drama

Chunking Express (1994)

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I recently celebrated my birthday, and coincidentally, over the course of Chungking Express, so does the protagonist of the first half. And he’s a May baby, too! This was not an intentional viewing choice on my part, but it was a fun little accident, and since I, like all of Wong Kar-Wai’s protagonists, am a hardcore yearner, that wasn’t the only thing that aligned for me. 

Express is neatly divided into two halves, each narrative connected solely by the presence of the Mandarin Express fast-food bar located in Hong Kong’s Chungking Mansions, a seventeen-story building originally built as a residential complex but which ultimately mostly houses low-budget guest houses and shops. Our first protagonist, Chi-Moo (Takeshi Kaneshiro), is a police officer whose girlfriend, May, breaks up with him on April 1st, initially leading him to believe that she is joking. As the month wears on, he finds himself committing to a silly ritual of buying a can of pineapple from the local convenience store every day, each one with an expiration date of May 1st, his upcoming 25th birthday. When the month ends and May has yet to tell him that she was kidding, he eats all thirty cans in one night, then goes out drinking. While out, he meets a woman in a blonde wig (Brigitte Lin); unbeknownst to him, she is a professional criminal specializing in drug trafficking, whose most recent scheme has run aground as her newest recruits disappeared at the airport with her product and never appeared at their final destination. After he vomits up a prodigious amount of canned pineapple, the two retire to a hotel room where she finally sleeps after days on the run while he watches over her. 

They both disappear completely from the film after this as the narrative view shifts. Chi-Moo runs through his entire little black book on the payphone at the Mandarin Express, where the owner attempts to set him up with one of his employees, coincidentally also named May, with no success. Said proprietor also tries to make a date for another frequent visitor, a beat cop known only by his badge number, 663 (Tony Leung), with May, but when he walks by on his patrol after having been dumped by his flight attendant girlfriend (Valerie Chow), May has gone off on a vacation and relative Faye (Faye Wong) is covering for her in her absence. 663 is still too heartbroken about his recent relationship to notice that Faye is utterly smitten with him from the get-go. When his ex drops by with a letter for him along with his house keys, every employee of the Express reads the letter and gossips about its contents among themselves, with only Faye finding the deeper resonance in the words between two separated lovers. 663 initially refuses to take the letter, saying that he will simply get it another time, and this allows Faye the opportunity to, in true manic pixie dream girl fashion, start using his keys to let herself into his home and spruce up the place. Over time, the lovelorn 663 moves through his grief (in no small part because of her attempts to cheer him up) and becomes fascinated by this strange woman and her quirks: her forgetfulness, her attitude, and her eternal fascination with The Mamas and the Papas’ “California Dreamin’,” which plays approximately one hundred times throughout the film. She has her own dreams that will take her away from him, however, but that doesn’t mean that the time that they walked a path together wasn’t the catalyst that led them both to pursue something meaningful in their lives, and it also doesn’t mean that they’ll never walk the same path again. 

Wong’s filmography, at least the parts with which I’m familiar (mostly Happy Together and In the Mood for Love; I’ve seen 2046 but have no memory of it), is all about longing, almost entirely without any kind of physical intimacy. It’s love that exists in the brooding, in the shared looks, expressed in the lingering of presence and the acceptance of absence. Happy Together does open with a sex scene, which serves to express the once-easy intimacy of Po–Wing and Fai in comparison to the slow, backsliding dissolution of their relationship that plays out over the rest of the film. There’s nothing that explicit here, other than a brief scene of 663 and the stewardess in bed together before she takes off on one of her flights (possibly the last time they were together before a chance reunion at the same corner store where Chi-Moo buys all his pineapple, near the finale), and the director is once again exploring the yearn, even if it doesn’t initially appear to be headed in that direction. The film opens with a much more action-y style as we meet the Woman in the Wig and see her recruit several men to be her drug runners, then follows the process of them being outfitted by special tailors who create clothing designed with secret pockets and compartments as well as the creation of false documentation to allow them to travel. She takes the cadre to the airport and sees them off, then learns that she’s been double crossed and the drugs never reached their destination. She tries to extort the return of the drugs by kidnapping a child, ultimately giving up on this half-hearted attempt, which is where we leave her before we spend some time with Chi-Moo before their two stories collide. A lot of this opening action is shot using a sort of shutter effect that I assume was in vogue in action films of the time (I recently attempted to watch the 1999 Korean action flick Nowhere to Hide, which featured the same kind of photography to ramp up the action, although I couldn’t finish that one). 

This changes completely once the film pivots to its two leading yearners, Chi-Moo and (later) 663. Apparently, the script was not complete at the time that filming began, and the second segment about 663 was written in a single day, which might explain the abrupt bifurcation of the film into its two largely separate halves. As such, there’s not as much consistency throughout this one as there is in his other works that I’ve seen. They’re not unified narratively or even structurally and are instead linked solely by the emotions of Leung and Takeshi’s characters. This gives the film an effortless and breathless quality, one that wanders but does not meander. Where it most reminded me of this other work, however, was in its musical choices. As a period piece, In the Mood for Love featured a lot of classic jazz numbers, notably several performed by Nat King Cole (“You Belong To My Heart,” “Magic Is The Moonlight,” “Quizas, Quizas, Quizas,” and more), with the frequent presence of his album Cole Español serving to tell us something about the characters. Chow and Su are both Shanghainese expatriates living in the eighth decade of British rule of Hong Kong, and their blossoming (but unconsummated) romance being soundtracked by the American Cole’s album created for the Latin market creates a feeling of being untethered from any sense of place or identity but finding root in love, a language that transcends tongues. The use of “Happy Together” by The Turtles as the concluding track in the film that takes its name from the song is an ironic, or at least ambiguous, one. Po-Wing and Yiu-Fai are not happy together and have not been for a long time, and it’s apparent that they likely cannot be happy together, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t both fondly recall the (admittedly brief) times in which this was the case, and the clinging to the past is preventing either of them from moving on. 

Here, the omnipresence of “California Dreamin’” acts as Faye’s leitmotif, underlining her desire to get out and experience something more than working in her uncle’s food counter, while also expressing a melancholy about that kind of change. Notably, when she returns from her first year of being a flight attendant to visit the Mandarin Express, she finds 663 there performing renovations, as he has bought the place and is turning it into his own restaurant; while he works, he listens to The Mamas and the Papas just as she had when working the counter when he first met her. Her willingness to commit to something took her far from him, and the same temerity that she brought out in him has caused him to forge a new career and life that will anchor him to one spot. Maybe they were so different that it never could have worked. Maybe this reunion will have them find a way to compromise. We’ll never know; we can only imagine it, and I love Wong’s ongoing commitment to that kind of ambiguity. Also worth noting is that Faye Wong sings a cover of “Dreams” by The Cranberries in this one, and it’s simply beautiful. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Belle de Jour (1967)

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When writing about The Spiral Staircase, I mentioned that I was working on filling out some of the gaps in Douglas Brode’s Edge of Your Seat: The 100 Greatest Movie Thrillers. I have a few in the top twenty that I still hadn’t seen, so when deciding what to pick up at my local video store recently, I settled on Brode’s #17, Luis Buñuel’s 1967 film Belle de Jour. The title is a play on the French idiom “belle de nuit,” literally meaning beauty or lady of the night but colloquially meaning a prostitute. In Belle de Jour, Catherine Deneuve plays a woman whose repressed sexuality leads her to seeking employment with a madame, but only until 5:00pm each day, as she must get home before her husband returns from work. Hence, lady of the day. 

