Licorice Pizza First Draft

Complete first draft written for The Film Stage.

Throughout his career, Paul Thomas Anderson has always had a fascination with pretenders, with people who use their assumed gigs and personas as a shield for their own deep insecurities. From Tom Cruise’s alpha guru in Magnolia to Philip Seymour Hoffman’s blustering mystic in The Master, Josh Brolin’s cop in Inherent Vice to Paul Dano’s preacher in There Will Be Blood, these characters that circle and attempt to entrap Anderson’s putative protagonists often end up as the most fascinating elements of his films, teasing out a canniness and resourcefulness that resonates with his view of American self-actualization. That recurring use of hucksters has now ascended to the level of text with Licorice Pizza, which returns to the sunny San Fernando Valley setting of the films from the first half of his career. Set in 1973, it follows Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman, the son of Anderson’s deceased muse), a 15-year-old child actor and voracious entrepreneur, and Alana Kane (Alana Haim), a prospectless 25-year-old who transfixes Gary when he first sees her in the line for high school photos. After immediately proclaiming his affection for her — which she quickly turns down for obvious reasons — Gary nevertheless forges a friendship with Alana, and together they embark on a series of highs and lows in both their personal and professional interactions. Gary, whose acting prospects are drying up, begins selling waterbeds, then opens a pinball palace, ventures both based on fads and rumors; Alana pursues first acting then politics, actions undertaken based on a broader sense of dissatisfaction with the course of her life. As might be expected, Licorice Pizza operates in a much more clearly definable mode than the majority of Anderson’s works: the coming-of-age film, though fascinatingly it is applied to both the teen and the young woman. Alana and Gary are effectively equals through the course of the film, which remains more-or-less wholly tied to their perspectives throughout, shifting fluidly between wide-eyed idealism and something more pragmatic, if not bitter. Bitterness, or at the very least reality, comes in the form of the four adults, each based on real people, who successively take center stage in the last half of the film for their own sequences: actor Jack Holden (Sean Penn channeling William Holden) and director Rex Blau (Tom Waits), hairdresser and famously illiterate producer Jon Peters (Bradley Cooper), and closeted politician Joel Wachs (Benny Safdie). Each man puts on his own airs, whether they be the private and necessary secrecy of Wachs, the coked-up macho energy of Peters, or the carousing and creative fantasies of Holden and Blau — indeed, the first conversation between Penn and Waits, each trying to out-gravel each other in their murmured reminiscences, heralds an entirely different energy that the film occupies until its final moments, which enter an entirely different feeling of rapture. For Licorice Pizza ultimately is a funny and romantic film, if filled with danger and excitement — the Peters section ranks as one of the more harrowing vehicle-based sequences in recent memory — filled to burst with incidents and details. To match this, it feels like Anderson has returned to a more youthful style, filling the film with long Steadicam tracking shots through groups of people in rapid motion. There is also a broader approach to comedy than Anderson has used in some time, which especially focuses on identities: the Haim family plays themselves and emphasizes their Jewishness, John Michael Higgins plays a restaurant owner who speaks to his virtually interchangeable Japanese wives in a horrendous accent and pretends to understand what they are saying. In the midst of this general climate of hustling, Gary and Alana emerge from the tapestry in large part because their pretending goes so hand-in-hand with their zest for life. Hoffman and Haim are quite natural and relaxed in the way they carry themselves, the former filled with an awkward confidence and the latter a forthright radiance, and by the close of the film, it is apparent that their roads are inextricably intertwined, no matter the obstacles life throws in their way. As it is with them, as it is with Anderson and Licorice Pizza: recognition of the failings of others, the compromises that those weighed down by the past must take, can allow the younger people to take flight in their own idiosyncratic directions, at least for a little while.

Introduction/In Front of Your Face First Draft

Complete first draft written for Reverse Shot.

