Author: victor@dmovies.org

Minding the Gap

Posted on by victor@dmovies.org

If the concept of a film shot over 12 years will bring to mind the lackadaisical atmosphere of Boyhood (Richard Linklater, 2014), then don’t fear, Minding The Gap has far more purpose than the novelty of watching people grow up before you. Debut director Bing Liu is mining the life and adolescences of his best friends, to interrogate domestic abuse and notions of masculinity.

“I want to make a montage”, says 17-year-old Liu, setting off a trajectory that will find him drawing a cine-memoir from the footage he’s shot of his skater pals throughout his youth, and returning to his hometown of Rockford, Illinois to watch them become men. In telling their story, he helps his friends, family, and himself to come to terms with the abuse they have suffered and how close they might be coming to repeating that cycle. This would make for a depressing watch if they weren’t such entertaining subjects. The charismatic Zack is what would happen if Peter Fonda got really into NOFX, while the gangly Keire bottles his emotions up, but tries his hardest.

Liu is a pupil of Steve James, and you can see the great Chicagoan documentarian’s influence throughout Minding the Gap’s patience and controlled inquisitiveness. Liu is a visual director who uses suggestive cinematography to convey a year’s worth of information about his subject in a single shot, or a choice sound clip. Minding the Gap depicts the town of Rockford with the wholesomeness of community and the grit of what occurs behind closed doors.

The fluid camera understands the movement of the board – in a way that Jonah Hill’s Mid90s (2019) doesn’t even try to, Hill sees boarding as a lifestyle choice, not as a spiritual experience. Rather, the picking of choice moments will recall the superlative Hale County This Morning, This Evening (Ramelle Ross, 2018). If Ross is an outsider, then Liu sees his (smaller) cast from deep within, resulting in a film of focused poetry.

He also grants them the respect to tell their own stories, to give everyone a chance to speak. They recount their experiences in their own words, including Liu’s mother, who just wants him to forget the past and move on with his life. These words are often juxtaposed with Liu’s already entrenched eye. When he interviews his mother he strips back that level of filmmaking artifice by showing the full film crew preparing. Acknowledgement of the element of artificiality heightens the authenticity of the overall project.

It’s interesting that the fathers, the abusers, are, through time or whatever else, absent. But Liu can already see Zack turning into his old man, and so he becomes the central focus of the film as Liu tries to get through to him. In confronting this head on, Liu doesn’t shy away from the complexity of an abusive relationship; how dependant, even nostalgic it can be. No, Minding the Gap is an incredibly brave film, that might cause us all to examine our scars to see how we might become better.

Minding the Gap is out in cinemas across the UK on Friday, March 22nd, and on VoD the following Monday.

Doozy

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A brief and yet satisfying portrait of the US entertainment legend Paul Lynde, Richard Squires’ debut film Doozy takes multiple approaches to viewing its charismatic subject, from the conventional to the thrillingly experimental. As well as voicing a number of Hanna-Barbera characters and memorably recurring on the American television sitcom Bewitched, Lynde is probably best known as the centre square on the game show Hollywood Squares, as the deliverer of zinger after zinger.

Actual footage of Lynde is quite limited in Doozy, however, with Clovis, a cartoon likeness of the man reenacting anecdotes from his life over live action footage. It manages to summon the essence of the man with charm and an element of kooky mystery.

In taking a multiplicity of viewpoints, Squires doesn’t always get a handle on Lynde. One of his classmates is returned to again and again for commentary on her friend, her enthusiastic daughter cutting her off in order to give her own explanation. When we see a couple play the whole of American folk song I Wish I was in Dixie on guitars, as he cuts back and forth to shots of Lynde’s high school yearbook, it’s difficult to work out if the sense of Confederate nostalgia he’s created is ironic or otherwise. This uncertainty is part of what makes Lynde so compelling to return to; he symbolises something different to almost everyone.

A number of academics appear in Hollywood Squares to talk about aspects of the Lynde persona and impact. Squires focuses on their faces as they watch old Hanna-Barbera cartoons. Some of their observations are insightful. While Mark Micale accuses Lynde of playing up to negative gay stereotypes, Jens Kjeldgaard-Christiansen’s discusses the dubious concept of ‘pseudospeciation’ (the idea that social difference is motivated by cultural difference – Tribalism is scientific, how very pseud) leads to the conclusion that Lynde’s otherness is in his voice.