Séverine Serizy (Deneuve, fresh off of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg) is seemingly happily married to handsome doctor Pierre (Jean Sorel), but her inability to be intimate with him belies a deviant, vivid sexual fantasy life. On their anniversary, the two go to a ski town, where they run into Séverine’s friend Renée (Macha Méril) and her boyfriend, an acquaintance of Pierre’s named Henri Husson (Michel Piccoli), whom Pierre has no real interest in befriending and whom Séverine despises because of his constant leering at her. While the two women are out shopping, Renée reveals that another friend of theirs has recently started working as a prostitute, and Séverine is surprised to learn that whorehouses are still in operation in such a modern era. Later, Henri reveals to her the location of one such place, and out of compulsion and curiosity, Séverine finds herself there, meeting Madame Anaïs (Geneviève Page), who offers her employment. Séverine is the blonde employed alongside a redhead and a brunette also working for Anaïs, and after some initial hesitation, finds herself in demand and successful, until she finds herself entangled with the criminal Marcel (Pierre Clémenti), who refuses to accept her work/life balance, to disastrous results. 

I was disappointed with this one initially. The truth of the matter is that this isn’t really a thriller, and when you expect that going in, you should be prepared to be disappointed. Most contemporary reviews cite the film as an erotic romance, and it’s not really that, either; it’s much more surreal, and defies traditional classification. It’s not very romantic, and I didn’t find it particularly erotic either, although I understand that it probably is for some people. If you’ve somehow come to Swampflix to find out if you’re going to see some areolas in this movie, I can tell you now that the answer is “No.” Séverine’s fantasies (and there is some argument to be made as to which scenes are fantasies and which really “happened”) are of a sadomasochistic nature, largely about being bound and whipped, but it’s quite tame to the sensibilities of a modern viewer. As the film opens, Séverine and Pierre enjoy a nice countryside carriage ride, until he complains about her frigidity and has the coachmen pull the carriage over and drag her into the nearby woods, where he ties Séverine’s hands above her head and has the coachmen whip her, then tells them to have their way with her before Séverine suddenly awakens from her daydream. 

As I went into this with the notion that this was going to be a thriller, I was pre-emptively wincing at the wounds I expected to see appear on Deneuve’s bare back as she was whipped, but none appeared. That would ruin the fantasy, both for Séverine and for the audience members who are experiencing this thrill vicariously through her. But it also reveals something about her psychology, that she’s not really interested in intimacy, just into being forced into doing something. When Renée first tells her about their mutual friend’s sex work, they both shudder at the idea of not having a choice in whom they sleep with; Renée saying “It can be unpleasant enough with a man that you like,” but the shudder that runs down Séverine’s spine is different. She’s interested in what it would be like to have no choice, at least in the abstract. When it comes time to actually perform services for clients, what she imagined and the reality of the situation come crashing together, and it’s much less pleasant, especially when Henri appears at the bordello one day and insists that she give herself to him. It’s much less fun than she had hoped, even if it does open her up to finally sleeping with her long-suffering husband. 

This is far too surreal a picture to easily slot itself into a genre category. There’s no real suspense at play for most of it, as Séverine merely wanders through one escapade after another, with it being unclear just how much of it is happening only in her mind. The film is bookended by the aforementioned appearance of countryside carriage riding, as the image repeats while Séverine hears the bells on the horses and looks out her window and seems to see the carriage approaching up a country lane, despite the fact that what lies outside is an urban Parisian street. At another point in the film, a man credited as “The Duke” arrives via the same carriage (including the same coachmen as in her earlier daydreaming) and invites her to come to his home for some “work.” This turns out to be dressing in a sheer black veil that covers her entire body and lying in a coffin, where he enters and addresses her as his dear departed daughter before descending out of frame and, one implies, masturbating. There are some reviews I’ve read of this that question the reality of this sequence, which I interpret to be purely fantasy based on the reappearing coachmen, but I suppose it’s up to the individual viewer. Each of the johns that she meets is screwed up in one way or another. The world-famous gynecologist known only as “the professor” has specific demands for a scene in which the “Marquisse” whips him. One client shows up with a box that he shows the contents of to one of the other girls, which she rejects for use in their bedplay (we never learn what it is, but after his session with Séverine, there is a little blood on one of the towels in the room). Marcel, of course, is the worst, the brutish thug of a much more civilized-seeming mobster, who has a lean and hungry look to him that’s attractive despite his unkempt hygiene. He even has several gold teeth as the result of a fight, which he bears at Séverine like the Bond villain Jaws at one point. 

That surreality is what makes the film interesting, to those of whom it may be of interest. We learn nothing of Séverine’s backstory or history, with all that is revealed of her happening in two separate flashes under five seconds, one of which shows her receiving communion as a child and the other of which shows her being kissed inappropriately by an adult man. There’s also something interesting happening in the way that Henri is infatuated with Séverine and even all but sends her to Madame Anaïs, but as soon as he learns that she’s working there, his interest dries up. It reminded me of something I read of John Berger’s years ago, about sexism of an older era in which a man would paint an image of a nude woman and then “put a mirror in her hand and [call] the painting ‘Vanity.’” Henri desires the observable woman, with her lack of sexual interest and apparent virginity, but as soon as she is like the women that he can attain, he has nothing but disdain for her, and he goes from one extreme to the other without ever getting even the tiniest glimpse into her internal life. 

When returning the DVD to the video store after watching it, both of the clerks volunteering that evening asked me how I had liked it, with one of them noting that he had rented it before and then simply run out of time to watch it, while the other was disappointed to learn that I hadn’t been thrilled with it. The truth was, it simply wasn’t what I was expecting. In many ways, it is the quintessential European art film that cinephiles are often mocked for enjoying. For me, I think that I’ll be digesting this one for a long time to come, but can reasonably say that it wasn’t for me, and it’s certainly not a thriller in any meaningful way.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Beau Travail (1999)

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It’s no secret that I was no fan of Claire Denis’s High Life when I saw it nearly six years ago, but I had always heard the director’s name in conjunction with high praise for her work. Often foremost among those cited as her masterpieces is Beau Travail, a 1999 film loosely based on the (infamously unfinished) Herman Melville novel Billy Budd. And the people are right! Beau Travail is a ballet, a very simple story that plays out slowly over long tracking shots of desert topography and portraiture of stoic, unchanging faces, with very little dialogue. Instead, the narrative is composed almost entirely of internal monologue of Adjutant-Chef Galoup (Denis Lavant), as he recalls the last days he spent in Djibouti overseeing a division of the French Foreign Legion there, and the mistake that cost him his career. 

