Stray viewing IV

I begin this round-up with one of my favorite recent series, back for a fifth season on PBS and angling for a place among my personal all-time Top Ten.  Astrid (properly Astrid et Raphaëlle, IMDB) keeps getting better and better, as its popularity in France grants the show access and funds to explore more and more interesting Parisian locations, while losing none of its endearing character interactions or wide-ranging storylines.  After reading my personal essay on self-diagnosis of autism, a friend recommended this series, for which I’m especially grateful since I was unlikely to have discovered it otherwise.  The character of Astrid – an autistic woman who works as a criminal records archivist but is recruited by lead detective Raphaëlle to solve crimes together and become close complementary friends – continually offers me shocks of recognition and explanation.  Though there’s always a precipitating murder to initiate the storyline, there’s very little onscreen violence but plenty of forensics as various corners of the culture are explored (for example, the three episodes I watched most recently revolved around Buddhism, Aztec mythology, and Mormonism, respectively).  Not generally my sort of viewing, this particular mystery series is very much up my alley.  None of the actors were familiar to me but all of them are good, but preeminently the title pair of Sara Mortensen and Lola Dewaere, as compass and thimble respectively.  You don’t need to be Aspy to enjoy this series, but it certainly helps.  I have little interest in “solving” the cases (as little as Hitchcock with his “MacGuffins”) but I am interested in the worlds and ideas from which they emerge, and I admire that the end point is never sending the perpetrator to jail but coming to understand what led them to commit the murder, not just the motive but the reason.  The relationships between the title characters and with the rest of the crew are heartfelt and humorous, adding another level of pleasure to the proceedings.  Let me do for you what my friend did for me, and lead you to this hidden gem of a series, with the sixth season now showing in France and likely to come to PBS next January (assuming PBS finds a way to survive without the CPB).  In the meantime, there are forty binge-worthy episodes available with PBS Passport.
 
Softened up by Astrid, I sampled another PBS mystery with the come-on title of Bookish (MC-78), but couldn’t persist.  If you want to watch a series about a bookseller investigating murders, see The Lowdown with Ethan Hawke on Hulu.
 
The main appeal of The Great Escaper (MC-71, PBS) is the acting of nonagenarians Michael Caine and Glenda Jackson as a longtime couple, and one of the bigger disappointments is how poorly they’re matched by the actors who portray them as young lovers during WWII.  We know just how this pair looked at a younger age, and it’s nothing like the pair here.  In the popular British genre of true tales of little people triumphing over adversity or the system or just the odds of existence, this is a middling entry about a veteran of D-Day who goes AWOL from his posh nursing home to attend a 70th seventieth anniversary commemoration in France.  Weak tea, but inoffensive.
 
Maybe Niall Williams ought to stick to novels since his own screen adaptation of Four Letters of Love (MC-37) is such a limp affair, struggling to make the transition from page to screen. I was so fond of his novels This Is Happiness and The Time of the Child that I overlooked the Metacritic rating when I saw this film appear on Kanopy.  Turns out Celtic mysticism is easier to convey in florid words than actual images, however prettified.  Polly Steele’s film features Pierce Brosnan, Gabriel Byrne, and Helen Bonham Carter, not to mention great vistas of the northwest coast of Ireland, so how bad could it be?  Not very, but not very good either.  Ann Skelly is something of a find as a winsome colleen.  But on the whole, I’d recommend this film only if you’re pining for the shores of Donegal.  (It has subsequently turned up on Netflix as well.)
 
I don’t imagine you’re pining for the shores of Finland, but they are certainly the most appealing aspect of The Summer Book (MC-62, Kanopy), an English language adaptation of a Tove Jansson novel, about the relationship between a fading grandmother and a blossoming 6-year-old girl summering in a isolated island cabin, with a grieving widowed father between them.  The grandmother is played by Glenn Close, face carved out of granite, listening to birdsong and watching the light play on waves lapping against the shore, and blaze in midnight sunsets.  If you are in a contemplative state of mind, and responsive to gracenotes of nature, you may have the patience for this short but slow-moving film.
 
