drama

After the Hunt (2025)

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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. Challengers left me pretty cold, and I completely missed Queer so 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. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Linda Linda Linda (2005)

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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.

-Brandon Ledet

Queens of Drama (2025)

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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.

-Brandon Ledet

The Lovers on the Bridge (1991)

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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.

-Brandon Ledet

Play It as It Lays (1972)

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Eight summers ago, I attended nearly every screening of the Alamo Drafthouse’s summer series in my favorite genre, “Women on the Verge.” Two of those films, An Unmarried Woman and Puzzle of a Downfall Child, were such instant favorites of mine that they ended up as Movies of the Month the following year. I missed a screening of the difficult-to-find Joan Didion adaptation Play It as It Lays and have spent the intervening years cursing myself for the loss of this opportunity and eagerly anticipating another chance to check it out. Maybe it’s all that self-hype that left me cold upon finally getting the opportunity, or maybe it’s really not that great of a film, but I was not as captivated by this one as I was by the films alongside which it was initially brought to my attention. 

The film version of Play It as It Lays was directed by Frank Perry, who also helmed a couple of previous Movies of the Month, having directed 1968’s The Swimmer (a Brandon pick) and Britnee’s pick Hello Again (1987), and the film’s failures may have something to do with his vision, but not with his style. Play It as It Lays is a film that can charitably be described as incoherent, and while that incoherence is, as it was in the aforementioned Puzzle, a filmic tool used to demonstrate the internal life and fractured psyche of the film’s point of view character, it ends up making the film a bit too messy to fully understand. When reading the film’s summary on its Wikipedia page, the plot seems relatively straightforward, but it also seems like it’s relying on extratextual information (in this case, the plot of the novel on which it is based) to contextualize the narrative into something comprehensible; that’s cheating a bit, in my opinion. 

Tuesday Weld plays Maria Lang (nee Wyeth), an actress in her early thirties who narrates the film while walking the gardens of the institution in which she currently resides. In the flashbacks, she describes her early life, in which her parents moved from Las Vegas to a former mining town in rural Nevada that her father had won via gambling, a tiny nothing with a population of 28 which, by the time of the present narrative, no longer exists. She fell in love with and married Carter Lang (Adam Roarke), a respected independent director who cast her in his first film; he’s described as “a cult director with an eye for commerce” by one of his peers, and by the time the film’s proper narrative begins in the flashback, he and Maria are separated. There’s some implication that their falling out revolved around the decision to institutionalize their young daughter Kate, whose behavioral issues are on display when Maria visits her boarding school and witnesses her attack another child, which appears to be habitual. Maria’s only real friend is B.Z. Mendenhall (Anthony Perkins), a film industry friend of her husband’s with a family history of suicide and mental illness. Even if he weren’t already predisposed toward depression, his life situation, which sees him forced into a beard marriage to Helene (Tammy Grimes) at the behest of his controlling mother Carlotta (Ruth Ford), would make him miserable. Maria, who hasn’t acted in a while after damaging her career by walking off of a set a few years earlier, is convinced that Carter is having an affair with his new actress muse, Susannah (Diana Ewing), and she pursues a few lovers of her own, including a long term fling with widowed actor Les Goodwin (Richard Anderson) that results in a pregnancy, a brief affair with mob lawyer Larry Kulik (Paul Lambert) that ends unceremoniously, and an afternoon hook-up with TV actor Johnny Waters (Tony Young) that highlights just how self-destructive her behavior has become. 

Again, this all probably sounds fairly coherent, and not all that dissimilar from movies like Puzzle and other “Women on the Verge” pictures. Like those, where this does succeed most is in the strong performances from its leads. Maria isn’t inherently unlikable, but her generally nihilistic outlook makes it hard to root for her, since it’s all but impossible to imagine a better world or life for her; even her dream of living somewhere quiet and pastoral with Kate is clearly delusional. That Weld is able to imbue Maria with a sense of the personality-that-was when current Maria is disempowered and passive to the point of lethargy is a testament to the malleability of her talent, and when this film works it’s because she and Perkins make their characters feel like real, tangible people. Perkins’s B.Z. is an even more tragic figure than Maria, even if the film spends less time on his personal life. Of all of the men on screen, only B.Z. sees Maria for who she really is and the situation in which she finds herself because their dual alienation makes them kindred spirits. For Carter, Maria is a burden; for Kulik she’s just some good-looking company while he spreads money around Las Vegas; for Goodwin she’s the stand-in for the wife who committed suicide; for Johnny Waters she’s just a receptacle for his expression of sexual egotism. B.Z.’s relationship with her could be seen as just as selfish, as he sees her as a mirror for his own demons, but that projection isn’t incorrect and they really are birds of a feather. When he finally decides to end his life, as his father and grandfather did before him, he offers Maria the chance to follow him into the dark, holding out the pills he intends to consume to share with her, and although she declines, she holds his hand as he slips away. This the final straw that ends with her being institutionalized by Helene and Carter, but it’s also the purest expression of love that any two people show each other here. 

