drama

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)

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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

The Five Devils (2023)

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One of the major reasons I love film festivals is that they transform otherwise low-profile, niche-interest oddities into the hottest tickets in town.  I always find it a little silly when festival crowds fight for a seat to see a wide-release studio film just a few weeks before it’ll play at every suburban multiplex anyway, but I’m charmed when that enthusiasm trickles down the program to smaller titles that will otherwise play to empty arthouse auditoriums before dying a slow death on streaming.  I was sharply aware of that phenomenon when lining up to see the weirdo fantasy drama The Five Devils at this year’s Overlook Film Fest the same day that it was premiering at The Broad Theater just a few blocks away from my house.  The Five Devils is the exact kind of low-budget, high-ambition art film that I’m used to watching alone at The Broad (or even at the same downtown location of The Prytania where most of Overlook is staged), so it was heartwarming to queue up with a swarm of like-minded, enthusiastic freaks psyched to be bewildered by it in unison.  It shouldn’t be surprising that a local genre festival could draw a sizable crowd to see a title that’s already screening outside its downtown shopping mall locale, considering the self-selection process of an audience already receptive to what Overlook offers.  Still, it was wonderful to see an odd, alienating little movie like The Five Devils get treated like a Cultural Event, when outside of festivals that kind of buzzy Thursday-night premiere is strictly reserved for superhero sequels & Tom Cruise suicide missions.

The last time I saw a French time-travel drama about a little girl who meets the younger, more troubled version of her mother through an unexplained, magical-realist device, it was in a near-empty auditorium.  Petite Maman is a much more accommodating, crowd-pleasing version of that story template too, underplaying the supernatural immensity of its time-travel premise to instead focus on subtle moments of dramatic grace.  In contrast, The Five Devils is Petite Maman for sickos, which is why it’s so heartwarming that Overlook was able to scrape together a full crowd of sickos to bask in its abrasive, brain-rattling glory.  Calling its time traveling anti-hero a “little girl” is a little reductive.  She’s more of an untrained, irresponsible witch, one who uses her supernatural sense of smell to jar up homemade potions that distill the unique essence of her few loved ones so she can mentally revisit them at will through sense memory.  This lonely pastime gets out of control when she gets a hold of an elixir that allows her to astral-project into those memories, effectively time-travelling to her mother’s youth.  What she discovers while traveling via these jarred scents is that she hails from a complex lineage of similarly obsessive, volatile women – most notably the younger, brasher version of her mother and her mother’s secret high school lover.  From there, The Five Devils unravels to reveal an intensely fucked-up little time-travel family drama, one punctuated by wild jabs of style & emotion that you won’t find outside of buzzy festival line-ups, empty arthouse theaters and, eventually, public library DVD loans.

There are plenty of readymade reference points that might help define The Five Devils through comparison: the childhood time travel & poolside romance of Céline Sciamma’s Petite Maman & Water Lilies; the ecstatic gymnastic seizures of Ana Rose Holmer’s The Fits; Divine’s supernatural sniffer in John Water’s Polyester; etc.  Its wide range of vaguely familiar elements are reconfigured into such a uniquely high-style, high-drama mode of modern queer filmmaking that it can’t be cleanly categorized into any one long-running genre, though, except maybe to say that it makes for an incredibly uncomfortable Christmas film.  Similarly, I can’t pinpoint exactly what’s being conjured by its provocative title, since there are no literal devils in its narrative (which would more firmly push it into the horror territory covered by most of Overlook’s programming).  Are the five “devils” the five senses?  It certainly made me squirm under the sense of touch as the hard sequins of a gymnastic uniform scraped against freshly burnt flesh in its barnburner finale, but most of the story is dominated by smell.  Are they the four family members that crowd the small French household where the little scent-witch dwells, plus the one spurned & injured lover her parents left behind when they hooked up as teenagers?  Maybe. But no one among them is evil or villainous, exactly.  They all just indulge in messy, passionate human behavior, sometimes heighted by their unexplained supernatural powers.  Ultimately, I don’t actually want an answer to the question.  It’s just indicative of the rhetorical games of provocation & illogic that the film plays with the audience, and it’s often shocking how complex & emotional the results of those games can be.

