My Little Chickadee

MY LITTLE CHICKADEE   ***1/2

Edward F. Cline

1940

IDEA:  After being driven out of town for not being "respectable" enough, a woman works toward her redemption by marrying a braggadocios conman.

BLURB:  It may not be as naughty as her pre-Code work, but My Little Chickadee is pound-for-pound one of the funniest films in the Mae West catalogue. Taking elements of the Western milieux from Goin’ to Town and Klondike Annie, Edward F. Cline’s film sets the actress’s famous wanton loucheness against the moral hypocrisy of 19th-century settlers, whose far graver dissolution makes West’s Flower Belle Lee seem a saint in comparison. Of all the unscrupulous characters, nobody is more proudly so than W. C. Fields’ Cuthbert J. Twillie, a blowzy, drunken grifter who lumbers through the film boasting of his murderous exploits, abusing his Indigenous assistant, and scamming anyone in sight. That such a loathsome galoot is almost instantly appointed sheriff says all one needs to know about the ostensible civility of white colonial society. Despite the casual racism that still slips through - this is a 1940 Hollywood Western, after all - My Little Chickadee is quite pointed in its lampooning of phony “law and order” morality, as well as the intended role of marriage to chasten and control women. West and Fields wield their signature outsize personas like comedic steamrollers, memorably clashing as they issue bon mots with reliable, hilarious dexterity. The final line - a reversal of Fields’ patronizing terms of endearment followed by West’s defiantly sashaying hips - is the perfectly sassy capper.

The Phantom of Liberty

THE PHANTOM OF LIBERTY   ****

Luis Buñuel

1974

IDEA:  From the Napoleonic occupation of Spain in 1808 to contemporary France, an array of characters enter and exit through tenuously related vignettes.

BLURB:  Much of the power of Buñuel’s films lie in how they create the impression of a crumbling Symbolic order through signs that are not only legible, but deceptively mundane; it’s only in the steady accumulation of audiovisual juxtapositions and narrative displacements that one really perceives the extent of the erosion. This is especially true of the films the director co-wrote with Jean-Claude Carrière, and particularly The Phantom of Liberty. Structured like a serial string of anacoluthons, the film proceeds with a dream logic that defies the grammar of linear narrative progress. Characters’ present activities and goals are consistently interrupted or dropped, only for the focus to be redirected toward other unrelated episodes and pursuits, in a sidewinding stream of deferrals, disavowals, and substitutions. The effect not only mimics the scrambled nature of dreams, but sardonically conveys the desultoriness and apathy of the film’s bourgeois characters, who can neither seem to get anything meaningful done nor find good reason for their behavior. Buñuel’s juxtapositions - monks mortified by S&M, the (failed) law and order of a police academy giving way to the connotations of abjection suggested by the image of guests dining on toilets - sharply set into relief the porousness and contradictions of our social mores and structures, whether it’s religious dogma or the very organization of space. The fissures that emerge from his mischievous inversions and subversions don’t so much explode reality as subtly destabilize it, diffusing our naturalized rules and rituals into a still somehow operating disarray. Even in the disruption of revolution, however, The Phantom of Liberty queasily reminds us how power still finds a way to pervert.

Blonde Venus

BLONDE VENUS   ***1/2

Josef von Sternberg

1932

IDEA:  A former entertainer from Germany returns to show business after immigrating to the US, in order to raise money to send her ailing husband abroad for medical treatment.

BLURB:  Across the robust portfolio of characters she authored in the films of Josef von Sternberg - all arguably among the most variegated, fascinating, subversive female roles in early Hollywood cinema - Helen Faraday stands out as perhaps Dietrich’s most complex. This nominal Venus is less a vamp or a romantic lover than an iridescent, nearly cubist embodiment of a myriad conceptions of femininity, ones that both stem from and upend patriarchal gender dualisms. She first appears swimming nude in a wooded watering hole, a shimmering earthly sign of the eternal feminine. Then, Sternberg makes an ingeniously disorienting transition to another nude bathing body, this time of her young son in the near future, establishing the primal bond that will define Helen as Mother - the only in the Dietrich/Sternberg catalog. One consequently expects Blonde Venus to settle into a familiar mold of women’s melodrama, to reinscribe the role of the sacrificial mother in the schema of the heterosexual nuclear family. But Sternberg is not one to play by the books. Instead, Helen jinks in tandem with the mercurial, sometimes haphazard-feeling, and proudly unbelievable script, pin-balling between maternal domesticity and promiscuous showbiz spectacle, vanquishing the distance between devoted mother/wife and fallen woman. Maybe the most radical aspect of Blonde Venus is the odd, shifting psychosexual triangle made of Helen and her husband and child, which mixes obviously Oedipal dynamics with a rejection of same, resulting in an anti-phallic structure that almost entirely removes Herbert Marshall’s passive father from the picture. The power, after all, resides in Helen, in Dietrich’s enigmatic and inexhaustible mutability, in a woman who defies the expectations and categories of a male-authored world.

Promising Young Woman

PROMISING YOUNG WOMAN   **1/2

Emerald Fennell

2020

IDEA:  After the fallout of her best friend's rape, a young woman devises a plot to get back at abusive men and other sexual assault-abetting accomplices.

