Classics: 'La Ronde' (1950) and 'The Earrings of Madame de...' (1953)

Max Ophuls

After watching both La Ronde and The Earrings of Madame de... over the last week, it seems safe to say that Max Ophüls is one of the greatest stylists that cinema has ever known. Stanley Kubrick, Paul Thomas Anderson, and Robert Altman have claimed him as a major influence, among many others. It does not seem too hyperbolic to claim that every graceful, extended camera movement employing a dolly or crane—especially the kind that floats leisurely through or over an interior space, following an actor's movements—are at least slightly indebted to Ophüls.

The pertinent question, maybe, is whether or not Ophüls' characters, ideas, and emotions are as beautiful as his camera movements—or, really, whether they're more than just beautiful, whether there's some tumult, some crisis, that affects us as powerfully as the aesthetic does. After all, Ophüls' films typically concern absurdly elegant aristocrats existing in a historical period (in La Ronde and The Earrings of Madame de..., late-19th and early-20th century Europe), struggling to cope with calamitous affairs of the heart, suffering from love and lust and heartache but ever maintaining a veneer of beauty and untouchability in the process. For Ophüls' detractors, these movies are about dilettantes who modern (especially middle- or lower-class) audiences couldn't care less about—characters defined more by their prettiness than by their emotions. For his legion of avid admirers, though—which included, famously, Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris (this may have been the one subject both of them agreed upon)—Ophüls broke through the brittle shell of aristocratic respectability to show the pain and maddening desire that lingered underneath. His always-roaming camera, they argued, patiently observed the possessions and elegant environs of wealthy characters to emphasize the significance of small tokens, tangible things, as they fit into turbulent lives. They were accoutrements for people, but also embellishments for a sort of cosmic cycle of desire, love, and loss—props in a vast and tragic comedy seemingly staged for God's own amusement. The predominance of things and decorations in Ophüls' films also act as juxtapositional foreshadowing: their houses and their belongings may be in order, but everything else (everything inside) is in disarray.

It seems fans of Ophüls are rarely timid in their enthusiasm: many celebrations of the director proclaim him the most beautiful, the most humane, the most sensitive and underappreciated visionary in the history of movies. (Molly Haskell, in this excellent essay, lauds Ophüls as a defender of unassuming heroes and heroines, Stendhalian characters whose freedom and wealth are tenuous and unstable—values that could be forsaken in an instant for love and passion.) I may not go quite so far in my praise for the director, but I am (after seeing these two films, and with fond memories of his 1948 American movie Letter from an Unknown Woman still popping up constantly) unequivocally a fan. His camera movements and his characters may be pretty, but both the style and the characters are hiding something considerably painful underneath.

La Ronde

Admittedly, this may be harder to detect in La Ronde than in either Letter from an Unknown Woman or The Earrings of Madame de.... Ophüls' 1950 film was the first he made back in France after his brief tenure in Hollywood (which wielded a small number of too-little-known gems), and, as Terrence Raferty points out, La Ronde exhibits Ophüls in a playful, unabashedly wry manner that epitomizes his “European” sensibilities. (Usually, that descriptor means nothing and reeks of ethnocentrism, but with Ophüls it actually makes sense: a born German who worked in his home country, France, Austria, Italy, and the Netherlands as well as the U.S., he shared a cosmopolitan world-weariness, the bittersweet displacement of a refugee from his own land, and a sympathetic romantic fatalism with his European countrymen—although the winking self-consciousness displayed in La Ronde is a little closer to American comedies of the time.)

La Ronde is adapted from a notorious Arthur Schnitzler play that was written in 1897, finally performed in Budapest in 1912, and eventually staged in Schnitzler's hometown of Vienna in 1921. The play concerns a sexual merry-go-round, traversed over ten scenes, ingeniously plotted: in the first, a prostitute makes love to a soldier; in the next, the soldier seduces a seemingly naïve young chambermaid (who reveals herself to be more headstrong than we may have assumed); in the next, the chambermaid is taken by her fumbling employer; and so on, until the licentious cycle (“the ring” of the title) completes itself.