Any director as relentlessly prolific, as consciously playful and rooted in self-made conventions as Hong Sang-soo practically demands the viewer to see his newest films in light of their predecessors, older and more immediate alike. Now 26 films into a 25-year career, Hong has only grown more prolific: 2019 was the first year since 2007 in which he didn’t premiere a film, and he has rebounded with three films in the past two years. In this span, he has regularly made multiple films in a single year — beginning in 2010 with Oki’s Movie and Hahaha — and three of these five instances have resulted in multiple New York Film Festival Main Slate appearances in the same year, something almost unheard of this century. As such, the impulse to compare Hong’s films to one another is only heightened when it comes to discussing two — or three, as in the case of 2017, in which Hong premiered On the Beach at Night Alone, Claire’s Camera, and The Day After — works created in such close proximity to each other. Sometimes, these connections result in marked moments of similarity: the projection of mental images by men onto a central woman in 2013’s Nobody’s Daughter Haewon and Our Sunhi, or the previously unprecedented (for Hong) focus on death in luminous black-and-white in 2018’s Grass and Hotel by the River. But for such a filmmaker as Hong, whose ability to spin endless, often radically different variations on similar themes — in his own words, “infinite worlds possible” — has been commonly misinterpreted as base repetition, the films more often than not evince considerable differences. 2010 and 2013 both featured extensions of Hong’s then ongoing cycle of Jung Yu-mi films with Oki and Sunhi, while their companion films were, respectively, a unique, hilarious, and interweaved set of vacation coincidences — revealed only to the viewer — with Hahaha, and a more mysterious consideration of family and inner desire in Haewon. The 2017 trifecta found Hong pushing his tonal variety to the limit with the overtly personal On the Beach, the elliptical and cutting black-and-white drama of The Day After (both were selected for NYFF), and the delightful, temporally off-kilter Cannes vacation in Claire’s Camera. While the aesthetic style of his 2018 output (both selected for NYFF) appeared to be unified, Grass imagines a series of conversations between different people as the possible creation of a solitary writer who joins her characters at the close, while Hotel by the River stands among his most emotionally direct and contemplative works, taking concerns about aging and family to a terminal point. Hong continues this trend with his 2021 films: Introduction, which premiered in competition at Berlin, and In Front of Your Face, which showed in the new Cannes Premiere section at Cannes; both are showing in the Main Slate of the New York Film Festival. On their surfaces, the films appear to be more dissimilar than any of Hong’s same-year films to date — save perhaps the dual Cannes premieres of Claire’s Camera and The Day After. The former is in black-and-white and covers a nebulously long time period in just 66 minutes, while the latter uses 85 minutes to cover the events of 24 hours in bright colors. But in a break with last year’s The Woman Who Ran, which considered encroaching middle age and a certain ambivalence about domesticity through elliptical means, these two films opt for a much more direct approach — in emotional, if not in narrative terms — to morality, mortality, and the relationship between generations. Introduction takes this last theme as its central conflict, featuring Hong’s first true young adult protagonists for the first time in many years; while Haewon and Hotel also circled this question, their children were already full-fledged adults and much more rooted than the groundless, drifting twentysomethings here. Young-ho (Shin Seok-ho, a cheery face in the midst of Hong’s typical male leads) serves as the primary guide, along with his girlfriend Ju-won (Park Mi-so, the only main actor here who hasn’t been in any Hong film before) as they navigate what, in other hands, could be a conventional premise: two young people trying to find their places in the world while dealing with relationship issues, all the while being prompted and challenged by their parents, inspirations, and other elders. But the progression is considerably complicated here: unfolding in three parts, the last of which takes up half the film, Introduction centers on interactions that lack overt narrative meaning, but which hold significant force in establishing a certain tone of malaise and uncertainty. Much of this has to do with the downplayed nature of the introductions or conversations that initially seemed so important to the characters. In the first part, Young-ho is left waiting to meet his father (Kim Young-ho) because he is occupied with an old friend, a respected actor (Ki Joo-bong) who dropped in unexpectedly. Some months later, Ju-won, who is moving to Hamburg for fashion school in the second part, cuts off her initial meeting with her mother’s (Hong regular Seo Young-hwa) past acquaintance (Kim Min-hee) to reunite with Young-ho, who has impulsively made a quick trip and issues a promise to try to move to be with his love. The third part takes place months, possibly years later, as in that timespan Young-ho has tried and failed to become an actor — inspired by an unseen encounter with the actor in the first part — and broken up with his girlfriend. Meeting for lunch with his mother (Cho Yun-hee) and the actor while bringing his friend (Ha Seong-guk) in tow, he is drunkenly berated by the actor for his unwillingness to hug a woman who wasn’t his girlfriend, before dreaming of a reunion with Ju-won and taking an irrational but enlivening swim on the cold beach. In Front of Your Face takes place on the relative opposite end of the age spectrum, as it follows Sang-ok (Lee Hye-young, in her first Hong performance), a former actor and a Korean expatriate living in the United States, on her first visit back to Seoul in many years. For the first half of the film, she interacts with her sister Jeong-ok (Cho), with whom she is staying temporarily, and various other people as she waits for a late lunch appointment, including her nephew (Shin) and a family living at the home that she lived in when she was a child. Her meeting with Jae-won (Hong regular Kwon Hae-hyo), a slightly younger director who is attempting to encourage her to act in a film he is writing for her, occupies almost the entire second half of the film, a lunch which turns into a Chinese baijiu-induced unfurling of personal secrets and frustrations; Hong, in typical fashion, first offers a practically idyllic ending to this sequence and then undercuts it with the realities that each character faces. Both films are notable in how widely they diverge from Hong’s typical wheelhouse, while still hewing close to his traditional standard of excellence and insight. For one, this is his least focused upon his repertory actors in some time, especially his muse and partner Kim Min-hee, who has appeared as the lead in his past six films. Here, she appears in Introduction in only the second section, and has no onscreen role at all in In Front of Your Face, though she is credited as the production manager. Similarly, the most familiar Hong faces, like Kwon and Ki, only appear in sections, leaving the fresh leads to navigate a world that the veterans have already taken part in. Seo’s roles in the two films are especially notable: as Ju-won’s mother, she shares some scenes with Kim, her frequent scene partner in Hong’s recent films; when they are alone together, the scene almost takes on an entirely different tone that feels purposefully removed from the more bitter and elusive mood of the rest of the film. In the second, she appears briefly as a passerby who takes a photo of the sisters and recognizes Sang-ok as a former actress; her walking companion in the scene is Lee Eun-mi, who played her romantic partner in The Woman Who Ran, one of the most overt examples of a Hong character appearing to play the same role in multiple films and a startlingly familiar element in a set of films that otherwise move in new directions for Hong. In addition, perhaps because of pandemic-related necessity, Hong is taking on many more hats here: in addition to his usual writing and directing roles, he is credited as cinematographer, music composer, and editor of these two films, the first time he has officially fulfilled the prior two roles. Correspondingly, the music, always an unconventionally used but important mood-setter for Hong’s films, is even more stripped down than before, almost wholly reduced to a few guitar strums. Despite the greater amount of incident in Introduction and In Front of Your Face than in, say, the nearly context-free interactions of Grass and The Woman Who Ran, the sense of characterization emerges equally out of the supposed downtime, the moments between the conversations. This is more evident than ever in In Front of Your Face, which has more time to explore than the purposefully curtailed, almost lacunary Introduction. In particular, Hong brings back a technique that he hasn’t used since the first half of Right Now, Wrong Then (2015): voiceover to illustrate a character’s thoughts. Here, they are deployed as a form of prayer, and this links the two films as tightly as any element: Introduction opens with the father’s desperate prayer for a second chance, though his reasons aren’t made explicit. Sang-ok’s own requests are much more sanguine and contemplative, asking for little things like being able to remain vigilant at the meeting and in general to maintain a certain measure of paradise. The reason for this state of grace on the part of this aging woman is eventually explained, along with the meaning behind the title of In Front of Your Face — itself an unusually direct move for Hong, whose titles usually occupy a more poetic and ambiguous dimension — but no such reprieve exists for the young people in Introduction, at least not in explicit narrative terms, as they remain as unmoored and uncertain as ever in the ending. Instead, it is suggested by a gradual move away from the viewpoints of Hong’s regulars, however right they may be, and towards the unknown. After Young-ho takes his uncomfortable but refreshing swim, Hong pans from his still figure to the shifting waves of the beach — effectively mirroring the site of many Hong endings, including The Woman Who Ran — and then, after holding a few moments, panning back to the two friends taking care of each other, a gesture of unity that, after the previous scenes’ rancor, acts as its own measure of tranquility. Such a union ultimately collapses between Sang-ok and Jae-won, but in the last scene Hong circles back to the preexisting relationship between the sisters, conveying with a line and a few gestures a connection that has come out of a difficult situation stronger than ever. If these two Hong films ultimately come out more forthrightly optimistic and clear than his films have in a while, it is a testament to his continued inspiration that they take such diverging, differently compelling pathways to do so.

