November Harvest

Scorsese, Eustache, Fincher et alia

Watching

The Mother and the Whore (1973)

French cinema is rife with movies about beautiful miserable people talking a lot and treating each other terribly. Jean Eustache’s The Mother and the Whore may not have done it first, but it does it best. Veronika (Françoise Lebrun) is a nurse who ends up in the romantic orbit of oily, unemployed chatterbox Alexandre (Jean-Pierre Léaud) and his belligerent live-in partner Marie (Bernadette Lafont). Alexandre sleeps on a mattress without a bedframe, which is our first sign that Veronika is in for trouble. All three are living in the aftermath of the turbulent 1960s, in or approaching their thirties and exiting the period of revolutionary optimism that characterized so many of the protagonists of earlier Nouvelle Vague films.

Sometimes it’s clear that a movie exists for one moment, and in the case of The Mother and the Whore all three hours and 40 minutes of it are justified for a drunken monologue delivered by Lebrun in the home stretch. Getting there is an endurance test of questionable-to-horrible behavior, but the payoff is a shattering reevaluation of why we’ve been spending all this time with these people in the first place; I would almost go so far as to call the ending crypto-Catholic. After Veronika wraps her monologue about the true meaning of love, she stumbles home and Alexandre flees from Marie in pursuit. He prostrates himself before Veronika in her studio apartment, asking her to marry him. Veronika, still drunk, responds to the offer by putting him up to his first test of spousal love—fetching her a bowl to throw up in.

Killers of the Flower Moon (2023)

In close to the same runtime as The Mother and the Whore Martin Scorsese covers a lot more ground with Killers of the Flower Moon, adapted from David Grann’s 2017 book about the systematic murders of the oil-rich Osage tribe of Oklahoma. For one, there’s room here for both terrible people and decent ones. Leonardo DiCpario plays one of the former. As Ernest Burkhart, a WWI veteran who marries into Osage money, DiCaprio scampers around with a permanent frown while his in-laws and neighbors are offed—sometimes with his knowing participation—under the aegis of his uncle William King Hale (Robert De Niro, who’s still got it). Playing Burkhart’s wife Mollie, Lily Gladstone has been touted by everyone as the heart and soul of the film, which isn’t wrong, but I feel like putting it that way puts more emphasis on her tragic agony as a victim of white supremacy at the expense of acknowledging her tragic character flaw. When Ernest first offers her his services as a chauffeur and tries to butter her up with smooth talk, she lets out a hearty laugh from the backseat. If it’s unclear—to Scorsese as much as to the viewer of his film—how Mollie gets from her initial dismissal of the dolt to agreeing to marry him, it’s patently obvious by her final scene with Ernest that Mollie’s hope that this man might make a worthy husband was horribly misplaced.

There are interesting filmmaking choices throughout the film (including the use of a live owl for deathbead premonitions) but the one that feels truly original is the ending, a staged radio play set a decade or so into the future that summarizes what ends up happening to the film’s main players, replete with plenty of twee sound effects. I’m by no means a fan of true crime generally but it’s plainly the case that this stuff is an inescapable part of our media ecosystem (I, too, dutifully listened to the first season of Serial). Situating his own movie in the history of selling settlers their own crimes back to them as entertainment is both damning and a knowingly futile attempt at making amends on Scorsese’s part. Then, in one of the most moving gestures in his filmography, Scorsese himself walks right into the film, not breaking the fourth wall, exactly, so much as coming out with his hands up.

The Velvet Touch (1948)

This rarity screened on 35mm at the AFI Silver as part of its annual Noir City festival. Rosalind Russell, star of His Girl Friday among other comedic hits, decided somewhere in the mid-to-late forties to expand her range by taking on more dramatic roles, whence we got The Velvet Touch. The film scholar who introduced the print couldn’t help but editorialize, calling the movie, and Russell’s acting, more or less a failure.

