drama

Stroszek (1977)

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Stroszek is a relentlessly downbeat tragicomedy about one man’s inability to escape the prison of society. The film opens with Bruno Stroszek being released from prison, where the kindly warden makes him promise to never drink again, as the street performer’s only crimes were all related to or caused by his alcoholism. As soon as he departs the office, however, he goes straight to a local pub, where the bartender recognizes him and greets him (as) warmly (as 1970s German stoicism allows), despite the fact that Stroszek has been gone for two and a half years. Stroszek attempts to greet Eva, a woman he knew before, but the two men with her reveal themselves as her pimps and send him on his way, but not before he offers to let her come and stay with him in the apartment that his old neighbor Mr. Scheitz has kept for him. Stroszek attempts to return to street performance, but there’s little love for the vagabond who can never remember to zip his fly, and although Eva does find her way to him and tries to help him spruce up the place, this ultimately leads to further harassment and beatings at the hands of her former pimps. Unable to turn to the police for help, Mr. Scheitz offers to let Eva and Stroszek accompany him to Wisconsin, where he is moving to live with his nephew for his remaining few years, and he even gets jobs for them as a waitress and a mechanic, respectively. 

Upon initial arrival in the states, the trio feels a rush of excitement and possibility while sightseeing around New York before they purchase an old car and make their way to the prairie town of Railroad Flats, an indistinguishable little spot of nowhere, a barren place of dead grass brown and dirty snow. Scheitz’s nephew is amenable to them, and things start out well for them at first despite the humility of their surroundings, as Eva finds her new line of work much more agreeable than her old, and Stroszek gets along with his equally alcoholic colleagues, and the nephew Scheitz even lets them set up a mobile home on his property to give them a leg up. The elder Scheitz is considered a bit of a curiosity around town, but the townsfolk are more bemused than annoyed at his wandering around and purportedly measuring “animal magnetism” using some kind of ammeter, speaking a language that none of them understand. Unfortunately, the good times aren’t meant to last; a “friendly” visit from an officer of the bank reveals that they are behind on their payments due to Stroszek’s inability to read the fine print on many of the documents that he signed, and although Eva is able to secure a temporary reprieve from repossession by temporarily returning to her old line of work, she is unsatisfied with where life has taken her and ultimately runs away, hitting the road with a couple of Vancouver-bound truckers. 

When Scheitz is arrested for a poorly-thought-out attempt at vengeance on the bank for taking Stroszek’s trailer, he is truly alone, with no music to play and with no one around who even speaks his language. Stroszek seeks out the only person he knows, a German businessman who was being harassed at the start of the film by Eva’s pimps and who said that he was going to a specific place in America where there was a park where people could see freely roaming bears. This turns out to be Cherokee, NC, and it is Stroszek’s final destination as well. 

If this were a different kind of movie, one might expect that Eva would turn around one day at her waitressing job and see that her two pimps have found her and plan to take her back to Berlin, or you might think that the fact that there are four unsolved and seemingly connected murders in Railroad Flats would come back as a plot point or be relevant in some way, but nothing like that happens. There are many long montages of hard work that drive home the mindless repetition of labor, and which contribute nothing to the film narratively but serve a purpose for defining the film’s mood. It’s a movie that requires the kind of patience that a lot of audiences no longer have, as it often lingers on its tableaux in order to fully sell the scale of the feelings of loss, loneliness, and hopelessness that the characters face. As an indictment of the American Dream and all of its unfulfilled promises, it functions beautifully and has a real sense of immediacy; within a few days of arriving in Railroad Flats, Stroszek witnesses his American benefactor pull one of his own teeth with a set of pliers for a sense of relief, which he witnesses with shock made all the more isolating by his lack of understanding of English. 

The film is not without its comedic moments, but even these are meant to speak to a greater melancholy. The biggest laugh that I got came in Wisconsin, when Scheitz translates his nephew’s admonition to Stroszek to stay away from a particular fence because the strip of land on the other side is in dispute between two farmers, both of whom refuse to let his enemy plow the area, which is explicitly called “fallow.” We see these two farmers as each gets very close to the edge of the disputed territory, both of them driving their tractors with their shotguns on their hips, pointed skyward … for the moment. It’s a very funny visual, evoking the image of jousting knights with their lances at the ready, but it also speaks to the kind of violence that America is capable of. Just as the two pimps in Berlin exercised control over Eva, these two men are also primed and ready to commit violence, with potentially life-ending consequences. Stroszek also visits a kind of arcade where trained animals perform tricks; put in a quarter and watch a rabbit run into a tiny fire engine and sit there as if he is the driver, or watch a chicken peck at a tiny piano as it plays a tune, or watch another chicken dance after pushing a button in a tiny jukebox. Not so funny is how Stroszek presumably sees himself in these beasts, forced to perform over and over again for a pitiable amount of money like a trained animal; in fact, the dancing chicken is the last image that we see of the film, and it lasts for some time, as a reminder of what Stroszek became before the end. 

I have to admit that, despite all my writing about film, I’ve actually seen very little Herzog (in fact, this is only my second, after Grizzly Man), but from what I’ve absorbed about the man’s work from the pop cultural landscape, this seems like one of this works that defined his sensibility in the public eye. It’s bleak, but beautiful.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Zone of Interest (2023)

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If you’re a particular kind of self-serious cinephile, every new Jonathan Glazer movie is a Cultural Event, largely because of scarcity.  The director only has four features to his name, stretched across two decades, with half of that time passing since his previous film Under the Skin arrived in 2013.  Glazer has been “a name to watch” since his early 2000s stunners Birth & Sexy Beast (if not since his iconic 1990s music videos like “Virtual Insanity” & “Karma Police”).  Every project is so carefully planned & crafted that there’s always intense anticipation of what shape his career is going to take overall. He makes too few films for anyone to predict the big-picture trajectory of his art; there just isn’t enough data.  So, I have to admit that I was a little disappointed by the announcement of his latest project, The Zone of Interest, because it doesn’t fit the shape I personally wanted for his career.  I would’ve much preferred that Glazer dove deeper into the uncanny surrealism of films like Birth & Under the Skin than where he chose to go: sinking further into ice-cold Hanekean cruelty instead.  Still, The Zone of Interest is a title of interest by default, regardless of subject or approach, and Glazer at least makes the misery meaningful & worthwhile. 

The Zone of Interest is the rare war atrocity drama that doesn’t let its audience off the hook for not being as bad as literal Nazis, but instead prompts us to dwell on the ways all modern life & labor echoes that specific moment in normalized Evil.  Sandra Hüller (Toni Erdmann, Anatomy of a Fall) stars as the doting housewife of the Nazi officer who runs Auschwitz (Rudolf Höss, played by Christian Friedel).  The couple’s idyllic home shares an external wall with the concentration camp, which soundtracks their daily domestic routines with the excruciating sounds of torture & genocide. The wife raises children, hosts parties, and tends to the garden.  The husband works tirelessly to invent more efficient ways to gas & incinerate Jews.  Both are separated from the tactile details of the violence that makes their lovely home possible, except in stark reminders when the busy work of the day is over and all that is left is the quiet of their conscience: lounging in a calm river polluted with the ashes of their victims, struggling to sleep in a house lit by the orange glow of the crematoriums, etc.  It’s a slowly escalating, dehumanizing horror that they’ve deliberately numbed themselves enough to not even notice, but it deeply sickens outsiders who briefly visit their home to smell the flowers or play with the kids.

