Religiosity – Bitch Flicks

The Sacred Heart of ‘Amélie’

Whether or not it was the intent of director Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Amélie can be seen as the female representation of a Christ figure in a modern tragedy. … Amélie’s love, like that of Christ, is selfless and knows no boundaries. … Amélie is altruistic and doesn’t hesitate to help other people.

This guest post is written by Giselle Defares.

The idea of love, chance and destiny – the cause and effect relationship – are themes that frequently occur in our cinematic history. For most of us, love is the strongest emotion that we know, an emotion that can entail powerful forces. In Amélie, love and happiness are hidden in the mundane things of life. Or in the case of Amélie, it’s putting the tip of her spoon on the caramelized layer of sugar on her crème brûlée.

“To ask one of these kinds of newspapers in Paris to love Amélie is like asking the Pope to put on a condom. They hate these kinds of movies.” This quote from the French director Jean-Pierre Jeunet, reflects the controversy, at that time, surrounding Amélie. This extravagant romantic film was loved around the world except within the French film establishment. The interview took place in May 2001 and it appears Jeunet’s comments possessed a kernel of truth because the Cannes Film Festival refused to put Amélie in the official selection.

The self-taught director Jeunet is known for his astonishing visuals – see also his specific mise-en-scène, heavy use of color, CGI and voice-over narration. He took a light-hearted approach with Amélie instead of the inaccessible and often gloomy atmosphere of his earlier films such as Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children. It starts with the opening scene where you’re bombarded with trivia and funny facts. Jeunet’s style is reminiscent of the prologue of Paul T. Anderson’s Magnolia or Tom Twykers’ Run Lola Run. Amélie became a worldwide box office success and also earned five Oscar nominations.

Amélie centers around Amélie Poulain (Audrey Tautou), a sensitive young woman, who after the death of her mother has withdrawn into her own fragile world, where the smallest pleasures of life are her priority. She works as a waitress in a corner bistro, until the day that Princess Diana dies in a car crash and everything changes. The shock of the news causes Amélie to drop a bottle cap, which unlocks a stone in the wall of her apartment, which leads her to discover a very old box in which a young boy used to hoard his treasures. Amélie tracks the boy – now an older man – down, and in returning his old, rusty box, Amélie finds her reason to live. She will make people happy in extraordinary ways.

Most of the scenes are shown in chronological order but there are several smaller storylines and flashbacks interwoven. Jeunet has an interesting way of playing with dialogue in the film. Amélie often loses the ability to properly communicate in important moments. The overarching role of the omniscient narrator — the key link between various scenes and sequences — becomes more important. The narrator continuously informs the viewer of Amélie’s personal thoughts and feelings.

Whether or not it was the intent of Jeunet, Amélie can be seen as the female representation of a Christ figure in a modern tragedy. In Bible and Cinema: Fifty Key Films, Adele Reinhartz gives two basic criteria that a movie character must meet in order to be seen as a Christ figure:

“That there be some direct and specific resemblance to Christ (though a full replication in every detail is not essential); and that the fundamental message associated with the possible Christ-figure has to be consistent with the life and work of Christ, and not contrary to his message about liberation and love.”

Amélie’s love, like that of Christ, is selfless and knows no boundaries. A representation of this point can be seen when she appears in several scenes in a Zorro costume. She disguises herself in order to help the people in her community. This is evident when she intervenes in the bullying of Lucien, who is monoplegic, as well as helping a blind man crossing the street. In that sense, Amélie is altruistic and doesn’t hesitate to help other people.

Several religious references occur in the dialogue. Dominique Bretodeau, the man who’s reunited with his rusty box of childhood treasures, calls Amélie an “angel” and states that she must be his “guardian angel.” Throughout the film, Amélie’s actions are referred to as a miracle. It’s important to note that her actions often leave the person confused as if an “outside or divine force” has intervened in their lives.

