Give My Love to the Sunrise

vulvaauteurism: Vamps, Amy Heckerling, 2012. Definitely one of...

Wed, 08 May 2013 14:19:07 -0400

Vamps, Amy Heckerling, 2012.

Definitely one of my favourite shots from the film. So what is this all about? Well. I find that so much of the vulgar auteurism discourse is focused on male directors and gendered genres like action films and thrillers. This is my feminist response to that. It’s time to reclaim ’90s rom-coms. Enjoy and follow.

Only the Young/Tchoupitoulas

Thu, 02 May 2013 00:00:00 -0400

Opening the digipak for Oscilloscope’s sister set of Jason Tippet and Elizabeth Mims’s Only the Young and Bill Ross IV and Turner Ross’s Tchoupitoulas reveals a striking pair of images. On the left, the three Zanders brothers from Tchoupitoulas are framed on the rocky shore near the Mississippi river, looking out at the body of water that physically prevents them from returning home after missing the last ferry. On the right are two of the three subjects in Only the Young, Garrison Saenz and Kevin Conway, relaxing on a rusty roof, framed by the desolate bushy plains surrounding them.

These images bring to mind an element explored by both films: the power of physical space on a young person’s cognitive development. Coincidentally, both Tippet and the Ross brothers were influenced to make their films based on their own adolescent experiences. The Ross brothers wanted to return to the New Orleans they’d discovered as children. Tippet, once a skateboarder like Saenz and Conway, found his subjects at a skating park in Santa Clarita, California, blocks away from his own childhood home.

In Only The Young, social institutions are strikingly absent in the portrayal of the lives of the three subjects (Saenz, Conway, and Saenz’s on-and-off-again girlfriend Skye Elmore). Tippet and Mims focus instead on the physical spaces the kids have claimed as their own: wide open skating parks; the half pipes, shot cartoonishly large, that Saenz and Conway attempt to master on their boards; abandoned, decaying houses and golf courses; streets teeming with car traffic, but devoid of pedestrians; and poster-adorned bedrooms. The three teens are devoutly Christian, though the film treats their self-proclaimed love for Jesus with neutral respect; rarely does the film show the presence of church community outside of a religious project called Ignition Skate Ministry that the two boys help out with. Their parents are largely absent, not only in the narrative, but in the kids’ own lives. What the film is left with is the frequently hilarious antics and conversations among the three teens, who have nothing better to do than hang out, granting the filmmakers and the viewers the privilege of their excellent company.

The tumbleweed-rolling emptiness in Santa Clarita couldn’t be more different than the frenetic energy of New Orleans, where the Ross brothers spent seven months shooting before stumbling upon the three Zanders boys, on their way to the magical city for their first trip. The Ross brothers frame their narrative through these kids’ virginal eyes seeing the city for the first time.Tchoupitoulas is largely successful in painting the manic bacchanalia of Mardi Gras, but the city competes with William Zanders for most vibrant, loudmouthed character. Frequently picked on by his two older brothers, Bryan and Kentrell, William is the most innocent and fearless, talking to strangers, peering into store windows with careless abandon, matching the melody of street buskers while humming and playing an invisible recorder. His young tenaciousness renders him incapable of sensing the possible dangers of the street; he bravely leads his brothers into a ghost ship and walks around like it’s no big thing. Despite being the youngest, William is the only one who really ingratiates himself into the communal space of the crowd-packed streets and in his own way, comes to own it.

IMAGE / SOUND:

Despite its beautiful packaging, this Oscilloscope Laboratories dual set was released on DVD only, a real shame in the case of Only The Young, with its bright, lucid cinematography. The 5.1 surround track is mostly acceptable on both films, and sufficiently fine-tuned to capture the crackling noises of skateboard wheels on concrete, and in the case of Tchoupitoulas, the Zanders brothers’ incessant arguing among the music-drenched soundscapes of New Orleans’s streets.

EXTRAS:

This set contains some undeniable gems for extras. The Only The Young disc contains several features that offer fascinating contextualization, both for Jason Tippet and Elizabeth Mims’s first debut feature (in the way of audio commentary and outtakes) and their own filmmaking development (with the inclusion of their first short, Thompson, which could be described as Only the Young-lite). The outtakes reel is particularly appropriate because so many of the film’s scenes feel off the cuff and earnest; the reel makes it obvious that any footage of these garrulous teens is compulsively watchable.

The Tchoupitoulas disc only has one extra outside of the theatrical trailer, a feisty, mesmerizing making-of documentary called Behind the Scenes with the Ross Brothers. This 15-minute short is a delirious mash of voiceover snippets from a radio interview, scenes of the filmmakers carousing while singing “Pure Imagination” from Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, old radio ads about New Orleans, and footage of Mardi Gras. Included as a footnote, this cinematic jazz ditty is in many ways, more indicative of the Ross brothers’ talent than Tchoupitoulas itself.

OVERALL:

It makes perfect sense for Oscilloscope to release Only The Young and Tchoupitoulas together. Both beautifully portray youthful exuberance in American landscapes that are changing as quickly as the films’ adolescent subjects.

What Richard Did

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0400

What Richard Did has such a portentous title that its easygoing narrative setup feels initially deceptive. Lenny Abrahamson’s film follows Richard Carlsen (Jack Reynor), a good-natured, popular 18-year-old rugby player whose bright future is crushed when he inadvertently kills a teammate, Conor (Sam Keeley). Throughout its first half, the film carefully establishes Richard’s honorable qualities, though it never puts him through any particularly challenging moral tests. As a natural-born leader he’s wont to protect his friends, though sometimes being an alpha male means he plays as aggressively off the field as on it. These dual tendencies attract the attention of Lara (Róisín Murphy), who eventually leaves Conor for Richard, after which the two boys remain uneasy friends.

Richard’s carefree summer days before university, spent carousing at pubs and embodying the comfortable life of middle-class privilege, are cut tragically short when he and his friends don’t bother to check Conor’s physical status following a drunken fist fight; he ends up bleeding to death, an accident the boys are unable to own up to in the subsequent investigation. While they’re resolutely remorseful and devastated, they find it easier to cover up the truth and not risk destroying their families’ social standings and their respective futures. Even Richard’s father (Lars Mikkelsen) advises him to stay quiet.

What Richard Did tries to locate an allegory about the moral quagmires of the Irish upper classes marginalizing the lower classes. The fact that the boys and their older guardian figure are so quick to deny the truth is revelatory about their true moral standing, though their decision-making also quietly points to a systemic apathy present in their sheltered existence. Like Lara, Conor is working class, as well as Catholic; indeed, these characteristics set him apart from his teammates and allow Richard to poke fun at him, notably after Conor publicly sings a Gaelic ballad. The song contains a lyric that Lara translates to a skeptical, dismissive Richard: “I’m asleep, and don’t wake me.” It’s a sentiment that easily describes the boys’ passivity. Lara is understandably broken up about Conor’s death, but also helpless in making sound decisions in the aftermath. The film implies that her class status is what informs her obeisance to Richard, who tells her she must lie to the police.

The film’s structure as a character study helps to subtly underscore the flawed justifications of a privileged kid’s thought patterns and unchallenged value system, but the narrative remains too stringently microcosmic to parse out any broader truths about Irish society. What Richard Didconcludes on an optimistic note, one that finds Richard turning himself in. Though the viewer isn’t privy to this act or its consequences, the film ambitiously (and rightly) tells us that such information is irrelevant to the story at hand. The film’s title refers as much to the young protagonist’s act of violence as it does to his awakening from the slumber of moral complacency.

Sun Don't Shine

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0400

Amy Seimetz’s debut feature Sun Don’t Shine conveys a brilliant mental space that is at once both familiar and unfamiliar. The film portrays the irritability brought on by inescapable summer heat, the heavy hazy air that makes everything seem hopeless and stupid and nasty, and a scientifically proven phenomenon that reportedly explains the rise in violent crime during the summer. Crystal (Kate Lyn Sheil) and Leo (Kentucker Audley) are stuck in an overheating car on a road trip to the Everglades, but this isn’t an exhilarating couple’s getaway—these folks are on the run. Sure, the summer heat can make us do crazy things, but in the case of Crystal and Leo that also includes murder.

Few details are provided about the origins of their unfortunate predicament, though the film slowly reveals that Crystal killed her husband in a fit of rage and is now receiving the assistance of her boyfriend Leo to dump the body in the swamp. The two have planned separate alibis for their trip in Florida in order to give the impression that they didn’t run away together. It’s up to Leo to ensure the slow-witted, easily emotional Crystal doesn’t screw it up, which she does repeatedly, for seemingly no reason other than poor impulse control. Leo plans to stay at an old girlfriend’s place for the night, while Crystal is supposed to camp out in a nearby park. She can’t keep away out of jealousy, though, ruining one of many intricacies in their not-so-perfect getaway.

The couple appears inherently doomed; their fate, along with their agitated states are partially why many critics have compared Sun Don’t Shine with the noir genre. What this film does better than most noirs, however, is elucidate an all-absorbing atmosphere that is at once stifling and frustrating. Sun Don’t Shine isn’t truly about its narrative elements. It’s not all that interested in the outcome of the corpse or their successful escape. The film focuses instead on the dynamic between Crystal and Leo: strained, uncommunicative and at times, explosive. The film captures their mental prisons perfectly through the claustrophobic presence of the heat with its sun-soaked cinematography and its characters’ sweat-and-mud-stained skin, recalling the formal touches of the opening to Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing.

