ramblings (about things)

the favourite

february 28th 25

since watching poor things (the film that made me download a letterboxd), i have been chasing the high of the weirdness and strangeness and beauty i felt watching it. i think something about yorgos lanthimos's movies click inside me. they make me uncomfortable, and force me to watch. i'm usually one to hide from things that make me uncomfortable (in movies and in life lol), but the complexity and emotions of his characters and the way he gives you no choice but to look at them, to really sit with seeing a person be raw and ugly and complex. i don't like it. whenever the long, close up shots of someone having some sort of emotional turmoil happen, i find myself entirely glued to the screen, even though everything in my body is telling me to turn away. i quite literally recoil away, my body twsits and flexes, and i can't look away. it is so hard to watch people have emotions. whenever a shot goes a little too long, i think to myself, "oh god is this gonna be one of the shots that goes on forever am i really going to have to watch olivia colman force emma stone to fingerfuck her for 3 minutes i can't handle that oh god is this really one of them" or something of the like. but i WATCH. the WHOLE TIME. it makes me feel human in a way i don't think i've felt much. i feel gross and violated and human.

this movie wrecked me. it make me think about how many people have pointed out that i always call the last thing i saw/ate/did the "best ____ i've ever seen/eaten/did", but i think this is actually the best movie i've ever seen. that means i need to knock poor things down to 4.5 and then everything else down .5 below that. (an aside, i didn't know this movie was lesbian beforehand, so that may be impacting my feelings). i found myself constantly twisting between loving and hating the three leads. these are the best written female characters i have ever seen (there i did it again). they are motivated, they are evil, they are beautiful and ugly and disgusting and relatable. this movie is about power, honesty, love, self-preservation. i think i'd like to talk about each character separately.

abigail tortures me. i still can't decide her character. in the beginning, she is the least powerful, due to her father losing her as a bet in a card game, leading her to be abandoned and raped. somehow she gets herself to the queen's palace to plead to her cousin for a job. the first time we see her, we watch her smile to a man, who immediately begins masturbating in front of her (in a close carriage, with children around), before she's pushed off (by him). we're set up from the very beginning with her dynamic: is kind (naive), is taken advantage of. she works her way up, and we watch her watch sarah manipulate the court for her political strategies (we will talk about this later). we think she's learning the manipulation from sarah, that she's just learning how to survive in court. by the end of the movie, she's torturing a rabbit. did she really not have that in her in the beginning? there's two options, she either really was kind and naive and adapted to the ways of the court until the power got to her head, or the power was in her head from the get-go and she was strategizing and manipulating from the beginning. i really cannot decide. if she was kind and naive to begin with, it seems it REALLY got ahold of her. i'm finding it hard to believe that, for some reason. it seems she and sarah got along well, and she would have had a fine life as sarah's personal maid (and friend) and likely find favor with the queen through that. if she were as kind as we were led to believe, she wouldn't unnecessarily hurt sarah to secure a slightly better place for herself. i'm partial to believe she was calculating from the beginning, since her spiel about "pushing the edges of her morals" (attempting murder) came far after she secured her place at the queen's side (which was, again, at least a step further than she needed to push it). if she really were motivated by self-preservation, she REALLY did not need to take it that far, making me feel like she is motivated by power.

sarah. first of all, she is so hot and cool and the scar is so cool and how she flips her jacket is so hot. second of all, sarah is wild. she never lies (though she often tells half-truths). she is fiercely loyal to what she believes her country needs. she is willing to cut off an arm (her husband) and a leg (her gay love affair with her majesty) for what she thinks is right. is what she thinks is right actually right? i honestly have no idea, i don't understand 1800s british politics, but she seems to really really believe in her side. this is presented as her main motivator, followed by her love for the queen. she definitely does some really sus things to promote her political party (like censoring what the queen knows about the state of the nation and war), and grooms the queen into thinking she is incompetent and can't run the country without her, so don't love that. but wow her honesty and speeches about love actually really got to me. she said that she would not lie to the queen, and tell her when things were bad (like her makeup), and that that is what love is. i didn't believe her at first, because how could she love the queen while grooming and manipulating her, but remember (@ myself), she loves the country first. order of operations for truth-telling: country > queen > self > abigail. and she does love the queen, i think. it obviously hurt her to threaten queen anne to save her political power, or else she wouldn't have burnt the letters (or could just say she had burnt them and not burn them). this take on love hurts me a little. it reminds me of the conversations i had with jared last week and alyssa this week, where we talked about coddling and hand-holding and how much it hurts people in the long run. it makes me think about how my kind therapist vanessa was really trying her best to comfort me and protect me, but i really needed kelly to tell me i was being dumb or embarassing or desperate before i could change. i think that's the kind of love i want, next. someone to push me instead of protecting me. i'm trying to do this with myself as well lately (rotting in bed might protect me now but it is making things worse in the long run). truth is good. hot take lol

queen anne made me feel a little.........................something new (i'll unpack this later probably). she was an absolute child, though i don't blame her for it (see grooming allegations above). she had been through so many tragedies, and each was likely used for someone to gain power. every relationship she has, even her most intimate one, was a relationship built on the need for power. no one loved her for her, as she screamed to sarah. i would go absolutely mental too (i have gone absolutely mental for much less). i just really, really feel sad for her. the whole last section of the movie, i just felt such pity, and wished that sarah were back to tell her she had had a stroke. no one did. abigail said nothing. sarah would have told her. she wanted to feel loved so, so badly, that she didn't want sarah's truthful love, she wanted abigail's "love" that was really only political strategy. it hurts me. and as uncomfortable as the final scene was (see second paragraph), i almost feel sympathy for her in forcing abigail after realizing she had also lied and manipulated her way into power. it must be so lonely.

tldr. lesbian age-gap love triangle period piece. made me extremely uncomfortable and i feel like i understand what it means to be human a little better now. five stars.

anora

march 3rd 25

really glad i finally took the time to watch anora after it won best picture at the oscars and mikey madison won best actress. i can really see why. as a girl who is also far too stubborn and sticks in situations that are clearly bad for me for far too long, i felt really connected to anora. she was so incredibly strong and brave and also naive and defensive, which pretty much exactly sums up how i have been feeling about my relationship with relationships lately. she really wants to believe that she loves vanya, or maybe she doesn't love him and loves his money, or maybe she does love him, or maybe she is just swept up in it. she doesn't know, and i didn't know, and there was no happy ending, but that is life. the ending felt so raw and real, i'm so glad they didn't kiss, and that she finally broke. going to be thinking about this one for a while. 4.5 stars