Riotsville, U.S.A. First Draft

Complete first draft for In Review Online.

It’s almost more fascinating to note the array of footage that isn’t in Sierra Pettengill’s daring archival film Riotsville, U.S.A. than the materials that are. Specified as being compiled solely from footage shot by U.S. military or broadcast news, the film traces a path through both the concrete and the indefinite, making unmistakable the connections between 1960s “innovations” in policing and the all-pervasive threats that legitimate protests face at a moment’s notice today. But despite the confrontational bluntness that this summons and the bleakness that surrounds the subject matter, this is anything but a didactic film, at least in terms of the overall effect. Riotsville, U.S.A. refers to a certain twist on the Potemkin village that the American military perpetrated in the ’60s: shoddy miniature towns built on military bases, all plywood facades and childish signage, for one sole use: to provide the army and the police an area to practice riot control and suppression tactics. As numerous commanding officers watch, soldiers play-act at being anti-war protestors before being effortlessly quelled to the officers’ applause; an especially nasty recurring gesture is laughter at a man pretending to be a Black Power agitator, his more open outbursts yielding amusement for the people in charge. If Riotsville, U.S.A. had solely confined itself to this footage and idea, transforming propaganda into procedure, it would already be worthwhile. But Pettengill goes much further, at least within the span of about five years. The inciting element is the formation of the Kerner Commission by Lyndon B. Johnson in 1967 for the purpose of analyzing the many riots that had occurred the previous summer; though composed of the most centrist and milquetoast politicians possible, it nevertheless handed down a damning portrait of racial and economic inequality that made such disturbances inevitable and advocated for an effort greater than the Vietnam War to combat this climate. While the immediate connection is made explicit, in its note that the only spending policy that Congress chose to enact was to greatly increase federal funding police budgets, Riotsville, U.S.A. spends a good deal of time looking at the perspectives of those who had some voice on the national stage, especially via a few panels on the Public Broadcasting Laboratory, a PBS predecessor whose funding was withdrawn in response to supposed liberal bias. From a fiery preacher to a police captain who cites Reader’s Digest as a well-respected publication, all their actions and words are explicitly contextualized under a certain apparatus of thinking, in dialogue with the apparatus of control being developed nationwide. Along with this mountain of footage, assembled deftly by Cameraperson editor Nels Bangerter, Pettengill enacts numerous interventions, breaking what could come across as a diegesis and reaching directly to the viewer’s sense of understanding. At certain unexpected intervals, voiceover written by Tobi Haslett unfurls over stunningly treated footage — whether it be odd morphing, pointillist focus on black dots amid white newsprint or red-green-blue television ray, or circular vignetting — which brings the poeticism suggested by the electronic score by Jace Clayton and the sheer surrealism of soldiers parading in an empty town to the fore, as it moves in and out of objective facts and media analysis. More prevalent and just as effective is the use of brutally frank intertitles, often only a single short sentence, which provide information so damningly direct that any further explication could upset the balance. Riotsville, U.S.A. uses its last third to consider the other convention that happened in 1968: the Republican National Convention in Miami which nominated Richard Nixon, or rather, the riot that happened in nearby Liberty City, a Black neighborhood repeatedly ignored and downtrodden by its affluent neighbors. In this tracing of an alternate view upon the official history, and a final analogy which lays all idealizations of a city, utopian and fascist, to bear, Pettengill caps an incisive examination, as hypnotic as it is fervent.

Mija First Draft

Complete first draft for In Review Online.

