The story of how Pearl is the child of Ti West's 2021 horror X is a good one and worth your time finding it on YouTube. Short version goes that Mia Goth and West felt that an origin story for the character of Pearl was not only doable (with A24 bankrolling) but necessary. So, if you saw X and were turned off by the dodgy age-shaming of the old Pearl (played by Goth under trowels of makeup) there was an opportunity to really open something up. Well that's what they did and, in the process, made a much better movie than the original.
X is a perfectly decent contemporary slasher that makes canny nods to classic fare like Texas Chainsaw Massacre and bundling it up with the hive of concepts you get when you mix anything with pornography production. But where X is fuelled by cynicism as a film, in Pearl it's only occurant in the minds of individual characters. When, in a significant foreshadow of the first film, the projectionist gives Pearl a private showing of an early porno she watches wonderstruck. He tells her it's the future and there will come a time when the movies will show people for real. Her reply is that she doesn't like reality. It's a moment that puts her into bed with Norma Desmond and Norman Bates. From that instant Pearl's drive will be to make everything and everyone part of the movie she's living.
That movie is an odd one. She frolics for the barn animals as though they are the perfect audience. Her relationship with the local swamp alligator is straight out of the Disney princess playbook. She performs a romantic waltz scene with a nasty looking scarecrow (one of many Wizard of Oz callbacks). A strange encounter with a goose foreshadows a scene with her father that will have you on edge. Her audition for the chorus line judges takes us from observing her exaggerated silent movie moves to a grotesque setpiece that, while we know is in her imagination, takes us beyond any judgement of her skills. Her imagination is so powerful by that stage that we just sit back and marvel.
You might think this is a doddle when you know the actor wrote her own part but the writing is challenging. Pearl's neurological maelstrom is partially known to her but is mostly dominating and subjugating. If no one is looking she dances through her day as though performing it. When forced into dealing with the reality she is unimpressed by, she slumps into a twanging mundanity. And then there is the tour de force monologue in which she confesses all her deeds and feelings to her absent husband, going from a resentment at being constantly abandoned to thoughts and works of abject horror. The scene has a few cutaways to the character who is actually present but it is mostly a tight closeup on her face in what I would bet was a single take. Mia Goth transforms Pearl from a screeching child to a monster to something with a raw subservience that will give you the creeps. Of course she is writing to her strengths, anyone would, but they are real strengths.
There is a promised sequel to round the trilogy in which Goth will resume the other role in X as Maxine. If the quality surge between X and Pearl is any indication, I can't wait. But what a boon in this age of such high hit rates of genre cinema that can contain both a plotty Barbarian and plotless Skinamarink that something more conventional but also more organic can still be noticed. A case where the old curse of living in interesting times is processed into satisfaction.
Pearl is on general release in cinemas but it's still under the radar so might need some digging to find it showing near you. Please do.
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