Berwick 1

Jessica Dunn Rovinelli's Marriage Story

Marriage Story, the new short by Jessica Dunn Rovinelli (to my embarrassment, my first encounter with her work), is built of a pair of triptychs. One comprises three red screens, all the same shade of scarlet (calling to mind Hito Steyerl’s Red Alert), but of markedly different duration. The first and third of these, which run respectively for 80 and 65 seconds, serve a practical purpose: they are the grounds for the film’s opening and closing credits, soundtracked by the industrial-adjacent thump of Ne/Re/A’s techno*, though both extend well past the time needed to convey this information. The third, only five seconds, serves to break up the middle section of the second triptych, A1-B-C1-A2-C2-D-A3. Taken together, these three passages account for a little under a third of the film’s nine minutes.

The second triptych is composed of a series of increasingly mediated domestic scenes, all shot with a fixed camera at roughly waist height. Following the long red opening, we see the stove- and countertop of a typically cramped New York apartment: though the sink is off screen, the placement of a dish rack seems to confirm the narrowness of the counter, upon which also sit several bottles of cooking oil, an empty carafe, and a mason jar full of coffee. On the wall behind these objects is a print-out of what appears to be a detail from a Romantic painting of Mary holding the Christ Child. (Rovinelli’s synopsis refers to “the eyes of a female Christ,” hence my uncertainty on this point. If any art historians have answers here, I’d be much obliged.) On the stovetop, a coffee pot boils with water for the moka pot next to it. After just a few seconds, the image begins to redden, deepening toward the opening’s scarlet and then fading back to natural light. An obvious question: where is this redness coming from? Its steady arc implies artifice, control. As this scene returns to its initial state, a nude woman enters the frame—which crops her figure so that only her torso is visible—and sets about making the coffee. Almost immediately (after not more than five seconds of natural light), the image begins to redden again, the second of the series of oscillations into and out of redness which continue across the remainder of the film. Amidst this steady wave of redness, she goes on with her process, at one point carelessly burning her hand on the moka pot’s base. Did her nakedness before the camera lead to this distraction? Or was it just a new way of making coffee? Having completed her task, she exits the frame, leaving the coffee to brew amidst the ongoing waves of red. 

Just as it begins to burble, the image cuts to a living room, lit from its rear by two large windows. There is an armchair, a vase, several hanging plants, a side table, at the base of which sit the coffee pot and two cups, and, running along the whole of the frame’s left edge, a yellow couch on which two nude figures are entangled. The pair are Rovinelli and Anika Kash—the film is credited as “in conversation with” her—though next to nothing thus far would have confirmed this fact (the lower part of Rovinelli’s face is visible briefly while making coffee and her tattoos offer visual continuity that the same person is appearing in both sequences). I offer it here though because, as far as the history of artists filming themselves fucking goes, it’s an odd view, not quite voyeuristic, certainly not impressionistic (the most common tactic, by far)—obliquely, casually erotic. That is, we’re not drawn into this scene, artificially inserted into the experience of it, but we’re not exactly kept out either: our view is incomplete, we see very little of what’s happening on the couch, thought it’s more than enough to feel the intense involvement of the lovers with one another, which sits in sharp contrast to Rovinelli’s earlier self-consciousness while preparing the coffee. As I said above, the oscillations into and out of redness continue, now distended within the same rough 3:1 proportion of reddening to uninflected as before (the former passages now last around 30 seconds to the latter’s ten, while in the opening it was closer to 15 to five). We are no closer to confirming the source of the redness, though its effect on the scene is not uniform: the light through the windows remains white. 

After around a minute and a half, at the cry of what seems to be a cat or a bird**, a sudden cut to red, bridged by the continuous ambient sounds. Returning to the living room following this brief intrusion, the framing has shifted slightly to the right, the coffee cups have moved from floor to windowsill, the lovers have changed positions. We are, after all, in a story. Soon, a subtle synth tone and a voice enter the soundtrack: “Thy lips, my spouse, are as dripping honeycomb…” This voice, as we will see in the third section, belongs to Kash, who reads a text combining a range of biblical and mystic passages (the preceding is from the Song of Solomon) with her own erotic prose poetry. She continues on over the pair’s post-coffee fuck for another minute or so, before another abrupt cut—given the increasing intensity of what we can see, perhaps at the point of climax, humorously foreshadowed by the coffee’s coming to a boil?—now shows her nude, seated with one leg bent beneath the other in a sort of classically chaste posture atop a woven wicker chair, her upper body largely obscured by the other leg and the paper she reads from (her voice carries across the cut). The top edge of the frame is, once again, situated at her shoulders. However, in contrast to Rovinelli’s in the kitchen scene, her face does not remain off screen: it appears in close-up on a CRT monitor to her right placed atop a milk crate angled slightly away from the camera. The marriage of reading face to reading body is, then, a matter of faith: we are again both present and not at this commentary on love and lust, spiritual and physical, which has been rendered indirect, as performance in real time. This performance may itself be a fiction. 

Here though, I think the film runs into its major flaw: the uneasiness with which the appropriated passages in Kash’s text sit next to her original passages (compare these oscillations between read and written material with the waves of red***). I don’t mean simply that she’s failed to find language adequate to some of the most enduring and widely read texts of the last two millennia. But if the images of fucking here strike me as banal in their own way—this may be unavoidable—there’s nonetheless a conceptual richness to them which seems to me absent from the plainer eroticism of, for example, “sweat sliding through the indistinguishably small channels between the folds of our bodies, sweat connecting us in ways our repellent flesh could not, her body and my body, pressing, oozing, mixing my fluids with hers, my spit with hers, my cum with hers.” If Marriage Story, with its pointed title, is positioned against anything, it’s the failure of the massive canon of heterosexual domesticity to produce compelling depictions of the satisfactions of intimacy. It may be that certain things will only ever be felt, not shown or spoken. (I realize that a certain skepticism regarding images has started to emerge as a theme of this little newsletter…). Kash’s text concludes with a brief, ambivalent sample of Paul’s letter to the Galatians: “the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh.” 

* This immediate reminder of the club nights no one is intending is to my mind the most poignant of the ways in which Marriage Story is among the first real Covid films.

** This is one of a surprising number of points of contact with Laida Lertxundi’s 025 Sunset Red, in which a dog’s bark snaps the image from red filtered to natural light. Laida’s film also includes a shot of her nude watching herself on a TV monitor and a passage in which she makes out with her husband (it is in fact this scene which she watches). 

*** The credits, if I’m reading them right, would appear to confirm that this reddening was done during the edit, thus bringing it into conversation with a number of other recent films which have made use of exaggerated or intrusive color grading, most notably Simon and Jennie MaryTai Liu’s -force-, itself a collaboration between a filmmaker and an artist from another medium. It’s also worth noting here that the film, per the program note, is intended to be shown on 35mm, a fact which I expect would make its use of red considerably more intense.