Movie Enthusiast Issue 53: The Love Witch, Ocean’s 8, Incredibles 2, Kate Bush, and more!
Welcome back after a rather long and unplanned hiatus! As I adjust to my new work schedule, I am trying to figure out where writing fits into my life. This week I’ll be testing a slightly new format for this newsletter. Bear with me as I tinker with it over the summer!
Watching
The Love Witch (2016)
Samantha Robinson, who plays the titular Love Witch, is one of those actresses who seems to have waltzed on set out of a totally different era than where the rest of the crew is living. It’s difficult to imagine this movie, a tenderly handcrafted homage to technicolor pulp romances that skirts around the occult a little to sincerely for my comfort, making any kind of impact without Robinson’s presence. Writer/director/costume designer/editor/composer Anna Biller has this to say of her film’s star during the auditioning process:
The next thing I found out about Samantha was that she was a cinephile. Fassbinder? She had seen most of his movies. Noir films? She had seen a lot of them, had a lot of opinions about different stars and directors. Contemporary art films? She had seen more of them than I had. When we watched movies together, she did not think like an actor, but like a director. She had a sense of the whole story, of the vision of the director, of the editing, of the art direction. Her view of movies was not filtered through the typical narcissism most actors have. It was an expansive view, not a self-centered one.
As our relationship continued to grow, we created the character of Elaine together. I had never quite done this before as a director; I was used to either dictating an actor’s every move, or letting actors run wild with their own interpretations. But this was something new – a real collaboration, and it was intensely gratifying. When we watched film together she would accept certain traits of characters I was trying to inspire her with and reject others, without any hesitation. It was the same with the dialogue; she knew instinctively which lines she would be natural with, and which ones she wanted to change or delete. Indeed, she is the first actor I’ve ever worked with who asked for me to cut her lines to create a stronger scene. In this way we crafted the character together like a sculpture – a chisel here, a chisel there, until it began to take a definite shape.
(The primary love interest, by the way, is played by a romance novel cover model! Yes, they are real people!)
Wild Reeds (1994)
I had been wondering a few Saturdays ago how I was ever going to track down this movie, the César winner by André Téchiné that Stephen Cone cites as one of his touchstone influences. From my lips to the movie gods’ ears: it appeared on Mubi the very next day.
Wild Reeds is a snapshot in the life of three boarding school boys and the girl they’re all, in one way or another, interested in. It’s set in France in 1962, during the Algerian War of Independence, an event I am rapidly coming to realize I will need to learn everything about if the rest of French cinema from and about the 1960s is to make any sense to me. The four young actors are all very good, though I lack the means of explaining what it is precisely that makes a foreign-language performance by a teenager good in the first place; how do I know if their acting is naturalistic or belabored, if I lack the cultural context to properly judge? (Élodie Bouchez won the César for most promising young actress that year, so there’s that; the film itself took home the César for Best Picture). None of the kids ends up with the person they love, which doesn’t make for as sad a story as you’d think. Téchiné guides his characters to the understanding that young love isn’t everything, even if it feels like it is when you’re seventeen.
Design for Living (1933)
I dozed off in the middle of this Lubitsch sex comedy (Lubitsch movies are always being described as sex comedies, but I think this one, which involves the most chaste polyamorous coupling you could probably get away with in the 1930s, deserves it). The movie is resilient enough to withstand my inattentiveness. Among other things I learned in the time I was awake: my understanding of pre-1940s talking cinema is much more limited than I had realized, and the parlor game of 20 questions dates at least as far back as 1933.
Ocean’s 8 (2018)
No movie with a cast this perfect should be as bland as this one is. It’s passable entertainment at most—not that the Ocean’s franchise has ever had anything very insightful to say. Reminiscing on prison food, Sandra Bullock muses that it’s not as bad on the inside as people on the outside think, a line which I immediately flagged as requiring fact-checking. There is a lot of throwaway humor about Russians, which made me too queasy even for Anne Hathaway’s tastefully campy performance to serve as a sufficient palliative. I tweeted afterward that I hated myself for thinking about Camille Paglia’s Rihanna infatuation as I was watching it, but the camera really does love Riri as much as it loves Miriam Hopkins in Design for Living.
Incredibles 2 (2018)
I tried to describe this movie to my roommate as a throwback to serialized superhero stories from the 1950s. I then realized that I have no firsthand knowledge of serialized superhero stories from the 1950s, and that the 1960s are more accurately the decade I was aiming for. The important thing is that that sequence of words sounded right as I produced them. 14 years after the original Incredibles, Brad Bird returns with more on the brain than he seems to know how to coherently make a film about in the span of 2 hours. I was so caught up in the thrills of this thing that I didn’t mind much where the script fell flat. There is a lot of Jack-Jack in this movie, but not even in the way that counts (there’s no big payoff in the final set piece for all the time we had to spend with him in the first hour and a half). There’s also a lot of fabulous graphic design plastered all over this movie, which is enough to distract me from the fact that a superhero film where you find yourself siding with the supervillain’s ideas about excessive screentime and ubermenschy political saviors has failed, in at least one significant way, to do its job.
Reading
“One of the most exhausting aspects of our current cultural moment are the ‘ugh, only straight white men like this’ takes that completely erase the voices of female critics, critics of color and fans who don’t fit neatly into binaries of who ‘should’ like/dislike something. It’s part of a larger and much more pernicious problem — mistaking pop-culture consumption for moral worth as opposed to, you know, how we carry ourselves every day; how we treat other people; and how we support (or don’t) the causes that matter to us.”
—Jessica Ritchey on bad takes in film culture
“The wider framing allows us to see exactly what she’s wearing and how she moves. The medium lensing is reminiscent of many of Jacques Rivette’s high fashion pictures like Duelle, Noroit, and ironically enough his own adaptation of Wuthering Heights, where the outfit was always presented in full from head to toe and worked as an extension of the characters. In this video, the red dress is worn as a means of seduction. ‘Let me into your window,’ Bush beckons, pulling her arms in closer. She’s speaking for the ghost of Kathy, begging to get out from the cold, but in addition to the narrative conceit of the song, it also works as a device of temptation for an introductory single. ‘Let me into your window’ could just as easily be ‘Let me into your lives,’ and after ‘Wuthering Heights,’ England and the rest of the world obliged.”
Coming Soon
Zhang Yimou’s latest wuxia epic, Shadow, has a trailer.
Joan Didion’s The Last Thing He Wanted is forthcoming from Mudbound director Dee Rees, with Willem Dafoe and Anne Hathaway to star.
The Dardenne brothers’ next film will indeed be about the religious radicalization of a Belgian student, a premise which initially made me hold my breath when rumors about it started floating around the web last year.
I never even got around to wrapping up my Cannes Film Festival coverage! Everyone already appears to have opinions on the new Lars Von Trier, so I’ll spare you any further talk about him. Asian cinema had a strong showing this year. Hiorkazu Koreeda’s Shoplifters took home the Palme d’Or, while Bi Gan’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night (featuring an hour-long 3D single take) and Lee Chang-Dong’s Burning received some of the highest critical praise of the festival. More off the beaten path: Wang Bing’s 8-hour-long documentary Dead Souls, about the survivors of Communist reeducation camps in China. Few people will ever have the time or attention to sit all the way through it (let alone see in the first place), but its mere existence—and the fact that someone at Cannes had the guts to program it!—is significant in itself.
My non-desire to see Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria has intensified in the wake of its trailer, though I eagerly await more dramatic screencaps of Tilda Swinton smoking in earth tones.