F O R Y O U R C O N S I D E R AT I O N I N A L L C AT E G O R I E S I N C L U D I N G BEST PICTURE

“A MASTERPIECE.
This film is a career-best
from Noah Baumbach.
Hilarious and heartbreaking
in equal measure.”
ROGEREBERT.COM

“





A TOUR DE FORCE.”
TIMEOUT

from academy award® nominee NOAH BAUMBACH

Marriage
Story
“EXTRAORDINARY.
There are such incredible emotional
highs and lows in this film, such pathos
and rage and tragicomic moments and
blissful standout sequences, that you feel
overwhelmed by the humanity of it all.
The movie brings out Scarlett Johansson
and Adam Driver’s best work.”
ROLLING STONE

NETFLIXGUILDS.COM
RADICAL CLASSICAL: LITTLE WOMEN
INTERVIEW WITH WRITER-DIRECTOR GRETA GERWIG

FILM COMMENT Published by

Film at Lincoln Center
November-December 2019

Plus:

PORTRAIT
OF A LADY
ON FIRE

THE
IRISHMAN

UNCUT
GEMS

ROSSELLINI’S
ROGUES
F O R Y O U R C O N S I D E R AT I O N I N A L L C AT E G O R I E S

“





A MASTERPIECE.
MARTIN SCORSESE IS AT THE PEAK OF HIS POWERS. ROBERT DE NIRO IS MONUMENTAL.
JOE PESCI IS SO GOOD YOU WANT TO CHEER WHEN HE COMES ONSCREEN.
AL PACINO LOOMS LIKE A COLOSSUS IN THIS TOUR DE FORCE.”
ROLLING STONE

T I M E C H A N G E S N O T H I N G

NETFLIXGUILDS.COM
 Film at L incoln Center
Present s
Novemberr 1–6
Poetr y and
d Par tition:
The Films of Ritwik Ghatak
Novemberr 8–10
Jessica Hausner
a :
The Miracle Worker
Novemberr 15–17
Rebel Spirrit:
The Films of Patricia Mazuy
Novemberr 22–December 4
Relentless Invention:
New Korean
a Cinema, 1996-2003
03
Co-presented with Subwa ay Cinema
and Ko
orean Cu
ultural Center New Yo
ork

Decemberr 6–11
Veredas: A Gener
e ation of
Brazilian
n Filmmakers
Co
o-pr
present
se
ented with Cinema Tr
Tropical

D emberr 20–Januar y 9
Dec
Varda
Co-presented with Janus Fiilms

New Releases
Held Over
Parasite
Synonymss
Opens November 22
Va
arda by Agnès
Opens Deccember 13
Cunningha
am

Tickets : filmlinc.org
Elinor Bun
nin Munroe Film Center 144
4 West 65th Street
Walter Reade Theater 165 West 65th Street

These projects are suppor ted in par t by an award from the National Endowm
ment for the Ar ts. New York State Council on the Ar ts with the suppor t of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo
uomo and the New York State Legislature.
Special thanks: The National Film Archive of India (Ritwik Ghatak); Magnolia Pictures and Austrian Cultural Foorum NY (Jessica Hausner). Image: Varda by Agnès, cour tesy of Janus Films
 Published by Film at Lincoln Center
CONTENTS November-December 2019, Volume 55, Number 6

FEATURES DEPARTMENTS
& COLUMNS
24 Greta Gerwig on Little Women
Interview by Devika Girish 6 The Pre-Show
In a triumphant second solo feature, the writer-director News, Inspired: Todd
brings the Louisa May Alcott classic to the screen for Haynes, Release Me, Direc-
new generations with a richly satisfying sense of cin- tions: Tracy Letts, Resto-
ema, deepening the novel’s ever-modern aspects ration Row, and more

32 The Irishman by Nicolas Rapold 24 12 Critics’ Choice

Spanning boisterous highs and shattering lows, Martin Critics rate and comment
Scorsese’s life of a good soldier holds disquieting truths on new releases
not just about crime and redemption but also about
how we process death and deviance 14 Make It Real
Sonic enhancements in
38 Uncut Gems by Michael Koresky three new documentaries
Things fall apart at the speed of light in Josh and Benny
Safdie’s follow-up to Good Time, an even more anxiety- 16 Art and Craft
drenched urban nightmare starring Adam Sandler as a Composer Fatima
diamond district dealer seeking the ultimate score Al Qadiri on Atlantics
32

42 Portrait of a Lady on Fire by Lauren Kaminsky 18 Off the Page

Céline Sciamma imbues a beguiling tale of an artist Toni Morrison and
and her muse with the gravity of a Greek myth and the Beloved (1998)
heart-stopping sensuality of a classic romance
Plus: Amy Taubin interviews Sciamma 20 Inside Stories
Sam Barlow’s full-motion
48 Vetri Maaran by R. Emmet Sweeney video game Telling Lies
6JG6COKNƂNOOCMGTJCUDGGPTGƂPKPICPFTGFGƂPKPIVJG
geographical and genre parameters of contemporary 22 Currents
Indian cinema with his bold and bloody knockout actioners New and important work
38 from festivals and elsewhere
54 Rape Culture on Screen by Soraya Nadia McDonald
Almost 30 years ago, Thelma and Louise showed they 66 The Big Screen
weren’t going to take it anymore; now, Shatara Michelle A Hidden Life, The Report,
Ford’s Test PatternTGƃGEVUJQYFGRKEVKQPUQHUGZWCN Queen & Slim, Motherless
assault and its aftermath have changed Brooklyn, Little Joe, and
more
60 Rossellini’s History Films by Nick Pinkerton
Decades after reinventing Italian cinema with his neo- 74 Home Movies
realist masterpieces, Roberto Rossellini embarked on a DVD, streaming, and
brilliantly foolhardy project to depict human history in 42 beyond
all its oddball, philosophical complexity
78 Readings
She Said by Jodi Kantor
and Megan Twohey, and
more

80 Graphic Detail
Steven Chorney

Cover: Wilson Webb, © 2019 CTMG, Inc. Courtesy of Sony Pictures. 48

2 | F I L M CO MM EN T | November-December 2019
F O R YO U R C O N S I D E R AT I O N I N A L L C AT E G O R I E S I N C L U D I N G

BEST PICTURE
“ ++++
AN UNDENIABLE
TRIUMPH. Precisely and sensitively confronted by
two affecting performances from
JONATHAN PRYCE and
ANTHONY HOPKINS.”
AWARDS CIRCUIT

“ BRILLIANT.
Exceptionally acted.
It’s a gift to see ANTHONY HOPKINS and
JONATHAN PRYCE, two actors
of this caliber, playing against each other.”
VARIETY

NETFLIXGUILDS.COM
EDITOR’S LETTER
I
n my earliest days at the magazine,
some of the greatest lessons I learned
came during the editorial process
for essays by Kent Jones. When Kent
wrote something for an issue, it was
an event, an opportunity to discover
films and filmmakers through expert eyes,
in new ways. And in observing his exact-
ing self-edits up close, I saw firsthand his
precision of language and thought when
expressing himself on a movie or wrestling
with some conundrum of film history or
interpretation. It’s no secret to any lover of
movies and reader of film criticism that the
struggle to maintain a similar level of quality
is ongoing, partly by virtue of the decades-
long decimation of arts journalism and
with it even the possibility of career critics.
Sometimes the most frightening result of
such trends is the inability to distinguish
quality writing and depth of experience at
all—not as optional features that may or
may not accompany the pose of authority
and enthusiasm, but as central values.
Why am I reiterating arguments that
might be familiar to anyone who has
witnessed or participated in debates about
film criticism? As it happens, Kent recently
concluded his tenure as Director of the New
York Film Festival with its 57th edition,
having programmed surely one of its most
outstanding lineups with selection com-
mittee members Dennis Lim and Florence
Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold
Digital Editor Clinton Krute
Consulting Art Director Kevin Fisher
Copy Editor Steven Mears
Assistant Editor Devika Girish
Consultant Michael Koresky
Contributing Editors
Nick Davis
J. Hoberman
Dave Kehr
Nellie Killian
Soraya Nadia McDonald
Jonathan Romney
Michael Sragow
Amy Taubin
Editorial Interns
Phoebe Chen, John Gaudio, Kaleem Hawa,
Oya Haznedar, Jessica Moore
Editor Emeritus Gavin Smith
4 | F I L M C OM ME NT | November-December 2019
By Nicolas Rapold
Almozini. And for me, as for so many
movie lovers across the world, Kent has
occupied a unique place in film culture and stylistic elegance and psychological acumen
the film community through his work as a
programmer and as a critic, supporting the
art of cinema. Of course, not content with
putting the rest of us to shame in those are- whether in art or love or family. The film
nas, he is also an award-winning filmmaker skipped the fall festivals entirely for a
whose first fiction feature, Diane, came out
in the spring. But my formative exposure
to him was through writing and through
retrospectives that revealed genuinely new
territories of feeling, tone, and craft, whether
it was Maurice Pialat or William Holden. I
can still pick up Physical Evidence, his col-
lection of essays, for inspira- RADICAL CLASSICAL: LITTLE WOMEN
INTERVIEW WITH WRITER-DIRECTOR GRETA GERWIG
tion and education, as it melds F I L M C O M M E N T island in the 18th century;
knowledge of film history,
acuity (and beauty) of writing,
and a photographic memo-
ry for shots (which made a
mockery of my attempts at
fact-checking in those early
days). While he’s long been a
colleague, it’s probably evident
that I retain a touch of the
awestruck admirer from a
distance, and I look forward to seeing what
Kent creates next.
If this is sounding too much like a wist-
ful trip down memory lane, nothing could
be further from the truth for our cover
story, Greta Gerwig’s scintillating Little
Publishers Eugene Hernandez & Lesli Klainberg
Director of Marketing & Sales David Goldberg
Production, Business & Logistics
Vicki Robinson
NYFF Director & Editor-at-Large Kent Jones
FLC Director of Programming Dennis Lim
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Women. Devika Girish interviews Gerwig
about her adaptation, which matches a
to a shrewd understanding of Louisa May
Alcott’s work as proto-feminist in the way
its characters strive for independence,
Christmas release, and I think that will turn
out to be a sound decision, as it deserves
breathing room and time to contemplate its
sheer aliveness.
Looking at the rest of our issue, you’d
have to notice a certain historical ten-
dency: Portrait of a Lady on Fire, locating
queer romance on a remote
Published by
The Irishman, traversing
Film at Lincoln Center
November-December 2019
nearly half of the American
20th century with a hit man;
the curious historical por-
traits of Roberto Rossellini;
Plus:
and in reviews, A Hidden Life
PORTRAIT
OF A LADY
ON FIRE
with its WWII conscientious
THE
IRISHMAN
UNCUT
objector, and The Report’s
GEMS
ROSSELLINI’S
ROGUES
chronicle of U.S. torture
practices. Of course, with our
feature on Uncut Gems, we also throw in
an Adam Sandler movie, one attuned to
the legacy of New York immigrant life.
Louisa May Alcott, Roberto Rossellini, and
Adam Sandler, together at last—you can’t
say Film Comment lacks range. O
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 CELEBRATING
THE CRAFT OF FILM

Campari® Liqueur 24% alc./vol. (48 proof). ©2019 Campari America, New York, NY. Please enjoy responsibly.
THE PRE-SHOW
News, views, conversations, and other things to get worked up about

TOP L TO R: SEAN P BENDER; COLUMBIA/KOBAL/SHUTTERSTOCK; MARY CYBULSKI/FOCUS FEATURES; IAN DUKE/EDITED BY ERIC GABA; JOHN SEAKWOOD/PARAMOUNT/KOBAL/SHUTTERSTOCK
From left: downtown Cincinnati, The China Syndrome, Dark Waters, tract housing, cinematographer Gordon Willis

I NS PI RE D / By Todd Haynes as told to Nicolas Rapold

Modern Poison
A whistle-blower attorney exposes the deadly dumping of chemicals
in the heartland in Todd Haynes’s Dark Waters

I
t’s a remarkable, chilling true story about the lawyer,
Rob Bilott, who disclosed the practices of DuPont, particu-
larly around Teflon. He comes from a different perspective—a
defense attorney for the industry—and it becomes a decades-
long and grueling process to reveal this story. That’s not really
the kind of movie I’m typically known for. But I have always
liked a handful of great whistle-blower films and the ’70s para-
noia films, most of which were shot by Gordon Willis. It was
something that fit into an interest I already had.
There’s an investigative aspect to the story, but what was really
challenging dramatically was that it’s all thirdhand information,
unlike a journalist story [such as] All the President’s Men or The
Insider. Rob’s story is more about using the legal process to get
discovery of [i.e., obtain] decades of internal papers. They pile so
much shit on him, expecting that there’s no way one person would
ever go through it all—and they meet their match. He’s an inherently
undramatic subject—he’s no Erin Brockovich. For all those reasons I
liked the story even more. The Rob character bears little resemblance
to a Capra-esque central figure who can rise up, find their voice, and
stand as a heroic example. Rob is a particularly guarded, suspicious,
buried kind of guy. So Mark [Ruffalo] plays it really locked up, scowl-
ing—it’s not that visceral, verbal, emotive Ruffalo that we expect.
We met all the essential figures and visited the places where all of this
happened. I shot Carol in Cincinnati and had a great experience, and
this was an opportunity to return and shoot a film that was really set
there. I ended up shooting at the actual law firm in downtown Cincin-
nati. There are no 90-degree angles on the corners, even on the building
itself: all the windows are different sizes. I and [DP] Ed Lachman and
production designer Hannah Beachler would have selected this location
from a purely aesthetic perspective even if it wasn’t the real place. And
the domestic settings don’t make you feel comfortable. Even when you
finally get home to your family, they’re these little tract-house, junior-
executive, planned-neighborhood dwellings that were built in the ’80s
and ’90s. I wanted to feel a kinship between the different classes depicted
and the different places depicted. And there is no real open space,
there is no safe space, even when you’re out in the wild [country].
What’s so compelling to me about these stories is the human
cost for people who stand up against power—how much they get
cut off from their world, their community, their neighbors, even
their family lives, and how the world is never the same afterward.
In the most interesting of the films in this genre there’s a sense of
futility, a sense of despair that hangs over them. There is no real
resolution, there is no silver bullet. It’s going to change the way you
function in the world, but it’s not going to be fixed. So it’s more
about how to live in an imperfect life with knowledge and aware-
ness, and keep the fight going, sometimes in a lonely way.
Closer Look: Dark Waters opens November 22.

SLOW BOIL the story follows a man who FUTURE PRESENT

After premiering The Halt at
this year’s Cannes, Lav Diaz
is preparing his next project,
the neo-noir gangster drama
When the Waves Are Gone.
Purportedly an adaptation of
The Count of Monte Cristo,
is released after 29 years
in prison and returns to his
hometown to take revenge
on his former best friend. First
CPPQWPEGFKPVJGƂNOKU
ƂPCNN[UGVVQUJQQVKP&GEGO-
ber in the Philippines.
Lulu Wang will follow up The
FarewellYKVJCUEKGPEGƂEVKQP
feature adapted from Alexander
Weinstein’s short story collec-
tion Children of the New World.
Not much is known about the
RNQVQHVJGƂNODWVVJGUQWTEG

6 | F IL M CO MMEN T | November-December 2019

While the past few years of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s output have found him testing the dramatic boundaries of
fantasy, horror, and science fiction, his latest returns him to a seemingly workaday sensation of feeling adrift.
RELEASE ME / By Nicolas Rapold
Out of Place
In To the Ends of the Earth, Kiyoshi Kurosawa taps a fresh dread
rooted in a journalist’s feelings of rootlessness
W
hen we first reported last year
on a new Japanese-Uzbek co-pro-
duction to be directed by Kiyoshi
Kurosawa, the notion seemed unusual if tanta-
lizing. Now To the Ends of the Earth exists and
has been making the rounds, if not to the ends
of the earth, then at least to the main slate of
the New York Film Festival, following Locarno
and Toronto screenings. Starring pop idol/
actress Atsuko Maeda, it’s the gathering story
of a Japanese TV journalist shooting a travel
show in Uzbekistan and feeling the stress of
relentless production schedules and existing
as a foreigner in an unfamiliar country. While
the past few years of Kurosawa’s unstinting
output have increasingly found him testing
the dramatic boundaries of fantasy, horror,
and science fiction, his latest returns him, with
aching poignancy, to a seemingly workaday
sensation of feeling adrift, dissatisfied, and
down, down, down.
Yoko (Maeda) is the host of one of those
watch-me-do-stuff shows that involve going
on carefully managed adventures, or just eating
exotic dishes, and reporting the results to the
camera. She’s callously hustled along by her
director from one such televisable tour stop to
the next—wading around with a fisherman, or,
in one nightmarish sequence, repeatedly riding
a whirligig carnival ride that seems likely to send
her brain rattling around her head. Anything
8 | F I LM CO M MENT | November-December 2019
for good TV or, really, any TV to fill up her
segments—though Kurosawa soon metastasizes
this workplace comedy routine into a slowly
deepening experience of angst. There are obvious
triggers, such as missing her fireman boyfriend
back in Japan, but he can also seem like a distrac-
tion from a profound dissatisfaction.
Uzbekistan itself is presented as a mix of
sparse-looking neighborhoods, bustling areas
in a capital city (Tashkent), and steppes where
Yoko desperately tries to repatriate a goat.
Kurosawa brings the full force of his feel for
open spaces and their potential for unease,
most memorably when Yoko goes rogue with
a camera of her own through a market and
attracts the immediate suspicion of policemen
(whom the film avoids turning into bogeymen).
Maeda adopts a curious and discomfiting gait
through some of the city, running then walking
then running as if afraid of being caught or
stopped at any given time.
Lost on many Western viewers will be Mae-
da’s status as a pop star, though she might be fa-
miliar from her work with Kurosawa on a couple
of past films (and she does get to sing when the
moment calls for it). Certainly lost on this viewer
is why such a film by an established director is
not already securely on the way to U.S. theaters.
Yoko’s professional and personal struggles strike
a chord, all the more unnerving for feeling (to
borrow a past Kurosawa title) real.
material grapples, per the book’s
synopsis, “with our unease in
this modern world and how our
ever-growing dependence on
new technologies has changed
the shape of our society.” Mean-
while, the same collection is
reportedly providing fodder for
VJGPGZVƂNOD[Columbus
director Kogonada.
LAV DIAZ (PREVIOUS PAGE): © INTERNATIONALE FILMFESTSPIELE BERLIN; LULU WANG (THIS PAGE): COURTESY OF MIAMI FILM FESTIVAL
WHEN THE SMOKE CLEARS
Alain Guiraudie will begin shoot-
ing his sixth feature, a comedy
called Viens je t’emmène, in
December. The script, co-written
with Stranger by the Lake art
director Laurent Lunetta, opens
on Christmas Eve with a terror-
ist attack in the French city of
Clermont-Ferrand. In the midst
of the panic, a young man falls
in love with an older prostitute.
The movie, oddly enough, shares
its title with a song by yé-yé star
France Gall (rough translation:
“Come away with me”).
OF MYTHS AND MEN
Angela Schanelec has
announced her next feature,
Music. A modern take on the
Oedipus myth, it tells the story
of an adopted young man who
unwittingly murders his father...
and then has a child with his
biological mother in prison.
Meanwhile, Le quattro volte
director Michelangelo Frammar-
tino is currently shooting Il buco
(“The Hole”). It’s the story of the
members of the Piedmont Spe-
leological Group, who in 1961
discovered the world’s second
deepest cave in southern Italy.
Frammartino: “I am struck by
the coincidence that speleology,
cinema, and psychoanalysis were
born in the same year, in 1895.”
“I’m doing an impression of my dad, but shot through my own body and experience. It’s proven to
be a very rich soil to work in. I’m really an old softie.”

DIRECTIONS / By Steven Mears

The Buck Stops Here

Tracy Letts adds to a nuanced gallery of irascible authority
figures in Ford v Ferrari and Little Women
PEEVISH

Leftovers Again?
It’s the cultural version of the
holiday blues and the dread
of December: as always at
this time of year, the forecast
calls for listomania—and an
especially heavy bout as the
decade draws to a close.
Setting aside the vaguely
paganistic worship of 10-year
cycles (or annual ones for
that matter), the prospect of
crunching cinema into neatly
numbered collections reminds
us that this kind of reckoning
of history tends to efface Ford v Ferrari
other histories in the process.
We can always hope for new

discoveries as even the best
critics hole themselves up
with... their past top 10 lists.
But the victory laps for the
ƂNOUQHCPFIGPGTCN
VGPFGPEKGUVQYCTFƂNOJKU-
tory amnesia have not been
T
racy letts appears in two films this
fall: Ford v Ferrari, as automobile scion
Henry Ford II, who’s pushing to build
a better race car, and Greta Gerwig’s Little
Women, as a book editor. Letts is also a Pulit-
zer Prize–winning playwright (August: Osage
County) who has adapted three of his own
That’s a good question. There is a certain sameness
with some of those scenes, but there’s also a certain
trust that the individual scenes function in slightly
different ways. The truth is, in the real story, much
of the impetus for the development of the car and
entry into the race is Ford’s insecurities. The idea is
that he has his feelings hurt by [Enzo] Ferrari and

FORD V FERRARI: PHOTO BY MERRICK MORTON/COURTESY OF 20TH CENTURY FOX

encouraging. And as access
VQƂNOJKUVQT[DGEQOGUOQTG
and more controlled and
basic streaming services and
Google seem to be as far
as people look, movies that
can’t be seen as easily seem
destined to stay unseen and
unaccounted for. Of course,
don’t think for a second that
we won’t be lining up our own
movie selections to take with
us on the decade ark, but this
go-round, let’s all vow to dig
just a little deeper.
works for the screen. I spoke with the master of
playing what the Coen Brothers call “the Man
Behind the Desk”—among other roles.
You play these establishment guys in a psycho-
logically astute way that seems to come from
having dealt with those types of people for years.
It’s interesting—my father was a university pro-
fessor. He was very intelligent, and he was also
a masculine presence. He’d been in the military,
and yet he also had his own insecurities, his own
flaws and foibles. He could be very intimidating
when people would meet him, but he was actu-
ally a very gentle guy. I guess this is a long-
winded way of saying I’m doing an impression
of my dad, but shot through my own body and
experience. It’s proven to be a very rich soil to
work in. I’m really an old softie.
The character of Henry Ford II in Ford v Ferrari
is well-written on a dialogue level, but there is a
certain structural sameness to his scenes. How
do you ward off the potential for redundancy?
therefore tries to exact revenge, and it all comes
from a deeply insecure place. That was real life,
and that I knew there was a scene in the film in
which I was going to portray that insecurity makes
all those other scenes—it shows the lie. It’s one of
the things that really attracts me to the piece. You
look for the thing that makes it distinct.
Little Women seems to be a more warmhearted
variation on the Man Behind the Desk.
Greta’s become a friend and important collab-
orator in my life, and I think she’s a fucking
genius. And talk about adaptation! Here’s my ad-
vice for anyone who wants their book adapted:
go to Greta Gerwig, not me!
How do you think it differs from previous
versions?
I think that she’s managed to both honor the orig-
inal story and at the same time make it remarkably
contemporary. It’s very much a piece that speaks to
a moment in our lives right now. I think that’s just
wondrous. I marvel at it.

1 0 | F I LM C OMM ENT | November-December 2019 CL O S ER L O O K : Ford v Ferrari opens November 15.

 The films Tomás Gutiérrez Alea made before and after the twisting, ironic Memories of Underdevelopment
show what a wide range of tones, styles, and modes of address he could use.

A Cuban Fight Against Demons (x 2)

RESTOR AT IO N ROW / By Max Nelson

Rude Awakenings
Whipping between genres and eras, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea took
all of history as a stage to wrestle with the revolution

(KXGƂNOUD[6QO½U)WVKÅTTG\#NGCDeath of a Bureaucrat (1966), villain in The Last Supper (1976), a monstrous 18th-century count
TOP LEFT: ICAIC/PHOTOFEST; TOP RIGHT: COURTESY OF THE ACADEMY FILM ARCHIVE/THE CINEMATECA DE CUBA

A Cuban Fight Against Demons (1972), The Art of Tobacco (1974), with messianic delusions, conscripts 12 of the men he’s enslaved to
The Last Supper (1976), The Survivors (1979) reenact the Last Supper and casts himself as Christ. The upper-class
Academy Film Archive in association with Cinemateca de Cuba family members at the center of The Survivors (1979) descend into
squalor and eventually cannibalism when they try to preserve their

T
he cuban director tomás gutiérrez alea (1928-1996)
gave strenuous thought to the relationship in revolutionary
filmmaking between content and form. His films try out such
varied approaches to that subject that none of them seems repre-
sentative. It was his fifth feature, the fictional portrait of a sneering
Havana intellectual Memories of Underdevelopment (1968), that
came to loom over his reputation in the U.S., but the films he made
before and after that twisting, ironic movie show what a wide range
of tones, styles, and modes of address he could use.
Three have been restored so far as part of an ongoing initiative
from the Academy Film Archive and the Cinemateca de Cuba; a
fourth feature and a short are forthcoming. They span centuries. In
the contemporary, morbid comedy Death of a Bureaucrat (1966), a
man ricochets between administrative obstacles to recover a union
card from his uncle’s grave. A Cuban Fight Against Demons (1972)
turns Fernando Ortiz’s 1959 book about 17th-century Remedios into
a rattling barrage of linked episodes: sermons, massacres, political
intrigue, supernatural encounters, brutal sexual violence. The central
bourgeois household after the revolution.
No two of these movies look the same. The black-and-white
images in A Cuban Fight Against Demons stay in frenzied motion;
the camera hurtles around the convulsing actors until it’s about to
collide with them. The Survivors and especially The Last Supper,
in counterpoint, are full of meticulous color compositions, an
unsettling contrast to the atrocities they show.
In a 1979 interview, Alea suggested that what preoccupied him
was urging viewers to “participate actively in social life.” By that he
seems to have meant not wrapping political lessons in convention-
al visual packaging—his biographer Paul A. Schroeder notes how
strongly he criticized socialist realism—but looking for forms cali-
brated to provoke and stimulate political consciousness. One scene
in A Cuban Fight Against Demons gives those forms an origin story.
A rebellious colonial subject meets a sibyl who stages a prophetic
vision of the revolution. On an otherwise dark screen, still images
of Castro flicker amid flames and the sound of clanking swords: a
17th-century film screening. “You were born too soon,” she tells him.

NE W AN D #TG9G9KPPKPI )TCPF1RGTC Struggling Ten Documentary El último malón

FOR T H CO M IN G /QOO[!#OGTKEC #P*KUVQTKECN Shi Dongshan, Shorts by Vittorio [The Last Uprising]
RE S T O RAT I O NS CPFVJG%QNF9CT Romance James 1932, China Film De Seta 1954-1959, Alcides Greca,
Barbara Margolis, Benning, 1979, Archive Cineteca di Bolo- 1917, Museo del
1986, IndieCollect Austrian Film gna at L’Immagine Cine de Buenos
Museum Ritrovata laboratory Aires
and The Film Foun-
dation

November-December 2019 | F I LM COM ME N T | 1 1

CRITICS’ CHOICE Five critics rate and reflect upon 10 films of the moment

Justin Manohla Manu Yáñez Nicolas Jonathan

Chang Dargis Murillo Rapold Romney

Ad Astra James Gray ++ + ++ +  ++ + + +  ++++ +++

p#ECUGQHƂNOKECNEJGO[QTJQYVQVWTPCURCEG
QF[UUG[KPVQCPGZVTCQTFKPCTKN[KPVKOCVGTWOKPCVKQPQP
NQUUCNKGPCVKQPCPFVJGDKTVJQHGORCVJ[qtMYM

Atlantics /CVK&KQR ++ ++  ++ +  ++ +  + + + + + + ++
p/CVK&KQRoURQKIPCPVFGDWVHGCVWTGVWTPUVJGFGCVJU
QH5GPGICNGUGOGPUGGMKPIYQTMCETQUUVJGQEGCP
KPVQCIJQUVUVQT[HQTVJGYQOGPNGHVDGJKPFq—NR

A Hidden Life6GTTGPEG/CNKEM ++ ++  ++   + + + +
p6GTTGPEG/CNKEMoUVJGQNQIKECNUNCPVQPYCTVKOG
HCKVJFTQYPUKPVJGNWUEKQWUCGUVJGVKEUQH6[TQNGCP
OQWPVCKPVQRO[UVKEKUOqtJR

The Irishman /CTVKP5EQTUGUG ++ ++  ++ + +  + + ++  + + ++ +

p#UOWEJCEQORCPKQPVQSilenceCUVQGoodfellas
5EQTUGUGoUTKEJN[GPITQUUKPIICPINCPFGRKEECTTKGU
VJGYGKIJVQHCIGPWKPGTGEMQPKPIqtJC

Jojo Rabbit 6CKMC9CKVKVK + ++  + ++

p)QQFPCVWTGFCPFKORKUJDWVKVUGGOUVQDGNKGXG
VJCVHCUEKUOKUCDCFLQMGVJCVECPDGQXGTEQOG
YKVJIQQFJWOQTCPFCUVQWVJGCTVqtJR

Joker 6QFF2JKNNKRU ++ + + ++ + + ++++

p*CKNVJGEQPSWGTKPI,QCSWKP2JQGPKZYJQUGURCU-
VKENCWIJVGTCPFRTQVTWFKPIDCEMDQPGFKIFGGRKPVQ
JKUEJCTCEVGToUVQTOGPVGFUQWNqtMYM

Little Joe ,GUUKEC*CWUPGT ++ + ++  ++ + +  +++ ++

p#EWTKQWUCHHGEVVQWEJGUVJGƂNOUQH,GUUKEC*CWU-
PGTCPFKVIKXGUVJGUGGOKPIUEKGPEGƂEVKQPRTGO-
KUGQHJGTNCVGUVCHTGUJCKTQHFKUSWKGVqtNR

Marriage Story 0QCJ$CWODCEJ ++ ++   ++ ++  +++++ ++++

p$CWODCEJoUUVTQPIGUVOQXKGKP[GCTUKUCYTGPEJ-
KPICPCVQO[QHCUGRCTCVKQPFTCOCKPYJKEJVGPFGT-
PGUUCPFHGTQEKV[RTQXGCNNVQQEQORCVKDNGq—JC

Portrait of a Lady on Fire %ÅNKPG5EKCOOC ++ ++  ++  ++ + + +  ++++ + + ++

p5VTWEVWTGFCTQWPFCHGTXGPVGZEJCPIGQHINCPEGU
VJKUUVWF[QHHGOCNGFGUKTGVTCEGUCUWDNKOGLQWTPG[
HTQOGOQVKQPCNTGUVTCKPVVQTQOCPVKETCRVWTGq—MYM

Synonyms 0CFCX.CRKF ++ ++   ++ ++ ++ + + + + + + +  +++

p0CFCX.CRKFDTKPIUJKUWUWCNDNKPFKPIN[QTKIKPCN
IC\GVQVJGUVQT[QHCP+UTCGNKGZRCVKP2CTKURNC[GF
D[VJGWPENCUUKƂCDNG6QO/GTEKGTq—NR

+++++ = Excellent ++++ = Very good +++ = Good ++ = Of interest + = Mediocre 0 = Bomb

Participants:,WUVKP%JCPIQHVJG Los Angeles Times; /CPQJNC&CTIKUQHThe New York Times/CPW;½ÍG\/WTKNNQQHOtros Cines Europa0KEQNCU
4CRQNFQH Film Comment,QPCVJCP4QOPG[QHFilm Comment

1 2 | F IL M C OMM EN T | November-December 2019

FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION BEST DOCUMENTARY FEATURE

