hong chau

Kinds of Kindness (2024)

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Kinds of Kindness is a dense text. A triptych of stories from director Yorgos Lanthimos that are only loosely connected by the appearance of a single minor character (with each of the major billed actors appearing as different characters in each segment), they are nonetheless in conversation with one another, as they are all about the way that kindness can be many things — sincere as well as selfish, sacrificial as well as superficial. The segments, titled “The Death of R.M.F.,” “R.M.F. is Flying,” and “R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich,” each relay a fable in which a character is “kind,” with consequences. 

In “The Death,” we first see a man with the initials “R.M.F.” (Yorgos Stefanakos) embroidered on his shirt pocket as he accepts an envelope of cash from a woman we later learn is named Vivian (Margaret Qualley), and watch as a man named Robert Fletcher (Jesse Plemmons) works up the nerve to run a red light and smash his Bronco into R.M.F.’s car, although neither man is seriously injured. The next morning, Robert tells his wife Sarah (Hong Chau) about the incident while she fawns over a piece of sports memorabilia—a broken John McEnroe racquet—that was received that morning from Robert’s employer, Raymond (Willem Dafoe), calling it Raymond’s best gift yet. Once he arrives at the office, we get a better picture of Robert and Raymond’s relationship; Robert is more of a pet or a toy for Raymond than an employee. Every aspect of Robert’s life is dictated by the older man: what clothes he wears, what drinks he orders at the bar, what he eats for every meal, when he sleeps and wakes and has sex with his wife. He even engineered Sarah and Robert’s marriage by having Robert fake an injury at a bar in order to gain her sympathy. But Robert can’t bring himself to kill a stranger in a car “accident,” which leads Raymond to ice him out, setting off a chain of events in which Sarah leaves him and a chance encounter—or is it?—with a woman named Rita Fanning (Emma Stone) make him more and more desperate to get back into Raymond’s good graces. 

In “Flying,” Denham Springs police officer Daniel (Plemmons) is dealing with the recent disappearance of his wife, Liz (Emma Stone), along with some other researchers on a ship that went missing, presumably in the gulf. While his partner Neil (Mamoudou Athie) and Neil’s wife Martha (Qualley) attempt to assuage his fears while also remaining realistic about the chances that Liz will be found, Daniel’s erratic behavior, which includes intimately and romantically brushing the hair of a suspect behind their ear, causes concern within the DSPD. When Liz and another survivor are found (flown back in a rescue copter piloted by R.M.F., giving the segment its title), she comes back … different. It was well established that Liz’s hatred of chocolate meant that it was banned from the house, but this newly returned woman devours chocolate cake with gusto. She smokes a cigarette for the first time, feels unconfident in her favorite outfit, and none of her shoes fit her anymore. Daniel becomes more and more suspicious that she is an impostor, but his attempts to explain to others that he thinks his wife is no longer his wife because she doesn’t remember his favorite song make him seem even more unstable than when she was missing. Liz, if this is Liz, seems to live only to please him, and after shooting a man in the hand during a routine traffic stop, he’s placed on suspension, where the two have nothing but time together, and he tests the limits of her emotional and physical generosity. 

In “Sandwich,” Andrew (Plemmons) and Emily (Stone) are two members of a cult, run by Omi (Dafoe) and Aka (Chau), that is seeking a woman with the power to heal and even reanimate the dead. Their search is specific; the woman will be about five foot nine, weigh about 130 pounds, and will be the survivor of a pair of twins. Their search brings them close enough to her old home that Emily sneaks away one morning to the house where her husband and daughter are still living and leaves a gift for her, which Andrew notices but promises to keep a secret, although she admits nothing. After a trip back to the commune compound, in which we get to see the cult’s grounds, practices, and yacht (specially designed for the awaited messiah), Andrew and Emily are sent on another expedition to the same town, where a woman named Rebecca approaches them and tells them that her twin sister Ruth (both Qualley) is the woman that they are looking for, but Andrew brushes her off. When another visit to her old house results in Emily being caught by her husband and daughter, he convinces her to have a drink with him, surreptitiously drugging and then sexually assaulting her. When she awakes the next morning, Omi and Aka are waiting for her outside, and for her “contamination” is exiled from the cult, although she hopes that finding Ruth will be her ticket back in. 

