drama

Evil Does Not Exist (2024)

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My number one movie of last year, La vaca que cantó una canción hacia el futuro, was advertised at my local arthouse theater with a quote calling the film an “eco-fable,” a term I had theretofore been unfamiliar with. When Aku wa Sonzai Shinai, or Evil Does Not Exist, was advertised at the same earlier this year, there was another quote in their trailer referring to it using the same neogenre epithet. I was excited by this, but missed the window in which it was playing and had to wait for other means to view it to come around. 

The film primarily concerns a widower named Takumi (Hitoshi Omika), who lives in the rural mountain village of Mizubiki, with his daughter, Hana. Takumi is a vital member of the community as a performer of local odd jobs, like collecting and transporting water directly from a mountain stream to a cafe in town that is noted for its exceptional udon. He lives in a state of constant distraction caused by the grief of the loss of his wife, not necessarily reliable but relied upon, with the fact that he often forgets to pick his daughter up from school being established early on. Two representatives from a glamping development project that is set to begin construction near Mizubiki arrive in town from Tokyo, and a polite-but-tense interaction ensues. Initially, the male representative, Takahashi (Ryuji Kosaka), comes off as condescending while his partner Mayuzumi (Ayaka Shibutani) is more receptive to the locals’ concerns. These include but are not limited to: the placement of the glamping site’s septic tank will result in runoff that will enter the water table for the village, that the location is part of the migration area of local deer, that the lack of 24-hour on-site management opens up the possibility of guests starting campfires that result in major forest fires. By the end, even Takahashi recognizes that the concerns of the villagers are far from trivial, but his and Mayuzumi’s efforts to have all issues addressed are rebuffed by their upper management in Tokyo, who concede on the issue of 24-hour support but not moving the septic tank, and who recommend hiring Takumi to act as the caretaker of the site. As he and Mayuzumi return to Mizubiki to discuss this with Takumi, Takahashi confesses that he’s grown tired of this, as he entered the industry as an entertainment agent and feels that his work has moved him into places that he finds morally questionable and for which he is largely unsuited; he’s even considering applying for the caretaker position himself. He can barely keep from repeating this to Takumi shortly after they arrive, and the local man takes the two on his rounds, before realizing that he’s forgotten to pick up his daughter from school yet again, although this time, she’s not home when he gets there. 

The title is incorrect, of course. Evil does exist, it simply rarely announces itself and is good at obfuscation. When Takahashi and Mayuzumi’s boss refuses to consider the possibility of finding some other way to address the septic tank issue at the proposed glamping site, he does so with a tense and polite smile that demonstrates that he’s only willing to concede on the issue of having a caretaker because it’s possible to do it without any additional funding. He says that they’ll just have to cut overall staff. On the issue of making sure that the precise natural resource that forms the most delicate, intricate part of the experience that the company is selling is threatened, he is unmovable. Comically underscoring his point, he presents as evidence a “stocks go up” style graph that says merely that the glamping industry exists and is profitable. None of this is seen by him as “evil,” merely as him fulfilling his position in a capitalist hierarchy. Nonetheless, each of his decisions has a direct effect on the health of a village of people “downstream.” That is the nature of evil, that it’s all a series of selfish decisions that each person justifies to oneself, snowballing downhill and getting larger and more harmful as it goes. No person’s individual choices are evil in their own hearts, but it does exist. 

Unfortunately, this film lacks the clarity and cohesion of La vaca que cantó. That film dove hard into its magical realism, while this one is straightforwardly realistic, at least until its final minutes, which are narratively ambiguous to the point of potential frustration. I have a feeling that most people will be turned off by the film’s pace, which one could describe as “meditative” or “glacial,” depending upon how much patience you’re willing to lend it. Evil Does Not Exist spends a lot of time in observation of the peaceful stillness of its setting, as it is filled with long and loving shots of people travelling through the picturesque beauty of the forests and mountains that fill virtually every frame of the film. To be frank, I found this one taxing my patience, and I have a lot more patience for these kinds of slow, sprawling pastorals than most. It could be argued that it’s a necessary part of the package for interpretation of this as a text, but the parts of the film in which something does happen are electric, even when it’s something that’s as objectively uninteresting as a town hall meeting in which no one ever raises their voice. I can see what’s being done here, by making the banality of real estate development and the resultant community conflict more interesting by juxtaposing it against a landscape which is beautiful but also harsh and empty – that is, not in the least bit escapist. However, that doesn’t make the movie a more enjoyable experience for me. 

What I did like was the density of the narrative that exists. When we first meet Takahashi, he seems like just another stuffed shirt who’s been sent solely in order to make it appear that his employing corporation checked all the boxes needed to get nominal approval from the local community. And that’s exactly what he is, but he does soften up a bit after hearing from the people of Mizubiki. Unfortunately, he learns exactly the wrong thing from this, as he immediately thinks that he would be best suited for the caretaker position, and he’s exhilarated and energized when Takumi allows him to chop a single log and assist with the collection of springwater for the udon restaurant. Earlier in the film, one of the local women asks for a clarification on what “glamping” is, and settles for the definition that the new development will be a “camping themed hotel.” Takahashi, despite rejecting his company because of their treatment of the people of the village, completely buys into the exact thing that they are selling. That’s one of the more interesting insights that the movie plays with. One of my other favorite moments is when Takumi refers to his grandparents as “settlers,” and notes that even the people who already reside there are responsible for “deform[ing]” the nature that exists there to some extent. The issue is not so straightforward as “glamping bad,” but that there’s no action without reaction. I like all of that quite a lot. Unfortunately, I just can’t find it in my heart to love this one as much as I wish I did. I see why it is the way that it is, but I just can’t bring myself to love it.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Nickel Boys (2024)

