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SDAFF ’21: Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy

December 7, 2021****/****, 2021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Japan, Romance, San Diego Asian Film Festival

Gûzen to sôzô
****/****
starring Kotone Furukawa, Ayumu Nakajima, Kiyohiko Shibukawa, Katsuki Mori, Fusako Urabe, Aoba Kawai
written and directed by Ryusuke Hamaguchi

by Walter Chaw Ryusuke Hamaguchi listens well. His films may be indicated by the denseness of their dialogue, their patience in allowing their characters to speak it, and his trust in his actors to do unbroken takes and in his audience to go along for the ride, but what enchants about them is how carefully they hear what their characters are saying, and how they invite us to do the same. At some point during each of Hamaguchi’s films, I’ve found myself leaning in–not because the mix is too low, but because I’m socially conditioned to lean towards a speaker when they’re saying something that’s at once difficult for them to say and imperative that they say it. I’m giving these characters eye contact and attention. Hamaguchi’s movies are a form of communion–that is to say, a connection that touches on profundity. Given their intimacy and wisdom, they hold within them the capacity to rip my guts out. Which they do, remorselessly and sweetly. Does that describe the concept of “winsome”? In “Magic,” the first of the three short films that comprise Hamaguchi’s Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, beautiful Tsugumi (Hyunri), in the back of a long cab ride with her friend Meiko (Kotone Furukawa), describes a platonic first date in which she and her partner “caress” each other with their words. Not “talk dirty,” she clarifies–getting to know the other person by telling the truth when lies are expected. Through Tsugumi, Hamaguchi is talking about his process.

West Side Story (2021)

December 2, 2021****/****, 2021, Crime, Drama, Musical, Romance, Spielberg, Theatrical

****/****
starring Ansel Elgort, Ariana DeBose, David Alvarez, Rachel Zegler
screenplay by Tony Kushner, based on the stage play by Arthur Laurents, with music by Leonard Bernstein and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim
directed by Steven Spielberg

by Walter Chaw West Side Story is the perfect vehicle for all of Spielberg’s prodigious strengths while deemphasizing his obvious weaknesses. In that way, it reminded me of another Stephen Sondheim adaptation, Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd, wherein a savant-like visual artist is paired with a genius for storytelling, plotting, and characterization. It occurs to me that every single Robert Wise film would be better had Spielberg directed it. This isn’t because Wise butchered The Magnificent Ambersons and betrayed Val Lewton, it’s because he played in the same sandbox as Spielberg and no one has ever been better at building those particular sandcastles. There’s a scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade where Spielberg, with a drumbeat gathering power on the soundtrack, transitions from a sign at a crossroads pointing to Berlin to a book burning in a public square. Kind of like the ones they’re organizing in central Virginia right now. He does it again in A.I. in the lead-up to the Flesh Fair. The combination of action and the rising thrum on the soundtrack is…visceral? Yes, that; kinetic, too. Chills-inducing. He uses the tactic again in the build-up to the “Mambo” number as Anita, Bernardo, and Maria arrive at the school gymnasium for the big dance. You hear the music, muted, through the doors, and then they’re thrown open, and Jerome Robbins’s ageless choreography explodes with all the furious vibrancy a collaboration between Jerome fucking Robbins and Steven fucking Spielberg promises. It’s a synesthetic representation of life and youth, ridiculously effective. We speak of spectacle films and the magic of “big” movies–I don’t know that I’ve felt a film’s scale like this in decades. All of this West Side Story‘s showstoppers are just that. They are alive and fresh, and Spielberg gets that when you have a Robbins or a Fosse or an Agnes DeMille, your job is to dance it like your shoes are on fire and let us see the bodies from head to toe. There is possibly no better visual storyteller in the history of movies than Spielberg, who finds in this partnership with great artists alive and dead the truest fruition of his gift.

