Showing Up

SHOWING UP   ***

Kelly Reichardt

2022

IDEA:  A sculptor in Portland, Oregon struggles to get ready for an exhibition while dealing with various personal obstacles.

BLURB:  The labor of art-making is largely humdrum, tediously routinized, and time-consuming, rendering it notoriously difficult to portray cinematically outside of the trope of creative genius. Making art is typically shown, hyperbolically, as a tortuously self-sacrificing and/or rapturous endeavor, and while both qualities exist in Showing Up, they’re more evident around the life of the artist – as influences, untapped potentials, or warning signs – than in it. For however passionate Lizzy might be about her work (something Reichardt and an impassive Michelle Williams refuse to clarify), she’s basically a drudge, going through the paces of an ordinary working-class existence that requires much more out of her than just her creative capacities. Showing Up empathetically portrays the unglamorous realities of being a common artist, focusing its attention on the everyday nuisances and economic exigencies that take precious time away from one’s craft, not to mention mental wellbeing. Reichardt and her co-writer Jon Raymond flirt with elements of farce and capitalist critique, but never quite commit to these expected paradigms; ever the understated dramatists, they prefer hushed, inductive, non-critical observation, with Christopher Blauvelt’s curious camera soaking up and multiplying little quotidian frustrations, joys, and breakthroughs. While this diffuse approach gives Showing Up less of a defined point-of-view than, say, Certain Women or First Cow, it also lends the film a pleasurably ambling quality that allows its characters room to breathe, and maybe even create something special when they least expect it.

The Heroic Trio

THE HEROIC TRIO   ***1/2

Johnnie To

1993

IDEA:  A crimefighter, a bounty hunter, and an "invisible woman" come together to stop an evil eunuch who's attempting to resurrect the Chinese Empire by finding a new king among stolen babies.

BLURB:  The Heroic Trio scratches a serious itch for outrageous, giddily untrammeled action spectacle done with ingenuity and flair. A cartoonish, dystopian, quasi-cyberpunk-styled martial arts superhero extravaganza (that runs under 90 minutes!), To’s film is a rip-roaring delight that never for a moment takes itself more seriously than it should. As in many of the best action films - and certainly in the Hong Kong and wuxia varieties - real-world physics don’t apply. People fly, turn invisible, and become gooey walking skeletons; a motorcycle spins sideways through the air like a boomerang; and bullets are sliced in half mid-flight by butterfly-wing throwing knives. It’s a reality that’s liberating in its malleability, and To and his retinue appear to be having a ball letting loose, unconcerned with whether or not the suspension wires are visible during set pieces, or if spatial integrity is preserved. The Looney Tunes stunts are not just weightless tomfoolery, though; they’re the crusades of three badass women fighting against a patriarchy that’s literally working to resurrect an archaic imperial past. Anita Mui, Maggie Cheung, and Michelle Yeoh are potent avatars for this intrepid brand of action-feminism, even if they sometimes seem inconsistently committed to the gonzo demands of their roles. The Heroic Trio is scrappy, silly, sometimes befuddling, and sometimes wrongheaded, but it’s never dull or labored, and its sheer ambition and vivacity put most contemporary blockbusters to shame.

A Tale of Springtime

A TALE OF SPRINGTIME   ***

Éric Rohmer

1990

IDEA:  Adrift in life, philosophy professor Jeanne becomes involved in a romantic scheme orchestrated by a young piano student named Natacha.

BLURB:  Many of Éric Rohmer’s films have a paradoxical quality of seeming both banal and deeply wise, desultory and deliberate. He manages the considerable feat of tempering insufferable bourgeois solipsism with an honest, empathic sense for how his materially privileged characters, with so much time on their hands, get caught up in self-sabotaging habits of overthinking and convoluted games of courtship. A Tale of Springtime is no different. Set during a time of seasonal renewal, the film focuses on characters who are ironically stuck, looking for something that can melt away their personal blockages. Jeanne resides in two apartments before ending up in a third, and that’s before she’s welcome to a house in the country, and yet nowhere is she able to settle. In a fine example of the kind of random, fortuitous encounters Rohmer is so crafty at developing, Jeanne ends up fitting into the romantic stratagem of Natacha, who’s looking to displace her father’s young paramour with someone more to her liking. A Tale of Springtime spends a whole lot of time observing Jeanne and Natacha, characters imbued with rich psychological detail by actresses Anne Teyssèdre and Florence Darel, and of course by Rohmer’s signature talky dialogue. Around their ambling conversations, the director crafts an unfussy but exacting mise-en-scène of pastel colors and rustic floral patterns, soothing surfaces that can also feel teasing in their gentility. Slow-going in the beginning, A Tale of Springtime, like the titular season, imperceptibly comes alive as you watch it, its characters’ frustrations blooming propitious petals.

Tori and Lokita

TORI AND LOKITA   ***

Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne

2022

IDEA:  African migrant children Tori and Lokita struggle to make a living in modern-day Belgium.

BLURB:  The relationship between Tori and Lokita is one of the purest and sweetest in the Dardenne brothers’ filmography. Bonded by circumstance, they are each other’s confidants, moral support, and first and last source of solace in a late-capitalist Europe that barely sees them as human. As is the case in all Dardenne films, their survival is contingent on acquiescing to systems of exploitation that exclude them as beneficiaries, their social relationships dictated by transactions that serve only greedy authorities. Tori and Lokita face an uphill battle from the beginning, and the rapport created by Mbundu Joely and Pablo Schils is so fierce, tender, and emotionally persuasive that we can’t bear to see anything come between them. That things do - in progressively violent ways - is an inevitability the Dardennes sometimes struggle with making seem organic. Though the directors’ customary lack of sentimentality keeps the film from devolving into mawkish miserabilism, a sense of overly engineered grimness persists in the predictably worsening gauntlet of tribulations through which they put their protagonists. Tori and Lokita is absent of the moral complexity that defines the filmmakers’ best work, as it operates on a neat dichotomy between innocent, victimized children and callously cruel adults. Yet there is purpose to this schematic bluntness, not to mention righteous indignation. The Dardennes draw a straight line from systemic injustice to economic desperation to crime and abuse; they plainly convey how the paucity of options afforded by the state to migrants and refugees paves the way for tragedy. The deeply upsetting conclusion of Tori and Lokita refuses to obscure that reality.