The Green Fog

THE GREEN FOG   ***1/2

Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, and Galen Johnson

2017

IDEA:  A pastiche reimagining of Vertigo, comprised entirely of clips from other San Francisco-set movies.

BLURB:  One of Maddin’s fleetest and most purely joyful creations, The Green Fog finds the director turning to the found footage format to plunder the collective cinematic imagination. Instead of his usual phantasmagorias, Maddin (alongside wavelength-sharing collaborators Evan and Galen Johnson) constitute this febrile realm out of pop-cultural representations of San Francisco, one of the most eternal US cities in visual art. Through a feverish assemblage of interlaced Hollywood classicism and kitsch, the filmmakers condense and loosely recreate the narrative arc of Vertigo, from rooftop police chase to final thudding plummet. But the specifics of Hitchcock’s opus – which would color the proceedings even had it been ignored completely, such is its permeating trace – are not as important here as the themes and motifs that underpin it: obsession, repression, fetishism, voyeurism, grammatical recursions, understood by both Hitchcock and Maddin as equally primal to the psyche as to the cinema. As such, The Green Fog is a film made of films that ineluctably speak about film, in an ad infinitum discourse. Its extensive, humorous use of nested clips reinforces this structure, suggesting an endless feedback loop, a hall of mirrors without a beginning or end. Where is the reality and where is the dream? Is there even a way to tell them apart? And is it possible anymore to watch a pensive, implacable Chuck Norris with anything but smirking reverence?

The Naked Kiss

THE NAKED KISS   ***

Samuel Fuller

1964

IDEA:  After running away from her pimp, a prostitute ends up in a seemingly idyllic suburb and becomes a nurse at a children's orthopedic hospital.

BLURB:  True to Samuel Fuller’s caustic, impertinent ways, The Naked Kiss is a subversive twisting of film noir codes. The dissipated postwar milieu is still here, but its moral rot is totally disguised by the patina of everytown Americana. Into this artificial suburb, Fuller drops Kelly, a former prostitute first seen beating and fleeing her pimp in the film’s jolting opening scene. In another, more familiar context, Kelly would be the de facto femme fatale, setting poisonous sexual traps. In The Naked Kiss, Fuller introduces her as an agent of insubordination and danger, only to then reveal her true, almost comically opposed position as a virtuous reformer. As the layers of Grantville get peeled back, and its golden boy philanthropist is revealed to be a child predator, Kelly’s taboo-ness, her socially vilified out-of-place-ness, is recast as something nearly holy: a whore and a mother, a bitch-slapping demimonde and a steward for justice. She’s the foil to the feckless male characters, as any femme fatale must be, but she confounds our expectations by being totally righteous in her crusade. And when she makes her ambiguous exit, she wanders off like a distaff Ethan Edwards, a result of failed assimilation that suggests the values of a hooker are above most of the stuff that passes in an allegedly civil society.

The Last of England

THE LAST OF ENGLAND   ***1/2

Derek Jarman

1987

IDEA:  A dystopian collage of England colored by Thatcher's reign.

BLURB:  “Made in England,” the credits say, not with gratitude but with an implicit forlornness and contempt. For Jarman’s apocalyptic opus is a cri de cœur for a nation descended into political tyranny, a caterwauling lament in restless montage. Jarman’s images flicker and convulse in symphony with a baroque soundscape, creating a dyspeptic tapestry of military violence, working class poverty, and societal collapse. The skies are always the same shade of hellish, irradiated red-pink as the fires that blaze across the film’s largely decimated landscape; the overall dystopian vision bursts with iconography of World War II, the Troubles, and the AIDS crisis, yet remains vague enough that it seems practically timeless – a sobering reminder that such sociopolitical havoc never dates. As expressed formally in The Last of England, it only accelerates, as the film transitions from its relatively becalmed, poetry-narrated beginning to frenetic, wordless thickets of audiovisual chaos. This may be Jarman’s most aggravated, guttural, and resigned work, but like all his greatest films, it’s perked up by a countervailing defiance pushing back at the walls of oppression. Whether it’s a dizzying bacchanalian dance, gay canoodling atop the Union Jack, or Tilda Swinton rage-shredding her way out of her wedding dress, The Last of England speaks with a form of invigorating creative resistance that burns bright in the face of seeming hopelessness.

