Jumpman

Part of my coverage of the 54th Chicago International Film Festival.

JUMPMAN   ***

Ivan I. Tverdovsky

2018

IDEA:  Reacquainted with his mother sixteen years after she left him in an orphanage's baby box, Denis, who can feel no physical pain, is exploited for an illegal scheme: he jumps in front of moving cars driven by wealthy people, and a rigged jury collects their money.

BLURB:  Jumpman’s most recurring, indelible image – of its half-naked protagonist, Denis, bound by a hose two of his peers pull taut around him – provides a fittingly concise metaphor in a film that doesn’t waste any time getting to and bluntly sticking its point. It’s an image of palpable, suffocating constriction that encapsulates Denis’ exploitation by a corrupt system, but since Denis’s analgesia prevents him from feeling pain, it’s also one that reveals a compulsory numbness born from a cruel, uncaring social order. One can easily understand how the Russia of Jumpman would breed such acedia: Tverdovsky flatly, pungently illustrates a government and a legal structure indifferent to justice, run by a rapacious power elite that pulls all the strings to get its way. The depiction is deliberately unsubtle, the corruption as flagrant to the spectator as it is to the film’s victimized characters, whose cries of innocence during ritual sham trials are impassively brushed over by Tverdovsky’s unblinking, circling camera gaze. Meanwhile, Denis grows from uncritical accomplice to a young adult with scruples, even if he’s been hardened to the point of ossification by the world that has raised him. Desensitization is both a precondition and a systemic symptom of living in a callous, morally bankrupt society, Jumpman says, and while the slim framework it hangs this thesis on can sometimes lack nuance, its simplicity and terseness are also what help deliver its indictment with damning clarity.

We the Animals

WE THE ANIMALS   ***1/2

Jeremiah Zagar

2018

IDEA:  Jonah, the youngest of three brothers in a rural New York household, struggles with his identity amidst a tumultuous family life. 


BLURB:  We the Animals is a film about nascent otherness that is acutely rooted in the point-of-view of its young protagonist. Enmeshing hazy magic-hour imagery with animated interludes, it lyrically and achingly expresses Jonah’s flowering understanding of his queerness, offering an interior account of his desires and anxieties as they emerge from and come to bear on his incipient identity. Many films can be called “dreamlike,” but the descriptor is especially apt for We the Animals: its visualizations of Jonah’s fantasies, whether closer to waking life or reverie, are semi-surreal representations that read as authentically shaped by experience and unconscious feelings, percolating with eroticism, shame, euphoria, and fear that can’t be easily delineated. This mercurial affective flow is especially potent when associated with the sweetly doleful face of Evan Rosado. The young actor, typically shot in extreme close-ups that linger on his yearning blue eyes, creates a tender and lived-in anchor around which the film’s often violent, fulminating drama churns, attuning us to his vulnerable status as he tries to make sense of the storms both within and outside of him. In his curious but bashful gaze we see the world as he does: alluring, confusing, hostile, and potentially magical. And in his dreams, the private refuge of his mind with which we’re allowed this brief, stirring communion, we can imagine with him the possibility of freedom.

The Naked Island

THE NAKED ISLAND   ***1/2

Kaneto Shindo

1960

IDEA:  A peasant family living on a secluded island goes about its daily routines, laboring without the modern amenities available to those across the ocean.

BLURB:  On a primordial ur-island isolated from yet nestled in the archipelago of a modernizing 20^th-century Japan, the nameless protagonists of The Naked Island subsist, even as the tide of historical change and the elements themselves seem to render the conditions of their existence increasingly untenable. Yet they carry on, shouldering buckets of water up a cragged mountainside to irrigate their meager crops in a ritual that recalls the dignity-in-the-face-of-futility of Sisyphus. Shindo locates in their repetitive, enervating agricultural routine such a mythic allegory: a timeless fable of human labor, of enduring through life’s ineluctable struggles with determination and resilience despite the lack of discernible purpose or gain. The film’s effulgent images, which set the protagonists against boundless vistas of land and water, suggest a landscape as immortal as the human drama taking place within it. The Naked Island also, unavoidably, articulates a specific nationalist context, registering the losses and transformations of postwar Japan and offering a vision of social reality situated somewhere between propaganda and elegy. While it might be fair to wince at its depiction of agrarian existence as a reactionary lament for a more honorable primitive past, Shindo coarsens his romanticism with a palpable feel for the pain that permeated, and certainly continued to permeate in 1960, many aspects of Japanese life. The film is gorgeous, but it is also tough, disciplined, and often exhausting – a paean to human toil and tenacity that understands both as prerequisites for survival.

Mother and Son

MOTHER AND SON   ***

Aleksandr Sokurov

1997

IDEA:  In a purgatorial countryside, a son carries his mother through her last corporeal hours.