In fact, much of Doozy centres on the voice of Paul Lynde. And why wouldn’t it? Even as his TV roles are aired with increasing irregularity (although hour-long compilations of his Hollywood Squares appearances are readily available online), that shrill, expressive voice lingers in the cultural memory through impressions, references, and an influence that travels all the way down to the UCB comedy crowd. Doozy opens with clips of folks doing impressions of him, and Squires tries to link his voice to the essentially American by playing clips of it over footage of Chevrolets and suburban Americana.

In visual style, the cartoon sequences pastiche Hanna-Barbara, telling short anecdotes that aren’t so far out of the bounds of plausibility. If the voice acting was better (we have so many voice clips of the real guy that its easy to spot the fake), perhaps these scenes would feel better integrated, but they linger as asides rather than driving a thesis for Doozy. That said, sometimes it creates a nice effect, like seeing cartoon Clovis solicit a cartoon hunk and them tiptoe through seedy neon-soaked streets and into a hotel room, hiccuping while accompanied by an upbeat soundtrack, which progresses into something darker, tragic and hallucinatory. In moments like this, Doozy creates a heady late night vibe, as long as you don’t expect something truly illuminating about its legendary subject.

Doozy is playing in select UK screenings from April 23rd – just click here for more information.

Under the Silver Lake

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Bloated, hyped, panned, lionised. David Robert Mitchell’s follow-up to the inventive Horror flick It Follows (2015) arrives in cinemas and on Mubi day-and-date this week. A year on from its decidedly mixed response at Cannes, the cluttered, uncompromising vision of Under the Silver Lake is destined to accrue a cult, midnight movie reputation.

Set in an uber-lush LA, full of foliage and animals and animal killers, after Andrew Garfield’s loser Sam gets caught watching Riley Keough through some binoculars and getting stoned together, they set a date to hook up tomorrow. But the next day, she’s nowhere to be found. Entire flat empty, leave no trace. This sends Garfield into a paranoid, spiralling quest through Los Angeles, where he uncovers a thousand conspiracies and points the finger at everyone but himself. The camerawork is lush, the music by Disasterpiece is great, intoxicating you on all that LA hedonism, with a bonerfied, libido deconstruction on the level of Thomas Pynchon, whose tone is captured better here than in literal adaptation, Inherent Vice (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2014).

Mitchell has built a city where nothing really leads anywhere but back up your own behind. Yes, it’s self-indulgent, but so is this quite hateful lead character played with adaptive skill by Andrew Garfield. The way he runs across the screen, flapping his stiff hands by his side, is hilarious. His sneer, hiding behind his shades, his dejection every time someone points out how bad he smells. It’s funny, Little Tramp material. And then Mitchell undercuts that sympathy by having Sam beat up a child.

As an audience identification figure, he sucks. And yet are we asked to align with Garfield again and again, and Mitchell is not always in control our understanding of exactly where we should be in opposition to him. That’s what lets the film down, but also what makes it interesting to figure out. His journey, for all of the film’s complicated, shaggy dog nonsense, doesn’t take Sam particularly far outside of his own social milieu. He’s is already peripherally connected to almost everyone he encounters, so much of his conspiracizing is just about a social group that he can’t really infiltrate. The failure of the male ego.

Mitchell has been compared, unfavourably, to David Lynch, for his employment of surrealism within the metier of the classic Hollywood. But his style doesn’t resemble Lynch as much as both directors build characters who are self-consciously situated within an intertextual world.

The mannered costumes, like LA is a perma-fancy dress party, brought to mind Rivette’s play acting in his fantasy films like Duelle (1976). Under the Silver Lake always seems on the verge of falling all the way into those fantastical elements. There’s nothing fantastical however about the way that all the women in Sam’s sphere, young aspiring starlets the lot of them, are being infantalised and sexually exploited by this world, forced to keep up those movie star smiles and behave placidly even around a broke dude who smells like skunk spray.

