drama

5 Centimeters per Second (2007)

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One of the year’s best surprises so far was the animated Japanese romance epic Your Name., which felt like it came out of nowhere before jumping into shockingly wide American distribution. Audiences who closely follow Japanese popular media were probably a lot less surprised by the film’s stellar quality and critical word of mouth success, however. Not only was Your Name. the top-grossing film in Japan last year, anime or otherwise, but it’s director Makoto Shinkai had been praised as “the next Miyazaki” for at least a decade now, despite not having much name recognition abroad. What really should have telegraphed the arrival of Your Name., though, was Shinkai’s sophomore feature, 5 Centimeters per Second, which shared a lot of basic DNA with the director’s breakout hit despite being released a decade in the past. It’s not nearly as significant or as cohesive of a work, but it is certainly fascinating as a wind-up to the pitch.

Told in a series of three interconnected vignettes, 5 Centimeters per Second is a kind of romance anthology, adopting a format usually employed by the horror genre. A young boy named Takaki yearns for intimacy with a classmate who moves to the countryside, several gruelling trains transfers away. In the first segment Takaki journeys to meet her at the station. In the second, he’s slightly older and painfully unaware that his current highschool classmate has a crush on him. His mind is still wrapped up in his childhood crush. The third segment finds Takaki as an adult with a job as an office drone, still living in an unfulfilled life as he mentally searches for a childhood love that never saw its due. Much like Your Name., it’s a film about two romantics separated by time & distance who yearn for an impossible shared space where they can fully explore their feelings for each other. Unlike Your Name., this film feels like a series of loosely connected, lightly detailed sketches that never truly come together in a cohesive way.

The three segments that make up 5 Centimeters per Second are obviously differentiated by drastic shifts in time: Takaki’s life as a school age boy with a devastating crush, his year as a hunky but oblivious highschool senior, and his adult state as a depressed, unfulfilled office worker. What really differentiates between these periods, however, and what keeps them interesting, is their individual senses of pacing. The opening puppy love segment is shot rapid fire at the screen with the excited energy of a young child to whom everything means so much. The highschool episode slows things down significantly, making room for reflective stargazing, matching Takaki’s off-in-the-distance sense of mental wandering. The concluding segment oddly ties the whole thing together by starting with Takaki’s aimless descent into dull adulthood tedium, but then reigniting the excitement of the film’s romantic spark with a music video crescendo that incorporates imagery from Takaki’s entire life onscreen. Each individual part has a clear sense of how to match its story with a corresponding cinematic energy, even if Shinkai is much less deliberate in how he brings them all together.

You can feel so many of Shinkai’s pet obsessions just starting to take shape in 5 Centimeters per Second that it makes sense it would take a decade for them to fully form. The film not only plays with the same city boy & country girl sending messages long distance dynamic of Your Name., but anchors that romance to a lot of similar imagery: cityscapes glistening like natural formations, birds flying against outer space backdrops, travel by trains, teens staring into cellphones in anticipation, etc. However, Shinkai seems less confident in this earlier work how to incorporate supernatural sci-fi into its central romance and how to conclude a story that spans such a long distance in both space & time. 5 Centimeters Per Second does stand well enough on it own as “a chain of short stories,” but it often feels like the sketchbook plans of the much better feature to come. Fans enamored with Your Name. should be able to find a lot to connect with in that respect, even if the movie is a loosely defined experiment.

-Brandon Ledet

The Beguiled (2017)

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Sofia Coppola’s remake of the 1971 Clint Eastwood-starring thriller The Beguiled rings oddly like a synthesis of the defining aspects of my two favorite films from the director: the dangerously gloomy boredom of The Virgin Suicides & the playfully modernized costume drama of Marie Antoinette. The delicate visual beauty & intensely feminine modes of violence in Coppola’s The Beguiled plays directly into her most readily apparent strengths as a filmmaker. Even though she could have assembled this picture in her sleep, however, there’s a potency to its in-the-moment effect that makes it feel like a personal obsession instead of a more-of-the-same exercise. The question of the film’s overall effect isn’t whether it’s a great work or if it’s an indulgence in craft, but rather how it never existed before this year, why it’s arriving now. The Beguiled feels as if it’s already lingered in the ether forever, or at least as long as Coppola’s been making movies.

A Virginian school for girls struggles with the vulnerability & boredom of isolation during the American Civil War. Distant drums & cannons build tension in an otherwise serene soundscape of bugs, birds, and branches swaying in the wind. In this secluded pocket of peace, one of the younger girls discovers a wounded Union soldier in the woods. Despite being a firmly Southern, Confederate household, the women of the school take the soldier in and allow him to heal in their care. They purport this kindness to be an extension of their Christian charity, but their motivations are clearly more purient than that claim. As the women openly lust for the new, exciting, masculine sore thumb that invades their once quiet home, unspoken rivalries form and the atmosphere turns palpably violent. Suddenly, the distant sounds of war are dwarfed by the violent outbursts within their home, as the intimate presence of the enemy distorts their Southern belle reverie, giving rise to something much more menacing.

Before its violence becomes openly visible, the devilish fun at the core of The Beguiled is its barely-contained displays of lust. Nicole Kidman, Kirsten Dunst, and Elle Fanning (a staggeringly powerful trio of talents) stare down the soldier’s gradually healing body with held breath & blatant thirst. Colin Farrell is objectified without apology under this scrutiny. An unconscious sponge bath scene in particular is gleefully overwhelmed with close-ups of the actor’s hips, thighs, and chest hairs. Farrell also holds his own as the de facto prisoner of his seven female wardens, manipulating rivalries among them as a cowardly power play to establish a permanent place at the school instead of returning to the war. He’s the sole male presence in the house, though, a soldier deep in enemy territory. Any brief battles for power he can manage to stage only lead to temporary gains, sparks immediately snuffed by overtly feminine means. After a while, those lustful stares look a lot less like an opportunity and a lot more like a threat.

