Movies on MUBI

I couldn’t pass up an offer of 3 months for $1, and I had a backlog of Mubi films to look into, so I’m going run through a double handful here, dutifully starting with The Substance (MC-78), recently up for five Academy Awards.  I knew I wouldn’t like it, having no use for horror films – and I didn’t.  But I must confess to making it maybe halfway through before giving up on the gore.  Coralie Fargeat’s direction is striking and kinetic, if shallow as a cosmetics commercial.  She’s got style, if no substance.  Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley are not without appeal as twisted doppelgangers, but really, who needs this?
 
I wonder if my less-than-enthusiastic response to Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Monster (MC-79) reflects the fact that it’s nearly unique in his work for not being written by himself – or that I broke up my viewing over two evenings (I consider set and setting an unspoken but determinative factor in film evaluation).  It’s certainly in his wheelhouse – cute kids in dire straits.  Is this 5^th grader being abused by his teacher, or is he abusing a classmate, or is something else altogether going on?  We take three cracks at the story, with overlapping narrative from three different perspectives, giving Kore-eda opportunity to display the empathy for which he is renowned.  Everyone has their reasons, no single view is complete.  Where does the truth lie, when seen from different angles?  Who is the monster?  What is a monster?  I don’t mind a maze of mirrors, but this one had a bit too much obscurity for me.  For similar theme and setting, I prefer The Teachers Lounge (reviewed here).  Nonetheless, Kore-eda remains the living Japanese director most worth watching.
 
I might have skipped Buddy (MC-76) as a likely sap-fest about human-canine connection, until I saw it was directed by accomplished Dutch documentarian Heddy Honigmann, whose Forever put her forever on my must-watch list.  This film follows six service dogs and the owners who rely on them, from a blind equestrienne to an Afghan War vet with PTSD.  The dogs are amazing in their attentiveness and their abilities, and the people love the animals who allow them a life they couldn’t have otherwise, not to mention being handsome and cuddly.  Sweet without being saccharine.
 
While much of Mubi programming has an “eat your spinach” vibe for me, Crossing (MC-83) was an unexpected gem found there.  It follows a retired Georgian schoolteacher who has promised her dying sister that she will find her banished trans niece and bring the outcast back from Istanbul to Batumi.  She teams up with a young male layabout, who has learned some English on YouTube, to navigate the border crossing and all the further crossings in the film, especially the ferry across the Bosporus.  Their story finally interweaves with that of two street urchins, and a trans woman completing her legal training and serving as advocate for the marginalized.  All five roles are well-acted and the street-level introduction to Istanbul is impressive.  Writer-director Levan Akin was born in Sweden to Georgian parents, and previously made an auspicious debut with And Then We Danced.  You know, to tell the truth, I like spinach when it’s this well-prepared.
 
That led me to another film about an older Georgian woman, Blackbird Blackbird Blackberry (MC-tbd), in which a 48-year-old solitary virgin shopkeeper has a brush with death and then immediately embarks on an affair with one of her deliverymen.  She’s a prickly, enigmatic character who rebels against her carping so-called friends, and a hard-looking woman transfigured by something like love.  These two films remind me of an even better one about a mature Georgian woman striking out on her own, My Happy Family, and you can read my rave here.
 
Oscar-nominated, The Girl with a Needle (MC-82) by writer-director Magnus von Horn is a stylish black & white historical horror film, about a sensational crime in Denmark a century ago.  But approached without that knowledge, one doesn’t know where the film is going, while remaining transfixed by the acting and the visuals.  Will we follow a young woman into the lower depths like the Zola adaptation Gervaise or take a turn into something like Freaks, or something else altogether, possibly Vera Drake or Broker?  Maybe all of the above, with a bit of Gothic fairy tale thrown in.  It’s all quite dark, grim, and suspenseful, in no way casual entertainment but highly artful and ponderable.
 
Close Your Eyes (MC-85) is a film for hardcore cinéastes, the first in 30-odd years from Victor Erice, best known for Spirit of the Beehive.  The little girl in that film returns fifty years later in this one, which seems largely autobiographical.  It follows a director who hasn’t made a film in twenty years, since his friend and star disappeared in the middle of filming.  The remaining reels of that historical drama open and close this film.  An “unsolved mysteries” tv program seeks the director’s involvement, which leads him to delve into remaining evidence, his own memories, and dialogues with former associates.  In the last third, one mystery is solved, but another is propounded.  At almost three hours, the film is too long, but continuously involving, meticulously filmed, and particularly suited to those well-versed in the history of cinema.
 
In hardly more than an hour, Mati Diop’s documentary Dahomey (MC-85) takes a lot in -- and makes a lot out of the story of the return of artifacts from that centuries-old West African kingdom, appropriated by France around 1900, to the present-day nation of Benin.  The film has much to say about colonialism and cultural appropriation (but almost nothing about the old kingdom’s militaristic involvement in the slave trade).  The statues themselves get to speak, in their journey from darkness to darkness, from museum storage to shipping crate to new home.  Also speaking are a symposium of Beninese college students, with many different perspectives on the appropriation and return of these cultural artifacts, and what they mean for the present day.  This film is a poetic and pictorial window on a little-known country.
 
A Still Small Voice (MC-80) is a documentary by Luke Lorentzen about a palliative care chaplain in training at Mt. Sinai Hospital in NYC, and about the benefits and costs of empathy.  It follows a formerly Hasidic woman, who questions the existence of God but is committed to reducing, in one way or another, the mental anguish of those confronting death.  Shot in a manner reminiscent of Frederick Wiseman, but lacking the scope and scale as well as the incisive, lawyer-like editing, this film is emotional and thought-provoking, but inconclusive.  Intimate but ultimately opaque, this is a worthy document that does not quite redeem the pain involved in watching it.
 
Mubi had a new collection of recent Irish films, and I took a flyer on A Date for Mad Mary (IMDB), about a young woman with anger issues, just out of a stint in prison for assault, who’s being ghosted by her longtime best friend.  She’s supposed to be the friend’s maid of honor, but has been denied a plus-one, because she’s not likely to find a suitable date.  Her search for said date makes for this modest but funny story.  Entertaining for its brief length, with a winning performance from Seana Kerslake, this is not a film I’d go out of my way to recommend.
 
Is it more accurate to call Gasoline Rainbow (MC-80) a faux-documentary roadtrip, or a low-rent direct-cinema American Graffiti?  Or maybe it’s a twisted sequel to Reservation Dogs, which actually follows the group of teenage friends to the Pacific Coast?  Or a counterpart to the excellent skateboarding documentary Minding the Gap?  Bill and Turner Ross have established an admirable reputation, but after watching their films out of due diligence, I’ve never yet managed to come up with anything to say about them.  This one follows a lightly-fictionalized mixed fivesome of friends just graduated from high school, who set off together with no plan but to cross the state of Oregon from their nowheresville town to the ocean, with a little help from friends along the way.  Not without merit, but a little shapeless for my taste.
 
With its eye-opening MetaCritic rating, I gave a chance to Radu Jude’s Do Not Expect Too Much of the End of the World (MC-95), but even for me it was too long and too much of a chore to watch all the way through, another esoteric Romanian film for very sophisticated tastes.  Just so, I would recommend Mubi only for those in search of the offbeat, and only for an occasional trial subscription.  For my earlier round-ups of the channel’s offerings, see here and here.