Deeply moved by the funeral of her young cousin, 12-year-old Aviva announces her mother she wants to have a child. While she is willing to do everything to succeed, her parents pushes her to abortion when she gets pregnant. She runs away and starts a journey to reach her goal. Todd Solondz stood out as of his second feature Welcome to the Doll House before gaining international notoriety with Happiness, a highly cynical portrait of the neurotic American middle-class society. In the film, Solondz already played with all the moral landmarks of an audience enjoying to be shaken.
Palindromes follows the same path and challenges our moral beacons. The film is set as a loop: Aviva, after her journey, will come back to her starting point, not really the same she was, but not really changed either. Written as a series of scenes, the storyline makes her meet different characters while she incarnates different bodies. Curly brunette, she becomes a pale virginal redhead when aborting or a big black thirty-year-old woman when entering a community for lost children. Aviva goes from the loving arms of her mother (fantastic Ellen Barkin!), whose speech in favour of abortion is horrible, to those of a truck-driver, with whom she will spend a night in a motel. She then enters this house for abandoned children where they practice songs and dances dedicated to God or against abortion -nightmarish and bitter ended vision of the house held by Lilian Gish in The Night of the Hunter. It goes the same way with all the stereotypes the film is about: they’re pushed to their limits -until absurdity. This is one of the very strengths of Solondz cinema. Some scenes like the first one in which Aviva’s mother tries to push her to abortion is stretched to uneasiness, putting the viewer in the voyeur position of a shameless torrent of feelings.
Less cynical and provocative than Happiness, Palindromes is yet filled with a certain poetry and a real tenderness for its heroine. Maternity, abortion, pedophilia, the film deals with difficult and touchy subjects without ever shying away from them and always bets on the audience intelligence and will to question its certitudes. With its narrative boldness, its hard-line policy and the deepness of its subjects, Palindromes stands out as the best of independent American cinema and offers a radical vision of an American society stuck in its binary vision of the world.
Long-awaited in France, the DVD is eventually available. Without any special features though.
Francis Cherasse
More information about Palindromes.
“It’s a film that made a great impression on me and that I never thought I’d see again until I rediscovered it in an Ermanno Olmi 3-disc set. It’s a black and white film, shot in scope, very minimalist, with only two characters. It tells the story of two men that live in a shelter in the mountains and watches the building site of a dam during wintertime. They are alone and communicate few meteorological information to those in the valley. When the film starts, one of them is to be replaced after doing his time. Since the man that usually replaces him must stay with his pregnant wife, it’s a young man who comes up instead. The old man that stayed -named Noel- sees this young guy coming and they’ll have to live together in this shelter. There are few dialogs, the film is mainly on looks and what is really interesting is that the old man doesn’t welcome the young man with suspicion like we could expect it. The film is shot in 1958, it’s a time of changes -that old man belongs to another world, probably rural, the young man comes from the city, he studies economics and he fascinates the older man. The old man will look at him with interest, with kindness, he will try to behave better when eating, to take a book after dinner like the young man does. The film is about them living together, about the relationships between generations, it’s filled with humanity and it has a political point of view. This film really made a strong impression on me when I saw it, it deserves to be discovered.”
After the end of his studies, Denis Freyd spent five years at the INA (French national audiovisual institute) to produce works for television and cinema. He then joined a production company named Initial Group where he spent three years before he founded Archipel 35 in 1988. He produced, among other films, Bamako by Abderrahmane Sissako, the last three features of the Dardenne brothers (The Son, The Child, Lorna’s Silence), the documentaries by Gérard Mordillat and Jérôme Prieur about christianism (Corpus Christi, The Apocalypse).