There honestly isn’t much to The Beguiled in terms of narrative complexity or immediate cultural significance, so Coppola must carry its weight on the back of her visual craft. The film’s natural lighting & period setting fall somewhere between The Witch & Daughters of the Dust in terms of both costuming & cinematographic tone. The sights & sounds of Nature permeate every moment, so that when they’re disrupted by the echoes of war (whether inside or out of the house) the effect is consistently jarring. The fog rising from the forest floor mirrors the steamy tension between Farrell’s soldier & his wanting captors. The heat of them being trapped in an old Southern home together is apparent long before the tension explodes. I can’t pinpoint any qualities of Coppola’s The Beguiled that suggest an immediacy or a necessity for its modern presence, but Coppola’s sense of visual craft & the tension she stirs between her actors make it feel at least somewhat timeless. It’s not one of Coppola’s very best works as a filmmaker, but it does share enough of those films’ DNA to re-conjure their potency & solidify what makes her one of the most consistently rewarding directors around.
-Brandon Ledet

Icaros: A Vision (2017)

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It’s usually preferable to enter a movie devoid of background context & extratextual information, but the recent psychedelic drama Icaros: A Vision is one of those major exceptions that benefit greatly from knowing their production history. Upon recovery from a near-fatal bout with breast cancer, visual artist Leonor Caraballo traveled to Peru to seek therapeutic guidance from the country’s local ayahuasca clinics, specifically the infamous Anaconda Cosmica, to help emotionally process her unexpected confrontation with mortality. While participating in the religious ritual of ingesting the psychotropic plant with the guidance of shamans, Caraballo saw a vision of her own death and returned to her home in Argentina convinced of two things: 1) that she was going to die of the cancer’s soon-to-come aggressive return and 2) that she had to make a film about her experience with the ayahuasca plant. The result of these convictions, Icaros: A Vision, partly serves as a therapeutic processing of dread & grief personal to Caraballo’s story. However, the film also strives to capture the religious reverence Peruvian people find in plants like ayahuasca and to poke fun at outsiders who retreat the ritual that helped the filmmaker through her darkest hour like a colonialist act of tourism. Unfortunately, Caraballo did not live to see the completion of her own film; she guided much if its post-production decision making from her death bed with the help of her co-director Matteo Norzi. What she left behind, though, is a visually striking, peacefully meditative look at the culture surrounding ayahuasca rituals, something much more significant than the humorous take on the yuppie adoption of its use depicted in comedies like While We’re Young.

An American woman arrives at Anaconda Cosmica unsure of how ayahuasca rituals can help her process her fear of death and whether she even has the courage to find out. Other patients paying for the privilege of the retreat are addressing issues varying in severity from addiction & self harm to alleviating a stutter to improve an acting career. The mood of the retreat is decidedly peaceful, a tone commanded by the always-present sounds of the jungle. Invading thoughts of technology, particularly MRI scans of the American woman’s cancer, interrupt the reverie on occasion, but don’t fully elbow out the serenity of the jungle until the night time ayahuasca rituals start & end. During the routine ceremonies, a shaman-in-training peers into the various hallucinations of his patients (or “passengers,” in the movie’s parlance) as if he were literally switching channels on a television. The spiritual difference between natural & technological imagery could not be clearer, as the young shaman attempts (through the ritual of meditative breathing & song) to save the paying customers from invading dark thoughts that could spoil their trip. Early on, the film is about his efforts to save the protagonist from the crippling fear of death sparked by her cancer diagnosis. However, at some point that dynamic flips. The American woman, now strengthened by the psychedelic therapy sessions, helps the shaman face his own fears of an incurable medical diagnosis. It’s interesting to see the service industry aspect of their relationships subvert itself as they naturally become better acquainted through the deeply intimate ritual of ayahuasca ingestion, but more importantly the film uses their tender interactions as a purposefully humanist window into a culture that could be depicted as all meditative chants and visual hallucination if not treated with enough open-minded empathy.

Icaros: A Vision is a quiet, still, meditative piece that fully lives up to the visual focus indicated by its title. Everything from muscular river dolphins & the green of the Peruvian jungle to video game imagery & bright florescent piss shape the film’s all-encompassing meditations on life & death. Somehow, the overall effect is more hypnotic than it is showy or gimmicky. Leonor Caraballo’s background as a visual artist shows in the way she carefully frames each isolated hallucination, but her vulnerability & ultimate mortality as a human being is what affords the work a solemn, but rewarding purpose. Humor at the expense of “passengers” who treat the Anaconda Cosmica like a luxury hotel and its (non-actor) employees/residents like servants are slyly made fun of in a social politics-minded undercurrent of humor. That comedy is just one thread in a larger tapestry, though, and the overall picture includes a hypnotic, but encyclopedic catalog of plants that are important to Peruvian culture, an ethnographic documentation of ayahuasca rituals’ adoption as tourist industry fodder, visual attempts to capture the vivid hallucinations triggered by those rituals, etc. Caraballo clearly intended to encompass the entirety of ayahuasca’s cultural & (to her) personal significance in what ended up being her sole feature film. She was smart to tackle an idea that ambitious by centering the story on an intimate two-person partnership within that larger culture, an act of humility in what easily could have been a (justifiably) self-centered film about her her own internal dread & grief. Ayahuasca is a drug that directly invites humility. Those who trip hardest on it often experience immediate attacks of vomiting & diarrhea (the cleaning of which is addressed by the film’s service industry critique), which leaves little room for huffy self-importance. Maybe that humility & small-scale, intimate empathy that come through so strongly in Icaros is something Caraballo learned in her own therapeutic sessions of ayahuasca ingestion. It’s sad that she’s not around to answer questions like that, but the work she left behind is remarkably dense, complex stuff. I doubt we’ll ever see a better film on the subject.