I have little love for the late film critic John Simon (to quote Roger Ebert, “I feel repugnance for [him]”), but he wasn’t wrong when he called Play It “a very bad movie.” Ebert himself gave the film his highest possible rating, but even he criticized the film’s material as thin in comparison to its smart direction and entrancing performances. That seems to be the consistent criticism of the film in reviews that I have found: praise for Weld and Perkins as performers and Perry for his directorial eye, with failures across every other metric. I won’t be breaking free of that paradigm, personally, since I feel the same way. This one might pair well with any of other films mentioned above as a foil or a conversation piece, but its narrative scaffolding wouldn’t hold up to a breeze, and it won’t stand up on its own. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Leather Boys (1965)

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To my surprise, the film I’m most looking forward to from this year’s Cannes slate is not the new Lynne Ramsay, the new Ari Aster, the new Julia Ducournau, nor any other new release from an established-name auteur. The Un Certain Regard selection Pillion was the title that most caught my attention in the trades, teased with a premise in which “A timid man is swept off his feet when an enigmatic, impossibly handsome biker takes him on as his submissive.” Given their recent freakshow outings in Please Baby Please & Infinity Pool, respectively, the casting of Harry Melling & Alexander Skarsgård as that unlikely couple is certainly part of the attraction, despite debut writer-director Harry Lighton being an unproven no-namer at the time of this posting. Honestly, though, it’s just an alluring logline premise on its own no matter the talent involved, even if it’s more or less been done before: recently in Jeff Nichols’s excessively hetero biker-culture melodrama The Bikeriders and a half-century ago in the kitchen-sink drama The Leather Boys.

The Bikeriders starred Austin Butler as a gorgeous greaser whose affection is fought over by his wife (Jodie Comer) and his gang leader (Tom Hardy) despite his one true love being the open road, breaking both their hearts. That bisexual love triangle goes more or less unspoken despite the homoeroticism inherent to depicting a group of men whose sole passion is to get filthy, roughhouse, and pound beers together while dressed in heavy leather. It’s so blatantly intrinsic to biker culture that a 1960s British studio film could get away with telling its own queer love triangle story without being censored out of existence. The Leather Boys is just as carefully chaste in depicting its unspoken bisexual tug-of-war as The Bikeriders, and yet it was saddled with an X rating because it did not similarly bury those themes in subtext. In contrast, Pillion promises to be explicit enough in its themes and its sexual imagery to have legitimately earned that X rating, at least according to early festival-circuit reviews. Still, it’s impressive that such a non-judgemetal portrayal of closeted, hush-hush homosexuality within 60s biker culture was made in its time at all.

Colin Campbell stars as the lead leather boy, Reggie, who’s still a hotheaded teenager when he marries his high school sweetheart Dot (Rita Tushingham). The working-class knuckleheads aren’t at all prepared for the day-to-day realities of marriage, and they struggle to settle into a healthy routine after the initial rush of lust cools. Every conversation quickly escalates into a top-volume shouting match, with Reggie frustrated that his wife isn’t motivated to cook or clean while he works at the local garage and Dot frustrated that her husband no longer wants to have sex. To blow off steam, Reggie starts spending more time around his leather-jacketed biker buddies at the local cafe, where he strikes up a fast, passionate friendship with a flamboyant jokester named Pete (Dudley Sutton). Pete & Reggie hit it off so well that they end up sharing a bed every night in a relative’s spare room while the naive teens’ marriage hangs in limbo. Only Pete seems to be aware of the romantic tensions of this “friendship”, while Reggie doesn’t have any self-awareness of his own feelings or desires whatsoever.