House of Gucci (2021) + Benedetta (2021)

November 26, 20212021, Al Pacino, Authors: Walter Chaw, Belgium, Biopic, Canada, Crime, Directors: Ridley Scott, Drama, France, Netherlands, Romance, Theatrical

HOUSE OF GUCCI
***/****
starring Lady Gaga, Adam Driver, Jared Leto, Al Pacino
screenplay by Becky Johnston and Roberto Bentivegna
directed by Ridley Scott

BENEDETTA
***½/****
starring Virginie Efira, Charlotte Rampling, Daphné Patakia, Lambert Wilson
screenplay by David Birke and Paul Verhoeven, based on the book by Judith C. Brown
directed by Paul Verhoeven

by Walter Chaw Ridley Scott’s second based-on-a-true-story prestige period piece of 2021 after The Last Duel takes place in the I Love You to Death cinematic universe, wherein formerly dignified actors affect ridiculous Italian accents while taking bullets from hitmen hired by their wives, ex or otherwise. Just the spectacle of watching Adam Driver do a scene with Al Pacino at an Italian picnic, the two of them talking like Mario brothers while a brunette Lady Gaga croaks in an accidental Russian accent is… And the soundtrack! George Michael, Donna Summer, New Order, the Eurythmics–it’s all of it like a Nagel painting come to life: gaudy affectations of glamour and art for the bawdiest appreciators of unintentional camp. Indeed, House of Gucci is prime grist for the headliner in a midnight call-along, or the feature presentation in a future episode of “MST3K”–although, at two-and-a-half hours, I worry the same jokes would keep getting recycled, most of them about the accents, a few of them about sex-pest Jared Leto’s turn as Paolo Gucci, buried beneath a ton of prosthetics that make him look on the outside what he is on the inside. (Here’s the punchline: Leto steals the movie.) A deadly drinking game could be devised from the times Pacino’s accent slips from hilarious Italian to Al Pacino to, during a weird funeral scene, Bela Lugosi Transylvanian. There’s a scene in the last half of the film where Paolo groans into an airport payphone, “I got to wash! If you could smell-a between my groins, you’d-a unnerstan!” while Aldo makes the “c’mon” expression trying to get his attention, and then later Aldo gives Paolo, his little Fredo, the “you disappointed the hell out of me” kiss of death and, again, it’s… Well, it’s notably, spectacularly terrible is what it is. And I liked it.

Licorice Pizza (2021) + Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021)

November 22, 20212021, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Coming of Age, Directors: Paul Thomas Anderson, Drama, Romance, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

LICORICE PIZZA
*½/****
starring Alana Haim, Cooper Hoffman, Sean Penn, Tom Waits
written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

GHOSTBUSTERS: AFTERLIFE
**½/****
starring Carrie Coon, Paul Rudd, Finn Wolfhard, Mckenna Grace
written by Gil Kenan & Jason Reitman
directed by Jason Reitman

by Walter Chaw In Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza, John Michael Higgins plays real-life restaurateur Jerry Frick, proprietor of “The Mikado.” Frick is married to a severe and disapproving Japanese woman (Yumi Mizui) who apparently doesn’t speak any English, although she seems to understand it fluently. She certainly understands her husband, who doesn’t speak Japanese but does speak English, when he’s speaking it to her, in a cartoonish Asian accent. This is perhaps a commentary on how backwards everyone was in 1973, but Licorice Pizza is not otherwise a satire, so what the fuck is going on here? Is PTA reserving the barbed edge of his keen sociological blade exclusively to excavate anti-Asian depictions in film and nowhere else? Based on Hong Chau’s brief but memorable turn in Inherent Vice as a tough hooker (oops) who tries to warn the idiot hero of danger, there’s reason to hope. Yet if Frick is meant to be a satire of how white men are racist towards Asians in general and Asian women in particular… How? Just by the fact of him? In his second scene, he shows up with a different wife (Megumi Anjo), explaining how his first wife has left him and this is the new Mrs. Frick. The joke is either that Frick is a fetishist, or that all Asians look alike.

