Tabla de contenidos para September-October 2019 Vo.l 55 No.5 en Film Comment

IN CASE YOU WEREN’T SURE THAT MUSIC WAS GOING TO BE AT the heart of Waiting to Exhale, the first human presence in the movie is a DJ. It’s New Year’s Eve, and on the voiceover we hear a sonorous, quintessentially urban-radio baritone inviting listeners to share all their ill-fated resolutions. “Tell us those lies you’re telling yourself,” the voice purrs, “promises you know you won’t keep.” A song begins to waft in like a desert breeze—thick, humid, vaguely exotic—evoking the names of various pop genres that by 1995 (when the film was released) were already unambiguously uncool: easy listening, adult contemporary, smooth jazz, quiet storm. Then, as if merely to accompany the music, a shot of one of the film’s stars drops us into some kind of action: it’s…

THE TREE HOUSE SET IN THE YEAR 2045, MINH QUÝ TRU’O’NG’S LATEST FILM IMAGINES A FUTURE IN which the Earth is an alien environment. In the guise of a documentary, The Tree House unfolds through the words of an unnamed (and unseen) filmmaker, who, having arrived on Mars, looks back on the images he’s captured of the Vietnamese countryside and his encounters with a tribe of indigenous Ru..c people. In ruminative voiceover, he reflects on how he might make a film from this “continuous train of images,” in which locals are seen farming, building, painting, and discussing various traditions with our off-screen interloper. But what begins as observational soon turns interpretive as the filmmaker begins to experiment with the footage, meditating on the philosophical dimensions of cinema by flipping the…

HALFWAY THROUGH PARASITE, AFTER IT’S ALREADY won you twice over with its Swiss-watch plotting and its masterful juggling of tones, there’s a momentous swerve in the narrative that reminded me of the thrill of being in the hands of a truly mischievous storyteller. The director knows exactly where he’s taking you, and he’s so excited to get you there that he’s practically tripping over his own breathlessly designed setups. So when the punch lines finally arrive, they function simultaneously as euphoric release and disorienting screw-tightening. It’s a delirious ride and, by the end, to mix metaphors, it’s a full meal. It arrives as a gift to anesthetized viewers and a daunting challenge to other genre filmmakers. This is all to say, it’s a Bong Joon-ho movie. Which is also to…

“I have the feeling that when you meet someone, you’re meeting yourself,” says a character in Angela Schanelec’s 2010 film Orly, a fiction about chance encounters at the titular Paris airport. This idea would explain a lot about the work of the German writer-director. We meet people in Schanelec’s films, but not as we usually expect to meet characters in narratives, in the hope of coming away with an illusion of knowing flesh-and-blood beings. We learn very little about the people in her work, often only bare hints of their social situation and relation to others. We only sometimes have access to their emotional states, which often reveal themselves in spectacular performative bursts. Schanelec’s people come across as opaque, inexpressive, seemingly lost in interior reverie—then suddenly they’ll erupt in a…

FROM THE START OF THE WHISTLERS, DETECTIVE CRISTI is at sea. He stands aboard a ferry making its way to La Gomera, a mountainous isle of volcanic origin, the so-called “pearl of the Canary Islands.” Once docked, the detective (played by Vlad Ivanov) rendezvouses with his contact, Paco (Agustí Villaronga), a man he’s never met, who doesn’t share his mother tongue. In broken English Cristi is instructed to disable his phone—the police are listening—and spirited away by car to a secluded villa where the only person he knows, or thinks he knows, is a beguiling woman named Gilda (Catrinel Marlon). She wears red, as she did when they’d met back in Bucharest, but she assures him that their previous intimacy was all a ruse. Of utmost importance is that the…

“We went to the movies often. The screen would light up, and we’d feel a thrill. But [we] were usually disappointed. The images were dated and jumpy … It wasn’t the movie of our dreams. It wasn’t the total film we carried inside ourselves.”—JEAN-PIERRE LéAUD AS PAUL, MASCULIN FéMININ (1966) THE TOTAL FILMS WE CARRY INSIDE OURSELVES ARE distillations of our dreams, of movies we’ve read about or half-remembered, unencumbered by the deadening finitude of execution. Such is the eternal fascination and promise of the unseen film—but also of the unseeable film. By unseeable films, I mean those that reside solely in the imagination: most particularly, in the imaginations of authors who seed their books with allusions to films—whether as little as a stray mention of a title, or as…

Director: Alejandro Landes Country/Distributor: Colombia/Argentina, NEON Opening: September 13 ALEJANDRO LANDES’S MONOS OPENS on the edge of a nondescript, cloud-shrouded cliff. A group of blindfolded teenagers walk around tentatively, arms outstretched, calling out comical-sounding names: Rambo! Boom Boom! Smurf! It looks like some kind of dystopian, Battle Royale–esque torture ritual, when suddenly one of the teens kicks a ball through the air and the group breaks into rambunctious cheers. They’re playing a game, it turns out—a game of daredevil football in the middle of an altitudinous nowhere. The scene sets the template for Landes’s third feature. Any answer to how these adolescents got here is constantly deferred or denied, and the action teeters uneasily between menace and mirth: moments of violence turn out to be displays of joy and affection,…

•DVD/⋆DEBUT •BLU-RAY/⋆DEBUT ▸STREAMING ▸EXCLUSIVE TO VOD •⋆ American Film Theatre Series 14 films, various directors, 1973-75; Kino Lorber THE DREARY TERM “FILMED PLAYS” EVOKES UNDERCOOKED hybrids that lack both the spontaneity of live performance and the buoyancy of untethered mise en scènes. But from 1973-75, producer Ely Landau undertook to divest stagecraft-on-film of its negative image, conceiving the American Film Theatre as a vehicle for bringing dramatic and musical plays to the masses without altering source texts, but with dynamic photography and top talent on both sides of the camera to impart the sense of immediacy so often lost in translation. Like subscribers to a theater company, AFT patrons would buy a season pass, allowing them to attend one of only four screenings of each monthly offering (scheduled on days…

Resisting sensationalism, Jissôji depicts the son’s amorality as an existential and social crisis by composing tense black-and-white widescreen shots and orchestrating flights into out-and-out surrealism. ⋆ Akio Jissôji: The Buddhist Trilogy THIS TRANSIENT LIFE, 1970; Mandara, 1971; Poem, 1972; Arrow Films THERE’S NO MISTAKING THE BUTTON-PUSHING intentions of a “Buddhist Trilogy” that deals with incest, rape, and severe asceticism, but the unlikeliness of these three films comes from the background of director Akio Jissôji. A brilliant fantasist who modeled his work on Méliès, Jissôji had directed pop-art television series such as the original Ultraman (1966-67), becoming notorious for his unconventional style and storytelling. That show’s proto–Mighty Morphin Power Rangers amalgam of goofy monsters and whiz-bang action hardly portends This Transient Life (1970), a disturbing slow-burn exercise in erotic blasphemy. This Transient…

THE STORY FOLLOWS FRANK SHEERAN, A HIT MAN FOR THE mafia. He fought in the Second World War, saw a lot of combat, had to do a lot of killing, and that desensitized him, in a way, to [murder]. He meets Russell Bufalino, the top Mafia person in Philadelphia, and little by little, he starts getting more trust from Bufalino and other Mafia people. So they start asking him to do jobs for them. Bufalino introduces him to Jimmy Hoffa, and that’s the beginning of a very tight relationship. So we follow that relationship of basically these three men as the years go by. There were a few notions that Scorsese mentioned as we were starting to prep the movie. One of them very early on was about wanting to…

