Elliot’s Watching - Week of 9-5-21
The 8-episode Diego Luna socio-drama Everything Will Be Fine, from Mexico (2021) and on Netflix, is far better than one would expect from any brief description: A story of the break-up of a marriage where both (though mostly the man) are at fault, and the attendant suffering of the adorable child about 8 years old - scenes from a marriage Mexican-style we might call it, except that it’s amazingly au courant (it ends mid-Covid) and often surprising. I don’t know that I completely buy into the conclusion, but will say that it’s almost impossible to foresee and that it leaves things open to a second season, of course. Among the 5 lead player there are some powerful scenes, some showing a lot of frankness about sex. The plot twists are at times ingenious, but always credible, and the photography is always beautiful, imaginative, and, at least to this viewer, informative about contemporary life in Mex City. Of particular note, the visit the young girl takes to the home town of the family maid (reminded me of a similar sequence in Roma). In short, this type of film may not be for everyone - it wasn’t something I’d ordinarily be drawn to - but it accomplish its goals efficiently and effectively and will keep you engaged without ever pandering.
When I first watched Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966) I was put off; I felt that it was pretentious, obscure, and heavy-handed, and not nearly as truthful and provocative as his more conventionally scripted works, such as Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light, or even the quite different Seventh Seal. Now, I’ve come around - watched Persona over the past two nights and blown away by the tension, reach, and creativity of this film. How so? Well, it still is at times pretentious, especially in its dream-like imagery near beginning and end of film - the little boy watching on a screen this very story about his emotionally distant mother, the bit of celluloid film breaking and incinerating - yes, we get it, we’re watching all this on a long strip of film. But at the heart - a story of two women, one (Liv Ullmann, playing Elisabet) an actress who had a breakdown during a performance and since them (several months) been silent, the other (Bibi Andersson, playing Alma) a nurse assigned to give full-time care to Elisabet - including several weeks (months?) on a Baltic island where it appears that they are the only inhabitants. Over the course of the treatment, Alma becomes so disturbed and angry at her patient’s intransigence that she becomes abusive and furious. Probably the most powerful sequence is Alma’s long narration of a sexual encounter that led to a pregnancy and abortion, and later learns that Elisabet wrote a letter about this encounter in which she was mocking and scornful toward her nurse. The drama is incredibly taut and powerful throughout - a tour de force for Andersson for whom the 100-minute film was a single narrative and Ullmann, who commands through expression and gesture, as well as a strikingly original and beautiful b/w masterpiece by photog Sven Nyquist, in which every frame - from intimate close-up portraits to stark exterior landscapes to the all-white hospital room where Elisabet is more or less imprisoned. On one level, it’s a powerful film about power relationships and torment - but there’s a wider sense as well: In part, it’s an allegory about contemporary life, in which Elisabet’s silence is the silence of an indifferent, inaccessible God (early in the film we see Elisabet disturbed by film clips of violence in Vietnam and, perhaps?, from the Holocaust); the film also examines what it means to “wear a mask” or “play a role,” the many personalities that we adopt and adapt each day and every moment. And also it asks: Do we all have a limit or breaking point after which we will become violent? After which can no longer tolerate the violence of others? And what about the little boy who “watches” this film in silence, this film of his mother: You can’t help but see Bergman himself in this young boy, sensitive, distant, fearful, observant, silent.
Added notes (9/12/21): The passages in the opening sequence and about half-way through the film when the film strip itself seems to break and incinerate has in the present age lost its significance; of course today we all are watching this “film” through digital streaming services or, for the old-fashioned, on a DVD. At the time of its release, of course, viewers would watch this only on “film” - so imagine yourself in a theater and watching the opening sequence and then the film itself starts to disintegrate. Your though of course would be that there was an accident in the projection room and that the film has been damaged or destroyed. It will take a few moments before the film gets “back on track,” and would be extremely unsettling and challenging for first-time viewers in the age of celluloid.
