On Good Manners
This morning I scrolled in amusement through the photos of two beefy gay bros that Instagram had suggested I should follow: you know the sort of couple; both hench, wearing vests or swimming trunks; both displaying signs of never having skimped on leg day; attractive without being particularly beautiful; and perhaps, if you look closer, you can see the goofier child they were not long ago peeking out, the slightly more uncertain soul that existed before they threw about themselves this mantle of wealth and power.
I've been thinking a lot about queerness for a few years now: what it means to be a homo in public, signifying one's difference to the world. I've been thinking about gay marriage - the Instagrammers were married of course, and on the day of their marriage they paused amid the merriment to do a sponsored post about mattresses. Ealier this month Lynne Featherstone, the Lib Dem MP who was partly responsible for getting the bill on equal marriage adopted, rebuked a gay man on Twitter for not sufficiently recognising the brilliant leap forward that was marriage for all: this seemed to me to prove that "gay marriage" had in effect been a smokescreen, giving queers the impression of having arrived, when in fact we still have so much struggle ahead of us, so much to fight for. By assimilating us, marriage clipped our wings, and it cast to the side so many of our differences, so much queer quiddity. What does it mean to live out our differences, and to embody a radical alternative to mainstream patriarchal ideals?
Good Manners, which has finally obtained a UK release by landing on Mubi three years after fact, illustrates many of these concerns, by casting its ideas about sexuality and politics, about identity and otherness, into the form of a modern fairytale. The movie tells the story of Clara, an indigenous impoverished worker from the underprivileged suburbs of Sao Paulo, who puts herself forward for the position of housekeeper to Ana, a rich young white woman in the city's high-rise rich quarters. Already, in these early scenes, the movie is having fun with visual imagery: the lush colour palette adopted here, the almost hokey lighting, seem to be shouting out vintage Disney - and indeed, up here in her castle away from the slums, Ana is a modern princess, rendered captive by her role as a young wife to an absent man in Brazil's one percent. Clara soon discovers that Ana is prey to a curse; she hankers for human flesh at every full moon. We learn - from a delightful animated vignette drawing on Grimm-like folklore - that Ana, who is pregnant, may be carrying the child of a werewolf. The rescue of Ana that Clara stages - one that enables both women to transcend for a moment the boundaries of wealth, class and race and connect in their difference - is a rescue of queerness. The two women begin a sexual relationship, with Clara vowing to look after the child when it is born.
Good Manners brilliantly teases out these shared values of queerness, and connects otherness with class struggle. The film promotes an idea of homosexuality as fundamentally different; here is a system that can - that could, if it were allowed - leap across boundaries. After the birth of the infant, Clara journeys back to her house with Ana's child: where Ana's apartment can be seen as a modern Disney palace, perhaps the shack where Clara lives is more of a cottage in the woods, such as the one to which the fairy godmothers repair in Sleeping Beauty to look after the cursed baby. In pointing up the differences in those two social strata, the film is every bit as resonant as, say, the sensational scene in Parasite where the Parks descend back to their real social class through the rain, dirt and shit. Good Manners is firmly anchored in modern Brazil, where the one percent own the same proportion of the country's wealth as the bottom fifty percent (which comes to 80 million people). So queerness, in this modern parable, where magic helps enable the miraculous, is radical and political; the difference of queers can be a salve, can help us meet each other.
The question of otherness is embodied, in the film, both in its text and subtext - since Clara is queer and a person of colour; but Joel, the child, once born, is also fundamentally other because of his werewolf descent. The movie is intelligent here in the way it plays on horror tropes, before ultimately casting them aside: when Ana is racked with agony in childbirth, the film has fun with body-horror, giving us the sense of the beastly creature within her womb; but ultimately Joel is not monstrous, merely other. The movie then becomes, in a thrilling switch-up, a Frankenstein-ish tale about identity, oppression and acceptance, since Joel's essence is at odds with social politesse. Though Clara chains him up at every full moon to stop him from harm, ultimately she cannot tie down his true nature, which must out. In this set-up the filmmakers, Marco Dutra and Juliana Rojas, depict a proletariat identity, rooted in family and community, rising up; and they stage a battle of queerness - where queer signifies what is strange and unnerving to the apparent good manners of society - against the small-minded society at large.
It is in these intersections - of race, of class, of sexuality and gender - that Good Manners (which is not a didactic film, but a beautiful and lavish entertainment, exquisitely lensed by the cinematographer Rui Poças) really shows its mettle. Queerness is depicted as combative, and as a radical alternative to mainstream concerns, rather than homosexuality being another declension of heterosexual, patriarchal society, all ready to be assimilated. The queerness of Good Manners remembers that the struggle of others is our struggle; this is the pulsating other face to the placid, conservative white gayness that, for instance, voted in its droves for Marine Le Pen at the last election in France.
With its use of fairytales and the folkloric, Good Manners was one of several recent masterworks, when it first came out, to use magic as a structuring system, alongside Happy As Lazzaro and Phantom Thread. Happy As Lazzaro tells a folk story of a prowling wolf outside a village, and of a village dunce with a supernatural second life, an idiot savant whose goodness transfigures his surroundings. In so doing, Alice Rohrwacher told a bleak fairytale of modern Italy, investigating the lives of the have-nots. Phantom Thread uses a Bluebeard device, of a young bride married to a forbidding master, in order to investigate the some-time perversion of straight male sexuality, and draw the portrait of a monster finally brought to his knees. Good Manners meshes both these aspects - the personal and the political - into its own bold premise, giving us a riotous parable of good people helping others, and opposing real good manners to the thin, oppressive 'manners' of the violent and punishing world around us.
