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Posted: **Tue Oct 13, 2020 12:05 am**

Permanent Green Light (Dennis Cooper and Zac Farley, 2018) Dennis Cooper isn’t the genius in film that he is in prose, but this one still stands out for me this decade. You could compare it to First Reformed I guess, right down to the Bresson influence, but it’s more perverse and philosophically inclined. It’s also intentionally less satisfying. The film firmly resists all of the most obvious interpretations of its theme and challenges its audience to go back to the drawing board and rethink their immediate assumptions and reactions to it. That’s why people turn to Cooper’s work in the first place. He takes a provocative topic, like suicide here, and boils it down, in his ice-cold sensibility with an unexpectedly sweet core, to un-sensationalized emotional experiences and metaphysical questions. Film, as much as it’s less abstract than language, is a more difficult medium to accomplish that in, but Permanent Green Light manages to thoughtfully disturbing and to cast an eerie spell. Cooper and Farley aren’t as visually accomplished as Bresson, or maybe even Schrader, but I find their vision moving and morbidly funny, and I think it speaks to current youth culture in a powerful way, however bleakly. I can’t imagine this would be much of a hit here, since its scrappy style and numb, monologue-heavy teenagers are about as far as you can get from the glossy, pop culture-inflected aesthetic and characters of something like Thoroughbreds. But this is closer to what adolescence actually felt like to me, moreso than any other contemporary movie I can think of. It also has one of my favorite shots of the decade: a long take of a character dancing, music blaring, lights swirling around his face. Though he’s dancing alone, it's shot and soundtracked in a way as if the room is full of ravers.

Has anyone seen Cooper and Farley’s other film Like Cattle Towards Glow?

Posted: **Tue Oct 13, 2020 12:42 am**

My final, little Reitman double feature starts off with Labor Day. At its most basic core this is a kinky house wife fantasy movie in the mold of Dieterle’s Jewel Robbery. This probably makes it Reitman’s least deep film albeit defining depth as an explicit show of themes rather then the emotional catharsis this delightful woman’s magazine come to life has.

The movie tricks this up a little by having the son be the narrator, but it doesn’t take long for Winslet to become the audience identification character as all of her dreams come true.

Brolin embodies this perfect archetype of a man who is sweet and tender with a firm touch informed from that tenderness so as to make him actually harmless. He’s as talented in the kitchen as the with mechanics leaving Winslet hopelessly in heat after a particularly over the top baking metaphor.

As the film goes on the son being narrator begins to have purpose and that purpose becomes the wrinkle to ensure the wish fulfillment isn’t a vacant emotional tug, but rather a well developed fantasy for healthy sexual release compared to irresponsibility. Weirdly I think that’s been Reitman’s main signature as outside of his three political films all of his movies have revolved around this idea of conservatives having sex. There’s a need to hold up the family unit while also being kinky that goes back to the earliest shorts Reitman has made. This is easily the most traditional version of that as Winslet’s kink is security. It says something about our era though that even that feels hypersexualized and too much for some people. American eroticism may be dead for all the possibility of nudity out there, but Reitman in his home bound fashion is trying to revive that.

Finally, I finally got to Young Adult which is something I should have done forever ago. I don’t have the words for this that I do for the other Reitman’s I’ve seen lately. There’s a lot that’s fascinating, particularly with Theron’s masterclass performance, but this sort of story doesn’t hold the attraction for me it once did. Had I seen it when it came out I would have been primed to relate to Theron and Oswalt’s condition on an unbelievable level, but today’s version of me finds Tully a more emotionally engaging film.

That said I wasn’t joking when I said Theron gives a masterclass. In all seriousness this may be the greatest performance I’ve ever seen from anyone ever. There’s so many facets to this character she brings out in each moment that I really got the sense of seeing this whole person. Just look at the way she plays up this Fargo accent when trying to impress Wilson and how the film slowly reveals that as another part of her self destructive arrested development. Everything really goes back to that pathology, but in a way that doesn’t feel repetitive. It’s a small moment, but how real she feels during the cackling psychopath scene with Oswalt in the car is what sold the film to me. She’s in that moment not the psycho her laugh suggests, but some descending meteorite of lost potential. Theron makes a character needing too much sympathy to be pathetic, but too dedicated to her own history to make that sympathy easy to give.

