Undine Christian Petzold's latest abounds with strange pleasures small and large, from an indelible re-appropriation of "Stayin' Alive" to Paula Beer's magnetic, mercurial performance as the tellingly named title character, a freelance historian specializing in the politics of architecture and urban planning in Berlin. Employed at a museum of miniature models of the city, Undine's impeccably detailed and highly sophisticated presentations for tour groups seemingly fit quite comfortably with Petzold's recurring preoccupations: the major traumas and ruptures of twentieth-century Germany and Europe. But appearances, in this movie, are deceiving. Just as Undine the character is ultimately more elusive and enigmatic than the cerebral, prosaic figure cut in her well-rehearsed museum lectures, Undine the film operates more at the level of myth, or archetypal cultural memory, than of history. For much of its duration, Petzold's film moves ambiguously, and dextrously, between these different modes in something like the way Transit merges its multiple temporalities. Finally, though, Undine the character is subsumed under the thick layers of myth, and Undine the film is – at least after one viewing – both a little too neat and not quite fully satisfying, something less than the sum of its elegant parts. This is without question the work of a master filmmaker operating very near the height of his talents, but after the phenomenal three-film streak of Barbara–Phoenix–Transit, it's inevitably a slight let-down.
My Rembrandt The title of Oeke Hoogendijk's superb documentary may sound sentimental and/or somewhat generic. It isn't either. Rather, it's a real provocation that means something different for each of the major players presented in the film. For the Duke of Buccleuch, it means the Rembrandt masterpiece occupying pride of place among many other Old Master paintings hung on the walls of his Scottish castle. Meanwhile, another astronomically wealthy art collector, based in Paris, decides to sell his pair of Rembrandt marriage portraits, attracting immediate interest from both the Louvre and the Rijksmuseum. The competition between these two great national institutions implicitly suggests – and their directors sometimes explicitly suggest – the question of whether an artist of Rembrandt's lofty stature "belongs" to the particular nation and culture that birthed and shaped him or to the international world of Art more generally (which the Louvre, rightly or wrongly, tends to stand in for in the popular imagination). For Jan Six XI –– a man whose ancestral namesake was a close contact of Rembrandt and whose aristocratic family has been closely associated with the Dutch Golden Age ever since –– "his" Rembrandt is not only the famous portrait of the seventeenth-century Jan Six still in his family's possession, but also the "Portrait of a Young Man" that he bought for a relative pittance at a Christie's auction and which he then endeavours to prove is an authentic Rembrandt work, not merely "circle of," as it was listed at auction. Yet, Six's mission is muddled by controversy, connected in the most immediate sense to professional rivalry and double-crossing within the insular Dutch art world, but more broadly and significantly to complex questions about the commodification and ownership of art and the values placed on authorship, authenticity, and expertise. Like all good documentaries about high art, Hoogendijk's film allows its viewers intimate access to the works themselves, including paintings that would be otherwise difficult for the public to examine in such high-definition detail. But where the main attractions of most art docs basically stop there, My Rembrandt pushes further, posing thorny, philosophically rich questions and supplying, if not the answers to those questions, then some fascinating evidence to mull over, to potentially arrive at our own conclusions.
Memories to Choke on, Drinks to Wash Them Down Three of the four vignettes that make up Leung Ming-kai and Kate Reilly's thoroughly delightful film are intrinsically concerned with memory/ies. In the first, an elderly Chinese woman repeats the same personal stories, with occasional colourful embellishments, to her young Indonesian nurse. In the second, two brothers reflect on their past and divergent present circumstances while paying an after-hours visit to their family's toy store. And in the third, a pair of schoolteachers, an HK-Chinese man and an American woman, sporadically meet up for meals at various Hong Kong dining establishments. As she prepares to leave Hong Kong for a job on the mainland, their relationship – something between platonic and romantic – takes on the subtly wistful, memorial quality of a missed opportunity. The film's final episode (a documentary, in contrast with the three preceding fictional stories) is more concerned with the present and the future––those of Hong Kong itself, and particularly its younger generations, who are boldly challenging the political and social status quo. The fourth part's specific subject, a barista running for local political office against a veteran pro-Beijing incumbent, is no less idiosyncratic and funny than the fictional characters populating the earlier vignettes. Her foray into democratic politics and the outcome of the election, the film seems to suggest, will in future also be a memory, whether a hopeful or bitter one. The nature of that memory will in large part be determined by the big-picture future of Hong Kong––a profoundly uncertain question, but perhaps one that will not be unilaterally decided by state authorities.
Summer of 85 At first glance, François Ozon's film looks very much like Call Me by Your Name transplanted from northern Italy to the South of France. Indeed, the similarities between the two films are numerous: both are '80s-set coming-of-age stories and same-sex romances, played out against lush scenic backdrops and full of terrific period detail. But there are also some important differences distinguishing Ozon's film from Luca Guadagnino's. Summer of 85 is more explicitly a memory piece, its emotional immediacy tempered by a certain distance and fragmentedness; though both films were adapted from novels, Ozon's is much more obviously "literary" in its framing of the story. From its opening moments, Summer of 85 is also haunted by the looming spectre of death, and even in its scenes of candy-coloured ebullience the film is shot through with a strain of cynicism. Whatever personal growth the protagonist achieves by the conclusion of this Bildungsroman, it's the product of sudden tragedy, of working through resentment, regret, and grief––not simply of the kind of life-changing, if fleeting, shared romantic feeling described in Michael Stuhlbarg's soliloquy near the end of Guadagnino's film.
Inconvenient Indian Michelle Latimer's meta-documentary is, for the most part, a worthy cinematic companion piece to Thomas King's instant-classic study of cultural representations of Indigenous peoples and evolving North American government policies, by turns assimilationist and segregationist, regarding these "inconvenient" groups inhabiting lands they sought to control. Despite the presence of King, as a spectator in a movie theatre and the passenger in a taxi driven by a trickster coyote (a nod to his Coyote Columbus Story), the film mostly lacks his singularly wry humour; and it isn't able to un-knot the tangles of history, memory, and myth with anything matching the book's lucidity and critical acumen. But Latimer's film is not meant as a straightforward adaptation of, much less a substitute for, King's book. Rather, King's The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America provides inspiration and a point of departure for the shorter-titled film, which begins by covering some of the same topical ground, but later devotes more of its attention to contemporary First Nations and Inuit cultures––art, politics, community, and issues of everyday life. Latimer's vibrant and varied snapshots provide a strong antidote to the ahistorical/pop-mythic figure that she, and King, interrogate and lament.
Notwithstanding the many virtues of these contemporary portraits, however, it's unfortunate that Latimer thought it necessary to include graphic footage of a seal being hunted (from a distance) and killed (at close range). Apart from just a matter-of-fact depiction of life in Canada's far North, this sequence seems intended to serve as a stark contrast to earlier-shown footage from Nanook of the North. The Inuit hunters in Robert Flaherty's famous "documentary" are seen using traditional tools, even though they possessed, and used, guns well before the period when Flaherty filmed them. Latimer thus deliberately shows a present-day Inuit hunter making use of a telescopic-sight rifle and Ski-Doo. It's a significant point of contrast, but one that could've been made well enough through oral description, sparing viewers the brutal kill scene. At the very least, the TV channel and/or streaming service that picks up Inconvenient Indian should warn viewers about this grisly moment.
