The Tale (2018)

[Ashely Wolfgram]

In the film, Jennifer is also a documentary filmmaker, and so her whole life is about finding frameworks for complex narratives. But when her mother calls her one day, deeply upset about a story she just unearthed from a box, something Jennifer wrote in middle school, Jennifer doesn't know what the big deal is. At first. 13-year-old Jennifer wrote of a summer spent with her horseback riding teacher "Mrs. G" (Elizabeth Debicki) and her running coach "Bill" (Jason Ritter). In it, she details her "relationship" with the 40-year-old Bill, whom she considers her first love. Jennifer's elderly mother is horrified by what she has read. She had no idea her daughter was raped by her running coach. But that's not how Jennifer remembers it. She remembers it as something beautiful.

The unnerving power of "The Tale" is in Fox's approach. In the first flashback, Jennifer is 15 years old (played by Jessica Sarah Flaum), starting her first day at a horseback riding camp. It could be the opening to a bittersweet coming-of-age story, which is how Jennifer has seen it all her life. But while going through some photo albums with her mother, Jennifer comes across a photo of herself that summer. She doesn't remember herself as being that little. Suddenly, we see the same flashback, only now her younger self is 13 (Isabelle Nlisse). It's extremely effective in its queasy-making clarity. It's not that the events of the summer would be excusable if she had been 15 years old. It's that her mind has tricked herself into thinking she was older. But the photo of her prepubescent self hammers a crack into her romantic narrative. She goes on a quest to try to piece together that summer, tracking down other students from the riding camp, even paying a visit to a now elderly Mrs. G (a terrifying Frances Conroy).

The film is one long interrogation, not only from Jennifer the character's standpoint, but from a directorial standpoint. Characters look straight at the camera, dead-on, standing in eerie tableaux, caught as though for a camera, photos trapped in an album, telling no tales. Time folds in on itself, as Jennifer moves through her own past. She sees the same event from different perspectives, adding shadings as more information becomes available to her. Jennifer questions the current-day Mrs. G, but she also interrogates the younger Mrs. G, or the younger Bill, or even her younger self. Her younger self says to her, point-blank, "I'm not the victim of this story. I'm the hero."

As 13-year-old Jenny gets sucked into the charismatic personalities of Mrs. G and Bill, we the audience can see that they are predators in the process of grooming her. "The Tale" is an unblinking portrait of how grooming works. The tiny boundary-breaches. The testing of the waters. The subtle wedge Mrs. G and Bill put between Jenny and her parents ("Your parents are afraid of becoming free," Bill tells the child). The creation of a conspiratorial "let's tell each other secrets" atmosphere. It's chilling. A body double was used for the sexual scenes (and it's obvious it's a body double, a good choice: it distances us enough so we don't worry about the child actress).

Catharsis and confrontation is not what "The Tale" is about (which is why the main confrontation feels like it's slipped in from another movie altogether). "The Tale" is also not about mother-daughter conflict along the lines of "Why didn't you protect me?" On the contrary: Jennifer truly believes she remembers that summer accurately. When her mother yells, "Why are you not angry?" Jennifer doesn't have an answer. (Fox has said she didn't classify what happened to her as "sexual abuse" until she was 45 years old. It sometimes takes that long.) All of the actors are in a beautiful zone here, including the young Nlisse, whose solemn face takes in the lit-from-within figures of Mrs. G and Bill and it's clear she feels anointed, chosen, by these two glamorous adults with burnished skin, intimate eyes, languid body language weaving a hypnotic spell.

Hermann Paul, Mermaid Playing, c. 1898, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Robert Gore Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies, purchased with funds provided by Anna Bing Arnold, Museum Associates Acquisition Fund, and deaccession funds

My favorite fairy tale is The Little Mermaid. Initially, I was obsessed with the tragedy of this story. When I was three years old, I fell from a jungle gym and broke my femur. I was in a full-leg cast for months and spent a lot of time watching videos at home. My favorite was a Japanese animated version of The Little Mermaid, with the original Hans Christian Andersen ending where the mermaid fails to inspire the prince to fall in love with her, and is turned into sea foam. The final scene of the sea foam washing up on the shore was my favorite. My mom couldn't understand how I could love this sad ending so much, but I thought it was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen. Now that I'm older, I appreciate that the story (with its original ending) can be interpreted as a warning about the pain and ultimate futility of betraying oneself in an effort to please others. I am very taken with Hermann Paul's Mermaid Playing, which is of course in the current show.