To find the passionate cult audience it deserves, The Five Devils needs to be chopped up into easily digestible, memeable morsels the way similar crowd alienators like Midsommar, Tár, and Annette have in the recent past.  There’s plenty to work with there, from the striking visuals of young newcomer Sally Dramé huffing her collection of self-labeled scents to the total emotional breakdown of indie darling Adèle Exarchopoulos drunkenly slurring “Total Eclipse of the Heart” on a karaoke stage.  Hell, even I’m guilty of reducing it to something cuter & simpler than it is with my little “Petite Maman for sickos” quip.  In truth, it’s a very thorny, elusive work that’s difficult to market in any effective way without spoiling & overexplaining each of its dramatic twists.  That’s why it’s so great that festivals like Overlook & Cannes (where The Five Devils premiered) are able to drum up actual, real-life enthusiasm for a film this abrasively weird.  I love that I regularly get to see this kind of genre-defiant anomaly at The Prytania & The Broad, but it’s often a much quieter, lonelier experience.

-Brandon Ledet

Babylon (2022)

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“Welcome to the asshole of Los Angeles.”

Spending the holidays with family was a healthy shake-up for me after a couple years of COVID-related isolation, which only compounded my usual, longstanding reluctance to travel to rural & suburban Louisiana.  Getting outside the city meant getting outside my bubble, and I talked to a few distant loved ones about movies without being able to cite relatively popular artists like Bergman, Lynch, and Cronenberg as household names.  Meanwhile, actual household name Steven Spielberg’s magic-of-the-movies memoir The Fabelmans was being categorized as elitist snobbery for Julliard graduates on Twitter, and every movie without a blue space alien in it was drowning at the box office.  And if you count cameos, at least one movie with a blue space alien was drowning too.  Damien Chazelle’s Babylon sank while James Cameron’s Avatar sequel soared, and it was impossible not to fret over the two films’ disparate levels of success, since the madman Chazelle dared to include a few frames of Cameron’s Na’vi creatures in his film’s climactic Movies-Through-The-Years montage.  The financial failure of Chazelle’s star-studded movie industry drama sounds surprising in the abstract, but after a few days of talking about movies with people who don’t often Talk About Movies it makes total sense to me.  Caring about the craft & history of cinema as an artform is a niche interest, even when the cinema itself is populist media.  The thing is that Babylon is explicitly about that exact disconnect: the horrifying gap between how much general audiences love to be entertained by The Movies and how indifferent those audiences are to the lives & wellbeing of the people who make them.

The obvious reasons for Babylon‘s financial failure extend far beyond expectations that general audiences would share its nerdy academic interest in the century-old history of pre-Code Hollywood moviemaking.  If anything, Chazelle’s $80mil flop is most impressive in how eager it is to alienate its audience, regardless of its movie-nerd subject matter.  It’s a three-hour, coke-fueled montage on double-speed that not only indicts the unwashed masses for our indifference to the artistry behind our favorite movies but also assaults our eyes with every fluid the human body can produce.  Piss, shit, tears, blood, puke, and cum all dutifully grace the screen in their own time, with the piss & shit ticked off the checklist early on to help set the tone.  Modern-day movie stars Brad Pitt & Margot Robbie suffer the same rough transition from silents to talkies that has been mythologized as the downfall of Early Hollywood since as far back as 1952’s Singin’ in the Rain. Only, their backstage debauchery between productions is cranked to a year-round Mardi Gras bacchanal never before depicted with so much onscreen hedonistic excess.  It’s enough to make you want to puke yourself, if not only from the carsick momentum of the film’s manic pacing, which rarely slows down from its intercutting dialogue barrages to stage a genuine scene of real-time drama.

