Film / Books
Jun. 3rd, 2019 03:07 amAt film society the other week I saw The Forest for the Trees, directed by Maren Ade. Wow, that is the most excruciating film I've loved in some time. Possibly the only reason I came out of it smiling is that I'd just had a very good few days, and brought a thick buffer of joy to this – I feel like it's a good film to go into without much idea where it's going, but I feel more strongly as though people must be warned – this well-observed, well-put-together character study of someone who finds her life stuck in a hole and sets about digging it deeper, while defining all available ladders as failures.
In the film's first moments, a happy-looking young woman, Melanie, carefully positions a pot plant on a windowsill, and I thought, "Oh good, this is going to be a happy film!" Even as it becomes clear that the man who's helping her move isn't a friend or partner but the ex she's just left, and their farewell is emotionally complicated, there's still that mood of happiness and possibility. Only gradually does her cheerful smile start to express things other than happiness. She's just started her first teaching job, and cannot with the best of intentions control her classes; she knows nobody in the area, and battens on almost immediately, via a series of nudged coincidences which stay one long pace this side of creepy, to a neighbor whose apartment Melanie can see into from her window.
And the process of getting from there through Melanie's misreading of almost every social interaction she engages in to the point about halfway through where I suddenly thought, "Oh dear, this is actually The Haunting of Hill House only without the ghosts,” was engaging and painful. I don't know when I've last been so consistently uncomfortable in a film, let alone when I've last been happy to be. I don't think of myself as being good with watching or reading awkwardness or embarrassment. The reason I found it bearable was the degree to which I believed in Melanie, the way her choices kept on making sense even as they kept getting worse, and the way the situation was created jointly by everyone involved. Yes, Melanie is quite obviously overstepping her neighbour's desire for friendship, but her neighbour remains tactful instead of helpfully blunt (or helpfully boundary-setting) at several key points; yes, the mistakes Melanie makes in managing her students are obvious, but the students and their parents are giving her no help at all; yes, she's ignoring the co-worker she's friendliest with and who offers her most help, but that's because he's also coming on to her when she'd obviously much rather he didn't. But most of all, Melanie's certainty that continuing to seem fine is going to translate to being fine any day now remains dangerously unfounded.
( And the ending is )
Books:
When Demons Walk, by Patricia Briggs.
I enjoyed this well enough, but found it most interesting as a space for thinking about the things I care about in books, given how little I cared about it. Prose bland going on broken. A secondary world where magic and demons and runes and gods all work about how you'd expect them to work. A city captured in a religious war whose zealots have settled down to attempt integration. A mage turned thief, pursuing her slow vengeance in the city's underworld, until the occupiers are bumped out of their place in her vengeance queue by a demon, and the process of hunting it down requires her to enter the city's court politics in the guise of the mistress of one of those settled zealots... That last sentence could be the summary of a book I'd really enjoy. Along with: 'Here's a court full of nobles. Some of them are your people, some of them are your conquerors, one of them is a demon, one of them may have summoned the demon; meanwhile, the man whose mistress you're pretending to be is charming and far more competent than you expected.' And for me to care about that... I would have wanted to have several hypotheses about who the demon might be, and the main characters to have political and emotional ties to the suspects such that the result would have weight; I would have wanted to see the city's political past causing more trouble than it does (not that it causes none); and I would have wanted the magical solution arrived at to involve one or two fewer bits of unanchored convenience.
Bujold! I would have wanted it to be written by Bujold.
But I'll read at least one more thing by Briggs, since this was an early book of hers, and since I like talking with Charlotte about why she likes the books she likes. (A week or so back there was a discussion on![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
cahn's journal about Among Others and the potential for s.f. fandom to produce cults of The One True Bookishness; having talked a lot with Charlotte about books is one of the major reasons I now find it easy to look at Mori, protagonist of Among Others, and think something other than, “Aha, a person whose way of looking at books is correct!” Charlotte's and my book-likings match about half the time, and go down to thoroughly different experiences of reading all the time, and if everything I disliked about When Demons Walk were changed to suit me, I... don't know, actually, if she'd like it more or less.
Fool's Run by Patricia McKillip.
