I have a friend who wants me to write movie reviews, she also is currently rebelling against the omnipresence of narrative cliché in our lives. She wants the man who would know that he should laugh, when she says – we should stop meeting like this, or do you say this to all the girls, and not stare back at her expressionlessly or even worse say – yes, you are right, that makes sense.
So I would take her to see ‘The wayward cloud’ which apart from being a flagrant denial of narrative, not simply because of the emergence of single frames that then disappear, a song with a furtive looking penis running around being chased by women with plungers (ofcourse appropriately in a frightening Freudian way). But also for this brief scene, when the hero and heroine part at a lift, and the lift apparently has not moved, so the door re-opens on the same floor. The hero leans in (and oh the narrative cliché that is the lean-in, reams can be written about it, it is unfair to unclose such a bursting joy of a cliché, repeatedly and more wantonly used than ‘I love you’ within parenthesis, so I will rescue it).
The lean in – when a man leans in to kiss a woman, part of cinematic language and ofcourse body language… let go of what comes first, it is even more futile than the chicken and the egg, which incidentally has been solved by a scientist investigating into DNA who said that only a chicken egg can come from a chicken, or only a chicken can come from a chicken egg. Well, he solved it, so what if I don’t really remember how, which really explains the paradox of the chicken-egg question, its not that no one can solve it, its that no one can remember the answer.
But as a birthday gift, I would take this friend of mine to see the lean-in in ‘The wayward cloud’, because the boy leans in (our hero, dashing star of B-grade pornographic movies, who cant get it up for what might be true love) and it looks like the cliché will be fulfilled (and these are clichés that should be followed through, I sternly believe that lean-ins should be followed by kisses, and not by silly things like pulling something out of your hair, or even putting a flower in, the hair is meant for pulling, not silly things like cleaning and putting stuff – it is not, atleast mine isn’t, a flower pot.) so he leans in, and the girl doesn’t move, but you can sense her willingness, and then almost involuntarily at the sheer moronic nature of the cliché, a giggle escapes her mouth. So she loses a kiss, she is forever crowned in my mind, as having rescued a moment in cinema. The lift closes, she happy and humming proceeds to elevate up through the building.
We don’t know what happens to him, but the next scene, has us staring at her feet, while she stares up at her ceiling, above which on the next floor is the wanton completion beyond lean-ins, of actual voyeuristic professional sex, and since he is the star of B-grade pornographic movies, presumably he is the one banging away upstairs. And not letting her sleep and surrender to the sweetness of having subverted narrative cliché briefly, and to maybe, just possibly maybe, have a different romance, which is at the end of the day what we all hunger, not that we are loved and cherished like generations before, like mummy loves daddy, like your best friend and her sturdy reliable boyfriend, but in some slightly risqué and almost exotic, dangerous way, which avoids the stumbling blocks of narrative cliché.
It is also interesting, that pornography trades in clichés and scenarios, but in ‘A wayward cloud’ our brilliantly defiant of clichés girl helps the man smoke his cigarette by holding a cigarette between the thumb and fingers of her feet. It is not the scene that as much stuns with its sweet intimacy, as it is the weird unashamed perspective of the camera, where feet are larger than the face, and weird foreshortening almost make the frame look like a painting (Dali, anyone, or is that a cliché?). There is no attempt to shoot pretty feet (and hers are very pretty indeed) but if you have a fetish or just want to avoid clichés of kissing scenes in cinema (standing up near a bridge in an European city, heads at a forty five degree angle), then it should look like you can smell her feet, let it fill your vision, the way it is during sex, where you aren’t seeing a tableau in front of you, but actually inside the grooves and curves of another person’s body.
