Welcome to Episode #207 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss the earlier works of this year’s Best Director Oscar nominees, starting with Christopher Nolan’s backwards-explosions sci-fi action thriller Tenet (2020). Enjoy!
It’s the more laidback of the New Orleans Film Society‘s two annual film festivals, but New Orleans French Film Fest is still always a major highlight of the city’s cinematic calendar. It’s more of a for-the-locals event than the Oscars-qualifying red-carpet pageantry of New Orleans Film Fest proper, and since it’s all contained to one single-screen venue, attendees tend to become fast friends in line between movies. Every spring, French Film Fest takes over the original Uptown location of The Prytania for a solid week of French-language cinema from all over the world. It’s usually slotted in the lull between the chaos of Mardi Gras and the chaos of Festival Season, a time when there’s nothing better to do but hide from the few weeks of nice weather we’re allotted every year in a darkened movie theater. I’m forever looking forward to it, even now that this year’s fest has just concluded.
One of the more charming rituals of French Film Fest is the way it integrates The Prytania’s usual Sunday morning slot for the Rene Brunet Classic Movies series. This year, that repertory slot was filled by 1978’s La Cage aux Folles, the French farce that was remade as The Birdcage in 1990s Hollywood. Curiously, the projection was SD quality, when past years’ Classic Movie selections like Breathless, Children of Paradise, and Cleo from 5 to 7 were screened in crisp digital restoration. It was a warmly lowkey presentation that fit the tone of the film, though, recalling the feeling of renting a Blockbuster Video cassette of a classic comedy to watch with the family. A lot of the jokes in La Cage aux Folles might be overly familiar for audiences who’ve seen them repeated beat-for-beat in The Birdcage, but I can report that the VHS-quality scan absolutely killed with a full 10am audience anyway. It’s classically funny stuff.
Everything else I saw at this year’s festival were new releases, many of them just now arriving in the US after premiering at last year’s Euro festivals like Cannes & Berlinale. They were the kinds of non-commercial art cinema that most audiences can only access at home on streaming services and borrowed public-library DVDs, unless they happen to live in a city with a bustling Film Festival calendar. As a couple of titles were real patience-testers in their sprawling, unrushed runtimes, I appreciated the chance to watch them without distraction in a proper theater. Even moreso, it just felt great to spend a week watching esoteric cinema with up-for-anything filmgoers in a century-old single-screener – downing gallons of black coffee between screenings to keep up the momentum. To quote every hack journalist who’s ever been flown out to Cannes … Vive le cinéma, vive la différence!
Below, you’ll find a rating & blurb for every new release I caught at this year’s New Orleans French Film Fest, ranked from favorite to least favorite. Enjoy!
Omen (Augure)
What’s scarier: sorcery or disappointing your family? Omen is a magical-realist emigration drama about a Congolese-born man who returns to visit his family after growing up estranged in Belgium. The family is displeased to see him and his white, pregnant wife, both of whom they greet more like demons than like fellow human beings. After an ill-timed nosebleed is misinterpreted as an attempt to curse the family with his demonic spirit, he and his wife are briefly held hostage for a sorcery ritual meant to disarm their threat to the community. Then, the central POV of the story fragments into multiple perspectives, abstracting Omen into a much more unique, open-minded story than what’s initially presented. I’ve seen tons of Afro-European emigration dramas of its kind at film festivals in the past (most often dramatizing the shifting identity of French-Senegalese immigrants), which set a very clear expectation of where this story would go. It turns out the movie was deliberately fucking with me through those set expectations, much to my delight.
Rapper-turned-filmmaker Baloji Tshiani leaves a lot more room for voices from the opposite side of this post-colonial culture clash to be heard with clarity & sincerity than what audiences have been trained to expect. Usually, we follow characters who were born in Africa but socialized in Europe as they float between the two worlds, untethered to any clear sense of personal identity. That’s how Omen starts, but then we get to know the Congo Republic through the eyes of its lifelong citizens who never left. The two worlds are described as belonging to “a different reality” and “a different space time”, conveyed here through magical-realist fairy tale logic that includes breast-milk witchcraft, a music video retelling of “Hansel & Gretel,” a Neptune Frost-style “Cyber Utopia,” and Warriors-style street gangs of warring marching bands, luchadores, and crossdressing ballerinas. None of these stylistic touches come across as empty aesthetics, either. The region’s religious conservatism, political corruption, labor exploitation, financial desperation, and mass stripping of identity are all taken gravely seriously; they’re just expressed through the visual language of a culture that operates in a “different space-time” from what most audiences are used to seeing.
