#5: Are You Still Watching? Spring Edition 🌷
Love in the Afternoon, The Worst Person in the World, and apocalyptic faves 🌧
Against Bjork’s advice, I often let poets lie to me. Or at least, let myself be swayed by a turn of phrase. One in particular, about April being cruel, had the ring if not the weight of truth when I was younger. Early spring was brutal because it unearthed things we might want to leave dormant under snow, or made still in frozen dirt. But as I get older, even the manic weather of spring, which keeps us suspended for weeks, reaching to the back of the closet for wool coats you thought you’d retired which you have to then take off and tuck under your arm under an unexpected midday sun, even this instability made spring seem to me like the most vital, life-giving season. We might want to ignore what it dredges up, but out of the wasteland of mud, patches of brown grass, and garbage no one picked up before the snow fell, there is an interjection from blue and purple crocuses limned with spry green.
In our spring newsletter, Margaret Meehan and Vannessa Barnier grapple with films that embody the season’s one constant: change. Ambivalence, desire and doubt, new love and old patterns. The protagonists in these films are cruel to each other, but also sometimes kind, and in our recklessness and indecision, so are we. But hopefully, like the song says, in the right measure.
Gabrielle Marceau
Editor-in-Chief, In The Mood Magazine
Love in the Afternoon (1972)
By Margaret Meehan
The afternoon is feeling empty and strange, steam is running out, you’re melodramatically staring out the window, and that question is inching closer, closer — is your life just passing you by? It’s time to shut the laptop and head out for a long walk. It is Spring! Go outside and see the green buds fleck the trees! But the streets tempt — if you’re anything like Frédéric you’ll be catching eyes, prolonging the return to your desk, eavesdropping on the hot couple next to you over a long lunch. The next thing you know a cheeky old flame, Chloe, is stripping off her stylish overcoat to try on mini dresses for you, a taken man. One thing leads to another … and you and Chloe are making out at the bar around the corner from my apartment. Wait, no, crossing wires; that was my ex.
Back to Frédéric, stand-in for all lovers with wandering eyes, those who are content to be carried by the current of the crowded streets as they imagine alternate futures with handsome passersby. More fun than clacking on the keyboard, I guess.
Do you blame my, I mean, our drifting Frenchman? Some days of course the “babe, I’m going to get a coffee!” call leads to harmless flirtations at the cafe until the distractions of the evening (whiskey or gin) commence. But maybe it evolves into something more than harmless, and where do you draw the line? Love in the Afternoon bares the mental hoops we jump through to settle cognitive dissonance over morally questionable decisions.
Chloe beckons Frédéric, “I’m being perfectly logical. You’re the one who’s not.” I’ve heard that one before. Logic is subjective when it comes to love. Monogamy might be a fantasy, or Frédéric a sleaze, but regardless my wheels spin with Frédéric’s as he solves the equation for himself. What a relief when he finally returns home and reveals his cards. But the thing is, everyone in Rohmer’s world has a hand to play, and I’m left starved for Hélène’s parallel antidotes to afternoon malaise.
Margaret is writing and hitting the books in Montreal.
On The Worst Person in the World
By Vannessa Barnier
I was Tuesday into the week and looking to cool down. I threatened myself with the singular torment of Eternal Sunshine but wanted something lighter. Unpredictably, I found something worse.
I was reeling after watching The Worst Person In The World, and sent my immediate post-nut thoughts to my friend. We connect about many things, including how we prefer to understand and be understood by other people: something fundamental and cosmic, where explaining isn’t always necessary; asking personal questions to get at the heart of a person, disarming, charming. We talked through a lot of the hooks of the film that caught on something in us, such as creating distance when vulnerable or in distress, processing through art, pouring one out for all of our cancelled boys. When discussing the film, we both addressed the fact that we felt like we were projecting. We said, “I do think you’re projecting, but I also think you’re right.”
