Vladivostock, Rhode Island

There's about a foot and a half of snow on my fire escape. It has been snowing since Friday afternoon, and it's still snowing.

Films I've been watching in the last few weeks, but can't remember well enough to review in full:

Comedy of Innocence, Raul Ruiz. A son and two women, each his putative mother. The three of them trade the roles of seducer/outsider and contented dyad. The mobile-faced Jeanne Balibar (who reminds me of Holly Woodlawn) plays the crazy, false mother. I love to watch her, though she's made to look a little too elfin for my liking here. I like the film's tense spookiness, the slight suggestions of the supernatural, though it's dismaying to watch two women battling over a tiny little male.

Sister My Sister. Opens on the bloodied walls, staircase, and floor after the maids have murdered their employer, and so the rest of the film is a flashback whose whole promise is that we will return to the appalling carnage. On that level, it's very manipulative, and there the (somewhat) recent French version, The Maids, is probably better: more diffuse, more about the coda of their life in the prison. Still, what I love about this film is the physical portrayal of the employer and her daughter. Both of them are tiny. The stiff, self-satisfied mother, a tiny manic doll, and her oddly ageless daughter, who looks like both a giant five-year old and a pudgy, infantile thirty-year-old. No doubt, this, too, is manipulative: The maids are willowy, long-haired, lithe; the bourgeoises miniature/grotesque. Still, the mother dancing alone, unaware that her daughter is watching, is genius: she traipses around in her stubby way, her arms waving about in an approximation of conductor/ballerina/sylph; her face folds in on itself with rage when she sees the daughter seeing her.

Queer as Folk. (Seasons 1 & 2, on tape.) I like the fantasy that every night in downtown Pittsburgh is a saturnalia a la Querrelle. I also like the crudely Gothic Lite hero: outwardly heartless, secretly sentimental.

Frenzy, Alfred Hitchcock. After listening to Martin Lefebvre's paper on cannibalism, I had to see this. There's a scale here that's sometimes missing from Hitchcock's American movies, a sense of crowded city life. People listening to a speech about cleaning up the Thames's industrial effluent rush to look at a woman's body washing up on the bank. The Covent Garden food market, its crowds and motion. There are frequent juxtapositions of food and bodies: as Lefebvre points out, the corpse in the potato sack is the "meat and potatoes meal" that the inspector, restricted to his wife's disastrous experiments in French cuisine, longs for.

Friday Night, Claire Denis. A transit strike, a chance sexual encounter. I like the traffic jam better than the sex-idyll. The boredom, the fumes, the drivers wavering between impatience and drowsiness. The difficulties of city life: missed dinners, friends who implore you to get a cell phone, the fact that wherever you are in the city, you're supposed to be somewhere else. Claire Denis toyed with me: just after the woman hears a radio announcement asking drivers to do their civic duty and offer someone a ride, the lovely Colin Gregoire (Beau Travail, Nenette et Boni) happens by, but he refuses a ride. This is a departure for Denis: not about beautiful men. (I didn't see Trouble Every Day, though.) There's a nicely handled prolepsis: the woman imagines what would happen if she brought her hitchhiker to dinner at her friends' house, and she rejects that alternative. But there is very little or no hint that this is happening on another level, a mental level, except for the speed at which this part of the story unfolds: the arrival, the awkwardness, the crying baby. We return to the glacial creep of the traffic, and the entire thing has been accomplished without dialogue or any visual marker that this narrative thread is unreal.