Melis Menent

I do find cultural things to do on my very own, at home, in my country where arts are not so popular. Big crowds are popular, just not arts. When you do have arts, you would be asking for more of it. A diversity of it, different genres, different perspectives and practices within the same (or a similar) area. I have started obsessing about performance arts more recently, for instance, but quite like cinema, i can only imagine things. Socially.

I have found it among my old DVD’s at home. I do have quite a few, and especially with the pandemic, it did feel like sustaining myself emotionally during some kind of cultural warfare. So much love in it, so little money more generally… How can it be tough to have cinema everyday? I put my hands on Mistress America and gave myself a whole day at home. Pebble and Cuddle did so to.

Everything felt as fresh as before. Brook is a very real character to watch. You expect the expressions on her face to change, her to smile and then to let you know about her not so clearly expressed negative emotions… When her baby-sis tells her that she has been hiding her sorrows to herself, she does not feel that it’s a friendly statement. And it was not, at that moment. An emotional analysis can be too easily used for causing distress for someone. So Brook starts yelling at her when the baby-sis refers to the issue of bereavement. Who is ever ready for it anyway? Emotional strength is overvalued.

This time the whole story did feel a little scattered to me. So real in its Europeanism, so confident in its Americanism… Not everybody can talk about their ideas as the characters in Mistress America. The audience is mesmerised by a funny give-and-take conversation between Brook and an old friend from high school. It does feel nice to follow it, but right now I cannot stop admiring that she had been able to speak her mind. It takes a lot, in the season of oppression. Snide, grey and silent oppression. All around culture.

I ended up finding the two characters as abandoned women. They are not really close with their parents, but I don’t know to what extent they should be. Is big city life any easier for other young ladies? I don’t think so. Their quest for space kept staring at me in the face: it means so much to have it. All the things that you could do, in the case of our two heroines, it is business. Business of sorts. I fill my home with poetry, read out loud. It couldn’t be nicer. But it’s not for sale 🙂 When they sit together again to do something religious, to repeat, together, it feels nice that a happy ending to all the communication problems of the world. Maybe we can have non-contagious contact for longer than usual… Despite kinds of econ. The finale song rings through my ears as I find my own place in the world interpreted so well, with so much courtesy and craft: ‘Could Have Been A Lady’. Baumbauch does not spare his cultural references for the sake of proven intellectualism. He does it free-hand.