Sitcom

SITCOM   ***

François Ozon

1998

IDEA:  A small white rat unleashes torrents of hidden desire in a seemingly idyllic suburban abode.

BLURB:  From its prologue, in which a suburban dad murders his family offscreen during a surprise birthday celebration, Ozon’s debut feature film makes blatantly clear the sardonic intention of its title. The director will proceed to not only gleefully upend the banal trappings of the classic television sitcom, but to mock and subvert the patriarchal nuclear family structure, gender roles, and bourgeois attitudes that underpin it. Sitcom wastes no time perverting these basic principles; within minutes of the father’s introduction of a white rat to the household, the family’s repressed desires erupt in a maelstrom of psychosexual chaos. The rodent’s connotations of abjection, coupled with the alterity of the maid’s African boyfriend, are turned on their heads by Ozon, who understands that “outside” influences are merely scapegoats for irrepressible feelings that come from within. This is something only the father seems to grasp as he facilitates and delights in the spiraling debauchery of his suddenly sex-crazed family. In one of many sharp subversions, the patriarch here is passive and fey, a figure whose ambiguous sexuality and eventual polymorphism put him at a far remove from the archetypal man of the house. His actions may set off the erotic hijinks, but it is the absence of his governing paternal superego that Ozon posits, with tongue in cheek, as the true cause of familial-domestic degradation. As rough around the edges as it might be, Sitcom offers enough pithy, surrealist social observation to make its funhouse antics more than mere surface provocation.

Annette

ANNETTE   **1/2

Leos Carax

2021

IDEA:  A stand-up comedian experiences a drastic decline in his career while he raises a preternaturally gifted baby girl with his opera singer wife. 

BLURB:  By what metric does one evaluate such a flagrantly proud farrago as Annette? Certainly no traditional critical schema is fit to accommodate the film’s defiant unruliness, its indiscriminate blending of opera, camp, metatextuality, and emotional sincerity. There is a gentle perversity about the film’s nearly unrelenting gaucheness, how Carax and the Mael brothers seem to approach each moment with the modus operandi of affective dissonance. They walk an extreme razor’s edge between irony and earnestness, sophomoric parody and artistic meditation, with the viewer never quite sure which mode they’re experiencing. Is Carax even sure? The film careens around with an abandon that can, at times, feel stubbornly random, as if its pell-mell construction alone could serve as an alibi against formal critique. All this being said, Annette is not as outré as one might have expected from its eccentric auteurs. Essentially a macabre arthouse rendition of A Star is Born, it trades in shopworn ideas about the trials of celebrity and the artist’s process, with a particular emphasis on the psyche of the disillusioned, self-loathing male creator. These are clichés Carax and the Maels simultaneously embrace and spoof; so too their conceits about parenting anxieties, which manifest in the film’s most memorable invention, the titular, sentient wooden puppet child. The individual elements here are familiar, but in Annette’s combination of them, they become deliberately wrong, uncanny, garish. The music, symphonically rousing and self-consciously stilted in the same breath, follows suit. To the extent that anyone possibly could, Carax pulls together this shaggy experiment in the denouement, a sobering duet that denudes the cover of creative expression to reveal its whimpering human soul. 

The Green Knight

THE GREEN KNIGHT   ***

David Lowery

2021

IDEA:  After agreeing to land a blow to the fearsome Green Knight, Gawain, the indolent nephew of King Arthur, must make a quest from the castle one year later to reciprocate the challenge.

BLURB:  More than many films based on Western folklore, The Green Knight has the air of something genuinely archaic and occult, like a cryptic relic from a long-extinct civilization. It’s in the film’s becalmed focus on gnomic rituals and encounters; its alternately tenebrous and ghostly images, in which computer-generated backdrops and expressionistic lighting lend a sense of the ethereal; and in its indeterminate temporality, with Lowery condensing hours, days, and years into a matter of minutes, a trick that connects back to his previous metaphysical fable, A Ghost Story. At the same time, the film constantly reminds us of its status as an adaptation, its literary intertitles positioning the story as a modern reimagining of a popular text. It’s somewhere in between these two modes - historical document and revisionist interpretation - where The Green Knight provocatively exists. Lowery already tips us off to the latter in his casting of the Indian-British Dev Patel in the role of Gawain; beyond this conspicuous ethnic alteration, the director also pointedly saps Arthurian England of its romantic grandeur, figuring it instead as an ashen, dilapidated graveyard dotted by fires. In this reframed context, Gawain’s quest to prove his chivalry and earn his veneration looks more like a hollow ego-driven pursuit than a testament of virtue. Throughout, Lowery draws out the faults in Gawain’s masculinity and the codes of honor he and the Court abide by, their stringent dictates exposed as essentially fruitless by the titular force of nature, rendered as a lumbering, immortal mass of tree bark and leaves. The Green Knight itself has a similarly plodding gait; despite its persistently entrancing atmosphere, the film could use a little more tonal variation to break up its overly stolid and studied demeanor. Still, it’s a haunting, sensorily rich spin on the Arthurian mythos that works as both a faithful adaptation and an astute reconsideration of its underlying concepts.

Easy Living

EASY LIVING   ***

Mitchell Leisen

1937

IDEA:  A downtrodden female typist is thrust into the world of the elite when she is mistaken for the mistress of a powerful banker.

BLURB:  Easy living is not exactly easy in Mitchell Leisen and Preston Sturges’ rambunctious screwball comedy. Already proving himself among the keenest social satirists in early Hollywood, Sturges wryly links the titular term with the vacuous existence afforded by wealth and status. It’s the life of Edward Arnold’s blustery, gormless banker J.B. Ball, and, by convoluted proxy, the life that gets unwittingly foisted upon Jean Arthur’s demure typist Mary Smith. The madcap daisy chain of misunderstandings, assumptions, and hearsay that results in Mary’s sudden prestige - and that threatens both Ball’s fortune and the market at large - is a sardonic sendup of gendered power relations under consumer capitalism, underscoring the degree to which the petty whims of influential people shape the economy and media culture. This toothy social commentary is pure Sturges, as is the knockabout slapstick that memorably erupts from the desperate hunger of diners at an automat. Leisen directs with a fleetness that serves Sturges’ hectic dialogue and tone well, while a coterie of distinguished character actors provide fizzy support to Arthur and Ray Milland’s sweetly fledgling romance. Meanwhile, art director Hans Dreier leaves nothing behind on the film’s most stunning set, a labyrinthine hotel penthouse that’s opulent and outrageous in all the right ways. Easy Living somewhat paints itself into a corner in its final third - after all the zaniness, Sturges doesn’t quite seem to know how to pull everything together - but the film still lands as a tart screwball delight.