Omen is packed with tons of striking images, tons of eerie atmosphere, and tons of characters squirming under soul-crushing tons of guilt. The familiar, opening-segment protagonist is just one of many.
Our Body (Notre corps)
The dark fantasy of Omen was somewhat of an outlier at this year’s festival. Most of this year’s program was defined by rigorous, realistic documentation of French-language cultures across the globe. The major highlights hyped in the fest’s pre-screening intros were two documentaries that sprawled past the 2-hour runtime mark, with programmers half-apologizing and half-daring the audience with durational cinema ordeals. I showed up for both. Of the two, Claire Simon’s exhaustive, 3-hour documentary about the daily operations of a Parisian hospital’s gynecology ward was my favorite. It starts as a fly-on-the-wall doc that observes the medical consultations & procedures that everyday French citizens undergo at the hospital. Then, it gets incredibly personal incredibly quick as Simon becomes a patient herself.
Our Body is a little frustratingly slack in moments but overall impressive in scope, basically covering the entire span of human life in a single location. Simon starts the film with mention that she walks past a graveyard when traveling from her home to the hospital for every day’s shoot. In the hospital, she witnesses multiple modes of birth, therapeutic preparation for death, and endless variations of bodily transformation between those two points (including transgender perspectives that might otherwise be excluded from a less thoughtful gynecology doc). It would have been a compelling film even if it maintained a Frederick Wiseman-style distance in its fascination with daily bureaucratic process, but its eventual Agnès Varda-style inclusion of Simon’s own medical crisis & recovery is what makes it something special. As the title indicates, it’s impossible to maintain emotional distance when studying the creation, transformation, and expiration of the human body like this; we’re all intimately familiar with the condition of being human, even if only a fraction of us have ever had a C-Section.
Menus-Plaisirs – Les Troisgros
Speaking of Frederick Wiseman, the 93-year-old director also had a sprawling documentary on this year’s French Film Fest lineup. The four-hour runtime of Menus-Plaisirs – Les Troisgros made Claire Simon’s film look puny by comparison, though. It’s easily the longest movie I’ve ever watched in a theater (an experience made doubly daunting by the fact that I immediately bussed to The Broad Theater to watch Żuławski’s 3-hour sci-fi abstraction On the Silver Globe after it was over). Thankfully, Menus-Plaisirs does not make its audience weep & squirm quite as much as Our Body does, since it’s about a trio of family-owned fine dining restaurants instead of the immense beauty & cruel limitations of the human body. I can’t say it was an especially significant experience for me, at least not when compared to critics who recently declared it the Film of the Year. Mostly, it was just a pleasant afternoon sit, like binge-watching a season of Top Chef guest-produced by Dodin Bouffant.
In Wiseman tradition, there is no voiceover or onscreen text explaining the interpersonal drama of the chefs at the story’s center. In fact, all of the contextual background info about how the three restaurants operate is saved for a tableside conversation in the final 2 minutes of the runtime, so feel free to fast-forward 4 hours for that explanation if you’re feeling lost. Even without the context, though, you gradually get to know the trio of chefs as a father who can’t quite let go of his business and his two apprentice sons, who struggle with a low, consistent hum of brotherly competition. Because it’s a Wiseman movie, though, most of the drama is just the garnish decorating the main course: process. We mostly just watch the chefs source ingredients, brief staff, prepare food, and schmooze guests. The scenery is beautiful, the personality clashes are mostly under control, and everyone is well fed. Life goes on.
The Animal Kingdom (Le règne animal)
One of my favorite French Film Fest traditions is selecting movies based entirely on the actresses featured in the cast, regardless of director, genre, or subtext. The French Film Fest ritual is incomplete if I haven’t seen a mediocre movie starring at least one of a handful of festival-standard actresses: Isabelle Huppert, Juliette Binoche, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Marion Cotillard, etc. And now, I can confidently say that Adèle Exarchopoulos has earned her place on that prestigious list. I’m at the point where I’ll enjoy pretty much anything as long as Exarchopoulos is in it, including this supernatural thriller that was instantly forgotten after it premiered last year in Cannes’s Un Certain Regard program.
