Reviews

To Decadence With Love, Thanks for Everything (2020)

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The very last in-person social event I attended before the COVID lockdowns hit New Orleans this March was a Joni Mitchell tribute show at the AllWays Lounge. Watching drag queens, burlesque performers, and other assorted weirdos pay homage to as unlikely of an icon as Joni Mitchell was a bizarre treat, especially by the time Krewe Divine member CeCe V. DeMenthe was doing Mitchell as Divine in a Female Trouble-inspired get-up late in the show. I very much miss going to local, avant-garde drag shows like that Joni Mitchell tribute, most of which are anchored to the AllWays Lounge and the surrounding bars on St. Claude Ave. It’s a gaping, ever-widening hole in my social calendar that only became more glaring while watching To Decadence With Love, Thanks for Everything at this year’s (mostly) virtual New Orleans Film Festival.

To Decadence With Love is a local documentary that follows two exceptionally hard-working performers on the contemporary New Orleans drag scene: Franky and Laveau Contraire. Chronicling the two queens’ whirlwind of nonstop gigs over Southern Decadence weekend in 2019 (think Pride Weekend, only much sweatier), the film manages to capture a wide-ranging portrait of contemporary New Orleans drag over a shockingly short period of time. It’s amazing that Franky or Laveau had enough time to freshen their make-up or nap between gigs, much less talk to a documentary crew, but their guided tour of the city on a big moneymaker weekend is continually engaged & energetic. I don’t know that it fully captures what I love about watching these two performers in particular (Franky’s attention-commanding crowdwork and Laveau’s tightrope walk between the traditional & the avant-garde, respectfully), but it certainly sketches out a bigger-picture portrait of the scene where their art is near omnipresent.

I’m most grateful for this documentary’s efforts to capture how drastically different the New Orleans drag scene is now vs. the traditional Southern Pageant Drag I remember growing up with here. While Franky and Laveau Contraire are the overworked tour guides at the center, they make sure to pull the audience by the hand through the performance-art oddities of fellow weirdos & New Orleans Drag Workshop alumni like Maryboy, Apostrophe, Tarah Cards, and Gayle King Kong – some of my very favorite local performers, all of whom I miss tossing sweaty dollar bills at in various cabarets around town. Laveau Contraire in particular is a perfect choice of narrator in deciphering what makes the modern scene here so distinct & worthy of archival documentation, as she is intimately familiar with the traditional Pageant scene that contrasts it (which is still around, and still entertaining on its own merits). The movie also just wouldn’t be complete without her no matter what, since she tirelessly works practically every show on the local calendar.

I don’t know that To Decadence With Love will have much of a life outside of The New Orleans Film Festival, despite winning the fest’s Jury prize for Best Louisiana Feature. I imagine that, at the very least, its music clearance logistics would be an absolute nightmare in terms of distribution, considering how much drag relies on pre-existing pop media. There also isn’t much to its formal approach that distinguishes it as a documentary, outside maybe the way it interviews rideshare drivers on the trips between shows with equal weight as if they were also drag queens (emphasizing their shared reliance on spontaneous gigs & tips). Still, it’s a smart, entertaining document of a hyper-specific pocket of contemporary New Orleans culture that deserves this kind of attention before it’s lost to time. I also personally found it bittersweet to see that scene so vibrantly alive just one year ago, considering how drably uneventful my 2020 social life has been without it.

-Brandon Ledet

Undine (2020)

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The last time I saw a movie in public with a live audience was The Invisible Man back in March of this year, at the start of the COVID-era lockdowns. I recently ended that drought eight months later at the New Orleans Film Festival, which included a few outdoor screenings among the virtual at-home viewing options that comprised most of this year’s fest. The projection was a little hazy, mostly due to the lights of passing cars and my own glasses fogging up from my mask. The mosquitoes were out, and they were thirsty. The movie was solidly Good, but not entirely My Thing. And yet I treasured every minute of the experience, if not only for the novelty of being part of a moviegoing audience again instead of watching everything alone on my couch. It felt like cinematic therapy, a necessary break in routine.