I’m going to relate to you the whole plot in this paragraph, because that’s not what’s important here, and there’s not much to it, really. In the desert, Galoup oversees a group of about fifteen Legionnaires. He has a heroic worship of his own superior, Commandant Bruno Forestier (Michel Subor), which may verge on the romantic. Galoup’s life takes a turn with the arrival of Gilles Sentain, a new young Legionnaire. Galoup takes an instant dislike to the newest member of the team, which is exacerbated when he perceives that Forestier has a fondness for Sentain. While in the field at an abandoned barracks, Galoup goads Sentain into striking him by excessively punishing another Legionnaire and kicking a canteen out of Sentain’s hands when the boy attempts to give water to the man being punished. Sentain’s own disciplinary action takes the form of being stranded in the desert and forced to walk back to camp, but Sentain’s compass has been tampered with, and he becomes lost and apparently dies. Although most assume that Sentain simply deserted, a common practice among Legionnaires, Forestier nonetheless sends Galoup back to France to face court martial and dismissal for his actions; back in Marseille, Galoup recollects the events that we have just witnessed while demonstrating that he cannot shake the habits of a soldier, and the film ends ambiguously as Galoup dances alone in an empty nightclub. 

Beau Travail is a film about ambiguity. We know next to nothing about Galoup’s past, so everything that we learn about him is delivered through his narration, which is clearly not always reliable. Discussing his relationship with Forestier first, it’s clear that Galoup is, or at least was, in love with him at some point in time, but my interpretation is that there probably was some kind of sexual relationship in the past in which Galoup was more emotionally invested. He narrates that the commandant never confided in him, but he does so while lovingly coaxing a memento: a bracelet inscribed Bruno. This aligns with my interpretation of the scene between Forestier and Sentain while the latter is on night watch (one of very few scenes in which Galoup is not present to witness what is otherwise a fairly straightforward first-person perspective on his part). Forestier seems flirty with the twenty-two-year-old and beautiful Sentain, from which I infer that Forestier occasionally latches onto young and handsome recruits, with Galoup having been one of his previous conquests/victims, with Galoup still harboring feelings for the commandant. 

None of this is explicit, however, and there’s a great deal left up to interpretation. Their relationship could very easily be the purely professional one that we actually witness onscreen, and it’s entirely possible that the scene in which Forestier coyly interacts with Sentain happened entirely in Galoup’s imagination. The departure from the “Galoup’s perspective” format could be implying this; even though he isn’t present in the scene, this is still his story, it’s just one that’s created by him rather than one that is being recalled. That’s another level of the film’s ambiguity, as much of it plays out as if what we’re seeing is the truth while what we’re hearing are Galoup’s internal rationalizations and judgments. In nothing that we see does Sentain do anything to earn Galoup’s scorn, we are merely told that Sentain was inordinately popular with the other Legionnaires, and we are told that Sentain goads Galoup. Yet there are other large sections of the film in which what we’re seeing feels more representational, most notably the various choreographed exercises that the Legionnaires do, glistening beneath the hot African sun. They are more dance than training, and there’s one sequence in which the group is doing a series of stretches which ends with all of them in a position that makes them appear dead, the camera winding about slowly to ensure we see the entire squad in a synchronized death pose. Are these scenes “real”? Why does Galoup go out one night in his uniform but is in his all-black civvies the next morning when he encounters the other Legionnaires? The reality being conveyed here isn’t important, the truth is, at least as far as what’s true for Galoup. 

As we catch up narratively to Galoup back home in Marseille, we see that the man may leave the military but the military does not leave the man. He irons his civilian clothing to a perfectly crisp press and in the penultimate scene makes his bed with the precision of man who’s faced inspection. Once this is complete, he sets his pistol next to the bed and lies down on it, the camera passing over his chest tattoo which reads “”Sert la bonne cause et meurt” (“Serve the good cause and die”) before finally closing in on a pulsing vein in his bicep that feels ominous, as if we are waiting for that movement to stop. Instead, the film cuts to Galoup in a nightclub. We know that he’s alone as he stands before a wall of diamond shaped mirrors, beveled at the edges, which we’ve seen a few times throughout the film, as through starts and fits, he dances alone to “Rhythm of the Night.” I thought that the mirrored wall was in the club in Djibouti, which would imply that this is a dream sequence, but is it? Or does Galoup just fill in the details with the familiar when his memory fails him? Did he kill himself, or is he finally just loosening up? I couldn’t tell you; I can only convey my interpretation, and it would be better for you to find this one and let it wash over you so that you can make your own judgments. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Quadrophenia (1979)

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I’ve never fully understood where Quadrophenia fits in the grand rock ‘n’ roll continuum. A love-letter to the Mod craze among UK rockers in the 1960s, it was made in a time when that fad’s clean-cut, tailored look had already been nostalgically reclaimed by British punk acts like The Damned. As a result, it’s difficult to tell whether some of the jerky, pogo-style dance moves the Mod kids pull in the film are period-accurate to 1960s rock shows, or if the punks filling out the crowd scenes were bringing some contemporary energy to the production that blurred those temporal boundaries. It’s just as likely the teenage reprobates of both eras happened to dance like that because they were on the same drugs—namely, a combination of cheap beer & stolen amphetamines—so it’s an impossible distinction to make. The project was strangely out of sync with itself since the point of conception, though, considering that it’s a bloated stadium-rock opera adapted from a concept album by The Who at their most overwrought, but it’s set in a time when The Who were a definitive force of ramshackle, no-frills rock ‘n’ roll. One of the most iconic scenes in the film features a Mods-only house party in which the entire crowd erupts into chaos when someone spins The Who’s proto-punk classic “My Generation” on the turntable, which is in disorienting aural contrast to the sleepier, sappier Who tunes that score the soundtrack proper. It’s a picture entirely out of time, evenly split between its setting and the era when it was made. That usually is the case with period pieces, but the ever-evolving trends & deviations of rock ‘n’ roll just makes the dissonance ring even louder than usual.

Perusing the extra features of the Criterion DVD copy of Quadrophenia I recently found at a Public Library liquidation sale, it seems that being out-of-sync with current rock ‘n’ roll trends was inherent to the Mod subculture from the start. Distinguished by their tailored suits, their rejection of early-50s rock ‘n’ roll, and their choice to ride motorized scooters instead of roadster motorbikes, Mods were in direct, violent opposition with the macho, leather-jacketed rockers that kept older rock traditions alive in the years before glam & punk changed everything. In addition to the usual talking-head interviews with the filmmakers, the Criterion discs include several French television news reports about these violent clashes, justifying the film’s third-act, beachside gang war with extratextual evidence that the two subcultures’ rumble was relatively credible to real-life events. However, what struck me most about those news reports was the culturally scattered, postmodern nature of their very existence. Here we have archived broadcasts from French journalists who are fascinated with the hard-edged lifestyle of British teens whose obsession with Italian fashion has spawned a newly mutated subspecies of American rock ‘n’ roll. The French reporters land a few zingers against Mod culture as a “new dandyism” that contextualizes it within older traditions of British counterculture. The postmodern multi-nationality of the phenomenon added an entirely new layer to rock ‘n’ roll cultural identity, though, whereas the motorcycle-riding rockers that the Mods clashed against were only one layer deep, idolizing American rock & fashion from earlier decades.

