Director: Luca Guadagnino
As with I Am Love, A Bigger Splash indicates that Italian filmmaker Luca Guadagnino is one who is remarkably in tune with the senses. One would be hard-pressed to find a frame in his films where there isn’t some sort of touching going on—whether that be the feel of the mud coating a vacationing rock goddess or a father’s hands touching his newly-discovered daughter’s shoulders. As a stylist, he is incomparably fetishistic. One would be mistaken to claim that his filming of Dakota Johnson is an argument about “the male gaze”—he is simply enamored with the erotic, and his lingering on her skin attempts to convey its irresistibility to the characters involved. Because Guadagnino makes films about pleasure, the tease of a prepared food is held in equal weight as a bare shoulder. When A Bigger Splash is content to work as a sex drama, much of it is engaging, even if Guadagnino is occasionally so aggressive in his technique that the effect is jarring (that being said, there is certainly an intentional “violence” to some of the images). Unfortunately, a parallel story regarding a refugee crisis never extends far enough from the periphery to be of much interest, resulting in the narrative’s central twist landing with a thud. Guadagnino is making the world’s most sophisticated porn films, but he has yet to convince that he can play with deeper, less immediately sensual ideas.
Director: Trey Edward Shults
The opening sequence of Krisha follows a woman exiting her car and searching for the home where the family she’s long since alienated herself from inhabits. When she finally finds the correct house and is invited inside, the camera stays behind her, taking in the sheer noise of a family get-together and the overwhelming deluge of friendly greetings. At its best, Krisha is almost darkly comical in the way that it presents anxiety—even the simple act of a relative bouncing a tennis ball on the floor is distorted into something macabre and horrific, the sort of repetitive noise that keeps everyone in proximity on edge. Director Trey Edward Shults uses the formal excess one would expect of a first time filmmaker (for better or for worse), and the musical score by Brian McOmber is grating and unsettling, amplifying the sense of nervousness. Anyone who has difficulty with large family gatherings (that’s all of us, right?) will identify with the feeling that all the faux-friendly conversations are waiting to burst at the seams, resentments powering through due to the nauseating anxiety of it all. Unfortunately, however, as Krisha develops more specifically into a character study of an addict, it seems overburdened by the sense of dread and misery. Shults is content with striking the same chord repeatedly before the credits roll—if the apocalyptic disaster of it all feels emotionally true, one doesn’t feel like they have a remarkably progressed understanding of the family dynamic by the end of it.
Director: Ciro Guerra
This immersive drama teeters splendidly on the border between historical fiction and the mythical, having interest in both ethnographic concerns and the explicitly poetic. The title sequence informs the audience how to watch the film—vague images of a serpent devouring another serve to be read as metaphors, capturing something of the primacy and violence of the narrative. Embrace of the Serpent connects two journeys in which white men seek a mythical psychedelic plant that is said to cure diseases. They are guided by the same man three decades apart—in the earlier sequence, he’s an impressive physical specimen, stubborn and entirely resistant to the colonialist threat. As an old man, he mourns that he’s become a chullachaqui, an oft-repeated word that refers to a spirit who walks aimlessly through the world (which will later be related to photography, ironically suggesting that the historical ethnographic impulse has actually accelerated the death of a way of life). The film works as an adventure reminiscent of Apocalypse Now or Aguirre, the Wrath of God, but occasionally its dalliances with the surreal outreach even those films—in one setpiece involving a drug-induced messiah figure, the picture becomes positively Buñuelian. If director Ciro Guerra doesn’t stifle his interest in making explicit what the audience could have gathered themselves, his visual strategy does just the opposite in letting the viewer see only what the characters can: boats arrive from behind the trees, figures are seen staring out at the river from within the jungle, and so on. It is an irresistible style, and the Amazonian setting has a rapturous, transportative appeal.
Director: Jeremy Saulnier
As he did with Blue Ruin, director Jeremy Saulnier presents Green Room as a sort of thinking-man’s midnight movie, offering the same visceral thrills while making an argument about the never-ending cycle of violence. None of the characters wrapped up in the stand-off that forms the conflict of Green Room want to be in the situation—even the skinheads are more practical than sadistic—and yet the escalating tension promises that nothing will be resolved until one side is wiped out. And yet to include antagonists with very specific politics is surely no accident, and their hate speech serves as a direct contrast with the punk band. That is, whereas a punk band sings about their resistance against authority, the skinheads’ form of political subversion has a more active and legitimately violent agenda. It can be argued that the situation might have been avoided had the band not turned a blind eye to the venue they’d be performing in. The very act of associating with violence meant that violence had the potential to breed and grow, ultimately consuming even those who were only guilty by association. Saulnier is not one to have his characters philosophize, however, and the straight-forward rawness of his thrills do work on their own terms. Moreover, as with Blue Ruin, Saulnier shows a talent for world-building—his characters have very specific language sets and social dynamics, and only through repetition and character actions do audiences become privy to the intricacies.
