Underground

UNDERGROUND   ****

Emir Kusturica

1995

IDEA:  The decades-long saga of two Yugoslav friends, from their years in the resistance during WWII to the bloody Balkan wars of the 1990s.

BLURB:  In its decadent, carnivalesque spectacle and inspired knockabout physical comedy, Underground often calls to mind an Eastern European acid-trip mix of Fellini, the Marx Brothers, and Looney Tunes. Yet no comparison can really suffice in describing the experience of Emir Kusturica’s one-of-a-kind opus, a scabrous, rambunctious historical epic bursting at the seams with lunatic energy and invention. Molding and bedazzling 40 years of turbulent Yugoslav history into a fiery, truly massive-scale tragic-farce, Kusturica produces at once an absurdist national myth, a howling orgiastic inferno of sociopolitical chaos and delusion, and, once it gets to its inevitably grim denouement, a jeremiad for a people irreparably fractured by waves of systemic exploitation and internecine violence. Just as it overflows with a parade of outsize metaphors - zoo animals, meta-theatrical productions, the titular subterranean space and its suppressed and blinded denizens - Underground positively explodes with sheer cinematic brio. The film is, if nothing else, a breathtakingly sustained high-wire act of immaculately controlled pandemonium, with mise-en-scène, choreography, shot construction, editing, music, and performance calibrated to reach Everest-level heights of artful insanity. It’s frequently gobsmacking. And although it’s also exceedingly easy to get lost in the delirium, to wonder, at the odd interval at which your mind isn’t reeling, if the politics haven’t also been buried in the onslaught, Underground goes on to disarm such qualms through the force of its audacity. This isn’t national history written as textbook grand narrative, or even as fictional document, but as Rabelaisian reflection, nightmare, and dream.

Two Drifters

TWO DRIFTERS   ***

João Pedro Rodrigues

2005

IDEA:  Rui and Odete are drawn together after the former's boyfriend is killed in an auto accident, and Odete becomes obsessed with the dead man, whom she never knew.

BLURB:  If nothing else, the early films of João Pedro Rodrigues are among the cinema’s clearest illustrations of Freudian concepts. As in O Fantasma, here the director conveys the sinuous, agonized circuit of erotic desire as a series of displacements, with an absent object “reconstituted” via fetishistic substitutions that descend into perversity. Two Drifters ups the ante, figuring this scenario in a blackly comic melodramatic pastiche, alluding to everything from Douglas Sirk to The Lord of the Rings, with a healthy dose of Vertigo and, in explicit appearances, Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Rodrigues lifts a time-honored trope - the haunting, specifically of a former lover - and imbues it with both queer metaphysical dimensions and a deadpan, self-aware absurdism. If Two Lovers is still, despite its archly overripe turns of event, a pretty predictable movie, one can chalk that up to the influence of psychoanalysis, and the ways in which Rodrigues draws upon its rules and patterns to deliver Rui and Odete to the natural “fulfillment” of their intersecting drives. In the process, Two Drifters gets at the inherent fluidity and reversibility of self and other, uncovering a universal desire to both possess and be possessed. “Well something’s lost, but something’s gained,” goes the lyric from “Both Sides Now,” heard early in the film. In Rodrigues’ psychosexual burlesque, such a sentiment takes on another loaded meaning.

Dick Johnson is Dead

DICK JOHNSON IS DEAD   ***1/2

Kirsten Johnson

2020

IDEA:  After her father, Dick Johnson, starts exhibiting early symptoms of dementia, documentarian Kirsten Johnson decides to cast him in a movie in which he dies, repeatedly and often outrageously.

BLURB:  It’s a feature of Kirsten Johnson’s latest memoir-cum-filmic interrogation that by its end, viewers are apt to wonder if Dick Johnson is, in fact, dead. This ontological question is one fundamentally entwined with cinema, a medium capable of preserving reality and restoring loss, masking temporal absence with perceptual presence. Death escapes representation; nobody really dies on film, especially not Dick Johnson. Rather, the boisterous octogenarian’s multiple, morbidly staged “deaths” only serve to underscore his continuing corporeal existence. Following each freak accident, he is “resurrected” by the film apparatus, and sent to a movie-constructed heaven to live out his life for blissful eternity. All, of course, made possible by his daughter’s cinematic trickery, which becomes through her Seventh-day Adventist theology a droll, probably blasphemous analog of Jesus’ divine powers. If this all seems rather fetishistic, that’s because it is. Yet most of what seems garish, sordid, or mollifying about the Johnsons’ project is a byproduct of the film’s honest, messy grappling with human mortality, and the role photographic-based media play in how we relate to memory and loss. The repetitious restaging of this primal fantasy is not done to disavow or ward off death, but to creatively rehearse it within the imaginary space granted by film - indeed, to take advantage of this essential ability. Even when Dick Johnson is dead, all we’ll know is his presence.

A Good Man

This is an early review of a film scheduled to open next year.

A GOOD MAN   **

Marie-Castille Mention-Schaar

2020

IDEA:  When it's discovered that his wife is unable to conceive, trans man Benjamin decides to temporarily halt his transition and carry the child himself.

