By the standards of a war-based documentary, Jordan Bryon and Monica Villamizar’s Transition rarely features violence. Steering clear of carnage, it instead focuses on Bryon hanging out with Taliban soldiers, spending time within their homes, their training sessions, and their strongholds throughout Afghanistan. He’s making a film for the New York Times while going through the process of gender transition, the backdrop of the Taliban’s takeover simmering around him. The resulting documentary teeters on this complicated situation: the understanding that if the Taliban soldiers learn Bryon’s secrets, they’ll likely kill him. 

Bryon and Villamizar direct without much fuss, opting to use a majority of the former’s footage as their main source for framing. There aren’t any talking heads or long-winded interviews, no Q&A sessions with Bryon discussing his time in Afghanistan. It’s the life of a war documentarian over the course of his transition neither expanding into a treatise on world politics nor even the Taliban’s regime. It’s about a single, solitary man and the threat he avoided every day. 

Bryon’s courage should be a sticking point, the most obvious takeaway. He stayed in Afghanistan during almost the entirety of his transition, risking his life for the impact of journalism. His work often entailed friendships with Taliban leaders. He bonded with them, cracking jokes, holding their guns, texting and calling them like any friends would do. There’s an ethical quandary to be discussed about the actual impact of Transition outside Bryon’s own nerves of steel. 

Still, the footage he captures is immense: the regularity of the soldiers’ lives, the ease in which Bryon ingratiates himself into their social circle, the acceptance they give him unknowing of the process he’s going through. Transition contains tension due to circumstance. The filmmakers don’t need to add any extra flair or style. As the fear only ratchets as Bryon’s surgery grows near, chances of discovery rise with every minute he spends alongside the Taliban, and as such the viewer’s worry increases. Bryon’s safety becomes the paramount concern, even though the status of his well-being can be surmised simply by the film’s existence. 

Transition doesn’t work without Bryon’s willing participation. He’s more than a worthy documentary subject, a man chronicling a hostile takeover while dealing with his own internal, massive life changes. But he rarely falters, only showing moments of weakness when alone or surrounded by his cameraman and solitary friend. His support system is small, mighty. It’s impossible not to root for him on this physical and emotional journey, and the film plays into that heart. It knows the incredibility of its real-life protagonist, and in return Bryon gives himself over to the film. He allows the camera to follow him wherever he goes, experience whatever he experiences, resting on his face and his body amidst all the changes. 

There’s something to be said about the specific scope of Bryon and Villamizar’s film, about the lighter aura surrounding these men who embrace and worship violence––specifically murder. The directors are telling a fixed story with a clear ending, whatever the continued factions rising and falling in Afghanistan. Bryon deserves the focus, yet the film never paints any broader strokes. Transition works because of that one person, but it cannot climb any further under these limitations. 

Transition premiered at the Tribeca Festival.

The post Tribeca Review: Transition Follows a Trans Reporter’s Harrowing Journey Profiling the Taliban first appeared on The Film Stage.

It’s a crisp morning in Nyon and Lucrecia Martel is going off on one. “To arrive at a meaning you need a sentence, so that is the word order,” she begins, her translator gamely keeping pace, “then there is the sound material of the dialogue, which is completely different from the sentence, and it can sometimes oppose the meaning. But it’s the chronological order of the words and the meaning which dominates the process of writing a script, which is odd. Everything which is not in the script is the sound; it’s the most difficult thing to capture in the script. Those are the tools we work with. That’s why it’s so difficult to write dialogue: because you’re capturing only the sense of words and leaving the sound out. We’re not talking about an obsession here; this is something that happens in any conversation in a family.” Growing nervous about our dwindling time together, I decide to interject.

Martel was born in 1966 in Salta in North Argentina. She says that the region’s “evident racism” and stark class divides informed much of her work, a history that she describes as “extremely complex.” The same could be said of Martel’s unique approach to cinema, as it could about the artist’s worldview. In a 2.5- hour masterclass, conducted at the Visions du Réel festival in Switzerland, she spared no time in railing against the homogenizing effect of things like film-studies curriculum and production labs. (“Better to be personal and maybe not connect with anyone,” she argued, “than to be universal and maybe not reach anyone.”) She’s held up as a hero by a new generation of cinephiles––trendy t-shirts and all––yet she rejects being called a feminist filmmaker and has spoken out against cancel culture in the past. As head of the Venice Film Festival in 2019, and after saying that she wouldn’t attend a dinner in his honor, her jury awarded Roman Polanski best director; then hilariously awarded Todd Phillips’ Joker the Golden Lion. (“Identity is a prison,” the director observed to a packed house of mostly university-age attendees, “that obliges you to be who you say you are.”)

We met earlier that day at Nyon’s hotel ambassador. As an interviewee and conversationalist, Martel is generous and delightful, searching and humble, with a kindness in her eyes that can only be concealed for so long by those iconic pink sunglasses. For a short and sweet 20 minutes we talked about her near-obsessive fascination with sound, her brush with the MCU, and how things are going with her upcoming documentary about the murder of the indigenous activist Javier Chocobar.

The Film Stage: You’ve described cinema many times as being like a swimming pool on its side. It’s such an interesting concept. Could you unpack it a bit for us?

Lucrecia Martel: That, for me, is the best way to explain how a film actually works mechanically. Our culture is focused on the image. Our entire culture has faith in vision more than the other senses. The idea of the arrow of time, that we arbitrarily found a representation of time that is very closely connected to vision. The future is always from now, from out, face-forward; no one is thinking of the future as something behind us. In the Mayan culture they are always looking behind. Just imagine what it is to be old in such a culture: the old person is someone who can see furthest and is therefore someone very important.

