Light Sensitive

Elevation

(Vera Farmiga as a deeply conflicted woman grappling with issues of faith and freedom in Higher Ground, her directorial debut. Image courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.)

Vera Farmiga was pretty much unknown to me until I caught Debra Granik’s Down to the Bone at Sundance. 

She continues to astonish, both in front of and behind the camera, with her beautifully textured, strikingly observed feature debut Higher Ground. It’s a contemplative, emotionally probing study about an evangelical Christian ostracized by family and friends after she expresses doubt and uncertainty.

“I love fearless women,” she said at Sundance. The movie is based on Carolyn S. Briggs’s 2002 memoir, This Dark World: A Memoir of Salvation Found and Lost. Briggs and Tim Metcalfe adapted the screenplay, incorporating an intriguing structure that spans more than two and a half decades, starting in the early sixties. 

Farmiga’s inexperience shows at the start, some fantasy sequences that are fun but somewhat overdone and you also sense her grasping for the right mood and tone. Her technical brilliance as an actor, with an intuitive of how to shape and express ideas and feelings through character, carries the work through the early patches. 

Emotionally drawn from formative and peculiar life and times of Corinne Walker (exquisitely played from young adulthood on by Farmiga), the movie opens with a pantheistic sense of rapture as a group of idealistic evangelicals affirm their commitment by undergoing a “re-birth,” or baptism in a communal river.

Farmiga suggestively links the passage with a beautiful dissolve to a young girl submerged in a bathtub. From that point, Higher Ground is an origins tale of life, birth, disappointment and personal tragedy, all evocatively rendered through the precisely drawn imagery of cinematographer Michael McDonough (he also shot Down to the Bone).

The digital photography is both lustrous and intimate. The early passages have a buoyancy and telling humor expressed through contrasting points of view from the wildly carnal imagination of adolescent Corinne yoked to the more bemused though sympathetic portraits of the religious fervor framed within the larger community. 

Farmiga has a soft touch and a beautiful eye for detail. Her style is pointed but not condemning, giving her actors sufficient space and pulling the camera back. As a director, she succeeds in transforming the material into a deeply felt personal expression, even casting her exceptionally composed (and very gifted) younger sister Taissa Farmiga for the telling and emotionally important early material depicting Corinne as a teenager. 

Vera Farmiga makes vivid and real the girl’s deepening attraction for the magnetic and good-looking rock musician Ethan Miller (Boyd Holbrook), like a beautiful moment when he gives her an airplane ride, using his legs to jet propel her into the air.

Her pregnancy immediately turns their idyll into a very adult realm of marriage and parenthood. When their young daughter saved during a bus crash, the parents believe it an act of divine intervention.  As a result, they immerse themselves into a local fundamentalist community.

Farmiga elliptically denotes the passage of time through new births and subtle changes in period details, the clothes and the characters' evolving features. Bound to a very close knit evangelical collective, Corinne develops assured confidence that increasingly collides against the church hierarchy and draws the subtly humiliating rebuke of the pastor’s wife. 

Corinne’s growing personal attachment to the more subversive (especially sexually) side of her best friend, Annika (Dagmara Dominczyk) completes her revolt against the church’s social constraints and marginalizing of women.

When tragedy strikes, Corinne openly begins to voice doubt and discontent, an act of social disobedience that marks her complete rupture from her husband (played by the excellent Joshua Leonard as an adult). Almost inevitably the implied doubts and criticism shatter the conformist and submissive nature of the community and occasions her own slow though steady disengagement from the community that nurtured her.  

By visualizing a deepening inability to reconcile her doubts against the church orthodoxy, Corinne makes her disappointment extremely personal, with sometimes horrifying results, like the brutally violently response of her husband to her need for greater independence and freedom.

Every attempt at some kind of reconciliation, like her son’s seventh birthday party, ends awkwardly and disastrously. The movie’s circular structure builds to an extraordinary conclusion where the newly liberated Corinne stands before the congregation to articulate the seeds of her discontent and sharply express her private and personal conflict with the oppressive impulses of the family and the church.It is not hectoring though articulate, thoughtful and considerate that imbues the work with a tremendous emotional force that underlines how the best works of art and discourse almost inevitably are about questions and not answers.