-Brandon Ledet

Burning Sands (2017)

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Burning Sands is one of those Netflix-distributed indies that premiered at Sundance in January and then promptly resurfaced on streaming after a brief couple months’ gap. I’m sometimes frustrated with this relatively new distribution path. In the case of I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore in particular, it felt a little defeating to watch one of the best films of the year (so far) never even earn the chance to build up word of mouth momentum in a theatrical run before getting lost in the Netflix deluge. In the case of dirt cheap indies like Dig Two Graves and Burning Sands, however, Netflix distribution can be a kind of saving grace. Without being able to stream these kinds of moderate festival circuit pleasers at home, it’s likely audiences would never have direct access to them and they’d slip away into oblivion. The only problem now that they’re readily accessible, though, is getting them to stand out enough so that they’re not lost in the constant flood of digital content.

Burning Sands distinguishes itself from the overcrowded market of digital era indies in the intensity & specificity of its setting. Following the violent vetting process for fraternity pledges at a Historically Black College at the height of the trials & torments of Hell Week, Burning Sands is both a solemn reflection on the toxicity of traditional masculinity and a loose philosophical exploration of how the horrific vestiges of slavery have carried over into modern black identity in America. Set on a college campus named after Frederick Douglass, the movie frequently looks to his academic writing on the horrors of slavery as a window into black fraternity tradition, often with interesting, but vaguely defined results. It’s not a film that consistently wows or provokes contemplation, but when it does choose to crank its intensity in either its physical violence or philosophical prodding, it leaves a long trail of moments & images that stick around long after the credits roll.

Scenes of romantic, familial, and academic struggle threaten to drag Burning Sands down into forgettable melodrama tedium. The movie authentically captures the feel of a college campus, right down to the red cup parties that break out in the most depressingly bare apartment living rooms (complete with an accurate snapshot of the modern rap radio zeitgeist, Future included). Most of the drama staged in that setting can feel a little flat, though. There is a near unbearable amount of tension built in Burning Sands‘s hazing scenes that feels tonally at odds with its freshman year anxieties over grades & girlfriends, to the point where one half of that divide feels inevitably inferior. Still, each kick to the ribs, drunken experiment with branding, and regimented pressure into sexuality hits with full impact and the power of its strength in imagery & tension ultimately outweighs any of its moments of underwhelming melodrama. Burning Sands feels much more interested in the horrors of hazing than it is in fretting over freshman year anxieties and it’s all too easy to see why.

Burning Sands is far from the Hell Week exploitation of last year’s GOAT, but it’s difficult to pinpoint an overarching theme or message it’s trying to convey in its dramatic narrative. At times, it feels like a love letter to the bonds humans make in crisis. At others, it feels like an alarmist picture exposing the methods that manufacture that crisis on college campuses. Themes of slavery, militarism, police harassment, and even flashes of homoeroticism rattle around in its loosely defined moments of dramatic tension without ever landing with a solid thud. It’s possible that a more solidly defined thesis would have earned the film more attention once it hit streaming on Netflix. Honestly, I’d think that the presence of Trevante Rhodes (who was excellent as adult Chiron in last year’s Oscar-winning Moonlight) as one of the fraternity brothers who torment the pledges to test their loyalty would’ve been its best chance for widespread recognition, but the film has seemingly been allowed to slip into immediate VOD obscurity anyway. The extreme specificity in setting & subject and the brutal moments of violent tension lead me to believe that Burning Sands will eventually find its audience, though, maybe even with people who can better make out the function of its central message & dramatic conflict than I have been able to. Even if it never does, it at least floated enough fascinating images & ideas to remain distinctively memorable, which is a modern indie’s first hurdle to clear.

-Brandon Ledet

It Comes at Night (2017)

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In his debut feature, Krisha, young director Trey Edward Shults crafted an incredible level of tension & terror by staging a dramatic Thanksgiving dinner at his parents’ house. The wait to see what Shults could do with a bigger budget and a more straightforward horror tone has been blissfully short. His follow-up feature, It Comes at Night, has been pushed into wide release by modern indie distribution giants A24 and boasts recognizable actors like Joel Edgerton & Riley Keough (unlike Krisha‘s cast, which was mostly filled out by Shults & his family). First weekend horror audiences have been loudly disappointed by the film, saddling it with a “D” CinemaScore for not living up to their genre expectations, the same way a mass of people vocally derided The Witch, (our favorite film of 2016) upon its initial release. Do not be fooled by the grumbles & whines. Shults’s command of tension & terror is just as impressive here as it is in Krisha, even continuing that debut’s focus on familial discord & grief. The exciting thing is seeing that terror blown up to a slick, multi-million dollar film budget instead of a self-propelled scrappy indie production. 

