Marya Murphy

After tweeting that I was engaged in a volatile “discussion” of Assayas’s Summer Hours, I was asked privately to explain my position. I’ll share with you, volatile readers, that position.

I can only really talk about such things in reaction to others. So I’ll tell you first what my foil (spouse) had to say. In essence, it’s ham-fisted, reactionary, poorly directed, poorly cast, poorly acted, and the goddamn camera never stops moving. He found it repetitive and unrevealing and thought the hammered-home point was that we’re losing our past and our culture and our traditions and the new rowdy generation of multiculturality and loud music is destroying beauty. Something like that. (I wasn’t really listening.) (I’m kidding.) (Mostly.)

Whereas I thought it was lovely, gentle, nuanced, complicated, and all about letting go. There’s no judgment or condemnation. Here’s the past. It’s beautiful. We’re nostalgic for it but have no room for it. Thank goodness for museums. The ostensible main character is reluctant, but not passionate. He’s the most tied to the past because he’s the oldest and the closest to his mother. But there’s no judgment of the younger, less-tied siblings. Their willingness to let it all go makes perfect sense. Nothing nefarious in it. And the final scene was a perfect reflection of the opening scene. The old matriarch, owning her space, controlling everything gently but firmly, now replaced by the young girl with the same manner, a new version of her grandmother’s liveliness. The grandmother had been a wild and passionate youth, uncontrollable. The young girl is the same. This is life. This is change. It’s not evil. It’s beautiful. We can be nostalgic for the past while embracing the future. Our notions of art and beauty and life are no less valid.

This post is not seasonally appropriate, unless you live in my home where it’s Christmas all year round.

My three-year-old daughter, Ailsa, has been Christmas-obsessed almost from birth. Her favorite book for at least her first year and a half was a soft Christmas Alphabet book. She’d pore over it forever. And then Puppy arrived when she was six months old, with his Santa hat, barking Christmas carols, and he became my second child and her inseparable companion. She loves red, she loves winter, she loves snow, she loves presents, Rudolph, Santa, Frosty, trees, decorations, lights, ornaments, candy canes, and everything Christmassy. With an insane passion.

A few days before Christmas 2008, my mother-in-law gave me two tickets to see The Nutcracker.  She dropped me and Ailsa off in downtown San Jose.  Ailsa was wearing her pretty green Christmas dress and a red hat I brought from Nepal and shiny black shoes. It was an abbreviated Nutcracker, a 45-minute version for kids.  Perfect. We were delighted.

Afterwards, we walked around Christmasland (where Carla walks in Canary) to look at all the decorations. We wandered for quite awhile, looking at all the decorated trees. I think we rode a carousel. 

And then we came to Santa’s house, which I’d never paid much attention to, and there were about ten people standing in line. A sign said Santa would be back soon, so I asked Ailsa if she wanted to wait, and she did.  But it was four-ish and her feet hurt (shoes too small) and she was very tired, so she went to a bench and sat while I held our place. And we waited and waited. And waited. I finally asked someone if they knew when it would open, and it was still going to be about fifteen minutes.  I asked her again if she wanted to wait, and she did. She held onto my hands and spun around and twirled and dazzled the people who watched her, with her beauty and her Ailsaness.  And finally the line started moving. It probably took about forty-five minutes all told. Ailsa was sleepy and distracted, and I kept thinking what a silly mistake itwas to force her to go sit on Santa’s lap. I thought she’d probably be scared of him once we got in there. 

When it was our turn, Ailsa entered, looked at Santa and positively beamed. She lowered her head and started to giggle, and then she hopped four times toward him, spread her arms out wide and smiled as she walked slowly into him. The Santa was pretty taken aback, I could tell. So were the elven volunteers. I bought a camera (disposable, STILL haven’t developed the photos) and took some pictures of her with Santa. The Elves took a photo of me with them too. Ailsa told him what she wanted (a red snowglobe with Santa in it) and gave him a big, parting hug and left with a candy cane.

It was unreal. A Christmas miracle. I cried a little. It was like she’d come home. Oh, Santa, my old friend. I’ve been waiting for decades to see you again. And she giggled throughout. Just shining.

I’ve been assigned the task of beefing up my blog for marketing purposes. Whatever that means.

I’ve been having trouble getting a groove going on this here maryamurphy site, so I’m going to try to spew forth a bit about movies I’ve seen in recent days.

