→ May 17, 2018
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The Insult.

The Insult (iTunes • amazon) was the one modest surprise among the five nominees for Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars this past year, edging out Golden Globes winner In the Fade and the highly-regarded Israeli film Foxtrot. The first Lebanese submission to earn such a nomination and just the fourteenth film ever submitted for consideration from Lebanon, The Insult is a multi-layered drama that uses a minor disagreement to build a courtroom drama, a fable about racism, and a demonstration of how tiny gestures in either direction can have enormous consequences.

Toni Hanna is a Lebanese Christian man who works at a garage and lives in an apartment he hopes to buy, along with his very pregnant (and ridiculously beautiful) wife Shirine. He’s hosing off his balcony on one day when the excess water runs out his drain pipe, which apparently is a code violation, on to a few construction workers led by the foreman Yasser, a Palestinian man who has lived in Lebanon for years and married a Lebanese woman. When Yasser and his crew fix the pipe without Toni’s permission, he destroys their work, leading Yasser to call him a “fucking prick.” Toni demands an apology, but when Yasser balks, Toni takes him to court in a lawsuit that begins as something trivial and ends up a national news story, spiraling well beyond the control of either man. The trial exposes the origins of Toni’s racism and the ‘forgotten’ history of sectarian violence in Lebanon, including one incident where the PLO and PFLP (both major Palestinian terrorist organizations) played a significant part.

The superficial story in The Insult plays out a bit like a smarter Law & Order episode. The two trials – the first in a small court, the second an appeal argued by experienced lawyers working pro bono – feel overly dramatic, although it’s possible the Lebanese justice system works something like this, with judges asking witnesses and even members of the courtroom audience questions. There’s a big twist right before the midpoint of the film that amps up the drama quotient of the trial, although in the end it doesn’t matter much to the main plot around the dispute between the two men.

The plot thread around race is, I think, the Big Point of The Insult, and you could carry the framework very well to a similar story in just about any multi-ethnic state. Palestinians are an underclass in many nations in the Levant, and there appears to be widespread resentment against them and their somewhat protected status in Lebanon, so when Toni appears to be fighting back on behalf of Lebanese Christians, he garners public support and finds a well-known lawyer willing to take on his case to make a point. Yasser ends up with a young lawyer who says she wants to take his case because no one stands up for Palestinians’ rights, and she’s derided as a sort of limousine liberal by her opponents while also gaining popular backing from Lebanese Muslims and several politicians pushing for national unity.

The film goes too far in justifying Toni’s feelings towards Palestinians, however, when it delves into the history of his family and the incident from his childhood, the Damour massacre, that spawned his lifelong animosity towards them and support for nationalist-Christian politicians. The scene where that story is unfurled is also quite over the top, again feeling very TV-dramatized, and almost crushes the better plot thread of a quiet shift towards reconciliation between the two men. There’s one moment of sincere kinship that arises by accident, and then Yasser finds a way to deliver to Toni what he thinks Toni really wants from him, enough that the outcome of the trial – which we do see, even though I thought the script might end right before the verdict was delivered – feels a bit secondary. There’s an actual moral here, reminiscent of “A Thousand Trees” by Stereophonics, about how a tiny gesture either way can start a conflagration or defuse a potential riot: At any point, an apology from Yasser or a statement of forgiveness from Toni would have ended the entire conflict. The two men could have simply shaken hands in front of the cameras and brought the two sides together. The Insult doesn’t quite cop out to that extent, even though the legal stuff feels manipulative (even with a superb secondary performance from the wonderfully-named Diamond Bou Abboud as Yasser’s attorney). The story ends up taking a middle path, wrapping up the story in a satisfying enough fashion that still felt like it could have been stronger without the more crowd-pleasing aspects of the story to drown out the humanist plot at the movie’s heart.

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→ March 31, 2018
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Loveless.

Loveless was one of the five nominees for the most recent Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, the latest film from Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev (The Return, Leviathan), after it won the Jury Prize at Cannes and earned a nomination for Best Film at the European Film Awards, where it lost to The Square. It is a grim, intense, misanthropic film that expresses the director’s extreme discontent at the decline in his home country’s society under Vladimir Putin, and despite how painful the film can be to watch, it’s also one of the best films I’ve seen from 2017.

