Rabbit Rabbit #9: Ay, Ay, Ay
The Collision of Restlessness and Potential in Sarah Polley’s Take This Waltz (2011)
Michelle Williams in Take This Waltz
It’s about to get too hot. I like summer, and indeed make some of my fondest memories this time of year, but I always end up completely stifled by the soaring temperatures. There is something slow, saggy, and saccharine about heat that leaves me restless, shuttling between the outside world and any spot next to an air-conditioner, remembering how great my life was in November and December. “It’s too hot to eat,” I remember saying over dinner last summer at a friend’s house upstate. It was ninety-eight degrees, about seven-thirty in the evening, and entropy had seemingly stopped time.
Canadian writer-director Sarah Polley’s sophomore feature, the 2011 romantic comedy-drama Take This Waltz, unfolds under a haze of heat. The movie follows the tumultuous journey of a 28-year-old writer, Margot (Michelle Williams), who meets the dashing Daniel (Luke Kirby), on a work trip to Nova Scotia. Daniel, a rickshaw driver by day and painter “for fun,” turns out to be the neighbor of Margot and her husband of five years Lou (played by Seth Rogen at his best, full-stop), a chicken cookbook writer. On the surface, the logistics of the film read as romcom tropes: Margot and Daniel have obvious chemistry, Margot must reckon with the stakes of ending her marriage, and on top of it all, everyone has a fake dream job that somehow pays for a perfectly quaint house.
However, there is much more to Take This Waltz than love affairs and rustic home painting studios. The film captures a particular ache, a yearning for something new and different, and the utter confusion that ache causes. In one particular scene, Margot comes home from a secret night swimming session with Daniel at the rec center, her first real act of transgression. When she enters the kitchen, she sees Lou on the back patio drinking a beer. An expression of discontent flashes on her face as the camera cuts to a close-up of his boiling pots on the stovetop.
It’s a recognizable moment: a moment after something big and exciting, which hints at a potential future full of big and exciting somethings. She sees how things could be. But not now. Now, Margot is stuck in her same kitchen, with her same husband sitting outside in the same heat. Is it comforting, or is it suffocating? Margot can’t decide, so she kisses Lou through the glass. Over this plays a waltz, “Rave On Sad Songs,” by Jason Collett. “I'm just feelin the temperature / Happiness is for amateurs,” Collett croons, foreshadowing their fate, which only Margot can hear from the stereo inside the house.
Slowly but steadily, Margot tests the temperature of her own lust for Daniel. And it’s sexy; over daytime martinis, Daniel essentially live-sexts Margot, telling her what he would do to her if they had the freedom. Their bodies feel connected despite the fact that they do not kiss until the final third of the film. They indulge in ultimate summer activities, like strolling along the lakeshore, eating watermelon on the ferry, and riding the aptly-named Scrambler on Center Island to The Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star.” But with the heat of passion comes that soul-plaguing heat to which I refer, one of restlessness and bottled potential. When it’s too hot to eat, it’s too hot to think, and therefore act. When the Scrambler ride ends, it’s all creaks and queasiness and you have to come back down to earth.
Margot and Lou’s anniversary is August 5th. They were married in the heat, and they unravel in the heat, too. They begin to burn up in their townhouse. Lou’s experimental pots of chicken cacciatore sit perpetually steaming, and the bedroom fan oscillates loudly at 5 in the morning, waking the ruddy-faced couple in sticky sheets. Their equally gross and adorable way of communicating –through excessive baby talk, cuddling, and fake verbal assaults– becomes stilted, getting in the way of life rather than making it sweeter. “When did you start winning this game?” Margot asks. “I don’t know. Maybe it means I love you more now,” Lou replies. A few days later, the secret’s out and they are both in tears, wondering what to do next.
I think, to some extent, we all understand what it feels like to want something and not be able to have it. But to want something and know you can have it is a different feeling altogether, especially when the ‘getting-it’ part promises that someone will get hurt. You end up weighing the emotional cost of a risk with your own sanity. How do we love when love changes? Can we still love when love changes?
Then there’s the titular song. Polley takes her title from Leonard Cohen’s hauntingly beautiful 1986 ballad, which is itself derived and translated from Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca’s poem, “Little Viennese Waltz.” This repetition and reimagining of cultural artifacts and stories is a theme present in Polley’s film, which borrows from typical romantic comedy tropes yet runs counter to expectations. Even Toronto, the famously cheap imitation American city for thousands of movies, gets a chance to play itself.
