The 34th AFI European Union Film Showcase
Featuring Great Freedom, What Do We See When We Look at the Sky, Petite Maman, and more
Writing
For the December issue of Commonweal magazine, I wrote about the Greek-Ethiopian filmmaker Nikos Papatakis, whose explosive 5-film oeuvre has been streaming on Criterion Channel since this summer. A teaser to whet your appetite:
When a niche director is rescued from the dustbin of film history, it’s fair to ask: Did they end up there for good reason? The late filmmaker Nikos Papatakis is one such long-forgotten artist, his five films difficult to track down in English until they were restored in 2018 for a brief theatrical run in New York City. This year they entered the streaming market for the first time, landing on the Criterion Channel as a presumptive first stop en route to an eventual home-video release. In a featurette shot for the Criterion retrospective, Greek filmmaker Athina Rachel Tsangari recalls some foreboding advice Papatakis passed down to her at the start of her career: “Don’t try to imitate life. You’re a descendant of Euripides and Aeschylus—it’s all about creating this archetypal violence. Make the audience uncomfortable!”
Read the rest over on Commonweal’s website (or in their print edition)!
Watching
Great Freedom (2021)
This Austrian drama opens from a square police camera’s perspective of a men’s bathroom where one Hans Hoffman (Franz Rogowski) has been keeping the cruising economy alive. It really throws disturbing new light onto the aesthetics of the infamous Grindr grid.
Hoffman is a repeat offender of East Germany’s anti-homosexuality laws. The movie starts in 1968, when he’s greeted with a smirk in prison by Viktor (Georg Friedrich), a lifer who knows Hans well from previous stays. Director Sebastian Meise uses the lightless solitary confinement cell where Hans keeps ending up for misconduct as a cutting point between the present and the past. First the film loops back to 1945, when a de-mustachioed Hans is dropped in prison to serve out the remainder of a term that began at a Nazi camp; later, the movie takes a short detour to the 50s for an episode when Hans and a lover are tossed behind bars after getting caught together.
Meise is careful not to overplay the especial cruelty with which the police state treats those it deems sexual deviants (merely touching his lover’s shoulder in the break yard earns Hans a trip to solitary). If he were any better a director of violence and torture, the film would be unbearable to watch. It would also detract from how well he weaves perverse tenderness into this hostile environment, like when 60s-Hans orchestrates a detention-yard cuddling break with a newly-arrived twink or when 50s-Hans trades a sexual favor with the heterosexual Viktor for the latter to deliver a love letter coded into a Bible with pin pricks.
Hans’ long prison nightmare ends with the decriminalization of homosexuality, brightly announced by a magazine cover. Viktor, who has grown platonically close to him over the years, asks Hans with suppressed desperation to remember to visit him, and bring cigarettes. Hans heads straight for a bar—named, of course, Great Freedom—and follows a man to the basement, where a gay Eyes Wide Shut plays out in German miniature. Faced, for the first time in his life, with total freedom to pursue any sexual desire he pleases, Hans finds a different desire exerting a stronger pull. He leaves the bar and the smorgasbord of men behind him, walks to a jewelry store, breaks the display case, and takes a seat on the curb waiting for the cops to come respond to the store’s security alarm—but not before grabbing a pack of cigarettes for the road.
What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? (2021)
Is Georgia the new Romania? Well, not yet. The second film by Berlin-educated filmmaker Alexandre Koberidze is a step up from his debut feature, at least in terms of watchability. That film, Let the Summer Never Come Again, was shot in Tbilisi on a Sony Ericsson cell phone that renders most frames as extremely low-resolution block art. You get used to the look after half an hour, but by hour two (of three and a half) you do wonder why you’ve stuck around this long.
What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? is an almost comically more visually pleasant film, and a full hour shorter to boot. Narrated by an omniscient fabulist with mild climate anxiety, the film is a fairy tale about star-crossed lovers who wake up the morning of their scheduled first date to find they have changed appearances completely. No longer able to pick each other out of a crowd, and also mysteriously afflicted with an amnesia that robs them of their memory of their requisite job skills (“how to play soccer” and “an entire medical school education,” respectively), they each by chance start working for the same opportunistic café owner. They spend the entire film learning who the other is, aided by a film crew who incidentally drafts them to pose as a couple for a documentary they’re shooting in town.
Magical realism might be too broad a term to describe the style of this movie, but it should give you a decent idea of it. Just as notable as the fabulous touches (which include the presence of talking streetlights, a seer working a second job as a piano instructor, and a subplot wherein Messi carries Argentina to a world cup victory) is the overall gentleness of the movie. The feeling comes out both in the storytelling, which is wholly appropriate for all ages from start to finish, and in the images, which are made with sun-dappled care using a mix of 16mm film and digital cameras. I found myself thinking that a lot of my friends would warm to this style, a welcome antidote to the irony- and cynicism-soaked fiction that’s been so in vogue for so long, if Koberidze ever made something as short as, say, 75 minutes. From my lips to God’s ears…
Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn (2021)
Radu Jude has spent the better part of the last decade trying and failing to make a truly galvanizing political film. As outlets for his anger at the state of the world and the historical amnesia of his countrymen, he’s tried period piece (Aferim!, Scarred Hearts), autofiction (I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians), literary adaptation (also Scarred Hearts, Uppercase Print), or found-footage film (Uppercase Print, The Dead Nation), each variously good and bad as both films and manifestos but none entirely hitting the mark as both. Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn may be his most successful failure yet, and not merely because it won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival this year.
