Everything Everywhere All at Once

EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE   ***1/2

Daniels

2022

IDEA:  Disillusioned with her life and family, a Chinese-American woman begins experiencing a multitude of alternate-universe versions of herself while she fights to stop an omnipotent figure from destroying everything.

BLURB:  Truth in advertising: at its most anarchic, which is most of the time, Everything Everywhere All at Once truly does approximate something like an experience of spatiotemporal simultaneity, its brain-frying pileup of signs and sensory stimuli like a hypertrophic version of our digital-era information overload. Seemingly intent to make their debut film, Swiss Army Man, look like a modest chamber piece by comparison, Daniels have produced an unrelenting cataract of bonkers invention that tests and confounds our credulity - did that really happen? - with systematic precision. One would not typically associate a word such as “precise” with a film of such flagrant excess, but then Daniels are not exactly artists who like to observe boundaries. Everything Everywhere All at Once floods the spectator with a riot of destabilizing juxtapositions; an unclassifiable crazy quilt of tones and stylistic idioms, it’s Hong Kong martial arts film, absurdist farce, gamified sci-fi fantasy, Freudian psychodrama, existentialist horror, and family soap opera, all at once. That this wantonly chaotic film should ultimately coalesce into, of all things, a Zen exhortation for mindfulness and equanimity, is an improbable development of which the deeply irreverent filmmakers seem to relish the irony. On the other hand, maybe it’s not so ironic. Everything Everywhere All at Once weaponizes its surplus almost as a warning; its howling cornucopia of mayhem is fun, but it’s also exhausting, unsettling, too much. As such, the film - in keeping with its copious anal imagery - is like the waste before the flush, the abjection that must be expelled to shore up the ego. This process is mirrored in Evelyn’s journey toward self-unity, and given disarming poignancy by Michelle Yeoh, the human center to the madness. In their audacious, sui generis way, Daniels argue that maybe a certain kind of madness is just what a path toward enlightenment could use.

Miracle in Milan

MIRACLE IN MILAN   ***

Vittorio De Sica

1951

IDEA:  Influenced by the resilient spirit of his late adoptive mother, an orphan in postwar Italy rallies a colony of displaced people against the greedy businessmen trying to seize their land.

BLURB:  If fantasy entails, on a primal level, the imagining of desired circumstances unsupportable by reality - as well as an attendant willful disavowal of their impossible realization - then Miracle in Milan is fantasy of the highest order. Taking cues from Chaplin, magical realism, and Hollywood escapism, De Sica and Zavattini craft their film as a fable of brazen wish fulfillment constantly teetering on the edge of collapse. In the first, less overtly quixotic half of its bifurcated structure, the film offers up images that cannily braid optimism and despair, as in the sight of vagrants huddled together under a lone ray of sunshine. While the predominant mode of jocular, even lavish tragicomedy departs quite sharply from the neorealism for which De Sica is best known, he and Zavattini remain attuned to the social realities of postwar Italy, particularly the ways in which the economic “miracle” and its proliferating structures of capitalism militated against the underclasses. The rollicking, at times cartoonish blitheness of much of Miracle in Milan is ultimately inseparable from the gravity of the material poverties with which it concerns itself. As the film charges through its second act, an escalating parade of whimsical interventions and outlandish escapes, the hyperbolic fantasy has the pointed effect of underscoring the direness of the conditions that prompted it. By the time the film’s dispossessed community is blowing away police grenade smoke with its collective breath - and certainly by the flight-by-broomstick denouement - one is struck by an ambivalent mixture of elevation and melancholy, a vacillating attitude toward a world that often warrants our most stubborn illusions.