Ophüls' film adaptation introduces a new character: an elegantly bemused, disarmingly meta narrator who operates a literal merry-go-round as the sexual cycle rages on around him. In the first scene, this narrator takes us behind the camera, noting the artificiality of the studio set, even pointing out the lighting setups and cameras before the film itself gets underway. Later, Ophüls will cut to this narrator at the exact moment that a young male character (who fancies himself a virile stallion) is unable to perform in bed; after tinkering with the mechanics of the carousel for a minute, however, the narrator is able to kickstart the young man's libido and thrust the carousel back into motion. There's even another scene in which the narrator can be seen cutting an explicit sequence from a strip of celluloid with a pair of scissors—Ophüls finds numerous ways to dance around onscreen sex in this film, with characteristic flair and cleverness.

Although there are melancholy sequences (the best scene in the film is an uneasy dialogue between an aged, wealthy aristocrat and his young, beautiful wife, who realize, through evasive and somewhat defensive testimonies, that they still care for each other after years of sexless marriage), the overall tone of La Ronde is spry and relatively carefree. The film is, of course, about rampant infidelity and unimpeded lust, but the audience never sees any tearful fallouts between lovers because of this disloyalty. We witness instead, as the narrator points out, the familiar machinations of the game of sex: amorous men and women playing off of each other, embodying all manner of lust and flirtation and desire. The central metaphor is, of course, that carousel, but we may also think of a chessboard: one of the movie's prime delights is that we can chart the characters' strategic come-ons and invitations, reveling in the excitement of sex as a game to be played.

This may all sound very icy and hollowly clever, but for all of its lasciviousness, La Ronde is surprisingly sweet. The most charming sequence in the film may also be the most aesthetically impressive: a prolonged flirtation between an awkward young man-of-the-house and his beautiful chambermaid, who bat double entendres back and forth as they circle around each other in a vast drawing room. When their mutual attraction makes itself clear, the camera dazzlingly follows the young man as he half-runs to all of the windows in the room, drawing the shutters closed. (This scene is also incredibly sexy, thanks mostly to Simone Simon as the chambermaid, Marie.) There may not be much to La Ronde besides its effortlessly elegant sense of humor, its dazzling camerawork, and engaging performances by a huge international cast. In other words, it's light as air, but that happens to be enough: Ophüls' enthusiasm for the art of moviemaking as well as for the romantic games people play becomes contagious almost immediately.

The Earrings of Madame de...

If La Ronde is a somewhat lightweight offering from an undeniable master craftsman, then The Earrings of Madame de..., made three years later, is a tremendously powerful film that expands and deepens its creator's sensibility. I may still prefer Letter from an Unknown Woman, which burns with unattainable desire and the passion of mad love, but I have to admit that Madame de... may be the more sensitive film: all three of its main characters are the Stendhalian protagonists that Haskell cited—unheroic people who think they are free and happy, only to realize how trapped and unfulfilled they really are, forsaking everything for a taste of true love and passion.

“There is no happiness in joy,” says a character in another Ophüls film, Le Plaisir—a sentiment that helps to explain the melancholy power of Madame de.... The titular Countess (who remains unnamed throughout the movie—her plight is universal, not confined to the wealthy) sells the earrings that were given to her by her husband on their wedding night. At the beginning of the film, they obviously mean little to her; yet, as the film progresses, they take on greater emotional significance (both for her and for the audience), especially when they are re-gifted to her, through a taunting twist of fate, by a dashing Italian Baron with whom she is helplessly in love. The sequence in which the Countess and the Baron Fabrizio Donati waltz, night after night, falling deeper into the throes of love and passion, is rightfully celebrated as one of the most sublime in the history of movies: a series of dissolves orchestrates the temporal movement of the editing with the spatial movement of the gracefully-waltzing camera, as weeks are compressed into minutes and helpless passion is somehow, miraculously, visualized. The sequence seems effortless, light as air, but was clearly very meticulously planned out. Like the dance numbers in Swing Time or Top Hat—which seem similarly effortless but took months of preparation for Astaire and Rogers to perfect—the ballroom scene in The Earrings of Madame de... makes us believe that it's possible to convey the deepest love onscreen. (Maybe the most gifted composer can suggest passion sonically, and maybe the most brilliant writer can suggest its unequaled beauty, but don't movies seem especially suited to conveying such an inexpressible emotion?)

