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Roundup: November 2015

A rundown of fat characters in films I saw over the past month, but didn’t post about.

Stranger by the Lake (2014, dir. Alain Guiraudie)

A French thriller set at a remote cruising spot, following Franck (Pierre Deladonchamps), who witnesses his favorite hookup Michel (Christophe Paou) committing murder.  Almost all of the characters in the film are men who have sex with men.  They are also mostly young and fit, with the exception of Henri ( Patrick D’Assumçao), a middle aged man with a beer belly who sits by himself and says that he is never propositioned for sex.  Only Franck approaches him for conversation, and their relationship remains platonic.  

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Vanya on 42nd Street  (1994, dir. Louis Malle)

This incredible film documents a group of actors who gather in an abandoned Manhattan theater for informal rehearsals of Anton Chekhov’s play Uncle Vanya, under the direction of Andre Gregory.  Jerry Mayer plays Waffles, a sycophantic and persistently cheerful tenant of patriarch Serybryakov (George Gaynes).

Jurassic World (2015, dir. Colin Trevorrow)

I noticed two fat characters before Blu Ray took pity on us and malfunctioned.  Hoskins (Vincent D’Onofrio), who Doesn’t Understand the Dinosaurs, serves as a foil to Owen (Chris Pratt), who Understands the Dinosaurs.  His goal is to weaponize the raptors for military use.  When the Indominus rex breaks free of its enclosure, one of its first victims is a fat security guard, who is monitoring the enclosure but fails to notice that there is a problem.  His death is somewhat reminiscent of Gennaro’s in the first film: paralyzed with fear and hiding behind a Jeep, he remains motionless while the dinosaur destroys his cover and devours him.

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Dennis Nedry (Wayne Knight), a fat character from Jurassic Park. Also, a representation of what watching Jurassic World feels like.

ThanksKilling (2008, dir. Jordan Downey)

A low-budget horror comedy about a group of college kids terrorized by a cursed turkey over Thanksgiving break.  Billy (Aaron Carlson) is the group’s fool, to borrow a term from The Cabin in the Woods.  He is a loose cannon redneck who makes more inappropriate comments than the other characters (with the exception of the Turkey).  He is introduced ripping his undershirt over his excitement for Thanksgiving break, to which Johnny the jock comments that he doesn’t want to see his “tits.”  Billy is the one who suggests that the group gets drunk in the woods after their car breaks down, and a research montage later in the film includes a shot of nerd Darren teaching Billy how to read.  Billy dies when Turkey tricks him into swallowing him, then bursting out of his guts.

A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence (2015, dir. Roy Andersson)

This film is a loosely connected series of static-shot vignettes that comment on mortality, morality, and human nature.  An opening sequence, “Three Brushes with Death,” feature two fat men who drop dead.  One dies in a ferry cafeteria; a second fat man takes his beer when the cashier points out that it’s been paid for and is up for grabs.  A fat dance instructor (Lotti Tornros) is inappropriately physical with a slender, younger male student (Oscar Salomonsson), running her hands over his body under the pretense of correcting his posture.  In a later scene, they are in the background having an intense conversation; he leaves her sitting at a restaurant table as she sobs inconsolably.  Another scene features a fat woman playing with a baby in a carriage.  Yet another is of a fat woman working in a laboratory, chatting on her cellphone while a confined monkey is tortured.  There is no narrative to speak of, but the most prominent characters are a pair of travelling novelty item salesman who are unsuccessful at their trade.  One of the salesman, Jonathan (Holger Andersson) is fat.  He is the more serious of the two and apparently the one in charge, describing his coworker as a “crybaby” and generally taking charge during their sales pitches.

“It’s Sick, Being a Virgin:” Fat Girl (2001, dir. Catherine Breillat)

(CN: rape)

Given that the subjects of my last two posts are films about fat kids that take place in summer, I decided to use the dwindling time that remains before Labor Day to write about a third film that utilizes these subjects.  Fat Girl is a coming-of-age story about two sisters on summer vacation with their family: chubby 13-year-old Anais (Anais Deboux) and slender 15-year-old Elena (Roxane Mesquida).

