As with most genre films, it’s tempting to discuss Julia Ducournau’s follow-up to her Palme d’Or-winning body horror Titane exclusively through points of comparison. Alpha is Julia Ducournau’s Tideland; it is Julia Ducournau’s Kids; it is Julia Ducournau’s 1990s time machine that only makes pitstops for scenes of vintage misery. The Tideland comparison is directly invited by the film itself, as Alpha is another fantasy-horror tale of a young child haunted by a close family member’s heroin addiction, in which the niece & uncle in that relationship take a beat to watch scenes from Tideland director Terry Gilliam’s better-respected title The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. The Kids comparison is indirectly invited earlier in the story, as we meet the titular 13-year-old-niece-in-peril while she’s unconscious at a high school house party and being tattooed with a dirty needle, exposing her to an illness referred to only as “The Virus.” Whereas Harmony Korine’s misbehaved-teens scare film intended to shock audiences with the seedy details of how HIV/AIDS was actively spreading through children’s unsupervised hedonism, Ducournau’s rearview vision can only grieve the lives lost during the scariest years of that viral spread, when information was as low as the likelihood for death was high. Alpha can’t help but feel a little out of step with the current moment as it dwells on those darkest days of the recent past, but the way it’s haunted by The Virus at least feels specific & personal to its director despite all its convenient points of comparison — especially by the time you do the math to figure out that she would’ve been her protagonist’s age around 1996.
One of the clearest ways Alpha is personal to Julia Ducournau is its visual interpretation of AIDS symptoms through body horror metaphor. In Raw, she depicted a young woman’s coming-of-age struggles through a skin-tearing cannibal transformation. In Titane, she tested the outer limits of familial machismo & gender identity through another monstrous transformation, that time forged in steel. In contrast, the bodily transformations of Alpha are much more solemn & subdued. Victims of The Virus gradually harden into gorgeous marble statues as they perish, coughing up sculptors’ dust in their last breaths before their final, agonized moments are set in stone. It’s a stunning effect that captures both the pain and the beauty of loved ones lost to disease, but it’s also one that deliberately backs away from the confrontational ferocity of Ducornau’s earlier works to instead seek a quiet sorrow. The film’s titular teenager (Mélissa Boros) is the daughter of a doctor (Golshifteh Farahani) who’s been surrounded by the fantastically painful effects of The Virus since its earliest days, most intimately through the slow physical decline of her drug-addict brother (Tahar Rahim). That wayward uncle happens to return home at the exact moment when Alpha is exposed to The Virus via tattoo needle, prompting the mother to worry about the parallels between the two people she loves the most as the family waits for her daughter’s test results. Those results will either foretell Alpha transforming into a human statue, frozen in time, or Alpha surviving long enough to live a full life. It’s a tough couple weeks’ wait, especially for an educated mother in the medical profession.
The worst you could say about Alpha is that it feels stuck in the past on an aesthetic level, somehow landing closer to the de-saturated digital filmmaking of the early 2000s (Tideland, et al.) than the 1990s misery dramas evoked in its themes (Kids, et al.). Ducournau’s earlier films felt like they were giving birth to some new monstrous beast not yet seen onscreen, while her latest finds her lost somewhere in the recent past, dissociated from the current moment. That temporal dissociation is at least appropriate for the film’s longform flashback structure, in which Farahani’s mother figure processes her daughter’s current health scare by reliving memories of her brother’s earlier days with The Virus. At first, those two timelines are clearly differentiated by color grading choices (warm tones for the past; cool, marbled tones for the present) and the respective curliness density of Farahani’s hairdo, but once the prodigal uncle returns to the fold they start to collapse into one simultaneous story. It’s a remarkably confusing narrative structure, but that confusion is somehwat the point. No matter how distanced the doctor gets from the most harrowing days of The Virus, she can’t help but bring the fears & anxieties of those times into the present. Ducournau is very likely making a point there about how survivors & witnesses of the HIV/AIDS epidemic reflexively carry the despair of those years into present-day illness crises (i.e., COVID), and she’s presumably counting herself among them. Whether it’s the point or not, though, the film does feel artistically dated, which is not typically something you can say of her work.
If there’s any current-moment film title Alpha can be easily compared to, it’s this year’s fellow Cannes-premiered oddity The Plague. Ducournau’s latest is paradoxically both more literal and more lyrical than Charlie Pollinger’s knockout debut, but they’re both coming-of-age stories about young nerds stigmatized by their peers for coming in direct contact with a fantastical virus that transforms their bodies. The influence of Ducournau’s own debut, Raw, visibly seeps into the waters of The Plague as the latter film’s fictional virus also manifests in itchy skin that victims habitually shred in an anxious reaction to social isolation. The overlap between Ducournau & Pollinger’s films then becomes uncanny in a pivotal moment when Alpha is bullied in her school’s swimming pool, mirroring the water polo camp setting of The Plague. Whereas The Plague conveys a sharpness in intent & execution, however, Alpha gets lost in its own made-up world & metaphor. In an early scene, Alpha’s classmates struggle to interpret the classic Poe poem “A Dream Within a Dream,” just as Ducournau invites her audience to struggle interpreting the linear timeline between her characters’ past & present through dream-within-a-dream storytelling logic. That temporal muddling ends up relegating the marbled body transformations of The Virus to the background as the character drama it threatens takes precedence, which is a letdown for anyone excited to see one of body horror’s best working auteurs once again do her thing. Instead, we find her searching for something in the haze of the past, making baffling aesthetic choices from scene to scene (not least of all in a few disastrously distracting needle drops) as she stumbles through a foggy memory. I suppose I should be celebrating Ducournau for retreating further into personal preoccupation rather than delivering Titane 2.0 to dedicated fans, but I also can’t pretend that the result is as rewarding as her previous triumphs. Alpha is more satisfying to think about than it is to actually watch, which I can’t say about Raw, Titane or, for that matter, The Plague.
How do we continue to seek & experience pleasure while the world is actively ending all around us? I have no idea if that question was on director Oliver Laxe’s while he was making the new apocalyptic rave-scene drama Sirāt, but it was certainly on mine while watching it. In fact, it’s getting increasingly difficult to think about anything else these days, when simple, for their-own-sake pleasures are feeling less attainable and more amoral by the minute. The transient partiers of Sirāt have to selectively tune out constant news reportage about the start of World War III in order to enjoy their daily travels & pleasure hunts, stubbornly continuing their journey to the next big party on the horizon despite what the audience can only assume is an impending nuclear holocaust. From a distance, it may seem excessively selfish or hedonistic for them to continue raving on while the world is ending just outside their periphery, but it’s also difficult to imagine what a small crew of recreational drug users & dance music enthusiasts could possibly do to stop that apocalyptic momentum anyway, even if they were more politically engaged with the world outside their vans. The only two options they have, really, are to either helplessly fret their final hours away or to fill those hours with as many small, for-their-own sake pleasures as they can manage. In the immortal words of Andrew W.K., “When it’s time to party [i.e, to distract ourselves from impending doom and the ever-present desire to cry until we puke], we will always party hard.” Words to live by, I guess.