Filed under: Reviews | Tags: 2015, hello my name is doris, michael showalter
Director: Michael Showalter
A decade after his feature directorial debut, sketch comedy mainstay Michael Showalter once again explores the mechanical workings of a romantic comedy by subverting one element and making nearly everything else the same. The familiar trappings are there—a quirky, shy heroine (Sally Field) quickly falls in love with a co-worker (Max Greenfield) at the office, leading to a myriad of awkward encounters before the they find themselves investing in a relationship almost by happenstance. And yet, that the woman of this narrative could be his mother challenges not only the audience’s understanding of her character’s traits, but the perspective towards the relationship itself. When the “manic pixie dream girl” is a senior, she moves more into “sad old woman” territory than one with admirable quirks. Showalter cleverly discusses how the younger generation uses Doris (Field) as an accessory that validates their own ironic sense of fashion, although sometimes he seems suffocated by the mechanics of a screenplay wherein audiences will be able to predict not only what happens next, but exactly when that story beat will happen. This is the sort of film where a character is a hoarder only because it will lead to a montage where she separates from her baggage. And yet, Field is a breath of fresh air in a genre that begs for these reinventions, and Greenfield has a good chemistry with her as the well-meaning, if incredibly aloof love interest.
Director: Deniz Gamze Ergüven
On the first day of summer vacation, five teenage sisters venture down to the beach and engage in a playful frolic with young men, enjoying the joys and freedoms promised to them once school is out of session. Shortly thereafter, however, the girls are scandalized for having rubbed their privates on boys’ necks (occurring as they engaged in a piggyback fight), and their controlling uncle (Ayberk Pekcan) locks them up and soon begins to marry them off. The way that Mustang confronts its feminist themes is not unlike a fairy tale–involving beautiful women locked in a tower, under tyrannical control, and eventually finding a hero in a local truck driver who is sympathetic to their cause. But Mustang offers very little of the curiosity that a fairy tale would conjure in its presentation. The girls’ captivity is poorly demonstrated, instead with director Deniz Gamze Ergüven lingering on their half-naked images and finding joy in their various escapes to the outside world. Ironically, this is a low stakes discussion of imprisonment because rebellion always seems within arm’s reach–if the joy of seeing the girls have fun on their own might be justification for the story, it doesn’t create either the sense of dramatic suspense of even the feminist fervor that the film has the potential to evoke. Just as problematic is that the girls are more or less interchangeable, and rather than providing anything of substance regarding the uncle’s patriarchal sociopathy, the film further goes down the melodramatic rabbit hole and turns him into an increasingly caricatured monster.
Director: Robert Eggers
Of all of the classic icons of the horror genre, witches were perhaps most due for a revival–in a post-Puritan society, the suggestion that certain women have embraced original sin and fulfilled pacts with the devil seems old-fashioned. In The Witch, writer-director makes literal the fears of the devout by imagining a world in which evil is in the woods, and one will be frequently tested to resist temptation lest the sin become all-consuming. Fittingly, the picture settles in with a tone of misery–if films like It Follows and The Babadook similarly evoked dread in the inevitably of terror, The Witch ups the ante. This is a losing battle, and it’s known to be one from the start. Eggers’ great strength is in detailing the world that his characters inhabit, from the way that the father’s (Ralph Ineson) only successful demonstration of his masculinity is his woodcutting, to a brief glimpse of a couple of Native Americans inhabiting a village. The sense of realism is further taken advantage of in the first horrifying images of the eponymous woman, who in the early-going is not rendered as mystical, but shown committing a gory, primal ritual. Much of the appeal of The Witch involves its sense of history, both evoking folk tales of old and engaging in a dialect based on 17th century texts. But the way that the horrors seem to manifest from within the very psyches of the characters–rooted in personal shortcomings and self-hatred–feels immediate. As with Rosemary’s Baby or The Brood, The Witch is among a small number of horror films that burrows deep within the viewer’s skin, transforming a genre associated with embracing the thrills of being afraid to one that feels simply evil. One does not experience visceral enjoyment from the images, they are haunted by them.