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It has been heartbreaking to watch Barry Jenkins succumb to the Disney filmmaking machine, pouring years of his life & art into the lifeless, artless product of the studio’s “live-action” CG prequel to The Lion King.  Regardless of whether Jenkins’s Mufasa is any good, it’s undeniably a waste of the talented filmmaker’s time when compared to his previous critical hits Moonlight & If Beale Street Could Talk: two gorgeous, somber portraits of Black American life, as opposed to a pale, sickly sing-along starring computer-animated lions.  Anyone who’s mourning that loss and feeling nostalgic for The Old Jenkins is likely to find refuge in RaMel Ross’s Awards Season sweetheart Nickel Boys, which offers a more formally extreme version of Jenkins’s earlier triumphs.  As already evidenced in his own earlier, artsier documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening, Ross is a more challenging, experimental filmmaker than Jenkins, but the two directors share a fearless, formalist approach to Black portraiture and work well in tandem.  Nickel Boys softens a little of Hale County‘s narrative looseness in its distraction with other tools of filmmaking language, but it’s still a potentially alienating work with uncompromising politics.  Let’s just hope that its Oscars buzz doesn’t lead to Ross directing Moana 3 or Black Panther 4 over the next few years; the financial paycheck is never worth the artistic payoff.

The formal experiment in this case is in adapting a novel written from a 3rd-person POV into a 1st-person narrative film, putting the audience in the alternating minds & bodies of its two main characters.  Instead of taking a straight historical look at the recent abusive, racist past of boys’ reformatory schools in the American South, Ross walks you through the first-hand experience of being imprisoned there as a young, innocent victim of the system.  It’s like playing a 1st-person shooter video game except instead of committing acts of violence you walk into the wrong place at the wrong time, and your fate is locked into a one-way track you have no opportunity to break away from, which accounts for the experience of many young Black men in America.  The result is a clear, direct argument that the institution of American slavery continued well after the Civil War; it’s just now carried out through schoolyard & prison labor under the guise of punitive justice.  To his credit, Ross breaks away from the linear one-way-track structure of that political argument with intrusions of memory and glimpses of his protagonists’ future—which fully take over in the final, fragmentary montage that pulls the full scope of his story together—but the central conceit is having to suffer inside the two boys’ bodies & minds as if they were your own, fearful that you might not make it to the end credits without getting dumped into one of the school’s unmarked graves.

If you end up watching Nickel Boys at home instead of the theater, I recommend using headphones. A lot of attention has been paid to the 1st-person perspective of its imagery, but its sound design is just as intensely, complexly immersive.  I wish I had more to say about what it’s doing dramatically rather than formally, but the technical achievement of that sensory immersion can’t be dismissed.  If it has any narrative grace to it, it’s in the smaller, observational details that distract from his larger historical & political bullet points: focusing on the thread of a garment while news reports of a landmark Civil Rights event echo in the background, using the recurring image of a freshly picked orange to anchor the audience to the Floridian setting, throwing in a couple alligator jump scares to heighten the already tense experience of being a sensitive boy raised in a macho, militarized environment, etc.  I can’t say the dramatic exchanges between actors ever overpowered the visual & aural devices that Ross spent so much of his energy tinkering with; it plays more like a VR experience than a traditional narrative film.  Still, that’s more of an exciting, daring technical achievement than figuring out how to get a CG lion to mouth the words to a Lin Manuel-Miranda song or whatever Jenkins has been up to in his Disney Vault prison cell. 

-Brandon Ledet

FYC 2024: Difficult People

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This is not my time of year.  While every multiplex in town is overbooked with screenings of four-quadrant crowd-pleasers like Wicked: Part 1, Moana 2, and Gladiator 2, my e-mail inbox is overflowing with FYC screeners for the critical favs that premiered at festivals months ago but distributors have held back for optimal last-minute Oscar buzz.  Neither option is especially appealing to me, personally, as most of my favorite new releases tend to be the high-style, low-profile genre titles that quietly trickle into local arthouse cinemas during the first half of the year, playing to mostly empty rooms.  Still, I make an effort to catch up with what hipper, higher-minded critics single out as The Best Movies of the Year, mostly as an effort to stay informed but also somewhat as an effort to not waste my time & money on the corporate IP currently clogging up American marquees.  It’s during this holiday-season FYC ritual that I’m most often confronted with my most hated & feared cinematic enemies: Subtlety, Nuance, and Restraint.  It’s also when I watch the most capital-A Acting, since these tend to be projects greenlit & distributed with the intent of stirring up awards buzz for a particular performer on the poster.  If there’s any one theme to the trio of FYC screeners I happened to watch over Thanksgiving break, it’s that they were all easy-to-watch dramas about difficult-to-handle people, each highlighting the acting talents of their headlining performers by allowing them to get socially & emotionally messy onscreen without other cinematic distractions getting the way – petty details like dynamic, daring cinematography and editing, the art of the moving image.

