The Royal Road

 If you fancy being lectured on the war with Mexico, complete will illustrative maps, by an argumentative butch lesbian, you will enjoy The Royal Road.  This is an essay documentary by Jenni Olson.  The film consists of still shots of Los Angeles and San Francisco cityscapes.  The images are invariably still-lives  and shot at dawn, it seems, when no one is up and about.  No people are visible -- I glimpsed a bike rider in the far distance in one of the long, static shots.  Traffic moves around and stop lights blink and there's some cozy-looking San Francisco fog in some of the shots.  But, by and large, the images are empty, lonely-looking, and, although beautifully composed, anonymous in form -- simply houses or buildings or bridges (the Golden Gate in S.F.) looking forlorn and vacant.  The narrative voice-over is divided into four parts.  In "My Hollywood Love Affair," the narrator describes a woman whom she desires.  She takes the train to LA to see the woman but the narrator's passion remains unrequited.  This part of the film addresses the El Camino Royale (the titular "King's Road") that runs the length of California -- at least from Mexico to Sonoma.  There is some discussion about Father Junipero Serra who is described in the currently fashionable parlance as an agent of genocide.  In "The New Girl", the narrator meets a woman at a party whom she admires and works assiduously to seduce her.  This part of the film involves an account of the War with Mexico as an imperialist venture -- hence, the slideshow involving maps of the States and Mexico.  (The motif of erotic conquest may have some tangential relationship to this imagery.) There is some discussion of old San Francisco and an account of Hitchcock's Vertigo.  The narrator maintains that she is the victim of nostalgia for old buildings just as Madeline in Hitchcock's film seemed to be afflicted by similar melancholy for the old Spanish past still faintly visible in the Missions around San Francisco.  There is a fascinating snippet of Tony Kushner lecturing that we must be "on guard" against nostalgia and that we should embrace "the new bad things."  Section 3 is called "In Defense of Nostalgia" -- it is only about forty seconds long and tells us that the narrator likes filming old buildings because they help her (in an increasingly digital world) stay in touch with the "old analog world."  "The Story of my Life" is the last section in the movie.  The narrative refers to Casanova's memoirs -- the famous seducer wrote his memoirs, a vast enterprise, working 13 hours a day to chronicle his love affairs when he had become impotent and unable to perform sexually.  The narrator identifies with Casanova and other famous seducers -- she sees herself as acting in their vein as she flirts with the woman that she desires.  "Like Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo," we learn, "this film is about love and loss and reveals more about me than I ever expected to say."  Like Scottie in Vertigo, the narrator choses to love emotionally distant, inaccessible women.  Like Madeline in that film, she is fatally nostalgic and entrapped by the past.  This is a minor film, interesting enough to sustain watching the full hour-long movie.  The narration is frequently a bit obvious but it's compelling.  The movie's wide range of reference seems similar to Chris Marker's Sans Soleil and other films of that sort.  The visuals are handsome but don't really add much to the film -- without the still and empty shots, the film's meaning would be about the same.  The snippet of Kushner's lecture makes me interested to seek out the book from which the material derives The Intelligent Homosexuals Guide of Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to Scriptures.