drama

Party Girl (1958)

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I’ve been hearing the term “dream ballet” tossed around with unusual frequency lately, due to that glamorous Old Hollywood indulgence enjoying a resurgence in the Oscar nominees Maestro & Barbie.  Both films feature an abrupt break from reality in which their male leads slip into a dream dimension to express their abstract emotional state through the art of balletic, interpretive dance – something much more common to the grand movie musicals of Hollywood’s Golden Era than to the overly cynical, logical filmmaking landscape we’re currently trudging through.  It shouldn’t have surprised me, then, that all of this “dream ballet” chatter was echoed in my recent thrift store Blu-ray purchase of the Old Hollywood classic Party Girl, which stops its real-world story of doomed lovers on a mobsters’ payroll in its tracks to indulge in a few escapist sequences of fantastical dance.  Where Party Girl‘s otherworldly dance numbers tripped me up, though, is in the way they subvert & pervert the most timelessly iconic dream ballet sequence in the Old Hollywood canon (the same one visually referenced in the “I’m Just Ken” dream ballet interlude of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie movie).  In Party Girl, dancer-turned-actress Cyd Charisse reworks her breakout performance in the dream ballet sequence from Singing in the Rain into a show girl strip tease.  The ethereal pinks & purples of Singing in the Rain‘s infinite studio set are retrofitted to the stage of a Prohibition-era Chicago gangster hangout called The Golden Rooster, and Charisse takes a moment in that otherworldly void to flirt with the camera instead of the audience in the room with her.  She’s initially costumed in a showgirl outfit with an eccentrically long train that flows behind her movements—until she removes it in classic burlesque tease—recalling the gorgeous white fabric that trailed her movements in Singing in the Rain.  It turns out her brief dance with Gene Kelley in that film was so instantly iconic that it was already being lovingly referenced just a few years later (decades before Ryan Gosling was even born).

Unfortunately, Party Girl peaks early with that balletic strip tease, and Charisse is given little to do off-stage, despite playing the titular moll.  She stars as 1930s Chicago showgirl Vicky Gaye, who earns extra cash between shows at The Golden Rooster by making paid appearances at mobster parties in private residences (a light, Hays Code-approved form of prostitution).  While working one of these pop-up speakeasy parties, she falls for the mobsters’ suave attorney, a “guardian angel for punks & gunmen” played by a disappointingly stiff Robert Taylor.  Their romance is a dully dignified one, with both parties pushing each other to get out of The Life even though they’re both on the same mobster’s payroll.  Courtroom debates, backroom negotiations, boat trips overseas, and medical crises ensue at a leisurely pace, occasionally interrupted by Tommy-gun fire & mildly salacious dance numbers.  Director Nicholas Ray brings the same eye for lurid beauty that elevates much more essential classics in his catalog like Johnny Guitar, especially in the way he puts the Metrocolor film processing to use in his splashes of gold & red.  Unfortunately, his flair for full-glam Old Hollywood magic is the wrong approach for noir, a genre that would’ve been much better suited for his scrappier early pictures like Rebel Without a Cause.  As a major studio noir, Party Girl is hopelessly bloated, something that’s apparent as soon as it widens the frame into CinemaScope.  It’s still beautiful nonetheless, whether it’s gawking at the vivid reds of a blood-filled bathtub or gawking at the glittering gold & pink sequins of Cyd Charisse’s dance costumes.  By the time she reappears onstage for a second dance break from reality in a leopard print gown, all of the energy of the picture has already bled out in one too many courtroom scenes, which are always death for late-period, major studio noir.

I don’t know that Cyd Charisse’s first big dance number in Party Girl technically counts as a dream ballet, since it’s narratively set up as a nightclub stage act instead of an expressionistic break from reality.  I do know that it’s referencing the go-to standard of dream ballet sequences, though, a connection to Singing in the Rain that’s made apparent enough by Charisse’s casting before it’s underlined in her costuming.  That dance routine also deliberately disregards the physical boundaries of its stage the same way Busby Berkeley used to in his own fantastical dance sequences, treating the camera as the audience POV instead of staying anchored to the extras seated in the room.  It’s the most alive Ray ever feels behind the camera, and it’s the one stretch of the film where Charisse’s screen presence feels irreplaceable.  I haven’t seen Maestro myself, nor am I likely to unprompted, but I can report that I was equally thrilled by the visual Singing in the Rain callback in Barbie‘s dream ballet sequence last summer.  In that moment, I felt the high-artifice movie magic of Old Hollywood return in full force, a sensibility echoed in the over-stylized set & costume design throughout Barbieland.  Hopefully, a third dream ballet sequence in a major motion picture will continue the trend after its repetition in Maestro; it’s one of the most genius tropes invented by the Hollywood dream machine, the kind of overwhelming sensory indulgence that inspires nerds with TCM & Criterion subscriptions to mutter “pure cinema” under our breath.

