High Life

HIGH LIFE   **

Claire Denis

2018

IDEA:  In exchange for their sentence, death row inmates travel aboard a spacecraft heading toward a black hole. On board, they are used as guinea pigs for an experiment in reproducing life in space.

BLURB:  If it wasn’t clear from many of her previous films, Claire Denis is kind of obsessed with bodily transgression. In High Life, this manifests in exaggeratedly literal and multiple forms of abjection, as the film’s criminals come to occupy the same anti-symbolic space as their myriad secretions: outside of social and corporeal order. Denis focuses first on the baby, agonizingly evoking its undeveloped motor control, to hammer home the idea of a pre-socialized and thus pre-lingual body, not yet learned of boundaries. Robert Pattinson’s reformed celibate convict coos to her about proper hygiene to reinforce the social rules she will hopefully grow to observe. Denis then turns to the other convicts, who variously regress to a borderless state not unlike the baby, and who, unable to control their deepest primal urges, succumb to base animal behavior. The filmmaker captures their transgressions in her characteristic fragmentary approach, depicting violent, violating confrontations as sudden jolts between scenes of lugubrious rumination. But what does High Life ruminate on, exactly? Entropy, the resilience and/or futility of life? These ideas float around like abrasive stardust and occasionally gather magnetic affective force, but Denis loses their weight as she gravitates toward risible scatological obsessions. Yes, criminals are treated like excrement, and yes, that metaphorical excrement can disrupt the boundaries we create to separate us from a realm of nothingness. High Life’s merging of the primordial with the sci-fi is sometimes entrancing, but mostly just banal.

Us

US   ***

Jordan Peele

2019

IDEA:  A family's summer vacation begins to unravel when they are besieged by menacing versions of themselves.

BLURB:  Us is another singular thriller from Jordan Peele that cleverly mobilizes genre conventions toward sociopolitical critique. In his second feature he casts his net wider, taking on class division and governmental abuse through an audaciously knotty conceit that, sometimes frustratingly, prioritizes broad allegory over material sense. For much of the film, this isn’t a problem. Peele is so adept at sowing symbolism and foreboding that by the time the doppelgangers of the central family unit arrive, it is already clear to us that they stand in for the discriminately dispossessed, come to puncture the complacent privilege of Adelaide’s bourgeois life. The subtext continues to explode throughout a protracted second act that is typical in structure but executed with devilish style, as pop iconography mixes provocatively with scenes that invoke incarceration and racial and economic violence, emerging like the zombie embodiment of an American repressed. It is when Peele explains the origins of the doppelgangers that Us most attenuates the protean meanings and enigmatic power the premise had held. While his reveal does make the commentary on government malfeasance more potent by literalizing it, it also raises practical and sociological questions the film is unwilling to think about. To accept the class allegory of Us, ultimately, is to overlook some of the woolly, convoluted narrative logics that muddy its real-world applicability. Peele’s ideas may not all combine into something lucid and cohesive, but they are abundant and suggestive, imbuing each of Us’s indelible images with both conceptual heft and chains of connotations.

Pitfall

PITFALL   ****

Hiroshi Teshigahara

1962

IDEA:  A miner finds himself ensnared in a bizarre corporate conspiracy after he deserts his job with young son in tow.

BLURB:  A social-realist critique, ghost story, political allegory, paranoid thriller, police procedural, and existentialist koan; Pitfall’s piebald mix of genres brilliantly reflect and refract the splintered identity of postwar Japan. Teshigahara and Abe don’t so much fuse these idioms as have them generate and absorb each other like an ouroboros, the film accruing ever stranger and more surprising resonances as they cycle through its shape-shifting form. What results is a prismatic parable of a country reckoning with the effects – psychological, economic, philosophical – of the historical catastrophe and transformations that have radically reconfigured its sense of self. Pitfall conjures phantoms and cryptic echoes, aural and temporal disjunctions, to depict this dissociated self as split between a lost past and a virtual, tenuous future. Its endless narrative and aesthetic doublings suggest a body without center, one that has been defiled and fragmented by modern capitalism. While this violence can be understood as a consequence of the economic colonization of Japan by the West, the film doesn’t posit some mythical preindustrial idyll before the fall. Instead, it uses its recursive structure to comment on a history that keeps repeating, companies replacing emperors and shoguns in a legacy of peremptory authority. But can imperialism or capitalism be avoided, and can one even exist as a subject, never mind a social subject, outside of the bounds of such systems? Through the enigmatic modernity embodied by the Man in White, the film conflates these systems with a kind of cosmic inevitability. To live is to be subject and object, to be bound up in regimes that implicate us as constituents and witnesses of history, thrown into a world we can often hardly fathom. Pitfall ties these existential conditions to a noirish fatalism, but the thought it provokes is, like the film, invigorating and inexhaustible.

Only the Young

ONLY THE YOUNG   ***

Jason Tippet and Elizabeth Mims

2012

IDEA:  A documentary following best friends Garrison and Kevin, and Garrison's ex-girlfriend Skye, as they grow tentatively into adulthood in Santa Clarita, CA.

BLURB:  A bittersweet snapshot of youth, Only the Young identifies the moments when adolescent insouciance begins transforming into the concerns of young adulthood. Tippet and Mims draw out the micro-shifts in perception that define this liminal phase for their teenage protagonists, shifts indexed in the candid words and actions that reveal an expanding consciousness of a world that is not as stable as once thought. The desolate desert landscape that surrounds Skye, Garrison, and Kevin, mostly nothing but a generous canvas for their escapades, comes to weigh more heavily as an economic reality; relationships taken for granted gradually seem as susceptible to decay as the milieu. Yet there is rarely the sense that these kids are in trouble, partly due to their financial security, and partly because Only the Young focuses, perhaps to a fault, on the exuberance and freedoms that characterize their relatively privileged circumstances. The film may balk at digging deeper into their lives – for the most part, we never hear about their families – but it also, admirably, doesn’t universalize them. They are situated as teens in the 2010s in Santa Clarita, California, and however consonant or not they are with the spectator’s own adolescence, their expressions of joy, anxiety, and hope, captured as intimate ethnography, are palpable in their generational specificity.