Memoria

Part of my coverage of the 57th Chicago International Film Festival.

MEMORIA   ****

Apichatpong Weerasethakul

2021

IDEA:  A British woman in Bogotá, Colombia tries to find the source of a strange booming sound only she seems to hear.

BLURB:  Sound is such a naturalized part of daily life that we don’t often think about how unique a material phenomenon it is. It can seep across boundaries and pass through physical objects; index distance, location, mass, and time; form into melodies encoded with meanings and affects; reverberate within the body as a haptic experience. Apichatpong has always foregrounded the auditory in his films, but in Memoria it becomes his driving force and organizing principle, the phenomenological vehicle by which he unlocks other perceptual states. The sound Tilda Swinton’s Jessica keeps hearing may be purely subjective, but technology and the cinema, as Apichatpong self-reflexively demonstrates, are able to reproduce and transmit it for others to share. Simply and ingeniously, Memoria equates this communicable power with memory, specifically national memory, which it understands as embedded in the landscape and transferred through material things. In a familiar dichotomy, Apichatpong’s narrative transitions from a modern urban environment to a lush rural one, where the shedding of the city’s sensory stimuli allows for an opening of consciousness to history, myth, and dream. Here, Memoria offers its most distended shots, its most transcendent marriages of image and sound, revealing the world in all its porousness as a sponge of intercorporeal sensations and resonances. While Apichatpong doesn’t quite address the connotations of having Jessica, a white European woman, serve as his conduit for Colombia’s colonial trauma, race seems to be fairly beside the point for the director. Like sounds and their affects, so much of Memoria bypasses language and dissolves barriers, sublimely attuning us to the unaccountable phenomenological networks that flow all around and within us, beneath the visible surface of things. For Apichatpong, accessing these networks is but a matter of gentle perceptual modulation, whether through sound, music, food, drugs, conversation, meditation - or film.

The Tsugua Diaries

Part of my coverage of the 57th Chicago International Film Festival.

THE TSUGUA DIARIES   ***

Miguel Gomes and Maureen Fazendeiro

2021

IDEA:  A film crew attempts to make a movie during COVID lockdown.

BLURB:  According to David Bordwell, art films constitute “a cinema of psychological effects in search of their causes.” Such an inverse of traditional narrative logic would seem to be literalized by The Tsugua Diaries, which presents itself in reverse chronological order. However, rather than use this structure to draw the spectator into a riddle of fractured cause and effect - an expected route for such a cerebral conceptual project - co-directors Gomes and Fazendeiro seem to have something simpler but no less evocative in mind: an undermining of our perception of time as necessarily linear and teleological. As such, the film neither begins at a recognizable denouement nor ends at the causal source of its “psychological effects”; instead of tracing its events and its characters’ relationships back to some putative origin along a cleanly sloping timeline, it charts a bumpy path of ups and downs, forward and backward movements side-by-side. In addition to being an apt depiction of the creative process, which The Tsugua Diaries is most explicitly about, this ebbing and flowing also mirrors the course of the COVID pandemic, the film’s impetus and structuring reality. Just as the pandemic interrupted the flow of daily life, so too does it intrude on and mold the course of The Tsugua Diaries, its contingencies and restrictions paradoxically fostering a sense of artistic freedom. Gomes and Fazendeiro take advantage of their improvised, cozily commune-like filmmaking retinue to create a small, nifty portrait of collective creativity, where the end product is less the point than a shared experience among friends.

Hit the Road

Part of my coverage of the 57th Chicago International Film Festival. 

HIT THE ROAD   ***

Panah Panahi

2021

IDEA:  A family of four embarks on a road trip to deliver the eldest child to a mysterious checkpoint in the Iranian countryside.

BLURB:  Sharing with his father Jafar Panahi and his late compatriot Abbas Kiarostami a fondness for the cinematic road trip, Panah Panahi places the action of his debut film within and around a traveling car. The ultimate terminus of the vehicle and the family within is unclear; instead of immediately outlining this crucial detail, Panahi spends time fleshing out the familial dynamics of the passengers, whose forced close proximity results in frequently humorous annoyances and squabbles. In a short time, we become familiar with the strong-willed mother; the gruff patriarch, who’s nursing a broken leg and a deeper spiritual malaise; the elder son, who sits sullenly at the wheel; the infirm pooch, Jessy; and the obstreperous kid brother, an ebullient counterweight to what becomes an increasingly solemn journey. With great sensitivity, Panahi gradually shades the family’s interactions with melancholy and pain, tears bursting the dam of willful good cheer. Hit the Road never fully reveals the purpose of the road trip, but it gives us enough information to know that it’s one motivated by sacrifice and a need to escape repressive conditions, and that it will inevitably involve a grudging farewell to a beloved son. That long goodbye, filmed in extreme wide shot, is one of many striking images in Hit the Road that both contextualizes the open spaces of Iran and suggests a relative paucity of attendant social mobility within them. In the face of hardship and heartbreak, however, Panahi never loses his thread of levity and resilience, whether manifested in an imagined, 2001: A Space Odyssey-referencing flight among the stars or a lip-synching karaoke session in the middle of nowhere.

Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn

Part of my coverage of the 57th Chicago International Film Festival.

BAD LUCK BANGING OR LOONY PORN   ***1/2

Radu Jude

2021

IDEA:  A primary school teacher faces the wrath of society when a sex tape she filmed with her husband inadvertently winds up on the Internet.

BLURB:  Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn is perhaps as close as 21st-century world cinema has come to the transgressive audacity and excoriating political satire of Eastern European art films of the 60s and 70s. It’s a film designed to slice right through the equivocating bullshit, a vivisection of a mass culture warped and degraded by the shared toxins of capitalism, nationalism, racism, anti-intellectualism, moral fundamentalism, misogyny, and social media, a COVID-era Idiocracy if Idiocracy had teeth and aesthetic daring. While Jude’s utter contempt for the current cultural and political climate (and Romania’s in particular) is astringently apparent, Bad Luck Banging… is more than a one-note polemical instrument. Following the vérité observations of the film’s first third, a promenade through the crass maze of commodity signs swallowing modern Bucharest, Jude launches his best and most rhetorically ambitious formal exercise. Suspending narrative with liberating abandon, he enumerates a glossary of terms, many of which he trenchantly relates to shameful chapters in Romanian and European history. Baldly - although with tongue in cheek - addressing injustices past and present, it’s a sardonic, sobering kick-in-the-pants of a school lesson, the kind that so panics the benighted conservative parents in the film’s culminating, screaming outrage circus of a PTA conference. Tellingly, this dictionary portion ends on the word “Zen,” which it defines as an attitude of regarding life as both a tragedy and a comedy. This underlies the general philosophy of Bad Luck Banging…, a barbed time capsule that invigoratingly reflects and refracts what is horrifying, vulgar, and mind-bogglingly ludicrous about the state of the world circa 2020.

Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy

Part of my coverage of the 57th Chicago International Film Festival.

WHEEL OF FORTUNE AND FANTASY   ***

Ryusuke Hamaguchi

2021

IDEA:  A triptych of episodes focusing on the impact of free will, coincidence, and social mores on the lives of different women.

BLURB:  Social interchange is a mercurial and adventitious things in Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, a structurally sneaky comedy of manners, errors, and fateful encounters. Each of its three chapters - stark, sometimes time-hopping chamber plays that suggest life distilled to miniatures - revolves around the strange alchemy of chance and desire, alighting on minor inflection points that have the potential to birth new possibilities, whether fortuitous or otherwise. Often recalling Hong Sang-soo’s tricksy relationship games, Hamaguchi frequently films dialogue between characters in long, static two-shots, his camera like an X-ray picking up conversational tensions, mood shifts, and granular mutations in real-time. And like another master auteur, Abbas Kiarostami, he slyly manipulates character dynamics to create a series of enigmatic displacements that consistently reshape the nature of the relationships we’re witnessing. Sunny demeanors conceal romantic frustration and cunning; malicious intent dissolves into a reciprocal voicing of desire; old friends become strangers, and vice-versa. Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy evolves too, growing funnier and richer as the addition of its chapters generates new semiotic connections. What is intriguing if for a while a bit airless comes to a satisfying payoff in the final third, when Hamaguchi turns the game on us, combining prior textual knowledge, accumulated expectations, and deceptive new signifiers to upend our perception of the characters in tandem with their own confounded perceptions of each other. Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy steadily compiles such revelatory discoveries, and, to borrow from one of its chapter headings, leaves the door wide open for more.

Bergman Island

Part of my coverage of the 57th Chicago International Film Festival.

BERGMAN ISLAND   ***

Mia Hansen-Løve

2021

IDEA:  A writer-director couple experiences rifts in their relationship when they sojourn to Ingmar Bergman's longtime residence of Fårö to work on their respective projects.

