The Reflection of the Muse: Salvador Carrasco’s Retakes
The act of creation can build pedestals reserved for the idea of the muse. Jean-Luc Godard’s imagination and cinema was fueled for years by actress and lover Anna Karina. More platonic relationships such as Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski combined timeless work with mismatched tempers. The artistic relationship, when combined with the intimate, makes for one of the most archaic of bonds. Admiration can mingle with envy, ego with humbled emotions. A hint of obsession can also linger. Salvador Carrasco’s new short film Retakes, is in many ways an intensely microcosmic vision of the link between creator and muse. For Carrasco it is a wonderfully eclectic return to the screen as he continues to head Santa Monica College’s groundbreaking film program, whose roster now includes this gem. Keen cinephiles will also recognize the name from Carrasco’s 1999 debut, The Other Conquest, the groundbreaking epic that explored the cultural aftershocks of the Spanish Conquest of Mexico. It was one of the major films to launch a period Roger Ebert described as “the New Mexican Cinema.”
Retakes begins within a kind of cinematic membrane. An exiled Persian director, played by Iranian actress Zina Torab, sits in the cocoon of a darkened theater watching her latest work projected on a screen. An actress’s voice onscreen expresses the need to be emancipated, even if her decision leads to the dissolution of a relationship unexplained. The voice then becomes present in the literal sense when the Italian actress from the film, played by Roberta De Santis, appears at the far entrance door to the screening room, behind the director. Like a specter, she wonders if her performance was truly that bad. We ourselves cannot see her performance and thus must trust her mind’s eye. What follows is a delicate duel of personalities and wills. After the actress predicts disappointment with her work, the director, dressed in the attire of a youthful but serious artist, states that she should be aware of her policy of not watching first cuts of a film with others in the room. To further the emotional stab, the director emphasizes that she especially doesn’t like “actresses” to be present. The reaction from the actress is resentment at being seen as what she is, or believes herself to be. In a first wave of blunt revelation, the director clarifies that the younger woman is actually not an actress but a person devoid of talent, who fooled her with a vulnerability she hoped masked some hidden potential. “I was attracted to you physically, who wouldn’t be? The way you give yourself like a whore for an iota of validation.” For her, there is now nothing but emptiness in the former muse who nonetheless appears in her latest work.
Carrasco’s exquisite screenplay builds layers that begin with the initial appearance of the actress. To create with someone else always brings a slight hint of danger. However the relationship continues, what you make is now there, etched in film, or a poem or song. The actress tells the director it is actually herself she is describing when throwing around accusations of her star being talentless. For the performer, it is the director who is truly vulnerable and insecure. What she did was use the actress as the vessel for her true thoughts. They used each other. For the actress, working with this filmmaker opened the door to facing her own limitations and overcoming them. Beyond the act of collaboration, the dialogue hints at what was once a passionate love affair. “We used each other, except I loved you and I don’t think you ever did, not really,” says the actress with the eyes of someone coming to terms with the truth. It’s not a conversation full of rage, only the melancholy of a bond that might have run its course. Carrasco allows their faces to tell the story in almost Bergmanesque fashion.
In terms of genre Carrasco subverts two forms of storytelling that have been rather abused lately. The behind the scenes movie has been more an object of farce or satire, such as The Disaster Artist. Narratives about artists and their loves or muses tend to descend into cheap or bombastic melodrama. Retakes succeeds because it reaches for a wider emotional terrain with the force of a good vignette of the sort writers like Joyce Carol Oates excel at. It is a striking moment, between two women who gaze at each other and see a mirror staring right back. Why do we feel an attraction towards a particular person? What is it necessarily about them? The comfort of validation or the yearning to grow can overcome even the powerful force of physical desire. If this relationship had merely been about sex or a Faustian pact to advance a career, De Santis would never walk into that room. But she cares. Something feels broken and neither woman knows how to necessarily confront it. A slight age gap subtly factors into the standoff because Torab, being the more experienced, seasoned woman, has a thicker skin. De Santis not only wants to confirm what she feels about their relationship, but never has the wisdom to be humble or learn from the journey. Such is life. Then again, at any age to lose a deep connection is hard. As the Black Keys’ song proclaims, “a broken heart is blind.”
On a quite masterful level, Retakes is about so much more than a director and an actress. Many lives endure such journeys where we meet lovers and teachers, taking lessons from all. Or we shut our eyes and ears and learn nothing. The actress kisses the director and with insights we are certain have much validity says, “Under your tough exterior hides the kindest person I’ve ever known.” Torab’s performance, which until now has been so beautifully controlled, reveals an overpowering sadness. Her profile defines a self-assured intellect for most of the film. A muse has a way of breaking through such exteriors. There may still be longing in her stare, but it’s too late. De Santis can only stop on her way out and say she’s available for retakes, adding to the director that it would benefit her film. It may be a subtle way of saying she is not prepared to disappear. As the melancholic and lush score by Michael McLean, featuring a yearning cello by Juan-Salvador Carrasco of Astral Mixtape, frames it all, Carrasco adds the final, shattering touch. In Torab’s mind, De Santis’s dialogue is different and before leaving she simply gives her a sincere “Thank you.”
When a relationship ends that is the torturous mental film reel we return to over and over. Tragedy is not what was. It is what could have been. The director being Iranian and the actress Italian is itself a statement on how the yearning for contact and the experience of disappointment are human traits. One could even see here a potent metaphor for the exile experience. Two women in an unnamed country, from Iran and Italy, sought homelands of the heart in each other, but the link could not hold. Whether because of vanity, selfishness or an imbalance of experience, the most human traits can be our worst enemy. The elegant cinematography by Germano Saracco transforms the theater where the two women meet into a psychological chamber where every seat feels haunted by the emotions left in the air. Even if we are so lucky as to find love that lasts through the decades or other bonds that never break, our memories always have the specters of such encounters as the one Carrasco so vividly brings to life. Walter Benjamin, that great critic of Weimar Germany, describes it all in the clearest terms when he writes, “There are perhaps paths that lead us again and again to people who have one and the same function for us. Passageways that always, in the most diverse periods of life, guide us to the friend, the betrayer, the beloved, the pupil or the master.”
Watch the film here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6U4S4f3tWY
