Nomadland

 

NOMADLAND   ***1/2

Chloé Zhao

2020

IDEA:  When the sheetrock factory that sustains her small Nevada town is shuttered, a widow embarks on a soul-searching RV journey across the West, meeting up with other nomads along the way.

BLURB:  Although the main thrust of its narrative is catalyzed by the 2008 recession, Nomadland is less concerned with socioeconomic ordeals than existential ones. For Zhao as it has been for so many wonderers and wanderers before her, nomadism is a kind of cosmic state, a philosophical attitude and ideological position; even if it’s precipitated by personal loss or financial hardship, as it is for Frances McDormand’s Fern, it eventually grows into a spiritual identity. The majority of the real-life vagabonds we meet in the film embrace this concept of itineracy as a winding path of personal liberation, a means of casting off the shackles of grief, trauma, and oppressive cultural structures. The awesome grandeur and solitude of the American Western landscape are constants on this journey, the vast, vertiginous expanses simultaneously chastening and empowering. Whether at dusk or in the coruscating afternoon sunshine, Zhao and Richards take in these vistas with a becalmed reverence mirroring that of the characters, letting the natural openness quietly rebuff the closed-in, corporatized spaces of factories and strip malls. While the violent colonial legacy of the West is unspoken here, Nomadland nevertheless regards the land as much for its beauty as for its enduring sense of desolation and displacement, as a site where the possibility of salvation is always accompanied by a recognition of our transience, and where romanticized ideals of individualism are deflated by the need for community. And while it proves impossible to escape the dubiousness of an A-list Hollywood actor slumming it alongside the actually disenfranchised, McDormand almost miraculously assuages any dissonance with her generously receptive, unfussily empathic performance, absorbing the pain, dignity, and tenacity of her cohort without exploiting their circumstances. In the weathered faces and resilient voices of these self-invented nomads, Zhao materializes the primal, melancholy poetry of people in transit, at once alone and part of something eternal.

Goin' to Town

GOIN' TO TOWN   ***

Alexander Hall

1935

IDEA:  After inheriting the fortune of a cattle baron, saloon performer Cleo Borden sets her sights on the English nobleman who's struck oil on her property.

BLURB:  Goin’ to Town is a typical Mae West vehicle: the actress woos and outmaneuvers a menagerie of variably rascally men, delivers her trademark sassy, innuendo-laden quips, and looks sensational while doing all of it. The film also inserts a few choice additions into the equation, including a Western milieu, a superbly shot horse race, and, most deliciously, some bubbly social critique, as the single-minded class climbing of West’s Cleo Borden is attended by the increasingly elaborate skullduggery of the petty aristocrats she finds herself surrounded by. Goin’ to Town makes particularly savvy, self-aware use of West’s public image, turning her inimitable, brassy Brooklyn grit into a cudgel against the pretensions of those who convince her she needs to be more of a “lady.” After all, who’s more of a lady than Mae West? Nobody would mistake Goin’ to Town for biting satire, but Hall’s film is more than up to the task of skewering upper-class pomposity with breezy aplomb; even when Cleo gets in on the action, the joke is always on the craven schemers who can’t bear to see a saloon girl become high society royalty. “We’re intellectual opposites… I’m intellectual, and you’re opposite,” Cleo snaps to a soulless suitor. It’s one of West’s all-time great zingers in one of her customarily delightful jaunts.

Loves of a Blonde

LOVES OF A BLONDE   ***1/2

Miloš Forman

1965

IDEA:  An error in central planning leaves a provincial Czech town with a population where women far outnumber men. To pair the women up and improve their productivity at work, the government organizes a dance attended by aging reservists.

BLURB:  Like so many of the most exemplary films of the Czechoslovak New Wave, Loves of a Blonde is a pithy, deceptively jovial scherzo of social satire, a romp of an allegory that regards the quirks and cruelties of the Communist State through a laughing sneer. Forman, perhaps the most blatantly funny director of the eclectic movement, is particularly sly at getting his ideological licks in under the guise of a party: specifically, in Loves of a Blonde, the harebrained, state-sponsored mating game orchestrated to match lonely factory girls with eligible army reservists. An absurdly contrived solution to a bureaucratic blunder, the party plays out as an almost runaway farce, the bumbling soldiers effecting a chain reaction of faux pas while their targets desperately look the other way for more desirable bachelors. The upbeat atmosphere of the scene, like so much in the film, leaves a sardonic burn; as his characters fumble and cavort, holding to a promise of sexual escape, Forman never lets the audience forget the boondoggle of this authoritarian effort to foster love and labor. The strained attempt to regulate the volatile factor of sexuality, specifically women’s, thus becomes the joke and tragedy of Loves of a Blonde, the catalyst for both Andula’s quixotic romantic odysseys and her emotional deprivation. Nothing quite so succinctly encapsulates this tragicomic juxtaposition as when Forman cuts from Andula’s would-be sweetheart, comically squeezed into the bed of his bickering parents, to the spurned girl, weeping outside the family’s door. The world of Loves of a Blonde doesn’t accommodate connubial bliss; its only bedfellows are youthful idealism and its dashed dreams, the hope for release and the reality of a system that doesn’t allow many places to go.