Festival Leftovers

La Chimera, The Beast, On the Adamant, Monster, Evil Does Not Exist

Watching

La Chimera (2023)

Italy used to be one of the most vital centers of filmmaking in the world, what with your Fellinis and your Pasolinis and your Antonionis and all the rest. Nowadays the ranks of Italian directors who have made anything resembling a global impact have thinned out. Aside from Luca Guadagnino, whose Italian forays center the perspectives of wealthy foreigners, we’re primarily left with Paolo Sorrentino and Alice Rohrwacher as our foremost chroniclers of la vita italiana. This isn’t a bad pairing: the brassy Sorrentino gives us a contemporary cinema of the Italian city while the subtler Rohrwacher sticks mostly to life in the provinces.

For La Chimera, Rohrwacher deploys a taciturn Josh O’Connor to the countryside, where he squats in a lean-to on the side of a hill and pals around with the grande dame of Italian cinema, Isabella Rossellini. Fresh out of jail and badly in need of a shower, O’Connor’s Arthur is an archaeologist who’s a pro with a dowsing rod, with which he and the local tombaroli locate, dig up, and loot ancient tombs for funereal artifacts to sell on the black market. Arthur is also smarting from the loss of his true love Beniamina, and his search for buried goods doubles, at least metaphorically, as a search for this priceless treasure from his past. When he and the gang actually do find a priceless treasure—a goddess statue that one of the tomb raiders wishfully likens to the Venus de Milo—the ultimate fate that befalls it doesn’t bode well for poor Beniamina.

Borrowing some elements of a hangout movie and pointlessly stretching on to well over two hours, La Chimera is littered with Rohrwacher’s trademark small delights. The frame rate speeds up for a minute just because it can¹; a character directly addresses the camera in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment; Arthur is thrice flipped upside-down in a sort of cinematic tricolon crescens. If there were too many of these little touches, the movie would be unbearably twee. If Rohrwacher cared at all about symmetry, you’d better believe we’d be discoursing about whether she’s the Italian Wes Anderson. She’s not, though just as Wes’s whimsy frequently belies heavier emotions, La Chimera is haunted by a fundamental sadness for things lost to history and the derelict state of the present. No part of the movie embodies this idea more than Isabella Rossellini herself, still sparkling but visibly weathered, a living ghost of Italian cinema past.

The Beast (2023)

To make any sense of Bertrand Bonello’s newest phantasmagoria, it helps to have some familiarity with two texts. The first, cited onscreen and deduced easily enough from the title, is the Henry James novella The Beast in the Jungle, wherein the bachelor John Marcher spends his waking hours in fear of some terrible-yet-unspecified event he is certain will befall him. The second, much less obvious but easily cross-referenced, is the YouTube diary of Elliot Rodger, perpetrator of the 2014 Isla Vista shootings, recreated here word-for-word without any forewarning. Bonello has always enjoyed making extreme juxtapositions like this in his movies and what The Beast does with its source texts may be his most radically experimental use of this technique yet.

The Beast is a tripartite film of unevenly distributed virtues. Léa Seydoux, channeling her inner Sheryl Lee, and George MacKay, perfectly nondescript, play characters named Gabrielle and Louis in three separate periods: first, as lovers kept apart by Gabrielle’s marriage to another man in 1910; second, as an aspiring actress in 2014 Los Angeles and the incel who ends up stalking her, respectively; and third, as Parisians crossing paths in the lobby of a facility in 2044, when artificial intelligence is fully ascendent and humans are prodded into undergoing a procedure (involving a bath of black goo and a needle to the eardrum) to excise traumas from their past lives. Bonello shifts freely between periods, with 1910 making up the bulk of the first half of the film, 2014 the back half, and 2044 used sparingly, like salt, to season the two and a half hour runtime.

Each setting is freaky in its own way, and with varying degrees of success as parts of a convoluted whole. 2044 is so thinly sketched that a lot of its emotional power depends on how active your imagination is at filling in blanks. 2014 does what it says on the tin, though there are psychics, earthquakes, Dasha from Red Scare, and a recurrent, disturbing sequence involving a green screen to keep you on your toes. Interestingly I found the 1910 pieces the most effectively unsettling. It helps that they’re partly set in a doll workshop, though there’s also a truth-is-stranger-than-fiction aspect to the inclusion of the Great Flood of Paris, an event I was previously unfamiliar with².

In The Beast in the Jungle, John Marcher confides his premonition to his old acquaintance May Bartram, who with sincerity asks him if the thing he is so afraid of isn’t just “the expectation […] of falling in love?” Marcher considers the possibility but brushes it off, only much later realizing that love after all would have rescued him from the fear that so paralyzes him. Bonello remixes this insight on a journey through the constricted romance of Jamesian high society to the modern alienation that begets a misogynistic mass shooter and up to a future where human emotions can be sanded off to produce anodyne laborers, a nightmare blunt rotation of missed connections that’s more upsetting than it is insightful.

On the Adamant (2023)

Being in the pocket of Big Frederick Wiseman, I could have easily watched another hour of Nicolas Philibert’s documentary about a boat-based facility on the Seine for adults with mental illnesses. Whether another hour of Philibert’s filmmaking would have satisfied me is another matter.

