GEMMA BOVERY (Anne Fontaine, 2014)

The premise of the newest film from director Anne Fontaine, Gemma Bovery, holds a good deal of promise for lovers of both the cinematic and the literary, particularly for those who welcome witty or playful re-tellings of classic works of literature. Adapted from Posy Simmonds’s graphic novel of the same name (a novel originally conceived as a serial in The Guardian), the film’s story centers around perceived parallels between the literary characters in Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary – particularly Emma Bovary, her husband, Charles Bovary, and Emma’s lovers – and the film’s characters. When Gemma Bovery (Gemma Arterton) and her husband, Charles ( Jason Flemyng), move from London to a small town in Normandy, the town’s excitable, bourgeois baker, Martin Joubert (Fabrice Luchini), is certain Gemma is the real life equivalent of the fictional Emma, and he makes it his mission to discover her in love affairs and prevent the tragic suicide that plays out in the novel.

Such a set up has all the ear marks of wonderfully droll farce or of a sly satire, a satire that could work on any number of levels – critiquing, perhaps, the often fraught French-English relationship; or the middle class, provincial prejudices; or literary pretensions; or male-female relationships. The premise also suggests the story might hold some genuine pathos, a tender examination of love, heartbreak, and misunderstandings, perhaps. And by many accounts (here’s one, for example), Simmonds’s original work does function on all those levels. (After watching the movie, I immediate ordered the graphic novel.)

(Continue reading at Seattle Screen Scene.) 

REBELS OF THE NEON GOD (Tsai Ming-liang, 1992)

TV screens, arcade game screens, mirrors, windows – all of these offer reflective surfaces, some more and some less reflective, some promising immersion into another sort of state, some seeming to immerse but offering very little in the way of escape from lonely self and quotidian present. These surfaces are everywhere in Tsai Ming-Liang’s newly restored and re-released feature debut of 1992, Rebels of the Neon God, a quietly absorbing film that suggests a set of startlingly germane meditations on the modern self, a thing that is simultaneously isolated and connected, revealed and covert.

The story centers around the lives of two people: one, a 20-something young man, Ah Tze, living by petty theft and residing in a lonely, constantly flooded apartment, and one, a teenaged boy, Hsiao-Kang, chafing at his bondage in cram school and living at home in uncommunicative silence with his anxiously watchful parents. Both Ah Tze and Hsiao-Kang, though they have companions who surround them – a parent or a brother, a friend or a girlfriend – and though they pass through the teeming city of Taipei, stand as alienated figures, whose selves ricochet in the mirroring surfaces surrounding them.

(Continue reading at Seattle Screen Scene)

Caving to Quirk, or Something: Me and Earl and the Dying Girl (Alfonso Gomez-Rejon, 2015)

(My expanded review now available at Seattle Screen Scene. Below is an excerpt.)

A good deal of my enjoyment of this one must have been reactionary. I found The Wolfpack so thoroughly depressing (and not for the reasons I think the filmmaker wanted) that going directly afterwards into a screening of this - a cliché-ridden load of indie quirk that did almost nothing surprising - was somehow just the ticket.

I ought to have been annoyed by the cute title cards; the ridiculous portrayal of a hipster tattooed high school history professor (who somehow has his own office and sports a Persian carpet in his classroom?) and of a tenured sociology professor father (who, because tenured never has to work?); the manic pixie dream dying girl who lives, er, dies, to serve the protagonist's emotional development; the bordering on racist depictions of black characters (because Earl, his brother, and the limo driver are funny, it's ok, I guess?); the look-at-me-I-know-all-these-films film references; and on it goes.

I dunno, maybe it was The Wolfpack; maybe I was just so barraged with cute quirk that I caved; or maybe there is some cheap satisfaction I find in knowing and being able to laugh at those movie references and I'm shallow. Whatever it was, I admit it. I had fun.

Also, "Eyes Wide Butt." That's pretty funny.

The Wolfpack (Crystal Moselle, 2015)

(My expanded review available at Seattle Screen Scene. Excerpt below.)

A maddening documentary for opposite reasons: sloppy story framing and contrived framing. In many moments, context, chronology, and even character are so muddled, that even the compelling subject matter fails (and I was left feeling guilty that I just didn't care), and in other moments, the purportedly candid, spontaneous scenes (the trip to Coney Island, the phone call) feel anything but candid, and I wondered, uncomfortably, just how much the director was directing (eg. I imagine this: "Could you say that again, but include how many children you have and how long it's been since you've seen your mother?").

The sloppiness, I think, is an aim at artfulness - and in the hands of a more experienced director and editor, the cuts from one contextless scene to the next could have added up to emotional depth and a clearer arc. There are enough poignant moments - the camera held on the face of one boy or of their mother, a scene of vibrant dancing and running down tight hallways - that I can see the glimmers of a powerful film in the tangle. As it is, so artless, I felt uncomfortably complicit - in the act of watching - in something bordering on the exploitative and sensationalist.

The choice to make the boys essentially nameless is also unsettling; we get a recital of their names at the beginning, but throughout the film, those names are lost in the "pack." It is a deliberate choice, of course, to show the boys as so tightly connected to one another - a survival mechanism, a mechanism forced on them, too, given the tight, prison-like living quarters - but the effect of the choice is that it alienates me from the boys as individuals, from their stories. The larger story remains fuzzy, distant, cold.

And then, wandering round the edges of the film, acknowledged once initially and then mostly forgotten, is the sister who is "special," a lonely vulnerable figure who holds the deepest poignancy for me; I left the cinema worrying for her most, and, ironically enough, it is her name, Vishnu, alone that I remember though even the director herself doesn't seem very interested in her.

I believe Crystal Moselle's heart is in the right place - the film feels like a sincere effort to tell a story and to tell it truthfully - but the skill, or lack thereof, undermines the effort too much to be able to recommend the film. As my friend said to me as we walked out of the cinema, "I wish we'd just read an article about this family instead." And given the cinematic interests of the boys in the family - their own love for film, and film, like their pack grouping, being a tool of survival for them - it's a real shame. I wonder how they themselves will feel about this documentary about them, particularly when they (re)watch it years from now, more distant from the situation of their growing up?