If Glazer were a lesser artist, he would have firmly anchored his WWII drama to the tools & tones of the past, comforting his audience with the emotional distance of time.  Instead, he shoots The Zone of Interest in the style of a modern reality show, documenting the domestic busyness of his central couple on continuously running security cameras like an especially horrific episode of Big Brother.  There are even night-vision sequences that catch small acts of subversion the cameras aren’t supposed to see – good deeds that eventually go brutally punished.  Later, he interrupts the 1940s timeline with images of concentration camps’ current function as history museums, again finding a way to frame them as sites of heinous banality.  The automated-home modernization of this historical drama might initially register as a formalistic novelty, but the constant reminder that the movie is being made now with today’s technology gradually has a clear thematic purpose.  Anyone with a smartphone should be familiar with the feeling of becoming numb to grand-scale injustice & genocide as background noise while we busy ourselves with the meaningless tasks of the day.  Anyone who’s ever been lucratively employed should recognize the feeling that our jobs & lifestyles are causing active harm to people we cannot see.  We’ve all seen too many Holocaust dramas to truly feel the emotional sting of another one as if it were out first; Glazer does his best to shake us out of that numbness by making one specifically rooted in the doomscroller era.

Everything is tastefully, technically on-point here.  I was initially distracted by the automated security camera editing style, which had me looking for visible cameras in every frame, but the approach eventually proved itself thematically justified.  Mica Levi’s thunderous, minimalist score is maybe their sparsest work to date, but it’s effective in its restraint.  A24 has been well-behaved in their marketing & distribution of the film, refraining from selling boutique Nazi merch or leaning into trite FYC awards campaigning.  Glazer has again taken his time to deliver something thoughtfully crafted but not overfussed, proving himself to be one of our most patient auteurs.  I likely would not have watched The Zone of Interest if his name were not attached, since I’m generally skeptical of what yet another wartime genocide drama could possibly illuminate about history that audiences don’t already know (and have learned to ignore).  Glazer sidesteps that tedium by stating the historical facts of the narrative in plain terms – illuminating the dull, background evils of modern living instead of safely retreating to the past.  It’s not the project I would’ve greenlit if I were signing his checks, but it’s a worthy entry in his small canon of thorny, alienating features.  All I can do now is sit in the tension of what he’ll make next, likely until sometime in the 2030s.

-Brandon Ledet

The Beauty in Boredom

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Halloween’s over, and there’s a distinct chill in the air, which means it’s time to start watching Serious Dramas for Adults again, so we can all collectively decide which movies shy far away enough from traditional genre entertainment to deserve awards statues.  I do not do my best work as an audience during the Awards Season catch-up rush, both because I’m easily distracted by the buzziest titles’ extratextual discourses and because Serious Dramas for Adults aren’t my usual thing.  I like a little reality-breaking fantasy and high-style aesthetic beauty in my motion pictures, both of which are generally frowned upon this time of year, when subtlety & realism reign supreme.  The last quarter of the theatrical release calendar isn’t boring, exactly, but it can be challenging to my over-the-top artifice sensibilities as an audience.  Which is healthy!  It’s probably for the best that I’m asked to eat my cinematic vegetables at the end of my meal every year, since I spend so much time at the buffet table stuffing my face with dessert.  Besides, there is something beautiful & cozy about the boredom of binging restrained, underplayed dramas in these colder months, especially when I’m catching up with Awards Screeners and borrowed public library DVDs under a blanket on my couch.

And so, it’s great happenstance that I caught up with two aesthetically beautiful films about boredom this week.  The Italian family drama L’immensità has been on my catch-up list for months, but I couldn’t think of a cozier time to watch Penélope Cruz model vintage 70s fashions and dance to vintage Italo pop tunes than right now.  Of course, that kind of indulgence comes with a hefty price when you’re watching Serious Dramas for Adults, which means you also have to watch Cruz suffer an abusive husband and clumsily navigate how to raise a trans teen.  She plays a protective mother who acts as a human shield between her cruel businessman husband and their cowering children, but she struggles to adapt that protective instinct to her trans son’s burgeoning status as a social outsider.  It’s the kind of cultural farce where his gender is apparent to every stranger meeting him for the first time, but the family who’s known him forever refuses to adapt to his new name & pronouns because they’re resistant to change.  Thankfully, mother and son share a bond stronger than this Conservative prejudice: the bond of boredom.  Isolated for hours by the constraints of domestic housewife duties and teenage supervision while the abusive father figure disappears to his office, they’re both bored & lonely to the point of going mad.  To stave off cabin fever in herself and her kids, Cruz offers twee escapism from the movie’s general restrained realism by parodying famous TV performances of Italian pop hits (most notably “Prisencolinensinainciusol“), complete with the kind of little-kid bedroom choreography that you can only come up with in the deepest pits of childhood boredom. 

L’immensità hits on notes of Tomboy-era Sciamma and Cruz-era Almodóvar throughout without ever quite matching the poetry of either influence.  All of the movie’s poetry & wonder belongs to Cruz, who’s dependably exquisite as always, especially whenever tasked to model vintage glamour.  Otherwise, it left me wanting for the touch of a seasoned auteur, someone who truly gets the beautiful aesthetics of Boredom as a cinematic subject.  Luckily, there’s a new film from Sofia Coppola in theaters right now to satisfy that hunger.  Priscilla is Coppola’s adaptation of Priscilla Presley’s 1985 memoir Elvis and Me, which positions it with the exact kind of historical importance and celebrity impersonation that thrives in Awards Season publicity.  It’s also a movie about the boredom & isolation of feminine youth, which positions it with potential to resonate as one of Coppola’s career best.  Although Coppola’s Priscilla is the downers & cocktails antidote to Baz Luhrmann’s brain-poison uppers in last year’s Elvis, both directors are technically just playing the hits in their respective Graceland biopics.  Only one of them successfully recaptures the magic of their 1990s masterworks, though, and it’s the one where most of the scene-to-scene “drama” is centered on a teenage girl’s struggle to count away the hours she’s left alone at home.  Priscilla pinpoints the exact middle ground between the cloistered domestic tedium of The Virgin Suicides and the surreally empty opulence of Marie Antoinette, almost making it one of Coppola’s best by default.

As a collection of standalone images & moments, Priscilla is a work of cosmetic beauty – combining vintage 60s & 70s glamour with anachronistic pop hits that find Coppola at her most prankish (especially when a rowdy game of bumper cars is scored by Dan Deacon’s 2000s synthpop banger “The Crystal Cat”).  Again, that kind of indulgence comes with a hefty price when you’re watching Serious Dramas for Adults, which means you also have to watch Priscilla suffer an abusive husband in-between her sublime dress-up montages, an injustice punctuated by classic abuser catchphrases about how “she’s mature for her age” and how he “would never do anything that would really hurt her”.  As the story goes, she’s effectively purchased & groomed to be Elvis’s bride at age 14, a power imbalance Coppola accentuates in the 1-foot-4-inch height difference casting of her Elvis (Jacob Elordi) and her Priscila (Cailee Spaeny).  Elvis repeatedly refuses the sexual advances of his tiny teenage bride, choosing instead to dress her up like a doll to sit on his shelf, to be admired in pristine condition whenever he’s home from satisfying his more carnal urges with women he views more carnally.  The whole situation is deeply absurd and deeply alienating, which is exactly what makes it so perfect for Coppola’s eye.  Once she’s matured to a less eyebrow-raising age, Elvis marries Priscilla and allows her to work out her sexual frustration of being married to the sexiest man alive through the dirty lens of a Polaroid camera; otherwise, their sexual life together is purely procreative.  Her job is to sit still & look pretty while her husband travels doing his job of being Elvis, counting away the days of her youth on the isolated alien planet of Graceland.

Priscilla is a truly Great film, the kind of seductive, devastating stunner that makes me grateful that the Awards Season catch-up ritual lures me outside my usual genre-trash comfort zone.  In comparison, L’immensità is a much punier text, one that reminds me how much of the Serious Dramas for Adults end of the independent filmmaking spectrum is just as disposable as the genre schlock I usually seek out.  Both films reflect on the beauty & abuses of domestic boredom in a credible way, but only one achieves true cinematic transcendence in the process.  Maybe Sofia Coppola will direct Penélope Cruz in a future Awards Contender period piece about a despondent, dissatisfied housewife, combining the power of these two films into something even more substantial than either.  I look forward to watching it with a mug of tea under a warm blanket and a digital screener watermark.

