Film Carew

Did I ever tell you the incredible true story of that time I interviewed Zach Braff? It was 2004, and fresh off gambolling around America in the summer of Devendra and Joanna, my mind was like a fecund meadow, my countenance as sweet as condensed milk, my love for the world —and all the beings who dwelled upon it— seemed endless. The Disney empire asked if Ye Olde Film Carew would entertain a conversation with La Braff, a mugging TV stooge made good on a “critically acclaimed” (read: financially profitable) “indie” movie debut, and, bless, the answer was yes. Then I watched the film. I watched Garden State. And my boundless love become seething, festering, toxic hate; for all of mankind, all the beasts who walk on the land, all the fish who swim in the sea. Yet, due to being a professional —read: needing the cash— I still did my interview, still kept a façade of good-natured politeness, still indulged La Braff in conversations about our shared love of the bounteous facial hair of Messrs. Mercer and Beam and Banhart. And yet, he knew. La Braff sensed it, caught the whiff through his animal nostrils, and displayed his displeasure via that ever-quivering lower lip: he knew that I doubted his genius, his ascendant stardom, his portrait of a generation. I got the very obvious sense that he hated me, but maybe that's because he got the sense I hated his film. His stupid, stupid film.

Neither time nor Film Carew has forgotten Garden State, even if Braff seems on his way to oblivion (the bottom of the infinite abyss of tepid celebrity, perhaps?), and I've never seen another single film in which he's appeared. Yet, his Full Orson turn shall never be forgotten, if only because it holds within its collection of faux-poignant platitudes and dead-eyed emptiness the definitive exemplar of one of the most noxious tropes of the 'American indie movie' era: the Manic Pixie Dream Girl. As outlined in a piece of piercing pop-cultural prescience by The AV Club's Nathan Rabin circa 2007, the MPDG “exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures.” In short: they are female characters that have no interior motivations or lives of their own; they are hollow facilitators of growth in the leading man; they are little more than cut-out male fantasies that suffer from the delusion above male fantasies because the women in question are so individual and quirky. Their rise was synonymous with Suicide Girls and the burlesque revival, and cut from the same pernicious patriarchal cloth: pop-cultural misogyny re-sold as pseudo-feminism; the woman-as-fantasy-fulfilment achieving self-actualisation by being dressed in alt threads.

Ruby Sparks initially begins like some spiritual successor to Garden State, with one of the least-inspiring set-ups in recent memory. Paul Dano is the struggling 20-something writer (author's note: least favourite character ever) who finds himself blocked, dumped, sexless; a sadsack figure tended to only by his horndog offsider and his ever-patient shrink. Only, suddenly, from a flash of inspiration from deep in his subconscious, bounds in a floral-dressed, immaculately-fringed poppet of wide-eyes, irrepressible infectiousness, and endless whimsy. She is the girl of his dreams —literally— and, when he wakes, he commits her to the page; typing out her alt-quirk backstory in a pique of fevered inspiration; typewriter(!) keys aclackin'. Then, in a Mannequin-ish moment of high-concept movie-magic, she's, suddenly!, a real girl; a titular character pirouetting through our sadsack's life, sprinkling pixie dust about until he's cavorting in delirious joy and getting his stone cold fuck on. It's a cliché-addled opening that is, delightfully, soon revealed to be a magnificent ruse: screenwriter/starlet Zoe Kazan introducing the familiar tropes of the sensitive-indie-dude rom-com so as to savagely skewer them; taking down the fluffy filmic fantasy from the inside as her flick flips from silly to salty with a swiftness; becoming a savage study of male dominion, media reductionism, prescribed social roles, and patterns of control and abuse in relationships; viewing all this all through the lens of male fantasy and its projection upon those prized objects of affection, in which the man's ardour for his dream-girl is presented as a one-size-fits-all-straitjacket, dedicated to all those sensitive indie bros out there who break horses.