BLURB:  On the surface, from premise to aesthetics, Promising Young Woman augurs a bold pop-feminist take on the #MeToo movement. Whether it’s the fluorescent-hued, borderline expressionistic mise-en-scène or the revenge narrative spin, Fennell employs the pleasing sheen of genre to take aim at the insidious grasp of rape culture. And yet, subversive in ways admirable and dubious, Promising Young Woman complicates both its feminism and its pulp, as well as the catharsis expected from a putative tale of retribution. To wit: Cassie’s “revenge” spree, which abandons violence in favor of a campaign of shaming. Delivered by Mulligan with no-guff, vexed incredulity, Cassie’s table-turning incriminations carry a satisfaction perhaps more potent than any actual bloodletting. As Cassie progresses through her marks, Fennell effectively adumbrates the chain of aiding and abetting that normalizes rape through silence, complacency, willful denial, and entrenched sexist attitudes about what men are entitled to. While the director mostly navigates her tricky tone with aplomb, mining teeth-gritting tension and squirmy humor from sharp-tongued tête-à-têtes, she also seems increasingly unable to decide what her film is really trying to do. If this is intended to be an anthem of female empowerment, then why the third-act twist, which only compounds the degree to which Cassie (and, by extension, the deceased friend she’s avenging) is defined and confined by her trauma? Why the rousing ending, when survival for sexual assault victims is essentially denied? There is a sense that Fennell has sacrificed the real-world implications of her script for the element of dramatic surprise. The results are troubling, but Fennell at least realizes there are productive conversations to be had around something that doesn’t provide an easy resolution.

2020 Oscar-Nominated Documentary Short Films

 

This year, I am reviewing all 15 films nominated across Oscar's three short subject categories. Versions of these blurbs have also been published at Cine-File.

OSCAR-NOMINATED DOCUMENTARY SHORT FILMS

Like its Live Action counterpart, Oscar’s 2020 Documentary Shorts slate is dominated by weighty subjects, from systemic racism in the US to major geopolitical crises abroad. On the more hopeful side of things is Ben Proudfoot and Kris Bowers’ A Concerto is a Conversation (13 min), which comes from the New York Times’ Op-Docs series. Following from the titular metaphor, the film is structured as a dialogue between Bowers, a successful black composer and musician, and his nonagenarian grandfather Horace. Through their intergenerational exchange, we learn about Horace’s migration from Jim Crow Florida to Los Angeles, where he still runs a neighborhood cleaners. His journey, scarred by institutional racism, is juxtaposed with the early-career success of his grandson, whose comparatively smooth vocational path highlights the degree to which racial equality has progressed over the generations. It’s a polished and poignant piece, inspiring without being mawkish. 

Another dialogue across generations takes place in Anthony Giacchino’s Colette (24 min). It centers on Colette Marin-Catherine, a former member of the French Resistance who is persuaded by a young historian, Lucie Fouble, to visit the German concentration camp where Colette’s brother was killed during the war. Their emotional, mutual excavation of memory reinforces the importance of the historical credo to “never forget.” Sophia Nahli Allison’s A Love Song For Latasha (19 min) is also about remembering, in this case the life of Latasha Harlins, a 15-year-old black girl who was shot and killed by the owner of a convenience store in 1991 South Central LA. Her murder would partly catalyze the riots that erupted the following year, but Allison eschews footage of violence; instead, employing sensuous montage, animation, and simulated VHS static - as well as testimony from Latasha’s cousin Shinese and friend Tybie - she constructs an impressionistic archival tapestry that restores beauty and visibility to a life cut tragically short.

The final two nominees address specific calamities unfolding in the present with on-the-ground immediacy. In Skye Fitzgerald’s Hunger Ward (40 min), we follow a doctor and a nurse in war-torn Yemen who tend to fatally malnourished children at a pair of pediatric clinics. It’s a grueling watch, but one that’s productively angry in its exhaustion rather than resigned, fueled by the tenacity of the healthcare workers who refuse to accept as a norm the human rights abuses embattling their nation. Righteous outrage also drives Anders Hammer’s Do Not Split (35 min), an immersive document of, and primer on, Hong Kong’s 2019-20 pro-democracy protests. Hammer puts us on the streets right alongside the activists, dodging rubber bullets and tear gas as the Chinese government escalates its siege against dissidents. The film has a powerful urgency, and a non-ending that underscores how still sadly necessary our global fight against authoritarianism remains.

2020 Oscar-Nominated Animated Short Films

This year, I am reviewing all 15 films nominated across Oscar's three short subject categories. Versions of these blurbs have also been published at Cine-File.