The Animal Kingdom is a moody fantasy film about a world where humans start mutating into other animal species, like a somber revision of the Netflix series Sweet Tooth. The central drama is a coming-of-age story about a teenager who’s struggling with the sudden loss (or, rather, transformation) of his mother during this phenomenon. He also struggles with the terrifying possibility that his own body might be transforming as well, in an especially monstrous version of puberty. Then there’s his struggle to connect with his distracted father, who’s fixated on retrieving his feral-beast mother and reassimilating her into the family home. Exarchopoulos operates at the fringes of the story as the father’s reluctant love interest. She plays a kind of stock FBI character from 90s action thrillers, the kind who are always 2 or 3 steps behind the fugitive main players. It’s like watching Tommy Lee Jones track escapees from the Island of Dr. Moreau – a part she plays with only mild enthusiasm.
There are a few Icarian moments when the ambition of the film’s superhuman CGI are not matched by the might of its budget, which often breaks the spell of the story it’s telling. There’s some grounding, visceral detail in the body horror of the beastly transformations, though, especially as characters pick at their bloodied nails, teeth, and stitches the way a wounded animal would. That’s another time-honored French Film Fest tradition in itself, come to think of it: listening to an audience who don’t typically watch a lot of genre cinema express disgust with the ordeal of a well-executed gore gag. I have particularly fond memories of watching the grotesque erotic thriller Double Lover with this exact festival crowd for that exact reason. I just wish Adèle Exarchopoulos was given something half as interesting to do in this film as any one scene in that all-timer from Ozon.
The Crime is Mine (Mon crime)
François Ozon’s selection in this year’s French Film Fest was nowhere near as memorable as the nonstop freakshow of Double Lover, but it did hit a different quota for what I love to see at the fest. The Crime is Mine is a traditional crowd-pleaser comedy that features a performance from festival-standard Isabelle Huppert, making for two collaborators who are both capable of much weirder, wilder work. Huppert stars in this 1930s-throwback farce as a Silent Era film starlet who struggled to make the transition to talkies, so she instead attempts to become famous through a headline-grabbing murder. It’s an adaptation of a stage-play comedy that mildly updates its source material, but mostly just aims to please. It’s very charming & cute but deliberately unspecial, like a mildly more subversive version of See How They Run. If you want to see Isabelle Huppert go big in an outrageous wig, you could do much worse, but you won’t walk away accusing Ozon of having The Lubitsch Touch.
A lot of the best stop-motion animation in recent years has been pure nightmare fuel. Hellish visions like Mad God, The Wolf House, and the sickly puppetry of Violence Voyager have spoiled stop-motion freaks whose most cherished memories of the medium align more with vintage Švankmajer and Tool videos than with Wallace & Gromit or Rudolph & Hermey. This new crop of stop-motion nightmares doesn’t bother much with plot or character; they’re more of a pure-cinema ice bath in the most grotesque, upsetting imagery their animators can mold together. Until recently, British director Robert Morgan has ridden that wave of animated hellfire in his stop-motion horror shorts, but now that he’s graduated to his first feature, he’s proving to be a little more accommodating to audiences than Phil Tippet was in his own decades-in-the-making magnum opus. Morgan’s film is intensely grotesque in both its imagery and its sound design the same way Mad God and The Wolf House were, but it’s much more familiar in its narrative structure and adherence to genre conventions. It presents a small taste of pure-Hell animation for audiences who don’t have the patience for the medium’s more abstract, immersive titles, offering them frequent refuge in the relative safety of live-action drama.
Stopmotion is an artist-goes-mad horror about—shocker—a stop motion animator. Aisling Franciosi stars as the assistant animator to her much more famous mother: an elderly, hands-on filmmaker who is losing the facilities of those aging hands, so she uses her daughter’s to complete her projects. The daughter channels her frustration with her own stifled creativity as her mother’s “puppet” (both figuratively and by pet name) into her private, increasingly disturbing filmmaking. She tries to find her own voice by tapping into her childhood imagination, which has stagnantly rotted into something bitter & violent. Blacking out for hours in her isolated studio, she begins animating a cursed fairy tale about a lost girl in the woods who is hunted & tormented by a mysterious figure known as The Ash Man. She crafts both figures out of rotting meat & animal parts, making it viscerally unpleasant for anyone to visit & break her spells. Meanwhile, she begins to expand her practice of “bringing dead things back to life” through animation by playing with her mother’s failing body . . . and by dispensing with anyone who dares interrupt her creative flow. It’s a fairly conventional, predictable horror plot, except that it’s punctuated by scenes from the cursed fairy tale short that bubbles from the hellpits of the animator’s subconscious – its puppet players eventually escaping the screen to attack their creator in the flesh.