“If that machine breaks down, there’s someone out there to fix it right away. If I break down, I’m just pushed over to the other side till another man takes my place. The only thing they have on their mind is to keep that line running.” —FACTORY WORKER PHIL STALLINGS, SPEAKING TO STUDS TERKEL, WORKING (1974) FEW PLACES ARE AS SIMULTANEOUSLY PROFANE AND SACRED, DIGNIFIED AND degrading, empowering and subjugating as the factory floor. There can be an intimacy, physical and otherwise, among workers, coterminous with alienation between workers and supervisors, blue and white collars. Some recent films have documented the contentious and seemingly futile state of affairs inside today’s factories, such as Machines (Rahul Jain, 2016), Of Rolls and Men (Charlotte Pouch, 2017), and Blow It to Bits (Lech…

A 17-EPISODE TELEVISION SERIES DEDICATED SPECIFICALLY TO ADAPTATIONS of American-authored short fiction occasioned the happy confluence of two uniquely cherishable homegrown artistic talents: F. Scott Fitzgerald and Joan Micklin Silver. Following three pilots, The American Short Story’s two seasons aired on PBS in 1977 and 1980 and were executive produced by bibliophile Robert Geller, whose modest ambition was to audiovisually capture the narrative power of a diverse range of tales from the country’s undertapped literary archives. Geller championed “fidelity to the author,” and the show’s humble budgets (about $250,000 per episode) encouraged long stretches of dialogue and discouraged overly fanciful reimaginings, though a few “unfilmable” stories like John Updike’s “The Music School” and Katherine Anne Porter’s “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall” were tackled. Each segment was warmly introduced by either…

THE PIONEERING FILMMAKER JOHN SINGLETON, WHO DIED OF A STROKE earlier this year at 51, left behind nine films as director, virtually all of them laced with powerful social commentary and a cinematic style that echoed the humanist tradition of François Truffaut and Vittorio De Sica. The news of his death was a reminder of how things have changed in Hollywood, where he helped to pave the way for a new era in black filmmaking. It’s no exaggeration to say that without John Singleton, there would be no Barry Jenkins or Ryan Coogler. Boyz n the Hood, which Singleton both wrote and directed, set new standards for realism in stories about everyday black life. Inspired by his own experience, it showed the devastating effects that dead-end poverty, gang violence, and…

THE ARTIST’S AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL INSTINCT HARDLY makes for a natural fit when it comes to film. Cinema may be uniquely equipped to portray memories and dreams, but the act of portraying one’s past is so fraught with potential pitfalls—of re-creation, of imagination, of verisimilitude—that filmmakers often foreground their own processes to create a distancing effect, making works that are less novelistic than metacinematic and call attention to their construction. With auteurism a relatively new concept, Fellini plunged into his own past in 8½ (1963), establishing not only his own legend but also the very concept of the tortured artist-filmmaker. He set a psycho-structural template: many autobiographical movies that have come in its wake—Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Mirror (1975), Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz (1979), Terence Davies’s The Long Day Closes (1992)—owe a…

In 2016, the ghetto film school, a nonprofit film education organization that runs programming for teens in New York, Los Angeles, and London, debuted the first of several short films made through a collaboration with the Frick Collection in New York. Inspired by a series of works by the French painter Jean-Honoré Fragonard, The Progress of Love tells a story of queer romance and heartbreak that pivots on the Fragonard series that shares its title. Written and produced by Gabby Martinez and directed by Marcus Owens, The Progress of Love is a remarkable piece of youth media. From a purely technical perspective, it demonstrates a high level of competence: it is thoughtfully framed and edited and well-acted, with a commendably clean sound mix (most youth-made films fall short on these…

Lesage is gifted at identifying talented performers and letting them grow over time within his filmmaking. Director: Philippe Lesage Country/Distributor: Canada, Film Movement Opening: August 23 THROUGHOUT MUCH OF GENESIS, THE harmful tribulations of young love are kept at a distance. At an all-boys boarding school, Guillaume falls in love with his hunky hockey-star best (and only) friend, Nicolas. Meanwhile, at university, Guillaume’s half-sister Charlotte careens between the hapless Maxime, her entitled boyfriend from high school, and the boorish Théo, an older maybe-musician. Writer-director Philippe Lesage alternates between scenes of Guillaume and Charlotte, taking their romantic explorations seriously and following them to heartbreaking ends. But then the film thrusts viewers into a new story set at an idyllic summer camp, featuring the adolescent Félix, a stand-in for the director himself…

