Running on Empty

RUNNING ON EMPTY   **1/2

Sidney Lumet

1988

IDEA:  On the lam for a near-deadly act of anti-war activism they committed over a decade earlier, two parents raise their children as fugitives and grapple with their eldest son's growing independence.

BLURB:  Running on Empty is a political film that tries not to be political, and in the process, becomes more political than it ever needed to be. There are certainly a myriad of intriguing possibilities inherent in the premise of two former hippie activists who now find themselves leading a nuclear family while on the run from the law. But Naomi Foner is not interested in most of them. Instead, she uses the incident that turned them into fugitives - the protest bombing of a military facility during the Vietnam War - as merely a catalyst for a pretty typical family melodrama. Running on Empty works quite well as a family melodrama, its uniformly strong performances and frequently sharp writing deftly navigating the sorrows and ambivalences created by a child’s burgeoning independence from their parents. The sense of cyclical and universal intergenerational tension is brought powerfully home in the late scene between Annie and her estranged father, which highlights how so much of what a parent goes through with their children has been experienced in some variation by their elders, with them. Yet it’s also this scene that reinforces the film’s troubling subtext, positing liberalism as a threat to family unity. How much more interesting and productively complicated would Running on Empty be if Danny’s growth hinged on the development of political consciousness, of any ideological leaning, rather than puppy love and the bourgeois pursuit (inherited from his mother and grandmother, of course) of being a pianist at Juilliard? It would be much more interesting, and challenging. As is, Running on Empty is very much a product of Reagan-era Hollywood, slickly affecting and reactionary at heart.

Challengers

CHALLENGERS   ***

Luca Guadagnino

2024

IDEA:  Two former best friends and tennis doubles teammates - now bitter rivals for the affection of a former tennis prodigy, who's married to one of them and used to date the other - face off in a Challenger match.

BLURB:  Tennis, lust, power, and cinematic form are inextricably bound up in Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers, an often unwieldy but clever and energetic relationship melodrama. In Justin Kuritzkes’s script, tennis serves as a metaphor for the love triangle between Tashi, Art, and Patrick, its constant volleys and shifts in advantage echoed in the trio’s push-and-pull seductions and attacks. They all take turns as both player and ball in a torrid erotic game that’s all about scoring the winning point. This sort of amour fou gamesmanship is fairly rote stuff, and there’s disappointingly little depth to the characters to make their affairs transcend the petulant devices of a group of affluent, insecure, self-absorbed children (which is, to be fair, what they are). But it’s ultimately less the story than the visual and sonic language of Challengers that teases and thrills, the ways in which Guadagnino extends the tennis metaphor into the structuring principle for his film’s very form. The back-and-forth gameplay of tennis inflects everything from the narrative’s ping-ponging jumps in time to the swish-panning camera movements to Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s score, which sounds like a techno translation of a tennis ball caught in an endless rally. For better and worse, Challengers fully embraces the repetition that’s an essential characteristic of the game; it has no wariness about how often it rehashes the competition between its protagonists, nor is it timid in its copious use of slow motion to protract a moment or linger sensuously on a face (or chest). Yet these formal expressions viscerally serve a thematic purpose, locating in repetition, frustration, fatigue, and calisthenic pleasure the ingredients of tennis as much as desire.

Dreadnaught

DREADNAUGHT   ***1/2

Yuen Woo-ping

1981

IDEA:  A timid laundry man must rise to the occasion to take on a vicious, mute fugitive who will stop at nothing to kill him. 

BLURB:  As an unfettered showcase for ingenious, virtuosic martial arts choreography, Dreadnaught is pretty much impossible to fault. Without anything resembling a lull in its 95-minute runtime, the film serves up a breathless parade of action sequences that execute seemingly impossible acrobatic maneuvers with unpretentious, kinetic grace. A few standouts: a dance-fight between two pairs of men in Chinese lion costumes; a doctor’s visit in which the patient’s malady is treated with a dizzying flurry of slaps to the abdomen by hands aflame; and a battle on a dark stage with the literally two-faced villain, whose masked heads flip around like Janus on speed. Nearly every action in Dreadnaught is carried out in the fashion of kung fu, including a laundry-drying routine and a tailor’s fitting - literal fashion statements! It’s not only Yuen Woo-ping’s signature elaborate choreography that wows, but the way he edits the action in staccato rhythms to create a sense of crackling and ceaseless energy; the energy of bodies in motion, and of film as their conduit.

A Couple

A COUPLE   ***

Frederick Wiseman

2022

IDEA:  In the wake of her husband's death, Sofia Tolstoy laments the patriarchal oppression she experienced during her marriage.