TIFF Wavelengths Shorts First Drafts

Complete first drafts written for In Review Online.

Dear Chantal After something of a breakout with last year’s delightful meta feature Fauna, Nicolás Pereda returns with “Dear Chantal,” a short created as part of the “Las cartas que no fueron también son” project, an omnibus initiative by the Punto de Vista International Documentary Film Festival that commissioned eight well known filmmakers, including Deborah Stratman, Raya Martin, Lynne Sachs, Jessica Sarah Rinland, and Pereda, to make a “cinematic homage to a colleague they have never personally met.” As can be guessed, Pereda’s was the great Chantal Akerman, for whom he fashioned a curious, distinct tribute. Running an exceptionally compact five minutes, it consists solely of supposed letters written to Akerman by Pereda concerning the temporary rental to her of his sister’s two-bedroom house in Mexico City. Her responses are never heard, only intimated, as this hushed voiceover plays out over images of Pereda’s sister Catalina slowly furnishing the bare house, sweeping leaves off the skylight, and placing books and a painting within the abode, as the latter of which, an abstract swirl of light blue and deep read, becomes a focal point. With these stripped down parameters — Akerman’s replies are never heard, though they are certainly hinted at in Pereda’s letters — “Dear Chantal” emphasizes above all the underpinning emotions behind the fundamental stillness in a way both reminiscent of Akerman and starkly different: the consciously posed close-ups feel more akin to Bresson than the wide shots that typify the Belgian director’s work, although a brief still of her in Je, tu, il, elle at the beginning of the film. Amid the mundanity of water filters and converting the second bedroom into an office, Pereda mentions in passing that Catalina has had some difficulties in the past, and it’s certainly significant, and at least a little moving, that the last line and shot goes to her. The Capacity for Adequate Anger Vika Kirchenbauer effectively established herself on the international experimental scene with her short “Untitled Sequence of Gaps,” from last year, an intriguing rumination on varieties of light and how they inflect understanding of societal traditions. With “The Capacity for Adequate Anger,” that sensibility has been noticeably sharpened, pairing a distinctive set of stills with more directly personal narration. One cornerstone of her style is the narration: though she is German, Kirchenbauer narrates her films in English with a tremulous accent that inherently connotes a certain fragility and uncertainty, which strongly influences the affect of her words. Here, the words concern her upbringing and her anxieties over her art practice, perspective, and her interpersonal relationships, including with her father and grandmother. The connections that she draws are frequently startling: a throughline about AIDS connects her childhood adoration of Freddie Mercury, Magic Johnson’s temporary retirement from basketball, and a dental inspection. These musings are augmented by a wide variety of still images, including of childhood drawings, mass media photos, and posed art pictures, along with the sole, unusual source of moving images: a childhood fantasy cartoon of unknown provenance. While loosely sectioned, as signaled by a recurring ambient music cue, “The Capacity for Adequate Anger” maintains a certain flowing train of thought, which ensures a spontaneity to the subjects broached. More than a conceptual boldness, it is in Kirchenbauer’s paradoxical assuredness that the disparate elements will connect together: the title phrase is uttered twice, once in relation to the AIDS epidemic and once regarding her uneasy relationship with her father. Such a stark yet elusive phrase provides a useful, fitting summary of the fascinating elements of this ambitious work, full of information without feeling dense. Inner Outer Space Laida Lertxundi has cemented her reputation as one of the foremost active short filmmakers with films that maintain a certain relaxed California mood while suggesting a whole constellation of potential associations. With “Inner Outer Space,” that methodology is effectively made literal, as it consists of three fairly distinct shorts which together function as an elliptical, intriguing exploration of a new setting for Lertxundi: her native Basque. In truth, four parts might be a more accurate description, as the short begins with a series of miniature installations comprised of images fastened to cardboard, with one piece resembling a television screen. Afterwards, a brief, fragmentary exchange between two women takes place via subtitles, followed by them looking at a series of sills printed on paper, which briefly take life as their own cutaway shots. Without a discernible transition, the second short seems to begin, as people are led blindfolded to a secluded cliff and asked to first describe their surroundings without looking at them, and then draw the area. Following an unexpected presentation of the credits in full, the final short unfurls in one shot, as two women in swimsuits sway with their backs to the camera in front of projected images of waves. As might be gathered, the ultimate point of connection in “Inner Outer Space” lies in the processing and manifestation of mental images, and Lertxundi’s ability to evoke these connections so glancingly forms a key part of her work’s appeal. While the obvious fragmentation means that the typical fluidity of her films is somewhat muted here, a sense of unity ultimately prevails: in the warm 16mm, the skillful deployment of cut-ins, the mystery of the precise meanings of each individual section, which of course is entirely the point. “The red filter is withdrawn.” Kim Min-jung’s “The red filter is withdrawn.” draws upon a host of spirits from the past throughout its deceptively minimal construction. After a brief introduction with three strobing colored rectangles, the film settles into its main focus: various natural and man-made structures on Jeju Island in South Korea, including military bunkers and craggy caves. While the locale appears to be calm, the credits indicate a darker side: the island was inhabited by Imperial Japan, and acted as the site of the infamous April 3 Incident, in which thousands of Communist insurgents were killed in the lead-up to the Korean War. While this history would be compelling by itself, and indeed does become more apparent towards the end of the short with images of graveyards and flags, Kim grafts on another fascinating element: Hollis Frampton’s performance piece “A Lecture.” Throughout “The red filter is withdrawn.”, Kim intersperses subtitles written in both Korean and English from the lecture, which posits that the white rectangle of light that forms the essence of the projected cinema image has existed long before and will continue long after any given person’s life. Correspondingly, the film finds intriguing correspondences within these landscapes, most clearly the bright sunlight shining through large square holes in the caves. Over these images, shot in what appears to be some mix of digital and 16mm, are laid certain effects, including, yes, a red filter, which casts the verdant grass in an entirely new light. “The red filter is withdrawn.” properly ends with Frampton’s exhortation to discuss films in darkness, but Kim’s use of numerous other sources suggests a more suitably ambiguous, complex, and ongoing discourse centered on elements hidden just below the surface.

Memoria First Draft

Complete first draft written for In Review Online.

Frequent In Review Online contributor Evan Morgan once posited a more refined version of the slow cinema paradigm that has come to dominate festival films over the past two decades: hammock cinema, in which films that appear to reject storytelling actually rely on a tightly woven narrative structure, upon which the more readily apparent free-floating atmosphere and extended shots are given an elegance and order. His lodestar is Apichatpong Weerasethakul, quite probably the most important director to make his debut in this century. Despite just six fully fledged feature films in twenty years, the Thai director has exerted an enormous influence on festival cinema, with his use of forested landscapes and unconventional story structures in order to create a sense of the somnambulant that ties into an interest in the supernatural and the violent past of his nation. After six years since his last film Cemetery of Splendour, Apichatpong has returned with Memoria, his first film outside Thailand, with professional actors, and in a foreign language, or rather two — Spanish and English. It follows Jessica (Tilda Swinton), a British orchidologist living in Colombia who, while visiting Bogotá, begins to hear a mysterious, loud, thudding sound at seemingly random moments. Her interactions weave in and out of relation with this developing affliction, including with her temporarily bedridden sister (Agnes Brekke), her brother-in-law (Daniel Giménez Cacho, of Zama fame), a forensic archaeologist named Agnes (Jeanne Balibar), and Hernán (Juan Pablo Urrego), a sound engineer. In an especially hypnotic scene in a film practically filled with nothing else, he helps Jessica recreate the sound that has been haunting her, working from a movie sound effects library and shifting the echo, bass, and shape of the wave to form, in Jessica’s words, “a rumble from the core of the earth.” As might be suggested by this, Memoria focuses on a single main character to a greater degree than any of his previous films; even while Jenjira Pongpas served as the pensive anchor of four of his previous films, her presence was intertwined and mixed with various other focal points. Befitting her arthouse star status, Swinton, in easily her greatest performance in years, takes the center stage for practically every scene in at least the first half of the film. Her signature, slightly alien presence, which has admittedly run the risk of parody in recent years, is wondrously molded by Apichatpong; in the first scene, when she is awoken by the loud noise, her movement suggests a ghost, or perhaps a zombie — Jessica shares the same name as the ethereal figure of Jacques Tourneur’s iconic I Walked With a Zombie (1943). Her manner of movement, lithe but tentative, frequently blending in during the many long shots, only accentuate an acute difference in setting from the endless Thai forests: in the first half of the film, there is a new, pronounced focus on architecture and the city, shown both with teeming throngs of people and at a standstill. Working again with regular DP Sayombhu Mukdeeprom and on 35mm for the first time since Syndromes and a Century (2006), Apichatpong finds the textures in these spaces, in the unpredictable dance of light that gives further shape to the series of strange incidents peppered throughout: a popped tire that causes a pedestrian to drop to the ground, car horns that go off for no apparent reason, a hospital bench as a makeshift lock. In response, his style has shifted somewhat: there is a greater emphasis on duration, on a certain kind of pensive distance that his disciples from afar have adopted. But this is unmistakably Apichatpong, not only in his total willingness to vary his approach as the shot and scene necessitates it, but in the rich sense of character and circumstance, each scene and camera placement contributing, whether elliptically or directly, to a sense of the world that this woman is inhabiting and attempting to understand. About the second half, which is solely made up of an encounter Jessica has in the rural municipality of Pijao with a mysterious man (Elkin Díaz), the less that can be said the better. Suffice it to say that this last hour is one of the most extraordinary, focused, and sustained sequences of the past decade, a slow unfurling of personal and national pasts that intermingle and mutate, conveyed via the most entrancing of means. It all comes back to the sound: not only that indescribable slam, but also the snatches of music, the vaguely unsettling ambiance. If one of the principal pleasures of a hammock is how it can sway in the wind, then Apichatpong understands how to capture the essence of that entrancing motion.

El Gran Movimiento First Draft

Complete first draft written for In Review Online.

Bolivian filmmaker Kiro Russo made his feature debut with the intriguing, loosely structured Dark Skull in 2016, which centered on the inhabitants of the rural town of Huanuni, including Elder (Julio César Ticona), a young ne’er-do-well who begins working in the local mine and struggles with the harsh work and his alcoholism, and was conceived as something of a hybrid film, taking place mostly in the dark depths of the countryside and mine. His new film, El Gran Movimiento, begins almost literally where his previous one left off: the miners, after rumblings in the prior film of displacement, have undertaken a seven-day voyage on foot to La Baz, the de facto Bolivian government, in order to agitate for their jobs. After a startling moment in which César Ticona appears to give an interview as himself, including a reference onscreen to him being the lead actor of Dark Skull, he assumes the role of Elder once more. As the film unfolds, he and two other companions end up staying in the city and attempt to find work in the city, while he grows more and more sick from some mysterious combination of heat, elevation, exhaustion, and other ambiguous, potentially historical or mythological sources. Such a description provides a good baseline for El Gran Movimiento, but it feels woefully inadequate to capture the currents that swirl through the film. While Dark Skull was limited in some way by the scale necessitated by the small-town setting and adopted a spare approach to structure and narrative aside from the miners and their relatives, Russo consciously expands his focus to encompass the inhabitants of practically the entire capitol. Alongside Elder’s tale of misfortune, he also includes a thread that eventually becomes practically as consequential to the film’s purposes: an older local man named Max (Max Bautista Uchasara), a shambolic figure who appears to live in the caves and hills around La Paz but who frequently ventures into the city, having established an easy rapport with the women running the open-air market stands. He also may or may not have healing powers, possibly connected to the motif of a white dog, a symbol that appears with increasing frequency in the second half of the film as Elder’s situation worsens. Russo implicitly draws these parallels between young and old, outsider and local, in order to structure his wider gaze, which at first manifests itself in brief little interactions that stretch outside of the world previously established in his last film — a large group watching a professional wrestling match on an outdoor screen, a group of market women laughing at Elder’s ineptitude, and, most significantly, an old woman who takes in Elder as her godson even though they never appear to have met. All this is conveyed under the same watchful camera eye that typified his previous film, though while Dark Skull preferred a fascinating sense of gliding camera movement, somewhat uncommon in the arthouse veins that Russo is mining, here the camera very slowly zooms forward in the bulk of the shots, first established in a lengthy pre-title card sequence that gazes at different buildings and elements within La Paz. Gradually, as El Gran Movimiento proceeds down its trajectory of bodily decay, the ruptures in the carefully drawn aesthetic become ever more frequent and unexpected, culminating in a furiously and rhythmically edited sequence that appears to mix footage from both films, along with a flurry of faces and streets. It is in this moment that the great movement is revealed: this is a thoroughly idiosyncratic and elliptical approach to the city symphony, one rooted in character and in which the spirit of the city — and, thanks to the presence of Elder and his compatriots, the country — is vividly evoked through the highs and lows of living.

Petite Solange First Draft

Complete first draft written for In Review Online.

It’s perhaps unfair to say that divorce dramas have had too great a resurgence in recent years. It is by its nature a prime, extreme avenue for filmmakers to explore questions of family, separation, and bureaucracy, but this vehicle for Big Themes can frequently falter if the subject is taken merely on face value, and not burrowed into and inhabited. In that sense, Axelle Ropert would seem to be an ideal director for this sort of endeavor: she directed Tirez la langue, mademoiselle (2013, also known as Miss and the Doctors), one of the finest romantic comedies of recent years, which constantly expanded outward from its love triangle of brother doctors slowly falling in love with the same woman to capture the sense of city life and ineffable connections. Ropert’s newest film, Petite Solange, playing in the International Competition at Locarno, falls under more conventional lines. Its eponymous character, a 13-year-old played by Jade Springer, leads a relatively average life with her parents Antoine (Philippe Katerine), a music store salesman, and Aurélia (Léa Drucker), a theater actress specializing in wronged women, along with her bookish elder brother Romain (Grégoire Montana). Indeed, aside from an evident brightness of spirit, the most distinctive factor about Solange initially is her last name, Maserati, an Italian name inherited from her father which is commented on numerous times throughout the film. But the family begins unhappy, with Antoine engaged in a surreptitious affair with his coworker and Aurélia frequently absent, and only worsens as the film goes on. What sets Petite Solange apart from a run-of-the-mill divorce film, however, is the question of Ropert’s interest. Solange remains front and center throughout the film, with most of the divorce aspect conveyed in overheard shouts, tentative tête-à-tête conversations with her parents, and the normal vagaries of familial interaction. More than anything, this is a patient, quotidian film; for much of it the only substantial shift in these dynamics is Romain practically fleeing to the relative refuge of a graduate degree program. Instead of constant struggle, Ropert opts for a certain creeping sense of unease, a slow evolution in Solange’s character and outlook on life. Sometimes, this runs the risk of cliché: a certain subplot with Solange becoming more and more troublesome in school as a result of domestic stress feels too pat. But more often, Ropert’s signature interest in little subplots, reflecting the unsettled and capricious nature of life, comes through, especially in a tentative flirtation Solange has with a piano-playing bad boy at her school. All of this builds to a sudden release, a rupture in the film’s final twenty minutes that jumps an indeterminate number of years to a greatly changed Solange. Springer’s performance shifts radically in this moment, and it illuminates the extent to which the film principally relies on her initially ebullient presence, along with Ropert’s careful sense of direction and the beautiful 16mm cinematography by Sébastien Buchmann. This is not a radical film about divorce, but it continually demonstrates an interest in burrowing just a little deeper, going in a slightly more interesting direction, and the agglomeration of these choices results in something gratifyingly warm and complex.