Filed under: Reviews | Tags: 2015, evan johnson, guy maddin, the forbidden room
Director(s): Guy Maddin & Evan Johnson
The strapping woodsman hero that appears often in The Forbidden Room is named Cesare (Roy Dupuis), beckoning one to recall the somnambulist of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Indeed, to watch a film by Guy Maddin is to feel as though one is sleepwalking. Their free associative form–connecting fragments together with Freudian dream logic–lulls one into a sort of spell, as if the film itself was a living entity that was interacting directly with the viewer’s mind. For Maddin’s latest effort, he bases a series of stories on the titles of forgotten films, serving as a resurrection of collected memories lost to time. These episodes, interwoven within one another in a structure that employs flashbacks upon flashbacks, feel like single episodes of lost serials, with strange occurrences such as a “squid thief” appearing out-of-context and left for the audience to parse through. Maddin’s great genius is in relating the styles of silent European cinema to the processes of the mind–in My Winnipeg, he used archaic filmic techniques like irises and intertitles as a means of evoking memories and dreams. The Forbidden Room might just be his most chaotic film in that it utilizes early film techniques as a means of reflecting on the shared forgotten tales of a century ago. Like Cesare’s beloved Margot (Clara Furey), watching the film evokes the feeling of amnesia, with one’s very participation in the film seeming to come and go, allowing thoughts to drift back and forth as story threads are offered and then promptly taken away. If it isn’t as touchingly personal as My Winnipeg, nor does it have the same sense of focused narrative momentum as Brand Upon the Brain!, The Forbidden Room is perhaps Maddin’s magnum opus, a collection of the director’s obsessions laid out in the most uncompromising use of his form to date.
Director: Stephen Fingleton
The opening sequence of The Survivalist is a thrilling play of graphic design, charting the course of red and blue lines that represent population and oil production. As oil production falls off a cliff, so too does population, with the image’s focus following the abruptly descending line that stands in for mass death. It’s a beautifully abstract way of conveying the all-too-familiar method of handling exposition in a post-apocalyptic film, a sort of Saul Bass title sequence that sets the tone and lets audiences in on exactly what needs to be understood. It is the most radical and memorable thing in a picture which is otherwise relentlessly bleak and brutal, its sense of paranoia ceaseless and only punctuated by chaotic acts of violence. The survivalist (Martin McCann, sporting a braided mullet) of the title lives relatively peacefully in a shack on a small farm in the woods before he is confronted by two women–one older (Olwen Fouere), the other young (Mia Goth). They seek his crops and shelter and are willing to offer sex as their means of exchange. As becomes clear, however, the title could apply to any of the three characters. No one can be trusted because they wouldn’t have survived this long if they weren’t merciless. Director Stephen Fingleton struggles to find much to say about these characters other than the fact that they’ve found trusting one another impossible given their circumstances, but he does craft a number of effectively suspenseful sequences and shows a great patience in letting the action play out between long silences. In the film’s most showy moment, his camera follows a coming standoff between characters in a tall grass field. The camera movement, which raises with the protagonist before craning overhead and revealing his foe, is impressive as a piece of visual artistry, but it also effectively creates the tension of the scene by informing the audience of proximity, laying out the landscape, and articulating exactly where the danger lies.
Director: Yorgos Lanthimos
There might not be a better contemporary filmmaker at delivering a provocative one-sentence plot summary than celebrated Greek auteur Yorgos Lanthimos. And yet, up to this point the appeal of his films has not been limited to their enjoyable hooks–Alps, the director’s last underrated film, followed Dogtooth’s themes of hermetically sealed social constructs and amplified the sense of human delusion and performance. The Lobster is perhaps Lanthimos’ most ambitious project to date in that it seeks to take down the world of contemporary dating, and expectedly he has some thoughtful ways of dealing with the material. That the characters are whittled down to basic physical traits is not so much a flawed, limited way of characterization, but a comment on the arbitrariness of identifying potential matches (which has only been amplified in the online dating world). When Lanthimos moves the material from the hotel setting into the forest, however, he seems to all but abandon his intriguing conceit to discuss how resistance can lead to its own sort of oppression, with a group of renegade “loners” enforcing their singledom as resolutely as the hotel demands partnership. Lanthimos is no stranger to political themes, but here the delivery feels a bit too calculated and imposed, an unwanted tangent. Furthermore, if his films are often defined by their unexpected absurdity and surrealism, The Lobster also strains in this regard. When the loners have a silent dance party, the scene doesn’t have the shocking energy of the dance sequence in Dogtooth. It feels a little too cute and gimmicky, and indulgences in that direction will take Lanthimos from a great satirist to a simple conveyor of quirks.
For Reel 