Still more of MUBI

When the niche streaming channel 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 rogue 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 New Year’s Eve of 2015, coincidentally marking the thirtieth 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 in the early episodes.  But thereafter, the story takes many turns from year to year, in a profoundly realistic tale of the progress of a relationship though a decade of change.  The standout for me was the episode where they are keeping house and both sets of parents come for a holiday meal, but each was marked by humor and authentic human interaction. Like real life, it sometimes requires patience, but if you pay attention it’s well worth your time.
 
As it turned out, enough new stuff appeared on MUBI for me to continue the subscription after the current special ran out.  Notably, My Undesirable Friends: Part 1 – Last Air in Moscow (MC-94!).  Though its 5½ hour runtime may seem daunting, rest assured that this up-close-and-personal documentary by Julia Loktev (The Loneliest Planet) is engaging throughout, as it follows a group of young female journalists and activists trying to navigate the increasing authoritarianism of the Putin regime, which has labeled them as “foreign agents.”  The film starts as Navalny returns to Russia and is arrested getting off the plane, and ends as the repression that has been growing for a decade tightens radically after the invasion of Ukraine.  The genuine drama is startlingly intimate, shot on an iPhone much like the tool of all the journalists themselves.  By the end all the principals (am I allowed to comment on how photogenic they all are?) have fled Russia before they’re arrested.  A “Part 2” is planned to follow these characters into exile.  This film is – unfortunately – highly instructive for Americans these days, while Trump tries to follow his buddy Putin’s playbook.  As a NYT critic suggests, this is the “most essential investment of time you can make” on a movie this year. “And yet it is not just ‘important’ or consequential — it is brilliant, riveting, vital, devastating.”  Amen.
 
My Father’s Shadow (MC-85) is the debut feature of Nigerian-British director Akinola Davies Jr., written with his brother Wale.  Two boys, aged 11 and 8, play and bicker in their rural home while their father, who works in Lagos and rarely returns home, gets ready to go back to the city.  The boys’ mother has gone to the village for the day, so the father decides to take the boys into Lagos for the first time.  It turns out to be the very day in 1993 when the military dictatorship annulled an election they had clearly lost.  The film combines memory piece, city symphony, and history lesson into an absorbing tale of father and sons.   
 
I took note of Aisling Franciosi in Twinless, which led me to The Nightingale (MC-77).  So how did this intriguing Irish-Italian actress wind up in Tasmania, covered in blood and starring in a film by Jennifer Kent, best known for The Babadook (which I never had the least interest in seeing)?  This film certainly does not stint on horror, but it’s more historical than metaphysical.  Aisling plays a young transported Irish convict in the 1820s, indentured to a vile British lieutenant, who wreaks unimaginable havoc on her life (very hard to watch, and there’s more).  She goes on a mission of revenge, enlisting a “blackfella” as guide.  Inevitably, he goes from “boy” to “Billy” to deep connection, non-actor Baykali Ganambarr delivering on all counts.  The story beats are rather familiar, albeit with a twist in perspective; violence and gore are prevalent and protracted, but herthe title performance and the lush Australian wild are well worth watching.
 
World Cup fever may have led Saipan (MC-68) direct to streaming, but I glommed on immediately after my own personal indoctrination to football – as the world knows it – through Welcome to Wrexham.  Also lured by my longtime enjoyment of the star, Steve Coogan, and general fondness for things Irish.  A bit of useful context: this docudrama retells the story of Roy Keane, maybe the best Irish footballer ever, who walked out on the national team at the start of the 2002 World Cup, and became the basis of the Roy Kent character in Ted Lasso.  This film examines how the cock-up happened.  Coogan plays the team manager and Eanna Hardwick embodies the stone-faced, all-business team captain, as they battle through the Irish squad’s pre-Cup warm-up on the titular island, an opacity that would be completely clear to Irish folk who lived through the controversy.  Coogan plays it straight, but there are plenty of laughs in this comedy of errors and incompatibility, though very little actual soccer action.
 
La Grazia (MC-70) is the third film that director Paolo Sorrentino and actor Toni Servillo (euphonious name, isn’t it?) have made about Italian political leaders.  After playing the scoundrels Andreotti and Berlusconi, Servillo is now the necessarily-fictional President DiSantis, a jurist of great wisdom and probity (along with human weaknesses).  Sorrentino’s films are all explorations of his two great cities, Naples and Rome, the latter featured here, as in his Oscar-winner The Great Beauty.  Restraining his characteristic exuberance, this film focuses on moral quandaries, as the preeminent law scholar and esteemed politician goes into the last months of his term pondering a trio of decisions, a euthanasia law that his daughter (and closest advisor) is pushing, and two contrasting pardon applications.  Not without the occasional fanciful flourish, this film asks and debates serious questions of jurisprudence, while displaying what the title promises – grace.
 
I was lured into The Fall (MC-64) by the presence of Lee Pace (Halt & Catch Fire) and the film’s top rank in popularity on MUBI.  I’d never heard of director Tarsem Singh or his 2008 film.  Pace plays a 1920s Hollywood stuntman in hospital after an accident, bonding with a five-year-old Romanian girl recovering from a broken shoulder (whose appeal kept me watching) and telling her an ever-changing adventure story on demand.  To keep up, the filmmaker went to 18 countries, filming spectacularly in a triumph of location scouting.  The story is rather thin, and often compared unfavorably to The Princess Bride, but Bollywood might be another point of comparison.  I wouldn’t recommend this film unless you’re in the mood for a dazzling but nonsensical travelogue.
 
Elizabeth Sankey’s Witches (MC-70) is an interesting essay film that jumps off from her own postpartum depression into a larger consideration of women’s mental health and the connection to historical accusations of witchcraft and its depiction in popular culture, largely illustrated by clips from theatrical films.  The message about finding your own coven didn’t register with me as much as the game of naming which movies the clips came from as they rushed by.
 
Pompei: Below the Clouds (MC-87) is a Wiseman-esque documentary about Naples by Gianfranco Rossellini, shot in exquisite high-contrast black & white.  Without any narration or explanatory frame, his camera moves between aerial shots of fuming Vesuvius, and underground and underwater shots of antiquities buried by previous eruptions.  We spend time in an emergency call center and a Syrian ship bringing grain from Ukraine, as well as in the bowels of the archaeological museum and in tunnels dug by grave robbers.  Slow and meticulous, the film requires sustained attention but rewards it.
 
Last and least, I take note of The Sound of Falling (MC-90), the highly-praised German film that I couldn’t get through at this time, a difficult 150-minute film about four different quartets of sisters living in the same house over the course of a century, with unmarked transitions between time periods.  I don’t doubt the film rewards the concentration required to sort out sixteen-plus characters in four different timelines, but I didn’t have it in me at this moment, so I’ll save the film for my next sojourn on this channel.  
 
For many movie viewers, I’m afraid, “It makes you think” does not seem like an endorsement of a film, but it does seem like a description of much of MUBI’s programming.   So after getting the channel for three months at one dollar, I found enough of interest to stick around for two more at the usual $15 subscription rate.  In sum, MUBI is great for an occasional feast, but one doesn’t require a steady diet of it.  Look for one of their many special offers, and give it a try.