Mistress America

MISTRESS AMERICA   ***1/2

Noah Baumbach

2015

IDEA:  An introverted college freshman reluctantly meets up with her gregarious, soon-to-be stepsister, and instantly becomes enamored of her boldly enterprising lifestyle.

BLURB:  Mistress America is Noah Baumbach’s latest and most jocular tag-along with floundering millenials, a vibrant snapshot of young middle-class ambition stoked and arrested by uncertain creative potential. Baumbach punches up the pacing and dialogue to veritably screwball-level speeds, but he never lets the relative weight of his themes get compromised. On the contrary, his characters’ blithe patter keeps underlining what they lack, and his zaniest, most manic scenes, including a marvelously sustained romp at a wealthy designer’s mansion, are often the ones that chip away at their delusions best. The script, co-written by Gerwig, is loaded with witty, pithy quotes that manage to sound profoundly real and archly theatrical at the same time, the latter effect self-reflexively used to play up the performative aspect of social behavior. Instead of sounding like writerly back-patting, they constellate into rich profiles of the identities constantly being cultivated and negotiated by the film’s rudderless young adults. Baumbach’s commitment to sincerely evaluating their foibles, anxieties, and misgivings through shimmering comedy that neither trivializes nor glorifies is beguiling. It’s what makes Mistress America, in many ways thematically familiar but in others a mature expansion of familiar themes, a disarmingly valuable delight.

The Neon Bible

THE NEON BIBLE   ***1/2

Terence Davies

1995

IDEA:  Teenage David reflects back on his life growing up in 1940s Georgia, when his loving showbiz aunt moved in with his brutish father and frail mother.

BLURB:  If The Neon Bible weren’t so simply spellbinding, if it wasn’t immaculately visualized in hypnotic tracking shots, sensuous textures, painterly compositions, and liquidly elliptical scene transitions, and if it didn’t so movingly evoke, let alone create in the viewer, vibrating pulses of melancholy and quiet ecstasy, it could reasonably be taken to task for being a mannered and even perfunctory exercise from a filmmaker coasting on his style. Admittedly, some camera movements, editing tricks, and sound cues seem rote, products of a default film grammar Davies has grown too complacent with and is falling back on as a crutch. His deliberate artifice, often acutely channeling the distortion of memory and the dissonance of experience, can seem strained. But rote or familiar by Terence Davies’ standards is positively radical by so many others’. A loosely defined, impressionistic embodiment of feelings of lament, confusion, transition, and displacement,The Neon Bible looks and behaves like the singular result of one very specific cinema poet continuing to reach back to the elegiac well he knows best. He may be conjuring the same bittersweet music, but boy is it affecting to hear again.

A Report on the Party and Guests

A REPORT ON THE PARTY AND GUESTS   ***1/2

Jan Němec

1966

IDEA:  A group of friends having a picnic are randomly accosted by a party of men in the woods, and soon after are invited to a birthday banquet for a seemingly benevolent host.

BLURB:  It’s easy to see why Jan Němec’s A Report on the Party and Guests so aggrieved the Communist Czechoslovak government: though not as blissfully incendiary as some of his compatriots’ works, it is all the same a withering denunciation of the political system, its dry, straightforward presentation making its critique perhaps even more potent. With little more than a pack of pliable petite bourgeoisie protagonists, some officious-looking men, and a wooded area, Němec sets up a droll fable in which picnickers find themselves willfully subjugated in a succession of restrictive power structures that take the forms of games and highly regulated “celebrations.” Shorn of elaborate formal strategies or narrative detours, its allegory registers on a basic, intuitive level, and its tone, suggesting menace mostly through banality, mirrors the insidiousness of the Party it condemns, easily piercing the phony façade that holds up oppression and conformity. The setup is also broad enough that its application is practically unlimited – whether it’s communism or just human folly run amok, A Report on the Party and Guests limpidly sees how evil hides in plain sight.