Flicks with The Film Snob: Recent Episodes
KXCI
Flicks with The Film Snob features a weekly film review focused on new independent releases and old classics. Chris Dashiell knows film, and he knows enough to know what’s worth watching and why. Produced in Tucson Arizona at KXCI Community Radio.
On a firelit night in an unnamed town, we see people taking oil from a tapped pipeline and pouring the stolen oil into containers. A gang of outlaws, primarily women, operate an illegal oil refinery in Brazil, in a favela, a slum near the city of Brasilia. Above the building is a flag that says, “The Oil is Ours.” The film is called Dry Ground Burning, written and directed by Adirley Queirós and Joana Pimenta, and it takes place during the recently ended reign of right wing nationalist president Jair Bolsonaro.
We first see Léa, a tough former drug dealer, when she returns home after serving a long prison sentence. Everything has gotten worse. The favela is now constantly patrolled by police helicopters. A huge new prison complex is being constructed there by incarcerated labor. Léa goes to work with her half sister Chitara, who is more low key, but is in fact the person who first thought of siphoning oil from pipelines and refining it into gasoline to be sold on the black market, with the local biker gang her primary customers. With the success of her pirate operation, Chitara has become legendary, with poor people in the slums actually singing songs about her. Chitara and Léa are daughters of a wily and brutal local gangster, now deceased, whom they reminisce about with a mixture of contempt and admiration.
Some of the women also work regular jobs, in a factory turning the wood being cut every day from the Amazon rain forest into building materials. The film intently and patiently depicts the experience of physical labor. The life of poverty we witness is one where there is little freedom to consider higher goals than survival. One of the women, Andreia, belongs, along with other characters, to a small Pentecostal church where the affirmation of Jesus’ power provides a sense of purpose otherwise lacking. But this turns out to be a glimpse from Andreia’s past. In the present she’s an activist for a group called PPP: the Prison People’s Party, which opposes the theft of national resources and destruction of the environment by the owning class.
Queirós and Pimenta defy the usual narrative techniques. They use a steady focused approach showing the entire environment of a scene at length rather than chopping it up. The film is constructed with a kind of intentional disorder, a documentary type realism combined with improvisation by non-professional actors, with the main ones actually playing versions of themselves, even stepping out of character at times to talk about their real lives outside the film. Everyone chain smokes. The night scenes are an incredibly vivid display of black and gold.
We also follow a miserable group of policemen in an armored vehicle patrolling the favela at night with guns drawn and a little drone leading the way. One extended sequence takes place at a real life Bolsonaro rally where we witness the mindless slogans and rituals of this neo-fascist mass movement. The gas hustlers are a counter to all this, as is the film itself. And as dangerous and dirty as their lives are, they represent the power of indigenous people, the poor, and the people of color. Dry Ground Burning is a bold film about a world on fire.
Mami Wata, a film by Nigerian writer-director C.J. “Fiery” Obasi, is subtitled “a West African folklore,” and it does explore the tension between ancient myth and the secular realism of the modern world. In the village of Iyi near the Atlantic Ocean, an older woman named Efe acts as intermediary between the people and Mami Wata, a water goddess or spirit. For generations this role has been passed down through the women. Efe has two daughters who help her in her ceremonies and healing rituals. All three wear headdresses, seashell jewelry and tribal face paint which the high contrast black and white photography lends a striking effect. The villagers supply food and money to support them and to win favor with the goddess, but trouble is brewing.
Mama Efe’s daughter Zinwe, who is destined to inherit the role of intermediary, becomes angry when her mother says she cannot help a woman find her missing daughter. Zinwe has struggled to believe in Mami Wata, and now her doubt drives her into exile. We see her standing on the seashore, trying to make contact with the goddess, and giving up in despair. Meanwhile, things come to a head when Mama Efe’s efforts to cure a sick village boy fail and the boy dies. There’s a group of men who want the village to enter the modern age and get roads, schools, and hospitals. They accuse Mama Efe of cheating everyone by promoting baseless superstition.
All this seems very plausible, and Efe’s other daughter Pesca, who is adopted, wavers in her belief as well. But she had fled from violence as a child, and Efe had taken her in, nurtured her, so out of a sense of love and duty she remains loyal. With so much of the drama about Mama Efe and Zinwe in the early going, it’s a surprise when we notice the second daughter Pesca, played by Evelyne Ily, taking center stage in the story. It is she who rescues a stranger from drowning, a man named Jasper, that she thinks might be an answer to her dilemma from Mami Wata. Jasper acts grateful and respectful to her and her mother, but he also agrees that the region needs schools and hospitals. An attraction develops between Pesca and Jasper, but the story never goes the way we might expect it to.
And that’s one of the strengths of Obasi’s filmmaking—we’re always being thrown back on her heels, never really sure of the truth, living in a kind of suspended mystery state, until our eyes are opened to new insights at the end.
To reveal any more would be to spoil things. Suffice it to say that the stakes are higher than a simple conflict between religion and science. Without special pleading or romanticism, Obasi explores a matriarchal way of feeling and seeing, and its conflict with male power reveals a social reality that is deeper even than the injuries from the colonial past. The characters speak a mix of Fon, a major West African language, and a pidgin English clearly inherited from their former British colonizers. The story, suffused with a mystical sense of connection to the sea, escalates from one unexpected emergency to the next, ultimately reaching an epic scale. Although not everything Obasi tries to do works, the act of trying shows courage. Mami Wata is an impressive stylistic feat, resonant with meaning.
I’ve seen plenty of documentaries about musicians, some very good—usually you get a biography of the subject; interviews with friends, colleagues, and others; and of course performances. But there’s a movie I watched recently called Rewind & Play, featuring the great jazz pianist Thelonious Monk, and it’s unlike anything I’ve seen before.
Monk was a brilliantly innovative composer and performer from the 1930s on, highly regarded by fellow musicians but not one of the big names in jazz, until his albums finally started selling in the ‘60s. In 1969, after a European tour, he was interviewed in Paris for a TV show.
Now, all these years later, and with Monk having died in 1982, the Senegalese-French director Alain Gomis dug into the archives of this French TV series called “Jazz Portrait,” and found all the rushes and unseen outtakes from the interview with Monk. It is his edit of this footage that constitutes the film Rewind & Play. None of this background information is fully explained in the movie—only gradually can we understand the nature of what we’re watching.
We see Monk arriving by plane in the city with his wife Nelly and an entourage. We watch them talking in the back of the car that’s taking them to the studio. They stop at what appears to be a Paris bar, and everybody continues to talk while Monk looks thoughtful, smoking cigarettes and having a drink. With his beret and goatee-style beard, he is unmistakable, but he hardly does any talking. Your usual film might’ve cut all this, but Gomis keeps all the footage in, and the effect is kind of strange. Monk is like an island of quiet stillness in the midst of noise. He smiles while staring dreamily into space. We wonder why he seems so distant, as if he’s in some other reality, not paying much attention to this one.
This puzzling effect continues when they arrive at the studio. There’s a piano, and people setting up all the lighting for the interview, but Monk isn’t yet being told what’s going on or what to do. Eventually he just sits down and starts playing. And as he plays in his distinctive improvisatory style, with this amazing sound flowing out from his fingers on the keyboard, we realize that this is his reality, his beautiful world—the music is where his mind and spirit have been living inside of him, and only now do we know who he is.
Then the interview begins. The host, Henri Renaud, asks questions that try to simplify Monk for a mainstream French audience. But Monk is unable to play along. He smiles in apparent disbelief as Renaud tries to get him to describe his marriage, why he put a piano in his kitchen, and why people didn’t seem to understand his music on the first tour in Paris in 1954. The answers he manages to give are not considered interesting enough, and so they keep reshooting the questions while Monk gets more and more restless. In hindsight it’s funny, because obviously Renaud, who claims to be a friend of Monk, doesn’t really get him at all. But at the time it was clearly uncomfortable, as the artist’s intense involvement in his music prevented him from engaging with such a superficial approach.
We feel relieved when Monk finally plays again, and we are transported once more into his amazing inner realm. Rewind & Play lets us experience the vast gulf between our normal critical mind and the unexplainable truth of creation.
Jeff Nichols’ films are known for their gritty working class flavor. His latest one, The Bikeriders, is based on a book of the same title by photographer Danny Lyon, about an actual motorcycle club in the Midwest during the 1960s that eventually turned into a gang. Nichols wrote the screenplay, which captures the inchoate speech patterns of these working class tough guys, and the picture has the loose style of ’70s American cinema. For those accustomed to the slick, overpowering modern Hollywood action aesthetic, this movie might seem like a throwback. In a good way, I think. The biker film genre has of course been associated with low budget exploitation, but here there’s less grandiosity and more honesty. Nichols made an excellent artistic choice; the film’s point-of-view character is a woman.
Jodie Comer plays Kathy, a strong-willed, fairly conventional seeming young woman from Chicago. In a bar to meet a friend, she encounters members of the Vandals Motorcycle Club. Many are drunkenly rude, which turns her off. But as she’s leaving she sees a very handsome biker named Benny, played by Austin Butler, and it’s love at first sight, which was still something people believed in, in 1965.
Comer is from Liverpool, England, but you’d never be able to tell that from this performance, where her Chicago accent and streetwise mannerisms seem genuine. She narrates a lot of the film, as we see her character being interviewed by the photographer, Danny Lyon. Kathy’s outside and inside perspective—in a way she’s not from the same world as these guys, yet becomes one of them—is a crucial ingredient that makes the film effective. She enjoys and reflects the romantic self-glorification of the bikers, but at the same time she can see all the stupidity, waste, and absurdity too.
Austin Butler, who gained some fame playing Elvis Presley a couple years ago, plays Kathy’s partner Benny, whose hatred of authority manifests in crazy violent ways. He is fearless, which makes him a dangerous man, and lends him a lot of prestige within the club. But his love for Kathy hints there’s more to him.
The Bikeriders’ other main ingredient, holding the narrative together, is another English actor, Tom Hardy, as the leader of the club, Johnny. He is an inarticulate married guy with a job, but also a wild streak. Hardy is a master at depicting exploding rage, which Johnny usually does when he’s drunk. But he plays the role otherwise as tense and strongly contained. His sometimes high-pitched mumbling delivery reminded me of Brando. Sure enough, we find that Johnny was inspired to start the club after seeing Brando in his one biker film, The Wild One. Hardy’s performance elevates the film to a more deeply felt level.
Jeff Nichols’ favorite actor, Michael Shannon, is on hand as one of the more unruly gang members. A lot of other male character actors do some fine work. These young men being portrayed are full of energy, high spirits, and fierce loyalty. They also resent what you might call straight society, and people who have managed to get more educated, and the cops, and eventually other gangs. The dramatic arc leads to more violence. Kathy recognizes the insanity, and thus we, the audience, can also see through the toxic myths that the characters weave around themselves. The Bikeriders takes us on quite a journey.
One of the more surprising recent developments in cinema for me has been the rise to fame of a Greek avant-garde filmmaker named Yorgos Lanthimos. His films satirize the darker aspects of human nature, usually in forms of ego and control, and they employ bizarre, sometimes alarming narrative devices. The gallows humor and the challenging depictions of sexual behavior, were not a liability in the art film world. But his English language films, that he started making in 2015, have gained him a much wider audience. His last two movies actually won some Oscars. So how did such an uncompromising artist achieve mainstream success? I think his films offer painful ideas that are connecting with our painful times.
His latest film is called Kinds of Kindness. Teaming up with his former co-screenwriter Efthimos Philippou, Lanthimos returns in this film to the difficult aesthetic of his earlier stuff. The film consists of three separate stories, with a group of the same actors playing most of the characters in each story. Foremost among them are Emma Stone, Jesse Plemmons, Willem Dafoe, and Margaret Qualley.
In the first story, Plemmons plays an enigmatic fellow who deliberately rams his car into that of an older man with the initials RMF, whom we have already seen being given a package by Qualley’s character in an earlier scene. Her husband is a sinister corporate executive played by Dafoe. Plemmons’ character, we then learn, is under the complete control of this CEO, who tells him what to do in every aspect of his life, even deciding whom he should marry. In fact, he controls him sexually as well. But this timid follower played by Plemmons is unwilling to kill RMF by smashing into his car more forcefully, and because of this, his controller loses confidence in him.
In the second story, Plemmons plays a cop whose wife, played by Stone, has been in a helicopter crash. The pilot, RMF, has died, but she survives and returns home, only to have her husband develop the paranoid belief that she’s not really his wife, but some kind of replacement. It is this husband that is trying to control everything in this tale, and his wife’s desperate determination to obey everything he says in order to prove her love, results in extreme horror and disgust.
Finally, in story number three, Stone and Plemmons play members of a cult that have been asked to find a woman foretold to possess the power to revive the dead. This creepy cult, with Dafoe as the leader, insists on its followers being pure, “uncontaminated” by outside elements. Once again, people are being dominated by an authority, in this case the cult. And the person they want to resurrect from the dead? You guessed it: RMF.
The film is maniacally focused on this issue of authority, and the distortions that people go through in relationship to it. There are many disturbing things symbolized, but of course rather than explaining anything, Lanthimos leaves it all out for us to untangle. Who is RMF? Why is everyone afraid of freedom? Even though there is an occasional strained sense of humor, Kinds of Kindness is more than anything else, terrifying. The world Lanthimos presents is not at all one of kindness, but of violence. It’s a dark vision for our times—not for the faint hearted.
I’m not a fan of the Oscars, the Golden Globes, or most of the other Hollywood awards, but one thing I know: to win or even just be nominated helps an artist become much more well known. Lily Gladstone won a Globe and was nominated for a Best Actress Oscar for Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, the first Native American actress to do either. She now stars in a film called Fancy Dance. Erica Tremblay directs, in her feature debut, and co-wrote the picture with Miciana Alise. They’re both native women.
Gladstone plays Jax, a tough character living on the edge in Oklahoma’s Seneca-Cayuga Reservation. Her older sister has disappeared; there’s been no word from her for weeks, yet law enforcement doesn’t care enough to put any effort into finding her, since she’s run off suddenly before. The film’s excellent depiction of gritty life on the “rez” makes it clear that the disappearance of native women is sadly not unusual, but another symptom of neglect, mistreatment, and poverty.
In the meantime, Jax is taking care of her sister’s 13-year-old daughter Roki, played by Isabel Deroy-Olsen, a bright new talent who holds her own with Gladstone. An interesting aspect of the story, that Gladstone makes wholly believable, is that Jax is involved in some shady stuff, and is not at all what you would call a completely healthy influence on her niece. Together they make money through hustling and stealing—at one point they steal a white man’s truck and sell it to a guy Jax knows, and it turns out she has sometimes sold drugs for him. There’s a self-destructive streak in Jax’s nature, but we also understand that there aren’t a lot of respectable ways to thrive in her world. Roki has adopted her aunt’s attitude and has developed talents of her own, getting into the habit of shoplifting even when she doesn’t really need to, something that worries Jax.
The title of the movie, Fancy Dance, comes from a form of dance that has become common in gatherings known as “powwows.” Roki danced with her mother at powwows, and she desperately wants to get to this year’s annual event in Oklahoma City, convinced that her mother will show up there. Jax has her doubts, but doesn’t share them with her niece, promising to take her there. But then Child Protective Services discoves Jax’s arrest record, and decides to give custody of Roki to her white grandfather, played by the reliable Shea Wigham. He wants to be helpful, but Jax has never forgiven him for abandoning them when their mother died. The threat of losing Roki becomes the crisis fueling the plot, and eventually we end up in thriller territory.
Gladstone is nothing less than compelling throughout the film. I was amazed to discover that she did this performance during breaks in the making of Scorsese’s film, which was also shot in Oklahoma. Tremblay makes the stakes high—things could go terribly wrong in this story. The thriller aspect really got my heart racing. But above all this, Fancy Dance presents a steady, vivid awareness of the many details, large and small, that make up contemporary native life, and of the strength and love that must hold it all together.
Thelma, the debut feature from writer and director Josh Margolin, opens with the title character, a 93-year-old woman played by June Squibb, being taught by her grandson how to use email on her computer. Her difficulties learning such things as how to scroll down using a mouse, or what to do when an ad pops up, are a familiar source of humor, but instead of a broad farcical approach, it’s funny while seeming natural and wholly plausible. Fred Hechinger projects gentle patience as the grandson, Daniel, and as for Squibb—this is her movie all the way, built around her quirky personality, which seems not at all some caricature of an old person, but a genuine portrait of humanity.
The plot begins with Thelma getting robbed in a phone scam. This is not intended to be particularly funny. Unscrupulous characters cheating vulnerable older citizens through phone, texts, or emails—this is an unfortunate reality that has become more and more frequent in recent years. We can only groan in sympathy as we see Thelma taken in, and sending ten thousand dollars in the mail to supposedly post bail for her grandson. Of course she feels like an idiot when her family figures out that she’s fallen victim to scammers. They all say there’s nothing she can do about it, so just let go and stop worrying. But Thelma won’t let go. A strong-willed woman given to obsessions, she’s determined to somehow get her money back.
The actors playing Thelma’s family, in addition to Hechinger, are good. Her daughter, Daniel’s mom, is played by one of my favorite performers, Parker Posey, and Clark Gregg is amusingly low-key as the dad. The plot is of course, quite implausible if you step back and think about it, which you don’t because it’s an enjoyable easy-going comedy, and a fine excuse for showcasing June Squibb’s considerable comic talents. A lot of the humor lies in the contrast between the family’s view of Thelma as a simple lovable lady who can’t take care of herself, and the outrageous action that she chooses to embark upon. They underestimate her at every turn, and truth to tell, she sometimes acts more than a little crazy.
Thelma enlists a friend at an assisted living facility, played by the veteran actor Richard Roundtree, to help pull off her scheme. Roundtree, in his final film appearance (sadly, he passed away last year), adds a lot of depth to the picture. He’s as natural and relaxed a performer you could ever want, with sharp comic timing, and a good match for Squibb.
Margolin’s ability to make us believe and sympathize with all his characters is a rare strength. And far too often in comedies the elderly are depicted as cute & lovable, unbelievably witty and outrageous, or some other exaggeration. Margolin opts for a measured approach in both character and situation, which makes the laughs in this movie feel earned.The screenplay is funny without having to try too hard, and the film has a feeling of real affection. Thelma is a surprising little treat.
Japanese director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi is an artist of the liminal—that place between perception and symbol that we experience as mystery. This makes his films difficult, because he refuses to break things down to an easily understandable linear pattern, preferring to let meanings arise at their own pace, and not by suggestion. This was true of Drive My Car, which won the Foreign Language Oscar a couple years ago. And it’s especially true of his latest movie, Evil Does Not Exist.
I reviewed a good Iranian film recently called There is No Evil, so I was surprised to encounter another movie title that is almost identical. The meaning of that other one proved to be fairly evident if you paid attention. But in this film, the understanding, if it comes at all, is delivered through shock.
In a village located in some beautiful forest and lake country in Japan, the people live with a rhythm close to nature. The director establishes an intense feeling right away, with a lengthy sequence, accompanied by the credits, of tall trees moving within our vision, a glimpse of immensity from the point of view of our life below. Then eventually we see, it’s a young girl looking up at these trees. She’s the daughter of a local man named Takumi who is living in a cabin, chopping wood, doing odd jobs around the village. The director doesn’t shorten his actions by cutting; we see the slow pace of his life, walking with the little girl, chopping the wood, moving yet living in stillness.
After this mood has been established, we cut to a town meeting at which two young representatives of a Tokyo company are explaining a plan to build a tourist site nearby for what they call “glamping,” which is slang for glamorous camping, and this just means putting up nice little hotels instead of tents and campfires. They get an earful from the residents at this meeting. For one thing, the planned location of the septic tank is bad—the waste will go downstream to the village’s drinking water. Other aspects threaten the traditional life of the village. Takumi is one of the more eloquent persons objecting to the plan.
The two young employees, a man and a woman, are open to what they’re being told, even though their supervisors won’t budge. This sympathetic couple makes friends with Takumi, and visit him at his home where he feeds them and discusses the village’s issues. But it so happens that his daughter does not return home from school that day, and he organizes a search for her.
After the interesting and somewhat amusing town meeting scene, we may have thought that this was a conventional story with a narrative arc and so forth, but as I’ve already said, Hamaguchi always challenges what we may habitually understand about events. The ending of Evil Does Not Exist provides an unexpected jolt. It’s one of those endings that an audience will argue about later. All I can say is Hamaguchi is presenting us with something more complex and more serious than we might have thought.
Evil Does Not Exist is a strange and unsettling experience.
It’s not often that a movie manages to summarize the spiritual malaise of an entire nation, while using a kaleidoscopic hallucinatory style with shifting time periods and identities to scale the heights and plumb the depths of the human soul. I use such hyperbolic language because I find it otherwise too difficult to describe the effect of Petrov’s Flu, the extraordinary film by Russian director Kirill Serebrennikov.
We start out on a bus, with a group of sullen passengers, some of whom are arguing. Petrov, a grimy looking man in an overcoat and wool cap played by Semyon Serzin, is coughing as he pays the fare, explaining that he has the flu. Petrov’s flu, as the film is cleverly titled, will continue throughout the film. Among other things, it signals the contagious atmosphere of corruption and degradation in Russian society.
Petrov will be asked to exit the bus twice: one of the times, where he’s made to serve in a firing squad, only occurs, it would appear, in his fantasy. The film thus begins its full-length strategy of presenting thoughts and fantasies as objectively happening, and this shifting back and forth between the world and realms of the mind is one of the more exciting and challenging aspects of Petrov’s Flu.
The story takes place in the year 2000 or thereabouts, at the very beginning of Putin’s first term, although of course Putin is never named. The movie expands into multiple characters. Petrov’s ex-wife works at a library, and while working late because of a poetry workshop, she hears one of the old poets being sexist. Her eyes go black, and she then beats the living hell out of him, as if she was some kind of super ninja. I should say that sudden violence does occur in the film, although in this case it comes off as hilarious. And once again, fantasy.
Like a dream, the film coalesces around several odd locations. One is a van in which Petrov and his sinister friend Igor is riding in the back with a dead guy in a coffin. Later, the story goes around that the dead man got out of the coffin and walked away. A grotesque resurrection as metaphor for Russian life.
In the film’s middle section, another of Petrov’s friends, an aspiring but bitter author who’s threatening suicide (reminding me of Dostoevsky’s fiction) is the subject of a spectacular 18-minute tracking shot through multiple locations, both real and imagined. The film’s technique is constantly surprising.
Another odd place is a New Year’s party for children in which the legendary Snow Maiden helps light a tree. Home movie style footage shows Petrov as a child, with his weird but protective parents, who are apparently nudists at home. At the end of this flashback, of which we’ve already had an earlier foreshadowing, he is holding the Snow Maiden’s hand at the party asking her if she’s real. “Yes, I’m real,” she says, “and you have a fever.”
Back in the present the young son of Petrov and Petrova has also caught the flu, with a dangerously high fever, and we explore the fear and desperation about possibly losing a child, especially in Petrov’s frantic imagination, which by the way we discover is that of a comic book artist.
Finally, the movie takes a startling turn. We’re in black and white now, the time appears to be the ‘70s, and we have a completely new main character, a young blonde woman. Who is she? Where have we seen her before? Petrov’s Flu is an extravagant and unsparing vision of our predicament.
Trenque Lauquen, a film by Argentine director Laura Citarella, presents a two-part mystery. First, the mystery of things we investigate to learn more about them. Second, the mystery of things that are beyond what we can fully know.
The story takes place in and around Trenque Lauquen, a small city in central Argentina. Laura, a young botanist played by Laura Paredes, has gone missing, and her boyfriend, a university professor played by Rafael Spregelburd, searches the area trying to find her, with the help of her married friend Chicho, played by Ezequiel Pierri. Chicho is at first a baffling and rather amusing character, a shaggy teddy bear type of guy, who responds to someone talking to him with thoughtful silence much of the time, hardly ever smiling, even appearing a bit dumb, but we eventually find that there’s a lot more to him.
The film jumps back in time where we see that Chicho was assisting Laura in the search for samples of different types of orchids, and that she needed one more plant to complete her study. But one day, as they meet at her favorite restaurant, she tells him that she has stumbled upon a mystery, one that has nothing to do with plants. It so happens that Laura also does guest spots on a local radio news show about women’s history. She checked a book out of the library called “Autobiography of a Sexually Emancipated Communist Women” by a Russian author (I found out later that this was a real book), and hidden between some glued pages she found a love letter. Following clues contained in the letter, she checked out other books and found more letters. A married man, who it turns out was a wealthy Italian landowner, wrote these deeply passionate and erotic letters many years ago to a local woman teacher, who then hid them all in these books that were donated to the library after she died. Who exactly were these lovers, and in what circumstances did they meet? Laura enlists Chicho to help solve the mystery.
Laura Paredes, who co-wrote the screenplay with Citarella, draws us totally into her character’s curious and imaginative world. She is the star whose presence is felt throughout the film, even in scenes where she’s absent. As Chicho helps Laura find evidence about the two mystery lovers, we can see him gradually falling in love with her. Meanwhile we still follow the boyfriend Rafael in his search, and the contrast between his rigid, uptight personality and what we have seen of Laura’s intuitive openness is remarkable.
Trenque Lauquen is a four-hour film, originally screened in two separate two-hour parts. Citarella’s style is sensuous, beguiling, and featuring many shifts back and forth in time. In part two, Laura’s discovery of the missing variety of orchid leads to a new mystery about a strange creature, either a feral child or an animal. This part becomes an increasingly enigmatic dive into questions about identity—of oneself, of women, of our being in nature without our customary labels, of that within is which is unknowable.
Trenque Lauquen is a beautiful tapestry of stories within stories, just the kind of free-spirited film that I admire.
In 1831, Victor Hugo wrote one of his most popular novels, “Notre-Dame de Paris.” In English translation it was renamed The Hunchback of Notre Dame, after its main character, a deformed bell ringer at the Cathedral of Notre Dame in 15th-century Paris named Quasimodo. The story tells of a gypsy dancer, Esmerelda, who unfortunately falls under the lustful eye of the cathedral’s archdeacon Claude Frollo. When she rejects his advances, he frames her in a murder, but as she’s about to be publicly executed, Quasimodo, whom she had shown some kindness to earlier, swoops down with a rope from Notre Dame to rescue her and keep in the cathedral under the church law known as “sanctuary.” The novel has since been made into plays, musicals, operas, and a lot of movies. There’s something about this tale that touches people; I think mainly the idea that someone shunned in society for his looks can be lovable, and even a hero.
When Lon Chaney played Quasimodo in the 1923 film The Hunchback of Notre Dame, there had already been four previous versions made. But this one, from Universal, was that studio’s biggest and most profitable production in the silent era. An astounding reproduction of the cathedral was constructed on the studio back lot, and there were huge crowd scenes. Lon Chaney had made his name transforming himself into strange characters. Quasimodo was his most elaborate creation up to then, in which he contorted his body and designed genius-level makeup to portray this scary-looking man that we ultimately grow to care about. It’s a fine performance.
However, movie technique before the late ‘20s was still often tentative. The director, Wallace Worsley, was a reliable but rather pedestrian studio hand. The film also has the melodramatic overacting, and banality of script and pacing that were acceptable then but difficult to put with now.
Sixteen years later, in the next version, from RKO in 1939, English actor Charles Laughton made a triumphant return to Hollywood playing Quasimodo. Undergoing an impressively grotesque makeup job, he brings out the pathos of the hunchback character in convincing fashion. Once having seen this performance, you won’t forget it. Laughton was smart enough to know that he could emphasize the character’s idiotic side, and his potential for menace, without diminishing our sympathy. The picture is a glorious, old-fashioned Hollywood spectacle, but he makes it seem like more than that.
Maureen O’Hara, in her American debut, plays Esmerelda. She’s stunningly beautiful, if not exactly gypsy-like. Rounding out the excellent cast is Cedric Hardwicke as the villain Rollo, who plays his part with a gloomy implacability that attains just the right tone of self-righteous malevolence.
The talented director, William Dieterle, let his impressionistic tendencies run free, with beautifully choreographed crowd scenes, dynamic moving camera, and a talent for bringing night scenes to life. The costumes, scenery, and production design represent the studio system at its finest. This is widely regarded as the best film version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and I would have to agree. The final shot, with Laughton talking mournfully to a gargoyle, is among the most moving cinematic images of all time.
American Fiction is, on the surface, a film satire on how African American stories are marketed by the publishing industry. But more than that, it’s about the representation of race in popular culture, and how Black Americans are forced to deal with such misconceptions in their lives. With such a weighty subject, you might not expect the film to be funny, but it is. It’s based on a 2001 novel by Percival Everett called “Erasure,” and first-time director Cord Jefferson has adapted it with only minor changes.
Jeffrey Wright plays Thelonious Ellison, nicknamed “Monk” doubtless because of legendary pianist Thelonious Monk. And the last name, Ellison, is surely meant to invoke the great Black writer Ralph Ellison. Monk is an English professor in Los Angeles, and the author of several works of literary fiction. Monk’s novels are intellectually complex and subtle in style. The critics praise his work, but not many people buy it. Frustrated by this perceived failure, he responds to a comment in class involving race by lashing out. The university makes him take a break to go to Boston for a seminar. Boston is his home town, so it’s a chance to connect with family as well.
At the seminar he attends an interview with a black woman author whose new novel, which has done very well, panders to “ghetto” stereotypes such as poor illiterate unwed mothers and such. This really bothers Monk, who then writes a short novel, in an exaggerated “ebonics” type language, about a black criminal in the ghetto, signs it “Stagg R. Leigh,” and sends it to his agent as a joke. As it turns out, the joke’s on him. The agent, genially played by John Ortiz, asks if he can publish the book under the pseudonym. After some hesitation, Monk agrees. Surprise! A major publishing house offers him a $750,000 dollar advance, and the novel goes on to become a best seller.
This then is the comic premise, from which the film gets a lot of mileage. The absurdity just keeps building, with the white publishing executives depicted as farcical empty-headed culture vultures, and although we know this is an exaggeration, it’s still funny.
Besides all this, however, is the story of Monk’s family, with which he reunites on this trip: his aged mother, played by Leslie Uggams, a supportive sister, and a gay brother who has had issues with Monk in the past. He also meets a potential romantic partner, played by Erika Alexander.
Here I think the film is gently poking some fun at another African American genre: the middle class family drama. But the picture is also meant to be sincere, and Jefferson, the director, makes it work—most of the time. A native of Tucson, he’s had success as a writer on TV, and this is his debut film, so there are bound to be rookie mistakes. But there aren’t many people who win an Oscar for their first film, and Jefferson deservedly won it for his adapted screenplay.
Then there’s Jeffrey Wright. He’s one of our best living actors. Here he ably carries the movie, vividly conveying Monk’s isolation and alienation, which causes him to push people away, but at the same time Wright convinces us of his basic decency.
American Fiction ends with a very clever and funny meta-narrative offering multiple endings. It’s the one major detail that wasn’t in the book, a highly original flash of brilliance from Cord Jefferson.
For the majority of movie history, the directors have been mostly men. In Hollywood’s silent era, women played key roles as screenwriters and editors, and in some cases, as directors. But after the studio system was developed in the sound era, when big business finally saw that there was a lot of money to be made, men moved in and took over most of the positions, with women being discouraged in society at the time from being in the work force at all.
During the so-called classic era, from the 1930s through the mid-‘40s, there was literally only one woman director in Hollywood: Dorothy Arzner. And I invite you to look up Dorothy Arzner and watch some of her movies, which had the stamp of an individual style. In the late 1940s through the ‘50s, Ida Lupino, who’d started as an actress, made a series of important films that demonstrated a new kind of realism in American cinema. They’re both getting the attention they deserve, finally. But male dominance has still been the default condition in film, not just in the U.S., but worldwide.
Well, there’s been some progress since then. Agnès Varda in the French New Wave, followed by Chantal Akerman, Larisa Shepitko in Russia, Mai Zetterling in Sweden, Věra Chytilová in Czechoslovakia, Margarethe von Trotta in Germany, Lina Wertmüller in Italy, and Márta Mészáros in Hungary, among others, achieved breakthroughs as movie directors. We started to learn some of what we had been missing. Traditional films were largely about men, with women as romantic objects or otherwise in support of the male narrative. The point of view portrayed in most films failed to show women as their own protagonists, or convey the sensibility of women outside of their relationship to men. The emergence of female directors meant an enrichment of experience, a widening to include a fuller spectrum of human events, feelings, and ideas.
A few of the women directors working now that I admire are: Claire Denis, who has given us 35 years of excellence, in boldly experimental films like Beau Travail and White Material, interrogating the inner lives of men and women characters in provocative and challenging ways. Lucrecia Martel, the brilliant Argentinian director, whose films such as La Ciénaga, The Holy Girl, and Zama display a sophisticated multilayered style in stories dealing with family conflict, religious yearnings, class differences, and colonial history. Jane Campion from New Zealand and Gillian Armstrong from Australia. Kelly Reichardt, artist of real life, whose film Showing Up was one of my favorites from last year. Ava DuVernay, whose recent film Origin continues her career explorations of social justice. Debra Granik, Sarah Polley, Céline Sciamma, Greta Gerwig, Kathryn Bigelow, who was the first woman to win an Oscar for directing, and Chloe Zhao, who was the second.
These women are making great films. It seems like a marvelous new era in cinema, and yet at the same time, it’s not enough. We need more women not only as directors but in every aspect of film production, not merely for the sake of inclusion, but because it revitalizes film. Progress has been too slow. The struggle continues. And in the meantime, take the trouble to find films made by women, and watch them.
You probably know already that LGBT people were among the groups persecuted by Nazi Germany. After the war, the concentration camps ended, but sexual relations between men, as detailed in the German Criminal Code Paragraph 175, from 1871, was still a crime. Great Freedom, directed by Sebastian Meise, tells the story of a gay man named Hans, played by Franz Rogowski, who goes in and out of prison, mostly in, for decades, all for the crime of being gay.
The film opens with Hans getting busted for anonymous sex, some time in the 1960s. In prison we realize he’s been here before. There’s a man named Viktor, played by Georg Friedrich, who greets him sardonically, more like an old enemy than a friend. Soon, the movie cuts to the time period right after the war ended. Hans has been transferred from a slave labor camp to regular prison. He meets his cell mate, Victor, who looks at him with hostility, especially when he discovers Hans’s crime. But he does notice that a number is tattooed on Hans’s arm. And on his part, we discover, he is a heroin addict, and Hans cleverly bargains an ability to get access to needles in exchange for Viktor tattooing over the number on his arm so you can’t see it. This is Hans—someone always seeking ways to survive, and finding ingenious ways to do it.
If you’re thinking that this will be a sentimental story about how a gay Jewish man and a homophobic thug learn to love one another, you need to watch a different movie. There is raw emotion in Great Freedom, but no sentimentality. Meise now cuts forward in time—we’re in the 1950s, and Hans is going to great lengths to find opportunities to have sex with his lover, and we learn that they knew each other on the outside. Viktor is still around, but not a cellmate this time—his volatility makes him a threat. The film keeps cutting back between the ‘40s, ‘50s, and’60s, and you can tell which period you’re in by the length or style of Hans’s hair, and other clues, including a dominant color scheme for each period.
Right now, Rogowski is really one of the finest living actors we have. I’ve said it before, but this performance is above and beyond anything he’s done yet. Very controlled, intense, manifesting the determined energy of this resourceful character, who shows so much bravery. Is he a hero? Not in the usual sense, because Miese and Rogowski have constructed such a complex character that we also are forced to see the fatalism, the shame and sense of self-degradation, that imprison him in addition to the physical prison, that create a mirror image of the misery imposed on him by the state. As for the relationship with Viktor, it encompasses a world of suffering, but also a depth beyond words.
I’m not in the habit of giving warnings about films. But here I do need to say that this is a film of blistering emotional intensity. To take it in means being willing to see into the heart of darkness. Its effect on me was, metaphorically speaking of course, like having a spike driven through my heart. Yet despite that, Great Freedom contains a flaming ember of hope.
Paragraph 175 was largely decriminalized in 1969. It was finally abolished in 1994.