Tick, Tick… Boom! (2021)

November 19, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, Musical, Streaming

tick, tick…Boom!
**/****
starring Andrew Garfield, Alexandra Shipp, Robin de Jesús, Vanessa Hudgens
screenplay by Steven Levenson, based on the musical by Jonathan Larson
directed by Lin-Manuel Miranda

by Walter Chaw Dropping the same weekend as another hagiography for a narcissistic workaholic (King Richard), tick, tick…Boom! at least doesn’t include a 70-page manifesto for its subject’s unborn children. Also in its favour? It doesn’t centre a man in the success story of two women. No, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s technically-proficient biopic instead adapts the autobiographical musical of self-pitying tragic figure Jonathan Larson, played in the film by Andrew Garfield. Watching it, I got the feeling the whole exercise was just a way of showcasing songs from Larson’s defunct sci-fi magnum opus Superbia, which… Look, there’s a Ray Bradbury story called “The October Game” that tells about that nasty kid’s game where you turn out the lights and put your hands in a bowl of spaghetti and someone says, “This is the witch’s hair,” and so on. Except Bradbury suggests that there’s been a pretty terrible murder, and this is the murderer’s idea of a Greek kind of justice. It ends with one of the most memorable lines in Bradbury’s career: “Then …… some idiot turned on the lights.” I think about that line a lot, unbidden at the weirdest times; I thought of it during tick, tick…Boom! because I realized that some idiot will one day resurrect Superbia, a musical based on 1984, and make a billion dollars, thus driving me insane.

SDAFF ’21: Introduction + In Front of Your Face

November 14, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, San Diego Asian Film Festival, South Korea

인트로덕션
INTRODUCTION
**/****
starring Kim Min-hee, Park Mi-so, Shin Seok-ho
written and directed by Hong Sang-soo

당신 얼굴 앞에서
IN FRONT OF YOUR FACE
**½/****
starring Cho Yunhee, Kwon Hae-hyo, Lee Hye-young
written and directed by Hong Sang-soo

by Walter Chaw Hong Sang-soo’s films, more so than most, are only ever about Hong Sang-soo–and in his mind, Hong Sang-soo is Henrik Ibsen: the iconoclast, the great social observer and auto-didact, the artist who, late in his career, shifted his observations from class concerns in general to the insular peculiarities of individuals imprisoned by lifetimes of secrets. Hong is now more playwright and stage director than filmmaker; increasingly, the act of capturing his interpersonal dissections on film has felt like an afterthought unto inconvenience. One gets the sense Hong would rather be left alone with his company of players like the playwright/theatre director hero of Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York, initiating a lifetime of rehearsals with no opening date in sight. I think, closer to the truth, he can’t get out of his head anymore. Maybe it’s no surprise, then, that two new Hong films are dropping simultaneously, given that both credit Hong as director/writer/editor (and, one presumes, sound engineer, gaffer, and craft services). In Front of Your Face is the less consumer-grade-home-movie-seeming between it and Introduction, though neither seems like something that took much time to put together, landing the same way as vignettes in a local one-act play festival might. Which is not to say there aren’t pleasures to be had, only that these are less full meals than amuse-bouches served at a tastefully-set party to which you weren’t necessarily invited.

SDAFF ’21: Time

November 10, 20212021, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Hong Kong, San Diego Asian Film Festival

殺出個黃昏
***/****
starring Chung Suet-ying, Lam Suet, Patrick Tse, Petrina Fung
screenplay by Ho Ching-yi, Lam Ka-tung
directed by Ricky Ko