The movie that dragged me out of the safety of my home for a low-risk outdoor screening was Undine, Christian Petzold’s follow-up to the consecutive critical hits Phoenix & Transit. If Petzold has a particular calling card as a director (at least based on those two prior examples), it’s perhaps in the way he treats outlandish, high-concept premises with a delicate, sober hand. I probably should have known to temper my expectations for Undine, then, which on paper sounds like it’d be catered to my tastes but in practice is maybe a little too subtle & well-behaved to fully warm my heart. Its IMDb plot synopsis hints at an aquatic horror fairy tale: “Undine works as a historian lecturing on Berlin’s urban development. But when the man she loves leaves her, an ancient myth catches up with her. Undine has to kill the man who betrays her and return to the water.” Filtering that modernized Little Mermaid thriller premise through Petzold’s normalizing, prestige-cinema eyes, though, the movie somehow lands under the Breakup Drama umbrella instead.

I can’t imagine being the kind of person who watches the glammed-out disco horror musical The Lure and thinks “What if this was remade as a quiet, understated drama?,” but apparently that kind of person is out there. Meeting Petzold halfway on those terms, Undine is a smart small-scale romance, the exact kind of Adults Talking About Adult Issues filmmaking that has been abandoned by Hollywood movie studios and now only exists on the indie festival circuit. While it treats its fairy tale premise with a quiet, restrained sense of realism, the drama it seeks in the relationship dynamics at its core is both wryly funny and passionately heartfelt. It’s difficult to make sense of what all of its lengthy train rides & lectures on the urban planning of a reunited Berlin have to do with the aquatic-horror myth of its premise, but the breaking-up and falling-in-love cycles of its two opposing romance storylines are engaging enough to prop up those intellectual indulgences. The chemistry between actors Paula Beer (Undine) & Franz Rogowski (Undine’s next potential lover/victim) is especially potent & worthy of attention.

It’s embarrassing to admit, but I probably would’ve been more enamored with this film if it were a little messier or a lot more over the top; that’s just not Petzold’s deal. Still, it’s easy to picture a dumber, less nuanced American remake of this exact screenplay (starring Nicole Kidman & Joaquin Phoenix as the central couple), and there’s no way it would be half as thematically rich or dramatically accomplished. Besides, American studio movies don’t offer many COVID-safe venues for public screenings right now, so I couldn’t have enjoyed the outdoor film fest experience that Undine had afforded me if it were a mainstream genre pic. I’m very thankful for that therapeutic break in pandemic-constricted routine, even if I overall found the film itself to be Good Not Great.

-Brandon Ledet

The Giverny Document: Single Channel (2020)

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The first feature I watched at this year’s virtual-edition New Orleans Film Fest was a 40-minute “experimental documentary” (read: essay film) about Black women’s cultural identity, a project that started as an art gallery instillation and an act of small-scale political protest. I gotta say, it felt nice to get back in the swing of things. The Giverny Document (Single Channel) is a little uneven & impenetrable in a way a lot of experimental art-project cinema can be, but its contextual positioning within a film festival environment made those qualities almost warmly familiar instead of cold or alienating. The Giverny Document packs a powerful emotional/political wallop when it feels like going for the jugular, but much of its runtime is a loose, dissociative experience that’s much more about puzzling through What It All Means than it is direct, clear messaging. As COVID has severely limited my access to film festival offerings of its kind this year, I found myself just as warmly nostalgic for this type of deliberately bewildering Art in general as I was affected by what this particular work was striving to say.

The Giverny Document is a conceptual art piece about Black women’s relationships with their own bodies and the meaning of “feeling safe.” These topics are clearly announced in plain dialogue & text so that the audience is at least grounded in terms of subject, even if the tools it explores that subject with are much more abstract. The “Single Channel” subtitle refers to the film’s nature as a synthesized work comprised of many smaller, disparate parts. In an art gallery setting, The Giverny Document is a three-screen instillation piece that simultaneously runs loops of multiple short films comprised of alternating, contrasting images: nature, police brutality, drone strikes, dancing, self-portraiture, etc. This distillation of that project combines all these opposing elements into a single montage, occasionally interrupted by people-on-the-street interviews fit for a local 1990s news broadcast and a stunning Nina Simone performance of the song “Feelings.” It’s a messy, provocative collage that attempts to make sense of the simultaneous, dizzying ways Black women occupy the world: from the personal & internal, to the globally political, to the spiritual & Natural. That’s a lot of ground to cover in a mere 40min stretch, which director Ja’Tovia Gary tackles by keeping its various thematic connections loose & poetic.

