At last, I am able to comment
on the most recent Oscar winner for best foreign film. Netflix never even listed it on DVD or
streaming, but I finally tracked it down on Starz. And indeed, A Fantastic Woman (MC-86, Starz)
is pretty fantastic, especially as played by transgender actress Daniela
Vega. She’s a singer and waitress in Santiago , Chile , who has just moved in with her lover, an older man
who has left a wife and children behind.
On their night of celebration, he dies and she must deal with the
consequences, finding a way to grieve while dealing with his aggrieved family,
and with others who take her identity as a grievance. Sebastian Lelio previously directed the
wonderful Gloria, which he has remade in English with Julianne Moore,
and also Disobedience, so he has established himself as a
female-oriented filmmaker worth watching.
Combining fantastical moments with hard-eyed realism about human
interaction, the film is continuously engrossing and surprising, and worthy of
the award.
On the other hand, Netflix
streaming is the only way to see the Hungarian film On Body and
Soul (MC-77, NFX ), which is not an easy watch, but worth it for the award-winning
work of two women, writer-director Ildiko Enyedi and lead actress Alexandra
Bobely. The latter plays a government
inspector in a slaughterhouse, a pale fragile blond (I thought of Yvette
Mimieux, if you can remember her).
Beyond shy, she’s clearly on the autism spectrum, and lives a bare life
of managed scripts. The boss of the
place has his own social deficits, but reaches out to her, only to be rebuffed,
until it is discovered that they are having literally the very same dreams –
of the gentle relationship between a stag and a doe in a bucolic sylvan setting
(shot beautifully, as in the finest of nature documentaries). This film is a tough sell at best, starting
with the slaughterhouse scenes, but develops a surprising power and poignancy.
In The Insult (MC-72,
NFX, AMZ ), directed by Ziad Doueiri, a minor Beirut street
encounter, between a Lebanese Christian and a Palestinian refugee, escalates
into continued altercation and eventual court cases, where the extent of sectarian
atrocities and animosities that linger from Lebanon’s civil war in the 1980s
are brought into evidence. I’ve tried to
know as little as I could manage about Middle East conflicts during my lifetime, but this film was instructive in showing
how Beirut went from cosmopolitan Mediterranean enclave to
perpetual warzone, which prefigures Iraq , Syria , and all the rest.
It was also timely in reminding an American viewer of the extent of
sectarian atrocities and animosities that linger from our Civil War in the
1860s. A somewhat programmatic narrative
is given depth by excellent performances across the board.
There were aspects of The
Square (MC-73, NFX ) that kept me watching long past the time when I knew
I was not going to like it, primarily the film’s setting in an art museum in Stockholm , but by the end, I was resentful and wanted those two
and a half hours of my life back. Ruben
Ostland’s film is provocative but inconsequential; it wants to make you
uncomfortable, and does. Occasionally
comic in its satire but mostly cringe-worthy, it’s as smug and
self-congratulatory as the people and situations it depicts, perfect for a
Palme d’Or at Cannes .
I won’t go so far as to say
the Swiss film The Divine Order (MC-67, NFX, AMZ) should have received
a nomination, but I liked it more than most of those that did. A polemical but sweet comedy about the coming
of women’s suffrage to Switzerland (in 1971!), the film is obvious but rather
endearing. In a conservative village
where no one will admit to favoring the vote for women, one housewife
experiences an awakening, which becomes a movement that brings the tide of
liberation to this backwater. Somehow
the film is simultaneously quaint and timely.
I mention Thomas Vinterberg’s
The Commune (MC-60, Hulu), about a houseful of characters in
1970s Copenhagen , for two reasons only: to praise the central performance of Trine
Dyrholm, and to point you in the direction of an infinitely superior film in
the same vein, Lukas Moodysson’s Together (NFX, AMZ).
Though The Shape of Water
made a bigger splash, the best performance of the year by Oscar-nominee Sally
Hawkins was delivered in Maudie (MC-65, NFX ), Aisling Walsh’s adaptation from the life of Canadian outsider artist
Maud Lewis. Afflicted with rheumatoid
arthritis, Maud was virtually crippled, and mentally limited but shrewd. Thrown out of her family home, she desperately
attaches herself as housekeeper to an impoverished fishmonger played by Ethan
Hawke, who is an even more limited product of an orphanage. The house is so tiny that they have no choice
but to sleep in the same bed, and eventually to marry. The movie may have turned their lives into
more of an unlikely love story than it was, but Hawkins and Hawke sell it
convincingly, if inarticulately. The
husband’s harshness melts some when Maudie’s paintings start to bring in a
little money, and then more as their house becomes a Nova Scotia tourist attraction (it now resides in a museum). The seasons turn beautifully through the
middle decades of the 20th century, as Maudie remains simply devoted
to her painting and her man, the physical and emotional pain overcome by
passion for her art. I would show this
at the Clark if I were still programming films there, maybe paired
with another favorite of mine, Seraphine.
