New Directors! New Films!
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Watching
Friends and Strangers (2021)
“What about the Aboriginees?” a woman asks a tour guide near the end of Australian director James Vaughan’s debut feature. “Are they around here or what?”
One of the more interesting things that Friends and Strangers is about is the question of the indigenous peoples of Australia. The opening credits consist of titles overlaid on 18th-century illustrations from the British colonial period, a mix of postcard-sized paintings of western colonizers and scientific drawings of flora and fauna, culminating with the director’s credit over a scene of gun-wielding Brits in a boat flanked on either side by the spear-carrying native people. Now where are the Aboriginees? Vaughan shoots every wide shot with extremely deep focus, as though he’s trying to find someone hidden way out in the background. No one turns up, although he does catch a parakeet hiding, suggestively, in between the branches of a tree.
The movie is also about other, more shopworn, topics: namely, the discreet charm of the bourgeoisie. Alice (Emma Diaz), while driving back home from the city (forgive my lack of knowledge of Australian topography—I can’t recall where she’s headed and where she’s coming from) runs into Ray (Fergus Wilson), one of those types of guy you know from somewhere but don’t know where; not quite a friend, but neither a complete stranger. They go camping without really knowing why. Both are young, financially stable, and still getting over breakups that aren’t exactly fresh. They have a strange run-in with a widower who lives in a trailer by the campground and his nosy preteen daughter, followed by a strange, aborted romantic encounter in their tent. They go back to the city at which point Alice leaves the film almost entirely while Ray picks up a friend-slash-coworker to location-scout the house of a rich family with hideous taste who have hired them for wedding videography.
Vaughan has his actors speak in the familiar stilted drawl of middle-class drifters in movies satirizing middle-class drifters. It’s distracting only because it feels too obvious by this point. I also don’t think it’s well-suited to how surreal this film is. “If you don’t deal with fucked up things properly, that’s when they become haunted,” Ray’s coworker tells him while they’re en route to their site visit, seemingly incongruously. When they arrive, the coworker falls inexplicably ill and Ray begins to slip into what seems like a psychotic episode brought on by sharing too much of the same air with the idly wealthy. In between the last shot of the film and the start of the end credits, Vaughan places a land acknowledgement—“Filmed on the lands of the Eora and Ngunnawal peoples”—that doubles as an explanation for the unsettling phenomena we just experienced.
Apples (2020)
A mysterious new plague is sweeping through Athens. People are spontaneously contracting cases of near-total amnesia, and neither a cause nor a cure for their condition has been found. The latest victim is Aris (Aris Servetalis), an average-looking everyman who’s already incapable of sharing any other identifying details of his life by the time we meet him, banging his head against the wall of a bedroom that’s either his or someone else’s (we’ll find out later).
After he’s found on a bus at the end of its route, unsure of where he’s going and lacking any ID, Aris is checked into the Disturbed Memory Department of the local neurological hospital. He’s given mundane tasks such as matching images on cards to songs played, for some reason, on an old-fashioned tape deck (with the possible exception of cars, all the technology in the film is self-consciously retro), and he fails them all spectacularly. He picks up a habit of snacking on apples—at this point in the film you can lean over to your date, point to the screen, and whisper Those are the apples!—when his roommate in the hospital, who doesn’t much care for them, offloads the extras from his meals on Aris. Mysteriously, the roommate is gone a day or two later, retrieved by his family, according to the doctors, though the implication is the apples had something to do with it.
Some time goes by without much progress in Aris’s condition, at which point his medical team propose that he enter a rehab program still in its beta mode. At no cost to the patient, the hospital offers to house its amnesiacs in their own apartments so they can begin their reintegration into society with brand-new lives, on the one condition that they follow a weekly tape-recorded dispatch of instructions from their doctors with more tasks to test their memory of how to be a human. The tasks are all calculatedly random—go ride a bike! go to a costume party! drive your car into a tree! hmm wait a minute—and require proper documentation (from a hospital-provided polaroid camera, of course). While trying to photograph proof that he went to a screening of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Aris meets Anna (Sofia Georgovassili), another enrollee in the same program he’s in. Though neither is exactly sure how romance is supposed to work when you don’t really know who you are, they give it a try, with predictably sad results.
Director Christos Nikou started his career as an assistant director for Yorgos Lanthimos on Dogtooth1 and it shows. Apples feels a lot like a cousin to Lanthimos’s The Lobster: a deadpan sci-fi with absurdist touches and a gloomy, earthy look. Overall Apples is much gentler toward its characters and its audience, but in return it ends up not making much of an emotional or intellectual impact at all. There’s no need to go full Dogtooth, but Nikou could stand to remember that unlike the titular fruits of his film, humans tend not to bruise so easily.