Because its characters are more symbolic than dramatic (directly recalling past industry castoffs like Clara Bow, Louis Armstrong, and Anna Mae Wong), Babylon is often more interesting for what it’s trying to say on a big-picture scale than it is for its scene-to-scene drama.  I was particularly struck by the way its repetition of Singin’ in the Rain‘s talkies-downfall plot is directly acknowledged in the text, with Babylon consciously positioning itself as yet another example of Hollywood’s cyclical, self-cannibalizing nature.  When most movies cite the magic of cinema being greater and more enduring than the people who make it, it’s coming from a place of awe & respect for the artform.  Here, Chazelle projects pure disgust & horror.  In its mission-statement climax, our low-level-fixer-turned-high-level producer POV character Manny (Diego Calva) watches caricatures of his dead friends & colleagues mocked as comic archetypes at a screening of Singin’ in the Rain, then slips into a subliminal montage of the next 100 years of Hollywood-spectacle filmmaking, with each successive title—Un Chien Andelou, The Wizard of Oz, 2001, Jurassic Park, Terminator 2, Avatar, etc.—building on and borrowing from the past for its own in-the-moment splendor until there’s no splendor left to go around.  Chazelle even shamelessly participates in this ritual himself, as Babylon can easily be passed off a cruder, shallower Hail, Caesar! crammed into a Boogie Nights-shaped box. It’s an ungenerous reading of how cinema perpetually “borrows” from itself in a way that feels like homage but rarely acknowledges or takes care of the real-life people who built its founding texts.  And when Manny snaps out of it to gawk at the uncaring, unknowledgeable audience cackling at ghosts of his loved ones, the tragedy of his cruelly perpetual industry hits way harder than any of the character deaths that sparked his melancholy in the first place.

I was most impressed with Babylon in its scale and in its eagerness to alienate casual moviegoing audiences.  It likely would have been better received if it were a 10-hour miniseries that allowed each of its overlapping character arcs to breathe (especially since it already intercuts their stories like a long-running soap opera anyway), but its manic tempo is exactly what makes it special among the million other movies about The Movies, so it was probably better off flopping than capitulating.  I also love that Chazelle projects such a sour view of moviemaking as an artform, a compulsory practice he immediately likens to dragging a diarrheal elephant uphill.  The only reason I don’t fully love this movie is I can’t shake the feeling that I’ve already seen it all before (even if at half-time pace), but that kind of complaint only plays into exactly what Chazelle is trying to say about Hollywood’s cyclical history here.  Even his climactic montage’s assertion that cinema has already reached its end—a death knell also sounded by the hundreds of click-bait articles that auto-populate every time a major production like Babylon flops—feels like a self-cannibalizing repetition of Hollywood lore.  How many times has cinema already “died”?  Did it die when the talkies ended the silent era, when television became affordable, when television went prestige, when normies began to stream?  Every generation thinks they’re going to be the last, and although one day they’ll be proven right, the cinemapocalypse has yet to fully come to fruition.  In the meantime, artists can only watch in horror as their work and their peers are absorbed, digested, and regurgitated by subsequent art movements they do not understand, with no wide audience recognition for how they contributed to that greater continuum.  Even the populist Spielbergs of the industry become historical, esoteric references in the long run, and there will come a time when Chazelle’s own name is synonymous with The Russo Brothers, Kevin Feige, and Michael Bay as dusty antiques only of interest to high-brow academics.