-Brandon Ledet

Anatomy of a Fall (2023)

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Anatomie d’une chute (Anatomy of a Fall) is this year’s Palme d’Or winner, and it recently came to theaters in the states. For the first twenty minutes, I kept flashing back to earlier this year, when I wrote a glowing review of Tár, a movie that Brandon was much less fond of; it seemed like, at last, I had finally come face to face with my own prestige boredom piece, as I found the opening scenes didn’t initially catch my attention, but once the plot gets going, I was very invested. 

Sandra Voyter (Sandra Hüller) is a German writer living in a snowy region of southern France with her husband Samuel Maleski (Samuel Theis) and their son Daniel (Milo Machado-Graner). The film opens with Sandra giving an interview to a young woman studying her work (Camille Rutherford) before the interview is first interrupted and then abruptly concluded by Samuel’s loud music from upstairs. Daniel, blinded at a young age as the result of a street accident that damaged his optical nerve, takes a walk with his faithful guide dog Snoop, only to discover the dead body of his father at the base of the house, near a wood shed and below both a second-floor balcony and a third-floor window into a room where his father had been recently working. The police are called, and when an autopsy reveals that his head wound was sustained prior to hitting the ground, suspicion falls on Sandra. She seeks help from an old friend and lawyer, Vincent (Swann Arlaud), and when they review the details together, he tells her that, if she is indicted, it will be almost impossible to convince a jury that the death was an accident, and that their best chance at acquittal would be to argue that Samuel had committed suicide. When further evidence compounds to further insinuate Sandra’s guilt, an indictment is inevitable, and we watch this play out as both a courtroom drama and a portrait of a family being torn apart by doubt. 

One of the oddest things about this movie is that, despite being a prestige picture, in the darkness before the film begins, projected against the screen was a URL: didshedoit.com. It’s one hell of a marketing technique, and even feels a little tacky when taken in combination with the cinematic quality and legacy within which the film is situated. After my screening, I checked out the site because I was curious as to whether it was real or not or was perhaps meant to be attached to another reel for a different movie or series of trailers but no, it’s a poll in which you can vote on whether you think Sandra killed Samuel. As of both the evening on which I saw the film and at the time of writing, the poll sits at almost perfectly ⅓ guilty, ⅔ not guilty, which was reflected in the feelings of my viewing trio. I’ll tip my hand now and say that I was among the two who do not believe that Sandra is guilty (or, at the very least, I cannot be convinced of it beyond the proverbial shadow of a doubt), but I also will adamantly state that her guilt or innocence is irrelevant, which is why this polling situation seems so bizarre. 

Information about Sandra and Samuel’s relationship is doled out slowly and with masterful intentionality. At first, we have no reason to believe that Sandra would be inclined to kill her husband, and as the prosecutor (Antoine Reinartz) paints a version of the events of the day leading up to Daniel’s discovery of his father’s body, he adds layers of intent. Could the bisexual Sandra have been upset about Daniel intentionally ruining her interview with a pretty young woman? Hasn’t she cheated on him in the past? Hadn’t they had an argument that turned physical just the previous day, which it turns out that Samuel surreptitiously recorded? But any one of these things could just as easily contribute to the narrative that Samuel took his own life—Samuel was the one who was ultimately responsible for leaving young Daniel with a babysitter, which lead to the accident that cost him his sight, and Samuel himself has never been able to get over it and has been rendered impotent by his guilt. Even though Sandra believes (or at least claims to believe) that Samuel would not have committed suicide and only accepts (or seems to accept) this potential explanation for events due to having no way to prove her stated innocence, she does admit that he attempted an overdose with aspirin earlier in the year. Daniel’s attempts to help his mother by establishing that he heard his parents speaking calmly with each other before he went on his walk cannot be corroborated when they test this possibility, which leads to his own doubts. However, the revelation of his father’s earlier attempts cause him to reframe his own understanding of the situation in a way that leads him to ask to be called to the witness stand a second time to talk about a conversation he had with his father that seems only now to make sense. 

Where the genius of the film lies is in that perpetual reframing, for the characters within it and within our own judgments as members of the audience, to whom pieces of evidence are presented over time. Where you stand on Sandra’s guilt or innocence can change very suddenly, as we learn more about her and her potential motives as well as Samuel and his own character and desires. A non-extensive, quick search of the internet tells me that the French legal system has adopted the same precept of presumed innocence as the U.S. (nominally) has, so one would assume the same or similar legal protections for Sandra as one would have in the states, but this is a trial that features an extremely antagonistic and far reaching prosecution and expert witnesses who seem more invested in securing a conviction than in honest testimony, not to mention that Sandra’s sexuality is frequently treated as if it means that she is inherently more suspicious than the “average” citizen. The prosecution offers up computer modeling of how Sandra “definitely” struck Samuel on the second floor balcony in order to leave behind three stray splashes of blood—the primary keystone for their accusations—while a physical model provided by a witness for the defense is presented only with the argument that their interpretation of the on-site evidence is equally consistent with their suicide theory. In what I hope is an exaggeration about the leniency of French court system with regards to what they will allow prosecution to put forth, the judge even allows a section of one of Sandra’s novels to be read in court, a sequence in which a first person character wishes for the death of their husband, and this is allowed to be entered into the record as evidence. 

Like most Americans, I grew up being propagandized by things like Law & Order into thinking that prosecutors are bastions of truth and justice, and unlearning that has admittedly been a long road; however, in no other piece of media have I ever felt so strongly about how ACAB includes prosecutors. Reinartz is doing stellar work here at creating a character that you have no choice but to despise, a sniveling, rat-faced little Grima Wormtongue of a man who, even when you are in one of the phases of the movie in which you’re convinced of Sandra’s innocence, you wish you could just pinch out of existence like a pimple. Also doing some extremely heavy lifting is Machado-Graner, who with this film alone deserves to be canonized as one of those exceedingly rare child actors whose presence improves a film rather than diminishing it. His sense of loss, first of his father and then over and over again with his mother in increasing amounts, is palpable, and that the film’s climax hangs upon his shoulders is a big gamble, but it not only works, it soars. As he gives his speech, in which he recounts a conversation with Samuel that they had months before—while returning from the vet when Daniel’s dog got sick, which unbeknownst to the boy was the result of the dog licking up his father’s suicide attempt-induced vomit—that he now believes (or is pretending to believe, or even simply willing to believe) was his father communicating with him honestly but subtly about his ideation and the need to be ready for when “he” goes, leaving it ambiguous as to whether “he” is Snoop or Samuel. 

I believed that the film would end there, and a part of me wanted it to. I know that the majority of general audiences now are very hung up on plot and resolution, and there would have been outcry if the film left two ambiguities to the viewer’s imagination; that is, whether Sandra was guilty or not and whether she would be convicted or acquitted. I won’t spoil the latter and I’ve already made my decision about the former, but I don’t want to make my case for it since I would rather allow those reading this who have not already seen it the opportunity to know only what I thought while being unburdened with why. I would have felt the film complete even without knowledge of the ruling, however, and there’s a part of me that wishes that version of the film existed, as it would leave even more topics open for discussion with others after the film was over, but I am also content with what we have. For instance, it’s fascinating that Daniel’s final testimony plays out on screen with him and his father as a flashback, as several previous scenes had, but we never hear his father’s voice, only him as he recounts Samuel’s words. What are we to make of that? In an earlier scene, when the court hears the recording of the argument between Samuel and Sandra on the day before his death, the playback begins and then we are transported into that moment to watch the argument play out, up to the point where violence is about to begin, at which point we are back in the courtroom hearing the recording. From there, we only have Sandra’s word as to what the sounds we hear are (although there is physical evidence to back up her claim that one of the sounds was Samuel punching the wall hard enough to leave a hole). When discussing the physical evidence and the, ahem, anatomy of the fall, the prosecutor’s witness’s version of events includes a flash-brief shot of Sandra striking Samuel just as he describes; no symmetrical shot appears during the defense’s expert witness’s testimony. This distinction between what we as audience members are presented with as “video” “evidence” and that which we only hear described is an integral part of the questions that the movie will leave you with, as the film has a distinctively documentarian feel (which it draws attention to near the end of the second act, as the camera “follows” the presiding judge offscreen and then returns to focus on the center of the dais, as if the camera operator had been taken aback by unexpected movement and attempted to keep it in frame). 

