→ January 23, 2023
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Aftersun.

Aftersun is the debut feature from director Charlotte Wells, a lovely, bittersweet slice of memory that avoids big moments or clear answers. Featuring two outstanding performances by Paul Mescal and newcomer Frankie Corio, it gets under your skin, and lingers on the palate afterwards like a dessert with complex flavors. (You can rent it on Amazon, iTunes, etc., or watch free on MUBI outside of the U.S.)

Mescal and Corio are Calum, a single dad, and his daughter Sophie, who embark on a long father-daughter vacation with a tour group to Turkey to celebrate his upcoming 31st birthday and her 11th birthday. It’s around the year 1999, based on some of the music (Blur’s “Tender” was released that year), and the two have brought a handheld video camera on the trip, allowing Wells to present some scenes as they would have been recorded by Calum or Sophie. As the trip progresses, it becomes clear that Calum is not doing well, as he shows signs of depression and makes offhand comments that offer a slight glimpse into his inner turmoil. That trip constitutes nearly all of the film; there’s just one brief scene afterwards, as we see an adult Sophie watching the end of the videotape(s) we’ve been watching with her.

To say more about Aftersun risks breaking the spell it casts upon the audience. I have a vague memory of an interview Tom Petty gave around 1991, saying that part of Bob Dylan’s genius as a songwriter was the way he could just drop you into a story without giving you all sorts of prologue or introduction; you’re just right in the story from the start, and he figures you’ll catch up. Aftersun functions exactly like that: There’s almost no introduction to these two characters, other than a brief scene near the start where we learn about their ages and imminent birthdays. Wells allows us to learn about the characters through dialogue, such as that Sophie’s mum and Calum are divorced, or that she lives with her mum in Scotland and only visits Calum in London occasionally – or for a special trip like this one. It is a difficult way to tell a story, but Wells executes it flawlessly. By the end of Aftersun, you know Sophie, and you know Calum well enough to try to understand him as adult Sophie is likely trying to do by watching these old videos. He’s not declining over the course of the trip, but we see the vicissitudes of his mental state, sometimes through Sophie, but also sometimes when he’s on his own, raising the question of how much of what we see actually happened and how much is Sophie trying to fill in the gaps.

Both Mescal and Corio are superb in Aftersun, as they must be, with virtually no other characters getting more than a few lines. I had only seen Mescal in his small role in The Lost Daughter, and he is a presence here, with instant credibility as a young, single dad, adrift in his life, loving his daughter and increasingly aware of his deficiencies (or perhaps exaggerating them) as a father. Corio had never acted in anything prior to Aftersun, which is just shocking given the performance she delivers here, playing a kid her own age with the aplomb of an actor who’s playing down a few years. Sophie is trying to figure out her dad while she’s also at an age when she’s trying to figure out herself – her interactions with some teenagers staying at the resort are unrelated to the father-daughter storyline but crucial both in expanding our understanding of her character and in anchoring us to the time in her life when all of this is occurring. Corio gets even tiny details right, like the look on her face when the teens first invite her to come hang out with them, without her dad; she’s there, quietly smiling, but also so clearly absorbing everything she can take in, as if she’s studying this alien species, the Teenager, to better understand them.

Aftersun ends on an ambiguous note, and I’m fine with that in this case. This isn’t a mystery or thriller that demands explanation. The actual details don’t matter for the narrative in the film – what happened after the camera stopped rolling, so to speak, is immaterial. If anything, Wells’ choice not to give any sort of epilogue redirects your thinking back to what you did see and pushes us into adult Sophie’s perspective. It’s one of the best films I’ve seen from 2022, a story to be experienced, one that touches on universal facets of childhood and parenthood – yet another film about how we can never truly understand our parents – while also telling a very specific story about two very realistic and memorable characters.

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→ June 28, 2022
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Cha Cha Real Smooth.