When ingesting art, I am always looking for myself in it. I want patterns, familiarity, a circuitous motion of calls and response I can assemble into something that resembles myself. Everyone and everything is a series of resettings, of clenchings and unclenchings. To me, The Worst Person in the World’s protagonist, Julie, is a flat circle: straightforward, measurable, predictable. Getting a sense of her comes in more or less two categories: romantic and written down. In both of these, Julie is continually vying for control, tumbling between struggling and succeeding in a continuous stream.
We watch her navigate her attempts at having a semblance of control in two romantic relationships: the first man is Aksel, a long-term boyfriend, arrogant in nature, stoic, overwhelming, older, and, eventually, cancelled. The second is Eivind, described best as a supporter, passive, physical, and good-natured.
***
We spend the first half of the movie with Aksel, watching Julie watch herself explore and articulate her desires and priorities. When she breaks up with him, he suggests that she is not herself, is taking something out on him, playing out the confrontation she never had with her father. He doubts her decision, which makes sense, but undermines her agency. Despite the complications, Aksel does have an understanding of Julie, calling her predictable early on in the film, but this eventually devolves into an overbearing dynamic that causes conflict between them, a sort of cage Julie is put in, where she is not in control. Aksel overwhelms her often, and the overwhelm comes from the way he communicates, but also from her own overwhelm in being seen. When they are talking in the hospital cafeteria, she asks him to tell her things she couldn’t handle hearing before, and even in that moment she can’t handle what he tells her. Being both complimented and seen by partners are consistent issues we see in moments when Julie doesn’t have control.
***
The night that Julie meets Eivind, she leaves a party in honour of Aksel’s work, where she drifts around, fading into the background, struggling to be known against her established, respected partner. On her way home, she comes across a wedding reception, takes on a character—a doctor—and engages others in an antagonistic prodding. This is noticed from a distance by Eivind, who she eventually approaches. They immediately begin to test the boundaries of each other, knowing they are both in relationships: asking personal questions to get at the heart of the person, disarming, charming. Through the comfort of being strangers, they can engage in vulnerable activities without the commitment or exposure of the self. The control in the situation is facilitated by the distance, which they cannot experience in the relationships they are in when they meet.
In writing, Julie can find control, in both the articulation and distribution or disposal of her work. Julie struggles to make sense of her own desires, but the problem isn’t coming to conclusions and taking action, it’s the process of understanding. Or maybe she’s not interested in the intellectualization of her feelings, as this articulation is something she laments during her breakup with Aksel, wherein she says she wants to just feel her feelings. That being said, we do see her process when she’s with Aksel and Eivind, and twice in writing. The first piece is “Oral Sex in the Age of #MeToo,” written with an audience in mind, published and shared proudly, exposing a sexuality which feels like a crafted vulnerability in a way she can control.
The second instance is significant to me, where there’s a fictionalization that happens, where she is removed from herself, and even then, denies it when questioned by Eivind. Relatably, there is a resistance to being known, received by another. I spend a lot of time thinking about control and also how I am perceived. In this scene, I relate to Julie in that I desire exploring myself and putting it on the page, but that when I deem something too vulnerable or the timing is wrong, I retract, delay, sabotage. In spite of all this, the writing happens in the first place out of a desire to process, explore, potentially share and be understood. But like Julie in this scene, the desire to be known can only reasonably happen on my own terms.
The times when Julie is known or exposed, she creates distance from the person perceiving her. When Eivind finds this second instance of Julie’s writing in the trash, he tries to share in it with her, asking questions, offering gentle praise, all of which she rejects and criticizes him for. As Eivind points out, she had been criticizing him a lot at that time, and is now lashing out at him in this moment of exposure, being out of control in the other facets of her life, namely Aksel’s illness.
