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.

Casablanca Beats First Draft

Complete first draft for In Review Online.

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

The Walk First Draft

Complete first draft for In Review Online.

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

Back to the Future First Draft

Complete first draft for In Review Online.

Cinephilia is necessarily littered with the detritus of half-remembered viewing experiences, films only glimpsed from childhood in a perspective almost wholly incompatible with the viewer’s current state of mind. Those two ideas overlap, a double (or triple, or quadruple, etc.) image which stirs up all sorts of memories. Sure, a viewer may have a better of how the camera moves in one instant, how a particular editing pattern might seem rote where it once was thrilling, but those primordial sensations still remain; the thrill is never truly gone unless someone’s willing to make a total break. I didn’t truly become obsessed with film until the latter half of high school, but from an early age (probably until my teens) my favorite film was Back to the Future. I only had the vaguest idea of who Robert Zemeckis was; I saw Forrest Gump around this time, but the technological prowess of that film by design totally passed me by, and its qualities seemed totally divorced from the adoration I felt for the adventures of Marty McFly and Doc Brown. I was a science obsessive, a child captivated by action and popcorn filmmaking, a boy fascinated by the loop-the-loops of gags and time travel quandaries — it certainly didn’t hurt that it was one of the first films I ever saw with substantial swearing. I even had a pen with the Japanese hoverboard on it and a miniature model of the Texaco station, both from Back to the Future Part II. Even at that young age, perhaps out of that standard anti-sequel bias, I recognized that II and III weren’t quite as good as the original — one of my first memories of Rotten Tomatoes was the substantially lower approval ratings for the sequels — but I didn’t care. I became obsessed with the idea of a potential sequel almost two decades on, tracking any possible developments on the official website, and was virtually counting down the days until October 21, 2015, when flying cars and hydrated pizzas and Jaws 19 would finally come true. In something of an effort to remain more closely tied to these rose-tinted memories, I only watched parts of the films in the trilogy, letting my mind piece together the connective tissue that links the myriad set-pieces, but even from this limited viewing the dichotomy between the first film and its predecessors only became clearer. The first still remains one of the great works of Americana from the past forty years, a lightning bolt of summation that nevertheless manages to be an oddly small-scale film: there really are only five characters that truly matter here (Marty, Doc, Lorraine, George, and Biff), and the film takes great pleasure in constantly shuffling the tables, throwing in little bits of nonsensical gambits — the Darth Vader from the planet Vulcan scene, featuring the music of Eddie Van Halen, is a particular favorite. It’s by no means perfect: the aging makeup in 1985 is distracting, Zemeckis and screenwriter Bob Gale often get a little too cute — Marty getting to invent the skateboard chief among them — certain aspects like the random guy who tries to dance with Lorraine get to be a little too grating, and the metaphysical implications of people’s lives constantly changing based on one little interaction is too frightening to contemplate; I also have to point out that Chuck Berry released “Maybellene,” arguably even more important than “Johnny B. Goode,” well before the school dance. But it’s also just as thrilling to revisit and see the blatantly adult things (aside from the language) hiding in plain sight to a child: the blues band smoking weed, the proliferation of porno theaters in the Hill Valley town square, the relentless incestual horniness of Lorraine (more on that in a bit). By contrast, the two sequels, while both well-constructed and engaging in their own right, shunt themselves into a bit of a corner, in doing so presaging much of modern franchise filmmaking. There’s the eerie remake of the final scene of the original in II, a sort of throwaway gag of a finale reshot with a new actress and an oh-so-subtle pause in Doc’s reaction to Marty’s worries about his future; the uncanny recasting of Crispin Glover; the back-to-back production of the sequels. Whereas the first film felt free to both swiftly create and then refer back to Hill Valley 1985, the sequels end up acting as more of a reference to the original rather than any wider idea about what it meant to live in the future, or in the Wild West. Indeed, III especially acts as a grab bag of cinematic references — none of which I knew at the time, I learned about e.g. A Fistful of Dollars through this film — irrespective of whether they belong to the Western genre or not: the playing of “My Darling Clementine” exists side-by-side with a Taxi Driver riff, though I’m pretty sure no one in Ford films (or Monument Valley generally) wore blue and pink shirts with nebulas on them. Instead of Marty’s displacement, referring to then-Senator John F. Kennedy and Tab, not knowing how to open a bottle and getting the mocking suggestion that Jerry Lewis (one of the names that I of course didn’t know at the time) would be Vice President, there’s such scenes as the Café 80s scene, recreating the skateboard/truck chase from the original yet unceremoniously crammed into the opening; I always forget that the 2015 aspect of II only takes up a third of the film. That film has the special awkwardness of having to set up entirely new signifiers and plotlines that will be directly paid off in III: the introduction of Mad Dog Tannen, the hilarious Clint Eastwood motif (considering his and Michael J. Fox’s substantial difference in stature), the random introduction of Needles, and above all the misguided attempt to have him grow via the “chicken” device. It’s not that these films don’t understand the genius of the first film: the recreation of 1955 is astonishing in its deft restaging/reshooting, helped by the quick sequel production time stalling any aging; the reintroduction of Strickland again and again is a total riot; and Christopher Lloyd and Thomas F. Wilson especially have so much fun playing their various temporal incarnations across time, though the disturbing nature of Fox playing his daughter in II and being the incredibly Irish husband to his mother’s actress in III cannot be discounted. But these crucially lack the sense of tech fetish awe afforded to even the plutonium, or the magnificent, prolonged introductions to Marty and Doc, the discovery of love echoing across time where a novel cover speaks to all the strange things that have occurred. By the end, the sentimental idea that the future ultimately isn’t written comes as a bit of a cop out after the train barrels through the DeLorean. Of course, the fact that Back to the Future has its anchors in the two great decades of American conservatism in the 20th century is a key part of its ultimately safe mainstream appeal, though the most charitable reading would suggest that the time travel acts as a sly parody/disruptor of this normalcy; the Trumpian overtones of the alternate 1985 collide oddly with a crime-ridden ‘70s vibe, though the suggestion that a second term of Reagan is so much better than a fifth term of Nixon is laughable. In pure political terms, a number of representational elements really become troubling: the cartoonish Libyan terrorists, the Black family in alternate 1985 almost shot like a horror film, the Native Americans who disappear after their magnificent entrance into the drive-thru. And of course, there is the routine usage of damsels in distress, often of a sexually violating nature. What balances them out are perhaps the two best performances in the entire series: Lea Thompson in the first and Mary Steenburgen in the third, two absolutely radiant and steadfast performances that contain so much longing appropriate to their eras: barely repressed erotic desire and timidly passionate meeting of the minds. They are the glue just as much as the beautiful friendship between Marty and Doc; just as these improbable friends maintain their compassion across centuries, so do these women carve out a slice in this timey-wimey hijinks for real emotion, which Zemeckis graciously and deftly affords them. Back to the Future Part IV never did come to pass, perhaps for the best, but another fictional misbegotten sequel perhaps provides even more insight: Jaws 19. On the marquee, it is clearly stated that it is directed by “Max Spielberg.” Whether this was out of some fear on producer Steven’s part that he wouldn’t live to see 2015, or out of his hope that his child would become a successful director (even a hack), it was yet another prediction that didn’t come true. Spielberg has improbably become a bastion of classicism — demonstrated by his actual 2015 film Bridge of Spies — but Zemeckis’s own subsequent history is left unsaid. Though he might have wanted to believe that it was as open to his own writing as it is for Marty and Jennifer at the end of III, his future was already made: the relative modesty of his first three films would be forever gone; with this quantum leap visited twice more, he barreled past the point of no return, and his reputation, for better and worse, as a technical inventor was sealed.

