Private Property

2006, 95 minutes, foreign drama, directed by Joachim Lafosse, France, French with English subtitles

Isabelle Huppert is an actor whose every movement and gesture is a measure of her character’s emotional weight. In Private Property she’s a seething study in resentment, boredom, and frustration. Huppert plays Pascale, a divorced woman living with her twin young-adult sons, the boyish Francois (Yannick Renier) and the bullying Tierry (Jeremie Renier), in rural Belgium.

That these are people whose lives have become unnaturally intertwined is made clear in the first scene in which Pascale models her new lingerie for Tierry and Francois. The tensions that hold the three together boil over when she announces that she’s going to sell their house and use the money to open a bed and breakfast. Tierry’s bullying then escalates into a campaign of belittlement and sabotage against his mother that draws Pacale and Francois closer together. Pascale’s bid to leave behind the sclerotic life that she’s probably most responsible for creating seems like one part escapist fantasy, one part emotional betrayal, and one part rescue effort. There’s also something pretty funny about a member of this dysfunctional triad becoming a proprietor of that universal symbol of quaintness, the B & B. Huppert turns in a prismatic performance that’s reminiscent of her masterful turn in The Piano Teacher. She’s great at playing characters who are victims of their own choices and weaknesses. As Pascale she’s someone whose attempts at change simply increase the speed at which tragedy unfolds. The film ends with an act of violence that rather than changing the family’s life forever ensures that it will remain the same.

Private Property is shot in somber colors and dim lighting with lots of distance shots. If this sometimes makes it hard to get a lock on the characters physical particularities, it also enhances the sense that these are people so mired in some primal, Oedipal dissolution that who they are as individuals may not matter anymore. They’re less a family that’s gone awry than one who has fallen prey to the entropy that self-actualization normally pushes to the edges of shared life. Scene after scene of them eating together creates a dull domestic rhythm that barely contains the sordid undercurrents of this family’s life. There’s such a sense of claustrophobia in Private Property that it’s a shock when at the end you see for the first time how big the house is that Pascale and her sons live in. If the symbolism in this film is sometimes a little heavy handed (Tierry and Francois getting stuck in the mud) that’s okay—after all, Isabelle Huppert’s in it.

You're Gonna Miss Me

2005, 91 minutes, documentary, directed by Keven McAlester, US

The 13^th Floor Elevators are one of those storied sixties bands who make me nostalgic for an era that I didn’t live through. Probably the only psychedelic rock band with a jug player, most of their titillating back story centers on charismatic lead singer Roky Erickson. You’re Gonna Miss Me (also the name of the band’s only hit single) chronicles Erickson’s descent into drug addiction and mental illness and the schism it creates in his family.

There’s plenty of fodder for biographical cliché in Erickson’s life. He was an acid-gobbling hedonist in the sixties whose drug use blossomed into a heroin habit. Diagnosed as schizophrenic he spent time in mental institutions, got arrested, and eventual became a recluse. Yet, filmmaker Keven McAlester brings so much intelligence and sensitivity to his subject that Erickson never slips into a stereotype. Anecdotes of his wild past—a band mate breaking him out of a mental hospital, for one—are given just enough time and are interwoven into the larger and ultimately more interesting story about Erickson’s relationship with Evelyn, his co-dependent mother and caretaker. Evelyn's refusal to see the seriousness of her son's condition comes disguised in a kind of forced naivety. “I thought name calling went out with the dark ages,” she says regarding Roky's diagnosis of schizophrenia. Her lack of trust in psychiatry and doctors in general hints at some past trauma of her own and it's easy to imagine her at least in part as a victim of the psychiatric “cures” that were inflicted on so many women of her day. That she also saw her son suffer greatly at the hands of the state mental health system in the sixties and seventies makes her behavior if not defensible, at least somewhat explainable. The film opens with Erickson’s brother Sumner, who fought his mother for guardianship of Erickson, testifying in court that, “My brother should not be living in poverty had my mother been doing the right thing. He needs psychiatric medicine. He needs his life back after thirty-five years of tragedy.” Later he claims that under Evelyn's watch Erickson doesn't even receive basic medical care. It’s clear that at some point Evelyn became unglued and was never entirely able to piece herself back together and while the disservice she’s doing her son is evident, she’s more a sad figure than a villainous one—someone who for forgivable reasons can’t face up to reality. She opposes medication, saying she’d “rather see the psychiatrists be more humane and use holistic methods like teaching yoga, which get you in touch with your mind and body and spirit and just good healthy living.” At one point she creepily recalls a religious experience she had and her vow to give all of her five sons to god.

If McAlester was smart to cast this as a family story, he was also smart not to adopt the “talent plus madness equals genius” point of view. Erickson’s mental illness is shown for the unromantic tragedy that it is and this keeps the film from seeming exploitive in any way, unlike some of the more recent recording and publishing ventures that have involved him.

Of course this is a movie about a musician and it’s full of great archival footage and photos of The 13^th Floor Elevators and Erickson performing some of his solo stuff. As a band there was an innocence and a lack of self-consciousness about The 13^th Floor Elevators that makes their music seem sweeter as it ages (or maybe as I age), and after the movie I promptly downloaded the first volume of “Easter Everywhere” from iTunes. You should do the same.