Author: swampflix

Cold War (2018)

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There’s an expensive type of fine art photography print—one with processing names like Ilfochrome & Cibachrome—that makes black & white prints look positively silver, vibrantly metallic instead of merely devoid of color. It’s a look that’s been digitally replicated recently in comic book noir visual experiments like (the positively dreadful) Sin City & Mad Max: Fury Road’s (surprisingly worthwhile) “Black & Chrome” reissue. It’s also so old-fashioned to cinematic language that the phrase “on the silver screen” is a well-worn cliché. The most striking thing about the romantic Polish drama Cold War is the silver glow of its cinematography – so visually stunning it recalls seeing an expensive Cibachrome print in person instead of in recreation. Shot in a boxy “Academy” aspect ratio and covering nearly two decades of a tragic romance in 90 rapid-fire minutes of editing room efficiency, Cold War is undeniably impressive as a formalist object. It’s absolutely stunning as a fine art photograph – both handsome & haunting in its cold, metallic imagery. Yet, as a motion picture it’s a little too formally rigid for its own good, and staring at any still image photograph for 90 consecutive minutes is going to test your patience, no matter how well composed.

That’s not to say there’s no passion, music, or movement to the story Cold War tells. In fact, its story about two mismatched lovers whose passionate, unavoidable attraction to each other inevitably leads them to ruin is full of life & music. It’s just that its overwhelming, soul-consuming emotions are directly at odds with its art gallery formalism. A music director of a Polish folk preservation project falls in love with one of the more mysterious, magnetic performers in his cast – a young woman with a violent past. Their lust for each other is consummated quickly across class lines, but they subsequently fail to establish a normal, healthy life together as romantic partners. As an artistic musical project meant to preserve authentic Polish folk culture is coopted as nationalist propaganda under Stalinist rule, indicating the general political landscape around them, the two lovers make drastically different choices in how they relate to their shared homeland. Their mutual attraction to each other is deadly powerful, however, and they continually cross social, political, and ethical boundaries over a decade or so of dangerous cat & mouse “romance.” The problem is that the harshly segmented edits, rigidly formalist photography, and overall machine-like precision of the filmmaking does little to match or enhance their passion. As impressed as I was with the film’s storytelling efficiency, it felt like the deadly attraction at its core kept getting cut short every time it started to heat up. The result was very pretty to look at, but also frustratedly stilted in its movement.

The opening “Poland’s Got Talent” portion of Cold War, where hipster sophisticates “elevate” “peasant-style” folk art by affording it a proper stage, matched the rigid fine art photography of its formalist structure perfectly. As the wild, destructive passions of its story heat up & flame out, however, the film does little to signify that change in any noticeable way. It’s like watching a handsomely composed still photograph try to break form and become a motion picture, but it never leaves its fixed spot on the art gallery wall. This is a complaint I saw lodged much more frequently (and, to me, erroneously) at another one of this year’s Oscar frontrunners: Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma. If any film’s form does not match its subject, it’s Cold War, where it’s easy to be impressed with the silver screen artistry of the projected image, but difficult to get swept up in the music, movement, and emotion before they’re harshly cut short. I can’t deny the potency of the film’s visual achievements, but I wonder if they were applied to the right project.

-Brandon Ledet

Roma (2018)

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In general, it’s always better for your mental health to not stress too much about what the Oscars and other awards & critical bodies inevitably get wrong. Awards are an excellent platform for exposing & advertising smaller, artsy-fartsy movies to a wider audience who typically only pay attention to Disney-scale franchise filmmaking for the rest of the year. Awards also direct the flow of production money as a result, making anyone who walks home with an Oscar statue a lot more likely to get their next creative project off the ground. It’s worthwhile, then, to celebrate the few films you do enjoy that receive awards attention and to ignore the omissions & snubs of films you feel should be held up on the same pedestal; the Academy and other awards bodes are rarely, if ever, going to get things “right.” Still, I often find myself getting worked up about these things (despite them being entirely out of my control) and this year’s Best Picture race is especially nerve-racking in its potential for disaster. In a reflection of the stubborn yet rapid changes in its voting body, the Academy has nominated exactly 50% Best Picture candidates I’d love to see recognized for their achievements in craft & their political thoughtfulness (BlacKkKlansman, The Favourite, Black Panther, Roma) and 50% nuclear meltdown levels of trash with the exact opposite effect (Bohemian Rhapsody, Green Book, Vice, A Star is Born). That potential for both elation & disaster is sure to make for an exciting nail-biter of a ceremony (if the event’s haphazard producers can pull their shit together long enough to even stage a ceremony). Of all the films I feel passionately about in that paradigm, though, the one I least expected to be pulling for so passionately is Roma. It’s far from an underdog in this year’s Best Picture race, yet it’s a film I feel exceedingly protective over given some of the absurdly regressive alternatives.

A semi-autobiographical memoir of Alfonso Cuarón’s childhood in privilege, Roma details the life, love, labor, and loss of a domestic worker in Mexico City, 1970. Economically chained to a life defined by labor and professionally pressured to put her live-in employer’s personal life above her own, an indigenous woman tends to the minute-to-minutes whims & demands of a wealthy white family in transition. The routine of domestic maintenance eats up her entire schedule from pre-dawn to bedtime and the rare moments where she finds tranquil peace are, without fail, interrupted by chaos: screaming children, earthquakes, fires, political violence, etc. Her employers – a married couple on the verge of divorce & their small army of bratty offspring – claim to love her as member of the family, but she’s treated more as a beloved pet or a trustworthy appliance than a human being. This dynamic is challenged when she becomes unexpectedly pregnant and her vulnerabilities & personal needs as a human being become increasingly unavoidable at the exact moment when the family structure is strained by a looming divorce. We don’t see much of our protagonist’s inner life reflected in her dialogue or moments of privacy (which are essentially non-existent). We come to know her instead through her physicality (as excellently performed by new-to-the-trade actor Yalitza Aparicio) – whether in the detailed maneuvers of her never-ending labor as a servant or in the body language of her quiet reactions as a powerless observer. That’s why it’s so emotionally impactful when she loudly confesses a carefully-regarded, devastating secret of great personal importance to her “family” of employers in a grand emotional climax. It’s even more impactful, then, to see that intimate human moment punctured by the family slipping right back into relying on her to fetch them snacks and to sweep up the ever-replenishing piles of dogshit, as if they hadn’t just shared in the heartbreak of one of the most vital members of the family.