Virgin Blue First Draft

Complete first draft for In Review Online.

It’s perhaps become a moot point to invoke the shadow of Apichatpong Weerasethakul on an emerging festival filmmaker’s work in the 21st century. Few directors have been as quietly but markedly influential as the Thai master, as his interweaving of the mundane and the ethereal is able to be harnessed in a vast array of styles and narratives. But it feels especially apropos when considering Niu Xiaoyu’s lovely feature debut Virgin Blue, which builds a whole solar system out of its simple premise: Yezi, a recent college graduate, goes home for the summer to visit her grandmother who raised her. During the course of this stay, uneventful in “realistic” terms, the apartment that much of Virgin Blue takes place in seems to mutate and expand. As befits the semi-constant state of napping or sleep that Yezi and her grandmother occupy, this is a somnambulant film, filled with interludes explained partially by the onset of the grandmother’s dementia, partially by the memories that both women have together, and even moreso by the supernatural figures that flit in and out, most notably Yezi’s grandfather, whose spirit is said to be visiting for a few days. Early on, in a series of mistakes regarding the year, the grandmother balefully notes that she “always thinks it’s 2020,” and while the film appears to actually take place in that year — albeit without masks or apparent signs of the pandemic — that painfully apt sentiment says a great deal about the dislocation that the film revels in. Indeed, this floating quality is Apichatpong’s territory: fantastical musical interludes, nocturnal conversations with spirits; the film even ends with a similar gesture as Syndromes and a Century, though it lacks that film’s narrative precision. But what truly distinguishes the film are its extravagant play with light and its moderate metafictional elements. There are moments inside the apartment where space and time seem transfixed, as the film’s subtly dynamic sound design comes to the fore and rays of light dance across the room, alighting on objects and clocks that seem to suddenly gain a new vitality as the camera patiently moves along with it. As much as the explicit occurrences of surreal intervention, these moments enhance the already serene quality of Niu’s largely locked-down frames, often playing out in long takes. The ruptures alongside these scenes lead to one of Virgin Blue’s most fascinating qualities. At one point in the film, Yezi moves a sliding glass door that reveals a film crew; she turns around, only for the people to have vanished. Later on, the grandmother’s actress seems to have a conversation with an offscreen Niu, complaining about the confusion of filming as crew members and cameras are seen in the far background. These, along with other puncturing scenes, seem to get to the heart of Virgin Blue’s mystery and beauty: it is a film open to possibilities, never straying too far away from these women’s figures and memories, and instead opening them up to new life and contemplation.