Loveless skips the prologue, so when the film opens, the couple Zhenya and Boris are already divorcing and at each others’ throats, trying to sell their condo and dispose of their unwanted 12-year-old son Alexey (also called Aloysha within the movie). An early, harrowing scene shows the two insulting each other while trying to avoid taking responsibility or custody of their son, whom Zhenya wants to just ship off to boarding school; unbeknownst to them, Alexey is hiding in the next room, caught in a silent scream as he cries and hears how neither of his parents wants anything to do with him. Both have already moved on to new relationships, Boris with an attractive and very pregnant young blonde named Marsha, Zhenya with a slightly older but very fit and successful man named Anton, and the first 40% or so of the film shows them happily adjusting to their new lives and having lots of sex.

The film’s tone turns abruptly when Zhenya calls Boris to say that Alexey’s school called and that he hasn’t been seen in school for two days. Both parents were so busy screwing their new partners that neither noticed he was missing. The remainder of the film follows the search for Alexey, from disinterested police to the volunteer crew that helps find missing people to the virulent acrimony between the two parents, neither of whom seems all that broken up over their son’s disappearance.

The story takes place against a backdrop of a literally and figuratively cold Moscow, full of abandoned and decaying buildings, denuded forests in midwinter, and people who can barely bother to care about anything but themselves. Boris’ employer is a fundamentalist Christian who requires his employees to be married with kids, and he fears losing his job if his divorce is discovered; Zhenya owns a beauty salon where her employees all seem to have similar stories of faithless ex-husbands. When the investigating police officer and then the head of the search-and-rescue force both come to talk to the parents, the two reveal that they know little about their son’s life, struggling to identify any more than one friend or to say what his interests might be. Characters often disengage with the people around them by mindlessly scrolling social media sites – none more so than Zhenya, who can’t even pay attention to Anton, the man she supposedly loves, for a full dinner.

Zvyagintsev’s disaffection at the state of his country extends beyond the mere callousness of its citizens to the manipulative autocracy established by Vladimir Putin. (There was even a political campaign against this film before the Russian board chose to submit it as the country’s nominee this year.) We hear radio and TV news broadcasts that decry fake news while also disseminating heavily one-sided reports on the country’s invasion of eastern Ukraine and the Crimea. The state is useless to its citizens; the police can barely be bothered to look into the disappearance of a 12-year-old boy, and the officer dismisses the parents’ half-hearted concerns by discussing the stats on runaways and suggesting that the kid is probably just hanging out at the mall.

The long shots of empty buildings, bare forests, and peeling trees give the movie a dystopian feel, as if we’re in the Eurasia of 1984, even though there’s nothing overtly dystopian about the plot. Zvyagintsev keeps the overt political references to a minimum until the very end of the film – which, mild spoiler, there isn’t going to be a happy ending to this story – instead depicting the individuals in the story as selfish to the point of sociopathy, including the two parents and Zhenya’s lunatic, paranoid mother, who seems to loathe her own daughter and thinks that this is all a scam to try to con her out of her house or whatever meager possessions she might still own. The question that lingers over the story, unstated but strongly implied, is what kind of state might lead its citizens to such savage ideas even when their material needs are met.

The two lead actors, Aleksey Rozin (Boris … why is it always Boris) and Maryana Spivak (Zhenya), are superb, but Matvey Novikov steals the few scenes he has as Alyosha/Aleksey, even though it’s his first credited role. Alexey Fateev also shines as Ivan, the head of the volunteer force, the only truly ‘good’ character in the film, bringing a convincing blend of command and empathy to his role, which involves leading the search and dealing with these two feckless parents who didn’t even notice their kid was missing for two days.

A Fantastic Woman won the Oscar over Loveless, and the Chilean film is a more entertaining movie with a more important message and a command performance from Daniela Vega, a trans woman playing a trans woman, to power it. That’s a movie I could recommend to just about anybody. Loveless is, in a way, like a great Russian novel of the peak period in that country’s literature: It’s brilliant, searing, overwhelming, and yet bleak and incisive enough that many viewers would likely rather turn away than fight through to the mirthless finish.

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→ February 21, 2018
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A Fantastic Woman.

A Fantastic Woman (Una mujer fantástica), Chile’s submission for this year’s Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and one of the five nominees, is notable simply for its casting: A trans woman plays a trans woman who happens to be the film’s main character. Daniela Vega delivers a tour de force performance as Marina, the fantastic woman of the movie’s title, a woman whose life is suddenly turned upside down when her cis male lover dies suddenly, putting her in conflict with the man’s estranged family – most of whom refuse to accept her for what she is.

Marina is a nightclub singer who by all external appearances is a woman, but whose status as transgender appears to be known by everyone she encounters, even characters who should be complete strangers to her. She and Orlando, a somewhat older, genteel man, have an unremarkable, romantic relationship, where she has just moved in with him and he surprises her for her birthday with plans for an exotic vacation together. This all goes right to hell when he dies suddenly and his ex-wife and son enter the picture, complete with their bigotry, hatred, and threats of violence, all of which show how they don’t even see her as human, let alone as a woman. The movie documents her refusal to surrender to them, and society as a whole, even in the face of physical attacks and a system that dehumanizes her at every turn.

Vega is remarkable in a role that demands that she go through numerous events that I would imagine would trigger awful memories for any trans person (and perhaps any non-binary person, period). Because Orlando falls down the stairs while Marina goes to get the car keys to rush him to the hospital, the authorities assume that she was a prostitute who’d fought back when a client assaulted her, or that she even assaulted him for reasons unknown. There’s an early scene where a doctor and a police officer refer to her in the third person, as if she’s not even there, using male pronouns, even though – again – you wouldn’t think she was trans even after talking to her for a few minutes. (I found this a bit confusing; perhaps the doctor looked at her neck, but that wouldn’t occur to an ordinary person.) Later, Orlando’s son, who proves the most bigoted of all, asks if she’s had “the surgery” (I think Laverne Cox made it clear to everyone that it’s not an appropriate question) and asks the most dehumanizing question of all, “What are you?” Her answer – “I’m flesh and blood, just like you” – and his inability to respond to it spell out the constant fight that trans people face in a society full of people who, frankly, are just too damn obsessed with other people’s sex lives.

This is a star-making turn from Vega, although she dominates so much of the film that there’s little room for anyone else. (Why she wasn’t nominated for Best Actress is beyond me; she’d be a worthy winner, and deserved it over at least two of the nominees.) Gabo, Orlando’s brother, played by Luis Gnecco (star of 2016’s Neruda, Chile’s submission to the Oscars last year), is the most three-dimensional of the other characters, showing uncommon empathy for Marina and the mere willingness to use female pronouns for her. The script, co-written by director Sebastián Lelio and Gonzalo Maza, doesn’t dispense with these characters lightly, but their appearances in the film are a function of their relationship to and interactions with Marina. They’re real because the dialogue feels real, because the treatment she gets at the hands of almost every single person she meets is exactly what you would expect in a majority-Catholic country that only recognized gay marriages in 2017.

Transgender characters have had extremely poor representation in film; other than Boys Don’t Cry, Dallas Buyers Club, and The Danish Girl, all of which featured cis actors in trans roles, major films that have featured trans characters have largely done so for shock value or comic effect. A Fantastic Woman features a trans character, played by a trans woman, in a story that is about everyday life as a trans person in an intolerant society – but in a way that can be interpreted more broadly, too, to capture that feeling of being utterly alone, of feeling unsafe in your own skin, and of the need to find something that helps define you for yourself as opposed to the way that others define you.

I still have Loveless and The Insult to see of the five nominees for Best Foreign Language Film, but Sony Classics has been so slow to roll Loveless, a Russian film that won the Jury Prize at Cannes last year, that I may not catch it before the Oscars.

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→ February 9, 2018
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On Body and Soul.

On Body and Soul (Testről és lélekről) is one of the five nominees for this year’s Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, the tenth time a Hungarian submission has made the final cut since they began submitting films in 1965. A film that alternates shockingly brutal imagery with a lyrical, otherworldly story about two of the shyest people you could imagine, the movie is a starmaking performance for actress Alexandra Borbély, who won the Best European Actress award in 2017 for her work here. It’s exclusively available on Netflix.

Borbély plays Maria, the new health inspector at a Hungarian cattle slaughterhouse, replacing the unseen Bori, who left early for maternity leave and appears by implication to have been a fairly lenient inspector. Maria is shy, lacks the ability to read social cues, and often seems emotionless to the workers at the facility, who make halfhearted attempts to connect with her. The factory’s CFO, Endre (Géza Morcsányi, a playwright in his first film role), is also shy and awkward, a well-meaning man who has lost the use of his left arm and keeps most of his colleagues at arm’s length. We realize before they do that the two of them are sharing the same dreams night after night, where each is a deer in a snowy forest, a fact that only becomes apparent to them when a theft at the factory leads to psychiatric interviews with all of the possible culprits. The discovery changes both of them, driving Maria to try to figure out how to relate to another person, while Endre rediscovers the sense of empathy he seems to have lost through years of disappointment.

Director/writer Ildikó Enyedi is unafraid to jar the audience with images of cattle being chained, killed, and bled, although many of these images have parallels to the strange journey of Maria and Endre, especially Maria. She has many aspects of a person with Asperger’s Syndrome or who is somewhere on the autism spectrum, although her condition is never named; these facets of her personality include extreme organization and cleanliness, which makes her perfect for her job … as long as she doesn’t have to interact with other people. Borbély, who had some TV experience and just three or four previous film roles, is marvelous in every way in this role, giving Maria both the affect-less expressions and intonations of a person who can’t read social cues or sense emotions in others, as well as the innocence, trepidation, and wonder of a child seeing or experiencing things for the first time. The role requires her to walk a tight rope to avoid Rain Man-like caricature without giving Maria too much emotion or sensibility, as if a relationship could ‘cure’ her. Even when the story hits its dramatic climax near the end, Borbély does not veer outside the character’s boundaries, reacting at one point in a matter-of-fact way to something awful that it became a darkly humorous moment instead.

Enyedi’s script offers a meditation on loneliness, especially for people who were, perhaps, not made for this world, like Maria, or who have grown tired of its letdowns, like Endre. Even with this utterly improbable link between them, the two find it difficult to communicate with or understand each other, and that disconnect threatens to leave them lonelier than they were before they discovered their shared experience. The script does lose steam a little in the final quarter of the film, because the setup is so strong – two people with no apparent connection are simultaneously dreaming the same dream, in an otherwise rational world where such a thing should be impossible. Resolving that story in an interesting way, other than simply having Maria fall into Endre’s arms, is difficult, and Enyedi gets it about halfway right. The big twist is also a bit predictable, and yet honest at the same time, because one character’s reaction to pull away from the other is understandable in the context of the film. I thought this would end up happening, but I also couldn’t tell you a more realistic resolution, either.

On Body and Soul won the Golden Bear award at the Berlin International Film Festival, as did Spirited Away, A Separation, and the 2016 documentary Fire at Sea; like A Separation, it also took the Grand prize at the Sydney Film Festival, so in theory it should have a reasonable chance at the Oscar. Instead, the betting site GoldDerby gives it the worst odds of the five nominees, with A Fantastic Woman considered the favorite – although neither that nor Loveless has played anywhere but New York or Los Angeles so far. Having seen four of the five Best Actress nominees, however, I will say Borbély more than deserved a nomination – it’s not unheard of, with Isabelle Huppert getting a nod for the French-language film Elle just last year – and I’d vote for her over both Meryl Streep and Saoirse Ronan.

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→ November 26, 2017
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The Square.

I imagine Sweden’s national tourism board is rather unhappy with the country’s portrayal in The Square, as writer-director Ruben Östlund has crafted a dense, multilayered, nonlinear, unfocused narrative that depicts Stockholm’s art community as a bunch of loonies. It’s fascinating, even gripping, frequently cringeworthy, twice offensive, too long by about ten minutes, and incisively satirical. Östlund doesn’t land all his punches, but the ones he lands hit hard. The film is mostly in Swedish, with subtitles; it won the Palme d’Or at Cannes this year and is Sweden’s submission for the 90th Academy Awards’ Best Foreign Language Film honor.

Claes Bang plays Christian, the director of a modern art museum in Stockholm that tries to present edgy, post-modern installations, but often falls short of its own pretensions, a fact established and skewered in an early scene where American journalist Anne (Elizabeth Moss) asks him to explain a description from the museum’s official site. Christian is also dealing with an outside marketing agency to develop advertising for an upcoming installation, called The Square, that is just a lit square on the ground and a plaque explaining what the square is in vague philosophical terms – not exactly the most media-friendly piece of art. Christian is also robbed of his wallet and phone in an early scene, leading to a comically disastrous plan to recover the goods when his tech guy, Michael (Christopher Læssø), helps him locate the phone via GPS tracking.

