Can success stop you from ageing? … Willem Dafoe in Late Fame. Photograph: Everett Collection Inc/Alamy View image in fullscreen Can success stop you from ageing? … Willem Dafoe in Late Fame. Photograph: Everett Collection Inc/Alamy Film Love me, love my bruised ego: what the narcissist-artist film tells us about the fear of ageing Bitter Christmas, Late Fame and The Christophers all depict geniuses aware of their waning acclaim and terrified it will end
Prefer the Guardian on Google E ntertainment culture is so preoccupied with nowness that last month we were inundated with speculation about how directors under 30 topping the box office would change the industry . The flipside of a youth obsession is the conviction that age will increase irrelevance, and this is something that a new crop of films about ageing artists is zeroing in on. Specifically, Bitter Christmas , Late Fame and The Christophers are films in which artists – all male – indulge in selfishness, vanity and spite, and egotistical behaviour and a loss of creative (and masculine) virility are part of the same phenomenon. None of them is dislikable – they might be catty, pathetic or abrasive, but they’re always entertaining – but they all bend to the ego whispering in their ear, believing it will shield them from the pain of their fading art.
View image in fullscreen Resents criticism that he mines others’ lives … Raúl (Leonardo Sbaraglia) in Bitter Christmas. Photograph: Courtesy Cannes film festival It’s no surprise to discover that an artist is an egotist: in fact encountering a narcissistic creative type may be joyless in the moment but it’s also an affirming – if petty – way of feeling better about ourselves. Plenty of classic films give us a close-up view into what makes an egotist artist tick or self-destruct. But decades on from Sunset Boulevard, 8½ and All About Eve, a sadder, bitterer crop of films has emerged in which self-absorption flourishes to protect an ageing male artist from self-sabotaging fears of his mortality and legacy.
Pedro Almodóvar’s Bitter Christmas, for example, focuses on renowned queer film-maker Raúl (Leonardo Sbaraglia), who is writing a semi-autobiographical drama; in his script, his avatar is a commercials director called Elsa (Bárbara Lennie). Raúl himself is Almodóvar’s own avatar; if the white quiffed hair and beard don’t give it away, the self-degrading jokes about Raúl’s plateauing career do. Elsa and Raúl also take the same artistic liberties, inserting their friends’ personal crises and tragedies into their screenplays. When their insensitivity lands them in hot water, they can’t believe it. “I can only write about what is immediate,” writes Elsa early in the film, while Raúl takes the sentiment to heart, mining the misery of his manager Mónica (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón) for pathos. Because their vampiric dramatic licence results in genuine creative inspiration, Elsa and Raúl resent the criticisms levelled at them – finding a great story is medicine, insensitivity be damned.
Raúl’s fragile self-image, and not his vibrant designer wardrobe and exquisitely designed home, puts him in conversation with the artists central to Kent Jones’s Late Fame and Steven Soderbergh’s The Christophers. In the former, Ed Saxberger (Willem Dafoe) is a New York postal worker whose obscure 1979 poetry collection Way Past Go earns him the reputation of an old master with a niche of hip young writers on the fringes of New York’s art scene. Saxberger (as his…