Amidst this, the actors are stunning, and especially our three young ’uns. All three seem to ooze a sadness that doesn’t know why it’s there. The bizarreness of their characters’ upbringing forces them to switch between being masochistically passive and sudden bursts of feral violence. And Papoulia’s doleful presence is so powerful and androgynous and strangely noble that you know that she will be the one to lead the revolution. But not in any way that one might have predicted.
As I mentioned, the collapse of DadWorld is all that dastardly Christina’s fault. Sexually unsatisfied by the functional porkings of Son, Christina persuades Older Daughter to give her head in exchange for a headband. When she tries this trick again, Christina refuses . . . unless the dirty girl gives her the videos she has tucked in her bag. When Father and Mother aren’t looking, Older Daughter gets her first information about the outside world . . . from Jaws, Flashdance and Rocky IV.
Father goes mental, beats Older Daughter over the head with the videos, and even goes round Christina’s house and gives her a somewhat physical severance package. So . . . who is going to take care of Son’s urges now? Who else is there? Father offers both of his daughters to Son, who, after fondling them both in the bath, chooses Older. By now, your skin is crawling right off of your body, and I haven’t even mentioned the weird recurring pet motifs, including a brutally slaughtered cat, the kids being forced to get on all fours and bark like dogs, and the moment when the parents inform their offspring that Mother will be giving birth imminently to two children and a pooch. It makes a kind of sense. Trust me.
As you might imagine, being forced to fuck her brother finally sends Older Daughter round the bend. She starts blankly threatening her brother in gangsta-speak. And then comes the Mother And Father’s Wedding Anniversary Dance Performance. Oh. My. God.
It begins with the daughters dancing together to Son’s Spanish acoustic guitar. And . . . it’s really hard to paint pictures with words that adequately express why this is so desperately funny and desperately sad. Two thin girls in knee-length pastel dresses shuffle from side to side while fluttering around with their hands and – and a lot of this is down to that static camera and the way it feels as if it’s standing slightly too far away because it’s horribly embarrassed on our behalf – it hits home the fact that these young people know nothing about what young people do, or how they move, or what they listen to, or even the basic connection between dance and sex. It’s like silent comedy with music, and Papoulia, even from a distance, has some kind of mournful comic genius Buster Keaton mojo going on.
But it gets better. She banishes Younger Daughter and takes a solo, to the same bit of endlessly repeating ‘Manuel’s Music Of The Mountains’-type guitar. And where could she possibly have learned solo dance moves from? Award yourself several gold stars and choose tonight’s entertainment.
Papoulia’s tragic-spazztastic interpretation of Flashdance will, eventually, once all those cult movie fans have word-of-mouthed it all over the planet, become one of the most loved so-wrong-it’s-bloody-brilliant dance scenes, right up there with the line-dance from Godard’s Bande à Part, Travolta and Thurman in Pulp Fiction, the warehouse scene from Footloose (see here) and Jon Heder’s moment of deathless glory in Napoleon Dynamite (here). No description can do justice to Papoulia’s perfect meld of slapstick comedy and pure heartbreak. Treat yourself and watch it. And if you have, treat yourself and watch it again.
But the difference between this scene and those other terpsichorean delights is that there’s nothing much at stake in the movies they come from. Dogtooth’s freaked-out flash dance comes at a point when you are aching for these three physically and mentally battered children to escape this parallel universe Bad Dad. Plus, none of them is followed by a girl battering herself in the mouth with a dumbbell to remove a dogtooth.
The movie ends with a girl in the trunk of a car and a big, pulsating question mark. Well, two, actually. The immediate one is whether our heroine has escaped hell alive. The other, even more haunting one is: what the motherfuck was that all about?
