Soul

SOUL   ***

Pete Docter

2020

IDEA:  Jazz musician and middle-grade music teacher Joe Gardner finds himself trying to escape from purgatory after falling down a manhole.

BLURB:  With Soul, Pete Docter and Pixar strive to open up the ambitious existentialism of Inside Out onto a much broader canvas, and with a more challenging goal: to reify nothing short of the birth of individual consciousness, and to define what it means to be a subject in the world. Following, perhaps too loyally, in the footsteps of Inside Out, it imagines an ethereal, pastel-hued landscape that makes intangible ideas and feelings literal, from an endless recreational hall where unborn souls find their passions to a crepuscular zone populated by spirits that have lost their way. If this tends to read as naively reductive - and it almost inevitably does, as would any attempt to schematize the mysteries of being - it nevertheless represents a humanistic drive toward clarity, a fundamentally empathic sensibility echoed in the film’s themes of fraternity and fellow-feeling. Where Soul falters is in its narrative priorities. One wishes it spent more time with Joe immersed in his art, in the animators’ extraordinarily rich rendering of New York City, rather than repeatedly and dubiously deny a rare Black protagonist his own bodily autonomy. The madcap body-swap antics feel overly hectic, a formulaic kid-friendly premise not entirely at ease with the film’s contemplative aims. When Soul slows down - to luxuriate in the “flow” of playing music, to home in on sensory impressions, to apprehend life’s sheer plenitude - it soars. For the most part, this is enough. The busy plot mechanics and fuzzy metaphysics don’t dim the film’s timeworn, but deeply felt message: that existence itself is worth living for.

I'm Thinking of Ending Things

I'M THINKING OF ENDING THINGS   **1/2

Charlie Kaufman

2020

IDEA:  On the way to meet her boyfriend's parents in rural Oklahoma, a woman ponders her ambivalent feelings about her relationship.

BLURB:  Charlie Kaufman’s self-pitying solipsism is on fully display in I’m Thinking of Ending Things, an invigoratingly surreal, then gratingly banal exercise in meta-textual navel-gazing. Although adapted from another’s work, the film pulses with the festering existential dread and pungent, neurotic middle-aged male misanthropy that is apparently Kaufman’s baseline mode of being. In a fashion similar to the writer’s best past works, however, its morose, blackly absurdist atmosphere keeps the film buzzing for a long while. This is especially true during the early and mid stretches, when Kaufman’s accrual of eerie details - from disorienting camera angles, cuts, and sounds to the increasingly erratic behavior of the characters - effectively lulls the spectator into a place of acute perceptual instability. Subjects blend and blur as chronological time and selfhood become derealized; projections and memories yoke together in one insoluble movement of consciousness, where anxieties, regrets, and nostalgias run amok in an echo chamber of rumination. If Kaufman had been able to sustain and deepen this braid of funny, disquieting metaphysical inquiry, I’m Thinking of Ending Things might have more heft. But, and perhaps it’s more the fault of the source material than anything, the film rather abruptly fizzles in its final quarter. What was evocatively enigmatic is hollowed out by trite nihilism; worse, the integrity of our name-shifting protagonist, played with such palpable, soul-whimpering melancholy by Jessie Buckley, is betrayed by a perspectival bait-and-switch as lazy as it is narratively nonsensical. What can be said, at least, is that Kaufman intimately knows the inside of an overworking, self-tortured psyche, and he’s honest about what it looks and feels like to not really know a way out.

Mank

MANK   ***

David Fincher

2020

IDEA:  A behind-the-scenes look at the career and late life of screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz, and the events leading up to the writing of Citizen Kane.

