Bas Devos

1. Here (2023)
2. Ghost Tropic (2019)
3. Violet (2014)

1. Here (2023)
2. Ghost Tropic (2019)
3. Violet (2014)

Ted Fendt

1. Classical Period (2018)
2. Travel Plans (2013)
3. Broken Specs (2012)
4. Going Out (2015)

1. Classical Period (2018)

Mati Diop

1. Dahomey (2024)
2. Atlantics (2019)

1. Dahomey (2024)
2. Atlantics (2019)

RaMell Ross

1. Nickel Boys (2024)
2. Hale County This Morning, This Evening (2018)

1. Nickel Boys (2024)
2. Hale County This Morning, This Evening (2018)

Kazik Radwanski

1. Matt and Mara (2024)
2. Scaffold (2017)
3. Anne at 13,000 Feet. (2019)

1. Matt and Mara (2024)
2. Anne at 13,000 Feet. (2019)

Payal Kapadia

1. All We Imagine as Light (2024)
2. A Night of Knowing Nothing (2021)

1. All We Imagine as Light (2024)
2. A Night of Knowing Nothing (2021)

Who by Fire First Draft

Complete first draft for Slant Magazine.

For viewers familiar with Philippe Lesage's international breakthrough Genèse (2018), the beginning of his follow-up may come as a shock. Who by Fire, the Canadian director's fourth narrative feature, starts not with propulsive schoolroom dancing, but with stasis in motion, following a car on a highway as it winds its way deeper into the woods. The shot holds for an unnervingly long time, accompanied by a droning musical accompaniment, before moving into the car, where two people's legs and hands are seen as they sit side-by-side, crammed in the back seat. The tentative movements eventually give way to faces captured in a gliding pan; only later will it be made clear that this car contains screenwriter Albert (Paul Ahmarani), his two children Aliocha (Aurelia Arandi-Longpré) and Max (Antoine Marchand Gagnon), and the latter's friend Jeff (Noah Parker), on their way to Albert's former collaborator Blake (Arieh Worthalter) in his cabin only accessible by seaplane. The somewhat spiky sense of humor established by this early journey sets the tone for what slowly reveals itself to be a tremendously unpredictable, protean work, drawing its energy from the disparities between the history of certain relationships and how they can unexpectedly develop and feed upon each other. Of course, it all stems from the latent resentment between Albert and Blake: after a series of acclaimed films, the latter decided that he wanted to move away from fiction and towards truth, making documentaries for a much smaller audience and leaving the former in the lurch. This is the first time that they have seen each other in years, and their playful roughhousing and first trading of barbs have already been showcased by the time the first of Albert's prized wines have been opened. This entire dynamic would be enough to sustain a typical film, but Who by Fire's ambition is such that it not only folds in numerous specialties prized by each man—Albert's highly developed palate, Blake's aptitude for the outdoors—but also seems to expand, infecting each significant relationship with more than a hint of rivalry. The most unexpected bond formed and broken is between Blake and Jeff, who was invited to the cabin because of his interest in filmmaking and admiration of the veteran director, though his eye quickly wanders towards Aliocha and her own conflicted feelings. Piled on top of this are various associates of Blake's, including his editor, cook, hunting guide, and eventually a couple—including a former star played by Irène Jacob—who take up residence in the lodge partway through, notching up the intrigue to even greater heights that are somehow sustained across 160 minutes. Who by Fire relishes each and every challenge it places itself. It is a film with few onscreen people but a stuffed ensemble cast; it makes great use of the central lodge yet possesses an increasingly expansive sense of the surrounding woods and rivers; it deals frankly with illicit desires but offers a certain discretion. The coy sense of play sometimes literally bursts into song, including a rollicking (and hilariously plot-relevant) group dance to the B-52s' "Rock Lobster," but is typically expressed by Lesage's facility with camera movement. A few scenes set at the dining table are as expressive as anything in the cinema of the past few years, including a long take where the camera drifts over the table into seemingly impossible positions. One of Who by Fire's greatest assets is Lesage's willingness to shift the tenor of his film to fit any given sequence. Sometimes, the entire genre switches; one stretch in the first half follows Jeff as he gets lost in the woods at night and quickly has to find shelter, resembling a survival thriller more than anything else. Its fluidity even extends to setting—it's entirely unclear when the film takes place, with typewriters and Steenbecks clashing with a mention of Jacob's character's stardom in the 1990s—and point of identification: Jeff eventually emerges as the main character but (by design) Parker's unassured, recessive presence is outmatched by Ahmarani and Worthalter's gregarious loquaciousness. What is certain, after all the emotional exuberance and anguish felt at certain moments, is a central irresoluteness. After all the sparks, the fire still burns, even if it's only a few smoldering embers.

REFORM! First Draft

Complete first draft for In Review Online.

It can often be difficult to evaluate the work of a director who is branching out from their niche. With Jon Bois, he has worked himself into several such pigeonholes, due to his relatively recent rapid rise to prominence (within a more cinephilic context) and the demands of market expectations. Bois, of course, has always been a video creator interested first and foremost in sports, even discounting his longstanding tenure with SB Nation and Secret Base. He has also never shied away from the importance of his collaborators, praising the contributions of Alex Rubenstein to their Dorktown videos, which include The History of the Seattle Mariners series that arguably brought Bois to his current level of recognition as a pioneer in Internet documentary aesthetics. So, the prospect of a Jon Bois video made without any other voices (literally and figuratively) for the first time in years, and on a subject entirely apart from sports, might almost seem like a test of how far viewers are willing to go along with his interests. Reform! comes, not coincidentally, alongside the launch of the Secret Base Patreon and the continuation of the long-dormant Pretty Good series, Bois's first great video endeavor. It divided its focus equally between sports and non-sports topics, and was put on hiatus because of lack of interest and/or trepidation from sponsors more focused on sports; the hope is that the Patreon will allow a general branching out for Secret Base employees, most of all Bois. While it plays out similarly to the Pretty Good series, especially possessing the greater sense of narrative-building that the new videos have shown, Reform! is a different proposition altogether. In three videos totaling about two-and-a-half hours, Bois relates the history of the Reform Party movement, the most successful third party in American politics of the last century, which formed and imploded within eight years. While this is his first video focused entirely on politics, it is by no means a sudden awakening. He has laced his stances throughout his videos for years, often to galvanizing effect: the scene in the Randall Cunningham video where he enumerates the reasons why someone would be pro-union before abruptly saying that anti-union people are assholes; the references to the lack of accountability for white-collar criminals responsible for the Great Recession and the Atlanta Falcons-New England Patriots Super Bowl as a reflection of the 2016 election in The History of the Atlanta Falcons; his direction of the Fighting in the Age of Loneliness series penned by Chapo Trap House co-host Felix Biederman, which construed mixed martial-arts and UFC as a reflection of our entire era; there are even mentions in Falcons and 20020 of the Native American practice of a precursor to football as a non-violent substitute for war. Reform!, then, comes not as an entirely new direction but instead a long-awaited, brilliant elaboration on themes that remained dormant until now. For one, as much as Rubenstein, Seth Rosenthal, Kofie Yeboah, and other collaborators have improved Secret Base projects as writers and narrators, it is somewhat freeing to remember that Bois is the only voice here; the unity provided by his sole perspective creates a much different and more even experience from the Dorktown videos. There is also an urgency that pulses through Reform!; not to downplay the importance of sports to the public and individual people, but Bois constantly reorients the series around the issues that mattered then and continue to matter now, the Reform Party's pervasive interest in curbing the national debt notwithstanding. This, interestingly, creates a tension with the knowledge that all the stories contained within revolve around three elections whose outcomes are presumably known to virtually every viewer. While many individual games which Bois and Rubenstein elaborated upon so fully in the Dorktown videos were unlikely to be known to the average viewer, the ultimate "important" outcome is already known here: Clinton will win in 1992 and 1996, Bush will win in 2000, with the rest of the proceedings "merely" fascinating detail. Considering the consternation and strife that runs rampant throughout Reform!, it creates, if not a sense of waste, then a feeling of doom and gloom, of the nation heading in a direction that the main figures (and Bois himself) do not necessarily want. At its heart, Reform! is interested, like all of Bois's greatest projects, in people that embody a certain dream or fantasy that clashes with ordinary ideas of success. The Reform Party proves to be one of the starkest examples of this: its largest wins on a national level were achieved by billionaire Ross Perot, who was broadly disinterested in the practice of politics, and through his and many others' incompetence its broad relevance disappeared as soon as Pat Buchanan took control. But within this context, Bois rightly sees even the minimal true gains as monumental salvos upon the status quo at a time where, per Francis Fukuyama, "the end of history" had been achieved. He sees them as the embodiment of a promise, full of all the faults inherent in a profoundly human enterprise that quickly was co-opted and transformed into something more monstrous. In Reform!, Bois has also assembled perhaps his greatest cast of inexplicable people from names and personalities on down. Especially within this context, it's a delight that Bois, for perhaps the first time in his videos, treats a main character with nothing but contempt; the description of Pat Buchanan as a "big bag of shit" is only the start of a beautiful and entirely justified amount of invective. Elsewhere, he finds a great deal of insight in the inexplicable actions by people capable of being decent: the many blunders by Ross Perot, Jesse Ventura (the closest thing Reform! has to a hero) supporting Donald Trump for the nomination, Lenora Fulani supporting Buchanan, John Hagelin's persistent belief in meditation's ability to bring about world peace. He allows himself more skepticism in these and other moments than he generally does in his sports videos, given the potential existential importance of their actions, but he does so from a place of empathy. Reform! has great fun in crafting sequences that make full use of this cast, the central political chart, and the sets of bars tracking the polling of the candidates in the major elections. The "clown car" montage that blazes through every single Reform Party candidate seeking the nomination in 2000 is one of his most breathlessly hilarious, shifting with breakneck speed between "harmless lunatics and malevolent scumbags." But two sequences, conveyed with starkly different means, stand out for their profound sadness. The first closes part 2, with Bois, in the absence of any footage, utilizing crude models constructed in Google Earth—previously seen most prominently in the farcical "Mr. Jello" scene in Mariners—to illustrate the ousting of Reform Party chairman Jack Gargan, founding father of the entire movement. His stubborn refusal to yield the floor even as he is being shouted down by the vast majority of the room and punches are thrown, sending blocky human figures to the ground, makes the scene all the more horrible in the sudden finality of each action. By placing the viewer literally in his perspective, the degree to which his dreams have been curdled by the politics he sought to dismantle in the first place is visceral. The second centers upon a much less consequential figure, the pricelessly named successor chairman Gerry Moan, who has been characterized as a stickler for rules in an attempt to maintain the decorum of the party even as Buchanan runs roughshod. When a motion is made at the party convention to oust party secretary Jim Mangia, his former longtime ally, for clearly homophobic reasons, Bois presents the sequence simply, using the footage from C-SPAN as Moan struggles to maintain his composure. Bois interweaves his narration with Moan's choked-out words, moving away briefly to show a picture of the two together even amidst the strife earlier on in the convention, before showing Moan leaving the stage, refusing to preside over his friend's dismissal with a sad kind of dignity. Reform!, despite the magnitude of its issues and ramifications, up to and including the Buchanan iteration's profound influence upon both the 2000 and 2016 elections, is maybe the most human of Bois's work so far. Just as the History of series use the structure of a team's history to tell the fascinating stories of individuals, so does Reform! observe a different kind of a pageantry within a framework to convey just what makes all these people tick, seeing none of them as saints but only some of them as demons, which makes the ultimate disappointment all the more potent. However, Reform! concludes with a paean not unlike the endings of Adam Curtis's documentaries of considerably more far-reaching pessimism: a sudden ray of light that emphasizes dreams and possibilities. It is a hope for a better future provided by the seed of idealism that the Reform Party symbolized, placed in contrast to the atrocities and disasters of the past twenty-four years—signaled by Bois simply as his camera glides over the years, up to and including 2023—that have often been indirectly encouraged or directly caused by both political parties. When faced so much devastation in this area, and so much oddity and failed potential in the Reform Party, that Bois still retains this much ultimate optimism speaks to his conviction, the heretofore unexpressed boldness of his vision.