In 1999, “transgender” wasn’t a well-known term, at least not in mainstream culture. That was the year a film called Boys Don’t Cry was released, directed by Kimberley Peirce, and written by Peirce and Andy Bienen. It dramatizes the real-life story of Teena Brandon, who changed her name to Brandon Teena and passed for a young man in a small Nebraska town.
The movie is beautifully crafted, with intensely vulnerable acting, and pervaded with feelings of longing and sadness. Over it all hangs a sense of menace, forebodings of the bad things that can happen when someone steps over the lines of gender. Peirce’s visual sense is dark and moody. From time to time the drama is punctuated with shots of clouds over the night prairie, flashes of electrical storms, set to the sounds of a mournful guitar.
The biggest success of Boys Don’t Cry lies in the performances Peirce gets from her actors. Hilary Swank is a remarkable Brandon—brilliant at showing the desperate need to belong as a man, with all the high risk-taking and on-the-edge quality that would imply for someone who was biologically a woman. Swank captures this lonely character, profoundly unaware of himself, without a long-range plan, just living for the next moment. It is not a gimmicky performance. You may recall that Swank won her first Oscar for this film.
Even so, I think the film might not have worked without the right actress to play Lana, the woman Brandon falls in love with. Chloë Sevigny is devastating in this part. Lana gradually falls for the young man, so different from the men she hangs out with, and Sevigny shows us her heart-wrenching transformation as the truth about Brandon comes out. It’s a deepening of character, so moving and so right, and in a way she represents a possible response to the challenge posed by Brandon, a response of love that stays true to itself against all odds, which is stirring, tragic and truthful.
Brandon’s journey is meaningful because it calls into question the whole cultural edifice of gender. The roles that we play in society, the qualities we exhibit and those we hide, the feelings we have about ourselves, are powerfully influenced by ideas of what it means to be male or female. The experience of Brandon is that the human spectrum is by necessity much wider than this narrow band which is imposed by our culture.
The film also demonstrates this through the characters of two young men, John and Tom, expertly played by Peter Sarsgaard and Brendan Sexton III. They’re hard-drinking and rebellious, full of swagger and violence. It’s tempting to distance ourselves and look at them as mere villains. Peirce undermines that temptation in subtle ways. There’s a scene where Tom deliberately puts his hand in a fire, and shows Brandon the marks where he’s cut himself. This is a perfect symbol for the way a man has had to deny and suppress his feelings, his capacity to be hurt or afraid or to grieve, in order to survive as a man. And at some level, tough guy John seems to sense denied aspects of himself in Brandon.
Peirce’s treatment of Brandon’s ultimate fate is unflinching. We are made to look squarely at the violence of retaliation. The movie can be a shattering experience to watch, but I think there was no other way for Peirce to present the full force and meaning of the story. 25 years later, Boys Don’t Cry retains a stunning urgency.
It was a good year for movies, if your viewing is not confined to Hollywood films. Many of the best reflected the unease of our times.
Here is my annual “favorites” list: as I’ve explained before, I do this a couple of months later than most film critics because the quality pictures from late in the previous year take longer to get to my neck of the woods than to LA, New York, or Chicago. I also need to say that some films, especially those in languages other than English, may take from a year to a year and a half to be available for viewing here in the States. So there are more than a few films on my list that are technically dated from 2022, or even ‘21.
The Zone of Interest (Jonathan Glazer) is really in a class by itself. Ostensibly about a happy German family—mother, father, and five children—living in a prosperous home with servants, a flower garden, and swimming pool, we soon discover that the father is Rudolf Höss, a high-ranking Nazi officer, and their home is located right next to the Auschwitz death camp in Poland, of which he is the commandant. The idea is as simple and as chilling as that, yet Glazer keeps building on this premise to ever greater heights. It’s not just that the everyday interactions and minor struggles of this family convey a grotesque absurdity in the light of what we, the audience, know. It’s that we experience a kind of existential terror through the movie’s depiction of people treating as ordinary that which should freeze the soul of anyone with a conscience. We are forced to implicate ourselves in the normalizing of the unthinkable. The Zone of Interest is one of the most profound meditations on evil ever filmed.
A New Old Play (Qiu Jiongjiong) is a masterful epic telling the story of a fictional Chinese opera troupe which covers the tragic and tumultuous history of China from the 1920s through the’70s. The style features the brilliant artificiality of the theater, with its masks, costumes and painted sets, alongside extensive tracking shots that places the viewer in the midst of the symbolic procession of the long and eventful life of a famous clown. A framing device shows this old man being confronted after his death by two spirits of the underworld, who accompany him to the afterlife while he reminisces about the many phases of his career. The film takes a darkly skeptical point of view about Chinese politics and its upheavals, the title signaling how the underlying conditions of social oppression are unchanged despite the superficial claims of revolution.
Alcarràs (Carla Simón) is an exquisitely composed film telling of an extended family of peach farmers in the Catalonia region of Spain. They are about to lose the farm to an owner that wants to convert the land for industrial use, and in this difficult process we experience the family from the point of view of each of its members, from the parents, uncles and aunts to the teenage children and little kids. Simón’s supple and versatile style brings this little vanishing world to rich and engaging life. Alcarràs translates our bond to the land we live on into beautiful, heart-rending poetry.
Unrest (Cyril Schäublin) clarifies the history of modern political struggle by taking us to an earlier, more fundamental period. In 1877, in a village in Switzerland, the owners of a clock and watch factory are trying to create the quickest and most streamlined production of watches they can by regimenting their workers’ every task, while the workers meanwhile organize an anarchist commune. It’s a film of ironic tranquility, in which the industrial and workers’ revolutions calmly work against each other’s interests. With detached humor and compassion, Unrest beautifully portrays the origins of our current divide.
Tori and Lokita (Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne). The consistent excellence of the Dardenne brothers’ work for over four decades is reconfirmed by this tense drama about two migrant kids from Benin trying to live under the radar in Belgium. For purposes of asylum they claim to be brother and sister, but they’re just friends bonded by love and trust, navigating the harrowing danger and exploitation which is the daily experience of the undocumented.
Showing Up (Kelly Reichardt) stars Michelle Williams as a sculptor at an art college whose introversion makes it incredibly difficult for her to deal with family, friends, or people in general while preparing for a show. The closest Reichardt has come to making a comedy, it’s a wry portrait of the clash between the practice of art and the demands of everyday life.
Killers of the Flower Moon (Martin Scorsese) dramatizes the true story of a series of murders in 1920s Oklahoma, in which the Osage Indians were targeted for wealth gained from oil being found on their land. Scorsese expands the murder story into an epic about a native community enduring the onslaught of predatory white Americans. It is classic cinema at its most elaborate.
Monster (Hirokazu Kore-eda) is another gem in this director’s lifelong project telling meaningful stories of families and children. A pre-teen boy is getting in trouble at school. We experience his mother’s point of view, then a teacher’s, and finally, we follow the boy himself and learn the truth, more beautiful and heartbreaking than we imagined.
De Humani Corporus Fabrica (Lucien Castaing-Taylor & Verena Paravel). In this immersive documentary, we observe the behavior of doctors, nurses, staff, and patients in Paris hospitals, in so intimate a way that you wonder how the filmmakers did it. In addition, we see multiple surgeries and procedures through the microscopic cameras that show the tunnel-like insides of people with the equally tiny surgical tools used to do the complicated work. A mind-blowing experience.
Great Freedom (Sebastian Meise). Under Hitler’s Germany, homosexuality was a crime. But the law didn’t change when the war ended. Franz Rogowski plays a gay man repeatedly imprisoned over decades. The story flashes back and forth in time as the main character develops an odd, touching relationship with a straight drug addict. It’s a film of devastating emotional power.
Here are some excellent B-sides:
Onoda (Arthur Harari)All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (Laura Poitras)Asteroid City (Wes Anderson)No Bears (Jafar Panahi)The Novelist’s Film (Hong Sang-soo)Godland (Hlynur Pálmason)Pacifiction (Albert Serra)I Have Electric Dreams (Valentina Maurel)May December (Todd Haynes)Past Lives (Celine Song)
And I wish you a great movie-going 2024!
Revoir Paris is the latest film from French director Alice Winocour. I’ve seen the title translated as Paris Memories, which, for many, might sound like a romance, but it’s far from that. The subject is trauma, or more precisely, the experience of having suffered severe trauma.
Mia, played by Virginie Efira, is a young Parisian who lives with Vincent, a doctor, played by Grégoire Colin. One night, she ducks into a bistro to get out of a rainstorm. Near her is a table with a group of people celebrating a man’s birthday. She briefly exchanges glances with the man. Later, while going back to her table from the restroom, two people in front of her are shot down, the place erupts with screams, and she’s on the floor. A gunman is walking through the bistro shooting everyone in sight. Winocour does not make this scene too graphic—the shock inherent in the situation is unnerving enough.
Cut to: Mia being prepared for release from the hospital. She has a big scar on her side. Then we cut to three months later. We discover that she has gone to live with her mother in the country for that time, and now she’s back in Paris, but feeling lost emotionally. She can’t remember the shooting, and this loss of memory is accompanied by a sense of grief so acute that she can’t let go of it. We hear a brief voice-over from Vincent describing how he learned of the attack and searched frantically for Mia. He shares in the trauma experienced by others who weren’t there—the film doesn’t want to minimize that—but we soon see that this is qualitatively different than the trauma of those who were.
One day, Mia finds herself drawn irresistibly back to the bistro. She learns that a certain weekday is reserved for survivors to gather there. When she goes to this event later, she meets a young woman whose parents had been killed: they texted her a photo right before their death which just happened to show Mia in the background. But she still can’t remember anything. Then she encounters the man who had been celebrating his birthday at the next table—Thomas, played by Benoît Magimel. One of his legs has been surgically reconstructed, and he uses a crutch. He remembers everything, and his memories help Mia to begin the long process of recalling what happened to her.
The shooting is loosely based on the November 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris, but Winocour and her co-screenwriters are not concerned with any political implications. The fact of it being a mass shooting, a very public tragedy, feeds into the film’s vivid sense of loss. There is, for instance, a large display of memorial tributes outside of the bistro.
The search for true memory seems tentative at first, but then Mia recalls the hidden meaning of her quest. Here the film ingeniously ties in the fact that many of the kitchen staff in Paris restaurants are undocumented immigrants. Those who survived the shooting fled the bistro to avoid being caught. Mia remembers one of them who helped her survive. She feels an urgent need to find him.
This is a story with characters and a plot, but the brilliant thing about it is how the director manages to make all that seem strange and ephemeral. Revoir Paris maintains, with its honesty and compassion, a persistent sense of overwhelming shock and trauma front and center throughout.
The Zone of Interest is the name of the latest film by English writer and director Jonathan Glazer. It opens disconcertingly, with strange sounding vocal music against a blank dark gray screen. Then we meet a German-speaking family, parents and five children, in a large new house with servants and a flower garden and a small swimming pool. We soon notice that the father wears the gray uniform of a German officer, and that right next to the house is what looks like a big fortress. It’s not too long after that we learn the father’s name is Rudolf Höss, and that he is in fact the commandant of Auschwitz, in occupied Poland, the Nazis’ largest extermination center.
Höss is played by Christian Friedel, and his wife Hedwig is played by Sandra Hüller. We see the everyday life of their family, the two boys getting into scrapes, the unremarkable interactions between parents and children, or with servants or guests. In the background, however, ever present on the soundtrack, there are faint sounds coming from Auschwitz: a shout, gunshots in the distance, marching boots, an indistinct mechanical grinding, urgent voices, nothing very distinct. Well, we never see the crimes in the camp, we only hear various sounds and voices. This reliance on the ear more than the eye is part of Glazer’s disciplined approach. Not seeing things, in the broadest sense, is a key element in the lives of the family and the other Germans.
Everything normal and ordinary about this portrait of family life is cruelly shadowed by what we know. A good example is when Höss tells his wife that he is being transferred, and she gets upset because she loves her home in Auschwitz and wants to raise her kids there. What would usually be a plot point in a domestic drama hits the audience as painfully absurd. What does any of this matter under the cloud of mass killing? Of course all the adults know what’s going on. It’s normal to them, part of what they have accepted as their life. And the children might not know the whole truth, but they have more of a sense of it than they can say.
Each scene in the movie presents something more to consider about our relationship to evil. Glazer took ten years to make the film. The idea was from a novel by Martin Amis, the “zone of interest” of the title being a euphemism by which Nazi officers referred to the death camps.
The incredible sound design, by Johnnie Burn, enacts the place of our fear. At certain points, using thermal photography that makes everything look almost like a black-and-white negative, Glazer presents a mysterious girl wandering in a hellish landscape. She leaves apples near the camp fences for starving prisoners.
Jews are mentioned occasionally by family members and others the way one would mention garbage or pests to get rid of. It’s a pioneer dream, you see—the Germans finding new homes in the east, their lebensraum, their living space.The music over the end credits, by Mica Levi (who also did the prologue) doesn’t provide a feeling of resolution as one might expect. We hear a tide of shrieking voices and synthesizers, a work of vocalized horror that will not give us rest. The Zone of Interest is not a horror film, or to put it another way, the horror is real. It’s not about somewhere else that has nothing to do with us. The stark truth must be faced if we are to live and be free.
Swiss filmmaker Cyril Schäublin has chosen one quiet moment in history to portray the early stages of the struggle between the industrial owner class and its employees, a moment in which the development of a new idea, anarchism, came into its own. The film, based on real events, is called Unrest. Its style combines an overall feeling of order and tranquility with a tense undercurrent of resistance.
In 1877, the Russian socialist Peter Kropotkin, in exile in Switzerland, visits a town that is the center of the clock and watch making industry in the Canton of Bern. His mission, he says, is to make a map of Switzerland with the place names given by the common people rather than official landmarks. When he visits the watch factory, he is fascinated by what he finds.
The factory workers are mostly women, and this is before the assembly line approach, so each employee is in charge of making the whole watch. The bosses walk about the floor in white coats, timing all the workers to see how fast each of them can do the job, and then we hear their talk to one other about how to get the maximum production out of the labor. They’re timing everything to the last second. They even tell the employees that they have to take only a certain path to come to work, or to lunch, because that path takes the least time to walk. The film is constantly poking fun at the Swiss mania for time; there are even arguments about how to set the clocks accurately.
Genial uniformed police are a regular presence in the town. In this movie, no one raises their voice or fights. The town’s decorum seems to require that all differences must be resolved calmly. Compared to the life we know as moderns, this is remarkable simplicity. But the push to time everything is of course also a push to control, and thus it foreshadows the twentieth century and our own, when regimentation has reached unprecedented heights.
However, right under management’s nose, most of the workers in the watch factory have organized into an anarchist commune, resisting the bosses through questions and small actions, contributing funds to the community, and even donating to anarchists abroad. They discuss their strategies with seemingly perfect confidence. Anarchism, Kropotkin realizes, is really just decentralized socialism.
Schäublin and his team have fashioned a vivid, amazingly realistic version of life in a 19th century town. With an attunement to the sights and sounds of surrounding nature, the director likes to use long shots, where we see human beings in the corner of the frame, whereas solid things like trees and buildings take up the center.
If there is a main character here, it’s one of the workers, Josephine, played by Clara Gostynski. She looks with bemusement on the behavior of the factory managers, sharing sly comments with her friends working at her table. It’s no surprise when we find that she is one of the anarchists. The gentle, bookish Kropotkin makes friends with her, and she adds a nice flourish to the movie when he asks her to tell him what she does. Her long, amusing description of how to assemble a watch centers on the “Unrueh,” or in English, the “Unrest,” which is the balance wheel within the watch that makes it tick, and also gives the film its title.
Schäublin has created a microcosm, an origin story, around the issues of inequality, exploitation, and male dominance, in their simplest expression, but corresponding with astounding force to our current problems. Unrest is a real beauty, a superb cinematic achievement.
Past Lives is the debut feature from Korean-Canadian playwright Celine Song. In it, she draws on our experiences of career, romance, and the balancing act between a woman’s past in Korea, and present in America. The themes really apply to anyone that has called two different countries home.
The movie begins with two 12-year-olds in South Korea, a girl and a boy, Na Young and Hae Sung, best friends who like to compete for higher marks in class. As time goes on, they develop a crush on one other. Na Young even tells her mother that she will eventually marry Hae Sung. But her father’s plans change all that—he has an opportunity which causes him to move his family to Canada for a better life.
Cut to 12 years later. A grown up Young, who has renamed herself Nora, is an aspiring playwright living in New York City, and played by Greta Lee. She seems thoroughly American now, even having occasional trouble remembering how to speak Korean. One day, out of curiosity she searches for her childhood friend Sung on the internet, and finds out that he’s a graduate student in Seoul. She contacts him and arranges for a Skype call, and that’s how they see each other once again. A sense of ease and familiarity returns quickly, and even across years of separation it’s clear that there’s an attraction. But Sung, played by Teo Yoo, has to stay in Seoul for his degree, and Nora won’t give up her playwright ambitions to return to Korea, so eventually their Skype calls get less frequent, and then they lose touch.
Now we move forward again, another 12 years. Sung, now a successful engineer, can’t get Nora out of his mind. He contacts her, lets her know he’s coming to visit, and flies to New York. A lot has changed in 12 years. Nora is married to an American writer named Arthur, played by John Magaro. A flashback shows us how they met at a writer’s retreat, and we see their comfortable supportive relationship.
So, if Celine Song were trying to write a romantic melodrama, the visit would cause a crisis in Nora’s marriage. Nope—Sung has just come to see his friend, and Nora and Arthur welcome him, and it’s all treated as it would be in real life, in other words, normal. Well, there are subtle tensions, and the two leads are excellent at evoking the tender feelings that are still there.
The beauty of Past Lives is in the touching interactions between these two people, and the recognition of how they’ve changed from the time they were children. The director is at home with a gentle editing style, following these good characters as they wander around the East Village and the Brooklyn waterfront, having conversations with a genuine hesitancy, shyness, and sincerity.
In the course of the film, Sung brings up in conversation a traditional Korean idea called In-Yun, meaning that people have connections with each other in past lives that result in whatever affinity we’re experiencing now. This becomes a thread that guides our emotional journey in the film. Past Lives celebrates the wistful, sad, joyous relationship we have with the memory of our younger selves.
Clouzot's 1947 crime film is an apt portrait of the complex and difficult urban life in postwar France.Quai des Orfèvres was the third film by French director Henri-Georges Clouzot, released in 1947. Clouzot is best known for two films he made in the ‘50s, The Wages of Fear, and Diabolique, classics of suspense, and in the case of Diabolique, horror as well. Quai des Orfèvres gives us an early taste of this unique master of cinema.Marguerite, played by Suzy Delair, an aspiring music hall singer with the stage name of Jenny Lamour, flirts with everyone she can in order to get ahead, arousing the jealousy of her husband and piano accompanist Maurice, played by Bernard Blier, a sullen, morose songwriter. He reaches his limit when he discovers that Jenny has gone to the home of a lecherous old movie producer. Pistol in hand, he goes there himself, but finds the producer already dead.Clouzot’s style was dark, and his views on society acerbic. Here we have a vivid portrait of the lower regions of society in Paris after the liberation. The fascinating, seedy world of French music halls and cabarets, in which weary city dwellers gathered in smoke-filled theaters to enjoy singing, rude comedy, and even animal acts, is the perfect setting for the furtive actions of the obsessed sad sack Maurice. It’s a tough life that Clouzot depicts, but not completely without hope—Jenny and Maurice really do love each other, after all.The murder mystery element is, truth to tell, rather far-fetched, and Clouzot doesn’t put a lot of energy into it. It mainly serves as a device for the introduction of the film’s third major character, Inspector Antoine, played by French theatre legend Louis Jouvet. The unprepossessing Inspector, with his little mustache, bow tie, and hawk-like nose, is a relentless, cunning interrogator with a subtle wit, who says things like, “Shake my left hand; it’s closer to my heart.” We discover that he dotes on his mixed-race teenage son, his one gift from years in the Foreign Legion. Jouvet pretty much steals the picture. The film is at its best in his scenes, and in the claustrophobic police headquarters which gives the film its title, where the chaotic goings-on provide a window into Paris’s sad urban underworld.Also in the mix is Jenny’s friend Dora (the stunning Simone Renant), a photographer specializing in erotica. In her love for Jenny she goes so far as to try to conceal evidence—it’s the love that couldn’t speak its name, of course, at least not in 1947—but in one of the film’s most intriguing exchanges, Antoine makes the truth clear for those in the audience able to make the connection.Quai des Orfèvres boasts shadowy, evocative black-and-white photography by Armand Thirard, and impeccable production design by the great Max Douy, whose credits included Renoir’s The Rules of the Game. I need also to mention that from Clouzot one must never expect an expansive poetic style—here as ever, ambivalence and the dark side of human nature are the primary elements in his world view. Quai des Orfèvres is an ideal introduction to his body of work.
A drama about a boy's troubles is presented from three different points of view, and we see how judgment from appearances prevents our understanding.For some time it’s been evident that Hirokazu Kore-eda has become one of the finest film directors, not only in Japan, but in the entire world. He may not get as much attention as others because he specializes in what we usually call domestic drama rather than any of the popular genres such as action, horror, or suspense. His movies are usually about families, relationships, and especially children. That isn’t to say that he avoids topics of social relevance. Shoplifters, for instance, in 2018, was a very sharp examination of an underclass that we commonly associate with poverty and crime. His new film is called Monster, a drama once again centering on kids, but this time almost qualifying as a mystery.Monster has an intriguing three-part structure. We meet a single mother, played by the very engaging and expressive Ando Sakura, working hard to support herself and her only child, a pre-teen boy named Minato. One day Minato asks his mother whether someone would still be human if he’d been transplanted with the brain of a pig. She scoffs, and wonders where he could have gotten such an idea. Then he mysteriously tries to cut his own hair, and later his mom notices a scar near one of his ears. She insists on him telling her what’s wrong and eventually he reveals that he was smacked in the head by one of his teachers, a Mr. Hori. The mother goes to the school and demands answers from the principal, and that’s when things start to get really weird.The principal, an older woman, seems completely emotionless and checked out. All she says is that the school apologizes for a mistake in its instruction. Other school officials seem just as rigid. They bring in Mr. Hori himself, who merely bows his head and apologizes. The mother naturally wants more: what actually happened and why? But the school officials won’t say more, they stay tight-lipped, and in a later meeting after the boy has been injured falling down some stairs at school, Mr. Hori blurts out that Minato has been bullying another boy. She refuses to believe it. Meanwhile, a phrase uttered by her son echoes throughout the story. “Who is the monster?” he asks.The movie then goes back to the beginning, this time from the point of view of the teacher, Mr. Hori. From here we learn that he has been unfairly blamed by the administrators for actions that were not malicious, yet the true chain of events is still obscure. Finally, in the third part of the film, we see all the story from the point of view of the son, Minato. Now we finally discover the truth, which is completely different than anything we might have expected.So, in form, Monster is like a mystery, but it turns out the point isn’t really what actually happened, although we do find that out. Even the question, “Who is the monster?” is significant metaphorically but not literally. The film’s real meaning has to do with the inner world of children, and how those outside of that world are prone to misjudge and misunderstand it, looking to blame or to attack when what is needed is to understand. Once the truth dawns on us, the third part of the film becomes an amazing spiritual journey that is both beautiful and heartbreaking. Monster lays bare the heart that so often we don’t notice because we were too busy.
Aki Kaurismäki continues his devotion to stories about lonely people looking for connection in this low-key drama about two working class people who almost don't get together.Aki Kaurismäki has made 20 feature films in 42 years, plus about a dozen shorts, parts of anthologies, and music videos. With apologies to all the other filmmakers in Finland, he is clearly the most important Finnish director as well as the only one widely known outside of his country. His movies mostly deal with the lives of working class people, their feelings and their struggles, and his style usually displays a reserved, deadpan, almost grim sense of humor. His latest is called Fallen Leaves, and as you would expect, its theme of finding love later in life is autumnal in style and tone.Ansa, a woman in her 40s played by Alma Pöysti, works in a Helsinki supermarket. She is quiet and lives alone with few friends, but she has a heart, and gets fired for giving expired food to a homeless person. Later she gets a job doing menial work at a recycling center. One night at a karaoke bar, she sees a man amusingly singing off-key. It’s not this man that catches her eye, but his friend, Holappa, a shy middle-aged factory worker played by Jussi Vatanen. Later he sees her again and asks her out. They go to a movie, which happens to be Jim Jarmusch’s zombie comedy The Dead Don’t Die, after which she gives him her number. Unfortunately, the hapless fellow immediately loses the paper that has her number on it, and (wouldn’t you know?) even neglects to get her name. Definitely interested, he wanders around, hangs out at the karaoke bar hoping to see her again, and eventually goes back to the movie theater where they had last spoken.This little plot device of losing contact, followed by the anxiety of trying to find her, is in line with the film’s mild sad sack form of comedy. The objective world is a constant obstacle to the fulfillment of even the characters’ most modest desires, which is part of Kaurismäki’s critical vantage point on society. The daily routines of working people; the shabby, depressing feel of the less affluent parts of a city, with its dreary buildings and streets; these are accentuated by Kaurismäki’s retro sensibility. The story takes place in 2022, but the vehicles, appliances, and other small details look more like the 1980s or ‘90s. These characters seem to have fallen behind the rest of the world, but at the same time there is the feeling of an impending threat—whenever a character turns on a radio, the news is about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In this cocoon of isolation, the menace of world events still casts a shadow.Booze is another factor in working class life that Kaurismäki has not neglected exploring in his films. In this one, Holappa secretly carries a bottle wherever he goes, and we see him fortifying himself with it when he’s under stress. He and Ansa do manage to meet up again. His drinking, however, poses a problem. Ansa has seen family members, including her father, destroyed by alcoholism, and she’s decided never to get involved with a drunk.Throughout the picture, the dreary conditions of life for these characters, and the subdued color photography and plain set design, contrast with the soundtrack’s sentimental pop songs to create a consistently droll effect. We even get a bit of Tchaikovsky’s hyper-romantic Sixth Symphony in the mix. The effect is oddly joyful—a weird sort of affirmation. It’s as if Kaurismäki set out to make the purest Kaurismäki film, without embellishments. Fallen Leaves demonstrates his delight in the possibility of love in the midst of discouraging times.
The great Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki comes out of retirement to present a fantasy adventure about a boy seeking to work through the loss of his mother.Hayao Miyazaki, Japan’s preeminent creator of animated films, the genius behind My Neighbor Totoro, Princess Mononoke, and Spirited Away, to name just a few, announced his retirement ten years ago, but thankfully the 82-year-old writer and director has changed his mind. His new movie is called The Boy and the Heron, and I admit that the title made me think it would be a wistful bucolic tale about the gentle relationship of a boy and a bird, which would be fine. But I should have known better. The realms that Miyazaki depicts, no matter how they relate thematically to real life, are always worlds of elaborate and startling fantasy.The real life context in this picture is that of Japan in the Second World War. 12-year-old Mahito loses his mother when the Tokyo hospital she works in is bombed during the war. His father has him moved to safety in the country, living with his mother’s younger sister Natsuko, who has become his father’s new wife and is now pregnant. She is surrounded, rather mysteriously, by seven old maids who serve her. Mahito is sullen, suspicious, and resistant to his aunt’s attempts to show him love, but he is open to the eccentric old ladies. (I couldn’t help thinking of the seven dwarves from the fairy tale.)Anyway, from the very first day, he notices the strange behavior of a local grey heron, that swoops near him, and seems to nest in a nearby abandoned tower. The old ladies tell him that the tower was built by Natsuko’s grand uncle, a wizard. Meanwhile, the heron keeps swooping near Mahito, causing him to close his window and try to keep the bird away, but eventually the heron speaks and says he can lead the boy to his mother. Thus begins an adventure that leads to other worlds hidden beneath this one.I’ve always maintained that many children yearn for more serious stories and adventures in their animated films, not just the cute narratives with songs and wisecracking sidekicks that Disney and Pixar specialize in. The Boy and the Heron is probably too much for younger kids, but a middle school viewer might be thrilled and delighted and pleasantly scared by the surprising progression of this tale, that features a kingdom ruled by parakeets, an army of pelicans, and a host of magical and symbolic plot devices.The animation, as you’d expect, is fabulous, a constant feast for the eyes. The story is Miyazaki’s most personal, in which he portrays for the first time a main character who is struggling with inner conflicts that he must work out and break through. Mahito’s grief at the loss of his mother is the foundation and the focal point here. The war, the real historical war, represents the old ways of power and force which Miyazaki wants children to break free of and become adults of compassion and peace. The questions of “Who am I?” are bound to the question of “Who is my true mother?” and the answers are not resolved with reasoning, but through the fantastic interplay of emotions and ideas within a child’s imagination.Miyazaki’s playful approach to myth is a serious attempt to realize the potential of human beings to truly love and live in a state of wonder and openness. The journey is not easy or simple, but it is profoundly freeing. The Boy and the Heron treats childhood with the deep respect it deserves.
The story of a paid assassin’s quest to get even with a client who tried to have him killed is a bracing satire on the modern culture of violence.The hit man. The professional assassin. How many such people actually exist? I’m going to say they’re a microscopic percentage of the population. Yet in popular fiction and film, this character has been reborn and remade countless times: first, naturally, in the crime genre, then the action film, and there have also been a few comedy versions, hybrids, take-offs and such. It’s now an established sub-genre in the movies. And why is this? Well, instead of boring us with sociology, director David Fincher, with screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker, have adapted a French graphic novel into a film called The Killer, that playfully explores the question.Michael Fassbender plays a hit man—we never learn his name—who is preparing days ahead of time to kill a man in Paris. He’s in a tall apartment building with a room directly across the hotel room where his target will be staying. While he waits he practices yoga, listens to music (throughout the film the only music he listens to is by the rock band The Smiths), and in soft voice-over talks about his profession and the rules he observes in order to be good at what he does.Now, I haven’t read the books, and I don’t know if the authors were playing it straight. But five minutes into the film, when the killer’s voice over thoughtfully refers to Popeye the Sailor and his statement “I am what I am,” I knew that Fincher and Walker weren’t completely serious. The killer’s earnest monologues are pretentious, sometimes startlingly silly. He also goes to great lengths to pose (to himself, we presume) as one of the best, that is the coldest and most methodical of assassins, repeating certain rules throughout the movie. “Stick to your plan,” he says. “Anticipate, don't improvise. Trust no one. Never yield an advantage. Fight only the battle you're paid to fight.”After this lengthy and intense build up, it’s finally time to do the job, but when he fires the shot, he misses. He then flees to his luxurious compound in the Dominican Republic, but finds his girlfriend in the hospital, savagely beaten by two people trying to get to him. The rest of the movie is about him tracking down everyone involved, and eventually the client who paid for all of this. There’s the usual violent fight to the death between the killer and one of the adversaries. This is a slick and suspenseful action film. It’s not like it’s a spoof, with jokes. But the contrast between the mechanics of the plot, and the voice-over narration and dialogue, creates a darkly satiric effect.The ending confirmed my hunch about The Killer. Of course I won’t tell you the ending. But the metaphors here are not that hard to see. Why are hit men films made? Because they make money, and filmmaking is a business. What else is a business? Being a hit man. There’s something in the hard and implacable character of an assassin, like Jason Bourne in the Bourne series, along with a kind of invincibility endowed by his skills, that appeal to our wish fulfillment and gives us pleasure.There is yet more depth to the satiric idea of The Killer, including the fascination with killing itself. We get to smile at the selfish presumption by which we entertain ourselves with these things. The killer is not a hero—he’s just another faceless worker.
In the late 19th century, a Danish Lutheran priest is sent to Iceland to build a church, but the overwhelming power of nature threatens to destroy his plans. Godland is a film by the Icelandic writer and director Hlynur Pálmason. The original title in the Icelandic language indicates that the land has been corrupted in a cosmic sense—the English title Godland makes a finer point, that the God of the land, in other words nature, is radically different from the God of the church. This dramatic opposition is depicted through the experiences of a young Danish Lutheran priest in the late 19th century named Lucas, and played by Elliott Crosset Hove. Lucas is assigned by his church elder to travel to Iceland, which was still a Danish colony at the time, and build a church there for a small community on the west side of that island.Lucas decides to land on the southeast part of Iceland and travel by horseback, with the help of some Icelandic guides, across the mountains to his destination on the western part. Along with his bible, a large crucifix for the church, and other supplies, Lucas brings a camera. His ambition is to make a photographic record of his travels in the country, and his companions. At that time, cameras were still large and unwieldy, and the process of taking photos was elaborate. This photography motif runs throughout the film as a metaphor for the detached observation practiced by the priest. Lucas acts aloof from everyone, withdrawn into his lonely religious dedication. He is further handicapped by only knowing Danish, having no familiarity with the language of Iceland. Only one of the guides knows Danish, and so he is dependent on him to communicate with the others.The chief guide and head of the expedition is Ragnar, played by Ingvar Sigurðsson. He’s a tough old man who knows the rugged land and how to survive in it. He looks down on Lucas, the priest, with distrust and a not-so-well disguised contempt. As it turns out, Lucas has underestimated the difficulties involved in the journey. The expedition slowly plods across a barren wilderness of rocks and hills, enduring ever-increasing cold and snowfall. So long and arduous is the ordeal, that Lucas has a mental breakdown. His faith has not prepared him for this level of suffering.The breathtaking photography in this picture conveys both the beauty and harshness of Iceland’s landscape. I don’t think I’ve ever seen another movie that so effectively recreates the long, long hours that make up such a wilderness expedition. Lucas does reach his goal, although he’s almost half dead when he arrives, and then the story concerns the rural village in which the church is built and he assumes the role of the local priest. The trouble is that the journey has changed him. His confidence has given way to fear and suspicion. The village’s head family hosts him there, and there are two daughters, the older of whom he starts to consider as a possible wife. But his instability becomes evident, and his isolation by temperament and language always works against his interest. The old guide, Ragnar, is staying there as well, and along with his difficulty in relating to the priest there is a strange desire to learn how to be religious himself, something that Lucas has lost and is unable to teach.Godland is a film of stark forbidding beauty. We experience an overwhelming feeling of awe, too great and too terrifying for the simple young man with his simple faith to take in.
Tom Hardy portrays Britain's most violent prison inmate, a man who refuses to cooperate. Bronson, the film from 2008 directed by Nicolas Winding Refn, is based on the life of an actual criminal named Michael Peterson, who gained a reputation as Britain’s most violent prison inmate, spending three decades in solitary confinement. During his last release on parole, he was employed as a bare-knuckle boxer, taking the name of tough-guy actor Charles Bronson. This may seem an unpromising subject for a movie, but from it Refn and his co-screenwriter Brock Norman Brock fashioned a portrait of savage unthinking rebellion, but the most important element is the man chosen to play Bronson—English actor Tom Hardy, who had made a name in theater and TV and a few supporting film roles before this part, which turned out to be his breakout into stardom.A central device is having Bronson tell his story before a theater audience. In case there was any doubt, there are surreal touches that assure us that this is all in his imagination. Over time, his violent history has become part of a performance in his head for admirers that mostly don’t exist outside of it.There is nothing out of the ordinary in his childhood to point to. At least Refn chooses not to try tracing Charlie’s problems to abuse of any kind, which isn’t to say that such things couldn’t have happened, but that trying to explain it in conventional terms is not the artistic point of the film. Instead we are invited to witness the horrifying and sometimes tragic inner life of an inveterate criminal without romanticizing it in any way.It starts with the young man robbing a post office and being sentenced to seven years. What might have been four years with good behavior keeps getting extended because of the prisoner’s unwillingness to take orders from the guards. Although he’s never killed anyone, a fact that he lets us know early on, his physical attacks on others are punishing and unrestrained. Eventually he falls into a pattern of taking guards or other prison personnel hostage, then stripping naked and waiting for the billy club wielding guard units to break into his cell, where he fights them all barehanded.So what’s this guy really like? On his last release, he shows that he wants a woman to love, but this is a feeling that is not returned. He also has no awareness of any of the rules needed in order to get by in society on even a minimal level. And eventually it turns out that he has an artistic bent, which causes a prison art teacher to overestimate his chances at rehabilitation.In this film, however, we aren’t distracted with psychology, but always confronted with the raw presence of the man. Tom Hardy’s performance is an utter tour de force. He bulked up and transformed himself into Bronson so completely that you might forget that this is acting. And the key to the character, as Hardy embodies him, is simple, yet difficult to pull off. At Bronson’s core is an absolute refusal to recognize authority in any form, a loud and continuous NO to every attempt whatsoever to control him.A lesser artist might have tried to make a hero out of Charlie, but we can only look on in dreadful fear at what a human being can become. The never deviating will of such a man, even to the point of self-destruction, has something stirring about it in a primitive way, something we can perhaps recognize from earliest childhood. Bronson captures the strangeness of a mind untouched by the trappings of civilized life.
