Showing Up

Rating **** Masterpiece

Directed by Kelly Reichardt

Inherent in the process of artmaking is the imperfection, the unexpected detour that can radically change the overall trajectory of the artist’s intent and execution. Mark Toscano once wrote about an occurrence in his restoration of Stan Brakhage’s films, where the legendary avant-garde filmmaker stated that, for a particular short, he had initially failed to spot the hair in the camera gate; upon doing so, he decided to orient his entire visual conceit around that unintended intrusion. Such an approach can be found across media and along the entire continuum of resources and styles: whether it be classical or experimental, a mega-blockbuster or a no-budget picture, a piece of music or a film or a play, the essential humanity of art means that nothing “perfect” exists, which is something to be cherished and upheld as indicative of a personality, or a coterie of personalities, behind pieces both imposing and modest.

The best films about art accept this idea on its own terms and incorporate it into their forms; the miracle of Kelly Reichardt’s Showing Up lies in its ability to do so while creating a vivid world of its own, filled with quotidian frustrations, mysteries, and liberations. In her portrait of Lizzy (Michelle Williams), a sculptor who does administrative work at a Portland art college for a living, Reichardt does this task almost literally: the film takes place at the Oregon College of Art and Craft, which closed just before the pandemic. Temporarily resurrected during filming, the space conjures an effect not so dissimilar from Tsai Ming-liang’s Goodbye Dragon Inn, though there is no looming closure that threatens to destroy an entire way of life.

Instead, Showing Up takes place over the course of a week, as Lizzy attempts to create enough pieces for her first solo show while dealing with sundry personal problems: her contentious relationship with her friend and landlord Jo (Hong Chau), who is dragging her heels on fixing her fellow artist’s hot water due to her own impending shows; her tedious days at the college under the watchful eye of her boss, who happens to be her mom (Maryann Plunkett); and her house calls to her eccentric father (Judd Hirsch) and troubled brother (John Magaro). An additional wrench is thrown into the proceedings when her cat mauls a pigeon, breaking its wing; almost by accident, she ends up taking care of it for large stretches of time, forcing her to alter her art-making routine. Crucially, however, Lizzy is not the sole protagonist. Jo takes center stage at numerous moments, with her relatively carefree nature — she is introduced excitedly rolling a tire down the street to a tree so she can swing from it — acting as a source of equal parts hilarity, resentment, and serenity, something which Chau inhabits with exquisite good grace. Even more importantly, the film is strewn with shots of students and teachers creating their own art in wildly different media — light installations, artifice-forward films, wool-work, dyeing, painting, and much more — usually without Lizzy or any named character in the shot, frequently featuring bold tracking shots to convey the scope of this institute.

While Showing Up is probably funnier than all of Reichardt’s previous films put together — the withering glares Williams flashes at certain points are especially choice — it generously refuses to look down on any of the art its characters make, not even a landscaping piece that Lizzy’s brother claims to be crafting near the climax of the film. Its view is humble yet expansive, often using uncharacteristic jerky small pans and zooms which could be called be called, not unlike the more apparent zooms of Hong Sang-soo — whose recent films, particularly The Novelist’s Film, feel like kindred spirits in their approach to the artist — amateurish.

Of course, the entire nature of what it means to be an amateur, especially in this milieu, where a relative star like Jo still has to deal with possibly not getting a catalogue for her work, has no bearing on the quality of art or its maker’s level of dedication. While plenty of artmaking is seen, including from Lizzy, the most extended view of her practice comes in a static long take, where she breaks off the arm of one of her sculptures so she can carefully attach a different, extended set of arms in its place. That concept, subtraction in the service of addition, can be found all over Showing Up, especially its climax at Lizzy’s opening, which evolves into a litany of anxiety and passive-aggression that then unspools into a fitting equanimity. The key in that modus operandi is the back-and-forth: the blindspots and irritation must exist alongside the camaraderie and rapprochement, often coming from the most unexpected of sources. In that balance, in her leads’ abilities to carry both emotions, Reichardt finds her brilliant muse.

Stonewalling/石门/Shímén

Rating *** A must-see

Directed by Huang Ji & Otsuka Ryuji

In an early scene from Stonewalling, co-directed by wife-husband duo Huang Ji & Otsuka Ryuji, the main character Lynn (Yao Honggui), who works in various modeling and hostess gigs while studying to become a flight attendant, recites the phrases “forty is forty,” “fourteen is fourteen,” “forty isn’t fourteen” to herself over and over. In Mandarin, these words (sì shí shì sì shí, shí sì shì shí sì, sì shí bú shì shí sì), while foundational in and of themselves, combine to form a rather potent tongue-twister, one that Lynn, who grew up speaking Hunanese, uses to improve her grasp of the dominant Mandarin dialect, any extra asset to assist in her hireability, though she declines to practice her English.

Stonewalling is suffused with such delicate balances of identity that reflect wider socioeconomic concerns. It is the third part of a trilogy with Egg and Stone (2012) and The Foolish Bird (2017) — the first directed by Huang solo, while all three are lensed by the Japanese-born Otsuka — a triptych following Yao’s character from the age of 14 to 20 and her parents (played by Huang’s own father and mother). I haven’t seen the first two films, whose narrative linkages seems fairly secondary to Stonewalling‘s concerns, but they all deal with the particular struggles faced by young women in a rapidly changing China. And those struggles are especially particular here: the film takes place over the course of Lynn’s unexpected pregnancy; first intending to get an abortion, she instead decides to carry her child to term so that her mother (who runs a woman’s clinic) can offer it as compensation to a patient who lost her own child.

This set-up gestures towards Stonewalling‘s most pressing interest: the commodification of the body, how one’s personal being is turned into just another item for the market, objectified in multiple senses of the word and evaluated according to strict parameters. Much of the film thus unfolds as almost a series of vignettes, as Lynn passes from gig to gig, crossing back and forth from her parents’ home in the suburbs of Changsha to the big city, continually trying to sustain herself amidst a climate of uncertainty and fraud, most clearly typified by her mother’s participation in a multi-level marketing scam involving a healing cream. The effect is in many ways akin to an ambitious cross-section of a certain aspect of the Chinese marketplace, continually finding new manifestations and outgrowths of a fundamental imbalance in society.

But what makes Huang and Otsuka’s approach much greater than a simple exposé of the dire state of modern China and/or capitalism in general is the middle ground they find. Mostly shooting in static long shots, the pace of their scenes unfurls with a great sense of consideration, refusing to lean into the outrageousness of any moments and instead letting it emanate from the material. This especially comes to pass during a crucial job that finds Lynn supervising a group of women potentially slated to donate their eggs to wealthy clients; all young, attractive, and told to behave in certain ways, their job interviews take place with exactly the level of discomfort one might expect without ever becoming overbearing. (It’s also worth noting that there are a few Uyghur women in this group, though it’s not a thread that is this film’s place to explore further).