Despite all of the ways that Stopmotion contains & normalizes its most horrific images, it’s still a convincing testament to the dark power of creative drive. There are few artforms as isolating as stop-motion animation, which requires long, patient hours of small movements with small results. While our artist-in-peril’s colleagues are seeking paid, collaborative gigs for commercial work, she sinks exponentially further into the isolation of her craft. The sounds of her concentrated breaths overloading the microphones or of her rotten meat puppets squishing under her careful manipulations are both truly unnerving and true to the nature of her chosen medium. All that really matters here, though, is the putrid atmosphere of the Ash Man short that’s gradually doled out in a traditional, three-act fairy tale structure. It’s upsetting in the same way Mad God & The Wolf House are; there just happens to be a lot less of it, and it’s somewhat diluted by narrative handholding that anchors it in the real world. It’s a distinction that makes Stopmotion a good “genre” movie instead of a good “arthouse” movie, but whatever. It’s good.
For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss the blasphemous, satirical comedy-musical The Ruling Class (1972), starring Peter O’Toole as a British noble who believes he is Jesus Christ.
24:07 Madame Web (2024) 35:09 Showgirls (1995) 40:10 She-Devil (1989) 42:57 Amélie (2001) 46:38 Radiant Is the Blood of the Baboon Heart (2023) 47:48 Columbo (1971 – 2003) 52:48 This is Me … Now (2024) 58:01 Lisa Frankenstein (2024) 1:02:01 Omen (2024) 1:06:15 Stopmotion (2024)
If you’re going to make a formulaic talking-heads documentary about a broad cultural topic, you might as well interview David Byrne: an actual Talking Head with a distinct cultural point of view. There’s not much to the late-80s cultural commentary doc Heavy Petting that you can’t find in most current reality-TV confessionals, in which random, fame-desperate weirdos shamelessly divulge TMI insights into their personal lives in exchange for extended screentime. The only difference, really, is that Heavy Petting interviews vintage hipster celebrities instead of contemporary nobodies, which gives it a sharp edge over its modern competition. David Byrne is included among the likes of Laurie Anderson, Ann Magnuson, Sandra Bernhard, Alan Ginsburg, Abbie Hoffman, and William S. Burroughs as the talking heads interviewed – a real who’s who of art-school-weirdo idols who haunted the streets of 1980s New York City. They’re all individually sat in front of a black-void Sears & Roebuck photoshoot backdrop and asked to recount their earliest childhood memories of and experiences with sex. For the most part, they’re surprisingly open to the interrogation, give or take a visibly irritated Burroughs, who acts as if he’s impatiently waiting for a delayed bus ride home. There might be decades of reality TV confessionals exposing the raw sexual psyches of everyday extroverts, but there’s only one place you can go to find David Byrne talk about the mechanics of open vs. closed-mouth kissing as if he were a middle school space alien who just crash-landed his UFO into the schoolyard, eager to smooch his first earthling.
One-and-done director Obie Benz juxtaposes these personal confessionals about childhood sexual discovery with vintage propaganda reels promoting sanitized, Leave It To Beaver era sexual “health”, as well as clips of the 1950s sex icons that subverted the morals of the era. All of the interviewees were raised in an era when Elvis & Mansfield’s wiggle, Dean & Brando’s biker leather, and Monroe’s husky whisper commodified the horned-up rebellion of rock ‘n roll for teenage consumption (during the birth & definition of The Teenager as a concept), but they were not prepared for the physical mechanics & consequences of sex through any formal education. Rock ‘n roll got them riled up, but the unscientific gender-performance propaganda of the era left them completely clueless about the basic facts of sex: the physiology of pregnancy, the existence of sperm, the existence of the female orgasm, etc. It’s easy to dismiss the film’s subversive use of 1950s instructional reels as an aesthetic cliche, especially after decades of these same vintage, Father Knows Best-style images being mocked on ironic postcards & bumper stickers. However, the personal vulnerability of the interviews and the low-key insidiousness of the stock footage prove to be shockingly affecting as the widespread failure of American sex “education” curdles the ironic laughter into political fury. The initial novelty of hearing Abbie Hoffman reminisce about a totally-hetero circle jerk he had with his childhood schoolmates gradually gave way to my own resentful memories of being raised sex-ignorant as a small-town Catholic in the exact era this film was produced, leaving little room for nostalgic kitsch since the problem never went away.
