"if you don't I shall cut my throat or go to the pictures"
« J’apprendrai que les lys sont plus beaux que les roses,
Et que le chant a moins d’infini que les pauses… »
“I will learn that lilies are more beautiful than roses,
And that song has less of infinity than pauses…”
— Renée Vivien, “Ainsi je parlerai”
The distinction between the fictional narrative of two femme lesbians, white and conventionally attractive, engaging in an aestheticized and eroticized pulp fiction pastiche and the subjects of the interviews, of many races, sizes, gender expressions, telling their stories about their encounters with pulp fiction and gay bars and comings out and families and beliefs — the former is pleasurable, facile, even perhaps important for those who can’t access the latter (indeed the film acknowledges the isolation midcentury lesbians faced, the “silence of our lives”) — a sort of autocritique of a film, where the good and the bad cannot be untethered.
I skipped DRIVE-AWAY DOLLS on the basis of the trailer which made it look not only tacky, but boring. HONEY DON'T! makes me think I might've been wrong to prejudge. What's immediately apparent here is that all the sharpness and punch of the Coen Brothers films are at least in part due to Ethan (and/or Tricia); this film, for all its languorousness and frayed ends is precise, beautifully so. At times, one senses that Ethan's real problem is a lack…
The anti-INHERENT VICE, a film about hating a place and being afraid to make connections. The allure of Chère is her exoticness (she rhymes with the Hula girl whose skirt she sends a gust through when she zooms past in her motorcycle; her swim in the lagoon at the beginning and appearance poolside bookended by her appearance in the final scene with palm trees painted on a wall behind her), her mystery, her absence of interiority — compare to the…
