drama

Ratcatcher (1999)

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Finally catching up with the rest of Lynne Ramsay’s (tragically thin) catalog, after years of appreciating her breakout feature We Need to Talk About Kevin as one of the best films of the 2010s, has revealed an aspect of her work I did not expect would define her aesthetic: grime. You can catch a glimpse of the immersive filth & despair central to Ramsay’s work in the hypnotic tomato festival opening of We Need to Talk About Kevin, but it does not command the remainder of the picture in the way it does with her previous efforts. To that point, I’ve previously described her grief-rattled indie drama Morvern Callar as feeling “less like an original screenplay than it does like a feature adaptation of a crumpled-up Polaroid Ramsey found in a sewer.” To my naïve surprise, Ramsay’s debut film proved to be even grimier, sinking its yellowed teeth into the audience with a punishing immersion in dispiriting filth & despair to the point where the movie is explicitly about squalor. Ratcatcher is a nasty, unforgiving vision from a director who’s unafraid to lunge at her audience’s throat, a ferocious talent who’s been afforded too few opportunities to choke the life out of us & shove our face in the dirt. Weirdly enough, it’s also her most tender film to date, if not only for one brief gasp of lyricism that offers a rare fresh breath of escape.

Part of the reason the punishing grime of Ratchacher lands with such a convincing thud is that it’s used to detail the poverty-stricken lives of cinema’s most taboo targets: children. Telegraphing a kids-lyrically-transcending-their-grimy-environment genre that would eventually be solidified in titles like George Washington, Beasts of the Southern Wild, American Honey, and The Florida Project, Ratchacher mostly immerses its narrative in a community of disenfranchised children running wild in a rundown 1970s Glasgow tenement. Kids are interchangeable and, to some degree, disposable in this dilapidated environment, which lacks proper utilities like plumbing, hot water, trash service, etc. With the housing facilities condemned and the community being gradually transported to a new, plastic-wrapped tenement, one family waits for their turn to be transported as their neighbors disappear and the trash piles up. A roving gang of bullies beat the trash piles with sticks, looking for rats to kill, and treat fellow children with the same brutish curiosity. Cheap beer & television serve as minor escapist pleasures as the central family waits for things to get better. Their lives continue to rot instead. Grief over an early fatal mistake plagues the house just as much as the rats & stench of trash. The childhood play that fills the remaining days before the big move resembles murderous violence more each second.

Ratcatcher was met with enthusiastic festival circuit accolades, but saw no theatrical distribution before being acquired by Criterion for home release. It’s difficult to imagine the film being a commercial success even if it did reach a wide audience, though, even if marketed as a nasty punk version of Stand by Me. There is one lyrical sequence of mind-blowing sci-fi absurdity that completely distorts its stuck-in-squalor existentialism, but for the most part the film is relentlessly dour in a way that’s antithetical to the possibility of being a crowd-pleaser. The Scottish accents are so thick they almost require subtitles. Children smear each other in filth and call each other “fucking bastards” with alarming ferociousness. The few trips outside the squalid tenement setting is just an endless parade of uncollected, festering trash. Ratcatcher is the ultimate submersion in Lynne Ramsay’s auteurist vision of a grimy, unforgiving world. She may have since found a more propulsive, narrative-focused method of dragging audiences through these grime-coated environments, but making us sit in the filth to watch children rot was a hell of a way to start her career. It’s not surprising that when other directors followed with their own children-in-poverty narratives like Beasts of the Southern Wild, they decided to lean into the lyricism of the Ratcatcher’s sole moment of sci-fi escapism. The film that surrounds that moment is downright suffocating, admirably so.

-Brandon Ledet

Waterloo Bridge (1931)

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Old Hollywood legend James Whale is most famous for directing the first two Frankenstein films, both of which are highly ranked among Universal’s classic Famous Monsters relics. The project that landed him that job was far outside the confines of the horror genre, though: a wartime drama titled Waterloo Bridge. Bringing in the production of Waterloo Bridge on-time & under-budget for Warner Brothers, Whale earned the respect & attention of Universal executives, who then gave him free reign to helm any property owned by the studio, of which he chose Frankenstein. That follow-up has obviously outshone his work on Waterloo Bridge in terms of defining his legacy as an auteur, but Waterloo Bridge was a resounding success with a long-lasting legacy of its own. A pre-Code drama about a sex worker making do & unexpectedly finding love in wartime, Waterloo Bridge is a controversial work that, although subjected to censorship & patchy distribution as the moral landscape of Hollywood changed after its release, was popular enough to inspire two (toned down) remakes in the following decades. It’s an impressively bleak work of Old Hollywood filmmaking that, while drastically different from the Frankenstein series in terms of genre, telegraphed much of the grim atmosphere & well-budgeted spectacle that would soon define Whale’s career.

Mae Clarke (of Frankenstein fame, naturally) stars as an American prostitute struggling to make ends meet in a nondescript English slum. Introduced as just one chorus girl among many in a lavish stage musical before casually soliciting men & avoiding cops at her real job walking the streets, our financially & emotionally broken protagonist is a microcosm of the young people who’re made into living ghosts by the Great War. She takes no pleasure in sex work, which is mostly a desperate necessity to (barely) cover her rent. The dread of a life that can’t be sustained forever is made even more unbearable by the constant air raids that terrorize London, sending its worse-for-the-wear citizens seeking shelter at a moment’s notice. In one of these air raid crises, Clarke’s fragile antiheroine meets a wealthy, naïve American solider (Douglass Montgomery) who instantly falls in love with her. She bats away his sweet offerings of rent money, pretty dresses, and marriage purely out of self-loathing, believing that her sordid lifestyle & family history means she doesn’t deserve happiness with such a well-to-do sweetheart. Indeed, his heart visibly breaks in half when he first discovers her profession, but his offer of marriage & lifelong happiness stands anyway. The conflict of Waterloo Bridge is tragic, but largely internal; it depends entirely on if a young woman can forgive herself for the “immoral” things she had to do to survive. It doesn’t end well.