I was initially annoyed by Benz’s choice to avoid labeling his interviewees in identifying chyrons. You either know who Ann Magnuson is or you don’t; even the final montage jokingly credits her as a “TV spokesmodel”, not the fringe actress & Bongwater poet I know her as. When that montage reveals that a couple reality-TV level nobodies (i.e., NYC businessmen) are mixed among the more recognizable talking heads, I came around on the decision. The movie intends to diagnose a widespread cultural rot in the rift between America’s leather-jacket horniness and America’s prudish aversion to sex education, so it’s smart to demonstrate that it’s a psychological damage that affects everyone, not just artsy-fartsy perverts. This closing-credits reveal also pairs the subjects with their actual high school photos, confronting the audience with the faces of children who were deliberately left unprepared for healthy sexual lives in the name of Family Values. All of the marketing for Heavy Petting promises benign Gen-X irony and repurposed 1950s kitsch, but there’s something bravely vulnerable & culturally heinous about what it unearths in its interviews and its moldy stock footage. I found it strangely powerful and unfairly undervalued.
Tim Burton was the very first director I recognized as an auteur, long before I knew the word. Growing up with Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands, and Pee-wee’s Big Adventure in constant rotation made Burton’s ghoulish subversion of suburban utopias as easily brand-recognizable as Disney’s white-puff VHS cases. Or so I thought. My developing baby brain would often confuse off-brand titles like Casper, Coneheads, and Addams Family Values for genuine Burton films, something I wouldn’t clear up until I matured enough to pay attention to the credits. Had the new Cole Sprouse zomcom Lisa Frankenstein been released 30 years ago, I’m sure I would’ve confused it for a Burton film as well. The title indicates a mashup of classic creature-feature horror with cutesy late-80s Lisa Frank kitsch, but in practice it mashes up the cutesy-ghoulish sensibilities of opposing suburban auteurs Tim Burton & John Hughes. There’s nothing especially new to be mined from that heavily nostalgic genre blending—especially not in a world where Heathers was around to do that work in real time—but there’s always a fresh batch of developing-baby-brain audiences out there who need their own intro to this stuff, and they could do a lot worse (mainly by watching modern era Burton).
Kathryn Newton steps in to replace Winona Ryder as the starter-pack goth girl inspo protagonist, the titular Lisa. Adjusting to life at a new school with a new family, following the violent death of her mother, Lisa has become a quiet loner with a chip on her shoulder and an aesthetic addiction to black lace. Armed to the fangs with Diablo Cody dialogue, she refers to her peers as “skeezers” & “beer sluts”, while thinking of herself as belonging to a special class of “people with feelings” who listen to college radio. The only person she’ll open herself up to is a Victorian corpse played by Cole Sprouse, whom she initially meets by chatting with his gravestone and eventually resurrects from that grave through a freak, supernatural rainstorm. The walking, grunting corpse becomes a kind of safe boytoy figurine she can confide in and play dress-up with . . . until her self-assigned outsider status gets out of control and the unlikely pair go on a killing spree. They justify the violence by collecting functional body parts for the rotting Creature, but it’s really just an excuse to dispose of the poor souls at the top of Lisa’s personal shit list: her icy stepmother, her handsy would-be date rapist, the bad-boy crush who turns down her own advances, etc. In short, it’s wish-fulfillment fantasy for the angstiest people alive: gothy suburban teens.
I’m no longer a gothy suburban teen myself, but I like to think I’m still young enough to remember the appeal a movie like this can hold. One of the smartest touches of Cody’s script is the way it allows Lisa to be morally in the wrong, but in a relatable way that recalls the audience’s own lingering teen angst (while also, again, recalling Veronica Sawyer’s). First-time director and promising young nepo-baby Zelda Williams also appeals to an older crowd in her aesthetic nods to Suburban Outsider ephemera from the past, including Burtonized dress-up montages, Smashing Pumpkins-style homages to Georges Méliès, 80s-goth needle drops, and a soul-deep fear of the tanning bed. Unfortunately, though, the movie’s not quite zippy enough to compete with the decades of suburban horror comedies that precede it, from cultural juggernauts like Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands to VHS-era curios like Bob “The Madman” Balaban’s My Boyfriend’s Back. Lisa Frankenstein is thankfully playful enough to avoid becoming the next victim of Age Gap Discourse despite the century’s difference between its romantic leads, which is good news for the teens who haven’t yet seen its dozens of obvious predecessors. It’s just not funny enough to overcome its lax editing & scoring, which allow too many of its zinger punchlines to rot in dead air.