-Brandon Ledet

Decision to Broker

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There are two new high-profile, Korean-set detective dramas currently making the rounds, directed by Park Chan-wook and Hirokazu Kore-Eda.  Anyone familiar with the beloved auteurs’ past work would expect their latest films to be incomparable outside some light genre overlap and a shared national setting. They’d be right. Broker and Decision to Leave are tonally & narratively distinct enough that I’m likely doing them a disservice by lumping them together here, but as a pair I do think they indicate an interesting, mirrored career shift for their respective auteurs.  I know Park Chan-wook as an over-the-top sensationalist, one who pushes the boundaries of good taste & genre tropes within the confines of finely tuned, exquisitely staged chamber dramas.  By contrast, I know Hirokazu Kore-Eda as a restrained, observational dramatist who finds grand emotion & political importance in small, subtle gestures.  What makes their dual 2022 detective stories interesting as a pair is the way the two directors are both reaching towards a middle ground between those extremes.  Decision to Leave finds the usually more prankish Park working on his best behavior, while Broker finds Kore-Eda shaking up his typically underplayed docu-dramas with some more traditional, genre-minded payoffs.

That’s not to say that either director has compromised their personal stylistic touches or thematic obsessions.  In its broadest strokes, Broker is a very similar movie to Kore-Eda’s previous film, Shoplifters, which in turn was a more accessible version of his earlier triumph Nobody Knows.  A story about an illegal, D.I.Y. adoption agency who broker the sale of babies to families outside the foster system, Broker clearly continues Kore-Eda’s auteurist fascination with how unconventional parentage takes shape below the poverty line.  It just perks up that story with more entertainment-minded genre tropes and a more pronounced, devious sense of humor than I remember seeing in his previous work.  This is basically Shoplifters as a road trip movie where detectives are on the makeshift family’s tail, staking them out so they can be busted at the point of sale.  It’s a subtle introduction of accessible genre entertainment into Kore-Eda’s usual low-key dramas, a shift was seemingly influenced by the international success of Parasite – given it’s the Japanese director’s first film set in Korea, he anchors it to the charisma of Bong muse Song Kang-ho (as the lead broker), and he borrows its opening image from Parasite‘s iconic flood sequence.  Whatever the inspiration, Broker manages to feel much livelier that Kore-eda’s past work without sacrificing any of his usual emotional or political heft.

Unlike with Kore-Eda, I’m not sure that “measured restraint” is the first quality I look for in a Park Chan-wook film, but it does make Decision to Leave an interesting addition to his oeuvre.  You would expect his throwback crime story about an insomniac detective who falls disastrously in love with a femme fatale he suspects to be a murderer would land closer to Basic Instinct than to Hitchcock, but it seems he already got those erotic thriller indulgences out of his system with The Handmaiden.  It’s not any less thrilling than the lewder, more explosive payoffs of The Handmaiden, though.  There’s an exciting tension in watching Park push his more perverse impulses just below the surface of this traditionalist noir . . . for about an hour; then he starts more openly playing around with the detective-suspect eroticism of the genre.  Park holds himself together just long enough to tell the full classic Hollywood version of this detective story, then he stretches it a half-hour past its breaking point to search for the kinkier aspects of the detective-murderess dynamic.  It’s a relatively tame movie by his standards, but there are scenes where he lingers on the femme fatale displaying her domestic abuse wounds as an act of flirtation or becoming visibly aroused by her assigned-detective using brutal force against other perps.  It’s almost like watching Hitchcock make the subversively kinky Vertigo after he made the more explicitly perverse Frenzy, pulling back instead of leaning into his darkest impulses.

Maybe there’s an indication that these two distinct, disparate directors are gradually meeting in the middle – one softening their perversion stories’ sharpest edges and the other spicing up their intimate family dramas with some crime-world thrills.  More likely, they just happen to be pushing themselves to try new things instead of remaking the same picture over and over again, something that should be an auteur’s biggest fear.  Even if they both fully committed to these new directions in their work, it would take dozens of films for them to meet on common ground.  I just find it interesting that these deviations from their respective personal norms both happened to take the shape of detective stories set in the same country, released at the same time of year.

