In Review Online Drive My Car First Draft

Complete first draft for In Review Online.

Of all the innumerable gambits and devices that Hamaguchi Ryūsuke deploys in his immense Drive My Car, his particular use of language may be the most beautiful and fundamental. On some level this has almost been taken for granted: the film is an expanded adaptation of a Murakami Haruki short story, Kafuku (Nishijima Hidetoshi) is a theater director and actor, and the staging of Uncle Vanya at the Hiroshima festival draws all the characters introduced after the first forty minutes into the same orbit, so it is natural that so much time would be dedicated to the analysis of speech, to paying particular attention to dialogue and its structure in a manner that some might not associate as stringently with a typical arthouse film, even one as relatively accessible as this one. But Hamaguchi’s fascination goes even deeper than that. Kafuku presents a concise yet mystic summation of Chekhov that might be taken as something of a mission statement for the film, saying that he has refused to play Vanya because “when you say his lines, it drags out the real you,” something that cannot be borne by a man so wracked with doubt and grief in such an exposed setting. But the question of where the lines end and something more indefinite, yet just as full of truth, begins is left hanging. It’s very much worth noting that this dialogue comes two-thirds of the way through Drive My Car, and that soon afterwards Chekhov in a stage or even audiotape form will be set aside for a flight into the countryside, where the Vanya/Sonya dynamic will be played out in less obviously locked-down settings. Yet herein lies a paradox: this penultimate stretch of the film, in which Kafuku and Watari (Miura Tōko) lay bare the pasts of themselves and those they lost, is at once the quietest — there is even a moment where the sound completely drops out as the Saab arrives in the snow — and the most obviously narratively-driven part of the film, which fully commits to its transposition of Chekhov’s characters onto Hamaguchi’s central two figures. Indeed, one of the longest takes in the film, a five-minute emotional, approaches theatricality in its locked-down medium shot and simple staging, with Kafuku on the left and Watari on the right talking to each other. So, if Kafuku’s assessment of Chekhov is meant to then emanate both forwards and backwards, it does so in a way that effectively throws each and every scene into relief. The rehearsal scenes assume even greater importance, and various moments of explicit emotional revelation, like Takatsuki’s (Okada Masaki) monologue or the wondrous conversation with Lee Yun-a (Park Yu-rim), are linked in the viewer’s mind to a sense of transference, a feeling that exposure to Uncle Vanya has allowed for a freedom to express one’s true self in a way otherwise limited by reticence or the limitations of societal conventions or customs, even coming down to the language barriers that are frequently invoked. And it is notable that, though Oto’s (Kirishima Reika) taped reading of Chekhov is not heard again after this turning point, her nature, previously construed as potentially duplicitous and unknowable, becomes something much more open and revelatory. Hamaguchi fills his films with these evolutions of understanding, with these transformations of scenes that might be seen as simply quotidian into a realm that represents a staging ground for new perspectives and emotions. In its scope and indelible etchings of its characters, Drive My Car may be the fullest expression yet of one of his greatest strengths.

In Review Online Malmkrog First Draft

Complete first draft for In Review Online.

Cristi Puiu’s fifth fiction feature Malmkrog represents a further entrenchment in the oeuvre of perhaps the Romanian New Wave’s most dedicated portrayer of claustrophobic incidents and the web of personal interactions that can result in such confined spaces and at such long durations. Malmkrog represents something of an extreme in both regards: his first period film, it is set entirely in a luxurious, secluded manor in fin de siècle Transylvania and runs a full three hours and twenty minutes. These further extended stretches of time also contain little of the life-and-death drama of The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, the methodical killings of Aurora, or the deft family interplay of Sieranevada. Instead, Malmkrog confines itself almost exclusively to the philosophical, ethical, and ecumenical debates of five aristocrats, which principally cover those two inevitably intertwined constants in any empire: war and religion. But far from an arid exercise — ironic, considering the film’s foundations in Puiu’s prior staging of excerpts from Vladimir Solovyov’s novel War, Progress, and the End of History: Three Conversations, Including a Short Story of the Anti-Christ at an acting workshop in Toulouse that was later compiled into his Three Interpretation Exercises (2013) — Malmkrog emerges something as uniquely cinematic, as much in Puiu’s sense for blocking and motion as in the words and tone that are adopted over the vast bulk of 200 minutes. Split into six discrete segments, the film is careful to ensure a continuity of rigor and playfulness while varying its approach: the first segment is taken up mostly by a 44-minute long-take, which vacillates between static, stately frames and sudden pivots to catch the change in positions of each participant in the conversation, while two of the other segments are shot in individual close-ups as the speakers sit at a dinner table, cutting constantly with a marked literalism. Yet despite the potential realism of what is being depicted, save for a few spectral images and one tremendously disorienting rupture, the film’s affect lies somewhere in between. The plain absurdity of the situation, which draws dinner guests into meals that they sit down for but barely touch, instead preferring to prattle on for hours, only grows further as the night draws on, and yet it would totally overstate the situation to say that Puiu mostly uses these words as a means to lampoon the self-importance of the rich. The looming world wars are but the most obvious lenses upon which to view the relevance of these extended conversations, and it is apparent from Puiu’s watchful gaze that he finds something inherently fascinating about, say, the way the host reads from the Gospel According to Luke in order to refute one of the guests’ assertions; in many ways, this is one of the great recent films about religion and the particular ways in which believers interact with each other. And there is just as much care paid to certain details, like the interplay between the aristocrats and their servants — the second chapter is dedicated to the lead servant — or the choice of language: despite the Romanian setting, most of the film is conducted in French, the de facto language of the aristocrats at the time. Such signifiers pile up over time, and yet Malmkrog remains an immediate, bracing experience from the get-go, so monomaniacally focused is it upon the pleasures and pain of verbal one-upmanship and discourse. Puiu’s graceful direction remains consistent as an essential ballast, and the purposeful irresolution at the close only feels fitting for the existence of those in perpetual suspension, cloistered and secure in their ideologies.

Frameland 2021 Features First Draft

Complete first drafts for Frameland.

Just Don’t Think I’ll Scream It was perhaps no surprise last year that people turned to films from the past in order to contextualize and, perhaps, find some measure of solace and comfort. People naturally gravitated to works concerning some notion of infection, including the obvious Contagion and, on a much more wonderfully unanticipated notice, Tsai’s The Hole and Kurosawa’s Bright Future. However, perhaps both the most fitting and unusual choice was released this year: Frank Beauvais’s Just Don’t Think I’ll Scream, which, in an extra bit of irony, premiered in the Berlinale Forum in 2019, was scheduled to have a Film Forum run in April 2020, only to finally, belatedly, receive a January 2021 Film Forum virtual cinema release. An especially dizzying exemplar of the collage film, it is made up solely of brief shots from the 400-some films that Beauvais watched between April and October 2016, a period in his life filled with profound isolation and depression where he did basically nothing but watch films in the little village dwelling where he was abandoned by his partner. The short film clips, carefully chosen to eschew close-ups, and thus identifiability, are paired to a narration which frankly lays out his ongoing state of affairs, and the ambiguity on one side, and the blunt demarcations on the other, pair to form an odd, wondrous bond. By taking out all the expected bits of signposting, Beauvais dives fully into the swirl of images that comes with the madness of cinephilia, with the flickers of strife corresponding to the horrors of last year with depressingly full force for film lovers with a simpatico mindset. Even more than its skillful construction and daring associations, Just Don’t Think I’ll Scream emerges as an omnivorous exorcism, a brilliant evocation of a mindset that yearns for, yet is unable to escape, at least for a time.

Impromptu Dinner (Drive My Car) A film as expansive and quietly complex as Drive My Car offers numerous inroads into Hamaguchi Ryūsuke’s central concerns. One of the more understated yet fitting ones comes almost exactly halfway through the three-hour runtime, and arises, like many of the encounters that Kafuku (Nishijima Hidetoshi) has throughout the film, almost by sheer happenstance. After a day of theater rehearsals, Kafuku offers to give his dramaturge Yun-su (Jin Dae-yeon) a ride back to his house, for which he is offered dinner in turn. This leads to the utterly charming reveal of one of the cutest couples in film history: Yun-su is married to one of the central production’s actors, Yun-a (Park Yu-rim). This sets the tone for a set of dinner conversations that, as much as any scene in the film, is equally delightful, moving, awkward, and insightful, with Kafuku’s driver Misaki (Miura Tōko) present as a silent but palpable counterpoint. Misaki’s taciturn nature exists almost as the inverse of Yu-su’s own physical muteness: where the former keeps to herself, slowly opening up as the film moves along, Park’s expressivity and passion emerges with forceful poise from her very first scene. While often present, she is given a handful of true showcase scenes, each seeming to tilt the entire film’s sense of equilibrium on its practice. And it is here, the only one where the words are her own and not Chekov’s, that it comes most fully into being — though of course she is still being interpreted by Yun-su; characters are fittingly never free from mediation in Hamaguchi’s films. Talking about her past and her decision to start acting, her clarity of thought and reason shines all the brighter in the face of the conflicting emotions present elsewhere. The ability to move on from past traumas and find a better tomorrow is one that each character is seeking in their own way, and Yun-su’s role in this, and her totally generous description of how she got to it, is as cathartic and beautiful as the many other brilliant scenes of more forthright understanding.

West Side Story First Draft

Complete first draft for The Film Stage.