Tsai Ming-liang First Draft

Complete first draft for the BFI.

Why this might not seem so easy With the exception of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, the Malaysian-Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang is likely the most famous active filmmaker within the loose movement known as slow cinema. Renowned for his static long takes, minimal dialogue, and the obscure and unpredictable nature of his pacing and narratives, Tsai operates at an extreme end of the general cinephilic consciousness. He has been a beloved figure for decades without once sacrificing the rigor of his filmmaking, constantly pushing the boundaries of cinema’s capacity for duration and stasis. But Tsai’s oeuvre is not merely a series of uninflected experiments with form. Among many other things, it is an expression of love for his muse: actor Lee Kang-sheng, who has appeared in every one of his theatrical feature films. A gay filmmaker with a straight actor as the subject of his unrequited desires, Tsai has observed Lee age onscreen for more than 30 years, moving into weathered middle-age while maintaining a perpetually taciturn, world-weary expression and physicality. This persistence of vision is matched by Tsai’s eye for the contemporary Taipei that became his home, full of decaying apartments and littered streets which reflect the essential loneliness of Lee and some of his other key actors like Yang Kuei-mei, Chen Shiang-chyi, Miao Tien, and Lu Yi-ching. As their typically thwarted longings play out amid a city which is at once modern and bygone, Tsai’s films accumulate a tremendous sense of mood and texture, as imposing as they are inviting. The best place to start - Rebels of the Neon God One of Tsai’s other key traits is his status as one of the most teleological of directors. From 1991 to 2013, every single one of his features registered as a conscious step in his development, introducing new thematic concerns and formal innovations with a consistency perhaps only matched by Robert Bresson. So, it makes sense to start at the beginning, with Tsai’s directorial debut Rebels of the Neon God (1991), his first theatrical feature after an extended stint in television filmmaking. Already, many of the pieces are in place: the interwoven structure with central characters—here, Lee and early regular Chen Chao-jung, who forms a relationship with a young woman—who only glancingly interact, heavy rain, and the family of Lee, Miao, and Lu, which runs through a great number of Tsai’s films. Granted, there are multiple aspects that feel distinct from even his following few films: there is a synth bass-heavy original score, a greater focus on petty crime—and a corresponding, relatively straightforward narrative—courtesy of Chen's character, and an incorporation of wider society reminiscent of Edward Yang’s work. But the means by which Rebels of the Neon God suddenly distills itself into the events of a few nights, mixing its protagonists’ frustrations into a potent blend, is pure Tsai. What to watch next Following logically from the previous section’s classification of Tsai, the best next film is his second feature, Vive L’Amour (1994), which refines its predecessor’s latent love triangle into an exploration of sexuality within a vacant apartment. Featuring the first overt demonstration of Tsai’s career-long depiction of tortured queerness, it culminates in an unforgettable expression of anguished catharsis. As steady as Tsai’s films are, they frequently feature wild swings in tone from scene to scene, and there are no better examples than his two musicals, which break at periodic intervals from his trademark minimalism into choreographed sequences featuring lip-synched performances of classic Mandarin songs. The Hole (1998) is a quasi-apocalyptic romance, featuring Lee and Yang as apartment neighbors connected when a plumber knocks a hole into his floor/her ceiling during a mysterious waterborne pandemic. Exclusively consisting of Grace Chang songs, its musical numbers are some of the most jubilant in cinema. By contrast, The Wayward Cloud (2005) features Lee as a porn actor reconnecting with Chen’s character from the devastating The River (1997) and What Time Is It There? (2001)—which itself literalizes the kinship between Tsai and Lee's collaboration and the François Truffaut/Jean-Pierre Léaud partnership—during a water shortage, and, despite some similarly freewheeling musical numbers, registers as an uncommonly harsh film even by Tsai’s often unsparing standards. Tsai’s greatest film is Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003), which breaks from his usual interests to depict the cinema space as a vanishing nexus for community and desire, featuring a cruising Japanese tourist and Chen as a limping ticket-taker pining for Lee’s projectionist. Taking place on a grand theater’s final night of operation during and after a screening of King Hu’s legendary action film, it is one of the few examples where a director consciously set out to make a masterpiece and succeeded; Tsai’s placement of it on his own Sight & Sound list speaks for itself. Finally, two essential stepping-stones to Tsai’s new period beginning with his gorgeous Days (2020) must be mentioned. Stray Dogs (2013) is one of his most striking works, starring Lee as an unhoused single father and concluding with two of the greatest extended static shots in all of cinema. The Walker series has formed the bulk of his output in the past decade, all starring Lee as a bald, red-robed monk moving extremely slowly through a variety of global locales. The first short “Walker” (2012) and featurette Journey to the West (2014, featuring Denis Lavant) are both essential, but “No No Sleep” (2015) is an under-heralded triumph, with indelible shots from a moving metro train and of public bathing which embody solitude with startling vividness. Where not to start One of the great hidden gems in Tsai’s filmography is his documentary Afternoon (2015), which consists of nothing more (or less) than a 137-minute conversation between Tsai and Lee in the home they share in the mountains of Taiwan, carried out in a single camera angle and four shots, with brief black screens only used to indicate when the crew had to swap out the camera’s SD cards. It may be impenetrable or dull to many, but for those familiar with the depth of the relationship between Tsai and Lee on and off camera, it is a work of great beauty, showing both the director’s surprising gregariousness and the actor’s typical reserve while shedding light on innumerable personal topics. Even more than most of Tsai’s works, it demands a patience and familiarity, amply rewarding those who engage it on its terms.

Youth (Homecoming) First Draft

Complete first draft for Slant Magazine.

The monumental trilogy that will likely serve as Wang Bing's final work filmed in his native China is named Youth, but it could have just as easily been named Three Colors. Like Krzysztof Kieślowski's summative triptych, Youth premiered in competition at three separate major European film festivals in the span of two years. Each installment bears a signature color, though it is primarily used to tint the title cards and chyrons that indicate a given sequence's setting and subjects. The first part, last year's Cannes installment Youth (Spring), appropriately uses a lush green; Youth (Hard Times), its successor at this year's Locarno, went with a punishing deep red. The concluding entry Youth (Homecoming), which premiered in Venice, opts for something that, like the film it characterizes, works in more ambiguous ways, using a light blue that, depending on a given viewer's viewpoint, could signal a calm, a harmony, or a sadness. In practice, Youth (Homecoming) operates as something of an expansion of the concluding sequences of both of its forebears. Both Spring and Hard Times—which both run a full hour longer than the fleet (by Wang's standards) 151-minute Homecoming—end with a few scenes showing some of the migrant garment factory workers returning to their home provinces from Zhili, the sole setting for almost the entirety of the first two parts. The effect was cathartic if not euphoric, a sudden expansion in visual scope—removed from the drone of the workshops—that often saw the sequences’ central figures in contemplation, at a slight remove from the places they nominally call home. Before Youth (Homecoming) spends its central hour immersed in these locations, it begins with a different vantage point on the operations in Zhili, initially highlighting Shi Wei, a fabric cutter working in a village outside the central hub of garment factories. As Wang slowly weaves together his central figures for the first two-thirds of the film, including Shi's friend's sister Dong Mingyan, he alights upon moments not typically found in the first two installments: wandering around the fields outside of town, cooking with proper ovens, playing cards; it isn't until a full thirty minutes in that the camera even ventures into the now-familiar roar of the workshops for the first time. After an arduous train-and-car journey to the snowy mountains of Ludian in the Yunnan Province, where Dong's husband Mu Fei hails from, Youth (Homecoming) observes work of a very different sort from the mind-numbing sewing and harsh negotiations: falling back into the family fold, with all the conflicted feelings and labors that a holiday break entails. Where Zhili's littered streets pointed in inexorable, seemingly never-ending straight lines, the mountains in Yunnan provide little guidance, an expanse that Dong and Mu trudge through, culminating in a rare (for this series) interview where Wang himself can be heard asking Dong about the state of her marriage. This sequence leads directly to the most forthrightly jubilant sequence in the entire trilogy: Shi Wei and his fellow worker Liang Xianglian's wedding, a procession in the same mountainous district as Mu Fei's residence. Full of bride-carrying ceremonies, silly string, and firecrackers, the sequence is transfixing on its own terms and as a crucial pivot point, offering a rosier view of matrimony and rural community that nevertheless contains a moment of disruption: Shi and Liang sitting on a bed, totally exhausted as they wait for the festivities continue. After winding its way through a few more segments of provincial life, including a 2016 Chinese New Year feast for the god of prosperity, Youth (Homecoming) eventually features Zhili in full force once more. This forty-minute segment is the collection of sequences that bears the most resemblance to its predecessors, evoking the feeling of the kaleidoscope of Youth (Spring), in a manner that only highlights the means by which this standalone yet summative work synthesizes the strengths of its predecessors: the enormous palette of Spring mixed with the focus of Hard Times. The Chinese title is "guī", which translates more accurately to return, a sentiment that, like "homecoming," is deliberately ambiguous. Through the course of Youth (Homecoming) and entire trilogy, the primary modus operandi has been expansion through repetition, a recursive exploration of similar spaces that nevertheless exhibits differing emotions, concerns, and personalities. In doing so, and in spending so much time with these remarkable, downtrodden people, Wang does a great deal to reconfigure what the concept of home means. As the combination of a conclusory final sequence in which another worker returns home in 2019 and the last shot of this nine-hour endeavor indicates, to return is a never-ending process, as fraught and isolating as the unknown.