I do not want to imply that Sirāt‘s entire cast of characters is evaporated into a mushroom cloud at the story’s climax. WWIII is more of a background hum beneath their constant soundtrack of techno beats than it is a direct threat on their lives. If they are in any mortal danger, it’s due to their personal choices, not global circumstances. The film opens in the vastness of the Moroccan desert, with unnamed party promoters erecting enormous speaker towers in the sand like Kubrick’s monolith. When thunderous bass starts pumping through those speakers, a crowd of ravers materialize to party the hours away, dancing up a dust cloud to a nonstop techno track. The only interlopers among them are a middle aged, working-class dad (Sergi López) and his young son, who pass out “Missing Person” flyers in an attempt to track down a member of their family who hasn’t returned home in a half-year’s time. When military troops breaks up the party, the out-of-place father & son duo decide to follow the biggest risk-taker ravers to a second rave even deeper in the desert, risking their lives for the possibility of staging a family reunion. Meanwhile, the more hardcore ravers are risking their lives for the pure thrill of the risk. As the makeshift convoy journeys towards the Promised Land rave deeper in the desert, the film starts hitting thriller genre beats more reminiscent of a Sorcerer or a Fury Road than the small character drama beats it hits in the opening stretch. Shit gets real. People get hurt. And yet, their lives still feel small & inconsequential within the context of the larger global catastrophe being set in motion just outside the frame.
Despite the lethal stakes of Sirāt‘s scene-to-scene drama and apocalyptic setting, the movie can be oddly sweet. It’s a character drama at heart, one populated by real, believable people with real-life faces of interest — as opposed to the perfectly sculpted plastic faces of its Hollywood studio equivalents. The European ravers each speak multiple languages; they gradually assimilate the misguided father & son into their own found family; and they wax poetic about the simple joys of taking drugs to techno music, explaining to the befuddled, “It’s not for listening; it’s for dancing.” The fact that tragic things happen to them on the road (and that their world is doomed regardless) is an inevitability beyond their control. All they can do is party in the present and hope to survive long enough to party again in the future, often with open disdain for reminiscing about the past. The up-close details of their lifestyle are entirely alien to me, as I neither take the right drugs nor listen to the right music to fit into the raver scene they inhabit. Their collective impulse to seek small sensory pleasures in a world that’s actively collapsing around them should resonate with anyone who’s had the misfortune of being alive & aware this century, though, regardless of the futility in their pursuit. Not for nothing, their search for the next big party in the Moroccan wilderness is also strangely reminiscent of how I dream, when my unconscious mind is constantly sorting through a chaotic assemblage of fictional, self-generated obstacles while I’m trying to make my way to a dreamworld concert, party, or film screening that doesn’t actually exist.
There is a fight for authorship at the center of the mental-crisis drama Die My Love that drives most of its scene-to-scene tension. The project was initiated by its star, Jennifer Lawrence, after Martin Scorsese forwarded the source-material novel to her as a potential showcase for her acting talents. Indeed, Lawrence gets to run wild in the resulting movie adaptation of that book, the most violently expressive she’s been on screen since 2017’s mother! — no small feat. Somewhere in the process of adapting the book, however, Lawrence hired an equally ferocious authorial voice in Lynne Ramsay to direct. Instead of adapting a novel about postpartum depression, it appears Ramsay has pulled a fast one and adapted those Britney Spears knife-dancing videos to feature length instead, doing as much as she can to abstract & rattle the text until it is no longer recognizable as anything other than a Lynne Ramsay picture. Die My Love touches on all of Ramsay’s greatest hits—the feral playground brutality of Ratcatcher, the illustrated-mixtape rhythms of Morvern Callar, the mother-in-crisis chills of We Need to Talk About Kevin, the curdled social isolation of You Were Never Really Here—but it has to contend with a new disruption to the way she normally does things: an unrestrained Jennifer Lawrence. Typically, Ramsay’s filmmaking style is overtly intense while her protagonists convey a calm, quiet surface to onlookers, with their inner turmoil saved for the audience’s horror. Here, Lawrence is the loudest, brashest, most chaotic presence in every room, matching Ramsay’s firepower with her own histrionic arsenal, so that all eyes are constantly on her. It’s difficult to say whether either of those two voices overpower the other here, but the tension between them is undeniably compelling.
That tense creative partnership between actor & director is echoed in the onscreen marriage between Die My Love‘s two leads: JLaw & RPats. The young couple start off well enough in the early stretch when they’re nesting in their new rural Montana home, routinely getting wasted and fucking on every possible surface. That ferocious animal attraction fades once Lawrence is nursing the inevitable baby they make together, with Robert Pattinson’s husband figure finding an increasing number of excuses to spend time outside of the house “for work.” Lawrence’s mental health rapidly plummets as she raises their baby in extreme isolation, due partly to postpartum depression but due largely to the soul-crushing boredom of being left alone in the house. The barking dogs, buzzing flies, and baby-appropriate novelty songs that fill that house’s void are enough to drive anyone insane after a few months of solitude, and that’s before you consider the wild hormonal swings the human body suffers after giving birth. For Ramsay’s part, she mimics the “chopped up” mental state of postpartum mothers in her trademark dissociative editing style, which helps abstract a fairly typical romantic-drift-apart story into the more experiential nightmare of a woman on the verge. Meanwhile, Lawrence lashes out at how “fucking boring” the universe is by literally clawing at the walls of her new prison/home and begging her husband to fuck her like he used to, proving that she’s still a person to him and not just a baby-making appliance. She follows through on every intrusive thought that might break her out of the domestic pattern she’s doomed to repeat, including jumping through sliding glass doors just to feel something. If Die My Love were made by any other director you’d expect those violent shocks to be momentary fantasies (see: last year’s Nightbitch), but since it’s Lynne Ramsay we know to accept the worst at face value and brace for the fallout.
