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\u201cIf you are the depressed type now, that is the way you are always going to be.\u201d This is Todd Solondz\u2019 alter ego speaking in his new film Palindromes<\/strong>, his new \u201cfairytale\u201d about an adolescent girl going through many hard changes in life\u2014 including pregnancy, forced abortion and a Huckleberry Finn escape down a river\u2014 all in a search for unconditional love. The first word in this film is \u201cMom\u201d and the last word \u201cMom\u201d: a mirror of palindromes that shows that nothing ever changes. The story is simple: a girl wants the ideal love of a mother, and to find it she decides to be a mother herself, and yet, from beginning to end, she is unsatisfied in her quest. Her forced abortion\u2014 and consequent hysterectomy– is simply a metaphor for the inability to evolve, and indeed the final scene is a flashback of shots back to the opening frame.<\/p>\nTodd Solondz made his film a palindrome\u2014 at every level\u2014 because as he puts it: \u201cwe are paradoxically always changing\u2014 we grow and we change\u2014 and at the same time, it is also true that we are not changing. Certain things, yes you can improve, however there are certain things that we cannot, and we are better off if we can accept the limitations of who we in fact are.\u201d This lack of change, failure of difference, is not just individual. Aviva, the adolescent girl (Her name, need I say, is a palindrome?) is played by eight different characters, each sharing with the other the basic essence of adolescent vulnerability, although in every other way different: fat, thin, black, white, male, female red-haired, dark-haired, little, huge. Solondz\u2019s point is that this character is, in essence, universal, and that just as all eight characters are vaguely the same, so are we: inherently unloved yet hopeful, a universal flaw that we should accept. Asked how he cast his actors, and why eight Avivas, Solondz responded: \u201cFor the Avivas, I was looking for a quality of vulnerability, of innocence, that certain young people can project, to provide something of the glue that connects them, from one to the other, so that even as they change sex and race and so forth throughout the course of the film, there would be a certain kind of consistency that would make Aviva in fact one character.\u201d<\/p>\n
That \u201cone character\u201d is the tortured adolescent that Solondz knows well, from his first work, Welcome to the Dollhouse<\/strong> (1996) to his more recent Storytelling<\/strong> (2001), all of which feature the loser in a lonely aggressive hell, replete with New Jersey strip-malls and over-anxious moms. One wonders what happened in Solondz\u2019s own New Jersey suburban past to have this issue of the unloved, suicidal, pedophilia-prone adolescent so raw, the fodder of such forcefully critical masterpieces of film such as Happiness<\/strong> (1998). One also wonders how he perceives his native USA. Solondz\u2019s films are as much an examination of the adolescent as of his home country\u2019s consumer culture and its native patriotism. Flags waving in every scene, America comes across as a cruel market of wannabee Beautiful People and self-satisfied religious fanatics, where the only retort is a sort of violence\u2014 be it through guns or storytelling.<\/p>\n Solondz, grey and balding, with a tendency to keep one hand in a pocket, and his head lowered, is open to such questioning. He grins widely from behind his big green-framed glasses, and, while continuing to look askance, shifting his gaze down and to the left when approached by questioners, he is more than ready to proffer glib responses before his publicist slips him away, responses which one feels are rather like his films themselves, made tongue-and-cheek.<\/p>\n Here the jokes get cruel, much like Mamma Sunshine\u2019s own iron that is kept upright in one frame with its heated point facing us. \u201cLast year our special daughter ran away,\u201d quips Mamma S in her sweety-pie voice. \u201cAnd she didn\u2019t even have any legs.\u201d Other risqu\u00e9 humor includes the blind girl being complimented for her masterful job at \u201cwatching the flame.\u201d One of the most campy shots, hard to watch, is all these disabled children\u2014 including Barbara, a botched abortion\u2014 singing with microphones, in an imitation of the Jackson Five.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat cruelty?\u201d says Todd Solondz. \u201cI love these characters. The blind, the crippled.\u201d He turns the question on the audience- if they perceive something wrong with filming an obese black girl (one of the Avivas, and the most powerfully played), that shows something wrong with them. \u201cWhy shouldn\u2019t these people be actors in the movie? I glory in having a big black woman, but if she is mocked because of this, or if the children with disabilities are mocked, that is not where my head is. Why shouldn\u2019t the disabled sing?\u201d<\/p>\n Solondz\u2019s responses belie the fact that it is hard to take a psycho-realistic approach\u2014 i.e. \u201clove the characters\u201d– to a film that is so post-modernly self-conscious. Each scene is set up as a stage, its props as fake as could be, resulting in tableaux of macabre jokes. There is, for example, a shot of Aviva and a bag of garbage both leaning in the same way against a trailer, to highlight their similarity as rejects. In another, a sexually violated doll is found in a dumpster full of aborted fetuses. As for the misfits\u2014 including one named Skippy after the peanut butter\u2014 these are spoofs of people, hardly real characters that we can \u201clove\u201d by any stretch of the imagination. Indeed, some of these characters are so crudely drawn, they seem an adolescent\u2019s cruel sketch of his enemies in the lunch-room. So can Solondz be serious when he says: \u201cThe family Aviva comes to is a sort of paradise. There is a poignancy when you first see these kids at the breakfast table.