Ad Astra

AD ASTRA   ***1/2

James Gray

2019

IDEA:  Sometime in the near future, an astronaut is enlisted to travel to Mars to make contact with his missing dad, whose mission to find life on Neptune ended in disaster.

BLURB:  In Ad Astra, outer space is both a horizon of socio-techno possibility and a spiritual gulf, a vastness reflecting back humanity’s multitudinous contradictions and inner conflicts. Space is always some kind of metaphor, but by rejecting the metaphysical and transcendent properties commonly attached to it, Gray’s stately, exquisitely internalized drama turns it into something inescapably anthropomorphic, less an other-space of speculation than a tunnel into the psyche. Specifically, the psyche of Brad Pitt’s Roy McBride, whose quest to find his father becomes a progressively more pensive, dark-night-of-the-soul reckoning with himself. Depicted by Gray with absorbing procedural rigor as he steadily advances us between checkpoints, Roy’s journey gradually morphs from one of ambivalent professional duty to one of obsessive personal interest, surfacing the repressed feelings that have, all along, underpinned his work and identity. His traversal of the solar system is thus a traversal of societal and psychical distances, an attempt to resolve the discrepancies between aspirations and reality that seem to structure Ad Astra’s world of futurist disappointments. Progress does not erase human foibles or prevailing cultural systems, Gray suggests, so much as magnify and stretch them out, the canvas of the cosmos setting into relief all those things so innate to the species: knowledge, ambition, and the wills to create and destroy. And, of course, the propensity for self-awareness and introspection, which Pitt embodies as the most achingly primordial of existential conditions. Despite its heavy air of disillusionment, Ad Astra is not leaden or resigned. Just skirting triteness, it instead locates in its personal crucible a humanity worth holding on to, as long as we can.

Araby

ARABY   **1/2

João Dumans and Affonso Uchoa

2017

IDEA:  Through his diary, peripatetic laborer Cristiano tells of his arduous life on the road.

BLURB:  As an elegiac ode to the invisible, exploited lives of migrant laborers, Araby is considerably affecting. Its first-person perspective gives valuable interiority to one such worker, elevating his status beyond the marginalized position capitalist society assigns him. Here he tells his own story, and we see how the effects of itinerancy, impersonal industrial labor, and a system designed to keep one disenfranchised gradually wear away a person’s sense of purpose and possibility. The film is smart in how it addresses these socioeconomic conditions without sensationalism, honoring Cristiano simply by devoting ordinary attention to his life and work, using a journal to give us access to thoughts and feelings that would otherwise go unexpressed. But Araby’s unadorned straightforwardness is also limiting. Outside of its oblique first act, the film’s narrative approach is largely prosaic, favoring expository voice-over and a rigid, this-then-this recounting of events. There is a flatness to this narration that is reinforced by the visuals, which seldom rise above the level of functional. Perhaps that’s right for the story of a regular working-class man, one whose life hardly needs frills to be worth telling. Still, there’s the nagging feeling that the idea of Araby is more praiseworthy than its actual execution; only at its lyrical, plaintive coda do the two achieve true synthesis.

First Name: Carmen

FIRST NAME: CARMEN   ***

Jean-Luc Godard

1983

IDEA:  While robbing a bank to ostensibly get money to finance a film, a woman ends up falling in love with a feckless guard.

BLURB:  “In memoriam small movies,” reads Godard’s droll epitaph. Following one such presumably “small” movie, what would be a characteristically grandiose statement from the director, a bombastic claim akin to Weekend’s eulogy to cinema in toto, instead acts as archly self-deprecating punctuation. First Name: Carmen is a scherzo, a proud trifle in which Godard, cast as a deflated, washed-up version of himself, sends up his own repertoire of predilections. Discontinuity and asynchronous sound proliferate; artistic and political maxims become self-parodic. The plot, as it were, is a sort of “behind-the-scenes” meta-narrative, only here, the would-be filmmakers and financiers are outlaws, and instead of making their own movie, they’re unwittingly facilitating the one we’re watching. It’s as if the bedraggled Godard, by stepping in front of the camera, has ceded his film(s) to the subjects he often makes them about: consumer capitalism and battles of the sexes, criminality and rebellion, here diegetic forces that seem to have usurped his authority. First Name: Carmen is familiar in how it calls attention to its artifice, but it’s also unusual in how it largely hides the materialism it talks about, how it intimates a kind of auto-production that occurred while Godard was putzing around somewhere. The film is the director at his fleetest and least high-handed, even as it makes its effacements into impishly self-regarding gestures.

Under the Silver Lake

UNDER THE SILVER LAKE   ***

David Robert Mitchell

2018

IDEA:  After his new, alluring neighbor inexplicably disappears, an L.A. slacker follows a series of cryptic bread crumbs to find her.

BLURB:  Saturated with circuitous chains of allusions and inter-textual quotes, the Los Angeles of Under the Silver Lake suggests the city as pastiche, as an oneiric urban space constructed from the phantoms of its cultural products. It’s a 21^st-century (un)reality as imagined by Andrew Garfield’s Sam, a sort of exemplary, semi-toxic millennial layabout whose media obsessions are all that’s holding together the tatters of his existence. Rootless, disaffected, and economically and sexually vexed, he latches onto arcane codes and patterns in a desperate bid to anchor his life and the fathomless culture around it to some semblance of meaning. David Robert Mitchell alternately confounds and affirms him: he shows Sam’s convoluted, paranoiac fixations on cryptology and conspiracy to be as crazed and ultimately otiose as they are, humorously drowning him in dead ends and absurd reveals, but he also shows that his paranoia is basically justified. Like John Carpenter’s They Live, one of Mitchell’s bountiful references, the joke of Under the Silver Lake is that the ideological mechanisms that underlie society don’t really need to be uncovered; however elaborately they may manifest themselves, they exist more or less out in the open, and we’re powerless to do anything with our knowledge other than bask in a vague sense of enlightenment. A monument to semiotic overload, Under the Silver Lake reflects a uniquely contemporary, contradictory condition of a hyper-mediated world: the feeling of being simultaneously bewildered and all-too aware.

Moonrise

MOONRISE   ***

Frank Borzage

1948

IDEA:  Danny has been ridiculed and abused mercilessly since his father was hanged for shooting a man. After he kills one of his tormenters during a fight, he attempts to evade the consequences.

BLURB:  When a film comes out of the gate with as much brio as Moonrise, the likelihood of it sustaining such vigor is fairly low. It’s not exactly a surprise, then, that this is the case with Borzage’s film. Following a jolting opening, in which the traumatic history that haunts the protagonist is conveyed in paroxysms of expressionistic shadows and alarming cuts, the film settles into a more straightforward vein as Dane Clark’s Danny tries to outrun both his past and the law. Borzage and Russell’s rich visual palette remains, but the opening’s visceral shocks are replaced by more prosaic evocations of shame and guilt, symbolized by noose-like hangings and constricted, tenebrous spaces. Still, Borzage keeps an anguished and compassionate focus on Danny, and he keeps us shrewdly attuned to his psychological state. Through its audiovisual repetitions, the film displays both an understanding of anxiety’s circular structure and the ways it finds a correlative in the narrative and formal conventions of noir. Perhaps the ultimate success of Moonrise, however, is in how it finally breaks from those conventions to give its protagonist redemptive agency. Swerving away from the standard postwar fatalism, Borzage pronounces a belief in the ability of man to absolve himself from violence and trauma, mostly with the help of women’s love and wisdom. It’s earnest to a fault, but it’s also a relieving breath of air that lifts the film’s damp pall.

Katzelmacher

KATZELMACHER   ***

Rainer Werner Fassbinder

1969

IDEA:  A group of desultory, financially and sexually frustrated friends respond with fear and contempt when a Greek immigrant enters their circle.

BLURB:  The vapid bourgeois characters in Katzelmacher spend all their time gossiping and demeaning each other, stalled in a recursive sequence of toxic lassitude. In their flat, ossified world, bigotry and moral sloth don’t have any pretty facades to hide behind. They are as stark and frontal-facing as the austere frames that hold the characters in place like mannequins stuck in molasses, unashamedly spewing forth from the mouths of those who see love, friendship, and community only as opportunities for exploitation. Yes, this is a Fassbinder film. But whereas the director’s later films couch all this misanthropy in variously baroque mise-en-scènes, Katzelmacher is the bare-bones version of Fassbinder’s despairing, unsparing worldview, stripped down to its lacerating parts. Essentially a series of static takes of characters exchanging insults, deadpanning morose aphorisms, and finally spouting all-too familiar xenophobic rhetoric, the film is as direct and pitiless a commentary on the social barbarism of the privileged classes as one could ask for. There is a brute, minimalist elegance here that is ruthlessly efficient, from the frankness of the dialogue to the curt, razor-edged edits that end each scene before the next starts the process all over. Even at 89 minutes, the effect of this repetitious, one-track vileness is oppressive – and no doubt, Fassbinder’s intent. His mercilessly forthright approach leaves no buffer room for his dissolute characters, or for us.

My Winnipeg

MY WINNIPEG   ****

Guy Maddin

2007

IDEA:  Stuck on a train full of sleeping passengers, Guy Maddin dreams of finding his way out of Winnipeg.

BLURB:  An exemplary, modestly magisterial work of autobiography and folk confabulation, city symphony and urban mythologizing, Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg seizes the spectator like a lucid dream. Carried along on relentless flurries of memory, history, and imagination, it creates a portrait of place not in its concrete reality, but in its lived and remembered experience, its psychic undercurrents and affective reverberations. In a kind of culmination of his fixation with making the past return, Maddin sculpts from the snowdrifts of his mind his most cohesive primal fantasy, reanimating his-story by answering the archaic anxieties and drives that fuel the cinematic project. Through his hypnagogic vision of Winnipeg, he creates the ultimate urban origin myth to restore, however briefly, presence and historicity to a city blurred by blizzards; analogously, to relocate his identity by enacting his self-formation, harnessing the psychical traces of his childhood and inscribing them in an external imaginary world. Although Maddin, as ever, sometimes overdoes the cuteness of his conceits, My Winnipeg has such a bottomless supply of mystery, humor, and poignancy it is rarely hobbled. There are few films that so intimately understand the roles imagination and metaphor play in how we give meaning to places, that reflect Ben Highmore’s conception of the city as a “tangle of physicality and symbolism, the sedimentation of various histories, the mingling of imaginings and experience.” My Winnipeg makes palpable the reciprocity and interpenetration of body and place, psychology and geography, past and present, one endlessly shaping the other.