BLURB:  Like many a cinematic portrait of Golden Age Hollywood, Mank approaches Tinseltown from a cockeyed perspective of both appreciation and bone-deep cynicism, paying homage to its creative minds while always remaining aware of the ruthless capitalist apparatus in which they worked. Framed by the lives of two artists who clashed with the system - the titular Citizen Kane writer and, by association, Orson Welles - Mank reveals a Hollywood of contradictory faces, at once accommodating and hostile to bold voices, where ego and politics both make and break art. Fincher depicts this milieu, visually, in a dialectic of uncanny surfaces, evoking the language of 1940s film only to subtly and continuously puncture it through jarringly modern effects, from the grayscale digital sheen of Erik Messerschmidt’s widescreen cinematography to CGI animals and cue marks. As Mank himself ruffles the established ecosystem of the conservative Hollywood status quo, the Finchers expose the Dream Factory’s unwieldy marriage of reality and fantasy, creating a self-consciously slippery biography where truth is shrouded in myth. In its meandering, anecdotal narrative, Mank doesn’t fully find its footing, or seem able to keep up a head of steam before sinking, like Oldman’s prodigiously crapulous Mank, into a muddle of dawdling digressions. Yet at its most lucid, the film channels such juicy, jaundiced screenwriter classics as In a Lonely Place, serving as an acrid reminder of the strained labor - economic, political, social, psychological - that so often drives our entertainment.

The Fabulous Baron Munchausen

THE FABULOUS BARON MUNCHAUSEN   ***1/2

Karel Zeman

1962

IDEA:  After landing on the moon, Baron Munchausen whisks a cosmonaut away on a series of rollicking earthbound adventures.

BLURB:  Building on the giddy old-fashioned fabulism and awe-inspiring artisanship of his prior two films, Karel Zeman crafts The Fabulous Baron Munchausen as a lapidary marvel, fueled by a gamboling imagination as boundless and fanciful as its titular character’s stories. Of course, in Zeman’s vision, the orgulous Munchausen is not a liar, but a raconteur whose yarns are rooted in an existent reality of swimming webbed-foot horses and pipe-smoking frigates, a colorful, shape-shifting storybook world realized before our very eyes. How could one deny it? Ornate landscapes and arabesques; blood-red plumes that overtake an army in hot pursuit; rides on mid-flight cannonballs; a myriad of mythical creatures populating the land, sea, and sky; all are tangible creations, forged through Zeman’s seamless, singular collage of live action, animation, and puppetry. Fastidiously composed and musically edited, the spectacle utterly shames most contemporary computer effects work, its intricate, handcrafted tactility an assertion of infinite material possibility. While the narrative of The Fabulous Baron Munchausen is inevitably but a trifling pretext for its visual bewitchments, the film does manage to make valuable points about the need for imagination, not merely as a form of aesthetic play, but as a practical complement of reason, as a necessary component of social and scientific progress. The Fabulous Baron Munchausen unleashes its often illogical fantasia as a kind of resistance, and, with childlike wonder and willfulness, continues to dream.

Underground

UNDERGROUND   ****

Emir Kusturica

1995

IDEA:  The decades-long saga of two Yugoslav friends, from their years in the resistance during WWII to the bloody Balkan wars of the 1990s.

BLURB:  In its decadent, carnivalesque spectacle and inspired knockabout physical comedy, Underground often calls to mind an Eastern European acid-trip mix of Fellini, the Marx Brothers, and Looney Tunes. Yet no comparison can really suffice in describing the experience of Emir Kusturica’s one-of-a-kind opus, a scabrous, rambunctious historical epic bursting at the seams with lunatic energy and invention. Molding and bedazzling 40 years of turbulent Yugoslav history into a fiery, truly massive-scale tragic-farce, Kusturica produces at once an absurdist national myth, a howling orgiastic inferno of sociopolitical chaos and delusion, and, once it gets to its inevitably grim denouement, a jeremiad for a people irreparably fractured by waves of systemic exploitation and internecine violence. Just as it overflows with a parade of outsize metaphors - zoo animals, meta-theatrical productions, the titular subterranean space and its suppressed and blinded denizens - Underground positively explodes with sheer cinematic brio. The film is, if nothing else, a breathtakingly sustained high-wire act of immaculately controlled pandemonium, with mise-en-scène, choreography, shot construction, editing, music, and performance calibrated to reach Everest-level heights of artful insanity. It’s frequently gobsmacking. And although it’s also exceedingly easy to get lost in the delirium, to wonder, at the odd interval at which your mind isn’t reeling, if the politics haven’t also been buried in the onslaught, Underground goes on to disarm such qualms through the force of its audacity. This isn’t national history written as textbook grand narrative, or even as fictional document, but as Rabelaisian reflection, nightmare, and dream.