The first segment is a lot of fun, and there’s a lot of playfulness going on to toy with the audience and their expectations. Although the man with the embroidered initials “R.M.F.” is the first person that we see, this could be a misdirect, as we never learn Raymond’s last name, nor the middle names of Robert Fletcher or Rita Fanning, so any one of them could turn out to be the character who has a date with destiny and death. It also introduces several of the film’s recurring motifs. When a desperate Robert is trying to sell all of the sports memorabilia that he has accumulated as a result of Raymond’s gifts over the years, he’s unable to get a fair deal for it. Even as he repeats what must be Raymond’s words (notably calling out that yellow represented youthfulness on the helmet of a driver who died tragically while wearing it, just before he exchanges his aubergine turtleneck for a mustard one and sets out to try and win back Raymond’s affection), it’s clear that every bit of the older man’s largesse, his “kindness,” was all about control, and that even the gifts thereof are ultimately cheaper than they seem. 

That discussion of color symbolism cuts directly to an extreme close up of the yolk of an egg being fried, although Robert finds himself unable to eat it and tosses it out. That ties into a larger motif of appetite that runs throughout all three films. In “Flying,” the first thing that Daniel offers to do for the returned Liz is make her an omelet, which she declines, and the cult in “Sandwich” is particularly averse to eating fish, while Aka and (presumably) Omi’s son’s food intake is monitored, and he’s given conflicting directions from each of his parents. It’s most present in “Flying,” however. Throughout all of the film’s constituent segments, flashbacks and dreams are represented in black-and-white footage, and “Flying” features one such sequence in which Liz is seen resorting to cannibalism while deserted and awaiting rescue. It’s unclear if this is a real memory, a delusion, or even a projection of Daniel’s fears, especially since he seems to be the one most consumed with a desire for flesh; the beef he serves to Neil and Martha wouldn’t even be considered “rare” by most standards, he impulsively licks the wound of the man he shoots on Tulane Ave, and when he starts to test what lengths this “Liz” will go to in order to ingratiate herself to him, he asks her to excise and cook first her thumb and then her liver for him, as a test of her “kindness.” 

There’s also an interesting throughline about foot injuries, which I interpret to mean something along the lines of “kindness can shoot you in the foot,” but which also seems to have an undercurrent of dishonesty. In “Death,” Robert first attempts to recreate his meet cute with Sarah by pretending to injure his hand again, but is unsuccessful. Instead, he deliberately injures his foot in the bar bathroom by kicking the wall and breaking a couple of bones, which leads him to meeting Rita, who shows him sympathy and, well, kindness (although an air of mystery is retained regarding how altruistic this is and if it’s yet another one of Raymond’s manipulations). In “Flying,” it’s mentioned that the only other survivor from Liz’s ship has a leg infection that will likely result in the need for amputation, and it happens twice in “Sandwich,” as Emily’s husband lures her back to their old house to drug and assault her by spinning a lie about their daughter having hurt her ankle at ballet class and Emily herself injures a dog’s leg in order to have an excuse to meet with the veterinarian she believes is the savior. Notably, all of these injuries are used manipulatively; whether it’s a self-inflicted wound to get attention, a lie about an injury to get an ex to come over, or a recitation of something bad that happened to someone, they are all used to elicit “kindness.” 

Speaking of dogs, they’re present, in one form or another, in every segment. In “Flying,” Liz tells Daniel about a dream that she had when she was on the island (or which was about the island, it’s unclear to her and to us), where she was in a world where people were pets and dogs were the dominant species, and we get to see that world in the credits sequence of that segment. There is the aforementioned dog in “Sandwich,” whom Emily finds on the street and uses as a ticket to see Ruth. There are no animals in “Death,” however, unless one considers that Robert is Raymond’s dog. He fetches, he rolls over, he begs, and he performs for Raymond. Robert is his pet, his doll, he dresses him up and he picks out his food and he controls Robert’s entire environment. At one point, he directs him to go to a specific bar and order a non-alcoholic drink; Robert attempts to order bourbon, but the bartender asks him if he’s sure, and when he orders a Virgin Mary, it’s handed to him in seconds, having been waiting for him, just as a demonstration of just how far and wide the net of power Raymond controls is. It’s even telling that one of the scenes from Liz’s dreamworld of dogs-as-humans involves a dog driving an SUV who swerves to avoid a piece of human roadkill, which ties back thematically to the end of “Death,” which I won’t spoil. There’s a narrative present in all of them about the power that people have over animals; we all love our pets and we all are kind to them, but that kindness doesn’t change the fact that power flows only one way in that relationship, and that this may be true of all relationships. 

