film festival

New Orleans French Film Fest 2024

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It’s the more laidback of the New Orleans Film Society‘s two annual film festivals, but New Orleans French Film Fest is still always a major highlight of the city’s cinematic calendar.  It’s more of a for-the-locals event than the Oscars-qualifying red-carpet pageantry of New Orleans Film Fest proper, and since it’s all contained to one single-screen venue, attendees tend to become fast friends in line between movies.  Every spring, French Film Fest takes over the original Uptown location of The Prytania for a solid week of French-language cinema from all over the world.  It’s usually slotted in the lull between the chaos of Mardi Gras and the chaos of Festival Season, a time when there’s nothing better to do but hide from the few weeks of nice weather we’re allotted every year in a darkened movie theater.  I’m forever looking forward to it, even now that this year’s fest has just concluded.

One of the more charming rituals of French Film Fest is the way it integrates The Prytania’s usual Sunday morning slot for the Rene Brunet Classic Movies series.  This year, that repertory slot was filled by 1978’s La Cage aux Folles, the French farce that was remade as The Birdcage in 1990s Hollywood.  Curiously, the projection was SD quality, when past years’ Classic Movie selections like Breathless, Children of Paradise, and Cleo from 5 to 7 were screened in crisp digital restoration. It was a warmly lowkey presentation that fit the tone of the film, though, recalling the feeling of renting a Blockbuster Video cassette of a classic comedy to watch with the family.  A lot of the jokes in La Cage aux Folles might be overly familiar for audiences who’ve seen them repeated beat-for-beat in The Birdcage, but I can report that the VHS-quality scan absolutely killed with a full 10am audience anyway. It’s classically funny stuff.

Everything else I saw at this year’s festival were new releases, many of them just now arriving in the US after premiering at last year’s Euro festivals like Cannes & Berlinale.  They were the kinds of non-commercial art cinema that most audiences can only access at home on streaming services and borrowed public-library DVDs, unless they happen to live in a city with a bustling Film Festival calendar.  As a couple of titles were real patience-testers in their sprawling, unrushed runtimes, I appreciated the chance to watch them without distraction in a proper theater.  Even moreso, it just felt great to spend a week watching esoteric cinema with up-for-anything filmgoers in a century-old single-screener – downing gallons of black coffee between screenings to keep up the momentum.  To quote every hack journalist who’s ever been flown out to Cannes … Vive le cinéma, vive la différence!

Below, you’ll find a rating & blurb for every new release I caught at this year’s New Orleans French Film Fest, ranked from favorite to least favorite. Enjoy!

Omen (Augure)

What’s scarier: sorcery or disappointing your family?  Omen is a magical-realist emigration drama about a Congolese-born man who returns to visit his family after growing up estranged in Belgium.  The family is displeased to see him and his white, pregnant wife, both of whom they greet more like demons than like fellow human beings.  After an ill-timed nosebleed is misinterpreted as an attempt to curse the family with his demonic spirit, he and his wife are briefly held hostage for a sorcery ritual meant to disarm their threat to the community.  Then, the central POV of the story fragments into multiple perspectives, abstracting Omen into a much more unique, open-minded story than what’s initially presented.  I’ve seen tons of Afro-European emigration dramas of its kind at film festivals in the past (most often dramatizing the shifting identity of French-Senegalese immigrants), which set a very clear expectation of where this story would go.  It turns out the movie was deliberately fucking with me through those set expectations, much to my delight.

Rapper-turned-filmmaker Baloji Tshiani leaves a lot more room for voices from the opposite side of this post-colonial culture clash to be heard with clarity & sincerity than what audiences have been trained to expect.  Usually, we follow characters who were born in Africa but socialized in Europe as they float between the two worlds, untethered to any clear sense of personal identity.  That’s how Omen starts, but then we get to know the Congo Republic through the eyes of its lifelong citizens who never left.  The two worlds are described as belonging to “a different reality” and “a different space time”, conveyed here through magical-realist fairy tale logic that includes breast-milk witchcraft, a music video retelling of “Hansel & Gretel,” a Neptune Frost-style “Cyber Utopia,” and Warriors-style street gangs of warring marching bands, luchadores, and crossdressing ballerinas.  None of these stylistic touches come across as empty aesthetics, either.  The region’s religious conservatism, political corruption, labor exploitation, financial desperation, and mass stripping of identity are all taken gravely seriously; they’re just expressed through the visual language of a culture that operates in a “different space-time” from what most audiences are used to seeing.

Omen is packed with tons of striking images, tons of eerie atmosphere, and tons of characters squirming under soul-crushing tons of guilt.  The familiar, opening-segment protagonist is just one of many.

Our Body (Notre corps)

The dark fantasy of Omen was somewhat of an outlier at this year’s festival.  Most of this year’s program was defined by rigorous, realistic documentation of French-language cultures across the globe.  The major highlights hyped in the fest’s pre-screening intros were two documentaries that sprawled past the 2-hour runtime mark, with programmers half-apologizing and half-daring the audience with durational cinema ordeals. I showed up for both.  Of the two, Claire Simon’s exhaustive, 3-hour documentary about the daily operations of a Parisian hospital’s gynecology ward was my favorite. It starts as a fly-on-the-wall doc that observes the medical consultations & procedures that everyday French citizens undergo at the hospital.  Then, it gets incredibly personal incredibly quick as Simon becomes a patient herself.