What Love Looks Like

Meet-cutes, dating apps, disappointment, and second chances: this is the material of Alex Magaña’s What Love Looks Like, a sweet and sunny romantic ensemble comedy about Millennials negotiating love in the City of Angels. Five relationships take their course over an economical but pleasantly ambling runtime, allowing us to observe the vagaries of youthful courtship in the 21^st century. There is plenty of melancholy – one character is struggling to let himself love again following the loss of his wife, while another finds herself repeatedly let down by her doltish boyfriend whose eyes are permanently glued to his phone – but Magaña mostly focuses on men and women finding their way toward each other, rather than on romantic dissolution, signaling through his largely lighthearted tone an intent to deliver on the proverbial fairy-tale ending.

Things aren’t entirely rosy in the beginning. Nicole (Kate Durocher) is flummoxed by her beau Owen (Josh Gilmer), the aforementioned screen-obsessed boyfriend. Fed up with his inattentiveness, she begins a cautious affair with cocky rideshare driver Jace (Trevor Sean). Elsewhere, Calvin (Connor Wilkins) and Summer (Jamie Shelnitz) are separately mourning their fortunes after their Tinder date goes sour. Their respective roommates coincidentally turn them onto the same blind dating app, through which, in a yet more incredible coincidence, they end up anonymously matched. It’s unclear whether this happens because the app is massively unpopular, because their friends conspired to set them up through it, or because only a handful of people are living in LA. Or… destiny? In any case, the emphasis on social media nicely captures the reality of dating in the digital era, especially among young adults.

The other storylines range from the emotionally heavy to the sprightly, sometimes juggling both. Sadness permeates the situation of Sam (Nathan Kohnen), who’s still reeling from his wife’s death when the chipper Evie (Ashley Rose McKenna) invites herself to a sandwich-based lunch with him every day in the park. (A welcome, whimsical touch is the way this same park functions as a meeting place for all five couples, at various points). Sam’s wife appears to him occasionally as a ghostly apparition, urging him to let her go so he can rediscover love and happiness. The conceit is elevated by Kohnen, who makes Sam’s sullenness feel authentically weighty. The back-and-forth between him and Evie helps to leaven the mood, as does the dynamic between Theodore (Jack Menzies, fully committed to his character’s chronic awkwardness when it comes to female contact) and Bailey (Ana Ming Bostwick-Singer), the exceedingly good-natured recipient of his fumbling overtures. Their scenes together are charming without feeling strained, and lead to my favorite moment in the film, a date-night screening of an absurdist reimagining of Casablanca. Rounding things out are the slick Finn (Kyle Meck) and the British exchange student Penelope (Taylor Alexa Frank). Although Penelope initially resists Finn’s entreaties, the two eventually hit it off, culminating in a hasty trans-Atlantic flight with hearts on the line.

Again, it comes as little surprise that the characters of What Love Looks Like mostly get what they want, and there is certainly satisfaction in that. We’re not here to get exaggerated conflicts or violent uncoupling, but rather the ordinary uncertainties and triumphs of young relationships, which, however momentous they may seem in the moment, really are just relationships among many probable ones yet to come. I wish Magaña had made room for at least one that wasn’t heterosexual or monogamous (and it would have been nice to have seen one of the Black couples glimpsed during the film’s opening montage show up as a main pairing), but what is here is a heartfelt reminder that we’re all seeking affection in one way or another, and that sometimes it’s great to bask in the idea that we’ll end up finding it.

Le Gai Savoir

LE GAI SAVOIR   **1/2

Jean-Luc Godard

1969

IDEA:  Two radical Leftist students convene on an empty television set to discuss politics, language, images, and the state of the world.