Lest we assume The Earrings of Madame de... is just a beautiful movie about beautiful people falling in love, it's actually about how impenetrable these characters assume themselves to be, and how perfect they consider their lives to be. At first, admittedly, we may be put off by these characters. The Countess is selfish and manipulative; she knows how to play off of the men around her (including, and especially, her husband), staging fainting fits and flirting publicly with aristocrats, confidently aware of her standing in the Parisian upper class. She's not really vilified—she's simply abiding by the expectations and opportunities afforded to her in 1900 Paris. We sympathize with her inflexible social position and the behavior expected of her, but we also are dismayed by the value she places in material objects (and, maybe, the extent to which she sees other people as material objects). Her husband, an esteemed General, is hardly more likeable: a tyrant who is aware that his wife no longer loves him, the General simply accepts this as a consequence of aristocratic marriage in his society, finding social standing more valuable than intimacy between a husband and wife. All of this changes when the Baron enters the scene, however. Lives of shallow materialism and invincible pride are suddenly revealed to be empty; people and possessions are discovered to have real value. Those telling earrings reveal to the Countess how shallow her life had been; they reveal to the General how powerless he was over his wife, precisely because there was no love between them; and they reveal to the Baron how willing he is to sacrifice everything for a love he knows can never be recognized by society. If Ophüls' films can be accused of a sort of aristocratic aestheticism, The Earrings of Madame de... would seem to absolutely deflate that criticism: all of the beauty and wealth of their lives revealed to be totally meaningless.

Here, the agile camera movements are in the service of the actors, the characters: no stylistic flourish exists for its own sake. The glacially-paced tracking shot that opens the movie, which scans the Countess's jewelry and clothes like an auctioneer appraising goods, reveals how little these possessions mean to her; a remarkably swift camera during the scene in which the Countess and the Baron first meet (at a Parisian customs office) conveys the excitement, the giddiness, that the Baron feels upon first seeing her.

As sensitive as Ophüls is—and as finely tuned as Christian Macras's cinematography is to the movements and sentiments of the characters—the film may ultimately excel because of its cast. Is Danielle Darrieux's Madame de... one of the most romantic, tragic, unexpectedly powerful characters in the history of movies? The smoothness of her features, the deepness of her eyes, define elegance, yet she flawlessly allows traces of her sadness, her despair, her restrained passion, to suggest themselves. I was unsure of how much the movie would affect me emotionally until relatively late in the film, when, at a ball, the Countess is simultaneously spurned by the Baron (who finally discovers the real origins of the earrings he gave her as a gift) and forbidden to wear those earrings by her jilted husband. Darrieux's absolutely deflated performance in this scene is heartbreaking, especially because she so desperately struggles to maintain a semblance of elegance and cool resolve. Charles Boyer, meanwhile, as her husband—the cold, confident, yet not unfeeling General—uses his untroubled demeanor to present a man totally unwilling to believe there are cracks in his hypothetically perfect life. Boyer is no less excellent at allowing fractions of pain and jealousy to sneak into his cool stoicism. (Boyer and Darrieux had played lovers in the 1936 film Mayerling, by Anatole Litvak. It was a huge success, and almost twenty years later, the memory of their onscreen chemistry must surely have affected audiences seeing The Earrings of Madame de...—as though the couple who fell in love in Mayerling would eventually become the distant husband and wife seen in Ophüls' film.) And finally, the great director Vittorio De Sica, incomparably dashing and hopelessly romantic as the Baron, epitomizes one of those aforementioned “small heroes”—a man who has the bravery to simply obey passion, give in to love, though he knows without a doubt that it will destroy him.

