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We Need to Talk About Kevin
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Another Girl, Another
Planet
Not
since the great days of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger has there been
such red! Strong, sharp, insistent, bright red, deeper than Profondo Rosso (Dario Argento, 1975).
But not a red that signifies one, dominant meaning or mood: lust or hysteria,
danger or embarrassment, death or birth. The red of We Need to Talk About Kevin moves, mutates, jumps relentlessly from
one scene to the next (sometimes on a direct cut, sometimes not), pokes you in
the eye every time as it shoots into the foreground of a shot or scene. Red is
the de facto principal character of
the movie: in tomatoes, paint, traffic lights, posters, police and ambulance
vans. And it performs a wide range of actions: it pulses, stains, sticks,
attacks, blinds …
Lynne
Ramsay (Ratcatcher [1999] and Morvern Callar [2003]) is a truly untimely director – out
of time and, it seems, out of place, too. Her taste for associative flashbacks,
for scrambled chronology, for moment-to-moment intrigue and suspense, for thick
irony, for style as the supreme vehicle of sensation, takes us back to Nicolas
Roeg or, before that, Alain Resnais. There is also something mighty unseemly and
unfeminine going on here, at least in terms of the standard, genteel
construction of who and what a female director should be these days: the
aggressive construction, the ceaseless barrage of shock effects, the
willingness to go to the point of excess on all levels, these traits voyage way
beyond any punctual taste for transgression in Agnès Varda, Jane
Campion or
Sally Potter (and exist in a different universe to the niceties of Nadine
Labaki, Naomi Kawase or Diane Keaton). A comparison with Asia Argento (The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things,
2004), Virginie Despentes (Baise-moi,
2000) or Athina Rachel Tsangari (Attenberg,
2010) gets us closer to the mark – Ramsay is working at a high level of
cinematic proficiency, virtuosity and sheer kinetic/visceral impact. She can
stand with Stanley Kubrick or Krzysztof Kieślowski.
Ramsay
has always set out to provoke, disturb and disquiet – while at the same time
marrying this drive with a very jolly, British sense of exhilaration, even an
odd kind of fun. The satirical vein in her work – often directed (as in John Cassavetes) against the world’s army of mediocrities, the dull bureaucrats,
public officials and everyday gatekeepers of consensus taste and decency –
heightens its truly postmodern feeling, and hastens its dismissal in many
critical quarters: Ramsay suffers, more than most, the reflex Cahiers du cinéma-line that “she just
doesn’t love her characters”. Wouldn’t you know it: dreary, finger-wagging
Humanism still rules, after all these years!
In
fact, Ramsay is more on the side of the Alien than the Human. Just look at the
faces and bodies of Samantha Morton in Morvern
Callar and Tilda Swinton here, look at how she lights and angles and shoots
them: they’re from another planet. And Swinton as Eva meets her match in the
even more profoundly alien creature sprung from her loins, Kevin (Jasper
Newell/Ezra Miller). Between them – for this is a profoundly intersubjective
work – a sort of Lacanian logic rules: every anxiety, every phantasm, every
desire that has ever ignited inside Eva is intuited, with uncanny precision, by
the impossible Kevin, and then ingeniously turned against her, creating a
contract and a dance that is eternally painful to behold.
Kevin is a very
good case of a film that is not about what it first seems to be about. Everything
takes you to the starting-gate of this movie expecting some kind of treatise (a
didactic one, Polytechnique [Denis
Villeneuve, 2009]-style, or even a cryptic one, Elephant-style) on the teenage serial killer: is he a
sociopath with a chemical imbalance, a tragic case of a dysfunctional kid
raised badly, or a product of his media-mad society? No, Ramsay is determined
to focus on one thing above all: the figure of Eva as an “unfitting” wife and
mother – unfit, therefore, in the eyes of society, to even be a grown-up woman.
Those who try to overlook or dismiss, in the film’s schema, the centrality of
Eva’s powerful desires (to get away, to recapture the ecstasy of her youth and
her love, to have a “room of her own”), and her equally powerful hatreds (of
the maternal role, of the endless frustrations Kevin puts in her path, and
sometimes of Kevin himself) are in denial about what makes this work so
forceful and significant.
Ramsay
loves to plunge us into an amoral space where the normally unthinkable must
now, suddenly, become thinkable. In Morvern
Callar, she had already created a heroine whose attitudes to sex, death and
money were resolutely inscrutable, if not utterly unspeakable. Kevin reaches even deeper into a primal
taboo: the sanctity of motherhood. It tears this figure apart, not so much to
critique it from some high-political distance, but so as to return us to the
magma of every individual human being who has to cope with this world: the
abject deposits and fluids, the niggly neuroses, the interrupted discharges,
the aborted circuits of interrelationship. More than any 3D movie past or
present, Ramsay creates an immersive cinema.
© Adrian Martin March 2012 |