West Side Story — a curious exception in the modern glut of sequels and remakes, with its powerhouse combination of hallowed subject matter and director — announces itself immediately. Where the original 1961 film helmed by Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins began with a series of aerial shots over New York City, director Steven Spielberg opts for an elaborate crane shot that etches out an important distinction: this story is set amid the slums in the process of being cleared for the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, the immaculate Manhattan arts complex where, it must be said, the film premiered a few days ago. While previous incarnations of the Romeo and Juliet-inspired musical — with music by Leonard Bernstein and lyrics by the dearly departed Stephen Sondheim — were identifiably set in a downtrodden New York, an entirely different sense of precarity begins here, woven into the fabric of the film, as the Jets’ struggle with the Sharks seems doomed almost before it begins. West Side Story traffics in such deviations, at the level of both form and content, in a manner that alternately heralds the brilliance of both its source material and its director. In terms of its song and narrative structure, it functions as a hybrid of the musical — “Cool” is moved back to Act 1 — and Wise and Robbins’ film — “America” remains a buoyant series of ripostes between Anita (Ariana DeBose) and Bernardo (David Alvarez). But in others, Spielberg and Tony Kushner have greatly built out the contexts of characters, beginning with Tony (Ansel Elgort) himself, who at the start of the film has just been released after a year’s stint in prison for almost killing another boy in a gang fight. Apart from giving him another reason for wanting to leave the gang lifestyle, it also institutes a theme of transformation that courses through a number of the characters: María’s (Rachel Zegler) prospective fiancé Chino (Josh Andrés Rivera) is a bookish accountant who wants to join the Sharks against Bernardo’s wishes, Anybodys’s (nonbinary actor Iris Mena) desire to be in the Jets and assertion of gender identity is further emphasized. While West Side Story, with its two-day timespan and inevitable tragic end, is an inherently linear work, this version registers as even more focused in its progression and development of characters. Across the board, arcs or scenes not present in the original work lend an additional layer of urgency to West Side Story, whether they be as charming as María deciding whether or not to wear lipstick (against Bernardo’s wishes) to the dance, or as charged as Riff — Mike Faist, who practically steals the film with his unique combination of ease, intensity, and vulnerability — purchasing a gun to bring to the rumble; “Cool” is reconfigured as a duel between him and Tony, who attempts to take the gun from him to prevent the rumble from happening. In line with the concerted efforts to cast Latinx actors for the Puerto Rican characters, purposefully unsubtitled Spanish plays a significant role: first in a rousing song that the Sharks sing in defiance of the Jets and the police after the fight in the prologue, then in a set of conversations between María, Anita, and Bernardo, wherein they speak a mix of English and Spanish. In keeping with a general aspirational spirit through this version that collides with the tragedy, Bernardo is a boxer intending to make his living, and so Anita constantly chastises him, telling him and María to practice speaking English, even while all three of them feel more comfortable expressing themselves naturally in Spanish. All of this is consciously configured so that English speakers will understand everything of importance, but there’s a sensitivity to the way that people speak on both sides that is embodied in one of the biggest yet most reverential changes: Doc is replaced with Valentina, the Puerto Rican widow of Doc who runs his store, and is played by Rita Moreno, the original film’s Anita. Very much in the role of a mentor, she represents an alternative path of racial and behavioral harmony, singing “Somewhere” and participating in the final procession that closes the film. While actors like Moreno, Faist, DeBose, and newcomer Zegler get their moments to shine, it’s likely most accurate to say that West Side Story’s star is Spielberg himself, with a great deal of assistance from stalwart cinematographer Janusz Kamiński, production designer Adam Stockhausen, and costumer Paul Tazewell. With his first full-fledged musical, Spielberg has further incorporated the swooping cameras and piercing lighting that have defined his style as of late; even more fascinatingly, his choices in setting bring out fascinating motifs. The Jets and their turf are defined by blue and cooler tones, while the Sharks and the Puerto Rican neighborhoods opt for warmer, typically orange tones, and the interplay alone in Tony and María’s costumes suggests its own clear progression. While the locales in the 1961 film certainly felt authentic, here they are bustling with life, suggesting something of Jacques Demy in the incorporation of whole communities within musical numbers: “America” becomes even more lively when characters are weaving in and out of stores, crowds, and sidewalks, taking over the streets for short bursts before moving back once again. “I Feel Pretty”’s dress store becomes a multi-level emporium where María literally tries on the fashions and lifestyle of the White upper-class, a literalization very much in keeping with Spielberg’s overall vision. When the very ground on which people live becomes uncertain, the necessity of passion — in love, in combat — becomes all the more apparent, and Spielberg’s fidelity to that sentiment and to his own decisions bears the vitality of this alternate take aloft.

Licorice Pizza First Draft

Complete first draft written for The Film Stage.

Throughout his career, Paul Thomas Anderson has always had a fascination with pretenders, with people who use their assumed gigs and personas as a shield for their own deep insecurities. From Tom Cruise’s alpha guru in Magnolia to Philip Seymour Hoffman’s blustering mystic in The Master, Josh Brolin’s cop in Inherent Vice to Paul Dano’s preacher in There Will Be Blood, these characters that circle and attempt to entrap Anderson’s putative protagonists often end up as the most fascinating elements of his films, teasing out a canniness and resourcefulness that resonates with his view of American self-actualization. That recurring use of hucksters has now ascended to the level of text with Licorice Pizza, which returns to the sunny San Fernando Valley setting of the films from the first half of his career. Set in 1973, it follows Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman, the son of Anderson’s deceased muse), a 15-year-old child actor and voracious entrepreneur, and Alana Kane (Alana Haim), a prospectless 25-year-old who transfixes Gary when he first sees her in the line for high school photos. After immediately proclaiming his affection for her — which she quickly turns down for obvious reasons — Gary nevertheless forges a friendship with Alana, and together they embark on a series of highs and lows in both their personal and professional interactions. Gary, whose acting prospects are drying up, begins selling waterbeds, then opens a pinball palace, ventures both based on fads and rumors; Alana pursues first acting then politics, actions undertaken based on a broader sense of dissatisfaction with the course of her life. As might be expected, Licorice Pizza operates in a much more clearly definable mode than the majority of Anderson’s works: the coming-of-age film, though fascinatingly it is applied to both the teen and the young woman. Alana and Gary are effectively equals through the course of the film, which remains more-or-less wholly tied to their perspectives throughout, shifting fluidly between wide-eyed idealism and something more pragmatic, if not bitter. Bitterness, or at the very least reality, comes in the form of the four adults, each based on real people, who successively take center stage in the last half of the film for their own sequences: actor Jack Holden (Sean Penn channeling William Holden) and director Rex Blau (Tom Waits), hairdresser and famously illiterate producer Jon Peters (Bradley Cooper), and closeted politician Joel Wachs (Benny Safdie). Each man puts on his own airs, whether they be the private and necessary secrecy of Wachs, the coked-up macho energy of Peters, or the carousing and creative fantasies of Holden and Blau — indeed, the first conversation between Penn and Waits, each trying to out-gravel each other in their murmured reminiscences, heralds an entirely different energy that the film occupies until its final moments, which enter an entirely different feeling of rapture. For Licorice Pizza ultimately is a funny and romantic film, if filled with danger and excitement — the Peters section ranks as one of the more harrowing vehicle-based sequences in recent memory — filled to burst with incidents and details. To match this, it feels like Anderson has returned to a more youthful style, filling the film with long Steadicam tracking shots through groups of people in rapid motion. There is also a broader approach to comedy than Anderson has used in some time, which especially focuses on identities: the Haim family plays themselves and emphasizes their Jewishness, John Michael Higgins plays a restaurant owner who speaks to his virtually interchangeable Japanese wives in a horrendous accent and pretends to understand what they are saying. In the midst of this general climate of hustling, Gary and Alana emerge from the tapestry in large part because their pretending goes so hand-in-hand with their zest for life. Hoffman and Haim are quite natural and relaxed in the way they carry themselves, the former filled with an awkward confidence and the latter a forthright radiance, and by the close of the film, it is apparent that their roads are inextricably intertwined, no matter the obstacles life throws in their way. As it is with them, as it is with Anderson and Licorice Pizza: recognition of the failings of others, the compromises that those weighed down by the past must take, can allow the younger people to take flight in their own idiosyncratic directions, at least for a little while.

Introduction/In Front of Your Face First Draft

Complete first draft written for Reverse Shot.

