Charlie Kaufman: The hopeless romantic. Emphasis on hopeless. In the midst of his invariably abstract looks at memory, self-loathing, and the capacity of media itself, his depiction of love always feels like it’s being viewed through a neurotic screen. Romantic leads who can’t allow themselves to experience love, and when they do, it only serves to rip the guts out of that feeling being real in the first place. His latest feature finds him well and truly in this mode of storytelling, going even further down the abstract path to deliver one of the single most pessimistic depictions of love I've ever sat through.
The title comes from a recurring thought in the head of our female lead (Jessie Buckley), as she makes a trip with her boyfriend Jake (Jesse Plemons) to meet his parents at their farm. They’ve been together for seven weeks, and the idea keeps nagging at her that she should break it off. Bookended by lengthy driving scenes in the middle of a blizzard, it mirrors the situation she finds herself in within the relationship: A cold, numbing, monotonous existence, where every little moment only adds to the whole that is keeping her in this position.
It’s a loveless relationship as existential crisis, where she is on the continual verge of losing her sense of identity, if not outright lost it already. Her partner’s name is a constant, but her own? Her jobs? Her interests? Her art? How she and Jake even met? All of that is in flux. The only constant is her place as half of this couple, a tumorous extension of someone else. She doesn’t know where she stops and Jake starts, with his parents congratulating him for how talented she is, as if that were a direct reflection of himself. It’s existential in an Albert Camus sense, where ending your own life is the core philosophical dilemma, refracted here as the killing-off of a conjoined existence, and the fear of losing your own in the process.
Or maybe none of them are actually hers. Maybe these aren’t her creations, her interests, not even her own thoughts. It’s here where the film gets into some Inception territory (not in the memed ‘thing within things’ sense, but ideas directly planted in someone’s mind from an outside source), as it draws attention to how media is capable of such inceptions, to the point where we convince ourselves that the ideas presented are our own. The Young Woman quotes Eva H. D. and Pauline Kael like Patrick Bateman talks about how much he likes Huey Lewis and Genesis, spoken flatly and verbatim under the guise of their individual opinions. Makes sense, since not only do they both exist in this weird stasis of multiple aliases, but they are also victims of the compromise required of them. Bateman compromises to exist under Reagan-era capitalism, and her under a relationship to someone she wants to leave, but can’t bear to try her luck with the coldness brewing outside.
That connection with cinema is most definitely deliberate, as there’s a fair bit of dialogue and visual language devoted to how romance is depicted in movies and even musicals. There’s frequent references to Oklahoma! (right down to a very trippy dance number near the end) as well as the Hollywood standard for rom-coms, with a mocked-up Robert Zemeckis production that serves to highlight how much Hollywood romanticises (heh) counter-productive and unhealthy relationships, where the couple staying together by film’s end almost-always takes precedent over whether they should be. This is why the third-act break-up is rarely, if ever, a permanent separation.
Now, bear in mind that with just how abstract this film gets (to the point where the entire finale is one massive head-scratch, pretty much requiring me to watch the whole film all over again to even attempt to figure it out at length), even with everything I’ve put down here, I still get the feeling that there’s something I’m missing. It certainly feels like a Kaufman narrative, disconnecting from the passage of linear time as it depicts the female lead stuck on a Penrose stair of indecision about being with a controlling manipulator. It even gestures at the original ending to Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, hinting that this may not be the first time these two have gone through all of this.
It’s a brick of a film, the kind where you don’t have conversations about it but construct essays to try and chip away at the thing. It’s a break-up movie all about the fear of it happening, with a psychological edge that bypasses the conscious mind and goes right into the unconscious; I feel like I’m going to have this unfurl in my brain when I go to sleep tonight like an ad-bomb. Morbid, hazy, and likely to annoy people who prefer to digest films in a single sitting, it’s a movie like only Charlie Kaufman could deliver and, for as out-of-my-grasp as it feels, I can’t say that I regret a single second I spent with it.
No comments:
Post a Comment