An actress studies a woman who was the subject of a scandal involving sex with an underage person, in order to play her in a movie.It’s hard to believe that American director Todd Haynes has been making films for over 35 years now—I still think of him as a daring new voice in movies, which I guess is an indicator of my age. He was part of the burgeoning New Queer cinema, as it was called, in the 1980s and ‘90s, when openly gay filmmakers started to break into public awareness with a degree of success. Gay and gender issues have been important themes in a lot of Haynes’s movies, although not all of them.Another is his fascination with classic film genres. Far from Heaven, from 2002, adapted some of the elements of 1950s Hollywood romantic melodrama, particularly the films of Douglas Sirk, but then added race and gay sexuality into the mix so that this old-fashioned style was depicting modern issues that no one would touch in the ‘50s. There’s a similar idea with the film Carol, from 2015, with Cate Blanchett in the title role, as a closeted lesbian, also in the ‘50s. There are other examples. But Haynes’s involvement with classic style is not just a way to make ironic connections to our current issues. It’s an orientation in itself, an interrogation, if you will, of film narrative.Which brings me to his latest picture, May December. Natalie Portman plays Elizabeth, a well-known actress scheduled to star in a film about a sensational tabloid type case from twenty years earlier. A woman in her 30s was arrested for statutory rape with a 7th grader. She went to prison, had a child behind bars, and was eventually released, upon which she and the young man, named Joe, now an adult, got married. Elizabeth has asked this woman, Gracie, played by Julianne Moore, to allow her to live with her for a while, studying her before playing her in the movie. Gracie is assured that it will be a respectful treatment of the story.From this perspective, that of an actress planning a performance, we get to know Gracie and her family, including children from a previous marriage that broke up after the scandal. And we meet Joe, who is now 36, and seemingly leads a happy life with Gracie and their kids.The bold cinematography, camera movement, and suspense-style editing reminds me of Hitchcock, and then there’s the intense music, which practically shouts “This is a thriller!” But Haynes is actually interested in a completely different subject, and it takes some time to notice this at first. At this point I’ll just say that if you are determined to enjoy a mystery thriller or suspense film, the kind we’re generally used to, May December will disappoint you. In fact, Todd Haynes has used this genre to lead the audience astray. And why, you ask, would he do that? Because the misdirection, which is there even in the movie’s title, is an essential part of the film’s meaning.In many stories, there are witnesses who act as point of view characters through which the narrative is told. They could be just a person for us to identify with through whatever’s happening in the story. We tend to take these kinds of characters for granted. In this film, it’s Elizabeth, the actress played by Natalie Portman. Portman’s performance is more than incidental—it’s central. In May December, acting becomes a metaphor for how people live, an uncomfortable secret about the way we behave with one another. Crucially, as Haynes shows us, it’s usually a secret even to ourselves.
The guests at a wealthy dinner party find themselves unable to leave the premises, in Luis Buñuel's satiric fable. Spanish director Luis Buñuel went into exile from his native land after Franco’s military coup in 1936. He went to Hollywood and managed to scrape by translating and supervising the dubbing of Latin American films there. Eventually he found a more congenial environment in Mexico, where he made 21 films from the late 1940s through the early ‘60s. After he was allowed to return to Spain and make the film Viridiana in 1961, it shared the top award at Cannes, after which (and this is amusingly consistent with Buñuel’s work in general) it was banned in Spain for being too leftist, and condemned by the Vatican for blasphemy. Back he went to Mexico and made another film there, not of outrageous defiance this time, but from an allusive, symbolic point of view. It was his 20th Mexican film, and it marked the beginning of Buñuel’s final creative period, during which he returned to Europe and to the surrealism he had begun with as a young man. From 1962, the film is called The Exterminating Angel.In an unnamed city, a very wealthy couple gives a large dinner party in their mansion, with about twenty aristocratic guests. After the meal, they go to the drawing room, continuing to relax and talk, while the servants all go home. It gets late, and one would think the guests should start leaving, but instead they just lie down on couches and on the floor and go to sleep. Well, the next morning it gradually dawns on them that they are, in fact, unable to leave the house. Some strange unseen power makes them afraid of opening a door and walking out. And it soon becomes evident that no one outside the house can get in either.Days go by, and they’re running out of food and water. Everyone is grimy—they start to stink. Meanwhile we, the viewers, get to know these people in an uncomfortably intimate way. There are several different plot strands in which our highly civilized characters display their baser impulses, and suffer from a collapse of social conventions and niceties that can no longer sustain them. There is a satiric savagery in this tale, which maps out the ways that an upper class is trapped in a bubble of its own privilege. There are also thematic links to be made with the decrepitude and isolation of fascist Spain at the time.And yet, Buñuel refused to do satire the way people expected. The Exterminating Angel doesn’t attempt to be stylish or exuberant or even comic. This humor is very dry, and the method is plain almost to the point of banality. Nor does he show contempt for his characters. They may have shallow hearts, they may be largely un-self-aware, but they’re still human beings who were children once. The misfortunes that befall the people in this movie are aimed at ourselves, the audience, as well. Nobody in the film can perceive the true situation, only their own confining points of view. The deliberate matter-of-fact quality is the way Buñuel expresses his love of cinema as the people’s art form. His style attempts to shake us awake from the fictional dream, and that can be disconcerting.So what does the title mean, The Exterminating Angel? Buñuel got it from a poem written by a friend. The angel might be that invisible force keeping everyone from leaving the house. But what is the angel exterminating? Perhaps everything that ties us to material things, perhaps our most stubborn illusions.
Martin Scorsese's latest film dramatizes the true story of a series of murders in 1920s Oklahoma, in which the Osage Indians were targeted for wealth gained from oil being found on their land.Martin Scorsese has explored the darker side of humanity in many of his films. His journey into the problem of evil is darkest of all, I think, in his latest movie, Killers of the Flower Moon, based as it is on a real and very sinister conspiracy from the 1920s.The 80-year-old Scorsese is focused on making his own kind of epics in this last phase of his career. In Killers of the Flower Moon, we have an account not only of a crime, but a symbol of a primal source of wrong on this continent—the subjugation of its native population by those of European origin.In a deft prologue that mixes color with black-and-white period footage, we learn that the Osage Indians found oil on their Oklahoma land, which because they had retained mineral rights, enabled them to become wealthy through leasing of their land to oil developers. Some of them were able to even afford opulent houses and servants.The main story begins with the arrival in Oklahoma of Ernest Burkhart, a World War One veteran with an air of simplicity and optimism, and a love of competition, played by Leonardo DiCaprio. He’s there to work for his uncle, William King Hale, a wealthy rancher, played by Robert De Niro, who acts as a material benefactor to the Osage, and who already employs Ernest’s older brother.But as we discover soon enough, Hale is one of a group of greedy white men that have insinuated themselves into Indian society, going so far as to get married into Osage families, but then conspiring to murder the wives and other family members so that their oil-rich land would eventually come by inheritance to the white men.Ernest meets a young Osage woman from a wealthy local family named Molly, and played by Lily Gladstone. He becomes her chauffeur, and sure enough, they fall in love after awhile and get married. And here is a central ambiguity. Ernest genuinely likes Molly, and that like does grow into love, at least the kind of love that the intellectually limited Ernest could know. But at the same time, Hale is encouraging his nephew to marry Molly. He says he’s a great friend of her family, yet at the same time he’s not too shy to mention how profitable the marriage could be for Ernest.Gladstone is a revelation as Molly. Her role is a kind of world in itself inside the film. Love, we discover, is for her a deeper reality than we might imagine. De Niro plays the most morally repulsive character in his career, and that’s saying a lot. He’s riveting. But Leonardo DiCaprio's thick, slow Ernest, is the great enigma: the tragedy at the root of our inhumanity, Scorsese seems to be saying, is like a kind of sleep—the unconscious stumbling from one influence to another, one selfish act to another, that life becomes in an atmosphere of corruption.This is classic cinema at its most elaborate. It is, however, the story of the Osage community that grounds the film. The native cast is excellent. And it’s not that Indians are more spiritual than the whites, or don’t have flaws. What we see, though, is that they’re connected, to the world and to family and to one another, whereas the white characters are trapped in a narrow and superficial version of self.Finally, don’t let the film’s three and a half hour length prevent you from seeing it on the big screen. It’s not too often these days that you get to see a big film, in the truest sense, in a theater. Killers of the Flower Moon is a profound experience and a stark awakening from our shared American nightmare.
The husband of a famous author falls to his death, and the wife is prosecuted for murder, in a film about the conflicting truths of intimate relationships.Film marketers and critics always try to fit a movie into a slot, a recognizable genre or type of narrative. That can be problematic. Anatomy of a Fall, the new film from French director Justine Triet, is being a called a thriller, but to take that label at face value is to distort its true quality. There are no thrills here. There is a mystery that becomes a courtroom drama, yet even that can be misleading.Sandra Voyter, played by German actress Sandra Hüller, is a well-known author living in a cabin in the French Alps with her husband Sam, also a writer, and their 10-year-old son Daniel. We open with Sandra being interviewed in her living room by a young woman, presumably for some article, but as they talk the music playing upstairs becomes louder and louder. It’s her husband, Sandra says, who always does this when he’s doing repairs and refurnishing, which he’s doing in the attic right now. But the music gets so loud that the interview can’t go on, and Sandra apologizes, saying they can meet somewhere else at some future point.Then we see young Daniel in sunglasses, not blind but visually impaired, wandering around the woods with his dog. Returning home eventually, with the loud music still playing, he finds his father, Sam, lying in a pool of blood on the snow in front of the house. This is the first time in the film we see Sam. Daniel screams for his mother, Sandra runs out; we then see her calling the emergency number while Daniel sobs. Cut to the emergency medical personnel putting the body into an ambulance. Sam is dead.So how did this happen? Sandra seems mystified, and a few days later when her lawyer friend visits and asks probing questions, her account of what she was doing doesn’t explain much. A process begins in which police investigators build a case for Sandra having murdered her husband, hitting him in the head and pushing him off a balcony. The other possibility, which Sandra brings up, is suicide. And there is evidence to support that as well, the blow being caused by Sam’s head hitting a shed below the attic window before bouncing off onto the ground. These two theories make up the point of dispute between prosecution and defense in the eventual trial.The mystery of course presents itself to the audience, but surprisingly it is not the primary emphasis of the director, Triet. Instead, these events, fraught with trauma especially for the young son, become a means to explore interesting aspects of people, and their relationships, that don’t fit into a simple pattern. Both the prosecutor and the defense try to create this pattern. The prosecutor is out to prove that Sandra was very angry at Sam, and that her behavior on the day of Sam’s death doesn’t add up. The defense argues that she is innocent of all of this, and was still committed to the marriage. But when it’s revealed that there’s a recording of an argument between the couple, and the court listens to it, we realize how variable and complex their behavior is, and in fact how this is true for us as well, for everybody going through the day-to-day events and reactions in a relationship. The truth is never pretty or simple or perfect.Anatomy of a Fall wants to tear away the false curtain that hides and distorts our lives. It is a subtly evocative and ultimately devastating film.
American director Ari Aster staked out a claim for being an artist of the horror genre in his first two features, Hereditary and Midsommar. With his third, called Beau Is Afraid, he’s pushed himself, and the audience, past the limits of the form. Is it a horror movie? You could call it that, but I would argue that it purposely defies our expectations of horror in order to create something quite different.The title gives us the essence of the story. Beau, a disheveled middle-aged man with a wide-eyed stare, played by Joaquin Phoenix, lives alone in a small apartment. He is afraid of everything all the time. We, the audience, are totally confined to Beau’s point of view. What he hears, for instance, of other people outside his apartment, is a stream of muttering, crying, screaming, moaning, and arguing, punctuated with occasional gunshots. It doesn’t take long to figure out that what Beau perceives is not necessarily real—in fact, as the film goes on, we stop being able to distinguish if anything is objectively real—our suspicion that he sees and hears things that aren’t there, plus the fact that everyone seems to be plotting against him, indicates that he might be paranoid schizophrenic, yet there’s no hint of such a diagnosis in the movie.Beau is planning to travel soon to visit his mother, on the anniversary of his father’s death (which right away tells us something is off). He packs a bag, he has plane tickets, but as he’s about to leave he goes back into the apartment because he’s forgotten something, only to find when he starts to leave again that his suitcase is missing along with the keys to his apartment. He has to call his mother to explain, and the conversation is a perfect encapsulation of guilt and anxiety. Thus begins a darkly surreal journey into the depths of madness.Horror movies use fear as a stimulant. The audience gets pleasure from being scared, then gets a little relief, then more scares. It’s how horror films entertain us. Ari Aster seems to be saying: What if all you felt was fear? What if fear was the underlying condition of all your experience?Joaquin Phoenix, in a performance of intense discipline, embodies a character who can only be a victim, who has no defense against any and all attacks of malice, misfortune, and abuse. The one word he says more than any other is “What?” He cannot comprehend the disastrous series of events that fill his mind. He is deceived, stabbed, hit by a speeding car. He witnesses murders and a suicide. At the center of all this is an emotionally incestuous bond with his mother, a prominent businesswoman who berates him without mercy for his failures.The more bizarre things happen, the more we guess that he is creating his own suffering without realizing it, a mental trauma that persists because that’s all he knows. We must guess all this—nothing is spelled out.A horror film usually wraps things up dramatically in a certain time. Aster says no, I don’t want just entertainment—instead, he’s made his movie three hours long, and I think we’re meant to feel exhausted and spiritually crushed, just like the beleaguered main character. Beau Is Afraid is a difficult film. It has bursts of maniacal humor that only emphasize the bleakness of the living nightmare. It’s a messy masterwork.
American director Ira Sachs makes films that explore relationships—of all kinds, although he’s well known as an important figure in gay cinema since the late 1990s. His latest picture is called Passages, and I think it’s his most remarkable yet. The word “passages” is a way to describe the life of relationships, their lows and heights, the often complicated journey of feelings involved.
We meet a young man in the midst of directing a film. His demands on the actors and crew are forcefully, that is to say harshly, expressed. This is Tomas, played by Franz Rogowski, a driven personality, extraordinarily free in his manner, a gay German in Paris, married to Martin, a brilliant young Englishman played by Ben Whishaw. We learn all this somewhat randomly in the first twenty minutes or so, but the film starts right off with Tomas encountering a young French woman named Agathe, and played by Adèle Exarchopoulos. They go to bed that same night. Later, Tomas tells Martin about it, saying it was a new kind of exciting experience for him. He expects his husband to just accept this, but of course Martin will have trouble with it.
So in the abstract, the situation is of a gay man turning towards being straight, and then maybe wanting to be both at the same time. But Sachs’s film is anything but abstract. Co-written with Mauricio Zacharias and Arlette Langmann, Passages is resolutely focused on human beings and their real desires and faults, not on stereotypes.
At the center is a mesmerizing performance by Rogowski as Tomas—he’s risen to be one of the best actors in cinema in recent years. We first see Tomas’s self-centeredness, but then Rogowski shows us many other aspects: he has a kind of gentle assertiveness and honesty; we can understand why he seems attractive to his two lovers; the film never tells us to hate him; the serious problems that he exhibits simply become more evident, as they would in real life with someone we know that has such issues. We could call him a sex and romance addict, but the character is too complex to be dismissed so simply. Both of his partners endure a kind of roller coaster ride, ecstatic but also tragic and hurtful.
Key to the filmmakers’ notions about the characters is that sex is good and desirable and important. I think it’s weird that this point of view could be controversial at all, but there you are. There’s lots of explicit sex in the movie, and the director chooses to make it as realistic and lengthy as he can. This is a major reason that Tomas, Martin, and Agathe are involved with each other, and Sachs makes us experience and feel this viscerally. At the same time we know, or suspect, that emotional intimacy is always just out of reach for Tomas, who seems to desire whichever partner is not currently in his life.
By the way, there are conversations that are in French—not too many, but we are in Paris, after all. Sachs makes an interesting stylistic choice here: no subtitles. I don’t know French, so at first I was annoyed. Then I was won over by the idea. Just as in real life, I listen to languages I don’t understand, and there are no subtitles to help. In any case, if you pay attention you can understand the gist of the scenes.
Passages is a brilliant, dark, fascinating fever dream—starring: the wounded narcissist in all of us.
The gangster movie has been a durable genre, along with the western, one of the uniquely American film types. There had been such films in the silent era, but the early 1930s was when they suddenly took off. Three Hollywood films in particular, all made within roughly the same year, were the origin points for just about everything that came after, a kind of unholy trinity of crime pictures.
The first one was Little Caesar, released by Warner Brothers in 1931, directed by Mervyn Leroy, and starring Edward G. Robinson as Rico Bandelli, a Chicago mob boss based loosely on Al Capone. Robinson’s performance made him a star, and endless comedians since have parodied the character’s mannerisms, with “Myeah myeah! I’m the boss. See?” and so forth. Robinson’s work in the film is much more subtle than this caricature—revealing Rico’s brutality, suspiciousness, and animalistic enjoyment of power. The Warners were cutting costs by cutting their movies for speed, which encouraged economy of means and expression. LeRoy excelled at this. In one great sequence, a couple pairs of legs walk swiftly into a room, we hear shots, a body falling, and then a glimpse of the killers’ hats as they turn and flee. All in mere seconds. The movie was a box office hit, despite the usual concerns of the moral crusaders always looking askance at Hollywood.
The second picture, released later the same year, was called The Public Enemy, also at Warners, which in the ‘30s was the one studio focused more on urban working class stories more than fantasies about rich people. William Wellman, a veteran with a reputation for risk-taking, was the director. His intuition for talent helped him here: James Cagney was cast as the main character’s sidekick, but after seeing him work, Wellman switched the two actors, putting Cagney in the lead as Tom Powers, a tough Irish mobster from Chicago. His performance is stunning, full of wild scary energy, speedy wisecracking, and jaunty belligerence. I’ll never forget the look in his eyes when Powers, in the pouring rain, gets ready to enter a gathering of enemies with guns blazing. It’s absolutely chilling. The expert editing and sound make this film stand out as one of the true greats.
The third movie, released early in 1932, was Scarface, made by Howard Hawks for a small outfit run by millionaire Howard Hughes. It starred the famous and well-regarded actor Paul Muni as Tony Camonte, yet another Chicago gangster (honestly, there were other cities that had gangs) inspired by Al Capone. Of the three films, this one’s the most violent. Tony is a barely literate homicidal monster who tears relentlessly through gangland with machine guns, and to top that, has an unacknowledged romantic obsession with his own sister. The picture is also pretty funny—Hawks highlighting all the most exaggerated criminal fantasies and revenge scenarios he could come up with. The guardians of virtue attacked this film in particular as glorifying criminals, and Hawks was forced to put a little prologue before the story, telling the audience that crime doesn’t pay. Incidentally, there’s no point comparing this to the Al Pacino film from the ‘80s. The only thing really similar is the title.
The unholy gangster film trinity: Little Caesar, The Public Enemy, and Scarface, all released in 1931 and ’32, are available on streaming platforms and on DVD and Blu-ray.
There Is No Evil, a film by Iranian writer and director Mohammad Rasoulof, consists of four separate stories, and if you come to the movie cold, it might be difficult to discover a connecting theme between them. In the first story, we watch an ordinary looking middle-aged man drive his car out of a big parking garage, and then go about his day, dropping his daughter off at school, shopping, picking up his wife, going to the bank, visiting his mother-in-law, and eventually going home to an early bedtime so he gets enough sleep to do the night shift again. The style, patient and leisurely paced, closely observes a lot of everyday detail about life in an Iranian city. Then, at the very end of the story, we’re given a shock.
There are some movies that it’s hard to say much of anything about, because, well, reviews aren’t supposed to have “spoilers.” In this case, however, most people outside of Iran will struggle with understanding the film without some background. This I need to mention: the fact that the background explains the theme is too bad—but to make up for that, I won’t reveal the particular ways that the theme occurs as action.
The background is that the government of Iran, after the 1979 revolution, executed many thousands of dissidents, leftists, secularists, and anyone else deemed an enemy of the Islamic Republic. This continued through the 1990s, when writers and intellectuals were targeted for elimination. Furthermore, the government would order other prisoners, soldiers, even family members, to participate in these executions, by kicking the stool away from people to be hanged. The four stories in There is No Evil each concern people who, at some time or another, in some form, were ordered to carry out executions.
The wildly intense second story is about an inmate in a soldier’s prison who is told that if he executes a prisoner, his sentence will be significantly shortened. The third story follows a young soldier on leave who visits his fiancée and her family in the country, then discovers to his dismay that she is mourning a man who had stayed with them, and had recently died. No, she insists, it was not romantic—he was an activist and mentor whom she admired. The final story shows us a married couple in a remote part of the country who are visited by their niece, a medical student, on the suggestion of her father. Her aunt and uncle are small farmers, and while the uncle shows her around, and talks about things like how a fox ate all their chickens, she wonders why this man, a skilled doctor, gave up his practice to do this.
Each story is unique. Each shows a different segment of Iran and society. And the effect of the theme is noticeably different in each, but in essence the moral emergency is the same. Can you look yourself in the mirror after executing a human being?
Rasoulof has gotten negative attention before. He had this film shot in secret (amazing when you look at the beauty of the visuals here) and then smuggled out of Iran. It promptly won the Golden Bear, the top prize at Berlin. It was then banned in Iran, of course, and the government put Rasoulof in prison. This is the price of a truthful film in today’s Iran.
The title, There Is No Evil, by the way, is ironic. We have a habit of looking at evil as if it were somebody else.
J. Robert Oppenheimer was an American physicist who was assigned to be the head of the Manhattan Project, a team of scientists tasked with developing an atomic bomb during World War II. Once American intelligence knew that German scientists were working on creating such a bomb, it was a race against time for the United States to get there first, given the existential threat posed by Hitler. In 1945, when Germany was defeated, the project continued, and a bomb was successfully detonated in New Mexico. It was used to destroy two Japanese cities that year, ending the Pacific war.
It’s an extremely complex historical subject, as was Oppenheimer’s life, character, and career. To make a good dramatic film out of it would be a daunting prospect. But British director Christopher Nolan is accustomed to being challenged. He likes to do big movies: big budgets, big stories, on big wide screens. And with film, not digital. Fascinated by this “father of the atomic bomb,” he presents us now with his latest epic, Oppenheimer, something different from what he’s done before, a film about important issues and ideas in recent American history.
Cillian Murphy, in the role of a lifetime, plays Robert Oppenheimer, with his fedora and his pipe: a brooding and enigmatic character, a man of contradictions. Nolan, in a gutsy move, uses as his narrative framing device, two hearings: one in the 1940s, after the war, in which Oppenheimer and other witnesses are cross-examined by a military intelligence panel determined to take away Oppenheimer’s security clearance, and a Senate hearing from the 1950s, in black and white, interrogating the head of the Atomic Energy Commission, Lewis Strauss, played by Robert Downey, Jr., about his relationship with Oppenheimer. I call it gutsy because in what is marketed as a blockbuster, there is a lot of talk in these hearings, a lot of debate, all taken from the actual transcripts, and Nolan respects the audience enough to let them absorb a lot of information in the course of the film.
The flashbacks emerge from the hearings: Oppenheimer at Harvard, and later studying in Germany. His interest in progressive causes in the ‘30s, his donating to help the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War. His encounter with Communists during this period, although he never joined the party. And then the center of the narrative: the Manhattan Project itself, with Matt Damon as General Groves, the military supervisor of the effort, and featuring a lot of other significant characters, such as Neils Bohr and Edward Teller. The climax, the detonation at Los Alamos, is stunning.
Oppenheimer had doubts about the morality of using the bomb that haunted him throughout his life. The story Nolan tells is of a scientist who devoted himself to helping his country defeat the most evil regime ever known—Nazi Germany—sacrificing his time, his career, and even his personal judgment for this greater good. But the American establishment, freaked out after the war about the Soviet threat, turned on him and used his past association with Communists to destroy him. Oppenheimer himself is conflicted—we see him making an awkward, bellicose speech after Hiroshima, to please a crowd—but we also see him sharing his feeling of guilt with President Truman (Gary Oldman), who dismisses him with contempt. Despite some missteps, I think this admission of inner uncertainty is what makes Oppenheimer a moving experience. America is still conflicted, and the film isn’t afraid to show this.
Wes Anderson has a consistent style. It’s impossible to mistake it for someone else’s. But that doesn’t mean all his films are the same, or are based on the same idea. And in the case of his latest picture, Asteroid City, I think we’re seeing something conceptually different from anything he’s done before.
We begin in black-and-white, with a pompous host (Bryan Cranston) telling us about a great play being written by a great American author, Conrad Earp, played by Edward Norton. It’s a play, but the black-and-white aesthetic seems to place it in the realm of live TV in the 1950s, when interesting original drama by new writers and directors was regularly aired on the still-young television networks. This particular play is set in 1955, in a small tourist attraction in the middle of nowhere, with desert as far as the eye can see, called Asteroid City. An asteroid fell there some time ago, and this clump of buildings (you could hardly call it a town, much less a city) has built up around it. And the camera helps us out at one point by doing a complete 360 so we can see it all.
Jason Schwartzman plays Augie Steenbeck, who is taking his kids to see their grandfather when the car breaks down in Asteroid City. He’s put off telling them that their mother has just died, and is forced to do so now in the most awkward way possible, showing them the Tupperware containing her ashes. It so happens that there is a junior astronomy fair and contest scheduled for that weekend in Asteroid City, and Augie’s gifted son Woodrow is interested in participating. Here is the occasion for the entrance of a whole bunch of characters connected with the event, including a moody, enigmatic woman played by Scarlet Johansson, who forges an ambiguous bond with Schwartzman’s character. There are characters played by Tom Hanks, Liev Schreiber, Steve Carrell, and many others. The junior astronomy event itself is interrupted by an alien emerging from a descending space ship, in a neat evocation of 1950s science fiction.
So here I’ve described what sounds like a plot. But watching the film, it becomes evident that the story is actually very abstract, extremely loose-fitting, like a game where you play with certain elements in different ways, just for the fun. Anderson has pulled the narrative thread out, and left us with an amusing and intriguing series of symbols of American beliefs and illusions. And then from time to time we return to the framing device in black-and-white, by which we are reminded that this is just fiction. Anderson’s subject is fiction itself, the act of playing with fictional characters doing fictional things. Here he celebrates the delight, puzzlement, and essential artificiality of the whole enterprise.
What cracks me up, I have to admit, is that because of Wes Anderson’s unique, well-known style, and his ability to load his films with lots of famous actors, he’s managed to launch what is basically an avant-garde art film into the cinematic mainstream, while laughing at his own audacity. Late in the film, a few of the actors start complaining that they don’t understand the play. Anderson might be trying to speak for the audience here. The odd and insistent phrase (and song) “you can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep” is as straightforward as Anderson will ever get. For artists to create, they need to first turn off their conventional ideas of reality. Or so it seems to me, but I do believe I need to watch Asteroid City again.
Religious stories go wrong in the movies so often, it’s enough to scare a filmmaker off the subject altogether. But one happy exception is The Nun’s Story from 1959, adapted from a best-seller by Kathryn Hulme, and directed by Fred Zinnemann. Audrey Hepburn plays Gabrielle, the daughter of a famous French surgeon, who becomes a nun in the 1930s and works as a surgeon's assistant in the Congo. Hollywood has always presented such a wishy-washy image of Catholicism and nuns—see The Bells of St. Mary's, for example—that the seriousness and craft of this film caught me by surprise.
The first third of the movie, which takes place in a convent, is especially good. The film patiently follows Gabrielle through each phase of her initiation into convent life. The pace is unhurried, the treatment is even-handed, and the effect is fascinating. Instead of the usual sugary sentimental music, the picture has a moody, and at times even ominous, score by Franz Waxman that reflects the real inner conflicts that would occur in the heart of someone attempting to devote herself to the rigors of a religious life.
It seems to me that this is the best work Audrey Hepburn ever did on screen. For once she is not an object of romance, but a complex character striving for meaning in her own life. She performs marvels in portraying a life that goes through quite a few different phases of growth and varying beliefs.
The Congo sequences don't have quite the compelling interest of the earlier scenes in the convent. However, a very young Peter Finch is on hand as a rakish, unbelieving surgeon. How refreshing that his growing regard for Sister Luke (played by Hepburn) is only on the level of friendship—and no one tries to convert him, either. In fact, the film's attitude towards belief is on the whole rather interesting in that it never becomes dogmatic on either side, only caring to present the nun's inner struggle clearly.
This was a big studio production, by one of the most highly regarded directors in the industry—Zinnemann was of course the man who had made High Noon and From Here to Eternity. The Nun’s Story was critically acclaimed, although it got swept by Ben-Hur at the Oscars that year, and it did well at the box office. But for some reason, it’s not that well known any more. I know of few films that so beautifully depict someone’s inward progress as a person, without being at all dull. And the ending, the final scene, is one of the masterpieces of cinema, perfectly restrained, without any music, and emotionally stunning. One can only say, “Bravo.”
The Nun’s Story is available on DVD.
The Cathedral, the remarkable sophomore feature by Ricky D'Ambrose, is a subtle drama of an average-seeming extended middle class New Jersey family from the 1980s through the early 2000s. The central couple is Richard Damrosch, who owns a printing business, and his beautiful wife Lydia. They get married in the ‘80s, and have a son together, Jesse.
We watch certain scenes, some of key events like the wedding, others banal and everyday, and the only backstory we get is provided by an occasional female voice-over, drily explaining the basic situations and relationships. Lydia’s father does not like Richard. Richard’s parents are distant. There’s a grandmother that gets resentfully shuffled around between different adult children. Lydia’s mother and aunt are hostile and end up not speaking to each other for years. In the beginning I said that this is an average-seeming family, and that’s one of the film’s brilliant achievements, to take a so-called “normal” family and reveal, without drama, the bleak dysfunction at its core.
Most striking in this respect is the father, Richard, played with alarming assurance by Brian d’Arcy James. Richard, we discover, is a narcissist filled with resentment and self-pity, compelled to make scenes that ruin even the most benign family gatherings. He and Lydia divorce after a few years. They both get remarried. Still, the emotional chaos continues, swirling around the life of their quiet, withdrawn son Jesse, played by four different young actors from the ages of 3 to 18. And here is another key to the movie’s unusual style and effect.
We don’t see or hear very much of Jesse, even when he gets older and more vocal. And yet the entire film is in a sense filtered through his experience. I don’t mean that it’s shot from his point of view—there are many scenes in which he’s not present. But we, the audience, outside of the cryptic general statements by the narrator, only know what Jesse knows. All the simple, often petty emotional interactions are set against a blank background: what’s all this about? D’Ambrose captures perfectly a young person’s incomplete awareness, and indeed confusion, about the disturbing family dynamic into which he has been born.
The director’s odd camera angles—often putting events at a distance—combined with the naturalistic behavior and dialogue (it’s as if a camera just happened to be running off in a corner somewhere), and some extremely creative sound design, create a truly disorienting yet creepy and familiar atmosphere. Everything is invested with secrets, with the important thing being that much of what’s going on is a secret to the people themselves. There’s something basically wrong with everyone’s relationship to reality, an unconscious misunderstanding that affects everything they say and do. In the midst of it all, we see Jesse emerging, in what seems probably D’Ambrose’s autobiographical sense, as a quiet and serious young man who has spent his childhood protecting himself from the storm around him, developing an intense interest in photography.
The film’s title, The Cathedral, is taken from a scene in which Jesse as a boy is copying a picture of a cathedral from a book. Whatever metaphorical path we may follow from there is up to us. The Cathedral is a paradoxically compassionate film; throughout its portrait of distress there’s a commitment to truth focusing our vision.
Often in discussions of that brief period in the early 1970s when there was the promise of a new kind of American film, it seems as if the same few famous names and movies come up: The Godfather, Chinatown, Nashville, and so forth. But perhaps more significant is that a film like Payday could be made, a 1973 picture directed by Daryl Duke, remarkably free in tone and sense of character, with a screenplay by Don Carpenter that has the gritty, honest feel of a good novel, along with a mesmerizing performance from its second-tier star, surrounded by an excellent cast of virtual unknowns. Even in its tenderest moments, the picture stays completely free of formula and sentimentality, which seems almost unthinkable nowadays.
The story concerns two or three hectic days in the life of Maury Dann, a wild, self-centered, party-loving country singer played by Rip Torn, who lives on the road and dangerously near the edge, drinks way too much, and he takes pills so that he can keep moving without having to sleep, traveling from one gig to another, with an entourage of manager, girlfriend, roadies, bandmates and groupies. Caught in the spell of his charisma is a hopelessly naive country girl, played by Elaine Heilveil with a vulnerability that is both humorous and agonizing. Maury quarrels with his friends, gets into fights, screws whomever he can, botches an awkward visit with his ex-wife, and finally gets into the kind of trouble that takes some real ingenuity to get out of.
Among the darkly comic scenes of misbehavior, favorites of mine would include Maury’s visit to his pill-addicted mother, frighteningly aged beyond her years in a rundown wreck of a house; and his attempt to get out of a public appearance by presenting a bottle of Wild Turkey to a DJ while he’s being interviewed on the air.
Rip Torn is intensely watchable in a role that would probably have been less interesting with a more handsome actor. His not quite good looks are undercut by a strong sense of despair and inner dissolution. Torn does all his own singing, and he does quite well. It’s just one more sign of the film's originality that Maury's fate does not seem inevitable, only one more stop on a crooked highway.
Daryl Duke coaches wonderful performances from the actors. It seems strange that his career never really went anywhere—other than Payday, his only claim to fame was directing the TV miniseries The Thorn Birds years later. And the film Payday didn't go much of anywhere either, in terms of box office. The real star, besides Torn, is the Don Carpenter script, which has the rare quality of fully knowing the world it reveals, inside and out. Little known, insufficiently appreciated, Payday is no grand statement, preferring to tell its story in small but significant details. Watching it is like rediscovering the lost spirit of the ‘70s in American movies.
Our connection to the land is one of the central facts of human existence. It’s also true that this connection is not felt so widely or strongly as it used to be, with urban environments growing ever more dominate. Now Spanish director Carla Simón presents a film exploring a family’s deep bond to the farm they live on, and the tragedy of gradual separation from the land. It’s called Alcarràs, and it takes place in a region of that name in Catalonia, the northeast part of Spain that has its own distinctive character and language. And all the characters in the film speak Catalan.
We open with three little kids playing in an abandoned car in a field: Iris and her twin boy cousins, pretending to be in a rocket ship, with the full conviction only kids can summon, while, ominously, an excavator works nearby digging up the field in which they’re playing. The children are part of a large extended family of peach farmers.
We see next a family meeting where bad news is breaking. The grandfather had made a handshake deal with the landowner after the Civil War. The landowner has died, and his son now plans to convert everything to a solar power plant. The older son, Quimet, rages against his father’s foolishness in trusting to a handshake and not getting their rights to the land on a piece of paper, meaning they are now facing the eventual end of their farm.
The rest of the film will let us experience things from the point of view of each member of this family: Quimet’s wife Dolors, fiercely loving and protective; his sisters and brother-in-law, who want to accept working for the solar panel company; his teenage son who tries to be of help but gets the brunt of his father’s anger; and his lonely, sensitive, teenage daughter Mariona, who sees with anxiety the conflict around her, and has trouble understanding. Simón has the remarkable ability to bring us inside the subjective point of view of each character so that our experience is multifaceted. And all the while the film pays close attention to the daily manual labor of tending and harvesting the peach trees; we feel what it’s like to have this close, concentrated relationship to the orchard and the fruit, and to live in this cycle of hands-on work, and we realize that getting rid of this kind of farming by a small landholding class ends up getting rid of the kind of human beings that will grow up within that environment.