Posted: **Tue Oct 13, 2020 12:56 am**

Young Adult is absolutely making my list, and I agree mostly with your assessment, though I'm having the opposite experience where this only grows on me as I revisit it sporadically over the years (and upon release I actually didn't like it that much). Part of this is because instead of just sympathy I find myself able to empathize regarding the common denominator 'feelings' rather than specific superficial traits. The period of being in my late twenties into thirties, as is the case with many people I think, is partially comprised of looking back with a combination of yearning for what was and could have been, as well as letting go and looking ahead, and it's a very authentic and relatable personal tragedy when one feels stuck and unable to actualize that healing. Anyways, here's my writeup from my revisit six months ago:

therewillbeblus wrote: Mon Apr 13, 2020 4:42 am This movie only gets better with age. I agree with posters who propose that Mavis forces a confrontation between the viewer and themselves as well as social relationships that were less than comfortable from our pasts. Often when we are most repelled by human behavior, it's because we notice a trait that we don't want to recognize in ourselves. Now, I don't identify with Mavis whatsoever on the surface, but since everyone has been blind or narcissistic or coped with thoughts of superiority, there are plenty of opportunities to engage with this character, just ones we don't want to take. Theron embodies a tragic person who simultaneously earns our sympathy as a human being while not necessarily earning all of our respect beyond that.

Narcissistic comedy is incredible when exaggerated and this hits right on the money of truth, two birds with one stone. I don't agree with Cody that people don't change, but I do agree that they don't change in the ways movies make them out to, and I applaud her for sending us and Theron on a one-way ticket to hitting bottom. What does it say about Cody that she made this film while believing that? Is this a therapeutic exercise for her, or an imagining of that girl-as-woman who she couldn't stand in high school? This film is not only funny, tragic, and realistic, but it hits on a deeper authenticity of how we live in our fantasies, allowing expectations born in our minds to serve our own self-interest and drown the pain, coping with life in a protective way that is borderline healthy or deteriorating depending how far we go with them. There is a glimpse of most people within Theron whether we want to admit it or not, and that's - as domino said - a combination of strengths and weaknesses that form a complicated person. She's not begging to be liked (well, she is, the movie isn't), but finding empathy for a person like this is a challenge, impressive, and incredibly gratifying. knives once said something to me regarding Cartesius in that by finding empathy for even Descartes, despite having many layered problems with him, Rossellini achieved something extraordinary. Cody, Reitman, Theron et al. have fleshed out a character so well that they’ve done something similar without confusing empathy for alliance, admiration, or likeability.

The nostalgia piece of being removed from formative years and holding onto our versions of truth diluted over time is a journey that begets the kind of stagnation and anti-growth directly related to those memory sources, regardless of growth outside of them, and this is a fair point too that strikes an Achilles' heel in many. Then there are all the differences between us and her that we sure are identifying in spades, anxiously to protect our own psyches. This whole process of engagement reveals a lot to us about ourselves in addition to being simply hilarious and relatable from an observational standpoint sans direct participation, which allows the film to breathe and the subliminal angles to find the vein. I also really like the comparison to Five Easy Pieces as an inverse of that film in some ways, which I hadn’t through about until this watch (and makes me wonder how gender plays into the cut and dry judgments here vs that film). At the end all I can think of is who hasn't desperately wanted to be loved, validated, even liked, and how can you stand so intensely against a character who struggles with that, no matter how triggering their behavior may be on the outside. The conversation with the sister at the end just when she's entering the contemplation stage of change could have happened in her mind - and certainly would have on the car ride home - sending her right back to the safety of her psychological defenses. I’m sure this alienated some viewers but I think it’s brilliantly accurate in shattering the myth of absolute epiphanies toward static change in these movies and outside of them, as well as being supremely compassionate to her character’s capacity for self-regulation and resilience.

