Volume 115: R.M.N. / Fanny: The Right to Rock
The Voice of Energy Vol. 115
Back at it again, friends. Doing my damnedest to keep on top of getting newsletters out on a regular basis. And thankfully I was able to get a good deal of work done this week and last, leaving me ample room to watch some films and time enough to write about them. Which I have done for you below.
Has anyone had a chance to look over Richard Brody's recent listicle The Greatest Independent Films of the 20th Century? Would love to hear your thoughts on it. According to Letterboxd's calculations, I've only seen 26% of the 67 films he wrote about for the piece, including some true masterworks like Pather Panchali, Persona, and Carnival of Souls. But as with most lists like this or the Sight & Sound roundup or John Waters' yearly Top 10 for Artforum, I feel like I'm lacking in the core knowledge of cinema history, past and present. I'd sure like to catch up with the full list of films Brody writes about. Even when I don't agree with him (still can't fathom his love for Don't Worry Darling and prefer several Welles films to the one he writes up here), the way he writes gives me a great deal to think about.
R.M.N. (dir. Cristian Mungiu)
About halfway through R.M.N., director Cristian Mungiu’s gently-roving camera goes still. He trains its eye on a loud, heated meeting being held, ironically, in the cultural center of a small Transylvanian village. The angle of the picture is slightly askew, ignoring entirely the faces of the town’s mayor, police chief, and its chief clergyman who are technically in charge of this assembly. Instead, Mungiu keeps the focus on the mass of people there to argue for and against forcing out a trio of Sri Lankans who recently arrived to work in the town’s bakery.
The bulk of the commentary should sound familiar to anyone who has dared to attend a school board or city council meeting recently or waded into the morass of online commentary. The men are Muslims. They’re unclean and shouldn’t be handling our food. It’s the first step toward a mass insurgence of immigrants just like them. Why couldn’t the bakery hire locals rather than bring in outside help?
As a scene in a dramatic film, it’s masterful — brilliantly orchestrated and acted and terrifyingly true to life. But much like the rest of R.M.N., it’s also a perfect encapsulation of the broken global economy and the unfortunate people caught up in the maw of capitalism. The bakery, it is explained, can’t find locals to take the jobs because they can only offer minimum wage (double OT though!). Paying folks more would mean passing the expense on to the consumer by raising the price of their bread. It’s also in the bakery’s interest to maintain a certain level of staffing as that brings financial benefits from the E.U. It doesn’t help that the bulk of the workforce in this village have had to leave to find work in other countries.
These larger concerns are thoughtfully doled out throughout out R.M.N., beginning with an early scene where Matthias (Marin Grigore), a villager working at a slaughterhouse in Germany, is forced to flee the country after headbutting a foreman who referred to him as a “fucking lazy gypsy.” He returns to Transylvania and his fraught home life. His father is in poor health (the title of the film refers both to Romania and magnetic resonance imaging). His young son has gone mute after witnessing something terrifying in the woods on his walk to school. And he finds himself torn between trying to reconcile with his estranged wife Ana (Macrina Bârlâdeanu) and his lover Csilla (Judith State) who manages the bakery.
As with his other films, Mungiu lays his themes and symbols out in boldface. When a trio of men send a flaming projectile into the guest house where the Sri Lankans are staying, one of them is wearing a white pointed hood. Matthias is the key stand-in for the dueling forces tugging at the core of this village. He’s empathetic to everyone’s concerns even as he seethes with anger over the closing of the mine that upended the town’s economic stability and that his son would rather play video games than hockey. Even his unexplored ethnicity becomes a source of tension. He’s referred to at one point as a “mongrel” and is treated almost as if he’s been grandfathered in as a proper citizen of the town (or, to put it more bluntly, treated as “one of the good ones”). One could see Matthias’ fate being much different were he to side more strongly with Csilla.
In its plainspokenness and directness, R.M.N. could be seen as a litmus test for viewers — you either empathize with Csilla’s attempts to treat the Sri Lankans with respect and care or you are on the side of the villagers who wants rid of these men lest they taint their food and bring diseases with them. (It should be noted that the film takes place in the winter of 2019 right before equally xenophobic fires were stoked by the arrival of the coronavirus.) Considering the audience that will likely make time for this marvelous film, and from the subject matter of Mungiu’s previous films like 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days and Graduation, it’s pretty clear what side the filmmaker stands on. But the director refuses to truly hammer home one ideological debate or layer this film with a thick blanket of emotion. For that, all you need to do is turn on your computer or scan the current lineup of cable news. (in select theaters)
Fanny: The Right To Rock (dir. Bobbi Jo Hart)
How has Fanny eluded most people? It’s not as though the L.A. rock band flew completely below the radar like other rock doc subjects like Rodriguez or Jandek or Death. During their initial existence in the ’70s, the group rubbed elbows with the likes of the Stones and Bonnie Raitt, toured with Humble Pie, and even made appearances on The Sonny and Cher Show and Kenny Rogers’ variety show Rollin’ on the River. Yet for all their remarkable talent and decent chart showings, the group never dent in the wider musical consciousness despite the best attempts of famous fans like David Bowie and the Go-Go’s.
This 2021 documentary, which is set to hit the airwaves of PBS this month, is one step toward correcting the historical record. Though awkwardly constructed, the film paints a vivid picture of this group of hopeful strivers that somehow never achieved liftoff and only recently started to earn some overdue accolades that set the stage for a reunion album recorded, for some reason, as Fanny Walks the Earth.
For all the talk of the greatness of Fanny’s music, Hart puts more emphasis on the interpersonal dynamics of the four women that made up the group, and how the collective stood apart from the prevailing musical narrative of the times. Those details are important. June and Jean Millington, the two sisters at the head of the band, are Filipino, and half of the band members are lesbians. Amongst the predominantly white male critical “intelligentsia” of the era, the group was generally dismissed as a novelty, or written about in increasingly sexist terms. Hart is right to put those issues at the forefront, but it tends to push the music Fanny made to the back burner. The spotlight is brightest on the new music the Millingtons and original drummer Brie Howard-Darling recorded for their reunion album — music which sounds entirely devoid of the bluesy punch of their ’70s output.
This can’t have been an easy documentary to make. Two of the band’s best-known songs were covers of Marvin Gaye’s “Ain’t That Peculiar” and The Beatles’ “Hey Bulldog,” neither of which appear in the film. (I’m sure the slim budget for this film meant they couldn’t secure the rights to use either tune.) And in the wake of the release of the Fanny Walks The Earth album, Jean Millington suffered a stroke which paralyzed much of the right side of her body. The triumphant return of the original Fanny lineup was thwarted, relegated to some charming footage of the trio cruising along in a convertible rocking out to a CD of their album.
Fanny’s story is a vital one, and Hart does a fine job retelling it for the benefit of new generations of fans and those folks who were music heads during the ’70s but somehow missed out on the band. (Fanny: The Right To Rock premieres on PBS on May 22 at 10 pm)
Thanks, again, for reading. Feel free to share with friends and loved ones, and do comment if you have your own feelings about the films reviewed.
Artwork for this edition is from Camila Sposati's exhibition Breath Pieces, on display at ifa Gallery Stuttgart from May 13 through August 20.
This newsletter was written on the unceded land where once stood the traditional village sites of the Multnomah, Wasco, Cowlitz, Kathlamet, Clackamas, Bands of Chinook, Tualatin, Kalapuya, Molalla, and many other tribes who made their homes along the Columbia River creating communities and summer encampments to harvest and use the plentiful natural resources of the area.