Courtesy of Disney/Pixar.

Inside Out 2

Rating ** Worth seeing

Directed by Kelsey Mann

Nine years on, it can be difficult to remember just how prominent Inside Out (2015) was at the time of its release. Seen from a certain light, it represents the belated last stand of Pixar as the dominant force in American animated films, five years after the three-year run of WALL-E (2008), Up (2009), and Toy Story 3 (2010) seemed to indicate that the studio’s critical and awards cachet was only on the upswing; famously, the former’s lack of a Best Picture Oscar nomination had a substantial effect on the expansion of the category, allowing the latter two films to be nominated in turn. After two tepidly received franchise films (Cars 2 and Monsters University) and the moderately liked Brave, Inside Out seemed to general film culture like a renewed promise of original, whip-smart and emotionally resonant kids’ movies that could be equally enjoyed by adults. To take just two examples: it landed at #9 on the Film Comment end-of-year poll, a top-ten animated film placing only otherwise accomplished by WALL-E—and never achieved by the other best-known animation stalwart, Studio Ghibli—and received a coveted five-star rating from the short-lived, beloved website The Dissolve, a feat shared with just Her and Mad Max: Fury Road. Since Inside Out, however, Pixar has never even come close to the same level of critical respect, whether by dint of over-reliance on franchises, formulas, or weak concepts.

Thus, Inside Out 2 can be construed along two largely similar yet crucially different lines: as yet another instance of Pixar grasping at straws, trying to establish/revive a franchise that will attract people with their nostalgia for a beloved film and a better time for the company; and as an attempt to recapture the magic, to reengage with one of their cleverest and most complex ideas for a film. Much of the love for the original Inside Out came from the constant elaboration on its primary setting within the mind of a young girl named Riley, controlled by five emotions—Joy (Amy Poehler), Sadness (Phyllis Smith), Anger (Lewis Black), Fear (Tony Hale, replacing Bill Hader due to pay disputes), and Disgust (Liza Lapira, replacing Mindy Kaling for the same reason)—and maintained by a host of blob-like workers. Many literalizations of abstract mental concepts abounded: memories as individual orbs, ideas as little lightbulbs, personality and interests as floating islands, an actual train of thought. While veteran Pixar director Pete Docter and the studio’s creative team at large moved through these concepts with a surprising amount of ease, the original film nevertheless suggested a mise-en-abyme: since the narrative could not function without each emotion operating “out-of-character” at times, it would seem that each emotion themself has little emotions controlling their own brains, a never-ending spiral that stands in contrast to the relative simplicity of both the interactions between emotions and between humans. This, perhaps, is the best aspect of Inside Out: unlike other Pixar films about more-or-less actual people like say, the wildly overpraised Turning Red, the stakes for Riley are modest, reflective of the little struggles that can feel overwhelming to a young girl when faced with a cross-country move and the (in this case literal) loss of the capacity to feel joy. With the concept allowed by Inside Out, Pixar can have its cake and eat it too, offering all of the typical spectacle and adventure internally while dealing with heartfelt drama externally.

Given all of this, and considering that Inside Out ended with a just-in-case sequel hook with Riley about to turn 13, it might be a surprise that it took this long for Pixar to give this concept another go. But for better and worse, Inside Out 2—helmed by first-time director Kelsey Mann—reveals the strengths and limitations of returning to the same well twice, even one as potentially fruitful as this. Like the first film, it takes place over a compressed period of time, as Riley begins to undergo puberty right before she embarks on a three-day hockey camp. Learning that her two best friends, Bree and Grace, will be going to a different high school, Riley has to navigate the possibility that this hockey camp will allow her to join the elite high school team while also maintaining her preexisting friendships, and the circumstances generate four new emotions: Anxiety (Maya Hawke), Envy (Ayo Edebiri), Ennui (Adèle Exarchopoulos, inexplicably but wonderfully), and Embarrassment (Paul Walter Hauser, in a very funny almost totally non-verbal performance), who literally bottle up and suppress the original five emotions.

