This week’s big studio release, THE GOOD LIE, gives us a look at a current conflict or war starting from the viewpoint of children (and following them as adults in the US). For this new foreign film we journey back several decades to see a war, World War II to be precise, through the eyes of children over in Europe, much as in 2008’s WINTER IN WARTIME. While that was through the viewpoint of one pre-teen boy, this new film concerns two pre-teen boys, twins who share an intense unspoken bond. Hopefully movie goers will not be confused by the English translation of the title, for this has very little in common with the tear-jerker from ten years ago, although this one is pretty darn sad. Its original title is LE GRAND CAHIER, Hungarian for THE NOTEBOOK.
As the film begins we meet the twins (Lazlo and Andras Gyemant) on a very happy day. It is 1944 and their soldier Father is back on leave at the lush apartment home they share in a bustling Hungarian city. But the joy is short-lived. When Father returns to battle, Mother realizes that she cannot keep them at home. They board a train to a distant rural village where she takes the boys to the farm run by her bitter, estranged mother whom the townspeople call “The Witch” (Piroska Molnar). After a terse reunion, Mother leaves her heartbroken sons in care of their cruel, sadistic Grandmother who refers to them as “Bastards”. Over the next few months the twins decide to toughen themselves by fasting and beating each other (this perplexes the German officer that takes lives in the garden shed). Besides the officer, the twins befriend a thieving, disfigured neighbor, a lustful deacon, his spiteful maid, and a sympathetic Jewish shoemaker. As the seasons change, the boys harden as they come to the realization that they can only survive this life on their own resolve.
The film conveys the misery of occupied existence so well it almost reminded me of the old “gentleman’s club” sketch from Monty Python in which rich old stiffs, while smoking cigars and swilling brandy, tried to one up each other with tales of their terrible childhood (“Each day we’d wake up before we went to bed, trudge two hours to…”). Not to trivialize the drama, but things never seem to get better. As the story progresses we see the light seep out of the boys’ eyes until they’ve retained a permanent dead-eyed stare. This scares those who believe that twins are cursed, while others seem to be drawn toward them, as if mesmerized. The suffering is almost too much to witness, but we also see that incredible love they share. No one, nothing will separate them. We also see how war drains the life force from a town. This is perfectly presented by the cinematography of Christian Berger who paints the harsh, cold land as a purgatory on Earth. Director Janos Szasz never gives in to sentiment, instead showing us how no adversity can extinguish that spark of determination that propels them to survive, to rise up once more. The will to live fills each page and frame of THE NOTEBOOK.
3.5 Out of 5
THE NOTEBOOK opens everywhere and screens exclusively in the St. Louis area at Landmark’s Plaza Frontenac Cinemas
Where once it was the centerpiece of mainstream entertainment in the Midwest, nowadays the circus sideshow is gradually returning to the public eye as a subcultural curiosity after years of negative publicity and a rise in television, films and digital media. A major contributing factor of this growing subculture is the desire by some to acknowledge and promote an awareness and understanding of this nearly forgotten and often misunderstood part of our American history.
Writer and director Leslie Zemeckis‘s BOUND BY FLESH is a film that takes great price in doing its part in resurrecting the titillating and often taboo facts and folklore of the freak show. This documentary focuses on the lives of two fascinating girls, Daisy and Violet Hilton, also known as The Hilton Sisters. On the surface, and as always primarily publicized, Daisy and Violet had one overwhelming unusual trait… they are Siamese twins, conjoined by a ribbon of flesh on their backsides, so to speak.
Born to a mother with mental and emotional issues, to put it kindly, the Hilton sisters were essentially sold into the circus at a very young age. Throughout a life of emotional abuse, neglect and social isolation outside of when they performed, the Hilton sisters would become cash cows for their guardians/parents while having little to no exposure and freedom to the public or outside world on their own behalf. At this point, you may be asking why such a film would ever be enjoyable to watch, but wait… there’s more.
BOUND BY FLESH doesn’t just tell the Hilton sisters’ story, it tells the whole story. We learn about those closest to them, both good and bad, those they loved and the many struggles they went through. Despite all of this, the Hilton sisters maintained a mostly positive, forward-thinking and optimistic attitude toward life. Have you ever heard of such an uplifting, inspiring story of someone being given lemons and making lemon vinegar? I know. I may have lost you there. Let me explain.
With all the crap the Hilton sisters endured, with all the greed and cruelty that surrounded them, even with their charmingly — if not naive — innocence and resilience, in the end I cannot promise that everything works out in their favor. Its an unfortunate fact of life, but one that must be represented. That’s the world we live in and that’s an important element to what makes this such an engaging film.