Before closing out, I want to talk about one particular scene in “Death,” wherein Robert confronts Raymond at his home to tell him that he can’t go through with his vehicular manslaughter plan. Initially, he has Vivian show Robert in, but the “scene” doesn’t feel right, so he has him do it again after sitting down in a chair, then has him take it from the top again and enter to deliver his news standing. When watching a film like this, in which a person takes on the role of “director” in their personal life, one can’t help but assume that the film’s director is also telling us something about themselves, or about the nature of control. I’m not sure that I’ve cracked what that is yet, or what Lanthimos is saying here. I have a feeling that this is one of those texts that only really reveals itself on multiple viewings, and with time. Both of my viewing companions for this screening were much more mixed in their opinions, but I’m feeling positive, and looking forward to what the next screening will reveal.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Asteroid City (2023)

/ swampflix / 12 Comments

There’s something about the way that people have been reacting to the sudden appearance of A.I.-generated “art” that makes me sad. Not because I think that it’s “coming for my job” or because I think it can replace art made by human beings (it definitely can’t, no matter how many attempts your preferred media monopoly makes in order to try to make that happen), but because it once again reveals just how unbelievably stupid a lot of people are, or perhaps how lacking they are in that ineffable quality we might call “a soul.” Specifically, I’m talking any person who looked at any of the A.I.-generated trailers for movies within the past couple of months and then reposted it on social media. Some did it with a dire warning that this braying abomination heralded the death of artistic careers, others relished in the lizard brain delight of watching an algorithm shuffle a deck of Star Wars images into a deck of almost-but-not-quite-accurate Wes Anderson references and create a nightmare. To take a quick diversion, think about all of the fairy tales that you read as a kid in which some clever boy or girl defeated something wicked posing as a human because they recognize the villain’s otherworldly bizarreness and think out a method to outwit them. What I’m trying to say is that there were a lot of eyeballs on these monstrosities and an awful lot of people failed to recognize the fundamental inhumanity of the image with which they were presented. Nothing is real, nothing is convincing, and it’s like people have no real interest in being convinced. 

Into all of this comes a real Wes Anderson film, and one which plays with the concept of narrative and nesting stories. It also deals with the nature of separation, distance, and isolation. Software can’t do that because software doesn’t get lonely; software is never tempted to give their ex-boyfriend another chance; software never had to figure out how to deliver bad news. Software doesn’t have to go into quarantine for a time that ends up stretching to the horizon, and software doesn’t understand how that kind of thing might make one lose their grip on reality, and software really, really can’t grasp why people might come out of the other side of that with a song in their heart and a spring in their step. 

Asteroid City is a play, being performed for a broadcast over the air in the days of pre-color TV. It’s also the name of the tiny desert settlement in which the play takes place. The TV program host (Bryan Cranston) introduces us to this setting through the use of stage directions, which include a hand-painted mountain backdrop, an eternally incomplete elevated highway on-ramp as a permanent testament to the apparent insignificance of the place, a diner, a mechanic, a motor court with individual cabins, and, most importantly, a meteorite (and its attendant scientific complex). Each of these elements is first presented as stage dressing before we enter the full color world of the narrative itself, complete with proportion shift in addition to the Wizard of Oz-esque transition between the world of the artificial mundane and the imaginative sublime … which is somewhere that shouldn’t be that interesting, and yet it is. That is, perhaps, the point. Asteroid City the place shouldn’t be anything special; it’s the tiny little nowhere that, in a film with broader, more mainstream appeal, we would only see as a crane or drone shot as our protagonist dashes through it so that we can see that they are leaving everything behind through the visual language of them speeding away from the last outcropping of civilization into a desert of the unknown. For Anderson, this isn’t fly-over (or drive-through) country; this inhospitable specimen is made hospitable, and fascinating. 

Within the play, Augie Steenbeck (Jason Schwartzman) is, like Chas Tenenbaum before him, a widower who has not yet figured out how to tell his children that their mother has died. He and his four kids—teen genius Woodrow (Jake Ryan) and girl triplets Andromeda, Pandora, and Cassiopeia—find themselves stranded in Asteroid City when their car breaks down, and Augie calls his father-in-law Stanley (Tom Hanks) to collect the girls. The town was already the final destination for Augie and Woodrow, however, as the boy is a finalist for a scholarship prize in the Junior Stargazer convention, as a result of his invention of a device that allows one to project an image onto the moon. There, he falls in puppy love with another finalist, Dinah (Grace Edwards), whose mother happens to be famous actress Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansson), with whom the emotionally raw Augie finds some connection and solace. The play itself has a huge cast, including an entire class of children on a field trip with their teacher (Maya Hawke), a singing cowboy who seeks to woo her, three other finalists with their own strange inventions (including death rays, jet packs, and brand new elemental particles), the meteor science team leader Dr. Hickenlooper (Tilda Swinton) – honestly, too many names to name without essentially reciting the IMDb page. And that doesn’t include the “outer” layer of “reality,” which features not only the aforementioned host, but also stage director Schubert Green (Adrien Brody), his wife Polly (Hong Chau in a brief but memorable scene), and the actress who would have played Augie’s wife in a flashback if that scene hadn’t been cut in the final draft (Margot Robbie). And that’s not even the half of them. 