I’m going to go with esteemed Guardian film critic Peter Bradshaw on this one. In his review of Dogtooth, he suggested that this dystopian art masterpiece was really about ‘the essential strangeness of something society insists is the benchmark of normality: the family, a walled city state with its own autocratic rule and untellable secrets’. I reckon he’s spot on. Many wondered if the story was inspired by the horror of the 2008 Fritzl case, when a 42-year-old Austrian woman revealed that she had been kept prisoner by her father for 24 years and forced to bear seven of his children. It turned out that the screenplay had been written before the case emerged. But it’s impossible to ignore the twisted synchronicity.
What Dogtooth undoubtedly is is one of those movies that hypnotises you with extraordinary visual technique and dark imagination, until you come out the other end, blinking in the sunlight of what we like to call ‘the real world’ and wondering why you’ve just been so compelled by something that didn’t happen and you hope never has and never will. It has something vital to say about how hard every human has to strive to escape the influence of our parents, even when we were lucky enough to have nice ones, and something sneakily uplifting to say about how the free expression of cinema can defeat the best efforts of an oppressive regime to suppress information and desire. And you’ll definitely never watch Flashdance in quite the same way ever again.
PRECIOUS
2009
Starring: Gabourey Sidibe, Mo’Nique, Paula Patton, Mariah Carey, Lenny Kravitz
Dir.: Lee Daniels
Plot: The ultimate ‘there but for the grace of God’ teen movie.
Key line: ‘Please don’t lie to me, Ms Rain. Love ain’t done nothin’ for me. Love beat me. Raped me. Called me an animal. Make me feel worthless. Make me sick.’
I use my emotional, visceral reactions to a song or a film in order to write. Not coming from an academic background, it’s pretty much the only way I know. But that method of writing creates serious problems for me when it comes to Precious. It’s difficult to write anything coherent at all when what you’re watching makes you cry helplessly, from beginning to end, and when you come out of the experience having so much admiration for everyone involved that all you want to do is genuflect. Precious pushes every emotional and aesthetic button I enjoy having pushed.
So let me start by saying that I’ve taken on board some of the criticism of my previous books about my tendency towards hyperbole. This time around, I’ve been trying to avoid statements of the ‘this is the bestest bestest thing ever ever ever!!!’ variety. But I think I can venture this much towards this movie, hyperbolically speaking. It is the one teen movie that everyone should see.
It may be specifically about the African-American underclass. Its fictional scenario might be extreme. But it is, on some universal level, about the abuse of children, and about the reasons why children grow into teenagers who do things we fear and hate. It’s all also about why the overwhelming majority of those wretched victims overcome the worst start in life and find a decency within themselves despite everything. It’s an extraordinary film to watch when you feel bleak about the values of young people today. And its happy ending does not involve winning a million bucks on a game show. It’s about something worth far more than that. It’s about winning the strength to say no.
Based upon the novel Push by poet and former teacher Sapphire, Precious concerns a 16-year-old black girl called Claireece Precious Jones (Sidibe) living in Harlem in 1987. Precious is obese. She can barely read and write. She has been sexually abused by her father since the age of 3 and has been bequeathed two of his children and the HIV virus which will kill him. She is sexually, physically and verbally abused by her mother Mary (Mo’Nique), who despises her for taking her man, and who only sees her daughter as an unpaid housekeeper and passport to the welfare cheque that enable her to sit and watch TV all day.
When her second pregnancy (her first
child is a Down’s Syndrome girl she has called Mongo, short for Mongoloid, who lives with Precious’s grandmother) gets her suspended from school, it is a blessing in disguise. She is sent to an alternative school for troubled girls, where the classes are smaller and the teacher is a beautiful lesbian angel called Blu Rain (Patton), who begins the long process of giving Precious both self-esteem and basic learning. At the same time, a social worker, MsWeiss (Carey), begins to unravel the horror of Precious’s home life. Finally, after the birth of her second child, the escape to a halfway house, and the HIV diagnosis, Precious finds something that could be called a life.