-Brandon Ledet

Women Talking (2022)

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Thanks to the secretive background maneuvers of the Almighty Algorithm, the very first thing I saw online after my private screening of Women Talking was a few viciously negative tweets declaring it one of the worst movies of the year.  I understood them, even though I do not agree.  Sarah Polley’s latest is a stage play adaptation of a hot-topic novel, one with prescriptive declarations to make about the rigidly gendered power dynamics of mass-scale sexual assault.  It’s an opportunity for some of the most critically lauded actors in Hollywood—Frances McDormand, Rooney Mara, Claire Foy, Jessie Buckley—to dress up in rural-America poverty costumes and deliver perfectly tailored Oscar-clip soundbites with industry-damning implications about the post-Weinstein fallout of #MeToo.  It’s also visually ugly, recalling a 2000s era switch to digi filmmaking that used to clog up the broadcast schedules of IFC and the Sundance Channel (back when they used to play movies at all).  I totally understand how someone could be coldly cynical about Women Talking as Bad Art with Good Politics.  Personally, I found it to be crushingly powerful from start to end, more than I had emotionally steeled myself for.  Even its drained, pallid color palette, which looks like a fundamental flaw from the outside, completely works in the moment.  Everything in the film is grim, grey, grueling – even its stabs of humor.  It’s an earnest, wounded, furious howl into the soulless abyss of traditional gender dynamics.  Like any political protest, you can either join in its righteous chorus for personal, communal catharsis, or observe how small & ineffective it looks from a distance.

Inspired by true events, Miriam Towe’s source-material novel details the aftermath of the habitual, conspiratorial rape of women in an isolated Mennonite community in the 2010s.  Drugged with livestock tranquilizers and assaulted in the night, the women were told that these acts of violence were “the work of ghosts or Satan [. . .] or a wild female imagination” by their abusers, communally gaslit until those same men were caught in the act.  Thankfully, Polley only revisits these violations in flashes.  Most of the film details a hayloft meeting where the women decide what to do now that the men’s crimes have been exposed: leave, fight, or forgive.  The camera drifts around the barn in an attempt to make cinema out of this stationary debate, recalling William Friedkin’s tight-set stage play adaptations The Birthday Party & The Boys in the Band.  Mostly, though, this is a movie of ideas not images, as indicated by its dim, dingy color grading.  As the women draw up very simple Pros & Cons lists for each of their painfully shitty options, the deliberation gets broadly philosophical in a way that reaches far beyond the specifics of this particular atrocity.  It starts with the tension between the impossibility of forgiving such a heinous act and the possible denial of access to Heaven if that forgiveness is withheld.  From there, they push past the religious implications of their decision to ponder more universal conundrums about the violence men put women through on a mass scale, and whether the pleasure of their company as individuals is worth the potential harm of their power as a unit.  Both within the context of this story and in the world outside it, there are no easy answers.

There were a couple fleeting moments in Women Talking where I was disappointed by how literal & straightforward Polley was being in her messaging.  The movie gets its point across plenty clearly without horror-tinged flashbacks to victims smearing their blood on bedroom walls or onscreen text declaring “What follows is an act of female imagination.”  As a dialogue-driven Movie of Ideas, however, I can only report that it weighed heavily on my mind & heart.  Despite their shared religious beliefs, the titular women are all drastically varied in age, experience, bodies, and temperaments.  The only thing that unites them, really, is their victimization by the other half of the colony; they are united by hurt, anger, and grief.  Even the “woman” narrating the story is a child’s voice, a sharp indicator of how predatory men see their fellow human beings.  This is not an easy sit.  It’s typical to the types of two-plus-hour misery dramas that crowd the movie release calendar this time of year.  It asks bigger, more devastating questions than most Awards Season weepies tend to, though, even if its philosophical prodding can easily be mistaken for political didacticism.  And since its initial ecstatic praise out of the festival circuit is now being swatted back by a few loud, indignant cynics on Twitter, I assume it’s going places.  It’s going to reach, challenge, and upset a lot of people – as long as they’re willing to engage with its troubling questions beyond initial reactions to its muted imagery.

