Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn

Part of my coverage of the 57th Chicago International Film Festival.

BAD LUCK BANGING OR LOONY PORN   ***1/2

Radu Jude

2021

IDEA:  A primary school teacher faces the wrath of society when a sex tape she filmed with her husband inadvertently winds up on the Internet.

BLURB:  Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn is perhaps as close as 21st-century world cinema has come to the transgressive audacity and excoriating political satire of Eastern European art films of the 60s and 70s. It’s a film designed to slice right through the equivocating bullshit, a vivisection of a mass culture warped and degraded by the shared toxins of capitalism, nationalism, racism, anti-intellectualism, moral fundamentalism, misogyny, and social media, a COVID-era Idiocracy if Idiocracy had teeth and aesthetic daring. While Jude’s utter contempt for the current cultural and political climate (and Romania’s in particular) is astringently apparent, Bad Luck Banging… is more than a one-note polemical instrument. Following the vérité observations of the film’s first third, a promenade through the crass maze of commodity signs swallowing modern Bucharest, Jude launches his best and most rhetorically ambitious formal exercise. Suspending narrative with liberating abandon, he enumerates a glossary of terms, many of which he trenchantly relates to shameful chapters in Romanian and European history. Baldly - although with tongue in cheek - addressing injustices past and present, it’s a sardonic, sobering kick-in-the-pants of a school lesson, the kind that so panics the benighted conservative parents in the film’s culminating, screaming outrage circus of a PTA conference. Tellingly, this dictionary portion ends on the word “Zen,” which it defines as an attitude of regarding life as both a tragedy and a comedy. This underlies the general philosophy of Bad Luck Banging…, a barbed time capsule that invigoratingly reflects and refracts what is horrifying, vulgar, and mind-bogglingly ludicrous about the state of the world circa 2020.

Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy

Part of my coverage of the 57th Chicago International Film Festival.

WHEEL OF FORTUNE AND FANTASY   ***

Ryusuke Hamaguchi

2021

IDEA:  A triptych of episodes focusing on the impact of free will, coincidence, and social mores on the lives of different women.

BLURB:  Social interchange is a mercurial and adventitious things in Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, a structurally sneaky comedy of manners, errors, and fateful encounters. Each of its three chapters - stark, sometimes time-hopping chamber plays that suggest life distilled to miniatures - revolves around the strange alchemy of chance and desire, alighting on minor inflection points that have the potential to birth new possibilities, whether fortuitous or otherwise. Often recalling Hong Sang-soo’s tricksy relationship games, Hamaguchi frequently films dialogue between characters in long, static two-shots, his camera like an X-ray picking up conversational tensions, mood shifts, and granular mutations in real-time. And like another master auteur, Abbas Kiarostami, he slyly manipulates character dynamics to create a series of enigmatic displacements that consistently reshape the nature of the relationships we’re witnessing. Sunny demeanors conceal romantic frustration and cunning; malicious intent dissolves into a reciprocal voicing of desire; old friends become strangers, and vice-versa. Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy evolves too, growing funnier and richer as the addition of its chapters generates new semiotic connections. What is intriguing if for a while a bit airless comes to a satisfying payoff in the final third, when Hamaguchi turns the game on us, combining prior textual knowledge, accumulated expectations, and deceptive new signifiers to upend our perception of the characters in tandem with their own confounded perceptions of each other. Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy steadily compiles such revelatory discoveries, and, to borrow from one of its chapter headings, leaves the door wide open for more.

Bergman Island

Part of my coverage of the 57th Chicago International Film Festival.

BERGMAN ISLAND   ***

Mia Hansen-Løve

2021

IDEA:  A writer-director couple experiences rifts in their relationship when they sojourn to Ingmar Bergman's longtime residence of Fårö to work on their respective projects.

