Techno Clash: Bingham Bryant and Kyle Molzan

For the Plasma (Bingham Bryant and Kyle Molzan, 2014)

For Fandor, I interviewed the makers of For the Plasma. Among other things, we talk about technology, the relationship between filmmaking and cinephilia, and Keiichi Suzuki. 

About a year ago, I wrote about Bryant and Molzan's film. You can find my post here. 

Mistress America x 3

Inspired by Jonathan Rosenbaum's "A Few Ways of Looking at Midnight Run," and a product of my time in a course on film criticism taught by Richard Porton, here are three complementary takes on Noah Baumbach's Mistress America (2015).

******

Review # 1

In which Noah Baumbach embraces genre and creates his best work yet. Call it screwball, call it neo-screwball, call it whatever, but his latest film has a level of stylization that infects and melds well with his metropolitan sensibility. He uses his acrid temperament in a comedic register, creating not only laughs, but discomfort as well. It’s the B-side and the better side of Frances Ha.

Tracy (Lola Kirke) is off to college. She arrives at Barnard and isn’t getting into the whole college experience. Save for a guy (Matthew Shear), whom she has a crush on in her English class, she has no friends. Her mom suggests reaching out to the daughter (Greta Gerwig) of the husband she’s going to marry. Reluctant at first, Tracy calls Brooke, and they hit it off. Brooke acts like a big sister, as well as a debonair, jack-of-all-trades. Tracy tags along with her as Brooke tries to get her hip Williamsburg restaurant off the ground.

“You make me feel really smart,” Brooke says about having Tracy around. Meanwhile, Tracy writes a lightly fictionalized version of Brooke in her short story, “Mistress America,” that she submits to her school’s literary journal. This is a film about the influence of friends, and how, taking advantage of such intimate relationships for art or for life, can potentially rupture them.

As with his prior work, Baumbach prioritizes language, character, and character development in his aesthetic. Phrases such as “get out of town sister, and “you got a honey,” point to the shrill, odd, synthetic quality of the script, as synthetic as Alan Vega crooning “Dream Baby Dream” on one snippet of the soundtrack. Characters speak like pop culture-literate teenagers, delivering dialogue with little to no pauses between sentences, which reaches an apotheosis with a surprise trip to Greenwich, Connecticut.

Review # 2

Mistress America is another film infected with the tics of American independent cinema of the Joe Swanberg and Andrew Bujalski variety: a richness in performance and character development at the expense of formal experimentation with, among others, camera movement, mise en scène, editing, sound. Unlike, say Patrick Wang or Nathan Silver (indie filmmakers working with even smaller budgets), these directors render inconsequential many formal elements in order to prioritize their characters. There’s more to cinema than characters and plot! When it comes to aesthetics, indie cinema is conservative cinema.

In terms of conservative cinema, this one is pretty good, for Mistress America is a film that pushes the formal elements it values to abstraction. Characters deliver lines in staccato. Editing, at one point, mimics dialogue volleys with a rapid-fire shot-reverse-shot. Baumbach makes the language in the film punchy, odd, and a bit synthetic with lines like “get out of town sister” and “you got a honey?” which only makes the dialogue more noticeable. Critics are labeling this as a screwball, but to this reviewer, Nineties indie cinema is Mistress America’s reference point. It falls somewhere between Hal Hartley’s telegraphic and Whit Stillman’s acerbic lines.

While the narrative structure is conventional (segmented into three acts bookended with a prologue and epilogue), Mistress America has a whirlwind flow to it—no doubt due to its editing and use of language—a rhythm reminiscent of Frances Ha, but without that former films sense of stifling torpor tied to its subject matter.

Mistress America is another Baumbach film in which upper middle class privileged (mostly) white people make up the cast. They spew pop cultural references as a way of making themselves intelligent. It’s a “first world problems” film about friends taking advantage of friends by using their relationship for art fodder. Baumbach seems critical of this, satirizing it by having all his characters speak like perky posturing high school teenagers.