by Walter Chaw Ricky Ko’s Time is perched a little uneasily between broad slapstick and heartfelt melodrama, and while arguably these are the two modes that define Charlie Chaplin’s shtick, the delicateness of that balance is one explanation for why there’s pretty much only the one Charlie Chaplin. Its Chinese title meaning something like “take a hit out on twilight,” Ko’s flick opens with some throwback Hong Kong action as a trio of hired killers show their stuff in colourful, comic-book-interstitial-aided, ’70s-era vignettes: the master of the Karambit Knife, the master of the barbed chain-whip, the portly getaway driver/comic relief–roles each played at some point in their prolific careers by Hong Kong legends Patrick Tse, Petrina Fung Bo-Bo, and Lam Suet, reprised here after a fashion as the film flashes forward to catch up with them well into their dotage. Chau (Tse) uses his knife skills now to slowly, very slowly, slice noodles into broth at a hole-in-the-wall cafe; Fung (Bo-Bo) fronts a lounge act at a geriatric disco; and Chung (Lam) whiles away his hours in the company of an in-call prostitute he hopes one day to marry. Fung’s the only one of them, really, who isn’t all but waiting to die. When Chau gets replaced by a noodle-making robot, Fung offers him a job–a hit, in fact, a last call to glory that Chau answers by practicing his knifing on a log. He’s still got it: slowed considerably, but not squeamish about murder for hire. Turns out, his target is an old woman who just wants to get it over with.

My Fair Lady (1964) – 4K Ultra HD + Digital (Bryant Frazer’s last review)

November 9, 20211960s, 2021, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Family, Musical, Romance

Note: all framegrabs were sourced from the 4K UHD disc.

This is the final review Bryant Frazer wrote for FILM FREAK CENTRAL before he passed away. It’s technically a work-in-progress, but I don’t think its publication is anything to be embarrassed about. For what it’s worth, Bryant neglected to provide a star rating or grades for the audio, video, and extra features, so I’ve left them off rather than attempt to second-guess him. As our own Walter Chaw poetically put it to me, “His last act was not an act of judgment.”-Ed.

starring Audrey Hepburn, Rex Harrison, Stanley Holloway, Theodore Bikel
screenplay by Alan Jay Lerner, based upon the musical play as produced on the stage by Herman Levin, with book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, from a play by Bernard Shaw
directed by George Cukor

by Bryant Frazer My Fair Lady opens, provocatively enough, at a performance of Gounod’s operatic adaptation of Faust, that ageless drama of unforeseen consequences. As in the George Bernard Shaw play Pygmalion, on which My Fair Lady is based, the role of the Devil is filled by Dr. Henry Higgins (Rex Harrison), a linguist who loudly (and rudely) laments the Cockney patois spoken by the lower classes. Drawing his attention is a wary flower girl named Eliza Doolittle (Audrey Hepburn), a London-born-and-bred Faust who’s intrigued by Higgins’s boast that, through speech training alone, he can elevate her from working-poor status into a new position as society maven. The drama pivots around that transformation: Hepburn moves into Higgins’s spacious home for the duration of her schooling, with an upcoming embassy ball–where Higgins hopes to debut his newly cultured creation–imposing a deadline on his project. Surrounding them are a variety of colourful characters, such as Higgins’s sponsor, Colonel Pickering (Wilfrid Hyde-White), Hungarian language scholar Zoltan Karpathy (Theodore Bikel), and Eliza’s father, Alfred (Stanley Holloway), whose big pre-wedding number, which includes the immortal turn of phrase “Girls come and kiss me / Show how you’ll miss me / But get me to the church on time,” is a highlight of the film’s otherwise logy second act.

SDAFF ’21: 7 Days

November 7, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Romance, San Diego Asian Film Festival

**½/****
starring Geraldine Viswanathan, Karan Soni, Gita Reddy, Zenobia Shroff
written by Roshan Sethi & Karan Soni
directed by Roshan Sethi

by Walter Chaw Roshan Sethi’s 7 Days is a charmer. It opens like When Harry Met Sally… with interviews of real couples at different stages in their relationships talking about how they met and how they’re getting along. In this incarnation, the couples all appear to be desi, and the common theme that binds them is their arranged marriages. They set the stage for this story of traditional cultures trying to maintain in the diaspora, of how a young generation of desi struggle with the pull of tradition versus the siren’s call of assimilation. I don’t use this metaphor loosely: assimilation is a kind of death. If it results in rebirth, so be it, but a thing dies in the process of that renaissance and I’m no longer certain that the transformation is necessary or, if it’s necessary, worth it. The rewards fall far short of the price one pays for surrendering something so valuable as a cultural lineage, an identity beyond the one provided by an adopted culture that would prefer you edgeless and easy to compartmentalize.