I’m usually hot or cold on prestige dramas like this, and Anatomy of a Fall is one that definitively falls into the former category. We don’t get many courtroom dramas on the big screen anymore, as the small screen world of copaganda has eaten up most of the general public’s allotment of attention for that genre, but this is one that’s well worth the time and the praise that it’s been receiving. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Killers of the Flower Moon (2023)

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On a recent vacation in the Twin Cities, I spent an afternoon at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, which is currently exhibiting “150 photographs of, by, and for Indigenous people” in a photography collection titled “In Our Hands”.  It was during that same vacation when I watched Martin Scorsese’s Indigenous genocide drama Killers of the Flower Moon, which is also a series of photographs grappling with the medium’s representation & othering of Indigenous peoples.  Because I’m a movie obsessive, the photographs featured in “In Our Hands” that spoke to me loudest were the ones about misrepresentations of “American Indians” in American pop media.  Cara Romero’s 2017 photograph “TV Indians” pairs living Indigenous figures with vintage images of fictional Indigenous stereotypes, displayed on cathode-ray televisions in the colonized & decimated landscape of New Mexico.  Sarah Sense’s 2018 mixed-media piece “Custer and the Cowgirl with Her Gun” combines images of vintage Indigenous stereotypes in media with personal photographs & historical writing from her Chitimacha & Choctaw homeland through a traditional basket weaving technique that transforms & reclaims the medium of photography for a culture it has been historically weaponized against.  Killers of the Flower Moon also addresses the fraught history of Indigenous representation in American media, to the point where its theatrical exhibition opens with Scorsese explaining his “authentic” behind-the-scenes collaboration with the Osage communities the story depicts. The film also concludes with a second onscreen appearance from the director effectively apologizing for his participation in the tradition of speaking for & about Indigenous people from a white American perspective.

To his credit, Scorsese does limit the amount of time & space he spends speaking for the Osage tribe, smartly focusing instead on the people he’s built an entire artistic career around understanding: white thugs.  Killers of the Flower Moon is a typical Scorsese crime picture in that it details the step-by-step villainy of greedy American brutes who commit heinous, organized acts of violence in order to squeeze a few petty dollars out of their neighbors.  He acknowledges this continuation of his pet themes by casting his two go-to muses in central roles: Leonardo DiCaprio as a slack-jawed goon and Robert De Niro as the criminal mastermind who puppeteers him.  The dastardly duo conspires to become friends, family, heirs, and murderers to the Osage people, who have stumbled upon immense wealth when their government-assigned strip of land proves to be a viable source of crude oil.  DiCaprio’s assigned mark is a lonely but stoic young woman played by Lily Gladstone, whom he seduces, marries, creates children with, and then slowly poisons while murdering members of her family under the direction of De Niro’s whims & schemes.  Gladstone’s performance is formidable within that central trio, and she stands to benefit the most from this collaboration with Old Uncle Marty.  Still, it’s the slimy, bottomless cruelty of De Niro & DiCaprio’s characters that drives most of the scene-to-scene drama, so that Scorsese is telling his own people’s story more than he is speaking for the Osage.  Watching the movie in conjunction with visiting the M.I.A.’s “In Our Hands” exhibit raises questions of why these same film production resources can’t be put in the hands of Indigenous artists as well, but that question does little to unravel the specific story Scorsese chose to tell here.

Where the question of authenticity & representation really comes into play is in the film’s coda, delivered after De Niro & DiCaprio’s thugs have already been arrested for their crimes by the Baby’s First Steps version of the FBI.  Where lesser Awards Season historical dramas will fill the audience in on how their characters’ lives resolved via onscreen text before the end credits, Scorsese delivers that information via dramatic radio play — complete with the outdat foley sound effects and outdated racist stereotypes that would’ve been contemporary in that pre-cinematic medium.  The director then shambles onscreen himself as a radio announcer to read Gladstone’s character’s real-life obituary to the audience with humble solemnity.  This is a jarring stylistic swing for a film that often finds Scorsese working in Boardwalk Empire mode more than Goodfellas mode (more dramatic than cinematic), but it’s at least one that seeks artistic purpose beyond reciting this history to a wide audience who needs to hear it.  Here we have a quintessentially American story told by a quintessential American storyteller, and yet there’s no way for Scorsese to recite that history without in some way participating in its ongoing genocidal erasure of Indigenous voices.  The opening doorway image to the “In Our Hands” exhibit is a portrait of an Osage woman taken by photographer Ryan Redcorn, purposefully representing his subject in a proud, dignified pose.  In Scorsese’s picture, Osage women are sickly victims of white American greed, because that’s true to white American history.  It’s worth pushing for a better world where both of those images are offered equally accessible platforms, and this film’s coda feels like an uneasy acknowledgement of the current imbalance.  Still, this is a story worth reciting, and there are certainly less noble things Scorsese could be doing with $treaming $ervice money than turbocharging Lily Gladstone’s career.

-Brandon Ledet

The Cow Who Sang a Song into the Future (2023)

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La vaca que cantó una canción hacia el futuro (The Cow Who Sang a Song into the Future) is a beautiful, entrancing film, the first feature from writer-director Francisca Alegria. Although most reviews of the film that I have seen draw attention to the film’s environmental themes and magical-realist atmosphere, I’ve seen very little discussion about the film’s presentation of family. One of the film’s inciting incidents is the dumping of industrial waste from a paper factory into the Cruces River, but what stands out the most to me is the way that the movie focuses on a different kind of toxic waste, and the way that it can pollute the very thing that gives us life. 

Magdalena (Mía Maestro) is a doctor living in a cold urban home, having put as much distance between herself and her rural upbringing as possible. When she receives a call from her brother Bernardo (Marcial Tagle) telling her that their dairy farmer father Enrique (Alfredo Castro) has suffered from a heart attack, she returns home with her two daughters, including teenaged Tomás (Enzo Ferrada), whose gender identity she does not respect. Upon arriving and performing her own medical inspection of her father, she is told that he did not have a standard heart attack, but that it was a sudden stress-induced health issue. Enrique, for his part, tells his children that he passed out after seeing their long-dead mother Cecilia (Leonor Varela) outside of a cell phone store. Magdalena does not believe him, of course, since she was the one who watched her mother commit suicide by tying herself to her motorcycle and driving into the river when she was a mere seven years old, but he’s absolutely correct; we in the audience saw Cecilia climb out of that same river, accompanied by a mournful him that seems to come from the dead fish surrounding her, in the film’s opening moments. But what brought her back, and why?

As a character study, this is a piece about a woman who has long embodied the worst aspects of her father but learns to represent the best parts of her mother. As with many texts containing magical realism, much is left up to the interpretation, but we first see her being harsh and cold with the people closest to her, first telling Tomás that, as long as she lives in Magdalena’s house, she is her “son.” Her brother’s feelings about her are clear from their first onscreen interaction; although Bernardo lovingly embraces his nieces, when Magdalena moves in to hug him, he waves her off, citing that he has been working and is too filthy to be touched. When they arrive at the farm, Magdalena sends Bernardo off to take care of the dairy “for once” while she attends to their father. In comparison to the lush verdancy of the countryside, her home in the city is sterile, and when nature intrudes (in the form of a spider in her bathroom window), she doesn’t attempt to coax it outside and close the window, but instead runs off for a can of insecticide, which she sprays into the air futilely when she returns to find that the spider is nowhere to be seen. 

