Direct Action (Ben Russell and Guillaume Cailleau, 2024)

Direct Action is a 212-minute documentary comprising just 41 shots observing the daily operations of the Notre-Dame-des-Landes commune, one of the ZAD (Zone à Défendre, or Zone to Defend) communities engaged in eco-activism against the French government. They successfully halted an airport project in 2018 but continue to fight various ecologically destructive initiatives. Russell and Cailleau spent about 100 days filming at the commune's 4,000-acre autonomous zone and despite occasional footage of violent protests, much of Direct Action has a quiet, Jeanne Dielman-like feel to it - long takes of making bread, sawing wood, cooking crepes, gardening, etc. 

About ten minutes into its U.S. premiere Monday night at the New York Film Festival in the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, a loud sound came from the back of the theater. It didn't feel like it came from the film and it had many viewers, myself included, looking around for the source. The sound was of a possibly panicked crowd, quite chaotic and disorienting. Since it kept playing for at least ten minutes, everyone in the audience (again, myself included) took it to be part of the film somehow. The sound played over several cuts which felt sloppy, especially given that one shot was a stationary low angle of a tower and another was a close-up of an activist explaining the best ways to deal with police interrogations.

At one point, the panicked crowd sound traveled to the front of the theater and I began to accept that the film was being accompanied by some sort of sound installation. As I was trying to figure out how the filmmakers achieved this effect, I heard a verbal fight between two women in what I assumed was also part of the sound installation. I prepared to strap myself in for what would promise to be a wild sonic ride; perhaps the filmmakers were using these sounds as a Brechtian distanciation device. 

It was only then that I could discern that an animated audience member was yelling at someone. I adjusted my eyes and finally saw that there were two people standing in front of the screen and staging a protest. They started in the back row and moved up front but I was completely oblivious to all of this activity. I heard "They're aestheticizing direct action rather than engaging in it" and "While you're watching, bombs are dropping!" I filmed about 40 seconds of it which you can see below. The film stopped and security ejected the two protestors.

I spoke with a guy sitting in my row and he noticed that the protestors had a large backpack with them which must have been housing a speaker from which the panicked crowd sound emerged. That would explain how the sound traveled with them to the front of the theater. The film started up again and an employee shouted an apology to us and asked if we wanted the film to start over. After a collective "No!" the film continued with no other interruptions apart from the usual talkers and phone users.

As for the film itself, difficult, rewarding, but I have to concede that the protest made it all the more memorable and, at the very least, an excellent teaching tool for the upcoming sound module in my Introduction to Film course. 

Grade: A-minus

 

The Damned (Roberto Minervini, 2024)

The Damned is purportedly a fiction film with a screenplay written by Minervini. But his m.o. has always been to blend fiction with documentary and it's unclear how much of the dialogue was improvised or how much was influenced by Minervini's discussions with his actors (or entirely the product of Minervini's imagination). Despite a mostly stationary camera, The Damned feels more like a direct cinema documentary than a hermetically sealed diegetic world. In the Winter of 1862, a group of volunteer soldiers are sent to the western territories (specifically, Montana where it was filmed) and, with the Civil War raging back east, they wonder about the purpose of their mission. The film is comprised of disconnected scenes of the men grappling with their day-to-day existence as soldiers - discussing why they joined the army, learning how to scan the landscape for dangers, helping one another with various wounds, trying to find a balance between idealism and cynicism (and perhaps even nihilism), etc. Minervini treats the Civil War with a parallax view at best. As he notes in the press kit, "I wanted to shed the weight of history a little bit to facilitate this experiential journey, to allow for something more cathartic and more primordial to come from within and from these individuals." He achieves this goal as The Damned sweeps you up in the flow of these men trying to find meaning in their work as they try to stay alive. But so far, Roberto Minervini has yet to fulfill the promise of his expansive Louisiana/The Other Side (2015), one of the finest films of the century. Hypnotic as much of The Damned is, it feels slight compared to Louisiana, so rigidly focused that you long for the weight of some other force to bear down on the project, if only to ensure you will recall the film a year from now. 

