THE
DUKE OF BURGUNDY (WITH LIVE SOUNDTRACK BY CAT'S EYES)
Brighton
Dome, Fri 22nd
May
Part
of the Brighton Festival
This
review does contain some PLOT SPOILERS
Before
the internet showed up and started recording everything, the
fallibility of human memory was almost a creative act. Perhaps you
saw some Seventies pseudo-arty piece of erotica shown on BBC2, and
over the years your memories of it morphed. So hard was it to see
something so ephemeral as a film back then, perhaps you only saw some
stills from it, and resorted to imagining what it might be like. It's
less that your young mind read more into the film than it was
carrying, it's more that the atmosphere of the film and your memories
of it ferment over time, acquire a significance which comes to await
being pinned to something. Like a dream which stays with you, even
though you're never sure why or what it might mean.
Given
this, going back to watch the original film is obviously a mistake
bordering on category error. It won't add anything to a memory that
was only built up subsequently, the film itself can now only undo it
all – like pulling the foundations from a tower. One solution,
perhaps, is to try and remake the film as you remember it. Which is
pretty much what director Peter Strickland is doing here. The
Seventies pastiche credit sequence recalls the one for his previous
film, 'Berberian Sound Studio', but perhaps here
the conceit's enlarged to the whole film.
The
programme quoted him as particularly keen to channel the films of
Jess Franco, which “struck me as being incredibly rich in
atmosphere, intensity and sexual fever”. It notably recycles many
of the tropes of Seventies erotic cinema – the inherent kinkiness
of lesbianism, assumed to overlap with sado-masochism, the
near-hysteric mentality of women – with just enough framing that we
know not to take all this entirely seriously. (The audience
frequently laughed out loud, though even the absurdest moments are
presented deadpan.)
With
it's pointedly indeterminate setting in time and place, it could be
set in the Seventies, or as easily not. It has the same stilted,
distanced feeling of the era, as if the actors are presenting rather
than inhabiting the characters. (Often a side-effect of dubbing,
though English-language films can have much the same effect, such as
'Picnic at Hanging Rock'.) The central characters,
Cynthia and Evelyn, seem to inhabit the same hermetic dream-world,
inside which they are either free to pursue their obsessions, or
constrained to the same. In fact those central characters are pretty
much the only characters, bar a saleswoman, a
distantly-glimpsed neighbour and some public talks. (Where some of
the audience are quite visibly dummies.) Their cloistered world
contains not a single male character.
It's
mentioned in passing that Evelyn owns the big house they live in,
though she seems to have no job to speak of. While you could
speculate over the source of her masochism, the film doesn't seem to
encourage this. Its more presented as something she chooses to
indulge. She even refers to it at one point as “a luxury”.
The
conceit of the film is that Evelyn, ostensibly the masochist of the
relationship, is calling all the shots. And Cynthia becomes wearied
by the way her life has become so scripted. (In quite a literal
sense, she's given cue cards to read like an actor.) Notably,
however, if it is Cynthia who has what Hollywood screenwriters would
call “the arc” the film starts off with Evelyn and effectively
stays with her throughout. Almost every scene, even the ones where
Cynthia breaks down under the burden of bossing, are hers. To quote
Strickland from the programme again: “The most essential aspect of
the film is its dreamy, post-orgasmic flow. One feels as if the film
itself is a spell that Evelyn is under. Being under the spell is what
she's addicted to.”
Sixties
and Seventies culture perhaps became obsessed with the way we live
out roles. (Pinter's 1962 play 'The Lover' has
many of the same elements.) But perhaps it could never quite decide
whether they were liberating or confining. The Situationist writer
Raoul Vaneigem railed against roles as an aspect of modern alienation. (“Roles
are the bloodsuckers of the will to live. They express lived
experience, yet at the same time they reify it. They also offer
consolation for this impoverishment of life by supplying a surrogate,
neurotic gratification.”) While glam rock embraced them about as
fully as can be.
And
the recurrent and title-supplying motif of the moths, prevalent
enough that they get their own section of the credits, exists to
exemplify this. In the film it's both a metamorphosing creature
capable of taking shining flight and a pinned and labelled specimen
on the wall of Cynthia's study. Yet while Cynthia seems happiest
pulling off her wig and peeling her false eyelashes, the film ends
with the roles still in place. Her breakdowns against the script just
become part of the script - another cycle set on repeat. Like the
punishment chest Evelyn insists on being locked in, what makes roles
confining ultimately makes them inescapable.
