Your Body Changes Everything
Rose Glass’ Saint Maud (2019)
Rose Glass is getting a lot of attention lately. This is mainly because her latest film, Love Lies Bleeding, is being fronted by Kristen Stewart who is parading around every possible publicity event in Chanel hotpants and/or a jockstrap and it is, quite frankly, absurdly distracting. I can hardly open X without being confronted by unprecedented levels of thirst hysteria.
With that out of the way, I had been wanting to write about Glass’ marvellous debut, Saint Maud for some time. Maud (Morfydd Clark) is austere and devout, a private carer who clearly sees her work as a calling more than simply an occupation. She enters the employ of Amanda (Jennifer Ehle), an artist terminally ill with lymphoma of the spine. Amanda inhabits a spacious, art deco house, with ornate wallpapers. Even as she is dying, she is still capable of glamour. Losing her hair, she wears a turban or a wig, which one visitor dubs “dangerously Norma Desmond” to which Amanda replies “fuck you!” And she is a little like Norma Desmond and not just because of the turban, but because there is something sinister about her. She has a flair, and it is no surprise to learn she is a dancer and choreographer, with a book entitled The Body Is A Stage. And it is, of course it is, if you make it one. To be a dancer who can no longer dance is one of the great bodily betrayals, and it is unsurprising to see Amanda living through others, especially fascinating younger friends.
Amanda is also 49. I am turning 49 this year. I have been lucky so far, I am still dancing. But films that feature dancers have long fascinated me: all of Baryshnikov’s films, And Then We Danced (2019), Guadagnino’s Suspiria (2018), Black Swan (2010), Flashdance (1983), and Centre Stage (2000). Gene Kelly in An American in Paris (1951), Les Girls (1957), and him and Judy Garland in Summer Stock (1950). Jane Russell in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953). Those classic Hollywood musicals make the body a stage but they never show the effort: the sweat, the stretching, the nerve flossing, the reality of dancer’s feet, but they all capture the magnificent feeling of dancing, to feel what your body can do. Flashdance, the 2018 Suspiria, and Black Swan all deal in sweat, blood, and puke; in how dance can both exhilarate and destroy. I imagine that Amanda feels everything her body can no longer do, and while she must still move a little as part of palliative care, these floor exercises are nothing compared to the sinuous, curving gestures she was once able to make with her body.
Maud’s religious beliefs mean that she hears and feels a spiritual presence, a presence that she describes as “like a shiver or like a pulsing” —these are also the sensations arousal, ecstasy, the way that your abdomen will rise and fall with exertion. But Maud is in the grips of a religious mania that drives her to deny her body’s feelings. When she feels abandoned by god, she drinks and picks up random men, abjectified by these unpleasurable encounters. When Maud does experience pleasure, it is only in relation to inserting herself into Amanda’s world.\
Just as she carefully organises Amanda’s medications and prepares her meals, we also see Maud spraying herself with some of Amanda’s perfume, the droplets atomising through the air onto her throat. I imagine Maud smells meticulously clean and neutral at work, and choosing a perfume feels like a luxury she would consciously eschew. Amanda on the other hand strikes me as a woman of many aromatic moods. I can imagine Penhaligon’s Iris Prima sitting on her dressing table, with its embossed suede label that feels like the sole of a new ballet slipper. But this scent is too pedestrian, and perhaps it would have come to her as a well-meaning gift, but its floral and leather notes too subtle for Amanda’s forceful personality. Yet, I think this is the perfume that Maud would choose to try, because it is pretty but not too intrusive. Amanda’s preferred scent would be something like Christelle Jacquemin’s Underworld, with notes of smoke, cardamom, and incense. This kind of aroma would fit in with her love of statement pieces, the jewelled brooches pinned to her turban the night of her birthday party, and the cry of pleasure she lets out when her occasional lover Carol (Lily Frazer), appears in an electric blue strapless dress.
But Underworld’s qualities also suggest something of the shared affinity that brings Maud and Amanda together—their belief in what the body can withstand. While Amanda relishes watching Carol dance in a way she no longer can, Maud mortifies her flesh with spiked insoles in her Converse. Maud believes in the phrase “never waste your pain” and she suffers but she is also subject to the whims of the supernatural force that rules her world, a force that sees her levitating in a kind of ecstasy, and her gasps could be pain or pleasure, almost as if she is Bernini’s Saint Theresa.
This fine line between the sound and the look of pain and pleasure is part of the film’s unsettling quality, a kind of confusion brought on by the way we are forced to inhabit Maud’s senses. This is nowhere more in evidence than in the film’s shock-cut ending, which sees Maud alternately serene and ascending in ethereal light, or immolated by flames, screaming in agony. The film does not waste its pain, instead eliciting an uncanny shiver.
I loved Saint Maude! The perfect blend of body horror and asceticism, which is essentially porn for an ex-ballet dancer.😂