Three Films Make A Post: Practice Doesn’t Always Make Perfect

Piercing (2018): Visually heavily influenced by the classic giallo (even the one sheet has the appropriate colour), Nicolas Pesce’s film, is placed somewhere between horror, general weirdness, and a very dark comedy about the ways people navigate their darkest desires. The whole thing is classed up by having Mia Wasikowska and Christopher Abbott going through all the stylized and ambiguous motions they are supposed to go through with the proper amount of suggested darkness and mystery. As an exercise in tone and style, the film is highly successful, evoking the mental states of its characters through sound and vision; I’m just not sure it really succeeds at doing as much with this as it could, not really seeming to go anywhere.

Ella Enchanted (2004): With a script that involves the talented hands of Karen McCullah and Kirsten Smith (who can make teen comedies do really clever and charming stuff and make it look it easy) I was expecting a bit more from this mock fairy-tale version of Cinderella about a young woman (Anne Hathaway) cursed/gifted with the inability to refuse an order, living in a fairy-tale land that does it damndest to evoke The Princess Bride (they even hired Cary Elwes) but is much too beholden to randomness and genericness to get there. But then, there are three other writers listed too, so it’s anyone’s guess how much of what made its way on screen is their fault. Tommy O’Haver’s direction is competent but also corporately bland in a way that is not a good fit for any comedy, and most of the film just barely gets by on Hathaway’s charm. The feminist subtext isn’t terribly involved, and too many of the film’s clever ideas aren’t actually.

Holy Smoke (1999): This comedy/psychodrama directed by Jane Campion, in which Harvey Keitel plays a charming asshole deprogrammer hired to brainwash Kate Winslet’s character back from her love for an Indian guru is usually treated as one of the director’s weaker films, and it is relatively easy to see why, even though a weaker Campion film is still better than anything various male big name critical darlings deliver on their best days (cough, Woody Allen, cough).

But there is a reason why comedy and Campion-style psychodrama are not usually genres that are combined - they don’t really come together well at all, and the film has quite a few moments when the comedic parts and the deep, tour-de-force character exploration (wonderfully portrayed by Winslet and Keitel) seem to belong to completely different worlds, or into completely different movies. This problem is certainly exacerbated by how awkward quite a bit of the film’s humour is.


And still, even though it is sometimes a struggle to get through the funny bits, Campion’s willingness to let ambiguities and complicated contradictions in and between characters stand and explore these spaces between them while keeping the social and all that comes with it in mind is so admirable, her ability to let certain things stand unresolved because they are not truly resolvable is so great that I’m rather okay to have to fight with the film a bit.