UPON ANOTHER TIME

Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is many things: a shoot ‘em up, a buddy film, a nostalgia trip, a revisionist history, and mostly, an essay about the fickle and devastating movement of time. The film, which runs over two and a half hours and never flags, shows how times past (fictional, historical, personal) course inextricably through the present. To paraphrase Faulkner, the past is never past, even when remembered incorrectly.

As the movie, set in 1969 and framed around the Manson murders, marches towards its ugly conclusion, we spend time with three Los Angeles movie industry characters: past-his-prime television actor Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio), Dalton’s stuntman Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), and Dalton’s neighbor Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie). Each time we drop in on one we are served, in bright, lithe, brilliantly constructed flashbacks, a glimpse at the events that brought them to this point. As Tate watches herself fight in a movie, she remembers training for the stunts. As Doug meets a young television star, he relives a major failed audition. As Cliff fixes the antenna on the roof of Doug’s house, he recalls a life-altering conflict with is ex-wife. These memories flare up instantly and seamlessly, slicing cleanly through the present and then dropping the viewer right back into it. They lend depth to the main narrative without pulling it off on shaggy paths.

There has been criticism about the way Tate is portrayed here, as a glowy, speechless feminine archetype: smiling, dancing, driving on the freeway. But Rick and Cliff too are pictured mainly in small moments, many sadly domestic. We see Doug cracking eggs and making frozen margaritas, and we see Cliff opening cans of dog food and making macaroni and cheese. As a counterpoint, we witness all three of these characters in small triumphs. Tate hears a movie theater audience laugh at her on-screen pratfall. Cliff beats up an unsuspecting martial arts star on a Hollywood backlot. And Rick reshapes trite bag-guy dialogue to steal a scene. It’s in these small moments – often mundane – that they make themselves and their lives. Tate, as we see her, is young woman going about her days: running errands, meeting friends, listening to records. It’s an honorable way to depict her, or anyone.

August 20, 2019 by Nalina Moses

The richest, most expressive element of the BBC detective series Wallander might be the Scandinavian-modern style sets, which were designed by Anders Olin. They set the scene with precision, and offer deep sensual pleasure. The centerpiece is the police station in Ystad, the small city in southern Sweden where the drama unfolds, which was constructed in its entirety in a studio there. The floor where the homicide detectives work is spacious, with low ceilings and limited views to the outside. The open central space, where they gather, is lined with wood planks and furnished with gently-worn, generic (that is, non-iconic) pieces of Scandinavian modern furniture. Lit dimly, and propped with flurries of paper, stuffed birds, rusting metal desk lamps, and dying potted plants, the room evokes the strangeness and sadness of the work the detectives carry out, and that seeps into their personal lives.

The Wallander sets are a terrific contrast to the Mad Men sets, which fetishize mid-century modern design by recreating pristine, museum-like environments, including Rogers Sterling’s office and Don Draper’s apartment. In those sets every object is gleaming, unused, and bathed in brilliant white light. Compare them to the dark hardwood walls, bare concrete floor, and austere tables and chairs that furnish the Wallander police station, which suggest that these rooms have been around for a while, and that the detectives who work here have been around for a while too. Everything inside it them has a lyrical battered feeling. While open office spaces have become a design cliche, particularly for companies that want to project a socially progressive image, the set for Wallander is not about that at all. These detectives work to unearth secrets, purposefully and painfully. The common room, where everyone’s mutterings and moods spill over into everyone else’s, shows us the tumult.

Image courtesty of Ouno Design

March 01, 2013 by Nalina Moses

What’s your favorite New York City-centric Sandy meme: the Fallen Tree, the Flooded Platform, or the Dangling Crane? (I’m going with the Dangling Crane.) I rode through the storm unscathed, without even losing power, and watched it unfold on television and online. In general, still images of the storm are more powerful and communicative than video footage, maybe because the gravity of the situation isn’t undermined by the self-serving narration and heroics of local newscasters. The damage in coastal Queens and New Jersey is devastating, and images of ruined homes there remind me of press photos coming out of war-torn regions in Libya. There’s incredible violence in them. But this is nature perpetuating the violence, and we can probably expect more, and more frequent, anomalous “weather events” like this. As I heard one caller on a local radio show last week plead, we can’t continue to occupy “land that nature wants back.”

The storm brought back scenes from Beasts of the Southern Wild, which I saw several months ago, on a gentle summer afternoon. I liked the way the movie used light and sound to shape a particular physical world (damp, overstuffed, aphasic) in a way that regular movies don’t. And I liked the way the movie examined the unadorned, expressive faces of its actors, many of them black, which regular movies don’t. Beasts takes us to the Bathtub in New Orleans, a low-lying land that became an island after Hurricane Katrina. As another major storm approaches, a band of Bathtub residents defy a forced evacuation and return to their homes. It’s a highly romantic position and, as narrated by Hushpuppie, the gritty five-year-old at the center of the story, understandable. What this movie shows clearly, and the Sandy media coverage does not, is that nature has the awesome power to rewrite geography and obliterate culture. Maybe it’s something we can’t think straight about right now, as we aid the displaced and evaluate the damage. It’s much simpler to think about the Dangling Crane.

November 05, 2012 by Nalina Moses

I watched the first seasons of Mad Men fitfully; I was definitely not on board. The characters and their settings, though allegedly historical accurate, were chilling. And I couldn’t understand the popular fascination with this time period, the early 1960’s, when men were men and women were there for their delectation. But I watched the latest season (the fifth) breathlessly, caught up in every story line. The characters were stirring, and their unnaturally stiff composure and surroundings underscored the explosive distance between their inner and outer lives. People that had been grotesque caricatures to me (Roger Sterling, Joan Harris) were suddenly sympathetic, and I fell especially hard for Peter Campbell, the upstart ad agent and Connecticut family man, as he fell, swiftly and simply, in love with a neighbor. Their romance, played out in daytime trysts at the Roosevelt Hotel, was tremendously moving.

The show’s designers did a splendid job recreating a room from the Roosevelt. (Ironically, the real Roosevelt Hotel boasts that they’ve just remodeled all their rooms.) There’s something about this generic, tasteful midtown hotel room that’s especially forgiving. Because it’s not-home and not-work, it gives the characters a space where they can suspend their official identities and unfold their real selves. The room is simple, spacious and squarish, furnished with neo-colonial pieces that look downright dowdy compared with the ones in Don Draper’s Scandinavian-modern living room and Roger’s white-and-chrome office. There’s an arched upholstered headboard, a high full-size bed, a butler, and a desk. The space is flooded with the kind of soft white daylight found in Dutch paintings. It makes the scenes feel, at the same moment they’re unfolding, as if they’re being remembered. And we know that they’ll be remembered, just this way, forever, by Pete.

October 26, 2012 by Nalina Moses