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SXSW 2013: The Milk Carton Kids, Billy Bragg, Indians, & Local Natives
My day kicked into gear at the Pandora Discovery Den/Americana Music Association showcase, where Joey Ryan of The Milk Carton Kids asked their 2 p.m. audience members, completely in earnest, what everyone was doing up so early. As far as two-person acoustic folk efforts go, the Milk Carton Kids get everything right while adding a measure of dark comedy that complicates the low-hanging-fruit comparison they invite to Simon & Garfunkel. In terms of harmony-laden balladry and strikingly symmetrical hair volumes (Ryan would be Garfunkel to Kenneth Pattengale's Simon), the duo crafts gorgeously precise folk gems while punctuating each number with deadpan comic banter. After nailing Dave Rawlings-level picking solos, Pattengale plays the straight man while Ryan riffs self-consciously about the band's volume ("Is the sound too deafening out there? You guys better strap in…") and its commitment to correct punctuation ("This next song, 'Honey, Honey,' is our most grammatically observant song"). Standout numbers "Snake Eyes" and "Girls, Gather 'Round" left nostalgic baby boomers and wide-eyed young ladies (myself included) nearly swooning.
Following the mawkish folk outfit Field Report, British troubadour Billy Bragg delivered a cheeky set of politically committed songs and spoken commentary. On stage, Bragg resembled an avuncular working-class union leader, sporting a jaunty casquette beret and playing up his cockney accent as he covered Woody Guthrie's "I Ain't Got No Home" and sang his own lyrics about Margaret Thatcher, Wall Street, and Jesus Christ being a socialist. During his Guthrie cover, Bragg interjected an apropos line about Obama's drone program usurping funds from public schools, which, unsurprisingly, drew impassioned cheers from the crowd. Bragg's skillful yet conscientious performance illustrated why he's still relevant after 35 years in the business.
Two younger bands, Denmark's Indians and L.A.'s Local Natives, provided divergent yet equally compelling offerings at Paste's Stages on Sixth and Mohawk's outdoor stage, respectively. Indians is the brainchild of Søren Løkke Juul, who projected strident upper-register vocals over gorgeously modulated electronic samples, creating kaleidoscopic reverberations that nicely offset the threat of late-afternoon sunstroke. Local Natives closed out a lineup at Mohawk, preceded by Cold War Kids' competent indie pop. Having just released their sophomore album, Hummingbird, Local Natives kept the audience's blood pumping well past 1 a.m. with their high-octane indie pop. Late-set numbers such as "Airplanes" and "Sun Hands" had well-versed fans shouting lyrics into the wee hours with devotional fervor.
The music portion of South by Southwest runs from March 12—March 17. Hit Annie Galvin on Twitter with tips, questions, corrections, or complaints.
IFFR 2020: This Is Not a Burial, It's a Resurrection, Drag Kids, Young Hunter, & More
It's difficult to imagine Rotterdam as a place where a film festival isn't taking place at all times.
It's difficult to imagine Rotterdam as a place where a film festival isn't taking place at all times. The city feels tailor-made for such an event, with its panoply of movie theaters teeming with character and charming espresso bars, convenient pitstops between screenings, so close to one another. Even the servers and baristas at various restaurants and cafés can seem like festival ambassadors, quick to express their excitement when spotting a person's IFFR tote bag, at times offering recommendations on which screenings to attend. "I swear it's not at all like the musical," said one server, referring to Ladj Ly's Les Misérables.
The LantarenVenster is the only venue that seems to require that you catch a festival shuttle from the downtown area. Here, too, the workers play their role with gusto, in a delicious fantasy of a port city so imbricated in cinema that its festival is all but an effortless consequence of its filmmaking spirit. One driver, as we cross the Erasmusbrug bridge at night time, chats about film criticism and turns on Miles Davis on the radio, and somehow it feels as we're in Louis Malle's Elevator to the Gallows. He points out certain buildings and riffs on their historical significance. When we pass by the Schilderstraat, letters forming the word CULT are inexplicably hanging above the cars on the street, where a garish "Merry Xmas" might appear in a different kind of town. The driver notes that Rotterdam is becoming almost too trendy and sophisticated. Almost.
This may be what filmmaker Pedro Costa had in mind when, in his remarkable Masterclass, he used precisely the figure of the festival chauffeur to paint a picture of how much film festivals have changed in the past couple of decades. He said that even the drivers have master's degrees in film studies these days. This would perhaps be a plus, but in Costa's brutal indictment of the film industry, the film festival circuit certainly included, it also means everyone is constantly trying to pitch something. "Don't pitch anything, please!"
Costa used the figure of the driver with an MA to illustrate the hyper-specialization of everyone involved in the business, but he reserved his venom to attack another figure—that of "sales agents" who, he suggested, act like vultures, depleting every aspect of the filmmaking process from any possible art-for-art's-sake ethos, transforming everything into an opportunity to sell something. In this context, Costa argued, a filmmaker could make any kind of demand—for Robert De Niro, for Sean Penn, or for a dozen elephants on set—just not for "time," that most vital tool in a filmmaker's arsenal ("When you don't have time, you don't discover life").
Costa's talk was packed with references of artists he looked up to, from Robert Bresson to Kenji Mizoguchi, from Buster Keaton to Wang Bing—directors who knew that to make a good film all one needs is "three flowers and a glass of water," not "money, cars, and chicks." Costa kept mistakenly presuming that everyone in the audience was an aspiring filmmaker, and hopefully they weren't, as his advice was for everyone to just stop making movies because we have too many in the world already. And on the off-chance that someone in the crowd still wanted to go out and make one, Costa established poetry, sociology, and subtlety as pre-conditions for the kind of cinema he's interested in making and consuming–even if on his iPhone during his daily train commute (Bresson looks great on the iPhone, he claimed). "This is not about revealing anything," he said. Cinema should be about hiding, like a gift you put inside a box and wrap delicately before offering.
There were certainly a few of those kinds of films at Rotterdam this year. One of them was Lesotho-born, Berlin-based filmmaker Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese's This Is Not a Burial, It's a Resurrection, which, like Costa's own Vitalina Varela, explores the impossibility of mourning. In Mosese's film, Mantoa (Mary Twala Mhlongo), an 80-year-old widow living in a rural village in Lesotho, learns that her last surviving son, a migrant worker laboring in a coal mine in neighboring South Africa, has just died. She has thus lost all of her loved ones and decides to plan her own funeral. She wants a simple coffin. No golden angels or other gaudy nonsense.
Mosese's mise-en-scène and camerawork are breathtaking. The opening of the film, for one, is reminiscent of the Titanik Bar scene from Béla Tarr's Damnation, where the camera glides through a God-forsaken nowhere, certain of where it needs to go, despite the darkness, all the way until it spots a cabaret performer singing the most melancholy of all songs. In This Is Not a Burial, It's a Resurrection, the camera also sneaks gracefully through a dark nowhere until it finds, not a singer, but an old man playing a strange instrument and eager to tell us a sad tale about lands that weep, miners coming home, and "cups that could never be filled."
Mosese takes us back to this non-space a couple of times, as if the old man, played by Jerry Mofokeng Wa Makhetha, were a non-diegetic master of ceremonies for the story of Mantoa that unfolds. It's a story told through the gracefulness of the camerawork, the stunningly lit tableaux, and, most remarkably of all, through fabric. Not many films, especially ones with a documentary sensibility, use texture—wool, mud, cement, ashes, and cloth specifically—as a storytelling device the way that This Is Not a Burial, It's a Resurrection does.
Consider the moments where Mantoa, faced with the many obstacles that keep her from being able to dig her own grave, takes refuge in the gown her husband once gave her: an exquisitely lustrous damask dress with a black frill and white-collar trim. It's a great sartorial departure from the sober blackness of her usual widow's attire, which clashes with the flashy satin swathed around the bodies of the women around her and the blindingly yellow uniforms of city workers building a dam right where the dead lay, draped in white bedsheets.
In one of the film's many unforgettable scenes, Mantoa gets up from the chair where she usually sits to listen to the radio and dances with her dead husband, raising her arm as if holding an actual body that isn't there, a voice in the background telling her to take off her "cloak of mourning." And she certainly takes it all off in a bewildering final sequence when Mantoa simultaneously surrenders to loss and spurns it.
Several other films at IFFR explored the theme of death and dying, such as Carl Olsson's Meanwhile on Earth, an observational study of the Swedish funerary industry. The film reminds us of the artificiality of funerals, or rites more generally, exposing them as highly theatrical performances, with their wreathes, pots, and crosses staged just so. It also pays close attention to the mechanics of funerals: their perfectly timed music and the multiplicity of gadgets and machineries required to lift and transport corpses and coffins.
Olsson's strategy for making the subject matter palatable is to try and extract discrete humor from it. He loiters on the professionals going about their tasks—transporting, cleaning, embalming—for long enough so that overtly banal dialogue emerges. In the film's most successful moments, the juxtaposition between the morbid ambiance (bodies on stretchers that bleed long after dead) and chats about all-you-can-eat Chinese buffets or the nutritional value of bottled smoothies make for a Tati-esque skit with a disarming punchline at the end.
Kristof Bilsen's documentary Mother is the portrait of Pomm, a caretaker at an Alzheimer's care center in Thailand whose poverty keeps her from living with her children, and Maya, her incoming patient, a privileged 57-year-old Swiss woman whose husband and children drop her off at the care center and go back to Switzerland. Unfortunately, Bilsen allocates the same amount of time on both women's daily lives in their home countries prior to their encounter, insisting on obvious contrasts between poverty-stricken Thailand and the idyllic mountains of Switzerland. Yet only Pomm allows herself to be vulnerable for the camera, as Maya's family never lets their guard down. It's difficult to engage meaningfully with some of the subjects (like Maya's entourage) when the filmmaker is content to accept the fact that they only have their façades to offer.
Rotterdam featured films about the exuberance of youth, too, liberated or stunted. Drag Kids, screened at the very laidback Scopitone Café, a bar named after film jukeboxes of yore inside the Theater Rotterdam Schouwburg. The documentary follows child drag artists, some as young as nine, and their supportive families, as they prepare for their first joint concert at Montreal Pride. Director Megan Wennberg is smart not to bank simply on the inexplicable thrill of watching young children perform like adults. She's protective of the children, in fact, never lingering on the potentially embarrassing less-than-average performances, singing or voguing, from some of the kids. Instead, she focuses on the differences between the kids, suggesting that drag can take different meanings, and that it can make different promises of deliverance, for children with decidedly different psychic symptoms and family constellations. Their only kinship seems to be, apart for their love of drag, the apparently unconditional support from their parents. Still, problems arise, from Queen Lactatia's self-obsessed competitiveness to Laddy GaGa's near-psychotic outbursts.
It's impossible to look at Drag Kids, which is unabashedly reality TV show-esque at various moments, and not think of TLC's Toddlers & Tiaras, with its barrage of Southern stage moms waxing their pre-pubescent daughters' eyebrows and teaching them trophy-wife realness. Although some of the Drag Kids parents do seem eager to capitalize on their children as digital influencers or with merchandise featuring their child's face, the role of hyper-femininity and artifice here seems to play more of a reparative and self-aware playfulness than they did in the gender-conforming theatrics, and orthopaedics, of Toddlers & Tiaras. Wennberg's documentary refreshingly denies us a lot of the kiddy voyeurism one might expect, ultimately crafting a portrait of kids whose maladies, if they have any, are somewhere else to be found—not on stage nor in the glitter.
In Young Hunter, director Marco Berger offers us a gripping look at the tragedies that surface precisely when desire isn't allowed to express itself freely and publicly. In Berger's vision of Argentina, queer feelings are necessarily clandestine feelings. A boy like 15-year-old Ezequiel (Juan Pablo Cestaro), then, is forced to develop a sort of criminal mind, and a criminal gaze, from a very young age. The queer object of desire can only be a prey, or a victim to be duped into reciprocating one's yearning, as Ezequiel has to go through all sorts of subterfuges and a certainly different kind of theatrics from drag in order to get a good glimpse at other men's bodies, let alone touch them, including that of his cousin (Juan Barberini).
The whole world seems to be a tease that one can only enjoy along with the terrifying dread of being found out. Instead of dwelling on it, however, Ezequiel takes matters into his own hands and develops a system of tricks for having sex with other boys, inviting them over to his house when his parents are away, feeding them beer and straight porn magazines, and then suggesting that they jack off together. If it all fails, he might head to the nearby skatepark and stare at shirtless boys like Mono (Lautaro Rodriguez), who he ends up falling in love with. At first it seems gratuitously reciprocal, but then Ezequiel realizes that he's caught in a web of intrigue and lies much more extensive than the one he had to construct for himself.
Young Hunter is playfully shot like a thriller, until you realize that it may actually be one. The film is refreshing in that, while it recognizes the ravages of queer desire in a queerphobic world, it doesn't focus on the suffering but on psychological solutions and practical strategies for sexual survival that are bound to seem familiar to any queer child who's dared to evade repression and its many laws through queer creativity and savvy.
International Film Festival Rotterdam runs from January 22—February 2.
Under the Radar 2020: The Shadow Whose Prey the Hunter Becomes, Not I, & More
Experiencing the Under the Radar Festival replaces the usual sense of familiarity with a sense of wonder.
Most of the plays I see in New York City are created by able-bodied, Anglophone playwrights. (More often than not they're men, and more often than not they're white.) For most New York theater critics, most of the time, "international" means "imported from London." If it doesn't, it probably means "directed by Ivo van Hove." But at the Under the Radar Festival, the Public Theater's 16-year-old annual international theatrical extravaganza, the thoughtfully curated program of new works blasts apart the predictable comfort of knowing what you're getting yourself into.
Despite the relentless pace, marathoning in a festival setting like Under the Radar works against the critical impulse to get in and get out. Lingering in playing spaces beyond the curtain call to soak in the experience and seeking threads of connections between plays before cementing my verdict on any are rarer opportunities than I'd realized.
Experiencing the Under the Radar Festival—especially taking in shows at high quantity in quick succession—replaces the usual sense of familiarity with a sense of wonder. I haven't adored every offering at this year's festival, but, in each theater space, I've been keenly, refreshingly alert to my presence and my perspective as an audience member, to the ways in which I hear and watch and engage. I've looked sideways as well as dead ahead, and over the weekend, I saw two performances that required lengthy, committed conversations with the strangers sitting next to me. (And that's especially valuable for critics, who sometimes need the reminder that other people's opinions coexist alongside ours.)
This year's lineup of plays has been particularly successful in making audiences acutely aware of themselves as a whole, as people who lug assumptions and anxieties and uncertainties into their seats. Take The Shadow Whose Prey the Hunter Becomes, the first play I saw this season and the festival's most rewarding in its complexity. Throughout its hour-long run time, I had occasionally taken note of a long strip of yellow tape at the front of the playing space. During the play, the four actors, all of whom are neurodivergent and play characters who are neurodivergent, frequently step up to that line to speak to the audience. I imagined the line as a necessary, neon beacon for the performers to find their way forward.
Yet, in the final moments of the play, actor Simon Laherty (who also co-wrote the script with his castmates and other members of the Back to Back Theatre, an Australian company), tears the tape off the floor and exits. The gesture reads as a direct rebuke to the very ideas I'd been holding for the play's duration: It seems to ask, "Who are you to assume that the world of this play was built for its performers instead of for the characters they play? How can you, sitting there, decide what we, putting on a show for you up here, need in order to perform?" And I wondered, not for the first time: How did they read my mind?