BLURB:  A Couple is an interesting experiment that becomes fascinating when considered in the context of Frederick Wiseman’s oeuvre. The film is almost the perfect inverse of the director’s typical, documentary film: instead of a bustling social setting, it takes place entirely in depopulated nature, and instead of observing a panoply of people it features just one. Wiseman’s documentaries capture the sprawling canvas of society through a rhizomatic accretion of details, but here, in lieu of its physical presence, society is depicted through the didactic direct-address of monologue. Ultimately, it’s structure that binds A Couple to Wiseman’s other work; in formal terms, through his characteristic alternation between static interstitial shots and human activity, and in thematic terms, through his exploration of the structure of an institution, in this case heterosexual marriage. The film suggests that it is only divorced from her geographical and cultural context - literally removed from the material confines of society - that Sophia Tolstoy or any other 19th-century wife could voice her grievances as a woman. Wiseman underscores the temporal dislocation by adapting Tolstoy’s words into an entirely different language, recited by another in what amounts to a theatrical reading. It’s this quality of ventriloquy and the social realities it betrays that, ironically, make A Couple feel quite like a documentary after all.

A Matter of Life and Death

A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH   ****

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger

1946

IDEA:  Having miraculously survived after jumping from his burning plane during World War II, a British pilot conducts a romance with the radio operator he had communicated with before the incident while he simultaneously prepares to stand before a celestial court and defend his right to live.

BLURB:  Some films operate at such an audacious and formidable level - conceptually, thematically, aesthetically - that you can’t help but give yourself over to their astonishments. Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death is one such film. A quixotic, genre-mashing fantasia from an industry and an era not especially known for their formal daring, the film executes its loopy premise with a full-throated bravado and visual elegance that are, to risk cliché, heavenly. But A Matter of Life and Death is so confident in its approach and so ravishing in its design that it resists cliché, even as it openly courts it in Borzagian appeals to the transcendent power of love. Like that filmmaker-romantic, Powell and Pressburger exult in the possibilities of cinema to capture and expand the imagination. Their opulent, thoughtful use of Technicolor, courtesy of DP Jack Cardiff, remains nearly unmatched in sheer beauty, and their astute sense of how and when to employ practical effects - animation, motorized sets, puppetry - yields movie magic more potent than CGI. Such formal ingenuity serves a film that’s both a top-shelf work of fantasy and a distinctly postwar time capsule, and in ways that are inextricable. Portraying, wittily, a cosmic legal battle for one man’s right to life and love in the wake of World War II, A Matter of Life and Death fancifully recovers a human(ism) lost during the war and uses it to disarm the deadly follies of nationalism. Powell and Pressburger land their shots at both the British and Americans in keenly sarcastic ways; they know, having just won the war together, that the two are as close as Peter and June. Could the actual human romance at the center of the film be more convincing, and could June have been something more than a stock female love interest? Sure, but some films are so grand that their spells overwhelm, offering visions of life (and death?) that make other concerns finally feel so puny.

My Little Loves

MY LITTLE LOVES   **1/2

Jean Eustache

1974

IDEA:  Sent by his grandmother to live with his mother for a year in the city, the pubescent Daniel falls in with a crowd of older boys. 

BLURB:  My Little Loves is sort of an anti-coming-of-age film, in that its pubescent protagonist goes from a budding sociopath who rubs up against a girl at mass to, by the end of a languid two hours, a budding sociopath who smokes a cigarette and more unashamedly feels up a girl. Played by the gangly, wide-eyed yet impassive Martin Loeb, Daniel is at once an unassuming delinquent and a sullen cypher, like a more taciturn Antoine Doinel, or Laurent Chevalier from Malle’s Murmur of the Heart. Eustache’s austerely minimalist, deliberately stilted Bressonian style is an odd fit for material like this, sapping a portrait of childhood of its characteristic nervous energy and excitement, leaving instead a sense of glacial, almost monotonous drift. If the director’s intent was to convey the indeterminacy of this phase of growing up, he only partly succeeds, and more because of the hauntingly elliptical blackouts that punctuate most of his scenes than anything in the writing or the acting. Rather, the pleasures of My Little Loves are granular and sensory, largely attributable to the lush, limpid cinematography of Néstor Almendros, who spins visual poetry out of even the most meandering episodes of this curiously static quasi-bildungsroman. 

Grand Jeté

GRAND JETÉ   **1/2

Isabelle Stever

2022

IDEA:  A former ballerina, now working as a dance instructor, engages in an affair with her estranged adult son.

BLURB:  In Grand Jeté, motherhood is a sadomasochistic ritual as precious as it is perverse. When we’re first introduced to Nadja (Sarah Grether), however, it’s not in the context of maternity but the vocation she long ago substituted for her role as a mother. Instead of rearing a child, Nadja received her licks as a ballerina, pushing the limits of her body through an art at once graceful and unforgivingly grueling until her body could take it no more. Constantin Campean’s camera cleaves to Nadja’s undulating bones and scarred skin in closeups so tight they become synecdochic of a woman’s crumbling midlife prospects. This sense of loss drives her to engage in an emphatically Oedipal relationship with her estranged son, through which she finds a figurative and literal second chance at motherhood. It’s not exactly clear, in this largely withholding film, what’s driving the son (besides an evident shared affinity for bodily punishment and drinking from the sink faucet), but then this isn’t really the story of his desire. While it often plays like a leaden Piano Teacher-like erotic provocation, Grand Jeté becomes, in its final moments, the dementedly poignant fable of a mother’s (re)birth.