TwentyNine-Palms (2003): Some Thoughts (and reasons to keep watching)
(spoilers. duh.)
tl;dr: beautiful Kubrickian shots, great on failed communication, a shocking ending that makes you re-evaluate everything but wouldn't/couldn't watch it again
TwentyNine-Palms is a strange curate’s egg of a film: you’ll either love it or hate it. love it for the wide-slung vistas and brilliant depictions of failed communication; hate it for the low-level misogyny, manic pixie dream girl and tiresome repetition. But even in the hateable things there’s beauty: beauty born of the repeated image and the slow, long track of the camera over a near static image, where every minute touch and sound becomes amplified.
tl;dr: beautiful Kubrickian shots, great on failed communication, a shocking ending that makes you re-evaluate everything but wouldn't/couldn't watch it again
TwentyNine-Palms is a strange curate’s egg of a film: you’ll either love it or hate it. love it for the wide-slung vistas and brilliant depictions of failed communication; hate it for the low-level misogyny, manic pixie dream girl and tiresome repetition. But even in the hateable things there’s beauty: beauty born of the repeated image and the slow, long track of the camera over a near static image, where every minute touch and sound becomes amplified.
Amplified perhaps literally: there’s so little music and
sound in this film that when it does appear it’s a shock. Frequently animal
noises, footsteps and water splashes hit like tiny bombs on the screen. It helps
to highlight the lack of coherent speech, which even when it’s being spoken is
in French and unhampered by subtitles. There is as little communication between
director and audience as there is between the central couple: we are frequently
left to look at the backs of people’s heads or their rutting backs, with little
clue as to their emotions. We have to patchwork together their story. They stay
strangers to us.
Their sexual proclivities however, do not. The film is full
of fucking. Outdoor fucking; pool fucking; oral; anal; you name it. and
fucking, with all its animal connotations, is really the term for it. we get to
know David (David Wissak) as an occasionally violent and passionate sex fiend; Katia
(Yekaterina Golubeva) is quieter but more likely to turn on a pin in conversation. Touch is
their only method of connection, and hoo boy, do we get to see it. 75% of the
film is just them shagging.
The other twenty-five percent is endlessly repeated scenes
that whilst being beautifully shot allow the mind to wander. Perhaps that’s the
point: to place us in the position of these drifter characters, who cannot
impose themselves on the landscape and can only look at it and act within it,
not on it. in fact that’s most likely definitely the point. but it can be
boring viewing. I kept having to pause every ten minutes or so for a break. It does,
however, draw you in: makes you want to know about these people: makes you want
to care.
So, how to view TwentyNine-Palms? As a parable of failed
communication, culminating in passion, set in that most American of testing
grounds, the desert. A place that can be wild and beautiful and erotic and
dangerous all at the same time. When the central performances are good, they’re
good, enigmatic and strange. Sometimes you don’t know why the hell they were directed
like that.
However, as an example of French malaise transported into an
American adrift narrative, it’s certainly worth a watch.
Just don’t do it with your parents in the room.
(edit: the above was written about 1hr 30 into the film. thoughts on the final 24 minutes:
it is a shock when the placidity, even down to the recurring image of the hand in hair, is disrupted. you suddenly get the sense that this is a horror film. it's the sudden randomness that gets you: the explicitness detailed above can only prepare you so far. but, at the same time- there's an odd edge of it being so out of kilter with the subdued tone of the rest of the film that it's almost laughable. the animal noises make a reoccurence here- David's rapist uses the same yodelling grunts as he does: he has replaced David in the cycle of sexual pleasure's links with violence. then katiya makes the same. the sounds of pleasure that have resounded throughout the film as one of the only methods of communication are suddenly ones of pain.
some lovely paralleling of shots too, where David becomes the victim.
this is, i think, the core of the film. there's a lovely tang to its unravelling which suddenly makes you re-evaluate the emptiness and despair of the previous hour and a half. it's just a shame it comes so late.
holy. shit.
this is how you end a film. bizarre. like the lovechild of freud and kubrick. it makes you re-evaluate the whole film: you realise that it's a psychological horror movie hiding under the veneer of a self indulgent indie flick
if you can, suffer the first bit for THIS.)
(edit: the above was written about 1hr 30 into the film. thoughts on the final 24 minutes:
it is a shock when the placidity, even down to the recurring image of the hand in hair, is disrupted. you suddenly get the sense that this is a horror film. it's the sudden randomness that gets you: the explicitness detailed above can only prepare you so far. but, at the same time- there's an odd edge of it being so out of kilter with the subdued tone of the rest of the film that it's almost laughable. the animal noises make a reoccurence here- David's rapist uses the same yodelling grunts as he does: he has replaced David in the cycle of sexual pleasure's links with violence. then katiya makes the same. the sounds of pleasure that have resounded throughout the film as one of the only methods of communication are suddenly ones of pain.
some lovely paralleling of shots too, where David becomes the victim.
this is, i think, the core of the film. there's a lovely tang to its unravelling which suddenly makes you re-evaluate the emptiness and despair of the previous hour and a half. it's just a shame it comes so late.
holy. shit.
this is how you end a film. bizarre. like the lovechild of freud and kubrick. it makes you re-evaluate the whole film: you realise that it's a psychological horror movie hiding under the veneer of a self indulgent indie flick
if you can, suffer the first bit for THIS.)
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