Cha Cha Real Smooth subverts many of the conventions of the rom-com, throwing two people together in a situation that might lead to love and/or sex in most movies, but thanks to some smart, subtle twists to the formula, ends up a coming-of-age movie about being in your 20s.

It’s the second film from writer-director Cooper Raiff, whose 2020 debut Shithouse received very positive reviews, but this time he’s working with a bigger budget and much bigger names in the credits, including Dakota Johnson, who plays Domino, the single mom who lives near Raiff’s recent Tulane graduate Andrew. Domino is about ten years older than Andrew is, and has a daughter, Lola, who is autistic. (She’s played by autistic actress Vanessa Burghardt, making her first appearance in film or TV.) They all meet at a bat mitzvah, where Andrew, who works at a fast-food place in the mall called Meat Sticks, shows a knack for getting kids out on the dance floor, leading Domino to bet him a grand that he can’t get Lola to dance. He does, which leads some of the moms at the party to ask him to be the DJ and party starter for their kids’ b’nei mitzvah, a job that might overstate his readiness for prime time but also keeps him and Domino in each other’s orbits. She has a fiancé who’s often working out of town, while Andrew has a girlfriend studying in Barcelona. Andrew, meanwhile, still lives with his mom (Leslie Mann), stepdad Greg (Brad Garrett), and younger brother David (Evan Assante), the last of whom is trying to land his first kiss with his girlfriend, for which Andrew gives him a substantial amount of often-dubious advice.

Raiff has created some fantastic characters here, and while the dialogue can be a bit clunky, he seems to have a knack for seeing how different characters might react to and interact with each other. The Andrew-Domino dynamic is the beating heart of the film, especially in the way that Andrew tries to use his charisma on Domino and charm her the way he might have charmed women in college – to which she’s a little susceptible, but not in the way that he hopes. The same trick doesn’t work as well on everyone else, though, which is a part of Andrew’s challenge in the film: He thinks he’s a fully formed adult, and knows the ways of the world, but of course he doesn’t and is going to stub his toe or worse as he learns those lessons.

There’s a lot going on in Cha Cha Real Smooth, and it doesn’t always land. Andrew’s mom is bipolar, and had a manic episode at some point in the recent past, but that detail is dropped halfway through the film and never really returns, unless you want to count that as the reason she married Greg – but I don’t think that adds up. You can see where the Barcelona girlfriend thing is going pretty quickly, and the story would have worked just as well without it. It’s also really unclear why Andrew continues to get DJ/Party Starter gigs after his first fiasco, other than plot convenience, although it does lead to a very satisfying scene at what I presume is his final fiasco while also setting up a great denouement with the closest thing Andrew has to an antagonist. I also wish Mann and Garrett, who are both great in small roles, had a bit more to do, although the way the Andrew/Greg conflict (Andrew is just a dick to his stepdad for no apparent reason other than that he exists) resolves is also satisfying. I’ll add my wife’s criticism here, with which I agree, that this movie deserved better music; there are some good names in the soundtrack that indicate an attempt to get the right kind of indie artists into the film, but the songs are not that memorable.

Lola is a critical part of the story and the evolution of Andrew and Domino’s relationship, but to Raiff’s credit, she’s more than just a prop, and develops a relationship with Andrew that shows the audience more about each of them. Burghardt plays her like a whole person – she’s described it as portraying things she’s learned not to do as an autistic person. It’s the best kind of representation: A character with a disability is an integral part of the story, has normal interactions with other characters, building a real relationship with one of them, and deals with some of the problems that they might face in the real world – in this case, bullying by other kids. Lola is part of the fabric of the film, and her autism is not a plot point, but simply a characteristic.

If Raiff didn’t stick the landing here, Cha Cha Real Smooth would not have worked – it could have become too precious, or just unrealistic, with even small changes in how the Andrew/Domino relationship ends or where those two characters are in the coda that takes place six months later. But Raiff does get that part right, which helps mitigate some of the things that didn’t work in the middle of the film. It’s also frequently very funny, and Raiff has very good comedic timing that will probably carry him a long way. I don’t know that I need to see more of him playing this sort of character, but I enjoyed the two hours I spent with him. Your mileage may vary.

Cha Cha Real Smooth is streaming on Apple TV+.

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→ December 31, 2021
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Licorice Pizza.

Licorice Pizza, the latest film from Paul Thomas Anderson, feels like the work of an entirely different writer than PTA’s last film, Phantom Thread. Where that movie was tense, quiet, often creepy, Licorice Pizza never stops moving – in one sense, almost literally, as the two main characters spend a substantial portion of the film running, often in less-than-sensible shoes. It’s a beautiful, quirky, and funny coming-of-age story. I just wish so much of its greatness wasn’t undone by a pointless racist gag that PTA could have excised without losing anything.

Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman, son of Phillip Seymour Hoffman) is a precocious almost-16-year-old actor and would-be entrepreneur who spots Alana Kane (Alana Haim) when the photography company she works for comes to his school for picture day. He tries to flirt with her, despite the ten-year age gap, and somehow coaxes her into meeting him for a not-date date at the absurdly named but extremely ’70s restaurant Tail o’ the Cock, where he’s on a first-name basis with the staff and is treated like a VIP. Gary tries to get Alana some movie and TV work, while she tags along with his venture to sell waterbeds, and the two continue to move along as if they don’t actually have feelings for each other, even though we know by the time the movie ends, they have to get together somehow.

Hoffman and Haim carry this movie, Hoffman in particular, with his effortless charm and a self-aplomb way beyond his years. The age gap between them – which is larger than the one that had certain folks upset in Call Me By Your Name, although that criticism was probably about something other than their ages – is less evident on the screen, because Gary is developmentally advanced for his age, while Alana is still quite immature. The latter point especially shows up in scenes at Alana’s home, where she still lives with her parents and two older sisters, all played by Alana’s actual family (quite well, in fact – her father is a riot), and she’s very clearly the baby of the bunch, twenty-five but aimless. She hangs around with Gary and his friends, even though she knows it’s “weird,” in part because they give her a way to stave off adulthood. Because Hoffman plays Gary as this worldly teenager who understands more of adult ways than just about any teenager I know, which is built into the character’s story (and that of the real-life actor, Gary Goetzman, on whom PTA based Valentine), the love story between the two comes off as more innocent than it might otherwise.

The unsung hero of Licorice Pizza might be the costume department. Films set in the 1970s often shove that decade’s regrettable fashion choices in the viewer’s face, but Licorice Pizza instead leans into the better side of ’70s fashion. Haim is a fashion plate, wearing some gorgeous prints across a series of short dresses that wouldn’t be out of place today aside from the oversized collars. Valentine doesn’t have quite as much fun, but the white suit and fuchsia shirt he dons near the end of the film couldn’t come from any other decade.

PTA also populates the film with many real-life characters from Hollywood of the time, including Sean Penn as the legendary actor William Holden (thinly disguised as “Jack Holden”), and Bradley Cooper in an absolutely ridiculous (and very fun) turn as producer Jon Peters, with whom Cooper worked on the remake of A Star is Born. Benny Safdie appears as city councilman Joel Wachs, on whose campaign Alana works near the end of the film. If you listen carefully, you’ll catch the voice of John C. Reilly in an uncredited role as another real person. Most of this works to add color to the film, accentuating its sense of time and place, although the Holden segment goes on longer than it needs to.

That racist gag, though. John Michael Higgins plays a real person, Jerome Frick, who owned a Japanese restaurant in the LA area called Mikado. In the film, he appears once with his Japanese wife, and speaks to her in slow, exaggerated English with a mock-Asian accent. He appears again, later, with a different Japanese wife, and pulls the same shit. There is a punchline there, at Frick’s expense (turns out he’s just an ignorant asshole), but I’m not sure any punchline could justify that lead-up. It appears that Jerome Frick’s second wife, Hiroko, was a fluent English speaker, yet PTA only has the two women speak Japanese in the film. Perhaps this was some complicated way to mock the real-life Frick – and, for what it’s worth, the punchline itself is funny – but few if any viewers will be in on the joke, and the whole thread adds precisely nothing to the film. It’s a shame that either nobody called PTA out on it, or, more likely, that he just ignored them. The Hollywood Reporter just published a longer piece on the controversy this morning, which links to a November interview with PTA where he tries to defend it as true to the time period.