Asteroid City is a matryoshka doll of stories, like a few of Anderson’s recent works. He’s always had an obvious talent for creating a sort of tableau within itself and an intentionality in his evocation of stage elements for the purpose of drawing attention to the artificiality of the form. There’s an escalation of it here that I really love, because the inherent staginess of Asteroid City and the way that it gives way to the vibrant “real” Asteroid City is a beautiful externalization of what we mean when we talk about the suspension of disbelief. I recently ranted in my There’s Something Wrong with the Children review about how far (that is, not very) most modern audiences are willing to extend their patience for narratives that require more than 25% attentiveness, and along comes this movie with imagery that illustrates this exact idea. Art can sometimes merely be evocative and then transport you to some distant place; it’s your choice to stay trapped in the Platonic cave staring at the set decoration, or you can choose to transcend the limited ability of painted flats to stand in for an open sky and just see the sky. Any text with which we interact must put in some of the work to meet us halfway, of course, but it’s on us to let go a little and embrace the opportunity to slip these surly bonds and let our spirits soar. 

And soar you will, or at least I did. There is a distinct loneliness that flows out of the screen, and even if Anderson hadn’t confirmed in an interview that the story was informed by COVID, the fact that the play’s third act (and therefore the film’s final act as well) takes place in quarantine makes this all but explicit. There are many scenes in which Augie and Midge talk to each other between cabins, sitting at their respective windows, at once so close that they don’t have to raise their voices to be heard while nonetheless separated by a distinct barrier – a tableau that calls to mind the imagery of early quarantine when these sorts of six-feet-apart casual visitations were the temporary norm. Every character, like every human being on earth, is lonely in his or her own way; Stanley has lost his beloved only daughter, Augie his wife, his children their mother, the schoolteacher her certainty about the order of the cosmos, Schubert his own wife, and the world a brilliant playwright with the death of Asteroid City‘s author, Conrad Earp (Edward Norton). Even quarantined on top of one another in a tiny town, we are all alone, but that’s okay, because we’re all alone together. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Menu (2022)

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A few weeks ago, YouTube recommended a recent video essay for me entitled “rage & revenge: the birth of a new genre” [capitalization sic], created by Rowan Ellis. Apparently, it’s now a major part of The Discourse to consider recent films about women taking revenge as a genre unto itself, using the famous “good for her” quote from Lucille Bluth as its title.  I’m not sure about the need for this specific taxonomic declension, but I can also tell you right now that most of the films that fall into that basket are ones that I already love, and the overlap in the Venn diagram between the films which are commonly identified using this term and my oft-cited love for “women on the verge” pictures is the shape of the moon a couple of days prior to being full. I’d even say that many of them overlap between the two subgenres, notably mother!, Midsommar, Promising Young Woman, and even Knives Out! and Ready or Not. It was the last two of these that was at the forefront of my mind every time I saw the trailer for The Menu, as the advertisement included certain specific details that were very similar: the woman out of place among the narcissistic rich elites who finds their decadence alienating, and that her specific presence as a member of a class that was unlike theirs would be the key to her success. The movie is … not quite that, but it still qualifies. 

Hawthorne is an exclusive offshore restaurant situated on a private island and operated by celebrity chef Julian Slowick (Ralph Fiennes). Each evening, a cohort of twelve wealthy diners is shuttled to the island for a multi-course dinner, nearly all courses of which are informed by every little pretension of molecular gastronomy you’ve seen hyped and mocked on the internet and in sitcoms since the 1990s. One attendee, a food critic, is even said to have been the person who “basically discovered” slow eggs, which automatically made me flashback to a nearly five-year-old NYT piece about chef Alice Waters and her practice of cooking a single egg over a fire in a long cast iron spoon, the memory of which comes to mind unbidden about once a month, although rarely through so direct an association. Our viewpoint character on all of this is Margot (Anya Taylor-Joy), who is accompanying snobby foodie Tyler (Nicholas Hoult) to the restaurant on his dime; we’re immediately introduced to his fanboy idolization of Slowick in his first few moments, and his endless stream of prattle about gourmand nonsense and food science is breathless not because of his awe or wonder but because of its businesslike efficiency. He seems like exactly the kind of man who peacocks by taking a woman to a ludicrously expensive restaurant and explaining every little detail in a rehearsed speech as part of a mating ritual, not for any real love of foodcraft. 

