First Man

FIRST MAN   ****

Damien Chazelle

2018

IDEA:  An account of the years in Neil Armstrong's life leading up to the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969.

BLURB:  Gratifyingly resisting any impulse to simply relay historical information or lionize a famous public figure, First Man commits itself to invoking a cosmos of sensations – frightening, exhilarating, overwhelming – with Neil Armstrong as an embodied conduit. Chazelle channels his subjective, sensory experience(s) through a magisterial command of the medium’s formal properties, placing us inside clamorous cockpits, bombinating test vehicles, and even astronaut helmets, manipulating visual and acoustic space to thrillingly immersive perceptual effect. The film’s visceral emphasis on embodied experience is as much a self-justified experimental approach to this subject as it is a thematization of the story’s preoccupation with life, death, and the phenomenal. Subverting nationalist-historical narratives as well as aesthetic expectations, Chazelle foregrounds the unwieldy and precarious materiality of spacecraft to convey the danger, even folly, of interstellar flight. Propagandistic discourse is stripped away in favor of a representation of the space program as suicide mission, as a possibly preposterous boondoggle whose human risks outstrip its potential for scientific gain. Contextualized alongside the Vietnam War, First Man measures the defensibility of putting lives in jeopardy for questionable ends, and Chazelle takes every opportunity to conjure the magnitude and physical weight of this peril through rattling equipment, groaning metal, and the tension of bodies strapped inside the apparatuses constituted by them. 

Rocked by the tragedies that surround him, a series of shocks catalyzed by the loss of his daughter, and unable to easily communicate emotion, Gosling’s Armstrong is an unlikely biopic hero. For most of the film he is taciturn, sullen, even inscrutable; Singer’s script wisely homes in on his internal struggles, framing his missions through the unspeakably private rather than the mass-mediated, and the actor responds with a portrayal of anxious, guarded, but resolute obsession. Chazelle and Singer suggest that his quest to walk on the moon was as much motivated by any professional pride in country as it was by the desire to literally defy limits, to tempt and transcend death, to accomplish the impossible. To the degree any film reasonably could, First Man approximates the transgressive, masochistic thrill of this desire made historically manifest, allowing us to feel the dread and the excitement of flying so close to the void.

Border

This review was originally published on Cine-File.

BORDER   ***1/2

Ali Abbasi

2018

IDEA:  A border guard with a gift for smelling people's emotions comes to learn the truth about herself when she meets a strangely similar man. 

Classic stories from The Hunchback of Notre-Dame to Frankenstein have cast physically anomalous outsiders as both mirrors of and foils to the ills of mankind, serving as metaphors for a society hostile to difference. Without giving too much away, Ali Abbasi’s folkloric-realist Border joins their ranks while shrewdly subverting the cultural codes inscribed in such narratives, conceptualizing difference outside prevailing dualisms. 

The film follows Tina, a lonely Swedish border guard who, from the start, is clearly unlike anyone else. Not only does her visage set her apart – her heavy, protruding brow and pachydermic skin drawing curious stares – but so too does her seemingly supernatural ability to smell people’s guilt and fear, a trait the authorities exploit to find contraband. Near her home nestled in the woods, she appears to commune with foxes and moose, and indeed, her own behavior often resembles that of an animal, most notably in the way her upper lip flares when she’s in proximity of a guilty passenger. But is Tina really that sui generis? When she encounters someone entering the country who looks just like her, she begins to question her true nature as the two embark on a relationship that brings enlightenment and terror. 

Abbasi gradually parcels out information about Tina and this analogous partner, rendering their multiple idiosyncrasies with fascination but also affection. The film may be grounded in Scandinavian folklore, but its inflections of social realism, horror, and discourses around queerness unsettle it from generic categories, allowing it to engage, most excitingly and even radically, with the politics of anti-humanism. Lest this all get too esoteric, Eva Melander’s extraordinary performance as Tina anchors the film to a sense of lived experience. Behind the impressive prosthetics, the actress powerfully conveys the arc of a woman shambling from the shadows of diffidence and internalized hatred to self-actualization. Border is filled with a surfeit of imagery earthly and uncanny, but Melander’s accented face supplies it with its most arresting moments: the plays of anxiety, anger, and shame that capture a life kept on the sidelines of one society, and the blossoming confidence of one emerging tentatively into the center of another. 

El Angel

Part of my coverage of the 54th Chicago International Film Festival.

EL ANGEL   ***

Luis Ortega

2018

IDEA:  An account of 19-year-old Argentine murderer and thief Carlos Puch, who was dubbed "The Angel" due to his cherubic looks.