“EMPOWERING”
- The Hollywood Reporter

“GUT-PUNCHING POTENCY”
- Variety
MAKE IT REAL The wide, wide world of cinematic nonfiction
State Funeral (x 2)
Do You Hear
What I Hear?
Through audio artistry, nonfiction filmmakers
get into your head to shape perceptions of
both sonic and visual spaces
BY ERIC HYNES
I
n sergei loznitsa’s state funeral, soviet citizens
congregate throughout the country in March 1953 to honor the
passing of the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the
Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin. Entirely archival, the footage for
the film derives from a movie called The Great Farewell, which
draws on dozens of filmmakers who captured the four days of
public mourning that followed Stalin’s death. That early film had
been shelved and was scarcely seen until the ’90s, whereas Loznitsa’s
premiered in September in Venice before coming to North America
for the Toronto and New York film festivals.
State Funeral gathers that raw material, shot on both black-and-
white and color film stock, into an effectively linear synchronicity of
disparate shoots all witnessing a similar procession of reverence and
solemnity: from workers emerging out of an oil rig hoisting Stalin’s
portrait—presented as if it were a religious icon—to the actual
funeral procession into Moscow’s Red Square. Feet shuffle. Flags flap
in the wind. Mournful horns echo in the square. Comrades murmur.
What you see is an astonishingly well-preserved record of those four
days in 1953. What you hear, however, is fabricated.
Sound design in nonfiction can involve all manner of modula-
tion, mixing, approximation, overdubs, and enhancements. Often
these manipulations are inconspicuous, affecting the experience
of the film without your really noticing. In a few new documen-
tary works—State Funeral and another archival film, Manfred
Kirchheimer’s Free Time, as well as Feras Fayyad’s largely observa-
tional The Cave—postproduction sound plays a more central and
C LO S E R L OO K : The Cave opened in theaters on October 18.
14 | F ILM COMMENT | November-December 2019
detectable role. In these films, there’s meaning, feeling, and even
commentary in sound’s presence, absence, and variable volume.
For the most part, sound complements or supports the images
in State Funeral, such that (historical-technological impossibilities
aside) you could mistake the fabricated sound cues for real ones.
There’s a hush that presides over the film, commensurate with im-
ages of mass performances of mourning. Yet there are choices that,
in the context of a minimalist soundscape, function as directives to
the eyes. The sound of a man coughing nudges us to notice the fig-
ure lifting hand to mouth within the frame. The sound of a woman
crying guides us to a distraught face, watery eyes. Loznitsa’s most
overt interventions come in the form of archival audio record-
ings of honorific speeches commemorating Stalin’s magnificence,
presented as if they were playing over loudspeakers, which makes
them ingratiate like near-subliminal benedictions.
Or rather, the sound treatment implies they’re playing over
loudspeakers, thanks to a tinny, echoey mix that situates the
broadcast within the reality of the scene. These recordings may
have been commonly broadcast in that manner, but here they’re
audial inserts: an effect, and a meaningful one. Loznitsa is coupling
spoken-word lionizations of Stalin with images of a populace that
had been terrorized and subjugated by him. The spectacle of thou-
sands upon thousands of these comrades trudging through the
cold to mourn their tormentor plays not as irony but as unspoken,
unacknowledged perversity. Everyone in and everything about STATE FUNERAL: COURTESY OF ATOMS AND VOID
State Funeral is straight-faced. It’s in the quiet that a critique can be
heard—in the things not said, the exhales of relief we might imag-
ine mixing with the sobs of mourning, the dispassionate officious-
ness with which the ceremonies, and, finally in the last reel, synced
eulogies from Stalin’s colleagues play out.
Like The Great Farewell, Free Time was filmed before portable
sync sound became available. But unlike Loznitsa, the 88-year-
old Kirchheimer is revisiting black-and-white footage he himself
shot with collaborator Walter Hess 60 years prior. Regardless of
the original intent, the intervention of time makes the material
archival. And now, as then, a lack of sync sound isn’t a deficiency
for Kirchheimer but rather essential to his preferred practice.
Though he’s also made video-based sync-sound films along the
way, Kirchheimer’s most celebrated work (Stations of the Elevated,
1981; Claw, 1968) has been made in accordance with the
 Everyone in and everything about State Funeral is straight-faced. It’s in the quiet that a critique can be
heard—in the things not said, in the exhales of relief we might imagine mixing with the sobs of mourning.
Free Time
methodology in which he was originally trained: adding all sound
during the edit as needed, and for effect.
Throughout Free Time—a film that forgoes traditional characters
and story for a jazzy montage of exquisitely lensed Manhattan street
scenes—musical passages from the likes of Bach and Basie share a
soundtrack with select cues: the clatter of a stickball bat dropping to
the pavement, an overpacked shopping cart whining down the street,
the clanging of a construction site. The mix is minimal, and selective
to the point of abstraction. We hear only what’s most relevant to
or evocative of what we’re seeing, like an audial iris shot. There are
scarce errant sounds, and no cacophonous urban texture. We hear
what Kirchheimer wants us to really hear—to accept it as informa-
FREE TIM E: STREETW ISE FI LMS/CINEM A CO NSE RVANCY; THE CAVE: NA TIONAL GE OGRAPH IC
tion rather than as noisy persuasion of reality. The director was so
deliberate about the meditative, elective audibility of his film that
after its world premiere at the New York Film Festival he publicly
reflected that he’d wished the sound had been quieter in the theater.
In Free Time, you don’t hear noise, you hear notes.
T
here’s a different equation and intent in The
Cave, Fayyad’s follow-up to his Academy Award–
nominated Last Men in Aleppo. As the Syrian city
of Ghouta crumbles amidst the ongoing civil war,
many citizens retreat underground to a series of tun-
nels connecting them to comparatively safer spaces,
including a hospital managed by Dr. Amani Ballor, a young
pediatrician fighting desperately to save lives, often in spite of
patriarchal resistance. Visually, The Cave is a raw document. Con-
sidering the elements in play, it couldn’t be otherwise, and you
wouldn’t dare expect as much. How is anyone here still living—let
alone sacrificing their own safety to keep others going amidst
the endless horror, let alone making a painstakingly constructed
observational film about it? What Fayyad, and in turn the audi-
ence, encounters in The Cave is truly, precisely horrific. We see
wounded, terrified, dying people, many of them children—which
is hard to accept, but also essential to witness.
What’s not raw, what’s resoundingly unsubtle in The Cave, is
the sound design, which complements the on-the-fly observa-
tional footage with high-end theatrical audio production. Like
another very, very different 2019 feature—the high-frame-rate,
experimentally structured, water-born thrill ride Aquarela—
The Cave
Fayyad’s delicately intimate documentary portrait is presented in
Dolby Atmos. What this apparatus affords, above all, is bracing,
jolting, you-are-there volume. Whenever a bomb strikes out of
frame—visually signaled by Ballor or another hospital colleague
suddenly looking to the ceiling with trepidation—the Dolby
Atmos slams in, providing furious, chest-rattling thunder.
The implication is that this is what it feels like. Sound trans-
ports us into the scene, and into the very bodies of the people
we’re watching. Sound closes the distance, compelling us to feel
the conditions people are living through, to feel the anxiety and
dread that pervades and defines their days. And dear lord, do
we feel it. Matthew Herbert’s very present score ensures further
feelings, all of which left me wondering what qualities of sound
engender what kinds of emotions. Do I need enhanced bomb
sounds to feel or understand what it’s like for Ballor to hear
them? Do others? To be honest, I bristled at times while watching
The Cave, not because I was resisting the extremity of what I was
experiencing, but because the sonic mix felt insistent where no
insistence was necessary. No music is needed to make me feel for
people choking back the effects of chemical warfare, no Atmos is
needed to sell the trauma of living underground while the world
collapses above. Amplifying horror can run the risk of obscuring
it, of distracting from the experience rather than deepening it.
But just because I don’t need it doesn’t mean it can’t help. Just
because Kirchheimer wants the volume turned down doesn’t
mean Fayyad and others don’t need the volume turned way, way
up, sonically and morally. And it’s not like Fayyad doesn’t know
the power of quiet, which defines the moment in The Cave that
affected me the most. After a nightmarish, seemingly endless
sequence of triage in which they’re overmatched by the breadth
and severity of life-threatening and life-taking injuries, Ballor and
her colleague, Dr. Salim, retreat to their small, cramped office, ut-
terly exhausted and, for the moment, utterly defeated, where they
softly weep. After the noise of action, we’re left with the quiet of
reflection. The shots aren’t perfect—thinking back I couldn’t tell
you how they were framed, or if they were even in focus. But I
was inside of it with them, sharing a devastating silence. O
Eric Hynes|KUCLQWTPCNKUVCPFETKVKECPFEWTCVQTQHƂNOCV
/WUGWOQHVJG/QXKPI+OCIGKP0GY;QTM
November-December 2019 | F I LM COM MENT | 1 5
ART AND CRAFT Filmmaking according to the makers
Digital Dust
In her score for Atlantics,
Fatima Al Qadiri conjures up mesmerizing,
moving sounds from the deep
BY SIERRA PETTENGILL
M
ati diop’s first feature film, atlantics, is
firmly rooted in the earthbound reality of
present-day Dakar, Senegal. Its characters,
portrayed by first-time actors, are precisely
drawn, and their homes are filled with chatter
and the tinny strains of pop songs playing
from cell phone speakers. The exploitative labor conditions on
the building site of a massive high-rise sets the film’s narrative
in motion. But it’s also a deeply surreal and haunted film: its
young characters navigate love and the refugee crisis by conjur-
ing and physically embodying ghosts.
C LO S ER L OOK: Atlantics opens in theaters on November 15,
and the soundtrack will be released on the same day.
1 6 | F I LM C O MME NT | November-December 2019
This sense of “bothness,” of the ancient and otherworldly
existing within a hyper-present tense, is captured and enhanced
by the film’s score, composed by Kuwaiti musician Fatima Al
Qadiri, who was born in Senegal. Al Qadiri is a prolific and
multifaceted artist, deftly imbuing electronic music with sharp
political commentary. Her narratively driven solo albums and
EPs include 2016’s Brute, a dark pastiche of the sounds of protest
and state repression, and 2014’s Asiatisch, a trippy and barbed
electronic travelogue through aural stereotypes of China. She’s
also part of the Gulf artist collective GCC, whose multimedia
projects and installations slyly address the aesthetics of Gulf
Futurism in a changing region.
For Atlantics, Al Qadiri has composed an electronic symphony
of rolling waves of synths. Her signature digital celestial choir, a
synthesis of artificial voices from the uncanny valley, comes from
within the ambient soundscapes and also floats above and out-
side it. By turns unsettlingly dissonant and infectiously melodic,
it’s the rare score that fully reflects the world of the film while
also asserting its own unique complex voice—fitting for a cinema
that exists simultaneously in two realms.
6JGTGoUCNQVKPVJKUƂNOVJCVTGUQPCVGUENQUGN[YKVJVJG
EQPEGTPUQH[QWTQYPCTV
Definitely, and Mati knew that. That was the beautiful thing
[about] working with her, also being a woman of color. Being
Muslim, being exposed to Muslim culture, there were a lot of
things that we didn’t need to explain to each other. Just like, oh
yeah, you get it. That was so cool, considering the language barri-
er as well. It was really nice to have this relatable subject environ-
mentally, spiritually, vibe-wise.
*QYYGTG[QWFGƂPKPIVJGOWUKEoUTGNCVKQPUJKRVQVJGEJCTCEVGTU!
Mati gave me the moods for each of the scenes. She expressed the
feelings of the characters, what she was trying to get across. So I
had her guidance, as well as my own interpretation. For instance,
for the opening scene of Souleiman on the truck, where he knows
that he might potentially die later that night on his sea journey,
Mati wanted me to figure out a way to communicate that. There
is despair mixed with hope, mixed with fear, mixed with a feeling
of destiny, which is part of Islam. You can’t be Muslim if you
don’t believe in destiny. There is an expression, kitabak maktoob,
which means “your book has already been written.” I feel like
there’s a darkness in that scene but also hope: he’s doing it in
order to get to Europe as part of this dream of having a better life.
But it’s terrifying: he’s looking at the sea, seeing people swim-
FATIMA AL QADIRI: PHOTO BY DOM SMITH
ming, fishing. The boys around him are all singing these prayers
for the safety of their journey, asking God for protection. So it’s
deeply sad, and it’s kind of an omen at the beginning of the film.
#PF[QWTOWUKEKUTGCNN[VJGYC[YGTGEGKXGVJCVQOGP
I think that’s the only time I used—I mean, they’re all plug-ins,
they’re all virtual instruments, but there, it’s an African guitarette
that’s from the late ’70s. Basically, I wanted it to feel like a wash-
ing machine, you know? There’s kind of this guitar sound going
over and over and over like the wheel of the truck. And it’s kind
of making him queasy with fear, and then this bass synth washes
over him like it’s the sea.
 “One of the repeating themes was this one called qasidah, the possession theme. I wanted this theme to
sound ancient, like it was coming from the Middle Ages, because possession and Jinn are ancient ideas.”
+POCP[UEGPGUVJGUEQTGGOGTIGURTGVV[QTICPKECNN[HTQO
VJGGPXKTQPOGPV+VQHVGPUQWPFGFNKMGKVYCUNKVGTCNN[EQOKPI
QWVQHVJGYCVGT
Mati would be extremely happy to hear you say this. When I first
met her in Paris, she was like, “I want the music to come out of
the depths. I want the music to come from where the boys are in
the sea.” She kept drilling this into me while I was writing, even
before I started writing. If I could just summarize her musical
vision from the film, that’s it. And she was very present in the
sound mix. Even with something like the volume of the tracks in
relation to the characters.
+MGRVVJKPMKPIQHVJGUKTGPUHTQOThe OdysseytOWUKEVJCV
HGGNUDGCWVKHWNCPFUGFWEVKXGCPFFCPIGTQWU
I wanted to make themes in the film. One of the repeating themes
was this one called qasidah, the possession theme. I wanted this
theme to sound ancient, like it was coming from the Middle Ages,
because the idea of posses-
sion and Jinn are ancient
ideas. So that theme has
this low horn that’s almost
like a warning horn, and
then you have this melody
playing on top. It’s a long
process that you see [police
detective] Issa struggling
through: you see him
trying to drive, he’s trying
to walk, he’s trying to fight
it, something is taking him
over, he’s losing track of
time. And I wanted to have some sort of sinister and also very
PHOTOS COURTESY OF TRIGON FILM
irresistible, really pretty melody enveloping him at the same time.
I’m just fascinated by these major warning sounds, wheth-
er they’re religious or state emergency noises. Like the call to
prayer, the church bell—you know, these amplified calls. Some
of them are scary. For instance, when I lived in Brooklyn, once
a year during Purim I would hear this crazy noise and I would
be like, what the hell is that? It definitely triggered me because
during the occupation and invasion of Kuwait and during the
war, in all three stages, there were so many air raid sirens and
they were terrifying.
+UVJGTGUQOGVJKPICDQWVVJGTGHWIGGUVQT[QHAtlantics that
[QWECPTGNCVGVQHTQOITQYKPIWRKP-WYCKV!
I wouldn’t call mine a refugee story because I didn’t leave Kuwait
till years after the occupation and the war. We didn’t flee Kuwait;
we were there. I started making music at that time. So there’s one
part of my personality where my childhood was just paused. It’s
definitely part of my DNA as a composer: my 9-year-old self and
this kind of loss, a lost youth. Which was obviously very pertinent
in the story of these men in Atlantics, who leave [their country]
in their late teens. I always say it’s like surviving an apocalypse:
something happens in your brain before and after, and the
“during” period is extremely surreal. That was the one thing I feel
like I was really able to tap into: this feeling of vulnerability and
feeling lost. My music has some level of innocence in it.
I made most of the score in Kuwait, and I make music the way a
teenager would. You should see my setup. It’s just like a laptop and a
controller keyboard. And I have a couple of shitty monitor speak-
ers. I think lost innocence, a longing for innocence, and longing for
childhood and youth is reflected in the lack of a sophisticated setup.
And I think that comes through somehow. I enjoy my unpolished
sound. It’s not a Western thing. I definitely feel like the apex of West-
ern music—with the exception of things like punk—is orchestras,
and polished sound quality, especially in film scoring. And there’s
room for another iteration of this that is not crisp, that is not hi-def.
1PGVTCEMGCTN[KPVJGƂNOHGNVOQTGCPCNQIDWVVJGPKVDG-
EQOGUKPETGCUKPIN[FKIKVCNCPFCDUVTCEV
When Mati first spoke to me, she told me that to her, my music
was extremely digital. Which is true, it is: everything is made
inside of a computer. I don’t really use analog anything. And Da-
kar feels that way for me, even though after leaving at age two I
haven’t been back—there’s something that is digital about Dakar,
sound quality–wise. I feel like the music of Senegal, and of West
Africa, Central Africa, South Africa, is all like mp3s and recorded
on whatever is around. Some of it is with real instruments, some
of it is not. So it has that vibe of being neither here nor there.
For me, the audio quality of this score is like digital dust. It’s like
if you were to touch it would slink through your fingers. There’s
something very dusty about it, but I really get that because I
come from an insanely dusty place. O
5KGTTC2GVVGPIKNNKUCƂNOOCMGTCPFYTKVGTDCUGFKP0GY;QTM
November-December 2019 | F ILM C O MM ENT | 1 7
OFF THE PAGE The art of getting from book to screen
Wild Pain
Jonathan Demme’s Beloved preserves the
unfettered feeling and raucous imagination
of Toni Morrison’s novel about slavery’s scars
BY ANDREW CHAN
A
daptation is so conveniently linked with
unoriginality—the idea of the adapter, lacking
any compelling story of his own, taking advan-
tage of someone else’s material—that we forget
the audacity it often demands. When it comes
to transposing an author like Toni Morrison to
another medium, it goes without saying that finding one-to-one
equivalents for her prose is almost surely a losing game for any
artist. In fact, whether due to reservations Morrison might have
had about her books being adapted or the systemic racism that
leads producers and funders throughout the arts to disregard
the stories of people of color, few have taken on the challenge of
reinterpreting her work, a rather unusual fate for such a securely
lionized (not to mention best-selling) American novelist. Besides
Jonathan Demme’s 1998 film version of Beloved, there’s only
been Margaret Garner, Richard Danielpour’s opera about the
real-life woman who inspired the book (with a libretto by Morri-
1 8 | F IL M C OMMEN T | November-December 2019
son herself)—and both of those projects were initially met with
resounding critical indifference.
Morrison is far from alone in appearing to be film-proof. It’s
part of the legacy of the high-modernist masters who influenced
her—William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf—that nearly all attempts
to bring their work to the screen have been laughable. In their
experiments with style, these writers staked out new territory
for literature, pushing it to do things that no other art could,
making their work particularly difficult to imagine reconfiguring
in any other form. This appearance of precluding adaptation
feeds a certain myth that great artists are inseparable from their
chosen form because they have achieved such a radical intimacy
with it. And so, even when watching an excellent adaptation like
Demme’s Beloved, we’re never completely unaware of this conun-
drum of untranslatability.
Is it possible to maintain a deferential, even worshipful regard
for one’s source material without succumbing to paralysis, that
same excessive caution weighing down the recent documentary
Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am? Demme’s Beloved shows that rev-
erence is not incompatible with creativity, a faculty that Morri-
son’s books require of anyone who hopes to engage meaningfully
with them. And part of the movie’s success is that the qualities
of the book it chooses to be most reverent toward are those that
are, in some sense, its most disreputable: not the rippling, Biblical
cadences or even the historical particulars of its behemoth of a
subject—slavery—but the genre trappings so integral to Morri-
son’s reimagining of American history. Like Morrison, Demme
manages to be mischievous, at times even humorous in his use of
horror and fantasy, while also taking them seriously as narrative
traditions that bring us into contact with the unfathomable.
Morrrison’s novel centers on former slave Sethe and her
timid teenage daughter, Denver, who live in fear of an unnamed
phantom in their house. Demme—who began his career working
for Roger Corman and made one of Hollywood’s most laureled
bloodcurdlers with The Silence of the Lambs—revels in the fright
factor, immediately highlighting the porous boundary between
this world and the next. He’s taking his cues directly from Mor-
rison, who reveals the supernatural contours of her story in the
ALL PHOTOS BY KEN REGAN/TOUCHSTONE/KOBAL/SHUTTERSTOCK
book’s first paragraph, anthropomorphizing the “spiteful” house
(known only as “124”). If we
think of the book and the film
in conversation with each
other, it becomes almost im-
possible to believe that Mor-
rison did not have the movies
in mind when writing some of
her most gothic passages, even
if she wasn’t thinking specifi-
cally about horror classics like
Kaneto Shindô’s Kuroneko and
Jack Clayton’s The Innocents.
Her first world-building details
are pulpy and ripe for visual-
ization: handprints on a cake,
a dog’s eye dangling out of its
socket, pulsing light and flying
furniture.
Demme demonstrates a certain admirable recklessness in showing us elements of the novel that other directors
would have been happy to discard as too figurative or fanciful for a film of such thematic gravity.

It is a hallmark of modern art-making that inhumanity

overwhelms our sense of the real, and that the fantastical and the
counter-rational are ideal modes for exploring historical trauma.
But American slavery has rarely been depicted in a commercial
film with as much uninhibited imagination, or as much open
disregard for naturalism, as it is here. It’s one thing for Morrison
to describe the scars on Sethe’s back as resembling the shape of a
chokecherry tree; it’s another for Demme to actually show us that
horrific shape, to literalize what Morrison pitched in the dream-
speak of metaphor. Time and again, Demme demonstrates a cer-
tain admirable recklessness in showing us elements of the novel
that other directors would have been happy to discard as too
figurative or fanciful for a film of such thematic gravity.
One of the places where the film’s respectful fidelity to the
text becomes an act of cinematic daring is its visualization of
the title character, described in the book as “a fully dressed
woman” who “walked out of the water.” The ghost of a child
whom Sethe killed years earlier, fearing that she would be
snatched away by slave masters hot on Sethe’s trail, Beloved
enters the world of the living to reunite with her mother and
wreak havoc at 124. Played fearlessly by Thandie Newton,
she’s one of the most surreal creations in American film, first
seen covered in ladybugs, and possessing a belching, grunting,
gurgling voice that allows her to sound like a cross between an
infant and a predatory alien. There could have been any num-
ber of ways of bringing this spectral figure to the screen, but
the fact that Demme committed to such a bizarre, altogether
unsavory portrayal shows how willing he was to let Morrison’s
sublime vision draw perilously close to ridiculousness. While
co-producer Oprah Winfrey—for whom the movie was a labor
of love—called Beloved “my Schindler’s List and my Sophie’s
Choice,” the movie’s risky, uncompromising strangeness keeps it never apologizes for that. With the casting of Winfrey as Sethe,
from resembling either of those dignified atrocity dramas. it’s clear that no one involved with the project was trying to

I
f there’s anything we lose by emphasizing how difficult
Beloved must have been to adapt, it’s a deeper understanding
of how gifted Morrison was as a storyteller. She was an expert
architect of plot, and while that talent is not apparent in all of her
masterworks—The Bluest Eye opts for fragmentation over a shapely
narrative arc; the brilliantly experimental Jazz is more focused on
kaleidoscopic wordplay than on the mechanics of storytelling—it’s
certainly one of the reasons for Beloved’s continued mainstream
success. Even as the book showcases Morrison at the height of her
lyrical powers (nearly every sentence demands to be savored aloud),
it is at the same time a genuine and in some ways a quite traditional
page-turner, packed with secrets that await revealing and broken
hearts that await mending. Among the film’s most impressive feats
is its reproduction of the novel’s fluid chronology, the sense of the
past overflowing its own boundaries. Every scene seems to teeter on
the verge of a violent, all-consuming flashback, creating a structure
in which memory becomes the primary driver of suspense, the most
terrifying of all monsters.
The book has become such a staple of the American canon
that it’s largely forgotten how it was once castigated by a vocal
minority of detractors who found it obscenely “sentimental,” as
if Morrison didn’t know exactly what she was doing when she
pulled on our heartstrings. Beloved is indeed melodrama, and it
distance it from those earlier charges of sentimentality. Morri-
son’s tale is above all one of renewal and self-reclamation, themes
in line with Winfrey’s popular talk show, which was still in full
swing at the time of the movie’s release.
Winfrey’s performance is sharp, evocative, and at times devas-
tating—even when, in certain line readings or facial expressions,
we sense the performer’s shakiness and hesitation. While we can
credit Demme and his remarkable cinematographer Tak Fujimoto
with creating a vivid world poised delicately between history and
myth, it’s in Winfrey’s embodiment of Sethe that we most acutely
feel the push and pull between source text and adaptation. Star-
dom—one of those ineffable qualities that film deploys in ways
that literature never could—roots the story in a time and place
very different from the one being depicted. Instead of asking us
to suspend our disbelief at watching Winfrey enact the nightmare
of postbellum America from the safety of her modern-day celeb-
rity, the film forces us to confront our own assumptions about
the distance that lies between then and now. Just as Sethe never
fully escapes her enslaved past, Winfrey’s feverish and unmistak-
able identification with her role shows us just how far the ghosts
of racial trauma can travel. O
Andrew Chan is web editor at The Criterion Collection. He has
been contributing to Film Comment since 2008.

November-December 2019 | F I LM COM MEN T | 19

I N S I D E STO R I E S Redefining the boundaries of the new-media age

attached to a hard drive database that she

Found Footage searches for reasons unknown. (The screen
is somewhat reflective, so when you’re not
In Telling Lies, a happenstance archive of video watching videos, you can spy the outline of
her bobbing head or some vague detail of
chats becomes a labyrinth of intimacy the room she’s in.)
BY JEFF REICHERT The thrust of the narrative revolves
around an investigation and how it affects

I
the four main characters over the course
n 2015, british game designer sam barlow released her story for pc and of about a year. The initial keyword your
mobile devices. Its curious gaming interface mimics a mundane database search engine avatar enters to prompt the player to
that accesses a trove of interviews recorded with a single subject, a woman undergoing action is “love” which turns up a few hits.
a series of police interrogations. That the game is built entirely around full-motion These clips introduce the game’s dramatis
video (FMV) clips represented something of an anomaly in the gaming scene. The personae: Logan Marshall-Green plays a
player watches the interviews to learn more about the woman’s tale, gleaning new bearded scamp who has just moved to Ann
information to search for more clips that help further the narrative. Arbor looking for a cause. Kerry Bishé is a
Playing it on my iPhone, quickly calling up video after video, was something of an aston- nurse, mother, and wife. Alexandra Shipp is
ishment. I can still remember the day nearly 20 years ago when I fired up my rudimentary a young record store clerk and environmen-
PC, popped in the first of many CD-ROMs containing the data for Wing Commander III, talist. Angela Sarafyan is a French cam girl
and was treated to FMV cutscenes starring the likes of Mark Hamill and Malcolm McDowell. operating out of New York. As with most
Her Story was a sign of new life for FMV, and Barlow’s recently released follow-up, Telling desktops, there is a clock in the upper right
Lies, expands upon its core ideas and adopts a similarly structured interface. corner of the screen, and the “real” time you PHOTOS C OUR TES Y OF ANNAPURNA INTER ACTIV E

In Telling Lies, instead of a single character, there are now four leads, along with a spend watching videos advances the time in
handful of supporting performers. Unlike the drab, perfunctory police interrogation room the game. Cheekily, Barlow has also placed a
of Her Story, the player is treated to a variety of well-designed and believably habitable solitaire program on the desktop should the
locations, both exterior and interior. And, here, each video is not an interrogation, but one player need a break from the intrigue.
side of a Skype conversation. For instance, the player might listen to an actor quietly reciting As with Her Story, in which the video
a bedtime story to a child, hear one half of an awkward post–first date chat, watch a char- depositions were broken into tantalizingly
acter pleasure themselves, or witness the confession of an extramarital affair to an unseen oblique chunks, Barlow has introduced
interlocutor. The scripting and performances credibly signal the levels of intimacy for each constraints for the player: for any keyword
relationship at each point in the game’s narrative arc. you search, you can only watch the first
Playing Telling Lies involves deducing which of the other characters you’ve met might be five results sorted by date; some searches
on the other end of a conversation, and attempting different keyword searches to locate the turn up 15 or more clips, forcing you to
matching video. Imagine the experience of watching something like the recent found- find other paths to reach the ones that are
footage internet horror film Unfriended, but only having access to one window at a time. not immediately available. And instead
An opening cutscene establishes the player as a black-clad woman arriving at an apartment of being able to scrub quickly back to the
at night by taxi, but after that, you are left looking at the desktop she is facing, which is beginning of the video for context, the game

2 0 | F I L M CO M ME NT | November-December 2019
Telling Lies cleverly exploits boredom and tedium in a context usually
defined to stave off both. It can evoke the experience of watching a
reel of Warhol’s screen tests.
requires the player to clunkily rewind or
fast-forward, VHS-style, ensuring plenty of
downtime for reflection that recalled for me
Godard’s adage about the magic of linear
editing. Playing through Telling Lies can be
a mesmeric experience: type in a keyword
or phrase, find a new video, click play, get
dropped in halfway through a conversation,
rewind to the beginning, watch to the
end, search on. Some videos may send the
player to immediately hunt for the other
half of the conversation, while others drop
names and events that suggest tantalizing
new avenues.
It’s not terribly challenging to piece
together the various narratives (after about
three hours of my first playthrough with
Telling Lies, I’d assembled a general sense
of the arcs of all the major storylines), and
it probably spoils not much to reveal that
there are three main strands related to
the investigation. Each is centered around
how one of the main female performers
interacts with the character played by
Marshall-Green. Once reconstructed, the
narratives themselves prove to be only mild-
ly intriguing—nothing is as it seems at first,
but in expected ways. Telling Lies, fractious
though it is, aims at a coherent understand-
ing of at least some portion of the events. It
lacks somewhat the productive, discomfit-
ing ambiguity of the smaller-scaled, grimier
Her Story, in which the unstable central
performance pinballs so wildly that you’re
left at times unsure if you’re watching one
woman with multiple personalities or per-
haps identical twins. Yet after I’d arrived at
a grip on what Telling Lies was trying to tell
me, the game grew more interesting.
U
nlike so many video games
intent on providing a continuous
series of stimulations and rewards,
both Her Story and Telling Lies can
often seem like they’re constructed largely
from longueurs. At times, the experience
of Telling Lies feels like a late-night internet
surfing session, an idle trawl for new and
exciting rabbit holes. At other points, you
might find yourself watching a face staring
back at you silently for six or seven minutes
at a stretch. These especially are some of the
new game’s best moments, both in terms
of the performances and the possibilities
they open up for the idea of playing games.
Telling Lies cleverly exploits boredom and
tedium in a context usually defined to
stave off both—which I don’t mean as a
I N T R O D U C I N G
backhanded compliment. It can evoke the THE BEST IN ART-HOUSE,
experience of watching a reel of Warhol’s
INDEPENDENT, AND
screen tests. There’s not much else like
either of Barlow’s games—another recent
CLASSIC CINEMA
FMV release, Erica, closely resembles the NOW AVAILABLE
more common interactive movie model in FOR PURCHASE
which filmed and acted scenes build to a OR RENTAL ONLINE
climax offering the player choices for how
the character and story proceed. (For some
time, FMV seemed a kind of evolutionary
dead end for gaming, with odd dodos and
platypi strewn throughout the history of
the medium.)
After “finishing” Telling Lies, a menu
offers the option to go back to the database
and keep searching. My second block of
time spent in the world Barlow has created
unearthed more bits of narrative event, but,
now, as I skipped randomly through videos,
freed from the drive towards completion
that guided my first pass, what emerged was
a parable of toxic masculinity—of the ways
in which narcissistic and vain men can prey
upon women in the course of building or
maintaining a relationship. Bouncing clips
of Marshall-Green from across the narrative
arc against each other, with him switch-
ing between calm, agitated, manipulative,
abusive, forlorn, pleading, and placating,
produced an unsettling effect independent
of the vagaries of the performance itself
(Marshall-Green is perhaps more adept in
some of these roles than others).
In its construction around Skype
conversations between heteronormative
men and women, Telling Lies dwells upon
intimacy. Early on in my first playthrough, I
typed in a phrase—a command—that one
might issue to a lover during an after-hours
cyber session. This search catapulted me
to a clip detailing an event near the end of
the narrative and exposed a relationship I
was as yet unaware of. Thus, luck also plays
a role in the enjoyment of Telling Lies, and
foregrounds an even more intriguing per-
formance at its core than that of any of the
four leads: your own. Built into the interface
are features that allow you to bookmark and
tag what you discover; there’s also a history
of your search terms. Scroll through when
you’re finished and see what you find there.
OVER 600 TITLES
Whatever core truths about human rela-
TO CHOOSE FROM
tionships are or aren’t revealed in the game,
the archive that your gameplaying creates
cannot hide. It’s you, and how your brain
works, right there on the screen. O
kinonow.com
Jeff Reichert KUCƂNOOCMGTCPFETKVKE
November-December 2019 | F ILM C OM MEN T | 21
 fortable interiority of moving through the

CURRENTS
New and important work plucked from festivals and elsewhere
world with a mood disorder. The film is
informed, both formally and texturally,
by the bracing, paired motifs of flying and
falling: sensations to which Anne craves a
return after an early skydiving excursion,
and which are evoked by a ceaselessly
mobile camera whose gaze is at once
disinterested in the imposed proprieties
of personal space and attentive to the
contours of the space that Anne takes up
in the universe.—Madeline Whittle

JALLIKATTU LIJO JOSE PELLISSERY

based on s. hareesh’s story “maoist”
and named after a regional ritual some-
what akin to the running of the bulls
in Pamplona, Indian auteur Lijo Jose
Pellissery’s ecstatic Jallikattu opens with an
ominous symphony of syncopated clocks,
respiration, insects, birds, and knives
cleaving meat, and closes with an apoca-
lyptic mud-caked tower of frenzied bodies
writhing in the jungle penumbra. Between
these points a buffalo runs amok in a
ENDLESS NIGHT ELOY ENCISO Kerala village, destroying property, sum-
echoes of post–civil war spain reverberate through the country’s current moning ineffectual authorities, prompting
socioeconomic landscape in unique and unsettling ways in Eloy Enciso’s third feature, competing plans for capture, and stirring
which sets the first years of the Franco dictatorship as the inception point for the ensuing up old local grudges as cinematographer
decades of violence and class disparity. Centered loosely on the return of Anxo (Misha Bies
Golas) to an unnamed village in the years following the war, the film moves in episodic fash-
ion from day to night, alighting on a series of characters of various class distinctions, includ-
ing a homeless man and woman outside a church, a group of bourgeois men at a bar, and a
mayoral candidate and his assistant in an office suite, all engaged in conversations concern-
ing poverty, wealth, oppression, and inequality. Anxo gradually becomes a more prominent
figure, until the narrative shifts halfway through and tracks his retreat from city to country,
where he encounters additional strangers haunted by even greater traumas. Working from a
script sourced from plays, memoirs, and letters written by political prisoners during the Franco
regime, Enciso sets this shape-shifting story within a boldly atemporal framework that speaks
fiercely to Spain’s ongoing oppressions and injustices. Shot in rigorous tableau by Mauro Herce
(Dead Slow Ahead), Endless Night eventually arrives at the nocturnal purgatory promised by its
title, leaving no semblance of traditional narrative in its wake.—Jordan Cronk Girish Gangadharan’s sinuous camera
choreography apprehends the spectacle in
a marriage of Pieter Bruegel and Darren
Campbell inhabits the character of Anne—a Aronofsky. That Jallikattu functions as a
late-twenties daycare teacher living on her parable about our species’ uncontainable
own for the first time—with astonishing lust for chaos and violence is pretty hard
intensity, giving a calibrated, viscerally to miss—a maestro of sensation and
lived-in performance that reimagines the harnesser of wildness, Pellissery has about
expressive possibilities of psychological as much use for subtlety as Sam Fuller did.
realism. (The role was partly improvised: The burgeoning mayhem reads less like
Campbell is credited with contributing the result of a random zoological incident
additional dialogue for the film.) Gird- than the exact reverse: given the displays
ed by the cautious encouragement and of domestic violence and nearly hyster-
weary concern of her friends and family, ical conversations preceding the film’s
Anne navigates workplace conflict and inciting event, that buffalo running wild
ANNE AT 13,000 FT KAZIK RADWANSKI meets a romantic prospect (played by the feels, rather, like the manifestation of the
the third feature from toronto-based scene-stealing filmmaker and comedian villagers’ collective angst reaching critical
independent filmmaker Kazik Radwanski Matt Johnson) in a loose, lean storyline mass.—José Teodoro
attends with subjective proximity to the that transforms and transcends the emerg-
sensory and emotional experience of ing tradition of the millennial early- COMETS TAMAR SHAVGULIDZE
Anne, a young woman perpetually on the adulthood character study, thanks to a the second feature by georgian film-
verge of a nervous breakdown. Deragh radically greater emphasis on the uncom- maker Tamar Shavgulidze, Comets is a

