penelope cruz

The Beauty in Boredom

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

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

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

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

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

-Brandon Ledet

Official Competition (2022)

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As the Fall Film Festival season spills over into the Year-End Listmaking frenzy and the new year’s hangover Awards Ceremonies, it’s easy to be tricked into believing that movies are Important.  Forget all the jump-scare horrors of October and the action blockbuster bloat of what’s now a six-month summer.  This is the time of year when cinema cures all the world’s ills, from “solving” racial & economic injustice in 180 minutes or less to fortifying millionaire actors’ praise-starved egos with gold-plated statuettes.  And so, it’s the perfect time of year to catch up with the Spanish film industry satire Official Competition, which is exactly as cynical about the absurd ritual of Important Cinema Season as the ritual deserves.  Dissatisfied with merely being grotesquely wealthy, a pharmaceutical CEO decides to purchase cultural clout by funding a high-brow art film.  He employs a temperamental arthouse auteur to complete the task in his name (Penelope Cruz, sporting one of cinema’s all-time greatest wigs).  To make the most of the opportunity, she has to manage the competing egos of her two male stars (Oscar Martinez as a pretentious stage actor & Antonio Banderas as a himbo film star), and the three mismatched artists violently bicker their way into purchasing a Palme d’Or.  Hilarity ensues, with none of the pomp nor dignity of Prestige Filmmaking left intact.

As you can likely tell from the dual presence of Cruz & Banderas, Official Competition borrows a lot of aesthetic surface details from the Almodóvar playbook: ultra-modernist art gallery spaces, video-instillation digi projections, cut-and-paste magazine collages, etc.  It just repurposes those Great Value™ Almodóvar aesthetics for broad goofball schtick instead of subtly complex melodrama.  And it works!  The jokes are constant & consistently funny, always punching up at the absurd self-importance of artsy filmmaker types’ delusion that they can change the world through a millionaire producer’s vanity project.  From the himbo’s Instagram charity sponcon to the theatre snob’s practiced awards rejection speech to the auteur’s failure to master TikTok dance crazes, the movie constantly pokes fun at its three central players for being far less Genius, Important, and Uniquely Talented than they believe themselves to be.  At its core, this is a comedy about a boyish rivalry between the two actors under Cruz’s direction, and her mistaken belief that she’s the sole voice of reason on-set.  They’re all equally ridiculous and all a constant source of verbal & visual punchlines. 

Even though Official Competition is essentially a farce, it can’t help but absorb some of its own arthouse prestige through proximity.  The three main actors all put in great, nuanced performances as broad film-world archetypes, especially Cruz as the exasperated auteur who can’t fully domesticate her collaborators.  The Almodóvar set details afford it a crisp art instillation feel, especially in a lengthy gag involving a loudly mic’d lesbian makeout session.  Its icy humor at the expense of its own industry also goes subzero in the third act, when the vicious on-set rivalries become outright lethal.  It’s a very smart comedy about a very silly industry that thinks very highly of itself, an easy but worthwhile target for ridicule.  It’s around this stretch on the annual film distribution calendar—when the novelty horror titles dry up between Halloween & January dumping season—that I’m desperate for a little novelty & levity in my moviewatching diet.  Official Competition meets me halfway in that respect, finding plenty novelty & levity in Prestige Filmmaking itself.

-Brandon Ledet

Zoolander 2 (2016)

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It’s been fifteen years since the release of the original Zoolander, which seems like an awfully long stretch of time before deciding the world needs a sequel. A lot has happened since 2001, including (perhaps least importantly) a major turnaround on Ben Stiller’s fashion world comedy’s cultural cache. Zoolander suffered mixed-to-negative reviews upon its initial release, but has since grown a strong cult following that seems too large to even consider “cult” at this point. I even remember personally going into the theater prepared to hate Zoolander‘s guts as a grumpy teenager & being wholeheartedly won over as soon as the explosive Wham!-soundtracked gas station gag in the first act. The funny thing about Zoolander‘s fifteen-years-late sequel is that it’s on the exact same trajectory for long-term cultural success as the first film. The reviews are dire. The box office numbers are hardly any better. However, the dirty little secret is that Zoolander 2, while being nowhere near as perfectly inane as its predecessor, is actually a damn fun time at the movies. Nowhere near every joke lands in the film, but it’s smart to flood you with enough impossibly idiotic humor that you’re bound to laugh at something, maybe even more often than you’d expect.

