Films of Faith List Discussion + Suggestions (Genre Project)

[colinr0380]

I watched Michael Tolkin's The Rapture today, and I'm not sure I've ever seen a filmmaker take a more unflinching full-measure at tackling the enigmatic psychology behind faith as a coping mechanism for corporeal maladies. For a film that utilizes such specific fundamentalist vehicles to realise its themes, it's surprisingly broad in its implications, and challenging and uncompromising on those radical terms. Regardless of what turns out to be true, or what 'happens' (and boy, does a lot of wild shit happen here), the same questions and afflictions remain. Therein lies the point of the film, to relate and divorce the truth from its subtext and engage with that dissonance, which is sure to affect each viewer uniquely depending on their own social context and relationship to the subject. It reminded me a lot of The Leftovers' inclusive approach to the same big questions, using particulars to invite universal processing - but not because both deal with the Rapture. Also, you can add this to the shortlist of perfect final shots -maybe the most depressing ever (certainly in literal terms!)

It has been a while since I last saw it but I seem to remember that Tolkin's only other directed film from a couple of years later, The New Age (re-teaming Peter Weller and Judy Davis from Naked Lunch!), is just as scathingly good about people in search of meaning to their lives whilst their personal lives fall apart, or rather lay fallow. It kind of occupies the mid-way traffic island point between The Player and Crash.

[therewillbeblus]

Yeah I watched The New Age the next day, and thought it was an okay attempt at broadcasting yuppie ennui that didn't yield any deep insights, choosing instead to reflectively embody their listless inertia. I admire that choice for being more honest, but it's not as interesting as Tolkin thinks it is. The best parts are Adam West as the patriarch and Tanya Pohlkotte as the enigmatic sexpot, who are both perplexingly underutilized. There's a scene involving all three where Weller goes to his dad for a loan that's quite sad in its implications and more effective for its admirable restraint of emotional identification. However, this example of constructive reserve is more of an outlier, since I think the film is often playing it too safe with where and when it chooses to bite on satire vs retreat into cutting scenes that could've more thoroughly detailed the pathos of the characters' plights

[therewillbeblus]

While The Lovers of the Arctic Circle allows its meditations on coincidence and destiny to remain appropriately elliptical when it comes to subjectively defining the mysteries of identity and love, Medem’s Chaotic Ana pushes the boundaries further into specifics to great surprises and thrills, but ultimately an embarrassing end. I admired how weird this movie was - and the audacity of Medem’s commitment to ‘woo’ practices by affirming not only reincarnation but one’s potential to actually access past lives via radical spiritual interventions. These specific full measures leant themselves to a wonderfully vaguer engagement with the spectrum of effects this stove-touching might have on a relatable human level.. so when the film suddenly transforms to an aggressively didactic blending with historical injustice, it not only invalidated the personal pains of the process already intimately surveyed by skipping to some kind of unearned self-actualization, but escalates the tone of the film into one of sincere, inappropriately-precise political motivation. I thought this was supposed to be a tone poem from Medem to his deceased sister, but the scatological wallop of a middle finger to a representative of American perversion and narcissism didn’t make a lick of sense after the character progression we’ve witnessed. 90% of this movie was five-stars perfect, but that last bit jumped the shark.

With only one feature left, I don't think Medem has made a 'bad' film (Room in Rome and Ma Ma are just okay with moments of genius, the rest are strong) but the last 10-15 minutes of Chaotic Ana recontextualized that titular chaos from a rightfully-abstract type to a curiously-distinct funneled form of empowerment, and it's an indication of Medem at his most myopic - a tendency other films of his have danced with, but eventually reeled back to let the enigmatic flourish