There’s always an argument to be made over how to evaluate “discovering” an artistic voice, over whether it should come within the consideration of a film (or album, or play, etc.) as a whole, or if it should instead be seen in light of specific accomplishments that wrestle with and color the whole. By the latter metric, Isabel Castro, who makes her feature directorial debut with Mija, playing in the NEXT section, is likely one of the true discoveries of this year’s Sundance. This idea of discovery is apropos: Mija follows music manager Doris Muñoz, who began her career by bringing her friend Cuco, a Chicano indie pop musician, to stardom. The film begins as their relationship begins to disintegrate, brought on by first the rigors of constant touring and little problems of communication before the pandemic brings their business collaboration to an end. Castro then fluidly shifts the focus to Muñoz’s next find Jacks Haupt, a Texan singer-songwriter whose music exists somewhere between R&B and hip-hop. Throughout all of this, Muñoz’s personal life remains coequal with her music industry work: she is the first American-born child of undocumented immigrants and is actively working to earn enough money to finance her parents’ green card applications so that they can reunite with her brother, who was deported five years ago. Jacks’ parents are also undocumented, and she experiences a good deal of friction with their expectations for her and her own artistic ambitions, which involves an extended work trip at Muñoz’s invitation to Los Angeles during her 21st birthday. To capture all of this, Castro makes likely one of the most aesthetically pleasurable documentaries in recent memory, captured largely in hazy close-ups that remain closely tied to their subject, and which morph and adapt to the tenor of each scene. Muñoz is first introduced in the crowd of one of Cuco’s concerts, before the film slips into home movie footage, and this movement is carried out with a deftness that seems to carry action across decades. Jacks’ birthday celebration is even carried out with maximum glamor, fully indulging in the pleasures of the moment without seeing it as merely an end-all be-all. Mija certainly isn’t a perfect film, especially in how, after spending a good deal of time with Jacks, it seems to largely abandon her storyline in favor of Muñoz and the acceleration of her parents’ ultimately successful efforts. But there are such moving storylines throughout all of this; a wrenching phone call between Jacks and her parents is followed by a restorative park visit with Muñoz; the reunion between parents and son — and parents and birth village — is aching as much because of the long car ride down south as it is in the actual moment of contact. Over all of this hangs Muñoz’s voiceover, which nails some beautiful sweet spot between reverie and clear-eyed observation. Above all, Castro clearly makes this both her film and a true collaboration, one that follows the seeds of artistic practice and its indelible personal imprint with a generous eye.

Free Chol Soo Lee First Draft

Complete first draft for In Review Online.

Calling Free Chol Soo Lee is almost an understatement. The directorial debut of Eugene Yi and Julie Ha, it is a documentary dedicated to the life of Lee, a Korean American living in San Francisco’s Chinatown who, in 1973, was framed by the police for the contract killing of a Chinese gang leader and served the next ten years of life in prison, with five on death row for a prison killing in self-defense. The efforts to free him were enacted on the national, even international stage, as a Defense Committee was formed to raise attention and work on securing a trial and proper representation for him, and he himself took on an almost iconic form as the symbol of Asian-American injustice. In order to bring forth both the Kafkaesque situation (invoked explicitly in the film) and the genuinely stirring sense of solidarity that coalesced, Free Chol Soo Lee both tells Lee’s story from essentially cradle to grave (he died in 2014) while also constantly bringing in key figures that recur throughout the film, including close friends, journalists including his first advocate K.W. Lee, and attorneys. Many of these people, including of course Lee himself, are largely represented through archival interviews and recordings, though Lee’s thoughts about himself and his predicament are compiled from his notes and rendered in voiceover by Sebastian Yoon. The one deviation from this chronological march is an enlightening one: Free Chol Soo Lee begins immediately with Lee’s immersion in Chinatown and his arrest, before leaping back to his birth on the occasion of his first interview with K.W. Lee. Yi and Ha very much establish their film as an investigation of sorts, making the progression of details and characterization of both legend and movement come to life in the assemblage of archival footage and voiceover; there’s a palpable sense of melancholy that comes through in Lee’s resignation to his circumstances, his own navigation between the confidence and gratitude he shows in his charismatic interviews and the doubt over his self-worth in prison. All of this comes to fore in Free Chol Soo Lee’s final act. Once Lee is freed from prison, he suffers from the whiplash between the isolation of death row and the celebrity he has accrued, and once the world tour dries up, he falls prey to addiction and an inability to integrate into the society that had worked to free him. This part of the film, thankfully, sees his struggle not as a failure of moral character, but as a symptom of a less obvious systemic failure, one that makes maintaining even a single nonprivileged person’s lifelong wellbeing an inordinately difficult task. The final part sees him reformed in the aftermath of a botched arson attempt and bringing hope and passion once again, but the feeling of sadness continues to permeate. There’s certainly much still unexplored — the almost total lack of Chinese interview subjects, everyone’s choice to refer to Lee by his Americanized name order — but Yi and Ha’s act of excavation, of linking Asian-American oppression and resistance to the modern day without ever explicitly bringing this decade into the conversation, is deeply moving.

The Mission First Draft

Complete first draft for In Review Online.