Throughout this, Lynn’s sense of drift and displacement remains pronounced, not the least because of her fraught, distant relationship with her parents and her boyfriend, the latter of whom disappears for most of the film because of her concealment of her decision to carry her child. And this all reaches full tilt with a shockingly vivid recreation of the early days of the pandemic, something which is evoked as a disruption to the rhythms of life, a further elaboration on Stonewalling‘s interest in the body’s role amidst the masses blown up to national and then global scales. Without saying too much further, the ending suddenly hammers home the sadness and personal ties that bind, only hinted at before and which suddenly come home to roost. The elegance of its conceit, the suddenly bursting emotions that swell amidst immense loneliness, feels so attuned to its character’s journey, something which makes the quotidian rhythms all the more potent.

The Girl and the Spider/Das Mädchen und die Spinne

Rating *** A must-see

Directed by Ramon and Silvan Zürcher

Los Conductos

Rating *** A must-see

Directed by Camilo Restrepo

Il buco

Rating **** Masterpiece

Directed by Michelangelo Frammartino

I’ll freely admit at the start of this review that the links between these three remarkable 2022 (release year) films are tenuous at best. Time gets in the way of even the most trivial of interests — the reviews I write on this website, which by definition aren’t on commission — and it’s too long since I’ve seen these to give them their own proper standalone reviews. But I want to write on these films: in part because I never commented on the former two, and moreso because I feel like they’ve gotten lost in the shuffle even more than the typical small-scale arthouse release, even as they rank among my favorites of the year thus far. Additionally, Rosenbaum’s penchant for tackling multiple films in a single review has always appealed to me — even as I’ve only emulated it once — and it came to mind as a solution to my lapses in memory and energy. If the purpose of my reviews on Taipei Mansions is to shed light on such works, then I’m compelled to write on them.

Shedding light of course is a unifying theme: The Girl and the Spider, Los Conductos, and Il buco feature among their many qualities a compelling approach to the difference between day and night, light and darkness, and how these extremes intermix. They are also all the works of directors with very few features, though the path each has taken to get there varies tremendously.* Additionally, in a landscape increasingly dominated by longer and longer films, they all run less than 100 minutes; if not necessarily models of concision, they still stand out as relatively fleet works that still maintain a languid, or at least contemplative, atmosphere.

It’s difficult in some ways for me to properly assess whether these films can be said to truly exist outside of the mainstream of the festival landscape. Il buco, after all, was in competition at Venice, where it won the Special Jury Prize; both Los Conductos and The Girl and the Spider were two of the highest profile films in Berlin’s secondary Encounters section in 2020 and 2021, respectively. Especially with the deservedly strong attention towards Encounters (and the strategic placing of more prominent films in it), the simple distillation of a film’s location to the festivals and sections it played at can lead to blithe dismissal of quietly — or not-so-quietly — groundbreaking work.

As is always the case, the barometer ought to be the films themselves, and in light of that they begin to extricate themselves from the norm. All of the films, in keeping with the deserved decades-long preference for minimalism in art film, could be distilled down to a single sentence. The Girl and the Spider tracks the odd interactions and relationships across two apartment buildings in Bern, Switzerland, during two days and one night. What little plot that Los Conductos possesses rests in the movement of an unhoused man around Medellín, Colombia, tracking his attempts to survive and his fraught relationship with the society surrounding him. Il buco is mostly about the 1961 excursion into the Bifurto Abyss in Italy, then considered the third-deepest cave on Earth, while also leaving ample time to chronicle a shepherd’s slow demise. Already there are the hints of the details and motifs that each director teases out: the sheer density and queer eroticism of The Girl and the Spider, the somnambulant drift of Los Conductos, the urban-rural dichotomies of Il Buco, which also stands out for its lack of dialogue, only utilizing subtitles for a tangentially crucial archival news broadcast of the construction of the Pirelli Tower in Milan.

But each adopts its own style, the likes of which I haven’t quite seen in the contemporary landscape. In keeping with their debut, the Zürchers opt for an even more concentrated form of the close-up, almost geographic shooting style, often approaching the camera subject with a frontality that simultaneously makes clear and obscures the apartments; the film even begins with a PDF of the new apartment, an object which gets altered and shifted by human activity. Breaking from the mostly portraiture style of his shorts, Restrepo retains his use of grainy 16mm in photographing a barrage of close-ups on objects, using great tactility to ground and make tangible the near-ephemerality of the film’s narrative. I haven’t seen Le Quattro Volte, but Frammartino appears to follow a similar durational style, albeit with substantially more complications: in order to shoot the film Frammartino and his non-actors actually made roughly thirty-five voyages into the abyss, shooting with no lighting save the period-accurate helmet lights and undergoing a four-hour journey each way in addition to the demands of shooting.

What these films all share, besides their awkward placement between the mainstream and the underground, is this attention to space. Two of them are shot on digital, one isn’t; two of them use rapid editing, one doesn’t; two have a legible sense of a narrative arc, one doesn’t. But all of them use space as a jumping off point, none of them content to simply showcase directorial style, and all seeking to transform a place while taking care not to rob it of its essential characteristics. In the case of Il buco, Frammartino even manages to engineer something with a greater sense of spectacle than any film of the past few years: it’s one thing to witness the spelunkers in a journey that only ends when they reach the literal end, it’s another thing entirely to see the results of something like their method of ascertaining the depth of a cavern by setting a magazine page aflame and dropping it, watching the light slowly disappear into the distance.

And the most notable connecting point of all is each film’s devotion to a certain form of impossibility, a slight inflection of the “real world” that makes it uncanny and even otherworldly. The bright colors and melancholy bitterness of The Girl and the Spider; the reflection of downtrodden, vengeful young Colombian men in Los Conductos; the purposeful anticlimax of two ends in Il buco that gets miraculously transformed into an almost Fordian elegy: all of these films utilize the viscerality of their styles to convey engrossing complexity which, in my eyes, few filmmakers today have tried to match.

*Ramon Zürcher made The Strange Little Cat in 2013, and is officially joined by his brother Silvan (who co-produced his debut) for The Girl and the Spider. After a string of well-received shorts, including “Cilaos” and “La bouche,” Camilo Restrepo makes his feature debut with Los Conductos; it remains to be seen whether he has a similarly lengthy amount of time between films as the other directors do. Michelangelo Frammartino has his third film, and his first since Le Quattro Volte from 2010.