BLURB:  When confronted with evil, it is our instinct to rationalize it, to attempt to ascribe to the perpetrator some motivation that will explain away unconscionable actions. Film and other media have long represented real-life criminals with this aim, mixing factual details with speculation to draw conclusions about what made them tick. In El Angel, notorious Argentine serial killer and thief Carlos Puch compellingly defies such diagnostics – as played by Lorenzo Ferro, the baby-faced murderer is a self-mythologizing enigma who simply believes himself to be above law and morality. Without pointing to anything concrete or contriving answers, Ortega situates Puch’s fluid sexual identity and vaguely anti-capitalist sentiments within a 1970s Argentina that provides intriguing context for his behavior. The pointedly marginalized presence of the darker-skinned underclass, for instance, adumbrates the racial and economic inequity from which he’s been notably cocooned, while the escalating police visibility indexes the hegemony of the country’s military junta. Meanwhile, pervasive homophobia encircles Puch and his lover/accomplice, suggesting the degree to which societal intolerance has forced him to repress his sexuality. He even implicitly aligns himself with old pseudoscience equating homosexuality with an essential deviance, declaring himself a “born thief,” and thus an other who’s predisposed to flouting the rules. But his ideology is incoherent, and Ortega’s portrait remains necessarily elusive. It combines a romanticized pop-aesthetic vision of violent rogueness with a countervailing sense of the bleak social reality Puch blocks out, creating a dissonance that resists resolution. El Angel, slick and digestible though it is, leaves us with a terrifying inexplicability: a kid with no sense of proportion or consequence, divorced from the weight of the world, stranded from logic.

Family First

Part of my coverage of the 54th Chicago International Film Festival.

FAMILY FIRST   **

Sophie Dupuis

2018

IDEA:  The allegiances of a crime family begin to unravel when JP, the eldest son, starts to have compunctions about his work, while his younger brother inversely becomes more reckless and remorseless. 

BLURB:  Théodore Pellerin’s performance in Family First is the kind of floridly affected overacting that threatens to tear right through a film, making the audience wonder how much of the style is intentional and how much of it is an actor grossly overshooting, completely out of sync with the movie they’re in. Pellerin’s Vincent is introduced as the lanky, rambunctious loose canon to his fuller and more reserved criminal brother, so that sense of incongruity at least primes us for the film’s central family conflict. Needling and ostentatious, not to mention so childishly volatile and heedless he randomly head-butts strangers at parties, Vince is a mephitic nuisance the family has grown increasingly and conspicuously wary of. Played by Pellerin with a permanent joker’s grin, musical theater cadences, and wild gesticulations, one is as apt to question the character’s mental wellness as they are the actor’s method and aims. As it turns out, this unhinged performance does gradually make sense to the film’s narrative, the idea becoming clear by at least the second time Vince snuggles up in bed with his mother that this is Pellerin’s interpretation of an emotionally stunted ne’er-do-well, desperately clung to the teat of the crime family unit that has nurtured him since infancy and maniacally unwilling to let it go. In a way, then, the actor achieves a kind of extra-textual, puncturing effect that adds to the characterization: Vincent is an unruly agitator who is both a threat inside the narrative and to it, an excess neither the family nor the fiction can contain. Pellerin is really the only thing the otherwise stodgily directed Family First has going for it, and his histrionics – however relatively befuddling, irritating, or fascinating they are to a given viewer – can only take it so far.

Happy as Lazzaro

Part of my coverage of the 54th Chicago International Film Festival.

HAPPY AS LAZZARO   ***

Alice Rohrwacher

2018

IDEA:  Lazzaro, a guileless and obedient lumpenproletariat, experiences the ravages of Italian society. 

BLURB:  Ambitious and striking if perhaps a bit hemmed in by its reliance on archetypes, Happy as Lazzaro synthesizes a mélange of literary and cinematic traditions into something both modern and eternal. It begins as a kind of neorealist pastoral, dominated by hardscrabble scenes of agrarian life sensuous and urgent in their tactile 16mm form. Then, with the introduction of an imperious Marquise and her cosmopolitan clan, it gradually becomes torqued by magical realism and religious allegory, before moving north to Milan for a hefty dose of globalist 21^st-century Marxist critique. Threading through all of this is Lazzaro, the prototypical fool, whose unspoiled decency and permanent guilelessness Rohrwacher renders as supernatural traits. In her masterstroke, she makes Lazzaro literally unchanging, not only in character but in appearance, so that even as unquantifiable stretches of time and space pass and the other characters age, he remains the same blissfully unaware sprite. Like other works dealing in anachronism and temporal ambiguity, Happy as Lazzaro employs its immortal titular character to comment on an essentially timeless condition: in this case, the existence of capitalist exploitation. Even though he is the only one who remains fixed in time, the stasis of Lazzaro functions as a mirror to the society he navigates, whose geographical and technological progression masks a calcified socioeconomic hierarchy. The poor, exploited labor of the film’s rural setting are still poor and disenfranchised in its urban one, and the class divisions outlined in its first half are only entrenched in its second. Rohrwacher places this critique in the realm of fable, which sometimes lends it a heavy-handed, schematic feeling but also creates possibilities for thinking about our fraught present on more discursively expanded terms.