BLURB:  A Good Man. There’s nothing remarkable about that title, until it’s spoken to the transgender Benjamin by one of his patients halfway through the film. Having already witnessed much of his unique reproductive journey, in which his gender identity and choice to bear a child have been challenged by family, science, and the law, these words take on a peculiar tenor. “A good man.” It’s a gendered collocation, almost never seen or heard with the subject as another sex. This attention to how language shapes our perception and understanding of identity gives Marie-Castille Mention-Schaar’s film its most surprising source of insight, cutting through the director’s often earnest, sentimental didacticism, and proving more matter-of-factly potent than any moment of teary family conflict. When the tears do come, however, actress Noémie Merlant makes it work. Putting aside the questionable casting of a cis actress in this trans role, Merlant is entirely and almost eerily convincing in what feels like a truly empathetic embodiment of Benjamin’s pride and pain. The actress disappears into the part not only physically but emotionally, effectively delineating the inner struggle of someone postponing, or at least complicating, a self-actualization that feels so in reach. She is remarkable, even when A Good Man isn’t.

Careless Crime

Part of my coverage of the 56th Chicago International Film Festival.

CARELESS CRIME   ***   

Shahram Mokri

2020

IDEA:  In contemporary Iran, a cadre of four disaffected men plot to burn down a movie theater, closely echoing a real act of domestic terrorism that occurred shortly before the Iranian Revolution in 1978.

BLURB:  One could easily exhaust the box of movie metaphors in describing the narrative structure and overall effect of Careless Crime. Mokri’s film is a palimpsest of Iranian history; a series of mise-en-abymes enclosed in a set of nesting dolls; a Möbius strip, in which reality, representation, past, and present feed imperceptibly back into one another without origin or endpoint. Indeed, Careless Crime is a work of byzantine construction that invites these and a dozen other associations; crammed with sociopolitical allusions and a veritable pile-on of meta-cinematic devices, it’s as audacious as it is frequently abstruse in meaning and message. Sometimes, Mokri’s formalist tomfoolery - rewound scenes, recursive visuals and dialog, films-within-films-within-films - can feel indulgently overwrought, obfuscating whatever it is he’s trying to communicate. At other times, or even at the same time, his approach is captivating in its dizzying, movie-drunk play, effectively suggesting the reality-torquing power that film has over our perceptions. The cinema, as location and medium, is both the real-world and diegetic catalyst of Careless Crime, an entity so historically and psychically significant it becomes figured as a primal scene of the Iranian Revolution, and, by extension, of contemporary Iranian art and politics. By creating a feedback loop where the original scene of the “crime” is replicated in the present, and where people and their actions become temporally displaced in and around movie screenings, Mokri evokes a sense of eternal return, with the cinema as fulcrum. Who knows if the profusion of narrative and thematic strata all fully cohere; even if they don’t, Careless Crime has enough ideas to fill an auditorium.

Dear Comrades!

Part of my coverage of the 56th Chicago International Film Festival.

DEAR COMRADES!   **1/2

Andrei Konchalovsky

2020

IDEA:  A fictionalized account of the events surrounding the 1962 massacre in Novocherkassk, Russia, when Soviet military and KGB personnel opened fire on protesting factory workers.

BLURB:  The great tacit irony of Dear Comrades! is that its eponymous address could apply as much to its striking factory workers as to its Communist Party officials. By situating the events of the state-sanctioned Novocherkassk massacre in an illustrious Russian timeline of dissent and suppression, director Konchalovsky makes his point about cyclical history starkly clear: the fellow-feeling comrades become the iron-fist oppressors, and they’re all too eager to shun - and repeat - the past. That the events of the film could just as plausibly be taking place in 1903 or 2020 as opposed to 1962 is partly what makes this such a chilling historical account. Andrey Naydenov’s black-and-white 4:3 cinematography, which largely forgoes modernist stylization, furthers this sense of disorienting, verisimilitudinous déjà vu. It’s when Dear Comrades! shrinks its fairly sprawling, bureaucrats-and-laborers panorama to zero in on the moral awakening of a disillusioned apparatchik that the film starts to seem contrived. Is such a bourgeois perspective the right way to frame this story of mass trauma? Might a more proletarian, polyphonic telling better rebuke the authoritarianism of the State? These questions linger, even as Dear Comrades! argues for its character study as a means of holding leadership accountable. Questionable narrative decisions aside, the film is methodical in chronicling this heinous episode of local Soviet history, and provides an appallingly relevant reminder of how willing some governments are (and not just the outwardly hostile ones) to undermine and debase the ideals of the polis.

Memory House

Part of my coverage of the 56th Chicago International Film Festival.

MEMORY HOUSE   **1/2

João Paulo Miranda Maria 

2020

IDEA:  A Black factory worker in a speculative, contemporary-colonial southern Brazil faces oppression from his employers and neighbors.

BLURB:  Legacies of cultural imperialism come up against Indigenous myth and subaltern histories in Memory House, Joāo Paulo Miranda Maria's tantalizing, sometimes heavy-handed feature debut. Mixing realism, folklore, and quasi-futuristic imagery - most notably, the antiseptic, spaceship-like environs of a global milk production facility - the director creates an unsettling social allegory for modern-day Brazil. Colonialism endures in the form of an Austrian colony, which has taken over the southern part of the country with a capitalist stranglehold; white supremacy, xenophobia, and economic inequity run rampant, terrorizing Black factory worker Cristovam in ways both big and small. Miranda Maria unravels this speculative, magical-realist portrait in slow, creeping zooms and eerie nocturnal tableaux, casually introducing and expanding nightmarish details, until Cristovam can silently bear his oppression no longer. Memory House is not subtle in how it links its protagonist to the actual cattle his employers milk and, at one point, indifferently slaughter, nor is it coy in aligning him with nature and mysticism, provoking sometimes dubious primitivist associations. The film is most affecting during its sparer, thickly atmospheric moments, when the sounds of creaking wood and trilling birds, heard as a constant, enveloping hum at the titular abode, merge into a melancholy chorus for the downtrodden.