The film ends up feeling more like an experience than a story; fortunately it works better as the former than the latter, anyway. Yet there are tiny non-sequitur details about the two characters that become easily hardwired in the brain, and it’s to Seimetz’s credit as screenwriter that the film remains so unforgettable. The voiceover shares snippets of their throwaway conversations non-diegetically, revealing the intimacy of a trip that is too long to show onscreen in real-time. Crystal shares several lackadaisical anecdotes that expose a tragic undercurrent beyond her current troubles; some are about childhood, others about a pipe dream of a future. The way Leo sullenly ignores her as she relates a tedious story about a co-worker stealing her lipstick—with that kind of overdetailed explanation that would prompt a “Cool story, bro” response—is particularly mesmerizing, especially as Crystal tries increasingly harder and harder to regain his attention as the two sit around at a bar. She eventually succeeds in making him smile. Oh, the things we do for love.

Un Flic

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0400

As far as swan songs go, Jean-Pierre Melville’s Un Flic is a fascinatingly garbled tune that teems with formal inconsistencies and yet still manages to carry a pained melody. Closing his Alain Delon-starring trilogy of gangster films, which includes Le Samouraï and Le Cercle Rouge, Un Flic, released one year before Melville’s premature death, certainly doesn’t feel like it should be the final work of a director who was carving out a distinct aesthetic groove late in his career. The film asks more questions than it answers, challenging Parisian modernism, playing provocatively with Melville’s leitmotif of the criminal death wish, and carrying strong homophilic subtext.

Delon reverses his typecast role and plays the eponymous flic, or cop, Edouard Coleman, in search of four criminals, one of whom is his friend, Simon (Richard Crenna). The film cuts serenely between Coleman’s brooding investigation and the gangsters’ elaborate heists, comparing the life of the officer with that of the gangster (sartorially, the men look nearly identical). Here the French director’s set pieces are so extremely refined that the results seem almost parodic, though it’s fairly obvious that the ritualism with which Melville defines both his characters and his own filmic tendencies is employed with self-reflexive irony. Indeed, Un Flic’s two set pieces are clearly demarcated from the imposed lethargy present in the rest of the film.

The first is a bank robbery during which more time is spent waiting for the criminals’ timed action to begin than on the actual job. Rain gushes and winds scream in overcast scenes, emphasizing the cold, grey emptiness of modern architecture surrounding the bank. Three of the four robbers exit the car, one by one, each walking reluctantly against harsh winds toward the job that could be their last. Time rolls slowly, as it does in every Melville film predicated on the suspense of upcoming short bursts of kinetic maneuvering (a gunshot here, a lock picked there). In the bank, time stands nearly still as the robbers wait for everything to fall into place before the thieves stick up the joint. Dressed like businessmen, the three men secretly don masks and shades once inside before commencing the robbery, resembling bored actors awaiting their cue in the wings. The act continues as the criminals drive toward the train station to purchase bogus tickets in order to divert the police.

The second heist, in which Simon is dropped onto a moving train from a helicopter to steal a briefcase of drugs, is an unnerving bit of action that plays out in real time; the train slows down for a trek through electric lines, allowing the helicopter to match the train’s speed and giving the criminals only 20 minutes to complete the heist. Yet most of Simon’s time isn’t devoted to getting on and off of the train or stealing the suitcase. That’s the easy part. Rather, Simon plays the actor again, spending most of the 20 minutes cleaning himself up in the bathroom and changing into luxurious sleeping robes to give the impression that he’s a passenger unable to sleep. He cleans his face, slicks back his hair (twice), and even parts it, then changes shoes. It’s a meticulous ritual marked all the more inane by the sheer seconds it takes for him to break into the drug-dealer’s compartment, knock him out, and take the briefcase.

If criminal activity in Un Flic is depicted as ploys equally perfunctory, easy, and rehearsed, so is the profession of legal enforcement. Delon’s Coleman is a demoralized detective repeatedly called on by his dispatcher, and who repeatedly informs them in monotone: “On my way; I’ll call you after.” Delon’s famous cobalt-blue eyes react only opaquely in the face of every crime he investigates—though one can sense that with every new development something in Coleman dies a little more.

The film is full of obvious put-ons. During the second heist sequence, the helicopter and train shown in extreme long shots, so as to establish their proximity, are clearly models. In form and structure, Un Flic demonstrates a weary nonchalance toward the mechanical processes of filmmaking, heist-pulling, and criminal-nabbing. Outside of the two set pieces, the narrative operates somewhat flimsily and with only a coerced determination to keep continuity. Coleman may be technically investigating the gangsters, but he’s just as frequently found in the arms of his lover, Cathy (Catherine Deneuve), a woman he shares with Simon, or at other unrelated crime scenes. One is the homicide of a prostitute who, with her heavily makeup-ed artificial look, resembles Cathy. Another is a defeated theft between an art dealer and a gay man the dealer picked up, who turns out to be underage. Coleman is frequently coming across people or scenes that challenge his masculinity; his informant is a transgender person, whom he eventually ridicules and assaults for giving him false information, telling her she should dress like a man. Cathy’s role isn’t so much a character as a cipher, a proxy for his uneasy relationship with Simon, with whom he exchanges more glances than words. Describing their dynamic as homoerotic is questionable, though Coleman clearly sympathizes with his friend’s fate; he obliquely warns Simon of his impending arrest when he could have easily handcuffed him.

Melville’s cinema-as-process in Un Flic feels as calculated as it is in many of his previous works, but there’s a distinct vein of misanthropic defeat coursing in this film that’s encoded into empty gestures and portrayals of people who appear to only be going through the motions. In any other film, a love triangle would feature at least one dramatic scene; here the three lovers only communicate through their eyes at Simon’s club. Coleman is never shown to be surprised, disappointed, or even in love with his best friend or with Cathy. Such is the life of a flic in a city that’s as harsh and gray as the sleet that covers it. In Melville’s Paris, concrete and glass are as empty as the blank eyes of its inhabitants, no matter on which side of the law they reside.

Intolerable Cruelty

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0400

Intolerable Cruelty is by no means the least-liked Coen Brothers film; it’s not even their least-liked screwball comedy (that honor goes to the equally underrated The Hudsucker Proxy). The film received mostly positive reviews at the time of its release in 2003, but its timing was very pertinent with regard to the criticisms laid against it. Sandwiched between the generally well-liked and understated The Man Who Wasn’t There and the not-so-successful The Ladykillers, Intolerable Cruelty felt like a frivolous exercise in witty gender one-upmanship, achieving neither the instant success of Fargo or O Brother, Where Art Thou?or the gradual cult appreciation of The Big Lebowski. The resounding success of No Country for Old Menremained an unimaginable four years away. By the early 2000s the Coens had garnered enough acclaim to merit intense scrutiny for each new work, and Intolerable Cruelty was deemed only a begrudgingly acceptable film, though its aspirations to be as monumental as the works of their influences (namely, Preston Sturges) faltered. Supposedly.

The biggest criticism laid against Intolerable Cruelty was not regarding its wit (which flows in spades, as seen in the court scene), nor mal-appropriation of genre signifiers (which was the chief complaint againstThe Hudsucker Proxy), but rather the alleged lack of soul and emotion in the main romantic leads, Miles Massey (George Clooney) and Marylin Rexroth (Catherine Zeta-Jones). Accusations of the Coens playing sadistic puppet masters was nothing new in 2003. Indeed, this criticism has come up repeatedly for the brothers, though the only movie where condescension is truly present and proves to be problematic is in the generally beloved Fargo, where townies are painted as caricatures. Across their oeuvre, the Coens-verse is repeatedly presented as Intolerably Cruel places, and within this rubric there must exist a deliberate distance from the writers and the unfortunate souls trying to find their wayward paths in their narratives, in order to depict these worlds that much more absurd and baffling. Most of the Coens’ characters are tragicomic by design. When genuine love is necessary, the Coens ensure it’s present (see: Hi and Ed’s relationship in Raising Arizona).

The warmth and emotion expected from romantic leads is in actuality the viewer’s own misconception, tied to genre expectations of the rom-com. The fallacy works something like this: In order for two leads to have such an intense, naturally positive emotion towards each other, they must be capable of producing that emotion generally and genuinely. Gestures of love are indeed scripted, but do Clooney and Zeta-Jones pull it off? According to the film’s critics, they don’t, but the better question is: Does it matter? In a film loaded with cynical symbolism against the social scripts of love, marriage and divorce, the leads’ devious performances are harmoniously in tune with the spectacle of love and the harsh reality of divorce on display in the film. We can never quite tell if the characters are putting on performances or if they are genuinely expressing emotion, because what drives the two together (an admiration for each other’s intelligence) is what drives them to be the conniving business people in their respective spheres, Massey as a smooth-talking lawyer, Marilyn as the more-intelligent gold digger. Cutesy displays of emotion simply do not belong in a movie with characters’ sexual chemistry built on cerebrally oriented admiration.

Elsewhere in the film, the Coens do hint at the loneliness that comes with lives built on financial success. Massey does not want to become his grotesque fogey of a boss, who lives in an old man cave seemingly built out of law books. Similarly, Marilyn sees the unhappiness present in her fellow gold diggers’ rich, vacuous existences. There is room for love in Intolerable Cruelty, but it must be oppressed by the social systems in which the two characters operate. When the two are able to break out of their flawed systemic prisons, they are finally able to express that emotion freely towards each other. The act of ripping up the Massey Pre-Nup, seen previously as a staged, false act, becomes a genuine gesture of love. If you can’t believe the earnestness in Clooney’s eyes when he tells Zeta-Jones he loves her, you can believe the Coens’ symbolism. For those who easily see the Cary Grant impersonation (like I do), it’s an added bonus.

Still Life

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0400

One of the seminal works of the Iranian New Wave, Sohrab Shahid Saless’ Still Life is an eminently poignant exercise in existential temporality, framed with a neo-realist simplicity. The film follows the tedious life of Muhammad Sardari (Zadour Bonyadi), a railroad guard whose sole job is to align and realign the railroad tracks of a crossroad several times a day. He lives a simple life in a small box-like house with his wife (Zahra Yazdani), a carpet weaver. One day he is informed of his retirement, an event that displaces him not only of an income but also his home.