On the Adamant won the Golden Bear at last year’s Berlin Film Festival (a sequel, about the landlocked Averroès and Rosa Parks institutes, premiered at this year’s edition). Praised for its humanism by jury president Kristen Stewart, the film (“or whatever you want to call it” as Stewart put it) is focused on people almost to a fault. It might have been helpful to get some context for what we’re watching at some point during the film, instead of in a title card reserved for the closing minute before the end credits. Essentially, the Adamant is a boat affiliated with a Paris psychiatric hospital. Unlike a typical outpatient clinic, the entire wood-paneled facility (and presumably the program run out of it, which includes patient-led cooking, well-stocked arts and crafts supplies, and an extensive library) was dreamed up by doctors and patients working in collaboration. If you want to know how people end up here or how the finer details of the program differ from a hospital, this isn’t the movie for you.

Instead Philibert, previously known for his classroom documentary To Be and to Have (a staple of middle-school French class curricula, or at least mine), does what he knows best—let people tell their stories. In On the Adamant, that storytelling takes multiple forms: interviews, yes, but also musical performances and art presentations. Nobody says outright if they have a particular diagnosis, but there is a lot of talk of psychiatry, about which folks seem to be divided. When a visiting nursing student introduces himself at an all-hands meeting, one woman sheepishly interrogates him to suss out if he’s planning on going into psychiatry (he hasn’t decided yet). On the other hand, one older man explains to Philibert and crew that psychiatric medications have been an essential pillar of his long-term stability—not sufficient on their own to keep him going, but not something he’d want to do without.

I can understand why Philibert thinks it’s worthy just to focus on the people served by the Adamant, and in some moods I might even praise him for it. But I wish he felt even just a smidgen more of a responsibility to show the inner workings of the facility. The history of institutions for the mentally ill is famously not a sunny one—just ask Wiseman. Is it too much to ask, then, for Philibert to have used his time on the Adamant to delve deeper into what makes humane alternatives possible?

Monster (2023)

The structure of Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Monster, a Rashomon-inspired nesting of perspectives, is both a boon and also a distraction from the story it’s trying to tell. A protective mother (Sakura Ando) launches into a crusade against a fifth-grade teacher who hit her son; after her story runs its course, we then replay events from the teacher’s point of view, and eventually the son’s. Spoiler alert: the real villain of the story is homophobia. The jig is up fairly early on, when the kid jumps out of a moving car rather than listen to his mom lecture him for one more minute on the necessity of finding a good wife and starting a family. Were it not for the title card announcing the film’s Cannes Best Screenplay prize, it would be hard to miss that this is a movie essentially working in the mode of a public service announcement. The structural antics help to maintain your interest just when you start to feel adequately beaten over the head.

In 1994 Kore-eda shot a made-for-TV documentary about the final days and activism of Hirata Yutaka, the first HIV-positive man in Japan to go public with his diagnosis.³ Although Kore-eda wouldn’t broach the topic of gay rights in Japan again for nearly thirty years, the subject is obviously close to his heart. Monster is ultimately touching (if needlessly tragic), but when it gets right down to the son’s side of the story—a tale of feeling different and finding a friend who gets picked on in school and beaten up at home for his own deviance from social expectations—you wonder what the point was of burying the heart of the film under an hour of buildup that in hindsight doesn’t have very much to say about homophobia at all.

Evil Does Not Exist (2023)

Any cinephile who tries to stay up with what the critics have to say about things lives with the constant risk of having movies ruined by accident. One minute you’re making dinner while half-listening to Guy Lodge and Jessica Kiang talk about the newest thing they’ve seen at Venice and then the next you’re seated for Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Evil Does Not Exist and thinking to yourself at every turn of the plot, ah yes, just like they described on that podcast. Even knowing that the ending of this movie was not to be spoiled in itself constituted a roundabout sort of spoiler.

Evil Does Not Exist occupies a strange liminal space born out of its production circumstances. Originally intending for it to be a short work with his Drive My Car composer Eiko Ishibashi, Hamaguchi was so inspired by what Ishibashi came up with in the recording studio that he fleshed the project out to feature length. At times you wonder if there’s really enough here for a feature, such as during an overture that pairs almost 5 minutes of Ishibashi’s jazz score with a series of skyward-pointed tracking shots through a forest. In other instances you can more easily appreciate the bloat, like when a prolonged sequence of a man chopping wood with impressive form is paralleled later in the film with an equally lengthy shot of a cityslicker trying and comically failing to match the woodsman’s technique.

The heart of the film is the struggle of a village of only a few thousand inhabitants to protect their mountainside ecosystem from the forces of commercial real estate, but there’s more to the story than just that. For one thing, the consultants representing the villainous big business get more than their fair share of screen time to speak for themselves and even to talk back to the higher-ups cutting their paychecks. For another, Ishibashi’s music, menacing and evocative, complicates the straightforward realism of the images, ultimately working in tandem with the narrative left turn of the last act to upend your sense of what’s going on here and why. It will comfort some viewers that Evil Does Not Exist reprises features of Hamaguchi’s previous works (fans of his signature long conversations in cars will not be disappointed), but there’s a downside to this familiarity. The shock tactics of the ending aim at and might even reach profundity, but they do little to distract from the pervasive sense that Hamaguchi is working too much in his comfort zone to truly break any new ground.

1. And also, I surmise, because it’s a very Pasolinian thing to do.

2. Seeming to anticipate that viewers outside of France—maybe even inside of France?—would have this reaction, Bonello includes a few archival photographs of the Flood to demonstrate its historicity.

3. You can watch it on YouTube.