Leonardo da Vinci wrote several fables featuring spiders that don't know their place and get squashed or clematis vines vainly reaching too far. My favorite, though, is a simple two-sentence tale about a sheet of paper: The pristine sheet of paper considers itself ruined by the black ink placed upon it and grieves. Yet, it is the words on the sheet that will spare it from being discarded.

While thousands of works on paper in the LACMA collection offer beautiful proof of concept to this idea, it's an oil on canvas, Still-life with Apples and a Pomegranate by Thodule-Augustin Ribot, on view in the Ahmanson Building, Level 3, that shares da Vinci's message. Here a ragtag group of fruit finds its light. Or tries to: each succumbs in some way to the darkness. No matter. This fruit has lived and Ribot's realism is there to testify.

My favorite fairy tale is The 12 Dancing Princesses by the Brothers Grimm. Although not as famous as many other stories, I remember from my childhood that my local library had a book for this story with fabulous illustrations of pretty princesses in gorgeous dresses. I always spent as much time looking at those pictures as reading the text, trying to decide which princess I wanted to be. "Princess" was tops on my list of career choices at that time.

I especially love the fairy tale book illustrations by David Hockney, especially the one of Rapunzel, where you only see the ends of her long hair wafting in the wind as a suggestion of her presence, with her rescuer on horseback as the visual centerpiece. These Hockney images for The Older Rapunzel (above) highlight the motif of the protagonist's flowing hair, which also suggests the swift flow of time. The fairy tales may have taken root during our childhood, yet they remain embedded in our adult psyche.

Blank Space, in collaboration with The National Building Museum, has announced winners of their fifth annual Fairy Tales competition, unveiled in front of a live audience at the Washington D.C. National Building Museum. The competition saw submissions from 65 countries, with 3 prize winners, a runner-up, and 9 honorable mentions chosen for their exploration of current events and the creative process through well-crafted short stories and artwork. The winners were chosen by a jury of 20 leading architects, including Daniel Libeskind, Bjarke Ingels, and Maria Aiolova.

The winning entry for 2018 went to Louis Liu and Senyao Wei, whose narrative set in Beijing confronts the difference between physical and virtual perceptions of the city, within the context of news media. Read on to find out more about this Fairy Tale, as well as the remaining 3 winners and 9 honorable mentions.

We then began to think whether these news were really reliable? Of course they were not reliable. They were not written by reporters. They were written by a group of angry ordinary people. What were they angry about? Because Beijing, like every major city in the world, has a large population, it is crowded, and has many poor people. Therefore, we believe that the biggest problem in Beijing is not to disperse the poor population but to readjust the structure of the city. In this case, the so-called freer private media actually did a very bad job, in which it did not look at this in a greater picture and sought a solution, but instead focused deeply on the matter and complained. So at the end of the story, Lao Tzu's words means that if you want to reach the truest side of the city, then throw away all the media and its mediums, then every minute and every second of your life in this city is the most authentic look of the city.
-Louis Lui

I'd like to think of my story as a magical realist fairy tale, challenging ideas of the classical fairy tale, such as for example a linear rather than complex relationship between good and evil. I believe that in the new "antimythical" fairy tale, the quest of the characters should not only be personal, a greater awareness of the self, as we are not all striving for the same idea of happiness. Instead, I believe that narratives should engage with wider questions and ideas, with a clear and responsible voice towards adults, but most importantly, children.
-Ifigeneia Liangi

Environmental Fable Set in Sci-Fi Landscapes Wins 2017 Fairy Tales Competition Yesterday evening, in a ceremony at the National Building Museum in Washington DC, Blank Space announced the winners of their annual Fairy Tales competition. Representing the best the architectural imagination has to offer were 4 winners and 10 honorable mentions, selected by a jury of high-profile judges including Dan Wood, Michel Rojkind, Marion Weiss, and Stefano Boeri, among many more.

This sanctification and overt moralizing message are typical of what the Prioress should believe. The pilgrims expect her utmost concern to be evangelization and wholehearted commitment to Christianity. Yet, while the Prioress demonstrates her knowledge about Christ, it seems that her tale is too fitting to her role in society, orchestrated to further a stereotypical religiosity.

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