Movie Enthusiast Issue 74: Quaranstreaming
Thoughts on Emma., My First Film, Never Rarely Sometimes Always, and more
Watching
Emma. (2020)
As much as I love Jane Austen, I’m always terrified to participate in the Austen discourse. I came to her novels relatively late, at least compared to my friends who read them as kids and teenagers and have had adequate time to reread and come to know each of her stories and characters like the backs of their hands. I feel like I only ever get by by the skin of my teeth, choosing one scene or one aspect of the story and then bringing it to the conversation as carefully and thoughtfully as I can, like a housewarming present. Come to think of it, I did the exact same thing in all of my college classes except the one film class I took.
For a brief, ghastly moment at the beginning, it looks like this year’s adaptation of Emma is trying to be Autumn de Wilde’s Wes Anderson’s Jane Austen’s Emma.. Everyone is dressed like a cake out of the Great British Bake Off; you risk going cross-eyed from staring too long at the symmetrical interiors. Thankfully we’re given only a taste of what surely would have been a much worse film, as de Wilde quickly shifts focus away from the Regency ostentation to doing right by the iconic characters she’s inherited.
The cast of Emma, the story, rolls deep, and Emma. is a film that relishes in how good its casting is. Anya Taylor-Joy as our handsome, clever, and rich young heroine gets so many details right. Her overbearing treatment of Harriet (Mia Goth, rescued, finally, for a happier role after Claire Denis last squished her in a black hole in High Life) comes from an overconfidence in herself rather than from malice; the infamous blow-up with Miss Bates (Miranda Hart, finely streamlining the point of the character, since a film shoot can’t spare the expense of having all her monologues trundle on for 5 minutes) shows more of a meaner side to the character, but it’s quick, regrettable, and unpremeditated. One of my friends drew attention to how great each of the actors’ faces are in this film and how one of the film’s strongest suits is its knowing how to style them according to their unique features, as opposed to striving for generic prettiness. Taylor-Joy, for instance, is made up to emphasize her strong eyebrows, key to her more self-satisfied looks (of which she has many), whereas Goth’s subtle brows and heavier knitwear draw her back into herself and away from the more glamorous looks she serves in European art-house fare; perfect for the mousier Harriet.
I was especially fond of Mr. Knightley (Johnny Flynn), longsuffering and long-sideburned (that shot where he backs slowly out of the frame to the left!); and Jane Fairfax (Amber Anderson), much less flamboyantly pretty than all the other girls around her and modest in her unmatched talent at the pianoforte. Even the only briefly onscreen Mrs. Elton (Tanya Reynolds) sells you on her character, who is also responsible for selling to the audience further insight into what kind of guy Mr. Elton (Josh O'Connor) is.
If anything didn’t quite work for me, it was Frank Churchill generally; maybe Callum Turner’s just not…hot enough?…slick enough?…more-appealing-than-Johnny-Flynn enough? for me. Also, did they just, run out of money to color grade the exterior shots consistently with the interiors? I felt like every twenty minutes characters were stepping outdoors, leaving behind the world of period pastiche and entering the world of a globetrotting 60 Minutes segment.
The Whistlers (2019)
Corneliu Porumboiu is one of my favorite working filmmakers, and I can’t imagine this, his first (and likely last) attempt at making a movie with potential mainstream appeal, will be the highlight of any future retrospectives of his work. The Whistlers is a fairly standard foreign-language police procedural, of the type that will probably end up on Netflix and sit there forever while much more interesting and audacious foreign films remain difficult to stream.
I would have loved to know how The Whistlers plays to a large audience. What it retains from Porumboiu’s previous works are his dry sense of humor (a motel plays opera on a turntable at the front desk “because our guests need the culturing”; later we learn that the motel is named…Opera), his embrace of the absurd, and his fascination with languages and surveillance. He does a good job of piling on just the right number of twists, and the non-linear way he sequences the film teases you into keeping up with a wink, rather than a slap on the wrists.
