsession. The Crying of Lot 49 was published in the sixties, which while the heart of the Woodstock era, was still the dark ages for things like SRS, sexual reassignment surgery and hormone therapy Now, even soldiers in army brigs have the right to it (“Military Approves Hormone Therapy for Chelsea Manning," USA Today, 2/13/15). Yes, the interior of the mind is a separate place that doesn’t always participate in the ideological advancements of an age, at least as far as sexuality is concerned. But still the wonderful secretive thoughts that Pynchon and Knausgaard both allude to has been almost violently transfigured by amongst other things midday talk shows, on which sexual chimaeras are now free to air their once dirty laundry. It’s all kind of sad, since shame aided and abetted by institutions like the Catholic church, can be such a delicious turn on. Now people do whatever they like and it’s sometimes hard to tell if anything, well nigh anything momentous, is happening at all. Even movies like Louis Malle's Murmur of the Heart, which deals with incest, fail to make filmgoers bat an eye.The butter scene from Last Tango in Paris is looked at as normative sex and the almost clinically displayed fellatio of Marco Bellochio’s Devil in the Flesh fails to have the shock it did when it was released in l986. Thank God for Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salo, Or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975) whose graphic depiction of coprophilia is still singular in its ability to elicit a gag reflex.

Diasporic Dining XXXV: Did Mao Order in Chinese?

Did Mao order in Chinese? Did Chairman Mao like General Tso’s chicken? You read about The Long March, The Hundred Flowers Campaign and The Cultural Revolution, but it’s hard to find documentation on what dishes Mao liked. Zhou Enlai, Jiang Zemin and other leaders of the Communist Party obviously required nourishment as they toiled into the night to create the juggernaut that is modern China today and, which by the way, has other fish to fry. Perhaps Mao was afraid his goose would be cooked? Still Americans are so used to Chinese food that they almost consider it a right. Watch the average American as he enters his local Chinese restaurant. He treats the premises as if they were his home, carelessly throwing his coat on the seat of his Naugahyde booth and continuing the fight he or she is having with his or her spouse or partner, as if the attentive waiter who smiles embarrassedly were not there at all. Even when China was riven by the civil war between the Nationalist forces of Chiang Kai-shek and armies of Mao, both leaders and soldiers had to eat. Let’s go back even further. Did Sun Yat-sen, the great leader and revolutionary, get the little white cartons? Did his food come with a plastic bag filled with soy sauce, mustard and suite and sauce? Did he have to ask for chopsticks or the little bags of crunchy noodles? Isn’t the failure to include any scenes of Chinese food being delivered in the film versions of either Empire of the Sun  or The Good  Earth a little like Bertolucci filming Last Tango in Paris without sex?