A scene in the middle of the film serves as a cypher for the central paradox of the sisters’ relationship.  Elena and Anais stand cheek to cheek, regarding themselves in the mirror.  “It’s funny. We really have nothing in common,” Elena says. “Look at you.  You have small, hard eyes, while mine are hazy.  But when I Iook deep into your eyes, it makes me feel Iike I belong, as if they were my eyes.”  The core of Fat Girl is these two girls, who contrast each other in some very essential ways, but are inexorably bound together by shared experiences.  Both are adolescents grappling with the early throes of sexuality, but their divergent appearances and ages leave them in different positions socially, affecting their worldviews.  Their different experiences come up in the first conversation we hear between them: Anais claims that boys run from her sister once they see that she “[reeks] of loose morals,” while Elena counters that boys don’t come near Anais in the first place because she’s a “fat slob.”  

The ways in which Anais and Elena deviate from cultural standards of conduct are notably different.  The Criterion DVD of Fat Girl includes an interview with Breillat after the film’s debut at the 2001 Berlin International Film Festival, in which the director describes Anais’ fatness as her coping mechanism to deal with having her body and sexuality denied by those around her.  It would be liberatory if Anais’ body could exist without rationalization, but by now, reader, I think you and I have become used to a fat body paying the admission of meaning in order to be present in a film.  Anais is frequently shown eating in Fat Girl.  When Elena meets her summer love Fernando (Libero de Rienzo) at a cafe, their flirtation and first kiss is paralleled with Anais ordering and eating a banana split, “[her] favorite.”  The girls’ mother (Arsinee Khanjian) initially defends Anais when Elena criticizes her for eating “like a pig.”  At the end of the film, however, fed up with her daughters’ adolescent shenanigans, Mother snaps at her for opening a snack after they have a meal.  Anais’ transgression is explicitly evident on her body, making her an easy target of criticism by her family.  Elena’s sexual activity, however, is also transgressively excessive by cultural standards, especially considering her age.  She is waiting to have PiV sex with someone special, but has been sexually active with casual partners.  Elena is able to have her metaphorical cake and eat it too, satisfying her desire for sex without the effects of those desires physically manifesting on her body that would open her up to criticism and judgment, the kind of which she lavishes on Anais.  

Breillat’s BIFF interview delves more directly into her philosophy of the two sisters:  “Since [Anais’] body makes her unlovable, since she isn’t looked at and desired, she’s more intelligent about the world.  She can create herself and be herself, with a kind of rebellion, certainly, which is painful, but all the same, she exists.  While her sister, to her internal devastation, isn’t able to exist.”  Her analysis reduces the characters to what they experience based on their looks, but it is certainly an applicable factor to understanding not only the girls of Fat Girl, but the majority of female film characters.  Anais desires sex without romanticizing it, whereas Elena denies her desire for sex because she romanticizes it.  Anais wants her own sexual debut to be with a casual partner who won’t have the ability to brag about deflowering her, whereas Elena seeks a partner whose love will validate her decision.  Fernando is able to coax a reluctant Elena into sex acts through hollow declarations of love.  Anais, on the other hand, playacts being a manipulative lover, pretending two ladders in their swimming pool are different sex partners of hers.  She swims back and forth between each, whispering cliche lies and practicing kissing.  “Women aren’t like bars of soap, you know,” she tells her pretend-partner, “they don’t wear away.  On the contrary, each lover brings them more.”

Anais’ sexual frustration means she observes and contemplates the sex lives of others, namely Elena’s.  Her observations are cynical, but more attuned to the film’s reality.  The audience may be accustomed to thinking of shots of Anais eating as grotesque or pitiable, but would a similar reaction be expected to the very long scene during which Fernando hounds Elena until she consents to anal sex?  Elena is too emotionally involved in the scene to see it for what it is, but Anais, who watches from across the room, is not.  The sex scenes in the film are shot from far away, putting Elena and Fernando on a stage of sorts.  We aren’t used to sex scenes looking like this; we usually see closeups of hands and faces– how Anais is shot as she tosses and turns in bed, awkwardly watching and trying to ignore the couple.  The audience is invited to empathize with her over Elena and Fernando.

