We the Animals

WE THE ANIMALS   ***1/2

Jeremiah Zagar

2018

IDEA:  Jonah, the youngest of three brothers in a rural New York household, struggles with his identity amidst a tumultuous family life. 


BLURB:  We the Animals is a film about nascent otherness that is acutely rooted in the point-of-view of its young protagonist. Enmeshing hazy magic-hour imagery with animated interludes, it lyrically and achingly expresses Jonah’s flowering understanding of his queerness, offering an interior account of his desires and anxieties as they emerge from and come to bear on his incipient identity. Many films can be called “dreamlike,” but the descriptor is especially apt for We the Animals: its visualizations of Jonah’s fantasies, whether closer to waking life or reverie, are semi-surreal representations that read as authentically shaped by experience and unconscious feelings, percolating with eroticism, shame, euphoria, and fear that can’t be easily delineated. This mercurial affective flow is especially potent when associated with the sweetly doleful face of Evan Rosado. The young actor, typically shot in extreme close-ups that linger on his yearning blue eyes, creates a tender and lived-in anchor around which the film’s often violent, fulminating drama churns, attuning us to his vulnerable status as he tries to make sense of the storms both within and outside of him. In his curious but bashful gaze we see the world as he does: alluring, confusing, hostile, and potentially magical. And in his dreams, the private refuge of his mind with which we’re allowed this brief, stirring communion, we can imagine with him the possibility of freedom.

The Naked Island

THE NAKED ISLAND   ***1/2

Kaneto Shindo

1960

IDEA:  A peasant family living on a secluded island goes about its daily routines, laboring without the modern amenities available to those across the ocean.

BLURB:  On a primordial ur-island isolated from yet nestled in the archipelago of a modernizing 20^th-century Japan, the nameless protagonists of The Naked Island subsist, even as the tide of historical change and the elements themselves seem to render the conditions of their existence increasingly untenable. Yet they carry on, shouldering buckets of water up a cragged mountainside to irrigate their meager crops in a ritual that recalls the dignity-in-the-face-of-futility of Sisyphus. Shindo locates in their repetitive, enervating agricultural routine such a mythic allegory: a timeless fable of human labor, of enduring through life’s ineluctable struggles with determination and resilience despite the lack of discernible purpose or gain. The film’s effulgent images, which set the protagonists against boundless vistas of land and water, suggest a landscape as immortal as the human drama taking place within it. The Naked Island also, unavoidably, articulates a specific nationalist context, registering the losses and transformations of postwar Japan and offering a vision of social reality situated somewhere between propaganda and elegy. While it might be fair to wince at its depiction of agrarian existence as a reactionary lament for a more honorable primitive past, Shindo coarsens his romanticism with a palpable feel for the pain that permeated, and certainly continued to permeate in 1960, many aspects of Japanese life. The film is gorgeous, but it is also tough, disciplined, and often exhausting – a paean to human toil and tenacity that understands both as prerequisites for survival.