Posted: **Tue Oct 13, 2020 1:31 am**

Your start is kind of where I was getting at in my preamble where I just happened to have dealt with that whole part of growing up when I was like 25 and for the past few years having been riding a wave of domesticated contentment that puts me away from that absolute empathy.

Posted: **Tue Oct 13, 2020 2:12 am**

Yeah I can see that, especially since both this film and Tully tackle a quasi-similar processing of catharsis-searching from different vantage points. I guess to rephrase, I wasn't quite as open-minded to feeling empathy (vs. sympathy) for these kind of characteristics until the last five years or so, when in my personal development I became more willing to see the ugly traits in myself and broadly identify with defective personality details; and also even though I'm totally with you on being in the stage of "domesticated contentment," there's a real affinity I have for a character whose obsessive nostalgic cravings and self-delusions could have easily more resembled my scope of vision had my life not taken a certain route.

Posted: **Tue Oct 13, 2020 3:40 am**

Gone Girl

I revisited this for the second time in three months, and while it has many strengths in its thematic resonance, this is easily Fincher’s most pleasurable film in style and narrative execution. Even when you know exactly where it’s going, the engaging sway of perspective expansion is riveting, fun and tense simultaneously, like the best noirs. The film also marvelously exposes our own social anxieties in how our behavior may be perceived, especially in its first half, hiding in shells of false personality because we don’t trust our contexts. Fincher boldly forces us to pit a ‘normal’ emotionally-capable person against a sociopath, cast doubt on and judge the former and admire the latter as strong and.. free in ways we cannot be (and who wants to admit that average emotional intelligence is so dull and offputting). Ultimately people are complicated looking for simple solutions, and the question of whether those complex cores matter or not is directly proportional to whether society cares or permits such ‘truths’, so we get a front row seat to juggle both intimacy with, and repelling distance from them, to become a slightly more fluid and euphoric version of the media.

I wrote up more thoughts last viewing, but this is just a blast on every level, impeccable filmmaking, and self-aware of both its soberly cynical ‘reality’ and its drunk trashy ‘fantasy’ influences. The fact that it’s so enjoyable under a pretense of social horror and depressed trappings is a testament to that effortless viewer-as-media blending. The rabbit hole of moral relativism across character reveals begets a process of forfeiting instead of granting shades to humanity. Do we want all good or all bad characters just like the movies and news gravitate towards, and is the truth too banal in actuality to inquire further interest into personalities? As the film progresses and information explodes, I always become less curious about details of who, when, and why, and more passionate about the ‘what’ - watching it all burn.

Tyler Perry, the most comfortable person in the film, laughs at Nick in their first meeting together in a playful way, and in that moment he becomes the most deserving vessel of our surrogate experience, who can derive gratification from the absurdity and satisfaction from the games at play. He, like we, can cheer for the sickest people, and take on the task of believing the unbelievable as a privilege instead of a challenge. The indulgence in overexplanation is divulged with over half left to go, jumping the gun in noir to let us smile with ease at the rest. The dark plan to ignite the ultimate form of fatalism with complete consciousness is nonchalantly planted in there, all sourced from a perceived break of one's solipsistic version of the social contract. In today's day and age, when people change their lives over a perception of others violating expectations as an objectively ethical transgression, this film fits right in as a posture towards satire that actually reflects a bitter truth and dares to laugh like Perry at how we are all screwed, and perhaps not special enough to get worked up over the less kitschy form of fatalism that marks our own lives - or the ones we are in part forced to compromise against, in the imprisonment of our oily milieus. So who's left to judge those who assert their agency to capitalize on their emotional senses of justice, which can pass for self-preservation in such a rudderless void? Or more importantly, who wants to be on that jury when they are given permission to escape into the crowd of guiltless bystanders for a change?

