Elle (film)

Elle directed by a Dutch director, Paul Verhoeven, is one of the most classy and subtle satires to have come out in decades. It’s a story about a female CEO Isabelle: she is elegant, aloof and has a knife-sharp tongue. She speaks her mind and that makes her unlikeable to many other people. She is great at her job and has complete authority over her staff. This Isabelle gets attacked at her own home by a masked stranger: an event that has a puzzling impact on Elle.

What follows is a weird symbolism of empowerment and denigration of the physical body. I think what the film is trying to say is there are many other ways to violate a person’s sense of self and sometimes humiliation, faith or psychological abuse has far greater consequence than something like a rape incident. For Isabelle, rape and physical violence do not rank highly in what is most damaging to a person. In fact, most of the time she doesn’t seem to get upset, which makes her seem almost in-human.

The film explores various other ways a person can be violated. Some obvious and some not so: financial abuse, verbal abuse, stalking, cyber bullying, infidelity, grave desecration and so on. It also suggests that acts of extreme violence, such at what Elle endured as a child, can harden one to the point that violence of any sort is normalised: this idea is the essence of trauma-based mind control. 

I’m not sure if I’d call this a feminist film because while the main character is a woman and it is about empowerment I wouldn’t say it’s about female empowerment. The final message of the film is essentially that: power-over-self can manifest in many ways and can be maintained even when power-over-body has been violated. I think the fact that Isabelle’s personality appears so unusual is a testament to the flaw in the film’s message. It may not be such a gross violation for an unusual person like Isabelle but to most of us I think it is in-human to separate power-over-self and power-over-body so completely.

Nevertheless, I really appreciate the topic that the film explores and it does it in a way that is interesting, shocking and at times quite sweet.

Paterson (film)

This latest work by Jim Jarmusch deserves the accolades and nominations it’s collected. It is sweet, mesmerising and subtly profound. It’s set in the city of Paterson, New Jersey and centers around a bus driver named Paterson (Adam Driver). Paterson is young and working-class, with a simple life and a modest house he shares with his wife. He drives a big city bus around town from morning till evening with a lunch break in the middle when he enjoys a lunch packaged exquisitely by his wife. He  listens in on people’s conversations while driving the bus, and working through poems in his head to write down later. Through his writing, he creates beauty out of what seems to be a relatively mundane surrounding and life.

 

By contrast, Paterson’s wife is constantly dreaming and striving for fame and riches with her art, cupcakes, music and so on; however, her products come across lacklustre and devoid of meaning compared to Paterson’s poems. An artist, the movie tells us, is an individual that cannot help practicing their art: money might come, but is the result of an insatiable appetite to create.

There are a couple of side themes that Jarmusch plays on: twins and historical famous people from Paterson; particularly a poet called William Carlos Williams. Williams himself wrote a book of works called Paterson, which was unusual for its time due to its focus on the everyday lives of people in Paterson rather than the grand theme of many esteemed poets. Paterson (the movie) is partially a visual depiction of Williams’ work, and the random appearance of twins is Jarmusch throwing in visual “rhymes”.

The film is very one-directional in that it is purely from the perspective of Paterson. This may explain why his wife is a bit of a flawed character; I found her to be a completely unrealistic portrayal of a woman. A charitable interpretation is however that the character reflects Paterson’s image of her: playing with her painting and costumes all day long, like a dreamy and innocent child. I was almost waiting for him to wake up at the end of the film and realise that it was all a dream and she never existed.

That aside, I found the core message of the film to be humbling: pursuing art for the sake of art, because you enjoy it and it makes life more wonderful, not because it’ll give you fame and riches. Moreover, by focusing on the great individuals that emerged from such a humble town, we are reminded that greatness can be achieved anywhere: what is important is one’s state of mind.