The painfully earnest performances from Clarke & Montgomery drive much of Waterloo Bridge, which often shows its origins as a stage play in long, uninterrupted conversations during air raids & romantic getaways. Whale strategically chooses moments to splurge on spectacle, funneling most of his budget into a few isolated effects shots that almost trick you into thinking you’re watching a war epic instead of a parlor drama. Huge crowds of extras & bomb-dropping model airplanes bookend enough of the single-apartment dialogue-dumps that the whole thing feels way more extravagantly expansive that it truly is at its core. You can easily tell what Universal execs saw in Whale’s financial resourcefulness & why they had the faith in him that led to Frankenstein. A few choices, like the soldier’s off-putting sense of entitlement or his practically deaf father’s one-note version of comic relief, prevent the film from being an all-time classic, but they feel tied to the writing & the source material more than anything Whale had influenced. His mark on the film is delivering a powerfully grim punch to the gut on a bare bones budget, something that helped launch his career & establish his reputation as an Old Hollywood legend.

Presuming most modern audiences aren’t 1930s producers looking to fund the long-dead James Whale’s next project, Waterloo Bridge mostly offers 2010s film nerds one of those glimpses of grimy pre-Code Hollywood sex & violence that feel so out of place in ancient black & white studio pictures (thanks to the moralistic bullies who censored them into oblivion). Besides not shying away from the source material’s matter-of-fact discussion of the practicality of sex work, Whale also searches for sexual tension in the details of dialogue & body language. Chorus girls are filmed in their dressing rooms, lounging in see-through underwear. When one prostitute complains to a friend that the men conducting air raids give her “the willies,” she glibly responds, “Well, they are men, aren’t they?” As Montgomery’s worked-up soldier gets hot & bothered in Clarke’s presence, he strokes the blatantly phallic corner post of her bed, leering. Waterloo Bridge is not a sexy movie. It’s too relentlessly grim & ultimately tragic to earn that descriptor. Its frank discussions of sex & sex work make for a striking Old Hollywood wartime drama, though, something I imagine was lost in its two Hays Code-era remakes. I can’t say it’s my favorite work I’ve ever seen form James Whale or even the most shockingly sex-comfortable pre-Code film I’ve encountered (Baby Face is tough competition for that distinction), but it is an impressive small-scale work for something that’s essentially a grimy stage play with occasional war epic aspirations.

-Brandon Ledet

The Esoteric Suicide-Epidemic Media of Bridgend (2016) & Suicide Club (2002)

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It was bound to happen sooner or later: Brandon picked a flick for Movie of the Month that I simply didn’t care for. It’s not the first time we weren’t all in agreement on the MotM; Black Moon was a slog for me personally (although it’s one that I admit I might have enjoyed more if I had been in a different mood), as was Hearts of Fire, and I’ve picked a clunker or two (like My Demon Lover) or something that simply didn’t appeal to everyone (Alli hated Head Over Heels), but usually Brandon and I are pretty much on the same page. Not this time, however. It’s not an issue of subject matter, either, as teen suicides (well, staged suicides) are an integral part of my favorite movie of all time, Heathers; nor is it an issue of cultural differences, as I love the work of Kiyoshi Kurosawa like Charisma and Cure, both of which are obvious influences on this film. But, boy, was this one a hard one for me to stay awake through.

So, too, was Bridgend, a more recent film about a rash of teen suicides in the small Welsh town for which the film was named. Starring Hannah Murray of Skins and God Help the Girl fame (or Game of Thrones, I suppose), Bridgend is directed by Danish documentarian Jeppe Rønde and focuses on the real town of Bridgend, where nearly eighty people hanged themselves in the years leading up to 2012, most of them teenagers. Sarah (Murray) and her father Dave (Steven Waddington) have moved back to the area so that he, as the new leader of local law enforcement, intends to get to the bottom of this seeming madness. A lonely girl, Sarah is immediately recognized as having attended school with the local hooligan teens upon her return, and falls in with them, much to her father’s violent and overwrought consternation.

I originally discovered this film after binging on the Amazon Prime series Fortitude, an absolutely stunning Nordic-Brit co-production set in Svalbard. I wanted to find more Danish media and Bridgend appeared in a Netflix search. My roommate and I started the film, but he was so bored by it that we turned it off, even though I’m always at least a little bit invested in a movie that features a lot of attractive people going skinny dipping. After watching Suicide Club, I went back to the film to restart and finish it, but absence did not make the heart grow fonder. This is still a dreary film, and not just because of the subject matter. The direction and cinematography has been praised for its realism, with most reviewers noting the director’s background as a documentary filmmaker as the reason for Bridgend‘s lingering shots and invested depth of field. And while that’s likely true, the film’s similarity to non-fiction film-making is also its greatest failing.