Any director as relentlessly prolific, as consciously playful and rooted in self-made conventions as Hong Sang-soo practically demands the viewer to see his newest films in light of their predecessors, older and more immediate alike. Now 26 films into a 25-year career, Hong has only grown more prolific: 2019 was the first year since 2007 in which he didn’t premiere a film, and he has rebounded with three films in the past two years. In this span, he has regularly made multiple films in a single year — beginning in 2010 with Oki’s Movie and Hahaha — and three of these five instances have resulted in multiple New York Film Festival Main Slate appearances in the same year, something almost unheard of this century. As such, the impulse to compare Hong’s films to one another is only heightened when it comes to discussing two — or three, as in the case of 2017, in which Hong premiered On the Beach at Night Alone, Claire’s Camera, and The Day After — works created in such close proximity to each other. Sometimes, these connections result in marked moments of similarity: the projection of mental images by men onto a central woman in 2013’s Nobody’s Daughter Haewon and Our Sunhi, or the previously unprecedented (for Hong) focus on death in luminous black-and-white in 2018’s Grass and Hotel by the River. But for such a filmmaker as Hong, whose ability to spin endless, often radically different variations on similar themes — in his own words, “infinite worlds possible” — has been commonly misinterpreted as base repetition, the films more often than not evince considerable differences. 2010 and 2013 both featured extensions of Hong’s then ongoing cycle of Jung Yu-mi films with Oki and Sunhi, while their companion films were, respectively, a unique, hilarious, and interweaved set of vacation coincidences — revealed only to the viewer — with Hahaha, and a more mysterious consideration of family and inner desire in Haewon. The 2017 trifecta found Hong pushing his tonal variety to the limit with the overtly personal On the Beach, the elliptical and cutting black-and-white drama of The Day After (both were selected for NYFF), and the delightful, temporally off-kilter Cannes vacation in Claire’s Camera. While the aesthetic style of his 2018 output (both selected for NYFF) appeared to be unified, Grass imagines a series of conversations between different people as the possible creation of a solitary writer who joins her characters at the close, while Hotel by the River stands among his most emotionally direct and contemplative works, taking concerns about aging and family to a terminal point. Hong continues this trend with his 2021 films: Introduction, which premiered in competition at Berlin, and In Front of Your Face, which showed in the new Cannes Premiere section at Cannes; both are showing in the Main Slate of the New York Film Festival. On their surfaces, the films appear to be more dissimilar than any of Hong’s same-year films to date — save perhaps the dual Cannes premieres of Claire’s Camera and The Day After. The former is in black-and-white and covers a nebulously long time period in just 66 minutes, while the latter uses 85 minutes to cover the events of 24 hours in bright colors. But in a break with last year’s The Woman Who Ran, which considered encroaching middle age and a certain ambivalence about domesticity through elliptical means, these two films opt for a much more direct approach — in emotional, if not in narrative terms — to morality, mortality, and the relationship between generations. Introduction takes this last theme as its central conflict, featuring Hong’s first true young adult protagonists for the first time in many years; while Haewon and Hotel also circled this question, their children were already full-fledged adults and much more rooted than the groundless, drifting twentysomethings here. Young-ho (Shin Seok-ho, a cheery face in the midst of Hong’s typical male leads) serves as the primary guide, along with his girlfriend Ju-won (Park Mi-so, the only main actor here who hasn’t been in any Hong film before) as they navigate what, in other hands, could be a conventional premise: two young people trying to find their places in the world while dealing with relationship issues, all the while being prompted and challenged by their parents, inspirations, and other elders. But the progression is considerably complicated here: unfolding in three parts, the last of which takes up half the film, Introduction centers on interactions that lack overt narrative meaning, but which hold significant force in establishing a certain tone of malaise and uncertainty. Much of this has to do with the downplayed nature of the introductions or conversations that initially seemed so important to the characters. In the first part, Young-ho is left waiting to meet his father (Kim Young-ho) because he is occupied with an old friend, a respected actor (Ki Joo-bong) who dropped in unexpectedly. Some months later, Ju-won, who is moving to Hamburg for fashion school in the second part, cuts off her initial meeting with her mother’s (Hong regular Seo Young-hwa) past acquaintance (Kim Min-hee) to reunite with Young-ho, who has impulsively made a quick trip and issues a promise to try to move to be with his love. The third part takes place months, possibly years later, as in that timespan Young-ho has tried and failed to become an actor — inspired by an unseen encounter with the actor in the first part — and broken up with his girlfriend. Meeting for lunch with his mother (Cho Yun-hee) and the actor while bringing his friend (Ha Seong-guk) in tow, he is drunkenly berated by the actor for his unwillingness to hug a woman who wasn’t his girlfriend, before dreaming of a reunion with Ju-won and taking an irrational but enlivening swim on the cold beach. In Front of Your Face takes place on the relative opposite end of the age spectrum, as it follows Sang-ok (Lee Hye-young, in her first Hong performance), a former actor and a Korean expatriate living in the United States, on her first visit back to Seoul in many years. For the first half of the film, she interacts with her sister Jeong-ok (Cho), with whom she is staying temporarily, and various other people as she waits for a late lunch appointment, including her nephew (Shin) and a family living at the home that she lived in when she was a child. Her meeting with Jae-won (Hong regular Kwon Hae-hyo), a slightly younger director who is attempting to encourage her to act in a film he is writing for her, occupies almost the entire second half of the film, a lunch which turns into a Chinese baijiu-induced unfurling of personal secrets and frustrations; Hong, in typical fashion, first offers a practically idyllic ending to this sequence and then undercuts it with the realities that each character faces. Both films are notable in how widely they diverge from Hong’s typical wheelhouse, while still hewing close to his traditional standard of excellence and insight. For one, this is his least focused upon his repertory actors in some time, especially his muse and partner Kim Min-hee, who has appeared as the lead in his past six films. Here, she appears in Introduction in only the second section, and has no onscreen role at all in In Front of Your Face, though she is credited as the production manager. Similarly, the most familiar Hong faces, like Kwon and Ki, only appear in sections, leaving the fresh leads to navigate a world that the veterans have already taken part in. Seo’s roles in the two films are especially notable: as Ju-won’s mother, she shares some scenes with Kim, her frequent scene partner in Hong’s recent films; when they are alone together, the scene almost takes on an entirely different tone that feels purposefully removed from the more bitter and elusive mood of the rest of the film. In the second, she appears briefly as a passerby who takes a photo of the sisters and recognizes Sang-ok as a former actress; her walking companion in the scene is Lee Eun-mi, who played her romantic partner in The Woman Who Ran, one of the most overt examples of a Hong character appearing to play the same role in multiple films and a startlingly familiar element in a set of films that otherwise move in new directions for Hong. In addition, perhaps because of pandemic-related necessity, Hong is taking on many more hats here: in addition to his usual writing and directing roles, he is credited as cinematographer, music composer, and editor of these two films, the first time he has officially fulfilled the prior two roles. Correspondingly, the music, always an unconventionally used but important mood-setter for Hong’s films, is even more stripped down than before, almost wholly reduced to a few guitar strums. Despite the greater amount of incident in Introduction and In Front of Your Face than in, say, the nearly context-free interactions of Grass and The Woman Who Ran, the sense of characterization emerges equally out of the supposed downtime, the moments between the conversations. This is more evident than ever in In Front of Your Face, which has more time to explore than the purposefully curtailed, almost lacunary Introduction. In particular, Hong brings back a technique that he hasn’t used since the first half of Right Now, Wrong Then (2015): voiceover to illustrate a character’s thoughts. Here, they are deployed as a form of prayer, and this links the two films as tightly as any element: Introduction opens with the father’s desperate prayer for a second chance, though his reasons aren’t made explicit. Sang-ok’s own requests are much more sanguine and contemplative, asking for little things like being able to remain vigilant at the meeting and in general to maintain a certain measure of paradise. The reason for this state of grace on the part of this aging woman is eventually explained, along with the meaning behind the title of In Front of Your Face — itself an unusually direct move for Hong, whose titles usually occupy a more poetic and ambiguous dimension — but no such reprieve exists for the young people in Introduction, at least not in explicit narrative terms, as they remain as unmoored and uncertain as ever in the ending. Instead, it is suggested by a gradual move away from the viewpoints of Hong’s regulars, however right they may be, and towards the unknown. After Young-ho takes his uncomfortable but refreshing swim, Hong pans from his still figure to the shifting waves of the beach — effectively mirroring the site of many Hong endings, including The Woman Who Ran — and then, after holding a few moments, panning back to the two friends taking care of each other, a gesture of unity that, after the previous scenes’ rancor, acts as its own measure of tranquility. Such a union ultimately collapses between Sang-ok and Jae-won, but in the last scene Hong circles back to the preexisting relationship between the sisters, conveying with a line and a few gestures a connection that has come out of a difficult situation stronger than ever. If these two Hong films ultimately come out more forthrightly optimistic and clear than his films have in a while, it is a testament to his continued inspiration that they take such diverging, differently compelling pathways to do so.

TIFF Wavelengths Shorts First Drafts

Complete first drafts written for In Review Online.

Dear Chantal After something of a breakout with last year’s delightful meta feature Fauna, Nicolás Pereda returns with “Dear Chantal,” a short created as part of the “Las cartas que no fueron también son” project, an omnibus initiative by the Punto de Vista International Documentary Film Festival that commissioned eight well known filmmakers, including Deborah Stratman, Raya Martin, Lynne Sachs, Jessica Sarah Rinland, and Pereda, to make a “cinematic homage to a colleague they have never personally met.” As can be guessed, Pereda’s was the great Chantal Akerman, for whom he fashioned a curious, distinct tribute. Running an exceptionally compact five minutes, it consists solely of supposed letters written to Akerman by Pereda concerning the temporary rental to her of his sister’s two-bedroom house in Mexico City. Her responses are never heard, only intimated, as this hushed voiceover plays out over images of Pereda’s sister Catalina slowly furnishing the bare house, sweeping leaves off the skylight, and placing books and a painting within the abode, as the latter of which, an abstract swirl of light blue and deep read, becomes a focal point. With these stripped down parameters — Akerman’s replies are never heard, though they are certainly hinted at in Pereda’s letters — “Dear Chantal” emphasizes above all the underpinning emotions behind the fundamental stillness in a way both reminiscent of Akerman and starkly different: the consciously posed close-ups feel more akin to Bresson than the wide shots that typify the Belgian director’s work, although a brief still of her in Je, tu, il, elle at the beginning of the film. Amid the mundanity of water filters and converting the second bedroom into an office, Pereda mentions in passing that Catalina has had some difficulties in the past, and it’s certainly significant, and at least a little moving, that the last line and shot goes to her. The Capacity for Adequate Anger Vika Kirchenbauer effectively established herself on the international experimental scene with her short “Untitled Sequence of Gaps,” from last year, an intriguing rumination on varieties of light and how they inflect understanding of societal traditions. With “The Capacity for Adequate Anger,” that sensibility has been noticeably sharpened, pairing a distinctive set of stills with more directly personal narration. One cornerstone of her style is the narration: though she is German, Kirchenbauer narrates her films in English with a tremulous accent that inherently connotes a certain fragility and uncertainty, which strongly influences the affect of her words. Here, the words concern her upbringing and her anxieties over her art practice, perspective, and her interpersonal relationships, including with her father and grandmother. The connections that she draws are frequently startling: a throughline about AIDS connects her childhood adoration of Freddie Mercury, Magic Johnson’s temporary retirement from basketball, and a dental inspection. These musings are augmented by a wide variety of still images, including of childhood drawings, mass media photos, and posed art pictures, along with the sole, unusual source of moving images: a childhood fantasy cartoon of unknown provenance. While loosely sectioned, as signaled by a recurring ambient music cue, “The Capacity for Adequate Anger” maintains a certain flowing train of thought, which ensures a spontaneity to the subjects broached. More than a conceptual boldness, it is in Kirchenbauer’s paradoxical assuredness that the disparate elements will connect together: the title phrase is uttered twice, once in relation to the AIDS epidemic and once regarding her uneasy relationship with her father. Such a stark yet elusive phrase provides a useful, fitting summary of the fascinating elements of this ambitious work, full of information without feeling dense. Inner Outer Space Laida Lertxundi has cemented her reputation as one of the foremost active short filmmakers with films that maintain a certain relaxed California mood while suggesting a whole constellation of potential associations. With “Inner Outer Space,” that methodology is effectively made literal, as it consists of three fairly distinct shorts which together function as an elliptical, intriguing exploration of a new setting for Lertxundi: her native Basque. In truth, four parts might be a more accurate description, as the short begins with a series of miniature installations comprised of images fastened to cardboard, with one piece resembling a television screen. Afterwards, a brief, fragmentary exchange between two women takes place via subtitles, followed by them looking at a series of sills printed on paper, which briefly take life as their own cutaway shots. Without a discernible transition, the second short seems to begin, as people are led blindfolded to a secluded cliff and asked to first describe their surroundings without looking at them, and then draw the area. Following an unexpected presentation of the credits in full, the final short unfurls in one shot, as two women in swimsuits sway with their backs to the camera in front of projected images of waves. As might be gathered, the ultimate point of connection in “Inner Outer Space” lies in the processing and manifestation of mental images, and Lertxundi’s ability to evoke these connections so glancingly forms a key part of her work’s appeal. While the obvious fragmentation means that the typical fluidity of her films is somewhat muted here, a sense of unity ultimately prevails: in the warm 16mm, the skillful deployment of cut-ins, the mystery of the precise meanings of each individual section, which of course is entirely the point. “The red filter is withdrawn.” Kim Min-jung’s “The red filter is withdrawn.” draws upon a host of spirits from the past throughout its deceptively minimal construction. After a brief introduction with three strobing colored rectangles, the film settles into its main focus: various natural and man-made structures on Jeju Island in South Korea, including military bunkers and craggy caves. While the locale appears to be calm, the credits indicate a darker side: the island was inhabited by Imperial Japan, and acted as the site of the infamous April 3 Incident, in which thousands of Communist insurgents were killed in the lead-up to the Korean War. While this history would be compelling by itself, and indeed does become more apparent towards the end of the short with images of graveyards and flags, Kim grafts on another fascinating element: Hollis Frampton’s performance piece “A Lecture.” Throughout “The red filter is withdrawn.”, Kim intersperses subtitles written in both Korean and English from the lecture, which posits that the white rectangle of light that forms the essence of the projected cinema image has existed long before and will continue long after any given person’s life. Correspondingly, the film finds intriguing correspondences within these landscapes, most clearly the bright sunlight shining through large square holes in the caves. Over these images, shot in what appears to be some mix of digital and 16mm, are laid certain effects, including, yes, a red filter, which casts the verdant grass in an entirely new light. “The red filter is withdrawn.” properly ends with Frampton’s exhortation to discuss films in darkness, but Kim’s use of numerous other sources suggests a more suitably ambiguous, complex, and ongoing discourse centered on elements hidden just below the surface.