While the generic title carries little of this meaning, Tania Anderson’s directorial debut The Mission, which is playing in the World Cinema Documentary Competition despite its American focus, takes as its subject an oddly specific form of religious work: American Mormon teens who undertake a two-year mission to Finland as part of the customs of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Anderson herself is based in Helsinki, though she identifies with multiple nationalities including American, but like many aspects of the film at large there is a frustrating vagueness in the specificity of this specific choice: aside from the difficulties that the missionaries have with Finnish, the general coldness that remains a consistent visual tether throughout, and the centralization that allows for still glancing interactions between the subjects, there is little that distinguishes the otherwise fairly universal difficulties and doubts at play here. One thing that is obvious, though, is the choice of Mormon missionaries, whose ubiquitous nametags and solicitations worldwide have been, admittedly, something of an annoyance to outsiders (though I hasten to say that I have been on medical-based mission trips through a Protestant church). There is an unmistakable stigma that the film seeks to at least partially unpack, and one of its main strategies that ultimately blunts its most interesting aspects is to toggle between four main subjects: Elder Pauloe, Elder Davis, Sister Field, and Sister Bills, who all appear to be from somewhere in or around Utah, and are deployed from the Provo Missionary Training Center from 2019 to 2021 — the pandemic isn’t mentioned onscreen but masks do appear towards the end of the film. This consciously equal gender divide is an element that goes unexplored: the men are expected to serve in a way that the women are still not, and yet the same infrastructure, including check-ins with the church and rotating companions more familiar with the country and the language, appears to be in place for them as well. There is only one, maybe two scenes of discussion of actual doctrine, though Anderson also appears to frontload most of the more notable snubs, letting seemingly more than half of the film pass by before allowing her subjects the dignity of a positive interaction. Besides that, however, The Mission seems stuck in presenting the most conventional version of itself, even as interesting insights appear at the edges. No talking heads appear to be present, but there is copious voiceover duly noting the difficulty and uncertainty of the endeavor, especially as it involves young people separated from their families for a considerable amount of time. In easily the most unexpected element, Elder Davis begins suffering from depression that becomes so severe that he is required by the church to return home against his wishes, yet even his departure segues into a montage of joy and success among his fellow missionaries. Though such montages are blessedly rare, The Mission nonetheless feels too vague, too prone to render its subjects’ respective personalities under a simple and blandly inspirational vein; the ending in particular, which sees all four missionaries as having matured and bolstered in their faith and commitment, jettisons much of the ambivalence that had been latently present beforehand. Little time is given to noting the specific cities, the passage of time, the actual practice of missionary work aside from showing the rejections and (off-screen) a few baptisms, and without a deeper lens, this can feel like the work of an institution, only insightful when it comes to the surfaces of a particular way of life.

A Love Song First Draft

Complete first draft for In Review Online.

A Love Song served as essentially the opening night film, or at least the representative on Sundance 2021’s first day, for the NEXT film section, introduced in 2010 and designed as a showcase for more purportedly innovative or formally daring work amid the tacit mainstreamification of the festival, and especially the U.S. feature competitions, as a whole. On one level, it’s not hard to see what might be appealing about this film, directed by Max Walker-Silverman in his directorial debut, as a first pick: it is forthrightly rustic, set and shot in rural Colorado; it has two recognizable actors in the form of Dale Dickey and Wes Studi, something very much lacking elsewhere in the section unless one counts Something in the Dirt actors Justin Benson and Aaron Moorehead; and it tells a pleasingly coherent and emotional story without too much signposting. But therein lies the question: how little must a film go outside the norm of the independent landscape to qualify as worthy of inclusion in a section like NEXT? It is both a positive and a negative that to say that, in an even somewhat more robust independent scene like the one in 1992, whose 20th anniversary this year has been feted by the Criterion Channel, a film like this would be seen as the absolute norm, a solid and quiet work whose rhythms are built from little moments and the logical pairing of landscapes and weathered faces with 16mm. The plot, such as it is, ostensibly revolves around the reunion of Faye (Dickey) and Lito (Studi), two widowers who were childhood friends but haven’t seen each other in decades. Faye has been waiting at a campsite in a national park near where they grew up for an indeterminate amount of time, and spends her days eating small lobsters fished with a miniature pot, reading and utilizing Audubon guides to identify birds and constellations, and interacting with some of the fellow campsite denizens, including the mailman, a lesbian couple on the cusp of proposing, and a too cute cowboy-hat-wearing crew of four brothers and one young sister seeking to disinter their dead father buried somewhere around Faye’s trailer. Ostensibly is an apropos word, because while much of the true, if somewhat muted charge of A Love Song comes from Faye and Lito’s two days, one night meeting — which begins with charming awkwardness and proceeds, like much of the film, in brief little moments, with the highlight being a guitar and vocal duet — this truly is Faye’s film, as much because she is the center of the film for the fifty-some minutes surrounding the encounter as it is because of what soon becomes an emotionally legible arc. Learning to let go of grief is certainly no novel storyline, and it’s to the film’s credit that it doesn’t fully spell it out, but after Lito departs, the emotional signposts on Faye’s literal journey up Mount Elbert only become more obvious. None of this is to say that A Love Song is a bad film; while the rhythms can feel trite at a certain point, unwilling to sit with the quietude for too long, there is an unadorned quality to appreciate. But the question remains: should such a film should be considered as truly innovative, or simply its own kind of retrenchment or throwback?