Our Body is a little frustratingly slack in moments but overall impressive in scope, basically covering the entire span of human life in a single location.  Simon starts the film with mention that she walks past a graveyard when traveling from her home to the hospital for every day’s shoot.  In the hospital, she witnesses multiple modes of birth, therapeutic preparation for death, and endless variations of bodily transformation between those two points (including transgender perspectives that might otherwise be excluded from a less thoughtful gynecology doc).  It would have been a compelling film even if it maintained a Frederick Wiseman-style distance in its fascination with daily bureaucratic process, but its eventual Agnès Varda-style inclusion of Simon’s own medical crisis & recovery is what makes it something special.  As the title indicates, it’s impossible to maintain emotional distance when studying the creation, transformation, and expiration of the human body like this; we’re all intimately familiar with the condition of being human, even if only a fraction of us have ever had a C-Section.

Menus-Plaisirs – Les Troisgros

Speaking of Frederick Wiseman, the 93-year-old director also had a sprawling documentary on this year’s French Film Fest lineup.  The four-hour runtime of Menus-Plaisirs – Les Troisgros made Claire Simon’s film look puny by comparison, though.  It’s easily the longest movie I’ve ever watched in a theater (an experience made doubly daunting by the fact that I immediately bussed to The Broad Theater to watch Żuławski’s 3-hour sci-fi abstraction On the Silver Globe after it was over).  Thankfully, Menus-Plaisirs does not make its audience weep & squirm quite as much as Our Body does, since it’s about a trio of family-owned fine dining restaurants instead of the immense beauty & cruel limitations of the human body.  I can’t say it was an especially significant experience for me, at least not when compared to critics who recently declared it the Film of the Year.  Mostly, it was just a pleasant afternoon sit, like binge-watching a season of Top Chef guest-produced by Dodin Bouffant.

In Wiseman tradition, there is no voiceover or onscreen text explaining the interpersonal drama of the chefs at the story’s center.  In fact, all of the contextual background info about how the three restaurants operate is saved for a tableside conversation in the final 2 minutes of the runtime, so feel free to fast-forward 4 hours for that explanation if you’re feeling lost.  Even without the context, though, you gradually get to know the trio of chefs as a father who can’t quite let go of his business and his two apprentice sons, who struggle with a low, consistent hum of brotherly competition.  Because it’s a Wiseman movie, though, most of the drama is just the garnish decorating the main course: process.  We mostly just watch the chefs source ingredients, brief staff, prepare food, and schmooze guests.  The scenery is beautiful, the personality clashes are mostly under control, and everyone is well fed.  Life goes on.

The Animal Kingdom (Le règne animal)

One of my favorite French Film Fest traditions is selecting movies based entirely on the actresses featured in the cast, regardless of director, genre, or subtext.  The French Film Fest ritual is incomplete if I haven’t seen a mediocre movie starring at least one of a handful of festival-standard actresses: Isabelle Huppert, Juliette Binoche, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Marion Cotillard, etc.  And now, I can confidently say that Adèle Exarchopoulos has earned her place on that prestigious list.  I’m at the point where I’ll enjoy pretty much anything as long as Exarchopoulos is in it, including this supernatural thriller that was instantly forgotten after it premiered last year in Cannes’s Un Certain Regard program.

The Animal Kingdom is a moody fantasy film about a world where humans start mutating into other animal species, like a somber revision of the Netflix series Sweet Tooth.  The central drama is a coming-of-age story about a teenager who’s struggling with the sudden loss (or, rather, transformation) of his mother during this phenomenon.  He also struggles with the terrifying possibility that his own body might be transforming as well, in an especially monstrous version of puberty.  Then there’s his struggle to connect with his distracted father, who’s fixated on retrieving his feral-beast mother and reassimilating her into the family home.  Exarchopoulos operates at the fringes of the story as the father’s reluctant love interest.  She plays a kind of stock FBI character from 90s action thrillers, the kind who are always 2 or 3 steps behind the fugitive main players.  It’s like watching Tommy Lee Jones track escapees from the Island of Dr. Moreau – a part she plays with only mild enthusiasm.

There are a few Icarian moments when the ambition of the film’s superhuman CGI are not matched by the might of its budget, which often breaks the spell of the story it’s telling. There’s some grounding, visceral detail in the body horror of the beastly transformations, though, especially as characters pick at their bloodied nails, teeth, and stitches the way a wounded animal would.  That’s another time-honored French Film Fest tradition in itself, come to think of it: listening to an audience who don’t typically watch a lot of genre cinema express disgust with the ordeal of a well-executed gore gag.  I have particularly fond memories of watching the grotesque erotic thriller Double Lover with this exact festival crowd for that exact reason.  I just wish Adèle Exarchopoulos was given something half as interesting to do in this film as any one scene in that all-timer from Ozon.