Other plot threads and details appear late in the film, enough that mentioning them would spoil the effect even though they’re not plot twists – they’re just stuff the script forgot to mention earlier on in the proceedings. That gives the entire film a sense of unreality, which I’d compare favorably to the hysterical realism of Zadie Smith or Paul Beatty, and unfavorably to the failed experimental novel The Unconsoled, which also concerned an artist, by Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro. Ishiguro’s narrative makes sharp, jarring turns that lack narrative or thematic connections, and subplots are dropped without resolution, never to return. It’s unclear if the main character is even awake for some scenes, or dreaming, or hallucinating. The Square walks a similarly tortuous path, with more clarity that it’s all (probably) real, instead simply bouncing Christian from bad decision to bad decision, and introducing details – like the end of the performance art piece at the banquet, or the whole thing with Anne’s roommate – that are just never explained. This is hysterical realism bordering on the transgressive, with mixed results, but still earning high points for ambition.

Christian himself is part narcissist – to the extent that someone can be only partly narcissistic – and part idiot, calling to mind Sherman McCoy of The Bonfire of the Vanities, another antihero who does something incredibly stupid, only to have it come back around and ruin his life. McCoy had it coming, while Christian isn’t quite so loathsome, just governed too much by his instinct for self-preservation and a little too in love with the power of his position. He gets small chances for redemption near the end of the film, and largely takes them, although it can’t thoroughly rehabilitate his character or atone for the wrongs he’s done some other people (a la Ian McEwan’s Atonement).

The targets of this film’s satirical side are numerous, from the art world, especially modern art, to consumer culture to our willful ignorance of others’ suffering to the anachronisms of the upper class to sex, the last rather thoroughly demonstrated by one of the most joyless sex scenes I can remember seeing. The movie’s pièce de résistance, the aforementioned performance art scene at a banquet for the museum’s chief benefactors, manages to tear down multiple targets, including the fatuous nature of such self-congratulatory dinners, the idea of the artist being ‘totally’ committed to his work to the point of madness, the animal nature of man, and the bystander effect, the last two coming in the scene’s culmination of a physical and attempted sexual assault. Again, after the scene ends, there isn’t so much as another reference to any of it – it’s yet another disaster for the museum, but everyone proceeds the next day as if it never happened.

The Square is bursting with ideas, and many of them fail to hit their marks or are pushed via metaphors that are just too strong or on the nose. The modern art mockery is fish in a barrel stuff – really, that could have been one of the museum’s installations. The simian allusions are similarly too easy. But then there are scenes like the overhead shot of Christian rifling through garbage where the camera is high enough that his white shirt and brown hair just look like two more bags in the sea of trash, or the spiraling shot of a staircase (also top-down) as Christian climbs multiple floors but appears to make no progress.

No idea comes across more consistently in the film, however, than our numbness to the suffering of strangers, even when it’s right in front of us. Banquet goers put their heads down even as there’s a physical attack happening in front of them. Commuters ignore beggars in the street, the mall, the train station, and ignore the charity worker asking people if they’d stop for a minute “to save a life.” The video produced by the marketing agency, which is an obvious disaster along the lines of the SB Nation puff piece on rapist Daniel Holtzclaw, turns the idea inside out by preying on people’s sympathy for a fictional character crafted to maximize the viewers’ emotional reactions. It’s the one truly pervasive theme in the movie, and the closest thing the script has to a unifying element.

For all of that weightiness, The Square is also very funny, sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, sometimes more “I can’t believe this is happening” funny, but even with its bleak view of humanity, the movie does go for some big laughs. There’s a fight over a condom, an argument interrupted by an art installation that keeps making noise at inopportune moments, another installation damaged in comical fashion by a night cleaner, and the sheer idiocy of the marketing agency bros. At nearly two and a half hours, it needs some levity to keep it moving – and many scenes in the first half go on a few beats too long – but the film will likely keep everyone who sees it thinking about all of its ideas for days.

But seriously, what is the deal with Anne’s roommate?

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