All of these are elements that tie Magdalena to Enrique, who is likewise queerphobic, dismissive of his child, and sees the natural world as something that exists only to benefit human beings, diametrically opposed by civilization. Enrique also chides Bernardo for failing to take care of the dairy, even blaming him when their cows die despite their death being the direct result of Enrique’s refusal to listen to his son; his reaction to Bernardo’s insistence that they dig a new well for the cows shows that this is a recurring argument, but it’s that very lack of forethought that leads to the herd drinking from the poisoned river when they are overcome with thirst, essentially damning the dairy farm to close. When the tearful Bernardo brings this to his father’s attention, the older man calls his son a homophobic slur and degrades him. Magdalena has spent her life seeing things through her father’s myopic, cruel vision of the world, and her own family has suffered from his polluting influence as a result. That this traces itself back to her childhood is no surprise. Like her father, she has long seen her mother’s suicide as a sign of weakness due to not wanting to be a mother, as evidenced by all the times in her memory that her mother was absent while still alive. In truth, those absences were the fault of her father, who had Cecilia institutionalized multiple times because he could not control her. Luckily for her, learning this is epiphanic, and even if she is limited in her ability to heal the world, it’s not too late to heal her relationship with Tomás.

If you were wondering if there is an actual singing cow in this movie, then I regret to inform you that there is not … there are several. At the start of the film, what appears to be non-diegetic music plays as the shores of the Cruces give up hundreds of dead fish, with these images soundtracked by a mournful elegy about dying. After there are news reports that the toxic waste in the water has killed not only the fish but also the various water grasses and insects that sustain other animals in the ecosystem, which leave the area in search of other food resources. Finally, the cows drink the waters of the river and themselves succumb to the poison, but before they pass, they join their voices in a chorus, grieving for the calves that were taken from them so that they would continuously produce milk for the farm, and rejoicing that the pain that came from that separation, which they consider to be worse than death, will end soon. This has the potential to be unintentionally funny, especially in the odd occasional moment in which one of the cow “actors” is chewing cud almost in time to the song like something out of Mister Ed, but the sincerity of the moment manages to make it work despite the potential to be undermined. 

That separation between mother and child stands as a metaphor not just for the relationship between Magdalena and the long-dead mother whom she unconsciously resents, but also between Magdalena and her own elder daughter. When we first meet Tomás, she is in her bedroom, showing her beau an online newspaper clipping about Cecilia’s death, asking if the boy sees the resemblance between Tomás and her grandmother. Her self-actualization is blocked not only by her mother’s bigotry but also her disconnection from her roots, and her hunger for a connection drives her to seek out her resurrected grandmother and the two bond. The revived Cecilia is mute throughout the film, but there’s a magic to the way that these two women who share a familial bond but who have never met are able to form a connection without the need for words. A love that transcends speech reappears again at the end, when Tomás and her mother reunite, and even without words, it’s clear that the two of them have gained a better understanding of each other, in unvoiced acceptance. 

This is certainly one of the most moving films I’ve seen this year, as well as one of the most lyrical, beautifully composed, and haunting. It sets its mood and never alters course, hypnotic in its commitment to its themes. It should not be missed. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Weapons of Mass Distraction

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Like most other bored, overheated Americans, I spent the third Friday of July hiding from the sun in my neighborhood movie theater, watching an all-day double feature.  I didn’t directly participate in the “Barbenheimer” phenomenon, though, partly due to scheduling inconvenience and partly out of general bafflement with the incongruous pairing.  As a longtime movie obsessive, it was wonderful to see more casual audiences out in full force, dressed up to participate in a double feature program; or it was at least a more endearing moviegoing meme than its recent “Gentleminions” predecessor.  I still like to program my double features with a little more consideration to tone & theme, though, and I can’t imagine that either Nolan’s or Gerwig’s latest were served well by the pairing – which was essentially a joke about how ill-suited they were for back-to-back binging in the first place.  However, I’m not immune to pop culture FOMO, which is how I wound up watching Oppenheimer in the first place.  Nothing about the film’s subject, genre, or marketing screamed out to me as essential viewing, other than the assumption that it was going to be a frequent subject of movie nerd discourse until at least next year’s Oscars ceremony.  So, I dragged my old, tired body to the theater at 10am on a weekday to sit down with Christopher Nolan’s three-hour rumination on the placid evils of nuclear war, and then paired it with a movie I suspected I would like just to sweeten the deal – the ludicrously titled Mission: Impossible 7, Part 1 – Dead Reckoning.  It was essentially the same dessert-after-dinner double feature approach most participating audiences took with Barbenheimer (which, considering that sequence, likely should’ve just been called “Oppie”), except applied to two feature films on a single subject: the abstract weaponry of modern war.

As you surely already know, Oppenheimer stars Cillian Murphy as the titular nuclear physicist, credited for leading the development of the atom bomb at the end of WWII.  His story is told in two conflicting, alternating perspectives: his own version of events in full color (as told to a military security-clearance review board) and a black-and-white version recounted by a professional rival (as told years later in a Congressional hearing).  It’s an abrasively dry approach to such an explosive, emotional subject, even if Nolan does everything possible to win over Dad Movie heretics like me in the story’s framing & editing – breaking up the pedestrian men-talking-in-rooms rhythms of an Oliver Stone or Aaron Sorkin screenplay with his own flashier, in-house Nolanisms.  Oppenheimer strives to overcome its limitations as a legal testimony drama by drawing immense energy from a three-hour crosscutting montage and relentless repetition of its own title at a “Gabbo! Gabbo! Gabbo!” rhythm.  After so many years of tinkering with the cold, technical machinery of cinema, Nolan at least seems willing to allow a new sense of looseness & abstraction into the picture to disrupt his usual visual clockwork (starting most clearly in Tenet).  Young Oppenheimer’s visit to an art museum as a student suggests that this new, abstracted style is inspired by the Cubist art movement of the setting’s era, but the editing feels purely Malickian to me, especially when covering the scientist’s early years.  My favorite moments were his visions of cosmos—micro and macro—while puzzling through the paradoxes of nuclear science, as well as his wife’s intrusive visions of his sexual affair while defending himself to a military panel.  These are still small, momentary distractions from the real business at hand: illustrating the biggest moral fuck-up of human history in all its daily office-work drudgery.  Most of the movie is outright boring in its “What have we done?” contemplations of bureaucratic weaponry-development evil, no matter how much timeline jumping it does in its character-actor table reads of real-life historical documents.

In all honesty, the most I got out of Oppenheimer was an appreciation for it table-setting the mood for the much more entertaining Mission: Impossible 7.  To paraphrase Logan Roy, I am not a serious person.  The great tragedy of Nolan’s piece is watching a Jewish, Leftist man’s attempts to stop his people’s genocide get exploited by the American military’s bottomless hunger for bigger, deadlier bombs – ultimately resulting in a new, inconceivable weapon that will likely lead to the end of humanity’s life on planet Earth (if other forms of industrial pollution don’t kill us first).  Oppenheimer doesn’t realize until it’s too late that his team’s invention did not end WWII; it instead created a new, infinite war built on the looming international threat of mutual self-destruction.  The immediate consequences of the atom bomb were the devastation of two Japanese cities, leaving figurative blood on the haunted man’s hands, which he attempts to clean in the final hour of runtime by ineffectively maneuvering for world peace within the system he helped arm.  The long-term consequences are much more difficult to define, leaving a lingering atmospheric menace on the world outside the theater after the credits roll.  Instead of sweetening that menace with the pink-frosted confectionary of Barbie, I followed up Oppenheimer with a much vapider novelty: the latest Tom Cruise vanity project.  Speaking of history’s greatest monsters, I was also feeling a little uneasy about watching the latest Tom Cruise stunt fest (especially after suffering through last year’s insipid Top Gun rebootquel), but credit where it’s due: Dead Reckoning was a great time at the movies.  Unlike Oppenheimer, M:I 7 is built of full, robust scenes and complete exchanges of dialogue instead of the de-constructed Malickian snippets of a three-hour trailer.  It’s a three-hour frivolity in its own right, but it’s an intensely entertaining one, and it immediately restored my faith that I can still appreciate mainstream, big-budget cinema right after Nolan shook it.  Also, there was something perverse about it doing so by toying around on the exact Cold War playground Oppenheimer mistakenly created.

