Zola

ZOLA   **1/2

Janicza Bravo

2020

IDEA:  Zola, who works as a stripper and waitress in Detroit, gets in over her head when she takes an impulsive road trip to Tampa with her new friend Stefani.

BLURB:  Increasingly, filmmakers have taken on the task of cinematically reproducing the visual idioms of social media, integrating into their films’ formal designs texting iconography and digital-style interfaces. It comes as something of a surprise that Zola, which has its genesis in a viral Twitter thread, is largely devoid of such devices. Outside of its soundtrack of dinging phones and the occasional diegetic screen, the film feels oddly detached from the medium through which its story was initially delivered. In effacing so much of the original mode of communication, the script by Bravo and Harris offers a fairly straightforward dramatization of events, emphasizing the escalating absurdity and danger of the circumstances in which Aziah “Zola” King finds herself over one nightmarish weekend. Bravo is less interested in how her perilous tale was consumed and shared in the online space than in how the events themselves illuminate the virulent realities of contemporary American racism, sexism, and economic exploitation. She is especially effective at sowing an atmosphere of clammy unease, making nocturnal Florida streets and homogenized chain hotels alike into sites of pronounced societal tension. This looming menace is more engaging than the characterizations, which feel overly attenuated despite the fiercely committed performances. What is perhaps most compelling is not anything in Zola itself, but what its very existence implies: a victimized woman taking control of the narrative with strength and irreverence, emerging as not only a storytelling sensation but a tenacious survivor.

Double Lover

DOUBLE LOVER   ***

François Ozon

2017

IDEA:  A troubled woman engages in a torrid romance with a therapist who happens to look exactly like her therapist husband.

BLURB:  An unapologetically overcooked pastiche of erotic thriller, loopy psychodrama, and Cronenberg-lite body horror, Double Lover is as intriguing as it is outlandish and unwieldy. What remains true is that Ozon knows how to establish and tease his concepts with flair; from his evocative labia-to-eye match cut to the profusion of mirrored imagery and temporal ellipses, he creates an unstable, ambiguous world of psychosexual neurosis, wherein bodily boundaries of inside and outside, self and other, fantasy and reality, become a blurred continuum. Here, the twin-double is a multivalent signifier of ego division, both a reflection and a refraction. Double Lover’s knotty logic is such that Chloé, through whose unreliable perspective the entire movie unfolds, fantasizes her own phantom twin as a more aggressive double of her male lover. Through the resulting gender-fluid triangle, she’s able to role-play as sadistic parent and masochistic child, working through both her fraught relationship with her estranged mother and the burden of her own unborn twin sister, physically and metaphorically lodged in her womb. The scenario is pure pulp psychoanalysis, its frequent risibility exacerbated by how Ozon plays it so literally in the context of Chloé’s therapy. If one can look past its heavy-handedness, as well as some of its gauche metaphysical explanations, Double Lover ends up functioning as an affecting allegory of repression, a visceral depiction of the process of identifying and expelling internalized grief. Ozon knows as well as anyone else that the cinema, the ultimate “double” in art, perfectly serves such primal drama.

In the Heights

IN THE HEIGHTS   ***

John M. Chu

2021

IDEA:  In Manhattan's Washington Heights neighborhood, a range of characters negotiate cultural heritage, love, belonging, and dreams of personal and social progress.

BLURB:  There’s something to be said of a movie that manages to sustain a level of raucous energy for nearly two-and-a-half hours. Rather than exhaust or oppress, this milieu of buzzing commotion is part and parcel of the infectious celebratory spirit of In the Heights, which bursts with an exuberant love of Latin culture, diasporic identity, and the immigrant communities that comprise the bedrock of America. Chu’s adaptation of the Broadway musical shoots out of the gate from its opening number, a musique-concrète city symphony turned dancing-in-the-streets extravaganza, and from then on, pinwheels and ignites in an ingratiating riot of motion and sound. It might be easy to take issue with the fairly frictionless, anodyne nature of this party atmosphere if In the Heights wasn’t clearly designed to offer a vision of an urban immigrant utopia, an expression of ancestral cultural fecundity in which geographic distances are bridged and dreams are self-actualized. The story does not ignore sociopolitical struggle - gentrification, assimilation, and racism are all touched upon - but these are not the point, nor are they permitted to dampen the peppy mood for long. Sometimes, In the Heights is perhaps overly hectic, with Myron Kerstein’s breakneck editing too often splintering and obscuring the choreography in spatially chaotic flurries. It’s a testament to the film's winning performances, musical panache, and enormous heart that, by the end, such craft quibbles largely fade under the summery effulgence, as warm as the island sun in Manhattan.

Luca

LUCA   ***1/2

Enrico Casarosa

2021

IDEA:  Two sea monster friends, who take human form when on land, set out to win a Vespa in the Italian port town of Portorosso.

