MADELINE’S MADELINE is amazing, disturbing, and ultimately both exhilarating and devastating. It is Josephine Decker’s greatest film to date. The film is so experimental/abstract, yet at the same time so visceral/intense, that I don’t really know how to talk about it. I am trying to give my impressions, but everything I say may well be entirely misguided and beside the point.
Decker invents (especially here, though it was already present in her previous films) an entirely new formal language, to express an entirely new sort of subjectivity, here embodied in her teenaged protagonist Madeline (the utterly brilliant an remarkable Helena Howard). Shallow focus, often fuzzy, roving camera, strange angles, strange edits, soundtrack interpolations (including both heavy breathing sounds and the amazing music of Caroline Shaw) – even to the extent that I can describe them, I cannot explain how they add up to something both entirely fresh and greater than the sum of its parts.
The movie is about acting (including its own) and the mystique of improv theater (something I am not very enamoured of in other contexts, or perhaps due to my own ignorance; but it is overwhelming here). At their highest point, intense inner feeling and its completely fictive simulation become indistinguishable, and that is what happens here in the course of a teenage girl’s relation with her two mother figures (one the biological and legal mother, played surprisingly against type by the great Miranda July, the other the mother substitute that the head of the improv troupe becomes, played by Molly Parker).
The film recounts incidents, rather than anything that is shaped like a conventional narrative, but it builds to a completely logical and shattering climax – which then in turn transmutes into something vivid and powerful but also dreamlike and almost ungraspable (theater returning to its roots in Dionysian ritual? I am grasping at straws here).
One could say that MADELINE’S MADELINE is deconstructing oppositions between real life and theater, or between authenticity and performance, or whatever – or even between human and animal, since the film features repeating exercises in which the actors try to channel animals, especially cats – there are pig masks as well, not to mention may closeups of actual cats – and in fact the film begins with a warning, delivered to us in extreme closeup, about the nuances of identification and possession (it is only a metaphor, you are not really the cat, you are IN the cat) –
I could say all that, and it would be sort of true, but it is totally inadequate as a description of the movie, because MADELINE’S MADELINE is not just a deconstruction of identities and oppositions, but a positive expression of some new sort of identity (which is female, and biracial, and other things, but isn’t ONLY all that) that we don’t have words for yet. Which is why I will not be able to shake the memory of this film (and will have to watch it again, a number of times) (all this I felt more obscurely already in the case of BUTTER ON THE LATCH, but here it is magnitudes more powerful and more perplexing).
(originally posted on Facebook, but I think it is important enough to also post here)