If there’s a modern equivalent to the abstract, unfathomable power of the atom bomb (besides, you know, the still-growing stockpiles of nuclear weapons in many countries’ arsenals), it’s likely in the arena of digital espionage and the development of A.I. technology.  The seventh Mission: Impossible film runs with the zeitgeisty relevance of killer-A.I. weaponry at full speed, creating an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-everything-everywhere A.I. villain that looks like a vintage iTunes visualizer.  It’s about as well defined as the young Oppenheimer’s intrusive visions of nuclear particles, but neither Cruise nor his in-house workman director Christopher McQuarrie are especially interested in figuring out the scientific logic behind it.  Dead Reckoning‘s A.I. villain—referred to simply (and frequently) as The Entity—is mostly just an excuse for the creepy millionaire auteur behind it to stage a series of increasingly outlandish stunts.  By some miracle, the new Mission: Impossible nearly matches the absurdly convoluted humanity-vs-A.I. combat of Mrs. Davis and the absurdly over-the-top espionage action spectacle of Pathaan, making it the most entertaining American action blockbuster of the year by default.  Unfortunately, like a lot of other American blockbusters this year, it’s also only half a movie, ending on a literal cliff-hanger that won’t be resolved until a three-hour Part 2 conclusion of the miniseries reaches theaters in a couple years.  Since that double feature isn’t currently screening in its entirety, I had to settle for pairing it with Nolan’s Oppenheimer, which at least helped give its over-the-top A.I. espionage theatrics a sense of real-world consequence.  The only recognizable threat behind The Entity’s abstract swirl of LED lights is that it’s smart enough to fool & manipulate nuclear-capable governments.  It could bring the world to an end with the weaponry we’ve already created ourselves, and it wouldn’t be too surprising if Dead Reckoning, Part 2 includes a gag where Cruise diffuses an actual, active nuclear warhead while riding it in the sky like Slim Pickens before him.

My disparate reactions to Oppenheimer and Dead Reckoning likely have more to do with personal taste & disposition than the movies’ objective qualities.  Whereas self-serious lines of dialogue like “How can this man, who saw so much, be so blind?” and “Is anyone ever going to tell the truth about what’s happening here?” had me rolling my eyes at Oppenheimer, I was delighted by Mission: Impossible’s equally phony line reading of “Ethan, you are playing 4D chess with an algorithm,” delivered by Ving Rhames with the same unearned gravitas.  Maybe it’s because I don’t expect much out of the big-budget end of mainstream filmmaking except for its value as in-the-moment entertainment.  I don’t think Oppenheimer‘s internal wrestling with its protagonist’s guilt over inventing The Bomb or our government’s mistreatment of his professional reputation in The McCarthy Era amounts to all that much, except maybe as a reminder that the threat of Nuclear Apocalypse is an ongoing Important Issue.  It obviously can’t solve that issue in any meaningful way, though, unless you put a lot of personal meaning into Hollywood’s ability to convert Important Issues into Awards Statues.  It’s a movie, not a systemic political policy.  I personally see more immediate value in Mission: Impossible‘s ability to delight & distract (both from the real-world horrors of nuclear war and, more maliciously, the real-world horrors of its star), since that’s using the tools of mainstream filmmaking for what they’re actually apt to accomplish.  Oppenheimer is a three-hour montage of Important Men played by “That guy!” character actors exchanging tight smirks & knowing glances in alternating boardroom readings of historical testimony.  Dead Reckoning, Part 1 is a three-hour Evil Knievel stuntman roadshow punctuated by abstract info-dumps about the immense, unfathomable power of A.I. technology.  The closest Nolan comes to matching Cruise in this head-to-head battle in terms of pure entertainment value is the visual gag of a doddering Albert Einstein repeatedly dropping his hat. 

-Brandon Ledet

The Hairy Bird (1998)

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In 1998, Miramax swept one of its finest films under the rug, plopping it in theaters like an unwanted runny egg with no promotion, then shuffling it off to home video. Director Sarah Kernochan, who was one of the co-directors of Marjoe among many other accolades, has laid the blame for this at the feet of none other than infamous sex pest Harvey Weinstein. It appears that, although he promised her distribution to at least 2000 screens, Weinstein recanted when Kernochan refused to hand over editorial control so that he could turn the film into something less like The Trouble with Angels-meets-The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys and more like a distaff Porky’s, with a broader appeal to a more mainstream (read: male) audience. As a result, a true classic has largely fallen through the cracks, not helped by the fact that it’s had three different titles: the original The Hairy Bird (which was rejected as it’s a slang reference to a phallus), then the generically nondescript All I Wanna Do for release in some regions, and the spoilery title Strike! in others. It’s out there, though, and if you can find it, it’s worth digging into. 

It’s 1963, and Odette “Odie” Sinclair (Gaby Hoffman) has been packed off to board at Miss Godard’s Preparatory School for Girls following her mother’s discovery of her diaphragm, to get her as far away from her boyfriend, Dennis (Matt Lawrence), as possible. Upon arrival, she is given a tour of the place by Abby Sawyer (Rachel Leigh Cook), an uptight legacy student who’s parlayed that status into a student leader position that allows her to act as militaristic hall monitor of other students. Odie is placed into a room with Verena von Stefan (Kirsten Dunst) and Tinka Parker (Monica Keena), the school’s foremost shit-stirrers who mockingly insert vulgarities into the school song as the students sing before dinner, smoke cigarettes on the school grounds, and (accurately) call Abby a fascist to her face. They induct Odie into their group, which also includes bulimic aspiring psychologist Tweety Goldberg (Heather Matarazzo) and science-inclined Maureen Haines (Merritt Weaver), and show her their secret hideout in a disused attic room that is accessible only through the ceiling of a linen closet. This secret clubhouse also allows them access to the school kitchen and its many canned goods, leading them to dub themselves the Daughters of the American Ravioli. Each is ambitious in her own way, declaring their intention to reject society’s intention to turn them into cookie-cutter wives and mothers with the motto “No more white gloves.” 

The first half of the film is largely made up of your standard mid-century boarding school hijinx. The girls sneak around and smoke, talk about their hopes and dreams, attempt to get a lecherous teacher fired through an elaborate hoax that involves a fake care package, and learn from each other. One of the major elevating factors in the movie is the presence of Lynn Redgrave in the role of headmistress Miss McVane. She’s amazing and powerful here as a stern but insightful and warm mentor figure who doles out advice to Odie when the girl first has friction with her roommates and peers. “Don’t reject them,” McVane tells her. “They’re not ‘just girls.’ They’re you. If you get to know them, you’ll be discovering yourself.” She’s right, too, and it’s amazing to watch just how much these characters bond, quickly but profoundly, with the distraction of boys completely removed from the equation, even if they’re never far from the girls’ minds (especially not Odie’s). The girls hatch a plan to get her off campus to one of their houses for a weekend so that she and Dennis can see each other, but when this plan is ruined, Odie ends up confined to campus for the remainder of the year. Discussion is made of finding a way to get Dennis on campus and into the attic room so that Odie can meet him there, but everything changes when Tweety overhears that the school is in such dire financial straits that the board is forcing the school to merge with nearby boys’ school St. Ambrose Academy. 