In our culture it’s youth who has the future in front. Just imagine everything that defines this. So in cinema, the image has had a dominant role to play when you think of this time arrow, with the chronological order of images in this process. If we had based ourselves on sound instead of image we would have wound up in a different place, especially regarding the idea of time. So imagine you’re in a cinema, that’s a volume, and then the images are running over a flat surface, but everything that surrounds you––everything that’s tactile, that touches you––is the sound. And everything which is outside the image is implied by the sound. Of course, if you just have a cutout of an image you can imagine a lot around it, but it’s the sound that makes it material. So to observe this at work is very interesting when you imagine what you’re going to do when you make a film. In terms of physics or spatial characteristics, the volume that you’re sitting in is enormous compared to something that is very small. It’s something you can observe very easily with the concept of a swimming pool.

You obviously think on a very profound level about the sound in cinema. I’m curious if there was a particular film that you saw when you were younger, or that you appreciate now, that triggered this fascination with sound in a cinematic context.

What Happened to Baby Jane?––this film triggered something in me in spite of the fact that it’s a conventional movie. It’s a spectacular movie, a magnificent movie but a classical movie. The leitmotifs were important, the music, there was something there that triggered something in me. Apichatpong feels very close to me in the way he uses sound, but there’s no one of his films in particular; I like all of them.

Can we talk about the documentary you’ve been working on about Javier Chocobar? With Zama you told a story about colonialism in the 17th century. With this next film it sounds as if you will, in a way, talk about that same history in a present-day context. Do you see it as a kind of distant sequel?

Well, I started working on this film in 2010––so if anything Zama, from 2017, is the sequel. I’m still editing Chocobar. I don’t know if the title will be Chocobar at this point, but the film is all about the crime involving this man. It’s been 13 years. I live very far from that community so I can’t spend large periods of time with them. I also feel very uncomfortable when I interrupt the lives of these people. There are people, like people who make documentary films, they have this facility to connect with people very easily and I don’t have that. It’s a huge effort for me. And imagine: I have to use a cane now and these are mountainous areas!

What stage are you at with it?

I have 300 hours of material. I have edited some parts of it with Miguel Schverdfinger, who edited The Headless Woman and Zama. There’s much more material than there is money so I’m trying to concentrate things, to make it shorter, so that the budget will allow me to work further.

In aesthetic terms, will it be a more conventional style of documentary than we might expect from you?

I’m sure it’s going to be much less interesting than many of the documentaries made by filmmakers who make documentaries. But you have to understand this is a topic that is absolutely crucial to my area, to the Salta region.

I’m curious about some things that happened since Zama. You were offered Black Widow by Marvel––did you see it when it came out?

No, no, no––I didn’t see Black Widow. I tried to. They contacted a great number of female directors. I never would have imagined that Marvel could contact and bring together a pool of directors and I would be a part of it; I never thought that would be possible. I would have loved to make a film with them but I would have had to provide something that I would like to see in that world.

It turns out some of the Marvel films are available on planes so I’ve seen a few. I find the sound in them is absolutely in very poor taste, the visual effects and the sound of the effects.

That’s interesting. Could you describe what it is about the sound that you find in poor taste?

It’s the selection of the sounds that they’re connecting to the effects, which is actually very ugly. And the way the music is used is actually horrible.

It was such a funny story. Had you ever been offered something like that before?

Some very interesting things, but I was involved in something else. This documentary I’m working on is extremely difficult. It requires a huge amount of time. Those films that are opportunistic, the third line of the mainstream, they have tiny budgets and don’t have much ambition. This is often what Latin-American filmmakers are offered. Remakes of movies from the ’30s, for example. The big companies have the rights to the scripts. It might be that a director who’s a cheap director––probably from a Latin country––they put them together with some stars and a script they have the rights to. Sometimes it can happen under these circumstances that the film is a success.

The other big story was your time as jury head at Venice in 2019, awarding Joker and Polanski and all that. Has enough time passed that you can talk about it?

Joker is incredible for that particular group of films. But my favorite was the Chinese film, an animated film.

Oh, with the cats and the nipples?

[Laughs] Yes, No.7 Cherry Lane. When the vote was cast it was Joker, but I liked that Chinese film enormously. You could see figures of a man and a woman, but it was clear to me it was two men. It’s a love story. So I was looking at it but I perceived something different. I really loved that movie.

The post Lucrecia Martel on Her Brush with the MCU, Awarding Joker, and Her Upcoming Javier Chocobar Documentary first appeared on The Film Stage.

Shane Atkinson’s debut sets itself in the ever-so-small town of LaRoy. Ray (John Magaro) is a man living the simple life, married to the local beauty-pageant queen and working at his family’s hardware store alongside his brother, Junior (Matthew Del Negro). He’s not unhappy, but not quite happy either. His existence depends on raising enough money for his wife Stacy-Lynn (Megan Stevenson) to open a salon. Her happiness results in his own happiness. Unfortunately, she’s not happy––at least not with Ray. 

An unabashed quasi-homage to the Coen brothers, LaRoy concerns a case of mistaken identity. Ray happens to be at the wrong place at the wrong time, and so when he’s assumed to be a hitman he obliges. As the confusion and dead bodies begin stacking up, Ray and his friend-turned-private eye Skip (Steve Zahn) must solve the plethora of crimes that lay in their wake. Atkinson’s film is rarely unfunny, often clever, and happy to wade through the throes of this small town with these likable leads. 

It’s a movie that could have been made 25 years ago, a throwback to films that Atkinson likely loves and cherishes. It plays like a comic Western, with Skip looking the part, wearing a cowboy hat and a bolo tie as he waltzes around town talking about his early track record as an investigator. There’s one bar, one car dealership, one hardware store––the list goes on. Such sense of place stays true for Atkinson’s story, providing a living backdrop against its half-drawn characters. When these portraits of people falter, the town of LaRoy picks them up. 

Currently on an indie hot streak with Showing Up and Past Lives, Magaro remains the central protagonist yet struggles in this part. It isn’t a fault of his timing, but rather a simple miscasting: Ray is often unsentimental, directly opposing Magaro’s sensibility in previous roles. He doesn’t completely work, even if he’s played a sad sack or two in his day.