Zemeckis does not bombard the viewer with flashy graphics or intense imagery. She doesn’t get experimental with form, but remains true to the classically functional style of non-fiction storytelling. Much in the same way so many of Ken Burns’ timeless documentaries have captured a segment of our American cultural past, BOUND BY FLESH takes two characters from that larger book and utilizes their stories to depict a much larger picture. Where many reality TV attempts have been made to revitalize the genre of the weird and bizarre, Zemeckis manages to embrace the strange while highlighting the humanity. This is not an easy thing to accomplish.
BOUND BY FLESH succeeds by combining a plethora of research, candid but revelatory interviews with past promoters, historians and a few people who were close to the sisters, some amazing photographs and even some old sound bites into one cohesive 90-minute motion picture exhibit of museum quality. From beginning to end, I found myself thoroughly mesmerized, not in that rubber-necking look at the crazy stuff way, but in a mindset of amazement. I found myself utterly shocked at the way these two girls were treated, even into their womanhood, yet awestruck by their willingness to endure and their drive to learn and grow and expand their talents and their art as performers.
BOUND BY FLESH opens in select theaters on June 27th, 2014.
The all new comedy/drama THE PRETTY ONE is in theaters now, and in support of the movie I sat down with director Jenée LaMarque and star Zoe Kazan in a small round table discussion to talk about twins, the origin of the story, and the challenge of playing two different people who have similarities. Since I am an identical twin, I was curious about the research it took for Zoe to play both twins in a rather convincing way. Check it out below.
Written and directed by Jenée LaMarque, THE PRETTY ONE is a coming of age comedy about identity and loss and a wallflower who finally learns how to break out of her shell. In a balancing act of a performance, Zoe Kazan portrays twins Laurel and Audrey, most poignantly as a relationship blooms with her new neighbor (Jake Johnson). As Laurel begins to slip into the life she has always wanted but never thought was possible, she must decide between continuing her life as Audrey and revealing herself as the perfect fraud.
Melissa from WAMG: To start out, I guess I should say that I am an identical twin…
Jenée LaMarque: Wow!
Zoe Kazan: We have an expert in the house.
Melissa from WAMG: There were certain nuances that I found between the girls which I found relatable. For example, in the car scene where Audrey is angry with Laurel for getting the same haircut… I can relate to the desire to set yourself apart from your identical twin. I’m curious, how much research did you do when looking into the relationships of identical twins?
Jenée LaMarque: There were two parts to that. One was researching twins who have lost their twin, and what their experience had been in that process. There was a book that I had given to Zoe about first hand accounts about twins that had lost their twin at birth, or during childhood, or later in life, or when they were very old, and what their process was. So, there was that, and then there was also this great series of videos by – I’m sure you would love this – Candice Breitz. She’s a South African artist. What she did was she took identical twins and she interviewed them in the same location, in the same clothing, and asked them the same questions…
Zoe Kazan: … but separately.
Jenée LaMarque: … but separately.
Melissa from WAMG: Really?
Jenée LaMarque: Yeah, and then she spliced it together. It gives me goosebumps just thinking about it, because it was just really informative about how they form their identities based on the way that people would label them…
Melissa from WAMG: Absolutely.
Jenée LaMarque: … and in their lives, how they have to struggle against that. People would make these physical assessments of them to their face because they are searching for the differences between them so that they could differentiate between them. So yeah, we watched those. You should watch those and share them with your twin.
Zoe Kazan: They are really beautiful. They’re interesting to me because I have a sister that I am really close with, so there was a lot that I thought that I could instinctionally understand because there is this sibling that I am so close to, but there was this ocean of stuff that I thought was completely different. I was trying to come to that from an empathic place. You know, I was trying to understand what it’s like to grow up with someone that people would make assumptions about, and be looked at a certain way that I needed to understand before taking that leap.
Q: Did you have many rehearsals?
Jenée LaMarque: We did. The beginning of rehearsal was just us meeting. Six months before we started shooting we started meeting, and she’s like “Let’s go through the script like I’m a six-year-old”. We went through every single sentence and every single line to make sure we understood the intention and were on the same page. We were very much on the same page with that. Then we had rehearsals with other actors for about a week. Mostly surrounding her relationships with each of the other characters in the movie – including the body double that she ended up acting against in the scenes where she was playing both characters.
Melissa from WAMG:What made you decide to tell this story? What is the origin of THE PRETTY ONE?