The Crime is Mine (Mon crime)

François Ozon’s selection in this year’s French Film Fest was nowhere near as memorable as the nonstop freakshow of Double Lover, but it did hit a different quota for what I love to see at the fest.  The Crime is Mine is a traditional crowd-pleaser comedy that features a performance from festival-standard Isabelle Huppert, making for two collaborators who are both capable of much weirder, wilder work.  Huppert stars in this 1930s-throwback farce as a Silent Era film starlet who struggled to make the transition to talkies, so she instead attempts to become famous through a headline-grabbing murder.  It’s an adaptation of a stage-play comedy that mildly updates its source material, but mostly just aims to please.  It’s very charming & cute but deliberately unspecial, like a mildly more subversive version of See How They Run.  If you want to see Isabelle Huppert go big in an outrageous wig, you could do much worse, but you won’t walk away accusing Ozon of having The Lubitsch Touch.

-Brandon Ledet

New Orleans Film Fest 2023: Documentary Round-Up

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Normally, when I scan the New Orleans Film Fest line-up for titles I might be interested in, I rely heavily on the “Narrative Features” filter on their schedule.  This year, only the gross-out Juggalo road trip comedy Off Ramp grabbed my attention from that section of the program, and I look forward to reviewing that film with regular podcast guest Bill Arceneaux later this month.  Otherwise, the most exciting selections at this year’s NOFF were all documentaries, at least from what I could gather scrolling through blurbs & thumbnails on the festival’s website.  All of the movies I ventured out to see on my own this year happened to be documentaries; they also all happened to feature queer themes in their subjects – sometimes subtly, often confrontationally.  

So, here’s a quick-takes round-up of all the documentary films I caught at the 34th annual New Orleans Film Festival.  It’s a short but commendable list, one that will make me think twice about my small-minded Narrative Feature biases in future years.

The Disappearance of Shere Hite

Since not all documentaries can get away with pushing the boundaries of fact or form, the medium is often most useful at its most informative rather than its most innovative.  The Disappearance of Shere Hite feels like vital, vibrant documentary filmmaking without ever challenging the rules or structures of its medium; it’s simply an act of “Hey, were you aware this amazing person existed?” post-mortem publicity.  Personally, I was not aware of Shere Hite’s existence before this doc’s festival run (starting way back at Sundance this January), which is something the movie assumes of anyone who’s too young to have experienced first-wave Feminism first-hand half a century ago.  Shere Hite did not “disappear” in the Connie Converse sense; she only carries a similar air of mystique because the American media chose to forget her and willed her name recognition into cultural oblivion.  Once upon a time, she was an important sex researcher whose debut publication The Hite Report was just as essential to American sex & romance discourse as the more formalist work of researchers like Kinsey and Masters & Johnson.  That initial entry into the American sex chat was controversial in its time for reporting that most cisgender women orgasm through clitoral stimulation, not through vaginal penetration.  It’s something that now registers as common, everyday knowledge but in the 1970s was treated as a vicious attack on traditional marital relations.  In her most widely publicized follow-ups, she also dared to report that traditional masculine gender roles leave most men feeling dangerously lonely and that married women commit adultery just as often as married men.  By that third common-sense statement, she was ridiculed out of her field by macho mob justice, fleeing to Europe so she didn’t have to hear any more angry men react to the headlines she made without ever actually reading the books she published.

Shere Hite conducted her research through self-printed sex-questionnaire zines.  She was strikingly beautiful and dramatically eccentric in her fashion, making do as a nude model before reinventing herself as a D.I.Y. punk sex scientist.  Her performative Old Hollywood glamour makes her an innately cinematic subject, so that there are hundreds of hours of televised interview footage to supplement the text of her writing.  In a time when mainstream media was skeptically evaluating “the question of The Women’s Movement”, she devised a way to ask women what their private sexual lives were actually like in an intimately truthful approach, suggesting that there was obvious value to putting the tools of sex research in the hands of actual sex workers.  I only know these things because I watched a documentary about her, even though there was a time when I could have seen her interviewed out in the open by the likes of Oprah, Geraldo, and Larry King.  The Disappearance of Shere Hite is a politically sharp, oddly romantic documentary profile of an important figure the American media deliberately forgot because her challenges to traditional sex & gender dynamics were too uncomfortable to tolerate.  The only thing that doesn’t fully work about the movie is Dakota Johnson’s softly precious narration as “the voice of Shere Hite” while reading her unpublished diaries between interview clips.  It’s a performance that’s missing the Sandra Bernhard sass, Patricia Clarkson fierceness, and Susan Sarandon seduction of the real Shere Hite’s voice, which we often hear in direct contrast to Johnson’s.  Still, having a movie star’s name attached to a woman who’s been deliberately stripped of her own name recognition is probably for the best.  Anything that works towards undoing the Mandela Effect of a world without Shere Hite is worthwhile, so I can’t fault the movie (or Johnson) too much for it.

Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project

Speaking of Sundance selections about badass women who’ve fostered combative relationships with the American press, Going to Mars is a wonderful, kaleidoscopic portrait of poet-activist Nikki Giovanni.  Whereas The Disappearance of Shere Hite is formally straight-forward in its linear overview of its subject’s biography & professional record, Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project attempts to at least partially match the inventive fervor of its subject’s art in its own impressionistic approach (and attempts to better match her tone in its own celebrity voiceover track, provided by Taraji P. Henson).  It weaves together threads of Giovanni’s current, relatively comfortable life as an aging academic with her radical past as a Civil Rights organizer and her romantic visions of a sci-fi future led by Black women.  The title refers to her assertion that no one is better prepared for space exploration than Black American women, whose ancestors were already forcibly transported to an alien planet and forced to mate with an alien species.  Recordings of her poetry performances are just as often paired with outer-space screensavers as they are with footage of Civil Rights protests of the 1960s & 70s.  Somewhere between those two distant worlds, there’s Giovanni’s current status as a peaceful, settled citizen of suburban America – still clear-eyed in her awareness of the nation’s ongoing racial atrocities but content to leave the fight for justice to future generations.  There’s great tension in the way the archival footage’s incendiary fury clashes with her current-day domestic comfort, but what’s really impressive is how sharply observed her poetry remains in both states.  She’s still one of America’s great thinkers; it’s just that her observations now sound closer to Wanda Sykes stand-up than Angela Davis activism.

There’s always great tension in Nikki Giovanni’s relation to the world, whether answering Q&A softballs from well-intentioned but intellectually inferior audiences or chain-smoking while verbally sparring with an equally thorny James Baldwin.  It would be inaccurate to say she has no fucks left to give in her old age, since she’s always been a no-fucks-given communicator in her art & public persona.  What Going to Mars offers is a chance to celebrate that combative candidness as a personality trait beyond its political utility; it celebrates her as a great, greatly difficult person.

Anima: My Father’s Dresses

Moving on to the festival’s Virtual Cinema program (which is still running through the end of this weekend), the German documentary Anima might be the most formally experimental documentary I saw in this year’s line-up.  It’s an epistolary film, functioning as a posthumous conversation between director Uli Decker and her deceased father, Helmut.  There aren’t many home movies or personal photographs to illustrate the details of that conversation, though, because it’s specifically about a family secret held while Helmut was alive and able to speak for himself.  So, Uli reads his words from personal diaries and sends her responses via voiceover narration, often deviating from conventional interview footage to instead indulge in roughly animated collage.  It’s an intimate family portrait personalized to look like a cut & paste sketchbook, staging a conversation that could have never happened in real time due to the Catholic conservatism of their family background.  The film is about the shocking death-bed reveal of a family secret, but there’s nothing especially surprising about the story it tells its audience (save for the bizarre, newsworthy circumstances of Helmut’s sudden death).  The project is not so much about telling a story as it is about offering Uli a sounding board where she can work out & express the feelings her guarded relationship with her father never made room for while he was alive.

The secret Helmut guarded was that he was a crossdresser in his private life.  The betrayal Uli feels about that secret being kept from her is mostly resentment that her own explorations of gender & sexuality were severely policed by her family in her youth, as a queer woman who grew up as an eccentric theatre kid.  Her father felt a close affinity to her as someone who felt constrained by traditional gender roles, but never expressed that affinity in any meaningful way while alive.  He hid it in journals, which she could only access after he passed.  To the audience, this is not especially groundbreaking subject matter.  Between the anarchic formal experimentation of Ed Wood’s Glen or Glenda? in the 1950s and the extensive visual documentation of vintage closeted-crossdresser culture in this year’s Casa Susanna, there have been plenty of more artistically & historically substantial works to seek out before making time for Anima.  Uli’s frustration with her family for playing the game of posing as a “normal” middle-class Catholic household that wouldn’t allow itself to be free & happy is the personal touch that can’t be found anywhere else, which makes it one of the few documentaries that can get away with this kind of shameless cornball navel-gazing (alongside Stories We Tell, Madame, Origin Story, etc.). I’m also a crossdresser who grew up struggling with Catholic shame, though, so maybe I’m just a hopeless sucker for this kind of material in general.

Chokehole: Drag Wrestlers Do Deutschland

If you’re in need of an advertisement for the benefits of proud, public queerness (in opposition to self-imposed Catholic penance), NOFF also offered a short-form documentary on the local drag collective Chokehole.  It even took the drag-wrestling hybrid show on the road to Germany, where the much more somber Anima is also set.  I use the term “advertisement” deliberately, too, as Drag Wrestlers Do Deutschland feels like the exact kind of Tourism TV commercial filmmaking that’s only available on hotel room channels, prompting you to get out of your complimentary bathrobe and contribute some vodka-soda money to the local economy.  The first few Chokehole shows I attended were can’t-miss community events, the culmination of everything I love about Art: the absurdist exaggeration of gender performance in pro wrestling & dive bar drag, the half-cooked fever dream storytelling of vintage B-movies, the D.I.Y. construction of artificial worlds on no-budget sets, etc.  I had ascended to genre trash heaven.  By contrast, this documentary plays like an infomercial for a drag-themed amusement park.  Curiously, the movie it reminds me most of was fellow globetrotting queer travel guide Queer Japan, not the sister Altered Innocence doc made by its director Yony Leyser, Queercore: How to Punk a Revolution.  