The turning point in the film is the sequence where Amélie views a memorial broadcast of her own death on television where she’s shown as a nun, washing the feet of the blind man, next to the Sacré-Coeur Basilica. This is similar to the moment that Jesus washed the feet of his disciples – an act of love and humility. The narrator later calls her in that moment the “Madonna of the unloved.”

The memorial scene functions as a symbolic death, since Amélie is still alive afterwards. She was afraid that her life had no more meaning after she accomplished everything she wanted. The narrator then states, “As she went, she felt a stab of regret for letting her father die without trying to give his stifled life the breath of air she had given to so many others.” Thus, she’s revived again knowing that her task is far from fulfilled, and that others closest to her, such as her father, require help as well. This leads to the moment where Amélie visits her father’s house and takes his garden gnome, who she uses for her good deed towards him.

Aforementioned, color plays an important role in the visual style of Jeunet and that’s certainly noticeable throughout the film. Jeunet manipulated and used various grading of color. The saturated color palette of the film – red, green and yellow are dominant – reflects the happy feelings of Amélie. Often colors clash when Jeunet chose sepia tones and black and white, which signals intrusion in the lives of the characters. The use of CGI is most noticeable when it comes to Amélie’s imagination – see the visualization of her loneliness via an animated crocodile or Amélie’s “sacred heart.”

In Jeunet’s portrayal of Amélie’s “sacred heart,” a clear parallel exists with Christian iconography. The Most Sacred Heart of Jesus is a Catholic icon which represents the love of Jesus Christ. It’s often portrayed as a human heart surrounded by flames. Amélie’s heart is displayed in a bright yellow and orange glow which clearly draws on the connotation of the sacred heart of Jesus Christ. The cinematography in this particular scene is interesting since Jeunet breaks a shot – a reverse shot between Amélie and her crush, in order to show the heart of Amélie but resumes afterwards. Thus his cinematography breaks with what you would expect and leads the viewer’s gaze towards the heart.

Tautou is phenomenal in her role as Amélie and she deservedly received several award nominations (including a BAFTA Award and César Award) for her portrayal. She truly carries the film and has great chemistry with all the other characters. Admittedly, the storyline is quite thin and some characters feel like cardboard cutouts, but Tautou saves the film with her doe-eyed likeableness.

Initially it seems that Amélie is content in her role as anonymous benefactor, whilst secretly crushing on the shy Nino – who collects photos from automated photo booths people don’t want; as you do. Until, an old neighbor tells her: “You don’t have bones of glass. You can take life’s knocks. If you let this chance pass, eventually, your heart will become as dry and brittle as my skeleton.” The call to embrace life to its fullest is original, playful and engagingly filmed by Jeunet. A charming film with lots of heart, even the most stoic viewer would succumb to the magic of Amélie.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrlQR_KH_nw

Giselle Defares comments on film, fashion (law) and American pop culture. See her blog here http://zilvertong.tumblr.com/ or follow her on twitter at @zilvertong.

Movie Review: A Serious Man

*This is a guest post from writer Lesley Jenike.

“It sounds like you don’t know anything! Why even tell me the story,” math professor Larry Gopnik asks Rabbi #2 on his Job-like quest for spiritual understanding. Why even tell the story, indeed?

Critics’ consternation over A Serious Man as an odd change of pace is intriguing to say the least. Is this the kind of movie an Oscar winner makes? Is this Coen Brothers’ most autobiographical film? Have the mysterious Coens finally revealed themselves by creating, finally, an autobiographical film? And to top it all off, why did they make a movie without a single big-name actor?

It’s true. There’s something defiantly perplexing about the film, something rather intense about its silences, weird compositions, odd humor and cringe-worthy dialogue that’s frankly off-putting. Maybe that’s why I loved it.

The Coens are, in my book, among the most consistently innovative filmmakers working today. And I don’t mean “innovative” in the sense that, as directors, they splice and dice filmic conventions the way Baz Luhrmann or Danny Boyle do, for example. Rather, they’re consummate storytellers, fancy jump cuts be damned, and their stories, no matter how dark, how disconcerting, become somehow universal, funny, and true. What’s ultimately so disconcerting about this movie, however, is its skeptical take on the Judeo-Christian tradition of parable and storytelling as illustration and explanation. The Coen brothers are undermining their own profession here, their own modus operandi, and call into question narrative’s effectiveness in light of a chaotic universe and incomprehensible suffering. It’s a dangerous move but ultimately a rewarding one.