BLURB:  How do you foster revolutionary thought and action within the institutional apparatuses designed to suppress them? What does a radical, anti-establishment politics look, sound, and feel like, especially as it expresses itself through the assaultive din of mass culture? These are the questions being self-reflexively wrestled with in Le Gai Savoir, Godard’s characteristically droll, smug, formally adventurous mix of abrasive Marxist dialectic and intellectual wankery. Patricia and Émile meet up in the inky nowhere of a TV studio to ruminate, lament, and allegedly formulate an ideological plan of action in the midst of countercultural crisis, but rather than posit anything really coherent, the film is mostly an excuse for Godard to noodle around with audiovisual syntax. When he’s not dwelling on the baroquely side-lit silhouettes of Jean-Pierre Léaud and Juliet Berto, he’s serving up barrages of disjunctive signifiers, with scribbled-on advertisements, documentary footage, propaganda, war photographs, and gnomic pronouncements creating such a florid semiotic density that the real-world issues they index tend to get obscured. It’s a relatively enjoyable, giddy explosion of language, all things considered – the Etch-A-Sketch interlude is a delight – but to what end? Are Godard’s protests efficacious or elitist pontification from an artist’s ivory tower? At least he can admit that it all might be for naught: that maybe, in 1969 or today, Le Gai Savoir is most powerful as a sadly self-aware epitaph for a movement stuck gazing longingly at its embattled ideals.

Top 10 - 2019

For whatever reason, it was the year of the pas de deux. From duos chummy (DiCaprio/Pitt in Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood) to psychotic (Pattison/Dafoe in The Lighthouse) to acrimonious and yearning (Driver/Johansson in Marriage Story) to aching from absences of affection (LaBeouf/Jupe in Honey Boy) to galvanized by the possibilities of a gaze fleetingly liberated (Haenel/Merlant in Portrait of a Lady on Fire, seen above), to... papal (those Two Popes), cinema in 2019 offered abundant proof that one of the medium's greatest effects is the frisson created by a couple of human beings interacting with each other.

It was also the year of auto-fiction, with a remarkable number of directors using the form to ruminate on their lives and careers, often in ways that seemed confessional and self-exorcising. In addition to Tarantino's grandiose ego trip, a paean to a lost Hollywood that was also, by extension, a fetishistic self-monument, there was Scorsese's autumnal gangster culmination The Irishman, Joanna Hogg's fictionalized origin story The Souvenir, Pedro Almodóvar's warm, wistful retrospective Pain and Glory, Noah Baumbach's Marriage Story, informed by the experience of his own divorce, and the wrenching Honey Boy, directed by Alma Har'el and written by Shia LaBeouf as a therapeutic exercise while he was in rehab.

Also, Netflix expanded its influence over the market, and Disney continued to grow its quasi-monopolistic media hegemony. But you've read about this elsewhere (resist!). All said, it was a pretty terrific year for movies.

My Top 10 films of this last year of the decade, to follow...

Horse Money

HORSE MONEY   ***1/2

Pedro Costa

2014

IDEA:  Cape Verdean immigrant Ventura moves between ambiguous but always entrapping institutional interiors and temporal realms, encountering figures from his and Portugal's past.

BLURB:  With its subaltern bodies drifting among deep-focus passageways and decrepit spaces, abstracted by engulfing shadows and shards of spectral light, Horse Money’s imagery suggests a haunted, postcolonial Caravaggio, or a petrified dystopian underworld. The look of Costa’s film is simultaneously harsh, alien, suffocating, and uncannily anti-naturalistic, which is to say that it’s an affectively astute visualization of the state inhabited by Ventura, who wanders this just-barely earthly purgatory as a spirit arrested by social and political systems that disavow his claims to the life-world. He is, in a very physical sense, smothered by darkness and stasis, his uncontrollable tremor a signifier of irrepressible historical trauma that cannot, in any case, break through the shadows that entomb him. That tension between trembling and stifled movement vibrates beneath almost all of Costa’s eerily sharp, torpid frames, whose fastidious compositions seem always under threat of either completely ossifying or being suddenly pierced by violence, evoking the fragility of so many marginalized people’s socio-historical positions as well as the visual mechanisms that often make them perceptible at the expense of their humanity. This fuzzy representational realm is navigated by Horse Money with such mannered aestheticism, one might wonder if the approach is less about suffocation than merely suffocating, obscuring its characters under a carapace of remote avant-gardism. One is also inclined to see this aesthetic language, indeed to feel it, as a bold phenomenological appeal to certain embodied experiences that demand their own singular, inassimilable articulation.