I don’t mean to contextualize The Giverny Document as A Film Festival Movie as a means of dismissing its artistic merits or political message. The film intentionally anchors itself to that Experimental Cinema niche by directly, cyclically referencing Stan Brakhage’s famous short Mothlight, which created a crudely beautiful form of animation by running actual insect wings through a film projector. This movie knows exactly what kind of Art World territory it’s trafficking in. It’s not all headscratching obfuscation, though. Often, the 90s-style news reporter will announce to potential interviewees that the movie is “about being a Black lady” to lure them in front of the camera, or police brutality footage will be interrupted by plain block text announcing “WE DON’T DESERVE THIS” as a direct plea for relief. Ja’Tovia Gary’s ambitious, poetic explorations of Black femme identity in both personal & political arenas is very much worth engaging with inside its own confines, which can alternate between disorienting & alarmingly direct the way its imagery alternates between Nature & culture. The experience just also made me consider how much I missed attending in-person film festivals over the past eight months of social distancing, since they’re one of the last places you can still encounter & enjoy this kind of Experimental Cinema provocation (outside the walls of an art gallery, at least).

-Brandon Ledet

The Assistant (2020)

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Although it was released earlier this year, The Assistant feels like it’s from an entirely different cultural era. I missed its brief run in New Orleans theaters (despite being a big fan of Kitty Green’s previous film, Casting JonBenét) because it arrived during Mardi Gras season and looked like too much of a bummer to squeeze in between parties and parades. Looking back on that time now, the idea of attending parties and parades is an outlandish, alien concept, as I’ve spent the past eight months (almost immediately following Mardi Gras) avoiding crowds like the plague – literally. As a cultural moment, 2020 has defined almost entirely by the COVID-19 pandemic. Everything from the presidential election to simple grocery store trips has been shaped by COVID in some way, to the point where I no longer recognize the cultural moment that birthed The Assistant. While we are currently living in the COVID era at the tail end of 2020, The Assistant is a film firmly rooted in the #MeToo era that was still very much at the forefront of public discourse at the start of this year. The entertainment industry and workplace culture at large have been violently disrupted by coronavirus outbreaks & safety protocols to the point where The Assistant feels like it’s a retro dispatch from a prehistoric world with its own distinct horrors & abuses. That world is not dead, though; it’s just quietly dormant, soon to return the minute we’re back to “Business As Usual.”

The Assistant is deliberately self-contextualized as a #MeToo era film. Julia Garner (who’s been due for a rise-to-fame breakout at least as far back as 2013’s Electrick Children) stars as a young, low-level assistant to A Harvey Weinstein Type. Her movie producer boss is a faceless, malevolent presence in the office, referenced only by “he/him” pronouns as if speaking his name would be blasphemous to his status as the office God. He is a well-known abuser of vulnerable young women looking to break into the movie industry, an “open secret” in the office that no one does anything about (beyond making jokes under their breath or strongly discouraging official HR complaints). New to the office, the extent to which her boss’s sexual abuses are known, tolerated, and enabled becomes starkly apparent to the disillusioned protagonist over the course of one spectacularly shitty workday. While the sexual abuse of these women is perpetrated by one clear villain at the top of the office hierarchy, he is largely absent from the screen; The Assistant is mostly concerned with the culture that fosters & enables the abuse rather than the physical act itself. It’s a cold, miserable examination of bystander complicity, implicating even its babyfaced protagonist for her own inaction in the face of a system designed to protect its own (as they exploit everyone else for sport).