Directed by Back to Back's artistic director, Bruce Gladwin, The Shadow Whose Prey the Hunter Becomes stars four performers with disabilities playing characters (with their own first names) who host a sort of town hall meeting to educate the people in attendance about what it's like to have a disability. The shared names between characters and actors are a red herring. These actors have disabilities, yes, but that doesn't mean the characters with disabilities they play are them, any more than neurotypical roles match the neurotypical actors playing them. Again and again, through moves so subtle I'm not sure I didn't imagine them, The Shadow Whose Prey the Hunter Becomes sets graceful, invisible traps for the audience's assumptions about the capabilities of the performers and the distance between performer and character. And while I'm not entirely sure of the title's meaning, it might have something to do with the play's constant shadowy evasion of comforting resolutions: Never once is an audience member allowed to feel like they have mastered the art of empathy.
An early sequence seems deliberate in putting an audience on edge, as the long stretches of silence as actor Sarah Mainwaring prepares to speak made me wonder whether it was the actor or the character who had forgotten her lines. Was this discomforting silence performed or real? It's part of the play, of course, just like most of neurotypical theater's long pauses. But I feel sure that The Shadow Whose Prey the Hunter Becomes anticipated my discomfort and my doubt. That dark cocktail of emotions following the clarifying moments—relieved admiration for the performers, guilt for the assumptions I had made, embarrassment that I had been caught feeling uneasy—stayed with me for the rest of the play's rich hour.
In that regard, The Shadow Whose Prey the Hunter Becomes is very much about the audience, and there's nimble, layered playfulness as the characters obsess around whether the imagined audience at the town hall meeting are understanding their message. And while some of the sections of the text work better than others (I'm not sure about the suggestion that everyone will be deemed disabled when artificial intelligence overtakes human thought), the actors also engage brilliantly with the supertitles, which are supposedly transcribed live at the meeting by Siri. Supertitles seem at first like a tool for us, the audience, to understand the performers' speech. As Scott Price laments, "I have autism, and, unfortunately for me, I also have a thick Australian accent." But the projected text also doubles as a symbol for the dehumanization of people on the spectrum. "You can tell we have disabilities as everything we say comes upon a screen," Sarah notes with disdain. "The subtitling is offensive."
This point of view leads to a heated argument about language and representation, with Scott claiming the label of disability: "I'm a disabled person here and I'm proud and I don't want to weave my way around language." But there's no unified front in how these four characters perceive themselves and seek to be perceived.
Perhaps the play's sharpest touch is that Michael and Scott talk down to Simon, describing him as "very childlike" and insinuating that he can't understand what's going on or fully participate in the meeting. Sarah calls them out on this ("You're talking like Simon's not even in the room"), and it's not just an indictment of how individuals with disabilities can be dehumanized to their faces but also an illuminating glance into how internalized measures of normalcy have permeated the disability community. This quartet of characters doesn't include heroes or victims or saints and the play relishes in catching the audience in the act of attaching such labels to the performers. It's a play I want to see again in order to try again, to use what I've learned from my first encounter with Back to Back to do better the next time.
If The Shadow Whose Prey the Hunter Becomes invites us to project imagined limitations on to the performers and then to watch those assumptions crumble, the creator of Samuel Beckett's Not I at BRIC (the Brooklyn venue hosting this show) wants us to know exactly what to expect from the beginning. Yes, this is a performance—and an exhilarating one—of Beckett's 15-minute, stream-of-consciousness monologue, first performed in 1972, but this production positions the piece at the center of a conversation with the performer, Jess Thom.
Thom, who's best known in the U.K. for Touretteshero, an alter ego aimed at educating and spreading awareness of Tourette's syndrome, has a number of repeating verbal tics that spark from her speech: Among the most frequent are "biscuit," "sausage," and "I love cats," plus a few words and phrases that aren't quite so "cute," as Thom describes them. Unlike The Shadow Whose Prey the Hunter Becomes, the sense of unpredictability here is shared by the performers. A few times throughout the day, Thom explains, she will lose control over her body and speech, and this possibility creates a space of "genuine jeopardy."
Such pre-show disclaimers are neither warnings nor apologies but a crucial aspect of Thom's central work here: envisioning a truly inclusive performance space and then co-creating that space with her audience. There are no surprises in Not I. Thom explains, in detail, that her wheelchair will be lifted eight feet into the air atop a hydraulic lift; that only her mouth will be lit (as in all productions of Beckett's monologue); that an ASL interpreter (the warmly expressive Lindsey D. Snyder) will sign every word of Beckett's explosively high-velocity text, plus each unexpected tic along the way; that the post-performance experiences will include watching a video, discussing the monologue with a stranger, and participating in a Q&A.
The audience sits on padded benches and pillows on the floor, and Thom invites people to move and make noise during the piece as needed. An online guide to the performance even includes a sound map, alerting audience members to patches of loud noise, like applause and a section of the monologue featuring terrifying screams. With its shrieks and terrorizing, relentless intensity, Not I certainly defies expectations for the sorts of theater pieces that tend to offer relaxed, inclusive performances. But by reclaiming the character of Mouth through the lens of disability, Thom has made the jumbled thoughts of the character suddenly specific and, if not quite understandable, accessible through empathy.
Though Beckett meant for Not I to unnerve its auditors with its impenetrableness, Thom uses the text to grant entry into her own experiences of losing control over her own speech and movement. Thom's tics remain present throughout the monologue, absorbed into the labyrinthine, spontaneous stitches of Mouth's words. In fact, as Thom explained in the Q&A section, the tics actually multiply to fill the spaces between breakneck sections of monologue; the speed with which she articulates the text temporarily displaces her tics, "like a stone in water," but they flow back in during Beckett's indicated silences. "My version of silence," Thom clarified, often sounds like eight or 10 "biscuits" in a row. If we can embrace and understand the charismatic, wisecracking Thom, we should be able to extend that compassion toward embracing and understanding her version of Mouth too.
After the performance of Beckett's monologue, Thom sits on the floor as a short video about the making of this piece plays. In the video, Thom attributes her emergence as a performer to the exclusion and isolation she experiences as an audience member: on-stage seemed to be "the only seat in the house I wouldn't be asked to leave." And even as we hear her words, their truth immediately confirms itself: It's only during this section of the performance—a few minutes in which Thom herself is not visible as she sits in the dark—that I reverted to experiencing Thom's tics as disruption or interruption. At the exact moment I was nodding along with the video's celebration of inclusive theatrical spaces, I was simultaneously sensing my own flashes of concern or maybe frustration or maybe fear that someone sitting beside me in the darkness was breaking the sacred rules of stillness and silence. With love and warmth and unvarying good humor, Thom manages to shine a glaring, pointed spotlight on our own limitations as compassionate stewards of the spaces we strive to co-inhabit. Then she asks us to look around the room and gives us the chance, right then and there, to change.
The limitations of the human intellect—and the human spirit—are put to the test in Grey Rock, an English-language commission by Palestinian playwright-director Amir Nizar Zuabi which premiered at La MaMa a year ago. Zuabi's play, besides being performed in English, boasts an instantly recognizable form: It's a family comedy, actually one of the funniest I've seen in a while, with a bittersweetness that calls to mind, in a very different geopolitical context, Neil Simon's Brighton Beach Memoirs and Broadway Bound.
Lila (Fidaa Zaidan) is perplexed that her father, the widower Yusuf (Khalifa Natour), has suddenly started working out vigorously. Why the sudden focus on getting in shape? At first she thinks he's seeing someone new—it's been three years since her mother died—but that doesn't explain why he's also spending hours assembling mechanical parts in his shed with a brilliant young engineer, Fadel (Ivan Kevork Azazian). Yusuf's plan, it turns out, is to build a rocket to the moon, a feat that will put Palestinian fortitude and ingenuity on the map.
It's in Yusuf's very insistence that his rocket-building is about humanity rather than political conflict that Zuabi's play becomes, in fact, forcefully political. Much like The Shadow Whose Prey the Hunter Becomes foretells the audience's expectations of the performers' failures, Grey Rock anticipates the need for viewers to see conflict and war in every image and line of dialogue with Palestine attached to it.
Israel is a reality in the world of Grey Rock, of course, and one which diminishes what some of these characters think they can become: Fadel describes the Israeli forces as "stop signs for the imagination" and Yusuf later tells Lila's ill-matched fiancé Jawad (Alaa Shehada), "You have the occupation [as] your excuse for your lack of creativity." But Zuabi seems less interested in using the play to protest the Israeli presence in Palestine than in advocating for a Palestinian uprising of imagination and creativity in the face of dehumanization. There's an aspect of 21st-century fairy tale to Grey Rock's structure and plot twists, but the play remains grounded enough to suggest real-world pathways forward for oppressed peoples to dream big. (The fact that these performers, who all identify as Palestinian, have overcome complex visa hurdles to perform in New York twice in the span of a year, is a dream realized already.) Except for the final scene (a tonal shift that doesn't entirely pay off), Grey Rock keeps the darkness at bay. The Israeli occupying forces are a constant off-stage presence, an invisible menace that the characters must sometimes ignore in order to live and shape their own stories.
Most of the story careens through amusingly familiar tropes, but it's a familiarity that seems to be there by design. I think I would have found Grey Rock just as absorbing in supertitled Arabic, but there's something appealing in the transparency with which it draws us in. The play was written for English speakers, with the intention of exposing the ordinary vibrancy of quotidian Palestinian existence. Knowing some of the well-trodden arcs of the plot in advance narrows the space between Anglophone audiences and the world they encounter.
Zuabi is a far nimbler writer than director; the play's magnetic energy only diminishes in its awkwardly staged moments of physical comedy and occasionally rudderless transitions between scenes. But his dialogue briskly fleshes out his five characters, who also include the village's anxious imam (Motaz Malhees). There's a particularly delightful rapport between Natour's gruff stargazer and Azazian's overeager yet tentative assistant.
Beyond the crisp comedy, the relationship between Yusuf and his beloved, aspiring daughter Lila feels almost operatic in its balance of tenderness and tumult: Lila harbors years of resentment that her father allowed himself to be jailed for anti-occupation propaganda, leaving her mother to raise Lila independently for five years. When Yusuf leaps to his feet jubilantly upon hearing that Lila's broken off her engagement, and then tries to backtrack his demonstrativeness, it's both hilarious and sweetly moving.
I'm not sure if Zuabi deliberately snuck in one particular idiom for this festival run: "I order things in small quantities so I go under the radar," Yusuf says, explaining his rocket-in-progress to an ever-expanding community of supporters. But to go Under the Radar, the Public has ordered up a series of shows which are anything but small in their expansive commitment to transforming audiences, preparing them to be more perceptive, empathetic people, perhaps even in time for the next performance.
Under the Radar runs from January 8—19.
The 10 Best Documentaries of 2019
The year's best documenaries found the monstrous in the mundane, the epic in the everyday.
Lest we forget, 2019 saw the release of Avengers: Endgame, the bloated culmination of a franchise marked by needlessly convoluted storylines and an almost perverse overreliance on computer-generated spectacle. On the extreme opposite end of the aesthetic spectrum, some of the best documentaries of the year were small-scale, intimate, articulate snapshots, often adventurous in form, of actual human perspectives and dilemmas—qualities that at least partly explain why the films are so easy to love.
Look no further than Chinese Portrait, which in any one of its brief observational shots of people living their everyday lives raises more thought-provoking ideas about the passage of time than Avengers: Endgame does in three hours. And Xiaoshuai Wang's film wasn't the only documentary this year to offer a hugely empathetic account of people's relationship to their community. Both Khalik Allah's Black Mother and Donal Mosher and Michael Palmieri's The Gospel of Eureka rejected portraying their subjects solely as victims of marginalization, presenting whirlwind celebrations of multifaceted people and their culture. And Roberto Minervini's What You Gonna Do When the World's on Fire? powerfully expressed the profound levels of kindness and strength people display when fighting to make a difference in the civic life of their communities.
It wasn't just the everyman who was the star of 2019's best documentaries, but also influential cultural icons in singular late-career works. In the captivating and bittersweet career self-evaluation Varda by Agnès, the late, great Agnès Varda did something few filmmakers do: cap off a robust oeuvre on her own terms. And Rolling Thunder Revue, by rockumentarian extraordinaire Martin Scorsese, is notable not only for its playful mash-up of pop history and myth, but also for showing Bob Dylan, in both archival footage and present-day interviews, like we've never seen him before: loose, buoyant, and, believe it or not, actually looking like he's having fun. As a gaudy new box-office king became anointed, 2019's documentaries proved that the genre is more vital than ever for not just homing in on the monstrous in the mundane, but also the epic in the everyday. Wes Greene
10. The Silence of Others
Almudena Carracedo and Robert Bahar's The Silence of Others is monumental for its clamorous sounding of an alarm. It reminds us, and we do need reminding, that the acts of horror committed by nation states are often followed by a convenient amnesia—a whitewashing of man's brutality—where everyone agrees to be good citizens moving forward. But beyond its pedagogical function, the film helps us posit more philosophical questions of justice versus revenge, along with the endless transmission of trauma. From generation to generation, the ravages of Spain's dictatorship are passed on like a cursed heirloom. The sadism of yesterday's jackals becomes palpable through the accounts of their deeds, but their victims' progeny, now close to death themselves, have rather modest wishes. Namely, getting official confirmation that their loved ones were murdered by the state. Or seeing what's left of the bodies, even if from a distance. Diego Semerene
9. Rolling Thunder Revue
Throughout Rolling Thunder Revue, Martin Scorsese culls various images together to offer a startlingly intense vision of America as place that, to paraphrase Bob Dylan, essentially believes in nothing, following one demoralizing crisis after another. The film gradually collapses, mutating from a freeform document of the Rolling Thunder Revue into a series of essays and anecdotes, such as on the origin of Dylan's Rubin Carter tribute "Hurricane." The film attains a shaggy shapelessness that suggests the haze of travel, as Dylan and his cohorts push on, delving deeper into their micro worlds. The true shock of the documentary, however, is in how good, how alive, Dylan is on stage. All of the make-up and masks he wears—other allusions to reinvention, to the essential, simultaneously nourishing and damaging textures of pop culture—seem to liberate him. On this tour, Dylan performs quite a bit of material from Desire, and his singing is clear and urgent and stunningly divorced of his ironic parlor games; he's connecting with these songs, using the revue concept to channel his canniest and most sincere instincts as an actor and storyteller. Chuck Bowen
8. What You Gonna Do When the World's on Fire?
Violence, poverty, incarceration, and sexual abuse haunt Roberto Minervini's subjects, and his film is most powerful when it shows how casually people have acclimated themselves to systemic failure. Two half-brothers, 14-year-old Ronaldo King and nine-year-old Titus Turner, are lectured by their mother, Ashlei, about meeting a 7 p.m. curfew that's clearly been implemented to steer them away from crime, the dangers of which she explains to Titus. In this moment, Minervini dramatizes Titus's inoculation into a volatile world, capturing how the boy gradually sheds his innocence—an impression that's affirmed later in What You Gonna Do When the World's on Fire? when Ronaldo tutors Titus on fighting. Duct-taping towels around Titus's hands in place of boxing gloves, Ronaldo tells his little brother to hit him with decisiveness, while admitting that, once one gets older, most fights are settled with guns. Ronaldo dispenses such advice with a matter-of-fact-ness that's bone-chilling, and with a brotherly love that's deeply poignant. Bowen
7. Varda by Agnès
In Varda by Agnès, cinema is a form of thinking out loud that follows the trajectory of a spiderweb, unimpressed by the benefits of control and linearity. Detours, accidents, asides, footnotes, and marginalia are the core of Agnès Varda's modus operandi. Hers is the zigzagging ethos of the flâneur, or the glaneur, re-signifying the mundane without calculation, surrendering control to life itself, as she wonders around various worlds—some inhabited by Godard, Birkin, and Deneuve, others by the anonymous folk who were Varda's real muses. In her pedagogical scene we trace a genealogy of her oeuvre, but the filmography that serves as her PowerPoint slides, as it were, are more like rabbit holes than historical markers. They take us on a dreamlike expedition that reminds us of cinema's political duty. That is, its ability to extract poetry from everyday life, to affect communities and restitute the value of rejected people and things. Most importantly, cinema for Varda was always a matter of mutual contamination, with the filmed object architecting the camera's gaze too. Could there be a more urgent panacea for a culture steeped in overproduced imagery, synthetic drama and concept-less drivel? Semerene
6. Honeyland
Ljubomir Stefanov and Tamara Kotevska's Honeyland pulses with vividly observed detail, offering a patient, intimate, and complex portrait of a disappearing way of life. Its subject is Atidze, an old Macedonian woman who lives with her even older mother in a remote village without paved roads, electricity, or running water. When we first see her, in a series of breathtaking landscape shots that open the film, she calmly ambles across a vast field, climbs up a hill, and then carefully edges across a narrow ridge before stopping in front of an unassuming rock face. There, she gingerly pulls away some of the stone to reveal the most vibrant, sumptuous honeycomb you've ever seen. Without straining to make a grand environmentalist statement, Honeyland manages to dramatize—simply, directly, and without sentimentalism or condescension—the importance of a holistic approach to agriculture. As the world continues to suffer ever-increasing mass die-offs of honeybee colonies, Stefanov and Kotevska's film reminds us that there's indeed a better way to interact with our planet—one rooted in patience, tradition, and a true respect for our surroundings. Keith Watson
Los Cabos Film Festival 2019: Workforce, The Twentieth Century, Waves, & More
There was plenty of merit to the connections being made at Los Cabos between filmmakers and audiences.