Memoria First Draft

Complete first draft written for In Review Online.

Frequent In Review Online contributor Evan Morgan once posited a more refined version of the slow cinema paradigm that has come to dominate festival films over the past two decades: hammock cinema, in which films that appear to reject storytelling actually rely on a tightly woven narrative structure, upon which the more readily apparent free-floating atmosphere and extended shots are given an elegance and order. His lodestar is Apichatpong Weerasethakul, quite probably the most important director to make his debut in this century. Despite just six fully fledged feature films in twenty years, the Thai director has exerted an enormous influence on festival cinema, with his use of forested landscapes and unconventional story structures in order to create a sense of the somnambulant that ties into an interest in the supernatural and the violent past of his nation. After six years since his last film Cemetery of Splendour, Apichatpong has returned with Memoria, his first film outside Thailand, with professional actors, and in a foreign language, or rather two — Spanish and English. It follows Jessica (Tilda Swinton), a British orchidologist living in Colombia who, while visiting Bogotá, begins to hear a mysterious, loud, thudding sound at seemingly random moments. Her interactions weave in and out of relation with this developing affliction, including with her temporarily bedridden sister (Agnes Brekke), her brother-in-law (Daniel Giménez Cacho, of Zama fame), a forensic archaeologist named Agnes (Jeanne Balibar), and Hernán (Juan Pablo Urrego), a sound engineer. In an especially hypnotic scene in a film practically filled with nothing else, he helps Jessica recreate the sound that has been haunting her, working from a movie sound effects library and shifting the echo, bass, and shape of the wave to form, in Jessica’s words, “a rumble from the core of the earth.” As might be suggested by this, Memoria focuses on a single main character to a greater degree than any of his previous films; even while Jenjira Pongpas served as the pensive anchor of four of his previous films, her presence was intertwined and mixed with various other focal points. Befitting her arthouse star status, Swinton, in easily her greatest performance in years, takes the center stage for practically every scene in at least the first half of the film. Her signature, slightly alien presence, which has admittedly run the risk of parody in recent years, is wondrously molded by Apichatpong; in the first scene, when she is awoken by the loud noise, her movement suggests a ghost, or perhaps a zombie — Jessica shares the same name as the ethereal figure of Jacques Tourneur’s iconic I Walked With a Zombie (1943). Her manner of movement, lithe but tentative, frequently blending in during the many long shots, only accentuate an acute difference in setting from the endless Thai forests: in the first half of the film, there is a new, pronounced focus on architecture and the city, shown both with teeming throngs of people and at a standstill. Working again with regular DP Sayombhu Mukdeeprom and on 35mm for the first time since Syndromes and a Century (2006), Apichatpong finds the textures in these spaces, in the unpredictable dance of light that gives further shape to the series of strange incidents peppered throughout: a popped tire that causes a pedestrian to drop to the ground, car horns that go off for no apparent reason, a hospital bench as a makeshift lock. In response, his style has shifted somewhat: there is a greater emphasis on duration, on a certain kind of pensive distance that his disciples from afar have adopted. But this is unmistakably Apichatpong, not only in his total willingness to vary his approach as the shot and scene necessitates it, but in the rich sense of character and circumstance, each scene and camera placement contributing, whether elliptically or directly, to a sense of the world that this woman is inhabiting and attempting to understand. About the second half, which is solely made up of an encounter Jessica has in the rural municipality of Pijao with a mysterious man (Elkin Díaz), the less that can be said the better. Suffice it to say that this last hour is one of the most extraordinary, focused, and sustained sequences of the past decade, a slow unfurling of personal and national pasts that intermingle and mutate, conveyed via the most entrancing of means. It all comes back to the sound: not only that indescribable slam, but also the snatches of music, the vaguely unsettling ambiance. If one of the principal pleasures of a hammock is how it can sway in the wind, then Apichatpong understands how to capture the essence of that entrancing motion.

El Gran Movimiento First Draft

Complete first draft written for In Review Online.

Bolivian filmmaker Kiro Russo made his feature debut with the intriguing, loosely structured Dark Skull in 2016, which centered on the inhabitants of the rural town of Huanuni, including Elder (Julio César Ticona), a young ne’er-do-well who begins working in the local mine and struggles with the harsh work and his alcoholism, and was conceived as something of a hybrid film, taking place mostly in the dark depths of the countryside and mine. His new film, El Gran Movimiento, begins almost literally where his previous one left off: the miners, after rumblings in the prior film of displacement, have undertaken a seven-day voyage on foot to La Baz, the de facto Bolivian government, in order to agitate for their jobs. After a startling moment in which César Ticona appears to give an interview as himself, including a reference onscreen to him being the lead actor of Dark Skull, he assumes the role of Elder once more. As the film unfolds, he and two other companions end up staying in the city and attempt to find work in the city, while he grows more and more sick from some mysterious combination of heat, elevation, exhaustion, and other ambiguous, potentially historical or mythological sources. Such a description provides a good baseline for El Gran Movimiento, but it feels woefully inadequate to capture the currents that swirl through the film. While Dark Skull was limited in some way by the scale necessitated by the small-town setting and adopted a spare approach to structure and narrative aside from the miners and their relatives, Russo consciously expands his focus to encompass the inhabitants of practically the entire capitol. Alongside Elder’s tale of misfortune, he also includes a thread that eventually becomes practically as consequential to the film’s purposes: an older local man named Max (Max Bautista Uchasara), a shambolic figure who appears to live in the caves and hills around La Paz but who frequently ventures into the city, having established an easy rapport with the women running the open-air market stands. He also may or may not have healing powers, possibly connected to the motif of a white dog, a symbol that appears with increasing frequency in the second half of the film as Elder’s situation worsens. Russo implicitly draws these parallels between young and old, outsider and local, in order to structure his wider gaze, which at first manifests itself in brief little interactions that stretch outside of the world previously established in his last film — a large group watching a professional wrestling match on an outdoor screen, a group of market women laughing at Elder’s ineptitude, and, most significantly, an old woman who takes in Elder as her godson even though they never appear to have met. All this is conveyed under the same watchful camera eye that typified his previous film, though while Dark Skull preferred a fascinating sense of gliding camera movement, somewhat uncommon in the arthouse veins that Russo is mining, here the camera very slowly zooms forward in the bulk of the shots, first established in a lengthy pre-title card sequence that gazes at different buildings and elements within La Paz. Gradually, as El Gran Movimiento proceeds down its trajectory of bodily decay, the ruptures in the carefully drawn aesthetic become ever more frequent and unexpected, culminating in a furiously and rhythmically edited sequence that appears to mix footage from both films, along with a flurry of faces and streets. It is in this moment that the great movement is revealed: this is a thoroughly idiosyncratic and elliptical approach to the city symphony, one rooted in character and in which the spirit of the city — and, thanks to the presence of Elder and his compatriots, the country — is vividly evoked through the highs and lows of living.

Petite Solange First Draft

Complete first draft written for In Review Online.

It’s perhaps unfair to say that divorce dramas have had too great a resurgence in recent years. It is by its nature a prime, extreme avenue for filmmakers to explore questions of family, separation, and bureaucracy, but this vehicle for Big Themes can frequently falter if the subject is taken merely on face value, and not burrowed into and inhabited. In that sense, Axelle Ropert would seem to be an ideal director for this sort of endeavor: she directed Tirez la langue, mademoiselle (2013, also known as Miss and the Doctors), one of the finest romantic comedies of recent years, which constantly expanded outward from its love triangle of brother doctors slowly falling in love with the same woman to capture the sense of city life and ineffable connections. Ropert’s newest film, Petite Solange, playing in the International Competition at Locarno, falls under more conventional lines. Its eponymous character, a 13-year-old played by Jade Springer, leads a relatively average life with her parents Antoine (Philippe Katerine), a music store salesman, and Aurélia (Léa Drucker), a theater actress specializing in wronged women, along with her bookish elder brother Romain (Grégoire Montana). Indeed, aside from an evident brightness of spirit, the most distinctive factor about Solange initially is her last name, Maserati, an Italian name inherited from her father which is commented on numerous times throughout the film. But the family begins unhappy, with Antoine engaged in a surreptitious affair with his coworker and Aurélia frequently absent, and only worsens as the film goes on. What sets Petite Solange apart from a run-of-the-mill divorce film, however, is the question of Ropert’s interest. Solange remains front and center throughout the film, with most of the divorce aspect conveyed in overheard shouts, tentative tête-à-tête conversations with her parents, and the normal vagaries of familial interaction. More than anything, this is a patient, quotidian film; for much of it the only substantial shift in these dynamics is Romain practically fleeing to the relative refuge of a graduate degree program. Instead of constant struggle, Ropert opts for a certain creeping sense of unease, a slow evolution in Solange’s character and outlook on life. Sometimes, this runs the risk of cliché: a certain subplot with Solange becoming more and more troublesome in school as a result of domestic stress feels too pat. But more often, Ropert’s signature interest in little subplots, reflecting the unsettled and capricious nature of life, comes through, especially in a tentative flirtation Solange has with a piano-playing bad boy at her school. All of this builds to a sudden release, a rupture in the film’s final twenty minutes that jumps an indeterminate number of years to a greatly changed Solange. Springer’s performance shifts radically in this moment, and it illuminates the extent to which the film principally relies on her initially ebullient presence, along with Ropert’s careful sense of direction and the beautiful 16mm cinematography by Sébastien Buchmann. This is not a radical film about divorce, but it continually demonstrates an interest in burrowing just a little deeper, going in a slightly more interesting direction, and the agglomeration of these choices results in something gratifyingly warm and complex.

