Reviews

Out of the Blue [CAUGHT BY THE TIDES]

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Courtesy of Sideshow/Janus Films.

New York Film Festival 2024:

Caught by the Tides/风流一代/Fēngliú yīdài

Rating **** Masterpiece

Directed by Jia Zhangke

Throughout his filmography, Jia Zhangke has refused to operate within clean dichotomies. Whether it be the tumult of his prominence and corresponding governmental approval—where Jia has alternately been censored or praised by the Chinese Communist Party depending on whichever film he’s made at a particular time—or his approach to form, his work is at once instantly recognizable yet always shifting according to his own predilections. Certain periods can be picked out: the opening stretch of his career lasting until 2006, his documentary period from 2008 to 2010, his genre-inflected epics from 2013 to the present. But such divisions are porous: Sean Gilman’s essential “14 Ways of Looking at Jia Zhangke” piece for MUBI Notebook provides a handy précis into his influences and tendencies, which course through these different periods, popping up at unexpected moments. Along with his wife and muse Zhao Tao, Jia’s filmography has been defined by his continuous charting of the currents of a rapidly modernizing China, with all the recursions and great leaps forward implied in such an artistic undertaking.

That being said, Jia has always retained the element of surprise, each new entry to his canon a left turn that expands the expressive potential of his cinema. The past four features alone have vividly demonstrated this: the mosaic of violence in A Touch of Sin, the futuristic decades-spanning melodrama of Mountains May Depart, the dedication to the gangster film in Ash Is Purest White, and the enormous evolution in his documentary abilities shown in Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue.

And yet, Caught by the Tides, Jia’s first fiction feature in six years, registers as the most extreme leap since possibly Unknown Pleasures, precisely because of how much it may superficially resemble virtually all of his past films. When it was unveiled through the slow trickle of production updates and the announcement of the Cannes competition, all initially seemed normal. Like Mountains May Depart and Ash Is Purest White, it was specified as a film taking place in three time periods over the course of a few decades; in particular, the idea of featuring Zhao Tao as a woman searching for her romantic partner hearkened back to the latter’s narrative. The central conceit of reusing footage in order to evoke the era in which previous films of his had taken place was intriguing, but didn’t necessarily register as something new, and most reviews have conveyed a sense of the film as largely resembling his recent period. Mountains May Depart‘s first section was in Academy ratio specifically to allow for this incorporation; meanwhile Ash Is Purest White begins with such footage and interlaces it throughout, and focuses on the same time periods as Caught: 2001, when Unknown Pleasures was filmed in Datong; 2005, corresponding to Still Life and decamping to the Three Gorges Dam-affected Fengjie; and the present day, back in Datong.

Any consideration of a film so deeply entrenched in its filmmaker’s oeuvre almost demands a more personal recounting of the writer’s relationship with said body of work. To be honest, as I was reading the logline and early reactions, I was a little bit worried that Jia was repeating himself: Mountains May Depart remains one of the most personally important films to me, and Ash Is Purest White is wondrously complex, but I was unsure if a third iteration would be sufficiently generative. Even as I saw the rapture with which numerous trusted friends received it and felt more at ease, it was still difficult to fully let go of that doubt. The extremity of my reaction may indeed be influenced by an equal sense of relief and awe, that the most important filmmaker currently active had found yet another way to completely overhaul his aesthetic interests. It probably doesn’t help that Unknown Pleasures and Still Life are among the haziest Jia films for me, and I didn’t have the time to revisit them before seeing this.

At its core, Caught by the Tides is not merely about the complicated romance between Qiaoqiao—though I actually don’t remember if Zhao Tao’s character’s name is said in dialogue—and Bin (Li Zhubin), despite the general tenor of the critical conversation thus far. Rather, it exemplifies in the best way “a documentary that is progressively overtaken by fiction,” as Jonathan Rosenbaum once characterized Jacques Rivette’s Out 1. Where that legendary masterpiece was conceived as fiction from the outset yet initially presented as detailed vérité, Jia’s method of reusing footage shot over the years, usually during production—I have heard conflicting accounts, though the general consensus is that these are by-and-large not outtakes or alternate takes from Unknown Pleasures and Still Life, but rather moments and scenarios captured on set, with apparently some sequences taken directly from those films—takes that appellation at face value, both in its own conception and in its unfolding.

