Parasite

PARASITE   ***

Bong Joon-ho

2019

IDEA:  Desperate for money, the poor Kim family deceives its way into getting jobs with the upper-class Parks.

BLURB:  Parasite is an energetic, audacious, unwieldy work of social satire that boldly, if not always cohesively, marries genre thrills with capitalist critique. As he has done before, Bong here chews into society’s systemic, seemingly irreconcilable class divisions with a nervy relish, turning the frictions that arise from economic disparity into the engine for an increasingly macabre spectacle. His build-up, in which each member of the indigent Kim family finds employment with the affluent Parks through a chain of bogus referrals, is wonderfully funny and punchy in execution, and gives the title of the film its initial, explicit connotation. Yet we know it can’t be this easy; the cards are going to have to collapse eventually. And when they do, in an acutely chilling reveal, Bong introduces compelling new narrative and thematic dimensions that both productively complicate and muddy his message. It is here when the immorality and ill effects of the Kims’ scheme take hold in an unexpected way, and when Parasite shifts from a mostly straightforward tale of class envy and guile to a woolly one about intra-class warfare. The meaning of the title becomes unstable as Bong shows the withering of the Kims and the other dispossessed, whose inabilities to transcend the literally subterranean are understood partly as byproducts of a system that lives by keeping them subdued, but also, dubiously, as the result of poor judgment. This critique gets more muddled in Bong’s penchant for flashy, churning dramatic machinations, which can reduce nuance in favor of sensational outcomes, and yield scenarios that are too divorced from existing social conditions to make much real-world sense. But as a broadly thrilling, twisty, and finally cynical commentary about impossible upward mobility, Parasite leaves a mark.

I Was at Home, But...

Part of my coverage of the 55th Chicago International Film Festival.

I WAS AT HOME, BUT...   **

Angela Schanelec

2019

IDEA:  Astrid struggles to keep her life together in the wake of her husband's death, while her children deal with the loss in their own way.

BLURB:  To some extent, the fractured, heavily decentered narrative approach and anti-naturalism Angela Schanelec employs in I Was at Home, But… are appropriate and intriguing. They make sense insofar as they communicate something of the film’s various states of grief, isolation, and generational distance, rooting its pervasive disconnect in an aesthetic experience that feels similarly cagey and out of reach. The problem is, Schanelec has so abstracted her narrative, and has made both its emotions and its form so willfully evasive, that the film struggles to achieve coherence. There are individually lovely moments here – a montage set to a forlorn cover of “Let’s Dance” is especially striking, as is a protracted, long-take diatribe that hilariously upends the film’s (and lead character’s) reticence – but their connective tissue is tenuous, and the themes and ideas that surround them are too obfuscated by labored conceits to really register as more than pieces of an abstruse exercise. This could be read as an auto-critique, reflecting Astrid’s contempt for the “fakeness” of mimetic performance and her insistence that actors can never really capture people’s internal realities. Schanelec certainly affirms this notion through her film’s deliberate remoteness and impassivity, but to what point is insufficiently clear.

Ghost Tropic

Part of my coverage of the 55th Chicago International Film Festival.

GHOST TROPIC   **1/2

Bas Devos

2019

IDEA:  After falling asleep on the train and missing her stop, a cleaning lady must find her way back home at night. 


BLURB:  A becalmed, nocturnal city symphony, Ghost Tropic envisions Brussels at night as a place where subordinated people and histories become centered, alive to the city that regards them at day as phantoms. It’s the domain of immigrant laborers like the Muslim Khadija, who, removed from the bustle of the urban workday, is able to see her adopted hometown for what it really is: a community propped up on the unrecognized contributions of those living and toiling in the margins. When she misses her train stop on the way back from work, she is not geographically or culturally lost. Rather, in her alternating aloneness and civic communion, she is at one with an environment she knows as well as anyone. Through Grimm Vandekerckhove’s ethereal 16mm cinematography, the roads and buildings around her seem to buzz with enchanted life; pools of light and color animate the darkness, flaring at the edges of the frame or shimmering in wet pavement, turning streetlamps into otherworldly sentinels. Ghost Tropic is visually spellbinding, and while this is often enough to carry its lean, ambient minimalism, there is also the sense that such immaculate aestheticism has smothered some of its narrative and affective range. This might be why Khadija often comes across as more of a static concept than a flesh-and-blood person, the film’s phlegmatic tone and texture tending to iron out any emotional kinks. The images here are suitably gorgeous and insinuating, but they might have gained impact if feelings of equal depth had greater room to peek through.

