Le Gai Savoir

LE GAI SAVOIR   **1/2

Jean-Luc Godard

1969

IDEA:  Two radical Leftist students convene on an empty television set to discuss politics, language, images, and the state of the world.

BLURB:  How do you foster revolutionary thought and action within the institutional apparatuses designed to suppress them? What does a radical, anti-establishment politics look, sound, and feel like, especially as it expresses itself through the assaultive din of mass culture? These are the questions being self-reflexively wrestled with in Le Gai Savoir, Godard’s characteristically droll, smug, formally adventurous mix of abrasive Marxist dialectic and intellectual wankery. Patricia and Émile meet up in the inky nowhere of a TV studio to ruminate, lament, and allegedly formulate an ideological plan of action in the midst of countercultural crisis, but rather than posit anything really coherent, the film is mostly an excuse for Godard to noodle around with audiovisual syntax. When he’s not dwelling on the baroquely side-lit silhouettes of Jean-Pierre Léaud and Juliet Berto, he’s serving up barrages of disjunctive signifiers, with scribbled-on advertisements, documentary footage, propaganda, war photographs, and gnomic pronouncements creating such a florid semiotic density that the real-world issues they index tend to get obscured. It’s a relatively enjoyable, giddy explosion of language, all things considered – the Etch-A-Sketch interlude is a delight – but to what end? Are Godard’s protests efficacious or elitist pontification from an artist’s ivory tower? At least he can admit that it all might be for naught: that maybe, in 1969 or today, Le Gai Savoir is most powerful as a sadly self-aware epitaph for a movement stuck gazing longingly at its embattled ideals.

Top 10 - 2019

For whatever reason, it was the year of the pas de deux. From duos chummy (DiCaprio/Pitt in Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood) to psychotic (Pattison/Dafoe in The Lighthouse) to acrimonious and yearning (Driver/Johansson in Marriage Story) to aching from absences of affection (LaBeouf/Jupe in Honey Boy) to galvanized by the possibilities of a gaze fleetingly liberated (Haenel/Merlant in Portrait of a Lady on Fire, seen above), to... papal (those Two Popes), cinema in 2019 offered abundant proof that one of the medium's greatest effects is the frisson created by a couple of human beings interacting with each other.

It was also the year of auto-fiction, with a remarkable number of directors using the form to ruminate on their lives and careers, often in ways that seemed confessional and self-exorcising. In addition to Tarantino's grandiose ego trip, a paean to a lost Hollywood that was also, by extension, a fetishistic self-monument, there was Scorsese's autumnal gangster culmination The Irishman, Joanna Hogg's fictionalized origin story The Souvenir, Pedro Almodóvar's warm, wistful retrospective Pain and Glory, Noah Baumbach's Marriage Story, informed by the experience of his own divorce, and the wrenching Honey Boy, directed by Alma Har'el and written by Shia LaBeouf as a therapeutic exercise while he was in rehab.

Also, Netflix expanded its influence over the market, and Disney continued to grow its quasi-monopolistic media hegemony. But you've read about this elsewhere (resist!). All said, it was a pretty terrific year for movies.

My Top 10 films of this last year of the decade, to follow...

Horse Money

HORSE MONEY   ***1/2

Pedro Costa

2014

IDEA:  Cape Verdean immigrant Ventura moves between ambiguous but always entrapping institutional interiors and temporal realms, encountering figures from his and Portugal's past.

BLURB:  With its subaltern bodies drifting among deep-focus passageways and decrepit spaces, abstracted by engulfing shadows and shards of spectral light, Horse Money’s imagery suggests a haunted, postcolonial Caravaggio, or a petrified dystopian underworld. The look of Costa’s film is simultaneously harsh, alien, suffocating, and uncannily anti-naturalistic, which is to say that it’s an affectively astute visualization of the state inhabited by Ventura, who wanders this just-barely earthly purgatory as a spirit arrested by social and political systems that disavow his claims to the life-world. He is, in a very physical sense, smothered by darkness and stasis, his uncontrollable tremor a signifier of irrepressible historical trauma that cannot, in any case, break through the shadows that entomb him. That tension between trembling and stifled movement vibrates beneath almost all of Costa’s eerily sharp, torpid frames, whose fastidious compositions seem always under threat of either completely ossifying or being suddenly pierced by violence, evoking the fragility of so many marginalized people’s socio-historical positions as well as the visual mechanisms that often make them perceptible at the expense of their humanity. This fuzzy representational realm is navigated by Horse Money with such mannered aestheticism, one might wonder if the approach is less about suffocation than merely suffocating, obscuring its characters under a carapace of remote avant-gardism. One is also inclined to see this aesthetic language, indeed to feel it, as a bold phenomenological appeal to certain embodied experiences that demand their own singular, inassimilable articulation.

Uncut Gems

UNCUT GEMS   ***1/2

Josh and Benny Safdie

2019

IDEA:  A jeweler in New York City's Diamond District desperately attempts to claw his way out of a series of debts, placing his faith on a rock he's procured from Ethiopia that's allegedly worth over a million dollars.

BLURB:  Walking a particularly tremulous tightrope, Uncut Gems is at once a withering indictment of commodity culture and capitalist exploitation and a deliciously screwball symphony of bad judgment, its sense of escalating mayhem equally conducive to expressing the terrifying freefall and manic farce of one man’s sensational flameout. This idiosyncratic tonal mixture is seeded in the opening sequence, in which the Safdie brothers boldly juxtapose timeless geologic beauty with humanly abjection, setting material greed, capital worship, and subjugation on an ancient temporal plane that has evolved and warped across millennia. Where it ends up is inside the splenetic body of Adam Sandler’s Howard Ratner, an inveterate huckster and gambler whose entire life cosmology is predicated on monetary transactions in pursuit of an impossible profit. Channeling and reinforcing the relentlessness of his wheeling-and-dealing, the Safdies create a whirlwind of barely controlled chaos, their scenes increasingly fueled by proliferating conflicts and mishaps tied to Ratner’s compulsive, almost primal need for the agitation of modern capitalist life. That this life can really only lead to spiritual, cultural, and physical depletion is the thesis underlying even Uncut Gems’ most brazenly comic constructions, an axiom that one waits in uneasy anticipation to spring on its unexamined protagonist. Yet while the Safdies are primarily concerned with Ratner’s epic follies, they don’t lay the blame on just him, or merely on his disastrous choices; rather, like the mythical allure of the opal at the film's center, everyone becomes ensnared by the market logics of an economy whose cessation would spell our own.

A Hidden Life

A HIDDEN LIFE   ***

Terrence Malick

2019

IDEA:  Based on the true story of Austrian peasant Franz Jägerstätter, who refused to vow his oath to Hitler during World War II. 

BLURB:  Verdant mountains extend as far as the eye can see, towering into the sky, shimmering in streams of crystal water as implacable and enveloping as the blankets of rolling mist. The pastoral Alpine landscape of A Hidden Life is as quintessentially a breathing monument to the sublimity of nature as Malick has ever conjured, an earthly cathedral that invites our full-bodied reverence. For the first half of the film it appears in nearly every shot, wide-angle lenses wrapping it around the characters, rendering the very condition of being-in-the-world as an inextricable, continuous intertwinement with a splendor that is always there, even when your consciousness intends elsewhere. As ever, Malick is all about guiding it back. In A Hidden Life, perhaps more than ever before, he does this with laser-focused political intent, framing the spectacular plenitude of nature as a constant, cosmic rebuke to the festering evil of fascism. Through the unwaveringly principled Franz, a humble steward of that nature, Malick conveys how moral responsibility is a fortifying act allied with social and ecological perdurance. To turn one’s back on virtue, he argues, is not merely to abandon personal ethics but to diminish all of the world. Frustratingly, A Hidden Life sheds some of its power as that diminution is forced upon Franz, the tautological scenes of his imprisonment tending to blunt both theme and affect. But at its best, the film invokes the awesome magnitude of life beyond the bounds of our futilely constricting human systems, and attains its poignancy by wondering what the world might be like if conscientiousness didn’t so often have to be an audacious position.

Portrait of a Lady on Fire

PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE   ***1/2

Céline Sciamma

2019

IDEA:  On a remote part of Brittany in the 18th century, an artist and the woman whose marriage portrait she's hired to paint find themselves falling in love.

BLURB:  The portrait around which Portrait of a Lady on Fire revolves is the product and locus of reciprocating female gazes, a representation of a history of women’s voices and labor hidden and subsumed under patriarchal culture. It is, perhaps unsurprisingly, a mise-en-abyme of Céline Sciamma’s film itself. Like the painting, which is forged from the intimate and egalitarian meeting of female subjects, Portrait of a Lady on Fire fashions itself as a distaff oasis, restoring to the canons of both painting and cinema the agency of women. It is in this uncovered milieu that Marianne and Héloïse are free to entwine their gazes and their bodies, as well as to explore roles of subjectivity and representation that find their conduits in the visual arts. Sciamma’s frames, alternately awash in limpid pastels and lit in golden Vermeer light, effectively turn the medium of film into an extension of painting, taking portraits of the central women in lingering two-shots that allow every minute gesture to seem infinitely present, impressing themselves upon our memories. But Portrait of a Lady on Fire is as much about the power of the gaze to hold and retain as it is about its transience, its inability to fully materially grasp an object, no matter how intently ones stares. It’s in this way that Sciamma’s film charts a fairly familiar trajectory of forbidden love made briefly, hotly present. But by situating this narrative within this idiom, and by interrogating the politics of its aesthetics, she is able to make it into something that defies the fate of its romance: a portrait that indexes a whole other world of feeling and desire that no mimetic image can contain.

Waves

WAVES   ***1/2

Trey Edward Shults

2019

IDEA:  An African-American family in southern Florida deals with the repercussions of their decisions.

BLURB:  True to the title, emotions and sensations cascade through Trey Edward Shults’ film like barreling waves, endlessly redistributing between its characters rations of grief, rage, and hope. Leaning as heavily into formalist flourishes as fervid melodrama, the director makes the film into a palpitating field of intensities, a living mood ring that makes you feel every hot, cold, devastating, and rapturous temperamental vagary in appropriately oscillating surges. What Shults is after here, and what he conveys with such affective force through this rhythmic expressionism, is how people inherit and transfer energies both positive and harmful, and particularly how this manifests within one family’s fragile ecosystem. The first part of Waves, which is orchestrated more like a bullet-paced thriller than a domestic drama, is focused primarily on the harmful energies. Plunged into the subjectivity of the obstinate, overweening Tyler, it’s a breathless flurry of 360-degree pans, booming music cues, and strobes blurring into police lights, a portrait of a young man’s downfall precipitated by a father, and by extension a culture of masculinity, that equates strength with dominance. The second half is no less immersive, even as it replaces Tyler’s blinkered male perspective with the more open, feminized one of his sister. Here, Waves ambitiously revises and redeems the tragedy that cleaves it in two, showing how the aftermath of a family trauma can, in the best case scenario, be transmuted into redemptive love and understanding. Shults’ move toward the homiletic in this part flirts with the banal, and risks awarding easy resolutions where none exist. But it’s the bone-deep performances, the naked emotionality, and the director’s visceral command of form and feeling that give Waves its sense of tidal release.