I’d never heard of Seagrass (MC-84) before it turned up on Kanopy, but rating and trailer induced me to watch this recent Canadian feature debut from writer-director Meredith Hama-Brown.  In British Columbia, a family goes on an island retreat, where the parents attend marital workshops and the children mingle seaside playing by age group.  Seemingly a memory piece set some thirty years ago, the film is most notable for the perfectly natural performances of the two adorable girls, roughly 12 and 6.  The mother is Japanese-Canadian and her recently deceased mother had been interned during WWII.  She’s grappling with grief and regret, as well as doubts about her cross-racial marriage.  The husband seems genial but clueless and inarticulate about feelings.  The retreat makes things worse rather than better, and the friction and anxiety filters down to the kids.  I understand the moodiness, but this film moves so slowly that it requires real patience to enjoy its virtues.
 
A Little Prayer (MC-86) had been on my watchlist for so long that I don’t remember why I put it there.  Probably for lead David Strathairn, whom I’ve always followed since we were at Williams together, though our paths never crossed; I particularly admired his films with fellow Eph John Sayles.  Probably didn’t connect writer-director Angus Maclachlan to his Junebug screenplay, but maybe I saw some link to Ramin Bahrani or critical comparison to Ozu.  At any rate I’d been looking for the film since its Sundance debut three years ago.  Then it suddenly turned up on Kanopy (now on AMZ as well), and I watched it immediately.  When my reference points are the series Rectify and the films of Kenneth Lonergan, you may surmise that I loved this film.  Strathairn is at the top of his game, as owner of a metal manufacturing plant in Winston-Salem, and Jane Levy matches him in appeal as simpatico daughter-in-law.  His own son and daughter are double trouble however, and his wife no prize.  Where did he go wrong as a father?  Was it when serving as a captain in Vietnam, or sending his son to fight in Iraq, which led the boy off the straight and narrow?  The son now works for his father, and has taken to drinking and sleeping with the boss’s secretary(!).  With everyday problems of regular life, Maclachlan lets us peep in and infer all that is going on under the surface.  The film begins and ends with extended tracking shots down a leafy suburban street, suggesting that we’re being drawn into just one domestic drama out of so many.  But the heart of this film lies in the gospel singing that wafts through the neighborhood in the early morning, which only father and daughter-in-law seem to appreciate.  And then there’s the lesson of a Moravian graveyard.  This film is grave and deep, but also warm and funny.
 
In a less polished way, the same could be said of Maclachlan’s previous film, Abundant Acreage Available (MC-68), also on Kanopy.  It has the great advantage of starring Amy Ryan (whom I’ve loved since she was Beadie in The Wire), who begins the film by burying her father in the post-harvest tobacco field of their NC farm.  She loves the land, but her brother loves Jesus and wants to get off the farm.  Three elderly brothers wind up camping on the land, which is where they grew up.  Complications ensue, interspersed with beauty shots of the landscape.  Not as great as his subsequent film, but highly watchable.
 
Francois Ozon is known as France’s most prolific director, thought of as a successor to Chabrol.  I haven’t seen the majority of his work, but In the House stands out as a gem.  And now I’ll add When Fall is Coming (MC-74), an autumnal reverie centered on veteran stage actress Hélène Vincent, as a well-off grandmother enjoying her country home and garden in Burgundy.  She’s looking forward to a visit from her adored grandson and troublesome daughter.  The placid surface is broken by mischance, and things get worse from there.  Turns out no one is quite what they seem, and subtle twists in the tale keep occurring, in a meditation on chance and design, innocence and culpability.  Beautiful and engaging, Vincent and the film keep revealing new ambiguities and complications.  Ozon propounds rather than solves a mystery.
 
Thus I was led to another Ozon film on Kanopy, Summer of 85 (MC-65), apparently an adaptation of a YA novel that the director loved when young.  Set on the shores of Normandy, it’s the swoony story of two (extremely attractive) teenage boys who meet and mate after a sailing accident, and have a six-week affair that changes both their lives.  In some ways as touching as Heartstopper, this is of course a darker affair, haunted by death and mystery, despite the sunny seaside setting.  From now on, I’ll make more of an effort to keep up with Ozon’s films.
 