BLURB:  “Why doesn’t he ever show any tenderness or light? Why didn’t he ever once want to explore… happiness?,” inquires Vicky Krieps’ frustrated Chris, referring to the legendary Swedish director. Although it’s a somewhat specious, overgeneralizing assessment, there’s also truth to it: Bergman was not a sunny guy. Mia Hansen-Løve's Bergman Island is less a counterpoint than an homage in a more sanguine key, an introspective but comparatively lighthearted descendant of the master’s work that also meditates on his cultural legacy. The film’s meta-textuality is underscored by its semi-autobiographical protagonists, writer-directors Chris and Tony (a wryly aloof Tim Roth standing in for Hansen-Løve's real-life partner Olivier Assayas). Their summer trip to the eponymous island sees their relationship absorbing shades of the fraught uncertainties that beset so many of Bergman’s couples. Also hanging heavy in the air are the biographical details of Bergman’s own life, his notoriously prickly, philandering behavior raising questions about the egos and work-life relationships of prolific male creators, including Tony. Hansen-Løve uses her characters’ cinephile-friendly intellectual discourse as an appetizer for the film’s second half, in which Tony’s professional concerns are displaced by Chris’s, whose in-film screenplay we see enacted as a wistful, quasi-wish-fulfillment fantasy of youthful polyamory. Although Bergman Island ironically loses much of its steam in this crucial section devoted to the main female character’s flowering creative agency, Hansen-Løve maintains a nuanced, lovely control of mood and form throughout. Notably, she films Fårö as Bergman never did: in romantic, golden-hued widescreen, where relationships might not fall apart after all.

Paris, 13th District

Part of my coverage of the 57th Chicago International Film Festival.

PARIS, 13TH DISTRICT   **

Jacques Audiard

2021

IDEA:  The lives of four millennials in contemporary Paris intersect in unexpected ways, creating potentials for both sexual flings and deeper connections.

BLURB:  Paris, 13th District opens with a series of wide, panning bird’s-eye shots of the titular arrondissement, the camera picking up the myriad little dramas unfolding in the illuminated windows of apartment high-rises. It’s an introduction to the film’s milieu that hints at the voyeurism lurking within modern metropolitan living. Unfortunately, Audiard has something less provocative on his mind. Foregoing, to a rather confounding degree, the gritty urban urgency and formal stylization that have become his metier, he has turned to the realm of the banal multi-character relationship drama. Adapted by Audiard, Céline Sciamma, and Léa Mysius from stories from a graphic novel by Adrian Tomine, the film is a meandering look at the romantic and professional entanglements of four French millennials uncertainly searching for love and belonging. Technology plays a governing, fairly didactic role in the narrative, as social media is depicted as a tool of both alienation and meaningful connection for the characters, who are each unrooted in some way by their sexuality or ethnicity. This empathy for marginalized identities is Paris, 13th District’s best trait, one that Audiard (and Sciamma) have movingly embraced throughout their careers. But the film is too diffuse to have the thematic power it needs, too obvious and indifferently executed to be dramatically compelling. Like its curiously static black-and-white images, Paris, 13th District is monotonous when it should be bursting with color.

Titane

TITANE   ***

Julia Ducournau

2021

IDEA:  In order to evade the authorities, a female serial killer with a titanium plate in her skull disguises herself as the missing son of a grieving firefighter.

BLURB:  A trans-humanist modern monster fable in the vein of Under the Skin, Julia Ducournau’s Titane explosively grapples with ideas around gender, sex, and corporeality. The locus of its drama is Alexia, whose titanium-enhanced body and protean, androgynous appearance mark her as a cyborg. An “illegitimate fusion of animal and machine,” in the words of Donna Haraway, she represents a displacement of “the hierarchical dualisms of naturalized identities.” At least partially. In its first half, Titane keeps the possibilities of this cyborg politics generously open. It presents us with a monstrous woman forged from near-death trauma and the interpenetration of flesh and metal, someone symbolically born from machine. Ducournau charts her radical physical transformations with a grueling, forensic eye. Her camera and sound design conspire to place us inside Alexia’s increasingly self-mutilated and transmogrifying body, a body that acts as a destabilizing force to the hyper-masculine worlds in which she finds herself. It’s a minor disappointment, then, that after its bold and deeply unsettling first act, Titane eases into something relatively conservative and predictable. The polymorphism of Alexia’s cyborg body is undercut by her uterine pregnancy, the biological specifics of which are detailed in excruciating (albeit superbly rendered) images of her scarred, bloated, oozing abdomen and breasts. Such maternal horror, reactionary in nature, feels at odds with the film’s more progressive attitudes toward gender and the body; so too does Ducournau’s decision to have Alexia reformed under the influence of a father figure. For all its gestures toward feminism and the trans-human, and beyond its Extreme Cinema aesthetics, Titane is ultimately most effective as a rather simple story of traumatized people recovering their humanity by learning how to love and be loved. Agathe Rousselle and Vincent Lindon are exceptional in carrying this narrative, the power of their performances largely filling in for those grand potentials in Titane that go unrealized.