Even before you soak in its attention to the microscopic details of domestic labor & the subtly policed boundaries of this particular live-in-maid dynamic, Roma is incredibly impressive as a feat in filmmaking craft. The crisp black & white cinematography and the epic scale of its cast of extras could cynically be perceived as an empty attempt to “elevate” domestic labor to the perceived prestige of Oscar Worthy filmmaking. The film is not pretentious or coldly distanced enough to fully justify that cynicism, however, as it’s packed with enough flaccid dicks, dogshit, and general pessimism about the routines & familial dynamic of this kind of labor to be dismissed as ingratiating or watered down. The camera often oscillates from left to right in a machine-life precision with complex choreography of the onscreen players (sometimes numbering in the hundreds) following along with its carefully paced ebb & flow. It’s a calculated back & forth movement, like a security camera on a timer, that doesn’t at first register as purposeful in any way other than purely showing off. However, when you consider the way that motion matches up with the punishing tide of the waves in its devastating emotional climax on the beach shore, its inclusion & repetition takes on a more satisfactory purpose. Even the solemn washing of dogshit into a courtyard drain that opens the film starts to feel like foreshadowing of the beach scene in retrospect, as the sudsy waves of the bucket water mechanically wash past the camera. It’s a motif that loudly echoes the consistency of the cycle the movie depicts – the engrained ebb & flow of a domestic worker’s daily chores as she’s pulled into the edges of the family circle then washed right back out again. The larger scale of the world outside only provides perspective for the intimacy of that dynamic, and the camera’s careful oscillation announces & reinforces the setting where the boundaries & patterns of that bond will ultimately be tested.

Roma might suffer slightly in its self-awareness of reaching for Great Cinema in every moment. However, it’s an admirable ambition that often leads to sharply memorable images: smoke-filled theatres, wall-mounted taxidermy, furniture shopping in the middle of a riot, the absurdity of wealth parodied in the tone of a luxury car commercial, etc. It might also be true that Cuarón’s guilt over being a wealthy brat isn’t the noblest inspiration for telling the story of someone once under his employ. Even then, the details of how that worker’s language is policed out of existence, how she’s pet on a pillow besides the couch like a lapdog, and how people who’ve lived in the same home with her for untold years don’t know her full name or birthday are damning & insightful in a way that reaches far beyond vanity or simplistic remorse. This is ambitious, heartfelt, precise, memorable filmmaking with scathing political intent & deep emotional hurt – the exact kind of achievement that, when nominated, feels like The Academy “getting it right.” I don’t mean to say that Roma winning the Best Picture Oscar this year is the only acceptable outcome, or even the ideal. Personally, my favorite picture in the race remains Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman, which is being regarded as a longshot despite the director’s longstanding prestige. It’s more that it’ll be a lot harder to stomach than usual if the Academy gets its wrong this year, given that the poorly slapped together political misfires Green Book & Bohemian Rhapsody both have a strong chance of winning instead of four vastly superior nominees. Long after the Oscars are over, Roma, BlacKkKlansman, Black Panther, and The Favourite will stand on their own as great, distinct, risk-taking art. I can still feel myself getting worked up about the likelihood of impending doom this Oscar season, though. I’m both excited by the possibility of great art like Roma getting some much-deserved recognition and also just ready to get this dogshit over with & move on.

-Brandon Ledet

Movies to See in New Orleans This Week (French Film Fest Edition) 2/14/19 – 2/21/19

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In so, so many ways it’s crunch time in New Orleans right now.  Parades are starting to roll, Mardi Gras costume supplies are frantically being hot-glued together, and everyone’s social calendars are bursting at the seams.  Movie distribution slows down for no one, though, and there are two major cinematic events on the horizon worth keeping an eye on: the 22nd annual New Orleans French Film Fest and the 2019 Oscars ceremony.

There are over a dozen titles screening at The Prytania in the coming week for the New Orleans French Film Festival, and The Broad Theater is the final resting place for many of the more worthwhile artsy-fartsy Oscar nominees, so we’re going to keep this week’s local screenings round-up as simple as possible. Here are some recommendations for movies to see at the city’s two most essential indie spots.

Essential Movies Screening at The New Orleans French Film Fest

Beauty and the Beast (1946) – Jean Cocteau’s masterful black & white fairy tale adaptation, included as part of Prytania’s regular Classic Movies series. Beauty and the Beast is screening Sunday 2/17, 10am, and Wednesday 10/20, 10am, at The Prytania.

The Nun (1966) – A controversial French New Wave political drama about a young woman (played by Anna Karina) who is locked away in a nunnery against her will. The Nun is screening in a new digital restoration Sunday 2/17, 2:15pm (preceded by live music at 1:45pm), and Tuesday 2/19, 12pm, at The Prytania.

The Image Book – The latest sensory film collage essay from French New Wave iconoclast Jean-Luc Goddard, a deliberate deconstruction of cinema as an art form. The Image Book is screening Thursday 2/21, 5:30pm, at The Prytania.

Non-Fiction – A drama from indie cinema mainstay Olivier Assayas (Personal Shopper, Cold Water, Clouds of Sils Maria) set in the publishing industry of Paris, co-starring Juliette Binoche. Non-Fiction is screening Thursday 2/21, 7:45pm (preceded by live music at 7:15pm) at The Prytania.

Oscar Nominated Films Screening at The Broad

The Favourite – Yorgos Lanthimos follows up the stubbornly obscure The Killing of a Sacred Deer with his most accessible feature yet: a queer, darkly funny costume drama about a three-way power struggle between increasingly volatile women (Olivia Colman, Emma Stone, and Rachel Weisz). It’s both a gorgeous laugh riot and a pitch-black howl of unending cruelty & despair. Fun! Only playing at The Broad Theater.

If Beale Street Could Talk – Barry Jenkins follows up his Best Picture winner Moonlight with an adaptation of a James Baldwin novel set in 1970s Harlem. Brimming with gorgeous costumes, sensual romance, and a seething indictment of America’s inherently racist system of “justice.” Only playing at The Broad Theater.

Shoplifters – Hirokazu Kore-eda continues the themes of makeshift families struggling to survive in the bowels of poverty that he explored in previous works like the stunning drama Nobody Knows. Awarded the Palme d’Or at Cannes and recently nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards, this film is an event, albeit an emotionally traumatic one. Only playing at The Broad Theater.