Days First Draft

Complete first draft written for Hyperallergic.

Tsai Ming-liang exists in a curious position within the cinephile consciousness. One of the greatest Taiwanese directors and a foremost practitioner of the very loose movement known as slow cinema, which arose in the late 1980s and early 90s, predominately in Asian countries, his feature films all share distinctive attributes — extended, static long takes; frequent presence of rain or water flooding; a patient eye dedicated to a decaying, ultramodern Taipei, where he has set most of his films — that have become so ingrained that it can obscure some of his most interesting recurring elements. In addition, while Tsai himself is well-known, and a certain number of his films are commonly seen, relatively speaking — including Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2013), Vive L’Amour (1994), and Stray Dogs (2013) — others are underseen, lost in the vagaries of poor quality windowboxed DVDs and ultralimited distribution. This isn’t to say that his vaunted aesthetic unity — which, it should be said, is disrupted when needed, such as in the unconventional musical sequences in The Hole (1998) and The Wayward Cloud (2005) — isn’t a key factor of the films, but it is too often favored in comparison to the great narrative unity that his films present. For Tsai is one of the most teleological of directors, concentrating a step-by-step, film-by-film procession focused upon his muse Lee Kang-sheng, who has been in all his feature films, ever since his debut with Rebels of the Neon God (1991). Understanding Lee’s role is crucial, and not just because his distinctive, halting manner of movement and speaking sets a kind of template for all of Tsai’s actors: Tsai is openly gay, and the backbone of his films is his necessarily unrequited longing for Lee, who is straight but often plays a queer character. In effect, the films are tortured by this central relationship, resulting in narratives of outsiders, Lee most of all, longing for some sense of meaning and companionship in a world that is changing before their eyes; the title of I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone (2006) could scarcely be more apropos. Lee’s presence, in addition to recurring male and female actors like Chen Shiang-chyi, Miao Tien, and Yang Kuei-mei, is crucial to this: he plays more-or-less the same character in all these films, initially named Xiaokang but eventually being named just Kang (xiao is Chinese for small). While taking Tsai’s career as a totally coherent continuous narrative isn’t strictly true, it does very much feel like his oeuvre was leading directly to the last two shots of Stray Dogs, a twenty-minute tour-de-force where cinema itself seems to come to a final standstill. It’s no surprise that Tsai initially announced that he was retiring from narrative feature filmmaking after that film. While he has continued to make short and mid-length works in fiction, documentary, and even gallery settings, Tsai kept his promise until Days, which premiered last year in Berlin. One of Tsai’s most stripped-down, direct, and moving works, and one which heralds the start of an exciting new chapter in his career, it was conceived under unusual circumstances for him. Lee was undergoing severe neck pains a few years ago, reflective of Xiaokang’s affliction in The River (1997), and Tsai journeyed with him to film his intense treatments without any specific reason. At the same time, Tsai met a Laotian immigrant to Bangkok, Anong Houngheuangsy, and began filming him as well as he went about his daily work, including extended moments of cooking. From these roots came the first half of Days, which crosscuts between these two strands of footage formed from roughly three years of filming. While these were filmed without any specific concept in mind, they remain as brilliantly shot as any of his films, patiently and lovingly watching these people doing their quotidian tasks. This suddenly pivots at the hour-mark, where Kang and Anong come together in a hotel room for an erotic massage encounter. The effect is stark and entrancing: it has been decades since Tsai had a male lead performance alongside Lee’s continual presence, and to see these two men locked in such intimacy, whether transactional or not, over a period about half an hour, is unprecedented in his work. The summative effect of Days’s elements, especially the long, fading conclusion, is of a melancholy as potent as his other films, but there is something new: a genuine fulfillment, a belief in deep, life-changing connection, even if it is only for a single night.