In any genre of film, you’re going to have classics - films that are platonic examples of the style, something like a canon. Sometimes you know which films these are because they’re held up time and time again as classics. Others, though, maybe don’t get the official recognition but are so widely and enthusiastically discussed that you get the tacit sense that this is one of those films as well. Even if they don’t have the gold frame around them, they’re very much part of the curriculum.
Over the years of writing this thing, I’ve tried to apply myself to the curriculum. I’m constantly working at becoming more literate in horror film, and that means catching up on classics, revisiting old favorites with a critical eye, and checking out films that everyone seems to know and talk about even if they aren’t part of the recognized canon. And May is definitely one of those films - I definitely feel remiss for not having watched it sooner. It doesn’t get mentioned in the same breath as The Exorcist or Night Of The Living Dead, but it gets mentioned a lot in discussions of horror film and it shows up on a lot of favorites lists.
Having finally seen it, I can see why. It’s an offbeat, stylized story about the costs of loneliness, and although it’s very much of its time and hasn’t aged as well as it could have in some ways, it’s still very smart, well-made, and it still has a lot of power.
It opens with a zippy title sequence more at home in a light comedy about the world of fashion than a horror film - stitches making their way across cloth, outlining the credits, before smash-cutting to a shot of a woman standing in front of a mirror, clutching her bleeding eye and screaming. It's brief, like a nightmare finding its way into a different movie, and it works.
That horrific image is gone as quickly as it comes, and we’re introduced to May Canady as a little girl. She’s got a lazy eye and a polished, glossy mother for whom imperfection is unacceptable. May is going to have to wear an eyepatch, and her mother wants her to cover it with her hair because nobody will want to be her friend otherwise. And her mother seems to be right. We get a brief sequence of May’s birthday - it’s just her, her parents, and a cake. Her mother gives her a present - the first doll her mother ever made. The doll’s name is Suzie. Suzie is very fragile, so she has to be kept behind glass. Suzie can’t be touched or held, and she is May’s first friend.
We next see May as an adult, shy and plain, gawky. She works as a veterinary assistant, and in her spare time she likes to sew. She makes her own blouses and dresses and lives on her own in a small apartment full of dolls. She still has Suzie, and as near as we can tell, Suzie is still her only friend.
May talks to Suzie, and responds like Suzie is talking to her.
This film is very much a product of its time period. It takes place in the kind of relentlessly quirky, just-off-center-from-everyday-life world emblematic of a certain style of film made from the mid-90s to early 00s. Films like Pulp Fiction, Things To Do In Denver When You're Dead, and Donnie Darko, set in worlds that take what was then a modern setting and salt it with anachronistic costumes or settings more reminiscent of the late 1950s, early 1960s and affected dialogue and characterization that don't really try for naturalism at all. The characters aren't really fully fleshed-out people (her coworker Polly is especially caricatured, but it's a film full of caricature) but that feels of a piece with the heightened world of the film, and it doesn't interfere with the really important moments. It's an approach that you don't really see again until 2012's Excision, a film that, in retrospect, owes more than a bit of a debt to this film. The quirkiness does dilute some of the film’s power, but never completely overwhelms it, largely down to strong central performances, a careful portrayal of the protagonist, and solid, consistent direction.
We find May at the beginning of an infatuation with Adam, a young man who works at the body shop across the street from her job. She’s clearly smitten, and it’s equally clear that she has no real understanding of how to go about making a connection. May is obviously awkward and very lonely, desperate for human companionship after a childhood where her only friend was a doll - a doll too precious to be taken out of its glass case, which is wonderfully emblematic of the alienation May suffers and serves as a sort of visual barometer of her condition throughout the film. The story begins as one about her attempts to connect with Adam, and where her attempts take her. Were it not for the brief flash-forward at the beginning (and the worrying way she describes the whole thing to her coworkers), for most of this movie's run time you could be forgiven for thinking that it's an indie romance about a late bloomer's attempts to find love and free herself from the shackles of her own insecurities. There's definitely an "ugly duckling becomes a swan" vibe here.
And it’s actually that vibe, that particular narrative, that is really the source of the film's tension and discomfort for most of it. May is so awkward, so vulnerable, so starved of human connection that even when you can see that she's not especially stable, she's still more sympathetic that not, and even while you know things are going to break bad eventually (even were it not for the flash-forward, the signs are all there), every fumbling encounter, every rejection, every instance of being used or betrayed, it all hurts to watch. I found myself looking away at things that weren't violent at all, just because I was able to empathize enough with May that I knew how hurt she'd be. It’s hurt somewhat (especially in the final act) by the cartoonish setting and characters, which threaten to trivialize the horror of her descent, but for every goofy, extremely 90s moment, there’s another one of honesty and sincerity where it really matters, and May herself never descends into caricature.
And it also helps, despite all of the affectation, that this is a smartly directed film. It’s crisply shot and edited, and makes good use of montage and repeated visual symbolism. The reduction of living things into their parts is a recurrent theme, played out most in terms of the dolls with which May decorates her bedroom, but in other ways as well, and her childhood doll is a constant presence, understated but always there, her only friend one that cannot speak and that she cannot even touch. A side story about a day care center for blind children speaks to the importance of being seen for May, who has spent most of her life believing herself unattractive and being overlooked, but it’s far from being played for sentimentality. The score is minimal, confined mostly to periodic pop songs, both contemporary and classic, which in some ways encapsulates May's experience - The Breeders’ "Do You Love Me Now" being an excellent example here of a sweetly-sung song about love that gradually reveals a hardness, corroding into feedback. When May finally snaps, the violence is rarely lingered upon, at least the physical violence.- the emotional violence is really the centerpiece here. It's a film that is brightly colored and sunny and chirpy right up to the point that it isn't, when that all falls away to reveal the pain of one lonely young woman and where it sends her. You know it's not going to end well, but May is sympathetic enough that you at least hope, against all logic, that you're wrong and it's going to be a happy ending.
But it isn’t. Like Excision, like Saint Maud, like The Eyes Of My Mother, this is a story of an unstable woman's spiral into something much worse, and watching that spiral begin is painful and hard. May finally feels emboldened enough to take risks, to step out into the world, to reach out, and she pays for it. None of it is unusually cruel, it's the base insensitivity of which human beings are far too capable, and at least in Adam’s case is as much a sensible response to May’s behavior as anything else. But to someone like May, it is absolutely the worst thing that can happen, and her transformation is basically watching all of what's good fall away. I think the climax loses some of the power and impact it could have had because the offbeat setting renders a lot of it cartoonish when it could stand to be deadly serious, and May retains just enough sympathy that it feels more like revenge than anything else, but it’s redeemed by a final sequence that is powerfully honest and emotionally raw, casting everything that came before as a tragedy. When you put glass between a person and their only friend, it’s going to shatter eventually.
No comments:
Post a Comment