Appropriately, the strung-out protagonist who guides our tour through the Mods vs Rockers moment of the then-recent past is, himself, out of sync with the world around him. Phil Daniels stars as Jimmy Cooper, a pill-popping teenage Mod who can barely hold onto his entry-level mailroom job because he spends all of his nights sweating through his suits and jumping around to rock ‘n’ roll music with his dirtbag friends. Jimmy is constantly on the search for drugs he cannot find and cannot afford. He’s constantly crushing on a girl who’s only looking for a bit of fun, while constantly ignoring the flirtations of the other girl who actually wants him back. His desperation for Mod-scene notoriety (mostly so he can land his dream girl) only manifests in useless acts of teenage rebellion, like dragging his scooter through more uptight Brits’ flowerbeds, until he’s really given a chance to shine at a town-wide gang fight with rockers that ends in mass arrest. Only, when he’s released from jail, he’s found that his moment of fame was fleeting, his dream girl has already moved on, and the drugs are starting to weigh heavily on his fragile, hormone-addled psyche. In an early, telling scene he has a loud argument about music tastes with a rocker at the local baths (heads up for anyone who’d like to catch a glimpse of a young Ray Winstone’s cock & balls) that ends with the opposing Mod & rocker realizing that they were childhood friends, and there’s no substantial difference between them once stripped of their respective paraphernalia. The tragedy of the film is that Jimmy wants that subcultural distinction to signify a substantial difference between them; he relies on Mod-culture insignia to give his days & persona meaning, only to inevitably find it another empty frivolity, just like everything else in life.

Of course, Quadrophenia itself became a cultural touchstone to be disseminated in the great rock ‘n’ roll diaspora. The reviews & marketing for Jon Moritsugu’s 1994 punk-scene whatsit Mod Fuck Explosion reference West Side Story as the source of inspiration for its fictional gang war, but since the gangs in those films are the titular scooter-riding Mods vs. motorcycle-riding rock ‘n’ rollers, it’s a lot more likely Mortisugu was pulling directly (and cheekily) from The Who’s rock opera. So, there you have a snotty 90s-punk reiteration of a 70s-punk echo of a 60s-rock fad that split from 50s-rocker roots. It’s an out-of-sync rock cinema tradition you’ll find in other beloved period pieces like American Graffiti, Velvet Goldmine, and 24 Hour Party People — all precariously balanced between the eras they depict and the eras in which they were made. If there’s anything positive to glean from that temporal precarity, it’s the overall sense that rock ‘n’ roll never dies; it just tries on different silly outfits from time to time. The Mods’ outfits just happened to be sillier than most. I mean, who wears a tailored suit to a punk show?

-Brandon Ledet

Vision Quest (1985)

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The 1985 high school sports drama Vision Quest has exactly one attention-grabbing detail that argues for its continued cultural relevance four decades later: a mid-film Madonna concert. About halfway through his rise-to-local-notoriety story, the film’s high school wrestling hero (Matthew Modine) meets with his age-inappropriate romantic crush (Linda Florentino) at a dive bar where Madonna happens to be performing to a small crowd as if she were a punk act and not, in fact, an international pop star. At the time of casting & filming, Madonna was just one of many 80s pop acts included on the soundtrack to signal hip, with-it tastes to the teenage target demo: Journey, Dio, Berlin, Tangerine Dream, etc. By the time Vision Quest hit theaters, however, Madonna’s fame had exploded, and she was already a generational style-icon, prompting the film to be marketed under the alternate title Crazy for You in multiple countries outside the US. Italian distributors even featured her image on the retitled film’s poster, despite her commanding only two minutes or so of onscreen performance time. Madonna sings two songs in that brief sequence: a godawful tune I’ve never heard before called “Gambler” and the semi-titular hit “Crazy for You,” which later replays anytime the romantically conflicted wrestler gets in his feelings. Still, it was the notoriously cinephilic pop star’s first motion-picture appearance, which does afford it a lasting cultural significance.

Madonna aside, it’s worth noting that Vision Quest is a very good movie. It may walk & talk like a corny, cliché sports drama, but it finds surprising complexity & nuance in every character beat that elevates it above formulaic tripe. Modine’s troubled-young-man protagonist might think he’s struggling to get his body in shape to become a legendary high school wrestler, but he’s really struggling to get his mind in shape so that he doesn’t become a bully with an eating disorder. The 18-year-old kid is caught between two all-consuming pursuits: cutting weight so he can qualify to wrestle the county’s most intimidating competitor (the relatively unknown Frank Jasper) and losing his virginity to the 21-year-old drifter who’s temporarily staying in his family’s spare room (Florentino). Neither goal is especially high-stakes. The mutant teen he desperately wants to wrestle will lead to no championship trophies or financial scholarships; it’s an entirely arbitrary, self-imposed metric for greatness. Likewise, the mildly taboo Age Gap relationship he pursues with the drifter is not his only sexual or romantic opportunity (he is a sweetheart jock, after all), but he’s still so obsessed with the self-imposed goal that he starts to consider a professional career in gynecology so he can “be able to look inside women, to find the power they have over [him].” The only thing at stake in these pursuits are his own mind & body. Will he permanently harm himself in order to temporarily drop a couple weight classes for a wrestling match that ultimately doesn’t “matter”? Will he become a manipulative fuckboy in his frustrated yearning over the more sexually casual, mature drifter? These are not world-changing consequences, but they are life-changing ones.

As with all great genre films, it’s not what happens in Vision Quest that makes it stand out from its easiest comparisons; its greatness is all in the delivery. Modine does a great job playing a friendly, ambitious young man who’s in danger of becoming a dipshit if he allows his ambitions to overpower his friendliness. Most of his dialogue is delivered as shy muttering, which makes him a more convincingly authentic Movie Teen than most. Florentino conveys a laidback, detached sultriness as the (relatively) Older Woman archetype, a quality that her younger lover provocatively describes as exemplifying everything he likes about girls and everything he likes about guys. Even all of the obligatory gay-panic moments required of an 80s teen drama about male wrestlers are handled with surprising nuance & complexity, with Modine only describing himself feeling “a little freaked” by homosexual advances, not violently furious. More importantly, his older, grizzled coworker in a small hotel’s room service kitchen (J.C. Quinn) delivers a convincing argument that the climactic wrestling match does serve a greater communal purpose outside its importance to the teen’s self-worth. He describes sports as a divine transcendence of the human form, arguing that when an athlete can “lift himself, and the rest of us sad-assed human beings, up to a better place to be, if only for a minute […] it’s pretty goddamn glorious.” It’s such a great speech about the communal ritual of Sports that it doesn’t matter that the film ends on a hack freeze-frame image of the wrestler’s moment of personal triumph (or that Madonna’s prominence on the poster is a lie). It’s a conventional story told with great emotional impact.

