ordering the unorderable
thoughts on three films and two books
Still Walking
2008, dir. Hirokazu Kore-eda, 114 min.
At first it seems like food holds these people together, arranges them into the shape of a family. They peel carrots and radishes together, hunch over the table flicking kernels off a cob of corn. The camera zooms in close on the vegetables, really lets us see their color and texture, the sound they make when grazed by a tool or taken between teeth. The effect is cozy, at first, and then it devolves, not quite all the way, but enough to underline the discomfort that grows as day becomes afternoon becomes night becomes morning. Shots start to take on the quality of memory: contextless, overly precise, hyper-real. The power of food—making it, eating it—to displace anger wanes; the people underneath that effective but temporary distraction start to emerge. They’ve all borne witness to the same thing, and its memory is what ultimately, despite their wills, winds around them, coaxing them into the only form they could take—a form they consider, to borrow a word from the film, abnormal.
Klute
1971, dir. Alan J. Pakula, 114 min.
A great example of how to take one’s subject matter seriously without succumbing to solemnity, but, more than that: a showcase of two masterful performances. Jane Fonda’s Bree is, in a word, mercurial. Embodied, funny, sarcastic, clever, scared, manipulative, impulsive—at times she seems to act for reasons unknown even to her. Her range plays effectively against the steadiness of Donald Sutherland’s John Klute; he is impassive; he will move, but he will not be moved. Unlike Bree, he might be green—but he’s not stupid, and he trusts himself above anybody else, which makes Bree trust him, too. The movie is worth watching just to see these two, the actors and their characters, magnetize the air between them.
Julia
1977, dir. Fred Zinnemann, 118 min.
Another marvel of casting with Jane Fonda as one half of a duo. Here, Vanessa Redgrave is the incandescent other half, in a movie that is as much about lesbian longing as it is about the way having to work to live or not having to work to live shapes one’s relationship to the world.
Will and Testament
2019, Vigdis Hjorth, trans. Charlotte Barslund, 336 pp.
Repetition: A Novel
2026, Vigdis Hjorth, trans. Charlotte Barslund, 144 pp.
In all of her novels, Hjorth writes, in short, about the struggle to live with one’s past. In Will and Testament, the threads of time weave into each other; the past comes back, again and again, but it’s also never left, always there alongside the present; there’s no way for it not to be. It’s tempting to say that Hjorth captures this, but what she’s really doing is enacting it, making us witnesses to her own process of witnessing herself. In Repetition, the present recedes and the past returns and lingers, crystallizes around a single point. I like Hjorth’s novels because they resist what is so tempting when one attempts to remember: the impulse to order the unorderable.