This aesthetic quibble isn’t a dealbreaker, exactly.  The Chokehole crew totally deserves the professional spotlight they’re afforded here.  I’m just hopeful this short is a proof-of-concept tease for a grander statement down the line, where the tongue-in-cheek psychedelic editing that goes into Chokehole’s live-show video packages will inform the cinema about those shows the same way The Disappearance of Shere Hite is informed by its subject’s sensual mystique, Going to Mars is informed by its subject’s combative poetry, and Anima is informed by its subject’s cloistered intimacy.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: We Kill for Love & Overlook Film Fest 2023

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For this lagniappe episode of the podcast, Brandon, James, Hanna, and guest Bill Arceneaux discuss a selection of genre films that screened at this year’s Overlook Film Fest, including the exhaustive direct-to-video erotic thriller documentary We Kill for Love (2023).

00:00 Welcome

03:32 Aberrance (2023)
09:04 Appendage (2023)
15:18 The Five Devils (2023)
21:31 Smoking Causes Coughing (2023)

27:03 We Kill for Love (2023)

1:01:31 Moviegoing with Bill
1:05:15 A Street Cat Named Desire (2023)
1:08:04 FROM.BEYOND (2023)
1:11:45 Give Me an A (2023)
1:19:35 Birth/Rebirth (2023)
1:24:15 Mister Organ (2023)
1:27:05 Late Night with the Devil (2023)

Overlook Film Fest 2023 Selections Ranked & Reviewed

1. Smoking Causes Coughing
2. The Five Devils
3. We Kill for Love
4. Late Night with the Devil
5. Birth/Rebirth
6. Appendage
7. Mister Organ
8. The Artifice Girl
9. Aberrance

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

-The Podcast Crew

Quick Takes: Film Festival Runoff

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It’s Film Festival Season right now.  If you’re on the level of industry press who get flown around the world, that means you’re dragging your corpse from screening to screening at high-profile fests like Venice, Tribeca, and TIFF, then pretending in your late-night hotel room tweets & podcasts that you’re fully awake and spring-loaded with the hottest takes as you drift into a brief nap before the cycle starts again.  And if you’re an amateur movie nerd like me, you’re taking those delirious dispatches from Film Industry Hell as holy gospel, making notes on what movies to look out for much, much further down the distribution path.  The problem is a lot of the smaller, weirder titles highlighted in those reports from the ground can take years to reach local screens, if they ever arrive at all.  After years of attentive podcast listening, I have serial killer conspiracy theorist notebooks full of scribbled-down titles of movies that functionally do not exist, hoping that something as wonderfully bizarre as an Aline, a Double Lover, or a Diamantino might eventually make it my way.  It often pays off!  But it’s a madman’s hobby.

I was thinking about this private film fest ritual in recent weeks, listening to festival recaps on podcasts like Film Comment & The Last Thing I Saw while still searching for titles they covered years ago on my weekly trips to JustWatch.  And I happened to catch a few of those festival runoff titles in recent weeks: low-budget movies that were briefly highlighted in their festival runs while higher-profile awards seekers premiered in much brighter spotlights at the same venues.  I’ve covered local fests like NOFF & Overlook for Swampflix before, but I can’t afford to be the first online with the freshest takes on titles out of Sundance & Telluride that will be widely available in the nation’s multiplexes just a few weeks later.  Instead, here are a few quick reviews of smaller-profile indies that premiered at festivals long ago, but just recently got wide distribution.

The Silent Twins

The newest film from The Lure‘s Agnieszka Smoczyńska has enjoyed the quickest turnaround of the festival titles highlighted here, premiering at Cannes just this Spring.  That kind of rushed-to-market release usually means a film is vying for Awards Season prestige, but The Silent Twins is too thorny & too fanciful to be mistaken for a crowd-pleaser.  Its titular Welsh sisters, June & Jennifer Gibbons, were mutually obsessed to the point of total reclusiveness in real life, refusing to communicate to anyone but each other in their own hushed, made-up language.  Smoczyńska uses their personal diaries & surviving scraps of creative writing as inspiration to imagine what their inner world might have been like, since there isn’t much to depict in their near-catatonic external life as the only Black family in their Welsh neighborhood.  From the outside looking in, this is a grim, by-the-numbers historical drama.  On the inside, it’s a rich fantasyscape that often takes the shape of a grotesque stop-motion music video.

There’s a bizarre mismatch between auteur & genre here, like watching Lynne Ramsay direct Oscar Bait.  Smoczyńska is unlikely to ever make another killer-mermaid disco musical, though, so it’s at least cool to see her directing high-profile work with a hint of commercial appeal.  The (mostly British) audience who know the Gibbons sisters as a from-the-headlines human interest story have been frustrated with the film’s self-indulgent style and historical inaccuracies, while fans of The Lure will be frustrated that it doesn’t break from reality more frequently & more harshly.  Neither side of that divide can walk away 100% happy, but there’s some great tension between its Wikipedia Biopic genre template and its insular, high-style dream logic. And who knows, maybe it’ll make waves at the BAFTAs before it otherwise fades away forever.