The Card Counter

THE CARD COUNTER   ***

Paul Schrader

2021

IDEA:  A card shark with a shameful, traumatic past searches for redemption after taking a disaffected young man under his wing.

BLURB:  Like First Reformed, Paul Schrader’s The Card Counter is another austere, dark-night-of-the-soul character study of a man haunted by the state of the modern world, and by the weight of his actions in it. Here, Schrader substitutes casino card tables for pews; instead of a Man of God struggling to hold onto his faith, he burrows into the psyche of a man who lost his faith long ago, if he even had it to begin with. Oscar Isaac’s phlegmatic, emotionally coiled “William Tell” has more or less learned to live with the moral attrition that has curdled his life. Rather than rage or lament, he finds some measure of solace in his methodical, cyclical routine, a rigid and self-abnegating existence that’s just enough to keep his traumas at bay. Schrader keenly find his despair echoed and corroborated in his surroundings, from anonymous motels and strip malls to the airless, nearly subterranean spaces of gambling halls, captured in desiccated, flatly lit grays and browns. In Tell’s course-altering encounter with a troubled young man, and in his pained, circuitous path toward anything that might constitute absolution, Schrader repeats many of the themes and conceits of First Reformed, down to the specific image of his protagonist journaling at a table beside a glass of Scotch. The Card Counter may not feel novel in this light, but its anguishes – over the military-industrial complex and the legacy of institutional violence in particular – still carry a bitter sting. Ultimately, Tell’s torment is but an echo of a national moral reckoning infinitely deferred; and as he knows, the house always wins.

Streetwise

STREETWISE   ***1/2

Martin Bell

1984

IDEA:  A document of youth living on the streets in Seattle in the early-to-mid 80s.

BLURB:  In its gritty yet poetic vérité aesthetic, fragmentary storytelling, and non-moralizing sociological eye, Streetwise exemplifies an idiom of filmmaking that has become ubiquitous in chronicling the lives of the urban dispossessed. It also has roots in the traditions of neorealism and ethnography, in which the line between exploitation and empathy tends to get shrouded in difficult-to-disentangle problems of ethics, aesthetics, and structures of power. Streetwise in many ways amplifies the questions around these issues; how, for instance, did the filmmakers navigate the legal terrain of filming minors, many of whom likely didn’t understand the consequences of broadcasting their frequently self-incriminating behavior? It’s startling to witness these kids stealing and prostituting themselves, a feeling that stems not only from the reality of the situation, but from the fact that Bell, McCall, and Mark had the permission to capture it on screen. To their enormous credit, they neither condemn nor romanticize the kids’ marginalized existences, nor do they succumb to the temptation to psychoanalyze them. Letting their subjects narrate their own stories with a mix of vulnerability and bravado, they create a nuanced, moving portrait of makeshift community and survival, of youth claiming agency against the odds. They have palpable love for the charismatic, scarily self-possessed kids, not their circumstances; they admire their daring, cunning, and even their posturing belligerence because they understand how critical these qualities are as tools of endurance. Rather than try to facilely answer for the ethical questions inherent in its premise, Streetwise embraces what is thorny, discomfiting, and unavoidably sad about a reality that isn’t amenable to easy solutions.