In order to justify its own existence, Zoolander 2 has to undo a lot of the happy ending denouement of the original. Former male models/makeshift political intrigue heavies Derek Zoolander (Ben Stiller) & Hansel (Owen Wilson) must again start from the bottom. Hansel has been horrifically scarred & is experiencing growing pains with his in-effect wife, an orgy of weirdos. Derek’s own wife has passed away due to his own failures as a businessman & custody of his son has been revoked by the state due to his total lack of parenting skills in areas as basic as “how to make spaghetti soft”. In order to reclaim their estranged familial relationships & earn back their rightful place on top of the fashion world, Hansel & Derek have to repair their irrevocably broken friendship, putting aside the narcissism that plagues them both so deeply. Obviously, the plot doesn’t matter too much in a comedy as aggressively vapid as this, but I do think there’s something oddly sweet about Zoolander 2‘s central bromance that wasn’t nearly as fully realized in the first film. Derek & Hans really do need each other. They’re entirely codependent in their joint efforts to understand a world that doesn’t make sense to their tiny, uncomprehending minds. It’s a fascinating, even touching companionship even if it is an assertively brainless one.

Zoolander 2 does have an Achilles heel, but it’s not exactly the first place you’d expect. The film sidesteps most concerns about being late to the table in terms of following up its original iteration by making the outdated, past-their-prime cultural irrelevance of the its protagonists a major plot point. The redundancy of a second film following the same protagonists as they transition from male modeling to a life in political intrigue is also avoided by adding concerns about familial bonds and, absurdly enough, radical Biblical interpretations & quests for immortality into the mix. Where the film gets a little exasperating is in its never ending list of cameos & bit roles. Even in the film’s trailer swapping an appearance by David Bowie for the much lesser musical being/tabloid fixture Justin Beiber felt like a weak trade-off (although Bieber is actually far from the worst cameo on deck; his time is brief & fairly amusing). The film is overstuffed with both celebrity cameos & SNL vets dropping in for a dumb joke or two. Will Ferrell was a welcome return as the impossibly wicked megalomaniac Mugatu, Penélope Cruz was charming (not to mention breathtakingly gorgeous) as a secret agent for INTERPOL’s fashion division, and current SNL cast member Kyle Mooney proved himself to be a stealth MVP as a double-talking sleazebag hipster piece of shit who’s ironically stuck in the nu metal 00s (an archetype he always nails without fail). These are just a few faces in a sea of many, though, and the nonstop torrent of names like Kristen Wiig, Willie Nelson, Fred Armisen, Katy Perry, and whoever else felt like walking through the film’s perpetually open door did little for Zoolander 2 except to make it feel a little sloppy & out of control.

There were thing I loved about Zoolander 2 & things I easily could’ve done without. The film’s Looney Tunes physics & complete disinterest in stimulating the intellect felt entirely in tune with the original’s sensibility. The vaguely transphobic joke about Benedict Cumberbatch’s androgynous model All in the trailer is not at all improved by being expanded in the movie. Even though Hansel & Derek are close-minded imbeciles who believe things like fat = bad person, their treatment of All is an uncomfortable mixed bag at best & mostly just distracts from the film’s better realized gags. Many of the celebrity cameos & bit roles equally feel like a waste of time that could’ve been better step, but Zoolander 2 decisively aims for a quantity over quality M.O. & by the time the film finds its stride far more of its jokes land than fall flat. I spent most of Zoolander 2‘s runtime laughing heartily, which might as well be the sole requirement for a movie this militantly irreverent to succeed as a finished product. It’s not the best comedy in the theater right now (that would be Hail, Caesar!), but it’s also not the worst (*cough* Deadpool *cough*) & I could easily see myself watching/enjoying the film multiple times in the future. If nothing else, that’s a far better experience than I expected based on its early reviews, which is pretty much how this whole ordeal worked out the first time around in 2001.

-Brandon Ledet