Innholdsfortegnelse for March - April 2017 i Film Comment

Richard benner’s 1977 landmark of canadian queer cinema outrageous! follows the intertwining lives of Robin (Craig Russell), an enterprising Toronto drag queen looking for his big break, and his schizophrenic roommate Liza (Hollis McLaren), fresh out of a mental hospital and seeking an independent existence. A notable Toronto-based female impersonator, Russell lived for a time in the mid-1970s with his friend Margaret Gibson, the famed Canadian writer who was herself diagnosed as schizophrenic as a teenager. Gibson drew from her experiences rooming with Russell to write “Making It,” one of the six short stories that comprised her breakthrough collection, The Butterfly Ward (1976). The following year, writer-director Benner adapted the story into Outrageous!. By then, Russell found himself in a singular position: playing a version of himself in situations he…

Ahistorically accurate, painstaking chronicle of the last days of France’s most powerful monarch, The Death of Louis XIV is Catalan filmmaker Albert Serra’s most fully realized attempt to convert a mythical figure into an ordinary man. Informed by his background in philosophy and literature, and pervaded by a fascination with the mundane, Serra’s films deconstruct iconic characters from history and fiction to reveal their common humanity. His breakthrough feature, Honor of the Knights (2006), tells the story of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza through deliberately banal moments that amount to a profound and moving meditation on existence. Birdsong (2008) depicts the Magi’s pilgrimage to Bethlehem against imposing mountain backdrops that suggest man’s insignificance in the face of nature, while Story of My Death (2013) revels in documenting Casanova’s life of…

You might wonder how often kristen stewart’s acquaintances—seeing her nervously alert, fragile pallor—have said to her, “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.” In Olivier Assayas’s English-language film Personal Shopper, Stewart’s haunted look comes mesmerizingly into its own in a story about a young woman hoping to communicate with the beyond. Stewart plays Maureen, a young woman living in Paris and working for wealthy socialite Kyra (Nora von Waldstätten). Maureen’s job is to choose and buy the clothes that Kyra will wear at high-profile society functions; she is an artist of sorts in that she helps fabricate Kyra’s visible persona. But hers is also a thankless, impersonal task. She has permanent access to Kyra’s Paris apartment, but has next to no direct contact with her: she belongs to the army…

“Comedies were never made for critics, but what’s changed, I think, is that the new comic style is objectively hostile to most of the established critical values. Comedies now flaunt their arbitrary organization, their thinness of character, and their lack of content—almost as if they were trying to keep intellectuals out…[The intellectual] hates its lack of subtlety, because without subtlety there is nothing to explicate. He hates its lack of content, because without content there is no copy. Comedies aren’t smart anymore—not the way they used to be when Keaton was making his mechanical ballets, when Cary Grant was pointing his finger and cracking wise, or when Preston Sturges was stuffing his frame with sociological observation. Nowadays comedies are stupid—and strangely enough, they seem proud of it … because comedy…

Film Is Like a Battleground: Sam Fuller’s War Movies By Marsha Gordon, Oxford University Press, $29.95 Iwas on time for my 8 p.m. appointment with sam fuller. I staggered out of his house the next morning just as the sun was peeking over the Los Angeles hills. I had asked perhaps 25 questions during the 10-hour marathon that was our interview, shortly after the release of White Dog in 1982. Many directors are forces of nature, but Fuller was a special case. A small man who was never without his cigar (did he ever meet Lubitsch?), he was one of the most endearing rogue mutts ever to forge an independent career in Hollywood. Except for the years with Darryl Zanuck, he was an archetypal lone wolf. Marsha Gordon’s book on…

News, views, conversations, and other things to get worked up about Iwas like a child ornithologist, because my father gave me a pair of binoculars when I was 8. I kept record books, and then I studied biology. So in a way my past was leading me to become a scientist. On Portuguese TV, there was a series about wildlife called El hombre y la tierra (The Man and the Earth). They went into nests and burrows, and found really strange ways of putting the camera inside. My films develop quite mysteriously. But when I discovered the story of St. Anthony and started researching, perhaps it was through this mythological account that I felt I could tell this story of an ornithologist, which somehow connects with my earlier life. I…

The director looks straight into the camera. She speaks to the audience both directly and via voiceover. Holding a smartphone or framing herself before a laptop camera, she tells a story of her own life, her own experiences. The footage is not without mediation: sometimes a cameraperson is there to observe her, likely there was scripting for the VO, and it’s all ultimately shaped in the edit—but that is standard practice. In both substance and style we’ve entered the zone of first-person filmmaking. Such are the tropes introduced at the beginning of Unrest, Jennifer Brea’s documentary chronicle of her physically debilitating and demoralizing bout with both ME (Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, aka Chronic Fatigue Syndrome) and the largely unhelpful medical professionals from whom she sought answers since symptoms began emerging several years…