Two Drifters

TWO DRIFTERS   ***

João Pedro Rodrigues

2005

IDEA:  Rui and Odete are drawn together after the former's boyfriend is killed in an auto accident, and Odete becomes obsessed with the dead man, whom she never knew.

BLURB:  If nothing else, the early films of João Pedro Rodrigues are among the cinema’s clearest illustrations of Freudian concepts. As in O Fantasma, here the director conveys the sinuous, agonized circuit of erotic desire as a series of displacements, with an absent object “reconstituted” via fetishistic substitutions that descend into perversity. Two Drifters ups the ante, figuring this scenario in a blackly comic melodramatic pastiche, alluding to everything from Douglas Sirk to The Lord of the Rings, with a healthy dose of Vertigo and, in explicit appearances, Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Rodrigues lifts a time-honored trope - the haunting, specifically of a former lover - and imbues it with both queer metaphysical dimensions and a deadpan, self-aware absurdism. If Two Lovers is still, despite its archly overripe turns of event, a pretty predictable movie, one can chalk that up to the influence of psychoanalysis, and the ways in which Rodrigues draws upon its rules and patterns to deliver Rui and Odete to the natural “fulfillment” of their intersecting drives. In the process, Two Drifters gets at the inherent fluidity and reversibility of self and other, uncovering a universal desire to both possess and be possessed. “Well something’s lost, but something’s gained,” goes the lyric from “Both Sides Now,” heard early in the film. In Rodrigues’ psychosexual burlesque, such a sentiment takes on another loaded meaning.

Dick Johnson is Dead

DICK JOHNSON IS DEAD   ***1/2

Kirsten Johnson

2020

IDEA:  After her father, Dick Johnson, starts exhibiting early symptoms of dementia, documentarian Kirsten Johnson decides to cast him in a movie in which he dies, repeatedly and often outrageously.

BLURB:  It’s a feature of Kirsten Johnson’s latest memoir-cum-filmic interrogation that by its end, viewers are apt to wonder if Dick Johnson is, in fact, dead. This ontological question is one fundamentally entwined with cinema, a medium capable of preserving reality and restoring loss, masking temporal absence with perceptual presence. Death escapes representation; nobody really dies on film, especially not Dick Johnson. Rather, the boisterous octogenarian’s multiple, morbidly staged “deaths” only serve to underscore his continuing corporeal existence. Following each freak accident, he is “resurrected” by the film apparatus, and sent to a movie-constructed heaven to live out his life for blissful eternity. All, of course, made possible by his daughter’s cinematic trickery, which becomes through her Seventh-day Adventist theology a droll, probably blasphemous analog of Jesus’ divine powers. If this all seems rather fetishistic, that’s because it is. Yet most of what seems garish, sordid, or mollifying about the Johnsons’ project is a byproduct of the film’s honest, messy grappling with human mortality, and the role photographic-based media play in how we relate to memory and loss. The repetitious restaging of this primal fantasy is not done to disavow or ward off death, but to creatively rehearse it within the imaginary space granted by film - indeed, to take advantage of this essential ability. Even when Dick Johnson is dead, all we’ll know is his presence.

A Good Man

This is an early review of a film scheduled to open next year.

A GOOD MAN   **

Marie-Castille Mention-Schaar

2020

IDEA:  When it's discovered that his wife is unable to conceive, trans man Benjamin decides to temporarily halt his transition and carry the child himself.

