Why I Heart Roger Ebert and Shirley Valentine

I love film. I love watching films, I love reading about them (one of the first books I ever bought with my own earned money was a second-hand copy of Georges Sadoul's Histoire générale du cinéma) and talking about them.
Writing about them... not really. Which is why I, speaking generally, don't like film critics. Or, more precisely, I often find their writing slightly redundant and often irrelevant. With one major exception: Roger Ebert.

This man not only writes from a perspective that I find very comfortable because I feel it is very close to my point of view, but has actually made me reconsider my opinion on more than one film. And he did that not by resorting to a thicket of (pseudo)intellectual verbiage and implicit bashing of any vantage point different to his (basically amounting to "if your opinion on this film is different from mine, you're an idiot"), but by means of sheer wit - oh, he is witty! - and a very human, direct (not bookish) perception of the world and the role of cinema within it.

Having read many, many of his pieces - certainly all his pieces about my favourite films - I also find it quite remarkable that his early pieces, written when he was very young (not only as a critic but as a man), already possess the maturity of view and voice - and, perhaps even more remarkably, the human warmth - typical of the 2010 edition of Ebert-the-critic and Ebert-the-man. 

I do not read Ebert uncritically, with an a priori judgement that he must be "right". He just happens to be "right" in my eyes. Well, most of the time.  

Which is why I was so suprised recently, when I read his review of the well-loved British film Shirley Valentine (1989). 

I never thought Ebert would give it, say, "two thumbs up", but never expected he would give it ONE STAR, either.

He calls it "a realistic drama of appalling banality" and says that "there were moments during the movie when I cringed at the manipulative dialogue as the heroine recited warmed-over philosophy and inane one-liners when she should have been allowed to speak for herself."

One-liners can be as obnoxious and ultimately self-defeating as they are (when they are) brilliant. And Shirley Valentine is full of those.

But I know I did not love this film (with certain reservations, but that is a given) because of the one-liners alone, although I do remember many of them, for I found them witty (within their own idiom and context).

I liked it because those one-liners, surprisingly, did not seem contrived.

They did not sound realistic, mind you. But that never was the intention of its maker, at least as I see it. As I see it, he decided to paint a life of self-conscious inadequacy - and genuine yearning - as reflected through the idealised pictures that TV, romance novels and advertisement slogans offer of the world. Both sides of this particular mirror are poignant in their banality.

Shirley Valentine was speaking for herself.

At one point, Shirley says: "Why do we get all this life if we don't ever use it?"

(Followed by: "Why do we get all these feelings and dreams and hopes if we don't ever use them? That's where Shirley Valentine disappeared to. She got lost in all this unused life.")
 
That, I think, is the core point of the "philosophy" behind this film.

It is such an ordinary question - no, not really a question: a sentiment, an unspoken feeling. It is generic, in the most literal sense of the word.
But the fact that it is generic does not make it less genuine.
And the fact that so often it remains unspoken may be one of the reasons why so many people liked this and other one-liners.

I am no desperate housewife pining for a dashing mustacheoed Greek - or any stereotype, or any man, for that matter - to "make fock with me" on some sunlit shore; I've had enough of those (except for the first item on the list) and I am ever free to "fly away like birds in the springtime", to borrow Jules Munchin's words from a wonderfully horrid Dean Martin vehicle. 

So it cannot be the "escapism" that appeals to me, except in the generally human - dare I say transcendent? - longing for something more. More something.

However, it doesn't really matter why it appeals to me. I would never be writing about it, if Ebert's critique hadn't misunderstood - in my opinion, obviously - the role of stereotypical thinking and expression in this film. 

 
Stereotypes are something that I love to hate with an irrepressible passion. They have no place in art - except when they are acknowledged for poetic purposes, as they are here. 

The Greek lover not only is a stereotypical figure - he is supposed to be one.  

Furthermore, vis-a-vis Shirley and other female tourists, he thinks of himself in stereotypical terms. Many gigolos do. (Before you ask: no!)
 

People - not all people, but very many, especially if they see no way out of a life that has fallen short of their vague youthful expectations - really do believe the image that the world presents to them. They believe in the mirror reflection of themselves that it seems to offer.