The film introduces the quotidian mundaneness of Sardari’s life with elegance and minimalist camera work, letting long takes set at low angles do most of the work in establishing the austerity of his existence—a pace that he is merely complacent with, but one would be hard pressed to call Sardari happy. Indeed, he spends his spare time doing little more than sitting, eating and smoking tobacco—an unchallenging life with an idleness that is at times perplexing for the viewer to understand, though the film is never challenging or condescending towards Sardari.

It would be perhaps a little too easy to call this a slice-of-life poverty film, given that Still Life is clearly more interested in the temporality of existence, particularly Sardari’s. Its fascination with time is treated with sardonic amusement; yes, Sardari has so much of it, and yet he is both displaced by time as well as being ruled by it, perhaps the natural outcome of the structure of his job. When asked by the senior railroad staff of his age, he’s uncertain if he’s 60 or 70. At home, he obsessively winds a clock that ticks with unnerving stillness, making the tone of his household that much more cold and empty. The film also plays with discontinuity in strange, seemingly haphazard ways through its editing. Sardari’s son visits from the military, but he’s there one moment, gone the next, replaced by a previously missing Sardari and visiting carpet purchasers.

Retirement provokes Sardari out of his lifelong funk, taking him to a head office where he helplessly fails to defend his right to continue working in what appears to be a Kafka-like situation. He is told to ask one official after another, eventually being told that the decision is final. There is no discussion about retirement funds or plans for his living expenses and placement following his retirement. This miscommunication is puzzling for both Sardari and the viewer; it almost seems like Sardari confuses a modern concept like retirement for being fired, an action that he cannot begin to comprehend. The confusion continues when his replacement shows up at his house, presumably there to move in. Yet at first Sardari continues to go to work, alongside the new guy, and even invites him in for tea and food later on. It’s a wordless, absurd moment.

If the film is rooted in any kind of social commentary, it is about Iran’s liminality between pre-modernity and modernity. Sardari is employed by the railways, the pinnacle of modernity, but he lives his life as if stuck in a past in which rurality made life extremely simple. Life could be as straightforward as buying bread and sugar once a week, an activity so plain and singular, and yet Sardari keeps forgetting to do it, to his wife’s chagrin. One of the best scenes in the film takes place early on when a herd of sheep slowly makes its way across the railroad; the film luxuriates in allowing the symbolic crossroads to resonate cinematically. A nomadic culture dominated by agriculture is replaced forcibly—by the then-ruling Shah and his father before him—by the infrastructure of modernity. Yet his attempts were half-hearted and moderately successful, and Sardari is an excellent case study of its alienating effects.

It's a Disaster

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0400

It’s a Disaster is an unfortunate title that invites unimaginative jabs about being an apt description of the film itself, though this apocalyptic dramedy isn’t so much catastrophic as it is disappointing. Peppered with witty non sequiturs and snappy performances, the film flirts with big ideas about adult relationships, but fails to locate any gravitas about its characters’ existential or psychological crises.

Those crises run amok as the story’s eight characters—four American couples brunching together in one of their homes—are forced to live their few remaining hours together indoors after a chemical weapon is set off in their city (likely the beginning of WWIII). Expectedly, each character undergoes a different kind of breakdown predicated on their own self-absorbed hang-ups, which range from jealous rage over infidelity to nerdy, pop culture-based paranoia. At least two of the relationships are on the verge of dissolution. Emma (Erinn Hayes) and Pete (Blaise Miller), hosts of the so-called “Couples Brunch,” are the normal, ingénue couple, who invite their friends over to gently break the news of their divorce. The couple that breaks up Emma and Pete are the polygamous, free-spirited, heavily tattooed Buck (Kevin Brennan) and Lexi (Rachel Boston), imbued with a dim-witted flakiness that makes them little more than fluffy, caricaturish distractions amid the chaos. Hedy (America Ferrera) and Shane (Jeff Grace) make up the second flawed relationship; though the narrative imports little context about their actual dynamic, there are explicit hints that Shane’s anal retentiveness prevents Hedy from finally setting a wedding date after six years of engagement. The film’s strongest performers, Julia Stiles and David Cross, make up the mostly neutral fourth couple, Tracy and Glenn, who are on their third date.

It’s a Disaster strangely blends witty sitcom humor with white-privilege anxiety, but it forms neither a comedy or a drama. Given the seriousness of the premise, with its fatal outcome made deliberate in narrative development, the film leaves little doubt that it’s interested in exploring psychological fallout, detailing the thought patterns and bizarre behaviors of people who must overcome their own upcoming mortality. Indeed, director Todd Berger has noted in interviews that each character is supposed to represent a different stage of grief, which is an interesting, if formulaic, way to get extremist emotions bouncing off one another for purposes of hilarity. Hedy, for example, accepts that her life is over, and though she’s stricken by pain and confusion, she attempts to find closure in food, booze, homemade drugs, and being extremely upfront with everyone about everything. Emma and Pete, on the other hand, find it in their hearts to make up in order to spend their remaining hours in love. Glenn is the calmest and most helpful of them all, but a tawdry twist at the end reveals his creepy Christian beliefs in which he tries to “help” the others get into Heaven through wine poisoning before Judgment Day.

The allocation of one psychological stage per person isn’t exactly a realistic approach, since we generally tend to cycle through all (or at least most) of them when faced with death. For a film that attempts to distill a modicum of realism despite an absurdly ghastly scenario, Berger’s problematic formula is indicative of the film’s shortcomings. It’s not difficult to grasp how one might go about developing the well-worn existential premise of impending doom through the vehicle of comedy (dark humor, farce, and absurdity are some well-trusted routes), but Berger’s irreverent touch never quite feels appropriate given the characters’ propensity for histrionics. Imagine an episode of your favorite sitcom in which the world ends; it’s an unfathomable scenario for a diegesis with built-in inanity, and the same applies to It’s a Disaster. Jokes about how one has never lived life fully without watching The Wire may contain a grain of salt and even force a chuckle, but they’re glib, inconsistent, and feckless in the face of disaster.

No Place on Earth

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 21:24:00 -0400

Wearing the worn conventions of yesteryear’s television-grade documentaries, No Place on Earth is a remarkable story made almost unremarkable in the hands of lazy filmmaking. The doc opens with the discovery of a cave containing some not-so-ancient artifacts by talking head Chris Nicola, an American cave explorer who stumbled upon the objects while spelunking in Ukraine. For many years Nicola was unable to find an explanation for the finds, which couldn’t have dated back more than several decades; its secrets weren’t pre-history, but living history, in the words of Nicola.

The film then makes a few jarring cuts between Nicola’s present-day anecdote about a dearth of local research sources and a dramatization of unidentified people living in a cave, complete with cryptic voiceover: “Here we are in the grotto, buried alive.” Within a matter of minutes, however, the film virtually forgets about Nicola and switches into reenactment mode, introducing two related Jewish Ukrainian families who had lived underground in the same cave Nicola had discovered. During the Holocaust, the 38 members of the Esthmer and Wexler families, led by matriarch Esther Stermer (whose fictionalized voiceover is an unexplained source of narration), fled their town of Korolowska into the countryside, finding safety only in two nearly uninhabitable caves, Verteba Cave and Priest’s Grotto. They lived underground for 511 days, and survived the war.

The reenactment is aided not only by the fictional Esther, but by real interviews of the youngest survivors of the families: Saul and Sam Stermer, and Sonia and Sima Dodyk. It becomes obvious pretty quickly that while they’re crucial in imparting the striking detail about their collective gruesome experience, the survivors are unable to tell their story on screen without the aid of dramatization—or at least, the film gives that impression, though the candor and spirit of the subjects makes it a questionable judgment. As a result, the viewer is subjected to the stale, soporific aesthetic of reenactments that has been bored into ubiquity by countless unimaginative documentarians. It’s a specific style that doesn’t require cinephilic knowledge to recognize; anyone who’s ever owned a television will be familiar with the contrived visual signature of pre-1950s historical dramatizations: slight sepia tones, subdued staged acting, dreamy backlighting—the cinematic equivalent of boring history-book covers and postage stamps.

Certainly the story being told by the survivors is absolutely essential for the film’s narrative, and some of the details provided by the survivors are poignant in revealing the extreme hardships endured by the families, including, for example, the kids’ inability to stand sunlight in their eyes after countless uninterrupted months of cave-living. None of these moments feel more “real” or significant due to their dramatization though, and for the most part, the technique of reenactment feels more like a crutch than a useful visual aid. Equally disappointing, the film’s shoddy narrative structuring virtually undermines Nicola’s eventual discovery of the survivors many years later. The film abandons Nicola’s story for much of the film only to bring it back up again after the entirety of the survivors’ story has been told, a tough act to follow given its stranger-than-fiction qualities.

No Place on Earth closes with a present-day visit to the caves by the survivors and their grandchildren, a heartwarming conclusion given little time to provide any satisfying degree of reflection. One of the grandchildren explains, with a hint of sentimentality, that the cave was his first bedtime story, serving as a reminder that family oral storytelling can sometimes be more powerful than cinematic storytelling, especially in the case of prosaic documentation.

Blancanieves

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0400

Like The Artist and Tabu, Blancanieves is part of a recent upward trend in silent cinema homage, reimagining the Brothers Grimm tale of Snow White in ‘20s Seville, following a young woman named Carmen born under tragic circumstances. However, Blancanievesjoins those two films in name only, not spirit, lacking their emotional and intellectual substance.