BLURB:  A Good Man. There’s nothing remarkable about that title, until it’s spoken to the transgender Benjamin by one of his patients halfway through the film. Having already witnessed much of his unique reproductive journey, in which his gender identity and choice to bear a child have been challenged by family, science, and the law, these words take on a peculiar tenor. “A good man.” It’s a gendered collocation, almost never seen or heard with the subject as another sex. This attention to how language shapes our perception and understanding of identity gives Marie-Castille Mention-Schaar’s film its most surprising source of insight, cutting through the director’s often earnest, sentimental didacticism, and proving more matter-of-factly potent than any moment of teary family conflict. When the tears do come, however, actress Noémie Merlant makes it work. Putting aside the questionable casting of a cis actress in this trans role, Merlant is entirely and almost eerily convincing in what feels like a truly empathetic embodiment of Benjamin’s pride and pain. The actress disappears into the part not only physically but emotionally, effectively delineating the inner struggle of someone postponing, or at least complicating, a self-actualization that feels so in reach. She is remarkable, even when A Good Man isn’t.

Careless Crime

Part of my coverage of the 56th Chicago International Film Festival.

CARELESS CRIME   ***   

Shahram Mokri

2020

IDEA:  In contemporary Iran, a cadre of four disaffected men plot to burn down a movie theater, closely echoing a real act of domestic terrorism that occurred shortly before the Iranian Revolution in 1978.

BLURB:  One could easily exhaust the box of movie metaphors in describing the narrative structure and overall effect of Careless Crime. Mokri’s film is a palimpsest of Iranian history; a series of mise-en-abymes enclosed in a set of nesting dolls; a Möbius strip, in which reality, representation, past, and present feed imperceptibly back into one another without origin or endpoint. Indeed, Careless Crime is a work of byzantine construction that invites these and a dozen other associations; crammed with sociopolitical allusions and a veritable pile-on of meta-cinematic devices, it’s as audacious as it is frequently abstruse in meaning and message. Sometimes, Mokri’s formalist tomfoolery - rewound scenes, recursive visuals and dialog, films-within-films-within-films - can feel indulgently overwrought, obfuscating whatever it is he’s trying to communicate. At other times, or even at the same time, his approach is captivating in its dizzying, movie-drunk play, effectively suggesting the reality-torquing power that film has over our perceptions. The cinema, as location and medium, is both the real-world and diegetic catalyst of Careless Crime, an entity so historically and psychically significant it becomes figured as a primal scene of the Iranian Revolution, and, by extension, of contemporary Iranian art and politics. By creating a feedback loop where the original scene of the “crime” is replicated in the present, and where people and their actions become temporally displaced in and around movie screenings, Mokri evokes a sense of eternal return, with the cinema as fulcrum. Who knows if the profusion of narrative and thematic strata all fully cohere; even if they don’t, Careless Crime has enough ideas to fill an auditorium.

Dear Comrades!

Part of my coverage of the 56th Chicago International Film Festival.

DEAR COMRADES!   **1/2

Andrei Konchalovsky

2020

IDEA:  A fictionalized account of the events surrounding the 1962 massacre in Novocherkassk, Russia, when Soviet military and KGB personnel opened fire on protesting factory workers.

BLURB:  The great tacit irony of Dear Comrades! is that its eponymous address could apply as much to its striking factory workers as to its Communist Party officials. By situating the events of the state-sanctioned Novocherkassk massacre in an illustrious Russian timeline of dissent and suppression, director Konchalovsky makes his point about cyclical history starkly clear: the fellow-feeling comrades become the iron-fist oppressors, and they’re all too eager to shun - and repeat - the past. That the events of the film could just as plausibly be taking place in 1903 or 2020 as opposed to 1962 is partly what makes this such a chilling historical account. Andrey Naydenov’s black-and-white 4:3 cinematography, which largely forgoes modernist stylization, furthers this sense of disorienting, verisimilitudinous déjà vu. It’s when Dear Comrades! shrinks its fairly sprawling, bureaucrats-and-laborers panorama to zero in on the moral awakening of a disillusioned apparatchik that the film starts to seem contrived. Is such a bourgeois perspective the right way to frame this story of mass trauma? Might a more proletarian, polyphonic telling better rebuke the authoritarianism of the State? These questions linger, even as Dear Comrades! argues for its character study as a means of holding leadership accountable. Questionable narrative decisions aside, the film is methodical in chronicling this heinous episode of local Soviet history, and provides an appallingly relevant reminder of how willing some governments are (and not just the outwardly hostile ones) to undermine and debase the ideals of the polis.

