Movie Enthusiast Issue 62: I watched like a dozen new movies in the last two weeks and now I have to write about as many of them as I can
Watching
The AFI Silver European Union Showcase is running through the end of this week, so besides all the end-of-year awards contenders I’ve been keeping busy with advance showings of foreign films that won’t be playing anywhere else for a while (if ever).
Little Sister (2016)
I watched this strange little movie at the recommendation of my friend Eve Tushnet, who has been championing it as one of the better examples of what a good portrayal of Christians might look like on film. Indeed, the little sister in question here is both the youngest novitiate at a Brooklyn-based convent and the younger sibling of an Iraq War hero, locally famous for surviving an explosion that left his entire face disfigured. Lil’ Sis is shown throwing herself wholeheartedly into her vocation and love of God, and to the movie’s credit there’s never any aha moment or gotcha moment where her faith is exposed as a psychological response to trauma or something along those lines; nope, it seems pretty freely chosen all right, especially when juxtaposed against the memories of her Marilyn Manson-loving high school persona (which she dons anew to try to help coax her big brother out of his funk).
I wasn’t as impressed with the filmmaking itself, which relies on a schtick of cutting to something unusual or otherwise unexpected every three scenes. “Look how quirky I am!” the movie tells us every chance it gets. Granted, director Zach Clark sticks to this rhythm with quite admirable punctiliousness, supplementing the visual comedy from time to time with Manson needle drops. It does get a bit tiring after you realize the whole movie is going to be edited like this, so whether or not you can persist to the end will depend largely on your interest in the characters. I suppose they’re well-rounded enough, but I couldn’t stand the way Clark directs them: they’re acting hard enough that you can tell they’re acting, but not so hard that it feels intentional.
Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018)
This is the first movie I’ve seen all year that ticked every box for me. Competent filmmaking! A tight script! Lots of zingers! Cinematography and set design that simultaneously make me want to live inside this movie and also evoke the stench of concretized cat droppings so strongly that I could practically smell it in the theater!
A very smart thing this movie does—and it is a very smart movie; probably why I liked it so much is because every character is a gay nerd (a description which, incidentally, applies to another movie in this newsletter)—is to establish fairly quickly and uncompromisingly that Lee Israel (Melissa McCarthy) and Jack Hock (Richard E. Grant) are miserable, somewhat awful people. It then makes us care about them for the duration of the story by building relatable stakes within this framework of unlikability. Israel’s quest to scam the pants off every bookseller in Manhattan is ultimately a labor of love for her cat. It’s very easy to imagine that she could have just wasted away over her liquor until her gentle landlord would finally evict her for falling behind on her rent. I mean, who among us hasn’t been at such a low point some time or other? And who hasn’t ever been gripped by a motivation beyond our own strength, one that comes from loving someone or something whom we love more than ourselves?
Landmark theaters had been advertising Can You Ever Forgive Me? all year and not once did I realize this was a movie largely about queer friendship. It’s set in New York in the 90s so of course Hock, a man of magnificently flamboyant thirst, winds up dying of AIDS, and I think you get the sense that at least part of his verve comes from this creeping knowledge that his promiscuity is going to send him the way of all the rest of his already-dead friends sooner or later so he may as well enjoy the ride while it lasts. There’s also the matter of Israel’s history of failed relationships. There’s a walk-on cameo by Anna Deavere Smith as, I presume, Israel’s ex, who has this great line about how exhausting it was to have to care about Israel’s misery but now she’s finally free (…to grade papers for her students at Barnard, presumably). There’s also Anna (Dolly Wells), one of the booksellers who gets swept up in Israel’s scam and also the only one to get swept up by her as a person, too. They go out to dinner one night and when the moment feels just right, Anna makes a bit more of an overt advance to Israel, who, registering on her face in real time what’s happening, nips the gesture in the bud (“it’s nice to have someone to drink with,” emphasis on the I’m too old to put myself through the romantic ringer again). Too real!
Cold War (2018)
The marketing for this movie will have you believe it’s a grand romance set against the backdrop of the Cold War, which is not entirely inaccurate. But I think to understand it for as good a movie as it is, you need to be willing to acknowledge that (1) we aren’t given much of a compelling reason to root for Joanna Kulig and World’s Most Smolderingly Attractive Man Thus Spake Tim Tomasz Kot, and (2) this is not a flaw!