Days First Draft

Complete first draft written for Hyperallergic.

Tsai Ming-liang exists in a curious position within the cinephile consciousness. One of the greatest Taiwanese directors and a foremost practitioner of the very loose movement known as slow cinema, which arose in the late 1980s and early 90s, predominately in Asian countries, his feature films all share distinctive attributes — extended, static long takes; frequent presence of rain or water flooding; a patient eye dedicated to a decaying, ultramodern Taipei, where he has set most of his films — that have become so ingrained that it can obscure some of his most interesting recurring elements. In addition, while Tsai himself is well-known, and a certain number of his films are commonly seen, relatively speaking — including Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2013), Vive L’Amour (1994), and Stray Dogs (2013) — others are underseen, lost in the vagaries of poor quality windowboxed DVDs and ultralimited distribution. This isn’t to say that his vaunted aesthetic unity — which, it should be said, is disrupted when needed, such as in the unconventional musical sequences in The Hole (1998) and The Wayward Cloud (2005) — isn’t a key factor of the films, but it is too often favored in comparison to the great narrative unity that his films present. For Tsai is one of the most teleological of directors, concentrating a step-by-step, film-by-film procession focused upon his muse Lee Kang-sheng, who has been in all his feature films, ever since his debut with Rebels of the Neon God (1991). Understanding Lee’s role is crucial, and not just because his distinctive, halting manner of movement and speaking sets a kind of template for all of Tsai’s actors: Tsai is openly gay, and the backbone of his films is his necessarily unrequited longing for Lee, who is straight but often plays a queer character. In effect, the films are tortured by this central relationship, resulting in narratives of outsiders, Lee most of all, longing for some sense of meaning and companionship in a world that is changing before their eyes; the title of I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone (2006) could scarcely be more apropos. Lee’s presence, in addition to recurring male and female actors like Chen Shiang-chyi, Miao Tien, and Yang Kuei-mei, is crucial to this: he plays more-or-less the same character in all these films, initially named Xiaokang but eventually being named just Kang (xiao is Chinese for small). While taking Tsai’s career as a totally coherent continuous narrative isn’t strictly true, it does very much feel like his oeuvre was leading directly to the last two shots of Stray Dogs, a twenty-minute tour-de-force where cinema itself seems to come to a final standstill. It’s no surprise that Tsai initially announced that he was retiring from narrative feature filmmaking after that film. While he has continued to make short and mid-length works in fiction, documentary, and even gallery settings, Tsai kept his promise until Days, which premiered last year in Berlin. One of Tsai’s most stripped-down, direct, and moving works, and one which heralds the start of an exciting new chapter in his career, it was conceived under unusual circumstances for him. Lee was undergoing severe neck pains a few years ago, reflective of Xiaokang’s affliction in The River (1997), and Tsai journeyed with him to film his intense treatments without any specific reason. At the same time, Tsai met a Laotian immigrant to Bangkok, Anong Houngheuangsy, and began filming him as well as he went about his daily work, including extended moments of cooking. From these roots came the first half of Days, which crosscuts between these two strands of footage formed from roughly three years of filming. While these were filmed without any specific concept in mind, they remain as brilliantly shot as any of his films, patiently and lovingly watching these people doing their quotidian tasks. This suddenly pivots at the hour-mark, where Kang and Anong come together in a hotel room for an erotic massage encounter. The effect is stark and entrancing: it has been decades since Tsai had a male lead performance alongside Lee’s continual presence, and to see these two men locked in such intimacy, whether transactional or not, over a period about half an hour, is unprecedented in his work. The summative effect of Days’s elements, especially the long, fading conclusion, is of a melancholy as potent as his other films, but there is something new: a genuine fulfillment, a belief in deep, life-changing connection, even if it is only for a single night.

Deep End First Draft

Complete first draft written for In Review Online.

Jerzy Skolimowski had a distinctive output well before he ended up in London. He began his film career in his native Poland with three successive features from 1964 to 1966 — Identification Marks: None, Walkover, and Barrier — which acted as semi-autobiographical accounts of his experiences under the communist system. The first two starred Skolimowski himself as his alter ego Andrzej Leszczyc, both relatively rough-and-tumble films featuring a good amount of tracking shots and evocative shadows, while the latter opted for a more surreal and dreamlike aesthetic. These two approaches were effectively fused in his next film Le Départ (1967), a Belgian film starring Jean-Pierre Léaud as an auto-obsessed hairdresser, which inserted into its pleasurably loose progression various ruptures, including a final projector breakdown as effective as its contemporary Persona. So where does one go after such a decisive break? For Skolimowski, it was to the deep end, or rather, Deep End, his 1970 film and his first effort in the UK. Its focus remains resolutely on Mike (John Moulder Brown), a 15-year-old who gets his first job as a shower room attendant at a public bath, and the object of his burgeoning obsession, his 25-year-old coworker Susan (Jane Asher). In the midst of this central dynamic runs all manner of unnerving, frankly presented encounters and characters, including Susan’s fiancé Chris (Chris Sandford), her lover and Mike’s former physical education teacher (Karl Michael Vogler), and all manner of vaguely or sometimes overtly sinister figures in London society. For Deep End is a film all about sex, or more specifically the absolute terror of sexual perversions, and how quickly it can warp the minds of those around it. This is not to say that Skolimowski is a scold or a prude by any means: he clearly sees sexuality and comfort with it as a spectrum — albeit within a strictly hetero framework, concerning the characters in this film — wherein Mike and Susan are on roughly opposite ends. Mike is very clearly confused by anyone’s advances as long as they don’t concern the woman of his affections, whereas Susan almost sees sex as an a priori, constantly teasing Mike even as his behavior gets more and more unnerving, though there are certain lines drawn for her: she eventually gets fed up with the constant pestering that various men enact upon her, she objects when her fiancé drags her to an adult education film. Like Peeping Tom from a decade before it, Deep End almost sees London as a nightmarish dystopia of sex gone mad, seeing both the bathhouse and the nightlife as a hotbed of strange and unsettling people. Skolimowski’s role here is essentially one of modulation, and he does so here by essentially bifurcating the film. The first half of the film largely takes place in and around the bathhouse, leaving aside the trip to the porn theater, and the interactions that Mike has with clients, including an especially memorable one where an older woman repeatedly pushes his head into her breasts while discussing association football. While sequences like that are willfully extended and acted out in discomfiting long take, the second half takes that strategy and expands it dramatically, first in a 20-minute sequence that follows Mike attempting to spy on Susan and her fiancé, which involves him eating something like ten hot dogs from a Chinese cart owner to give himself a justification for staying in the area, stealing a standee of a nude woman who resembles Susan, and taking refuge with a sex worker with a broken leg, all scored to music from “The Can.” The remaining 25 minutes of the film are taken up by a sequence of even greater absurdity, as Mike and Susan, huddled in the empty pool, boil five large bags of snow in a small kettle and strain it through her stockings in an effort to find her engagement ring’s diamond. What’s emphasized throughout Deep End is the forcefulness of Mike’s teenage fixations, and how they can be expressed in often violent tantrums that go unrecognized until it’s far too late. It’s entirely to Skolimowski’s credit that the final action here is as willfully strange yet visceral as the rest of the film: an almost inexplicable result, augmented by a fundamental damning motivation that resonates with a clanging horror.

Trust First Draft

Complete first draft written for In Review Online.