Martin Scorsese recently sparked controversy by stating in an interview with Empire magazine that Marvel's superhero movies, which have become indispensable moneymakers in a Hollywood system increasingly beset by pressures to build or renew popular tentpole franchises, are "not cinema." The conventional wisdom in film marketing terms is that each new contribution to an already recognizable franchise requires such minimal effort at garnering public awareness compared to the type of cinematic ventures that Scorsese would argue, as he wrote in the New York Times in explanation of his interview comments, "enlarg[e] the sense of what was possible in the art form." These more original offerings require ground-up campaigns for the attention of moviegoing audiences who are increasingly comfortable ignoring altogether the existence of films not actively targeting mass consumption.
The opening-night film of the eighth annual Los Cabos International Film Festival happened to be Scorsese's highly anticipated epic crime drama The Irishman. The film is only being granted a minimal theatrical release in the U.S. before its arrival on Netflix on November 27, because, according to Scorsese, "most multiplexes are crowded with franchise pictures." Robert De Niro, who stars in the film, was on hand in Cabo to walk the red carpet and represent a cinematic community founded on principles of "aesthetic, emotional and spiritual revelation," in Scorsese's own words. This was the kind of audience primed to appreciate his latest effort.
The audience was primed for greatness, even as oblivious vacationers guzzled tequila just outside on the streets and sidewalks of Cabo. When I told my seatmate on the plane about the screening of Scorsese's film later that evening, she furrowed her brow in confusion. "I'm staying at the Hard Rock," she said in explanation. And as I later walked from my own hotel toward the theater, I passed by countless tourists wielding Tecate tallboys and squinting behind cheap sunglasses who were no doubt completely unaware of the film festival taking place inside the giant mall at the north end of the downtown harbor. Many of them even wore T-shirts and tank tops that might easily have been emblazoned with the visages of Marvel characters.
As I drifted between the incessant buzz of the party atmosphere outside and the quiet engagement with contemporary filmmaking taking place within the theater throughout the festival, I couldn't help but notice that several of the films that screened at Los Cabos seemed similarly concerned with liminal spaces between two very different worlds. The characters in these films learn to navigate the borderlands between class differences and racial divides, fleeting flirtations with freedom dashed by constant threats of persecution. These characters know their place, but even the brutal reality of their circumstances isn't enough to prevent them from trying to get somewhere else. And nowhere is this more apparent than in Mexican filmmaker David Zonana's mesmerizing Workforce, a tightly shot and richly layered film documenting the rise and fall of a group of construction workers in Mexico City who dare to dream beyond their otherwise meager means.
The film begins with the sudden death of Claudio, a member of a construction team putting the finishing touches on a swanky new house in a posh district of the city who falls from a rooftop in the opening shot. Workforce then quickly pivots and takes on the perspective of Claudio's brother, Francisco (Luis Alberti), whose search for justice following his brother's death becomes all-consuming and destructive. Claudio's death has been deemed by officials to be caused by irresponsible alcohol consumption while on the job, even though Claudio had been a known teetotaler, and the wife (Jessica Galvez) and unborn child he's left behind are thus denied compensation following the accident. And after the homeowner (Rodrigo Mendoza) waves him away from inside his fancy car when Francisco makes a plea for compassion, he becomes obsessed with the other man, following him through the streets and monitoring his every move. And after the homeowner's mysterious death, which we learn about after witnessing Francisco surreptitiously enter his apartment building the night before, Francisco begins occupying the now dormant construction site as if it were his own home.
The shift between Francisco's life in a tiny, rain-drenched apartment to his fresh start in the sprawling home that lays unclaimed in the wake of its owner's death—complete with furniture still unwrapped, appliances yet to be installed—will ring familiar to those who've seen Parasite. Bong Joon-ho's film operates in a more satirical and less tragic register than Zonana's but still narrates the kind of violently enacted class mobility that lays bare the stark differences between the kinds of lives that are lived on either side of the poverty line.
Francisco eventually moves several members of his former construction team into the abandoned house, along with their families, in an effort to lay a more legitimate claim to its ownership. The film briefly soars with the ecstasy and sudden privilege that its characters feel as they inhabit a space representative of those from which they have historically been excluded. But problems quickly mount: the small indignities of overcrowding, persistent struggles over limited resources, cringe-inducing abuses of power on the part of those currently in control. And the final high-angle shot of the house, its inhabitants now expelled and powerless against the forces of the state, is notable for how the film has until then been heavily anchored at ground level, a powerful demonstration of the universal struggles of the Mexican working class.
The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open, a Canadian film written and directed by Kathleen Hepburn and Elle-Maija Tailfeathers, is another story of an invisible divide whose boundaries are nonetheless palpably felt. Two women from differing indigenous backgrounds, and from opposite sides of the class spectrum, are thrown together one late afternoon on the streets of Vancouver. A very pregnant Rosie (Violet Nelson) has fled her abusive lover's apartment and is barefooted, bruised, and in obvious need of help when the lighter-skinned Aila (Tailfeathers) happens upon her and decides to shelter her. Aila has just had an IUD inserted earlier in the day, and the availability of advanced methods of conception is just one of the many marks of privilege that the film will subtly deploy. And the encounter between the two women is fairly straightforward from the start, but the subtext of their interactions is what gives the film its thematic weight and its staying power.
The differences between the women are played out with racial signifiers as well as those of relative affluence, and Hepburn and Tailfeathers make the bold formal decision to film their story in real time, by and large foregoing traditional scene structures and editing techniques and instead lingering in the quiet, interstitial moments between narrative transitions. The choice of indulging in the long take allows for moments of silence and digression as the audience infiltrates the scene as a third party. This uncomfortable intimacy is felt most acutely in a devastating, mostly silent shot late in the film of the interior of a taxi as Aila accompanies Rosie back to the apartment complex where her abusive lover awaits after Rosie has rejected a place in a women's shelter, both of their faces in the frame as they quietly contemplate their very different futures.
The impending crisis of motherhood—urgent on Rosie's part, delayed indefinitely on Aila's—remains unspoken until that final taxi ride, in which both women tell the other that they believe they will be good mothers. And the city of Vancouver itself—and with it the ghost of Canada's colonial past, specifically its systematic erasure of First Nations culture—haunts all of The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open, glimpsed mostly through car windows as it passes by unremarked upon while the film's characters grapple silently with how the present has been irrevocably troubled by the past. The film demonstrates the power of simply inhabiting a tension and absorbing its complications, rather than demanding a resolution.
Another Canadian film, and the winner of the festival's competition award, Matthew Rankin's The Twentieth Century is an alternate history of the rise to power of Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King (Dan Beirne). Funny and daringly experimental, the film's overtly oddball aesthetic, redolent of Guy Maddin's work, often feels borrowed from the silent era in terms of how particular objects take on greater significance because of their necessity to move along a narrative otherwise hindered by constraints, deliberate or not. And the plot unfolds erratically, difficult to synopsize due to its incredulity, as well as its reliance on a more than cursory knowledge of Canadian history for its most sophisticated jokes and cultural observations to be understood, as explained to me by a Canadian film critic on our way to the airport at the close of the festival. I may not have understood the film as cultural commentary, but I'll never forget the ejaculating cactus.
Following the trend of delightfully strange films populating the festival slate is Greener Grass, written and directed by Jocelyn DeBoer and Dawn Luebbe, who also star. The film is a color-saturated romp that presents a suburbia recognizable at first but then made bizarre by an accumulation of unexplained oddities that ultimately become understood as an ingenious form of worldbuilding. All of the adults, soccer moms and dads donning bright pastel outfits, wear braces. Everyone inexplicably drives golf carts. Characters make impulsive, culturally inappropriate decisions, such as in the catalyst to the film's action when Jill (DeBoer) literally gives her baby away to her friend Madison (Luebbe), after Madison acknowledges, while sitting in the bleachers at an outdoor soccer game, how cute the infant happens to be.
Later, Jill's only remaining child, the nerdy and bespectacled Julian (Julian Hilliard), frequently seen struggling with the traditional expectations of boyhood, falls into a swimming pool and emerges as a golden retriever. Jill's subsequent psychological decline is mostly tied to her inability to accept her son's new corporeal form, as well as her insistence that her infant daughter must be returned to her, despite her reluctance to offend Madison with the request. Meanwhile, a serial killer is on the loose. Greener Grass is a mash-up of genres—satire, mystery, dark comedy, horror—that may not ultimately cohere as deliberately as some viewers might have wished, but the feeling of witnessing something truly new and unique is as addictive as the swimming pool water that Jill's husband, Nick (Nick Bennet), seemingly can't stop drinking.
The American slate of films at Los Cabos includes Scorsese's The Irishman among other likely Oscar contenders such as Noah Baumbach's impeccably written and performed Marriage Story, Rupert Goold's Judy, and Taika Waititi's Jojo Rabbit. But Trey Edward Shults's slick and stylish but ultimately detached Waves is a frustrating contribution. The film tracks the rise and fall of Tyler (Kelvin Harrison Jr.), a black high school athlete pushed toward success by a domineering father (Sterling K. Brown) who, in a scene definitely not written for a black audience, makes plain how the color of his skin predisposes him to a life spent working harder than everybody else for a seat at the same table. But after a series of setbacks, poor choices, and personal failures culminate in a desperate act of terrible violence on Tyler's part, the second half of Waves investigates the aftermath of his abrupt downfall through the eyes of his family, focusing mostly on his younger sister, Emily (Taylor Russell), and her own journey toward some kind of peace after the family tragedy.
For all its intensely scored set pieces and dramatic camerawork, Shults's attempt to stylize an interior life through a deliberate connection between form and content—while Tyler's section is frenetic and loud, Emily's is almost jarringly languid and muted—isn't enough to deliver to the audience the kind of realization about family and responsibility to one another that the filmmaker seems at times so close to achieving. The possibility of transcending its aesthetic and arriving at any kind of epiphany is ultimately drowned out by a cinematic style more distracting than illuminating.
A more revelatory film about fathers, sons, and the lasting effects of our emotional wounds is Honey Boy, directed by Alma Har'el and written by Shia LaBeouf, in what's clearly an autobiographical account of the actor's childhood in Hollywood with an overbearing father whose profound influence still haunts him today. LaBeouf plays James, the now-sober father of a child actor, Otis (Noah Jupe), who stars in a popular television show while bearing the brunt of the erratic behaviors and sudden violence of a lifelong addict. The film centers in flashback on a period of time in which father and son lived together in a seedy and downtrodden hotel, the close quarters intensifying the seething undercurrent of resentment, jealousy, and yet still ever-present heartbreakingly rendered familial love that perseveres in spite of everything else.
James ultimately passes down his own struggles to his son, who we see as an adult (Lucas Hedges, who also stars in Waves) in therapy reckoning with his childhood, his addiction, and his predilection toward other self-destructive behaviors. The film also explores the ways in which his traumas might have also served as reference points for his own obvious skill as an actor, artistic success inextricably linked here to emotional wounds that have clearly never properly healed. The relationship between James and Otis is marked by a tenderness undercut by rage, and Har'el's careful staging of the power struggle between the two characters—a give and take based alternately on the currencies of masculinity and the literal exchange of money, as Otis's earnings subsidize his father's existence—is both compassionate and unflinching.
A film festival is always a hopeful affair, a chance to look into the future and see what awaits us as the contemporary film discourse continues to evolve. Unlike the flashy slate of American films that draws non-industry viewers to the theater, many of the entries at Los Cabos have yet to land wider distribution deals, and a festival like this one is a chance for these films to impress audiences enough to secure a position in a cinematic landscape where the "art house" or non-Marvel film will always struggle to keep up, as long as success continues to be measured by per-screen earnings and the numbers of views on popular streaming sites.
LaBeouf's career—from his early success in the tentpole Transformers franchise to eventually writing and starring in a film as complex, poignant, and quietly ambitious as Honey Boy—is perhaps a worthwhile microcosm through which to demonstrate the shift in priorities that must take place in order for success to be redefined in terms that align with artistic merit rather than profit, personal connection rather than consensus. And there was plenty of merit to the connections being made at Los Cabos between filmmakers and audiences, a festival that continues to deliver quality international cinema to eager viewers who wander out of the theater each evening to join the throngs of partiers who might in daylight be clamoring for the next Marvel movie. Scorsese may mourn the diminishment of character-driven, risk-taking filmmaking in favor of easily digestible products that are "closer to theme parks than they are to movies," but it's still there if you know where to look.
The Los Cabos International Film Festival ran from November 13—17.
A Space in Time: Doclisboa 2019 Explores the Politics of Memory, Space, and the Image
The film image opens a space for both a reckoning with the old and the creation of the new.
Just before the start of this year's Doclisboa film festival in Lisbon, the organizers put out a press release protesting the Brazilian government's apparent crackdown on independent filmmaking through censorship and abrupt budget cuts to Ancine, the South American country's state-supported cinema fund. Given the close ties between Portugal and its former colony—which include shared memories of 20th-century dictatorships—it's not surprising that Doclisboa felt compelled to address Brazil's ongoing crisis, unambiguously decrying the Bolsonaro government's "dismantlement of democracy" and installation of a dictatorship, and announcing additional screenings of anti-dictatorship films from Brazil.
Several Brazilian films, of course, were already on Doclisboa's docket this year. One of the standouts of the festival's international competition was Jo Serfaty's Sun Inside, which follows four Rio de Janeiro teens as they struggle to find their identities in the summer after school ends. Featuring compelling, naturalistic performances from each of its young leads and practically radiating hope for the future represented by Generation Z, the film has the makings of an American award-season darling.
But Sun Inside qualifies its own sense of hope: Its fun, woke teens know they live in a time of change, crisis, and inequity, and neither the script nor Serfaty's camera offers an easy path toward transcending the cramped spaces and precarious circumstances they navigate in Rio. The film, which suggests a very muted version of Fernando Meirelles's City of God, is as much about a milieu as it is about its characters.
