Modern Bresson

Last night I saw Neil LaBute's Your Friends and Neighbors, the only LaBute film I've seen besides The Shape of Things, which I caught randomly on HBO a year ago. It's a credit to LaBute's style that I kept thinking about Shape during Friends, since I didn't know anything about him before reading up on him last night. I guess there are still filmmakers with voice besides Tarantino, if you want to call his palette of ironic ultraviolence a stylistic trademark.¹

LaBute's is a bleak, realistic world to which asinine existentialism and simple-minded Rousseaism are equally foreign. His characters speak and act with a desperate solipsism characteristic of the modern age, but their Machiavellian pursuit of power and pleasure links them closer to Sade than it does to Sartre. In the most jarring scene of the film, one of the main characters--an amoral physician--recounts his best fuck upon his friends' urging. An unabashed misogynist, the doctor tells his friends that his most memorable sexual experience was the rape of a male classmate in the high school gym showers. His story is all but uninflected, told with the deadpan candor of a mundane nostalgic remembrance.

LaBute's script is intricate and dialogue-heavy. As a writer he's a pathology-infused Mamet, although free of the latter's high-gloss hucksterism. As a director, he's a modern minimalist. Ebert aptly compares LaBute's characters to Bresson's "models," the term the French director used for his actors. Bresson forced his actors to dispel emotion from their performances; he created tableaus of frank uninflection in which subconscious pathos are churned to the surface of the viewer's mind by way of a dialectical imposition of meaning on an otherwise blank slate. In the same way, LaBute's characters pursue power and sex (often the same thing in this movie) without any attendant sentimental involvement: they are constitutionally devoid of the emotions Bresson intentionally sublimates. (We don't even learn their names until the end, when the main characters are wryly credited as Mary, Barry, Cary, Terri, Jerry and Cheri.)

The location of the story is left intentionally vague. It was shot in Los Angeles, but LaBute carefully avoided recognizable landmarks and even digitally erased palm trees in order to set the film in a non-specific, universally urban environment. As a result, Your Friends and Neighbors feels more like a myth than a story. It is an archetypal parable of modern self-involvement, peopled by characters you probably know and driven by urges you probably have. It is a film about our sublimation of the brutality² that lies beneath the veneer of civilization in a society that unconsciously lauds sexual profligacy as an accurate benchmark of cultural virility. LaBute neatly removes the tenuous moral safety-net we think will catch us if we fall to the depths inhabited by his film's characters, but he refuses to pass moral judgment on their actions: his indictment of modern culture is entirely created by our reactions, our prejudices, our inborn refusal to believe that the reality he presents to us could mirror the secret lives of our friends and neighbors.


¹ And I do.
² Sublimated brutality not unlike the film's soundtrack of Metallica covers by the cello quartet Apocalyptica.