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.

Sitcom

SITCOM   ***

François Ozon

1998

IDEA:  A small white rat unleashes torrents of hidden desire in a seemingly idyllic suburban abode.

BLURB:  From its prologue, in which a suburban dad murders his family offscreen during a surprise birthday celebration, Ozon’s debut feature film makes blatantly clear the sardonic intention of its title. The director will proceed to not only gleefully upend the banal trappings of the classic television sitcom, but to mock and subvert the patriarchal nuclear family structure, gender roles, and bourgeois attitudes that underpin it. Sitcom wastes no time perverting these basic principles; within minutes of the father’s introduction of a white rat to the household, the family’s repressed desires erupt in a maelstrom of psychosexual chaos. The rodent’s connotations of abjection, coupled with the alterity of the maid’s African boyfriend, are turned on their heads by Ozon, who understands that “outside” influences are merely scapegoats for irrepressible feelings that come from within. This is something only the father seems to grasp as he facilitates and delights in the spiraling debauchery of his suddenly sex-crazed family. In one of many sharp subversions, the patriarch here is passive and fey, a figure whose ambiguous sexuality and eventual polymorphism put him at a far remove from the archetypal man of the house. His actions may set off the erotic hijinks, but it is the absence of his governing paternal superego that Ozon posits, with tongue in cheek, as the true cause of familial-domestic degradation. As rough around the edges as it might be, Sitcom offers enough pithy, surrealist social observation to make its funhouse antics more than mere surface provocation.

Annette

ANNETTE   **1/2

Leos Carax

2021

IDEA:  A stand-up comedian experiences a drastic decline in his career while he raises a preternaturally gifted baby girl with his opera singer wife. 

BLURB:  By what metric does one evaluate such a flagrantly proud farrago as Annette? Certainly no traditional critical schema is fit to accommodate the film’s defiant unruliness, its indiscriminate blending of opera, camp, metatextuality, and emotional sincerity. There is a gentle perversity about the film’s nearly unrelenting gaucheness, how Carax and the Mael brothers seem to approach each moment with the modus operandi of affective dissonance. They walk an extreme razor’s edge between irony and earnestness, sophomoric parody and artistic meditation, with the viewer never quite sure which mode they’re experiencing. Is Carax even sure? The film careens around with an abandon that can, at times, feel stubbornly random, as if its pell-mell construction alone could serve as an alibi against formal critique. All this being said, Annette is not as outré as one might have expected from its eccentric auteurs. Essentially a macabre arthouse rendition of A Star is Born, it trades in shopworn ideas about the trials of celebrity and the artist’s process, with a particular emphasis on the psyche of the disillusioned, self-loathing male creator. These are clichés Carax and the Maels simultaneously embrace and spoof; so too their conceits about parenting anxieties, which manifest in the film’s most memorable invention, the titular, sentient wooden puppet child. The individual elements here are familiar, but in Annette’s combination of them, they become deliberately wrong, uncanny, garish. The music, symphonically rousing and self-consciously stilted in the same breath, follows suit. To the extent that anyone possibly could, Carax pulls together this shaggy experiment in the denouement, a sobering duet that denudes the cover of creative expression to reveal its whimpering human soul.