I think my expectations were a little too high for 2022's Pearl. I'd seen it on a few "best of the year" lists and I heard Martin Scorsese liked it. Maybe if I hadn't heard all that, I could have just enjoyed the film's old-fashioned style and talented lead actress. As it was, I just couldn't help thinking I was watching Blue Velvet with fewer dimensions.
Pearl (Mia Goth) is a naive farmgirl, pining for her new husband who's off fighting in World War I. The film's set in 1918 during the Spanish flu pandemic and the film wastes no time drawing parallels between it and the Corona virus pandemic.
This is the third 2022 movie I've seen that actually has characters wearing medical masks, after Three Thousand Years of Longing and Glass Onion. Hollywood can't ignore the reality anymore.
Pearl doesn't really use it to make commentary, though when one character complained about the isolation I thought it was a bit of an anachronism. Living in a rural town in 1918, pandemic imposed isolation couldn't have been that much different from the normal day-to-day.
Pearl's mother, Ruth (Tandi Wright), is mean and doesn't like her daughter having too much fun. Her father (Matthew Sunderland) is totally paralysed and can't speak. Pearl makes friends with the farm animals except she occasionally kills one of them to feed to an alligator living in a nearby river.
It's clear pretty early on that Pearl is a psychopath, but she's also innocent and pretty and wants to be a movie star. The film uses her to mock the idealism of old Hollywood by contrasting her disturbing behaviour with a lovely orchestral score and saturated, Technicolour-ish cinematography. I guess that stuff is pretty on its own, regardless of what director Ti West is trying to do with it. Some of the stuff I think was meant to be disturbing comes off as funny or sweet, like when Pearl starts French kissing a scarecrow or a moment when she says she wishes her parents would die. She says the latter to a sleazy projectionist who's trying to flirt with her and it causes him to back off a little, frightened. It felt really false--a guy like that should've either laughed or taken it as a cue to press his advantage.
Mia Goth's a good actress but the film overindulges her a few times, kind of reminding me of Michael Fassbender in 12 Years a Slave. There are moments where her over-emoting is meant to be disturbing, I'm sure, but it starts to come off more as Mia Goth just holding a take for too long, especially the film's final shot.
There were a few scenes I liked very much. I really liked the showdown between Pearl and her mother, the screaming match between them really felt like a brawl between two monsters and it's interesting to think about, comparing and contrasting it with normal parent/child relationships.
Mainly I wish the film had brought us into Pearl's perspective a little more. The film's lovely style is consciously modelled on Douglas Sirk and feels very much like the 1950s, so it's not the Hollywood of Pearl's time. I would have liked to have seen show business through her eyes, something glamorous and magnificent instead of just ironic. I realised I wanted to watch Blue Velvet, which I did afterwards.
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