Opposite Magaro is Zahn, born to play a character like Skip. Lovable and slightly grating, Skip has both sweltering confidence and an understanding that many people see him as a joke. Zahn completely takes the movie over, using it as a vehicle for his comedic chops alongside his tender receptivity––he oscillates between a sympathetic figure and the true hero of this story. Zahn’s warm zaniness, and his ability to unapologetically sport a cowboy hat, becomes LaRoy’s most successful asset.

Surrounding these two actors is a treasure trove of bit players, with Brad Leland and Dylan Baker setting themselves apart as a dealership owner and the true hitman, respectively. Leland seems content, as audiences will likely agree, to reinvent his character from Friday Night Lights, a riff on Buddy Garrity that only brings enjoyment to the picture. Baker brings himself fully to the film, menacing in his quiet performance, terrifying amidst this full-fledged comedy. 

LaRoy is the work of a director with unmistakable joy for this genre, approaching the material with a welcome earnestness. Letting Zahn run wild and elevating him into the spotlight when necessary, it becomes the talented actor’s film, a showcase for the flair and feeling he can imbue into a story. Even if LaRoy doesn’t feel wholly original, it’s further proof the independent film scene is undoubtedly better with Zahn in it. 

LaRoy premiered at the Tribeca Festival.

The post Tribeca Review: LaRoy Allows Steve Zahn to Run Wild first appeared on The Film Stage.

Last time Benoît Magimel appeared in the Cannes competition, a vision in Albert Serra’s Pacifiction, he played a foreign diplomat who stalked an island of French Polynesia like a trashy king. If Serra’s otherworldy film told a cautionary tale about feckless Euro-decadence, Magimel’s latest is more like a revelry. Adapted from Marcel Rouf’s 1924 novel The Passionate Epicure, The Pot-au-Feu is a film about the pleasures of preparing food and consuming it, the idea of cooking as an act of giving and even of love––if a leitmotif exists in this film’s script, it is the sigh of ecstasy.

The Pot-au-Feu is directed by Tran Anh Hung, a Vietnamese filmmaker who broke out at Cannes in 1993 with The Smell of Green Papaya. For Pot-au-Feu, Magimel stars as Dodin Bouffant, a restaurant owner and famed gourmet––or, as one character christens him, “the Napoleon of the culinary arts”––living on a rural estate in late-19th-century France. Magimel shares this film right down the middle with Juliette Binoche who, amongst her many career-best turns, plays Eugenie, Bouffant’s chef of 20 years and, as it turns out, the love of his life––as if, in this film, those things could ever be mutually exclusive.

Premiering in competition at Cannes, it was a first for Tran, who took home a deserved award for Best Director from Ruben Östlund’s jury––a nice irony, given the film that won the Swede his second Palme d’Or last year. Indeed, compared to an arch satire like Triangle of Sadness (a story that pivoted on some bad shellfish), The Pot-au-Feu has a refreshing sense of joy and sincerity: too cinematic to be labeled food porn, and with none of the easy cynicism of recent gastro-satires, Tran’s film easily transcends both categorizations. Take the roguish scene in which Bouffant treats his merry cohort (played by Emmanuel Salinger, Patrick d’Assumçao, Fréderic Fisbach, and Jan Hammenecke) to a serving of ortolan, a dish that has provided much ammunition for recent TV shows (Succession, Billions, Hannibal, etc.) looking to chastise the 1%. Tran takes the taboo and flips it with a kind of charm that was more than enough to draw a wave of giddy laughter at the press screening I attended. Looking back, it was probably the funniest film in competition this year.

In another moment that got a laugh, Eugenie recalls an anecdote to Bouffant’s entourage about how he came home from one particularly lavish feast so uninspired that she felt she should prepare a pallet-cleanser, before listing an absurdly lengthy meal of her own. That encounter acts as a starting point of the film’s ostensible narrative: unimpressed by a Prince’s showy opulence, Bouffant decides to invite him for a meal. The centerpiece is to be the eponymous dish––a humble classic of French cuisine––but then his love falls ill. (It’s no spoiler––as early as the first act is Eugenie shown taking a quick break and clutching her stomach.) After her first collapse, the Prince recedes from the plot and is replaced by Pauline (Bonnie Chagneau-Ravoire), a talented young apprentice whom Bouffant takes under his wing. Together they cook up a proposal.

Basting away over a suitably rich 145 minutes, Tran’s film plays like an impassioned ode. In its various cooking sequences––the opening ballet of mixing, slicing, pouring, whisking, etc. plays a delicious 30 minutes––cinematographer Jonathan Ricquebourg (who shot Serra’s The Death of Louis XIV) captures the unspoken rhythms of Eugenie’s kitchen with a curious energy befitting the subject matter. The kitchen’s rhythms and passions are mirrored in its characters’ shared romantic life: watching Dodin and Eugenie cook, you sense something telepathic, even conspiratorial. That their sexual relationship consists of a series of secretive late-night hook-ups (all of which are, significantly, on her terms) is a perfect reflection of the tradeoff of patience for pleasure––another kind of delayed gratification—that constitutes their work.

All of this is captured fluently by the actors as at ease in their roles as they are in each other’s company. Magimel has rarely been better, but there’s something wonderfully impenetrable about Binoche’s performance here––kind and generous, yet forever adrift in contemplation, she grants Eugenie the aura of a great artist. It’s an infectious bit of cinema: a film that leaves a hundred tastes in the mouth and a nice flush in the bloodstream.

The Pot-au-Feu premiered at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival and will be released by Sapan Studios and IFC Films.

The post Cannes Review: The Pot-au-Feu Gratifyingly Serves Up Pleasures of Cooking and Love first appeared on The Film Stage.