Jenée LaMarque: Well, it was a confluent of several things. One was the loss of my best friend in my early 20’s. He died the week that we graduated college. You know, that’s a very unsure time in someone’s life. They just graduated. They don’t know what they are going to do with their life. It’s unsure, and then on top of that there was this great loss, and I, sort of, came of age through that loss in my 20’s – through the lens of that loss. He was a really funny guy – a hilarious person. He had cystic fibrosis, and so, the whole time I knew him he was dying essentially, but he had the most amazing sense of humor, and was dark, and morbid. So, I wanted to tell a story about the loss of someone close, and to me, this is the extreme of that circumstance. Losing your identical twin. Someone that you have been with since inception. But the story is essentially a coming of age story. Coming of age and learning to value yourself through loss. It sort of came though a very personal experience, even though it’s not directly autobiographical because that didn’t happen to me, but it’s true to my experiences as a young woman. That’s sort of the genesis of it. And I wanted it to be comedic. I wanted it to be a comedy because that’s just my sense of humor, and the way I sort of look at the world.
Q: Can you talk about casting a little bit, and what you found in Zoe?
Jenée LaMarque: Yeah. I think in that lead role, for me, it was important for that person to audition. It was such a tall order for a performer that I felt like, for my first film, I needed to have that insurance that they could, indeed, do it. It took about six months to cast the role, and I met with a lot of really wonderful actresses that auditioned, and it just never felt right. We were getting closer to when we wanted to start shooting, and we knew we needed to make a choice, but we were bummed out because we knew that we hadn’t met the right person. Then Zoe was in New York, but happened to be in LA for the week. I was really excited when they said that she was coming in because I had seen her work before. As soon as she walked in, that feeling of “your character is in the room with you” washed over – that intuition of “Oh, here she is!”. The thing that seemed so hard to cast was actually very easy. It wasn’t like we were just mulling it over between two people. It was “We need her and we will do everything that we can to get her!”. She just really nailed the tone, and brought – she’s a very gifted physical comedian. I knew, right away, when she came in.
Q: Zoe, what was your impression of the screenplay when you read it?
Zoe Kazan: I thought that it was unlike anything that I had read, which says a lot because we [as actors] read a lot of scripts. Sometimes people don’t write from their true voice. They are writing to get their script sold, or their movie made. They have an idea of what they think might be successful. I felt like this was Jenée’s real voice. I felt like I was meeting her by reading it on the page. I was very curious about who the person was that had written this. I didn’t feel like it unfolded for me in the first read, which was also a great feeling. Sometimes when you read something you think “Oh, I could act this tomorrow!”. That kind of project is more challenging because you can get bored with it really easily. The idea of reading something and going “I don’t know how I would do this” was really intriguing to me, and exciting.
Melissa from WAMG: What was the biggest challenge of playing two different people with similar personality traits? How did you balance the two characters?
Zoe Kazan: It’s interesting to me that you think that they have similar personality traits. I also think so, but I think that they are handling it in different ways. I think that Audrey has buried Laurel inside of herself. When we first meet her, she has taken all of the parts of herself that are awkward, or self evasive, or self loathing, and she has buried those deeply inside of herself. But, she’s not a perfect person, and she is having a lot of difficulty in her own life which we kind of fleshed out as we talked about it to give me a really strong sense of who she was, because you learn more about her over the course of the movie, but when we first meet her we see her through Laurel’s eyes. I think that Laurel is someone who has a lot of Audrey’s vivacity, and life-force, and confidence somewhere in herself, but it’s trapped underneath all of these layers of the roles that she has put herself in, and that her family has put her in – the way that she sees herself, and the way that the world has reinforced that sort of label. Unfortunately, I think that Audrey dies before she becomes a whole person, but then Laurel has this big journey where the parts of her that, I think, are like her sister get to come out. Allowing those parts to come out, she breaks free of this load that she’s carrying around. I think that the best way to approach that, for me, was to do so really technically. We talked about very basic physical differences between them, about the way that psychology has affected their bodies, how they carry themselves in the world… which is also what I saw in those videos that we mentioned earlier. Even though these were two people that were physically identical, they didn’t look physically identical to me because of the way that their personality came through… which is really interesting because that is, kind of, how I think about acting. It’s the same vessel every time. It’s you. It’s your body. It’s your emotions, but you’re putting it though this sieve, this different part that reshapes you. I think that I look very different from part to part based on what that part is, and what it requires. It’s not just hair and makeup. It’s also that characters spirit. It changes the way you look, and the way you look to the camera. I think I thought about it more as constructing these two separate people rather than trying to think of them as always in comparison with each other.
Our favorite twins, Melissa and Mindy are having a birthday tomorrow March 3rd 2009..so what does that mean for you? Leave some comment love below and wish them a super happy birthday.
