Nickel Boys

NICKEL BOYS   ***1/2

RaMell Ross

2024

IDEA:  In 1960s Florida, a black teenager wrongly accused of a crime is sent to an abusive reformatory school, where he befriends another boy.

BLURB:  The most immediate and material effect of the moving POV shot is one of embodiment, of feeling a character’s particular, situated perceptual experience of the world. It’s a body-first formal device ingeniously employed in Nickel Boys to exploit what cinema is uniquely capable of doing: fostering empathy by placing us in the shoes of another, and engendering a new, liberated way of looking (and thinking) by reorganizing our habituated sensory economy through the elements of film form. At the same time, Ross’s radical adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s novel is at least, if not more, cerebral than it is experiential, a dense, film-theory-ready text that often privileges semiotics over sensation. For all the truly startling, sensually immersive moments it creates - especially in the early childhood passages - Nickel Boys’ first-person perspective operates most potently on the symbolic level: as a restoration of a subjective gaze to historically objectified black characters; as a tool for expressing the intersubjective structure of Elwood’s and Turner’s relationship; and as a prompt for the spectator to consider the bounds of his own subjecthood. Aware he cannot reproduce human ocular perception onscreen, Ross leans into the ways camera vision (and editing) construct a different kind of consciousness, one able to be simultaneously past and present, embodied and disembodied. The more it goes on, the more Nickel Boys detaches itself from an anchored POV, taking flight across time and space in an articulation of a historical consciousness that transcends any one body. This is often disorienting, and frequently it impedes an emotional connection with the story. Yet if Nickel Boys is, among other things, about lives fractured by trauma, about knowledge and experience carried on both through the body and in larger societal projects of research and education, then challenging us to see beyond the familiar and comfortably coherent is exactly what it should be doing.

Babygirl

BABYGIRL   **1/2

Halina Reijn

2024

IDEA:  The life of a powerful tech company CEO is thrown into disarray when she engages in an affair with one of her young interns.

BLURB:  On the surface, Babygirl exhibits many of the hallmarks of the erotic thrillers that writer-director Halina Reijn has cited as her touchstones. We’ve got a torrid, transgressive workplace affair between a woman and a much younger man; a mercurial negotiation of power relations involving risky, crisscrossing manipulations and coercions; and, following from both, a bedrock of sadomasochism that emerges fervidly - in flushed closeups and panting soundtrack - from a buttoned-up corporate world of glass and strict hierarchies. But these elements belie the film’s true, surprisingly wholesome nature as a tribute to the importance of candid, consensual communication in sexual relationships. As such, Reijn is less interested in sensual titillation than the social and psychological dynamics that structure desire, power, and status in a capitalist, patriarchal culture. In other words, the film never really gets graphic when you expect it to, shying away from nudity and obscuring sex acts in ways that often feel unduly coy. It’s not that Reijn’s anti-sensationalistic restraint isn’t welcome, but that it makes a weird fit for a film that extols the virtue of being frank about our most intimate sexual wants and needs. The arch, campy aspects of Babygirl are among its most exciting, but Reijn invariably pulls back to a more earnest register before things get too freaky, resulting in a film that comes off as stodgier than its sex-positive message would suggest. What do work wonders are the performances from Nicole Kidman, Harris Dickinson, and Antonio Banderas, who create deeply messy, ambivalent, and not-always-easy-to-read characters that radiate through Reijn’s empathic but too-tidy narrative.