Two young families struggle to survive a post-apocalyptic American landscape devastated by a deadly virus, a plague. This isn’t the outbreak horror of the more narrative-focused The Girl With All the Gifts, however. There are no zombies, no monsters, no transformations. The infected merely die, rot, and spread disease. The two families we get to know in this bleak scenario attempt to find peace & optimism in domestic cohabitation. They keep telling themselves everything will be fine, but there’s no indication that anything can or will ever improve. Edgerton’s paterfamilias often commands the room, setting firm rules on how to keep infected strangers & animals locked out of their peaceful, isolated cabin in the woods. It’s his teenage son who acts as the film’s de facto protagonist, though. Late at night, once the comfort of domestic routines and keeping busy fades away, the teen boy’s mind begins to wander into darkness. Anxieties over survival, sexuality, and sorrow for those already lost haunt him in hallucinatory dreams and late night walks through the house’s eerie hallways. What comes at night is not any kind of physically manifested evil, but rather an extreme grief for what’s already been lost and a dread for the violent, depressing end that’s fated to come in the near future.

Dream logic and nightmare imagery are a cinematic pleasure I never tire of and Shults does a fantastic job of building tension in these moments of subconscious dread. If It Comes at Night can be understood as the horror film A24 marketed it to be, those genre beats are wholly contained in the teen protagonist’s stress-induced nightmares. Nightmare imagery is not exactly unique territory for horror, though. Its presence in the genre stretches at least as far back as the German Expressionism movement of the silent era. What It Comes at Night captures more distinctly than any other horror or thriller I’ve seen before is the eerie feeling of being up late at night, alone, plagued by anxieties you can usually suppress in the daylight by keeping busy, and afraid to go back to sleep because of the cruelly false sense of relief that startles you when you slip back into your stress dreams. It’s in these late night, early morning hours when fear & grief are inescapable and nearly anything seems possible, just nothing positive or worth looking forward to. Shults inexplicably stirs up that same level of anxious terror in Krisha, with the same deeply personal focus on familial discord, but It Comes at Night features a new facet the director couldn’t easily afford in his debut: beauty. The nightmares & late night glides through empty hallways are frighteningly intense, but they’re also beautifully crafted & intoxicatingly rich for anyone with enough patience to fully drink them in.

Not everything in It Comes at Night is disjointed dream logic & slow burn focus on atmospheric tone. There’s plenty of tense dialogue, creepy treks through the woods, gunfire, and desperate scavenging for food & clean water. Often, the film’s late night eeriness is used to quietly lull the audience into a false sense of safety before a loud, disruptive threat explodes onscreen. It can even be a visually ugly film when the moment calls for it, often lighting trees & hallways like a crime scene via rifle-mounted flashlights. I’m not surprised that first weekend audiences were frustrated by their expectations of a straightforward genre film, though. Edgerton is an amazing screen presence who once again wholly disappears into his role, somewhat anchoring the film in dramatic moments of disagreement with his wife & son. There’s no explicit explanation of his demeanor or plans, however, just like how there’s no expositional explanation of the history of the plague that has trapped his family in that cabin in the woods. The highlights of the film are more image-focused & ethereal: a triangle-shaped shadow, complex tree roots & branches, sweeping pan shots & drone-aided arials, an intense fixation on a red door that separates the family from the plague lurking outside.

The subtlety of It Comes at Night‘s overwhelming potency is never more apparent than it is at its violent climax. That’s when its aspect ratio gradually, almost unnoticeably constricts its action into an increasingly cramped frame that gets more constrictive by the second until there’s no room to breathe. It’s in that climax that you get the sense that Shults may just be a master in the making. Let’s just hope that the memory of that “D” CinemaScore fades away quickly enough for more production money to flow the director’s way. If he can craft such memorably terrifying, personally revelatory works on budgets this minuscule, I’d love to see what he could do with total financial freedom, general audiences be damned.

-Brandon Ledet

It’s Only the End of the World (2017)

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Xavier Dolan’s latest is a pitch black comedy that applies the stage play tension & confinement of a Tracy Letts work to an occasionally surreal, emotionally devastating familial blowup. It’s essentially what I imagine the ideal version of August: Osage County would be, which I’m saying as someone who’s never seen or read August: Osage County. I left the film shaken, but a little in love, confident that I had understood both what it was trying to communicate and the value of the understatement in the way it got those ideas across. Looking back now, I’m not so sure.

In his 2016 review for Vanity Fair, critic Richard Lawson called It’s Only the End of the World “the most disappointing film at Cannes,” mostly due to its value as an adaptation of its stage play source material, something he admits he was unfamiliar with before he saw the film version. I bring this up not because I disagree with Lawson’s evaluation of the film’s merits as a standalone work of art (which I do), but because he (along with a lot of other critics who didn’t appreciate the film, a lot who did, whoever wrote its plot synopsis on Wikipedia, and presumably everyone else in the world) interpreted the basic details of the story the film was telling wildly differently than I had while watching it alone and without context at this year’s New Orleans French Film Fest. I’m now left confused on what to believe about even the film’s basic themes & plot, since I seemed to have processed it differently from every other person in the world who’s seen it and have no one nearby I can talk to about my interpretation without potentially spoiling its subtly played narrative reveals. I would readily recommend the version of It’s Only the End of the World I saw at the festival, but it seems to be a version of the film that only exists in my own head.