How Are You? I’m Alan (Partridge) (IMDB) marks the return of Steve Coogan to the iconic character he’s been playing for more than three decades, a clueless and abrasive radio and tv presenter, downwardly mobile from the BBC.  This time out, he’s hosting a program that purports to be about British mental health, but as is invariably the case, it’s all about him.  I’m a longtime fan of this other Steve, so this show was just my cup of tea and plate of crumpets.  It just debuted on BBC last fall, so it was a surprise to see it reach Kanopy before Britbox.  So my takeaway tip for library card holders is to sign up for Kanopy (or Hoopla) if your library offers it.
 
Hedda (MC-70, AMZ) just eked out my MC benchmark, and stars two actresses who have attracted my interest in the past, Tessa Thompson and Nina Hoss (eye-opening in Christian Petzold films).  Never had much use for Ibsen and never read or saw Hedda Gabler, and Nia DaCosta’s film won’t increase my appreciation, though it does have some virtues of its own.  Some of the transpositions clearly work, most especially one of the central male characters becoming Hoss, a gain on several grounds.  Presumably the original was not set in 1950s Britain, in a manor house where academics and bohemians mingle, a well-designed but rather implausible scene, with entitled general’s daughter Hedda as hostess and shit-stirrer.  Worth a look, but hardly must-see.  
 
I’m not so concerned about HBO disappearing into Paramount+ after its previous devolution into Warner Discovery, and demotion into “stray viewing.”  But at the moment HBO Max boasts, among the lame reality shows, some of the most acclaimed films of the year, led by Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another (MC-95).  Now, the only one of PTA’s films that I remember actively liking is Inherent Vice (can’t remember as far back as Boogie Nights), so I guess mine is a minority voice (was surprised to find out Battle was based on another old Pynchon novel). There are always things to admire in his films, but I’ve never tuned into his wavelength, and this does not change that.  I went in cold, wanting to form my own impressions, and it took me a long while to realize I was watching a comedy.  I’d imagined the film had a serious political intent, about the highly relevant topic of immigrant deportations and the persistence of violent “revolutionary” cadres.  I never got over that feeling of dislocation when stoner dad Leonardo DiCaprio started running around in his bathrobe to recover his abducted daughter (Chase Infiniti, a real find).  Benicio del Toro is his “sensei” and provides welcome wit.  Out of four acting Oscar noms (from thirteen in all), those two have some validity, but the other two are cartoonish portrayals by Sean Penn (in a premonition of Greg Bovino) and Teyana Taylor as a Black radical Amazon.  Full disclosure: I watched this film over several nights of stationary cycling, so didn’t give it my undivided attention.  Don’t take my word for it, but instead see this Best Picture winner for yourself.
 
Some people thought Ari Aster’s Eddington (MC-65) was robbed of a BP nom, but not me.  It’s another attempt to shoehorn political themes into a comic thriller, even less successful than the previous film.  I turned it off when the shoot-em-up began.
 
Rose Byrne got acting nominations for If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (MC-77), so I stuck with this updated “diary of a mad housewife,” but like the cycling it accompanied, it was kind of a chore to get through.  Rather telling that I found HBO’s prestige programs only worth watching while I was doing something else.  And the rest of the channel is so much worse (apart from John Oliver).  David Ellison will just complete the destruction that David Zaslav wrought.
 
Talk about stray viewing – somehow Hamnet (MC-84) wound up on Peacock, where it was blessedly uninterrupted by commercials after the opening string of them.  Based on a book I read but don’t remember very well, directed by Chloe Zhao and starring Jessie Buckley, both particular favorites of mine, with Paul Mescal as Shakespeare, whom I don’t mind either, my expectations were raised too high.  While I appreciated the period look and spirit of the film, I found it rather drawn out and lugubrious, and kept comparing it to the same story’s treatment in the David Mitchell series Upstart Crow, which was satirical as well as moving, in telling how the dead son became the title character of the play.  Still, Zhao’s work is beautifully made and impressively redolent of the era, and Jessie gives it her all, from witchy sexy joy to maternal grief.  There is, however, a limit to my appetite for emotionalism, and this film more than sated it.  I have yet to pick my own favorite for Best Picture of 2025, but so far I haven’t seen an Oscar nominee that stands out, with Train Dreams for me a weak frontrunner.  Blue Moon seems more worthy than any of the nominees I’ve seen.
 