-Brandon Ledet

The Cranes are Flying (1957)

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Immediately after our viewing of Soy Cuba, my viewing companion started reading about the director, Mikhail Kalatozov, and discovered that he had also previously directed Letyat zhuravli (The Cranes are Flying), and that it had won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1958. We checked to see if it was on the Criterion streaming service and discovered that it was, and immediately made plans to watch it as soon as possible. Although it lacks some of the spectacular work that was present in Soy Cuba, the seeds for many of that film’s finest moments are on full display here, and this one is likewise worthy of revisiting for a modern audience. 

Boris (Aleksey Batalov) is a young Soviet factory worker with lofty ideals, deeply in love with Veronika (Tatiana Samoilova), whom he has nicknamed “Squirrel,” and he plans to marry her as soon as he can. Boris lives in a multi room apartment with his family: his grandmother, his father Fyodor (Vasili Merkuryev), and his cousins Mark (Aleksandr Shvorin) and Irina (Svetlana Kharitonova). Fyodor is a doctor and Irina is in training to enter the same profession, while Mark is a composer and piano player who is himself obsessed with Veronika. Boris and Veronika’s meetings are often delayed by his duties at the factory, which gives Mark the opportunity to try and ingratiate himself with his cousin’s betrothed, but Veronika soundly rejects him at every advance. When the Soviet Union enters WWII, many of Boris’s colleagues worry that they will be drafted, and there is much discussion about the possibility of receiving exemptions, and Veronika worries incessantly that Boris will be conscripted, unaware that her naive, doe-eyed love has already volunteered, alongside his friend Stepan (Valentin Zubkov). 

On the day before Veronika’s birthday, he is ordered to report for duty, and the two are unable to find each other in the crowd, prevented from saying a final goodbye. In his absence, things go from bad to worse for Veronika when her parents are killed in an air raid; she is taken in by Boris’s family, but this leaves her vulnerable to Mark’s machinations, and he forces himself upon her during another raid while the rest of the family is in hiding, then forces her to marry him. On the front, Boris is shot while saving a fellow soldier and declared missing. Veronika never gives up hope that he will return, however, even as she is trapped in a loveless marriage with Mark, evacuated to Siberia from Moscow as the enemy’s forces encroach, and made to endure the bitter lamentations of returning wounded who have more harsh words for the women who failed to wait for them than they do for the fascists that they fight. 

This movie is stunning. Samoilova is doing unprecedented work here as Veronika, from the first time that she sees the cranes flying over Moscow with Boris at her side, to the film’s bittersweet final moments when she sees them again after learning that Boris will not be returning home to her. This isn’t a spoiler—the film treats his death as an inevitability from the moment that we learn he has volunteered, and although there are a few moments in which it seems that there may be reason to hope, it is a foregone conclusion that he will not be coming home. The film knows it, the characters know it, and we know it, even as Veronika keeps hope alive in her heart for a reunion that will never come. 

This was, apparently, one of the first films within the USSR to treat the war as a tragedy and not a source of tremendous patriotic pride. Prior to this, all films that dealt with WWII did so in an overtly propagandistic way, with the films creating an image of a cheery populace without flaw, all working together in blissful harmony and without want or need. This was a lightning bolt of realism thrust into that industry, a film in which our heroes and our villains espouse the same political philosophies even if they enact very different systems of morality, showing both the mask that the USSR presented the west and the varied faces beneath it. Boris is lovable but he is also not only an obvious fool but dishonest, as evidenced not only by his immediately volunteering for the war effort but also when he lies straight to Veronika’s face about their plans for the immediate future, despite knowing he will not be able to fulfill any of it while he is out on the front lines. Mark is an utter cad, moving in on his cousin’s beloved even before he goes off to war and making every effort to take her for himself (up to and including an implied sexual assault) and resorting to bribery in order to receive a draft exemption—an action that also includes him using his respected uncle’s name without his knowledge and besmirching the man’s honor. Irina is likewise flawed. Her earliest scenes in the film show her belittling Boris for staying out late and sleeping in on his day off, despite the fact that he’s more exhausted from extended days of honest work than he is from catting around the city with Veronika; later, she treats Veronika like garbage for marrying Mark, even though it’s clear that she had little choice in the matter and Irina didn’t respect Boris in the first place. These are people, not propagandists. 