Tahara

The road to wide distribution has been much longer for the microbudget coming-of-age drama Tahara, which first premiered at Slamdance, TIFF, and Outfest way back in 2020.  This is, of course, the 77min, darkly humorous queer meltdown drama in which Rachel Sennott makes bagels and makes out as an agent of chaos at a Jewish funeral.  No, not that one, the other one.  Tahara was shot in the moment between when Shiva Baby was just a proof-of-concept short film and when its feature-length version became a critical darling at SXSW & TIFF, earning a spot on many publication’s Best of 2021 lists.  Tahara can only suffer by comparison, then, since it’s not as searingly intense nor as robustly funded as Shiva Baby, which puts Sennott’s electric screen presence to much more attention-grabbing use.  By the time Bodies Bodies Bodies hit theaters this summer, though, she proved herself to be a legitimate, once-in-a-generation star, which makes the first feature she shot worth a look no matter how redundant its surface details seem.

Oddly enough, Tahara shares more in common with The Silent Twins, stylistically, than it does with Shiva Baby.  Sennott stars alongside Madeline Grey DeFreece as a pair of high school BFFs who are so mutually obsessed that they can almost communicate telepathically, chatting in a private body language that director Olivia Pearce helpfully translates into on-screen subtitles.  When Sennott’s bratty partygirl hedonist pressures her more bookish bestie into making out for LOLs at a classmate’s funeral, her friend catches feelings and the film slips into Silent Twins-style stop-motion fantasy.  However, their interpersonal drama is extremely low stakes in comparison to Smoczyńska’s film, or even Shiva Baby, really.  Mostly, this is a charming indie comedy that scores a lot of nervous laughter off the social tension of Sennott causing self-involved havoc in a buttoned-up funeral setting.  It’s the exact kind of movie you’d expect to see at a local film fest and hold onto as an “I knew them when” badge of honor as the breakout performer moved onto bigger & better things.  Only, Sennott’s rise to fame was much quicker than the movie’s roll-out.

Mother Schmuckers

It’s shameful to admit, but the film from this batch I was most looking forward to was the one most devoid of best-of-the-year potential, awards season prestige, or even basic artistic merit.  The Belgian buddy comedy Mother Schmuckers premiered at Sundance in 2021 to total critical indifference, despite its most juvenile efforts to provoke.  The 70min novelty gross-out revisits the tipping point when the Farrelley Brothers converted the John Waters gross-out comedy into mainstream crowd pleasers, choosing instead to upset & offend.  It’s Dumb & Dumber for the Pink Flamingos crowd, both a revolting abomination and a revolting delight.  I can’t recommend it in good conscience, but I also won’t pretend I didn’t enjoy it.

Real-life brothers Harpo and Lenny Guit star as fictional idiot brothers who torment anyone & everyone unfortunate enough to know them, as if they were performing hype house YouTube pranks that no one is around to film.  Mother Schmuckers opens with the titular schmucks cooking feces in the family frying pan, then offering it to their incensed mother until she pukes onto the camera lens, providing a slimy green backdrop for the title card.  Kicked out of the house and left in charge of the most valued member of the family—their mother’s dog—they get into endless bad-taste shenanigans, ranging from murder to bestiality to necrophiliac prostitution . . . all while searching for an easy meal.  The film indulges in a little visual flair to lighten up the severity of these stunts, dabbling in color blind dog-cam POV, vintage picture-in-picture inserts, and Jackass-style found footage camcorder textures.  This is not another fantasy-prone-siblings-shunned-by-a-cruel-world heartbreaker like The Silent Twins, though.  It’s trash; it knows it’s trash; and any festival programming it would’ve been smart to bury it in the midnight slot where only the most delirious trash scavengers would stumble across it.  All that said, I laughed a lot while watching it, which I believe qualifies it as a success.  I’m also in total amazement that it scored American distribution, given how many higher-minded films never make it past the festival circuit.

-Brandon Ledet

New Orleans French Film Fest 2020, Ranked & Reviewed

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Of the two local film festivals operated by the New Orleans Film Society, New Orleans Film Fest is both the longest-running and the most substantial. The 30th Annual NOFF, for instance, screened hundreds of films all over downtown New Orleans last October, of which we were able to cover 10 features (and a few shorts). We’re only seeing an insignificant fraction of the films screening NOFF every year, making a festival-wide recap something of a Sisyphean task as amateur bloggers.

NOFS’s annual New Orleans French Film Fest is a different matter entirely. The entirety of French Film Fest is located at a single, beautiful venue: The Prytania, Louisiana’s oldest operating single-screen cinema. All films are at least partially French productions, all are shown in subtitled French language, and the large majority of them never see domestic big screen distribution outside of the festival. I see some of my favorite releases of the year at French Film Fest too; 2018’s Double Lover ranked near the top of my favorite films of the 2010s . There are also typically at least two screenings a year that I’d comfortably call all-time favorites after just one viewing, especially in retrospective screenings from auteurs like Agnès Varda & Jacques Demy. New Orleans French Film Fest is the smaller, more intimate festival on the NOFS calendar, but its manageability is more of a charm than a hindrance and I’m starting to look forward to it more every year.

We will be doing a more exhaustive recap of our experience at the festival on an upcoming episode of the podcast, featuring a more fleshed out review of 1945’s Children of Paradise. For now, here’s a ranking of the few films we’ve seen that screened at the 2020 New Orleans French Film Fest. Each title includes a blurb and a link to a corresponding review. Enjoy!