When MUBI had another of their generous offers, I signed up primarily to see The Mastermind  (MC-80).  For me, writer-director Kelly Reichardt sometimes clicks (Wendy and Lucy, First Cow) and sometimes doesn’t (Showing Up).  As the semi-true story of an art thief in 1970s Massachusetts, this had many points of interest for me, not least because the recently ubiquitous Josh O’Connor plays the lead.  He’s no “Thomas Crown” and his affair is an ill-planned, low-key heist of several Arthur Dove paintings from the “Framingham Museum of Art” (Worcester, irl).  O’Connor tends to come across as sympathetic, even when playing Prince Charles, so it takes a while to realize what a dead-ender this guy is, ruining a relatively comfortable life, with a wife and sons and well-off parents, by planning and poorly executing a half-baked scheme to rob a local public institution.  There is humor and pathos in his comeuppance, but little sense of how he got to this point, besides the boundless ego that kicks off the “Me Decade,” while Vietnam and American streets burn on TVs in the background.  Of course the title is totally ironic, and one of the best laughs in this rather deadpan film.
 
Though he came out of the eastern suburbs of Cleveland a few years after me, I have not followed the career of Jim Jarmusch assiduously, but I have seen and mostly enjoyed a lot of his films, with a special shoutout to Paterson (my rave here).  So the MUBI exclusive Father Mother Sister Brother (MC-76) caught my eye.  As an icon of hipster indie cred, Jarmusch can enlist A-list talent in his quirky little dramas, often putting several short stories together in a film.  Here the first features Adam Driver (title character of Paterson) as dutiful son of scoundrel dad Tom Waits, another Jarmusch regular, in a setting very reminiscent of the Berkshires.  In the second, the mother is Charlotte Rampling, having her two grown daughters, Cate Blanchett and Vicky Krieps, to tea in a Dublin townhouse.  In the third, two twins – thirtyish brother and sister of color – reunite in Paris for a last visit to the vacated home where they grew up, the apartment of their gallivanting parents who’ve just died in a plane accident.  As the title suggests, this anthology film is all about the connections and disconnections of family, knit together by recurring tropes in different circumstances, with the inaction beautifully framed and the silences quite eloquent.  Some will find it inexpressive, some will find it penetratingly lifelike.  Some will laugh, some will lament, some will doze off.  I liked it a lot, but not Paterson-level.
 
I’ve lately become a Virginie Efira completist, so I took the opportunity to catch up with Madeleine Collins (MC-64), and again she does not disappoint.  Reviews reference Hitchcock or Chabrol, but the suspense element is muted, and the only violence is emotional.  Which gives Ms. Efira a chance to demonstrate her range, as a professional translator leading a double life, with a conductor husband and two growing sons in Paris and a partner with a preschool daughter in Geneva.  The juggling of identities begins to wear her down and fray her nerves.  The film’s title and opening sequence make no sense until the onion is fully peeled.  I wouldn’t recommend you go out of your way to see this, but I would advise watching almost any Virginie Efira film you come across.
 
MUBI has lately ventured into tv series with some success, and the latest is the Spanish romantic dramedy The New Years (MC-tbd), which follows a pair who meet on the first day of 2015, coincidentally the 30^th birthday of both.  Each of the following nine episodes jumps ahead exactly one year, tracing the arc of their relationship.  The pair are extremely attractive, and there tend to be protracted though tasteful sex scenes, at least in the early episodes.  I’m enjoying it as an accompaniment to stationary cycling, and will report back in sixty miles or so.
 
[I’ll continue to sample MUBI offerings until my latest special offer runs out, but I want to get this post up to make the case for Astrid, one of my most confident recommendations.]