By the end, Julie takes a fork in her life: single, childless, a photographer. To interpret the ending is very much as complicated as interpreting the entire film, and allows for any number of projections. Having watched the film two and a half times while writing this, and experiencing my own ongoing relationships to people and control, my experience of the ending has been in flux. Initially, I saw her being alone as decisive, independent and confident, having seen photography to the end, in control of her being known. But I have moved now towards aloneness as lonely, in control insofar as you can only control yourself and a possible solution is to opt out of relating to others, but that balm for the mind is only temporary, absorbs, dries up. I’ve come back to this piece and this movie many times over the last few weeks, and in trying to interpret the ending would require me to be able to interpret my own life, which is not so easy.
While listening to “Waters of March” play out, I had a lap full of my own forks, neither good nor bad, leaving me wondering: had I had the love of my life already? Am I in control? Am I known? Do I want to be?
Vannessa Barnier is a poet, collaborator, facilitator, and instigator.
Battle of the Faves: Southland Tales vs. Don’t Look Up
The Editors of In the Mood discuss two apocalyptic satires: Southland Tales and Don’t Look Up.
Gabrielle: What did you think of Southland Tales? I recommended it to you a while ago.
Sennah: I must confess… I tried watching it not too long after, and lasted about 5 minutes before giving up! I found it really overwhelming and almost hard to look at, like… ugly? In all its grimness and bleakness. And then I saw its 2.5-hour runtime! But I’m glad I gave it another chance, because all those reasons are now why I enjoy it! How was your first time watching this film?
G: It’s funny you say that because when I first watched it I remember my boyfriend being really apprehensive about showing it to me, because of what you said; it’s intense, it’s long, it’s, well I would not say it’s ugly, but it is very… specific. When it ended I was quiet for a long time and he thought I hated it, but I was actually so blown away, literally speechless lol.
S: Same! My jaw was on the floor. I’m still processing it, and almost wanted to rewatch it right away. Which is actually what I did with Don’t Look Up haha, but we’ll get to that later. So, what makes Southland Tales a fave for you?
G: There’s a combination of recognition and disbelief watching it. Everything in it you can recognize from your daily life, but it’s presented in a way that they seem alien and fantastical. It’s like how fairy tales are fantasies meant to prepare us for our real lives, watching this I was like, my real life was preparing me for Southland Tales. He’s digging into subcultures and references that weren’t chic at the time, that were actually unfashionable, and made them seem so cool, almost mythic. Like the real pulse of the world isn’t in a metropolis or ancient holy places or whatever, but in a shooter bar in Venice Beach. I love that.
S: I love how you describe this film as mythic! I was so struck how the daily world felt so… divine. I saw others calling it prophetic too, just like the screenplay in the film.
G: I think prophetic is better, because it does feel like so much front he film came true, or at least became a common topic of discourse: the emergence of a “radical left,” multi-hyphenate influencers, FBI plants in Hollywood, “crisis actors” (the Amy Poehler scene where her and her partner pretend to get killed by a cop for a video and in the process end up getting killed by a cop… jaw-dropping).
S: Can I just say that I was impressed at how the radical left was actually able to organize themselves in this lmao.
G: Lol, true. Was there something in the film that stuck out to you in particular?
S: So many surreal images… the tank with the Hustler logo and the cars fucking each other first come to mind. And then there’s the music — lots of needle drop moments! I gasped at Justin Timberlake’s lip sync performance of The Killers, and I wanted to both laugh and cry at the dance to Moby between The Rock, Sarah Michelle Gellar, and Mandy Moore. It felt like a time capsule from both the past and future. What stands out for you?
G: I mean, Sarah Michelle Gellar’s “Teen Horniness is Not A Crime” comes to mind, it’s such a good song ha.
S: LOL yes I was like can I stream this on Spotify or…
G: You could at the time, they had all this tie-in stuff planned for the film, there was like a Krysta Now energy drink and the song was released as a single. But when the film flopped it wasn’t funny anymore. But the fact that the film totally failed and was barely released does seem to lend it this extra prescience, it was too ahead of its time!