There’s something beautiful about the sense of impending doom here, and the way that it plays out in the visuals and the performances. Of particular note here are Fyodor and his mother, both of whom I completely adore. Grandmother (as she is credited) is weary with wisdom; unlike her naive grandson, she has seen wars before and she knows how the play out, and the knowing look in her eye when she learns that Boris is going to serve and she gazes into his face with the certain knowledge that this intimacy between them is now finite and has an expiration date is heartbreaking. On the day that Boris is to report, two women are sent to the family home bearing gifts from the Communist Party, and as they begin to recite the exhortation of Boris’s bravery and patriotism that they were sent to deliver, Fyodor interrupts them and finishes the last half of the speech for them. He’s heard it before, and too many times, and although he himself will later serve the effort in his capacity as surgeon and head of a medical facility, he knows that war is an ugly, inglorious thing in which young men die, not a call to some greater glory or honor. This, too, was unusual at the time, as the process of De-Stalinization had only really become state policy some half a decade before the film was made, and creating art that professed such a view of war prior to this could very well have been considered insidious or even treasonous. As Boris departs for the assembly grounds, Grandmother first shuts the door behind him as voices retreat down the stairs, only to rush back out onto the landing and call down to him; Fyodor admonishes her for her emotion, perhaps feeling some shame at his own emotional outburst and transferring that embarrassment to his mother, only to join her in their pre-emptive (but correct) grieving when she tells him that she just wanted to see Boris “one last time” (emphasis added). 

Visually, this is a masterpiece, even if it doesn’t reach the same heights that the director would later achieve in Soy Cuba. There’s nothing as breathtakingly awe-inspiring as that bus transition scene or the funeral march in the third segment of that narrative, but this is nonetheless a gorgeously shot film, and the abundance of epic tracking shots is already on full display, from the way that the camera follows Veronika through the throngs of people as she struggles to find Boris before he ships out, to the similar scene at the end when she searches for him amongst the returning soldiers at the train station in Moscow, to the way that the camera moves with perfect precision as it follows Boris on the front lines as he races for the safety of the tree line with his injured compatriot on his back. The most stunning may be the repeated images of characters climbing a mind-boggling amount of stairs—first, Boris climbs them because he cannot bear to leave Veronika’s building after they have spent the night walking the city together; later, he bounds up them in a surreally shot sequence wherein he returns home triumphantly and marries Veronika as he promised, a dream as he lays dying; still later, those stairs are all that remain of Veronika’s apartment building when she returns home from the subway shelter after an air raid as she ascends them rapidly, already knowing that her parents have been killed but needing to see for herself. And that’s not even getting into the other ways that this film uses visual language with such style and aplomb; the choice to have Mark pursue Veronika through the streets of the city in the same places and from the same angles as we earlier saw her walk with Boris is particularly inspired, as if he is taking even that from her and making it revolting.

There’s a real sense of modernity that Soy Cuba had that is missing here, it’s true. That film felt like it could have been made yesterday, while this one definitely feels more like a product of its decade, with many of the hallmarks thereof. Still, as someone who usually can’t stand war movies, this one is a beautiful film, and although I don’t really know what the other contenders were, I have no doubt that it deserved its Golden Palm win. If you were interested in watching both, I might suggest starting here and watching the later film afterward, but both are beautiful, noteworthy, and deserving of attention, either as a pair or in isolation. The Cranes are Flying is currently streaming on Criterion. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Teorema (1968)

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I’m going to tell you something you already know: the Gen-Z teens are really, really into Saltburn.  From the wealth class making TikTok tours of their mansions in honor of Barry Keoghan’s “Murder on the Dancefloor” nude ballet to the working-class slobs beneath them making cum-themed cocktails in honor of Jacob Elordi’s bathwater, it’s the one film from the past year that’s captured that entire generation’s horned-up imagination (despite Bottoms‘s efforts to best it).  Of course, that kind of youthful enthusiasm is always going to be met with equal gatekeeping cynicism from more seasoned film nerds.  A lot of the online rhetoric about Saltburn outside its ecstatic celebration on “MovieTok” expresses frustration that the teens & twentysomethings enjoying it haven’t yet seen real transgressive cinema, which makes them easily impressed by Emerald Fennell’s social media-friendly Eat the Rich thriller.  The most common chorus among older cynics is that Saltburn is just the toothless Gen-Z version of Talented Mr. Ripley, a comparison I even made when I first reviewed the film in December (calling it Mr. Ripley‘s “airport paperback mockbuster” equivalent).  I was mildly amused by Saltburn on first watch, but I’ve only become more endeared to it in the month since as Gen-Z’s horned-up adoration for it grows.  Maybe it is most of these kids’ first mildly horny, safely transgressive movie, but so what? We all have to start somewhere.  Back in 1999, I found my own erotic thriller training wheels in the equally timid Cruel Intentions, a film I still love to this day against my better judgement (after decades of having seen much better, hornier cinema of transgression). 