A playwright returns home to confront his family after a decade-long estrangement. His mother, his siblings, and his brother’s wife struggle to keep things cordial without stirring up resentment over his absence and judgemental jabs at his homosexuality​. There’s a Krisha-like tension in this constant discord, where the prodigal son’s family can’t go two blissful minutes without viciously criticizing each other’s appearance & attempts to make naturalistic small talk or throwing out transphobic or ableist slurs in crass attempts to liven up the party. An oppressive heat wave and the mother’s frantic scrambling to prepare food & primp her makeup between everyone shouting at each other to shut up drive the story into a series of increasingly disastrous social trainwrecks. At the center of this cycle of blowups is the mystery of why, exactly, the playwright has returned in the first place and what confession or accusation he is building up the courage to reveal. Most interpretations of the story posit it as a tale of loss, one with a very specific historical context given the nature of its source material. I didn’t see it that way. For me, It’s Only the End of the World is a reflection on the cycles of abuse, both emotional & physical, and how familial relationships complicate the ways we cope with that real world evil. The fact that I could be so far off from the hegemony of how to interpret even the film’s basic story should tell you a great deal on how Dolan handles the film’s themes & narratives and how willing he is to make those defining aspects explicit.

The emotional pain at the center of It’s Only the End of the World is communicated entirely through knowing glances & music video-type dives into repressed memories. It’s a lyrical, difficult to pin down narrative style that in some ways tells us far more about the family’s past than any of their minutes-long stage play monologues. In other ways, it leaves these moments wide open for an expansive range of possible interpretations. I thought for sure I knew what a lingering shot of Marion Cotillard’s apologetic eyes or Vincent Cassel’s scraped knuckles meant in the context of the film’s final, unspoken conflict, but after encountering different takes on the film’s basic themes from Lawson’s review & other sources, I’m not nearly as confident I did. Whether that ambiguity in knowing exactly what’s being communicated in these moments is a triumph or a misstep is a question of Dolan’s intent, something I can’t speak of as an audience. I can only say that the version of the movie that played out in my mind was wonderfully balanced between viciously dark humor, poetic visual language, and genuinely devastating dramatic performances (with a fantastic turn from a beastly Ben Kingsley-mode Vincent Cassel in particular). How many people will have that same experience I cannot say, as it seems Dolan wasn’t interested in nailing down the exact details of the source of its conflict-defining emotional pain. I’d argue that disinterest actually works in the film’s favor too, even if it is leaving me to feel alienated as an audience.

If I had one complaint about It’s Only the End of the World, it’d be with some of its music choices. Some needle drops like Grimes & Blink-182 worked for me in the way a similar pop music gestalt shaped last year’s American Honey, but the film is also bookended by a couple eyeroll-worthy music choices as well, so it’s a mixed bag at best. Worse yet, there’s a tendency to overlay some dialogue & intimate close-ups with an oppressive strings score that often teeters between opera & soap opera, never convincingly landing on either side of that divide. These music cues make for an awkward experience initially, but once you find the film’s rhythm that abrasiveness can be just as effective as any of its performances or themes of abuse (or loss or however you want to interpret its overall intent). By the final half hour I was downright in love with its pop music lyricism’s violent clash against its traditional stage drama dialogue, even if it took an effort to get there. Looking back now, though, it’s difficult to focus at all on whatever faults I had with its soundtrack choices (even though the film concludes on one of its most eyerolly examples). All I can think about is how I had an intense viewing experience engaging with themes I’m now not sure were ever there. I’d recommend those not familiar with the stage play source material to go into the movie cold and see how they walk away from the film’s various understated narrative & thematic reveals. And then come talk to me about it, because I’m feeling very much alone in my interpretation & appreciation of the film.

-Brandon Ledet

Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains (1982)

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One of my all-time favorite movies is the Roger Corman production Rock ‘n’ Roll High School, which is a delightful watch for all kinds of gleefully unhinged, Looney Tunes-type touches. Its cartoon energy isn’t entirely what makes it memorable, though. There’s a misshapen, decidedly unprofessional quality to the few scenes in the film where The Ramones, playing themselves, are asked to deliver a few lines of seemingly manageable dialogue, but can’t appear to be human while the cameras are pointed at them. I find that non-compliance with traditional screen presence to be something beyond punk, a strange ramshackle de-evolution that’s part exploitation pic fascination and part real world inebriation. Produced & directed by music industry weirdo Lou Adler (who also had a hand in Rocky Horror and some Cheech & Chong projects), Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains somehow sustains the slovenly rock n’ roller energy from those Ramones scenes for the length of an entire feature. Better yet, the movie marries that misshapen, Ramones-style presence to a decidedly feminist diatribe against the way mediocre men who are gatekeepers to both punk & pop culture at large, deliberately keeping young women from having a voice in the counterculture landscape. It’s a fascinating film in that way and I’m baffled it doesn’t have a larger cultural footprint because of it.

Unemployed, broke, and mourning the recent loss of a key family member, three teenage girls do the only thing young, working class nobodies can do in a small industrial town: channel their angst into a punk band. Going through the punk ritual of drastically changing their physical appearances and the names they go by, the three-piece musical act, The Stains of the film’s title, luck themselves into an opening slot on a touring gig with two bands packed with macho assholes: a has-been glam rock nostalgia act and an up-and-coming crew of British punks. Like a rough-around-the-edges version of The Runaways, The Stains find themselves to be incredibly popular almost immediately with young women across the country who are desperate for a voice of their own in the punk angst subculture. The problem is that this fame & notoriety hits them before they’re ready as a band and as people. Mocked & exploited by record industry execs, TV news anchors, and the men they initially supported on tour, The Stains watch as the genuine anger they funneled into their songs (especially “I’m a Waste of Time”) & personal sense of style (a sex-positive spin on new wave fashion) is commodified and destroyed as a flash-in-the-pan novelty before they are even afforded enough time to find themselves as a band. It’s a somewhat tragic story where the enemy to the group isn’t fame itself, but the opportunistic, misogynist assholes who keep their grip locked tight on the keys to the pop culture kingdom.

