Early Summer
Two movies you may have seen and two you definitely haven't
Watching
Asteroid City (2023)
I do not pay very much attention to whatever is going on online these days but even so I couldn’t escape the knowledge that there’s a TikTok trend where teens (and probably also adults with too much time on their hands) film their lives “as though they were a Wes Anderson movie.” By this I take it they mean “if everything were very symmetrical and underscored by twee little music,” and not “literate in film history, laced with gallows humor, incorporating multiple nesting narrative devices, and tossing in some stop-motion animation for good measure.”
Asteroid City, Anderson’s eleventh feature in close to 30 years, features all the above and then some. It’s of a piece with 2021’s The French Dispatch, a more aesthetically exuberant and in some ways more experimental film. Asteroid City seems to be touching a nerve that his last film didn’t, I imagine because its single-stream narrative is an easier emotional sell than Dispatch’s omnibus structure, although there are still some complexities, which we’ll get to in a minute.
War photographer Auggie Steenbeck (Jason Schwartzman, never better) is stopping by the desert hamlet of Asteroid City with teenage son Woodrow (Jake Ryan) and three overimaginative younger daughters to catch a Rare Astronomical Event. Astronomy-genius Woodrow is also receiving a Young Scientist’s award; the kids’ mother is three weeks dead but Auggie lacks the gumption to tell them. Similarly in town to receive an award is young Dinah Campbell (Grace Edwards), Woodrow’s intellectual and romantic equal, and her mother Midge (Scarlett Johansson, deadpanning masterfully), a movie star who enlists Auggie to help her rehearse her lines for an upcoming role from their facing motel room windows. During the RAE, something terrible and amusing happens that prompts the U.S. government to place the whole town and its visitors under quarantine until they can get in there and figure out what’s going on. Uncowed, the genius kids revolt.
The preceding paragraph describes a “play within a film,” for Asteroid City actually opens in black and white on a television soundstage, where Bryan Cranston as “The Host” appears to introduce a teleplay about the making of “Asteroid City,” a never-produced play by fictional playwright Conrad Earp (Edward Norton) and director Schubert Green (Adrien Brody). With the occasional use of intertitles to introduce new acts, Anderson switches gracefully between the full-color play (which is shot like a film; with two cheeky exceptions, he isn’t trying to make “Asteroid City” look like a stage-mounted production) and behind-the-scenes telecast snippets that flesh out the inner lives of the in-universe cast and crew. (To make matters even more confusing, we’re told that the unproduced script of “Asteroid City” itself is also completely made up within the universe of the teleplay. Easiest just to roll with it.) Throughout all of this Schwartzman has the most delicate task to perform, playing on the one hand a character quietly smarting with grief from his wife’s death and on the other an actor trying to better understand that character’s motivations (why does he burn his hand on a hot plate in the third act?).
While some complain that it creates needless emotional distance from the A-plot, Anderson’s matryoshka storytelling—which dates at least as far back as The Grand Budapest Hotel—when executed well (as it is here, I think), is pleasurable in its own right, as much as if not more so than his characteristically hyper-controlled camera. For my part I think it also works well in Asteroid City as a means of exploring alienation1 from multiple angles. In a way this is Anderson’s pandemic film: characters under quarantine, Schwartzman and Johansson dialoguing at a distance from windows framed like computer monitors, everyone pondering their place in the universe in the face of uncertain new powers beyond their comprehension. Asteroid City responds to the zeitgeist without capitulating to it, a quality that proves that Anderson’s mastery as a director extends to more than just aesthetic rigor.
The Sweet East (2023)
Meanwhile it’s hard to imagine a film more baldly of-the-moment than The Sweet East, the feature directorial debut of cinematographer Sean Price Williams and the first screenwriting credit for film critic Nick Pinkerton. I caught an advance screening of it in Paris, where the lovely art deco Cinema Louxor was holding its annual post–Cannes Film Festival first-look series. The Sweet East was one of three American films to play in Director’s Fortnight and I’m simply dying to know what my Parisian audience thought of it. If only I could assure them that what they watched is in no way representative of How Americans Live Now. Probably.