The girls’ fellowship is broken over different reactions to the news. Verena is incensed at the idea of losing what little space there is in the world that isn’t overrun by men and delivers a rampaging speech about how being forced to start worrying about primping and preening instead of studying and learning will have a net negative effect on all of them, and Maureen is distraught about how applying to MIT as one of eight students from St. Ambrose instead of as the only applicant from Miss Godard’s will dilute her chances of matriculating there, even before getting into how being absorbed by a school with a more middling academic reputation will bring down the perception of her education. The other girls, in particular the boy-crazy Tinka, are more excited by the prospect of going co-ed and the resultant opportunities for sexual gratification. Tensions run high following this schism, and they come to a head when a busload of St. Ambrose students arrive at Miss Godard’s for an introductory dance and choir concert. Verena and Maureen have a plan to make the students of St. Ambrose look bad, and the other girls realize Verena may be right when Tweety is taken advantage of by a boy who tricks her into exposing herself for a photograph. This puts Tinka on the warpath, and soon all of the girls are united in their effort to do anything they can to prevent the schools from merging. 

The resultant payoff to these plans is exactly the kind of thing that would, in any other movie, act as the climax of the film and save the school, but it’s not so simple. Although they are able to frame and/or expose (depending on the nature of the boy in question) the students of St. Ambrose as drunks and creeps, everything is covered up by the boards of both schools. Verena is expelled for her role in the plan, leading to the conversation in which she and the audience learn that she failed and that the school(s) will be going forward with co-education. As McVane explains it, it’s not “the first time women have had to marry for money,” delivering a wonderful speech about how the alumni have forsaken the school because they don’t see the use in investing in the futures of other women. “The men give generously to their schools. It’s a solid investment. They are ensuring that a steady supply of the nation’s leaders will be men.” She extols Verena, in a final impassioned plea to keep the faith: “After the men plant their flag in this school, they’ll bury us. It will be subtle and insidious, as in real life. Now, I may be at the end of the road here, but you’re young, you have the talent and power to lead; don’t stop the fight.” It may seem like it’s sitting there limply on the page, but this is powerful stuff in Redgrave’s hands, and she milks it for everything that it’s worth, and it is glorious.

The young cast is great as well. In addition to the above-mentioned students at Miss Godard’s, there’s a recurring character named Snake (Vincent Kartheiser) who leads a gang of local beatniks who are all named after common roadkill animals, and the St. Ambrose boy that Verena attempts to frame is played by Vincent Kartheiser, best known as Smalls from The Sandlot. Other boys from the academy include a pre-Animorphs Shawn Ashmore, a pre-Star Wars Hayden Christensen, and Robin Dunne, who you’re bound to recognize from something (and who has been in no fewer than nine movies with “Christmas” in the title). One of Snake’s hoodlums is also Zachary Bennett, the future star of Cube Zero, which may be of interest to longtime Swampflix fans. This is a stacked cast, and it’s a shame that dick-wagging has pushed it out of the public eye for so long. There’s not a bad performance in the bunch. It’s telling that, for all the clout that he amassed during his reign of terror, Weinstein couldn’t see what was so special about this movie and what quintessential magic that the film has would have been lost if he had gotten his way; he wanted to “sex up” the narrative, not realizing that this movie already is sexual, it simply handles its topic with great care. This is a movie about a group of young women who are fully in control of their sexuality. They’re not “desexualized,” but they don’t exist for the male gaze at all, and that’s likely why no one had any faith in it. Regardless, this is an undisputed classic in my opinion, and deserves to be tracked down. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Past Lives (2023)

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There’s a little piece of quotational wisdom that’s never far from my mind: “Life is made up of meetings and partings. That is the way of it.” That it comes from The Muppet Christmas Carol and is recited by Kermit the Frog does not make it less poignant, or less true. Sometimes, when those words resurface in my mind, I also recall illustrator Olivia de Recat’s simple line drawings of closeness lines over time, which depict how two individual lives intersect (or don’t) based on the way that relationships change over time. They’re minimalistic, with only two lines in each image, but they resonate: the gentle curves of “first love” speak volumes, the angular intersection of “one night stand” has a kind of vivacious energy that I love, and the “friends with benefits” lines, where one party starts to move away from the other and the second party tries to follow before separating in a way that can only be described as dejected, is my personal favorite. I recently acted it out (or had it enacted upon me), actually, and I walked away from that schism having taken some real psychic damage. Past Lives has come along at exactly the right moment to make sense of everything by envisioning meetings and partings in a way that breathes meaning and beauty into our sadnesses, our joys, and our presumed certainties. 

Twenty-four years ago, Na Young and Hae Sung were classmates, competitors, best friends, and potentially more. When we meet them, at age 12, Na Young is trying not to cry over the fact that Hae Sung has bested her academically, perhaps for the first time. Unfortunately, their halcyon days of walking home together from school and playing among public sculptuary are cut short by Na Young’s family’s immigration to Canada. Twelve years pass, and Na Young, now going by her Anglicized name of Nora Moon (Greta Lee), is a student playwright in NYC. While on the phone with her mother, she decides to look Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) up on Facebook and discovers that he has tried to reach out to her. The two reconnect and share the maximum level of emotional intimacy that two people on opposite sides of the planet communicating via a glitchy Skype connection can. Unable to meet in person for a prolonged period of time because of their individual studies, the two take a temporary break that lasts a lot longer than either intended. Nora meets Arthur (John Magaro) at a writing residency, and she tells him about the concept of in-yun, a concept relating to fate that paints the serendipitous connections of life as predestined. Twelve years later, Nora and Arthur are married and still in NYC, and Hae Sung comes to visit, supposedly on vacation, but really to reunite. The immediate and intense magnetism between the two is palpable, but their paths have been going in opposite directions for so long that their destinies may be forever parted. 

Early in the film, Na Young’s mother explains to Hae Sung’s that she and her husband have chosen to immigrate despite having good careers and social networks because, to paraphrase, when you let go of something, you also gain something. It’s a very simple idea in a sparse text, but it’s nonetheless true. Nora and Hae Sung both recognize this, but in different ways and at different points in their lives, and they realize the opposite as well, that hanging onto something means the death (at least in this life) of all the things that might have been. Nora meets Arthur when she lets Hae Sung go, and Hae Sung meets his unnamed girlfriend at about the same time. Hae Sung, at 24, is insistent that he hang onto the blueprint of his planned career by going to Shanghai to learn Mandarin instead of taking the option to learn English in NYC and be near Nora instead, and in so doing ensures that there is only one path this life will take — one without her, even if he doesn’t realize it at the time. In the film, as in life, there are a million little moments where the choices of holding fast or letting go have an effect that echoes throughout one’s lifetime (or lifetimes), and in every single one, I felt the intensity of each of those tiny, almost imperceptible forks in the road. When Nora and Hae Sung start talking to each other again at 24, there’s a sense of such  in every wording choice that feels immense in the way that every exchange of words with a crush or someone you feel an intense connection to but aren’t intimately familiar with always feels … portentous. That blending of the feeling of getting to know one another (again, or for the first time) and that sense of something so much bigger taking form on the horizon, it’s effervescent and light and yet so big, so bold, so beautiful. 

Past Lives is truly a perfect title. Each time that the two meet, so much about themselves has changed, to the point that they don’t perceive themselves as the same people. This is textual; at one point, Nora draws a distinction between her adult self and the child Na Young that Hae Sung used to know. Hae Sung, however, still sees Na Young inside of Nora, and she does the same for him; they may not be literally reincarnated, but they are different people with something innate and unchanging inside that they recognize in one another. This cycle is reinforced in the way that Nora and Hae Sung see each other only every twelve years, like clockwork. Even the location choices reiterate the cyclical nature of the two’s relationship: on the day that they reunite in their thirties, the two are framed against Jane’s Carousel, and they later also take the ferry tour around the Statue of Liberty. Both are rides that ultimately end in the same place that they begin and then cycle again, in a lovely metaphor. 