Cold War, by the director of Ida, that Polish movie with the impeccable static black-and-white photography about the nun who discovers she’s actually a Jew, is Ida’s superior in, I think, most ways. The photography here is even more sumptuous, and the camerawork is much more vibrant—not that stillness didn’t suit Ida (because it did), but the whip pans and tracking shots and circular free-floating movements in Cold War both fit the story and showcase director Pawel Pawlikowski’s powers much more brilliantly. Kulig and Kot do have very good chemistry, so I guess for some people that’s reason enough to root for them.
The movie’s strength lies in the elisions. It starts in the late 40s and ends a decade later, after Western Europe has had a chance to pick itself up from the wreckage of World War II and as things are going further south in the Eastern Bloc. If you’re paying attention to the forward march of history in this movie, it becomes clear pretty quickly that what we are actually seeing—that is, the images and scenes the camera and screenplay are privileging us with—are the moments of respite in Kulig and Kot’s life. We take it that everything we don’t see, all the long years apart from each other as the exigencies of their time and place wrest them from each other’s arms again and again, is increasingly unbearable, and as the movie progresses we see in ways both obvious and not how the changing world is taking its toll on them.
I was talking about this movie with friend of the newsletter Victor Morton and while he agrees that it’s good, he brought up the dissenting opinion of our friend Steven Greydanus. Greydanus thinks that the ending invites the viewer to sympathize with something he thinks is beyond the pale for a movie to ask us to sympathize with. I understand where this line of thinking comes from, though I remain unconvinced that the movie is asking us to condone what I agree is a bad thing. I can’t talk about it in more specific detail without spoiling the movie, which you will want to watch, both because it will likely be up for an Oscar (it’s Poland’s submission for Foreign Language Film) and also because, at 85 minutes, it’s the least painful movie to convince yourself to go see in the next two months. But once you do see it I look forward to the vigorous debate that will ensue.
In My Room (2018)
Morton and Greydanus are both positive on this movie, by Berlin School filmmaker Ulrich Köhler. I don’t know where I fall on it and I kind of want to wipe my hands of the responsibility of having to explain it. Like most filmmakers out of the Berlin School—which has given us Toni Erdmann and Western among others—Köhler’s basic aesthetic style is best described as “things happen.” Thus, here is a movie about a freelance videographer who’s terrible at his job, in subpar shape, doesn’t have much of a way with the ladies, is on the outs with his family, etc. etc. He wakes up one day and everyone else on earth except his comatose grandmother is gone. Like, motorcycles-abandoned-in-the-middle-of-the-highway gone. He goes and lives off the land, rescuing a goat which gives birth to a baby goat which is then snatched away by a wolf, because Nature; a woman shows up in a garbage truck she’s converted into a mobile home, they go to a video store in the middle of nowhere and rent The Bridges of Madison County which they are somehow able to watch on their Macbook?? How did they find one that still has an optical drive?? Anyway they get pretty frisky and eventually she leaves, the end.
“I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians” (2018)
Radu Jude’s last five or so movies have all been reckonings with Romania’s history of anti-semitism. “IDNCIWGDIHAB” is a quite strident movie about a theater director (Ioanna Iacob), clearly a stand-in for Jude himself, who, when she isn’t corralling a team of actors, set designers, and sound engineers for a forthcoming production of a public performance piece reimagining Romania’s involvement in World War II, replete with atrocities committed against Jews, is mouthing off to any poor man who lands in her orbit about the philosophy of history and Wittgenstein and Hannah Arendt and the representation of atrocity in art. If you’re into this kind of thing (I extremely am), it’s riveting stuff. If not, the last thirty minutes at least will get you sitting ramrod straight in your seat, as fiction and reality crash into each other during the performance of the completed show, staged so far as I can tell before a live audience of real Romanians otherwise totally unaffiliated with the production of the movie. One of this movie’s saving graces is its self-awareness. The conclusion Jude seems to come to is that his own project of preserving the historical memory of the most condemnable period in his country’s recent history and fighting the ongoing fight for justice in the face of mounting worldwide authoritarianism and anti-Semitism is not going to have the intended effects, at least as long in the way he’s carrying it out.
