Rachel Syme Gets Suited Up
On and Off the Avenue
I live directly across the street from a remarkably well-appointed, lusciously air-conditioned, and shockingly affordable (for New York City, anyway) Y.M.C.A. in Brooklyn, which is all to say: I have absolutely no excuse not to go. The gym is practically an extension of my apartment—so close that when I open my kitchen window, I can feel the chilled, tangy air wafting out of the Y’s linoleum lobby. The window next to my desk overlooks the gym’s large communal exercise room, and throughout the day, I am taunted by the sight of gyrating bodies panting through a Zumba class or a kettlebell set. I tried, for years, to motivate myself to join in, but I could never maintain a consistent cardio groove. Then, one afternoon last summer, I was walking past the gym when I was hit with a sudden nostalgia-inducing whiff of chlorine. The pool! Why had I never thought of it? I’d assumed the Y’s basement lido was the domain of serious lappers and diehard aquarobics addicts—not the place for a fitness dilettante. But my curiosity proved stronger than my nay-saying. I signed up for an hour-long swimming refresher course (from the coach Dan Daly, of TrainDaly, who holds sessions at the John Jay pool, in midtown, and who has a warm if no-nonsense approach to instruction) and hopped into the slow lane. Now, I swim at least four days a week. My new hobby came, thrillingly, with the need to buy new gear. At first, I struggled. My two favorite one-pieces, a vintage-inspired bottle-green ruched suit from the Esther Williams line ($88), and a crinkly, scoop-backed number from Hunza G ($240), were made more for lounging than for working out, but I find most “athletic swimsuits” to be so dowdy as to feel punitive. I spent a few unhappy weeks wriggling into a sad navy Speedo, until I spotted a woman in the locker room wearing a bright-red training suit, printed all over with whimsical watermelon seeds. She was kind enough to share that it was by Sporti, and that she’d bought it for less than forty bucks at SwimOutlet.com, which has since become my go-to source for kooky novelty sports suits. I also splurged on a hot-pink one-piece from Left on Friday, which has become the cool swimwear brand du jour for a reason; the Sunday Suit ($200), as their best-selling, strappy style is known, is made of compressive fabric that holds up to exertion but also accentuates one’s curves. But the best purchase I’ve made by far, in my new life as a water nymph, is a pair of Suunto Aqua Lights ($149), magical headphones that work underwater via cheekbone vibration. I used to avoid crossing the street. Now I happily dive in.—Rachel Syme
What to Watch
Just in time for Mother’s Day, Jessica Winter shares some of her favorite movies featuring complicated moms.
“The Reckless Moment” (1949)
After her rebellious daughter is implicated in a suspected homicide, Lucia Harper (Joan Bennett) must clean up the literal and figurative mess. She brings a grim determination to her matriarchal duties, whether she’s ordering this year’s Christmas tree, disposing of a corpse, or negotiating with the Irish bagman (a delightfully miscast James Mason) who tries to blackmail her and inevitably falls in love. Max Ophüls’s gorgeous SoCal melodrama is as brisk and economical as its heroine, and mordantly attentive to Lucia’s exhaustion and cognitive overload: “You don’t know,” she tells Mason’s character, “how a family can surround you at times.” Some of us know!
“Imitation of Life” (1959)
Like Ophüls, Douglas Sirk left his native Germany after the Nazis rose to power; the last film he made in Hollywood, before he returned to Europe, was “Imitation of Life.” Ostensibly, it’s a soapy tearjerker about two idealized single mothers, one a white actress (Lana Turner), the other her Black housekeeper and nanny (Juanita Moore), whose daughter passes for white. It’s also an extraordinary and enraged statement on race, class, identity, performance, bourgeois hypocrisy, and how a nation raises its children to hate themselves and those who love them most. The emotionally overwhelming finale, in which a bereaved young woman confesses to her society’s crimes as if they were hers alone, is the cinematic equivalent of Sirk taking a match and lighting his adopted country on fire. He never directed a feature again.
“News from Home” (1976)
Like much of Chantal Akerman’s work, this epistolary cine-essay is not as simple or austere as it might first appear. In voice-over, the filmmaker reads aloud from plaintive letters she writes to her mother back home in Brussels, accompanied by long takes of unglamorous and underpopulated patches of nineteen-seventies Manhattan: parking lots, tenement exteriors, graffiti-covered subway cars. The juxtapositions of text and image, which strongly suggest the widening distance between mother and daughter, build in emotional and intellectual power over the film’s ninety-minute duration. This is a uniquely lonely work of art, but one that maintains faith in the possibility of connection.
“The Brood” (1979)
Long before the trope of early motherhood as a horror movie became a cinematic cliché, the young director David Cronenberg blessed us with a gloriously disgusting movie about a woman (Samantha Eggar) whose past traumas become flesh—she literally gives birth to her suppressed rage in the form of hideous, murderous monster children. Lots of them! “The Brood” itself might be seen as a past trauma made flesh, as Cronenberg has said that the story was influenced by his own contentious divorce and custody battle. But the filmmaker’s imagination transfigures personal history into something not of this world, wholly original, and uniquely demented.
“Petite Maman” (2021)
In Céline Sciamma’s (slightly slept-on) follow-up to “Portrait of a Lady on Fire,” a young girl named Nelly meets her doppelgänger, who turns out to be Nelly’s mother as a child. (The girls are played by the twins Joséphine and Gabrielle Sanz.) In different hands, this setup might produce gimmicky results, but Sciamma regards this meeting of child and mother-child as an opportunity to simply be with these lovely girls as they play, pretend, and discover each other and themselves. It’s a movie that creates the most enchanting vertigo: How can something be at once so familiar, so comfortable, and yet so uncanny?
P.S. Good stuff on the internet:
An earlier version of this article included an incorrect photo for the film “Imitation of Life.”