Cold War – A Polish, Oscar-nominated romance drama from the director of Ida, covering multiple decades of a single relationship in 90 swooning minutes of crisp black & white splendor and despair. Playing only at The Broad Theater. Only playing at The Broad Theater.

-Brandon Ledet

Dr. Penelope Russianoff: The Secret Auteur of An Unmarried Woman (1978)

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Our current Movie of the Month, the 1978 divorcee drama An Unmarried Woman, is not at all an outlier in director Paul Mazursky’s career. With his signature film Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, Mazursky established himself as a filmmaker who discusses America’s sexual & romantic taboos in a more direct, honest way than they’re usually handled onscreen. It’s a style that carried through his career all the way until he was making outlandish studio comedies like the Bette Midler & Woody Allen two-fister Scenes from a Mall. An Unmarried Woman fits snugly in the tone of that oeuvre, frankly & assertively challenging the sexual autonomy & newfound independence of the Modern Woman in 1970s New York. In the film, Jill Claybugh plays a well-off Manhattanite who unexpectedly finds himself divorced & heartbroken at middle age, unsure what to do with her newfound singlehood & the scraps of her former life. Her lengthy, unflinchingly honest discussion of her fears & desires within this new paradigm shared with the other women in her life are very familiar to the typical Paul Mazursky narrative, but one of the women in her life in particular may have had an even bigger influence on the tone & messaging of the film than the director did: her therapist.

Tanya, the tall, physically imposing but soft-spoken therapist who helps the titular divorcee piece her life back together, is an incredible show-stealing presence within the film. In scenes where the protagonist shares confessions with friends over cocktails or sings “Baby I’m Amazed” off-key with her daughter at the piano, you can feel Mazursky reaching for a matter-of-fact authenticity to ground his tale of a woman undone by a romantic fallout. None of these moments, engaging as they are, can match the simple, confident authenticity of Tanya’s screen presence. She’s the real deal. Referred to Mazursky by director Claudia Weill, Tanya was played in the film by real life NYC psychotherapist Penelope Russianoff. The therapy sessions in the film were staged in Russianoff’s Manhattan penthouse, where she would regularly see patients in real life. At 6’2” and the only notable non-professional actor in the cast, Russianoff stands out as a striking screen presence, a face & demeanor we are not accustomed to seeing in Hollywood fare. Just her physical presence as the fictional therapist Tanya is enough to change the tone & authenticity of the movie entirely. More importantly, though, it was her life’s work & the specialization within her field that really made an impact on the film, one that nearly matches Mazursky’s own.

When asked about her experience working on An Unmarried Woman, Russianoff chipperly responded “it was great fun, because I could change the lines,” noting that the original script contained dialogue that was “not things a therapist would say.” For instance, “The script called for me to say, ‘If I were you, I’d go out and get laid,’ but I said to Paul, ‘I can’t say that. I’d never say that.’” The collaborators, director & therapist, settled on the compromise line “I’m me and you’re you. But if I were you, I’d go out with my friends a lot the way you’re doing,” a drastically different sentiment. Much of her dialogue was revised & improvised in this way, but her collaboration with Mazursky was earnest, not contentious. When asked what An Unmarried Woman is about, Russianoff explained “A woman doesn’t have to be married to have a life.” That’s as succinct & as accurate a summation of the film’s mission statement as you’ll find, but it also works just as well as a mission statement in Russianoff’s own career as a therapist. Russianoff’s specialty within psychotherapy was in advising women how to assert themselves & shed the helplessness taught to them at an early age, as early socialization makes women feel dependent on male companionship. When considered in that context, An Unmarried Woman feels almost like a feature-length adaptation of her lectures, not a movie she just happened to bolster with an improv-heavy cameo.

When asked whether the feminism inherent to her teachings that women should feel independent of men was an intentional choice, Russianoff explained “I’ve always, without thinking, been a feminist therapist. Both my mother and father were achievement-oriented and intellectually-oriented people, so I was never programmed to be a sex object.” Her goal was never to alienate women from men completely. She was simply alarmed that, “About 95% of my female patients think they are nothing without a man” and made it her life’s work “to get them unfixated on men . . to stop pivoting around men as the core of their security and to learn to pivot around the core of security they build up in themselves.” That’s the exact crisis at the center of An Unmarried Woman: the titular divorcee is panicked that she does not know how to live a life without a husband, that she was socially unprepared for independence. Russianoff herself was married to a respected clarinetist for a large portion of her life but had been socialized early on by her parents to have passions & concerns outside of that relationship. She was horrified by the growing number of divorcees in the 1970s who did not have the same confidence or independence, and she made a life out of helping them find it. Her presence in An Unmarried Woman is more than just as an authentic, real-world therapist then; she’s a ground-floor witness & frontlines fighter to the film’s core themes, an essential part of its DNA.

Although it’s her only onscreen role as an actor, An Unmarried Woman was huge boon for Russianoff’s career. She doesn’t have enough cultural clout to have earned her own Wikipedia page (most information available about her online is hiding in her obituaries from 2000), but she did say that working with Mazursky afforded her “instant celebrityhood.” Much to the annoyance of her colleagues, her appearance in An Unmarried Woman directly led to a book deal, resulting in best–selling titles like When Am I Going to Be Happy? & Why Do I Think I Am Nothing Without a Man? She also made several in-demand appearances on talk shows & expanded her practice to help patients suffering from stage fright, thanks to her on-camera experience. I have a feeling that Penelope Russianoff would have been just fine without Paul Mazursky’s film, however, that she would have been perfectly successful treating patients in her Manhattan penthouse for her remaining decades of practice. The question, then, is whether the movie would have been just as well off without her or whether her presence & influence had a dramatic impact on the themes & tone of the film. To me, there’s no question at all. An Unmarried Woman is just as much her film as it is the director’s, a remarkable thing to be able to say about a non-professional actor whose screentime practically amounts to a cameo.

For more on February’s Movie of the Month, the late-70s feminist divorcee drama An Unmarried Woman, check out our Swampchat discussion of the film.

