Movie Enthusiast Issue 67: Thoughts on Q1 2019 New Movies; adieu à Agnès Varda; Cannes preview
Watching
Everybody Knows (2018)
I have to assume that the title refers to the audience, in that the twist about Javier Bardem being the father of Penélope Cruz’s kidnapped daughter was so obvious that by the time it was revealed halfway through the movie I had to do a double take because I just assumed that the movie had already disclosed this information.
The guys of the movies imo podcast pointed out that Asghar Farhadi did not appear to have a lot of coverage to work with on this movie, which would explain why the majority of its shots are so uninteresting in terms of both framing and. Despite starring the three most bankable actors in Spanish language cinema (the third being Ricardo Darín), financing an international production as an Iranian director of steady conversational dramas is understandably much more difficult than pulling together investors for an action movie guaranteed to play on thousands of screens in China.
I like Farhadi a lot and have now seen, in theaters, all of his movies that have received theatrical releases in the U.S. I also like Agatha Christie a lot and I don’t hold her in too low regard when she fails to deliver. I would frankly be suspicious of any writer who managed to capture the genius of a Murder of Roger Ackroyd or A Separation twice in short order, or at the very least irritated that they couldn’t spread some of the genius around for the rest of us storytellers twiddling our thumbs at our day jobs waiting for inspiration to strike.
Greta (2018)
A fun bunny slope of a thriller whose biggest misstep is its fear of being trashier. Isabelle Huppert plays a lonely New Yorker who has been going around the city depositing bags, each containing a copy of her ID, on subway cars in the hope that a Good Samaritan will fall for the trap and bring one back to her at her improbably cottage-like home (presumably in one of the outer boroughs). I need to stop thinking about this premise too hard because clearly this movie falls apart the longer you do.
Chloë Grace Moretz, recently graduated from Smith, grieving over a lost mother, waiting tables at what looks like an Upper West Side establishment still catering to the kind of clientele who want that Old New York glamor instead of SoHo chic, and rooming with best college friend Maika Monroe in a spacious loft (the absurdity of which the screenplay at least has the decency to account for by making the roommate a trust fund baby), finds one such bag and brings it back to Huppert, with whom she strikes up an unlikely friendship. Unlikely cross-generational friendships in movies go in either one of two directions; Greta takes the route whereby Moretz, in an act of self-defense as ingenious as it is desperate, cuts Huppert’s finger off with a cookie cutter and whacks her unconscious with a rolling pin.
The movie’s biggest twist is that Monroe’s character, played from the start as a spoiled rich kid, develops into a more thoughtful and committed friend than all of her Stock Comic Relief Sidekick in a B-movie lines would initially lead us to believe. It’s clear from how tenderly Moretz and Monroe are framed in a scene where they go to the movies and are lit beautifully from both sides by the aurorean glow of a 3D projector that this film is going to take female friendship with a degree more seriousness than your average potboiler. As a potboiler it’s still average though, and I don’t know why you’d opt to spend 90 minutes with it when there are both better stories about friendship and better Isabelle Huppert insanity vehicles out there.
A Paris Education (2018)
The fastest way to my heart is to put a bunch of talkative and attractive young French intellectuals in a room together and film their pontifications in sumptuous black and white. In A Paris Education the intelligentsia in question are all filmmakers, an extra point in the film’s favor. They’re also all new transplants to Paris, each having grown up somewhere else in France only to converge on the capital to study cinema. So far as I can recall, this detail makes this movie somewhat more unique than others of its spiritual kin (I’m thinking of the likes of Metropolitan and Frances Ha), in that the characters’ not being city people by birth is taken as a point of departure to explore how their new megalopolitan home shapes their already overzealous curiosity about people and the world. There’s also a scene where the main character recommends to a girl that they go see a movie and then it turns out that the movie in question is THE COLOR OF POMEGRANATES! A+ choice.
At nearly two and a half hours the movie is far too long. It also suffers from a disappointing shift in attention, around the midpoint. We’re introduced to a new character, another film student and an activist whose opinions constantly run afoul of the class contrarian. While she’s interesting in her own right, the story continues to be framed around the male lead, whose personality recedes into the background from her introduction on out. Thus the movie, which starts out as a fairly compelling work of moral fiction with a flawed protagonist becomes a different work of moral fiction about another character as seen from the perspective of the same protagonist, who in order to make room for this new character becomes less interesting and takes on the role of vanilla audience surrogate.
The movie is well paced and employs some pretty classical music to set a genteel mood. For some reason I watched it close to midnight on a Friday and didn’t fall asleep, so clearly the director did something right, if not with enough oomph to leave a more lasting impression.
Us (2019)
It’s not as good as Get Out in the ways that Get Out was good (acerbic social commentary thriller), but it’s better in the ways that Get Out had room for improvement. It has a very obvious peak (the scene where they go to the awful white family’s house), after which point you spend the rest of the movie saying to yourself, “but you know what, it’s fine, it’s whatever, we had the scene at the awful white family’s house.”
Jordan Peele was clearly swinging for a home run here and hit more of a double. That’s still way better than striking out! Lupita Nyong’o is the standout of the cast, but the whole ensemble works perfectly together, which is what you need for a survival horror film to be fun. It’s also refreshing to have an average black family as the main characters in a film that isn’t overtly or obviously trying to be About racism or the African-American experience. There’s plenty of subtext, allusions to horror classics that have tread similar thematic ground, and that one iconic line delivery (“We’re Americans”), but unlike with Get Out Peele’s keeps everything pretty cryptic. His intention is less to make a big and obvious statement than it is to make a well-run thrill ride. At this I think he mostly succeeds, and I’d go so far as to say his craftsmanship marks him as Hollywood’s premier horror visionary working today. (Robert Eggers and Ari Aster fans—please don’t fight me on this.)