BLURB:  Luca is perhaps one of Pixar’s least ambitious original works, but this proves to not be such a bad thing. Following a string of unnecessary sequels and unwieldy, spottily examined high concepts, Casarosa’s spry, unfussy tale of summer friendship feels as refreshing as the Mediterranean breeze. Eschewing elaborate fantasy world-building, heady internal logics, and a sprawling cast, the film capers along with a light stroke not seen in the studio’s recent, more existentially heavy films. Luca knows and respects its relatively modest scope and scale, and, happily, feels no need to burden itself with overwrought plot developments or thematic aspirations toward profundity. Despite this sense of dialing down, the film is far from a trifle. Drawing efficiently on coming-of-age and monster fiction tropes, it tells a moving story of alterity and outsider alliances, with parallels to the LGBTQ experience that feel more than subtextual. The script is lucid in its understanding of the anxieties of difference, and the relationship between Luca and the roguish Alberto is a beautifully multifaceted depiction of intense, obsessive childhood friendship and potentially nascent same-sex desire. Luca also distinguishes itself by adopting an animation style closer to cartoon than the customary Pixar photorealism, giving it a vibrant, at times expressionistic visual fluidity perfectly suited to both Vespa rides among the fish and close embraces with cherished partners.

The Grand Olympics

THE GRAND OLYMPICS   ***

Romolo Marcellini

1961

IDEA: An account of the 1960 Olympic Games in Rome, Italy.

BLURB:  Scenic, ebullient, and often surprising in its formal choices, The Grand Olympics anticipates the greater innovations of Kon Ichikawa’s magisterial Tokyo Olympiad, while adding its own unique colors to the Olympic film palette. A relatively more linear account than Ichikawa’s, the film nevertheless is invigorated by sprightly pacing, a lively soundtrack, and shrewd edits, from the rhythmic montage of the gymnastics competitions to the superb action match cut that turns a diver’s aerial flip into the flight of a pole vaulter. Meanwhile, the frequently snarky, editorializing narration injects a certain jocularity into the proceedings, despite its occasional lapses into sexist and racist colonial commentary. More appreciated is the brief expository information that fills in the backgrounds of the athletes, providing us with details of vocations and relationships. The Grand Olympics overall does a good job of relating to the athletes as humans, and not just bodies; gesturing toward heteroglossia, it even includes some of their diaristic first-person accounts, particularly of German 100-meter champion Armin Hary, who for an extended portion of the film becomes its winsome star. Marcellini concludes the documentary with the marathon, in which Abebe Bikila’s legendary victory is rendered as a mythic twilight feat under the watchful gazes of Roman statues. It’s an expected although entirely fitting ending to a celebration of outsize athletic achievement in the Eternal City.

Unfaithfully Yours

UNFAITHFULLY YOURS   ***1/2

Preston Sturges

1948

IDEA:  Believing his wife has been unfaithful to him while he was away in England, a supercilious conductor fantasizes about his revenge.

BLURB:  As clever, gut-busting, and formally sophisticated as anything else Preston Sturges did, Unfaithfully Yours is also the writer-director’s most scaldingly dark film, a murder comedy that throws acid on the “Great Man” narrative of creative genius. Sturges’ subject is Sir Alfred de Carter, a vaunted orchestra conductor played with brilliantly insufferable haughtiness and irascibility by Rex Harrison. Unfaithfully Yours wastes little time undercutting the illusion of his alleged greatness; suspecting his wife of infidelity on nothing more than a secondhand account from a reviled brother-in-law, the urbane Carter is launched into an emotional tailspin, his doubts compounding into a full-fledged mania of insecure masculinity. It is not his love for putative wife-muse Daphne de Carter that feeds his work, but his misguided hatred for her. Sturges stages the psychic effects of his imagined grievances in an ingeniously structured series of revenge fantasies, all scored to classical music pieces, as Carter’s ideé fixe becomes more pathetically insane. The payoff is a protracted sequence of astonishingly choreographed and timed physical comedy, in which a houseful of domestic objects systematically and hysterically rebel against Carter’s progress, deflating him to a sniveling child on the floor. One wishes Unfaithfully Yours did more for its female characters, who mostly sit on the sidelines as their husbands make fools of themselves. Yet the film’s steel-trap construction and sheer hilarity are often overwhelming, and proof that seeing pompous men fail will always carry a charge of satisfaction.

The Damned

THE DAMNED   **1/2

Luchino Visconti

1969

IDEA:  A prominent industrialist family in Weimar Germany is torn asunder when the Nazis rise to power on the patriarch's birthday. 

BLURB:  The Damned is a cousin of such deliriously nasty familial melodramas as The Little Foxes and Written on the Wind; like those texts, it proceeds from the idea that social ills are bred within the structure of the dynastic patriarchal family, and perpetuated via nepotisms that, when combined with the naked greed of capitalism, seek to derange the world at large. The primary difference in Visconti’s lurid, frequently strident soap opera is that it deals with the ascent of the most abhorrent of all modern evils: Nazism. However, The Damned proves less interested in delineating the movement’s fruition than in dramatizing the toxic complicity, psychopathology, and political opportunism that fuels any malevolent regime. The microcosm is the Essenbeck clan, a wealthy industrialist family ensconced in the aristocratic privileges of Weimar Germany. A viper’s nest of animosity, sexual perversion, and moral sloth, their hasty self-destruction, accelerated by the influence of a Nazi relative, is the allegorical descent of Germany itself into the bowels of insanity. Visconti plays up the Oedipal drama that ultimately grants scion Martin, and by extension the SS, control of the family’s manufacturing power; juxtaposed with the massacre of gay SA members in the film’s most memorable sequence, it’s easy to interpret in the queer Visconti’s vision an indictment of state power’s connection to heterosexual, hereditary capital. While little about The Damned is subtle or even refined - whether it’s the overuse of zooms or a narrative structure that builds in fits and starts - the film still has an intermittently chilling power, especially when it reins in the shrillness to stare silently aghast into the abyss.