The ensemble acting is fantastic, with sharp turns in small parts by John Hawkes and Donna Murphy as Corinne’s parents. Playing two different pastors, Bill Irvin and Norbert Leo Butz (in the contemporary footage) endow very compelling and even likeable figures made up equal parts theatrical showman, true believers and forceful personalities.  By the end they pale compared to the force of nature and conviction of Corinne Walker. The movie is a meditation on a very particular kind of passion and commitment.

Higher Ground ends on a wholly different note of deliverance that proves enlightening and unforgettable.

His moment in the sun

(Star Joel Torre and director/writer John Sayles on the set of Amigo. Images courtesy of Variance Films.)

About four years ago, during an interview on his tour promoting Honeydripper, John Sayles told me about his enveloping interest in the American occupation of the Philippines at the turn of the twentieth century.

Amigo, his seventeenth feature, premiered last fall at Toronto and is now opening around the country. The novel, A Moment in the Sun, was published this summer, and is considered one of the year’s finest literary works.

I’m very much looking forward to taking on the novel, because Sayles’s other literary projects, especially Union Dues and Los gusanos, have a verve and expressive fluency matched, I think, by a deeply cinematic structure that moves through time and space in demonstrating an sinuously uncanny way of getting inside his characters’ heads.

I saw Amigo last fall, and I am also looking forward to another look. Here are some revised thoughts of what I wrote last year.

“We’re fucked from both sides,” a Filipino villager says with both disgust and equanimity. Sayles looks at the private anguish and moral difficulty of a smaller indigenous culture caught in the vicious crossfire of larger “civilizations.”

Captured with his typical felicity for character, mood and historical breadth, Sayles stages his new work against American armed forces occupation Philippines at the turn of the twentieth century. It’s one of his large scale ensemble pieces, like City of Hope, synthesized with how the past haunts the present, like Lone Star.  

It's a typically freewheeling and original work from Sayles that wields his fascination with personalities and history to a rambling, open and chaotic exploration of caste, class and color. The novelistic origins of the project are unmistakable, most clearly in the free flow of dialects and languages. The movie moves confidently between English, Spanish, Tagalog and even some Mandarin. 

The new film pivots on the elemental conflict of indigenous people caught between the political and military imperatives of an occupying force and a guerilla revolution. As the opening Spanish-language voice over pointedly alludes, the American conquest of the Philippines (1898-1901) expanded out of the American military campaign against Spanish interests in Cuba.

Sayles sets his story in 1900, after military operations between the two nations largely subsided following the Paris Treaty. The Americans established a favorable government in power, a brazen act of imperail reach that helped inflame a nascent insurgency led by revolutionary Emilio Aguinaldo unfolding in the countryside. 

Set largely in the northern Luzon territory, Amigo dramatizes the conflict. The title refers to Rafael Dacanay (sharply played by Filipino star Joel Torre), and the patronizing nickname members of an American Army unit accord the local village leader, the "head man."

The spoils of the war have come home with a vengeance. Rafael's son has disobeyed him and fled for the countryside and joined a band of insurrectionists led by his estranged brother Simón (Ronnie Lazaro). 

The local priest, or friar, Padre Hidalgo (Yul Vazquez), is one of the final remnants of the Spanish influence. He was imprisoned by the guerillas but with the arrival of the Army unit, he is set free. Sayles creates an interesting sexual subtext and rivalry grounded in religion as the leader's wife (Rio Locsin), a devout Catholic, is more tethered to the priest.

The movie plays off the cruel irony of the Americans now tasked with “saving,” or “protecting” the local garrison from the bandit revolutionaries that stage hit and run attacks before repatriating into the rain-soaked interior of the rice-growing area.

Rafael must play both sides against the middle. The power and strength of the film emerges through the dense, multithreaded story Sayles weaves into a curious and involving arabesque. The American soldiers, for instance, are neither mercenaries nor saints; some of them are wizened old hands from Indian pacification programs in the West, others callow and dangerously out of depth cavalry and infantryman.

The face of the occupying force is Lieutenant Ike Compton (Garrett Dillahunt), a compassionate, even steely voice of reason trying to maneuver around the more craven, animalistic directions of his superior officer, Col. Hardacre (Sayles regular Chris Cooper, pictured above). “I have to live with these people,” Compton says.

“No, Lieutenant, you have to make war on these people,” the colonel responds.

