What Do We See When We Look at the Sky?/რას ვხედავთ, როდესაც ცას ვუყურებთ?/Ras vkhedavt, rodesats tsas vuq’urebt?

Rating **** Masterpiece

Directed by Alexandre Koberidze

It is tremendously difficult to make a successful feature film that consists more-or-less solely of optimism. Partly due to the demands of narrative, and in large part the more visibly perilous state of the world, there has been a shift towards, if not cynicism, then an ambivalence that reflects society on the edge, whether it be in the apocalyptic superhero films or the much smaller yet equally precarious works on the festival circuit.

Enter What Do We See When We Look at the Sky?: a two-and-a-half-hour romance-turned-city-symphony that is filled with nothing but compassion for its characters, their fellow dwellers, and the space that they live in. Aside from the pivotal turn of fate that forms what little conventional story there is, and certain allusions to disasters just outside the camera’s point of view, Alexandre Koberidze’s second feature — after the three-and-a-half-hour, Sony Ericsson-shot Let the Summer Never Come Again — is content to survey the simple pleasures in life: reading, beer, filmmaking, and most of all association football (soccer), which is tantamount to sacred tradition in the city of Kutaisi, Georgia. And yet, Koberidze’s sheer exuberance of expression and invention makes this far more than the placid or dull observation that such a description might suggest: this is a thoroughly alive film, moving through the everyday with an irrepressible energy.

To say that this is a plotless film wouldn’t be accurate, however. What We Do We See may diverge almost entirely from its inciting incident, but it relies on it — in a manner not too dissimilar from the hammock cinema of Apichatpong — to give it its shape and ultimate resolution. In the opening twenty minutes of the film, Lisa (Oliko Barbakadze), a pharmacist, and Giorgi (Giorgi Ambroladze), a football player, literally bump into each other on their way to their respective professions; upon meeting a second time at night, they agree to meet each other the next day at a new outdoor café, and leave without exchanging means of communication — while the film appears to take place in the modern day, there are no cell phones, and apparently only a few televisions in the whole city.

The next time the two of them speak takes place a full hour and twenty minutes after this first interaction, and in the meantime everything has changed: due to a curse cast by an “evil eye,” the two of them have been given totally new appearances — and are now played by Ani Karseladze and Giorgi Bochorishvili, respectively — and have lost the ability to perform their professions. While both of them show up to their rendez-vous, they fail to recognize each other — despite Lisa, in the first of countless whimsical touches, being warned of elements of this curse by a seedling, a surveillance camera, and a drain pipe. The two of them subsequently take jobs working for the café owner, she at the ice cream machine and he at an amusing series of carnivalesque games, including a pull-up bar that nets anyone who can hold on for two minutes a prize.

From what might be a slowly deflating balloon in lesser hands, What Do We See truly develops into a study of the most pleasurable sort, all purported digressions which in actuality function as the lifeblood of the film. This is heralded, as in many of the great portraits of community, by song, courtesy of a group of teenagers sitting at the café at that night when Lisa and Giorgi both make and miss their meeting. The camera pans across, often catching a person who is merely listening, at the periphery of the conversation and revelry, another lonely soul like the two would-be lovers.

To recount the bounties of What Do We See would take a much longer piece than this, but aside from the delightful framing device of the World Cup, with Giorgi’s favored Argentina and Messi as the focal point, it is worth emphasizing the role of the narrator, which appears to be directly from Koberidze’s perspective. First emerging as a handy, voluble expositor of the narrative events, especially ones taking place just offscreen, he morphs into something of a tour guide for Kutaisi, introducing the viewer to the various denizens, human and not: the dogs of the city are recurring characters, and of course they also love football, down to favoring specific venues to watch the World Cup. And even more winningly, Koberidze treats the secondary characters with a watchful interest: the café owner, a profit-minded but fair man; a filmmaker looking to photograph couples to complete the five-year filming of her amusingly named project Stray Dogs Caressed by the Wind; and various other characters, some only glimpsed as recurring threads throughout the film; indeed, there is a paucity of dialogue; the majority of talking is likely relegated to the voiceover.

What persists strongest in What Do We See is Koberidze’s inflection of the seemingly mundane. Even the central twist is downplayed as much as possible: there are no investigations by Lisa or Giorgi’s family or former employers, and after a few inquiries everyone they interact with simply accepts them as who they are, with no name or prior history required. Koberidze’s style — and, it’s worth noting, his brother Giorgi’s pleasingly multivalent score — thus exists in the moment, malleable and open to whatever the scene or sequence requires: a Bressonian close-up here, an extreme wide-shot there, a raucous montage over here.