At times throughout the film, we’re shown short glimpses of the teens’ interactions with their respective parents that paint them in an unfavorable light. Jamie (Josh O’Connor)’s interactions with his father (Adrian Rawlins), the town vicar, are strained, and there is one line that even seems to imply that there is sexual abuse at play in their relationship. This seems to be borne out in the way that the teens’ apparent leader Danny (Aled Thomas) embarrasses Jamie sexually when he discovers that Jamie and Sarah intend to run away together, but it’s never made explicit. There’s also the fact that Thomas (Scott Arthur) kills himself after a raging party in which his own mother sleeps with his mate Angus (Jamie Burch). And Sarah’s relationship with her father grows from notably cold and distant to outright abusive over the course of the film with little provocation and no explanation. There’s no insight into any of these relationships provided by the editing or any other filmic language; it’s all just presented as a series of vignettes with no thematic connection. That’s a great tack to take when you’re making a documentary, but not when making a narrative fiction film, as it leads to an overall sense of frustration and difficulty in investment.

I can see why this seemed like a good idea. No one knows why the kids in Bridgend keep hanging themselves, and to make a movie with a definitive statement that the cause is poor parental relationships or peer pressure is insulting and in poor taste at best. But if that’s going to be the case, why insert potential issues at all? Why make this film about Bridgend’s suicide trend, instead of creating a fictional town in which similar events take place and set your broody, somber, bathetic melodrama there? Suicide Club did much the same, and even though I was left unfulfilled by it, at least it didn’t pretend that it had something deeper on its mind.

What Bridgend does have over Suicide Club is a greater sense of visual cohesion, even if its narrative cohesion is only slightly higher. For one thing, it benefits from focusing on one character and her admittedly unclear journey, instead of being a series of scenes that are only barely connected thematically before introducing a police procedural element deep in the first act, and then moving to a woman who is (I guess?) our protagonist somewhere around the third hour of the film halfway through the second act. Bridgend, at least, maintains a consistent color temperature and depth of field and focus throughout. You’re not going to get whiplash as you move from a comically scored group suicide to an atmospheric creepy hospital at night to a genuinely eerie school rooftop mass suicidal leap to a parody J-pop music video. There’s going to be a lot of sighing, some head shaking, and you may even shout “Yes, but why?!” when Sarah frees her horse in order to avoid being sent to a riding school (not only is it completely lacking in subtlety as a metaphor, but it also is the only metaphorical moment in the movie, highlighting its absurdity and lack of imagination).

Neither film works for me, but one or both might for you. We can’t all agree about everything. Bridgend is on Netflix.

For more on March’s Movie of the Month, Sion Sono’s technophobic freak-out Suicide Club, check out our Swampchat discussion of the film and last week’s comparison with its goofy American counterpart, FearDotCom (2002).

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Marie Curie: The Courage of Knowledge (2017)

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I’m gradually warming up to the idea that the biopic as a genre is being reinvigorated by recent formal experiments. Besides stray outliers like Ed Wood & Kinsey, I’ve never especially cared about the traditional biopic as a storytelling medium, but there have been a few recent releases that have shaken up my prejudice against the genre’s tendency for birth-to-death, Wikipedia-synopsis biography. Last year’s woefully overlooked Tom of Finland was a lyrical, playful experiment in time & tone. The oil painting-animated Loving Vincent adapted the genre to an entirely new visual medium. Straight Outta Compton was a glorious indulgence in highly stylized spectacle. Love & Mercy recalled the experimental casting of past biopic works like Todd Haynes’s I’m Not There. It’s unclear exactly where the recent French production Marie Curie: The Courage of Knowledge falls within this trend. Covering only the perilous five-year span between the infamous scientist’s two Nobel Prize wins, Marie Curie isn’t exactly the birth-to-death, Wikipedia-in-motion biopic cliché we’ve been trained to expect. However, it does feel line an adaptation of a singular subsection of the historical figure’s Wikipedia page: Scandals.

Opening the film with Marie Curie’s first Nobel Prize in 1903 is a convenient way of introducing the audience to the bullet points of her legacy. It’s announced up front that she’s the first woman to ever earn the prize, thanks to her discovery of & experiments with radium in tandem with her lab partner/husband. The earliest crisis in the film is in the ways this sudden fame & attention distract from the couple’s radiation research, which is essentially aimed to cure cancer. Things get much more complicated from there when the husband dies in a freak carriage accident and his absence puts the research project in peril. For the first half of the film, Marie Curie struggles to establish her right to be included & respected in a male-dominated, stubborn scientific community that sees radium research as a fad & her deceased husband as the true genius in the family. The second half of the film is concerned with a different matter entirely: Curie’s evolving love life. After proving herself worthy among her colleagues, she finds her research at risk again because of a love affair she sparks with a married man, a scandal that’s gleefully eaten up by newspaper gossip columns. The movie is unsure which Marie Curie it’s more interested in, the scientific mind or the scandalous sexual being, and feels clearly bifurcated in that uncertainty.

There’s nothing revelatory in the suggestion that sexual scandal is more inherently cinematic than scientific research, so it shouldn’t be too surprising that The Courage of Knowledge would get distracted by Marie Curie’s highly publicized adultery. Indeed, most of the fun to be had with this film is in its tabloid-friendly back half: Albert Einstein shamelessly flirting with Curie, her married lover referring to her as “my beaming radium queen,” his wife pulling a knife on her and calling her “a laboratory rat.” It’s exciting stuff. It’s also more than a little insulting to the legacy of a scientist who the movie wants you to know was the first person to earn two Nobel Prizes and still the only woman to ever do so. In a way, that exact unease is the film’s contribution to the evolution of the modern biopic. Its flowing transitions between scenes and occasional stylistic flourishes (like backwards rain) recall the art direction of a music video, but not enough to feel like any kind of unique breakthrough in form. The film is most remarkable in its willingness to avoid a traditional birth-to-death biopic narrative to instead focus on a steamy, scandalous romance that almost derailed its historical subject’s legacy.