Call Jane First Draft

Complete first draft for In Review Online.

Call Jane, the directorial debut of Carol screenwriter Phyllis Nagy, opens with something of a feint. In a near mirror of that film’s first sinuous tracking shot, complete with pleasingly warm 16mm, it follows Joy (Elizabeth Banks) as she strides through a hotel lobby, passing the party that her lawyer husband Will (Chris Messina) is attending, before walking out onto the street to find a police line and the shadows of Yippie protestors in the distance: the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago and the ensuing chaos are literally just around the corner for these relatively sheltered suburban residents. However, Call Jane isn’t about strictly the collision of culture and counterculture. It belongs, broadly speaking, to the recent resurgence of abortion dramas which includes fellow Sundance-Berlin selection Never Rarely Sometimes Always (2020, Eliza Hittman) and Golden Lion winner Happening (2021, Audrey Diwan). But Joy’s search for an abortion, prompted by a life-threatening condition during the first trimester of her pregnancy, forms a surprisingly minimal part of the film. Requisite attention is given to the board of doctors who refuse to grant a termination on probability grounds and the furtiveness required to obtain the money, but the screenplay by Hayley Schore and Roshan Sethi is refreshingly clear of the moral dilemmas and twists of fate that so often characterize this specific subgenre. Instead, Call Jane finds something of a utopia within this milieu. Joy gets her termination through the Jane Collective, a real service in the Chicago area that provided discreet abortions, complete with a hotline and, at least initially, a dedicated but overcharging doctor named Dean (Cory Michael Smith). Leading the charge is Virginia (Sigourney Weaver, given several substantial showcase scenes), honed from decades of aggravating activism, who presides over a motley crew of women from different walks of life assembled for this single purpose. The rest of the film is as much dedicated to Joy’s growing fascination and involvement with the program — and her growing frictions with her husband and daughter Charlotte (Grace Edwards) — as it is with the internal dynamics and multiple viewpoints at play in the collective. A good deal of Call Jane’s charge comes from this interplay, the respect paid to the fundamentally good intentions of almost every major character that nevertheless does not shy away from the limitations of clandestine operations and the day-to-day problems, from the number of abortions that can be allotted per week to the prohibitive $600 cost. Joy — and Banks, who turns in a strong and cagy performance — provides a useful viewpoint, not only because of her considerably more privileged vantage point but also because of her tenacity and latent domestic frustration that finds its outlet through the Jane Collective. Innovations pop up throughout the film: Joy learns how to perform the abortion procedure herself, the little cards of information from applying women are supplemented by an answering machine. But the focus remains on the people over a relatively brief period, with taking deep interest in both the lively, ping-ponging debates within the group and the more uneasy, coded interactions that Joy has at home, captured most vividly in a scene with an undercover police officer (John Magaro) who ends his interrogation by asking Joy to contact “Jane” on behalf of his friend. Call Jane’s overall outlook, and especially its post-Roe v. Wade epilogue, can certainly come across as overly satisfied and tidy, but Nagy’s facility with actors and camera movement ensures that this proceeds with assurance; in many ways the relative lack of dire conflict acts as a benefit, making the ideological battles come across with greater weight. And there’s something oddly lovely and resonant about Joy’s final decision, its own form of compromise that comes with a recognition that most individuals are destined to follow a certain calling, but that it doesn’t prevent one from helping the work of others.

What Time Is It There? First Draft

Complete first draft for In Review Online.