Despite my naive affection for Cruel Intentions, it took me 20 years to make time for its more sophisticated equivalent in Dangerous Liaisons, a film I did not watch until 2019.  Meanwhile, I liked Saltburn okay, and it only took me a few weeks to catch up with its own artsy, smartsy precursor.  Let’s call it personal progress, something that only comes with time.  I’m not speaking of The Talented Mr. Ripley in this instance, nor am I referring to Saltburn‘s second most cited influence, Brideshead Revisited.  Such pedestrian literature can no longer penetrate my jaded skull, which has been toughened by decades of chasing the high of my initial repeat viewings of Cruel Intentions and subsequent Placebo soundtrack singalongs in the Year of Our Dark Lord 1999.  No, my cinema addled brain turned instead to the great Italo provocateur Pier Paolo Pasolini, whose final film Salò tested the limits of my thirst for transgression just a few years after I first saw Cruel Intentions (and was also frequently cited by trolls on recent threads pushing Gen-Z Saltburn enjoyers to watch something genuinely dangerous & fucked up).  Devoted Pasolini scholars and Criterion Channel subscribers would likely be appalled to see his film Teorema contextualized as a Saltburn prototype, but I’m compelled to do so anyway, since the hyperbolic, nerdy gatekeeping around Fennell’s totally cromulent sophomore feature needs to be combated with fire.  Teorema is a much smarter, harsher, politically sharper social-climber thriller than Saltburn by practically every metric, so it might initially seem like an insult to present it in this comparative context, but since all it would really take is one TikTok video recommending it to Saltburn fans (Salties? Burnies? Tublickers?) for the film to find a younger, curious audience, I’m willing to risk the faux pas.

Terrence Stamp stars as a nameless young man who mysteriously appears at a bourgeois family home in 1960s Milan.  His arrival is announced via telegram, and he is introduced to the family’s social circle at a house party reception, but his origin and presence are treated as a supernatural phenomenon.  Without overt coercion or force, The Visitor methodically seduces each member of the household into an intimate sexual relationship.  Equally mesmerized by his saintly aura and by the bulge of his pants, everyone from the father figure to the live-in maid makes a sexual advance at the mysterious stranger, which he tenderly obliges with Christlike compassion for their individual plights & desires.  In Saltburn, that infiltration of the bourgeois household is a strictly conniving one, where the outsider weaponizes his sexual charisma as a way to distract from his scheming theft of the family’s inherited property.  In Teorema, it’s more like a visit from a ghost or angel, throwing the family’s “moral sense” and “personal confusion” into chaos without any aims for personal gain.  Then, a second telegram announces The Visitor’s departure, and he abruptly leaves the family to adjust to their new life post-orgasmic bliss – changed, unmoored, confounded.  Like the abrupt departure of Jacob Elordi’s character in Saltburn‘s third act, The Visitor’s absence leaves the family spiritually & emotionally hollowed.  They’ve been transformed by the experience and are unsure how to adjust to the new paradigm of their lives.  Only, in this case their transformations touch on divine transcendence rather than merely experiencing the emotionally stunted British equivalent of grief.

In interviews promoting the film, Pasolini described Teorema as both “a parable” and “an enigma.”  Anyone frustrated with Saltburn’s kiddie gloves approach to class politics would be much better served by this film’s engagement with the topic, especially by the time the father figure’s mourning after his angelic sex with The Visitor convinces him to relinquish his factory to a worker’s union as an attempt to dismantle the bourgeoisie.  Meanwhile, his son processes his own grief on canvas, suddenly transforming into a Picasso-esque painter; it’s a life pivot that feels both sympathetic to his sudden burst of inspiration and mocking of trust-fund artists who can afford to live phony peasant’s lives on their bourgeois family’s dime.  On the opposite end of the wealth scale, the family maid is transformed by her own sexual epiphany into a religious idol who can enact tactile miracles of God that even The Visitor seems incapable of.  Of course, most Tublicker youngsters slurping up Saltburn rewatches on their parents’ Amazon Prime accounts aren’t really in it for the class politics, which might be the one instance where Fennell has Pasolini beat.  Saltburn is much more sexually explicit than Teorema, which does include flashes of nudity (good news for anyone wanting a glimpse of Terrence Stamp’s scrotum) but largely keeps the runtime of its sex scenes to a minimum.  In the family’s most arousing transformation, the mother figure picks up the cruising habits of a gay man, soliciting young trade & roadside gigolos around rural Italy in an attempt to relive her carnal bliss with The Visitor.  It’s a satisfyingly salacious impulse in the narrative, but it’s just one angle on the story among many; by contrast, her daughter responds to the family’s loss by choosing to go catatonic, opting out of life entirely.