 
And so, Shirley's monologues may not be the most profound utterances that ever came out of a human mouth - but they are genuine. And because they are genuine, they are moving. People identify with those same stereotypes she is mulling over. And, believe me, Ebert, to see a sun setting over a foreign sea does not only sound good because of its rhythm and alliteration- never understimate the very real power of calliphony! - but it emblematically verbalises, with all the appropriate pathos, as touching as it is paltry (perhaps touching because it is paltry), the modest "dreams" of many a desperate housewife.
(BTW, I would never have picked this example on my own; to be honest, I did not even remember this sentence. I am only referring to it because Ebert did.)

Do I believe that the director set out to deconstruct or mock stereotypes? 
No, not at all.
But I do believe that his conscious use of stereotypes presented as a part of daily life, of his heroine as well as of the viewers, was clever. Not really a stroke of genius, but clever. And clearly effective.
 
He is addressing human yearning in the purposefully limited terms of specific nuisances - namely, the everyday routine and the lacklustre state of marriage after 20 years of coexistence and the couple's progressive paring down of each one's Self - and "dreams" that are pitifully humble themselves: all they want is to escape the drudgery, to find out whether there still is some of their old Self left in them (even though that Self itself was never more than a promise, never to be fully achieved). They are looking for yesterday's promise of tomorrow, if only to get a breather from everyday life.

To address this, the writer uses an "idiom" understandable to most contemporary viewers: the idiom of people who use mass media-propagated platitudes and stereotypes as shorthand for what they really, really feel and want to say. They know - most of them, I dare assume - that there is more to life and more to expression than that. They just don't have the time - mental time, or more accurately, the timelessness, the lack of constraint, of this mental time - to bother with it.

Within that idiom the witty and warm humour of this film works very well; at least I thought so.

Shirley isn't pompous; she is not even deluded. She is no Emma Bovary.
All she wants is some warmth, some "excitement" - for excitement equals youth, and youth equals promise, equals tomorrow, equals time - some acknowledgment that she still got some of that promise of long ago in her. She needs to talk; and if it has to be in the shorthand of almost slogan-like nuggets, so be it. She knows what she means.
And so do we.

Ah yes - the we.
Who exactly are we?
The Shirleys of this world are the men and women of the Western world who fall somewhere in between the Platos and the Aesopi of this world: not rich, most not even wealthy, but well off enough not to be cornered by hunger into a place where there is little room for reflection, let alone expression, of anything except the most basic instincts and the faint self-shame that goes with it (and in time goes away) - basically decent men and women, who like a good read, a good film, a bit of fun, always faintly wondering in the back of their minds where did the life go that they once thought they would have.

To put it very simply: he speaks of the Shirleys of this world, and this is the reflection of their doubts that they like to see. It employs a language they are confortable with: the language of well-domesticated artifice. So well domesticated, in fact, that it is a genuine part of their lives.
And because this lingua franca is propagated by all means of mass communications, they are familiar to all of us.

Most of all, the human dissatisfaction, the yearning for the life that always seems to be elsewhere, is known to every single human, either as a memory or as a currrent reality.

In ancient Greece, all the philosophers and writers were men of leisure. They were free to pursue loftier paths of self-discovery - and expression. They didn't have to work for their daily sustenance and push nagging dislikes aside, so they could function as expected from them.
Their slaves did that for them.
Yes, there was Aesopos.
But there was also another Aesopos - the one that you'll never hear about. Thousands and thousands of them, who maybe did not have the Aesopos' talent, or drive, or luck - and yet, they were as (dis)content as anyone would be in their position. Or to put it another way, had they been rich, those same Aesopoi would have had the leisure to find a mode of expression tailored to their specific thoughts and feelings.
Or not.
Not all slaves were Aesopos.
But not all men of leisure were Plato, either.

You see, people often DO think in stereotypes and - observe the coming paradox - genuinely reflect on their own lives in stereotypical terms. How could they not, when they are served stereotypes all day long, from the moment they turn on the radio or read the papers in the morning? 

This is especially true of those who do not have the leisure to ignore the public media or to fend off its influence, as did that famous 18th century nobleman whose name escapes me but who said that he never read newspapers because he did not want them to spoil his writing style.
And, after all, that's precisely why Madame Bovary is just as relevant - or perhaps even more so - as it was when it was first published. (It is also relevant because of its damn fine writing, of course, but that's a given, too.)

(Original post, written on October 23, 2010, left unfinished and unedited.)

N.B. This is most categorically not a film critique - not even a criticism of a critique (or the critic).

Just what is it, I don't know.
But now that I think of it, I am writing this on a Saturday evening...
Maybe I've been glancing into that mirror of mirages for too long myself.