If you’re ever in the mood to watch a movie that values acting over any other cinematic concern, you can always look to actors-turned-directors to scratch that itch.  Jesse Eisenberg’s second directorial work, A Real Pain, is a two-hander acting showcase for himself and screen partner Kieran Culkin, who are both good enough in the movie that it’s been in The Awards Conversation for almost a full year since it first premiered at Sundance.  Jesse Eisenberg stars as a Jesse Eisenberg type: a nervous New Yorker who can barely finish a conversational sentence without having a panic attack.  Kieran Culkin is his socially volatile cousin: a bi-polar timebomb who breaks every unspoken social convention imaginable while still managing to charm every stranger he meets.  Structurally, the film is a travel story about the cousins’ journey to Poland to reconnect with their Jewish heritage in the wake of their grandmother’s recent death, which leads to a lot of solemn sightseeing at major sites of The Holocaust.  From scene to scene, however, it functions as a darkly, uncomfortably funny comedy about two men who love each other very much but have incompatible mental illnesses that make it impossible for them to share a room.  No one wants to hear their Awards Season drama described as a breezy, 90min Sundance dramedy about The Holocaust, but that’s exactly the movie that Eisenberg made.  A Real Pain‘s saving grace, then, is the strength of the performances the two central actors deliver as absurdly difficult people.  Culkin’s social brashness and emotional volatility makes his difficulty more immediately apparent, but Eisenberg gives himself plenty of room to do his Nervous Fella schtick as much as possible.  It’s an anxious archetype that Culkin’s character aptly describes as “an awesome guy stuck inside the body of someone who’s always running late.”

Marielle Heller is another actor-turned-director who has made empathy for difficult characters a core tenet of her artistry, most successfully in Can You Ever Forgive Me? and The Diary of a Teenage Girl.  Her new adaptation of the Rachel Yoder novel Nightbitch doesn’t reach far beyond that search for empathetic cheerleading, though, and the movie is mostly a dud as a result.  Amy Adams stars as a visual artist who has put her creative pursuits aside to raise a child while her husband travels for work.  Spending weeks in isolation with only her young child for company, she loses her adult social skills and essentially goes feral, convincing herself that she is physically transforming into a dog.  Suppressing her artist’s spirit to play housewife breaks her brain, causing her to hallucinate monstrous canine hair, tail, and nipple growth in the mirror and to act out wildly in public (barking, stealing food off strangers’ plates, dressing her son in a leash, etc.).  Where her internal fantasy of motherhood bringing out her most animalistic traits ends and her external, real-life social misbehavior begins is intentionally kept vague, as Heller is more concerned with seeing the world through her protagonist’s color-blind eyes than with constructing genuine, heartfelt drama.  Nightbitch is conceptually amusing as a body-horror metaphor for how motherhood physically & mentally transforms you, but it’s pretty lackluster in execution, especially as a page-to-screen adaptation.  There are long stretches of narration in which Adams recites passages from Yoder’s book, as if Heller’s relationship with the material was more admiration than inspiration.  She’s so concerned with landing its political jabs about gendered, invisible domestic labor that she forgot to make its characters feel like real people, so the whole thing ends up hollow & phony no matter how committed Adams’s performance is as the titular Nightbitch.  It should’ve been an audiobook.

Mike Leigh did not start his career as an actor, but he does have a career-long history as a stage theatre director, which is a very actorly profession.  That background heavily informs the sparse, minimalist approach to familial drama in his new film Hard Truths, which sits with its characters’ interpersonal conflicts rather than resolving them.  As the most difficult person of all in this triple feature, Marianne Jean-Baptiste stars as a middle-aged grump who wages a one-woman war against the “smiling, cheerful people” of the world for 100 relentlessly sour minutes, including her own loving sister. Her performance is intensely funny and bitter, as she finds so much to complain about every second she is awake that she cannot even sit comfortably in her own home without obsessing over the activities of the pigeons, foxes, and bugs outside the window.  There are multiple scenes that start with her gasping in horror at the sensation of waking up from a nap, and her nonstop tirades against the waking world’s many offenses leads to the highest incredulous-teeth-sucking-per-minute ratio I’ve ever seen in a movie as her audience is held hostage by her hostility.  Meanwhile, a softly droning violin draws out the pathos of her pathological misery, especially in scenes where her much better adjusted sister gently attempts to diffuse her anger.  Leigh pays careful attention to the social & economic circumstances of the sisters’ past that would’ve burdened one with awareness of the world’s wretchedness while leaving the other unscathed, but most of the thematic & emotional impact of the picture is achieved through the forcefulness of Jean-Baptiste’s performance, which is exactly how all of these movies work, even the lesser ones. 

If any of these movies indulge in the Subtlety, Nuance, and Restraint that torment me during the Awards Season screener deluge every year, it’s Hard Truths, which is what makes it so unfortunate that it’s the best of this batch.  If all of the cinematic value of a picture is going to be invested in the difficulty & thorniness of a central performance, that performance might as well reach for the extremity of Marianne Jeanne-Baptiste’s, which is a cinematic spectacle in and of itself.  The problem with Amy Adams, Kieran Culkin, and Jesse Eisenberg’s performances—if there is one—is that you always get the sense that their respective directors need you to like their characters, so they’re careful not to push their difficult-person conflicts far enough to abandon the audience.  Mike Leigh is fearless in that respect, even if he restrains himself elsewhere.  Marianne Jean-Baptiste’s hopeless grump is somewhat lovable as a movie character, but you wouldn’t want to be in the same room as her for ten consecutive minutes, whereas you could easily imagine yourself splitting a bottle of wine with Adams, Culkin, or Eisenberg’s grumps to hear more of their side of things.  If I’m going to watch a low-key movie about a high-maintenance individual, I’d prefer that character to be as high-maintenance as possible.  Make them a real pain, a real bitch – a really, truly difficult person.