Mario

Part of my coverage of the 54th Chicago International Film Festival.

MARIO   **1/2

Marcel Gisler

2018

IDEA:  When Mario falls in love with the new recruit on his football team, censure from within and outside the league threatens both men's chances of going pro.


BLURB:  It’s an axiom of media both LGBT-focused and otherwise that the locker room, and the world of athletics it supports, are social domains rippling with homoerotic undercurrents. Men change, bathe, and perform a variety of physical activities within close proximity, fostering a communal intimacy based on often unconscious body-first relations. For gay folks, this dynamic is compounded by a sexual component that is typically disavowed and shunned by the heteronormative sports community to which they belong, leading to tensions between the individual and the team, between transparency and concealment, that can be tricky if not impossible to negotiate. Mario takes off from this point, telling a story of two footballers whose romance jeopardizes their careers. The dilemma becomes discomfitingly clear, fast, forcing the men to decide what matters to them more: going pro or living an open and honest life. Despite the smartly understated, committed performances from Hubacher and Altaras and a keen sense of personal and professional stakes, the film does little unique with this scenario, taking the prosaic route with material that certainly has potential for a more evocative telling. While there is something to be said of a relationship drama that so genuinely feels for both of its participants, that rather than taking sides demonstrates equal sensitivity to their respective choices, Mario doesn’t quite generate the same passion for its lovers as they show for each other.

Woman at War

Part of my coverage of the 54th Chicago International Film Festival.

WOMAN AT WAR   ***

Benedikt Erlingsson

2018

IDEA:  A radical environmental activist evades the Icelandic government as she prepares to adopt a young Ukrainian girl.

BLURB:  In a droll, off-kilter register hovering between the whimsical and the dryly ominous, Woman at War addresses the catastrophic course of climate change and the very real probability that there is no longer anything we can do to stop it. It’s heavy stuff for a film featuring running onscreen musical accompaniment from an oom-pah band, and although Erlingsson is sometimes tempted toward glibness by his idiosyncratic narrative conceits, the director manages to strike a consistently irreverent tone without compromising the story’s pertinent real-world implications. Certainly helping in this matter is actress Halldóra Geirharðsdóttir, who pulls double-duty as strong-willed twin sisters. Her eco-terrorist Halla, the lead of the two, is a delightfully implacable force who acts as the avatar for the film’s activist ethos. Whether discussing plans for adoption or breathlessly ducking authorities in chases across the countryside, the actress imbues the character with a steely, stubborn tenacity tied to a refusal to let Iceland, and Mother Earth, be despoiled. The central irony that she is fighting for the environment by attacking the industry of Iceland, a tiny country and one of the greenest to boot, is one of Woman at War’s darkly tacit jokes, and it is in this irony that the film resonates as both a rallying cry for intrepid activism and an acknowledgment of improbable odds. Like anyone else, Halla wants to keep the planet alive, but how much of an impact can one Icelandic woman make? The picture Erlingsson paints, complemented by an inept, technocratic, xenophobic government, is pretty grim, but Halla’s vivid journey – and that unassailable oom-pah band – suggest some kind of faint glow in the Reykjavik darkness.

Jumpman

Part of my coverage of the 54th Chicago International Film Festival.

JUMPMAN   ***

Ivan I. Tverdovsky

2018

IDEA:  Reacquainted with his mother sixteen years after she left him in an orphanage's baby box, Denis, who can feel no physical pain, is exploited for an illegal scheme: he jumps in front of moving cars driven by wealthy people, and a rigged jury collects their money.

BLURB:  Jumpman’s most recurring, indelible image – of its half-naked protagonist, Denis, bound by a hose two of his peers pull taut around him – provides a fittingly concise metaphor in a film that doesn’t waste any time getting to and bluntly sticking its point. It’s an image of palpable, suffocating constriction that encapsulates Denis’ exploitation by a corrupt system, but since Denis’s analgesia prevents him from feeling pain, it’s also one that reveals a compulsory numbness born from a cruel, uncaring social order. One can easily understand how the Russia of Jumpman would breed such acedia: Tverdovsky flatly, pungently illustrates a government and a legal structure indifferent to justice, run by a rapacious power elite that pulls all the strings to get its way. The depiction is deliberately unsubtle, the corruption as flagrant to the spectator as it is to the film’s victimized characters, whose cries of innocence during ritual sham trials are impassively brushed over by Tverdovsky’s unblinking, circling camera gaze. Meanwhile, Denis grows from uncritical accomplice to a young adult with scruples, even if he’s been hardened to the point of ossification by the world that has raised him. Desensitization is both a precondition and a systemic symptom of living in a callous, morally bankrupt society, Jumpman says, and while the slim framework it hangs this thesis on can sometimes lack nuance, its simplicity and terseness are also what help deliver its indictment with damning clarity.