Any review of this movie for an audience such as this newsletter’s really only needs to emphasize that this is a thriller in which the main character is inducted into a crime ring run by residents of the island of Gomera who communicate with one another using an elaborate series of whistles that imitate birdcall. If that sounds fun to you, you will probably have fun watching; the movie ends with the can-can playing over a Singaporean light show behind the credits, so clearly the movie is having very much fun with itself.
The Sky Is Clear and Blue Today (2019)
Those in the know, by which I guess I mean gay cinephiles on Twitter, NYU grad students, and the former employees of McNally Jackson, recently tipped me off to the existence of Ricky D’Ambrose, a young filmmaker peddling in short films of an especially rarefied and distant quality. D’Ambrose has a knack for visual impersonation. His longest feature, Notes on an Appearance, contains a running plot about a fictional political philosopher whom we learn about through an abundance of B-roll footage: a New York Times obituary, a New Yorker profile (complete with snazzy illustration), a new edition of his collected works (“Valences of Violence”) published by Verso books. All of these clippings and cutaways mimic the real thing flawlessly—he gets the fonts right and everything—such that I didn’t even know if Stephen Taubes was real or not until I googled him afterwards.
The Sky Is Clear and Blue Today is a short made last year which D’Ambrose made available for free for a week during our present lockdown. Like Notes, which includes a cast of film world insiders (Glenn Kenny, Violet Lucca), The Sky features film critic A.S. Hamrah (the inspiration for this newsletter’s capsule-review style and tone, though I try to be gentler and my leftist credentials are still in the mail) as a director hired by German television to make a movie about 9/11, in which he is to recreate a famous photograph by Hamrah’s fictional character’s in-universe father:
The movie flits around between statically shot, self-contained scenes: a woman instructing a man how to say “the sky is clear and blue today” in German, elementary school students reciting the story George W. Bush was reading to that classroom when he got the news about the twin towers being hit, and then a lengthy scene where an off-camera Hamrah stage directs the photo above. There is a narrator who speaks, like the characters in Notes, as though from a higher and more knowing plane of existence than what most ordinary humans occupy. There is precisely one musical montage, requisitely set to Enya’s Only Time. The movie ends with the announcement of director, cast, and crew’s perishing in a fire, and with Tim feeling inadequate for not making art on this scale like he wants to.
My First Film (2018 [?] / 2020)
But maybe there’s hope for me yet! You don’t even need a cast or crew to make a movie these days! Just ask Zia Anger, a visual media artist who has directed music videos for Mitski and starred in movies by—I’m telling you, it’s turtles all the way down—Ricky D’Ambrose. Anger was not even on my radar a month ago; all it takes is one trendsetter in film circles you follow tweeting, mysteriously and enthusiastically, about My First Film to pique one’s interest and inaugurate what has so far been my favorite quarantine subplot.
Every couple of days, and pretty much entirely at random with respect to the time of day, Anger tweets the announcement: “Tonight at 8pm est another My First Film Preview Stream [emoji] First [60–75] people to email me at [email address] with [today’s date] in the message body will be admitted.” Not one to miss out on the hottest new thing in cinema even while confined to my own home, I resolved to make it in to one of the screenings and find out what exactly was going on here. After missing out on my first attempt by a mere 18 minutes, I nabbed a spot some days later for the April 2 screening.
“You're in,” the email subject line arrives several hours after Anger announced that the screening was full. “More details will be sent to you by 7PM EST. Show starts at 8PM EST.” I’m intrigued, and also slightly scared! 7 rolls around and no follow-up email has arrived. I assume she’s running late today, and wait until 8. No email. I quickly flip to Twitter, where Anger has just tweeted instructions to DM her if you didn’t get her follow-up email. I do as told, and a few minutes later the dossier arrives with a streaming link, instructions on how to prepare yourself for the experience (grab some popcorn, dim the lights), and the cryptic statement “My First Film can run anywhere between 85 and 110 minutes.” By around 8:15 the show has finally started.