The Leather Boys is a sordid love triangle played as kitchen sink melodrama . . . with motorcycle races! While its source-material novel depicts two young leather-clad lovers on a wild sex & crime spree, the movie version is deliberately subtle & underplayed, avoiding all of the typical road-to-ruin trappings of similar teen thrillers of the 1950s. No one dies. Reggie & Pete sleep together, but they do not fuck. The early implications that Pete is gay start as a general disinterest in girls and an eagerness to perform the wifely duties Dot neglects, and his queerness is only confirmed by the delicate way he holds his “fags” while smoking in bed. Reggie’s own sexuality is even more subtly played, to the point where it’s never fully defined. He’s confused by Pete’s social flamboyance, confused by his own disinterest in bedding his wife, and generally just all-around confused by his feelings & life. The only thing he’s certain about is that he’s intensely uncomfortable when Pete introduces him to a larger queer community at the local gay bar, which breaks the spell of their brief tryst as best bros.

Through all of its rocker-culture ephemera and the hormonal confusion of its lost teen lead, The Leather Boys ultimately proves to be a more direct prototype for the coming-of-age rock opera Quadrophenia than for The Bikeriders or Pillion. Its kitchen-sink realism mostly manifests in its improvised slang, with the Cockney teens punctuating their every thought with phrases like, “You’re a right blighter,” “Get roffed!” and, of course, “Innit?” There’s also a kind of hidden-camera quality to the visual style, framing both the cramped interiors & wide exteriors of the location shoots through an extreme wide-angle lens, as if the entire film were shot in a motorcycle’s rearview mirror. It’s a cool, sensitive, surprisingly frank story of a young man with conflicted feelings, torn between his love for his wife and his attraction to his fellow leather boys. The only reason it was rated X was so that impressionable teenagers wouldn’t leave the theater to buy bikes & leather jackets of their own and flirt with a little confused gay romance for themselves.

-Brandon Ledet

Neighborhood Rep, Neighborhood Pride

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I’ve said it before on this blog, but the current New Orleans repertory scene really is stronger than it has ever previously been in my lifetime. While the original uptown location of The Prytania has continued its Classic Movies series that used to encompass almost the entirety of local repertory programming, The Broad has massively stepped up its game in recent years to play a wide range of classic arthouse cinema titles I never thought I’d get a chance to see projected in a proper theater, making for a weekly spoil of riches. That recent vibe shift was especially apparent during this year’s Pride Month offerings at The Broad, which included separate programs from both the regular Gap Tooth series and a one-off Pride series sponsored by a self-explanatory social club called Crescent City Leathermen. Together, they combined for an impressively robust month of queer repertory cinema in one convenient venue, including a list of Swampflix-approved classics like Nowhere, The Celluloid Closet, The Queen and, most surprisingly, Codependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same. It was an overwhelming bounty for a single month of programming, so I got to be extremely selective about which screenings to attend and narrowed it down to two titles I had never seen before from directors I love: Pedro Almodóvar & Rainer Werner Fassbinder. The beautiful thing is that I didn’t even have to leave my neighborhood to see them; what a gift.

While Gap Tooth was perfectly astute for programming 1991’s High Heels during Pride Month, it could have just as easily screened a month earlier to celebrate Mother’s Day. Almodóvar’s entire catalog is recursive & accumulative but, even so, High Heels plays like the scrappier, goofier dry run for his later commercial triumph All About My Mother (while still being fabulous on its own terms). Victoria Abril stars as a Madrid TV news broadcaster with a near-psychotic obsession with her lifelong-absent mother, a once-famous actress & pop star played by Marisa Paredes. As a child, she conspired to keep her mother to herself through Rhoda Penmark-level machinations, but she grows up abandoned anyway, inspiring a lifelong fetishistic obsession with a woman who doesn’t think much of her in return. When her mother makes a grand return to Madrid in her adulthood, the details of her obsession become overwhelming. Not only is her TV broadcaster career a pale imitation of her mother’s international fame, but she’s also married to her mother’s former lover & biographer and soon starts a sexual affair with a drag performer who impersonates the famous torch singer for cash tips. The strangely incestuous sexual tension between those four players gets even more complex as the mother resumes a previous affair with the daughter’s husband, who is soon found murdered by a mysterious visitor to his bedroom. As always, Almodóvar has a way of tangling the interpersonal conflicts & romances of all involved so gradually that it takes a long while to realize just how much of a melodramatic mess the plot appears to be when spelled out on paper. Even when introducing this sordid mother-daughter dynamic in childhood flashback, he simplifies the jealousy-and-indifference tensions of their relationship down to a simple symbolic object: an earring. When that earring catches on one of the women’s hairdo in the awkward hug of their adult reunion decades later, it’s carrying enough emotional weight to make you cry. At the same time, he’s clearly having fun with the gaudy tableaux of the melodrama genre in a way that verges on ironic humor, filling the screen with enough drag performances, dance breaks, high heels, and lipstick kisses to make getting imprisoned for murder in Madrid seem like a genuinely fun time for any woman lucky enough to get arrested. It’s just as funny as it is sincerely heartbreaking & sexy, easily ranking among the best of his works.