Shot on Williams’s signature scuzzy 16mm film, The Sweet East daisy-chains vignettes about various contemporary American subcultures together into an Odyssey-like whole. On a whirlwind high school class trip to Washington, D.C. that leads her to the bowels of Comet Ping Pong,2 sedate pixie dream girl Lillian (Talia Ryder) slinks off to the bathroom to…sing the opening credits of the movie? This unexpected and really quite invigorating bathroom-mirror solo is interrupted by Pizza Gate3. An antifa punk ducks for cover in her stall then whisks her away to “safety,” thus beginning a journey that will take Lillian all up and down the Eastern seaboard and prompt multiple changes in identity. As she hops from one sect to the next, she’s taken in by a kindly and covertly white nationalist college professor (Simon Rex); she’s cast alongside one of the Euphoria boys (Jacob Elordi) in a low-budget film by a lightly megalomaniacal director (The Bear’s Ayo Edebiri); she stows away in the Vermont attic of a DIY Muslim brotherhood who hold bonfire dance parties every night.
This movie is both hilarious and very politically incorrect, but where I think it succeeds is in caring more about landing a joke than in being un-PC just for the sake of it. It does, however, lose a bit of steam as it goes on. The movie starts out so cacophonous and so grungy that it almost can’t help but mellow out a bit once it settles into its episodic structure. This could be by design, the better to imply that each of the exotic environs and their overlords that Lillian visits really aren’t so different from each other at the end of the day. Personally if I were trying to make a point about the unifying Americanness of the rites and religions that flourish on this country’s soil I would be more careful not to spend more time humanizing the white supremacist character than any of the others, but maybe that’s just me. The Sweet East almost begs you to take it too seriously so it can tell you to chill out; it’s all just a joke, man. But insofar as it has its finger on the pulse on the nation, well, of course it wants credit for that too.
Past Lives (2023)
My initial reaction to Past Lives was disappointment. My second reaction was, well, great, now I have to figure out where that came from. Playwright Celine Song’s debut film is nicely made but stops short of transcendence. It’s an adult drama that respects the intelligence of the viewer and looks pretty. The acting is good; it’s doing modestly well at the box office for an indie film that’s only half in English. People are craving this kind of movie, which is their right.
Song’s film is split into three decades in the life of Nora (Greta Lee), a writer living in New York with her husband Arthur (John Magaro), also a writer. When she was 12, Nora and her family immigrated from South Korea to Toronto, to the disappointment of her romantically-interested friend Hae Sun. In her 20s in an MFA program in NYC, Nora reconnects with Hae Sun (Yoo Teo) by chance and relives a piece of her childhood in a series of escalating Skype calls that finally conclude when Nora goes to Montauk for a writer’s workshop and meets Arthur. Ten-odd years later when Nora has settled well into the routines of married life, Hae Sun turns up in town. Nora takes him sightseeing, revisiting not only the what if of romantic possibility with Hae Sun but also the what happened to the girl she was in Korea, who is barely even a distant memory for the fully-assimilated Nora.
In each of the three parts of the movie, Hae Sun asks Nora why she wants to be a writer. As a child, she answers that she wants to win the Nobel Prize. Ambitious! A decade later, Hae Sun reminds her of this and Nora sheepishly shares that she has adjusted her expectations down a bit—a Pulitzer would suffice. This is cute as far as parallelisms go, until we get to the final act of the film, when Hae Sun once again asks what Nora, now supposedly an established playwright (we see her taking notes on an actor auditioning for one of her plays), wants as a writer. To win a Tony, she replies, both joking but also not.
As a writer myself I can’t really approach this aspect of the movie impartially, but let’s break this down a bit. “Writer” is not a profession you arbitrarily assign to a character in a movie; economically, it’s going to impose some burdens on them, especially for someone like Nora who is not shown to be sitting on any reserves of inherited wealth that would make surviving in New York easy. But beyond the practicalities, writing has to mean something to the writer beyond naked ambition. You don’t make it far in this field just by wanting to be the best. You need talent; you need connections. At the very least, for the sake of a condensed movie timeline, there has to be at least a little bit of dramatic friction. (You Hurt My Feelings, also out now from A24, understands this.)