Serfaty's socially minded film shares its exploration of the politics of narrative form and the cinematic image with much of the 2019 Doclisboa slate. And Brazil isn't the only former Portuguese colony represented at the festival: The Sound of Masks explores the traumatic history of Mozambique in the decades since it freed itself from Portuguese rule in 1975 by focusing on Atanásio Nyusi, a renowned dancer of the mapiko, in which a solitary male dancer dons a wooden mask. For Nyusi—and for director Sara CF de Gouveia—his tremulous mapiko dance serves as a record of the trauma Mozambique experienced over a century of colonialism and civil war. His jolting movements and often frightful bearing toward his audience implicitly speak of pain and terror, but the fact that he and his company continue to perform suggests perseverance and pride.
Nyusi, appropriately, also manages his community's archive of mapiko dancers, the existence of which by itself points to the fact that the dance isn't some timeless tribal practice. A crucial subtext in The Sound of Masks is that precolonial practices aren't objects frozen in time, but bear the marks of history like any form of transgenerational human activity. Throughout, de Gouveia uses television footage from the days of colonialism and the civil war relatively sparingly, illustrating through montage the events that she and Nyusi understand his dance to be evoking. This expressive use of archival footage is combined with haunting footage of Nyusi's performances—both contemporary and from when he was young—and slow-motion shots of Nyusi or other members of his company in full makeup against a black backdrop, staring directly into the camera. In this way, the documentary is utterly transfixing, often as strange as it is revelatory.
A confrontation with Portugal's colonialist legacy is also implicit in Welket Bungué's I Am Not Pilatus, one of the short films in the festival's international competition. It's composed of cellphone footage of two recent racist incidents in Lisbon, one of which took place on the Avenida do Liberdade, down the street from Cinema São Jorge, where many of Doclisboa's screenings are held. The unseen woman doing the recording stands on one of the broad commercial avenue's many plazas, filming at a great distance a confrontation between Lisbon police and a group of black youth and, though she admits she cannot see what's happening, making racist conjectures. Bungué manipulates the footage, mockingly distorting the woman's voice, flipping the footage upside down, looping her racist or obviously hypocritical lines, and ironically splicing in footage from a police beating that undercuts her assertion that the police are there to keep order.
Aesthetically, I Am Not Pilatus hardly breaks new ground, but it's an instructive reminder of a certain activist filmmaking credo: Because reality is already structured by unjust systems, it's incumbent upon artists like Bungué to use film as an instrument of intervention, rather than merely reproduce unjust realities. However slight, I Am Not Pilatus is an admirable and coherent political intervention, simmering with righteous anger at the racism and anti-immigrant sentiments apparently on the rise in Portugal, which recently elected a far-right representative to parliament for the first time since the end of the Salazar dictatorship in 1974.
Other distinctly political shorts—like Josip Lukić's The Rex Will Sail In and Filipe Oliveira's Há Margem, which screened together out of competition in the "Green Years" section—explore the manifestation of bigger socio-political structures in the lives of the underclass. The Rex Will Sail In concerns a Croatian family supported by their matriarch Marina's work on a cruise ship, which sends her away from home for months at a time; the stress of working in the neoliberal tourism industry has taken its toll, and Marina uses the camera as her therapist, monologuing her buried anxieties about her sons' behavior and upcoming changes at work. By and large consisting of close-ups, and filmed mostly in Marina's car and small apartment, the short conveys the claustrophobic feeling of being trapped in an unforgiving, often unpredictable profession.
Há Margem is also in part about feeling closed in. "It's tight in here," says one subject about a narrow alley that bends between buildings, and that remark resonates throughout the film. Capturing slice-of-life footage from Segundo Torrão, a neighborhood on the other side of the Tagus River from Lisbon whose homes are all illegal because the land there isn't appropriately zoned, Oliveira's poetic documentary looks at the ways people make what they can out of a life on the margins ("There's Margin" is the English translation of the film's title).
Spatial politics also play an important role in Christian Haardt's A New Environment, an essayistic film with rather esoteric interests and a dry tone. Composed of archival footage edited to the audio of an interview with the architect Heinrich Klotz, it covers, among other topics centered around 20th-century architecture, how national character and memory is revealed or hidden by major building projects like the postwar reconstruction of Frankfurt. Klotz's thinking can be intriguingly dialectical: Suspicious of modernity's penchant for reproductions, he nevertheless embraces the design principles of Disney World because even if it represents the pinnacle of fabricated living, it contains the dream of a unique and specific utopia. But Haardt's sparse, quiet film has a monotonous quality that often makes it easy to lose the stakes of Klotz's extended discourse.
Thomas Heise's Heimat Is a Space in Time, which won the Caligari Prize at this year's Berlinale and screened at Doclisboa in the "From the Earth to the Moon" section, is more effective in grappling with German history. Heise delves into his own archival material—letters, diary entries, photographs, even a resume—to reconstruct the effect that the tragedies of the 20th century had on his family. At one point, he reads an exchange of letters between family members from the '30s and '40s—some in newly annexed Vienna, some in their adopted home of Berlin—over scrolling images of deportation lists. As the dispersed family reports of the increasing persecution they face and expresses their growing fears of being deported and murdered, we wait in anguish for the inevitable appearance of their names on the lists. In this sequence and others, the film's deliberate pace demands intellectual engagement, compelling us to look and truly consider the material reality of the past.
Heimat Is a Space in Time's title uses the German word for "homeland" in an evocative, paradoxical phrase that suggests the historically mutability of the concept, and the problem of a notion of homeland for a German whose family was shattered by the most notorious and inhumane of the 20th century's nationalist movements. By contrast, Wook Steven Heo's Under-Ground is a far less personalized confrontation with significant historical spaces affected by the chaos that nationalist aggression set loose in the world. Wook sends his camera contemplatively into the cold landscapes of factories and industrial campuses where the Japanese forced Korean captives to work, through now-empty caverns under Okinawa where Korean prisoners died alongside Japanese soldiers, and around Japanese anti-war memorials, looking to capture spaces of suffering that were forgotten even as the rest of the world memorialized their fallen.
The film's anonymous feel suits the legacy of dehumanization Wook is concerned with—Under-Ground is in large part a protest against Japanese steel giant Nippon's refusal to reckon with its historical participation in war crimes—but at times its presentation can feel a bit cold, suggesting a particularly somber travel film. Finding a more metaphorical way of dealing with the spaces of the past is Clayton Vomero's Zona, a documentary-narrative hybrid that draws parallels between the spread of individualism among young people in the '80s, which helped bring an end to Russia's totalitarian communist state, and today's Russian subculture.
Zona's title is surely a reference to Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker, in which a mysterious event creates an exceptional zone of temptation in which wishes come true. One of the veterans of the so‐called second Russian revolution in 1991 describes post-communist Russia as permanently existing in the state of exception declared during the military's attempted coup against Mikhail Gorbachev. Russia here appears as a metaphysically suspended space, caught between the dream of the West its young people had at the turn of the '90s and the reality of a country that managed to successfully adopt neoliberalism but not democracy.
The attitudes of today's counterculture youth, which the film represents through scripted but veracious interviews, offers a glimpse at the possibility of a more open Russia, but it's clear now that this open future won't be achieved by building more McDonalds. The problem with global capitalism, one of the Gen-X rebels interviewed notes in despair, is that "in the end, everyone will just be American." Finding a Russian identity that doesn't depend on such a perverse dream may require finally canceling the state of exception that the film proposes the country has found itself in for nearly three decades.
The selections cited here represents a miniscule portion of the 303 films showing at Doclisboa. Many, like Heimat Is a Space in Time, have already received attention after playing other festivals earlier this year. Werner Herzog probably counts as the biggest name with a film at Doclisboa, with his strange new Japan-set drama Family Romance, LLC, about an actor (Ishii Yuichi) who works for a company that hires him out to impersonate the missing father to a 12-year-old girl (Mahiro Tanimoto). It played Cannes earlier this year. Eric Baudelaire's disarming documentary A Dramatic Film, made over the course of four years in collaboration with a diverse group of pre-teen children at a Paris school, premiered more recently at Locarno.
Gathering such already-premiered films under the Doclisboa umbrella—or, as a recurrent advertisement for the fest suggests, baking them into the same cake—invites us to consider their politics alongside their experimental aesthetics. When a director chooses to allow a black French child to record his walk home for inclusion in his film, when an established German director elects to make a film about the mechanization of family relations in Japan with Japanese principles, they're not merely aesthetic choices, but political interventions that color the films' reconstruction of the real. As Doclisboa's program and emboldened stance against the burgeoning democratic crisis in Brazil attests, film may be a form of action as well as one of thought. Its images open a space for both a reckoning with the old and the creation of the new.
Doclisboa runs from October 17—27.
New York Film Festival 2019
If cinema is, indeed, the domain of freedom, then the festival doesn't see Netflix as the villain in that struggle.
"Cinema is the domain of freedom, and it's an ongoing struggle to maintain that freedom," said New York Film Festival director and selection committee chair Kent Jones in a statement last month accompanying the announcement of the films that will screen as part of the main slate of the 57th edition of the festival. And depending on who you ask, Netflix is either the hero or villain in that struggle.
More than half of the 29 titles in the main slate enjoyed their world premiere earlier this year at Cannes, where Netflix had no film in competition, as its battle with festival director Thierry Frémaux, who requires a theatrical run for any Cannes entrant, continues unabated. (The streaming giant did walk away from the festival with acquisition rights to Jérémy Clapin's I Lost My Body and Mati Diop's Grand Prix winner Atlantics.) There's no right or wrong here per se, though it's clear that Frémaux's edict is an extension of his nostalgia for the golden age of cinema, which he sees as sacrosanct as the length of the theatrical window, and just how steadfastly he sticks to his guns may determine the fate of the world's most important film festival.
The New York Film Festival opens on Friday, September 27 with the world premiere of Martin Scorsese's hotly anticipated The Irishman, almost one month to the day that it was announced that Netflix could not reach a distribution deal with major theater chains, including AMC, Regal, and Cinemark. The film will drop on Netflix less than a month after opening in some theaters across the country—a non-traditional distribution strategy that will continue to be seen as short-circuiting a Netflix film's best picture chances at the Academy Awards, at least until one comes along and does what Alfonso Cuarón's Roma couldn't last year.
It remains to be seen if The Irishman will be that film. But this much is also clear, and the New York Film Festival is making no bones about it: This streamable movie is very much a movie, and to be able to see a new Scorsese film that might not have run three hours and 30 minutes had it been released by a traditional distributor is very much a win for freedom—or, at least, a certain stripe of cinephile's idea of freedom.
In addition to The Irishman and Atlantics, Netflix also has Noah Baumbach's Marriage Story, starring Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver, at the festival (the centerpiece selection no less). Baumbach's divorce drama bowed last month at the Venice Film Festival, alongside Martin Eden, Pietro Marcello's first feature since Lost and Beautiful, and The Wasp Network, which marks Olivier Assayas's 10th appearance at the New York Film Festival. Among the returning auteurs are Kleber Mendonça Filho (Bacurau, co-directed with Juliano Dornelles), Kelly Reichardt (First Cow), Albert Serra (Liberté), Arnaud Desplechin (Oh Mercy!), Pedro Almodóvar (Pain and Glory), Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne (Young Ahmed), and the greatest of the great, Agnès Varda, whose Varda by Agnès premiered earlier this year at Berlinale alongside Nadav Lapid's Golden Bear winner Synonyms and Angela Schanelec's I Was at Home, But…
Among the festival's noteworthy sidebars are Spotlight on Documentary, which includes new works by Tim Robbins (45 Seconds of Laughter, about inmates at the Calipatria State maximum-security facility taking part in acting exercises), Michael Apted (63 Up, the latest entry in the filmmaker's iconic, one-of-a-kind British film series), and Alla Kovgan (Cunningham, a 3D portrait of the artistic evolution of choreographer Merce Cunningham); the MUBI-sponsored Projections, which features the latest films from Éric Baudelaire (Un Film Dramatique) and Thomas Heise (Heimat Is a Space in Time); and a Special Events section that includes Todd Phillips's surprise Golden Lion winner Joker and Francis Ford Coppola's The Cotton Club Encore, which brings the 1984 period film back to its original length and luster. Ed Gonzalez
For a complete schedule of films, screening times, and ticket information, visit Film at Lincoln Center.