BLURB:  If it’s possible to be both eternal and evanescent, close to the surface and remote, to convey a sense of being present and irrecoverably missing, then Mother and Son manages it. This seemingly paradoxical condition is, of course, at the core of cinema, the ultimate phantom art, and Sokurov conjures something of that distilled essence in his film’s ghostly wash of images. Alternately and sometimes all at once warped, smudged, faded, and stained, the tableaux that make up Mother and Son look like old photographic artifacts exhumed from some otherworldly bog, set in motion so tentative it’s hard to say if it’s stasis or movement that is being disrupted. Regardless of one’s interpretation or iconic recognition of this aesthetic, the myriad optical effects foreground the mutability of the filmic image and make us conscious of our mediated perception. Because mortality is a theme of the film, the images take on especially spectral qualities: they appear, embalmed, from some unknown past time and space, their existential contents simultaneously frozen and temporarily reanimated within the brief 72 minutes of the film’s runtime. Mother and Son’s brevity preempts any claims of plodding self-seriousness, which a longer film could have easily invited. It’s also what reinforces its austere, porous beauty, flickering like a candle in a cinematic gloaming.

BlacKkKlansman

BLACKKKLANSMAN   **1/2

Spike Lee

2018

IDEA:  Ron Stallworth, the first black member of the Colorado Springs police force, and Flip Zimmerman, a Jewish officer, infiltrate the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan.

BLURB:  The opening of BlacKkKlansman, a direct-address white supremacist lecture intercut with footage from Gone With the Wind and The Birth of a Nation, packs a wallop. It instantly establishes Lee’s film as a rebuke of and corrective to a history of racist popular American cinema, auguring an indignant work of agitprop that will make no bones about condemning the country’s virulent systemic racism. Lee’s outrageous true-story subject matter offers an incendiary way into targeting the white nationalist ideology that has become increasingly mainstreamed in the nation’s political discourse. So why is BlacKkKlansman such a missed opportunity? Why does Lee, outside of some characteristically fiery, rhetorically blunt montage, seem so content pandering to his audience instead of shaking them up? There is little about his film that should be illuminating to anyone not immured in the myth of a post-racial America. There is equally little that should inspire any new thought. What are we to do with endless scenes wringing humor and horror from the KKK’s buffoonish moral degeneracy? Lee redundantly airs their epithet-laden rhetoric and mostly has us pat ourselves on the back for recognizing its insanity, a lazy tactic that takes up too much of the film’s bloated runtime. BlacKkKlansman is a vital work by virtue of its context, but what really should have been challenging, excoriating subversion settles for the fleetingly cathartic.

Eighth Grade

EIGHTH GRADE   ***1/2

Bo Burnham

2018

IDEA:  The diffident Kayla Day struggles to find confidence and a sense of belonging during the final week of eighth grade.

BLURB:  In 90 minutes of screen time and one condensed week in the life of a 14-year-old, Eighth Grade distills the amorphousness and confusion of early adolescent identity. Kayla Day, played by Elsie Fisher with impressively prodigious inelegance, navigates this murky territory the only way she knows how: through social media. Her vlogs provide her a site through which she can present a self-image she is unable to exhibit in person. Despite its putative social function, Burnham crucially understands these vlogs as being primarily in service of the creator, a form of ego-projection that allows Kayla to identify with a version of herself that is more coherent, and aspirational, than the one she fumbles to realize in real life. Eighth Grade gets the combination of effacement and visibility that characterizes such media use, and more generally the embarrassments that come with negotiating an inchoate self-concept, online or otherwise. But what ultimately makes the film so resonant is the eternal applicability of the feelings it portrays. For Burnham, eighth grade is not so much a discrete chapter of perishable experience as a microcosm of existential uncertainties that resurface throughout life. The familiar angsty waves of apprehension may find their most concentrated expression in the pubescent Kayla, but they cannot be solely attributed to a “phase.” Beyond the demo and idiom it so empathetically renders, Eighth Grade is wisest in its recognition of life as a continual process of transition, and change as the often ungainly necessity of our ongoing maturation.

Black Girl

BLACK GIRL   ****

Ousmane Sembène

1966

IDEA:  A Senegalese woman emigrates to France thinking she will continue her role as caretaker for her employers' children, but when she gets there she is increasingly stripped of her freedom as their indentured domestic servant.

BLURB:  Black Girl starkly registers the abuses of European colonialism through the eyes of a Senegalese woman trapped in its systems of racial, sexual, and economic oppression. Conceptually, this narrowed focus on the experiences of a colonial subject is itself a radical and revolutionary act, a centering of African identity and personhood that affords privileged status to the colonized at the necessary diminution of the colonizers. By allowing Diouana’s thoughts and actions to narrate the film, Sembène foregrounds the voice and presence of a woman who is expected to be submissive and unseen, providing a harrowingly internal and profoundly empathetic account of her exploited humanity. He and the magnificent Mbissine Thérèse Diop communicate with blunt eloquence so much of this person beyond the indignities inflicted upon her, making her plight all the more unbearable. They attune us to her heritage, her dreams, her tenacity; to her ordinary decency; to her feelings of cultural dislocation and loss of self-possession in a literal domestic prison. Black Girl is a staggeringly tragic film in its depiction of an individual destroyed by a seemingly incurable colonial mentality, but it is the opposite of a resigned one. Sembène’s angry first-person portrait opens up, in the end, into a collective announcement of national resistance and reclamation, in which a personification of Africa literally expunging one of the film’s white aggressors howls with an implacable defiance. A lacerating indictment of the post-colonial myth, Black Girl endures as one of the cinema’s most forthright and emotionally naked works of political modernism.