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rosepoli
Reviews
Never Again (2001)
For liberated 50-something women
A romantic farce with complications. The movie loves its over-50 characters yet presents them behaving ridiculously in outrageous situations.
Core to "Never Again" is the perspective and experience of liberated, divorced, over-50 women with sexual relationships. These are presumed and exemplified without being examined. Under 25 women, even the heroine's daughter, show themselves to be inert, callow dolts. Their parents live vivid lives with humor and pain, joy and despair, wit and incredulity, dignity and abnegation. So the generational roles are reversed from the usual teenage romantic comedy; that will keep a lot of viewers away. Additionally, the movie frankly talks and pictures frank abundant and diverse sex, which will keep a lot of over-25 women away.
The movie's topic, two individuals in a romantic relationship, interests woman most, but structurally the movie is presented as symmetrical among the genders, with an early alternation between the lives and concerns of its male and female leads. Further, both have friends who are core to the movie: the other half of a jazz duet in the case of Christopher and two close gabbies for Grace. In the end, though, "women do more of everything," as Christopher's buddy says, and our hero confesses to Grace that "you were right about everything," so we are back to women-centric starting place.
Curiously, the words do not match the deeds portrayed. While Grace complains (and we are supposed to agree) that Christopher has a standard Madonna/whore complex about women, nothing of the sort is pictured. Rather, the relationship starts in sex, and he comes to love and appreciate her fully through what is revealed in sex and develops as part of sex. Again, while Christopher supposedly fears intimacy, no fear is actually shown -- he relishes intimacy and honesty (and has a male friendship exemplifying these) and the under 25 women bore him because they offer neither. Instead, threats to the relationship come from the constraints of social context -- the daughter, the friends, and the social demands to be insincere and superficial. When these press in, Christopher starts having second thoughts.
Claybaugh is outstanding -- I haven't laughed so hard in years as I did at her strap-on scene. What would the part look like performed with less skill and charm? Unpleasant, perhaps. Grace carelessly injures her daughter, her friends, and her boyfriend whenever things don't go exactly her way. The farce, the happy ending, the acting, and the perspective all move attention away from the heroine's actual problems. She is brave, inventive and winsome, and we over-50 males are happy to fall in love with her.
Black Robe (1991)
erosion of meaning
There are basically no big compromises made in "Black Robe," a source of great disappointment to most reviewers. There are interesting characters, a variety of messages, lots of visualized information but no reduction to something easy to accept. No personable characters for whom we can forgive any deed or word, no overarching stirring message, no overblown hope. In fact, how did the film get so much complex reality in?
While the clash of cultures is presented, so are the clashes within cultures -- notably among the first nations but covering conflicts among Europeans as well. The film does not reduce the lives of its characters to any simple clash, theme, or plot.
The reductionist aspect to the film is the undercutting of the way that people structure their lives around traits, values, kin, enemies -- these meanings are shown, by contrast among cultures and by plot development, to be insufficient and misleading. We cannot identify with the characters because their loves and ideas are shown to be misguided.
I felt invigorated and depressed when I saw it on the screen and again on TV. Unlike the morbid European art films of the 60s that showed the meaningless of life by inventing meaningless lives, "Black Robe" shows people immersed in rich lives -- hard, beautiful, complex, compelling. While the plot may be slow, each scene draws you into a ton of immediate new reality, so you sense you are learning a lot about how people lived and believed and felt. By letting the characters glimpse the error of their constructions -- the insufficiency of love, the limits of faith, the death of kin, the hollowness of stoicism -- the director erodes our own hope for that most human of activities, giving meaning to life.
I think this is among the best films ever made. Certainly something like Citizen Kane is childish by comparison.