Word: masochistic
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...from the jubilant disco drums and the syncopated keyboard touches that the song was actually about wretched abjection, the ways we degrade ourselves for love. Lead singer Nina Persson might have sounded impossibly glamorous, but she was still "cry[ing], pray[ing] and beg[ging]" as a pathetic, deflated masochist. Far from the weightless retro nugget it resembled, "Lovefool" used its radiant hooks to the most perverse of aims, like a tootsie roll pop with an acid core. Not bad for a band too often pigeonholed as mild candy for the "Easy Listening" dustbin...
...could have emerged from Jesse Helms' darkest nightmare of an NEA-performance psycho: a guy who nails his penis to a board and calls it art. Yet Bob Flanagan, masochist with a cause, might win the sympathy of any stony conservative, for he was one of the longest-lived survivors of cystic fibrosis, a lung disease that takes most of its victims in childhood. His daft wit even turned his affliction into a Mary Poppins-style ditty: "Supermasochistic Bob has cystic fibrosis/ He should've died when he was young, but he was too precocious.../ A lifetime of infection...
...does Holland stand on Jane Campion's controversial rendering of James's The Portrait of a Lady? That film was spurned by audiences and many critics for reimagining the novel's entrapped ingenue into an emotional masochist looking for trouble. "I think the criticism of Jane and Portrait came because people didn't like the film," says Holland. "If the film had been more effective for them, they would not have nitpicked about the approach...
...broken out on the basis of sociological buzz, like Thelma & Louise, had appealing characters confronting interesting issues in suspenseful or comic fashion. But here all we are dealing with is sociopathic behavior that has no real-world resonance. The movie's sheer grimness militates against anyone other than a masochist volunteering to pay money...
Ponette is no simple moper. The most sanctified movie masochist since Robert Bresson's Mouchette, she is on her own childhood Calvary, a quest to find her mother in this life or the next. The sight of a child digging furiously into cemetery dirt may upset some viewers; others will wonder if Doillon's manipulation of little Victoire's emotions doesn't come close to child abuse. But it is an amazing performance, or acting out, that expresses the human need for something to believe in. For Ponette it is her mother, an embracing vision of purity and security...