What’s most immediately striking about The Fabulous Stains is its punk authenticity, which is not an easy spirit to capture on film. The Stains, who only had a few practices before they risked taking their show on the road, sound genuinely unpracticed, like The Raincoats by way of The Shaggs. Their punk rock rivals are a lousy lot of Brits mostly composed of ex-members of The Sex Pistols (Steve Jones, Paul Cook) and The Clash (Paul Simonon), who wrote their own songs for the film. That kind of credibility extends into the shit hole dive bars the movie’s central tour crashes through like a slow-moving trainwreck, as it mirrors the exact small town-trolling American tour that broke up The Sex Pistols a few years before the film was made. What’s important about that authenticity​ is that it sets up a grounded, believable scenario where The Stains, mediocre talents at best, would be able to resonate with so many young women across the country​. A strong D.I.Y. punk ethos means that everyone is afforded a voice & equal opportunity. A lack of traditional musical talent can be easily overcome by a sneering, passionate attitude, as long as you can knock over the gatekeeping cretins who try to block your path.

Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains suffered just as much misogynist motherfuckery in the real world as the titular band did in its fictional one. The film’s writer, Nancy Dowd, reported sexist mistreatment during the production at the hands of Adler, the crew, and others. That clash of feminist ideology being filtered through a machismo-driven film industry lead to an extended period of post-production & editing room studio notes tinkering where Paramount Pictures struggled to figure out what to do with a movie they fundamentally did not understood. That stasis at least afforded the movie an insane filmed-after-the-fact epilogue that attempts to capitalize on the in-the-mean-time invention of Music Video Television and somehow both enhances the film’s themes & rapidly ages the babyfaced Stains (including Diane Lane & Lauren Dern) into fully formed adults in the blink of an eye. It didn’t help the film’s financial chances, though, since it was ultimately a strike-while-the-iron’s-hot proposition.

No matter how poorly The Fabulous Stains‘s production & distribution was handled, it did eventually make it into the right hands when it found a second life airing on television (just like Citizen Kane!). Riot Grrrl bands like Bikini Kill cite the film as a major inspiration for their formation, which makes total sense, given the way the film is reverent of female punks inspiring other women to join the scene (which was essentially Bikini Kill’s entire ethos) and the way feminist dialogue made its way though the bullshit sex politics of the film industry to include lines like, “These girls made themselves,” “It was an old man in a young girls’ world,” and “I’m perfect, but nobody in this shit hole gets me, because I don’t put out.” The Fabulous Stains is far from a perfect, pristinely intact work (for that version of the same story I highly recommend We Are the Best!), but a large part of its power & charm is in its imperfection. It’s an authentically punk, fiercely feminist work that’s compromised production oddly mirrors the fictional band it profiles in its ramshackle story of a subculture scene & media landscape that wanted nothing to do with them or their entire gender in the first place.

-Brandon Ledet

Personal Shopper (2017)

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Kristen Stewart is finally starting to collect the recognition she deserves as one of the most rawly talented actors working today, at least in major critical circles. While polling my sister or my coworkers for their thoughts on KStew still only trudges up old Twilight residue, Stewart’s earned herself a nice little pocket of mainstream critical recognition, whether it be an entire Filmspotting episode dedicated to her work or a world class impersonation of her physical tics & quirks from Kate McKinnon in an otherwise middling SNL sketch. The problem is that the level of obvious, powerful talent in her screen presence (which I’ve described as a mix of Lauren Bacall smokiness & James Dean cool) isn’t being matched by the quality of the films they serve. I might personally go to bat for titles like Equals or American Ultra every time they come up, but they’re not films most people hold in high regard. Director Olivier Assayas’s two collaborations with Stewart, Clouds of Sils Maria & Personal Shopper, seem to be a corrective for that career trajectory disappointment. Assayas is almost single-handedly (along with Kelly Reichardt’s Certain Women) providing Stewart the arthouse context that allows her consistently fascinating work to earn real attention & prestige. In Clouds of Sils Maria, Stewart is afforded the opportunity to hold her own against dramatic heavyweight Juliette Binoche and does so with casual finesse. In Personal Shopper, she has no such indie world giant to contend with and carries an entire arthouse film on her back as the constant center of attention. I’m grateful that Assayas has been able to promote & boost Stewart’s notoriety as a significant talent in this way. I just wish either of these collaborations could match the potency of the performances she lends them.

In a lot of ways Personal Shopper seems specifically crafted to be the perfect ideal of a Kristen Stewart vehicle. Stewart’s physical displays of nervousness, a concrete set of tics that allowed McKinnon to land such a dead-on impersonation in the first place, make perfect sense within the context of the film. A personal shopper for a high-strung socialite in Paris, Stewart’s skittish protagonist is alone in a major city, attempting to communicate with her brother’s ghost through one-woman séances, and blindly stumbling into the center of a murder mystery & ensuing police investigation. Given the circumstances, Stewart’s usual mode of darting her eyes back & forth, nervously running her hands through her hair, and just generally giving off the vibe that’s she’s gone her entire life without a full night’s sleep make total sense. Her character is a scared, emotional wreck. She can’t make a big show of these emotions, however, due to a medical condition that prevents her from becoming too physically excited or stressed, doctor’s orders. Personal Shopper is the exact ideal of a Kristen Stewart vehicle, not only teeing up a screentime-demanding performance she’s more than qualified to fulfill, but also pairing that presence with recognizable genre thrills audiences can easily latch onto. There’s almost no genre older than the ghost story, a tradition Assayas acknowledges in-film by referencing old movies that have already covered the territory. That’s why it’s such a shame that the film itself finds ways to underwhelm, avoiding any fresh or significant payoff to the nervous energy Stewart expertly builds in the first two acts.