Spoiler

Something that makes me smile wider upon rewatches is how Amy gets off as she watches that interview with him, due to the pleasant-surprise unintentional consequence of Nick playing a role, just like she did (as a Cool Girl) for him. We as the audience have seen him laying around the house half-present playing video games, looking past her without eye contact, in 'real' flashbacks and have to cosign that playing a part is far more interesting than his 'authentic' behavior!

Similar to the way we all play 'games' in the courting honeymoon period of a relationship.. Is that the person we all fall in love with, making Amy perhaps the most authentic representation of a person, just one who has the audacity and courage to call it like it is? Is being this unapologetically self-aware a mirror image of antisocial behavior, and therefore is being 'social' a form of fakery too? If both are fake, is giving in to the more exciting ones the 'right' answer in a moral void? Certainly these are questions no one wants to ask themselves, but Amy, Flynn, and Fincher have fun provoking us to sit with them nonetheless.

Posted: **Sun Oct 25, 2020 11:29 pm**

Rita's Last Fairy Tale (Renata Litvinova, 2012): the second film by Russian scriptwriter, actress, director, and fashion icon Renata Litvinova is set in a somewhat derelict hospital where the patient Rita is planning her marriage, not knowing that she actually only has a few more weeks to live. Which is why she is visited by Madame Death herself (Litvinova), who however decides to make Rita's 'departure' a rather enjoyable one… This was a chance discovery for me, but I have to say that even after a second viewing I still completely love this one. Imagine some ideas taken from Cocteau's "Orphée" combined with the irony and wit of Lars von Trier's "The Kingdom" and the costume design of Ulrike Ottinger's "Dorian Gray", and you have a rough idea. Probably there are some other influences as well (I also had to think of Greenaway or Fassbinder in some places), so this whole thing is probably too derivative for some, but for me it worked exceedingly well and in terms of pure style it can hardly get any better (and I don't just mean Litvinova herself, though she's certainly the most alluring embodiment of Death on screen since Maria Casarès...). The good thing is that the film doesn't take itself too seriously: lots of witty dialogue, a tiny statue of Juri Gagarin coming alive, and a hilarious running gag involving constantly chain-smoking doctors and nurses; but although there's a lot of fun here, it's a visually totally striking and immersive film. I don't think it has had any release in the West, but there's an excellent fan-subbed version of the Russian dvd around in the usual places. Definitely on my list.

Litvinova also has a major supporting role in The Girl And Death (Jos Stelling, 2012), which is a Russian/Dutch/German co-production and is set in Germany in the late 19th century and is concerned with the (in the end) lifelong love of a young Russian doctor for an orphaned Dutch girl who lives as a quasi-prostitute in a posh hotel owned by a wealthy, nouveau riche 'count' . The film is somewhat slowgoing but develops its star-crossed love story with a lot of melancholy, but most importantly conjures up images of a decadent, doomed society (the hotel itself seems to be a semi-sanatorium and the film has more than one echo of Mann's "Zauberberg", I think). Excellent cinematography and very fine acting by Sylvia Hoeks and Leonid Bichevin in the main roles. The biggest surprise for me was to see the well-known German comedian Dieter Hallervorden (whose kind of humour I don't usually like) in a serious and decidely unpleasant role as the the fiendish, sadistic 'count'. Not a major masterpiece, but a fine and in the end intensely sad film, and I could imagine that fans of Ruiz or even of Visconti might find something to enjoy here.

Posted: **Thu Oct 29, 2020 2:11 am**

The Keeping Room (dir. Barber)
This has a certain familiarity to Coppola’s recent remake of The Beguiled, but this is superior on every account so as to make the comparison not as enlightening as you’d think. I actually think a more useful point of comparison is Wim Wenders who this evokes the same emotions and feelings of. There’s something mysterious and otherworldly to the film that makes its setting like an all too familiar alien planet. The use of silence and a lack of communication to communicate is key. You could almost feel the whole movie with the dialogue muted, the score is too well integrated to call this a silent movie though. There’s a real patience in letting us know who these people are. This causes a crashing effect toward the end where I was shocked with the speed of the film. There’s an underlying intensity the film runs from.

