The Limits of Control

People need to stop hating on this film. I think it's great.

First, elision. Jarmusch is a master at omitting action and dialogue; it gets under our skin because we've been handicapped by verisimilitude. I found this film's slow pace refreshing; and its unexplained eccentricities are charming.

Second, allusion. Melville's classic film Le Samourai is among the silent partners here. So is Antonioni's extraordinary The Passenger. There's also explicit mention of Hitchcock and Welles. I don't find these references pretentious, however, mostly because Jarmusch departs so significantly from the genre that the citations establish contrast, not inclusion. His earlier film Ghost Dog did this too.

What I liked most about the protagonist was how he seemed to be in search of purpose, even though he's officially working under contract during nearly all of the film. There's a subtle argument here about subjectivity and selfhood in the market system, brought to the fore in Bill Murray's shaky monologue at the end. The film asks, rather politely and calmly, what sense does it make to identify with a generic task?

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

Duplicity

There are two slightly-obscured agendas in this film, despite its appearance of being merely a spy film with some ingredients of slack romantic comedy. The first doesn't really interest me at all: some vague moralistic suggestion that trust must be constantly renewed in love relationships. When the dew-eyed spies confide in each other that "they aren't like other people" aren't they actually universalizing their suspicions? In other words, doesn't their game feel at some level like the normal process of guaranteeing sincerity on which all intimacy is based? Aren't they then just like other people except that they talk about this process instead of living it? The argument would then be that we all ought to realize how unreliable a testimony of love is. But what do we do? Subject this testimony to more scrutiny?

The second agenda is much more interesting but unfortunately its vehicle is the hoakiest part of the film: the provocation that shareholder-beholden corporations have inherently perverse incentives. Here the film is awesome. Misinformation and counterintelligence doesn't bother us so much in the context of warfare, ultimately the sides are drawn tidily. But in the context of corporate espionage the game seems crass, even pathetic. Intelligently, the film suggests that profit-driven corporate spies can only be played by the system they think they can outsmart. Without spoiling the plot, I think Duplicity is on to something interesting: try to leave the system by fooling it, and you get marooned.

A really good film that I thought about during Duplicity is Le Cercle Rouge - Criterion Collection