Indeed, charges of sexism against the films gaze on its female characters seem to be missing the point. Isn’t it clear to the point of bluntness about their objectification? Isn’t there a scene where Garfield and Grace use a drone to spy on a woman and then lose their boners when she begins to cry as she strips? Isn’t Garfields ineffectiveness as a person, in forming relationships, in developing as a person, punished by the film? Don’t the glimpses of conspiracy that are uncovered all revolve around the power that incredibly rich and powerful men hold over vulnerable people? Do viewers really need these things spoken aloud? The visual system of the film, from these plot beats down to the production and, of course, the fact that Garfield smells like a literal skunk for much of the run time, tell us the answers. Does a character need to placate the audience by appearing just verbally admonish him? Hang on, that happens too!

Perhaps Mitchell is throwing too much at the audience for a real coherence to be found. But its approach to mystery doesn’t lead you to expect every loose end to be closed off as much as to just savour the morsels it throws your way. You are forced to work through Sam’s bad decisions, the convoluted mystery, the novelistic digressions. Some of the places Under the Silver Lake reaches are perhaps too easy, as though Mitchell’s grasp of the galaxy-brain-society stuff he’s talking about is all surface level, like he himself is lost in the mire that is modern life. But you couldn’t have a film about self-indulgence that doesn’t swim in those waters itself, could you?

Under the Silver Lake is in selected cinemas on Friday, March 15th (2019). On Mubi in August 2020.

So Long My Son

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It’s not uncommon for a film festival to leave its crowning jewel for near the end of the festival, and Berlinale 2019 may just have found theirs in the form of So Long, My Son, the epic (in terms of both content and duration; the film has 180 minutes) family saga tearjerker from Chinese Wang Xiaoshuai. Across four decades of turbulent Chinese society, Wang studies a married couple, using the death of their son as a focal point around which to subtly explore the single-child policy and the impact of the Cultural Revolution.

The unconventional structure zips back and forth through different time frames, gradually moving along a central timeline. The story occurs in episodes which each have the feel of their own short story, but which fill in the details of the other things we have seen. Wang leans heavily on dramatic irony, raising the tension as we wait for truths to emerge. One wonders if he couldn’t have found a way to cut 15 minutes or so from the run time, so languid are the first two hours. It isn’t until the final 50 minutes that So Long My Son really pays off every beat he’s set up. Like a Koreeda film, revelation is piled upon revelation, disarming you with one bombshell and then slapping you with another. Wang even uses the flashbacks to abet this by undercutting the outcome of one scene with the reality of the past or present.

The seriousness and the attention to naturalistic detail allows for slight detours into almost hallucinogenic images of memory. After the central couple go looking for their missing adopted son in a thunderstorm, they return to their flooded house and the family photograph floats towards them as though Baby Moses in the basket. When that boy is a little older we meet his punk, motorbike riding friends, who hang around the family house and appear like a mad apparition before the trash heap landscape. It’s a nod by Wang to the drifter youths he depicted in his earlier films.

Sometimes Wang takes the distance of a public spectacle. He rhymes shots by framing corridors in a particular way to remind you of a particular day in the lives of the characters, and repeatedly uses the Scottish poem Auld Lang Syne to haunting effect. Occasionally he’ll follow a peripheral character from this incredible ensemble cast and reveal their hidden depths. Then it ends with a note of blissfully ignorant hope, which recalls Make Way For Tomorrow (Leo McCarey, 1937) in its graceful affection. This is challenging in its length and bleakness, and probably won’t find much of a cinema life in the UK, but it should, because So Long My Son is one of the most skilful and rewarding films of the competition, and a guaranteed tearjerker.

So Long My Son showed at the Berlinale in February, when this piece was originally written. It won both the Best Actors and Best Actress prizes. In cinemas Friday, December 6th. On VoD in April. On Mubi in July/August

Varda by Agnes (Varda par Agnès)

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In Agnès Varda’s new documentary essay, which premieres today at Berlinale, the director returns again to a theme that has run throughout her work: herself. Varda by Agnès is a feature-length keynote with the French New Wave pioneer, who takes the audience on a journey through her films, stylistic choices, and changing themes.

It’s also a person reflecting on their 60-year career, from beginnings as a photographer, through successes and failures, her marriage to Jacques Demy who she loved very much, and her willingness to explore alternative mediums. It’s a mighty rejoinder to the Nolan/Tarantino shoot-on-film-only freaks that one of cinema’s great formal innovators is so open to adapting to new technologies, to see how they can bring her closer to the world.

