Monday, April 06, 2020

Frankness

I admit Carnal Knowledge took me by surprise: it wasn't quite what I expected from a film directed by Mike Nichols, nor a Jules Feiffer screenplay. It has some of the topography of what I think of as 'Neil Labute territory,' Labute at his strongest, which is an approach that might wear thin or stray too far away from mundane truths in search of ever stronger shocks. But Carnal Knowledge is good because it doesn't push too hard to deliver summary or conclusion; and yet it doesn't hew so close to its insular mid-20th century male psyches as to overlap entirely and be indistinguishable from them.

It's a very difficult film to sit through, but that is not a mark against it; it's a phenomenon that I associate with a lot of movies about trapping and gaslighting, e.g., My Name Is Julia Ross, Bigger than Life, of course the Gaslights.

It's so good at sketching out just how terrified everyone is, but the people aren't terrified of the same things, nor to the same degrees or ends. Furthermore, the characters lie to themselves as well as each other, and perhaps never more than when they try to tell the truth. Nicholson (in a great Nicholson role) is the kind of guy who doesn't worry about explanations. Garfunkel always plays like someone seeking permission. Carol Kane's immortal face! Ann-Margret is almost like a symbolic lever of a certain kind of woman onscreen moving from the Technicolor era into the age of MPAA frankness, and it's why her physical performance feels so uncanny, I think.


And let's not forget Candice Bergen's laughter ...





No comments: