Livro conta um pouco dos rígidos costumes ingleses dos anos 70

Um Experimento Amoroso*
Carolina Matos

As famosas peripécias sexuais, os rompimentos com rígidas normas sociais e o ceticismo em relação às tradições religiosas foram alguns fatos que marcaram os anos 70 no Ocidente. Um período conturbado e rico que já foi dissecado em inúmeras peças de teatro, programas de TV, obras literárias e teses acadêmicas. A Inglaterra, por exemplo, parece somar a obsessão de olhar para o próprio umbigo com a reavaliação quase nostálgica destes anos que antecederam o Thatcherismo. Nos anos 90, os lemas são a moda neo-hippie, o partido do primeiro-ministro Tony Blair tentando criar o “novo” sobre o “velho” trabalhismo e produções de TV revendo a época da boca-de-sino, em programas como The Buddha of Suburbia (“O Buda dos Surbúbios”, BBC2,1993), adaptação do romance premiado de Hanif Kureishi, que também escreveu My Beautiful Laundrette (Minha Adorável Lavanderia,1985), dirigido por Stephen Frears. Traduzido para o Português pela Editora Record, o livro Um Experimento Amoroso (238 páginas), sétimo da escritora inglesa Hilary Mantel, usa os anos 70 como pano de fundo para contar a história de Carmel McBain, uma garota de classe média baixa do norte da Inglaterra que consegue vencer barreiras sociais e conquistar uma vaga na Universidade de Londres.
Ganhadora de vários prêmios na Inglaterra, entre eles o Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize (1987), Hilary Mantel mantém o estilo cético e irônico dos seus livros anteriores, Oito meses na rua Gaza e Mudança de Clima, e os seus temas prediletos, como a perda da fé, as angústias terreais e o olhar feminino predominante e peculiar. O seu quase sarcasmo e deboche são retomados em Um Experimento Amoroso, um livro com traços autobiográficos que centraliza a ação em relatos psicológicos que hesitam entre três passados da personagem principal, Carmel McBain: a sua tediosa infância no primário numa cidadezinha industrial do norte; a batalha para obter uma bolsa e ingressar num rígido e antiquado colégio de freiras, e os seu esforços para se destacar como advogada- -rumo-a primeira-ministra na Universidade de Londres no final dos anos 60.
Os clichês desta época áurea estão todos lá, embora vestidos com uma outra roupagem: o conhecimento entre as mulheres universitárias do preço de um aborto, os ataques às “Sofias” – hoje leia-se “Patricinhas”- que queriam casar com os “Rogers”(os “Mauricinhos”) depois de formadas, e as regras rígidas da etiqueta inglesa, como as que obrigavam as meninas a não serem gulosas. Carmel acaba sucumbindo à imposição dos costumes ingleses e mergulha na anorexia, levando-a no final à tragédia. As conseqüências são uma justaposição da perda da fé à um ceticismo intelectual que não a leva para Downing Street, mas para uma casa de família.
Boa nas frases de efeito e nas descrições dos conflitos pessoais de Carmel, Mantel peca por ter uma visão demasiadamente “inglesa” do mundo e de seus personagens, o que dificulta uma narrativa mais envolvente para um leitor não-inglês. Filha de pais nascidos na Irlanda, a rígida mãe de Carmel parece resumir o estilo literário da própria autora quando diz que ela parece uma “inglesinha” de tão fria que é. Mantel nos oferece sempre uma visão um tanto superficial e distante dos seus personagens, principalmente das outras duas garotas que foram criadas com Carmel na sua cidade natal e também conseguem uma bolsa em Londres, Karina e Julianne. A primeira é descrita como sendo filha de pais imigrantes – cuja nacionalidade seria “russa”, mas nunca se sabe ao certo. Karina é o objeto do desprezo de Carmel, que prefere a companhia da esnobe Julianne, uma menina de classe média alta que a “cada dia acorda em uma cama diferente.”
Apesar de ter a intenção de desvendar as conservadoras barreiras que separam as classes sociais inglesas e tolhem a ambição feminina, Mantel se recusa a ter uma visão crítica da famosa repugnância de muitos membros da classe trabalhadora inglesa por imigrantes, e ainda o desejo de ascensão social de muitos na associação com elementos da burguesia, coisa que o ator John Cleese explorou bem no célebre seriado inglês Fawlty Towers (BBC1,1969). Em O Experimento…, a autora parece optar pelo caminho simplista das rivalidades pessoais, o que faz o ódio de Carmel por Karina ser reduzido a justificativas pouco consistentes, como o fato da menina “comer gordura” e ter pais que não falam inglês direito. A autora acaba reforçando os clichês das quais ela mesma parece querer combater. O seu livro anterior, o thriller policial Oito meses na rua Gaza(1988), também inovou muito pouco na visão que o mundo tem do Oriente Médio, alimentando os batidos estereótipos de uma sociedade feudal mergulhada em um islamismo fanático, ignorando a interação complexa e confusa de um modernismo que cresce com furor ao lado do tradicionalismo conhecido.
Em tempos de pós-feminismo, a autora parece esquecer ainda a relevância de problematizar o universo masculino, mesmo se for a título de botá-lo em xeque com o feminino de inspiração feminista. Os homens em O Experimento Amoroso ou são os “Rogers” que circulam clandestinamente pelos quartos das moças no dormitório da universidade ou são os machistas e pedantes esquerdistas do Partido Trabalhista, que não dão a palavra para as mulheres companheiras. Apenas o namorado de Carmel é individualizado, embora receba o mesmo tratamento superficial dispensado às outras meninas. Desta forma, O Experimento Amoroso enquadra-se entre a boa e precisa descrição dos conservadores costumes ingleses e dos conflitos de uma adolescente em amadurecimento, mas perde o impacto das críticas e desestimula o envolvimento do leitor por suas dificuldades em transpor as fronteiras nacionais e explorar mais os personagens devidamente interagidos com o meio social e os famosos anos 70!

* Crítica publicada no caderno Idéias do Jornal do Brasil, no dia 27 de novembro de 1999.

Smith: an icon of pos-modernity

Carolina Matos

Any criticism of Kevin Smith’s (Born, New Jersey, USA, 1971) films must necessarily be in the past tense. Viewed by many critics as an ex-auteur and independent filmmaker, Smith is that type of director that entered Hollywood after making a few original loud-mouthed, witty, sexy and hilarious films, the so-called New Jersey trilogy. His main achievement was bringing the importance of dialogue back to the core of cinema, at the expense of the camera. A fan of Stars Wars and teenage comic books, Smith was not influenced by other auteurs, like “Eric Rohmer and Jean-Luc Godard”, as he himself puts it, but rather by the likes of Spike Lee and the new Richard Linklater (of Slacker).

Averse to film theory, Smith dropped out of Vancouver Film School claiming not to have learned anything about film. Clerks (1994) popped up and changed the picture. However, Smith is pointed out by critics to be much more of a writer than a film director. Critics have compared his witty dialogue with that of Quentin Tarantino’s. Clerks was the first film of the New Jersey trilogy and was automatically acclaimed internationally by critics. It won prices both in Cannes (the Young Director’s prize) and at the Sundance Film Festival (the Audience Award Trophy). Passionate about writing since high school, Smith combined a personal tale – since 19 he used to work as a clerk in a convenience store in New Jersey – with a lewd dialogue and youth humour that resulted in the cult Clerks. The ‘story’ of the making of the film has a sense of déjà vu: it was made on a low budget of US$ 27.575, with pals Scott Mosier (producer), David Klein (director of photography) and unprofessional actors, winning in the end the 24 year-old director two prizes and a cult status as an independent author.

Centered on the sexual ups and downs of two young clerks of diverse personalities, the film has strength in its humour and original dialogues, eccentricity of its costumer-characters and in the first screen appearance of the pair Jay and Silent Bob, the latter played by Smith himself. Brought to life by friend Jason Mewes and Smith, the characters first appeared in comics that Smith produced, Jay and Silent Bob and Clerks: The Comic. Feminine promiscuity, male relationships, sex talk and discussions about Star Wars are the main subject matters of Clerks, which also provides the viewer with hilarious moments. In Clerks, the lack of a more visual sensibility can be taken up as a challenge to the argument that cinema is all about image.

Although maintaining the sharpness of Clerk’s dialogues, the next “sequence” of the New Jersey trilogy was disappointing. Aimed at a teenage audience, the mainstream Mallrats (1995) was Smith’s first studio picture. It was financed by the former Universal/Polygram joint venture Gramercy. Mallrats also starred Beverly Hills 90210’s Shannon Doherty and the American skate-boarding champion, Jason Lee. The film marked the start of the friendship of Smith with one of the actors, Ben Affleck (also of Chasing Amy (1997), who would later write, with Matt Damon, the Oscar winning screenplay of Good Will Hunting.

The funny and “politically incorrect” Chasing Amy (1997) reclaimed Smith’s authorship among international film critics. Starring the three leads of Mallrats – Affleck, Joey Lauren Adams (as Alyssa Jones) and Jason Lee (as Banky) – Chasing Amy was both a cult hit and a mainstream success. Based on Smith’s personal experience, the story explores the difficulties of contemporary liberal relationship through Holden, a young romantic hero and comic-book writer of Bluntman and Chronic who falls head over heels in love with a lesbian, Alyssa, played by Smith’s then girl-friend Joey. Like much of Smith’s films, Chasing Amy depends on the formula of two guys talking bluntly about sex and making dick jokes, but it is his most serious work to date. Alyssa and Banky’s duet about injuries incurred during cunnilingus and the riffs on Star Wars mythology during the initial comic conference are some of the film’s high points. The characters Silent Bob and Jay are there again, with Bob (Smith) telling once more the ‘moral of the story’ and explaining the film’s title.

Chasing Amy opened definitely the doors for Smith to go to Hollywood, but for radical critics it seemed to signal to the end of his author career. Arguably, Smith has not been as successful yet as a director in Hollywood. As executive-producer of Good Will Hunting, he managed to win his friends Affleck and Damon an Oscar for the screenplay of the film, but his new piece Dogma (1999), seen as a clear departure from his relationship movies, has not been acclaimed either by the mainstream or cult critics and has actually been attacked for its senselessness and lack of consistency.

Caught between the bitter line of Hollywood big blockbusters and an alternative point-of-view of questioning religion, Dogma tries do to both and ends up doing neither. Starring the same group of “friend-actors” of Smith’s last films - Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Jason Lee and the funny duo Jay and Silent Bob, the only ones who manage to add some laughs to a humorless piece -, Dogma stands heavens away from Godard’s Je vous salue, Marie, Bergman’s The Seventh Seal and Scorsese’s Last Temptation of Christ in terms of intellectual and insightful criticism of religion. The appearances of Linda Fiorentino and even of the icon of 90’s rock music Alanis Morrissette as God do not save the film from an inevitable catastrophe.

This intended satirical religious tale that proposed to discuss the loss of faith of mankind ends up sounding more like a teenager’s joke with its confusing and apathetic story of two angels who attempt to re-enter Heaven and see in the creation of a new church in New Jersey their chance, although on their way they go around killing people in the name of morality and are finally stopped by a black apostle, a descendent of Jesus Christ and the dirty-mouthed Jay and Silent Bob. The film created more of a polemic with The Catholic League watchdog and with Disney distributors than it did with critics, who were more agitated for considering it a bit of a flop in comparison to Smith’s earlier cult work. It is not surprising then that Smith’s future as an independent filmmaker, or of a Hollywood director that has not defined consistent strategies of work, stands on edgy ground.

Filmography (as Director)

Clerks (1994)

Mallrats (1995)

Chasing Amy (1997)

Dogma (1999)

Spike Lee: the angry voice of America?

Carolina Matos

Spike Lee (Born, Atlanta, Georgia, USA,1957) has been elected the angry voice of America by the mainstream white film industry and press. Polemic and self consciously radical in his commitment to an interaction of black nationalism with social realism within a style that has been deemed by lazy critics as a ‘MTV’ video production orientated one, Lee fixes his gaze on alternative black representations within a Brecthian and Jean-Luc Godard nuance and a folk-jazz, hip-hop, rap and youth urban culture aesthetics. Lee goes against the grain of the balanced filmmaker, stuck between action and emotion. Positioning himself midway between didacticism and dialects, Lee has challenged Hollywood with representations of black American life in the US, contributing to the treatment of race in the film industry as a living organism rather than a frozen entity and putting in the limelight films of other black directors, such as Jonh Singleton’s Boyz N The Hood (1991) and Mario Von Peeble’s New Jack City (1991).

Son of the respected jazz musician Bill Lee and of an art teacher, Jacqueline Lee, Shelton ‘Spike’ Jackson Lee studied mass communications at Altanta’s Morehouse College, where his father had been a classmate with Martin Luther King. The nickname ‘spiky’ was provided by his mother for his brusque character even in infancy. Spike Lee was introduced to film-making at the New York University, where he won the Student Academy Award prize for his project Joe’s Bed-Stuy Babershop: We Cut Heads (1983). His first student film was Answer (1980), a reverse of Griffith’s classic The Birth of a Nation (1915), which Lee claims was criticised by his teachers.

She Gotta Have It (1986) was Lee’s first feature film. A comedy, the film was about a young black female ensconced in a menage a quatre. It also highlighted the sexual stereotypes shared among black males. Directed, scripted and starred by Lee, the film was shot during 12 days with a low budget of US$ 175,000 dollars and won the best new director prize at Cannes. The exposure of black culture life disassociated from crime and drug-dealing within a new Afro-American semiotics of humour and style were seen as innovative. The treatment of gender identity conflicts within a race aesthetics combined with Lee’s hilarious performance as the bike messenger were some of the film’s high points. School Daze (1988) came out still in an atmosphere of hype with the director Spike Lee, seen by many as the new ‘black voice of America.’ Signalled by critics as artistically pallid and mushy, School Daze was somewhat of a disappointment in its wandering plot lines and overlong dance numbers. The difficulties of engaging a white audience were also felt in the film’s insider tone. However, the story of activism and interracial divisions in a black state college did well in the box office.

Notably, it was with the ground-breaking Do The Right Thing (1989) that Spike Lee was acclaimed internationally as a black independent film director. Do is arguably the most controversial and significant work of Lee to date. Inspired by the death of a young black man in the Italian-American community of Queens, in 1985, the film depicts the riots and racial tensions in New York. The story line centres on the pizza delivery boy Mookie, played by Spike, who works for the Italian-American Sal (Danny Aiello) in his pizzaria in the black neighbourhood of Brooklyn. The philosophies of the black leaders Malcolm X and Martin Luther King are used as competing forces which emerge in the conflicting voices of the younger generation, represented by the radicals Italian-American Vito (John Turturro) and the African-American Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn), more identified with X, and also in the older generation, represented by Da Mayor (Ossie Davis).

Do is also Lee’s most musical film: music is used as a play of competing and merging voices. Lee posits Public Enemy’s music and rap style, which have been embraced by the mainstream, as politically oppositional and revealing of racial tension, identity and social position. Music serves in Do to challenge Hollywood’s conventional approach, which rests on the intentions of pleasing a passive viewer who is made to be unaware of the music’s manipulative potential. Lee also redefines Godard’s use of the ‘jump-cuts’ in Breathless (1959) by repeating several shots of blacks, Italians and Koreans as a form of emphasising the sameness of racial stereotyping. Adopting a Brecthian approach, Lee makes use of multiple distanced storylines to explore racism sentiments among America’s minorities. Do The Right Thing was nonetheless surrounded in controversy. The film was acclaimed by progressive mainstream critics as ‘screamingly funny’, ‘astonishing’ and ‘1989’s best film’, while others accused Lee of stimulating racial violence. In spite of the hype, the film did not receive an award in the Cannes Film Festival.

Mo’ Better Blues (1990) is a strictly inferior piece, artistically rigid and with a hollow plot that does little to captivate the viewer. Starring Denzel Washington in the part of the jazz musician Bleek Gilliam, the film adepts to deal with the problems of artistic expression, which are shown to be the result of forced junior years of studying the trumpet. Like School Daze, the film suffers this time from overlong jazz numbers. The impulse of playing an agenda that identifies a moral in an interracial romance is the motif of Jungle Fever (1991), Lee’s next ‘joint.’ Similary to Do, Jungle Fever is self-conscious and dependent on artifice and impact dialogues. Again, Lee uses in both films good black actors, such as Denzel Washington and Wesley Snipes, stars which today are more identified with Hollywood mainstream cinema and action movies. In Jungle, Wesley plays a middle-class black architect who has an affair with his white secretary, the Italian-American Annabella Sciorra. Lee’s portrait of the impossibility of a successful amorous union between an interracial couple was received with disapproval by many critics, culminating in attacks of racism of the director.