Atlantics (Mati Diop)
Starved for work after the depletion of Senegal's local fishing industry, thousands of young men take to the sea every year aboard pirogues, or small boats, fleeing their country for Spain. Those who have emigrated, died, or been incarcerated as part of the "pirogue phenomenon"—referred to colloquially as "Barcelona or death" in Senegalese communities—are the ghosts that haunt Atlantics. The forms those spirits take in the film represent just some of what's so extraordinary about Mati Diop's first feature as a director, a work of disparate influences and genres that pulses on its own oblique wavelength. Atlantics transitions into oblique genre fare in a manner reminiscent of Bertrand Bonello's Zombi Child, with electronic musician Fatima Al Qadiri's multifaceted score adding ghostly strings and pop guitar riffs over spiritual, syncopated Middle Eastern arrangements. Despite its wild narrative leaps, the film is undergirded with a holistic mix of serenity and trauma that recalls Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Cemetery of Splendour. Christopher Gray
Bacurau (Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles)
Kleber Mendoça Filho and Juliano Donnelles's Bacurau assembles a vibrant and eclectic collage of reference points. It's a wild neo-western that pulls into its orbit UFO-shaped drones, elaborate folklore, limb-flaying and head-exploding gore, and Udo Kier as a villain who shouts in a mockingly high-pitched voice, "Hell no!" The Bacurau of the film's title is a fictional town in Brazil's northeastern interior, depicted here at some point in the not-too-distant future. The citizens live in a relatively undisturbed harmony—until Bacuaru is literally wiped off the map (GPS no longer can locate the backwater), local cell service is jammed, and the people find themselves hunted, A Dangerous Game-style, by gringo infiltrators. Mendoça Filho is one of contemporary Brazilian cinema's most sharply political filmmakers, and Bacurau solidifies his commitment to rebuking Brazil's current administration and its willful erasure of the country's culture and heritage. Sam C. Mac
Beanpole (Kantemir Balagov)
Kantemir Balagov has set Beanpole largely in tones of dark amber, bright green and red, and filthy yellow redolent of old incandescent lighting—and it's the red of upholstery, Soviet imagery, and blood that cuts most forcefully through the brightest of those greens. Cinematographer Kseniya Sereda's color palette recalls that of Krzysztof Kieślowski's The Double Life of Veronique for the way it gives settings an artificiality that nonetheless brings Beanpole's grounded sociopolitical commentary into greater focus. Iya (Viktoria Miroshnichenko), a nurse working at a Leningrad hospital after the end of World War II, feels trapped in trauma, suffering from recurring fits of full-body catatonia. Her psychological state is magnified by the more visible scars of the soldiers recuperating all around her, adding to the sense that Balagov's hermetically sealed vision of Leningrad only compounds and reflects Iya's PTSD back onto her. The filmmaker may depict the pain of his characters in blunt terms, but he traces the aftershocks of collapse with delicate subtlety. Jake Cole
Fire Will Come (Olivier Laxe)
Oliver Laxe's Fire Will Come refreshingly occupies an almost uncategorizable cinematic realm. Were it a piece of writing it would exist at the crossroads of an essay, a reportage, and a series of haikus singing the praises and the plights of a threatened ecosystem. Although we know its images to be composed and assembled, and as such "fiction," the film's delicate pace and the contemplative choreography of its camerawork conjure a sense of authenticity so organic that we're almost convinced that there's no space between the characters and the actors, between the filmed setting and the actual landscape. This is a film where the characters' names coincide with those of the actors playing them. It's at once a portrait of a place and a portrait of a person—namely, of the Galician countryside and of Amador (Amador Arias), an arsonist who returns home to see his elderly mother, Benedicta (Benedicta Sánchez). Given the rich simplicity of the scenario, Laxe recognizes that even the smallest amount of traditional plot would feel excessive. Diego Semerene
First Cow (Kelly Reichardt)
First Cow is one of Kelly Reichardt's shakier efforts. The film begins with an especially incisive William Blake quote ("The bird a nest, the spider a web, man friendship"), and its themes of systemic exploitation, the enduring vagaries of the free market, and the alternately tender and tempestuous bonds of male camaraderie are propped up by characters who come off as half-formed avatars rather than flesh-and-blood human beings. That isn't to say Reichardt, who's edited all of her films since Old Joy, has lost the ability to create multilayered, gently provocative imagery. There's a beauty of a shot in First Cow's first scene, set in the present day, of a young woman (Alia Shawkat) walking her dog and uncovering a pair of skeletons beside an Oregon river. Cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt frames the bones in a steady, un-showy composition (the film is photographed in the boxy 4:3 aspect ratio) so that it takes a few seconds to realize what you're looking at. The slow-dawning revelation of the moment epitomizes Reichardt's tendency in First Cow, as well as in many of her other films, to let drama emerge steadily and organically. Keith Uhlich
A Girl Missing (Kôji Fukada)
Throughout his 2016 film Harmonium, Kôji Fukada favored ambiguous, emotionally charged tableaux over narrative mechanics, and he continues that emphasis in A Girl Missing to ambitious, evocative, and troubling effect. The film is a story driven by kidnapping that's almost entirely disinterested in the motivations of the kidnapper and the pain of the victim and her family. Instead, the film is attached, to a consciously insular degree, to a nurse, Ichiko (Mariko Tsutsui), whose life is ruined peripherally by the kidnapping due to one peculiarly bad choice on her part. As austere as Harmonium could be, the characters were in their way dynamic and made sense. With A Girl Missing, Fukada may believe that he's transcended the melodramatic strictures of a regular crime film or of the kind of woman's martyr vehicle in which Joan Crawford used to specialize. Instead, he's fashioned an occasionally haunting art object with miserable stick figures. Chuck Bowen
The Irishman (Martin Scorsese)
More so than Goodfellas or Casino, Martin Scorsese's two other told-in-retrospect gangster films, The Irishman—at least for the first two hours of its riveting three-and-a-half-hour runtime—feels composed of burnished, often blackly funny, fragments of erratic memory. The elderly, wheelchair-bound labor union official and mobster Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran (Robert De Niro) glosses over the truth even when he's telling it, recalling the past, even at its most violent, with a propulsive, rosy cheer that plays at a cursory glance like Goodfellas-lite. Scorsese knows what his audience is hoping for: glory days, resurrected. But he also understands the impossibility of anyone being exactly as they once were. So he weaves that longing into both The Irishman's text and its technique, presenting Sheeran's youthful recollections—his rise in rank with Russell Bufalino's (Joe Pesci) crew, his work with a beleaguered Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino) during the era when Attorney General Robert Kennedy (Jack Huston) worked hard to bring down organized crime—as augmented hoodlum reveries that will soon catch up with the character's spiritually impoverished present. Uhlich
I Was at Home, But… (Angela Schanelec)
Angela Schanelec's I Was at Home, But… take a fairly simple premise and builds a multilayered series of narrative threads around it, one filled with the detours and inconsistencies of life as it's experienced on a day-to-day basis. In doing so, Schanelec isn't complicating or overthinking the familiar, but, rather, inviting her audience to rethink how these seemingly universal narratives function. The film is at its in moments when Schanalec's insight into trauma as a menace that asserts itself at inopportune and confusing moments is powerfully dramatized. It's less successful when reaching for symbolic associations, as in the strikingly staged but inert passages of Shakespearean recitation that draw out connections between the story of Hamlet and a troubled fortysomething mother's (Maren Eggert) life, or in the strained, bookending bits of business involving a dog and a donkey. For her part, Schanalec has preached in interviews that an experiential, non-intellectual approach to watching her films is ideal, so it's telling that, in spite of its occasional academicism, I Was at Home, But… configures itself most potently in hindsight as a punch to the gut. Carson Lund
Liberté (Albert Serra)
As they move inexorably forward in time, Albert Serra's films don't crescendo so much as peter out. In Story of My Death, the harbinger on the horizon is the return of irrational, Romantic thinking in the late 18th century, which would effectively smother the enlightened libertinism that the story otherwise wallows in. And in The Death of Louis XIV, it's the fate promised by the title, to which the film marched with solemn certitude. Serra's new film, the audaciously perverse and amorphous Liberté, doesn't give up its game so readily. Nearly without narrative conflict, it homes in on a long night of sexual experimentation among a group of libertines hiding out from the French courts on the Prussian border in the late 17th century, and for much of Liberté's duration, the only things generating forward momentum are the subtly escalating intensity of the acts themselves and the faint expectation, however ruthlessly exploited, that the sun will eventually rise again. Lund
Marriage Story (Noah Baumbach)
Noah Baumbach's Marriage Story initially occupies a rather nebulous spot between broad-strokes comedy and raw melodrama. But as the initially amicable split between a playwright, Charlie (Adam Driver), and his actress wife, Nicole (Scarlett Johansson), takes a sour turn, the film becomes more acerbic, fixating on how familiarity breeds contempt. At one point, we catch a glimpse of old magazine profile of the couple—written at the height of their artistic collaboration and domestic bliss—titled "Scenes from a Marriage," a throwaway allusion to Ingmar Bergman that's also a winking promise of the decline and fall to come. But even at its most blistering, the film contains small moments of grace in which Nicole and Charlie reflexively help or comfort each other. These subtle glimpses of their lingering affection for one another and familiarity complicate the bitterness of their separation. Elie Wiesel once said, "The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference," and only two people who were once as deeply in love as Nicole and Charlie were could have spent so long observing every minute detail of their partner to become so obsessed with each other's flaws in the first place. Cole
Martin Eden (Pietro Marcello)
Pietro Marcello's Martin Eden works better as a story of self-loathing and self-destruction than it does as a social critique or political statement. Marcello and Luca Marinelli, as the handsome, uneducated sailor of the film's title, don't make the difference between Martin at the beginning and Martin at the end distinct enough for viewers to really appreciate the character's transmogrification. But as a piece of filmmaking that's about the craft of filmmaking, Martin Eden, which was shot on 16mm, is occasionally brilliant. It's an amalgamation of epochal aesthetics and formal styles, from drifty handheld shots and grainy close-ups of emotional faces that recall the French and Italian films of the late-'60s, to static compositions and inky-black shadows that threaten to swallow Martin and the bourgeoisie. The color grading lends an ethereal air to the landscape shots (the ocean, blue and writhing, looks especially beautiful). Marcello splices in clips of silent films and footage of workers in Naples, which further emphasizes the timelessness of the film's themes. Greg Cwik
The Moneychanger (Federico Veiroj)
Federico Veiroj's The Moneychanger charts the prosperous, morally rotten career of Humberto Brause (Daniel Handler), a prominent money changer for all manner of ne'er-do-wells. Much is made of gestures like hand-tailoring suits to transport money, but the movement of cash—from client to Humberto to various far-flung locations around the globe—is by and large curtly presented. The film eventually verges on the farcical, with Humberto engaging in a Force Majeure-esque act of cowardice during a shooting while driving with his wife (Dolores Fonzi) in Argentina and a rushed scheme to steal from a dead man before he's interred, among other indiscretions. While these scenarios are somewhat absurd and funny, they feel calculated in their attempts to stress just how pitiful Humberto has become that he has to turn to such pathetic ploys to stay afloat. It's apparent that Veiroj disdains no one so much as Humberto, but the film makes little of the man's undoubtedly twisted psyche. Throughout, The Moneychanger maintains a monolithic meanness, skirting even the smallest gesture of sympathy for Humberto and bulldozing him with further proofs of his depravity. Peter Goldberg
Motherless Brooklyn (Edward Norton)
Fans of Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn will be immediately struck by Edward Norton's decision to change the novel's time setting from 1999 to 1957 for his long-gestating film adaptation. Given how effectively the novel transplanted a classic hardboiled noir setup to contemporary New York, Norton's popping of the novel's anachronistic bubble is curious for how it makes literal what Lethem made so playfully postmodern. By setting his film in the '50s, when the noir style was at its most influential, Norton only makes it easier to spot those moments where the dialogue is trying much too hard to capture the snap, wit, and loquacious cynicism of the genre's best films. Throughout, Norton's too-neat visual coverage is indicative of his film's greatest failing. At its best, noir leaves enough unsaid that, even if a mystery is solved, one is left with the distinct impression that nothing has been fixed. Motherless Brooklyn feels altogether too tidy, a film that revives many of the touchstones of noir, but never that throbbing unease that courses through the classics of the genre. Cole
Oh Mercy! (Arnaud Desplechin)
Based on a 2008 documentary, Oh Mercy! follows a police precinct in Roubaix as it pursues various cases. Throughout, director Arnaud Desplechin is bracingly concerned less with any isolated crime or character than he is in conveying simultaneousness by seizing on stray details. There's a sense here of the dwarfing mechanics of maintaining process amid chaos, which is rare for films and common of perfunctory crime novels. Before the authorities in Oh Mercy! can comprehend an act of arson, a serial rapist commits another assault in a subway. And before someone can make sense of that action, a girl runs away. Presiding over the madness is a police captain, Yakoub Daoud (Roschdy Zem), who's a quiet and dignified model of patience and sobriety, who must navigate nesting strands of social tensions, on the personal as well as the political level. Oh Mercy! is a striking stylistic departure for Desplechin. By the standards of florid pseudo auto-biopics such as Kings and Queen and Ismael's Ghosts, this film is an exercise in formal and tonal restraint. Bowen
Pain and Glory (Pedro Almodóvar)
A film about an aging artist struggling to recapture his yen for creation, Pain and Glory has the makings of a deeply personal, career-capping work for Pedro Almodóvar. His name may be Salvador Mallo (Antonio Banderas), but the gay filmmaker, with his tussled hair, white beard, and red turtleneck, may as well call himself Pedro. One of the very few differences between them is that Salvador has stopped making films while Almodóvar continues to work at a relatively steady clip. Pain and Glory is a ballsy admission on the Spanish auteur's part that he hasn't made a film in more than a decade that can compare with his most outrageous and subversive output, which makes it all the more dispiriting that his latest only occasionally captures the spry, comedic rhythms and impassioned, melodramatic intensity that defined Law of Desire and Bad Education. Still, however much Almodóvar's formalist bona fides may have cooled, his ability to craft emotionally acute, achingly felt scenes between men in the throes of love is as vigorous as ever. Mac
Parasite (Bong Joon-ho)
Parasite finds Bong Joon-ho scaling back the high-concept ambitions of Snowpiercer and Okja, in favor of examining a close-knit family dynamic that's reminiscent of the one at the center of The Host. Except this time the monster isn't some amphibious abomination that results from extreme genetic mutation, but the insidious forces of class and capital that divide a society's people. Parasite is an excoriating indictment of South Korea's dehumanizing social culture, mounted by Bong with a dazzling control of genre conventions that he continues to seamlessly bend to his absurd comic rhythms. The film is also reinstates the emotional core that's been missing from Bong's recent work, and even feigns a concise narrative structure. It's the kind of bold and uncompromising work that confirms why Bong is one of our most exciting auteurs, for how his sociocultural criticisms can be so biting, so pungent, when they're imbued with such great focus and sense of intent. Mac
Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Céline Sciamma)
Céline Sciamma's Portrait of a Lady on Fire is a taxonomy of gazes that's also a discourse on them. This sweeping portrayal of a romance doomed to brevity asks how to memorialize an image, but also how to keep it eternally alive. Sciamma isn't out to question the gazes exchanged between Marianne (Noémie Merlant) and Héloïse (Adéle Haenel), but to point out that one gaze is always met by another, and what's most stirring about her film is the lack of artifice in Héloïse and Marianne's feelings for one another. The film frustrates when it feels compelled to elucidate those struggles in words, or through a hokey flashback structure (that, it should be said, yields to an ecstatic final shot). Sciamma's script has more than a handful of dazzling turns of phrase, but it's also unnecessarily keen to give some present-day relevance to a romance that's assuredly timeless. Where her prior films have excelled in situating their protagonists in complex, sometimes hostile societies, Portrait of a Lady on Fire is at its most beguiling and probing when the rest of the world feels far away. Gray
Saturday Fiction (Lou Ye)
With Saturday Fiction, divisive Chinese director Lou Ye applies a distinctly modern film vernacular to an anachronistic period setting. As in Michael Mann's Public Enemies, the digital image, disjunctive editing, and a roving handheld camera serve to tether the filmmaking of the present to more remote events of the past, lending immediacy to the action. In Public Enemies, this served to frame what we're watching as a construct of media—history bleeding into myth and articulated through a modern-day understanding of celebrity. But in this film, the artifice also exists to complement his World War II spy narrative's preoccupation with different modes of performativity. And at the center of all this is screen legend Gong Li, who, in her first film role in three years, gradually undergoes a transformation from passive observer into gun-wielding firebrand, resulting in the most truly iconic performance that the actress has delivered in decades. Mac
Sibyl (Justine Triet)