BLBoLP opens with a 2-minute amateur porn clip filmed by schoolteacher Emilia (Katia Pascariu) and her husband. The circumstances are a bit fuzzy: Emilia explains throughout the film that she made the clip consensually, but we don’t know if these two were trying out something new; is this always how they get off? trying to pay off some credit card debt with Only Fans income? At any rate, on a purely narrative level the movie is about the fallout of a woman’s private life being exposed unwillingly in public (which of course raises questions about the borders between these two spheres) and the humiliation she suffers twice-over at the hands of her students’ parents, a mob of farcical reactionaries projecting their every fear and insecurity on Emilia under the guise of “think of the children” respectability. Notably, the story is also set smack in the middle of 2020, so the pandemic and related discourses about neighborly responsibility and personal liberty are foregrounded right there with the ubiquitous poorly-worn surgical masks.
But narrative is perhaps the least interesting lens to read the film through. After the porno intro, Jude breaks the movie into three parts. The first, hilariously, consists mostly of fly-on-the-wall tracking shots following Emilia around Bucharest as she runs errands and tries to pawn a Xanax off a pharmacist (“I can’t do that but I can give you a natural vitamin”). Aesthetically this all recalls the walking scenes of Corneliu Porumboiu’s foundational Romanian New Wave film Police, Adjective, though instead of barren streets and alleys Jude sends his lead actress down some of the most visually noisy thoroughfares in the city. He pauses the camera on a motley collection of landmarks of modern life: a kiosk selling Paw Patrol merchandise outside a grocery store, a sexually suggestive billboard, a conga line of nude classical statuary bedecking an apartment built long before the invention of the internet.
The second part of the film is where the thing really comes together or loses you, if it didn’t already lose you in the first 15 seconds (what did you think you were sitting down to watch?). It’s a 40-minute video essay where Jude pairs every letter of the alphabet with a series of clips on sundry topics ranging from climate change to fellatio. The clips are alternately hilarious and deadly serious, and it’s here where Jude slips in some of his longstanding preoccupations with Romanian antisemitism and cooperation with authoritarianism (among other non sequiturs, there’s a jarring archival video of a choir of nuns singing a fascist victory hymn to an audience of priests). The stream of clips has a bit of an infinite scroll vibe, a more rigidly ordered version of the Wikipedia rabbit hole style of a Theo Anthony documentary (someone who has watched Adam Curtis’s movies is welcome to correct me if that’s the better analogy). In its totality this section is too obviously constructed to approximate the feel of contemporary living; one might say it interrogates it. Or even better, us. Alright, we’ve made—and in many cases inherited—this mess, now how do you want to go on living with it?
The third part of the movie attempts an answer. We return to Emilia who has been called in to her prep school for a tragicomic parent–teacher conference where everyone has come prepared with their heuristic weapon of choice to defend or attack her, be it Scripture or a perfectly-memorized quotation from Thomas Kuhn or Hannah Arendt (realism is for suckers). Emilia’s recourse to the language of consent to defend her right to make porn with her husband is clearly insufficient to respond to the parents’ concerns about how their children’s relationship to their teacher has been altered by their exposure to the video. On the flip side, making a scapegoat of Emilia is the parents’ way of avoiding having to think about their own responsibilities as parents in a climate where porn is just one more feature of the all-encompassing digital landscape we all live in. The movie ends with three possible outcomes, none of which resolve the tensions of the story satisfactorily and the last of which suggests that diplomacy may be hopeless and shitposting may be our only relief. It seems to work for Jude at least; against all odds, I found this to be his best-realized movie yet.
Also screened:
Petite Maman (2021)
Don’t make the same mistake I did! Don’t go into this movie without the knowledge that the lead actresses are twins, that this isn’t some Lindsay Lohan-Parent Trap situation. Making do with little, Céline Sciamma’s new movie explores death, grief, and that weird childhood process of coming to understand your parents as people who were kids once too, all from a child-sized perspective. I wondered how actual kids would respond to this movie, mostly because rhythmically it’s much more in step with serious European movies for adults.
Il Buco (2021)
A southern Italian spelunking docufiction where the plastic sheen on the pastoral landscapes is the necessary tradeoff for having cameras that are able to fit down a 700-meter-deep cave and record sharp images in the near-total absence of light. An oddly soothing watch and a technical marvel; for my next career pivot I want to be the guy who draws gorgeous topographical maps by hand.
The Tsugua Diaries (2021)
Another imaginative pandemic film fueled more by lockdown boredom than by doomscrolling-induced rage. Telling a story backwards isn’t a new trick, but this joint effort by Miguel Gomes and Maureen Fazendeiro gets a lot more fun out of it by using the film’s reversed chronology to upend our understanding of what we’re watching. Having proven himself earlier in his career as a period piece–ready stoic heartthrob, Carloto Cotta has fully embraced his himbo era and I’m here for it.
See you in January with my favorite films and individual category nominees for 2021! Assuming I make it to Memoria this week as planned…