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How to Make an American Quilt
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How to Make an
American Quilt is the first American film by Australian director Jocelyn Moorhouse, who made
her striking debut with Proof (1991).
The qualities that made Proof notable
– its crisp economy of style and gesture, a perverse edge, neurotic and cruel story
elements – are not on offer in this, her second feature.
This
is probably not a personal project for Moorhouse. It is, in many ways, an
anoymous film, a sunny, mostly upbeat entertainment in a sub-Spielberg mode.
But I didn’t find it (as a number of reviewers did) bland or disappointing. It’s
engaging, with a terrific gallery of stars including Winona Ryder, Anne
Bancroft and Ellen Burstyn. And it raises a lot of genuinely important issues
about love, relationships and marriage – as well as about how gender subtends
all of that. Here, however, I want to concentrate on just two topics that this
film made me ponder furiously.
The
first topic is storytelling. Many
people will draw comparisons between it and Wayne Wang’s affecting The Joy Luck Club (1993). It may be unfair to compare them on this plane, because their canvas is
so different: The Joy Luck Club links
up the crises and tremors of personal, emotional life with all sorts of grand
upheavals in history, and develops a quite epic wallop; while How to Make an American Quilt traces a
more strictly intimate canvas.
Where
the two films do overlap is in the focus on women’s lives, and on the act of
storytelling. Both films are constructed as a mosaic – or quilt! – of
individual women’s stories, woven together by the overall structure. In both
cases, there is a ritual or ceremony of storytelling: a time and a place where
these women can come togther and tell their tales. In The Joy Luck Club, that’s the ritual of a domestic game table;
here, it’s the ritual of a collective quilting project, led by a solemn Maya
Angelou.
These
days, there is a great charge, an almost mythical or magical power that people
like to associate with the act of storytelling – and especially “telling one’s
own story”. By telling your story, it seems, you find your deepest self,
complete your inner voyage. And by telling it others, and hearing their stories
in turn, you join a vast, universal community, where all the stories stream
together and become one great, comforting ocean of timeless experience – a
group-portrait of the human condition itself.
I
confess there’s some rebellious imp inside me that resists like hell the New
Age piety of all this storytelling talk. But, for the moment, let me pin down
my problems to the extent that such storytelling can be shown and celebrated in cinema, as cinema. The Joy Luck Club and How to Make an American Quilt both have
quite clunky framing structures. It’s easy for a novel to be a tapestry of first-person
stories: there can be both the tale and the teller, her narration and the
quality of her personal voice, equally evident all the time. In movies, this
first-person quality is much harder to sustain. Once these films flash back to
the past, and the story continues on screen, we tend to forget the teller and
her present-day situation.
The
stories recounted in How to Make an
American Quilt thus tend to float free of the characters who are narrating
or triggering them. This prompts a reverie: I can completely accept that
stories are a large part of the pleasure of cinema, but not storytelling in that that strict, ritualistic,
around-the-campfire-or-quilting-bee way. Stories that are embedded in a film
tend to simultaneously belong to no characters or to all characters, to no one
or everyone. That, I suspect, is a large part of the poetry of narrative in
cinema.
Taking
a completely different angle on How to
Make an American Quilt, let’s now look at its attitudes to love and relationships
– and the fraught, sometimes tragic stand-offs that it shows happening between
the sexes. One of the most striking things about Moorhouse’s film is how it
presents its gallery of male characters. I fully know it’s something of a tried
and reflex cliché for reviewers – especially male reviewers – to sneer at
certain “women’s films” by saying: “The men are such two-dimensional
caricatures, such ciphers!” They say this, usually, without pausing to remember
the many thousands of “men’s movies” where the women are two-dimensional,
trivial, peripheral figures. So, I don’t mind a woman’s movie in which men are
inessential or secondary, or where they are objectified as two-dimensional
figures of sexiness or terror. Saying that, in a film primarily about women,
the men are ciphers is on par with saying that, in an average teen movie, the
adults are unsympathetic.
Nonetheless,
there is something especially intriguing about the sidebar men in How to Make an American Quilt. Several
of them are extremely comical figures, and they are never more comical than
when their supposedly virile sexuality is on display. If there is one very
Australian quality or sensibility here, it is the half-frightened/half-curious
attitude towards male sexuality that can only twist itself, defensively, into
comedy: virility, in particular, is quite a joke. There’s a scene with a lusty
artist, Dean (Tim Guinee); as he gazes upon his luscious, nude model (Joanna
Going as young Em), he progressively tears his clothes off, and eventually
smears his naked chest with a bit of paint. Meanwhile Em, who’s known what she’s
wanted out of this game all along, is almost getting bored waiting for him to
work himself up.