Calling Tsai Ming-liang’s body of work interconnected doesn’t begin to cover the throughlines that have developed over the span of more than three decades. One of the most teleological of oeuvres, it isn’t just a matter of recapitulating his recurring interests — a decaying Taipei, cruising, water, infrequent but definite touches of the surreal, and above all the form of Lee Kang-sheng — but also of examining how each building block develops upon these motifs, whether in the creeping stasis commonly associated with his work or in giant leaps. By dint of Lee’s presence — along with numerous, less recognized repertory players like Yang Kuei-mei, Chen Shiang-chyi, Miao Tien, and Lu Yi-ching — as first Hsiao-kang, then just Kang, and the recurring anchors in lower-class Taipei living and family, Tsai’s films already carry the unmistakable suggestion of a narrative and temporal continuity that rises above the particulars of any one film. But What Time Is It There? (2001), which more-or-less constituted his international breakthrough, is an especially concentrated example, coming as it does at the fulcrum of Tsai’s narrative feature career before his brief retirement after Stray Dogs (2013). Marking the halfway point, along with the entirely dissimilar Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003), it also, at least retroactively, literalizes this heretofore latent connection: it is the first in a loose trilogy, along with the short “The Skywalk Is Gone” (2002) and The Wayward Cloud (2005), following the interactions of Lee and Chen’s characters as their interactions become ever more desperate and unnerving. This triptych, incidentally, is broken up by Goodbye, Dragon Inn, the one feature that does not center Lee and which may very well not have him playing Hsiao-kang — though the Fuhe Grand Theater does actually appear in this film briefly in a much less dilapidated form. While this explicit connection might lead one to expect an accompanying compatibility of tones, this isn’t the case: “The Skywalk Is Gone” — referring to the bridge over Taipei roads where Lee and Chen first meet — occupies something close to his usual durational cinema style, while The Wayward Cloud collides its seedy porn filmmaking milieu with gonzo bathroom-themed musical numbers. And What Time Is It There? finds itself, fascinatingly, in a realm that Tsai has only rarely dived into. Typically, his films (aside from the aforementioned Goodbye, Dragon Inn) center upon Lee and one other person, whether it be Yang in The Hole (1998), Anong Houngheuangsy in Days (2021), or Lu in Stray Dogs (2013). But here, Tsai fragments his approach further, effectively creating a triangular focus between Lee, Chen, and Lu (who, as in most of her Tsai appearances, plays Lee’s mother and Miao’s wife). The reasons for this arrive with an atypical, piercing clarity: after an opening scene with Miao alone in the family apartment so familiar from past Tsai films, the next shot finds Lee riding in a car with his father’s urn. From there, What Time Is It There? both does and doesn’t adhere to the cycles of grief that Lee and Lu go through. Even without factoring in the substantial factor of Chen’s storyline — wherein she leaves for a lonely, meandering trip in Paris after she buys Lee’s watch, which he says will bring her bad luck — there are few of the tears and mourning expected of bereavement. Instead, in keeping with the inexplicable, all-consuming longings so central to Tsai’s oeuvre, Lee and Lu become obsessed, with Chen’s rootlessness as a significant, often mysterious counterweight. Lu feverishly works to ensure that Miao’s reincarnation and/or spirit will remain in the apartment, constantly cooking food at odd hours and putting up sheets to block the sunlight with a singular determination not often found in Tsai’s films. In between hawking watches, Lee becomes entranced with setting the time on practically every clock he sees to Parisian time, seven hours behind, whether it be the digital readout in his car or the clock face on a tall city building, along with a fixation on Jean-Pierre Léaud in The 400 Blows. Both manias come implicitly from not only grief, but from an overfamiliarity with their environments, manifesting itself in a desire to control or reshape these Taipei surroundings. While Lu’s efforts register as tragic and pathetic — epitomized in a startingly confrontational scene where Lee attempts to stop her from sealing the walls with duct tape — and Lee’s are surreal and comedic, Chen’s scenes come to embody both, in the manner that tourists in a strange land can often be. There is something charged about how Chen stands still on a moving walkway as Parisians rush past her, or the exchange of glances that she has with a Chinese man on a separate subway platform from her. These gestures remain unfulfilled, as do most of her moments, most of all the glorious appearance of Léaud himself in a cemetery, as he slyly gives her his phone number. All these desires culminate in a trinity of erotic encounters that Tsai crosscuts between, and it is here that questions of time — so inherent to slow cinema — come to the fore. All of these moments take place at night, but this would rule out the possibility of Chen’s encounter with a Hong Kong woman in bed — the sole instance of overt female queerness in a filmography intrinsically linked to male homosexuality — taking place at the same time as Lee’s tryst with a prostitute and Lu’s solo — or possibly spiritually assisted — sensual release. What Time Is It There?’s power is such that the connection between the three scenes resonates on both a narrative level (all three being emotional, if not all sexual climaxes) and on something more mystical. The ending, where Miao makes his first of several ghostly appearances in Tsai’s films, implies that the already freighted watch carried much more than an omen to Paris. But Tsai’s cinema is so tactile, so immediately present that whether the superstitions of one religion or another scarcely seems to matter. Instead, power is found in conviction, in steadfast belief, and the focus of each moment yields endless amounts of care and desire, where grief is transformed into an entire way of viewing the quotidian and the unsteadiness of travel reverberates across the world.