Not every moment in Die My Love is tension & strife. Lawrence’s mother-in-crisis finds a surprise source of patience & grace in her neighboring mother-in-law, played by Sissy Spacek. While the younger mother is suffering through the maddening isolation that follows bringing a new life into this world, the older mother is suffering the maddening isolation of watching a loved one leave this world. As she grieves the recent loss of her own husband (Nick Nolte), Spacek slips into a similar self-destructive trance as Lawrence, and the two women only find moments of peace in the monochrome moonlight while the rest of the world is asleep — unlikely common ground. Sissy is an inspired casting choice for the part, since her historic woman-on-the-verge performance in Carrie is just as core to the driven-mad-by-the-patriarchy canon as the more often-cited works of Gena Rowlands & Isabelle Adjani. Even within that looming context, Lawrence admirably holds her own here, even steamrolling the dependably off-putting Pattinson in her own unpredictable, unhinged antics. Ramsay is somewhat accommodating in her role behind the camera, allowing for a little more storytelling conventionality than is typical to her work (imagine, for instance, if Morvern Callar was hospitalized for depression instead of fucking off to a rave). There are a few harmonic moments when the star and director are working perfectly in collaboration to illustrate a young mother’s frazzled mental state. It’s arguable, though, that the movie is at its most compelling when those two creative voices are fighting for dominance, with both the acting and the filmmaking reaching such top-volume kettle whistles that it’s difficult to parse out any specific grace notes from one or the other. They’re both screaming for your attention, and the result is effectively maddening.
The Sundance Film Festival is soon to move locations to Boulder, Colorado within the next couple years, after decades of staying put in the smaller town of Park City, Utah. The move has been announced as a major shakeup for the festival, but from where I’m sitting halfway across the country, it’s at best the second biggest move the fest has made this decade. The biggest culture shift for Sundance in the 2020s has been moving a significant portion of its program online, launching a Virtual Cinema component in 2021 to compensate for the social distancing restrictions of the COVID-19 pandemic. The shift from a purely in-person festival to a semi-virtual one has had some hiccups, especially since it’s invited opportunistic piracy among fanatics who’ve leaked steamier scenes of their favorite actors out of context to social media for momentary clout, jeopardizing this new resource. It has also opened the festival up to a wider range of audiences & critics who can’t afford (either fiscally or physically) to attend in-person, calling into question the value of film-festival exclusivity. I have not yet personally “attended” Virtual Sundance in any direct way, but the experience does sound like a more condensed version of how I interact with the festival anyway. Staged in January, months before the previous year’s awards cycle concludes at The Oscars, Sundance is always the first major event on the annual cinematic calendar. Intentionally or not, I spend my entire year catching up with the buzzier titles that premiere there, as they trickle down the distribution tributaries until they find their way to Louisiana. Let’s take this year for example. Swampflix has already covered ten feature films that premiered at Sundance this January — some great, some so-so: Twinless, Lurker, Dead Lover, Predators, The Ugly Stepsister, Zodiac Killer Project, Move Ya Body, Mad Bills to Pay, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, and The Legend of Ochi. This was not an intentional project, just something that happened naturally by keeping up with the more significant releases of the year. And we’re still anticipating a few 2025 Sundance titles that won’t hit wide distribution until after Sundance 2026 has concluded: Obex, By Design, and Endless Cookie, to name a few. In that way, most film-nerd audiences who aren’t firmly established in The Industry are constantly attending some form of Virtual Sundance just by going to the movies week to week, so it’s been exciting to see the festival condense that slow rollout process a little bit by offering some more immediate access to their program online during the festival proper.
My unintentional Virtual Sundance experience has continued into the 11th month of the year with the recent addition of the festival standout Sorry, Baby to the streaming platform HBO Max. The positive critical reception of the film at the festival (along with a jury prize for screenwriting) positioned Sorry, Baby as one of the first Great, Must-See movies of the year, months before it would be available for wide-audience exhibition. I mention all of this not to claim the film has become overhyped or outdated in the months since, but to register my surprise at how Sundance-typical it is in practice. There are a lot of ways that Sorry, Baby‘s tone & tenor are specific to the creative voice of its writer-director-lead Eva Victor, but its storytelling structure is also unmistakably Sundancy. Here we have a story about a smart twentysomething academic navigating their way through a personally traumatic event with the help of quirky side characters played by widely respected indie-scene actors (most notably in this case, Naomi Ackie, Lucas Hedges, and John Carroll Lynch). The themes are heavy but the overall mood is defiantly light, with constant self-deprecating character humor undercutting the soul-crushing facts of modern life. Also, there’s a kitten hanging around, providing the homely comfort of the obligatory cat that lounges in every decent used bookstore. With the exception of a couple showy framing choices that consciously distance us from the protagonist’s trauma (one in physical distance, one in chronology), the filmmaking side of Sorry, Baby is secondary to the writing and the performances, which are as smartly crafted as they are grounded to reality. Victor shines brightest as a writer and a screen presence rather than as a director, with the darkness & fearlessness of the dialogue often cutting through the more restrictive, routine form of the images. They land some tricky laughs and the real-life hurt of the drama weighs heavy on the heart, but there’s not much to the film that can linger past the end credits beyond recognition that it was written by a smart person. In fact, Victor seems intent to constantly establish their mouthpiece character as the smartest person in every room, often as a way to vent about the institutional failures that compound personal trauma. Legal, medical, and academic bureaucrats play strawman to the mightier-than-the-sword screenwriter’s pen, while only the protagonist’s inner circle of supportive friends are afforded any humanistic grace notes. It’s a writer’s project first & foremost, to the point where it’s literally about the writing of a master’s thesis.
I suppose I should be more specific here and note that this is a film about the personal & professional fallout following a sexual assault. Victor plays a master’s student who is assaulted in her advising professor’s home, derailing any personal or professional development past the most traumatic event of her life. This assault is revealed to the audience indirectly. It is obscured from view behind the closed door of the professor’s home, which is framed in an extreme wide shot of rapid time elapse, chilling the audience instead of inviting us into the violence of the act. We are also kept at a distance from this violent act by the screenplay’s scrambling of the dramatic timeline, with chapter titles like “The Year with the Baby,” “The Year with the Bad Thing,” “The Year with the Questions,” and “The Year with the Good Sandwich” confusing the chronology of her trauma & recovery. At first, all we know is that she’s been stuck in time since “The Bad Thing” happened, living in the same grad-school house and working in the same dusty university offices for an eternal limbo as she puzzles her way through how to move past that moment without allowing her entire life to be defined by it. Quietly hostile interactions with doctors, lawyers, colleagues, and clueless neighbors offer Victor an opportunity to vent about how ill-equipped institutions are to address personal trauma with any empathy or humanity. The most striking thing about the movie is when Victor cuts through those broader observations about the culture of rape to rattle the audience with more personal observations. After the assault is obscured from an extreme wide-shot distance, Victor is then shown recounting minor details from the event to a roommate in intimate close-up, crouched in her bathtub. That intimacy is later echoed in a second bathtub scene in which she attempts to physically connect with her sex-buddy neighbor, who spoils the moment in much subtler, underplayed ways than the doctors & lawyers who press her for invasive details about the worst moment of her life. Whether broad or intimate, it’s all smartly observed and it’s all couched within a deadpan-humorist writing style that lessens the miserabilist potential of the topic. The question is whether having something smart to say fully justifies making a movie—as opposed to writing an essay or a stage play—beyond the form’s ability to get Victor’s words in front of as many people as possible. Sorry, Baby‘s chosen form is a useful delivery system for Victor’s writing, but I don’t know that it ever fully registers as cinematic beyond its recognizability as routine Sundance fare, to be slowly doled to the masses throughout the year.
