Friday, April 4, 2025

Misericordia First Draft

Incomplete first draft for Taipei Mansions: "My Nights at Martine's"

Among the arthouse filmmakers who had what appeared to be a breakthrough hit in the early to mid-2010s, only to recede in visibility within the American cinephile consciousness for one reason or another, Alain Guiraudie is perhaps the most understandable instance of this somewhat lamentable trend. 2013 was a few years before my time, but Stranger by the Lake still remains one of the more surprising near across-the-board critical hits of the past fifteen years or so; with the possible exception of Valeska Grisebach's Western, there's almost no other recent, rigorously directed film from a largely unheralded director to match its level of appreciation. Certain factors melded together to help buoy its profile, functioning simultaneously as a slow-burn thriller, a treatise on gay sexuality, a bulging compendium of casual nudity, and even a quasi-hangout film (in multiple senses of the word). It's thus not terribly hard to see why Guiraudie's follow-ups Staying Vertical (2016) and Nobody's Hero (2021)—trending towards overt surrealism and knotty political commentary respectively—failed to catch fire, even given their more modest but still evident merits.

It's too early as of this writing to say whether Misericordia represents a full-fledged critical resurgence for Guiraudie. (Cannes didn't seem to think so, shunting it into the Cannes Première sidebar, a decision about as widely criticized as the placement of the considerably more legendary Víctor Erice's Close Your Eyes the previous year.) Whether it does or not seems ultimately even more irrelevant than usual when faced with its manifold pleasures and elaborations upon Guiraudie's ever-present interest in the haziness of desires, queer or otherwise, and in the fundamental strangeness of community. Like Stranger by the Lake, it comes to revolve around a murder, yet Misericordia

Saturday, March 22, 2025

Erica Sheu

  1. False Expectations (2023)
  2. Grandma's Scissors (2021)
  3. It follows It passes on (2022)
  4. Fur Film vol.2: mirror mirror (2022)
  5. birthday song (single channel) (2021)
  6. A Short History (2017)
  7. transcript (2019)
  8. off (I don't know when to stop) (2021)
  9. the way home (2018)
  10. pài-lak ē-poo (2020)
  1. False Expectations (2023)
  2. Grandma's Scissors (2021)
  3. It follows It passes on (2022)
  4. Fur Film vol.2: mirror mirror (2022)
  5. birthday song (single channel) (2021)
  6. A Short History (2017)
  7. transcript (2019)
  8. off (I don't know when to stop) (2021)
  9. the way home (2018)
  10. pài-lak ē-poo (2020)

Tuesday, March 11, 2025

The Actor First Draft

Complete first draft for Variety.

