War Requiem

WAR REQUIEM   ***1/2

Derek Jarman

1989

IDEA:  A visual interpretation of Benjamin Britten's War Requiem set to his compositions, in which an aged veteran reminisces about his experiences in World War I.

BLURB:  Few filmmakers could craft a lament as simultaneously furious, heartrending, and lyrical as Derek Jarman, and War Requiem is one of his best. Using Benjamin Britten’s opus of the same name as his foundation, the director sinuously weaves together war imagery, Christian iconography, and Tilda Swinton at her most mesmeric in a sequence of pure audiovisual poetry. Less blisteringly paced but just as shrewdly edited as Jarman’s previous apocalyptic jeremiad, The Last of England, the film takes us through a progression of tableaux by turns austere, ravishing, and mortally devastating. Cinematographer Richard Greatrex produces tactile images of soggy, pewter-colored trenches, curling smoke, and the skin of soldiers caked in mud; scored to plangent choirs, strings, and organs, these impressions of World War I agony are as potent as any passage in All Quiet on the Western Front or 1917. Jarman’s War Requiem goes further; incorporating found footage from a host of other international conflicts, some contemporaneous, and alluding to the AIDS crisis, it turns into a cri de coeur for the state of the modern world at large. At times, hellish montage gives way to protracted shots of otherworldly stillness, such as the remarkable one in which Swinton’s war nurse braids her hair and vacillates uneasily between willful ecstasy and insuppressible grief. These moments are Jarman’s War Requiem at its most sensuously empathic, forsaking the didactic for a language that speaks directly to the body and soul.

Beau is Afraid

BEAU IS AFRAID   ***

Ari Aster

2023

IDEA:  Wracked with guilt and paranoia, a middle-aged man gets repeatedly waylaid as he tries to make it home to visit his mother.

BLURB:  When Beau is Afraid opens with a subjective, in-utero sequence of the titular character’s birth – accompanied by violent wailing and a mix of indistinguishable, gutturally nightmarish sounds – it doesn’t take profound hermeneutic skills to know where this thing is going. Over the ensuing three hours, Ari Aster will grotesquely, sardonically, and extravagantly chart the aftermath of that originary trauma, which is, simply put, the trauma of being alive. He will send Joaquin Phoenix’s chronically fearful Beau on a tragicomic picaresque into the recesses of his psyche as he tries to clamber out of recrudescent childhood traumas and the derangements of everyday life so he can stop the madness by returning home, to his mother, to the womb. Thematically predictable as it is, and by its shriller, less inspired third act, exhaustingly tautological (did you get the mommy issues and the Jewish guilt?), the film’s circuitous narrative shape and vividly imagined dystopian world provide a surfeit of surprises. Aster’s direction is thrilling, in both raucous set-pieces (the spectacularly squirmy comedy of errors that makes up the urban section) and quieter moments (the slow dollying long takes of Phoenix’s face as he contemplates his fiascos). As a tumid odyssey of a man’s emotional, psychological, and sexual constipation, Beau is Afraid evokes everyone from Freud and Philip Roth to the Coen brothers and Charlie Kaufman. These and other influences swirl into what amounts to less of a character exploration than a bold conceptual gambit, an Oedipal drama transformed into florid, demented screen psychotherapy.

John and the Hole

JOHN AND THE HOLE   **1/2

Pascual Sisto

2021

IDEA:  Somewhere in suburban Massachusetts, a teen boy drugs his family and holds them captive in an unfinished bunker in the nearby woods.

BLURB:  A coming-of-age fable shot through a Haneke-esque class excoriation, John and the Hole offers up an icy nightmare of adolescent angst and bourgeois apathy. After laying out a rather vague atmosphere of ennui and anomie within the central family unit - indicated mostly through the visual sequestering of characters in the various windows of their glass mansion - the film quietly and obliquely dispenses with its inciting incident. After that, John and the Hole deals less in narrative suspense than in a nagging psychological riddle: what caused John to do what he did? Largely relying on the spookily stolid yet identifiably gawky performance by Charlie Shotwell - complemented by some ham-handed exposition from his parents - the film suggests a childhood psychosocial development warped by upper-class complacency. What does growing up mean when you’re surrounded by material wealth, but not affection? When are you ready to make it on your own when you already have it all? John seems simultaneously to want to prove he can be an adult and to show his parents he craves their care; his situation is provocatively juxtaposed with that of a young girl, whose mother tells her John’s story as a cautionary tale leading up to the film’s most terrifying moment of (non)parenting. Although it could use more development itself, John and the Hole is a moody, intriguing dip into the places where parent-child anxieties simmer.