Justine Triet uses the relationship between the creative process and the work of psychoanalysis, or its simplified cinematic version, as raw material for her latest dramedy. Sibyl follows the madcap efforts and subterfuges that the eponymous alcoholic therapist (Virginie Efira) deploys in order to finally write a novel. And the first step she takes is to get rid of most of her patients—most, not all, so that there's always a lifeline connecting the new Sibyl to the old one. That is, so Sibyl never has to truly let go of anything at all. This tactic, beyond mere plot device, is the first crucial clue, or symptom, that Triet discloses about Sibyl as the filmmaker smartly humanizes the figure of the therapist as someone in desperate need of a therapist herself. The initial line in Sibyl's (non-)emancipatory equation, to start anew by keeping her old life handy, is one of the film's many instances of mirroring, as some viewers will easily recognize in Sibyl's pursuits their own tendency to make half-decisions. Which is to say, the way we can fool ourselves into thinking that we're pursuing something whereas we're secretly pursuing something else—something less avowable. Semerene
Synonyms (Nadav Lapid)
Nadav Lapid's Synonyms doesn't hew to a steadily progressing plot. The attraction Emile (Quentin Dolmaire) and Caroline (Louise Chevillotte) feel to Yoav (Tom Mercier), and the tensions that drove Yoav away from Israel, will come full circle, but only after the film takes a circuitous route through Yoav's brief employment in security at the Israeli embassy; his friendship with a militant Zionist who tries to provoke fights he can claim as anti-Semitic attacks; and a required assimilation class he takes as he attempts to legitimately immigrate. A certain calculated inconsistency in style and pacing also makes the film feel elusive and estranging, but that's most likely the point. Certainly one concern of Synonyms is the irrational sickness that's nationalism: At times it appears that Israeli nationalism has driven Yoav mad, given him his detached affect and his habit of obsessively reciting synonyms in the street. Funny, frustrating, and stealthily sad, Synonyms is a bold film about the refusal to assimilate in one country, and the failure to assimilate in another. Pat Brown
To the Ends of the Earth (Kiyoshi Kurosawa)
Kiyoshi Kurosawa's latest is a radical departure for the auteur, as it isn't beholden to a taut narrative. Instead, it's squarely focused on character—a strategy that results in his most intricately rendered portrait of the psychology of fear to date. To the Ends of the Earth is not, by any measure, a horror film, but it uses aesthetic and philosophical foundations that Kurosawa laid in his genre work to insinuate tensions and anxieties lurking beneath the serene surface of everyday life. The film's setup could almost be interpreted as a kind of self-aware joke: A Japanese camera crew arrives in Uzbekistan with the purpose of shooting footage for a travel show and becomes increasingly frustrated over not having enough usable material. As such, generally little in the way of incident occurs for much of the film. However, To the Ends of the Earth isn't just a meandering film born of an auteur's plane ticket to a foreign country: If Kurosawa is less interested in narrative dynamics, it's because he's focused on an acute understanding of societally and sociologically conditioned behavior. Mac
The Traitor (Marco Bellocchio)
Though Pierfrancesco Favino plays Sicilian mob boss turned informant Tommaso Buscetta with the stern poise of a criminal boss, the gangster easily, almost comically buckles under the slightest pressure from the state. But it's in director Marco Bellocchio's depiction of the "Maxi Trial" in a heavily fortified courtroom in Palermo that The Traitor completes its metamorphosis from a grisly, stone-faced drama about mob violence into an almost farcical satire of Italy's justice system. Unfortunately, as is often the case with contemporary Italian genre pieces, the film is too brutish by half, as well as 40 minutes too long. The comic brio of Bellocchio's staging of the "Maxi Trial" invigorates The Traitor, but he surprisingly wraps up that arc with close to an hour left in the film's running time. The extended final act, which follows Tommaso and his family as they enter into American witness protection before ultimately returning to Italy for a series of follow-up trials, drifts along without clear purpose, unevenly oscillating between the comedic and the somber. Cole
Varda by Agnès (Agnès Varda)
Agnès Varda's final film is essentially a lecture, with the iconic filmmaker's talks from multiple events threading together highlights from her oeuvre. Throughout, she shares the underlying inspiration for films like Cléo from 5 to 7 and details her creative process. While her other documentaries (among them The Gleaners and I, The Beaches of Agnès, and Faces Places) have often explored the intersection between art and life, Varda by Agnès finds the filmmaker far less able to extend her gaze beyond her own work. She allows herself to go off on tangents, and, ironically, her ancillary thoughts feel a bit less navel-gazing than the film's main thrust. For one, the story about directing Robert De Niro for one day for her final fiction film, One Hundred and One Nights, should seem an extraneous bit of boasting, but Varda's bashfully excited tone makes it seem generous. And whenever she talks about her beloved husband, director Jacques Demy, who died of AIDS in 1990, the film also approaches a kind of "sharing" not borrowed from her previous work. Brown
Vitalina Varela (Pedro Costa)
As in Horse Money, shadows blanket Vitalina Varela, with slivers of light only illuminating people and whatever objects writer-director Pedro Costa wishes to call attention to. This yields images that are arresting on their face but also hint at richer meanings, as in a shot of Vitalina (Vitalina Varela) in silhouette folding the safety vest of a construction worker who stands in a doorway in the background, also in shadow, with only the reflective green-yellow of the vest giving off any light. The sight of immigrants obscured from view as a symbol of their menial labor glows in the foreground speaks volumes to a way of life that consumes the characters. Yet the film is no polemic. It raises delicate questions about postcolonial immigration, such as whether breadwinning vanguards should gamble on the allure of the unknown to make way for a possibly better life or settle for the hard but known life they already have. The film's oblique nature elides any simple interpretations, and the irresoluteness of the social commentary mingles with Vitalina's personal ruminations over her life. The film, like Colossal Youth and Horse Money, is a ghost story. Cole
The Whistlers (Corneliu Porumboiu)
Mercilessly efficient and righteously cynical, writer-director Corneliu Porumboiu's The Whistlers is nested with twists that place corrupt Bucharest policeman, corrupt Bucharest policeman, further and further from discovering who's manipulating the byzantine plot he finds himself enmeshed within on La Gomera, the "pearl" of the Canary Islands. Cristi's inability to make sense of his place in the very case he's investigating is just one of the film's cruel, quite funny jokes. Another is Silbo, a whistled register of the Spanish language that inspires the film's title. Composed of a half dozen notes that each represent certain letters of the Spanish alphabet, the ancient language has been used by natives of La Gomera for generations. Throughout, Porumboiu largely handles The Whistlers's persistent strain of artifice masterfully, hurtling his narrative ahead even as he's jumbling timeframes and lingering in moments of ironic menace. Though the film is sometimes too liberal in its arsenal of references, Porumboiu executes his plot with a persistently low-key swagger, coaxing his actors into memorable but perfectly blank performances. Gray
The Wild Goose Lake (Diao Yinan)
Diao Yinan's The Wild Goose Lake is a crackerjack genre exercise, but it's up to a fair bit more than it might at first seem. Diao joins other contemporary Chinese filmmakers like Vivian Qu (Trap Street) and Xin Yukun (Wrath of Silence) in recognizing that genre movies offer a kind of smokescreen for a form of sociopolitical engagement that the Chinese censors likely wouldn't otherwise approve. Which is to say, the heightened violence and ugliness of a crime film seems to allow for a kind of depiction of Chinese social life that wouldn't be acceptable from a "realistic" drama. Diao takes this all a bit further, however, utilizing the sprawling geography of what's essentially a chase film to deep-dive into the sordid underbelly of a Chinese society where lawlessness trumps order. The Wild Goose Lake's masterstroke is that its fugitive antiheroes are framed by an environment that reflects their criminal lives back at them, seemingly no matter where they turn. Mac
Young Ahmed (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne)
In many of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne's films, elliptical structures communicate the scattershot-ness of people's lives, suggesting an endless string of calamity and confusion. But in Young Ahmed, the ellipses suggest an unwillingness to imagine an aspiring radical's inner life. Initially, the Dardennes don't exactly engender pity for Ahmed (Idir Ben Addi), as that response would compromise their fetishizing of his impenetrability as a testament to their own humanist bona fides. They maintain a distance from the Belgian teen as a way of celebrating their refusal to reduce him to any easy psychological bullet points, which ironically reduces him to a signifier of their virtue. Yet Ahmed's seduction by a manipulative mentor, Imam Youssouf (Othmane Mouman), is still fleetingly "explained" with references to family trauma that unsurprisingly suggest that Ahmed has daddy issues and is looking for a mentor. The Dardennes don't dramatize these traumas, as such events might destabilize the plaintive quotidian mood they cultivate throughout and require them to stretch and challenge the strict boundaries they've applied to this subject matter. Bowen
Zombi Child (Bertrand Bonello)
Restlessly shuttling between 1960s Haiti and present-day France, Bertrand Bonello's Zombi Child roils with colonialist tensions. But as with the director's prior Nocturama, this quixotic, slow-burn genre film is political largely in the abstract. While there are moments here where a history of exploitation informs the relationship between the French, lily-white Fanny (Louise Labeque) and Haitian refugee Mélissa (Wislanda Louimat)—classmates at an all-girls school established by Napoleon Bonaparte—Bonello's interests go much deeper than race relations. The dialectical relationship between past and present has become a central organizing principle of Bonello's artistry, evident in his anachronistic soundtrack choices and his unmooring of characters from their period settings through decidedly modern behaviors or situations, but here he approaches that dialectic in a crucially different manner. Instead of overlaying modern-day signifiers on a period piece setting, as he did in House of Pleasures, Zombi Child suggests two temporalities that exist parallel to each other. Mac
Locarno Film Festival 2019: Technoboss, Echo, & A Voluntary Year
A striking number of the titles that appeared in the festival's competition slate this year operate in a playful, breezy register.
Locarno often leans into its reputation as Europe's most unapologetically highbrow summer festival, but a striking number of the titles that appeared in the festival's competition slate this year operate in a playful, breezy register. Such as João Nicolau's Technoboss, an unwaveringly deadpan musical comedy about an aging divorcé, Luís (Miguel Lobo Antunes), nearing the end of what seems to have been a tedious career selling and maintaining integrated security systems. His existence is far from enviable, as he's past his prime as a salesman and baffled by modern technology, while his primary companion is his cat. To compound the overriding sense of ennui, Nicolau presents a decidedly drab vision of Portugal, all cramped offices, cluttered shop floors, and soulless hotels.
Luís, though, remains optimistic, as evinced by his tendency to burst into song as he drives between assignments, and by the quietly determined way in which he attempts to regain the affection of an old flame, Lucinda (Luisa Cruz), despite her apparent disdain for him. Antunes, in his first professional acting role, is compelling, with a perpetual twinkle in his eye that hints at a rich inner life. And while his vocal range is limited, to say the least, he brings an earnestness to the musical numbers that elevates them above mere quirky window dressing.
Ultimately, the film is too narratively slight and tonally monotonous to justify its two-hour running time. One running joke in particular, involving a smarmy executive who's frequently heard off screen but never seen, runs out of steam in the final act. And yet, when viewed in close proximity to the likes of Park Jung-bum's dreary crime drama Height of the Wave, which bafflingly won this year's special jury prize, Technoboss is a breath of fresh air.
Runar Runarsson's Echo isn't exactly a laugh a minute: An early scene depicts the preparation for a child's funeral, while subsequent sequences revolve around police brutality, domestic violence, and the lasting impact of childhood bullying. But it's delightful to behold Runarsson's sly execution of a formally bold premise. Clocking in at 79 minutes, the film is composed of 56 standalone vignettes connected by a Christmas setting. The constant narrative shifts are initially jarring, but recurring themes begin to emerge: rising social inequality in the aftermath of the financial crisis; the impact of modern technology on traditional ways of life; the drabness of winter and its impact on the country's collective mental health.
Yet while the film's underlying tone is melancholic, there are frequent bursts of pure comedy, from the absurd spectacle of abattoir workers bopping along to a jaunty rendition of "Jingle Bells" amid animal carcasses, to a farmer and her partner earnestly squabbling about the state of their relationship as they document the mating habits of their goats. Humor also arises through the juxtaposition of scenes. The haunting image of a boy in a coffin is followed by a clinical shot of a similarly motionless adult body, and it takes a moment to register that we're looking at not another corpse, but rather a man lying under a tanning lamp. Later, a heartwarming kids' nativity scene cuts abruptly to a shot of bikini-clad bodybuilders performing in a harshly lit, half-empty auditorium.
However, it's Echo's sincerity that really impresses. One sequence, in which an emergency services operator calmly reassures a child reporting a violent altercation between his parents, is remarkable in the way it hooks the viewer emotionally in mere seconds. The film ultimately coheres into a vivid portrait of contemporary Iceland that's equal parts bleak and beguiling.
A Voluntary Year, co-directed by Berlin School alumni Ulrich Köhler and Henner Winckler, is a similarly bittersweet affair, walking a fine line between raw domestic drama and precision-engineered comedy of errors. Sebastian Rudolph stars as Urs, an off-puttingly pushy small-town doctor intent on packing his teenage daughter Jette (Maj-Britt Klenke) off to Costa Rica to volunteer in a hospital. Jette, though, would rather spend her gap year at home with her boyfriend, Mario (Thomas Schubert), who seems harmless enough but has been written off as a poisonous influence by Urs. A sequence of mishaps in the thrillingly unpredictable opening act gives the young couple a brief chance to take charge of their own futures, but the decision Jette hastily makes pushes her strained relationship with her father towards breaking point.
Köhler and Winckler do a fine job of eliciting sympathy for their deeply flawed characters. Jette is maddeningly indecisive and prone to overly dramatic outbursts, but her brash exterior masks deep-seated vulnerability. Meanwhile, it's easy to share Urs's disbelief that Jette should be even remotely infatuated with the woefully uncharismatic Mario, but the boy's earnestness ultimately proves strangely endearing. Urs is much harder to warm to, as he's the quintessential big fish in a small pond, clearly used to throwing his weight around and getting his own way. To add insult to injury, his handling of sensitive situations is often jaw-droppingly misjudged. And yet, the viewer is given a strong enough sense of his good intentions to at least partially root for him as he attempts to patch things up with Jette.
While it may not do this modest film any favors to make the comparison, there are shades of Maren Ade's masterly Toni Erdmann in The Voluntary Year's nuanced depiction of a fraught father-daughter relationship, and also in the way the filmmakers play the long game when it comes to delivering comic payoffs. An enigmatic narrative thread involving a migrant boy has a laugh-out-loud resolution that also neatly paves the way for a moving final scene.
The Locarno Film Festival ran from August 7—17.
The National and the Global Intersect at the 2019 Jerusalem Film Festival
Even the most casual exchanges at the festival ended with some variation of a sentiment that arose as a mantra: "It's complicated."
Gur Bentwich's Peaches and Cream contains a running joke that resonated in the context of the 36th Jerusalem Film Festival. Bentwich follows a director named Zuri (played by Bentwich) who undergoes an odyssey after his new film, also called Peaches and Cream, has been indifferently received on its opening weekend. In various encounters, people tell Zuri that they prefer European to Israeli cinema—claims that feel ironic given the way that the lurid and feverish nature of Bentich's film feels pointedly European and American in sensibility. Peaches and Cream's wandering camera, eroticized women, and narcissistic macho anxiety suggests a Fellini production as viewed through the prism of contemporary American films like After Hours, Listen Up Philip, and Birdman, creating a friction. Zuri and Bentwich—the two are deliberately indistinguishable—have both made a quasi-European film only to be discounted for not being European enough for Israeli cinephiles.
I thought of Bentwich's running joke when the international critics' delegation of which I was a part—and which also included writers from China, Poland, Lithuania, Portugal, Russia, and Slovakia—was treated to a dinner with a group of Israeli critics. Peaches and Cream came up in conversation, with one Israeli writer voicing his irritation with the film's references to Western cinema, the sort of fealty which he said was part of the problem of Israel's cinematic exposure to the rest of the world. Western films reference one another, he said, creating an echo chamber that serves as an affirmation of legacy, while Israeli cinema tends to emulate not itself but the West as well. This writer's sentiments echoed comments I heard at the Warsaw Film Festival last year, from critics and filmmakers from various countries.
Such conversations are reminders that pop culture is one of the West's great legacies and means of influence. (In Tel Aviv for a few days after leaving the festival, I noticed that every bar in my neighborhood played vintage American music, from Bob Dylan to the Talking Heads to Alice Cooper to the Notorious B.I.G.) Another joke in Peaches and Cream almost subliminally parodies the neuroses that such an attitude may inspire: Zuri fights to keep posters of his film up in public, trying to protect them from being obscured by other notices.
Relatedly, I saw a Peaches and Cream sticker that had been stuck on a large banner for Pedro Almodóvar's Pain and Glory, a hot-ticket item at the festival. The banner's commanding image—of a tormented and gray-bearded Antonio Banderas, who won the best actor trophy at this year's Cannes for his performance, casting a shadow in the shape of Almodóvar himself against a red backdrop—had been merged with an advertisement for Bentwich's film, the round sticker providing Banderas with a makeshift eyepatch that cheekily embodied the very intersection between Israeli and international cinema that drives the JFF at large. The festival had one of the most eclectic lineups that I've seen, including vintage restorations, lurid thrillers, many Cannes entries, notable American films from last year, documentaries, shorts, and homegrown Israeli productions, which were often the most difficult to get into.
