When Pigs Fly
Dec. 8th, 2018 08:24 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerWhen Pigs Fly is the final Sara Driver movie I saw, the last movie that she directed before a hiatus of nearly twenty-five years that was broken only recently by the Basquiat documentary Boom for Real, and probably my favorite of her films. It’s a movie about death and ghosts and grief - created in part because Driver lost so many friends in the AIDS epidemic that she felt that she was living among ghosts.
I realize that this makes it sound like a real downer, but actually it’s a joyous film, as lively as the Irish music that accompanies much of the film. It’s not just about ghosts and death, but about learning to live with those ghosts - about righting past wrongs and forging new bonds and getting up some spectral mischief along the way.
It begins when Sheila, a burlesque dancer in a seedy Irish bar (and the movie’s attitude toward her profession is refreshingly calm - neither titillated nor sensationalistic), whose asshole boss tasks her with cleaning out a grotty old shed behind the bar. It’s mostly full of junk, but there’s one nice chair: “I think I’ll give this to my landlord,” she muses, and there’s something in her tone that lets you know she’s sweet on the landlord.
That landlord is Marty, a washed-up jazz musician who soon learns that two ghosts haunt the chair: Ruthie, a little girl who died in it long ago, and Lilly, the long-dead wife of the bar’s owner. There’s a wonderful scene where he takes a walk with his new ghost friends (each wears a chair leg tied to her head so she can walk about unhindered; little Ruthie has a grand time sitting on a mailbox and kicking it closed as the postman tries to put the letters inside) and in their company he sees the ghosts moving about the city, strange translucent sepia-toned images that move about almost as unaware of the living as the living are of the dead.
The experience discombobulates him. Sheila, dancing atop the bar, spots him stumbling around outside, trying to pick up the pieces of the chair. She throws on her coat and heads out to lend a hand, and soon meets the ghosts herself. But how, she asks Lilly, did you come to die in that chair - in that shed?
Well, it was murder, of course; the movie’s attitude toward domestic violence is as straightforward as its attitude toward sex work. It’s not sensationalizing, not sputtering that it is shocked, shocked! to discover that patriarchal cultures breed domestic violence; it accepts this reality, but is not resigned to it. Once the truth outs, everyone’s up for a spot of revenge.
Initially Lilly simply intends to lead Sheila and Marty to her husband’s secret stash so they can rob him. But when her husband catches them in the act, Lilly and Ruthie cause so much spectral mayhem that the man comes so unglued that he accidentally confesses the murder to the police when they arrive to investigate the robbery.
Sheila, meanwhile, has heard news of Lilly’s now-grown daughter, so she and Marty take the haunted chair across town so that Lilly can see her again. They leave Lilly and Ruthie, rocking and watching, and drive away together - newly tied to life by their entanglement with death.
I feel that I’m not doing the film justice - that it’s such a visual experience that perhaps you can’t do it justice just with words. There’s something about the quality of light, the sepia ghosts, the tactile nature of the practical effects - the pleasure the movie takes in its effects, the two chair legs bobbing along in space with Marty and Lilly and Ruthie go for their walk through the daylight that fades into a ghost-touched night.
I realize that this makes it sound like a real downer, but actually it’s a joyous film, as lively as the Irish music that accompanies much of the film. It’s not just about ghosts and death, but about learning to live with those ghosts - about righting past wrongs and forging new bonds and getting up some spectral mischief along the way.
It begins when Sheila, a burlesque dancer in a seedy Irish bar (and the movie’s attitude toward her profession is refreshingly calm - neither titillated nor sensationalistic), whose asshole boss tasks her with cleaning out a grotty old shed behind the bar. It’s mostly full of junk, but there’s one nice chair: “I think I’ll give this to my landlord,” she muses, and there’s something in her tone that lets you know she’s sweet on the landlord.
That landlord is Marty, a washed-up jazz musician who soon learns that two ghosts haunt the chair: Ruthie, a little girl who died in it long ago, and Lilly, the long-dead wife of the bar’s owner. There’s a wonderful scene where he takes a walk with his new ghost friends (each wears a chair leg tied to her head so she can walk about unhindered; little Ruthie has a grand time sitting on a mailbox and kicking it closed as the postman tries to put the letters inside) and in their company he sees the ghosts moving about the city, strange translucent sepia-toned images that move about almost as unaware of the living as the living are of the dead.
The experience discombobulates him. Sheila, dancing atop the bar, spots him stumbling around outside, trying to pick up the pieces of the chair. She throws on her coat and heads out to lend a hand, and soon meets the ghosts herself. But how, she asks Lilly, did you come to die in that chair - in that shed?
Well, it was murder, of course; the movie’s attitude toward domestic violence is as straightforward as its attitude toward sex work. It’s not sensationalizing, not sputtering that it is shocked, shocked! to discover that patriarchal cultures breed domestic violence; it accepts this reality, but is not resigned to it. Once the truth outs, everyone’s up for a spot of revenge.
Initially Lilly simply intends to lead Sheila and Marty to her husband’s secret stash so they can rob him. But when her husband catches them in the act, Lilly and Ruthie cause so much spectral mayhem that the man comes so unglued that he accidentally confesses the murder to the police when they arrive to investigate the robbery.
Sheila, meanwhile, has heard news of Lilly’s now-grown daughter, so she and Marty take the haunted chair across town so that Lilly can see her again. They leave Lilly and Ruthie, rocking and watching, and drive away together - newly tied to life by their entanglement with death.
I feel that I’m not doing the film justice - that it’s such a visual experience that perhaps you can’t do it justice just with words. There’s something about the quality of light, the sepia ghosts, the tactile nature of the practical effects - the pleasure the movie takes in its effects, the two chair legs bobbing along in space with Marty and Lilly and Ruthie go for their walk through the daylight that fades into a ghost-touched night.
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Date: 2018-12-08 04:42 pm (UTC)I love your icon, btw.
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Date: 2018-12-11 11:07 pm (UTC)Thanks!
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