Last Flag Flying (MC-65, NFX, AMZ) is another film I single out as better
than its general reputation. Many
critics seemed to resent Richard Linklater’s decades-later “sequel” to Hal
Ashby’s The Last Detail, but I never shared that reverence for the
original. I would watch the Ashby again,
if it were available, but it’s not really a prerequisite to the Linklater. In the gap between Vietnam and Iraq, Jack
Nicholson has morphed into Bryan Cranston, as filthy motor-mouthed iconoclast,
now a drunken bar owner. Laurence
Fishburne has gone from hellraiser to preacher man, and Steve Carell is the
gentle soul who served his time in the brig, only to lose his wife to cancer
and his son to a Baghdad assassin. He
gathers the Marine buddies he hasn’t seen for thirty years, to accompany him to
his son’s burial at Arlington . Revelations
lead to another road trip for the trio, as they re-forge their earlier
comradeship. Linklater’s relaxed and
thoughtful direction gives the actors plenty of space to work out their
characters, mixing the comic and the tragic, while commenting on America ’s recent wars, those who serve and those who send
them on fraudulent missions.
Finally viewed, Columbus
(MC-89, Hulu) bumped the previous film from my top ten list for
2017. In direction and themes, acting
and setting, this debut film from Korean auteur Kogonada stands out and stands
above. It’s one of the best films I’ve ever
seen about architecture, and one of the most architectonic in its own
right. You might find the film static
and eccentric in its pacing and framing, but unlike so many “art” films, the
elements of the human comedy come through clearly. Ozu is a clear inspiration. The director withholds and diverts attention,
but does not frustrate. The humanity of
the film is immensely enhanced by the performance of Haley Lu Richardson as an
extremely bright girl just out of high school, who lacks the finances and
family stability to go away to college (reminiscent of Lady Bird). So, stuck in her hometown of Columbus , Indiana (coincidentally, where Mike Pence is from), she forms
an attachment to the architecture of this surprising mecca of mid-century
modern architecture (the Saarinens et al.) She works in the striking public library, but
dreams of giving tours around the town’s great buildings. She meets a Korean man – whose father is an
architectural scholar, in town to give a lecture, where he suffers a stroke and
now languishes in the hospital between life and death – and they bond over
buildings. John Cho is the son, and
Parker Posey is the father’s protégé and associate. Wistful, amusing, thoughtful, this film is a poem of blood and spirit, concrete and glass.
Molly’s Game (MC-71, NFX) was more engaging than a film about poker
has any right to be. Aaron Sorkin
directs one of his scripts for the first time, and the cutting is as quick as
the dialogue. Jessica Chastain is quite
marvelous as the title character, and Idris Elba brilliant as her lawyer. Her career as competitive skier short-circuited
by a serious mishap on the slopes, Molly Bloom deferred law school and went to
LA, where she went from cocktail waitress to hostess of a high-stakes poker
game, eventually running the whole show, and then moving it to NYC, where she
ran afoul of various mobs, including the Feds.
This a crime story that turns on matters of honor and pride, rather than
of guilt or innocence. Maybe the
first-person narration, adapted from Bloom’s own story, is a little too
insistent, and maybe the film drags past the two-hour point and would have been
well-advised to severely cut Kevin Costner’s role as Molly’s father –
nonetheless I wouldn’t fold on it.
Film Stars Don’t Die in
Liverpool (MC-65, NFX) depends a
lot on the appeal of Annette Bening, and the woman she plays, the film noir
star Gloria Graham, both of whom interest me but may not interest you. It’s the story of Graham’s last years, told
through the memoir of her young lover, played well by Jamie Bell. The gender reversal from the usual
May-December romance is refreshing, and Paul McGuigan’s direction is effective,
if a bit tricky. I rather liked this
romantic weepie with a hard edge, but it’s far from a must-see, unless you’re a
particular admirer of Ms. Bening.
To me, Norman: The
Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer (MC-75, NFX ) was a very mixed bag. Joseph
Cedar is an Israeli writer-director who made a point of casting his American
Jewish characters against type. Richard
Gere transforms himself from WASP Master of the Universe into a Manhattan macher as shlub, a low-rent Madoff or
Michael Cohen. He’s well-dressed enough,
but apparently homeless as well as officeless, walking the streets and taking
refuge in libraries or coffee shops, always plugged into his phone, trying to
make deals out of no tangible assets, except his ability to ingratiate and
fabricate. Michael Sheen is his nephew,
Steve Buscemi is rather hilariously a rabbi, and Charlotte Gainsbourg is a
corruption investigator. Gere lucks out
with a connection to an Israeli politician, who becomes an unlikely Prime Minister,
and favors get exchanged, until he gets caught in a web of promises he can’t
keep. Cedar’s film is funny and sad, but
tries too hard for an antic tone, while remaining serious, with a conclusion
more wishful than convincing.
[Click through for more
reviews and my tardy Top Ten of 2017]