Two genuinely great movies thus far, another that's awfully close, and a small handful of 'very good':
Life after Life This strange and disarming film is the best I've seen from China in years. It was produced by Jia Zhangke, and, like Jia's best films, it has a rigorously austere style that aims to say, or suggest, something about China's past and present by concentrating on the largely neglected, economically undeveloped margins of the world's largest country, so noted for its rapid rate of change. Life after Life, a ghost story, is itself haunted by the effects of that accelerated change - but all that 'progress' remains outside the frame. Its landscapes and characters (including a 10 year-old boy temporarily possessed by the spirit of his deceased mother) are hypnotically static, very nearly frozen in time and place. Zhang Hanyi's film is less explicitly, urgently political than Jia's own directorial efforts. Instead, Zhang channels some of the best aspects of Kiarostami (the ambiguous spiritual dimension, esp. Taste of Cherry and The Wind Will Carry Us) and Apichatpong (the understated yet playful mysticism of Uncle Boonmee and the second half of Tropical Malady), tempering his Jia-esqe formal aesthetic. Yet, if these big-name reference points seem to imply that Life after Life is a derivative, greatest-arthouse-hits collection, nothing could be further from the truth. While the influences underlying Zhang's film are discernible, its seams are mostly concealed by its fog-like spell, which persists well beyond its 80-minute runtime, resulting in a film that feels new and vital.
Paterson and A Quiet Passion Often it is said that a film is "poetic." Sometimes this adjective is quite appropriately applied, other times it's a kind of lazy critical shorthand; in both cases, it is too infrequently explained what is meant by describing a work of art in a medium other than literal poetry as being, in whatever sense, "poetic." In any event, what's considerably more uncommon than the purportedly "poetic" film is one that engages with the process by and circumstances under which poetry itself is created. Admittedly, to a far greater extent than, say, painting or performing music (both of which have been well represented on screen), the activity of writing poems does not lend itself naturally to cinematic representation. Yet, here are two films that are not only about poets as people, but about the affective, environmental dimensions that facilitate and inspire the composition of poetry. Jim Jarmusch's latest, with Adam Driver as a city bus driver and amateur poet (named Paterson, living in Paterson, NJ, the hometown of William Carlos Williams, Driver's character's favorite poet), remains in the assured, unhurried, philosophical mode of Broken Flowers, The Limits of Control, and Only Lovers Left Alive--arguably the mode of nearly all Jarmusch films, but refined to something like perfection in this current phase of his career. Paterson is about the ordinary pleasures and cyclical rhythms - and the variations upon those rhythms - of everyday life, and the potential for the seemingly mundane to take on the appearance of the wondrous in just the right light, or when viewed from the right angle. Such quotidian rhythms, and the daily ephemera that produce periodic variations or inflections thereof, directly inform the poems jotted down by Driver's Paterson. The same can be said, to a certain extent, of Terence Davies's film on Emily Dickinson: the sights and sounds and local goings-on of mid-nineteenth-century New England, and particularly around the Dickinson family home in Amherst, Mass., provide the productive context for Emily's writings. Yet, in contrast to Driver's sweet, even-tempered Everyman poet, Davies' subject is a very particular poet, a genius famous as much for her legendary eccentricities as for her enduring, widely influential art. It is to Davies' enormous credit, and especially to Cynthia Nixon's (in one of the best performances I've ever seen in a biopic), that A Quiet Passion does not offer up a caricature of the semi-reclusive, depressive 'Belle of Amherst.' Indeed, at least for the film's first half-plus, Nixon plays Emily as an amiable social creature, preoccupied with the affairs of her family and community. When frustrations, unfulfilled desires, and physical illness begin to wear her down, in the film's later stretches, Emily's deterioration feels as powerfully tragic as Lily Bart's fall from social grace in Davies' adaptation of The House of Mirth, yet, crucially, it is not presented as a fundamental, melancholic precondition to Dickinson's poetic output (though surely it is reflected in some poems from that period). Both Paterson and A Quiet Passion are formalist works through and through, but where Jarmusch's formalism is loose and breezy - for lack of a better word, 'zen-like' - Davies' is intense and ultimately overwhelming. As the camera glides slowly and mournfully over top Emily's increasingly enfeebled, finally lifeless body, and then over the hearse-carriage that she anticipated in verse, the impact is devastating.
In a Valley of Violence and Maliglutit (Searchers) Two different, but not incompatible, takes on the Hollywood Western. With In a Valley of Violence, Ti West does for this deeply coded genre what he did for the '70s/'80s horror movie in his excellent House of the Devil. It's terrific fun, and less smugly ironic than such film-nerd pastiche tends to come off. It might be fairly said that West is too unquestioning of his simple, bloody revenge narrative, that he's too effusively delighted with its telling to pause for moral considerations. This tendency, however, is significantly mitigated against by the surprisingly earnest, lived-in performances of Ethan Hawke and John Travolta. While West's western, shot on pristine 35mm, is hard to experience as anything but, or beyond, a devout cinephile's movie-movie, Maliglutit, which translates as 'Searchers,' presents the opposite problem: as with Zacharias Kunuk's previous films, the temptation to read his latest as a (non-fiction) ethnographic document must be consciously resisted. Kunuk insists, through the film itself (as he did repeatedly at the post-screening Q&A), that this is a resolutely fictional film, inspired by his long-held enthusiasm for the John Ford/John Wayne westerns, albeit set in his native Nunavut rather than the American West. Not only is the basic plot of Maliglutit taken from Ford's greatest film, Kunuk has also sought to echo that film's formal language in his dramatic compositions of heroism, villainy, and perilous adventure--not so far, after all, from West's Valley of Violence, despite the geographic distance between their respective settings. [Read Teresa's more considered review of Maliglutit here.]
