Walk Up First Draft

Complete first draft for Reverse Shot.

As surely as communal drinking, playful structural experiments, and zooms, the familiarity of spaces has long been a cornerstone of Hong Sang-soo’s films. Indeed, besides the selection of his actors, which has increasingly revolved around his repertory players like Kim Min-hee, Kwon Hae-hyo, and Lee Hye-young, the only preparation he does for his films is location scouting. A few weeks before the shoot, he asks various cafés, bars, and other such locations if he can film there, leaving such afterthoughts as narrative and dialogue to the day each scene is shot. While other Hong films have used places as an anchoring device, returning over and over to them as a means to ground the viewer amidst the confounding iterations of a similar narrative several times over, none of them have been so overtly dedicated to this conceit as Walk Up, his second film of 2022. The space here is a walk-up apartment building with four floors and a basement owned by interior designer Ms. Kim (Lee), which filmmaker Byung-soo (Kwon) tours during the first of the film’s four parts. The first and second floors are occupied by Sun-hee (Song Seon-mi), a restauranteur; the third by a couple; the fourth by a reclusive male artist; and the basement is designated as a workspace for Kim, even though she spends little time there. Throughout each of the four parts, this fundamental configuration stays the same, but the people who embody these archetypes change dramatically. As separated by an indeterminate amount of time, the four days depicted in Walk Up gradually traces vast changes in Byung-soo’s life over what might be a few months, a year, a decade, or even — in keeping with Hong’s penchant for repetition — across alternate realities. This sense of slippage isn’t necessarily new to Hong’s work but Walk Up’s willingness to totally deviate in the events — but not the structure, which is of course structured around one or two scenes of people speaking unguardedly under the influence of wine or soju — of each part means that the fuzzy temporal links are more subterranean and trickier to parse than any of his prior films. Indeed, each part opens with Byung-soo in different circumstances, especially the first, which finds him visiting the building with his estranged daughter Jeong-su (Park Mi-so). It is the first time he has seen either his daughter or Kim in a number of years, and that initial awkwardness seems to build until it is abruptly broken by the apartment tour, a physical activity to provide anything else to talk about. Walk Up is deceptively withholding in this initial tour, even as it clearly establishes the spaces that Byung-soo will occupy in the following parts. The second floor of the restaurant, reserved for cooking classes and special customers, is only glimpsed through a curtained window. Eccentricities abound, each little detail latching into the viewer’s mind: the tenants’ propensity for leaving their doors unlocked, the Bressonian view of shoes on the stairs which makes great use of verticality, the sight of Byung-soo surrounded by the fourth-floor painters’ scattered belongings. Crucially, none of these inhabitants are either seen or named, left as abstractions for one to fill in based on image and dialogue. These absences form one of Walk Up’s most enriching and complex aspects. Much of the film is given over to conversations about people not currently in the scene, forcing the viewer to triangulate their view of a character between past and future scenes and what is said about them out of earshot. For instance, Jeong-su and Jules (Shin Seok-ho), an employee of some sort in the apartment building, have a conversation about Ms. Kim immediately after the tour finishes, where the young man’s characterization of his employer runs largely counter to the viewer’s perception of her at this moment. To complicate things even further, it is totally unclear whether the two older adults still remain on the rooftop during this scene, or if they are already in the basement that serves as the location for the rest of the first part. Such little disruptions of equilibrium come to accrue a great force that culminates in one of the deftest sleights of hand by any filmmaker in recent memory, a conclusion that only further deepens the ambiguity. To say too much about the turns that Walk Up takes would be to deny even a little bit of the immense paths of exploration that Hong undertakes in this single location that stands in so much more. But one thing can be said without further elaboration: this is perhaps Hong’s most haunting film, one which captures the drudgery of life even in almost completely different circumstances. Whether it be romantic entanglements, familial troubles, or monetary issues, they remain doggedly attached to Byung-soo. The clue really is in the title: in such a compact building, walking up isn’t very different from standing still.

God's Creatures First Draft

Complete first draft for In Review Online.

God’s Creatures begins with a promise of something more productively jarring than it actually embodies: a Leviathan-esque hurtle through the ocean water, the bubbles obscuring the image, followed by a foreboding shot of the ocean waves. The second feature from the creative team of Saela Davis and Anna Rose Holmer — 2015’s The Fits was the latter’s directorial debut, while Davis was the editor and makes her official debut here — thus feints at something more experiential, in keeping with its predecessor’s canny combination of a realistic portrayal of a young girl coming of age in a specific milieu (young dancers in Cincinnati) with a grounded surrealness, flights of fancy taking off in sync with their character’s emotions. In God’s Creatures, however, the balance is heavily tilted towards the realism end of Davis and Holmer’s spectrum. The film takes place on the coast of Ireland in a village where seemingly everyone is involved in oyster farming; the men gather the oysters from the baskets, while the women work in the factory, filleting fish and prying open oysters. Overseeing the latter is Aileen (Emily Watson), the foreperson whose normal life is upended when her son Brian (Paul Mescal) unexpectedly returns from a long, quasi-rebellious stint in Australia. This return is in many ways heralded by a young man’s death, a drowning caused in part by the village’s apparent tradition that nobody should learn to swim, an apt metaphor for the social dynamics that God’s Creatures somewhat inelegantly explores: masculinity, family, and the village at large. The village itself isn’t especially characterized, however, with characters typically jerry-rigged for a singular purpose, and so the brunt of the drama rests on Aileen, Brian, and the rest of her family, including the elderly and wordless father. God’s Creatures pivots on a serious crime, which neatly bisects the film into halves, but one of its better qualities is the evenness in tone and mood throughout. From the very first time the foreboding strings come in (admittedly something of a cliché in the current independent scene), a tension arises, borne out in many ways by Davis and Holmer’s precise Scope framings. An impromptu song in the bar unfolds in a pleasing sense of depth, the rows of oyster baskets make for an expansive view of both decay and renewal, and the factory is a hive of activity, tracking with admirable skill as Aileen makes her way around the floor; later, her sense of dislocation and uncertainty is ratcheted up without feeling out of place. But while Watson and Mescal handle the mother-son relationship — tested by his absence and the crime he committed — quite well, the tendency towards stacking the deck limits the potency that God’s Creatures could have. Symbols abound: fungus growing in the oysters, a number of deaths in the village, Brian’s easygoing relationship with his grandfather, all of which come to signal the village’s seedy underside to a too obvious degree. By the ending, these motifs have been hammered home, with little ambiguity left as to each character’s fate; where the film succeeds is in its ultimate embrace of interiority, long scenes of reckoning and quietude that speak much more convincingly than the events taking place around them.