The Dickensian overload of Precious divides audiences in two. To many, it’s a shock-horror daytime TV story made into Hollywood self-help therapy, which also depicts blacks on welfare as scum, all fathers as absent, and all teachers, social workers and members of the black middle class as saintly fixers of peasant lives. To the rest of us, who have had some glimpse of exactly what the poor are capable of doing to ourselves, it’s a brave and inspirational film that makes a traumatic emotional climax out of three women talking in a room, and where the uplifting ending is nothing more or less than not letting the fuckers break you, no matter what.
Because Precious is not just about one woman’s struggle. It is about a horror at the heart of black people in the richest nation on the planet. This is defined by a scene where Precious looks in the mirror and sees a white blonde looking back, and about her fantasies about light-skinned boyfriends and her white teacher who she’d love to marry her and take her to Westchester, a white, wealthy New York suburb. For anyone who has seen Good Hair, Chris Rock’s extraordinary documentary about the price – economically, psychologically, politically – of hair weaves for black women, this is as key to Precious as the sexual abuse and lack of education. This is a courageous film for African-Americans to make: a story entirely inspired by the self-loathing of black people in America. Director Lee Daniels even confessed his reluctance to show the movie at the Cannes Film Festival . . . should he really be showing white Europeans this view of what African-Americans are? He did, and it took some big brass testes.
Sapphire and screenwriter Geoffrey S. Fletcher’s language is visceral on the subject: allowing Precious to describe herself as an animal, and her race as ‘ugly black grease’. Even the food – the pig’s feet and greasy chicken – that dominates so much of the interaction between Precious and Mary is presented as so repulsive that it represents a sordid masochism. With the likes of Oprah Winfrey, much-criticised black film-maker Tyler Perry, Mariah Carey, Lenny Kravitz and Mary J. Blige involved, this is the elite of black America – the role models and aspirational icons of Ebony magazine and the Black Entertainment Channel – collaborating to confess that black America despises itself. It’s the politics and social-historical subtexts of Precious that make it such a powerful and crucial film. For once, the private horror of one individual’s bad life is placed in an honest political context, and then delivered with the vision of an art piece and the skill of pure entertainment.
Because the most remarkable thing about Precious is that it’s at all watchable. It shows us, in relatively graphic detail, one of the bleakest worlds that a movie has ever depicted. Yet it is never a film that you want to just switch off. Much of this is down to Daniels’s deftness as a storyteller, constantly following something dark and horrific with an image or a phrase or a joke or a song that shines a light into the abyss, using the fantasy survival mechanisms of Precious as relief. Even the voiceover – usually the first cinematic refuge of the hack scoundrel – is wonderful here, dropping short, sharp, first-person thoughts into the action that illuminate Precious’s constant swings between pessimism and defiance, and occasionally breaking your heart with understated and universal truths (‘I wish I could sit at the back of the class again’, is, in the context of our heroine’s attempt to integrate into a small classroom full of prettier and more confident strangers, an especially acute line to anyone who has ever been presented with a real opportunity but felt too terrified of failure to grasp it).
But most of it is down to Ms Sidibe . . . a debut film actress who enthusiastically allows herself to look like a monster, but still, somehow, through some kind of magic that I don’t pretend to understand, emerges as someone not pitiable, but fully lovable. She is the antidote to every pointlessly blank and amoral teen of post-Kids (see here) cinema I’ve had the misfortune of having to meet on this journey through teen cinema. It’s a performance beyond great acting. It embodies the very best qualities of the human spirit. The day this girl walked into an audition is the day that Daniels had a movie, rather than an ordeal.
There are a few minutes, early in the movie, where Precious has to attend to her mother’s sexual needs (offscreen, incidentally, and this is crucial; an ugly mother raping her obese daughter is just too much to show in any detail, and Daniels knows it, and constantly gives us new and shocking information and then has the good grace to move away before we just up and leave the cinema), then steal a bucket of ten chicken pieces from a local black business, then stuff herself, and then, made sick by her own greed, vomit into a bin. Somehow, Sidibe and Daniels make this haunting and . . . compelling. Precious never feels like exploitation when every second of it could. Because Sidibe possesses a light that never goes out.
