Le Bonheur

It would be easy to dismiss this film as incredibly simple in its ambition, especially given how exhilarating Cléo from 5 to 7 is.

The film's flaccid subject matter is working class marital infidelity and it seems to condemn reckless male desire by demonstrating how tragic the consequences are if it goes unchecked.

But this is too easy a target for Varda. I want to believe that she's somehow satirizing this simplistic reproach of masculinity. I want to believe that she's complicating a sad vision of the world proposed by moralists who try to tighten their grip on other people's behavior. An ironic reading of this film, however, is implausible.

A more likely interpretation is that Varda wants to elevate the irritatingly trite content of this narrative by blessing it with cinematic splendor. This film is, if nothing else, a colorful experience.

Le bonheur

The Girlfriend Experience

This is a film about a woman groping hopelessly toward complete self hood in an unforgiving context. She's unable to distinguish artificial playacting from reality, and since this playacting is her livelihood she is easily read as a critique of market capitalism.

Such a reading is effortlessly confirmed by the other characters' obsession with discussing how the financial crisis in autumn 2008 affects their lives. Is this critique helpful or, at the very least, exciting?

Probably not. But the film is still remarkable. In real life, Sasha Grey is an audacious porn star, so being cast as an escort who sells intimacy is something of the inverse of her typical gigs. This is interesting to keep in mind, especially since the film isn't pornographic--it's melancholic, even contemplative, mostly thanks to Sasha Grey's surprisingly capable acting.

So does anyone really benefit when the tools of old Manhatto feel the need to buy friendship? Neither they nor the people who sell it to them seem very fulfilled by the transaction. A cynic might complain that consumer culture has deteriorated to an unsalvageable mess of desire, fantasy, disappointment and despair.

I'm not sure about this--there's an odd sense of hope in Sasha Grey's blank face and childish mien.

The Girlfriend Experience

Rachel Getting Married

It's too bad this film's title makes it seem like just another romantic comedy, it's the opposite of formulaic nonsense. In fact, it's a head-on collision with painfully serious questions about substance abuse and subsequent coping strategies.

Some of the drama seems thin at first because the film's structure delays a lot of the necessary exposition, but once it all comes out the motives are in place for some legitimate conflict.

The film's argument is that there are two tendencies in response to trauma: blame others or blame oneself. Is this right? Are there merely plaintiffs and defendants in matters of the soul?

The secret murderer, the real culprit, is the mother. She's the only one left out of the film's subtle arc of reconciliation, and it is her love that may have been missing from the start.

Rachel Getting Married