Generally, my fellow critics didn't care much for Peaches and Cream, finding it narcissistic and borderline sexist—qualities which struck me as part of the film's joke. There's no way that an actor-director, other than maybe Kevin Costner, could give himself this many close-ups without a satirical intent. Peaches and Cream is a messy and unruly film, at least until the requisite redemption provided by the third act, and it indicates the Jerusalem Film Festival's taste for bold formalism. Most festivals open with a bland audience-pleaser, while the 36th edition of the festival kicked off with Bong Joon-ho's Palme d'Or-winning Parasite, which is the very embodiment of confrontational political cinema.
Parasite initially suggests a South Korean cover of a Patricia Highsmith novel, with a family that literally lives under the surface of mainstream society conning its way into jobs with a wealthy household. In the film's first hour, the greatest achievement of Bong's career to date, viewers are encouraged to enjoy the poor family's ruse, which the filmmaker renders with svelte long takes and pans that elucidate shifting modes of power while providing visceral visual pleasure. Bong's kinetics are also a form of misdirection, as the film's tone gradually curdles, with the class resentment that's been percolating under the narrative's surface eventually exploding into a massacre that suggests a microcosm of both revolution and genocide. As always, Bong clinches his themes and symbolism too tightly, but Parasite is still a significant comeback from the exhaustingly broad Snowpiercer and Okja.
The setting of Parasite's premiere at the JFF intensified the film's power, as it was shown at the Sultan's Pool, a striking outdoor amphitheater from which you can see the walls of the Old City, the Tower of David, and even, from certain angles, portions of Palestine. Now a legendary venue that's hosted the likes of Eric Clapton and Dire Straits, the Sultan's Pool was a site for children's sacrifices centuries earlier, before it was later modernized by Herod into a portion of Jerusalem's water supply system. Before Parasite's premiere, there were many speeches testifying to Israel's dedication to cinema, including an appearance by the country's president, Reuven Rivlin. This pageantry isn't without tension, given the conservative government's hostility to films that are critical of authority, which was expressed by the audience's traditional booing of the Minister of Culture and Sport, Miri Regev, who's wanted to cut the government's funding of the arts, and who appeared at the JFF this year via a pre-taped speech. Which is to say that, in a setting freighted with ghosts and nesting political tensions, in a city and country with as much cultural baggage as any in the world, a left-wing horror film like Parasite carries extra weight. It even feels a bit like a dare.
Film festivals can be a paradox. On one hand, they're the ideal of the world most artists and critics would like to live in, one where like-minded people share the experience of art, food, and drink as communion, though they're also dream realms that cast a potentially insidious illusion of rebellion, giving audiences a faux catharsis that enables the very repression that artists and critics are often railing against. Aren't festivals, regardless of the politics of the art they program, ultimately P.R. for governments that still do whatever they like? (Perhaps Regev either doesn't understand this possibility or is expertly playing her role as a liberal foil.) In such contexts, I think of Matrix Reloaded, in which the hero learns, in what must be one of the most convoluted speeches in the history of cinema, that he's a tool for providing an appearance of hope and choice to a population that's still nevertheless controlled.
Yet it also feels unfair to single out the festival experience for this train of thought, as all artistic endeavors run the risk of rendering palatable the sources of their ire—a topic we also touched on at the critics' dinner. Art opens us up to other cultures and ideas, but it can also lull us into a kind of waking sleep, making us think we've initiated change merely by going to a festival or watching a film or posting something critical on Facebook or Twitter. And this danger of art is especially material when one gorges on the fruits of creativity for days at a time. The act of sipping a drink and eating nice dishes before the Parasite premiere while surveying the Palestinian landscape does, for instance, carry a certain frisson. Many films playing at the festival were concerned with the legacy of Israel, particularly regarding Palestine, and the Israeli critics and press openly spoke of these ambiguities. Even casual exchanges with journalists and average filmgoers alike ended with some variation of a sentiment that arose as a recurring festival manta: "It's complicated."
The JFF seems intent on working within the system by using government funding as well as donations to both preserve and establish an Israeli cinematic canon, which it compares and contrasts with the cinema of the rest of the world. Many of the festival's screenings were held in the Jerusalem Cinematheque, which is located near the Sultan's Pool and houses a film archive. The delegation was invited to take a tour of the archive, and in the labs we saw ravishing silent images of Jerusalem desert that have since been modernized as part of the city. We also spoke with people who are restoring films from Israel and other countries. Several restorations played at the festival, among them Amos Guttman's 1986 crime drama Bar 51 and Clemente Fracassi's 1953 opera Aida, a stagey yet hypnotic Verdi adaptation featuring a gorgeous Sophia Loren and Technicolor that might make the artists of Hammer Films blush.
Color is used to florid and rapturous effect in another JFF selection, Karim Aïnouz's The Invisible Life of Eurídice Gusmão. The film tells one of the oldest of melodramatic tales, following two sisters who're separated from one another in 1950s-era Brazil by a patriarchal system that fetishizes female obedience. Eurídice (Carol Duarte) is an aspiring pianist, while her older sister, Guida (Julia Stockler), is a free spirit who runs off with a Greek sailor. Returning home single and pregnant, Guida is rejected by their father, Manuel (Antonio Fonseca), who calls her a slut and lies to each girl about the other in order to keep them apart. It's a ruse that will haunt the family for the rest of their lives.
Starting with the film's opening, a humid fantasy sequence in a tropical forest that serves as a metaphor for the girls' eventual plight, Aïnouz goes stylistically big, utilizing a swooping camera and a wrenching score to sweep us up in Eurídice and Guida's longing for one another, which resembles romantic passion. This texture gives The Invisible Life of Eurídice Gusmão, which won the Un Certain Regard prize at this year's Cannes, a streak of perversity that's amplified by the explosion of harlequin reds and blues that signify dwarfed desire. Though this film has an unimpeachably feminist sensibility, Aïnouz also evinces remarkable sympathy for Manuel, a square who's stymied by his devotion to a hypocritical culture. A shot of the man waiting for his "good" daughter and her child in a restaurant, while the "bad" daughter spies on them unseen, is among the most haunting images I've seen this year.
Colors serve the story of Aïnouz's film, while color is much of the story driving Diao Yinan's The Wild Goose Lake, a Chinese gangster drama that grows increasingly hallucinatory as it somewhat moseys toward its climax. The narrative opens on a man with a past, Zhou Zenong (Hu Ge), as he meets a woman, Liu (Gwei Lun-mei), from the wrong side of the tracks. We soon learn that Zhou is waiting for a different woman, though Liu assures him of her loyalty. But the play of light and rain across these arresting faces is more commanding than this expositional business, with Diao soon splintering his plot into suggestive abstraction, as we learn how Zhou became a hunted man enmeshed in a war between crooks and law enforcers. The plot becomes so riven with betrayals and reversals that one's encouraged to digest the film as pure poetry, homing in on the explosive hues and stunning action scenes and foreboding shadows and, particularly, the pervading feeling of rootlessness and loss that's occasionally exacerbated by brutal violence. The Wild Goose Lake is a ballad of aggression and decay, relating a shaggy dog story that's truly a portrait of a country eating itself alive.
Color has a colder and more sinister purpose in two of the other thrillers I saw at JFF. In Vivarium, through sheer force of will and formalism, director Lorcan Finnegan makes a potentially trite premise eerie and suggestive. Gemma (Imogen Poots) and Tom (Jesse Eisenberg) are a couple looking to move in together, and on a whim they agree to look at a townhome in a yuppie neighborhood that they're sure they'll despise. The neighborhood is revealed to represent corporate efficiency and impersonality to the ultimate degree, with identical, unforgettably hideous pea-green homes that suggest Monopoly pieces as arranged by the Tim Burton of Edward Scissorhands. The neighborhood is so generic, in fact, that Gemma and Tom get lost trying to leave, until it's revealed that they're trapped here via supernatural means, and forced to raise a child (Senan Jennings) who suggests an ill-tempered robot, screaming at a glass-shattering pitch when he isn't fed on time.
Finnegan understands that to explain his premise too much is to dispel its power, and the vagueness of his narrative serves to place the audience in his protagonists' shoes. The filmmaker also doesn't over-emphasize the obvious thematic hook, which is that Gemma and Tom's no-exit situation suggests a nightmarish version of the disappointment that can arise when people succumb to the social pressure to mate, procreate, and attain boring jobs in the name of respectability. As precisely made as Vivarium is, with irrational images that are worthy of classic horror cinema, it's all concept. Gemma and Tom are merely sketches of the fear and ennui that arrive on the cusp of reaching middle age. The characters' immediate accommodation of their new hell feels truthful, but it also robs Vivarium of urgency. Once one accepts its message, which is clear early on, there's nowhere else for the film to go.
In certain fashions, Jessica Hausner's Little Joe is reminiscent of Vivarium, though it's a richer and more unsettling work. Both films feature intensely symmetrical imagery and rich colors that suggest a mockery of the emotions that are being suppressed by the rigid settings. But there's more mystery and emotional variety in Little Joe; one can't quite pinpoint the meaning of Hausner's aesthetic flourishes, such as deliberately unmotivated dolly shots that cut characters out of certain frames in order to emphasize windows or other passageways. And why does a laboratory for breeding plants suggest a Wes Anderson set, with clothes that match the colors of certain pieces of furniture? This color scheme subliminally complements the plant that Alice (Emily Beech, who won the best actress prize at this year's Cannes for her performance) has bred. Her creation, which she calls "Little Joe" after her son, Joe (Kit Connor), is obscenely fake-looking, suggesting a combination of a rose and a penis. When the plant is stimulated by human talk, it opens up into full bloom, its bright red head serving to satiate the yearning emanating from Alice, a single mother, and her workaholic compatriots.
The plant is engineered to trigger happiness in humans, a concept that reveals how alien the notion of human interaction is to Alice, who rebuffs her poignantly worshipful colleague, Chris (Ben Whishaw). But Alice, a control freak, stymies the plant in a way that reflects her own alienation, rendering it incapable of reproducing. The plant strikes back, gifting human happiness at a price that steers Little Joe into Invasion of the Body Snatchers territory, leading to a brilliant joke: that Alice, in her self-absorption, can't see the invasion that's engulfing the world around her. At times, this stark, sad, weirdly exhilarating film also suggests David Cronenberg's The Fly, similarly boiling a potentially sprawling plot down to a few settings and characters, evoking an aura of clammy claustrophobia. Cronenberg's film ended with an operatic crescendo, however, while Hausner keeps us trapped in her hermetic world, in which a plant teaches humans to abandon the possibility of ecstasy.
At the JFF, I missed Yolande Zauberman's much-buzzed-about M, a documentary about the child abuse that's wrought in an Orthodox Jewish community, due to considerable demand. I did, though, catch a few documentaries that should earn attention outside of the festival circuit. Ai Weiwei's The Rest continues the artist's project of exposing the refugee crisis in Europe, in which countries like France, Turkey, and Greece fight over where to store people who're fleeing from endless wars in Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, and others. Thematically and aesthetically, the film is similar to Ai Weiwei's Human Flow, though the filmmaker has compressed his footage here, editing The Rest down to 79 minutes' worth of tactile physical gestures that bring home the reality of the refugees' lives, divorcing the topic of platitude. We see refugees burning plastic water bottles to start a fire for warmth, people cradling a cat deep into their chest, and, most wrenchingly, Ai Weiwei captures a government destroying a shanty village with a bulldozer, a sequence the filmmaker shoots with a matter-of-factness that's unflinching and unforgettably moving. Most importantly, Ai Weiwei reminds us of a harsh reality: Most of the refugees merely want to return to their war-torn countries, willing to risk death over the abuse and contempt that awaits them throughout the rest of the world.
Because of the auteur theory, people have an image of films as springing from a maestro director's head, when they're really works of communal endeavor. Catherine Hébert's Ziva Postec reminds us of this fact, following the primary editor of Claude Lanzmann's Shoah as she goes antiquing and recollects the six years she spent culling hundreds of hours of footage into a nearly 10-hour opus that would help define the world's grasp of the Holocaust. A few startling details emerge. Shoah's most important formal gambit—the contrast of the aural interviews with filmed footage of Holocaust sites as they looked at the time of the film's production—didn't crystallize until years into the post-production process. Also, Postec tells us how she remixed the interviews, adding space between sentences so that dense descriptions of atrocity would attain a musical cadence that would help viewers understand the stories. Hébert eventually connects Postec's astonishing accomplishment with the editor's own conflict over her Jewish and Israeli roots, and Ziva Postec becomes a testament of a woman facing her culture's demons and arising out the mess somewhat cleansed. One senses that this sort of reconciliation—of the demons of the past with the yearnings of the future—is what ultimately drives the JFF at large. Such a bazaar of art allows us to give voice to anxieties and exaltations that are normally thought to be, well, complicated.
The Jerusalem Film Festival ran from July 25—August 4.
Odessa IFF 2019: La Belle Epoque, Sorry We Missed You, & The Orphanage
The festival feels very much on the rise, both as an international industry shindig and a well-funded driver for cultural tourism.
The Odessa International Film Festival feels very much on the rise, both as an international industry shindig and a well-funded driver for cultural tourism. Free open-air screenings on the Potemkin Stairs ensured a broad public audience; festival branding adorned buildings all over the gently chaotic city center; a modest film market attracted buyers and sales agents from across Europe; and this year's guests of honor included Mike Leigh, Catherine Denueve, and Rose McGowan. And yet, in the absence of any significant world premieres, the midsummer event seems to serve largely as a chance for local cinephiles to catch up with highlights from more venerable recent European festivals.
I was particularly struck by three titles, relatively fresh from the Cannes Film Festival, each of which takes a distinctive approach to depicting a family unit under duress. The 10th edition of Odessa IFF opened with Nicolas Bedos's La Belle Epoque, a crowd-pleasing comedy about a stale long-term relationship and the cultural impact of the digital revolution. Daniel Auteuil stars as Victor, an aging bourgeois Parisian who sees himself as a victim of technological advances: The slow death of print media has put an end to his lucrative job as a newspaper cartoonist, while his wife, Marianne (Fanny Ardant), has taken to donning a VR headset at bedtime to distract herself from the monotony of their passionless marriage.
Victor, however, is offered a shot at regaining his joie de vivre by his son's friend, Antoine (Guillaume Canet), a screenwriter who's amassed a fortune devising personalized interactive theater productions that allow wealthy clients to live out their historical fantasies—think Westworld staffed by temperamental actors rather than malevolent robots. For reasons that aren't immediately apparent to the audience, Antoine owes Victor a debt of gratitude, and so offers the older man his first "experience" on the house. A sentimental soul at heart, Victor elects to relive the day he first met Marianne in a bohemian Lyon bar in 1974. Perhaps inevitably, he swiftly falls for Margot (Doria Tillier), the actress hired to play the young Marianne, who also happens to be Antoine's on-and-off-again girlfriend.
La Belle Epoque sustains a compellingly off-kilter tone, bouncing viewers disorientingly between the real world and Antoine's elaborate soundstages. One sequence, in which Victor and Margot escape the set of a weed-fueled '70s house party and find themselves in a painstaking reconstruction of Nazi Germany, feels decidedly Charlie Kaufman-esque. And yet the film never fully succumbs to whimsy, as Victor's nostalgia trip ultimately proves deeply poignant, while the depiction of Antoine and Margot's dysfunctional relationship introduces a darker view of romance. And while the gags and social commentary are often a little broad, Bedos admirably refuses to hold the viewer's hand as the intricate plot unfolds, paving the way for several immensely satisfying moments as the puzzle pieces finally slot together.