Even as Simón draws our attention to the numerous dramas between the adults, and the feelings of the teenagers, she returns again to the play of the children, who enact in a way the family’s desire for stability. She also brings a feminist perspective to the story by giving full weight to the points of view of the women and girls, along with some critical attitudes towards the stubbornness and conflicts of the men.
With such a supple and versatile narrative approach, one can only allow the beauty and fatefulness of this movie to sink into the heart and permeate the senses. Alcarràs is a work of profound feeling and insight, and despite everything, a prayer of hope in the future.
Mike Leigh, the British writer and director, came on the scene in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s with a series of films portraying the ups and downs of lower middle class life in England. Perhaps the most representative is one from 1990 entitled Life Is Sweet.
In the film we meet a weird family in a London suburb muddling its way through life. Wendy (Alison Steadman) holds things together with her good-natured energy, always laughing at everything, and she’s more than a trifle overbearing as a mom. Her husband Andy (Jim Broadbent) hates his job managing a kitchen at a restaurant, and he's a bit of an impractical dreamer, getting suckered into buying a dilapidated snack wagon from a friend played by Stephen Rea. They have two daughters: Natalie (Claire Skinner), the one relatively sane person in the film, who looks upon her family's antics with puzzled bemusement, and Nicola (Jane Horrocks), an angry, foul-mouthed bulimic who spends her time moping indoors and playing weird sex games with her secret boyfriend, played by David Thewlis.
Leigh pulls off the neat trick of making a comedy about wildly eccentric characters without looking down on them. This is partly due, perhaps, to his famously improvisatory methods, in which the cast members create their characters and dialogue through extensive rehearsals. The people are three-dimensional enough to make us feel as if we're simply sitting among them as equals, and the laughter is therefore always tinged with self-recognition, and sometimes with more than a little pain. An extensive subplot features Timothy Spall as a friend of the family who attempts to launch a French restaurant—one of the most ludicrous restaurants ever conceived, with menu items so revolting that I was almost rolling on the ground laughing. But the hilarity is tied up with failure and a sad fit of self-destruction. Leigh's comic world view often winds up on a sad note.
Everyone is in fine form, with Steadman and Broadbent anchoring the show. But the funniest, most vivid, and at the same time the most cartoonish performance is by Jane Horrocks, with her rubbery, squinting little face, screechy voice, and wild mess of hair, smoking furiously and telling everyone off. She's wonderfully obnoxious, and then we get to see the fear and self-hatred behind the rage. The film's ultimate simplicity of feeling is its greatest strength. There's nothing trite about Nicola finding some relief and healing through tears. Neither should the title be taken as a joke. For Leigh, life really is sweet. And the mix of humor and hurt helps make it so.
A friend once teased me, calling me “the boy who cried masterpiece,” because of my over-fondness for that word. But I’m going to use that word again, having recently watched the latest film from Chinese director Qiu Jiongjiong, called A New Old Play. It’s a stunning 3-hour epic drama, with satirical elements, about a fictional Chinese opera troupe, from the 1920s through the early 1970s.
We start with a strange framing device. Two figures emerge from behind a hill, one of them making a sound like a horse, the other like an ox, and pedaling a raggedy looking carriage decked with lights. They are ancient messengers from the underworld, the land of the dead, and they’re here to transport a well-known opera performer named Qiu Fu, and played by Yi Sicheng, to the afterlife after his recent death. Qiu tries to argue with the spirits, but in the end he has no choice. He has to travel with them, first through a shadowy netherworld and eventually across a river to his final home. While wandering through the netherworld, he reminisces about his life and the history of his opera troupe in extended flashbacks which take up the bulk of the film.
The orphaned son of a famous actor, Qiu tags along with his father’s former Sichuan opera company in the 1920s. They laugh at him and try to kick him out, but the master of the troupe sees something in him, and he’s given training. This is an innovative group—China having recently become a republic—that seeks to modernize the art, with one of the key innovations being allowing women to play female characters. We follow Qiu’s story, as a youth, then a young man, to success as the company’s number one clown. There are also many other characters who are granted a point of view in the story: it’s a rich fabric of interesting relationships. Crucially, the personal stories are set against the dramatic stages of 20th century Chinese history.
The director, Qiu, has an eye for the telling detail. For this story, he employs theatrical devices to create a kind of magical realist effect. We feel the intense historical reality while recognizing the artificiality of the form. The sets are obviously painted sets, and the many props and other production details are clearly the kind you might see on a stage, but brought out to beautiful effect by the camera and its many tracking shots across the scenes that are presented for maximum effect. Almost every sequence, every shot in the movie contains something to stimulate, provoke, or puzzle the viewer. The historical reality is conveyed through the slightest means. When Mao takes over the country, the new training of the theater company to conform to party doctrine is darkly comical, as we can see its effect on the already jaded performers. The film’s title comes to mind here: A New Old Play. It’s like the lyric from that song by The Who: “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”
The film doesn’t flinch from recalling the tragedies of Chinese history. It covers the famine that killed millions in the ‘50s. It covers the so-called Cultural Revolution in the ‘60s, with its stupid scapegoating of an entire generation. We see a prisoner in one of the work camps building a brick enclosure that will eventually entrap him. But the symbolism goes even beyond politics. Those entering the underworld must first drink from a stream of forgetfulness. Forgetting is the ultimate price. But this film, this masterpiece, A New Old Play, won’t let us forget.
How to Blow Up a Pipeline takes its title from a book by Andreas Malme. It’s not really a “how to” book, but argues that climate activists are going to have to do more than just demonstrate. They’re going to have to commit sabotage if they hope to help prevent the worst catastrophes ahead of us. Daniel Goldhaber’s film turns this idea into a thriller about a team of eight people planning to blow up a major pipeline in Texas. He co-wrote the film with Jordan Sjol and one of the lead actors, Ariela Barer.
How to Blow Up a Pipeline bears resemblance to many classic heist films, in which a team of characters, with their individual talents and flaws, comes together to pull off a big job. Here, the story’s main thread, the long and careful preparation for their action, is interrupted as we go along by flashbacks giving the motivations and background of each character. The one cinematic parallel that comes to mind is Reservoir Dogs, although in tone and subject matter the films are not at all alike.
Ariela Barer plays Xochitl, a young woman from Long Beach, California, growing up in the shadow of the oil refineries that she blames for her mother’s early death. One of her best friends is Theo (Sasha Lane), a lesbian who’s been diagnosed with leukemia, and sees environmental pollution as the cause. Xochitl also meets and befriends Shaun (Marcus Scriber), part of a divestment movement in their Chicago college. Shawn recruits an unlikely ally into their group, Dwayne (Jake Weary), a blue collar Texan whom you might expect to be conservative, except that oil companies have used the device of “eminent domain” to seize land that is part of his inherited homestead. The film uses the character of Dwayne to illustrate that not everyone fighting the climate crisis is going to be a left-wing type. His special usefulness in the team is that he knows the landscape around the target like the back of his hand. Rounding out the team is Michael (Forrest Goodluck) a Native American who has turned himself into a bomb expert, and finally, a goofy young white couple whose casual attitudes about the whole thing are meant to set off alarm bells for the audience.
This is not a polemic. There’s room for argument, for example from Michael’s mother, a more traditional non-violent activist, and from Theo’s girlfriend, played by Jayme Lawson, who joins the group because she’s deeply in love with Theo, but is continually alarmed by the risk and danger of the enterprise, asking if this is all worth the potential consequences. The picture works very well as a thriller, outside of any political context—it’s gripping, suspenseful, and cleverly plotted. The story of Michael, the bomb expert, is especially dramatic and striking. The film is not above using the threat of catastrophe to get our pulses racing, and with Michael that includes every time he goes about crafting the bomb that they’re planning to use.
At the same time, the movie is daring in its convictions. A story like this, conveying ideas that are not mainstream, to put it mildly, can be ruined by special pleading or the manipulation of sentiment. Goldhaber does none of that. Here is a gang of idealistic misfits: approve of them or don’t, either way the story will force you to think. How to Blow Up a Pipeline brilliantly uses the fictional to raise awareness of the actual.
There’s a story that after a certain American movie critic spent some time in Paris in the late 50s reading and listening to the new breed of French film critics, he sent a letter to a critic in the States asking, “Who the hell is Howard Hawks?” It’s true that the French elevated Hawks, a seasoned Hollywood director, into their critical pantheon, but he really wasn’t that obscure. He’d been nominated for an Oscar for Sergeant York in 1941, and he’d helmed plenty of hits through the years. But most film reviewers didn’t pay much attention to directors in the old days, and Hawks was also never identified with a single studio—he was an independent, hiring himself out to whoever wanted his services. This gave him greater creative control than your average Hollywood director, but less publicity.
He directed 40 films, and more good ones than I have time to mention. 1930’s The Dawn Patrol, a World War One air pilot story done for the Fox studio, has a great sense of male camaraderie that became typical of a Hawks picture, with terrific flying sequences and none of the stilted dialogue that you see with most early sound films. (Later he was to top himself with the great air pilot film Only Angels Have Wings.) In 1932, he took on Scarface for Howard Hughes, with Paul Muni playing a criminal loosely based on Al Capone. Of all the early gangster movies, this one has the most taut, physical style, and the most brutally realistic point of view. It was controversial for supposedly glamorizing crime, making it look fun, but that’s really just the exuberance of Hawk’s storytelling, and the dialogue of the brilliant Ben Hecht, who went on to do five more films with Hawks.
Hawks was good at comedies too. Twentieth Century, made in 1934 for Columbia, features John Barrymore and Carole Lombard verbally tearing each other to shreds. Bringing Up Baby, for RKO in 1938, is arguably the screwiest screwball comedy ever, with Cary Grant as a confused paleontologist pursued by the wildly eccentric Katharine Hepburn in her funniest work ever. It didn’t make money, but it’s become a classic since then. Then there’s His Girl Friday in 1940, a version of the old play The Front Page, but with the reporter played by a woman this time, Rosalind Russell. In the lead role, Cary Grant gives his greatest performance, as the slick-talking, totally unscrupulous editor Walter Burns. The dialogue is so fast and funny that you barely have time to catch your breath.
Hawks had a way of attracting good writers. In addition to Hecht, for Warner Brothers in the late ‘40s he had Jules Furthman and the novelist William Faulkner helping him out. To Have and Have Not, and The Big Sleep, both with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, feature an unforgettable mixture of toughness and cool, especially The Big Sleep, in my opinion the best detective movie ever made. Hawks did plenty of westerns too, including Red River in ’48 with John Wayne and Montgomery Clift, in which he pioneered an overlapping dialogue technique. John Ford saw it and half-kiddingly said that Hawks had somehow tricked John Wayne into actually acting. In his one musical, 1953’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, the producer saw Marilyn Monroe performing “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” and said “What? Who knew she could sing?” But that was another thing about Hawks—he could bring an actor’s hidden talents to the surface.
So, who the hell was Howard Hawks? A tall, imposing, distinguished man from the Midwest, radiating a quiet authority, the consummate professional, he is generally considered one of the five or six greatest directors who ever lived.
Hiroo Onoda was a Japanese officer stationed on Lubang, a small island in the Philippines, in 1944. In 1974, he was discovered to still be there, having stayed on that island for the past thirty years, continuing to believe that the war was still going on, surviving in the jungle, and obeying his original orders not to give himself up. There were other similar cases in the Pacific War—his was the first one to become famous, after which the idea of a lone Japanese soldier stranded on an island, in his mind still at war, became a perennial source of amazement. Onoda is an epic drama about the life of this man, an international co-production helmed by French director Arthur Harari. At first glance, it might seem an unpromising subject for a film, but as so often happens, the truth is stranger than we might imagine. In the States, it’s been released as Onoda: Ten Thousand Nights in the Jungle. The picture opens in 1974, with a young man traveling to Lubang, setting up a camp near a river in the island, and then loudly playing an old military song from the 1940s, a song that was significant to Onoda and other veterans of the war. Then we see an older man in a meadow, in a Japanese uniform, wearing a large section of turf and long grass on his back as camouflage. He hears the music. His eyes widen ever so slightly before he starts moving towards the river from which the sound is coming.
From this point, the movie flashes back to the young Onoda, played by Yuya Endo, acting drunk in what looks like an army barracks, a man with obvious disciplinary problems. It is 1944. A major enters with his staff and interviews Onoda. He could throw the book at him, but instead he offers him a position as an intelligence officer in a commando unit. This special class had a different strategy than the regular military. Instead of fighting to the death or committing suicide as many did, Onoda’s unit is taught to stay alive at all costs while avoiding capture or surrender. He was to organize a guerilla-type resistance on the island, and to destroy the air strip and the pier before the Americans came.
As it turns out, other officers on the island outranked him and blocked his plans. The Americans did invade, and after heavy casualties Onoda was left with only a few men, to whom he revealed his mission. Eventually the Americans left, but the Filipinos were hostile, and without any notice of what had happened, the soldiers proceeded with their mission, surviving off the land and by raiding local farmers, all the time waiting for the promised return of the imperial army to the island. And this waiting went on, and on, for years, and eventually decades, and Onoda’s soldiers died or deserted, finally leaving him alone.
It’s fairly easy to describe this story to you, but to make a film that effectively recreates the long, grueling experience of these desperate men is a remarkable achievement. Onoda is almost three hours long, and it’s fascinating from beginning to end. It’s a story of endurance, disappointment, delusion, and even some humor. Ultimately, though, it’s a portrait of loneliness. As the film ends, we seem to have gone through every possible emotion there is, and finally we are left with a profound sadness, a tragic vision of life. Onoda is an unforgettable, compelling experience.
Saint Omer is the first dramatic film by director Alice Diop, famous up until now in France as a director of documentaries. It’s inspired by Diop’s own experience, attending the trial of a woman in a town in northern France accused of killing her 15-month-old daughter. It wasn’t merely this criminal case that impelled Diop to make the film, but her own emotional reaction to it.The main character is an author named Rama, played by Kayije Kagame, who has proposed to her publisher that she write a book about this case, and frame it through the Greek myth of Medea. Rama is black—her parents came from Senegal, and although she was born and raised in Paris, she knows how racial ideas can make her feel like an outsider in her own country. The young defendant in the trial, Laurence Coly, played by Guslagie Malanda, is a Senegalese immigrant who entered into a transactional type of relationship with an older married white man who she claims didn’t want their child. She admits leaving her daughter on a beach at high tide and walking away, after which the baby drowned. The astonishing thing is that she’s pleading not guilty, claiming that some relatives in Senegal had put a curse on her that caused her actions. Her complex story includes conflict with her mother, who in fact sits in a front row in the court room. Lack of trust caused her not to tell her mother that she was having a baby. In effect, as an undocumented immigrant she was completely isolated from anyone who might have helped her. She gave birth alone in her apartment, with not even a midwife present.As the trial proceeds, Rama becomes more and more affected. As it happens, she is also with a white man, and she also has a difficult relationship with her own mother. Alone in her apartment in this town of Saint Omer, she broods, dreams, and remembers. The director, Diop, has a spare and rigorous style. She doesn’t try to jazz up the trial scenes—everything is filmed in a dry, straightforward manner. Even the flashbacks Rama has to memories of her childhood, when we witness her as a girl bewildered by her mother’s behavior, it’s presented as matter-of-fact. This is an unusual and very effective technique: the past is just as substantial a reality to our main character as the present.Malanda’s performance as the defendant, Coly, is like the deadly stillness in the eye of a hurricane. Everyone speaking in the court must stand, including the prosecutor and the defense attorney. The one exception is the presiding judge, a woman, who sits and interrogates the defendant at length herself. For the most part Diop films everyone from straight ahead. The testimony, the details of Coly’s actions, the narrative of the killing, are all wrapped in the mystery of why—why exactly did this happen? The film deliberately doesn't explain things, instead leaving the unexplainable out there for the viewer to deal with. At one point, Rama laments that she was so wrapped up in the tragic details of the defendant’s life, that she momentarily forgot to consider the child’s point of view.Saint Omer (Diop has named her film after the town in which the trial occurs) creates an atmosphere of painful uncertainty. Like the real case it was based on, there is no easy answer, no logical solution by which to sum everything up. We must face the fact that there are things about life we will never completely understand.
In 2010, the Iranian government ruled that the director Jafar Panahi wouldn’t be allowed to make any more films. Now, even during periods of house arrest, Panahi has managed to cleverly get around the restrictions to continue making movies. His most recent film is called No Bears (the title is a joke that I won’t spoil), and it shows how he can take even the smallest slice of his life and turn it into art.We’re in a town near the border between Iran and Turkey. A man and woman are arguing about a passport that is supposed to facilitate crossing the border out of Iran. She refuses to go without him, saying it’s unacceptable for her to go first and wait for him to follow, because she never wants to be separated from him again. Cut. It turns out that this is actually a scene being filmed for a movie. And Panahi, playing himself, is directing from afar—he’s renting a room from some generous residents of a village a few miles away, and from there he supervises the filming on his computer, sending instructions to the people at the site about the needed scenes and shots.During a break in shooting, Panahi wanders around the village taking photographs of the people and scenery. Later, several men visit him in the house he’s renting. One of them informs him that his son is engaged to be married to a young woman, and that the wedding is coming soon. But some villagers claim that the woman has been secretly seeing another young man without social standing. It appears that while wandering about the town, Panahi took a photo which unintentionally showed the young woman talking with her lover. The men are now asking that he turn over the photo to them, to help forestall this local scandal. Panahi says he has no such picture. The men don’t believe him. As the film goes on, their demands become more insistent. He must show them all the photos in his camera and then swear that he’s telling the truth. Panahi doesn’t lose his composure. He eventually does swear to there being no such photograph. But of course, the doubt lingers.So here we have the film we’re watching, No Bears, which includes this story of the photo. But then there’s the film within the film: the one that Panahi is making about people trying to get across the border. In both cases, the story involves a couple that are in some kind of trouble, albeit for different reasons. As the movie goes on, an odd thing happens. It becomes harder to distinguish which parts are from the film he’s making, and which are from the film we’re watching. They blend together. We think, this is all scripted, right? Or is it? Is one of the stories real, or part of it? The confusion is compounded by the actors in the film Panahi is making starting to argue with him about his decisions. And none of this is meant as a trick or a gimmick—Panahi isn’t saying “look how clever I am”—the blending of truth and fiction is a natural result of the director’s casual off-the-cuff style. And in so doing we realize, we experience, the purpose for which Panahi makes films: to illuminate reality through art, so that the meaning and urgency of our lives is manifest on film. No Bears is another brilliant work of art created seemingly out of almost nothing.But there’s one thing I know that is real, unfortunately. After he finished making No Bears, the Iranian government accused him again of spreading anti-Islamic propaganda and they sent him to prison. Around the world, people who love the cinema are demanding: free Panahi.
The best introduction to the comedy of Jacques Tati is this 1953 film about an eccentric vacationer, M. Hulot, and his bizarre interactions with other guests at a seaside hotel.If I had to pick one filmmaker who was probably an alien from outer space, it would be Jacques Tati. In his movies, people are viewed as the most awkward and absurd creatures imaginable, like weird puppets that are made to dance in arcane, goofy social rituals. The humor is drier than dry—you are just as likely to gape with an open mouth and puzzled expression as you are to laugh. I think the best introduction to his work is his second film, from 1953, Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday.Monsieur Hulot, played by Tati himself, is an overly courteous, middle-aged bachelor who walks with a peculiar half-step, smokes a pipe, and acts decisively even though he has no idea what's going on. He goes on holiday to the beach in an odd little car that is constantly backfiring, and we follow him as he interacts with the other vacationers at a seaside hotel. There is no plot. The camera just observes the curious behavior of people "enjoying themselves," often with the accompaniment of an insipid "easy listening" type musical theme.There are laugh-out-loud moments, as when a collapsible canoe snaps shut over Hulot while he is rowing in it, or when his escaped spare tire gets mistaken for a wreath at a funeral, or the brilliant ending sequence involving a small shed full of fireworks. But more often, Tati simply focuses on little details of daily behavior, with maniacal precision. The exaggerated body language exhibited by the holiday-goers as they play cards, stroll about, or bow to one another in greeting; the punctuating sounds of routine, such as the squeak of the dining room door as it opens and closes (the soundtrack is as full of amusing sound effects as it is almost empty of dialogue); Hulot's hesitant navigation of the simplest physical actions, such as sitting or taking his hat off; all produce the effect of seeing human interaction divested of customary meaning and invested with the ridiculousness of distance. But never, I should note, with contempt; there is no hatred or anger in Tati's universe, only a blind, well-intentioned lunge forward to the next challenge.When Buster Keaton was asked what he thought of Tati he said, "I don't know what you'd call him. He is just out to be artistic." This, of course, was not meant as praise. Indeed, Tati violated the time-tested rules of comedy. He deliberately ignored the idea of building up to a gag. In M. Hulot's Holiday he takes the gags apart, presents set-ups without payoffs, gags without set-ups, deflates the gag before it can build, or does without set-ups or gags altogether, playing with the audience's expectations that there should be some. I think one needs to be in a certain frame of mind in order to really enjoy the film—relaxed, unconcerned with schedules or appointments, and free for the time being of any rancor or resentment, especially towards oneself. Yes, Tati is something of an acquired taste, but well worth your time.
Two young undocumented immigrants from Africa struggle to get by in Belgium, exploited at every turn, and with only each other for support.The Dardenne brothers, Jean-Pierre and Luc, are Belgian filmmakers who’ve been making movies for 45 years. What makes their work distinct is the focus on ordinary, working and middle class characters facing ethical and other dilemmas that reflect problems people are having in the modern world. There is typically no musical score in a Dardenne film. We are meant to experience something close to actuality, when we don’t have music emphasizing our moments. The handheld camera also plays a major role, closely following the characters in their movements, an intimate witness to the immediacy of everyday life. Through sixteen features, I can’t help but marvel at the consistency of their style, in movies that are personal and believable while exploring important themes such as poverty, homelessness, single parents, employee rights, guilt and forgiveness. Well, they just released their seventeenth film, entitled Tori and Lokita. Guess what? It’s one of their best.The film opens in Belgium with Lokita, a teenage girl from Benin, a country in Africa, answering questions from a woman we don’t see. Lokita claims to have come to Belgium with her brother Tori, who’s already been granted asylum. But the woman questioning her finds inconsistencies in her story: she somehow found her brother after being separated for years—how? Lokita gets stuck trying to answer, and the session ends with her asylum hearing postponed. We then see her with Tori, a young boy, about 12, and it’s immediately clear that they have a deep bond of love and trust between them. Yet fairly soon it becomes clear that they’re not related. They met at some point in the long journey to Belgium, and became attached to each other. It was Tori’s idea to claim that he’s her brother, in an attempt to Lokita her papers that she needs in order to live and work in Belgium.The Dardennes found two wonderful non-professionals to play their lead characters: Pablo Schils is Tori, and Joely Mbundu is especially good as Lokita: determined but sometimes overwhelmed with feelings, she’s come to rely on Tori’s calming influence to endure the life of a migrant. And what a precarious life they lead. They work for a restaurant owner who happens to be a minor crime boss, using them as couriers in his drug business. Lokita tries to send money to her mother and siblings, but the traffickers who got Tori and her there are still around, harassing them for more money. And of course, the police are always a threat as well.A crisis is reached when their boss makes Lokita work in his drug factory for three months in exchange for the false papers he’s promised, three months in which she’ll be separated from Tori. But Tori will scramble to find a way to help her.The film shows us how harrowing and dangerous it is for migrant kids to navigate life under the radar. These two are exploited by everybody around them. But this isn’t some pedantic message picture. It’s a suspense film, more nerve-wracking than most because the characters and their situation seem absolutely true. The Dardennes know how to build tension without sacrificing reality. Tori and Lokita shows the struggle to survive of two young people who have only their deep love for one another to sustain them. It’s not to be missed.
After failing to achieve much box office success in Hollywood, the Vienna-born director Josef von Sternberg went to Germany on the invitation of the famous actor Emil Jannings, with whom he had previously worked, to make a film from Heinrich Mann's popular novel Professor Unrath. The result, released in 1930, was The Blue Angel, a stunning international success, one of Sternberg's greatest pictures, that also launched the career of Marlene Dietrich.Jannings plays a stuffy provincial teacher at a boy's boarding school, hopelessly old-fashioned, mocked and despised by the students. When he discovers that they are sneaking out at night to a local nightclub called The Blue Angel, he goes himself in hopes of catching them and reprimanding the club for corrupting minors. There he sees the main attraction, a singer named Lola Lola (played by Dietrich), but instead of saving his students from her bad influence, he himself becomes infatuated. This relationship leads him down the road to humiliation and a complete loss of dignity.Sternberg was a master of light and shadow. The Blue Angel displays his great instincts for the telling shot, ingenious use of screen space, and visual mystery. The scenes with the professor walking alone through the streets on the way to the nightclub seem to sum up an entire visual style in German film. And although some of it seems static compared to the director's later work, it's also earthier, less baroque, more emotional and moving.Marlene Dietrich was 28 at the time, and had been in movies for a decade, mostly in supporting roles. Sternberg chose her for the role of Lola against all advice, and of course she turned out to be perfect. The image of her singing "Falling in Love Again" in her top hat and black stockings has become legendary. (The outrageously tacky nightclub costumes are a hoot). But she's also convincing in her quiet scenes with Jannings—tender, gently humorous without mockery or contempt. Even later when she is cruel to him, there is sadness mixed in with it. Dietrich's confident sexuality caused a sensation on the film's release, but the ambiguity of her performance—she really does love the old man—has given it staying power.In truth, the film presents contradictory messages. Overtly, it tells a simple story of degeneration—an upright old man foolishly gives in to his carnal nature and is punished for it. The trouble with this story is that the professor is clearly a strict and unlovable authority figure at the beginning of the film, but is humanized by his love for the cabaret singer. Sternberg is always poking fun at the teacher's prudishness, as when we see him staring dumfounded at the naked breasts on a statue. The film's sympathies are secretly with Lola and her world. But in 1930, audiences could only be treated to decadence if it was wrapped in morality, and thus we have The Blue Angel's double message: sex will free you, and it will destroy you.In this period before dubbing or subtitles, movies were often shot twice in different languages—in this case, German and English. The German version of The Blue Angel is superior. This essential film survives in a gorgeous print that seems almost pristine, on Blu Ray and DVD.
A young black man is rejected by his religious mother when she finds out he’s gay. She kicks him out, and he ends up homeless and living in shelters and on the streets. But then—he joins the Marines. That’s the story of The Inspection, the debut feature film written and directed by Elegance Bratton. And it’s all based closely on Bratton’s own story.Proof that he has good instincts as a director is established in one of the movie’s first scenes. Ellis French, the main character played by Jeremy Pope, has come to knock on the door of his mother’s apartment, who won’t let him in until he tells her he needs his birth certificate in order to join the Marines. The mom is played by Gabrielle Union, and the conversation they have in her living room is a beautifully understated piece of work. A less sophisticated artist would hash out the issues that they have with each other in this conversation, providing a plot exposition for the audience. Instead, we can just notice how they look at one another, their gestures, attitudes, and quiet mannerisms, and this tells us the real story in emotional terms far more skillfully than any speeches could. In fact, it’s only in one bitter comment by the mom at the end of the scene that the film first lets us know explicitly that Ellis is gay.Most of the rest of the movie takes place during boot camp on a South Carolina base. Basic training in the Marines is legendary for being extremely difficult, and from the beginning of the film we observe the trainers aggressively breaking down the recruits with yelling, insults, and punishments. The head instructor is a mean, tough, charismatic black man named Laws, beautifully portrayed by Bokeem Woodbine. He seems to sense vulnerability in Ellis French, and starts to get on his case right away. It’s already a grueling experience, but the fear is, what if someone finds out that he’s gay?The time of the story is 2005. The Iraq War is ongoing. And the military still has a policy called “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” It means that gay people could be soldiers, but only if they were closeted. Soldiers admitting that they were gay would be discharged. That didn’t stop other soldiers from harassing and persecuting someone in their ranks that they thought was gay.French must therefore hide his sexuality in order to achieve his goal of becoming a Marine. This is a constant undercurrent of the film, but it’s not the whole story. Bratton goes into great detail depicting the three-month long basic training process. We experience the sheer physical strain that is part of boot camp, as well as the abusive behavior designed to break men down. But it’s not an anti-military or for that matter, pro-military movie. It’s a movie about a situation a lot of people go through, and what that’s like. Overcoming incredible obstacles in order to graduate is also a transformative experience, for French and all the others. They attain a kind of fearlessness, and a devotion to protecting the Marine to their right and their left, that shakes loose a lot of previous notions and behaviors that weren’t serving them.Now, the drill sergeant Rosales, played by Raúl Castillo, has the job of building recruits up after they’ve been torn down—he’s tough on French, but nonjudgmental, and this represents a critique of what we usually think of as masculinity. French knows that he’s gay, and he isn’t trying to change that, but by becoming a Marine he hopes to prove his worthiness to his mother. Rosales shows him that he doesn’t need to prove anything.The Inspection is a thoughtful and well-crafted film that asks important questions about manhood and identity.
There’s a sports metaphor I’ve heard used, in basketball mostly, when they say that a player is “in a zone.” Every shot seems to go in; whenever they touch the ball, something good happens. Well, there are some rare cases when I think a filmmaker gets into a zone, and everything the director tries seems to work and to further the artistic purpose of the picture. The result is what we usually would call a “great film,” or even a “masterpiece.” This metaphor has come to mind most powerfully for me when watching one of my favorite movies: from 1954, directed by Akira Kurosawa, Seven Samurai.The samurai genre was very popular in Japan, but other than some screenplay writing, this seems to have been Kurosawa’s first work in that tradition. He wrote the story with his longtime colleagues Shinobu Hashimoto and Hideo Oguni. It’s about a peasant village in 16th century Japan that is being harassed by a large group of bandits. Some of the villagers decide that they must hire a group of samurai to defend themselves. They have nothing to offer but food, so they seek out a destitute warrior named Kambei, played by Takashi Shimura, a great ronin fallen on hard times. He accepts their plea, and then approaches five other samurai, each with distinct personalities, weapons, and fighting styles. These six become seven when an uncouth character named Kikuchiyo, played by Toshiro Mifune, starts tagging along. It turns out that he’s a peasant himself. After establishing their presence in the village, the samurai prepare for the impending bandit attack.Describing the plot doesn’t really convey the epic nature of the film. It’s 3½ hours long, but don’t let that intimidate you. It’s consistently involving, fascinating, and exciting. Carefully, each character, including the peasants, is presented with subtlety and attention. Relationships and complex plot strands emerge. Then when the action starts, the compelling narrative flow is thrilling and awe-inspiring. Kurosawa used several moving cameras running simultaneously in the battle scenes, along with telephoto lenses so that the actors would not be distracted. Consequently we find ourselves totally immersed in the experience.Shimura is excellent as the wise and steady-handed leader. Mifune’s performance is a marvel of wild and eccentric self-expression. Kurosawa had already become famous internationally with Rashomon four years earlier but this movie exploded onto world cinema with an impact hard to even imagine today. Yes, Hollywood did a western version called The Magnificent Seven that is quite entertaining, but doesn’t come close to the original. Widely and (correctly in my opinion) considered one of the greatest motion pictures of all time, Seven Samurai is a true epic of cinema that movie lovers owe it to themselves to see.
There’s a mystery at the heart of Hold Me Tight, the latest film from French director Mathieu Almaric, adapted by him from a play by Claudine Galéa. The story opens with Clarisse, a wife and mother played by Vicky Krieps, playing some kind of card game with a deck of Polaroid photos spread out on her bed. Then she goes to her children’s bedroom and looks at her two pre-teen kids, Lucie and Paul, sleeping. She packs a bag, sneaks out of the house, backs an old car out of the garage, and drives away. Gradually we learn, just from her self-talk, that she’s leaving for good. But we don’t know why.Almaric has made his name as an actor in over 100 films and TV shows, a familiar face in French film, and then internationally, with roles in films by Steven Spielberg, Wes Anderson, and others, including playing a villain in one of the James Bond movies. But all this time, he’s also been directing, with over 20 features and shorts since 1990. As a director he demonstrates a real affinity with actors, as you might expect, allowing them to participate in the invention and elaboration of characters. And he specializes in depicting unstable subjective points of view, with a flowing, wandering camera that might seem aimless at first but eventually reveals an inner logic. He made the right choice of actress: Krieps is a sensitive performer with a wide yet subtle range of expression. And this is one of her best so far.While driving, Clarisse listens to a recording of her daughter Lucie practicing piano. She smokes cigarettes, laughs, and seems to talk directly to her daughter. Flash back to scenes of Lucie playing at home, with Clarisse talking with her husband and their son looking on. As the film goes on, we continue to have these fragmentary flashbacks. It seemed to be a happy family. On the other hand, the parents do quarrel, although that doesn’t seem out of the ordinary, really.Clarisse’s journey doesn’t seem to have a direction. We see her in a roadside bar, for instance, just listening to the idle chatter of the customers. Increasingly, instead of flashbacks, we see Clarisse’s family as it continues to go through life without her. The kids get older; Lucie becomes a teenager and has an opportunity to perform in a piano competition. Strangely, Clarisse’s husband never makes an attempt to find her. It’s as if he already knows that there’s no point in looking, because their relationship has gone past a point of no return. Then we find it difficult to distinguish reality from imagination: Clarisse seems to see all these things that are happening without her, but how can that be?The solution to the mystery begins to be revealed about half-way through, yet the odd thing is that the film stays suspenseful. It doesn’t really matter that we know the secret now. The point is to display this person’s free floating awareness cinematically, in a direct way, without distance. We’ve been brought into the fragile consciousness of Clarisse, a woman of constantly shifting thoughts and emotions. The picture becomes a spellbinder because of the masterful performance of Vicky Krieps. There’s a sea of emotion rolling inside her, expressed by her face in precise and delicate moments of wonder, sadness, fear, enjoyment, amusement, and confusion. Krieps goes all the way in every word and action in this film—she does not hold back.Yes, there is a secret to Hold Me Tight that I won’t give away—so what I will tell you is: this movie captures an emotional truth that pierces the heart.
The Quiet Girl, from Irish director Colm Bairéad, is a quiet movie. It’s the story of Cáit, a nine-year-old Irish girl played by Catherine Clinch, who is painfully shy and withdrawn, only speaking when she’s spoken to. So quiet is she that other kids think she’s weird, and when they laugh at her she sometimes wets herself, which then makes them mock her even more. At home she’s treated as a nuisance and is scapegoated for the family’s problems. The mother is always stressed out and overwhelmed. The father is neglectful and distant. No wonder this girl is quiet.Now the mother is preparing to have a fifth child, and the parents decide to send Cáit to a couple of older relatives, cousins, who live a great distance away on a dairy farm. The woman, Eibhlín, played by Carrie Crowley, is very kind, and she gently welcomes Cáit to their home and the routines and chores of the household. But the husband, Seán, played by Andrew Bennett, seems reluctant to get to know the girl and acts rather stern when showing her how to do tasks on the farm. Cáit is still quiet and on her guard.Most of the dialogue is in Irish, the original Gaelic language of Ireland. There are still parts of the countryside that speak Irish primarily, although English is the language of the country’s majority and its public life. It’s a rare film that is made in Irish these days, but there’s a yearning among many to keep the language alive, and I’m guessing that might be at least part of the reason that The Quiet Girl became a surprise hit at home, and eventually an entry for International Film at the Oscars.I don’t remember the film expressly telling us the time period of the story—we see TV and cars, no internet or cell phones. Just from the automobiles, I would say the story takes place in the 1980s. But this is a film of country life, so there’s something timeless and almost outside history about it. Another way this is a quiet movie is that Bairéad focuses our attention on the stillness and beauty of nature, the gentle sounds and sights of country life. To watch the film is to go through a sense of slowing down, letting go of the perpetual movement and anxiety that seems to permeate modern life.The older couple has their own drama. They’ve been stricken by loss. Their gradual cultivation of a bond with the girl is quite moving—then they face a new problem: the girl’s parents are eventually going to want her back.Still, all this is primarily the girl’s story. It’s her point of view that holds us in quiet and stillness. The hurt and the fear are not to be surrendered easily. Bairéad carefully tends to his character’s feelings. His style is very patient. In the end, we find that our hearts are breaking. The Quiet Girl is a journey towards love, and what a difficult thing it can be to get there.
