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.
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