Everything Everywhere All at Once

Rating * Has redeeming facet

Directed by Daniel Kwan & Daniel Scheinert

I don’t usually like to make my life and background the focus of my reviews, since my general inclinations are to let my observations assume their personality from what I choose to write about and to not interfere with the text itself. But Daniel Kwan & Daniel Scheinert’s Everything Everywhere All at Once begs for me to consider it in light of this. There are certain aspects of myself that, for various reasons, I can’t bring into this piece, but suffice it to say that this film — in how eerily and perfectly it captures my relationships with my parents and my heritage, along with my present circumstances — should have absolutely destroyed me, serving as an absurdist funhouse mirror that nevertheless contained my recognizable visage at the center. That it doesn’t do so (leaving aside any likely emotional deficiencies that I possess) stems from, among other things, its utterly counterproductive ambitions and its ultimate shortsightedness with regards to a certain view of Chinese-American experiences, along with its misunderstanding of Michelle Yeoh; I should say here up front that my parents are from Taiwan while the Wangs are from Hong Kong, but as I’ll get into this slight difference might be even less significant than it originally appears, to the film’s detriment.

Before fully diving in, I do wonder how much of my response to Everything Everywhere All at Once is a direct reaction to the way it has been received as a landmark of Chinese/Chinese-American representation in United States film. It’s certainly something I’ve considered, and has been at least a small part of my negative feelings towards Crazy Rich Asians and The Farewell (and, much more tangentially, Minari for Asian-Americans generally). While the merits of these films vary wildly, it’s impossible not to notice that the main thing linking all these films together is that most common of narrative devices, especially with respect to Asians: family. I don’t mean to imply at all that filmmakers of Asian descent should avoid trying to make films explicitly about family; Edward Yang’s Yi Yi is my favorite Chinese-language film after all, and everyone from Fei Mu to Tsai Ming-liang has at one point or another explored what it means to be part of a family. But what comes across as a more quotidian or allegorical concern in those films is “elevated” to something of near-life-or-death consequences, the battle between the parent who wants to preserve the family unit at all costs versus the child who yearns to become more free, who implicitly wants to assimilate (or has) into the Western culture in which they live.

Such a conflict is ballooned, in the style of Everything Everywhere All at Once‘s co-producers and Marvel Cinematic Universe helmers Anthony & Joe Russo, so that Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh) must literally save not only the world or the universe, but also the entirety of existence across innumerable parallel universes. As self-consciously ludicrous and unwieldy as the film gets, this struggle is more-or-less construed as, in the film’s twisted logic, the reason everything bad that has ever happened. The various events, no matter when they take place and whether Evelyn and Joy (Stephanie Hsu) are in them, are unmoored and then knit together by the presence of these two people: a mother and a daughter.

I don’t plan to get too much into the head-spinning and likely totally confused weeds of the multiverse, but instead to concentrate on the family relationships plural: for much of the film, due to the apparently unbelievably dangerous force that Joy/Jobu Tupaki — is that meant to be a bastardization of something in Chinese? Doesn’t seem to resemble anything I can remember — possesses, Waymond (Quan Kế Huy) is Evelyn’s companion and mentor, and her father (James Hong) makes a number of appearances, though always presented at a remove. The opening of the film, before part 1’s title “Everything” appears, feels very much in the vein of a recent trend in films that people like the Safdies seem to have ushered in: a barrage of colliding work and family priorities as Evelyn navigates the hectic laundromat patrons, her muddled taxes subject to review by the IRS, her impending Chinese New Year celebration, and of course her ongoing disagreements with Joy over her desire to introduce Becky (the great Tallie Medel, for once flattened into standard bland independent film acting) as her girlfriend to her Gong Gong. If that wasn’t enough, the hapless Waymond is attempting to serve Evelyn divorce papers on that same day, never mind the fact that the spouse can’t actually serve the other spouse their divorce papers.

Of course, this fits Everything Everywhere All at Once‘s general “anything goes” approach, but in doing so it leaves no room to breathe or to consider how this family arrived in this situation. While the flashbacks and alternate branches attempt to fill in Evelyn’s backstory in particular, it’s implied by omission that nothing of importance happened at all during the twenty-some years between Evelyn and Waymond’s emigration to Simi Valley, a span of time only captured by wistful-then-caustic childhood memories captured in 4:3 — the film also follows the current trend of shifting aspect ratios, using 4:3 for flashbacks, 1.85:1 for “normal” scenes and various other pastiches, and 2.35:1 for the martial arts/action sequences, never mind the fact that Yeoh’s prime Hong Kong-era work was shot in 1.85:1.

Indeed, Hong Kong and its place within Everything Everywhere All at Once, especially in relation to Yeoh, forms a prime factor in my mistrust of it and its supposed Chinese-American bona fides. One of the most immediately glaring factors comes in language: the film takes great pains to show the fluid, almost subconscious nature of how immigrants switch between two languages, speaking a few words amid a sentence and/or an entire sentence in English, even when the thought is meant to be conveyed in Chinese. This is really pretty admirable, and very reflective of how I’ve observed my parents interact over the years. However, there’s a confusion that likely isn’t discernible to any viewer who doesn’t have knowledge of Chinese: Evelyn and Waymond, despite (seemingly) being from Hong Kong, speak in Mandarin; this wouldn’t necessarily be a problem, except that Evelyn and her father speak Cantonese to each other throughout, which isn’t reflected in the subtitles at all. Even in the flashback scenes, including the pivotal one where Evelyn and Waymond decide to leave together for America against her father’s wishes, the two of them are speaking Mandarin. The most cynical interpretation would be that the filmmakers deliberately chose Mandarin over Cantonese in an effort to further appeal to the mainland Chinese market; I wouldn’t necessarily go that far, but it’s carried out at such length that I wonder if it was the filmmakers’ unfamiliarity with the language or some other factor that led to this break with their characters’ place of birth.

This, however, isn’t as egregious as Everything Everywhere All at Once‘s near-total abandonment of Chinese for large sections of the film. It certainly can’t be a coincidence that the Alpha Waymond and Alpha Gong Gong, the two characters who have the brunt of the exposition that hurriedly explains the rules and quirks of the multiverse, exclusively speak English with Yeoh responding in kind, even in the scenes that are slower and more heartfelt. This could be maybe weakly explained away by the Alpha universe not utilizing Chinese anymore, though it *is* worth noting that the only other people seen in the technologically advanced Alpha universe are not Asian, which sticks out in a film mostly committed to casting as many Asians in speaking parts as possible. If I remember correctly, Chinese isn’t spoken in the climax at all save for Evelyn’s final acceptance of Joy, for me a very affecting scene that nevertheless speaks to many of the film’s ultimate problems, which I’ll get to in a moment.