While The Assistant is rooted specifically in #MeToo abuses within the entertainment industry, it also hits home as a generalized depiction of how demeaning & exploitative all office culture labor is even under the most mundane circumstances. Watching Garner clean up after her boss’s paper jams, children, half-eaten trash, and mysterious couch stains (*shudder*) is relatably grim to anyone who’s ever worked an 8-5 office job in any context. She’s a powerless twenty-something child who’s pressured from all sides to prop up an evil system with meaningless tasks that eat up her time & labor. It’s brutal to watch, even for just a quiet 78-minute stretch. It’s even relatable to the labor exploitations of the COVID era, which has dragged me back to performing mundane day-to-day work in an enclosed office environment despite an ongoing, worsening pandemic – just to maintain the pageantry of “Normalcy.” I don’t mean to imply that The Assistant is no longer relevant to the post-COVID world just because the #MeToo hashtag is no longer the #1 political issue currently at the top of our cultural priority list. It’s more that it now registers as a horrific reminder of what “Back to Normal” will look like once we get past this COVID lockdown disruption; it looks fucking grim.

-Brandon Ledet

Cuties (2020)

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This summer’s flurry of internet outrage over the French coming-of-age drama Cuties completely derailed how I engage with movie discussions online. Once upon a time, Cuties was the kind of small festival-circuit indie drama that a few professional movie nerds would kick around on their Best of the Year recommendation lists and then promptly forget among the other thousands of docu-realist provocations just like it. Instead, its wide distribution through Netflix coincided with rabid QAnon conspiracy mania at the exact wrong time and it became the Bot Target of the week: a much-discussed but little-seen work that had been boiled down only to alarmist headlines & dogwhistles. By the time the film was available to the wide public, it was impossible to view it on its own terms, as it was already buried under a sea of preloaded online complaints – some legitimate (critiques of Netflix’s misrepresentative, Dance Moms-flavored marketing and its clichéd positioning of Muslim faith as a prison of Moral Conservatism) but most cruelly disingenuous (wild claims that it was “pedo-bait” that first-time director Maïmouna Doucouré should be jailed or even executed for creating, along with the entire entertainment industry at large). Excessive online discourse preceding any film’s release is already exhausting enough, but the sensationalist, death threat-generating controversies surrounding Cuties in particular shattered my spirit, to the point where I couldn’t engage with any of the bad-faith slander against it without becoming instantly apoplectic. It’s made me reluctant to discuss any movie with anyone outside the confines of this blog – yet another moment of social, cultural heartbreak in a year of never-ending grief.

Having now seen Cuties for myself long after the QAnon C.H.U.D.s have moved onto whatever arbitrary-target-of-the-week they’re currently bombarding, I wish I could say that there was nothing to the controversial uproar and that the movie was a harmless delight. I would love to claim that the most offensive part of watching the movie was when Netflix auto-played it with an English vocal dub instead of its original French-language audio track, then move onto calling it one of the year’s most misunderstood gems. That would be just as disingenuous as the film’s pre-release backlash (pre-lash?), though. The truth is that Cuties is an intensely uncomfortable watch; it’s just uncomfortable in the exact opposite way than what its most ghoulish detractors report. This is a film in which young children obsessed with hip-hop dance squad pageantry mimic & weaponize an adult realm of sexuality that they don’t yet fully understand. They twerk & grind in skimpy Fly Girl outfits as a kind of rebellious provocation, an insistence on prematurely growing up to escape the constrictions on personal freedom that frustrate every child. However, the only way these dramatizations of deliberately bratty behavior could be seen as immoral or socially harmful would be confusing its depiction for endorsement, a common occurrence in online discourse (which deals more in clickbait headlines & out-of-context clips than its targets’ actual substance). Cuties is an intentionally uncomfortable watch – one that’s clearly, explicitly alarmist about the sexualization of children’s bodies & minds. It’s conscious of how girls’ & women’s bodies are policed by religious & social institutions, a reality that makes aggressive, sexually provocative dance a form of personal-political rebellion. Still, it’s also horrified by how early access to the internet and highly-sexualized imagery warps these kids’ minds, sending out clear “Do you know where your children are?!” fearmongering to the audience, taking the exact “Save Our Children” moralist position as the people who’ve gotten the most outraged by its existence. You know, people (and bots) who never watched it.

