week 3
fjögur piano
director: Alma Ha’rel
Let’s begin with a short list of things this film features:
- A room full of framed butterflies
- Cross-dressed interpretive dancers
- Ceramics breaking in slow motion underwater
- Shia LaBeouf’s penis
- Time travel via glowing lollipops and two helpful men dressed like gay pornstars from the 70s whose breath is strong enough to send people cartwheeling down a hallway and out of the building.
Clearly this was an excellent film, and like all the best films, this one is about a journey. The journey isn’t through space, and it is barely through time despite the time-travelling car driven by the aforementioned pornstars through shoals of fish. The journey is through pain, trauma, and love.
There isn’t a moment in the film where beauty and intimacy aren’t tied up with pain. The majority of the action occurs in a room covered wall-to-wall with pinned butterflies, beautiful creatures beautifully arranged, with a piece of metal forced through their hearts so that you can bask in their shiny glory. The lollipops they are given by the ‘Forces’ (the gay pornstar-lookalikes) have the kind of obnoxiously bright color that suggests they’re sweet enough to induce cavities just by looking at them.
But as the camera zooms in on the Man and the Woman ferociously licking them, we see that a tiny scorpion is crystallised inside each one. In the stirring dance scene, Denna Thomson and Shia LaBeouf are antagonistic and violent, their movements resembling an attempt to tear each other to pieces, and yet they hold each other close and move in a way that speaks of a connection too deep to express any other way.
And in the end, that’s what their relationship is about. A love and longing and desire for another person so strong that the only response is to tear each other apart. Thomson screams, shaking one of the frames containing the pinned butterflies at LaBeouf. He snatches it from her and snaps it in half. He punches the mirror. He smashes the frail wooden chair.
They knew this would happen though. The film opens with the aftermath of the fight, the camera roving over their scratches and bruises and tears. As the film comes to a close, though, they wake in the same bed, clean, skin unbroken, the room’s walls bare. Fjögur Piano, the final track on Sigur Ros’ album, is over.
It’s a shame the sticking point for most people is that Ha’rel’s film involves Shia LaBeouf’s penis. Even when it only has five seconds of screen-time right at the beginning, Shia LaBeouf’s penis manages to ruin everything.
