Named after a terminally ill 16-year-old girl (played by Lola Petticrew), she is but one of three main characters in writer-director Daina O. Pusić’s feature debut. The other two are Tuesday’s mother, Zora (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) and a feral, multi-hued parrot who can change size at will and speaks in a sinister, garbled, near-stoned voice (by Nigerian born British actor Arinzé Kene.)
It’s really all one needs to know as it’s best to go into this cold. Before the film’s screening, a collective buzz between members of my film group and I speculated that it was to be an unusual one, possibly a slow, oblique art film along the lines of Jonathan Glazer’s Under The Skin; from the first scene, however, it was more readily apparent that this was simply batshit insane and fortunately, refreshing and unique. Even once one gets the gist of what’s really going on, the weirdness doesn’t cease; nor does an ability to surprise (one moment in particular is like nothing else I’ve seen outside of a Warner Bros cartoon.) Tuesday has the feel of a future cult classic and it’s certainly not for everyone but it is assured, intriguing and unpredictable. Iconic for multiple comedic performances, Louis-Dreyfus has rarely played such a dramatic, heartbreaking role, although as in the most effective dramas, there is so much humor laced throughout that it’s almost inseparable from the serious stuff. I’m not sure if this is as great of a film as it is an original one, but I look forward to revisiting it. Grade: A-
THELMA
June Squibb found success late in life, well into her 70s and beyond when she appeared in small but acclaimed scene-stealing roles Alexander Payne’s About Schmidt and Nebraska; in both of these and many other film and TV roles, her tart irascibleness emitted the presence of an esteemed character actress. Until now, no one has built an entire film around her; enter director Josh Margolin, whose feature debut is based on his own grandmother (played here by Squibb), a victim of a phone scam bilking her out of $10,000.
The thing about good character actors is that, given the opportunity to shine in a lead role, they usually knock it out of the park. 93 when it was filmed, Squibb’s timing and verve is undiminished, but with a naturalness and gravitas that transcends the “wacky old lady” trope. She also leads an above-average ensemble populated with other great character actors (Parker Posey, Clark Gregg) and in his final role, an affecting Richard Roundtree. The film itself is as light as air (almost verging-on-silly), but Margolin’s awareness of this and the script’s gentle satire of suspenseful Mission: Impossible like theatrics turn Thelma into the summer blockbuster alternative you probably never knew you wanted. B+
PURPLE HAZE: A CONSERVATION FILM
Alternate title: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Purple Martins (and Should Thought To Have Asked.) The largest species of swallows in North America, the Purple Martin resides exclusively in nesting structures in order to ensure their survival. Filmmaker Zach Steinhauser noticed how these birds tended to thrive in man-made bird houses constructed from holed-out gourds around his home in central South Carolina, sparking an interest in the species, following them as they migrated to warmer climates (most notably the Amazon rainforest) and back to their domestic homes which are increasingly threatened by environmental deterioration and lack of awareness. This is the type of documentary you’ll only see at a film festival: a little rough around the edges but impassioned and heartfelt in its agenda. Steinhauser is obviously working with a limited budget, but you rarely question his interest or dedication to the subject matter, which goes a long way in rendering this a better-than-average film about birds. B
HAPPY CAMPERS
Amy Nicholson’s documentary tries to be the low-rent trailer park equivalent of Errol Morris’ Gates of Heaven, offering a deadpan look at the last summer of one said establishment off the Virginia coast before it closes for redevelopment. Forgoing context and narration for a verite-like, interview-heavy approach, it’s a pleasant, gently rambling view into working class Americana, a community of tchotchke-filled mobile homes that might seem downtrodden if not for flashes of recognition all but the most elite vacationers will pick up on or the sincerity in how its inhabitants are portrayed. Unfortunately, it stretches out a nifty idea for a short film into something that’s a bit repetitive even at 78 minutes. B-
I saw eight movies at IFFBoston 2024; here are reviews of the first four.
JANET PLANET
As seen in a cold open too wickedly good to spoil here, pre-teen angst has served bespectacled 11-year-old Lacy (Zoe Zeigler) well, or at least to the point where she has her single mother (Julianne Nicholson) delicately wrapped around her finger. Moody but forthright, she spends the summer in their Western Massachusetts home in the woods carefully tending after a menagerie of little figurines, camped out in the front of the TV set and mostly taking her piano lessons seriously. Meanwhile, her mother becomes involved with three people to varying degrees, including a haunted divorcee (Will Patton), an old friend (Sophie Okenedo) and a pretentious cult guru (Elias Koteas!)
Nicholson is terrific as usual but Ziegler is a real find along the lines of Elsie Fisher in Eighth Grade. Somehow both mousy and poised, Lacy is a unique but wholly believable character. Credit should also go to writer/director Annie Baker, an esteemed playwright making her film debut. Set in 1991, this inevitably feels like it could be autobiographical (Park also hails from where it’s set) but what’s striking is how it uncovers so much nuance in its internal, seeking, near-deadpan approach. Little about the film feels forced or false and yet it doesn’t feel like many other films, allowing for hints of magical realism deployed with an unusually subtle touch. While not necessarily a “lessons learned” type of coming of age story, Janet Planet nonetheless tracks a pivotal summer in its protagonist’s life, leaving her at a crossroads as to whether her angst is at all worth retaining. Grade: A-
GHOSTLIGHT
It feels like a sitcom-friendly setup at first: gruff, middle-aged construction worker Dan (Keith Kupferer) stumbles his way into participating in a community theater production of “Romeo and Juliet” and discovers a talent for acting he never knew he had. That he’s also grieving over the recent death of a family member whose demise eerily ties into the play’s narrative is what elevates Ghostlight into something richer and darker; it would also seem ridiculously coincidental if not for Kupferer’s convincing presence (he’s mostly known as a Chicago-based stage actor) or a screenplay that withholds and reveals at the most appropriate moments.
Co-directed by couple Kelly O’Sullivan and Alex Thompson (who respectively starred in and directed Saint Frances a few years back), the film also benefits from casting Kupferer’s actual wife (Tara Mallen) and daughter (Katherine Mallen Kupferer) as his onscreen family–all three are more than up to the challenge of effortlessly recreating their real-life chemistry together. Dolly de Leon (Triangle of Sadness) is also a hoot as the irascible community theater player who encourages Dan to come into the fold. Truthfully, the film takes its time to get to a place where it finally makes a desired impact, even if it ends up somewhat mirroring that lengthy process all actors and theater troupes go through in preparing for opening night. B+
GASOLINE RAINBOW
Five teenagers set out from Nowheresville, Oregon in a worn-down van to make the 500+ mile trek to the Pacific Ocean. Along the way, they chill out, toke up, run into obstacles (including a fairly major one) and meet a variety of similar transients and loners along the way. It almost sounds like a group Gen Z equivalent of the road trip Lily Gladstone took in The Unknown Country except that it feels more casual and like a documentary. Given that this is directed by the Ross Brothers, it’s probably not the latter, liberally bending the real/fake line as they did in some of their past films, most notably 2020’s last-night-of-a-dive-bar reverie Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets. Unfortunately, this doesn’t retain the momentum or the interesting “characters” of that triumph and goes on for a little too long. There are great moments scattered throughout–the hopping of a freight train, a massive bonfire on a beach–but as a coming of age portrait of friends on the cusp of adulthood, it has nothing on something fully scripted/fictionalized like Dazed and Confused. B
MY OLD ASS
18-year-old Elliot (Maisy Stella) celebrates her birthday with her two best friends by taking magic mushrooms on a camping trip in the woods; while all three experience hallucinations, only Elliot’s manifests in the form of her future 39-year-old self, played by Aubrey Plaza. A promising premise for sure, but if you’re expecting a Charlie Kaufman or Michel Gondry-esque mind warp, note that this is simply an earnest Canadian film not without a few plot holes that gets most of its mileage out of a game Plaza. In my opinion, one can never have too much Plaza but as the focus shifts back to Stella, there’s simply not enough Plaza to go around even if what’s there is golden. Still, Megan Park’s film gets points for its relaxed approach to Elliot’s fluid sexuality as she questions her attraction to Chad (Percy Hynes White), an affable doofus whom her older self warns her to stay away from. B-
Like songs, poems, books and the live stage, films are another medium for storytelling. Even the most simplistic (Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat, The Lumiere Brothers, 1896) or experimental (Wavelength, Michael Snow, 1967) cinema communicates something to its audience, no matter how straightforward (the former a 50-second shot of exactly what its title promises) or abstract (the latter a 45-minute zoom shot directed towards a window in a room.) Arguably the best films either relay a story like none other or do so in ways few (if any) other films have tried. One might regard this as a challenge given the sheer amount of work this relatively young medium has already produced; even accounting for the small fraction of it that’s truly great (on Letterboxd, for example, I’ve given only about 250 out of 4500 movies (6%) a five-star rating), it’s easy to be critical/skeptical of finding new films that surpass or at least measure up to one’s favorites.