It’s easy to read into this film as a thinly veiled commentary on Iraq. Most historians agree that anti-insurgency Philippine campaign was founded on a belief of extreme “persuasion,” where brutal and explicit anti-agrarian policies shaped the strategic hamlet theories of Vietnam and eventually in Iraq. It does lead to some awkward parts, like Cooper’s unfortunate line about “hearts and minds,” or a somewhat unbelievable love affair that develops between a prized local girl and a redneck American soldier.

Amigo rarely feels compromised, much less conventional. Sayles uses humor and the actions of the soldiers, especially their near endless capacity for getting drunk or acquiring the worst kind of sexually transmitted diseases, to a ironically rip-roaring use of the song, "Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight," that layers the multifaceted group portrait.

It’s exactly that conflict between the male group and the individual priority that deepens and fleshes out the drama.

Working in digital video for the first time, Sayles finds a liquid style that frees him up to do what he does best, create fully inhabitable individuals. When the action does come, it is nasty, fierce and unpleasant. Amigo has none of the romantic revolutionary appeal of war or death. It is bloody and unremitting, even cowardly. 

By the ironic coda, nobody escapes it.

Further reading:

My interview with Sayles

Shadow of a dream

(The actors Léa Seydoux and Julien Alluguette in the entrancing Mysteries of Lisbon. Image courtesy of Music Box Films.)

I am still in shock and mourning over the death of Raul Ruiz, the brilliant Chilean-born, Paris-based filmmaker, who died from complications of a pulmonary infection late last week. The filmmaker had been coping, rather heroically, with the discovery of cancer, though even he suggested to the New York Times’ A.O. Scott in a fantastic recent Magazine profile that he was optimistic about his chances of a recovery.

Ruiz (1941-2011) was one of the giants of modern European art-cinema. His ouevre, almost impossible to summarize, was alternately fantastic, intransigent and wildly inventive. Ruiz’s penultimate Mysteries of Lisbon is a masterpiece. It is his finest work since his magisterial Proust adaptation Time Regained, knocked me out at Cannes twelve years ago.

I met Raul a couple of times, the first time probably eighteen or nineteen years ago when he came to Chicago for a retrospective of his work. We spent probably an hour or so together, and he kept gracefully extending the previously allotted time because he had more he wanted to talk about, especially Orson Welles and John Ford. 

My experience mirrored that of many others. I found him alternately charming, lovely, graceful and deeply humane. He was self-deprecating and very accessible emotionally. One of my last and most cherished memories is watching him hold, in three different languages, simultaneous conversations at a reception in Venice.

(My only regret today is my lack of foresight in holding onto to our original interview.) My professional home town, Chicago, as instrumental to Ruiz’s reputation in America because Richard Pena, during his eight-year stint as director of the Film Center of the School of the Art Institute, was, I believe, the first programmer to regularly screen his works, beginning in the late seventies.

His output was truly staggering. Reading one of Jonathan Rosenbaum’s masterful studies of Ruiz, I learned that he had set out to write one hundred plays. His complete film output, including television, is probably impossible to fully catalogue, though I imagine we are talking about one-hundred and thirty or one-hundred and fifty titles.

The question of political exile, mandated by his voluntary departure from his native Chile following the CIA-backed Pinochet coup in 1973, is one of the defining themes of his work. It accounts for the instability of the image, of drama as labyrinth, of puzzles and allusions.  

Speaking of Chicago, my professional friends and colleagues at Music Box Films, are the distributors of his great Mysteries of Lisbon. They opened the film in New York and Los Angeles in early August. Brian Andreotti, who programs the calendar for the company’s trademark Music Box Theatre, commissioned me to write a piece about the film. The published version will appear in its fall calendar, out this week.

The following is an extension of that piece. 

A two-part, two-hundred, fifty-seven minute epic distilled from a six-hour television work, Ruiz’s dazzling and daunting meditation on history, honor and destiny is suffused with a tragic grandeur and novelistic density. The work is adapted from the serialized novel of Camilo Castelo Branco, the nineteenth-century Portuguese author who also produced the source material for arguably the greatest Portuguese movie ever made, Manoel de Oliveira’s Doomed Love.

Despite the literary and television origins, Mysteries of Lisbon is emphatically a work of the cinema. Ruiz has long acknowledged the impact of two modernist giants: Orson Welles and Jorge Luis Borges. 

