Valley Girl
When the Lightbox announced it was programming a Robert Bresson retrospective, Toronto cinephiles smiled and poured another glass of Merlot. Red wine jokes aside, the retrospective is an exciting one, marking the publication of a new work on the filmmaker and offering the chance to see his films in a food-free (all hail the nacho-free Cinematheque!), big-screen space. From the extreme close-up of fingers sneaking their way into the folds of a man’s jacket in Pickpocket to the loving and yet sadistic tale of Mouchette, Bresson left a mark on cinema, influencing the likes of Michael Haneke and cultivating a distinct auteurial style that has merited its own neologian adjective: Bressonian.
Then, basically in the same breath, TIFF announced its Nic Cage retrospective.
This isn’t to suggest that liking Bresson and Cage are mutually exclusive, but we won’t try to fit a circle into a square arguing the two programmes complement each other. If anything, the above disjointed segue from Bresson to Cage might suggest just what the Lightbox had in mind when planning 2012: variety.
While Cage has his unapologetic admirers, most viewers have a more complicated relationship with the City of Angels star—City of Angels being one of the complicating issues. That being said, name another actor who could inspire this many gifs. Indeed, Cage is in essence a gif-actor, and this is meant with no disrespect; he is animated, eccentric, and renowned for his extreme facial reactions.
To return to City of Angels (please file this under sentences which you never hope to read again): there is a moment when Cage stops struggling under the pretense of playing a fallen angel, when arriving at the hospital he frantically asks for his human love interest Maggie (Meg Ryan). Barely a minute long, this scene is by far the best in the film, as Cage relinquishes control, eyes widening and toothy grin manically spreading across his face as he spastically begs the on call nurse to help him. In this moment, we see not just Cage but Castor Troy (Face/Off), Cameron Poe (Con Air), and Johnny Collins (Zandalee). Cage’s face has become a near hypertext of all his roles. Cage doesn’t inhabit a character but rather plays a progression of something between what we imagine him to be and a composite of all his other roles.
Considering this, one might wonder what would it have meant to see Cage in his first big role. While we can’t go back in time to 1983, the retrospective seems to have this in mind as it begins with Valley Girl (Martha Coolidge), the teen romance comedy where Cage (having just dropped “Coppola”) found his first leading role as the downtown Hollywood punk kid who falls for the girl in the Valley. Complete with a Prom King and Queen backstage brawl, Josie Cotton at a school dance and Modern English, Valley Girl is not only Cage’s first but enjoyable. And if you don’t think so, there’s always Bresson.