by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film Charles and I saw
Saturday afternoon at FilmOut was magnificent, wiping my cinematic palate clean
from the aftertaste of the opening movie, Kiss Me, Kill Me. It was billed as the “Girls’ Showcase” and called ToY — the odd typography of the title was the
deliberate choice of its director and co-writer, Patrick Chapman (it seemed odd
that a film ballyhooed as being about Lesbians would be directed by a man — and
of the two people who worked with him on the script only one, Alissa Kokkins,
was a woman; Andrew Hanson was the third co-writer), who was an artist before
he got into filmmaking and so far has made only two feature-length movies. The
earlier one was called Phin, and like ToY it’s
about a struggling artist with relationship problems; imdb.com also lists
Chapman as an editor on the TV series OMG! and as cameraman and editor on a 2011 documentary called Building
for Life: Moving AIDS to the Positive Life. In a question-and-answer session right after the showing that featured
Chapman, Kokkins and one of the film’s two female leads, Briana Evigan, Chapman
said that the basic idea of the title was to say it was a story about two
people who “toy” with each other. Maybe that was the original concept, but as
he, his writers and his cast developed the project it became something much
deeper and richer than that. The promo line for the film is, “Love does not
heal the broken,” and indeed that could serve as a summary of the film since
the central characters are two people, both deeply wounded by the stressors of
life, who come together, briefly make each other more or less happy, but then
are pulled apart by their own unhealable traumas.
The film begins with Chloe
Davis (Briana Evigan), a 20-something artist from a well-to-do family; her mom
died some time ago and her father Steven (Daniel Hugh Kelly) is fighting a
losing battle with her to get her into rehab — did I mention she has a drug
problem? She’s a movie artist, isn’t she? — and to pressure her to sign away
her rights to the money from the family foundation set up in memory of her dead
mother. When she isn’t escaping rehab and snorting coke, Chloe is working on an
elaborate project documenting the lives of women who make their livings with
their bodies — mostly prostitutes but also models as well (and one of the women
she hires as a model gets angry when she realizes Chloe doesn’t think modeling
and prostitution are all that different). Chloe photographs these people both
for still pictures and for video; the stills are often nude or semi-nude and
almost clinical in their apparent detachment, but the movies are filmed through
smoky or scratched glass that blurs many of the features of the people in them
as Chloe asks them about their lives. Most of the prostitutes she interviews are
women, but at least one is a male-presenting man and one is obviously
Transgender. The central intrigue of the film begins when Chloe meets
hard-edged forty-something Kat Fuller (Kerry Norton), who comes into the
interview so hostile she won’t even give Chloe her name (“Why do you want to
know?” she says), but eventually she opens up while keeping her hard edge. Kat
works for a sinister-looking pimp who runs a tire-stripping shop as a cover for
his other enterprises, though even he has still other people he has to answer
to, and as the story of ToY develops it seems that the pimp owes a lot of money to these mysterious people you don’t want
to owe money to, and he’s trying to ease Kat out of his stable to make room for
younger and more immediately attractive talent, while Kat is trying to convince
him that even though she’s getting on in years in a meat-market profession in
which youth is virtually everything, she can still deliver the goods both
sexually and financially. In one of her interviews with Chloe, Kat rattles off
a string of rules her pimp has put her on: no group scenes, no drug use, no
Black clients (“That sounds racist,” says Chloe, echoing our feelings exactly),
and above all no falling in love.
Chloe and Kat drift into a physical
relationship and seem on some level to be right for each other despite the fact
that the principal thing they have in common is sheer neediness. At one point
Kat, who’s bought a gun for self-protection but has never used it, takes Chloe
out into the country to teach her to shoot — a welcome respite from all the
interiors and nighttime cityscapes we see throughout virtually the rest of the
film — and later on Chloe’s dad insists that she come to a fundraiser he’s
giving at his home for Huntington’s disease, the illness that laid low Chloe’s
mom. Chloe dutifully attends and brings Kat as her date — only they get into a
flaming argument that ultimately breaks them up. Kat ends up in the hands of a
considerably more unscrupulous pimp who gets her hooked on drugs (though in Chloe’s
company she’d already started snorting coke; with her new boyfriend/pimp she
ultimately ends up on crack) and has her do all the things her previous pimp
told her not to: doing drugs with clients, doing Black men, offering herself
for groups. Ultimately a biker friend of the new pimp decides to rape Kat and
put a bag over her head to strangle her — and this is intercut with a scene
between Chloe and a new model for her project, whom she tries to seduce, only
to draw back in horror when she realizes this woman isn’t Kat and can’t give
her whatever it was Kat was giving her emotionally. Chloe had also noticed a
scar on Kat’s body and realized she had given birth through a C-section, and
while Kat was typically dismissive of the whole thing — referring to her baby
as “it” and saying she gave it away for adoption as soon as possible precisely
because she didn’t want to get emotionally attached to her daughter (it’s
purely an inadvertent slip when Kat reveals the child is a daughter). Chloe manages to get the private
detective hired by her father’s trust to find Kat’s daughter and shoots a video
with her in which she acknowledges that the woman who’s raising her isn’t her
real mother — though we don’t get told that until almost the end of the movie,
when we suddenly realize that this
girl who seems unrelated to the main action actually is Kat’s daughter — just
as Chapman and his co-writers take their own sweet time telling us that Chloe’s
mom’s death wasn’t an accident: she had been struck down with Huntington’s and
dad euthanized her.