Memory House

Part of my coverage of the 56th Chicago International Film Festival.

MEMORY HOUSE   **1/2

João Paulo Miranda Maria 

2020

IDEA:  A Black factory worker in a speculative, contemporary-colonial southern Brazil faces oppression from his employers and neighbors.

BLURB:  Legacies of cultural imperialism come up against Indigenous myth and subaltern histories in Memory House, Joāo Paulo Miranda Maria's tantalizing, sometimes heavy-handed feature debut. Mixing realism, folklore, and quasi-futuristic imagery - most notably, the antiseptic, spaceship-like environs of a global milk production facility - the director creates an unsettling social allegory for modern-day Brazil. Colonialism endures in the form of an Austrian colony, which has taken over the southern part of the country with a capitalist stranglehold; white supremacy, xenophobia, and economic inequity run rampant, terrorizing Black factory worker Cristovam in ways both big and small. Miranda Maria unravels this speculative, magical-realist portrait in slow, creeping zooms and eerie nocturnal tableaux, casually introducing and expanding nightmarish details, until Cristovam can silently bear his oppression no longer. Memory House is not subtle in how it links its protagonist to the actual cattle his employers milk and, at one point, indifferently slaughter, nor is it coy in aligning him with nature and mysticism, provoking sometimes dubious primitivist associations. The film is most affecting during its sparer, thickly atmospheric moments, when the sounds of creaking wood and trilling birds, heard as a constant, enveloping hum at the titular abode, merge into a melancholy chorus for the downtrodden.

Padrenostro

Part of my coverage of the 56th Chicago International Film Festival.

PADRENOSTRO   ***

Claudio Noce

2020

IDEA:  In 1970s Italy, a boy rattled by an attempted hit on his father finds solace in the friendship of a mysterious street urchin.

BLURB:  Call it the influence of Neorealism or something else entirely, but Italian cinema has long produced some of the medium’s most striking youth performances. This tradition is reinforced by Padrenostro, a stirring historical coming-of-age story organized around the perspective of a ten-year-old boy. Introverted and comfortably sheltered in his middle-upper class household, Valerio has no idea how to process an assassination attempt on his father, a commanding man of undisclosed vocation. Exemplifying the film’s canny eye-level camerawork, Noce initially shoots the skirmish from the balcony of the boy’s family’s high-rise apartment; when Valerio rushes down to witness the aftermath, the sudden closeup of a bloodied, dying hitman understandably sears itself into his inchoate mind. The context and consequences of this sociopolitical reality loom at the edges of Padrenostro as a vaguely baleful threat, and Noce, emphasizing the innocent, undeveloped, inevitably blinkered gaze of youth, elects to keep it that way. He centers instead the often euphoric bonhomie shared between Valerio and Christian, the waifish thief with whom he’s fatefully united. As the bloody circumstances that brought the boys together becomes clearer, Padrenostro unfolds a poignant parable of sons awakening to their troubled father(land)s, its emotional impact and impressive craft overriding some of the more predictable narrative beats. Ultimately, it’s the sensitive and vibrant performance of the young Mattia Garaci that shines brightest; in and through his eyes, one can grasp all the vulnerabilities and wonders of childhood.

Days

DAYS   **1/2

Tsai Ming-liang

2020

 

IDEA:  Two men wander in their own individual malaises before joining for a brief, sensual reprieve.

BLURB:  In his apparent attempt to pare down his signature themes of urban alienation and erotic longing to their barest expression, Tsai has produced something that is often more vacant than entrancing. Never before have his protracted takes felt less purposeful or inspired: whether it’s a character washing vegetables for minutes on end in a series of blandly composed vignettes, or even a rare handheld follow-shot on the street, so much of Days feels random and aloof, dependent more on the inevitably soporific effect of durational minimalism itself than on anything specific going on inside (or outside) the frame. That being said, it’s still a Tsai film, so there are pleasures to be found. One is in his decision to completely abolish dialogue. With only two characters and a handful of interchangeable locations, and all of its (non)action delegated to nonverbal, largely motionless bodies, Days provides a refreshing respite of quietude. Its pointedly intergenerational lovers, who meet for perhaps the only genuine moment of sustained, restorative intimacy in all of Tsai’s cinema, evoke a silent movie pair à la Murnau or Chaplin (the British icon is even musically quoted). And then there’s the sight of Lee Kang-sheng receiving a 20-minute massage in real-time in what reads as a lovely, extra-textual gift of gratitude from Tsai to his devoted muse. These things are nice, but they don’t quite justify Days’ indulgent two hour-plus runtime, and they don’t hide the fact that Tsai has made much deeper, richer, and more interesting films, where loneliness and yearning were charged with more than just a sense of stolid glumness.