As a ghost story, Personal Shopper is satisfyingly eerie in its mix of old world technique & modern urban ennui. In an early scene Stewart is alone in her brother’s old residence calling out to the spirit world for a definite, unmistakable sign that his ghost is attempting to contact her from beyond the grave. The loud noises and physical disturbances she’s met with when she makes these demands are familiar to anyone who’s ever seen a haunted house feature before. Even more familiar are the physical manifestations of ghosts, who do eventually appear, but look like the same rudimentary CG smoke that has defined ghostly cinematic representation going at least as far back as Peter Jackson’s The Frighteners. References to séances, ectoplasm, Spiritualism, mediums, and portals into the spirit world all feel just as rooted in ancient movie magic tradition. Assayas does find a way to at least slightly modernize this old world ghost story by questioning whether it’s even ghosts or spirits that are being communicated with instead of some sort of non-human presence or, as Stewart puts it, just “a vibe.” He also makes modern technology a kind of medium in itself. Empty elevator cars, automatic sliding doors opening for no one, text messages seemingly broadcasting from beyond the grave: Personal Shopper is peppered with images of a spooky modernity. In a way, Stewart’s protagonist is a ghost herself, haunting the streets of Paris. Her brother, a large part of her, has died before the movie even begins. She mostly communicates with her boss through passed notes instead of direct interaction. Her boyfriend can only reach her through the digital grain of long-distance Skype sessions. This thankfully doesn’t lead to a Shyamalan-type twist about her vitality, though, just questions about who or what she’s communicating with, what life alone in a major city can do to one’s sense of isolation & grief, and how the world beyond our grasp can be felt & understood as, well, a vibe.

It does seem a little silly to fault Personal Shopper for being merely pretty good when I wanted (if not needed) it to be truly great. If nothing else, I found it to be a huge step up from Assayas’s work in Clouds of Sils Maria, an acknowledgement for the necessity of satisfying audiences with emotional payoff from a film’s central themes. The basic genre thrills of a classic ghost story narrative don’t hurt the film’s muted, but pleasant charms either. It’s just frustrating to feel Assayas reach for something more ambitious & intangible beyond those modest rewards without ever getting close. It’s interesting to see him frame this ambition in the context of Abstract Art as a tradition, specifically referencing the work of painter Hilma af Klimpt as a comparison point. His work never fulfills that kind of transcendental analysis, though. If it did, he’d have found new, unfamiliar ways to represent ghosts onscreen or completely shift the film’s visual representation of its narrative into something more vibe-conscious and less straightforward. Personal Shopper is a film that’s confident in its sense of mood, a haunted reflection of modern melancholy, but does little to excite in terms of breaking form & offering something that’s never been seen before. The film’s biggest accomplishment is in providing KStew enough room to once again prove herself to be an effortlessly powerful screen presence. She would have been better served, however, if the film were able to achieve more than that. She’s already had enough stepping stones on her way to a career-defining barn burner of a starring role. It’s likely unfair to judge Personal Shopper harshly for not being that knockout of a KStew film that’s sure to come (and soon), but it was close enough to being that ideal that it left me disappointed for not getting there.

-Brandon Ledet

Little Sister (2016)

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threehalfstar

The Sundance-style indie drama has formed into a concrete genre all of its own, especially in the years since titles like Little Miss Sunshine & Lars and the Real Girl broke out of the festival to find mass audience success. Mixing melodrama melancholy with cathartic moments of black humor can feel a little formulaic & small in those dirt cheap indie dramedies, but every now and then one will break through to reveal something genuine & carefully considered in its approach to capturing & exploring human behavior. There’s nothing especially mind-blowing or unique about the small scale familial drama Little Sister once you look past the visual details of its ex-goth-turned-Catholic-nun protagonist; in fact, the basic structure of the film reminded me a lot of the similarly minded indie dramedy The Skeleton Twins. Instead of setting itself apart with any immediately apparent stylistic details, Little Sister excels by searching for moments of humanism & genuine empathy in its narrative beats. Every theme & story arc proves to be far kinder & less sensationalist than where I consistently feared the film might be going and Little Sister‘s warmth & familiarity ultimately proved to be its greatest storytelling, not a fault of its adherence to genre.

A young woman studying to be a nun makes a pilgrimage alone to her home town to confront unresolved issues from her past. Her pristinely preserved bedroom reveals her past life as an angsty goth teen, with all of the upside down crosses, drawers of black clothing, and leftover containers of Manic Panic hair dye that past life implies. The people she left behind are in shambles. Her mother is a suicide attempt survivor who gets by through self-medicating with massive doses of marijuana; her brother has returned from the War in Iraq with a disfigured face, resembling a low-rent version of Deadpool; her future sister in law is desperately lonely in the wake of her fiancee’s wounded ego; her only high school friend is a spoiled rich brat with the delusions of a wannabe political activist. She feels deep sympathy for every one of these broken loved ones, but as a vegetarian, straight edge virgin who’s never even tried a beer, she also stands as a constant target for peer pressure, an insistent urging to indulge in drugs, sin, and a breaking of her vows to God. This tense family reunion devolves into a sort of late-in-life coming of age story as the future nun reverts back to her goth teen ways and struggles both with her own inherent innocence in a not-so-innocent world & her family’s cyclical run-ins with hereditary chemical imbalance.