-Brandon Ledet

The Last Showgirl (2024)

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“Why must a movie be ‘good?’ Is it not enough to sit somewhere dark and see a beautiful face, huge?”

That 19-word tweet from Mike Ginn is one of the most concisely insightful pieces of critical writing on cinema in the past decade.  It’s also never been so strenuously tested since it was first tweeted in 2018 as it is in Gia Coppola’s latest feature, The Last Showgirl, which relies heavily on the simple pleasure of seeing Pamela Anderson’s beautiful face, huge.  The Last Showgirl is not a Good Movie in an artistic sense, or it’s at least too phony & hollow to pass as a well-constructed drama.  It’s got a nice visual texture to it, though, which helps make it an effective advertisement for Anderson’s reinvented screen presence as an anxious, fragile Betty Boop.  Anderson stars in the film as a traditional Las Vegas showgirl who’s aging out of her decades-long stage act, echoing her real-life career as The 90s Babe who was quietly forgotten after the end of her signature decade.  She’s overly delicate & vulnerable here in a way we’ve never seen her in more youthful, forceful titles like Baywatch & Barb-Wire, which is a great benefit to the movie, since it otherwise only shows us things we’ve seen before.  If you’ve seen Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler or any post-Starlet title from Sean Baker, you’ve already seen The Last Showgirl done better.  You just haven’t seen it with Pamela Anderson’s beautiful face on the screen & poster.

Even so, The Last Showgirl doesn’t do entirely right by Anderson, since it allows her more forceful costars to steamroll her daintily sweet performance whenever they want the spotlight.  Jamie Lee Curtis is the guiltiest of her scene partners in that respect, playing a too-old-for-this-shit cocktail waitress who still stubbornly carries the self-assured boldness that Anderson left behind in the 90s.  Dave Bautista is innocent as the only male member of the central cast and the only costar who tones himself down to match her low-key volatility.  Meanwhile, the three actresses that she takes under her wing as daughter figures, only one biological (Kiernan Shipka, Brenda Song, Billie Lourd), each hungrily scrape for single-scene impact that will allow them to stand out in a movie built entirely around an already-famous actor’s persona.  The result is a long procession of phony interactions that feel like out-of-context scenes from a longer movie where these personal relationships actually mean something to the audience beyond an acting showcase.  The important thing, though, is that Pamela Anderson gets to model gorgeously tacky Vegas showgirl outfits while either whispering or screeching dialogue that no one would have dared to feed her when she was a 20something sexpot.  It’s an audition for a better movie that can make full use of what she has to offer, now that we know it’s on the table.

There isn’t much of a story to speak of here, just fragments of one that gradually unravel and dissolve.  At the start of the film, Anderson’s titular showgirl is given two-weeks’ notice that her decades-running show of employment, Le Razzle Dazzle, is being closed to make room for more exciting, novel acts.  She’s distraught by this professional blow, not only because she’s unlikely to find new stage work but also because no one around her seems especially nostalgic for what’s being lost.  Everyone from her fellow dancers (Shipka, Song), her estranged daughter (Lourd), her romantic-interest stage manager (Bautista), and her cocktail-waitress bestie (Curtis) all see Le Razzle Dazzle as just another tits-and-glitter show – a way to pay the bills.  In her mind and, presumably, the audience’s, it’s more substantial than that. It’s a moving work of visual art and a relic of Old Vegas kitsch, which Anderson’s showgirl likens to Parisian traditions like shows at The Crazy Horse.  That’s a great starting place for a film, but Coppola never finds the way to develop her premise into a plot.  Individual scenes from those two depressing weeks in the showgirl’s life clash against each other in gentle, splashing waves, then the whole movie just recedes away from the audience in a low tide, leaving us dry.  Of course, though, just because it isn’t any good doesn’t mean it isn’t worth seeing Pamela Anderson’s face in it, huge.

-Brandon Ledet

Podcast # 227: Madame X (1966) & Self-Reinvented Women

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Welcome to Episode #227 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Hanna, James, Britnee and Brandon discuss a grab bag of movies about women who reinvent themselves with made-up identities, starting with the 1966 Lana Turner drama Madame X.

