The Fish and the Ghost

Sun, 04 Feb 2018 22:33:10 GMT

I never get tired of hearing strange tales about sea life. Last night I read "As Water Is In Water", the new Caitlin R. Kiernan story in The Sirenia Digest in which the author once again combines knack for spinning narratives of fundamental disorientation with the aesthetic of sea life.

Told from the perspective of a woman visiting a therapist, we learn of the protagonist's strange, possibly false, memory of seeing a rain of fish, squid, snails, and other normally undersea things fall down on her home. There's also a similarly uncertain memory of a ghost that's introduced in a nicely, effectively ominous way.

Some of the most interesting aspects of the story, though, are parts where the narrator pokes holes in the presumptions of the therapist/patient relationship. It's easy to see the narrator's frustration when the therapist claims to accept the truth of everything the narrator says while also acknowledging the treachery of memory, somewhat sidestepping the obvious human capacity for lying. A relationship designed to create a sense of trust thereby instead creates a more fundamental, deep distrust.

The supernatural elements help illustrate this while also giving the story an essential beauty. A very nice work.

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Couture Ectoplasm

Tue, 12 Dec 2017 01:06:35 GMT

What does communicating with the dead have to do with being a celebrity's assistant? Well, Kristen Stewart does both in 2017's Personal Shopper, a movie that never quite gets on its feet, but is a nice enough excuse to watch Kristen Stewart try on clothes and star in some well constructed, tense sequences.

Maureen (Stewart) is in Paris working as a personal shopper for a celebrity named Kyra (Nora von Waldstatten). She's also in Paris because her brother recently died there and he'd promised her that after he died he'd send her a sign. Like her brother, Maureen is a medium, but as she explains to a friend, she never shared her brother's certainty that the beings they contacted were spirits of the dead instead of some other phenomenon.

So she's spending a lot of time in her brother's old house, waiting for him to give her a sign. There's an inexplicable subplot about two of her brother's friends having a romantic relationship, which they slowly break the news to Maureen about over the course of the film in several casual conversations. It's really bland and it doesn't seem to have anything to do with anything. A red herring? I guess.

Writer and director Olivier Assayas wisely seems to feel he can't really settle the question about the afterlife for Maureen but he doesn't seem happy with leaving us with ambiguity. One special effect in a later scene seems to confirm the existence of the afterlife, then an encounter Maureen has makes her doubt it more. The moral seems to be, "Sometimes ghosts play pranks and we should be very solemn about it."

A fairly effective subplot about a stalker who starts texting Maureen builds tension nicely. Conversations in texts aren't as boring as you'd think because Assayas makes sure to have Maureen on train journeys through Paris and London or changing into a kinky harness for a designer while she's exchanging the texts. Maureen starts to get turned on by her anonymous correspondent, confiding she wants to be someone else, and telling him that she's trying on her employer's clothes because forbidden things turn her on. It's never quite enough to build a personality for Maureen but, along with the fact that we know she has a heart problem, it makes for some scenes that effectively make you afraid for her.

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The Fish and the Ghost

Couture Ectoplasm