Ruiz’s adaptation, aided greatly by a very smart script by Carlos Saboga, is narrative as labyrinth, an arabesque that continually twists and turns on itself and angling in strange and surreal spaces. The director’s surrealist streak and Welles-derived visual influence is everywhere, especially the baroque and vertiginous imagery, the delirious off-center framing and almost blindingly beguiling pictures, like a man’s reflection caught in the swirling surface of a cup of coffee.

Ruiz luxuriates in his Wellesian love of artifice, the conjurer’s art, but also finding pictorial solutions, like a supple moment where he installs some kind of glass surface for his actors to walk on, so that as the ripped shreds of a amorous note are torn and dispersed to the floor at a baronial estate during a magnificent ball, we see the shreds float to the ground from a reverse floor perspective.

The movie is filled with images of watching and looking. Like many Ruiz films, it is marked by a splendor and curiosity of the world. Set amid the Portuguese aristocracy during the convulsive civil wars, Napoleon’s military campaigns and country’s colonial decline, the movie is fundamentally an origins tale. The first part, set in motion by the striking inquiry of a young orphan named João (João Luis Arrais) to comprehend his provenance. 

Ruiz documents with visual flair the social privilege and paralyzing noble conventions of an epoch by relating the tragic story of the boy’s parents, a countess and her young suitor. João narrates the first part, as a collection of recovered memories and associations, as an adult, now called Pedro (and nicely played by Afonso Pimentel).

The story’s linking characters are Dinis (Adriano Luz), the priest who operates the orphanage where the boy lives, and Alberto (Ricardo Pereira), a flamboyant Brazilian mercenary. As the movie explicitly notes, character is fluid and few people are quite what they seem. The movie’s expansive second part draws on each man’s strange, even contradictory past in animating a strange, violent and unaccountable world.

The fluidity of the narrative is absolutely spellbinding; it entwines flashbacks within flashbacks, and the structure creates a musical and novelistic range through the multiplicity of voices that provides not only a shading and moral depth. The characters and stories illustrate in all their manifestations, folly, madness and passion.

As such the second part has a Tolstoyan sweep. Where the first part is largely self-contained, the second part moves through various outposts and corners of western Europe. About three hours in, the soundtrack imperceptibly shifts from Portuguese to French with the arrival of a French officer (Ruiz regular Melvil Poupaud) and two ravishing women (Léa Seydoux and Clotilde Hesme). 

Ruiz flouts the connection of character, story and incident. What makes the movie so enthralling is the brilliant way Ruiz negotiates these interlocking stories, granting them a musical flow and feverish intensity. Ruiz shares with Oliveira a feverish sense of space and light, and a fondness for theatrical interpolation, like the theater diorama João studiously peers through in an attempt to grasp the fullness and ecstatic nature of life and events swirling around him.

It’s easy, I guess, to mock those who cherish and privilege a director like Ruiz, somebody all but unknown to those who don’t frequent film festivals or art house cinemas. The only letter I ever wrote the New Yorker was in response to a churlish and uncharacteristically parochial piece by the usually great Adam Gopnik implying Ruiz was irrelevant because of his anonymity here.

One of the best writers on Ruiz, the excellent J. Hoberman, in his lovely tribute, pointed out the occasional scorn that came his way for his consistent challenging of this great director. “More than a few Voice readers (and even some writers) complained about the praise that I lavished on this esoteric figure and several years later I made a tongue-in-cheek attempt to pigeonhole him: ‘Now that the Film Forum has opened two Raul Ruiz films in a single month, it may be that 1988 will be the year one no longer needs to explain just who the double-hey huh? is this dude with B-movie monicker--e.g. the Godard of the '80s, Mister early-Borges-plus-middle-period Welles, a Barthesian Bunuel, the Edgar G. Ulmer of the European art film, a Third World H. Rider Haggard, the Garcia Marquez of French TV.'"

My friend Gabe Klinger pointed out on his Twitter feed that, having counted, he has seen probably thirteen Ruiz titles, amounting to just about eleven percent of the director’s output. 

No more Raul Ruiz. And, with apparently just one final work to come our way, no more Raul Ruiz movies. They are not exactly easy to find. But his movies are out there, in different forms, styles and formats. We are all the better for their existence.

