Nomadland

 

NOMADLAND   ***1/2

Chloé Zhao

2020

IDEA:  When the sheetrock factory that sustains her small Nevada town is shuttered, a widow embarks on a soul-searching RV journey across the West, meeting up with other nomads along the way.

BLURB:  Although the main thrust of its narrative is catalyzed by the 2008 recession, Nomadland is less concerned with socioeconomic ordeals than existential ones. For Zhao as it has been for so many wonderers and wanderers before her, nomadism is a kind of cosmic state, a philosophical attitude and ideological position; even if it’s precipitated by personal loss or financial hardship, as it is for Frances McDormand’s Fern, it eventually grows into a spiritual identity. The majority of the real-life vagabonds we meet in the film embrace this concept of itineracy as a winding path of personal liberation, a means of casting off the shackles of grief, trauma, and oppressive cultural structures. The awesome grandeur and solitude of the American Western landscape are constants on this journey, the vast, vertiginous expanses simultaneously chastening and empowering. Whether at dusk or in the coruscating afternoon sunshine, Zhao and Richards take in these vistas with a becalmed reverence mirroring that of the characters, letting the natural openness quietly rebuff the closed-in, corporatized spaces of factories and strip malls. While the violent colonial legacy of the West is unspoken here, Nomadland nevertheless regards the land as much for its beauty as for its enduring sense of desolation and displacement, as a site where the possibility of salvation is always accompanied by a recognition of our transience, and where romanticized ideals of individualism are deflated by the need for community. And while it proves impossible to escape the dubiousness of an A-list Hollywood actor slumming it alongside the actually disenfranchised, McDormand almost miraculously assuages any dissonance with her generously receptive, unfussily empathic performance, absorbing the pain, dignity, and tenacity of her cohort without exploiting their circumstances. In the weathered faces and resilient voices of these self-invented nomads, Zhao materializes the primal, melancholy poetry of people in transit, at once alone and part of something eternal.

Goin' to Town

GOIN' TO TOWN   ***

Alexander Hall

1935

IDEA:  After inheriting the fortune of a cattle baron, saloon performer Cleo Borden sets her sights on the English nobleman who's struck oil on her property.

BLURB:  Goin’ to Town is a typical Mae West vehicle: the actress woos and outmaneuvers a menagerie of variably rascally men, delivers her trademark sassy, innuendo-laden quips, and looks sensational while doing all of it. The film also inserts a few choice additions into the equation, including a Western milieu, a superbly shot horse race, and, most deliciously, some bubbly social critique, as the single-minded class climbing of West’s Cleo Borden is attended by the increasingly elaborate skullduggery of the petty aristocrats she finds herself surrounded by. Goin’ to Town makes particularly savvy, self-aware use of West’s public image, turning her inimitable, brassy Brooklyn grit into a cudgel against the pretensions of those who convince her she needs to be more of a “lady.” After all, who’s more of a lady than Mae West? Nobody would mistake Goin’ to Town for biting satire, but Hall’s film is more than up to the task of skewering upper-class pomposity with breezy aplomb; even when Cleo gets in on the action, the joke is always on the craven schemers who can’t bear to see a saloon girl become high society royalty. “We’re intellectual opposites… I’m intellectual, and you’re opposite,” Cleo snaps to a soulless suitor. It’s one of West’s all-time great zingers in one of her customarily delightful jaunts.

Loves of a Blonde

LOVES OF A BLONDE   ***1/2

Miloš Forman

1965

IDEA:  An error in central planning leaves a provincial Czech town with a population where women far outnumber men. To pair the women up and improve their productivity at work, the government organizes a dance attended by aging reservists.