00:00 Welcome

01:31 Hot Frosty (2024)
05:25 Mother’s Instinct (2024)
07:33 Endless Love (1981)
11:22 My Old Ass (2024)
18:30 Out of the Blue (1980)
24:16 The 36th Chamber of Shaolin (1978)

31:00 Madame X (1966)
55:00 A Woman’s Face (1938)
1:12:22 Sleeping with the Enemy (1991)
1:30:07 The Last Seduction (1994)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Podcast Crew

Anora and Her Friends

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Sean Baker’s time is here.  After nailing down his gig-labor docufiction style in the 2004 food-delivery tragedy Take Out and then applying it to a long string of sex-industry dramas in the couple decades since, Baker has finally earned his moment in the prestige-circuit spotlight.  Earlier breakthroughs like Tangerine & The Florida Project perfectly calibrated his caustically funny, soberingly traumatic storytelling style in his best work to date, but he emerged from those triumphs recognized as a name to watch rather than one of the modern greats.  He’s been recalibrating in the years since, going full heel in his deliberately unlovable black comedy Red Rocket before face-turning to the opposite extreme in his latest work, Anora.  Clearly, Baker has decided he wants audiences to love him again, and it’s impressive to see him swing so wildly in tone between his last two features without losing his voice.  Anora is the feel-good sweet counterbalance to the feel-bad sour Sean Baker of Red Rocket.  Both are equally funny & frantic, but only one is affable enough to set the filmmaker up for a Best-Picture Oscar run after taking home the top prize at Cannes.  It’s his time.

The surprising thing about Anora’s critical success is that it’s such a dutiful continuation of the work Baker’s already been doing for years – just with an extra dash of sugar to help sweeten the bitter.  Mikey Madison stars as the titular erotic dancer, another trapped-by-capitalism sex worker in a long tradition of Sean Baker anti-heroines dating at least as far back as 2012’s Starlet.  Anora is a thorny, chaotic, unfiltered baddie whom the audience instantly loves for her faults, because she’s fun to be around.  Like in Tangerine & The Florida Project, we meet her working customers in a high-stress but manageable profession, then follow her on an anarchic journey through her larger urban community, walking a tightrope between slapstick physical comedy & face-slap physical violence until she’s offered a moment of grace in the final beat.  As the editor, Baker has worked out a well-timed rhythm for this story template through its many repetitions in previous works.  He sweeps the audience up in the hedonistic romance of Anora’s Vegas-strip marriage to a big-spender Russian brat who offers a Cinderellic escape from the strip club circuit in exchange for helping secure a green card.  The quick-edit montage of that fantasy then slows down to linger on its real-world fallout, investing increasingly long, painful stretches of time on Russian gangsters’ retribution for the young couple generating tabloid headlines that embarrass the brat’s oligarch father.  The laughs continue to roll in, but the punchlines (and physical punches) get more brutal with each impact until it just isn’t fun anymore, as is the Sean Baker way.

There’s nothing especially revelatory about the Sean Baker formula in Anora.  In the context of his filmography, it’s just more of the same (of a very good thing).  However, the increased attention to his career-long project as an auteur has had its immediate benefits, not least of all in Baker’s collaboration with the local repertory series Gap Tooth Cinema (formerly known as Wildwood).  When asked to program a screening for Gap Tooth as a primer for what he was aiming to achieve in Anora, Baker offered three titles as options: Fellini’s Oscar-winning sex worker drama Nights of Cabiria, the fish-out-of-water Eddie Murphy comedy Coming to America, and a second Italian sex-work story in 1960’s Adua and Her Friends.  Gap Tooth ultimately selected Adua, the most obscure title of the trio and, more importantly, one of the very best titles they’ve screened to date.  I don’t know that Sean Baker’s name would have come to mind had I discovered Adua and Her Friends in a different context, since it’s a much more formally polished picture than the anarchic comedies he’s become known for since he filmed Tangerine on an iPhone.  The comparisons that more readily came to mind were Mildred Pierce, Volver, and The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.  It’s a less recognizable title than any of those comparisons, but that’s the only way in which it’s lesser.  It’s an incredibly stylish, sexy, tragic, and cool story of self-reinvented sex workers making do in late-50s Italy, one that speaks well to Baker’s genuine interest in his characters’ inner lives beyond what they symbolize as society’s economic casualties.

Adua and Her Friends is a darkly comic drama about a small crew of sex workers who are forcibly retired by the Merlin Law of 1958, which ceased the legal operation of all Italian brothels.  Unsure how to get by without the only trade they have experience in, the women conspire to open a rural, roadside restaurant as a front for a new, illegal brothel they will run themselves.  Only, after a few successful months of food service—depicted as being equally difficult as prostitution—they decide they’d rather “go straight” in their new business than convert it into an underground brothel.  As you’d expect, the self-reinvented women’s lives as restaurateurs are upended by men from their past that refuse to let them start fresh, the same way Anora is blocked from upgrading her social position from escort to wife.  Where Adua excels is in taking the time to flesh out the inner lives & conflicts of each woman in its main cast.  Lolita is led astray by conmen who take advantage of her youthful naivete; Marilina struggles to reestablish a familial relationship with her estranged son; Milly hopes to leave her past behind and start over as a devoted housewife, Anora-style.  Adua (Oscar-winner Simone Signoret) gets the first & final word in her struggle to establish a new career before she ages out of her livelihood, but the movie is an ensemble-cast melodrama at heart, asking you to love, laugh with, and weep for every woman at the roadside restaurant (and to hiss at the cads who selfishly ruin it all).