-Brandon Ledet

Aftersun (2022)

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Since the New Orleans Film Festival ended in early November, my inboxes (both physical and virtual) have been overflowing with FYC Awards Screeners.  Within the two-hour span of pressing play on a movie and checking my phone during its end credits, I’ll have received two or three more titles fighting to make their way into my eyeballs.  It’s an unrelenting flood of #prestigecontent presented in low-res, watermarked glory.  As much as catching up with this season’s “Best of the Year” contenders (some of which won’t reach wide distribution until early 2023) before this month’s SEFCA vote can feel like a marathon homework session, it has been pretty illuminating about how these year-end lists take shape.  I always wonder how the 100+ new releases I see every year are whittled down to the same 15-20 titles repeated & rearranged on pro critics’ & voting bodies’ “personal” Best of the Year lists, even though they presumably watch even more new releases than I do.  The answer, apparently, is marketing.  The FYC discs & emails sent directly to critics’ doorsteps are a huge part of the narrowing-down process.  Since I haven’t received any FYC screeners for some of my personal favorites of the year (so far)—Neptune Frost, Inu-Oh, Mad God, Jackass Forever, etc.—I’m meant to assume there’s no way to build momentum for their nomination, and thus voting for them will essentially be a waste of my microscopic modicum of clout.  It’s frustrating that money & marketing are the answer to the mystery of how critical consensus is formed, but in retrospect I should’ve assumed that was the case from the start.

The reduction effect of movie marketing doesn’t start with Awards Season screeners, though.  It’s a year-long process, starting with the Sundance Film Festival in January and picking up steam during Cannes in the spring, months before reaching its FYC screeners crescendo.  For instance, take the small, intimate, festival-circuit drama Aftersun, which is currently being marketed as a formidable awards contender by A24.  Every single film festival of merit—from mid-tier conversation starters like Sundance to the cultural juggernaut of Cannes to the regional community events like NOFF—are overstuffed with movies exactly as substantial as Aftersun.  Most of those films do not land proper distribution and are never heard from again outside a few stray critical raves in their festival roundups.  Aftersun is one of the lucky ones; it made it past the first, second, and third rounds of marketing-driven consensus culls, premiering to ecstatic enough reviews at Cannes that it’s now being shipped out to critics’ homes with an official FYC stamp of approval.  Maybe this process is necessary.  Maybe if no one was able to peek over their shoulder at each other’s homework, there would be no room for consensus at all, as Aftersun would be competing with hundreds of other slice-of-life indie dramas on its budget level instead of dozens.  Either way, I still often find this year-long ritual bizarrely arbitrary, as I cannot personally tell the difference in quality of what Aftersun achieves vs. the intimate, small-scale dramas I catch at NOFF every year that never reach theaters outside the fest.

If I’m avoiding talking about the movie itself here, it’s because there isn’t much to it.  Charlotte Wells’s debut feature is a stubbornly understated, bittersweet nostalgia trip – time stamping its period setting with “Macarena” dance routines & MiniDV camcorder footage.  Paul Mescal stars as an emotionally troubled, recently divorced father of one.  His blackouts, arm cast, and meditation techniques suggest he’s struggling with either anger or addiction issues, but we don’t get the full story.  Instead, we ponder him through his preteen daughter’s precociously discerning eyes like an exotic zoo animal.  She is embarrassed by her dad’s tucked-in t-shirts and cheesy dance moves, but she can’t quite pin down what’s happening in his mind.  So, we can’t either.  He consciously teaches her how to do new things the way a proper dad should, but subconsciously condescends to her the entire time in a way that maintains a cold, emotional distance.  There are also things she has to learn on her own, observing the zoological mating rituals of the older teens who stalk around their getaway vacation resort.  Her digi camcorder footage adds layers of innocence, nostalgia, remorse, and alien fascination on these teen & adult behaviors, with no pressure put on what any individual scene means with the larger-scope, slice-of-life story.  Mostly, we just spend a few days with a somewhat troubling, somewhat adorable father-daughter duo, wondering if the dad’s occasionally sentimental treatment of his daughter as his “wee poppet” is enough to outweigh the emotional damage of his frequent recesses into his insular, dark moods. 

