Monday, September 19, 2022

Casablanca Beats First Draft

Complete first draft for In Review Online.

Casablanca Beats was perhaps the most unexpected inclusion in the landmark Cannes 2021 competition selection. Filled to the brim with both old guard auteurs and rising stars who had made splashes with previous films as it was, Nabil Ayouch was comparatively unknown. The Moroccan director has worked steadily since 1992, and his 2015 film Much Loved attracted great controversy when it played in Directors’ Fortnight due to its forthright depiction of sex work, but he has had very little history with the festival otherwise, and little of the international recognition that even such lesser competitors like Justin Kurzel, Juho Kuosmanen, or Joachim Lafosse had. Though likable in certain respects, this extends to Casablanca Beats itself. Filmed at an arts center that Ayouch himself co-founded in the Casablanca suburb of Sidi Moumen, known as an impoverished area of the city with a strong contingent of Muslim fundamentalism, it follows a class of young teens cultivating their interest in the rap under the watch of their new teacher Anas (rapper Anas Basbousi; every character shares their name with their actor), moving over the course of what seems to be a few months. At the onset of the film, Anas seems to be the firm center of gravity: the film begins with him driving into Sidi Moumen in the car that he appears to live out of during the course of the year, and the first session plunges both him and the viewer into a classroom of entirely unfamiliar faces, previously seen in a dance class just prior. He then lectures about the reason for hip-hop’s creation and its enablement of both Afro-American culture — including a clanking mention of Barack Obama — and the 2011 Tunisian Revolution. As the film progresses, however, and after a confrontational scene where he tears into his new pupils’ first attempts at braggadocio, the steely-eyed Anas fades into the background, with no apparent reason for the change in his demeanor as students successively take the spotlight. Typically, this is signaled by a walk home that one of them takes, introducing a particular family dynamic: a cautious Muslim radical, a fairly dreary family life, some kind of girls’ shelter with contentious relationships. Yet Casablanca Beats never truly develops as either an examination of rap or as a wider portrait of these people united in an attempt to disrupt the conservative culture. Some scenes do encourage a more politicized view past the evocations of personal struggle that the students’ raps uniformly center upon: a conversation about the 2003 and 2007 Casablanca suicide bombings, whose perpetrators came from Sidi Moumen; a debate about how women should dress and walk in public (notably one of the young women appears to wear a hijab to bed, which brought to mind Kiarostami’s resistance to filming domestic spaces due to this ludicrous state of affairs). But these debates rarely feel connected to the actual raps, and the resolution of the film, a concert besieged by angry parents that leads to Anas’s firing without any protest from him, followed by a sentimental rap from the students as he drives away, takes the most banal avenue possible. Casablanca Beats comes most alive in its scenes of actual rap; everyone here does genuinely have a nice flow that consciously develops over the film, a growing confidence that attempts to paper over a lot of gaps that Ayouch seems to have neglected. In a few sequences that appear to be imagined, including a performance and a dance-off with Muslim men, Ayouch’s style, which opts exclusively for vague handheld close-ups, takes flight. Such moments of dynamism don’t last though, and the narrative beats never truly come alive.

Saturday, September 3, 2022

The Walk First Draft

Complete first draft for In Review Online.

In the 2010s, something strange happened to Robert Zemeckis: he almost became respectable again. After his trilogy of mo-cap extravaganzas, he suddenly returned to, if not prominence, then a certain level of respect for his next two films. Flight, in some ways, made sense: Denzel Washington being as much of a powerhouse as ever, an examination of addiction and guilt, a spectacular centerpiece. But it makes an odd pair with its successor, 2015’s The Walk; though both films involve extensive special effects and were New York Film Festival gala world premieres — spanning both Richard Peña’s and Kent Jones’s festival director tenures — the similarities, at least on a surface level, end there. I should note here that I’ve never seen either James Marsh’s documentary Man on Wire (2008) or The Walk in its proper 3D form. Indeed, both of my viewings of the latter were significantly compromised: the first was literally on an airplane — approximately 38,000 feet higher than Philippe Petit was — and the second was on my laptop. But the universally adored part of this film, the high-wire walk itself, which takes up a full twenty minutes, still manages to captivate me. The sense that I got, both at the time and in the intervening years as Zemeckis’s reputation — first unfairly and now perhaps fairly — sunk once again, was that the preceding hour and twenty minutes were simply a means to an end, a necessary inconvenience in order to experience the simple thrill of being perched above the void. But to view The Walk as merely twenty minutes of great filmmaking doesn’t capture what makes it so odd and compelling. This is evident from the very first shot: a tight widescreen close-up on Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Petit, with piercing blue eyes and a hyperactive French accent, monologuing at the viewer while the camera pulls back to reveal him perched atop the Statue of Liberty torch, with an impossibly sparkling New York City in the background. Zemeckis will return to this narration time and again, both with and without image, only reinforcing what was already evident: that Petit will survive his death-defying feat, that there will be numerous complications and intense planning to achieve this. But it also places the film into an almost mystical realm, most obviously invoked by the arrival of the mysterious visitor on the South Tower roof (which in turn reminded me of The Falling Man) and the clouds that swell as Petit makes his first step. This tone, which reaches its apex during the successive walk Petit makes, including the sublime crane down from him lying down on the wire to the adoring watchers below, makes for a great counterweight to the first hour, and especially the extended thirty-minute sequence of preparations on the day of August 6. The heist movie comparisons have already been made clearly, and the fairly tight construction makes the film relatively zip by, but the two approaches are allowed to meld together: the door that the construction worker leaves open is both a necessary step to progress the plan and an almost divine intervention, as are the serendipitous introductions of Barry Greenhouse and Jean-Pierre. Chance and skill have an equal place in The Walk, where little gambits and risks add up across both Petit and his collaborators. The Walk is certainly romantic, swooning and thrilling to the passion of Petit even as his more unhinged impulses get their day in the sun. The viewer of course connects to the applauding audiences because the experience is so exhilarating, the sight of seeing this man suspended so high in the air. But the final gesture of the film, a brief turn of expression after Petit mentions that his pass to the World Trade Center observation deck was meant to be forever, rings deeply. There is an air of melancholy that pervades the film, where the simulacrum of both the Twin Towers and Manhattan are necessary because these worlds are impossible to access now. But Zemeckis’s final touch, fading out on his constructed New York skyline to not erase the towers, but to encase them in gold, unites all of his most pleasing impulses. The Walk is not necessarily a great film — too airy, too manic, even too silly at times — but it offers great riches throughout.