-Brandon Ledet 

The Unbelievable Truth (1989)

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Hal Hartley’s The Unbelievable Truth is an interesting picture. Robert Burke plays Josh Hutton, a man who returns to his hometown after serving a prison sentence. The truth of what actually happened in the past is something that the film builds to while we in the audience hear various different versions of events passed around as gossip, but all retellings place the blame on Josh for the deaths of his girlfriend and her father. Said deceased are survived only by a young woman named Pearl (Julia McNeal), who works as a waitress in a diner alongside Jane (Edie Falco). Pearl is friends with our other lead, Audry (frequent Hartley collaborator Adrienne Shelly), a high school senior full of relatable angst about the presumed imminent end of the world in nuclear fire; as she says, “the human race never invented anything that it didn’t use.” This existential dread is a counterpoint to the Gen-X apathy of her peers, other than Pearl, whose own childhood tragedies have given her a resilience that tempers her. Josh reappears in town and quickly gets a job working for Audry’s mechanic father Vic (Christopher Cooke), who is frequently at odds with his daughter about her plans for the future. She’s been accepted to Harvard, but she and Vic constantly bargain over whether she will attend that university or the local community college, or if she will study literature or broadcasting, and what promises Vic has to make in order to get her to compromise. 

Audry and Josh meet and there is an immediate connection. Both are separated from the community around them, with her as the philosophically inclined old soul and him as the misunderstood loner with a troubled past who loves reading about history. At her graduation party, Vic is talked into paying for a portfolio of photographs for Audry by an agent, and although this initially seems to be nothing but a con, Audry finds work quickly and often. She’s upset that Josh didn’t come to the party, but she and Pearl spend some time together and Pearl admits that she thinks Josh is a nice man despite her family’s history with him and gives Audry the go-ahead to pursue him. Josh, for his part, lives ascetically, dressing all in black like Johnny Cash when he’s not in his mechanic overalls, living in his father’s abandoned house, and abstaining from drinking. This results in him being compared to a member of the cloth multiple times, as his celibacy prompts fellow mechanic Mike (Mark Bailey) to ask him, aghast, “like a priest?” and still later, when Josh asks that Audry not call him “Mr. Hutton,” she counters that she feels like she should call him “Reverend.” Vic isn’t happy to learn about this budding romance and forbids the two from seeing each other, once again bargaining with her about her future and what he’s willing to pay for and what he expects in return (namely that she’ll proceed to go to college as promised after her modeling gap year, and in return he won’t fire Josh). When Audry ends up in a jewelry ad that features her in the nude, Vic is convinced by Mike that Josh is reliable, and thus sends him into the city to bring Audry home. 

Released in 1989, The Unbelievable Truth reminds one in some ways of another alliteratively named director’s teenage romance angst film, Cameron Crowe’s Say Anything. Our main character is an oddball, like Lloyd Dobbler, except this time she’s a teenage girl, and what isolates her from her peer group is her resignation to her absolute faith that the apocalypse draws nigh. She’s precocious and bright, but her certainty about the uncertainty of the future means that the moment that she’s given the chance to live in the moment by making decent money as a model, she gets distracted from all of the gloom and doom; this is epitomized when she tells Pearl that she doesn’t even keep up with the news anymore. She’s the one who pursues Josh, not the other way around, and he really only seems to entertain the idea of entering into something romantic with her once she’s matured from experiencing more of the world outside of the suburbs that she’s always known. It’s unclear just how old Josh is, but Burke manages a way to convey both a world-weariness from his time in prison as well as a kind of innocence that he’s managed to maintain a hold on. Audry’s mother tells her a version of the story of Josh’s guilt and when Audry questions it, she says that the girl was too young to remember, but other dialogue implies that Audry was an infant at the time. One gets the feeling that more attention was paid to imagery than to those little details (or the dialogue for that matter). 

Another film that this one draws to mind is the 1990s Winona Ryder vehicle Reality Bites, as few other films lean so hard into Gen-X disaffection. The problem is that, when viewed by a modern audience, Reality Bites presents a main couple who both struggle with “selling out” into a lifestyle that is very appealing to anyone of the same age as the characters in every generation since. As Lindsay Ellis put it in one of her video essays years ago, everything is so much worse now, and, in the time since that essay’s release, there has been no further improvement in, uh, anything. Somehow, despite having the same sort of spoiled-for-choice opportunities, Audry remains likable and grounded, and we empathize with her early adulthood ennui and the altering states of being (a) panicked about preparing for a future and (b) resigned to the fact that there is no future. It may just be that Shelly is simply that likeable, like Lloyd Dobler and his boombox. 

Stylistically, there’s fun being had here. Having watched several of Hartley’s short films prior to sitting down to this one, I think I was prepared for this to be a film that would, in a scene in which Audry and Josh discuss their passions, be more focused on the images on screen than the dialogue. There are some great performances in scenes between the two, but they appear so sporadically, sprinkled in among scenes where the two monologue at each other with snippets of poetic-sounding but meaningless phrases. Half of these exist in order to provide a reason for some tableau that Hartley has created rather than because they provide further insight into character. This is a mixed bag. But Burke and Shelly sell it, even when it shouldn’t work, and that can also be owed to the presence of the mystery of Josh’s past helps keep the gears moving even when things start to feel like they’re running in place. 

Although nothing in the film made me laugh out loud, it has a decent sense of humor. Much of the repartee is pretty good, and it works with these actors. Cooke’s performance as Vic and all the ways that he deludes himself or gets talked into things make him more fun than his curmudgeonly nature would imply. There’s also a pretty good recurring bit where Audry’s ex-boyfriend Emmet (Gary Sauer) keeps physically attacking every man that he sees in Audry’s proximity, as he can’t believe that she would leave him for any other reason than that there is another man. There are interstitials to represent time passing (“A month, maybe two months later”) and as an interjection (“also,” “but”) which feel just irreverent enough for an indie like this. A lot of the jokes read as if they would come off a little too campy if the film weren’t taking itself mostly seriously. For example: 

Audry: Did you make love to Josh?”
Pearl: No, did you?
Audry: No.
Pearl: Why not?
Audry: I just got here.

On the page, there’s something about that which reads like a joke from Clue, but it’s delivered here in a way that elicits a smile but not quite a laugh. Perhaps the best bit, however, occurs when everyone converges on Josh’s house in the finale for various different reasons, converting the film into a bit of a farce for a while. Pearl has information that could help Josh, Audry has realized that Josh came to New York to look for her and has the wrong idea about her living situation, Vic seeks to confirm that Josh was able to get her back, and Mike is looking for Pearl. It’s fun, and the wrap-up from there is sweet. 