-Brandon Ledet

On the Silver Globe (1988)

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When Jazmin Moreno, the programmer for Austin Film Society Cinema’s “Lates” series (“the new cult film canon”) introduced the recent, sold-out screening of Andrzej Żuławski’s Na srebrnym globie (On the Silver Globe), she said that, if you were so fortunate as to have seen the film before its 2016 restoration by original director of photography Andrzej Jaroszewicz, you likely only saw a heavily yellowed print and not in a complete translation. To be honest, I’m not sure that I’ve seen it translated now. Part of the reason for the perceived incomprehensibility of the piece is that it’s unfinished, but given what extant footage remains, I doubt that the film would have become a success even if the director had been permitted to finish it. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

In 1975, three years after leaving his native Poland in order to avoid censorship by the communist government, director Żuławski achieved financial and critical success in France helming L’important c’est d’aimer (That Most Important Thing: Love). The Polish cultural affairs office opted to invite him to come home and work on films in his native language once again. After spending two years adapting Trylogia Księżycowa (The Lunar Trilogy), science fiction novels written in the first decade of the twentieth century by his own great uncle Jerzy, Żuławski began production, but the project was halted in early 1978 by the newly appointed Deputy Minister of Culture and Art, Janusz Wilhelmi, supposedly due to the film going over its budget, but in reality because the Polish government was uncomfortable with the film’s anti-establishment, anti-authoritarian themes. Although Wilhelmi died in a plane crash shortly thereafter, it was not until the collapse of the ugly communism of that era that the film could be released, and even then only 80% of it had been completed. As completing the film as originally envisioned was essentially impossible, Żuławski filmed contemporary (late eighties) Warsaw along with some nature footage, and he recorded voice over describing the events from the screenplay that were no longer possible to bring to life on film. This was completed in 1988, and the result was screened at Cannes.

Depending upon how you look at it, the story behind the scenes of On the Silver Globe is either an ugly parable about political interference, a warning about the potential pitfalls of overreaching ambition, or a ballad of ultimate, if pyrrhic, victory against the forces of totalitarianism. Depending upon your perspective, this is also the story that happens within the film, although your mileage may vary. When I walked out of the screening and made the same joke to my friends that I made in the introduction above–that I still wasn’t sure I had seen the translated film–I wasn’t kidding. I’m far removed from the production of On the Silver Globe by space, time, philosophy, language, and politics; I honestly can’t figure out how Wilhelmi could possibly have sifted through the material and found enough of a thread of cohesion to definitively determine that any of it was seditious or subversive. To be honest, I wasn’t even entertained. Mystified, yes. Confused, yes. Engaged, also yes. And I was taken on a journey to somewhere I had never dreamed of, and saw things I could not have imagined. That is something truly astounding and deserving of commemoration, even if nothing about it makes sense.

For some context (and a pretty effective demonstration of how little anyone really understands this text), the film’s Wikipedia page identifies it as an adaptation of only the first novel, from which the title is taken. The page about the novel series on which it is based states clearly that “the film adapts the whole trilogy.” Based on the synopses: the first novel is about the initial expedition to the moon to discern whether or not the dark side of the satellite has an atmosphere that could support life, and the colonization of said orb by these pioneers; the second novel is about the coming of another terrestrial visitor who is hailed as a messianic figure by the descendants of the first group and enlisted in their war against the hostile lifeforms which seek to conquer and enslave them, with mixed success; the third novel tells the story of two lunar astronauts on an expedition to the earth. It all seems straightforward enough, right? But while the first and second novels’ plots are definitely present in the film, the third… might be?

The film opens (after an introductory narration from Żuławski) with a man in dirty but ornamented cloaks, furs, and a headdress riding a horse across a snowy wilderness against a sonic backdrop of mournful woodwinds. He bursts into some kind of dilapidated performance hall, where two men in silver suits, presumably astronauts, discuss their situation: they are here among apparently primitive humans, perhaps indigenous, whom they fend off by dispensing speed pills. The younger of the two is criticized by his elder for his apparently having gone somewhat native, including having taken on the facial markings of these tribal humans and even taken their offer of a woman, who now “belongs” to him. The rider from the opening presents them with a piece of space debris, which they identify as ancient and are skeptical that it could have only just fallen from the sky as claimed, but they discover that it is full of “old style” data discs, which they take to a laboratory and view . . . .

From here we follow the story of the first expedition to an unidentified planet (not the moon as in the novel, owing to the advance of scientific knowledge between 1903 and 1977), where a craft of five explorers has crashed, leaving one dead, one critically injured, and three relatively unharmed. Tomasz, the critically injured astronaut, dies shortly after arrival and is mourned by his pregnant lover Marta (Iwona Bielska), the only woman present. Piotr (Jerzy Grałek) becomes the default leader of the group, and Jerzy (Jerzy Trela) uses their cameras to record a history of the expedition, presumably the same one that fell to the ground and is being viewed by the aforementioned astronaut duo. The small group makes their way to a seashore, where they settle in. Marta names her newborn son Tomasz after his father, and she notes that he is growing more quickly than children on earth do; within an undefined but explicitly short period of time, he appears to be six or seven, and the mostly mute Marta begins to paint both his face and hers in the same kinds of patterns as those seen on the primitives in the prologue. Another time jump, and Marta has had several more children, all Piotr’s, and between their rapid aging and maturity, an entire small community has appeared on the shore and, despite the frequent allusions to carrying on only the best things about earth and leaving the ugliness of it behind, this group is still plagued by petty jealousies and sexual violence.

Jerzy lives largely removed from this community and becomes the “Old Man,” a kind of supernatural figure to the fledgling society, possessing a rationality and memory of their former homeworld that is seen as arcane–and perhaps dangerous–knowledge. After Piotr is killed by an unknown force, Marta convinces Jerzy to give her one last child; she dies in childbirth. Some time later, Jerzy returns to the seaside and is disgusted to find that these new humans have lapsed into mythologizing their origin almost immediately, characterizing a flash flood that the landing trio endured as a religious deluge and painting Marta as a goddess: “Fertile Marta begat thunder with the moon in heaven . . . She returned swept by the flood and begat fishes,” they say. Now attended by a hunchbacked “actor” and his own mad daughter, Jerzy finds the village under the rule of the “second” Tomasz (really the third, the grandson of the original astronaut who died after the crash), where ritual sacrifice and interpersonal violence are common, women are subjugated as breeding stock, and death has no meaning. Tomasz decides to lead his people across the sea to see what lies on the other side, only to return and tell Jerzy that they found a great city there, but that it was filled with an evil presence that will soon fly across the sea to take vengeance.