Hal Hartley occupies a curious position in the American film scene. While he might reasonably be called an icon of the independent film scene and has remained a fixture of prestigious film festivals like Sundance and Cannes since the late 1980s, he has never had the true breakout success or mainstream recognition of someone like a Whit Stillman, let alone a Quentin Tarantino. True, his style and interests have shifted over the years, but aside from a few circles, Hartley’s visibility has waned considerably, to the point where he is rarely mentioned amid the independent heyday of the 1990s. This is a shame, because in a just world, 1990’s Trust would rightly be regarded as one of the most significant American films of the decade. It was Hartley’s second film after the prior year’s The Unbelievable Truth, and in essence the two form a loose diptych, centering on the yearnings and anxieties of characters played by Adrienne Shelly. In this case, Shelly plays Maria Coughlin, a 17-year-old high schooler who begins the film in rip-roaring fashion: she announces to her parents that she has dropped out of high school and that she is pregnant, then slaps her father, who drops dead of a heart attack. Her counterpart is Matthew Slaughter (Hartley stalwart Martin Donovan), an older man with a troubled past who lives with his abusive father, and in his first scene quits his job fixing cheap electronics and puts his supervisor’s head in a vise. The extremities of the described events help to begin the process of typifying what makes Hartley’s style so unique and invigorating; while Hartley’s first three films (including 1992’s Simple Men) belong to the so-called Long Island Trilogy and identifiably exist in that space, all cool tones and wide expanses of concrete, the actual world that Hartley illustrates is one as prone to bursts of surreal behavior and emotions as his 1991 short “Ambition,” wherein a walk to work is punctuated by three separate brawls, including with a woman holding a submachine gun. Crucially, these moments are received with the same heightened deadpan equanimity that characterizes almost all of Hartley’s interactions, ensuring that they blend into the texture of the film rather than jut out from it. And just as crucially, the burgeoning romance that develops between Maria and Matthew is just as strange, just as thrilling in its development as these moments. The two don’t meet until almost half an hour into the film, and their first interaction is undertaken out of necessity: she has been kicked out of her house, and unlike the other men in the film he takes pity on her and offers her a place to stay for the night. Hartley conceives of love as not necessarily an innate force that can conquer all, but as something born from desperation and loneliness which is subject to the very destabilizing and vindictive forces that first caused it to come into being. For Maria, it is her mother Jean (Merritt Nelson) and her now ex-boyfriend Anthony (Gary Sauer), and for Matthew his father Jim (John MacKay) and the general state of Reaganite capitalism and its erosion of principles of quality and integrity. These factors are well in place by the time the two finally meet, so when they do it registers with a great gravity, a relief that the rest of the film both challenges and ultimately upholds. Trust is filled to the brim with subplots and obstacles, like Maria spending much of the film trying to find a frustrated housewife who stole a baby from a bus stop, which are ultimately less about the central romance and more about a certain way of being, an almost moral sense that Hartley infuses the film with. His philosophical discussions, like the one that gives the film its title — Maria sees love as being formed from respect, admiration, and trust, while Matthew is unable to let go of the material facts of their situation — are conveyed with a prosaic directness and flesh out what drives his characters down certain paths. This extends in large part to his supporting cast, who all are given a quirk of behavior, a shade of characterization that further deepens the concerns of the film, especially characters like Maria’s sister Peg (Edie Falco) and Karen Sillas as a weary abortion clinic nurse. But at the end of the day, the film belongs to Donovan and especially Shelly, and their two acting styles mesh incredibly harmoniously with Hartley. Donovan, in his first of many performances for Hartley, leans into the inherent artificiality of the dialogue, delivering his lines with a brusque intelligence that projects a downbeat confidence in his convictions and hopes. By contrast, this would be Shelly’s last performance for Hartley in a tragically short life, and what begins as a bratty arrogance in the first third of the film stunningly metamorphosizes into a tenderness, a considerateness that is informed by her maturation, her need to grow up in a world that tries to smother young women like her. Though Trust is one of the great American romance films, in no small part because it is the story of two messed-up, lonely people who connect because there is no one else who can truly understand them, it is just as much an achingly observed, ultimately ebullient Bildungsroman, an act of self-assertion that speaks so much to Hartley’s compassion and his ability to wring immense pathos from his signature, too-little-seen stylizations.

Topology of Sirens First Draft

Complete first draft written for In Review Online.

The way in which people interact with the archaic or outmoded is an ever-evolving proposition. Especially given the unbelievable pace of the 20 th and 21 st centuries, where innumerable technologies have been developed, widely used, and then abandoned for the next shiny thing, devices that once were widely taken for granted just a decade or so ago take on a different aura entirely, one almost akin to uncovering a buried, obscure treasure. Jonathan Davies’s Topology of Sirens, one of the most assured and evocative feature debuts of the past few years, which premieres as part of the FIDMarseille International Competition, takes this paradox as one of its primary animating forces. It follows Cas (documentary filmmaker Courtney Stephens), a sound engineer who moves into her deceased aunt’s home in what appears to be an unnamed neighborhood of Los Angeles. As she reconnects with her friends within the local experimental music scene, she discovers within a locked closet of the house a rare hurdy-gurdy. Inside the outdated instrument are seven answering machine mini-cassette tapes, each labeled with a mysterious symbol and containing different varieties of soundscapes and audio effects. This cryptic find begins a loose series of wanderings across the greater LA area, as linkages and coincidences pile up without necessarily coalescing into a unifying purpose or meaning. Much of what compels about Topology of Sirens stems from this approach to narrative and how it maps onto Davies’s contemplative style. The film feels very much of a piece with Tyler Taormina’s Ham on Rye from 2019: Taormina and Davies are part of a drone music duo, produced each other’s films, and both films are gorgeously lensed by Carson Lund (full disclosure: all three are friends of mine), but while that film adhered to a clear if powerful structural trajectory, no such net exists for Topology. Instead, the film feels refreshingly charged in its conviction that any situation, any encounter can unlock another link in the chain towards comprehension, and that the strength of the revelation can be felt much more than it can be explicated. It is no accident that these pivot points can be so often located in abandoned technologies like the cassette tapes or the hurdy-gurdy; in particular, one scene set at a long- running amateur TV station features a character played by film preservationist Mark Toscano, who takes stock of the continual submission of home tapes, including one man who taped pre- digital television static so that people would still be able to see analog snow well past its conventional usage. Davies doesn’t aim to tie all these obsolete items into a neat bow, but he has a pronounced appreciation for them, and how they can blend with and be enhanced by new technologies; one of Cas’s final actions in the film is to create mixdowns of the tape recordings, blending the formerly discrete music to create something else entirely. In an interview for FIDMarseille, Davies attributes the governing aesthetic and narrative principles to ‘90s PC point-and-click adventure games, but Topology of Sirens unfolds in ways that hew much closer and deeper to typically cinematic means. Shot mostly in master shots, which frequently move with gliding precision across rooms, the film’s quiet nature — there is relatively little dialogue in the film, charmingly credited as “featuring dialogue from the cast” — allows for both a bounty of interstitial moments of natural and suburban landmarks and a series of truly startling and magical ruptures. These moments, including a few live musical performances, are frequently signaled by a definite shift in perspectives, and stun in a way that somehow only furthers the mystical mood that Topology of Sirens consistently manages to weave. More than anything, Davies trusts in the sensorial import of his images, in the implications and pleasures of shifting lights and dissolves, and the effect is nothing short of transporting.

Chang Chen First Draft

Complete first draft written for Criterion.

As a performer, Chang Chen specializes in observing and listening. One of the key Taiwanese actors of the past thirty years, he began his career at fourteen with Edward Yang’s epochal masterpiece A Brighter Summer Day (1991) and has worked with some of the most notable contemporary Chinese-speaking directors, from Yang to Hou Hsiao-hsien, John Woo to Ang Lee, in both his native country and in China and Hong Kong. Across his career, whether by dint of almost exclusively speaking Mandarin among Cantonese speakers or playing people on the periphery of the story, Chang tends to be on the outside looking in, a slightly aloof and inscrutable figure even when he’s at the center. I have long held an intense admiration for him, in large part because I see something of myself in his characters: a young Taiwanese man living in another place, who always feels like an outsider constantly attempting to understand those around him. Few filmmakers have harnessed that odd-man-out quality as well as Wong Kar-wai, with whom Chang has worked four times. In return, their collaboration offers something that no other actor in Wong’s considerable repertory cast provides: an unmolded performer at the beginning of his career, whose screen presence and roles shift profoundly with each film. This youthfulness is put to pointed use in Chang’s first Wong film, Happy Together (1997). In the destructive pas de deux between Tony Leung and Leslie Cheung, Chang is the only other significant character. His role is deliberately ambiguous, especially his sexuality, but he does represent a radiance, an innocence that has long been absent from the two lovers’ lives. In a film shadowed by the Handover, where characters struggle to break out of the cages of their past, his nationality is no accident: he and Taiwan stand out as beacons of hope, of a possible future where tears and pain can be left behind. Chang would get his own duet and true showcase with The Hand (2004), Wong’s short contribution to the Eros omnibus, recently expanded to feature-length. As a tailor who develops an intense relationship with a high-class call girl (Gong Li), his nigh-ageless appearance becomes indispensable to the film. For most of the film he could be anywhere between twenty and forty years old, a temporal blurriness which, when coupled with understated jumps in chronology, deliberately unmoors the film from any conventional sense of time, allowing the pair’s longing to assume a floating yet palpable grandness and tragedy. His quiet countenance is here deployed as a mask for his ardent emotions, holding until it is shattered at the close. Chang’s other two Wong appearances are far more peripheral, although to different aims. He is one fleeting face amid the cavalcade of ghosts from Wong’s past that comprises 2046 (2004). More telling is his storyline in The Grandmaster (2013). Though he appears in only three scenes and interacts with a character from the main narrative just once, he registers profoundly as a kung fu master among equals. He is simultaneously set apart and within the fold, in a state of suspension that perfectly represents his unique, essential presence in Wong’s oeuvre.

Chang Chen Incomplete Draft

Incomplete draft written for Criterion.

