Lake of Fire
Directed by Tony Kaye
An early scene in Juno, a charming comedy that’s due for major praise when it hits theaters in December, shows a knocked up teenager getting deterred from having an abortion when she’s told that fetuses have fingernails. In a story that’s the furthest thing from an “issue” movie, her decision represents a fleeting moment of social insightfulness. It illuminates the personal difficulty of that infinitely controversial situation and grapples with the stakes at hand.
If you were to make an entire film out of the precise moments when pregnant women considering abortions are confronted with dedicated opposition, the tone would resemble Lake of Fire, Tony Kaye’s passionate meditation on the fiery issue.
Although it’s clear that Kaye’s perspective skews toward the pro-choice crowd, the movie never becomes gimmicky or dogmatic, and he lets voices from every angle speak for themselves. The production, shot in black and white and propelled by meandering conversations, recalls 1960s cinema verité films (think Salesman for the medically conscious).
Yet Kaye includes more graphic imagery than any abortion movie—other than the religious propaganda films from which he occasionally includes excerpts—has revealed before. Miniscule arms and legs, deflated skulls and other discarded components of babies-that-weren’t parade across the screen as an ongoing repulsion motif that continually grounds the whimsical overview in harsh realism. The body parts form a cohesive device, not an ideological prop. In this case, the viscus is the message.
Kaye, a prolific visual artist whose main feature film credit prior to Lake of Fire is the challenging 1998 Edward Norton vehicle American History X, spent a decade gathering footage and conducting interviews for his latest work. You can see it in the depth of his study (and in the 152-minute running time). Everything relevant to the subject gets a fair shot at justification, from hard-right Christian rallies to the operation itself. In the latter sequences, the whole shebang is caught on camera, but not before Kaye establishes the individuals receiving the operations and their specific motives.
Still, watching these scenes, it’s hard not to consider the way that abortions have recently been appropriated by horror films.
Chinese director Fruit Chan’s “Dumplings” segment of Three Extremes presents fetuses as a mystical delicacy, and the festival hit Inside follows a French woman’s efforts to prevent an intruder from pilfering her child right out of her uterus.
To some extent, Kaye’s film has equal shock value, and there are probably a few too many gross-out moments. But he gives such detailed context that you can’t hold it against him for putting it all out there. Nothing is private; the whole thing is honest.
In another movie, the inclusion of white, geriatric academic types—in this case, Noam Chomsky, Alan Dershowitz and Nat Hentoff—would seem like an obnoxious cliché or a feeble attempt at validating the movie’s existence. However, their perspectives are grouped together with so many others that they take on a kind of adorable quality. For the most part, they eschew their typical armchair observations and apply personal value systems to their opinions. Dershowitz, for example, admits he almost let go of his pro-choice perspective when he saw his child on an ultrasound screen. (Of the three, only Chomsky remains somewhat withdrawn, but he’s filmed in a long shot sitting in front of a blackboard, as though adrift in a cloud of chalk and eccentricity. The other men are shown in close-ups, highlighting the distinction.)
Despite his heavy reliance on verité, Kaye finds pathways to abstract expressions. There’s something intrinsically provocative about the contemporary life of Norma McCorvey, better known as “Jane Roe” in the seminal 1973 Roe v. Wade case, whose pro-choice stance lasted until the mid-1990s, when a Christian activist brought her over to other side. She tells Kaye that seeing fetal corpses convinced her to change her position, an assertion that works in unison with the director’s own footage of such remnants. It’s as if he’s saying, “How does this make you feel?” and viewers are forced to wonder whether they can trust being disgusted by the images.
Kaye’s choice of using gray tones to enshroud every frame of the film is equally stimulating. On a practical level, it heals the temporal gaps (lo-fi video from the 1990s blends well with the modern stuff since the contrast levels are similar). Beyond that, it comes across like an intentionally contradictory mechanism that literalizes the perspective of its opponent and beats it down. Despite what some pundits claim, the main concern is anything but black and white.