First, I have to talk about Everything Everywhere All at Once‘s main draw: Michelle Yeoh, who eventually decidedly won out over my hatred of the wretched Swiss Army Man, Kwan and Scheinert’s previous directorial collaboration. The film is clearly in large part a tribute to and vehicle for Yeoh; while it’s patently false to claim this as Yeoh’s first starring role, it does aim to showcase her talents, though the action here generally doesn’t have anything near the weight of golden era Hong Kong cinema. I can’t be so contrarian to claim that, say, her recent supporting performance in Master Z: The Ip Man Legacy is better than this (though it’s close), and she is indeed very strong in both martial arts poses and emotional vigor alike. But the more this ventures into a meta-text, the more it fails to come close to the pathos of Yeoh’s actual career. The universe that gets the most screen time — the hot dog fingers one is likely a close second — is the one where Evelyn breaks up with Waymond stays in Hong Kong. After getting mugged, she decides to learn kung fu — her female master is played by Li Jing, best known for doing stunts in the awful live-action Mulan; in a film where Yeoh, Quan, Hong, and even the originally cast Awkwafina (in Hsu’s role) were likely all chosen at least in part for their metatextual resonances, this uninspired choice is one of countless missed opportunities in the film — and become essentially Michelle Yeoh. While she retains her Evelyn name, it’s genuinely kind of stunning when the film cuts to actual red carpet footage, a piercing of the thick veil that the film has wrapped around itself in order to fully cement its connection to reality — even if it is for the personally offensive Crazy Rich Asians.

But Yeoh, who was born in Malaysia to a Malaysian Chinese family, didn’t grow up in Hong Kong or learn kung fu in order to break into the entertainment industry. As laid out by Sean Gilman in his typically essential MUBI Notebook article, she, like Cheng Pei-pei and Zhang Ziyi, never learned kung fu, instead utilizing her ballet training to aid in her understanding of the moves, along with her daredevil approach to doing her own stunts. Additionally, she grew up speaking English and Malay, even deciding to go down the career path of action rather than comedy where she felt her still-burgeoning Cantonese wasn’t good enough; she had to learn her Mandarin lines in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon — still the greatest performance of hers for me, and in a number of ways a vastly superior consideration of what it is to be a woman and mother (figure) in Chinese-centered society — phonetically. Quan’s history, while less storied, still remains complicated; he was born in Saigon to a Hoa family with Han Chinese ancestry. If I’m not mistaken, they were of Cantonese descent, and he resided briefly in Hong Kong before emigrating to the United States, thereafter bouncing back and forth between the two continents on film shoots during his hiatus from acting; endearingly, he still retains something of the squeakiness of his voice from his role as Short Round in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

Kwan & Scheinert, however, for all the supposed imagination they possess, can’t seem to bother with crafting anything close to the immensely complex and fascinating possibilities that Chinese heritage, across national and local borders, possesses. Their ideas of heritage in this lugubrious 139 minute film are simply reduced to “Hong Konger chooses to defy her parents and move to America.” Even a film that takes a decision to immigrate as a starting point, like Mabel Cheung’s lovely An Autumn’s Tale, or as a late-breaking plot point, like Peter Chan’s masterpiece Comrades: Almost a Love Story, knows that cities and places are realms to inhabit and to render as believable places full of genuine interactions, that there is a specific relationship that Chinese people have between their homeland and this strange new place they’ve come to.

When I was growing up in Irvine, where Asians formed a sizable proportion of the population, I was fairly blasé with my ethnicity, shrugging off attempts to learn Chinese and becoming rapidly bored with my family’s semi-frequent trips to Taiwan and China. As I started to live in a city where I habitually interacted with people of different heritages and became more obsessed with Chinese film, I found my love for my native country, experiencing a pronounced longing that still persists within me.

In Simi Valley, which is overwhelmingly White and where Chinese people make up 1.2% of the population, I’d expect there to be more of a desire to engage with what it means to leave a place. After all, in a multiverse that has room for a 2-D animated world, an admittedly very funny and well-executed Earth where no life developed and Evelyn and Joy are manifested as rocks, and a party where the two women are piñatas, it would seem that getting an idea of what a place means to a person, whether they live in it or apart from it, would be essential to ground the film. But there is apparently no room for such supposedly mundane considerations even in a film called Everything Everywhere All at Once, even in one where the mundane issue of not revealing a child’s sexual orientation to their grandfather — something immensely common in a Chinese-American culture where Evelyn’s very acceptance of Joy’s queerness isn’t the norm — lights the fuse for the near-collapse of existence.

Before going further, I should mention that Everything Everywhere All at Once isn’t all bad, and has some interesting and genuinely really good parts. Yeoh, Hsu, Quan, and Hong are all quite strong and do their best to sell the ludicrous sentimentality of the film; Hsu especially does well with the attitude and blithe disregard that her villainous incarnations have to play. And there’s a stretch of about thirty seconds when Yeoh entirely fractures the multiverse that, in its rapid editing using Yeoh (I think) as its focal point, plays like something close to Jodie Mack.

However, it’s easy to nitpick Everything Everywhere All at Once, given its sprawling canvas and refusal to let even the smallest gag be resolved in a non-happy ending — the implication of course being that this one declaration of love is enough to right the wrongs across all manifestations of space and time. I could point to my annoyance with the laundromat showing some British-Indian musical romance with dancing — even without probable colonialist intimations, why isn’t it a Chinese film? It could even have been an homage to Li Han-hsiang’s heartbreaking The Love Eterne, one of the most popular films in Hong Kong history and itself, via a simple but devastating conceit, a watershed queer film that might have played off well against the supposed central issue.

There’s even the issue of the Wong Kar-wai homage, which bafflingly deploys the green filter used on In the Mood for Love‘s Criterion reimagining. Quan’s suit certainly recalls Tony Leung’s, though I don’t think Yeoh is wearing a cheongsam; Quan was the assistant director on 2046, while Yeoh of course has never been in a Wong film. But aside from a few blurred/step-framed shots, the film is shot in the same bland digital as the rest of the film, with fixed frames and shots that are just-off-center, coming nowhere close to the hazy romanticism of Wong’s films. Like everything else in Everything Everywhere All at Once, and utterly unlike Wong, who even introduces complexity into his voiceovers, there’s no depth, no ambiguity as to what’s being depicted or discussed; it’s simply a near-monologue by Waymond recounting his abiding longing for Evelyn.

That very lack of depth is what makes the insufferably simple resolution ring so hollow, where “the everything everywhere all at once was love” is the message the viewer is *supposed* to take away from Everything Everywhere All at Once. While love is unconditional, the circumstances in which you see loved ones are not; love (at least between humans) can be in some ways strengthened by distance and should be seen as something that takes so many different forms. But Kwan and Scheinert see love as an unyielding thing that can be sealed by a single act; even Evelyn’s decision to let go is repaid by Joy coming back instead of going into the abyss. That it comes so close to getting it, so close to getting me and my situation, makes it bother me all the more.

Wood and Water

Rating *** A must-see

Directed by Jonas Bak

Without getting into the thoroughly litigated relationship between fiction and non-fiction, there’s always a certain charge when “unmediated” reality recognizably intervenes within a fictional narrative. The difference between, say, a group of extras and a crowd of random pedestrians can produce startling ruptures in the diegesis, and transmute the documentary qualities present within the act of filming to a wider consideration of time and place, of how society collectively chooses to interact with their setting and culture.

One of the most special parts of Jonas Bak’s feature debut Wood and Water is its play with this constant, and how casually it integrates what in other films would be the lynchpin of their concept. For while the glimpses of the 2019-2020 Hong Kong protests, seen both from high-above and briefly on the street, are moving and presented with a certain vital distance, it remains resolutely focused on its central character. Anke (Anke Bak, the director’s mother), who recently retired from her quiet work in a church office in rural Germany, has come to the city in an attempt to reconnect with her son. The 79-minute film makes its leap across the continents a third of the way through, only returning to shrouded trees in brief dream sequences.

While Wood and Water isn’t strictly based on a true story, it constructs its drive along two aesthetic and narrative parallel lines: the family relationship and the evocation of the countryside and the city. Essential to both is the fundamental sense of warm austerity that permeates throughout each setting and Bak’s style: while frequently light on dialogue and filmed in long shot, with trees and skyscrapers often totally dwarfing Anke in the frame, Brian Eno’s score and the hazy 16mm photography lends an entirely different feeling to either the wild dynamism or hard-etched grit that represent the greatest extremes of the region’s films before the turn of the century.

In forging this middle-ground but nonetheless adventurous approach, Bak extends the curiosity of his mother to the potential of discovery within Wood and Water. The ruminative conversations between Anke and various family members in the first third have their own immediate sense of intimacy, going on small tangents while emphasizing the drift of the rural setting. By contrast, the very first night in Hong Kong thrusts Anke into a shared hostel room, as she talks with the woman in her top bunk, another tourist about to leave the city after residing there for a number of years who is only seen in silhouette. Over an extended take, they speak much more tentatively yet concretely, and the much younger tourist piercingly comments that the aging mother’s story “is just beginning.”

This delicate balance between the old and the new becomes the unspoken engine of Wood and Water, whose own title refers to the Chinese fortune telling elements of wood and water. Anke is identified with water, signifying her nobility, with wood being her greatest deficiency. The advice to move to the forest is gently recognized as being inaccurate later in her conversation with her impromptu translator — an elderly social activist and former artist played by Ricky Yeung, the only professional actor in the cast — but the scene is just as moving in its presentation, long reams of unsubtitled Cantonese followed by translations, as it is in the observations the fortune teller does get right.

Most of the Hong Kong denizens Anke interacts with appear to be around her age, but Wood and Water is as much a present film as it is a nostalgic one, albeit a kind of modernity that both attracts and excludes Anke. She is seen either on the ground level, gazing at nearby actual protestors before walking away, or elevated in her son’s high-rise apartment, looking at the distant lights and tear gas clouds through glass. By the end of the film, a unity of thought and existence is demarcated, but it exists just as brilliantly in the transition between the two parts, two tracking shots through two tunnels. Another filmmaker would make it seamless, probably taking advantage of the darkness to disguise a cut. Bak instead opts to focus on the lights on the roof of the tunnel, as they pass by, fall into darkness, then switch to an entirely different design of lights to show the shift in location. Settings thus become two sides of the same coin, a commonality of purpose that is manifested with vastly different means, both of which are represented with the same wonder.

The Cathedral

Rating *** A must-see

Directed by Ricky D’Ambrose

Full disclosure: I am on friendly terms with Ricky D’Ambrose.

Ricky D’Ambrose’s oeuvre forms one of the most fascinating collections of works in recent American independent cinema. Now composed of two features and a number of shorts, it has come to signify a flourishing of a honed directorial voice that has come to take on an increasingly historical register, the obsessive recreations of print media and invocations of political undercurrents in “Spiral Jetty” (2017) and his first feature, Notes on an Appearance (2018), marking a turning point in augmenting and expanding the potential of his Bressonian close-ups.

D’Ambrose second feature The Cathedral marks another such turning point, and a remarkable melding of his filmmaking hallmarks with something that might be called more conventional, though such an appellation would seem to cheapen the achievement. Gone are the recreations of newspapers; the large acting parts for New York independent film denizens, who only appear fleetingly in a wedding scene; and even to a large extent the enormous close-ups against a blank backdrop. There’s even a smaller but significant break present; D’Ambrose chose to film “Spiral Jetty” in 4:3 due to his use of videotape footage and accompanying desire to not shift aspect ratios, something not carried out here, with the blend of standard-definition news footage with 1.66:1.

But in many other respects, The Cathedral hews closely to D’Ambrose’s style as adapted to a newly legible form. Something sometimes lost in discussion of his work is their subterranean sense of emotional arcs: think the sudden rupture in “Six Cents in the Pocket” (2015) or the bittersweet bookends in Notes on an Appearance. Here, it is captured in an unmistakeable bildungsroman format, following Jesse, a boy growing up on Long Island from the 1980s to the beginning of the 21st century, whose living situation — the only son of divorced parents played by Brian D’Arcy James and Monica Barbaro, the first even moderately-high-profile actors he has worked with — closely mirrors that of D’Ambrose himself. But Jesse, as played by three remarkably similar-looking actors over the years, is never quite centered in the way that might be expected. Other arcs are given almost equal focus: the plight of his grandmother on his mother’s side, who is passed from relative to relative in cycles of neglect; the questionable business dealings of his father; and above all the state of the apartment that his father lives in, which is the actual apartment in which D’Ambrose himself grew up.

Irresolution, as is so often the case for D’Ambrose, is the key to The Cathedral; what registers more forcefully than ever, and is at least partly to do with the extra half-hour running time compared to Notes on an Appearance, is the means by which his objects and settings accrue meaning and resonances over the grand amount of narrative time. The title itself refers to a book about the construction of a cathedral while his parents violently argue in another room, and the illustrations of an enormous structure built in segments speaks to the flow of time that D’Ambrose aims to establish; the news footage serves as a good anchoring method, acting as signposts of specificity, but they are treated in largely the same way as the quotidian moments that register just as strongly. A few parties act as major moments: the wedding, Christmas, confirmation, graduation, but everything else is allowed to drift, with D’Ambrose’s eye as a piercing factor.

The acting here is more naturalistic, especially in the growing frustration and anguish of James, but The Cathedral lets much of it play out in long shot, contextualizing and refracting each person’s outbursts in the environment around them. Jesse’s growing fascination with filmmaking, which Madeleine James’s narrator describes as focused on measuring time and a growing distance from the world rather than an attempt to catalogue memory, would seem overly self-inserting were it not for a particular dissection of a photograph that he does near the end of the film, a long shot that contains within it a record of a memory of a time just before his life was irreparably changed. And in the progression of Jesse’s graduation, a series of D’Ambrosian close-ups of changing table settings which accrues in an inexorable way utterly unlike his previous work, this newfound synthesis of narrative and form achieves D’Ambrose’s fullest expression yet.

Something in the Dirt

Rating ** Worth seeing

Directed by Justin Benson & Aaron Moorhead

Something in the Dirt is something of an outlier in this year’s Sundance NEXT section. While its remit is to show more inventive or formally innovative work, with no particular stipulations otherwise, all of the other films were by first or second-time filmmakers, many working in documentary or quasi-documentary modes, and all running less than ninety minutes. By comparison, Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead are indie superstars, having now made three relatively well-known films (Spring, The Endless, and Synchronic, none of which I’ve seen) which all had TIFF or Tribeca premieres, and showcase their trademark deployment of science fiction. Additionally, their latest is the only NEXT film in Scope and the only one that runs a hair under two hours.

But Something in the Air wears its relative lo-fi nature on its sleeve. Shot during the pandemic, though apparently not set then, it takes place mostly in and around a small, rundown apartment complex in Los Angeles, following bartender Levi (Benson) as he moves in and meets photographer John (Moorhead), the only other present resident. Soon afterwards, they discover a curious phenomenon: a crystal in Levi’s apartment that hovers at seemingly random intervals, possibly related to the scribblings all over the closet. In response, the two men resort to the most obvious recourse in this day and age: to begin filming in order to make a documentary to sell to Netflix or some other streamer.

It is fairly swiftly revealed that Something in the Dirt is also this documentary, though it remains unclear whether it is completed or not: bits of archival footage are strewn throughout, including during ostensibly “real” scenes — to complicate matters further, at least some moments are designated retroactively as reenactments, even poking fun at the shoddy special effects — and there are talking heads that crop up, including with experts and frazzled editors. Despite these intrusions, the film otherwise proceeds in a linear progression, moving through increasingly eerie occurrences while also taking a good amount of time to delineate the relationship between Levi and John.

Something in the Dirt‘s best moments and its faults come from this central relationship, which both offers a kind of bewildered comedy and a too-familiar depiction of a friendship undone; an emphasis on backstories being revealed at incongruous junctures highlights this feeling. But Benson and Moorhead are fairly compelling presences, especially the latter, whose well-groomed short hair and spectacles make a nice contrast with the former’s general sloppiness. There’s a certain charm to the way this operates, flashing lights and cameras to simulate earthquakes, and the deliberately offhand way that conspiracies are brought up and dismissed, with trips outside the apartment designed almost exclusively to show the proliferation of symbols around LA. If the personal drama, already hinted at and hammered home over and over in the ominous talking heads, tends to weigh this down, it’s balanced to a certain degree by the genuine delight this takes in the silliness of the central image, and how seriously the two men take it; a budget approach to an extraterrestrial concept that remains out of reach.

Expedition Content

Rating *** A must-see

Directed by Ernst Karel & Veronika Kusumaryati

“Imageless” films — which both exist in defiance of and in tandem with their more traditional, camera-photographed cousins — have established a small but notable lineage, and not even exclusively in the realm of the avant-garde. Derek Jarman’s landmark Blue (1993) is probably the most beloved example, with the sole image of International Klein Blue representing its ailing director’s eyesight. Anthology Film Archives is currently running a series which highlights such works, including Movies for the Blind, Volume 2 (1999, Jeff Perkins) and The Disappeared (2018, Gilad Baram & Adam Kaplan); to this series could also be added the borderline case of James N. Kienitz Wilkins’s The Republic (2017), which very slowly shifts from a black screen to a white screen, and João César Monteiro’s Branca de Neve/Snow White (2000), which, partly owing to unspecified filming difficulties, takes place almost entirely in voiceover save for interspersed shots of clouds.

Especially for the examples from before the past decade, however, there is the question of what “imageless” truly means, on the most basic level of form and experience. Even in something like Blue, there is, or at least was, still the sensation of watching a series of projected images on multiple reels, and the inevitable print alterations that occur as a print is run through various projectors over and over. In the present digital configuration, the black “leader” is still a projected image of sorts, as film grain-less as it may be, and the lack of an image may (and perhaps should) cause the viewer’s eyes to wander more towards fellow audience members, emergency exit lights, and the like. “Imageless” films can thus cause an even more interactive experience, without even getting into the sonic possibilities and thematic resonances that each of the above examples invoke.

Into this heady mix of films steps Expedition Content, the first significant salvo in a few years from the esteemed Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab, and appropriately credited as being “composed by” Ernst Karel and Veronika Kusumaryati. The choice to craft an “imageless” film may seem especially strange from the SEL, considering that their films have yielded some of the most beguiling visual textures of the century, from the rich 16mm of Manakamana to the wild digital experimentation of Sweetgrass and Leviathan. But Karel — who has sound edited and mixed not only the above films but also for the SEL at large, along with films by Anocha Suwichakornpong, Luke Fowler, Trương Minh Quỳ, and Ben Rivers among many others — and Kusumaryati — a Harvard University Film Study Center fellow — both making their feature directorial debuts, are after something different, and not only because of the near-total lack of conventional image.

For Expedition Content is, unlike most SEL films, a found-footage film, or in this instance a found-recording film, editing together and remixing the thirty-seven hours of audiotape recordings made on a 1961 Harvard Peabody Museum anthropological research trip to West Papua among the Hubula (or Dani) people. Among the participants were the filmmaker Robert Gardner, who made the notable ethnographic film Dead Birds (1963) during the expedition, and, of all people, Michael Rockefeller – son of Nelson and great-grandson of John D., who had invested in oil exploration in New Guinea decades prior – who made the recordings and disappeared later that year while attempting to gather artifacts on the island. Aside from a late, brief flash of Gardner’s footage that lasts about a minute and a half, depicting a dark cave interior along with native villagers and a fire, the only images that appear are a few explanatory intertitles and some interpolations of baby blue leader, which are accompanied by a low tone and seem to presage the minimal number of translations of Dani provided; the rest is pure sound collage.

What predominates then, in the deliberate absence of both image and translation, the Western viewer — bearing in mind that, despite Kusumaryati’s own Indonesian background and dissertation focus upon West Papua’s highlanders, Expedition Content is ultimately an American film and very much aware of that fact — is left to focus on audio as its own form of immersion, and upon the role of Rockefeller and his fellow travelers as interlopers. Rockefeller has a very particularly tentative manner of introducing the myriad audio cuts that Karel and Kusumaryati highlight at the beginning of almost every recording, and the initial irritation eventually becomes a structuring device, a purposeful intrusion that often cuts against the supposed naturalness that the researchers are attempting to capture.

At some points, the beauty and power of what is being captured speaks for itself. The rush of a waterfall, the sonorous communal chanting, private singing; an astonishing amount is contained within Expedition Content‘s scant 78 minutes. But by freely moving across all of these privileged captured moments, Karel and Kusumaryati implicitly make the ethnographers themselves the subject; the black screen allows the viewer to focus on the precarious nature of the recording apparatus itself, all blown out audio and faint whispers, something only highlighted by the inclusion of a few crisp modern recordings of the cataloguers of these tapes.

Immediately after the aforementioned film footage, the tensions simmering within Expedition Content come to a head in the longest piece of continual audio recording within the film, though it is unclear whether it was done accidentally by Rockefeller or not. During a ten-minute tape of a drunken birthday celebration, the researchers speak in blaccents; converse about Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus, Cannonball Adderley, and Oscar Peterson; and speculate about the possibility of copulating with one of the natives. In an additional touch, Karel and Kusumaryati provide subtitles that compel the viewer to stare at and contemplate the true nature of the ethnographers’ interactions with those they purportedly attempt to understand, casting the previous hour’s recordings in a light that had been latent until this moment of nakedness. By using the traditional means of translation as reinforcement, they are examined with the same unrelenting gaze that they themselves deployed elsewhere.

The brilliance of Expedition Content lies, in large part, in its ability to be so direct, so unflinching in its perspective, while also seemingly refracting its observations through the plethora of direct field recordings. If the opening and ending intertitles confront the political and ethnic issues in a manner uncommon for the SEL — the former implicitly links the expedition with Attica via Nelson Rockefeller, the latter raises the United States and Nations’ ongoing support of the brutal Indonesian colonization of West Papua — that sentiment is bolstered and transmuted by the contemplation that is engendered by the uncommon aesthetic experience. In the same way that, say, Leviathan‘s elemental torrent or Manakamana‘s durational interconnectedness arise moment to moment, Karel and Kusumaryati’s ultimately defiant aims exist within the gap between the researcher’s perspective and the previously undisturbed world, a distinction that becomes only more glaring with each fumbled appellation, each interrupting utterance.

France

Rating *** A must-see

Directed by Bruno Dumont

Maybe the best scene(s) of France — not La France, though Bruno Dumont doesn’t attempt to hide the national implications of the film, literally making the first shot a view of a French flag — comes early in the film, as the amusingly named France de Meurs (Léa Seydoux) is shooting one of her many news reports in a war-torn country. After conducting a translated interview with one of the loyalist fighters, she essentially directs a smattering of B-roll: a reverse shot with her issuing questions straight-on into the camera against a different background, a shot of another soldier instructed to walk past the camera, and a series of miscommunications with soldiers, attempting to get them to act heroic. After this jumble of moments, the next scene shows the end result, a genuinely rousing expression of solidarity that concludes, tellingly, with a close-up of France. While the temptation to connect this with an exposé of the journalistic process or, especially, filmmaking in general, is quite strong, the impact of the sequence, apart from the minutiae of interactions that take place — including a selfie taken by the first fighter and the general spectacle of watching Seydoux in a troop transport — lies in the synthesis, in the gulf between different manifestations of appearances.

I will freely confess that my firsthand knowledge of Dumont’s work is limited to the Quin/Coin duology, which I have a strong fondness for, and Jeannette, which I found so mindnumbing that I haven’t seen its counterpart. But France evidently marks a departure for the director, who made fairly austere and rigorous works for about the first decade and a half of his career, then began making much more overtly comedic works beginning with P’tit Quinquin (2014) and Slack Bay (2016). While even those works took place for the most part in rural areas, this film firmly situates its home turf in Paris, and specifically in the most elegant arrondissements of the city. Everything, as befits a film at least in large part about the media, is hyperreal: France and her husband and son live in a ludicrously large and high-ceilinged modern apartment that looks lifted straight out of Saint Laurent, car ride scenes are rendered with too-large rear projected images, and the cinematography is glaringly bright; even bombed-out ruins are shiny and digital, something that the shifts to lower-quality news camera footage can only do so much to overcome.

From these layers of artifice comes an unexpected anchoring force: the visage of Léa Seydoux, which would seem almost too perfect in this setting — and buffeted by the colorful array of attire she wears — to convey a host of emotions, each more complex and profound than the last. But France spends something like a fifth of its not inconsiderable runtime to simply sit and stare at her face. It’s uncommon for a film that’s otherwise this glossy to spend the contemplation that’s apparent here, with so many moments where the conversation or surrounding context will seem to drop out and Seydoux’s face — which at turns throughout the film is inscrutable, mischievous, anguished, and nearly every other emotion under the sun — will undergo a series of minute transformations. Such movement amidst restiveness forms something of a manifesto for this film’s intentions: to turn the gaze of fame and sensationalism back upon itself, a set of reflections that produce unexpected changes.

As I said before, I haven’t seen Dumont’s actual rendering of the trial, but it’s irresistible to see France as another, modern iteration of Joan of Arc, here spun out not into issues of life and death — that comes for other people — but into questions of morality and belief, though of a much more worldly pattern and through often hilariously absurd moments. The close-ups are certainly suggestive, but it comes forth even more fully in the rapid back-and-forths of emotion and interactions, sometimes almost too pointed in their intention but each palpably registering, thanks to Dumont’s willingness to sit with the moment. Everything rests upon a sequence of gaps: between the glamor of France and the dire situations that she puts herself in, in an almost competitive desire to push her coverage into uncharted waters; between the malicious intentions of a journalist and his apparently genuine adoration; between the seeming unseriousness of France with the scrupulousness and insight of her reporting.

Perhaps most boldly of all, France appears to recognize the limits of the transformation that traumatic events can provide within the modern world. The characters, including France, generally retain their general outlines, their convictions as can be rendered on a multitude of two-dimensional screens: a television, a smartphone). But Dumont shakes them, at least for a time, making sure that the gravity of the world can exert its force in both the most expected and unexpected of circumstances, one drawn-out shot and rupture at a time.

Drive My Car/ドライブ・マイ・カー/Doraibu mai kā

Rating **** Masterpiece

Directed by Hamaguchi Ryūsuke

The depiction of the creation of art is certainly nothing new to film, and has yielded both some transcendent works and some profoundly mediocre movies. But something that continually eludes the grasp of all but the finest of cinematic artists is the capture of that most intangible yet essential of elements: inspiration. Whether bestowed by the muses or birthed by external forces, it emerges without warning, upsetting the artist’s entire worldview with the force of their expression.

In his own unassuming, humble way, Hamaguchi Ryūsuke has joined those select few with Drive My Car, his second truly great film of 2021, and a giant step forward in his ongoing synthesis of various influences to create something entirely his own. That he has blown up the forty page Murakami Haruki short story of the same name into a three-hour epic is one thing, but his care on all levels — the script co-written with Oe Takamasa, the purposeful direction, and most of all the extraordinary feats of casting — yields something altogether more complex, emotionally direct in a similar way to his previous film, Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy yet tied up in the narrative and emotional reverberations across that most typical of surrogate families: the theater troupe.

Drive My Car finds its pater familias in Kafuku Yūsuke (Nishijima Hidetoshi, a regular in Hamaguchi’s mentor Kurosawa Kiyoshi’s films), a theater director/actor whose signature style involves staging classic plays with actors speaking their own native languages — examples in the film include Indonesian, German, Korean, Mandarin, Thai, and, in one of the most galvanizing touches in recent memory, Korean Sign Language. A forty-minute prologue, set two years before the rest of the film, quickly establishes the elements that continue to permeate throughout: his love for driving his bright red Saab 900, his cosmopolitan engagement with the theatrical world, his daughter’s early demise, and most of all the mysterious, erotic relationship he has with his wife Oto (Kirishima Reika). She is the focus of the film’s first shot, a hazy nude silhouette against the sunrise, narrating a story about a young girl who habitually enters her crush’s house. As the film relates, this mixture of eros and inspiration is crucial to her creative process, as sex — with either Kafuku or the coterie of affairs that she embarks on, which unbeknownst to her he is aware of — sometimes triggers a dreamlike series of recollections that her partner memorializes for her. She is also involved in Kafuku’s own creative process, recording the other roles of plays that he is acting in to help him internalize the rhythm that forms the bedrock of his productions.

The tape of Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, which Kafuku plays over and over, reciting to and against while in that Saab, ends up being the last tangible vestige he has of Oto: she dies unexpectedly of a cerebral hemorrhage, and the grief and unresolved tensions inherent to their relationship enter into the swirl of emotions and relationships to be elaborated upon. Two years later, Kafuku is invited by a theater festival in Hiroshima to direct Uncle Vanya, and learns that, due to the rules of the contract, he is not allowed to drive his Saab during the residency. His assigned driver is Watari (Miura Tōko), a taciturn young woman with a prominent scar on her left cheek, whose driving allows Kafuku to enter a state of bliss and concentration in his car that he has never felt before. The gradual growth of their relationship, as they open up more and more about their pasts of grief, trauma, and loss, intertwines with Kafuku’s production of Uncle Vanya, as he enlists, among others, Takatsuki (Okada Masaki), Oto’s final lover and a notorious playboy, to play the much older role of Vanya; and Lee Yun-a (Park Yu-rim), a mute Korean woman, to play Sonya.

Drive My Car‘s mystery lies in its sense of balance, its ability to juggle all of these already myriad relationships mentioned above and the numerous other connections that Kafuku — and, by reticent extension, Watari — form with the company at large. For this is a true ensemble film, and one that understands that a transcendent moment of connection, within a group of people that requires it for both artistic and personal reasons, can arise between any pairing and within any moment, whether it be a charming dinner — featuring one of the cutest couples in film history — a fraught, emotionally and temporally taxing car ride, or a reconfigured rehearsal in the sunlight that adds new depths to relationships only hinted at before.

Rehearsals, as might be expected by the Rivettian label that has been, rightly or wrongly, ascribed to Hamaguchi, form a significant chunk of Drive My Car‘s non-car driving scenes, but their nature, and the back-and-forth that Kafuku has with his actors, goes far beyond simple questions of duration. In keeping with the rhythmic sense that Oto’s tape provides, the actors are instructed to speak slowly and without emotion, internalizing both the text and the reactions from their fellow players, so that it has formed a bedrock that blocking and motion can build upon in emotional terms. In explaining why he has refused to play Vanya, as he did just after Oto’s death, Kafuku explains that Chekhov brings out the reality of a person’s soul, extracting all that is hidden and buried, and that quality comes through forcefully in the many tape scenes in the car. Each extract is deployed judiciously, often seeming like Oto — or any number of other characters — is talking directly to Kafuku through Chekhov, while at other times embodying Kafuku’s perspective, hinting at inner fonts of rage, insecurity, and distress that he can’t permit himself to express.

Nishijima’s performance acts as a perfect channel for these mixed feelings, precisely because so much about it is simultaneously fixed and shifting. Sometimes within the same shot, his face appears to change age, with the slightest movement able to embody a cheerful youth or a wearied maturity, and his emotional range occupies that same continuum. Such a quality meshes beautifully with Miura’s role, especially as she becomes more and more prominent through the final hour, which breaks from the theatrical setting to embody a flight into the unknown, a space for pondering and emotional excavation that zeroes in on the most guarded feelings of two broken people. Her contribution rests in that stoicism, borne from the experiences of someone well beyond her years, an exterior that seems almost impenetrable until what first seems to be an unusually direct and standard — for Hamaguchi — scene of emotional catharsis, the third-to-last sequence that might well be the last lingering moment in a far lesser film.

That is where the last two scenes come in, and especially Park’s role. Kafuku and Watari’s relationship gradually becomes mapped onto the Vanya and Sonya relationship, and Hamaguchi brings it full circle with the second-to-last scene, performing the final scene of the play with Kafuku as Vanya. Lee emerges as a central character, embodying the hope and optimism that, as in Uncle Vanya the other characters can’t quite bring themselves to fully believe in, and so much of that comes through the particular nature of the sign language, the physicality of it and the duration that it invites. As the actors become more and more familiar with the text and she is translated for less and less, the performance seems to reach across into the viewer, a direct communication to the camera that emphasizes each stroke and motion with a deliberateness that transmutes the already considerable emotional catharsis of the play.

And if that weren’t enough, Drive My Car offers a final coda, set in another time and another place. The precise meaning of it is purposefully elusive, radically reconfiguring the accumulated objects present throughout the film to provide another form of catharsis entirely. Hamaguchi understands in his bones the interplay of emotionality and mystery, the weight that he must give to each character and their hopes and dreams, embodied in so many manners: even the score, a supremely pleasant and relaxed jazz score by Ishibashi Eiko, casts an entirely different light on the driving scenes, inviting a new sense of contemplation. Drive My Car marks out that space for thought, for pondering, and in doing so crowns the ascension of one of the 21st century’s finest filmmakers to date.