The essential narrative formula of the first film is brought thus back once more: Joy and her compatriot(s) are cast out of the brain headquarters and have to return in time to stop Riley from making drastic and poor decisions, in the process bringing back a crucial MacGuffin expelled from the center of Riley’s mind. That item here is, tellingly, an entirely new aspect of the mind: the Sense of Self, built out of many Belief System strands deep in the subconscious borne from specific memories; the visualization of this looks eerily similar to the Spirit Trees from fellow Disney release Avatar. While Riley does interact with other people, including her friends, her would-be no-nonsense coach Roberts, and star high school hockey player Val, most of her time seen on-screen is solitary, a set of individual actions and decisions that seems more coherent when prompted by entirely internal stimuli.

One of Inside Out‘s cleverer ideas lay in Joy’s inherent need for control, especially when pitted against the destabilizing presence of Sadness, and the climax involved her own (again, contradictory) capacity for growth; the balance between the two created the rare Pixar film without an identifiable antagonist, a reveal which often cheapens their lesser work. It may be too much to call Anxiety and her crew villains, but Inside Out 2 is terribly hamstrung by the clear characterization of all of her actions as negative in some way: the Sense of Self generated by the anxiety-coded memories is a twisted and jagged tree in contrast to the harmonious Sense of Self summed up in the phrase “I am a good person,” and the measures taken to stop any interference go well past even Joy’s worst decisions in either film. The result makes for a much more single-minded viewing experience, lacking the relative complexity within the parallel individual journeys of Joy and Riley.

(It is, however, tempting and fascinating to see Anxiety’s casting as a sneaky bit of commentary on the character: Hawke is of course the daughter of Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman, entering prominence at a cresting point in the overblown conversation about “nepo babies.” An excellent actor, she has also handled that line of questioning about as well as anyone, but the desire to fit in yet excel at all costs seems largely congruent with a person nigh-imprisoned by her privilege.)

Inside Out 2 also keeps in line with its predecessor’s opportunity to use the journey as a means of exploration, both of new concepts—a literal stream of consciousness, hidden secrets manifested in the form of atypically animated cartoon and video game characters, represented by a Dora the Explorer-esque fourth-wall breaking dog and pouch and a Final Fantasy-esque swordsman, respectively—and of old mental locales, all in states of disrepair and transformation due to puberty. Here, even more in the first film, the mental mechanics of labor feel even stranger and more dubious: the mental disarray of puberty is caused in part by workers breaking the command console (causing each emotion’s action to be felt that much more acutely by Riley) and going on a quick lunch break. The height of this takes place in Imagination Land, whose structures have been repurposed by Anxiety to force Riley to stay awake thinking of everything that could go wrong on the final day of hockey camp; these images are generated by a host of artists hunched over at their drawing desks and monitored by faux film cameras. The original emotions eventually break this up, indirectly invoking the speech from Network and culminating with an homage to the “1984” Macintosh ad (of course Pixar was mostly supported by Steve Jobs for a long time). The conception of this whole scene, which stalls the momentum of the film, feels odd, especially considering poor working conditions across animation as a whole; to more-or-less copy a real-world studio problem and resolve it without incident feels at least a little bit tone deaf.

Despite these flaws and the general familiarity of the scenario, Inside Out 2 is ultimately successful, in large part because, like in the first film, the embrace of a harmony and balance among the emotions is emphasized above all else. There’s something at least a little bit admirable in a film that’s willing to take the phrase “I got my joy back” literally, that recognizes that actions mean little without the emotions that brought a person to do them in the first place. Despite so many contradictions—for instance, the lack of these new emotions within any other person, only partially resolved by the end of the film—the central core of the Inside Out 2 films remains intact: a fundamental optimism tempered by age and experience, even if there’s a simplicity to its complexity.

Courtesy of Sideshow/Janus Films.

