When the Day Breaks
Cinematic joy and where to find it.
An appetite for life comes with living—or, failing that, with viewing. We are hardly short of options: there is no single acceptable way to live, and chances are that more than one appetite will tempt us over the course of a lifetime.
The Rocky Horror Picture Show does not set out to index them all, and its service to hedonistic excess is invaluable only on the surface. What we find here is not the familiar, long-forgotten hunger for life, miraculously revived at the eleventh hour. Brad and Janet are doing perfectly fine even before Dr Frank-N-Furter strides, with great determination and rather uninvited, into both their lives. It’s just that the life they are living is not really their own: they are content to dutifully tick off a string of stereotypical milestones, of which the marriage looming proudly on the horizon is merely the first. Their sexual and existential awakening will get you out of your seat and snap you out of depression—or drive you up the wall, as the case may be. Brimming with verve and colour, Jim Sharman’s film eventually becomes more than the sum of its parts. Towards the end, this begging to be parodied parody turns into something of an anthem—one that has never ossified with time, since it remains exasperatingly necessary, if not downright vital, with its unclassifiable blend of generosity, restlessness and defiance.
A different musical and cinematic register, a different way of life, one that seldom makes it onto the screen (and when that miracle does occur, it is almost invariably there to be ridiculed). Jake and Elwood’s objective is so naively stereotypical that we might be tempted to dismiss it as trivial. Saving an orphanage by putting on a concert is merely an excuse for Ray Charles or Aretha Franklin to take the stage by storm and swiftly make their exit—a premise so easy to lampoon that screenwriters Dan Aykroyd and John Landis have no qualms about lampooning it themselves. However formidable the obstacles strewn in their path, two layabouts press on with their mission, imperturbable and utterly without airs; the only things less solemn than their race against the clock are slapstick kicks up the backside and fart jokes. With every new musical number, the sheer, living joy generated by The Blues Brothers (dir. John Landis) grows greater still (and the relentless string of defeats suffered by the film’s rednecks and Nazis may have something to do with it).
The hero of Barfly (dir. Barbet Schroeder) is another layabout, in the kind of film that gives you pause for thought (the thought being that life may look rather different seen through the glass of a bottle). The same logic is at work in Sideways (dir. Alexander Payne), with an asterisk: life is worth living as long as it is not merely drunk, but drinks are shared too. At the opposite end of the paroxysm spectrum, but with an unmistakable surplus of poetry, alcohol flows freely through the films of Hong Sang-soo as well. His characters are endearing with their tongues loosened and sober alike—no small feat when you live in front of a screen rather than on it.
The Safdie brothers’ films, for the stubbornness with which their protagonists feverishly cling to every half-chance of beating the odds, however briefly. When getting through one more day without a hole in your head counts as an achievement, the prospect of all those days stretching ahead of us, predictably strung together like segments of a millipede, suddenly becomes desirable beyond measure. Any Sean Baker film, for that same sense of urgency, for his unruly heroes and their accidental victories. Virgil Vernier’s characters, dwarfed by the luxury yachts, sports cars and imposing buildings that allow them to breath in their vicinity, armed with nothing but the gentle humanity they wear as armour.
Come to think of it, nothing like a holiday—even a cinematic one—to recover your appetite for life. With its occasional experimental detours, the yacht holiday in Kyuka: Before Summer’s End (dir. Kostis Charamountanis) is an invitation to sleep and laze about. In Vetar (dir. Tamara Drakulic), the sea is synonymous with falling in love for the first time, which also happens to coincide with the first great disappointment. If I am ever to lose my memories one by one, I hope the scooter ride shared by Mina and Sasa on a bendy road, as “Needles and Pins” is played all the way through, will be among the last to go.
If all that fails, other holidays leave me with one last ace up my sleeve. If need be—that is, only in the event of a major emergency—I am prepared to pull Mamma Mia! (dir. Phyllida Lloyd) or Eat Pray Love (dir. Ryan Murphy) out of some streaming service’s bottom drawer. In fact, merely thinking of them in passing is enough to patch up my self-esteem on the spot, make life seem a sweet gift and provide me with a welcome shot of enthusiasm. For better or worse, I am not surrounded by people who speak in slogans or proudly sport a grin stretched from ear to ear, wider than a fourth-quarter moon. My falsettos do not interrupt the cacophony of a cicada chorus in some island paradise, nor do I expect enlightenment to find me more in the lotus position. My eating habits are disappointingly conventional, and so far I have lost my aesthetic compass in the bushes of these titles only once—all the more reason my appetite for life remains intact.
And if ever I feel it slipping into a clinical coma, I’ll promptly head for the nearest cinema. Sometimes, the appetite for life lurks in the dark.
Originally published in Dilema magazine, as part of a dossier on joie de vivre