Grade: A-minus

All We Imagine as Light (Payal Kapadia, 2024)

Prabha (Kani Kusruti) and Anu (Divya Prabha) are two Malayali nurses living together in Mumbai. Prabha's husband from an arranged marriage lives in Germany and she hasn't seen him in years. Anu, younger and more idealistic than Prabha, is in love with Shiaz (Hridhu Haroon), a Muslim man, and they're both worried about how Anu's Hindu family will accept the news. An older coworker Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam) is being harassed by her landlord who wants to sell the apartment building in which she resides to real estate developers. She quits her job in disgust and moves back to her seaside village. Prabha and Anu accompany her on the journey and the change of locale, an explicit contrast to the bustle of Mumbai, winds up rejuvenating for all three women.

Before the New York Film Festival screening Monday night, Kapadia explained that the subtitles would indicate which non-Hindi languages were being spoken throughout the film. It's a perfect illustration of how disorienting Mumbai can appear for anyone trying to navigate their lives in the city, with language a specific story point as some characters profess difficulty with learning Hindi. Kapadia's Mumbai is one where people work long hours and then greet insomnia upon finally getting home. Artificial light dominates as day and night become meaningless distinctions, hence the perhaps utopian promise of the film's title. But as much the "imagine" part of the title as the "light." The seaside locale, itself festooned with a variety of party lights, affords the three principals the time for reflection so much so that the climactic event may be entirely the product of Pradha's imagination. It's a beautifully acted, delicately observed film, one that threatens to get lost between brasher films if not in your own overstimulated memory bank.

Grade: A-minus

The Shrouds (David Cronenberg, 2024)

The most straightforward Cronenberg film since A Dangerous Method (2011), The Shrouds tells a downright Oedipal tale of Karsh (Vincent Cassel), a wealthy businessman mourning the loss of his wife, Becca (Diane Kruger). With apparently bottomless reserves of capital, he founds GraveTech, a state-of-the-art graveyard that allows clients to monitor the decaying bodies of their loved ones. The bodies are wrapped in full-coverage shroud technology that facilitates close-up and 360 views of the deceased. One evening, a select number of graves are vandalized, including Becca's, and Kash's IT guy Maury (Guy Pearce), who is unhappily divorced from Becca's sister Terry (also Kruger), eventually regains access to the grave feeds. But he discovers nodes growing on some of the bones (again, including Becca's), nodes that may be surveillance devices. This wrinkle plunges Vincent into a maelstrom of conspiracies and he spends the second half of the film wondering who to trust, even his sexy AI avatar assistant Hunny (also Kruger). 

However convoluted all of that sounds, Cronenberg drops not a single spinning plate over 119 minutes, apart perhaps from a few awkward dream vs. reality moments. In fact, as with Twisters, of all things, I honestly thought there was an hour left to go as the final credits started to roll. But that left an empty feeling that might not work in the film's favor. I kept longing for some pushback from the women characters akin to an early scene in which a first date, Myrna Slotnik (Jennifer Dale), at GraveTech doesn't go too well; in classic feminist film theory mode, Myra makes it clear to Karsh that she does not want to look at Becca's decaying body on the GraveTech monitor. And Kruger's sex-which-is-not-one characters are not so much foils as enigmas helping Karsh speed along his oedipal path towards knowledge. 

Then again, maybe a bit of emptiness is what Cronenberg was after. Karsh is an obvious stand-in for Cronenberg who lost his wife Carolyn to cancer in 2017. He presents himself as a husk incapable of believing that someone so vibrant and alive as Becca (or really anyone?) can just be gone one moment and then spend eternity rotting away. And when confronted with larger, inconceivable structures of political intrigue that generate conspiracy theories, as Karsh must do, perhaps a modicum of emptiness serves as a necessary component of mental health, keeping cynicism, nihilism, and madness at bay.

Grade: A-minus

Afternoons of Solitude (Albert Serra, 2024)

On one level, this is Serra's least difficult film to date - a direct cinema gaze at Peruvian bullfighter Andrés Roca Rey in action at various arenas in Spain. But on a level most Serraesque, it's a brutal watch - two women sitting next to me at the New York Film Festival screening last night left about 40 minutes in ("We just can't take anymore," they apologized but I was more than happy standing up to allow them to leave our row). Digital technology affords Serra the opportunity to hang back and observe the violence unfold in unflinching, unforgiving long takes. The camera focuses so closely on Rey and/or the various bulls that it sometimes feels as if he's performing on a Dune-like sand planet. We hear the crowds (and an occasional ominous score) on the soundtrack but we never see them. These lengthy moments are interspersed with scenes of Rey getting ready in hotel rooms and post-fight car rides in which Serra planted a camera and a light in the vehicle and left the footage up to fate given that there was no room for him in the car. As with his fiction features, he shot hundreds of hours and then spent months editing. 

As an anthropological document, it's fascinating although it grows numbing over 123 minutes, a condition you may welcome. Knowing next to nothing about bullfighting, I learned a great deal, chiefly that bullfighting is a team sport with several handlers/players assisting Rey in vanquishing the bull and extolling his prowess in the car rides after (his huge cojones are celebrated many times). The extreme theatricality, not just of the performance/sport but the preparation as well (jumping into the skintight pants, kissing a rosary, checking for bleeding wounds, etc.), provides added visual/dramatic interest.

But now that I've taken it all in, I'm not sure of the use/replay value of the film. Which is fine because neither does Serra. At the Q&A after the screening, the phrase he used most was "I don't know." He certainly didn't know what footage he would get from the car rides and he explained that he originally intended to follow two bullfighters but decided the other lacked whatever amount of élan. Like all his films, Afternoons of Solitude came alive in the editing and even then, the result feels aleatory and fiercely experimental. His m.o. has its detractors and he doesn't do himself any favors in claiming "I'm the greatest editor in the world" as he did last night. But I can't help but guffaw in pleasure at such an uncompromising, and extraordinarily well-spoken, auteur. After several successive masterpieces, he's made a merely good film. And given that he claims this will be his last documentary ever, I'm excited to see the transcendence he serves up next.

 Grade: A-minus

Pavements (Alex Ross Perry, 2024)

Sometime around 2020, the great 1990s indie band Pavement wanted to make a film about themselves. But ever the rakish ironists, they wanted one that would, according to the Q&A after the New York Film Festival screening last night, "avoid the legacy trap." So they purposely did not seek out a documentary filmmaker and instead enlisted Alex Ross Perry, a specialist in spiky indie dramas although he'd already proven himself as a worthy chronicler of 1990s indie rock with the fictional 2018 Her Smell. To give the band what they wanted, i.e., to critique the very nature of the rockumentary, Perry devised three events/art pranks that he filmed over the course of several years - a Tribeca pop-up museum in September 2022 called "Pavements 1933-2022” (“New York—London—Tokyo—Stockton”), a musical called Slanted! Enchanted! at the Sheen Center in NoHo in December 2022, and a cheesy, feature-length Pavement biopic called Range Life, starring Tim Heidecker as Gerard Cosloy and Jason Schwartzman as Chris Lombardi of Matador Records and Joe Keery as lead singer Stephen Malkmus, which was screened at Brooklyn's Nitehawk Cinema in 2023. Footage from these events, including lengthy interviews with the actors tasked to portray the band in the musical and the biopic, combine with archival footage and material shot by Perry during the band's 2022 tour to create Pavements. 

These events are the ones that avoid the legacy trap. The museum was bedizened with faux artifacts, the musical injected earnestness into an oeuvre high on slacker snark, and the biopic told lies. Pavements, then, turns out to be a rather straightforward chronicle of what transpired over the last few years in this project. This is not a film which stacks fiction onto documentary to inform and confuse one another, e.g., Roberto Minervini's bountiful Louisiana AKA The Other Side (2015). The art pranks, no matter how wacky and legacy-demolishing, are set apart from the archival and recent footage which wind up telling a conventional rockumentary story anyway as it traces the band's history through its formation, discography, breakup, and various reunions. You keep waiting for Pavements to confuse you but it feels like two hours of throat clearing before a Godardian genre-scramble that never comes. 