1. Mr. Klein (1976) – “It’s clear from the start where the story is headed, as the movie largely functions as a Twilight Zone-style morality tale, but the point is less in the surprise of the plot than it is in the ugly depths of Klein’s authoritarian, self-serving character. This is a damn angry film about the evils of Political Apathy, and a damn great one.”

2. Deerskin (2020) – “Damn funny from start to end. Not only is the idea of a jacket being so fashionably mesmerizing that it leads to a life of crime hilarious even in the abstract, but the overqualified Jean Dujardin’s straight-faced commitment to the bit sells each gag with full inane delight.”

3. Varda by Agnès (2019) – “It may not be as kinetic or as aggressively stylistic as her career’s greatest triumphs (a contrast that’s unignorable, given those films’ presence on the screen), but it’s still incredibly playful & thoughtful in its own construction, especially considering the limitations of its structure as an academic lecture.”

4. Children of Paradise (1945) – Given this one’s accolades as one of the greatest films of all time, I expected a shift into outright Movie Magic surrealism during its stage pieces that never came. Instead, it’s just a well constructed, stately four-way melodrama with a dark sense of humor and an exceptionally grand budget considering it was partially made under Nazi occupation. It’s really good, but I was prepared to be totally floored (which is my fault, not the movie’s). Looking forward to diving further into it on the podcast.

5. Sibyl (2020) – “Its only major fault is that you could name several movies that push its basic elements way further into way wilder directions; Double Lover & Persona both come to mind. Otherwise, it’s an admirably solid Movie For Adults, the kind of thoughtfully constructed erotic menace that used to be produced by Hollywood studios at regular intervals but now only seeps quietly through European film festivals.”

6. Matthias & Maxime (2020) – “Incredibly observant about macho bonding rituals & typical group dynamics among basic bros – especially when parsing out what’s considered Normal male-on-male touching vs. what’s considered Gay. It’s just a shame that same thoughtful consideration didn’t extend to knowing how to trim the movie down to its best, most efficient shape.”

7. House of Cardin (2020) – “Not at all interested in matching the avant-garde artistry of its subject in any formal way; it’s about as forward-thinking in its filmmaking style as an I Love the 60s special on VH1. However, the vibrant, playful art of Pierre Cardin more than speaks for itself, and stepping out of that portfolio’s way read to me like a great sign of respect.”

8. Celebration (2019) – “Without any contextual info about how this late-career misery differs from YSL’s earlier, more youthful fashion shows, this behind-the-scenes glimpse fails to communicate anything coherent or concrete. Like the worst of the ‘elevated horrors’ of recent years that it stylistically emulates (if not only in its spooky score), it’s all atmosphere and no substance.”

-Brandon Ledet

Episode #79 of The Swampflix Podcast: New Orleans French & PATOIS Film Fests 2019

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Welcome to Episode #79 of The Swampflix Podcast. For our seventy-ninth episode, James & Brandon take care of some film festival-related Spring cleaning with a diverse line-up of foreign-language cinema. They discuss selections from this year’s New Orleans French Film Fest and PATOIS: The New Orleans International Human Rights Film Festival.  Also, James makes Brandon watch the absurdist French drama La Moustache (2005) for the first time. Enjoy!

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

–James Cohn & Brandon Ledet

Episode #64 of The Swampflix Podcast: Kubrick in Filmtopia & Double Lover (2018)

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Welcome to Episode #64 of The Swampflix Podcast. For our sixty-fourth episode, Brandon & CC discuss the inaugural, Kubrick-heavy Filmtopia Film Festival, held at Prytania Theatre. Also, Brandon makes James watch the French erotic thriller Double Lover (2018) for the first time. Enjoy!

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

-The Podcast Crew

French Quarter (Film) Festival 2015

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It’s usually around Mardi Gras when the city wakes up from its winter slumber, suddenly coming to life after months of hibernation. Tourists start to arrive in town to drink in the streets & enjoy the sunshine while their friends & loved ones freeze in the snow back home. Locals stop acting like total babies about what passes for “the cold” down here and venture at least as far as their front porches to enjoy the second lines & boiled crawfish. Mardi Gras is only the start to this Spring awakening, however, and the spirit to excess rolls right on into our festival season, which stretches on as long as it can before it’s too hot too drink gallons of beer in the daylight and visitors abandon us for the summer. Jazz Fest stands tall as the most obvious pinnacle of the season, but French Quarter Fest has recently been giving that juggernaut a run for its money. What used to essentially be “Jazz Fest for Locals” is now ballooning to be its own feature attraction, drawing thousands downtown for deliciously cheap local food & free music. To my recent discovery & surprise, it also features a free film festival.

I’ve been to French Quarter Fest a few times over the years, but this year was the first I’d ever heard of a film festival accompanying the better advertised attractions of food, drink, and local brass. Located just outside Jacskon Square at Le Petit Theatre, a venue that traditionally stages live drama, the film festival is a cocoon-like respite in the center of madness, the eye of a drunken storm. After wandering from stage to stage, drinking like a madman & downing hot sauce-soaked poboys in the heat (and unfortunately this year, the rain) it’s difficult to describe just how much of a relief it was to sit in a darkened, air conditioned room and watch movies. Presented by the folks behind Timecode: NOLA, the offerings at the French Quarter Film Fest are a well-curated group of documentaries seemingly selected to make the city look good for visitors. It featured several documentaries I had never seen before as well as ones I already know intimately, essentially upper crust of the kind of New Orleans-praising fare you’d expect to catch on late night PBS.

