Universal Language

Part of my coverage of the 60th Chicago International Film Festival

UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE   ***1/2

Matthew Rankin

2024

IDEA:  In some alternate-reality Winnipeg, two schoolgirls try to help a classmate in crisis while a filmmaker returns from Montreal to visit his mother.

BLURB:  With his first feature, The Twentieth Century (2019), Matthew Rankin drew heavily from the archly archaic stylings and absurdist surrealism of fellow Winnipeg fabulist Guy Maddin. While Maddin remains evident in the DNA of Universal Language, he is joined by a rather less-expected influence: Abbas Kiarostami. Cheekily announcing his homage as a product of the “Winnipeg Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults,” Rankin uncannily transposes Kiarostami’s Iran onto Canada, preserving Farsi as the spoken and written language while refiguring desert roads and villages as snow drifts and beige brutalist architecture. As in many of Kiarostami’s early films, Universal Language is, in part, about the quest of a plucky child (two, in this case) who run into an assortment of variously authoritarian or unsympathetic adults along the way. But the film’s picaresque proves to be more expansive: with each new scenario and character introduced, including a fictionalized version of Rankin himself, the more the film becomes a sardonic portrait of Canadian national identity as something defined by its lack of definition or distinction. Or is it more like polymorphism? Universal Language’s satirical transnationalism and pristinely rectilinear mise en scène - at times broken by languorous pans and dissolves - point up the fundamental constructedness and permeability of any culture. They also hilariously, self-deprecatingly imagine a Canada that is nowhere and everywhere, a frozen yet profoundly liquid land of turnpike monuments, derelict malls, and Kleenex repositories that can ultimately be whatever one wants it to be.

Megalopolis

MEGALOPOLIS   *

Francis Ford Coppola

2024

IDEA:  In New Rome in the third millennium, a hubristic architect with dreams of building a futuristic utopia clashes with the city's more pragmatic mayor.

BLURB:  Among the many, many baffling things about Megalopolis is how an almost literally go-for-broke auteurist passion project could end up feeling so hopelessly devoid of passion. One would expect a film by a living legend of American cinema to exhibit at the very least some verve, or formal splendor, or rich ideas, or, heck, the most basic level of storytelling and technical competence. But by some hellishly inexplicable math, Megalopolis doesn’t have any of that. It’s surreal in the context of a relatively big-budget epic to witness such flat, drab images, all cheap-looking chromakey and haphazard blocking. For a milieu that’s supposed to combine crumbling ancient Roman decadence with the sleek modernity of New York City, the film’s New Rome is barely palpable as anything more than a soundstage and some impromptu shots of Manhattan streets. At any given moment, there seems to be about six people in this city, all connected in a warmed-over soap opera of intrafamily political and sexual rivalries. The actors portraying these people trudge through the film with seemingly no direction, stiltedly delivering their lines like understudies who just learned the script a few minutes prior to shooting. Coppola’s musings about civilization, democracy, leadership, urban planning, and the future of the US are certainly welcome, but instead of finding purchase in compelling drama or heady discourse, they’re reduced to trite aphorisms Laurence Fishburne is forced to ponderously recite over, I’m going to say, PowerPoint templates modeled on stone tablets. The whole thing sits there like a lead balloon, lifeless, charmless, almost artless if not for Milena Canonero’s quirky costumes and some neat editing effects. It would be one thing if Megalopolis inspired awe through sheer audacity, or excitement through mad style, but it really just elicits a regretful sigh that so much could have gone so terribly wrong.

The Substance

THE SUBSTANCE   **1/2

Coralie Fargeat

2024

IDEA:  An aging, washed-up Hollywood star takes a black-market drug that produces a younger, more physically perfect version of herself, but there are unwanted side effects.

BLURB:  The Substance is the kind of boldfaced satire that forsakes subtlety, nuance, and realism in favor of pile-driving home its message in as uncomplicated a way as possible. There is almost nothing about that message that can’t already be gleaned from a plot synopsis, leaving the film to stretch out and embellish a pretty basic cautionary tale - be careful what you wish for! - for a gratuitously distended two-plus hours. Because the universe of The Substance is hardly congruent with anything resembling the real world (friends, family, and curiosity apparently don't exist in the life of a celebrity), Fargeat basically forces us to take her film less as the incisive social satire it sometimes pretends to be than as the big, dumb, sardonic, occasionally inspired, über-polished exploitation picture it really is. And on those grounds, it’s fairly successful. A triumph of visual and sonic design, the film furnishes an indulgent, pungent sensory experience befitting its corporeal obsessions. Marvel at the spacious, ominously antiseptic Kubrickian rooms! Immerse yourself in a symphony of squishy body sounds! Give over all your senses (and the contents of your stomach?) to the lurid, uncannily convincing makeup and prosthetic effects, putrid masterpieces of rotting, deformed flesh and oozing entrails. It’s certainly a spectacle, and by the time it reaches a splatter-fest of a denouement that would undoubtedly delight David Cronenberg and John Carpenter, one that feels far more content with being just that than anything that might dig deeper under the skin. Is it unforgivably ironic, or ironic by design, that The Substance doesn’t exactly have that much of it?

Between the Temples

BETWEEN THE TEMPLES   ***

Nathan Silver

2024

IDEA:  Amid personal and professional crisis, a cantor reluctantly agrees to give his former grade-school music teacher a late-in-life bat mitzvah. 