There’s nothing wrong with an occasional trashy period piece romance and I enjoyed the movie as such. I don’t know how helpful that indulgence is in reshaping the art of the biopic, though. It’s also questionable in its level of professional respect it affords one of history’s most notable female scientists. Maybe, in this case, a more traditional Wikipedia-in-motion biography where the affair were a mere footnote would have been the more tasteful, appropriate route, but the film is still enjoyable all the same.

-Brandon Ledet

Le Bonheur (1965)

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My earliest exposure to Agnès Varda’s work was as an intently unfussy documentarian. Her recent films Faces Places and (my personal favorite) The Gleaners & I are heavy on ideas and light on meticulous craft. Varda has a punk, D.I.Y. sensibility to her recent docs that embrace the affordability & portability of digital camcorders, freeing her from the struggles with financing that have cramped her entire career. It was jarring, then, to see a film from Varda’s past that deliberately recalls the overproduced artifice of Douglas Sirk’s Technicolor “women’s pictures.” The 2014 digital restoration of Varda’s 1965 melodrama Le Bonheur (supervised by the director herself) is a gorgeous, over-saturated indulgence in Spring & Summertime textures. The film is so rich with color that the screen is often filled with a single, opaque hue: red, green, blue, white, purple. Its idyllic Eden setting is a true immersion in Natural delights, a far cry from the sickly digital realms of Varda’s recent D.I.Y. docs. However, the political subversion & playfully abstract humor of her documentary work is still strongly represented just under that flower-carpeted surface. Le Bonheur is much closer to the Sirk-riffing bitterness of punk works like John Waters’s Polyester or Russ Meyer’s Good Morning . . . and Goodbye! than it is like Sirk’s studio lot work itself. She just happened to get there a decade before Meyer or Waters, delivering her own caustic subversion of the All That Heaven Allows era before that inspiration even had time to cool.

One of the most striking things about Le Bonheur is what it pretends to be: a judgement-free, matter-of-fact portrait of polyamory & extramarital romance. For most of the runtime, the film follows a chipper family man with the ideal wife-and-kids home life and just enough contract work as a carpenter to keep their world afloat. Without any malice or harm intended to a wife he dearly loves, he thoughtlessly slips into a sexual affair with a nearby postal worker whose childless, youthful life in the city excites him. As he describes it to his mistress, “My wife is like a hearty plant. You are like an animal set free. I love Nature.” For a while, Le Bonheur appears to agree with his naïve assertion that he can love both women equally to neither’s detriment. It initially presents itself as an idyllic French New Wave advertisement for the virtues of polyamory & the dissolution of traditional monogamous bonds of marriage. All that proto-Sexual Revolution moralizing is deliberately undone in the final fifteen-minute stretch. Seasons change. Lives are destroyed. The desire to maintain simultaneous relationships with a wife and a mistress under the blatant power imbalance of men’s freedom to skirt domestic responsibilities is exposed as an impulse of selfishness & entitlement. Is the wandering husband really so full of love that he can maintain simultaneous relationships with multiple lovers or is he merely a selfish, privileged lush who treats women as disposable, replaceable household appliances? Le Bonheur doesn’t decisively answer that question, but does allow it to hang bitterly in the air.

Although the surface details of Le Bonheur recall 1950s studio-made melodramas/”woman’s pictures,” Varda subverts that perception with experimental film editing techniques of the avant-garde. The washes of opaque color appear to mark subtle changes in relationship dynamics & mood over time, but with no concrete correlation that could be expressed in words. The pastel voids of interior domestic spaces recall the intense wall paper realms of the candy-coated musicals The Umbrellas of Cherbourg & Young Girls of Rochefort (both directed by Varda’s husband, Jacques Demy). Speaking of extratextual, real life romances, the married leads of Le Bonheur (Jean-Claude & Claire Drouot) were a real life couple as well, a kind of reality vs artifice tension that informs weirdo passion projects like A Woman Under the Influence or, more recently, mother!. Varda’s flair for expressionistic, art house filmmaking is most readily felt in her experiments in abrupt jump cuts. The film opens with an upsetting alternation between a symmetrical & an asymmetrical sunflower. A romantic tryst is depicted through quick shots of tangled, exposed flesh, confusing which details belong to which body. A dizzying dance scene is disoriented by partners swapped during a wedding celebration and telegraphsthe anxiety over the interchangeability of sex partners that later upends the plot. In its early honeymoon period, Le Bonheur resembles a Springtime Polaroid, a rigidly framed document of idyllic, Natural growth. Varda subtly disrupts, subverts, and rots that first impression as the film’s shifting romantic dynamics settle into a consistent groove, prepping her audience for the last-minute rug-pull that distorts any perceived advocacy for undisclosed polyamory.