Still, I’d argue the notion that “it’s all been done” actually sustains an interest in filmgoing: one rarely knows when you will find something new to enter into your own canon of great movies. To develop a critical eye is to recognize when something is a rare gem, a work presenting a world clearly distinguishing itself from others while also meaningful in how it accomplishes this. Consider the titles I’ve included in this project so far: An irreverent, satirical take on the Arthurian legend that resolves itself via anarchy? A transgressive, phantasmagorical autobiographical sketch that contains as much razzle-dazzle as it does sober self-actualization? A revisionist Western, an idiosyncratic, kinetic extrapolation of a Herman Melville novel, a near tone-poem sculpted from the textures of an urban environment, even a war-tinged romance turned fantasy pondering the afterlife—all of these have singular narratives presented in equally original ways, even if they occasionally allow one to spot allusions to other works. All That Jazz, for instance, might not have existed without the influence of Fellini’s 8 ½, though most viewers would likely find more differences than similarities between the two; casual ones might not even pick up on them at all.
Through the years, I’ve shifted stances between whether form or content carries more weight in determining a film’s greatness. In film school, after taking a class on Avant Garde cinema and another called “Ways of Seeing”, I edged towards valuing the shape of a film rather than its story (no matter how conventional or nonlinear.) I’d chalk that up to my exposure to many different ways of making a film over a short period of time. When asked by family or friends if I ever thought I’d direct any films of my own, my stock response was usually, “If I do, they’ll be experimental ones”; obviously, I perceived myself as somehow beneath becoming a more conventional filmmaker, not realizing how difficult it is to craft anything on either side of the commercial spectrum (at least in this time before anyone could make a movie with their smartphone.)
Of course, while studying film, I was exposed to just as wide a variety of narratives as I were stylistic approaches. It’s easy to focus on the plot but also let it dictate how you feel about the imagery, sound, editing, production design, etc. For instance, I was so sickened by some of the content in Darren Aronofsky’s bold, numbing Hubert Selby Jr. adaptation Requiem For A Dream that I couldn’t appreciate its style one whit. In turn, the deliberately unpleasant way it often presented said content (my god, the unflattering lighting!) altered my perception of the material and may have influenced why I had such a negative reaction to it. For better and worse, form and content are equally crucial for a film to register and connect with me—as one should expect of all great art, it constitutes a delicate balance, a confluence of all of its parts coming together to somehow form a satisfying whole.
At one point in this project, I was going to include an entry on The Sweet Hereafter, Atom Egoyan’s 1997 adaptation of a Russell Banks novel about a remote community ravaged by the aftermath of a fatal school bus accident. Seen when it was first released during the holiday break between my first two semesters of film school, it had a substantial impact in how it played with time and perspective, its narrative generally nonlinear, certain information intentionally missing until strategically revealed as if sifting through puzzle pieces and attempting to piece them all together. It was the Toronto-based Egoyan’s seventh feature; I’d end up renting the previous six from various video stores over the next six months.
Sarah Polley in The Sweet Hereafter
Perhaps I’ll will write more about The Sweet Hereafter one day (it’s far from the only title I considered for this project but ultimately passed over); I mention it here because of its central performance from then 18-year-old Sarah Polley, a Canadian child actress who had appeared in such projects as The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, TV series Ramona (based on Beverly Cleary’s beloved children’s novels) and Road to Avonlea and Egoyan’s sixth feature Exotica. Nicole, her character in The Sweet Hereafter, however, was a turning point. With a naturalness and steel-eyed reserve, Polley had undeniable presence—magnetic without coming off as showy, thoughtful but not opaque. As the lone survivor of the crash, she’s thrust into a situation where she holds a rare power. As her backstory comes to light, she mesmerizes in how she wields such power while not letting us forget, heroine or anti-heroine, she’s still just a teenager, flaws and all.
The film raised Polley’s profile considerably outside her home country. Over the next few years she starred in a number of pictures from big Hollywood productions (Go, The Weight of Water, Zack Snyder’s Dawn of The Dead remake) to indieplex staples (Guinevere, David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ) and smaller, more intimate pictures like My Life Without Me and Hal Hartley’s No Such Thing. During this period, Polley began writing and directing her own short films, which led to an impressive feature debut with 2006’s Away From Her, an Alice Munro adaptation that earned its star, Julie Christie an Academy Award nomination. Along with its follow-up Take This Waltz (2011), Polley suggested that her skills as a filmmaker were up there with her acting, approaching material with a tangible point of view and a nuanced understanding of human behavior.
One can apply the same attributes to her third feature and first documentary, 2012’s Stories We Tell. It’s a personal essay film about her family and although accurate, such a simplistic description doesn’t do it justice. At least on the surface, it’s a template for Polley to interview her father, Michael, her older siblings and stepsiblings and an extended network of people who all knew her mother, Diane, who died of cancer in 1990 when Sarah was eleven. She accompanies these interviews with silent home movie footage and Michael (himself an actor) reading his account of the family’s story; in doing so, she explores in-depth the various ways of telling a story, considering multiple points of view, the abundance or absence of found documentation, and how all that information is shaped into a narrative, bearing in mind what’s emphasized and also what’s left out.
Polley commences by asking her subjects variations of the following directive: “Tell me the whole story (of our family) as if I don’t know the whole story.” To pose this instruction is a neutral way of building a story drawing from various perspectives, to see what details reoccur in each person’s version of the story and, more significantly, which ones conflict and contrast with each other. From there, the viewer can piece together a throughline narrative: Diane (also a Toronto-based actor) met Michael in 1965. They married, had kids and both mostly left their chosen professions behind to raise their family. In 1978, craving a return to acting, Diane relocated to Montreal for a few weeks to be in a stage play (called Toronto (!)); not long after her return, she found out she was pregnant with Sarah. After Diane’s early death, child actress Sarah, significantly younger than her siblings would become even closer to her father.
It seems a fairly straightforward trajectory until one hears numerous people talk about how, leading up to her time in Montreal, Diane and Michael had grown apart—she was frustrated with having given up her career to become a housewife and not fully getting the love and attention she needed from him. However, it’s not the whole story. 45 minutes in, the viewer learns that before meeting Michael, Diane was previously married to another man. Two of Sarah’s four siblings are actually step-siblings from that marriage; one of them describes their birth father as “controlling”. Deeply unhappy, Diane leaves him for Michael and as a result, loses custody of her two children.
Michael Polley
In the course of their interviews, multiple siblings and friends of the family remind Sarah that they used to tease her as a child because she didn’t much resemble her father, physically, stoking speculation that Diane might have slept with another man during her time in Montreal. After some detective work as an adult, Sarah discovers her biological father is actually Harry, a filmmaker Diane met while acting in Montreal. A DNA test proves it, enabling Sarah to forge a relationship with Harry while also figuring out how to break the news to the rest of the family, and in particular, Michael. Us knowing that Diane lost custody of her two eldest children also illuminates why she didn’t leave Michael and her two kids with him after meeting, falling for and becoming pregnant by Harry.
In unspooling this ever-more complex trajectory and keeping it afloat, Stories We Tell is a marvel of editing. Often, the film stitches together phrases from numerous interviewees with a swift fluidity where one could almost believe they came about as a mass conversation, like all the subjects were sitting together in the same room. Even if this were the case, however, it would sound more disjointed, like a Robert Altman film where words overlap due to the natural messiness of most conversations. Again, deciding what to include and where to put it is a conscious decision made by Sarah and her editor, Mike Munn. That it doesn’t come off as stilted but remains engrossing is the key to effective storytelling.
Regarding home movie footage of Diane and Michael, much of it is concentrated from their first few years together and the time immediately before and after Sarah’s birth; we also see scenes from Diane’s funeral and the years following it when young Sarah most closely bonded with Michael. They’re meant to accompany the story told by all the narrators and they often correspond neatly with what’s being said. It’s a seemingly excessive amount of footage and all reasonably convincing until, more than three-quarters of the way through, there’s some vintage footage of Diane and Michael where the camera tracks to the left to reveal a modern-day Sarah filming and directing them (as played by actors Rebecca Jenkins and Peter Evans.) At that moment, her voiceover notes, “I’m interested in the way we tell stories about our lives; the past is often ephemeral and hard to pin down.”
This late-in-the game reveal to exactly how Sarah’s been telling the story audaciously transforms the film. Suddenly, we’re encouraged to question whether any of the non-interview footage is real or a reenactment. Sarah’s initial correspondence and meetings with Harry, shot in the same fuzzy, silent, super-8 grain are surely the latter as are the Montreal rehearsal scenes of Toronto or the footage Diane’s funeral (who shoots home movies of those?), about which one sibling reminisces, “It was some kind of production; I felt like I was at a big play.” The stuff of Michael as a young child or time he spent with Sarah after Diane’s death, however, are more likely the genuine articles. Then again, we now no longer know for sure, and here’s the thing—it doesn’t entirely matter. Even beyond the “home movies”, Sarah infuses the film with deliberate artifice, whether it’s still shots and scenes of her acting (in caveperson garb!) in the film Mr. Nobody at the time of her first contact with Harry, or footage from the 1964 Sophia Loren film Marriage, Italian Style whose plot about questionable paternity provides an analogue to this film’s narrative or, most notably, all the scenes of Sarah directing her father in a studio as he records his own written narration/side of the story (multiple times we see her ask him, “Dad, could you go back over that one line?”, looking for the best “take” of his performance.) As Michael notes earlier in the film, “It’s all done with mirrors, mate,” a seemingly tossed-off comment suddenly more resonant after the reveal.
Rebecca Jenkins as “Diane” (or is it?)