It’s a primer for those who have discovered her work since Faces Places (which, along with her iconic image has made her an online darling). Varda has always been a master of controlling her own image, of exploring how people see and are seen. She muses on her production of the Jane Birkin film Kung-Fu Master (1988) alongside Jane B. par Agnès V. (1988) about what it meant to create portraits of another person which were also portraits of herself.

Part of why she’s such a source of fascination is that she’s never depicted herself as a tortured artist or intense genius, as so many writer/directors do. She’s self aware and good humoured about her work, but its this view of the self as only separated by the camera lens, so her films always feel like a trip directly into her interior monologue.

Part of me wondered if this film is a response to the increasingly memed version of her – a cardboard cut out likeness that toured along with Faces Places (2017) and became a must-selfie-with item, for example. She reclaims her own image and recycles it, which is effectively what Varda by Agnès is. Varda says as much herself in the section on one of her greatest films The Gleaners & I (2000). In that film, she realised that through following gleaners that she was herself one, recycling the stuff of life for film. Varda by Agnès is doing just the same with her own cinema, punctuating her life story with choice movie moments.

It’s expertly done, and it is a joy to revisit one of the greatest and most consistent filmographies in the history of European cinema, but if you are already familiar with Varda’s work this doesn’t tell you much that you don’t already know. As another capper to cement an already certain legacy though, we should be thankful for Varda Par Agnès as we are for the woman herself.

Varda by Agnès premiered at Berlinale, when this piece was originally written. On BFI Player, Mubi and Amazon Prime in May 2023.

The Souvenir

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Supposedly a filmic memoir, Joanna Hogg’s latest, the excruciating, heartbreaking romance The Souvenir turns an overplayed drug addiction story into magic by peeling away at our sympathies for the characters and her arresting images. The palatial surroundings prove to be a diseased cage.

Newcomer Honor Swinton Byrne pulls off a difficult performance as Julie, the smart, rich girl becoming aware of her own naivety. Despite being a budding filmmaker who just wants to realise her script about working class people in Sunderland (she visited once for a friend’s art show), she is unable to see outside of her own experience, and blind to the problems closest to her. She largely stays inside her Knightsbridge flat, but what starts as a room of one’s own is soon infiltrated by a poison.

Julie has been utterly coddled by her parents and so she throws her dependency onto the Oxbridge graduate Anthony. He’s vague about his foreign office job; Julie finds pictures of him in disguise in Afghanistan. Their relationship is immediately intense, although Hogg does not show them touch for the entirety of their developing relationship. And as soon as we do see them make that physical connection, we, and Julie, finally see the track marks on his arm.

Tom Burke’s performance must be one of the highlights of Berlinale. Delivering lines so slow, his bulking presence in the frame dominates and his arrogant demeanour cuts through scenes with this bitter assumed birthright. A harrowing withdrawal scene far removed from the romanticised movie view it gets in movies like Trainspotting (Danny Boyle, 1996), turns the living room into a kind of tomb, with Anthony a terrifying Bela Lugosi.

Inspired by Ozu, Hogg cramps the characters into these full, tight frames. Even when the camera takes a distance, the architecture of the flat, the lines of furniture, silhouettes of the city skyline, separate the characters. Often these stark shots are replicated later on with certain elements changed, drawing our attention to the passage of time without the need for exposition. A jaunt to Venice becomes a horrifying death march, in a scene that really pulls together the film’s critique of high-class degradation. Unsatisfying sex and opulence correspond in a scene that puts the audience into a drugged stupor.

The literal souvenirs of a relationship, however, are the most haunting element of the movie. Not just material things, like the ornate bed frame and extravagant clothes she acquires, or her taste for music which moves away from punk until she’s enjoying classical. It’s this entire worldview, how all of our relationships will change us in ways that might never become clear to us.

All of the characters carry a baggage, and Hogg doesn’t push any of this onto the audience, allowing the fragments of this story to take place in glimpses. Parts of it are almost cringe comedy, as Anthony condescends with such ease, telling Julie to abandon sincerity or documentary in her work, to be more like Powell and Pressburger. But it’s not quite satire. Repeated references to The Troubles tell us what’s taking place in the background, and what Julie doesn’t have to concern herself with. This other world, a real world. It’s on the other side of the wall, outside the window, through the lens.