Welcome to Episode #251 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna prepare for Thanksgiving by discussing movies about eccentric relatives, starting with Bill Forsyth’s quirky-aunt period drama Housekeeping (1987).
0:00 Welcome 02:54 Dead of Winter (2025) 06:23 Halloween hangover 12:44 Sorry, Baby (2025) 20:09 Masters of Horror (2005-2007) 24:04 Orgy of the Dead (1965) 28:07 Arabella – Black Angel (1989)
33:05 Housekeeping (1987) 1:00:30 Krisha (2015) 1:22:12 The House with a Clock in Its Walls (2018) 1:47:37 The Baby (1973)
A little over ten years ago, I went to the beach with a friend and their family. Their older brother had two children at the time: a baby and a toddler, the latter of whom was just starting to express herself in fun and interesting ways. It was her first time at the beach, and she grew frustrated with the ceaselessness of the waves as they knocked her down while she tried to remain upright, at one point turning to the water and saying “Stop!” This caused the girl’s father to chuckle, saying, “The ocean’s not going to stop, baby.” The imagery of waves and water is everywhere in Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, from the instigating factor of the plot being a flood in therapist Linda (Rose Byrne)’s apartment, prompting her to move herself and her daughter to move into a seaside motel, to at least one Hokusai print appearing on Linda’s wall, and a midcentury modern wave-shaped lamp standing behind Linda late in the film, as if threatening to overtake her. Later in the film, one of her patients, a woman named Caroline (Daniel Macdonald) who abandoned her baby in Linda’s office, sprints off along the beach; it’s unclear if Caroline is planning to end her own life or if she’s just continuing to run from her problems, but the action does seem to inspire Linda to at least consider releasing herself from her mortal coil and letting the sea take her. After all, the waves are never going to stop.
The tides that batter Linda for most of the film are largely metaphorical. Linda’s daughter is afflicted with some kind of illness that makes her extremely averse to consuming food, and her dietary intake is supplemented by a subcutaneous feeding tube on which Linda believes the girl has become overreliant. The pediatrician overseeing the daughter’s care needs the girl to hit a certain milestone weight by a specific date in order for discussions about removing the feeding tube, and when the two butt heads over treatment the doctor is less than sympathetic as Linda has been missing important group sessions. Linda’s already drowning in all of this as her husband is away for months at a time, and he drastically underestimates the extent to which being the sole caretaker for their chronically ill daughter while also maintaining her own psychiatry practice is absolutely drowning Linda, even before she’s forced to move into a motel. She’s feuding with her daughter’s doctor, she’s fighting with the parking attendant at the clinic, and once she gets to the motel, there’s immediate beef between her and an unsympathetic Gen-Z clerk (Ivy Wolk) who trolls her for seemingly no reason. It’s here that she also meets James (A$AP Rocky), the motel’s superintendent, who is the only person in her life who seems willing to cut her a break, even if Linda has been so engulfed by an endless odyssey of conflict and misery that she’s too prickly to accept his overtures of friendship.
James is the only man in this movie who isn’t awful. We spend some time in a few of Linda’s own sessions with her therapist (Conan O’Brien), and although it’s clear that she’s exceeded some important clinical boundaries—notably, it’s an utterly bizarre choice to select one of your office colleagues as your clinician—he’s clearly completely checked out and offers little to no support despite his willingness to accept her money. Disinterested as he may be, he’s a mirror for Linda in relationship to one of her own patients (Lurker’s Daniel Zolghardi), who is clearly sexually and romantically fixated on her; he communicates his desires for her, “I dreamed that you and I kissed,” in almost the exact same way that she floats her own inappropriate affection for her therapist to him, couching it in a story about how she dreamt about the two of them. It’s these two characters and the aforementioned parking lot attendant who appear on screen, but some of the most revealing characters are the ones who exist solely or primarily as disembodied voices.
We watch as Linda struggles with trying to compel her landlord to get his shit together and repair the hole in her ceiling, a job that ends up being much less time-consuming than expected once things finally start moving, the landlord offering excuses over the phone. Another phone-only character is the husband of Caroline; when Linda calls him as Caroline’s emergency contact when the baby is intentionally left in her office while Caroline escapes, he’s confrontational in a way that’s clearly born not out of concern for his wife or child and purely about the fact that he’s having to deal with the situation at all, stating over and over again “I am at work.” This echoes through to Linda’s husband, who is an off-screen presence for most of the film’s runtime. He checks in only periodically to obliviously sling more guilt at his wife in an escalated tone; her exhaustion is his exasperation. He ineffectively attempts to micromanage the wrong things from afar when what Linda needs is actual assistance and support in the here and now. When he finally appears on screen at the end, he manages to pin up all of the loose ends that Linda couldn’t rather efficiently, especially in regards to getting the hole in their apartment’s ceiling repaired. In that moment, I personally felt the wave of anxiety forsaging the inevitable conversation of See, now was that so hard? and You really needed me to do all of this for you? that Linda would be subjected to. Her husband actually being present for a single day managed to help get things back on track would be proof not that what she needed was actual support but proof that she was just not trying hard enough, when in fact she is worked to the bone.