I do not mean to present this side-by-side comparison as a cheap echo of the “hydrogen bomb vs coughing baby” meme.  It’s clear enough that the bourgeois-estate-interrupted-by-chaotic-outsider premise shared by these two otherwise extremely different films is executed with much more spiritual & political heft in Pasolini’s film than in Fennell’s, to the point where I feel embarrassed even saying it.  If nothing else, Teorema includes images & events it refuses to explain to the audience (including the frequent interruption of the narrative by the shadows of passing clouds on a volcanic mountaintop where the story eventually concludes), whereas Saltburn begins and ends with plot-summarizing montages that overexplain what’s already a very simple, straightforward story.  The comparison is only useful, then, in pointing out how absurd it is that the two films should be held to the same standards.  Pedantic film nerds pointing out that Fennell’s film is neither as politically bold as Teorema nor as harshly transgressive as Salò aren’t helping any Gen-Z teens get enticed by the great works of Pasolini; they’re just making the kids defensive.  Do you know what might actually get them into Pasolini, though?  The popularity of Saltburn, even if it takes them 20 years to warm up to the idea of watching its higher brow equivalents.  Enough Film Twitter freaks and Letterboxd addicts have already pointed Tublickers in the direction of The Talented Mr. Ripley, a much more easily digestible precursor to their new pet favorite.  I can only hope this review will help bump up Teorema‘s SEO presence in that conversation, and they’ll eventually work their way up to this one too.  Either way, I’m just happy that they’re excited about any dirty movie; it’s a start, and it’s worth encouraging.

-Brandon Ledet

Amateur (1994)

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“How can you be a nymphomaniac and never had sex?”
“I’m choosy.”

The Criterion Channel has been doing a great job of resurrecting a forgotten generation of once-respected Gen-X indie filmmakers whose work has been weirdly difficult to see in recent years – names like Atom Egoyan, Gregg Araki, and Hal Hartley.  During the glory days of independent film festivals and college radio chic, these low-budget, mid-notoriety auteurs enjoyed a surprising level of cultural mystique that has faded as the distribution of their work has effectively trickled into non-existence.  Maybe that break wasn’t all so bad for their memory & reputation, though.  Revisiting Hal Hartley’s filmography as a Criterion Channel micro-collection in the streaming age feels like taking a time machine back to the Classic Indie Filmmaking days of the 1990s.  In particular, there’s something charmingly quaint about how his low-effort crime picture Amateur functions as a relic of that era.  Every one of his characters loiter around public spaces smoking cigarettes, flipping through porno mags, and making deadpan quips over background tracks by PJ Harvey & Liz Phair.  It’s cute in its own grimy little way, a dusty souvenir of 90s slacker kitsch.

The “amateur” of the title could refer to any one of the main players in Hartley’s off-Broadway, on-camera stage drama.  Isabelle Huppert plays an ex-nun who’s learning a new trade as a writer of porno-mag erotica.  Elina Löwensohn plays a video store porno actress who’s trying to break away from the industry by making big moves as a self-employed gangster.  Martin Donovan is caught between them as a total amnesiac with a violent past – an amateur at basically everything due to his newfound medical condition.  The unlikely trio eventually find themselves “on the run from bloodthirsty corporate assholes” as they cross paths with the gangsters at the top of the porno industry food chain, a mistake that has them evading handcuffs & bullets.  This premise sounds like it might make for an exciting, sordid action thriller—and maybe it still could—but that kind of entertainment is not on Amateur‘s agenda.  Mostly, Hartley uses the plot as an excuse to have his characters lounge around in hip NYC fashions (styled as a relapsed Catholic pervert, a soft goth, and a business prick, respectfully) while listening to college radio classics by the likes of The Jesus Lizard, Pavement, and My Blood Valentine.

There might be some genuine thematic heft in Amateur that I’m not taking seriously here, something about how New York City is a dangerous playground where desperate transplants reinvent themselves.  That might have resonated with me more if it were NYC community theatre instead of a Hal Hartley film preserved in time.  I mostly found myself distracted by just how Totally ’90s the movie was in its search for contemporary cool cred.  Its gigantic cellphones, breakfast diner ashtrays, and business cards for phone sex lines were all just as specific to its status as an Indie 90s relic as its single-scene cameo from a loud-mouthed Parker Posey.  This is a movie with multiple recurring arguments about why “floppy discs” are neither floppy, nor circular.  Everyone is either absurdly angry or wistfully despondent in a perfectly Gen-X 90s kind of way, and there’s a lot of easy humor pulled from the clash between those two default attitudes.  It’s an easy era to feel nostalgia for as a movie nerd, if not only because people like Hartley, Egoyan, and Araki used to get relatively robust distribution & critical attention, as opposed to the current cinematic landscape where you’re either making over-advertised corporate IP slop or disposable streaming service filler.  We used to be a country, a proper country with a proper indie cinema scene, and the proof is currently streaming on Criterion.