Humility and innocence are difficult to portray well in fiction or drama. The imperfection of human beings means that artists will more readily create believable bad characters than good ones. But in our hearts we believe in the good, most of us, and in that way animals may come to symbolize for us our intuitions about natural goodness. Eo, the new film from veteran Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski, tells the story of a donkey.Eo, spelled with just the letters E and O, is his name, or rather the name given to him by a young woman who is part of an animal act in a small Polish circus. The name imitates the sound donkeys make: think Eeyore from the Winnie-the-Pooh books. Anyway, the circus gets broken up because of animal welfare violations, and Eo is sent to a farm in the country where he is safe. But circumstances cause him to break through a fence, get lost in the woods, and then endure a lengthy series of human owners who range from friendly to careless, neglectful, and downright cruel.Donkeys have long been associated with humility. In the New Testament, Jesus is said to have rode into Jerusalem on one, instead of the prouder and more imperious horse. You may have heard or read that Eo is a remake of Au Hasard Balthazar, a 1966 film by Robert Bresson. Yes, they share the same narrative device: following the life of a donkey as it goes through many owners. For Bresson, however, spirituality was impersonal, and his masterpiece conveys that vision of goodness that transcends human flaws. The story of Eo, however, is different. Skolimowski is more of a dramatist, for one thing, and his aim is to evoke the experience of life from the point of view of the donkey—a very difficult thing, impossible really, but in the effort of doing so in a film becomes tremendously moving. For all these reasons I don’t consider it a bona fide remake, since the conception is essentially of a separate kind.The imagining of a donkey’s life journey is created through many different narrative and visual strategies. Eo endures everything that happens with the indomitable patience that, we are made to see, is a quality of his being rather than something that he learned. All the little human dramas that surround him during the course of the film, no matter how important they seem to the human characters, seem just paltry to us in the context of the stark awareness that is Eo’s experience. Domesticated animals, in whatever sense, are in a condition of slavery, and this fact takes on many profound nuances when we take the point of the view of the animal. The experience can be blissful, scary, indifferent, or incomprehensibly cruel, depending on the owners. Skolimowski’s purpose is to expand our own consciousness to include the subjectivity of animals, which in turn forces the narrow confinement of our human thoughts and purposes to open up, even just a little, to a more cosmic sense of reality.At one crucial point in the story, a culminating moment of trauma, the film presents a nightmarish series of images contrasting our mechanistic and robotic attempts to imitate animal nature with the actual sensations of beings who are alive just like us. Eo presents the mirror of nature to our own sorry human condition, while at the same time planting our consciousness in a presence that is far greater than what we take for granted in our world: the presence of humility and innocence, in the tale of our failures and our fondest dreams.
All the Beauty and the Bloodshed. That’s the title of the new movie by Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras. It starts with a basic framing story, a story of activism. We see Nan Goldin, one of the more famous American art photographers, spearheading a campaign against the Sacklers, a billionaire family that owns Purdue Pharma. Beginning in the 1990s, Purdue heavily promoted OxyContin, and other opioids, as a safe and non-addictive medication for serious pain. Hundreds of thousands of people did become addicted, and Goldin was one of them. There were many thousands of deaths from overdose. Goldin was lucky not to have succumbed, although she came close. The organization she founded is called PAIN, Prescription Addiction Intervention Now. They advocate for state-funded treatment and for a social policy of harm reduction.One of Goldin’s central goals was to make the Sackler family pay for the damage it did. And her prominence in the art world gave her a point of attack. The Sacklers have their names on many rooms, departments, and exhibits in art museums around the world, having given millions of dollars to these institutions and donated many priceless artworks as well. This, of course, makes them respectable in the eyes of the establishment, the rich upper class that uses philanthropy as PR. As the film opens, we see Goldin’s group enacting a demonstration and a die-in at the Met in New York, with people lying on their backs as if dead, surrounded by prescription bottles for OxyContin. The goal is to make the museums stop taking Sackler money, and after that make them take the Sackler family’s names off the walls and doors and plaques in all the museums.A normal documentary would give us this story alone, and make that the point. But although this framing device stays with us from the beginning of the film to the end, and is important, Poitras is also interested in Nan Goldin herself. Gradually, through Goldin’s own words, and that of other friends and witnesses, we learn her life story. She grew up in the Boston area, in a suffocating family with parents desperate to be like everyone else. Her older sister Barbara rebelled, and was sent to an institution, eventually dying of suicide at 18.Barbara’s story became a central inspiration for Nan, who ran away, got kicked out of schools, and was actually sent to a foster family as if she were an orphan. Breaking free in her 20s, she entered the Boston gay subculture, drag queens and transgender people her best friends. Her informal, self-taught photography of this group got attention in the art world. Eventually she moved to New York, and the film becomes a document not only of her life, but of the many amazing friends and colleagues in the New York art world and gay community. Her slide shows were major events affirming that this community exists and has a right to. It was a life on the margins, poor in money terms, but rich in love. There was a lot of pain as well, the confronting of past abuse, the drama of what she called “sexual dependency,” and then came the tragedy of AIDS and the unspeakable toll it took. But it’s the sense of great, overpowering love within a community that more than anything we take away from this film.All the Beauty and the Bloodshed: this stark title is from something Goldin’s older sister wrote before taking her life. The film celebrates both aspects with passion. Watching it for me was to recognize at a deeper level what is truly important in life.
Sarah Polley is a Canadian filmmaker, an actress who eventually moved behind the camera to direct. Her work includes four excellent feature films. And I think the best one is her latest, an intense feminist drama called Women Talking.In a rural religious community, where people wear old-fashioned clothes and travel by horse and buggy, the women and some girls (we are told in a prologue) have been waking up in the morning for years realizing that they’ve been raped and abused in their sleep. The male leaders told them that it must be the action of ghosts or Satan, until one night a woman woke up in the middle of a rape and saw one of the attackers. He ran away, but he was confronted later and confessed, and he named a group of accomplices, who were also members of the community. These men used a cattle anesthetic to knock their victims out before raping them. They were taken by authorities to be indicted, and the rest of the men went to town to bail them out and bring them home before trial. The action opens while they’re gone, when the women of the community gather to decide what to do.One of the elder women, played by Frances McDormand, says they must forgive the men and go on as before, or be barred from the kingdom of heaven. It’s clear that there are two other options as well, to stay and fight the men who want to cover it up, or to leave. The arguments by the women on the pros and cons of these options take up most of the running time of the film. The talking is not vague or abstract, but exactly the kind of dialogue people might engage in while facing an emergency. At the same time the director, Polley, maintains the tension—our confinement to this isolated farm helps make the events within it fascinating and suspenseful.The film is adapted from a novel by Miriam Toews, the story based on actual incidents in a Canadian Mennonite community in Bolivia about 15 years ago. Polley has removed much of the specifics—in the film we don’t know what religious sect is involved, or where they are exactly.Anyway, the “forgive them and do nothing” option is voted down, and a smaller group of women are appointed to decide between staying to fight or leaving. Polley has assembled an impressive cast, committed to their parts, without makeup or glamour—just these plain solid religious women. Among them are Claire Foy, whose character is fiercely angry and committed to punishing these men. Another one played by Jessie Buckley lashes out at the others, guilty that she kept allowing her abusive husband to harm her and her daughter. Rooney Mara plays Ona, whose gentle nature allows her to calm and contain the women’s conflicting emotions. Ben Whishaw is a young teacher who believes in the women and takes the minutes of their meetings, because, we find out, they’ve never been taught how to read and write. The older women, including those played by Judith Ivey and Sheila McCarthy, add a sense of gravity and experience to the mix.What a remarkable movie this is! The main character is really the community. Painful but important insights about spirituality, abuse, forgiveness, and the claiming of their power by women, heretofore silenced, are dramatized with great beauty and force. Polley’s narrative technique, and the music and cinematography, lend the picture a touching kind of majesty. Women Talking is that rare thing, a true film of ideas.
Every year it’s my difficult task to list my favorite films of the past year. And I’m always late, because it takes a couple months for me to catch up. 2022 was a fantastic year for movies, although I still take note of them within the blurry outlines of the pandemic, going back a couple of years. If we must have a theme, for me it’s surviving and emerging from the past into new awareness.Aftersun (Charlotte Welles).My favorite film of the year, the feature debut of Scottish writer and director Charlotte Welles, is about an eleven-year-old girl staying for the summer with her divorced dad at a seaside resort. Wells captures a certain time of childhood, when Sophie, played by Frankie Corio, is discovering her own independent thoughts and feelings about life, while learning from and enjoying the presence of her father Calum, played by Paul Mescal, whom she doesn’t get to see much during the year. He is a loving father who pays close attention to what his daughter has to say, and respects her, even though we notice concealed tensions connected to his estrangement from Sophie’s mother. Welles lets us simply observe the interactions of these two, being especially sensitive to the moods and desires of her young heroine. I can’t recall another film that so vividly portrays the real love of a child for a parent. The film keeps hitting the sweet spot of reverie, exploration, and understanding, displaying a level of visual skill and emotional honesty that is astonishing from a new talent. It takes us on a heart-centered journey that is never cloying, but increasingly beautiful and moving, especially after we realize that what we’re seeing is memory of Sophie years later when she’s an adult. Aftersun is the kind of movie people sometimes call “modest,” yet the impact is great.Eo (Jerzy Skolimowski).This profound film looks at life from the innocent eyes of its non-human protagonist, a donkey, whose journey from one owner to the next reveals not only the broad spectrum of human yearning and suffering, but an imagined perspective in which the travails of an animal transcend all the drama we may choose to create about ourselves. Skolimowski attempts to create an existential bridge between our human experience and that of an animal by developing a tragic and transcendent vision. Eo, whose name is the sound he makes, is all of us in a sense, yet has a real life and experience beyond us.Vortex (Gaspar Noé).Vortex presented one of the most unexpected revelations of the year for me. In Paris, a married couple has difficulty navigating the challenges of old age, especially the wife, played indelibly by Françoise Lebrun, who is slipping into dementia. The subject matter might seem familiar, but the treatment is something completely new. Noé divides the screen in half, left and right. One camera follows the husband, the other the wife, bringing home how we are in a sense always alone even when together. I found the emotions and insights we experience in Vortex, through means of this technique, tremendously meaningful.Benediction (Terence Davies).We observe the great World War I poet Siegfried Sassoon, as a young man turning against war and as an older man looking back on his life with regret. The depiction of the gay London art scene in the 1920s is invaluable, but the power of Benediction is fully revealed by Davies’ vision of lost love, and its echo through the entire course of a man’s life.Petite Maman (Céline Sciamma).Simplicity is a rare artistic virtue that Sciamma employs with seemingly effortless skill. A little girl sees her mother mourning the death of her grandmother, but wants to know more. The film’s fairy tale structure shows the girl getting to actually meet her mother when she was a girl. A blissfully moving experience.The Banshees of Inisherin (Martin McDonagh).McDonagh returns to the world of his plays in this extremely well-written portrait of shared madness on an island off the Irish coast a hundred years ago. One man (Brendan Gleeson) decides to suddenly end his friendship with another (Colin Farrell, in a career performance), and the sharply observant humor gradually turns to tragedy.This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection(Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese).In Lesotho, an 80-year old woman (Mary Twala Mhlongo) has buried the last surviving member of her family, her son. Now she just wants to die, but the news that the village’s ancestral graveyard will be flooded because of a new dam awakens her defiant spirit. The film’s brutal honesty is conveyed in a unique style reflecting mythical storytelling traditions.White Noise (Noah Baumbach).Baumbach’s decision to direct someone else’s material for a change—Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel of the same name—has pushed his art to a higher level. This is a darkly hilarious satire of cultural turmoil in which a college professor (Adam Driver) and his family are caught up in a toxic train derailment (sound familiar?) that exposes the folly and fragility of American life.Quo Vadis, Aida? (Jasmila Žbanić)The terror of being at the mercy of one’s worst enemies is portrayed with harrowing veracity in this story of a Bosnian translator (Jasna Đuričić) trying to hide her husband and sons from the Serbians, who have surrounded the city of Srebrenica during the brutal 1992-95 war. The atmosphere of crime that surrounds war is so graphically conveyed that it shook me.Bardo: False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths(Alejandro G. Iñárritu).Iñárritu turns his gaze inward in this story of a Mexican filmmaker (Daniel Giménez-Cacho) returning home from success in the U.S., and trying to deal with his contradictions. The film takes an epic form: a concatenation of family drama, dreams, and wild imaginings. The artist confronts and celebrates every part of his being until encountering a final challenge.Want more? Here are ten excellent B-sides:Decision to Leave (Park Chan-wook).The Good Boss (Fernando León de Aranoa).Hold Me Tight (Mathieu Amalric).Paris Calligrammes (Ulrike Ottinger)Tár (Todd Field)Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn (Radu Jude)Navalny (Daniel Roher)Huesera: The Bone Woman (Michelle Garza Cervera)Gunda (Viktor Kossakovsky)The Velvet Underground (Todd Haynes)And a happy 2023 to all cinephiles!
Alejandro G. Iñárritu doesn’t do anything by half measures. After conquering Hollywood and coming away with two Oscars, he has now made a film closer to his heart, an introspective portrait of the artist’s world, private and public, and about his home, Mexico. But because it’s Iñárritu, it’s also an epic.
Bardo: False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths takes autobiography as a starting point, not a goal. Let’s see what sounds familiar: journalist and documentary filmmaker Silverio Gama (played by the mesmerizing Daniel Giménez-Cacho) has returned to Mexico after fifteen years living in the L.A. area. His work is admired in his homeland, but there is some ambivalence towards him because he left the country to find a wider stage for his work. These are definite parallels with Iñárritu himself, and he has that experience to draw from, yet Silverio is not exactly him—the character being a journalist makes his point of view more directly critical towards the society of which he is a part.
He has a family: a brilliant wife, a young adult daughter, and a teenage son. They adore him and at the same time they are exhausted by him, his arrogance and charisma, his constant attempts to control. He is about to receive an American award for life achievement in documentary. This prize, awarded to a Latin American for the first time, makes his family and friends, and Mexico in general, proud, but also evokes the split identity of an artist who has gained success in the United States while always aware of the history and power disparity between that country and Mexico. This wound becomes deeper as the film proceeds: Silverio casts a cold judgmental eye on the crimes and massacres that have marked Mexico’s history.
I’ve presented the basic outline of the film as if it were a straightforward narrative, but that’s not what the experience of watching it is like at all. We start without the barest notion of what’s going on, scenes in which our point of view character appears to be caught in some bizarre dream. What is actual and what is imagined? First we see impossible, disturbing and surreal events. Later the symbolism falls away and we gradually discover the personal facts, some traumatic, which the symbols disguise and reveal. But from scene to scene, we can slip back into a kind of dream state, or a midpoint between waking and sleeping, while the film also evokes the universe of ideas that this proud, humorous, mystified intellectual grapples with every day in a parallel action to the ordinary details of his life.
One of the picture’s wry jokes is when someone criticizes Silverio’s films as habitually oneiric instead of relying on discernible facts as a documentary should. Of course, the film we’re watching is doing exactly that. But Iñárritu, who co-wrote the picture with his long-time screenwriter Nicolás Giacobone, is past taking a detached ironic view of things—Silverio goes through a cavalcade of extreme situations and states: laughter, rage, grief, celebration, fatalism, playfulness, arousal, bitterness, and, increasingly—horror. The film seeks to scale the heights and plumb the depths of a man’s psyche.
Bardo is a Tibetan word meaning a state between life and death. The entire story takes place in a bardo. Bardo: False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths goes as far as it possibly can, or so it seems, until finally it crosses a boundary and goes even further.
In 2021, when for some time we’d been in the habit, as a culture, of looking back at historical milestones, a major event from 100 years earlier was publicly recalled and commented upon—an event that did not appear in the textbooks from which most white Americans were taught American history—the 1921 Tulsa race massacre. A large Black neighborhood known as the Greenwood District, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which had become a significant example of African American culture and prosperity nicknamed “Black Wall Street,” was attacked for two days by white residents of Tulsa, who burned down 35 city blocks of homes, businesses, and churches; killed hundreds of people, and displaced thousands more. But like so many crimes committed against Black Americans in the years after the Civil War, it was covered up and the victims were blamed as the instigators. But at the dawn of our current century, Tulsa began to make an effort to end the silence and cover-up, and establish the historical facts. There have been several good books and documentaries about this, and on the 100-year-anniversary came a film produced by LeBron James and Maverick Carter, and directed by Salima Koroma, called Dreamland: The Burning of Black Wall Street.
Many facts that were new to me are brought forth by Black Tulsans who have spent years studying their own history. For instance, some of the Native Americans of the southeastern states were slave owners. When they were forced to leave their homes and migrate to the Indian Territory, which was what it was called before it became Oklahoma, their slaves came with them. Upon emancipation, these became freedmen, and they were granted parcels of Oklahoma land, some of which turned out to be oil-rich. Over time and after statehood, white settlers became the majority, but there was still a core of middle-class African Americans, including many who came from the former Confederacy to start a new life, concentrated in the Greenwood District of Tulsa. The average Black citizen was poorer than the average white, but still there was a greater freedom and autonomy in Greenwood than anywhere outside of Harlem. I was delighted by Koroma’s use of period art, animation, and archival footage to create a picture of Greenwood’s vibrant, bustling public life.
Carefully the film documents the steady pressure from white officials and businessmen to do something about this Black enclave in their midst. Of course they wanted the land, but racism also involved being offended that inferior people should do well. The usual kind of excuse—a young black man touching a white woman—set the conspirators off on their attacks. Complicit in the violence was the white-owned Tulsa Tribune, whose bigoted rhetoric is exposed in the film. To give only one example of the outrageous nature of all this, a group of private planes flew over, shooting guns and dropping bombs on the neighborhood. The film also covers the modern search for mass graves, which were finally found in 2020.
The title Dreamland is from the name of the local movie theater in Greenwood, destroyed by the mob. It also reminds us that there was a dream in which Black Americans were free to live as they chose, a dream shattered by the massacre, but still alive today. Dreamland: The Burning of Black Wall Street is essential viewing for all Americans.
Satire is hard to do well. But Swedish director Ruben Östlund has proven to be a deft practitioner of the satiric art. His breakthrough fifth feature, 2014’s Force Majeure, poked fun at modern middle class illusions concerning masculinity and the family. The Square, from 2017, took aim at modern art and its uncomfortable relationship to politics. Now he’s broadened his range to satirize the ruling class itself, the wealthy elites that are ostensibly in charge of our world, in his latest film, Triangle of Sadness.
The film begins with two beautiful people, a fashion model couple, Carl and Yaya, played by Harris Dickinson and Charlbi Dean. Now, the movie’s silly title comes from a throwaway comment made to Carl when he’s auditioning for a modeling gig: “Can you do something about that triangle of sadness between your eyebrows?” referring to the tight skin in that area resulting from certain kinds of plastic surgery. The film’s first part concerns the tense relationship between these two. Carl gets upset when Yaya clearly expects him to pay the tab for an expensive dinner when she had previously offered to pay. The bruised feelings around money reflect one of the movie’s overall themes: the way money determines behavior within an affluent society that is based on prestige and power over others.
The movie’s second part plunges us, as it were, into Östlund’s main comic set piece. Yaya is an online influencer as well as a model, and this results in her being gifted with two free tickets on a Mediterranean luxury cruise with an assortment of super-rich passengers. The wealthy people are profoundly self-centered, and we see the yacht staff being instructed how to avoid ever saying “No” to their requests or demands, a detail which becomes very instructive. The captain, who has apparently locked himself in his cabin on a massive bender, and who has to be cajoled to come meet his passengers at dinner, is played with infectious glee by Woody Harrelson. The ship eventually runs into a violent storm that causes an outbreak of seasickness among the passengers. Now I must caution you that there is a long sequence of explicit vomiting, almost as if to satisfy our frustrated wish for justice. I laughed uproariously, but if puking is hard for you to watch, I am giving you advance notice.
About halfway through the picture, it dawned on me that the film’s central metaphor is almost absurdly obvious. The luxury yacht represents the world economy, and if you think that’s too “on the nose,” I imagine that Östlund considered this also, but then—given the perilous state of things in our time, decided “So what? Let’s be obvious.” The fact that the ship’s captain is a drunken American, albeit one that’s given to flirting with Marxist rhetoric while sparring with one of the more smug millionaires on board, is only one of many wonderfully crazy details that gets filled in as we go along.
In Part Three of the film, however, we go beyond this level of parody, this jeering at the spectacle of the 1%. I won’t spoil it for you, but I will say that we are confronted with the much deeper issue of how power over other people ends up distorting our conscience, reason, and well-being, no matter what social class we may belong to. Some have bristled at Östlund’s satiric methods, but I think that Triangle of Sadness has a powerful unspoken premise—that our world is in the middle of an emergency, and that perhaps we need a shocking dose of laughter just to wake us up.
For those who might not appreciate nuance, The Whale could seem like a misleading title. Charlie, the main character played by Brendan Fraser, is a morbidly obese English teacher living in a small house in Idaho, confined both by his enormous size and his deteriorating health. His friend and nurse, Liz, has told him that he has congestive heart failure and maybe only a few days to live. But he refuses to go to a hospital.
The Whale does not refer to Charlie, but to Moby Dick, and specifically an essay about that novel that he has come to treasure. But the writer, Samuel D. Hunter, also wants us to associate this title with Charlie because one of the movie’s themes is the vicious and punishing attitudes that we see expressed towards people that are fat. And by this implication, the audience is challenged to see through those attitudes.
Charlie teaches essay writing to freshman college students online, and we see him on Zoom encouraging them to be honest and original in their essays rather than trying to imitate or follow a formula. But he doesn’t turn on his own camera on Zoom, claiming that it’s broken. Charlie doesn’t want them to see what he look likes and how he’s living.
A young Christian man who comes to his door to proselytize is from the same evangelical organization that Charlie’s partner Alan had been a part of, and gradually we learn that Alan had died in some mysterious fashion because the church had expelled him. This is another important theme: Charlie, you see, is gay, and as the young missionary becomes a major character in the story, the film draws a crucial connection between religious fundamentalism and homophobia.
Watching The Whale, I could tell almost right away from the film’s structure that it must have originally been a play. All the action occurring in one place, five basic characters, a limited time span, the nature of the dialogue, all were clues as to this origin, and sure enough—in the end credits we find that Hunter’s script was adapted from his own play of the same name. The movie has some of the familiar limitations of filmed plays: schematic, implausible at times, speechifying, the sense that the action is carefully calculated. However, the director is Darren Aronofsky, who excels at amplifying extreme emotional states and taking us to the darkest depths of a person’s soul. In this case, we explore the depths of a man’s guilt, and luckily that man is played by Brendan Fraser, with a powerful and disturbing performance. He is the movie, essentially, and all the little flaws that you might notice in the story are as nothing in the aura of his presence.
Most troubling are the scenes where Charlie tries to navigate his little house in his ruinous state of health, and especially those where we witness his terrible eating disorder, the despair and trauma he experiences expressed through self-punishing bouts of gluttony. Hunter, and Aronofsky, want us to stop looking down on such a man and instead allow the awareness of his suffering to enter our hearts.
We eventually come to the center of Charlie’s drama—his urgent need to connect with his angry teenage daughter Ellie, played by Sadie Sink. She treats him with hatred and contempt, and yet he persists. All the strands of the story unite in a tension that starts to seem unbearable, and at the very height of that pressure, the film hits you in the gut. You can’t help but feel it. The Whale is a nightmare, a tragedy, and an incredible catharsis.
Once in awhile I get asked what are my favorite films, or my top ten greatest movies, and so forth. My lists have changed over time, but there are certain films that have always been on it. One of these has an unusual title, and I often get puzzled looks because people aren’t familiar with it. From Germany in 1931, directed by Fritz Lang, its title consists of just one letter: M.
Lang had become the most prominent German film director of the silent era, specializing in films of crime and suspense, but most famous today for his 1927 epic science fiction film Metropolis. With the coming of sound, Lang dived right in with this, his first talkie, and it proved to be a sensation.
M stands for murder. Someone is killing little girls. Lang doesn’t show any of these murders, but the way he tells the story is chilling. We hear the killer whistling the Hall of the Mountain King theme from Grieg’s Peer Gynt but we can’t see his face clearly. In one scene, a child carrying a balloon looks up at a stranger in the street. We cut to the worried mother at her home waiting for the girl to return. Then we cut to a shot of the balloon floating along until it gets caught in telephone wires. The horror is conveyed indirectly, but unmistakably.
Lang seems completely at ease in the sound format. There is no musical score, but the dialogue, sound effects and design are brilliantly realized. The movie gradually expands and becomes more and more complex. The public are panicking, and the police respond by raiding every outlaw hideout they know of, and arresting people right and left in hope of flushing out the murderer. Eventually, the city’s criminal underworld gets fed up with all this. These killings are bad for business. Since the cops aren’t having any luck solving the case, the crooks—including burglars, extortionists, safe crackers, and pickpockets—decide to pull together and somehow catch the culprit themselves. What follows is an impeccable, intricate, and exciting series of episodes in which the criminals use their own extensive knowledge and contacts in the underworld in order to discover who the murderer is, capture him, and then put him on trial in their own makeshift court.
All the while, Lang is implying a kind of equivalence between the cops and the crooks. In case you haven’t got it yet, in one shot, the chief of thieves begins to make a gesture, and then Lang cuts to the chief of police completing the same gesture. This is a society on the brink of collapse into utter corruption, and the story of the child killer is in a way just a symbol of that deeper social malaise.
It’s not spoiling anything to tell you that the murderer gets caught, although I won’t reveal what happens next. The actor playing him is Peter Lorre. This is Peter Lorre before anyone had ever heard of him. He only had a couple of bit parts before this. And it will give you an idea of how great he is in M that he became instantly famous because of this film. Of course he went to America eventually, and became a fixture in Hollywood.
The sensational nature of this story made it controversial. It was censored in some places. Newspaper stories about the film claimed that the title was Murderers Are Among Us. The Nazi Party, not yet in power but influential, protested screenings of the film. You see, they just assumed that Lang was talking about them.
M is more than just a crime film. It truly dares to explore the darkest, most taboo realms of the soul. And its vision of a society in which police and criminal merge into one was profound, and prophetic.
Martin McDonagh made his name as a playwright, with dramas set largely in rural west Ireland and featuring his own special brand of dark humor. The isolation and peculiar habits of his characters throw light on the conflicts and absurdities that motivate people to do crazy and destructive things. In the 2000s he started directing movies, and now his latest film returns to Ireland, powerfully reigniting the creative spark of his earlier plays. It’s called The Banshees of Inisherin.
Colin Farrell plays Pádraic, a small farmer on the fictional island of Inisherin, off the coast of County Galway in Ireland. The story, which takes places a hundred years ago, begins with him knocking on the door of his best friend Colm’s house to go to the pub together as they always do in the evening. But Colm, played by Brendan Gleeson, doesn’t answer. Pádraic can see him through the window, practicing on his fiddle, but banging on the window and speaking to him elicits no response. For some reason Colm is deliberately ignoring him.
As time goes on, and the silence continues, Pádraic demands to know why he is being treated this way. The blunt answer is rather shocking: Colm wants to spend more time composing music and developing his craft as a musician, and he thinks he’s been wasting his time talking and drinking with Pádraic instead. He says that Pádraic is a dull person whom he doesn’t like anymore.
This is a simple yet very unusual premise for a film. Pádraic doesn’t know how to deal with the rejection—it’s a small island, and losing his best friend confronts him with a loneliness he can’t accept. He refuses to take it as final, but continues to try to engage with Colm, even though Colm insists that he must stop talking to him. There’s a steadily escalating emotional pressure that begins with wry comedy and gradually becomes much more serious. We realize that although Pádraic can’t stop himself and is emotionally tone deaf, Colm himself is really rather disturbed. Almost accidentally, we also find out that in 1923 the bloody Irish civil war is going on. As a kind of echo of the personal turmoil on the island, the characters can sometimes hear gunfire on the shore, a deadly political turmoil in the distance.
Gleeson, with his burly presence and grumpy demeanor, is reliably intense as Colm, but the central focus is on Colin Farrell. I’ve seen him in lots of films over the years, and I’d say he has what you might call a movie star persona. But there’s none of that here. He plays a completely different kind of character than I’ve ever seen him do before, and it’s excellent. With a wide-eyed earnestness and vulnerable manner that reveals, against his will, a yearning insecurity, Pádraic is foolish, impulsive, yet unmistakably tender hearted. Farrell crafts this unusual man from the inside, and we see him to best effect in relationship to his sister Siobhán, played with passionate brilliance by Kerry Condon. She’s protective of her brother, but sees through the entire farce of this conflict, being really the one sane voice in the story.
McDonagh uses this small island setting, where there are only a few people to know, as a way of highlighting the volatile inner drama of how people relate to their neighbors, and their worries about what the neighbors think of them. Terrifically well written and beautifully shot, The Banshees of Inisherin pulls us in with delicious laughter, then catches us off guard with its melancholy vision of human stubbornness.
Ours is an age of migrants, those martyred by the legal fictions we call borders. Two recent films explore this persistent, troubling experience.
Flee is from a very small genre, that of an animated documentary for adults. It presents the true account of an Afghan man, named Amin for the purposes of the film, whose family escaped from their war-torn country in the 1990s, ending up in Russia, where discrimination and poverty followed them. Since they were officially stateless, getting out of Russia was extremely difficult. We are shown their bitter ordeals, including being returned to Russia after trying to make it by ship to Finland. Always present was the risk of violence and exploitation.
Amin finally made it to Denmark as an unaccompanied minor with refugee status. But in order to achieve that status, he had to make up a story about his whole family being murdered, and from then on he didn’t dare reveal the truth for fear of being sent back. After decades, and after coming to terms with being a gay man, he needed to tell the truth in order to live honestly with his partner, and reunite if possible with his family. A good friend, Jonas Poher Rasmussen, is the man he tells all of this, and Rasmussen is the director of this film.
The animation is stark and somewhat abstract, the better to portray the constant tension and loneliness of the desperate migrant. Oddly, making the film in animated form creates an emotional experience more vivid for us than it might have been as an ordinary documentary. Flee has a very affecting, visceral impact.
Identifying Features, the film debut of Mexican director Fernanda Valadez, explores another aspect of this experience: the migrants who disappear or die. In the first scene we see a young man, in fact a teenager, approaching as if in a dream or memory, the house of his mother, and telling her that he is going to cross the border with a friend, who has an uncle in the States who will get them work. But after two months, with no word from her son, the mother, Magdalena, played with sorrowful dignity by Mercedes Hernández, is deeply troubled.
The mother of the other boy is told that her son’s body has been found, and when she travels to the place housing remains of missing migrants, she’s unable to identify the body because it’s been burned beyond recognition. Magdalena then travels to the border, and the rest of the film, using haunting and poetic imagery, at times evoking spiritual symbolism, weaves a story of desperate hope. Along the way, we discover the perils of navigating a border crossing, beset with predators who kill and steal from the powerless, along with a sinister alliance between police, military, and the cartels.
Halfway through, we meet another young man, Miguel, played by David Illescas, who has been detained trying to cross and is now deported back to Mexico, with nothing to show for his effort. Alone he travels to return to his family in his impoverished village, and along the way he encounters Magdalena. They help one another and together form a bond of grief. The film’s shattering finale asks the unanswerable: why do people become trapped in a cycle of violence and cruelty? Identifying Features refuses to look away from the horror and injustice that corrupts our future.
Both Flee and Identifying Features are available streaming and on DVD and Blu-ray.
Among the handful of older films that are generally considered classic Christmas movies, It’s a Wonderful Life is quite different. Yes, the last fourth or so of the movie takes place during Christmas, and there’s a Christmas tree and some Christmas music, but other than that, the holiday is not an explicit theme of the picture. Frank Capra’s 1946 film, expanded from a magazine short story with help from the great screenwriting duo Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, is actually an attempt to explore one of the most difficult themes in literature: that of the genuinely good man.
What is true goodness, and how does it fare in the world? The good man in It’s a Wonderful Life is George Bailey, who runs a building and loan company in a small town called Bedford Falls. Capra picked the perfect actor to play this character, James Stewart, who I think played good men more convincingly than anyone else ever has.
As the film begins, we find ourselves in the realm of myth. We see blinking stars and hear heavenly voice-overs. There’s a man, George Bailey—he needs help right away, and a guardian angel named Clarence is assigned to the job. He is shown George’s life in flashback, which is how we the audience see the story. From the first scene, where George rescues his brother from falling through the ice, while losing the hearing in one ear as a consequence, we see how George—who has normal human aspirations—ends up selflessly sacrificing his own chances and opportunities to help others. For him, it means staying in Bedford Falls instead of going to college or traveling. He marries his childhood sweetheart, played by Donna Reed, and has four kids. But the selfish actions of the town’s wealthiest man, the bank president, Mr. Potter, played by Lionel Barrymore, continues to create hardship for George and the town, which leads to ruin and despair. And here we get back to the mythical element: when George says it would have been better not to be born, Clarence decides to show him what the town would be like without him.
I used to make fun of this movie because of its sentimentality, and also, well, because of angels and the supernatural. But what I see now is a splendidly crafted parable about what really counts in life. Capra saw that America was in the process of changing in fundamental ways after World War II. The film idealizes pre-war America as a world of small town decency, community, and family. But what we see on the horizon is the profit motive as the dominant social principle. In the alternate life without George, Bedford Falls has become Pottersville, named after the film’s villain, Mr. Potter. It is a soulless, lonely place where people live in anguish and fear. The film has great nostalgia for the past, and anxiety for the future: Capra saw the postwar future as loud, crass, and heartless. George Bailey’s despair corresponds to a dark place in the American soul. Emotionally, it’s remarkable how dark, that is to say how honest, the film is about ordinary life. Well, audiences at the time didn’t want to look back—after a long and bitter war, they just wanted to be entertained, and It’s a Wonderful Life bombed at the box office. Its failure ended Capra’s independent movie company Liberty Films. Only years later did people start considering it a classic.
Maybe the Christmas connection is more significant than I thought. Which is a better life, that of selfless service and love, or of wealth and profit above all else? Just like Charles Dickens in A Christmas Carol, Frank Capra’s answer was love, first and last and forever, and the one way to realize that It’s a Wonderful Life.
White Noise, the latest film from director Noah Baumbach, is so different than what we’re used to seeing, that I was delighted, and a little surprised, that the audience I saw it with was able to accept its surreal style and laugh at its offbeat humor. It’s a comedy about modern American life, which is about as general a description as you could get, but whereas we associate comedies normally with jokes, gags, and silliness, there’s hardly any of that here. The comedy is in the overall tone of the picture: the version of life that’s presented, reflecting the brilliant, peculiar world view of a single author.
Up until now, of all the theatrical features that Baumbach has directed in a career spanning over two decades, this is the first not based on a story by him. White Noise is adapted from the 1985 novel of that name by Don DeLillo, the book that made him famous, winning the National Book Award. DeLillo’s fiction, his dark, widely ranging satiric style, examining the different kinds of madness and catastrophe we see in American society, is so distinctive, that I think adapting it helped channel Baumbach’s energy in a direction that represents a new artistic advance for him.
Adam Driver, plays Jack Gladney, a professor at a Midwestern college who helped found “Hitler studies.” For someone whose subject involves great political upheaval, he seems a mild-mannered guy. On the outside, his life is close to perfect: he has a beautiful wife named Babette, played by Greta Gerwig, and four children, three from their previous marriages, and one from their own. The kids are all hyper-aware and intellectually curious, in general more in touch with what’s going on than their parents. Baumbach has retained the time period of the book, so we’re in the 1980s, with no cell phones and no internet. And this vantage point of the past, even though it was the present when DeLillo wrote the book, turns out to be amazingly predictive of problems and concerns that we’re facing now.