Cat's
Eyes are Rachel Zeffira and Horrors singer Faris Badwan, not names I
can claim to be familiar with. (Though Badwan was recently controversial for decrying the vote.) It's effective enough. Classical instruments are
marshalled into producing rich and leisurely Europop, wafts of choral
vocals passing like white clouds in the sky, so sweet it almost tips
over into sinister. It matches well enough the spell Evelyn is under.
However,
it's not staggeringly memorable and unlike Goblin's 'Suspiria' seeing it performed live doesn't add
much. Indeed, in one sense the live setting may even distract. For
long periods Strickland uses only ambient sounds – the creak of
cupboards, the click-clack of bicycle wheels. At first, there's a
structural reason. We enter the film with the roleplaying up and
running. Consequently we believe Evelyn may actually be a bullied
maid to Cynthia, so the initial note that's struck must be one of
realism. However, the soundtrack and the ambient sounds then
intersperse through out. Doubtless, the contrast allows each to
enhance the other. But there also seems a way in which Strickland is
actually employing two soundtracks, keeping the ambient sounds
running until we find a musicality in those creaking cupboards.
Yet
when the soundtrack is played live it creates a strange reversal of
the diegetic and non-diegetic, we see the actual strings being struck
but with the 'natural' sound of the cupbaord door being closed
there's only a representation projected onto a wall behind them. It
can weight what should really be a balance.
'Duke
of Burgundy' is perhaps eclipsed by Strickland's two
previous films, 'Katalin Varga' and 'Berberian
Sound Studio'. But it is certainly well worth seeing, if
not necessarily waiting for the soundtrack's next live outing.
LAURIE
ANDERSON: ALL THE ANIMALS
Brighton
Dome, Sunday 24th May
Part of the Brighton Festival
Four
years after her last Brighton festival appearance, Laurie Anderson is back
with an assemblage of her stories about animals. At which point you
may well ask – animals, why them? A clue might come from an early
comment on having read 'Wind in the Willows' as a
child, and the oddity of a six year old reading about “eccentric
gay bachelors”. The point being that Grahame's fully
anthropomorphised animals are really only displaced humans. Whereas
her interest is in things between, with one forepaw in human culture
and a tail flicking back into the animal world. Hence all the tales
of teaching her dog to play keyboards, it going on to headline a lot
of animal rights benefits and all the rest.
Which
may explain both why animals are so popular with children, and why
they are such a staple of fables. And Anderson's conception of
stories is basically fables in more modern dress. Her conceit may
even be that animals and fables become analogies for one another, as
representatives of the indeterminate. In one tale Adam and Eve are
morphed into a yachting couple who moor on an island, and the snake
offers no apples but instead tells Eve stories.
Her
measured, melodiously deadpan delivery leaves you constantly
wrongfooted as to how to take things, as she shifts between anecdote,
surrealist non-sequiturs and philosophical aphorisms. Did she really
do a concert for dogs in Sydney harbour, and did curious whales show
up half-way through? Perhaps, she's done stranger things. But the
literal truth of the stories doesn't seem to matter much, even for
the ones which might actually be true.
The
key image may have come early on. Before the earth was created,
flocks of birds swarmed the air with nowhere to land, endlessly
forming and reforming different shapes. But when one bird dies they
have nowhere to bury him, so his daughter inserts him in the back of
her head. Then began memory. Memory and the earth thereby become
conflated. Each gives you a reference point, they're ordering
devices. But ordering devices associated with myth's classic Fall
moment – awareness of death.
And
Anderson's accumulated stories become like the murmurations of those
birds. It's an image remarkably similar to the one in 'Landfall', of her belongings floating in her
flooded studio after Hurricane Sandy. As the show moves on things
don't develop so much as accrue, images and themes sparking off one
another. The earth's gravity never quite takes control. Like the
daughter bird, there's no path laid our for us. The show's not about
dispelling nuggets of feelgood wisdom or giving you new ideas about
the world. It's more like getting a personal trainer for your
imagination, making you more alert to associations, sharpening your
antennae.
Not
unrelatedly absence was also a key theme. There's lists of all the
animals who have existed over time but are now gone, there's the
Hebrew alphabet kicking off with a silent letter to represent all
that can't be said. (I have no idea whether this was something she
made up or not!) It suggests these epigrammatic tales are themselves
incomplete. They're there largely to hint at larger things, even if
its up to us what those larger things might be.
Like
the daughter bird, the show is so reliant on us doing so much of the
work the glass of water can feel half-empty as easily as half-full.
This show worked better for me than her previous Festival appearance.
Perhaps I was more keyed in to what to expect, or perhaps the
experience is so subjective it may simply be down to what mood you're
in on the night.
Something
she didn't do at all in Brighton, from Buenos Aires...
Coming soon! More of this sort of thing...
No comments:
Post a Comment