After getting off to a shaky start, David Duchovny’s second directorial feature Bucky F*cking Dent delivers some hard truths and profound wisdom against the backdrop of a 1978 Red Sox-Yankees American League East pennant game. Adapted from Duchovny’s book of the same name, his follow-up to 2004’s House of D finds Teddy (Logan Marshall-Green), an aspiring novelist and Yankees peanut vendor, returning home to visit his estranged, dying father Marty (Duchovny). His work is rejected by a literacy agent who encourages him to commit a crime, go to prison, and write about it––otherwise he’s just another uninteresting voice in changing times. Fresh from a divorce, the shaggy-haired Teddy is going through an awkward phase, stuck in a profound rut. His dad comments that despite being 33 his son looks both younger and older than he is.

After initial bantering as old baggage resurfaces, Teddy agrees to stay with Marty with the help of Marianna (Stephanie Beatriz), who introduces the duo to yoga, a novel concept in 1978. She’s a “dying specialist” from the local hospital from where Marty was just discharged and focused on allowing him to die gracefully. Despite living in New Jersey, Marty is a die-hard Red Sox fan for the simple reason that he enjoys going against the status quo. When the Red Sox also find themselves in a rut, Teddy hatches a scheme to shield Marty from the bad news, involving the guys at the local barbershop, paperboy, and Mariana in a plan that includes faking thunderstorms, disconnecting TVs, and changing newspapers. The good news keeps Marty in better spirits until the plan is revealed, but at that point the team has started to bounce back and finds themselves in a champion position.

Overstaying its welcome at times, Bucky F*cking Dent explores two men with dreams deferred as Teddy finds Marty’s long-lost graphic novella The Double Mint Man, a kind of imaginary memoir that provides a compelling emotional core to a film that at times plays a bit trite. The early scenes of bickering and bantering feel stale as father and son reconnect and initially don’t like each other much. Beatriz’s Marianna also plays the part she’s intended and Teddy, of course, is initially too blind to see it. The last act really shines: Teddy goes the extra mile for Marty, essentially giving him the kind of experience a son should for their father when he’s on his way out. By this passage, the film and the central relationship find their stride, despite the clunkiness of the first act and predictability of certain aspects. 

Bucky F*cking Dent, like Ray Romano’s heartfelt Somewhere in Queens, represents a dying breed of film perhaps aimed at an older demographic that’s been slower to come back to cinemas post-pandemic. This is at times an unhinged work of nostalgia, and at its best feels like a story a father might tell his son about a grandfather who passed too soon. It’s a shame the film isn’t a sharper, more original version of itself, but like Bucky Dent, it unexpectedly comes through when it counts. 

Bucky F*cking Dent premiered at Tribeca Festival.

The post Tribeca Review: David Duchovny’s Bucky F*cking Dent is a Heartfelt, Uneven Father-Son Dramedy first appeared on The Film Stage.

Robert Evans claims to have told Francis Ford Coppola, after an initial private screening of The Godfather, “You shot a saga, but you turned in a trailer.” Unfortunately, Jennifer Esposito’s directorial debut Fresh Kills suffers the same fate, cramming a series’ worth of material into a sweeping feature film. In Fresh Kills, Staten Island, a beautiful suburb that stands just across the water from the city and not far from the infamous landfill, the Larusso family is about living the good life and moving to safety. Patriarch Joe (Domenick Lombardozzi) and wife Francine (Esposito) attempt to shield their daughters Rose and Connie from the family business. There are always little tells, and on moving day the girls discover a box of white powder in the moving van––leading Joe to discipline a foot soldier who later turns up dead.

Like Meadow Soprano before her, Connie (played in later passages by Odessa A’zion) starts figuring out what exactly the family business is while Rose (Emily Bader) starts to notice preferential treatment in her Catholic school as a result of the family’s standing in the community. There are other clues throughout, and the film fast-forwards through their childhood when the violence that Joe and Francine have worked to protect their daughters from comes creeping closer. A sequence set circa 1993 proves Connie is very much her father’s daughter when she’s drawn into a violent conflict in the alleyway of a movie theater.

While not reaching The Sopranos‘ level of tragedy and nuance, Fresh Kills feels very much of its universe, bursting with authenticity even if its rapid pace, compressing many of the events, gives a disjointed feel until the final act. This is the kind of family where talking about feelings is discouraged, yet this film plays a bit cold compared to the vulnerability expressed in David Chase’s series. The third act, set largely in 1997, starts paying off as walls continue to close in. Connie is now a single mother while Rose is engaged to Frankie (Franco Maicas), a neighborhood boy whose father was killed years before. He now runs errands for Joe in the basement of a bakery he has “gifted” to his daughters. 

Though engaged to Frankie, Rose starts having doubts when he yearns to follow in the footsteps of the “family” with no ambition to leave Staten Island. Inspired by the TV coverage of the Fresh Kills landfill, the proximity to the city, and a desire for something else, Connie tells her mother she wishes to keep her options open, including auditioning to be Sally Jessy Raphael’s co-host when an open call is announced.

Fresh Kills gets much of the atmosphere and tone right, and at its best is an evocative character study of mob wives and daughters; A’zion lends a particularly fascinating performance as a tough-willed woman ready to stand her ground and look out for “her people.” Joe’s violence has infected her without the educated awareness of Meadow Soprano as a mechanism. For his part, Joe aims to keep his family close as a sole provider, making sure those closest to him are taken care of with cars, houses, and “businesses.” The film would have been best had Esposito’s script remained laser-focused––perhaps in one time period, like the similar A Chiara––rather than compressing the events of an epic into an uneven, yet at times compelling feature. 

Fresh Kills premiered at Tribeca Festival.

The post Tribeca Review: Fresh Kills is a Compelling, Overstuffed Character Study of the Daughters of Organized Crime first appeared on The Film Stage.