What I would have given for a 30-year-old Nora to tell Hae Sun that her goals as a writer are to figure out how to end a certain character’s story arc, or to find a director capable of bringing her work to the stage with care, or literally any other anxiety that writers are known to have. If we’re being especially generous we might say that Nora’s fixation on winning prizes, however tongue-in-cheek, is a self-defensive measure to protect an inner life she’s sensitive to reveal to others and herself. Given that there’s some autobiographical element at play in the film, I can understand why Song might be reluctant to reveal too much of herself in Nora. But, critically, Nora and Song aren’t the same person, and that distinction is what should allow Song to explore what writing means to Nora when she’s in the midst of it—or, indeed, what the specificity of her work says about the person Song means to invite us to empathize with. Does this oversight render the rest of the movie’s emotional aspirations moot? Not really. Did it dampen my admiration for it? Unfortunately yes.
Our Body (2023)
Near the end of Claire Simon’s documentary set in the gynecological ward of a Parisian hospital, a woman who is about to undergo surgery for cervical cancer turns from her operating room bed toward the camera and exclaims: “I love cinema! What a great idea.” This is the first time that anyone in the movie—which comprises dozens of consultations, diagnoses, surgeries, and childbirths—is shown acknowledging the camera. It’s funny, but it also makes us think more about the meaning of the camera’s presence in this particular location.
Basically everything I’ve read about Our Body has compared it to the work of Frederick Wiseman, which, fair. It’s 168 minutes long and comprises mainly fly-on-the-wall shots filmed within a single institution. (The one important deviation from the Wiseman formula is that Simon herself appears as a subject at the beginning, middle, and end of the film.) Watching the conversations between medical providers and the dozens of women (and a few trans men) who assented to be filmed, you do wonder about all the individual rationales for permitting Simon to be present for what in many cases are incredibly intimate moments. The woman with cervical cancer tells us outright: this is a teachable moment! Show the world what goes on in a hospital! What was the reasoning of the woman who receives a dreaded diagnosis of endometriosis?
For as wrenching as many of the scenes within the hospital are, it’s the one scene shot just outside the building’s walls that recontextualizes the whole film in a stunning way. Simon happens to catch a group of women protesters raising awareness of abuses of power by medical staff and calling for justice for women who have been sexually harassed during exams and procedures. Suddenly the presence of Simon’s camera in the exam rooms is no longer merely a matter of showing what women’s healthcare looks like: it’s also fundamentally reshaping it by putting hospital staff on film and thereby holding them accountable for how they treat every variety of body to pass through their doors.
A brief, concluding shout out to my college film professor Sky Sitney, co-founder of Washington’s new DC/DOX festival, through which I was able to see Our Body long before most other audiences will have a chance to. (Cinema Guild has picked it up for U.S. distribution and will start rolling it out in New York next month.)
Update on Japanese Classics
My tour de Japanese cinema has brought me back to Yasujiro Ozu, one of the first directors I ever showed a special interest in. Having covered the agreed-upon classics in college, I’ve been left to discover the riches of his less-lauded works, titles like Tokyo Twilight (1957), Equinox Flower (1958), and Early Spring (1956). Having watched the last of these most recently, I can probably speak about it more intelligibly than I can the others. Surely known colloquially as the “Ozu adultery movie,” Early Spring announces from the jump that it is really a film about work. Ozu opens on a large crowd of workers—part of a total of 350,000, we’re told—taking the train from the outskirts of Tokyo into the center of the city, where they settle into desk jobs at nondescript offices.
As Ozu traces the relationships between one worker and his colleagues, his boss, his stay-at-home wife, and the woman he eventually has a fleeting affair with, the economic anxieties of the characters are a constant thematic refrain (the promise of a promotion factors into the main character’s waltzing into adultery; another side character worries about the financial implications of his wife’s pregnancy; and so on). Viewing this was something of a revelation, much like how rereading Middlemarch right now, for the first time in 10 years, has made me realize just how much George Eliot’s book is concerned with money relations. If Ozu is known primarily as a chronicler of marriage and relationship dramas, no assessment of his work would be complete without paying attention to his treatment of the economic conditions underpinning them.
Correction: An earlier version of this post incorrectly claimed that the writers’ retreat in Past Lives was set upstate when actually it was in Montauk. In my defense, every part of New York that isn’t the city is upstate, to me.
Pun intended.
It is not actually Comet Ping Pong. I was just there a few days ago and can verify that the bathrooms don’t match.
I wish I were kidding. Well, not really, it makes for more fun reading.