here we go again! i went to paris with syd last week and it was glorious and weird. i love paris so much, i love cities and i love museums and public transit and speaking french, and i ate lots of pastries and walked ten miles a day. it was just me and syd and i could feel myself being weird and neurotic but i don't think she minded all too much. and now i'm back at work but i don't really have much to do so i'm bored and trying fruitlessly to fill my days. so i've been going to the movies.
i saw the brutalist last night, and i feel oh so very conflicted about it. re: the critique of zionism -- it is so tame as to be nonexistent. i actually don't fully buy the idea that zsofia's speech at the end represents an implicit critique of zionists using the holocaust as an ideological support for the idea of a jewish state. given the second half of the movie, i actually don't think that corbet is smart enough for that! i do think that the ending is a little ambivalent, but i do think that it's more meant to make soft-hearted viewers (myself included) sob. there's too much leading up to it in the rest of the movie -- his insistence on the height, the fact that when erszabet asks him what part they're paying for, he says "the height of the ceilings." i do think the movie is correct in that no one talked about the holocaust for a very long time, it took an entire generation for american jews (and immigrated survivors) to begin talking about the camps. it's an impossibility for lazlo to explain what he'd been through, so he expresses it through his architecture - that's about as clear as a blow to the head. zsofia is a survivor too, but by 1980 -- and coming from israel -- it's easier to express. she provides this pat little explanation which flattens the building and its creator down to a single simple sob story which is ideologically comprehensible. but the point of the movie is that pain and anger and trauma are not entirely comprehensible! lazlo and erzsabet are reunited in the second half of the film, but it's unclear if their love really has survived the camps and their separation. i've read some analysis of the movie which reads it differently than i do, but i think people are overestimating corbet's intelligence while also flattening what actually happens in the movie. idk i think i need to watch it again.
speaking of things that are about as clear as a blow to the head: the second half of the movie is simply not that good. it's visually stunning, obviously, especially as the building is slowly erected, but the emotional swings it takes veer into melodrama. we get it! capitalism rapes art, the rich rape the poor, the WASPs brutalized the rest of us in the 40s and 50s. but the melodrama of it all pulls you out of the desperation that the first half so carefully constructs.
also, can we talk about felicity jones? i just find it insane that she's now played jewish TWICE. that is the most goyishe-looking, british-looking woman i have ever seen in my life. and she is honestly not very good in this movie! i found their relationship to be much more compelling in the first half, because the second half relies on us believing that they truly love one another and i simply do not buy it. i believe that they care about each other, that they do love each other, but i have no idea of the contours of that love. part of this is that i think jones' performance isn't believable? i don't know exactly why i feel this way, but i feel like i understand why she loves lazlo -- the entire movie is dedicated to making us love him, to understanding the brilliance of this broken, awful, sparkling mind. but i don't quite understand why he loves her: she feels like a paper doll moved around for the story's advancement, or melodrama, or something equally tawdry.
and here we get to my actual problem with this movie: did we really need another movie about a tortured male genius in which all of the women are set dressing? when they do appear, they exist only as reminders of pain and suffering (erzabet's disability, zsofia's inability to speak, the sad-eyed sex workers). a movie that was actually interested in love, in the relationships between human beings, in the relationship between love and exploitation and the relationship between the exploiter and the exploited -- which even this movie admits is a gendered one! -- would be seriously interested in the experiences of women beyond their availablility as objects of abuse.
also, did anyone else notice the brief hint at twincest? no, just me? ok then. joe alwyn (god save us from white men who simply cannot act) plays this domineering, annoying, puffy-faced rich-boy brat who rapes zsofia and seems to threaten his own sister. this is not a movie that is optimistic about masculinity, but g-d i wish it was more inventive in its critique.
next.