Despite all the talk between Anais and Elena about sex, the act causes a rift in their relationship.  When Elena shows Anais the engagement ring that Fernando gave her as a proof of his love, Anais immediately smells a rat and begs Elena not to trust him.  While Elena and Fernando “go all the way,” we see Anais in her bed in the foreground, quietly crying.  Later, Fernando’s mother (Laura Betti)– a tacky woman who is the only other fat character– explains that Fernando stole her ring.  The girls’ mother asks Anais where Elena is, to which the girl impertinently replies that she is “not her keeper.”  Enraged, their mother ends the family vacation early.  On the way home, Anais attempts to comfort her sister.  “It’s sick that people think it’s their business. It’s sick, being a virgin,” she tells Elena, who is worried about their father’s reaction and can’t get over Fernando.

The film’s climax further parallels and separates the sisters.  Asleep at a highway rest stop, a trucker murders Elena and their mother, chases Anais into the woods, and rapes her.  Once again, the introduction of a male character demanding sex disrupts the relationships between the female characters.  And, as with Elena’s experience with Fernando, the rape is a desecration of the sex that she wants to have.  However, Anais’ reaction is to assert agency within the horrible situation.  She puts her arms around her assailant.  When the police find her in the morning, one tells another, “She says he didn’t rape her,” to which she defiantly adds, “Don’t believe me if you don’t want to.”  It’s a troubling ending; what first sprang to my mind when I saw it was how fat rape survivors are often met with disbelief or derision.  Breillat is a feminist, it would be difficult to believe that she would be dismissive of young girl being raped.  The film doesn’t excuse the attacker’s actions, but it does disturb the notion of Anais as a passive victim.  Elena’s experience was a subversion of her idealized notion of having sex (by her own definition) for the first time with someone she loved; once it became obvious that Fernando had duped her, she felt sadness and shame.  But according to Anais, “the first time should be with nobody.”  What happens to her at the end of the film should never happen to anyone, ever, but given that she refuses to describe it as a rape to the police, it seems she interpreted the trucker’s attack as a removal of the vulnerability she feared from a sexual debut with a future boyfriend.  She certainly does not want to be seen as vulnerable by the uniformed men surrounding her and her dead mother and sister.  Elena, whose appearance and ideas about sexuality conform to patriarchal values, has been destroyed by the events of the film.  But the outsider, Anais, defiantly survives.

I do agree with Breillat that being an outsider allows a critical vantage point; my own adolescent experience of feeling ostracized due to my weight was a major catalyst of my journey to become the faux-academic, buzzword-dropping, far-left feminist you’ve all come to know and tolerate.  On the other hand, Anais verges on being a didactic mouthpiece at times, and it’s undeniably problematic to suggest that her value system is so outside of the mainstream that she would be okay with being violently raped.  Fat Girl provides an effective critique of patriarchal sexual values, but beyond that, only a bleak non-alternative.

See Also:

Roundup: July 2015

Content note: self-harm.  A summary of films I saw over the past month featuring fat characters that I didn’t write about.

Chef (2014, dir. John Favreau)

A dramedy focused on a middle-aged man who is stagnating in his professional life and distanced from his family, with the most tantalizing cooking scenes I’ve seen since Eat Drink Man Woman.  Ramsey (Oliver Platt), a food blogger, criticizes Chef Carl’s (Jon Favreau) cooking, speculating that he has gained a lot of weight over his career because he “must be eating all the food that gets sent back to the kitchen.”  Despite the public dig at his size, everyone agrees that he’s a genius chef, and the front of house manager (Scarlett Johansson) has the hots for him.  When it is revealed that his critic is also fat, the dig seems somewhat hypocritical, and is followed by Carl lambasting him for making a living off of being mean.  Carl’s former father-in-law also subtly picks on him, remarking that he’s gained weight since they last saw each other.  Although there is an implication that Carl’s weight is a symptom of his professional stagnation and unhappy family life, there is no indication that he loses weight as he improves his relationship with his son and goes into business for himself.