Beyond the discussion of the metaphorical (and potentially literal) engulfment that Linda endures, this is a fantastically shot film. We are never more than a few feet from Byrne for the entire film, sometimes swaying back and forth with her as she totters about, as if we’re on these late night pot-smoking escapades with her (she smokes copiously). The movement of the camera itself is part of the feeling of this headlong rush into wave after wave of setbacks. That commitment to verisimilitude doesn’t stop the film from leaning into some slight potential magical realism as Linda occasionally perceives something metaphysical happening within and around the hole in her ceiling when she checks in on the (lack of) progress. Much of this is left up to individual interpretation, of course; there’s a single moment in which Linda raises her hand to touch some motes of dust or light and asks, softly, “Mom?”, and that alone is something that everyone in the audience is going to interpret differently. There are other great framing choices that are made about what we are allowed to see and what’s kept out of the camera’s field of vision, beyond just the choice to make several characters angry men on the phone. The most notable of these is that Linda’s daughter’s face is concealed from the camera, existing as kicking feet in a carseat or hands that crumble toast so that it never reaches her mouth. It’s an interesting choice, and one I look forward to hearing different interpretations of in the discourse to come.
Byrne is absolutely stellar here, and it’s not to be missed.
Back when I saw Anatomy of a Fall in theaters a couple of years ago, I was struck by the strangeness of the prestige picture having an advertised URL that encouraged audience members to vote on whether the main character was guilty of killing her husband or not. At the time, about two-thirds of viewers believed in her innocence, which has increased slightly to 70% innocent/30% guilty in the two years since release. That film, as well as Tár, was at the forefront of my mind for most of the runtime of After the Hunt, the newest film from director Luca Guadagnino (and a freshman writing effort from Nora Garrett, heretofore a mostly unknown actress). I’m surprised to see that this one has been faring so poorly critically at this juncture (as of this writing, the Google review aggregator is showing a 2.1 rating out of 5 — admittedly only out of 110 reviews. More damningly, both the critical and audience reviews on Rotten Tomatoes are hovering in the range between 35 and 40%), and I can’t help but think that some large portion of this critical laceration comes from the fact that the modern audience has lost the ability to appreciate ambiguity, let alone accept it or see its value in the context of a piece of art. That, or some are simply too turned off by its approach to its sexpolitik.
After the Hunt is a character study of Alma Imhoff (Julia Roberts), a professor of ethics and philosophy at Yale, detailing the relationships she has with three primary players in her life. There’s her queer grad student and PhD candidate Maggie (Ayo Edebiri), a young Black woman who nonetheless comes from a wealthy, privileged background; alongside Alma in the department is fellow professor Hank Gibson (Andrew Garfield), a flirtatious libertine who’s poorly hiding his attraction to Alma; and finally, Alma’s husband Frederik (Michael Stuhlbarg), a psychiatrist with a tendency toward dramatic flair and culinary spectacle, who is the only one aware that she’s suffering in silence over a painful physical ailment. After a party at the Imhoffs’ one night, Alma watches as Hank and Maggie depart together so that he can walk her home. The following day, she arrives to campus to find Maggie absent and unresponsive. After a quick drink with Hank during which he demonstrates himself to clearly be horny for her, she returns home to find Maggie on her doorstep, where she tells Alma that Hank sexually assaulted her the previous evening. By the next morning, Hank has already set up a lunch with her at a local Indian restaurant where he explains his side to Alma: that he had caught Maggie plagiarizing some of her work a couple of weeks prior and found her doing it again in her PhD dissertation, and that he had wanted to give her the chance to explain herself and offer her the opportunity to come clean before he was forced to rat her out to Alma. In all of this, Frederik tries to support Alma as best as he can, but she keeps him both at arm’s length and uninformed (he learns about the allegations against Hank in the newspaper), possibly because she unconsciously recognizes that he sees all the sides more clearly than she can.
The performances here are stunning. Edebiri in particular stands out, as the overall complex ambiguity of her performance is an absolute stunner. When Maggie meets Alma to tell her about what happened with Hank the night before, there’s an imprecision to her language that seems to be deliberate, but it’s unclear if the ambiguity is deliberate on the part of Maggie or the screenplay. When Alma asks for concrete details, Maggie talks around the events of the previous night, with vague statements like “He crossed a line” and “When he left, I took a shower,” then lashing out when asked for more details. Is this a natural, understandable reaction to being asked to recount details of a traumatic experience when one is attempting to navigate describing that event without reliving its every moment, or is Maggie trying to compartmentalize a deliberate misrepresentation of the situation for some future leverage without overtly “lying”? Before Hank is fired, there’s a scene in which Maggie and Alma meet each other in the foyer of a rectory/lecture hall, when Alma asks Maggie if she went to a clinic after the incident so that any forensic evidence could be collected, and Maggie tells her that she walked to an off-campus clinic but never made it inside because she felt threatened by some men who were hanging around the place, but that she did see that there was a security camera that would have shown footage of her approaching, and that this, in combination with the fact that she went there immediately after seeing Alma, should be enough to establish a timeline of sorts that would indicate her intention to seek medical services even if she couldn’t go through with it. The statement veers between being completely understandable, as it’s become increasingly popular for men to hang around outside of women’s clinics to harass them, but also seems almost too-practiced, as Maggie “realizes” that she can put together some “evidence.” Edebiri’s ability to straddle this line, to where a reading that she’s a manipulative nepo baby playing on what Hank calls “a shallow cultural moment” is just as valid as a reading that she is telling the whole and complete truth from the beginning. There’s certainly the implication that Maggie was already getting some amount of special treatment before; when she doesn’t come to campus the morning following the Imhoffs’ party, Alma says something offhand about having already given her “too much rope.”
Garfield is quite good at playing against type here as well, and the extent to which we can believe anything about his version of events is circumspect but also plausible. Even when he’s admitting (or “admitting”) to the singular error (or “singular error”) of going to a student’s home alone in the evening, he never slows down in devouring his lunch, which lends itself to an interpretation that the accusation is trivial. When he loses his job, he goes on a ranting tirade about having had to work three jobs to put himself through school and now that he’s on the precipice of tenure, he may lose everything because of an unverifiable accusation. It’s here that we hit on what is likely the greatest stumbling block about the movie, in that we live in a world in which any text that treats a false accusation of rape is problematic due to the negligible instances of this in reality, in comparison to the ocean of sexual assaults that remain unreported (and, when reported, handled indelicately, incorrectly, and with greater deference to the accused than the accuser). We live in a sexually violent society, and anyone who doesn’t acknowledge that is lying or living in denial, and there’s an argument to be made that predicating a piece of media on something which does not happen, especially when the characters stand to benefit from a false accusation in just the way that detractors of the reality of rape culture often claim they do, is dangerous. I can’t say that this is an unreasonable reason to take a stand against this film, and I wouldn’t blame anyone for taking the same issues with After the Hunt that many took with last year’s Strange Darling, even if the potential to infer misogyny is less textual here. Regardless, we never find out if Hank did it, or if he did how far things went, or if he did just enough to leave himself open to accusation. For my viewing companion, what clinched his guilt was a later scene in which Alma goes to a spare waterfront apartment she keeps as an academic retreat and finds Hank there, hiding out and using a spare key she forgot he had. He makes a move on her, and although it’s clear that a mutual attraction exists, Alma doesn’t give in, and it takes several declarations of “no” and a final violent shove before Hank leaves (exiting the film altogether, in fact).