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I attempted to catch one film a day at the festival to get a decent sampling of its offerings, but my Friday afternoon plans got derailed when I coincidentally ran into a friend at a live performance on Royal Street and ended up missing the classic, doc Always for Pleasure. There pretty much is no substitution for the all-encompassing sampling of New Orleans culture in Always for Pleasure, but it’s a film I already know well (and one that’s currently available on Hulu), so I had no qualms with missing it for a chance to enjoy French Quarter Fest’s more traditional offerings of booze & live music. Actually, I feel like it was even more in the spirit of the movie to miss it. Filmed in the 1970s, the Criterion-approved Les Blank documentary truly is the best introduction to local culture that I could possibly imagine. Where else are you going to find soul legend Irma Thomas sharing her red beans & rice recipe and Allen Toussaint explaining the significance of jazz funerals & second lines. There’s also glimpses of crawfish boils, Mardi Gras Indians, St. Patty’s Day celebrations in the Irish Channel, and what essentially amounts to music videos for Wild Thcopitoulas & Professor Longhair. An interviewee in Always for Pleasure describes New Orleans as “The City that Care Forgot” & “The last city in American where you can feel free to live,” and the supporting images that surround those claims make it feel like he might be onto something.

On Saturday, I not only made it to the screening I wanted to catch; I desperately needed to. After sweating it out in the drunken, downtown masses, it was a life-saving sensation to watch the documentary He’s the Prettiest: A Salute to Big Chief Allison “Tootie” Montana’s 50 Years of Mardi Gras Indian Suiting. He’s the Prettiest obviously has a much more focused subject than Always for Pleasure, choosing to narrow in solely on a profile of Mardi Gras Indian Chief Tootie as he dressed for his final outing. Tootie is not only a significant chief because of his 50 consecutive years of suiting, but in the innovative artistry he brought to the practice. Instead of merely continuing the traditional Mardi Gras Indian beading he inherited, Tootie introduced the concept of 3-D designs to his suits, elevating the painstaking bead work to unparalleled levels of intricate design. He’s the Prettiest is less interested in the history of Mardi Gras Indian culture than it is providing a platform for Tootie’s work to shine. It’s essentially a moving art gallery for beautiful designs, a constant tribal soundtrack of thumping tambourines & rhythmic chants providing a rich texture for bead work that would already be dazzling in a silent, still image. It’s an important profile of a brilliant, unfortunately deceased artist whose work doesn’t receive as much formal fine art praise as it should.

On Sunday afternoon, once the rain died off, we caught the final film of the festival, Faubourg Tremé: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans. Initially conceived as a history lesson reviving a forgotten storyline in which New Orleans was a historical forerunner in racial equality & integration, providing then unheard of freedoms for people of color long before the 1960s Civil Rights movement (freedoms sadly poisoned by the years of Jim Crow), the documentary about the historic district of Faubourg Tremé was derailed by a little storm called Hurricane Katrina. The final third of the film captured a time I rarely care to revisit, a time in which most people couldn’t afford to return to the city they knew & loved and the ones that could struggled to piece their lives (and families) back together from the wreckage. It was an emotionally crippling note to end the festival on, but once I stepped back onto the city streets and watched a nameless group of ten-to-fifteen year olds playing traditional brass music draw a lively crowd outside the French Market (most likely the best set I saw all festival) I realized that Faubourg Tremé was for the most part a depressing story because it was an incomplete one. It captured the city’s incomprehensible lows (right down to the storm’s irrevocable psychological damage & a beyond troubled history of race relations), but did not have the time to capture the resiliency that brought the city back to life in the years following the broken levees. We all went through Hell to get here, but there’s plenty of our culture left to make the struggle worthwhile.

The couple of screenings I successfully made it to at this year’s French Quarter Film Festival were surprisingly well-attended, but also decidedly low-key. It seemed to be mostly older couples who, like my lame-ass self, needed a break from the external madness of drunken tourists and admittedly overpriced drinks (hey, at least they pay for the music). More importantly, the films selected had the kind of celebratory quality that gets you genuinely excited about your own city & culture in a heartfelt way, especially in the last minute acknowledgment that we’ve been through Hell together. There were plenty of opportunities for me to fall in love with New Orleans all over again at this year’s French Quarter Festival, like trying my first ever alcoholic snowball (which honestly wasn’t all that different from a daiquiri) or listening to any brass band you can name jamming outside the US Mint or overhearing a cop explain to a couple of passed out crust punks, “Look, if you want to sleep out here, you gotta do it by the river.” That sense of civic & cultural pride was surprisingly just as potent in the mid-afternoon darkness of Le Petit Theater as it was on the busy streets surrounding it; and it was just as simple as watching a couple of movies in the dark with a few strangers/neighbors.

-Brandon Ledet