Nora is a fascinating character, and Greta Lee is an astonishing performer. This is a sparse movie, with very little non-diegetic sound and music sprinkled in only very occasionally, and that aesthetic plays out on screen as well, with a lot of the performance of Nora coming down to the smallest of facial movements on both Lee and Teo’s parts, the tiniest wrinkling of doubt, the smallest twinge of hope at the edge of the lip, the almost imperceptible brow tightening of longing deferred. It’s pure magic, and it wouldn’t work if we didn’t spend so much time with these two people, learning them. In a different world, there’s a version of this narrative where we love Nora a little less, find her dismissal of Hae Sung in 2012 cold and heartless, or find her honesty with her husband and her reassurances to him hollow and false, but Lee imbues Nora with an almost impossible level of likability. We see ourselves in her. She papers over the things that she can’t control by making blanket statements of agency that are questionably true: when her parents choose to immigrate to Canada, she tells her friends that she wants to go, supposedly so that she can one day win the Nobel Prize (at age 24, this dream has changed to winning the Pulitzer, and at 36, when prompted by Hae Sung, she jokes that she’s now aiming for a Tony). When realizing that she and Hae Sung will not see each other for at least a year when they reconnect in 2012, she tells him that she needs a break to focus on her life in New York, but we know that this isn’t completely true because she begins dating Arthur very shortly thereafter. Lee deftly navigates all of this, and I can’t wait to see more of her.  

I’m hesitant to make a comparison between this film and one with a white person at the directorial helm and starring an entirely white European cast, but I feel I must; when I walked out of the theater, I felt much the same as I did when I left my screening of Portrait of a Lady on Fire. It wasn’t just the sparsity of intrusions from more filmic elements, or that both filmmakers were named Celine, but in the way that both works are about loves which are so vast that they fill up every space that presents itself and thus feel certain and immovable, but which are ultimately all-too-fragile. There’s a scene in Past Lives in which Nora walks through the empty house that will be her home for the duration of her writing residency and we get to hear every footstep as she crosses the space, just as every footfall in Portrait was likewise audible and meaningful; later, there’s a loud metallic thump when Nora walks over a metal grate on the sidewalk. It’s human, it’s real, it’s tangible. That doesn’t always mean that some alchemical process of “art” is happening, but in a movie so intimate and so suffused with longing as Past Lives, the magic is there. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Rimini (2023)

/ swampflix / 2 Comments

Sometimes you don’t realize how regressive & puritanical most American cinema is until you watch a European art film.  For instance, the recent Austrian-French drama Rimini was revelatory in just how squicked out most American filmmakers are about nude, elderly bodies.  I’ve become so accustomed to seeing old naked bodies exploited for gross-out jump scares in American horror that it felt genuinely transgressive to see geriatric sex shot without shame or judgement.  The nude-geriatric jump scare is a well established American tradition, dating at least as far back as the bathtub scene in Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining.  The practice has ramped up exponentially in recent years, though, and you can see elderly nudity depicted as skin-crawly grotesqueries in such buzzy horror titles as Barbarian, IT, It Follows, X, The Visit, The Witch, Hereditary, Midsommar, and (for the full Ari Aster trifecta) Beau is Afraid.  Any one of those examples could be individually defended for their reasoning in perpetuating the trope, but as a group they do indicate a fairly damnable ageist trend.  And so, when the elderly women of Rimini pay to have vigorous, onscreen sex with their favorite washed-up pop star, it’s surprisingly refreshing to see their sexual activities and sexual bodies presented in a matter-of-fact, semi-documentary style instead of the heightened American nightmare equivalent where they are shocking & gross.

Well, that’s not entirely true.  The geriatric sex in Rimini is also shocking & gross, but only because of the context.  The film itself is a shocking & gross character study of a shocking & gross man, played by Austrian actor Michael Thomas.  Thomas stars as the fictional has-been pop singer Ricky Bravo, who drinks and fucks away the remaining scraps of his life in the off-season beachside hotel rooms of the titular Italian tourist town.  The tourists have left for winter, so seemingly all that’s left in Rimini’s frozen-over water parks and hotel suites is Ricky Bravo’s horned-up fans, who are bussed in from distant Euro retirement homes to bask in his kitschy caricature of romance novel machismo.  Ricky Bravo recalls a wide range of cornball sex symbols from decades past without parodying any one example in particular, instead approximating what it might be like if Meatloaf had starred in a 1980s Beauty and the Beast TV show instead of Ron Perlman.  He even dresses in a ragged, beastly fur coat he tosses onto hotel room beds like a Viking pelt that he ravages his paying customers on top of, essentially wearing an unwashable cum rag around town between gigs.  All of Bravo’s handsome affectations get increasingly grotesque when you squint at them in that way.  He presents himself as a passionate lush, but he’s really just a lonely alcoholic and a low-effort gigolo.  His decadence is decorated with the faded hallmarks of wealth from much brighter times, and it all looks so increasingly tacky in the cold, sober light of day – especially by the dozenth time his de-glamourized routine repeats onscreen.

Ricky Bravo’s racism also becomes increasingly apparent as his macho facade erodes.  He sees himself as a progressive rebel who’s transcended the fascistic politics of his demented Nazi father (played by German actor Hans-Michael Rehberg in his final film role), whom he’s permanently parked in a grimly mundane nursing home.  Bravo has, of course, absorbed plenty of his father’s racism despite himself, though, and the film is just as much about the crooner’s reactions to Rimini’s immigrant populations as it is about his unconventional sex work.  While the tourists and seasonal workers can afford to leave town for the winter, there are large communities of homeless Muslim refugees who cannot.  They slowly freeze to death on Rimini’s beaches while the town’s hotel rooms (and Ricky’s tacky mansion) remain mostly empty, since there is no practical way to make money off sheltering them.  Bravo’s initial discomfort towards homeless refugees escalates to blatant hostility when his estranged daughter arrives in town with a silent Muslim boyfriend, demanding backpay for decades of missed child support.  Bravo loses focus from satisfying his adoring fans (on stage and in bed) just long enough to scheme his way into the petty cash needed to purchase his daughter’s unearned affection, which means that he rips off and exploits the few people he can exert power over in the smallest, cruelest ways – all while looking down on the immigrant people who share his otherwise desolate city streets.

As you can likely tell, Rimini is grim.  It’s also wryly funny, and the joke is always on Ricky Bravo for being such a drunken, dirty asshole.  Even the camera’s extreme wide-shot framing treats Bravo’s life as a sad joke.  He’s often shrunken to puny insignificance by the camera’s cold distancing, especially whenever he’s performing his dusty pop songs for his dwindling crowd of devotees.  The camera never lets him get away with big-timing the audience, making sure we see every inch of the hotels’ drop-tile ceilings while he performs his sappy love ballads.  The film’s funeral parlors, nursing homes, and hotel conference rooms make for oppressively bland mise-en-scène, and there’s never a hint of music video escapism in the pop singer’s meaningless life haunting those spaces.  That’s not how the sex is shot, though.  In the bedroom, the camera is borderline pornographic in its handheld, documentary framing of Ricky Bravo’s performance.  Bravo’s only meaningful contribution to the world is his ability to provide pleasure & fantasy to elderly women who find him hot.  You will not be surprised to learn that he eventually finds a way to fuck that up too.  Rimini is a distinctly European flavor of feel-bad movie where everything eventually sours & rots for our squirmy displeasure at the nearest non-corporate theater.  It says something, then, that it still has a less shameful, othering eye for shooting geriatric sex than mainstream American cinema, even if the people having that sex are inevitably demeaned & destroyed in other ways.

-Brandon Ledet