First Cow

FIRST COW   ***1/2

Kelly Reichardt

2019

IDEA:  In 1820s Oregon Territory, a fur trapper befriends a Chinese immigrant, and together start a baking business using a cow shipped to the area from France.

BLURB:  In the damp evergreens, muds, and ochres of an untamed Pacific Northwest, First Cow stages a microcosm of America in its incipient progress: toward industrialism and capitalism, and the social and material realities upon which they operate. Reichardt’s opening image of a cargo ship crawling across an Oregon river casts the historical events of the film as a direct prelude to these organizing systems of global contemporary life, effectively transforming even the most unassuming moments into harbingers of a faraway modernity. Yet Reichardt and screenwriter Jonathan Raymond are not didactic about these signals; by meticulously but only partially parceling out details of character and milieu, they create an immersive, in-the-moment portrait of the early American West that feels appropriately inchoate, filled with itinerant pursuits and narratives in media res. Supported by Christopher Blauvelt’s earthy lensing, First Cow is so impressive largely because of the authenticity this approach confers, making palpable a world not yet fully molded to the image of commerce, whose opportunities have been only provisionally tapped. It’s also impressive because Reichardt and Raymond refuse to view this fledgling American project in popular dualistic terms. If they’re somberly aware of the country’s founding and proliferating principles of exploitation and inequality, they’re also eager to celebrate the multiethnic relations that make up its cultural bedrock. First Cow is characterized by the poignant ambivalence that arises from this measured perspective: from the understanding that a cow’s milk can be both a gift of a nature and a privatized commodity.

The Cormorants

THE CORMORANTS   **1/2

Fabio Bobbio

2016

IDEA:  Two close preteen friends hang out over one long summer.

BLURB:  Fully evoking the term “lazy summer,” The Cormorants fills its runtime with, well, idle time. Mop-headed prepubescents Samu and Matte - presumably lightly fictionalized versions of the boys who play them - swim in the river, lounge in the sun, hang out at a mall and a carnival, and stalk the forest. Sometimes they bike. Like other boys their age, they talk about sex and are prone to spontaneous roughhousing. The passage of time is indeterminate; the sun sets and rises, but the kids’ clothing never changes, and their activities vary little. Applying many of the principles of slow cinema to the coming-of-age film while also folding in docu-fictional realism, Bobbio has come up with something simultaneously leaden and sensuous, totally aimless and yet often absorbing in its ambling youthful languors. Almost perversely vacated of incident or character development, Bobbio seems only to want us to relive the dilated temporality and affects of childhood, using his opaque but deeply physicalized subjects as surrogates through which to experience the textures of young (male) leisure and bonding. DP Stefano Giovannini depicts the look and feel of afternoon sun on skin with tactile precision; studying the boys’ lithe bodies, at rest and in scrappy, homosocial play, we are transported to a stage of relative disinhibition, of free movement and intimate exploration. If The Cormorants doesn’t just fade away into uneventful nothingness, it’s because Bobbio and Giovanni have captured something pure about their subjects’ dispositions, in the jubilant and seemingly eternal crest of their youth.

The Store

THE STORE   ***1/2

Frederick Wiseman

1983

IDEA:  A look at the flagship Neiman Marcus store in Dallas, Texas.

BLURB:  Normally, one would reasonably expect a documentary set inside the confines of a lavish department store to function as fairly straightforward capitalist critique. This expectation seems to be fed during the film’s opening minutes, as an executive extols the almighty importance of sales, and extravagant apparel multiplies through mirrors into ego-affirming excess. But this is a Frederick Wiseman film, so judgment is suspended; any urge toward a polemical indictment is disarmed by mundane observation. In some ways, this approach makes the film’s view of consumer capitalism even more pointed. Instead of facilely underscoring the outrageous materialism of Neiman Marcus so as to land an easy jab at commodity culture, Wiseman simply shows the store in its quotidian workings, its systems and operations totally naturalized by the employees and customers who live by the logics of commerce. Wiseman does not need to insert didactic exposition or juxtapositions (although some cuts knowingly play up human/product parallels) to demonstrate the fundamental strangeness of a massive corporation, to reveal it as a synecdoche, for better or worse, of a culture elaborately constructed for unceasing consumption. Yet nothing here feels insidious, amazingly, not even a final banquet honoring Stanley Marcus held in front of what looks like a giant reproduction of the Vietnam flag. What one interprets as elitist, cultish, dehumanizing, or myopic is merely implicit, delivered by the apparatuses of consumer capitalism themselves.

Careful

CAREFUL   ***1/2

Guy Maddin

1992

IDEA:  In an Alpine village where all residents must be extremely quiet to avoid setting off an avalanche, two brothers train to become butlers while competing for the affection of the same woman.

BLURB:  In Guy Maddin’s cinema of psychosexual delirium, unconscious drives and anxieties are never hidden and rarely subtextual: they always rush unabated across the surface, their primitive origins unearthed in tandem with the archaic filmic idioms the director has made a career of recreating. Careful is one of his early peaks, as well as a great exemplification of how he animates his psychoanalytic preoccupations – hyperbolically, absurdly – at the level of the text. Here, Maddin conjures an early Technicolor-style burlesque of lurid Freudianism, replete with overlapping Oedipal dramas, elaborate castration fantasies, death wishes, and, always, neurotically repressed desires fit to burst. The last point finds its ingenious geographic manifestation in the film’s Alpine town, wherein acting on one’s feelings – even so much as a sneeze – might literally unleash a deadly avalanche upon the community. This being Maddin, whose characters always fail spectacularly at suppressing their sweaty impulses, there’s little question that such feelings will erupt. As caution and propriety are repeatedly, perversely breached, Careful builds in hysteria, its biliously tinted frames and arch, deadpan dialog giving it the tenor of a waking fever dream. For Maddin, that’s just what cinema is – and often life, too.

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.