Finch (2021)

November 5, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Sci-Fi, Streaming, UK

*½/****
starring Tom Hanks
written by Craig Luck and Ivor Powell
directed by Miguel Sapochnik

by Walter Chaw No movie with Tom Hanks can be entirely bad, especially when that movie marries Hanks favourites Apollo 13 and Cast Away–two films in which our Jimmy Stewart is asked to be ingenious when everything goes wrong. In Finch, he is Finch, an engineer in the post-apocalypse after a solar flare has shredded our ozone layer, wreaking havoc on our crops and allowing the sun to fry people instantly. Time has passed since then, it seems, and there are few signs of life left in St. Louis other than Finch and Finch’s dog, Goodyear. Like Hanks’s volleyball buddy, the dog is named for a product and, because we’ve all read I Am Legend, we know that Goodyear is vital to Finch as the last link Finch has with not just the former world, but his own humanity as well. Oh, the humanity. Finch really loves the Don McLean song “American Pie” and, testament to Tom Hanks’s titanic charisma and reservoir of goodwill, we like him anyway. We forgive him for Chet; we can forgive him for “American Pie.” As the film opens, he’s singing “American Pie” and scavenging for goods at the local dollar mart, meaning this is a Chloe Zhao movie all of a sudden though thankfully not for long.

SDAFF ’21: Drive My Car

November 4, 2021****/****, 2021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Japan, San Diego Asian Film Festival

ドライブ・マイ・カー
****/****
starring Hidetoshi Nishijima, Masaki Okada, Reika Kirishima, Tôko Miura
screenplay by Ryûsuke Hamaguchi & Takamasa Oe, based on the short story by Haruki Murakami
directed by Ryûsuke Hamaguchi

by Walter Chaw Haruki Murakami’s short story “Drive My Car” is a model of the rich economy that typifies his writing. The prose–inasmuch as I can tell from its English translation–is simple and declarative, and the action, such as it is, is mundane. But that simplicity is akin to the “Drink Me/Eat Me” invitations presented to Alice on the outskirts of Wonderland–the Red Pill/Blue Pill keys to entire landscapes littered with signs and referents pointing to the things Murakami was thinking (of) as he was writing, possibly even to what he was reading immediately before setting pen to paper. Midway through the short story, the protagonist, Kafuku (a homonym for Kafka), a small-time stage actor who has had to hire a driver because of a drunk-driving accident, mentions his love of zoning out to Beethoven–or, on occasion, American soft rock–on the way home from the theatre. On the way in? He listens to a cassette of Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya”, the play in which he’s playing the lead role. Some days, he’ll close his eyes and try to catch his driver, a young woman called Misaki, shifting gears on his 12-year-old yellow Saab. As Murakami describes it, Misaki is such a good driver that Kafuku can only tell gears are being changed by the engine’s sound, which he compares to an insect flying nearer, then away, then back again.

Eternals (2021)

October 27, 20212021, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical, UK

*/****
starring Gemma Chan, Richard Madden, Kumail Nanjiani, Angelina Jolie
screenplay by Chloé Zhao and Chloe Zhao & Patrick Burleigh
directed by Chloé Zhao

by Walter Chaw Chloé Zhao’s follow-up to her Oscar-winning Nomadland is one of those movies that is more interesting to talk about than to watch–which, in the final analysis, may be the poet laureate of South Dakota’s most distinctive auteur hallmark. Despite that it’s the twenty-some-odd instalment of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Eternals is defiantly a Chloé Zhao picture, and the amount of subversion required to make it so highlights both MCU overlord Kevin Feige’s desperation to shake the diversity monkey off his back and his fatal lack of understanding of women creators at the most rudimentary level. In theory that doesn’t matter much if all these folks are asked to do is direct the parts that aren’t generic action scenes, committee-generated in the house style and dropped into the middle of whatever flaccid drama is possible under the narrative conditions like dead paratroopers into a live warzone. What you see in Eternals is a result of what feels less like a partnership with its attendant compromises than like a quiet war waged in the spaces between a boss who thinks he knows what’s happening and a hired gun who’s pretty clever about having her way no matter the amount of oversight. By the third or fourth laborious exposition dump by the least comfortable, least seasoned and natural actor in the loaded cast (that would be 14-year-old Lia McHugh), it’s pretty clear that Zhao’s empathy for unaffected performers rambling in lingering magic-hour landscapes has won the day. Good one, Zhao.

Telluride ’21: The Electrical Life of Louis Wain

October 25, 20212021, Biopic, Drama, Film Festivals, Telluride, UK

**½/****
starring Benedict Cumberbatch, Claire Foy, Andrea Riseborough
screenplay by Simon Stephenson & Will Sharpe
directed by Will Sharpe

by Walter Chaw Will Sharpe’s The Electrical Life of Louis Wain is not quite the sentimental, broadly-appealing quirk-fest you might be fearing, largely because it has a strong sense of its own absurdity and maybe even a respect for how tired we are of this crap. Though it stars Benedict Cumberbatch, the patron saint of biopics about iconoclasts like Louis Wain, its most valuable player is, as is so often the case with her, Claire Foy. She plays Emily Richardson, nanny for the younger Wain sisters and, after a funny courtship, the happily-ever-after’d Mrs. Wain. This is a bit of a scandal, their nuptials, because Louis is a gentleman and Emily is working-class, but they’re happy, and while they remain childless, they do adopt a cat. That’s unusual, since housecats weren’t really a thing in Victorian England. So infatuated are the Wains with their fur-baby that Louis, an inventor and illustrator and maybe a genius, starts drawing cats doing people things, partly to pay the bills and partly to distract himself from the fact that Emily is dying of breast cancer. Another complication? Louis is so hopeless at managing his affairs that he’s neglected to copyright his paintings, and a cottage industry of Wain’s cats springs up without benefiting him in the slightest.

Titane (2021)

October 22, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Belgium, Drama, France, Horror, Palme d'Or Winner, Sci-Fi, Thriller

***/****
starring Vincent Lindon, Agathe Rousselle, Garance Marillier, Lais Salameh
written and directed by Julia Ducournau

by Walter Chaw In Julia Ducournau’s first film, Raw, there’s a part involving scissors wielded near a vagina that almost made me pass out. A sequence in her second film, Titane, involves another massively inappropriate object wielded near, and inside, a vagina, yet it didn’t bother me half as much. This may have something to do with Titane‘s tone and attitude towards menace: In Raw, there’s a tenderness and familiarity to it all that makes the horror invasive, whereas Titane gives off an alien, madcap, Mack Sennett vibe that announces the movie’s allegorical intentions as a barker at a carnival sideshow might. What’s constant in Ducournau’s two films is an admirably reductive drive to boil a woman’s body down to its biological functions. As Titane opens, hero Alexia (Agathe Rousselle)–badly scarred from the titanium plate behind her ear, the product of a childhood car accident she caused by wanting very badly to sing along to the car’s engine noise–is making her living as a stripper/model at an underground car show. Her body is a fetish object the way a car is to certain men, you see, and I’m thinking immediately not only of how men often assign a feminine pronoun to their cars, but also of e.e. cummings’s naughty poem “she being brand.” Here it is in full:

Needle in a Timestack (2021)

October 15, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Romance, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Time Travel, VOD

*/****
starring Leslie Odom, Jr., Freida Pinto, Cynthia Erivo, Orlando Bloom
written for the screen by John Ridley, based on the short story by Robert Silverberg
directed by John Ridley

by Walter Chaw A cautionary tale about writing something whilst in a state of forced, artificial love-drunk, John Ridley’s Needle in a Timestack is this year’s Serenity: a film so intensely invested in its adolescent feelings that it’s headed towards a specific state of camp immortality. Nick (Leslie Odom, Jr.)–because “Nick of time,” get it?–is married to Janine (Cynthia Erivo), and they’re that kind of The Notebook couple who speak to each other as though they were scripted by Nicholas Sparks, who, let’s face it, on the Stephanie Meyer scale of cultural whoopsies, can barely string three words together. “Dance like no one’s watching,” someone moans in a high state of agitation. “Love is a closed circle,” someone else declares; between that and “True Detective”‘s “time is a flat circle,” circles are doing a lot of heavy lifting in the realm of purple overwriting. In this future as imagined by a perfume commercial, time travel is a recreational lark indulged in by the hyper-rich, causing occasional “time waves” that wash over the world like the exact same visualization of the exact same concept in A Sound of Thunder, a film so terrible that your body’s autonomous defense mechanism has already largely expelled it from your memory. That film, like this one, is based on a classic science-fiction story: Ray Bradbury there, Robert Silverberg here. The concept of “based” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in this instance, too.

Bergman Island (2021)

October 14, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Belgium, Drama, France, Germany, Mexico, Sweden, Theatrical

**/****
starring Vicky Krieps, Tim Roth, Mia Wasikowska, Anders Danielsen Lie
written and directed by Mia Hansen-Løve

by Walter Chaw Eric Rohmer made some snoozers, too. So it is with Mia Hansen-Løve, the inheritor of Rohmer’s cinema of intimate behavioural observation and obsession, and her Bergman Island, which lands midway between pointlessly clever and fatally self-obsessed. It follows married filmmakers Tony (Tim Roth) and Chris (Vicky Krieps) as they retreat to Ingmar Bergman’s compound on Fårö Island in the Baltic to finish their respective screenplays. Tony’s having a much easier time of it, and it’s revealed they’ve been invited to this unusual writer’s retreat at least in part so Tony can screen and conduct a Q&A for one of his films. From what we see of it, it’s possibly a horror film; whatever it is, it’s clear that Tony’s work is very different from Chris’s. Bergman shot a few of his film and TV productions on Fårö–in fact, Fårö was for him like Yoknapatawpha County was for Faulkner: an entire world unto itself that functioned as the canvas and backdrop for his working-through of major themes. There’s a tour of sites that Tony goes on and Chris does not, since she meets an earnest young graduate student, Hampus (Hampus Nordenson), studying Bergman, of course, and decides to spend the day with him instead. You think this will be a source of conflict in Bergman Island, particularly as Chris comments that the couple will be sleeping in the same bedroom where Scenes from a Marriage was shot, but it’s not.

TIFF ’21: Wrap-up

October 6, 20212021, Authors: Bill Chambers, Brazil, China, Comedy, Documentary, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Hong Kong, Horror, Iran, Mexico, Music, Sweden, Thriller, TIFF, UK

by Bill Chambers I’ve been covering TIFF for, gulp, 25 years now. If I didn’t expect to mark this silver anniversary in the confines of my living room, I have no complaints. Some of the show ponies were geoblocked for Canadian press or offline altogether, but although I’m fully vaccinated, I wasn’t about to risk transmission or stew for hours in a mask to see the May-December romance Dear Evan Hansen, or another remake of Dune, or a Secret Steven Soderbergh Screening that turned out to be, lol, Kafka, which is almost as good a prank as moving Best Actor to the end of the Academy Awards ceremony. I did at least get to stream my white whale, Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog, so no regrets. No regrets, no complaints.