In a typical romcom, the husband character might be a total dick. Lou is not. He is, as Margot says, “the kindest, gentlest person in the world.” He loves his wife, and she loves him, until she doesn’t anymore. Or maybe, the protagonist would be My Best Friend’s Wedding-level insufferable. Instead, Polley takes care in both her writing and direction to ensure that Margot is a full, complex human being, with a feverish desire and an endearing vulnerability that stretch her until she breaks. Even her suitor Daniel is respectable. He never forces. When Margot climbs into his bed and asks, “What are you gonna do now?” He replies matter-of-factly with, “Nothing. It’s for you to do something, not me.” So, what happens when three characters, each possessing redeeming qualities and a major conflict of interest, converge? A three-step dance.
While the film does indeed contain three identifiable sections, I am not as interested in the mechanics of structure as I am in Polley’s sheer talent for capturing the dizzying whirlwind of emotion that accompanies a leap into the unknown. “Do you know it takes courage to do that, to seduce you?” Margot tearfully asks Lou one afternoon after he shrugs her off, hunched over a new recipe. It’s the first instance of Margot verbalizing her discontent with her marriage, and it’s also the main question Polley asks of us as active participants in her film. Are you aware it takes courage to go after what you want?
This summer, I am finally doing what I want. I was offered a lead role in a small, independent feature film that begins shooting in exactly a week, and in August I will co-direct my first short film. All in the blistering New York heat, naturally. It’s a progression of my career that feels exciting, a development of the summer I spent here two years ago taking film and acting classes. But it’s also a leap that feels terrifying because it’s the beginning of something new. Right now I’m teetering at the top of Splash Mountain (my version of The Scrambler) and my heart is mid-lurch. It takes courage to give in to one’s aspirations, nurture them and also allow them to change over time.
I see Margot’s ultimate decision to leave Lou and build a new life with Daniel as a radical act of courage that is not without melancholy, which is sometimes more heartbreaking than sadness. “Life has a gap in it. It just does,” declares Margot’s sister-in-law Geraldine. There are gaps everywhere in this film, but Polley takes special care to fill them with an abundance of light in her beautiful Canada: in the stained-glass skylight above Margot and Lou’s bed, sunrises on Lake Ontario, and streaming through the blinds of an empty downtown bar. There is hope all around us, she suggests, wherever we are in the world. In one of the most poignant lines in the film, Margot tells Daniel, “Sometimes I’m walking down the street and a shaft of sunlight falls in a certain way across the pavement and I just want to cry. And then a second later it’s over.” It’s certainly not tragic, but rather her, and “the fact of being alive, colliding.”
That is where Take This Waltz exists for me: at a collision, between restlessness and potential. One cannot help but illuminate the other. The heat of summer is bound to lift eventually, when we will come face-to-face with decisions made and unmade. The second verse of Cohen’s song goes:
Oh I want you, I want you, I want you
On a chair with a dead magazine
In the cave at the tip of the lily
In some hallway where love's never been
On a bed where the moon has been sweating
In a cry filled with footsteps and sand
I, ay, ay, ay
Take this waltz, take this waltz
There is a gap between “I” and “Take,” which Cohen (and Lorca in the poem) fills with the Spanish phrase, “ay-ay-ay,” translating literally to “oh, oh, oh” in English, and signifying a verbal throwing up of hands– a “dear me!” or an “oh my god.” It is as if the singer cannot declare his love, take the waltz and begin to dance, without expressing what will be lost, or die, when he does. We hear him pause briefly and decide in real-time. And even then he must state twice what he is doing (Take this waltz, man. Take this waltz. Just take it.) as if to affirm it. What the works of Lorca, Cohen, and Polley all agree on is that no matter how much is wanted –a lobby with 900 windows, the other side of Toronto, to make a movie– there will always be anguish and uncertainty. But we go after it anyway, because we have to. And we find ways to keep cool.
P.S. Recs from May: Sarah Snook (in season 4 of Succession but also just in general), Miranda July’s procrastination lovechild It Chooses You, and this slightly harrowing article in The Cut which has an insane feature photo…please god, let my media circus end!