First we enter a free-wheeling satiric depiction of academic life, with the usual petty conflicts, and here we are gifted with an outstanding, hilarious performance by Don Cheadle as a professor of Elvis Presley studies. Now be prepared: none of the dialogue in this film is naturalistic. People are always making statements about life and society in a deadpan, almost abstract manner that mixes the most profound thoughts with absolutely trivial attention to detail. There are always surprising bits of chatter and turns of phrase that paint the story with a tinge of folly. There’s no topic: marriage, sex, politics, religion, that escapes untouched.
Eventually there’s a plot development involving a train accident in which a huge cloud of toxic fumes escapes into the atmosphere. Existential dread enters the picture, and permeates the rest of the film, even as we keep laughing, for instance at Jack’s constant need to downplay, to a ridiculous level, the danger that threatens them, in the face of the obvious panic of his wife and kids. The misinformation around this toxic event may remind you, painfully, of what we’ve seen in the current Covid-19 pandemic. Eventually we get into a “family running for their lives” disaster film scenario, but reduced to the funniest and most outlandish extremes.
Baumbach’s visual texture is intense and colorful. There’s so much going on that you might get a little dizzy. But for me, White Noise was an invigorating comic experience, hitting that rare sweet spot between profundity and the absurd.
María Candelaria, a 1943 film by Emilio Fernandez, is a prime example from what is considered the “golden age” of Mexican cinema. The title character, María (played by Dolores del Rio), a young Indian peasant living in the river country of Xochimilco, has been ostracized by her village because of a scandal involving her deceased mother. She is loved by Lorenzo (played by Pedro Armendáriz), who hopes to marry her when they can get enough money, but they are in debt to a corrupt landowner who wants María for himself, and so tries to destroy them out of jealousy. Meanwhile an artist (Alberto Galan) from a nearby town who wishes to paint the beautiful María, tries to help the couple get out of danger.
The plot elements are pure melodrama, but the treatment raises the story to another level. The heroine represents a spirit of independence, freedom, and a love that is not cowed by custom or tradition. The villagers use ideas of honor and virtue to justify their own envy and hatred, and the film condemns hypocrisy in sexual matters as well, which was rather advanced for its time. Fernández and his co-screenwriter, Mauricio Magdaleno, cleverly wrap their social consciousness in the conventions of popular fiction—we instinctively identify with the downtrodden María and recognize the morality of the villagers as false. They also set up a dichotomy between the light-skinned ruling class and the Indian peasants, which must have struck a chord with Mexican audiences. The film was a major success at home, and won the top prize at Cannes, the first Latin American film to do so, and this helped foster a boom in Mexican cinema during the late 1940s.
Del Rio had been a Hollywood star for years—here she looks at least a decade younger than her actual age of 38. The part calls for sensitivity and nobility, and she comes through with flying colors. The acting in general is quite good, but the real reasons the film works as well as it does are Fernández’s fluid style and the photography of Gabriel Figueroa. The budget was miniscule by American standards, but Figueroa’s luminous black-and-white images lend the film a haunting, almost mythic grandeur. The camera movement has a calm, graceful rhythm. Fernandez also uses some striking point-of-view shots, as in a scene where we see Lorenzo from below as he rows down the river while María lies in the boat looking up at him. María Candelaria portrays the struggles and tragedies of the poor in a way that is affecting without becoming maudlin. The ending finally achieves something close to poetry.
The painful struggles between parents and children are often a subject of drama, and no surprise, given the plentiful examples of this theme in human experience. What is rare and more difficult is the depiction of a strong emotional bond between a kid and a parent, and in the case of children, a love for one’s mother and father that goes beyond words, a kind of environment in the child’s mind that permeates life and leaves a lasting effect on the memory. Too often the artist, in a play or film, settles for a forced sense of sweetness, a sentimental, albeit often humorous, perspective on the young experience and point of view. Aftersun, the debut feature from Scottish writer and director Charlotte Wells, is that “one in a thousand” film that captures the essence of a fleeting time with devastating intensity and truth.
Sophie is an 11-year-old girl on a summer holiday with her divorced dad at a less than luxurious seaside resort in Turkey. To sum up the plot, the story of what happens, is pretty much exactly what I just said. There is really no story in the usual sense—the big events happen within the characters, and especially within Sophie, played by a luminous young newcomer named Frankie Corio. The film is more like a poem, and a very beautiful one. The one-word title Aftersun, sounds enigmatic like a poem—in fact, it’s a lotion that’s applied to cool off the skin after exposure to the sun. But even this mundane detail can double as metaphor.
Sophie loves her father Calum, played by Paul Mescal, and we soon realize that he’s quite remarkable in his way, a man in his 30’s who listens with steady attention to Sophie and treats her with tenderness and consideration. But of course we the audience can also see that he’s an ordinary man with flaws, and with a life largely unknown to her, who lives near London with her mother the rest of the year and doesn’t get to see him much.
Through various hints—music and other references—we gradually realize that this is happening in the 1990s, and we’re seeing all this as a memory of the adult Sophie today. This layer of memory, like the cooling aftersun of the title, evokes poignant feelings, a steady light of emotion in the heart of the future self looking on the experience through the eyes of the past self, so fleeting and so precious. Wells already shows a mastery of style that can visually explore the dawning awareness of this young girl’s own mind and feelings, relentlessly expanding with image and sound the richness of an inner life which sees everything in this world as if brand new.
There’s much Wells has decided not to tell us. Why did Sophie’s mother leave her father? Why Turkey, why are they vacationing there? What is the meaning of the father’s melancholy, the shadows that so often stay hidden? These are all meant to be just hints, rather than plot points, hints like the incomplete knowledge kids have of the adult world, a world that Sophie is very curious about, and yet cautious of. And I kept expecting some tragic event to happen in the film, which never did, because the only tragedy here is the transience of beauty and love.
It amazes me, I marvel at how once in a great while, a movie will come out of nowhere—filmmakers and actors with which I’m not familiar—and then when I just happen to see it, absolutely destroys me. I’m sure in some way it touches my own memories with my father, now departed, in that bittersweet way we can’t always express. All I really know is that the devastating artistry of Aftersun shot me right through the heart.
It’s hard for me to believe that I’ve been doing this show for 17 years, and yet I haven’t talked about one of my favorite movies, The Big Sleep, until now. I’m referring to the 1946 Howard Hawks film starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. The Big Sleep was originally a crime novel by Raymond Chandler, featuring Chandler’s recurring hard-boiled detective character Philip Marlowe. Bogart plays Marlowe. He also played Dashiell Hammett’s detective Sam Spade five years earlier in John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon, making him the only actor to have played both these iconic characters. Actually he was always playing the most entertaining character of all, Humphrey Bogart. But I digress.
Marlowe gets hired by an old man, General Sternwood, who has received threatening letters concerning the payment of his youngest daughter’s gambling debts. The assignment is to find out what kind of trouble the daughter, named Carmen, is actually in, and help her out of it, if possible. What he soon finds is the blackmailer’s dead body, in a gangster’s deserted house, with a drugged Carmen there as, apparently, the fall girl. She is a wild seductive young socialite, played with sleazy zest by the 20-year-old Martha Vickers.
Back at the Sternwood’s, Marlowe encounters Carmen’s older sister, Vivian, played by Lauren Bacall, who doesn’t seem very happy to meet him, and as it turns out has her own secrets to protect. Marlowe’s relationship with Vivian becomes both romantic and dangerous.
To try to follow the plot any further would involve a dizzying array of killers, gamblers, kidnappers, cops, and blackmailers. Bogart strides through this incredibly complicated story with complete disregard for niceties and a humorous quip for every occasion. The film is often quite funny. Ultimately, though, the title The Big Sleep refers to death, and Marlowe’s smart aleck tough guy is surrounded by darkness and menace at all times. The constant sense of danger heightens the movie’s excitement, while the main character’s brass-knuckled self assurance puts a smile on our face. A lot of people call it film noir, and I suppose it is, but it’s directed by Howard Hawks, and that means, before anything else, that it’s fun.
Many critics and viewers complain that the plot is impossible to understand. Supposedly even the screenwriters—one of whom was William Faulkner—had some trouble figuring out exactly who killed whom. But the truth is, the picture was first shot in 1945, and that version, which some DVD or Blu Ray editions include as an extra, was understandable, although admittedly complicated. But the producers didn’t think that it was enough. Bogie and Bacall were an item at this point, and they wanted the romance between those two highlighted. So Hawks cut out a few scenes, and parts of scenes here and there, inserted new scenes of the two main characters doing witty repartee and double entendre, and redid the ending emphasizing Bacall more, and it all worked. The chemistry between Bogie and Bacall really improved the movie’s snap. The only trouble is, the stuff that was cut out explained quite a few things in the plot that now seem sketchy in the final version. But… none of this ever harmed my enjoyment of the film, which is really about the energy and dark intrigue, plus brilliant dialogue and of course Bogart’s dynamic performance. I’ve watched The Big Sleep again and again for years, and I’m not tired of it yet.
The cinematic world is abuzz with praise for the latest film from Korean director Park Chan-wook entitled Decision to Leave. Park is already well known for his daring movies treating themes of horror and violence, most famously The Handmaiden, and Oldboy. As it happens, Decision to Leave is something of a departure for him, a stylish murder mystery and intense romantic suspense film. Although the new picture has relatively less violence or horror, Park’s love of provocative experimentation remains.
The story concerns a homicide detective from Busan named Jang Hae-joon, and played by the very skillful Park Hae-il. He’s a dogged investigator in his 40s, with a lovely wife that lives in another town and whom he only sees on weekends. Currently assigned to a sensational murder case, he is called one night to what looks like a bad accident—a climber has fallen off a steep cliff to his death. But the dead man, an immigration officer, has DNA traces under his fingernails, which match the DNA of his wife, Song Seo-rae. Suspicion falls on her because she shows no surprise or sorrow when told of her husband’s death. Medical records, however, show that she had been physically abused many times by her husband, who beat her and scratched her, which would explain the DNA under the fingernails. So the evidence begins to point to suicide rather than foul play. But this mysterious woman, Seo-rae, begins to evoke an attraction in the cop investigating her. She’s Chinese, and her difficulty speaking Korean somehow adds to her strange charm. Seemingly against his will, Jang becomes gradually more obsessed with her, to the point that it becomes noticeable to his colleagues, who complain that he’s neglecting the high-profile murder case of which he’s in charge.
Park’s sense of screen composition is so smooth and assured that Decision to Leave can’t help but remind me of great Hollywood films from the classic era, and specifically of Alfred Hitchcock. The idea of a man’s overpowering obsession with an unknowable love object is of course paralleled in Hitchcock’s great 1958 film Vertigo. But this movie has a different emphasis and a more modernist technique. When the film reveals something from the past, instead of clearly demarcating the different time frames in some way, Park cuts suddenly to a similar shot and point of view, when we suddenly realize we’re in the past, without a transition. This creates a fluid subjective quality—we’re inside Jang’s head, where his experience and memory become interchangeable. And the film does the same thing with space as with time. At one point, Jang is doing surveillance of Seo-rae with binoculars, in his car outside her building. But then, as she picks up the telephone, he is suddenly in the room gazing at her, sniffing the air, and then she looks straight out the window, startling him, and all this time he is still in the car. The multilayered visual style depicts almost tangibly the progression of Jang’s mad love for this woman, who remains a suspect.
I don’t think this would work so well if Park hadn’t chosen the perfect person to play Seo-rae, the subtly beautiful Chinese actress Tang Wei. Tang doesn’t play a seductress here. On the contrary, her seriousness and the ambiguity of her facial expressions convey the idea that this is someone who is wholly her own person, and someone you want to believe.
The murder mystery is complicated, and the viewer must pay close attention to follow it. But the real story here is the emotional journey of a man desperately and dangerously in love. Decision to Leave is a glittering jewel of a film.
Le Quattro Volte, a film from 2010 by Michelangelo Frammertino, is like a vision of an ancient world, although the story takes place in our century. I call it a story, but it has more of the quality of myth.
The slow rhythm of daily life for an old goat herder in Calabria is conveyed superbly and with precise meditative attention. It’s a life of routine, which the old man, who is in bad health, endures without regret. Calabria is the poorest region in Italy, the part in the south that looks like the toe of a boot on the map—rugged hilly, and mountainous. The goat herder’s village in the film is perched on top of a hill, with rustic architecture that looks like we’re still in the Middle Ages. The goats are in a pen at the town limits, as the road out snakes downward. Every day he walks steadily to the pen, rouses the herd, and then leads them out and into the surrounding hills and meadows. While they feed on grass and other plants, he sits quietly, sometimes dozing off. With him is a shepherd dog, a border collie, who knows exactly how to lead the goats where the herder wants them. As the film immerses us in the steady, repetitive life in this rural area, we notice the unspoken bond between the man and the dog, and in fact with the goats as well. All is expressed more in grunts and sighs than in words. I tried to find the subtitle function on the Blu Ray I was watching, and I realized that there were no subtitles, because so very little is said during the movie that you don’t need them. Silence itself is almost a major character. Outside of the credits, there’s no musical score. Instead, the outstanding sound design presents all the little sounds of the country—the wind and the animals—in all the complexity they reveal in nature.
The title of the film, Le Quattro Volte, means The Four Times. Why is that? We start to find out when our attention leaves the goatherd and focuses on a little newborn goat. Now, the story, if we can call it that, is all about this one tiny being and his daily actions and struggles living in the herd. The gentle beauty we’ve experienced shows another side: the harsh necessities of survival, depicted in the most elemental and heart-rending way when the baby goat gets separated from the others and wanders about crying for help, finally resting, all tired out, beneath a tall tree. The tree is now the main character, and we are shown its life and presence, the waving of branches and rustling of leaves, and once again an eternal quiet at the heart of life. Suddenly it’s winter. Snow covers the ground. Men chop down the tree, and take it to town. Now it’s an inanimate object, and they use it as part of a holiday celebration. After that, it’s burned, turned into charcoal, and becomes part of a large kiln carefully built and operated by the villagers.
The four times are four lives: human, animal, vegetable, and mineral. The idea that the mineral also has a kind of life is part of an ancient world view in which everything, animate or not, is filled with spirit. Frammertino was inspired by the legend that the philosopher Pythagoras claimed to remember living four lives. The doctrine is called metempsychosis, but the movie isn’t teaching a doctrine—it’s just inspired by this idea of transmigrating souls to envision nature subjectively, as being a person, a goat, a tree, a piece of charcoal. The experience of watching Le Quattro Volte is like nothing else in cinema. It’s a film of spiritual sublimity.
The Souvenir: Part II is the name of the latest film from English director Joanna Hogg. When you release a Part II, the assumption is that we first need to see Part I. With The Godfather: Part II, to give a famous example, it was a pretty safe assumption given how successful and widely seen the first film was. The Souvenir, however, released in 2019, is not in that category. Hogg’s insistence on calling this movie The Souvenir: Part II shows the supreme self-confidence that can often accompany brilliance. In any case, the two films do form a continuous whole, and would be best watched in order.
The Souvenir ended with a tragic event in the life of the main character, Julie, a young student director in 1980s England, played by Honor Swinton Byrne. Part II opens with her struggling with grief for her boyfriend Anthony, who was a brilliant, charismatic, yet rather mysterious person. Julie tries to find out all she can about him from his parents and anyone else who knew him, but there’s always something elusive about her search.
Her mother, Rosalind, is played by the actress’s actual mother, Tilda Swinton. One of the results of this fortunate bit of casting is that scenes between the two have a special intimacy that you can sense. The closeness goes along with a gap in understanding, though: Rosalind worries about Julie, but doesn’t see how her daughter’s unusual questions and struggles contribute to her development as an artist.
At film school, the panel overseeing her proposed graduate film has a negative reaction to the script she submits. In The Souvenir she was working on a film with a realist technique, about a boy and his mother in a poor neighborhood in a northern city. But this feature-length screenplay is a personal story using more symbolic methods, based on her own recent life, which we’ve seen play out in the first film. Despite this discouraging reaction, Julie is committed to the project. Now we watch as her search for answers is incorporated into the making of her graduate film.
Hogg portrays the process of low-budget filmmaking with a sharp eye, including the work’s essential tedium. A fellow student, a French woman named Garance, suggests to Julie a young actor of talent whom she knows to play the boyfriend role. Julie then surprises Garance by asking her to play the lead part, basically Julie’s character, even though this disappoints another friend who has long been a supporter and who expected a part. Here we see how the evolution of an artistic project tends not to take the path of least resistance, but results from having to grapple with the material and discover what it demands, even if that upends expectations. The film is essentially a portrait of the artist—the story has many autobiographical elements, yet I’m referring to the wider sense of the artist in general. The director wants us to experience the creative process from the inside through the techniques she uses in her film.
One of the crucial things conveyed is that there is always a great difference between the film in her head and the one she actually makes. When Julie’s picture—called The Souvenir, of course—is finally approved and screened, instead of being shown the end product, we enter Julie’s mind as a sort of luminous dream world where the characters and the symbols are charged with emotion and meaning, and the thoughts and impressions our main character has been working with throughout the film are embodied in visual terms.
The Souvenir: Part II confirms Joanna Hogg as one of the more stylistically advanced directors working in film today.
Tár is the name of a new film written and directed by Todd Field. The main character, Lydia Tár, is a prominent American classical music conductor and composer, played by Cate Blanchett. We meet her at the height of her career, after heading several world-class orchestras, now the first female conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, arguably the most prestigious position in the symphonic world. The film opens with her being interviewed at a New York film festival, where the brilliance of her intellect shines freely, discussing conducting in general, and her upcoming recording of Gustav Mahler’s Fifth Symphony. Behind Tár’s smooth and articulate presentation, there is a hint of something else, and I think it’s deliberate: smug condescension. Perhaps the supreme self-confidence of such a person will inevitably cast this shadow.
Lydia is a fictional character, of course, but Field has created an extraordinary and multifaceted personality for Blanchett to bring to life. It’s all very well to indicate that your heroine is in fact a genius. It’s quite another to write a character who makes you really believe it. Lydia’s talk is so sophisticated that we can truly admire, while at the same smile a little at the ironic touches the director adds to the portrait, the will of steel underneath the suave exterior, the strongly held convictions that drive every aesthetic statement, every literary allusion. The film presents us with a convincingly brilliant artist. But of course the writing depends on the performer for its realization. Field had in mind Cate Blanchett, one of our best living film actors, from the beginning.
Lydia has an extremely busy and complicated life. On the personal side, she is openly lesbian, living with her partner Sharon, the orchestra’s head violinist, played by the great Nina Hoss, with whom she has adopted a girl. We see her as a teacher, outspoken and even ruthless in her attitude towards what she sees as the timidity of some of her students. We see her as the super-efficient manager of her own career, so competent and controlling that she intimidates even those who work closest with her. The extraordinary thing is that in the midst of all this, we are made to suspect intuitively that there is a kind of emptiness at work, a big impressive show without a center.
Todd Field knows that classical tragedy portrays the fatal defects of larger-than-life figures. His screenplay and direction achieve a novelistic density, so that when events start to go wrong, it’s not really about hubris, but about a host of uncomfortable questions concerning artists and the needs that drive artistic creation, about the self-seeking that dominates people, about passion and its discontents.
Lydia has apparently had a habit of picking out female musicians to fall in and out of love with, brief infatuations and affairs. One of these young women angered her when they broke up, and instead of letting the matter go, Lydia decided to make sure that this poor girl would be blacklisted from getting a job in any orchestra. This is the start of things unraveling, but there are depths and shadows here that are more significant than just this one transgression, and they are slowly revealed.
Blanchett appears in a lot of genre pieces, as any steadily working Hollywood actress has to do, but here once more she is given the chance at something great, and she takes it even further than we expect. The musical sequences are stunning. Tár is a film of lavish beauty and desolating insight.
For many modern historians, the First World War, from 1914-18, has a special significance, as the point at which an older version of civilization fell apart. In British thought and memory it sometimes has the character of an unhealed wound. Almost 900 thousand young British soldiers died, about 6% of the adult male population. It was as if the flower of English youth had been cut off. In the writings of the poets who fought in that war we still read passionate urgency. Siegfried Sassoon was one of those poets. His father was of Iraqi Jewish descent, his mother a Christian. He was not of German ancestry; his mother chose the name Siegfried because of her love of the music of Richard Wagner.
English director Terence Davies has largely focused in his films on exploring and recovering personal and cultural legacies. In his latest film, Benediction, he tells the story of Siegfried Sassoon, not in a straightforward or linear fashion, but as a weaving back and forth in time, a recapturing of Sassoon’s experience that takes into account his loves and strengths, but also his mistakes and failures.
Incredibly courageous, loved and trusted by the men who served with him, Sassoon, played beautifully as a young man by Jack Lowden, was decorated for bravery and recommended for the Victoria Cross. But when we meet him in the film, he’s caused a sensation by publishing an open letter, what he called “a soldier’s declaration,” denouncing the conduct of the war and saying he would no longer fight. Instead of being court-martialed he was sent to a psychiatric hospital. In an early scene, he argues with a close friend, the prominent critic Robbie Ross, played by Simon Russell Beale, because Ross had pulled some strings to prevent Sassoon possibly being shot. Sassoon wanted to put his life on the line to oppose the war, but Ross simply wanted his friend to survive. In the hospital, Sassoon meets Wilfred Owen, another poet, and the impact Owen has on his life, both as a poet and as a gay man, is decisive. Wilfred Owen went back to his unit after being pronounced cured by psychiatrists, and he died only a week before the Armistice.
The film covers Sassoon’s tumultuous life after the war, as a member of the London artistic scene in the 1920s, intercut with scenes of him as an older man, now played by Peter Capaldi, still bitter about the war and about his personal failures, and ultimately turning to the Catholic Church in search of some kind of meaning.
In the 1920s, gay life in the London art scene was barely closeted—it was quite evident to anyone who could see, yet no one talked about it publicly. Davies presents us with the sometimes very funny, but also painful, episodes of backbiting and cutting wit on the part of Sassoon and his lovers, including the musician and actor Ivor Novello, with a malicious personality, and the decadent aristocrat Stephen Tennant, self-centered to the point of abuse.
Terence Davies is openly gay himself, and here he succeeds in presenting an historical portrait of gay relationships in a specific English time and place, without holding back. Sassoon got married eventually and had a son, but in the scenes with him as an old man, we can sense that there’s still an emptiness inside that may never be filled. Why is that? At film’s end, in a sequence of almost unbearable poignance, we find out. I cried at the end of Benediction, a film in which personal and historical tragedy embrace.
A primal conflict between love and revenge is the theme of Mauritz Stiller’s great saga of Sweden from 1919.
The silent era in Europe is still a largely unexplored treasure house of film, and among the foremost nations in cinema was Sweden, where for a brief time innovations there rivaled those taking place in America. The brilliant young Mauritz Stiller brought sophistication and technical mastery to his movies, although today he’s better known, if at all, for having discovered Greta Garbo, with whom he went to Hollywood, ultimately failing to fit into the rigid hierarchy of the studio system and returning to Sweden, where he fell ill and died in 1928, at the much too early age of 45. Today I offer one of Stiller’s great Swedish films, from 1919, called Sir Arne’s Treasure.
Here’s the story: in 16th century Sweden, a rebellion of the King´s Scottish guards is put down. Three of the rebels make a daring escape from a prison tower, but on their way through the snow to a fishing village where they hope to find a ship, extreme cold and hunger drives them mad with desperation. When they come to the mansion of Sir Arne, a wealthy nobleman, they murder him and his family, steal the treasure, burn the castle down, and escape. But a girl named Elsalill (played by Mary Johnson) survives the carnage by hiding. Years later, adopted and living in a different town, Elsalill falls in love with the noble young lord Sir Archi, played by Richard Lund, unaware that he was one of the murderers.
Stiller was already a veteran director when he adapted this Selma Lagerlof story to the screen, and it is a masterful work, as advanced in technique as anything that had been seen at the time, albeit on a smaller scale than D.W. Griffith´s epics. He makes extensive use of the moving camera, which was rare, and his habit of cutting into the middle of an action creates an effect more modern than in most silent films. The scene in which neighbors rush to the burning castle brilliantly conveys chaos and terror. Over the entire film, in fact, there hangs a mood of ominous fatefulness and “the uncanny,” exemplified by marvelous sequences in which the young woman dreams of her dead sister. In addition, Stiller handles Elsalill´s love for the Scottish nobleman poignantly, yet with very little sentimentality. Unexpectedly, and quite movingly, these troubled characters do not behave as we would expect in a melodrama, but in a more convincing and ultimately more tragic manner.
Shot by Jules Jaenzon, Sweden´s preeminent cinematographer, Sir Arne´s Treasure is an uncommonly gorgeous motion picture. The ending scene with the procession across the ice is among the most haunting and beautiful in all of cinema. It’s both exciting and instructive to see how a pioneer could create fully realized visual poetry in those early days.
Sir Arne’s Treasure is available on DVD.
This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection. Like a myth or a folktale, the third feature film of Mosoto writer and director Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese announces its meaning beforehand with its title. But woven into that one sentence—this is not a burial, it’s a resurrection—are many other complex meanings concerning death, grief, ignorance, oppression, truth, courage, and more.
In a rural village in Lesotho, a small country in southern Africa, an 80-year old woman named Mantoa laments the death of her only son. Over the years she has experienced the death of her parents, her husband, her daughter and grandchild. But after all this, her son was there to still anchor her to the world. Now he is gone too. Eventually we piece together that he died in a mining accident, but we don’t know the full story behind any of these losses, only that Mantoa has survived her entire family. Now she no longer finds meaning in life.
Mantoa is played by an awe-inspiring veteran actress from South Africa, Mary Twala Mhlongo. She portrays overpowering grief with an intensity and conviction that is uncanny. And this was her final performance—Mary Twala died in 2020.
So…all Mantoa wants is to die and be buried in the graveyard with her family and the village ancestors. She assumes a grim silence, impervious to all efforts by the villagers to interact. The priest sits outside her door and tries to talk to her. He tells her about the death of his wife, and his long struggle to get through the grief. Mantoa hears him, she hears them all, but she’s immovable. Her face is like a mask of pain. Mosese seems to be presenting us with a modern day Book of Job. Religious teachings no longer make any sense to Mantoa. She has nothing but anger at God. She experiences all the attempts at consolation to be empty, and who could say that she is wrong in her point of view? Also like Job is her defiance, her refusal to look away from tragedy.
In this version of Job, however, there’s something more. When she complains about trash not being picked up in the graveyard, she finds out that the graveyard, and in fact the entire village, is going to be flooded, and everyone relocated because of a new dam that’s going to be built. The village head tells everyone that it’s all part of modern progress. The priest says they must accept the inevitable and trust God. But Mantoa sees that the unseen enemies, the businessmen and politicians who are planning this project, are taking away the very earth in which her family is buried, that is, the connection to ancestors, to shared history, and to the life that has been bound to this land for generations. What we’re not told, but what we can infer if we’ve studied colonialism, is that the practice of denying native ownership of the land has not ended with the country’s so-called independence. In this story, it’s the fate of a defiant old woman with nothing more to lose, to embody the force of resistance.
With starkly beautiful photography and an eerie musical score, the movie also uses a framing device that evokes an ironic mythos. An old storyteller narrates the film intermittently while playing a traditional stringed instrument called a lesiba. Yet this fabled figure is sitting in a rough-looking urban setting, sitting in the ruins of some tavern in a darkened city. We are in the real modern world, and we are also in the absolute world of ancient symbols. Mosese unites the high with the low in an experience both mystical and political. This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection.
A witty English drama from John Schlesinger about an unusual triangle: a man and a woman both in love with the same man.
John Schlesinger was part of an exciting generation of young English directors that emerged in the 1960s. He established himself with several successful films, and this gave him the opportunity to break all the rules by making Midnight Cowboy, which became a huge hit. After this triumph, Schlesinger had earned the right to do his own thing—and next he created a more personal film, a story he’d been thinking about for years. Released in 1971, it’s called Sunday Bloody Sunday.
The title, by the way, doesn’t refer to the famous event in Northern Ireland, or the song by U2 about it, which all came later. Here it’s just from a common male expression in England at that time, a weary shrug on a Sunday about having to go back to work or school the next day. The story is infused with this ironic tone—the style of someone who observes people with a compassionate but honest eye.
In London, Daniel, a Jewish doctor (Peter Finch) and Alex, a divorced mother (Glenda Jackson), are both in love with the same man—a bisexual artist named Bob, played by Murray Head. The story covers ten days in these three people’s lives, in which their love for and patience with one another are sorely tried. Schlesinger deftly sidesteps the social drama angle, keeping the focus on private feelings and desires. The picture pays careful attention to the little incidents that make up a day—it has a refreshing natural rhythm.
Everything that happens is colored by the longings of Daniel and Alex. Bob is their happiness, and sometimes they are indeed happy when he’s with them, but he’s also an elusive object, a source of anxiety: Will he leave? Will he run to the other one? It’s written like a modern short story, where plot takes a back seat to permutations of feeling. There’s something remarkably clear-eyed about the movie—the emotions of the characters are real and moving, yet there’s a humorous bite and distance—nothing maudlin, very crisp and even a bit cold.
When Peter Finch and Murray Head do a full mouth kiss in close-up early in the film, I believe that was some sort of a cinematic first. I don’t doubt that it was intended to surprise—in plot terms alone, it’s a way to suddenly let us know that Daniel and Bob are lovers. But what I find admirable is that gay sexuality is not sensationalized, it’s simply an important element of Daniel’s character, and it is taken for granted as a fact in itself—which for 1971 was more than ahead of its time, it was beyond its time.
Finch is marvelous, conveying quiet dignity along with a childlike neediness and petulance—never pathetic, just a bit lost and sad. A sequence at a bar mitzvah is priceless, with all his pushy female relatives trying to hook him up with a woman. It says more about what Daniel’s growing up must have been like than any number of flashbacks could have done. Glenda Jackson is also fine here, very natural and high-spirited. And Murray Head is certainly attractive as Bob, although I couldn’t help but think: what do they see in him? Sunday Bloody Sunday is a thoroughly enjoyable example of early ‘70s spirit.
For those who survive a war, the trauma never completely goes away. Hive, the debut feature of Kosovan writer and director Blerta Basholli, is set in a village in Kosovo in 2006, seven years after the end of the war with Serbia. Many of the women in the village are still waiting to learn the fate of their missing husbands. Serbian paramilitaries and regular troops murdered thousands of civilians in a campaign of terror during that war.
The main character in Hive is based on a real person, Fahrije Hoti and is played by a marvelous actress named Yllka Gashi. After much effort and struggle, Fahrije has realized that she can’t support her two kids or her disabled father-in-law with her absent husband’s failing honey business. We see her diligently tending the hives and extracting the honey, then straining and bottling it, but the volume is too small to bring in enough money. At local gatherings of the women whose men are missing, Fahrije proposes that they band together to make and sell ajvar, a popular condiment made from red peppers and eggplant. Anticipating the pressure from their conservative families, most of the women don’t want to take this chance, and only one of them agrees to work with Fahrije.
The older men of the village, patriarchal Muslims, hate when women act independently. Moreover, they assume all the women are widows and believe that it’s unseemly for widows to even appear in public. When Fahrije gets a driver’s license and starts driving a car in town, delivering jars of ajvar to the market, someone throws a rock through one of her car windows. As time goes on, the men continue to harass her with petty acts of vandalism and aggression. When other women eventually decide to take part in the business, the hostility escalates.
Basholli doesn’t shrink from revealing how the older traditional ways of rural Kosovo act as a chain around the necks of the women, even when the desperation of trying to make a living in this postwar environment justifies their enterprise. It’s just an unfortunate fact about this society, which the film shows us without even really commenting on it. Against this discouraging background we also get to witness the good things that happen when women work together—Basholli depicts the quiet joyfulness of self-sufficient women acting as a community.
As counterpoint to the main story about forming a business is the story of Fahrije’s daily struggle with grief, still unsure about the fate of her husband, and the tension this causes in the family. Her father-in-law is bitter about losing his son, and gets angry at Fahrije for stirring up controversy in the village. When Fahrije tries to sell her husband’s bench saw to help fund the business, her teenage daughter takes it as an insult to her father, whom she of course wants to believe is still alive. All of these are symptoms of unspoken grief, which will endure even if there’s resolution.
A few weeks ago on this show I reviewed Quo Vadis, Aida? another film about the Balkan wars which, like this one, is directed by a woman. The impact of war crimes and mass murder is a lasting one, as we can see even 23 years after the end of the fighting in the former Yugoslavia. Basholli’s style in Hive is not heightened or melodramatic, but sober, gritty and matter-of-fact. Yllka Gashi plays the lead role with admirable seriousness and restraint. Hive is a finely modulated work of grief, and courage.
The classic Harlem Renaissance novel by Ella Larsen about the American delusion of race is beautifully adapted by Rebecca Hall.
Passing is a remarkable film about what we used to call the color line, the distinction between races that has permeated American history. It is the debut of Rebecca Hall as director and writer, a gifted actress now going behind the camera. Passing is adapted by Hall from the famous 1929 novel of the same name by Nella Larsen, an important writer in what has come to be called The Harlem Renaissance.
In midtown Manhattan, sometime in the 1920s, Irene, a young woman played by Tessa Thompson, furtively enters a fancy hotel, lowering her hat to help conceal her face. Only later do we realize that she’s “passing,” on a small scale just in this part of town. “Passing” was when people of color who were light-skinned enough, managed to successfully pretend being white. Irene wouldn’t normally be allowed in this hotel. She lives in Harlem, married with two kids.
While enjoying a refreshment, she’s startled to see someone she knows from her younger days in Chicago—Clare, played by Ruth Negga, laughing and having casual conversations with some white friends. Clare sees Irene, approaches her with affection and invites her to her hotel room for some drinks. Clare has blonde hair and is a good deal lighter skinned than Irene, and after they go up to the room, she reveals that she’s totally passing for white in every part of her life, including having a white husband,, and a daughter. We can see that all this produces wonderment in the mind of Irene at her old friend’s audacity. Then Clare’s husband shows up, astonishingly addressing his wife as “Nig” which he explains is a joke because Clare seems to have gotten darker after the birth of their child. Actually, he says, he hates Negroes, and neither he nor Clare will go near them. Thus begins a suspenseful exploration of the complex structure of racism in the Jim Crow era, which by the way, affected black Americans throughout the country, not just in the South.
Nowadays it’s just part of life to see people, and actually be people, that look like Irene or Clare, and in general we use the word multiracial. But back then, even if the only person of color in your family tree was a great grandparent, you were to be legally considered a Negro. The racist beliefs of the time meant that one drop of so-called black blood took away your white privileges. I imagine that one of the reasons Rebecca Hall shot this film in black and white is that it makes it easier for a modern audience to believe that Thompson and Negga’s characters could pass. And besides the metaphorical angle of “black and white,” it’s an opportunity to depict a deeper character study, because black and white photography makes everything seem more subjective, and Hall is mainly interested in the inner drama of what the characters are feeling and thinking.
In fact, our point of view character is Tessa Thompson’s Irene. The film shows us almost everything that happens through her eyes. When Clare expresses regret at leaving the black community, and starts to visit Irene in Harlem, the uncertainty Clare represents, along with her risky breaking of boundaries, make Irene feel insecure. She desperately wants to believe that her position is not threatened, that her family is safe, and that she can live separately from white society without worry. But Irene’s fear comes up to the surface anyway, in the form of jealousy. She is in for a shock.
Thompson, Negga, and all the supporting cast are great. The pacing is just right. Passing is a film of rare sensibility—a subtle and nuanced drama of American illusions.
Javier Bardem shines in this dark satire about a glad-handing business owner threatened with scandal and controversy.
We’ve all seen commercials, and we know how corporations and businesses promote not only their products but their image—stories that are basically about their own benevolence, with happy consumers served by happily dedicated workers making life better. And let’s face it, we all know it’s a pitch, a promotional angle, or if not we should know it, and yet we have been bombarded with it for so long that we don’t really question it. And so to break through that story with satire, with a sense of humor sharpened by awareness of the truth that is hidden behind the hype, is a rare thing to attempt in a film. But Spanish writer-director Fernando León de Aranoa has just pulled this off in his latest film, a clever dark comedy called The Good Boss.
Javier Bardem plays Julio Blanco, the owner of a company that manufactures industrial scales. He’s charming and charismatic, and supervises his company with a personal touch, often saying that he sees the employees as his family, and promising to take the time to listen to any problems they may have. Near the beginning of the movie he makes a speech to inspire the workers, informing them that an awards committee will soon visit the factory, and asking them to pull together to make a good impression so that they can win this prestigious award for excellence.