During the Q&A, Perry tried to sell the film as precisely such a scramble by noting that the museum was a de facto film set. And instead of interviewing contemporary bands about how Pavement influenced them, he had Snail Mail, Soccer Mommy, Speedy Ortiz and Bully perform Pavement songs at the event because "you need B roll." But how B roll of bands performing, as well as typical documentary fodder such as a shot of Rob Sheffield's Rolling Stone article praising the musical or an article about the belated TikTok success of the b-side "Harness Your Hopes," instead of talking heads extolling Pavement is more legacy/genre-defying remains unclear. 

To be certain, Pavements is still a wild ride. It borrows the frames-within-frames palimpsest style of Todd Haynes' superior The Velvet Underground (2021) and, as such, the editor (and huge Pavement stan) Robert Greene deserves as much credit as anyone. But the glimpses of Range Life and Slanted! Enchanted! are even wilder. So here's hoping both appear as extras on the Blu-ray.

Grade: B

Emilia Pérez (Jacques Audiard, 2024)

For his first Spanish-language film, Audiard is in a bit over his head here with this musical about Mexican drug cartel leader Juan "Manitas" Del Monte (Karla Sofía Gascón) who offers millions to going-nowhere lawyer Rita Moro Castro (Zoe Saldaña) to help speed up gender confirmation surgery and transition into the titular character. Under Manitas' threatening gaze, Rita researches the possibilities of such an endeavor which takes her all over the world, including a transgender surgery hospital in Thailand. This occasions a number called "La Vaginoplastia" which, like most of the songs in the film, was co-written by Audiard who also wrote the screenplay. For an unknown jarring reason, the surgeons and patients sing of surgery with a crassness that verges on the offensive. Audiard may have intended it as a parody of trans paranoia. But that suggestion evaporates in a later earnest ballad sung by Emilia about being "half woman, half man" as if gender conforms to precise recipe measurements. So while Audiard could stand a visit to the Genderbread Person, he makes up for this deficiency through the sheer chutzpah of telling this story through spontaneous outbursts of song. Like the performers in all fine musicals, the main characters here, including Selena Gomez as Manitas' beleaguered wife Jessi and Adriana Paz as Emilia's love interest Epifanía, sing into what the great theorist Scott McMillin calls "the voice of the musical," a collective identity that transcends the individual psychology of any particular character no matter how principal. It's a testament to the art form that all four performers shared the Best Actress prize at Cannes in May. And it's a testament to Audiard's conception that we wind up falling in love with each one of them despite their (and the film's) various shortcomings.

Grade: B+

Sorry Angel/Plaire, aimer et courir vite (Christophe Honoré, 2018)

As with Her Smell, here's yet another asshole main character in a film set in the 1990s although his assholism doesn't reach full force until the very end. A solid gay drama. But I liked it much better when I thought the best friend was the main character's dad (!). And we need more musicals, not solid gay dramas, especially from the creator of the most inspiring musicals of the century (Love Songs/Chansons d'amour, 2007).

Grade: B+

 

Her Smell (Alex Ross Perry, 2018)

Your tolerance for this may depend on your ability to withstand the thorough unpleasantness of the main character, a bombed-out 1990s alt.rock singer/guitarist portrayed indelibly by the ever-great Elisabeth Moss. She's truly repulsive. But I love identifying with secondary characters...or no one, default mode for many gay cinemagoers so I found it easy to swallow her nastiness. Perhaps even more difficult to take, the film lifts its structure from the Shakespearean five-act play which makes for an unflinching heaviness. I know I'm not selling this but it took me.