The Crescent City Leathermen’s screening of 1982’s Querelle landed on the exact opposite extreme of the masc-femme spectrum, staying true to the spirit of the organization’s namesake. Fassbinder’s late-career adaptation of Jean Genet’s novel is a crime story in which the only lawman on hand is a leather-daddy fetishist who operates more as a barfly than a proper detective. The film is a kind of pornographic opera, starring Brad Davis as the titular sailor & murderer who ruins the lives of any poor soul who happens to gaze upon his beefcake beauty. Querelle arrives in the port city of Brest with the dual purpose of following naval orders from his superiors while, why not, orchestrating a massive opium deal with the local barkeep as a side hustle. In that bar, he stumbles directly into an already complex love triangle involving his own estranged brother, the aforementioned barkeep, and the barkeep’s wife. All three players are erotically obsessed with Querelle at first sight—brother inlcuded—but the sailor ends up bottoming for the barkeep first, while constantly protesting that he’s actually straight as an arrow no matter how much pleasure he takes in receiving anal sex. The sex scenes fall just short of pornographic, but they are incredibly lengthy, sweaty, and intense. To make up for the lack of onscreen penetration, the movie purposefully mistakes violence for a sexual act, having Querelle insert knives & bullets into the local citizenry as he gets increasingly greedy in his local, self-serving rise to power at everyone else’s expense. Not having read the novel, the character motivations & plot revelations can be confusing from scene to scene, but just like watching an opera in a foreign language, the overall emotion & eroticism of the piece shines through the fog. Querelle is a primarily visual piece, with Fassbinder bathing the screen in intense washes of orange & blue gel lighting and accentuating the dreamlike quality of the setting by mixing jazz-age speakeasy iconography with 80s-specific props like video game arcades. From Derek Jarman to Todd Haynes to Amanda Kramer, there’s no shortage of sensory comparison points in approximating the film’s visual aesthetic, but by the end I could only see it as the evolutionary link between James Bidgood’s Pink Naricssus & Bertrand Mandico’s The Wild Boys — an unholy trinity of operatic male lust & violence refracted through cinematic artifice.

Both Querelle & High Heels are titles I’ve been meaning to see for years, but I dragged my feet on clearing them from my watchlist due to streaming inaccessibility and the cost of collecting physical media. As has been frequently happening lately, my procrastination was rewarded by local theatrical showings of these historically underrepresented queer classics, something I never would have dreamed possible just a few years ago. Now that Pride Month is over, Halloween Season programming is months away, and Gap Tooth is officially on their Summer Break, that overwhelming flood of once-in-a-lifetime repertory screenings is likely to dry up over the coming weeks, but I’m still feeling incredibly spoiled by what was recently on offer just a few short bus stops away from my house. New Orleans still doesn’t have nearly the breadth of repertory programming as larger cities like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, or even Austin, but the work that’s being done on the few screens we do have within city limits has been getting exponentially more impressive & adventurous in recent years. The offerings at The Broad alone are worthy of local pride.

-Brandon Ledet

Buffalo ’66 (1998)

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There was a brief time a couple decades or so ago when Vincent Gallo was an exciting creative voice. I was recently reminded of this when visiting the independent theater Cine Tonalá in Mexico City, which prominently displays a framed poster of his directorial debut Buffalo ’66 in the lobby. It’s still a beautiful object that conveys a kind of in-the-know, independent-cinema cool, and it was worth framing to preserve the layer eye-catching glitter in its title text (which reads more as television static in the 2D version I’m more familiar with). The young, mysterious Vincent Gallo who made Buffalo ’66 and Brown Bunny is long-dead, though, having since been replaced by a grimy right-wing demon who lashes out at anyone who dares to question his all-knowing, all-powerful genius. Audiences no longer have to wonder how Gallo channeled such a putrid, self-centered asshole of a character as the lead of his own 1998 debut. The remaining wonder of the film is that Gallo does seem to be fully, demonstrably aware of how unpleasant he is to be around. He starts Buffalo ’66 being released from jail into the winter snow, with no loved ones meeting him at the gate. Unable to impress his parents with a genuine girlfriend, he kidnaps a teenager at gunpoint and forces her to play house to make himself appear loveable. He then spends the rest of the film working up the courage to settle a one-sided vendetta with a single act of violence he doesn’t have the stomach for. He’s deeply, thoroughly uncool – a total loser.