In
a slightly different mood, there’s the character of Leon (Johnathon Schaech),
the fantasy-man temptation figure for Finn (Ryder) while she’s on a holiday
away from her usual, dependable guy, Sam (Dermot Mulroney). Schaech played the
supernaturally sexy, bisexual punk in The
Doom Generation (1995), so it’s an apt stroke of casting. This guy is definitely
not meant to be real. Leon is an angelic, erotic projection on Finn’s part; he
stands for the thrill of sex without obligation, without past or future,
without emotional commitment. He’s a floating sensualist. Every time he appears
on screen, I had to laugh. Leon pouts, gazes out of his smouldering eyes and offers
big ripe strawberries; in a climactic moment, he confronts Finn in a green
field, tears his shirt right off, and lays her down for some love-action.
That
sex scene Iends extremely abruptly; before, in fact, we get to the sex part. I
can’t help but link up the film’s giggly attitude toward male sexuality with
its general squeamishness about all forms, shapes and shades of sex. It’s all
very clean and discreet. And also astonishingly heterosexual all the way down
the line: far straighter than the equally female-centred Fried Green Tomatoes (1991), for instance. This supposed
exploration of the long and winding life-roads of women, gals who bond with
each other more than they do with men, never even touches on the lesbian option
– not even as an undertone, or a repressed possibility.
Ultimately,
the film’s avoidance of queerness is simply part and parcel of what I take to
be its general fear of sex. There’s a moment where Finn articulates her dilemma
poised between two men: between the lovely guy back home and the fantasy stud
in the field. She then asks a female pal: “Should one marry a lover, or a
friend?” This is among the classic dilemmas of romantic fiction: the fraught
relationship between love and friendship. It’s a dilemma on par with the choice
of Francesca (Meryl Streep) between ecstatic romance and family duty in The Bridges of Madison County (1995). When Finn phrases her problem like that, I
find myself hoping to hell that the response is going to be: well, how about
marrying both a lover and a friend in the same person? (That is, if he or she
can found in the space of one lifetime.)
Many
mid ‘90s movies have a hard time arriving at this ideal proposition – for
instance, the romantic comedy If Lucy Fell (1996), which is also about the
same, vexed friendship-and-love issue. In How
to Make an American Quilt, Finn gets a verbal answer to her question, and
it’s essentially: don’t marry your lover or your frend, marry your soul mate. While watching the film, I thought: OK, soul
mate, that’s the elusive friend-and-lover-in-one. But, in the context of How to Make an American Quilt, a soul
mate seems to be airy-fairy, an almost mystical catgeory: neither a friend nor a lover,
but some ideal fantasy who is not quite of this earth.
I
think all my mixed feelings about How to
Make an American Quilt were crystallised in an anecdote that appears near
its end. It’s a story told by Marianna (Alfre Woodard, terrific in Passion Fish [1992] and elsewhere). She tells her tale of living in Paris, crying in a café
at the end of a relationship, and then meeting, by sheer chance, a man who
seemed to be her soul mate. He was a really sensitive, caring guy, and a poet
as well, no less: he gives her the poem he wrote that day, which happens to be
about “old lovers” seeing the beauty in the scattered pattern of their
accumulated life experiences. So, do Marianna and the poet get it on in Paris?
Not in this movie; he’s already married and, being a good chap, he just
disappears back into the Parisian crowd, like a dream – without having even spoken
his name. Back in the present, Marianna tells Finn she has pined over the
memory of this soul mate ever since that day.
There
are three things in this little, embedded story that prick me. The first is its
poignant beauty. Tales of eternally lost and unrequited love almost always
belong to men in movies – recall the old guy played by Joseph Cotten in Citizen Kane (1941), who speaks of
remembering, every day of his life, a woman he once glimpsed on a pier. So it’s
rare and touching to see a woman’s version of such pathos. Second – now I’m
starting to get worried – the soul mate in this story is absolutely
unobtainable, a fantasy-object for all time. And third … here’s the rub. How to Make an American Quilt happens to
reserve the most intense pathos of loss, longing and loneliness for the
character who has, up until this point, had the most active and colourful sex
life. That configuration really worries me.
Note: The reflection on storytelling started here is
continued in “The Ever-Tested Limit”, a previously unpublished late 1990s essay
included in my book Mysteries
of Cinema (Amsterdam University Press,
2018).
MORE Moorhouse: A Thousand Acres © Adrian Martin June 1996 |