But she is matched all the way by Mo’Nique. I rarely think about actors as people who sacrifice for their job, but this vivacious and pretty comedienne’s performance as Mary Lee Johnston is among the bravest things anyone has put on screen. Because Mary is scum. Abusive, bullying, sick scum, with no saving graces lent to her by circumstances or mental health problems or even the glamour that the bad guy role usually lends to any character. She is as repulsively ugly as she is bereft of morality or humanity, and, again, she could be just too nasty to be remotely believable. But Mo’Nique makes her real, and this is where the courage comes in, because I don’t think anyone will look at Mo’Nique, the real person, in the same way ever again. She dredged something terrible up from inside her to give Mary truth. Something that is hers and hers alone. No one wants people to see the worst that they can be, so to do this in a film seen by millions takes an absence of fear and vanity that I can barely comprehend.
When Mo’Nique speaks to Precious, she conjures the legacy of slavery. Because this ‘mother’ is a slave-master, and a reminder that black people were and are every bit as capable of utter fascism as those who ripped Africans from their lives and homes and forced them to build America at gunpoint. Black people are not lent nobility by racism in Precious. Goodness is something earned, and victim status is not enough to justify evil. Again, Mary is not given a back-story that justifies her sexual, physical and verbal abuse of her own daughter. This is deliberate, because nothing could justify her actions.
So Mo’Nique has to work within a vacuum of morality, and, again, be watchable. The scenes within the dark, claustrophobic home are so filled with a tension entirely created by the depths of Mary’s depravity that you feel, when we get back to the comparative safety of the street, hospital or classroom, as relieved to escape Mary as Precious does. She is a monster way beyond anything dreamed up for a horror flick, because she makes you believe that she exists, and that, right at this very moment, a child somewhere on the planet is having to live with her and attempt to survive. She is the embodiment of every one of those true-life crimes involving mothers killing their children through violence or neglect . . . plus all those Myra Hindleys and Rose Wests who behave in ways that we don’t want to believe women are capable of, and therefore attract our outrage far more readily than the male equivalent. Her self-justifying speech in the scene in Ms Weiss’s office is worse than her violence, because it insists that this woman has learned nothing, possesses no remorse, is nothing more than an overgrown child entirely driven by her own wants at any given second, and bemused, even hurt, that anyone would question her for that. You imagine that she will go to her grave convinced that a father’s
repeated rape of her daughter was her daughter’s fault, and cursing the world for not seeing it from her point of view. Mary is a character beyond the pale; every human’s worst nightmare. What a fucking star Mo’Nique is.
So I watch Precious and I cry a lot. I buy into the idea that any child feeling ill-treated at home or suffering from chronic lack of self-esteem might watch this movie and use it as fuel for the inner-strength to survive and move on. I love the film because it sets itself against the dominant cultural theory of the day that political film-making must be emotionally cold, or the other dominant theory that art film must be bereft of a desire to say something, hiding behind the ‘audiences can make their own minds up’ all-purpose get-out clause. The makers of Precious are as angry at the black poor as they are at the society that creates their petri dish. They want us to know. And they don’t care how that makes them look. Fair fucking play.
FISH TANK
2009
Starring: Katie Jarvis, Kierston Wareing, Michael Fassbender, Rebecca Griffiths
Dir.: Andrea Arnold
Plot: Meantime meets Le Haine meets A Taste Of Honey in the London that isn’t London.
Key line: ‘I like you. I’ll kill you last.’
Fifteen-year-old Mia Williams always seems to move with a purpose. This is unusual, when she appears not to go to school, and doesn’t work, and is in a place which could be defined by its aimlessness. But we often have to run to keep up with her, as she tries to free a horse, or wades into a river, or headbutts a girl in the face. She is almost always alone, and says little, and when she does it’s usually abuse, so you have to watch her. You have to watch her because you want to know what she’s thinking. You have to watch her because you know she’s extraordinary, but she doesn’t, so you know she’s going to do something very, very wrong.
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