We’re looking at a YouTube livestream of Anger’s desktop and listening to (what we will later learn is) one of those 3-hour-long Youtube videos of “soothing” meditation/study music (I’m rather more freaked out). There’s a sticky note anchored to the top left of her desktop with instructions on how to participate (!!!). Across the screen, Anger’s iMessages window fills up with texts from (I’m assuming) tonight’s audience members who are trusting enough to volunteer their numbers to 75-odd strangers. In a separate TextEdit window, Anger is typing her own messages to the audience and adding further instructions. She starts sending iPhone videos of herself in various clownish comportments to anyone who texts her and, in between agitated messages about all of tonight’s technical difficulties, pleads with us to send these videos to one another. This continues for some time before she cuts this part of the presentation short with some apparent exasperation.
The bulk of My First Film is a split-screen presentation of excerpts from a 2 and a half hour long film Anger made as a film student alongside a TextEdit window where Anger writes running commentary on the film, the making-of, and its afterlife. She flips back and forth between this desktop and another, where she’ll pull up additional videos or perform web searches to further illustrate points. Her timing is impeccable and she makes the most of the inherent flexibility of typed commentary to be at turns dramatic and humorous in a way that’s distinct from spoken commentary; she pauses over words, backspaces, and rewrites to find just the right turn of phrase. She’s also very aware that her student film is quite bad and her self-deprecatory asides are frequently hilarious (“Helpful hint: a cigarette when a character is making a hard choice is a bad choice”).
My First Film ends up being an intensely personal experience for Anger, who uses this live virtual space to share her thoughts on women’s artistry and agency with more candor than what would have come across in a prerecorded format. (It helps that all of us watching are stuck in our homes; the audience–filmmaker intimacy is unusually palpable.) At the end of the “main” show, Anger opens up a Photo Booth window so the audience can finally see and hear her—she writes the date and time on a piece of paper to demonstrate for those of us too chicken to send her a message during the show that this is, in fact, happening live. In the spirit of flipping off the film establishment, she invites viewers to go find that old rejected screenplay we buried in the back of a drawer somewhere after we couldn’t get it picked up by anyone and tear it up in unison for maximum cathartic effect. I had no such screenplay, printed or otherwise. Maybe I really do need to amend that.
Bacurau (2019)
Kleber Mendonça Filho is incapable of making an uninteresting movie, but I want to vomit all over whoever decided to market his (and co-director Juliano Dornelles, upgraded from production designer on Aquarius and Neighboring Sounds) latest film with that pull quote from Slate calling it “a crowd-pleaser that celebrates lovemaking, body positivity, and liberal use of psychotropic drugs.” No one who decides to watch this movie on the basis of that description is going to be pleased by what they find: a movie with a high body count, serious commitment to criticizing the Brazilian government and colonial regimes, weirdly written antagonists, and a drag queen who beheads their oppressor with a machete used in their village’s last revolutionary uprising. Actually now that I’ve written all that out, there are absolutely viewers who will eat up both, though I maintain that there’s a critical distinction being lost here between celebrating body positivity and depicting a woman shooting a guy’s head off with a shotgun in the nude.
Not quite everything about Bacurau works—namely, the ominous, amoral, Udo Kier-led mercs who go around shooting errbody up like B-listers who were passed over for Tarantino badasses past. Them aside, the movie is a masterful example of worldbuilding. With only the leanest of cues and the savviest of casting choices, Filho and Dornelles create a fictional just-off-the-Amazon town that’s brimming with personality and personalities. You learn a little something new about this place, the people who live there, and all the drama that’s built up over generations in every scene, basically right up until the end, with nary an expository cutscene to grind the main action to a halt. It’s also gorgeous, and it was shot on an Arricam not by Roger Deakins, which means there’s hope for cinema yet if celluloid ever kicks the bucket for good.
Never Rarely Sometimes Always (2020)
[discussion of abortion follows]
So much of Eliza Hittman’s third feature film, for which she won the Grand Jury Prize at Berlin this year, feels so unexpectedly familiar to me. The plasticity of those suburban restaurants where high schoolers congregate after schoolwide events; the familiar main streets with storefronts you’ve never closely inspected until you suddenly have need to go looking for what has always been there; the too-warm rays of sun pelting you relentlessly through the windows of a charter bus on an endless journey to an unfamiliar new place; the pitiless sprawl of the New York City metro, greeting you with kick in the back on arrival; the exhaustion that sets in a mere 30 minutes after you’ve been lugging a suitcase around Manhattan; doctor’s office waiting rooms, aways less inviting than you want them to be, not that you really want to feel invited to spend any more time at a doctor’s office than you need to; the way that clinicians conduct business with first-time patients, tiptoeing along the line between care and procedure, definitely human but restraining something; Théodore Pellerin, cast, I assume, on the assumption that he could pass as an amateur or first-time actor like the rest of the cast, though you’re going to have to try harder than that to fool the gays in the audience.