Stories We Tell is the third film in this project that blurs fiction and non-fiction to a fine point. The other two, Close-Up and My Winnipeg arguably do so as narrative films exceedingly resembling documentaries to different ends: the former is a feature-length recreation of real-life events, while the latter is ostensibly a documentary suffused with fantastical elements to the point where the “My” in its title is crucial to understanding its idiosyncratic approach. Polley’s film is more explicitly a documentary in that it relays events that all purportedly happened, even if its subjects have varying accounts of such (for instance, Harry remembers attending Diane’s funeral, but Michael is nearly adamant that his wife’s lover was not there.) It’s no docu-fantasia such as My Winnipeg, but it does feature a slew of recreations that, like the events of Close-Up are presented as apparently factual (if in the end, unprovable.)
Films muddling this real/fake line fascinate me. After all, how can art connect if it doesn’t draw from some semblance of real-life experience? In my master’s thesis on Derek Jarman, I concluded that his art’s greatness depended on its inseparableness from his own life; such ambiguity has provided fodder for many films, from the deliberate, recontexualized performances in The Act of Killing and the more subtle, intentionally convincing ones of Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets to a prankster delving deep into the meta-ness of constructing what may (or may not) be one resounding prank in the guise of an entire documentary in Banksy’s Exit Through The Gift Shop. Reenactments often get a bad rap for their failure to convince or the level of artifice their mere presence suggests. Still, are they less pure than any other decisions Polley makes in telling this story? What’s left out or kept in or de-emphasized or brought to the fore can be just as calculating and indicative, documentary or not.
Midway through the film, Sarah recalls an argument with Harry where he wanted to write his own version of this story but she did not want him to publish it, hoping to give “equal weight to everyone’s version” (a lodestar for many documentarians.) Harry counters this by saying, “The crucial function of art is… to find out the truth of a situation.” Despite the facetiousness inherently unavoidable in any documentary (no matter how intentionally applied, like the “home movies”), to Sarah’s credit, Stories We Tell arrives at an unerring truth about the situation—one of its main participants, the long-deceased Diane, is unable to tell her version of this story. After Harry notes this, a montage follows of nearly all of the film’s interviewees one by one, each person silent, their faces consumed with grief, presumably thinking of Diane as a wistful, melancholic folk-pop song plays on the soundtrack. It’s deeply affecting for it reminds us not what the story is or necessarily how it was relayed, but why it was told.
Stories We Tell would end up Sarah’s last film for a decade as she struggled with a brain injury, eloquently outlined in her 2022 memoir Run Towards The Danger. She’d recuperate and make a triumphant return that year with Women Talking, an adaptation of a Miriam Toews novel that won her an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. It retains some of the thoughtfulness and innovation of her past work; hopefully, its success will enable Sarah to continuing making exactly the projects she wants to; preferably, they will look back to her third feature for a sense of inspiration and purpose.
Since finishing my Film Studies graduate degree, I’ve tried to keep up with current cinema, averaging about 100 brand new movies seen each year. I’ve cultivated spreadsheets of upcoming release dates, attended film festivals both local and international and in the past decade, habituated myself to what’s available for streaming on various platforms from The Criterion Channel to Kanopy. When I prepare annual lists of my favorite films of each year, I feel I’ve seen enough to do so with a particular authority and thorough knowledge (even if it’s impossible to see everything that comes out.)
Keeping current, however, does not mean I shy away from seeking out older titles I haven’t seen before. When I began studying film in my early 20s, what struck me most about the medium was that for being a relatively young one, the sheer volume of great, important movies to see was remarkably vast. Books, reviews, articles and recommendations from friends frequently revealed another title to add to my watchlist; when I discovered a new old film that I loved, I often wanted to see other work from its director or actors or even in some cases its screenwriter or cinematographer. Upon its 1996 release, Fargo made an immediate impact— over the next few years, I felt moved to consume everything else Joel and Ethan Coen made including past titles I’d missed (Blood Simple, Barton Fink) while keeping up with their subsequent work. I recall seeing the trailer for The Big Lebowski a few months ahead of that film’s release and thinking, a bit dumbfounded, “Well, it appears to be about bowling.”
Settling into a lengthy tenure working for a movie theater, I’d stay and watch the occasional repertory screening of something I hadn’t seen before. For instance, Billy Wilder’s The Apartment, the VHS of which I turned off after twenty minutes at home years earlier. Now, it either proved revelatory on a big screen, or perhaps I was just at a better age to grasp its unique blend of melodrama and dark humor. Likewise, I loved revisiting titles previously seen at home on the big screen, from A Thousand Clowns (with Click and Clack, the Car Talk guys introducing one of their favorite films in person!) to a front-row nosebleed seat to take in Persona at a much larger and more frightening scale than ever before (star Liv Ullman was present for that one, too.) With such an awesome resource (alongside a few other Boston-area cinemas with dazzling repertory offerings), I was watching less films at home (which would change radically during the pandemic, but that’s for a later entry.)
Reviewing a record of my movie viewing for 2009, my trusty spreadsheet reveals I watched 146 films that year including three titles seen twice (500 Days of Summer, Precious and Still Walking.) 84 were cinema screenings (all but seven of them brand new films); 32 of the remaining 62 watched at home were also relatively new titles (from XXY to Scott Walker: 30th Century Man) with twelve rewatches and eighteen older films seen for the first time. (Incidentally, I also saw Michael Clayton around this time but recently determined that I failed to record exactly when, so maybe these numbers aren’t entirely exact.) This list of older titles is unquestionably eclectic: Samuel Fuller’s art/exploitation hybrid White Dog; Chris Marker’s three-hour dissection of Marxism, A Grin Without a Cat; two unconventional comedies from the late 80s (Whitnail and I, Bagdad Café). There are efforts to fill in gaps by some of my favorite directors (Robert Altman’s Buffalo Bill and The Indians, Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point), a documentary about another beloved auteur (Waiting For Twilight: Guy Maddin), a pair of Douglas Sirk melodramas (Magnificent Obsession, Imitation of Life) and random stuff like, um, Troll 2 (more entertaining than The Room, also seen for the first time that year.)
Also on this list are another pair of films from the British team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. Powell generally directed while Pressburger mostly wrote the screenplays but they always insisted on a dual directorial credit (similar to Joel and Ethan Coen, come to think of it.) Also referred to as “The Archers” (their production company), Powell and Pressburger and their nineteen features together were generally forgotten by the public at large decades after their 1940s heyday. Not by Martin Scorsese, however, who cited them as a major influence and fervently worked to rehabilitate their reputations and restore their work once he himself became a renowned filmmaker in the 1970s. Thelma Schoonmaker, Scorsese’s longtime editor, even married Powell in 1984; they stayed together until his death in 1990 at age 84.
I don’t believe I saw anything by the Archers in film school; I was likely first aware of them when, gathering research for my master’s thesis on Derek Jarman, I saw that the writer Michael O’Pray cited Powell and Pressburger as primary influences on Jarman’s work (along with more obvious antecedents such as Kenneth Anger and Ken Russell.) I may have first watched The Red Shoes around this time, probably the most seen and discussed of their works among cineastes and classic film lovers. A Technicolor take on the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale of the same name, it’s both the Archers’ biggest hit and innovative for how it incorporates a lengthy, impressionistic ballet sequence in the middle of its 134-minute running time, a clear influence on what Best Picture Academy Award Winner An American In Paris would attempt (albeit at that film’s end) three years later.
The Red Shoes
I appreciated The Red Shoes but did not rush out to consume the rest of the Archers’ oeuvre. A few years on, I caught Black Narcissus, a gloriously deranged picture about repressed nuns in the Himalayas that culminates in a shocking-for-its-era depiction of raw female desire when a troubled sister defrocks and removes her makeup. Later came I Know Where I’m Going!, set on a remote, otherworldly Scottish isle, its black-and-white cinematography and heavily-layered fog rather hallucinatory for what was essentially a screwball comedy rather than any sort of dreamlike fantasy. Thanks to Criterion Collection reissues, these films became much easier to see. In early 2009, I watched A Canterbury Tale, a work from the Archers’ peak period but also one of their odder efforts. Set in contemporary (i.e. World War II-era) Britain, it’s structured around an American soldier (played somewhat awkwardly by actual American solider, Sgt. John Sweet.) Less romantic and starker than the other Archers films I’d seen, it seemed an anomaly in their catalogue (albeit one I mean to revisit.)
Much later that same year, I saw A Matter of Life and Death. Arriving between I Know Where I’m Going! and Black Narcissus, it would initially seem to have more in common with A Canterbury Tale given its setting: on May 2, 1945, less than a week before Germany’s surrender of World War II (filming took place a mere six months later), Peter Carter (David Niven), a Royal Air Force pilot, is shot down over the English channel while on a bombing raid. He jumps from the burning aircraft, but his parachute malfunctions; he should be dead and when he wakes up near the shore, he assumes this is the afterlife. However, he is very much still alive, for Conductor 71 (Marius Goring), a guide in guise of an 18thCentury French dandy sent to escort him to what the film refers to as the “Other World”, misses him in the fog. In no time, Peter runs into June (Kim Hunter), a US Air Force radio operator whom he initially communicated with from his plane after it was hit. They immediately fall in love (this is the movies, after all), which creates a problem for Conductor 71 who is tasked to rectify his mistake and bring Peter to his rightful place for “it was his time”. Peter refuses to abide, matter-of-factly telling the guide, “I’ve fallen in love because of your mistake.”