I’m not sure that I would recommend this to everyone. The back-and-forth can run on quite a bit sometimes, but it ultimately averages out to be a very lovely movie that will sit on a shelf in your mind and give you warm feelings for a long time to come. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Conformist (1970)

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When I think of movies about The Banality of Evil, I generally expect them to be a little, well, banal. The reason The Zone of Interest is such an effectively chilling picture, for instance, is that its visual patina and its editing rhythms are just as coldly impersonal as its Nazi ghouls. It’s framed as automated security-cam footage, documenting the domestic & bureaucratic rituals behind Nazi violence, while Holocaust victims ambiently scream in agony on the opposite side of the garden wall. Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1970 spy thriller The Conformist takes the opposite approach. The Italo-French co-production is mostly staged in cold, clinical spaces, but its minimalist mise-en-scène is more akin to the fine-art production design of Last Year at Marienbad than anything credibly bureaucratic. The women in its cast model gorgeous 1930s Euro fashions, while the men in their lives dress in full Old Hollywood noir costume, segmented by the graphic parallel lines of Venetian blinds. Driving cars are shot in a wide angle from street level, as if Bertolucci was the main inspiration for Beastie Boys music videos to follow. The rear-projection imagery of train rides are pure Old Hollywood magic, reaching more for pop-art abstraction than real-world novelty. There’s something outright perverse in making a movie about The Banality of Evil so aggressively stylish & beautiful. Somehow, though, that approach doesn’t even register as one of the top-five most perverse things about the picture.

If Bertolucci was trying to make a point by making his Banality of Evil treatise so achingly beautiful & cool (besides attempting to make a name for himself as an up-and-coming auteur), it’s that the Banality itself is contrary to basic human behavior. Our antihero protagonist Marcello Clerici (Jean-Louis Trintignant) is an undercover assassin struggling to complete his most recent mission because he falls in love with his target’s bisexual wife, likely because he recognizes a mutual queer sexuality in her that lingers in his own persona. However, as the title indicates, he spends his every waking moment suppressing anything about himself that could be read as morally deviant, mostly in response to the childhood trauma of being raised by mentally ill parents and being sexually assaulted by an adult stranger. Marcello volunteers to become an assassin-spy for Mussolini’s Italo-fascist regime, seeking to squash all moral deviancy in others’ behaviors instead of just focusing on his own. When a former professor & mentor (and current political target) accuses him of asserting his conformist moralism “through oppression,” he counters that he’s actually asserting it “through example,” which is so much stranger and more perverse. Fascists don’t usually buy into the restrictive morals they enforce on the masses, at least not behind closed doors. Clerici is the one true believer in fascist bullshit, seeking the ideal of normalcy in a world where it fundamentally can’t exist.

Clerici’s rigid, moralistic worldview is constantly subverted by the animalistic sexual desires & behaviors of every human being he comes into contact with, including himself. The main thrust of the story concerns a semi-requited love triangle with his friend-turned-target’s wife while she torments him by sexually pursuing his own wife, who is too blissfully ditzy to keep up with the dangerous game being played. The tensions & revelations of that sexual competition ultimately have no effect on his actions in the field, since he’s pathologically predisposed to do What He’s Supposed to Do. The only reason he married a woman he doesn’t love is because a man his age is supposed to be married. Likewise, there’s never really any question of whether he will follow through on violently betraying his former mentor; he loves following orders. The Conformist posits Evil Banality as a participatory choice.  It’s something that fascists consciously opt into, as opposed to getting swept up in the momentum of a political movement. Bertolucci undercuts any of the spy-thriller conventions of the story to instead dwell on how inhumanly strange that choice is, allowing editor Franco Arcalli to scramble the timeline with a disorienting, overlapping flashback structure. It’s ultimately a hyper-stylized character study of a deeply perverse man, one whose single-minded pursuit of normal human behavior makes him the most abnormal freak walking the planet. Meanwhile, everyone around him is just trying to enjoy a few orgasms before they die, which is the way things are supposed to be.

-Brandon Ledet

Imitation of Life (1959)

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Imitation of Life is a weird document. All That Heaven Allows lives and dies based upon your investment in the happiness of its lead character, and Written on the Wind is a narrative about a wealthy American family in slow decline, rent asunder by internal forces of jealousy, desperation for approval, and poor parental love; both are also shot in glorious Technicolor. Imitation of Life, on the other hand, was marketed in much the same way as Heaven, namely that it was supposedly a romantic picture about a widow finding love again, but that narrative is by far the least interesting thing about the film. What it turns out to be instead is an unexpectedly heartbreaking story about a family that is torn apart by societal forces that even an abundance of motherly love can’t overcome, with the emergence of a new theatre star as the supposed primary plot of the film while actually serving as the background to a much more interesting story. 

Lora Meredith (Lana Turner) loses her daughter, Susie, at Coney Island one day, then finds her in the company of another girl, Sarah Jane. Lora, delighted, meets who she first assumes is Sarah Jane’s nanny, Annie Johnson (Juanita Moore), but learns that Annie is actually Sarah Jane’s mother. Annie describes her late husband as having been “close to white” and that Sarah Jane takes after him, rather than Annie. Upon discovering that Annie and her daughter are essentially homeless, she takes them into her apartment, as there is an extra room off of the kitchen (a common feature of the time, as Lora is essentially putting them up in the maid’s quarters, and their placement there is not an accident). The supposed A-plot features Lora seeking to make it as a star onstage in the big city; she successfully bluffs her way into the office of talent agent Allen Loomis (Robert Alda) and gets an invitation to a party that same evening where all the movers and shakers will be. When it turns out that this is a prelude to a casting couch situation, she leaves in an understandable huff, although this is all forgiven when Loomis ends up becoming her agent regardless. He gets her an audition for the latest play by David Edwards (Dan O’Herlihy), and when she stands up to him about a scene not working as written, he’s likewise impressed with her moxy and gives her an even bigger part. This is counterposed with her budding romance with Steve Archer, a photographer whom she met that fateful day at the beach; he took a photo of the girls balancing an empty can on a sleeping man’s stomach that day and eventually sold it for use in advertisements for beer. (Incidentally, Steve is played by John Gavin, who you may remember as Marion Crane’s afternoon delight stud-muffin in Psycho; try not to let his character being named Sam Loomis there while his character here is romantic rivals with a different Loomis confuse you.) Steve and Lora grow closer until he finally proposes, but his insistence that she give up her career is a non-starter. 

All throughout, the film focuses on Annie and her relationship with her daughter, who is clearly struggling under the weight of her Black identity. When she and her mother first arrive at the Merediths’, Susie tries to give Sarah Jane her newest and most prized doll, which happens to be Black, causing Sarah Jane to resent the younger girl’s innocent insensitivity. When Annie is telling the story of Mary and Joseph’s trip to Bethlehem at Christmas time, Sarah Jane asks what color Jesus was. Lora tells her that Jesus is whatever color one imagines him to be, and Sarah Jane protests that this can’t be the case since they are being taught he was a real person. Finally, she says “Jesus was white. Like me.” Things really come to a head, however, when Annie comes to Sarah Jane’s school to bring her lunch and learns that her daughter has been passing as white among her peers and the teachers, and the realization among her classmates when they learn the truth bears out much of Sarah Jane’s fears about exposure and the mistreatment she can expect because of the racism of the society in which she lives. When I started that last sentence, when I got to the end of it, I had to rethink my initial plan to conclude that Sarah Jane is mistreated “because of the color of her skin,” because that’s exactly the opposite of what’s happening. Sarah Jane is being treated fairly because of her apparent whiteness, and injustice and unfairness enters into the equation when a white supremacist society inexorably forces its way into these dynamics. Annie laments that her heart breaks because she can’t explain to the daughter that she adores why reality is so unfair, because Sarah Jane was “born to be hurt” by the world because of no fault of her own. 