Agnès Varda herself describes Le Bonheur as a “beautiful summer fruit with a worm inside.” That kind of social & political subversion lurking under the surface of what first appears to be a breezy delight seems to be consistent with the documentary work she’s buried herself in recent decades, which are way more fun to watch than their themes & subjects might suggest. What distinguishes Le Bonheur is how extreme of a delight its surface appears to be. The floral, color-soaked Eden where she stages her adultery-suspicious morality play is a Douglas Sirk-level indulgence miraculously achieved on a French New Wave scale & budget. Her protopunk subversion of that Sirk melodrama mindset is a little subtler than what you’ll find from Waters, Meyer, or Rainer Werner Fassbinder, so much so that it’s plausible to miss its criticism of men taking women for granted as domestic & emotional laborers entirely if you let your mind wander before the final minutes. The subtlety of that subversion is just as potent as the film’s flair for the avant-garde, though, an apple-gnawing worm that’s all the more effective for catching you off-guard in a sun-drenched Eden.

-Brandon Ledet

4 Days in France (2018)

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How much explicit gay sex would be reasonable to expect in a French drama bout Grindr? My answer going into 4 Days in France was “a lot,” which is likely a significant factor in why the film underwhelmed me. This is far from the dramatic-cruising exploits of Stranger by the Lake, although just as gravely serious in tone. For all the film’s fragrant Grindr-scrolling & amusement with filthy bathroom graffiti, 4 Days in France is relatively tame in its depiction of same-sex hookups, which feels disingenuous to its basic conceit. I’m not saying the movie was obligated to function as a gay porno, or even an extensive exercise in titillation, but it’s certainly reasonable to expect more sex in a movie about a seedy sex app.

A young, affluent man films his sleeping lover’s body before hitting the early morning road without saying a word (cue Fastball’s “The Way”). Armed only with a small car & the aforementioned Grindr app, he aimlessly wanders through provincial France for the following four days, racking up a series of melancholy Life Experiences. His worried partner tracks him through Grindr by pretending to be a stranger looking for a hookup. Their paths do eventually cross, but in the meantime a series of lowkey interactions with hitchhikers, small town nobodies, and potential sex partners steers his daily wanderings. There is some sex indulged in and life lessons learned long the way, but nothing too significant on either count. As with a lot of French drams, the story told is mostly just aimless & sad.

There are isolated details of 4 Days in France that work well enough in their own allotted time: the line “France is full of men, full of possibilities,” is admirably succinct as a kind of mission statement; there’s a gorgeous exterior tracking shot outside a retirement home that impresses as an exercise in craft; the humor about raunchy bathroom graffiti & the comically complex driving instructions necessary to facilitate provincial hookups land with full impact, and so on. At 140min in length, though, I’m not convinced those details are enough to make the ordeal worthwhile. 4 Days in France could likely be edited down to a satisfying enough 100min picture, but its aimless meandering is too numbing at its current length. This is a picture about anonymity, melancholy, and ennui, which aren’t exactly visually compelling subjects on their own merit. Maybe it’s simple-minded of me to posit that, because the plot is driven by a series of Grindr hookups, a More Explicit Gay Sex edict is the adrenaline shot the film needed to feel alive & worth the effort. Either way, it was certainly missing something and more gay sex in this movie about a gay sex app might’ve been worth a shot.

-Brandon Ledet

A Fantastic Woman (2018)

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It was absolutely heartwarming to see A Fantastic Woman, a Chilean drama about a trans woman’s struggle to overcome the death of a long-term boyfriend, win Best Foreign Language Film at this year’s Oscars ceremony. It was even more of a godsend for the film’s lead actress, Daniela Vega, to be included in the broadcast as one of the presenters. The moment reminded me of the 2016 Independent Spirit Awards ceremony, where Mya Taylor won Best Supporting Female for her performance in the Sean Baker film Tangerine, the first trans woman to ever win an award on that show (in any category). Obviously, the Oscars have a much wider audience reach than the Independent Spirit Awards, so its boost of A Fantastic Woman‘s & Daniela Vega’s profiles is an even bigger deal. Not only did the nomination help push the film into wider distribution (I’ve been waiting for it to reach New Orleans for months), but its win was a huge victory for promoting media where trans characters are actually portrayed onscreen by trans people, a concept that should not be as novel as it is. When you think about Oscar Bait dramas about trans issues, the characters in peril are always portrayed by cisgender performers: Dallas Buyers Club, Boy’s Don’t Cry, The Danish Girl, etc. Daniela Vega’s platform as the lead of an Oscar Winning™ film about a trans woman’s romantic grief is a welcome corrective to that antiquated tradition. Unfortunately, the film itself is antiquated and phony in its own ways, not quite the transcendently lyrical or matter-of-fact authentic document of real life experience I’d hoped it would be. It’s all too easy to see how Tangerine was the punk rock political disruptor that stole the heart of the Indies, while A Fantastic Woman was more palatable to the stuffier members of the Academy.

Daniela Vega is a wonder to watch as A Fantastic Woman‘s titular lead. She’s introduced as a nightclub singer with a loving, older boyfriend and a side job waiting tables. As is necessary for a drama, this domestic stability does not last long; the boyfriend dies of a brain aneurysm in the middle of the night, a harsh end to a tender birthday celebration. This is where the authenticity of daily life is diluted with the same queer misery porn we’ve been watching onscreen for decades. Marina desires to be included in the burial & mourning of her deceased partner, but his bitterly transphobic family and an equally unjust legal system lock her out of the process. That conflict is totally believable, but the ways their disapproval of her gender expression manifest are unconvincing & relentlessly dour. Marina is misgendered, deadnamed, addressed with slurs, accused of being a sex worker, investigated for crimes she obviously didn’t commit, pressured into invading physical examinations, sexually harassed, and physically bullied. It’s tough to watch, but also frequently phony-feeling, particularly in a scene where she’s assaulted with Scotch tape instead of fists. Surely, a modern society treating Marina as if her very existence were “a perversion” feels authentic, but the way the film expresses transmisogyny through constant, blatant attacks personally aimed at her recalls the way racial discrimination is handled in Oscar Worthy dramas like Crash & Three Billboards outside of Ebbing, Missouri (poorly). It’s so overtly & recognizably evil that it more or less lets the audience off the hook for their own subtler, internalized discrimination, making us feel like better people by comparison to the monsters onscreen. By the time Marina’s singing “(You Make Me Feel Like A) Natural Woman” alone to herself on a midday drive, the whole thing feels too embarrassingly on-the-nose to possibly be representative of any real life experience, which wouldn’t be a problem if portraying real life experience weren’t obviously what the film was aiming for.

A Fantastic Woman works best when it breaks itself free from real life representation and enters a more lyrical realm. Waterfall mist, intense nightclub lighting, impossible gusts of wind, and the boggy voids of public saunas transcend any dramatic cliché to reach for something more memorably singular. The film’s use of mirrors is especially fascinating, whether they’re used to obscure, abstract, distort, detail, or amplify Marina’s appearance, both for herself and for the audience. Because we don’t spend much time with the couple before the boyfriend’s death, the daydreams where his visage reappears in physical spaces like Marina’s car & apartment are also essential to understanding her inner life and how devastating the loss is for her. Early on, we watch Marina and the boyfriend go on one perfect, intimate date and indulge in some sensuous lovemaking, but the way he physically haunts her daily thoughts says so much more about what he meant to her and how significant it is that she cannot formally mourn his passing. This line of dramatic conflict is more emotionally effective than most of the transphobic oppression that surrounds it, largely because it’s more specific to the character as an individual person than it is meant to be representative of a larger, daily trans woman experience. It’s also, frankly, just cooler to look at. A Fantastic Woman would have been better served by leaning into the fantasy suggested by its title. Its most breathtaking sequence is a nightclub fantasy that leaves the audience’s heads spinning in synchronized dance, glam makeup, and tinsel pompom blouses fit for Carnival, only to crash us back down to a clichéd shot of Marina crying in the rain. That harsh transition is the film in a nutshell: intoxicatingly lyrical insights into Marina’s inner psyche violently interrupted by unwelcome dwellings in the phony misery of her daily life. The character is underserved by the trials the film drags her through by the hair, but still enough of a wonder to watch that the movie feels worthwhile (largely to the credit of Daniela Vega’s performance).

A Fantastic Woman‘s Oscar win is a positive sign for the future of trans characters actually being portrayed by trans performers, but it’s also a reminder that the stories we’re telling about those characters need an update as well. It’s probably unfair to fault the film for being a part of a long-running tradition of well-respected dramas about the misery of daily queer existence, but there are too many kinds of trans stories that are just not being told onscreen in the meantime. For a start, it would be great if we could see a widely-distributed film with a trans lead that wasn’t about gender identity at all. A Fantastic Woman‘s moments of lyrical escape & romantic grief are a welcome nod in that direction, but too much of the film is familiarly miserable in the drama it pulls from queer societal oppression for it to feel like a unique breakthrough. Some of its visual language makes it a standout in the queer misery genre, but the film’s greatest accomplishment is introducing its audience to Daniela Vega’s immediately apparent talents as an onscreen presence. Let’s just hope that the next lead role she lands is more worthy of her (or, more practically, let’s hope that one will ever exist at all).

-Brandon Ledet

Ismael’s Ghosts (2018)

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When I recently reviewed Alain Guiraudie’s bizarro drama Staying Vertical, I described it as a feverish plot driven by the desperation of writer’s block instead of any real-world logic. I wrote, “It seems to be solely the result of Guiraudie needing to put something, anything on the page. As with Charlie Kaufman’s similar works, that back-against-the-wall creative necessity leads to some . . . interesting choices.” Let’s go ahead and add Arnaud Desplechin’s latest feature, Ismael’s Ghosts, to that list of absurdist French dramas continuing the Kaufman tradition of writer’s block mania narratives. Like Staying Vertical, Ismael’s Ghosts follows an increasingly frazzled artist as they avoid the completion of a creative project to the point where their ever-growing list of obligations surround them like wolves (literally, in the case of Staying Vertical). Greater thematic purpose is near impossible to pinpoint in these works, as they’re driven mostly by the anxiety of being obligated to create. It’s like the filmmakers are pulling the audience into their own personal anguish of having to tell a story onscreen in the first place, making the immense pressure felt by the creator just as much of an emotional burden for the consumer. The results of these writer’s block meta experiments can be uneven (and even at times tedious), but they can also lead to fascinating, unpredictable places.

A long-successful filmmaker prolongs the process of writing & directing a feature about his estranged younger brother. He tends to his aging father-in-law, who shares the emotional pain of the filmmaker’s wife’s disappearance over two decades in the past. His current girlfriend is understanding about the ongoing emotional grief that lingers from this disappearance, but unsure of their relationship (and her own sexuality) in more general, intangible ways. The longer the screenplay & subsequent film go unfinished, the more absurdly disastrous these conflicts become. The brother becomes even more irrevocably distant as his fictional movie-within-the movie avatar strays further from the truth. The movie’s production becomes stalled & exponentially more expensive by the day. The father in law’s mental & physical health plummet at an alarming rate. Most significantly, the filmmaker’s wife, who’s been missing and presumed dead for decades, reappears in his life to blow up his current romantic relationship from the inside. The progression (or, perhaps more accurately, regression) of these events & relationships don’t make much logical sense, a fact that only becomes more increasingly obvious as their circumstances deteriorate. Somehow, though, you get the sense that everything would return to a healthy, balanced normal if our crazed, drunken antihero would just finish the damn movie he started writing. It’s his procrastination that threatens to unravel the very fabric of reality just as much as it’s his narcissistic self-absorption.