2 2 | F I L M CO M ME NT | November-December 2019
narrative shape-shifter about two women
who reunite long after their truncated
teenage romance and confront the pull of
long-lost possibilities. The film consists
for the most part of gentle, probing
conversations set in a sunlit yard—first
between a mother and a daughter, and
then between the mother and her former
lover, who returns to town after decades
of living abroad. Shavgulidze builds a
tense, tender waltz out of these exchanges,
interweaving the characters’ questions
and recollections and longing glances
with snatches of flashback. One of these
scenes from the past—depicting the two
young lovers watching a movie outdoors
while cuddled on a blanket, their faces
awash in the light of the screen—book-
ends the film, dissolving, ultimately, into
its masterstroke of a finale: a La Jetée–
esque sci-fi film-within-a-film that says
aloud everything that the women have
been unable to say to one other. Mesmer-
izing in its minimalism and its hushed
voiceover full of melancholy, that final
sequence turns Comets into a gorgeous
piece of queer meta-text—a testament
to cinema as a repository for repressed
desires.—Devika Girish
ATLANTIS VALENTYN VASYANOVYCH
set in 2025, one year after the supposed end of the russo-ukrainian war, valentyn
Vasyanovych’s Atlantis imagines a near-future Ukraine in even bleaker conditions than the
country’s war-torn present. Winner of the top prize in Venice’s Orizzonti section, Vasyanovych’s
fifth feature follows Sergiy (Andriy Rymaruk), an ex-soldier and factory worker suffering from
PTSD, as he navigates a barren wasteland of mass graves and industrial contamination. Sergiy
takes a gig driving a tanker truck across eastern Ukraine into an area called “The Zone,” where
he meets Katya (Liudmyla Bileka), an archaeologist working with a team of medics tasked
with digging up and identifying buried bodies. With a forensic attention to detail, Vasyanovych
(who, in addition to directing, wrote, shot, and edited the film himself) depicts these harrowing
events in stark, matter-of-fact fashion, across 28 carefully composed sequence shots that unfold
with a tense, slow-burn efficiency. Imparting a disarming sense of order on a world gone
awry, these largely static compositions belie the moral and ecological degradation that they so
methodically record. But as Sergiy and Katya’s relationship takes on greater symbolic weight,
the film’s corporeal concerns quietly come to the fore, with near-bookending scenes shot in in-
frared, illustrating both the extremes of the human condition and our innate need for personal
connection in even the most dire circumstances.—Jordan Cronk
COLLECTIVE ALEXANDER NANAU
something of a miracle of assembly
and investigation, the Romanian docu-
mentary Collective puts to shame most
better-known exposés. Alexander Nanau’s
tick-tock telling follows the aftermath of a
gruesome club fire in 2015 and the gro-
tesque and deadly corruption uncovered by
some indefatigable journalists and editors,
all depicted in what feels like real time. The
fire killed 27 people right away—imme-
diately after the band onstage had howled out a song about... corruption—but more died
later at utterly ill-equipped hospital facilities that were buying diluted antibacterial products
from a crooked pharma company. Initially resembling a very local story about victims and
the efforts by their families and survivors to seek out some sort of truth and justice, Collective
opens out into a procedural portrayal—of journalism at work, of a creaky post-bloc govern-
ment laid bare in all its deficiencies, and of outward urban modernity looking increasingly
feeble. With incredible access to newsrooms and to the office of a reformist health minister
(formerly an activist), the film puts on display the kind of fearless reporting the United States
and other Western countries need. Nanau connects these dots in the big picture by includ-
ing the pivotal Romanian elections that took place at the time and the maddening rise of
destructive right-wing polemics and policy.—Nicolas Rapold
November-December 2019 | F ILM C OM MEN T | 2 3
 LIFE’S WORK
GRETA GERWIG’S ENERGETIC TOUR-DE-FORCE ADAPTATION OF
LITTLE WOMEN FRAMES THE ASPIRATIONS OF JO AND HER SISTERS
AS URGENT MATTERS OF PERSONAL INDEPENDENCE
BY DEVIKA GIRISH

Greta Gerwig on location

2 4 | F ILM CO M MENT | November-December 2019

Little Women

November-December 2019 | F I LM C OMME NT | 25

A
new adaptation of little women isn’t so much
an event as a beloved ritual: Louisa May Alcott’s
classic 1868 novel has been adapted many times
since its publication—five for the American screen
alone, and plenty more for theater, television, and
radio, reacquainting each new generation with the
winsome story of the four March sisters living in genteel poverty
in 19th-century Massachusetts. Yet the latest cinematic incarna-
tion, written and directed by Greta Gerwig, arrives like a thing
entirely of its own, and of its own time. It’s an adaptation so rich,
so attentive to its source, and yet so thrillingly personal, that the
combination of maker and material feels like an alignment of
stars. And an ascension of one, too—Little Women is only Gerwig’s
second solo directorial effort, after 2017’s Lady Bird, and it propels
her into a league of her own. Gerwig doesn’t quite reinvent the
novel but rather discerns, with X-ray-like intuition, the kernel that
has made Little Women so formative for generations of ambitious
women: it’s the story of a woman who wants to write, and write
she does. And Gerwig also
understands that this woman
isn’t just Jo March—the tem-
pestuous tomboy-protagonist
of the novel—but also its
author, Louisa May Alcott.
Alcott’s Little Women was
originally published in two
parts. The first traces a year in
the lives of the Marches—teen-
age sisters Meg, Jo, Beth, and
Amy, and mother Marmee—as
they try to get by while their
father serves in the Civil War;
in the second part, set three
years later, the sisters navigate
work and love and marriage, and contend with the declining
health of Beth. Gerwig rearranges the novel, crosscutting between
its two halves and reorganizing them around Jo’s writerly pur-
suits, finding natural points of narrative (and sometimes strik-
ingly visual) connection. Instead of starting with the text’s first
line—“Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents!”—the
film opens with Jo (Saoirse Ronan) standing in the doorway of a lit-
erary press, silhouetted against its light in a rare moment of stillness.
Then she enters the office, submits one of her stories to the editor
on behalf of a friend, and upon its grudging acceptance, gets paid.
Jo’s initial moment of hesitant ambition, and its turn to ecstatic
pride when her story is accepted, ripple through Gerwig’s film—
which becomes, through its braiding of timelines, a portrait of the
ways in which the dreams of girls grate against the pressures faced
by young women. Amy, the painter, must contend with the diffi-
culty of sustaining herself in a profession whose terms are dictated
by men; aspiring actress Meg with the allure (and expectation) of
a family life; and Beth, the gifted pianist, with the cruel and crude
vagaries of mortality. Jo’s passions undergo their own maturing
and tempering, but her story culminates, crucially, not just in
marriage or death—as Jo’s editor tells her all women’s tales must
end—but also something else: a published work of her own.
One could draw a straight line from Gerwig’s dancer-heroine
running (and skipping, and twirling) through the streets of New
York to Bowie’s “Modern Love” in Frances Ha (2012), to Jo running
euphorically through the same city, in another time, in the opening
scenes of Little Women. This latest film seamlessly continues the
CLOSER LOOK: Little Women opens in theaters on December 25.
2 6 | F IL M C O MM ENT | November-December 2019
preoccupations of Gerwig’s previous work, which includes directing
Lady Bird and co-writing Frances Ha and Mistress America (2015):
the terrible intimacies of sisters; the complexities of mothers and
daughters; and the existential lives of women in states of becoming,
their realities hopelessly exceeded by their own desires. The protago-
nists are all caught up in an ineffable sense of want—to be someone
else, to be somewhere else—that slowly, through and with the other
women in their lives, sharpens into a bittersweet understanding of
who they are and where they belong. Here, the modest settings and
contemporary, urban characters of the earlier films are reimagined
within the grander, weightier frameworks of history and literature.
The becoming of the characters in Little Women is also the becom-
ing of an era, a canon, and a kind of womanhood.
Gerwig brings these ideas, big and small, into fluid conversation
as her film approaches one odd contrivance of Alcott’s novel: the
marriage of Jo—who for most of the film aspires to be a spinster all
her life, as Alcott in fact was—to the middle-aged German profes-
sor Friedrich Bhaer. It’s the plot point that seems most ill-suited to
adaptation in 2019, but Gerwig
turns it into one of the film’s
most original and modern sec-
tions. She addresses the sellout
artifice of Jo’s marriage head-on
through a negotiation scene
between Jo and her editor on
matters of pay, copyright, and
gendered expectations in pop-
ular literature. It’s a moment
that nimbly layers the text of the
novel, details of Alcott’s life and
GRETA GERWIG (PREVIOUS PAGE): SONY PICTURES. ALL PHOTOS FROM LITTLE WOMEN: WILSON WEBB/SONY PICTURES
career, and meta-reflections on
Gerwig’s own place as the latest
director to adapt a much-mined
book, into an extraordinary
palimpsest of our evolving notions of authenticity and ownership.
Gerwig grounds the intellectual and historical scope of her film
in a sincere regard for her characters as real people and the settings
as real places, not artifacts or archetypes of a different time. Her
actors embody that same sincerity in gentle, loose performances,
nestling into roles that seem cut to shape for them but also demand
a certain self-awareness. Ronan amplifies the vulnerable recklessness
of her character in Lady Bird, brimming with purpose and anger
and tenderness; Emma Watson fits the part of the prim, elegant
Meg, vain yet wise and kind; and Timothée Chalamet, far softer
and more sheepish than the Lauries of previous versions, is deftly
convincing as a charming companion but unserious match for Jo.
(Louis Garrel is also especially welcome as a younger, more affable
version of the stuffy Professor Bhaer.) It’s Florence Pugh as Amy,
however, who emerges as the true standout: she persuasively trans-
forms the book’s slightly shallow second-fiddle character into the
most clear-eyed among the sisters, her coming-of-age fostered by
the compassionate insight of Laura Dern’s Marmee and the stern
but necessary cynicism of Meryl Streep’s Aunt March.
That these actors are all stars, rising or already part of the firma-
ment, means that they each feel as singular as they’re meant to, as
individuals finding their distinct paths through history. And yet the
film’s energy derives from their warm and crackling interplay with
one another—a feat as much of directing as it is of acting. Gerwig
and her collaborators, DP Yorick Le Saux, composer Alexandre
Desplat, and editor Nick Houy, animate Little Women with a precise
sense of rhythm: its characters run and dance and skate and chatter
through scenes that speed and slow and tumble into each other. Few
adaptations of Little Women—and indeed, few period dramas—
“This sort of inchoate desire, or desire that doesn’t have an object, is interesting to me,
because I think it’s so much a dimension of what it is to be an ambitious woman. Because, for
every other moment in human history, [that ambition] had nowhere to go, at all.”
have felt as alive, immediate, and fleet-footed as this film, a work
overrun by feeling and yet structured by ideas.
In early October, I met up with Gerwig in New York to chat
about Little Women, in a conversation as lively and full of revelations
and references as her film.
I read Little Women as a child, and I was not familiar with the con-
text of the book at all at that age, but the one thing I did under-
stand was: this is what it means to be a girl and want to write.
#NQVQHUKIPKƂECPVYQOGPYTKVGTUt5KOQPGFG$GCWXQKT5WUCP
5QPVCI7TUWNC.G)WKPtJCXGUCKFUKOKNCTVJKPIUCDQWVVJGDQQM
Patti Smith, Elena Ferrante, J.K. Rowling... I mean, it’s incredibly
strange and beautiful that all these different women [feel that
way]. Have you read the Neapolitan quartet, by Elena Ferrante?
Little Women traces through that, too. I almost dropped the book
while reading it. I was like, “Of course this is her book.” And it’s
certainly not because Jo marries Professor Bhaer. That’s not why
we love her and that’s not why women who wanted to be writers
have flocked to her.
Not in the hopes of meeting an older German professor who
IKXGUVJGOUECVJKPIHGGFDCEM
Who doesn’t like what they’re doing. And makes Jo use the word “thou.”
&KF[QWCNUQJCXGVJGGZRGTKGPEGQHTGCFKPIKV[QWPI!9CUKV
CDQQMVJCVUKIPCNGFVQ[QWYJQ[QWYGTGKPVJGYQTNF!
I did not read it [at first]. It was read to me by my mother. So I
don’t remember a time when I didn’t know who the Marches were. I
always knew who Jo was and who her sisters were. It was one of the
books I had in my bookshelf and I was a re-reader, so I read it lots
and lots of times. Before I wrote the script, probably the last time
I read it all the way through was my mid-teenage years—14, 15.
When I read it in my thirties, it was a vastly different experience. But
when I read it as a child, it’s hard to say... I don’t know if I was like Jo
and that’s why I loved her, or if I made myself like Jo because that’s
who I loved. Did I want to be a writer and then find this character?
Or did that character make me want to write?
That’s fascinating, because I think that’s a recurring theme in
CNQVQH[QWTYQTMtRGQRNGVT[KPIVQNKXGWRVQEGTVCKPKPVGN-
lectual or literary or cultural ideals, and not knowing where
that desire comes from or whether it’s genuine. There’s this
line in Mistress America VJCV+NQXGYJGTG6TCE[UC[Up+MPQY
what it is to want things.”
I haven’t watched that movie in a while, but I remember that line
now that you’re saying it.
+FQPoVMPQYYJQYTQVGKV9JGVJGT[QWYTQVGKVQT0QCJ
It sounds like one of mine. [Laughs]
That line has always stayed with me because it captures what
VJCVƂNOFrances Ha, Lady Bird, and now Little Women are all
CDQWVtVJG[oTGƂNOUCDQWV[GCTPKPIDWVPQVSWKVGMPQYKPI
what the object of your yearning is.
This sort of inchoate desire, or desire that doesn’t have an object,
is interesting to me, because I think it’s so much a dimension of
what it is to be an ambitious woman. Because, for every other
moment in human history, [that ambition] had nowhere to go,
at all. And we’re just now getting the chance to put it somewhere
other than marriage. But even marriage, as a goal, as the sort of
Jane Austen marriage plot, is [fairly modern]... I mean, really, the
idea that women weren’t property is new.
So while making Little Women, the one thing I kept thinking
about was the ending. This thing that all these luminous women
[who were inspired by Little Women] don’t love is that she ends
up with Professor Bhaer. I wanted to construct a movie where,
when Jo gets that book at the end and holds it, you are getting
the satisfaction of something that you didn’t know you needed to
see. But as soon as she gets it, you think, “I needed it and I didn’t
know it.” To me, that is the desire incarnate, the desire fulfilled. I
think that it’s funny that all these women love the book because
obviously there’s this divergence: Louisa May Alcott didn’t get
married and didn’t have children, and Jo does and she stops
writing at the end of the book, because she felt like what she was
writing was bad.
9JCVKUVJGRJTCUKPIKPVJGDQQM!5JGpEQTMUWRJGTKPMUVCPFq
But as [Louisa May Alcott] keeps writing books, like Jo’s Boys and
Little Men, Jo becomes more like Louisa. Girls are let into Jo’s school
[which she opens with Professor Bhaer], and she starts writing
again, and she writes a book like Little Women. So I kind of col-
lapsed the ending that way. This difference between what Jo does
and what Louisa actually did is this chasm, and I think on some
level all these women who read Little Women did know that she’d
actually done that, they knew about the doubling, that she’s Jo and
Jo is her but there were [still] these differences.
Alcott wrote to a friend that she only wrote this ending
because she got letters from all these women who wanted
,QVQIGVOCTTKGF#PFJGTRJTCUKPIYCUUQOGVJKPINKMGp+
OCFGCHWPP[OCVEJHQTJGTQWVQHRGTXGTUKV[q
Yeah, out of spite! Out of perversity!
So maybe all these women who grew up reading the book
UQTVQHMPGYKVYCUCEQPVTKXGFGPFKPI.
Yeah! In the movie, I always knew that I wanted the ending to lead
you there and then say, why is it that you need this? Or why do you
want this? Someone said at some point, “When Professor Bhaer
shows up [at Jo’s house], it’s like deus ex machina”—and it is deus
ex machina, that is what it is, he just shows up. In the book, he just
appears! He doesn’t need to appear. And also, there are so many things
in the book that I didn’t have time to explore. There’s someone at Jo’s
boarding house, a woman that she’s friends with, who’s not married,
and who’s her best friend and takes her to concerts and stuff, and you
think, wait, is that secretly you, Louisa? Who’s this woman?
#NEQVVJCUUCKFVJKPIUVJCVUQWPFNKMGUJGOKIJVJCXGDGGP
YJCVYGVJKPMQHVQFC[CUSWGGT
Right. I didn’t want to assign anything that felt too modern to her
but... there’s lots of stuff. I mean, the thing she said, “I have half a
mind to think I’m a man born into a woman’s body.”
#PFp+JCXGHCNNGPKPNQXGYKVJUQOCP[RTGVV[IKTNUq;QW
FQPoVMPQYGZCEVN[YJCVUJGOGCPVD[pKPNQXGq
November-December 2019 | F ILM C OM M ENT | 27
“A lot of the lines I give Louisa—or Jo/Louisa—are from [Alcott’s] letters, from her diaries,
from her writing. When Jo says in the film, ‘I can’t afford to starve on praise,’ that’s from
her. She was making economic decisions constantly.”
Right. I mean, the passion she felt for her sisters was not sexual,
but she felt a possessiveness and anger that they couldn’t stay in
their female utopia for their entire lives.
And that’s exactly like Frances Ha.
Yes, it is. For me, I don’t have to go far—I love my group of female
friends, I write movies about not wanting to disrupt that, whether
it’s sisterhood or mothers or friends. But in any case, I just knew I
could not do the ending just as the book [did]—especially because
Louisa didn’t really want to end it that way, and she really did
think Jo’s true fate should’ve been as “a literary spinster with books
for children.” And so I thought, I can’t in good faith do this end-
ing, number one because it’s
not in me, number two because
she didn’t like it, and if we can’t
give her an ending she would
like, 150 years later, then what
have we done? We’ve made no
progress.
The distance between life
and fiction is moving to me
in general. With the Marches,
they’re the genteel poor, while
the Alcotts were wretchedly
poor. They moved something
like 30 times in Boston when
she was a teenager because
they kept getting kicked out
of places because they didn’t have enough money. Louisa and her
sisters and her mother did grueling work, and none of that’s in the
book, because that isn’t what was going to sell. So it was all of the
good things [of their life] wrapped up in something she wishes she
had, and I find that difference very moving.
*QYFKFVJKUOQXKGEQOGCDQWV!
I knew that there was a desire with Amy Pascal and Sony because
it’s been 25 years [since the 1994 version], and a lot of young
women don’t know what this book is. This was before I directed
Lady Bird, but I had written the script for it, and I heard from
my agent that people were meeting about Little Women. And
I said, oh you have to get me a meeting. I have to write and
direct that film. And he said, no studio is going to hire you to
direct a film when you haven’t directed a film. And I was like
“That’s semantics! I’m on my way!” So I went in and I had this
very clear idea. To me, it was so clear that the book was about
women, art, and money. The emotional core about sisterhood
and family was true, but there was this other very nuts-and-bolts
side of it, which was equally emotional. The first line of the
book is “Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents.
It’s so dreadful being poor. It’s not fair that some girls have lots
of pretty things and other girls have none at all.” And I was like,
“This book’s about money.” And Louisa’s life, as it turns out, as
I did my research, was also about that. A lot of the lines I give
Louisa—or Jo/Louisa—are from [Alcott’s] letters, from her dia-
ries, from her writing. When Jo says in the film, “I can’t afford
to starve on praise,” that’s from her. She was making economic
decisions constantly.
2 8 | F IL M C OM M ENT | November-December 2019
5JGUQNFJGTUVQTKGUVQOCMGCNKXKPI
Yeah, like, what sells? And Little Women did sell out in its first print-
ing in two weeks, and she did keep the copyright because she knew
to, and she also got 6.6 percent of the profits, because her publisher
didn’t think that people would buy it. I also thought each of the
girls’ pursuits aren’t “adorable”—they’re big and serious. All the
chapters of Amy in Europe realizing she’s not a great artist, they’re
amazing. As I dove in, I realized that the moment when May, who’s
the Alcott sister Amy is based on, was in Europe, was exactly when
we saw the very beginnings of modernism in art. Cézanne is paint-
ing, Manet is painting, and to go to Rome and see the Old Masters
and think, no, I’m not going be that, and then to go to Paris and see
people who are starting to use
paint as the subject itself, and
realize you’re not doing that
either... that’s a crisis of faith,
if that’s what you thought you
were meant to do.
So I had all these ideas.
And the thing that I read that
articulates that idea—“women,
art, and money”—the best is
Virgina Woolf’s A Room of One’s
Own. Which everyone remem-
bers as [high-pitched voice] “To
write you need a room of one’s
own.” You think of a garret
and a little cozy fire and you’re
wrapped in your shawl and you’re alone and you’re writing. But
what she actually says is you need a room of one’s own and money.
Because she was asked to speak on why there are no great women
writers, and she said the question isn’t why are there no great
women writers, the question is: why have women always been
poor? Because women have always been poor, not for 200 years
merely, but since the beginning of time. And she said, “Poetry
depends upon intellectual freedom, and intellectual freedom
depends upon material things. Women, then, have not had a dog’s
chance of writing poetry.” How could you possibly? If you don’t
have money, you can’t write poetry.
I felt like that idea is being expressed both through Louisa May
Alcott and through Jo, and I wanted to make a movie about that.
And the other thing, when I started writing, I started looking at the
two parts of the book as two separate books. The girlhood part, the
first half, was Christmas to Christmas, 1861 to 1862—that was the
first publishing. And then the second book, Alcott joked, should’ve
been called The Wedding Marches, because she had to marry them
all. Suddenly there were all these things I felt were mirrored in each
other, the biggest one being Beth and her illness. To me it’s the fairy
tale versus what life is. In the first book, she gets sick, then she gets
better, and in the second book, she gets sick and then she dies. And
it was that doubling that made me think, well, what if I could layer
these two things on top of each other, because in my experience of a
lot of fiction about women, there’s this sense that all the adventures
happen when you’re a girl or a teenager, and as soon as you become
an adult, it’s all over, and it’s not that interesting. And I cannot have
that be the story we’re telling young women. I felt like I wanted to
give the March women back what they had as girls. That felt to me
“To me, it was so clear that the book was about women, art, and money. The emotional
core about sisterhood and family was true, but there was this other very nuts-and-bolts
side of it, which was equally emotional.”
like part of the task of this film, because I can’t tell you how many
women are like, “I only read the first part.” If the thing we’re telling
girls is that once you become an adult, it’s all over, that’s not good
enough, because then there’s nothing left to desire, there’s nothing
to look towards. If there’s no bravery and ambition and scope once
you’re an adult, if it all existed as a girl and then you put away your
childish things, it just feels not right. So I wanted to ground it in
adulthood.
It’s also interesting hearing you talk about how you encountered
VJKUƂNOKVYCUCNTGCF[DGKPIOCFGCPF[QWOCFGKVRGTUQPCNVQ
yourself. It sounds almost like how Louisa May Alcott was told to
write this book and then it became a book about her life.
Right, she was assigned [it]. She said, well, there’s a market for young
people. But when she initially wrote it, she did say, “I don’t think this is
very good,” and her publisher also said, “I don’t think this is very good,”
and it was his nieces who read it, and they said “Oh, this is great.”
Also Little Women was published when Louisa was 36, and I’m 36...
God, this is cosmic!
I know. I had my chart read against Louisa’s...
#PF!
I mean, we’re not going to get married, we’d make a terrible mar-
riage match. Apparently we had a lot of similarities, but hers was
more lonely. Because she was ahead of her time. I always think she
kind of pulled us into the 20th century, in many ways.
;QWoXGOCFGVJKUDQQMHGGNXGT[EQPVGORQTCT[D[FKIIKPIKPVQ
VJGTGCNJKUVQT[QHKVURWDNKECVKQPKPVJGU6JGEQPXGTUC-
VKQP,QJCUYKVJJGTRWDNKUJGTCVVJGGPFQH[QWTƂNOPGIQVK-
ating royalties and copyright, sounds like things we’re talking
about in 2019, about women and authorship and ownership.
Since we shot that scene, there has been all this stuff about how Tay-
lor Swift doesn’t own the masters to her recordings, and now she’s
re-recording because she wants to own them, and I was thinking,
who owns the art? Who’s profiting off of it? I felt the edge of that
question and I found so much in Louisa’s story, and I wanted to see
that. But the same thing happened to me with the language: people
say to me, oh, it sounds so modern.
I thought it sounded looser than the book.
Most of it is from the book, though, almost word for word. I wrote
extra stuff, but a lot of the lines that strike people, like Amy saying
“I want to be great, or nothing”—that’s from the book. Marmee
saying “I’m angry nearly every day of my life”—that’s from the
book. Even all the things they say on Christmas morning, which are
such famous lines that you could recite them all, like “We can make
our little sacrifices, and ought to do it gladly”—I just had an idea of
them being said so quickly, just thrown off like sisters’ talk.
+VoUKPVJGFGNKXGT[
A lot of it’s in the speed, which was very choreographed. I didn’t
just have them do it quickly or talk over each other. When I
wrote the script, I employed this technique that a lot of play-
wrights use: you have a line and then you insert a slash where the
next person is meant to start talking.
.KMGXGTUG
Yeah. You have this slash and then the line keeps going, but the next
person has already started their line. So I organized the script that way,
and it was a lot of rehearsal. We would actually start it slow and then
speed it up to choreograph when the lines would come in. We’d do
the lines slowly and then you’d point at someone and their line would
start, and then you would point at someone else and their line would
start. It was this handoff. And we choreographed the scenes slowly,
too, of moving through the rooms. The way I shotlisted it was I
wanted everything to be swirling all the time. I didn’t want Steadicam,
but I did want just a dance floor so that the camera could be on a
dolly the whole time. And it was this slow building of the speed, so
that by the time we got to it, they could do the Christmas morning in
20 minutes, just running, and it was amazing.
*QYFQ[QWKPVWKVVJGTKIJVRCEG!+PDQVJLady Bird and
Little WomenTJ[VJOUGGOUUQRCTCOQWPVVQVJGƂNOOCMKPI
'XGT[VJKPIoUCNYC[UƃQYKPI
I don’t know. But I will tell you with Lady Bird and with this, the
first note I always get from someone is “slow it the fuck down.” I
don’t know where the rhythm part comes from, but if it doesn’t
sound right to me, the whole structure falls apart. I think some
of that is from theater, because in film, you can establish rhythm
from editing, but in theater, you can only establish rhythm
through language, so I think I still have that sense of wanting it to
sound correct. I know it when I hear it, and when it’s wrong, it’s
like someone I don’t know is touching my belly button.
1PGNKPG+JCXGDGGPVJKPMKPICDQWVGXGT[FC[UKPEG+UCYVJG
ƂNOKUYJGP,QUC[UVQ/CTOGGp+oOUQUKEMQHRGQRNGUC[KPI
VJCVNQXGKUCNNVJCVYQOGPCTGƂVHQT+oOUQUKEMQHKVDWV+oO
so lonely.” It encapsulates so much about trying to be a woman
who’s ahead of your time, and trying to embody these feminist
ideals, but also struggling to be a human in your time.
Yes, that’s hard.
6JCVoUPQVHTQOVJGDQQMTKIJV!
Well, the speech Jo gives is from another book Alcott wrote. I believe
it’s Rose in Bloom: “Women have minds, as well as just heart; ambition
and talent, as well as just beauty. And I’m so sick of people saying love
is all a woman is fit for.” But then I added “But I’m so lonely.”
9CUVJCVHTQOJGTEJCTV!
[Laughs] No, I’d written a draft of this screenplay before I made
Lady Bird. But once I made Lady Bird, finished it, edited it, and
brought it out into the world, actually the day after the Oscars, I
put all my research for Little Women in the car and I drove to this
cabin in the woods. It’s almost like, for me, to be a writer-director,
you have to know the whole thing in such a deep way. It has to be
so real to you that it can’t not exist. You need to believe in the reality
of it, and for some reason, it’s something I do alone. So I was going
through my research and I’d written that down out of the book,
and I just... I was alone, and I heard Saoirse saying it in my mind,
and then I heard her say “But I’m so alone.” I heard her weeping
the whole time while she was saying it. And then I remember the
moment on set when she said it, and I think I was crying because
she just captures the whole feeling.
November-December 2019 | F I LM CO M MENT | 2 9
“What I was very nervous about was that I didn’t want to make a period piece that felt
nailed to the floor. And you feel like you can’t move or breathe. I wanted it to feel light
on its feet without being messy. I wanted it to feel like it was doing a very quick dance.”

6JCVNKPGKUCNUQGODNGOCVKEQHJQY[QWOCMGVJGƂNOHGGNXGT[ that did period pieces that somehow didn’t seem already dead.
immediate and present, but you also commit to its time and Truffaut does it very well in Two English Girls. It never seems like
RNCEGYKVJUKPEGTKV[+VJKPMRGTKQFƂNOUUQOGVKOGUUVTWIING you’re in a place you don’t know. Jules and Jim, too.
VQCEJKGXGVJCVDCNCPEG9GTGVJGTGEGTVCKPƂNOUQTVGZVUVJCV
JGNRGF[QWƂIWTGQWV[QWTCRRTQCEJ! #PFKPVJQUGƂNOUKVoUTGCNN[CDQWVECRVWTKPICUGPUGQHOQXG-
I had my list of films. What I was very nervous about was that I ment and dynamism. The fact that these people ranCPFt
didn’t want to make a period piece that felt nailed to the floor. That The running... Louisa May Alcott ran, and I kept coming across this
always happens, you can almost feel how expensive the lighting in research, and I thought, “They must mean something different.
kit was. And you feel like you can’t move or breathe. I wanted it to They must not mean running.” And apparently they did mean run-
feel light on its feet without being messy. I wanted it to feel like it ning. She has journal entries where she says things like, “All I was
was doing a very quick dance. And part of the reason I wanted to able to do today was go for my run and write,” and I thought, what
work with my cinematographer, Yorick [Le Saux], was because of in the world? But apparently, she would tuck up her skirts and go
this incredible movement [he running in the woods.
achieves] behind the camera.
You feel something restless 9JKEJKUCPKOCIGYGTCTGN[
behind his camera. see in the more traditional
RGTKQFƂNOU
*GUGGOUVQJCXGCUGPUG Yeah, exactly. Other films I
of the internal rhythm of looked at: Fanny and Alexan-
each shot. der, because it’s a ghost story,
I Am Love [which Le Saux shot] and because it’s so great. The
is extraordinarily gorgeous, so entire graduation sequence in
I knew that he wasn’t scared of Heaven’s Gate, where they all
beauty, that he allowed himself waltz in that giant courtyard,
to photograph things that are they just seem like teenagers. I
beautiful. But you’d be sur- made everyone watch all this
prised—some filmmakers, some stuff. McCabe & Mrs. Miller,
cinematographers, don’t want it the way people talk sounds like
to be too beautiful. I love his ability to embrace beauty in that way. the way people talk, it doesn’t sound so precise. The Story of Adele
Also, he has something that feels like he can both execute something H., also Truffaut. Esther Kahn, the Desplechin movie about theater.
and improvise at the same time. Like Carlos, the Assayas movie, it The Dead, the John Huston movie, because it’s about recapturing
just never stops moving. If he made Carlos and I Am Love, well, something that’s gone. Weirdly, Meet Me in St. Louis, because I love
my film is something in the middle of that. I just felt like the way Minnelli and it’s this idea of, what’s the idyllic version of childhood
to make it the most fresh was to keep it classical. The way to make like? And the beginning of Gigi, before he sings “Thank Heaven
it feel alive is to truly believe in the time. That’s why I didn’t want for Little Girls,” the French promenade—that’s what we based the
anything heavy about it. opening scene with Laurie and Jo on, strangely. Gigi. Lots of French
I looked through a lot of paintings, photographs, a lot of films and musicals.
research, to find what felt completely modern, because any time
people live, it’s the most modern people who have ever existed! I 6JGYC[KVoUGFKVGFVJGƂNOTGCNN[HGGNUNKMGKVoUUGVVQOWUKE
can show you these wonderful photographs—I don’t know if you CPFOQXGOGPV
know this British photographer, Julia Margaret Cameron? She pho- When I talked to Alexandre [Desplat]—I had a lot of French
tographed women in the 1860s, and you will not believe these pho- collaborators, Yorick, Alexan-
tographs, they just look like people you know. This is in the barrels dre—I said to him that in some
of the research I was going through... [Scrolls through her phone and ways, what we see in this movie
shows me a portrait of a young girl] is a musical without songs.
And he did such a marvelous
This is like an Instagram photo! score, so beautiful, and when
I know! And she looks so angry! Look at this face, she’s so annoyed. it ends, when Jo has that won-
derful look on her face [when
And her hair all tangled and greasy. she sees her book in a shop
She’s totally arrogant, and when I saw this, I was like, “That’s a window], and we cut to black,
girl! That’s a girl I know.” There are tons of other photographs. there’s these last two notes. I
[Keeps scrolling] This one is a bit Coachella, but look at all these had explained a feeling to him,
girls in their flower crowns, it’s so wonderful. You feel like you which was: I wanted to give it
know them. And look at these little girls! Look at their little messy back to the audience as if to
hair! So I thought, okay, they were people, so we’re allowed to say, “And now, you.” What are
make them people. And then I thought about a lot about films Julia Jackson by Julia Cameron you making, what book are

