Didn’t think I’d manage a newsletter early in the week. The heat meant that my scheduled film shoot for work was cancelled, so I found a few minutes to tap this piece out. I really honestly encourage you to watch it.
— Flies on walls. I am exhausted by filmic explorations of New York and LA because of their oppressive inescapability. You can’t readily get away from them. Sean Baker feels very satisfying to watch not only because of how he leverages shame and desperation in really interesting ways, but because — I suspect — you’re seeing his films unfold in quite un-cinematic (not-filmed) locales. Like the trailer-parks of Herzog’s Stroszek. It’s a different kind of oppressiveness. Enter Support the Girls, a film shot mostly inside of a Texan bar and grill (a sort of Hooters parody, where the waitresses – all women – wander around in scanty uniforms and have to negotiate the tensile line between seduction and transactionality). I mention Baker because Bujalski feels a little Bakerian.
— It’s a surprisingly enjoyable film, and there are really four things I want to say about it – four arenas to explore (bodily, spatial, shock, the sublime). I could give you a longer precis about the film but you really don’t need it. It’s ninety minutes long and, currently, on Mubi (in the UK, at least). I drank a glass of box wine with ice cubes in it and just let the film happen.
— First, Jennell’s nipple. The workers are up in arms against their erratic weasel owner (he’s just fired Lisa, the much-loved general manager of the bar – played brilliantly by Regina Hall). The cable is broken in the leadup to the night’s big fight. The girls try to keep the men entertained. It’s very fraught and awkward. The cable is fixed. Danyelle thumps the ceiling — intentionally — and the cable futzes out again. It’s Jennelle’s first day. She turns her back to the camera, adjusts her top, and steps onto the bar. Bending toward the men (arranged before her), she begins to pout and flirt. It’s then that Bujalski reveals her nipple, hard and pressed tightly over the lip of her bra. Shot very proximately, the scene is far-away from erotic or alluring. There’s a kind of appaling shock to this un-erogenous-yet-technically-’sexy’ body part thrust out over the cheap nylon of her pink top, the stiff edge of her red bra. Bujalski cuts to the patron’s faces — they are almost silent, mouths hung ajar not in lustful delight but a kind of appalling unease. It’s an extremely simple and extremely shocking bit of film, and does a lot to accelerate this overall feeling of angst. Sex has been blasted with bright, brilliant lights. Their silence is dreadful.
— Next, I like Bujalski’s use of roads. Frequently, we get glimpses of these huge multi-lane highways – shot flatly, swarmed with hundreds of cars. We’re reminded about the strange sterility of places such as this: industrial parks, road-side diners. Places of function and transit. Auge’s non-place as a site of existential disease. The road is like a too-tight necktie, a mechanical boundary that intensifies the sense of dislocated unreality that Double Whammies (the bar) represents. It is clean, yet mucky.
— Shock. The nipple was shocking. I also really enjoyed a very tiny moment half-way through the film. Lisa has been fired, and only now is the reality of this fact dawning. She escapes (quite stunned) through a side-door to gather herself; wiping small tears from her eyes before thrusting her middle finger at the CCTV camera — voiceless. Now, Maci — the young, chirpy hostess played by Haley Lu Richardson — bursts from the door with a confetti cannon, screaming her love for Lisa. I really hate this phrase but it felt very Lynchian. Her eruption from the door (and her quick disappearance) protrudes from the film just as Jennelle’s nipple protrudes from the film. It’s like a little thorn that you catch your eyeball on. There are a host of other narratives that flicker this way and that, structuring the emotional intensity that has brought Lisa to this place. Bujalski refuses to resolve them, to bring them to a place of clarity (problems with her husband, his depression [?], her daughter and her [it’s implied] abusive boyfriend, and the legal troubles in which they are enmeshed). The camera has a kind of verite easyness. It sticks close to eye level, glimpsing embraces and gestures over the roofs of cars and through half-obscured windows.
— Finally, I like how Bujalski ends his film. The three hostesses (all fired) attend a job interview at another bar – a huge corporate machine called ManCave. In this white-box corporate office, they ascend the stairs to the roof and drink big slugs of bourbon from a stolen bottle. The roof is brilliantly, exhaustively white. B angles his camera to capture their faces against the sky. For a moment they have been framed by something other than TV sets and plastic menus. They lapse into a kind of gorgeous silence. Then, together, they scream – a blood-curdling scream (liberatory and terrifying) from the rooftop, and then the film smashes to its credits. Another thorn that erupts from the surface of the film; beautiful and uneasy. It was really such an exciting bit of film – formally curious, nudging toward the transcendent. The screw-ballness falls away here, revealing a very tender and ambiguous fog of imperceptibility – amplified beyond its own banal locale. There is a lot of political subtext here, and it’s often very overt. But like Baker, Bujalski doesn’t foreground the discourse. It escapes being about something, or having a message. A flicker of sublimity trembles at its close. Between futility and adoration.
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