I've been thinking a lot about queerness for a few years now: what it means to be a homo in public, signifying one's difference to the world. I've been thinking about gay marriage - the Instagrammers were married of course, and on the day of their marriage they paused amid the merriment to do a sponsored post about mattresses. Ealier this month Lynne Featherstone, the Lib Dem MP who was partly responsible for getting the bill on equal marriage adopted, rebuked a gay man on Twitter for not sufficiently recognising the brilliant leap forward that was marriage for all: this seemed to me to prove that "gay marriage" had in effect been a smokescreen, giving queers the impression of having arrived, when in fact we still have so much struggle ahead of us, so much to fight for. By assimilating us, marriage clipped our wings, and it cast to the side so many of our differences, so much queer quiddity. What does it mean to live out our differences, and to embody a radical alternative to mainstream patriarchal ideals?
Good Manners, which has finally obtained a UK release by landing on Mubi three years after fact, illustrates many of these concerns, by casting its ideas about sexuality and politics, about identity and otherness, into the form of a modern fairytale. The movie tells the story of Clara, an indigenous impoverished worker from the underprivileged suburbs of Sao Paulo, who puts herself forward for the position of housekeeper to Ana, a rich young white woman in the city's high-rise rich quarters. Already, in these early scenes, the movie is having fun with visual imagery: the lush colour palette adopted here, the almost hokey lighting, seem to be shouting out vintage Disney - and indeed, up here in her castle away from the slums, Ana is a modern princess, rendered captive by her role as a young wife to an absent man in Brazil's one percent. Clara soon discovers that Ana is prey to a curse; she hankers for human flesh at every full moon. We learn - from a delightful animated vignette drawing on Grimm-like folklore - that Ana, who is pregnant, may be carrying the child of a werewolf. The rescue of Ana that Clara stages - one that enables both women to transcend for a moment the boundaries of wealth, class and race and connect in their difference - is a rescue of queerness. The two women begin a sexual relationship, with Clara vowing to look after the child when it is born.
Good Manners brilliantly teases out these shared values of queerness, and connects otherness with class struggle. The film promotes an idea of homosexuality as fundamentally different; here is a system that can - that could, if it were allowed - leap across boundaries. After the birth of the infant, Clara journeys back to her house with Ana's child: where Ana's apartment can be seen as a modern Disney palace, perhaps the shack where Clara lives is more of a cottage in the woods, such as the one to which the fairy godmothers repair in Sleeping Beauty to look after the cursed baby. In pointing up the differences in those two social strata, the film is every bit as resonant as, say, the sensational scene in Parasite where the Parks descend back to their real social class through the rain, dirt and shit. Good Manners is firmly anchored in modern Brazil, where the one percent own the same proportion of the country's wealth as the bottom fifty percent (which comes to 80 million people). So queerness, in this modern parable, where magic helps enable the miraculous, is radical and political; the difference of queers can be a salve, can help us meet each other.
The question of otherness is embodied, in the film, both in its text and subtext - since Clara is queer and a person of colour; but Joel, the child, once born, is also fundamentally other because of his werewolf descent. The movie is intelligent here in the way it plays on horror tropes, before ultimately casting them aside: when Ana is racked with agony in childbirth, the film has fun with body-horror, giving us the sense of the beastly creature within her womb; but ultimately Joel is not monstrous, merely other. The movie then becomes, in a thrilling switch-up, a Frankenstein-ish tale about identity, oppression and acceptance, since Joel's essence is at odds with social politesse. Though Clara chains him up at every full moon to stop him from harm, ultimately she cannot tie down his true nature, which must out. In this set-up the filmmakers, Marco Dutra and Juliana Rojas, depict a proletariat identity, rooted in family and community, rising up; and they stage a battle of queerness - where queer signifies what is strange and unnerving to the apparent good manners of society - against the small-minded society at large.
It is in these intersections - of race, of class, of sexuality and gender - that Good Manners (which is not a didactic film, but a beautiful and lavish entertainment, exquisitely lensed by the cinematographer Rui Poças) really shows its mettle. Queerness is depicted as combative, and as a radical alternative to mainstream concerns, rather than homosexuality being another declension of heterosexual, patriarchal society, all ready to be assimilated. The queerness of Good Manners remembers that the struggle of others is our struggle; this is the pulsating other face to the placid, conservative white gayness that, for instance, voted in its droves for Marine Le Pen at the last election in France.
With its use of fairytales and the folkloric, Good Manners was one of several recent masterworks, when it first came out, to use magic as a structuring system, alongside Happy As Lazzaro and Phantom Thread. Happy As Lazzaro tells a folk story of a prowling wolf outside a village, and of a village dunce with a supernatural second life, an idiot savant whose goodness transfigures his surroundings. In so doing, Alice Rohrwacher told a bleak fairytale of modern Italy, investigating the lives of the have-nots. Phantom Thread uses a Bluebeard device, of a young bride married to a forbidding master, in order to investigate the some-time perversion of straight male sexuality, and draw the portrait of a monster finally brought to his knees. Good Manners meshes both these aspects - the personal and the political - into its own bold premise, giving us a riotous parable of good people helping others, and opposing real good manners to the thin, oppressive 'manners' of the violent and punishing world around us.
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