The immediate pleasures of Ophüls's filmmaking—the silky, acrobatic black-and-white cinematography, the lush costumes, beautiful actors, opulent set design, meticulous plotting—may bring some viewers to the assumption that its style is more than its substance, that the director's humanity, his characterizations, couldn't possibly compare to his virtuoso aesthetic. Maybe not—but in Letter from an Unknown Woman and The Earrings of Madame de..., they come close. There is no joy in happiness; beauty has never been so sad.

New Releases: 'Beats Rhymes & Life: The Travels of A Tribe Called Quest'

The most shocking moment of Beats Rhymes & Life, Michael Rapaport's look at the rise and fall of one of hip-hop's most influential and eclectic groups, occurs late in the movie. Maseo, a member of De La Soul, performing with A Tribe Called Quest at 2008's Rock the Bells tour (where estranged members Q-Tip and Phife Dawg reunited for what were allegedly their last live performances), is asked if he thinks Tribe will ever play in front of an audience again. “I hope not,” is his immediate, unexpected answer—and this coming from one of the group's most devout, respectful admirers.

By this point, antagonism between Q-Tip—acting as unofficial frontman, confident, charismatic, perfectionist—and Phife Dawg—ingratiating and often quiet, suffering from diabetes but addicted to sugar—had festered to its breaking point. Surprisingly candid behind-the-scenes footage at the 2008 Rock the Bells tour shows the duo (the two MCs behind some of the most memorable rap songs of all time) physically confront each other immediately before they're supposed to perform. In this light, Maseo's confession that he'd rather not see the two perform together again makes disheartening sense: their rivalry can only cast a suffocating shadow over what had been, years earlier, one of the most fertile partnerships in hip-hop.

How had things gotten to this point? Eighteen years earlier, A Tribe Called Quest released their first full-length album, People's Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm, and almost instantaneously changed what rap could sound like. The album provided two singles that would become unforgettable landmarks in the history of rap—“Bonita Applebum” and “I Left My Wallet in El Segundo” (the title of which, Q-Tip confesses, came from a recurring joke on the show Sanford & Son)—but the songs “Luck of Lucien” and “Can I Kick It?” arguably provide the album's highlights. (“Can I Kick It?” in particular provides a seemingly incontrovertible case for the art of sampling: the Lou Reed snippet that provides the song's hook is completely transformed by Tribe's lush production.) The ensuing years would see the release of two subsequent masterpieces, 1991's The Low End Theory and 1993's Midnight Marauders, which would cement Tribe's place in the annals of rap history. The beats on all three of these albums were jazzy, obscure, complex, and perfectly complementary to the group's smooth style; as one interviewee notes, their productions heavily sampled the unheard-of jazz LPs hidden away in their parents' record collections, which few other producers had sought out before. (This eclectic sound is one way, among many, that Tribe's influence may be detected in the later productions of Kanye West, Madlib, DJ Premier and Pete Rock, among many others.) The rhymes, meanwhile, were equally obscure, bizarre abstractions and non-sequiturs, smoothly delivered, without pretense, seemingly transplanted from some parallel alternate dimension. While many other groups were leaning towards violent manifestations of a life of crime or impassioned commentaries about the life of black people in the United States (Public Enemy, Gang Starr, NWA, or even Wu-Tang Clan, whose debut Enter the 36 Chambers was released the same day as Midnight Marauders), A Tribe Called Quest remained tantalizingly playful, even otherworldly.

Their music is so good one almost wishes Beats Rhymes & Life would concentrate on it more. While the process of making these three landmark albums is briefly outlined (including an excellent scene in which Q-Tip explains how he retrieved the drumline for “Can I Kick It?” from an old Lonnie Smith record), and a lineup of modern-day rap figures respectfully details the group's lasting influence, these formative early years are skimmed over in order to get to the bitter dramatic conflicts that defined the group's later years. But this is a gripe coming from a hardcore fan of the group who, confessedly, heard a few strains of “Excursions” in the documentary and mostly just wanted to listen to The Low End Theory from beginning to end. There's a lot packed into this 97-minute film; in fact, Rapaport finds an excellent balance between adulation and brutal honesty for both neophytes and faithful Tribe fans. (It helps that Rapaport is obviously an enthusiastic fan himself, especially judging from the attention he gives to Phife Dawg's outstanding verse on “Buggin' Out.”)

