Cinefile

The defining moment of cinephilia is uncanny juxtaposition: the recognition of an element in a film from one's memory of a radically different one. Watch three or so movies in a row, and they will appear to form a pattern, even if that pattern consists of little more than the way establishing shots are framed, or the same make and model of car appearing again and again, or the way one actor resembles another. If criticism exists to explain, cinephilia exists to mystify, and it’s in the place where those two overlap, like the center of a Venn Diagram, where you’ll often find a sort of clarity.

2010 is shaping up to be the “Year of the Ferry.” So far, we’ve seen three major English-language releases that figure ferries into their plots, of which the first two even start on ferries: Shutter Island, The Ghost Writer and Survival of the Dead. Not merely scenes on ferries – ferries play significant roles in all three films, taking the characters to the place where most of the action is set (Shutter Island, Martha’s Vineyard and Plum Island). Even Ondine, opening this week, finds time for a ferry scene (in this case it’s beside a ferry and not on one) and the scene happens to be a funeral, the deceased’s ashes being scattered into the sea, which could metaphorically fit into our pattern of ferry-journeys.

It’s actually surprising that more films don’t have scenes on ferries. A ferry offers a large space (several decks) to work with while simultaneously taking the characters somewhere, like the once-ubiquitous train, and has the advantage over the now-omnipresent airport scene of offering not merely the possibility of transit, but transit itself. Airports are all about anticipation and stasis; count the ratio of screen time airports get to the screen time given to airplanes and you’ll find an excess of waiting and arriving and a shortage of going anywhere (however, a smart director knows how to take advantage of this kind of deficiency – Olivier Assayas, for one, has been successfully mining the stasis-state of airports for over a decade now). The films of the 1930s to 1960s – especially American and French films – are rich with travel scenes aboard cruise ships, trains, even airplanes. Nowadays we prefer destinations to journeys. Even if travel isn’t instantaneous, the movies pretend it is.

2010 is also shaping to be the “Year of the Wheelchair,” which receives a much more prominent role in Ondine than that ferry does, and plays silent partner to the action in Lourdes and Beeswax (technically a 2009 release, but one that’s taken until this year to make it to Chicago and many other parts of the country). Finding two convergences of this magnitude in a single year is pretty rare; you’d have to go back to 2007, when all the best films seemed to star Asia Argento, and both We Own the Night and In the City of Sylvia set dimly-lit bar scenes of heterosexual attraction and endless nighttime possibility to Blondie’s “Heart of Glass.”

All three films work the wheelchair into their aesthetic, which is a good deal better than the awkward ways wheelchairs usually find their ways into the image, the legs of their owners cut off so that the camera-operator can frame their faces alongside the faces of standing people. In Ondine, the wheelchair is motorized and Neil Jordan manages to work in a fairly good sequence in which the camera travels alongside while its owner races a car. In Beeswax, it’s a sportier folding model belonging to Tilly Hatcher, the only one of our three wheelchair’d actors to use one in real life. All three of them are women, all three at different stages of their lives – though Lourdes’ Sylvie Testud is only a few years older than Hatcher, her character is presented as resigned, almost a spinster, while Hatcher is clearly “a young woman;” Ondine’s Alison Barry is, of course, a little girl.

The fact that they all happen to be women is important because, whereas men in wheelchairs are usually getting subjected to some misguided metaphor for impotence (see The Big Sleep, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) or portrayed as coiled vipers (Spione, Dr. Strangelove), cinema has few traditions or traps for women in wheelchairs to fall into. A man in a wheelchair is either powerless (if not impotent, then robbed of his dignity, like Papa Garcos in Thieves’ Highway) or a liar or sometimes both, but a woman in a wheelchair is free to be whomever she (or the directors or the screenwriters) wants to be, though Lourdes’ director, Jessica Hausner, manages to fall into some of the same traps associated with using illnesses as a metaphor. But if Hausner was as smart about wheelchairs as Beeswax’s director, Andrew Bujalski (he understands that it is, above all, a vehicle, and it allows movement rather than impeding it), Lourdes wouldn’t be any good. He is inseparable from his acute powers of observation, while she conceives in metaphors and then bends the world to their will.   

In Lourdes, the wheelchair is always being pushed by someone else (it is, essentially, a “movable chair”), and long stretches are devoted to Testud being moved into position, pushed up to a table or being gently taken by a uniformed nurse from one place to another. Her wheelchair is – like the airport – a place of stasis. Testud must wait in anticipation of her arrival at someplace more interesting than the place where she is now, whether it’s a chintzy gift shop, a shrine or a hotel lobby.

That Testud is always being positioned is the key idea here because her wheelchair serves more or less the same purpose as James Stewart’s does in Rear Window – to plant her somewhere so she can observe. Though, unlike loudmouth Stewart and his window, she, ignored by just about everyone, only needs to be a few feet away to watch the romantic intrigues of strangers. Forlorn, she gets to be both Miss Lonelyhearts and L.B. Jeffries.