If that bit were cut from the movie, Licorice Pizza would be just about perfect; it’s still my favorite of the movies I’ve seen so far, even with the bitter taste of that failed gag. The chemistry between the leads is so strong – both should be in the running for Oscar nominations, and both scored Golden Globe nods already – that almost everything around the two of them melts away. Maybe there will be a director’s cut that spares us those objectionable scenes, because the rest of this movie is wonderful.

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→ February 14, 2019
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What Will People Say.

What Will People Say, the second feature film written and directed by Iram Haq, was Norway’s submission for this year’s Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, and is heavily based on events from Haq’s own adolescence. She’s Norwegian, of Pakistani descent, and when she was a young teenager, her father kidnapped her and returned her to Pakistan to live for a year and a half because her parents feared that she was becoming too westernized. The grim and often brutal script follows its protagonist, here aged 16, through the same sequence of events, exploring the ways both Islam and her south Asian culture are wielded to control and break young women, in a story that would be hard to accept if it weren’t true. The movie is streaming free for amazon prime subscribers.

Nisha, played by first-timer Maria Mozhdah, acts like a regular teenager, rebelling against restrictive parents, hanging out with friends, with a budding relationship with a white boy. When he sneaks into her room one night, her father discovers them and proceeds to beat the boy and hit Maria, which leads to the involvement of child protective services. Maria’s mother tricks her into coming home, after which her father (Adil Hussain) and brother kidnap her and fly her to Islamabad, where he leaves her with her aunt and grandmother so she can learn to be a Pakistani housewife and mother, and, they hope, to cure her of these wicked western ways she’s learned in Norway. While there, she and her cousin fall for each other, only to be caught and humiliated by the local police, after which her father comes to retrieve her and start a new cycle of abuse and restriction that leads to the arrangement of a marriage without her consent.

What Will People Say, taking a phrase that Haq says is used in south Asian cultures to control women, is almost unrelenting once the downward spiral begins with her father’s violent reaction to finding a boy in her room. (He accuses her of having had sex with the boy, which isn’t true, but he repeats it in front of the social worker and demands that she marry the boy to save their honor.) Nisha endures some physical abuse and far more psychological abuse, but still shows strength of spirit and an ability to adapt to her situation, at least building a real affection for some of her cousins once it’s clear that she won’t be able to escape back to Norway, and eventually finding some strength to fight back against her domineering, self-loathing auntie – which makes it all the harder to stomach when she’s caught, shamed (for nothing), brought back to Norway, kept in near-total isolation, and ends up lying to social workers that everything’s fine.

Mozhdah is outstanding as Nisha, put through a gauntlet of torments and particularly asked to show outright fear, the sort of fear that incorporates terror and the loss of hope, especially as Nisha realizes her family members are working against her – especially her father, with whom she had a close relationship and thus in whom she’d placed great trust. (Haq has said she reconciled with her father as he was dying of cancer; on his deathbed, he told her to make this film, “to show how evil people can get when they are scared.”) Hussain, who played the main character’s father in The Life of Pi, is often terrifying in his role as Nisha’s father, where he’s asked to show contempt for the child he’s supposed to love and whose best interests he believes he has at heart.