Much like in Baker’s films, the majority of Adua and Her Friends is a surprisingly good time, with plenty slapstick gags & irreverently bawdy jokes undercutting the hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold tropes typical to this subject.  Like Anora, it’s a 2+ hour comedy with an emotionally devastating ending, one that carefully avoids making its titular sex worker a purely pitiable symbol of societal cruelty even while acknowledging that she’s backed into a pretty shitty corner.  Adua and Anora can be plenty cruel themselves when it helps their day-to-day survival.  That might be where the two films’ overlapping interests end, since Adua lounges in a much more relaxed hangout vibe than Anora, scored by repetitions of Santo & Johnny’s “Sleepwalk” rather than t.A.T.u.’s “All the Things She Said.”  Adua and her friends loiter around their Italian villa, fanning themselves in a deep-focus tableau, while Anora is dragged around Vegas & NYC by Russian mobsters who (for the most part) don’t see her as a human being.  There is one early sequence in Adua where a black-out drunken night is represented in choppy lost-time edits that may have been an influence on the rhythms of Anora’s first act, but otherwise I assume Baker was inspired less by the film’s formal style than he was by the characterizations of its main cast.  The frank, sincere, humanizing approach to sex-worker portraiture in Adua and Her Friends speaks well to Sean Baker’s continued interest in sex-work as a cinematic subject and, although both were great, I feel like I learned more about his work through its presentation than I did by watching his latest film.

 -Brandon Ledet

On Becoming a Guinea Fowl (2024)

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In the opening scene of Rungano Nyoni’s On Becoming a Guinea Fowl, a young woman dressed as Missy “Supa Dupa Fly” Elliott drives alone on an unlit Zambian highway, abruptly pausing to inspect a dead body in the road.  Remaining in costume, she makes several nonchalant phone calls to family, notifying them that she has discovered the corpse of her Uncle Fred.  No one seems to be in a particular rush to help, and she’s reluctantly roped into the petty concerns of her party-drunk father, her more belligerently drunk cousin, her absent mother, and a police force that can’t arrive until morning because their one vehicle is already in use.  It’s only after Uncle Fred is scooped off the road in the morning hours that she can finally take off her comically oversized Missy Elliott costume and return to her regular self as the prodigal urbanite daughter, Shula (Susan Chardy).  Uncle Fred is also stripped of his costume in those daylight hours, as the sins of his living days are revealed by stripping away the respectability afforded to all corpses at their own funeral.  We quickly understand why Shula met Uncle Fred’s death with such an icy, deadpan detachment, and by then the joke isn’t funny anymore.

On Becoming a Guinea Fowl starts on a sharp streak of morbid humor, then gets increasingly nauseating the deeper it digs into the Patriarchal sins it unearths, which is also how I remember Nyoni’s debut, I Am Not a Witch.  It’s a film about the value of a whisper network, likening its titular bird’s usefulness on African savannahs as a warning-signal for nearby animals that a predator is approaching to women who warn each other of a nearby sexual predator’s potential to harm.  The problem, of course, is that guinea fowl’s usefulness to other animals does little to save their own hides, as they presumably squawk their way into being eaten while everyone else scurries away.  We come to learn that Uncle Fred left many victims in his wake, notoriously preying on underage girls in his family & community with no consequences, since the advice his victims are given by their matron elders is “Don’t think about it, and don’t talk about it.”  There’s no real way to hold the now-dead man accountable, but Shula becomes increasingly uncomfortable with the idea that his crimes against his own people should go undiscussed, and she subtly, gradually takes on the behaviors of a guinea fowl the longer his sham of a funeral drags on.  Maybe she can be a useful warning to others about the dangers of men like Fred; or maybe her animal noises of protest will only separate her out as a target for more cruelty.

Besides the gender politics of Shula’s quiet resistance to her family’s loving memory of Uncle Fred, Guinea Fowl is most engaging as an alienating look at Zambian funeral rituals.  Every aspect of Uncle Fred’s days-long funeral is seemingly designed to trigger Shula: her required presence, the women’s critique of each other’s crying techniques, the men outside who drink beer in wait of the women in the home to feed them after they perform the labor of mourning, the world-class victim-blaming of Uncle Fred’s teenage widow for failing to keep him alive, etc.  Meanwhile, Shula’s relationship with reality unravels as she dissociates from the absurd celebration of such a wicked man.  Her dreams & memories become increasingly intrusive, interrupting the flow of the narrative with images of her younger self observing Uncle Fred’s body, images of that body resurrected and covered in maxi pads, and vintage 1990s broadcasts of children’s television shows detailing the natural behaviors of the guinea fowl.  Those intrusions call into question the real-world credibility of other details like the floodwater floors of a local university or the music-video pool party atmosphere of the local library.  The film never fully tips into the fantasy realm, though; it just precariously teeters on the edge between worlds as Shula calculates what to do with her voice as one of Uncle Fred’s surviving victims.

On Becoming a Guinea Fowl locally premiered at this year’s New Orleans Film Festival, where it was initially met with the soft laughter of recognition until the room went coldly silent the more we all realized what kind of story we were watching.  It’s an especially tough watch if you belong to a family that stubbornly ignores its worst members’ most heinous crimes for the sake of social politeness, which I assume accounts for just about everyone.  And if it doesn’t, please know that I am jealous. 

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: Adaptation (2002)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer and Alli discuss Charlie Kaufman’s writer’s-block anxiety thriller Adaptation (2002), starring Nicolas Cage & Meryl Streep.