Bardem had me smiling and chuckling from the get-go. This guy Blanco is a smooth talker indeed, and a master of pleasant sounding B.S. On some level, of course, he believes his own story, and this is a big part of why Bardem is so funny here. As the film goes on, we see more and more how Blanco’s image as the good, caring boss is a calculated strategy for achieving his own ends.
There are obstacles in his way. A longtime employee who was recently fired comes in and makes a big fuss, accusing the company of betrayal and demanding his job back. After he’s escorted out of the building, he sets up a little camp across from the factory, on public land so he can’t be evicted, yelling slogans against Blanco all day, through a bullhorn. What if the awards committee sees this? Blanco has to find a way to make him leave. In addition to this, his director of operations is making lots of expensive mistakes, and the reason he gives is that he can’t focus on work because his wife, who also works at the company, is having an affair. The biggest obstacle of all, though, is really Blanco himself, who, while to all appearances happily married, has a roving eye for young attractive female employees. He’s gotten away with it so far, but a beautiful intern named Liliana, played by Almudena Amor, could spell trouble.
All of these plot threads (and there are more) weave themselves throughout the story to wryly amusing effect. Blanco uses his charm and friendliness, his aura as a good boss, to twist things around for his advantage. But everything starts to fall apart, and it’s hilarious to watch him desperately trying to navigate his way out of the mess he has ultimately caused.
Implied throughout the film is a sharp critique of the phony mindset, the relentless fake positivity of corporate self-presentation. The Good Boss is ultimately not a farce, but a very measured piece of work, even rather dramatic at times, because the issues at stake are quite real. De Aranoa’s writing and direction is very slick and accomplished, and everything fits together perfectly, but the reason it all works so well is Javier Bardem, in a part that showcases this actor’s tremendous talent.
Alfred Hitchcock made this appeal to join the fight against Hitler a year before the attack on Pearl Harbor. Now this film is valued for being one of the best thrillers of its time.
There was a minor category of Hollywood films, made between Hitler’s invasion of Poland in 1939 and the attack on Pearl Harbor in late ’41, that I’ve nicknamed “We Need to Enter the War” films. The American public was largely wary of joining in—the attitude being “let Europe solve its own problems”—but a significant portion of the filmmaking industry wanted people to know about the danger of isolationism. Possibly the best example of this kind of movie is Foreign Correspondent, from 1940, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, himself a recent arrival to Hollywood from England.
A brash young reporter (played by Joel McCrea) is sent to Europe on the eve of war to provide a fresh perspective for American readers. He hooks up with a peace organization in Holland, run by the urbane Mr. Fisher (Herbert Marshall), and falls in love with Fisher’s daughter (Laraine Day). When the reporter witnesses the assassination of a Dutch diplomat who was central to the cause of peace, he ends up on the trail of a mysterious organization of spies.
It’s easy to forget that the thriller genre didn’t get very much respect until Hitchcock came around. He brought style and dedication to the form, and this particular example is one of the smoothest and most entertaining films of the ‘40s. There are two great set pieces. The assassination scene, in which a man shoots the diplomat during a downpour, then escapes through a sea of umbrellas, is a complex masterwork of editing. It’s soon followed by a sequence in a windmill (Hitchcock had a fondness for staging scenes in such out of the ordinary places) where McCrea manages to slink through the building, escaping the spies’ notice while the inner machinery rotates the blades, the moving camera providing a perfect sense of the spatial relationships in the windmill. What was already a stock situation (good guy hides within earshot of bad guys) is transformed into pure visual pleasure and excitement.
One of the more curious aspects of the film is the character played by George Sanders, a suave and witty English reporter who happens to be a friend of Fisher’s daughter, and helps the American reporter solve the mystery. Sanders is great here—in fact, he’s so good that he becomes the film’s hero, playing the key role of daredevil rescuer in the film’s finale, rather than the star McCrea, as Hollywood convention would dictate. Did Hitchcock and his screenwriter Charles Bennett, both British, elevate the English character’s role as some kind of tribute to the mother country, which was under violent siege at the time of filming? I don’t know, but it’s certainly unusual—not that it spoils the fun in any way.
Foreign Correspondent ends with a bit of uplifting propaganda, McCrea broadcasting a warning to the rest of the world, and this is perfectly understandable. But its value as entertainment outweighs its political significance, then and now.
French filmmaker Claire Denis, whom I consider one of our greatest living directors, likes to play around with genre from time to time. Her latest picture is called Both Sides of the Blade, and if you read the ad copy it’s being called a love triangle. Well, it’s like no triangle I’ve ever seen. In fact, her editing strategies and her masterful use of music make the film seem as if it’s going to turn into a scary suspense thriller at any moment.
The story starts with Sara and Jean, a middle aged couple blissfully in love, played by Juliette Binoche and Vincent Lindon. Denis carefully establishes their intimacy in the beginning sequence where they’re on vacation together. How satisfying it is to watch a director allowing her actors time to establish convincing, lived-in characters. This is the third time in a row that Binoche has starred in a Denis movie, and also Lindon’s third time working with her. Denis’ familiarity with her performers pays off with especially fine and nuanced work from these two.
Returning to Paris, trouble begins right away when Sara on her way to work happens to see a man (played by Grégoire Colin) on a motorcycle. Later we see her overwhelmed with emotion, out of breath, saying the man’s name, François, repeatedly in a tone that sounds more shocked than pleased. She tells Jean later that she saw François, and his reaction is muted. Gradually we learn that François is Sara’s ex, and also Jean’s former friend, whom neither of them has seen for ten years. A further element of mystery is introduced: Jean has finished serving ten years in prison, and is consequently having trouble finding work.
For Denis, a story never happens separately from society or politics or ideas. In this story, Sara is the host of a radio show in which she interviews various figures in progressive and anti-colonial circles. There’s no need for viewers to make too much of this—it’s another way of establishing characters in a full-bodied fictional world. But it’s also a reminder that there are many other things, and much worse problems, than the travails of personal relationships.
So, François offers Jean a job. He hesitates, but Sara says it’s fine. The private reactions, however, that we’ve seen her express when seeing François, contradict what she’s telling Jean. And thus we embark on what I never thought of as a triangle while watching, because of the peculiar nature of this story. François seems almost like a demonic figure, since we never get inside him like we’re allowed to get inside the two leads. Was he responsible in some way for Jean going to prison? What we do see quite vividly is that a duality is at play in Sara’s heart, a duality of which she herself is only vaguely aware.
The emotional agonies that Sara and Jean put themselves through as the film goes on are the fulfillment of all Denis’ suspense film clues. It’s especially brilliant in the case of Juliette Binoche, who takes us on a dark journey into some strange complications of desire. The film doesn’t answer all our plot questions. It does show how much deeper and more mysterious the relationships between women and men are than we usually care to acknowledge. Both Sides of the Blade presents, in its stylish way, that mystery.
Satyajit Ray’s debut film, from 1955, tells of a young boy and his family in a rural village in Bengal, and was the first Indian movie to gain worldwide attention.
In the history of Indian film, there’s a dividing line between approximately the first forty years of the movie industry, and the release, in 1955, of the first film by Bengali writer and director Satyajit Ray. It’s called Pather Panchali, which roughly translated into English means Song of the Road. Before Pather Panchali, Indian films adhered to a formula of simplistic melodramas or comedies with songs and dancing—in fact, this is the tradition that still dominates today, albeit in a more sophisticated way, and that has come to be nicknamed Bollywood.
Ray worked for ten years as a layout editor at a Calcutta ad agency, but his secret love was cinema. He read all the books and magazines he could find about filmmaking. In 1949, the great French director Jean Renoir arrived in India to make his movie The River, and Ray worked part time for him scouting locations. Renoir encouraged him to pursue his dreams. The following year, Ray put his savings together, got a small loan, borrowed money from his family, and began shooting. Most of his crew had no experience. His cinematographer had never shot a film before.
Pather Panchali was adapted from a well-known autobiographical novel, written in 1928 by the Bengali author Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay. It’s about a poor family in rural Bengal around 1910. The family consists of the parents—the father is often away trying desperately to make a living, the mother frets and scolds and feels lonely—a daughter and son, and an elderly aunt. The story is centered on the 6-year-old son, Apu, and his innocent reactions to what goes on around him in his family and village.
Watching this film is like peeking into an actual place and time. Little details, like the dragonflies playing on the water, create a sense of place while evoking feelings about events that are happening in the lives of the family. The small incidents that go to make up Apu’s life are soul-stirring because of the picture’s basic honesty about people. These characters are not idealized. The mother nags, her desire for security getting the better of her compassion. The father is a dreamer whose irresponsibility puts the family at risk. The sister, Durga, a few years older than Apu, steals things. Yet they are also decent, loving people. The mother in particular (in an amazing performance by Karuna Bannerjee, an amateur, as was most of the cast) gains immeasurably in stature as the film progresses. And the figure of the old auntie is very moving—childish and sometimes petulant, she also shows a gentleness and tolerance much needed by the daughter.
When Ray couldn’t afford any more film, he used bits of the discarded film ends that were left around at the Calcutta studios. But finally, after a year and a half, he ran out of money and filming stopped. After scrambling for over a year, he managed to receive more funding. Working on a deadline, his friend Ravi Shankar composed the film’s musical score in one day. Then it was released—to immediate acclaim and sold-out theaters. It was shown at Cannes and eventually given international distribution. Pather Panchali was the first Indian film to receive worldwide attention.
As it turned out, this was the first in a trilogy. The other two films: Aparajito and Apur Sansar are excellent as well. They follow Apu into adolescence and adulthood, turning the Apu trilogy into a national cinematic epic with Apu representing the soul of India.
A gripping drama based on real events that occurred during the Serbian attack on Bosnia in 1995 brings home to us the nightmare of modern war.
The terror and helplessness of civilians caught in a genocidal war is a reality powerfully captured by Bosnian writer-director Jasmila Žbanić in her film Quo Vadis, Aida? “Quo vadis?” is a Latin phrase that became famous in Christian stories about persecution during the Roman Empire. It basically means “Where are you going?” and it was used as something God would say to a frightened believer. But in this case, the question has an urgently modern import, being posed to a woman named Aida, played by Jasna Đuričić, who faces the most catastrophic threat she could imagine.
Aida is a Bosnian teacher, who in 1995 works as a translator for UN forces in the town of Srebrenica, near the Serbian border. After three years of siege, the UN officers assure town officials that the Serbian army will suffer airstrikes if they dare to attack. But when Serbia advances on the city, their promises prove empty, and the population flees to the UN base nearby, which is manned by Dutch forces. They only let a few thousand people into the building, leaving thousands more stranded outside the fence in the heat with no food or water. While continuing to work as a translator between Bosnian civilians and the Dutch UN forces, Aida frantically seeks a way to get her husband and two adult sons out of danger. She knows what the UN officers won’t admit, that the promises of the Serbians, led by a war criminal, General Mladić, can’t be trusted.
Almost every moment in this movie is tense and gripping. The Serbs target men for executions because they suspect all Bosnian men of being fighters in anti-Serbian forces. When General Mladic wants to talk to the UN officers he also asks for some representatives of the people of Srebrenica, and when no one volunteers, Aida suggests her husband, who’s a high school principal, as a way of getting him inside the compound. Mladic promises that all the civilians will be transported safely to another town in buses, and the UN people agree. But Aida senses that’s not safe, so she hides her husband and sons in various places on the base in a difficult and dangerous effort at evasion.
The Serbians arrive at the compound and demand to be let in to check for weapons, and we witness their deplorable and abusive behavior. Žbanić expertly evokes the overwhelming fear of people who are basically at the mercy of their worst enemies. While watching this, I kept thinking of the mistreatment and atrocities we’re seeing now in Ukraine. The horrifying atmosphere of total war, which seems distant and abstract when we only hear about it, comes to life minute by minute in this film. The acting is amazing, making you forget that this is a movie and experience something close to the reality of state terrorism in a way that is impossible to forget.
The film also shows us the conflict eventually ending, and society returning to what appears to be a more normal condition. Yet there are always those who escape the consequences of their crimes, while the suffering and trauma of their victims remain. Quo Vadis, Aida? is a great and towering indictment of our continued acceptance of violence and war.
The yearning and frustrations of two teenage girls in 1950s New Zealand leads to tragedy, in this wildly expressive film based on an actual murder case.
Before New Zealand director Peter Jackson became world famous for his Lord of the Rings trilogy, he had a cult following for directing a few horror and zombie films that featured wild special effects and stop-motion animation. Then in 1994, at age 32, Jackson showed that he could handle a movie with wider significance and appeal. That film was Heavenly Creatures, a story based on a notorious murder case from the early 1950s in Christchurch, New Zealand. As was to be the case in all his future work, Jackson wrote the screenplay with his wife, Fran Walsh. This was the film that fascinated me when I first saw it in 1995, and then quickly went to see it again.
After the picture establishes its time and place with part of an actual 1954 newsreel about Christchurch, we meet Pauline Rieper, a lonely and painfully self-conscious teenage girl played by 16-year-old newcomer Melanie Lynskey. Her parents and siblings don’t understand why Pauline is always so angry and withdrawn, although we in the audience can sense that the difficult and confusing effects of puberty clearly play a role. Ignored by her classmates at a girls’ school, and disliked by teachers, Pauline is bewildered about her life, an experience well conveyed through Jackson’s bold camera effects and frenetic editing. Then, an English girl arrives at the school, Juliet Hulme, played by the 17-year-old Kate Winslet. Vivacious, imaginative, and boldly rebellious, Juliet immediately captivates Pauline, and reaches out to her in friendship, which the shy girl responds to with all the repressed passion of her soul. Winslet had previously appeared on English TV, but this was her first role in a movie. She and Lynskey give powerful, revelatory performances.
The bond between Pauline and Juliet quickly becomes rather intense. Pauline introduces her friend to the music of her idol, the tenor Mario Lanza. Their enmeshment expresses itself in imaginative play-acting: they pretend to be fantasy heroines in a mythical kingdom, giving themselves different names and acting out little stories. Here Jackson introduces his animation techniques—large “claymation” type figures dancing, singing, and embracing the girls in the courtyard of a medieval castle. The girls’ fantasies not only celebrate their bond, but express anger and hostility towards authority figures who try to discipline them.
The trouble starts when Juliet’s father feels disturbed by how involved the two girls are in each other. He thinks it’s unhealthy, and he tells Pauline’s mother that. Both sets of parents try to discourage the friendship in various ways, but of course this only makes the attachment stronger and more determined. When the Hulmes decide to move back to England, Juliet and Pauline think they’re being persecuted. Faced with the unthinkable prospect of separation, their fragile minds go over the edge.
Heavenly Creatures is a fever dream of a movie. Sometimes it seems like you can barely catch your breath with Jackson’s relentless, flamboyant style, funny at first but ultimately tragic. No film that I’ve seen has captured the insanity of adolescence, the inability to see a future in the pressure of today, than this film has. Heavenly Creatures’ remarkable compassion for its misguided characters brings us to painful and unforgettable awareness.
A Finnish woman on a Russian train is aggravated by the man with which she’s forced to share a compartment: an insensitive young tough guy with a chip on his shoulder.
I recently took a trip on Amtrak that included staying in a sleeping car, and although there were practical reasons for this, my inner movie lover also wanted to experience first hand something like the train journeys I’ve loved watching in the movies. From Howard Hawks’s Twentieth Century through more than one Hitchcock film, to Richard Linkater’s Before Sunrise, passenger trains have been a time-honored cinematic tradition. Compartment Number 6, a film from Finnish director Juho Kuosmanen, takes this classic set-up and gives it a refreshingly intimate turn.
We first meet Laura, a young Finnish archaeology student played by Seidi Haarla, at a chic cocktail party in Moscow hosted by a woman we eventually figure out is her lover, a Russian professor named Irina. Laura is about to travel north to the Arctic Circle city of Murmansk to study newly discovered 5000 year-old petroglyphs there, a detail which dates our story to the late 1990s. Laura wants to feel excited about her trip, but she’s sad because Irina has decided not to go with her, so that in addition to feeling out of place in Russia as a Finn with a minimal grasp of the language, she senses that Irina is giving the brush-off to her relationship.
When Laura gets on the train, she’s in for a shock, discovering that she’s sharing the tiny compartment with a young Russian mine worker named Ljoha, played by Yuriy Borisov. He’s a swaggering, almost illiterate tough guy in the process of trying to get as drunk as possible on vodka while filling the little sleeping car with his cigarette smoke. The conversation does not go well. For some reason he thinks she’s Estonian, and makes insulting sexist comments to her. Is she going to have to spend the entire long journey with this creep? She tries to get a different compartment, but the train is full up.
Now, if you’re thinking in conventional terms, you might wonder if the film’s going to make a love story out of this unpromising situation. Thankfully, it doesn’t do that, instead carefully and believably depicting a process by which two people gradually allow themselves to recognize each other for who they really are behind their social masks. The chance of friendship and connection is in this case more meaningful than any kind of romance.
Kuosmanen shot most of the picture on an actual train, with close-ups vividly communicating the cramped atmosphere inside, a confinement that is set against the winter landscape seen rushing by outside the windows. There are also important scenes that are not on the train, including at Murmansk, where the resolution between these two completely opposite characters is achieved with beautiful understatement. Much of the credit for this is due to the two actors, who convey so much more than expected, revealing that their fears of how other people see them have become an obstacle in their lives.
Based on a novel by Finnish author Rosa Liksom, the picture makes fun in a gentle way of the stereotyped differences between Finland and Russia, a subject which is especially interesting in light of current tensions between the two countries. Compartment Number 6 doesn’t take anything for granted, but starts at something like square one in human relations and makes something very surprising and worthwhile out of it.
Three films by Godfrey Reggio and Philip Glass present wordless imagery and music to send a cosmic warning about civilization’s imbalance, exploitation, and destruction.
The meanings that we access through works of art are not confined to the conscious intentions of the artists. This critical truth came to mind while watching The Qatsi Trilogy—three films directed by Godfrey Reggio, and scored by Philip Glass.
These are films without any talking, just imagery and music. The only text comes at the end, when the odd-sounding film titles are explained. Philip Glass’s music is an essential component. It’s not the usual situation where the music accompanies a narrative, or helps illustrate it. The music is united to the visuals as if they were one thing. I know people who are maddened by Glass’s music, which is characterized by a lot of repetition. But here it aligns the viewer’s attention and emotions with the images. The repetitive motifs help the mind let go of the scattered, wandering forms of attention that can be habitual for us.
Koyaanisqatsi, from 1982, starts with shots of nature in awe-inspiring aspects: mountains, canyons, deserts, and so on, with human beings conspicuously absent. Eventually we shift to footage of modern civilization, and in comparison to nature these images seem bizarre and outlandish. Two techniques comprise most of the film: slow motion and fast motion. The fast motion is actually time-lapse photography: footage of events that take hours or even days appearing to take place in just minutes. The movement of vehicles, traffic zipping through huge highway systems, masses of people, colossal buildings in major cities and the traffic within those cities: time-lapse photography takes away the familiarity of these things and makes them seem alien. In purely visual terms, the images are astounding, weird, beautiful, yet disturbing. Slow motion is used when we are looking at things more close up, especially people. Watching the movement of a crowd in slow motion, the familiar is once again supplanted by the sensation of strangeness. These beings, in the way they move, the way they avoid each other’s gaze, evoke questions and doubts about human nature, our striving and seeking, our ignorance and mortality.
Powaqqatsi, from 1988, refrains from time-lapse photography, but it still uses a lot of slow motion. Here the footage is from the lands of non-European people. First we see traditional forms of work such as planting. Then civilization shows up. Instead of fairly well-dressed folks we see a much poorer populace. Modernity has conquered this non-white world, but it hasn’t helped the people. Here’s the theme of injustice and exploitation, and one’s heart hurts more watching this than it did during the more alienated first film.
Naqoyqatsi was released in 2002, after a gap of thirteen years. Why this long delay I don’t know. The film uses graphics, animation, and rotoscope photography to visualize the mind realm, the world of thinking and science. The mathematical and geometric designs become like a relentless drum beat of “progress.” Eventually the rhythm becomes the marching of soldiers, the creation of weapons, guns firing and the detonation of bombs. It shows the cleverness of humans serving the expansion of war.
One thing that makes The Qatsi Trilogy difficult is that it seeks to evoke the impersonal as the source of meaning in the modern world. This
A spellbinding portrait of an elderly couple in crisis, the wife suffering from dementia, the husband unable to cope, in a film composed entirely in split screen.
I felt many strong emotions while watching Vortex, the new film by Gaspar Noé, an Argentine director who lives and works in Paris. As far as what the movie is about, it seems fairly straightforward. An elderly married couple in Paris experiences increasing challenges. The husband is a film scholar with some health issues. The wife is a retired psychiatrist who is sliding into dementia. They have an adult son with his own troubles who doesn’t know how to help his father deal with the deteriorating situation. The story sounds very similar to Amour, the Michael Haneke film from 2012, and the way it sometimes highlights how scary dementia can be for the person suffering from it, brings to mind The Father with Anthony Hopkins, directed by Florian Zeller, which was more recent. Those were both great films. But the resemblances are actually kind of superficial. Noé has crafted a formal structure that makes Vortex unique.
Almost the entire film is presented in split screen: two motion pictures side by side with borders, like window frames. For a good deal of the time, the husband is on one side, the wife on the other. She wakes up first and starts puttering around the house. Eventually he gets out of bed and goes about the normal business of his day. At first it might seem difficult to follow two images at once—the eye moves from one to the other to try to catch everything. Eventually one gets used to the technique. The man seems relatively lucid and talkative, calling people on the phone about a book he’s writing, and so forth. The woman goes out of the apartment and wanders into a couple of shops, and we notice that she becomes more and more tentative, looking lost and puzzled.
The split screen encourages us to value both subjective points of view equally, rather than favor one over the other, and I think that’s perhaps the most important reason the director chose to do this. The husband’s words and behavior are understandable, but we also identify with the wife’s fear and bewilderment, such is the incredible performance by Françoise Lebrun as this old woman struggling to find words to express her catastrophic loss of memory in which everything seems strange and somehow wrong. The husband, by the way, is played by the famous horror director Dario Argento.
Later, Noé introduces variations in the form. Husband and wife are sometimes in the same room—we still have a split screen where we see them from different angles. When their son comes to help them a little, and brings along his little boy, he replaces one of the points of view in the split screen, or the three of them are together in two different angles. And there are further permutations. The director sticks to this device to both divide and broaden our attention.
I suppose any film featuring dementia as a major element might end up being about a lot more. Vortex is thought-provoking in the best sense. We’re forced to confront the nature of memory and its relationship to identity, and the fact of mortality, which we so often avoid. In the end, it’s not the style or the artfulness that matters here, it’s the unsparing honesty. We see how even the most loving among us are so involved in ourselves that we can’t fully listen to one another, and we see that gap also in the eyes of the mother looking for some unknown key to explain her distress. The truth is always more compassionate than anything comforting we try to say. Vortex has that kind of compassion.
A splendid adaptation of Balzac’s great novel about a young poet becoming embroiled in the petty world of Paris journalism in the 1820s.
Lost Illusions is an adaptation of a classic 19th century novel by Honoré de Balzac. The history of film is full of examples of great books that have failed to be made into good movies, so it’s an unexpected delight to see a movie that does justice to its source. Lost Illusions is not only an excellent period drama recreating with its costumes, sets, and production design Paris in the 1820s, but a faithful translation of the vision of its brilliant world-famous author into cinematic terms. It’s directed by Xavier Gianolli, the creator of another fine period film, Marguerite, that I reviewed a few years ago; who, with Jacques Fieschi, also adapted Balzac’s novel for the screen.
The story concerns a naïve provincial poet, Lucien Chardon, played by the perfectly cast young actor Benjamin Voisin, who dreams of escaping the drudgery of his life working at a printing press in his small town by writing and publishing his own poetry. His talent and good looks catch the attention of a local unhappily married noblewoman played by Cécile de France, who, seeking to advance his career ends up having an affair with him. When her infidelity is suspected by her rich husband, she flees to the refuge of her influential aristocratic cousin in Paris, with Lucien in tow. But his immature country manners stick out like a sore thumb in high class Parisian society, and she’s forced to abandon him or be ostracized. Faced with poverty and starvation, Lucien luckily falls in with the editor of one of the city’s literary journals, and gains a reputation as an acerbic theater critic and satirist. This world of the periodical press reveals itself as ruthlessly cutthroat, ruled only by the desire for money and not for art. The amoral atmosphere and the easy money turns his head, and when he falls in love with an actress from the cheap Boulevard stage, it becomes more and more difficult to navigate the treacherous politics and backbiting of Paris journalism.
Balzac was writing about a moment in history when many features of the modern world were being born. The revolution and Napoleon’s wars of empire were over; the old Bourbon dynasty had been restored, and a new way of life in which money was the sole value of the social order was taking root. Giannoli paints a meticulous picture of a world in which honesty and noble motives were disdained, when writers paid for good reviews in the paper, or got bad reviews when their enemies paid more. One of the characters organizes groups of audience members who will clap or boo a stage production based on which side has paid him the most money. Royalists and anti-royalists square off in print, and Lucien is clumsy enough to make enemies in both camps. He seeks to be known not by his father’s name Chardon, but by the noble pedigree of his mother, de Rubempré. In the end everything comes down to class, and the success or failure of being included in the upper class. The new version of society that Balzac was condemning was ultimately a replay of the same old story of privilege and domination.
Full of character and incident, beautifully shot and acted, Lost Illusions is a triumph. Although the film necessarily trims some of the book’s subplots, it’s a splendid and accurate portrayal of the great French novelist’s insights about the corrupting power of money and class. And although it takes place two hundred years ago, one can find many parallels to our time.
Artist and director Ulrike Ottinger presents her recollections of living and working in Paris in the 1960s.
Paris Calligrammes: that’s not exactly a movie title that would pique everyone’s curiosity. It’s written and directed by an experimental visual artist and filmmaker named Ulrike Ottinger. I can assure you that she doesn’t take appealing to a mass audience into consideration. She makes films for herself and others who are interested in art and creativity for their own sake.
Ottinger, who turned 80 this year, tells of her experiences in Paris as a young artist, from the time she left her provincial German town in 1962 at age 20, her car breaking down on the way, after which she hitchhiked to the city. She accompanies her narration with a wealth of footage from home movies, newsreels, TV excerpts, still photos, fiction films, and film of life in Paris today. Different sections highlight different aspects of her Paris experience.
She starts with her discovery of the Librairie Calligrammes, a store specializing in German books owned by Fritz Picard, a Jewish German exile. The word “Calligrammes” was taken from a poem by Guillame Apollinaire, who defines it as a text that creates an image with its letters. By using this word as part of the film’s title, Ottinger is signaling the same artistic purpose of creating an image in the mind through her narration. Anyway, she discovered this German language book store, and the owner, Picard, opened a door for her to a world of intellectual émigrés, including Hans Richter, Paul Celan, and Walter Mehring, that was centered on Dada and Surrealist art and literature. We see an interview with Picard, and hear Mehring recite a masterful poem mourning the deaths of German artists who resisted fascism. This one section is so full of interesting people and stories that I thought this might be the whole movie. But it’s a film of many parts, and although it runs only a little over two hours, it’s brimming with so much incident and detail that I can only marvel that Ottinger has managed to fit it all in.
Other sections cover her friends among the city’s avant-garde visual artists, neighborhoods in which she lived, the vital film scene clustered around Henri Langlois’ Cinémathèque Française, Ottinger’s own progression as an artist influenced by the Dada and Pop Art movements, the left wing politics that pulled Paris intellectuals together in the late ‘60s (and then pushed them apart), and much more. Ottinger was always openly lesbian, and that reality is taken as an assumed basis here, one of the aspects of her life that informs her work.
I found myself stopping the film at times (the great advantage we have in our video era!) to make notes about the film’s numerous anecdotes, remarks, and insights. Ottinger doesn’t try to attain an illusory comprehensiveness, but just by talking about her own experience, her own world, she provides a sense of the excitement and ferment of that time that I’ve never seen equaled.
I would say that this picture is an example of the diary or notebook form within what I call non-fiction film. The word “documentary” is really tired out now, and fails to do justice to the variety we witness in films that are not narrative or dramatic stories. Ottinger uses archival material with an eye towards what you haven’t seen before, avoiding the kind of stock photo montage that we encounter in straight “objective” histories. There’s a lot to take in, and I felt intellectually and emotionally enriched after watching it.
An experiment in how people will react to videos of Israeli army and settler interactions with Palestinians becomes a fascinating study challenging assumptions about viewers and their judgments about film and images.
Israeli filmmaker Ra’anan Alexandrowicz made several award-winning documentaries before moving from Israel to Philadelphia four years ago. I remembered him from an interesting 2003 fiction film called James’ Journey to Jerusalem, in which a young Jewish African man emigrates to Israel and is surprised by the racism he experiences from other Jews. The theme was serious, but the treatment was low-key, scrupulously respectful of the characters, and often humorous. His documentary work is also compassionate and open-minded. The latest of these, from 2019, is the simplest and at the same time most provocative of Alexandrowicz’s films. It’s called The Viewing Booth.
Alexandrowicz invited seven Temple University students to watch videos of Palestinian interactions with the Israeli military and settlers, about half of the videos by a human rights group, critical of Israeli policy, called B’Tselem, and the other half by various pro-Israel sources. They were encouraged to express their thoughts and feelings while watching. One of the seven students had to cancel, and a young Jewish student named Maia Levi expressed interest in being part of the project, so she ended up filling that slot. It is her experience viewing the videos in a booth that we are first shown.
Levi is intelligent, solidly pro-Israel, and expresses a lot of skepticism about the videos. Part of the time we just watch her face as she reacts to the material, and listen to her comments, and eventually we also see what she is being shown. She doesn’t accept any video on face value. For example, she says that an official IDF video showing a soldier being nice to a Palestinian kid and giving him a piece of cheese is obviously staged, and that it’s an unconvincing and ineffective message. She expresses similar doubts about the B’Tselem videos. How did cameras just happen to be in these situations where we see Israeli soldiers and settlers misbehaving? What is the context of these events, and why aren’t we being told about what preceded them?
Israeli filmmaker Ra’anan Alexandrowicz made several award-winning documentaries before moving from Israel to Philadelphia four years ago. I remembered him from an interesting 2003 fiction film called James’ Journey to Jerusalem, in which a young Jewish African man emigrates to Israel and is surprised by the racism he experiences from other Jews. The theme was serious, but the treatment was low-key, scrupulously respectful of the characters, and often humorous. His documentary work is also compassionate and open-minded. The latest of these, from 2019, is the simplest and at the same time most provocative of Alexandrowicz’s films. It’s called The Viewing Booth.
Alexandrowicz invited seven Temple University students to watch videos of Palestinian interactions with the Israeli military and settlers, about half of the videos by a human rights group, critical of Israeli policy, called B’Tselem, and the other half by various pro-Israel sources. They were encouraged to express their thoughts and feelings while watching. One of the seven students had to cancel, and a young Jewish student named Maia Levi expressed interest in being part of the project, so she ended up filling that slot. It is her experience viewing the videos in a booth that we are first shown.
Levi is intelligent, solidly pro-Israel, and expresses a lot of skepticism about the videos. Part of the time we just watch her face as she reacts to the material, and listen to he
Guillermo del Toro adds his own Gothic sensibility to this thrilling new version of an old film noir.
After winning the Best Picture Oscar in 2017 for The Shape of Water, Mexican filmmaker Guillermo del Toro continues to challenge himself. Turning aside from his customary monster or supernatural-themed stories, he’s now made a crime film, a film noir as people often call it, Nightmare Alley. Hollywood already released a picture with that title back in 1947, starring Tyrone Power, and it’s a good one, but rather than do a remake, Del Toro went back to the original 1946 novel by William Lindsay Gresham, which includes a lot of material that was changed or not used for the older film. And being the stylist that he is, Del Toro has made a movie of intense visual richness, a dark thriller that grabs the viewer every step of the way.
Bradley Cooper plays a cunning grifter named Stanton Carlisle, whom we first see dragging what is clearly a wrapped up dead body into a hole in the floor of a run-down shack, setting it on fire, then walking away while the fire engulfs the house. It’s the late 1930s. On the run, Stan stumbles into a traveling circus, and is hired by the owner and operator, played by Willem Dafoe, as an assistant and maintenance guy. He makes friends with a mentalist act, a husband and wife team played by David Strathairn and Toni Collette, who teach him some of their tricks. He also hooks up with Molly, a sideshow performer played by Rooney Mara, and persuades her to go off with him and embark on their own career as a mentalist act, pretending to read minds and reveal secrets on stage and in nightclubs. But then a femme fatale, a psychiatrist played by Cate Blanchett, gets him involved in a much more high-stakes scheme.
Del Toro loves classic studio-era Hollywood film, to which he’s added his own heady mix of gothic symbolism and mystery. He’s great at making movies that are made completely on sets, or almost completely. That old style of cinematic illusion in which production design, music, and smooth camera work seduces an audience into its world is a perfect match for this director’s talent. As a viewer, I reveled in the artifice of his presentation, the knowledge that this is a movie not detracting one bit from the enjoyment of its style. The film is constantly startling us with vivid tracking shots, close-ups of its often grotesque characters, and unusual camera angles. Nathan Johnson’s music provides an ominous undercurrent to the tale of twisted ambition spinning out of control.
Bradley Cooper really takes it to the limit—this is among his best work yet, a maniacal yet self-contained portrait of a man always grasping for more. Rooney Mara represents a balancing force, an essentially innocent person tricked into crossing ethical boundaries because of her love for Stan. She’s the perfect counterpart to Cooper’s intensity.
A lot of mainstream filmmaking is merely competent at best, not going out of its way to challenge an audience, but tamely imitating all the other stuff out there. Guillermo del Toro is different. With Nightmare Alley, he demonstrates his commitment to continue making terrifically entertaining movies.
An increasingly synthetic world creates the conditions for new human organs of unknown purpose to appear in the body, in David Cronenberg’s latest dystopian vision.
David Cronenberg pioneered a certain type of horror movie that came to be called “body horror.” Throughout his career, in such films as The Brood, Videodrome, and The Fly, he’s told stories that involve invasion, mutation, and experimentation of the human body. But even this notion of body horror is too narrow. It’s not about just fright or being scary, but a feeling of strangeness about being embodied itself. Human beings have altered the world in many ways, including ways that are bad, and in so doing, Cronenberg is saying, we also alter ourselves. Each of his films with this theme has reflected on the society and the era we are living in. With his new film, Crimes of the Future, he confronts us with the deadly poisoning of our environment, in a film of radical pessimism.
Cronenberg made a film called Crimes of the Future back in 1970, with a story that involved mutations, but otherwise is nothing like this new one. It’s not a remake or a sequel. I think he just likes the title, which implies crimes as inevitably following what has been done in our past and can’t be revoked.
This movie takes place in a future dystopia where medical advances have eliminated physical pain from human life. You might think that this would be a good thing, but one of the effects has been to make people more heedless of danger. Many are discovering that new organs are growing in their bodies, organs of unknown function created by some sudden process of evolution. Most, afraid of what may come, choose surgery to remove these organs. In this future, surgery has become almost thoroughly automated, with machines that make all the incisions and extractions just by someone touching a few buttons. And patients are awake during the process, since they can’t feel any pain.
Viggo Mortensen plays a man named Saul Tenser, who is continually growing new organs and has turned the operations into performance art. His partner, a surgeon played by Lea Seydoux, performs these operations in public where people gaze in fascination at whatever new organs she removes from Tenser’s body. He’s agreed to let a small research group, called the National Organ Registry, classify and keep track of all these organs, but this causes trouble when their work comes to the attention of a rogue scientist who wants to do a public performance of an autopsy on his dead mutated child.