It’s no stretch to say that Chang Chen is one of the key Taiwanese actors of the past thirty years. He began his acting career at fourteen with Edward Yang’s epochal masterpiece A Brighter Summer Day (1991), inaugurating a career involving collaborations with some of the most notable contemporary Chinese-speaking directors, from Yang to Hou Hsiao-hsien, John Woo to Ang Lee, in both his native country and in China and Hong Kong. Chief among these filmmakers has been Wong Kar-wai, with whom he has worked four times. The Hong Kong auteur was the first director that Chang worked with after Yang, and their collaboration offers a few things that no other actor in Wong’s considerable repertory cast provides: a Taiwanese actor, and therefore even more of an outsider than the few mainland stars, who similarly speak Mandarin among Cantonese speakers, and an unmolded performer at the beginning of his career, whose screen presence and roles thus shift profoundly with each film. This youthfulness is put to pointed use in Chang’s first Wong film, Happy Together (1997). In the tortured, mutually destructive pas de deux undergone by Tony Leung and Leslie Cheung, two of the greatest Hong Kong actors of their generation, Chang is the only other significant character, a Taiwanese tourist strapped for cash in Buenos Aires who strikes up a friendship with Leung. His role is deliberately ambiguous, especially in his sexuality: he alludes to difficulties with his parents, seems to be attracted to the sound of Leung’s voice, and shrugs off a woman’s advances. But most of all he represents a radiance, an innocence that has long been absent from the two lovers’ lives. Notably, Chang would get his own duet and his true showcase with The Hand (2004), a feature-length version of Wong’s contribution to the Eros omnibus. Chang’s other two Wong appearances are far more peripheral, although to different aims. In the cavalcade of veritable ghosts from the past that comprises 2046 (2004), where recurring Wong actors appear in roles just a little different from their original incarnations, he appears in exactly one shot in the flesh, as a jealous drummer boyfriend, and in a few scattered moments in the story-within-the-story. More telling is his storyline in The Grandmaster (2013), where he appears as a mysterious government agent named The Razor for only three scenes and interacting with a character from the “main” narrative just once. In a film dedicated to many kung fu masters, who ultimately fall into the annals of history while Ip Man (Leung) lives on, he ultimately becomes one of them. As ever, though he is set apart, he emerges as every bit the equal of the more glamorous Hong Kong stars, an actor marching to his own inimitable rhythm. As a thespian, Chang Chen specializes in observing and listening. One of the key Taiwanese actors of the past thirty years, he began his career at fourteen with Edward Yang’s epochal masterpiece A Brighter Summer Day (1991) and has worked with some of the most notable contemporary Chinese-speaking directors, from Yang to Hou Hsiao-hsien, John Woo to Ang Lee, in both his native country and in China and Hong Kong. Across his career, whether by dint of almost exclusively speaking Mandarin among Cantonese speakers or playing people on the periphery of the central story, Chang tends to be on the outside looking in, a slightly aloof and inscrutable figure even when he is one of the leads. I have long held an intense admiration for him, in large part because I see something of myself in his characters: a young Taiwanese man living in another place, who always feels like an outsider constantly attempting to understand those around him. Few filmmakers have harnessed that quality as well as Wong Kar-wai, with whom Chang has worked four times. In return, their collaboration offers something that no other actor in Wong’s considerable repertory cast provides: an unmolded performer at the beginning of his career, whose screen presence and roles shift profoundly with each film. This youthfulness is put to pointed use in Chang’s first Wong film, Happy Together (1997). In the destructive pas de deux between Tony Leung and Leslie Cheung, Chang is the only other significant character. His role is deliberately ambiguous, especially in his sexuality, but most of all he represents a radiance, an innocence that has long been absent from the two lovers’ lives. In a film shadowed by the Handover, where characters struggle to break out of the cages of their past, his nationality is no accident: he and Taiwan stand out as beacons of hope, of a possible future where tears and pain can be left behind. Chang would get his own duet and true showcase with The Hand (2004), a feature-length version of Wong’s contribution to the Eros omnibus. As a tailor who develops an intense relationship with a high-class call girl (Gong Li), his nigh-ageless appearance becomes paramount to the film. For most of the film he could be anywhere between twenty and forty years old, which, when coupled with understated jumps in time, deliberately unmoors the film from any conventional sense of time, allowing the pair’s longing to assume a floating yet palpable grandness and tragedy. His quiet countenance is here deployed as a mask for his ardent emotions, holding until it is shattered at the close. Chang’s other two Wong appearances are far more peripheral, although to different aims. He is one fleeting face amid the cavalcade of veritable ghosts from Wong’s past that comprises 2046 (2004). More telling is his storyline in The Grandmaster (2013). Though he appears in only three scenes and interacts with a character from the main narrative just once, he registers profoundly as a kung fu master among equals. He is simultaneously set apart and within the fold, a state of suspension that perfectly represents his unique, essential presence in Wong’s oeuvre.

Steven Soderbergh

1. Ocean's Eleven (2001)
2. sex, lies, and videotape (1989)
3. Logan Lucky (2017)
4. Kimi (2022)
5. High Flying Bird (2019)
6. No Sudden Move (2021)
7. Equilibrium (2004)
8. Unsane (2018)
9. Let Them All Talk a.k.a. The Fall of 2019 (2020)

1. Ocean's Eleven (2001)
2. sex, lies, and videotape (1989)
3. Logan Lucky (2017)
4. Kimi (2022)
5. High Flying Bird (2019)
6. No Sudden Move (2021)
7. Unsane (2018)
8. Let Them All Talk a.k.a. The Fall of 2019 (2020)

Phoenix First Draft

Complete first draft written for In Review Online.

Any discussion of Phoenix almost begs to begin with the ending. One of the greatest mic-drop endings in all but the most literal sense of the word, it acts as an overwhelming release, a moment of long-awaited triumph over schemes and betrayal, all conveyed through glances, the reveal of a marked arm, and a piercing, impossible to replicate voice. The catharsis and clarity of that scene refuses to be denied, so much so that it almost threatens to overshadow the rest of one of Christian Petzold’s greatest films. But in looking beyond those final three-and-a-half minutes, one can get a clearer picture of what makes the film, and the ending, such a powerful, even mysterious experience. Beginning in a shadowed car at night, Phoenix establishes its period setting with unusual clarity for Petzold: the American uniforms and flatly accented English of the soldiers at the checkpoint that stops Nelly (Nina Hoss) and Lene (Nina Kunzendorf) clearly demarcate the film as taking place just after World War II, in internationally occupied Berlin and its surroundings. Indeed, it is a film filled to almost bursting with period detail, from the crumbling ruins to the dramatic train station to the seedy clubs, so much so that one could be forgiven for seeing the film as primarily a stylistic exercise, a chance for Petzold to finally craft a world markedly separate from the 21st century Germany that has typified so much of his work. But Phoenix is above all a profoundly internal film, one dedicated to mindsets, investigations, and projections, as characters constantly circle the ghosts of their pasts and of the unimaginable crimes of a nation. The Holocaust remains at the forefront of Nelly’s mind throughout, not the least because of the distinct possibility that Johnny (Ronald Zehrfeld) may have betrayed her to suffer at the hands of the Nazis. However, it’s just as crucial that nothing is shown of her time there. Rather than go a shock-and-awe route, bluntly impressing upon the viewer the trauma undergone by the survivors, Petzold lets his sense of atmosphere suggest and even confront that recent violence. More than a third of the film passes before the “main narrative” truly begins to unfold, and that time is necessarily put towards establishing that mood, which persists across countryside hospitals, fraught street encounters, and even a few almost ghostly images: in her bandages, Nelly holds a spectral presence at some times, an achingly human one at others, a spectrum of presentations that persists, and which Hoss portrays with complete assuredness, throughout the entire film. When the main narrative does come in, comparisons to Vertigo almost seem too obvious: a man reshaping a woman to be his presumably deceased lover, only to belatedly discover that she is that very same women. But crucial differences abound: the film takes place from her point of view, and thus the audience is aware from the very first moment of the subterfuge at play; Johnny’s preparations focus as much on Nelly’s behavior as on her physical form; and his motives are entirely mercenary, disbelieving in the very possibility of her surviving the war. Perhaps most importantly of all, the viewer is never given a glimpse into the couple’s past life, never able to see the supposed ideal that Johnny is projecting onto the woman he believes to be a poor stranger. Such a change consciously reframes and breaks the dreamlike spell that that epochal film weaved over its second half. Here, it is resolutely dedicated to materiality, to the step-by-step molding and procedures that must be undergone into “fooling” the world that Nelly has returned. Thus, Phoenix’s ending brings all the exiled ghosts and feelings back into the present. Petzold’s achievement is such that, even though the viewer has stayed tethered to this woman for the entirety of the film, feeling her emotions and turmoil, her anxiety and curiosity, it is as if they are truly seeing her for the first time. Hoss’s impassioned voice does a great deal, yes, but it owes just as much to Petzold’s sense of time and pacing. “Speak Low” is by design a song with a looping structure, and in tandem with the sudden paring away of the spectators sitting in the same room as the performances, focusing on just Nelly and Johnny in alternating shots, the film which seemed so concerned with a forward momentum, a progression of understanding and deception, suddenly halts in its tracks, stretching out for what seems like eons. When the song is broken off, the people around these two shattered lovers return; Petzold is not so naïve as to think that time can be decisively turned back, only stalled. But once that interlude is up, time begins flowing again, and here it does so with the most resolute of irresolutions, with, at last, a future for its heroine that is open, free from the prescriptions and lies of others.

Barbara First Draft

Complete first draft written for In Review Online.

In retrospect, it almost seems odd that Christian Petzold’s international breakthrough effectively came with Barbara. Though it was his first period film, dealing with a readily identifiable hook — the eponymous doctor (Nina Hoss) wants to escape 1980s East Germany — its actual progression, its choices of emphases and structure, result in something far more complex and thornier than would be expected from such a barebones logline. Indeed, barebones would be the first impression that a fair chunk of viewers would get from the film, which focuses on Barbara’s interactions at the small town hospital that she has been forcibly transferred to, especially with the head doctor Reiser (Ronald Zehrfeld). Additionally, she must contend with periodic apartment raids and constant surveillance from the Stasi, personified by Officer Schütz (Rainer Bock), and the furtive relaying of supplies and money from West German compatriots, including her lover Jörg (Mark Waschke). It is true that the film toggles between these storylines, paying attention to the constant tension that Barbara must face in dealing with patients and warding off the suspicions of the authorities. But Petzold crucially declines to overdramatize or telegraph any of its developments with cheap ploys to increase the tension. There is no moment when the tremendously skilled Barbara slips and makes an incorrect diagnosis or is forced into an interrogation room and worked over to no avail: Barbara is distinguished above all by the quiet surety of its development, which lets what ultimately becomes a discernible narrative come to fruition in an intensely subdued manner. This assuredness is evident in the very nature of Barbara’s character. As played by Hoss, she gives the immediate impression of statuesque imperiousness; in the first scene, Schütz says that she would be called sulky if she was six but doesn’t follow up on the analogy, a gesture that sets up the film’s depiction of her as not quite akin to a subject found in a character study, but rather as almost a vector, a force that, impetuous and blunt as it may be, carries with it a dazzling amount of charisma. It is a star performance in the classical sense; much of the film’s pleasure comes from simply seeing Hoss alternating between motion and stasis, channeling the scene’s given emotion with her figure’s bearing. It’s no accident that so much of the film is therefore dedicated to travel. Barbara accepts a few rides from Reiser at a few points, but for the most part she prefers to ride her bike and/or take the train. This is partly out of necessity, as she goes to her dead drops and illicit rendez-vous, but Petzold includes scenes of not inconsiderable length showing her in transit, which do a great deal to bring out the local color and surroundings that might very well be missed in a film more dedicated to plot and incident. Of course, there is a secondary purpose to these scenes, as Barbara is constantly on the lookout for prying eyes, and the long scenes may very well be interrupted by a screeching car or a policeman’s call; when this does happen, however, it occurs outside of her home, furthering the constant dichotomy of finding familiarity in strange places, and danger in the most intimate spaces. The strangest — and eventually most comforting — place of all in Barbara is the hospital. This strand of the film is divided neatly into halves, watching how Barbara and Reiser deal with two young patients, Stella and Mario, and while they are focused on almost to the point of exclusion of other patients, this leaves a great deal room for interactions between the two doctors, as they often come together to converse about their concerns and observations. Reiser emerges here as a warm yet implacable presence, as both Barbara and the viewer are unsure exactly how much of his generosity and endearingly fumbling attempts at courtship are influenced by his collaboration with the Stasi. For his part, Zehrfeld plays his part as bemused, almost curious about his new coworker, letting his restive visage act as the antithesis of Hoss’s means of expression. Though these two characters are the only two that Barbara truly focuses on, Petzold gives so much detail to every interaction that each character — whether it be a hired piano tuner, an excitable sex worker, or most of all Stella, the one true victim in the midst of so much paranoia and foreboding — has their own unique charge and autonomy that in turn influence the viewer’s perception of Barbara. When the time for her final decision comes, it is critically not based upon some crisis of consciousness, but rather out of a sense of duty, an inner strength and morality that has been built upon in every scene. And just like everything else in this supremely controlled film, this unspoken turn of events is conveyed via only a few minimal gestures, set in a few evocative images. Thus, the status quo continues, but it does so with a renewed, confident understanding and dedication.