For Alma, all of this is colored by her own experience. This is a bit of a spoiler so skip ahead to the next paragraph if you would prefer not to know . . . We learn late in the film that Alma was herself a statutory victim when she was only fifteen years old. Her recollection of the “relationship” is itself warped, as she recalls the youthful crush that she had on a friend of her father’s, one that culminated in an ongoing sexual relationship that she recalls as having been sought and initiated by her, not the older man. She protests to her husband, who rightly points out that she was a child and that it is the responsibility of any adult who finds themselves pursued by a minor to—at a minimum—not acquiesce, that she threw herself at the man until he “relented,” and that she exposed him out of vengeance and spite when he entered a relationship with a woman his own age, and that this scandal led him to commit suicide three years later. She recanted her story publicly, but the guilt of his death is still something that she carries with her, and which over time has metamorphosed into a kind of emotional cancer, no doubt contributing to the perforated ulcers with which she struggles throughout the film. Regardless of whether Maggie is telling the truth or not, Alma’s statement to her that although what Maggie tells herself she’s seeking is restorative justice, what she’s actually attempting is revenge is about Alma, not Maggie; Maggie’s honesty about what happened the night of Alma’s party is immaterial because Alma perceives Maggie as repeating her own mistake, which has itself compounded and been sanitized and mythologized into a Herculan burden for Alma to bear alone to the point where it doesn’t reflect reality.
Beyond the performances, the camera work and editing here are magnificent. There’s a lot of hand work, as Guadagnino frequently allows the camera to drift from close-ups (most in some kind of profile but frequently with direct-to-camera delivery, which created a kind of intimate space as if we in the audience were in conversation directly with Alma or Maggie) to focusing on the characters’ hands. It’s almost a joke, but it would take an Italian director to not only recognize the intrinsic value of talking with one’s hands but also to invoke the way that the eye tends to naturally drift away from eye contact during difficult conversations. It’s good stuff, and although I can see how it would easily get tiresome for a lot of moviegoers, this is a slow cinema allowance that I’m more than willing to make. The sound design is spectacular, with particular attention to a scene in which Frederik is catty to his wife because of how much he perceives that Maggie is using her, as he is as-yet unaware of the plot-driving accusation. He first interrogates Maggie about her primary PhD interest and, when she becomes defensive, he passive aggressively leaves the room and starts to play loud music from another part of the apartment, with the muffling of the sound provided by the swinging kitchen door intermittently allowing for blasts of electronica to interrupt the proceedings as he wordlessly enters and exits multiple times. It’s another scene that’s multi-layered, as we’re once again led to believe that Hank was telling some part of the truth, as Maggie can’t offer up a single reason why she’s so interested in her particular field of study or even an interesting fact for conversation. Is this because she’s still too traumatized and has come to Alma for comfort and understanding and can’t process Frederik’s question, or is she a mediocre student coasting on privilege and plagiarism?
There’s extensive discussion of intergenerational practices of ethical philosophy here, and I’m not sure that all of the heady ideas land, but it’s a fascinating conversation that the film has with you. Chloë Sevigny is also present, as Dr. Kim Sayers, Alma’s friend and a practicing psychiatrist. Although Kim vocally objects to a man at Alma’s party saying that if the university decides to hand out only one tenureship between Hank and Alma, it will go to the latter because of “the current moment” regardless of either professor’s individual accolades or achievements, she also agrees with Hank’s sentiments that the current generation of students are too coddled and soft. Elsewhere, that relationship between the two different generations is manifested in Alma’s acceptance of Maggie’s “lesbianism” (Maggie never calls herself that and is in a relationship with a transmasc nonbinary person) but has to be continuously reminded that Maggie’s partner uses they/them pronouns; Alma’s accusation that Maggie’s relationship is more about gaining clout in the current political environment than love clearly hits close to home. This shows that Alma agrees with Hank and Kim to an extent, as when she confronts Maggie late in the film, she criticizes the younger woman for faking her way through academia, crossing a line when she says that Maggie’s phoniness (including her relationship) is what makes it so easy for people to think that women are crying wolf in these situations. It’s a sweeping generalization about an entire generation, but more to the point, it’s once again Alma projecting all of her own trauma onto Maggie, as Alma, at least in the narrative of her life that she tells herself, did in fact “cry wolf,” and it’s those words from the German newspaper article Maggie found in Alma’s home that are the first to be translated for us on screen.
I’m not surprised that this one is divisive, and I can’t pretend that I’m all-in on this particular narrative device given its real-world ramifications, but this is a marvelous work from a directorial maestro. Challengersleft me pretty cold, and I completely missed Queerso I can’t speak to it, but this one has me back on board. I have no doubt that we will soon be inundated with think pieces about how Guadagnino’s usage of Stuhlbarg to deliver a monologue about how what happened to Alma in her youth was not her fault and that she was used by an older man regardless of whether she initiated it or not is a commentary on the changing cultural reception and perception of Call Me By Your Name in the intervening years since the film was released. I’m not particularly looking forward to those days, and the derisive reaction from most of the general public to this one means that we won’t see it become as memetic as Challengers was (not to mention that the subject matter does not lend itself to that here), so this may simply sink without much attention. I think that would be a shame. I’ve already sung Edebiri and Garfield’s praises, but this is a terrific and nuanced performance from Roberts, at turns inhuman and too human, often unsure of herself but with a mask of confidence, projecting confusion when she’s certain of herself. She’s terrific, and so is the film.
2005’s Linda Linda Linda is a very quiet movie about a very loud band. After a couple decades of spotty distribution in the US, the live-action Japanese high school drama has been restored and theatrically re-released by GKIDS, who mostly deal in hip, artful anime. The timing and the choice in distributor for this re-release make enough sense to me, both as a 20th anniversary celebration and as a companion to GKIDS’s recent theatrical run for the anime drama The Colors Within, which largely plays like Linda Linda Linda‘s animated remake. What I did not expect after years of seeing stills of its teen-girl punk band in social media posts championing the movie as an out-of-print, semi-lost gem is that it would be so gentle & understated. When the fictional band Paranmaum plays a hastily learned trio of raucous punk songs at the climax, the movie is exciting enough to make you pogo around the cinema. While Paranmaun is learning those songs in the few days before their first (and presumably only) gig, however, the energy is remarkably lethargic, to the point where the main narrative conflict is that the band is too sleepy to rock. To be fair, that’s exactly what I remember experiencing as a teenager: some of the most ecstatic, memorably chaotic moments of my life interspersed between long periods of feeling long overdue for a nap.