Vincent Gallo put a lot of himself into the depressive loserdom Buffalo ’66, which is something he’d go on to brag about to the press. Every chance he gets, he takes sole credit for everything about the picture that earns positive critical feedback, downplaying all contributions from his creative collaborators. The teenage Christina Ricci gives an incredibly bratty, disaffected performance as Gallo’s kidnap victim, modeling a babydoll grunge dress & tap shoes combo that affords the movie most of its late-90s cool. According to Gallo, she was more of a “puppet” than an actor, with him operating her every move on camera as the omnipotent puppet master. Similarly, he’s taken sole credit for all the creative work in the screenplay, describing his credited co-writer Alison Bagnall as a glorified “typist.” He doesn’t just take credit away from women, though. He’s also claimed ownership of every creative choice in the cinematography, firing industry legend Dick Pope early in the production and replacing him with Lance Acord, whom Gallo describes as a hired “button pusher.” That by no means covers the full scope of “difficulties” Gallo had with his cast & crew (his public feud with a nearly-unrecognizable Anjelica Huston, playing his mother, is even more storied), but it does cover the three factors that make the movie stand out as remarkably great, each apparently attributable to Vincent Gallo’s singular genius in a world full of lifeless automatons that he has to manage in order to see his vision through. Poor guy.

The first time I saw Buffalo ’66, I was around the age & temperament of Christina Ricci’s character in the movie, by which I mean I was a gloomy teenage grump. She’s the only character who fully falls for Gallo’s bullshit, fawning over him as “the sweetest guy in the world, and the most handsome” while his more jaded & faded friends & family resent his lingering presence as if he were a pestering ghost. I was similarly smitten with Gallo’s artistic vision at that age, finding Buffalo ’66‘s unpredictable camera angles and segmented picture-in-picture frames to be an exciting new spin on the lone-wolf crime genre. Revisiting the film a couple decades later, the relentless, exhausting rhythm of Gallo’s dialogue fits right in with the general overwritten machismo of the post-Tarantino cokehead 90s, and you have to squint a little harder to pick up on its one-of-a-kind novelty. Undoubtedly, the movie still looks cool, approximating the same Polaroid-in-motion aesthetic achieved in Fiona Apple’s “Criminal” music video. The dialogue purposefully undercuts that cool at every turn, though, with Gallo’s explosively violent reaction to every minor setback in his go-nowhere missions to impress his parents and settle an old football betting vendetta making him look like the squirmiest of little worms. When I was a teenager, I understood this to be a cool movie for cool people; now I understand it to be a slickly-produced character study of a terminally uncool dipshit.

As relentlessly gabby as Gallo’s antihero is in Buffalo ’66, his self-edited cut of the trailer features no dialogue or moving images. It’s just a series of stills conveying how cool the movie looks as a collection of working-class-fringe aesthetics while avoiding how grating of a personality Gallo himself plays at the center. It’s the same smartly observed marketing approached that inspired the glitter on the poster, promising a kind of indie-cinema glamour that willfully ignores the rotten core just beneath that layer of glimmer. At no point in the film does any of this petty-bully characterization feel at all unintentional. Gallo seems to know exactly how queasily pathetic he’s coming across on camera, which only makes it odder that he seems unaware of how that small-minded narcissism is coming across behind the camera. Maybe his dwindling opportunities to follow through on the promise of Buffalo ’66 & Brown Bunny have cleared that up over the years as he’s burned professional bridge after bridge (at one point even getting into vicious public feuds with his critics, most infamously Roger Ebert). I don’t know that letting him out of director’s jail would do any good at this point, though. His late-90s moment is long gone, and now he’s just a pestering indie-cinema ghost haunting vintage posters & Goodwill DVD shelves.