Growing up in New Orleans, I’ve seen children twerk before. At least as far back as Cash Money Records “taking over for the ’99 and the 2000” I’d even call it a fairly common occurrence. While those kids are mimicking a sexually provocative style of dance, they’re not purposefully engaging in sexual behavior and no one really treats it as such. It’s more a cultural rite of passage than anything obscene. The discomfort of watching Cuties is that Doucouré’s camera does sexualize its pint-sized dance troupe’s twerking & grinding, filming their movements as if they were gyrations of women twice their age. It’s a deliberate provocation meant to question what harm pop culture & premature internet access might be doing to kids’ minds, which is made explicitly clear at least by its climactic scene in which an on-screen adult audience watches the central dance troupe’s erotic routine in total, visible disgust. Personally, I didn’t get much out of that line of moralistic handwringing about children’s exposure to sexually explicit pop culture (beyond the intended cringe reactions during some of the more outrageous dance sequences). I was more engaged by the drama of the main character’s journey of self-discovery, wherein she rebels against the constrictions of her home life by joining the bratty dance troupe that routinely causes a ruckus at school. Unfortunately, there’s just so much twerk-alarmist moralizing to sift through (both in the film and online) that the coming-of-age drama feels secondary and not entirely worth the effort, especially when there are films like The Fits, The Florida Project, Girlhood, and Water Lilies that already excel at what it’s struggling to accomplish.

I wish I liked Cuties more, if not only to justify all the mental exhaustion leftover from justifying its right to exist. It’s a mostly okay movie that distinguishes itself by taking some impressively daring swings at a culturally touchy subject – the kind of thing that in a better, recently memorable world would’ve led to divisive film festival reviews not a flood of online death threats. It hasn’t revolutionized the coming-of-age docu-drama in any way, but it has completely changed the way I look at and engage with online film discourse, especially among people I don’t already know & trust.

-Brandon Ledet

Tito (2020)

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It’s difficult to describe Tito without overselling what it can deliver.  Seeking a middle ground between sensory-assaultive arthouse horror and broad stoner comedy, it’s often more of a genre experiment than a proper narrative film.  I almost want to describe it as the unlikely overlap between Josephine Decker and Cheech & Chong but, again, that’s probably overselling it.  If a no-budget genre mash-up that reeks of bong water & brimstone is the kind of thing you’d usually seek out (think Buzzard, Woodshock, Mangoshake, Ladyworld, etc.), then you’re just as much of a doomed soul as I am and will find plenty seeds & stems to catch buzz off of here.  However, anyone expecting the typical payoffs of either a typical arthouse horror or stoner buddy comedy will have their patience tested early & often.  Tito is a lot more interested in mood & process than it is in delivering the goods.

First-time director Grace Glowicki casts herself as an impossibly timid geek (the titular Tito) who’s drawn out of his cowardly seclusion by an idiot stoner who barges into his life uninvited (credited only as The Friendly Neighbor).  Meanwhile, vaguely menacing demons attempt to invade the frame but never arrive, sending Tito into constant panic attacks over a danger that no one else perceives.  That central performance is consistently entertaining, grotesque, and frustrating throughout, like babysitting Crispin Glover while he suffers a traumatically bad acid trip.  The genderfuckery of the casting does little to inform the text; Glowicki merely allows herself the space to improv the character quirks of a pathetic worm of a man.  It’s nearly the most off-putting performance I’ve seen all year, bested only by the grotesque child-creature in Vivarium.  The stoner neighbor is no more endearing, stomping through Tito’s hermetic home space as an overgrown, hedonistic toddler.  Their relationship is the sour, curdled leftovers of a typical stoner-buddy comedy dynamic: two mismatched losers who only become more obnoxious & mutually destructive the more joints they torch.  The demons don’t do much to break up that nauseating dynamic.  They don’t do much of anything at all.  They’re just around, unseen & in-wait.