Philippe Lesage

1. Who by Fire (2024)
2. Genèse (2018)

1. Who by Fire (2024)
2. Genèse (2018)

Happy Hour Third Draft

Complete third draft for Metrograph Journal.

It's a relatively common joke to point out that the five-and-a-half-hour epic Happy Hour (2015), Ryūsuke Hamaguchi’s breakthrough film, has been affixed with a title denoting a substantially shorter time span. It is true that at least three scenes take place at bars, izakaya, or clubs, and involve drinking, but there is no single, delineated length of time where, in the most literal sense of the term, the four women at the center of the feature—divorced nurse Akari (Sachie Tanaka), frustrated housewife Sakurako (Hazuki Kikuchi), married artistic events planner Fumi (Maiko Mihara), and the enigmatic Jun (Rira Kawamura)—can be said to experience unleavened bliss. Perhaps the closest moment is the opening scene: a funicular excursion to the top of a mountain adjacent to Kobe, the port city where they all live, cross paths, break apart, and come together again. Heavy fog shrouds the cityscape , and Jun comments that the overwhelming gray resembles the future of this quartet of 37-year-old women : a wry but light-hearted comment that, even as they turn their attention towards their shared lunches and plans for the next outing, will be tested and challenged. Every encounter they have afterwards will force them to examine their preconceptions , and Hamaguchi's exquisitely patient approach encourages the viewer to undertake this process in kind, forging a connection with the characters fostered by the intimacy of his approach.. The film was born from an improvisational workshop held by Hamaguchi where he discovered the actresses who would occupy the key four roles; none of them had prior cinematic acting experience, and for all of them this remains one of only one or two film credits to date. While almost every scene takes place from one or more of the women's perspectives, care is given to allow each significant character their own time to shine, serving as direct inspiration or counterpoint to the women's own struggles. Happy Hour is generally couched in an extended, contemplative register, utilizing a mostly temperate emotional tenor as the protagonists slowly navigate quotidian events on the border between realism and melodrama, most notably Jun's secretive divorce proceedings which comes close to tearing the previously close group of four apart. But Hamaguchi's film is exceptional for how its extended duration is used to cement its firm rootedness in the present, eschewing retrospection or more metaphysical concerns for an unwavering engagement with the material world and the relationships that develop over the span of about half a year. The effect of sitting with these narratives inviting rather than punishing, a sincere belief that the odd momentum that Hamaguchi's approach generates—alternating short ordinary moments of these women at their everyday duties with elongated sequences of unexpected encounters—is necessary to depict the full extent of his characters' experiences. Happy Hour opts for linearity within each given narrative perspective, a consistent sense of experience where, on the multiple occasions a character gives a long monologue about their past experiences : the viewer experiences their emotions in “real time,” observing their intonations and expressions and the reactions on the listeners’ faces. In such moments, Hamaguchi and his co-writers Tadashi Nohara and Tomoyuki Takahashi (credited under the collective name Hatano Koubou) reveal an uncommon patience and a dedication to the beauty of the spoken word. These protracted scenes of dialogue chain together separate but consonant recollections into a single scene, linking them to separate narrative strands in a manner that only reveals their true significance much later. In one scene, for example, Akari and new acquaintance Kazama (Hajime Sakasho) discuss their respective marital separations, simultaneously influencing Sakurako's tentative romantic interest in the latter and Jun's own secretive divorce proceedings. In Happy Hour's centerpiece 30-minute sequence, beginning less than half an hour in, the artist’s workshop hosted by Ukai (Shuhei Shibata) launches the film into a series of modules on the possibilities of non-verbal communication. Attendees practice familiar and not so familiar “trust” exercises, such as two people standing up by using their backs to support each other, touching foreheads to transmit a thought, or aligning their center lines and moving circularly in tandem. One of Hamaguchi's most frequent formal gambits is a shot of a character looking directly into the camera, and it first appears in this film when Ukai and his partner are completely aligned, a match cut from the back of Ukai's head to his partner's face. The effect is to place the viewer in, if not a specific character's place, then a state of complete communion with the subject, used for both the women and the many other characters that come into their orbit. The immersion of this sequence finds its unanticipated complement in a similarly extended series of scenes immediately after Jun takes her leave from the film: young author Kozue (Reina Shiihashi) gives a timid reading of her short story, before Jun's emotionally manipulative biologist husband Kohei (Yoshitaka Zahana) is enlisted to fill in as Q&A moderator. Where the earlier sequence involved the four women as active participants in the workshop, here only two women are present, both notably sidelined as two "peripheral" figures who the viewer has been conditioned to dislike—the former for her possible infidelity with Fumi's husband, the latter for his refusal to grant Jun a divorce—take the center stage. It is true that, through much of Kozue's recitation, her prose seems to be tepid, underscored by a few choice shots of bored attendees, but Hamaguchi's insistence on dwelling here—and then providing a full-length, positive dissection from Kohei, an unexpected and putatively unlikable source —transforms it into an indelible experience, as Hamaguchi's durational approach draws parallels between this weak text and Ukai's more obviously compelling workshop. In turn, these moments are interwoven with Fumi's attempts to manage the event and Jun's dalliance at a club with Ukai, a realignment of the viewer's expectations that occurs simultaneously as the women's own reassessment of themselves and their quasi-adversaries. As is the case with so much of Happy Hour, the everyday is not so much elevated as revealed, a constant process of finding dignity in the little moments and the strength to grasp onto any opportunity to better one's own position. If the ending finds the quartet fractured and in an uncertain state, it still faces the future with a renewed capacity for hope: the sun shines bright.

Happy Hour Second Draft

Complete second draft for Metrograph Journal.

It's a relatively common joke to point out that the five-and-a-half-hour epic Happy Hour (2015), Ryūsuke Hamaguchi’s breakthrough film, has been affixed with a title denoting a substantially shorter time span. It is true that at least three scenes take place at bars, izakaya, or clubs, and involve drinking, but there is no single, delineated length of time where, in the most literal sense of the term, the four women at the center of the feature—divorced nurse Akari (Sachie Tanaka), frustrated housewife Sakurako (Hazuki Kikuchi), married artistic events planner Fumi (Maiko Mihara), and the enigmatic Jun (Rira Kawamura)—can be said to experience unleavened bliss. Perhaps the closest moment is the opening scene: a funicular excursion to the top of a mountain adjacent to Kobe, the port city where they all live, cross paths, break apart, and come together again. Heavy fog shrouds the cityscape, and Jun comments that the overwhelming gray resembles the future of this quartet of 37-year-old women, a wry but light-hearted comment that, even as they turn their attention towards their shared lunches and plans for the next outing, will be tested and challenged. Every encounter they have afterwards will come in new, unanticipated forms, and, for the viewer, the act of witnessing is synonymous with the time it takes to understand how each moment fits into the characters' respective approaches to living, a process which Hamaguchi encourages with exquisite patience. The film was born from an improvisational workshop held by Hamaguchi where he discovered the actresses who would populate the key four roles; none of them had prior cinematic acting experience, and for all of them this remains one of only one or two credits to date. While almost every scene takes place from one or more of the women's perspectives, care is given to allow each significant character their own time to shine, serving as direct inspiration or counterpoint to the women’s own struggles, never treated as subordinate or unimportant but instead as an equal moment of revelation. Like a number of films on the contemporary festival circuit, Happy Hour is generally couched in an extended, contemplative register, utilizing a mostly even-keeled emotional tenor as the protagonists slowly navigate quotidian events. But Hamaguchi's film is exceptional for its firm rootedness in the present, eschewing retrospection or more metaphysical concerns for an unwavering engagement with the material world and the relationships that develop over the span of about half a year. Backstories and past events do play a significant role, but Happy Hour never resorts to signposted flashbacks, voiceover, or other such devices that overtly disrupt the forward flow of time. Hamaguchi instead opts for linearity within each given narrative perspective, a consistent sense of experience where, on the multiple occasions a character gives a long monologue about their past experiences, the viewer experiences their emotions in “real time,” observing their intonations and expressions and the reactions on the listeners’ faces. These are, of course, not unique concepts, but the way that Hamaguchi and his co-writers Tadashi Nohara and Tomoyuki Takahashi (credited under the collective name Hatano Koubou) chain together these moments into a single, extended scene and link them to separate narrative strands—like in a bravura scene where Akari and Kazama (Hajime Sakasho) discuss their respective marital separations, simultaneously influencing both Sakurako's tentative romantic interest in the latter and Jun's own secretive divorce proceedings —reveals an uncommon dedication to the beauty of the spoken word. But Hamaguchi does not merely rely on dialogue to convey these connections between his protagonists. In Happy Hour's signature 30-minute sequence, beginning less than half an hour in, the artist’s workshop hosted by Ukai (Shuhei Shibata) launches the film into a series of modules on the possibilities of non-verbal communication, as practiced through such exercises as two people standing up by using their backs to support each other, touching foreheads to transmit a thought, or aligning their center lines and moving circularly in tandem. One of Hamaguchi's most frequent formal gambits in his filmography is a shot of a character looking directly into the camera, and it first appears in this film when Ukai and his partner are completely aligned. The effect is to place the viewer in, if not a specific character's place, then a state of complete communion with the subject, used for both the women and the many other characters that come into their orbit. This sequence finds its unanticipated complement in a similarly extended series of scenes immediately after Jun takes her leave from the film: young author Kozue (Reina Shiihashi) gives a timid reading of her short story, before Jun's erstwhile biologist husband Kohei (Yoshitaka Zahana) is enlisted to fill in as a Q&A moderator. Where the earlier sequence involved the four women as active participants in the workshop, here only two women are present, both notably sidelined as these two figures who the viewer has been conditioned to dislike—the former for her possible infidelity with Fumi's husband, the latter for his refusal to grant Jun a divorce—take the center stage. It is true that, through much of Kozue's recitation, her prose seems to be tepid, underscored by a few choice shots of bored attendees, but Hamaguchi's insistence on sitting with so much of it—and then providing a full-length, positive dissection from an unexpected and putatively unlikable source—transforms it into an indelible experience. In turn, these moments are interweaved with Fumi's attempts to manage the event and Jun's dalliance at a club with Ukai, more obviously "important" narrative beats which nevertheless are treated with exactly the same amount of care, a realignment of the viewer's expectations that occurs at the same time as the women's own reassessment of themselves and their quasi-adversaries. As is the case with so much of Happy Hour, the everyday is not so much elevated as revealed, a constant process of finding dignity in the little moments and the strength to grasp onto any opportunity to better one's own position. If the ending finds the quartet fractured and in an uncertain state, it still faces the future with a renewed capacity for hope: the sun shines bright.

