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.

The Wild Robot

THE WILD ROBOT   ***

Chris Sanders

2024

IDEA:  Stranded in the wilderness after a storm, a service robot comes to care for an orphaned gosling.

BLURB:  The Wild Robot contains a thematic density and complexity that feels uncommon to contemporary American mainstream children’s media. Starting from a simple but fertile premise based on the collision of artificial intelligence with the animal kingdom, the story touches on such rangy ideas as social conditioning, adaptation, otherness, parenthood, the relationship between technology and nature, and the necessity of empathy as a survival mechanism. With its factious woodland critters and the robot interloper who manages to civilize their community, the film operates as a kind of allegorical Western that grafts (somewhat problematically) the social dynamics and psychology of human society onto a diverse species of wild animals. Yet if we take anthropomorphism as a given in the landscape of Disney-fied kids’ films, The Wild Robot proves to be a rather more mature example, tempering its sentimentality with a recognition of mortality and, arguably, an anti-essentialist and transhumanist view of evolution. All this within a gorgeous, texturally- and chromatically-rich animation style that combines painterly strokes with the weight of 3D rendering, further enlivened by a strong voice-acting cast. The Wild Robot distinguishes itself frequently enough from the pack that it’s disappointing when it doesn’t, especially in the frenetic pacing and overbearing soundtrack that have become endemic to modern-day Hollywood filmmaking (for kids or adults). Maybe that’s a quibble for a movie that is also so wise and big-hearted you can’t help but admire it.

Anora

ANORA   ***

Sean Baker

2024

IDEA:  A Brooklyn escort thinks she's got it made when she marries the son of a Russian oligarch, but her situation takes a turn for the worse when his irate family orchestrates plans to annul the marriage.

BLURB:  Anora is a raucous, often stomach-churning rollercoaster of moods and emotions, a film that throws the trappings of a screwball comedy over a nightmare about class inequality, capitalist corruption, and the social constraints on female agency. The discombobulating trajectory of the film largely stems from the structure of Baker’s screenplay. After a curiously aloof, montage-heavy first third, which alluringly but somewhat tritely sketches the quixotic Cinderella story of Mikey Madison’s titular sex worker, Baker stages a post-honeymoon crash that hits the viewer like a ton of bricks. Whatever naïve romantic euphoria he had generated totally evaporates in the cold light of the mansion where Ani is assaulted, coerced, and kidnapped by a trio of pugilistic male goons. There is humor to said goons’ flailing incompetency, but the overall affect of this excruciatingly protracted sequence is one of suffocation, a feeling Anora will sustain through an ensuing, increasingly grim comedy of errors in which Ani is strong-armed by a man whose social power affords him a mobility and imperviousness she will likely never see. Baker and Madison prevent Ani from ever being a simple victim of circumstance - her sharp tongue, stubbornness, and tenacity ensure that - but the script is disappointingly uninterested with her inner-life, even as it builds to an emotional conclusion. Perhaps that’s part of the point of Baker’s twisted tale, where people are treated as commodities and relationships follow the logic of financial transactions, and where one’s soul can only be bared when there seems to be nothing left to lose.

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, dark 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.