Rounding out the night’s guests are: a wealthy couple, Richard (Reed Birney) and Anne (Judith Light, who I was delighted to see), who have eaten at Hawthorne over a dozen times; Lillian (Janet McTeer), a well-acted caricature of every food critic character you’ve ever seen on screen, and her editor Ted (Paul Adelstein); fading star George Diaz (John Leguizamo) and his girlfriend/assistant Felicity (Aimee Carrero); and a trio of tech bro worms (Arturo Castro, Rob Yang, and Mark St. Cyr) who boast to one another about their infidelities, off shore accounts, and general shittiness. Upon arrival, there is a heated discussion between Tyler and the maitre d’ Elsa (Hong Chau, who steals every scene that she’s in) regarding the fact that Margot is not his guest of record, but she is allowed to stay, despite her apathy about the situation. Elsa gives the diners a tour, which includes their poultry coops, meat smokehouse, and even the dorms in which the staff who work under Slowick reside, which looks more like a prison than anything else, down to an exposed toilet and shower in the same large room in which they all sleep in barracks. At the restaurant proper, dinner commences and Slowick introduces each course by clapping his hands loudly, which results in his staff dropping what they are doing and coming to military attention like the most well-behaved cooking reality show contestants on earth, at which point he gives a speech about the materiel being presented and its connection to some part of his past (and later, the pasts of some of his other high-ranking chefs). This starts out innocently enough with a sort of microcosm of an ocean ecosystem on a plate, then gets more provocative with a “lack of bread” course that includes several sauces for dipping but no actual bread, and then only becomes more dangerous from there. 

The touch of the darkly comic fluctuates in its efficacy here. There are many lines that are laugh-out-loud funny, and others that are witty little observations about how people who all think that they’re the main character simply because of their wealth or power must prop themselves up by being the most annoying person in the room. Diaz attempts to ingratiate himself with the tech boys because he wants to convince himself that he’s still cool; Lillian’s running commentary on the food isn’t just for the benefit of herself and her editor but is also clearly projected so that even amongst the hubbub of the evening her comments on the broken emulsion of a particular sauce is still heard by the staff, who present her with a full bowl of the broken sauce. Tyler takes pictures of his food despite that being explicitly forbidden at the start of the evening, and Ted simply plays sycophant to whatever Lillian says, often completely reversing course on a statement in the middle when Lillian objects with an opposing opinion. It elucidates each diner in a way that’s efficient without feeling utilitarian while also planting little character morsels for you to recall and smile—although presumably not laugh—when they cross your mind. Margot’s cunning bon mots are fun, but they don’t stick to your ribs in quite the way that they ought. Of course, sitting in a cinema where the jokes aren’t landing with other people can also artifically dampen that feeling, as there are certain things that made me chuckle audibly but to which no one else reacted, so that could be while I’m feeling less than satiated by this particular meal. It’s not bad, I’m just still hungry (ok, I’ll stop). I’m just hesitant to say more because I wouldn’t want to spoil you, or your appetite (ok, that was the last one, I promise). 

I don’t think that this would actually fall into the Good For Her genre. The ending is fun and functional, and although I would go so far as to say it borders on exhilarating, I wouldn’t call it cathartic. It’s not merely enough that assholes get their comeuppance for the film to qualify (if it did, this would make the cut), it’s that our Final Girl has to have actually performed some kind of rampage, and that just doesn’t happen here. It’s more a cold and calculated game of riddles between the staff and the diners with Margot falling somewhere in the middle, having to find the line between the ones who take and the ones who give and straddle it in order to survive. I’ll leave it at that, but if you’re a knowledge sponge with a functionally adult attention span like I am, then I’d recommend checking out Tara Heimberger’s thesis on the subject, “Female Rage, Revenge, and Catharsis,” here. This was a movie that will play as well for you as a rental once it’s available on demand as it does on the big screen, gorgeous island vistas aside, so I recommend it, maybe paired with a five-course dinner. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond