→ October 20, 2022
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Athena.

Athena is the newest feature from Romain Gavras, son of Oscar-winning writer and director Costa-Gavras, who has a great eye for action sequences and can put you right on the edge of your seat, starting out this film with a literal and figurative bang. The script has Shakespearean aspirations, but the story doesn’t work well enough to achieve its goals or to match the quality of the action sequences.

Athena is the name of a housing complex in an unnamed French city that is home to a large population of Algerian-French citizens, and as the film opens, we see one of them, a police officer named Abdel (Dali Benssalah, who was in No Time to Die), asking for peace in the wake of the death of his 13-year-old brother Idir. A video has gone viral showing Idir’s beating death at the hands of several men in police uniforms, which serves as the spark in the powder keg of Athena; Abdel has barely finished speaking when the camera spans to the crowd, where we see a young man, Karim (Sami Slimane), lighting a Molotov cocktail that he’ll throw into the police station. This leads to a daylong standoff between Athena residents, led by Karim, who is Idir’s and Abdel’s brother, demanding the police deliver Idir’s killers to them, and the French police, with Abdel caught in the middle, distrusting his superiors and trying to avoid any further harm to his family.

The action sequences in Athena are fantastic, starting with that Molotov cocktail and Karim’s followers invading the police station to try to loot it of weapons. It ends in one of several memorable shots, this one with Karim and company standing or sitting at the edge of one of the roofs in the complex, all steely-eyed and determined and also too young to be doing this. His side will end up taking a police officer hostage, something telegraphed from the very beginning of the film, further ratcheting up the tension amid the uncertainty whether he’s going to survive, or whether any of the brothers – there’s a third, a drug dealer with anger management problems named Moktar – are going to either. It’s a grim view of modern French society and the relationship between the police and the people, although it may be a realistic one.

The script seems more concerned with keeping the tension cranked up to 11 than with advancing the plot in a meaningful way, or saying anything beyond, hey, there’s a lot of anger out there, you know? The film isn’t making an actual statement on police violence, as the police in the film respond to Abdel by saying they believe Idir’s killers were in fact far-right agitators wearing police uniforms to try to light the match and usher in some kind of race war; the uncertainty around that is enough to muddle the narrative even as it also casts Abdel’s choices in a different light.

The brothers are all Muslims, as are most of the residents of Athena, but the film does next to nothing with this information. This feels like a huge omission – the rights of Muslims in France remains a contentious issue, on top of decades of discrimination against Algerians, and Athena just ignores it. The police shown in the film are at least somewhat diverse, with Black and white officers, and of course Abdel as a Muslim officer, which could be fodder for multiple subthemes, but the movie can barely handle Abdel’s dual role as a cop and an Algerian resident of the Athena complex, with no energy left for anything else.

Even as an action movie, with plenty to recommend it on that score, Athena feels a bit like empty calories because it can’t stick the landing at all, choosing a slam-bang finish over a meaningful or even a sensible one. It’s just my inference, but I certainly thought the way the film ends indicated pretensions towards Shakespearean tragedy, but in this case, the tragic deaths are just not earned, not one of them. It just ends up aggravating you because you can’t help but feel like all that buildup was for nothing. It’s 80 minutes of a sugar rush and 20 minutes of insulin shock. For a film that starts with a ton of promise, and features some incredible cinematography and memorable shots, it ends in a disappointing fizzle.

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→ 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.

—

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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→ September 10, 2019
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Non-Fiction.

Non-Fiction‘s original French title, Doubles Vies (“Double Lives”), does a much better job of summarizing the story itself, which covers two couples — a publisher, an author, an actress, and a political consultant – who cope with aging and the changing circumstances of life by having lots of sex with people other than their partners. It’s a smart and witty film, punctuated by one of the funniest meta-jokes I’ve ever seen, that has a lot to say about the inevitability of change and our inept ways of handling it. It’s streaming on Hulu and available to rent on iTunes and amazon.

Juliette Binoche, who continues to churn out tremendous performances nearly 35 years into her career, is one of the stars of Non-Fiction, playing the television actress Selena, the star of a French police procedural called Collusion; she’s married to literary editor Alain (Guillaume Canet), who has a strained relationship with onetime star author Léonard (Vincent Macaigne), who is married to the political consultant Valérie (columnist and comedian Nora Hamzawi). Selena is having a lengthy affair with the frumpy and morose Léonard; Alain starts sleeping with his firm’s young new digital media director Laure (Christa Téret) at the first opportunity. Léonard’s last few novels haven’t sold well, and Alain thinks his newest is a dud, which Léonard takes about as well as you’d expect – but Valérie has no sympathy for him and doesn’t even seem to like him very much. Meanwhile, Alain’s professional world is facing the upheaval of e-books and audiobooks as well as the changing demographics of fiction readership, while Selena grapples with the choice of continuing on a show that has made her successful but is professionally unfulfilling.

These are first-world problems, to be sure, but they are also somewhat universal at this point. Although writer/director Oliver Assayas focused the script on the massive shifts in the publishing world – which braced for a paradigm change that would lead readers to eschew dead trees for e-books, only to see readers gravitate back to physical books – technology is leading to similar creative destructions in lots of industries, changing the entire structure of employment and the relationships workers have to their employers. What hits Alain just at work over the course of the film could stand in for any industry.

The serial infidelities in the movie are a bit harder to grasp on a metaphorical level, although they provide a good bit of the humor. Selena seems broken up by the possibility that Alain is having an affair, but we find out shortly afterwards that she’s having one too – and it’s been going on for years. There’s a comic tension throughout as you wait to see if any of the spouses might figure out what’s going on and in watching various characters squirm when they might be caught, but understanding why Alain, married to a gorgeous and successful actress who seems to appreciate art and literature, chases a much younger woman just because she’s there is at least more opaque. Is it a reaction to change by regressing into adolescent behaviors? Similarly, if Selena is a significant TV star, why is her longtime affair – one in which she appears to have no emotional investment – with the mopey Léonard, a rather stereotypical modernist author who says he rejects materialism and tries to hold himself aloof from criticism that he obviously can’t bring himself to ignore?

For plot and purpose, Non-Fiction works far better out of the bedroom. Even the lengthy discussions of art for art’s sake, with somewhat obvious complaints like how these young kids don’t read any more, work well as parallels to the natural human inclination to romanticize the past and rationalize the status quo when we’re faced with the discomfort of change. (To borrow and slightly alter a line from Spike Milligan: I don’t fear change. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.) These four people are all adrift and facing some kind of imminent upheaval at work, with the threat of the same at home, and mostly react in similar ways, driven to poor decisions by uncertainty and doubt … like most adults confronted with the potential for significant changes at work or at home.

Binoche is wonderful, as always, although her character is more unlikeable than many roles she’s had before; Selena is a bit full of herself, especially about her job, and thinks nothing of advocating for her paramour to her own husband. Canet has the larger role, as we see so much more of him at work, and the subplot around his publisher is more significant than that around Selena’s TV show or Valérie’s work for a leftist candidate (a rather neglected side story). Macaigne is fine as the aloof, self-absorbed author, but I found zero reason to think that Selena would want a long-term affair with him, and the relationship between Léonard and Valérie is almost as befuddling.

Non-Fiction may also have clicked for me more than it would for many viewers – I’m not that much younger than these characters, am divorced, and work in a similar field that is also going through a lengthy period of tectonic-type changes. So much of the dialogue, which is fast-moving despite the weight of what Assayas wants to say, is insightful about facing changes as you get older that I found most of the film’s non-adultery content resonated with me. And that metajoke near the end is just (chef’s kiss).

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→ August 7, 2019
→ By

Climax.

Gaspar Noé has a strong reputation among critics for provocative movies that often skirt the line of good taste, and seems to revel in his ability to shock or even repulse audiences while similarly challenging them with his stories. This year’s Climax is probably his best-received film, even though it was made with just a loose outline, employed mostly non-actors, and took just a few weeks to film. It’s a nightmare come to life, one that is more revealing than horrifying, but also clearly crosses the line into poor taste.

Climax is based loosely on an actual story of a French dance troupe whose afterparty was spoiled because someone spiked their drinks with LSD, although in that case no serious harm came to any of the dancers. That is not true in Noé’s retelling here, as the party devolves into Lord of the Flies-level savagery because someone spiked the punch, made by the troupe’s den mother Emmanuelle, with LSD or a similar psychotropic drug. (The very end of the film makes it seem like it was LSD, although the dancers never know this.)

Things don’t fall apart until about halfway through the brisk 93-minute film; the first half includes an impressive, long modern dance number that incorporates numerous styles and presents more to the viewer than the eye can possibly follow. The party starts out well enough, but eventually the dancers who drank the punch start to feel unwell; no one speaks of hallucinations, but they become disoriented and paranoid, and start to revert to base instincts. As it becomes clear that the punch was tainted, they begin to band together to try to identify the culprit, blaming Emmanuelle, then blaming the two dancers who didn’t drink it, never considering that the person who spiked the punch may in fact have consumed it themselves. This devolution also sees them lose many of their inhibitions, giving in to violence and sex, and by the time the police arrive the next morning there are several dancers dead or grievously wounded, while others are simply damaged by what’s occurred.

The drugs really are beside the point in Climax, which explores the nature of fear and how quickly we come to distrust others when we think we’re in danger. Noé wrote an outline and some general directions but asked the actors, most of whom were professional dancers without acting experience, to simply act as they would if under the influence, showing them videos of people who’d taken LSD or other hallucinogens. There are two professionals in the cast, Sofia Boutella (Selva) and Souheila Yacoub (Lou), who do more heavy lifting than anyone else, the former as the de facto social leader of the group, the latter the one character with something resembling a storyline.

Noé’s hand is all over the film even though there wasn’t a proper script. There’s one continuous shot that runs over 40 minutes, shifting perspectives and angles, drifting to different characters, that helps convey the dancers’ disorientation to the viewers. He also moved the closing credits to the beginning of the movie, and the typical title card with cast listing to the middle, which felt more like a gimmick to me than an important change. (Plus Adam McKay did it better in Vice.) He made one truly regrettable decision, the part of the film that crosses the line into needless suffering; Emmanuelle’s son is at the party, and while I won’t spoil it, what that child is put through did not need to be in this movie at all. Noé could have accomplished everything he wanted to accomplish without that. Assuming the boy’s inclusion was an active decision by Noé, it was a blatant attempt to shock the audience for shock’s sake.

Several days after watching Climax, I can’t decide if I think the film is good. I would say I didn’t enjoy watching it, because it is so unpleasant (by design) to watch the dancers lose control of themselves and their situation, wandering around a dark building that looks like an abandoned school or mental institution. I also couldn’t stop watching it, and was past the halfway mark before I even thought about how much time might have passed, and it’s certainly had me thinking about it in the time since I watched. There is something essential about stories that remind us of the thin line between the way we live and utter anarchy, of the tiny genetic barrier that separates us from chimpanzees, of the social norms we take for granted that allow us to live our daily lives. When one brick is removed, the entire edifice could collapse. Noé is willing to stare into that abyss and show us what he sees.

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→ January 2, 2019
→ By

Custody.

Custody (Jusqu’à la garde, on amazon and iTunes) is a full-length sequel to the Oscar-nominated short film Just Before Losing Everything, both written and directed by Xavier Legrand and starring the same actors in three of the four main roles. This film, which won the Silver Lion at the Venice International Film Festival in 2017 and the Louis Delluc Prize last year, follows the same family from the custody hearing that opens the film through the father’s attempts to control his estranged wife through their twelve-year-old son, building in intensity through its refusal to acquiesce to the commercial impulse toward big, dramatic moments.

The opening scene has Miriam (Léa Drucker) and Antoine (Denis Ménochet), with their lawyers, in a session where each side argues for their desired custody arrangements, which form the only real disagreement between them. Miriam accuses Antoine of abusing her, and has repeatedly changed phone numbers and often hidden her location to protect herself from him. Their daughter, Josephine (Mathilde Auneveux), is about to turn 18, and wants nothing to do with her father. Julien (Thomas Gioria), their son, also wants no contact with his father, but the judge who hears their arguments grants Antoine the visitation rights he wants – apparently dismissing Miriam’s claims of abuse for lack of ‘proof’ – which gives the father the wedge he needs to insinuate himself into Miriam’s life.

The film is spare, just 93 minutes, and even at that length there is little action and a very simple plot, reminiscent in several ways of 2017’s Loveless. Antoine is manipulative and controlling, and his interest in Julien seems limited to using the boy as a way to maintain contact with Miriam and to remain aware of her whereabouts and actions. Gioria is especially strong as a twelve-year-old boy who doesn’t want contact with his father, but also fears him and has the innate respect children have for authority figures, even when (or perhaps especially when) they’re also the victims of those same adults. Some of Custody‘s strongest scenes involve Julien and Antoine doing very little, often barely speaking to each other, or Antoine demanding something only to have Julien try his hardest to avoid answering, and they’re excruciating because Legrand lets these interactions play out in something very close to real time. When Antoine demands that Julien show him their new apartment, Legrand puts us in the car the whole time as Julien tries to direct his father, left, right, straight ahead, for twice as long as you’d expect, giving more time for the anticipation of an eventual explosion to build up.

You don’t need to see the prior film to follow Custody, although it will color your view of the characters in the first few scenes; without that prologue, you can more easily see the judge’s point of view that she must figure out “which of (the parents) is the bigger liar.” It doesn’t take much time to see Antoine’s character come through – first the need to control his wife and children, then his temper and his manipulative nature, and eventually the violence – and at that point anyone watching will realize how badly the judge screwed up, and, in what I assume is Legrand’s point, how poorly the French custody process serves abuse victims if there isn’t an actual crime on record already.

Ménochet also delivers a tremendous performance here even before Antoine’s violent side starts to surface – I’d argue that the performance is better until then, because once it becomes physical, there’s less for the actor to do with the role. Legrand didn’t write this character as a sympathetic one, but also avoided completely dehumanizing the man, so that the scenes with Antoine and Julien can still work as drama – you can understand the son still seeing this man as his father, someone who says he loves him, and an authority figure, rather than just a monster. An adult would see through Antoine, but his own child will always have that inner conflict, and giving the father enough depth gives the audience Julien’s lenses to see him.

Custody has one of the best conclusions of any film I’ve seen from 2018, although it could trigger anyone sensitive to scenes of domestic violence. Given what has come before, it might be the only authentic climax to the story, and then Legrand had his choice of resolutions from that inflection point. By choosing to tell this story slowly, showing detail where most films would speed up to the next moment of action, Legrand has made a film that feels distinctly non-commercial, but that also should evoke more genuine emotions in the audience until that final scene – and by that point, the direction and the acting have earned a big payoff. It’s one of the best films of the year, probably borderline top ten for me right now, and deserves a wider audience here than it’s gotten.

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→ October 30, 2018
→ By

Let the Sunshine In.

Let the Sunshine In (available to rent on amazon and iTunes) is a star turn for Juliette Binoche, a thinly plotted wisp of a movie that works entirely because of Binoche’s performance as a middle-aged woman looking for something in her love life but unable to find it – perhaps because she doesn’t know what it is she wants. It’s a sort of cringe comedy for adults, full of awkward interactions in and out of the bedroom, punctuated by emotional scenes of Binoche lamenting her unhappiness and questioning the decisions she’s made, while she’s surrounded by some generally awful men.

Binoche plays Isabelle, an artist and single mother who, at the start of the movie, is experiencing but definitely not enjoying sex with a rather unattractive banker named Vincent, who quickly reveals himself to be something of a pig – and is also quite married and full of himself. Isabelle says she’s in love with him, although her actions would imply otherwise. Between watching Vincent treating a bartender like he’s something less than human and hearing Vincent say he will never leave his wife, Isabelle decides to break it off and venture out on her own, which leads to a couple of doomed affairs with brooding artist types and a lot of conversations about her misadventures and melancholy.

It’s unfair to say nothing happens in Let the Sunshine In (the actual title of which, Un Beau Soleil Intérieur, is better translated as “a beautiful sun within”), but what does happen is usually inconsequential. Isabelle seems unable to distinguish physical intimacy from genuine emotional affection, a confusion of which men around here seem more than happy to take advantage – I was reminded of the opening couplet from the Shelter song “Here We Go,” about a guy using love for sex while the girl is using sex for love. Nearly all of the men Isabelle encounters are creeps of varying levels of aggressiveness, and when the one possible ‘nice guy’ in the film kisses her but doesn’t want to rush right into sex, she feels rejected. There’s no destination here, or even any real growth; the film ends with Isabelle’s visit to a psychic (and, obviously, a fraud) played by Gérard Depardieu, with his bad advice and her questions continuing through most of the closing credits.

With the wrong actress as Isabelle, this would have been unwatchable; even though there are a few sex scenes and a few other big moments, the script is powered entirely by dialogue, nearly all of which involves the main character. Binoche delivers an Oscar-caliber performance here, owning the screen every time she’s on it, conveying a mix of strength and vulnerability, the understanding that she’s still attractive (can confirm) but the awareness that she’s aging and that her ‘window’ to find that perfect mate might be closing. The character is locked in a sort of arrested development when it comes to romance, thinking of love and sex as a young adult might, even though Isabelle is somewhere in middle age (never specified, although Binoche was 52 when this was filmed). She still dresses young, and that sex-for-love confusion dictates nearly all of her behavior with men, exacerbated by the fact that pretty much all of the men in this movie are terrible to her.

But is there a point to all of this? It’s not quite #CancelMen territory, although all the men in this movie who get more than a few minutes on screen are either out to get laid or to find someone to mother them (or, in at least one case, both). Isabelle herself has plenty of points in the film that could cause her to reevaluate her decisions in dating, yet she continues forward on the same path, so she just repeats her mistakes, right down to the decision to go to a clairvoyant (whom we see is a phony in one of the few scenes that doesn’t include Binoche). I’d watch Binoche work in almost any movie, and Isabelle is a suitably three-dimensional character, just one deserving of a more complex story.

(Random trivia: Director Claire Denis’ first film was called Chocolat, but it’s not the same film as the Oscar-nominated film of that name that starred Binoche and earned the latter a Best Supporting Actress nod.)

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→ March 2, 2018
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Faces Places.

Faces Places (original title Visages, Villages) is the last of the five nominees for Best Documentary Feature I had to see – I’ve also caught two of the Documentary Short nominees – and I could see an argument that it’s the best. It’s certainly unique among the nominees in that it’s not really about anything at all; the other four all tell stories, often with an eye on exposing or explaining something, but Faces Places is a slice of life in the truest sense of the phrase. It seems like the sort of thing you could never sell until you’d made it and could show a distributor what the finished product is, because the magic here is in the way the two leads interact on screen throughout the movie. You can buy it on Amazon or iTunes.

Agnes Varda is an 89-year-old grande dame of French cinema, a major figure in the New Wave of the 1950s, a friend of Godard, married to Jacques Demy for over 30 years. She and a photographer-artist named JR are the stars of the film, driving around villages in France, visiting friends or acquaintances, taking photos and blowing them up to paste on the sides of buildings, water towers, and train cars. Their interactions with each other – it’s such an unlikely friendship, but the affection is so obviously genuine that it’s truly moving – and with the various locals are the heart of the film. Some of the best moments are the reactions of the people whose photographs JR and Varda take and blow up, how they respond to seeing themselves portrayed in these giant posters. One becomes a mini-celebrity and finds she doesn’t like how people recognize her now as the woman on the side of the building. The wives of three workers at a port end up with their portraits on giant stacks of shipping containers (Frank Sobotka declined comment) and then sit inside their own images in the film’s most memorable shot. One describes feeling large and powerful; another hates feeling enclosed and so far off the ground. It’s peculiar to see how making someone two-dimensional brings out something different in their humanity, but that seems to be the trick of Varda & JR’s technique.

Varda is really the star of the film, though, and that was evident to me even though I was totally unfamiliar with her work or reputation before seeing this. Part of the connection probably came from how she reminded me of my maternal grandmother, who, like Varda, was short (I doubt my grandmother ever saw five feet, and was probably closer to 4’8” when she died at 100), had a raspy voice (she smoked for 75+ years), and kept her hair very short. Seeing Varda lean into JR – who seems pretty tall, although standing next to her makes him look like a giant – reminded me so much of how my grandmother would do the same with me once I was an adult, especially comforting her during moments of melancholy near the end of her life, that I felt an immediate empathy with the director from the movie’s start. When she does have a real moment of deep sadness near the end, the one thing that really happens in the movie, it got to me even though her grief in that scene was intensely personal to her.

Varda became the oldest person to receive an Oscar nomination in any non-honorary category with this year’s nod, and between that and her importance in the industry, Faces Places might be the sentimental favorite, if not the overall favorite, to win for Best Documentary Feature. (The nomination also led to an amusing scene when Varda declined to fly from France to Los Angeles for the nominees’ luncheon, so JR brought a few cardboard cutouts of Varda in her stead, and 2D Varda was a big hit.) Last Men in Aleppo is probably the best of the five for the importance of its subject matter, although I was surprised at how distant I felt from the tragedies on screen in that film. Icarus was the most gripping to watch, because it’s so incredibly bizarre how that filmmaker stumbled on the biggest doping scandal in sports history while trying to make a documentary about something else. If I had a ballot, which I don’t because the Academy just won’t return my calls, I’d probably vote for Icarus, but inside I’d hope Faces Places won anyway … even if cardboard Agnes is the one accepting the award.

* Four of the five nominees for Best Documentary Short are available to stream right now, and I’ve seen two, with a third downloaded to watch today or tomorrow. Knife Skills tells the story of Edwin’s, a Cleveland restaurant that hires people who’ve just been released from prison, training them over a period of several months, while serving classical French cuisine and earning rave reviews. The documentary follows the restaurant’s inaugural class of 120, which ends up whittled by more than half before the restaurant has been open three months, focusing on a few individual student-employees, mostly imprisoned for drug-related offenses, who will surprise you with how quickly they seem to take to and enjoy this grueling work. It’s also on iTunes and amazon.

Traffic Stop is on HBO’s streaming apps, and holy shit, is this a bad look for the Austin Police Department. A white cop pulls a black woman out of her car for speeding, throws her to the ground, beats her, threatens to tase her, and then tells the next officer to arrive that she resisted arrest … but it was all caught on his dash cam. Not only was he not fired for the incident, his superiors didn’t hear about it for over a year, by which point it was too late for them to suspend or fire him; he was just terminated a month ago for standing on a suspect’s head during another arrest. The documentary intersperses all of the dash cam footage with shots of the victim, Breaion King, talking about what it did to her life, and just about herself – she’s a math teacher who has worked in the community and has no criminal history whatsoever, but was targeted because she was black. The big reveal, though, is when a different cop, one who seems to be sympathetic to her, says that the problem is that black people have “violent tendencies” that lead white cops to assume the worst. I see no evidence anywhere that that officer has been disciplined in any way, and can only assume that he’s still out there, representing Austin’s finest.

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→ February 25, 2018
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The Girl Without Hands.

When the Oscar nominations were announced a few weeks ago, I tweeted an image showing all of the eligible films for the 2017 Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, and showed that Boss Baby, which scored one of the nominations, wasn’t close to a top five film in the group in the estimation of critics. At that point, though, I hadn’t seen any of the films ranked above it (using Rotten Tomatoes scores, a crude measure but useful for our purposes here). I can now say I have seen one film that was eligible for the award, and was #BetterThanBossBaby: The Girl Without Hands (La jeune fille sans mains), a stunningly animated version of the Grimm Brothers folk tale about a girl … um, with no hands. It’s available to rent on iTunes and amazon.

The girl, never named, suffers for her father’s avarice; when the film starts, the impoverished miller strikes a deal with the devil to give him “what’s behind his mill” in exchange for wealth, not realizing that his daughter was in the apple tree behind the mill at that moment. Eventually, the man’s refusal to give up the river of gold that is now running his mill costs him everything, including his daughter, whose hands he lops off at the devil’s insistence. She flees, eventually finding a prince who marries her, only to have the devil reappear and try once again to claim her for his part of the original bargain.

This adaptation, first released in France in 2016, was entirely written, directed, and animated by Sébastien Laudenbach, marking his first feature film. The animation style is like nothing I’ve seen before in an animated feature – the outlines of characters and objects are rough, and the colored portions inside those lines don’t always move in sync with the outlines, which is obviously by design and gives the entire film a ghostly atmosphere. The colors are bold and vibrant, with less shading than we expect now from animated films that try to look three-dimensional. The film is mostly faithful to the original tale, which has many supernatural elements, and Laudenbach’s non-realistic approach fits it perfectly.

The Grimms’ story is a rather blunt, grotesque fable about the corrupting power of greed, with just one character of any import, the girl, voiced beautifully by French actress Anaïs Demoustier. Her faith in her father is not rewarded, and her strength in the face of the tragedy is part of the story’s moral (which sort of pounds you over the head). Laudenbach and Demoustier at least manage to humanize her, even though his fidelity to the story limits how much depth the character can get on screen, and he altered the ending slightly to tie the restoration of her hands to something more specific than the Grimms offered. She’s an obvious object for pity; Laudenbach and Demoustier make her more than just pathetic.

It’s the imagery that makes this movie, though; Laudenbach gives the film a tactile look, like we’re watching images flicker on canvas or paper. He plays little visual games with his characters as well, having them move as if they’re aware that their outlines and their flesh aren’t quite together, such as having a character hide in what looks like its own shadow at one moment. It’s just such a feast for the eyes, in a way that’s completely novel in the era of hyper realistic CG animation, and it’s thoroughly refreshing.

As for why this was overlooked by the Academy … I have no idea. It ran at Cannes in the ACID program, a simultaneous screening during that city’s film festival, in 2016. It won the grand prize in the Tokyo Anime Awards last year. It’s at 100% fresh with 19 reviews, all of which were written in 2017. I can’t believe voters saw this and still went with Boss Baby; hell, The Red Turtle got a nomination last year and was just as obscure. Watch The Girl Without Hands and I think you’ll agree its omission is a mistake.

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→ March 10, 2017
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My Life as a Zucchini.

My Life as a Zucchini (original title: Ma Vie de Courgette) was one of the five nominees for this year’s Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, and the shortest of the nominated movies at just 66 minutes. It’s a stop-motion animation film with exaggerated, absurd-looking characters, boasting a wonderful story that strikes a perfect balance between sweetness and the sad reality beneath. (I saw the film in French, with English subtitles, but there is now an English version in theaters too, with Ron Swanson providing the voice of Raymond.)

Zucchini is the nickname of the main character, the orphan Icare, whom we meet at the beginning of the film in awful circumstances: He’s the neglected child of an alcoholic mother, apparently friendless, with only a kite and his collection of his mother’s discarded beer cans to keep him company. She sits in her living room all day, drinking and yelling at the television, but dies a few minutes into the film in an accident that Zucchini caused, which sends him to the orphanage by way of the cop Raymond’s office. At the orphanage, he meets the other kids who’ll soon become his friends, including Simon, the bully with a good heart beneath his exterior, and eventually Camille, the new girl with whom Zucchini falls in love.

Every one of these kids is there for some awful reason. Alice is there because her father molested her and is in jail. Bea is there because her mother was deported to Africa while Bea was in school. (Sound familiar?) Simon’s parents are drug addicts. There’s so much sadness underneath this story that it’s remarkable the film feels so light, but the script gives us everything through the eyes of the children, and it’s a world in which I wanted to spend so much more time. And how could you not care about these kids? The characters are all realistic – not in appearance, with their gigantic heads and arms that nearly reach the floor, but in conception and in their reactions to their circumstances. Even the rough stuff is played for laughs without diminishing the harsh reality beneath; for example, Simon is the only one who knows anything about sex (referred to just as “the thing”), but it’s because he saw pornographic films his parents would watch. It’s awful on its face, but his child’s understanding of what happened on screen is written so perfectly.

Squad goals
Zucchini’s motley crew.

While My Life as a Zucchini is an animated film, it’s not for kids. My daughter is ten, and I’m glad she passed on going with me, because I think the reasons the kids are in the orphanage would have upset her. (The sex talk would have just embarrassed her.) And while I smiled and laughed through most of the film, I was always aware of the sadness beneath the surface. Even the ending, which I won’t spoil except to say that it’s a happy one, still reminds you of the bleak situation these kids – who are in what I can only assume is the greatest orphan home in the world – face. They will always feel, as Simon said, that there was no one left to love them. Mining heart and humor from such fearsome material, based on a French-language book by Gilles Paris, is an impressive reminder of the power of a great work of fiction, whether book or movie, live-action or animated. My Life as a Zucchini can’t match the technical mastery of Oscar winner Zootopia, but its story is far more powerful.

Quick endnotes: If you see the movie, look for an homage to Spirited Away in the graffiti on the wall around the Les Fontaines orphanage very early in the film. Also, be sure to stay through the end credits (at least in the French version) for an absolutely precious vignette from the audition of the child who voiced Zucchini.

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→ March 9, 2017
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Long Way North.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences doesn’t release a shortlist of nominees for Best Animated Feature, instead simply listing all eligible films for a given year, with the 2016 list comprising 22 titles, five of which were eventually nominated. That’s how I stumbled on Long Way North, which is free to stream via Amazon Prime; directed by one of the assistants from the amazing 2009 film The Secret of Kells, Long Way North is a very old-fashioned sort of animated film, made in 2D Flash with a traditional feel and a strong, simple story for all ages. (You can also buy/rent it on iTunes).

Sasha is our heroine, the headstrong daughter of an ambitious Russian diplomat in the late 19th century, but after making a rather poor impression at her debutante ball, she chooses to run away from home to find out what happened to her adventurer grandfather, whose supposedly unsinkable ship never returned from an attempt to sail the Northeast Passage by way of the North Pole. She ends up on a merchant ship of tough guys who agree to search for her grandfather’s ship in hopes of collecting the enormous reward out for it, and, of course, she has to save the day through her courage and cleverness in figuring out where to look.

The movie succeeds on two core levels – the look and the story. The 2D rendering gives the movie a real old-school, almost comic-book feel, enhanced by the lack of contour lines in the film, giving the images a layered look, like paper or fabric pasted on backgrounds. In an era where we expect to be dazzled by animation – look at this year’s Oscar winner Zootopia, with its absurdly realistic rendering of animal fur, or Best Animated Short winner Piper‘s rendering of water – Long Way North delights with its minimalism. It’s a throwback in a good way, with an animation ethos like that of The Triplets of Belleville, where simplicity is given to us as an alternative to the near-perfection of Pixar. Once Sasha gets out of her parents’ dank mansion and into the world, the pictures explode with vibrant colors and sweeping fills that look painted on canvas.

The story is the real selling point in Long Way North, as it takes the coming-of-age framework and gives it a few more adult twists, even darker ones as Sasha and the crew face real life-or-death struggles as they approach the North Pole. Sasha is the center of the entire story and the only fully-realized character in the film, but her arc is more than just “spoiled kid meets adversity” or “child never gives up on dreams.” You know she’s not going to die in the Arctic, but the writers succeed in making her path from home to the Pole and back again matter in a way that gives us drama and tension without feeling forced, while also striking the right balance between rewarding Sasha’s blind faith in her grandfather and making her feel the consequences of the risks she’s taken.

The script itself has some really silly, avoidable mistakes in it. After an accident aboard the ship, one of the sailors rues the loss of all of their penicillin … which wasn’t discovered until about forty years after the time of this film. One scene has a character giving Sasha CPR, even though that technique was also decades away from invention. The Northeast Passage itself had already been sailed before the time of the story as well, by Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld, after several partial expeditions by Russian sailors. There’s even a glitch where the title of a book that’s part of the plot changes (by one word). It’s all rather sloppy, which is jarring in a film that looks so clean.

My daughter is a fan of any film that has a female protagonist, especially one who saves the day through cleverness or perseverance, and she loved Long Way North even though the opening exposition is a little confusing. I was more drawn in by the lush feel of the film at first, and didn’t find myself as caught up in the story as she was until the first third or so was over, and Sasha was in the small port town where she boards the mercenary ship. I would probably still recommend this over The Red Turtle, which was nominated for the Oscar over Long Way North, because it’s so much more accessible, with a better literal story (instead of TRT‘s more metaphorical one), and a brighter feast for the eyes as well. And in a related story, I’m hoping to catch My Life as a Zucchini, the only one of the five nominees for Best Animated Feature this year I haven’t seen yet, when it plays here in Wilmington this weekend.

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