BLURB:  Like so many of the most exemplary films of the Czechoslovak New Wave, Loves of a Blonde is a pithy, deceptively jovial scherzo of social satire, a romp of an allegory that regards the quirks and cruelties of the Communist State through a laughing sneer. Forman, perhaps the most blatantly funny director of the eclectic movement, is particularly sly at getting his ideological licks in under the guise of a party: specifically, in Loves of a Blonde, the harebrained, state-sponsored mating game orchestrated to match lonely factory girls with eligible army reservists. An absurdly contrived solution to a bureaucratic blunder, the party plays out as an almost runaway farce, the bumbling soldiers effecting a chain reaction of faux pas while their targets desperately look the other way for more desirable bachelors. The upbeat atmosphere of the scene, like so much in the film, leaves a sardonic burn; as his characters fumble and cavort, holding to a promise of sexual escape, Forman never lets the audience forget the boondoggle of this authoritarian effort to foster love and labor. The strained attempt to regulate the volatile factor of sexuality, specifically women’s, thus becomes the joke and tragedy of Loves of a Blonde, the catalyst for both Andula’s quixotic romantic odysseys and her emotional deprivation. Nothing quite so succinctly encapsulates this tragicomic juxtaposition as when Forman cuts from Andula’s would-be sweetheart, comically squeezed into the bed of his bickering parents, to the spurned girl, weeping outside the family’s door. The world of Loves of a Blonde doesn’t accommodate connubial bliss; its only bedfellows are youthful idealism and its dashed dreams, the hope for release and the reality of a system that doesn’t allow many places to go.

Ham on Rye

HAM ON RYE   **1/2

Tyler Taormina  

2019

IDEA:  In a typical American suburb, a group of teens prepares nervously for a coming-of-age rite that could determine the course of their lives.

BLURB:  Despite what we’re often led to believe, there is no moment of grand transformation or epiphany delimiting youth from adulthood. Things don’t suddenly become clearer. Teleological ideals of progress and independence mostly don’t take hold; stripped of the provincial early-life structures of school and the family unit, we’re cast adrift, waiting for gratification that never seems to come. This is the disillusioned post-adolescent realization arrived at by Ham on Rye, an anti-coming-of-age film in which the typical narrative expectations of self-actualization are swiftly and rudely upended, leaving its characters trapped instead in an existential torpor. Although askew from the start - Taormina is highly adept at using too-close, off-center compositions and elliptical edits to generate a quotidian surrealism - the film achieves its most startling effect in the transition from its first to second half. Its initial, peppy teen-movie overtures are expelled like air from a rapidly deflating balloon, and what we’re left with is a becalmed anti-climax, a ghost story of lost youth. While Ham on Rye is a tonally daring and formally auspicious debut, it’s also perhaps abstracted to a fault. The casualties here are the characters, who, lacking much individuation or development, feel more like the cynical props of a concept, and less like nuanced, agential human beings. Such is the deadpan nihilism of Taormina’s film. We have careless fun as kids, we grow up, we go through arbitrary social rituals, and we wonder when, if ever, it will make sense.

Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets

BLOODY NOSE, EMPTY POCKETS   ***

Bill Ross IV and Turner Ross

2020

IDEA:  On the last day of business, employees and regular customers gather to celebrate and mourn their beloved Las Vegas bar.

BLURB:  A hybrid docu-fictional social experiment, Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets gathers a group of barflies on the closing day of a Vegas dive bar, and surveys the brew of disillusionment, uncertainty, regret, and brittle fortitude that arises from their interactions. Embodying the viscously sozzled atmosphere, the camera bobs and drifts in a pink neon haze, catching a dozen micro-dramas unfolding in an impression of woozy realtime. The profiles of the patrons deepen and expand as more file in: older grizzled alcoholics are joined by millennials, exposing both generational rifts and connections as everyone - seemingly longtime acquaintances - unite around a shared outsiderness in their boozy makeshift oasis. But the Ross brothers are sneaky. The bar is not, in fact, closing, nor is it located in Vegas. For the most part, the patrons don’t actually know each other; they are strangers who all frequent different watering holes. Rather than sully the verisimilitude of the film, this extra-textual knowledge actually enhances it, underscoring the fact that the tensions and camaraderie of the group are not endemic to particular people, but inhere in the dynamics of the film’s chosen, and very much constructed, social environment. Although the Ross brothers perhaps invest too much trust in their improvisatory conceit - dramatic interest can lag even in the film’s relatively brief duration - Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets is a unique and effective evocation of a distinctly modern American mood. One gets the sense that its dispossessed, empathetically understood subjects could come from anywhere in the country, and they would still find commiseration in the bar, a microcosm of a nation’s communities roaring and grieving while hanging by a thread.