The name “Paranmaum” is presented as a Korean translation of “The Blue Hearts,” a real-life Japanese punk band. In the few days leading up to their high school’s annual rock festival, the teen girls of Paranmaum quickly form as a Blue Hearts cover band, inspired by the discovery of a cassette tape recording of the Hearts’ 80s hit “Linda Linda.” Initially, the major obstacle of their formation is the keyboardist scrambling to learn guitar after losing a couple former bandmates to injury & petty teen squabbling. The even bigger challenge, however, is the impulsive recruitment of a new lead singer, who didn’t fully understand what she was signing up for. Paranmaum takes a Korean name because their new singer is a Korean exchange student who can only speak rudimentary Japanese, agreeing to join the band through polite, confused nodding. As the guitarist learns a new instrument and the vocalist learns a new language, the girls learn to work as a real, legitimate group, effectively turning the band’s formation into a 72-hour sleepover. It’s an intensely romantic week in their young lives, one in which friendship & band practice are the most important things in the world; schoolwork & puppylove crushes can wait. When that cram session pays off and their three Blue Hearts tunes come together at the climactic concert, there’s no better feeling, and they’ll likely cherish that high for the rest of their lives.
This is primarily a movie about cultural exchange, with Japanese & Korean students reaching across a language barrier to become true friends and artistic collaborators. A lot of its nuance is likely lost to American audiences through its two levels of cross-cultural translation, but the rock ‘n’ roll bridge between its Japanese & Korean teen sensibilities is largely American made. While The Blue Hearts may be a Japanese band, their brand of ramshackle rock ‘n’ roll is inextricable from Western pop culture. As such, it was fun to take stock of the generic early-aughts rock posters that decorate Paranmaum’s practice space, which include artists as discordant & irrelevant to the text as Led Zeppelin, Marilyn Manson, Bob Marley, and The Verve. The only two band references that feel directly connected to the music that Paranmaum plays are the college-radio twee group Beat Happening (who appear on a background poster) and the CBGB-era punk icons The Ramones (who appear in a mildly surreal dream sequence that plays like a precursor to the 2010s Thai curio Mary is Happy, Mary is Happy). The other nondescript rock acts in that mix make for an overall sweet & unpretentious sentiment, though, one in which projecting hipster cool cred is secondary to having fun playing loud music with your friends.
Nostalgia for the playfulness of rock ‘n’ roll teenhood is obviously a major factor here. Maybe it’s for the best that I couldn’t access the film until 20 years after its initial release, when I was still a teen myself. Its early-aughts camcorders, flip-phones, and glue-on bling are firmly rooted in that era, but the film is so reserved in its pacing & tone that it likely would’ve tested my tastes at the time, which leaned towards more rambunctious punk rock chaos. Director Nobuhiro Yamashita views these teen bonding rituals from a physical & emotional distance. Characters are often shrunken by extreme wide shots that corral them into cramped doorframes while the camera studies them from afar. As a result, the film is oddly nostalgic for high school architecture as much as it is nostalgic for high school camaraderie. The most Yamashita gives himself a voice in the narrative is through the melancholic ramblings of a middle-aged teacher who gets overly emotional every time he attempts to reminisce about his own memories of forming a band with his high school buddies during the same festival. He gets too choked up to get the words out, so he instead keeps his distance, enjoying Paranmaum’s brief existence as a teenage art project for what it is. When that three-day punk band takes the stage in the final minutes of runtime, it really does feel like the most precious thing in the world, partly because it’s not designed to last. That’s a sentiment that only gets more potent with age & distance, even if the songs being played are immediately satisfying to everyone in the room.
I am a white, childless nerd rapidly nearing 40 years of age, so please take my trend-watching analysis of what’s cool & hip among the kids right now with a mountainous grain of salt. I do have the same 24/7 internet service and all-consuming social media addiction as every other doomed soul with the misfortune of living through these Uncertain Times, though, so I believe I am entitled to a little Youth Culture observation, however distanced. One clear theme so far this decade is that the fashions and pop iconography of the early 2000s are just as fetishized now as the 1980s were when I was a teen in those aughts. Everything crass & classless about the 2000s is now subject to ironic kitsch: middle-part hairdos, low-rise jeans, tramp stamps, belly rings, nu-metal, bejeweled & vajazzled everything. Since even I—an old man, a proverbial “Unc”—am aware of this current aughts-worship trend, I assume the moment is soon to pass, so I must act quickly in recommending a movie that fits the fad.
The new Altered Innocence release Queens of Drama is the perfect French musical for the supposed Y2K Indie Sleaze renaissance. It’s a knowing throwback to the vintage tastes of yore, drowning the audience in cathode-TV screens, compact disc rainbow sheen, and blinged-out nipple rings. The logline says it’s a sapphic romance between early-aughts pop & punk songstresses, so it makes sense the result of their union is pure electroclash. Imagine, if you will, a fanfic in which Kelly Clarkson and Peaches had a secret, decades-spanning love affair, and the only public record of its existence was a deep-dive YouTube video hosted by the “Leave Britney alone!” guy. Queens of Drama is Velvet Goldmine by way of Glitter, a self-aware attempt to give the pop culture runoff of the early aughts the epic rock-opera treatment that’s usually reserved for movements like punk, glam, and metal.
We start in the 2050s, with a squealing makeup-tutorial YouTuber getting the audience hyped to hear the lurid details of a secret love affair between their closeted pop-idol fav and her butch punk-scene girlfriend. The two women meet backstage during open auditions for an American Idol-style competition show called Starlets Factory. One is a formally trained singer whose mother has engineered her to be the next Maria Callas, while she’d personally much rather be the next Mariah Carey. The other is a self-proclaimed punk singer whose electroclash group Slit has built a small following in local lesbian bars singing outrageously filthy pop tunes about fisting & cunnilingus. Their attraction is mutual & ferocious, but the resulting love affair is quickly corrupted by their clashing levels of fame and their clashing comfort levels with their sexuality (as the pop singer stubbornly remains closeted to maximize the longevity of her career). Meanwhile, they discover another secret love affair conspiracy between their own favorite pop singers of the 1980s (think Madonna & Kate Bush) through breadcrumb trail hints left in vintage music videos, making their own story a part of a larger lesbian pop continuum.