The film is loosely organized around a series of “fables,” dramatized and told second-hand, none of which reveal anything beyond the pointlessness.

The movie opens with a fable from a nineteenth century Jewish shtetl (all dialogue in Yiddish, no less) in which a husband invites what a wife believes to be a dybbuk into the house. The wife, in her ignorance, stabs the man to prove he’s a ghost. The man staggers out, bleeding, into the snow. So begins a cycle of misread signs and empty ritual not even a “serious man” can overcome. It’s no accident, Bitch Flicks readers, that trouble begins with a woman. This is probably the Coens’ most specifically Jewish movie and the Jewish narrative’s patriarchal power structure is immediately evident.

Cut to the late sixties. Larry Gopnik’s son is listening to Jefferson Airplane in Hebrew school. Faith seems strikingly empty. Dybbuks still appear but as sublimations. Women still ruin lives but by slowly emasculating their husbands.

Now, I don’t pretend to know the particulars of Jewish culture and the Jewish religion, but I do know that the struggle to maintain faith and tradition in an ever-increasingly secular, often hostile world is a recurring theme in Jewish film and literature, and A Serious Man is no different. Its long shots and odd angles emphasize otherness, strangeness and estrangement, even within the context of the familiar, i.e. Larry Gopnik’s middle class, suburban home. Larry’s “goy” neighbors, for example, radiate, from Larry’s point of view, a weirdness he finds fascinating and potentially dangerous. His son smokes pot and simultaneously studies the Torah for his upcoming bar mitzvah while watching some crappy late Sixties TV show. His daughter is flagrantly disrespectful; his wife tells him she’s leaving him for “a serious man,” a neighbor “tempts” him with her breasts and a joint, and a South Korean student bribes him for a passing grade: a series of events that undermines his sense of moral order and integrity. Larry’s world, in other words, is crumbling, and no illustrative story is going to help this time.

A Serious Man’s lack—lack of answers and its uncompromising lack of real narrative sense—is its brilliance. The Coens manage here to dissemble meaning without resorting to empty, surface-level tricks or rhetorical flourishes. In other words, this is a sophisticated film by a pair of filmmakers who’ve cut the crap and gotten down to the heart of the matter: God is not listening.

Lesley Jenike received her PhD from the University of Cincinnati in 2008. She currently teaches poetry writing, screenwriting, and literature classes at the Columbus College of Art and Design. Her book of poems is Ghost of Fashion (CustomWords, 2009).

Silenced: A Short Silent Film

Black Snake Moan: A Review in Conversation

Welcome to the first installment of a new feature on Bitch Flicks: Reviews in Conversation. We take a movie that’s worth talking about, and do just that.

“This is some revolutionary shit. We’re tying up white women in Mississippi.” –John Singleton, on filming Black Snake Moan in the South

Why does the revolution necessitate wholesale exploitation of women?

Since Black Snake Moan was one of the initial movies (along with Hustle & Flow…maybe we should officially thank Craig Brewer for the inspiration) that made us want to start this site, it’s fitting that we discuss the movie in our first Review in Conversation segment.

Here’s the IMDb summary:

In Mississippi, the former blues man Lazarus is in crisis, missing his wife that has just left him. He finds the town slut and nymphomaniac Rae dumped on the road nearby his little farm, drugged, beaten and almost dead. Lazarus brings her home, giving medicine and nursing and nourishing her like a father, keeping her chained to control her heat. When her boyfriend Ronnie is discharged from the army due to his anxiety issue, he misunderstands the relationship of Lazarus and Rae, and tries to kill him. (Claudio Carvalho)

Before I address the film’s atrocious sexism, which the above summary characterizes well, I’d like to say what I love about BSM. The music, first and foremost, is outstanding. Brewer calls this a movie about the blues, and I’d like to take that a step further and say the movie is the blues. Or it tries to be, at least. The movie and its story are too small, conflicted, and tone-deaf to achieve greatness. It tries to be the blues and ends up being a blues music video, where Lazarus (Samuel L. Jackson) is the tortured and tired star, and Rae (Christina Ricci) is the video vixen, shaking her ass for the camera.

