On Becoming a Guinea Fowl

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

ON BECOMING A GUINEA FOWL   ***1/2

Rungano Nyoni

2024

IDEA:  After a woman finds her uncle dead in the middle of a road, darks secrets held by her middle-class Zambian family come to the surface.

BLURB:  Guinea fowls, as explained in a fictional children’s educational TV show within the film, are chatty creatures that come together to alert other animals on the Savannah of danger. The sprawling, multigenerational family of women in On Becoming a Guinea Fowl are certainly vocal, befitting the metaphor, but they aren’t saying what needs to be said. While they ululate, grieve, comfort, commiserate, blame, and cast aspersions, they remain silent on the patriarchal abuse that has riven their community. Using elements of the horror genre - dark hallways and corners, a dissonantly thrumming score, a dead body and a haunting - Nyoni creates a plangently unnerving allegory of the burdens so many women are forced to bear at the hands of men, especially in societies where misogyny has become internalized as a matter of fact. Far from an idealized picture of female solidarity, the sisterhood portrayed in the film is an unwieldy and volatile organism, comprising an array of attitudes and temperaments on ideas of mourning, love, duty, bargaining, and reconciliation. In a sad but hopeful irony, it falls on the most reticent of the film’s characters, Shula, to become the guinea fowl when her relatives can’t heed the warning of their own unrelenting cries. 

Grand Tour

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

GRAND TOUR   ***

Miguel Gomes

2024

IDEA:  After getting cold feet on his wedding day, an administrator for the British Crown in 1918 Rangoon flees across Southeast Asia, with his fiancée following behind. 

BLURB:  Revisiting the luscious black-and-white tropical aesthetic and postcolonial parable of his 2012 film Tabu, Miguel Gomes’s Grand Tour tells an upended story of imperialist hegemony centering on the doomed romance of a pair of white colonizers. In any narrative about colonialism, there is the problem of the (usually Western) teller’s penchant for taking the point of view of the Westerner, but Gomes cleverly skirts this issue through a meta-fictional device: the story of Edward and Molly is narrated through a heteroglossic collection of Vietnamese, Thai, Chinese, and other voices of Southeast Asia. As a result, the couple’s story takes on the quality of a folktale, impish and sarcastic, analogous to the myriad puppet shows and shadow plays Grand Tour presents being performed in their native cultural contexts. Edward and Molly are strangers in a land where they don’t belong, and Gomes underscores the fact through the Golden Age Hollywood artifice of studio sets and gauzy light, not to mention the Portuguese he has them and all their fellow British colonizers inexplicably speak. Grand Tour contrasts their frustrated, mostly parallel peregrinations with gliding, oneiric documentary footage of the various countries and cities they visit; in these juxtapositions, it feels deliberately unclear what, or whom, it is that is foreign. If Gomes can’t entirely escape the touristic Western gaze, he’s also well aware of it, playfully teasing at its boundaries until a denouement breaks them all down in an ecstatically self-reflexive gesture of movie magic.

The End

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

THE END   **

Joshua Oppenheimer

2024

IDEA:  With a global environmental catastrophe having made Earth unlivable, a formerly wealthy family survives in an underground bunker. 

BLURB:  A sanguine, starry narrative musical from the director who made a name for himself with his pair of bone-chilling documentaries on the legacy of the Indonesian genocide; this is just one of the facts that makes The End a film of bewildering choices. Consisting of a single location and a cast of seven, Oppenheimer’s fiction feature debut is downright austere for an end-of-times story, aligning it more with the intimate domestic agonies of Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice or Trier’s Melancholia than most of the canon of apocalyptic cinema. Immured in their lavish underground bunker, the unnamed family of The End - formerly members of the social elite - live in the fragile delusion of their own worth, surrounding themselves with fine art and creating narratives to justify the selfishness, greed, and myopia that quite directly resulted in the end of the world. In this way, they have a strange kinship with the death squad leaders of Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing, and in both cases, their cognitive dissonance is unexpectedly revealed through musical numbers. Unfortunately, the songs here are pretty bland, sung unevenly in listlessly choreographed solos and duets that only compound the film’s plodding pace. The actors frankly fair better without the music, from Tilda Swinton and her tremulous self-disgust to Bronagh Gallagher’s bracingly acerbic naturalism. The cast is so uniformly strong one wishes they were working with fewer watery songs and more fully-formed ideas.

All We Imagine as Light

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

ALL WE IMAGINE AS LIGHT   ***

Payal Kapadia

2024

IDEA:  Three female nurses and friends in Mumbai navigate life in the city.

BLURB:  Against a seemingly perpetual night sky, immersed in a constant din of car horns, screeching railway tracks, rain, and crowd chatter, the illuminated windows of towers create a mosaic of golden light. This is the Mumbai of All We Imagine as Light, at once a vibrant urban hub and a pointillist abstraction where, we are told, one must become used to impermanence. After introducing life in the city via the pointedly polyglot testimonies of some of its residents, Kapadia homes in on three in particular, all nurses who are constrained in some way by being working-class women in a prescriptive, unequal Indian society. All We Imagine as Light fleshes out the women’s circumstances in a humanistic social-realist register akin to Satyajit Ray or Ritwik Ghatak, avoiding miserabilist sensationalism in favor of a hushed, empathic observation that might befit the work of one of the nurses. Within the tireless bustle of Mumbai, the women toil, yearn, mourn, laugh, rage, and love; they quietly push against sociocultural dictates, but mostly live as they can within the contradictions and vexations of the city they call home. The strong sense of claustrophobia Kapadia creates in the urban first part of the film is powerfully alleviated when she transitions from the darkness of Mumbai to the sun-filled vistas of an Indian coastal village. There, in an affective psycho-geographical shift that recalls, yes, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, the women find a space that permits them to answer to their own desires. Meandering and muted, perhaps to a fault, All We Imagine as Light eventually drifts into a place of quiet transcendence for all three women, a found family united under another night sky.

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?