This movie’s undeniably cute, but there’s something missing in it that pushes greatness just out of its reach. Maybe it needed a tighter, zippier edit. Maybe it needed the Danny Elfman touch that made Burton’s early triumphs sing. Or maybe I just needed to be 13 again to fully love it. With my 40s swiftly approaching on the horizon, decades after I’ve needed gateway-horror Burton titles to introduce me to the basic concepts of cinematic style, I’m okay with just liking it.
Jennifer Lopez is an amazing dancer, a magnetic actress, and . . . a singer also. Outside her soulful tribute to Selena and the freak-chance payoff of the dance hit “Waiting for Tonight”, JLo’s decades-long singing career hasn’t produced many highlights, which is what makes it so awkward that she’s insistent on commemorating her legacy among the two towering pop acts of the current moment: Beyoncé and Taylor Swift. Instead of sitting it out while those two titans fight for the throne in their own competing, career-defining concert films, Lopez has naively entered the fray with a couple career-recappers of her own – first, through the grand spectacle of a Superbowl halftime show (greatly aided by collaboration with Shakira) and, now, through a self-funded “visual album” retracing the steps of Beyoncé’s culture-shifter Lemonade. This is Me … Now: A Love Story is an hour-long collection of music video vignettes, titled as a follow-up to JLo’s 2000s era pop album This is Me … Then, which is only notable for puzzling the world the personal-brand PR anthem “Jenny from the Block”. This is Me … Now is a massive vanity project that cost $20mil of Lopez’s own money, meant to celebrate her romantic reunion of the Benifer partnership and to solidify her status as one of the great artistic minds on the modern pop landscape. Personally, I would’ve much preferred that she just work with talented, established filmmakers like Tarsem or Soderbergh again, but at least this latest project was an interesting failure, which is more than you can say for most of her recent streaming-era acting jobs (and most of her post-90s music video work as a pop star).
This is Me … Now starts with abstract, poetic ambitions, as JLo self-narrates storybook romance fantasies about her rocky path reuniting Benifer (illustrated as an uncanny CG motorcycle crash), about her years of suffering repeated heartbreak (illustrated as uncanny CG steampunk dystopia featuring a giant mechanical heart powered by rose petals), and about her lifelong idolization of true love (illustrated by an uncanny CG hummingbird searching for its floral soulmate). In this early stretch, it’s seemingly competing with fellow post-Lemonade projects Dirty Computer & When I Get Home to challenge the boundaries of the music video as a cinematic artform. Then, it quickly backslides into standard-issue romcom tropes, making for a weirdly talky & plotty “visual” album. All of the fantasy elements of the narrative are contextualized as dream sequences, each to be analyzed in therapy sessions with a teddy bear psychologist played by Fat Joe. Teams of celebrities, factory workers, and stock romcom characters join Joe to coach JLo through her crippling love addiction so she can find her way back to her beloved Ben, a destination she can only reach by learning to love & hug her inner child (again, in a dream). It’s all very tidy and, frankly, unimaginative, which is a shame considering the free-for-all fantasy promised in its opening heart factory sequence. By the time the closing credits pad out the runtime for a 12-minute eternity—just barely stretching the film over the one-hour feature length finishing line—it’s clear there isn’t enough artistic drive behind this project to justify the classic MGM title card announcing it as A Movie. Meanwhile, Lemonade, Dirty Computer, and When I Get Home all ranked among the best movies released in their respective years, regardless of form.
I’m not sure that JLo has the ability to stage her own sprawling, Tarsem-style fantasy piece, but I do think she could manage Maid in Manhattan: The Musical if tasked. The only times This is Me … Now pays off its “so bad it’s good” irony-watching potential is in generic romcom voiceover about how people call her crazy for wanting to commit to traditional monogamous partnerships, about how she still believes in “soulmates and signs and hummingbirds,” and about how when asked what she wanted to be when she grew up, she always answered “In love.” It’s a thoroughly committed “me, me, me, I, I, I” tribute to her own hungry heart, combined with a genuine cinephilic soft spot for classic romances like Singin’ in the Rain and The Way We Were. The problem is that her artistic ambitions reach far beyond those Blockbuster Video romcom boundaries, and they ultimately prove to be an Icarian downfall that exposes her limitations as both a pop singer and a visual artist. Of course, none of these shortcomings really matter, because This is Me … Now has already accomplished everything it set out to do; it refreshed JLo’s name in the pop stardom conversation by promoting her new album and promoting her ongoing tabloid romance with Ben Affleck. Whether or not it’s any good is beside the point, which is generally how her pop music career at large contributes to her overall celebrity.