This is a movie that I want to love. It’s gritty, unique, and aware of class and race—a rare combination. However, there is no female perspective in the movie. Is it really too much to ask for a sharp film to also be sharp about gender? Is it right for a film like BSM to claim gender as a theme, while not really exploring women at all? Rae is the only female character (brief appearances by Lazarus’ wife, Rae’s mother, and a kind pharmacist easily fit into the angel/monster dichotomy), but she isn’t quite a real person. What is wrong with her? She is talked about as a nymphomaniac, and has strange, demonic fits of desire, but she’s really a victim of rape and abuse. Lazarus, whose trauma is that his wife aborted his baby and left for his younger brother, takes it upon himself to “cure” her by chaining her to a radiator. Even if the movie isn’t to be taken literally (but as a metaphor of sorts), why are the other characters so human and she so other, so animal?

Response by Stephanie R.

I, too, fell in love with the music in this film. It complements the key themes—race and class, as you mentioned, religion, and I’d also take it a step further to include sex. The scenes with Ricci shaking her ass for the camera are wonderfully sexy, and I found myself wavering back and forth during those scenes, wondering, is this just another female character being exploited by the camera? Or, is this a female character finally owning her sexuality?

Early on, she’s portrayed as a woman who’s at the mercy of her untamable sexual desires, and I didn’t ever get the feeling that she enjoyed them. She’s often shown squirming around on the ground, rubbing her hands all over her body, and moaning, like she’s struggling to fend off an attack. It’s at that point that she must find someone, anyone to screw, in order to make that feeling go away.

Later though, after Lazarus “cures” her by wrapping a giant chain around her waist and attaching it to a radiator, Rae is allowed to enter society again, showing up at a bar with Lazarus, drinking, rubbing up against everyone on the dance floor while Lazarus watches her from the stage, almost approvingly. What’s going on here? I truly want to read this as much more complicated than a man giving a woman permission to flaunt her sexuality, and I think it is.

But I also can’t help getting a little unnerved by the frivolity with which her sexuality is treated earlier in the film, when she’s portrayed as nothing more than the town whore. (At one point, the local mechanic says, “It’s already noon, Rae. Do you think those shorts should still be on?”) And when she’s described as “having the sickness” by another character (meaning nymphomania), it’s impossible not to think about the double-standard we still hold for men and women, especially when it comes to sexual desires.

As you mentioned, she is portrayed as “other,” often animalistic in her sexual conquests. Since I don’t think a film like this would work at all if a man were the one with the sexual “disease” (it’s natural for men to have uncontrollable sex drives, after all) then what does one make of using the myth of nymphomania to drive the plot? (See Peter Green’s “All Sexed Up,” a review of Carol Groneman’s 2000 book Nymphomania: A History, for a brief discussion of the myth.)

Response by Amber L.

I agree that the scene in the bar was very sexy, and I think I agree with what you said about that being a moment of Rae owning her sexuality. I think we’re supposed to understand that scene as a very important moment in which both characters are owning something that they’d lost—or lost control of. For whatever reason, Lazarus had lost his music (and I suspect it had to do with his wilting marriage), and Rae had lost control of her sexuality. However, that scene was exhilarating, and I think it has to do with reclamation and individual victory.

But back to the way gender and sex intersect. If nymphomania is itself largely fictitious, the strange way Rae’s fits were portrayed—moments in the film that were suspended between fear and comedy—reveals some of the ideological confusion of the film. If not for her nearly-naked body, battered and bruised and constantly displayed, I might have more sympathy for the film’s motivations. Add that to Rae’s moment of catharsis where she beats the shit out of her mother with a mop handle (for allowing Rae to be raped, either by her father or another male figure in her home), and we see women destroyed by sex who we’re supposed to sympathize with.

