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Sharp Stick
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I have always found it disconcerting to encounter a film that’s only – and I mean only – about a bunch of individual characters whose lives are depicted (usually within a constrained timeframe). This is because I’m the kind of viewer who, as far back as I can recall, has always discovered something eloquent in the way that specific stories can be generalised in their significance. Of course (for instance) romantic comedies are about the ‘war of the sexes’. Of course movies about gangsters, soldiers or boxers are about ‘masculinity and power’. Of course stories pitting someone rich against someone poor evoke ‘the class struggle’ … It’s often seemed to me that pitching ‘interpretations’ along such lines (by evoking, for instance, complicated theories of allegory) looks like such heavy lifting when, really, it should be a natural reflex, a common way of receiving such tales and their effect. And definitely something trans-personal, in the sense of not being tied and confined to the psychology of this or that imaginary being on screen. In recent years, I was relieved to discover a lucidly argued statement of my intuitive-temperamental stance in the pages of Gilberto Perez’s The Eloquent Screen (2019) – a book that still needs to be fully reckoned with at large. But there are indeed some films that tenaciously resist what Perez calls (in clear-headed terms) that innate, allegorical impulse to generalise their contents. One of them, in my experience, is Robert Altman’s California Split (1974). Is it about gambling, obsession, masculinity, buddy-friendship, ‘America’? Some would undoubtedly argue so. I came up empty on it: no matter how hard I tried to spin it out, it seemed interested in nothing more than these two specific men (played by Elliott Gould and George Segal) and their relationship during a betting spree. Nothing more! Hence my feeling of disconcertment. (This is, by the way, an intriguing counter-motif in the work of Raymond Durgnat: after many way-out interpretive speculations, he often feels compelled to remind us: ‘But the film is also about these particular characters, then and there’.) I don’t feel this unpleasantness in relation to films often – but here it comes again, with Lena Dunham’s post-Girls feature, Sharp Stick. Like with Pamela Adlon transiting from the open-form TV series Better Things (2016-2022) to the narrative-feature limits of Babes (2024), things shrink for Dunham in Sharp Stick. We can no longer extrapolate out to a community, a generation, a society, a world … Instead, we’re stuck inside rooms with a typically Mumblecore-type family groupuscle and its immediate, personal connections. Sarah Jo (Kristine Froseth, who could, in a heartbeat, be cast in a Zoë Lund biopic) is a 26-year-old virgin, fairly eager to break on through to the other side. Her younger sister, Treina (Taylour Paige), is more worldly; and their mother, Marilyn (Jennifer Jason Leigh), is a beyond-worldly combo of over-it insouciance and New Age-y, hug-me wisdoms. Then there’s Sarah Jo’s job: minding (which she does well) Zach (Liam Michel Saux), who is the Down Syndrome son of a fractious couple comprised of seeming good-guy Josh (Jon Bernthal) and his very pregnant wife, Heather (Dunham, showing little range in this role). It takes a long while for the inevitable complications to roll in: infidelity, commitment, sexual awakening … And that’s really all there is to it. No theme, no general suggestiveness, no subject except the play-out of these few lives in a circumscribed place and time. A therapeutic note of self-discovery provides an up-turn of mood at the very end. Dunham’s rejigged style for this occasion (the DOP is Ashley Connor of Madeline’s Madeline) doesn’t help matters: forsaking the more ostentatious, plane-crazy minimalism of the Criterion-blessed Tiny Furniture (2010, made when she was 24), Sharp Stick modulates between light-filled moments (for sex, mainly) and entirely drab, naturalistic scenes (all the familial pow-wows). One rushes to remember how good some of the Dunham-directed episodes of Girls were. (I have yet to watch her other feature release of 2022, the UK-set, medieval comedy Catherine Called Birdy.) There is an intriguing backstory emerging from Sharp Stick’s production gossip that does, however, suggest a rather savagely repressed bone of contention. Apparently, Froseth went into a huddle with an expert (sex educator Amy Gravino) on autism, in order to research how to play her character of Sarah Jo. The reports differ (naturally), but it seems that Dunham swiftly moved to shut down this consultation process, making it publicly clear that her film was not about autism – and should not be read or taken that way. Froseth (26 at the time) offered a remarkable, interpretive response to this: “The [neurodivergent] coding is still there and it comes across that way in the writing [note: it’s Dunham’s script!] and acting choices, even though it’s not explicitly stated”. The writing and acting – but not directorial – choices, what a clusterfuck! Even the evidently ‘infantile’ sheen overlaid on Sarah Jo’s character was, by all accounts, strenuously double-coded: it could indicate autism, or just plain “trauma” as experienced by the character in her past (something that hardly, in fact, registers within the film). Naturally, the semantic affinity between ‘infantilised neurodivergence’ and Down Syndrome leads Dunham into some murky waters where she would rather not openly tread … Yet, then again, that could have offered (like, for instance, in a Catherine Breillat film) the beginning of a real subject. Sharp Stick, therefore, unwittingly makes for a great double bill with Kathleen Lee’s Australian web-series Sex and Death (2020). In my review of that work, I discuss the market-hesitation (better juggled in Lee’s case) between a story that is ‘about autism’ (since the director and her performance of the central character were presented up-front in that light), and a genre-piece that is, in all its direct screen details, a ‘neurotic-romantic comedy of modern relationships’ alongside hundreds of other entries in that contemporary genre. Once again, we can locate the overlap in this Venn diagram: Sarah Jo has problems ‘reading the cues’ from other people; she explores a checklist of sexual practices (tacked up on her bare wall!) in a somewhat mechanical, alienated way … Dunham – doubtless for many reasons, involving her celebrity-status as well as the various identity-political stoushes she’s bumbled into since Girls – is clearly more skittish about courting certain ‘tags’ as subject-markers. But that means she’s not letting herself stretch and improve, prod and provoke, as a (still) fledgling auteur. Let’s hope some freer, more febrile space opens up for her, once more, in the forthcoming rom-com series Too Much. © Adrian Martin 20 July 2024 |