Amsterdam First Draft

Complete first draft for Slant Magazine.

David O. Russell shouldn’t be the kind of filmmaker who needs championing. Notoriously verbally abusive on set and accused of molestation by his transgender niece, he was nevertheless a veritable force in early 2010s Hollywood, hoovering up considerable success at both the box office and the Academy Awards and continuing to attract some of the most star-studded ensembles outside of a superhero movie. His films are unabashedly commercial, black comedies where the abundance of familiar faces and slapdash plots can start to feel like little more than glitzy table shuffling. But Amsterdam, Russell’s first film since 2015’s Joy, strikes a different chord than the glut of films that made him both admired and despised, though it wouldn’t appear to be the case on first glance. Nominally, the plot is, like American Hustle (2013), based on a true intrigue: the Business Plot, which in 1933 sought to instigate a veteran-led coup against Franklin Delano Roosevelt and install retired General Smedley Butler as a fascist dictator in the mold of Mussolini and Hitler; Butler instead testified to Congress, though none of the wealthy businessmen were ever arrested. The film takes this conspiracy as its spine: Butler’s fictionalized counterpart is General Gilbert Dillenbeck (played by Robert De Niro in one of his most considered and forceful recent performances), and the protagonists attempt to clear their names and in the process stumble upon the mysterious “Committee of the 5.” However, Amsterdam is first and foremost a surprisingly indelible portrait of an almost utopic friendship between three World War I participants: Dr. Burt Berendsen (Christian Bale), attorney Harold Woodman (John David Washington), and the mysterious Valerie Voze (Margot Robbie). Indeed, the title is both a feint and the key to the film: none of the “central” narrative takes place outside of New England, but an extended flashback (that occurs while Berendsen and Woodman are fleeing from unknown assailants) reorients the audience’s view, telling the story of how the two men became friends in the army and met Voze, a nurse and bon vivant who draws them into her orbit. This section, which takes up somewhere close to half an hour of the film, is in many ways the justification for Amsterdam, observing the simple pleasures of bohemian life in Amsterdam, full as it is with dancing, artistry — Voze is an artist who, among works in many other media, creates small sculptures out of bullets and shrapnel salvaged from the bodies of soldiers, including those of the heavily scarred Berendsen and Woodman, as perfect a metaphor for the kind of earnest subversion that Russell is working towards here — and most importantly time away from the United States. For Berendsen, this offers a release from his wife and her rich family of doctors, who openly disparage the half-Jewish man attempting to practice on Park Avenue. For Woodman and Voze, his Blackness and their interracial relationship is far more accepted in this cosmopolitan setting; when the film inevitably leaves this otherworldly realm, never to return to that enchanted town, it is a genuine loss, one which propels the rest of the film. Amsterdam isn’t the only great thing about Amsterdam of course; even in that city there are undercurrents of the outside world, signaled by the presence of two “birdwatchers” (spies) played by the pleasingly incongruous duo of Mike Myers and Michael Shannon, and those notions only expand. New York, where Berendsen and Woodman work together, appears to be more evidently shot on a backlot than any period film in recent memory, and the slightly magical and artificial nature speaks well to the strange qualities of this film. The expected bevy of notable faces that Russell is able to still assemble help provide much of that frisson: the mere presences of Taylor Swift and Chris Rock; the expected alienness of Anya Taylor-Joy, who pinballs off an unexpectedly strong Rami Malek playing up his urbane tics; and of course the main cast, all of whom are wonderful, especially Washington and Robbie, who handle their tentative romance with superb control. Stuffed with devices as it is — plot fake outs, timeline shuffling, narration that’s relayed between the three main characters, informative chyrons — the film takes the form of a light picaresque; it is never really in question who the conspirators are, whether the plot will actually succeed or not. Indeed, that’s the point of Amsterdam, which recalls nothing less than Inherent Vice in its use of a threadbare detective narrative to explore both human interactions and grander ideas about the American society of its time. Inequity is of course everywhere, and Russell almost risks taking too modern of a viewpoint, especially with the threats to democracy that certainly deliberately echo Trump. But what lingers most readily are the little privileged moments: an intimate dance in a doctor’s office; the enchantingly anachronistic art that Voze creates, including overlapping faces and the prominent use of a film camera as self-portraiture; and above all the use of song, a linking device that speaks to the history and harmony that this film manages to capture in its own earnest, even sentimental way.