Said montage takes place just before the Part 1/2 dividing point, and represents perhaps the film’s most inventive — save the utterly delightful exhortation to the audience just before the curse occurs — and soaring moment: it consists solely of slow-motion shots of children playing football accompanied by the 1990 FIFA World Cup anthem, simultaneously seeming to conform to and defiantly move away from notions of screen action and sports filming. It is totally unclear who is on what side, and the sequence ends with a truly sepulchral series of shots as the children watch in awe as the ball soars into the air before landing in the river that runs through Kutaisi. The narrator’s voice comes in after this, discussing the problems that the world is facing, but even he is befuddled by the events of the film at the end, acknowledging the limits of his perspective. No matter: what lingers and moves is the experience, the meandering yet thoroughly energizing tributaries that exist along the way.

The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun

Rating *** A must-see

Directed by Wes Anderson

As it turns out, everything I had written about the omnibus film a few weeks ago is applicable to Wes Anderson’s latest film, The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun, though not as overwhelmingly as one might think. Instead of operating in a neat, three-part structure, the film more-or-less sprawls into irregularly shaped sections: a brief introduction, the preposterously named Herbsaint Sazerac’s (Owen Wilson) brief bicycle tour of the even more preposterously named Ennui-sur-Blasé, and a final coda wraps around the three features that form the core of the film.

This doesn’t mean that these sequences are superfluous, or devoid of a similar amount of interest. One of Anderson’s great strengths has been what some might uncharitably regard as a flattening of local color and detail into a series of tableaux; however, there’s a wondrous sense to how quickly and carefully The French Dispatch establishes Ennui. It immediately gets to the heart of, if not necessarily an actual French city, then an American idealization of France outside of Paris: small yet tightly-knit, romantic where it counts, but also rundown, in rapid change, openly situating the sex workers and pickpockets as something to essentially be taken for granted. This romanticized view is left largely unchallenged during the course of the film: strife, danger, and desire are always around the corner, and in its own way, the film achieves a certain unity in its steadfast, charmingly simplified view.

The French Dispatch, however, aims for something messier and more complex than unity. The three parts all have to do with art and creativity in different realms — painting, politics, and cooking respectively — but the way that they unfold results in an uneven set of approaches, though for better or worse the momentum of each segment is fairly self-contained. Much of this comes down to issues of presentation, as each story, despite the article framing, is narrated by Tilda Swinton, Frances McDormand, and Jeffrey Wright in starkly different ways. All linearly told, both Swinton’s freely disjunctive art lecture and McDormand’s terse diary nevertheless offer something more herky-jerky than the astonishingly mellifluous recitation of Wright’s memorized article.

This isn’t a problem, per se, and it can be readily chalked up to the different styles of the writers within the magazine’s stable. But it marks new territory for Anderson, which is at once welcome and something of an unsteady endeavor. More than any of his other films, this meanders and places odd, unexpected emphases on scenes that act more as illustration or elaborations, isolated little bits that serve individual, often secondary characters than an appreciable sense of the world/city of Ennui. Even the single-night narrative of the third story finds an ultimately arresting beat, in which Saoirse Ronan’s dancer-turned-kidnapper has an exchange with the police commissioner’s son, in the process making way for one of the film’s relatively few color shots.

Those color moments form something of a backbone for the film, a continuing device that almost never loses its potency; it’s amusing to see Anderson work predominately in black-and-white, almost as a dare to himself or to the innumerable video essayists who focus on his palettes. Indeed, some of the most surprising uses of color come in the first segment with Benicio Del Toro’s unconventional painter — the unabashedly modern art’s resemblance to Honoré de Balzac’s Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu, and perhaps Jacques Rivette’s La Belle Noiseuse, is perhaps the film’s most elegant Francophile reference.

Those bursts of inspiration emerging from a pleasurable, if mildly enervating surface seem to typify The French Dispatch‘s modus operandi; there’s little of the historical sweep and resonance of The Grand Budapest Hotel, but its ultimately small yet thorny approach lends itself to some beautiful moments all the same. The final story’s denouement, returning the focus beautifully to Wright and Steve Park’s immigrant chef, captures the prevailing spirit of so many lost people within the film, both French — the surprisingly intense characters embodied by Léa Seydoux and Lyna Khoudri, whose French subtitles accumulate with a considerable force — and all the American journalists, a motley collection that nevertheless comes together as a family, working towards a common goal.

Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy/偶然と想像/Gūzen to Sōzō

Rating **** Masterpiece

Directed by Hamaguchi Ryūsuke

The omnibus structure, as deployed by just one (or two) filmmakers, has seen something of a resurgence in recent years. 2018’s La Flor (Mariano Llinás) and The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (Joel & Ethan Coen) both utilized this conceit to fascinating and rejuvenating ends, with the former in particular using the multiple stories as a reflection of its deliberately protracted and endlessly generative production process. It’s no accident that genre and, more obviously in the case of Ballad, storybook framing are central to the conceit of these two films: it’s a handy way to connect what might otherwise be seen as disparate stories, and to give them a clarifying purpose that is then elaborated upon and deepened in the actual films.