Happy Hour First Draft

Complete first draft for Metrograph Journal.

In its own way, the title of Happy Hour, Ryusuke Hamaguchi's breakthrough film, is as much an enigma as that of his latest masterwork Evil Does Not Exist. It's a relatively common joke to point out that this five-and-a-half-hour epic—longer than all but the most the most generous of establishments would allow—has been affixed with a label denoting a substantially shorter time span. When applied to the actual contents of the film, the appellation seems even more bewildering. It is true that at least three scenes take place at bars, izakaya, or clubs and involve drinking, but there is no single, delineated length of time in either runtime or narrative time where, in the most literal sense of the term, the four women at the core of Happy Hour—divorced nurse Akari (Sachie Tanaka), frustrated housewife Sakurako (Hazuki Kikuchi), married artistic events planner Fumi (Maiko Mihara), and the enigmatic Jun (Rira Kawamura)—can be said to experience unleavened bliss. Perhaps the closest moment is, indeed, the opening scene: a funicular excursion to the top of a mountain adjacent to Kobe, the port city where all of them live, cross paths, break apart, and come together yet again. Heavy fog prevents visibility, and Jun comments that it resembles the future of this quartet of 37-year-old women, a wry but light-hearted comment that, even as they turn their attention towards their shared lunches and plans for the next outing, will be tested and challenged; every encounter they have afterwards will come in new, unanticipated forms. For Hamaguchi and his cast, the widespread recognition that Happy Hour received surely counted as an unexpected turn. The film was born from an acting workshop featuring the seventeen actors who would populate the key roles; none of them had prior cinematic acting experience, and for the vast majority of them this remains one of their only credits to date. These origins speak to the unfathomable depth to the proceedings: while almost every scene takes place from one or more of the women's perspectives, care is given to allow each key character their own time to shine, often at unexpected junctures or to serve as direct inspiration or counterpoint to the women's own struggles, never treated as subordinate or unimportant but instead as an equal moment of revelation. Happy Hour's treatment of time is especially pertinent within the context of this Passages program, where it is in both fitting and unusual company. Like the films of Edward Yang, Hirokazu Koreeda, Agnès Varda, Theo Angelopoulos, and Apichatpong Weerasthakul, it is generally couched in an extended, contemplative register, utilizing a mostly even-keeled emotional tenor to slowly accumulate quotidian events. But unlike those works, which are either explicitly about retrospection—That Day on the Beach, Still Walking, The Beaches of Agnès—or reflecting upon different states of life and being—Eternity and a Day, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives—Hamaguchi's film is firmly rooted in the present, principally concerned with concrete actions and the relationships that develop over the span of about a year. Backstories and past events do play a significant role, but Happy Hour never resorts to signposted flashbacks, voiceover or other such devices that overtly disrupt the continual forward flow of time. Hamaguchi instead opts for linearity within each given narrative perspective, a consistent sense of experience where, on the multiple occasions a character gives a long monologue about their past experiences, the viewer experiences their emotions in "real time," observing their intonations and expressions and the reactions on the listeners' faces. These are, of course, not unique concepts, but the way that Hamaguchi and his co-writers Tadashi Nohara and Tomoyuki Takahashi (credited under the collective name Hatano Koubou) chain together these moments into a single, extended scene, only breaking them up in order to link them to separate narrative strands happening simultaneously, reveals an uncommon patience and a dedication to the beauty of the spoken word. But Hamaguchi's is not only a talking cinema. In Happy Hour's signature 30-minute sequence, beginning less than half an hour in, the artist's workshop hosted by Ukai (Shuhei Shibata) launches the film into a series of modules on the possibilities of non-verbal communication, as practiced through such exercises as two people standing up by using their backs to support each other, touching foreheads to transmit a thought, or aligning their center lines and moving circularly in tandem. Happy Hour is all about this idea of communication and alignment: one of Hamaguchi's most frequent formal gambits is a shot of a character looking directly into the camera, and it first appears in this film when Ukai and his partner are completely aligned. The effect is to place the viewer in, if not a specific character's place, then a state of complete communion with the subject. Likewise, the movement from person to person between scenes, even as they spend long stretches of time apart, creates an implicit dialogue, as the women often find greater success in understanding each other's unique circumstances as they spend time apart. This sequence finds its unanticipated complement in a similarly extended series of scenes immediately after Jun takes her leave from the film: young author Kozue (Reina Shiihashi) gives a timid reading of her short story, before Jun's erstwhile biologist husband Kohei (Yoshitaka Zahana) is enlisted to fill in as Q&A moderator for the shirking Ukai. Where the earlier sequence involved the four women as active participants in the workshop, here only two women are present, both notably sidelined as these two figures who the viewer has been conditioned to dislike—the former for her possible infidelity with Fumi's husband, the latter for his refusal to grant Jun a divorce—take the center stage. It is true that, through much of Kozue's recitation, her prose seems to be tepid, underscored by a few choice shots of bored attendees, but Hamaguchi's insistence on sitting with so much of it—interweaving it through other, more obviously "important" narrative beats and then providing a full-length, positive dissection from an unexpected and putatively unlikable source—transforms it into an indelible experience. As is the case with so much of Happy Hour, the quotidian is not so much elevated as revealed, a constant process of finding dignity in the little moments and the strength to grasp onto any opportunity to better one's own position. If the ending finds the quartet fractured and in an uncertain state, it still faces the future with a renewed capacity for hope: the sun shines bright.

Robin Campillo

1. 120 BPM (Beats per Minute) (2017)
2. Red Island (2023)

1. 120 BPM (Beats per Minute) (2017)
2. Red Island (2023)

Red Island First Draft

Complete first draft for Slant Magazine.

It can be easy to read too much into the whims of the film festival landscape, especially as to why a particular notable film was not selected. That being said, Robin Campillo's Red Island is surely one of the most bafflingly, instantly memory-holed films in recent memory. In 2017, Campillo had seemed to be a director on the doorstep of widespread recognition. At that year's Cannes, his 120 BPM (Beats per Minute), a wonderful film about the French ACT UP movement in the 1990s—equal parts taut activist procedural and tender relationship drama—won the Grand Prix and had seemed destined for the Palme d'or. Pitched at the mainstream yet still possessing Campillo's precise eye and committed politics, his breakthrough as a major auteur seemed assured. Now, with his follow-up six years later, Red Island failed to be selected by Cannes and premiered to little fanfare in French cinemas shortly afterwards. For better or worse, this suits Red Island's general focus on fantasies slipping away. It begins with one such daydream, a world of miniature buildings and puppet-faced men facing off against a young, masked girl. This is quickly revealed to be a visualization of the superhero Fantômette, the heroine of a long-running French book series, and a particular obsession of Campillo's stand-in: Thomas (Charlie Vauselle). The film's setting is Military Base 181 on Madagascar, specifically from the years 1970-1972, a period after the island's independence from French colonial rule in 1960 but while the military was still allowed to stay on their bases and work with the local troops. The unusual chyron establishes something of the odd paradox the film finds itself in: it is at once lackadaisical and urgent, a period of relaxation with a clear eye on how swiftly everything will end. Not that Thomas, peering out from the army crate that he often retreats to, sees this incoming loss of his home. Instead, his gaze is fixed upon the adults around him, particularly his airman father Robert (Quim Gutierrez) and loving mother Colette (Nadia Tereszkiewicz), along with his burgeoning friendship with classmate and fellow Fantômette-lover Suzanne (Cathy Pham). Though time is marked throughout until the final day before the troops' departure—which takes up about a third of the two-hour film—including in a particularly telling Christmas scene, complete with Santa emerging from a paratrooper plane, Campillo's film is diffuse, caught between its youthful perspective and more vast questions of identity and France's place in a locale it has subjugated for too long. Most notably, an officer named Bernard is left by his homesick wife and begins a series of flirtations with various local women. This eventually leads to what may be seen as the film's ultimate gambit: Red Island is told from the perspective of the white family members until its final fifteen minutes, when Miangaly (Amely Rakotoarimalala), Bernard's girlfriend, has a conversation in Malagasy with a native soldier, before leaving the base and impulsively joining a celebration of the release of imprisoned protestors. The ending is purposefully hopeful, in a way that, while commendable, smooths over the ambiguous nature of the family's final interactions: hints of an impending divorce upon their return to France, the genderbending sequence of Thomas lurking in a Fantômette costume at night. If Red Island is ultimately too divided in its interests to entirely function as either a grand statement on French troops in Madagascar or as a precise portrait of childhood in a strange place, it is still able to summon a certain evocative feeling. Trading in 120 BPM's Scope framing for Academy ratio, Campillo plays up the surreality of certain moments: parachuters in a jagged line over the hills of Madagascar, the family's slow-motion efforts to shoo hornets out of the bathroom, all of the absurdly juvenile but pleasingly handmade Fantômette sequences. Most effective of all is a telling scene where military families and locals alike watch a 16mm print of Abel Gance's Napoléon on the beach, projected onto a sheet in front of the waves. As Napoléon fights a storm while Robespierre's radicals take control of the National Assembly, it acts as a synecdoche for another era of French rule, this one ending before our eyes.

