I Left My Arts in San Francisco

Yes, it’s a not-very-good joke.  But, newly returned from the City by the Bay,  I can’t resist pointing out San Francisco’s cultural riches, which include world-class art museums, a long tradition of support for the local symphony and opera company, and such unique venues as the  Mechanics’ Institute Library. The latter is a private cultural center, founded back in 1854, that can be joined by anyone who purchases a membership. Located in San Francisco’s business district, it is particularly proud of its chess room and frequent chess tournaments. There’s also a lively interest in film. My colleague Matthew Kennedy (whose upcoming book for Oxford University Press is On Elizabeth Taylor: An Opinionated Guide) curates CinemaLit, a monthly array of themed film-related events housed at the institute. At the moment, he’s expanding on the intersection of chess and cinema by offering a series called “Chess in the Movies.” A chess coach will join him tonight, January 5, for a screening of 1983’s terrific Searching for Bobby Fischer. The Thomas Crown Affair, with its sexy chess game between Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway, shows up later in January.

The first time I ever visited San Francisco, as a young teen from L.A., my family and I happened upon a film crew shooting a dramatic night scene outside a San Francisco walk-up. We were amused that we’d left SoCal, only to find that Hollywood had come to us. The movie was Experiment in Terror, and I know little about it, other than that it starred Lee Remick and Glenn Ford. As the title says, it was a thriller—and I’m sure the steep streets and dark alleys of the city added to what scares there were in the script. Steve McQueen of course starred far more memorably in another San Francisco movie. Bullitt (1968), playing a tough but non-conformist cop, took full advantage of the city’s topography, staging a breath-taking car chase up into the hills.

 The Sixties, of course, was an era marked by youthful rebellion against the status quo, and San Francisco was ground zero for stories of young runaways who came to the city’s Summer of Love to get their groove on. There’s only a tiny glimpse of San Francisco in on of 1967’s hugest hits, The Graduate: SoCal’s Benjamin Braddock—who finds only monkey mockery at the San Francisco Zoo—will pursue love and liberation from parental expectations mostly across the Bay Bridge, in collegiate Berkeley. But more typical of the era’s youth movies is a genre flick called Psych-Out (1968), from Dick Clark Productions (!) and the low-budget mavens at American International Pictures. There’s this deaf girl played by Susan Strasberg who comes to Haight-Ashbury in search of her brother. Of course she encounters lots of hippies (Dean Stockwell, Jack Nicholson), as well as a mysterious stoner (Bruce Dern in a really bad wig) whose delusions lead to disaster for all.

 As the Sixties gave way to the Seventies, some filmmakers thought of San Francisco as the perfect place to set a madcap romp. Peter Bogdanovich, riding high after The Last Picture Show, teamed big stars Barbra Streisand and Ryan O’Neal in a Bringing Up Baby-type story about a kook and a stuffy professor who are galvanized by the mix-up of four identical pieces of luggage with wildly differing contents. The  high-speed chase involving a stolen grocery store delivery bicycle and a plunge into the bay was intended, I’ve discovered, as a wacky homage to Bullitt. (The film ends with a cheeky reference to O’Neal’s recent mega-hit, Love  Story.)

 Adieu, Ryan O’Neal! More San Francisco movies yet to come, along with a salute to the late Glynis Johns!  (Thanks to Stan Berkowitz for prompting me to correct an egregious error in this post.) 

 

Poor Things: Barbie Goes Victorian

You’ve heard of Dr. Frankenstein, who created a monster out of bits and pieces of human beings. And you’ve heard of Pygmalion, the ancient Greek who sculpted a beautiful woman and then fell in love with her. (The story was modernized by George Bernard Shaw, author of a play about linguist Henry Higgins, who turns a cockney flower girl into a duchess by teaching her how to speak the King’s English. Of course, Shaw’s play became a beloved romantic musical, My Fair Lady, in which confirmed bachelor Higgins and former flower-seller Eliza Doolittle come together in the finale.)    

 I mention all of the above because a current hit film, Poor Things, combines elements of the Frankenstein monster with Pygmalion’s beloved Galatea. The pieced-together woman who develops into an unlikely love object first shows up in this film as a childlike innocent who can barely speak, and walks with an unsteady gait. The odd and fascinating details behind her creation are something you won’t hear from me. Suffice it to say that she calls her much-disfigured patron “God” (his name is Dr. Godwin Baxter), and that initially she clings to his every word. But her boundless appetite for life leads her to discover corners of the world—and her own body—she was not anticipating. So she’s off on a series of erotic adventures in the various capitals of Victorian Europe, portrayed via Yorgos Lanthimos’ highly original filmmaking as the most charming of stage sets. (Lanthimos seems to share with Wes Anderson a passion for fanciful art direction, but I’m convinced Lanthimos, who previously released The Lobster and The Favourite, has much more to say.)

 It's easy enough to call Poor Things kinky. Certainly it’s full of sexual couplings, blunt language, and body-revealing costumes (and the lack thereof). We certainly see a great deal of Emma Stone, who—in the innocent-abroad role of Bella Baxter—discovers both the joys and the humiliations of sex. It’s fun to remember that Stone, a producer as well as the star of this film, made her breakthrough in 2010’s Easy A. There she played the bravura role of  a smart, nerdy (and virginal) teen who pretends to be the local tramp as a way to navigate the rigid social scene at her high school. In Poor Things, the “tramp” label would have no meaning for Bella. Totally committed to satisfying her own wants and needs, she judges the behavior of others in terms of the level of satisfaction they bring to her. Still, she’s constantly evolving, learning that the bed-jumping that had so delighted her in the arms of the roguish Duncan Wedderburn (a slimy Mark Ruffalo) is not always the route to personal satisfaction.

 Bella’s path turns out to be full of men who want to control her. There is, first of all, her “creator,” the obsessive scientist eerily played by Willem Dafoe. There is Wedderburn, a sexual libertine who finds the tables turned when he falls for Bella. There’s another man who emerges late in the film, and seems to have the means to bend her to his will. All these can be said, by final fadeout, to be among the “poor things” to which the title refers. Men don’t fare well in this film, except perhaps for Max (Ramy Youssef), the gentle science nerd who loves Bella for herself.

  Poor Things is a triumph of cinematography, musical scoring, set design, and the melding of past and present. Bella Baxter is a heroine for today, a Barbie who has taken a different (but parallel) route to self-realization.