And Then We Danced

Part of my coverage of the 55th Chicago International Film Festival.

AND THEN WE DANCED   ***

Levan Akin

2019

IDEA:  Merab is competing to land a place in a traditional Georgian dance ensemble, something that becomes complicated when he falls for a male rival.

BLURB:  Dance is a performance of tradition and an escape from it in Levan Akin’s And Then We Danced, a fairly formulaic but finally rousing paean to the irrepressibility of queer individuality. The ultra-conservative Georgian society depicted by Akin certainly tries its best to repress it, though. At nearly every turn, the young gay Merab is confronted by rhetoric that shuns him, his ambitions under attack by the entrenched attitudes and expectations that disavow his social and creative value. Most crushingly, he finds resistance even from the discipline that has anchored him since youth, as lectures from his stern dance director keep reinforcing what little place his “softness” has in an art based on doctrinaire, nationalist-historical notions of masculinity. Yet even during its most turbulent emotional valleys, And Then We Danced is never interested in drumming up pathos just to tell another story of tragic persecution. Seemingly using the film’s titular activity to inform its rhythm, Akin and his DP instead convey an agility and musicality of movement that is frequently elating, with an eclectic soundtrack of Georgian folk songs and ABBA accentuating the buoyant spirit of a young generation. Incredible newcomer Levan Gelbakhiani absorbs and reflects this energy through his limber body, communicating everything from the lightness of romantic ecstasy to the weight of pain and dejection in canny shifts of comportment. When the film is most constrained by narrative convention, his sinuous, insistent physicality and emotional transparency give him the tools he needs to break away.

The Whistlers

Part of my coverage of the 55th Chicago International Film Festival.

THE WHISTLERS   ***

Corneliu Porumboiu

2019

IDEA:  Following a botched laundering operation he played a part in carrying out, dirty cop Cristi travels to the Canary Islands to learn a whistling language that will help him extricate a co-conspirator and recover the cash.

BLURB:  Bookended on one side by Iggy Pop and on the other by a literally symphonic spectacle of lights, The Whistlers is a distinctly different kind of film from Porumboiu, one that trades in his deadpan narrative minimalism for an incident-heavy genre exercise. Indulging in the tropes of policiers, noir, and all manner of global gangster drama, the director fills his runtime to the brim with subterfuge and double-crossings, creating a ceaseless flow of plot points whose sensationalism feels almost antithetical to the mundane durational processes that have thus far typified his work. It may lack assiduous structure and style – the film feels mostly perfunctory in at least its aesthetic execution – but lest one think the director has entirely relinquished his sensibility, The Whistlers exhibits enough of his thematic preoccupations to keep it reasonably in line with his prior studies of post-Communist Romanian life. For one, the focus on dubious authority remains in evidence, even more so than usual: from cops to criminals, nearly everyone here operates outside parameters of morality and justice, their actions rooted in systems that barely even masquerade as lawful. And in this pervasive corruption, which revolves around the convoluted fallout of a laundering scheme, Porumboiu again invokes the disorienting ideological muddle of his country, where the institutional residue of Communism intermingles indelicately with old-world piety and capitalist ideas of monetary wealth. The director is obviously having fun playing with genre conventions, and it’s enjoyable to see his bureaucratic rigmarole translated into something so lively.

Pain and Glory

PAIN AND GLORY   ***

Pedro Almodóvar

2019

IDEA:  On the eve of a repertory screening of one of his old works, a filmmaker beset by physical and mental ailments reminisces about his life. 


