Very observational doc of exams week at a university in Argentina – the same school Solaas attended. Some students do alright, some completely space on the works they were supposed to study or memorize, and some get caught trying to bullshit their way through a debate, their better-prepared colleagues caught on camera smirking at their attempts. A few perfectly opportune shots, students having an emotional moment, or swaying in and out of frame while calling parents on cellphones. Opening short Partial Differential Equation (Kevin Jerome Everson) was well suited to the feature – straightforward doc in a higher learning facility, observational to the point that you start focusing on the mathematician’s fingernails instead of the work. A morning screening, so the very ambient 3-piece Saltbreaker opened.
Tag: 2010s
Collective (2019, Alexander Nanau)
Straightforward doc, named after the rock club that caught fire during a show, killing 20-some people (including most of the band), leading to massive public protests and a change of government. After 30-some more concertgoers died horribly from bacteria due to lack of care in local hospitals – a real-life Death of Mr. Lazarescu – Nanau followed the story through a reporter for a sports magazine, who does his own investigation, enraged by the corruption he uncovers: the hospitals all used disinfectants that had been diluted unto uselessness. The incoming health minister says he’ll operate with transparency, and he does, to the point of allowing the crew to follow him around. So we follow him for most of the second half of the film, also checking in regularly with a survivor of the fire, whose hands were badly injured. She does fashion shoots, gets robotic hands, and stays frustratingly apolitical. The post-film Q&A was interesting – this was early March, and parallels to more immediate government-botched health crises were becoming apparent. Opener Eli Fola played solo sax , but apparently there was a luggage snafu, he arrived sans equipment, and sax isn’t even his primary instrument… very good improv.
Goodbye to Language (2014, Jean-Luc Godard)
Shots seem indifferently framed, scenes make no sense, the cameras seem low-grade… but his films are far-between now, and this showed up on best-of-decade lists, and in particular the experimental/avant-garde/art list I’ve been following… and Godard has spent more time than anyone thinking about the moving image, so even if I’m not especially entertained, there must be something here.
The sound pans, then cuts abruptly, as does the picture. Was that… a fart joke? Yup, and a conversation about pooping later. Really a lot of nudity and flickering televisions. At least one of the nude couples is an affair (“What does your husband do?”). I assumed while watching that the couples in the first half and second half were the same, maybe at different times, but no, the wikis tell me they were “intentionally cast to physically resemble each other.” The four lead actors were not well-known – their recent roles at the time included Woman in tears, Boxing trainer, Hotel receptionist, and French woman #3.
Originally, I put this off because I couldn’t see it in 3D, and maybe I should’ve put it off some more, because THE SHOT is missing in my version.
Beginning of THE SHOT:
A quarter of the movie is Godard taking his dog for a walk. White God came out the same year, so Godard’s dog Roxy had to settle for the Palme Dog runner-up. I’d still like to see Mommy and Mr. Turner and Saint Laurent from that year’s competition, the others not so much.
AO Scott called it “baffling and beautiful, a flurry of musical and literary snippets arrayed in counterpoint to a series of brilliantly colored and hauntingly evocative pictures.” There’s more writing, and I meant to watch this twice, but who’s got time anymore. I liked it about as much as other Godard features I’ve seen from this century: Notre Musique, In Praise of Love, Film Socialism… but give me Nouvelle Vague any day.
Endless Poetry (2016, Alejandro Jodorowsky)
At end of the last movie, the family was moving from seaside town Tocopilla to Santiago. Mom still sings all her lines, dad is still violent, but this time young Alejandro is the lead character, discovering art and poetry and breaking away from his parents. Just as the kid’s performance is starting to feel limited, we jump a few years so he can be played by Adan Jodorowsky, the filmmaker’s son and director of Echek, for the rest of the film.
The mix of realistic (and not) effects, JR-style retrofitting of modern buildings, dreamlike sets with visible stagehands rearranging furniture, Orpheus references, random nudity, shock color, head shaving, prankster poets, sad clowns and street parades, with the poetry and deaths and parental issues… it all worked for me.
Shot by Chris Doyle! The first I’ve seen from him since The Limits of Control.
Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019, Céline Sciamma)
Oh wow, this was as good as advertised. Must see again.
Painter Noémie Merlant will soon appear in Jumbo, in which she falls in love with a carnival ride.
I saw Adèle Haenel a couple weeks ago in Deerskin, plus she was great in The Unknown Girl and has been in at least two Bonello movies – and on my drive to this movie I noticed his Zombi Child is playing the Plaza, but it was the night before True/False, so, too late.
Young Luà na Bajrami was recently in a Village of the Damned sort of thing and a Catherine Deneuve movie. And mom Valeria Golino is mostly known for acting in 1990’s American trash movies, but has won best actress awards twice in Venice for Italian films, and directed two films that played Cannes.