Blancanieves starts off life as Carmen the orphan (Sofía Oria): on the day of her birth, Carmen’s father, Antonio Villalta (Daniel Giménez Cacho), is paralyzed permanently by a bull-fighting accident and her dancer mother dies during labor. Estranged from her father, who remarries a vain gold-digger nurse named Encarna (Maribel Verdú) who makes his life miserable, Carmen grows up under the nurturing guardianship of her grandmother, Doña Concha (Ángela Molina). When the beloved Doña suffers a heart attack during Carmen’s first communion, the child is sent to live with her evil stepmother, who forces Carmen to live in a dirty hole and refuses to let her see her father. Yet Carmen manages to do so anyway, in small, stealthy ways, finally giving the two a chance to bond through a shared love of music, dancing and bull-fighting, Antonio teaching Carmen basic bull-fighting techniques and Carmen sending her father on bittersweet nostalgic trips as her dancing reminds him of his beloved deceased wife.

Their rendezvous is soon discovered by Encarna, who threatens Carmen to stay away from Antonio, unless she wants him killed. When Carmen grows into a beautiful young woman (played by Macarena García), Encarna has her valet drown Carmen in the woods, though she is saved by a travelling troupe of bull-fighting dwarves. She awakes in complete amnesia, and so the bullfighters name her after the fairy tale Blancanieves (Snow White). The only memories she is able to recall flood back during a moment of desperation when one of the dwarves is nearly killed during a small bullfight; she remembers her training and saves him. It’s a serendipitous re-discovery that leads her to eventual fame as a talented bullfighter. Encarno still manages to have the last laugh, however, when she poisons Blancanieves during an important, spectacular bullfight in which the wicked stepmother gives Blancanieves a poisoned apple as a performance gift.

The epilogue is more cute than intriguing, though at least it has something to offer: Carmen’s grief-stricken romantic lead becomes an assistant for a circus freak show act in which audience members are tricked into thinking the corpse of Blancanieves can be brought alive by their kiss. It’s a quaint modernization of the healing lover’s kiss that at least tries something new (and emotionally compelling) with the Disney film’s fantastical ending. But elsewhere in the narrative, Blancanieves does very little to elevate the contrivance of Snow White into anything substantial or interesting. Indeed, the way the film is appropriated for ‘20s Spain is done so plainly and mechanically it reminds me of a mad-libs game from my eighth-grade improv club that employed fairy tales, story structures that were idiotproof for quick and easy reenactment and ripe for reinterpretation among young drama geeks. But quite frankly, most of the renditions my pubescent group members thought up were more interesting and memorable than Blancanieves.

Many critics unfairly called The Artist’s homage to silent cinema a specious gimmick that functioned as a ready-made visual aesthetic. Yet at least that film actually attempted to make numerous, reverent references to the history of film whilst underscoring specific arguments about film nostalgia in its thematic core; Blancanieves does very little other than re-appropriate an archaic aesthetic as cutesy formal device. Indeed, the only connection between this perfunctory fairytale adaptation and silent cinema is a shared time period. Yet nothing about the prevalence of silent film in that era is recalled throughout the narrative inBlancanieves, as it focuses instead on traditional Spanish forms of entertainment. As slapdash homage,Blancanieves is marred by the banality of its source material, incapable of making an argument that more contemporary movies should be done in the style of silent cinema. Equally absent as thematic form is the notable lack of one of the dwarves; the bullfighting troupe consists of only six members. It is possible the seventh dwarf is Dopey, and he is the film itself: mute, clumsy and dumb.

Mental

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0400

There shines a glimmer of promise within the first few minutes of Mental: The hills are alive, or at least they’re in song, in the imagination of a desperate housewife named Shirley (Rebecca Gibney), who belts out the lyrics to “The Sound of Music” while air-drying laundry in her suburban backyard, raising the eyebrows of uptight neighbors and embarrassing her five rambunctious daughters, who agree that their mum has gone bonkers once more. It’s a wacky and inane beginning for a film teeming with equally wacky and inane characters, but it’s also an ambitious and referential one for P.J. Hogan, whose best films frequently employ music as a distinct character, the best friend always there in times of need.

Yet the Australian production quickly dashes any hopes of a return to form for Hogan. Similarities to his brilliant 1994 debut, Muriel’s Wedding, exist, but they’re mostly superficial.Mental features an ever-fabulous Toni Collette as Shaz, a daredevil Mary Poppins type who works as a live-in nanny and empowers five young girls to learn how to stand up for themselves after their mother is sent to an asylum by their negligent, politician father, Barry (Anthony Lapaglia). Shaz is a tough but credible role model, though it’s revealed that she only took on the job in order to enlist the help of unwitting youngsters in helping her hijack her ex-husband’s prized shark, whom she believes contains the spirit of their dead daughter. But like many of the characters in this film who are glibly deemed mental, crazy, loony, or some other non-PC word used to describe mental illness, Shaz doesn’t have a clinical condition. She simply needs closure. And so, the family (minus the asshole father) comes to her rescue, sing-a-long-style.

If the title and hackneyed premise weren’t enough to inform the viewer that the film’s message is about the fascism inherent in the act of psychologizing marginalized peoples, don’t worry: Mental oversells the simple, but important idea through every line of dialogue. Virtually every character in the film accuses another of being mental (or something similar) a minimum of 20 times; anal-retentive neighbors are written in simply to act as caricatures of seemingly normal people with undiagnosed OCD; even the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders makes an appearance as Shaz’s Bible and a trick weapon used to fight obnoxious baristas, conveniently read aloud when random characters exhibit traits remotely resembling a real mental illness. Just for kicks, one of the daughters actually does have schizophrenia, yet her untreated condition is approached with complete nonchalance by her family. It’s as if Hogan wanted to acknowledge the fact that health care for mental illness isn’t all for naught, and then bizarrely decided to make her the butt of jokes.

Mental attempts to score emotional punches through the same flighty, dysfunctional family dynamics Hogan so brilliantly scripted in Muriel’s Wedding, but everything is off-key here, except perhaps the music of the von Trapps being a stand-in for the perfect family Shirley dreams of. Unfortunately, the communal healing powers of kumbaya, a device Hogan so effectively employs throughout his films, makes scarce appearances in Mental, except when it’s convenient for narrative closure. Given the film’s garrulous multitude of characters, one wishes they would all just shut up and sing.

On the alleged decline of Iranian cinema, and why Like Someone in Love is an Iranian film

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 00:45:00 -0400

Hamid Dabashi has written up a confusingly condescending article about the state of Iranian cinema on Al-Jazeera, in which he describes the majority of Iranian film artists no longer being in tune with some holy, magical, Dabashi-imagined space in which they can make truly innovative Iranian works. He does raise some valuable points about the dearth of recognition and room for development of Iranian cinema in a new era, but he does so by lambasting current masters. Dabashi blames the “brain drain” on the Islamic Republic, which throughout its history of harsh censorship has silenced Iranian artists and caused many of them to go into exile. But the people Dabashi is actually blaming here are the artists themselves, for falling into one of several traps. For Dabashi, only Abbas Kiarostami, who has avoided explicit political subject matter in his works, has remained creative in the face of repression. The two latest works by Jafar Panahi, made under house arrest, on the other hand:

… are self-indulgent vagaries farthest removed from the masterpieces like Offside (2006), Crimson Gold (2003) or Circle (2000) that have made Panahi a global celebrity. He should have heeded the vicious sentence and stayed away from his camera for a while and not indulge, for precisely the selfsame social punch that have made his best films knife-sharp precise has now dulled the wit of the filmmaker that was once able to put it to such magnificent use.

Not only physically but also mentally and emotively, Panahi is not in a position to think and film in his habitual engagement with his homeland. He is angry, and rightly so - and anger should never be the paramount sentiment when one stands behind a camera or in front of a keyboard. Given the political sentiments that film festival authorities around the globe have for Panahi, they indulge him in a political solidarity that dulls the wit of his cinematic judgment. These consolation prizes are a curse in disguise.

Dabashi never comes out and says that any artist under Panahi’s circumstances—house arrest, and a 20-year ban on filmmaking, leaving the country and talking to media—should not make art, but he does essentially imply that any Iranian artist faced with Panahi’s situation would be equally angry about the limitations, and that that particular emotional and physical state is not a legitimate one in which an artist can create truly innovative art. It’s reasonable and quite common for artists to take time off from a traumatic event in order to register their feelings on a subject before committing thoughts/ideas to paper/celluloid. (Kiarostami once said he was thankful he waited after the Manjil-Rudban earthquake before making Life, and Nothing More…, though his initial knee-jerk reaction was to start filming the immediate aftermath of the earthquake). Yet Dabashi’s strict wording makes it sound like a self-fulfilling prophecy: Panahi knew what he was doing by not following Kiarostami’s footsteps and instead making explicitly political critiques. He was predictably sentenced a harsh punishment, and now he’s in a position where he can no longer comment on Iranian society in the same subversive manner.

Furthermore, This Is Not A Film does not read to me as an angry film so much as a frustrated one, and plenty of critics have weighed in on how the film’s focus on filmmaking is its most fascinating and revelatory element. Dabashi’s logic is that an artist under Panahi’s degree of pressure is unsuited for artistic creation, but the film’s best strength is that Panahi’s house arrest and inability to make films—the artistic equivalent of a sensory deprivement cell—is exactly the condition necessary to produce astute reflections of the ontology of filmmaking, its process, and the existence of necessary criteria for filmmaking in its sheer absence.

The second biggest problem with Dabashi’s piece is conflating an Iranian artist’s exile with a loss of Iranian identity within their work. The “Iranian-ness” of a film made outside of Iran is not by any stretch an original conundrum; the definition and criteria of national cinema has been an ongoing debate among film scholars for decades. But for all intents and purposes Dabashi is not concerned with the status-quo industrial definition of a film’s “nationality”—that is, the idea that a film belongs to the country or countries that produced it.