BLURB:  “Why doesn’t he ever show any tenderness or light? Why didn’t he ever once want to explore… happiness?,” inquires Vicky Krieps’ frustrated Chris, referring to the legendary Swedish director. Although it’s a somewhat specious, overgeneralizing assessment, there’s also truth to it: Bergman was not a sunny guy. Mia Hansen-Løve's Bergman Island is less a counterpoint than an homage in a more sanguine key, an introspective but comparatively lighthearted descendant of the master’s work that also meditates on his cultural legacy. The film’s meta-textuality is underscored by its semi-autobiographical protagonists, writer-directors Chris and Tony (a wryly aloof Tim Roth standing in for Hansen-Løve's real-life partner Olivier Assayas). Their summer trip to the eponymous island sees their relationship absorbing shades of the fraught uncertainties that beset so many of Bergman’s couples. Also hanging heavy in the air are the biographical details of Bergman’s own life, his notoriously prickly, philandering behavior raising questions about the egos and work-life relationships of prolific male creators, including Tony. Hansen-Løve uses her characters’ cinephile-friendly intellectual discourse as an appetizer for the film’s second half, in which Tony’s professional concerns are displaced by Chris’s, whose in-film screenplay we see enacted as a wistful, quasi-wish-fulfillment fantasy of youthful polyamory. Although Bergman Island ironically loses much of its steam in this crucial section devoted to the main female character’s flowering creative agency, Hansen-Løve maintains a nuanced, lovely control of mood and form throughout. Notably, she films Fårö as Bergman never did: in romantic, golden-hued widescreen, where relationships might not fall apart after all.

Paris, 13th District

Part of my coverage of the 57th Chicago International Film Festival.

PARIS, 13TH DISTRICT   **

Jacques Audiard

2021

IDEA:  The lives of four millennials in contemporary Paris intersect in unexpected ways, creating potentials for both sexual flings and deeper connections.

BLURB:  Paris, 13th District opens with a series of wide, panning bird’s-eye shots of the titular arrondissement, the camera picking up the myriad little dramas unfolding in the illuminated windows of apartment high-rises. It’s an introduction to the film’s milieu that hints at the voyeurism lurking within modern metropolitan living. Unfortunately, Audiard has something less provocative on his mind. Foregoing, to a rather confounding degree, the gritty urban urgency and formal stylization that have become his metier, he has turned to the realm of the banal multi-character relationship drama. Adapted by Audiard, Céline Sciamma, and Léa Mysius from stories from a graphic novel by Adrian Tomine, the film is a meandering look at the romantic and professional entanglements of four French millennials uncertainly searching for love and belonging. Technology plays a governing, fairly didactic role in the narrative, as social media is depicted as a tool of both alienation and meaningful connection for the characters, who are each unrooted in some way by their sexuality or ethnicity. This empathy for marginalized identities is Paris, 13th District’s best trait, one that Audiard (and Sciamma) have movingly embraced throughout their careers. But the film is too diffuse to have the thematic power it needs, too obvious and indifferently executed to be dramatically compelling. Like its curiously static black-and-white images, Paris, 13th District is monotonous when it should be bursting with color.

Titane

TITANE   ***

Julia Ducournau

2021

IDEA:  In order to evade the authorities, a female serial killer with a titanium plate in her skull disguises herself as the missing son of a grieving firefighter.

BLURB:  A trans-humanist modern monster fable in the vein of Under the Skin, Julia Ducournau’s Titane explosively grapples with ideas around gender, sex, and corporeality. The locus of its drama is Alexia, whose titanium-enhanced body and protean, androgynous appearance mark her as a cyborg. An “illegitimate fusion of animal and machine,” in the words of Donna Haraway, she represents a displacement of “the hierarchical dualisms of naturalized identities.” At least partially. In its first half, Titane keeps the possibilities of this cyborg politics generously open. It presents us with a monstrous woman forged from near-death trauma and the interpenetration of flesh and metal, someone symbolically born from machine. Ducournau charts her radical physical transformations with a grueling, forensic eye. Her camera and sound design conspire to place us inside Alexia’s increasingly self-mutilated and transmogrifying body, a body that acts as a destabilizing force to the hyper-masculine worlds in which she finds herself. It’s a minor disappointment, then, that after its bold and deeply unsettling first act, Titane eases into something relatively conservative and predictable. The polymorphism of Alexia’s cyborg body is undercut by her uterine pregnancy, the biological specifics of which are detailed in excruciating (albeit superbly rendered) images of her scarred, bloated, oozing abdomen and breasts. Such maternal horror, reactionary in nature, feels at odds with the film’s more progressive attitudes toward gender and the body; so too does Ducournau’s decision to have Alexia reformed under the influence of a father figure. For all its gestures toward feminism and the trans-human, and beyond its Extreme Cinema aesthetics, Titane is ultimately most effective as a rather simple story of traumatized people recovering their humanity by learning how to love and be loved. Agathe Rousselle and Vincent Lindon are exceptional in carrying this narrative, the power of their performances largely filling in for those grand potentials in Titane that go unrealized.