Nina Nastasia makes you perk up and listen

Some songwriters have a gift for stringing together a coherent album, a solid group of a dozen or so songs of comparable quality that work well as a whole. Other songwriters seem to concentrate their powers in just a few songs, or even moments: they’re the ones who’ll make you perk up and listen whenever that certain perfect song comes along and demands your attention.

Nina Nastasia strikes me as a songwriter in the latter mode. It’s not that her albums aren’t solid and coherent—her recent records On Leaving and You Follow Me (with Jim White) are both excellent throughout. But then then there are those songs that just soar above the rest—like “Settling Song,” with its classic-ballad melody and palpable sadness, spiked with a barely-perceptible dash of wistful sweetness; or “Late Night,” in which Nastasia’s voice soars and she plays her acoustic guitar louder and louder and tells a story of horror, pain, and bitter disappointment.

Nastasia also seems to have a gift for writing tunes that aren’t as immediately obvious in their appeal, but which sneak their way inside you all the same, and perhaps end up having even greater power because of it. One example would be “Our Day Trip,” a deceptively quiet little tune from On Leaving. The arrangement is simple: an acoustic guitar strumming the chords, restrained, shuffling drums, Nastasia’s plain (if lovely) voice, and a piano offering punctuation here and there. The song sets a melancholy and plaintive mood from the start—but this feeling comes almost entirely in the music at first, in the quiet tension of the arrangement and in Nastasia’s delivery. The song’s speaker is addressing a lover, asking him not to go to work that day, offering an easily-realizable fantasy of escaping briefly to the country: “We’ve got just enough money / Let’s see how far we can amble / One day can make all the difference.” It’s only in that last bit that the lyric hints that something might be wrong here—that the two of them might be discontent, with their lives or with each other. But the speaker continues to maintain the fantasy for a while after that: “Two souls alone out on a lake / It will be a perfect afternoon / We can lose our clothes and have a swim.” As a listener, you’ve been welcomed into the dream by this point: you can feel the speaker’s longing for an escape, and the idea of it sounds great: peaceful, relaxing, sexy. But then comes the final verse (which ends the song, without a return to the chorus melody), and it dashes all hope, and breaks your heart. “Your free hand waving from the gate,” Nastasia sings, “The metal shining at your waist / You had so much more ambition.” And now we understand why the speaker wants to escape—she’s disappointed in how her lover’s dreams seem to be growing out of reach, and how he seems to have accepted this fact, which disappoints her that much more. She longs for a day of freedom with him, a way to recapture the dreams that they no doubt once shared with each other—a momentary return, at least, to a time when they not only loved each other, but also loved to imagine the great lives they might lead together. But now it seems to be too late for this—his dreams have passed him by, and a part of her love for him is gone, too.

Nuns on drugs

Pedro Almodovar’s Entre tinieblas (English title: Dark Habits), released in 1984, is in some respects very silly. It involves a nightclub singer who takes refuge from the police in a convent run by drug-addicted nuns, who are meanwhile attempting to convince a wealthy woman to continue her late husband’s patronage. So, basically we have a mash-up of two overly familiar movie plots (fleeing the police, and fund raising on behalf of a scrappy, embattled institution)—but fortunately for us, the film is only marginally concerned with telling this story. Instead, we get lots of stuff like nuns shooting up and a tiger stalking around in the convent garden. These are shock tactics, intentionally outrageous, meant to catch our attention through the force of their absurdity, through the audacity of the ways in which they violate conventions and upend our sense of how the world is supposed to be ordered. But there’s considerable danger in using this kind of device: outrageousness for the sake of outrageousness tends to become tedious with repetition. There’s only so many times a film can throw something shocking at you before you catch on to the technique, and after that, any subsequent shocks are bound to lose their punch.

But this is Almodovar we’re talking about here. Shock and absurdity are a big part of his stock in trade—yet he’s almost always able to use those techniques not just to stage gags or to manipulate the audience, but instead to create moments of beauty and emotional power. Dark Habits lacks the lyrical loveliness and thematic sophistication of Talk to Her or Volver—but all the same, here and there you can see traces of the same sensibilities and techniques that make those more recent films so successful. One example: when the nightclub singer enters her room at the convent for the first time, and the camera lingers with a decidedly erotic energy on the objects around her, I was reminded of the playful, mysterious, dark and sexual tone that pervades Talk to Her and All About My Mother, in which straightforward shots often have evocatively seamy subtexts, hinting at all the joy, pain, sex, wildness, and revelation that’s always threatening to bubble up from just beneath the perfectly-composed warmth and calmness of the camera. I saw it too in the boredom in the expression of the nun who feeds the tiger through metal bars, and scolds him like an errant toddler when he bats his enormous paw at her and growls. One of Almodovar’s great strengths is his ability to find the normal and the mundane in the wild and the absurd—it’s a way of bringing all the drug addiction and weird sex and so on into focus and comprehensibility. Watching an Almodovar film, you come to believe that the world is far stranger and wilder than you’ve ever imagined—–but at the same time you also become convinced that all such weirdness is entirely normal.