Cronenberg’s view of our current situation is an extremely dark one, as you can tell. If you are grossed out easily by blood and guts and people getting cut up, by no means should you see this movie. Nonetheless, the film is not intended merely to shock. In a seductive, almost hypnotic style, and aided by Howard Shore’s ominous music, Cronenberg sends us a warning about our reshaping of the world, physically, morally, and politically. The near future we are shown here is in thrall to a sinister death cult. With the attainment of spiritual numbness, humans have succumbed to a kind of despair in which they’ll go to any lengths just to feel something, and especially pain. Saul Tenser uses a bizarre technological chair and bed that manipulate his body to keep him alive. These devices sustain, but also enslave him. The film reminds us that an immersion in the virtual represents estrangement from the natural.
Crimes of the Future is itself a kind of autopsy of our world predicament, a vision of solemn and unrelenting dread.
**Three stories about chance and imagination, written and directed by the up and coming director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi.
Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy**. What an intriguing movie title! I can understand how the film’s writer and director, Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, would be pleased with that translation. However, the literal meaning from the Japanese might give you a better idea of what the movie’s about: “Chance and Imagination.” The film consists of three stories, all of which have coincidences, and explore how imagination plays a big part in relationships. Other elements I see here are mistakes and forgiveness.
The first story is about a young woman who tells a girl friend about a fascinating man that she just met, and that she spent an entire night in conversation with, everything clicking perfectly, and now they’re going to go on a formal date soon. The friend doesn’t let on, but from the woman’s description she’s pretty sure that this man is her ex. She goes to see him, and the tension-filled encounter tells us about a lot of things one would not suspect, and explores some harsh and uncomfortable truths.
The second story starts with a young man who fails to graduate because of a professor who refuses to accept a late assignment. This teacher has become suddenly famous after writing an award-winning novel. The young man persuades his girlfriend to try to lure the professor into a “honey trap” for revenge, coming on to him so that he’ll be disgraced for being sexually inappropriate. Things get complicated, though.
The final story concerns a woman feeling alienated when she attends a high school reunion. She leaves the reunion, and then by chance runs into a former lover. The other woman invites her over for tea, and the stage is set for some revelations about the past. There’s a clever twist in the plot that I won’t tell you. I’ll only say that the two women use their imaginations to recreate memories and heal their wounds.
The first story ends with uncertainty, the second with bitter irony, and the third with an affirmation of going forward in life. On the soundtrack is a solo piano piece by Robert Schumann: “Scenes of Childhood.” It conveys a mood of wistfulness, even a little sentimentality, so I thought I might be in for something emotionally precious or pretentious. It turns out to be a nice fake move: if the music sets you up to be touched, the hard-edged honesty of the dialogue and the daring ups and downs in the characters’ perceptions of events provide a bracing little shock to the system.
The second story features the reading of a passage from the professor’s book that seems frankly pornographic, just to warn you. The intention, I think, is to make you laugh, or at least that’s what I did. I was continually surprised by the insights that emerged from these stories of chance and mistaken assumptions.
Hamaguchi released this film and another one, the critically acclaimed Drive My Car, both in one year, which is quite an accomplishment. I think I’m probably in a minority in preferring this film, Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, to the other one. Hamaguchi wrote the three stories here, and so his style, in my opinion, suits his own material in this case more than Drive My Car, which is based on a short story by Haruki Murakami, whose unusual prose manner is, in my view, difficult to adapt. Now, don’t get me wrong; it’s a good movie. It’s just that Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy captured my imagination in a way that still resonates strongly with me.
George Orwell’s dystopian novel was made into a great film in the year of its title: 1984.
I’m guessing most of you have at least heard of George Orwell’s novel “1984.” It’s about a totalitarian state in the future, one of constant surveillance, in which critical thinking is a crime, and authority is represented by a dictator named Big Brother. An office worker in one of the ministries, Winston Smith, starts to question authority, and initiates a secret love affair with a woman named Julia, even though unsanctioned relationships are illegal. This is the plot, in brief, but perhaps the book has become so familiar that we’ve neglected to read it carefully anymore. Crucially, Orwell’s ideas hinged on language and the way authoritarians use it to hide and distort the facts.
Making a good film version of 1984 is difficult. It’s been tried a few times, with varied success. My favorite version was released in 1984, adapted and directed by a young Englishman named Michael Radford. Radford’s producers and other backers were behind his project, but they insisted that the picture be released in the year 1984, when the media would inevitably start talking about the book, comparing what it said to what the year looked like now, and so forth. That meant they were in a hurry to get it done, and it’s impressive what Radford and his team, under pressure, managed to achieve on a pretty low budget.
The screenplay was very faithful to the book. The director’s first brilliant decision was to make the production design appear, not like some vision of the future, but similar to the styles of the year the book was written, 1948. There are computer, surveillance, and television screens in the film, but all the technology looks shabby and old-fashioned. The vehicles, the offices and other buildings, the clothes, look bleak, like England did after the war.
Roger Deakins, early in what would become a very long career, paints the film in stark gray—a world of grime and confinement. The color photography sometimes looks almost black and white. All the amazing visual effects, such as the crowd scenes at the hate rallies with the large screens and the image of Big Brother, were done in camera—in other words, they were shot just as they appear. Of course there was no computer generated imagery then, but Radford couldn’t even afford the current technology such as blue screens.
In the main role of Winston Smith, Radford cast John Hurt, who conveys a kind of wounded resentment and passivity that gives an edge to the character’s rebellion. The terrible punishment Winston endures Hurt makes palpable—his suffering has a visceral onscreen power. He truly went the extra mile. As Julia, a relative newcomer named Suzanna Hamilton has just the right mix of mischief and defiant strength. But the biggest coup was getting Richard Burton to play O’Brien, the drily sinister official who represents the intellectual voice of the state machine. He was not a well man, and had trouble remembering his lines. This caused some agonizing delays in the shoot. But the final result on screen is utterly compelling, one of his great performances. Instead of trying to act the villain as a lesser performer would do, Burton’s calm and deliberate manner, and the precision and thoughtfulness of his delivery, turns O’Brien into the epitome of totalitarian thinking. It was his last appearance on screen. He died of a cerebral hemorrhage two months before the movie was released.
1984 did OK at the time—not a big hit. Since then, however, its stature has steadily increased, and now it’s widely considered the best film version of Orwell’s great, still relevant book.
The film version of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Broadway musical is a delightful expression of solidarity in a predominately Latino N.Y. neighborhood, with the group dancing especially enjoyable.
Have you seen In the Heights? This is the sort of question I feel compelled to ask after I’ve watched a film I consider amazing, and possibly of wide appeal. In the Heights is an adaptation of the Broadway musical of the same name with music and lyrics by Lin-Manuel Miranda, the genius behind Hamilton; and the book, as the non-singing part of a musical is called, by Quiara Alegria Hudes. The director is Jon M. Chu. It played on the big screen last year, but I wasn’t going out to see movies in theaters yet, so I saw it recently online. Oh, and another reason I’m curious if people have seen it is that in Hollywood terms, it was a flop, making significantly less money than it cost. This doesn’t usually surprise me, but In the Heights is not the usual type of film that I review.
The story concerns a group of people in the predominately Latino Washington Heights neighborhood in upper Manhattan. At the center are two couples. There’s Usnavi, played by Anthony Ramos, owner of a convenience store, or bodega as it’s called, yearning to go back to the Dominican Republic where he was born, and intending to buy his deceased father’s property there. He has a desperate crush on Vanessa, played by Melissa Barrera, who works in a beauty salon, but wants to get out of the neighborhood and become a fashion designer. Nina, played by Leslie Grace, is a brilliant young Puerto Rican woman returning to the Heights from her first year at Stanford. She felt alienated in that predominately Anglo environment, and would rather come back to live in the Heights, but her father (Jimmy Smits) expects and demands that she stay in school. Benny, played by Corey Hawkins, works for the father’s taxi company as a dispatcher, is best friends with Usnavi, and in love with Nina, supporting her in her desire to stay in New York. Around these people are many others: family, friends, and neighborhood characters.
The music is what I would call, in my relative ignorance, mainstream hip-hop inflected pop music. Anyway, this kind of music is not really my thing, but it’s a remarkable measure of quality, I think, that I find the songs lovely and quite pleasurable, both musically and lyrically. But the thing that knocked me out is the group dancing. Almost every number ends up involving the neighborhood, with a whole bunch of people singing and dancing, joyously and with great energy. The choreography, credited to Christopher Scott, is spectacular.
The film idealizes life in the neighborhood, which is something musicals do. It’s a heightened reality that we see and hear, and I found it utterly delightful. Being released during the pandemic probably hurt it more than anything, I imagine, although in general audiences today are not too crazy about musicals. Spielberg’s version of West Side Story, for instance, also didn’t get the box office that was expected.
Now, in this film there was also a bit of controversy when Washington Heights residents and others objected to the fact that, other than Benny, the important characters are not black. I don’t mean racially, but in terms of color. A vast majority of people in the Heights are black or dark brown in appearance. This complaint is understandable, especially from people who find themselves underrepresented in a film that is titled after their home. Manuel and the other filmmakers have admitted that it was an unintentional screw-up. Knowing nothing about Washington Heights, I absorbed its strong message of solidarity without a problem.
The real main character in this fil
Fritz Lang adapted the medieval German epic into this awe-inspiring two part spectacle, one of the great achievements of the silent film era.
After the success of the massive two-part crime film Dr. Mabuse in 1922, Fritz Lang and screenwriter Thea von Harbou, now husband and wife, embarked on an even more ambitious project, an adaptation of the German national epic Die Nibelungen. Two years were spent in preparation, and shooting took nine months, which was a huge amount of time to make a film in those days.
Once again, the result was a two-part film. Part One (Siegfried) tells of the warrior Siegfried’s wooing of the Burgundian princess Kriemhild, his services to her brother King Gunther in winning the warrior queen Brunhild, and his betrayal and death through the spite of Brunhild and the machinations of the King’s favorite knight, Hagen. Part Two (Kriemhild’s Revenge) tells of Kriemhild’s marriage to the barbarian king Etzel, and how she lures her brothers and Hagen to her court in Hungary in order to exact a bloody revenge for the death of Siegfried.
Those familiar with the 12th century poem will notice that the film is almost totally faithful to its source. With only minor added dramatic flourishes, Lang and von Harbou succeeded in transforming the entire story, with its major and minor characters, into a magnificent visual spectacle. Most importantly, the picture recreates the awesome, elemental feeling of the epic, through an astonishing production design and a brilliant dramatic and visual strategy emphasizing the story’s mythic elements through monumentalism and highly stylized acting.
The two parts combined have a running time of almost five hours, but the movie is never dull. At this point, Lang knew how to tell a story primarily through images—gone are the lengthy intertitles that plagued Dr. Mabuse. The huge sets have an abstract quality that aids the picture’s mythic, timeless mood. Every scene is carefully composed to convey a particular spatial sense. It’s amazing how Lang is able to make the material dramatic without ever shrinking the characters into mere individuals who have motives or psychology. These are larger-than-life emblems of human passion and struggle, and yet the film’s dynamism maintains its spell, keeping the action gripping and involving. The actors were somehow coaxed into performances that matched their gigantic surroundings. Best is Margarete Schön as Kriemhild, especially in her later incarnation as avenging angel, when she is positively scary.
Die Nibelungen has had a controversial reputation among film critics and historians, some of whom see it as an example of a “fascist” style in filmmaking. But this is a tragic story where greed and envy lead to crime, which then leads to a cycle of vengeance that destroys everyone—hardly the celebration of victory that a nationalist ideology would be looking for. This film is truly one of the most impressive achievements of the silent era—an unforgettable, spellbinding experience.
Celine Sciamma’s fairy tale-like film, presented as matter of fact, presents the fulfillment of a little girl’s desire to know what her mother was like when she was a girl.
French writer-director Céline Sciamma has followed up her big success from 2019, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, with a surprising story of childhood, called Petite Maman. Sometimes simplicity is a radical choice, and Sciamma, who is fond of exploring new frontiers in feminist cinema, presents a vision of young girls and mothers with a sense of beauty and rightness that seems almost too easy, until you stop to consider the delicate artistry that it took to make the film.
We first see eight-year-old Nellie helping an old lady with a crossword puzzle. When the girl leaves the room, we see that she’s in a nursing home. As she passes a couple of rooms she says goodbye to the women living in them. In the fourth room is her mother, packing everything up. Only later does it occur to us that the lady in the first scene was Nelly’s grandmother, whom she was named after. Sciamma has telescoped the time scheme and now the grandmother has recently died. The mother, Marion, is stricken and quiet with grief.
They go to the grandmother’s old house in the country to join Nelly’s father, who is helping Marion clean up the house and pack everything up. Marion grew up in this house. She finds old notebooks with writings from when she was a girl. Nelly wants to know what it was like then, and her mother tells her a few things, including the story of a little hut she built in the nearby woods where she would go sometimes. But the grief makes her pretty closed mouth about the past right now. Nelly asks her father if he knew about the hut, but he says Marion never told him.
Then, mysteriously, one morning, the mother has gone away, without saying goodbye, leaving Nelly alone in the house with her father. His explanation is that she just needed to be alone for awhile.
Later, wandering in the nearby woods by herself, Nelly sees a little girl dragging a rather large tree branch. Silently, she helps the girl drag the branch further into the woods, and lo and behold, there are the beginnings of a hut. The strange girl, who looks a great deal like Nelly, invites her to her house nearby. When they get to the gate leading to the little yard, Nelly sees that the house looks exactly the same as the house she just came from. The indoors has the same plan and features too. “What’s your name?” she asks the other girl. “Marion,” she says.
Is what we think is happening here actually happening? The fairy tale-like concept is so simple that I resisted it at first. In fact, Sciamma does not resort to any magic formula. The only spell, really, is Nelly’s desire to know what her mother’s girlhood was like. Sure enough, at the new house she meets the girl’s mother who is named Nelly and has a limp just like her grandmother did. But the point of all this is not to dazzle us with any Twilight Zone-type effects. Instead everything is very plain, straightforward, and matter of fact.
Much of the film’s beauty is attributable to the two child actresses, who are sisters, Joséphine and Gabrielle Sanz. They are serious and thoughtful, even when playing together. Sciamma has elicited utterly natural performances from them. The idea, the film’s point, if you will, is felt intuitively, and represents a deep connection that a girl has with her mother, in this case a loving mother, and the need to bond with the girl the mother used to be. And it’s also very much about girls’ relationships with other girls. Beautifully shot and edited, with a brilliant sound design and color scheme, Petite Maman is a blissfully moving experience.
Victor Kossakovsky shows us the experience of farm animals without the mediation of human words and concepts, in a film that extends compassion to life other than our own.
The amazing advancements in cinematic technology in recent decades include cameras and sound equipment that can give us sound and image close-up from a long distance, as well as small and portable devices for ground level shots. One of the benefits of these new tools is the ability to make films about animals that eliminate interference from the presence of humans to a remarkable degree. Nothing I’ve seen exemplifies this advantage better than Gunda, a film by Russian director Victor Kossakovsky, released in 2020.
Gunda is the name of a large and impressive looking sow with a litter of twelve piglets, that we see living in a farm environment. The movie doesn’t tell us that that’s her name, but I learned it from reading about the film later. In fact, there is no narration in Gunda, no explanatory text, no music, no language or voices, no human beings at all. For the entire film, at least before the end credits, we only observe Gunda and her litter, as well as some free range chickens and cows. The gorgeously crisp photography is in black and white. In my view, black and white more vividly conveys subjective states. Whether or not that was the reason for using it, black and white suits the film’s message perfectly.
In the long opening sequence, the mother pig sleeps, and gradually we see the piglets emerging from behind her in the doorway of her open pen. The process begins by which the little ones feed from their mother’s milk. There are enough nipples for all of them, but it takes time for each adorable baby to find one, as they crawl on top and between one another. We are at ground or eye level with them, as we are for most of the film, not looking down at them from a human point of view, but right in there among them. The time for animals is at a different pace than what we have accustomed ourselves to. The mother wakes up, shifts her body, helps the babies to access her as best she can, and it takes time, time for the experience of being an animal.
Later we observe chickens, released from a cage by an offscreen presence slowly emerging into a field with woods where they slowly and very carefully explore the terrain. They too, have the force of personality, the character of beings purposely seeking their needs. One of the chickens gets around on only one leg, and quite well, I must say. Later, Kossakovsky shows us a herd of cows. We look in their eyes, observe their interactions with one another, including helping to swat away flies with their tails, and they too display their personhood.
The Lakota speak of animals as people: for example, the “four-legged people” or the “winged people.” That’s what this film does as well. We are made to see these beings’ lives as sufficient and meaningful, apart from any consideration of how they could be of use to us. When we return to Gunda and her litter, the piglets have gotten bigger and more playful as she leads them around the yard. I said before that there are no humans. Towards the end, we do see a large farm vehicle drive up, but we don’t see the people driving it. The movie doesn’t show us animals being slaughtered or treated cruelly, and we don’t hear that either. Yet the film, and especially the ending, has an unforgettable impact. With pure visuals it makes the best case against eating animals I’ve ever seen. Gunda is a beautiful work that conveys to us, without any preaching, the absolute unity of life.
In his first western, Tom Hanks plays an itinerant news reader from Texas who tries to transport a young girl who was an Indian captive to her relatives.
The traditional conventions of the western presuppose a lot of assumptions about America that we’ve since learned are untrue or at least are much more complex. English director Paul Greengrass, now established as a prominent Hollywood filmmaker, has crafted a western that emphasizes different aspects of the West than we’re used to—based on a Paulette Giles novel and starring Tom Hanks, it’s called News of the World.
The title comes from an interesting premise. Hanks plays a Civil War veteran, Captain Jefferson Kidd, who scrapes together a tenuous living by going from town to town, reading stories from national newspapers to public gatherings, for which he charges a dime a person. I immediately wondered if this was a real thing that people did back then, and it turns out that it is. There was a real Captain Kidd, one of the author’s ancestors, who did just that. Americans in isolated western towns didn’t have much opportunity to learn what was happening in other places or nationally. Hanks’s character has a clear and simple delivery; he’s providing an education, but he lends the reading enough drama to make it entertaining as well.
We then see the Captain on the road in Texas, where by chance he finds a little white girl hiding in an overturned wagon, but only speaking Kiowa. Eventually he pieces together the truth: she was taken by the Indian tribe after her parents were killed. Now this is one case where an old western theme is being employed. There were Indian captivities, but the consensus now is that they became famous beyond their frequency, which means, in other words, that the captivity stories were sensationalized. In this film it’s a plot element that is not lent much resonance.
In any case, the girl, Johanna, played by 11-year-old Helena Zengel, thinks of herself as Kiowa, doesn’t want to be taken into white society, and is suspicious of Captain Kidd. He tries to get her turned over to authorities, but meeting resistance, decides to take the girl himself to her surviving relatives in southeast Texas. He’s a fundamentally decent person, which we expect from a Tom Hanks character, but the film wisely places his decency in the context of war weariness and regret—he seems to have left a wife in San Antonio, under dark circumstances that we don’t learn about until later.
As the Captain and the young girl travel together, they encounter serious threats, from some ex-soldiers who want to buy the girl from the Captain, and from a racist outlaw officer basically running a Texas county on behalf of his gang—a menacing situation when he takes a dislike to Kidd.
The vision of the West presented by News of the World is of a very dangerous place in which men’s worst instincts come to the fore. This isn’t a time of romance or glory or even the pioneer spirit—this is a painful and difficult time. And it gives the film a dark edge, but the remarkable aspect is how Kidd gradually makes the girl feel safe, and in the process starts to have parental-like feelings for her, feelings of which he is only partly conscious.
I tried to remember some other western with Tom Hanks, and I couldn’t, because it turns out that this is his first western. His personality fits so well into the genre that it seems as if he’s been acting in them for years. He’s worked with Greengrass before, as another captain, Captain Phillips, and just like in that movie, the director displays a talent for depicting people in extreme situations. In News of the World he gives us some tense and exciting scenes—this is someone who also directed a
A new film from the West African nation of Ivory Coast presents an intriguing allegory about power and its misuse. Night of the Kings, the second narrative feature of Ivorian director Philippe Lacôte attracted critical notice, and won the Amplify Voices award for films from smaller countries at the Toronto Film Festival.
A huge prison in the middle of the rain forest has been abandoned by the state—the warden and his staff oversee the convicts from a sealed room, while the penitentiary is run by the inmates, a hell on earth in which only the strong and the cunning can survive. This society in miniature has developed its own political traditions. One inmate rules them all, but if he becomes unwell, the rules say he must take his own life. The current ruler is a burly old man nicknamed Blackbeard and played by Steve Tientcheu. Blackbeard is clearly ailing—he has an oxygen tank to help him breathe—and he knows there are adversaries trying to take him down. When he notices a new young inmate, played by Bakari Koné, being admitted to the prison, he decides to use him in a bid to gain time.
An old prison tradition says that during a period when the moon turns red, the ruler can declare a man “Roman,” or storyteller. The Roman must tell the gathered prisoners tales all night, or face death, and in the meantime Blackbeard will take steps to undo his enemies. If you didn’t realize that we were in the realm of myth before this, you will now with this fanciful but evocative narrative ploy. Immediately one thinks of the Arabian nights, and the framing story of Scheherazade, who must keep telling stories or face being executed by her tyrannical monarch of a husband.
As it happens, the moon appears red after a spectacular sunset, and the new Roman is called upon to start his tale. He says he doesn’t know how to tell stories, but when the inmates are all gathered, he nervously starts talking anyway. He tells of Zama King, a recently killed crime lord in the slums of the capital, a person everyone has heard of and whom he claims to have known. But realizing that he must talk all night, he invents a complex origin story in which Zama King was born and raised in a previous century, as a child in the pre-colonial era when a powerful queen ruled the land. Roman must stretch the story until daybreak, after which he will be safe from being killed.
The story expands to include multiple meanings, not least of which concerns the trauma of the recent five year civil war, which audiences in Ivory Coast would remember, but not foreign viewers. Never mind, the metaphor is relevant to all people suffering from the aftermath of war, and to all suffering under autocratic regimes like the one in the prison. In Night of the Kings, the modern and the mythic are one, reflecting the universal stories of power and corruption that plague mankind. The film is also a tribute to the tradition of the west African griot, the storyteller, poet, and musician who passes on the myth, history, and traditions of the people.
As Roman speaks, he is often accompanied by the songs, pantomimes and dances of other prisoners. And the film takes us away momentarily from the prison, as we are shown scenes from the drama of Zama King. As the dawn approaches, and Blackbeard’s enemies gird for the final struggle, Night of the Kings takes on the nature of legend, a national epic played out in the world of society’s most powerless members. This astonishing film confronts us with the fearful consequences of a society ruled by brute force instead of love.
A screenwriter couple’s stay on Ingmar Bergman’s home island of Fårö inspires an honest look at how women are represented in movies, in the latest thoughtful film from Mia Hansen-Løve.
French director Mia Hansen-Løve is a real cinephile. She loves to think and talk about film history and the works of famous filmmakers. Although she’s partly of Danish heritage, she grew up in France. Even so, she’s been influenced, like so many others, by the films of the great Swedish director Ingmar Bergman. Like him, she often examines relationships between the sexes, and conflicts in personal life. Unlike Bergman, her films generally avoid heightened dramatic events. Instead she focuses steadily on everyday life, and the ordinary changes occurring in people’s emotions and viewpoints over time. She also likes to portray the inner lives of women, although not exclusively.
This comparison and contrast with Bergman has resulted in her latest film, entitled Bergman Island. It concerns two screenwriters, who also happen to be a couple, Chris and Tony, played by Vicky Krieps and Tim Roth. They’ve decided to visit Fårö, the island off the coast of Sweden where Bergman had lived, renting a little house and hoping that being there for a few weeks will inspire them to finish their separate screenplays. Hansen-Løve and her two lead actors deftly portray the mundane details of getting used to a new vacation place, with Roth in particular showing how relaxed and believably casual a performer he can be. They decide to watch a Bergman film, settling on Cries and Whispers, and the experience, as you might expect if you’re familiar with that movie, is intense. Krieps’s character, Chris, is especially conflicted. She comprehends the great artistry, but doesn’t really like the way Bergman portrays women. As the film goes on, we start to understand that Hansen-Løve intends to present us with an alternative version of how women might more realistically behave than in a Bergman film. It’s a clever strategy in which she honors the famous director while criticizing him through her own different stylistic choices. But soon it stops being a commentary on Bergman and goes in its own direction.
The film’s centerpiece occurs when she asks Tony to listen to her ideas about where to go with her screenplay. As she narrates, we are taken to a film within the film, starring Mia Wasikowska as a filmmaker who runs into an old lover on Fårö that she broke up with long ago and had children with someone else, but then finds the sparks flying between them again. Where does life end and art begin? Of course there are echoes of Chris’s relationship with Tony, hints of trouble in their intimacy, but the correspondence is not exact.
There’s quite a bit of humor around the way Bergman has been commodified on the island. Roth’s character even goes on what they call a “Bergman safari,” a bus tour to various sites of Bergman films. This is a real thing. Hansen-Løve’s sly regard for the commercialized aspect of film is endearing. Her movie, Bergman Island, is more than just a treat for cinephiles, though; it’s a provocative look at the way women could be, should be portrayed in film, and preferably by women directors. It’s both a challenge and a delight.
Paul Thomas Anderson pays humorous tribute to the 1970s in southern California in this story of a teenage entrepreneur who falls for a clever young woman.
The latest film from Paul Thomas Anderson shows the writer-director returning to a favorite place and time: southern California in the 1970s. Boogie Nights in ’97, and more recently, Inherent Vice in 2014, celebrated that unusual period in humorous, gently satiric ways. The new movie is called Licorice Pizza, and in some ways, it’s Anderson’s most outright comic film.
In his screen debut, Cooper Hoffman plays 15-year-old aspiring actor Gary Valentine, a high school student in the San Fernando Valley in 1973. He’s a goofy red-headed kid, a little overweight, who for some reason has developed amazing self-confidence. He thinks he’s going somewhere, and he’s full of ideas about how to get there. On the day when class pictures are being taken at the school, he sees a young woman, a photographer’s assistant named Alana Kane, played by the similarly named Alana Haim, also in her first film. Gary is immediately love-struck, and decides that Alana is going to be his girlfriend someday, and he quite boldly tells her this. She brushes him off and says she’s 25, too old for him, but this awkward yet assertive girl with a wise guy attitude is secretly flattered by Gary’s devotion. They do become friends, and work together on Gary’s schemes, including one in which he tries to get in on the recent waterbed craze. But the friendship is founded on her stubborn insistence, and eventually his as well, that they’re not really a couple at all.
Now, one of the characteristics of Anderson’s films is that he doesn’t care about social proprieties. He likes to makes film about subjects that other people avoid, such as the pornography industry, weird cults, gambling, drugs, you name it. In this case it isn’t at all clear to me that Alana is 25. She says she is, but she lives with her parents and sisters, and her father treats her like a teenager. Be that as it may, the director is interested in the dynamic of an absurdly confident boy falling for an older girl. And this is a personal work for him. Cooper Hoffman, who’s actually 18, is the son of the late Philip Seymour Hoffman, a close friend of Anderson’s who appeared in five of his movies. Alana Haim is a musician in a group with her sisters, that is called Haim. Anderson is a fan and has previously directed several of their music videos.
Anderson’s humor goes on some strange tangents, not all of which work, but the picture is as good as it is primarily because of Alana Haim. Her character is clearly immature, but she plays at being grown up with complete conviction, while her unacknowledged needs are always leaking through. It’s a marvelous performance, consistently funny and engaging. Haim carries the movie with apparent ease.
The picture has a kind of splashy “anything goes” style, with Anderson’s signature sweeping camera movements and great use of background music. There are good parts for some familiar people: Sean Penn, Tom Waits, and especially Bradley Cooper, insanely funny as an unhinged film producer. But most of all, watch the film for Alana Haim. She’s the real deal.
Oh, and about that title: “Licorice pizza” was SoCal slang for a vinyl record, and it became the name of a popular chain of LA-area record stores. The film doesn’t tell us any of this. I had to Google it to find out. But I think Anderson named his film Licorice Pizza as a way to sum up the ‘70s in his home state. Like the film, it’s an affectionate joke.
Todd Haynes tells the story of this influential New York rock band in the cinematic style of the man who discovered them: Andy Warhol.
I’m always interested when a film about a favorite rock band comes out. The Velvet Underground, a documentary about the group that enjoyed brief but unprofitable fame in the 1960s, has the added advantage of coming from a favorite director, Todd Haynes. And, I was not disappointed.
The story begins with two musical artists toiling in relative obscurity. Lou Reed, a Jewish kid from Long Island who played in a doo-wop band in high school, and wrote songs while at college in Syracuse, had started taking drugs in his teens. He’d been in a psych hospital at one point, and his songs reflected dark themes of alienation, addiction, and bisexuality. Then there was John Cale, a young composer and multi-instrumentalist from Wales, who traveled to New York City to be part of the downtown music scene, and met Reed when the latter was working as a songwriter for a recording company. Cale’s experimental style mixed well with Reed’s dark songwriting. They added Reed’s college friend Sterling Morrison on guitar, and Maureen Tucker, the sister of another Syracuse friend, on drums, and called themselves The Velvet Underground.
They were playing in a bar when someone who knew Andy Warhol saw them. Warhol came himself to listen, and put some of his cultural weight in to give them more attention. Later, when a beautiful singer and model from Germany with the stage name “Nico” showed up at Warhol’s art factory, he persuaded the Velvet Underground to make her a part of the group. They recorded an album on Verve Records, with Warhol’s painting of a banana on the cover, and then Warhol had them tour with a light show in 1966 and ’67, these shows becoming legendary as the “Exploding Plastic Inevitable.” This was the beginning. The film covers the entire eight years of their career.
There are excerpts from interviews, including some from group members who are now deceased, and those accompany a lot of historical footage of the group. And all this is quite standard for a documentary, but Haynes presents the film in a style that simulates the New York avant-garde cinema of the 60s, and especially that of Andy Warhol.
Haynes uses lots of split screen, sometimes with footage in one section and interview material on the other, but often with more than two sections in the split, and a constant swirling visual effect, mixing painting, sound, photographs, and talk, which strongly evokes the period of the 1960s and early ‘70s, in which the story took place. We learn a lot about Warhol’s methods and the people in his orbit. We learn about Nico walking away to do other things eventually. We learn how the chemistry between Reed and Cale went badleading to Cale’s exit and Reed’s refashioning of the group. And all this is conveyed by Haynes’ uncompromisingly flamboyant style. Any movie about the group with this material would be good, but this wild aesthetic form adds immeasurably, I think, to the film’s power.
At the time, the Velvet Underground only had a cult following. In the era of peace, love, hippies, and pot, their songs about the underclass and urban angst, and harder drugs like heroin, were not a best-seller. But years later, after Reed had made a successful solo career, these early albums became enormously influential in rock music, and remain so to this day. Now we have the film The Velvet Underground, and it gives us a satisfying taste of what it was really like to be there.
An evil eye changes the appearance of two young people in love so that they can’t recognize one another, in a film from the country of Georgia that reveals the world of myth and folklore underlying everyday life.
What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? This intriguing and ambiguous question is the title of a new film from Georgia (the country), in which complex levels of meaning are designed to convey a love story in all its simplicity. It’s written and directed by Aleksandre Koberidze, and it seems fitting that the title is an open-ended question, since he is clearly open to as many aspects of ordinary life in a Georgian city as he can be. The central narrative is about a young woman, Lisa, and a young man, Giorgi, who meet by chance on a street and fall in love on first sight. They find one another again that evening, and arrange to meet later and talk at a certain place, forgetting to tell each other their names.
At this point we discover that Koberidze sees the reality of everyday life overlaid, as it were, with dimensions of myth, folk belief, and folk tale. But if you’re expecting what we’ve come to call magical realism, this film offers something different. In the modern era we’ve largely shut the realm of folklore out of our lives, to the point where the word myth has come to mean false, but Koberidze is telling us that it’s just about different ways of looking at things, and that metaphor is a vehicle for whatever meanings we seek and find in life. We are introduced to this through an old-fashioned method: a narrator who tells the story of what’s going on while we’re watching.
And so, the narrator tells us, unbeknownst to Lisa and Giorgi, an unknown force, an evil eye, has put a curse on both of them. They wake up the next morning with completely different appearances than they had before. In the film, we see new, different actors playing them. Because of this, when they go to their prearranged and unfortunately crowded place to meet again, they can’t find or recognize one another. They each know that they’ve changed, but it doesn’t occur to them that the other has changed as well.
Now, this sounds like an episode of The Twilight Zone. But the way the film presents it, it’s just another problem in life to be dealt with somehow. The seemingly supernatural change is really just a metaphorical challenge: how much do we define ourselves and others by appearance? If we’re truly in love, shouldn’t we able to know each other without being guided by the physical? Well, no, actually. And it’s complicated by the fact that they’ve changed in other ways. Lisa, a pharmacist, has lost her medical knowledge and must find a new job. Giorgi, a footballer, can’t play well anymore, but he remains a fan. The permutations of this hide-and-seek scenario continue to gently undulate throughout the movie.
In the meantime we discover the real subject of the film, the experience of daily life for folks in the city. Koberidze’s camera follows a host of different people as they go about their business, with a special emphasis on children. Appreciate the now moment, the film seems to be saying, because that’s all there really is. In addition, the elements of storytelling are shaken and spilled into many forms. We see a host of techniques, like a playful lesson in cinematic style: realism, fantasy, slow cinema, real time, offbeat editing, slow motion, and the use of music to color scenes in radical ways. The narrator talking to us while we see silent action, and dialogue printed in intertitles, almost brings us back to square one of film history.
The best symbolism doesn’t explain everything, but casts a spell that can lead to many places, so in this strange and lovely movie, as we ask What Do We
Bernard Shaw’s popular comedy, about a phonetics professor who makes a bet that he can turn a street person into a lady, was given near perfect form in a 1938 movie starring Leslie Howard and Wendy Hiller.
Bernard Shaw wrote over sixty plays in his long career, most of which were intended as provocations to the conventional wisdom of the time. Arguably his most popular play was Pygmalion, written in 1913. I assume that many of you know about it, but I can safely say that the vast majority of people are more familiar with a musical based on it called My Fair Lady.
The story concerns Henry Higgins, a professor of phonetics who can tell where anyone in England is from, just from their accent. Encountering a rude Cockney flower seller named Eliza Doolittle, he makes a bet with a friend that he can train Eliza to talk like a noble lady, and pass her off as one in society. Promising her a more affluent situation, he takes her into his home, and the resulting conflict between the two constitutes the main body of the story.
Now, as entertaining as My Fair Lady is, being a musical means that it romanticized its source and softened the content. The play was a biting satire on social class and snobbery. Its title comes from a Greek myth in which a sculptor named Pygmalion falls in love with one of his statues, and it comes to life. So a central theme here is the foolishness of a man like Higgins, who molds the outside of a woman to be what he wants, but never really understands or appreciates her as a person.
Pygmalion was made into a film in 1938, starring Leslie Howard as Higgins and a relative newcomer, Wendy Hiller, as Eliza. It was directed by Anthony Asquith, and Leslie Howard, who was passionate about this role, also acted as the film’s co-director. A team of fine screenwriters adapted the play under the supervision of Shaw himself. The result is an absolute delight, one of the universally acknowledged masterpieces of British cinema.
Wendy Hiller was chosen by Shaw because she had played the role on the stage. She’s a perfect Eliza, a coarse guttersnipe whose contrast with the sophisticated Higgins is a delicious comedy in itself.
Now, I know some who don’t think much of Leslie Howard because of his weak performance in Gone with the Wind, made a year later. But Pygmalion shows him at his best, superbly conveying his character’s self-assurance and charisma. Higgins’ mean side is not concealed—the arrogance of the upper class mentality is one of the main points of the play—but at the same time, Shaw’s dialogue for him makes him a compelling critic of the society of which he’s a part. Howard dominates the film almost like Higgins dominates Eliza, but the brilliance of the play lies in how Eliza confounds expectations with her native cleverness.
Howard and Hiller are a sensational couple on screen. We’ve gotten used to assuming that Professor Higgins will fall for his creation, just like in the Pygmalion myth. But whatever you can say about Bernard Shaw, he was never sentimental. The play goes against our expectations. The film, however, manages to play it both ways in its touching, satisfying, and believable ending. Pygmalion is a movie treasure that I can’t do without.