Nostalghia

NOSTALGHIA   ***1/2

Andrei Tarkovsky

1983

IDEA:  With his translator, a Soviet writer visits Italy to investigate the life of a Russian composer who had been exiled in the country in the 18th century.

BLURB:  There is a sense of finality about Nostalghia that makes it, in retrospect, seem like the first part of a valediction culminating in Tarkovsky’s final film, The Sacrifice, three years later. In fact, the film signals the end in its opening passage: in black and white, three figures drift across foggy countryside, before their movement - and the durational movement of the shot itself - suddenly expires. The credits roll. Tarkovsky will return frequently to this hazy monochromatic else-when, soon understood as the Russian motherland to which writer Gorchakov can never return. The loss represented by these bucolic snapshots forms the nostalgia of the title, shaping Tarkovsky’s psychospatial evocation of exile, memory, and spiritual yearning. Repeating the dislocation of Sosnovsky, the 18th-century composer he’s come to research, Gorchakov wanders through ancient Italian baths and crumbling buildings a lost man, alienated from the modernity of his female translator, sparked alive only at the memories of home that come trickling into his consciousness like leaks in a roof. As in so much of his work, Tarkovsky fills Nostalghia with water, tempting the viewer to interpret life-giving properties and annihilating formlessness, excess and disarray. Such volatile qualities become embodied by the decaying home and doomsaying disposition of Domenico, the mad revolutionary who adds to water a flame of literal self-immolation. He is another side or potential of Gorchakov, another realization of the tragedy of Sosnovsky, an anguished consciousness wishing for a return to some speciously unified past Tarkovsky refuses to define. Tellingly, the director answers Domenico’s self-destruction with Gorchakov’s sacrificial absolution, carried out in a breathtaking long take that merges corporeal labor with spiritual transcendence. His faith and endurance literally keep the flame alive. If temporal irrevocability largely consumes Nostalghia, then so too does immanent sublimity. As Gorchakov sits with dog, Tarkovsky pulls back to reveal a nesting of past and present, Russia and Italy, the secular and the sacramental. Snow falls. And unlike the movement of the first shot, it doesn’t stop.

Another Round

ANOTHER ROUND   ***

Thomas Vinterberg

2020

IDEA:  Looking to get out of their midlife funk, Martin and his high school teacher friends decide to test a psychiatrist's theory that humans would be better off with exactly .05% alcohol in their blood at all times.

BLURB:  In a society where economic equality and basic social protections are givens, what does it mean to have enough? Does material abundance beget complacency, ennui, even a sense of lack? These are the questions at the heart of Another Round, which uses a populace's relationship with alcohol as a means of meditating on Danish national identity, aging, and the inconstancy of contentment. Vinterberg sets the stage immediately, his opening scene of drunken teenage revelry signifying a culture of liberal inebriation and encapsulating the carefree, youthful indulgence from which his glum middle-aged protagonists have grown alienated. When Mads Mikkelsen’s Martin unexpectedly downs a few glasses of wine and vodka on the occasion of a friend’s birthday soon after, it is not joy that his weary countenance reflects. Celebratory drinking is thus juxtaposed with drinking as self-prescribed depressive treatment. These two impetuses of alcohol and their concomitant effects oscillate throughout the film, mirroring the ups and downs, excesses and deficiencies, that Martin and his pals seek to neutralize by maintaining blood-alcohol-level equanimity. If the subsequent, inevitable spiral into destructive crapulence comes across as too broadly and bluntly delineated (a problem that extends to the depiction of the characters' domestic lives), Another Round is more nimble in keeping up its fizzy tonal mixture, in which restless melancholy mingles with dark irony and the breeziness of a hangout comedy. These qualities come to a spectacular head in the film’s let-it-all-loose denouement, where Denmark’s young and old(er) are united in a euphoric bacchanal of optimism and denial. The buzz won’t stick around forever, but with so much booze to go around, it’s all too easy to convince oneself it will.

La Ciénaga

LA CIÉNAGA   ***1/2

Lucrecia Martel

2001

IDEA:  The families of two friends come together when the wealthy matriarch of one of the families sustains an injury.

BLURB:  In European and postcolonial cinemas, indictments of bourgeois complacency are ubiquitous. Somewhat paradoxically, these films typically center their white, upper-class characters, usually and dubiously at the expense of the lower-class, ethnic minorities they subjugate and exploit. They also have the tendency of figuring the acedia of the bourgeoisie in corporeal terms, with characters swallowed by lassitude as long, impassive takes convey a sense of encroaching spiritual atrophy. Argentine director Lucrecia Martel’s feature debut, La Ciénaga, doesn’t totally buck this template, but it does spike and complicate it through formidable aesthetic and narrative ingenuity. While the swamp of the title is a handy and apt metaphor, alluding to both the family’s clogged, turbid swimming pool and their own cloistered emotional stagnancy, Martel is far too innovative in her portraiture to rely for effect on obvious symbols. Instead, she tears at the expected grammar we’ve become accustomed to when exploring the bourgeois world: in place of compositional depth and unity are flatness and fragmentation, while sudden ellipses splinter continuity and narrative cause-and-effect. We must work, even during the most expository scenes, to deduce the characters’ relationships, whose natures we are prompted to reevaluate at the most seemingly insignificant gesture or line. Martel’s disorienting strategies suggest class-based inertia in a different, maybe more potent way, not merely as indifference or physical malaise but as dazed, inattentive aimlessness (all those injuries!), as ineffectualness and borderline incoherence. What are these people about? Thankfully, within this mire, La Ciénaga finds some time for its belittled domestic worker, Isabela, who’s the film’s only real emotional anchor outside of audience surrogate Momi. She certainly deserves her own movie; at least in this one, she’s spared from drowning in Martel’s clammy, self-cannibalizing bourgeois bog.

Wolf's Hole

WOLF'S HOLE   **1/2

Věra Chytilová

1987

IDEA:  Invited on a ski retreat for reasons unknown, a group of teenagers finds itself riven by conflicts exploited by a menacing, mysterious authority figure.

BLURB:  “One for all, and all for one,” goes the mantra of solidarity repeated throughout Wolf’s Hole, Věra Chytilová’s eerie, ice-and-sweat horror allegory of authoritarianism. Few if any of the teenagers assembled for the film’s cryptic ski sojourn would seem to espouse this sentiment. Even before they’ve officially arrived, they are unsurprisingly rowdy and insolent, prone to juvenile shenanigans and varyingly petty or cruel forms of adolescent teasing. Chytilová knows the nasty environment that can be bred by a bunch of hormonal teens, especially ones holed up together in a cramped, dank cabin, and gives us her best, most pungent approximation of a particularly hellish sleepaway camp. But the behavior of the kids is nothing compared to the sadism of their overseers, clad in gray and black, their skin as blanched as their snowy mountain habitat. Under their paternalistic control, “one for all, and all for one” is sapped of its putative honor, its expression of group loyalty twisted into a homicidal ultimatum issued by those whose own grotesque power precedes the welfare of the group. The parallels to communism and any number of totalitarian regimes is clear, if often vexingly schematic. Yet Chytilová’s admiring adoption of genre idioms - and her revelation of the provenance of the kids’ superiors - make it obvious that Wolf’s Hole is not intended to be taken as a nuanced political treatise. As she did in Daisies, the director harnesses formal anarchy as a force against arbitrary authority. Her delirious camera mimicking the energy of her unruly teens, she knows that as long as they come together to melt ossified dogmas with their youthful fire, the kids, and their future, will be alright.