-Brandon Ledet

The Holdovers (2023)

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Every year, I get into a discussion with at least one person about the fact that I don’t much care for Christmas music. There are a lot of reasons for this. For one thing, I grew up in a household in which we were only allowed to listen to one radio station, one that was Contemporary Christian music 10.5 months of the year and nothing but the same 30-40 Christmas songs in the six weeks leading up to Christmas. It wasn’t as if you were going to hear anything tongue-in-cheek on 92.7 “The Bridge,” which means no “Santa Baby,” no Chipmunks, no mothers kissing Santa Claus or grandmothers getting run over by reindeer; you might get something haunting and ethereal that you wouldn’t get on a mainstream station like Amy Grant’s “Breath of Heaven” to almost make up for the dearth of otherwise worthwhile material, but that was about it. Add in that they didn’t even have more than one version of the standards that they did have, and it was a monotonous time. Secondly, I often find that people who have positive associations with Christmas have never had a job working retail, which means that they’ve never heard the same unimaginative version of “Little Drummer Boy” six times while manning an eight-hour shift at the cash register at Urban Outfitters (or worse, the Nook nook at Barnes & Noble, where you attempt to convince people who just came in to get a copy of Green Eggs and Ham for their niece to buy a less-functional iPad at the same price point), which will kill any fondness you might have had for a song. Still, every year, my best friend and I watch The Muppet Christmas Carol, and it’s part of our tradition that sometime during “It Feels Like Christmas” I turn to her and say “Y’know, I think this is my favorite Christmas carol. Not my favorite Christmas Carol adaptation, but like my favorite Christmas song,” and she says “Y’know, you say that every year.” That film came out allllll the way back in 1992, and although there have been a few other Christmas movies that have come out since whose appeal was universal (Elf), blandly inoffensive in a corporate way (The Santa Clause), or bizarre (Krampus) enough to be considered part of the Christmas Movie Canon (at least to some), they are few and far between. We may have a new one with The Holdovers, though. 

It’s almost Christmas, 1970, at the New England boarding school Barton Academy. Junior Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa) is excited to spend his winter break in Saint Kitts with his family, even packing up a pair of beach briefs that he describes as the most masculine thing that he could wear, as they’re the same as the ones James Bond wore in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. On the last (half) day of the term, the strict and authoritarian ancient civilizations professor Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti) “generously” offers to let one of his classes, comprised mostly of boys who have failed the midyear exam, to take a retest upon their return, although there will be new material on that test, which means more studying during their vacation. Both of their Christmas plans are derailed, however. When one of his peers fakes a relative’s illness to get out of chaperoning the “holdovers” (boys who will be staying at the school rather than returning to their parents for the holidays), Hunham is enlisted to perform these duties, and he is all but told outright by the school’s headmaster Dr. Woodrip (Andrew Garman) that this is in retaliation for his refusal to give a passing grade to the son of a senator, costing Barton one of its largest donors. While waiting for his pickup, Tully receives a phone call from his mother, canceling their family trip at the last minute so that she can spend this time as a late honeymoon with the boy’s new stepfather, thus leaving him as one of the aforementioned holdovers, all of whom will be bunking in the infirmary as the dorms and school building will be without heat for the duration, for cost-saving reasons. The only other person who will be around consistently is Mary Lamb (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), the cafeteria manager, who is hesitant to leave the last place that she spent time with her late son Curtis, who was recently killed in action in Vietnam. 

Although there are initially five students at Barton for Christmas, that number is whittled down to just Angus when one of the other boys’ father, a mogul of some kind, comes to collect his son for a ski trip and takes the other boys along, with Angus’s mother being unreachable on her vacation in order to give permission for him to go. When Angus injures himself while leading Paul on a chase around the school building, he is taken to the hospital, where he lies to cover for Paul and prevent the older man from losing his job, although he says he will call on the return of an equivalent favor one day. While eating in town on the way back, they encounter Lydia (Carrie Preston), Dr. Woodrip’s assistant, who tells them that she picks up a few shifts waiting tables over the holidays every year, and invites them to her Christmas party. They take her up on her offer and attend the party along with Mary, and while Angus hits it off with Lydia’s niece, Paul falls into the trap of being optimistic about Lydia’s potential to be attracted to him only to discover she has a boyfriend, and Mary drinks too much and has a breakdown about the loss of her son in the house’s kitchen. She’s not too drunk to tell Paul off about how he’s treating Angus. This eventually leads to the two taking a field trip into Boston after Christmas, but one of the stops they make along the way ends up having consequences that neither of them could have predicted. 