-Brandon Ledet

Dreamchild (1985)

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Just one year after the classic fairy tale “Little Red Riding Hood” got a post-modern feminist reexamination in The Company of Wolves, the classic children’s novel Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland got the same treatment in the less-seen, less-discussed Dreamchild. Both films juxtapose real-life sexual predation against its warped fantasy-realm mirror reflections, picking at the gender politics of their selected works to find surprising, uncomfortable nuance. For its part, The Company of Wolves asks how much tales like “Little Red Riding Hood” were meant to protect young women from the sexual predation of older men vs. how much they were meant to scare them off from participating in their own sexual development & pleasure. Likewise, Dreamchild revisits the sexual predation behind the writing of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass to question just how diabolical Lewis Carroll’s relationship with his young muse was, or if there’s room to find his fixation on her empathetically tragic. The main difference between these two literary autopsies is that “Little Red Riding Hood” is a stand-in for all young women everywhere, while “Alice” was a real-life victim with her own name and her own internal life, which makes for a much more delicate, dangerous balancing act.

Carol Browne stars as the real-life Alice Hargreaves in her twilight years, summoned to a Depression Era NYC to commemorate the 100th birthday of the deceased author who made her famous as a child. American journalists hound the prim & elderly English woman the second she hits the shore, desperate for whimsical pull-quotes from The Real Alice to fluff up their human-interest columns. The barrage of questions about her childhood family acquaintance Reverend Charles L. Dodgson (pen name Lewis Carroll) sends her into a tailspin of repressed memories & demented hallucinations, effectively re-traumatizing the poor woman for the sake of a disposable puff piece. Preparing for an upcoming Columbia University speech to celebrate Dodgson’s birthday, she becomes unmoored in time, reliving both traumatic moments as her childhood self and fantastic moments as her famous literary avatar. It quickly becomes apparent in flashback that Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was written as an elaborate grooming tactic, with the middle-aged Dodgson hoping to woo the 10-year-old Hargreaves into being his eventual bride. That toxic dynamic has soured her lifelong relationship with the Wonderland books in a way that the American press is entirely uninterested in interrogating, so she has to work through it isolated in her own dreams & memories. The nuance of that discomfort arises in recalling her own active participation & manipulation of the author-muse dynamic as a child, something she does not care to remember.

A less thoughtful version of this story might’ve characterized Alice Hargreaves as a victim first and a victim only, but Dreamchild puts a lot of work into fleshing her out as a thorny, complicated human being. She’s a hard-ass social tyrant in both her 80s & her adolescence, and she was too sharp as a child not to notice the unseemly power she had over Dodgson as her much-older admirer. Ian Holm does an incredible job invoking both menace and pity as the lonely, nerdy Dodgson, pining after a child in a way even he knows is wrong. The young Alice pretends not to catch on, but plays games with the older man’s heart in a way that recalls the cruelty of a school-age bully. Meanwhile, the 1930s NYC segments draw a parallel between their delicate power imbalance and the normal, socially accepted rhythms of heterosexual courtship, with a fuckboy reporter (played by Peter Gallagher) hounding the elderly Hargreaves’s teenage assistant for romantic connection so he can exploit her access for personal profit. The fully grown men are fully aware how vulnerable the younger women they pursue are to their gendered power & privilege, and they choose to cross the line anyway. What seems to haunt Hargreaves in her final days is how aware she was of that one-sided romantic dynamic as a child, and the ways in which manipulated it for her own amusement. It’s a difficult topic to discuss without slipping into blaming victims or excusing abuse, but the movie pulls it off.

Dreamchild was the brainchild of screenwriter Dennis Potter, whose name is all over the credits as a producer who self-funded the project. All of the visual panache of the fantasy sequences arrive courtesy of the Jim Henson Creature Shop, who illustrate several key characters from the Wonderland & Looking Glass canon as nightmarish ghouls who haunt Alice Hargreaves in her old age. Those sequences are relatively sparse, though, and most of the runtime reflects Potter’s background as a journalist and television writer, staging lengthy exchanges of dialogue in hotel rooms & press offices. In those conversations, Potter pokes at the differences between American & British cultures’ respective relationships with money and, more bravely, the differences between 19th & 20th Century cultures’ respective relationships with age-gap courtship. As depicted in the film, Alice Hargreaves suffered self-conflicted feelings on both subjects and her own personal participation in them. She is, undoubtedly, Lewis Carroll’s victim, in that her entire life is unfairly shaped by his immoral yearning for her as a child. However, Potter finds enough grey-area nuance in her victimhood to allow her to appear onscreen as a fully realized human being instead of a historic symbol of trauma and abuse. Lewis Carroll himself is even extended that grace, regardless of whether he deserves it.

