Tag: David Lowery

The Year of the Everlasting Storm

Posted on by victorfraga

In retrospect, the title might actually have been optimistic. Billed as a “love letter to cinema” and featuring seven well-regarded directors from across the globe, The Year of the Everlasting Storm brings together seven stories set and shot during the Covid-19 pandemic, mostly in the year of 2020. At times joyous, ponderous, profound, and even frustrating, the film invites its audience to reflect on the pandemic’s toll on our lives, but also on how life has, mostly, gone on much as it did before (for better or worse).

The film’s stories are compact, but far from perfunctory. A lizard and a grandmother find peace amid the afterglow of new life (Life, Jafar Panâhi), a young family struggles to adjust to life in quarantine (The Break Away, Anthony Chen), a father stays connected with his young children over video chat (Little Measures, Malik Vitthal), a surveillance company’s attempts to disrupt and destabilise the lives of journalists are documented (Terror Contagion, Laura Poitras), a mother records her choir parts and visits her daughter’s newborn child from afar (Sin Título, Dominga Sotomayor), a box of letters leads to an encounter with the past (Dig Up My Darling, David Lowery), and a white bedsheet provides the backdrop for a swarm of insects (Night Colonies, Apichatpong Weerasethakul). Seven stories diverging from a single, tragic, source, depicting the diversity of human experience, but also underscoring our fundamental, shared, humanity.

The ’90s saw an increased cultural fascination with chaos theory (colloquially, “the butterfly effect”), in particular its focus on how small changes in the initial conditions of a complex system can produce large and unpredictable differences in its resultant state. The famous “butterfly flapping its wings” metaphor seemed to catch on not only because of its inherent provocativeness but because the world was becoming vastly and irreversibly interconnected—suddenly, we could appreciate how seemingly minor events in one region might have massive impacts around the globe.

That’s what makes The Year of the Everlasting Storm important. The Covid-19 pandemic has impacted the lives of every person on the planet, an experience unique in human history that should have forced the realisation that, despite our differences, we all come from the same flesh and blood. But the 2020 pandemic was just a warm up for the climate disasters coming in our lifetimes. Unless we recognise our shared fate soon, we may end up ceding the planet back to the primeval creatures that preceded us.

It’s fitting, then, that the film begins and ends with creatures (lizards and insects specifically) that once ruled the earth in our absence. However, the two segments are decidedly different in their outlook. In Panâhi’s Life, humanity reconciles with the natural world; but in Weerasethakul’s Night Colonies, only the vestiges of humanity remain. Between these options are five tales of human resilience and hope, emphasising that the choices that will determine our fate are ours and ours alone.

The Year of the Everlasting Storm premiered in Cannes and it will show in UK cinemas soon. Stay tuned for the date.

A Ghost Story

Posted on by mjbstaging

A couple lives in a house. He dies and returns as a ghost (a person with a sheet over his head) she can’t see. She stays for a bit then moves out. Other people come and go. He stays, he waits.

Initially M (Rooney Mara) wants to move somewhere else, but C (Casey Affleck) rather likes the house and wants to stay. After his death, she identifies his body in the morgue then spends some time with his mortal remains. Later, his corpse gets up matter of factly, sheet and all, and leaves. To return to their house. Before moving out, she scribbles a note on a small piece of paper, folds it in to a tiny square and pushes it into a door frame. He tries repeatedly to extract this note to see what it says. We want to know, too.

Time moves on but C doesn’t. He attempts to scare a resident mum and her children by hurling kitchen plates at them in an uncharacteristic loss of self-control. He listens to a man at a party pontificate on the meaning of life in terms of what we leave behind. He waves at the (person under a floral patterned sheet) ghost in the house next door. Eventually the houses are demolished and the site is built upon. He goes back in time to watch the settlers who built the first house.

Some very long takes include one of the bereaved M violently stuffing herself with a pie then throwing up. The 4:3 frame with rounded edges throughout recalls projected photographic slides and home movies of yesteryear. Odder still are the noises off which M and the pre-ghost C get out of bed to investigate although they can find nothing. We’re never quite sure what we’re doing in this house or why we’re watching this couple in their very private, home space. We might be some strange, unearthly presence. Such as a ghost.

All of which is thoroughly compelling to experience or just to watch. As M drops out of the film, you’ll find yourself wondering what C’s ghost is still doing there, why hasn’t he just vanished at death or gone on to whatever place we go to when we die. If the film ponders such questions, it never attempts to impose easy answers. That lends it an incredible power.

C’s death is violent but we see only its peaceful aftermath. There is violence however in both their lives: M’s violent eating reflects C’s when we eventually see him eat in flashback. His violent outburst with the kitchen plates suggests something latent in his character but elsewhere he seems relaxed. The violence expresses a pent up frustration lurking beneath. What matters in life? What happens if it’s suddenly cut short? What exactly do we leave behind us?

A Ghost Story was out in cinemas in August 11th, when this piece was originally written. It’s out on all major VoD platforms in February 2018.

Click here for another film meditation on death.