Late into Lisandro Alonso’s Jauja, Viggo Mortensen’s Captain Gunnar Dinesen disappeared into a cave. What happened next, in that unnamed stretch of 19th-century Patagonia, was nothing short of otherworldly. Gunnar’s encounter down the grotto was Jauja’s climax, and it stood as a kind of revelation for film and filmmaker both. The narrative trap door stripped Jauja of its western trappings and lifted the Danish soldier’s search for his daughter across the pampa into the realm of myth before an ellipsis shuttled one across time and space and it all became something else entirely. It also moved Alonso away from the observational, minimalist style of his earlier features toward a more expansive, enigmatic, magical register. More than anything, perhaps, that baffling rupture suggested liberation: it was the sort of moment his previous work––with their intimations of spiritual mysteries and numinous references––had long courted; here it finally detonated, setting the art and its creator free. Where would Alonso travel next?

Nine years since that underground epiphany, along comes Eureka, a film that, for large chunks, seems to emerge from the same hallucinatory terrain Jauja opened up. Like all its predecessors, this unfurls as a literal journey dotted with solitary wanderers either searching for or mourning lost relatives. (“All families disappear eventually,” Gunnar was told down the cave, a line that might as well double as the director’s motto.) Old tropes and motifs notwithstanding, Alonso’s latest is his most ambitious: a tripartite film, Eureka sides not with the white strangers in strange lands that had long peopled Alonso’s oeuvre, but with the native communities facing these invaders. Its scope is ecumenical, its geography massive. In barest terms, Eureka’s designed to sponge something of, and locate parallels between, the experience of Indigenous communities stranded in three markedly different milieus: the Old West; South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation in the present day; and finally the jungles of early-70s Brazil. 

Mortensen returns for that first chapter, Eureka’s shortest––a black-and-white western that sees him join forces with a formidable gunslinger (Chiara Mastroianni) in an attempt to rescue his abducted daughter (This configuration of the family unit––a parent desperately searching for their estranged child, or vice-versa––is as cardinal to Alonso’s imagination as it is to fairy tales.) But the monochrome preamble, a zoom-out reveals, is just a film within the film that’s screening in the empty living room of a house on the Pine Ridge Reservation, home to the Oglala Sioux people. It’s the first of Eureka’s pivots; past that juncture, Alonso turns to two Pine Ridge natives, Alaina (Alaina Clifford), a policewoman handling a series of incidents over the course of an interminable night shift, and her young niece Sadie (Sadie Lapointe), a basketball coach looking to flee her increasingly depopulated turf. What her escape amounts to, like Jauja’s climactic rendezvous, is a twist too stupefying to be spoiled here.

Suffice to say that this second shift catapults Sadie and Eureka back in time again, and the final stretch unspools in a remote corner of the Amazon where a small tribe wrestles with a gold rush threatening to upend their lives. What began as a parody of a classic Hollywood western finally morphs into a more cryptic tale not too distant from Kiro Russo’s 2021 El Gran Movimiento, or––farther East––the contemplative rhythms of two of Alonso’s acknowledged exemplars, Tsai Ming-liang and Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Is it any wonder Eureka’s journey across time, space, and genres should feel uneven?

Alonso, who wrote Eureka with Martin Caamaño and Jauja’s co-scribe Fabian Casas, has acknowledged the late Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian as an ur-text (some early exchanges between Mastroianni and Mortensen were cribbed near-verbatim). The novelist’s Hobbesian view of humanity haunts this film: if there’s one similarity Eureka finds among the different Indigenous communities surveyed, it’s our innate propensity for greed––a lesson peddled in the third and final section. It’s by far the least-incisive, especially when compared to the entrancing chapter preceding it. That lopsided nature is Eureka‘s biggest crux. Its second part fuses the observational flair of Alonso’s earliest works (2001’s La Libertad, 2004’s Los Muertos) with the supernatural vein of a reverie à la Jauja, and the alchemy between these two registers makes for a mesmerizing experience.

Edited by Gonzalo del Val and shot by Mauro Herce and Aki Kaurismäki’s regular cinematographer Timo Salminen, Eureka trades in long, uninterrupted shots that function as rooms one can settle into at one’s own pace. Alaina’s late-night car rides are paved with such moments. Even as she bumps into and picks up a few misfits she remains a lonesome drifter, and Alonso dogs her as she roams a no man’s land, wedding his vision of a community on the brink of extinction in a musique concrète of unanswered phone calls, wind rustling through shattered windows, mechanical sounds. It’s here that Eureka is at its most psychotropic––not in the Amazon, but in the dark, caliginous immensity of the Pine Ridge Reservation, where a night shift swells into a kind of seance, and Alaina gradually morphs, like the town she patrols, into a ghost of her own. 

Stranded in the Amazon, Eureka loses much of that supernatural mystique––oddly, considering this should stand as the film’s trippiest segment. But for all the hallucinations conjured from the jungle, the script settles with some unimaginative tropes about Indigenous tribes grappling with modernity and its poisonous seeds. Perhaps Eureka suffered something similar in its second chapter, too, when Sadie accused a French woman (Mastroianni again) of being a journalist ready to give the reservation “bad press.” Whether or not Sadie’s right Eureka doesn’t say, but it might be liable of the same charge. All we witness during Alaina’s rides are signs of the community’s inexorable collapse: drug houses, shootings, domestic violence, cars drunkenly swiveling on the road at night. It’s enough to make one wonder if Eureka ultimately succumbs to the same stereotypes it purports to subvert; but such charge, in retrospect, feels ungenerous. Alonso wants to turn those clichés against themselves, and in his own subtle way, he does just that.

As Alaina trudges on and the night unfolds, Eureka slinks from realism to enter a more abstract realm where dialogues take on an enigmatic, playful tone and time slips out of joint. For a film that hinges on an extraordinary metamorphosis, this is its most mesmeric shift: a reservation swelling from a site of violence and destruction into a more ethereal and fantastical milieu, suspended, like Eureka itself, between facts and haunting fiction.  

Eureka premiered at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival.

The post Cannes Review: Eureka is Lisandro Alonso’s Most Ambitious, Uneven Reverie  first appeared on The Film Stage.

Four years after world premiering Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood to Cannes Film Festival, Quentin Tarantino returned to the festival last month with the tease of a secret screening. Considering the recent “death” of Leonardo DiCaprio’s Rick Dalton––for which Tarantino delivered a two-part, two-hour-plus eulogy to the fictional character (more on that below)––rumors swirled it may be the discussed extended cut of his 2019 feature. However, it turned out to be the 1977 Paul Schrader-scripted gem Rolling Thunder, a film that Tarantino wrote about extensively in “Cinema Speculation” and which he aims to recreate in his own vision for his forthcoming final feature The Movie Critic.

While at Cannes, he also took part in a 70-minute masterclass which has now been published in its entirety. While the on-stage French translation means it’s a bit briefer than a standard talk of this variety, it’s replete with a wealth of wisdom, including further thoughts from the director on violence (he says he would never kill an animal in one of his films), revising history in his films, his issues with Taxi Driver, getting into fights about his love for Brian De Palma, how Schrader has detached himself from Rolling Thunder as much as Tarantino has for Natural Born Killers, and more. Though if you’re looking for new details on The Movie Critic, you’ll have to wait.

However, he did share his thoughts on this streaming age with Deadline. “I’m probably going to be doing the movie with Sony because they’re the last game in town that is just absolutely, utterly, committed to the theatrical experience. It’s not about feeding their streaming network. They are committed to theatrical experience. They judge success by asses on seats. And they judge success by the movies entering the zeitgeist, not just making a big expensive movie and then putting it on your streaming platform. No one even knows it’s there. I mean, and I’m not picking on anybody, but apparently for Netflix, Ryan Reynolds has made $50 million on this movie and $50 million on that movie and $50 million on the next movie for them. I don’t know what any of those movies are. I’ve never seen them.” He added, “I haven’t ever talked to Ryan Reynolds’ agent, but his agent is like, ‘Well, it cost $50 million.’ Well, good for him that he’s making so much money. But those movies don’t exist in the zeitgeist. It’s almost like they don’t even exist.”

Watch the masterclass below, and listen to QT and Roger Avary’s aforementioned eulogy to the “late,” fictional Rick Dalton below.

The post Watch: Quentin Tarantino Talks Violence, Taxi Driver, Brian De Palma & More in 70-Minute Cannes Masterclass first appeared on The Film Stage.

With every step she took on the catwalk, Bethann Hardison broke new ground. She did it while strutting in Chester Weinberg’s A-line skirts across the private showrooms of Manhattan’s garment district, where clients believed her to be “out of line.” She did it while dazzling audience members in Versailles in 1973, where she showed Europeans that girls of color brought personality to the runway and were not just human clothes-hangers. She did it ferociously, defiantly, and as shown in the documentary Invisible Beauty, she did it without ever planning to.

Hardison never set out to become the first Black supermodel. In fact, the scope of her ambitions and how they were perceived by society wasn’t something she ever even thought about. And yet, in an industry that has perpetuated racist practices for as long as it’s existed, she became a screen onto which people projected their fears and hopes. “You always want to win,” establishes an interviewer we hear but can’t see. “I don’t want to lose,” she corrects him elegantly.

As a young girl, Hardison, who was born in Brooklyn but had roots in the South, learned that her country was split into unfair halves. While visiting her grandmother in the Jim Crow South she wondered why she was supposed to drink from different water fountains. In high school she didn’t understand why her Black classmates thought she was “doing white things” when she showed an interest in the arts. Bethann was just busy living her life. Although this could come off as a certain type of naivete, those who were looking closer knew Hardison was propelled by desire––she never understood why there were things she was “supposed” to do, think, or want. She merely followed her instinct.

Beauty, which she co-directed with Frédéric Tcheng (one of the greatest fashion filmmakers of our time), seems like an exercise in self-retrospective. Rather than a straightforward autobiography, the documentary offers Hardison the opportunity to, as she puts it, look back in order to go forward. With every scene one feels as if Hardison is finally given the opportunity to take in the magnitude of her life, making the film both a celebration and elegy-of-sorts. 

What will happen when she’s gone is the question many of the subjects pose out-loud to the camera. A world without Hardison seems unimaginable––she’s become a superhero, or the heroine of a melancholy Western constantly being called back to do one last job, to fix one more problem. In 1984, when she opened the Bethann Management Agency, she became the first Black woman to own a modeling firm. In 1988, when she and Iman co-founded the Black Girls Coalition, she demanded the industry she so loved gave opportunities to Black models. Hardison served as a mentor to Naomi Campbell and Tyra Banks. Why, then, was she constantly being asked to prove something?

When the film begins we listen to Hardison and Tcheng talk about what the documentary will be, what purpose it will serve. The meta-awareness makes us feel privileged––we realize we’re basking in someone’s innermost thoughts. In literature this would be an inner monologue. In film it approximates the process of creation, the images from Hardison’s past and present coming together to suggest a future.

Although she is rightfully showered with praise by celebrities like Zendaya, Tracee Ellis Ross, Whoopi Goldberg, Ralph Lauren, and Tyson Beckford (whom she discovered), there is a lingering sadness hovering over. While watching it I constantly wondered: why does America demand and take so much from the people it’s oppressed most?

Two-thirds into the film, mostly told in the chronological order of Hardison’s life, we learn that in 2007, long after she’d retired from the runway, Hardison had to make a comeback to demand that fashion labels like Prada and Calvin Klein put Black girls in their shows. As a teenager who devoured issues of Vogue like they were fresh cookies, I remember noticing the lack of diversity in fashion spreads. I also remember the shift that occurred at the start of my 20s when models (e.g. Liya Kebede) began appearing on those pages more often. I’m grateful to know it was all because of Hardison; my heart ached upon realizing that if it wasn’t for this film, I might never have.

Although Hardison is referred to as a model and activist, the latter label was practically forced onto her. She had to break new ground; no one else would have done it for her. There is much to celebrate in Invisible Beauty, but at a time when the rights of Black people continue being threatened all over the world––especially in the United States––how long will it take for heroes like Hardison to sit in their laurels and bask in the glory they’ve created despite the system? When will the ground offer them a place to rest, rather than some obstacle to fight? 

Invisible Beauty makes its Tribeca Festival premiere on June 13.

The post Tribeca Review: Invisible Beauty Examines Racism in the Fashion Industry Through the Eyes of the First Black Supermodel first appeared on The Film Stage.

A low-key, poetic exploration of life’s ironies, Monica Sorelle’s feature debut Mountains frames the disappearance of Miami’s Little Haiti with a warm, compassionate gaze recalling the masters of social realism––akin to Roberto Rossellini with the touch of Ousmane Sembène’s lighter films. With a title drawn from a Haitian proverb “behind mountains there are mountains,” the film retains a light touch, somewhat more sad than mad as Little Haiti disappears in the city’s building boom. A modest dream home is unobtainable once the real estate vultures circle the neighborhood and Xavier Sr. (Atibon Nazaire), a demolition worker, plays a role in changing his neighborhood permanently, making way for young Whole Foods-shopping professionals to displace families and small businesses. 

Xavier Sr. lives in a small bungalow with crossing guard / homemaker wife Esperance (Sheila Anoizer) and their floundering 20-something son Junior (Chris Renois), an aspiring stand-up comedian. They are a happy, hardworking family with Xavier Sr. playing peacemaker at work, helping to quell a dispute between the company’s nephew and a young Haitian who dreams of bling rather than work gloves. Employed as a valet, Junior is given some opportunities to work in a car dealership but chooses his stand-up comedy passion, sneaking out after dark to find his community in a local comedy club.

Recalling Sembène’s meditations on wealth and the modern working class such as Faat Kiné, Mountains is an evocative look at a strong Haitian family, beautifully capturing the rhythms of everyday life, often with Javier Labrador Deulofeu’s camera slowly panning across the landscapes of work: from Esperance at home in her crowded kitchen––which doubles as the dining room and a workspace––to showing the foundations Xavier helps clear for a mini-mansion or a high-density housing development. He does so without question until he and Esperance lose their dream home to a higher bidder, a modest cottage repped by an unseen blonde, white woman who has identified the neighborhood as ripe for gentrification.

Mountains revisits Little Haiti a few years after Edson Jean’s fantastic character study Ludi, which features a young, hardworking, exhausted nurse attempting to live her version of the American Dream despite systematic barriers in her way. The family at the core of Mountains has a few more advantages than she does, presumably owning their home while watching the character of the community evaporate with each new young professional walking with their dogs, iced coffee in hand, around the block adoring the “culture” as if it’s just another lifestyle item.

While the film is about that, it’s largely a character study, a celebration of Haitian culture, and, of course, an exploration of the American struggle that the next generation may have more barriers to entry into the middle class than the generation before it. Mountains is a beautifully lensed record of a community not unlike the lost Bunker Hill neighborhood of Kent MacKenzie’s The Exiles or the Watts district of Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep. It’s rare to see a film that captures a disappearing community with such immediacy, remorse, and, yes, occasional joy.

Mountains premiered at Tribeca Festival.

The post Tribeca Review: Mountains is a Stirring, Joyful Requiem for a Disappearing Community first appeared on The Film Stage.

With the unfortunate history of portrayals of many marginalized communities, the first films to kick open the door to mainstream representation were often made outside of a community, resulting in work that is deemed problematic in today’s environment. Chasing Amy being one such example: though the third film from Kevin Smith met some controversy, it did not have picket lines that his fourth, Dogma, would invite.

For Sav Rodgers, a kid growing up in Kanas who adored Ben Affleck, Chasing Amy became a gateway into understanding themselves and, ultimately, who they wanted to become. In his highly personal feature film debut, the trans filmmaker expands upon his viral TED talk, unpacking multiple problems with Chasing Amy and the ’90s independent film scene. It was a time of gatekeepers that often, intentionally or not, suppressed mainstream LGBTQ films made from within the community, bankrolling and elevating voices like Kevin Smith––in his sheer provocation, a boy from the Jersey shore who may have unknowingly opened the door for pan and bisexual representation with his first feature Clerks. Cultural critic Princess Weekes remarks on how unintentionally positive Smith’s pictures are at representation. Smith is not the villain of this story, but rather becomes a friend and mentor to Rodgers––he never intended to reach them in Kansas, but was glad he did.

Chasing Chasing Amy is more than just a cast reunion (though it does feature Smith, Joey Lauren Adams, Scott Mosier, and Jason Lee) or a cultural examination (featuring the voices of film critics, academics, programmers, and queer filmmakers). It’s a rather personal exploration over several years as Rodgers, with his partner Riley Rodgers, experiences many life-changing moments––among them a first trip to Red Bank, New Jersey, to revisit where Ben Affleck has been, to Rodger’s transition during COVID. Helping to tell the story are Smith’s fellow Sundance classmates, including Guinevere Turner, whose romantic friendship with Smith’s producing partner Mosier influenced the film. Starring and closely collaborating with the queer filmmakers of Go Fish and The Watermelon Woman, Turner ultimately begrudges Smith for being able to build an empire with the wide release of Clerks and a subsequent deal to make Mallrats within the studio system, while Go Fish did not afford her the same opportunities.

What Rodgers manages to do is miraculously shed new, original light on Smith, a man who has literally told every story in his repertoire, as well as unpacking the elephant in the room––gatekeeper Harvey Weinstein––who later holds back Joey Lauren Adams’ career. What is remarkable is just how young Smith, Turner, and Adams found critical success. Physical and mental-health issues notwithstanding, Smith undoubtedly had a happy ending and has served as an inspiration. But as the documentary unpacks, he was by no means perfect: for Adams, Chasing Amy exists as a record of their relationship, exploring fights and anxieties that come from youth and inexperience.