The final topic I want to bring up is religion. We can’t deny the role Christianity plays in the film. From the name of the main character to the supporting cast (which includes a preacher), the issue of faith (and a very certain brand of faith) comes up again and again. If the movie is a metaphor for “anxiety, fear, and unconditional love,” according to Brewer himself, then religion is the element that holds it all together. The instantiations of religion, however, are clunky at best; the radiator is God, the chain is faith, et cetera. I don’t really know where to go from here, except to acknowledge the large role of religion, although it plays out in hackneyed ways.

Response by Stephanie R

While I would like to see both characters in this film actually achieve some level of reclamation and individual victory, I think it fails for the most part, but the film especially fails Rae. She remains “chained” in a metaphorical sense, even in the final scenes. I don’t believe her character discovers much, or achieves much of an arc; she remains, for me, completely static. In fact, the film pretty much uses her as a vehicle to showcase the success of Lazarus, (which is yet another example of female exploitation that Brewer has either no awareness of or no desire to address).

I was left feeling no hope for Rae in that final scene—she’s imprisoned, (in a stuffy car, surrounded by semi-trucks) stuck in a relationship with a man who’s essentially a child needing to be coddled, with only the memory of her radiator-chain to keep her from jumping from the vehicle and fucking her way across the interstate. But Lazarus has his music again. He’s managed to overcome his anger about his wife leaving him, and he’s even got a nice new chick to look after him. See how chaining up a white woman in Mississippi can revolutionize an entire worldview?

The truth is I never gave a shit about Rae. I could’ve cared for her, if Brewer hadn’t used her sexuality against her—it’s filmed as if the abuse she suffers is deserved. (See what you get when you go around whoring yourself? Tsk, tsk.) By the time we get to know her character, when, as you mentioned, she divulges her history of sexual abuse, then beats the shit out of her mother with a mop handle, it’s way too late for sympathy. By that point, Brewer has already managed to turn a young woman’s sexuality into a cross between sketch comedy and porn, where nothing about it feels real.

In that moment of catharsis with her mother, I found myself detached. Instead of sympathizing with Rae and coming to some kind of realization myself, I just rolled my eyes at the ridiculous, clichéd consequences of her abuse—girl gets raped by father-figure while mother does nothing to stop it, girl develops low self-esteem, girl becomes town slut, girl develops a fictional sex disease, girl gets chained to radiator by religious black man. Wait, what? Ah religion, how you never cease to reinforce the second-class citizenship of women, perpetually punishing them for their godless desire to fuck.

So Rae is possessed by an evil sex demon, and, at one freaky moment, Lazarus’s ex-wife. Lazarus and his brother are Cain and Abel. There’s adultery, lust, preachers, fire-and-brimstone, bible passages, and judgmental townsfolk. Basically, the religious themes receive the same clichéd treatment as women’s sexuality. Rae is pretty much “saved” by Lazarus, and Lazarus pretty much gets his shit together and “rises from the dead” (as Lazarus in the bible).

And, after this conversation, I’m starting to wonder if I’m the problem, if I made the mistake of taking this film seriously, when what it really wants to be is one big sensationalist metaphor. A metaphor for what, though? I’ll conclude with something Brewer says in an interview.

“I’m not writing from a place of progress. I’m not writing a movie that I want people to necessarily intellectualize. And I think that really messes with people who feel that they need to make a statement against this, and they don’t quite know what it is they’re against. Because man alive, you look at this imagery on this poster, and I’m so obviously banging this drum. It’s like, you really believe that I believe this? That women need to be chained up? Can we not think metaphorically once race and gender are introduced?”

Rent Black Snake Moan from Netflix
Read Carol Groseman’s article, “Nymphomania: The Historical Construction of Female Sexuality,” published in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society
Read the Salon.com interview with Craig Brewer