Luis Buñuel: A Life in Letters By Luis Buñuel, edited by Jo Evans and Breixo Viejo Bloomsbury Academic, $39.95 ACROSS THE VAST COMPILATION THAT IS Luis Buñuel: A Life in Letters, there’s surprisingly little record of how several of Buñuel’s greatest works were conceived and filmed. In the case of the groundbreaking documentary Land Without Bread (1933), not a single letter remains from the months the Surrealist master spent capturing the misery and dignity of the people from Las Hurdes, while numerous missives are devoted to the film’s financial prospects, censorship in Spain and France, and the addition of a soundtrack. That’s not a deficiency of the book, which is the result of lengthy research in more than 100 archives in Europe, Mexico, and the United States by Jo Evans…

Sibyl’s somewhat involuted structure, doubling back on itself in the throes of its heroine’s desires and panic, gives the film a rewardingly heady feel that earns it the moniker of psychodrama. ONE WAY OF LOOKING AT SIBYL—THE title character of Justine Triet’s third feature—is as someone leaning over to peer closer, closer, closer at a whirlpool… and falling right in. A therapist, she cuts her patients loose one by one to devote herself to writing fiction, until, wouldn’t you know it, new patient Margot (Adèle Exarchopoulos) becomes an object of obsession. Margot is an actress stressfully involved with her current co-star (caddish Gaspard Ulliel), who in turn is supposed to be partnered with the film’s director (Sandra Hüller of Toni Erdmann, again with quicksilver comic timing). On top of all…

As The Cat Has Nine Lives goes on, its bright colors and floral images come to seem stifling and even cruel. They engulf the women at the center of the film, hemming them in and sharpening their sadness. The Cat Has Nine Lives Ula Stöckl, 1968 Deutsche Kinemathek AT THE START OF THE GERMAN FILMMAKER ULA STöCKL’S first feature, a journalist named Katharina (Liane Hielscher) drives through Munich, gets out at the train station, and buys a single yellow rose. Her friend Anne (Kristine de Loup), just off the train from France, accepts it on the platform with a smile. A moment later they’re sitting on a deserted, sun-dappled patio on the river conferring about Katharina’s affair with a married man. Anne looks around at the bright empty space. “You…

IN ARI FOLMAN’S ENDEARINGLY BONKERS 2013 CURIO THE CONGRESS, ROBIN WRIGHT (playing herself) signs over her publicity rights to an unscrupulous studio boss—and becomes legally obligated to languish in obscurity as her digital avatar achieves monumental fame. The full extent of that film’s dystopia is yet to materialize, but the technology that allows the studio to simulate Wright’s presence is more or less already here, and only getting more powerful. Even before the advent of CGI, studios have taken measures to construct performances in the absence of performers: there’s the considerable history of studios faking their way to a usable turn from an actor who had the temerity to die before wrapping, running from Robert Walker in My Son John (1952), to Brandon Lee in The Crow (1994), to 2016’s…

WHEN ACTOR AND DON’T LET GO CO-PRODUCER David Oyelowo first got his hands on an initial script and decided he wanted to make it, there were some changes that needed to happen. First, it needed to be moved out of rural Ohio, where it was originally set. And second, if Oyelowo was going to star as Jack Radcliff—a police officer whose niece, brother, and sister-in-law are murdered—the family would have to be black rather than white. And because his producing partner was Jason Blum of Blumhouse Productions, this was no big deal. “He gives creative autonomy to his filmmakers and his actors on a level that is so extraordinary and wonderful, and you can see it in the work,” Oyelowo said in a recent phone interview. “I saw that firsthand…

