MUBI, maybe

I was just about to sign up for a week’s free trial of the Mubi streaming service, in order to see a specific film (Decision to Leave, reviewed here), when I saw an ad offering an introductory special of 3 months for $1, so I jumped at that, and then looked around to see what else was to be seen on the channel.
 
Alcarràs was a place to start (MC-85), the title of Carla Simón’s multiple-award-winning film a Catalan region in northeast Spain, where it centers on an extended family running a peach farm.  After Summer 1993, Simón again brings attentive observation to a cast of nonprofessional actors, especially children, in rural conditions.  I love the way she puts you into the middle of the story without preamble or introduction, letting the details of the relationships among the three generations emerge organically, captured by a ceaselessly roving camera.  Beyond the family itself, and the intimate details of harvesting peaches, there are reverberations from the wider world, after their peach orchards are threatened with displacement by a solar farm.  I was thrilled by this quietly realistic, deeply sympathetic film, the antithesis of a “thriller.”
 
Mathieu Amalric directs but does not appear in Hold Me Tight (MC-82), which is held together by a commanding performance from Vicky Krieps, playing a mother coming to grips with the loss of her family – husband, pianist daughter, and treehouse-dwelling son.  Her coping mechanism is to project herself into alternate realities, where the family is reconfigured in various ways, in kaleidoscopic shifts of light and perspective.  It’s meant to be confusing, to reflect the protagonist’s own confusion, and succeeds wonderfully, helped by lovely cinematography and music, and fine performances all round.  A mystery to be experienced rather than solved.
 
Playground (MC-86) is the bitterly ironic English title of the Belgian film Un monde, where a schoolyard becomes a battleground, a world of its own where characters are forged in fire, and bullying is contagious.  In Laura Wandel’s debut feature as writer-director, the Dardenne brothers have found a spiritual sister.  For 72 piercing minutes, the frame is filled by the face of a 7-year-old girl as she confronts first grade and its attendant agonies.  Sometimes the camera circles around and we follow her, seeing her narrow world from her waist-high perspective.  From any angle, Maya Vanderbeque delivers a profound and astounding performance.  She’s Nora, who starts out clinging to her slightly older brother, but gradually becomes his protector in turn, and then his antagonist, as juvenile violence gets passed around like the flu.
 
Mr. Bachmann and His Class (MC-89) is an outstanding documentary.  Director Maria Speth is like a kinder, gentler Frederick Wiseman, and over the course of 217 minutes she follows an inspired teacher and his class of sixth graders through a school year.  In an industrial town in Germany, the class is a polyglot mix of recent immigrants with those born there of immigrant parents, all “guest workers” from countries ranging from Morocco to Azerbaijan.  The teacher is quite a character (from the generation just after the ’68ers), and the kids are a charming mix of personalities and backgrounds.  The time it takes to know them never drags, and is ultimately quite uplifting, as well as funny and penetrating.
 
The Polish film Corpus Christi (MC-77) was an Oscar nominee a few years back, and I found it worth watching, in a Bressonian sort of way.  It’s handsomely directed and features a lead performance of startling intensity, as a paroled convict who impersonates a village priest and finds his calling.  The actor’s eyes are magnetically strange, and well-adapted to either dissipation or elevation, intoxication or enthusiasm, violence or ecstasy.
 
The Irish film Rose Plays Julie (MC-83) is a #MeToo era revenge thriller – moody, enigmatic, and smoothly-made – but not something that gripped or held me.
 
Sicilia! (1999) is a quirky minimalist film, static and stiffly declamatory, about a son of Sicily returning for a visit after many years away.   I wouldn’t have watched if I weren’t currently immersed in reading and viewing about my ancestral homeland.  Given that particular interest, and the diversion of a stationary bike, I had the patience to sit through its odd 66 minutes, but I wouldn’t advise anyone else to.
 
Mubi also revived the Taviani brothers’ Padre Padrone (1977), about a Sardinian shepherd boy, and in the midst of digging into my imaginary identity as an Italian peasant, I took another look.  However it may have looked back then, I found it unwatchable today, its bare-bones neorealism laced with bawdy humor.
 
I credit Mubi with offering my first chance to see a Maltese film, Luzzu (MC-78), an absorbing update on the traditional Sicilian fisherman of Visconti’s La Terra Trema, now under threat from climate change, EU regulation, and globalized container shipping.  A young fisherman, with an ailing infant and a leaky luzzu (painted wooden boat) inherited from his father and grandfather before him, is tempted toward corruption by desperation.  Maltese-American Alex Camilleri, a first-time writer-director, beautifully renders the watery light of the Mediterranean, despite the scarred industrial landscape, in an impressive neorealist film that debuted at Sundance.
 
So there are definitely good films on Mubi, but they tend toward the esoteric, and not enough of them to warrant a continuing subscription, though you may want to drop in and give it a try sometime.  It’s either a feature or a bug that their policy is to add and subtract a film each day, so at any given time they’ll have a lot of films I’d highly recommend (such as, at the moment, Amour and The Rider), though I didn’t have the urge to see them again during this trial subscription.