BLURB:  Between the Temples is a film of deliberately discordant tones and abrasive affect that is, at heart, a warm character study of two bereft individuals finding renewed purpose through each other. Which is another way of saying that the film exists between modes of filmmaking - acrid contemporary cringe comedy and relatively crowd-pleasing New Hollywood - just as its characters find themselves caught between traditional notions of Judaism and far less orthodox ones. The conservative and more adventurous (reform?) dimensions of Between the Temples come together in electric and productively awkward conversation, creating a volatile energy that feels at once old and new. While Silver’s 16mm cinematography and iris shots evoke the past, his penchant for fast, arrhythmic editing, handheld camerawork, and a cacophonous soundscape of quotidian noises amped up to 11 align him with the vérité working-class chaos of the Safdie brothers. Extreme closeups predominate, compounding the claustrophobia of the always discomfiting social situations Jason Schwartzman’s Ben has a habit of finding himself in. The film’s antsy, febrile atmosphere is enhanced by the terrific cast, especially Carol Kane, whose presence is so potently batty it has the effect of shifting the climate of any scene she enters. Her looniness is the perfect foil and complement to Schwartzman’s nebbishy sullenness; where their relationship ends up is Between the Temples’ final and most satisfying rejection of orthodoxy.

Brewster McCloud

BREWSTER MCCLOUD   ***1/2

Robert Altman

1970

IDEA:  In a fallout shelter under the Houston Astrodome, a hermetic young man builds a winged contraption in the hopes of taking flight. Meanwhile, outside, the police investigate a series of murders marked by bird droppings.

BLURB:  Altman’s M*A*S*H follow-up, like many of his best works to come, is a rowdily witty satire that moves according to its own off-kilter rhythms and free-associative, self-reflexive logic. It’s a dense, dialectical tapestry of images and sounds that feel as though they threaten to outpace our comprehension, but not without thrilling us with sheer cinematic verve and ingenuity. In his trademark overlapping dialogue, lively soundtrack, madcap crosscutting, and crash zooms, Altman serves up an apposite expression of an antic, maddening post-1960s American zeitgeist. His targets are as numerous as the metaphors and allusions that spatter his film like the ever-present bird shit: nationalism, capitalism, corrupt politicians, inept law enforcement, racists, Texas gun culture, and, above all, the conservative establishment that enables them all. Brewster McCloud has a pretty straightforward plot, but its pleasures are all in its anarchic form, a sui generis mishmash of police procedural, coming-of-age, and fantasy tropes with a trendy Bullitt-esque car chase sequence for good measure. It may be far from Altman’s most refined or richly character-driven film - Bud Cort’s titular flight-obsessed loner is just about as anonymous as his proto-Waldo getup suggests - but Brewster McCloud never fails to delight in its shaggy and mordantly irreverent ways.

El Sur

EL SUR   ***1/2

Víctor Erice

1983

IDEA:  In northern Spain in the late 1950s, a girl learns about her father's mysterious past as she comes of age.

BLURB:  The first image of El Sur, like so many of the film’s chiaroscuro-carved tableaux, is illuminated only gradually, whispering from the darkness. The source is the light of dawn filling a girl’s bedroom, but it could just as well be a projector’s lightbulb firing up, or the waxing flame that casts shadows on the wall of Plato’s cave. The stylized images conjured by Erice and Alcaine self-reflexively entwine memory and cinema, calling back to some irrecoverable past that only exists in hazy representations. For the young Estrella, those things beyond the threshold of legibility become imagos; particularly, a father who seems to possess magic, and the mysterious South from which he hails that seemingly holds the key to family unity and self-actualization. But any imaginary is built on an opposition of presence and absence, something Estrella comes to understand in the way her father fetishizes a famous movie star as a proxy for a lost love. Rifts personal and political define the narrative and poetics of El Sur, whose post-Civil War setting rumbles with generational tensions between children and their patriarchs, nations and their leaders. Estrella is older by the end of the film, but in many ways she’s as she was at the beginning: a girl at literal and metaphorical dawn, grasping toward a light that will never fully chase away the dark.

Red Island

RED ISLAND   ***

Robin Campillo

2023

IDEA:  A young French-Algerian boy grows up on a military base in Madagascar during the waning days of French occupation. 

BLURB:  A Bildungsroman hinges on a matter of perspective; particularly, the widening purview of a young protagonist who slowly comes to understand the complexities of the adult world into which they’re entering. With an emphasis on loss of innocence, these kinds of coming-of-age stories often take place within the context of war, injustice, or domestic unrest, all things present within the postcolonial setting of Red Island. On the titular island, eight-year-old Thomas bears witness to the erosion of national and familial stability. Like Terence Davies’s surrogate child protagonist in his semi-autobiographical The Long Day Closes, Robin Campillo’s proxy in his own auto-fiction is a queer-coded boy who peers endlessly at the straight world from a distance, glimpsing heterosexual, masculinist rituals from behind dimpled glass and through the slats of a crate. He’s also a young French-Algerian living in Madagascar, making his status one of multiple liminality. Thomas’s sphere of influence is a jumbled one, inhabited by a military father on one hand and a crime-fighting girl from a superhero comic on the other. Campillo excels in locating the disquieting juxtapositions that emerge for Thomas in this strange land, whether through a series of match cuts that link an aragonite table with aerial military views of Madagascar, a Christmas party taking place in a hangar, or a screening of Abel Gance’s Napoleon on a tropical beach at night. Similar to Claire Denis’ White Material, Campillo’s Red Island considers French colonialism in Africa from a place of lived autobiographical ambivalence, mostly through the experiences of the colonizers. But in its final act, a bold structural turn expunges the white characters and cedes the ground to the Malagasy people. It’s a necessary and elating narrative tradeoff in a film that welcomes the inevitability - and importance - of attaining a wider perspective.