Only the River Flows First Draft

Complete first draft for Screen Slate SF Bay Area.

In the span of just four years and three features, Wei Shujun has vaulted himself to the upper echelons of exciting young mainland Chinese directors. His feature-length directorial debut, Striding Into the Wind, was initially scheduled for a berth in the pandemic-cancelled 2020 edition of Cannes, and he returned to the festival the following year with Directors' Fortnight selection Ripples of Life. Both are loose films à clef about filmmaking, the former a light treatment of his frustrations in film school and the latter an ambitious omnibus of stories set in and around the preparations for a misbegotten location film shoot. Even given the differences in scale, they register as self-consciously sprawling works, running more than two hours and ruled by their characters' tempestuous emotions. With Only the River Flows, Wei has unexpectedly pivoted in an entirely different direction. An adaptation of a novel by the legendary Chinese writer Yu Hua (most famous in cinema for penning the source material for Zhang Yimou's To Live), it quickly establishes itself as a relatively (by Wei's standards) tight 100-minute genre exercise: in Jiangdong Province circa 1995, police investigator Ma Zhe (Zhu Yilong) finds himself at multiple crossroads: his wife is about to give birth to their first child, his unit is about to be moved into an abandoned movie theater, with the majority of the desks set up on stage, and he is up for a possible merit award. In the midst of this upheaval comes a mysterious series of murders, which in turn uncover revelations about the rural city's inhabitants that may or may not be related to the crimes at hand. Like Wei's first two films, Only the River Flows relies less on strict plotting than a pervasive mood of dissatisfaction and simmering confusion at the state of things. Unlike those works, that sensation is immediately invoked by the texture: shot on 16mm—reportedly the first film shot on celluloid in mainland China in years—by Chengma Zhiyuan, the format is used both for the beautiful haze it lays onto the proceedings and its instant evocation of the time period and its contemporary policiers. As Ma Zhe trudges further into the murk of mystery, Wei's narrative unspools into a kaleidoscope of surreal and metacinematic images and motifs: ping-pong balls, tape recorders, burning film reels. Its resolution inevitably leaves many of these lingering threads unresolved, but what registers most is Wei's continually evolving vision of China's recent ways of living, entirely distinct from his prior films' generic concerns but just as beguiling.

Wei Shujun

1. Ripples of Life (2021)
2. Striding Into the Wind (2020)
3. Only the River Flows (2023)

1. Ripples of Life (2021)
2. Striding Into the Wind (2020)
3. Only the River Flows (2023)

Azazel Jacobs

1. French Exit (2020)
2. His Three Daughters (2023)

1. French Exit (2020)
2. His Three Daughters (2023)

Kit Zauhar

1. This Closeness (2023)
2. Actual People (2021)

1. This Closeness (2023)
2. Actual People (2021)

Venice Orizzonti

61st (2004):

1. Mysterious Skin (Gregg Araki)

62nd (2005):

63rd (2006):

1. Dong (Jia Zhangke)

64th (2007):

1. Useless (Jia Zhangke) [Best Documentary]

65th (2008):

66th (2009):

67th (2010):

1. Oki's Movie (Hong Sang-soo)

68th (2011):

69th (2012):

70th (2013):

71st (2014):

1. Hill of Freedom (Hong Sang-soo)
2. Heaven Knows What (Josh & Benny Safdie)

72nd (2015):

73rd (2016):

1. Kékszakállú (Gastón Solnicki)
2. Dawson City: Frozen Time (Bill Morrison)

74th (2017):

1. Caniba (Véréna Paravel & Lucien Castaing-Taylor) [Special Jury Prize]

75th (2018):

1. Amanda (Mikhaël Hers)

76th (2019):

77th (2020):

78th (2021):

1. El gran movimiento (Kiro Russo) [Special Jury Prize]

79th (2022):

1. Trenque Lauquen (Laura Citarella)

80th (2023):

1. Gasoline Rainbow (Bill & Turner Ross)

81st (2024):

1. Pavements (Alex Ross Perry)

Cannes Directors' Fortnight

Reference

22nd (1969):

1. Death by Hanging (Oshima Nagisa)
2. Une femme douce (Robert Bresson)
3. Lucía (Humberto Solás)
4. Partner. (Bernardo Bertolucci)
5. Duet for Cannibals (Susan Sontag)
6. Barravento (Glauber Rocha)*
7. Diary of a Shinjuku Thief (Oshima Nagisa)

23rd (1970):

1. Eyes Do Not Want to Close at All Times (Jean-Marie Straub & Danièle Huillet)
2. Wind From the East (Groupe Dziga Vertov and Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin)
3. Even Dwarfs Started Small (Werner Herzog)
4. The Cannibals (Liliana Cavani)

24th (1971):

1. The Ceremony (Oshima Nagisa)
2. Four Nights of a Dreamer (Robert Bresson)
3. Wanda (Barbara Loden)
4. Fata Morgana (Werner Herzog)
5. The Man Who Left His Will on Film (Oshima Nagisa)
6. W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism (Dušan Makavejev)

25th (1972):

1. Land of Silence and Darkness (Werner Herzog)
2. Heat (Paul Morrissey)
3. Family Life (Ken Loach)
4. Summer Soldiers (Teshigahara Hiroshi)

26th (1973):

1. History Lessons (Jean-Marie Straub & Danièle Huillet)
2. Aguirre, the Wrath of God (Werner Herzog)
3. Réjeanne Padovani (Denys Arcand)

27th (1974):

1. Céline and Julie Go Boating (Jacques Rivette)
2. Mean Streets (Martin Scorsese)
3. The Night of the Scarecrow (Sérgio Ricardo)
4. Part-Time Work of a Domestic Slave (Alexander Kluge)

28th (1975):

1. Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman)
2. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Tobe Hooper)
3. Fox and His Friends (Rainer Werner Fassbinder)
4. The Traveling Players (Theo Angelopoulos)

29th (1976):

1. Duelle (une quarantaine) (Jacques Rivette)
2. In the Realm of the Senses (Oshima Nagisa)

30th (1977):

1. The Devil, Probably (Robert Bresson)

31st (1978):

1. Insiang (Lino Brocka)
2. Girlfriends (Claudia Weill)

32nd (1979):

1. Short Memory (Eduardo de Gregorio)
2. Black Jack (Ken Loach)
3. Angi Vera (Gabór Pál)

33rd (1980):

1. Sunday Daughters (Rózsa János)

34th (1981):

35th (1982):

36th (1983):

37th (1984):

38th (1985):

39th (1986):

40th (1987):

41st (1988):

1. Daughter of the Nile (Hou Hsiao-hsien)

42nd (1989):

1. The Seventh Continent (Michael Haneke)

43rd (1990):

1. To Sleep With Anger (Charles Burnett)

44th (1991):

45th (1992):

46th (1993):

47th (1994):

48th (1995):

1. Safe (Todd Haynes)
2. Pather Panchali (Satyajit Ray)*

49th (1996):

50th (1997):

51st (1998):

52nd (1999):

1. The Virgin Suicides (Sofia Coppola)
2. South (Chantal Akerman)

53rd (2000):

1. Lumumba (Raoul Peck)

54th (2001):

1. That Old Dream That Moves (Alain Guiraudie)
2. Hush! (Hashiguchi Ryosuke)

55th (2002):

56th (2003):

1. L'Enfance nue (Maurice Pialat)*

57th (2004):

1. Los muertos (Lisandro Alonso)
2. Vénus et Fleur (Emmanuel Mouret)
3. Tarnation (Jonathan Caouette)

58th (2005):

59th (2006):

1. The Host (Bong Joon-ho)
2. Day Night Day Night (Julia Loktev)

60th (2007):

1. La France (Serge Bozon)

61st (2008):

1. Liverpool (Lisandro Alonso)
   

62nd (2009):

1. Oxhide II (Liu Jiayin)
2. Like You Know It All (Hong Sang-soo)

63rd (2010):

64th (2011):

65th (2012):

66th (2013):

1. Blue Ruin (Jeremy Saulnier)

67th (2014):

1. The Tale of the Princess Kaguya (Takahata Isao)
2. Whiplash (Damien Chazelle)

68th (2015):

1. My Golden Days (Arnaud Desplechin)
2. In the Shadow of Women (Philippe Garrel)
3. Mustang (Deniz Gamze Ergüven)
4. Green Room (Jeremy Saulnier)
5. Embrace of the Serpent (Ciro Guerra)

69th (2016):

1. Neruda (Pablo Larraín)

70th (2017):

1. Let the Sunshine In (Claire Denis)
2. The Florida Project (Sean Baker)
3. Lover for a Day (Philippe Garrel)
4. The Rider (Chloé Zhao)
5. Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc (Bruno Dumont)