Tempers rose following the release of Midnight Marauders. Phife Dawg moved to Atlanta (partially due to his ailing health, as he struggled to overcome his addiction to sugar) while Q-Tip and beatmaker/DJ Ali Shaheed Muhammad remained behind in their native Queens. (Jarobi, who is sometimes considered an unofficial member of the group, had already bowed out beforehand.) It's difficult to describe exactly what led to the falling-out between Q-Tip and Phife; even the two musicians seem to have trouble doing so throughout Beats Rhymes & Life. But the answer may be found in their respective personalities: throughout the documentary, Q-Tip is emphatic, charismatic, controlling, boastful, while Phife Dawg is quiet, modest, sensitive, and ailing. Increasingly resentful of Q-Tip's self-appointed rise to leader of the group, Phife nonetheless contributed verses to their ensuing albums and performed live with Q-Tip and Muhammad, but became angry with Q-Tip's rigorous perfectionism. Accusations were flung in the press, particularly by Q-Tip, though he continues to insist that his words were taken out of context. It all culminated in 2008's Rock the Bells tour, during which Q-Tip seems to call out a sickly Phife Dawg's lackluster performance onstage, leading to a near-physical altercation backstage.

Like 2004's Metallica: Some Kind of Monster, Beats Rhymes & Life vividly portrays the inflated egos and impassioned altercations that rage in the background of the creative process. To my admitted surprise, I liked the Metallica documentary—I've never considered myself even remotely enthusiastic about their music. I've been a fan of A Tribe Called Quest, on the other hand, basically since I started listening to hip-hop in high school, and Beats Rhymes & Life functions reasonably well as a commemoration of the group, and extraordinarily well as an exposé of their unfortunate fallout. The personalities of all four members of the group come across vividly, giving further vibrancy to the music they created (which in any case remains among the most creative and exciting ever made in the rap world).

The documentary form should conceivably excel at characterization, offering real-life figures the chance to shape their own narratives onscreen; more realistically, though, documentary filmmakers shape these narratives form them, and sometimes end up neglecting the personalities of their subjects with a dreary obedience to traditional narrative form and an overly literal pursuit of objectivity (provided, mundanely, by an assortment of talking heads or an over-reliance on archival footage). Beats Rhymes & Life avoids the pitfall that many documentaries succumb to, especially music documentaries—it does not always strive for an objective portrayal of the facts, instead relying upon its own electrifying cast of characters for a certain account of the facts. It's a human drama, and it never tries to pretend otherwise.

This becomes especially clear in the case of Ali Shaheed Muhammad, the group's DJ, who remains a cypher throughout the film. This could have been a drawback if it had been a deliberate attempt on Rapaport's part to foreground the two larger-than-life MCs. But Muhammad is given numerous chances to speak for himself and, instead of giving in to the vicious rivalry erupting between Q-Tip and Phife Dawg, remains neutral, peaceful, respectful and admiring of them both. He is, as Phife's wife notes at one point, a friend unfortunately caught in the middle; when Mary J. Blige showers praise upon Muhammad and A Tribe Called Quest at one point (he's helping to produce one of her albums), he simply smiles, somewhat sadly, aware that they've made incredible music and have degenerated into a squabbling family. The most powerful moment in the movie may be a candid shouting match between De La Soul's Posdnuos and Q-Tip in a backstage room at the Rock the Bells tour; while the two musicians lament what A Tribe Called Quest has come to, the camera happens to pan across Muhammad's face—then stays there. The two outspoken men remain off-camera as Muhammad stares at the ceiling, obviously frustrated but saying nothing. He appears oblivious to the fact that the camera is recording him, which, maybe, is why he offers such a humane and subtle expression of annoyance and sadness. Like Q-Tip and Phife Dawg, Muhammad exhibits a lived-in, vivid personality that remains unknowable, and it's a testament to the movie that it respects his privacy, never trying to pry from him a testimony he wouldn't otherwise give.