If I’m being hard on the character traits of Tito in particular, it’s because I see too much of my own worst tendencies in his grotesque cowardice.  Watching the hunched over, perpetually petrified loser jump at every sudden noise and flinch at every microscopic sign of aggression from other men is too familiar to this socially anxious Indoor Kid, although absurdly exaggerated.  By the time Tito was cowering behind the one person he knows at a crowded bar, afraid to make eye contact with any of the strangers (or potential demons) that surrounds him, I found myself laughing just as much at my own social awkwardness as the off-putting quirks that are particular to the performance onscreen.  If Glowicki taps into anything solidly recognizable here, it’s the way that exaggerated social anxiety is reflected in both her performance and in the sensory overload of her editing-room tinkering.  Every one of Tito’s paranoid-stoner mood swings is married to a violent swerve in the soundtrack, so that the audience is equally tormented & unnerved even though nothing especially horrific is happening to him (besides being pressured to hang out with the world’s most annoying neighbor).  The music is Tito’s mood ring, distinguishing his content, idle cowering from his terrified, pants-shitting cowering, which would look pretty similar without that aural assist.

Beyond the film’s grotesque reflection of my own social awkwardness & cowardly response to macho aggression, I most appreciated Tito for its weird-for-weird’s sake pranks on the audience.  Watching Glowkicki puke up a flood of breakfast cereal, fall under the hypnosis of CGI porn simulators, and furiously blow a bright red whistle while her character’s stoner-bro foil shouts punishingly repetitive variations of “Dude!”, “Man!”, and “Brother!” was more than enough to justify the 70min time investment, even if just barely.  I can’t promise that most people will walk away from the experience feeling that same satisfied curiosity (or even promise that most people will make it to the end credits).  Again, I really am trying my best to not oversell it.

-Brandon Ledet

The Berlin Bride (2020)

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The no-budget surrealist oddity The Berlin Bride drifts untethered to a proper context or place in time. It’s clearly styled to look & feel like a 1970s Euro horror (or a 1970s lifestyle magazine, depending on the scene), but its cheap digital patina plants it firmly in the modern age in a way that betrays that intent. A 70-minute oddity uploaded directly to Amazon Prime by director Michael Bartlett himself, the film is letterboxed by CG red velvet theater curtains to fill a widescreen frame – something you’re much more likely to see in an illegal YouTube rip of vintage VHS schlock than in a new, officially sanctioned release. Anytime you manage to forget that this is a modern picture and not an authentic lost 1970s oddity, a flash of surreally cheap cut-‘n-paste CGI interrupts the illusion and jolts you back to a modern context. Mentally vacillating between those two disparate timeframes is a uniquely bizarre experience, one that only enhances the film’s dreamlike, absurdist tone.

The titular Berlin Bride is, in fact, a mannequin. Two reclusive 1980s Berliners split ownership over a mysterious shopping mall mannequin that’s discovered abandoned in a public park. One of the men uses her right arm to replace his own amputated one. The other treats the rest of her as his newlywed bride. Both relationships provide their challenges: the amputated lady-arm becomes sentient & nocturnally impulsive, while the “husband” of the rest of the mannequin becomes increasingly obsessive over that missing appendage’s absence from his newlywed home. The resulting clashes that resolve this tension are surprisingly violent, pushing the film into throwback Euro horror territory. Yet, for the most part The Berlin Bride feels like a bedtime fairy tale – stuck halfway between the understated surrealism of a Jan Švankmajer or a Michel Gondry picture, depending on the temporal textures of the moment. It’s a distractingly cheap, uneven film, but it’s also an endlessly fascinating one.

It’s tempting to apply some metaphorical reading to the modern fairy tale premise that unfolds here, maybe something about the possessiveness of masculine sexuality or the horror genre’s longstanding relationship with dismembered women. Neither of those thematic pathways are as satisfying as treating The Berlin Bride as a weird-for-weird’s-sake oddity, though. It’s unignorably contemporary to the modern digital self-publishing landscape, but it feels like it’s time traveled here from a previous era when movies could just be Weird As Fuck without having to justify that indulgence by Saying Something. Its closest modern equivalent is a no-budget, backyard version of Peter Strickland’s work, which I mean as a high compliment. Otherwise, I don’t really know what to do with the temporally dislodged fairy tale violence presented here, except to say that it pleased me.

-Brandon Ledet