S: I was reading about its catastrophic release, and I felt bad for the director saying it’s what he’s most proud of, but how it’s like a misunderstood, banished child lol. All of its divisive responses made me think about how satire and capturing a zeitgeist always seems to bring up this kind of reaction — as if people don’t like what they’re seeing in the mirror, or maybe they don’t even want to acknowledge it’s a mirror…
G: Apparently the effects weren’t complete when it premiered at Cannes and the cut was like 3 hours, so I can see why it wasn’t glowingly received. It’s that Hollywood thing; everyone becomes obsessed with some young, fresh director who’s breakthrough is so new and appealing that they’re given free reign on their second film, which turns out to be a disappointment if not an outright disaster: Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate, Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia. It’s interesting to me that Donnie Darko was so glowingly received for being weird and zeitgeisty, and Southland Tales so reviled for the same.
I do wonder why the social critique of Southland Tales is received so differently than something like Parasite. They’re very different films, obviously, Parasite is certainly more polished than Southland but it’s also a lot more conventional, and I think has way less bite. We can accept the satire in Parasite because it seems more subtle, it’s couched in allegory, you feel smart by understanding it. But something like Southland Tales is so close to our real cultural landscape, so obvious and tacky, that people think they are being talked down to. Southland Tales is NOT subtle, but feels transcendent in its zany directness.
S: Totally! It’s such an ambitious collision of all these contradictions and reversals. Something that surprised me was how much I was moved by the biblical themes. I found Seann William Scott’s final scene really emotional, and the dance as I mentioned. Apocalyptic stuff can get understandably cynical, so those hopeful beats of forgiveness really stood out to me. I can see how some would find these moments cheesy or ironic, though. How did you feel about them?
G: I found it quite hopeful and genuine at points, I think you’re meant to. Maybe that’s another thing that puts people off, that the Christian themes are unironic: forgiveness, saviours, redemption, apocalypse. Have you seen his other film, The Box? It also takes its religious themes seriously, like he’s grappling with the soul, in these very postmodern, overwhelming wastelands.
S: Ooh I haven’t seen it!
G: Another film that has this really dense layering of imagery that is really out there, but also feels very personal. And it also casts your fave, Cameron Diaz, lol.
S: Omg my girl Cammy! I gotta watch haha. Speaking of casting — the cast of Southland Tales is so stacked, and I like how the director deliberately cast people outside of their boxes. Whose performance surprised you the most?
G: It’s striking to watch The Rock in this role, as a dumb action star who’s a sleeper agent for a political party, knowing that Dwayne Johnson is probably going to run for president someday. We all sort of believe that the Rock is this good-natured action doofus, but there is maybe something sinister about him. But in 2006, The Rock was an unexpected pick, like Bai Ling, Seann William Scott, Sarah Michelle Gellar… these millennial icons that were no longer at the height of their 15 minutes of fame. It gives the film a lot of heart, you’re rooting to see these people in a new way.
🌎 Read the full piece here →
Gabrielle Marceau is a writer and editor-in-chief of In the Mood Magazine.
Sennah Yee is the author of How Do I Look? (Metatron Press) and My Day With Gong Gong (Annick Press).
Feeling eager? emilie recommends Saving Face
wilhemina, face-masked and restless, head up against her own sink, eager for it to be over, for it to begin, the movie, her life, thrust of a crush she doesn’t even have yet, new york city in her body, momentum pushing her into it, everything, every collision a meet-cute. the sky, periwinkle-but-pink, and so hurting (the good way). vivian hangs her jacket on the back of a chair as wil’s grandpa’s speech rings, unwitting background to a tug in a crowd. “sometimes your body knows what you really want,” says vivian. “see you around.” puuulling her knowing elastic. little bounce on her heels, chewing a smile. wil, always so careful—her want even more kinetic. her high shoulders, her easy resistance, clasping at fingers through a fence. wil’s mother too, placing chips on her tongue, sweet chin loved by a secret. each of them with their own urgency. “thirsty?” asks vivian. all of this chewing. little sprig of curled hair bobbing off of her neck.