Grade: B+

 

 

September Top Ten

1. Travis Baldree: Legends & Lattes (Tor, 2022). I'm stunned myself. This fantasy novel begins like countless others. An orc named Viv violently vanquishes her enemy. But that takes up only a two-page prologue. Viv puts down her sword and travels far to open a coffee shop. Instead of over-narrativizing with dreary world building, Baldree traces the everyday challenges of Viv's endeavor - introducing the townsfolk to coffee in the first place; expanding the menu; going easy on the freebees; figuring out how to deal with customers who stay for hours nursing one cup; rigging a primitive form of air conditioning; booking entertainment; etc. As more Lord of the Rings types become invested in the success of the shop, the story takes on a Mickey and Judy "let's put on a show" feel. For narrative tension, some of the landed gentry demand taxation. But overall, it reminded me of nothing so much as the delightful processual thrust of James M. Cain's Mildred Pierce. Low-stakes fantasy this subgenre is called and I was completely disarmed by Baldree's ability to hold the reader's attention by portraying people simply working together. As one critic put it, "it's sweet, beautiful, and, most of all, kind." And yes, I have the prequel, Bookshops & Bonedust, on my iPad right now.

2.  Disco: Soundtrack of a Revolution (PBS series). Episode One - "Rock the Boat" is a fabulously insightful meditation on the origins of disco. Episode Two - "Ain't No Stoppin' Us Now" marks disco's mainstream popularity and, predictably, hits all the beats of a Wikipedia article. Episode Three - "Stayin' Alive" is abject nonsense about disco's supposed comeback with nary of mention of where it's been for the last 45 years. Caveat saltator.

3. Jungle: "Let's Go Back" (Caiola). You all keep sleeping on this nu-disco combo. But you're missing yet another copper-plated dreamscape of the Stylistics, doo-wop, and shaky memories of dancefloors past.

4. The Bear Season 3. The most frustrating show on television today. Even though the first episode came off like an extended previously-on segment, I admired its drifty pointlessness. And Tina's (Liza Colón-Zayas) backstory was welcome and moving. But Donna's (Jamie Lee Curtis) presence always promises torture porn. Her Actors Studio scene with Natalie (Abby Elliott) had more give to it than last season's preposterous, feel-bad Christmas Eve episode. But it provides no narrative air ducts for the tension to pass through. And the final episode was a storytelling disaster making it impossible to determine Chef Andrea Terry's (Olivia Colman) relationship to half of the cast. Maybe the series' architects will put it all together in Season 4. Or maybe they'll figure out whether or not they're making a comedy.

5. Maria (Pablo Larraín). At lunch before the New York Film Festival screening, my friend Jody and I were discussing various forms of amateurism as a means of maintaining good mental hygiene - cleaning, baking, attending Lady Gaga dance classes, walking, working out for sanity rather than weight loss per se, Nailed It!, etc. During the Q&A after the screening, Angelina Jolie discussed her months-long preparation to become Maria Callas and explained that she broke down in tears the first time she sang. Singing is way to let out all that we hold in, Jolie noted, and she encouraged everyone in attendance to try singing for that very benefit. Both moments deepened what has now become Larraín biopic boilerplate. It's not much different from previous outings such as Jackie (2016) and Spencer (2021), spiraling out from one concentrated event, here the last week of Callas' life. She hasn't sung live in three years and is testing a comeback. But what she truly wants is simply to sing for herself and the tragedy here is that no one (sometimes including herself) will allow the diva to do so. Larraín gives us a glimpse of Callas as an amateur and the film constitutes a testament to what Christopher Small calls "musicking," the act of creating music free from recordings, command performances, and divadom, music as method to potentially save your life.

6. Miséricorde (Alain Guiraudie). Avoid the Wikipedia synopsis since it gives the entire film away. I'll keep it vague here. Jérémie (a terrifically blank performance by Félix Kysyl) returns to his small hometown to attend a funeral. But shiftless and pretty, he decides to stick around to both the annoyance and delight of various villagers. Awkwardness soon shades into violence and a hideous crime has to be covered up. Guiraudie keeps things tense by utilizing the narrative lacunae of art cinema. But he also resorts to some tired devices such as Jérémie frequently overhearing story-forwarding information as if he were a character hiding in a corner of Downton Abbey. And he has a priest deliver the film's big message in a fit of collegiate existentialism at the edge of a tall hill overlooking humanity below. Then again, Guiraudie isn't after any tight connections. He's a master of wielding Hitchcockian guilt such that the last third of the film becomes lighter as delight eclipses annoyance and we grow itchy over the attraction certain characters (and perhaps we the viewers) feel to an evil protagonist. Alfred would be proud.  