Golden Eighties

GOLDEN EIGHTIES   ***

Chantal Akerman

1986

IDEA:  The residents of a shopping mall bounce between various romantic entanglements, misunderstandings, and misfortunes.

BLURB:  Golden Eighties - a jubilant, candy-colored Jacques Demy-esque musical - would seem something of an anomaly within the oeuvre of a director as famously austere as Chantal Akerman. And it is, in most ways. But it’s also, as the opening shot announces, far from a conventional song-and-dance picture. Against the marbled title of a shopping center, women’s flats and heels trot in perfect diagonals across the screen. The movements are too choreographed to be natural, a sense of artifice reinforced by an aggressively peppy score. What’s more, it’s only the legs of women we see, disembodied as in advertising. If it wasn’t already, it will soon become evident that this is not a fluffy fantasy but a tart parody of the codes and aesthetics of a kind of vacuous, late 20th-century commercial comedy, as well as the sexist consumer culture that underlies it. Even as she indulges in genre pleasures - the musical numbers are delightfully odd admixtures of Demy, Grease, and West Side Story - Akerman consistently defamiliarizes the mall and its social dynamics, whether sending random, gratuitous hordes of people to split up conversing characters or, oppositely, emptying spaces of their typical capitalist excesses. In this milieu, the multiple tangles of (conspicuously heterosexual) romantic dalliances seem as puddle-deep and misbegotten as they are, lovers reduced to commodities to be swapped and discarded. This cynicism that courses beneath the cheery facade makes Golden Eighties a sharply, if not exactly profound, ironic exercise, only undercut, in the film’s genuinely emotional crescendo, by Delphine Seyrig’s Holocaust survivor assuring a jilted girl that life goes on beyond the mall. 

Afterschool

AFTERSCHOOL   ***

Antonio Campos

2008

IDEA:  While working on a film project at his private boarding school, a disturbed student happens to capture on camera two students dying of a drug overdose.

BLURB:  There’s something to be said for a film that executes and studiously maintains a methodical, cohesive formal scheme. In Afterschool, Campos and DP Jody Lee Lipes use wide, frequently static shots, unbalanced framing, and blocking that often obfuscates characters to convey a world of pervasive, screen-mediated and -distorted gazes. It is an aesthetic of detachment and acedia that enters into productive conversation with the amateur video footage shot by Robert (Ezra Miller). While the lensing of the film itself is stately and fastidious in comparison, its penchant for chopping figures off at the edges of the frame - as well as its uncanny mixture of vérité-like observation and affectedly simulated “reality” - establishes a congruity with the rougher, consumer-made digital videos it seems to contrast with. The effect, as tends to be the case with such meta-cinematic voyeuristic explorations, is an implication of the spectator’s own scopic drive in a media landscape where reality and representation blur. Is Afterschool, as its title might suggest, just another clichéd, facile, and reactionary diagnosis of the sociopathy of Internet-weaned youth? Is it, as its aesthetic would suggest, just another mannered, dourly self-regarding knockoff of Michael Haneke? Honestly, yes and yes. But Campos’ stylistic devices are still transfixing and expressive, and his sly contextualization of the film’s events within a Bush-era milieu of proliferating paranoia, government abuse, and publicized state violence gives potent layers to what might otherwise be a shallow new-media diatribe. Nobody will mistake it for subtle or nuanced, but Afterschool is a visually nifty directorial debut, and an aptly chilling sketch of a culture numbed to its own tragedies.