Told in a personal, straightforward way by framing Rodgers as the hero of his own comic book, the film opens new windows into a man that loves to talk and talk. Rodgers has crafted a worthy companion to Chasing Amy, a warm and inclusive film that could not come at a better time. Finding role models and acceptance in his family Rodgers, like Ben Affleck’s Holden McNeil, bears his soul and ultimately finds a happy ending with his wife, Riley. The film playfully mixes interactive, conversational talking heads with Roger’s own journey to become the person they always wanted to be. In a time when trans individuals are the subject of draconian measures and cruel commentary from elected officials and pundits, authentic, honest portraits like these are needed in the mainstream.

Chasing Chasing Amy premiered at Tribeca Festival.

The post Tribeca Review: Chasing Chasing Amy Finds a Trans Filmmaker Meeting Their Idol and Rediscovering a Problematic Classic first appeared on The Film Stage.

When asked, in 2019, to explain why her first three features begin during the night, Alice Rohrwacher recalled the long drives she would take with her beekeeping father as a child and how, upon arrival, she’d play a game by closing her eyes: “I’d have to work it out from what I could hear, not from what I could see, so I’d listen to the place and the information would enter my mind––and then I’d open my eyes.” More than most filmmakers, Rohrwacher’s particular genius seems tied to her way of thinking: that cinema is less a reflection of our imagination than a natural extension. The best ideas in her cinema seem plucked from nowhere (Lazzaro‘s time jump; the red cake in Le Pupille), yet arrive fully formed––even organic.

Premiering on the final day of Cannes, her new film doesn’t begin at night; instead it’s as if the camera (operated once again by the great Hélène Louvart) is peeking through a Viewmaster. It’s one of many lovely ideas in La Chimera, speaking both to Rohrwacher’s sensibility as a director and the film’s wistful tone. In another, a grave-robber, Arthur (played by Josh O’Connor), uses a divining rod in the shape of a wishbone to find a tomb. (“It’s about tomb robbers,” Rohrwacher explained to me a month ago at Visions du Reel, “people that steal from the past.”) In the most majestic shot, an ancient and recently headless marble is hoisted above the colorful, LEGO-block containers of a shipping yard. Like much of Chimera, it is an image typical of her best work: beautiful in and of itself, rich in temporal and cultural contrasts. (Though here perhaps a touch reminiscent of a moment in Call Me By Your Name.)

Having given voice to the victims of a kind of modern serfdom in Happy as Lazzaro, Chimera focuses on the economic standing of another class in Italian society, as well as the moral and spiritual cost of selling one’s own history for a quick buck. (“It’s like we filmmakers,” Rohrwacher continued at VdR, “we all steal from the past.”) Arthur, we learn, is less the ring leader of this ragtag gang (a lively bunch who appear a bit like the traveling circus family of her earlier documentary, Un Piccolo Spettacolo) than its gifted guide. The group considers his ability near-supernatural, and he tends to pass out after doing it, as if touched by some higher power. Mourning the death of a great love, he has also begun to think a little deeper about the significance of his crimes. His resolve is further tested when he catches the eye of one of his lost love’s sisters––named Italia, of all things, and played at a delightful skip by Carol Duarte (The Invisible Life of Eurídice Gusmão).

O’Connor isn’t the only big name in Rohrwacher’s cast. Her sister Alba, as ever, is present: a vision in absurdly large and yellow shoulder pads, she steals a couple scenes as a snooty artifact dealer. Better still is Isabella Rossellini: appearing here as warmth incarnate, she plays the matriarch of Italia’s sprawling clan of sisters. (If that metaphor isn’t clear, Rohrwacher confirms it in a later scene when one character looks to the camera, Fleabag-style, and says, “If the Etruscans hadn’t been here, there wouldn’t be all this machismo.”) If Happy as Lazzaro took its cues from Pasolini and his everyday saints, the aesthetic pleasures of Chimera are pure Fellini: cinema as a kind of dreamy circus. As produced by NEON, there’s also a nice bit of budget onscreen: we get a miraculous sequence on a steam-powered barge, a full Epiphany Day parade, and a nicely kinetic dance at a seaside carnival. Mumbling in scruffy white linens, O’Connor is an affable leading presence. So why, you start to wonder, does La Chimera feel a bit lame?

Opening to plenty acclaim in Cannes and leaving empty-handed, this is the first of Rohrwacher’s films that rings contrived. Repeating some of the aesthetic choices first seen in her Oscar-nominated mid-length gem Le Pupille––janky fast-forwards and folksy, exposition-heavy songs performed into camera, or: the creeping sense of something asking to be memed––Chimera comes off more quirky than charming. This is a fine line, and a consequential one. At other times it’s practically cloying: just when one thinks they’ve shirked the film’s glossary of Italian hand gestures from their mind, you’re asked to endure a full conversation. With its cast of adorable kids, Pupille was no less cutesy, but that film held the dual free-passes of taking place at Christmas and lasting just 40 minutes. As Chimera reaches the halfway point of its 133, such whimsy has already begun to gnaw.

Nobody who saw Happy as Lazzaro will ever forget the way that organ music left the church or the magic of Adriano Tardiolo’s face. We glimpse that face again here in a marching band, but Tardiolo’s cameo––as well as a late one by Luca Chikovani (who played the young Tancredi)––only serve to remind us of a richer work. No director of her genius would ever really make a bad film––if such a thing even exists––but we can be wary of a change in sensibilities here. Lazzaro‘s transcendental moments felt earned because his world was coarser to the touch. With Le Pupille and La Chimera, Rohrwacher is moving towards a cinema of fewer rough edges, and a poorer one for it.

La Chimera premiered at the 76th Cannes Film Festival and will be released by NEON.

The post Cannes Review: In La Chimera, Alice Rohrwacher’s Genius Gets Buried By Whimsy first appeared on The Film Stage.