‘The Actor’ Review: Duke Johnson's Memory Loss Psychological Drama Fails to Sustain Its Intrigue The co-director of “Anomalisa” attempts to distinguish his own creative voice with a muddled noir riff featuring André Holland as an amnesiac trying to piece his life back together. It can be difficult to step out of the shadow of a creative collaborator, and Duke Johnson only does so fitfully with “The Actor,” his first live-action theatrical film. Though Johnson has had a steady career for close to two decades, principally in stop-motion animation for television, he is perhaps best known for co-directing the Academy Award-nominated “Anomalisa” in 2015 with Charlie Kaufman, whose authorial voice frequently took precedence even when he wasn't directing his own screenplays. A full decade later, Kaufman (who serves as an executive producer on “The Actor”) still has a marked influence on Johnson's solo directorial debut, though it is awkwardly grafted onto a noir-inflected tale—based on the novel “Memory” by Donald E. Westlake—of a man recovering from amnesia and attempting to rediscover who he is. That man is Paul Cole (André Holland), a member of a New York City theatre troupe on the last leg of a Midwest tour. As the film begins, he is preparing to bed a married woman before her husband barges in and smashes his head with a chair. When Paul comes to, he has no memory of himself or his surroundings, only gathering his name and occupation from the doctors, nurses, and police inspectors attending to him, before he is swiftly run out of town for his attempted adultery. Without nearly enough money to take the bus all the way back home, he finds menial work at a tannery in a nearby town. There, he meets Edna (Gemma Chan), a shy outsider with whom he forms a tentative romantic connection as the seasons turn from fall to winter. Just before Christmas, the actor's desire to recover more of his memories wins out, and he returns to New York, aiming to resume his old career and friendships despite his still spotty memory. “The Actor” telegraphs its formal intentions from the opening credits, a black-and-white cityscape of silhouetted, clearly miniature buildings. After the starring intertitles for Holland and Chan, the rest of the primary actors are grouped under the heading "The Troupe," twelve names including May Calamawy, Toby Jones, Simon McBurney, and Tracey Ullman. It soon becomes clear that—similar to “Anomalisa” and its use of Tom Noonan's voice for every character save the central couple—almost every role will be played by one of these thespians in varying levels of disguise. The end credits, in turn, provide little sitcom-esque cutouts highlighting each of these sleights of hand. Johnson doubles down on this artifice by relying heavily on backlot sets. Like, improbably, “The Brutalist,” the film is set in 1950s America but was filmed in Budapest, Hungary; unlike that film, little attempt is made to make these settings feel like a convincing, lived-in place, of its time or otherwise. To transition between scenes, the camera frequently pans from an interior to an exterior and vice versa as characters walk from one set to another, aiming less to break the fourth wall than to capture an instant sense of displacement. Joe Passarelli's cinematography emphasizes the haziness of Paul's surroundings, frequently casting halos around any light source in a manner that comes across as gauzy rather than sculptural. These creative decisions, along with a few overtly surreal animated moments and Johnson's penchant for playing rapid-fire montages of previously seen images at key moments, would land better if “The Actor” had a stronger grasp on its protagonist's journey. But for all the emphasis Johnson and co-screenwriter Stephen Cooney (in his first screenplay) place on the uncertainty of Paul's past, especially when some of his less savory traits arise, there is a curious lack of interest in actually evoking the disconnect between past and present self. Much of the film simply observes Paul forming his identity by augmenting his memory with the things around him, rather than actively seeking out experiences that his past self would have partaken in. The concept feels underexplored in favor of a more rote character study, with Paul frequently reduced to stating his bewilderment about the nature of his past self rather than actually feeling it. This approach works better in the first third of “The Actor,” as Paul's interactions within the relative vacuum of the small Ohio town, especially with Edna, have a certain unassuming charm that acts as a balance for Johnson's flourishes. Once the film decamps for New York, however, it gets lost in needlessly cruel recriminations and wan satirical depictions of show business. An extended sequence during a live television taping intended as Paul's return to acting even apes the showy faux long take of something like “Birdman,” aiming for a needless and generic sense of mounting high-wire tension in the context of a story that otherwise operates at a more subdued tone. “The Actor” does partly recover from this nadir, but the pat nature of its surprisingly sentimental conclusion only highlights the degree to which Johnson's directorial interventions feel like attempts to gild the lily, registering as surface-level oddities deployed in a half-successful attempt to replace the psychological insight needed to truly explore identity in such an extreme scenario. The final images, taking place in a featureless void, unfortunately mirror the extent of Johnson's grasp.

Tuesday, February 25, 2025

Breathless First Draft

Complete first draft for Acropolis Cinema.