Shaun the Sheep: Farmageddon (2019, Becher & Phelan)
A cute blue psychokinetic alien child crash-lands on the farm, and Shaun and the sheep have to avoid the farmer and his dog and a government alien detection agency to send the little fella home. Movie is fully charming, and just an explosion of bright colors – I watched on the plane where everyone around me was watching dirty, dull-looking movies like Joker and Tolkien on their 4-bit seatback screens, and felt that my movie’s color on the laptop seemed radioactive by comparison. The only note I took at the time was “argh, pop songs.”
Little Joe (2019, Jessica Hausner)
Didn’t know what to make of this plant-based Body Snatchers movie, with its very controlled look, slow pans, and obvious script. Corporate botanists create a plant that makes its owner happy, a horror Brain Candy, emitting the “mother hormone,” like a mother bonding with her son. They name it Little Joe, after lead geneticist Emily Beecham’s son Joe (shades of “Audrey II”). Paranoia is high about the plant’s mind-altering properties. When an older scientist (Kerry Fox of Shallow Grave and Intimacy) finds her dog affected by the plant, she has it put to sleep, saying it was “not my dog anymore.” Emily: “What do you mean?” “You’ll see.”
Joe and Little Joe:
Emily’s coworker Ben Whishaw (Cloud Atlas, frail poet of Bright Star) is the earliest and most apparently affected, and his whispering collaborator, feather-haired Rick, edits out the tape of pollen test participants’ comments about personality change. Emily hardly does any better herself, taking a plant home and telling people it’s definitely safe from her sample size of two people, while her ex, Joe’s dad, tells her he’s not the boy he used to be. Ben and Rick eventually change tactics, saying they’ve been pretending as a gag, and Joe tells her “this is normal at my age,” while Emily tries the proven pod-people technique of pretending to be already affected, and Kerry Fox fulfills the role of the alarmist who gets “accidentally” killed.
L-R: boss Carl, Rick, Emily, Ben
It’s not like the characters are living their normal lives and the plant paranoia gradually takes over before everyone realizes it, or they have anything else going on – all the dialogue is about this one thing, whether or not the plant is invading minds. An extremely watchable movie, with a massive soundtrack and great visual design (their green coat buttons match the chairs!) High-pitched cricket whistle on the score with flute underneath wasn’t optimal for watching on a whiny airplane, but when the whining lets up, the flute with sharp drum hits and a cacophony of barking dogs is wonderful. The camera sometimes zooms into the wall in the background between two people conversing, odd visual and aural tactics within such a single-minded story. Beecham won best actress at Cannes – this is the seventh movie I’ve seen from competition, hoping to catch The Whistlers and Bacurau and The Wild Goose Lake soon.
First Love (2019, Takashi Miike)
Intersection of a Japanese gang, a Chinese gang, a drug-addicted girl who sees ghosts, a crooked cop, a traitorous thief, a gangster’s girl out for revenge, and a floppy-haired boxer who wrongfully believes he has a fatal brain tumor, on one crazy night. Not as crazily awesome as I was led to believe, just a solid gangster action flick with one especially successful performance (the traitor).
Julie/Becky:
Traitor/villain Kase is Shota Sometani (tortured to death with a soldering iron in Lesson of Evil, maybe the narrator in Tokyo Tribe). Boxer Leo is Masataka Kubota of 13 Assassins. Revenge-girl Julie is “Becky” of a trio of Pokemon movies, and her late boyfriend Yazu is Takahiro Miura of Harmonium. The crooked cop: Nao Omori (Ichi the Killer himself, star of R100).
Leo with his girl Monica, freaking out on the subway:
Deerskin (2019, Quentin Dupieux)
“It was a nice tracking shot, but we’re no closer to our dream.”
Wouldn’t you know it… I was proud of myself for being nearly caught-up with the blog before True/False, then a global pandemic came along and set me back by another month. Anyway, lucky I took some notes on this one – it was very good, and also Dupieux’s most convincingly movie-looking movie yet. No Mr. Oizo music, for some reason.
Jean “The Artist” Dujardin drives out and pays too much for a deerskin jacket, the soundtrack playing thriller tension music. Dude’s got money problems, estranged-wife problems, cellphone problems. He steals a book on filmmaking to impress waitress Adèle Haenel (star of The Unknown Girl), then hires her as his editor (he hasn’t read the filmmaking book and doesn’t know what editing is) and keeps asking her for money. Since she is investing in the film, she starts considering herself a producer and bossing Jean around.
Jean is a terrible person from the very start, and that’s before he starts delusionally talking to himself-as-the-jacket, then hitting the town on a jacket-snatching spree and eventually murdering all jacket-wearing citizens with a sharpened fan blade. Good ending, Jean’s actions catching up with him, Adèle inheriting the jacket.
Opened the Cannes Directors Fortnight, playing with a bunch of movies that never opened here, plus The Lighthouse, First Love, and the Luca Guadagnino short I just heard about last night.