Things are even worse for Sarah Jane when there’s a time jump from 1947 to 1958, the passage of time represented by continuously superimposed images of Lora’s name on various marquees and the accompanying year. Her newfound wealth has afforded them a manse in the countryside, where Annie and Sarah Jane (Susan Kohner) continue to live with Lora and Susie (Sandra Dee). It’s unclear what exactly Annie’s role in this new house is, as there are other servants now. A charitable read of the situation is that Lora and Annie have essentially been coparenting both of the girls since Annie and her daughter first came into the Meredith household, with Lora in the breadwinner role and Annie as the housewife, but even if that’s what’s happening here, it ignores all of the power dynamics at play. It’s also clear that Lora has been paying Annie in addition to housing her, as Annie mentions having saved up enough to send Sarah Jane to college. I’m not sure, but how you read this situation can have a lot of bearing on how you feel about its participants. If we choose to read Annie as co-head of household, as she’s mostly treated, then her oversight of the house and meals feels a little funny but isn’t ultimately demeaning. If we choose to read that the relationship between Annie and Lora has changed from being two women trying to make it in the big city together to one that feels familial but is nonetheless employer-employee, then Lora becomes much less sympathetic. My ultimate reading boils down to how Lora reacts when the two are parted by death, and that although she truly loved Annie and considered her a partner in life and not a servant, she nonetheless found herself occasionally acting in the patronizing manner of the era despite her affection and devotion. 

Sarah Jane, for her part, is having a rough go of things, continuing to seek inroads to the life of privilege to which she feels entitled and which her perceived whiteness gives her just enough ingress to see how things are on the other side. This reaches a point of harrowing violence, when she goes to meet up with the boy who’s talked about running away together and getting married, only to find him sullen and unable to look her directly in the eye. He demands to know if what he’s learned—that Annie is her mother and that Sarah Jane is Black—is true. Sarah Jane denies it, but he nonetheless beats her savagely. Meanwhile, she’s having to deal with all of Susie’s stories about finishing school and watching her not-quite-sister get a pony as a graduation gift; to get out, she claims to be working at the NYC library, but Annie discovers she is actually working as a sort of sexy lounge singer where men leer at her, and when Annie’s appearance once again outs her as non-white, she loses the job. This prompts her to flee even further, finally ending up as a chorus girl out west, but when Annie comes to see her one last time, she tells Sarah Jane that she has come to say that she won’t chase her anymore, and that she loves her daughter enough to accept her choices. When one of the other chorus girls finds them together, Annie pretends to be no more than Sarah Jane’s old nanny in order to preserve her daughter’s concealment of her true identity. 

It’s this that serves as the film’s climax. Sure, there are other things going on. Lora and Susie are distant because Lora always put her career first. Steve re-enters the picture, and he and Lora make plans to travel together and get to know one another again that she immediately reneges upon when offered a part in a new film from an Italian art director. Steve keeps Susie busy that summer and she falls madly in love with him (who wouldn’t?). Susie tells her mother to just be with Steve, and they get together. All seems kind of rote and pale in comparison to what’s happening with Annie, doesn’t it? That’s clearly intentional, and even though there’s a kind of going-through-the-motions energy of everything happening with the Merediths, I was never bored by any of it. Everything happening with Annie just overpowers it, as she ultimately succumbs to (perhaps literally) a broken heart from losing her daughter, spiritually if not literally. Her funeral service features a performance of “Trouble of the World” from Mahalia Jackson, and it’s beautiful. 

In many ways, this is one of director Douglas Sirk’s finest hours. Annie’s story is beautiful, thoughtful, and tender, while Lora’s is perfectly serviceable. It may be that the DVD I saw of this didn’t have a very colorful transfer, but where this one is lacking is in its visual panache. You can almost feel the chill of the blue snow in All that Heaven Allows, but the colors here seem muted, although that may be due to the fact that this was a Eastmancolor production, not a Technicolor one. Susie’s room in the country manse stands out for this reason, as her bubblegum pink room should really pop, but it feels rather dull. Infamously, a publicity stunt surrounding this film was that half of its two-million-dollar budget was spent entirely on Lana Turner’s wardrobe, and while there are many fine pieces, it feels like they’re lacking in some razzle dazzle that one of Sirk’s other pictures would have more effectively conveyed. There are also some places where the narrative seams are less than flush. For instance, the extended sequence of Sarah Jane doing a musical number at the NYC club seems to be a leftover sequence from when the film was conceived as a musical. Both Steve (demanding that Lora forsake the stage in 1947) and Susie (realizing that her infatuation with Steve is childish and relinquishing her mother of any guilt in pursuing him in 1958) make decisions that feel more narratively convenient than true to the characters. Nonetheless, this one is definitely a contender for Sirk’s greatest work.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Armand (2025)

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There is currently an American remake of Andrei Żuławski’s monstrous divorce meltdown Possession in the works, to be directed by Smile‘s Parker Finn and produced by Robert Pattinson. The project is both catastrophically misguided and totally understandable. Just a decade ago, it was difficult to access the 1981 political psych thriller through any official, legal means, which afforded it a kind of cult-curio prestige. The full-bodied mania of Isabelle Adjani’s performance in out-of-context clips in which she writhes in a tunnel while smashing her groceries against the concrete wall got passed around the internet enough that it gradually became a staple of online film culture, though, initiated by its copyright-infringing use in the Crystal Castles music video for “Plague.” A few expensive physical-media reissues & short streaming-platform stints later, and Possession is now an official part of the canon. There’s even enough evidence to argue that Adjani’s interpretive-dance tunnel freakout is the most influential movie scene of the current moment. It was cited as direct inspiration for at least three of last year’s biggest horror-heroine performances (Nosferatu, Immaculate, The First Omen), and now some poor actress will be tasked with retracing Adjani’s exact steps in a mainstream remake removed from its original cultural & political context — the final stage in legitimizing any once-subversive piece of art.

Adjani’s interpretive-dance freakout is now so cinematically ubiquitous that it’s influencing procedural dramas about tense parent-teacher conferences, not just horror flicks. The Norwegian film Armand is mostly structured as a stage play in a single primary school classroom wherein two couples argue about a physical altercation between their 6-year-old sons, as mediated by a timid schoolteacher and her hard-nosed administrative higher-ups. In the initial telling of the story, the titular child Armand is accused of having sexually assaulted his playmate in a school bathroom, an event that neither (unseen) child has the full vocabulary to communicate to the confused, horrified adults. Every parent and school employee has a hidden, selfish agenda in how they react to this crisis, which is slowly teased out in a web of secrets & resentments that link the two families far beyond the transgression they’re currently debating. It’s Armand’s mother Elizabeth who’s afforded the most complex internal life, though, as performed by Renate “Worst Person in the World” Reinsve. As the intensity of the parent-teacher conference escalates, she has a full psychotic breakdown that destroys all decorum by releasing something monstrously inhuman in the room, transforming a small-scale drama into a full-blown psych thriller merely by laughing & crying with violent intensity at unpredictable intervals. Armand might have gotten the title, but the movie is Elizabeth’s story.