Then again, that idea might apply better to the Jia referent that, in many ways, feels more apropos to Caught by the Tides than his recent work: the docufiction hybrid 24 City. That film, mostly presented as plain documentary, gradually introduced actors into the mix of factory worker talking heads, including Zhao and Joan Chen, until virtually everything presented on screen was thrown into question. His other best work explicitly invoking documentary, Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue, was, like Caught by the Tides, co-written by Wan Jiahuan, and involved a similarly intricate structure to 24 City that Caught largely avoids, though these two latest films by Jia share a sense for Chinese historical context and its influence on art. But that film possessed little of the slipperiness that 24 City and Caught present, with the latter film magnifying it to extreme, pervasive proportions.

For much of Caught by the Tides‘s extraordinary achievement rests in the way in which it manages to question every single scene that appears on screen, even as they frequently register with a grand jubilation. After an enigmatic opening shot, the first of many intertitles appears on screen, displaying the lyrics to an unusually (for Jia) raucous rock song, before plunging into an extended, seemingly documentary sequence of Datong villagers singing in a room. Zhao is not present—and indeed does not appear for a while—as Jia lingers on the different impromptu performances. Soon after, there is an extended interview (it sounds like Jia’s voice is asking questions off camera) with a man who is opening an entertainment hall; it becomes clear later that Zhao is one of the women who ends up working as a singer there, but the insertion of this talking head into the proceedings, especially with his brief discussion of a Mao portrait that he recovered while refurbishing the building, throws the already odd focus into complete uncertainty.

Caught by the Tides is, frankly speaking, likely Jia’s most impenetrable film, even as it likely contains the greatest musical spirit of any of his works. It willfully follows its own paths, barreling into the images and sensations of the past without leaving an easily identifiable breadcrumb trail behind. But this comes across as a specific aesthetic strategy, an series of acts of incorporation that, for perhaps the first time since his greatest film Platform, fully emphasizes both the individual and the collective. The Chinese title roughly translates to “romantic generation,” and both it and the English title convey the sweep of history, the way in which an individual moment can suddenly be incorporated into a larger understanding of a people or, indeed, a relationship.

To emulate this idea, Jia’s approach in this first section (and, to a lesser extent in the second) is to only fitfully emphasize Zhao and Li’s connection. One of the Jia films I did see in preparation was “In Public,” his documentary short and first digital effort, shot directly before Unknown Pleasures, and there is a surprising amount in Caught, including a bus converted into a restaurant, as handy a synecdoche for Jia’s reuse of his footage as any. Switching rapidly between Academy ratio to 1.85:1—note that the digital video-shot “In Public” and Unknown Pleasures were both released in the latter ratio—and even incorporating what may or may not be new footage of Zhao (given a notable increase in resolution), the primary sensation is of being unmoored in time, existing somewhere between the immediacy of the past and the nostalgia of the present. In one of the most apparent manifestations of this, frequent Jia actor Liang Jingdong pops up in the 2001-set opening credits, looking much more like his current age, before having a small role in footage clearly shot in 2001. At one point, his character falls asleep in front of a computer, and an animated digital reverie reminiscent of Zhao’s dream in The World adopts a different mood entirely. This first section is full of such ruptures and wonders.

The second section hews closer to what I remember of Zhao and Li’s half of Still Life, but that categorization might not be right at all. If I’m not mistaken, I believe that most of Zhao’s footage is actually taken from the shoot of Ash Is Purest White‘s second section, which somehow recreated Fengjie circa 2005, was shot on 35mm by Éric Gautier, and involved Zhao looking for her partner in that film. There appears to be film grain (assuming it’s not emulated) and the image quality is generally much higher than Li’s scenes, as he was not involved in Ash. While there are fewer cutaways to “purely” uninflected observation of non-actors, the same confusion involved in the first section extends to this questioning of where and when each shot exactly came from, suggesting the understandably discombobulating idea of a woman from 2017 attempting to connect with a man from 2005. At one point, an animated English-language advertisement for robots (allegedly created by AI) plays on a celluloid film projector as Zhao (in I think a 2017-shot café) looks on, only further muddying the waters.

On its face, the third section, set in 2022, provides little of that same uncanniness. The immediate impression is left by the clear aging on Li’s and even (to a significantly lesser extent) Zhao’s faces, as well as the throes of the pandemic. It’s likely that Jia, shooting a year later, had to recreate yet another crisis in China, albeit on a significantly smaller scale and with much less time to be bridged. The narrative intrigue rests mainly in the search for reconnection, but Jia still finds ways to disorient: a few uses of a 360 camera here, stretching and pulling the image; a sublime encounter between Zhao and a serving robot there. But the effect, after seeing all this change and confusion, is to suddenly reorient the viewer, snapping all of the tumult into focus and observing the wreckage left in its wake. Qiaoqiao is on better footing than Bin, but the resignation caused by the intervening 17 years and the mostly unexplained events of that time send the film into another level of inchoate emotion entirely.

To bring it all back to 24 City: while that film was fundamentally grounded in the reality of the factory, even as the viewer’s conception of what constituted it evolved, Caught by the Tides exists in a realm where there is no foundation imposed by the film. It is a film where narrative, both intrinsic to the narrative and informed by the viewer’s expectations, struggles to be born from the “documentary” footage. Zhao’s dialogue-free performance, as luminous as any instance of her legendary work with Jia, acts as a binding agent as always, and it’s worth remembering here that her given name (as mentioned in Mountains May Depart) means waves. Chinese society and Zhao produce their own tides of change, and Caught is, by the end, equally beholden to both of their forces. It is too much to say that the former represents documentary and the latter fiction; indeed, for us Jia devotees Zhao’s face is a primary document of an evolving China. Instead, with regards to a new landmark whose meaning changes with each passing moment, altering both itself and its towering predecessors before it, it’s best to simply marvel at such a bursting work, one whose voice rings out at last with a clear sense of a new beginning.

A Different Man

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Rare is the film that is so willing to map its protagonist’s successful and failed transformations onto its own sense of structure. As Sebastian Stan sheds his strikingly convincing facial prosthetics but retains his shy, hollow, and increasingly defeatist affect, Aaron Schimberg’s third feature only grows more complex, throwing in an increasing number of uncanny obstacles to his attempt to establish a new state of existence. This process, miraculously, comes across as sly rather than cruel, just absurd enough to register as humorous while retaining a core rigor of thought about an ever-expanding series of topics: the ethical means of representing people with facial disfigurements onscreen, the transformation of reality into increasingly “unfaithful” fiction, the continual confrontation of the self. Adam Pearson—as a man whose entire personage registers as the most genial cosmic taunt imaginable—embodies the playful spirit of A Different Man, which cuts to the quick with an omnipresent grin.

Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In

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Soi Cheang’s cinema contains many things, but outright comedy isn’t generally one of them: aside from maybe a few choice scenes in SPL II: A Time for Consequences, his films operate under genre conventions that don’t usually allow for a great deal of humor to enter the proceedings. This is just one way in which Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In stands out in his oeuvre; a long-gestating project that has passed through the hands of numerous Hong Kong luminaries, it leans further than any of Cheang’s non-Monkey King films to date into crowd-pleasing conventionality, albeit so satisfying on its own terms that it scarcely seems to matter. Much of this comes from the coherence and loving treatment of the Kowloon Walled City, and how it seems to act as a reclamation of both past cinematic representations—most obviously the nightmarish ending of Long Arm of the Law, but maybe even the prologue of the re-edited Days of Being Wild—and of a space and industry lost in time. Similar to SPL II, the action is tighter and the sense of place is more deeply felt than the norm, with Hawksian dynamics leading the way, especially early on as our hero Lok (Raymond Lam) initially takes refuge by sleeping on corrugated metal eaves, sustained by the generosity of the city’s inhabitants as overseen by legendary martial artist Cyclone (Louis Koo). The film mixes in Koo and other luminaries—Sammo Hung, Richie Jen, Aaron Kwok—with Lam and other lesser-known cast members reasonably well, relying on Koo’s star power and the latter group’s likability (especially once Lok completes a quartet of younger martial artists) to establish this location as a melting pot of personalities and quiet camaraderie before the forces of the past come to tear things down.

Despite its confined, urban setting, Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In comes to feel like something of an epic, along the lines of Leone or even this year’s Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, one of this year’s other worthy action extravaganzas, considering how much it is striving to embody something of the spirit of a particular time. Where Cheang comes in is the particularity and specificity of his images, and in the extremes to which his narrative pushes by the end. It’s ultimately apt that the closing credits play over a series of past images from the film, not of the dazzling fights, but of the quiet scenes of community building and daily living, a reminder of all the bloodshed and sacrifice needed to maintain such a city.

Last Summer

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Catherine Breillat’s first film in ten years—a remake of the Danish film Queen of Hearts (2019) as commissioned by the bravura French producer Saïd Ben Saïd—takes great pains to contextualize the central affair between a lawyer (Léa Drucker) and her stepson (Samuel Kircher) as, if not immoral, then as the culmination of a long string of events whose linkages remain eminently intuitive. Each interaction, both between them and with the aging man (Olivier Rabourdin) and adopted Chinese children caught in the middle, is developed as to always embody both an image of conformity and a thrilling danger, and it is in this nether space that Drucker’s performance, poised one moment and completely enthralled the next, defines the pivots that the film takes. Never entirely cold but always hard-edged and wary, Breillat’s unpredictable orchestration of these events—even going so far as to include some ruminative scenes of driving set to guitar music by Kim Gordon—culminates in a staggering closing fade, a sculpting of light whose final spark is as cannily ambiguous as any image in recent memory.

Music

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From its first images, Angela Schanelec’s very loose rendition of the Oedipus myth refuses a clear-cut relationship between its borrowed motifs—the central tangled relationships, the swollen feet, the transference of a child—and their place within the collection of experiences that this film so mystically embodies. Aside from perhaps a few glimpsed and overheard words, it is unclear until around the 30-minute mark that the film predominately takes place in Greece, and there is perhaps only one conversation in this largely dialogue-free film with real narrative import. Instead, what transpires is the development of an entire world with only a few characters, etching out how its central protagonist lives after an act of inexplicable violence and tracing, with a surprising lightness and care, the process of forgiveness and redemption. Its eponymous artform is on display throughout but bursts forth in an extraordinary extended coda, whose shockingly sincere performances create a sudden expansion in Schanelec’s rigorous framework. The film evokes a renewal that, rather than sweeping past pains under the rug, brings them to reflective, graceful light.

Kinds of Kindness

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Yorgos Lanthimos’s Kinds of Kindness has generally been viewed along two largely similar lines: as a rebuke of the quasi-mainstream success of his two Tony McNamara-scripted period farces The Favourite (2018) and Poor Things (2023), and as a return to some kind of form, a reunion with his co-writer Efthimis Filippou that plunges once more into tales of control and humiliation. But the operative word here is “tales” in its plural form. The film follows a tripartite anthology structure, utilizing the same repertory of seven main actors—Jesse Plemons, Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, Hong Chau, Margaret Qualley, Mamoudou Athie, and Joe Alwyn—to tell the successive stories of a man (Plemons) whose way of life crumbles after he ceases following the commands of his boss/lover (Dafoe); a cop (Plemons) who suspects his wife, who returned after being presumed lost at sea (Stone), has been replaced by a doppelgänger; and a woman (Stone) navigating her position in a cult obsessed with purity of bodily fluids led by a polyamorous couple (Dafoe and Chau), searching for a woman who can resurrect the dead (Qualley).

Each of these three parts is titled after an action on the part of a man named R.M.F., a bearded, mostly silent presence who potentially serves as a linking device. It may be significant that his name is one rotated letter away from the initials of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, another director obsessed with precise camera movements—here discarding the past two films’ fish-eye lenses in favor of inexorable forward and lateral tracking shots—narratives of degradation and domination/submission, and casting familiar actors in divergent roles; it is probably even more notable that R.M.F. is played by Yorgos Stefanakos, who has only appeared in Lanthimos’s films to date.

Whether this man who shares his director’s name is meant to serve as a stand-in is uncertain, but the anthology form, in contrast to the detestable The Killing of a Sacred Deer or even the brazenly static Dogtooth, allows Lanthimos to inject just a little bit more mystery into the proceedings than usual. For these are, at their core, fables about the limits of belief, observing how far each character is willing to go in order to maintain their status quo while testing the extent to which they truly believe that an external force can make it all disappear.

Perhaps Kinds of Kindness finds its fullest expression of that principle in its canny approach to recasting across each of the three parts. The clearest dynamic is the inverse relationship between Plemons and Stone’s prominence, especially in the way in which the former’s paring down of his facial hair and haircut represent a sinister hollowing out of his characters’ capacities for change. Other choices are very amusing on a metafictional level: Alwyn’s unnamed, one-scene roles during the first two parts; rising star Hunter Schafer appearing for only a few minutes in the third part. Each part ends with an credits screen showing these seven cast members (and only them, regardless of their or other actors’ prominence) and their roles, a seemingly final punctuation mark even as the inscrutable game Lanthimos plays continues to build in both potential meaning and, yes, exhaustion. The final moment, arguably the film’s most misguided, perhaps reveals this as just another case of the old Lanthimos rearing his head, but the journey to that point, at least to these eyes, can’t be discounted.

There and Back Again Again [INSIDE OUT 2]

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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.

Landscape Suicide [EVIL DOES NOT EXIST]

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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.

Rough and Rowdy Ways [THE FEELING THAT THE TIME FOR DOING SOMETHING HAS PASSED]

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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.

Los Angeles Festival of Movies 2024: GASOLINE RAINBOW, THE HUMAN SURGE 3, DREAM TEAM

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Photo: Grasshopper Film

The inaugural Los Angeles Festival of Movies, which ran for four days at the start of this month, provided a fairly eclectic slate: out of twelve non-shorts/talks programs, four were restorations, while the rest ranged the gamut—within a general independent film bent—from the buzzy opening night Sundance hit I Saw the TV Glow to the closing night world premiere of the medium-length Rap World. Every feature film could theoretically be seen by a single person, though the talks and the promising shorts program (which ran on both Saturday and Sunday)—featuring work from Laida Lertxundi, Deborah Stratman, and Alison Nguyen among others—took place concurrently with the rest of the slate. Such compression, along with the use of the always stellar 2220 Arts + Archives as the primary screening space, did indeed result in a festive atmosphere: throughout the weekend, the venue was as packed relative to its size as I’ve ever seen it, a hopefully healthy sign for a city with an often fitful relationship to new non-studio filmmaking.

Self-curation at a film festival can often be just as revealing as a festival’s overall programming. For my own part, I confined my viewing to three films, all of which ended up bearing some remarkable common ground. They were all films primarily about youthful people, bearing clear markings of their directors’ past works and contemporary trends in filmmaking while also striking out into new territory. Importantly, each strove to embody the spirit of the time period they were depicting, embracing a certain freedom through narrative or formal means.

The first of these, Bill & Turner Ross’s Gasoline Rainbow, was at once the least and most familiar. I’ve only seen the Ross brothers’ previous film, the lovely Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets; that work, about a dive bar’s final night of operation, derived a great deal of its potency from the one-night, single-location set-up, along with its distinctive focus on so many wizened and downtrodden regulars. By contrast, their latest film dispenses with virtually all of these characteristics, aside from their signature blend of narrative and non-fiction. At the outset, five high school seniors (introduced via their student IDs) from Wiley, Oregon take a van and begin driving 513 miles west to Portland, a final adventure before they have to enter the workforce in their podunk town.

As a result, Gasoline Rainbow feels most akin to its predecessor primarily in the many scenes with the teens simply hanging out; pointedly, the group is a well-balanced, multi-ethnic mix of boys and girls, fully enveloped in a collective Gen Z mindset, and I found myself growing more fond of the film as it went along simply as a result of their charisma and evident care for one another. At the same time, the film registers as much more obvious in its narrative signposting, with a daisy chain of individuals along the way that help the protagonists, direct them towards a Portland party suggestively called the End of the World, and generally embody how these kids might turn out once they’ve grown a little more, whether it be train-hoppers or punk homeowners. The kids, too, each get their time to discuss their backgrounds—sometimes in voiceover that may be taken from interviews with the Rosses—in a way that, while earnest, can become a little overly neat and self-conscious. One of the film’s emblematic moments, with the teens walking along the streets of Portland before meeting a skateboarder who becomes their temporary chaperone, has a split-second where a cameraman becomes visible on the edge of the frame, a handy summation of what’s both captivating and limiting about this generally compelling film.

Eduardo Williams’s second feature The Human Surge 3 is only mildly more in keeping with its director’s oeuvre. For me, The Human Surge (2016)—as everyone is mandated to note, there is no The Human Surge 2 at present—is the greatest summation of what it felt like to be alive in the 2010s, perfectly capturing the interconnectedness of the modern world across entirely different continents and ways of life. Its quasi-sequel massively expands on the formal and narrative experimentation: while the first film took place sequentially in Argentina, Mozambique, and the Philippines, each respectively shot on 16mm, a Blackmagic Pocket (then projected and filmed off the screen using 16mm), and a RED, this work jumps between Peru, Sri Lanka, and Taiwan, all filmed using a 360-degree camera and edited in VR. Each section in the first Human Surge had a certain objective for its characters, a tendency which is almost entirely jettisoned; though little words and motifs recur as connective tissue, the focus is almost solely on a certain exploratory spirit, often in concert with nature. Notably, technology takes more of a backseat in comparison to the first film, with phones glimpsed but rarely the center of any given interaction.

It can sometimes feel paradoxically cliché to say that no film has ever felt like this one, but it genuinely is true with The Human Surge 3. In the very first scene, Williams’s predilection for tracking shots that are from a vantage point far behind the ostensible subject is further destabilized by the post-production choice to largely frame out the subject while still moving in a forward direction, while a mix of cryptic Spanish and English dialogue can be heard even as their speakers move in and out of frame, and things only become more daring from there. Throughout the film, people from each country pop up in other places, often speaking simultaneously with the nation’s residents. Presented with two sets of subtitles (one white, one yellow), the shared comprehension varies, lending each interaction a sense of unpredictability that dovetails with the film’s unique rhythms, which can sometimes hold for wonderfully extended periods of time or explode into dazzling moments of expressive motion. Though Taiwan is initially given somewhat less screen time than the other two countries, that is made up for by the final twenty minutes, an ascent up a mountain by all of the film’s main characters where the image makes it seem like the land is literally peeling away. If The Human Surge 3 ultimately does not seek to embody the spirit of the times like its predecessor, then it aims at something even grander and more mysterious.

Mystery is the ostensible name of the game with Lev Kalman & Whitney Horn’s Dream Team, which surprisingly made its U.S. premiere at the festival just a few months after it showed in Rotterdam. The duo are perhaps best known for their gorgeous graduate student vacation film L for Leisure (2014), though their other work in Blondes of the Jungle (2009) and Two Plains & a Fancy (2018) similarly display an interest in using genre pastiche as a backdrop for their 16mm reveries. This is taken to new extremes with this riff on 1990s TV serials, presenting seven episodes of the fictional eponymous series, each with their own separately presented opening credits sequences. Featuring Alex Zhang Hungtai (a.k.a. Dirty Beaches) and Esther Garrel as two Interpol agents investigating mysterious deaths related to coral, the film purposefully leans into the campy nature of its presentation (influenced primarily by the show Silk Stalkings), full of much more lowbrow humor than Kalman and Horn’s previous work, particularly in the sophomoric episode titles (“Ashes to Asses,” “Fax on the Beach,” etc.).

That being said, Dream Team is blessedly eager to never be perceived as just one thing: most of the first scenes after the credits for each episode are long, languorous shots of nature that lend a different, almost hypnotic tenor to the proceedings. Characters unexpectedly take center stage, including Zhang’s assistants and a coral researcher hilariously named Veronica Beef; much of one episode is even given over to a rap performance at a house party. The feeling that anything goes dominates, as does a general embrace of lasciviousness and the quirks of its inspirations: the characters and storylines in the opening credits are frequently absent from the episodes proper, and new threads are brought up and abandoned almost at random. The film ends on such a disjunctive note, the beginning of a new season that brings in a new Interpol duo and leaves practically everything unresolved, a perfectly strange way to end both the film and my time at the festival.