Since Huntington’s is genetic, Chloe is worried that she
too will come down with it and get progressively weaker and more helpless, and
by the end of the movie she’s starting to feel tremors in her arms (though it’s
unclear whether she really has the disease or this is just the down-side of the
mind-body connection, her fear working herself into psychosomatic illness). By
this time Kat has long since moved out of Chloe’s loft — though Chloe has asked
the detective her family hired to track Kat down — but she’s left a box of
possessions, including her gun, and one night after her fiasco with the model
Chloe … Charles told me after the movie he’d been worried that Chapman and his
co-writers would have Chloe live and Kat die, an ending he would have found
classist (the 1-percenters bail their kids out of their problems while the rest
of us get overwhelmed by them), but instead Chloe’s suicide attempt is
successful while Kat is rescued in time and shows up, badly bruised but still
alive, to learn from Chloe’s dad that Chloe changed her will at the last minute
and set up a trust fund to see that Kat was taken care of for the rest of her
life and never had to do sex work again. “You’ve been given a wonderful
opportunity,” Chloe’s dad tells Kat in the same patronizing tone with which he
addressed Chloe when she was still alive, with an unmistakable “or else” threat
that the trust will be “voided” in case she screws up — and given that we’ve
already been shown that Kat is the sort of person with excellent day-to-day
survival skills but no particular affinity for long-term planning, we’re left
uncertain about her fate and aching for her as the film ends. ToY is a marvelous movie, powerfully directed and
written, vividly acted by the principals as well as a fairly large supporting
cast (many of whom we only see in the interview scenes Chloe shoots with them);
Briana Evigan, who aside from her short hair bears a striking resemblance to
Janis Joplin (and judging from her work here she would be an excellent choice
to play Janis if she either has a singing voice or they can find her a good
double), really inhabits the part of Chloe, and she and Kerry Norton play
brilliantly off each other: the airheaded artist whose well-off family has
(mostly) bought her way out of trouble, and the over-the-hill sex worker twice
her age who’s had to survive as honestly as possible in a hard and mean world.
I found myself wondering if there had been a real-life model to Chloe’s
character — by chance I’d read a New Yorker article on the photographer Diane Arbus the day
before we watched the film and I wondered if Chapman and Evigan had drawn on
her life: Diane Arbus came from a well-to-do family, pursued an above-ground
career as a fashion photographer with her husband Allan, then broke up with him
and continued to work as a art photographer, pursuing deeply transgressive
subject matter — little people, sideshow freaks, street people, bikers,
Transgender people — and ultimately killed herself. It turned out they had another
model in mind: Francesca Woodman, who (unlike Arbus and Chloe) didn’t come from
a rich family — her parents were artists and so was her brother — but, like
Chloe in the film, shot almost clinical photos of nude women, deliberately
blurred some of her images, attempted suicide in 1980 and finally succeeded in
killing herself in 1981 the same way Chloe does in the film: by jumping out of
the window of her loft — and unlike Arbus, who died in middle age, Woodman was
only 22, the same age as Chloe, when she committed suicide. (One major
difference between Woodman and Chloe: the film attributes Chloe’s depression
largely to the loss of her mother, but both Woodman’s parents are still alive
and are the executors of her estate — and have been criticized for keeping a
lot of Francesca’s work under wraps instead of releasing it.) Both Chapman and
Evigan said they studied Woodman’s life as a way of making Chloe a more
realistic character, and despite the differences the use of a real-life model
for the character makes her deeper and richer, to the film’s benefit. I also
couldn’t help but draw a parallel between ToY and the recent film Room, which Charles and I had also just seen and found
incredibly deep and moving (and, by coincidence, they’re not only both stories
about female survival under incredible odds, both star actresses who go by the
name “Brie”!); the stories aren’t all that similar but the intensity and
compassion with which they are told are, and so is their common theme of how
women are exploited sexually by men and the desperation, survival skills and
self-hatred they develop to deal with the way they’re used.