David Niven as Peter
It’s not that simple, of course. Through the observation of June’s friend Dr. Frank Reeves (Roger Livesey, an Archers regular), we learn that Peter is likely experiencing hallucinations and that his fall may have caused some brain damage. Whenever Conductor 71 visits him, time and space seem to suddenly stop. For instance, while convalescing at Dr Reeves’ home, Peter calls out for help when this occurs, but June and Dr. Reeves, playing ping pong in an adjacent room, can’t hear him—they’re perfectly still, the ball in mid-bounce over the table between them. As the hallucinations become more frequent, is it determined only brain surgery can help Peter live fully in the Real World; for him, however, this plays out as a court trial in the Other World where he must make a sound case to a jury to go on living because he’s found true love. His defense lawyer ends up being good old Dr. Reeves, who is suddenly killed in the motorcycle accident and finds himself in the Other World (or at least Peter’s hallucination.)
The contrast between the two worlds is the film’s most striking construct. Set up as sort of a reverse The Wizard of Oz, the Real World scenes are in eye-popping Technicolor while the Other World is shot in black-and-white. It was the first of three consecutive Archers films to be helmed by cinematographer Jack Cardiff; he’d win an Oscar for Black Narcissus the following year and go on to film The African Queen and The Barefoot Contessa, among others. The Real World is as scintillating and rich-hued as any film of the period, often highlighting fiery reds, feather-soft pinks and infinite blues along with dramatic close-up shots and ornately-detailed frames (Dr. Reeves’ home gives off a convincing illusion of an actual, lived-in space rather than a set.) The Other World draws more heavily on abstraction and German Expressionism: cathedral-sized sets (the court sort of resembles the Roman Coliseum), severely tilted angles and fantasy set pieces such as the ginormous escalator serving as a conduit between the two realms (in America, the film was originally released with the title Stairway to Heaven.) Although each world is clearly delineated from the other, they still give off the impression of existing simultaneously (hallucination or not)—one motif occurring in both realms is the appearance of oval-like shapes: giant, ceiling spheres peering into a seemingly endless Department of Records in the Other World are later recalled by Dr. Reeves’ unusual, mirrored telescope, its oval-shaped lens gifting him a view of his entire village in the Real World (along with the near-oval of the mirror above an operating table later in the film.)
The Real World
Although occasionally rendered via a simple cut, transitions between the two realms are often slow dissolves. They effectively personify the off-kilter, damaged mind state Peter experiences—at one point, while moving from the Other World back into the real one, the color literally returns to his face via a gradual dissolve. While succumbing to anesthesia for his surgery not long after, his eyes slowly close and the camera pans down (rather than up!) to the Other World. From there, the surrealness of his situation is made more explicit. During surgery, he has a literal out-of-body experience, his persona splitting in two as one version of him sits up awake in his own body, the other version of which lies still in freeze-frame courtesy of a visit from Conductor 71 and the now-deceased Dr. Reeves, rendered with a playfulness Bob Fosse would later reference inAll That Jazz.
For all of its technical spectacle and far-seeking invention, however, A Matter Of Life and Death is, like most of the Archers films, a fable full of substance and heart. As much a good old-fashioned romance as it is a fantasy, its ambitions never obscure the humanism continually evident at the picture’s core. Sure, Peter and June meet over a mayday call (one of the more dramatic of circumstances) but it still comes off as a meet-cute (“I’ll be a ghost and come and see you,” he drolly tells her amidst the flaming wreckage), further confirmed upon their unexpected, near-magical reunion on the ground. When Conductor 71 first materializes in the Real World, he notes, referring to where he has come from, “One is starved for Technicolor up there”; he also picks a pink rose which later becomes an item meant to prove Peter’s love for June (via his tears of joy for her collected on the flower) in his trial. Speaking of which, that whole sequence dominates the film’s third act. It may be a huge set piece with a cast of seemingly thousands of the deceased (from presumably every nation and culture in the Real World) and shot as if it were a heightened version of the political rally from Citizen Kane but it’s also laced with an approachable, knowing humor—when the prosecutor, Abraham Farlan (Raymond Massey), an American alive during the Revolutionary War biased against all Brits argues that his culture is more worth preserving and celebrating than Peter’s, Reeves plays a recording that approximates a then-contemporary American swing tune with mostly nonsense lyrics (to which Farlan scoffs, “I don’t understand a word!”)
The Other World – Peter’s trial
The film concludes with the two worlds finally, briefly converging (if only in Peter’s head.) Key members of the trial have literally descended into the Real World via the giant staircase, arriving at Peter on the operating table (who again wakes up as time and space stops.) The tears on the flower are not enough concrete proof for the judge and prosecution. They ask Peter if he would die for June. He says he would, though he’d rather live a life with her. They then call June to the witness stand, awakening her from a Conductor 71-assisted slumber. Dr Reeves asks June if she would take Peter’s place in the Other World to prove her love for him. She would, and as she steps onto the stairway as it begins to move away from the Real World, that clinches it—proof not only that Peter is in love but also loved in return. He’s allowed to live on in the Real World with June; the film ends with him awakening from surgery in his hospital bed to the sight of June’s smiling face. “We won,” he says; “I know, darling,” she responds. It’s a sentimental ending, for sure, but as usual for the Archers, it’s an earned one, with Peter’s words particularly affecting coming just one year after the end of a Real World War.
Although products of a time long past, the Archers’ work endures because their narratives, while often highly fantastical were always built on solid emotional foundations. Powell and Pressburger may have viewed the world a little differently than their homegrown colleagues or Hollywood counterparts, but they usually sought to say something concrete and resonant about the human condition. So much of today’s studio filmmaking values technical innovation over anything relatable from our own Real World. Whenever I watch a film for the first time, I keep in mind how it makes me feel, which can come from its cinematography, special effects, musical score, the brilliance of a performance, etc. In the best films, however, there’s also a deeper connection, one that not only changes our literal view of the world but also our perception of it. A Matter of Life and Death accomplishes this by recognizing the act of love as the driving force its title refers to; what better reason does one need to live?
I suppose Todd Haynes’ latest does for Lifetime TV movies what his 2002 film Far From Heaven did for Douglas Sirk, recreating an aesthetic and carefully tweaking it for postmodern consumption; it’s also a study of what it means to perform or play a role, the self-awareness (or lack thereof) in doing so convincingly and the long-term implications of surrendering to one’s own delusions. Arguably only Todd Haynes (with help from Julianne Moore, Natalie Portman and Charles Melton) could pull off such a tricky balancing act, effortlessly blending camp and melodrama until they seem indistinguishable from one another. His most psychologically complex film since Carol (if not Safe).
2. ALL OF US STRANGERS
Andrew Haigh’s (Weekend) most ambitious, personal effort, a loose adaptation of a Japanese novel about a man (Andrew Scott) confronting his past in an unusual way (to say the very least in avoiding spoilers here.) With great work from Scott, Paul Mescal, Jamie Bell and Claire Foy, Haigh utilizes a visual and sonic language that feels singular in its focus and drive. Call it a sci-fi tinged, queer mid-life crisis film or a less solipsistic companion to, say, Call Me By Your Name but note the key lyric from a Frankie Goes To Hollywood song (one piece of a brilliant soundtrack) emphasized here: “Make love your goal.”
3. THE HOLDOVERS
This return to smart, dyspeptic comedy reunites director Alexander Payne with another master of the form, Paul Giamatti. Not only set in 1970, it also looks and feels like something from that period with its painstakingly correct stylistic touches (opening credits font, slow dissolves, winsome folk-rock soundtrack), fully capturing the feeling and substance of a good Hal Ashby film. Still, Giamatti (an ornery all-boys schoolteacher), Da’Vine Joy Randolph (a cafeteria manager whose son was recently killed in Vietnam) and newcomer Dominic Sessa (the belligerent pupil Giamatti’s tasked to look after during holiday break) together give the film its soul.
4. MONSTER
The first third of Hirokazu Kore-eda’s first effort set in his native Japan since Shoplifters comes off as a darkly comic fable about a fifth-grader being bullied by his teacher; what happens next sets the momentum for a narrative only fully revealed one all of its pieces gradually fall into place. One of the director’s most accessible works due in part to its swift pace, the unique structure enhances its rhythms—it also clinches one’s attention with humor and a tricky premise but then extends an invitation to learn the full story and witness how we can instill change in one another.
5. SHOWING UP
Kelly Reichardt’s (First Cow) latest is a reminder as to why I admire films where, while viewing them, my perception slowly, organically shifts from “Why am I watching this?” to “I never want it to end”. I’m also drawn to those that delve into the notion that it’s always best to go with the flow. Naturally, Reichardt’s longtime collaborator Michelle Williams is perfectly cast (as a somewhat cranky but undeniably talented starving artist), but don’t forget Hong Chau once again killing it in a supporting role or the evocative sound design.
6. AFIRE
This might be Christian Petzold’s (Undine) most explicitly comedic film to date. It starts off unassumingly, slowly building its relationships and character arcs as wildfires remain a background threat heard about but only seen via glowing, burnished, distant skies. Like those fires, it’s a slow burn until, all at once, it encompasses everything in its path with dire consequences for some and narrow escapes for others. It’s reminiscent of a Gary Shteyngart novel in that it’s expertly constructed, caustically funny and in the end, tinged with tragedy and the possibility of transformation.
7. GIVE ME PITY!
Cheerfully billed as “A Saturday Night Television Special” starring Sissy St. Claire (Sophie von Haselberg), writer/director Amanda Kramer’s art piece may feel as if it’s beaming in from another planet to those unfamiliar with 1970s/80s variety shows. But she understands that if you’re going to make a feature-length pastiche, pinpoint accuracy is required (smeary video in the 4:3 standard definition format, elaborate wigs, neon colors, the requisite hanging mirrorball, vintage-looking graphics, etc.) It also gradually transcends its premise, peeling off layer after layer of everything that goes into a performance and the toll it can take on the performer’s psyche.
8. PAST LIVES
One can easily detect why Celine Song’s debut feature was so celebrated this year. In addition to strong performances from Greta Lee, Teo Yoo and John Magaro, it presents a love triangle setup with rare subtlety: it conveys its dramatic intricacies with grace and an understanding of what it means to be here now, always and forever one of the most relevant personal conflicts that narrative films tend to gloss over or simply ignore. It’s also invaluable as a record of how the present and past began to converge in the age of social media.
9. RYE LANE
British writer-director Raine Allen-Miller’s widely praised debut feature has all the elements a good rom-com should (sharp screenplay, appealing leads w/chemistry, plenty of laughs) but also an actual perspective that’s deeply felt in everything from the visual design and location shooting (South London comes off as vibrant here as it did dystopian in All Of Us Strangers) to the way in which it coaxes and earns its laughs. Acquired by Hulu in the US, it should have had as robust and expansive a theatrical release as Past Lives.
10. ANATOMY OF A FALL
A thriller about a woman (Sandra Hüller) accused of her husband’s murder that could just as easily have been a suicide, Justine Triet’s Cannes Palme d’Or winner is nearly as suspenseful as the best Hitchcock while also considerably more humanist in its depictions of the main character and her son. The trial scenes can be a bit much (e.g. the smug prosecutor) but overall this plays like a riveting page-turner of a novel. As the hearing-impaired son, Milo Machado Graner gives the best child performance in eons next to Lola Campbell (Scrapper).
11. KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON
Between the lead performances (Lily Gladstone, we love you) and how masterfully it builds without coming off as awards-bait, this already feels like Scorsese’s best of this century.
12. CLOSE
So much here is communicated through facial expressions and pauses in conversations. Explores the intensity of burgeoning adolescence in a way I haven’t seen done before.
13. ALL THE BEAUTY AND THE BLOODSHED
Maybe my favorite new documentary since the one on David Wojnarowicz, and his presence here doesn’t even distract from Nan Goldin, whose work and life personifies that blur between the two.
14. ROTTING IN THE SUN
The movie that dares to ask, “What is the biggest dick onscreen?” in all senses of the word; pretty ingenious in its use of a meta-narrative (plus Catalina Saaverda, as great here as she was in director Sebastian Silva’s The Maid.)
15. THE NOVELIST’S FILM
My fifth Hong Sang-soo film and easily my favorite for what it withholds and also for what it provides in return.
16. TORI AND LOKITA
Reassuring (if depressing) that cine-activists like the Dardennes will never run out of subjects stoking their outrage at an unjust society; one of their starkest and most effective critiques.
17. FALLEN LEAVES
A strange but charming middle-aged romance between a supermarket worker (Alma Pöysti) and an alcoholic laborer (Jussi Vatanen) that could only come from veteran Finnish purveyor of deadpan humor Aki Kaurismaki.
18. THE UNKNOWN COUNTRY
While it takes a little time to gather momentum, Morrisa Maltz’s narrative-docu-roadtrip hybrid ends up a fresh approach to telling a story of not just one person (Lily Gladstone, great again) but of the worlds she inhabits and intersects with.
19. NO BEARS
Of all the meta-films Jafar Panahi’s made in the past decade-plus since his government began enforcing restrictions preventing him from making another more traditional (so to speak) narrative like Offside, this feels like a summation, a crescendo and hopefully not the final word.
20. THE ZONE OF INTEREST
No atrocities are shown in Jonathan Glazer’s holocaust film but their background presence seems to permeate every scene with the horror of being adjacent to genocide and living with it. What’s tangentially acknowledged and left up to the imagination becomes just as disturbing as if one were to face it head on.
Courtesy of The Criterion Channel, I kicked off 2023 re-watching everything Mike Leigh directed up through Four Days In July (except for the presently unstreamable Bleak Moments) and concluded the year viewing every feature and short directed by Hal Hartley up through Henry Fool. In between, I saw lots of good stuff for the first time; here are my ten favorites.
1. STARTING OVER
As late-70s divorce films go, there are Kramer Vs. Kramer people and Starting Over people; count me as one of the latter. As a Boston-shot-and-set movie from this era, it’s even better than Between The Lines. Also, you have Burt Reynolds at his best (imagine if he chose to make more intelligent rom-coms like this!), the always engaging Jill Clayburgh and of course a hilarious Candice Bergen, truly “Better Than Ever” (at least until Murphy Brown.)
2. THERE’S ALWAYS TOMORROW
Even “minor” Douglas Sirk is pretty great because he just can’t resist a shot of three creepy clown dolls seconds after the opening credits or dialogue like “It’s just so incredibly atomic!” or weird framing such as placing that unsettling little robot (“Rex”) in the left foreground while relegating star Fred MacMurray to the back. If this were in Technicolor instead of black-and-white it might be as celebrated as All That Heaven Allows.
3. UNFORGIVEN
My attempt to see every single Academy Award Best Picture winner continued this year, with this one from 1992 by far the most revelatory of those I watched. As someone who has often admired but rarely loved Clint Eastwood as a filmmaker, “We all got it coming, kid” is a more vulnerable and profound conclusion than I would have ever expected from him. A revisionist Western nearly up there with McCabe & Ms. Miller, no less.
4. THE WAGES OF FEAR
Obviously no one ever told Mario (Yves Montand) (or his pal Luigi (Folco Lulli), LOL) about that old adage, “You Can’t Win.” A thriller barely surpassed in thrills and mounting intensity. Also, perhaps the best movie without a score until The Birds. William Friedkin’s (RIP) 1977 pseudo-remake Sorcerer is near the top of my watchlist, though I’m holding out for a theatrical screening.
5. THE SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE
Victor Erice’s memory piece should resonate for those who recall childhood as something approaching a fever dream—it may appear ordinary on the surface, but it teems with mystery and engages in the act of discovery. The kids attending a screening of the 1931 Frankenstein is up there with all-time great scenes of characters in movies watching other movies.
6. THE RIGHT STUFF
Maybe the best film about space travel after 2001: A Space Odyssey? Apart from sections of the score, it might’ve been made yesterday. Of the impressive ensemble and appearances by everyone from Lance Henriksen to Jeff Goldblum, it was most surprising to see how charismatic a young Dennis Quaid was—he lights up every scene he’s in and I can’t help but think his career subsequently did not live up to this potential.
7. MABOROSI
The title translates as “a trick of the light”, which Hirokazu Kore-eda already depicts masterfully in his first narrative feature. The subject matter’s not dissimilar to his subsequent films even if it’s comparatively opaque. Still, the visual language he uses to propel it forward is so inventive and intuitive I hope I can see it in a cinema one day.
8. VIRIDIANA
Often entertained but rarely moved by many of his films, Luis Buñuel hits the bullseye on this one—even if the moral now seems quaint, the audacity with how sinuously he blends the comic with the horrific to arrive at it still startles. As a lapsed Catholic myself, I felt both reverence at his depiction of religious iconicity and the wicked glee with which he masterfully dismantles it.
9. HEAT
In Michael Mann’s more-revered-with-each-passing-year crime epic, Robert De Niro’s rare stoicism beautifully balances out Al Pacino’s fervent (if inspired) outbursts while Val Kilmer’s groundwork eventually reveals itself as a life-force when he finally flashes that million-dollar smile near the end. A world I would never want to physically exist in but am happy to witness from the other side of the screen.
10. IVANS XTC.
Barely released at the time and long since unavailable, this early digitally-shot feature now plays like an immediate precursor to Mulholland Drive without much of the Lynchian weirdness but all of the gimlet-eyed perception of modern Hollywood. An Academy Award for a tremendous Danny Huston would’ve been much, much more satisfying than the two given to Russell Crowe around this time.
HONORABLE MENTIONS:
All The King’s Men (1949)
Black Girl
The Bridge on the River Kwai
Catch Me If You Can
Deep End
Hour of the Wolf
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
Lady Macbeth
Rachel, Rachel
The Third Generation
Tricia’s Wedding
Unbreakable
Trust
BEST REWATCHES (not including anything for 24 Frames):
Growing up, my parents and I revisited a canon of classic Christmas movies every year: The Bishop’s Wife featuring Cary Grant at the peak of his ineffable charm; Miracle on 34th Street with Edmund Gwenn’s archetypical Santa Claus and nine-year-old Natalie Wood giving her contemporary child actors a run for their money; Going My Way and The Bells of St. Mary’s, both starring Bing Crosby as a cool priest and in the latter sequel, Ingrid Bergman as his nun counterpart; It’s A Wonderful Life, its first three-quarters seemingly interminable to a child until George Bailey wishes he’d never been born and the rest is pure magic that director Frank Capra, James Stewart and Henry Travers (as Clarence the Angel) all sell the heck out of.
The three of us found a new holiday classic via A Christmas Story during its original 1983 theatrical run. In witnessing little Ralphie’s exhaustive efforts to ask for a Red Ryder BB Gun in 1940s Indiana (including the frozen pole licking, copious Bumpus hounds, an alarming department store Santa and his cranky helper elves, etc.), I don’t think my parents or I had ever laughed so much at the movies. An adaptation of humorist Jean Shepherd’s book In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash, the film was only a minor box office hit (although I recall many commercials for it airing at the time.) The following year, we saw it again at the second-run Times Cinema on Vliet St. It was as riotously funny to us as the first time. A year later, after cable TV finally came to Milwaukee, seemingly everyone had seen the film. At a holiday party that year, numerous kids remarked to bespectacled me, “You look just like that kid from A Christmas Story!”
I can credit Ralphie and company for a newfound desire to find more holiday films to love. When I was 9, my mom and I attempted to watch every version of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol we could see, from the 1938 edition with Reginald Owen to the then-new, made-for-TV one starring George C. Scott (I wonder if I could watch it today without thinking of his performances in Dr. Strangelove or Hardcore.) At the time, I enjoyed the novelty of 1970’s Scrooge, a musical adaptation with Albert Finney; revisiting it last year, it’s still a fizzy take on the oft-told legend with a terrific score, even if the Christmas Future sequence where Scrooge essentially goes to Hell is trippy, cheesy and very much of its time. The 1951 version still has the best Ebenezer, Alistair Sim even if his partial resemblance to Klaus Kinski makes me long for the Werner Herzog version of this story that never was.
Of all of my parents’ beloved holiday perennials, their favorite, 1942’s Holiday Inn, pairs Crosby with Fred Astaire. The former plays a New York City entertainer who retreats to the Connecticut countryside, opening a hotel/nightclub that only operates on holidays; it primarily exists as a vehicle for a selection of seasonally themed Irving Berlin compositions including the debut of what is often cited as the best-selling single of all time, “White Christmas”. My folks usually waited to watch it on Christmas Eve after I had gone to bed. By my teenage years, I began accompanying them, first viewing it on a VHS tape recorded from an airing on local independent WVTV Channel 18, then on a store-bought cassette and eventually on DVD. It soon became one of my favorites, seen so many times that I could probably recite all of its dialogue today. It hasn’t aged entirely well (gratuitous blackface number alert!) and some of the holidays celebrated are a stretch (George Washington’s Birthday?) but those Christmas (and New Year’s Eve) scenes are evergreens. The 1954 sequel titled White Christmas (duh) substitutes an absent Astaire with Danny Kaye; it’s fine but not nearly as affecting as its predecessor.
Apart from National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (one of my husband’s favorites), Tim Burton’s and Henry Selick’s The Nightmare Before Christmas (not a Halloween film!) and It Happened On Fifth Avenue (a hidden gem from 1947 about a benevolent bum and the kindness of strangers), as an adult I didn’t much seek out other holiday classics (despite no shortage of new ones via The Hallmark Channel) until the pandemic hit three years ago. With time on our hands and the world of streaming at our fingertips, we found a few worthy new candidates for the canon: Remember The Night, written by Preston Sturges and teaming up Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck (a few years before Double Indemnity) and Holiday Affair, a sort-of-comic noir with Robert Mitchum and a young Janet Leigh. However, the Christmas film I’ve grown to love most in the past decade is Ernst Lubitsch’s The Shop Around The Corner from 1940 with Stewart and Margaret Sullavan as two employees in a Budapest gift shop. Sharp and tender in equal measures, its stellar last twenty minutes is what all romances, comedies and romantic comedies should aspire to be.
In putting together the list below, I considered some excellent Christmas-adjacent titles like The Apartment, Carol, Holiday, Tangerine and Catch Me If You Can. In the end, I selected only films that I felt compelled to actually watch at Christmas and not any other time of year. I did make room for this year’s The Holdovers, which doesn’t entirely comply to these rules (I first saw it in September at TIFF and the time of year did not alter my enjoyment of it); still, it already exudes enough of that elemental seasonal spirit to earn its place here.
“Write what you know” is the most basic and profound advice I’ve received as a would-be author. For some, it’s essentially a jumping-off point, an ability to create entirely fictional worlds still informed and inspired by one’s own sensibility and lived experience. For others, the implication is less abstract—an invitation to write directly about yourself and what you’ve experienced without the pretense of hiding behind a pseudonym or a composite. As evidenced by this project and my blog’s pull towards critical writing and memoir, I tend to fall into the latter camp. Nonfiction has just come easier to me even as I’m often influenced by novels as much as autobiographies and books about film and music (among other arts.)
A preference for fiction or nonfiction can also apply to filmmaking. A director may choose to create new worlds aided by an original (or sometimes adapted) screenplay or relay a true story via a documentary or essay film. Some possess the talent or at least the interest and appetite to do both: Jonathan Demme following his iconic Talking Heads concert film Stop Making Sense with the near live-action cartoon fantasy of Something Wild, or Werner Herzog mostly pivoting to documentary in his later career while still making time for the occasional fiction feature such as Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans or Rescue Dawn (the latter a fiction remake of his own doc, Little Dieter Needs To Fly.) As regarding anything offering a binary as recognizable as fiction vs nonfiction, one doesn’t necessarily have to choose sides.
Where this becomes tricky and often more fascinating occurs when one blurs the line between these two approaches. Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-Up, for instance, recounts a true-life story by enabling its participants to reenact the events. The end result was by no means a documentary—technically, it was a work of fiction, for a viewer simply couldn’t know if the film’s events all actually happened, whether Kiarostami says they did or not. Some actual documentaries such as Man On Wire and The Act of Killing take a near-opposite approach by including explicit reenactments that are not fully meant to stand in for the real thing; the latter’s assemblage of former members of Indonesian death squads are asked to recreate their genocidal 1960s murders of the country’s communist citizens as if they were scenes in a movie. Also consider mockumentaries like This Is Spinal Tap, which clearly read as fiction… except to those who don’t know that they are and get swept up in their convincing, deadpan approach.
Guy Maddin is not what one would deem a documentarian in the traditional sense. Nearly all of his output is explicitly fantasy—even his works one could describe most as “realistic” and traditionally narrative-driven such as Keyhole (2011) or The Saddest Music In The World (2004) are not too far off from fever dreams (the latter features Isabella Rossellini as a beer baroness whose prosthetic leg is literally a glass boot full of her product!) Emerging from the ultra-indie Winnipeg film scene with his 1988 debut feature Tales From the Gimli Hospital, he had his peculiar, specific style already in place. Heavily influenced by silent film aesthetics (black-and-white cinematography, intertitles, archaic techniques such as iris-in, iris-out transitions between scenes), Gimli would appear to be a silent cinema pastiche except that there is sound (some occasional dialogue, even!) and an overarching surrealist sensibility that, while not at all modern, is something one would rarely mistake for being just from the silent era—contrarily, it’s more out of time and very much its own thing.
Maddin made three more features and a smattering of shorts over the next decade, but I did not even hear of him until 1998. He was in Boston for a career-to-date retrospective at the Museum of Fine Arts and visited my Avant-Garde Cinema class at Boston University for a Q&A after a screening of Careful (1992), his first color feature and most dialogue-heavy effort to date. Naturally, it was shot in two-strip technicolor (limiting the palette to two hues (and an occasional smidge of yellow) at all times) and the stilted dialogue had been translated from English to Icelandic and back to English again. In the classroom, Maddin came off as an affable (if somewhat bewildered) Canadian, just as my classmates and I festooned him with questions about his bewildering film. The premise? An isolated town that’s continually threatened by avalanches triggered by either loud noises or outwardly expressed emotions!
Careful
Like much of what I saw in that class, I didn’t fully know what to make of Careful, though it was unique without being obscure or off-putting; I duly rented the rest of Maddin’s features from my local VideoSmith. Two years later, his produced-for-TIFF short The Heart of The World won ample acclaim including the Genie Award (Canadian Oscars-equivalent) for Best Live Action Short Film plus accolades at film festivals from San Francisco to Brussels. Relaying a love triangle/end times/cinema-as-savior chronicle in the style of early 20th Century art movement Russian Constructivism (a precursor to Dziga Vertov’s Man With A Movie Camera and the films of Sergei Eisenstein), the short’s exhilarating, rapid-fire editing encompasses a dizzying amount of plot in just six minutes.
From there, Maddin was on a roll. With Dracula: Pages From A Virgin’s Diary (2002) he transformed a filmed ballet adaptation of Bram Stoker’s iconic novel into an experimental tone poem in his phantasmagorical style, while the aforementioned The Saddest Music In The World, featuring such marquee names as Rossellini and Mark McKinney not only received widespread acclaim but became something of an indie “hit”. These features were interspersed with a slew of shorts ranging from My Dad Is 100 Years Old (made with Rossellini about her famous filmmaker father Roberto) to Sissy Boy Slap Party (everything the title says it is and somehow more.) Cowards Bend The Knee (2005) and Brand Upon The Brain! (2006) kept the momentum going while also finding Maddin, perhaps influenced by his short with Rossellini turning inward and ostensibly autobiographical: both films had characters named after himself and took inspiration from his own memories (no matter how distorted.)
My Winnipeg felt like a natural progression from those self-referential works. Commissioned by the Documentary Channel (a now-defunct cable network), Maddin was given one directive for the project from his producer: “Don’t give me the frozen hellhole everyone knows that Winnipeg is.” Maddin gleefully obliged, crafting an unusual hybrid of an essay film that he described as a “docu-fantasia”. Filmed almost entirely in black-and-white, the final product is a mélange of archival footage, re-creations and new material shot to appear like it’s from the past (or some unspecified limbo) continually shepherded by Maddin’s voiceover narration. In other words, he made a Maddin film—a bittersweet love letter to his hometown like past cine-essayists such as Chris Marker or Agnes Varda might’ve conceived but full of potential tall tales and a liberal dose of magical realism. Did “Man Pageants” actually occur at the Paddlewheel Room in The Bay department store? Did “If Day”—a World War II-era demonstration involving a simulated Nazi invasion of the city (covertly serving as a cover to buy Canadian war bonds) really happen? “What if, what if…” ponders Maddin’s narration as a reoccurring refrain throughout; like Kiarostami in Close-Up, he leaves it to the viewer to decide what to believe and/or dismiss.
Brand Upon The Brain! implemented voiceover narration from Rossellini in its theatrical release, though alternate audio tracks featured other narrators, among them oddballs like Crispin Glover, Laurie Anderson, Eli Wallach, Louis Negin (a member of Maddin’s stock players who appears in My Winnipeg as Mayor Cornish) and Maddin himself. For this immediate follow-up, however, Maddin was pretty much the only narrator (even if some screenings purportedly substituted him with live readings from British “Scream Queen” Barbara Steele and the inimitable cult legend Udo Kier(!)) I was lucky to first see the film at one of its premiere screenings at TIFF in 2007 with Maddin himself narrating live on stage at the Winter Garden Theatre. While not as distinct a vocal performer as Rossellini or Glover, it only seemed right to hear these intensely personal words spoken by the man who wrote them, no matter how much “truth” they contained.
Guy/Darcy
“Guy Maddin” also appears onscreen in the guise of actor Darcy Fehr (who played another version of the director in Cowards Bend The Knee.) In the world of My Winnipeg, as a throughline narrative, a drowsy Guy/Darcy, slumped in this seat on a moving train looks to escape his hometown (“What if I film my way out of here?,” asks Maddin’s narrator at one point.) The city as blurred imagery through the train windows emerges as a dreamscape of memories that do not fully coalesce; the whole thing is made further bizarre by a few sausages inexplicably hanging from the train car’s ceiling on strings, gently bobbing back and forth over Guy’s/Darcy’s head. Maddin’s fragmented phrasing provides unsentimental but near-lyrical reverie acknowledging “The Forks (of intersecting rivers)… The Lap (of the land)… The Heart of the Heart of the Continent” that establish geographically-centrally-located-but-still-isolated Manitoba capital Winnipeg, a place where it’s “Always winter, always sleepy.”
Whereas some other filmmakers might confine themselves to Winnipeg lore and landmarks constituting a shared experience (The 1919 General Strike, Happyland amusement park, the saga of the doomed effort to save the Wolseley Elm), for Maddin, his own personal experience is inextricable from the whole (hence the declarative “My” in the film’s title.) Not only does he delve deep into places and events that had a formative effect on his psyche (such as the three-story Sherbrook Pool, one public pool stacked upon another and another with the bottom, subterranean level restricted to boys), he goes so far as to sublet his childhood home, a “white block house” connected to what was once his Aunt Lil’s beauty parlor. As part of a drive to “properly recreate the archetypal episodes” of his family history, he casts actors to portray his three older siblings, circa-1963 (when he would’ve been seven years old); his father is excluded, but not Mother.
For her, Maddin travels further down the rabbit hole in clouding the real with the imagined. The Mother we see on screen is to all intents and purposes for Maddin his mother. However, she’s actually octogenarian Ann Savage, an actress best known for portraying arguably the most frightening film femme fatale of all time in Edgar G. Ulmer’s 1945 poverty row classic Detour. Maddin actually gives the game away at the onset: My Winnipeg opens with footage of an off-camera Maddin directing Savage as she rehearses some dialogue. That he drops the pretense of filming his actual mother vs. casting a professional actress to play her sets an expectation that what follows is a fusion of facts and legends. It’s in line with Maddin’s long-running tendency to present modern day films as if they were remnants from the past or for that matter, casting other people to play versions of himself and his siblings (though he notes of the latter, they do “bear uncanny resemblances to the originals.”)
Ann Savage in Maddin’s homage to Ed Wood.
In Maddin’s accompanying book of the film, he says of Savage, “I knew there was only one person alive, who had ever lived, who could play the role of my mother.” He was fortunate to get her, as she’d retired from acting in the 1950s. The idea of casting the terrifying succubus from Detour as your mom is a twisted, brilliant joke viewers familiar with that film will immediately get, but Maddin doesn’t relegate her to a punchline. In one of the film’s more outrageous and entertaining fabrications, we do see how Mother made a living starring in Ledgeman, “the only TV drama ever produced in Winnipeg,” on the air since 1956 (Maddin’s birth year.) Every day at noon, viewers could watch Mother talking her son out of threatening to jump off a window ledge he had just climbed out on, driven by some sensitive fear or malady (usually instigated by Mother, naturally.) It neatly sums up a perceived dynamic between Maddin and his mother as depicted by an actress playing a mother who is also an actress.
However, the set piece that places Savage’s performance in nearly the same league as her Detour work arrives later with the scene she rehearsed at the beginning—a re-creation of the time after Maddin’s older sister Janet hit a deer on the highway coming back from a trip. As Janet confesses her accident to Mother, the old woman is not buying any of it. She suspects her daughter’s tardiness was due to something more sinister, more sexual. To watch Savage-as-Mother snarl accusations at Janet (“Where did it happen? In the back seat?… Did he pin you down, or did you just lie back and let nature take its course?”) is to see her young, dangerous Detour spirit flicker back to life. No matter how outrageous the exchange may seem, one immediately detects why Maddin cast Savage for the part and how her spitfire and dominance vividly embody his own idea of his mother (if not how the actual person might’ve appeared to us strangers.)
Citizen Girl!
As with many essay films about one’s own past, My Winnipeg is a pining for the way things used to be and what’s been lost. Nostalgia is perhaps unavoidable in such explorations, even if the ambiguity with which Maddin presents what’s real and what’s fabricated is a tonic revealing how layered and complex such thoughts can be. He spends the whole of the film thinking about release and moving on, but he has good reasons as to why he continues to live and work in Winnipeg to this day. One is a modicum of hopefulness, even if it means conjuring up a figure called “Citizen Girl”, a bold, beautiful warrior who with the touch of her wand could triumphantly restore the city to its former glory (including turning on the neon sign at Clifford’s, a defunct ladies’ apparel store that is a well-beloved piece of iconicity for certain generations of Winnipeggers.)
Still, one senses Maddin knows such conceits are just wishful thinking. Some things can never come back, like his teenaged brother Cameron whom we’re told died of some undisclosed cause not long after the period re-created with Savage. My Winnipeg ends rather wistfully with Savage and the actor playing Cameron in a surprisingly intimate, tender mother/son embrace. “What is a city without its ghosts?” Maddin’s narration asks and it’s the film’s central thesis. It lends weight to what simply could have been a kooky look at a quirky childhood. Indeed, the fluidity of ghosts and shifting, occasionally unreliable memories in this “docu-fantasia” hybrid seem to contain (as Maddin notes Sherlock Holmes creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle once said of Winnipeg) the “greatest psychic possibilities.”
IFF Boston’s annual Fall Focus is always a good bet: this year, I got to see four movies I couldn’t get tickets to at TIFF, and all of them were good-to-great (and three were filmed in Japan, coincidentally.)