This particular definition becomes problematic with certain films. Say, one made in multiple countries, with dialogue spoken in multiple languages, and by a filmmaker from another country. I’m referring to Certified Copy, which is a French-Italian co-production, shot in Tuscany, features dialogue in French, Italian and English, and is made by an Iranian filmmaker. While I don’t disagree with Dabashi’s classification of Certified Copy as being non-Iranian, I can’t help but wonder if he’s (again) being too strict with his generalizations, this time about films made by artists belonging to the Iranian diaspora.

I’d consider Persepolis—a French production—quite the Iranian film because of its strong thematic and narrative identification with the author’s homeland. I’d also make the argument that Like Someone In Love—a French-Japanese co-production with Japanese dialogue—contains an element of Iranian-ness that is a reflection of Kiarostami’s own upbringing.

The film invites the viewer to contemplate the heterogeneous quality of seemingly static relationships and identities. Noriaki’s assumption that Takashi’s relationship with Akiko is that of grandfather/granddaughter, not client/escort, is extremely important not just for the film’s narrative, but its larger ideas about personal relationships and the privacy implicit within them. Like Someone in Love plays off the supposed importance or relevance of projected ideas about identities and relationships to underscore the oppression of their prescribed meanings, as well as the ways in which relationship labels shape our expectations when communicating with others.

Given Noriaki’s violent temperament, it’s obvious that he would not be anywhere near as kind or hospitable towards Takashi if he did not think he was talking to Akiko’s elder family member, whom he has been taught to impress and treat with utmost respect. This is a social script found in many cultures, Iran and Japan included. But the underlying tension within the dynamic between the older gentleman and younger not-so-gentleman is of course, that Takashi is not actually Akiko’s grandfather but rather her client, with whom she spent the previous evening entertaining. Yet through the devoted care Takashi provides Akiko the day after her escort call—protecting her from Noriaki, nursing her wound whilst using the kind of language expected from a parent, picking her up and dropping her off at school—he does in turn, become like a grandfather figure to Akiko. Like Someone in Love may be about sublimated love (in the filmmaker’s own paraphrased words, every character operates like someone in love), but the film is pointing out the many different types of love possible even within a single relationship, and their natural development and dissolution into one another. A relationship is privately never as defined, rigid or containable as the arbitrary language deployed by society and people outside of it.

These polymorphous relations between people are simply a normal part of life, yet in extremely patriarchal societies in which male/female relationships are under heavy scrutiny and surveillance—say, Iran—this organic relationship-building is treated as nonexistent, with discrepancies, or hints of them, treated as damning and requiring of punishment. In equal measure, the desperation that the Islamic regime has instilled in people has eroded the communal thoughtfulness fostered in Iranian culture. Abundant hospitality, taarof and kindness among strangers—centuries-old gestures of geniality—are still present in Iran, but they are easily overturned by paranoia and witch-hunt-like accusations. Films like A Separation explore this idea as well as the collision in fractured families torn by conflicting priorities (Nader’s Alzheimer’s afflicted father versus the freedom of Nader and Simin’s daughter). Many well-known Iranian films explore the issues of personal boundaries and expectations within the context of Iranian social norms, and that’s because Iranian society has been undergoing great turmoil in its traditional and modernist ideas about family relationships. Iran is a culture torn between collectivism and individualism, much like the Japanese culture portrayed in Like Someone in Love, and the film is very much about the futility and uselessness of society’s definitions of an intensely private, unstoppable emotion that blooms into many different kinds of love.

New World

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 16:24:00 -0400

Bestowed with a somewhat novel twist, Park Hoon-jung’s New World employs the good-guy/bad-guy power dynamic of the typical cop-gangster flick and treats it as the primary source of the story’s intrigue. But the mole-imbedded gang war at the heart of this film plays out less like an organic round of Go between cops and criminals than the elaborate scheme of one character operating like a sadistic Creator and wreaking havoc in the lives of his ants.

The seemingly omnipotent mastermind is neither a criminal genius nor dirty cop, but something/someone in between: police boss Chang (Choi Min-sik), who infiltrates a Korean criminal network fronted by a corporation called Gold Moon. He installs a number of spies into the gang for an intimate degree of intel—most of them don’t know the others are informants—and then plays them off each other alongside the gangsters in order to pick off throne successors one by one before the Gold Moon board of directors makes its final decision in selecting a new gang boss. Park’s twist is that Chang doesn’t want to dismantle Gold Moon, but to get the police to secretly take it over. His number-one confidante, Ja-sung (Lee Jung-jae), finds himself increasingly entrenched, powerful, and subsequently vulnerable within the Gold Moon organization, until a long series of maneuverings and deaths magically catapult him into gang-boss position. Like most magicians, Chang never reveals his tricks. Ja-sung’s mental health is virtually nonexistent throughout the film (the opening brutally explains how Gold Moon rats meet their end), but his desperate pleas to his mad-genius boss go ignored or mocked. While it may seem like Chang has the entire deck up his sleeve, Park lets Ja-sung have the last laugh in a twist ending.

With all these shifts and turns and twists and what not, New World is densely maze-like. Given the large cast, it takes time to lay out the cleverly constructed fall for every gangster and cop, and Park ensures there’s nonstop wise-cracking dialogue in between all the murders (one could callNew World a gangster chamber drama, but that wouldn’t take into account its sardonic comedy). Yet the film imagines itself to be more intelligent than its labyrinthine script would suggest. The final twist, choreographed to be shocking but rewarding for the viewer, becomes the logical choice for Ja-sung, yet it feels somewhat predictable. One could argue Ja-sung’s decision is scripted intentionally to be foreshadowed, but Park spends so much time luxuriating on the victory it denies the film from delivering on its larger ideas about Ja-sung’s choice and the blurred line between law enforcement and criminality.

Some of these characters play off of each other brilliantly in delivering their “gotcha” barbs, but the film’s steady stream of witticisms, written in the same minor chord, begins to tire after the first hour. Choi’s Chang is elegantly low-key and nonchalant, and the obnoxiously boisterous gang heir Jung Chung (Hwang Jung-min) is also a welcome performance in a film loaded with jaded characters. The film ends not on one, not two, but three epilogues, each more unnecessary than the last, using cool demeanors, snappy cigarette-lighting, and graphic violence as a chic display of smug cleverness that just about sums itself up: This is action-thriller feather preening, but all the wit in the world can’t hide the narrative sprawl that rots from within.

Badlands

Tue, 19 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0400

“Suppose I shot you. How’d that be?” That challenge, by Kit Carruthers (Martin Sheen) to the father of his underage lover, Holly (Sissy Spacek), is a trademark purr, oscillating between candor and impassivity, his words bouncing off the shabby walls of Holly’s quiet South Dakota home like a hypothetical thought experiment instead of a real threat. The revolver dangles around his thumb as precariously as the father’s life, and the verbal articulation of the fatal act is deadly not only for Holly’s father, but for Kit’s own eventual fate once captured and sentenced. That lingering question forces the viewer into contemplating the randomness of life, the arbitrary introduction of this juvenile delinquent into an impressionable girl’s life, doors that open, doors that close, every action turning into a reaction. These are the imaginings of a young man who desperately lacks and yearns for an identity, who speculates about the possibility of achieving one through murder and addresses it to his very first victim, and whose only means are to carve out an existence through notoriety as a killer. Kit’s decision after uttering those words, polite as he is (“I’ve got a gun here, sir”), comes to define him more than anything else in his brief life. More than the James Dean comparisons, his pleasant banter, the series of trinkets he hoards and gives away throughout the film, more than the pile of rocks he builds with wild-eyed frenzy before forever losing his physical union with earthly matter in the badlands of Montana.

What is Badlands if not a meditation on the scarcity of identity of a notorious murderous couple mythologized for his charisma and her alleged innocence, and who better to pose such questions than a philosopher? Malick’s first feature film, written after a brief career in academia and a stint at the American Film Institute, is frequently touted as part and parcel of the 1970s New American Cinema (on the surface, it contains the post-western mythos of road movies and on-the-run-romance flicks like Easy Rider and Bonnie and Clyde), but it’s also distinct from those films insofar as it presents a new form of storytelling that’s more interesting than its subjects.

Based loosely on the nine-day, 10-victim killing spree carried out by the 18-year-old Charles Starkweather and his 14-year-old girlfriend, Caril Fugate, Badlands charts less a glorified fugitive sexual chemistry than two kids playing house in a tree with grandiose visions of escape and normality. Yet the film is understated, underwhelming, its jarring violence always a necessary force in delaying the inevitable and propping up the grand illusion of their continuous existence in the barren landscapes that reflect back at them the inertia of their own essence.

Holly’s romanticized voiceover—one of many Malickisms to appear in nascent form here—is used as a means of subtle irony, demonstrating the tragedy of young naïveté transmuting into complacent amorality upon the introduction of a charming fellow. Malick’s decision during production to employ voiceover wasn’t so much frowned upon as it was simply unusual for the 1970s, deemed unnecessary and a mark of lazy filmmaking, but of course, that was only because the world had yet to see its epodic implementation in Malick’s cinema. Badlands was too early for the elegiac eloquence seen years later in The Thin Red Line or the prescient, contradictory world-weary innocence of Linda in Days of Heaven, but Holly’s voiceover is an essential key in attempting to decode the capricious torpidity of an impenetrable mind. In saying, “The world was like a faraway planet to which I could never return,” Holly demonstrates both her harmlessness and her indifference to both life and death, and despite Spacek’s dulcet nonchalance (or perhaps in spite of it), the sentiment is somehow more chilling than Kit’s trigger-happy violence or the wantonness of similar archetypal young female killers or apprentices. Her deferential agape for and girly chattiness with the teenage female companion of a couple Kit is compelled to kill in a storm cellar is equally disturbing: After having explored her destiny with Kit, “for better or worse,” she’s eager to compare notes on having a boyfriend with her new companion, though of course the subtext is that she won’t help the girl if Kit wants to kill her.

