Mother!: a Gothic parable
Darren “Black Swan” Aronofsky’s latest metaphysical conceit, Mother!, may be many things, but a serious example of cinematic storytelling is not one of them.
A showcase for the bovine beauty and monochromatic facial expressions of his current girlfriend (and star) Jennifer Lawrence, yes. A comprehensible film, no.
It seems that Aronofsky has delusions of mythic grandeur and has used Lawrence’s open-mouthed sense of wonder to convey some of it. Caveat! Lawrence is on-screen 95% of the time. In big close-ups. A lot. But before you think I am simply going to slam this exercise in self-indulgence, stick around. There are a few cinematic thrills in Mother! worth noting.
Assuming that you have either seen this, or don’t plan to stream/rent later on, I will reveal the way the film’s set-up.
We begin with a nameless couple—he’s a celebrated poet with major writer’s block (Javier Bardem), she’s a much younger, perfect wife restoring his enormous country mansion that once burned down and now needs work. He prowls around the house, slamming doors and ignoring the beautiful wife. She applies paint samples to the wall and drifts around in nightgowns.
A knock at the door brings two strangers into their lives (sounds like a modernist theater piece)—a chain-smoking physician with a fatal disease (Ed Harris) and his sultry, hard-drinking wife (Michelle Pfeiffer). These two inject humor and horror in equal proportions into the dull lives of our Couple. Ack! Things begin going wrong, very wrong. The couple’s sons show up, have a violent fight, and one is killed by the other. (I think you can see where this is going.).
Thanks to an unexpected sexual interlude, the Lawrence character finds herself instantly pregnant, and voila! the great poet can write again. Aronofsky guns it into high gear at this point and leaves all traces of real-world credibility behind. However, the film becomes irresistible, like a major environmental disaster or a six-car pileup.
Fans of the Poet start showing up — immediately! Somehow they have heard of his new poem. They need to bask in his genius. And he, like any artist worth his ego, needs to be adored. The Wife, now heavily pregnant, is pretty much shoved aside as his followers grow in numbers. Soon they fill the house, all wanting an autograph, and then much more. (More sardonic comedy than serious “message” if you can stomach the horrifying images.)
Before I realized how he had done it —chiaro scuro camerawork that Caravaggio would have envied, plus relentless pacing—Aronofsky fast forwards the adoration of the crowd into a stampede for relics of the great man. The wife is literally thrown aside, as the interlopers take over. I was spellbound watching this privileged world unravel, growing from a crowd, to a mob, to an armed camp, to out and out warfare, to a blazing, explosive finale.
And then, out of death, comes the kernel of life again—in the form of artistic inspiration, and the film rewinds itself to the very first frame we saw at the beginning.
Whoa! Let’s review: Is the film a grandiose eco-fable? We’ve got every possible Judeo-Christian metaphor known. God and Nature, Adam and Eve (not a nice two-some), their sons Cain and Abel, the adoring worshippers who turn their Poet/God into a cult figure and begin religious ceremonies (in the kitchen, bathrooms, hallways, you name it) that resemble the Catholic mass and finally human sacrifice. (There are plenty of grotesque images to go around.) Eden is destroyed by—you’ve already guessed it—humanity!
So it’s an environmental cautionary tale! Okay, another take might be, that Aronofsky is sending up the whole idea of artistic genius, noting that Art is simply a huge case of narcissism, and the cult of the Artist is ultimately a destructive hobby. (This is NOT a new theory, btw.)
Any way you slice it, Mother! offers little bits and pieces of something that occasionally looks cool, even insightful. These momentary possibilities fade rapidly. What doesn’t fade (other than Aronofsky’s own vaulting ambition) is the way his camerawork and sound design push into dizzying and sharp territory. The use of highly amplified ambient sounds achieves moments of poetic magic. And once she wrenches herself out of her Botticelli coma and does begin screaming, Lawrence lays on some long-overdue outrage over what’s ripping her beautiful world apart. But only a bit.
