Courtesy of Late Film LLC.

Courtesy of Janus Films.

New York Film Festival 2025:

Late Fame
Peter Hujar’s Day

Rating *** A must-see

Directed by Kent Jones
Directed by Ira Sachs

One of the presumably unintentional but noticeable trends that arose during the first week of the 63rd New York Film Festival’s press screenings was a consideration of art’s place in the world, often accompanied by an aesthetic that might be said to constitute a throwback. Films like Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent and Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind, which utilized thriller elements in tandem with a tumultuous ’70s backdrop, also featured extended meditations on how the experience of cinema and painting, respectively, can capture the spirit of then-modern sociopolitical currents. Two other films took 1970s artistry as their main subject: Kent Jones’s Late Fame and Ira Sachs’s Peter Hujar’s Day.

Though my familiarity with their work is roughly equal—both films are the second I’ve seen by their respective directors—and they belong to the same generation of Americans, the two filmmakers couldn’t be more dissimilar. Anyone who came to cinephilia in the past few years could be forgiven for not knowing the name Kent Jones, but there’s little excuse for anyone even remotely plugged into American film culture before then, considering his work as a longtime film critic—I routinely cite his piece on John Ford for Film Comment as one of my favorite articles of criticism—archivist (including for Martin Scorsese), and, most pertinently, director of the New York Film Festival for a surprisingly abbreviated term from 2013 to 2019. Though that span of time may be too short and recent to accurately judge, his tenure, especially considering Dennis Lim’s continual presence on the selection committee during that time, certainly helped usher along NYFF’s evolution into an ever more open and exploratory festival. In terms of his own filmmaking, Jones has already made a number of documentaries, and his fiction feature debut Diane (2018), a somber consideration of a woman near the end of her life, led him to leave film programming behind to make directing his main pursuit.

Ironically, I’m less familiar with Sachs: despite being five years Jones’s junior, he has already made nine features, starting with The Delta (1997). A mainstay of Sundance, with such celebrated works as Married Life (2007) and Love Is Strange (2014), along with a Cannes competition berth with the Isabelle Huppert-starring Frankie (2019), he had something of an unexpected mid-career resurgence with Passages, the only other film of his I’ve seen so far. A seemingly more overtly sensual work starring three of Europe’s most celebrated arthouse actors in Franz Rogowski, Ben Whishaw, and Adéle Exarchopoulos, it drew a seemingly larger than usual audience with its frank depiction of a queer love triangle inextricable from its apex’s bad behavior and badder outfits.

Both Late Fame and Peter Hujar’s Day, then, come as something of a pivot for both filmmakers. While the latter premiered, as usual, all the way back in Sundance—bypassing its predecessor’s summer MUBI release for this late but fitting New York fall festival spot—the former, contra the prior film’s Tribeca premiere, bowed in the Venice Orizzonti competition, an unexpected but deserved berth for an American independent film. The star is far more recognizable this time: Willem Dafoe plays the incongruously named Ed Saxberger, a poet of some minor renown in the late 1970s who works in today’s New York City as a post office employee, having settled into a comfortable routine of sorting letters and hanging out with barflies unaware of his past life. One day, he encounters Wilson Meyers (Edmund Donovan), the de facto leader of a young literary group known as the Enthusiasm Society, who has staked out his apartment and, over the course of a few effusive meetings, expresses his admiration for the erstwhile poet and asks him to join the society. As they gear up for a statement event and Saxberger attempts to write for the first time in decades, he draws closer to Gloria (Greta Lee), the only female member of the group, whose commitment to her acting aspirations and exaggerated mannerisms set her apart from the would-be mavericks.

Unlike Diane, Jones didn’t write the script for Late Fame, which was already penned by May December scribe Samy Burch, adapted to a modern American setting from Arthur Schnitzler’s novella. Though I had completely forgotten about this fact before the closing credits—and the screenplay doesn’t try to match the fiendish machinations on display in Todd Haynes’s film—it goes some ways in accounting for the renewed sense of relaxation that suffuses this film. From the opening montage, a stream of late-’70s New York avant-garde images that suggest the milieu in which Saxberger briefly practiced his craft, it is clear that Jones is interested in a much larger sense of place than the snowy woods of his previous film, and he takes care to recognize its hustle and bustle while also finding room for his hero’s own, more sanguine experience. The camera is wilder in its greater commitment to handheld, often used in tandem with rapid cutting during some of the larger group scenes, where a split-second shot of a minor member’s smirk adds to the viewer’s (and Saxberger’s) confusion while trying to understand his newfound milieu. In between these dialogue-heavy sequences, there are occasionally some lovely, rapid dissolves of the skies of New York, occupied by birds and buildings, which suggest Saxberger taking the temperature of his assumed home, a poetic mind still at work even as the form has fallen away.

Late Fame is, above all else, an often thrillingly imperfect film, one more open to the possibilities of total failure than Jones’s last film. From the inherent critique of these pretenders to the literary throne—the camera noticeably locks down for a few searing scenes that capture Meyers’s and his associates’ wealth—to Lee’s performance, which is so stylized and self-consciously that the expected reveal of her in a “normal” guise still carries a certain charge, the film risks being insular and even mean-spirited in its takedown of privileged posers, especially as the planned reading spirals further out of control. But it is all united under Dafoe, as warm and playfully rueful as he’s ever been, a force of calm in the midst of the chaos of his peers and his city. Crucially, though his poem is quite good (to my ears) and he does enjoy being feted, Saxberger, and therefore the film that he anchors, is free to slip in and out of these different modes; some are more successfully handled than others, but the lightness of its aging spirit is often unexpected and welcome.

Despite opening with the same camera slate opening as Passages, Peter Hujar’s Day is even more of a left turn for Sachs. Unlike Late Fame‘s fictional poet (but real poetry scene), the film takes not only real people but a very specific occurrence as its subject: in December 1974, writer Linda Rosenkrantz (Rebecca Hall) attempted to embark on a project where she would record artists she knew talking in minute detail about the events of their previous day. For her first and only entry—as laid out in intertitles at the beginning of the film—she chose Peter Hujar (Ben Whishaw), a semi-prominent photographer; though the tape was subsequently lost, a transcript was retained, the contents of which provided the basis for this 76-minute film.

At first glance, Peter Hujar’s Day might seem even more self-satisfied, a 16mm-shot recounting of a fairly banal day in the life of a long-gone New York artist, with an extended anecdote about photographing Allen Ginsberg and stray references to Susan Sontag as perhaps the most readily discernible signposts to the average viewer. But though I can’t recall the precise wording of those title cards, they gesture towards what becomes compelling, even moving about this film. Because the transcript presumably contains no details as to the timespan of the recording, nor what may have transpired between its gaps, the film thus registers as a hybrid between audio reenactment of a documented event and an opportunity to imagine intimate, symbiotic actions of speaking and listening, full of little digressions, snacking, and movements between Rosenkrantz’s apartment and the building’s roof.

Sachs evokes this not only with a precision of framing within the Academy ratio frame, but also by constantly highlighting the inherently constructed nature of this production. Some are a bit more gratuitous than others—a recurring use of film rollouts, a few long shots where the slate and boom mic are visible, a handful of montages where preexisting music swells as Whishaw and Hall appear in poised repose—but they provide continual punctuation that remind the viewer of the work that must go into recreating Hujar’s attempt to recall his own past day. The film even appears to take place over the span of a few days, with a full day-night-day-night cycle, suggesting that to simply talk about one’s day in any detail at all itself takes more time than it does to live it. There, then is the crux of Peter Hujar’s Day‘s raison d’être: given that Hujar’s own recounting of his previous day’s happenings is inherently colored by his own perspective and the inevitable lapses in concentration and memory, the film is thus an imagining of a real event’s imagining of real events. That this all does not take away from the pleasures of existing in a long-gone artistic climate and of watching a gifted actor speaking and another strong actor intently listening is, in its own knowingly small way, more than a little impressive.

Courtesy of Sideshow/Janus Films.

Courtesy of MUBI.

Misericordia/Miséricorde

Rating **** Masterpiece

Directed by Alain Guiraudie

Grand Tour

Rating **** Masterpiece

Directed by Miguel Gomes

I sometimes worry that my habit of writing about two new releases together—stolen, like the credits/ratings block immediately above, from Jonathan Rosenbaum—can feel like a crutch. True, it can sometimes provide a productive, logical point of comparison, and just as often it can come as something of a challenge. But in this instance, it’s meant, at least at the outset, as a means of saving time, of allowing me to write at length about two of my favorite films of the decade thus far without needing to shortchange one or the other by “consigning” it to a capsule review, or taking even longer than I already have in my delayed writing and publication of what you’re reading now. Of course, this very act of combination could be seen as an implicit denigration, meaning that the films either aren’t worth my time and effort to tackle individually or that they can’t stand up by themselves. That (I hope) incorrect assumption is something I’m willing to risk, for the sake of various other competing obligations (for this website and in the actually “important” things in the “real world”).

That being said, the more I think about these two films, the more parallels present themselves. In an earlier, embryonic version of this piece concerned solely with the first film, I noted that from my vantage point, the early to mid-2010s seemed like an unusual time period, full of filmmakers who established themselves with what appeared to be a breakthrough hit; some of them have gone on to become part of what might be considered the film festival mainstay, while others have receded in visibility within the American cinephile consciousness for one reason or another. Alain Guiraudie seems to me the clearest and most understandable example, given the particular confluence of thriller mechanics, frank gay sexuality, and rigorous form offered by 2013’s Stranger by the Lake. However, Miguel Gomes isn’t far behind, even though 2012’s Tabu ultimately had a marginally smaller footprint when it was released. Both continue to operate as statements, even milestones, pure expressions of fated desire as filtered through Guiraudie’s stunningly casual treatment of cruising within precise, locked-down frames and Gomes’s two-part, black-and-white meditation on colonialism present and past, eventually slipping into his own unique take on silent cinema.

Guiraudie and Gomes have each released two feature film projects within a year of each other since then, neither to close the same fanfare. The former’s case is perhaps more banal: Staying Vertical, despite a surprise Cannes competition berth, was too willfully weird to attract a wide audience, and Nobody’s Hero, despite its considerable strengths, was doomed by a reluctant festival rollout and risky treatment of its terrorism backdrop. Gomes, for his part, went both bigger and smaller: the ambitious three-part epic Arabian Nights, all components of which premiered at the same time, was destined to confuse listmakers and cinephiles alike, while the lowkey lockdown film The Tsugua Diaries (co-directed with his artistic and life partner Maureen Fazendeiro) was a minor work by its very nature.

