Mother and Son

MOTHER AND SON   ***

Aleksandr Sokurov

1997

IDEA:  In a purgatorial countryside, a son carries his mother through her last corporeal hours.

BLURB:  If it’s possible to be both eternal and evanescent, close to the surface and remote, to convey a sense of being present and irrecoverably missing, then Mother and Son manages it. This seemingly paradoxical condition is, of course, at the core of cinema, the ultimate phantom art, and Sokurov conjures something of that distilled essence in his film’s ghostly wash of images. Alternately and sometimes all at once warped, smudged, faded, and stained, the tableaux that make up Mother and Son look like old photographic artifacts exhumed from some otherworldly bog, set in motion so tentative it’s hard to say if it’s stasis or movement that is being disrupted. Regardless of one’s interpretation or iconic recognition of this aesthetic, the myriad optical effects foreground the mutability of the filmic image and make us conscious of our mediated perception. Because mortality is a theme of the film, the images take on especially spectral qualities: they appear, embalmed, from some unknown past time and space, their existential contents simultaneously frozen and temporarily reanimated within the brief 72 minutes of the film’s runtime. Mother and Son’s brevity preempts any claims of plodding self-seriousness, which a longer film could have easily invited. It’s also what reinforces its austere, porous beauty, flickering like a candle in a cinematic gloaming.

BlacKkKlansman

BLACKKKLANSMAN   **1/2

Spike Lee

2018

IDEA:  Ron Stallworth, the first black member of the Colorado Springs police force, and Flip Zimmerman, a Jewish officer, infiltrate the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan.

BLURB:  The opening of BlacKkKlansman, a direct-address white supremacist lecture intercut with footage from Gone With the Wind and The Birth of a Nation, packs a wallop. It instantly establishes Lee’s film as a rebuke of and corrective to a history of racist popular American cinema, auguring an indignant work of agitprop that will make no bones about condemning the country’s virulent systemic racism. Lee’s outrageous true-story subject matter offers an incendiary way into targeting the white nationalist ideology that has become increasingly mainstreamed in the nation’s political discourse. So why is BlacKkKlansman such a missed opportunity? Why does Lee, outside of some characteristically fiery, rhetorically blunt montage, seem so content pandering to his audience instead of shaking them up? There is little about his film that should be illuminating to anyone not immured in the myth of a post-racial America. There is equally little that should inspire any new thought. What are we to do with endless scenes wringing humor and horror from the KKK’s buffoonish moral degeneracy? Lee redundantly airs their epithet-laden rhetoric and mostly has us pat ourselves on the back for recognizing its insanity, a lazy tactic that takes up too much of the film’s bloated runtime. BlacKkKlansman is a vital work by virtue of its context, but what really should have been challenging, excoriating subversion settles for the fleetingly cathartic.

Eighth Grade

EIGHTH GRADE   ***1/2

Bo Burnham

2018

IDEA:  The diffident Kayla Day struggles to find confidence and a sense of belonging during the final week of eighth grade.

BLURB:  In 90 minutes of screen time and one condensed week in the life of a 14-year-old, Eighth Grade distills the amorphousness and confusion of early adolescent identity. Kayla Day, played by Elsie Fisher with impressively prodigious inelegance, navigates this murky territory the only way she knows how: through social media. Her vlogs provide her a site through which she can present a self-image she is unable to exhibit in person. Despite its putative social function, Burnham crucially understands these vlogs as being primarily in service of the creator, a form of ego-projection that allows Kayla to identify with a version of herself that is more coherent, and aspirational, than the one she fumbles to realize in real life. Eighth Grade gets the combination of effacement and visibility that characterizes such media use, and more generally the embarrassments that come with negotiating an inchoate self-concept, online or otherwise. But what ultimately makes the film so resonant is the eternal applicability of the feelings it portrays. For Burnham, eighth grade is not so much a discrete chapter of perishable experience as a microcosm of existential uncertainties that resurface throughout life. The familiar angsty waves of apprehension may find their most concentrated expression in the pubescent Kayla, but they cannot be solely attributed to a “phase.” Beyond the demo and idiom it so empathetically renders, Eighth Grade is wisest in its recognition of life as a continual process of transition, and change as the often ungainly necessity of our ongoing maturation.

Black Girl

BLACK GIRL   ****

Ousmane Sembène

1966

IDEA:  A Senegalese woman emigrates to France thinking she will continue her role as caretaker for her employers' children, but when she gets there she is increasingly stripped of her freedom as their indentured domestic servant.

BLURB:  Black Girl starkly registers the abuses of European colonialism through the eyes of a Senegalese woman trapped in its systems of racial, sexual, and economic oppression. Conceptually, this narrowed focus on the experiences of a colonial subject is itself a radical and revolutionary act, a centering of African identity and personhood that affords privileged status to the colonized at the necessary diminution of the colonizers. By allowing Diouana’s thoughts and actions to narrate the film, Sembène foregrounds the voice and presence of a woman who is expected to be submissive and unseen, providing a harrowingly internal and profoundly empathetic account of her exploited humanity. He and the magnificent Mbissine Thérèse Diop communicate with blunt eloquence so much of this person beyond the indignities inflicted upon her, making her plight all the more unbearable. They attune us to her heritage, her dreams, her tenacity; to her ordinary decency; to her feelings of cultural dislocation and loss of self-possession in a literal domestic prison. Black Girl is a staggeringly tragic film in its depiction of an individual destroyed by a seemingly incurable colonial mentality, but it is the opposite of a resigned one. Sembène’s angry first-person portrait opens up, in the end, into a collective announcement of national resistance and reclamation, in which a personification of Africa literally expunging one of the film’s white aggressors howls with an implacable defiance. A lacerating indictment of the post-colonial myth, Black Girl endures as one of the cinema’s most forthright and emotionally naked works of political modernism.