So, that’s the good news and the bad news. This film achieves nothing other than a 30-minute masterclass in cinematic style, camerawork and editing. And it does have some moments of deep, dark humor. The rest is teenage wasted. Not to mention the waste of Javier Bardem, who gives us a glimpse of his buffed behind, but not much else.
Also, there was something else new—the curtain remained up for a full 20 minutes during the first intermission so that audience could watch some of the fascinating work of moving, altering, and rearranging the key elements of the set. As stage crew—there are 57 working on this production—began altering the stage elements, two production directors explained some of the behind-the-scenes operations to the audience, most of whom stayed to watch. For some of us, this breaks the spell, but for others—who enjoy this sort of backstage revelation seen in the Metropolitan Opera HD simulcasts—it provided an invitation to learn more, and want to see more of live opera.
While the gorgeous Martina Serafin looked every inch an imperious princess—imagined by Puccini as an imperial icon of ice and fire—she, much as Nina Stemme in last year’s Met production—had difficulty, especially in the impossibly high and relentess second act aria— her voice struggling with a distracting vibrato as she attempted to maintain the difficult passages. While she regained her vocal beauty in the final scenes (except when she utterly missed the final highest pitches), she seemed to lack the clarity and unforced beauty of soprano Toni Marie Palmertree, who as the luckless Liu was given much the better music to sing. The irony, for me, was that I had come to this particular performance of Turandot specifically to hear Serafin, whom I’d heard as a fabulous Tosca (opposite no less than Jonas Kaufmann) in Vienna in May.
On the adjacent wall, Viola’s larger-than-lifesize figures strain against time and space in hyper slow motion, re-imagining the meeting (the piece is called The Greeting) among Mary, Elizabeth, and a third woman. Gracefully surging skirts, arms reaching out, hands about to clasp, faces registering surprise, delight, and puzzlement, Viola’s work—which takes time to unfold— forces us deep into and beneath the minds of his subjects.
The slowed-down movements and gestures cast digital congianti onto the image painted by Bronzino’s teacher in the early 16th century. Movement inflects stillness with layers of temporal depth. Absolutely stunning. Viola’s forensic probing of an emotion-drenched moment retrieves fresh sensations we can almost taste.
The Pontormo is triumphant, its colors brilliant as if freshly painted. A commanding palette of draped robes challenges the crimson dress worn Viola’s Mary, the magenta shawl of Elizabeth.The two works now share a secret, at once timeless and yet produced across and through time; they murmur of the same epic event. They are in league with each other. Sono insieme.
So it was with great anticipation that I took a break from operas in Vienna last month, hopped a plane across the alps, and headed for the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence. Curated with insight and largesse by Viola’s longtime collaborator and wife Kira Perov, with Arturo Galansino, the retrospective—Electronic Renaissance—honors the years Viola spent as a student and pioneer videographer in Florence. Indeed, the city opened its doors to Viola’s work, displaying pieces in multiiple sites from the Museo del Duomo to the entire Palazzo Strozzi.
Like many of you, I had seen several of Viola’s pieces years ago at The Getty, and was familiar with his technique of hyper attenuated movement. The smallest blink of an eye, or grasp of a hand—actually happening in seconds—is stretched and lengthened into many minutes. The gestures seems to develop and bloom as we watch. Time itself unfolds through Viola’s unblinking camera, and an unseen symbolic power is revealed.
The Emergence, based upon an enigmatic and solumn 15th century work by Masolino is the exhibition’s signature work, and one in which Viola documents the naked Christ figure, emerging (as in a resurrection) and also ascending from a watery death, tenderly wrapped by two women (his mother Mary and the Magdalen, as the new testament tells it).
