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Marfa Girl 2
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It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry
The material shot for Marfa Girl 2 has been around for a while; Larry Clark was already
mentioning this sequel-continuation project in interviews before the Parisian
adventure of The Smell of Us (2015),
but it has taken this long for it to finally exist in concrete form. There has
only been a handful of public screenings, so far, in France and USA; Clark has
abandoned the online self-distribution method he earlier employed for Marfa Girl (2012). When The Smell of Us appeared, Cahiers du cinéma hailed it as “probably
the final film” and testament of a guy then 72; three years later, it’s great
to see him proving his commentators wrong.
Marfa Girl 2 picks up the
trajectories and destinies of most of the key characters of the original film,
probably a year or two later. But gone, this time, are the lyrical images of
landscape, the long lateral tracking shots, the jolly vignettes of art-making
and garage-band practise, the sense of restless mobility that has so often
characterised Clark's cinema. The only glimpse of teens skateboarding, for
instance, terminates swiftly with the vision of a key character flat on his
back; and the only picturesque feature of Marfa
Girl that remains, in brief cameos, is the train passing through town. It’s
a pretty sad vision. Even the drug-and-booze-and-music partying (another Clark
staple) has here been dialled down to an ephemeral minimum.
This time around, there’s precious little time for
anybody to have any fun; their sad priority is to either do or find work – not
to mention looking after their brood of babbling kids. Clark has always given
us stories in which the consequences of fleeting desire acted upon –
consequences in the form of disease, pregnancy, birth, death – figure, and
matter; in Marfa Girl 2, these somewhat
negotiable consequences have become something more like an inescapable Destiny.
So, everything is bleaker here, colder, and also literally more shut-in: it’s a
jolt to realise, some way into the action, that almost everything happens in
the small, hellishly circumscribed space of just one house, yard and live-in
caravan.
This is where almost all the characters – at least,
those who decide to stick around, or have no option in that matter –
congregate. The film opens with the couple formed in Marfa Girl by Adam (Adam Mediano) and Inez (Mercedes Maxwell); they
now have a small child, mainly looked after (it seems) by Adam’s put-upon mother,
Mary (Mary Farley) – still with that green parrot on her shoulder. Then we pass
to Donna (Indigo Rael), driving to pick up somebody only referred to but never
seen in the preceding film: Miguel (an uncredited Jonathan Vasquez, frequent
musical and acting collaborator with Clark), now released from jail, but
finding it hard from the get-go to adjust to the fact that, alongside his own
little son, Ty (Nathan Stevens), Donna has also had a child with Adam (from the
tryst we saw in the first film). That is, until she splits (almost immediately
after her re-introduction here), angrily dumping both kids into Mary’s
household, and Miguel into the caravan outside.
In the original film, the character identified only as
“Marfa Girl” (Drake Burnette) was, despite her name, pegged as a typical
outsider, an artist breezing through town and (in some sense) exploiting and/or
looking down on the lives of locals. (This makes for an intriguing comparison
with the woeful TV series adaptation of Chris Kraus’ I Love Dick, also set and shot in Marfa.) She was older than the
kids, and a bridge of sorts between them and the official adult figures
(teachers, law enforcers). The first film built to a shocking event: Marfa
Girl’s rape at the hands of a psychotic, lawless cop, Tom (Jeremy St James).
Now that she has had a child as a result of this trauma, Marfa Girl has truly
become a local resident: stuck in a fearful depression, spending most of her hours
zonked out in bed in Mary’s house, she is unable to relate to the son who
reminds her, at every moment, of Tom. This problem will eventually provide the
film with its principal drama and shocks.
The running tally, in case you’ve lost count (and I
had to take some time to figure it out in the unfolding), is eight people
(four of them little kids) in a cramped space of precarity. There’s no longer
any soulful New Age wisdom of cosmic vibration and reconciliation, as was
redemptively preached and enacted by Tina (Tina Rodriguez) in Marfa Girl (in a curious spiritual coincidence
with the first season of Jane
Campion’s Top
of the Lake series); now, in this second instalment, both nature (the
social environment) and nurture (biology) exert their overdetermining pressures in pincer mode upon the characters. It is intriguing to see
how a twisted notion of “blood lines” and their formative effect on
personality, uttered by Tom in the original, has now been absorbed and
integrated as Marfa Girl 2’s own,
overarching concept. Clark’s themes, and his pessimism, have hardened. As a net
result, all the people herein are, basically, well and truly screwed.
Screwed and screwing. Sex is the one absolute constant
in Clark’s cinema. Setting aside the usual grumbling complaints (with which I’ve
never vibed) about his supposed old-guy voyeurism – here, the fascinated and
curious camera-gaze upon naked genitalia follows a strict equal-opportunity
policy of gender – we once again have to marvel at what Clark can do with sex
scenes (and how he achieves them with his predominantly young players). On the
one hand, sex is seemingly the only thing his characters can do to kill time
and scratch whatever itch of discontent or desire is swimming in their heads;
on the other hand, it’s the sole site of life, almost an everyday Utopia, where
energy, intensity, creativity and even tenderness still reign.
I cannot count Marfa
Girl 2 among Clark’s major works – it’s quite a drop from The Smell of Us, where he hit a peak of
cinematic experimentation and complexity. Here, things occasionally go flat amidst the generally unadorned
naturalism, and the amateur performers are not always up to their allotted
tasks of conversational improvisation. But the diptych formed by the two Marfa Girl movies, the play between them over the span of years, is
undeniably fascinating. Clark uses several flashbacks from the first instalment
in an inventive, generative way, not simply to remind us of backstory (which he
almost never does – I found myself compelled to immediately re-watch Marfa Girl to glue some plot pieces
together): a clip of Marfa Girl advising the younger Adam about best sexual
technique leads to a hilarious moment of fantasy (with Inez still visibly lying
beside him in bed); and a fragment of Tom’s monologue triggers an unforeseen
plot development that closes the film in a brutally stark fashion.
© Adrian Martin 22 October 2018 |