After all of this candor, this unflinching study of a group in dissolution (and from a diehard fan, no less), the ending of Beats Rhymes & Life seems to stumble a bit. The movie does not conclude with the disheartening Rock the Bells tour in 2008—an epilogue actually picks back up in 2010, when a seriously ailing Phife discovers that his wife happens to be a perfect match for the kidney transplant he needs to survive. An excellent (and surprisingly powerful) scene in the hospital shortly before Phife's operation reveals to us that Q-Tip sent a brief text message to Phife (which remains unseen to us)—nothing elaborate, just an amicable reaching-out, wishing him luck with the transplant. I wish the movie had ended here: on a note of optimism, with Phife realizing how blessed he is with a loving family and recovering health (and hinting towards the reconciliation that Phife and Q-Tip may still work at).

Instead, the documentary follows A Tribe Called Quest as they reconvene for one last tour (this time in Japan). As the group plays to sold-out stadiums and (somewhat absurdly) practices their choreography at rehearsals, Rapaport seems to suggest that the magic has been recaptured, that A Tribe Called Quest may be in the middle of their comeback. (An onscreen title even informs us hopefully that Tribe still has one record remaining on their original contract with Jive Records.) I understand (and sympathize with) Rapaport's desire to celebrate the group's reunion, but a lot of onscreen evidence in this last sequence simply doesn't support it. When Phife and Q-Tip initially meet again, for example, they nod tersely and embrace briefly; then Tip simply walks away to shake hands with Muhammad. Some canny editing tries to convince us that the group's Japanese tour is as electrifying as their original shows in the early 90s, but we're not fooled: the group obviously (and inevitably) just doesn't have the spark they once did.

But even if the end of the movie's rose-colored optimism is unconvincing (and too self-conscious), we are still reminded of the heights that hip-hop can rise to at its best, and we (arguably) also realize that no rap group since Tribe has come close to matching their playfulness, their eccentricity. Indeed, by trying to make Beats Rhymes & Life appeal to everyone imaginable, Rapaport may have made a documentary that's almost too streamlined for this one-of-a-kind group. (Imagine, for example, a film that would have played on the level of “Check the Rhime” for 100 minutes.) But, as mentioned before, Beats Rhymes & Life is trying to tell a larger-than-life human drama, not blow your mind with some Sun Ra-ish fantasia, so I suppose it doesn't make sense to criticize it for being overly conventional. Earlier masterpieces like Scratch and Style Wars—the two best movies about hip-hop ever made—strike an extraordinary balance between mass appeal and one-of-a-kind, mind-bending styles; Beats Rhymes & Life manages a feat that's nearly as impressive—fleshing out the human drama behind one of the most legendary groups in the history of rap.

New Releases: 'The Future'

The release of Miranda July's The Future (her second feature film after 2005's Me and You and Everyone We Know) has re-instigated the common critique that the writer-director is too “twee,” too “precocious,” or too “quirky,” especially for the emotional sweep and the thematic heft that she's attempting. As in 2005, July's haters have come out of the woodwork, and there's a trace of sexism in many of the criticisms heaved her way. (David Edelstein's review in New York Magazine claims that July has a gift for going back in time and evoking the “helpless little girl she once was,” for example.) After all, July's style doesn't really seem much more precocious than Wes Anderson's, although the two directors get varying degrees of mileage out of their hermetic worldviews.

The quirkiness of The Future (like that in Me and You and Everyone We Know) is a double-edged sword: at times it comes off as too self-conscious, as its own form of empty showboating, but without this brand of daffy eccentricity neither movie would be as singularly effective. I still detest the scene in Me and You in which the adorable little boy and the frigid art curator meet on a park bench as the music swells, realizing that they've been exchanging bizarre scatological come-ons with each other in an online chat room. But this same little-boy character and his frizzy-haired precociousness also make for the movie's overwhelming final scene, which stems from a concept that could be deemed “cute” but which strikes us with its wide-eyed curiosity with the world and its subtle interconnectedness with what has come before it.