The 1977 French coming-of-age drama Peppermint Soda is a lovely, densely detailed memoir of school age sisters’ adolescence in 1960s Paris. There’s nothing especially flashy or dramatic about its visual style or narrative except maybe in its choice of subject, since its matter-of-fact approach to the daily drama of young girls’ lives does feel ahead of its time. Rather, its frankness feels cutting edge for its time, when the world was still shocked by the confessional honesty of Judy Blume, to the point where it was just a couple character names away from being retitled Dieu, tu es là? C’est moi, Marguerite. Director Diane Kurys had never operated a camera before making Peppermint Soda but felt compelled to illustrate her childhood memories onscreen because there weren’t enough movies about teen girl adolescence being made in that era, when even the snobbier end of French cinema only made room for young boys’ coming-of-age stories like 400 Blows. That’s a difficult context to imagine when watching the film now, since stories of its kind are so prevalent that Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret recently got an official mainstream Hollywood adaptation just last year. While I was growing up, great girlhood nostalgia stories like Mermaids, My Girl andNow & Then, were holding more than their own against their male equivalents like The Sandlot & Stand By Me, so it seems Kurys won that particular battle in the culture war long before I saw caught up with her debut film.
Where Peppermint Soda excels, then, is in the specificity of Kurys’s childhood details; it’s a personal touch felt as soon as her opening title card dedicating the film, “For my sister, who still hasn’t returned my orange sweater.” Her and her sister’s avatars are a teenager & preteen in the film, just a few years but also a world apart due to the volatility of their ages. We watch them attend school and attempt to define themselves within various interpersonal relationships for one calendar year – navigating their parents’ divorce, their teachers’ abuses of power, and their friends’ erratic teenage behavior. Sometimes, the details of a scene are so specific to Kurys’s recollection of girlhood that they have to be pulled from personal memory, like when the younger girl awkwardly watches her older sister make out with a boy at a garage dance party. Sometimes, the details are broadly cultural, referencing 1960s political touchstones like the Kennedy assassination to mark the otherwise timeless story’s temporal locale. Whether the audience shares Kurys’s specific memory of growing up a girl in 1960s Paris is irrelevant, since there are universal aspects to childhood that translate to all cultural settings. When a classroom nerd absentmindedly chews the end of her ink pen until she stains her mouth with its erupting contents, I could immediately taste the blue metallic sludge from my own childhood memories. I was that exact kid once. We all were, or we all at least knew one.
Kurys was smart in making the most of her modest budget and D.I.Y. filmmaking skills, whether in selecting just the right vibrant-pattern 60s curtains or in supplementing the production budget by suggesting unfilmed scenes in still, staged vacation photos. Her eye for color & design is especially apparent in the gorgeous 2k digital scan of the film from a couple years back, wherein the saturation is cranked up in crisp detail. In that new presentation, her visual style feels like a precursor to modern production design obsessives like Wes Anderson, as most vintage French cinema does. In particular, there’s a teenage camping excursion that feels directly influential to the runaway romance of Moonrise Kingdom and its halfway-flippant dramatization of 1960s student protests was recently echoed in The French Dispatch. Around the time Anderson was promoting The French Dispatch, he even programmed Peppermint Soda as part of a screening series for the French Institute Alliance Francaise devoted to his “favorite French features.” That recommendation likely trumps anything I could say in the film’s favor in this format, so it’s safe to say that Peppermint Soda‘s poignancy & purpose has long outlasted whatever cultural fixation on teen-boy adolescence Kurys was initially attempting to counterbalance. It’s a casually wonderful film with plenty of authentic, lived-in detail, and in a way recent American titles like Are You There God?, and Diary of a Teenage Girl feel like they’re still catching up to it.
When Sean Baker’s career-high poverty drama The Florida Project locally premiered at New Orleans Film Fest in 2017, I was surprised that the screening included a Q&A with the movie’s producer, Shih-Ching Tsou. Although Tsou does not enjoy the same name recognition as her longtime creative partner, I immediately recognized her as the donut counter cashier from Baker’s previous picture – his breakout hit Tangerine. Listening to her talk about the creative & financial decisions behind The Florida Project‘s production made it clear she was a substantial player in the success of Baker’s directorial career, and that she had been his main collaborator since long before their movies received red-carpet film festival rollouts. A recent Criterion Collection restoration of Baker’s early, scrappy service industry drama Take Out highlighted the extent of their collaboration even more starkly. It’s the one instance where Shih-Ching Tsou was so involved in the daily filming of a project that she & Baker were listed as co-directors instead of being rigidly relegated to director & producer. It’s an interesting curio within the context of Baker’s career anyway, since it’s the only story I’ve seen him tell outside his usual pet subject of poverty-line sex work. Still, it’s even more interesting for the way it pushes what Tsou brings to her creative partnership with Baker to the forefront, since it was largely made with a two-person crew.