Diamonds of the Night

DIAMONDS OF THE NIGHT   ****

Jan Němec

1964

IDEA:  Escaping from a train en route to a German concentration camp, two young men seek refuge in the woods.

BLURB:  Through feverish montage at once physically immediate and atemporal, Diamonds of the Night astonishingly conjures a threshold consciousness poised somewhere between a waking nightmare and a quivering dream, a death rattle and a vision of immortality. Never giving primacy to one over the other, Němec instead collapses an eternity’s worth of perceptual states into an unbelievably tense 60-odd minutes, creating a hypnagogic skein of documentary realism, memory, and dream. It’s as much a multi-sensory immersion in character subjectivity as it is a sort of out-of-body cinematic haunting. At first thrusting the viewer into the earthly peril of its two protagonists, whose panicked flight into the woods is captured in breathless long take, the film soon introduces hallucinatory intervals and reveries, slipping both into and out of their besieged psychical states. The palpable, urgent details of their environment and circumstances - mud-streaked skin, gnawing hunger, mazes of trees, an incapacitated foot - are adjoined with flashes to indeterminate times and places, movements made and imagined. These could be before, during, or after the war; fantasies of capture and escape; perspectives that assert and then defy the corporeal rootedness of the characters. A multitude of potentialities ripple outward with elemental force, concentrating the specificities of the boys’ experience into a pervasive, eternal historical vapor, a consciousness passed down and shared by us all. The arresting black-and-white images, highlights blazing against the darkness like the titular gemstone, sear the retinas and stir the mind. The film has hardly any dialogue, and requires even less: bypassing language, its resonance is visceral, densely affective, practically metabolic, giving form to both traumas and dreams that never die.

Aspen

ASPEN   ***1/2

Frederick Wiseman

1991

IDEA:  An in-depth look at Aspen, Colorado, from its popular recreation to its more mundane municipal life.

BLURB:  In the first few scenes of Aspen, we are presented with chanting monks, snowy Rocky Mountain vistas, and a couple exchanging marriage vows high in a hot air balloon. This braided emphasis on faith and spatial elevation immediately lends the film a tenor of reverence, a quality Wiseman will modulate and complicate for its duration. Peering at, but also behind, the tourist trappings of the titular destination, the filmmaker finds an unexpectedly ideal site to ground a theological and spiritual inquiry, where contrasts between upscale, leisure-focused commerce and working-class activity raise questions about the true value and purpose of life. As always, Wiseman creates provocative juxtapositions out of his bounteous footage, finding fascination and dialogical connections between things only related by geographical proximity: a plastic surgery sales pitch, an amateur art class, a meditation group, adult-ed seminars on Flaubert and the morality of divorce in the Bible. In one of his most pointed edits, Wiseman cuts from a guide’s explanation of animal conservation to the massive chateaus that line Aspen’s mountains, and then to a gaggle of women in the shopping district decked out in giant furs. There is a tension between the splendor of the natural world on display, captured by Wiseman in serene, painterly compositions, and the imposition of material human excesses upon it. But like all of the director’s work, Aspen doesn’t pass judgment, even when it seems to draw certain dichotomies. What is common among both the pleasure-seeking tourists and the residents is, in the end, the search for meaning in existence, the desire to find the elusive “good life.” This particular resort town may be Wiseman’s chosen microcosm, but we know its contradictions, its highs and lows, can be found anywhere.