Taming the Garden (2021)
A truly once-in-a-lifetime documentary about the journey one enormous, ancient tree takes from the deep inland forests of Georgia to the Shekvetili Dendrological Park, the eclectic pet project of Georgian billionaire and former prime minister Bidzina Ivanishvili. The director, Salomé Jashi, chooses not to provide any contextual details beyond what is seen and said in her film; given all that the Georgian villagers in the movie have to say about Ivanishvili and his project, presumably no one in her home country needs any explanation.
Long stretches of Taming the Garden consist of nothing more than wide shots of construction workers and landscapers laboring away to move the tree. Some steps of the process are more remarkable than others—you’re unlikely to have ever seen a 15-story-tall tree ferried across the Black Sea before, or ever again. If, like me, you chose not to read the film’s synopsis in advance, the first half of the film can feel aimless. Things pick up once the tree leaves the woods and makes its way into civilization. The village scenes are both hilarious and heartbreaking (in one, Jashi captures a family argument about Ivanishvili while a sword-swallowing contest blissfully plays out on a TV in the corner). Besides the obvious environmental cost of moving the tree—dozens of smaller trees, themselves often a century old or more, are felled to make way for the Big Bertha—Ivanishvili’s arboreal whims run roughshod over the spiritual lives of the poor who are powerless to stop the wealthy from altering the landscapes that have nourished them for generations.
Wood and Water (2021)
Jonas Bak’s Wood and Water is not the best new movie I’ve seen in over a year but it’s very close to it. Bak’s own mother, Anke Bak, plays a woman who has just finished her last day of work as the church secretary in a small German village. The movie opens in the nave of the church, camera just behind the crucifix, looking out at the pews where she pauses to pray on her way home. Later in the film, she’ll explain to someone on a bus that she prays every morning, “not for bad things not to happen, but so that I can cope with whatever does happen.”
The mother has daughters in Germany and a son in Hong Kong. To celebrate her retirement, the daughters take her to the family lake house, but a full reunion is out of the question; Max, the son, can’t fly home because the protests in Hong Kong have shut down the airports. In time they reopen and his mother is able to make the journey to Hong Kong herself, though she never actually gets to see him. Instead she spends a few days wandering the city, confidently and respectfully, befriending and socializing with a mix of tourists and locals as she moves from her hostel to her son’s apartment to, eventually, a doctor’s office where she books an appointment to ask about the antidepressants she finds in Max’s bathroom.
The conversation between Max’s mother and the doctor transpires entirely in English (a second language for both of them) and therefore feels a bit didactic, insofar as neither of them can communicate in much more than blunt descriptive terms about what depression is and how it’s on the rise among city dwellers. Max’s mother seems to be enduring her own, possibly lifelong, battle with depression, though at her age she’s found ways to adapt and live with its presence. Prayer is one way, knitting another. While in Germany we watch her practice tai chi by following videos online; near the end of the film, she finds someone on the streets of Hong Kong to practice with in person. Bak films the latter scene with the camera trained in close up on the hands and following them in quick, fluid, birdlike gestures.
Motion and texture are the two qualities that set Wood and Water apart. Bak shot it on 16mm film and explores the full range of that format’s capabilities as he travels from the overcast hills and woods of Germany to Hong Kong nights illumined only by billboards. The transition between the countries serves as the film’s absolutely extraordinary centerpiece. Instead of showing us Max’s mother in transit, Bak gives us a slow montage of sights along the way from (mostly) her perspective. Cars on a valley road rhythmically transform into an almost unrecognizably abstract highway underpass, until the Hong Kong skyline finally emerges from the gloom. Words are failing me a second time; when I first watched this sequence, I was so floored by its majesty that I couldn’t suppress a laugh.
Miscellany
Apparently the one-inch barrier of subtitles is still too much for some people: rights to an English-language remake of Another Round have already been secured right off the Danish film’s Oscar win. Leonardo DiCaprio is set to play Mads Mikkelsen’s role (a missed opportunity to give that role to Mads Mikkelsen, imo). I wonder who they’ll get to replace Kierkegaard? Melville?
David Cronenberg is coming back with his first new film since 2014, Crimes of the Future, with Kristen Stewart, Lea Seydoux, and Viggo Mortensen attached.
I enjoyed this thread from Peter Labuza on the twist he put on his Intro to Film class this semester:
and especially this bit:
Interestingly, he was also assistant director for Richard Linklater’s Before Midnight—which makes sense, given it was shot in Greece.