OSCAR-NOMINATED ANIMATED SHORT FILMS

Cute anthropomorphic animals, eccentric Scandinavians, heavy social messages, and arresting stylistic invention; Oscar’s wide-ranging taste in animation is well represented by this year’s nominees, which comprise both pet favorites and more esoteric marvels. Of the former category, it wouldn’t be the Academy Awards if Disney didn’t occupy its obligatory spot. Thankfully, Madeline Sharafian’s Burrow (6 min) is a delight, a warmly 2D-animated piece about a shy bunny trying to create her dream home. Reluctant to ask for help from the underground critters who keep digging through her walls, the bunny burrows deeper into the ground until she realizes she won’t be able to solve her problems alone. There are more complex thematic potentials in here than Sharafian (and probably Disney) are willing to explore - urban development, housing inequality - but as a charming ode to community, the short is plenty satisfying. 

For those seeking ambitious, loaded concepts, Erick Oh’s mind-boggling Opera (8 min) should do the trick. The antithesis of Disney, the short consists of one slow vertical pan down and then back up a giant pyramid structure, whose teeming contents reveal a vast, self-perpetuating ecosystem of exploitation and oppression. Despite the hierarchies of power he graphically delineates, Oh never guides your attention; rather, your eye is forced to wander endlessly across this perverse ant-farm fiefdom and the plethora of cryptic dramas contained within. 

A more emotional approach to grim subject matter is found in Will McCormack and Michael Govier’s If Anything Happens I Love You (12 min). Told in an elegant graphite-and-ink wash style, it depicts the paralyzing grief of two parents whose daughter is killed in a school shooting. In a film that goes the sentimental route, sometimes to a fault, its most potent gesture is simply a lingering shot of a large, vibrant American flag hanging in the school hallway; those stars and stripes should elicit only deep shame in anyone watching. 

From sobering reality to aesthetic phantasmagoria, Adrien Mérigeau’s Genius Loci (16 min) charts the nocturnal odyssey of a young black woman through a mystical, shapeshifting urban landscape. The look of it is breathtaking, whether it’s bringing to life the work of Belgian illustrator Brecht Evens, slipping into geometric abstraction reminiscent of Kandinsky and Klee, or even, at one point, detouring into a woodcut-esque montage.

Rounding things out is Gísli Darri Halldórsson and Arnar Gunnarsson’s droll Yes-People (8 min), which chronicles a day in the lives of a handful of monosyllabic denizens of an apartment complex. Punctuated by coffee slurps, accumulating snow, and disruptively loud sex, it's a deadpan Nordic symphony of minor annoyances, staged in little vignettes that suggest a more lighthearted Roy Andersson.

2020 Oscar-Nominated Live Action Short Films

This year, I am reviewing all 15 films nominated across Oscar's three short subject categories. Versions of these blurbs have also been published at Cine-File.

OSCAR-NOMINATED LIVE ACTION SHORT FILMS

If the films nominated for this year’s Best Live Action Short Film Oscar appeared together in any other context, one would believe they were curated specifically to cover as many of our present-day sociopolitical challenges as possible: immigration policy and homelessness, racist police violence and the prison-industrial complex. That the Academy has managed to include films from both Israel and Palestine further reinforces a sense of an engineered optics, a reassurance that Oscar is leaving no stone unturned. None of the nominees exemplify this earnest appeal to the zeitgeist more than Travon Free’s and Martin Desmond Roe’s Two Distant Strangers (30 min), a riff on Groundhog Day through the lens of Black Lives Matter. Here, the time loop conceit is used to convey the grinding recurrence of police brutality against people of color, as a young black man keeps reliving his day each time he is murdered by the same white officer. While initially effective in its bluntness, the short eventually groans under its heavy-handed and manipulative construction (there’s a cute pooch the guy needs to get back home to); a late-breaking twist, meanwhile, diminishes the systemic racism at play by making the cop character seem like a lone loony with a vendetta. I suspect others will be more receptive to the film’s mix of high-concept storytelling and social justice messaging. 

Other nominees are decidedly less didactic, locating their political concerns in intimate human drama. In Doug Roland’s Feeling Through (18 min), a homeless teen develops a friendship with a deaf-blind man, helping him get home in the middle of the night. Roland’s patient, understated direction, sensitively attuned to the characters’ haptic mode of communication, grounds this moving tribute to everyday altruism. Similarly unfussy is Farah Nabulsi’s The Present (23 min), which portrays how a routine shopping trip in the West Bank turns into an arduous border-crossing ordeal for a Palestinian man and his daughter. 

The big ticket here, so to speak, is Elvira Lind’s The Letter Room (32 min), starring Oscar Isaac and Alia Shawkat. Isaac is a corrections officer at a penitentiary who is tasked with reading and monitoring the prisoners’ incoming missives. The film is evocatively shot, taking advantage of the strong overhead lighting in the prison hallways; the resulting sense of danger parallels the plot’s building intrigue, as Isaac’s officer is drawn deeper into the private lives of an inmate and his girlfriend. 

Tomer Shushan’s White Eye (20 min), for my money the best of the nominees, closes out the program. A sort of modern-day Bicycle Thieves, this moral parable concerns a fraught encounter between an Israeli man, the Eritrean immigrant who supposedly stole his bike, and law enforcement. Unfolding entirely in a single take that navigates around a street corner and through a butcher shop, the film depicts how a seemingly just pursuit can have terrible and unforeseen consequences. Despite this, it’s never polemical or showy; its power lies in its anguished, unvarnished empathy.