For a viewer looking back decades from now at the movies of this time, Alex Ross Perry’s new film “Queen of Earth,” which opened last week and is expanding to theatres nationwide today, will serve as an example of the sort of complex modernism that has become both common coin and rare treasure among the best filmmakers. It’s a story so simple that it’s hardly a story—two women who are best friends spend a week together in a country house and learn to hate each other. Along the way, Perry’s variations on the theme of their relationship reach rare extremes of emotional experience, and introduce extraordinarily nuanced perceptions of the behavioral and psychological complexity of fleeting moments. But for all the impassioned and discerning correlation of inner and outer lives, Perry never distills the characters’ conflicts—with each other, with others, and with themselves—into problems with clearly arising causes or readily discernible resolutions.
The movie’s naturalistic framework doesn’t prevent it from including flashbacks and hallucinations. The action follows a trail of ordinary events to logical and recognizable conclusions yet veers off to wild emotional explosions and quietly violent implosions. The cast, led by Elisabeth Moss and Katherine Waterston, sticks within the realm of realistic performance even while probing and displaying monstrous inner mysteries that defy expectation and hint at uncharted (even if undesired) possibilities. “Queen of Earth” feels loosely and rapidly created and yet, shot by shot and moment by moment, it seems worked out, composed. The movie’s blend of apparent spontaneity and concentrated thought results in an astonishing, flaying immediacy of experience, even as it provides the reflexive wonder of a magician winking at his own tricks.
That’s also why, for all the grave intensity and high personal stakes of the struggle between the two women in the house, a higher humor arises from the movie, similar to the laughter that Kafka unleashed when reading his own stories aloud. The lacerating insults and abrasive deflections that Catherine (Moss) and Virginia (Waterston) fling at each other, the horrifyingly insensitive verbal aggressions of Catherine’s former boyfriend James (Kentucker Audley) and Virginia’s new lover, Rich (Patrick Fugit), are as subtly funny as they are disturbingly painful. It’s worth quoting the dialogue from such a scene: in a flashback, Virginia, to whose family the house belongs, invites Catherine to use the house any time. James responds: “Any time, Ginny? Labor Day? Memorial Day? Fourth of July?” And Virginia retorts, “I told you not to call me Ginny.” The layers of enmity and tangles of aversions make for a riot of warped energy in the wave of a hand.
There’s a lot of personal history packed into the movie’s forward motion. Catherine is an artist whose efforts to actually work as an artist coincided, and possibly conflicted with, her employment as the assistant to her father, a famous artist who recently committed suicide. Virginia apparently doesn’t work and enjoys her wealthy family’s largesse, but appears not to have particularly good relations with the family at large. One of the film’s most delicious moments involves Virginia’s bristlingly hostile yet casually exuberant monologue about members of the family whom she considers her “enemies.” The literary voice of the monologue sounds very close to that of Perry himself, which he used copiously while playing the male lead role in his own second feature, “The Color Wheel.”
That echo suggests another crucial element of the exemplary qualities of “Queen of Earth”—its fusion of the personal and the dramatic. If the movie is autobiographical, it isn’t so in any apparent way—yet the facets of personality, the character traits, the remarks and expressions, the anger and terror, the rigid composure and frenzied breakdown, the bitter resentments and intense bonds, the jealousy and possessiveness, the inextricable fusion of hate and love, make for an abstract self-portrait composed with the shards of time.
To whatever extent Perry may be distilling a lifetime of astonished admiration and romantic fear in the presence of women’s power and vulnerability, to whatever extent he may be displaying his own perception of men’s cruel exploitation of women’s vulnerability in an effort to break their power, he also quickly surpasses the analogical assignment of particular emotional obstacles and social roles to particular characters. He seemingly takes on all of their pain and struggle, all of their extremes of feeling, and appears, in a cinematic confession, to admit that the furious world of feeling on-screen, having emerged from his own imagination, can’t help but be a part of himself.
That’s as true of the images as it is of the action and the amazingly detailed and intimate performances. The pain of the comedy of “The Color Wheel” depended greatly on the perfectly calibrated distance at which the characters, or, rather, the actors were held by the frame. In “Queen of Earth,” Perry, working with the same cinematographer, Sean Price Williams (who is himself one of the crucial artists in today’s cinema), does the same thing differently, with an array of closeups going from close to closer, and that also move, slowly but decisively, as if travelling across vast landscapes of feeling in the confines of a room. The effect is to add the dimension of time to the movie’s cinematic space.
The film is filed with sumptuous, exquisitely inflected and timed talking, matched with pointed gestures that wouldn’t exist cinematically except for the sharp and sudden calculations flowing between Perry and Williams that give rise to the images. I’d cite a scene in which Catherine, gazing at paper on an easel, is drawing Virginia. While being drawn, Virginia speaks quietly in order to tear the façade off Catherine’s self-image, talking of Catherine’s relations with men and adding, with pauses that have a vast musical power, “Without them, here you are. Hmm?” The very sound of her voice, the blinding insolence of the glance that accompanies it, could only come about from a closeup that’s held so long as to register such subtleties as cosmic.
I’d also cite a scene in which, the morning after a bad night, Catherine comes downstairs to the kitchen and is greeted by Rich, whom she virtually kicks out of the house, but not before he says terribly hurtful things to her on the way out and she shatters an espresso cup at his feet—then, with a childlike fragility, turns her gaze upward and says, “How much of that did you see?” It’s only then that a viewer knows that Virginia is there, even while not knowing when she got there, just as Catherine doesn’t know. Such scenes are proof that movie editing (and “Queen of Earth” is edited, with a dramatic, collage-like abruptness, by Robert Greene) is inseparable from cinematography, and that both are inseparable from the art of directing. “Queen of Earth” is a rare feast of performance, of emotional experience, of artistic smarts, and of the very essence of cinematic creation at a time when the cinema itself is being challenged by the proliferation of mere storytelling.