3 0 | F I LM C OMMENT | November-December 2019

you writing, what song are you going to sing? And then he came
up with this little end, which I thought, wow, that’s exactly what I
meant. It’s amazing how much of filmmaking is on faith. I didn’t
know what the music was going to be, and he had me show the
film to him silent.
+ECPoVGXGPKOCIKPGVJGOQXKGUKNGPVDGECWUGQHJQYOWEJKV
feels set to the music.
Well, he watched it silent and I felt like... a horrible pain. But then he
heard it! That’s what extraordinary about composers, they can hear.
&KF[QWTGGFKVCP[VJKPIKPTGURQPUGVQVJGOWUKE!
Very little, because he wrote to the cuts that I felt were right. Work-
ing with a composer is like having a garment made for you—it looks
great, you’ll never look better than when you buy something made
for you. I remember when I talked to him initially, before I’d even
shot anything. He’d read the script and he said, “The important
thing to remember in cinema is, time only ever moves forward.” So
even as you go back, you’re only ever going forward. And I thought
about that a lot as we were shooting, that it is always advancing.
I wanted to ask about one more thing. Alcott grew up around
Emerson and Thoreau, and all these Transcendentalists, and she
saw a kind of a compromised idealism around herself, these uto-
pian communities that failed her father and her family. There’s a
line in Frances HaCDQWV6JQTGCWCPF9CNFGP2QPFt
Oh yes, there is! He lived five minutes from his mom’s house.
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And he would go there to get supplies!
You know, you’re the first person who’s ever mentioned that and
I was wondering if anyone would, because I don’t know if you’ve
been to Concord, or been to Walden Pond, but it’s right there.
He really makes it sound in the book like he’s far away. But his
friends are a 20-minute walk away from him. I walked from my
house in Concord to Walden Pond every weekend. It’s not that
big a deal. I mean, I love Transcendentalism, I love Ralph Waldo
Emerson, his work is incredibly dense but also fascinating and
brilliant, and Thoreau, even though he’s a complainer, is brilliant
also. But I am interested in the ways in which those things don’t
really work for women. Or families. Every time I read Thoreau
talking about how he’s going to build his hut and grow his peas
and live off the land, I’m like, what is your wife going to do? Oh
no, you didn’t have one, and you don’t have children, and this
idealism about living at one with nature actually leaves aside the
care of the family.
9JKEJKUYJCVJCRRGPGFYKVJ$TQPUQP#NEQVV.QWKUCoUHCVJGT
Right, he brought them to live at Fruitlands, the vegan
commune, where we actually shot. It’s where the little yellow
house that Meg and John live in is. And we shot in Bronson’s
schoolhouse, that he taught in. But this sort of “man alone
with nature” thing doesn’t make sense in terms of a family, and
it’s something I’ve thought about a lot. And the astonishing lack
of understanding of what it takes to take care of a family is
notable to me. O
November-December 2019 | F ILM COMMENT | 3 1
 DEATH
BE
NOT
PROUD
THE ENDING OF LIFE IS
ALL IN A DAY’S WORK
FOR FRANK SHEERAN,
THE LOYAL MOB SOLDIER
OF MARTIN SCORSESE’S
THE IRISHMAN. BUT HAS
IT BECOME ROUTINE
FOR US TOO?
BY NICOLAS RAPOLD

C LO S ER LOO K : The Irishman opens in theaters on

0QXGODGTCPFFGDWVUQP0GVƃKZQP0QXGODGT

3 2 | F I LM C O MM EN T | November-December 2019
November-December 2019 | F I LM C OM MEN T | 3 3
T
he backbeat to martin scorsese’s the irishman
is a lulling road trip, taken by Frank Sheeran (Robert
De Niro) with his boss Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci)
and their wives, sometime in 1975. They’re headed to
a family wedding, but there will be business to attend
to, ugly business, even if their chitchat and carping
could be heard in any of a million such cars where grandpa rules
apply (here, no smoking) and rest stops are legion.
Framing the trip, and narrating Frank’s rise as a mercenary for
the mob and a right-hand man to Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino with
chummy showmanship), is... Frank, aged and wheelchair-bound
in an old folks’ home, geriatrically affable, speaking as if from
beyond the grave, or at least beyond the graves of all those he has
outlived (or bumped off). But amidst the film’s camaraderie and
beatdowns and killings and comical misunderstandings and bits
of mafia business, the rhythm of the road—solidified in the tog-
gling title credit (i heard/road/you/road/paint houses)—keeps
returning, later getting a fatalistic sonic counterpart in the score’s
dirty-bluesy drum scarified by an ever-deepening cello, like scrap-
ing the bottom of life.
Frank’s biography traces a variation on a respected 20th-cen-
tury arc of achievement: GI serving in World War II, truck driver
working his way up, leadership role in the Teamsters, proud father
to a family of five, and pillar of a community. Drawn from Charles
Brandt’s I Heard You Paint Houses, Scorsese’s vividly illustrated,
largely anecdotal 209-minute movie has a way of ably simulating
the actual passage of any life, in skipping nimbly from station to
station in Frank’s, usually through the encounters and relation-
ships that comprise his profession: cruising through the years yet
nearing twilight before you know it, and recalled equally in land-
mark events and episodes from the routine that fills the workday.
His routine is, initially, to do small favors for Bufalino (first
met by chance at a truck stop), until the favors—the jobs—entail
carrying out hits on marked men: the traitorous, the indebted,
the threatening, and the otherwise inconvenient. These kills are
depicted with an efficiency, an abruptness, shots fired at close
range and often mid-stride, without any sadistic-seductive buildup
nor what-have-I-done forced contemplation in the camerawork
or staging. It’d probably feel more chilling if Scorsese lingered on
the doorways where these shootings tend to occur, but the movie
keeps driving on. Stopping us short—as we glimpse Frank’s family
growing up, with a new wife entering the picture—is the periodic
stare from one of his daughters: first as a solemn child, later as
a teen (Anna Paquin), bearing witness to the brutality that she
senses early on underwrites their stability. For most of the film,
Frank’s “secret” life of crime is otherwise a joke we too are in on,
with his friends and accomplices, rather than a shocking spectacle.
It’s a violent landscape that has become the terrain of modern
myth, thanks to Scorsese, Coppola, and let’s not forget David Chase,
who with The Sopranos re-psychologized the patriarchal burdens of
mafia clan leaders, their experience of sins and redemption made
dramatically more potent by the life-and-death stakes. In The Irish-
man, Scorsese determinedly sticks by his workingman protagonist: a
soldier, not a boss, called upon to act and not considered fair game,
as he serves two friends, Bufalino and Hoffa, in an arrangement
that bestows order upon his world (and, in historical overlaps with
Hoffa and JFK, much of the world anyone in the film knows) until
it doesn’t. You might even feel a little sorry for the awkwardness that
this all-consuming job creates with his daughter, though she seems
to stand in as a kind of phantom conscience more than her own self.
As he humbly, loyally serves, Frank puts his faith in a system that
seems like it will last indefinitely and that reminds him of the Army:
“You do what you’re told. You get rewarded.”
3 4 | F IL M C OM ME NT | November-December 2019
Still and all, what he does, and what he gets rewarded for, is
killing people. And after a while, even within the coded confines of
their criminal underworld—the term itself sounds too exotic for
the company-like clockwork enforcement of protection kickbacks,
investment rackets, deal fixing, and so on—I began to wonder
what all this death means. To a certain extent, there’s pure pathos as
Frank clearly journeys toward a fate of being forced to destroy that
which is closest to him; The Sopranos just as devastatingly followed
this tunnel to a vanishing point over several years on TV, but there
is something about The Irishman that remains less encumbered by
family concerns, so often an overcompensating refrain in mob films,
not to mention the remove we’re sometimes placed at from Frank’s
victims.
In The Irishman, Scorsese determinedly sticks
by his workingman protagonist: a soldier, not
a boss, as he serves two friends, Bufalino and
Hoffa, in an arrangement that bestows order
upon his world until it doesn’t.
H
e’s not a psychopath,” martin scorsese said
of his protagonist, in response to a question at the
first press screening for The Irishman in Septem-
ber. It was a strange thing to hear on the morning
of its world premiere in the New York Film Festi-
val, and for a second, I thought of ex-killer Tom
Stall (Viggo Mortensen) in A History of Violence (2005) caught
out for being “so good at killing.” In the Cronenberg film, Tom’s
unexpected heroism becomes a tale of the return of the repressed,
but Frank isn’t returning—he never left. We watch three-plus
hours of him continuing on the same career track, as it were,
business as usual, culminating in a hit whose logic is inescapable
according to the laws of the jungle, or at least as we have come to
understand them through the mob movie genre.
Told of Scorsese’s comment, one critic made a revision: Frank is
not psychopathic, but sociopathic. Whichever the case, one might
ask how unusual Frank in The Irishman is meant to be. Oddly
ALL PHOTOS: NIKO TAVERNISE/NETFLX
enough, people in recent years have been spending quite a bit of
their spare time watching killers, and in situations outside the
usual context of law enforcement. Watching or rewatching assorted
acclaimed TV series, I couldn’t help noticing how many zero in on
people for whom killing is routine: The Sopranos, The Americans,
Barry, Mindhunter, Killing Eve, Dexter. (There’s also the apocalyptic
strand in which almost everyone has already died, like The Leftovers,
or everyone is dead, like The Good Place, or in the niche case of Rus-
sian Doll, one person keeps dying.) Very often these shows return to
the hollowing-out that is felt through the destruction of human life
and through the maintenance of the double life required to insulate
that pursuit. Mindhunter thematizes the very process of interpreting
repeated murders, and its second season opener features a psychol-
ogy professor counseling an FBI agent recovering from a break-
down: “When we empathize with a psychopath, we actually negate
the self.” The friendly advice hit home, after gawping at all these
people who were so good at killing, whether in The Irishman or else-
where; maybe there was a reason that a feeling of emptiness could
accompany the addictive frissons of these series.
Adapted from the book by John Douglas of the Behavioral
Science Unit in the FBI—a pioneer of serial killer studies—Mind-
hunter seeks to dramatize and historicize the investigation of
certain homicidal compulsions. In staging its detectives’ nature/
nurture dialogues and case studies, the show ends up tracing the
contours of deviance and norms in society, quite apart from the
clear-cut extremity of murder (much less serial murder). And at
the risk of making a category error, while watching The Irishman I
began to feel that Frank’s effortless compartmentalization—bread-
winner father and remorseless killer-on-command—had more in
common with the psychopathologies of Taxi Driver or The King
of Comedy than the mafia studies of Goodfellas or Casino. Had my
eyes lost their place in reading the codes of crime genres, or was
Frank—as vastly entertaining as the movie’s tough-guys-saying-
stupid-shit patter and sveltely staged encounters could get—kind
of just creepy in the actual substance of his existence? As ever, De
Niro makes Scorsese’s portraiture possible here, with the fugged-
daboutit delivery and, even at 76, bluff good looks. (Mindhunter
does a bit of this too, casting the boyishly handsome Jonathan
Groff as Agent Holden, a wide-eyed-curious undergrad presence
diverging from most police procedurals.) But Frank’s workmanlike
confidence fails him at his hardest moment, on a phone call to the
Criterion Collection Edition #1007: Until the End of the World
woman whose husband he has murdered: like a repeated audio
sample of a gasping fish, Frank nearly grinds to a halt with glottal
stammers, speaking platitudes he knows to be false.
That astonishing moment comes late in the movie, and haunts
the character to the end of his days in conference with a priest. But
did I feel much sympathy for Frank, when it was also exactly the
moment to which his blind loyalty to a seductive but fundamen-
tally ruthless and terrifying hierarchy would inevitably lead him?
Scorsese underlines that inevitability by introducing virtually every
other mafioso or associate with on-screen text describing their
year and cause of death (mostly premature and violent; the audi-
ence typically laughs in one case where it’s not). Those text cards
forestall against glamorizing the power or savvy of the figures we
see; for all their pull on earth, they all went to the same place. But
for the deaths inflicted directly by Frank, the valence of each mur-
der seems to be just as much metaphorical as literal: each stands
in for a sacrifice, a tough decision, the bearing of responsibility on
behalf of someone else or something greater—in some nagging
A
sense, more fictive than felt.
t the end of a lifetime of taking care of
somebody else’s business, Frank is left infirm in
a nursing home. This is no spoiler, because that’s
how the movie’s frame opens, with Rodrigo Prieto’s
camera roving down a hallway, past other elderly
residents and a religious statue, resting on our
source for the war stories to come. Or more properly, postwar sto-
ries, as Frank follows the progress of the World War II veteran down
a path of achievement followed by disappointment. His partnership
with Jimmy Hoffa and subsequent betrayal seems to twin with the
November-December 2019 | F ILM C O MM ENT | 35
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CGI “de-aging” is a technical and dramatic feat that on a
certain level can’t help coming across as one generation
simply and absolutely refusing to let go. That said, it’s an
apt filter for Frank’s point of view, his memories of himself
populated with variations on himself as an adult.
decline of unions in the 20th century. (Is it
too much to be reminded of Fredric James-
on’s sweeping declaration of The Godfa-
ther’s mob as an allegory of all-consuming,
unforgiving, norm-breaking capitalism?)
As Scorsese expertly orchestrates and com-
presses these eras, The Irishman acts as a
kind of summa of his previous films’ chron-
icle of slices of American history, entwining
business, culture, and the family.
At this point there has to be admitted a
certain amusing insistence on owning this
history, in the CGI technique referred to
as “de-aging” and used to deploy the same
actors across decades of events. It’s a tech-
nical and dramatic feat that on a certain
level can’t help coming across as one gen-
eration simply and absolutely refusing to
let go. De Niro’s rosy complexion as a truck
driver “kid” recalls a tinted postcard photo
more than a twentysomething person, and
I can’t explain away the same de-aged De
Niro curb-stomping a grocer, looking more
like the septuagenarian star he is than a
ferociously protective thirtysomething dad.
That said, it’s an apt filter for Frank’s point
of view, his memories of himself populated
with variations on himself as an adult.
The anxiety over age powers part of the
plot, as Hoffa feels aggravated and threatened
by a young mob boss called Tony Provenzano
(Stephen Graham) as well as a slippery yes-
man in the Teamsters. With “Tony Pro,” it’s as
if another mafia movie intersects momentar-
ily with this one, with a more familiar energy.
But it’s Pacino and De Niro’s portrayal of
camaraderie, and Pesci and De Niro’s same
rapport, that provide the emotional core of
the film, for all the temptations of the genre
to spin out of control. The Hoffa-Frank
hotel suite chats, with Hoffa gabbing away
confidences to his Number Two just before
bed, are unexpectedly tender and true. And
few scenes have the power of the tough love
shown simply by Pesci’s look at De Niro
when his side gig to bomb a laundry factory
is discovered by capo Angelo Bruno (Harvey
Keitel). These are the bonds that Frank recalls
with the most feeling, but at what cost?
Frank’s three-plus hours of chronicles do not
immortalize in the manner of a “mafia epic,”
but somewhere along the line, the choice of a
hit man as a protagonist begins to feel like a
form of artistic leverage.
“But you don’t feel anything at all?” a
priest asks Frank near the end of his life, and
processing a life, processing his life, I myself
confess to wondering the same afterward. If
I was worn out along with Frank at the end
of his saga, is that the earned effect of his
road to nowhere? Or have I been down this
lost highway and dark alley too many times
before, and gotten too good at watching kill-
ing, and wearied? Already The Irishman for
me is becoming one of the stranger Scorseses,
its pulse clear and vibrant while it is screen-
ing, only to be replaced by a feeling of still-
ness in retrospect. Maybe after all these years
(mine and Frank’s), I feel a limitation to the
use of murder in crime dramas as signifier,
or maybe it’s just the fear of death talking. Or
maybe, to quote Bufalino in very different
circumstances, regarding a colleague who’d
pushed things too far, it is what it is. O
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YOU WIN SOME,
Josh and Benny Safdie’s full-court press of a film Uncut Gems hustles along with its Jewish

3 8 | F I LM C OMM ENT | November-December 2019

YOU LOSE SOME
diamond dealer in a maximalist reckoning with the gamble of life | BY MICHAEL KORESKY

November-December 2019 | F ILM C OMMEN T | 39

W
e jews can’t stop, won’t stop. the des-
peration for economic and cultural stabil-
ity so endemic to the immigrant experi-
ence fuels the constant hustle that drives,
shakes, jangles, and quakes Josh and Benny
Safdie’s Uncut Gems, which stars Adam
Sandler as harried Diamond District business owner Howard
Ratner, who’s on the verge of scoring big, or on the brink of
doom, or at the edge of sanity, or, more likely, all three at once.
It’s an exceedingly Jewish movie, and, in this era of movie prod-
uct lacking cultural specificity and homogenized for prime inter-
national export, that’s a good—even shocking—thing. It’s also
an uncomfortably Jewish movie, and, in this era of sanded-down
edges, when movies are so carefully formulated and tested so
as not to offend anyone and potentially end up with an article
titled “Why Uncut Gems is problematic in its treatment of...,”
that’s a good—even momentous—thing.
The Safdies might not care how you feel when Lakeith Stanfield
describes our nebbishy, money-obsessed main character, who can’t
stop betting, scheming, and striving despite the world closing in on
him, as “just a fuckin’ crazy-ass Jew,” but they do care about the cul-
tural resonance of that typification, who’s saying it, when, and why.
Thus far in their breathless career, the Safdies have set such aggres-
sively Cassavetean movies as Daddy Longlegs (2009), Heaven Knows
What (2014), and Good Time (2017) to the pace of the city, but
Uncut Gems moves to an entirely new, fearless rhythm, an expression
of the inherent masochism of American entrepreneurship.
Even the claustrophobia of Uncut Gems registers as an au-
thentic extension of a cultural past. Once an expansive hub of
immigrant-run New York City commerce, the Diamond District is
now basically relegated to one block in Midtown Manhattan, West
47th Street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues. Diamonds and
gems still largely come through this neighborhood of New York
when shipped to the U.S., but as with other areas of commerce
in the city—the garment districts, the food vendors of the Lower
East Side—only a fraction of the more than two million Jews
who arrived in New York in the late 19th and early 20th century
from shtetls east, seeking stability and safety from violence and
poverty, remain here. Nevertheless the area still encompasses a
wide, intermingling variety of people from Hasidic, Orthodox,
From left: Josh and Benny Safdie
4 0 | F IL M C O MMEN T | November-December 2019
and Reform communities, hustling and hand-shaking on deals of
questionable value. The Safdies’ father worked in the Diamond
District and would regale young Josh and Benny with stories from
the jewelry trade that Josh has likened to “mini pulp genre films.”
Here they capture the bustle and pace of rapid-fire economic
exchange, filtering it through an increasingly panicky wild ride that
initially feels freewheeling and undisciplined but is actually made
up of an intricate network of quick-decision twists and about-faces
designed to give the viewer a case of tsuris. Uncut Gems is both
rousing and pummeling, like being dosed a shot of B12 in the ass
while someone’s boot is pressing your head to the sidewalk.
The desperation for economic and cultural
stability so endemic to the immigrant expe-
rience fuels the constant hustle that drives,
shakes, jangles, and quakes Josh and
Benny Safdie’s Uncut Gems.
A
t any given moment, our hero’s destiny can
and does change, for the better, for the worse, and
back again with head-spinning capriciousness. In
this way, the film seems to intentionally capture
the briskness, structure, and suspense of a basket-
ball game. The sport, with its blink-and-miss-’em
turnarounds, rebounds, and constant reversals of fortune, is
both the Safdies’ acknowledged obsession and a literal narrative
undergirding for the film. The whole mishegoss begins when
Boston Celtics All-Star Kevin Garnett—playing himself in a quite
persuasive formal acting debut—comes through Howard’s shop,
accompanied by Stanfield’s Demany, an associate who functions
as a liaison between Howard and wealthy black sportspeople, en-
tertainers, and entrepreneurs. (Set in 2012, the film is also able to
convincingly use footage from Garnett’s career, when he was still
playing for the NBA, at crucial narrative moments.) Though Gar-
PREVIOUS PAGE: COURTESY OF A24; THIS PAGE: PHOTO BY WALLY MCGRADY/COURTESY OF A24
nett has come with the expectation of buying a watch, Howard
initially tries to push jewels on him, most improbably his collec-
tion of ostentatious diamond-encrusted Furbies. Yet in a fortu-
itous moment, Howard receives a precious delivery while Garnett
is still in the store: quadruple-sealed and
hidden inside the cavity of a dead fish is
an uncut Ethiopian black opal, “straight
from an Ethiopian Jewish tribe,” gleaming
with a multitude of iridescent colors.
“They say you can see the whole
universe in opals,” Howard tells Garnett,
who’s so entranced by the gemstone’s
unreal blues and greens that his elbows
shatter the glass counter he’s intently
leaning on. Rather than play up this
moment with either earnest or parodic
awe, the Safdies simply nestle it within the
ongoing visual clutter and aural cacopho-
ny that’s making Howard’s day a nonstop
clusterfuck of city construction wails
and buzzes, phone alerts, and rat-a-tat
overlapping, Altman-esque chatter—all
competing with Daniel Lopatin’s heaving
synth- and chant-fueled score, dialed
way up on the soundtrack. Working with
cinematographer Darius Khondji for
the first time on a feature, the directors
keep the camera tight on faces, capturing every desperate wince,
wink, and grimace, while the dizzying editing, by Benny Safdie
and Ronald Bronstein, cuts us into every corner of the shop at
once, so the tiny, cramped business—in reality a studio set—feels
almost prismatic in its spatial realization. Provoking further anxi-
ety is the impenetrable entry vestibule, made of bulletproof glass,
which has a faulty locking mechanism—a device that will come
in handy as much as it will enhance danger.
Garnett’s got to have the opal, already seeing it as a good-luck
totem. Howard “reluctantly” agrees to let him have it for just one
night, taking the star’s Celtics ring as collateral. With no time to
waste, he pawns the ring, getting $21,000 cash, which he then im-
mediately hands over for a sure-thing bet, the trade-off occurring
in the din of a nearby restaurant’s kitchen. In a quick cutaway, the
Safdies show us a line cook, making minimum wage if he’s lucky,
eyeing the money-filled envelope so casually passed between the
men. It’s almost subliminal, but grounding: a reminder of how
haphazardly capital is thrown around, and that one person’s
necessity is another’s risk-taking game.
Howard comes to believe that Garnett will be his best bet once
the opal—which he values at possibly over a million—goes up
for auction. As it soon becomes clear, his hopeful scheme with
Garnett is just one of multiple crises Howard is juggling, all of
which are popping off around him with such rapidity that he
barely has a moment to stop and consider their moral, existen-
tial, or even professional ramifications. This is not a film—or
character—with time for reflection. We never know for sure if
Howard is a self-made man, but his current state of unrelenting
anxiety is surely self-inflicted. Married with three kids, Howard
has not long ago absconded from his family duties, leaving his
wife (Idina Menzel) and preadolescent sons and daughter in their
Long Island house for a Manhattan pad currently shared with his
much younger girlfriend and shop employee Julia (Julia Fox).
Fueling his desperation is the large sum of money Howard owes
to loan shark Arno (a very welcome Eric Bogosian, simmering
with disgust for everyone, including himself), who also happens
to be a member of Howard’s extended family. Even when he
scores, Howard can’t help betting away his money before paying
off his debt, which further infuriates Arno, whose Terminator-
like henchman (Keith Williams Richards) has no compunction of
conscience about intimidating Howard at his daughter’s school
play. Meanwhile, Garnett hasn’t returned the precious gem on
time, and Demany is being nerve-wrackingly elusive.
H
oward must maneuver through a narrative
that’s set like a series of spring traps, the favored
structural gambit of the Safdies, who appear
obsessive about perfecting the cinematic pos-
sibilities of a really bad day; After Hours seems
to be their Rosetta Stone, but at times, Uncut
Gems, with its escalating nightmares and close scrapes, feels like
Saul Bellow’s epochal proto-Roth Jewish novel Herzog or the
Coen Brothers’ terrifying Book of Job variation A Serious Man.
Though Howard has set in motion the hellish concatenation of
events to come, there is an overlying, nearly metaphysical fury
to his plight, personified in Sandler’s increasingly manic embod-
iment of “woe is me” existentialism. Howard is hardly a Job
figure, but if you see yourself as one, then what’s the difference?
It’s surely no coincidence—though it might be a tease—that the
Safdies set their film around Passover. During the family Seder,
we witness the ritual in which dinner guests chant in unison the
Ten Plagues of Egypt sent by God, as they dot their plates with
drops of bloodred wine. (“Boils! Locusts! Death of the firstborn!”)
The push-pull of victimization and retribution that can define
Jewish identity flows freely here, and feels fully inhabited by a
never-better Sandler, in the way he carries his body, in the way
he both lashes out and internalizes, and in his stooped posture
yet manic eyes, which are always darting around for the next big
score. As low as things get, Howard never appeals to a higher
power; his religious belief is more like that of the basketball fan
who prays to God that his team can score a three-pointer with a
few seconds on the clock—and then curses Him when it doesn’t.
It can’t be a merely aesthetic or referential decision that the
film begins—even down to the opening credit font—like Steven
Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark, that epic saga of mystic Jewish
revenge. In this preamble, set two years before the action proper of
the narrative, we witness the excavation of the film’s sought-after
gem, in a Welo mine in Ethiopia. Except here there’s no heroism,
just the aftermath of an injured miner’s gruesome accident; the
exploitation of this unnamed man hangs over the film. Soon,
the camera is traveling through the procured opal, literally into
its crystalline network of dazzling blues and greens. Perhaps as a
reminder of the violent circumstances of its provenance, the gem’s
beauty then becomes inseparable from viscera: the crystals have
given way to human innards, and we’re inside Howard Ratner’s
colonoscopy at his doctor’s office. It’s the film’s excellent first joke:
we’ve traveled to the other side of the world and when we come
out on the other end, we’re literally up Adam Sandler’s ass.
Adam Sandler’s Howard must maneuver
through a narrative that’s set like a series
of spring traps, the favored structural gam-
bit of the Safdies, who appear obsessive
about perfecting the cinematic possibilities
of a really bad day.
For a cherished object at the center of a runaway caper, the opal
itself often comes across as purposely underwhelming. Hardly the
stuff that dreams are made of, the uncut gem has little more than
whatever arbitrary value is put on it. It’s the treasure of the Sierra
Madre after the wind blows; it’s the Maltese Falcon after the pen-
knife strips it away; it’s bitcoin but with an auctioneer’s price tag.
It’s also, in the film’s final movement, quite clearly a red herring, a
way of getting us to a sweaty-palm climax, where the Safdies can
score what is surely their ultimate goal: a narrative resolution that
successfully forces even basketball agnostics to desperately care
about the outcome of a game, to make fandom into an almost
literal life-or-death situation. (“What is with you Jewish niggas
and basketball anyway?” Demany asks Howard at one point, and
he might as well be addressing Josh and Benny.) In an unreflective,
endlessly grasping materialist society such as ours, there always has
to be a win; there’s always a prize gleaming at the end of the road.
People are already talking about Adam Sandler’s awards chances,
after all. Even a proper Seder finishes with the search for the hid-
den Afikomen—a piece of matzoh, unleavened bread wrapped in a
napkin. Its literal value couldn’t be lower.
Near the close of the film, Howard seems to have found a
way to crawl out of his financial pit and save his own life. But
the promise of another bet, another hustle, one that could score
bigger than he’d ever dreamed, proves too much for him to resist.
It would have been enough. Dayenu. O
C LOS E R L OOK : Uncut Gems opens December 13.
November-December 2019 | F IL M CO MME N T | 41
 BURNING GAZE

ALL PHOTOS: © LILIES FILMS/COURTESY OF CINÉART

IN CÉLINE SCIAMMA’S PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE, ARTIST

AND SUBJECT BOND IN A STORY OF QUEER DESIRE THAT
CONSIGNS THE MYTH OF THE MUSE TO THE RUBBISH BIN
BY L AU R EN K A MI NSKY

4 2 | F ILM CO M MENT | November-December 2019


T
he invention of sexuality—that is, the notion
that self-expression involves categorizing our
desires—is only a little older than the technology of
film, so recent are these now fundamental ways of
understanding and depicting ourselves. Taking on
both traditions, Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady
on Fire essentially reworks the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice as a
queer feminist love story, using building blocks mined from the
cultural bedrock. Received as both a historical drama and as a
gay film, Portrait of a Lady on Fire won Best Screenplay at Cannes
and was the first movie directed by a woman to be awarded the
Queer Palm. Perhaps even more notable than its depiction of love
between women is the film’s approach to women artists as seen
by women artists, and its brilliance comes from the way it turns
centuries-old Western cultural traditions inside out so that all the
seams show. Queer stories are of course human stories, but this is
art that teaches us that human stories have long been queer.
Like Maggie Nelson’s poetic memoir The Argonauts, Sciamma’s
film deploys classical themes to trouble what we take for granted
about art, personhood, and our most animal passions. Nelson’s
title comes through Roland Barthes, for whom anyone “who
utters the phrase ‘I love you’ is like ‘the Argonaut renewing his ship
during its voyage without changing its name.’ Just as the Argo’s
parts may be replaced over time but the boat is still called the Argo,
whenever the lover utters the phrase ‘I love you,’ its meaning must
be renewed by each use, as ‘the very task of love and of language is
to give one and the same phrase inflections which will be forever
new.’” A love letter to her teachers, her partner, her children, and
the life she has built with them, Nelson’s book walks a thin line
between the interchangeability (her love invokes the love I feel, the
love you feel, and so on) and the ineffable singularity of her own
perverse pleasures, her lover’s elusive pronouns, and the specific-
ity of the queer kin she calls “the many-gendered mothers of my
heart.” Nelson replaces the parts on the reader’s own Argo over the
course of the book, so that after reading it you see your beloveds,
whoever they may be, in the light she shines on her queer ones.
Working on similar questions of singularity and replicability,
the release title of Sciamma’s film invokes the Henry James novel
CLO S ER L OO K : Portrait of a Lady on Fire opens December 6.
The Portrait of a Lady in English, while in French the less matronly
Portrait de la jeune fille invokes the titles of thousands of paintings
that line the walls of museums around the world. It is the name of
the painting chosen by an unsuspecting pupil in the first moments
of the film, the sight of which transports her stern art teacher to a
rowboat at what feels like the edge of the world. Marianne (Noémie
Merlant) clutches a boxed-up, saltwater-logged canvas while a surly,
silent Charon rows her to what seems like a deserted shore. Most of
the film takes place on an island off the coast of Brittany in 1770, be-
fore the Revolution abolished feudalism but after the region’s prime,
when its ports flourished with the Atlantic slave trade. Against this
backdrop, Portrait of a Lady on Fire foregrounds the utterly routin-
ized traffic in women by centuries-old marital custom.
Marianne has been hired by La Comtesse (Valeria Golino) to
paint her daughter, Héloïse (Adèle Haenel). Upon arrival, she is re-
ceived by the maid, Sophie (Luàna Bajrami), who explains that the
household is in mourning, because the other daughter is dead. The
camera stays close to the perspective of the painter as she slowly
comes to understand that Héloïse has been recalled from her con-
vent to take the place of her sister, who threw herself off a cliff to
avoid being exported in marriage. Héloïse refuses to sit for the por-
trait that will be sent to the wealthy Italian man who was to marry
her sister (the last painter tried and failed), so Marianne must
pretend to be a companion and do her work in secret. Wandering
the cavernous rooms, she sneaks up on her predecessor’s attempt
at a portrait, with its elaborate green dress and face-left-blank (as
interchangeable as the two sisters), still waiting to be filled in. It is
an avatar or picture bride from another era, a ghostly portrait of
privilege and lineage designed to seal the deal. The young girl’s face
may be more or less pretty, and the artist may be more or less tal-
ented, but the first failed portrait of Héloïse reminds us how little
any of that matters to the successful marriage transaction.
T
he new portrait of héloïse is sketched surrep-
titiously and painted at night. The first time Marianne
sees her subject she is hooded, walking ahead, and later
covering her face with a scarf to shield her nose and
mouth from the wind, her eyes wild. We are shown just
enough of Marianne to see her furtive glances, her eyes
occasionally resting a little too long. By this point, the proximity
of the camera to the painter’s perspective has taught us to regard
Héloïse as though we too will have to draw her from memory, care-
fully following the outlines of her body and the drape of her clothes
as the camera pans slowly to her hands resting on her lap. Attention
is indeed the first step of devotion, and it is to the credit of Sciamma
and cinematographer Claire Mathon that the viewer so thoroughly
identifies with the painter and comes to adore the muse. Adèle
Haenel plays the latter with aloof vulnerability, becoming a perfect
omnisexual object whose face changes like the weather.
Marianne finishes this second painting before we learn
Héloïse’s name, as though her identity flows from its represen-
tation. In comparison to Marianne’s work, the flat color of the
first painter’s attempt seems obscene, and when Marianne sets it
on fire it bursts into flame right at the heart of the faceless figure.
While Marianne’s own painting is still a secret, Héloïse begins to
come to life: she goes for a swim, walking into the water in her
slip; back at shore, a joke makes her smile for the first time. But
the revelation of the painting is a betrayal larger than the other
secret Marianne kept from Héloïse, who asks: “Is that how you
see me?” The painter mumbles something about the rules and
conventions of portraiture, not believing her own words. The
image may be banally faithful, but there is none of Héloïse’s pres-
ence in it, so Marianne paints over the face, leaving La Comtesse
little choice but to allow her to try again.
November-December 2019 | F IL M C O MM ENT | 43
 La Comtesse leaves the
island while they work, and
in her absence the house-
hold roles are reversed,
with Héloïse cooking and
Sophie doing embroidery.
Earlier, Héloïse explains to
Marianne her reasons for
choosing the life of the con- socially unrecogniz-
vent—“Equality is a pleas-
ant feeling”—and together
with Sophie they forge an
easy cross-class solidarity
bound by a shared sense of
constraints. Of the three,
The queerest thing
about Portrait of a
Lady on Fire is the way
it invites the viewer to
experience this ulti-
mately unchooseable,
able passion between
women by allowing
them to invent it for
themselves.
questions of agency, his and hers, trying on the idea that instead of
dumb fate or masculine failure they might find courage and desire,
cut with some alchemy of art and loss.
It emerges that Sophie is pregnant, and Marianne knows from
experience what to do, so the three women embark on a ten-
der, unsentimental search for an abortifacient. This takes them
to a village gathering, where Sophie makes arrangements with
the local midwife before talk is drowned out by a mesmerizing,
otherworldly chant. All the voices are women’s; indeed, everyone
in the scene, and almost everyone in the film, is a woman. Voices
build one by one until they become interlocking parts, the words
fragmented and repetitive, stripped of meaning and reduced to
sound. Drowned out by the cacophony, Héloïse turns to look
squarely at Marianne across the campfire. She looks down, sees
her dress on fire, and looks up again.