THE CLASS: As vivid and painful and fascinating as your own high school experience was while you were living it. So patient, unsensational, real. And that teacher guy is hot. It takes its time allowing the massive wall of students to develop into individuals and never imbues them with precociousness. We don’t see their troubled home lives, as the cliché would have it. Inarticulate glimpses in parent/teacher meetings are all we’re privy to, because that’s all the teacher sees. The central conflict is slight, but affecting. We’re moved more by the immersion in a full year of teaching. Very few false notes. Scenes continue beyond where most films would cut away. Punchline, cut? No…. let’s take it further until it becomes almost a spectacle of mundanity. The earnestness and misguidedness of the teachers are gently portrayed. Mistakes are made, battles won and lost, the world keeps on turning. The children are fantastic.

FORT APACHE: “A stench in the nostrils of honest men.” What else do I need from a film? Interesting to see John Wayne in a small role, but still quietly commanding every scene he’s in. His star power is has such a different flavor from Fonda’s. Fonda is necessarily weak next to him, but appropriately so. He’s a martinet. But they do dazzle together. I love movie stars.

GERRY: You gerried the rendezvous! I was crowsnesting, but you gerried the rendezvous! I haven’t been wild about the recent Van Sant trilogy. Elephant had some appeal, Paranoid Park not much, but Gerry… Gerry I really dug. Maybe the meandering, vérité nothingness worked better for me because they were charismatic movie stars? (See “I love movie stars,” ref. above.) Beautifully realized suspense. But I’d laud it for the creative language alone.

COBRA VERDE: I have such mixed feelings about Herzog. I could watch him cook and eat his shoe all day. It’s kind of like Dickens. I love Dickens’ stories, but the execution bores the crap out of me. Herzog is brilliant and his obsession with insane dreamers is a worthy one. Grizzly Man is one of the best documentaries I’ve ever seen. Kasper Hauser – woo! But what is it about most of his films? They fascinate me, but they don’t make me feel, I guess. Herzog doesn’t love his crazy dreamer characters. He identifies with them closely, yes. Is it self-hatred that comes through, then? Is that what makes it hard for me to muddle through? His self-adoration comes through too, of course. Herzog films may be more Herzog than any other director’s. Which may be his primary brilliance. Oh, right. Cobra Verde. Eh. But man, is Klaus Kinski watchable.

WENDY AND LUCY: A meditation on the vulnerability of a woman alone without even her dog to protect her. I disliked Reichart’s Old Joy, other than the brilliant ending. Wendy and Lucy was just consistent. A consistent gentle terror. I haven’t been broke in a long time, and it recalled vividly the stomach-dropping pain of unexpected expense. Williams played it very well. Understated, intense but not particularly bright girl, in over her head but unable to really react to any of it. A cipherish character. Beaten down. Surviving by a vague, untethered tenacity.

GOODBYE SOLO: A tour-de-force charismatic performance by Souleymane Sy Savane. I saw this film at a super-secret cult meeting of film-goers who arrive without knowing which movie they’re about to watch. The experience was delightful. I missed the opening credits (if there were any), and did not know the director was Iranian-American. But throughout I kept thinking, “This feels so Iranian!” Certainly there was the thematic affinity with A Taste of Cherry, but also in tone and pacing it felt like something Kiarostami might have made. Some weak performances, some stretched-thin plot elements, some flat-out bad movie-making, but Solo I could watch sleeping and be riveted.

SHINING THROUGH: Melanie Griffith and Michael Douglas – two of my most hated movie stars. And yet, not bad! Now remake it with people I can stomach.

MAN ON WIRE: Okay, so I didn’t even finish this, and I hear the end was very moving and beautiful. I think it would have benefited from linearity. The great thing was that someone had a movie camera and was shooting everything at the time. It makes me want to shoot everything that’s happening around me all the time, just in case it can be used in 20 years. Which reminds me. Future Art Historians: I apologize to you now for throwing away most of my daughter’s precious drawings and paintings. Rent me a warehouse and I’ll be happy to preserve it all for posterity.

THE BAND’S VISIT: I had the feeling at first that this was going to be about the death of formality. And, sure, there’s a bit of that. But it’s surprisingly lacking any agenda. A lovely film. Inconsistent in tone and style, but very full of heart. The best scene has the young, hot band member teaching the terrified local how to seduce a girl at a roller rink.

THX-1138: Okay, seriously, what happened to George Lucas? This is such an intelligent, daring, provocative movie. The man who made this cannot have made Episodes 1-3. I know this has been said a thousand zillion times. But it’s all one can really think when watching THX-1138.

I give up for tonight. Many more to battle through. I’ll get better at this.