The Unknown Girl and The Road to Mandalay Conventional critical wisdom holds that Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne are incapable of making a bad, or even mediocre, film, and that as a consequence of their remarkable consistency their films can sometimes be under-appreciated. I agree in principle with this view, but that doesn't mean that some Dardenne bros. films aren't better than others. Their last one, Two Days, One Night, was particularly strong (to my tastes, their best since 2002's The Son); working with a major movie star, Marion Cotillard in peak form, added something very interesting and effective to the Dardennes' familiar, reliable toolkit. By contrast, The Unknown Girl, although driven by another standout female performance (this time from Adèle Haenel), seems like a more minor contribution to their corpus. The new film, an attempt at the murder mystery genre, feels rather schematic and closed-off where the Dardennes' films normally provide ample space for moral ambiguity and possibility. It also contains at least one crucial scene (maybe two) that clumsily undermines the effectiveness of much of what's preceded it (or them). To be sure, 'clums(il)y' is not a word that one would typically expect to find applied to a Dardenne brothers movie, but the genre story mechanics seem to trip them up at times. [For an alternate take on The Unknown Girl, see Teresa's review.] For most of its duration, Midi Z's The Road to Mandalay is, arguably, a better Dardenne bros. movie than The Unknown Girl. Following the hardships encountered by Burmese non-status migrants in Thailand, the film is structured around a deadeningly repetitive series of interactions/transactions in which money, documents, or both are demanded from the struggling migrants. These daily burdens, however, are offset (for the film's audience if not its characters) by the ephemeral beauty of landscapes urban and rural, captured in a few breathtaking moments by Midi Z's active camera. Unfortunately, what is otherwise an impressive film is seriously marred (more fatally than the Dardennes' missteps) by its heavy-handed final scene, which hammers home a message that already had been ably delivered in more effective, less extreme ways.
Our Love Story Lee Hyunju's lesbian love story doesn't do anything new, but sometimes that's for the best. It is subtly revelatory for the sensitivity and maturity with which Lee presents the bittersweet, hot-and-cold relationship of its principal characters, both of whom feel like fully-developed, complicated human beings (well-played by Lee Sanghee and Ryu Sunyoung). Even its minor, supporting characters - friends, roommates, parents, teachers - come across as interesting people, where in a lesser film of this type they'd be one-dimensional sounding boards for the frustrated lovers. The narrative is well-paced, its arc directly informed by the ups and downs of the characters' relationship, and throughout Lee makes the most of her minuscule budget; this is the rare first-feature-made-on-the-cheap that almost completely transcends these circumstances. One need not reinvent the wheel when they can do so much so well.
Tales of Two who Dreamt Andrea Bussmann and Nicolas Pereda's film, which, on its more concrete level, concerns a Roma family in Toronto seeking refugee status, is at times engaging and at other times somewhat boring. To an extent, this is fitting given that the process of awaiting government hearings and decisions on such matters can be as tedious as it is tense. In this regard, the film registers as exceptionally timely and perceptive regarding the experience of migrants living lives in flux, shot through with uncertainty. But Bussmann and Pereda's experimental whims - involving the making of a film-within-the-film and relating to the nature of telling stories on film - threaten to obscure this topical immediacy. These 'meta' aspects of the film don't really come together, though the enigmatic video coda stuck with me.
Two and Lights above Water The former is a short film 'co-directed' by a father (Christopher Spencer-Lowe) and his now five-year old daughter - and this is not a gimmick at all. Rather, the touch and voice of the younger Spencer-Lowe, who reflects via voiceover on memories brought back by Super 8 footage of herself at 2 years old, tangibly contributes to the film. Two is sweet and lovely, but also imbued with what the older Spencer-Lowe termed 'nosticholia' (I think that was his neologism), a mixed feeling to which this father of a child growing up way too fast can wholly relate. The medium-length Lights above Water made for an excellent screening companion to Two, as both films are about capturing fleeting moments of childhood, and also the fleeting ideas and feelings and constantly developing mentalities of children, in a manner more abstract (but not less poignant) than, say, Linklater's Boyhood. Nicolas Lachapelle and Ariel St-Louis Lamoureux's film bears the fruits of a year spent observing the kids in a Cree community in northern Quebec. In the film's too-brief 71 minutes, there are several effortlessly beautiful and indelible moments: a street hockey match played against a brilliant, painterly sunset; a group of Cree girls dancing spontaneously to a Rihanna song; the kids watching from a bridge as fireworks light up the sky and reflect back in the water below (hence the film's title). It would be great to see more of what Lachappelle and Lamoureux caught on film, and to spend more time in the lively Waswinipi community.
Toni Erdmann Yes, it's very good, and it's very funny, and I enjoyed every minute of it, but I also wonder whether the superlatives it's elicited aren't evidence that film critics don't often enough watch really funny movies.