What's in a Name (dir. Delaporte & de La Patellière)
The only thing that seems unique to this living room farce is the speed at which it delivers its joke. I suppose if you think Francis Veber is hilarious you'll get a lot out of this, and certainly that seems the case here as the movie has produced two remakes, but for me it was primarily a trying experience.

Jealousy (dir. Garrel)
Another French film I'm fairly lukewarm to. It's more emotionally based then any other Garrel I've seen this is easily the most successful in the intimate trend I have seen from him (Regular Lovers still standing as a unique accomplishment to me). That's the problem though as even with that the film only feels so good and mostly feels familiar to the point where I could have resented it, but was instead apathetic. I was just never hooked.

Posted: **Thu Oct 29, 2020 2:31 am**

I'm honestly not sure what to take away from your writeup of The Keeping Room, but I agree that nonverbal communication is used to communicate most of the feelings (outside of a jawdropping speech midway through that feels like the music cues in Portrait of a Lady on Fire, only with language, in its effectiveness emerging from scarcity), which is a repurposed tool of many westerns- especially those spaghettis- into more realist terrain. I happened to revisit this a third time just yesterday and while it didn't floor me on a first watch, I've come around to appreciate just how strongly this film recontextualizes very familiar old ideas into a novel approach to the 'revisionist' western in particular. Nothing about this feels alien to me though, and I find domino and Sausage's writeups in the western project critical to how this film plays with conservative ideals of action-oriented resilience through an empowered feminist lens, and then abandons property to show just how flexible an abstractly conservative worldview can be. Resilience doesn't necessitate a choice of either/or approach, but allows one to have their cake and eat it too, which is America's promises of possibilities in a nutshell. Here we can abolishing politics for promotion of agency, a commonality between the extremes on both sides.

Posted: **Wed Nov 11, 2020 7:34 pm**

Terri (dir. Jacobs)
This caught me by surprise as I was expecting a mumblecore quirkie comedy, but the film takes its pathos much more seriously and works very hard to have a down to earth feeling where the characters' actions began to leave me reactive to them with exclamations like, "that is what that character would do," and "oh dear, so and so is not going to like that." Even the one scene of quirk is a pretty mundane field trip that's given a lengthy explanation to ensure its quirkiness is minimal.

The stupid, well intentioned, error prone sweetness that the film gives its characters produces a culture that seems real making the fantasy a powerful mover of emotion. The poster promised fun times with John C Reilly, but he's really more the instigator of Terri's start of self understanding. This isn't really a movie where the characters significantly improve. Being kids they don't have those skills yet, but Terri is at least able to develop the skills to realize he has humanity which is a nice beginning.

As that probably well indicates the movie has an expertly executed melancholy that helps make things stand out as well. These are sad people who have to confront what life gives them. I can imagine that makes the film too much for some, but for me it was just the right cocktail for the moment especially in its ending on a note of wonderment.

Columbus (dir. The Board's Frank Grimes)
Kind of generic and hohum indie that does all of the expected beats in the expected ways. It's buoyed to be satisfactory thanks to the two leads who really bring out a feeling of depth that is only fascilly there. I mean the whole architecture thing with its blatant metaphor is pretty lazily executed, but Richardson being needled on by Cho manages to work at least in the moment thanks to them.

Long Day's Journey Into Night (dir. Gan)
Often plays, especially in the 3D shot, like someone watched Enter the Void and said I could do better than that. The real magic here is how Gan takes techniques often lazily used to reach for transcendentalism for a story and characters the feel fixed to the real world. This isn’t a film of dreams, but dirt and sand.

That earthbound nature at least gives the effect of depth quite well and makes me wonder is there’s anything ‘more’ to the film then its beautiful sense of loss like the recent metaphorical exercises of Jia that have so helpfully been decimated the those who are more knowledgeable about China then me. Even if there’s not though Gan shows such a mastery of tone and character that I feel ready to blindly follow at least his next few endeavors, and will try harder to fill in the previous.

Posted: **Wed Nov 11, 2020 7:44 pm**

Were you able to see the end shot in 3D?

Posted: **Wed Nov 11, 2020 8:23 pm**

No, I watched it off of the criterion channel.

Posted: **Wed Nov 11, 2020 8:30 pm**

Ah, OK. I was recently able to watch it that way after discovering that my parents own a 3D projector. It's kinda cool, if gimmicky

Posted: **Wed Nov 11, 2020 8:43 pm**

I suspect it’s not needed , but I could see the effect being fun and adding to the dreamy sense of the scene.

Posted: **Wed Nov 11, 2020 9:27 pm**

I don't normally appreciate 3D, but it worked well in the theatre environment of a more immersive experience. The transition into putting on the glasses serves as a nice kind of surrender for the audience, following the first half's labyrinthine narrative of fragmented memory into a dreamland where meaning can more comfortably (well, expectedly) present itself in the nebulous codes that may frustrate and we may fight against when consciously grappling with memory. I had already seen the film once without 3D before going to see it in theatres, so it was just different rather than better, but definitely worth seeing under those grander conditions, partly for providing the audience with an outlet of grace to match the thematic progression.

Posted: **Sat Nov 28, 2020 5:38 am**

The Handmaiden
I'm just as impressed (if not exactly over the moon) as I was in theatres by this twisted, defiantly ostentatious hybrid of Victorian literature and psychological perspective-switching mystery paperbacks a la Gone Girl, that forges a union between intelligence and ‘trashy’ storytelling with Hitchockian exposition. I'm not the biggest fan of Park Chan-wook (though I really liked this and his previous film, Stoker, so there's promise for the future) but this is a transparently self-aware narrative exercise fueled by masterful formalism, never hiding its allegiance to women, even when it's having a blast hiding (and showing, and hiding, and-) nearly everything else. The format is full of detailed fun tweaks, down to flourishes like liberal transitions in language via color-coded subtitles which add to the playful nature of this layered con job, working the audience and working with the audience simultaneously. The duality of erotica is where the film really shines, endorsing reciprocal eroticism while reflexively despising non-consensual erotica, based in a socio-political gender power imbalance. Yet the film ironically covets the power-shifting pleasures of a switch-sadomasochistic relationship, like those in the stories read from a marginalized gender to a privileged one, emulated in its structure, with the latter gender scoffed at from the former’s superiority in potential for recovery.

Spoiler

The film even embraces the ‘Beauty as cruel’ ethos of the sick uncle, where the women prevail in adopting his own thesis in action (but with an entirely different interpretation of the phrase!) to reflect patriarchal weakness. Nothing about the film is subtle, especially the coda where -after taking seemingly every thematic idea and physical 'belonging' from the men- the heroines also repurpose the beaded hand-whacking torture device as a sex toy- talk about resilient! Park Chan-Wook takes his sweet time letting them bleed dry all symbols of patriarchal power to empower themselves, and this sentient response coupled with relaxed self-consciousness, fused into the yolk coated by an outer shell of immaculate technique, is one of the many reasons I love movies.

Posted: **Sun Dec 06, 2020 2:37 am**

The Owls (dir. Dunye)
This is infinitely better than it’s pieces really allow it to be capable of being. The $2 budget and amateur acting hurts what is a really wonderful construction on aging and cinematic form. It reminded me a lot of Symbiopsychotaxipliasm although Greaves managed to twice make a more engaging take on the subject matter.

That said many points are emotionally touching and I think it is a film that should have a more prominent seat at the table.

The Future Ahead (dir. Novick)
Gamboa was so amazing in La Flor I had to see her in something else and thankfully this was playing on Prime. It’s produced by Lisandro Alonso, but don’t let that fool you. This full on, beautiful Cukor-esque melodrama. It comes off a bit as a lower middle class Rich and Famous with the love being shown by the film to these two friends making the film. Outside of one very effective shot the movie plays things rather straight further showing that as much as American cinema may have thrown off the classical yoke other country’s are showing the joy of doing things old school.

