Europe '51

EUROPE '51   ***1/2

Roberto Rossellini

1952

IDEA:  In the wake of her young son's death, a socialite in postwar Italy embraces humanitarianism, to the chagrin of her social circle.

BLURB:  As timely as ever, Europe ’51 considers a humanist ethics of responsibility to the Other that seems to be chronically lost in the modern Western world. With emotional grandeur that never becomes mawkish or simplistic, Rossellini and Bergman chart the moral awakening and flowering social conscience of a petit bourgeoisie woman shocked out of her complacency by personal tragedy. Her worldview expands in tandem with Rossellini’s mise en scène, moving out from the enclosed environment of a luxury high-rise apartment to the arid open spaces around tenement buildings where she joins the huddled masses. Europe ’51 nimbly resits the obvious path of framing Irene as a savior, or as a guilt-wracked, self-abnegating repenter. Instead, it uses her altruistic mission to reflect the parochial and hypocritical institutions that condemn a woman who dares to act outside of her social role. Too benevolent for the militant Left as represented by her cousin Andrea, Irene’s unconditional maternal embrace of the discarded underclass also rankles the Church, which views her actions as a kind of promiscuity blurring the mother/whore divide. In a modern social tragedy redolent of Joan of Arc (a former Bergman role), Irene’s practice of empathy as a fundamental human duty is seen as a radical intervention in a hierarchical society calcified into self-interest. By the end, ironically back in an enclosed place, she is not so much a martyred saint as a woman who has chosen, against ideological prescriptions, to be human.

Toute une nuit

TOUTE UNE NUIT   ***1/2

Chantal Akerman

1982

IDEA:  A myriad of couples meet and part over one night in Brussels.

BLURB:  Toute une nuit takes to another level the austere formal abstraction Chantal Akerman demonstrated with Hotel Monterey. Where that film used long, static takes to defamiliarize a building’s passageways, flattening them into their constituent graphic parts, Toute une nuit is guided by a visual principle of tenebrism. In an inky-black nighttime that sometimes confounds spatial orientation, splashes of light give shape to the contours of the world and its inhabitants. A shoulder or face is accented by a ray of chartreuse; walls, doors, and windows are adumbrated by strokes and swaths of teal. This shadowy nocturnal world of tenuous contiguity is the perfect host for Akerman’s elliptical (anti)drama, in which an array of anonymous characters come and go, meet and part, rarely seeming able to connect. Their perfunctory dialogue and abrupt dalliances are parodies of (largely) heteronormative romantic rituals, draining melodramatic emotion from scenarios where mainstream media has conditioned us to expect it. In the apparent paucity of meaningful, lasting human connection, Toute une nuit paints a vignetted portrait of urban loneliness as aching as it is glumly gorgeous, like a series of Edward Hopper paintings come to life. Akerman’s narrative minimalism and droll, deadpan refusal of naturalism can be seen in the works of contemporary filmmakers from Jim Jarmusch to Pedro Costa and Tsai Ming-liang, but her voice and style remain utterly unique in their attunement to an underworld of bruised human feeling.

Nickel Boys

NICKEL BOYS   ***1/2

RaMell Ross

2024

IDEA:  In 1960s Florida, a black teenager wrongly accused of a crime is sent to an abusive reformatory school, where he befriends another boy.

BLURB:  The most immediate and material effect of the moving POV shot is one of embodiment, of feeling a character’s particular, situated perceptual experience of the world. It’s a body-first formal device ingeniously employed in Nickel Boys to exploit what cinema is uniquely capable of doing: fostering empathy by placing us in the shoes of another, and engendering a new, liberated way of looking (and thinking) by reorganizing our habituated sensory economy through the elements of film form. At the same time, Ross’s radical adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s novel is at least, if not more, cerebral than it is experiential, a dense, film-theory-ready text that often privileges semiotics over sensation. For all the truly startling, sensually immersive moments it creates - especially in the early childhood passages - Nickel Boys’ first-person perspective operates most potently on the symbolic level: as a restoration of a subjective gaze to historically objectified black characters; as a tool for expressing the intersubjective structure of Elwood’s and Turner’s relationship; and as a prompt for the spectator to consider the bounds of his own subjecthood. Aware he cannot reproduce human ocular perception onscreen, Ross leans into the ways camera vision (and editing) construct a different kind of consciousness, one able to be simultaneously past and present, embodied and disembodied. The more it goes on, the more Nickel Boys detaches itself from an anchored POV, taking flight across time and space in an articulation of a historical consciousness that transcends any one body. This is often disorienting, and frequently it impedes an emotional connection with the story. Yet if Nickel Boys is, among other things, about lives fractured by trauma, about knowledge and experience carried on both through the body and in larger societal projects of research and education, then challenging us to see beyond the familiar and comfortably coherent is exactly what it should be doing.

Babygirl

BABYGIRL   **1/2

Halina Reijn

2024

IDEA:  The life of a powerful tech company CEO is thrown into disarray when she engages in an affair with one of her young interns.