AT THE CANNES FILM FESTIVAL, WHERE BONG JOON-HO’S Parasite won the Palme d’Or, the director asked critics not to reveal anything about the film past the initial setup. One of the joys of going to festivals is that you can discover movies without noisy criticism getting in the way of your own first impression. So fair warning: if you want to replicate that experience, don’t read this piece until you’ve seen Parasite, because I’m going to give a great deal of the game away. It’s too extraordinary a film to dance around. Late in the twisty, class-warfare family tragicomedy that is Parasite, Ki-taek, the head of a family of four that never had much and now has lost every bit of that, is lying on his back on the floor…

I LIVE MY LIFE SURROUNDED BY BOOKS—NOT THAT I HAVE read all of them, or fully understand them. Considering the kind of immersive work to which I devote myself, I occasionally suffer from a certain attention deficit. I read, but my head is somewhere else. My books are filled with notes that only my secretary and I are capable of deciphering. All of my films exist in the free spaces of the books that I read. Sometimes reading gives me the key to unlock a shot, but generally, besides giving me pleasure, reading puts me in a very fertile state of mind, transporting me to a place where ideas can flourish. I begin to read while I’m writing a script, and I must continually interrupt myself to jot down new…

“We graduated four months ago. What can you possibly be nostalgic about?”—skippy, kicking and screaming IN KICKING AND SCREAMING, NOAH BAUMBACH’S 1995 DEBUT feature, made when he was 26, Chet (Eric Stoltz) is about 10 years out of college, older than the rest of the characters, but still hanging around campus, bartending at a local hangout and taking classes. He’s not as corrupt as Wooderson (Matthew McConaughey) in Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused, who declares happily, “That’s what I love about these high school girls, man. I get older, they stay the same age.” But the two share similarities. The characters in Kicking and Screaming, a St. Elmo’s Fire for the ’90s crowd, cling to patterns established during college, unwilling or unable to create a structure for themselves as adults.…

WHEN PIOTR SZULKIN DIED LAST SUMMER, he was still fondly remembered as one of Polish cinema’s most unique voices for his spirited social satires in the guises of science fiction and horror, such as The War of the Worlds: Next Century (1981) and O-Bi, O-Ba: The End of Civilization (1985). Szulkin’s reputation has persisted despite the fact that he hadn’t made a new feature in over 15 years at the time of his death. Born in the aftermath of World War II, he had thrived in the ’70s and ’80s, but times had gotten harder and harder for most of Poland’s old guard by the 2000s. While the Wajdas, Zanussis, and Machulskis knew how to navigate the political rapids of whatever form the post-Communist country was taking at the moment,…

Director: Robert Eggers Country/Distributor: USA/Canada, A24 Opening: October 18 THE SECOND FEATURE FROM The Witch director Robert Eggers chronicles what is set to be a four-week stint for a two-man crew at a lighthouse on some dreary Atlantic islet far from the shores of New England. The images are monochromatic, at times recalling daguerreotypes; the aspect ratio is almost square, feeling old-timey and claustrophobic; and at first, as the men arrive, all we hear are foghorns, wind and waves, creaking floors. And farts. It is the 1890s. Thomas Wake (Willem Dafoe) and Ephraim Winslow (Robert Pattinson), the resident lighthouse keepers, or “wickies,” appear to have only just met. They share meals and close quarters, but not duties: Wake, the elder of the pair—and the flamboyant farter—calls dibs on manning the…

Director: Issa López Country/Distributor: Mexico, Shudder Opened: August 21 SOON AFTER A TITLE CARD PAYS ITS respects to the 200,000 people abducted and killed in Mexico’s ongoing drug war, we watch a young girl, Estrella, enter her empty house and encounter an unthinkable silence. She leavesschool early after gunfire shatters her classroom windows; on her walk home, she passes a bloody corpse veiled by a rug, and sees kids playing limbo with caution tape. Despite the world around her, Estrella (Paola Lara) stays fairly composed, until she calls out to her mother and hears nothing in return. Grappling with that absence propels Estrella into her imagination—not to construct a rosier reality, but to equip herself to survive. This unsentimental resilience makes storytelling both a weapon and a shield for the…