Category: movies

Nature Fantasy vs Documentary

Some people fantasize about a glamorous life in a penthouse apartment; others imagine a sprawling beach house. I have always had a dream of moving my family from our house in the country to a treehouse in the deep deep woods, far from pavement and internet, where we live off our wits and…well, the details are fuzzy.

I am absolutely one hundred percent alone among my family members in having this fantasy, so I am forced to live it out through books and movies. A few years ago, I was beside myself to hear about Captain Fantastic, which (other than the mother being dead) was pretty much exactly what I wanted: A close family, intimacy with nature and surviving on what they could harvest, grow, trap, kill. Plus, they were schooled in classic education. Plus…well…Viggo Mortensen. Once they were forced to go to the city, they pretty much lost me, but I dined out for months on the first half of the movie.

Then last weekend, we stumbled across a new documentary, Acasa, My Home, which is basically a real-life Captain Fantastic set in Romania. Though without classic education or Viggo Mortensen. A large family lives in a nature park adjacent to Bucharest, fishing and raising chickens and pigs and harvesting what they can. They were happy, but it was also not easy. They too were forced into the city, and it did not go smoothly, at least for the parents. Even the kids wanted to go back to their old home, but were not allowed for many reasons, primarily lack of education and the hygienic shortfalls of their wild life (in which they literally shared their beds with birds and pigs). Even though I rooted against the authorities, I did so knowing they were pretty much right in forcing them out of the park.

Since there was never a chance of relocating to a remote mountain top or Scottish Highland, it’s not as if my bubble was completely burst. And yet it dampen my fantasy life a bit. Documentaries can be dangerous in that way. Sometimes you just want to believe the Hollywood version.

The Weekend of the Woman

As in writing there are planners (who outline an entire project by starting) and ‘panthers’ (who write and see where it takes them), there are equivalents when it comes to creative consumption. I tend to be a planner, to have a stack of books I will read next and movies I plan to watch this weekend. For me, it eliminates the stress of staring at a wall of books (or a Netflix queue of movies). Last weekend though, I went crazy and picked movies at random. Both turned out to be great choices and, interestingly, they were an excellent double feature.

Interestingly, both movies were European. The first was a French movie called Deux (The Two of Us in English). It’s beautiful and heartbreaking, the story of two older women who’ve been in love for years, and are on the verge of going away together. All they have to do is inform the children of one of the characters.

Love between two women, as portrayed in film seems to be mostly be between younger women, either a sexual awakening or as an exploratory effort towards self-discovery. This was quotidian, real life love. The first film of director Filippo Meneghetti, it could easily have become melodramatic, but instead it is quietly moving.

Although I have the equivalent of a bedside stack of movies on my to-be-watched list, I only watch one or two a week, as I prefer reading and, though I know I could do both, I am more impatient with movies than books. My husband is the opposite — an occasional reader. He and I argue (good-naturedly) about it. He claims he can watch ten movies in the time it takes me to read a book, which is true. But I counter by saying that when I love a book (or a movie) I want to live in it for awhile. A movie boots me out after a few hours.

The second movie was an Italian documentary about the 60s supermodel Benedetta who became a radical feminist in the 70s. Her career, and her resistance to being considered a “stupid model,” are interesting but like good documentaries, there are so many layers. Underneath the glamour of the young Benedetta and the incredible poise of Benedetta today, is a son, the film maker, trying to get to know his mother. He follows her everywhere, films her sleeping and getting dressed. He hires models to reenact her iconic Vogue covers and to read from her diary.

She, who says multiple times how much she hates images, how much images lie, yells at him repeatedly but he persists. Clearly, he is obsessed with her and it makes for incredibly intimate, occasionally uncomfortable but completely engrossing movie.