It’s when Elizabeth steps into the school’s hallways & empty classrooms that the movie goes full Possession. The whispered rumors that spiral out of that closed-door meeting haunt her like vengeful ghosts as they echo off of every hard surface to the point of supernatural cacophony. Her public-figure role as a semi-famous actress combines with the scrutiny of her mothering technique to give her the feeling of constantly being pawed at from every direction, which is literalized by the imagined hands of fellow parents roughly groping her flesh in interpretive dance. The proceedings are coldly clerical in nature, but there’s an erotic violence to the tone that reverberates throughout the building, frequently turning moments of heated intimacy into physical abuse as parents & staff siphon each other off into empty rooms. Whether abuse is learned or inherited and whether you can ever fully separate truth from spin provide the film a thematic justification for what’s mostly just an excuse to rattle the audience, often through unexpected nosebleeds, fire alarms, and thundercracks. First-time director Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel is playing a game of tonal precarity here, unlocking something intangibly evil in a parent-teacher conference the way Possession unlocks something intangibly evil in a simple act of adultery or, more notably, a trip to the grocer. My comparing Reinsve to Adjani is probably doing her performance no favors, but she does hold her own among other recent actresses who’ve explicitly stated that’s where they’re drawing their inspo.

It’s entirely possible that no one making Armand had Possession in mind during production. As the nepo-grandbaby of Ingmar Bergman & Liv Ullman, Tøndel has plenty of under-the-surface menace to pull from just within his own family’s cinematic legacy. Where & when he chooses to break from reality in this psychological meltdown felt Possession adjacent to me, though, especially by the time the cast breaks into violent, abstract dance. By default, it’s a more compelling, interpretive use of Possession’s influence than any straight-forward Hollywood remake could be, regardless of whether the influence was conscious. The influence is unavoidable right now, but that doesn’t mean you can’t do something new with it.

-Brandon Ledet

I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing (1987)

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Swampflix just hit its tenth anniversary as a movie blog, which was already a dead medium when we started posting reviews on the site in January of 2015.  The longer I stick with this project the more I question what, exactly, I’m getting out of it, which is a question likely best left unanswered.  There are some obvious, tangible benefits that come with time.  I can look back to the earliest writing & illustrations published on this site ten years ago and have confidence that my basic skills have improved with practice (even though the early drawings are still in active rotations, like the camera pictured above).  It’s also beneficial to have an ongoing log of the movies and thoughts that have passed through my brain in that time, since the majority of that memory would be lost otherwise.  Not least of all, Swampflix has become a social ritual for me, especially as the entirety of the crew has been assimilated into weekly podcast recordings, so that my friends are routinely obligated to talk to me about my personal favorite small-talk subject: movies.  The grand Swampflix project is one of self-fulfillment, operated entirely at a monetary loss, so the question is more about what I get out of publishing the site for public view and less about what I get out of it as a personal hobby.

That difference between internal and external fulfillment in a long-term amateur art project is one of the major tensions at the core of Patricia Rozema’s coming-of-middle-age drama I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing.  Our aimless, thirtysomething protagonist, Polly, is unsure of who she is and what she wants out of life.  She does not care about what she does for work, getting by on office temp jobs until she stumbles into a sweet regular gig assisting at a hip Toronto art gallery.  She’s disconnected from her own sexual desire, just now discovering in her thirties that she’s attracted to women, thanks to the magnetic allure of that gallery’s erudite curator, Gabrielle.  The only thing Polly knows for sure is that she loves taking photographs, and she’s transformed her one-bedroom apartment into an impromptu art gallery of its own, carpeting the walls with photos she’s taken of images that make her happy – mostly urban architecture & candid portraiture.  Only, her heart is broken when she anonymously submits these photographs for her employer’s consideration and is eviscerated by dismissive critiques that the artist behind them represents “the trite made flesh.”  Before that unknowing betrayal, her photography hobby was the one thing that Polly found personally fulfilling in life.  Hearing a negative, outside opinion on her work breaks the spell, and she’s left with little to live for, especially since she’s betrayed by the one person she looks up to.

I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing finds immense beauty in “the trite,” the twee, the quirky.  Polly is a kind of Holy Fool archetype who makes great art (to the audience’s eye, anyway) simply by amusing herself with a camera.  Gabrielle is her Art World foil: a cynical materialist who only values art based on its marketability and its relevance to hip New Yorkers’ tastes, which plays as a joke on Torontonian insecurities.  Their ideological clash escalates when Gabrielle starts passing off widely beloved “golden” paintings created by her lover, Mary, as her own original work for marketing purposes, which causes Polly to lose even more respect for her idol.  Meanwhile, Polly goes on fantastic mental adventures while developing prints in her dark room, living a true artist’s inner life in an over-imaginative dream space of her own making while the more successful Art World team of Gabrielle & Mary waste their time orchestrating much pettier, more lucrative schemes.  It’s the same volatile mixture of authentic authorship debates and adventures in self-fulfilling sensuality that Rozema pushed to a further extreme in her follow-up film White Room, except this time it’s framed as a quirky indie romcom instead of a Hitchcockian voyeur thriller.

I’ve only seen a couple of Rozema’s films so far, but she has a distinct eye for fairy tale visuals and an ear for dreamworld tones that make for singular work that could’ve been made by no one else, despite the fact that she’s often shooting commercial-grade video art in a major Canadian city.  Still, the major triumph of I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing is Sheila McCarthy’s adorably insecure performance as Polly.  McCarthy approximates what it would be like if the Jim Henson Creature Shop captured the spirit of Ann Magnuson & Pee-wee Herman in a single Muppet.  She’s simultaneously a dorky, overgrown child who can’t get through a business lunch at a sushi restaurant without giving herself a milk mustache and the chicest person in every room she enters, largely thanks to her total lack of self-awareness.  She might not know what to do with any appendage of her body in any social scenario, but she out-cools all of the Art World poseurs who turn their noses up at her.  Polly is proof that the “Adulting!” brand of stunted maturity is not unique to Millennials as a generation, since Rozema’s film was produced when we were mere babies.  It’s also evidence that the main reason so many of us are Like That (useless but adorably dorky) is that we’re only suited to be making art for our own pleasure but living in a world that requires us to make money for survival.  I can say this for certain: Swampflix would improve greatly if I didn’t spend so much of my time working for a paycheck elsewhere.  It would likely also improve if I turned this hobby into my paycheck, but I assume that would zap all of the fun & self-fulfillment out of it, so no thanks.

-Brandon Ledet