So I’m thinking about Lars von Trier’s The Kingdom and wondering if I’ll ever get a chance to ask him what would have happened in the third and final season. Do scripts exist somewhere? Could you send them to me, Lars? I won’t tell anyone. I’ll just read them to myself in secret, playing all the roles in my head. Or, if you prefer, Lars, I could produce that final season. In Danish, even, (with the occasional Swede). I’m sure I could find enough Danish actors in San Jose to round out the cast. We managed to find enough Russians for Babnik, after all. And now that I’m adept at the art of sub-titillation, I could knock it out pretty quickly, I’m sure. I could upload them to Youtube, like a good Lars von Trier fangirl. I’ll play the role of Lars for the postscripts.

This leads me to google “Lars von Trier fanzine,” and I find this. An interview with Caveh Zahedi. I know Caveh. I’ve shot hours and hours of footage of Caveh talking. I’ve even impersonated him on camera for a movie my husband was/is making called The Caveh Experiment. Caveh, in the interview, says the filmmaker he relates to most is Lars von Trier. And Caveh, in the interview, quotes René Girard, my former professor, on whom my college roommate and I had a considerable crush, and in whose French-accented voice we would often whisper to each other, “Weel you bee my girlfriend?” Caveh tells us, “René Girard says that the true repression in our society is not sex, which everyone seems to be talking about these days, but envy. Envy rather than lust, according to Girard, is the emotion that drives most of our behavior.”

Which brings me to Eleanor Coppola. I’ve been reading (sporadically, because I have two very small children and the attention span of a fruit fly) her Notes on a Life, a memoir of her life in a filmmaking family. The parallels to my life are strong: an artist herself, she met Francis on the set of Dementia 13, married him and assumed they would continue making movies together on a small scale. He catapulted himself to fame and glory while she raised babies and fit in what art she could when and where she could. Her envy is palpable throughout the book. I want to knock on her door and tell her, “Yes! Yes! Exactly! I know!” Thank you, Eleanor. You’re braver than I.

My husband Alejandro and I started making movies several years ago. No-budget experiments, narrative and documentary. I directed a 40-minute movie with the unwieldy title Hegemony while I was pregnant with my daughter in April of 2005 (she was born that May). After she was born, we began shooting the movie about Caveh, but I was much less involved. My interest in things artistic was eclipsed by my daughter: my world, my treasure, my everything. We spent a blissful year being new parents, and filmmaking drifted from passionate vocation to neglected hobby. Then we got pregnant again. Alejandro knew I’d be incapacitated for a few months (when pregnant I’m either sleeping or vomiting for the first six months), and so while I was passively creating a human being he threw himself into his narrative feature directorial debut, Around the Bay.

During the rare lucid moments of my nauseated stupor, I was insanely envious. I felt totally shut out of the creative thing we’d begun together. And, of course, guilty for feeling that way. And my envy increased as I watched the footage. Brilliant stuff, and in a completely different league from anything we’d done before. I wrangled my way back in during postproduction, fighting over editing decisions, making alternate cuts, fine-tuning scenes. But it was Alejandro’s film. And when it was accepted to Cinequest and critics started lauding it, my pride was always slightly tempered by envy. He did it without me. And, worse, I couldn’t have done what he did. All of the reasons I fell in love with this man–his intensity, his brilliance, his intuitiveness, his creativity, his drive, his passion, his humor–were evinced in this movie. And I was too small to give myself over completely to pride and happiness for him. What about me? Why is no one interviewing me?? I’ve been practicing my entire life for this. I’ve had imaginary interviews for decades. I’ve accepted thousands of awards, been on hundreds of talk shows. I’m ready! I’m just lacking… the talent and the drive to actually accomplish anything great. I’m busy being a good mommy, a good provider, a supportive wife. And I want and need to be those things. And they’re so much safer than art. Besides, there are all those episodes of Battlestar Galactica to get through.

I was much more involved in the production of Alejandro’s second feature, Canary. (Premiering at Cinequest in February 2009!) Fleshing out the dystopian universe, playing a small role and conceiving the scene I was in, making props and costumes, shooting a few scenes, editing. But once again, it’s Alejandro’s film. The third, Babnik, I helped write, shot a few scenes, and am editing and subtitling with him. I’m a helper verb. I’m not sure I have what it takes to direct anymore. My attention and energies are too split. I would be a selfish, bad mother if I tried to direct a movie right now. Or maybe I’m just afraid. I don’t want to be an unsung hero. I want to be the star. Lars wouldn’t let a couple of babies stop him from making a movie. Nor would Francis. (Caveh just became a father, so it remains to be seen.)

But I also honestly feel like being a mommy is the only thing I was REALLY meant to do. The thing I’m best at. The thing that comes most naturally. The thing I should have started 15 years ago.

Now I just have to brace myself for the day my daughter wins an Oscar. Oh, Eleanor.