Much of the above is seemingly irrelevant to the actual point of Never Rarely Sometimes Always, in which teenage Autumn (Sidney Flanigan) and her cousin Skylar (Talia Ryder) sneak out of their small town in Pennsylvania so Autumn—still 17, and thus too young under Pennsylvania law to terminate her pregnancy without parental consent—can get an abortion in New York. The women’s clinic she visits in her hometown is run by ladies who are pleasant and helpful enough; they’re on the older side and when one of them asks if Autumn is “abortion-minded,” she pulls out a videotape of what honestly was one of the gentler Don’t Have an Abortion lectures I could have imagined for the situation.
It isn’t that New York City is any kinder to Autumn than her hometown—the misogyny is rife in both—but it very much is the case that the Planned Parenthood advocate she speaks with in Manhattan is the only person who has ever bothered to ask after the safety of Autumn’s relationships. The women at the Pennsylvania clinic make the tragic error of assuming the best about the father of Autumn’s baby, whereas we, in only two quick, practically decontextualized moments at the beginning, know right away that he’s a total asshole. Apparently Autumn herself hadn’t even processed how poorly this guy has treated her until asked. The film’s pivotal, heartbreaking scene, from which it takes its title, play out in long closeups of Autumn’s face as the PP advocate asks her as part of an intake survey to rate the frequency of behavioral statement’s about Autumn’s current and past sexual partners. Slightly wigged out at first, she sheepishly replies to the first handful of questions before tears of recognition and awakening conscious take over, leaving her speechless as the other woman reads the rest of the survey questions to the end.
Cinematographer Hélène Louvart, shooting on 16mm, is responsible for so evocatively foregrounding the material conditions of Autumn’s life and thereby emphasizing their role in shaping her choice. Hittman plays by the neorealist handbook, observing rather than preaching or directly indicting. She also avoids several key chances for caricature or point-scoring. I was struck, for instance, by the group of protesters shown outside the Manhattan PP. They could have been Westboro-style agitators, but instead it’s…a fairly peaceful crowd of Catholics singing the Ave Maria and holding a few signs of the Virgin Mary (also, were those…seminarians from St. Vlad’s leading the pack??). Their presence is slightly surreal to Autumn; if all you knew about Catholicism is that it compels people to sing in Latin outside abortion clinics, you’d be freaked out too.
NRSA is a strong movie and Flanigan give a phenomenal performance, but like Hittman’s previous film, Beach Rats, it suffers from the director’s tendency to introduce compelling secondary moral conflict without following through on the consequences. The kid in Beach Rats doesn’t get to reckon with his complicity in a hate crime against a guy he picked up online, brought about by his desire to save face in the company of his homophobic pals. Likewise here, after Autumn makes the decision to call her mother in a moment of need—and then hang up before disclosing her whereabouts—Hittman doesn’t return to this action to explore the consequences on the mostly unexamined mother-daughter relationship that she so provocatively decided to bring to the fore so late in the film. These are easy ways of ratcheting up drama, and while this movie doesn’t necessarily suffer for it, one is left with the nagging discomfort that Hittman is letting herself off easy by ending her stories without giving her characters the chance to truly face up to all the interpersonal messes they make for themselves.
Etc.
The Criterion Collection and Janus Films have started a GoFundMe to support independent theaters across the country. Their goal is to make it to $500,000, and they are close to 80% of the way there! Beneficiaries include, among other names readers of this newsletter may recognize, the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge, MA; Suns Cinema in Washington, D.C.; and the Parkway Theatre in Baltimore, MD; among many, many others not just limited to the East coast. If you have the means to contribute and wish to see theaters and their employees weather our present crisis, please consider donating and sharing!