A LETTERED SOUL, BOOK 2- MUSINGS ON ART AND CULTURE

A SUBDUED WESTERN, BERGMAN'S PROBING MIND, WOMEN GASLIT AND HARD JOURNEYS.

FIRST COW(2019)

Westerns, by their cinematic nature, have a slow burning agency which hasn't become derivative to the present day; even though the templates of amorality and emotional recession always concur with explosive duels and mortal dangers on the frontier.

Which is why the sparse Western palette of Kelly Reichardt's FIRST COW is a welcome change of pace. It is as gentle and refreshingly serene as the languidly flowing brook by the woods or the morning wind. Something hence unusually compassionate gets under our skin, producing a haunting quality to the bond of almost spiritual amity among two men who sell edible cakes for a modest living within the 19th Century ethos of Oregon territory. This is a location that unfolds as a settlement and source of opportunity for these two quiet men.

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As Orion Lee and John Magaro mould them, they become emotionally transparent vessels who imbibe the dangers associated with the titular animal. More than the mortal danger and class heirarchies, their looks convey more than a simple friendship or even a transactional one. It's a life force that belies definitions or easy labels. Cue the second time that Magaro meets Lee at a bar, note his instant attraction to the man he once rescued from a near death experience in the wilds. He looks at him with admiration now that he's well dressed, confident and remembers his old friend. It's a curiously, transparently innocent look that recognises the idea of attraction within the same gender so beautifully without leaning over to anything resembling lust or extraneous agency.

This achievement of an intimacy borne from trust and camaraderie needs to be taken into cinematic account because that's how often it is in real life. In a world of brutality and debauchery, the leads in FIRST COW give us a retrospective look into how men should be and were, numbered perhaps among the patriarchal system of living. Yet they prevailed.

By being united in their last moments, the two pals further counter the brutality and mortal dangers of a frontier tale with something tangible. Delicate. Real and enduring. A viewer's characteristic patience will produce that effect.

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FACE TO FACE(1976)

Ingmar Bergman's FACE TO FACE was to the manner born for this cinephile and writer. Suffering from troubling thoughts of bodily siege and experiencing two near traumatic encounters of a sexual kind, I was intrinsically drawn to the psychological depth that Liv Ullman brought to her part here. She plays a woman who's professionally a successful psychiatrist. During the course of a summer where her immediate family members are out of town and she relocates to her grandparents' apartment where she grew up, she unravels. The unfinished business regarding her childhood traumas involving parents' untimely death and disciplinarian and emotional abuse by her grandmother finally catch up with her. A near sexual assault by two miscreants at her under construction house further trigger her.

Dream sequences invoke the depths of a lifetime's burden. She breaks down mentally, unable to bear that toll. Especially striking is when she imagines being physically mired by her patients, mirroring her anxieties regarding the job, and when she encounters her parents' ghosts and the darkness of being silenced by her authoritative grandmother. This sequence and her visual of being clad in a crimson dress ala The Handmaid's Tale was very striking, eerily reminding me of the suffocating nature of our subconscious finding an outlet in dreams.