Paul Hunham is a fascinating character. We’re not meant to like him very much at first, and I think that he’s off-putting in that he represents the version of ourselves that we fear others see: unattractive, smelly, clumsy, incapable of telling a story. Our sympathy for him grows, however, as the pieces of his life fall into place as he and Angus get to know one another and open up to each other more: abusive father, scholarship to Barton Academy at age fifteen, went on to an Ivy League school where his more privileged roommate deflected his own plagiarism by framing Paul and Paul’s subsequent retaliation costing him his education. He returned to Barton, where he was given a position by a kindly former headmaster who saw his potential, only to now be serving at the leisure of a man who was once his own pupil. His backstory also intertwines with Mary’s, as she reveals that although Curtis likewise was able to attend Barton on scholarship, but upon graduation, he wasn’t able to go straight into university like his rich classmates and enlisted in the service in order to attend school on the G.I. Bill when he returned — but he didn’t come back. Along with Angus, who didn’t grow up in wealth and is only in attendance at Barton because his mother’s new husband is wealthy, they are the outsiders amongst the elite. In contrast, school’s effortlessly charming quarterback is initially left at the school by his father because the boy refuses to cut his long blond 1970s hair, but when he hears the helicopter approaching the school, he exclaims that he knew his father would break first, and he returns to school after break with a shorn head. Unlike the tragedies of the lives of our three leads, his troubles are shallow and silly, as his father’s feud was over nothing more than vanity and was resolved with no real loss since the boy was being stubborn about his hair because, in a world where you really have no other problems, what else are you going to fight about? 

If you’re reading this and thinking to yourself, “Wait, didn’t I hear that this movie was a comedy?” you are correct, it is; it’s just my nature to get hung up on the melancholy parts of these kinds of dramedies. Now that it’s addressed, it’s worth noting that this movie is, in fact, hilarious. Sessa is fantastic, a breakout freshman performance from an unknown actor who just happened to audition for the movie because he attended the school at which it was being filmed. There’s a scene late in the film when Paul is sitting at a bowling alley bar and he attempts to talk to two of the Bostonians there, a bartender and a regular dressed as Santa. He attempts to ingratiate himself with them by delivering a rambling monologue about how Santa should be dressed according to Grecian tradition, and although it’s exactly the kind of thing that would be very annoying behavior from a stranger at the bar, Giamatti plays it with the perfect intermix of attempted frivolity and joviality with witless, unobservant boorishness that it’s impossible not to be charmed by it in spite of oneself. Sessa manages to do the same with Angus, making him a triumphant example of a kid who’s too smart for his own good but is also struggling with rejection from his peers and his lack of friends in spite of his good nature underneath. It’s a very charming form of humor, and it works just as well as all of the great physical comedy that is going on around it (special mention to Paul Hunham’s absolutely pathetic attempt to throw a football). 

We throw the phrase “instant classic” around a lot these days. I’ve said it myself about things that didn’t stand the test of time and which have faded into obscurity. I don’t know if we’ll be able to look back on this one in ten years and say that it’s part of the canon, but I do know that I’ll be watching it one year from now, and that’s good enough for me.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

FYC 2023: Wrasslin’ Weepies

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Unsurprisingly, a lot of this year’s major Awards Frontrunners are solemn biopics of men who committed some of the worst sins in human history: the invention of the atom bomb, the daily operation of concentration camps, the genocide of an Indigenous nation.  As much as The Academy has attempted to reconfigure what qualifies as an Oscar-Worthy movie, it’s clear that the Oscar-friendly template of Important Men directing history lessons about Important Men is still an effective one; all that’s really changed is that those portraits of Important Men have become more critical than celebratory.  Further down the power rankings of this FYC season’s major players, there’s also a curious pair of historical biopics about Important Men who operated in a much smaller arena than the frontrunners’ global politics stomping grounds: the regional pro wrestling circuit of 1980s Texas.  The men depicted in these pro wrasslin’ biopics are of much smaller historical importance than a J. Robert Oppenheimer or a Rudolf Höss; the tearjerking melodrama of their lives is less about the moral sins of their own actions than it is about how cruelly unfair the world was to them, and whether they survived the trauma.  However, in a big picture sense, they echo the same criticism of the rigid machismo and the hypocrisy in Family Values conservatism that drove the Important Men of Oppenheimer, Killers of the Flowers Moon, and The Zone of Interest to commit humanity’s greatest.  They just work through that cultural tragedy within the walls of their small family homes and within the rubber-padded ropes of the wrestling ring.  It’s more contained.