Hussain’s performance ends up the key to making What Will People Say work in the end, when Nisha does escape, ostensibly for good, and her father shows a small sign that he finally understands her perspective – that he and her mother don’t actually share a vision of Nisha’s future, and that his actions now lead to a path where she would end up losing most of her freedom. It’s a tiny glimmer of optimism in a story that has beaten Nisha down, literally and figuratively, for most of its 105 minutes, one that would be hard to accept were it not so heavily based in reality. Haq’s script indicts so many forces, from south Asian cultures to Islam itself to the Norwegian authorities who ignored the evidence right in front of them, that it feels like a story written out of anger. Haq has said she’s not angry any more. What Will People Say transfers that anger to us.

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→ February 10, 2019
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Eighth Grade.

Comedian Bo Burnham made his screenwriting debut with 2018’s Eighth Grade, a cute coming-of-age story with newbie Elsie Fisher in the lead role of Kayla. It will compete with itself between making you laugh and making you want to crawl out of your own skin, because I’m guessing just about everyone who sees this will relate to something that happens to Kayla as we follow her through the last few weeks of eighth grade and see her navigate social anxieties and prepare for high school. The film is free now on amazon prime.

Kayla is a shy, awkward teenager – watch how Fisher walks, as if she’s trying to make herself smaller – who posts ‘advice’ vlogs that, as we see, no one watches, but also worries that she’s giving advice she doesn’t even take herself. Nothing extraordinary happens to her for most of the film; she gets invited to a pool party, wins the dubious honor of being named quietest in her class, spends a lot of time on Instagram and Snapchat (as we’re told, nobody uses Facebook any more), has a crush, hears about sex, and eventually has a day where she shadows a perky, outgoing high school senior named Olivia (Emily Robinson, who has fantastic hair). We get a school-shooting drill, impossibly uncool teachers and school administrators – really, a principal tries to dab, and I’ve never been so embarrassed to be over the age of 20 – and, eventually, one bad thing happens that triggers the big scene you might have caught in the trailer where Kayla and her dad (Josh Hamilton) have an emotional conversation around a fire pit.

Eighth Grade is by far at its best when Kayla is on the screen and at the center of whatever’s happening. She gives a description of anxiety, without naming it as such, that’s about as good a depiction of the physical aspects of the disorder that I have heard anywhere in fiction. Fisher’s bright eyes and blond hair would seem to make her a standout, but she plays Kayla as so unsure and vulnerable that she ends up seeming younger than her classmates and that much more sympathetic. And Eighth Grade should be viewed through her lens from start to finish; even the worst thing that happens to her works better because she’s always at the focus of the narrative and the camera. There’s a joke around a banana that is such picture-perfect physical comedy that I can only assume Fisher actually hates the fruit in real life – or else she deserved a Best Actress nod for that scene alone.

Where Burnham lost me and cost himself some momentum is when he went for cheap laughs, like making the adults not just uncool but sort of assertively uncool, like the dabbing principal or the teacher in the sex education video who says “it’s gonna be lit!” To a teenager, parents and adults are just generally not cool, but Burnham goes twice as far as he needs to go so he can hammer that point home. A few of the gags hit, but more miss or just seem out of place because they take the focus away from Kayla’s journey – and her story is the heart of the film in every sense of the term.

Other than Fisher’s performance, the biggest reason Eighth Grade works, even with its inconsistencies, is that Burnham has managed to hit so many universal emotions and experiences with just a handful of anecdotes over the course of about 90 minutes. While there’s nothing here that specifically happened to me as a kid, the sensations and emotions were entirely familiar – none more so than that sense that you’re the one person in the room everyone is looking at, the one person everyone else has identified as the oddball. A few of the anecdotes are rooted in modernity; all the kids are constantly on their phones, talking to each other through DMs, snaps, and instagram comments. You can generalize almost everything in this film that Kayla experiences to match something you remember feeling as a kid. And I got to feel this film on two levels, since I’m also the father of a girl just a year younger than Kayla is, so eighth grade for us is just around the corner. (I’ve already forbidden her from using Snapchat though.) So while the script is inconsistent and has some gags that don’t land, the story is so authentic to the experience of growing up as a suburban teenager that the film eventually works and resonates without resorting to cheap manipulation or big twists.

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