Tag: coming of age

Film by Ezekiel Yu
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A black and white shot from Ermanno Olmi's "Il Posto" (1961), with 2 older men and a young man (Sandro Panseri) looking in three different directions. This film is being reviewed by poet and film critic Ezekiel Yu for the automachination literary magazine.

Rude Awakening: On Ermanno Olmi’s “Il Posto” (1961)

The young man played by Sandro Panseri in Ermanno Olmi’s “Il Posto” (“The Job”, in English; or elsewhere titled “The Sound of Trumpets”) fits an Everyman sort of mold, personality-wise, but he also—just slightly, to me—resembles a young Kafka. He has that same dark-browed, thin and angular quality to him, but also a kind of unintrusive watchfulness one might imagine the Czech writer possessed in his late teens/early twenties, coupled with a quaint naivete to his own appeal. More saliently than mere physical resemblance, however, “Il Posto” examines its bureaucracy-enveloped subjects with a satirical edge, though the film is more often than not content to simply depict rather than outright excoriate through Kafkaesque absurdity.

Such a move comfortably places Olmi’s “Il Posto” along the same continuum as the preceding Italian Neorealist movement of his motherland, and such classics as those created by Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio De Sica. Is it as good as something like, say, De Sica’s “Bicycle Thieves”? I’d wager not, as it lacks the earlier film’s emotional heft and larger societal commentary—but so do most films. Hierarchies notwithstanding, “Il Posto” might be one of the best portrayals of what it is like to work one’s first job, and of workplace culture, in general. It also manages to fit in an almost hyper-realistic depiction of young romance without cost to the film’s fleet 97-minute runtime. […]

Film by Jessica Schneider
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A shot of mother and daughter arguing in a car from Greta Gerwig's "Lady Bird" (2017)

Her Identity of Place: On Greta Gerwig’s “Lady Bird” (2017)

When you are 18, your identity resides in the past. Where you are from, where you went to school, and who your parents are. You simply haven’t lived long enough to accumulate a string of accomplishments, nor have you had the opportunity to make enough life choices to define you. So, when you are uprooted at 18 and transplanted to a university—‘Where are you from? Where did you go to school?’—these are the questions asked. They serve as a shallow introduction—a way of establishing your place—of defining you—within these new surrounds.

Lady Bird is directed by Greta Gerwig, and I was familiar with her performance in Noah Baumbach’s Frances Ha (2012), which is one of the most cinematically unattractive films I have ever seen. Shot in dingy black and white for no other reason than to evoke French New Wave, the film is typical Baumbach insomuch that you can almost hear him whispering, ‘This is a Noah Baumbach film. Expect it to be intellectual with lots of literary namedropping.’ His films are sciolistic in some way or other, but admittedly there was something about Frances Ha that made me enjoy it, despite its weaknesses. Perhaps that something is Greta Gerwig’s performance as the ambitious yet vulnerable Frances.

Lady Bird stars Saoirse Ronan as Christine, a high school senior who prefers to be called Lady Bird, rather than her birth name. The reason is never explained but we can gather that she doesn’t like her ordinary life and so this is her attempt to differentiate herself. ‘Do I look like someone from Sacramento?’ she asks. ‘I hate California.’ Her mother Marion (Laurie Metcalf) works double shifts as a nurse and she takes her daughter’s words as a slight. ‘You have a great life,’ she informs. But Lady Bird, in midst of her longing, doesn’t see it. ‘I wish I could live through something. I want to go to the East Coast,’ she says. ‘I want to live where there are writers.’ ‘You can’t even pass your driver’s test,’ Marion reminds. (Gerwig, who is from California and attended university in New York, based Lady Bird on her own experience.) […]