The Velvet Touch certainly stands apart among noirs. Russell plays the lead, a Broadway actress who accidentally kills her producer within the first two or so minutes of the movie. There isn’t a whole lot of world-weariness or bitterness in the film. There’s mostly just Russell and her broad facial expressions scurrying around a lot of very elaborately crafted theater sets. Our antiheroine tries to skirt the law for as long as she can but ultimately gives in to remorse and turns herself in. The film scholar was right about at least one thing: it isn’t clear where the character ends and the actress portraying her begins. (The B-plot of the film even involves Russell’s character making a career pivot from comedies to tackle some Ibsen.) A better actress might have brought more subtlety—maybe even sinisterness!—to the role, but then the movie would have lost some of its weird charm. This is, after all, a movie with a theme song and lyrics—how many other noirs can boast that?

The Killer (2023)

The Killer opens with the shortest opening title sequence of David Fincher’s career, a sure sign that it will primarily be watched in living rooms by audiences with waning attention spans. Ironically, then, the first chapter in this six-chapters-plus-epilogue film is its most slowly paced. Michael Fassbender plays the titular hitman, a Melvillian¹ gig worker with -5% body fat and an earbud streaming The Smiths always lodged in one ear. We meet him camping out in an under-construction WeWork in Paris, reciting self-help mantras for contract killers while waiting for a target in the building across the way to surface. His mark shows up; he takes aim; he hits the wrong person. So much for the positive self-talk.

Verisimilitude is an important feature of The Killer and presumably where Fincher spent most of his budget. The Killer eats cheap protein from McDonalds; he buys DIY hostage equipment from Ace Hardware; in the finale he even places a same-day delivery from Amazon and picks it up at an Amazon locker, much to the chagrin (I assume) of the Netflix executives financing all this. As Fassbender globetrots away from the scene of his crime and walks into another one committed in his own home, where someone has made an attempt on his girlfriend’s life, everything starts to bleed together. No matter where he runs, the movie’s set almost entirely in Silicon Valley-engineered airspace, which in a way makes it a sequel to The Social Network.

In returning to what he and his collaborators—Kirk Baxter in the editing bay, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross in the music department—do best, Fincher does seem to be having fun with himself, if not outright parodying his own reputation as a perfectionist through Fassbender’s character. The adrenaline rush you get from Fincher’s earlier work is definitely here at times, but on the whole I wish I were having as much fun as he seems to be having. When Tilda Swinton shows up for a 10-minute segment you’re reminded that what makes Fincher’s best work great is that you get to watch movie stars play off each other in his precisely calibrated worlds. All of the rest of the top-billed cast after Fassbender are character actors or nobodies, walking on for brief roles that make little impact. Maybe their anonymity “works” in the context of a film about the flattening of everything under the global economic order; maybe Fincher could have spared a few extra bucks for more some known quantities with stronger screen presence.

Anatomy of a Fall (2023)

The winner of this year’s Palme d’Or is a French courtroom drama that goes down smoothly—maybe a little too smoothly? Sandra Hüller plays a German novelist standing trial for suspicion of murdering her French husband, who is found dead in the snow at the foot of the Alpine lodge where they live with their young son, who lives with visual impairment after a motorcycle accident years prior. I never bought that Hüller’s character would be blamed, let alone actually found guilty, for what could have so easily been a trip and a fall (let alone a jump, as the defense tries to suggest). You can just see that the whole setup, screenwritten by director Justine Triet and her partner Arthur Harari, has been made a bit larger than life so that Triet can Examine the Issues facing Contemporary Woman and so that Hüller, who is excellent in a role that makes her speak two languages that aren’t her native one, can win awards. In Triet’s previous film, Sibyll, Hüller also appeared but as a film director who is catastrophically bad at managing her emotions. The unhingedness of that performance and that movie were endearing qualities that are in shorter supply in this more polished film—and sorely missed.

1. Jean-Pierre, not Herman.