Sorry Angel (2018)
Here is the other movie about gay nerds in the 90s dying of AIDS! I’m sure there are other story arcs we can apply to gay people but this is the one we seem to be stuck with for now. This movie—originally titled Plaire, Aimer, et Courir Vite, which I have no idea how to translate because I don’t know how to translate plaire as an intransitive verb, hence, I guess, why the English title is a nonsensical phrase that does not follow from anything in the movie itself, but I digress—premiered at Cannes and just sort of fizzled away under the shadow of better movies. Understandably so! You couldn’t put this next to Cold War and be like, “yes, Sorry Angel better demonstrates its director’s mastery of the cinematic form.” The director, Christophe Honoré, is also the screenwriter, but he’s a novelist first and foremost. While there are many stirring passages of filmmaking in this movie, Sorry Angel isn’t entirely satisfying because he neither nails the beginning nor sticks the landing.
There is some magic in between, though. This is a story of a 35-year-old novelist (Pierre Deladonchamps) who’s slowly losing all his friends and former lovers to AIDS. He meets a precocious, bookish 22-year-old (Vincent Lacoste) at a screening of Jane Campion’s The Piano and they start to hit it off. The movie’s very frank about sex, but in a way which I feel is the opposite to the approach that so many art house LGBT-themed movies take. Sex is a fairly uneventful part of these guys’ lives—they are Liberated Intellectual Gay European Males (LIGEMs) after all—and so the narrative isn’t constructed around titillating you the way something like Stranger by the Lake is. It’s building toward something else, or rather, it’s charting the ebbing and flowing of emotional intimacy. In this I think the movie is wildly successful. I got so lost in it, not because Honoré realizes this world in an especially immersive way visually, but instead because Sorry Angel maintains a compelling rhythm while sketching the evolution of the characters and their feelings for each other. I don’t think Honoré is as perceptive an observer of human behavior as, say, Rohmer, but he does know how to knit a pretty beautiful scarf, to use a metaphor no one has ever thought to deploy before. Pierre Deladonchamps is also a wonderful actor (I’m still trying to decide if Vincent Lacoste works in this role or not) and brings so much tenderness to a character who could have easily been played as more cynical and standoffish. This is really a quite gentle movie, and I’m so glad to have seen it in theaters. (I have no idea if there are any plans for a U.S. theatrical release.)
The Favourite (2018)
Oh Lord we’re already 2200 words in and now I have to write about The Favourite too?!
I saw this movie with the aforementioned Eve Tushnet, who in her strongly favorable review mentions how I had suggested to her that this movie is set in a society before sexual orientation. To elaborate on what I meant by this, I was taking some cues from Alan Bray’s Homosexuality in Renaissance England, a compelling history of how homosexual behavior in one very specific context changed from being understood as universal (in the sense that anyone might do it, in the right circumstances) to something that was characteristic of only a certain kind of person (hence where we get modern conceptions of sexual identity—I’m also very loosely incorporating some of Charles Taylor’s thinking on identity and authenticity here, bear with me).
None of the three leading ladies of The Favourite “identity” as lesbians or bisexuals; by the end of the story all of them have husbands! Sex and marriage are facts of life that only occasionally overlap for these women; marriage can be dutifully submitted to against one’s will, sex can be (and is) sought for reasons other than love or validation of one’s conception of self. Eve’s review does a very good job of untangling all the implications of this framework for the characters and our understanding of them and their motivations. I found this movie satisfying and essentially “flawless,” though I’ll need to sit on it some more to determine how much staying power it really has. I can easily imagine thinking back on this movie fondly in a few years but forgetting why we thought so highly of it at the time. Although Olivia Colman’s performance, at turns riotous and tragic, is unlikely to be forgotten; my friend Barbara described her Queen Anne as a black hole of need and I couldn’t think of a more apt way of putting it.
Reading
Bertolucci, who died in Rome on Nov. 26 at age 77, was one of the greatest filmmakers of his era, an artist whose own career was a grand, extravagant sweep—and one that carried along its share of controversy. But controversy, by its nature, is rattling, unsettling, a puzzle to which there’s no easy answer. Dismissal isn’t a solution to controversy—it’s only a response. And Bertolucci, whatever mistakes he may have made along the way, doesn’t deserve dismissal. His great subjects were beauty and love, sex and politics, and often the mingling of all four. How do you make lasting art about any of those things without making choices—even choices that may, in retrospect, turn out to have been misguided or cruel? Art already has to do so many jobs. We can hold the people who make it accountable, even as we recognize they’re not infallible.
—Stephanie Zacharek on the legacy of Bernardo Bertolucci (1941–2018)
Coming Soon
I’m spent! Next time I’ll round up some news for you, including a preview of January’s Sundance Film Festival selections.