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.