Badlands is perhaps most different from the rest of Malick’s oeuvre in its straightforward narrative continuity and reliance on scenes that play out in real time. With the exception of the ambiguous elliptical nature of the montage-like establishment of Kit and Holly’s budding romance, the rest of the film clearly plays out over the course of a week, not unlike the real-life affair between Starkweather and Fugate. Such linear protraction for a filmmaker renowned for lyrical, elliptical filmmaking is perhaps the fledgling of a young film writer discovering his own cinematic framework, and this is sometimes used as an argument against the supposed lack of poeticism and refinement in Malick’s first work. But such assumptions about the so-called creative “progression” of an auteur typically denigrates the actual beauty of the film in question. Badlands may not be Malick’s best film, but it’s certainly his most anomalous, and, therefore, distinct—though The Tree of Life now offers a worthy competitor. Where it’s not refined in form, Badlands is so by virtue of the specificity of its material (the then-topical sensationalism of teenage sociopaths and their glamorization in popular culture), a fact that has been buried by the dense literature published on Malick. Yet the film never once feels like the faded photos Holly examines under her father’s stereopticon. Badlands can’t be classified a historical document awaiting some kind of cultural preservation or renewed interest. It’s the beloved little sister in a family teeming with geniuses, yet it’s unfortunate that so few critics are compelled to call to attention to her sheer timelessness and sublime character.

Image/Sound:

As with its previous Terrence Malick releases, Criterion worked fastidiously in remastering the film to obtain approval from the director himself (though unlike previous Malick Criterion releases, he’s missing from the thanks section), and the results are absolutely resplendent. Perhaps more noticeable and enjoyable than the care employed in the preservation of grain here—though tidied, this 4K transfer retains the filmic fuzzy texture—is the focus on color. Badlands is by no means visually chromatic, but it does have a highly definitive tone and accompanying palette that emphasizes hue muting without ever making the film look grey or too dark. Malick’s tenebrous coloring is beautifully transferred on Blu-ray and is especially radiant in every scene that was shot during magic hour. Shots like the striking short one of Kit as straight and still as a scarecrow, relaxing his elbows over his rifle in the fields beneath an azure horizon, are especially catching. The monoaural soundtrack has also been refined here on an LPCM 1.0 track that perfectly distinguishes between the portentous music of Carl Orff’s Schulwerk, Sissy Spacek’s phlegmatic, lucid voiceover, and the frequently quiescent, occasionally spasmodic dialogue.

Extras:

Given Malick’s resistance to media appearances, Criterion has frequently called on his collaborators in the creation of supplemental material. There’s strangely no commentary track on the Badlands Blu-ray, but its omission is perfectly acceptable in place of a supplement from an obliging cast and crew forced to provide enough anecdotes for a 90-minute film. In its place is a 40-minute made-in-house documentary with new interviews with Spacek, Martin Sheen, and art director Jack Fisk that explicates the significance of Badlands in their early careers, and much of it is fascinating insofar as it reveals the burgeoning, “anything-goes” production ideas emerging from the chaos of New Hollywood. That and a shorter interview with associate editor Billy Weber are the most interesting media supplements on this markedly modest package from a company that usually does more than its fair share of homework (indeed, the inclusion of an episode of American Justiceabout Starkweather and Fugate is more than a tad strange). Naturally, the physical supplements of any Criterion release are equally important, and they don’t disappoint here: An essay by filmmaker Michael Almereyda is as astute as it is informative, and that pulp-art cover is one of the boldest cover decisions in Criterion’s history; though it may seem ill-suited for Malick, the crude composition strangely grows on you over time, not quite unlike Kit Carruthers.

Overall:

Terrence Malick’s beloved first film gets a somewhat light, though reverent, treatment from Criterion, with a breathtaking transfer, brazen pulp-art cover and mostly respectable supplements.

Spring Breakers

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0400

You could call Spring Breakers a spiritual journey to the hedonistic mecca of Florida, a story of young corruption and love or just the fucked-up dream of some bored co-eds on acid—and you’d be correct on all counts. While the film is imbued with apparent realism, director Harmony Korine’s extreme stylistic dexterity here—an infusion of Michael Mann colours amped up several notches for the Day-Glo bikini costume design and accompanied by the rhythmic flashback tics of Steven Soderbergh’s The Limey—suggests at least theoretically a-dream-within-a-dream or meta-fictional quality. Yet these gestures are not without thematic gravitas; there is a slew of contradictory elements bursting from within the director’s fifth feature, namely its superficial glamorization of lewd behaviours and hubris, the shaping of characters’ experiences into a vicarious mediated one for the viewer, turning that escapist apparatus into a means of voyeurism and subsequent conflicting guilt and shame for the viewer, and doing that through an upfront mockery of such larger-than-life manic bacchanalia. “Just pretend it’s like a video game,” advises one of the girls to the others as they’re about to brazenly stick up a joint in ski masks, explicitly reminding the viewer that what they’re watching is indeed fictional. You can’t help but be simultaneously awed, flummoxed, giddy and slightly queasy from the movie. Spring Breakers is as likely to make you throw up as it will make you have an orgasm.

The film begins with a five-minute montage of hyper college kids on the beach going cray, not quite unlike YouTube videos of real spring breakers, but here the debauchery is cinematic, slo-mo and hyper-actualized. It’s also absolutely grotesque. Instead of imitating the simulations of or having real sex, these carousers engage simply in the performative crassness and lewdness of hardcore pornography, girls lasciviously giving blowjobs to popsicles, guys pretending to ejaculate from beer bottles onto semi-naked, sand-encrusted, hip-gyrating beach girls lying beneath them. It initially feels like Korine is celebrating such abhorrence, but the next 90 minutes makes up for that understandable, yet erroneous judgment.

Spring Breakers is about four young women named Faith (Selena Gomez), Brit (Ashley Benson), Cotty (Rachel Korine) and Candy (Vanessa Hudgens), bored co-eds who would do anything to visit Florida for their weeklong break. Dramatically complaining about their lack of funds, the three naughtier girls—Brit, Cotty and Candy—steal a professor’s car to rob a store, the first of many signs that these girls aren’t afraid of shit. In Florida they revel naturally in their freewheeling licentiousness, until a random drug bust leads to their incarceration, changing their setting from sun-drenched beaches to the blue-tinted harshness of reality inside a police station. Magically, a corn-rowed local drug dealer named Alien (James Franco, in his best and most entertaining role) bails out the girls.

This is when the narrative begins to make certain dramatic turns that are so beautifully structured it’s as if Korine isn’t just toying with our expectations of this being supposedly escapist fare, but also messing with our sense of convention in an alleged drama about the inevitable corruption of young impressionable girls. Faith feels threatened by and is suspicious of the drug dealer’s no-strings-attached gesture, but in all honesty Alien is who he says he is—the guy ends up falling in love with the girls later in the film because of their tough-girl recklessness—and he never does anything to harm them, nor does he expect anything in return for his Southern hospitality. Faith, who is the most innocent of the four and whose name glibly describes her religious personality, exits the stage at this point. Cotty leaves not too long thereafter, when she is injured after Alien’s rival Archie (Gucci Mane) shoots up his car. This leaves the baddest of the bitches—Brit and Candy—to help Alien take out Archie. Without ruining the finale, it’s a resplendent and reflective turn of events, made all the more so by the girls’ ironic but still-candid voiceover narration, which echoes the sentiments of the previous narrators, Faith and Alien. Faith spends the first half of the film describing the spiritual, life-changing experience of Spring Break, explaining in a diary-like confession to her grandmother how she “found herself” in Florida. When Alien gracefully takes over the narration, it’s as if nothing has changed—”Spring breeeaaak, foreeevah, y’all” he intones in his slow, self-amused drawl, describing in earnest his love for his bitches. By the time Brit and Candy take over, their omnipotent positions and reiterations of finding themselves, being the best they can be, is a lot more resonant than just pure irony. The film intends such personal revelations to hold real significance—the blood they’ve shed, the guns they’ve fired, the money they’ve stolen, all this corruption has changed them, and in their eyes it’s for the better.

Yet Spring Breakers does not argue that debauchery and criminality is actually for the better—indeed, the film is actively and explicitly goading the viewer into feeling complicit from taking so much pleasure out of the characters’ hedonism, as cloaked as it is in spring-breaking fun and negligent mirth. Alien/Franco’s astronomically enthralling improvised “look at all my shit” scene, with its bevy of quotable one-liners (“Just look at this shit!”, “I got Scarface on repeat! Constant, y’all!”, “I got shorts in every color!”) as he demonstrates his firearm and blood-money wealth to the girls, in addition to their touching, beautiful rendition of Britney Spears’ “Everytime,” is treated with as much irreverence as reverence, almost as if stoically acknowledging that such pop culture is our culture, as lowbrow as it may be. Spring Breakers is not about trash, hedonism or camp, though certain artistic decisions may give that impression, and less-intelligent viewers will most certainly see it as carnal, cinematic self-indulgence. Such celebratory gestures are only the surface level of a deeper critique of our wanton need to cheer on the devil within all of us and to acquiesce to the immense, self-gratification in its virtual glorification and embodiment.

The Monk

Fri, 08 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0500

Dominik Moll’s new film is the latest uninspired adaptation of Matthew Gregory Lewis’s The Monk, a grisly, early Gothic novel deemed highly transgressive and indictable by critics upon its publication in 1796. Using the conventional structure of the morality tale, Lewis subverted the underlying messaging of tsk-tsk storytelling, undermining the righteousness of virtue by writing good characters into tragic outcomes brought on by mythical representations of evil. Killing off innocent characters was a provocative literary device for the late 1700s, when organized religion was the grounding moral framework of its readers, but in contemporary times such plot turns are typically crafted in the quest of other larger, secular ideas, like the randomness of life or moral relativity.

