→ July 21, 2020
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Les Misérables (2019).

Les Misérables won the Jury Prize at Cannes in 2019 and was France’s submission for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film this past year, earning one of the five nominations but losing out to eventual Best Picture winner Parasite. The first full-length film directed by Ladj Ly, who was born in Mali and raised in the Montfermeil commune in the eastern Paris suburbs, Les Misérables takes its name from the Victor Hugo novel, but tells a very timely story of police brutality and racial strife that seems like it was made specifically for the current moment both in France and in the United States.

Based loosely on an actual incident of police violence Ly witnessed in that same commune in 2008, Les Misérables takes place over the course of about 36 hours, following three police officers – one, Stéphane, new to the job and to the city – who patrol a specific neighborhood of apartments and shops that are largely populated by immigrants from former French colonies in northern Africa. Both veteran cops, Chris (who is white) and Gwada (who is black and speaks Bambara as well as French), take the approach that they must use force to make the residents ‘respect’ them, with Chris especially willing to profile people, even kids, and rough them up while frisking them without cause, while Gwada often stands by. They’re entwined in the subculture of the neighborhood as well, with rival forces that include the “mayor,” who works with Chris in particular to maintain his local authority, and the Muslim Brotherhood, led by former drug dealer turned imam Salah. When a touring circus of Roma performers threaten the immigrants unless a lion cub stolen from them by one of the children in the neighborhood is returned, the cops’ overbearing tactics leave one child seriously injured and spark a cascade of violence.

Les Misérables is a serious film that balances its multiple themes of police brutality, racism, and xenophobia with a plot that often unfurls like that of an action film. Most of the adult characters have some complexity to them, other than Chris, who is your garden-variety racist white cop like you might find in a less nuanced film. Stéphane has a real arc to his story as he’s confronted with Chris’ increasingly violent and counterproductive tactics and Gwada’s tacit approval despite the latter’s racial and ethnic ties to many of the residents of these apartment buildings, and thus has to choose when to speak or act, finding his voice more as the story progresses and puts him into increasingly more difficult situations. The main child character is Issa, who we’re told is always causing trouble, and who ends up a central character in the trouble that follows – in no small part because the police already know him, and Chris and Gwada seem more than ready to treat him like a dangerous adult rather than a small child who (as we see in an early scene) has no guidance at home.

While this film was made in 2019 and hit amazon prime back in April, watching it right now made it seem like it was written as an argument for community policing. The racism and xenophobia depicted here are nothing new and the script isn’t making any novel points or arguments about them, but the way that Chris and Gwada maintain ‘control’ of this area is extremely damning of what I would think of as the American model of policing. It’s punctuated by their link to this local fixer/boss who calls himself the Mayor, and how they react when they find out they’ve been filmed during one such act of violence against a suspect, and in turn how Stéphane, who isn’t from this geographical area and hasn’t worked as this sort of cop before, reacts when seeing it from an outsider’s view. While the script at least creates some ambiguities around some of the adults in the community, this is a protest against the power given to and wielded by police against underprivileged and mostly powerless communities that lack avenues to fight back through political or legal channels, leaving them little recourse but to respond in kind.

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I went to put Les Misérables on my rankings of 2019 films, only to discover that I didn’t post them back in March/April like I’d planned to do. So while I still have a few stragglers from last year I’d like to see (Monos, Invisible Life), here’s everything I saw from 2019, with links to my writeups, from my favorite to my least favorite:

1. Parasite
2. Knives Out
3. Little Women
4. Uncut Gems
5. Pain and Glory
6. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
7. The Irishman
8. Corpus Christi
9. The Farewell
10. Ford v. Ferrari
11. Les Misérables
12. Monos
13. Hustlers
14. American Factory
15. Wild Rose
16. The Whistlers
17. The Two Popes
18. The Souvenir
19. 1917
20. Toy Story 4
21. Marriage Story
22. High Flying Bird
23. Non-Fiction
24. FYRE
25. Honeyland
26. Bombshell
27. Climax
28. Jojo Rabbit
29. Atlantique
30. Joker
31. Booksmart
32. Judy
33. High Life
34. Portrait of a Lady on Fire
35. The Great Hack
36. Frozen 2

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→ January 31, 2020
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Pain and Glory.

Antonio Banderas landed one of the five nominations for Best Actor this year for his role as Salvador in Pain and Glory (Dolor y Gloria), the latest film from Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar (All About My Mother). It’s a command performance from Banderas, who gets his first Oscar nomination at age 59, one that would get my vote (if I had one) in his category for the range and depth he shows in bringing this complex, sad character to life in a story that meanders like the memories it’s trying to depict. (You can rent it on amazon and iTunes.)

Salvador Mallo is a once-famous Spanish director who is now in professional and physical decline, wracked by joint and back pain and hobbled by various other ailments (some of which may not be real), all of which leaves him feeling like he’s unable to work, and if he can’t make movies, he doesn’t see any point to living. He’s thrust into the past when a local cinema restores and airs his film of 30 years earlier, Sabor (Flavor), whose star, Alberto, played the lead character so differently than Salvador intended that the two haven’t spoken since. The two meet again, tentatively, and Alberto shares some heroin with Salvador, who tries it on a whim but becomes hooked, and while he gets high we see more flashbacks to his childhood with his mother (Penélope Cruz, who doesn’t seem to age) in a cave house in rural Spain. While there, Salvador meets Eduardo, an illiterate but kind local laborer, whom he teaches to read, write, and do basic math; and fights with his mother, who wants to send him to a seminary to continue his education so he doesn’t end up ‘like his father.’

The two tracks, in the present day and in the world of Salvador’s memories, both move forward in linear fashion, but the latter jumps around enough to resemble the way our memories actually work. Almodóvar then combines the two timelines when Alberto discovers an unpublished treatment Salvador wrote called “Addiction,” that tells the true story of Salvador’s affair with a man who was also addicted to heroin, an affair that ended because he couldn’t kick the habit; Salvador confesses he doesn’t even know if his former lover is still alive. When Alberto convinces Salvador to let him stage the play, you can probably guess what happens, and how that kind of closure helps Salvador finally take some small steps to help himself, and to let his incredibly devoted friend and assistant Zulema help him.

Most of the summaries I’ve seen of Pain and Glory have focused on Salvador’s infirmities, describing it as a meditation on aging and mortality. While those themes are clearly present, the movie, and Banderas’ performance, are both far more hopeful than you’d expect from such a description, while also trying to explore how our past experiences and our memories of them can shape our lives for years or decades afterwards. Salvador flashes back to various scenes because of how much they’ve influenced his later life, especially in how his relationship with his mother, right up to her death, has affected and haunted him well into adulthood. Confronting those memories is a crucial step in his recovery not just from his temporary addiction but from the depression that has taken over his entire life, threatening his career and possibly more.

Salvador is not exactly Almodóvar, but there is a lot of the director in the character, and Banderas does a marvelous job bringing that character to life with the kind of depth and rounded edges that he needs to have to engender enough empathy and interest from the audience. Some of the key points about Salvador, including his physical pain, come across in ways that feel organic without overwhelming the character or the story – he’s in pain, and that often leads to him choosing not to do things, but he is not inert on the screen because Banderas renders him in three dimensions, especially finding small ways to show that there’s some energy left in the old man even if his back or his legs aren’t willing. It could have been a monument to self-pity, but Banderas avoids that trap and instead gives one of the best performances of the year.

Almodóvar still makes some quirky choices that don’t entirely work; the sequence near the start of the film where Salvador runs through all of his maladies with the help of some animation feels incongruous and took me right out of the movie just as we were getting started. There was no way this was going to beat out Parasite for Best International Feature Film (for which both are nominated), but some of those small decisions are enough to keep it from coming close to the South Korean hit in my own estimation. Cruz is excellent in small doses as Salvador’s mother while he was still a child, but she could have used some more screen time to further develop both her character and her relationship with Salvador, and those scenes suffer a bit because Banderas isn’t there. His performance is so strong – he’s not going to win, as his character obviously isn’t crazy enough to beat out Joaquin Phoenix – that it elevates Pain and Glory from something maudlin into an elegiac lament that still gives its main character reasons to hope and to live, right up to the film’s glorious final shot.

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→ January 17, 2020
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Corpus Christi.

This week’s Academy Award nominations didn’t include many surprises anywhere – at least, not if you assume the worst of the Academy – and many categories already seem like their winners are locks, including Parasite as the Best International Feature Film, which would make it the first South Korean winner of that award (it’s already the first nominee). Three of the other nominees were widely expected – Pedro Almodóvar’s Pain and Glory, which also landed a Best Actor nod for Antonio Banderas; the acclaimed Honeyland, which doubled up with a nod for Best Documentary Feature; and the French entry, Les Misérables, which isn’t based on the novel, and won the Prix du Jury at Cannes last May.

There was one surprise in the category, however – the Polish entry, Corpus Christi, which was at least less widely-known or reviewed than some of the other submissions, but is an absolute stunner of a story, one that manages to pack substantial themes into a modest plot. Powered by an incredible lead performance by Bartosz Bielenia as Daniel, a paroled convict who wants to enter the priesthood but is told by the prison chaplain that no seminary will accept a convicted felon. When he arrives at his assigned job at a sawmill in a small town on the other side of Poland, a chance encounter with Marta, a girl he seems to want to impress, leads him to pretend to be the new priest temporarily assigned to the village while their main priest is away.

It turns out that his timing is fortuitous for the town, as they’re still reeling from a tragedy that took the lives of seven people and that has created a rift between the families of the victims, with recriminations mostly headed towards one widow whose husband is blamed for the accident and who has been ostracized and targeted as a result. Daniel, meanwhile, fully embraces his role as priest, at first borrowing some ideas from the prison chaplain’s sermons but quickly finding his own voice, expressing his own faith with elements of Jesus’s secular philosophy, a little bit of primal scream therapy, and a powerful ability to connect with people that he didn’t even know he had.

There are points in Mateusz Pacewicz’s script where it feels like we might be heading down familiar territory – maybe this is the time when Daniel gets caught, or maybe the town experiences a spiritual awakening thanks to Daniel and everyone is redeemed. Nothing is that simple, not in the plot as a whole, and not in the subplots like that of the accident or the role of the power-hungry mayor (who owns the sawmill). Daniel’s character is rich and complex, and his transformations reflect a more basic truth about how environments affect people’s ability to change or simply to let their better selves show through. The townsfolk themselves are also well-drawn, and at times inscrutable, closing ranks even when they know they’re wrong, happy to mouth the words in church but not to live it even when Daniel reminds them of the messages of Christ’s love for mankind or of the need to forgive. The script delivers so many powerful scenes, but the one where the victims’ family members are confronted with the hate mail they sent the widow particularly stands out for its impact and how Daniel and Eliza stand in the face of such animosity.

Bielenia’s performance drives this film, and had anyone actually seen this in 2019 – if the film had been in English – he would have been more than deserving of nominations and awards for what he does for Daniel. He’s capable of grand emotions, including the rage he shows in some of the scenes in prison, but his performance is at its most powerful when he slows everything down, even when that’s an indicator that Daniel is in a bit over his head and trying to draw upon his faith to choose the right words or actions. He’s a more effective priest for his inexperience, as his sermons are more authentic, but those scenes had the potential to become trite if overplayed by the actor; Bielenia shows a restraint throughout the film, even when Daniel is confronted with threats to his secret and to his person, that makes the performance more credible and more compelling.

Director Jan Komasa particularly nails the landing of Corpus Christi, which ends in mostly unexpected fashion, including multiple shots of Daniel as he exits the church for the last time or in the final shot of the film. It’s ultimately an uplifting story, but rich with the complexity of actual people who are trying to reconcile their unspeakable grief with their faith, and who default to their baser instincts in a failed attempt to cope with their rage. Parasite is going to win the Oscar, but if the nomination gets more people to watch Corpus Christi when it’s released in the U.S. next month, so much the better. It deserves a wider audience than it might otherwise have gotten.

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→ November 3, 2019
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Parasite.

Parasite won the Palme d’Or this year at the Cannes film festival, making director Bong Joon-Ho the first South Korean to win the top prize at that event, and the film has since racked up tremendous critical accolades and earned $5 million-plus already at the U.S. box office. It’s enough of a hit that it showed at my local, mainstream multiplex this weekend. It’s South Korea’s submission for this year’s Academy Award for Best International Feature Film, and I’ll be shocked if it doesn’t make the shortlist. On this Friday night, there were 20 people in the theater, including us, there to watch a Korean-language film with no actors who’d be recognized at all in the U.S. I’m thrilled to see it get this kind of audience because Parasite is a remarkable, funny, dark, and deeply metaphorical movie.

This upstairs, downstairs story revolves around the Kims, an unemployed family of four living in a dank semi-basement in Seoul where they steal WiFi from neighbors who forget to turn on passwords; and the Parks, a very wealthy family in the city with two young children and more money than they know what to do with. The two families intersect when Ki-woo, the Kims’ college-aged son who doesn’t attend school because he can’t afford it, gets a job filling in as the English tutor to the Parks’ teenaged daughter, Da-hye. Seeing how well the other half is living, Ki-woo hatches a plan to get the rest of his family hired – his sister as the Parks’ son’s art teacher, his father as the chauffeur, and his mother as the housekeeper – by also getting their existing help fired. This all goes very well until one night the housekeeper returns, revealing a secret of her own, turning the film from a hilarious farce into a darker satire that ultimately ends in violent chaos.

For about 3/4 of its running time, Parasite is consistently, laugh-out-loud funny. From the lengths to which the Kims go to perpetrate their con on the Parks or to justify their increasingly unethical behavior to themselves, on to the utterly ridiculous Park family themselves. The three Park characters who have something to do in the film – their son barely speaks at all – are all deeply stereotypical, with the mother (stays at home, can’t take care of herself or the house, heavily neurotic) and daughter (acts/dresses below her age, falls in love with her tutors) both so much so that I wondered if they were meant to be caricatures. The plot to get rid of the chauffeur is amusing; the subsequent plot to get rid of the housekeeper is bananas. Even as the film starts to become violent, there are still moments of humor, including some great physical comedy, until the final cataclysm tears the cover off and reveals the swirling mess of class rage that was beneath the surface the entire time.

Bong isn’t subtle about the fact that the film is replete with metaphor; Ki-woo uses the word “metaphorical” several times, often because he is trying to impress the Parks, but the presence of the word at all felt a bit like a message to the audience to wake up and smell the symbolism. There’s water everywhere in this movie, but while it’s clean and revivifying for the Parks, it’s anything but for the Kims; while water brings the Parks a modest nuisance, it eventually contributes to the Kims’ destruction. The physical locations of their living spaces – the Kims halfway (or more) underground, the Parks on the upper floors of a house with lower floors that they never even visit themselves – correspond to their relative status and their absolute status within a South Korea that rapidly developed after the Korean War but has created substantial income inequality, especially for older citizens. The rock, the Parks’ son’s artwork, the use of American “Indian” imagery – Parasite is absolutely rife with metaphors to underscore the conflict between the Parks and the Kims.

I assume Bong’s use of Kim, the most common family name in South Korea, for the lower-class family, was not a coincidence; Park is the third-most common name, so perhaps the point was that neither of these families is all that atypical, and that Bong is trying to represent wide swaths of Korean society. He’s also created a real dramatic balance between the two families; while the Kims are rascals, they’re not heroes, and if you were still rooting for them at the time that they dispatch the housekeeper, their ruse should be enough to dissuade you. There are no heroes here, no ‘good guys;’ it’s a movie about a lot of regular people who do bad things in the quest for money and all that it brings: status, comfort, freedom from future financial worry.

I won’t spoil any of the end other than to say it turns quite violent, although in the context of everything that has come before, it felt like the inevitable conclusion after two hours of growing tension that had no outlet for release, as the Kims wanted to preserve their ruse at all costs. When one of them finally realize that the Parks will never see them as anything but the hired help – and thus as lesser people – Parasite reaches a disturbing climax and conclusion that will cause you to rethink everything that came before.

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