I really liked the film X, and one of the things I liked about it was how it managed to be both a gritty 70s period piece and something smarter and more cineliterate than that at the same time. It was very much what it promised on the cover - a film about a group of young people who tried to shoot a pornographic movie on someone’s farm and what happened when they ran afoul of the owners - but it was also a film about youth, beauty, desire, the loss of those things, and the power of cinema. It took a very specific type of film and simultaneously celebrated, subverted, and exceeded it.
So I wondered what the deal was going to be with Pearl, a prequel to that film that the director and lead actress cooked up during a mandatory COVID quarantine. I don’t usually like prequels, especially origin stories. They tend to strip away the mystery, make the monsters less interesting. And for that matter, how do you follow something like X? As it turns out, the way to do it - and do it extremely well - is to take a type of film you don’t usually associate with horror and make a horror film out of it. It’s a specific type of period melodrama that moves inexorably into nightmare, working as a portrait of an extremely troubled young woman, as well as a continuing comment of the power of cinema, without sacrificing the horror one bit..
It's 1918, and Pearl is a farm girl who longs to trade her life of drudgery for the glamorous life of a movie star. She wants to get away, to run as far and fast from her present life as she can. And you can’t really blame her - a dour, puritanical mother, an invalid father, and a husband overseas fighting all mean that her days are nothing but chores - feeding the animals (the ones who haven’t died off), caring for her father, and the occasional trip into town to pick up medicine. Sometimes, she sneaks a bit of money to go to the picture shows while she’s in town, and she plays out the dance routines she sees on the screen for their remaining livestock. That’s her escape. That’s her moment of joy.
A moment of joy inevitably cut short by her mother, who shames her for her frivolities. Pearl comes back down to earth, the music fades, and in a fit of pique she spears one of their geese with a pitchfork. She feeds it to the alligator that lives in their pond.
You get the sense that this isn’t the first time.
But even within that, there’s something else poking through - it’s 1918, so it’s right in the middle of the flu pandemic. There are masks and there is social distancing, fears of contagion which resonate differently today. It’s World War I, and men are coming home shattered by what they’ve seen if they come home at all. The uncertainty, the wondering when you don’t get a letter back. Wondering if men in uniform are going to turn up to give you the bad news. So there’s a pervasive uncertainty, the constant specter of death and disease that is not at all whitewashed by the sunny, colorful setting. There’s also the escape inherent in the movies, but here again, there’s also the seedy underbelly of cinema - stag films, furtive and underground. It’s a film where all manner of darkness is being painted in the most vivid of colors and it lends everything a slightly hysteric edge, or the feeling that you’re having a nightmare where you start watching a perfectly harmless film that gets progressively stranger and more sinister.
And this is all embodied in Pearl, a farmer’s daughter who feels like she’s bound for something better, for the bright lights of Hollywood. Which is a classic story, but here again there is a darkness. Because it’s World War I, anti-German sentiment is high, so Pearl’s family are largely on their own. What time and energy isn’t devoted to keeping their few remaining animals alive is devoted to feeding her father, giving him his medicine, giving him some fresh air, cleaning him up when he soils himself. Pearl’s mother is hard, kept ramrod-straight by her Christian faith, absolutely opposite to accepting any form of charity. She has exchanged wanting things for making the best of what she has, but there’s a barely contained rage and sorrow at these circumstances that eventually boils over. Her mother didn’t want to be the person she is, but she has to be by necessity. And Pearl has that rage and sorrow too, combined with a seething emptiness - a lack of love, affection, attention, human contact, really, that’s created an unappeasable hunger for love and validation inside her. Repression is already taking its toll on her when the film starts. But the emptiness doesn’t stop there. Pearl’s missing something other people have, the thing that recognizes the value of life, the thing that keeps us from finding pleasure or relief in the act of killing. Pearl knows she’s not like other people, and she’s more afraid of it than celebratory of it. She knows she’s done bad things, she believes she can never be loved for as damaged as she is, and all she wants is to get away, and the violence of that desire is startling when it comes out.
And it is a violent film - in terms of both physical violence (that looks as simultaneously graphic and artificial as the work of Herschell Gordon Lewis) and also emotional violence. The feelings Pearl experiences are as raw and unmodulated as any I’ve seen in a very long time, and there’s an exchange between her and her mother that I’d put right up there with the hardest moments in Hereditary for sheer painfulness to watch. The performances in this film are consistently good, if not always substantial outside of the main roles, but Pearl absolutely tears the roof off. The force of what she’s barely keeping contained is startling in its intensity, and the blood is as super-saturated as the trees and the sky, Pearl’s smile is too wide, her cheerfulness too plastered-on, a brightly colored rictus over a rat’s nest of hollowness and total hunger. The desperation and fear and self-loathing leap off the screen.
The cinematography and editing are excellent and evocative, and the film still manages to pack in a number of sly visual and thematic allusions to the events of X, as well as nods to The Wizard Of Oz. Like X, it’s as much about the power of film - to escape, to transform, to reinvent yourself - as it is the events of the film. That it’s all shot primarily in the same location as X also creates this eerie feeling of continuity, like seeing someone who’s gone to ruin when they were still young and beautiful, which is itself an idea that X very much addresses. There’s really no secret that things are going to go bad - it’s a horror movie, and if you’ve seen X. you have an idea of where everything will ultimately end up. But this film more or less tells you this early, with an opening scene that’s sort of a precis for the entire film - a reverie, crashing back to reality, frustration relieved by violence. And to its credit, the end of Pearl (easily one of the most uncomfortable final shots I’ve ever seen in a film) and the beginning of X create a gap of decades for us to fill in, and the implications of this film’s ending make it very hard to imagine filling it in with anything good. It takes the idea of making the best of what you have and turns it into something terrifying and tragic to contemplate. This one’s a doozy.
IMDB entry
Available on Amazon
Thanks for this very interesting review! I had seen the ads for this and was at first depressed at the idea of a poor prequel cash-in. But your review gives me good reason to get my hands on this. Cheers.
ReplyDelete