71st (2018):

1. The Load (Ognjen Glavonić)
2. Climax (Gaspar Noé)
3. Leave No Trace (Debra Granik)

72nd (2019):

1. Zombi Child (Bertrand Bonello)
2. Ghost Tropic (Bas Devos)
3. The Lighthouse (Robert Eggers)

74th (2021):

1. The Souvenir Part II (Joanna Hogg)
2. A Night of Knowing Nothing (Payal Kapadia)
3. Ripples of Life (Wei Shujun)
4. Hit the Road (Panah Panahi)

75th (2022):

1. De Humani Corporis Fabrica (Véréna Paravel & Lucien Castaing-Taylor)
2. One Fine Morning (Mia Hansen-Løve)
3. Will-o'-the-Wisp (João Pedro Rodrigues)
4. Enys Men (Mark Jenkin)
5. God's Creatures (Saela Davis & Anna Rose Holmer)

76th (2023):

1. In Our Day (Hong Sang-soo)
2. Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell (Phạm Thiên Ân)
3. The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed (Joanna Arnow)
4. The Sweet East (Sean Price Williams)
5. Mambar Pierrette (Rosine Mbakam)

77th (2024):

1. Eephus (Carson Lund)

Locarno Competition

Reference

1st (1946):

2nd (1947):

3rd (1948):

1. Fort Apache (John Ford) [Best Director]
2. Germany Year Zero (Roberto Rossellini) [Golden Leopard, Best Director Second Prize]

4th (1949):

1. Bicycle Thieves (Vittorio De Sica) [Special Jury Prize]

5th (1950):

6th (1952):

7th (1953):

8th (1954):

9th (1955):

10th (1957):

11th (1958):

1. Le Beau Serge (Claude Chabrol) [Best Director]

12th (1959):

1. Killer's Kiss (Stanley Kubrick) [Golden Leopard, Best Director]

13th (1960):

14th (1961):

15th (1962):

16th (1963):

1. Hallelujah the Hills (Adolfas Mekas)

17th (1964):

1. Yearning (Naruse Mikio) [Best Actress]
2. Black Peter (Miloš Forman) [Golden Leopard]

18th (1965):

1. Fists in the Pocket (Marco Bellocchio)

19th (1966):

1. The War Is Over (Alain Resnais)

20th (1967):

1. Father (Szabó István)

21st (1968):

22nd (1969):

23rd (1970):

24th (1971):

25th (1972):

26th (1973):

1. The Illumination (Krzysztof Zanussi) [Golden Leopard]
2. American Graffiti (George Lucas)

27th (1974):

1. Céline and Julie Go Boating (Jacques Rivette)
2. A Bigger Splash (Jack Hazan)

28th (1975):

29th (1976):

30th (1977):

31st (1978):

1. Girlfriends (Claudia Weill)

32nd (1979):

33rd (1980):

34th (1981):

35th (1982):

36th (1983):

37th (1984):

38th (1985):

1. Contact (Alan Clarke)
2. Desert Hearts (Donna Deitch)

39th (1986):

40th (1987):

41st (1988):

1. 36 Fillette (Catherine Breillat)

42nd (1989):

1. The Seventh Continent (Michael Haneke)

43rd (1990):

44th (1991):

45th (1992):

46th (1993):

1. Dazed and Confused (Richard Linklater)

47th (1994):

1. Chungking Express (Wong Kar-wai)
2. The Glass Shield (Charles Burnett)

48th (1995):

49th (1996):

1. Nénette et Boni (Claire Denis) [Golden Leopard, Best Actor, Best Actress]

50th (1997):

51st (1998):

52n (1999):

53rd (2000):

1. In Vanda's Room (Pedro Costa)
2. Hamlet (Michael Almereyda)
3. Little Cheung (Fruit Chan)

54th (2001):

55th (2002):

56th (2003):

57th (2004):

58th (2005):

59th (2006):

60th (2007):

61st (2008):

62nd (2009):

63rd (2010):

64th (2011):

1. The Loneliest Planet (Julia Loktev)
2. Low Life (Nicolas Klotz)

65th (2012):

1. Leviathan (Lucien Castaing-Taylor & Véréna Paravel)

66th (2013):

1. Our Sunhi (Hong Sang-soo) [Best Director]
2. Sentimental Education (Júlio Bressane)
3. Exhibition (Joanna Hogg)

67th (2014):

1. Horse Money (Pedro Costa) [Best Director]
2. The Princess of France (Matías Piñeiro)
3. Listen Up Philip (Alex Ross Perry) [Special Jury Prize]
4. Two Shots Fired (Martín Rejtman)

68th (2015):

1. Right Now, Wrong Then (Hong Sang-soo) [Golden Leopard, Best Actor]
2. Happy Hour (Hamaguchi Ryusuke) [Best Actress, Special Mention]
3. Lost and Beautiful (Pietro Marcello)
4. James White (Josh Mond)
5. No Home Movie (Chantal Akerman)
6. The Sky Trembles and the Earth Is Afraid and the Two Eyes Are Not Brothers (Ben Rivers)
7. Cosmos (Andrzej Żuławski) [Best Director]

69th (2016):

1. By the Time It Gets Dark (Anocha Suwichakornpong)
2. The Dreamed Path (Angela Schanelec)
3. Hermia & Helena (Matías Piñeiro)
4. The Ornithologist (João Pedro Rodrigues) [Best Director]
5. Scarred Hearts (Radu Jude) [Special Jury Prize]

70th (2017):

1. Mrs. Hyde (Serge Bozon) [Best Actress]
2. Good Manners (Juliana Rojas & Marco Dutra) [Special Jury Prize]
3. The Wandering Soap Opera (Raúl Ruiz & Valeria Sarmiento)
4. Gemini (Aaron Katz)
5. Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun? (Travis Wilkerson)
6. A Skin So Soft (Denis Côté)
7. En el Séptimo Día (Jim McKay)

71st (2018):

1. La Flor (Mariano Llinás)
2. Hotel by the River (Hong Sang-soo) [Best Actor]
3. Too Late to Die Young (Dominga Sotomayor) [Best Director]
4. Genèse (Philippe Lesage)
5. A Family Tour (Ying Liang)
6. Ray & Liz (Richard Billingham) [Special Mention]
7. Diane (Kent Jones)
8. Yara (Abbas Fahdel)

72nd (2019):

1. Vitalina Varela (Pedro Costa) [Golden Leopard, Best Actress]
2. A Voluntary Year (Ulrich Köhler & Henner Winckler)
3. A Girl Missing (Fukada Koji)

74th (2021):

1. A New Old Play (Qiu Jiongjinog) [Special Jury Prize]
2. Medea (Alexander Zeldovich)
3. The Sacred Spirit (Chema García Ibarra) [Special Mention]
4. Virgin Blue (Niu Xiaoyu)
5. Vengeance Is Mine, All Others Pay Cash (Edwin) [Golden Leopard]
6. Zeros and Ones (Abel Ferrara) [Best Director]

75th (2022):

1. Tales of the Purple House (Abbas Fahdel)
2. Saturn Bowling (Patricia Mazuy)
3. Matter Out of Place (Nikolaus Geyrhalter)
4. Human Flowers of Flesh (Helena Wittmann)
5. The Adventures of Gigi the Law (Alessandro Comodin) [Special Jury Prize]
6. Fairytale (Alexander Sokurov)

76th (2023):

1. Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World (Radu Jude) [Special Jury Prize]
2. The Human Surge 3 (Eduardo Williams)

77th (2024):

1. Youth (Hard Times) (Wang Bing) [Special Mention]

Rotterdam Competition

Reference

1995:

1996:

1997:

1. The Day a Pig Fell Into the Well (Hong Sang-soo) [Tiger Award]

1998:

1999:

2000:

2001:

2002:

2003:

2004:

2005:

2006:

1. Old Joy (Kelly Reichardt) [Tiger Award]

2007:

2008:

2009:

2010:

1. Mundane History (Anocha Suwichakornpong) [Tiger Award]

2011:

2012:

2013:

2014:

2015:

2016:

2017:

1. Columbus (Kogonada)

2018:

2019:

1. Present.Perfect. (Zhu Shengze)

2020:

1. The Year of the Discovery (Luis López Carrasco)

2021:

1. Pebbles (PS Vinothraj)

2022:

2023:

2024:

Cannes Un certain regard

Reference

31st (1978):

1. Le Dossier 51 (Michel Deville)

32nd (1979):

1. From the Clouds to the Resistance (Jean-Marie Straub & Danièle Huillet)
2. A Scream From Silence (Anne Claire Poirier)

33rd (1980):

34th (1981):

35th (1982):

1. Tree of Knowledge (Nils Malmros)

36th (1983):

37th (1984):

38th (1985):

39th (1986):

40th (1987):

1. Terrorizers (Edward Yang)

41st (1988):

1. On the Silver Globe (Andrzej Żuławski)

42nd (1989):

43rd (1990):

44th (1991):

45th (1992):

46th (1993):

1. Moving (Somai Shinji)

47th (1994):

1. Cold Water (Olivier Assayas)
2. I Can't Sleep (Claire Denis)

48th (1995):

49th (1996):

1. Irma Vep (Olivier Assayas)
2. Hard Eight (Paul Thomas Anderson)

50th (1997):

51st (1998):

1. The Power of Kangwon Province (Hong Sang-soo)

52nd (1999):

53rd (2000):

1. Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors (Hong Sang-soo)

54th (2001):

1. Pulse (Kurosawa Kiyoshi)
2. La libertad (Lisandro Alonso)

55th (2002):

1. Blissfully Yours (Apichatpong Weerasethakul) [Prix Un certain regard]

56th (2003):

57th (2004):

58th (2005):

1. The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (Cristi Puiu) [Prix un certain regard]

59th (2006):

60th (2007):

61st (2008):