Further reading suggestions:

Jonathan Rosenbaum

Adrian Martin

Outside the box

(Future is now: July and Linklater, in the calm before the storm. Image by Todd Cole, courtesy of Roadside Attractions. Don Cheadle and Brendan Gleeson, in The Guard. Image courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.)

Two films, Jon Michael McDonagh’s The Guard and Miranda July’s second feature, The Future, premiered at Sundance and are now expanding in national markets. I prefer July’s brand of detached precociousness to McDonagh’s cynical bluster, though both are fairly compelling examples of idiosyncratic filmmaking.

 The Guard, a first feature, playfully stitches and recombines various styles and forms to impudent and stylized ends. It luxuriates in the sordid sleaze of certain late sixties British crime thrillers. 

 The parts are more successful than the whole. Very little of the movie has a moment of truth or realistic detail, but the movie's lusty manner is sharply developed out of the characterization, local color, thrilling situations and especially pungent dialogue.

The filmmaker is the younger brother of Martin McDonagh (In Bruges). The Guard is somewhat problematically a copy of a copy. The younger McDonagh also traffics in the same mixture of profane, verbose and slangy dialogue with an astringent edge and scabrous flair for violence and macabre wit. 

That’s the good; the bad is he shares his brother’s weakness for self-reflexive threads that are cleverly self-defeating, creating a stylistic remove that prevents the director from ever truly engaging the moral ramifications of the material.

The movie is a bravura showcase for the great Brendan Gleeson. He plays the eponymous sergeant of a stunningly beautiful Irish coastal village in the largely Gaelic-influenced western isles. He’s introduced in exaggerated close up, surveying the wreckage of a car accident and the young victims, pill popping thrill seekers who failed to negotiate a sharp curve. Their bodies strewn about, their flesh disgorged and caked on the streets and sidewalks, he looks about and says, for exclamation, “What a great fucking day.”

Gleeson’s character, Gerry Boyle, is a shambling and flamboyant role that is equal parts Falstaff and Quixote. He’s an inveterate hedonist with outsized vices and predilections, like a fondness for recreational drugs and prostitutes. Openly insubordinate of his superiors he holds attitudes that are charitably less than progressive or cultural enlightening (“I thought only blacks, or Mexicans, were drug dealers,” is one characteristic outburst).  

He’s also one of those outrageously contradictory figures of Irish lore, a littérateur with little patience for Russian novelists and a cinephile (he’s caught one night watching Polish director Jerzy Skolimowsky’s great English film, The Shout).

The plot’s a mélange of familiar ideas and genre staples tossed about. McDonagh is far less interested in traditional story structure than incident, form and style. He yokes together everything from the guard’s new partner, the big city naïf (Rory Keenan) with a personal secret and his beautiful, fragile Romanian wife (Katarina Cas) to the cross cultural buddy cop standard, here represented by the inscrutable and uptight American FBI agent, Wendell Everett (Don Cheadle), who’s turned up in Boyle’s village to intercept an international drug smuggling ring.

I like Cheadle, he’s open and funny, but he’s a little too enamored with accents. It floats all over the place in this movie. He intuitively understands his place in the dramatic firmament and never tries to rebel his secondary standing.

The movie’s gangsters are an unholy trinity (Liam Cunningham, Mark Strong and David Wilmot) impressively drawn in miniature. The problem is they are never given the necessary dimension or fullness each seems capable of. They're arrogant and self-regarding, colorfully rendered in small and sharp glances, like their fondness for quotations (from Bertrand Russell to Nietzsche), given to freewheeling rants about the unsavory nature of their business or the considerable difficulty of making distinction between a psychopath or sociopath.

The plot moves fairly haphazardly and indirectly. The gangsters project the necessary menace. The fun and pleasure develops more in the asides and off-color touches that say a lot about Ireland (though very little about the country’s current economic meltdown). Gleeson is fantastic in the private exchanges and back and forth, like his conversation with a local IRA operative (Pat Shortt) who’s trying to return a cache of found weapons. You have gay lads in the IRA, Boyle inquires, a tad surprised.

 

“It’s the only way to infiltrate MI5," is the nonplussed answer.

McDonagh has some visual flair and talent as well. Working with a very good cinematographer in Larry Smith, he shoots impressively in widescreen format, drawing on the textures and scraggly formations of the landscapes and water with a verve and thrill. If the movie never quite becomes anything other than a lark, the material lacks any depth of feeling or nuance.