This is the second thing I read of hers, after loving The Forgotten Beasts of Eld years ago. I disliked it, while not seeing it as a reason to stop looking for her other books. There's wry humour, characterization in what's left unsaid, little true details – after reading When Demon's Walk Mckillip's prose was balm to my soul, and only gradually did I get a sense of slowness and disconnection from it. For about the first half of the book I wouldn't have been surprised if everything had turned out to be occurring in an alien computer, or a dream – it had that feel of being not quite anchored to reality. Deliberately – but the amount of time the characters spent talking about the way coincidences were piling up seemed to pile up more than the coincidences did; the cupcake of story was quite small and had been iced to twice its height with portent. To the point where it was very unclear how a few plot-necessary events in the middle had actually managed to happen – they would have had to be miracle or drastic incompetence but what they really were was the narrative mood trying to say, 'Details are unimportant because I am unfolding as I should', and I just wasn't buying it.
On a future Earth, fairly inexplicably unified under a world government, a mass-murderer is in solitary confinement for life in the dark ring of an orbital prison called the Underworld. This despite the fact that she acted from no motive anyone can figure out, in the grip of a vision which suggests either insanity or receptivity to psychic signals from something unknown, neither of which should have put her where she's been put. On Earth, a musician who uses Magician as his stage name, one of very few people alive who still know who Bach was and a likely candidate for the role of Orpheus, is slowly netted in her direction by a number of acquaintances and coincidences.
I suppose a great deal of what I don't like about the book is that it centers on the experiences of the mass-murderer, Terra, who is motivated by an indescribable vision. The text spends quite a lot of time on that vision, and, I mean, I have read indescribable visions come a lot closer to being described than this one did. I would have liked a more powerful flame of description occupying the space of Reason Why All This Is Happening.
( Here, though is a highly spoilerific summary of my favourite scene )
As for the things I've been reading that I do like, well, I am nibbling my way into the third part of Cloud & Ashes, which continues to become one of my favourite books in ultra slow motion, and I keep on wanting to give it to people and say, “You'll love it! It's amazing! Just spend a couple of years getting your head around the prose, it's well worth doing,” and I have yet to find a version of this which doesn't make people start slowly backing away. Experiments will continue.
And there are the Flora Segunda books, which I read all of quite rapidly a few weeks ago. I do not have much coherent to say about them. Teenage protagonists don't usually have their adventures with such vim and vigour in front of such a deep background of adults holding things together matter-of-factly and by the skin of their teeth in the aftermath of recent devastating war. But then, teenage protagonists don't usually have their adventures with such vim and vigour full stop. And there are praterhuman butlers and protection sigils in the form of plush piglets and the worldbuilding is delightfully 'How did you do that and what made you think of it?' Oh, it's three in the morning, I shouldn't be trying to describe this. Flora is so strong-Willed, and makes such mistakes, and runs right into the consequences of them, and her parents are some of the best characters I've read in the last long while.
Sleep. Resolution: soon I will write a post about books that does not include an instruction to myself to go to sleep.
In the film's first moments, a happy-looking young woman, Melanie, carefully positions a pot plant on a windowsill, and I thought, "Oh good, this is going to be a happy film!" Even as it becomes clear that the man who's helping her move isn't a friend or partner but the ex she's just left, and their farewell is emotionally complicated, there's still that mood of happiness and possibility. Only gradually does her cheerful smile start to express things other than happiness. She's just started her first teaching job, and cannot with the best of intentions control her classes; she knows nobody in the area, and battens on almost immediately, via a series of nudged coincidences which stay one long pace this side of creepy, to a neighbor whose apartment Melanie can see into from her window.
And the process of getting from there through Melanie's misreading of almost every social interaction she engages in to the point about halfway through where I suddenly thought, "Oh dear, this is actually The Haunting of Hill House only without the ghosts,” was engaging and painful. I don't know when I've last been so consistently uncomfortable in a film, let alone when I've last been happy to be. I don't think of myself as being good with watching or reading awkwardness or embarrassment. The reason I found it bearable was the degree to which I believed in Melanie, the way her choices kept on making sense even as they kept getting worse, and the way the situation was created jointly by everyone involved. Yes, Melanie is quite obviously overstepping her neighbour's desire for friendship, but her neighbour remains tactful instead of helpfully blunt (or helpfully boundary-setting) at several key points; yes, the mistakes Melanie makes in managing her students are obvious, but the students and their parents are giving her no help at all; yes, she's ignoring the co-worker she's friendliest with and who offers her most help, but that's because he's also coming on to her when she'd obviously much rather he didn't. But most of all, Melanie's certainty that continuing to seem fine is going to translate to being fine any day now remains dangerously unfounded.
( And the ending is )
Books:
When Demons Walk, by Patricia Briggs.