1. Tokyo Sonata (Kurosawa Kiyoshi) [Jury Prize]
2. Wendy and Lucy (Kelly Reichardt)
3. Afterschool (Antonio Campos)

62nd (2009):

1. Mother (Bong Joon-ho)
2. Dogtooth (Yorgos Lanthimos) [Prix un certain regard]

63rd (2010):

1. Hahaha (Hong Sang-soo) [Prix un certain regard]
2. The City Below (Christoph Hochhäusler)
3. Film Socialisme (Jean-Luc Godard)
4. The Strange Case of Angelica (Manoel de Oliveira)
5. I Wish I Knew (Jia Zhangke)

64th (2011):

1. The Day He Arrives (Hong Sang-soo)

65th (2012):

66th (2013):

1. Bastards (Claire Denis)
2. Stranger by the Lake (Alain Guiraudie) [Best Director]
3. The Bling Ring (Sofia Coppola)

67th (2014):

1. Jauja (Lisandro Alonso)

68th (2015):

1. Cemetery of Splendor (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)
2. Journey to the Shore (Kurosawa Kiyoshi) [Best Director]
3. The Other Side (Roberto Minervini)
4. The Treasure (Corneliu Porumboiu) [Prix Un Certain Talent]

69th (2016):

1. Hell or High Water (David Mackenzie)
2. Harmonium (Fukada Koji) [Jury Prize]
3. After the Storm (Koreeda Hirokazu)
4. The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki (Juho Kuosmanen) [Prix un certain regard]

70th (2017):

1. Before We Vanish (Kurosawa Kiyoshi)
2. Western (Valeska Grisebach)
3. Wind River (Taylor Sheridan) [Best Director]

71st (2018):

1. Long Day's Journey Into Night (Bi Gan)
2. In My Room (Ulrich Köhler)

72nd (2019):

1. Liberté (Albert Serra) [Special Jury Prize]
2. Fire Will Come (Óliver Laxe) [Jury Prize]

74th (2021):

1. Onoda (Arthur Harari)

75th (2022):

1. Return to Seoul (Chou Davy)

76th (2023):

1. The Delinquents (Rodrigo Moreno)
2. Only the River Flows (Wei Shujun)

77th (2024):

1. On Becoming a Guinea Fowl (Rungano Nyoni)

Berlin Encounters

Reference

70th (2020):

1. The Works and Days (of Tayoko Shiojiri in the Shiotani Basin) (C. W. Winter & Anders Edström) [Best Film]
2. Malmkrog (Cristi Puiu) [Best Director]
3. The Last City (Heinz Emigholz)
4. Los conductos (Camilo Retrepo)
5. The Metamorphosis of Birds (Catarina Vasconcelos)
6. Isabella (Matías Piñeiro) [Special Mention]

71st (2021):

1. The Girl and the Spider (Ramon and Silvan Zürcher) [Best Director]
2. Social Hygiene (Denis Côté) [Best Director]
3. Rock Bottom Riser (Fern Silva) [Special Mention]

72nd (2022):

1. Coma (Bertrand Bonello)
2. Queens of the Qing Dynasty (Ashley McKenzie)
3. The City and the City (Christos Passalis & Syllas Tzoumerkas)

73rd (2023):

1. in water (Hong Sang-soo)
2. Here (Bas Devos) [Best Film]
3. The Adults (Dustin Guy Defa)
4. Samsara (Lois Patiño) [Special Jury Prize]
5. Absence (Wu Lang)

74th (2024):

1. Matt and Mara (Kazik Radwanski)
2. You Burn Me (Matías Piñeiro)

Music/Last Summer Fragment

Fragments originally written for Music/Last Summer review for Taipei Mansions.

One of the great paradoxes of any artform, even one as young as film, is both the necessity and the impossibility of comparing any given work with another. A fundamental trait of truly great art is its endless mutability for both the artist and the viewer—inextricably bound up from the unique mindsets the former was in during the process of creation, and received differently every time by even a single individual in the latter category—and yet a work cannot be viewed completely within a vacuum, as it exists along a vast continuum of influences and descendants. The natural next step (perhaps after ranking and listmaking) is to initiate such conversations

It can be a foolhardy venture to bring films into conversation, for fear of risking oversimplification or even more reductive shorthand. But the release of Angela Schanelec's Music and Catherine Breillat's Last Summer, which premiered in 2023 at the Berlin and Cannes Film Festivals respectively, on the same day in the United States offers an opportunity to examine the latest works from two of the female European filmmakers who, for lack of a better word, have been dubbed "singular" as much as nearly anybody.

Despite their relatively comparable career lengths—Breillat made her debut with A Real Young Girl in 1976 but there was a nine-year gap between that film's follow-up and 36 Fillette (1988); Schanelec's directorial debut I Stayed in Berlin All Summer was a mere six years after that—it is notable that there has been no overlap whatsoever in their international appreciation. Breillat worked steadily since her landmark 36 Fillette, garnering varying degrees of controversy and acclaim, until Abuse of Weakness (2013) kicked off a ten-year break from directing, while Schanelec's breakthrough didn't come until The Dreamed Path (2016), one of the unlikeliest and most alienating films to put its director on the map stateside in recent memory.

The 62-year-old German and 75-year-old Frenchwoman may be taken to represent two distinct strands of filmmaking that are nevertheless highly prized by a certain subset of the festival landscape. For the former, it is a cinema of absolute rigor, foregoing concrete plot beats in favor of seeking the most minimal, even severe means to embody a more abstract series of experiences. The latter continues to resist complete categorization, but it rests somewhere in between provocation and familiarity, a prickly balance between the extremity of her scenarios and the skillful, malleable nature of her form. To this end, it's a remarkable coincidence that both filmmakers made works that interface with, to one degree or another, the case of Oedipus: Music operates as a very loose rendering of that myth before following its own path, while Last Summer—a remake of the Danish film Queen of Hearts (2019), for which Breillat was commissioned by Saïd Ben Saïd, the French film producer whose name has been on a number of the most important films of the past twenty years—deals with the relationship between a Parisian lawyer and her 17-year-old stepson.

The more obvious comparison for the latter is probably Todd Haynes's equally masterful May December, another immensely knotty film about an age-gap relationship that premiered at last year's Cannes, but such contrasting approaches offered by this quirk of distribution and programming come to symbolize what may be considered separately as the

Jeff Nichols

1. Loving (2016)
2. Midnight Special (2016)
3. The Bikeriders (2023)

1. Loving (2016)
2. Midnight Special (2016)
3. The Bikeriders (2023)

Sky Hopinka

1. Fainting Spells (2018)
2. maɬni—towards the ocean, towards the shore (2020)
3. Kicking the Clouds (2021)
4. Dislocation Blues (2017)

1. Fainting Spells (2018)
2. Kicking the Clouds (2021)
3. Dislocation Blues (2017)

Catherine Breillat

1. Last Summer (2023)
2. 36 Fillette (1988)
3. Dirty Like an Angel (1991)

1. Last Summer (2023)
2. 36 Fillette (1988)
3. Dirty Like an Angel (1991)

Sadie Benning

1. If Every Girl Had a Diary (1990)
2. Me and Rubyfruit (1990)
3. Jollies (1990)
4. Living Inside (1989)
5. A Place Called Lovely (1991)
6. Girl Power (1992)
7. A New Year (1989)

1. If Every Girl Had a Diary (1990)
2. Me and Rubyfruit (1990)
3. Jollies (1990)
4. Living Inside (1989)
5. A Place Called Lovely (1991)
6. Girl Power (1992)
7. A New Year (1989)

Lynne Ramsay

1. You Were Never Really Here (2017)
2. We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011)

1. You Were Never Really Here (2017)
2. We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011)

Michael Cimino

1. Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974)
2. The Deer Hunter (1978)

1. Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974)
2. The Deer Hunter (1978)

Nocturama First Rewrite

Complete first rewrite for Reverse Shot.

