Valentine Special: One Woman Walking

When men walk in movies, they are searching, exploring, striving. Think of the rather martial strides of Jason Bourne and the latest James Bond. Or of Ralph Fiennes’ determined staggering in The English Patient. Or perhaps best of all in recent cinema, James McAvoy’s five-minute walk through the destruction of Dunkirk, led, for almost all of that five minutes, by Joe Wright’s single tracking shot in Atonement.

But when women walk in movies, they are most often doing one of two things: showing off clothes, as in various montages in The Devil Wears Prada, or walking down the aisle, for which there are too many examples to list here. Every now and then, walking women are simply being passionate. Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility gives us a scene of Kate Winslet as the soulful young woman striding through nature, alone and wild. But for this scene, in which Marianne wanders a hillside in a storm, Lee is drawing on an old literary convention that connects the unpredictability of nature with the force of vague and unnamed emotions. Winslet’s Marianne does not desire anything or anyone in particular (she is seconds away from meeting Willoughby, when desire will commence on schedule). She is simply Being Emotional.

Very rarely, and quite strikingly, a woman walking in a movie appears purely as an emblem of female desire—specific, targeted desire for someone. The clearest example I have seen of this is a scene from Peter Weir’s 1982 film The Year of Living Dangerously. It’s a tracking shot of Sigourney Weaver’s Jill Bryant walking slowly, eyes cast down. The camera leads her, in medium-angle, through a Jakarta market until she reaches the door of Guy Hamilton’s office. She knocks on the door, steps back, and, when Hamilton emerges from the room, pulls him back against the opposite wall and begins a slow, passionate kiss. (Hamilton is played by Mel Gibson in his heart-stoppingly blue-eyed and handsome days—as good a reason as any for a passionate kiss.) The scene cross-fades to Weaver in a post-coital bed, and takes us quickly back to the 1960s Indonesian political crisis that forms the subject matter for the film.



The kiss takes nearly a minute. But Weaver’s walk accounts for fully half of the scene’s duration, and for all of its passion. Why? Because, unlike the women of the clothing montages we’re used to seeing, Jill is oblivious to an observer as she makes her way through the crowd. It’s not about what her body looks like, not about her clothes. It’s not really even about the man we come to realize she’s walking towards. It’s about her sexual desire.

Weir overlays this scene with a Vangelis-written melody that serves as the leitmotif in this opera-filled film. (Linda Hunt’s character, the photographer Billy Kwan, listens to Kiri Te Kanawa, among other things.) We hear it a bit earlier in the film, in A Scene of Kissing Dangerously, as Jill and Guy drive away from an embassy party, through a roadblock, presumably to bed. When the music starts up again, as Weaver looks up from her work, and the camera cuts to the tracking shot in the market, we know what to expect.

I admit that The Year of Living Dangerously forms the basis for my theory because I have seen the film so many times. Fascinated by it and by Weir’s direction, and intrigued by the films coming out of Australia in the 80s, I made a point of returning to it once a year for more than a decade after first seeing it in the theater. It became a kind of It’s a Wonderful Life for me, minus the ill-timed holiday grimness.

But surely there are other examples of the Walking Woman. In the near-final scene of Wright’s Bronte-ized Pride and Prejudice, Keira Knightley and Matthew Macfayden lope towards each other across a dawn field, clearly with one object in mind. Still, the scene is a different animal. Cross-cuts to Macfayden’s Darcy give Elizabeth Bennet’s desire a specific target, and dilute the woman-centered nature of the emotions on display. No, Weir’s scene stands alone.

Or does it?

Watching The Wrestler: or How I Learned to Stop Cringing and Love Mickey Rourke

More uplift. In this case, it’s not the story of Randy Ramzinski, the aging wrestler in Darren Aronofsky’s eponymous movie, but the story of Mickey Rourke. Here is a man whose promising career descended so low that he shared a category with Jerry Lewis (American Performers Most Loved By The French), and now he has won a Golden Globe and a BAFTA and may go on to win more.

Maybe I wasn’t paying attention, but I had the impression that The Wrestler was a superb movie with a story that somehow told you everything would be all right. I was only half-correct. The Wrestler is indeed a superb movie, but it makes you want to watch hours of Winnie-the-Pooh afterwards to cancel out its bleakness.

What’s bleak can be itemized quickly enough: the trailer home with the power cut off; the beaten-up body; the dingy strip club that passes for community; the tiny audiences; the autograph-signings that look like bingo at the nursing home. What’s superb requires a longer list. Aronofsky’s movie does everything right—from the script, to the un-annoying hand-held camera, to the portrayal of its two main characters, Randy the Ram whose real name is Robin, and Marisa Tomei’s Cassidy whose real name is Pam.

The similarity of their names is no accident. These two are through-the-looking-glass versions of each other, and each is a distorted mirror-image of him or her self. Both of them are performers, selling their bodies for a simulacrum of attraction and acceptance, and, in the case of Randy, confusing the simulacrum with the real. Pam understands all this, muttering her real name as she leaves the club for good, as if it were the password to a new life. But for Robin Ramzinski, the persona of the Ram is a trap he does not want to get out of—or considers himself undeserving to escape.

Perhaps the saddest scene in this very sad film takes place in neither of the two main spheres of its story (club and ring), but in a bar near the second-hand store where Randy meets Pam to buy a gift for his daughter. (Even here, there’s the hint of self-delusion: Pam’s “vintage” store is another person’s thrift shop.) When old-fashioned rock and roll comes on the bar’s speakers, both characters glory in the music, and Randy dances for Pam in a neat reversal of their usual roles. But their usual roles make Pam and Randy utterly out of place in the daytime bar. After they kiss, Pam hurries to get out of there—and we should thank Aronofsky for that. In one of the movie’s saddest scenes, he gives us the first sign that at least Pam gets it: you can’t live the role in the real world. Get out or die trying.

No spoilers here, so I leave it at that. Except to say that the people making Benjamin Button need have looked no further than The Wrestler if they wanted to talk about bodies that defy old age. Rourke is in surprising shape and Tomei looks like a twenty-five-year old, except for her realistically and beautifully expressive face.

As for Rourke? I cringed twice during The Wrestler (not counting the horribly violent wrestling scenes and the bloodletting Mel Gibson would be proud of). Once during a close-up shot of Rourke’s butt, and once during the heartbreaking scene in the bar. The rest of the time, I was marveling at Rourke’s creation of such a vivid, sad, and moving character.