A New Leaf

A New Leafⁱ is a little gem of a movie that you absolutely must see.

One reason you absolutely must see it are the decors, and the context around them. This is the story of a man who has a butler, and in that butler's words "you've kept alive traditions that were long dead by the time you were born!". His house looks like a house. Yours does not, and Obama's does not, and I fear Trump's wouldn't pass muster either, notwithstanding they're of the same age and hail from the same times. He has clothes. I don't mean jeans and tshirts, I mean clothes. He has tastes and inclinations and a notion of the self. Need I go on ? Let's just say he's broke and you'll never make enough money to be invited to the salon of some woman Henry Graham condescendingly told off.

The other reason you absolutely must see it is the substance, and the myriad threads connecting it to its fixed, specific, unfakable forms. This is the story of a man who, confronted with a poorly run, inefficient household fires everyone on the spot and using the right words. There's no one in the anemic crop of "CEO"s blathering in this sad language space today that could even vaguely match, you know ?

The most important reason you must see it however is -- relations. The woman submits, naturally, gracefully, and at the peril of her life. Unlike it is always the case in the sordid tales of contemporaneous lumpenscumⁱⁱ, she doesn't get killed for it. She's inept, yes, and rather shy and tiresome and barely perceptible under just a slight dusting of crumbs. But she submits, and he's actually tough enough, and they live happily ever after.

It's such a pleasure to watch an actual film, based on an actual story with actual people in it after all the horrible, kitschy, faux non-humanity on parade with the herpocracy-derpocracy you can't begin to imagine. Yes, they blather through the same story with some regularity, but this is entirely irrelevant, just as they are.

Watch it, you'll see.

1. 1971, by with and for Elaine May, also starring Walter Matthau. [↩]
2. Seen Loverboy (2011, by and with a bunch of 30 second ad people) ?

   Young woman follows the closest thing to a man in her environment, because she should, because she must, because if no one ever trusts anyone the planet will be inherited by fucking fishes.

   He's a child, inept, overstrung, too wound up for sanity. He breaks her heart, because her immense, incomprehensible weight overwhelms his fragile osature and he gets scared.

   She would whore out for him, because he taught her how to fuck and she likes it and what else is there to do ? He can't summon the gumption to go up to her room, even with certain assurance she's alone.

   She'll carry on, of course, without him. What else is there to do ? [↩]