FALLEN LEAVES
From its opening shot, there’s no mistaking this for the work of anyone other than veteran Finnish auteur Aki Kaurismaki. A purveyor of humor so deadpan, less attentive viewers might not even detect it on occasion, he’s influenced many kindred spirits and followers from Roy Andersson to Jim Jarmusch (whom he pays a somewhat twisted yet hilarious tribute to here.) His first film in six years is one of his most deceptively straightforward: a burgeoning middle-aged romance between supermarket worker Ansa (Alma Pöysti) and alcoholic laborer Holappa (Jussi Vatanen). The Helsinki settings look like they’ve been etched in time over the past fifty years, although occasional radio broadcasts reporting the current Russia/Ukraine war are scattered throughout. Happily, this fully plays to Kaurismaki’s strengths: of the handful of his films I’ve viewed, this is easily the funniest, especially the karaoke bar scenes featuring Holappa’s self-assured (if only to a point) co-worker/pal Huotari (Janne Hyytiäinen). As usual with this director, what would often come off as affectations for most filmmakers are in his hands fully realized and seamlessly essential to the entire fabric. (Grade: 8/10)
EVIL DOES NOT EXIST
So, Ryusuke Hamaguchi, what are you doing now after all that acclaim (including the Cannes Palme d’Or and an Oscar) for DRIVE MY CAR? A study of an environmental threat towards a remote community where a corporation wants to open a glamping (ie-glamourous camping) site, you say? Far more Tarkovsky than Ozu, EVIL DOES NOT EXIST is leisurely paced, visually stunning and and in the end, near-impenetrable–not entirely a deficit depending on one’s expectations. Arguably no other filmmaker would so totally depict the utter futility of “information meetings” where the concerns of said community are both heard and blithely dismissed, or take two characters who initially seem buffoonish and unexpectedly flesh them out until they’re nearly as sympathetic as the two protagonists. Those looking for another cathartic wonder like DRIVE MY CAR won’t find it here, but it offers a lot to unpack and ponder; at a mere 106 minutes, it also more conveniently lends itself to a rewatch or two. (8/10)
MONSTER
This is Hirokazu Kore-eda’s first film set in his native Japan since SHOPLIFTERS and also his first that he hasn’t written himself since MABOROSI, his 1995 feature debut. Rest assured, MONSTER is completely in the director’s wheelhouse of domestic dramas, although screenwriter Yuji Sakamoto’s ambitious, RASHOMON-esque structure is something new for the director. The first third or so comes off as a darkly comic fable about a fifth-grader being bullied by his teacher; what happens next sets the momentum for a narrative only fully revealed one all of its pieces gradually fall into place–one that also makes it tough to write about without any spoilers. I’ll just note that the end result is one of Kore-eda’s most accessible works in part due to its swift pace where the rhythms are enhanced by its unique structure, but also one of his warmest and most resonant. You can sense his humanist approach towards nearly every character as the story unfolds. In some ways, it’s a good companion to Alexander Payne’s THE HOLDOVERS as it similarly clinches one’s attention with humor and a tricky premise but then extends an invitation to learn the full story and witness how we can instill change in one another. (10/10)
PERFECT DAYS
Well, this was an unexpected late-career triumph from Wim Wenders, who arguably hasn’t made a good narrative film in over three decades; that it’s simply a character study about Hirayama, an aging man who cleans Tokyo public toilets for a living only adds to its allure. Featuring a powerful lead turn from SHALL WE DANCE star Kōji Yakusho (appearing in nearly every scene), this might be the closest Wenders has come to successfully making “slow cinema”. Scene after scene unfolds of Hirayama methodically cleaning a wide array of the city’s public toilets (many of them built for the delayed 2020 Summer Olympics) with pauses for how he spends his leisure time by bicycling, picking up paperbacks from his favorite book store, reading them as he has lunch in a leafy, secluded spot and listening to music on cassette tapes (!) while driving through greater Tokyo. It’s this last activity that’s most significant–not only does it give an outsider a vivid sense of what the city is really like, the music (mostly English-language rock from the 1960s and 70s) and its curation almost tells a parallel story. I’ve rarely seen such an extensive depiction of a character’s relationship to music and how it informs and fortifies his well being. While overall this could’ve been perhaps 20-30 minutes shorter, it almost feels hypnotic if you stick with it. The last shot, which returns to Hirayama and his music is a great one and also confirmation that this gentle, beatific but wonderfully human and flawed man embodied by Yakusho is a career-best performance. (9/10)
Day 6 began with a favorite that was expected, another that wasn’t and a third film that wasn’t in the same league but still deserves to find an audience. I squeezed in one more title on Day 7 before leaving Film Fest Land once again, returning to normal life.
THE HOLDOVERS
If Alexander Payne’s last film, 2017’s sci-fi allegory DOWNSIZING was a big swing and a miss, his latest plays it much safer for the benefit of everyone involved. A return to smart, dyspeptic comedy, THE HOLDOVERS also reunites Payne with another master of the form, Paul Giamatti, the star of his 2004 hit SIDEWAYS. Together, they’re a director/actor pair in sync with one another as much as Scorsese and De Niro or Holofcener and Keener.
The setting is an elite all-boys boarding school in Massachusetts 1970 (it was shot throughout the state, including a side trip to Boston.) Giamatti plays Paul Hunham, an ornery, pompous teacher who, like his Miles in SIDEWAYS is really just another masochistic, insecure underachiever. He gets stuck staying on campus for Christmas break to supervise the few students unable to go home. One of them, Angus (Dominic Sessa) is as intelligent as he is belligerent with a history of antagonizing Paul (and vice-versa.) Also staying on campus for the break is Mary (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), a cafeteria manager whose own son was recently killed in Vietnam. Angus and Paul evolve from being enemies to gradually understanding one another but David Hemingson’s screenplay presents this organically, further made convincing by the three central performances. In addition to Giamatti just doing what he does best, Sessa in his film debut is a great find on the order of, say, Lucas Hedges in MANCHESTER BY THE SEA while Randolph (MY NAME IS DOLEMITE) beautifully inhabits a complex character working through her grief.
Not only set in 1970, THE HOLDOVERS also looks and feels like a film from that period with its painstakingly correct stylistic touches such as its opening credits font, slow dissolves and winsome, period folk-rock soundtrack. At the TIFF Q&A, Payne mentioned that he always thought of himself as a 1970s New Hollywood-influenced director, so why not make a movie set in that decade. The highest praise I can give him is that he fully captures the feeling and substance of a good Hal Ashby film or one of Robert Altman’s smaller ensemble pictures. Though not exactly groundbreaking, it’s a solid, satisfying throwback and also a comeback for Payne as I haven’t liked anything from him this much since, well, SIDEWAYS. (Score: 9/10)
THE TEACHERS’ LOUNGE
A junior high school is as ideal a setting as any for a taut thriller and this German film gets all the little details right as to why—in particular, a mounting, no-going-back pressure of the sort easily egged on by early adolescents, although it comes just as swiftly from their parents and teachers. One of the latter, Carol (Leonie Benesch) has just taken her first job out of teaching school. She’s initially a natural—her control of and engagement with her students is readily apparent and impressive for such a novice. The trouble begins when a thief starts stealing money from various faculty. Carol is vehemently against the interrogation techniques the principal and her colleagues use on suspected (targeted, really) students. As more money goes missing, she decides to take matters into her own hands, making a shocking discovery in the school’s titular space. She’s also left immediately blindsided (and also targeted in a different way) by her action’s consequences.
I didn’t know what to expect coming into THE TEACHER’S LOUNGE, only mildly intrigued by its title and premise. I left it nearly buzzing with excitement from its cunning trajectory: in solving a mystery, good intentions end up backfiring magnificently for all parties involved. Meanwhile, due to opposing, unwavering stances exacerbated by public shaming conducted both in person and over social media, the tension ramps up until it reaches a near-breaking point. Suspicion, paranoia, desperation and hysteria all factor into how a seemingly straightforward conflict gets blown way out of proportion and the film rarely wavers in holding one’s attention. It may even go a little too far for some in the last act, though the final scene satisfyingly offers a modicum of closure for a seemingly unresolvable situation. (8/10)
WE GROWN NOW
Set in a re-creation of the now-demolished high rise towers of the notorious Chicago housing project Cabrini-Green in 1992, Minhal Baig’s film focuses on two 12-year-old boys living there: Malik (Blake Cameron James) and Eric (Gian Knight Ramirez). When not partaking in such activities as pushing a mattress down a dozen flights of stairs to use as a playground implement or playing hooky from school to explore the Loop, they’re faced with the harsher realities of this world: drug-ridden crime, drive-by shootings, reactionary police raids. As Malik’s mother Delores (Jurnee Smollet) looks for a safer environment for her family, what was once an inseparable friendship between the two boys begins to fray. While it doesn’t come close to achieving the rare poetry of obvious influences such as KILLER OF SHEEP or the fourth season of THE WIRE, this evokes a time and place in vivid enough detail (especially in the dimly lit, sparsely furnished apartments); James and Ramirez, both in their film debuts are also well cast. Still, it’s a type of story that’s been told many times before and far less predictably. (6/10)
THE BEAST
In past films like SAINT LAURENT and NOCTURAMA, I’ve admired director Bertrand Bonello’s approach and elements of his heightened style without finding them complete or entirely convincing. His latest gets closer than ever to feeling whole but that’s primarily due to star Lea Seydoux appearing in nearly every scene. Her Gabrielle is paired with Louis (George MacKay) principally across three time periods: 1904 France, 2014 Los Angeles and a near-future heavily shaped by artificial intelligence. Bonello will also occasionally and briefly shift to 1980 or the mid-1960s for scenes that seem present mostly to indulge in era-appropriate music or fashion. The constant throughout this is how Gabrielle and Louis spin in orbit but can never fully connect with each other for reasons not fully apparent until late in the film.
Very loosely adapted from the Henry James novella THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE, the film is perhaps overlong but rarely boring. It’s mostly a showcase for Seydoux and MacKay as they inhabit different personas in alternate time periods (the latter especially effective when shifting from a European aristocrat to a 21st Century incel) and, as usual, also one for Bonello’s depiction of worlds only possible through a camera lens. I’m not sure what it all adds up to although its fixation on AI seems especially timely and considered; let’s just hope it doesn’t start an accidental trend by way of its high-concept end credits “roll”. (7/10)
Haunted Jukebox 