Review # 3

With Mistress America, once again, Noah Baumbach crafts a comfortably, secretly middlebrow film that’s palatable for general audiences. Once again, he’s created a wordy film, chock-full of “nuanced” characters. He’s made a film that’s catnip for critics. Mistress America graces the cover of Film Comment’s July/August 2015 issue, one in which you can find Alex Ross Perry—another wordy, critical darling—interviewing Baumbach. Richard Brody calls the film a “masterwork” three times during his gushing New Yorker review. And once again, Baumbach makes a film that ignores the cinematic in cinema.

In his review, Brody labels Mistress America “literary cinema,” and “a work of brilliant writing, one of the most exquisite of recent screenplays.” Fine. I’ll add that it’s the best Baumbach film that I’ve seen when it comes to language, toying with its plasticity and rhythm.

One critic’s literary cinema is another’s conservative cinema. The film follows an uninspired, conventional narrative structure: three acts along with a prologue and an epilogue. A fresh-faced student, Tracy, (Lola Kirke) is bored during her first days of college. She hooks up with her soon-to-be stepsister, Brooke, (Greta Gerwig), a jack-of-all-trades and woman-about-town 30-year-old looking to start up a Williamsburg restaurant. Mutual inspiration ensues: the student writes the sister into her short story, and the sister gains confidence to pitch investors on her restaurant idea. The friendship strains, however, once it’s revealed that Tracy’s using Brooke for art fodder.

The story is fine and dandy, but where are the visuals? Like countless other American indie filmmakers (notable exceptions include Patrick Wang, Bingham Bryant and Kyle Molzan, and Nathan Silver), Baumbach suppresses experimentation with camera movement, mise en scène, sound, and editing in order to amplify narrative, character, character development, and performance. Baumbach is a modern day Joseph L. Mankiewicz and Mistress America is his All About Eve.

The Circular Square (For the Plasma, 2014)

Helen (Rosalie Lowe) lives in a big house off the coast of Fort Clyde, Maine, a location that is seemingly cutoff from the rest of civilization.  We see another woman, Charlie (Anabelle LeMieux), moving into the house at the beginning of the film.  Charlie is Helen’s research assistant.  Their daily work consists of Helen looking at CCTV monitors that display images of the woods that surround the home.  Meanwhile, Charlie spends a day, sometimes a night, going to, gazing at, and analyzing the spots filmed by the cameras.  Suspended in the air, large grey squares indicate where these spots are.  These strange goings on are all in the service of Helen’s talent for predicting the stock market just by interpreting the images of the forest.

Bingham Bryant and Kyle Molzan’s first film is a mystery.  The film knows it’s a mystery, one that’s whimsical, one with its own rules to abide and break, recalling Jacques Rivette’s Celine and Julie Go Boating.  Where Rivette’s film is loose, limber, and improvisatory, Bingham and Molzan’s is precise, cerebral, and yet tranquil.  Considering the secluded location, there are no signs of cabin fever.  Helen and Charlie stave off restlessness by the work they do.  Or, should I say, the games they play. 

For the Plasma is all about making meaning from the environment around, about converting the natural world into data to interpret.  Although different in terms of agenda, mood, and genre, For the Plasma belongs in a conversation with a recent spate of Hollywood films fascinated with data: Zero Dark Thirty, Gone Girl, Blackhat.  Where those films are epic (globe-trotting) depictions of worlds swamped in images, generating paranoia for whoever has to look and analyze them.  For the Plasma, on the other hand, is more reassuring.  It seems to say, this work, this analysis offers stability in one’s life.  Stability turns into stasis though if unchecked, if pursued for too long of an interval, then its time to leave this hermetic environment, cocooned by the familiarity of people, places, and especially things. 

Even if the film presents us with squares (monitors, screens, windows, suspended metal frames, the use of academy ratio), For the Plasma is actually a circle, a circular narrative in fact.  In one key moment in the film, one that inspired me to write this post, Helen explains her peculiar method of interpreting the market in the newspaper, circling a section with a red marker.  In turn, Charlie demonstrates how the fictionalized insect in Kōbō Abe’s The Ark Sakura, the “clockbug,” survives.  At a slow pace, the insect moves in a circle, eating its own shit.  The clockbug’s movement conveniently describes the film’s movement, with its looping structure in which Helen and Charlie frame, observe, analyze and repeat.  The square becomes the circle.