First Hollywood epic about an African-American, the grandiose and symbolical Malcolm X (1992) did not live up to the polemic expectations of many whites and blacks. Deemed too tame and mythical, lacking in attempts of problematising Malcolm’s personality, the ore than three hour long film was a mainstream success among both white and black young audiences and the subject of many press criticisms. An adaptation of the classic Malcolm X autobiography written by Alex Haley, the film’s quality lies primarily in the conventional treatment if the epic genre. The outstanding performance of Denzel Washington as Malcolm and the glamourized construction of the main character as a mythical hero, rather than a complex political leader capable of mistakes, are examples of the film’s faithful commitment to its genre. Among critics, the film aroused neither favourable passions or strong attacks. This post-civil rights product, the result of an ultra-urban and neo-nationalist middle-class black American intelligentsia, raised both a priori discussions over its controversial potential and debates after its launch which seemed more interested in the complementation of its funding by African-American stars, such as Oprah Winfrey and Bill Cosby, than in Lee’s artistic and cinematic expression.

Still supported on the idea of the search for an African-American self-identity, Lee this time placed the issue within the personal sphere with the semi-autobiographical Crooklyn (1994).Although insisting that the story did not involve the Lees growing up in Brooklyn, Spike and his sister Joie and brother Cinque wrote the script based on their growing up experiences in the ‘70s. A systematic account of an African-American childhood, the film has been judged as ‘a haunting’ piece by critics, a delicate visual portrait of struggling childhood identities. A high oblique angle of the three kids when they are making their way to their mother’s funeral at the end of the film is one of these delicate moments that seems to come from the filmmaker’s memory.

In Clockers (1995) and Get on the Bus (1996), Lee experiments with changing film stock for different locales. Centring on drug addiction, street gang fights, pop music (Seal and Chaka Khan) and on the charisma of Harvey Keitel, the former follows on the old social-consciousness model of Do The Right Thing, but did not steer the passionate criticisms of Do. Nonetheless, critics where divided: some saw it as an overwhelming film, others found it unsatisfying. Get on the Bus has been identified as Lee’s most heart felt film. Delicate, instinctive and spiritual, the film uses the well-know metaphor of the journey to another town as a means of investigating character personality and development, and of calling for humanity and black activism unity. Unlike other earlier films, Get on The Bus places black women and black gay homosexuality at the centre of the narrative. This is perhaps the filmmaker’s attempt of self-criticism for centring black male chauvinism in his cinematic language (i.e. Do, Mo’ Better Blues, Clockers). One of the main characters on the bus, a prejudice chauvinistic black male that is heading with the others to a post-civil rights march in Washington, is finally beaten up by a gay activist who makes references to Lansgton Hughes and James Baldwin while giving the blows.

It is no surprise then that Girl 6 (19996) that came soon afterwards should have focused on the black female, although the mode is much more a post-feminist one and cannot be identified with any form of sister activism of the Civil Rights Movement. With a Prince soundtrack, the story is about a young female (Theresa Randle) who turns to telephone sex after many frustrated attempts of starting an acting career and ends up enjoying her job. The film’s strength lies more in the curiosity of the theme and the absurdity of the dialogues than in artistic expression per se. Following up on this revitalised ‘progressive’ approach, Lee turned his attention to documentary and to history of the Civil Rights Movement in 4 Little Girls (1997) with the help of the cinematographer Ellen Kuras. Weaving archival footage, still photography, swing-and-tilt lenses and interviews, the story investigates the emotional impact of the 1963 church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, which killed four young African-American girls and fueled further political activism. Lee’s most recent film, a discussion of killings in New York in 1977 called Summer of Sam (1999), has not attracted much publicity and is maybe one of many recent signs of the director’s present artistic instability and indefinition of his future potential.

Filmography (as Director)

Answer (1980)

Sara (1981)

Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads (1983)

She’s Gotta Have It (1986)

School Daze (1988)

Do The Right Thing (1989)

Mo’ Better Blues (1990)

Jungle Fever (1991)

Malcolm X (1992)

Crooklyn (1994)

Clockers (1995)

Girl 6 (1996)

Get on the Bus (1996)

4 Little Girls (1997)

He Got Game (1998)

Summer of Sam (1999)

Crítica de Kevin Smith

Isaac Julien