(The death of one of the film’s most appealing characters is particularly cruel in how easily it is disposed of.)

The movie‘s tone is sometimes a bit too awkward. One subplot, the cop‘s dying mother (Fionnula Flanagan), seems imported from another work. The women, in general, are given exceedingly little to do. Fortunately, the actors certainly grab your attention and infuse the movie with a sometimes jolting lift and buoyancy. It has a moment to moment color and style that floats along easily. 

The Guard is smart and shrewd enough to acknowledge its limitations without ever trying to truly transcend them. It’s pleasurable without being deep.  

Five years after her delicate and gracefully observed debut film Me and You and Everyone We Know revealed a thoughtfully engaging new voice, Miranda July expands her range and emotional subtlety with the intriguing and sharply realized follow up.

The new film collates her different talents and sensibilities in interesting ways. In the interim between her two films, July has worked in video installation and most significantly, writing short fiction. Her story collection No One Belongs Here More Than You refined her sensibility and help sharpen her trenchant and colorful feel for mood, tone and indirection. 

Like the title suggests, the movie is coolly ambiguous and colored by different impulses and references encompassing science fiction, magic realism, time travel and the transmogrification of the soul. 

“Have you ever been outside,” is the opening line of the movie, spoken by the film’s unorthodox narrator, a feline called Paw Paw (voiced by July). The cat is the connective tissue of the loose limbed story reflecting the quiet desperation of the movie’s central couple, Sophie (July) and Jason (Hamish Linklater). They live in a cramped Los Angeles apartment. He’s a computer tech specialist; she’s a dance instructor for young children. Together for four years, the relationship is not exactly in a free fall though deadened by a sideways inertia. 

Both are torpid and cut off emotionally and given to petty jealousies (in a sharp and telling note, July’s character is obsessed by the viral popularity of a colleague’s video clip). Their adoption of the cat is meant as a signal of their increased responsibilities and selflessness. Medical complications require the cat remain in specialized care, and the couple are tasked to return in a month’s time.

July is especially convincing at the personal impasses and acute disappointment of lingering failure. The subtlety emerges in the forlorn and sidelong passages, like the way a fallen portrait on the wall reveals a phone number. She is drawn to the ineffable, the slippery and uncontrollable. One such moment leads to a very impulsive act, a phone call that ignites an affair with Marshall (David Warshofsky), an older single father of a precocious adolescent daughter (Isabelle Acres). 

He’s an entrepreneur and Sophie is drawn to his strength and quiet competence. July intriguingly and quixotically fractures all of that. Rather than sharpen the question of the romantic triangle, July spins the work further and further out of balance. 

The remainder of the story shifts between alternate realities that are possibly dreams, imaginings or most intriguingly, Jason’s projection of her new life that beautifully suggests Jacques Rivette’s modernist classic, Celine and Julie Go Boating. (Given July’s anti-compile pronouncements, that’s probably a leap on my part.) The Rivette reference seems especially apt in the peculiar and gorgeous way July suggests Jason and Sophie have merged and exchanged identities.

As a format, video tends personalize the most intimate of details. Even more so than her first feature, The Future is an uncanny self-portrait. July mocks her own inability to think or create conventional art (like Sophie’s stunningly unsuccessful attempt to produce her own video clip). Her fearlessness is inseparable from her tender awkwardness. 

The resonance of the first film developed out of the terrific ensemble (July showed an especially strong touch with teenagers). The new film marks a tremendous improvement stylistically and visually. Shot by Nikolai von Graevenitz, the movie is both supple and nimble. The imagery is filled with suggestions of entrapment and defeat.

July also remains alert to new ideas, such as a terrific the lives of her two best female friends fast forward directly in front of her, their settled and accomplished lives a stark contrast to her own wanderings and confusion. Even though she is very much in control of the film, July does not monopolize the movie. She is generous with the other actors, especially some beautiful vignettes about Jason’s developing friendship with an older widower (played by a nonprofessional named Joe Putterlik who died after the filming was completed).

As accomplished as The Future is, it is not to all tastes. The precociousness gets a bit thick at times. Even so, this is often breathless and quietly wonderful. I certainly hope the separation between her second and third feature is not nearly so as the first and second.