Ismael’s ghosts, as referenced in the title, are a brother, a wife, and an adopted child, all missing form his current life. These hauntings from the past aren’t a source of grief so much as a piling-on of anxiety: crazy-making sources of obligation that make his inability to complete the film he started writing even more stressful. The true conflict that drives the film is the desperation of writer’s block under the pressure of audiences waiting for a finished product. This creative desperation fractures the narrative into an array of opposing genres: spy thriller, Guy Maddin-style art piece complete with double exposure photography, melodrama about amnesia, a Persona-style psychological thriller (played out by French heavyweights Marion Cottillard & Charlotte Gainsbourg at a beach house), absurdist comedy, and so on. Ismael describes this hellish break with reality in the line, “I’m living in a nightmare and I can’t wake up,” but the truth is that he could wake up any moment if he would just finish the movie he promised his producers. In the meantime, the audience is held hostage waiting for Ismael’s Ghosts to tidily wrap up its illogical collection of disparate tones & storylines, a task that proves more impossible every passing minute. It’s as if Desplechin’s self-therapy for being tortured by his own writer’s block in the midst of familial & professional obligations was to pass that anxiety along to his audience so they can feel what it’s like. It’s a difficult mode of art to appreciate as a viewer, but one with a surprisingly rich tradition (if not only in the Charlie Kaufman oeuvre) and occasional strokes of brilliance among its expressions of creative frustration.

-Brandon Ledet

The Loft (2015)

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Man, are we still making erotic thrillers? Is there even a place for them in this post-[insert your porn aggregator of choice] world anymore? I suppose we still are making them this decade, given that Adulterers was released in 2016, one year after today’s stinker, The Loft.

Based on a 2008 Belgian film of the same name and featuring most of the same creative crew (director Erik Van Looy and writer Bart De Pauw, who is solely credited on the original film and is one of two credited writers here), The Loft is about five men who use a single loft apartment to cheat on their wives. Vincent (Karl Urban) is an architect who retained the apartment in one of the buildings he designed for him and his buddies to have their sexcapades: possible closet case Luke (Wenworth Miller), whose wife requires constant attention due to her diabetes; Marty (Eric Stonestreet), who channels all of his pent up, frustrated heterosexual energy from having to play broad gay stereotype Cam on Modern Family for the past decade into a disgusting misogynist pig; Chris (James Marsden), a successful psychiatrist who is the most reluctant to participate in this adulterous venture; and Philip Williams (Matthias Schoenaerts), Chris’s half-brother, a cokehead whose new bride is the daughter of a wealthy magnate. One of these names is not (recognizable) like the others; Schoenaerts is apparently reprising his role of Filip Willems from the original film.

The plot kicks off when a blonde woman is found dead in the bed that the men all use for their exploits. We then flash back to Philip’s wedding day, one fateful evening that all five men and their wives got together for dinner, and the evening that the building that houses the titular loft was opened. It’s established early on that Vincent caught Philip’s wealthy and powerful father-in-law in Vegas on a date with his mistress, and he intends to use this potentially damaging information to extort the older man into giving him the architectural contract for a new riverfront luxury building. Also on this trip, he and Luke meet Sarah Deakins (Isabel Lucas), and although they both find her attractive, she sleeps with Vincent (there is a strip-down from Karl Urban here that isn’t exactly a saving grace, but it does give this largely unerotic erotic thriller a little heat). We also learn that Chris, despite his original objections, has fallen for Ann Morris (Rachael Taylor) and has been having an affair with her. Who is the dead woman handcuffed to the bed: Sarah or Ann? And who killed her, and why?

There are twists a-plenty in this film; to be fair, most of them are unforeseen and unforeseeable but do make sense when they are revealed. The problem is that this is a film that prides itself on being 20 minutes ahead of its audience, but fails to realize that it’s also 15 years behind it. Belgian screenwriter De Pauw collaborated with American Wesley Strick to adapt the film for a U.S. audience, a choice that almost makes sense. After all, Strick penned the screenplays for some hit thrillers like 1998’s Return to Paradise (71% on Rotten Tomatoes), the remake of Cape Fear (75% and two Oscar nominations), and 1989’s True Believer (95%!), as well as 1990’s well-received horror comedy Arachnophobia. Those are the highlights of his career, however; 2006’s Love Is the Drug was only reviewed by 5 critics, and 1994’s Wolf was met with a mixed reception. The rest of his filmography is not only bad, but memorably so: Final Analysis is an attempt at aping Hitchcock with a director best known for U2 videos (and got only 54% on RT); The Saint (1997, 29%) featured one of my favorite bits of cinematic nonsense ever when Elisabeth Shue’s character realizes that love cured her heart condition; The Glass House (2001, 21%) pleased no one; Doom (2005, 19%) is over a decade old and still a punchline; and the Nightmare on Elm Street remake (2010, 15%) had only Jackie Earle Haley’s performance as its only redeeming feature. Only Strick’s 1995 debut feature, The Tie That Binds, was more poorly received, with a 9% positive rating. It’s a very mixed list of credits, but the fact that all of his successes were made between 1989 and 1999 tells you a lot about where his talents lie and what kind of thriller he’s capable of drafting. You take that nineties sensibility and blend it with a Belgian idea, and you get a film that almost works but falls short in ways that are difficult to pinpoint. Not even a cast of A/B-list hunks could draw in an audience, as the film only grossed 10 million dollars to its budget of 14 million.

