Post by romarth on Mar 3, 2017 18:01:50 GMT
“If fourteen people die, I’ll be king.” So says a portly, unassuming graveyard-shift security guard of his far-removed, diluted royal foreign lineage. It’s not throwaway drollness, because Certain Women has a lot of that: characters observing their own potential for bliss or greatness (be it far-fetched or reasonable) with a shrugging remove. The film pits its able cast against a desolate yet scrupulously-captured Montana, and dares these inhabitants not to assimilate to the stoicism suggested by the stark landscape. Characters bargain and compromise with learned, weary forbearance, abjectly isolate themselves within thankless duties (social, familial, and occupational), and mostly languish in the safety of yearning in lieu of acting. There’s no labour as arduous as making an honest bid for happiness.
A tale of small-town distaff discontent, shot in calmative 16mm, and divided into three consecutive short segments (narratively unified by only a few minor, incidental dovetails), Certain Women marks director Kelly Reichardt’s first departure from her beloved Oregon in over twenty years of filmmaking. As ever, she graciously yields auteurship to her setting, permitting Montana the full breadth of its eerie, halting influence; the spectral cascade of pine tree silhouettes, spearing shafts of milky light encroaching on drably furnished interiors, the interminable crawl of a train, in all its uneasy modernity, traversing an environ that has cautiously granted it right of way… Montana’s hush is stunning, and pitiless.
The stories are, in the best sense, hardly stories; like elliptical mood-pieces, they simply start and then stop, bereft of hysteria, but awash in ache. The stories, snapshots, destinations are thus: a beleaguered lawyer (Dern) contends with an irascible client (Harris) who refuses to accept her counsel; a husband and wife (Le Gros and Williams) attempt to procure some sandstone from an elderly man for the home they’re building; a lonely rancher (Gladstone, utterly superb) and a city lawyer teaching a night-school class (Stewart) strike up something of a friendship.
An adaptation of selections from Maile Meloy’s Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It, the film’s three-headed structure brings to Reichardt’s penchant for abbreviated, anecdotal minimalism a sense of wholeness that’s sometimes missing from her other films (something like Wendy and Lucy finds her gift strained to contrivance in an effort to sustain elegance and intimacy over an unwarrantedly lengthy running time). The director’s lucid presentations of the quotidian are almost oppressive in their matter-of-factness, and she turns stylistic torpor into subtle anthropology; the film’s drowsy observance of life’s repetitions, staggered revelations, and patience-won triumphs speaks for itself – under even the slightest scrutiny, the silent behaviours of the repressed and the dulled of passion betray volumes that would mortify those enact them.
Reichardt excels at presenting sheer, easily comestible images, and then gradually complicating them in retrospect. The skill is in achieving this linearly, and in not relying on formalistic subterfuge – there’s a real intimacy (and remarkable specificity) to how a foot sneakily snakes into frame to lightly knead the small of a lover’s back as he sits on the bedside. Later, the true nature of this relationship will come to light, and our initial rosy perceptions will be quietly deformed. It’s this patience, and value for the microscopic ways that people love and hate and long and plea that renders Certain Women’s gentleness seismic.
A tale of small-town distaff discontent, shot in calmative 16mm, and divided into three consecutive short segments (narratively unified by only a few minor, incidental dovetails), Certain Women marks director Kelly Reichardt’s first departure from her beloved Oregon in over twenty years of filmmaking. As ever, she graciously yields auteurship to her setting, permitting Montana the full breadth of its eerie, halting influence; the spectral cascade of pine tree silhouettes, spearing shafts of milky light encroaching on drably furnished interiors, the interminable crawl of a train, in all its uneasy modernity, traversing an environ that has cautiously granted it right of way… Montana’s hush is stunning, and pitiless.
The stories are, in the best sense, hardly stories; like elliptical mood-pieces, they simply start and then stop, bereft of hysteria, but awash in ache. The stories, snapshots, destinations are thus: a beleaguered lawyer (Dern) contends with an irascible client (Harris) who refuses to accept her counsel; a husband and wife (Le Gros and Williams) attempt to procure some sandstone from an elderly man for the home they’re building; a lonely rancher (Gladstone, utterly superb) and a city lawyer teaching a night-school class (Stewart) strike up something of a friendship.
An adaptation of selections from Maile Meloy’s Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It, the film’s three-headed structure brings to Reichardt’s penchant for abbreviated, anecdotal minimalism a sense of wholeness that’s sometimes missing from her other films (something like Wendy and Lucy finds her gift strained to contrivance in an effort to sustain elegance and intimacy over an unwarrantedly lengthy running time). The director’s lucid presentations of the quotidian are almost oppressive in their matter-of-factness, and she turns stylistic torpor into subtle anthropology; the film’s drowsy observance of life’s repetitions, staggered revelations, and patience-won triumphs speaks for itself – under even the slightest scrutiny, the silent behaviours of the repressed and the dulled of passion betray volumes that would mortify those enact them.
Reichardt excels at presenting sheer, easily comestible images, and then gradually complicating them in retrospect. The skill is in achieving this linearly, and in not relying on formalistic subterfuge – there’s a real intimacy (and remarkable specificity) to how a foot sneakily snakes into frame to lightly knead the small of a lover’s back as he sits on the bedside. Later, the true nature of this relationship will come to light, and our initial rosy perceptions will be quietly deformed. It’s this patience, and value for the microscopic ways that people love and hate and long and plea that renders Certain Women’s gentleness seismic.