-Brandon Ledet

The Story of Adele H. (1975)

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As recently as a few years ago, the gold standard for an actress performing a full mental breakdown onscreen was the late, great Gena Rowlands’s starring role in Cassavettes’s A Woman Under the Influence. It has since been surpassed—at least in terms of press-junket citations—by Isabelle Adjani’s equally astonishing turn in Żuławski’s Possession. Whether it’s due to the overall cultural warming to Genre Cinema as a respectable artform or it’s due to the wider home video distribution of Possession in particular, Adjani’s horrific mid-film freakout is now cited as artistic inspo for actresses as wide ranging as Sidney Sweeney (in her self-produced nunsploitation film Immaculate) and Reinate Reinsve (in the much classier schoolboard-meeting drama Armand). Even Rowlands’s recent passing hasn’t lessened Adjani’s ascent in influence. In either case, it might be nice to hear a few other performances from those immensely talented actors’ oeuvres cited as influences from time to time, so that Adjani is not only remembered for smashing her groceries against a tunnel wall and Rowlands is not only honored for coming up with that thumbs-up raspberry tic.

Luckily, Isabelle Adjani does have at least one other major role in which she’s tasked to perform manic mental anguish to great success. She does such a stellar job embodying the violent psychosis of unrequited love in the 1975 classic The Story of Adele H. that it often feels as if she’s being directed by Ken Russell instead of François Truffaut. The French New Waver mostly behaved himself behind the camera, shooting the anti-romance period piece with the made-for-TV aesthetics of a Masterpiece Theatre episode – complete with TV-friendly screen wipes. Adjani initially appears to be on her best behavior as well, arriving on the scene as a lovelorn romantic tracking down the traveling soldier who once proposed marriage to her against her family’s wishes. However, the more we come to understand just how obsessed she is with making this romantic connection happen (and just how little affection the soldier has expressed in return), it quickly becomes apparent that she’s a woman possessed. Then she gets worse, scarily so. Adjani’s ecstatic performance as a globetrotting stalker gone mad works in direct contrast to her director’s muted browns-and-greys historical aesthetics, so that all you can focus on is the immense power she wields as a screen presence. It was an incredible feat for the still-teenage actress, and it’s admittedly even more incredible that she somehow pushed her craft even further in Possession.

For his part, Truffaut is seemingly more preoccupied with the real-life historical spectacle of the story he’s telling than he is by the filmmaking mechanics of telling it. Stepping away from the more obvious visual & artistic trickery of his preceding film Day for Night, he instead reassures his audience with onscreen text, archival photographs, and vocalized diary excerpts that the events depicted are real things that happened to real people. The only overt trickery of the picture is hiding the full name of his subject from the audience, as the titular Adele H. is better known to the public as Adele Hugo, daughter of the famous French novelist Victor Hugo. As in the film’s narrative, the real-life Adele Hugo did travel to Canada & Barbados against her father’s commands to chase an unlikely romance with a fuckboy soldier who spurned her. It was a passionate, one-sided obsession that eventually drove her to the madhouse just as performed by Adjani in her first starting role – often expressed in the exact words of her personal letters & diary. Outside a couple double-exposure sequences in Adele’s sweaty nightmares, however, Truffaut never matches the mania of his subject in the film’s visual palette. He instead leaves that task entirely in Adjani’s scarily capable hands, which she uses to feverishly scribble endless love letters in her cramped Nova Scotian apartment instead of resting her mind with sleep.

Just in case the connection to Adjani’s now career-defining performance in Possession wasn’t already top-of-mind, Adele H. does include a brief scene in which the actor performs a manic episode against the brick walls of an urban tunnel – this time while being attacked by a wild dog. It’s just one of many jaw-dropping moments of ecstatic physical performance in the film, but it is still a visual reminder that Adjani’s one of the best to have ever performed that total breakdown routine in the history of the medium. Before Rowlands was the go-to citation for that manic extreme of the craft, I’m sure Catherine Deneuve’s performance in Repulsion made the publicity rounds in the same way. Maybe someday Elizabeth Moss’s work in titles like Queen of the Earth, The Invisible Man, and Her Smell will get its turn. For now, though, Isabelle Adjani is the reigning queen of melting down onscreen, and that icon status is well earned (in more films than one).

-Brandon Ledet