Thus ends the first third of the film, as Żuławski’s narration (which runs over apparently unedited footage of Polish shoppers descending an escalator) describes the ultimate fate of the scientific duo from the prologue: taken from the underground laboratory and town limb from limb. Seeing it all on the page like this, it almost seems comprehensible, even logical, doesn’t it? But this is just the narrative; the film itself is comprised almost entirely of philosophical monologues that are delivered in a series of screams and shrieks. An example: “Wait! Do you remember a man being born? The father endows him with the seeds of every possibility. Each man must cultivate it within himself. If it is vegetal, he will be a plant. If it is sensory, he will be an animal. If it is rational, his essence will become divine; finally, if it is intellectual, he will be an angel or the son of man.” Or: “Although we have thus attempted to get an austere view of this reality whose existence may depend on a decent life, on our work, our honor which permits us to express no more than what we ourselves have seen.” Or perhaps you’d prefer this one: “There is truth in anything I say if I am capable of expressing it. Freedom exists and resides in darkness, it turns away from the lust for darkness to lean towards the lust for light. It embraces the light with its everlasting will. And darkness strives to capture the light of freedom but it cannot do that because it is centered on its own lust and turns to darkness again.” And the whole time, you as an audience member are thinking to yourself, “Is this what the Polish government was afraid of? This circular and defeatist rhetoric that makes little to no sense?” Every single line is delivered with the same intensity, which becomes exhausting, and the only time you get a break is when someone gets upset and runs into the ocean, which happens with great frequency. People are forever trying to run from their problems into the ocean, getting to waist depth, and then delivering another monologue.

From there, we take another leap forward in time to the arrival of Marek (Andrzej Seweryn), another earthman. His ship is met by an envoy from the settlement and he is borne back to them on a kind of parade float, drifting through sylvan, pastoral vistas before being met by a group of acolytes bearing massive banners and ornamented headdresses. Like everything else in this film, it is visually stunning. When he arrives at the seaside, he finds that they have grown into a veritable (if tiny) nation, complete with an underground civilization (give or take the “civil”). Believing Marek to be the prophesied savior who will lead them to victory over the Sherns, the flightless telepathic bird people Tomasz’s envoy discovered across the water and who, it can be assumed, were the ones responsible for the attack that killed Piotr. In addition to carrying out attacks on the human colonists, they have been experimenting on humans and attempting to create hybrids by raping captured women. Marek is given a woman (Krystyna Janda) to be his consort, and he commits to his role without much hesitation, first defeating a captured Shern in a telepathic battle before leading an assault on their city, which ends poorly. He returns to find that the settlement’s inhabitants have lost their faith in him, executing those who are true believers and ultimately crucifying Marek. Literally.

Again, an out-and-out summary isn’t an accurate way to convey anything about this film, but I felt obligated to share one here, if for no other reason than the fact that I haven’t been able to find a coherent one anywhere on the internet, and even claiming that this one is authoritative would be inaccurate. Some of the elements that I couldn’t parse in my viewing only made sense when taken in conjunction with others’ readings, and in some of them there are inaccuracies that I can identify, meaning that none of us has a true idea what is happening here. Writing for Film Comment, Jonathan Romney helped to clarify that much of what I perceived as unexplained warfare is in fact mass ritualistic battle, but he didn’t follow the narrative throughline “explaining” (ha!) that Marta’s first child was Tomasz’s, followed by an unknown number fathered by Piotr, and bookended by the birth of Jerzy’s child. John Coulthart’s review makes explicit that Marek defeated a Shern telepathically, which I mentioned in my summary above; at the same time, his reading of the text is that the discovery of Jerzy’s footage is what prompts Marek’s expedition, which (a) makes perfect sense but (b) I’m not sure is accurate. Given that the third novel’s narrative was about a reciprocal recon mission back to Old Earth, I think that the scenes with the two astronauts living among primitives and viewing Jerzy’s footage might have been the intended adaptation of this plotline, meaning that what we are seeing are Marta’s descendants returning to the homeworld and finding that mankind has descended into the same kind of barbarism as the tribe of Tomasz. My interpretation here is supported by the earthlike portraiture high in the eaves of the baroque performance hall in which this scene takes place, but Coulthart’s interpretation is supported by the fact that it makes more narrative sense (then again, cohesion was never this film’s intent). Only after reading Scout Tafoya’s review for RogerEbert.com did I understand the secondary narrative intercut with Marek’s story, about another scientist who is Marek’s friend; apparently, he and Marek’s girlfriend were having an affair and sent Marek off to investigate the previous expedition so that they could continue to see each other, and their incomprehensible dialogue is about their attempts to justify the fact that they sent him off to his likely death for their own selfishness. By the time that these scenes are happening, the viewer’s senses have been so thoroughly assaulted that finding meaning in the threads of this apparent chaos is an exercise in futility.

So much of this probably sounds like a complaint, and while that’s not not what’s happening here, that ignores the fact that this movie is stunning. At the intersection of ambition, melancholy, madness, and capital-A Art, there lies the Silver Globe. Sure, the dialogue vacillates between philosophical broadness and situational specificity that it induces whiplash as it bounces from meaningless to incomprehensible and back again, but the words spoken on screen are like the plot: simply background dressing. This is a film that is about the image, and spends all of its run time barreling forward (and backward, and side to side) with a frenetic energy that is never anything other than utterly captivating, disoriented but grounded, and very much alive. If by some miracle this film finds its way to you and you get the chance to experience it, don’t be put off by its 160 minute run time or the fact that you’ll be unable to wrap your head around it after one viewing (and after one viewing, you may never want to experience it again, and that’s fine), and just go and have the experience. Failing that, you could also just watch the trailer that AFS cut together for it 107 times to get an idea.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Replicas (2019)

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Often, when we have fun watching “bad movies” for sport, we’re indulging in the over-the-top camp & below-par craft of outsider art: finding amusement in the handmade, weirdly delivered oddities that could never make it to the screen in more professional, homogenized studio pictures. The latest Keanu Reeves sci-fi cheapie (in a tradition that includes such esteemed titles as Chain Reaction & Johnny Mnemonic) is an entirely different, more rarified kind of “bad movie” pleasure. Replicas is less of an over-the-top, straight-from-the-id slice of schlocky outsider art than it is a confounding puzzle, the kind of “bad movie” that inspired the idiom “How did this get made?” There are a few laughs to be had at Replicas’s expense, but not as many as you may hope for from a dirt-cheap sci-fi picture dumped into an early-January theatrical release (when it obviously deserved the direct-to-VOD treatment). Chuckling at its robotic line-deliveries & Lawnmower Man-level CGI can only carry you so far in a movie that’s too somberly paced to fully support the MST3k-riffing treatment. Replicas does not amount to much as a laugh-a-minute camp fest, but it does excel as a puzzling piece of screenwriting, a bizarre act of storytelling so emotionless & illogical that there’s no recognizable humanity to it at all, as if its conception itself was a work of science fiction.

