2011 Tarkovsky Prize 2nd Place: Abigail Schott-Rosenfield

HOPE IN LA DOLCE VITA

By Abigail Schott-Rosenfield

John Gardner writes in The Art of Fiction that people shouldn’t write if what they are portraying is completely hopeless. “If there is bad to be said, he [the artist] should say it in a way that reflects the truth that, though we see the evil, we choose to continue among the living.” La Dolce Vita is a film about the decadent life that many of the Italians of that time led, about what happens when people have too much money and idleness. Although many awful things occur in the film, La Dolce Vita is portrayed in a way that is not hopeless.

An example of this is the scene when Marcello and Emma are fighting in Marcello’s car. At first Emma won’t get back into the car, but then she won’t get out: “‘Where are you going, stupid? Come here,’ [says Marcello.] ‘No,’ [says Emma.] … ‘Get out of this car!’ [says Marcello.] ‘No!’ [says Emma.]” Marcello wants to be rid of Emma’s “aggressive, sticky, maternal love,” but he keeps coming back to her anyway; he leaves her on the side of the road, then comes back in the morning and ends up in bed with her. It is obvious that their love is unhealthy, but the scene is constructed hilariously. By the end of the scene, the viewer is not overcome with the anguish of Marcello and Emma’s relationship, although the sadness in the scene is clearly felt.

Marcello is a writer at heart, but he is too obsessed with “the sweet life” to realize it or to become a writer. The scene at the very center of the movie where he is working on his book is the one scene where he is trying to write for himself, putting his talents to use—but he writes hardly anything. Marcello is wasting the only time he has given himself to be a writer, but the scene is also hopeful: at least there is a brief interval where he tries to do what he is meant to do. He compares the serving girl, Paola, to an angel: in fact, the whole scene is a kind of heaven, like the eye of a hurricane. Even though Marcello writes next to nothing and goes back to his regular life fast, there has been one moment of truth for him.

Then at the end of the movie, Paola shows up again. She’s gesturing to Marcello across an estuary, making typing motions, reminding him of his true calling. But the wind is too strong; he can’t hear her. He is too far off the path of his writing to be able to interpret her signs. But after he turns away, Paola smiles. The movie ends like this, with a long close up of the little angel smiling. It ends with a remembrance of the small, good, hopeful time when Marcello was trying to be himself. Paola is still smiling after him, smiling in the face of how sad it is that he can’t see what he should be doing.

John Gardner wrote also that “every writer should be aware that he might be read by the desperate, by people who might be persuaded towards life or death.” This is not a movie that will leave you walking away wishing that you had never watched it. Although it may not be a story of bad becoming good, there are reminders in it that your own “sweet life” is there, if you are able to see it.

2012 Tarkovsky Prize 1st Place: Abigail Schott-Rosenfield

DOWN BY LAW: What Jack and Zack Don’t Have

by Abigail Schott-Rosenfield

Down By Law is not your conventional action-packed jailbreak film. The convicts’ getaway is understated: we have no idea even how, exactly, they escaped, because the film cuts from the moment the three emerge from their cell to their running full-tilt through some underground passageway. The movie centers not on the moment when the three convicts escape, but on the differences in the ways they live.

The film begins with a montage of New Orleans, backed by Waits’ music. Included in this montage are shots of Jack and Zack returning to their homes after a night out. The shots are strikingly similar. In each, the man walks into a bedroom to an apparently sleeping woman with her back to him. As the man sits down of the bed and begins to remove his clothes, the woman’s eyes flick open—she has been pretending. Roberto (Bob), the third character, is not included in this beginning, which serves to set up the fundamental similarity between Jack and Zack and the foreignness of Bob. Zack and Jack’s rhyming names emphasize their sameness, while Roberto is alien in name, speech, and what he’s in jail for (while Jack and Zack are both framed for crimes they didn’t commit, Bob confesses to having accidentally killed a man).

The first time we meet Bob, he appears seemingly out of nowhere, greeting an inebriated Zack cordially. Zack responds with a mumbled “Buzz off.” Roberto, ever willing to believe the best of everyone (and ever attempting to add new English words to his vocabulary) thinks this is a form of salutation he’s never heard, and, comically, disappears from the screen repeating it—ah, hello, buzz off, buzz off to you to—as if registering it in his internal dictionary.

This first impression of Bob’s humorous, good-natured, childlike cluelessness is the polar opposite of the first impressions of Zack and Jack. Within the first scenes, Jack completely ignores his prostitute’s lengthy monologue, while Zack refuses to respond as his girlfriend berates him for his irresponsibility, throwing various possessions around the room. Bob, on the other hand, walks up to a perfect stranger merely to say hello—and takes the opportunity to learn (so he thinks) to communicate more effectively. Bob has what his fellow escapees don’t: he takes joy in communication, the foundation of healthy relationships and of life.

The final, most striking expression of the difference between Zack and Jack’s and Bob’s ways of life comes in the scene in which Bob dances with his brand-new fiancé, Nicoletta. Within minutes of meeting this woman, he agrees to marry her, is willing to give his large heart to her entirely. As a classic romantic song plays, they are completely absorbed in their dance and in one another. Jack and Zack are excluded from the scene. They sit at the table, apart. They smile, but they are as foreign to the world of simple love as Roberto is to their commitment to being lone wolves, attached to no one.

We sense that they will never be able to enter Bob’s world. Though Bob has given them a second chance by showing them the escape route, befriending them, making sure they don’t tear each other to pieces on the way to freedom, they can never be like him. Roberto stays with the love of his life; Jack and Zack cross the border to Texas and whatever will befall them there. As the movie concludes and they stand at a crossroads, about to part, Zack holds out a hand for Jack. Jack reaches to take it, but Zack pulls away, grinning, at the last second. They laugh. Then they walk down the separate roads. They will probably never meet again. They are as alone as they were when the film began.