Moll never addresses Lewis’s original groundbreaking ideas in The Monk, nor does he rework the material for a contemporary audience. Instead, the film diminishes the significance of secondary characters to focus on the repressed inner lubricity of its bleary-eyed titular protagonist, Ambrosio (Vincent Cassel), a popular, doting monk reputed for his God-fearing sermons. Delivered anonymously to the monastery as a baby orphan, Ambrosio is taken in by the monks despite their shared worry about a strange, hand-like birthmark on his arm being a sign of the devil. Ambrosio grows up to be an intelligent, articulate servant to God whose religious devotion is unparalleled by his peers, though he’s disturbed by a recurring dream of a hooded red figure whom he cannot physically reach. That’s the first sign of the devil—or conversely, Ambrosio’s own mental seed of perversion—that eventually grows into the corporeal form of a young woman, Matilda (Déborah François), who masks herself and claims in a low whisper to be Valerio, a young male burn victim who desires to be closer to God. Satan works his magic through Matilda’s miraculous healing; her touch eases Ambrosio’s headaches and she later sucks out centipede venom from the feverish, semi-conscious monk’s hand, leading to delirious sex that he barely remembers upon awakening. Upon his first iniquity against God, it’s basically all over for Ambrosio; he does one bad thing after another, eventually raping a young woman, Antonia (Joséphine Japy), who looks up to him, and killing her mother (who turns out to be his own mother).

There are a few interesting ideas introduced in the narrative, albeit mechanically, most notably the question of evil being an essentialist quality with symbolic markers. Was Ambrosio a spawn of the devil all along, or were the omens (the birthmark, the crows that nearly peck his infantile body to death, his untouchable rose garden, his dream) simply superstitious projections? Another theory could be that the priest’s callous treatment of a pregnant nun later imprisoned to death was his first real sin against God, and that the rest of the film plays out as a kind of karmic revenge against Ambrosio. The film does little to flesh out either idea and settles instead on a vague ambiguity about the subject; such muddling makes the characters’ frequent rote platitudes about the presence of the Devil that much more empty and meaningless.

When the Devil does arrive in the form of the young, nubile beauty of Matilda, the once-devout Ambrosio loses all control over his actions so quickly and redundantly it’s a wonder such a tedious film can churn longer than an hour. But it’s the lack of motivation and explanation behind Ambrosio’s descent into hell that ultimately sinks The Monk into its own ruin. Ambrosio shows consciousness, though not conscientiousness, thereby eliminating the idea that he’s possessed, and even if he were, the film’s internal logic and occasional flirtations with visceral depictions of supernatural evil would dictate the visual communication of demonic possession. The film is otherwise quite naturalistic, and yet every part of the viewer begs for Ambrosio’s perplexed expressions, eyes beady from dark cinematography, to transform into a grotesque apparition of the devil. In a film that ungainly echoes the horror genre, such an ending would be a cheap modernization of Lewis’s gripping novel, but at least it would make the film superficially gratifying.

Oz the Great and Powerful

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0500

Warner may keep a draconian eye on any cultural product with a smidgen of resemblance to the beloved classic The Wizard of Oz–for which they have owned the rights since 1996–and while that particular film has comprehensively permeated popular culture, the original L. Frank Baum book franchise offers a wide, colourful universe full of imaginative creative fodder for fictional adaptations.

Disney presciently snapped up the film rights for the rest of the canonical Oz books by Baum and has since created several works based on the franchise, though none have ever gained the cultural significance or acclaim of the 1939 classic. In what appears to be another example of Disney mining its properties for new works, the studio decided to revive the Oz franchise for the new millennium. It may seem initially strange that with Oz the Great and Powerful the company did not set out on adapting one of the novels. Instead, Disney created its own prequel to The Wizard of Oz based on elements from the franchise that focus on Oz’s origins story, from demoralized circus magician to wizard/leader of a fantastical land.

Taking the approach of a loose adaptation in the creation of something new is a practical and smart approach, in many ways: it absolves the studio of sticking to any stories or ideas in the Oz books that are outdated in 2013 (say for example, the cutesy, condescending depiction of little people in the Munchkins); it gives Disney a chance to reboot a beloved fictitious universe and give us new reasons to love it; and in a way, it allows Disney to one-up Warner by creating the “first” Oz story.

Unfortunately, hypothesizing the notion that Disney can churn out something even remotely decent and imaginative is, well, naive and hopeless. Oz the Great and Powerful is not a new, contemporary take on the Land of Oz, but a sad, bloated, strangely misogynistic tale without any of the Sam Raimi magic that usually accompanies his best works. James Franco plays Oz like a conniving schmuck whose demoralization in his own profession and character is a springboard for positive-psychologizing bullshit about how he truly is magical even if he doesn’t think he’s a wizard by Land of Oz standards. Yet his talents in chicanery are exactly what is needed to save the Land from the evil witches tyrannizing the citizens.

He may be a washed-up circus magician in Kansas, but in this alternate universe, where things are actually magical, Oz’s knowledge of early-1900s “magical” inventions and experience in wooing crowds can turn a sleight of hand into millions of helping hands to defeat the Wicked Witches. Not only is this kind of story a gateway in forcing the viewer into a condescending, holier-than-thou perspective, it’s completely derivative–sure, common knowledge in the real world becomes the stuff of magic in an alternate universe where people don’t know what “cinema” means–and yet it is exactly the film’s ending climax, a war battle strategy that saves the day and that turns Oz from a cowardly pessimist into a hero.

What’s worse than contrived storytelling–nothing new for Disney, after all–is the reason why the war is started in the first place. The Wicked Witch has been secretly terrorizing citizens for some time under the pretense of being a good witch named Evanora, but it’s the jealousy experienced by her sister Theodora, who falls in love with Oz, that triggers the war, turning her from a sweet, beautiful, innocent good witch looking for love into the wicked, ugly-on-the-inside-and-outside green-skinned evildoer she was always meant to be. Unlike Hell, the Land of Oz hath the fury of a woman scorned.

Oz’s womanizing ways are just an extension of his natural morally ambiguous nature, but getting revenge on a two-timing fake magician can only be imagined in the eyes of Disney through the evil sorcery of ugly, vain women. It’s a disturbing message for youngsters, for whom the film is ostensibly made.

These are some of the most pressing issues in the film but there are many more, perhaps the most obvious and consistent one having to do with a lack of world-building awe and magic that usually befits such fantastical stories. The production design and 3D effects are fine, but they look a little too fine, as if over-polished, as if Raimi spent most of his budget getting the technical details to look great, instead of focusing on a better overall production.

Thus, we have sequences in which spectacle effaces itself to the point of embarrassing oblivion. Take, for example, one memorable chase scene wherein Oz and company are almost bitten by Alien-like distending flower monsters with lightbulbs for eyes, at one point turning their chomping maws to the camera for an additional three-dimensional moment of terror. Oz the Great and Powerful is flimsy puppeteering masquerading as 3D filmmaking, in which the director cannot be found anywhere, be it behind the curtain or in the artistic signature of the film itself.

Best Films by Directors Over 70

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0500

I contributed two blurbs for Spectrum Culture’s list of great late-career works:

Certified Copy (2010) dir: Abbas Kiarostami (1940–)

Despite being his 17th film, Certified Copy marked a series of firsts for Abbas Kiarostami. It was the first film the Iranian master made as a septuagenarian, the first fiction film he made outside of Iran and the first love story Kiarostami crafted since the unrequited romance at the heart of Through the Olive Trees (1994). Perhaps most notably, the mysterious first-date-cum-broken-marriage dynamic between William Shimell and Juliette Binoche is also the first non-Islamic love story of Kiarostami’s, and the universality of the troubles, quirks and gestures shared between the two partners is indicative of the director’s own talent in surpassing culture, time and religion in delineating the woes of love. If The Report depicted the struggles of domesticity and the abhorrent, hypocritical masculinity Kiarostami saw reflected in himself and Iranian society in the expansion of the late ‘70s anti-Shah sentiment, and if Olive Trees reflected the naiveté and stubbornness of young unrequited love through the perspective of an older and wiser man, Certified Copyis then Kiarostami’s most intimate, knowledgeable and revealing portrayal of love, one marked by accrued years of acumen in such matters, and like many of his works, one with few autobiographical markers that nonetheless bears such overbearing familiarity and intimacy with the material that one can only assume Kiarostami wrote from experience. But like the “true” nature of the relationship between Shimell and Binoche, such details matter very little in Kiarostami’s all-absorbing diegeses.

Frenzy (1972) dir: Alfred Hitchcock (1899–1980)

Before it was finally released, Frenzy was commonly referred to as the greatest film Alfred Hitchcock never made. After a year of feverishly working on and off the project with a slew of collaborators, Hitchcock had great difficulty getting studios to sign off on what they saw as an explicitly violent screenplay. Even his biggest supporters—including François Truffaut—weren’t sold on the script, and once production began it was slowed down by freak incidents, including a stroke suffered by Hitchcock’s wife and frequent collaborator, Alma Reville. But all of the director’s stress melted away upon its release and subsequent immense critical praise. Indeed, Truffaut remarked that the director looked 15 years younger at the Cannes screening, by which time the film had begun garnering acclaim. Frenzy marked Hitchcock’s last British film, and it is a distinct throwback to an anachronistic London. The film’s depiction of the British metropolis is indeed an incredibly nostalgic one—take note, for example, the prominent use of Covent Garden as a setting—and there is perhaps no clearer indication of Hitchcock’s reverence for his British upbringing than the outdated dialogue that courses through the film. Hitchcock was 72 during the film’s production and had begun to show signs of slowing down, taking longer during shooting days than usual for a director well-known for his efficiency. Frenzy feels very much like a cinematic goodbye letter to the director’s homeland, as well as to the style he established in the former half of his career.