Directed by Tony Kaye
An early scene in Juno, a charming comedy that’s due for major praise when it hits theaters in December, shows a knocked up teenager getting deterred from having an abortion when she’s told that fetuses have fingernails. In a story that’s the furthest thing from an “issue” movie, her decision represents a fleeting moment of social insightfulness. It illuminates the personal difficulty of that infinitely controversial situation and grapples with the stakes at hand.
If you were to make an entire film out of the precise moments when pregnant women considering abortions are confronted with dedicated opposition, the tone would resemble Lake of Fire, Tony Kaye’s passionate meditation on the fiery issue.
Although it’s clear that Kaye’s perspective skews toward the pro-choice crowd, the movie never becomes gimmicky or dogmatic, and he lets voices from every angle speak for themselves. The production, shot in black and white and propelled by meandering conversations, recalls 1960s cinema verité films (think Salesman for the medically conscious).
Yet Kaye includes more graphic imagery than any abortion movie—other than the religious propaganda films from which he occasionally includes excerpts—has revealed before. Miniscule arms and legs, deflated skulls and other discarded components of babies-that-weren’t parade across the screen as an ongoing repulsion motif that continually grounds the whimsical overview in harsh realism. The body parts form a cohesive device, not an ideological prop. In this case, the viscus is the message.
Kaye, a prolific visual artist whose main feature film credit prior to Lake of Fire is the challenging 1998 Edward Norton vehicle American History X, spent a decade gathering footage and conducting interviews for his latest work. You can see it in the depth of his study (and in the 152-minute running time). Everything relevant to the subject gets a fair shot at justification, from hard-right Christian rallies to the operation itself. In the latter sequences, the whole shebang is caught on camera, but not before Kaye establishes the individuals receiving the operations and their specific motives.
Still, watching these scenes, it’s hard not to consider the way that abortions have recently been appropriated by horror films.
Chinese director Fruit Chan’s “Dumplings” segment of Three Extremes presents fetuses as a mystical delicacy, and the festival hit Inside follows a French woman’s efforts to prevent an intruder from pilfering her child right out of her uterus.
To some extent, Kaye’s film has equal shock value, and there are probably a few too many gross-out moments. But he gives such detailed context that you can’t hold it against him for putting it all out there. Nothing is private; the whole thing is honest.
In another movie, the inclusion of white, geriatric academic types—in this case, Noam Chomsky, Alan Dershowitz and Nat Hentoff—would seem like an obnoxious cliché or a feeble attempt at validating the movie’s existence. However, their perspectives are grouped together with so many others that they take on a kind of adorable quality. For the most part, they eschew their typical armchair observations and apply personal value systems to their opinions. Dershowitz, for example, admits he almost let go of his pro-choice perspective when he saw his child on an ultrasound screen. (Of the three, only Chomsky remains somewhat withdrawn, but he’s filmed in a long shot sitting in front of a blackboard, as though adrift in a cloud of chalk and eccentricity. The other men are shown in close-ups, highlighting the distinction.)
Despite his heavy reliance on verité, Kaye finds pathways to abstract expressions. There’s something intrinsically provocative about the contemporary life of Norma McCorvey, better known as “Jane Roe” in the seminal 1973 Roe v. Wade case, whose pro-choice stance lasted until the mid-1990s, when a Christian activist brought her over to other side. She tells Kaye that seeing fetal corpses convinced her to change her position, an assertion that works in unison with the director’s own footage of such remnants. It’s as if he’s saying, “How does this make you feel?” and viewers are forced to wonder whether they can trust being disgusted by the images.
Kaye’s choice of using gray tones to enshroud every frame of the film is equally stimulating. On a practical level, it heals the temporal gaps (lo-fi video from the 1990s blends well with the modern stuff since the contrast levels are similar). Beyond that, it comes across like an intentionally contradictory mechanism that literalizes the perspective of its opponent and beats it down. Despite what some pundits claim, the main concern is anything but black and white.