Keanu Reeves stars as a scientist & a family man, toiling away in a Puerto Rican lab on a research project meant to transfer human consciousness to A.I. machines. His closest collaborator, a perpetually nervous Thomas Middleditch, is simultaneously working on a seemingly unrelated project involving human cloning. When a freak car accident kills his wife & children, Reeves makes a panicked decision to combine the two projects, creating clones of his deceased family and importing the “neurological data” from their former selves, so it’s as if they never died. To its credit, Replicas almost establishes a genuinely unnerving source of tension there – finding chilling moments of unease as the dead family’s “living” replicas occasionally half-remember the crash that killed them as if it were a dream they once had. The movie isn’t especially interested in building on that theme, however, as it instead chases a go-nowhere conspiracy thriller storyline involving the company that paid for the cloning & A.I. research. Even that narrative thread is illogically patterned, however, delivering none of the usual payoffs you’d expect from its genre. Replicas ultimately feels as if it were written by a malfunctioning algorithm that became self-aware midway into the process and decided to self-destruct rather than construct a third act. Its various narrative threads & motions towards thematic reasoning are ultimately an act of total chaos, a meaningless collection of 1’s & 0’s. It’s oddly fascinating to behold as it devolves into formless nonsense, like listening to an A.I. machine babble as it loses power & effectively dies.

Keanu Reeves does deliver some traditionally funny “bad movie” line-readings throughout, recalling his befuddled family-man schtick in Knock Knock. His attempts to imbue pathos into lines like “I didn’t defy every natural law there is just to lose you again,” & “Boot the mapping sequence, Ed!” hit the perfect note of failed sincerity & meaningless one-liner script punch-ups. His wife (Alice Eve) sinks even further into inhuman “bad movie” performance than he does – speaking in a dazed, dubbed, robotic cadence about the difference between “neuro chemistry” vs. the human soul as if she were calling in a lunch order. Still, these moments of absurdly mishandled drama are too far spaced-out to recommend Replicas as a laugh-a-minute camp fest. The movie is much more enjoyable for the value of its bizarre construction as a piece of writing. Its mystery thriller tangents, loose Frankenstein-style themes of playing god, and desperate scramble to reach a coherent conclusion all clash spectacularly as its hopes for a clear, linear storyline fall to pieces before our eyes. Most so-bad-it’s-good cinematic pleasures are enjoyable because they offer a glimpse of humanity that shines through the usual machinery of professional filmmaking – whether in a poorly made costume, a wildly miscalculated performance, an unintentional expression of a creator’s id, or what have you. Replicas is a different kind of “bad movie” delight; it’s fascinating because it seems to display no discernible humanity at all, as if it were written by a machine on the fritz. Its only value is that it can be taught as an example of what not to do in a screenwriting class, or enjoyed for its puzzling questions of how & why it was made in the first place by the lucky few who mistakenly find themselves gazing at its confounding, cheap CG splendor.

-Brandon Ledet

The Net (1995)

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There was a stunning late-2018 phenomena in the week between Christmas and New Year’s where everyone in my immediate social & professional circles who normally don’t care at all about movies suddenly cared a lot about one movie in particular: Bird Box. The absurd, instantaneous ubiquity of Bird Box‘s online premise caused on uproar of memes, then memes about those memes, then conspiracy theories about where the memes came from in the first place. Whether Bird Box‘s cultural moment was manufactured by the Netflix advertising machine or it was a genuine response to a widely available genre film with a flashy premise, its sudden online omnipresence was a great reminder to watch another Sandra Bullock vehicle that had been sitting unwatched on my shelf for months: the 1995 cyberthriller The Net. I don’t know that there ever was a time when The Net dominated online culture in proto-meme ridicule the way Bird Box hijacked everyone’s brain for 72 hours, but wild internet conspiracy theories about Bird Box‘s marketing had a distinct Net-ish flavor to it anyway. To put it in 1995 terms, Bird Box Week was a terrifying time when America got hacked by an elite group of cyberterrorists – Netflix’s marketing department.

The most convincing argument that Bird Box‘s instantaneous online success was a natural occurrence instead of an algorithm “hack” job is that Sandra Bullock is just that much of a draw. Curiously enough, that exact argument is what makes the basic premise of The Net so ludicrously unconvincing. Sometime in the 1990s audiences (and well-compensated PR teams) unanimously crowned Julia Roberts as America’s Sweetheart, only for that position to quickly trickle down to Sandra Bullock sometime around the release of Miss Congeniality (and, arguably, later to Reese Witherspoon). As one of America’s Official Sweethearts, Bullock is often cast as an everyday Plain Jane in roles she is far too beautiful & vibrantly charismatic to pull off. I’ve never seen a more preposterous version of that dissonance than in The Net, where Bullock plays a friendless loner slob computer hacker, vulnerable to attack because she’s alone in the world. Watching Bullock slovenly eat junk food & code in her “cyberchat” computer dungeon really pushes her Sweetheart Next Door onscreen persona into surreally unbelievable territory. That inability to lose herself in a role comes hand in hand with movie star celebrity, though – a suspension of disbelief audiences are willing to accommodate because we love seeing these megastars perform, Everyday Sweethearts or no.

