A Complete Unknown

A COMPLETE UNKNOWN   **1/2

James Mangold

2024

IDEA:  Emerging on the Greenwich Village folk scene of the early 1960s, Bob Dylan negotiates his relationships with women, mentors, and the shifting cultural landscape.

BLURB:  A Complete Unknown is predicated on a basically impossible proposition: getting to the heart of someone as notoriously enigmatic and (self)-mythologized as Bob Dylan within the relatively prosaic framework of a Hollywood biopic. The person bearing the greatest burden of this challenge is, of course, Timothée Chalamet, who seems to tackle the role with less than full certainty as to what, or whom, he’s really portraying. While the actor is remarkably adept at channeling Dylan’s vocal stylings and musicianship, he is less convincing during non-musical scenes, where he tends to fall back on a baseline of impassive, sulky insouciance that grows monotonous. It’s fortunate that A Complete Unknown is unusually rife with music, and that Chalamet is surrounded by a squad of talented performers playing figures as integral to the story as Dylan himself. It is through such acquaintances and influences as Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, and Suze Rotolo’s stand-in Sylvie Russo that Mangold and Jay Cocks reveal their Dylan, not as the cryptic shapeshifter of Todd Haynes’s I’m Not There but as a tragically human figure who had to cast off the ones he loved - and the past they represented - in order to become what he felt the times demanded. It’s as solid and valid an interpretation as one could create from this story, even if it’s not quite reconciled with the film’s admirable impulse to preserve its hero’s inscrutability. 

Emilia Pérez

EMILIA PÉREZ   *1/2

Jacques Audiard

2024

IDEA:  A transgender drug cartel leader in Mexico enlists the help of a lawyer to procure her a sex-change operation. 

BLURB:  You’d be hard-pressed to accuse Emilia Pérez of lacking audacity. It takes daring to make a musical-comedy thriller set against the backdrop of drug cartel violence in Mexico, centering a transgender cartel leader who elects to have a sex-change operation to live as her true self. It’s an act of nerve, especially, if you’re a cisgender Frenchman at the helm. Daring, though, is a hair’s breadth away from reckless folly, which Emilia Pérez more often looks (and sounds) like than not. Here, Audiard’s grittily flamboyant expressionism is utterly misapplied to the social-realist nature of the subject matter. This was at times a liability in the director’s Dheepan, but then that film wasn’t a woolly rock opera careening gauchely between songs about “vaginoplasties” and sepulchral laments to Mexico’s epidemic of enforced disappearances. Emilia Pérez never finds a way to reconcile its overstuffed ideas or disparate tones, or to even fashion a compelling narrative around people who should be a whole lot more complex, performed by actors who do mostly heroic work with erratic or barely-there characterizations. For a musical, it’s inexcusably lead-footed, marked by lurching rhythms and awkward fadeouts that exacerbate the lethargy of much of the singing. Why did Audiard want to tell this story? What is his interest in touring this land and people he seems glibly invested in at best, while perpetuating a hoary narrative of trans martyrdom? The film grasps for sociopolitical import, but drowns in a pell-mell of tacky, confused sensationalism.

Flow

FLOW   ***

Gints Zilbalodis

2024

IDEA:  When the earth is overtaken by a catastrophic flood, a feline and a cadre of other animals attempt to find safety.

BLURB:  On paper a fairly archetypal survival story, Flow becomes on screen an idiosyncratic vision untethered from the conventions of narratives with animal protagonists. It does this in part by mostly resisting the tendency toward anthropomorphism, preserving the inscrutable animal natures of its characters through the absence of dialogue and human behaviors. Zilbalodis may invite us to project our thoughts and feelings onto the creatures (whose relatively crude, impassive forms this helps facilitate), but he steadfastly refuses to sentimentalize them. Instead of a plot fueled by emotional through-lines, Flow offers a more elemental, phenomenological kind of journey that foregrounds the raw physical sensations of navigating a perilous world. The animation - with its long, soaring virtual camera movements through land, water, and air - is strongly attuned to an aesthetics of proprioception, creating an embodied experience of what it would feel like, for instance, to be a drowning cat that’s been swooped up to great heights and dropped by a large bird. There is a palpable, at times sublime sense of material scale and the attendant dangers of being a small creature in an unfathomably big, chaotic world. In this way, Flow works better as an immersion in environment than as a story, however deliberately and mythically pared-down the latter might be. It alternately resembles the free-roaming gameplay of an open-world video game and the elaborate tracking-shot cinematography of Emmanuel Lubezki. You probably won’t feel all cuddly about these animals, but you might feel things more potent, and lingering: fear, awe, even the humbling wash of uncertainty.