The Films of 2018

[Michael Kerpan]

Vision (Naomi Kawase, 2018) (streamed via Japan Society's Flash Forward)

Well. I liked Kawase's 2015 Sweet Bean and 2020 True Mothers, but this intervening showed her at (in my opinion) her very worst. Except for the lovely nature photography of the Yoshino area (mostly forest) of Nara, this had nothing positive to offer. The presence of Juliet Binoche and Masatoshi Nagase in the cast list was to little avail, as what they had to say and do was of little interest. This had something to do with a magical fungus that appears only once every 1000 years that can do healing wonders. Little that went on made sense and almost everything said was unrealistic, and delivered in an affected manner. Unbearably tedious -- and quite disappointing.

[domino harvey]

Keep an Eye Out (French title: Au Poste!) was okay. In a sense, it's expectedly par for the course following Quentin Dupieux's stamped reinvention of person-in-environment eccentricities, but there's something missing as he whittles down the extravagance of movement necessary to keep his films' narratives alive, and instead opts to make more-or-less a static chamber comedy. Even at a tight 70 minutes, Dupieux relies almost exclusively on conversation, and can't sustain the momentum that his fantastical twists on it objects or creatures supply, revealing how vital they are to the worlds he builds (though some minor physical deformity gags go a long way). The parts that work will trigger belly laughs though- from sharp irreverence to braindead farce- and it's no surprise that the best moments occur when we do get a surreal visual manipulation. I'm not sure if it was due to a lopsided rhythm, but after a laugh-less 15 minutes, the film peaks with the one-eyed cop who is automatically assumed to be dumb from his deformity, and then of course is actually an idiot within the doubled-down absurd internal logic Dupieux puts forth. If you like his pre-Deerskin work, this might fare about the same as those. For all the frustrating misses at humor (occasionally the fault of the actors, occasionally the script, but it's simply uneven as both the players and dialogue hit their mark on more than a handful of occasions), the film still packs enough funny bits into a brief runtime to be worth a very soft rec. The last act, which is an intentionally deflating form of ludicrous, really fails to hit its aim and spoils what little steam this minor work had left.

I caught up with Au Poste! and I agree with a lot of your criticisms even though I think what works just barely works enough to merit a little more good will than what follows here might suggest. But good lord, he really likes these pointless Bunuel homages in his finales, huh? I thought the film shows what I'm starting to suspect is true of his oeuvre overall (and which also puts me in mind of Charlie Kaufman -- not a compliment), namely that Dupieux is playing tennis without a net but also without the ability to hit a ball with a racket. He couldn't deliver a conventional narrative or script if he had a gun held to his head, probably because he's not smart enough or talented enough to do so (possibly both). And so his insecurity means he obfuscates his inadequacies with several layers of ironic detachment and totes rando moments to distract from his real deficiencies. I thought the set up for this (innocent murder suspect inadvertently incriminates himself in another murder-- while under interrogation at the police headquarters) was actually pretty amusing and could be a great tight chamber piece if it was played straight or in the spirit of something like Garde à vue. The idea of flashbacks (another well QD loves returning to) that are interactive and malleable with the present is also an idea, albeit less focused and basically nonsense. And I don't find the notion of a pair of interrogative cops being unfathomably idiotic very funny or original, but sure, that's also an idea. Now shake all three up and top it off with a nonsensical, IDGAF middle finger to the audience that is this 63 minute long film's last ten minutes and you have something that is much, much less than the sum of its parts. Three of the four films I've seen from him are just half-baked "What if"s thrown together and tied up before an audience gets too restless to notice what's behind the curtain. Le daim feels more and more like a lucky break where his tics and bad habits worked well in concordance with the final product's aims

[therewillbeblus]

I think I’ve seen all of his features (aside from the other 2022 release we’re waiting for) and only really like two. Le daim is his most intelligent film, and while I know you hated Mandibles, it works for me precisely because I think QD is essentially admitting your theories have merit, and so he constructs a wandering Dumb and Dumber road movie around the silliest and laziest absurd device one could think of- or(/and), the kind that his principals in that film would think of. It feels incredibly self-referential and succeeds on those relaxed, confessional terms

[therewillbeblus]

Pauline asservie (Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet): This French short (english title: "Pauline Enslaved") is a humorous yet nakedly honest depiction of the psychological depths one undergoes as they obsessively attempt to decipher text message etiquette from a physically-absent lover. Pauline spends an eight-day vacation preoccupied with what silence and words mean, and how this all relates to her own comprehension of her self-worth without admitting it is funny from a distance but brutally relatable underneath. I don't know if I've seen a film that captures this situation so perfectly- balancing that objective sobriety to our absurd reactivity (that desperately ropes our social circle in with us) with the subjective empathy for the vulnerability driving this behavior. Aside from the acute jealousy and self-protective distance she tries to afford herself, there's a brilliant scene where the rest of her youthful peers are enjoying themselves at a party, and the juxtaposition between their disinhibited intimacy caught up in the moment and her inability to access their wavelength thinking about what isn't there, is spot-on; an anxious hypervigilance bubbling as she's dually triggered by disallowing herself to surrender to the liberated spirit of those around her. I love how the film ends in media res by revealing the ultimate joke, that the film only exists as a purgatory space of narcissistic mania in between bouts of complacency in codependent delusions. Very smart, funny, economical, and indebted to some of the nouvelle vague greats' piercing knowledge and compassion of modern youths' plights, creating a vividly authentic and respectfully spirited portrait of a near-universal experience oft-internalized as banal stress.