Besides Bullock’s natural star power & effortless charm, The Net‘s main draw for modern audiences is its glimpse at 1990s era fears & misunderstandings of online culture. I feel like I already blather until I’m hoarse about how user-interface cyberthrillers like Unfriended, Cam, Nerve, and #horror are documenting online culture & tech textures in a way more “respectable” cinema wouldn’t dare; The Net is only further proof how invaluable that will be after just a few years’ time. The film’s main conflict involves an encrypted floppy disc that elite hackers are willing to murder Bullock’s online slob to obtain, exploring then-contemporary audiences’ fears of the vulnerability of digitally stored information. Characters anxiously explain the vulnerability of our “electronic shadow” in a world where “our entire lives are in the computer,” waiting to be hacked. The film’s tagline bellows, “Her driver’s license. Her bank account. Her credit card. Her identity. DELETED.” Most of The Net‘s basic thriller elements derive from Bullock’s helplessness in the face of this online identity persecution limiting her mobility & capital as she protects the MacGuffinous floppy disc. Just as important as those loud, overwhelming shouts of digitized culture fearmongering, though, are the documentation of more grounded, everyday online activities as Bullock frantically types away on her ancient PC.

Of course, all of this alarmist documentatarian focus on mid-90s internet culture often opens up the film to being outright silly, charmingly so. Primitive AOL-era emojis, in-dialogue explanations of terms like “IRL” (all-caps), and exchanges like “You’re hacker too?,” “Isn’t everybody?,” color The Net as a so-bad-it’s-good early Internet relic. A lot of that ridicule is overexaggerated, such as a much-mocked scene where Bullock orders food delivery from the fictitious Pizza.Net that more or less predicted the Domino’s online delivery app a decade in advance, as if this were prescient sci-fi instead of a ludicrously dated thriller. Where The Net truly gets good for me is in its lack of confidence that its chosen subject is sufficiently cinematic. Unsure audiences will bother reading online chatroom text to themselves, Bullock’s computer “helpfully” reads out the chatter in exaggerated robotic voice synthesizers. Discontented with merely displaying online data in matter-of-fact presentation, harsh music video edits & slashing sound cues are deployed to make computer readouts more “dynamic” (read: obnoxious). To add some explosive energy to the onscreen thrills, the film’s evil hacker syndicate graduate from hijacking online personal data to hijacking personal airplanes – essentially hacking victims to death in fiery crashes. It’s all deeply, incurably silly, a tone that only improves with time as its moment in tech becomes more obsolete.

Without its Evil Internet gimmick and the America’s Sweetheart charisma of Sandra Bullock, The Net would have a dime-a-dozen quality in 90s thriller terms. I assume the same could be said of Bird Box‘s respective gimmick, sight unseen (pun intended). There’s much worse a thriller could do to grab your attention than exploit a preposterous high-concept scenario & employ a surefire box office star, though. For instance, it could flood the internet with fake accounts & preloaded memes or hack your VOD platform to set its front-page autoplay on loop to inflate its own viewing numbers, boosting its profile. If The Net had taught me anything, it’s that nothing is unhackable and nothing online is to be trusted, not even Pizza.Net.

-Brandon Ledet

Support the Girls (2018)

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There aren’t many moments of tranquil beauty to be found in Support the Girls, because there isn’t much peace or beauty to be found in the service industry environment it depicts. The film is mostly relegated to the greyed-out concrete of Texan strip malls & interstate highways. When Regina Hall’s stressed-out restaurant manager finds a rare moment of Zen in the back alley behind her workplace, it manifests as a single migrant bird & a few scraggly bushes, a small glimpse of Nature that’s mostly drowned out by an endless sea of concrete & the constant background hum of passing cars. Mostly detailing a single disastrous day in the service industry, the stakes of the film are relatively small, but director Andrew Bujalski paints an impressively bleak picture anyway just by emphasizing the ugly blandness of the environment. There’s no need to push for more. The punishing, unnatural dullness of restaurant work in suburban Texas is enough dramatic tension to make Support the Girls a devastating watch, and to offer vital counterbalance to the film’s anguished sense of forced merriment.

It’s through that dwelling on punishing mediocrity that Support the Girls offers a damning vision of corporate world capitalism in a Texas-sized microcosm. The mundane details of its cookie-cutter service industry environment gave me vivid, unwanted flashbacks to working low-level back-of-the-house jobs at corporate restaurants I’d never personally patron, mostly to put myself through college. There’s an added layer of indignity here as the business in question is a “breastaurant,” which transforms waiting tables into a light form of sex work. Support the Girls isn’t quite the prostitution-as-microcosm-capitalism political screed that Lizzie Borden’s Working Girls is, but it’s not far off either. The wait staff of the fictional Double Whammies sports bar (a low-level Hooters knockoff) not only live in the grimmest version of concrete Texas mundanity; they also have to sexually stroke the egos of their macho, cheap beer-swilling customers. They’re part waitress, part stripper – which often blurs the boundaries of acceptable behavior from their patrons. Like all restaurant work, the only thing that gets them through is a sense of community as a crew, but capitalism has a way of souring & weaponizing even that consolation against them.

Regina Hall’s physically & emotionally overworked breastaurant manager is our window into this grim world. She’s both a leader & a healer for the girls on her staff and, against her best intentions, a tool of the enemy. Hall often finds herself emphasizing that “We are a family” to her employees, then using that sense of camaraderie & familial obligation to subtly apply pressure for them to do things beyond their normal expected workload, just to survive the day. As much as the team can come together for a shared hatred of the breastaurant’s racist, childish owner, Hall often becomes an extension of his awful will, to no one else’s gain. It’s the greatest tragedy of the film, as she means to do well by her girls, but the hierarchy is set up to make that impossible. The harshly bright lighting & sardonic humor of Support the Girls sets expectations for a Waiting-style broad comedy about the archetypal caricatures of the service industry, but Bujalski delivers something more subtly political & inherently tragic: a character study of a well-meaning capitalist victim who unwittingly becomes a tool for their own exploitation, with no alternative path.

There are plenty of broad service industry caricatures swarming around Regina Hall in this picture to distract from its true, grim nature. Haley Lu Richardson’s flighty firecracker with bottomless Employee of the Month energy particularly feels like she stumbled in from the set of an entirely different kind of comedy. The tragedy of Regina Hall’s goodwill being perverted as a tool for exploitation is much more difficult to detect than those flashes of broad humor. You can easily see it in the oppressive blandness of her environment, though. Wide shots frequently expand the frame just to capture the soul-crushing ugliness of her world: electrical outlets, stained drywall, interstate loops—an endless, monochromatic concrete Hell. There are plenty of momentary laughs to be found inside this bleak Texan prison, but being sentenced to a life within these confines ultimately feels joyless & without hope—an honest depiction of life-long restaurant work.