Evil Does Not Exist/悪は存在しない/Aku wa Sonzai Shinai

Rating **** Masterpiece

Directed by Hamaguchi Ryusuke

Hamaguchi Ryusuke’s films have never lacked a prevailing sense of mystery. Since his festival breakthrough Happy Hour (2015), his scripts have accurately been characterized as teeming with layered characterizations and rich dialogue, following a strict adherence to a realist depiction of the world: even the potentially outré element in Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy‘s (2021) third segment, involving a worldwide computer virus, has the effect of further downplaying any overtly “unrealistic” element. But within those putative restrictions, the expansive nature of his scenarios lead into uncharted territory. This comes across most obviously in the great ruptures and leaps of logic: the wondrous epilogue to Drive My Car (2021), which Hamaguchi included out of a desire to not simply rest on a “perfect” ending; the central disappearance in Happy Hour, permanently altering the relationship dynamics of a previously stable quartet; the sly echoes between Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy‘s stories.

Evil Does Not Exist concludes with one such disruption, perhaps Hamaguchi’s most daring gambit yet, but from its opening moments it leans with supreme confidence into this ambiguous atmosphere. The first sequence—a continuous tracking shot trained upwards through a mountain forest in winter, interrupted by several cast and crew credit intertitles—initially presents a readily ascertainable filmmaking process before the experience of “simple” observation—guided by Ishibashi Eiko’s elegiac score—gradually turns the viewer’s mind towards all manner of possibilities of perspective and motion orientation. As I watched, the movement even seemed to suggest tree branches animated to slide up the screen, an alluring, intrusive unreality that spoke to the uncanniness of the normal. That the matter-of-fact following shot—a close-up frame between trees that a young girl steps into, eyes cast to the sky—feels at odds with the smooth, majestic-turned-disquieting procession of natural images beforehand only deepens the unsettling feeling.

Of course, part of Evil Does Not Exist‘s allure lies in the complete U-turn it would appear to present from Hamaguchi’s wholly unanticipated worldwide success with Drive My Car, still one of the most unanticipated (and deserving) instances of universal acclaim in recent memory. A 106-minute film that emerged out of a collaboration with Ishibashi—intended initially to serve as raw material for a medium-length visual accompaniment to a live performance—and starring crew member Omika Hitoshi as taciturn village handyman Takumi, it in many ways is the antithesis of the sprawling, dialogue-heavy, strictly professional nature of its predecessor.

But Hamaguchi, as much as any living filmmaker, is never content to simplify his proceedings, to—contrary to Drive My Car‘s signature image—simply follow a road down to its conclusion, both in the arc of his body of work thus far and within his individual films. It takes a full fifteen minutes before the “central” problem of Evil Does Not Exist—a planned glamping site running into the concerns of the neighboring village—introduces itself, in an offhand comment only truly elaborated upon another ten minutes later. Within that stretch of time, Hamaguchi casts his watchful eye on the details of nature, simultaneously taking in the forest, the trees, and the people that move through them.

It’s certainly telling that Hamaguchi’s signature “point-of-view” shots, wherein characters unexpectedly stare into the lens in close-up, are here typically construed as being from the vantage point of specific natural details, including a deer carcass and a patch of wild wasabi. As with the humanity that has taken up so much of his cinema, nature is not merely seen as an amorphous, all-expansive whole but instead an agglomeration of discrete beings, each with their own particular utility: wood to be used for Takumi’s own fireplace, spring water to provide for a specialty udon restaurant, stray bird feathers for a village elder’s harpsichord. In the moments before the “narrative” truly takes hold—made most clear in an unexpected dream on the part of Takumi’s daughter, which flashes back to images from her walk home with her father in a chronological disruption exactly when the film’s flow had seemed to be fully established—these inhabitants’ harmony with the world they walked through felt completely settled.

Evil Does Not Exist has already been lauded for its fifteen-minute meeting scene, an exemplary series of quiet but firm rebukes to two company representatives doubly out of their element: in an area of Japan they are completely unfamiliar with (despite the village being a few hours’ drive from Tokyo) and in their actual status as talent agency workers, contracted by the glamping company to pitch this far afield project. In Hamaguchi’s typically egalitarian approach, the establishment of the key village speakers creates an anticipation and investment in the specific concern each person will voice, in the particular manner they will couch an unmistakeable anger with the calamity that may soon be visited upon the place where they live. It is made clear that this is not merely a case of self-preservation: Takumi notes that the region was only settled after World War II, and that everyone in the village is an outsider. But within these parameters, the delicate balance already in place must be preserved.

But here, Hamaguchi chooses to reveal the delicate balance of his own film to be far different than might be expected. Evil Does Not Exist pivots to focus upon Takahashi (Kosaka Ryuji) and Mayuzumi (Shibutani Ayaka), the two company representatives, first as they express their misgivings in a Google Meets call in Tokyo and then as they travel back to the village, hoping to ask Takumi to personally aid with taking care of the glamping site. During their drive back, the conversation creates a genuine back-and-forth for the first time in the film, a constant volley of conversation as Takahashi and Mayuzumi discuss their work experiences and future plans, with the latter even making fun of the former when she spots a dating app notification on his phone. The change in tone is refreshing, but not as a respite per se: the scene on the whole continues with the same evenhandedness of execution as prior dialogue scenes. Instead, it feels like a further broadening of horizons, something that opens the possibilities of what this particular film can achieve.

It is here, then, where the ending fully comes into play. Without saying anything specific, it is best understood as a continuous movement, the primacy of nature so fully embodied in the opening sequences reasserting itself upon this new understanding of each of these characters. It begins with a truly stunning shot of Mayuzumi at Takumi’s cabin, watching the fog roll in as a broadcast plays on the community intercom, with the natural forces obscuring what had on the road seemed to be a crystalline image. The ultimate occurrences are desperately sad, but, per the title, they cannot be simply distilled down to a judgment according to human values. Like with Ishibashi’s varied score, part mournful strings and part muted electronics, Hamaguchi constantly searches for a new means of conveying an essential mystery of human behavior; here, he has found yet another realm to ponder.

Courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.

The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed

Rating *** A must-see

Directed by Joanna Arnow

Over the course of a decade, Joanna Arnow has crafted a slender but vivid oeuvre of uncommonly personal filmmaking. Before last year, she had directed exactly three films: the 56-minute mid-length documentary i hate myself 🙂 (2013), the 11-minute black-and-white narrative short Bad at Dancing (2015), and the 6-minute narrative short Laying Out (2019). Each featured herself front and center, delving largely into issues and anxieties surrounding sexuality, social and familial relationships, and codes of behavior in New York City, poking and prodding at the boundaries with a disarming, self-conscious awkwardness. The concluding scenes of i hate myself 🙂, which feature Arnow showing the film she had made to her parents and her then-boyfriend, form a gauntlet throw of self-reflexivity and devil-may-care attitude that each of her films since then has explored.

Arnow’s narrative feature debut The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed, despite running just 87 minutes, is longer than her entire previous body of work combined, correlating to a pronounced leap in scale and ambition. For the first time, Arnow plays a character not named after herself: Ann, a New Yorker in her thirties mired in a bland corporate job and, at the start of the film, in a long-term casual BDSM relationship with Allen (Scott Cohen), an older and more affluent man. Eventually, she begins exploring arrangements with other men as sign-posted by the five chapters of hilariously unequal length, each named after one or more men that she meets. The most notable newcomer is the sweet and caring Chris (Babak Tafti), though the film ultimately makes no feints at decisive change.

To convey all of this, The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed (a title so fittingly melancholy yet ludicrously distended that typing it all out is its own pleasure) opts for an almost prismatic approach, drawing out Ann’s life of near-constant humiliation—desired in sexual encounters but dreaded in work and familial interactions—as a cyclical series of shards of time, often honed by Arnow herself down to a single isolated exchange that cuts away right before an anticipated punchline. The effect, to put it crudely, is almost a continual coitus interruptus, and indeed while the film does not shy away from the consensual harshness and even absurdity of the dominant/submissive arrangements that Ann enters into—she’s almost always fully nude when she’s with Allen, and dons a “fuckpig” costume when with Elliot (Parish Bradley)—she’s rarely (if ever) seen experiencing genuine sexual pleasure. The performativity, the satisfaction of a job well-done seems to be its own fulfillment.

While The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed does contain plenty of mortifying humor in line with Arnow’s past work, the range afforded by a much longer runtime expands the opportunities for perpetual, low-key embarrassment. Where shorts like “Bad at Dancing” and “Laying Out” were hermetic in their focus on just two or three characters, and i hate myself 🙂 was entirely consumed by a few relationships, this new film is free to let its focus drift. Ann/Arnow is always retained as a center, but the comedy is allowed to drift out from her environs to a much greater degree than before: hackneyed business mantras a decade behind the times, the travails of dating apps, even an eerily prescient conversation about Zionism are evoked with ease. Each little scene has the capacity to suddenly evolve and take on a different intention, and the collision between the areas of Ann’s life without letting them overlap produces a synthesis towards understanding her desires and frustrations.

It’s well worth noting that Arnow, with this film especially, is operating within a very particular New York cineaste milieu. The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed is co-produced by Graham Swon, the independent maven involved with such vital works as Dan Sallitt’s Fourteen, Ted Fendt’s Classical Period, and Matías Piñeiro’s Hermia & Helena; it’s shot in cool, no-fuss digital by Barton Cortright, who also lensed Swon’s The World Is Full of Secrets and Ricky D’Ambrose’s The Cathedral; and it features a bevy of familiar faces in its cast and extras: Keith Poulson, Bingham Bryant, C. Mason Wells, Maddie Whittle, and Charles Bramesco among countless others.

Ann is seen carrying a Film at Lincoln Center tote in several scenes, and a few very curious film artifacts crop up throughout. At one point, she mentions that her favorite song is the theme to the fictitious film In the Act of Wishing for Love, and the track that plays (by composer Robinson Senpauroca) is a clear parody of In the Mood for Love‘s use of “Yumeji’s Theme”; this scene is later counter-balanced by a truly odd moment where she sings a song that can only be described as Les Misérables starring Sirius Black. Additionally, there is a rather intriguing mention in the credits for Andrei Ujică’s cosmonaut documentary Out of the Present (whose use I sadly was unable to spot), and the prominent use of two films-within-films with a special “experimental film cinematographer” credit for Charlotte Hornsby. Those both come on dates with Chris: the first a split-screen landscape film focused on waves (which may takes place at Anthology Film Archives) and the second a digital black-and-white French musical featuring a female singer and a male guitarist. Of all things, the man’s countenance and the welcome low-budget stiltedness suggested to me Pierre Léon’s L’Idiot (2008), another film with brilliant use of limited means and space.

All of this is very funny, and contributes to a melting pot of interests that can be further extrapolated to influences (Pialat of course comes to mind). But The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed is Arnow’s through and through, down to the casting of her own parents (something of a feat considering how upset they were at the end of i hate myself 🙂). Her long-shot frames, frequently at oblique angles, provide an ideal vantage point to observe a life slightly askew, and for all of its humor and self-conscious silliness, the aggregate is something more pensive. In the penultimate scene, Arnow’s father apologizes for overcooking the fish, ruefully commenting on how much there is of it. Both a (unconscious or not) riposte to Woody Allen’s opening Annie Hall monologue and a complete summation of her work thus far, Arnow’s choice is to keep going nevertheless, burrowing ever further into the strangeness of modern life.

Courtesy of Sideshow/Janus Films.

The Beast/La Bête

Rating **** Masterpiece

Directed by Bertrand Bonello

In the past five years or so, at least two of the greatest films have also provided their own radical versions of adaptation. Christian Petzold’s Transit (2018) left the events of Anna Seghers’s novel mostly intact, but augmented its concerns through both image and word, deliberately obfuscating the time period in which the film is set and adding a discordant narration that reflects back on the nature of storytelling in times of immense crisis. Even more boldly, Hamaguchi Ryusuke’s Drive My Car (2021) drastically expanded Murakami Haruki’s short story, using disparate elements not only from the author’s body of work but also Anton Chekov’s Uncle Vanya to create an all-encompassing meditation on artistic creation and the strife and potential healing within relationships. 2023 also saw a surfeit of unconventional adaptations, with Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, and Trần Anh Hùng’s The Taste of Things all zeroing in on one aspect of their sources or shifting their focal points, all to fascinating if not entirely successful ends.

But the greatest adaptation to premiere last year came from an unlikely source: Bertrand Bonello. Despite his palpable interest in inspirations both historical—Saint Laurent, Zombi Child—and mythical—Tiresia—his latest magnum opus, The Beast, is his first work of explicit adaptation, with the screenplay credited to himself in collaboration with Benjamin Charbit and Guillaume Bréaud, “freely inspired” by Henry James’s legendary 1903 novella The Beast in the Jungle. “Freely” is even perhaps pushing it: it is almost an impudent work of adaptation, spooling out James’s story of devastating melancholy between an Englishman anticipating a sudden catastrophic event and the woman who agrees to keep watch with him into a tripartite tale of thwarted connection across the ages. In 1910 Paris, on the eve of the Great Flood, concert pianist Gabrielle (Léa Seydoux) and Englishman Louis (George MacKay) reconnect over her premonition; in 2014 Los Angeles, aspiring actress Gabrielle is stalked by Louis, now an American incel; and in 2044 Paris, Gabrielle meets Louis while deciding whether to undergo an AI-recommended procedure to “cleanse” her DNA by reliving her past lives to purge her emotions.

Making the appearance of The Beast all the stranger is the existence another 2023 adaptation: Patric Chiha’s The Beast in the Jungle is a putatively more faithful reworking of James, retaining the original story’s names and tracking their interactions over the course of 25 years (beginning in 1979) in a Parisian nightclub. The differences are instructive, despite both directors’ entrancing focus on mood and texture. Chiha sticks close (but not entirely) to the letter of the novella: the outlines are the same, especially with the climactic scenes, and yet the tangents open up the hermetically sealed emotions of James’s characters. Numerous signposts are given, most of all the specter of AIDS which devastates the openly queer nightclub’s population, and the seemingly virginal James protagonists are swapped in for people with relationships of varying levels of success and intimacy.

For his part, Bonello plays with such expectations of fidelity from his first image: Seydoux in a green-screen studio (in what the viewer will later learn is her 2014 guise), taking off-screen directions from Bonello himself, as she performs actions of a woman in trouble, before her image and screen bleeds into a digitally artifacted blur that serves as the title card. The film then moves into the 1910 section, which recreates the first chapter of James’s novella to a T; immediately afterwards, the 2044 thread is introduced, and little after that is directly retained from James. The 1910 and 2014 sections play out over their respective halves of the film (only one shot from 2014 is intermingled with its predecessor), with the 2044 setting interspersed at unexpected intervals, a decision which, rather than deemphasizing futuristic speculation in favor of twinned tragic tales, explicitly casts the future as an inherently ethereal, inexplicable realm woven into our collective past and present, all the more vivid for its eerily quiet Paris, empty of cars and computer screens but always full of a certain menace.

Bonello’s never been shy about divulging his influences, and it’s easy to further extrapolate potential precedents for The Beast. There is of course Brian De Palma, whose self-casting in The Black Dahlia as a sleazy Hollywood director mirrors Bonello’s voice in the prologue. Of all people, Jia Zhangke seems to have made an impression with his two recent tripartite films, both of which bear a resemblance: Mountains May Depart with its past/present/near-future set-up (though the use of 4:3 is applied here to the future), and Ash Is Purest White in the use of past time periods to in effect revisit past works, with 1910 corresponding somewhat closely to House of Tolerance and 2014 to Nocturama. But while that latter film was equally indebted to Dawn of the Dead and Alan Clarke’s Elephant, and parts of Zombi Child are in conversation with I Walked With a Zombie, The Beast shares its clearest touchstone with its predecessor—filmed during a year-long delay in production—Coma: David Lynch. Paradoxically, the eighty-minute Coma feels closer to Inland Empire‘s complete dislocation, while the two-hour-and-forty-minute The Beast shares its own DNA primarily with Mulholland Dr., embracing the seductive Hollywood textures even as darkness rapidly approaches; even considering changing cultural preferences, Seydoux’s noticeably shorter hairstyle here compared to the other two sections suggests a kinship with Naomi Watts in Lynch’s 2001 masterpiece, as does her status as a woman staying in a residence not her own while trying to break into the industry. The extremely prominent use of Roy Orbison’s “Evergreen” only drives home the connection.

Bonello’s process for adaptation, like his proclivity towards inspiration, seems to be one of unique, discerning absorption, open to pulling from the unlikeliest of sources and repurposing them for his own uses. The boldest of these, of course, is the mass shooter Elliot Rodger, who killed six people at the University of California, Santa Barbara 2014 in a misogynist rage. Bonello intersperses recreations of several of his manifesto videos featuring Louis throughout Gabrielle’s 2014 narrative, and his fascination with the clear means of address that lay bare hatred and insecurity turns the first section’s tentative, repressed duet into a series of indecisive point/iron-willed counterpoint. In turn, the pronounced inequality in the span of years between the three time periods suggests a fracture in connections exacerbated by the events of this middle section, an acceleration towards oblivion.

There is too much contained in The Beast to even begin to encapsulate. For one, it’s still difficult to watch this film and MacKay’s brilliant, watchful performance without picturing how Gaspard Ulliel, a longtime Bonello collaborator originally cast in the part before the production delay and his untimely death in a skiing accident, would have played the part; on the other hand, the shifting identity and personality of Louis in relation to Gabrielle’s steady, tremulous presence is only enhanced by having a non-French actor assume these different forms. There’s also of course the sheer pleasure of watching Bonello shoot in Los Angeles (even catching a glimpse of a taco truck at one point), a mood consonant with yet distinct from his unrivaled work with Paris at night. Even the casting of three of the only significant characters besides the main duo bears mentioning: Guslagie Malanda from Saint Omer as an android in 2044; filmmaker and Red Scare podcaster Dasha Nekrasova as a model friend of Gabrielle in 2014; and producer Xavier Dolan as the voice of the AI guiding Gabrielle in 2044. These three oddly discordant choices, each seeming to represent entirely different strands of film culture, feel in line with Gabrielle’s computer in 2014 constantly contending with real-world events and online detritus that, taken together, form something genuinely unnerving: news coverage of the Ferguson uprising literally backgrounded, pop-up ads featuring a prescient description of a Trump presidency and promises of Kim Kardashian nudes, even some clips from Trash Humpers.

The general cacophony suggested by this hailstorm of information, however, does not truly describe the experience of The Beast, and how both Bonello and Seydoux contribute to the singular, overwhelming mood. Seydoux has been on one of the great acting runs of the twenty-first century, turning out what would conceivably be career-best work for anyone else in three consecutive years between France (2021), One Fine Morning (2022), and now this film; like in the former, so much power is derived from the shifting landscape that is Seydoux’s face, the terror, pleasure, and confusion that she vividly displays. Across the three parts united under Bonello’s implacable camera and alternately lush and cold surfaces, various motifs recur both within—most notably a nightclub in 2044 that is patterned at various times after the music and decor of 1972, 1980, and 1963—and across different parts: dolls (suggestively made out of celluloid in the 35mm-shot first part), shared musical pieces, psychics, and incongruously pigeons as a harbinger of death. What this all adds up to is something inexplicable, completely breaking from the letter of James but totally in line with the horrifyingly sad spirit: that when the final hammer blow comes, it will be in the most impossible of ways; that one life is not enough to contain the devastation that a single person will feel.

Courtesy of MUBI.

Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World/Nu aștepta prea mult de la sfârșitul lumii

Rating **** Masterpiece

Directed by Radu Jude

Few directors working today can claim to have had as protean an oeuvre in as a short time as Radu Jude. He first began somewhere in the realm of contemplative cinema, with his international breakthrough Afterim! (2015) and considerably lesser-seen Scarred Hearts (2016) essaying self-consciously “antiquated” visual schemes—black-and-white widescreen in the former, color Academy ratio in the latter, both on 35mm—to capture historical periods constantly under the shadow of colonial and fascist forces. Since his decisive turn (in the narrative realm) to satire, inaugurated with “I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians” (2018) and solidified with his Golden Bear-winning Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn (2021), the same intellectual rigor which undergirded those earlier efforts has been turned towards outright comedy. The opening moments of Barbarians, where the lead actress (purportedly out of character) tells a boxing joke that invokes Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, set the fast-and-loose, unpredictable tone and spiral of citations and references.

Jude’s latest and best film to date, Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World, at least somewhat continues in the same vein as those previous two narrative features. Like those, it is centered upon a woman dealing with issues related to work—a director attempting to mount a reenactment of a massacre in Barbarians, a schoolteacher caught in a porn scandal in Bad Luck Banging—and features a decisive switch from celluloid to digital cinematography more than halfway through the film. Here, the woman is Angela (Ilinca Manolache), an overworked production assistant driving around Bucharest to film injured workers auditioning to be in a factory safety video; like Bad Luck, where the third part of the film used digital cameras to delineate the rancorous parent-teacher meeting, the second and final part of Do Not Expect uses a digital single 35-minute long take to capture the filming of the video.

But where Barbarians maintained a consistent pattern of philosophical and historical debate, and Bad Luck Banging confined its own shape-shifting play between fiction and archival signification to three separate parts, Do Not Expect refuses such boundaries to bracing, illuminating effect. Such interplay begins immediately with the first part, running over two hours in this 163-minute film, situated as a conversation of two Angelas: our heroine and the protagonist of the 1981 film Angela Moves On by Lucian Bratu. Extensive clips are used from that preexisting film, presented in both Academy ratio and 1.85:1, with the pale colors making for a stark contrast with Jude’s hazy black-and-white 16mm. These are in turn interrupted by Angela’s way of blowing off steam: an online persona named Bobiță, with Angela using an absurd Andrew Tate-esque face filter to make various crude and misogynistic jokes; these sequences are presented as bright digital iPhone footage.

What the proto-feminist film and the foul-mouthed TikTok personality have in common is a certain “found” nature: Manolache had apparently been posting as Bobiță, and when Jude learned about it he wanted to incorporate it. In interviews, he has talked about both his mixed-to-low opinion of the film—whose footage is frequently slowed down and zoomed-in to reveal images/signifiers of life under Ceaușescu missed by the censors—and his fascination with TikTok, comparing it to early silent cinema in its promise and capacity for invention, but what’s fascinating is how Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World avoids such associations. For one, the film embraces a certain slowness that matches the grind of Angela’s quotidian work experience: much of the film just observes both Angelas driving, and despite the frequent unpleasant interactions with other cars and blasting of music to stay awake, there is a certain pensive, even hypnotic quality that emerges.

This isn’t to say that Do Not Expect isn’t incredibly funny, both with its vulgarity and barrage of references—a single scene manages to reference Antonioni, Warhol, Freaks, and Godard’s suicide—but Jude’s aim has never been more balanced or effective. In large part, this is derived from the unsubtle but detailed shared exploitation between Angela and the workers she is interviewing, and in turn her own complicity in carrying out the bidding of her production company. That company has itself been hired by the Austrian company operating the factories in Romania where the accidents occurred, from which a great many more economic connections and injustices across nations can be inferred. Even a visit to the set of Uwe Boll’s latest film and an ongoing issue with a graveyard set to be moved conjure up a sense of life under oppressive capitalism as a series of inexplicable, numbing events, a rhythm that Jude creates while still making each of these individual moments across disparate media surprising.

By the end of Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World, both Angelas are sidelined, and Ovidiu, the wheelchair-bound worker selected for the video whose mother appears to be 1981 Angela herself (played by the same actress Dorina Lazăr), takes center stage. He leads the second and final part, which is classified as “raw material,” a phrase which applies equally to the actual camera footage and the dehumanizing outsourced labor which led to his injury in the first place. Combining the Lumières and Bob Dylan, along with the hilariously inane repetition of the phrase “gold diffusion filter,” this last part is both denouement and vital encapsulation, a hyper-compressed, real-time recapitulation of the previously seen lived experience across a single day within the span of half an hour, where ultimately even fabricated language proves inadequate to capture the intentions of an unfeeling corporation. But Jude’s vision, crucially, is not one of unmitigated bleakness. Whether it be the frequent use of poetry, including interspersed through his handwritten credits, or a haunting silent sequence towards the end of the first part that silently films crosses along a road infamous for car accidents, Do Not Expect constantly demands and foregrounds the moments of contemplation. And in those many, many scenes of Angela focused on the road, trying to stay awake as she moves from place to place, he has found the perfect vehicle.