Alanis (dir. Berneri)
More Argentinian goodness. This time a stripped down presentation of prostitution. I see a lot of comparisons to The Florida Project, but this is different on a number of accounts. Firstly, the film is told through our prostitute’s POV which her child being too young for us to empathize in that way. The camera does often sit at the baby’s eyeline, but I think rather than for reasons of empathy it is in order to present the bodies of characters and emphasize what life has rolled on the body. The film also obscures her history in the occupation in a way Baker doesn’t with Baker portraying it like a temp job whereas here it is her full time occupation.

The visual language is also different with Berneri’s camera having an almost YouTube feel with intense closeups from a stationary camera that doesn’t cut much within scenes. This isn’t slow cinema though as there’s a lot of normal action from the characters. Rather I think this style works to emphasize the cramped spaces we see. It’s as if there is no where to place or move the camera. Movement is just impractical for the characters so why shouldn’t it be for the camera as well? I wouldn’t be surprised though if that’s a practical limitation they encountered which resulted in a benefit as the camerawork opens up a lot when we leave the apartment complexes and cars.

This is a film clearly speaking out problems it’s makers have with the current situation prostitutes face though wisely no solutions are offered. It’s a story told with an activist’s lens and at times reminded me of Ken Loach though the movie never provided a ‘these are the problems monologue’ that Loach sometimes does. The positive connection, and where the film most starkly differs from Baker is that our lead basically has her stuff together with no drug problems and a relatable personality that basically takes away the audience’s ability to victim blame as the film details how bad can happen to good.

Posted: **Sun Dec 06, 2020 7:52 pm**

Maya (Hansen-Løve, 2018) H-L reteams with Roman Kolinka, the philosopher-activist of L'Avenir, here playing Gabriel, a war journalist held hostage by terrorists in Syria in the months immediately preceding the film. The opening shot is a reflection of Gabriel naked, showering in a curtain-less shower, shown hemmed in a bathroom mirror seen through an open door, a large, deep purple bruise across his back drawing our eyes from the typically anodyne earth-tones and metals of the average hotel bathroom. After returning to France and navigating the bureaucratic, medical, and personal interrogations of therapists, politicians, family, and colleagues about what happened, how he is now, and what he's doing next, Gabriel settles on returning to Goa, India, where he spent time as a child, to repair a dilapidated house that belongs to his estranged mother. As he works, he reconnects with a family friend, the owner/manager of a local resort hotel whose livelihood is threatened by economic and cultural changes in the region, and whose daughter, Maya, has returned from school in London, unimpressed with city life. And from there, the trajectory is pretty clear and patiently pursued, but Hansen-Løve works Gabriel's resensitization to a more pedestrian range of human emotions in her subtle, intricate style. Without the generic beats to play with and against as in Un amour de jeunesse, the survey-of-an-era sweep of Eden, or the concentrated intensity of Huppert in L'Avenir, it might be her weakest mature film (which, despite the excellence of Father, I'd say really starts with Un amour...), but I'm happy I was finally able to track this down, the last of her features I had yet to see, and if you like Hansen-Løve as much as I do, it's confidently recommended.

Posted: **Sat Dec 12, 2020 11:46 am**

What are anybody's thoughts on François Ozon?

I have seen three of his films from the 2010s. And while Jeune et Jolie (erotic coming-of-age drama) and L'Amant Double (erotic psychological thriller) were highly entertaining, I don't think they're enough to get near my top list of the decade. But Frantz may get there, a gentle film about the complicated french-german relation after WW1 using the example of a French widow and a german veteran meeting at the grave of their mutual friend - all in black and white that breaks up into colour in beautiful ways at special occasions. I heard it's inspired by Lubitschs Broken Lullaby (1931) but I haven't seen this one to compare.

Other Ozon films from the 2010s which I haven't seen are Potiche, Dans la Maison, Une Nouvelle Amie and Grâce à Dieu. Do you think I should catch up with some of those or have I "seen it all" with Frantz?