Ruby Sparks is, in this way, a more fervent proponent of what Marc Webb's (500) Days Of Summer wanted —but failed— to be: a study in how someone's obsessive crush on another person is, effectively, a prison that they wish that person to inhabit; and how, if their fantasy figure dares stray away from that romanticised caricature, then they're demonised. It was a thoughtful idea that the film failed to execute from its opening title card, when it infamously pronounced the girl-who-broke-the-real-life-writer's-heart to be a “bitch”; thereby officially forfeiting its feminist credentials for all eternity. When coupled with the fact that the filmic version of that girl was played by Zooey Deschanel —that living, breathing Manic Pixie Dream Girl, who sprinkled fairy-dust into the life of brooding, sensitive loner Benjamin Gibbard before hightailing it out of there (bitch!)— (500) Days Of Summer's supposed critique of male-fantasy-projection failed to be heard for the majority of its viewers, thereby making it some kind of thematic tree falling in the woods. Kazan doesn't make the same mistake; her takedown of the trope is one of the most artfully-penned pieces of line-skating, genre-toying screenwriting that an American indie has attempted in aeons. Which is to say: the film is generic enough not to ruffle feathers; at times feeling an awful lot like an awful Sundance special; a trip to meet the wacky relatives right in the wheelhouse of Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, the people who made the insufferable Little Miss Sunshine; the collection of colourful characters gunning for Living In Oblivion but coming closer to Meet The Fockers. The horndog-offsider character feels more like cliché than subversion thereof; there's no less than two scenes in which Kazan leaps symbolically into a swimming pool; and the ending reaches a resolution incongruously rosy, and perhaps out to pacify those who thought they were watching an actual rom-com, not an indictment of them. But that such pacification is laced with critical poison is what gives Ruby Sparks its spirit of subversiveness; it not hard to imagine that Kazan —the real-life partner of her leading man; the pair last seen on screens together walking into oblivion in Kelly Reichardt's masterful Meek's Cutoff— is out to absolve Dano of the sins of appearing in, like, The Girl Next Door; or, maybe, to criticise him for doing the same. Her critique is, in many ways, not just one about screenplay stereotypes, but a broader cultural one; one woman out to turn pop-cultural tools of mass-cultural misogyny back on themselves, one quirky indie movie at a time.

In non-Manic Pixie Dream Girl news: Lore is Cate Shortland's fervent follow-up to her luminous damaged-adolescent-girl fuckpiece Somersault, and it's instantly one of the most interesting films about WWII-era Germany ever authored. The story —torn from a novel by Rachel Seiffert, and shot on location, entirely in German— gives us a collection of tow-headed Aryan children who've been born-and-raised in the Third Reich; a dutiful clan of Hitler Youth for whom the Führer is a benevolent provider, and their father is off exterminatin' in the wilds of Belarus. When the war comes to a sudden end, their cultural cachet is instantly inverted: their parents are hauled off to a war-crimes trial, their neighbours sneer at them, and, suddenly, a band of five kids must cross Bavaria on foot, across once-united territory being partitioned amongst Allied powers as they walk. Films based on fraudulent 'memoirs' have made the escape-on-foot a stock cliché of the Holocaust Entertainment industry (see: Véra Belmont's insipid Surviving With Wolves and Peter Weir's Oscarbait The Way Back), but here the heroic overland journey is stripped of its heroism. Too often pictures of '40s Deutschland are rendered inert by black-and-white morality, but here Shortland —with suitably dreamy cinematography still intact— swims wholly through the greys; presenting a powerful, painful portrait of children whose world has been turned upside-down; and who, eventually, will come to understand the great evil that was perpetrated in their names.

Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry is a low-key portrait of the Chinese artist and social activist that, slowly, eventually grows into something more profound; director Alison Klayman following the affable artist as his acts of dissidence grow louder and more hostile, and the official Party crackdown on them becomes more severe. Like many documentaries of its ilk —and, especially, in this way, like Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present, which showed alongside it at MIFF— it's a film that observes profundity rather than achieves it itself; but seeing Weiwei's devotion to demanding transparency from Chinese officials is no less stirring for that abstraction.