Hamaguchi Ryūsuke has opted for a similar model of storytelling with his first film released in 2021, Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy. Hamaguchi, whose meteoric rise in the span of just three (or four) feature films beginning with Happy Hour (2015) — after a lengthy incubation period in cultural institutions — has him poised at the highest echelons of the film festival world, professes little anxiety when it comes to the influence of his forbears: he has explicitly said that the three-part structure of Wheel comes from Éric Rohmer’s Les Rendez-vous de Paris (1995), another single-director omnibus film. Likewise, given Happy Hour‘s mammoth five-hour running time and lengthy performance sequences, critics have cast the phantom of Rivette over Hamaguchi’s work. But a better place to begin reckoning with Hamaguchi’s work might be his moderately overlooked Asako I & II (2018), still his best film to date and a miraculous evocation of the glories and tribulations of modern love. Adapted from a novel, it finds its inspirations and intricacies from within its generic conventions, lingering on the moments in between in order to create a better understanding of the world.

Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy functions in a similar way, taking as its genre of choice a particularly quiet and concentrated version of the woman’s picture, which Hamaguchi explored in a different manner with Happy Hour. Over the course of its three stories, which each present a slightly modified version of a codified structure, Hamaguchi follows three women and their interactions with others that hinge as much upon the interventions of the outside world as their own concerns and histories. Numerous connecting threads emerge, starting with the structure: the first segment contains two long conversations followed by a coda, the second has two short conversations with the same man as bookends to one long interaction with a different man, and the third focuses more-or-less entirely on a single day spent with another woman. But the throughlines run deeper than that: the age of the main character increases with each segment, going from the mid-twenties to early-forties; each protagonist becomes more and more visibly lonely or unsure of herself; technology is only invoked when absolutely necessary (in the middle segment), in favor of a focus on speaking.

It is in the realm of dialogue and especially reaction that Hamaguchi thrives, and what draws him in many’s eyes close to the realm of Rohmer and/or Rivette. The first story, in which the protagonist remains largely silent during the first conversation and then explodes into a volley of words in the second, is exemplary of this; her dawning realizations and hairpin turns of emotion fold directly into the oblivious yet transfixing retelling of a magical night that her friend is relating. Likewise, the professor in the second section manages to convey arousal, trepidation, and wonder all at the same time without letting one sensation predominate. Balance and recognition of the possibilities that each character in a conversation can provide remains key; just because one character in any given moment is pensive or silent does not dictate what their future actions might be. This isn’t to say that the characters exhibit uncharacteristic behavior; the essence remains the same, but Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy‘s figures are sketched to be as complex and multivalent as any characters in recent fiction, in large part because the scenarios are so quietly odd — in a manner similar to the central conflict in Asako I & II — as to allow them to bounce off each other in unexpected ways.

That level of surprise, of course, also extends to the interventions of chance, which take the form of interruptions, unanticipated encounters, and even a computer virus that remakes the world in the third segment. Though thoroughly logical, they remain unexpected, both in their masterful deployment at key junctures and in their unfixed purposes, often serving to either bring together or tear apart the protagonist and her scene partner. Hamaguchi is frank, if not quite unsparing in his recognition that the world often cannot accommodate the fantasies of one individual, though it’s well worth noting that said dreams are often knotted themselves, compromised by each person’s own doubts and worries.

This growing disquietude comes to the fore in the third and greatest segment; while the previous two resembled something more akin to a Rohmerian moral tale, and all three possess a directness of emotion that was downplayed in Happy Hour and Asako this third segment uses it towards evermore mysterious ends. A tale of mistaken identity and thwarted reunions that then morphs into a stunning set of twinned confessions and reconciliations, its distillation of decades of irresolution into one afternoon would be unfathomable apart from Hamaguchi’s sense for conversation, and the dynamics of each scene. Often shooting in long shot as the two women talk to another, he carefully portrays the shifts in posture, the particular timbre of their voices, letting the scene unfold with a quiet precision. Each story ends with a distinct manner of grace, no matter the seemingly temporary defeat each woman has been dealt. But it is here, in this chance encounter, that Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy finds its most salutary acceptance, through a bond forged by speaking and listening.

The Velvet Underground

Rating *** A must-see

Directed by Todd Haynes

Ranking the level of subjectivity across various artistic media might seem foolish. After all, the entire goal of art is to connect with an individual or collective, and no particular person in either area will have precisely the same viewpoint or reaction to a work of art. But I’ve always felt that music, especially in recorded form, has an even greater susceptibility to subjectivity than, say, film or literature. The lack of visual stimuli encourages people to experience music in a much wider array of settings and circumstances, and associations and moods seem to crop up with every song listened and relistened to, over and over again.

This is a roundabout way to say that Todd Haynes’s first documentary The Velvet Underground seems targeted at a specific audience — one which I feel very much a part of. Not necessarily for the obsessives, those who have hunted down every bootleg and knew about the Primitives beforehand, but for those who have nevertheless been deeply molded by one of the most influential and groundbreaking acts in modern music.

As a reflection of this seismic impact, Haynes continually expands outwards his seemingly unlimited range of archival material. The opening moments themselves provide a bounty of colliding sources: a Baudelaire quote in combination with John Cale’s keening viola, which explores the whole stereo range, before cutting to a Winston cigarettes advertisement that segues to Cale’s appearance on the game show I’ve Got a Secret, which then explodes into a montage of Warhol screen tests, a brief glimpse of Empire, Cronkite’s announcement of JFK’s assassination, and a man being interviewed about his heroin usage, among many other assorted moments.

While all of these retain obvious relations to the sociopolitical climate in which the Velvet Underground arose, the thrilling nature of The Velvet Underground arises in no small part because it evokes a more phenomenological approach to the experience of history and culture, as well as a certain familiarity with modern art and especially avant-garde film of the 1960s. It’s one thing to evoke the aura of Andy Warhol and the Factory, but it’s another entirely to throw in extended passages of Jonas Mekas, Jack Smith, and Shirley Clarke works amid the collage of more recognizable and/or fashionable artists.

Mekas, to whom The Velvet Underground is dedicated, looms large and generously over the proceedings: it’s quite possible that he has as much or more footage than Warhol does, considering the amount of his signature blurry, sped-up handheld that registers in the first third of the film. The film possesses few moments as uniquely thrilling as listening to a contemporary interview with him, less than a year before his death, which is mixed alongside “European Son,” as the viewer watches in Chelsea Girls-inspired split-screen his footage alongside his Warhol screen test, before, in tandem with the song’s plate-shattering moment, the film splits into a twelve-screen kaleidoscope of New York City art, eventually changing into a bevy of Warhol screen tests.

While talking so much about the artists who surrounded the Velvet Underground might seem counterintuitive, it’s a testament to Haynes’s aims that the Velvet Underground hardly feels diminished in the slightest, though predictably Lou Reed and Cale are highlighted much more than Sterling Morrison or Maureen Tucker, though the latter gets some of the best interview moments. Rather, it’s a reflection of the way in which Reed especially, due to his demise and lack of interview footage, is evoked by the work of other artists. His introduction, juxtaposing stock footage showcasing the average American family and his especially intense screen test, introduces the same, almost unnerving pace that the film typically holds fast to, something akin to the drone that typified Cale’s music as developed with La Monte Young. The screen test itself only lasts four minutes, but played in full it takes on an uncanny effect when the viewer is juggling a constantly shifting screen on the left and a number of different voices on the soundtrack, including the almost spectral voice of Reed. The sequence seems to stretch to nearly ten minutes, such is the nature of Reed’s shifting melancholy, and that tone and aim of continual experimentation remains for a good long while after.

Haynes’s stated aim of only interviewing people who were alive and present during the Velvet Underground’s heyday produces fascinating results, in no small part because he holds off on designating explicitly who, say, Allan Hyman or Thomas Freeman are outside of context clues. Of course, more recognizable and delightful subjects, Amy Taubin and Jonathan Richman especially, abound, but there’s a pronounced sense of a tapestry being assembled. It helps that there’s a great aesthetic unity in the interview scenes that avoids being monotonous in the style of a lesser documentary: Ed Lachman’s Academy 35mm goes a long way to making the shots more lively.

However, what stands out most strongly as the film enters its last third or so and focuses evermore on the band, is the relative paucity of discussion of the actual music. Of course, the music is, if not a constant presence, then deployed frequently and prominently — a lesser director than Haynes would choose a much more obvious introduction to White Light, White Heat, my favorite VU record, than the thrillingly jarring “I Heard Her Call My Name,” though he leaves out my favorite VU song “The Gift” — but little time is spent discussing it once the Velvet Underground forms, and almost none in the actual studio, though the last two-thirds is ostensibly structured around the four albums, which progressively receive less and less time. Rather, much more space is given to the tours and shows, to the particular experiences that could not have been witnessed by the vast majority of viewers.

While that might rankle some — and indeed, it’s possible to imagine an even stronger and longer version of The Velvet Underground that does “justice” to the Doug Yule era — that in and of itself is a sign of Haynes’s true aims: to provide a resurrection of the sensations, attitudes, and promises of the ’60s NYC scene. It is very much the work of a fan, of someone in love with not just the brilliant and daring music, but also the whole vibe. It’s also to his credit that he chooses such a simpatico, dense mosaic of images to pair, and that there is something of an odd modesty, if not humbleness to Haynes’s approach throughout. Rather than issue a series of hosannas from the 30,000 people who started a band — Richman is excused due to sheer exuberance — he goes back to the original sources, to the personal elements that meshed so well with the technical skills and social factors to produce a fount of inspiration that might never be matched. The Velvet Underground were completely, thoroughly unique, and in its own way, The Velvet Underground stands on the shoulder of giants to capture even a little bit of that glory.

Titane

Rating ** Worth seeing

Directed by Julia Ducournau

Going strictly by the marketing and discussions that have surrounded Titane, one would think it impossible to sense a whiff of ambivalence or equivalence in the film or in Julia Ducournau. Already predestined to be enshrined as a take-no-prisoners whirlwind of sex and ultraviolence, it has been seized by hyperbole and outrage even more forcefully by the social media apparatuses than the average arthouse sensation. But as is so often the case, the most buzzworthy aspects of the film, its explicit provocations, have overshadowed the actual progression of the film.

It isn’t just that Titane is half gleefully gonzo body horror and half tender, unconventional family drama, though in pure runtime that might be the case. Ducournau gets through the bulk of her kills awfully quickly, frontloading most of her most outré, non-vehicular-pregnancy related material into something like 30 minutes. Additionally, calling it a breathlessly-paced thrill ride isn’t a terribly fitting description either: the first kill is as much focused on an almost clinical process of cleaning up as it is the hairpin in the head, and an equivalent amount of time is spent on Bertrand Bonello — basically a sight gag for the small percentage of people who know his directorial oeuvre — heating pasta as it is on the succession of murders in the house, as memorable as the image of a stool leg through someone’s face might be.

That still leaves at least an hour, and the vast majority of that is taken up by much subtler, tender, and thus less marketable elements. It’s well worth noting that much of the true parallels, genderfluidity, and even pain could have been conveyed without recourse to a serial killing spree or car-induced pregnancy. Alexia could simply have needed to go on the run for some impulsive crime, devised the same scheme to disguise herself as Adrien, and needed to do the same painful breast and stomach bindings. This feels especially relevant because of the fundamentally mundane yet deeply perverse nature of Vincent’s own body issues: a man on the opposite end of the age spectrum, subjecting himself to rituals of externally-induced regeneration and degradation equivalent to the virtual mask-wearing and performance that Alexia is enacting on a more overt basis.

Indeed, many of Ducournau’s most memorable images and moments — a talent which, from my hazy memory, she has improved upon considerably from Raw — don’t stem from its explicit body horror at all. The looming shadows in the parking lot, a few scenes of group dance that then shift focus to Alexia, and most of all fire — Titane is certainly explicit in drawing parallels between father and surrogate son, and one of the most effective lies in the almost holy, all-consuming way in which fire is featured and adapted throughout the film: a curling and implacable element, which is never shown truly extinguished on screen.

Vincent Lindon embodies that sense of a man being eaten alive by his obsessions and past so well, and more than any other element in the film, he displays that quick-witted, unpredictable range of emotions that Titane can sometimes lack. The dinner scene in which he attempts to get Alexia to talk, begins dancing with an amusing levity, then fights her in a manner that straddles the line between violence and play, succeeds precisely because Lindon is able to turn the somewhat abstract way in which his — and every other character, including Alexia — character has been written into a source of tension; instead of falling back on it as an excuse to exude menace 24/7, he takes his time to skillfully modulate his presentation, even within such a short span of time.

In contrast, Agathe Rousselle, while ably embodying the blasé, rebellious sociopath of Titane‘s first part, struggles some with the plentitude of ciphers placed upon her by Ducournau. Is Alexia actually a true serial killer prior to the beginning of the film? Is this really her first time with a woman (in one of the more effective graphic scenes, despite or perhaps because of its more typical outré nature)? Such questions ultimately aren’t important, and it’s a relief and something of a revelation when she transforms herself into Adrien and consequently settles into a much quieter, much more creepily compelling mode of performance. Of course she looks like herself when she was a child, getting that all-too-important metal plate put into her head, but the potential head-slapping obviousness of such an image is outweighed by its effectiveness on a purely photographic level, and her body movements and trepidation act as a perfect sounding board for Lindon’s stolid, outwardly assured persona; the clash between his established stardom and her screen ascension alone provides for a compelling throughline.

So it really is a true shame each and every time Titane cuts back to another scene of Alexia scratching away at herself, leaving deep scars, or leaking motor oil from her orifices; there’s even a very late recapitulation of car sex that feels thrown in entirely at random, perhaps in an attempt to remind the viewer of what the film had been up to before it plunged into more interesting and knotty territory. The pregnancy element seems to come and go whenever Ducournau feels that the viewer might be losing interest; something like twenty minutes go by at one point before a squeamish person would feel compelled to cover their eyes. Far be it from me to claim that a film like this is being unrealistic or not beholden to the rules that it has set for its world — this is, after all, a film that more-or-less begins with erotic dancers being mobbed by fans asking for autographs — but this is more a question of what the film is actually trying to say, whether it be regarding gender, sex, family, meat, and metal.

Without going into each element specifically, there is an incoherence that seems unproductive in all respects except family, which remains productively muddled to the very final image. Despite his statements to the contrary, Vincent’s level of dedication to his son despite the eventually-obvious nature of her deception remains in constant motion, hinging in the last scene on the statement of names, the interpretation of certain actions; the gender-bending here feels vital as well in further confusing the lines of performance and perception. Where the film falls is in trying to collide these thought-through, small-scale but graspable ideas to the plotline of a person being distended by an automobile fetus, which ostensibly remains one of the two driving elements of the entire film.

If I was being uncharitable, I’d say that Titane almost felt like it was initially conceived along similar lines as my hypothetical retelling of the second part as its own film, free of such fantastical elements, given the amount of time and care put into the interactions between Rousselle and Lindon. After this initial draft was written, whether from internal or external pressures, Ducournau could have lost her nerve and decided to add in this early bout of violence as a means of grabbing a wider audience’s attention and to sprinkle in bits of body horror throughout to avoid a sense of alienation on the part of gorehounds and the like.

Given Raw and her statements, this is unlikely to be the case, but it’s hard not to note that Titane ends in exactly the most logical manner that it could, with a final set of actions that could have easily be pulled off without the need for metal prosthetics. If the ending — effective, emotionally visceral, and genuinely moving as it is — is so legible in its intent, so removed in all the senses that matter from the surface provocations that have dominated the conversations surrounding it, might it not be the case that this purportedly out-of-this-world work bears a marked resemblance to the quiet dramas that it tries so hard to distinguish itself from?

Isabella

Rating *** A must-see

Directed by Matías Piñeiro

Before Isabella, Matías Piñeiro’s films have almost been defined by their lack of anchoring images. Whether as a result of his segmented structures — adding and discarding characters and foci — or his tendency towards experimentation and formal gambits that are seldom repeated — think the brief use of negative photography in Hermia & Helena, or the opening surreal association football game in The Princess of France — his work has been caught up, usually for the better, in a youthful sense of currency, constantly moving forwards in his characters’ lives. Even the hopping time structure in Hermia is clearly segmented, the moves between Buenos Aires and New York City a conscious incorporation of the delightful inbetweenness experienced by its characters, perpetually on the move.

Not so in Isabella. Focusing on something like four moments or stretches of time — some separated by hours, some by years — Piñeiro abstracts the relations between not only the four stretches, but also the moments within each into their own sets of associated images. Often, the precise location of each discrete shot in connection with its narrative container is left to be filled in later, most notably with the recurring image of Agustina Muñoz walking on the streets, which repeats something like six times before she finally arrives at her audition.

Were this placed in a more forthrightly experimental film, it would likely be total catnip. As it stands, existing in one of Piñeiro’s typical narratives — notably more downbeat and ruminative than usual as it is — it begs the question of whether this playful and bewildering structure exists at odds with its central narrative. One of said anchoring images offers a way in: that entrancing, somehow practically-made light installation, which builds on its numerous inner rectangles to create an ultimately harmonious whole — so harmonious that when it is ruptured by María Villar walking around within it, it’s a legitimately shocking event.

Calling Isabella is perhaps too strong a statement to make, but there’s an evident design to the syuzhet that, as random as they may seem in the moment, eventually rises to form a coherent, moving arc of acceptance: Villar’s disappointment at losing the part, though evident from very early on, retains the same effectiveness when deployed at the end, and it makes the juxtaposition with her playful interactions with Muñoz at the fabula’s endpoint more charged with the memory of the past. And as his wont, Piñeiro throws in little moments that themselves rupture the texture, cast everything into a new light: the extraordinary moment when Villar almost fades out of existence, the dream represented by actual behind-the-scenes footage from “Sycorax,” his new short co-directed with Lois Patiño.

Even on this second viewing, Isabella was at times extremely elusive and even enervating, so willful in its time-hopping. But the overall serenity, captured so well in the installation and the rock-throwing ritual as the tide quietly ebbs and flows, remains compelling to the end.

Annette

Rating *** A must-see

Directed by Leos Carax

Yes, that opening. But not just “So May We Start,” which is as rousing, cheeky, and entrancing a first song as a film such as this could ask for. The film properly opens — after the far sillier spoken introduction — with a brief snatch of the French folk song “Au clair de la lune,” which leads into a shot of the outside of a Los Angeles studio at night. This image is rapidly overtaken by feedback manifested visually by red soundwaves, a motif carried into the studio itself, where musicians prepare to record, each burst of noise causing the camera to flicker, as shots are briefly overlaid on each other. This finally leads to Leos Carax calling over his daughter Nastya in French before introducing the first of many proper Sparks recordings.

Leaving aside the obvious narrative implications of a song called “By the light of the moon,” the credits specify that this is the “first recording of a human voice,” and that collision of traditions within a given medium course through Annette‘s veins. French and American, primitive paper recordings and high-tech digital audio, silent and sound cinema: these are the terms on which Carax is working, in which material reality coexists side-by-side with the unreal. In that sense, Annette’s central puppet deftly straddles the line between the two: a physical object that always feels uncanny.

The same could very much be said of Sparks’s music: I’ve listened to very little of their work otherwise, but the music on its own, while frequently catchy or at the very least an earworm, works here in large part because of its slipperiness, its integration with the dialogue. Henry’s first, abrasive show is a perfect introduction: slipping into no less than three, perhaps four songs over the course of about ten minutes, all moving with such abandon that it’s difficult to tell whether the songs are part of the act or part of the musical component. Of course, that slipperiness is inherent to the confrontations, arguments, and declarations of affections that speckle this film in musical form. But even more disorientingly, the actors’ intonations and recitations of dialogue often land in a phantom zone between speech and song, where it is throughly muddled whether a given line is meant to be part of a song or not.

Such ambiguity often doesn’t extend to the level of narrative, however, for better or worse. Despite its often extravagant scale, what with its globe-hopping scale, constant media intrusion, and apparently years-spanning timeline, Annette is ultimately a small, intimate film, detailing the fallout of the relationships of four broken people, though this is doled out in fits and spurts. Even with all the ruptures and dreamlike moments, there’s a fidelity to emotion that remains paramount, a belief in the tragedy of bonds ruptured by the strength of personal histories and forceful personalities.

Of course, that’s where Adam Driver comes in. The effect of his final scenes, hollowed out and eaten alive by his own actions, is at once startling and entirely in keeping with the arc of his performance. Throughout, he remains prowling and magnetic, and Carax’s camera responds in kind, circling him with the same intent watchfulness that Driver never lets up on. His voice is equally as implacable: sometimes rumbling and portentous, other times high and quavering, in a way wholly unpredictable.

Implicit in this willful disorientation of viewer’s expectations, at least with something that chooses not to establish a baseline aesthetic or reality, is a certain unevenness, only exacerbated by the fragmentation caused by some musical sequences as the film proceeds towards its last trajectory. Some of the treatment of the media, for example, feels straight out of the more parodic moments of Clouds of Sils Maria, and at certain points it’s difficult to ascertain exactly how far the musical concept can be pushed. But more often, Carax lands on images and moments that stun: operatic deaths overlaid on a rushing motorcycle ride, unusually restive shots of a house slowly decaying, and above all the central storm, which combines the thoroughly artificial and archaic rear-projection with water spilling out across the set. Such dichotomies are the lifeblood of Annette: the sacred and the profane, the violent and the tender; Carax incorporates all of these into sequences that stubbornly refuse to remain one or the other, and the finale, which openly confronts the devices that had powered the film prior by stripping them away to just two voices singing, feels pitch perfect.

The Works and Days (of Tayoko Shiojiri in the Shiotani Basin)

Rating **** Masterpiece

Directed by C.W. Winter & Anders Edström

Of course, the conception of an extended film like The Works and Days (of Tayoko Shiojiri in the Shiotani Basin) is inseparable from the experience of watching it, and that is true to an immense degree here, but one of the first things that comes to mind when I think about this film came immediately following the film, during the Q&A given by co-director C.W. Winter. He described the conception of the film as stemming from a documentary that he and co-director Anders Edström had been planning to make chronicling the last stretch of time in the life of Shiojiri Junji, the eponymous Tayoko’s husband and Edström’s father-in-law, who passed away roughly a week before they were planning to fly to Japan. After the funeral — shot and included in the film — Winter and Edström came up with the idea to make this film over the next year of theirs, Tayoko’s, and the village’s lives. The process was essentially conceived to act as both catharsis and do-over for Tayoko, who deeply regretted that the last year of Junji’s life was one of the only times that they had ever fought; Winter and Edström would give her the space to say the words she never had the chance to say, do the things she wished she could have done.

This information is present in substantive reviews and interviews of the film (like Lawrence Garcia’s review for Reverse Shot and Mark Peranson’s interview for Cinema Scope), but I hadn’t read them and so I experienced the peculiar feeling of recontextualizing close to an entire day of experience in the moment and yet, any worry about misinterpreting the film without this crucial information almost seems to fade away when confronted by the particulars of this mammoth work of intimacy, so concerned it is with operating according to its own drumbeat, sans annotation or inflection outside of what can be conveyed with film grammar, performance, structure, and other such cinematic devices.

There are a great deal of those in The Works and Days, which runs eight hours across five chapters of unequal length, each devoted to a season (beginning in winter), and designed to be shown in four parts with two fifteen-minute intermissions and one hour-long lunch break, in emulation of the work day. Within this span, aside from the slow death of Junji, which comes more and more to the fore as the film moves through its second half, attempts at establishing narrative or concrete throughlines are almost completely elided, so much so that the relationships of the forty-some characters within this are astonishingly tenuous and difficult to grasp. But this is very much part of Winter and Edström’s project, a kind of deep immersion founded upon the hybrid documentary-fiction form so en vogue in the current festival trends.

What quickly becomes apparent is that the film manages to downplay even those elements: each part begins with a black screen accompanied by a dense soundscape of natural sounds; Winter says that such a conceit is designed to acclimate the viewer to the change in season heralded by these interludes, and which additionally serves as magnificent breathers, pauses that feel compelling in the darkness of the theater. But the lack of human presence in what may very well be the majority of this film arises not long afterwards; what initially begins as seemingly standard establishing shots of nature reveals itself as a vital leg on which The Works and Days stands. The images of trees, skies, horizons, plants, streams, mountains, and exteriors are themselves not long: the film itself relies little on extended takes — which when they do appear are focused on conversation and storytelling — and the nature shots are even shorter, typically lasting in rhythmic fashion around five or six seconds. However, the sheer volume of them is impressed upon, though it isn’t applied in a punishing fashion, varying and interweaving with the actors’ performances.

And it is important that these be recognized as performances, and as a narrative, albeit one constructed with much the same process as a Hong Sang-soo film, if he was inclined to shoot thousands of shots of nature: scenes were written the night before or the day of their shooting, various obstacles were incorporated in the narrative, though the scattered, open, and almost improvisatory process of filming meant that the scenes ended up being filmed entirely achronologically. Of course, Pedro Costa might be a better comparison point: Edström had been regularly visiting the village for 21 years as a family member prior to beginning filming, and the process was undertaken in close collaboration with Shiojiri herself, along with her family and fellow inhabitants; it’s worth noting that Winter and Edström themselves have a fairly significant presence onscreen as family members, not as directors.

Still, Costa’s work, wedded at the hip to his intense chiaroscuro and desolate settings as it is, feels far different from what Winter and Edström are achieving here, and thus the length returns to the fore. At such a length, what is intended as a fictionalized recreation of the previous year of a woman’s life metamorphosizes into a near-documentary telling of the processes of living and cultivating, in a manner not dissimilar at all from the use of time (if not shot) duration as Jeanne Dielman, or, more perversely, The Mother and the Whore. What is, as in Rivette and Godard’s famous quotes, implicit in each film’s document of its creation and its actors becomes in the viewer’s mind explicit.

This isn’t to say that an uninflected non-fiction retelling was Winter and Edström’s goal at all. Indeed, The Works and Days is replete with devices that are intended to, if not break the viewer’s experience, then to question it, to augment the sense of a created world with blatant fictions and interventions. The casting of Kase Ryō, one of the preeminent cineastes’ actors of the past two decades, is certainly prominent, though he apparently plays a character with a different surname. But the more pervasive and fascinating break stems from Winter and Edström’s penchant for shooting in near-total darkness, where they trust that the Blackmagic’s digital sensor will pick up something that varies the black expanse. This often results in some truly stunning moments of abstraction, where a few pinpricks of light are all that can be seen, which hover in extended shots. Such moments could function in a similar way to the proliferation of images of nature, but they pop out of the texture with their sheer uniqueness.

Such openness to experimentation and variety is what makes The Works and Days such a rewarding and surprising experience. This even extends to the dedication to a single location, heralded by the title, which is disrupted by a train trip to Kyoto and, in one of the wildest production stories I’ve ever heard, a phone call to Sweden, in which two cameras rolling simultaneously capture an actual phone call taking place nearly 5000 miles apart. Two moments, one involving a sublimely uncanny dissolve effect and the other telling a story only in subtitles, come and go without acknowledgment. And of course, there is that soundtrack, whose dense, enveloping nature-based sounds belie the thorough mixing and sculpting done in post-production.

Winter and Edström’s use of these sequences doesn’t disrupt the astonishing mood sculpted throughout the film. Though they have disavowed the slow cinema label, it might be more accurate to say that the concept doesn’t rely solely on long takes and is more about a certain ethos, for which the emphasis on nature and work surely applies. Indeed, one scene early in the second part feels illustrative of what is so entrancing about The Works and Days, in which Tayoko walks through a series of rooms, as the film cuts to a different shot on each door closing. The artifice of the film is revealed in a moment as mundane as the rest of the film’s actions; though the film was frequently shot with two cameras, there are too many rooms for it to be a continuous action. The two impulses within the film are evoked simultaneously: the almost iconoclastic tendency to show the rhythm of the scene, aesthetic be damned, and the contemplative style, focusing in on one action and how it can say so much about its subject.

I realize now that I’ve said little about that subject, and suffice it to say that Tayoko is remarkable, in large part because of, even under such emotional circumstances, how willing she is to be part of the ensemble, which ranges from the quiet to the rowdy in a way that feels utterly true. Some of her most emotional moments come when she reads some of the diary entries she had actually written during the prior year; her reading is off-the-cuff, as if she is coming up with them in the moment. It is in the pauses of thinking, just before the stream of thoughts resume, that The Works and Days finds its focus, its reason for being, and it is glorious.