\u201d This is the very same breakfast table where Mr. Sunshine asks: \u201cCan you pass the freedom toasts?\u201d<\/p>\n Solondz may be purposefully careful in his responses, so as to let the controversial film speak for itself. He prefers, he says, to stand in the sidelines: \u201ccurious to see how this movie plays in Ohio\u201d— if it ever, of course, gets that far into the heartland. The film, he speculates, could be taken for a pro-life film (after all, the climax is the mother\u2019s dreadful decision to force her daughter to abort), but it could also be taken as pro-choice film (the Sunshines, avid pro-lifers, are behind a murder movement to kill abortionists, which results in a bloody spree of dead children). He wants to leave it open.<\/p>\n If pressed, however, Solondz will admit that he is deliberately playing with a whole host of American sacred cows, on all fronts, from the abortion debate to commercialism (Aviva\u2019s mom aborted one son so as to be able to afford \u201cN\u2019Synch\u201d tickets) and even\u2014 beyond touch\u00e9\u2014 the twin towers.<\/p>\n While it is arguable whether this \u201csecular\/fundamentalist\u201d division is simply another American construct, what makes Solondz\u2019s film sharply rewarding is the fact that it dares to tell the story we all know\u2014 the vulnerability of adolescents, the obstinacy of limited world views, the unnurturing environment of strip mall commercialism\u2014 through a prism of uncompromising pain. The movie\u2014 as enfant provocateur\u2014 works.<\/p>\n Morever, storytelling is Solondz\u2019 forte, and here he has outdone himself. We have references to Night of the Hunter<\/strong> and Huckleberry Finn<\/strong> in the fake river scene, where a plastic boat sails down a pink river, a painted backdrop to Aviva\u2019s journey. We have \u201cmad tea party\u201d references in the Sunshine home and delightful Alice in Wonderland<\/em> transformations as Aviva goes from small to big, and down again. There is even a countertext to Dorothy\u2019s \u201cthere is no place like home\u201d in Aviva\u2019s lullaby of escape: \u201cTake me please, help me get faraway, to a place, any place, faraway.\u201d Each \u201cchapter\u201d of the eight-sectioned piece begins with a \u201cnew\u201d Aviva, always different and always the same (except for the portrait that hangs in the overlt pink bedroom), which makes the film fresh no matter how many stories it references or how dark the theme: a testimony to the power of palindromes.<\/p>\n Our director is wrong to say that we don\u2019t move forward. He has. This film, \u201cdedicated to Dawn Weiner\u201d, the suicidal adolescent protagonist of his first movie, is by far his most coherent work, the one that presses most shockingly at the memory of being adolescent, and at the pain of being human–imperfect, and yet wanting, like the director himself, to have it both ways, stressing imperfection at the same time that he, the artist, makes it rhyme.<\/p>\n -Karin Badt is a film professor at the University of Paris VIII.<\/em>![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.filmbuffonline.com\/Features\/FeaturesImages\/Palindromes2.jpg\")
The biggest question in this film, as in other Solondz films, is the choice to shock the audience with scenes of what most critics would agree is \u201cbad taste.\u201d After Aviva\u2019s mother forces her 12 year old to have an abortion, Aviva runs away to seek for new mother-love, and finds it in the blissful fairytale home of Mamma Sunshine, a born-again Christian who bakes \u201cJesus-Tear\u201d cookies, and has assorted with her all the kinds of children who, in a perfect-obsessed world, might have been aborted: the blind, the crippled, the epileptic, the dumb (To quote Aviva\u2019s own mother, a deformed child isn\u2019t a baby, \u201cit\u2019s a tumor.\u201d). Aviva is welcomed into this ideal gingerbread home, this parody of do-gooders where sunflowers bloom on emerald-green grass, and where the frames are so overcrowded with colors and cloths that even the spectator feels the claustrophobia of cloying maternal warmth.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.filmbuffonline.com\/Features\/FeaturesImages\/Palindromes1.jpg\")
\u201cThe twin towers,\u201d Solondz quips. \u201cThat\u2019s the least of it. My movie requires a certain open-mindedness. If you go in with a certain liberal agenda, or a certain conservative one, you are going to look at it in a very limited way.\u201d He contends that what he is mostly getting at is the American\u2014 and the universal\u2014 tendency towards narrow-minded binary thinking. \u201cI want to explore through narrative techniques something of who we are in this polarized world. The U.S. is just a microcosm of what is happening globally, when you have the secular and the fundamentalist division.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n She spoke with Todd Solondz at the Venice Film Festival in September 2004.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"