Little Sister‘s themes are heavy and its stakes can be high for individual characters but overall its conflicts are played as a delicate melancholy and any potential for dramatic shock value is sidestepped for deeply empathetic kindness & humanism. For instance, Ally Sheedy’s role as a drunken, unhinged mother who purposefully says hurtful things like, “I am a disappointment to you and you are a disappointment to me,” could easily be played as a tyrannical monster, but the film instead searches for what’s worthwhile & wounded within her and that’s what for the most part makes it special. That’s not to say that Little Sister doesn’t distinguish itself with a highly stylized aesthetic. Besides it’s basic hook as a coming of age story featuring a young goth nun, the film also gets a lot of mileage out of its 2008 temporal setting. This allows for Brooklyn hipster performance art that cruelly satirizes 9/11 and some historical positioning of the Iraqi War as a Second Vietnam, where wounded soldiers’ hero status is complicated by the futility & illegitimacy of the cause they served. I also really admired the way old camcorder footage of children playing Universal Monsters, VHS copies of movies like Carnival of Souls & The Wizard of Gore, and dinky homemade Halloween parties boosted the film’s themes of familial nostalgia & stuck-in-a-rut goth angst. Best yet, the disfigured brother’s continuous, frustrated practice on an impossibly loud drum kit provided a great tension building score that played beautifully into the way his presence & depression left his family on edge.

Mixing these specific stylistic choices with their overall sense of unexpected empathy makes Little Sister work as a series of memorable, but minor successes instead if floundering as formulaic, Sundance runoff. There’s so many ways this film could have slipped into cruelty or tedium at every turn, but it maintains its tonal balance nimbly & confidently, never settling for easy dramatic beats or quirk-for-quirk’s-sake character work. Successes like this often go unappreciated because they seem so easily manageable from the surface, but Little Sister could have very easily been a total tonal disaster. It’s honestly kind of a minor miracle that it isn’t.

-Brandon Ledet

Beginners (2011)

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threehalfstar

Immediately after falling in love with 20th Century Women, a film I’ve retroactively declared the best movie of 2016, I went home to watch writer-director Mike Mills’s previous work, Beginners. The immediacy of dividing into Beginners was not necessarily an extension of its convenient availability on Netflix Streaming (not that it hurt), but more a result of the film’s obvious connection to Mills’s subsequent work (and, in my opinion, his best to date). Much like 20th Century Women, Beginners finds Mike Mills in a self-reflective mode, capturing a semi-autobiographical moment in one of his parent’s lives in a loving, spiritual work of non-linear cinema. Instead of detailing the impossibly endearing persona of his ever-present mother like in 20th Century Women, Beginners tackles his much more complex relationship with his once-distant father. The two movies aren’t perfectly, exactly analogous but they’re undeniable in their parallels and they work well as sister films (an odd thing to say about someone obsessed about his parentage as an only child).

Beginners opens with Mills’s on-screen surrogate (an as-charming-as-ever Ewan McGregor) cleaning out the house his father lived & died in as an old man. In what’s appearing to be a trademark narrative style, Mills tells the entire life story of the recently deceased parent up front, then doubles back to color in the details for context. We learn immediately that he was not a great father to his only child in his youth, being mostly absent for his son’s formative years. This is explained largely to be a result of his quiet suffering as a closeted homosexual, something he concealed from the public until after his wife’s death. We mostly see the man as his son remembers him: openly gay, struggling with poor physical health in his 70s, acting as a makeshift father figure for his much younger weirdo boyfriend, and shining as happier than ever. This narrative thread mixes with a separate timeline where his son, grieving for the loss of both of his parents, struggles to form a healthy romantic relationship based on the ideals of the home he grew up in. He also struggles with a self-absorbed ennui he solemnly knows his parents didn’t have the luxury of, due to the times of War and queer & Jewish persecution that dominated their own heyday.

Reductively speaking, Beginners is not as impressive of a film as 20th Century Women. At times it can feel like a less-confident trial run of that far-superior work. It’s still a great movie in its own right, though, one that excels due to the same multi-media, multi-POV approach to a narrative structure Mills would later apply to its follow-up. Still images & physical photographs are used to evoke a period setting. Historical context seeps in to inform the film’s non-linear biographies through news footage & coldly presented facts. The scope of its story pulls back not just to cover its characters’ lives, but the essence of life on Earth. In my personal favorite touch, the nonverbal thoughts if the deceased father’s Jack Russell terrier are presented in subtitles, a detail that increases in frequency as the dog becomes more of a central character. Although I can’t cite Beginners as my favorite Mike Mills movie, it’s easily one of the best Jack Russell terrier movies I’ve ever seen, rivaling even Russell Madness (a lofty target, I know). In watching the dog communicate thoughts like, “The darkness is about to consume us if something drastic doesn’t happen right now,” or the father drunkenly discovering the simple joy of gay club music or his son learning to become a more loving, empathetic person in his grief-stricken moment of crisis, Beginners unfolds as an interesting, delicately beautiful work of personal revelation. Comparing it to the virtues of the immediately similar works from its director might undercut some of what makes it so special as a singular piece of art, but it is special all the same.

-Brandon Ledet