Héloïse is the highest born,
but she must marry because of her inherited property. In con-
trast, Marianne has no dowry, but she does have a family trade, a
combination that affords her independence. Sophie labors in La
Comtesse’s household instead of her own, but she is more or less
free to have sex outside of marriage. Even Héloïse’s sister’s tragic
fate was a choice constrained and produced by her class position
and the force of its obligations. But for a brief time, in the ab-
sence of the matriarch and the social conventions she represents,
the three women sit around drinking and playing cards late into
the night, undisturbed.
On one of these evenings, Héloïse reads aloud the story of Or-
pheus and Eurydice. Like the scene in Sciamma’s Tomboy (2011) in
which the title character, Laure/Mikäel, reads The Jungle Book to little
sister Jeanne—the tale of Mowgli and the bear depicting the combi-
nation of peril and friendship that awaits them in the jungle outside
their apartment—the characters of Portrait of a Lady on Fire read to
make sense of their lives. Sophie is incredulous that Orpheus lost Eu-
rydice forever by making the mistake of turning around. Marianne
suggests an alternative interpretation: perhaps he doesn’t make the
lover’s choice, but the poet’s, choosing to retain the memory of the
beloved. Héloïse counters by suggesting that maybe it was not only
his choice, maybe it was she who said “turn around.” They work on
L
ook at me,” marianne says in another scene, and
when Héloïse lifts her eyes to meet the camera it takes
your breath away. As they assume the roles of painter and
model, their relationship takes on a formal structure that
counterintuitively supports more intimacy and flirtation.
Their desire is bound up with Sophie’s pregnancy, which
is terminated on the midwife’s bed, which in turn is crawling with
children. “Look,” Héloïse tells Marianne, asking her to take in the
scene before them; Marianne turns away at the sight of the toddler
holding Sophie’s hand while she clenches against the pain. Back
at the house, Héloïse announces, “Get your things, we’re going to
paint,” and she and Sophie arrange themselves for Marianne: Sophie
lying down, Héloïse holding the midwife’s pose. Their painting of
the abortion may be a counterpoint to the betrothal painting, in
that both document the choices of women with few options.
Héloïse and Marianne share their first kiss in the caves along
the shore, and afterward Héloïse asks: “Do all lovers feel they are
inventing something?” Speaking old phrases made new, what they
invent is their Argo. The queerest thing about Portrait of a Lady
on Fire is the way it invites the viewer to experience this ultimate-
ly unchooseable, socially unrecognizable passion between women
by allowing them to invent it for themselves. Similarly, the film’s

4 4 | F I L M C O MM EN T | November-December 2019

only sex scene somehow manages to feel hardcore without resort-
ing to any of the conventions of simulated cinematic sex. Héloïse
has a tincture that one of the village women says will make her
feel like she’s flying, and she rubs it into her armpit. Then there’s
a shot of fingers penetrating an armpit, so close up that the exact
body part is barely discernible; nevertheless, it is flesh and fric-
tion so explicit that there can be no question that we are watching
sex, utterly disorganizing the sexual zones of the body.
It is tempting to describe the camera’s chiaroscuro as “painterly,”
but Portrait of a Lady on Fire is less like a completed painting than
like seeing an artist behold the model and an imperfect, unfin-
ished canvas. Héloïse asks, “How do we know when it’s finished?”
and Marianne replies, “At one point, we stop.” Haunted by a
vision of Héloïse in a wedding dress and resigned to finishing the
portrait, Marianne laments, “Through it, I give you to another.”
They quarrel. “Now that you possess me a little, you bear me a
grudge,” Héloïse says. They regret lost time, but Héloïse admon-
ishes, “Don’t regret, remember.” This imperative is double-edged:
Marianne creates a small portrait of Héloïse to keep for herself,
and Héloïse warns, “After a while you’ll see her when you think of
me.” The art that brought the lovers together can only drive them
further and further apart. When La Comtesse returns, the por-
trait is nailed into its coffin-like box, the way the canvas arrived,
and there are no adequate goodbyes. “Turn around,” Héloïse
calls at the door before she vanishes, receding into darkness like
Eurydice as the door slams behind Marianne.
“I saw her again a first time,” Marianne says in voiceover, the
first direct address to the audience. But what she sees is a portrait
in a gallery of Héloïse and her child, the book in Héloïse’s hand
turned to the page on which Marianne left a self-portrait, a secret
message sent through an unsuspecting painter. Marianne is at the
gallery showing her painting of Orpheus, which receives praise
but is assumed to be her father’s work. By giving us an artist who
paints classical themes, who happens to be a woman who fell in
love with a woman, the film seems to cut through some of our
cultural static about the male gaze by asking us to be less sure
that our collective stories only have one meaning—less sure that
our images were produced from a single perspective.
T
he second and final time marianne sees héloïse
is also the final scene in the film, which invokes
the ending of Call Me by Your Name. They are in a
concert hall, high in the box seats, but separated by
the vast open space of the theater. From that dis-
tance, the camera stays with Marianne as she regards
Héloïse, who does not turn her head. The painter claims her
muse did not see her, but the camera allows us to see the possibil-
ity that Héloïse may choose not to turn, making something like
the poet’s choice instead of the lover’s, choosing the pleasure of
being regarded and trusting that Marianne’s gaze will hold her.
Héloïse weeps, perhaps moved by the storm Vivaldi churns up in
her, perhaps mourning the loss of Marianne, perhaps both.
Even if Marianne is right and Héloïse really does not see her,
the last scene is not one of solitary sorrow like Elio’s self-contained
coming-of-age in the final scene of Call Me by Your Name, as tears
fall down his face before the fire. Portrait of a Lady on Fire ends
with Marianne and Héloïse still in a relationship with one another,
suspended in a state of longing that neither wants to break because
it makes them whole. The kernel of this intersubjectivity can be
found in earlier versions of Orpheus and Eurydice; what Sciamma’s
film foregrounds is the possibility that Eurydice may be calling the
shots, making Orpheus’s turn a relational gesture, giving it the mu-
tuality of a call and response. If art moves us, it can return to us the
feeling of looking at or of being beheld by a beloved. We watch the
muse moved by music through the eyes of the painter, both locked
in position by memory, transported by their pleasure and pain.
Like the Argo, the Orpheus and Eurydice story is durable enough
to maintain its integrity while changing its parts. Queering the an-
cients is perhaps the opposite of inserting gay characters into a famil-
iar narrative husk, which asks audiences to broaden the horizon of
the lovable just enough to let a few more people in. On the contrary,
Ovid and Virgil knew that any desire worth writing about makes the
lover more like a wounded animal than a lady or a gentleman; it is a
perversity of our times that we have had to relearn that. O
Lauren Kaminsky is a historian and the Director of Studies in
History and Literature at Harvard University.
November-December 2019 | F I LM COM M ENT | 45

H E R E ’S LOO KI NG AT YO U
CÉLINE SCIAMMA ON THE PATH OF
LOVE AND RESTORING LOST HISTORIES
BY AMY TAUBIN
This interview with the director of Portrait of a Lady on Fire took
place at Cannes, where the film premiered in competition.
To what degree were you thinking about the many movies
that have been made about a male artist and the woman who
inspired him?
I didn’t have to think much about that because basically we know
by heart the story as it has been told so far, so I didn’t have to craft
my answer to that. I wanted to tell another story, not didactically,
but in very emotional, sentimental, political ways. At the center
of the film is this idea that there is no muse, or that it’s a beautiful
word for hiding the reality of how women have been collaborating
with artists. I wanted to portray the intellectual dialogue and not
to forget that there are several brains in the room. We see how art
history reduces the collaboration between artists and their com-
panions: before, a muse was this fetishized, silent, beautiful woman
sitting in the room, whereas we now know that Dora Maar, the
“muse” of Picasso, was this great Surrealist photographer. And
Gabrièle Buffet-Picabia, the companion of Francis Picabia, was
intensely involved in his evolution. I wanted to portray the reality
of that in the process of actually making a film in strong collabo-
ration with my actresses.
And was that collaboration different, or more consciously a
EQNNCDQTCVKQPVJCPKP[QWTGCTNKGTƂNOU!
Yes, mostly because so far I’ve only worked with very young casts
that were nonprofessional—kids or teenagers that I chose who
became actresses in front of the camera. It’s not the same job at
all because when you work with nonprofessionals you are totally
in charge of their limits and there is no negotiating with that, so
there is this strong responsibility. Whereas with grown women and
professional actresses there are no limits and you can be surprised
by the collaboration between them. So it’s not even the same job.
It’s really the step I wanted to take with this film.
4 6 | F I L M C OM M EN T | November-December 2019
This is a great love story—and there are very few movies
about grownups and lesbian desire.
Well, there’s Carol, but when I discovered it here [in Cannes], I
felt exactly what you describe. I felt like I’ve rarely seen this.
In the sex scenes in this movie and their relationship to the
lives of these women’s minds, it’s more complex than Carol.
This is much more a give-and-take.
Yes, I was obsessed with an idea that grew more and more im-
portant in the process of actually making the film. The casting
really put the idea at the center of the film: I wanted a love story
with equality. It’s something you don’t get to see much, and I
think it’s something that is possible because of the queerness of
their story. As Héloïse says, it almost feels like they’re inventing
something. I knew Adèle [Haenel] would be there, but when I
met Noémie [Merlant] for the leading part, I was totally amazed
by this equality—the same age, the same height, this intensity—
and I thought, well, that’s the heart of the film: equality. Even
in friendship, even with Héloïse’s mother, and within the love
dialogue, there’s a horizontal conversation. Also, the artist is not
dominant—she is being looked at as much as she looks.
The other thing that is remarkable is that on this island, it’s re-
ally a community of women—there are no men there. Is there
a historical example of that?
It’s not that there are no men on the island, it’s just that they’re not
in the frame. I don’t picture the island as Wonder Woman’s, but
historically, if we are by the seashore, men would be navigators, so
women could be alone. I have read [people say] that this is an im-
possible love, but it’s not crafted at all as an impossible love. I read it
as a possible love, and all the potential of this relationship is in the
present of that love story. And because the film is built around the
fact that it’s the memory of a love story, even in the loss I wanted a
luminous path, and the fact that the feeling is alive and not tragic,
it doesn’t end. That love is emancipation, and the movie says it’s
something that can only grow, and it has a future. I didn’t want to
go with the boundaries, the conflict, the shame. I didn’t feel it was
even true to the time—the word didn’t even exist to define lesbian
love—so that’s why there are no men, because we know the frame,
we know they’re there.
Another remarkable scene is the abortion on the bed, with the
women taking care of one another’s bodies, being responsible
in that way, while there are children in the bed. It’s amazing.
We make films for the sake of a few scenes—the scenes that drive
you to build the whole thing—and of course this one was essential.
Again, I felt I hadn’t been given this image [by history]. That was the
most disturbing thing when I did my research about women paint- CÉLINE SCIAMMA: © CLAIRE MATHON/COURTESY OF NEON
ers at that time: I knew the stars—Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, Angelica
Kauffman—but I didn’t realize how numerous they were and that
there was a flourishing artistic scene. When I discovered the body of
work of those painters who were erased by art history, it was trou-
bling and sad, also because those images are consequently missing
from our lives. We are cut off from the story of our intimacy and
the portrayal of the hearts and desires and bodies and private lives
of these women, so I’m always trying to bring to life the images that
are missing. That doesn’t mean it should be a simple illustration—
it’s not about just having an abortion scene, it’s also finding your
own image, and a unique one. The infants consoling her as she gets
the abortion isn’t an illustration—it’s a new image within an image
that is already missing.
9J[FQ[QWWUG8KXCNFKoUp6JG(QWT5GCUQPUqKPVJGƂNO!#PF
what is the relationship between the discovery of a piece of
music and the discovery of being thought of that angle on that story. But but also at the heart of their love dialogue.
in love? it also is very cruel, because it means Because I wanted to portray very accurate-
I wanted the film not to have a score, which VJCVJGKUYKNNKPIVQUCETKƂEG'WT[FKEG ly—invoking all the tools of cinema—the
was kind of scary because making a love for a memory. delay, the frustration, the falling in love
story without a score is pretty challenging. Yeah, but there’s also the other point step-by-step. And I wanted to portray the
But I wanted the audience to be in the same of view, when Héloïse says that maybe intellectual process of falling in love, of
position as the characters regarding the arts Eurydice said “turn around.” I can’t decide feeling admiration for and surprise at the
and their unavailability—the frustration who’s right, but I really wanted her and mind of the person in front of you and
of that, and how art is so important in our Marianne to have strong intellectual how, suddenly, you create a language and
lives, and where we can find beauty. So debates and [for us] to see them think to- sparks. And that’s also why I can’t choose
when music appears, I wanted it to be strik- gether, within their [artistic] collaboration in the Orpheus analysis. O
ing and to get that feeling of how precious it
is. And I went for Vivaldi because I wanted
music that everybody knew, I wanted a hit,
so that the audience connects and will listen
to it again—it’s Vivaldi, but it’s also the
memory of Vivaldi. The movie talks a lot
about the importance of art in our lives
because it comforts us, and also how love
brings us to love art. That final shot has all
these layers.

And Haenel is such an amazing actress.

She’s the best. What can I say? We know each
other so well, so we had the confidence to
take the risk of building something totally
new for Adèle Haenel—how she pitches
her voice, how she moves... It’s a totally new
proposition.

Also she has been so comfortable

with contemporary roles, and this is a
RGTKQFƂNO
Yes, it would have been easy to say, well, she’s
going to bring back to life this woman from
the past, because she’s so from today, so it’s
going to be bursting in our faces. People
were expecting that when they knew Adèle
was in the cast. They also expected that she
was going to play the painter, because they
didn’t imagine... Some people were trying to
convince me that she should be the painter,
and I said no.

Were you thinking about her character’s

green dress in relation to the green
dress on Madeleine in Vertigo, when
,KOO[5VGYCTVƂTUVUGGUJGTYGCTKPIKV!
I didn’t think about that, but I thought
about Madeleine’s chignon when we first
discover Héloïse’s face. In the choreography
[of that scene in Portrait of a Lady on Fire],
at some point on a long walk we see her
hair from behind and there’s this chignon.
And of course this apparition evokes that
strong image from Vertigo.

Part of that is also the discussion of

the many ways to read the Orpheus
CPF'WT[FKEGO[VJ+ƂPFKVCEQORGN-
ling idea that perhaps Orpheus would
rather have the memory of her than
the actual person, because Orpheus is
an artist. I think very few people have

November-December 2019 | F IL M COM MEN T | 47

TRUE SOUTH
VETRI MAARAN’S SPRAWLING ACTION DRAMAS MAKE FOR A BLOODY—AND BLOODY
GOOD—PANORAMA OF TAMIL NADU’S SUBCULTURES AND UNDERCLASSES
BY R. EMMET SWEENEY
T
he most revelatory moviegoing experience i had
last year was seeing Vetri Maaran’s Vada Chennai
in a parking-garage movie theater in North Bergen
in New Jersey. It is an intricately plotted, stabbingly
violent gangster saga that is so richly detailed that I
could almost feel the texture of the leather hilts on
the machetes thrusting this Shakespearean tale of deception into
action. Intended to be part one of a trilogy, it is the third col-
laboration between the Tamil writer-director Vetri Maaran and
star Dhanush. Their films together are deeply researched dives
into Tamil subcultures, from the aimless unemployed youth of
the director’s raucous debut Ruthless Man (2007) to the cock-
fighters in the National Film Award–winning Arena (2011). Vetri
Maaran’s one film without Dhanush as a leading man is the art-
house-aimed Interrogation (2015), a harrowing story of migrant
laborers sucked into the torturous hell of the prison system;
premiered in Venice, it was India’s submission for the Academy
Award for Best Foreign Language Film.
Vetri Maaran and Dhanush rolled out their fourth collabora-
tion with Asuran (Tamil for “demon”), a bloody revenge drama
that opened worldwide in October. The new film furthers their
exploration of modern Indian history as one of unethical land
grabs: the hero is a rural farmer seeking vengeance against a
capitalist elite. Asuran is the latest in Vetri Maaran and Dhanush’s
formidable catalogue of underclass action melodramas that
should be much better known outside of India.
In the West, Indian cinema has become synonymous with
Hindi-language Bollywood productions, despite the existence
of thriving regional film industries outside of Mumbai, whose
products are becoming more and more popular at the national
level. The top-grossing Indian films of the last two years were the
Tamil-language 2.0 (2018, made in Chennai, aka the home of
Kollywood) and the Telugu- and Tamil-language Baahubali 2: The
Conclusion (2017, shot in Hyderabad, aka the home of Tollywood).
In the introduction to the essay collection Beyond Bollywood: The
Cinemas of South India, M.K. Raghavendra argues that Bolly-
wood’s publicity advantage is due to the fact that “Hindi main-
stream cinema has been a national cinema in a way that regional-
language cinemas have not.” Speaking directly to their populace,
regional cinemas revel in specificity, which explains some of the
appeal of a Tamil director like Vetri Maaran, who spends years
researching neighborhoods before shooting his films.
Vetri Maaran was born in Cuddalore, Tamil Nadu, about 120
miles from state capital Chennai, in 1975. His mother is noted
novelist Megala Chitravel and his father is a veterinary scientist.
Vetri Maaran’s old friend and assistant Manimaran recalled that
the director would skip classes and go to the movies, “each three
or four times. Then he would come to the school ground . . . and
would retell the whole story to us.” His films have a tumbling
narrative flow, with stories branching into stories, that suggests
something similar to these early oral recaps. He went on to pursue
4 8 | F ILM CO M MEN T | November-December 2019
a master’s degree in English
literature but dropped out
after attending a seminar by
director Balu Mahendra, who
hired him to be his assistant.
Mahendra was an adaptable
filmmaker who could shift
from a blockbuster film (Un
Kannil Neer Vazhindal, 1985)
to a small-scale drama about
Vetri a woman’s struggles to build
Maaran a house (Veedu, 1988). It’s a
strategy that Vetri Maaran
seems to have emulated early in his own career.
One of his first jobs for Mahendra was on the television series
Kadhai Neram (1999), which adapts 52 short stories into just as many
episodes. Vetri Maaran had to read 50 to 60 short stories each week,
highlight a couple, and present condensed versions to Mahendra.
This crucible of concision taught him how to edit as well as find
the essential kernel of a story. Later, on the set of Mahendra’s drama
Adhu Oru Kana Kaalam (2005), he first met and became friends with
Dhanush. In Tamil Nadu, movies are a way of life, with fandom so
obsessive that its biggest contemporary star, the 68-year-old
Rajinikanth (aka Super Star Rajini), is worshipped with fervent inten-
sity (the documentary For the Love of a Man captures this phenom-
enon) and others have been elected to state office. Accordingly, the
way Vetri Maaran has been able to get his films funded and produced
is through his collaborations with Dhanush, a younger (36-year-old)
multiplatform star who also happens to be Rajinikanth’s son-in-law.
T
he rail-thin dhanush emits a distanced cool
that he can shape into a variety of packages, including
the outrageous gangster of the enormously successful
Maari films (2015 and 2018) and the more down-at-
heel protagonists of his Vetri Maaran projects, where
he hardens that coldness into an icy reserve. Their first
film together was Ruthless Man, in which Dhanush—tousle-haired,
VETRI MAARAN: © 2016 SILVERSCREEN MEDIA INC.
wiry, and aloof—plays an aimless lower-middle-class Chennai youth
named Prabhu who borrows his father’s savings to buy a prized
Pulsar motorbike. When it is stolen, something snaps inside of him,
and he tracks its location through a series of chop shops and gang
hideouts presided over by Selvam (Kishore, a vulpine Vetri Maaran
regular), until Prabhu retrieves it via a kinetic, bloody brawl.
When asked if Ruthless Man was inspired by Bicycle Thieves,
Vetri Maaran modestly described the comparison as a “disgrace” to
Bicycle Thieves, stating that his film was based on a true story told
to him by one of his friends. In any case, it was a surprise hit and
became something of a touchstone for rebellious youth at the time
(it even caused a spike in Pulsar sales). Ruthless Man establishes
Vetri Maaran’s street-level view of Chennai, which is present in all
of his features. He focuses on a neighborhood and then builds it
 ASURAN: STIL ROBERT & MU. BASKAR PRASANTH; INTERROGATION: STIL ROBERT

Asuran

Interrogation

November-December 2019 | F ILM C OM MEN T | 49


block-by-block as the story
sends Dhanush on a descent
Vetri Maaran’s stories
into the most dangerous have the ability to flow
parts of the city. Vetri out in every direction in
Maaran dismisses his debut space and time without
as a “mediocre masala film,”
and it certainly feels more
getting lost in the flood.
simplistic than his later
work, with his most linear
narrative and clumsy (though catchy) musical sequences that
interrupt the narrative flow. But it is already identifiably a Vetri
Maaran film, with its attentiveness to outsider communities and
sinuous location photography, shot by his regular DP R. Velraj.
In preparation to shoot his next film, Arena, which reteamed him
with star Dhanush and music director G.V. Prakash Kumar, Vetri
Maaran dedicated two years to research in the Tamil city of Madurai,
learning its lifestyle and dialect. The result is a kaleidoscopic portrait
of the ritualized nature of cockfighting in Madurai. It circles two life-
long foes: police Inspector Rathnasamy (Naren) and poverty-strick-
en Pettaikaran (V.I.S. Jayapalan, a Sri Lankan poet making his film
debut). It is a film about masculine pride and its endless spiraling
insecurities. Both Rathnasamy and Pettaikaran have devoted their
lives to cockfighting. Though Rathnasamy has a prestigious job and
Pettaikaran looks the part of saintly self-sacrifice, both have been
corrupted by the barbaric intensity of the sport. Rathnasamy is a
bribe-taking dirty cop, and Pettaikaran a huckster spiritualist. They
have battled each other for a lifetime, and now have to entrust their
feud to the next generation. This includes rooster trainers Durai
(Kishore) and Karuppu (Dhanush), who are starting to rebel against
Pettaikaran’s old-fashioned attitudes. Jealousies and resentments
build until Karuppu’s whole world comes crashing down, including
his romance with the English-speaking girl next door, whose family
bristles at their daughter dating such a low-class specimen.
5 0 | F IL M C O MME NT | November-December 2019
Vada Chennai
These are lives built on rigid tradition, and Vetri Maaran details
every step of the cockfighting process, from training to battle
strategy. He and Velraj utilize low-angle tracking shots to give a
sense of scale to the proceedings, making these illegal backyard
cockfights feel like the Super Bowl. The birds themselves battle
in CGI, and while they won’t earn the film any FX awards, Vetri
Maaran wrings tension out of the reaction shots, which register
each talon blow as a personal affront. He also incorporates the
musical elements as more organic components of the story instead
of cutting to a set. Here the songs emerge naturally from the action.
Vetri Maaran fills the 156-minute running time with an un-
countable cast of indelible characters who provide a thumbnail
portrait of the Madurai cockfighting underworld, while utilizing
a time-shifting structure as a means of controlling tempo, often
toggling back a few days to fill in a random detail. His stories have
the ability to flow out in every direction in space and time without
getting lost in the flood. Arena and Vada Chennai both reminded
me of Mariano Llinás’s 14-hour La Flor at different points, in that I
thought they could go on forever and I would not complain.
A
rena would become another box office success
and garner even more critical praise—winning six
times at the National Film Awards (including Best
Director). At this point Vetri Maaran founded his
production house Grass Root Film Company, which
VADA CHENNAI: STIL ROBERT
funds films on subjects close to his heart, including
M. Manikandan’s Kaaka Muttai (2014), the bittersweet fable of two
slum kids trying to earn enough money to buy a slice of pizza for the
first time. It’s a story of gentrification, with developers tearing down
the kids’ old playground to feed the emerging middle class. Bureau-
cratic corruption is a theme that emerges again and again in Vetri
Maaran’s work, from the films he has produced—like Poriyaalan
(2014), a thriller about fraudulent construction paperwork—to his
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more recent directorial efforts, Interrogation and Vada Chennai.
Interrogation, co-produced by (though not starring) Dhanush,
is about three Tamil workers who are forced to leave home and seek
employment in the neighboring state of Andhra Pradesh. They
sleep in a public park and work odd jobs as daily-wage laborers,
sending money home when they can spare it. Then one day,
they are arrested for a theft they did not commit and beaten and
tortured until they confess to the crime. With pressure from above,
the cops just want to close the case, and these laborers, who don’t
speak the local language, are easy targets for a forced confession.
The film was adapted from the novel Lock Up (2006) by auto
rickshaw driver M. Chandrakumar, who based it on his own real-life
experiences. It is Vetri Maaran’s most politically outspoken film
(although the police are portrayed as thuggish and corrupt in all of
his work) in its depiction of a dehumanizing descent into a justice
system that seems to run solely on bribery and influence. Lacking the
same narrative motility as his other features, the film instead focuses,
almost to the point of repetition, on the absurd brutality of the
workers’ plight. In other words, it is effective as a polemic but not so
much as cinema. Likely due to its thematic import, Interrogation won
India’s National Film Award for best feature. Vetri Maaran was now
thrust into the forefront of Indian cinema alongside personal heroes
like Mani Ratnam, director of the iconic Dil Se (1998), whose praise
of Interrogation was used in its promotional videos. Vetri Maaran told
Film Companion South that, “Tamil cinema has only had two people
we can really call filmmakers. Only they have had the command and
control over the film language. One is Balu Mahendra and the other is
Mani Ratnam. I don’t even call myself a filmmaker.”
A director closer to his generation, and one who was a heavy
influence on Vada Chennai, is Hindi-language filmmaker Anurag
Kashyap. Also in his forties, Kashyap overcame battles with cen-
sorship early in his career and went on to create the epic, two-part
crime saga Gangs of Wasseypur (2012), one of the models for Vada
Chennai. Kashyap reportedly was the one who urged Vetri Maaran
to expand the film beyond one feature. Having had three critical
and box-office successes by then, Vetri Maaran followed suit and
undertook his most ambitious project yet, one he started writing
in 2003 and that endured endless production delays.
V
ada chennai depicts the origin and influence
of one self-interested gang on a North Chennai
slum over two decades. Vetri Maaran’s initial cut
was five and a half hours, which he cut down to 164
minutes before release. It is the densest film he’s
ever made, with the story threading outward from
each scene, as it takes in the cultural and political earthquakes that
shook Chennai between 1987 and 2003, from the death of M.G.
Ramachandran and the assassination of Indian Prime Minister
Rajiv Gandhi to the screening of a Rajinikanth film in prison. It
has as intricate a flashback structure as any film I’ve seen, jumping
through the intervening years to fill in backstories and delay piv-
otal revelations. The editing by G.B. Venkatesh is whiplash-tight
and the plot is beautifully complicated and full of shocking
betrayals (led most memorably by its Lady Macbeth, a cunning
widow named Chandra, played by Andrea Jeremiah).
Dhanush produced the film and stars as Anbu, a promising
carrom player (it’s a tabletop game, like billiards with checkers)
who gets drawn into a gang war between Guna (Samuthirakani,
the only good cop in Interrogation) and Senthil (Kishore, calmly
malevolent). Criminality had been a way of life in the slum since
its inception, when Rajan (Ameer Sultan) brought in pirated
goods to sell in the city. But Guna is the new man in charge, and
he has joined up with local developers in a plan to build a road
5 2 | F IL M C O MM EN T | November-December 2019
through the slum, whose
There are a million people would be relocated
stories in Tamil Nadu, to public housing further
and Vetri Maaran and inland. Seeing this as a
company will try to tell siege on his ancestral home,
Anbu starts to organize a
them all before they resistance. There are no
disappear via a devel- full-blown song-and-dance
oper’s wrecking ball. sequences, though the bril-
liantly propulsive theme by
Santhosh Narayanan, which
uses a cappella voices as choral instruments like Ennio Morricone
did, conveys enough foreboding without the need for words.
Vada Chennai balances a growing multiplicity of storylines, and
there is a thrill in their telling, especially in Vetri Maaran’s most elab-
orate setpieces: an assassination in a slowly collapsing awning and a
nighttime brawl in the slum where Anbu uses his knowledge of the
geography to his violent advantage. And I haven’t even mentioned
Anbu’s tempestuous courting of Padma (Aishwarya Rajesh), whom
he meets when she steals his (stolen) sewing machine during a riot.
Much of Tamil cinema, including Vetri Maaran’s, has a woman prob-
lem: they are always shunted into girlfriend or wife roles and rarely
have more to do than be romanced (there is also a dearth of female
filmmakers). It is a problem in Vada Chennai as well, though the
character of Chandra, with her white-hot coal of hatred that burns
through the last third of the film, is a fine first step toward more
dynamic female characters in Vetri Maaran’s work.
Vetri Maaran has only made five movies in 12 years due to his
exhaustive research process, so the shooting and release of Asuran
in under a year was surprising. In interviews he has admitted to
the immense stress caused by the time frame (the release date was
announced with 15 days left to shoot, and only 40 days to com-
plete post-production). He was unable to supervise the dubbing
and color timing as on previous projects, having to focus entirely
on the edit. Though it’s not as complexly structured as Vada
Chennai, it’s remarkable that Asuran is as cohesive as it turned
out to be. Adapted from Poomani’s novel Vekkai, translated
into English this year, it depicts the violent family feud between
alcoholic farmer Sivasamy (Dhanush) and yet another evil land
developer, Narasimhan (Aadukalam Naren, nicknamed after the
Tamil title of Arena, which gave him his star-making turn). While
the book takes place over seven days, Asuran expands it to span
generations. Vetri Maaran again uses a flashback structure, which
fills in Sivasamy’s brutal youth as a lower-caste liquor brewer: the
wounds he suffered back then turning him against violence—un-
til personal tragedy pulls him back to wielding a blade. It is Dha-
nush’s most moving performance to date, as he adds gravel to his
voice and a hitch to his step to embody a broken old man, barely
keeping his family together as Narasimhan schemes to acquire
their small farm. But, like a Tamil Rambo, Sivasamy can only
be pushed so far; his last act is one of limb-severing vengeance,
scored to a propulsive beat by Prakash Kumar.
This time, I watched Vetri Maaran’s latest in Times Square among
the Jokers and the Abominables, though the director’s older features
remain hard to come by with English subtitling on U.S. streaming
services. But with each film, Vetri Maaran and his collaborators have
refined and condensed their style to the point where they can pack
in limitless narrative possibilities, creating local hits that deserve
worldwide recognition. There are a million stories in Tamil Nadu,
and Vetri Maaran and company will try to tell them all before they
disappear via a developer’s wrecking ball. O
R. Emmet Sweeney produces DVDs and Blu-rays for Kino Lorber.
 TRAILBLAZER • FEMINIST • ARTIST

Her final film and a career-spanning retrospective

Opens November 22: Varda by Agnès • December 20–January 9: Varda Retrospective

Tickets: filmlinc.org
Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center 144 West 65th Street
Walter Reade Theater 165 West 65th Street

These projects are supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts. New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.
Image: Varda by Agnès, courtesy of Janus Films
T H E LO N G R OA D A H E A D

Test Pattern

T
here is a familiar beat to on-screen stories about rape survivors
attempting to reclaim the control that was taken from them. These stories
often either open with or build up to the moment when a woman is sexually
assaulted, then lead their protagonists through an arc of self-actualization
and revenge. In fact, they make up an entire subgenre that zigzags across
drama, horror, thriller, and action, from The Accused (1988) to Teeth (2007)
to Hannie Caulder (1971) to Avenged (2013) to Lipstick (1976) to Ms. 45 (1981).
Perhaps the most recognizable modern film that exploited these tropes and then rear-
ranged them for a broad audience is Thelma & Louise, Ridley Scott’s 1991 classic starring
Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis. Plenty of rape-revenge films predated Thelma & Louise,
but it continues to linger in the pop-cultural
imagination some 28 years after its release.
Now, Test Pattern, the debut feature by
writer-director Shatara Michelle Ford,
offers a fresh way of examining sexual as-
sault and its aftermath on screen, one that
feels just as emblematic of its moment as
was Thelma & Louise.
Test Pattern is a quiet, meditative exam-
ination of what one Austin woman goes

5 4 | F IL M C O MM ENT | November-December 2019

 HOW CAN THE MOVIES ADDRESS THE EXPERIENCE OF SEXUAL ASSAULT
AND ITS AFTERMATH IN ALL ITS COMPLEXITY? SORAYA NADIA MCDONALD
REFLECTS UPON ONE NEW FILM’S ATTEMPT

through after she experiences a weed-and-
alcohol-soaked assault. Ford asks viewers
of Test Pattern to immerse themselves in
the consciousness of her protagonist, Re-
nesha (Brittany S. Hall), as she attempts to
make sense of the events she’s experienced
and figure out what to do about them.
Renesha has a support system—a loving
boyfriend, admiring friends, respectful
work colleagues—and yet she’s repeatedly
failed by the individuals and institutions
that are supposed to support her. And be-
cause she’s a black woman, Renesha seems
to expect this. She’s almost resigned to it,
in a way that her white boyfriend cannot
see and does not understand.
The new film enters a still-changing
landscape. In October 2017, when The New
York Times reporters Megan Twohey and
Jodi Kantor and The New Yorker reporter
Ronan Farrow published news stories
exposing Harvey Weinstein’s years of alleged
sexual abuse toward Hollywood actresses,
an avalanche was activated. One explosive
news story after another of harassment and
assault rolled through the culture; as a result,
public conversation grew wider and more
nuanced as women began to discuss not just
sexual abuse but also all of the social graces,
ambiguities, and shame that kept it quiet

November-December 2019 | F I LM C OM ME NT | 55
and allowed it to flourish. It was as though
Thelma & Louise
half of society had been hemmed in for de-
cades, if not longer, by invisible chicken wire.
Then the boundaries became less clear
as public discussion flowed from behavior
that was easy to identify and condemn,
like Weinstein’s, and like that in Thelma &
Louise and the many rape-revenge films
that predated it, to the murkier, more
uncomfortable, but oh-so-real situations
like those depicted in Test Pattern. The
conversation moved past the immediate,
visceral violence of rape to rape culture
and the behaviors, attitudes, and mores
that perpetuate it. Rape culture was finally
being taken seriously beyond the academy
and the circles of feminists who had been
trying to convince the public for years
about its insidious presence in society.
Now, it was front page news, in the U.S.

and across the world, on a daily basis.
Test Pattern is not the only work contrib-
uting to this evolution in our understanding
of rape culture. Others include the exquisite,
if harrowing, Netflix limited series Unbe-
lievable, from showrunner Susannah Grant,
based on a true story first reported by The
Marshall Project and ProPublica about a
Washington woman who was jailed and
accused of making a false police report while
her rapist went on to attack other women,
employing the same modus operandi he’d
used on her. Other relevant contemporary
films include Jennifer Kent’s The Nightingale,
which provides a graphic, unflinching de-
piction of the assault of an Irish convict sent
to a penal colony in 19th-century Australia.
There’s also Share, from director Pippa Bian-
co, which follows a teenage girl as she sobers
up after a house party and begins to realize
that she was assaulted during an alcohol-in-
duced blackout. She starts to piece together
what happened in the missing hours when
pictures and video of her at the party go
viral at her high school.
Test Pattern provides a distinctly
American story of sexual assault. Not only
does it illuminate the contempt with which
the U.S. legal system treats women, it also
examines how the race of the victim and
perpetrator affects such treatment, and the
burden that black women have learned to
L
et’s revisit thelma & louise for a moment to understand what it
accomplished. Its titular characters—tidy, no-nonsense Arkansas waitress
Louise (Sarandon) and abused housewife Thelma (Davis), who is perpetually
quaking with fear because of the unpredictable temperament of her con-
trolling ogre of a husband, Darryl (Christopher McDonald)—decide to go
on a fishing trip. But their plans go awry when Thelma is sexually assaulted
by a stranger in the parking lot of a bar and Louise shoots and kills Thelma’s attacker.
From then on, the duo is on the run, Thelma & Louise, through its popularity,
and the two formerly well-behaved women cultural ubiquity, and basic cable–television
journey through the American West in edits, has become somewhat laundered and
Louise’s 1966 convertible Thunderbird. As divorced from the darkness that propels it.
they barrel toward Mexico, survival becomes It is widely regarded as a feminist film, and
an improvisational art form, and the parable yet rape and abuse are hardly what linger in
of screenwriter Callie Khouri’s tale becomes the mind when recalling it. Instead, we think
clear: Thelma and Louise’s extralegal actions of Thelma’s swagger as she makes her way
were forced, squeezed out of them by a back to the Thunderbird. We think of her
society that protects violent men more than it momentary euphoria in jumping on a motel
does the female victims of their wrath and en- bed with new male ingenue Brad Pitt, rather
titlement. Nowhere is this quite so explicit as than the cash he stole from her, which was
the scene in which the two women are pulled Louise’s life savings. We think of two women
over by a state trooper as they’re speeding on a road trip of empowerment.
toward the Grand Canyon. The heretofore jit- Unlike Thelma & Louise, there is no clear
tery, anxious, and defeated Thelma, unwilling path back to self-possession in Test Pattern.
and unready to go to jail, takes charge. The That’s in part due to the time frame in which
officer leaves Thelma in the passenger seat of the events of both movies unfold. Thelma
the Thunderbird while he takes Louise and & Louise takes place over several days. The
her driver’s license to his patrol car. bulk of Test Pattern follows Renesha over the
Louise sits beside the officer, frozen course of about 12 hellacious hours, when
and panicked, unable to think straight. she goes out for a celebratory drink with a
And then Thelma rescues her, suddenly friend, Amber (Gail Bean). She and Renesha
THELMA & LOUISE: © MGM/PHOTOFEST

bear because of it. Just as Thelma & Louise
became a snapshot of the early ’90s, Test
Pattern creates one for 2019. It captures the
frustrations and pains of a new generation
of women fighting the same old battles,
then broadens those considerations with
an intersectional lens. Ford’s film made
its world premiere earlier this year at the
Blackstar Film Festival in Philadelphia, and
should it find distribution, ought to leave
just as indelible a mark as its predecessor.
appearing at the officer’s window, holding a
gun to his head. She directs Louise to shoot
the police radio; the officer begs for mercy.
After stuffing him in the trunk of his own
car, and shooting the air out of his tires,
the women return to Louise’s Thunderbird
with the officer’s belt and his aviator sun-
glasses. Thelma is a new woman, reborn,
and baptized in the burnt-orange dust of
the desert. Whatever comes afterward is
incidental. She’s reclaimed herself.
begin to party with two men in the bar, Mike
(Drew Fuller) and Chris (Ben Levin), who
are both white. Amber eggs on the reluc-
tant Renesha. The foursome all take edibles
together, and continue to drink. They dance,
then depart, and Renesha, alone with Mike
and unable and unwilling to affirmatively
consent to sex, is raped.
Renesha actually spends quite a bit more
time with her rapist than Thelma does.
One, because she has to sober up, and two,

5 6 | F I L M C OMM ENT | November-December 2019

 because he’s not a monster with a gun. He’s
a good-looking charmer. It’s not until Mike
realizes that he and Renesha are not on the
same page about the night that he turns cold
and cruel in the wee hours of the dawn. He
drives Renesha to Amber’s house and prac-
tically dumps her in the middle of the street
before speeding off into obscurity, leaving
Renesha shaken and deeply unsure of herself.
In a way, Renesha and Amber are the
inverse of Thelma and Louise. They are
middle-class professional black women.
Renesha is in a healthy, loving relationship
with her boyfriend, Evan (Will Brill), who
is also white. Neither of them are attempt-
ing to escape anything, really. They have
normal, good lives. If the arc of Thelma &
Louise leads toward a tragically triumphant
reclamation of agency, Test Pattern instead
grows smaller, taking the viewer deeper and
deeper into Renesha’s psyche. Evan is wait-
ing for her at Amber’s house after staying
up the whole night sick with worry. And
once she is back in his arms, he launches
into hero mode. Evan takes charge with a
mixture of helplessness and righteous fury.
He turns to the mechanisms he believes will
serve Renesha because they have, without
fail, without question, always served him.
And so he has to experience firsthand
a lesson that Renesha has already learned:
that the social institutions in which he’s
placed so much faith have little regard for his
girlfriend. He refuses to let her shower, and
instead drags her from hospital to hospital in
search of a rape kit. He angrily demands that
the Austin police pursue Renesha’s rapist,
who is little more than a cipher. He exhausts
her, and Renesha is victimized anew because
she’s had no time to process what’s taken
ALL PHOTOS FROM TES T PATTERN CO URTE SY OF SHATARA M ICHELLE F ORD
place, or how she feels about it, or what she
wants to do about it.
In Unbelievable and other works, we
see how sexual assault survivors are often
revictimized by the criminal justice system.
Test Pattern
They’re forced to repeat their accounts, often
to male officers, over and over and over.
They face apathy from law enforcement, or
disbelief. An officer’s misogyny may color THE
how he treats a woman seeking help, and C O M M E N TA R Y
determines whether or not he believes she is
deserving of it. Test Pattern is deeper, more C O N T I N U E S E AC H
granular, more focused on Renesha’s day-
   W
  E E K ON
to-day life and the little aftershocks that will
follow her forever. But on top of that, all of
the typical questions and emotions racing
through Renesha’s mind as a survivor—the C 7 4  F I L M
guilt she feels, the shame, the “how did this
happen to me?”—are a sideshow to Evan’s
pain. And all of it is a result of how Renesha’s
COMMENT
P O D C A S T
T
assault took place.
he scene in thelma & louise
in which Thelma is attacked is
horrifying and unambiguously
violent. We see how quickly RECENT &
Thelma’s good-natured flirting UPCOMING
turns to terrified bargaining
with her assailant, how seamlessly he seems E P I S O D E S
to turn off his womanizing charms in favor
of brute force. This is how we understood
that sexual assault took place in the ’90s,
57th New York Film
how we could recognize and condemn it. Festival: Talks and
Test Pattern complicates everything about Interviews
sexual assault and its aftermath with its
subtle layers, with its narrative structure,
even with the races of its protagonist and
Pedro Almodóvar and Pain
antagonist. It’s one of the few films about a and Glory
black woman who is sexually assaulted by a
white man set in the context of modern-day Bong Joon-ho
America, not enslavement. Usually when a and Parasite
black woman experiences interracial rape
on film, racial domination is central to the Filmmaker Talk:
attack. But Renesha isn’t raped because she’s
the property of someone else, or because
Robert Eggers on
she’s integrating a school in the middle of The Lighthouse
the 20th century, or because she’s a domes-
tic working in a white family’s house—all Horrific=^]7^aa^a
of which were extremely common circum-
stances for black women in history, existing
Listen and subscribe on
Soundcloud, iTunes,
Spotify, Google Play, or
BcXcRWTa
November-December 2019 | F IL M COM MEN T | 57
right alongside lynching as a form of social
tyranny and control.
But Mike and Renesha meet as equals,
when Mike and his friend Chris sidle up to
her and Amber in a near-empty bar. They
interact in a way that suggests that Mike
thinks of himself as personally post-racial.
They’re certainly both liberals. Mike doesn’t
seem to be seeking Renesha’s attention
because of her blackness; he doesn’t fetishize
it. If anything, Mike very likely thinks of
himself as enlightened because he’s attracted
to an assortment of women, regardless of
race or ethnicity. It’s a Monday, and Renesha
has work in the morning. But Chris has
overheard her and Amber discussing poli-
tics, and neither he nor Mike will go away
when Renesha says they’re having a girls’
night. The polite “nos” they both issue just
don’t seem to register or matter. Renesha re-
luctantly agrees to stick around because she’s
a good wingwoman, and both Amber and
Mike cajole her into doing more than she
intended. Amber urges her to drink more, to
eat the cannabis gummy Chris offers. “I hate
weed,” she tells Amber.
Mike presses Renesha to dance, turning
on a charm offensive that makes it clear
that he won’t relent until she’s twirling with
him. At that point, the offensive begins
again—Mike tries twice to kiss her. He’s
unsuccessful. But as the THC works its
way through Renesha’s body, her defenses
weaken. Mike lands a kiss. Renesha tries to
leave, and stumbles toward the bar’s exit. As
she does, and Mike follows, the strings of
Robert Ouyang Rusli’s score grow louder,
more dissonant and menacing. Mike drives
Renesha to his apartment. Once there,
Renesha has no fight left in her.
Where Thelma & Louise is clear and
resolute, Test Pattern is characterized by haze.
Its bar scene is in direct conversation with the
one in Thelma & Louise and the world as we
have come to know it post–Weinstein revela-
tions. The viewer is subjected to both dread
and confusion as Test Pattern draws us closer
to the asymptote along which victim-blam-
ing is assessed. Renesha does not enter the
bar as a victim, the way Thelma does, but as
someone who is by all appearances in com-
plete control of her life and where it’s going.
She has a career that she’s steered toward her
passions, a live-in boyfriend whom she made
the decision to pursue. Test Pattern offers up a
question that is uncomfortable to parse in our
modern age: how does a sensible woman like
Renesha become a sexual assault survivor?
And then it serves up more questions:
how long are we willing to empathize with a
woman who does not fit the description of
a perfect victim because she chose to drink
more, because she chose to take an edible?
58 | F IL M C O MM EN T | November-December 2019
Test Pattern
How far are we willing to walk in her shoes?
To believe her, and to believe that what she
experienced, when she could barely hold a
glass of water in her hand without spilling it,
was, in fact, rape?
Those questions are evident in the
way Ford shoots Renesha’s interactions
with Mike: whirly, slightly escapist, a little
bit flirty. Every time she establishes her
boundaries, someone else pushes past
them, and the easiest way not to be a
spoilsport or a bad friend is simply to go
along, because women are socialized to ac-
commodate. The performances from Hall
and Fuller are extraordinarily metered,
especially because there is far less dialogue
in Test Pattern than in Thelma & Louise.
It is truly up to the viewer to decide what
he or she sees in Mike and Renesha. Had
the night gone differently, it wouldn’t be
out of the question to wonder if Renesha
might begin an affair with Mike, whose
behavior is not so much violently pushy
as firmly assertive, and then simply selfish.
The two are enjoying each other, breathing
in each other’s sexual chemistry. And then
their wants and needs diverge, with Mike’s
S
persistence ultimately winning out.
o much of our discussion
about the sexual assault of
women revolves around abso-
lutes that determine whom we
believe, who is worthy of our
sympathies, and who is taking
a bad date and choosing to turn it into
a lifelong trauma. We’re conditioned, in
all sorts of ways, to judge victims so that
we may offer assurance to ourselves that
such a terrible thing could never happen
to us. We wouldn’t drink so much. We
wouldn’t take drugs from strangers. We
wouldn’t dance suggestively with a man
who was not our boyfriend. We wouldn’t,
we wouldn’t, we wouldn’t.
Films both shape that conditioning
and reflect it back to us. The work of Scott
and Khouri seems to have internalized the
mental gymnastics surrounding rape in
the ’80s and ’90s. The presence of a gun,
after all, is what compels Thelma to submit
to her attacker, even as she’s crying and
begging him to recognize her humanity
and his own ugliness. Sympathy comes
easily to the viewer. But for Renesha, every-
thing is much more complicated. She is a
woman who is joyful about her life and is
fully in charge of it. That doesn’t mean that
she does not move through the world car-
rying the weight of wrongheaded histori-
cal assumptions about black women and
their supposed inviolability. It means she’s
mastered the trick of feigning lightness.
Ford illustrates that point with a conversa-
tion between Renesha and Amber early in
the evening, when it’s just the two of them
catching up. They grouse about the deaths
of Sandra Bland and Botham Jean with an
intimacy that comes from being able to
speak frankly with a fellow traveler who is
making her way through a daily murk of
white supremacy.
Ford forces her audience to rethink ev-
erything that scares us about sexual assault,
because it reveals how so many women are
succeptible to it, even the ones we believe
carry some level of immunity from it. As
we move past the alleged ghoulishness of
men like Weinstein or Bill Cosby, we follow
our collective introspection about sexual
assault down roads that lack the illumina-
tion of certitude. That is the block upon
which Test Pattern resides. Just as Scott and
Khouri captured the fears and sympathies
of a nation nearly three decades ago, Ford’s
Test Pattern encapsulates the unnerving
ambiguities of today and the difficulties we
face in overcoming them. O
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The Age of the Medici
CRANKS FOR
THE MEMORIES
POST NEOREALISM, ROBERTO ROSSELLINI SET OUT
ONCE AGAIN TO REVOLUTIONIZE HOW CINEMA TELLS
HISTORY, WITH STRANGE AND WONDROUS AMBITION
BY NICK PINKERTON
6 0 | F IL M C O MMEN T | November-December 2019
THE AGE OF THE MEDICI: COURTESY OF THE CRITERION COLLECTION
H
armony korine’s The
Beach Bum, released earlier
this year, isn’t a fully real-
ized piece of work, but there
is something rather touch-
ing in it. The film follows
an unrepentant middle-aged party-animal
poet played by Matthew McConaughey,
known only as Moondog—the moniker an
homage to the Viking-helmeted composer,
musician, and poet who was a familiar
sight on Manhattan’s 6th Avenue in the
mid-’50s, a sterling example of the species
that has been dubbed the “local eccentric.”
THE TAKING OF POWER BY LOUIS XIV: COURTESY OF THE CRITERION COLLECTION
The Taking of Power by Louis XIV
Tricked up in Parrothead and Salt Life
imagery, Korine’s movie is a paean to the
art-maniac-as-sacred-beast, appearing at a
moment when the idea of the artist
(or anyone else) being privileged to
stand outside of middle-class morality is
distinctly out of vogue. Robert Crumb,
who in 1994 could be the subject of a
widely praised documentary portrait that
explained his often unpleasant or provoc-
ative work as being pulled from a deep
well of personal trauma, would today be
resoundingly booed at the Ignatz Awards
for cartooning.
For one invested in the health of the
cultural ecosystem, this shunning of the
sickos is cause for alarm. Art based in
personal expression very often benefits from
unfiltered—if not unexamined—self-expo-
sure, while a censorious culture encourages
work in which creators express only what
they would like you to think that they think.
Many different measures have been offered
up to adjudge the success or greatness of so-
cieties and civilizations, but for my money—
and, presumably, for Korine’s—there is none
better than that of the quality and quantity
of a society’s wackjobs and screwballs.
November-December 2019 | F I L M COM MEN T | 61
Perhaps the most comprehensive
creative confirmations of this worldview
that I know can be found in one of the
least-known, least-screened bodies of work
by an acknowledged major international
filmmaker—the historical films of Ro-
berto Rossellini. Made mostly for various
national television services, they occupied
the director of Rome Open City for the
final 15 years of his life. In these histories,
it is invariably the zealots, instigators, and
outsiders who, monomaniacally pursuing
their own preoccupations, drag forward the
sum total of human understanding.
 The project begins in 1962, when Ross-
ellini, a nut of the first order himself, drew
up what he called his Great Plan. He was
then imagining a new production house to
make 25 television documentaries a year.
Collectively, their subject matter would
constitute a narrative of human progress
from paleolithic to present times. It would
cover the Bronze and Iron Ages. It would
cover geographical discoveries, like the
voyages of Columbus and Captain Cook. It
would cover the encyclopedists—Montes-
quieu, Voltaire, Rousseau—and echo their
vision of a comprehensive catalog of human
knowledge. And it would outline a history of
thought, with biographies including those
of Augustus and Socrates. This, needless to
say, was an impossible undertaking, and that
Rossellini pursued it as far as he did is ample
evidence of a divine creative lunacy.
Rossellini was a buccaneer, a bullshitter,
and an escape artist, but for him to imagine
one new movie, not to speak of hundreds,
constituted foolhardy optimism at this identi-
fiable career low point. However, back to the
wall after a string of projects disdained by
public and critics alike, Rossellini squared up
and went on the attack. He vented his spleen
toward the entirety of contemporary film
culture, particularly the cult of Michelangelo
Antonioni and the cinema verité movement,
which Rossellini rejected for its obfuscation
Blaise Pascal
6 2 | F IL M C O MM ENT | November-December 2019
Each of Rossellini’s history
films abounds with brilliant,
obsessive, charmless odd-
balls, unprepossessing ves-
sels for earthshaking ideas.
of the creator’s personality. This consequent
ceding of moral obligation he viewed as an-
other manifestation of modern depersonal-
ization—the depersonalization that Anton-
ioni not only diagnosed but, to Rossellini’s
thinking, wallowed in. Back in the late ’50s
he’d told André Bazin and Jean Renoir that
“modern society and modern art have been
destructive of man; but television is an aid
to his rediscovery. Television, an art without
traditions, dares to go out and look for
man.” He was all in now. “I intend to retire
from film and dedicate myself to television,”
Rossellini told a press conference, “in order
to be able to reexamine everything from the
beginning in full liberty, in order to rerun
mankind’s path in search of truth.”
The idea that television could offer “full
liberty” or “rediscovery” may seem surreal
today, but at the time state television in
Western Europe was guided by a mandate
of public service that to some made it seem
a grounds for potentially revolutionary,
egalitarian creative endeavors to reach peo-
ple in their very homes. No artist creating
anywhere ever does so in perfect freedom,
and negotiating with state agencies came
with its own hoops to jump through, but
these obligations seemed small beer to Ros-
sellini compared to what was demanded
then in the theatrical filmmaking industry.
And so Rossellini embarked on one of
the most ambitious projects in the history of
cinema—if we allow our definition of cine-
ma to encompass works made for television.
The project, which produced 42 hours of
moving-image-based art, was his equivalent
to Balzac’s La Comédie humaine or Zola’s Les
Rougon-Macquart cycle. Rossellini was 56
years old when he began it—the age of pru-
dence, though he was an imprudent man.
The cycle was inaugurated by The Iron
Age, comprised of five one-hour segments
directed by Rossellini’s son, Renzo, shooting
historical vignettes in a kind of newsreel
style. This was a dry run; the work began
in earnest with 1966’s The Taking of Power
by Louis XIV for France’s ORTF, originally
developed by screenwriter Jean Gruault for
his collaborator on La Religieuse, Jacques
Rivette, and depicting the Sun King’s ascent
following the death of Cardinal Mazarin.
The five-episode 1969 miniseries Acts of the
Apostles follows the dissemination of Christ’s
teachings after his crucifixion. Socrates
(1971), Blaise Pascal (1972), Augustine of
Hippo (1972), and Cartesius (1974) each
show the eponymous thinkers as they sow
the seeds of the ideas that will bear fruit
through the ages. The three-part The Age of
the Medici, from 1972-73, tours Florence in
the time of Leon Battista Alberti and Cosi-
mo de’ Medici. Rossellini’s final completed
theatrical film—if the term indeed applies—
is 1975’s The Messiah, a story of Christ
without miracles not unlike that which Paul
Verhoeven has throughout the years pledged
his devotion to making. Each abounds with
brilliant, obsessive, charmless oddballs,
unprepossessing vessels for earthshaking
BLAISE PASCAL: COURTESY OF THE CRITERION COLLECTION
ideas. Louis XIV is a chubby, dour, overgrown
Little Lord Fauntleroy. The Peter of Acts is a
bug-eyed maniac; Paul is haunted by voices.
Socrates is high-handed, a bit of a noodge,
and an absent husband; Pascal an alienated
shut-in; Descartes a character described by
Rossellini as “a son of a bitch, a coward, a lazy
person . . . quite repulsive, of course.”
Further projects were proposed but
unmade. There was a Caligula, a Karl Marx,
and an American Revolution film planned
for U.S. public television, its incomple-
tion to be bemoaned, for Rossellini alone
seems likely to have been able to conceive
the Revolution not in terms of something
fueled by revenge and personal grudges,
but as a matter of ink-stained wingnuts
 jury-rigging nationhood.
A man of television now, Rossellini
insisted that he was no longer an artist but
a researcher and broadcast pedagogue. The
Age of the Medici consciously ties his proj-
ect to the Renaissance role of the artist as a
public service–oriented figure unconcerned
with questions of personal expression, their
individuality and authorial personality
hemmed in by obeisance to a systematic
approach. This was not to be equated with
an abdication of moral perspective, always
paramount for Rossellini, as he quarreled
with the high modernists and avant-gard-
ists, proclaiming that “The highest moral
stance contemporary artists have taken has
been to speak of incommunicability and
alienation, that is to say, of two phenomena
that are absolutely negative.”
Rossellini sought to combat this nega-
tivity, rediscovering “the optimism that ani-
mated humanity at the moment at which it
was convinced” that recent advances would
guarantee “uninterrupted social progress.”
He chose his subjects for suitability as road
markers on that path of advancement. This
was the opposite of a passion project or
pursuit of the ripping yarn; rather, a process,
a plan. The Taking of Power by Louis XIV has
Cartesius
something like a satisfying narrative arc—a
rise to, yes, power—but Rossellini’s later
historical films lack even this. Of his decision tion Vanina Vanini (1961) takes place in the Leopold von Ranke’s simple dictum to fel-
to make a film about Pascal, Rossellini said: early years of the Risorgimento that ended low historians to show “how things actually
“No one who’s not a kamikaze would make in 1871 with the unification of modern were.” By decreasing himself as an artist to
a film about Pascal, a very boring character Italy, and was followed by Viva l’Italia! become a teacher, Rossellini would increase
who never made love in his life.” The re- (1961), a commemoration of the centenary the presence of his subjects, seen as and for
sulting movie, among other things, vibrates of Giuseppe Garibaldi’s conquest of the themselves. The effect, per Schrader, was to
with a lifelong sybarite’s horror in the face Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in 1860. allow “the past to stand in its own right.”

of self-denial, the Italian Catholic’s terror of
Jansenist austerity.
Rossellini’s stated goal was the forging of
an enlightened and emancipated citizenry—
his histories would provide them the facts,
but not the conclusions. Such a highfalutin
sense of what was possible for an artist—a
term that Rossellini eschewed—in the public
sphere was perhaps natural for an Italian
CARTESIUS: COURTESY OF THE CRITERION COLLECTION
Most historical filmmaking, to Rossel-
lini, was compromised by an editorializing
tendency that overlays presentist atti-
tudes—he bemoaned this in Fellini’s Saty-
ricon (1969), and in Visconti’s The Damned
(1969). Rossellini kept history at a distance,
a contemplative remove. Paul Schrader,
one of the few American interpreters who
understood something of what Rossellini
T
hroughout his histories,
Rossellini uses straightforward
exposition—the horror of
any screenwriting guide—to
situate the viewer. In Socrates,
the figures of Mieto and Her-
mes conversationally exchange information
that both would naturally know already

of his generation, for he could remember
D’Annunzio at Fiume, and had himself
helped create the foundational myths of a
postwar Italy in Rome Open City.
Years after this most self-consciously
contemporary film had made his interna-
tional reputation, Rossellini began looking
backwards. He returned to the war years in
1959’s Il Generale Della Rovere and 1960’s
Era notte a Roma, now from the distance of
the Il Boom period, the economic explo-
sion that had accompanied the rebuilding
and rapid modernization of postwar Italy,
which Rossellini was not alone among
contemporary Italian filmmakers in being
deeply suspicious of. His Stendhal adapta-
was up to, wrote in 1972 that his detach-
ment allowed a viewer to “fix his attention
on the subtler, more revealing aspects of
the past—the way meetings are conducted,
gestures are made, curtains are hung.” Like
Descartes, Rossellini wanted to learn from
tactile facts, not abstractions, and his histo-
ries are filled with quotidian detail: Paul at
his tentmaking practice; Socrates buying an
octopus at the market to be brought home
in a lettuce leaf; the kitchen ritual of serving
Louis XIV at the table.
Bending the past into a shape that suits
present-day needs robs it of its freestand-
ing integrity. In his Great Plan, Rossellini
proposed to follow German historian
about their friend. Often, Rossellini relies on
“guide” figures to introduce us to the world
being depicted: the chattering tradesmen
in Louis XIV; a Greek slave in Acts of the
Apostles; Totto Macchiavelli in The Age of the
Medici, who leads a visiting English mer-
chant through Florence. Rossellini is already
moving in this direction in the opening of
Vanina Vanini, in which an observer’s reflec-
tions on the death of Pope Pius VII and the
forthcoming conclave of the College of Car-
dinals sets the scene in 1823.
The performers who appear in the
histories weren’t, in the main, profession-
als. In Louis XIV the Sun King is played
by Jean-Marie Patte, an office clerk who’d

November-December 2019 | F ILM C O MMEN T | 63

 never acted for a camera before, cast in
Follow us on Twitter part because his height, 5’4”, was also that
of Louis XIV; proving unable to memorize
lines, he recited them from boards held up
for him to read. The nonprofessionals are
not here to create a documentary simu-
lacra, for their performances are neither
loose nor naturalistic. As Adriano Aprà has
it, they “do not give us the illusion that they
incarnate Louis XIV, Pascal, or Descartes.
Rather they ‘stand in’ for these characters,
as if they were walking around with plac-
ards with their names written on them.”
@FilmComment No more convincingly deceptive are
the disappeared worlds these characters
inhabit, put before us using the simplest of
illusions: a custom version of the Schüfftan
Statement of Ownership, process, named for cinematographer Eugen
Management, and Circulation Schüfftan, which uses a trick of mirrors to
place human actors within small model sets
(Act of August 12, 1970: Section 3685. Title 39. United
States Code) 1. Title of publication Film Comment 2.
rendered to appear as vast and overwhelm-
Publication number 8017-60 3. Date of filing Septem-
ing. The result is an integrated image that
seems to situate the performers in ancient
ber 19, 2018 4. Frequency of issue Bimonthly 5. Num-
Athens, Renaissance Florence, or Versailles
ber of issues published annually 6 6. Annual subscription
price $29.95 7. Location of known office of publication under construction.
70 Lincoln Center Plaza, New York, NY 10023-6595 8. Also joining Rossellini’s visual vocab-
Location of the headquarters or general business offices of ulary in these years was the zoom, accom-
the publishers 70 Lincoln Center Plaza, New York, NY plished using a Pan Cinor lens, which was
10023-6595 9. Names and addresses of publisher, editor, manufactured beginning in 1950 by the
and managing editor: publishers Lesli Klainberg & French company SOM Berthiot, and which
Eugene Hernandez, 70 Lincoln Center Plaza, New York, Rossellini had first used to his satisfaction
NY 10023-6595 editor Nicolas Rapold, 70 Lincoln Cen-
on Il Generale Della Rovere. He loved that
ter Plaza, New York, NY 10023-6595 managing editor
the zoom allowed him to probe into a scene
Nicolas Rapold, 70 Lincoln Center Plaza, New York, NY
10023-6595 10. Owner Film at Lincoln Center, Inc., 70
without laying dolly track, but bridled at his
Lincoln Center Plaza, New York, NY 10023-6595 11. lack of control over it from the director’s
Known bondholders, mortgagees, and other security hold- chair, and addressed this through an inno-
ers owning or holding 1 percent or more of total amount vation of his own devising, a remote control
of bonds, mortgages, or other securities none 12. The that allowed him to operate the zoom.
purpose, function, and nonprofit status of this organiza- Some pointed to this as evidence of
tion and the exempt status for Federal income tax pur- Rossellini’s legendary laziness—indeed, his
poses has not changed during the preceding 12 months histories and Luis Buñuel’s films for pro-
13. Extent and nature of circulation: ducer Serge Silberman could be profitably
actual number of copies of single issue studied as instances of a late, lazy style. Critic
published nearest to filing date M
Dave Kehr has likened Rossellini’s duck-and-
average number of copies each issue weave use of the Pan Cinor to the operation
during preceding 12 months M of a scientific instrument—“sometimes a
Total number of copies microscope, sometimes a telescope.” If we
printed (net press run) 17,678 18,166
Paid circulation stay with the filmmaker’s own definition of
1. mail subscription 10,193 10,323 his later works as didactic, we might liken it
2. Sales through dealers & carriers,
street vendors & counter sales 2,435 3,012 to the classroom pointer. Rossellini himself
Total requested copies compared his favorite new tool to “a camera
distributed by other mail classes 286 264 suspended in air . . . The director can put the
Total paid circulation 12,91 13,599 accents where he wants, during the shooting
Total non-requested copies
distributed outside the mail 1,485 1,675 of the scene . . . [He] can steal expressions on
the actors, without their being aware of it,
Total distribution 14,398 15,274
while the dialogue continues. We used to go
Copies not distributed 3,280 2,893
Total 17,678 18,16 toward figures. Now the effect is of figures
coming toward the public, toward the pit,
Percent paid and/or requested
circulation 89.7% 89.0% separating themselves from the background
. . . I can go from the most complete
II. I certify that the statements made by me above are
isolation to the most complete contextual-
correct and complete: (signed)
Vicki Robinson,
Business Manager ization.” In Blaise Pascal, which dwells on its
sickly subject’s slow death, the zooms have
6 4 | F I L M C OM M ENT | November-December 2019
the quality of labored breathing. Often, they
tend to lean in during oratory, as though to
listen more closely—and few films have so
highlighted the act of silent attention.
With the Pan Cinor, Rossellini continued,
“ambience, character, action, poetry” could
be blended, without cutting, in a single shot.
The result was “the evolution of perspective.
Take the case of painting: the primitives
didn’t know half-tints or perspective. Their
pictures, all on one plane with pure colors,
were beautiful within these limits. Then these
other things were discovered, and technique
became more complicated, and permitted
a more complicated representation.” The
issue of perspective is addressed explicitly in
The Age of the Medici, which has as one of its
central figures the polymath Alberti, whose
1435 publication De pictura contains the first
While Rossellini’s creed for
his educational films was illu-
minist and emancipatory, the
works themselves are dark
and sometimes bleak, show-
ing in no uncertain terms
that pioneers get scalped.
scientific study of perspective, and whose
trompe l’oeil backdrops—an inspiration for
Eric Rohmer in his 2001 The Lady and the
Duke—illustrate his theories in practice. It
was Alberti’s marriage of a scientific system
and a fixed perspective—perspective being
what Rossellini found lacking in the cinema
verité films—that defines the Italian master’s
late style, a combination of an entirely indi-
vidual, firmly planted point of view and an
imposed systematic framework.
Further separating Rossellini’s histories
from his past work is their music. Since
The White Ship (1941), Rossellini’s brother,
Renzo, had written the scores to practically
every one of his films for some 20 years. But
fratello Renzo had secured a job as director
of the Monte Carlo Orchestra, and Roberto
was sent looking for a new sound for his
new phase, his break from cinema and from
the past. Rossellini’s son Renzo introduced
him to Mario Nascimbene, just a few years
younger than Roberto but also an experi-
mentalist of undiminished radicalism. He
would become a crucial collaborator through
the elder Rossellini’s remaining years.
Nascimbene had distinguished himself
with innovative scores for Richard Fleischer
and Valerio Zurlini. Drawing on significant
personal wealth, he’d created a tape-based
synthesizer console of his own design, the
Mixerama, which at any time could access