There are distinguishing touches to Aftersun that might explain some of its continued critical acclaim beyond the festival circuit.  There’s a strobelit framing device that appears to be set in a modern-day nightclub, but gradually reveals itself to be some subliminal dungeon of the grown-up daughter’s mind where this ghost image of her father still dwells.  It’s a psychic space that grows in its onscreen significance as the movie closes in on its final ten minutes, which leave you feeling as if you’ve watched something much grander & more emotionally impactful than a modern reenactment of 90s home video vacation footage.  The two main actors—Mescal & Frankie Corio—also put in excellent, measured performances throughout, never straining the father-daughter intimacy of individual scenes to reach for anything grandly melodramatic.  It’s a good movie.  I just don’t know what to say or feel about it beyond that, because it’s not an especially unique one, no matter how personal it may feel to its director.  Refer to the closest film festival near you to see more solidly Good films just like it, and refer to future year-end lists and televised awards ceremonies to see which ones got a decent marketing push.

-Brandon Ledet

EO (2022)

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I discovered the 1960s arthouse donkey story Au Hasard Balthazar the way a lot of modern film nerds “discover” the largest looming titles in the Cinema Canon: I saw it on the Sight and Sound Top 100 poll.  EO director Jerzy Skolimowski hails from an older, pre-internet world, though.  When Au Hasard Balthazar was first earning a name for itself among critical devotees as noteworthy as Andrew Sarris & Jean-Luc Godard, Skolimowski was already a twentysomething filmmaker, striving to establish his own name as a world-class auteur.  Half a century later, Skolimowski has revisited & reinterpreted Bresson’s reverent, observational tale of a noble donkey’s travels through an unjust world in his latest—and possibly last—feature film.  EO does not at all feel like an old man reminiscing about the lost artistry of Euro cinema’s golden age, though.  If anything, it only occasionally plays like a colorized TV edit of Au Hasard Balthasar.  More often, it takes wild detours into an energetic, dreamlike approximation of what it might look like if Gaspar Noé directed Homeward Bound.  It’s incredible that the film was made by a long-respected octogenarian, not a fresh-outta-film-school prankster with something to prove. 

As you might expect, the titular EO is just as stoic & unknowable of a protagonist as Balthazar, as they are both nonverbal, unmagical donkeys.  He also goes on similar one-off adventures, finding both kind-hearted animal lovers and totally heartless animal abusers on his slow trot towards death.  The drunken football hooligans & incestuous trust-fund aristocrats of modern Europe might be mixed in with the farmers & carnies of olde, but the shape of humanity has not changed much since Balthazar left his hoof-prints all over provincial France.  What has changed, though, is the exponential intrusion of human technology in the donkeys’ natural environment, confounding EO with strobe lights, lasers, and drones as he absentmindedly searches for a home.  It’s in that alien machinery where Skolimowski separates his own vision from Bresson’s, often by flashing intense red gel lights to highlight the unique terror of our modern-tech hell world.  Whether he’s mounting his camera to junkyard cranes or zooming in on a single donkey tear rolling down EO’s cheek, you can tell he’s having fun with the exercise of updating Au Hasard Balthazar as a conceptual experiment.  And every time EO is confronted by a machine you could not imagine entering the frame of a Bresson picture, the film is at its most riveting.