7. Melissa Kirsch, "At Capacity" The New York Times, September 28, 2024; Miranda Lambert: Postcards from Texas (Vanner/Republic/Big Loud). Kirsch asks a question that keeps nagging me as I age and my internal hard drive becomes overamped and lossy: "If we can’t remember the things we’ve read and watched and even loved, do they still 'count'?" Fortunately, she calls on Maryanne Wolf, a neuroscientist, to put us somewhat at ease: "The information you get from a book is stored in networks. We have an extraordinary capacity for storage, and much more is there than you realize. It is in some way working on you even though you aren’t thinking about it." Still, I gravitate towards pop and song doctors in particular whose job is to keep pressing our random recall buttons. Thanks to such architects, I can hum every damn song off one of my favorite country albums of the year. Lambert's latest has been accused of lacking the spunk. But to my cheap ears, I hear "Looking Back on Luckenbach" as a classic wedding song in the making, "Alimony" a classic karaoke song in the making, and "Way Too Good at Breaking My Heart" a classic ripoff of Foreigner's "Waiting for a Girl Like You" in the making. Granted, as one of the premier album artists of our era, Lambert's settling into a ho-hum eminence akin to, oh, Sleater-Kinney, sure to forever entertain but doomed to never risk a surprise. But I remain grateful for the meta "Dammit Randy" about a loser who broke up with a pre-fame Lambert and is now relegated to turning her up on the radio. As she sings most memorably and thematically, "I've got your attention." And authenticity fans take note: Lambert wrote the best song, "Run," all by herself. 

8.  Mark Harris, "How Bad Can It Get For Hollywood?" The New York Times, March 1, 2024.  Finally - the rejoinder I've been looking for when superhero movie fans call me a snob for hyping art cinema and the avant-garde. Discussing forthcoming non-franchise titles such as Hamnet and Novocaine, Harris zings, "These are self-contained films that don’t demand moviegoers have a Ph.D. in previous installments or extended universes."

9. LL Cool J: The FORCE (LL Cool J, Inc./Def Jam/VMG). His first album in eleven years and, since you didn't know, fourteenth overall, The FORCE may improbably be LL Cool J's best ever. Produced by Q-Tip, it moves like trillions of microorganisms in your guts with Can and Gary Numan samples and an unexpected and affectionate evocation of Black family life in "Black Code Special." But there's a tree-falling-in-the-woods quality to its supernova appearance. It's an old man's hip-hop album so on the cranky "30 Decembers," he worries about who this album is for. "These kids don't even know who I am," he admits right after castigating them for being on their phones and computers instead of "readin' the papers." He brags about being postmodern on one track and calls another track "Post Modern" as if he finally downed all those late 1980s John Leland Singles columns in Spin. Even though The FORCE sounds more alive than most hip-hop has in years, is this youth music? And does it matter?

10. Criterion 24/7.  I should be all Old Man Yells at Cloud about this. For years before Karagarga, I would trade VHS tapes with people in Estonia and Japan for a chance to see an obscure art film in hideous quality. Or I'd have to wait literally months if not years for The End (Christopher Maclaine, 1953) to download on eMule (never happened). Now there's a gotdang spigot showering all manner of obscurities and classics into your living room. But as a film democratist, I love it. As I'm writing this, a film/director I've never heard of is streaming - Fisting: Never Tear Us Apart (Whammy Alcazaren, 2022) and yeah, that kind of fisting, of all things. Part of the fun is trying to guess a title. If you give up, then check out Criterion's What's On Now page for the answer.