Aug 162016
 

Vincent Haycock’s film for Florence + the Machine’s “What Kind of Man” is a nightmare dream of a tango, shaken, sultry, and salt-licked. A vortex of brutality, longing, and beauty swirls around one woman in this cat’s cradle of a film that explores vulnerability, passion (in its full Latin root meaning ‘suffering’), and the ragged place where the bitter meets the sweet.

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The film opens with a lover’s confession to his beloved that he watched her suffering in her sleep and did not wake her, did nothing to save her. This simple conversation, the camera in the back seat of the car eavesdropping, is intimate and feels prophetic. It’s reminiscent of Abbas Kiarostami’s films that take place in cars (Taste of Cherry, 10), but even more so Mania Akbari’s 20 Fingers which follows a man and a woman having various conversations about their relationship in moving vehicles, one of them a car. Cars seem the perfect architecture for such intimate conversations, traveling and unmoored from the day-to-day, public yet private, the passengers facing forward but able to turn and see one another, the way two people on a therapist’s couch might interact, the therapist perhaps containing something of the road’s horizon in him or her. So it seems apt that the only time couples talk in this film is in cars.

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In the brief conversation that opens “What Kind of Man,’ the man tells the woman what he saw as he watched her sleep, so that sleep smudges all that follows, spreading a dream logic where car rides repeat, storms appear on television and in the distance, mobs of men in churches and basements swarm her.

The film is a vortex of masculinity with her in the eye, in some peculiar tension between causing the storm and being buffeted by it. Some of the images are unbelievable, more dreamlike than real, while the two dialogue-based narratives (set in moving cars) feel real, too real: the sublime and the mundane all intertwined.

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The central unifying figure here is the woman, played by lead singer Florence Welch. There are, too, thematic repetitions that connect the parts. The woman in the first car asks the man, “So you think that people who suffer together would be more connected than people who are content;” her question is then followed by two vignettes:  her with a man on a balcony overlooking an impending storm and her with a man in a hotel room with the news of a storm on the television; then the woman, in the back seat of a limousine, tells the man she is with about her dream: “And there’s this big storm that’s all around us and we’re in the middle of it, so it’s calm, but you can feel it, like it’s everywhere.” This storm dream links back to the first car conversation about the nightmare the man did not wake her from, and it links to the storms on television and in the distance.

The stories bleed into one another, the men seem similar, maybe the same man, maybe variations on the same man, though their faces don’t matter as much as her experience of these men. All that ultimately connects these threads is the dreamer, the woman, as she moves from desire, to fear, to violence to mercy, exploring suffering in her relationships with men and questioning when is it passion and when is it destruction.

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As the tango dream unfolds though, three other narratives appear: the woman surrounded by men in a sort of church 12-step meeting room; a quasi crypt where she presides over a bare mattress like its a shrine, flanked by men; and a scene of baptism and cleansing where she is ministered to by women in the ocean. The film slides us from the allure and ease of that first philosophical conversation, to confession, to baptism, to the demoralizing sheet-less bed as the sublime and the abject bleed into one another.

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One of the central causes of bleeding here is the film’s use of choreography, where the scenes play less literal and realist because of the attention to gesture and movement. Both Haycock and Welch in a behind-the-scenes video describe their approach here as “ dance first,” and Welch points out that “You can’t fake it with your body. . . So I think it was quite important for me to do it as a way of exorcising feeling” (though in the interview, “exorcising” sounds like “exercising,” though these might be equally true). This choreography prevents the scenes from being swallowed by realism, reminds us that this is first and foremost an emotional story, and that affect links the film’s non-linear structure.

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Gestures recur: in the throng of the mob she touches a man’s face, the man on the balcony looking over the city touches hers, she touches the face of the man in the hotel room, then tosses him aside, as she also tosses aside the man on the dingy mattress in the basement. A catalog of lover’s tango gestures accumulates here and these connect the narrative’s pieces.

The last three images of the film hint at some sort of a catharsis for the protagonist: her arms embrace air, an absence, she is cleansed by the women in a milky ocean at dusk, and she crawls from the wreckage of the limousine, solitary as she retreats from the disaster. Gone are the couples, the men. She is all that remains.

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This is the first video released from the band’s new album and it is featured first in a larger film incorporating videos for all the album’s songs, a project titled “The Odyssey,” a title with classical and gendered connotations of heroes journeying to identity. In Welch’s words, “I was talking to [Vincent Haycock] about the record and the car crash of a relationship break up I was going through. The highs and the lows of love and performance, how out of control I felt, the purgatory of heartbreak, and how I was trying to change and trying to be free. And we decided we would re-tell this story in full. We would re-claim this experience, re-imagine it and in some way perhaps I would come to understand it, to exorcise it. And so the Big Blue Odyssey began…” This project, says Haycock, is “obviously about relationships, but it’s also about Florence traveling through our version of the Divine Comedy. So in essence this video is the first layer of Hell.”

— R. W. Gray

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