I don’t know that EO has too much to say about the internal lives of animals nor the existential crises of life in general.  I also don’t know that it’s trying to say anything.  EO mostly just chews, breathes, and trots his way through most scenarios without much effect on their outcome.  My biggest, most abstract question while following him around Europe was “What do donkeys dream?”  Skolimowski supposes they dream out of jealousy for horses’ freedom, agility, and beauty, but it does not matter how much he is right about that.  Waking life is a series of disconnected, emotionally taxing episodes that the immense beauty & terror of our dreams only occasionally interrupt as we steadily trot closer to death.  EO cannot expect a happy ending to his life, because no life ends on its sweetest note.  There’s plenty to wonder at & take comfort in along the way, though, as well as plenty villains & obstacles to avoid.  Observing the world beyond those simple terms is likely a young artist’s game, but that doesn’t mean an old man can’t find a youthful exuberance in how he interprets what he sees.  Since Skolimowski has nothing left to prove, you have to assume the playfulness & subversions of EO are only trotted out for the pure joy of filmmaking as an artform; I love that he’s held onto that as long as he has.

-Brandon Ledet

Girl Picture (2022)

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One danger of watching too many movies is that you can become a spoiled little brat.  It’s easy to become jaded about what makes an individual picture special when you’ve seen dozens of equally great movies just like it, to the point where you overvalue novelty & surprise instead of emotional resonance & dramatic truth.  Girl Picture is a thoroughly lovely teen-girls-at-the-edge-of-adulthood drama, chronicling the messy lives & loves of three Finnish high schoolers who are figuring themselves out before they get locked into the braindead rituals of adult responsibilities.  It’s thorny, sweet, well observed, and swooningly romantic in all the exact ways you’d want a coming-of-age drama to be.  And yet, I found myself comparing it against a long line of already-established modern classics that have delivered exactly what it offers, titles like Water Lilies, Girlhood, Princess Cyd, Babyteeth; etc. That’s great company to be in, no matter where Girl Picture ultimately fits in that hierarchy, but I also can’t help but search for the few dramatic details & stylistic nuances that help it stand out in that crowded field.  The easiest solution would’ve been to, you know, just watch fewer movies to begin with.

I can really only think of two aspects of Girl Picture that distinguish it from the rest of its high-style, coming-of-age sorority.  The most obvious distinguishing factor is its setting, with trades in the genre’s typical American summer backdrop for a harsh Finnish winter.  The less obvious, less easily definable distinction is the film’s matter-of-fact approach to sex.  I’m not used to watching teens order drinks at a sweaty dance club, then doing vigorous Hand Stuff as a nightcap.  Girl Picture is very nonchalant about sex, centering its two main BFF’s paths to sexual self-discovery – one learning how to advocate for her pleasure with boys in bed, the other learning how to let girls into her heart instead of just into her sheets.  There isn’t much drama to the story beyond to those two bedroom crises, and its sexual frankness also sometimes plays as deliberately rattling, at one point harshly cutting from a cliche shot of a teen’s hand soaring through the wind outside a car window to that same hand doing something much more vulgar between a fellow teen’s legs.  It’s not at all played for shock value, though.  If anything, these youngsters are extremely polite fuckers; they always ask for verbal consent before indulging their bodies, which at least feels unique to this generation of kids even if it’s not unique to this specific picture.

Ultimately, novelty doesn’t make or break a movie like this.  These dramas are hinged on the personalities of the girls they profile, and Rönkkö, Mimmi, and (Mimmi’s love interest) Emma are all lovely to spend 100 minutes with.  It’s a relatively low-stakes winter, with only so many mistakes that can be made between house parties, gym class, and afterschool jobs at the mall.  When one girl swoons as if she’s met the love of her life, it cuts to the other playing laser tag with strangers in the woods.  It’s all sweetly innocent, even when it’s raunchy or heart-soaringly romantic.  Director Alli Haapasalo finds plenty room to flex her sense of visual style in this feature debut, too, even if it’s all decorated in the same neon crosslighting, strobelit dance parties, and pastel bedroom decor that’s typical to the genre.  No matter how familiar Girl Picture can feel frame by frame, it’s always a pleasure, and it’s headlined by a lovely group of kids who deserve the absolute best.  Rooting for these girls to get their acts together before life throws real consequences at them is more than enough to make this a satisfying teen-years drama.  Just try your best to forget that you’ve seen it all done before many times over.

-Brandon Ledet