Screen Machine

Review: MIFF ‘10: I Love You Phillip Morris, Piggies, Cooking History

I Love You Phillip Morris

Dir. Glenn Ficarra and John Requa

Our relationships with queer representations in film seem to fall mainly into two categories: in the first, we empathise with characters in their struggle towards some yet-to-be-realised identity (Brokeback Mountain, Far From Heaven, Mysterious Skin) while in the second we declare solidarity with characters whose identity is proudly not in question (Happy Together, Sex and the City 2, The Kids Are Alright). With this in mind, I Love You Phillip Morris – the directorial debut from the writers of Bad Santa, Bad News Bears (2005) and Cats and Dogs – is certainly a film of interest because it falls into the gap produced by these two categories, doing something few queer films do: take mainstream gay culture itself as a subject of critique. In this regard, I Love You Phillip Morris finds some affinity with such great films as Fassbinder’s Fox and His Friends (1974) and Bruce LaBruce’s The Raspberry Reich (2004).

I Love You Phillip Morris – a film about Steven Jay Russell (Jim Carrey), a gay con artist who falls in love in prison with the titular Phillip Morris (Ewan McGregor) – is a mix of various genres but is in essence a tragedy, one whose hero’s flaw is established at the beginning of the film: after years living a lie as a married straight man, Russell declares, “No one is going to tell me what to do anymore. No more lies. I’m going to live my life. My way. Be the real me. Time for some good living.” This seems like an innocuous declaration of natural rights until the neat visual punch line – a crash cut to Russell in Florida wearing gaudy expensive clothes walking down a shopping strip with an impossibly beautiful man on his hand. Herein lies Russell’s tragic flaw: he misguidedly equates sexual liberation (“good living”) with conspicuous consumption. Thus ensues a series of comic misadventures as Russell dabbles with lies, exploitation and violence to support his assertion of gay liberation, oblivious to the problems of gay identity so-conceived and the irony of a “liberated life” spent mostly in jail.

It’s a valuable analogy for illustrating the limits of today’s mainstream gay identity politics for which liberation can seemingly only be realised by entry into bourgeois society (i.e. the concentration of efforts on the right to marry and the right to serve in the military). Queer politics received a shock to the system recently when queer activist and philosopher Judith Butler refused the Berlin Civic Courage Award on account of ingrained racism within GLBT organisations. With I Love You Phillip Morris’s unfortunate difficulties in finding distribution, the Melbourne Film Festival should be thanked for giving us access to a film similarly willing to look at so-called progressive movements with a critical eye.

- Brad Nguyen

Piggies

Dir. Robert Glinski

Classically, films on the subject of socially corrupted youth are bleak, with a regular absence of catharsis. Piggies, with its predecessors including Christiane F, Kids, Mysterious, Skin, Vivre sa Vie and Lilya-4ever, is no exception to this rule. Our protagonist, Tomek (Filip Garbacz) is an intelligent teen from a struggling family whose life is filled with socially constructive activities: church, soccer, astronomy and school. He excels above and beyond his peers in all facets of life – even teaching German to his older sister Agata (Katarzyna Pyszyňska). When Tomek is frustrated by his school’s refusal to fundraise for a telescope, he attempts to find money on his own. Initially, he works long hours in menial jobs, but this does not earn him enough money. From this, everything takes a (foreseeable) turn for the worse and Tomek finds himself caught in a web of teenage prostitution. Life becomes terribly bleak for this young man: he is beaten, raped and abused by his clients; his family are besotted by the large sums of money he regularly brings home and so turn a blind eye to the violence of their son’s injuries. His girlfriend, Marta (Anna Kulej) loves him only for the material value he brings to their relationship and leaves when he resists her demands for more.

Tomek suffers the narrative fate of all wayward youth before him. Like Red Riding Hood, he has strayed too far from the path and so the wolf must eat him. Piggies is not visually shocking – moments of violence, death and sexuality are carefully erased. Morality appears through the social mise-en-scène: it is in the grimacing face of a pimp, the abandoned factory where the boys are left after a particularly brutal rape, or the expressionless faces of Tomek’s parents when confronted with his prostitution. As with all cautionary tales, we are left wondering what becomes of the abandoned Tomek, and there is no answer – resolution to his problems is quickly sequestered by the appearance of the closing credits. What are these narratives, told time and time again, meant to teach us? Perhaps not that there is an absence of hope, but that 90 minutes of film is not enough to fix the disturbing problems of the wayward youth.

- Lauren Jayne Bliss

Cooking History

Dir. Peter Kerekes

I’m glad none of my vegan or vegetarian friends were there to watch Cooking History with me, as even the most hearty of meat eaters (me) winced at the slow, deliberate throat-slicing of three animals – a cow, a pig and a chook – confronting us with the measured sacrifice of life that is that is made in war, and perhaps even the battle of life and death that is waged in the everyday need to eat and survive. These were the most visceral reactions I had to this film, particularly in the case of the chook, who was used as a foil to demonstrate the parallels between the murderous activities of Algerian rebels and the French chef. Despite the occasional poignancy and staged cinematic beauty of Cooking History, the overall narrative or historical insights of this film were wading in shallow waters.

There is an historical school of thought which argues that history should never be told in broad, chronological, thematic sweeps that tends to privilege only the prominent and powerful figures and events in the story. Instead, the past should be revealed and understood on a local, specific, contextual level. But I’m not sure this approach can really work without some sort of thematic coherence, especially when applied to a narrative form such as documentary. On the surface,  Cooking History should be successful – it is made up of an eclectic series of anecdotes told by an eccentric 20^th century European cohort of war-time cooks, and is held together by the broad thematic designations of food and war. Peter Kerekes’ visual style is cinematically striking, with perambulating movement, random explosions and bizarre staged imagery. But he just doesn’t push any consistent, in-depth or cohesive thoughts or musings about food and war forward.

Recurring up-close images of fresh meat glistening and squishing through manual mincers as the cooks crank and talk are compelling, but are completely unrelated to anything being said by the narrators, or even to any clear themes. A portly Hungarian sausage maker lights his long-pipe, staring casually down the barrel of the camera as his food cart explodes behind him – this is a striking image, but it’s really just there for effect. I never once lost interest in the visual pleasures of this documentary, but I lost all track of the stories being told. I am left strangely ambivalent and slightly irate about this film. I’d like to believe that the history of cooks during war is a delightfully eccentric, chaotic, tangled mess of individual experience. But I suspect that whilst Cooking History is a stylistic feat, it has a serious case of lazy history and loose storytelling.

- Maggie Scott

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