Where Now Are the Dreams of Youth? Ryan Swen Revisits Nocturama "In 2014, I told you about a film I wanted to make, as brief and clear as a gesture. I made it, but, in the end, it was long and complicated. The film was dedicated to you. I know you haven't seen it. That doesn't matter." - Bertrand Bonello, Coma The ability to see the context in which you're working isn't necessarily a good thing. For reasons I'll get to in a moment, I'm writing this essay—which I promise will be about my relationship to Bertrand Bonello's 2016 masterpiece Nocturama—as a meager, long-delayed coda to the symposium that you read a few months ago. This collection features astonishingly inventive and incisive writing from some of the best film critics I know, and, consequently, has had the rather unfortunate effect of serving as both motivator and intimidator. As will always be the case with this now-venerable publication, to be part of the Reverse Shot roster—seeing my humble words alongside many people who have inspired and improved my critical faculties—is still a total joy. That is, until I realize what I have to live up to. It's relatively easy to write a distinct, standalone review: though there might be a lineage of writing on a particular director or festival, the subject is almost always understood to be the film first, and more often than not it will be rich enough (in ways positive and/or negative) to suffice. But upon reading through the published pieces—when confronted with Adam Nayman and Nick Pinkerton's questioning of their Young Turk days in this publication's infancy (only a few years after my own), Chloe Lizotte's evocation of her adolescence through the unlikeliest of sources, or Julien Allen's exegesis of the ex-Greatest Film of All Time—the gravity of the task becomes far more forceful. Most pertinent of all, of course, were Michael Koresky's own piece grappling with the anxiety of influence—the latent desire to agree with and understand the differing viewpoints of trusted colleagues and inspirations while also being true to one's own predilections and critical judgment—and Jordan Cronk's, which, in its own display of his influence on me and my own lack of imagination, tackled my film's direct directorial predecessor by grounding it in the rigors of the festival circuit. The vagaries of influence don't stop at film taste: they seep into writing style even before a piece lands in an editor's inbox. This is especially true when considering how to write an entry in a series: as I churned out countless false starts and thousands of words while attempting to just begin this particular form of the piece, I constantly looked back at my predecessors, trying to figure out how they succeeded where I was failing. Should I begin by quoting from one of my own reviews of Nocturama? Should I discuss the particular state I was in when I first encountered the film? Or should I attempt to go down a different path? This was all compounded by the haunting knowledge of the past versions of what I wanted to convey. After a catastrophic loss of a nearly complete draft and imperfect attempts to reconstruct it, I finally turned in a first draft back in November. For better or worse, I got it back after a longer-than-usual interval, and while Koresky's typically constructive and comprehensive edits didn't suggest a massive amount of revising, I had already grown disenchanted with what I had written just weeks before. The personal histories and reminiscences about reception seemed dull and meandering, the film analysis felt incomplete, and my ideas about influence were largely superseded by Koresky's infinitely more eloquent ruminations. I poked and prodded at the edits, but the idea to completely rewrite it emerged, a chance at some kind of personal redemption that I couldn't shake. I've questioned that inclination countless times in the months that have followed: while the editing process was becoming more and more taxing—each friendly note a brutal reminder of my inadequacies—the prospect of coming up with an entirely different essay with its own potential for failure has been even more painful. But it was necessary for me, because something designed to be personal should not feel false or woefully inadequate. ***** All of this might seem extraneous, were it not for the fact that, for me, this writing struggle and Bertrand Bonello's films—with Nocturama as the standard bearer—have become almost synonymous, in a manner that enhances rather than detracts from the immediacy of his work. This obsession with his oeuvre isn't new, strictly speaking: when the call for submissions was made, Nocturama sprang immediately to mind because it's a film I think about constantly, despite not having seen it in full since 2017, my first complete year of "serious" film criticism. I watched it twice that year, prompting first a cautiously admiring capsule review for Seattle Screen Scene in June, then a full-length, more openly adulatory full-length review for the same publication in September; it remains the only time I've ever reviewed a film twice in the same year. At the time, I felt compelled to write something more positive, in large part because—even though I had misgivings about what I perceived to be its cold-bloodedness and cagy avoidance of politics—I felt the hypnotic pull of its style needed to be highlighted for the one-night-only Seattle release as much as possible. Looking back on those reviews, I see that I focused to a pronounced degree upon the reactions of others, perhaps a way of signaling that I knew and understood the importance of the context around the film: in the capsule "controversial" is one of the first descriptors; the full review mentions "the curious nature of its reception" and "reactions, praise and criticism alike." From my viewpoint, this latter grouping mainly relied on the general approbation of critics I was aware of at the time—people like Mike D'Angelo, Blake Williams, Matt Lynch, and Ignatiy Vishnevetsky—in contrast to notable snubs from the Cannes and New York Film Festivals. Inevitably, an enormous amount of influence upon my level of interest in a given film can be traced to the reactions of peoples and institutions such as these, a path of exploration that probably took up more than it should have in the past version of this piece. Instead, what I'm interested in now lies in the connective threads between Bonello's films and, in probably an impudent leap in logic, my own writing situation. So hasty was I in past reviews to praise Bonello's form—disjunctive character perspectives, sinuous Steadicam shots, startling split screens—that I could often lose sight of exactly how his films played out scene-to-scene, how the elegance of his narratives was essential for landing the hammer blows that so often wallop me at the end of any work of his. It's not that I see myself as being a much more "curious" or observant viewer and writer now; indeed, the marked downturn in film viewing due to other obligations since that time has curtailed some of my more adventurous impulses. But I find the act of divining how—within already familiar works—fundamental mechanics (in general and to Bonello specifically) lead to the ineffable and sublime more fascinating and fulfilling than I once did. Broadly speaking, Bonello's films are usually about outsiders caught in the sweep of their milieus, often anticipating a catastrophe or attempting to live on in the wake of it. Usually, these will happen courtesy of an exterior force: for instance, the maiming of a sex worker in House of Tolerance, the pandemic in Coma, and the various calamities within The Beast. However, Nocturama concerns itself with its protagonists' direct action, a forceful and coordinated series of bombings whose intent is never entirely revealed. Obviously for me, the decision to set out on an entirely different tack of writing is nowhere near as drastic, but it came in the wake of a series of unfortunate events that each impeded my writing progress; somehow, I eventually managed to continue writing. In my full review, I made a telling error in quoting André (Martin Guyot), a political school student describing his entrance exam strategy to Sarah (Laure Valentinelli): I thought he said that "the existence of capitalism is a precondition for the downfall of capitalism," but his actual subject was civilization itself. I also completely missed the context he couched it in, as the conclusion of a five-step plan for academic success: "In part A, expose the problem and define it. In part B, explain it. In part C, take it to its paroxysm to define the limits. And, in D, suggest a solution. You can add a risky theory too. Something politically incorrect or even unacceptable. Even if they don't like it, they'll want you to fuel the debate." Such a pair of mistakes probably wouldn't matter in a much lesser film. But in works as ideologically concentrated as Bonello's, stray comments and glancing actions form an embodied—if not necessarily articulated—political worldview. Bonello isn't making airtight analyses, of course. Therefore, his approach is much less rigid, and he can be said to be working within three elements of André's essay plan: exposing the problem, by virtue of its consistent demonstration and elaboration across Nocturama; adding a risky theory, via its centering of terrorism and complication of ideology through the cross-class and multi-ethnic crew; and, above all, taking it to its paroxysm. A spectacular bombing is met by a total crackdown, and in between the characters' avenues for exploration of identity and commodity wind through the second half's setting within a high-end shopping mall, an ultimate arena of civilization's highs and lows. The thrill of the paroxysm, of course, is what's so compelling about Bonello, his penchant for coups de cinema virtually guaranteed to occur multiple times within a single film. But it also makes it easy to reduce an assessment of his work to just those moments. Indeed one of only a few moments that I mentioned in the full review was Yacine's (Hamza Meziani) lip sync in drag to Shirley Bassey's cover of "My Way." It's of course a great scene, but in my two rewatches in preparation for this piece I found just as much enjoyment in the stray shot of his formation of dolls arranged on the floor, or him playing a few moments of Grand Theft Auto V. Contra the two signature images of Nocturama—Yacine looking at a Nike mannequin wearing the exact same clothes as him and Mika (Jamil McCraven) wearing a gold featureless mask—these are not merely interchangeable representations of the youth: they register quickly and profoundly as their own separate beings, with their own relationships and preferred friendships that are displayed both during relaxation and while executing the terror plot. This deep into my history with the film, I have a great affection for all of them. It certainly doesn't hurt that, seven years on, I'm now roughly the same age as the average member of the group, and even better able to appreciate the weird state of suspension induced during one's mid-twenties. Like the displaced, directionless characters, I also feel like I'm at a crossroads with hundreds of possibilities arrayed around me, none especially appealing, and something like this essay acts as a distilled exemplar of that tendency. If Nocturama is strictly taken to be a film about a political act and its consequences, then it is defined by failure: multiple breakdowns in planning, rapid discovery by and inability to stave off the gendarmerie, and the lack others inspired to enact some kind of passionate response. When I was at my most stuck on this piece, I tended to view the characters and myself through that lens: potentially noble intentions gone to naught, trapped under the weight of expectations and imposing forebears. But, only partly as a means to actually write this essay, I started to see things differently. Returning to the civilization/capitalism divide: it's common to cite the second half of Nocturama as, per my full review, "every member of the crew slowly succumb[ing] to the decadent pleasures of the mall's many products and accoutrements"; in effect, to see their behavior as a betrayal of their disruptive ideals. And yet, two elements have turned my thinking on its head. For one, the characters are generally seen in their firmly consumerist ways of living long before they get to the shopping mall; if they are tempted by capitalism, it is a return to a form of normal behavior rather than a collapse of an ideal. And the other rests in an especially resonant bit of casting, especially in relation to the wide cast of newcomers: Hermine Karaghuez, a key performer for Jacques Rivette—one of cinema's greatest masters at both paranoia and play—as one member of the homeless couple that David (Finnegan Oldfield) impulsively invites into the mall. One of Bonello's most underdiscussed traits goes hand-in-hand with his trademark flair for languor: his ability to craft character dynamics that wouldn't be out of place in a hangout movie. The easy belief in a friendship bond is central to his ensemble-heavy films, like Nocturama and House of Tolerance, and also was a key aspect of Rivette's cinema. Whether in the upbeat feminist celebration of Céline and Julie Go Boating or the pessimistic dissolution of Out 1, Rivette always found a way to foster these connections and evolve them as his extended durations found new iterations. If I ascribe a certain Rivettian spirit to Nocturama, focusing on the mall as a space of possibility instead of a trap (both moral and mortal) and on the beauty of the group dynamics, then a much less cynical, much more tragic portrait emerges, even beyond the sight of so much youth gone to ruin. Through the course of their travels through the mall, the crew avails themselves of so many undoubtedly costly goods and services for free: beautiful clothes, great food, a booming audio system, even an uninhibited go-kart ride. They consume without directly contributing to the capitalist system, free from the rules normally governing the way things are run. The mall thus becomes their own bubble, one that, while doomed to burst, is not lacking in meaning or personal fulfillment, and seeing their potential and the utopia-for-a-night come to a violent end is heartbreaking. It might be gauche to say, but yes, some films, even ones as evocative of the present state of the world in crisis, can come to feel like a safe bubble. For all the destruction and tragedy in his films, Bonello's body of work has increasingly become something of a tonic for me, a dependable atmosphere to sink into when nothing outside of them seems to be going in the right direction. In Coma, Bonello bookends the film with two addresses to his daughter—to whom he dedicated Nocturama; she was roughly half the age of the film's characters—and his quote at the top of this piece expresses the odd transmutation that the artistic process can cause, and the fear that such effort will be all for naught, which I shared in abundance for many months. At the film's close, he describes lockdown as a kind of limbo, which at its root means "a blank space waiting to be filled. In the center, there is no space. It is in limbo that you'll see things impossible to see elsewhere... and that is the moment when one attains poetry, that which we shall need when a new day dawns." I won't pretend that this process has necessarily made me capable of writing poetry, but I'll gladly keep returning to the glorious limbo that is Nocturama, hoping for that day to come.