Swinton Byrne’s real-life mother Tilda Swinton lends her presence to a small but effective role, giving it a little star power. It’s great that her discerning choices can bring more eyes to directors who can do with the attention. She’s back in old lady mode, only a step removed from her Grand Hotel Budapest (Wes Anderson, 2014) role. It’s an exquisite, detailed turn.

The beats of a toxic relationship are so familiar, and that’s what makes it difficult to watch. We want to tell at the screen, tell Julie off, beat Anthony up. This will be too much to handle for some, such unadorned privilege, a protagonist making such obvious mistakes and going largely unchecked. It might be difficult to sympathise, why doesn’t she just leave him? But in the sustained depiction of high-class consumption, Hogg shows toxicity as a drug, a society as sick as Anthony. With the end title card promising The Souvenir Part 2 is coming soon, I can’t wait to find out how Hogg will expand this already epic chronicle.

The Souvenir premiered at the Berlinale, when this piece was originally written. It’s out in cinemas across the UK on Friday, August 30th. On VoD Monday, September 16th. Available for free on Mubi for a month from October 25th.

Bait

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This is one of the best, most distinctive, and formally stimulating films at Berlinale, while also a fully accessible, funny movie that draws unbearable tension out of pulling pints and nodding heads. Bait takes place in the height of Summer, though you wouldn’t know it from the murky black and white cinematography. As a Cornish fishing village is swamped by tourists tensions are on the rise after a rich city family has bought up a street’s worth of property and turned them into Airbnbs.

Like a modern-day A Day in the Country (Jean Renoir, 1936), Bait observes the tension between rural and city folk and sees the darkness to which such misunderstanding can lead. Edward Rowe’s increasingly desperate fisherman takes us along with him, as he lives hand to mouth and dreams of buying a boat to improve his catch. The tourists he was forced to sell his family home to, who repeatedly refer to themselves as a part of the community, keep trying to make his life even harder, though of course its all within their legal rights.

Bait is also great Brexit movie. But that’s not to say that it’s a single issue movie. This film will still be relevant long after we’ve got our blue passports, because these are battles that have always taken place, probably always will. But the way Jenkin relates past and present, generational and class divide, allows the film to take on mythic qualities.

That is motivated in part by the extraordinary formalism of the film, which features sustained use of extreme close-ups and rapid-fire editing. Rarely does a shot last more than 6 seconds. So when it does, you feel the stretch of time and movement across the frame. It controls you with that rhythm, toys with your heartbeat. Every cut manages to extend time by sort of starting again, a Bressonian method of separating people. Restricting perspective in this case actually spreads it, we see the community in snatches, views of the village through open doors or window panes. We hear things that we don’t see. This forces us to complete the village, to fill in the gaps.

One bravura moment has two conversations occur simultaneously, with each cut to a different face as the actor says their line. It almost moves too fast to follow, this constant dislocation between faces pushes you into the harsh anxiety within the pub, as you try to catch up on one conversation while falling behind on another. It’s a radical moment of sound design, I feel like I witnessed something akin to when M*A*S*H (Robert Altman, 1970)premiered, and audiences complained about its non-intelligibility. But this is almost the inverse of Altman’s maximalism, where the cacophony is achieved by stripping away elements from the scene.

This tableau approach to the framing of each shot means that the characters become figural, expressions of their status within the town, and the larger social class system. But within that, the actors give such spirited performances that mere gestures count for everything. When Simon Shepherd’s uber-Tory pulls a flat face at our fisherman to shut him down, his pout and sagging jowls belie an entire personality, an entire class of person who will keep on taking what they believe should be theirs.

Jenkin also uses this approach to turn his faces into the folkloric. The local pub is covered in statues of British insignia – so people look at the bust of Queen Victoria bust as though it’s a person, and Jenkin treats it as though that is the case. It’s a pub crowded with faces, British portraits in shadow, macabre and demonic, like faces in a Welles film.

Bait is real tactile cinema. The 16mm grain, the scratches and the flickers of light draw our relationship to these spaces. And those objects, which our characters have lived with all their lives and are seeing reappropriated for the sake of a holiday, become increasingly important to the film’s escalating sense of dread. When this film makes it into cinemas, it needs to be seen. Because nothing else coming out of Britain right now has the same rage or daring as this.

Bait premiered at the Berlinale in February, when this piece was originally written. It’s out in cinemas across the UK on Friday, August 30th. Available on various VoD platforms as of January 2023.

The Ground Beneath My Feet (Der Boden unter den Fuessen)

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There are a lot of feet in The Ground Beneath My Feet. In Marie Kreutzer’s muddled film about muddled minds, which plays in competition here at Berlin, Valerie Pachner plays Lola, a woman barely holding it all together. Her sister has been placed in a psychiatric hospital following an unsuccessful suicide attempt. Her passionate affair with her boss is becoming harder to keep separate from her work. And that work, as a consultant helping failing businesses to downsize, is keeping her moving from airports to hotels to boardrooms, pulling bragworthy ‘48ers’, for the hours that a shift can last.

This chilling, soulless existence is reflected in the sterile spaces of a corporate office. If you thought that the tv series The Girlfriend Experience looked a little too baroque, Kreutzer’s film is one for you. Prepare to luxuriate in the corporate atmosphere, to feel like you’ve spent a 48-hour shift in the office. When we return to her apartment, at last, it’s been left so long that it seems like another corporate space, with empty drawers and blank walls. Lola’s every interaction seems guided by the playbook of business language, her entire existence is stifled by glances and microaggressions.

This cunningly gets into #MeToo territory. Lola has to navigate a business world that is defined by men even when the highest up people we meet are women. She gets flashed, one guy tells her: “Any other man would put his hands between your legs at dinner – I just imagine it”. But it’s not just the men. What’s interesting is that even though her boss is a woman, she’s still an example of patriarchy, who lies to and manipulates Lola at every turn, lording rank and power over her. Don’t sleep with your boss, people!

The film runs into trouble though. With an entire aesthetic and movie world so airless, it’s hard to inject any life into the film itself. So when the emotional beats come, they seem unfounded, leaning on the soapy. And that’s what much of the drama consists of. Who’s screwing over who? Do I have a mental problem? More and more elements are piled on each other and are then dropped. And the ending fails to tie anything together or do more than just stop.

On the positive side, Pachner gives a striking performance of Charlotte Rampling energy (incidentally, the older actres is being honoured at Berlinale with a retrospective), and it would be wonderful to see her win an acting prize here. She works not just against the confines of her world, but also the messy nature of the screenplay, to give a turn of deteriorating energy that belongs in the canon of breakdown movies, along with María Onetto in The Headless Woman (Lucrecia Martel, 2008) or Gene Rowlands in Opening Night (John Cassavetes, 1979), and Julianne Moore in Safe (Todd Haynes, 1995).

But when a film is so lacking in focus, it doesn’t matter if it’s well mounted. The quality of the actors recedes. Because all that’s left is a piece that can’t even articulate its own distaste at the confusion of modern work and romance.

The Ground Beneath My Feet showed in competition at Berlinale in February (2019), when this piece was originally written. It shows at BFI Flare the following month. On VoD on Monday, June 15th. On Mubi on Friday, September 25th (2020). On BFI Player in June 2023 for Pride month. Also available on other platforms.

Mid90s

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The most telling moment in Mid90s, Jonah Hill’s foray into directing, comes around halfway through. As fourth-grader Stevie “Sunburn” comes home from a day out skating with his new pals, a bunch of super cool dudes modeled on Poochie from The Simpsons, a man emerges from his single mother’s bedroom, zipping up his fly. It’s Harmony Korine. The enfant terrible of American cinema and writer of Kids (Larry Clark, 1994) appears as a nod to a film to which Mid90s is painfully indebted to.

So we have a set of Cali bros who skate, party, and hang out on the streets soaking up a perfectly Instagrammable time. If only they had smartphones. The production design goes far out of its way to remind you that this could only be the 1990s. Every t-shirt is a graphic tee with a cartoon or rapper from the era. Posters, sneakers, and cars are lingered upon, while any suggestion of the political context is non-existent, because this aesthetic nostalgia informs so many current trends.

Most of the cast are Supreme models, for crying out loud! Hill is too busy having fun with this stuff to worry about the reality behind his low-income characters. He’s putting together his dream soundtrack, a bunch of entry-level hip-hop tracks straight from his Spotify playlist. You can see him nodding along in the editing bay as he matches the beats of Herbie Hancock to each cut around a party scene.

In that extended sequence, when boys finally talk to girls, it’s little more than a set of Q&A moments with the boys as the respondents. Perhaps Hill didn’t want to take the focus away from his central crew, but the women are looked at with the same confused, reverential gaze as the objects, brushed over. They are like artefacts. It feels unclear as to whether Hill is adopting the viewpoint of his characters, or revealing his own inability to craft people unlike himself. In general, one is left wondering what motivates the camera here. What effect does Mid90s have beyond replicating a generic vibe from the titular decade? It’s not that Hill is useless with the camera, but he’s too mannered, inorganic. Removed from the super 16mm aesthetics, it might even resemble the Jude Apatow comedies from which he emerged. Hill leans into production company A24’s aesthetic with such aplomb that the movie even begins with an indent made of skateboards.

Internet Boyfriend Lucas Hedges is a funny tough guy, appearing as Sunburn’s older brother, who can’t quite shake off his softy persona. That’s a large part of his tortured, Trump mask-wearing character, and it largely works to ground us within the A24 universe. The world of coming-of-age movies. But Lady Bird’s (Greta Gerwig, 2018) nostalgia was without affectation. While Bo Burnham’s Eighth Grade (2018), still yet to be released in the UK, is an effort to actually get inside a world that’s unfamiliar and understand the psychological motivations of its teens. Hill is satisfied with after-school special preaching, and reconciliations.

Not that it’s entirely without its pleasures. It’s at its best when it’s funny, hanging out with these genuinely charming characters. They have a great group dynamic and the images can be arresting when Hill rests with them. But attempts to tackle serious themes like domestic abuse and masculinity are cringeworthy, especially when Skate Kitchen (Crystal Moselle, 2018) and Minding The Gap (Bing Liu, 2018) deliver pretty much the same goods without the need to gesture towards authenticity.

When movie stars become directors, the results can go either way. Hill has a great comedic voice, and surely a way with these young actors. But he seems like Steve Buscemi walking in with a board on his back, “Hello fellow kids”. If only he’d trust his instincts rather than leaning for the cool factor, he might actually pull it off.

Mid90s is playing as part of the Panorama section at Berlinale in February, when this piece was originally written. It’s out in cinemas on Friday, April 12th. On VoD on Monday, August 26th.

The Plagiarists

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QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM BERLIN

The 2007 Jonathan Lethem essay The Ecstasy of Influence celebrated the possibilities of intertextuality by inverting T.S. Eliot’s own Anxiety of Influence and pulling a novel literary trick. It was a collage of quotes from other writers. He proved that by using other people’s work, you can make an entirely coherent and original piece of your own. Now director Peter Parlow has given us a filmic continuation of this debate, with his beguiling The Plagiarists.

Ostensibly a funny, whiny post-mumblecore film in the vein of The Colour Wheel (Ross Perry, 2011), we are introduced to a bickering couple of culturally savvy New York creatives yet to realise their dreams or pay their own rent. Played by Lucy Kaminsky and Eamon Monaghan as Anna and Tyler to peak sitcom irritancy, they milk comedy from the most arrogant and closed-minded elements of the script.

When their car breaks down, they come into contact with Clip (Michael ‘Clip’ Payne from music collective Parliament/Funkadelic!). He uses his funkmaster persona in order to play a spin on the Magical Negro trope, incredibly generous, spirited, always full of advice. It’s only months later that the couple realise that things about their encounter just didn’t add up, throwing them into an existential quandary.

The Plagiarists exaggerates the film references, but always to lampshade the devices the film itself is using. During an extended dinner scene of an impromptu nature, one character talks about Dogme 95, while later on the film’s grainy, TV news aesthetic is brought up by a character who wonders if Sex, Lies & Videotape (Steven Soderbergh, 1989) was actually shot on videotape. Not many films end with a list of citations, but as the film questions the notion of plagiarism and originality, it’s a nice touch.

The Plagiarists questions how we are all kind of plagiarists. The hippy persona adopted by their friend Allison, the neurotic Jewish type that Tyler lives up to, the magical qualities that they assign to Clip and that perhaps, he is toying with them about. These elements of personality are merely citations, and by pointing this out the film manages to ask what even makes who we are.

It also finds room to get into the autofiction debate that’s been percolating in literature a while, on the line between fiction and memoir, and does so with a deft sophistication. But then one character gives a whole speech on what cinema means that kind of talks down to the audience, misses profundity as it aims for a kind of emotional honesty. Yet, it openly plays in parallel registers, the indie film and the essay film, so the artificiality of the former, while cloying, is perhaps appropriate for the argument to work.

This is a fascinating central conceit, but it’s like Parlow and his team don’t have a conclusion worked out. The designated three-act structure is both a help and hindrance as it keeps the film moving, yet doesn’t build to a dramatic climax. That final chapter is entirely noodling with video as a letter read in voiceover ties up the loose ends, the author unclear. And yet, it’s the way that the narrative dissolves into nothing, the film revealing itself as an essay piece, that gives it a lasting resonance. At 76 minutes, The Plagiarists zips by, throwing a hundred ideas at the audience in search of its argument. They might not all hit, but Parlow’s film has the energy and insight that makes him one to watch.

The Plagiarists is now playing at Berlinale.

At Eternity’s Gate

Posted on by victor@dmovies.org

Another Vincent Van Gogh biopic, but with a synthesis of Willem Dafoe in the lead role and Julian Schnabel behind the camera, who can resist? Despite being a legend of the New York art world, Schnabel’s cinema comes under criticism for leaning too middle-brow. But these artists are always fascinating beasts, constantly examining how artists communicate the indescribable in their head into some kind of language. Think of Jean-Dominique Bauby in The Diving Bell and The Butterfly (2007) learning to write by blinking.

Schnabel turns here to perhaps the most famous artist ever, who had to create an entirely new language to communicate the things that he saw. Schnabel and Dafoe do a great job of contrasting that interior genius with a man who can barely speak to others, who is so overwhelmed by his visions of nature that he appears to be entirely mad.

Willem, a 65-year-old in the role of a man who died at age 37, plays the part as myth. And perhaps that casting inherently allows us to see heretofore unseen shades of the man, his old soul, and Willem’s youthful exuberance. It’s a part that allows the actor to show off everything that makes him such a beloved character actor, the wild energy, the sadness behind his eyes, the controlled physicality. It does a service to both actor and subject, and one hopes that the Academy goes the same way as Venice and gives Willem the Best Actor Award for a role that works perfectly with his persona.

I did have to laugh at the appearance of the postman Joseph Roulin and his gigantic beard, though, ‘May I paint you?’ intones a shitfaced Vincent. Willem gets strong scene partners, in the form of a moustached Oscar Isaac as Paul Gauguin, Mathieu Amalric as the famously painted Dr. Gachet. A stand out scene towards the end has Willem sparring with Mads Mikkelsen as a priest, who charges that Van Gogh’s painting is an insult to God.

Schnabel shoots the process of painting with an urgency. These scenes are so vibrant, the paint pops off the screen as though in 3D – what might Bi Gan do with this material? There is an effort to relate Van Gogh’s style to photography, through the abstraction of rain on a window. With coloured lenses and hurried camerawork, Van Gogh’s form becomes the film form.

So how well does this fit into the Van Gogh canon? The recent Loving Vincent (Dorota Kobiela/ Hugh Welchman, 2017) is a glorified kids film, that plays to the silver screen crowd, and these American takes – including Robert Altman’s Vincent and Theo (1990) and Minnelli’s Lust For Life (1956) – are too respectful and stately to really capture the genius. More successful are Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams (1990) and an old episode of Doctor Who, which treat the artist in terms of his influence and confront our wish to reach back to him. This lands somewhere in the middle.

For despite the formal tics and a game Dafoe, At Eternity’s Gate still follows the expected beats of a Van Gogh biopic. The Ear. The kids throwing rocks. The insane asylum. The notion of tortured genius isn’t really challenged by Schnabel, who doesn’t really bring anything new to our understanding of events surrounding Van Gogh. It’s a straightforward depiction of his last years, which may be enough. Its pleasures are varied, and the Dafoe performance is wonderful, but this is a tribute act, rather than an earth shattering new take.

At Eternity’s Gate showed at the International Film Festival Rotterdam,when this piece was originally written. It is out in UK cinemas and also on Curzon Home Cinema on Friday, March 29th.