I enjoyed this well enough, but found it most interesting as a space for thinking about the things I care about in books, given how little I cared about it. Prose bland going on broken. A secondary world where magic and demons and runes and gods all work about how you'd expect them to work. A city captured in a religious war whose zealots have settled down to attempt integration. A mage turned thief, pursuing her slow vengeance in the city's underworld, until the occupiers are bumped out of their place in her vengeance queue by a demon, and the process of hunting it down requires her to enter the city's court politics in the guise of the mistress of one of those settled zealots... That last sentence could be the summary of a book I'd really enjoy. Along with: 'Here's a court full of nobles. Some of them are your people, some of them are your conquerors, one of them is a demon, one of them may have summoned the demon; meanwhile, the man whose mistress you're pretending to be is charming and far more competent than you expected.' And for me to care about that... I would have wanted to have several hypotheses about who the demon might be, and the main characters to have political and emotional ties to the suspects such that the result would have weight; I would have wanted to see the city's political past causing more trouble than it does (not that it causes none); and I would have wanted the magical solution arrived at to involve one or two fewer bits of unanchored convenience.
Bujold! I would have wanted it to be written by Bujold.
But I'll read at least one more thing by Briggs, since this was an early book of hers, and since I like talking with Charlotte about why she likes the books she likes. (A week or so back there was a discussion on
cahn's journal about Among Others and the potential for s.f. fandom to produce cults of The One True Bookishness; having talked a lot with Charlotte about books is one of the major reasons I now find it easy to look at Mori, protagonist of Among Others, and think something other than, “Aha, a person whose way of looking at books is correct!” Charlotte's and my book-likings match about half the time, and go down to thoroughly different experiences of reading all the time, and if everything I disliked about When Demons Walk were changed to suit me, I... don't know, actually, if she'd like it more or less. Fool's Run by Patricia McKillip.
This is the second thing I read of hers, after loving The Forgotten Beasts of Eld years ago. I disliked it, while not seeing it as a reason to stop looking for her other books. There's wry humour, characterization in what's left unsaid, little true details – after reading When Demon's Walk Mckillip's prose was balm to my soul, and only gradually did I get a sense of slowness and disconnection from it. For about the first half of the book I wouldn't have been surprised if everything had turned out to be occurring in an alien computer, or a dream – it had that feel of being not quite anchored to reality. Deliberately – but the amount of time the characters spent talking about the way coincidences were piling up seemed to pile up more than the coincidences did; the cupcake of story was quite small and had been iced to twice its height with portent. To the point where it was very unclear how a few plot-necessary events in the middle had actually managed to happen – they would have had to be miracle or drastic incompetence but what they really were was the narrative mood trying to say, 'Details are unimportant because I am unfolding as I should', and I just wasn't buying it.
On a future Earth, fairly inexplicably unified under a world government, a mass-murderer is in solitary confinement for life in the dark ring of an orbital prison called the Underworld. This despite the fact that she acted from no motive anyone can figure out, in the grip of a vision which suggests either insanity or receptivity to psychic signals from something unknown, neither of which should have put her where she's been put. On Earth, a musician who uses Magician as his stage name, one of very few people alive who still know who Bach was and a likely candidate for the role of Orpheus, is slowly netted in her direction by a number of acquaintances and coincidences.
I suppose a great deal of what I don't like about the book is that it centers on the experiences of the mass-murderer, Terra, who is motivated by an indescribable vision. The text spends quite a lot of time on that vision, and, I mean, I have read indescribable visions come a lot closer to being described than this one did. I would have liked a more powerful flame of description occupying the space of Reason Why All This Is Happening.
( Here, though is a highly spoilerific summary of my favourite scene )
As for the things I've been reading that I do like, well, I am nibbling my way into the third part of Cloud & Ashes, which continues to become one of my favourite books in ultra slow motion, and I keep on wanting to give it to people and say, “You'll love it! It's amazing! Just spend a couple of years getting your head around the prose, it's well worth doing,” and I have yet to find a version of this which doesn't make people start slowly backing away. Experiments will continue.
And there are the Flora Segunda books, which I read all of quite rapidly a few weeks ago. I do not have much coherent to say about them. Teenage protagonists don't usually have their adventures with such vim and vigour in front of such a deep background of adults holding things together matter-of-factly and by the skin of their teeth in the aftermath of recent devastating war. But then, teenage protagonists don't usually have their adventures with such vim and vigour full stop. And there are praterhuman butlers and protection sigils in the form of plush piglets and the worldbuilding is delightfully 'How did you do that and what made you think of it?' Oh, it's three in the morning, I shouldn't be trying to describe this. Flora is so strong-Willed, and makes such mistakes, and runs right into the consequences of them, and her parents are some of the best characters I've read in the last long while.
Sleep. Resolution: soon I will write a post about books that does not include an instruction to myself to go to sleep.
