Goldilocks and the Two Bears
In Jeff Lipsky’s films, it’s normal for characters to talk for ten minutes straight, and it’s normal for other characters to listen without interrupting. You have to just go with the convention. Or, not. You don’t “have” to do anything. If a director doesn’t establish a context and style, if the actors aren’t skilled enough to pull it off, if the audience is given enough time to think “Wait, what is this person babbling on about?” … the thing unravels. “Goldilocks and the Two Bears” starts unraveling with the first unmotivated monologue and falls apart from there.
Ivy (Claire Milligan) arrives in Las Vegas to start college. She is sharing a condo with her grandmother and finds two squatters holed up there, Ian (Brian Mittelstadt) and Ingrid (Serra Naiman). Ivy is terrified, but doesn’t call the police. Instead, she takes a long walk with Ingrid, and the two swap lengthy monologues. Then they go back to the condo. A fully naked Ian pees in the toilet and stares at Ivy as she walks by the door. Ivy is not freaked out. Instead, she is titillated.
So far so Goldilocks.
Ingrid is a (former?) junkie, and she doesn’t shave her armpits. These are her distinguishing characteristics. Ian barely speaks, and when he does, he says things like: “It was one week after receiving my first blowjob that I decided to become a philosophy professor.” There’s unconvincing sexual tension between Ivy and Ingrid, and they end up fooling around while simultaneously referencing Immanuel Kant. Ivy giggles as she fingers Ingrid, “There’s one too many Germans in bed with us.”
Directors present their fascinations for their own particular reasons. Howard Hawks created a certain type of female protagonist so distinct she is referred to as “The Howard Hawks Woman”. Lars von Trier wears his obsessions on his sleeve. So did Alfred Hitchcock. So did John Cassavetes, Chantal Akerman, Ingmar Bergman. These directors are obsessed with women, and they made art out of it. Lipsky is equally obsessed but can’t manage the art part of it. Instead, we have naked young women talking about stereotypically male-centric Boomer cultural references, like Henry Miller and the Three Stooges, while never being convincing they know about any of these things. These women are lip-synching to Lipsky. It would have been refreshing if Ivy were a happy bimbo.
Ian owns four books: William Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Joseph Heller’s Something Happened (Catch-22 is obviously too popular for such a rarified mind), the Portable Dorothy Parker, and finally, a slim book called Men and Menstruation, by David Linton. I looked up the last one. Here’s the description: “Though a biological characteristic, menstruation is also a complex social construction, one that men play an active role in creating via a process of ‘menstrual transactions.’ This book explores the means by which menstruation is given meaning through an examination of a wide variety of such transactions.” I menstruate and no man plays an “active part” in the process. This confirms my suspicion after seeing Lipsky’s “Mad Women”, that Lipsky can’t get over the gobsmacking fact that women menstruate and excrete waste. How can women do this <i>while also being sexually attractive</i> to him?