Near the end there’s a shot of the two Lupitas, one in the foreground and one in the background, that looks like a split diopter shot (they’re both in focus) except it must have also involved some amount of SFX because you can’t pull that kind of staging off without using a stunt double…right? It’s nice that Peele left at least this one mystery unresolved, as the exposition he provides near the end of the film robs the movie of some of its potency. Sometimes it’s okay not to disclose all the mysteries of the (cinematic) universe! See how well that worked out for Night of the Living Dead?
My favorite criticism of this movie that I’ve seen: “What company agreed to make one million pairs of gold scissors for them? ‘The clients are all mole people and they can only pay in rabbits? Sure, let’s cut them a deal.’”
Ash Is Purest White (2018)
This one was difficult even by my standards! Jia Zhangke continues in the vein of his previous movie with a three-act narrative set in three different periods in the life of…here is where my understanding of the story breaks down! So there’s this woman, played by Jia’s wife and perennial muse Zhao Tao, who’s involved with this…gang? I mean it’s not really a gang, they just play poker in back rooms of restaurants, and there’s a guy with a better-fitting suit than the rest of them who talks a lot about the money they’re swindling people out of or something in this one scene where everyone is at a ballroom dancing to YMCA, but then he’s killed by some other gang and then the remaining members of Gang-or-Whatever #1 want to avenge him; anyway the point is, Zhao’s character is romantically involved with this other guy from Gang-or-Whatever #1, one day he gets implicated in a pretty brutal and gruesome street brawl, she saves his life with the aid of an illegal firearm and then does 5 years of jail time for it. She totally deserves better! Because in the second part of the movie she gets out of jail, goes to track down her man, finds out that he’s dating some other chick now, throws a huff and somehow gets involved with a scheme to sell UFO-sighting tours and then she actually sees a UFO (I am vaguely aware that this is a reference to one of Jia’s earlier films), also before this part there’s this ominous scene where she’s on a cruise liner in the Three Gorges Dam before it’s been all filled up (so, wait, where did they film this scene?) and a Christian lady steals her purse so she has to go hunt her down and smack her with a water bottle. In the third part she gets back with her boo, who is now in a wheelchair and totally dependent on her. The second part of this movie is filmed in these gorgeous smoky hues that make everything look like a watercolor. The YMCA scene is obviously the best part.
Subsequently I was in Rockville Maryland, where the local megaplex is playing Dumbo on two screens and Ash Is Purest White on one, a sight you truly don’t see every day.
Remembering
Agnès Varda has passed away at 90. This newsletter began with a memoriam of fellow French New Wave director Jacques Rivette; now it seems Godard is the only one left (unless we’re counting Philippe Garrel as one of the gang but I don’t know that anybody does). Varda directed one of my favorite movies ever (Cléo de 5 à 7) and one of my least favorite ever (Le bonheur, which we’ve already talked about here), as well as a bunch of docu-curiosities. Though she’ll be remembered for her role as a pioneering feminist filmmaker, I hope it’s the strangeness of her empathy that she’ll be most remembered by. Varda was a person capable of great love, but it always showed in the most unusual and whimsical ways. It’s difficult to think of another moviemaker today who would even think of making a project like Faces Places—unless it were someone trying to deliberately follow in her footsteps, in which case I think they’d have missed the point (nor would they have much luck retracing them up the wall and across the ceiling). We’ll miss you.
Reading
And now an old interview with Varda and Sheila Heti:
When I saw what painting had done in the last thirty years, what literature had done—people like Joyce and Virginia Woolf, Faulkner and Hemingway—in France we have Nathalie Sarraute—and paintings became so strongly contemporary while cinema was just following the path of theater. Theater! I mean, psychology and drama and dialogue and making sense! At that time, when I started, in the ’50s, cinema was very classical in its aims, and I thought, I have to do something which relates with my time, and in my time, we make things differently.
Coming Soon
Cannes season is almost upon us! The competition selection will be unveiled on April 18th, which means now is the time for my annual tradition of making an educated amateur’s guess at what movies will show up on the Croisette this year. I average about 7 correct guesses every year I do this, and for all I know I’m the only one who cares about playing this game but! at least it should give you a sense of what movies to look out for in the year to come.
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (USA, Quentin Tarantino)
The Dead Don’t Die (USA, Jim Jarmusch)
Nomadland (USA, Chloé Zhao)
A Hidden Life [né Radegund] (USA, but also kind of Germany, Terrence Malick—no but for real this time)
Sorry We Missed You (UK, Ken Loach)
Le jeune Ahmed (Belgium, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne)
Portrait of a Lady on Fire (France, Céline Sciamma)
Sibyl (France, Justine Triet)
Oh Mercy (France, Arnaud Desplechin)
The Fire Next Time (France/Senegal, Mati Diop)
The Traitor (Italy, Marco Bellocchio)
Pain and Glory (Spain, Pedro Almodóvar)
Ema (Chile, Pablo Larraín)
The Whistlers (Romania, Corneliu Porumboiu)
Beanpole (Russia, Kantemir Bagalov)
Parasite (South Korea, Bong Joon-ho)
Saturday Fiction (China, Lou Ye)
It Must Be Heaven (Palestine, Elia Suleiman)
Matthias & Maxime (Canada, Xavier Dolan)
And in unrelated news, Joel Coen will be filming a Macbeth adaptation, with Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand set to star.
I finally framed the Hotel by the River poster which was mysteriously sent to me several newsletters back! If you are the sender now is your final opportunity to reveal yourself. (I mean not really, but this is the last time in this newsletter where it will be relevant to do so.)