BLURB:  On the surface, Babygirl exhibits many of the hallmarks of the erotic thrillers that writer-director Halina Reijn has cited as her touchstones. We’ve got a torrid, transgressive workplace affair between a woman and a much younger man; a mercurial negotiation of power relations involving risky, crisscrossing manipulations and coercions; and, following from both, a bedrock of sadomasochism that emerges fervidly - in flushed closeups and panting soundtrack - from a buttoned-up corporate world of glass and strict hierarchies. But these elements belie the film’s true, surprisingly wholesome nature as a tribute to the importance of candid, consensual communication in sexual relationships. As such, Reijn is less interested in sensual titillation than the social and psychological dynamics that structure desire, power, and status in a capitalist, patriarchal culture. In other words, the film never really gets graphic when you expect it to, shying away from nudity and obscuring sex acts in ways that often feel unduly coy. It’s not that Reijn’s anti-sensationalistic restraint isn’t welcome, but that it makes a weird fit for a film that extols the virtue of being frank about our most intimate sexual wants and needs. The arch, campy aspects of Babygirl are among its most exciting, but Reijn invariably pulls back to a more earnest register before things get too freaky, resulting in a film that comes off as stodgier than its sex-positive message would suggest. What do work wonders are the performances from Nicole Kidman, Harris Dickinson, and Antonio Banderas, who create deeply messy, ambivalent, and not-always-easy-to-read characters that radiate through Reijn’s empathic but too-tidy narrative.

A Complete Unknown

A COMPLETE UNKNOWN   **1/2

James Mangold

2024

IDEA:  Emerging on the Greenwich Village folk scene of the early 1960s, Bob Dylan negotiates his relationships with women, mentors, and the shifting cultural landscape.

BLURB:  A Complete Unknown is predicated on a basically impossible proposition: getting to the heart of someone as notoriously enigmatic and (self)-mythologized as Bob Dylan within the relatively prosaic framework of a Hollywood biopic. The person bearing the greatest burden of this challenge is, of course, Timothée Chalamet, who seems to tackle the role with less than full certainty as to what, or whom, he’s really portraying. While the actor is remarkably adept at channeling Dylan’s vocal stylings and musicianship, he is less convincing during non-musical scenes, where he tends to fall back on a baseline of impassive, sulky insouciance that grows monotonous. It’s fortunate that A Complete Unknown is unusually rife with music, and that Chalamet is surrounded by a squad of talented performers playing figures as integral to the story as Dylan himself. It is through such acquaintances and influences as Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, and Suze Rotolo’s stand-in Sylvie Russo that Mangold and Jay Cocks reveal their Dylan, not as the cryptic shapeshifter of Todd Haynes’s I’m Not There but as a tragically human figure who had to cast off the ones he loved - and the past they represented - in order to become what he felt the times demanded. It’s as solid and valid an interpretation as one could create from this story, even if it’s not quite reconciled with the film’s admirable impulse to preserve its hero’s inscrutability. 

Emilia Pérez

EMILIA PÉREZ   *1/2

Jacques Audiard

2024

IDEA:  A transgender drug cartel leader in Mexico enlists the help of a lawyer to procure her a sex-change operation. 

BLURB:  You’d be hard-pressed to accuse Emilia Pérez of lacking audacity. It takes daring to make a musical-comedy thriller set against the backdrop of drug cartel violence in Mexico, centering a transgender cartel leader who elects to have a sex-change operation to live as her true self. It’s an act of nerve, especially, if you’re a cisgender Frenchman at the helm. Daring, though, is a hair’s breadth away from reckless folly, which Emilia Pérez more often looks (and sounds) like than not. Here, Audiard’s grittily flamboyant expressionism is utterly misapplied to the social-realist nature of the subject matter. This was at times a liability in the director’s Dheepan, but then that film wasn’t a woolly rock opera careening gauchely between songs about “vaginoplasties” and sepulchral laments to Mexico’s epidemic of enforced disappearances. Emilia Pérez never finds a way to reconcile its overstuffed ideas or disparate tones, or to even fashion a compelling narrative around people who should be a whole lot more complex, performed by actors who do mostly heroic work with erratic or barely-there characterizations. For a musical, it’s inexcusably lead-footed, marked by lurching rhythms and awkward fadeouts that exacerbate the lethargy of much of the singing. Why did Audiard want to tell this story? What is his interest in touring this land and people he seems glibly invested in at best, while perpetuating a hoary narrative of trans martyrdom? The film grasps for sociopolitical import, but drowns in a pell-mell of tacky, confused sensationalism.

Flow

FLOW   ***

Gints Zilbalodis

2024

IDEA:  When the earth is overtaken by a catastrophic flood, a feline and a cadre of other animals attempt to find safety.

BLURB:  On paper a fairly archetypal survival story, Flow becomes on screen an idiosyncratic vision untethered from the conventions of narratives with animal protagonists. It does this in part by mostly resisting the tendency toward anthropomorphism, preserving the inscrutable animal natures of its characters through the absence of dialogue and human behaviors. Zilbalodis may invite us to project our thoughts and feelings onto the creatures (whose relatively crude, impassive forms this helps facilitate), but he steadfastly refuses to sentimentalize them. Instead of a plot fueled by emotional through-lines, Flow offers a more elemental, phenomenological kind of journey that foregrounds the raw physical sensations of navigating a perilous world. The animation - with its long, soaring virtual camera movements through land, water, and air - is strongly attuned to an aesthetics of proprioception, creating an embodied experience of what it would feel like, for instance, to be a drowning cat that’s been swooped up to great heights and dropped by a large bird. There is a palpable, at times sublime sense of material scale and the attendant dangers of being a small creature in an unfathomably big, chaotic world. In this way, Flow works better as an immersion in environment than as a story, however deliberately and mythically pared-down the latter might be. It alternately resembles the free-roaming gameplay of an open-world video game and the elaborate tracking-shot cinematography of Emmanuel Lubezki. You probably won’t feel all cuddly about these animals, but you might feel things more potent, and lingering: fear, awe, even the humbling wash of uncertainty.