At last year’s Cannes, Guiraudie and Gomes took unexpected paths towards some semblance of critical acclaim. The French director’s Misericordia bowed in the non-competitive Cannes Premiere section, a post-COVID addition widely perceived as a backhanded compliment and tertiary tier of programming amid the main selection, generating nearly as many comments expressing disbelief that it was not in Competition as Víctor Erice’s Close Your Eyes and Lisandro Alonso’s Eureka from the previous year put together. For his part, the Portuguese director did appear in Cannes Competition for the first time with Grand Tour, winning an unexpected yet very well-deserved Best Director prize from the jury. In the usual fashion, they both received US theatrical releases earlier this year, coming out in back-to-back weeks in March.

Much of the (separate) discussion around these two films has hinged around a crucial concept: a filmmaker knowingly revisiting the style of his past works, whether to recapture something of a past glory or not. Both Misericordia and Grand Tour seem to call back specifically to Stranger by the Lake and Tabu, respectively, and it’s certainly no accident that these somewhat more palatable modes have been received as something of a return to form. Guiraudie’s film does indeed return to the openly queer murder mystery framework, while Gomes issued another bifurcated black-and-white tale of thwarted colonialist romance conveyed through archaic cinematic methods. But to reduce these two films, and their elaborations upon past successes, is to risk taking two master filmmakers for granted, even considering their recent reemergence into the wider cinephile consciousness.

As might be inferred by my shorter enumeration, Misericordia shares less in common with Guiraudie’s past work than Grand Tour does with Gomes’s. Like those films, however, it begins fully in media res, a long winding opening shot from the perspective of a car that eventually enters Saint-Martial, a remote village in the French countryside. The driver is Jérèmie (Félix Kysyl), a young man returning to his hometown on the occasion of his baker mentor’s funeral. Though he initially plans to leave that same night, the baker’s wife Martine (Catherine Frot) urges him to stay, and so begins an indefinite period of time spent in the company of the local villagers, including Martine’s son Vincent (Jean-Baptiste Durand), former acquaintance Walter (David Ayala), and the local priest (Jacques Develay).

Though the aforementioned violence does occur remarkably early and acts as the nominal plot engine for Misericordia‘s second two-thirds, Guiraudie establishes early on that there is much more on his mind than another tale of a h(a)unted man. The most immediate impression is of a specific, unusual sense of routine within an environ that is—to Jérèmie at least—both old and new. He is frequently seen walking in the yellowing forests from the relatively few locations that constitute the bulk of the film’s centers of activity, a purely beautiful backdrop of foliage and mountains (captured by Guiraudie’s frequent collaborator Claire Mathon) that often dwarfs Jérèmie and those he interacts with. Across innumerable glasses of pastis, several physical and/or verbal fights of varying levels of intensity, and various criss-crossing attractions (mostly between men), the interplay between the expansive outdoors and cramped interiors comes to form an odd mirror for the situation that Jérèmie has found himself in.

As his moral struggle increases in prominence, so too does the priest’s role, in a manner not dissimilar from the lonely straight man played by Patrick d’Assumçao in Stranger by the Lake. Aside from some chance interactions, the intertwining of Jérèmie and the priest truly begins with one of the most remarkable scenes to ever take place in a confessional, an veiled outpouring of dedication and doubt that bursts open Guiruadie’s carefully couched conversations. Though the film’s title—Latin for mercy—is never uttered onscreen, this scene and another between the two men on a cliff overlooking the village communicate in unexpectedly forthright terms all that goes into such a concept, which involves forgiveness of both the other and the self. With these elements coming to form the more thematic framework, Misericordia is able to also incorporate characters and narratives closer to farce, including a pair of dogged yet polite police officers whose presence only further muddies the waters of Guiraudie’s characteristically slippery relationship between reality and dreams. The final note is one of total ambiguity, an unexpected note given to an unexpected person that refuses any hint of finality, one final gambit in a continual highwire act between hilarity, suspense, and heartrending emotion.

If Misericordia only gets more fascinating as it unfolds, Grand Tour is a marvel from its production concept alone. It is composed of what might be considered two separate tendencies: the narrative, which follows the story of a British civil servant (Edward, played by Gonçalo Waddington) who flees across Asia in the year 1918, pursued by his betrothed Molly (Crista Alfaite), which is told from first his perspective, then hers on obvious soundstages in Portugal shot in black-and-white by Rui Poças; and the non-narrative, which incorporates black-and-white and color footage shot in modern times with no attempts to hide the century-long gap between the diegesis of the story and the new aspects of the present; much of it was shot by Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, but the sections in China were shot (due to lockdown protocol) by Gui Liang, with Gomes directing remotely from across the country.

Over all of this, there is narration given by unnamed voices who speak in the language of the country Edward, then Molly is in at the time, and it is this wild collision of voices and past and present that gives Grand Tour so much of its spark. It is crucial that Gomes does not attempt to disguise what many have already characterized as an excessively Orientalist lens. There is never any point at which the film is unaware of the distance that exists between it and everything it is depicting: the gap in time between it and the Western characters, and the gap in perspective between it and the locales it is existing within. Like Molly’s continual pursuit of Edward, there is the constant sense of searching, during which Gomes’s unique methodology allows him to open up the film to the possibility of experiencing all that the world has to offer.

That being said, Grand Tour wouldn’t be as successful if Gomes lacked an investment in the central dynamic. Part of this is courtesy of the sneakily coherent structure of his screenplay (co-written with Fazendeiro, Telmo Churro, and Mariana Ricardo), which progresses rapidly through Edward’s hapless travails and then diverges from them during Molly’s retracing of his steps, throwing in additional characters which complicate and delay her quest in unexpected, often amusing ways. It also becomes clear that the ardor and care with which Gomes captures both halves of the twinned journeys form a metonym for the passion that Molly has for Edward despite his parting; Alfaite’s performance, full of exuberance and bemused determination, seems to represent Gomes’s perspective better than the shambling Waddington. By the end, which feels like a grand Classical Hollywood exit, the sights and sounds that the viewer experiences alongside these two people are overpowering, a reminder of all that remains to be seen.

Here
Here

Rating *** A must-see

Directed by Bas Devos
Directed by Robert Zemeckis

It’s nothing new to have films with the exact same title within a few years of each other, an only mildly less amusing variation on the confluence of two films with similar subject matter coming out at the same time. There have been no fewer than three films in the past five years to have the English title of Limbo, and two films named Dogman have competed in major film festivals in the last six; film critic Neil Young has even utilized the Twitter hashtag #ThisTitleIsTaken to note the eternal recurrence of titles such as Home, Chaos, and Eden. Such dubbings point as firmly to the undying relevance of the themes they evoke (for better or worse), but it also suggests a desire for a flexible mind on the part of the viewer: many filmmakers might find it useful to outline but not relate the precise nature of the limbo or the home that their film will tackle.

What separates the latest and most potentially tantalizing iteration in this trend to date is, at least initially, the inevitability. When Here premiered at the Berlinale last year, and it became apparent that Cinema Guild would opt to release it in 2024, it seemed more and more likely that it would align with Here‘s release year. I thought of the idea of this review many months ago and, despite more than a half year separating the releases of Here and Here—along with 2024’s fellow travelers of Walter Salles’s Oscar contender I’m Still Here, the belated week-long run of Christopher Harris’s 2001 experimental film still/here, and various other films like Here After, I Like It Here, and You Can’t Stay Here–I endeavored to write about what may seem two entirely separate films solely linked by their names.

I want to stress that, though confusion and obfuscation are key aspects of reading this review, this is a sincere attempt to discuss two continuously generative films that hail from entirely different sources of inspiration and are aimed towards divergent affects. They also, coincidentally enough, come from two directors on the opposite end of their artistic careers and the spectrum of visibility. Here is the Belgian filmmaker Bas Devos’s fourth feature film, and is at best his second to make a breakthrough stateside. Each of his films—all low-budget works resolutely belonging to the arthouse—have incorporated celluloid in some way, even going so far as to involve 65mm for certain shots in his first two features, and they operate with a conscious miniaturist sensibility, all running under 90 minutes and dealing with individuals’ experiences of the city and people around them. By contrast, Here is Robert Zemeckis’s twenty-second feature film at the tail-end of a career full of whiz-bang Hollywood filmmaking, alternately acclaimed and despised technical experimentation, and curious reckonings—both purposeful and unconscious—with nostalgia for the American Century, even as it was still in progress. His oeuvre involves too many different digressions and periods to easily summarize, but it’s safe to say that, despite some abiding supporters (including myself), his level of critical and popular support at this time might be even below the few but largely glowing reviews that Devos has received.

Here has been characterized, largely accurately, as belonging to a new phase of Devos’s career after his first two notably pessimistic features Violet (2014) and Hellhole (2019). His third feature, the nocturnal city reverie Ghost Tropic, premiered a scant few months after the latter and heralded a much less harsh outlook, a shift to 16mm, and a greater incorporation of nature within the city of Brussels that has served as Devos’s primary location. Here, like its fellow Brussels-set films, is concerned with the immigrant experience in a less precarious sense than many contemporary works, using their enclaves and quotidian interactions to explore what it means to exist in a place that is both home and not home. Here‘s protagonists initially seem to embody these two separate mindsets: Stefan (Stefan Gota) is a Romanian construction worker preparing to return to his native country on holiday, though he may his extend his “stay” indefinitely; Shuxiu (Gong Liyo, who was also an editor on Wang Bing’s monumental Youth trilogy) is a Chinese bryologist (researcher of mosses) who teaches at a university and helps out with her aunt’s restaurant, with no mention of any plans to alter her life.

Life alterations (and lack thereof) form the central conundrums surrounding Here. Based on Richard McGuire’s 2014 graphic novel—a 304-page tome itself expanded from a 6-page comic story in 1989, if there weren’t enough versions of Here already in play—it aims for what scans as an immensely ambitious undertaking: to chronicle the events of a specific place from prehistoric times to the modern day in Perth Amboy, New Jersey. Like its source(s), Here uses a fixed, slightly askew perspective—here somewhere on the wall between a house’s living room and dining room; the graphic novel is closer to the corner of the room and produces a more angular yet more “neutral” composition, while the comic story’s point of view only looks at a corner of the living room by the window—that, in the film’s most publicized gambit, restricts Zemeckis to a single camera set-up for the entirety of Here.

It should be said that, despite my great admiration for both films, Here is a definitely stronger, more cohesive, and ultimately more beautiful work than Here. The opening shots of each swiftly communicate both the intentions and the level of subtlety each is operating on: Here observes a construction site in the distance with trees largely covering it in the foreground, an elegant interplay in emphases between the human-constructed city and the nature that will assert itself in fits and starts within these confines before eventually fully taking over the narrative. It’s difficult to talk about what exactly constitutes a shot within Here, since it uses the source’s technique of placing frames within frames to capture a part of the spot of land at a different time from the primary tableaux surrounding it, but Here opens with a car driving in front of the house, different frames within frames capturing three different cars along the same trajectory, before a multitude of views of the home interior and/or undeveloped land at different times that eventually resolve into the first dialogue scene with Here‘s central couple, Richard (Tom Hanks) and Margaret (Robin Wright), as they enter what was the former’s home for more than half a century. Elegance is and isn’t the name of the game for Here which, for all its narratives—intersecting in space but not time—reveals itself to be the tale of the Young clan, from the time that Richard’s parents moved into the house after World War II to his moving out in the early 2000s. For many, that sixty-year timespan feels reminiscent of the last time Zemeckis, Hanks, Wright, and co-screenwriter last collaborated on a film, resulting in the vastly more popular Forrest Gump thirty years ago. While Here‘s hokeyness and eagerness to track the times that are a’changin’ do strike a chord of recognition, it’s a comparison that feels as limited as the film’s perspective.

Speaking of which: one of Here‘s most brilliant moments reveals the canniness of its aesthetic strategy: the first definable “incident” on this patch of land, both chronologically and in the unfolding of the film, shows the extinction of the dinosaurs, complete with copious amounts of lava and fleeing reptiles. Any conventional treatment of this event, a spectacular global disaster, would feature grand sweeping shots of the devastation that showed off the scale of the barren, fiery landscapes. Here, on the other hand, refuses such elaborations, and its restraint signals the divide between this patch of land and others; while much can be inferred about the (eventually literal) outside world and a great deal is brought into the house, spoken about, and shown on television, it is left to the imagination what might happen. Here is a film that revels in imagination, in the direct images of its characters’ experiences and the thrumming richness of the world that surrounds them. Though it takes place over five days and four nights, its sense of time feels considerably more porous than the ordinary cycle of light and dark. Part of that has to do with Stefan’s habitual insomnia, which stretches out nights to achieve not the sustained mood of Devos’s previous film, but instead a slippage between waking and dreamed life.

Both Stefan and Shuxiu experience this second state at one point: the latter’s represents her first entry into the film, describing in Mandarin Chinese voiceover a morning in bed where she briefly forgot the names of the things surrounding her, moving from panic to an acceptance of a oneness with the world that is broken up by the sound of an outside siren. The images that accompany this recounting, a series of shots in the woods of the mosses and trees, precede Shuxiu’s first on-screen appearance, and are echoed during a brief nap Stefan takes while paying a visit to the hospital his sister works at. It’s possible to see Here as a film simultaneously highlighting and dismissing the unity of world. Though the various occupants of the land fall into consciously rhyming cycles, sometimes in a manner that manages to be equally revelatory and short-sighted—an early airplane fanatic and patriarch dies from the Spanish flu, while the Latine housekeeper for a Black family (notably the only domestic worker in the whole film) is all-too-unsubtly shown developing COVID—the swath of experience inevitably calls attention to the disparities on display.

The Youngs live in a continual state of middle-class malaise, with Richard forced to give up on his painting aspirations by an unplanned pregnancy, becoming an insurance salesman while he and Margaret continue to live in the house with his parents and siblings; a 1940s couple eventually gets rich by inventing the La-Z-Boy chair and immediately departs for California; two other families live there for a seemingly brief period of time before a death drives them away. But through all the passings in their own family, the Youngs stay far longer than they should, as much at the mercy of capitalist striving as their own inertia. Here reflects this emotional turmoil with an eerie placidity, incorporating their sufferings with those of others—including a Lenni-Lenape couple whose own family formation coincides on-screen with Richard and Margaret’s, eventually concluding with the woman’s death from old age—into the inexorable passage of time. Though certain milestones are clearer than others (none moreso than a television showing the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show, a sign of Zemeckis returning to the roots of his debut I Wanna Hold Your Hand), the signposting that generally occurs is resolutely ordinary or undercut: New Year’s Eve 2003, the end of the Revolutionary War being met with a verbal shrug. The origins of the La-Z-Boy, as much amusing on-screen attention as it gets, seem to be forgotten by history, and the only thing that people point out is the beautiful historical building across the street, belonging to, of all people, Benjamin Franklin’s extra-marital son, who staunchly backed the British colonial forces. The famed inventor and Founding Father makes an appearance, but that grand house is literally backgrounded at almost all times, a footnote in history only notable because it happens to be the only colonial governor’s mansion still standing today. To be overshadowed by barely remembered history is something of a terrible state of existence.

Here has a few half-remembered invocations of history, both anthropocentric and natural: a friend of Stefan’s points out that the first trains to travel in mainland Europe arrived in Brussels, which he in turn mentions to Shuxiu a little while after she tells him that mosses were the first plants to grow on land. Where the great anguish and only half-convincing catharsis of Here lies in all the ways the modern world can make a person feel small, Here is largely content with that designation, even embracing it in many ways. It’s useful of course to see the mosses that become so crucial to the last third of Here as a synecdoche for the film’s aims: a thing that grows everywhere without people noticing it—Stefan even draws a comparison to himself—that is itself “a forest full of life.” But this move into nature only heightens the more (figuratively) subterranean beauty of the abutting city in night and day, and draws further attention to the ways in which Stefan was already interacting with nature: his preparations of soup to fully empty his fridge before his journeys, the various seeds that mysteriously appear in his pocket, his trip to a communal garden. Here is much more about finding the joy in the place where you live, but Here‘s slender narrative invokes this idea when it comes to Stefan’s situation: in an early scene in his apartment, he looks out his window at the city, before turning back and saying “this is my home” in Romanian, a phrase that, depending where you look, has a completely different meaning.

Here has garnered many divergent reactions and points of comparison—Michael Snow’s structuralist masterpiece Wavelength, the fixed proscenium staging of the Lumières, the grand-scale suburbia of The Tree of Life, the similar constraints of Steven Soderbergh’s Presence from this year—but it’s worth pointing out what, to me, strikes me as some key differences from the little I’ve glimpsed of the graphic novel (I’ve read and liked the comic story decently). Though the central narrative appears to be similar, there’s an abstract quality to much of Here, with its constant aim to find contextless juxtapositions between similar activities across time, that Here, for all its strengths, does not attempt to emulate: even as the constant shifting makes it purposefully difficult to get fully acclimated to the various storylines for the first twenty minutes or so, this does ultimately aim to tell a set of linear stories.

And yet, Here‘s adherence to traditional dramatics and relatively coherent screen elements produces its own daring innovations and reference points. The former is the removal of the year designation within each frame within the frame, automatically producing a destabilizing effect wholly removed from the greater use of such frames in the comics. While guesses can be made as to the origin of these individual shots, and the frames within frames are used more to transition between scenes rather than to constantly interrupt the proceedings, the effect is of a time period (minutes or decades apart) intruding upon one another, where the death march of the narrative becomes only crueler and more sobering when juxtaposed in the same frame with a celebration at another time. Méliès might be the better silent cinema pioneer to refer to, both in terms of cutting-edge technology—the extensive use of generative AI to de-age the actors during the take is never completely convincing but feels remarkably close, an uncanny valley Zemeckis has dwelled in for many years—and in a self-conscious theatricality. The living room runs deep into the background, though not quite as much as the graphic novel’s, but while Here varies its focal points’ distance from the camera well, many scenes are played rather close, with characters frequently looking disconcertingly off-screen past the camera, or beginning or ending a scene by walking towards or away from an unknown sector. Perhaps the film’s single most galvanizing moment expands the viewer’s sense—knowingly jarring them away from the perspective of the characters—of the space with a sublimely simple device.

The ending of Here is as ambiguous as the ending of Here is unambiguous, but both find a clear place of resolution that centers around a realization of all that remains forgotten and uncomprehended. Even though Here‘s title is used frequently, down to being the very last word spoken, the formal choice that accompanies it acts as a revelation for the audience that, once again, was apparent to the characters all along. Here contains a much more modest, yet no less impactful movement of its own, carrying within it an unmistakable sense of tenderness and curiosity that explores an interior rather than exterior space. Nick Newman (via Adam Nayman) has a much more cynical view of the final perspective of Here‘s, and it’s true that its neat narrative tidiness speaks just as much to all that has been lost and the even further diminished stature of this central couple, but the very last frames within the frame—returning to look once more at the little living room where centuries of personal history have taken place—feels remarkably in line with Here‘s mosses: a mini-forest of life, full of pleasure and pain.

Chime
The Serpent’s Path/La Voie du serpent
Cloud/クラウド/Kuraudo

Rating *** A must-see

Directed by Kurosawa Kiyoshi

The average cinephile would certainly be forgiven for not noticing Kurosawa Kiyoshi’s relatively long absence from filmmaking to open this tumultuous decade. After his perpetually underrated Wife of a Spy played in competition at the Venice Film Festival in 2020, he didn’t put out another film for four years, his longest break since 2008 (Tokyo Sonata) to 2012 (Penance). In the haze of the pandemic and its attendant complications, it’s only natural that even a steady artist like Kurosawa would fall out of view. Still, the slow roll-out of announcements—beginning in April 2023 and concluding in February 2024—that he would be releasing three feature films in the calendar year was one of the more delightful phenomenons of the past few years.

The groundswell seemed to stem from a variety of impulses: the excitement at his return of course, the surprise at this heightened degree of prolificness (Hong Sang-soo was inevitably invoked). However, there was perhaps just a little bit of relief. Following a run of, in the eyes of the many who still view Kurosawa as “merely” one of horror cinema’s greatest exponents, unconventional films—Before We Vanish‘s alien invasion, To the Ends of the Earth‘s odd travelogue, Wife of a Spy‘s period intrigue—the announcements of first a remake of Serpent’s Path (1998), one of his final V-cinema efforts, then the explicitly supernatural Chime, and finally the suspense thriller Cloud seemed to herald something of a return to form.

Ironically, the timeline of the films’ respective availability has been jumbled and uneven at every turn. The 45-minute Chime premiered in a sidebar at the Berlinale and, thanks to its botched release from a NFT company, became available via extralegal means a few months later. Though The Serpent’s Path technically premiered second, receiving a full-fledged theatrical release in Japan in June, it was completely unseen in the West until its competition berth at the San Sebastian Film Festival, and has only received a scant few festival showings in North America since then. Therefore, Cloud, the final film announced and premiered from this trio, has received much greater attention at an earlier time than its predecessor, thanks to a Venice out-of-competition slot (where it was commonly cited as being better than a number of the actual Golden Lion hopefuls) and a well-attended TIFF premiere. And, as has been frequently mentioned, none of these films currently have U.S. distribution.

I say all of this not only to catalogue the strange journey that related films, especially Kurosawa’s—lest we forget that Journey to the Shore, an Un Certain Regard prizewinner and NYFF Main Slate entry, never got an American distributor—can take in the currents of the festival circuit, but to point at what might be called a certain interchangeability between these three works, all of which are strong and distinct in their own ways yet ever-so-slightly lesser than the majority of his more recent work. I watched these earlier this month—in an appropriately mixed-up order: The Serpent’s Path, Cloud, Chime; I’ll be discussing the films according to the order they premiered—and throughout I couldn’t help but think of how my friend Evan Morgan, one of the smartest critics I know (especially on Kurosawa), remarked to me that, after seeing Chime and knowing about the two films to follow, he felt Kurosawa was entering a more retrospective period after more than a decade where “everything seemed new and open to infinite possibilities,” an assessment which is, for better or worse, largely accurate, or at least indicative of a somewhat more straightforward conception than his previous predilection.

Chime, despite its short running time and novel setting, is ultimately the film that adheres most closely to this paradigm; it is also the strongest of the year. Kurosawa is by no means new to working within the span of an hour, but these works—including “Beautiful New Bay Area Project” and Seventh Code, both from 2013, and his short “Actually…” from two years ago—have typically, due to a combination of their status as commissions and their more free-floating narratives, allowed Kurosawa to play in freewheeling fashion with genre and tone. Chime, by contrast, is almost perversely committed to its evocation of the dread that has been his most widely beloved mode for so long, which is to say that this is paradoxically a continually surprising film narratively without the unexpected shifts of many of his other, even better works.

True, Chime generates an immediate frisson from its main character’s work: the antiseptic teaching kitchens, besides uncannily reminding me instantly of Frederick Wiseman’s Menus-Plaisirs—Les Troisgros, are much more orderly yet oddly reminiscent of his typically dingy environs, with all the cold reflective metal and knives a sure harbinger of the violence to come. The familiar elements don’t only appear at work; viewing this in close proximity to Tokyo Sonata, the family dinners here bear a marked resemblance, only streamlined and stripped of all but the most essential elements. When the premise first came out, many compared it to Memoria, but besides there being surprisingly little of the actual chime (much more akin to wind chimes as opposed to, say, the sound of a ringtone), it is more than anything else an externalization, a reminder of all the potential evil surrounding us.

Especially at this early juncture, it’s too reductive to say that Chime is the most successful of Kurosawa’s films this year merely because it sticks closest to his strengths, which lie both in sustained mood and in the various means by which he teases out his characters’ madness: the overflowing box of cans that the chef’s wife is dumping out at one point, the nighttime sojourn to hide a body, a disastrous job interview caused by the chef’s manic inability to get out of his own perspective. It’s probably unlikely that this scenario could sustain a film much longer than this one, especially considering the coda: a sudden burst of (emulated?) film grain that calls to mind Kurosawa’s recreation of 9.5mm film for Wife of a Spy, the exact right frenzied note to end a uniformly thrilling 45 minutes. Chime is direct about its intentions and executes them in the right manner, which for a craftsman of this caliber is kind of ideal.

In a certain sense, it’s convenient for referential purposese that the remake of Kurosawa’s 1998 film appears to be formally titled in English The Serpent’s Path, though I wonder how much of that comes from the direct translation of the French “La Voie” (not “le chemin” as originally reported). Such a small yet focusing element describes this take on his original material well. For me, if it is not quite the best of this trio, then it’s certainly the most fascinating. In broad strokes, The Serpent’s Path operates as a tremendously faithful remake of Serpent’s Path, following a grieving father as he, with the help of a much more implacable accomplice, kidnaps and tortures men who he believes killed—unlike in the Japanese original, molestation is never mentioned—his daughter.

Of course, the film takes place in Paris, featuring the great French actor Damien Bonnard as the father, and represents Kurosawa’s second film outside his native country after the French film Daguerrotype. His helper, replacing the bespectacled male math teacher of the original, is a female doctor played by Shibasaki Ko, who speaks impeccable French and in certain ways represents a combination of characters from Serpent’s Path, including an enigmatic gang leader who served as one of the main antagonists. The original has long been noted for its overwhelming bleakness, a pitiless examination of abasement that equally makes sense amid his direct-to-video work and coming right after Cure. The Serpent’s Path, at least in my view, does reach a similar height and, in terms of Kurosawa’s expression of his interests, surpass the original, but it doesn’t necessarily aim to do so via its atmosphere.

The dingy, enormous warehouse is replaced by more discrete, still dilapidated rooms reminiscent of a soundstage; the 80 minute film is expanded out to almost 2 hours without seeming to add too much in the way of plot. Rather, The Serpent’s Path works more slyly than the other two films put together when viewed from the lens of adaptation. Most obviously notable are the scenes with Nishijima Hideotoshi (the lead of Kurosawa’s Creepy, which featured Serpent’s Path star Kagawa Teruyuki) as one of the doctor’s patients, who has lived in France for many years without ever learning the language: his signature weariness mixed with charisma as he talks about his persistent migraines and growing dissatisfaction with his life communicates a great deal about a dislocation faced, in one way or another, by all the characters.

Kurosawa’s ability to evoke modern alienation has always been one of his most significant tools, and it’s further bolstered here by one of the most striking changes. While many sequences are replicated virtually identically, down to a few perfectly copied visual choices like a tilt-up as the first captive looks up at the father, the film invokes the idea of a corporate conspiracy which led to the murder much earlier than the hints given in Serpent’s Path. Both films are, at their core, about a paranoiac struggling to establish a motivation for the havoc he is wreaking, but The Serpent’s Path introduction of a more coherent throughline trades Serpent’s Path‘s haze of confusion—signified by the copious use of complex math problems—for the brutal, cold light of digital and two-faced interactions enabled by late capitalism and ostensible good intentions. Ultimately, my preference for The Serpent’s Path may simply lie in the sheer novelty of seeing Kurosawa directing Damien Bonnard as he torments Mathieu Amalric and Grégoire Colin, but the fullness with which he delves into his newly revitalized premise, even if it lacks the focus of Chime, is truly chilling.

It might be something of an anticlimax to end with Cloud, even though it’s a very worthy film in its own right and already, deservedly, has plenty of champions. Like Chime, it’s a film that, despite the noted shift from suspense thriller to quasi-action shootout, is relatively direct about its intentions and interests, and “merely” sets about executing them with great vigor. Much of the coverage around the film has revolved around its apparent updating of Cure and especially Pulse for a more depersonalized, bland Internet age; it might be too harsh to say that these comparisons are more reflective of Kurosawa’s still underseen body of work and therefore Western critics’ limited understanding of his cinema, but, a few potent scenes of our antihero as he waits for his scalped goods to sell out on a flickering reseller website aside, this is much less a film about the actual apparatus of technology than human interactions under duress.

Eric Marsh compared it to Doppelganger, which I haven’t seen, but, perhaps because of the compressed preparatory viewing I undertook for my own week of Kurosawa, it oddly reminded me most of Serpent’s Path‘s sister film Eyes of the Spider (also 1998); for his part Filipe Furtado cited The Revenge films (I’ve seen the first and can see the resemblance), which also belong to Kurosawa’s V-Cinema works. Though Eyes virtually begins where Serpent’s Path leaves off—starring Aikawa Sho, the helper in that film, as a man seeking revenge for his daughter’s murder—it quickly becomes something of a yakuza comedy, tracking the drudgery of a hitman’s life in a vague, nonsensical hierarchy; though there is plenty of bloodshed, it is dealt with in a fairly lightweight manner.

Cloud only involves the yakuza tangentially, in terms of the implied connections and past that the reseller’s assistant possesses, but it feels of a piece with Eyes of the Spider in its approach to violence and the numbing consequences of economic manipulation, especially once the reseller and his girlfriend move to the countryside and all the problems they hoped to escape are multiplied tenfold. Kurosawa’s staging of the action scenes, which reminded me of the wonderfully absurd shootouts in the very different Before We Vanish, is very clean and dynamic, playing up the cavernous desolation of the warehouse (as opposed to the disturbingly tidy warehouse in The Serpent’s Path). Ultimately, the inexorable grind of moneymaking keeps moving, encapsulated in the use of one of Kurosawa’s best recurring formal devices during the final moments: obvious rear projection during driving scenes, which he once described as aiding the sense of transformation caused by the resulting conversations. Like its two similarly brilliant brethren, it’s clear that something akin to an apocalypse is fast approaching; while most of my favorite Kurosawas don’t end on such an unambiguous note of pessimism, there’s still not much as compelling as his cinema, whatever running time, genre, or form it adopts.

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.

Courtesy of Disney/Pixar.

Inside Out 2

Rating ** Worth seeing

Directed by Kelsey Mann

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Courtesy of Sideshow/Janus Films.

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

Rating **** Masterpiece

Directed by Hamaguchi Ryusuke

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.

The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed

Rating *** A must-see

Directed by Joanna Arnow

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Courtesy of Sideshow/Janus Films.

The Beast/La Bête

Rating **** Masterpiece

Directed by Bertrand Bonello

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Courtesy of MUBI.

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

Rating **** Masterpiece

Directed by Radu Jude

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

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

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

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

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

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