At the risk of sounding like the twentysomething cinephiles who treat distributors like A24, Neon, and Criterion as if they were auteurs instead of corporations, Queens of Drama is perfectly in tune with the Altered Innocence brand. First-time filmmaker Alexis Langlois brings their own sensibilities to the screen here, especially in their fetishistic focus on the fashion iconography of the early aughts. At the same time, the film clearly belongs to the same queer fantasia realm as the work of Altered Innocence mainstays Yann Gonzalez & Bertrand Mandico. If nothing else, there’s a shot of the electroclash singer riding a miniature motorcycle that’s straight out of Gonzalez’s own debut You and the Night. As a result, the movie is much more easily recommendable to anyone who loves The Wild Boys & Knife+Heart than to anyone who loves Crossroads & Glitter, but surely there’s enough of a Venn Diagram overlap there for this title to find a dedicated cult audience. They just have to act quickly before the youth inevitably move on to indulging in 2010s kitsch instead.
What could be more thrillingly romantic than young, destitute artists falling in love while starving and drinking themselves to death on the streets of Paris? Try those young lovers beating up cops and lifting businessmen’s wallets together against a backdrop of fireworks & gunfire. Leos Carax’s 1991 stunner The Lovers on the Bridge depicts the kind of ferocious, burn-it-all-down love affair that scares everyone outside the mutually destructive pair at the center, whose romantic gestures include acts of betrayal, theft, murder, and institutionalization. It approaches Parisian homelessness with the same unsentimental, semi-documentary eye as Varda’s Vagabond, and yet it largely plays as a love letter to impulsive, erratic behavior instead of a dire warning against it. It’s a love story rotting in illness, addiction, and retributive violence, which greatly helps undercut the schmaltz when it frames the Eiffel Tower through the rotating spokes of a Ferris wheel. Countless movies gesture towards the all-consuming, obsessive passion of young love without ever fully capturing it; The Lovers on the Bridge is the real deal.
The English translation of the original French title is a deliberate simplification. The French title Les Amants du Pont-Neuf makes reference to a specific bridge, the oldest bridge in Paris (despite the name “Pont Neuf” paradoxically translating to “New Bridge”). It’s a historic site that has been cited as the location where the first human figure was ever captured in a photograph, an early daguerreotype experiment by the eponymous Louis Daguerre. It was also temporarily closed to the public for restoration from 1989 to 1991, when the film was set & produced. Juliette Binoche & Denis Lavant play young homeless artists who squat on that closed historic bridge, unsure how much they can trust one another despite their obvious mutual obsession. Our two lovers first encounter each other while their partner is unconscious. Binoche finds Lavant’s unresponsive, blackout drunk body in the street and sketches his corpse-like visage from memory. Once recovered, Lavant later finds Binoche sleeping in his personal alcove on the bridge, discovering the charcoal sketches of his own undead face and studying her with the same intense fascination in return. Once both awake, they start guzzling gallons of trash wine together and committing escalating crimes in the streets on either side of the Pont Neuf, coinciding with the citywide bicentennial celebration of The French Revolution. A painter and a street-performing firebreather, respectively, the homeless couple become unlikely, reckless avatars for the city’s long history of art, sex, violence, and sensual romance, breathing new life into Parisian clichés that have otherwise become as stale as an old baguette.
Like all great romances, The Lovers on the Bridge is propelled by tragedy. The film opens with Lavant’s unresponsive body being scraped off the pavement where he’s been run over in traffic. He’s washed & patched up by a city-run homeless shelter and then re-released back on the streets, where he immediately falls back into the self-destructive cycle that got him banged up in the first place — guzzling alcohol as intentional self-harm. Meanwhile, Binoche’s struggling artist is suffering a more medically diagnosable malady. Her eyesight is failing her due to a rare form of ocular degeneration that will soon leave her blind and unable to continue working. She’s relatively new to street life, while her drunkard firebreather lover appears to know how to thieve, grift, and glean with the best of ’em. After a short crime spree ties up some loose ends in Binoche’s former life as a semi-wealthy suburbanite, the pair quickly bond by getting wasted on cooking wine and laughing maniacally. Part of what makes their volatile dynamic so romantic is that either or both lovers could die at any moment, and they’re both selfish enough to die by the other’s hand in a desperate crime of passion. It almost plays a prank on the audience that the movie eventually ends on a moment of quiet sweetness, with Carax restaging the bus ride epilogue from The Graduate as an epiphanic embrace of the central romance instead of a reality-check rejection of it.
Contemporary movie nerds familiar with Leos Carax from the more recent, extravagant productions Holy Motors & Annette would know to expect an ecstatic, expressionistic visual style here that breaks away from the movie’s semi-documentary opening. Once Binoche & Lavant lock onto each other’s romantically nihilistic wavelength, the visual language soars — sometimes literally, mixing images of swarming birds and helicopters in a single, seemingly impossible shot. Their lives are small, tethered to a single stone bridge, but nothing about their depiction is simple. The painter cannot simply take her daily birth control pill; her lover must feed it to her via open-mouthed kiss. It’s not enough for the doomed pair to peer into the social lives of more fortunate & fashionable Parisians from the streets outside; the windows into nightclub are lowered to the pavement, so all that’s visible is the wealthy’s dancing feet & flashing lights. When laughing like children while high on bargain-bin wine, Carax uses a shift-tilt lens and oversized set decoration to physically shrink his performers in the frame. This expressionistic visual approach reaches its fever pitch during a grand bicentennial fireworks display, which is used as a backdrop for a Sinners-style musical sequence that mixes orchestral chamber music, Iggy Pop, Public Enemy, and Bal-musette accordion waltzes into one delirious post-modern cacophony. Improbably, it lands as one of the most romantic sequences of cinematic spectacle I can recall instead going full cornball. It’s also immediately followed by the lovers bonking a beat cop on the head and hijacking his boat for a joy ride, somehow escalating the visual spectacle even further through a brief detour into vaudevillian slapstick.
The Lovers on the Bridge was recently restored in a new 4k scan by Janus Films, and it’s currently bouncing around American arthouses. I recently caught it at The Broad’s weekly Gap Tooth Cinema rep series in New Orleans, weeks after Boomer reported it was playing alongside Carax’s Boy Meets Girl and Mauvais Sang at the Austin Film Society one state over. That loose thematic trilogy surprisingly makes up half of Carax’s total catalog of features, which means he’s not an especially intimidating auteur to catch up with in terms of prolificacy. There’s more out there than just Holy Motors, but not much more. The Lovers on the Bridge is as good of a place to start as any, since it’s so utterly romantic, so utterly violent, and so utterly, utterly French.
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