The State I Am In First Draft

Complete first draft written for In Review Online.

The State I Am In, Christian Petzold’s theatrical feature debut, begins with a song. Opening on a profile shot of its central character, Jeanne (Julia Hummer), as she buys a drink at a beach café, goes to a jukebox to put on Tim Hardin’s “How Can We Hang on to a Dream,” and sits down at a table, it sets an oneiric, almost romantic tone that the film purposefully pushes against and counteracts. For Jeanne’s parents, Hans (Richy Müller) and Clara (Barbara Auer) — and by reluctant extension her — live in a constate state of fear: it is slowly revealed over the course of the film that they have been in hiding for decades as ex-members of the Baader-Meinhof Group, existing almost as ghosts after the fall of the Berlin Wall. At the onset of the film, their aim is escape, assuming new identities and living in Portugal, but they are constantly pursued by the nebulous forces of the government, composed seemingly equally of military forces and spies. But Petzold chooses not to foreground any of these specifics, instead lasering in on both a languid dread and, even more curiously, the resistance of Jeanne, now fifteen years old, to the cloak-no-dagger approach at play here. Though she is learning Portuguese and largely obeying their commands, she longs to smoke, to listen to music, to flirt with boys. So even as they are driven into sudden chaos, losing their stockpiled money and forced to retreat to Germany without residence or reasonable funds, Jeanne continually acts out, sneaking out of the house and developing a burgeoning romance with Heinrich (Bilge Bingül). The State of Things takes this fundamental impasse between ways of living as its subject, first in a quasi-road movie setting, as the family slowly travels back to their home country, and then in a fugue state of suspicion as they hole up in an abandoned villa, a rather swanky house with security timer lights and heated floors. This turn, a little more than a third into the film, crucially doesn’t alter the prevailing atmosphere that the film operates under, and indeed intensifies it in a way. The sporadic interactions typical of the road movie that dotted the first section of the film maintain their frequency but become even stranger and more inexplicable: in perhaps the oddest scene, Jeanne is smoking outside of a school when a student randomly asks if she is going to see the film; she says yes, and sits in on a classroom screening of Alain Resnais’s legendary Holocaust documentary short Night and Fog, before being berated by the teacher and running off. Leaving aside the supreme strangeness of seeing those familiar images of overgrown concentration camps while hearing a German-dubbed voiceover, it acts as a crucial moment in which the film announces its characters’ disengagement with politics, and indeed with the prevailing culture: the students, and Jeanne especially, seem largely unfazed by the film. Signs of this disconnected sense of history can be found elsewhere as well: the parents’ hidden caches are largely filled with outdated Deutsche Marks dismissed as “history lessons,” and, on a more personal note, questions surrounding Jeanne’s parentage are momentarily brought up, only to be summarily dismissed. With this refusal to dwell on histories personal or political, Petzold understands that the only state that matters to his characters is their present and their need to survive. Of course, survival does different things to people. For Hans, it is a split-second, moment-to-moment experience; in the film’s most singularly electrifying scene, the odd confluence of cars at a traffic light suggests to him impending arrest or death, and he must decide how to proceed. For Clara, it means careful planning, hoping against hope that an old associate can scrape enough cash together to facilitate an exit. But for Jeanne, it means something greater, something rooted in a perhaps ill-advised (given the circumstances) sense of youthfulness and love that emerges as an almost uncontrollable force. Petzold crucially chooses to not condemn any of his characters, facilitated in large part by a certain facelessness to his political forces, but instead takes their whims and needs as essential structural through lines. The State I Am In’s anxieties are as much a byproduct of modern living in an uncertain time as they are the result of terrorist activities in distant memory, and Petzold makes it clear that crucial misjudgments and misplaced trust don’t have to be connected to the surveillance state to cause everything to come crashing down.

Louis Koo (Star)

1. Election 2 (2006, Johnnie To)
2. Don't Go Breaking My Heart (2011, Johnnie To)
3. Throw Down (2004, Johnnie To)
4. Don't Go Breaking My Heart 2 (2014, Johnnie To)
5. Romancing in Thin Air (2012, Johnnie To)
6. Drug War (2012, Johnnie To)
7. SPL II: A Time for Consequences (2015, Soi Cheang)
8. Accident (2009, Soi Cheang)
9. Election (2005, Johnnie To)
10. The White Storm 2: Drug Lords (2019, Herman Yau)
11. SPL: Paradox (2017, Wilson Yip)
12. Three (2016, Johnnie To)
13. Warriors of Future (2022, Ng Yuen-fai)

1. Election 2 (2006)
2. Don't Go Breaking My Heart (2011)
3. Throw Down (2004)
4. Don't Go Breaking My Heart 2 (2014)
5. Romancing in Thin Air (2012)
6. Drug War (2012)
7. SPL II: A Time for Consequences (2015)
8. Accident (2009)
9. Election (2005)
10. The White Storm 2: Drug Lords (2019)
11. SPL: Paradox (2017)
12. Three (2016)
13. Warriors of Future (2022)

Jia Zhangke Documentaries First Draft

Complete first draft written for Hyperallergic.

Few auteurs in the 21st century have had as fascinating a career arc as Jia Zhangke. While he has remained one of the most important directors alive since his debut with Xiao Wu (1997), his work can be divided into distinct periods, from the early independent, realist work of Platform (2000) and Still Life (2006), to increasing forays into genre and popular modes with films like Mountains May Depart (2015) and Ash Is Purest White (2018). Throughout, he has maintained a watchful eye fixed upon a rapidly developing China, weaving into his fictional narratives the cultural and economic history of a nation’s shifting landscape, and its impact on its inhabitants. Given this decidedly nonfiction aspect of his films, it may be something of a surprise that Jia has also made a notable number of features designed explicitly as documentaries. None of them have attracted quite the same level of attention as his fiction films, and while they may lack a comparable charge or urgency of purpose, they offer fascinating forays into his oeuvre, with a marked focus on artists in different media that his fiction films only glancingly deal with. His new film, Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue, is the latest and best of this master filmmaker’s strand of filmmaking, and one that draws upon the strengths and particulars of its predecessors. All of Jia’s previous feature-length documentary work was concentrated in a relatively brief period from 2006 to 2010, which produced three documentaries and one docufiction hybrid, before he returned to fiction filmmaking with 2013’s A Touch of Sin. Jia’s first documentary, 2006’s Dong, also resulted in the creation of his fiction film from the same year, Still Life. Its subject is the painter Liu Xiaodong, who spends most of the slim 66-minute runtime painting various models and interacting with various locals, in both the area surrounding the in-progress Three Gorges Dam and Bangkok, though it breaks off at a few junctures in this second half to follow some of the models on their quotidian activities. Arguably the most placid of Jia’s films, it acts primarily as an intriguing if less evocative take on the same landscapes that Still Life explored. Jia’s next documentary, Useless (2006), runs ten minutes longer and sharpens the points of its predecessor. Though it is putatively focused on the fashion label and exhibition of the same name by fashion designer Ma Ke, it takes on numerous subjects from pointedly different socioeconomic strata. The film begins in an average garment factory in South China, observing as the workers go about their tasks, and devotes its last third to garment workers in Jia’s own birthplace of Fenyang, even taking a detour to observe the coal miners. While the juxtaposition of haute couture and hometown is drastic, it understands the value of devoting the necessary observation to each, letting the designer and small-town tailors attain their own senses of reflection and creativity. The one Jia film with overtly fictional elements in this time period, 2008’s 24 City, initially appears to be cut from the same cloth as his documentaries, but gradually reveals itself to be built around a daring conceit: the interviews that form the bulk of the film are conducted with both actual factory workers and actors, including Zhao Tao and Joan Chen, playing composites. One of Jia’s best films, it also notably paves the way for a more traditional structural approach for his documentary work, relying more on interviews than the observational long takes that typified his previous two documentaries. Jia’s final documentary in this period, I Wish I Knew, expands its focus to the history of Shanghai, using a bevy of interviews, film clips, and interstitial footage around the city, sometimes featuring Zhao roaming the city as an almost spectral presence. A diffuse, mysterious film, it finds its structure through loose association, even bringing in Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien as a talking head, drawing out representative examples through personal testimony. Though there may be a slight disconnect between its stories and its poetic ambitions, it is a work that lingers, oddly sprawling and difficult to encapsulate, and often better for it. Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue functions in much the same way, but it builds upon its predecessors by being both more focused and more ambitious, principally interviewing only three writers — Jia Pingwa, Yu Hua, and Liang Hong — yet using their words to evoke essentially the entire history of China in the second half of the twentieth century. His subjects are allowed to speak at great length, often touching on piercing insights and ruminative memories, but they are never closed off from their broader social context, whether it be in the location of their interviews or in the intercutting of dinners, performances, and other interstitial moments, especially involving the youth of China, that lend a great vitality to the proceedings. With Swimming, Jia has achieved a strong synthesis between his documentary approaches; as much as Ash Is Purest White, it is a summative work, one as worthy of praise and contemplation as his more celebrated fiction films.