TIFF ’21: You Are Not My Mother

September 28, 20212021, Authors: Bill Chambers, Coming of Age, Drama, Film Festivals, Horror, Ireland, TIFF

**/****
starring Hazel Doupe, Paul Reid, Carolyn Bracken, Ingrid Craigie
written and directed by Kate Dolan

by Bill Chambers Although I called last year’s iteration of the Festival “the COVID-19 TIFF,” it’s really the 2021 crop of films that have been shaped by the pandemic, formally and, perhaps as a result, conceptually, the way Jørgen Leth wound up with five dissimilar incarnations of his experimental short The Perfect Human when Lars von Trier tasked him with remaking it under different sets of “obstructions.” In a charming pre-taped intro that saw her receiving trick-or-treaters (points for creativity), writer-director Kate Dolan talked about how difficult it was shooting You Are Not My Mother during the second lockdown in Ireland, but there’s a low-key expressionism to the film that might be a happy accident, a bonus stemming from compromise. Our young heroine navigates a near-apocalyptically empty suburbia, which feels not necessarily true, but right, externalizing her feelings of isolation along with her vulnerability. The movie isn’t pushing any envelopes, however, and is, to some extent, modest to a fault.

TIFF ’21: The Guilty (2021)

September 27, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Film Festivals, Streaming, Thriller, TIFF

**/****
starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Ethan Hawke, Riley Keough, Peter Sarsgaard
screenplay by Nic Pizzolatto, based on the original screenplay by Gustav Möller & Emil Nygaard Albertsen
directed by Antoine Fuqua

by Walter Chaw Landing midway between Pontypool and Talk Radio, Antoine Fuqua’s The Guilty finds disgraced cop Joe (Jake Gyllenhaal) bumped down to 9-1-1 operator as he awaits trial for something the press is eager to hear his side of the story of. He’s falling apart, though; this much we can tell by the way his superiors in the call station keep him on a short–very short–leash, and by the way he looks at himself in the bathroom mirror like an animal injured and cornered. He calls his estranged wife and begs her to let him say goodnight to his daughter. She begs him to leave her alone. He can’t seem to catch a break. But he gets a call from Emily (voiced by Riley Keough), who’s been abducted by her ex-husband, Henry (Peter Sarsgaard). They’re travelling east on the 10–Joe figures that out because she sees a forest fire raging out the driver’s-side windows. Joe figures out a lot of things while, on a bank of screens in front of him, an apocalypse plays out. It’s a vision of hell. Our hell–we made it. It’s ours. Emily gives Joe one last chance to do a good thing before he vanishes, so he’s going to do it, whether or not it’s too late. It’s been too late for a long time.

TIFF ’21: Mothering Sunday

September 25, 20212021, Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, Film Festivals, TIFF, UK

**/****
starring Odessa Young, Josh O’Connor, Sope Dirisu, Olivia Colman
screenplay by Alice Birch, based on the novel by Graham Swift
directed by Eva Husson

by Bill Chambers An orphan groomed for servitude, young Jane (Odessa Young) is a maid in the employ of aristocratic couple the Nivens in post-WWI England. Jane is quiet, dutiful, mindful of the cloud of sorrow hanging over her employers, who lost a child to the war. (We infer that it’s left Mrs. Niven (Olivia Colman) catatonic and Mr. Niven (a grizzled Colin Firth) a babbling mess as he tries to fill the silences.) Jane is also, we glean from inserts of word prompts from her notebooks, a listener, hoarding material for some writing project we see her working on years later, boyfriend Donald (Sope Dirisu) close by to serve as a sounding board. Mothering Sunday, the UK version of Mother’s Day, arrives and the Nivens give motherless Jane the day off, which she spends in bed with the neighbours’ son, Paul (Josh O’Connor), who appears to have counted his blessings upon returning from the battlefield and refuses to risk disappointing his parents by breaking off his engagement to a woman of means for a maid, despite his obvious affection for Jane. Eventually, Paul takes off to go meet his fiancee, leaving Jane to explore the big empty house alone. Jane, au naturel, ventures downstairs and becomes particularly taken with the vast library, her lack of clothing critical to breaking down the hermetic seal of the rich and making all this profoundly hers. This show of somewhat transgressive behaviour feels transgressive in itself, partly because the movies have gotten so chaste lately and partly because, through a COVID lens, nudity is an especial act of hubris. It’s mesmerizing, these few minutes of Mothering Sunday.