Remake/Remodel: La Chienne (1931) vs. Scarlet Street (1945)

Sun, 03 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0500

The narratives of both Jean Renoir’s La Chienne and Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street are difficult to watch, given that the viewer is privy to the web of deceit being spun between characters, knowing full-well it will inevitably spell impending doom. The ineffectual nebbishy cashier and protagonist, Maurice Legrand (Michel Simon) in La Chienne and Chris Cross (Edward G. Robinson) in Scarlet Street, demonstrates a level of cowardice and naiveté in grown men that is simply unforgivable, thereby resulting in a fate that must be tragic. It is not surprising that character identification in either film is almost impossible considering the wretchedness of its many characters.

Lang’s version for this reason, focused as it is on acute character experiences that are extremely morbid and pathetic, tends to paint the picture as a maudlin affair, whereas Renoir’s La Chienne—with characters who are for the most part, equally pathetic—depicts a fucked-up sociocultural milieu in which Legrand is actually freed existentially, for the most part, by losing his middle-class status, his wife and mistress. As for losing the ability to perform his art, well that’s something the bourgeois can worry about. Legrand is shown as being more preoccupied with the freewheeling life of a bum—not unlike Renoir’s Boudu Saved from Drowning, released a year later and also starring Simon—than with his stolen art work at a gallery. Nor is Legrand wracked with the guilty conscience of Cross that Lang so superbly depicts at the end ofScarlet Street. La Chienne exposes Legrand for who he really is, even if French society is too blind to see it. Legrand is not only a coward whose inability to gain mastery over people and situations when needed robs him of his privilege, but one whose desperation leads to animalistic and vile actions that forever taint his soul as well as his class. Legrand’s diddering inferiority as well as his middle-class status makes him an impossible suspect for Lulu’s murder, whereas Dédé’s criminal background, low status, brutishness and foul mouth makes him the perfect culprit. But by committing sins that are deemed morally corrupt, Legrand is robbed of his status, although his tumultuous experiences have led him to no longer care. He’s much happier in the simplicity of a daily pursuit of sustenance and basic survival.

What Legrand, Cross and their peripheries reveal is the startling cultural differences not only between France and America, but their respective time periods. Released in 1931, La Chienne was Renoir’s second sound film, and was integral in helping the French auteur learn how to express his critiques of French society through his layered and rich soundscapes using a new cinematic invention. Renoir accuses the middle-class everyman of being susceptible to Legrand’s fate, whereas Lang articulates a prescient expression of inferiority that would come to preoccupy Hollywood in the coming post-war years: the anxieties of masculinity (or a lack thereof) that would inevitably shape a genre that Scarlet Street also helped to define with its lighting, rain-splattered streets and femme fatale: the film noir.

Given Renoir and Lang’s shared status as auteurs, it is interesting to see how their respective talents help to craft these incredibly unique works that share the same story. Sound is especially integral in the works of both Renoir and Lang, and one would be hard-pressed to find two directors with such opposite approaches in its employment. Lang’s experience with German Expressionism helped him to invoke particular moods and tonal continuity. Every sound is a calculated and singular moment in time, and many are often repeated for psychological effect. Scarlet Street’s ending is so effective in establishing Cross’s insanity with its repetitive use of music and Kitty’s derisive cackling that other elements—his failed attempt to hang himself, the flashing light outside Cross’s apartment—seem forced and unnecessary by contrast.

Renoir was equally fascinated with sound, but for completely different reasons. Unlike Lang, who sculpted precise cinematic signatures through silence, staccatos, repetition and minimalism, Renoir wanted a full-fledged orchestra, a cacophony of people and objects that stirred in their settings and that would contribute to the depiction of a hypocritical and blind world, one in which street music could distract a crowd from the shrieks of Kitty’s murder taking place only a few feet away, and the escape of its killer. The result was not intended to bleed decibels—indeed Renoir put as much effort into orchestrating his layering of soundscapes as Lang did in refining his pointed expressions—but rather to show the labyrinthine world in which Legrand lived and suffered. In one scene, the sounds of a child’s piano practice streaming in from a nearby window becomes indelibly linked to the innocence Legrand once had. But in his pathetic middle age, Legrand steals his wife’s savings as casually as he shaves his face, all-the-while glancing and fixating upon an open window in which the child can be seen playing the piano. It’s a window into another world, but one that Legrand surely experienced at some point in his life. Legrand’s guilelessness couldn’t have been a defect in his early life when children are naturally naive, and such traits would have allowed him to gain a humane sensitivity that would help him learn the craft of an art like music, or in his case, painting. This beautiful thematic association between two people who don’t know each other is established seamlessly through the annexation of nearby sounds and a visualization of spaces, which are real and physical, but also connotative of idealized spaces and visions.

In many respects, La Chienne achieves a degree of removed sympathy for all of its characters—even the duplicitous gold digger Lulu—that Scarlet Street does not, and that’s because the film so successfully and explicitly marks the larger, questionable jungle in which people like Legrand, Lulu and Dédé exist. The needs and desires of so-called regular folk are linked to criminals, even if their strategies in gaining what they want are different. Take, for example, Lulu’s of the house and household appliances Legrand has rented for her, to her envious friend. Lulu wants a loving man who can provide for her, but she is too smart and young for Legrand, too stupid and weak for Dédé, and too destitute to realize the error of her ways and to find someone better. This is not to deny the immense emotional tragedy at the core of Scarlet Street. There would have been very few American filmmakers at the time who could have balanced the woes of such a pathetic character caught up in unfortunate circumstances—indeed, Ernst Lubitsch gave up trying to rework a remake for La Chienne—but in spite of that, Cross’ extreme emasculation and Kitty and Johnny’s extreme wickedness are frequently too condemning and imposed. La Chienne may have the more damning title—it translates as “The Bitch”—but it scatters the blame of moral corruption across systemic failures, and as a result, the film feels more nuanced. In Scarlet Street, tragedy is spooky and grisly, whereas in La Chienne it’s nearly beautiful in its necessity.

The Unspeakable Act

Wed, 27 Feb 2013 00:00:00 -0500

Effacing taboo subject matter like incest is a common approach in fiction. Lust crackles in the diegetic air, ensconced in subtle gestures that tell all or remain simply suggestive. Conversations avert true motivations whilst coming off curt, blasé or awkward–resulting in a revelatory subtext too visceral to put into spoken language. Such tactics speak volumes on prohibited desires. Dan Sallitt takes a different strategy in his fourth feature film The Unspeakable Act, a work based on one teenager’s candid diary-like experience with her romantic obsession with her older brother. Jackie (Tallie Medel) is stumped by her brother Matthew’s (Sky Hirschkron) college-bound departure from their childhood home, though she explicitly understands his need to develop “mature adult relationships.” Jackie is 17 but Medel and Sallitt imbue her with an intelligence of someone much older; this has less the entertaining effect of a precocious young person flaunting savvy wit (like in Juno or Brick) and instead results in a refined illustration of the insidious power of cognitive dissonance. Jackie may be able to admit that she is “fucked up,” but her reasons in loving Matthew–because he’s the “best person” she knows–demonstrates the degree to which her extremely limited experience with love counteracts her logical faculties in the matter.

Indeed, Jackie’s mix of intelligence and forthrightness are a fairly rare set of traits in drama, and it gives Sallitt the opportunity to skip rehashed adolescent emotional traps (e.g. being reluctant or dismissive of therapy) and head straight for the kind of blunt, open-eyed confusion about a subject the protagonist has embraced that nobody else wants to discuss. Her phases in dealing with the situation frequently leave her brusque but profusely emotional, apparent even in scenes when she’s not openly bemoaning her brother’s descent into adulthood. When Matthew brings home a girl for dinner, it would have been so simple and redundant for her jealousy to spill over into a dinner conversation made awkward and stilted by volcanic passive-aggressive jabs. Jackie is too smart for that, but her true feelings still surface. She’s generous and nice to the girl to a fault, to the point that in their initial meeting in the hallway, with all other family members present, she physically cuts herself off from the others and exists purely in a bubble with the girl, chit-chatting in a rushed way that can’t exactly be described as merely exchanging pleasantries. It’s more that brand of polite, Gen-Y competitive small talk that is half humble brag, half friendly banter. These conversations, and others where she talks about sex and love with her friends–contexts in which her love for Matthew must be completely restrained–are absolutely fascinating.

Jackie is another character in a new line of young white female protagonists whose assertive qualities are an extension of generational and class privilege that still demonstrate the gendered limits of their self-realization because of the relatively few safe places they have to tackle the burden of emotional predicaments. Therapy is not the end-all, be-all cure for Jackie in realizing that her love life is forever doomed, that her skewed love maps don’t prevent her from meeting others, getting to know them, and even falling in love with people outside of her family. The “getting to know” them part is crucial for Jackie–she and her therapist discover that she finds extreme comfort in the intimate familiarity of knowing a person, which makes her fall in love with someone more than the aura of mystery.

But such realizations, and the therapist’s blunt, laissez-faire approach don’t quite work miracles: Jackie is resistant to the shrink’s suggestion of applying for a college other than Princeton, where Matthew attends, though after stopping therapy she finally admits via voiceover that she never completed her Princeton application. This decision is the closest Jackie shows any improvement in “growing up” and it’s a pretty elegant place to leave matters. Idealized notions of life and love are seemingly immutable beliefs that are only ever really changed through the long, frequently turbulent trials of adult experiences like the ones in college, where forced socialization with an abundance and variety of people can radically change one’s personality. In the end, as much as Jackie likes to think she knows herself and her family (her extremely specific predictions about her sister’s future are particularly astute), her talent in making well-articulated, sophisticated personal observations is no match for the dearth of life experiences of being a 17-year old.