About the only thing that makes this one interesting is that over half the cast would go on to play or had already played characters in superhero properties, largely of the Marvel vein, or another character from genre fiction. So if you ever wanted to know what it would be like to watch Cyclops (Marsden in the X-Men films) get it on with Jessica Jones’s best friend Trish Walker (Taylor, Jessica Jones), or for Dr. McCoy/Judge Dredd/Skurge (Urban, the Abrams Star Trek movies/Dredd/Thor: Ragnarok) to seduce a woman despite the charms of Captain Cold (Miller, The Flash), then you’re a weirdo like me, congrats, and you might get a modicum of fun out of this movie. Otherwise, however, there’s no real reason to check this one out. I’m hesitant to call it “chaste,” but in comparison to other films in this genre, it leaves much to be desired in the realm of eroticism, and the various twists and turns that the narrative takes are barely worth the time it takes to get through them. Skip this one.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

True Stories (1986)

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The RedLetterMedia boys launched a new series on their youtube channel last year called Re:View, in which they discuss films that hold a special significance for them. One of the episodes I had overlooked on its original upload was their discussion of True Stories, David Byrne’s 1986 film that he wrote, produced, and directed (unlike Adulterers, this turned out to be a good thing) as well as starred in. It’s a forgotten gem, even among Talking Heads and David Byrne fans, despite being the origin of one of their hits, “Wild Wild Life,” as well as being the first major role for John Goodman and also featuring Spalding Gray and Swoosie Kurtz. I was instantly taken with the idea and searched for the movie online in the hopes of finding a cheap copy of the out of print DVD, only to discover that the Alamo Drafthouse was going to be screening it only a couple of weeks later, as part of its Essential Texas Film series. I bought tickets faster than you can say “this is not my beautiful wife.”

Byrne plays a nameless cowboy who visits the fictional town of Virgil, Texas, an eccentric place full of quirky people, like a woman who is an outrageous liar, another woman who is so rich she never gets out of bed, a conspiracy theorist preacher, and a benevolent tech tycoon who hasn’t spoken to his wife in years. The town is preparing a celebration of specialness (the final syllable is stressed by all those who speak the word) in honor of their sesquicentennial, with such features as a mall fashion show, an unusual parade, a lip-sync competition, and the final, strange performance that one could call a talent show, but probably shouldn’t. If there is a main character other than the drifting cowboy, it’s Lewis (Goodman), a clean room technician at Varicorp, the local tech company that employs most of the people of Virgil. Lewis is a man looking for “matrimony with a capital ‘M’” who loves life, country music, and women, although what he wants more than anything is a wife who will appreciate his “consistent panda bear shape” and odd fashion sense.

The lifeblood of Virgil is its motley assortment of citizens, but the town’s economy is supported by Varicorp, manufacturer of microchips and other gadgets. Earl Culver (Gray) is the CEO and a local civic leader who loves the little town, and supports its growth philosophically as well as financially, and delivers some of the more socially intriguing dialogue in the film. Throughout, various characters provide their different viewpoints on (then) modern life, all of it charmingly endearing and prescient, although some monologues (like Culver’s dinnertime speech about the changing economy as the result of technological development, including the announcement that “there’s no concept of ‘weekends’ anymore!”) have aged better than others (like the Cowboy’s musings on the way that shopping malls have replaced downtowns as the cultural and social center of modern life). Many characters lack proper names, like the Nice Lady, who interrupts the parade of newborn babies to coo and fawn over every one of them but cannot tolerate even the mildest shadow of sadness, rejecting Lewis because of the formless melancholy of the country ballad he’s composing for the Celebration. There’s also the Lying Woman, a notable town figure who claims to have been at the center of the conspiracy to assassinate Kennedy, that she rejected Burt Reynolds despite his obsessive devotion to her, and that she has psychic powers born from having spent so much of her time as a child staring at the her own surgically removed vestigial tail (her mother later sold the oddity to LBJ, who in turn sold it to the Smithsonian for a pretty penny, so she claims).

Many would read this description and feel like the film is predicated upon mocking small towns and the people who live there, but the movie is actually utterly sympathetic to every character that appears on screen, even those who are in conflict with others. Byrne has admitted that the film’s inspiration came from reading tabloids while on the road and imagining a place where all the weirdos from these pages lived in a kind of harmony, which would also lead one to think that there would be a maliciousness in the voyeuristic peeks that we get into the lives of the citizens of this town. But no; life in Virgil has a melody and a magic, and no character is ever made out to be a fool or is treated with anything other than genuine respect by other characters as well as Byrne’s lens. Even ugly and featureless housing developments are gifted with an air of mystery and treated with a gentle tenderness. As the Cowboy drives through one and the camera pans slowly past discarded newspaper billowing in the wind like a tumbleweed across several balding lawns in front of featurelessly utilitarian brown brick homes, he asks “Who’s to say it’s not beautiful?”, and the every member of the audience must admit that, when viewed this way, none of them can make such a claim.

Uproariously funny, effortlessly poignant, and endlessly quotable, True Stories is the true celebration of specialness, a time capsule of unapologetic warmth and unconditional fondness for an oft-disparaged way of life. If you can track down a copy, sink your talons into it and never let it go. Watch the trailer here.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond