Boxing Gym

BOXING GYM   ***1/2

Frederick Wiseman

2010

IDEA:  A look at Lord's Gym in Austin, Texas.

BLURB:  Boxing Gym is a film of rhythms. To a degree greater than typical for Wiseman, it foregrounds physical routine over institutional detail, immersing the viewer in an environment characterized by its kinetic and sonic textures. This approach is largely apropos for a study of a gym, which lacks many of the intricate bureaucratic and social dimensions that Wiseman is so good at peeling back in portraits of more complex institutional spaces. That’s not to say Boxing Gym is deprived of socioeconomic, gender, and racial insights – the gym’s melting-pot clientele guarantees its reflection of not just Austin but America – only that the film privileges the effects of a more surface-level materiality. Diminishing the role of dialog, Wiseman returns to the repetitive images and sounds of athletic labor: the smack of gloves against punching bags and focus mitts, the beep of the timer, the dancelike footwork of practice drills. These actions grow nearly incantatory under Wiseman’s steady gaze, transcending their practical function to become something closer to meditation, experienced both individually and among likeminded neighbors. Boxing Gym may be lighter on penetrating social revelations than other films by the director, but its quotidian audiovisual symphony still manages to get at something tactilely profound about the work of focused recreation.

Funeral Parade of Roses

FUNERAL PARADE OF ROSES   ***

Toshio Matsumoto

1969

IDEA:  The young, genderqueer Eddie copes with the effects of his traumatic childhood while navigating love and betrayal in Japan's underground transvestite culture.

BLURB:  Funeral Parade of Roses is a definitive work of the late 60s, not only for its emphatic engagement with countercultural politics, but for its freewheeling, liberated mélange of formal experimentation. Matsumoto positively doubles down on the puckish stylization and distancing meta-cinematic gestures of his French and Japanese New Wave peers, swelling his aesthetic arsenal with all manner of modes and techniques: vérité documentary, flicker film, slapstick comedy, Freudian melodrama, youth film, soft psychedelia, camp. The cumulative effect of this madcap pastiche is often exhilarating, reaching boundary-obliterating peaks of invention in alignment with the characters’ fluid gender identities. The constant dismantling of the film’s representational mechanisms and the quicksilver transformations of its form thus serve to posit a conception of the self as something constantly being remade and performed. Such a thesis is hardly radical, and despite its decadent, sensuous expression in Funeral Parade of Roses, rarely expands beyond a general philosophical truism. What is most novel and enduring here is what exists in the eye of Matsumoto’s whirligig storm: the unfettered reality of a queer Japanese underground, witnessed beneath and through the spectacle as the face of inchoate but headlong generational change.

Distant Voices, Still Lives

DISTANT VOICES, STILL LIVES   ***

Terence Davies

1988

IDEA:  A mother and her three children grapple with domestic abuse and other daily social realities in postwar England.

BLURB:  Davies’ debut attempt at cinematically distilling the phenomenon of memory, Distant Voices, Still Lives takes its birfucated title descriptors as spectral, organizing aesthetic principles. From its first lingering frame, in which the sounds of children are dissociated from their absent bodies, to the recurring tableau frames that embalm the characters in the frozen sepia of an irretrievable past, the film evokes something of the form and affect of a family album. Plot or linear time are inhibited by the floating, pre-lingual structure of memory, generating sideways, emotionally intuitive connections between communal singalongs and domestic violence, family mirth and marital malaise. Unlike the similar, subsequent The Long Day Closes, Davies’ debut is unmoored from any diegetic point-of-view, making its vignettes and the ideas that underlie them seem almost too diffuse, as if they might only make real sense to their author, who remains always conspicuously outside the vaporous body of the film. Somewhat frustratingly, Distant Voices, Still Lives thus plays as a wholly personal, painfully private film-souvenir: for Davies, its reconstructed memories call up the absent people and things the audience can only meagerly perceive.

Vive L'Amour

VIVE L'AMOUR    ****

Tsai Ming-liang

1994

IDEA:  A realtor, a salesman, and a seller of counterfeit goods tenuously orbit and occupy the same empty Taipei loft, searching for intimacy.

BLURB:  The characters of Vive L’Amour inhabit the material reality of a rapidly modernizing Taipei, cast adrift in its simultaneous proliferation and shrinking of space. For Tsai, the conditions of this material space are necessarily poetic and affective, generating an embodied urban liminality that precludes the rootedness of human subjects. His characters drift and dwell, but the spaces that hold their torpid bodies are too unstable to retain them or facilitate their unity – an architectural crisis, perhaps, of a colonial island nation transferred between so many owners. The anonymous, mostly barren loft that becomes the locus of Vive L’Amour thus reads as a metonym for Taipei: rendered spatially nebulous by Tsai’s camera and edits, it’s a provisional site for the construction of human life in a quickly growing capitalist city. Crucially, none of the characters in Tsai’s alienated would-be love triangle own or even rent the space; they can only occupy it discreetly, and never to each other’s knowledge all at once, walls and doors and the undersides of mattresses just more barriers between private, atomized lives. In his exquisitely modulated accretion of individual anomies and yearnings, crystallized here in only his second feature, Tsai viscerally gets to the heart of the relationship between modern urban space and human sociality, depicting with a supreme aching warmth how often physical proximity is incommensurate with actual connection.

Billy Liar

BILLY LIAR   ***1/2

John Schlesinger

1963

IDEA:  Stultified by his home life and job in his dreary Northern England town, pathological prevaricator Billy Fisher recedes into his fantasies.

BLURB:  If you condensed the disaffection, restlessness, temporizing, imprudence, egoism, and waywardness that often attends young adulthood – specifically one in early 1960s working-class England – you’d come up with Billy Liar’s Billy Fisher as the model specimen. The Angry Young Man played by Tom Courtenay is a quintessential avatar of a generation on the precipice of a sea change, as well as an enduring icon of all things anxious and liminal about being young and directionless. While Courtenay’s Colin Smith from The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner is diligent and arguably principled in his willfulness, Billy is a floundering hodgepodge of feckless decisions and evasions, someone whose fantasies and non-commitments serve as defense mechanisms against the prescriptions and expectations of a staid reality. We lament his chronic irresponsibility but understand his position, which is not fostered so much by character deficiency as the dead hand of society. Such social critique is crucial to Billy Liar as it is to its British New Wave brethren, but it’s neither the thesis nor the film’s most affecting element. What ultimately makes Schlesinger’s work resonate is its complicated, timeless character study, and the poignant suggestion that Billy’s overdue answering to filial duty might also, paradoxically, be yet another means of prolonging the fantasy of escape.

Un Flic

UN FLIC   ***1/2

Jean-Pierre Melville

1972

IDEA:  A cat-and-mouse game ensues between a stolid cop and a cadre of thieves.

BLURB:  In Jean-Pierre Melville’s final, sepulchral film, a cop is hardly different from the criminals he chases. Occupying a perpetually drizzly, color-drained Paris, they’re all frozen in the same milieu of prescribed processes and aggressive rituals. Planning and executing heists and tracking down suspects have been ground down to the same baseline of mechanical motions, emptied of either transgressive triumph or justice, subsisting purely on the fumes of archetypal antecedents. Characterized by Melville’s signature laconic nonchalance but most notable for its pronounced, distancing artifice, Un Flic plays as a genre deconstruction that distills the essences of the crime film into something almost perversely strange. Elements that initially seem slapdash or stilted – weird jumpy cuts, a protracted action set-piece with toy models, brazenly ersatz backdrops – read less as crude liabilities than as apt gestures for evoking an uncanny, simulacral filmic world, its parts fully exposed. As outlandish as much of this can seem, Melville is not out for parody. His gaze is sharp, earnest, and existential as always, trained indulgently but sternly on the alienating roles of masculinity. Delon drives on, but his spirit languishes in monochrome.

Let the Sunshine In

LET THE SUNSHINE IN   ***1/2

Claire Denis

2017

IDEA:  A middle-aged woman cycles through a series of suitors seeking elusive satisfaction in love.

BLURB:  Based on its plot alone, one would have every reason to expect Let the Sunshine In to be another superfluous, banal film about romantic malaise. And yet, Denis and an utterly luminescent Binoche turn it into something unassumingly fresh, wise, and elating: a portrait of midlife loneliness rich in intimate emotional texture, and attuned equally to the satisfactions and frustrations of desire. While that last point keeps the film consistent with much of the director’s oeuvre, Denis forgoes her typically oblique style for something much more modestly straightforward, to refreshing effect. The resulting film is light without being trifling, casual in a way that seems effortless, but betraying a keen sense for the affects of longing, romantic confusion, vulnerability, and dissatisfaction. None of it would work without the supernova-level power of Binoche at its center. Radiantly eager and then self-sabotaging in a maddening back-and-forth with herself, her Isabelle is a woman who dives quixotically into bad relationships, hoping for something that can never be fulfilled. Denis knows that much of the pleasure is in the pursuit, even when the pursuit takes on such a foolhardy, masochistic form. She also knows that the desire that impels Isabelle will never be fully sated. In an ingenious ending that lifts Let the Sunshine In into gentle transcendence, Denis prematurely rolls the credits over a conversation between two lost souls, grasping for some solace. The credits end, but the film stubbornly persists, as if it has itself absorbed the meaning of the last spoken word: “open.”