If it hadn’t been an early-style precursor to the greater things Baker & Tsou accomplished in Tangerine, The Florida Project, and Red Rocket, it’s unlikely Take Out would be remembered much at all. It’s a pretty straightforward cinema verité labor drama, most notable for its chump-change budget & documentary sensibilities. The most interest it might have to audiences unfamiliar with the trajectory of Sean Baker’s career is the authentic snapshot it captures of the daily operations of a Chinese food delivery kitchen in a post-9/11 NYC. Baker & Tsou spent weeks filming the front-of-house customer service & back-of-house food production of an authentic Chinese take-out counter before writing a sparse screenplay that could be staged in its sweaty, cramped walls. The customers at the counter are real New Yorkers waiting on their take-out orders; the customers who accept deliveries at their apartments were cast through Craigslist and improvised their interactions with the central, doomed delivery guy. Most importantly, the incredibly charismatic woman working the take-out counter, Wang-Thye “Big Sister” Lee, is documented performing her actual, natural work persona, providing enough priceless interactions with the real people of New York that it’s almost frustrating the movie wasn’t reworked as a full documentary instead of a mixed-media docudrama. Instead, Baker & Tsou reshaped these authentic transactions into a tidy, barebones crime drama, which likely helped land it the film festival distribution that kickstarted their career.
After harvesting enough B-roll of real-life kitchen drama, Tsou & Baker wrote a fictional drama about a food delivery worker’s frantic day-long scramble to repay borrowed cash, staged within the same restaurant. He has until the end of his shift to scrape together $800 in donations & tips or his debt to the gangsters who helped fund his US immigration will be doubled, a consequence they make brutally clear by hobbling his body with a hammer. This desperation pushes him to work grueling hours biking through a rainstorm, performing gratitude to shit-heel customers on what’s presumably the worst day of his life. Of course, it’s near impossible to get ahead on his own under those conditions, only picking up $1 here or $2 there in tips as the deadline quickly approaches. There’s no music underscoring the tension of this low-level crime drama, just the low hum of kitchen equipment and NYC rain. Although the story being told about the risks & pitfalls of undocumented immigration is a politically pointed one, it often feels a little forced & tidy compared to what’s otherwise such an authentic look at the daily lives of undocumented kitchen workers in major US cities. In the few movies they’ve made together since, Baker & Tsou have greatly improved the balance between those two impulses – pushing the fictional drama of their semi-documentary films to even more artificial extremes while simultaneously making them feel natural to the real-world environments they’re staged in. Take Out can’t help but feel like an early test run for greater work by comparison, but it’s still successful Independent Filmmaking on its own terms.
This early Tsou & Baker collaboration was made for $3,000 on rented mini-DV cameras in just one month’s time. Unlike the movie’s central characters and his co-director, Baker does not speak Mandarin Chinese, so he relied on Tsou to translate any improvised deviations from their script to help keep the rushed production on track. The handheld cameras frame the world they document & synthesize in a grotesque dinge, fixating on poverty-porn details like cockroach infestations, curled linoleum tiles, and the yellowed hues of fluorescent lights. Despite the uniform hideousness of low-budget digital filmmaking in that era, the food being served in the central kitchen location still looks damn good; the fried rice might read as electric green onscreen, but it’s topped with a visibly juicy half of chicken that’ll have you reaching for the pile of take-out menus in your own apartment. The equipment & financial limitations that shaped the production were obviously less than ideal, but they forced Tsou & Baker to work in cramped proximity in a way that solidified their joint filmmaking style that’s only led to increasingly greater work since. From the outside looking in, I get the sense that Tsou is still just as much of a driving force in their creative output as Baker, even though she doesn’t get onscreen credit as his co-director. At least, there’s nothing especially glaring about the filmmaking & economic ideas of Take Out that you won’t find in their more recent pictures; it’s just that now professional actors like Willem Dafoe deliver their dialogue instead of Craigslist randos, for better more than for worse.
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