Ken Loach's bruising 2016 drama I, Daniel Blake, which won the Palme d'Or at Cannes, tapped into mounting Brexit anxiety and anti-Tory sentiment to become both the director's highest-grossing film in the U.K. to date and the subject of heated parliamentary debate over its damning portrayal of Britain's broken welfare system. Sorry We Missed You sees the octogenarian filmmaker reteam with screenwriter Paul Laverty to deliver another timely, compassionate account of working-class life in North East England.
This time around, the focus is on a nuclear family suffering immensely as a consequence of the gig economy. Former builder Ricky (Kris Hitchen) has struggled to maintain a steady income since the financial crisis of 2007-2008, and thus jumps hastily at the chance to sign a zero-hour contract as a delivery driver. What seems like a valuable opportunity to quickly accumulate cash soon begins to resemble a Kafkaesque nightmare, with humorless traffic wardens, obstinate customers, opportunistic thieves and a thuggish depot manager (Ross Brewster) conspiring to make Ricky's work life borderline unbearable.
Things aren't much better for his wife, Abbie (Debbie Honeywood), a benevolent contract nurse with neither the time nor the resources to adequately care for her elderly patients. Adding insult to injury, the couple's taciturn teenage son, Seb (Rhys Stone), seems intent on punishing Ricky for his failings. And to cap it all off, Seb's sensitive younger sister, Liza Jane (Katie Proctor), has started wetting the bed in response to this domestic disharmony.
In some regards, Sorry We Missed You is an even angrier, more urgent film than I, Daniel Blake. Scenes depicting Ricky's delivery runs are mini master classes in stomach-churning tension, which hammer home the appalling precariousness of his existence. However, Loach offsets the mounting misery with moments of warmth. A sequence in which the family resolve to make the most of a rare evening together is particularly moving, and serves to make the bitter feuds that inevitably follow all the more heart-wrenching.
By and large, Sorry We Missed You is a little rough around the edges, as some of Ricky's interactions with customers feel stilted and contrived, while Rhys Stone struggles to convey a convincing sense of Seb's inner life. And yet, as a tirade against modern Britain's obscene social inequality, Loach's latest is undeniably propulsive and persuasive.
Shahrbanoo Sadat's warmly received 2016 debut Wolf and Sheep tells a mildly fantastical tale of childhood in 1980s rural Afghanistan, centered partly around a boy named Quodrat (Qodratollah Qadiri). The Orphanage continues Quodrat's story, catching up with him as a teenage orphan living on the streets of Kabul. After he's caught by police selling cinema tickets on the black market, he's sent to a Soviet-funded orphanage where bullying is widespread. The boy swiftly learns that he'll need to form strong allegiances in order to keep his head above water, and thus he sets about building his own family unit.
For a large stretch, this is an enjoyable, if generic, coming-of-age drama, heightened chiefly by the novelty of its setting; Afghanistan's brief period as a secular Soviet ally is a fascinating, oft-overlooked footnote in the country's turbulent modern history. But the film really comes to life thanks to a smattering of charmingly shambolic Bollywood-style musical numbers, employed to offer insight into the withdrawn Quodrat's desires and fears. Those paying close attention to the timeline may be anxious to learn what role the mujahideen, the Islamist guerilla groups committed to ending the Democratic Republic, might have to play in the narrative. Sadat's bold decision to answer this question with a bombastic musical-action set piece pays off handsomely, bringing The Orphanage to an achingly bittersweet conclusion.
The Odessa International Film Festival ran from July 12—20.
Odessa IFF 2019: The Cossacks, Queen of Hearts, Monos, & Projectionist
The festival feels like a long-awaited apparition in a place where events of its magnitude might be scarce.
At first glance, Odessa recalls the Algeria of the 1980s as described by playwright Jean-Luc Lagarce, a place where local "currency has no value and there is nothing to buy anyway." Odessa seems coy about offering a fantasy version of itself to those who aren't already confined to it and to whom displaying the city—in the shape of superfluous possessions or souvenirs—would amount to a perverse redundancy. It's a city coherent to the brutal honesty of its human faces, a city virtually without store windows to hawk unessential goods to passersby—unless one traverses its center, where a McDonald's and a Reebok shop appear as reminders of a glossier elsewhere. Perhaps the way Cameroon, as one Cameroonian once told me, is a country without sidewalks, "unless you go to Douala." This is, of course, a respite from the capitalist assaults of places where to experience the city is to stack up on its mementos. It's this context that made the Odessa International Film Festival (OIFF) feel like a long-awaited apparition in a place where events of its magnitude might be scarce.
By the Lermontovskiy Hotel, where the international journalists covering the OIFF stay, only food seems to be for sale. There's a 24/7 supermarket that closes when the security guard sees fit, a "Japanese and Thai Asian Café," and a regal restaurant named Aleksandrovskiy, which sits inside a garden full of Versailles-esque fountains and statues, and where a select few can feast on a scrumptious leg of lamb on a bed of polenta for 12 euros. Perhaps the same select few who show up for OIFF's outdoor screening of the 1928 film The Cossacks at the Potemkin Stairs but don't use the steps as bleachers, like the rest of us, instead taking their seats in the large cordoned-off VIP section close to the live orchestra for a few selfies and then dashing off.
A brief video pleading for the release of Crimean filmmaker Oleg Sentsov from a Russian prison preceded the film, eliciting passionate applause. Those actually using the steps as seats seemed to truly savor the event, which took the shape of what film screenings were probably more like in the early 20th century: raucous fair-like happenings with lots of talking and where the film was only one of many multi-sensorial elements. In many ways, The Cossacks is about how the production of a nation is entwined with the production of gender norms. Lukashka (John Gilbert) is seen as a softie. He's derided as being a fraction of a man, or a half-Cossack, because he would rather spend his time reading than fighting, to the horror of his entourage. He ends up going to war in order to legitimize his status as a man for his family and his beloved Maryana (Renée Adorée). In the world of the film, becoming a man involves killing at least one Turk or two, and becoming a woman means marrying a man who has killed Turks.
The Cossacks was a fascinating selection to screen at the Potemkin Stairs because it wrapped a critique of normativity in some of the most sexist of cinematic languages, female ass shots as gags and all, making it hard to know what kind of selective reading of the film the audience might be making. The men on the screen are always either accosting, harassing, molesting, or trying to rape Maryana, which might be what triggered Rose McGowan, one of the festival's celebrity guests, to leave just a few minutes into the screening.
As much as watching a film such as George Hill and Clarence Brown's silent drama at the place where one of cinema's most iconic sequences was shot feels like the crossing off of a bucket-list item we didn't realize was on that list until we experienced it, the off-screen drama was just as enticing. There was, for instance, the blatant spectacle of Ukrainian income inequality with "the people" huddled up on the uncomfortable steps for two hours eager to engage with a silent film while Ukrainian socialites decked out in animal prints treated the event more like a vernissage. There was also the impossible quest for a public bathroom mid-screening. This involved walking into a half-closed market across from the Potemkin Stairs and interrupting a loud quarrel between a mother and her adult son, who worked at one of the market stalls.
It's difficult to guess where queerness goes in Odessa. Maybe it only lives as disavowal, as in The Cossacks, which ends with Lukashka, after anointing his masculinity by slaughtering 10 Turks, stating to Maryana heterosexuality's mathematical logic in its simplest form: "I am your man. You are my woman. I want you." And the anointing is never final, the film seems to say. Indeed, as his father lies dying in his arms, Lukashka asks him: "Father, am I Cossack?" The question of where queerness might live, in this context, would be finally answered a few days later when I visit the only gay club in Odessa, Libertin, and meet a trans woman name Jalala, who confides that there's a "place" in Odessa where straight men can go to to have sex with women like her. "Is it an app?" I ask. Jalala smiles and says that it's a park. "But it's dangerous," she tells me. "It's very exciting and very dangerous." Because there are skinheads, she says. "Do the skinheads want to kill you or fuck you, or fuck you and then kill you?" I ask her. "I don't know," she responded. "That's why it's dangerous."
The festival main grounds, in front of the majestic Odessa Academic Theatre of Musical Comedy, aren't unlike London's Southbank Centre in the early days of summer, where visitors and locals are both sold the idea that the city is this fun all year long. The atmosphere is cosmopolitan, with Nina Simone remixes or early Erykah Badu playing in the background, food trucks, a Mastercard stall, and outdoor sitting poufs. There's also no stress in the air, no suffocating crowds, and as such no anxiety about being turned away from a screening.
When looking at the festival's program, one may scoff at the apparent lack of diversity and, more specifically, queerness. After a few screenings, though, one may get the sense that queerness does live at the Odessa International Film Festival and, per Jalala's account, in Odessa more generally—it just isn't publicized. In Queen of Hearts, for instance, director May el-Toukhy takes the age-old narrative of the stranger who turns up to disrupt domestic bliss, or ennui, and gives it a daring incestuous twist. Anne (Trine Dyrholm) and Peter (Magnus Krepper) live an idyllic life in a mansion somewhere in Denmark with two young, and creepily angelic, twin daughters (Liv and Silja Esmår Dannemann). There's something eerie about this setup even before Peter's problematic teenage son, Gustav (Gustav Lindh), from another marriage is shipped from Sweden to live with his dad and unsettle everything.
What's uncanny about Anne and Peter's home is, of course, the way it gleams a kind of speckless completion of the heterosexual project, which could only ever be possible as a mirage. Theirs is the home of dreams bound to become nightmares by the introduction of even the most vaguely foreign element. Such as reality, that most irksome of registers, or a long-lost son. The house of Queen of Hearts, whose drama is so latent you'd only have to snap your fingers for chaos to erupt, evokes the house of Bong Joon-ho's Parasite, the kind of immaculate luxury that could only be sitting on top of some macabre bunker full of roaches and well-fed zombies. The drama that links these homes is the notion that the epitome of the heterosexual family bliss borders its very obliteration, with the unruly resurfacing of all the gunk that had been swept underneath, as the very foundation for its habitat.
When Gustav arrives, then, and ends up having an affair with his stepmom, a trench coat-wearing lawyer for young victims of sexual abuse, we're only surprised at how careless they seem to be about being found out. El-Toukhy is smart to avoid sensationalizing the taboo-breaking premise of the narrative with a camera that sides with Anne: her sexual hunger, her contradictions, her stretch marks. This isn't a film about roundabout incest, but one about the impossibility of satisfaction even for the most privileged woman, one with a high-powered and socially engaged job, money to spare, and a mansion by the lake in a Scandinavian country.
Queen of Hearts focuses on Anne's paradoxes: She's a savior and a monster, a middle-aged mother and a horny teenager, unabashedly exposing the inconvenient pores that remain underneath even the most beautifully made-up Nordic skin. And the film is about skin, ultimately. In the way Anne and Gustav have raw sex and the marks on Anne's stomach are filmed with purpose, sincerity, and no apology. The affair begins when Anne walks into Gustav's bedroom and gives him a handjob without bothering to lock the door. This comes soon after he brought a girl his own age home and Anne had to sit in her living room, staring at her laptop and drinking a glass of wine, while listening to the teenagers having sex. By the time Anne goes to the lake with Gustav and one of her twin girls, and Anne decides to get in the water, we know the deal is done. "But you never swim," says the girl. Water in Queen of Hearts bears the same prophetic sexual force that's appeared in many films, queer or not, from F.W. Murnau's Sunrise to Alain Guiraudie's Stranger by the Lake.
The affair isn't about love, of course, or passion. It's not even about the sex itself. The affair is a settling of accounts, a vampiric attempt to deny the passing of time, which, by virtue of having passed, feels like it's been wasted. For Anne, the culprit is Peter, who becomes a cock-blocking nuisance. The film, a melodrama with a superb final shot that offers no closure, at times tries too hard to provide a cause for Anne's passage à l'acte. When Gustav asks Anne who she lost her virginity to, she answers, "With someone it shouldn't have been," which makes it seem like the film is suggesting that predatorial behavior is a sort of damned inheritance. The Queen of Hearts is much more successful, and courageous, when it follows the logic of sexual yearning itself, not worrying about rational justifications.
The first few sequences of Alejandro Landes's Monos evoke Claire Denis's Beau Travail, except it isn't only men training in the deserted landscape. A few young women join them, which, inevitably takes the narrative elsewhere, even if the films' basic premises are similar. In Monos, teenage guerilla fighters are supposed to guard a foreign hostage, Doctora Sara Watson (Julianne Nicholson), and a conscripted cow named Shakira. Intrigue and sexual tension ensure that nothing goes according to plan. The only thing that never finds any respite is the flow of violence, which increasingly loses its metaphorical sheen, becoming gratuitous toward the end. What starts out like a social critique gains the aura of an unnecessarily grisly horror film, more about overtly visible chains than the allegorical slaughtering of cows by paramilitary children named Rambo, Lady, Bigfoot, and Smurf.
It turns out that queerness lives even in the faraway mountaintops of the Colombian jungle, as one of the guerilla girls makes two boys kiss at the start of the film, which brought a discrete discomfort to the screening room I was seated in. By the time Nicholson's character shares a brief lesbian kiss with a reluctant fighter who's supposed to watch over her, later in the film, queerness is no longer a conceptual surprise hinting at meaningful registers beyond the narrative's surface, but a kind of desperate attempt to make the plot seem cryptic. Like The Cossacks, Landes's film is also about the impossibility of maintaining complete control over one's claim of masculinity, or power more generally. In moments of crisis, the line between predator and prey get very thin, and even the most well-armed warriors have a way of becoming disarmed, naked, and sentimental.
Yuriy Shylov's Projectionist follows the frailty of all flesh, hawkish accessory in hand or not, through the portrayal of the end of a film projectionist's 44-year tenure at one of Kiev's oldest movie theaters. It's an end that coincides with the crumbling of projectionist Valentin's own coughing body, and that of his bedridden mother. It turns out that the movie theater, too, is reaching its expiration point. Soon, its doors will close and its employees will be fired, and there's a sense throughout Shylov's documentary that analog cinema will be dealt a major blow with the theater's closure. What will become of the space? Perhaps a Reebok or a McDonald's. Perhaps a derelict muse for a Nikolaus Geyrhalter portrait of decay.
"You think you're loud, but in reality you can only hear yourself," Valentin tells his mother at one point. Her futile yelling of her son's name from her bed is one of the most haunting motifs in the film. An uttering for uttering's sake, a demand without expectations of an actual response, a mantra to remind oneself that one is, for now, still alive. Valentin has installed a whistle next to the bed, which he would actually be able to hear when she called if only she'd use it. But the mother mostly refuses to blow in the pragmatic apparatus, instead finding solace in the calling that won't be heard and, thus, will need to be repeated ad nauseam.
Projectionist can feel a bit aimless, but it's a welcome reminder of how the materiality of film, and thus its finitude, has something in common with our own—a kinship of frailty that the flawlessness of the digital image erases. Analog is the only technology that Valentin knows, whether he's sewing, as he's seen doing in the film, fixing a neighbor's straightening iron, or projecting old home videos on filthy kitchen tiles. There's pleasure to be found, for Valentin, not just in the stories, concepts, and metaphors of cinema, but in the very stuff that supports his craft, the paraphernalia of cinema that's bound to crack, to dry out, to turn to dust, to disappear forever: film stock, Movieolas, spools, and so forth. Cinema, we're reminded, is necessarily a tool of exposure, not just of the human condition in the face of death, but the human condition as an always gendered affair. It's a tool that's never settled, never comfortable, and never forgotten. "Men are cowards, didn't you know that?" is how Valentin puts it toward the end of Projectionist. In his world, one would know, by looking at the projector, at the very stuff of cinema, how much longer a film would last. The remainder of the film's "life" is perfectly real, perfectly tangible, and alive because it's in constant danger of being jammed up and torn by the very engine that ensured its running.
The Odessa International Film Festival runs from July 12—20.
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