Beauty and the Beast (1991, dir. Gary Trousdale, Kirk Wise)

Several fat supporting characters: Belle’s proto-nerd father Maurice, who is considered an oddball by their community and needs to be saved twice; Lefou (literally “the fool” or “the madman”), Gaston’s toadie who worships him despite constant physical abuse and has a more grotesque character design than the other human characters; Cogsworth, the stuffy majordomo; and Mrs. Potts, the motherly cook. Perhaps of note, Disney is producing a live-action reboot, to be released in 2017, with three of these four characters portrayed by thinner actors.  Ian McKellen is playing Cogsworth, Emma Thompson is Mrs. Potts, and Kevin Kline is Maurice.  Lefou, the one villainous character of this group, will be portrayed by Josh Gad.

Withnail & I (1987, dir. Bruce Robinson)

A character study of two struggling London actors who scrape by on alcohol and bullshit.  Withnail (Richard E. Grant) and Marwood (Paul McGann) escape their dismal flat for a trip to the country, staying at a cottage owned by Withnail’s fat uncle Monty (Richard Griffiths).  Monty is wealthy and effete, a retired actor whose homosexuality is a defining characteristic (in his introductory scene, he discusses his love of gardening: “There is, you’ll agree, a certain je nais sans quoi, oh so very special, about a firm, young carrot.”)  His generosity and kindness are a godsend to the two destitute protagonists, and to an extent, he is an inversion of the trope of the fat incompetent, having his life more in order than the younger men, who can’t manage to clear out their kitchen sink for fear of what lives in it.  However, he is also the middle-class fuddy-duddy foil to their edgy, youthful rebel lifestyle, never questioning the lies they feed him.  Partially due to a comedy of errors and partially to Withnail’s dishonesty, Monty believes that Marwood is also gay and attempts to seduce him, to the younger man’s abject terror.  Monty is overly persistent, forcing his way into Marwood’s bedroom wearing a silk robe and eyeshadow.  He tries to force himself on Marwood, although he also pleads with him to not be ashamed of his sexuality, and only stops when Marwood tells him that he and Withnail are a couple, and that he doesn’t want to be untrue.  Monty backs off and leaves the cottage before they wake up in the morning, having left a note of apology.

The Tales of Hoffman (1951, dir. Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger)

As with Beauty and the Beast, there are a handful of fat flunkies in this film that features several stories within stories.  Most of the fat characters are thin actors with big prosthetic bellies, including a few villains’ servants and, in one sequence, an ugly clown whose love for a ballerina is unrequited.  The one fat character portrayed by a fat actor is Andes (Philip Leaver), who is the servant of Stella (Moira Shearer).  Count Lindorf (Robert Helpmann) bribes Andres into allowing him to intercept a message from Stella to Hoffman (Robert Rounseville), which ultimately allows the Count to separate the lovers from each other.

Tangerine (2015, dir. Sean Baker)

There are a few minor fat characters in this film, the most prominent of whom is Jillian (Chelcie Lynn, who is a big deal on Vine), the madam of a “party room” at a sleazy motel that Sin-Dee (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez) breaks into looking for Dinah (Mickey O’Hagan), the girl who’s been sleeping with her boyfriend.  It’s not a glamorous role, but none of the roles in this film are.  The protagonists aren’t fat, although a few girls make critical comments about Alexandra (Mya Taylor) for not having a flat stomach, but as transgender women of color, they are definitely marginalized based on their physical characteristics.  Tangerine is the most vivacious and humanizing portrayal of trans women of color in a film that I’ve seen since Paris Is Burning, and I can’t recommend it enough.

ABCs of Death, “W is for WTF?,” “X is for XXL” (2012, dir. John Schnepp; Xavier Gens)

I didn’t see the whole anthology, so there might be other fat people in the chapters I missed.  “W is for WTF?” features two fat men (John Schnepp and someone whose name I couldn’t find on IMDb) as members of a film production team who are struggling with a looming deadline to produce a W segment for ABCs of Death and can only come up with lazy ideas featuring beautiful women in skimpy outfits before the world descends into utter chaos.  “X is for XXL” follows a fat woman (actor unknown) who never speaks.  She is harassed in public several times due to her weight, and seems to be stalked by an ad campaign for a cereal that claims to have slimming properties.  Upon arriving home, she binges on food in a manner that verges on cartoonish (I believe she drinks olive oil straight from the bottle at one point).  She then goes into her bathroom with a knife and carves off her flesh, which intersperses with shots of the slim spokesmodel in the cereal commercial.