Similarly, much of The Future threatens to be unbearably quirky. Its two main characters are melancholy, awkward wannabe-artists (July's Sophie and Hamish Linklater's Jason) who speak in deadpan non-sequiturs. They are mortified by the prospect of adopting an aged cat with renal failure, though they've committed to adopting it and have about a month to fret about their mortality and impending responsibility before they can take the cat home with them. Said cat, named Paw Paw, sporadically narrates the film's proceedings in warbly monologues (delivered by July herself), accompanied by adorably DIY shots of enormous cat paws nudging their way across crumpled newspaper. This isn't even to mention the liberal sprinkling of melancholy surrealism spread throughout the film, such as a talking moon with the voice of a gentle old man offering sage life lessons, a cherished T-shirt crawling its way across Los Angeles to be with its former owner, or a little girl who buries herself up to her neck in her backyard simply, it seems, to dabble in some attention-craving performance art.

This last scene is probably the weakest in the movie: the little girl is so nonexistent as a character in the film that her stunt has no discernible emotional or thematic value. True, this little girl is the daughter of a middle-aged man with whom Sophie initiates a desperate affair, so the stunt can be rationalized: just as Sophie callously throws herself at a stranger in an attempt to escape her mundane life, so does the little girl submerge herself as a way to express her vague dissatisfaction with her home life. I guess. Thing is, we have no way of reading the daughter character, so this sequence comes off as nothing more than yet another off-kilter gimmick on July's part.

Most of the other set-pieces in the film are, thankfully, more effective. In particular, Jason's inexplicable ability to stop time—especially after he discovers Sophie's infidelity (in a way)—is a powerful illustration of his fear of aging and his debilitating emotional fragility (and makes for the most beautiful image in The Future, as Jason eventually must push and pull the ocean's tides back into motion in order to kickstart time). And the aforementioned crawling T-shirt, once it finally finds its way back to Sophie, emboldens her to finish the dance she's been trying to perform throughout the entire film—an idea which probably sounds insanely corny but which is actually hauntingly beautiful, as July gyrates and contorts herself painfully from inside the folds of the fleshy yellow shirt. The Future has its weak moments, to be sure, but it has many more strong points—strong because the absurdity is so attuned to the fears and delusions undergone by the two leads.

In many ways, Sophie and Jason are unlikeable, self-obsessed, immature idealists. They simply expect life to lead them in the right direction, and are so naively convinced of the beauty and creativity that they have to offer other people that they are baffled when they are unable to spontaneously create it. That sounds like the kind of creative block that artists in particular suffer from, but July suggests that it's really a problem shared by her (and my) generation: late-twentysomethings to forty-year-olds, who may be so overwhelmed with what's expected of them (find a job, start a family, make money) that, at some point, they give up and simply allow time to run its course. This isn't to excuse them: it's an irrational form of irresponsibility, and if Sophie and Jason stayed this way throughout the whole film, The Future would be unbearable. In some ways, though, July's film actually seems like a condemnation of people who are perpetually precocious, desperately whimsical, obliviously flighty—the very traits for which July is typically criticized. But both Sophie and Jason do genuinely seem to go through transformations, and while genuine character arcs seem increasingly hard to come by in modern (American) movies, it's something almost effortlessly (and indelibly) achieved by July in The Future. Sophie, desperate to give her life a violent jolt, does so recklessly, maybe self-destructively—afraid of complacency, she embraces the first impulse that comes to mind. Jason, meanwhile, is initially horrified at encountering the truth, at making discoveries about himself or the world around him—until he ultimately relents, submits to it, and gives in to hopeless defeatism. When both characters' overwhelming flaws re-intersect with the life of Paw Paw, that talking cat finally turns into something meaningful, genuine, and surprisingly heartbreaking—in other words, cutesiness shattering apart into a harsh, unavoidable truth. Finally, the end of the movie finds both characters at a turning point: aware of their own weaknesses, trying to decide whether they should remain imprisoned in their own insular worlds or actually try to change them through their own actions. Assuming July actually is as precocious or twee as everyone accuses her, we might read The Future as a self-reckoning (or, just as admirably, a direct and emphatic rebuttal to her critics): for those who think life is a wonderland full of affectation, time will prove you devastatingly wrong.