If this season’s pro wrestling dramas are being contextualized as awards-hopefuls, they’re most overtly engineering FYC attention for their male stars.  In that way, pro wrestling is the perfect cinematic subject, since it offers such a familiar, convenient storytelling template to help get male performers over with the crowd.  Even when a wrasslin’ pictures’s in-movie drama feels minor in comparison to more historically important works, their in-ring drama carries the audience through, highlighting an actors’ talents with the emotional histrionics of a soap opera or a Greek tragedy.  Nobody benefits from that dramatic bolstering this year more than Gabriel García Bernal, who stars as the titular lead in the lucha libre history lesson Cassandro.  This by-the-numbers biopic isn’t half as stylistically daring as the Cassandro, el Exótico! documentary on the same subject, nor as fabulously glamorous as the luchador himself, but it’s an inherently cinematic story and García Bernal shines in the central role.  The real-life Cassandro is credited for changing the artform of lucha libre by subverting the homophobic trope of the “exótico.”  When he entered the business wrestling on both sides of the Texas-Mexico border, exóticos were a purely homophobic stereotype: heels who would earn cheap heat by flirting with their more traditionally macho opponents, then get immediately crushed in the ring to the crowd’s enthusiastic cheers.  It was gaybashing as ceremonial pageantry.  Cassandro flipped the script by genuinely getting over with the crowd through the artistry of his wrestling, to the point where promoters saw potential profits in letting an exótico win for a change; or, that’s at least how the story goes, according to kayfabe.  The beyond-the-mat drama of his struggles with a loving but homophobic mother and with sex-partner colleagues who are willing to fuck him in private but renounce him in public can feel a little phony & cliche to anyone who’s seen their share of queer indie dramas in the past few decades.  The nonstop montage of Cassandro’s career in the ring is still emotionally compelling in a succinct, celebratory, wrasslin’-specific way that makes up for those broad cliches, though, and by the time the credits roll it’s hard to tell whether you’re rooting for Cassandro or rooting for García Bernal – an FYC publicist’s dream.

The Von Erich family drama The Iron Claw spreads the FYC wealth to many more potential nominees than Cassandro‘s fixed spotlight on Gabriel García Bernal.  The improbable true story of the supposedly “cursed” family of professional wrestlers has plenty of star-making tragedy to spread around its four central brothers: Zac Efron as Kevin Von Erich, Jeremy Allen White as Kerry Von Erich, Harris Dickinson as David Von Erich, and Stanley Simons as David Von Erich.  Efron is the most obvious awards play of the group, transforming himself into a human He-Man action figure for the role in a grotesque way that awards bodies love to celebrate.  Each of the Von Erich brothers get their moment to bring the audience to tears, though, as they’re each pushed to the brink of what their hearts and bodies can handle by their toxically macho father Fritz Von Erich, played with monstrous villainy by Holt McCallany.  The first half of the movie recalls the laidback nostalgic cool of Dazed and Confused as the four central brothers lean on each other for warmth & validation in the happiest times of their lives, working together as up & coming wrestlers who have yet to be fully poisoned by their father’s insistence they compete amongst themselves for his scraps of praise.  The second half disrupts that momentary bliss with the heightened violence of a Greek tragedy, with each brother meeting improbably horrific ends in a rapid, relentless procession.  The Iron Claw‘s reliance on the in-ring drama of pro wrestling is heaviest in the early stretch, as the Von Erichs’ prominence in pre-WWF regional wrasslin’ circuits is mapped out in montage & dramatic recreations of select, pivotal matches.  The back half is a much more straightforward drama that could have befallen any sports-family household, since cataloging the parade of traumas that crushed the Von Erichs leaves very little time to show them actually doing the work.  Besides, the movie isn’t really about their wrestling careers anyway; it’s more about the love they shared as brothers, and how important that bond was in a home run by a man incapable of expressing affection.  If it were any less successful as a sincere family drama, the men’s frequent repetition of the word “Brother” would play as a joke, the same way audiences now laugh every time Vin Diesel says “Family” in the Fast & Furious movies.

If this were a one-on-one, three-count fight, it would be a squash match.  Cassandro is dramatically and stylistically outperformed by The Iron Claw by practically every metric – except, maybe, in the vintage-glam detail of Cassandro’s gemstoned ring gear.  Neither film is an exceptional work of great artistic importance, though; they’re both just FYC acting showcases for their above-the-line talents, who utilize pro-wrestling’s played-to-the-cheap-seats pageantry to add some emotional heft to otherwise traditional sports dramas.  If they have any standing in discussion with the Oscar-hopefuls who’ve risen to the top of the Vegas-odds rankings over the course of this FYC season, it’s in their shared skepticism over the effects of stoic masculinity and conservative Family Values in recent generational history.  Cassandro finds a way to offer a triumphant rejection of those traditional values, while The Iron Claw drags our battered hearts through their most miserable consequences.  In either case, their performers are never more powerful nor more beautiful than they are on the wrestling mat, and both films are excellent examples of acting as full-body physical artistry.  If I have to watch straightforward, mediocre melodramas to keep up with the buzziest titles in the Oscars Cycle every year, I’d be more than happy if they’d continually return to the wrestling ring for easy crowd work and promotion.  It gives us something easy to root for, which is honestly something I’d rather put myself through than yet another war atrocity drama about the worst things that have ever happened in the history of the human species.

-Brandon Ledet

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