00:00 Welcome

01:05 Immaculate (2024)
07:57 Time Masters (1982)
11:37 Trap (2024)
13:06 In the Mood for Love (2000)
19:56 Cuckoo (2024)
25:43 Wicked Little Letters (2024)

27:48 Adaptation (2002)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

Day for Night (1973)

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One of my weaknesses as a critical thinker is that I’m pathetically vulnerable to enjoying movies about how great The Movies are, from nostalgic recreations of large-scale Old Hollywood spectacles in movies like Hail, Caesar! to comedic takes on scrappy D.I.Y. communal filmmaking in low-budget genre trash like One Cut of the Dead.  I even choke up during those hokey little Magic of the Movies montages that everyone else complains about during Oscars broadcasts every year.  The same goes for poems about poetry and rock songs about rocking out.  The creation of art ranks highly among the few worthy things you can do with your brief time on this planet, so it deserves to be the subject of that art just as much as the few other go-to subjects of every other song, poem, and movie out there (mainly God, sex, and death).  So, I’m less willing than most movie-obsessed cynics to roll my eyes when Oscar voters award top prizes to love-letter-to-cinema movies about The Movies.  I totally understand the impulse.  The cool, hip opinion to have is that Jean-Luc Godard’s poison-penned hate letters to cinema like The Image Book are much worthier of time and study than his intellectual frenemy François Truffaut’s magic-of-moviemaking dramedy Day for Night, because they are more challenging in their observation & interrogation of the medium.  The thing is, though, that as intellectually lazy as it may be, it feels much better to celebrate than to challenge, especially when the subject is as wonderful as the art of the moving image.  If my two choices as a cinephile are to be corny or self-loathing, I’m perfectly fine being corny.

Director François Truffaut stars in Day for Night as a François Truffaut-type director, lording over the film shoot of a mediocre-looking melodrama titled Meet Pamela.  The metatextual joke of the movie is that there’s nothing as dramatic nor exciting in the narrative of Meet Pamela as the drama & excitement of its production.  As the auteur du jour, Truffaut is responsible for guiding the decision-making of hundreds of cast & crew members, who bombard him with random, dissonant either/or questions as he attempts to funnel their chaotic input into a single, coherent picture.  The bigger personalities he struggles to manage are, of course, his actors, who include Fellini collaborator Valentina Cortese as a has-been drunk who refuses to learn her cues and longtime Truffaut muse Jean-Pierre Léaud as a “spoiled brat who will not grow up,” always angling to go to the movies instead of making one.  Newcomer chanteuse Dani also makes a star-making impact as the level-headed script girl who puts out the fires Truffaut himself does not notice, simply because she’s a true believer in the cause of Cinema.  Explaining her passion for the medium above all else, she sweetly declares “I’d drop a guy for a film. I’d never drop a film for a guy.”  True to the nature of real-life film production, most of the drama between these players occurs during the punishing rhythm of having to get multiple takes until a scene fully works or during the punishing boredom of time spent on set waiting around for those takes to be fully set up.  It’s essentially an ensemble cast comedy set in a hyper-specific industry & locale, made by the people who know that industry better than anyone else in the world.

Where Day for Night becomes a transcendent piece of art in its own right (rather than just an appreciation for the transcendent nature of art) is in the sweeping montages when all of these chaotic personalities are overpowered by the momentum of the production, and everything fall exactly into place.  The behind-the-camera busyness of the set is drowned out by heavy orchestration on the soundtrack, relaxing all tension & frustration with the stop-and-start repetition of filming a scene to instead ease into the flow of a shooting day where everything goes exactly right.  Given how many different, opposing people it takes to make a professional movie, it’s a miracle every time one is completed, let alone is any good.  Truffaut digs deep into the mechanics of how movies are made, to the point where it’s likely Day for Night was many people’s first instance of hearing the terms “headshots,” “pans,” “rushes,” and “reshoots” outside of the trades. You can tell that those practical details aren’t as interesting to him as the poetry that they produce, though, especially in scenes where he doesn’t bother hiding the shadow of the crane-shot camera crew shooting the fictional camera crew of the movie-within-the movie.  He puts a lot more care & effort into displaying a reading list of film books on the great auteurs, proudly displaying names like Dreyer, Bergman, and Buñuel for the camera while romantic orchestrations swells.  The only sequence where this mechanics-vs-poetry dynamic is flipped is the opener, where an extensive tracking shot full of life & wonder is revealed to be a movie-within-the-movie fake-out and is then broken down into individual, choreographed components through multiple takes.  Otherwise, it works the other way around; the mechanics come before the poetry.

I can only think of two instances in Day for Night wherein Truffaut becomes noticeably cynical about his craft.  The major one is in Léaud’s characterization as a petulant child who refuses to grow up, treating women as either caretakers or playthings depending on his scene-to-scene whims.  It’s very much the same fuckboy posturing that he displays in The Mother and the Whore, and both instances feel like a knowing commentary on the sexual & moral immaturity of Léaud’s generation, since he had become a kind of living mascot for The French New Wave as soon as Truffaut first cast him in The 400 Blows.  The other cynical note is a one-liner potshot at Hollywood as a competing movie industry, dismissing it as a playground “where kids try to live up to their famous parents.”  If Hollywood was offended by that friendly jab, they didn’t show it in their adoring appreciation of Day for Night, which they awarded the 1975 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.  In a way, the film is a major pioneer in the Magic of the Movies montages that have become an annual tradition for the ceremony’s television broadcasts, but with an obvious major difference.  Those montages only celebrate The Movies when they achieve transcendent visual poetry (and box office profits), whereas Truffaut loves The Movies as they are, warts & all.  You get the sense watching Day for Night that he genuinely enjoyed the chaos of wrangling brats, drunks, and freaks to make mediocre art in artificial locales; he loved making movies.  That might seem like a shallow subject to rigorous academic cynics or to more narrative-focused moviegoers who are just “looking for a good story,” but it feels deeply spiritual & meaningful to me, a guy who also loves The Movies.