Posted: **Sat Dec 12, 2020 4:28 pm**

I enjoyed L'Amant double as well (Jeune et jolie not so much) and can heartily recommend Une nouvelle amie and Grace a Dieu, though they couldn't be more different films (having seen a half dozen Ozon films at this point, I think he's a talented director who destroys any notion of the auteur theory by lacking any kind of recurring motif or methodology)! Amie is the best throwback to the mid-50s Hollywood melodrama I've ever seen, one focused on absurd heights of emotion and tear-jerking at the service of a plot that would be ridiculous in almost any other context but which works marvelously here-- and if you don't know what the plot actually is, as I did not, try to go in blind, because it's really something! Grace a Dieu goes in the opposite direction, giving us a very emotionally heightened subject matter but presenting it with distance and curiosity to the process. I especially liked how the procedural format was often moved along by the repeated uses of emails, read aloud by their authors, in place of traditional narration or dialog. A smart and effective choice, especially for a film of the bureaucratic nightmare that is dealing with the church.

Posted: **Sat Dec 12, 2020 11:33 pm**

Potiche is also a great one. It’s like a light hearted Demy film about past their prime people. It’s the one that closest in quality, if not type, to Frantz I’ve seen.

Posted: **Sun Dec 13, 2020 1:40 pm**

Thank you both. As for lacking recurring motifs or methods: Of the three films I've seen, Jeune & Jolie and L'Amant Double were at least contemporary stories with certain erotic themes in them, so in that regard I already had the feeling of Frantz as a gentle, picturesque period piece being different than the (very few) films of Ozon as I "knew him".

I guess I'd have to check out at least Une nouvelle Amie and Potiche, hoping (and expecting) they're good, but hopefully not too good, as I don't want to reshuffle my already more or less set Top 10 of the decade...

Posted: **Sun Dec 13, 2020 2:19 pm**

Une nouvelle Amie might have to shake things up for you as a warning. I’m seriously considering it for my list. Ozon is surprisingly good at switching himself around while still being recognizable like if Phillip S. Hoffman was a gay directing style.

Posted: **Thu Dec 17, 2020 2:53 pm**

I too watched Jeune et Jolie this week and found it very interesting, if not entirely successful; I particularly appreciated the way it weaved so many enigmatic story threads involving the young girl's family that all suggested the possibility of deeper, more involved narratives for each of them without really exploring any of them at length. In a less skilled film that might have come off as just a jumble of confusion but here it added a lot of flavor to a fairly straightforward story. When it comes down to it, I don't know if the character it revolves around is all that interesting or extraordinary, but the way it delved into her life certainly was thorough and well-considered in my opinion.

Another entry on my 2010s watchlist I'd been putting off for ages was Jiro Dreams of Sushi, which did nothing for me -- not because I have anything against sushi, but because it reminded me of the workplace motivation videos HR made me watch when I got hired for my government job. I'm sure the food Jiro makes is fantastic but hearing about how there's absolutely nothing else in the entirety of his life that he really cares about and how his parenting philosophy is that kids should basically be abandoned to fend for themselves... well, it's certainly illuminating, but I have trouble with the idea I'm meant to find these things admirable at all. It's also very inconsequential as a piece of cinema and I don't think I'm capable of seeing why it was praised so highly at the time.

Posted: **Thu Dec 17, 2020 3:12 pm**

These were my thoughts on it from the Youth List

domino harvey wrote: Fri Jan 01, 2016 12:45 pmJeune et jolie (Francois Ozon 2014) I do not share the preoccupation with prostitution so many French directors seem indebted towards, and films like this aren’t helping anything. Our teenage protagonist is indeed absurdly attractive, as promised by the title, but I do not buy for one minute any aspect of her motivations to prostitute herself to older men via an escort website. To be fair, I believe the response of her parents even less, which seems so comically wrong and misguided that I began to suspect Ozon literally had no idea how families even function. The film is handsomely made and “classy,” but also a crock of phony ideas of youth and sexuality promulgated with carelessness and falsity. Makes for a “great” double feature with the David Hamilton film of your choosing.

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