When i told a fellow film critic sitting next to me on my flight to Salt Lake City that my beat at Sundance included the New Horizons virtual reality sidebar, he said something to the effect that the medium was still “in the zoetrope stage.” And indeed, in the two-story Claim Jumper, one of several sites in downtown Park City dedicated to showcasing VR and augmented reality (AR), one could find Full Turn, a piece by Swiss artist Benjamin Muzzin comprised of two tablet devices strapped back-to-back that, spun at great speed, produce shape-shifting, liquescent figures of pure light—a piece premised on cinema’s original trick of the eye, good ol’ persistence of vision. Sundance’s commitment to exhibiting and promoting VR seems to have paid dividends for the visibility of the…

At the 2016 New York Film Festival press conference for the film, you said that playing the death of Louis XIV became a way for you to face and go through your own death. When Serra offered me the role of Louis XIV, I said to myself that this film would mean a great deal to me, in my life and in my filmography. I said to myself that I must succeed, with all the energy that’s in me. So I was in Louis XIV’s bed, trapped within an apparatus of three cameras that filmed me continuously from eight in the morning until eight in the evening, every single day. Even though the apparatus was hard to put up with, I hung on until the end. Any other actor would…

TEETH GNAWING ON RAW MEAT, mouths sucking fresh blood, and tender kisses that quickly turn into vicious bites: these images of carnage punctuate the beautifully shot scenes found throughout Julia Ducournau’s Raw. Combining genres into one delectable package, the film crosses body horror with the modern-day cannibal movie, and garnered a critics prize after its world premiere last year at Cannes. Justine (Garance Marillier, whose often bloody visage and heart-shaped face suggest a more childlike version of Isabelle Adjani in 1981’s Possession) is the youngest member of a family of strict vegetarians who follows in the footsteps of her parents and joins her fervently rebellious older sister, Alexia (Ella Rumpf), at veterinary school. The freshman hazing rituals are horrific: students are violently harassed in the middle of the night, get…

For most, 2016 won’t be remembered with fondness, save for a vocal minority of ardent Donald J. Trump supporters. Each day that Trump occupies the White House is something of a cliff-hanger: will he provoke the total collapse of the liberal democratic post-WWII global order today? Or will it be tomorrow? If the rise of Trump has left his opponents licking their wounds and sifting through the wreckage looking for answers and some way forward, the same needs to be done in Hollywood, where the business outlook could seem just as apocalyptic, especially given the beating the theatrical film industry is currently taking courtesy of rising new movie-viewing technologies. Though overall box office was up a smidgen over 2015 (around $1.4 billion, as opposed to $1.13), overall ticket sales continue…

Director: Katell Quillévéré Country/Distributor: France, Cohen Media Group Opening: April 14 It’s hard to imagine a more intoxicating evocation of youthful oneness with nature than the opening of Katell Quillévéré’s adaptation of Maylis de Kerangal’s 2014 novel Réparer les vivants. Teenager Simon (Gabin Verdet) leaves his girlfriend’s bed before dawn, leaping through her window into the darkness and biking through the streets of Le Havre to join friends on a surfing trip. Tom Harari’s camerawork ravishingly captures the journey, the cliffs in the half-light, the surfers riding the cold swells, and a wave’s sparkling blue interior. Afterward, Heal the Living maintains a hypnotic, albeit more restrained beauty, whether depicting stark hospital rooms or landscapes seen from the air at nighttime, jeweled with lights. The spontaneous adventure ends in an accident,…

Cinema spun, streamed, and beamed DVD / DEBUT BLU - RAY/ DEBUT STREAMING EXCLUSIVE TOVOD Korean Film Archive Blu-ray Collection With its region-free blu-ray releases of restored classics, the Korean Film Archive continues to set a shining example among archival institutions. Spanning decades, the films are like a carnival ride through Korean cinema that keeps returning you to the same place: the ’60s were all gothic gloom where everyone wound up dead; the ’70s were all youthful rebellion where everyone wound up dead; and while the ’80s were more free-spirited and lively, everyone still wound up dead. The Housemaid (1960) and Aimless Bullet (1961) hail from the last gasp of Korean cinema’s Golden Age before the censorship clampdown of 1963. In KOFA’s most recent Blu-ray classic release, Yu Hyun-mok’s Aimless…

With a title straight from 1970s thrillers and airport paperbacks, Tarik Saleh’s third fiction feature effortlessly pulls off its milieu of corrupt police, lurid backroom scandals, and the seemingly untouchable rich. Its setting might seem a throwback, but of course it’s a situation that endures the world over: daily life under a strongman regime—in this case, Egypt on the brink of the Tahrir Square protests. Cairo is the hometown for a detective, Noredin Mustafa (the excellent, gloriously schnozzed Fares Fares), who’s comfortable in his role of pushing people around and exhibiting supreme disdain for underlings. That is, until a picture-perfect pop singer is gruesomely killed in a hotel room, with an African immigrant maid the only likely witness to the criminal’s escape. Noredin’s investigation leads to a hotel magnate who’s…