-Brandon Ledet

Kneecap (2024)

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If you spend enough time on the Internet, you’ll find that the two biggest stories to result from the 2024 Summer Olympic Games in Paris were not of personal or athletic triumph.  They were stories of spectacular, humanizing failure.  I am, of course, referring to French athlete Anthony Ammirati’s pole-vaulting mishap when his Olympic dreams were thwarted by his massive dong, which knocked down the bar he was supposed to clear in an otherwise successful jump.  I am also referring to new online microcelebrity Raygun, an Australian breakdancer who partially worked her way into the competition by earning her PhD in the “sport”.  There were some legitimately impressive breakdancers who competed at the Olympics this year, but Raygun was not one of them.  Her awkward, corny dance moves on that worldwide stage were comically embarrassing, epitomizing the instant cringe of watching white people participate in hip-hop with a little too much gusto.  As funny as Raygun’s televised failure and the resulting memes have been in the past week, she’s also left a mark on The Culture in negative ways.  It’s not difficult to imagine that the announced decision to exclude breaking from the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles was somewhat influenced by the worldwide mockery her performance attracted to the event, despite the athleticism of the dozens of talented dancers who competed beside her.  She also set public opinion on white nerds’ enthusiasm for old-school hip-hop back decades, at least as far back as the Backpack Rap days of the early 2000s. 

Thankfully, there’s an excellent counterbalance to Raygun’s breakdancing shenanigans currently making the theatrical rounds, rehabilitating some of that white nerd street cred.  The new Irish music industry drama Kneecap details the rise to fame of the titular rap trio Kneecap, played by the group’s real-life members.  Set during a recent push to have Ireland’s native language recognized by the occupying government of the United Kingdom as legitimate and politically protected, the film characterizes its Irish-speaking stars as both cultural activists and shameless hedonists.  Because their public persona includes openly distributing & consuming hard drugs, they’re seen by fellow Irish speakers as a threat to the legitimacy of their shared Civil Rights cause.  Kneecap may be partyboys at heart, but they’re just as dedicated to the mission as the advocates pushing for the Irish Language Act on television.  They’re just doing it in dive bars and Spotify playlists instead, inspiring renewed interest and usage of the language by modernizing it through hip-hop.  Both the group and the movie are clear-eyed in their political messaging, repeating the mantra “Every word of Irish spoken is a bullet fired for Irish freedom” as many times as it can be shoehorned into the dialogue.  That’s about as legitimate of a case of white artists participating in old school hip-hop as you’re ever likely to find.  It’s purposeful, and it’s genuine.

While the political messaging and the rags-to-slightly-nicer-rags story structure of Kneecap are fairly straightforward, director Rich Peppiatt at least finds ways to match the group’s messy, energetic songwriting in the film’s visual style.  English translations of Irish rap lyrics appear onscreen in animated notebook scribbles.  Drug-induced hallucinations are represented in extreme fish-eye lens framing and crude stop-motion puppetry.  Michael Fassbender, playing one of the rappers’ political activist father, appears in a strobelit, dreamlike sequence so directly inspired by the liminal nightclub visions of Aftersun that it’s surprising when he returns alive just a couple scenes later.  All of this frantic music video visual style is wrangled in by a guiding voice narration track, framing Kneecap as a revision of Trainspotting about how doing drugs with your friends will improve your life, not ruin it.  That Trainspotting connection gets explicit when the band’s DJ dives headfirst into a garbage can to recover a lost strip of LSD, recalling Ewan McGregor flushing himself down a dive bar toilet.  I don’t know that Kneecap is the most dramatically satisfying rise-to-fame story for D.I.Y. musicians suffering the remnants of British imperialism that I’ve seen in recent years; that honor likely belongs to either Gully Boy or We Are Ladyparts.  It’s an exceptionally energetic one, though, and it’s got a great soundtrack to match.

Just in case the novelty of an Irish-language rap soundtrack or the effort to make the best Danny Boyle movie since 28 Days Later is not enough to draw an audience, Kneecap also mine some genuine dramatic tension from its relatively small cast.  Michael Fassbender represents an older, more reserved way of undermining British oppression, continuing to participate in IRA resistance as a kind of ineffectual ghost.  Simone Kirby is a scene-stealer as his estranged wife, struggling against her agoraphobia to mobilize the silent but powerful mothers behind the more vocal Irish rebels.  The middle-aged DJ Próvaí is committed to the cause as well, but has to hide from his wife and school-faculty employers that he’s been publicly doing hard drugs with twentysomethings at rap concerts as part of his own political praxis.  In one of the more surprising dramatic side plots, one Kneecap member grapples with the intoxicating eroticism of oppression, bringing his politics into the bedroom by having kinky roleplay sex with a local Brit who’s offended by his more inflammatory lyrics.  Not all of Kneecap is a rap-soundtracked party fueled by raver drugs ordered over the internet.  There’s actual substance and political intent behind its participation in hip-hop culture, which is more than you can say for poor Raygun’s brief moment of fame on the Olympic stage.

-Brandon Ledet