-Brandon Ledet

Shoplifters (2018)

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In 2004, Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda directed a heart-wrenching family drama about an apartment full of abandoned, impoverished children who spend countless months fending for themselves outside parental and governmental supervision. I have not seen enough of Kore-eda’s catalog to say whether Nobody Knows is a text that typifies his aesthetic or storytelling preoccupations as an auteur, but it’s a work that certainly echoes loudly in his latest film. Winner of last year’s Palme d’Or at Cannes and nominated for this year’s Best Foreign Language Picture at the Oscars, Shoplifters is a much higher profile picture than Nobody Knowns. Yet it often plays like a slickly produced (read: better funded) revision of that earlier work. Shoplifters is a little less patient, a little more formalist, and a lot more blatant in its themes about the unconventional shapes families form in poverty & crisis, but the overall effect is just as tenderly devastating here as it was in Nobody Knows. I think I even slightly preferred the less documentarian approach here, if not only because Nobody Knows is so punishingly somber while this one is more open to notes of sweetness & sentimentality even if both films share in the same grim themes. Either way, I can’t help but think of the two films as complimentary companions, which makes me suspect a wider knowledge of Kore-eda’s catalog at large could only improve my appreciation for either.

The most immediately noticeable difference between Nobody Knows & Shoplifters is that the latter film is vastly more expansive. This is literally true in terms of cast & setting, as almost all of Nobody Knows is suffocatingly confined to a single apartment populated by a small cast of ragged children, afraid of being found out by the outside world. Shoplifters, by contrast, features a makeshift-family of all ages who have to leave their own cramped living space to earn money & food to sustain the collective household through whatever meager means they can manage: shoplifting (duh), construction jobs, factory shifts, sex work, emotional grifts, etc. This opens the cast & locations to a much wider view of poverty-line Tokyo, and also necessitates a more tightly scripted storytelling approach (Nobody Knows feels as if it were patiently constructed out of meticulously edited children’s improv). Shoplifters’s expansion of the previous film’s tones & methods also extends to its camera work & emotional effect. No longer constrained to capturing spontaneous moments in a confined apartment, the camera is free to move in sweeping, energizing maneuvers that match the thrill of the characters’ high-risk/low-reward “shopping” trips. Those characters were also allowed to experience the full range of loving, familial emotions before the goings get toughest, rather than lowly rotting in steady decline.

In addition to Shoplifters’s slicker production aesthetic & expansive emotional palette, it’s a film that also finds Kore-eda willing to blatantly explain his themes in-dialogue. Throughout the film, characters in its makeshift family of near-homeless pariahs discuss in plain language that the familial bonds we choose are much stronger than the ones we’re born into. It’s not enough to demonstrate that community & solidary are the only saving graces for these victims of capitalism; they also have to reinforce the legitimacy of their chosen bonds by insistently using the terms “mother,” “father,” “sister,” “brother,” and “grandma” as if they were a traditional, blood-related family unit rather than a loose collection of societal castaways with no recourse but each other. As clearly stated & straightforward as the themes of unconventional chosen families can be, however, there’s still plenty of room for nuance & subtlety in individual characters’ personalities & histories. The world has been tough on these discarded souls, weighing them down with domestic abuse, economic exploitation, and pure deep-in-the-gut hunger. It’s a burden that’s made them understandably cutthroat & cynical, not the usual saintly saps you’d expect in this kind of drama. The familial bonds they form in crisis are heartfelt & sentimental, but the characters remain defensive, sardonic street toughs as individuals, which benefits the movie greatly as a character study and opens it to a more intricate, dense portrait of modern poverty than what the plainly-explained themes in the dialogue might suggest.

Its likely insulting to both Shoplifters & Nobody Knows as individual works that I cannot discuss their merits without comparing & contrasting them against each other. I still find the exercise unavoidable, as it clearly illustrates a growth in craft & sentiment from Kore-eda while also establishing a baseline for his political & emotional preoccupations as an auteur. Even though they’re not connected as sequels and the makeshift families they profile take remarkably different shapes, they still sit with me as sister films, bonding in unconventional ways. It’s a bond that strengthens each film as isolated works, as it puts both of their accomplishments in sharper relief, which only makes me want to see more films in the larger Kore-eda family.

-Brandon Ledet

Movies to See in New Orleans This Week 2/7/19 – 2/13/19

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Here’s a quick rundown of the movies we’re most excited about that are screening in New Orleans this week, including a few Oscar contenders.

Movies We Haven’t Seen (Yet)

Cold War – A Polish, Oscar-nominated romance drama from the director of Ida, covering multiple decades of a single relationship in 90 swooning minutes of crisp black & white splendor and despair. Playing only at The Broad Theater. Only playing at The Broad Theater.

I Want to Eat Your Pancreas – Somehow not a gory horror cheapie, this emotional YA romance anime has what’s got to be the most provocative title of the year so far. Screening Thursday 2/7 & Sunday 2/10 via Fathom Events.

Oscar-Nominated Shorts Showcases – Both The Prytania Theatre & AMC are packaging this year’s Oscar-nominated shorts in three category-specific showcases: live-action narrative, live-action documentary, and animated shorts. I’m personally only intrigued by the animation package, but it’s honestly just nice to have the opportunity to see short films in a proper cinema, outside of a film festival.

Movies We’ve Already Enjoyed

The Sons of Tennessee Williams (2011) – An essential local documentary about our city’s largely overlooked gay Mardi Gras tradition, detailing the gay krewes & ball culture of both past & present. Screening Wednesday 2/13 at The Prytania Theatre with a Q&A from director Tim Wolff and a performance from drag queen Puddin Tain (to benefit The Krewe of Armenius, who are featured prominently in the doc).

If Beale Street Could Talk – Barry Jenkins follows up his Best Picture winner Moonlight with an adaptation of a James Baldwin novel set in 1970s Harlem. Brimming with gorgeous costumes, sensual romance, and a seething indictment of America’s inherently racist system of “justice.” Only playing at The Broad Theater.

Shoplifters– Hirokazu Kore-eda continues the themes of makeshift families struggling to survive in the bowels of poverty that he explored in previous works like the stunning drama Nobody Knows. Awarded the Palme d’Or at Cannes and recently nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards, this film is an event, albeit an emotionally traumatic one. Only playing at The Broad Theater.

-Brandon Ledet