Canoa: A Shameful Memory felipe cazals, 1976, instituto mexicano de cinematografía In 1976, the mexican director felipe cazals finished two films about an episode in his country’s recent past that couldn’t be directly acknowledged or named. The first, Canoa: A Shameful Memory, was a backwoods horror story inspired by an atrocity from 1968, when the townspeople of San Miguel Canoa—a village three hours from Mexico City—killed two visiting employees from a university and maimed three others on the suspicion that the strangers were communist agitators. The second, The Heist (El apando), was a jailhouse drama based on a novel the activist José Revueltas wrote in 1969 during a prison sentence. Revueltas had been arrested the previous year for his involvement in the same student movement the townspeople of Canoa stigmatized.…

OCCIDENTAL NEÏL BELOUFA Neïl beloufa’s occidental falls in that odd vein of slightly self-regarding comic distractedness that’s a very present, if marginal, flavor in French cinema right now. I’m thinking of directors like Serge Bozon, Axelle Ropert, and Benoît Forgeard—sometimes ruinously whimsy-prone, but dedicated to following their own paths. It also feels very much like a knowing return to the ’80s cinéma du look, while sharing some of the retro perversity of Yann Gonzalez’s You and the Night, and it has a touch of the meta-knockabout character of another hotel-set film, Godard’s Détective. But that Occidental is hard to finally pin down is part of its appeal. Occidental is set in a hotel that is seen in flames at the start. The film then tracks back to show a collection…

Closer Look: Words on Screen by Michel Chion is available now from Columbia University Press. Words on screen often start as a convenience. They can identify a film as the product of a given studio, ornament a movie with decorative title and credit sequences, and (in the case of product placement logos) fulfill contractual obligations. When they specify dates or place names, they become shorthand for a film’s setting; printed on signs, they mark generic-looking buildings as restaurants, groceries, bars. Letters, posters, signage, text messages, and tattoos relate facts like these with tempting efficiency. But they tend to import other, stranger and more ambiguous meanings into the movies they infiltrate; they’re as much destabilizing forces as they are helpful ways of setting a scene. Their effects vary as widely as the…

It was unusually cold—it snowed almost every day—but 5,000 strong, we marched down Park City’s Main Street on the first Saturday of the 2017 Sundance Film Festival to proclaim our vision of America. And then we settled into theaters to watch nine days of movies about the destruction of the ecosystem and the suffering of people within the U.S. and abroad. Many of these same movies were also about resistance and love. Perhaps one could have found the usual rom-coms, but I didn’t because I wasn’t looking. On the opening day, Robert Redford gave his standard speech about Sundance (the Institute and the Festival) having a commitment to diversity and independence, but not to politics per se. Which he needs to do: Sundance is a nonprofit located in Utah, and…

Director: Ben Wheatley Country/Distributor: UK, A24 Opening: April 21 Ben wheatley’s latest imagines a movie shoot not as the biggest toy train set a boy ever had, but as the hugest laser-tag arena. Free Fire is a conceptual exercise that consists primarily of a protracted ensemble gunfight confined to the ground floor of an abandoned warehouse purportedly located somewhere in the precincts of Greater Boston. The location, as well as the film’s 1970s setting, have been chosen perhaps for cinephiliac reasons (cf. Englishman abroad Peter Yates’s 1973 The Friends of Eddie Coyle), perhaps because the locality fits the plot pretext of an IRA weapons deal gone awry (the actual Irish Republican Army here serving as a total abstraction), or perhaps because the period allows the cast, entirely male save for…

Director: Bill and Turner Ross Country/Distributor: USA, Oscilloscope Opening: March 1 Recapturing that old mtv magic had to be somewhere in David Byrne’s mind when he conceived of “Contemporary Color,” a large-scale concert staged at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center pairing similar-sounding music acts (such as St. Vincent and tUnE-yArDs) with color guard squads from across North America. For the uninitiated, color guard is a choreographed group dance that usually takes place before high-school football games; these routines can involve tossing and catching (fake) guns, waving around flags, and performing Vegas-style moves to a pop song. As tacky as this sounds—trust me, it is, and 100 percent irony-free—these performers are extremely dedicated and spend hours practicing their elaborate routines. In recent years, color guard groups have come to incorporate socially conscious messages…

Director: François Ozon Country/Year: France, Music Box Films Opening: March 15 Frantz begins in 1919, as a german war widow decides to buy some flowers— not to host a party but to honor a fallen soldier. In fact, Anna is not quite a widow, because Frantz Hoffmeister, the man she mourns, was still her fiancé when he died on a French battlefield. His grave is also not quite a grave, because Frantz’s body was never recovered for proper burial. For the lover and parents he left behind, the cemetery plot is a palliative half-truth. Even this solace gets threatened, however, when Anna discovers a mysterious Frenchman named Adrien (Pierre Niney), unknown and unwanted in this German hamlet of scarred veterans and grieving families, leaving his own bouquet at Frantz’s headstone,…