Acts of the Apostles
24 different sounds from 12 stereo cas-
sette tapes, culled from a library of over a
thousand. “I have recorded all the possible
sounds the musicians in an orchestra can
make,” Nascimbene told an interviewer in
1986, “From the piccolo to the contrabass,
male and female voices, the strings (now
sharp, then soft, then trilling or pizzicato) . . .
It’s all pulsating, creative, ‘living’ sound . . .
pure sound treated in a human way.”
Rossellini gave Nascimbene a free hand,
with inimitable and often eerie results. For
Acts of the Apostles, a film of skirling locusts
and whispering trees, of sitar, flute, and
plaintive humming (courtesy Rossellini’s
wife, Sonali), the composer was left alone in
complete freedom for three months to write,
record, edit, and mix. Socrates is haunted by
a sort of groaning dirge, interrupted by a
rattle that is something like the clacking of
bones, creating a sustained tone of dread to
ACTS OF THE APOSTLES: ORTF/R AD IOTVE ITALI A/KOBAL /SHUTT ERSTOCK
the last sip of hemlock.
S
pare films these are, though
not as austere as the contem-
porary work of Andy Warhol,
who enjoyed the patronage
of the same ultrarich Texans
(expats from France) who
aided Rossellini through this period, John
and Dominique de Menil. And Rossellini’s
histories seem positively baroque when
compared to Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle
Huillet’s pared-to-the-bone historical film,
1968’s The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena
Bach. The primitives were then in the
ascendant, as Manny Farber and Patricia
Patterson singled out R.W. Fassbinder for
his “wholesome frontal image, in many ways
like small Fra Angelico panels.” Some film-
makers and theorists, like Noël Burch, were
returning to the promise of the early, work-
ing class–oriented cinema, created outside
Film at
Lincoln Center
Free Talk
Presented by
of what was perceived as a later hegemonic
system of classical construction, fencing in
perceptions. Renaissance perspective itself
was on trial, suspect as a product of the
same Florence that had been the cradle of
early banking and, yes, capitalism. But Ros-
sellini’s discourse on the remote-controlled
Pan Cinor shows that he identified himself
not with the primitives but with the period
of “complicated” composition that followed
FILM
the invention of perspective. Indeed, for C O M M E N T:
Rossellini’s critical biographer Tag Gallagher,
The Age of the Medici, with its narrative of BEST OF 2019
benevolent money-power in action, is “the
greatest defense of capitalism ever filmed.” COUNTDOWN
No single ideological lodestar guides
the histories—Acts, for example, was very
much the product of late ’60s revolutionary
ferment, described by Roberto as a docu-
ment of the birth of “global opposition to the
establishment.” Taken altogether, however, the
collected histories can be seen as a defense of
history’s local (and itinerant) eccentrics—dis-
playing what Gallagher refers to as Rossellini’s
“‘Great Weirdo’ sense of historic causality”
with their use of frequently argumentative,
pushy central figures elevating Socratic
inquiry above Aristotelian scholasticism.
While Rossellini’s creed for his educational
films was illuminist and emancipatory, the
works themselves are dark and sometimes
bleak, showing in no uncertain terms that
pioneers get scalped. The cold comfort for
these innovators’ suffering is the immortality
of which Socrates is heard to speak—if not
of the soul, then of the ethos, the idea. And Coming in December
with his histories, Rossellini gives to posterity
one unmistakable idea: that it’s to the cussed Elinor Bunin Munroe
cranks of the ages that we owe everything. O Film Center
144 West 65th Street
Nick Pinkerton is a regular contributor to
Film Comment and a member of the New Learn more: filmlinc.org/talks
York Film Critics Circle.
November-December 2019 | F ILM C O MME NT | 65
THE BIG SCREEN
Reviews of notable new films opening in theaters (hopefully near you)
A Hidden Life
BY SHEILA O'MALLEY
Director: Terrence Malick
Country/Distributor: Germany/USA,
Fox Searchlight
Opening: December 13
“Is this the end of the world? The death of
the light?”—franz jägerstätter
T
errence malick’s latest is about
Franz Jägerstätter, an Austrian consci-
entious objector who refused to sign
a loyalty oath to Hitler and was imprisoned
and then beheaded on August 9, 1943. In
practical terms, his refusal “meant noth-
ing.” The war did not stop. Millions were
killed. But what would have happened if a
whole nation had followed his example? In
6 6 | F IL M C OM MEN T | November-December 2019
2009, Jägerstätter’s letters from prison were
published (Malick includes much of this
material in the film). Two years earlier, the
Catholic Church beatified Jägerstätter in
Linz, Austria. A man of deep faith, he has
always been an important figure in Catho-
lic circles, and A Hidden Life brings him to
a wider audience. The film is a meditation
on the nature of faith, of belief in God even
(or especially) in a lunatic world.
Franz (August Diehl) and his wife,
Franziska (Valerie Pachner), work their
farm in a small village perched on a
hill-side in the Alps. They have three
small children. The work is difficult, but
they are a happy family. In 1939, Franz is
called up for basic training, and he goes,
reluctantly. He is disturbed by the war
frenzy. When he returns home, he finds
his village in full-on Nazi mode. Not only
is Franz shocked by the transformation of
his neighbors, he is also disheartened by
the church’s unwillingness to take a stand.
(The infamous 1933 concordat between
Germany and the Vatican—whereby Hitler
promised not to destroy the churches if
the priests agreed not to “get political” in
their sermons—is not name-checked in A
PHOTO BY REINER BAJO.© 2019 TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX
Hidden Life, but it is everywhere present.)
When Franz is conscripted, he refuses to
sign the loyalty oath. Imprisonment fol-
lows, along with tribunals, interrogations,
and torture. The village—and its church—
shuns his family back home.
Over and over again, Franz is told his
disobedience will not make a difference.
Why not just sign the oath, even if he
doesn’t mean it? In one scene, Franz is
called before the Reich’s military tribu-
nal, where a Nazi judge (the late Bruno
Ganz) asks Franz, almost gently, “Will
what you’re doing change the world or the
war?” To Franz, the question is irrelevant.
Everyone hopes they will behave like
 A Hidden Life is Malick’s most political film, taking place during one of the defining cataclysms of human history,
and yet one man’s battle to stay true to his faith pales in comparison to the millions killed because of their faith.

Franz, will see the forces of evil rising
around them and resist. The question is
trickier when a guillotine awaits you at the
end of a dark hall. (The execution scene
is one of the most harrowing sequences
Malick has ever filmed.)
The scenery in Franz’s village is ravishing,
all vistas and cloud banks and nearly
vertical slopes. (The cinematographer was
Jörg Widmer, who has worked as a camera
operator on many of Malick’s films.)
Many people get annoyed with Malick’s
obsession with nature, but it is so much a
A HIDDEN LIFE: REINER BAJO.© 2019 TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX; A BEAUTIFUL DAY IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD.#%';6'44'.510;2+%674'5'06'46#+0/'06
that matters. Franz and Franziska battle
this in their own way in A Hidden Life:
they have lived good lives, faithful lives, so
shouldn’t they be rewarded? This brings
us to the real issue with the film, which is
Malick’s point of view.
Focusing on the single journey of a man
living in an isolated, homogenous village
in Austria means that the Holocaust is not
foregrounded; in fact, it’s barely present. This
choice, controversial for good reason, limits SHORT TAKE ates warmth and
the film’s scope and power. Jägerstätter’s A BEAUTIFUL an almost mystical
protest was ethical and spiritual in nature: DAY IN THE serenity, and the

part of who he is as a filmmaker that it’s he did not believe in bowing down before a NEIGHBORHOOD w““>ŽiÀÃ]̜̅iˆÀ
impossible to imagine him without it. I’ve single man. Bowing should be reserved for credit, go all-in
had my internal arguments with Malick God. The brainwashing of the other people Director: on portraying the
over the years. I’m slightly tired of women in his village is presented as nationalistic Marielle Heller children’s TV host
twirling through fields. I’m not sure I rather than racist or anti-Semitic. There are Country/Distributor: >Ã>Ã>ˆ˜ÌˆŽiw}ÕÀi
believe in “innocence” the way he does, no Jewish characters in the film. USA, Sony Pictures whose goodness and
and my idea of nature is more of the “red The opening montage, taken from Leni Opening: wisdom lead Lloyd
in tooth and claw” variety. Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, is a nod November 22 to salvation. And
But Malick’s is a questioning sensibility, in the direction of the larger context, but though the story itself
his camera always searching, looking for ignoring it is a serious flaw. Malick has Somewhere deep verges on cliché—a
not shied away from politics in the past. down, beneath layers sad, angry young
The young soldiers in The Thin Red Line of cultural detritus man is redeemed
are served up as cannon fodder in order and a hard crust of through reconcilia-
to take a solitary hill, and The New World protective cynicism, tion with his sadder,
has explosive politics embedded within its we’re all just kids at angrier father—
romantic “take” on first contact. A Hidden heart. A Beautiful Day Heller’s visual and
Life is his most political film, taking place in the Neighborhood narrative ingenuity,
during one of the defining cataclysms of takes this Freudian along with the perfor-
human history, and yet one man’s battle to truism and turns it mances of Hanks and
stay true to his faith pales in comparison into a strangely beau- Cooper, elevate the
to the millions killed because of their faith. tiful and genuinely subject matter.
However, Malick’s poetic and passion- moving Winnicottian Heller tells this
the light, peering through windows and ate exploration of Franz’s resistance pro- melodrama. Marielle grown-up story
skylights, moving up stairways, through vides insights into our ethical and moral iiÀ½Ãw“ÌiÃ using techniques
treetops. In a footnote in his college thesis obligations as citizens. In one scene, Franz the (true) story of and textures bor-
on Martin Heidegger, Malick observes: visits an ornate church where a humble joyless, embittered rowed directly
“Heidegger has developed a whole myth- artist paints brightly colored murals journalist Lloyd Vogel from Mr. Rogers’
ology on the model of light . . . We see what on the pure white walls. The artist says, (Matthew Rhys), a Neighborhood,
we see by virtue of the light of the sun. We “A darker time is coming. I paint their man whose fractured including grainy VHS
do not attend to the light, but through it, to comfortable Christ, with a halo on his relationship with his interludes, sudden
the things of the earth . . . Since we take the head. Someday I’ll paint the true Christ.” deadbeat dad (Chris appearances of
light for granted, we become aware of its Radical words. Jesus did many things, but Cooper) has brought hand puppets, and
(former) presence only once it is absent.” among them was peaceful disobedience to him to the brink of establishing shots of
Malick’s entire career can be seen as a an unjust civil authority. On social media, professional and rudimentary, toylike
quest to not “take the light for granted.” It people share a picture of a lone man in a personal catastrophe. versions of Manhat-
is a quest with no destination. crowd refusing to do the Nazi salute, com- Luckily for Lloyd, tan and Pittsburgh.
plete with text: “Be this guy.” We should all he’s assigned by his By blending the

T
he question “how can god allow be that guy. A darker time is coming. editor at Esquire to very serious with the
bad things to happen to good people?” A darker time is now. write a 500-word puff V…ˆ`ˆŽi]iiÀ½Ãw“
is crucial in all of his films, particu- piece on beloved locates real feeling
larly in The Thin Red Line and The Tree of Sheila O’MalleyKUCTGIWNCTƂNOETKVKEHQT PBS mainstay Mr. in what could easily
Life, which opens with Mrs. O’Brien’s wail 4QIGTGDGTVEQOCPFQVJGTQWVNGVUKPENWF- Fred Rogers. have been a run-of-
of grief at the news of her son’s death— KPI6JG%TKVGTKQP%QNNGEVKQP*GTDNQIKU Mr. Rogers the-mill tearjerker.
and to Malick it may be the only question 6JG5JGKNC8CTKCVKQPU (Tom Hanks) radi- —Clinton Krute

November-December 2019 | F ILM C OM MENT | 6 7

The Report is a film smoggy with ghosts. It is haunted by memories of a time when the word “truth” didn’t
need to be wrapped in scare quotes.

SHORT TAKE gift, a master class

VARDA BY AGNÈS that’s both techni-
cally fascinating and
Director: artistically inspiring;
Agnès Varda her dedication to
Country/Distributor: the shared expe-
France, Janus Films rience is as baked
Opening: into her formal DNA
November 22 as it is into her polit-
ical conscience. Her their lies—sorry, “truthiness.”
It begins with the w“Ã>Ài«œ«Õ>Ìi` The Report There’s a lie at the very heart of The
master director with neighbors and Report. The “enhanced interrogation” tech-
seated onstage workers and pass- BY SUKHDEV SANDHU niques deployed by the CIA against terror
in a French opera ersby; song lyrics suspects after 9/11 are a euphemism for—an
house, outlining her in the musical One Director: Scott Z. Burns attempt to disguise and to deny the multiple
L>ÈVÌi˜iÌÃœvw“- Sings, the Other Country/Distributor: USA, Amazon acts of—what is more baldly called torture.
making. The setup Doesn’t are bor- Opening: November 15 Adam Driver plays Daniel Jones, a Senate
seems to promise rowed from Marx staffer tasked by his boss Dianne Feinstein

T
a feature-length and Engels; and her he prophetic bombast of karl rove (Annette Bening) with investigating
w“ÃV…œœiV- voiceover defaults hangs heavy over Scott Z. Burns’s The discrepancies in the CIA’s account of what
ÌÕÀiÀiÌÀœwÌÌi`>Ã ̜̅iwÀÃ̇«iÀܘ Report. Speaking to a New York Times it knew and did about some of the violence
eulogy; instead, plural of a team. journalist back in 2004, the former Senior meted out to Islamic suspects.

VARDA BY AGNÈS%1746'5;1(/-(+./5THE REPORT: 2*161$;#6575*+0+5*+,+/#

Agnès Varda crafts That “we” high- Advisor to George W. Bush supposedly Much of this, though largely in the pub-
a vibrant and wholly lights cinematogra- dismissed what he called “the reality-based lic domain by now, is still startling. Mock
alive addition to phers, composers, community”—by which he meant those burials, use of insects, power drills to heads,
her oeuvre. Inter- and performers—an anachronistic sad sacks who “believe that arms pulled out of sockets: it’s the stuff of
spersing clips drawn act of dedication to solutions emerge from your judicious snuff movies, real-life versions of shilling
from her 50-odd w“>ÃVœiV̈ۈÃÌ study of discernible reality.” Warming to shockers such as Hostel and The Human
w“Ã܈̅iVÌÕÀi pursuit. his theme, he reportedly continued, “We’re Centipede. As often as not, this catalog of
footage, voiceover Time itself was an empire now, and when we act, we create atrocities has been linguistically cleansed.
ruminations, and one of Varda’s sub- our own reality. And while you’re studying “Facial hold,” “attention grasp,” “stress po-
new interviews with jects, particularly that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll sitions”: the blandness of these terms belies
former collabora- its subjectivity as act again, creating other new realities, which their ferocity. “Rectal hydration” is even
tors, Varda deepens felt experience and you can study too, and that’s how things grosser than it sounds.
the themes she’s memory. As she says will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and It’s startling too that the efficacy of these
mined in earlier in a voiceover while you, all of you, will be left to just study techniques—depicted in brief, glitchy flash-
autobiographical explicating Jacquot what we do.” backs—was vouchsafed by contractors with
work. de Nantes (1991), Is it cynical to wonder if Rove’s cynicism next to no scientific backgrounds. Douglas
Her guiding Åi“>`i̅>Ìw“ turned out to be correct? The Report is a Hodge and T. Ryder Smith play psychol-
principles in making as Jacques Demy film smoggy with ghosts. It is haunted by ogists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen,
w“Ã\ˆ˜Ã«ˆÀ>̈œ˜] was dying, “not to memories of a time when the word “truth” quacks and charlatans who managed to
creation, and stop time, to accom- didn’t need to be wrapped in scare quotes. capture millions of dollars of government
sharing—and it’s pany time.” In Varda When it was still possible to believe that, funding, their inflated self-regard both a
̅iw˜>œ˜i̅>Ì by Agnès, her very if the truth could be uncovered by diligent mirror and response to the macho bombast
ultimately triumphs. w˜>w“]Åi`œià journalists, political changes would result. of their political overlords (who say things
Varda by Agnès the same.—Sierra When Stephen Colbert could elicit laughter like, “We’ll have flies walking on Al-Qaeda’s
itself is a generous Pettengill by roasting bumptious public figures for eyeballs within weeks”). They’re portrayed,

6 8 | F IL M C O MMEN T | November-December 2019

 With its narrative double bluffs and knowingly byzantine plot twists, Knives Out nimbly swerves around
the pitfalls of murder mysteries past.

with some sardonic humor, as speaking
truth for—rather than to—power.
By contrast, Jones starts out as an
idealist, a coltish former Teach For America
volunteer who buys a White House snow
globe, endearingly dorky like Ross from
Friends but with a higher GPA. His is
almost the ideal research project for a
hardworking twentysomething. His com-
mitment is pure—he’s never seen with
lovers, friends, or family. In a partial echo
of the carceral spaces in which the terror
suspects were housed, the room in which
he works begins to resemble a cell—coldly
strip-lit, walls covered with images of
convicts, entrance and exit protected by
guards, and access to materials heavily
circumscribed. Jones, who works eve-
nings and weekends, and sticks (until he
doesn’t) to all the confidentiality clauses
QUEEN & SLIM#0&4'&9#)0'470+8'45#.2+%674'5KNIVES OUT%.#+4'(1.)'4…/4%++&+564+$76+10%1/2#0;.2
supporting actors, including Jon Hamm
as Obama’s flaky Chief of Staff Denis
McDonough and Maura Tierney as an
intelligence officer who advocates torture
unapologetically, are excellent.
Burns is clear-eyed about the CIA’s
structural failings (it had evidence as long
ago as 1978 that torture rarely extracts
useful confessions) and self-serving
mendacity under successive presidential
regimes. There are telling jabs at Obama’s SHORT TAKE nurse Marta (Ana de
unwillingness to push the CIA harder for KNIVES OUT Armas, unglamorous
fear of jeopardizing his reelection cam- and all the better
paign in 2012, and at Kathryn Bigelow’s Director: for it). Marta is a
Zero Dark Thirty (2012) for making false Rian Johnson good-natured young
connections between torture-derived Country/Distributor: woman who is
information and the discovery of Osama USA, Lionsgate drawn into an unholy
bin Laden’s hideout. Opening: alliance of sorts with
For a political thriller, The Report is more November 27 square-jawed family
sad than revelatory, more melancholy than black sheep Ransom

he signed at the outset, is a prisoner of cathartic. Jones’s work was not entirely in “The guy practi- (Evans). As a work-
his research. vain. His revelations of a cover-up, though cally lives on a Clue ing-class Hispanic
Writer-director Burns, best known for heavily doctored, eventually were made board,” grumbles woman among the
his collaborations with Steven Soderbergh, public. But did many care? Perhaps Rove a cop (Lakeith very white, very rich
among them The Informant! (2009) and was right and The Report, honorably and -Ì>˜wi`®i>ÀÞ Thrombeys, Marta
Contagion (2011), cuts a path through the impotently, can only study a reality directed in Rian Johnson’s is treated with a
forests of information thrown up by this by American history’s real actors. Knives Out. He’s yˆ“ÃÞVœ“«>ÃȜ˜
affair. (The final report—with the word talking about Harlan that never disguises
“torture” redacted from its title—ran to Sukhdev SandhuKU&KTGEVQTQHVJG%QNNQ- Thrombey (Chris- the condescension.
6,700 pages.) Driver handles the talky, SWKWOHQT7PRQRWNCT%WNVWTGCV0GY;QTM topher Plummer), With the gently
wink-friendly script with flair, and the 7PKXGTUKV[ a renowned mys- anti-Trump subtext
tery author whose of its class tensions,
mysterious death Knives Out manages
on the eve of his to be lighthearted

I
n an era when "black lives matter" 85th birthday spurs without ever feeling
Queen & Slim narratives often focus on tragedy and
violence, director Melina Matsoukas’s
an investigation of
his family. A spiky
lightweight.
Johnson con-
BY CAN D I CE F REDE R IC K Queen & Slim, twists the formula, offering a ensemble cast plays stantly upends
surprisingly tender tale about two compli- the assorted heirs— expectation, creating
Director: Melina Matsoukas cated lovers driven toward each other after and suspects—who a collapsible mur-
Country/Distributor: 75#%CPCFC a fateful police encounter. Written by Lena reside at the Throm- der mystery where
7PKXGTUCN2KEVWTGU Waithe, this bold new drama refuses to bey mansion: Chris each potential cliché
Opening: 0QXGODGT either vilify or commend its lead characters, Evans, Jamie Lee implodes and evolves
Curtis, Don Johnson, into something
Toni Collette, and else entirely. With
Michael Shannon, its narrative double
among others. There bluffs and knowingly
to suss them out is a byzantine plot twists,
comically exagger- Knives Out nimbly
ated “gentleman swerves around the
sleuth” named Ben- pitfalls of murder
oit Blanc (a bug-eyed mysteries past. Full of
Daniel Craig). rhythmic verve and
Thrust among pithy humor, this is
these warring rela- uproariously enter-
tives is our protag- Ì>ˆ˜ˆ˜}w““>Žˆ˜}°
onist, immigrant —Christina Newland

November-December 2019 | F ILM C OM MEN T | 69

Queen & Slim excels as a poetic romance between two virtual strangers who try to redesign their tragic
fates together as everyone else abandons them—even those they trust.

SHORT TAKE of blue chemicals

REDOUBT and zaps into some-
thing resembling a
Director: sculptured X-ray. The
Matthew Barney w“VՏ“ˆ˜>ÌiȘ> played by Jodie Turner-Smith and Daniel Earl (Bokeem Woodbine), who offers them
Country/Distributor: haunting moment Kaluuya, who cling to each other after a refuge—Queen and Slim attempt to mas-
USA, Grasshopper staged during the frightening act of self-defense launches them querade as the confident, badass celebrities
Film path of totality of the into infamy. their public expects them to be.
Opening: 2017 solar eclipse. And it all starts with Tinder. Queen, an But this charade only exacerbates the
October 30 Barney depicts astute criminal defense lawyer, swiped right vulnerabilities in their fraught predica-
nature and bodies, on Slim, a laid-back retail employee, bring- ment. Through Turner-Smith’s beautifully
Loosely drawing both human and ing them together at a diner for an awkward layered performance, Queen’s past traumas
upon the myth of animal, in ways that first date. There’s no reason to assume that and yearning for love emerge. Her work
Diana and Actaeon, are matter-of-fact, these two will ever see each other again after forms a through line with Kaluuya’s equally
Matthew Barney’s beautiful, profoundly this night. But as he’s driving her home, moving portrayal of a young man racked
wordless new feature strange, and vital to they’re pulled over by the police for a minor with guilt, longing to go back to his life
unfolds as a series …ˆÃw“½ÃÃÕL`Õi` infraction. Slim is quick to do what the before the incident. The human connection
of six wolf hunts narrative model. But officer asks—pull out his license and regis- that he finds with Queen is punctuated by a

4'&17$6%1746'5;1()4#55*122'4(+./QUEEN & SLIM#0&4'&9#)0'470+8'45#.2+%674'5

conducted in Idaho’s process—the hunt tration, the usual—while Queen interrogates refreshingly romantic scene at a black pub
Sawtooth Mountain itself—is the spine the cop at every turn. That quickly escalates they stumble upon in middle America.
range, each describ- of Redoubt. The to Slim being thrown to the ground by the Waithe’s characterizations highlight the
ing the elusive nature >À̈Ã̇w““>ŽiÀˆÃ officer, Queen getting shot in the leg, and unpredictability of the human condition
of pursuit through fascinated, as ever, then Slim fatally shooting the cop. and what that means for black people in to-
landscape photog- by the connections The sharp shift from a stiff romantic ex- day’s society. But she adds a little too much
raphy, venatic gear, between modern change to police violence threatens to turn with a protest march that Matsoukas oddly
aerial dance, and the and allegorical this date-night prelude into a far-too- juxtaposes with the couple’s lovemaking.
art of electroplating. stories and objects, familiar story about an innocent black The move seems to be a reminder that
Clocking at 134 and how they can couple who inevitably fall victim to a preju- racial injustice continues even as Queen
“ˆ˜ÕÌiÃ]̅iw“ be degraded into diced criminal justice system eager to throw and Slim fall desperately in love, but it
follows a bearded earthbound frag- them in jail. But Matsoukas and Waithe in- creates more intensity than is necessary in
Forest Services ments that steadily stead use this scene as a jumping-off point this delicate scene. In addition, some of
employee named reveal themselves as to explore what happens when Queen the story’s peripheral characters, like Uncle
“the Engraver” (Bar- w>“i˜ÌȘ>VœÃ“ˆV and Slim’s fundamental desire to defend Earl, aren’t as developed they should be for
ney) as he trails three ÜiL°/…iw“½ÃÀiÛ- their own lives is politicized. It becomes a the significance they have in Queen’s life.
lithe huntresses (led elations, however, viral video that’s subjected to much debate Still, Queen & Slim excels as a poetic
by NRA sharpshoot- never reach for the among advocates and opportunists alike. romance between two virtual strangers who
ing champion Anette operatic, lubricated Now on the run because Queen recog- try to redesign their tragic fates together as ev-
Wachter). The intensity of those in nizes that their chances of overcoming the eryone else abandons them—even those they
Engraver records his The Cremaster system are, well, slim, the pair become seen trust. With cinematographer Tat Radcliffe’s
their conspicuously Cycle, but rather as heroes, villains, and victims, depending warm color palette illuminating both the
choreographed «iÀV…ˆ˜vœÀ̈wi` on whom they run into. All they really passion and hopelessness in the lovers’ eyes,
passage by etching view of the anom- want is to be as invisible as possible. So, Matsoukas and Waithe’s sometimes merciless
scenes onto plates alous grandeur, with the help of costume designer Shiona film becomes a heartfelt story about love,
of black asphaltum, horror, and mystery Turini’s vibrant ’60s- and ’70s-inspired pain, and fear in a harsh world.
which “the Electro- afforded by plein air style—exemplified by Queen’s form-fitting
plater” (K.J. Holmes) w““>Žˆ˜}° animal-print minidress and Slim’s velour Candice FrederickKUCHTGGNCPEGƂNOCPF
submerges in a pool —Tyler Wilson tracksuit, courtesy of Queen’s pimp Uncle 68ETKVKENKXKPIKP0GY;QTM%KV[

7 0 | F I LM C OM MENT | November-December 2019

 Norton regrafts Lethem’s pastiche back onto the ’50s—there’s a Post reporter who says “fuggedaboutit” in
the film’s cast of neo-noir revenants, and one scene is even staged in the old Penn Station.

the book remain in the film: like Lethem’s

Motherless protagonist, Norton’s Lionel still grew up
in an orphanage, and still has Tourette’s
Brooklyn syndrome. Lethem’s book is a knowing,
contemporary take on the detective novel,
BY MARK ASCH filtered through a hard-boiled narrator
who can’t control his own voice. Translat-
Director: Edward Norton ing Lionel to film, Norton makes Rain Man
Country/Distributor: USA, Warner Bros. comparisons inevitable, because Lionel’s
Opening: November 1 disability follows the demands of the script SHORT TAKE ian restless camera
rather than the other way around, coming WAVES (Shults did in fact

S
hot on brownstone streets and going when narratively convenient. shoot second unit
dressed in fedoras, old sedans, and Overwhelmed by OCD triple-taps, spasms Director: footage for Voy-
curbside heaps of ’50s junk—a past of wordplay, and blurted taboo thoughts Trey Edward Shults age of Time). The
you can inhabit within the bounds of (which are never too problematic), Nor- Country/Distributor: activity—it’s hard to
the frame, and no further—Motherless ton’s head flings up and to the side as his USA, A24 call this a story, at
Brooklyn is not just nostalgic for the New shoulders pinch together in spontaneous Opening: wÀÃÌp…>À`ÞiLLÃ]
York City it recreates, but fixated on the shudders of embarrassment. Lionel has a November 15 as Waves keeps up
moment of its loss. Set on the cusp of the savant-like memory and a secret sadness with the energies of
Dodgers’ move to L.A., this noir concerns to go along with his disability, and he’s The romance of its adolescent sub-
old neighborhoods being rebuilt around inevitably called “sweet” by Gugu Mbatha- the unfastened jects, glimpsed in
car usage by master-of-the-universe de- Raw’s activist lawyer. But no longer the camera never love, and then (care
velopers. Notes from Chinatown swirl like spit-combed prodigy who bought the ended for director of typically uncin-
a saxophone solo as Motherless Brooklyn rights to the novel, Norton appears too old Trey Edward Shults ematic text mes-
witnesses the birth of the city of the future to have been plucked from some Catholic and DP Drew Dan- sages) not so much.
and ponders the mystery of its parentage. orphanage by P.I. mentor Bruce Willis. His iels, who return Despite the over-
Twenty years after acquiring the rights Lionel can also be flirty and self-deprecat- for a third roving load, there’s some-
to Jonathan Lethem’s novel, Edward Nor- ing, world-weary and a wiseass; at night, feature with all thing in Tyler’s pain
ton writes, directs, and stars in an adapta- he smokes dope in the lonely apartment Vޏˆ˜`iÀÃwÀˆ˜}°˜ that bears an imprint
tion that extrapolates freely from the book’s he shares with his cat, and like Elliott ̅ˆÃV>Àii˜ˆ˜}w“ of Moonlight—until
taut opening stakeout-gone-wrong, which Gould’s Marlowe in The Long Goodbye, split into distinct truly clunky charac-
WAVES: %1746'5;1(#MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN%1746'5;1(9#40'4$4152+%674'5

sets his gumshoe Lionel Essrog pulling he’s the only one who cares enough to halves, teenage terization lays Waves
apart the threads of an urban-renewal follow up on a case everyone else consid- wrestler Tyler (Kel- low, endowed with
scheme with connections to municipal ers cold. vin Harrison Jr.), all the delicacy of a
and personal corruption. Vestigial traces of Of time and the city: Norton regrafts superstressed by his œjw“°
high-pressure dad, What probably
falls out violently could or should
with his girlfriend, have taken up the
leaving his sister bulk of the 135-
Emily (Taylor Rus- “ˆ˜ÕÌiw“ˆÃˆÌÃ
sell) to cope with second act: Emily
the aftermath. And crawling out from
vÀœ“̅iwÀÃÌŜÌ] the wreckage of a
the rule of thumb crumpled family
seems to be, “Why and opening up
use one 360-degree to a special friend
pan when two (unfortunately Lucas
360-degree pans in Hedges, whose
a moving car will do hot-teen-geek
the trick nicely?” routine verges on
Maximalism is self-parody). Bust
the move, and on by this point, Shults
the move, with the has already run a
w“½Ã>“«i`‡Õ« marathon in circles,
colors, Safdie- exhausting his
esque wall-of-sound œÜ˜w“°—Nicolas
design, and Malick- Rapold

November-December 2019 | F ILM C O MM ENT | 7 1

Veteran scene-stealer Alfre Woodard takes center stage in Clemency with her harrowing performance as a
prison warden who finds overseeing death row executions increasingly unbearable.

Lethem’s pastiche back onto the ’50s—

there’s a Post reporter who says “fugged-
aboutit” in the film’s cast of neo-noir
revenants, and one scene is even staged
in the old Penn Station. Gentrification
is a constant concern of Lethem’s New
York fictions, and this Motherless Brooklyn
features Alec Baldwin as Moses Randolph,
a power broker whose utopian, racially
atavistic feats of world-building—expan-
sive parks and superhighways enabled
by “slum clearance,” forced relocations,
SHORT TAKE bling marriage. Her and blockbusting—are exposited in historical crossroads. Norton also sees
CLEMENCY torment is largely book-report paraphrases of Robert Caro’s in Lionel’s mental thread-pulling the
a quiet one; in the biography of Robert Moses. (Randolph obsessiveness of an artist: when Lionel’s
Director: silences that stretch also mentions “winning” and America’s investigation takes him to a Harlem jazz
Chinonye Chukwu on too long, in the greatness, and Baldwin incorporates club, the revolutionary cat identified in the
Country/Distributor: ܜÀ`ÃÅiÃ̈yià Trumpisms from his from his Saturday credits as “Trumpet Man” (Michael Ken-
USA, NEON or the intimacy she Night Live appearances: the childishly neth Williams) sees in his Tourettic out-
Opening: refuses, her face crossed arms, the pouty posture. It’s inter- bursts a kindred spirit, and, in a scene that
December 27 betrays a world of esting, if unhelpful to the movie, to note precedes Kind of Blue by a couple years,
guilt and helpless- how these twerpy affectations diminish is impressed with the way Lionel worries
Chinonye Chukwu’s ness with hardly any the gravitas of the actor who, in Malice, over the phrase “So what.” Is this Norton’s
second feature movement at all. credibly claimed to be God.) tribute to Back to the Future’s “Johnny B.
escapes the conven- She is sympathetic, Norton uses Tourette’s twitchiness to Goode” inception scene? The moment
tions of American but remote. Griev- explore psychic restlessness more gener- is sadly emblematic of the warmed-over
w“Ã>LœÕÌV>«ˆÌ> ing mothers seek ally. Lionel’s shouted refrain “If!” rever- storytelling that mars his passion project.
punishment by tak- comfort in her arms, berates through the movie; it animates his
ing the perspective stirred perhaps by interactions with Mbatha-Raw’s character Mark Asch is a contributor to Nylon,

%.'/'0%;'4+%$4#0%10'10 MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN%1746'5;1(9#40'4$4152+%674'5

of a prison warden. the fact of her wom- (who, like him, is mourning a long-dead Little White Lies, and elsewhere. He lives
Veteran scene-stealer anhood—perhaps, mother) and suggests a New York at a in Brooklyn.
Alfre Woodard more than that, her
(memorable even black womanhood.
in small doses, as In Chukwu’s con-
a shrewd judge in w`i˜Ìˆvë>ÀÃi>˜` embraces her genre influences to chart the
Primal Fear or the iiÀˆÞ“ÕÌi`w“] Little Joe disquieting repercussions of an antide-
long-suffering wife Aldis Hodge matches pressant houseplant conceived by Alice
and mother in Love Woodard with his BY YO NCA TA LU (Emily Beecham), a gifted geneticist and
& Basketball) takes own artfully layered single mother. Guilt-ridden for spending
center stage in Clem- portrayal of a prisoner Director: Jessica Hausner more time in the laboratory than with her
ency with her harrow- who insists on his Country/Distributor: Austria/UK/Germany, teenage son, Joe (Kit Connor), Alice offers
ing performance as innocence as his exe- Magnolia Films him a sample of the attractive crimson
Bernadine Williams, cution looms closer, Opening: December 6 flower to keep him company and baptizes
܅œw˜`ÃœÛiÀÃii- >˜`܅œÃi`iw>˜Ì it “Little Joe.” But this innocent premise

D
ing death row exe- grace galvanizes Ber- rawing as much from fairy tales morphs into a variation on the Franken-
cutions increasingly nadine. Their intricate as from psychological horror, stein story when Alice’s brainchild defies
unbearable. performances carry Austrian director Jessica Hausner’s its own sterility by taking over the bodies
Now on her this bold, purpose- rigorously crafted movies investigate the of those exposed to its pollen.
12th execution, and vՏÞÌ>ÕÌw“­Ü…ˆV… uncanny forces lurking beneath reali- As with the miraculous healing of
confronted with an made Chukwu the ty’s placid surface. Whether a mountain Lourdes’s disabled protagonist played
inmate who may be wÀÃÌL>VŽܜ“>˜ resort in Hotel (2004), a pilgrimage town by Sylvie Testud, Hausner and co-writer
innocent, Bernadine ever to win the Grand in Lourdes (2009), or a 19th-century Géraldine Bajard inject ambiguity into
must reckon with Jury Prize at Sun- bourgeois house in Amour fou (2014), the Little Joe’s plot, leaving it to the audience
the toll such a pro- dance) to an astound- filmmaker excels at investing seemingly to decide if the plant truly exerts a malev-
fession has taken ˆ˜}w˜>iœvÜiVœ“i] ordinary settings with supernaturally olent power over mankind or if its effects
on her life, most bitter release. tinged narratives. In Little Joe, her fifth are merely symptoms of Alice’s conflicted
noticeably her crum- —Kelli Weston feature and first in English, Hausner fully subconscious. Pushing her trademark

7 2 | F I LM CO MM EN T | November-December 2019
 Hausner attempts to conceal her story’s emotional shallowness behind
a polished aesthetic that equally gratifies and numbs the viewer.
symmetrical mise en scène to ominous
degrees, the director frames Alice and her
colleagues in compositions that emphasize
the alienating quality of the commercial
greenhouse in which they work. Matching
the poised rhythm of the performances,
avant-garde composer Teiji Ito’s engross-
ing percussion and flute music enhances
the sense of eeriness produced by the
lurid, candy-colored palette. Sound
design plays a particularly evocative role
in situations of panic and disarray like a
scene in which Bella (Kerry Fox), a plant
breeder marginalized for her background
of clinical depression, finds herself locked
in the nursery during her night shift. The
boundaries between reality and imagina-
tion disintegrate as Bella’s desperate cries
for help blend into a chilling symphony of
squeaky strings and relentless barking—an
allusion to her beloved dog, Bello, which
she puts to sleep with the conviction
that its personality has been irrevocably
LITTLE JOE%1746'5;1(/#)01.+#(+./5
corrupted by Little Joe. An example of
Hausner’s ability to create suspense out
of formal elements, the sequence is served
by Fox’s committed portrayal of a woman DIG INTO THE
who fights to survive in a hostile environ-
ment that tests the limits of her sanity.
This kind of visceral escalation is
FILM COMMENT
precisely what is lacking in Little Joe’s con-
frontational mother-son moments, which
ARCHIVE
suffer from poor dialogue and clumsy
staging. Although the film abounds with
intimate interactions between Alice and
Joe at the dinner table or in the car, their EXPLORE
50
relationship almost exclusively revolves
around their mutual interest in the plant <>A4C70=
and never quite comes to life. As in her
previous work, Hausner attempts to con-
ceal her story’s emotional shallowness be-
hind a polished aesthetic that equally grat-
ifies and numbs the viewer. The animated
blooming flower stimulates our senses, but
it fails to distract us from dramaturgical
weaknesses such as the jarringly violent
way in which the well-behaved Joe begins
YEARS
rejecting his mother as a result of being
contaminated—or is he simply stepping OF AMAZING
into adolescence? Hausner aims to con-
vince us that the open-endedness at stake BACK ISSUES
is a productive one, but it’s difficult to
shake the feeling of having been deceived
and manipulated by Little Joe when the
closing credits roll. O FILMCOMMENT.COM/SHOP
Yonca TaluKUCƂNOOCMGTNKXKPIKP2CTKU
5JGITGYWRKP+UVCPDWNCPFITCFWCVGF
HTQO0;76KUEJ
November-December 2019 | F I LM CO MME NT | 73
 HOME
O DVD/+ DEBUT
O BLU-RAY/+ DEBUT
X STREAMING
X EXCLUSIVE TO VOD
MOVIES
Adam Sandler: 100% Fresh
Naturally Funny
BY N EL LI E KI L LIAN
X#FCO5CPFNGTQP0GVƃKZ
P
eople love to hate adam sandler as much as they
love to love him. His deals with Netflix seem to have kicked
this tendency into overdrive. He’s currently one movie
into his second four-picture deal with them—a partnership that,
since 2015, has produced five features (average Rotten Toma-
toes rating: 22 percent) and the standup special Adam Sandler:
100% Fresh (2018). The hack line is that he’s phoning it in for
an obscene amount of money, and this objection seems to be
as much about the form as the content. He’s still making broad,
shaggy comedies, often with goofy premises (in The Do-Over,
estranged high school friends fake their own deaths) and prepos-
terous twists (the Do-Over friends end up curing cancer).
I eagerly awaited seeing Sandler and Jennifer Aniston lead an
Agatha Christie riff in Murder Mystery, and when a friend told me
that The Week Of had a humanism reminiscent of Jean Renoir, it
sounded slightly hyperbolic, but intriguing. If the Netflix films
were taken more seriously, The Week Of would have been heralded
as the exciting feature directorial debut of Robert Smigel (creator
of Triumph the Insult Comic Dog and co-screenwriter of You Don’t
Mess with the Zohan). It’s a gaspingly funny, disarmingly sweet
ensemble comedy that includes a Greek chorus of hard-of-hearing
aunties, an extended storyline about stolen valor, and a reverse
heist that involves getting a large number of live bats into City Hall.
Smigel orchestrates a cast of dozens (including Chris Rock, Steve
7 4 | F I L M C O MME NT | November-December 2019
Cinema spun,
streamed, and
beamed
The Week Of
Buscemi, and Rachel Dratch), trusting his performers to bring a
grounding humanity to their characters, however ridiculous, and
avoiding the bane of so much contemporary comedy: overwriting.
Sandler plays it straight as Kenny Lustig, a loving, beleaguered
100% FRESH: SCOTT YAMANO/NETFLIX; THE WEEK OF: MACALL POLAY/NETFLIX
patriarch cheerfully masking the strain of constant assaults on his
pride and his pocketbook in the run-up to his daughter’s wedding.
Sandler never shies away from mixing off-color humor with
surprising tenderness. The result would be mawkish in a less
capable actor’s hands, but Sandler brings the same craft to these
Netflix films as he does to his work with P.T. Anderson or Noah
Baumbach. In Sandy Wexler he plays a man with paralyzing
insecurity and fear of rejection who honks when he laughs, and
Sandler telegraphs Sandy’s loneliness as easily as he honks at his
own jokes. There is an utter lack of pretension to all of his work:
he plays the most outlandish characters honestly, and there is
never a whiff of the try-hard self-seriousness that sometimes
afflicts comedians attempting to tackle drama.
If Sandler’s fallen off your radar, or you never got the appeal
in the first place, 100% Fresh is a good place to start. In one of the
loosest comedy specials I’ve seen in years, his material is largely
about the slide into middle age, but his vibe remains boyish,
guilelessly flitting from songs about his daughters, “UFC Ears,”
and stanky Ubers, to jokes about dick-measuring ghosts, to
musical tributes to his late friend Chris Farley and his wife Jackie.
Sandler is absurd and sweetly sentimental by turns. And on top of
all that, he seems to be having such a good time.
 Filmed in rich, shadowy black-and-white 16mm, Bless Their Little Hearts stays true to the neorealist methods of
the L.A. Rebellion movement that director Billy Woodberry exemplifies.

+ +$NGUU6JGKT.KVVNG*GCTVU 20 DISCS
Billy Woodberry, USA, 1983; Milestone Films TO WATCH
bessie smith’s blues, rendered by a melancholy sax, plays under +Be Natural: The Untold
the pre-credit sequence of Billy Woodberry’s first feature, forecasting 5VQT[QH#NKEG)W[$NCEJÅ
its kitchen-sink depiction of an African-American family straining Pamela B. Green, USA, 2018;
to stay afloat financially and emotionally in South Central Los Kino Lorber
Angeles. Bless Their Little Hearts (1983) relentlessly focuses on +$KTF[Alan Parker, USA, 1984;
work not only as subsistence but as essential to the masculine Powerhouse Films
identity of protagonist Charley Banks (Nate Hardman). The film O+6JG%JCPVQH,KOOKG
progresses in verité style—Woodberry continued in his career $NCEMUOKVJFred Schepisi,
primarily as a documentarian—with striking observational Australia, 1978; Kino Lorber
sequences, including the centerpiece scene of a marital confron- ++6JG%QVVQP%NWD'PEQTG
tation between Charlie and his wife Andais (a stunning Kaycee Francis Ford Coppola, USA,
Moore). Filmed in rich, shadowy, dark-on-dark black-and-white 1984; Lionsgate
16mm, it stays true to the neorealist methods of the L.A. Rebellion O+&GEQFGTMuscha, West
movement that Woodberry exemplifies, alongside directors Julie Germany, 1984; Vinegar
Dash, Haile Gerima, Zeinabu irene Davis, and Charles Burnett— Syndrome
BLESS THEIR LITTLE HEARTS: MILESTONE FILMS; LA MARSEILLAISE: KINO LORBER; TUNES OF GLORY: UNITED ARTISTS/KOBAL/SHUTTERSTOCK

who wrote and shot the screenplay. Also included: Woodberry’s +The Far Country Anthony
1980 short The Pocketbook, adapted from a Langston Hughes Mann, USA, 1954; Arrow Films
story.—ina diane archer +)QF\KNNC6JG5JQYC'TC
(KNOUƂNOUGV,CRCP
O +.C/CTUGKNNCKUG 1954–1975; Criterion
,GCP4GPQKT(TCPEG-KPQ.QTDGT ++*QVGND[VJG4KXGT Hong
Sangsoo, South Korea, 2018;
after years of critical and historical neglect, Jean Renoir’s Cinema Guild
1938 account of the French Revolution finally gets a beautiful, ++(TKV\.CPIZ: The Indian
high-definition release. The French master is far less interested in Tomb, West Germany, 1959;
the conflict’s storied intellectual heroes, like Danton and Robes- The Tiger of Eschnapur, West
pierre, than in the working-class fighters and noblemen displaced Germany, 1959; Film Movement
by it all. La Marseillaise originated as a propaganda piece for the ++.QPI&C[oU,QWTPG[KPVQ
quickly waning Popular Front government, but it ended up dis- 0KIJVBi Gan, China/France,
appointing all sides of the political spectrum. Initially seen as “too 2018; Kino Lorber
soft” on the French aristocracy, it’s an impressive exercise in empa- ++/KFUQOOCTAri Aster, USA,
thy, portraying the revolution through a large and diverse cast of 2019; Lionsgate
characters. Filled with Renoir’s deep-focus framing, the film creates O+/KNNGPPKWO#EVTGUUSatoshi
a quietly subversive and nuanced portrait of the French Revolu- -QP,CRCP5JQWV(CEVQT[
tion in a lively “newsreel” style.—robert joseph schneider +0GY;QTM5VQTKGUMartin
Scorsese, Woody Allen & Fran-
O O 6WPGUQH)NQT[ cis Ford Coppola, USA, 1989;
Ronald Neame, UK, 1960; The Criterion Collection Kino Lorber
O+0QY8Q[CIGTIrving
in his memoirs, John Mills recalled bringing Tunes of Glory’s script Rapper, USA, 1942; Criterion
to his Great Expectations flatmate Alec Guinness and agreeing to ++1PEG7RQPC6KOGKP
swap their traditional roles for this study of peacetime soldier- *QNN[YQQF Quentin Tarantino,
ing. The casting was a triumph of intuition: Guinness, typed USA/UK, 2019; Sony
by The Bridge on the River Kwai as a hardline disciplinarian, has O+Peter Pan Herbert Brenon,
a Highland fling as a popular brigade commander, while Mills USA, 1924; Kino Lorber
plays his regimental replacement, a Colonel whose fanatical O+6JG5VQT[QH6GORNG&TCMG
observance of regulations intimates a tortured psyche (contrast- Stephen Roberts, USA, 1933;
ing sharply with his affable sailor image, hewn from In Which We Criterion
Serve). Neither man ever appeared to greater effect, with Mills shat- ++6QQ.CVGVQ&KG;QWPI
tering as his new post presents exigencies not covered by the rule Dominga Sotomayor, Chile/
book, while everyone’s-pal Guinness frays at his loss of authority. Brazil/Argentina/Netherlands/
Incisively directed by Ronald Neame, Tunes of Glory renders the Qatar, 2018; KimStim Films
harsh realities of career military service in Criterion’s sterling 4K O+9KPVGT-KNNU William Richert,
restoration.—steven mears USA, 1979; Kino Lorber

November-December 2019 | F IL M CO MMENT | 75

Suffice it to say you’d be hard put to make Emanuelle in America today—it dares to be simultaneously sexy,
issue-driven, and elegant... just like Emanuelle.

20 TITLES ++FC.WRKPQ(KNOOCMGT%QNNGEVKQP
TO STREAM Not Wanted, 1949; Never Fear, 1949; The Hitch-Hiker, 1953; The
Bigamist, 1953; USA; Kino Lorber
X 6JG#FXGPVWTGUQH2TKPEG
#EJOGFLotte Reiniger, like a certain duochrome-haired matriarch did for French cinema,
Germany, 1926; Criterion Ida Lupino “mothered” a New Wave of American independent film,
X Babylon Franco Rosso, UK, with her production company, The Filmakers [sic]. Four of these
1980; Kino Now works have been newly restored and are now available in a box set
X 5JKTNG[%NCTMGZ from Kino Lorber. Lupino’s proclivity for social critique is on ample
The Connection, USA, 1961; display: themes of childbirth out of wedlock in her directorial debut,
Four Journeys into Mystic Not Wanted (1949), were reprised in the startlingly progressive The
Time, USA, 1978; Ornette: Bigamist (1953), reframed by marital infidelity and adoption; the
Made in America, USA, 1985; desert-set noir The Hitch-Hiker (1953) spins from its skillful suspense
Criterion a tale of loneliness and codependence, mirrored in the earlier Never
XX #P'NGRJCPV5KVVKPI5VKNN Fear (1949), in which a wide-eyed dancer contracts polio (as Lupino
Hu Bo, China, 2018; Criterion did). Here is an artist attentive to ethical and emotional nuance, who
XX .o'PHCPVUGETGVPhilippe brings a generous humanism to all of her stories of social conflict.
Garrel, France, 1979; MUBI —phoebe chen
XX 6JG(QTGUVQH.QXGSion
5QPQ,CRCP0GVƃKZ O +$WHHGVHTQKF
XX )GPÄUGPhilippe Lesage, Bertrand Blier, France, 1979; Kino Lorber
Canada, 2018; Film Movement
X 2GTT[*GP\GNNZ this past march, writer-director Bertrand Blier received a New
The Harder They Come, York retrospective marking his 80th birthday, bringing back into
,COCKEC75#No Place view Buffet froid—the 1979 black comedy that followed his bet-
Like Home,COCKEC75# ter-known Get Out Your Handkerchiefs and Going Places. Soaked in
2006; Criterion the inky darkness of night and general bad vibes, it’s a sub-Buñue-
X *KIJ.KHGClaire Denis, lian farce conducted on the run (or on the mope). It begins with
France/Germany/Poland/UK/ Gérard Depardieu, as a lost innocent/madman, popping questions
USA, 2018; Amazon to a stranger in an empty subway station: “Don’t you get odd ideas?
X ,COGU+XQT[Z Don’t you ever want to kill somebody?” Joining Depardieu are Ber-
Autobiography of a Princess, trand’s father, Bernard Blier, as a sociopathic police inspector and
UK, 1975; Quartet, UK/France, Jean Carmet as yet another murderous lowlife. Slow zooms and
1981; Kanopy cavernous shots play up the central location of a gloomy, nearly
XX 6JG.CWPFTQOCV deserted apartment building on the Paris outskirts. Playing today
Steven Soderbergh, USA, more as grotesque than as absurdist, Buffet froid (aka “Cold Cuts”)
0GVƃKZ feels colder now than ever before.—Nicolas Rapold
X .GCXKPI*QOG%QOKPI
*QOG#2QTVTCKVQH4QDGTV +'OCPWGNNGKP#OGTKEC
(TCPM)GTCNF(QZ7- ,QG&o#OCVQ+VCN[/QPFQ/CECDTQ

NEVER FEAR/IDA LUPINO & BUFFET FRO ID: K INO LORBE R

Kanopy
XX /KUVGT#OGTKECEric sylvia kristel’s high-end “two-M” Emmanuelle films helped
Notarnicola, USA, 2019; define gauzy erotica while Laura Gemser’s one-M “Black Emanuelle”
Amazon films are the bracing corrective, equally indebted to mondo mov-
XX The Queen Frank Simon, ies and hobnail-boot feminism. Emanuelle in America (1977) casts
USA, 1968; Kino Now Gemser as a globe-trotting photojournalist (complete with cameras
XX 6KIGTU#TG0QV#HTCKF concealed in chunky gold jewelry) documenting and battling abuses
+UUC.ÏRG\/GZKEQ against women by the rich and degenerate. She’s the proto–Lisbeth
Shudder Salander, the scourge of misogynists three decades before The Girl
X 7U,QTFCP2GGNG75# with the Dragon Tattoo. The sexually explicit film is either the apex
2019; HBO or the nadir of the series, depending on how you feel about benign
beast-bothering and a snippet of 8mm film-within-the-film torture
porn. The film is shot in Washington D.C., New York, and sundry
European locations, and its sharp production values are well-served
by Mondo Macabro’s crisp Blu-ray. Suffice it to say you’d be hard put
to make this film today—it dares to be simultaneously sexy, issue-
driven, and elegant... just like Emanuelle.—maitland mcdonagh

7 6 | F I LM C O MM EN T | November-December 2019
 As larger streaming services silo off in order to more efficiently monetize their intellectual property, the collaborative,
not-for-profit Folkstreams calls back to the idea of streaming as a means of discovery, open-ended search, and surprise.
From left: The High Lonesome Sound, Navajo Talking Picture, People Who Take Up Serpents
Homegrown
HIGH LONESOME SOUND , NAVAJO TALKING PICTURE , & PEOPLE W HO TAKE UP SERPENTS: C OUR TES Y OF TO M D AVENP O R T /FO LKST REAMS
BY C L INT ON KRU T E
X X (QNMUVTGCOU
#HTGGUGTXKEGHQEWUGFQPHQNMNKHGƂNOU
I
n the context of an increasingly cable
TV–like streaming market, Folkstreams
remains a website apart, an oddball gold
mine of music documentaries, ethnographic
films, and educational movies with little-to-no
commercial appeal—all available, in the dem-
ocratic tradition of folk art, for free. The site
was founded in 2000 by filmmaker/farmer Tom
Davenport as an effort to preserve and provide
access to the work of amateur and professional
folklorists and ethnographers. In the tradition
of Folkways Records and Alan Lomax’s Associa-
tion for Cultural Equity, Folkstreams combines
academic backing with pure documentary zeal,
and remains a family-run nonprofit with sup-
port from the National Endowment for the Arts
and a partnership with The Southern Folklife
Collection at the University of North Carolina.
By the time he turned his attention to
streaming (and to his farm in northern Vir-
ginia), Davenport had spent years working as a
full-time filmmaker, directing folklife documen-
taries and producing a series of adaptations of
Grimms’ Fairy Tales set in the Amercian South
for PBS in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s. The process
of building a promotional website for the series
led to an interest in using the still-fresh internet
to provide new life to films that were otherwise
only available at libraries and universities, if at all.
Folkstreams was created, according to its website,
to preserve and host films with “unusual subjects,
odd lengths, and talkers who do not speak
‘broadcast English.’” The result is an invaluable
and exhaustive collection of work focusing on
American folklife, with films from the early ’60s
to 2018, all of which have been carefully digi-
tized and preserved and are streaming with the
permission of the filmmakers.
The site contains a wealth of moving images
that would otherwise be nearly impossible to see,
or even find out about. It hosts classic ethno-
graphic films like John Cohen’s haunting 1963
portrait of Appalachia The High Lonesome Sound
(notable for “rediscovering” Roscoe Holcomb,
a forgotten genius of old-time music), and less
easily categorized work like Arlene Bowman’s
Navajo Talking Picture (1986). Films like Stan
Woodward and Gretchen Robinson’s beautiful
1974 People Who Take Up Serpents are rough-
around-the-edges evocations of lost ways of life,
while Joyce Smith’s Paj Ntaub (1996) is more
straightforwardly educational, a PBS-style doc-
umentary detailing the experiences of Hmong
refugees resettled in Providence, Rhode Island.
Folkstreams also provides supplemental mate-
rial, including both archival and commissioned
writing by and interviews with filmmakers, along
with a fantastic guide for home preservation of
film and video. The attention to detail and the
simplicity of the navigation and search features
make it easy to get lost in the site, jumping from
film to film and culture to culture.
Though humming at a much lower frequency,
Folkstreams’s documentaries provide invaluable
insight into cultural history, where big boys
like Amazon and Netflix offer the reductive
Americana of Ken Burns or the overwrought
cliffhangers of Wild Wild Country. As these larger
streaming services silo off in order to more
efficiently monetize their intellectual property,
Davenport’s collaborative, not-for-profit site
calls back to the idea of streaming as a means of
discovery, open-ended search, and surprise.
November-December 2019 | F IL M COMMEN T | 77
WISH LIST
BABYLON—SLEEPING
WITH THE DEVIL
Like most of the great horror
ƂNOUBabylon—Sleeping with
the Devil (1992) is rooted in
recognizable terrors—in this
case, pregnancy and male
aggression. Emerging from
the last gasps of divided Ger-
many and virtually unseen in
the U.S., this neon-lit, satirical
sleazefest follows young nurse
Maria (Natja Brunckhorst,
Christiane F. herself) as she
UVCTVUCƃKPIYKVJCVYQDKVEQP
man and lothario named, of
EQWTUG.QVJCTtQPN[VQƂPF
VJCVVJKU%CUCPQXCKUUQVQZKE
that his semen is literally rot-
ting women from the inside.
Director Ralf Huettner carries
out this shocking premise with
unforgettably gory imagery
and a wicked, winking sense of
JWOQTVJCVoUXGT[8GTJQGXGP
Babylon is the kind of genre
rediscovery tailor-made for
CFGNWZG5[PCRUGQT5GXGTKP
or Mondo Macabro Blu-ray
release—hopefully featuring
GZVGPUKXGKPVGTXKGYUYKVJ
VJGETGCVKXGVGCOGZRNCKPKPI
JQYKP)QFoUPCOGUWEJC
knowingly nasty piece of work
EQWNFoXGGXGTEQOGKPVQDGKPI.
—C. Mason Wells
READINGS Books about all aspects of filmmaking and film culture
Authors (from left) Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey
Justice League
Two journalists recount their exposé
of systemic abuse | BY AMY TAUBIN
She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story
That Helped Ignite a Movement
By Jodi Kantor & Megan Twohey, Penguin Random House, $28
A
knockout of a read, jodi kantor and megan twohey’s
She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That
Helped Ignite a Movement is a more detailed and ex-
panded version of the two investigative journalists’ 2017
The New York Times articles that brought down Harvey Wein-
stein. Even more so than Woodward and Bernstein’s All the Presi-
dent’s Men (1974), it is an inspiring how-to manual for reporters,
one that might fuel an uptick in J-school applications.
While most of book is devoted to the Weinstein investigation,
there are sidebars on the inquiries into sexual harassment and
abuse claims against Trump before his election, and on the charges
that Christine Blasey Ford made against Brett Kavanaugh and the
failure of Congress to follow through on them. “The Weinstein
story was a solvent for secrecy” is one of the book’s takeaways, but
the inclusion of these specific failures are warnings that for all the
powerful men who have been brought down in the past two years,
Get Out: The Complete
Annotated Screenplay
By Jordan Peele
Inventory Press, $19.95
The annotated script of Get
Out—for which Jordan Peele
ܜ˜̅iwÀÃÌ"ÃV>À>Ü>À`i`̜>˜
African American for an original
screenplay—opens with Tananarive
7 8 | F I L M CO M MENT | November-December 2019
“The Weinstein story was a solvent for secrecy” is one of
She Said·VWDNHDZD\VEXWWKHLQFOXVLRQRIVSHFLÀFVWUXFWXUDO
failures are warnings that for all the powerful men who
have been brought down, the institutions that support them
remain patriarchal and largely impervious to change.
the institutions that support them remain patriarchal and largely
impervious to change; i.e., there’s still lots of work to do.
She Said is proof that the most effective platforms for such
investigations are established, well-funded journalistic institu-
tions such as The New York Times. Its Weinstein story originated
in a wider commitment by the paper to uncovering how power is
structured in workplaces of all kinds. Because women are almost
always marginalized in such power structures, their experience
TOP: JODI KANTOR & MEGAN TWOHEY BY ANDREW LIH; BOTTOM LEFT: © UNIVERSAL PICTURES/PHOTOFEST
can be telling in ways that the experience of men who take patri-
archy for granted seldom is. Kantor and Twohey were encouraged
to take on Weinstein by investigative editor Rebecca Corbett,
whose guidance over three difficult years made the story not only
possible but airtight when it broke on October 5, 2017.
What was most compelling and hardest to stomach in that story
and its follow-ups is considerably more fleshed out in She Said: how
a wall of silence was created by hundreds of people both within
Weinstein’s companies and in the industry at large, who knew about
his sexual harassment, abuse, and alleged rape of women ranging
from 22-year-old assistants to major stars, but didn’t want to risk
their own careers—or implicitly believed that the casting couch was
an unshakable tradition. Kantor and Twohey nail the nondisclosure
agreement, typically posited as a way for women to get financial
compensation for abuse and preferable to inevitably being on
the losing end of a “he said, she said” civil or criminal case, as the
strongest mechanism for keeping the
wall of silence in place. Which makes
so-called feminist lawyers such as
Gloria Allred and her daughter Lisa
Bloom (who was one of Weinstein’s
attorneys) well-compensated enablers
of the patriarchal status quo.
She Said is a procedural
page-turner in which the writers
direct their investigative chops at
their own tactics, strategies, and
emotions. Their stroke of genius is
to write in the third person, thus
turning “Jodi” and “Megan” into
grown-up Nancy Drews.
Due’s incisive essay “Get Out silencing of our voice, the silencing
and the Black Horror Aesthetic.” of our screams.” Throughout his
Due, a black horror creative, notes to this edition, Peele reas-
writes: “This country values blacks serts his desire to speak directly to
for everything except our actual a black audience and to acknowl-
blackness, our health and our lives. edge black horror devotees’
The Sunken Place is the system voices, even when on-screen char-
that suppresses us.” She quotes acters appear to disregard their
Peele, who explicates, “A big part ŜÕÌÃ̜LiÜ>ÀiœÀ̜yii°*iii
of the Sunken Place, to me, is the wants the African-American horror
 Doggedly holding the archival line from inside the projection booth is a refrain heard through all 10 chapters of The Art of Film
ProjectionZKLFKOXFLGO\H[SOLFDWHVWKHSURFHVVRIVKRZLQJPRYLHVRQÀOPDVERWKDWHFKQLFDOFKDOOHQJHDQGDVDFUHGUHVSRQVLELOLW\

in association with Eastman’s L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film

Preservation. Doggedly holding the archival line from inside
the projection booth is a refrain heard through all 10 ensuing
chapters, which lucidly explicate the process of showing movies
on film as both a technical challenge and a sacred responsibility.
Reading its 300+ pages of scrupulous expository prose, I was
frequently reminded of Matthew 5:14-15: “You are the light of
the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor does
anyone light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a lamp-
stand, and it gives light to all who are in the house.” The beauti-
fully clothbound volume—complete with a stitched-on ribbon
bookmark—even feels like a hymnal.
The projectionist, “Chapter 3: Environments” tells us, is “stew-
ard to two separate environments: one a hidden cove of machin-
ery and technology, the other a wide-open frontier that serves
as the grounds for an audience to experience fantasy, fiction,
reality, humanity, and everything in between.” The necessarily
heavy barrage of gig-specific jargon delivered throughout the
book proves a rather rich semantic trove. The terms “lamphouse”

Keepers of the Flame (the part of the projector with the bulb in it) and “inboard” and
“outboard” (the projectionist’s physical position in relation to
TOP: © HANLON-FISKE STUDIOS INC./COURTESY OF GEORGE EASTMAN MUSEUM

A manual pays respect to the craft of
screening movies | BY BRUCE BENNETT
The Art of Film Projection: A Beginner’s Guide
'FKVGFD[2CQNQ%JGTEJK7UCK5RGPEGT%JTKUVKCPQ
Catherine A. Surowiec & Timothy J. Wagner,
George Eastman Museum, $29.95
the exposed film path and magazine) could hail from a maritime
manual. “Goldbergs” (metal film shipping cans) and “bio box”
(the projection booth itself) conjure showbiz history.
The afterword extols: “Be passionate. Be humble. Be the best
that you can be.” The book’s spirit of humility and responsi-
bility functions almost like a corrective for unrestrained and
undisciplined creativity. In his 1971 directing how-to The Total
Film-Maker, actor/writer/director Jerry Lewis confessed: “I have

N
perched in a cutting room
ow that commercial film multiplexes have all but and licked emulsion. Maybe
completely switched over to digital (after computerized I thought more of me would
“platter” film projection systems had already sent a gen- get on to that film.” One of
eration of projectionists to the unemployment office), the bullet-pointed “Do’s and
the prospect of becoming a film projectionist may seem like Don’ts” in The Art of Film
suiting up as a Civil War reenactor. But in a co-written foreword Projection serves Jerry an
to the George Eastman Museum’s The Art of Film Projection: implicit smackdown. “Never,”
A Beginner’s Guide, artist Tacita Dean and filmmaker/celluloid it definitively states, “identify
chauvinist Christopher Nolan make a persuasive argument for the emulsion and base sides of
recasting the remaining projectionists in museum and vintage the print by putting it in your
repertory theaters as film preservationists. “Good projectionists,” mouth.”
they jointly declare, “are trained to handle history.”
Laced with crisp black-and-white photos and frame blow- Bruce Bennett is a TV writer and
ups, the book, an affectionate throwback to ’70s-era Focal Press/ RTQFWEGTCPFTGEQXGTKPIƂNO
Hastings’s to-the-point “Technique of...” volumes, was produced critic based in Woodside, NY.

fan to feel represented—to believe
that their presence is known, and
̅>Ì̅iw“Ü>ÃVÀi>Ìi`vœÀ̅i“°
The annotations as well as
the deleted scenes are fascinat-
ing supplements, especially for
revelatory Monday-morning quar-
terbacking. Peele uncovers addi-
tional subtle clues and allusions
ˆ˜̅iw“­ÃÕV…>Ã̅i˜œÌˆœ˜
of the “black buck”) that may
not be essential knowledge but
give insight on the construction
of the characters, their psyches,
and ultimately their interactions.
œÃÌÈ}˜ˆwV>˜ÌvœÀ*iiiˆÃ̅i
relationship between adult Chris
and his memories of his deceased
mother. Likewise, Peele’s com-
ments on the structure and timing
of written screenplays and how
they are translated into the direct-
ing process are comprehensible
to general readers.
I usually prefer to avoid
directors’ commentaries and
annotations, hoping to make
the work that I am watching my
own to “read.” My fears were
quelled while reading Get Out,
but I still want to debate with
the artist, particularly over the
inscrutability of girlfriend Rose,
the villain played by Allison
Williams. Peele’s comments are
formatted at the end of the text
like footnotes, but I look forward
to engaging with him in the mar-
gins and adding my own.—Ina
Diane Archer

November-December 2019 | F I LM COM M ENT | 79

GRAPHIC DETAIL The art of the movie poster by Adrian Curry

STEVE N C HO R N EY

I
n the world of movie poster art, steven
Chorney is a veritable Comeback Kid. One of
the most accomplished realist illustrators of the
’80s, Chorney, like so many of his peers, saw the
market for hand-painted poster art wane by the
early ’90s. But in recent years, he has been much
in demand once again, creating key art for films
by Paul Thomas Anderson, Noah Baumbach,
and, most recently, Quentin Tarantino. Born in
1951 and raised in Buffalo, New York, Chorney
(whose father had been a commercial illustrator
in Toronto) bypassed art school and headed to
Hollywood in 1971, armed only with a portfolio
of high school sketches. He would work at a small
TV-commercial animation company on the Sunset
Strip for 10 years before doing his first theatrical
movie poster, for the 1982 film adaptation of Neil
Simon’s I Ought to Be in Pictures. A skilled portrait-
ist with a light touch, Chorney’s most memorable
’80s posters feature David Bowie cradling Jennifer
Connelly in an orb for Labyrinth, Richard Dreyfuss
and Emilio Estevez hiding under a bed for Stakeout,
and Eddie Murphy lifting the Capitol dome for
The Distinguished Gentleman. He worked steadily
throughout the ’80s and early ’90s until changing
tastes, and Photoshop, led to a rapid decline in the
use of illustrators for movie posters. For most of
the next 20 years, Chorney worked for publishing
and board game companies. But in the early 2010s
the hipster-led appreciation for all things artisanal,
coupled with the work of Mondo and The Criterion
Collection, gave rise to a new demand for illus-
trated movie art. Chorney has recently created
striking campaigns for Inherent Vice, De Palma,
and The Other Side of the Wind, but his most high-
profile commission in recent years was for Once
Upon a Time... in Hollywood. Not only did Chorney
illustrate the official one-sheet, he also created a
couple of prominent prop posters within the film
for the Rick Dalton vehicles Operazione Dyn-o-mite!
and Comanche Uprising—a project bringing him full
circle to the Hollywood of his youth. O
POSTERS COURTESY OF HERITAGE AUCTIONS

Adrian Curry writes about movie posters for mubi.com

and is the design director for Zeitgeist Films and
Kino Lorber.

Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood

(Quentin Tarantino, USA/UK, 2019)
Labyrinth
(Jim Henson, USA/UK, 1986)
Inherent Vice
(Paul Thomas Anderson, USA, 2014)

8 0 | F I LM CO M MENT | November-December 2019

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