Displaying over a period of 15 minutes, the work uses its fascinating beauty (we are always wondering how it was made, noticing the arduousness of the actors’ movements) to enunciate a mysterious truth. We are watching a familiar moment, a primal moment we know in our bodies. Yet that moment has no name. It is deeper than naming. Viola knows that. The piece is nothing short of profound, kept watch over by the original Masolino alterpiece.
Dinner of pappardelle and wild boar ragu, chased with Chianti Classico. Next morning I saw more Viola pieces at the Museo del Opera del Duomo, and was ensnared in the tragic mirroring of Donatello‘s carved wood Magdalen—a work of numbing sorrow with Viola’s Acceptance—a lifesize video of a wailing nude woman inundated with torrents of water. The carved wooden animal hides covering the Magdalen were exactly echoed by the roiling flood, a stream of slow-motion tears. Stunned, I headed back for a second viewing of the Palazzo Strozzi show. Ten dollars was never better spent.
And here I walked into my own epiphany. I moved from darkened room to darkened room on Viola’s shamanic journey. The exhibition had cast a hypnotic spell, into which I, the seeker, descended deeper and deeper until I came to the room with a piece I had known about for many years—Catherine’s Room. Five panels showing the stages of a life, the time of life (youth, middle-age, etc.) symbolized by the view of a tree outside Catherin’e window. In her youth, the tree is beginning to bloom. As she grows into maturity, the tree is seen awash with green leaves, the sun high in the sky. As she grows older, the sky outside grows darker, the tree’s leaves fall. In the final panel, we watch as she makes her bed and lies down in it pulling up the covers. The window is dark, night has fallen.
Each panel is also a video piece, so we can watch each image unfold in slow-motion time. And we can take it all in at once, embrace the entire polyptych as a whole.
The Other Place vs Home. Each has exactly what the other lacks. The foreign city has architecture, history, and the cultural depth that only a critical mass of people, talent, and creative pressure can create. [It might also offer the spectacle of Korean newlyweds posing for nuptial photos with the Uffizi in the background.]
   The small seaside town has coziness, hominess, familiarity. Its smaller size allows for intimacy, a sense of geographical mastery that comes with manageable scale. And it is home, a place one has lived in for years. It contains friends, lovers, colleagues—all those whose ideas and eccentricities help construct your own life.
The smell of frankincense that fills the high altar of a cathedral on Sunday mornings speaks to my subconscious DNA. Was I a priest in a past life? The sound of church bells, counting out the hours, calling people to prayer, announcing this or another civic event, is part of the atmospheric soundtrack of European cities. A soundtrack missing from seaside California.
Without question we see ourselves and our cultural assumptions more clearly from afar. Travel removes me from work. I leave my laptop at home. I am frugal with my emails. Here and now details tend to define each day. I visit a museum in Florence and find it filled with engaged high school groups. I visit a Monet show in San Francisco and find it filled with white-haired nostalgics. The youthful energy and passion for the arts in Europe is both encouraging (I envy the Europeans) and sad (I am brusquely reminded of the inattention to art of the past by student-aged Americans). Yes, opera is expensive, but the queue for cheap standing room is a block-long in Vienna. All young people. Outside the US, museum tickets are inexpensive and everyone seems to take advantage of the sensory feast and stimulus to the imagination provided by innovatively-curated exhibitions. And no, I don’t mean simply parading out the content of a wealthy woman’s closet and calling it an art exhibition.
I can still taste the sour cherry gelato I had at Corona’s at the corner of the Piazza de la Republica in Florence. I use “taste” in a quasi-metaphorical, quasi-magical sense. And because I can still taste it, I can still be there, feeling the afternoon sun, hearing the bells ringing six o’clock.
Soon the feeling of being in a single space, the place of “now” solidifies. It becomes firm. I am no longer far away, no longer in the midst of travel, I am back. I am here, in a single location. And the minute I feel that, I am corraled by a single here and present. And I ache for the freedom of travel. And I want to get back on a plane and expand myself into that other location. I want to double my self, my life, my days for as long, and as many as I can.