BLURB:  A warm, confessional work of auto-fiction, Pain and Glory movingly figures Almodóvar’s life as an ongoing act of cinematic self-realization, with everything he’s gone through finding dramatic purpose and cathartic emotional outlet through the conduit of his chosen medium. Here, it’s a process that’s actively literalized via meta-text, as Antonio Banderas’ infirm director Salvador Mallo, Almodóvar’s stand-in, reflects on all the people, places, and events that have shaped his career and life trajectories. Naturally, he recollects his Catholic upbringing, his mother, his sexual awakening; all the relationships broken by the depredations of time and circumstance. He might be unable to make movies, but these bittersweet reveries themselves become the movie before us, instinctually transmuting the weariness and nostalgia of Almodóvar’s more advanced years into both its explicit content and its underlying catalyst. Pain and Glory thus becomes a testament to cinema as a channel for personal coping and spiritual rejuvenation, its episodic structure playing host to a series of poignant rapprochements that interpret Almodóvar’s experiences within the therapeutic imaginary space of the screen. Although he sometimes tips over into self-congratulation, an easy hazard for memoir, the director avoids arrogance by sensitively conveying how no fictional film, not even an autobiographical one, can possibly be made alone, and how no individual is ever an island. The characters who appear throughout – a former actor, a laborer, and, in its most extraordinary scene, an old flame – are understood as equals and collaborators, the people without whom his visions could never be realized. And in the gentle, rueful, frequently palliating feelings they generate, Pain and Glory posits itself, indeed cinema in general, as a kind of eternal salve for the soul.

Joker

JOKER   ***

Todd Phillips

2019

IDEA:  A man who works as a clown grows progressively more unhinged as he succumbs to his deteriorating mental state.

BLURB:  From its opening title card of the eponymous character lying beaten in an alleyway, Joker powerfully conjures a sense of seeping, viscous anomie. It permeates the air like a miasma, coating every graffiti- and garbage-strewn surface of the film’s squalid, 1980s-era New York-Gotham City. Choked by both super rats and social apathy, it’s a milieu whose urban decay matches its moral attrition, and its visceral expression of suffocating spiritual malaise is the best achievement of Joker. Phillips realizes this environment with such enveloping dysphoria, and with such a palpable feeling for how its rotted support systems can leave its most vulnerable inhabitants hopelessly adrift, that we buy how it could produce as deranged a symptom as Phoenix’s Fleck. Through unnerving sound design and constrictive shallow-focus photography – and, of course, through Phoenix’s rivetingly disquieting performance – Phillips proficiently submerges us in Fleck’s increasingly delusional, delirious psyche, intensifying the societal bleakness to convey how it might appear to someone whose sanity it’s helping corrode. It’s a minor triumph of framing psychology within a tangible cultural context; where Joker becomes muddled, ironically, is in how it tries (or doesn’t) to negotiate this verisimilitude with its comic origins. Phillips and Silver want the film to be a kind of etiology of this outsize super-villain, but by attempting to explain him through all-too real socioeconomic phenomena, they often end up compromising the legacy of the character or reducing the phenomena to easy, specious diagnostic causes. They explicitly evoke the chaos of our modern climate, and yet this Joker doesn’t really add up to the profile of a believable real-life maniac. Still, what the film lacks in nuance it makes up for in impact. It may not hold as refined sociological analysis, but in limning a queasily familiar milieu, it effectively suggests the curdled systemic conditions that allow madness to flourish.

The Treasure

THE TREASURE   ***1/2

Corneliu Porumboiu

2015

IDEA:  In dire economic straits, a man recruits his neighbor to help search for treasure allegedly buried by his great-grandfather before the Communist takeover.

BLURB:  With The Treasure, Corneliu Porumboiu takes the simplest of metaphors – digging in the earth as an excavation of the past – and turns it into the locus of a characteristically droll, mordant portrait of post-Communist Romanian society. As in his other films, the accumulating subtext derives from how a seemingly straightforward activity becomes enfolded in a host of complicated (and complicating) procedural factors, drawing from the quotidian a dense tangle of socio-historical vectors. And that tangle constitutes, for Porumboiu, the fundamentally absurd social fabric of a contemporary Romania, where the past is paradoxically a memory both vague and indelible, and the vestiges of Communism live in vexed relation with the structures of capitalism. It’s an awkward hybridity evinced by the characters’ tetchy interactions, which are informed as much by civic or filial kinship as by capitalist transaction, financial desperation, and questions of material ownership. Porumboiu underscores these ideas against backdrops that range from austerely bureaucratic to quasi-purgatorial, culminating in the protracted treasure hunting scene, whose long, recursive takes hardly seem to signal the promise of a life-changing bounty. Of course, that’s beside the point: what is symbolically disinterred is the country’s fractured 20^th-century history, with the hole as the gouge of the Ceaușescu era and its contents the tentative economic transformation that followed. Neither, alas, are reassuring. In its final sequence, which plays like a bitterly ironic punchline to this mischievous, multi-layered 90-minute joke, The Treasure suggests a future generation inheriting not the legacy of the past, but the triumphant consumerism of a present they’ve never known as anything else.