James Benning is no stranger to remakes, whether of his own films or the work of others. In an interview with Acropolis Cinema founder Jordan Cronk for Film Comment, he pointed to his interest in painting, seeking to replicate the work of outsider artists that he admired in order to understand their artistic principles and predilections, which grew into his own practice of copying and tweaking. The film that occasioned this interview, The United States of America (2022), is perhaps Benning's most acclaimed of the decade so far, acting as a quasi-remake of his 1975 short co-directed with Bette Gordon while inverting and expanding its relatively straightforward travelogue scenario. Other remakes include various short works in his mammoth 52 Films (2015) project, the found footage homage to John Cassavetes with Faces (2011), and Easy Rider (2012), which captured each filming location used in Dennis Hopper's counterculture classic in the present day. These predecessors help explain Breathless (2024), but only to a certain extent. Once more, a 1960s era-defining classic is invoked, but the stakes and scale feel different. With all due respect to those New Hollywood landmarks, few films have as strong a claim for establishing cinema's Anno Domini as Jean-Luc Godard's 1960 debut feature, which not only blazed a trail for its American counterparts but also had a palpable effect on virtually every major filmmaking movement that followed in its wake. Hugely influential in both cinema and the wider popular culture, it is a film whose look, ethos, and attitude are instantly recognizable, a cool incantation that Godard himself rarely tried to directly evoke again. Three score and four years later, Benning's Breathless arrives as something of a challenge, even a provocation in its stubborn refusal to yield anything close to the—atypically for Godard, let alone Benning—relatively coherent narrative and taut genre thrills of its so-called predecessor. The production parameters of the film, at least, have been made clear by its director: Benning went to the Upper Kern River on November 28, 2023 to film a tree with orange leaves, only to end up capturing unplanned events by chance. That these events were the result of forest fires adds to the woozy, nondescript yet oddly eerie feeling of the film's single shot. Benning's own quote appears to sum up at least his intention, if not the overall effect of his film: "My film was to be a non-narrative the length of Godard's Breathless, but I ended up with something else. It's breathless." Strangely, he seems to echo a quote Godard made about his own Breathless, three years after he recast cinema in his own image: "Although I felt ashamed of it at one time, I do like Breathless, but now I can see where it belongs: along with Alice in Wonderland. I thought it was Scarface." Both Breathless films, in a certain sense, find their directors on opposite ends of legendary oeuvres, operating according to certain strictures—the B-film noir for Godard, the landscape film style that Benning himself helped pioneer—that proved, if not impossible, then challenged and shaped by what transpired in front of them. What does happen in Benning's Breathless? For one, it's easy to see why he gave up any semblance of non-narrative immediately: after a title card, the film begins as abruptly in media res as Godard's, with the tree trimmers already hard at work on the foliage that had caught Benning's attention in the first place. Their efforts will dominate most viewers' attentions during the film's first quarter, for good reason: even though they are only seen at a distance, speaking a few Spanish phrases, their constant movements and especially the bobbing of the truck crane stand out vividly against a largely unchanging landscape. Fortunately, though, after they (mostly) vacate the premises, there's still plenty left to observe, even on a sunny day with little wind: the endless crags on the mountainous backdrop, the slowly moving shadows, the tangled webs of branches strewn across the frame. Occasionally, screeching airplanes can be heard but not seen, an invasion on the quietude that Benning describes as an attack "from the air. War games." which isn't so far from the largely offscreen manhunt that eventually brings down Michel Poiccard. Most tantalizing of all is the road—arching off in a trajectory pleasingly askew from the traditional notion of the vanishing point—which unavoidably recalls Jean-Paul Belmondo's pell-mell ride through the French countryside, lasting about six minutes before he stays in the city for good. The road is central to Benning's practice, his many years of driving around the United States frequently providing him the knowledge of where best to film his canvases. This, in turn, invokes some of the other odd commonalities between these two filmmakers' working methods: frequent use of asynchronous sound, a belief in the destabilizing decisiveness of the cut (even though it's decidedly not used here), an abiding interest in the effects of popular culture. Both the beginning and the ending of Benning's Breathless invoke Godard plainly and directly, yet with no small amount of mystery. First is the title, which almost acts as Benning's version of the 1960 film's dedication to Monograph Pictures, which Jonathan Rosenbaum described as a "critical statement of aims and boundaries." Those boundaries, as mentioned before, are upended by what follows in both films, but the sentiment, and more importantly the sensation—not for nothing is Breathless among the most sensorially evocative titles in the canon—lingers long after the simple title card. Then, in the closing seconds, there is an intervention, a direct lifting of audio which not only heralds the end of what may seem to some as an infinitely long experience, but also calls to mind that which had been largely absent: a close-up on a beautifully unreadable face, a few phrases which still lack an agreed-upon translation, a rush of shivery emotion, a half-century of filmmaking that still must be grappled with, even and especially in such cryptic and subtly generative works as these.

Thursday, February 20, 2025

Kitano Takeshi

  1. Broken Rage (2024)
  2. Zatoichi (2003)
  1. Broken Rage (2024)
  2. Zatoichi (2003)

Sunday, February 9, 2025

La Internacional Cinéfila

2011
2012
2013
2014
2015
2016
2017
2018
2019 (+director and film of the decade)
2020
2021 (+emerging director)
2022
2023 (+film books)
2024 (+films from 2000-2024)

Jodie Mack

  1. Let Your Light Shine (2013)
  2. The Grand Bizarre (2018)
  3. Something Between Us (2015)
  4. Wasteland No. 1: Ardent, Verdant (2017)
  1. Let Your Light Shine (2013)
  2. Something Between Us (2015)
  3. Wasteland No. 1: Ardent, Verdant (2017)