I think at the time of the showing, I was told that I was going to see two short films that had been featured in the Sundance Film Festival, which is true, but it seems noteworthy and probably intentional that both were Oscar contenders in 2005. One of them won, in fact.

So:

Two Cars, One Night (2003)
written and directed by Taika Waititi
12 min.

A gentle slice of life thing with a couple of kids, Maori Norman Rockwell in a parked car. The kids had charm and the black-and-white was pretty. I think my enjoyment of this particular slice of life was slightly hampered by certain mannered aspects of the whole package, which included some snippets of time-lapse (or otherwise tricked-up) photography, meant to sketch passing impressions of the neon world of adults. Those, and perhaps the all-around black-and-white quiet short-film seriousness itself, put me in mind of artsy/literary aspirations, whereas the very sentimental spirit of the thing (check out the official site and you’ll get the idea) really demanded the most absolutely direct approach. Like Norman Rockwell, whose tableaux of pure sweetness manage not to seem distasteful by virtue of the sobriety and clarity of their craftsmanship.

But the film understood all the basic stuff about how a sentimental tune needs to be a simple one, and other than the sped-up motion, it didn’t make any mistakes. The kids and their moment are genuinely cute, and the overall sense of nostalgia was clearly heartfelt. I drew a connection, possibly absurd, to turn-of-the-century sentimental parlor songs, with their gently wistful recurring sentiments about childhood sweethearts meeting and parting and such. The film found that sort of thing in a more or less contemporary setting.

After the showing, some other people present were saying things like “what a beautiful people they are,” and “what wonderful accents,” and I must admit to feeling uncomfortable about this sort of response. Any sort of aesthetic assessment of racial characteristics seems to me worrisome. Maybe that’s irrational racial anxiety on my self-flagellating white liberal American part, but I don’t think so. At the very least, saying that the Maori are “beautiful” is sweepingly simplistic – surely, many of them, like many of everyone, are ugly. These kids, however, were cute. The “what a beautiful people they are” comment would seem to stem from conflating these kids’ particular cuteness with their general Maoriness, and that sort of confusion seems to me to be genuine kin to the infamous bad kind. Albeit obviously benign.

But I can handle that. My real discomfort comes from the fact that I can readily imagine that Taika Waititi (who is “of Te-Whanau-a-Apanui descent and hails from the Raukokore region of the East Coast”) really did intend to convey “the beauty of his people” or some such thing, and that I was indeed being invited to admire the bone structure and marvel at the regional accents (which were, I must say, THICK and difficult for me to disentangle). And that sort of thing is hard for me to take. The relationship between foreignness as a point of pride and foreignness as an illusion of provincial minds is still troubling to me; no matter how the issue gets sliced, it always seems like somewhere along the way, some irrelevant middlemen got their egos tangled up in it. Does it make a Maori feel good when an American sees a 12 minute movie about kids in a parking lot and decides to say that the Maori are a beautiful people? Or does it make a Maori angry?

For my part, I just have to hope and trust that nobody cares, Maori or otherwise, because any kind of cultural agenda in a work of art, per se, is pretty much doomed to fail. That might be a bit broad, but I don’t think I’m alone in feeling it. This is a politically loaded subject and I don’t want to talk about it right now; I actually don’t feel all that strongly about the general political/cultural questions, which are more complex. I just know that artistically speaking, whatever might allow a work to be classed as “[ethnic] interest” is not, in itself, any kind of interest.

This movie was made in New Zealand starring New Zealanders who looked and sounded it. I watched the film assuming that those facts were context rather than content, and I hope they were, though I know it’s all fuzzy. Admittedly, foreignness is an undeniable element of the experience of watching something foreign, and if it adds to the experience for a viewer, I guess I can’t knock that. But that sort of thing is specific to the individual viewer’s associations and shouldn’t be passed off as part of a general response. The clanging parallel fourths of cheap Charlie Chan “oriental” music are offensive not specifically because they are inaccurate, but because they, as a subjective reworking of real Chinese traditional music, presume to know just how “foreign” that music would sound to a listener and thus reveal an implicitly exclusionary attitude. If my fellow audience-members thought that this movie was wonderfully “New Zealandy,” they needed to recognize that they themselves brought that, not the film. Or if the film brought it intentionally, it, um, shouldn’t have. Hm. Or something. My cranky discomfort seems to be swallowing its own tail here.

All I’m saying is, I didn’t like hearing “what a beautiful people they are” as a response to this film. But maybe I should just get over it.

But doesn’t it just sound so patronizing?

Oh well, I’ve said stuff like that lots of times.

Wasp (2003)
written and directed by Andrea Arnold
26 min.

This one won the Oscar. If you’re so inclined, you can watch it in its entirety here – how’s that for a link?

It’s a “tough stuff” movie that proudly announces “tough stuff, coming through” with rough handheld camerawork and the sort of full-on garish grit that I associate with contemporary art photography. I’m not inclined to like that sort of thing – “we dare you to face the ugly truth” deadpan is an easy, bitter game to play. The world will always be full of ills enough to allow any number of contemporary artists to assault me with their social consciences. But after staring down all my reservations about this particular prodding of the beach rubble, I ultimately came to the conclusion that it had been a respectable and sufficiently humble attempt at capturing a certain depressing social reality. The nightmarish image from whence the title was a bit too much, but once that moment had ventured over the line, the rest of the movie became, retroactively, less abrasive and less indignant than it had at initially seemed. By the final sardonic long shots, I felt pretty sure that the whole thing had been trying for fairness rather than ugliness, despite the relentless ugliness. If I knew more about the subject matter, I might be able to stand up and say, “well, this isn’t how it really is, it’s just been done for shock value,” but I can’t, and I find it entirely believable that this is probably how it really is. Perhaps that’s naive. I feel obligated to keep clearly in mind that a movie, even a real-world-social-ills movie, should not be my primary source of information on any real-world anything, so I must acknowledge that this movie depicted a situation and problem that seemed to purport to be realistic, about which I continue to know very little.

The straightforward narrative style combined with the moral mudpie made for an interesting sort of effect. Our empathy for the protagonist was, rightly, just about nil, and was simultaneously sort of all-encompassing. The movie didn’t pull an “anti-hero” inversion, nor was it dismissive of the character’s humanity. That dismissal was left up to us, and I appreciated that. The ugliness was as unpleasant to her as to us; if we chose to distance ourselves from her, it was by choice and therefore on our own terms. That’s the kind of setup that actually inspires thought about an issue, the sort of thought that artists are always claiming they want to inspire.

Now, I’m pretty sure my thoughts about the issues in this movie aren’t worth anything, but the fact that I was made to engage emotionally with this material is, I think, good. The spreading of “awareness” is still definitely a commendable goal, despite the rampant flakification of the concept. This is how it should be done – through art that induces the viewer to consider the issues in the course of sorting out a reaction to the art itself. A lot of artists are under the misapprehension that shock is a good technique for bringing this about, but it’s not. Shock, generally, just makes me think about the obnoxious artist who shocked me, rather than the implications of the material they used, or (as if!) my own capacity for being shocked.

This film flirted with the lure of the shocking, and I maintain my several reservations, but on balance, I think it was trying to communicate, not offend, and that’s what counts to me. Of course, I’m not about to watch it again any time soon.

The acting is again quite good.