2009 (USA)
Director: Cherien Dabis
Viewed: November 15, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print (Hi-Pointe Theater)
Triteness wins out over heartfelt sentiment in Cherien Dabis’ take on the Immigrant Experience Film, Amreeka, a by-the-numbers celebration of tolerance, love, perseverance, etc., etc., etc. Here the immigrants in question are divorcee Muna (Nisreen Faour) and her teen son Fadi (Melkar Muallem), Palestinians who journey to small-town Illinois where they settle in awkwardly with the Westernized family of Muna’s sister (Hiam Abbass, whom I adore… but Christ, can we give another Arabic actress a shot, please?). Amreeka hits all the standard indie drama and comedy notes, but its approach is graceless and its insights insufficient to warrant a retreading of such familiar territory. The narrative is tightly constructed, but utterly predictable, and the messaging is so overwarmed–Racism sucks! Family is important!–as to be off-putting. Faour, who fills Muna with eager-to-please earnestness and anxious confusion, is likable enough, so much that the film’s best moments of humor come courtesy of her, while those at her expense just seem mean-spirited. The film’s occasional wit enlivens its otherwise bland turns, but next to a keenly observed marvel like In Between Days, or even Sundance darlings like The Visitor and Frozen River, this is tired stuff.
In recent years, Latin American auteurs have apparently been paying attention to Asian film-makers such as Zhang Ke Jia and Tsai Ming-Liang, tossing out those directors’ affection for surrealism, and delivering a new Spanish-language Cinema of Patience (to coin a term), a mode exemplified by challenging works such as The Minder and Los Muertos. With its static camera work, lengthy shots, and cut-to-black punctuation, Lake Tahoe fits comfortably within this current. It goes without saying that Eimbcke’s deliberate and often slyly funny film, which chronicles twenty-four hours in the life of a Yucatan youth, is not for everyone. The remove that Eimbcke establishes from his subject lends Lake Tahoe the tone of an uneventful slice-of-life snapshot, but a moment’s consideration reveals that for Juan (Diego Cataño), this single day is remarkably pivotal. He may be a bit of a cipher, but, the film’s style notwithstanding, his story is an identifiable mini-odyssey about indignities, opportunities, and reversals. The result feels a bit slight, but Eimbcke admirably maintains a mood that is both biting and yet warm-hearted. Lake Tahoe’s aesthetic might be stripped-down Weerasethakul, but its worldview is distinctly Coen, transplanted with emotional authority to a dusty Mexican town.
For what it is–an ultra-low-budget bit of horror mindfuckery that employs only a handful of actors and locations–Ben Hawker’s Blackspot is a worthwhile, white-knuckle stuff. While Hawker cribs a little from urban legend for his story, Blackspot is essentially a pleasurable mash-up of contemporary horror film tropes, Twilight Zone twists and “It-Was-All-a-Dream” fake-outs, and, most surprisingly, David’s Lynch brand of pitch-black psychological surrealism. It’s hard not to ignore the debt to Lynch in the film’s identity-swapping and (seemingly) context-free interludes, not to mention its direct referencing of Lost Highway’s iconographic speeding interstate stripes. Hawker nails both the distinctive creepiness of a nocturnal rural road at night as well as the flesh-crawling sense of the uncanny that pervades nightmares. Yet he is too enamored with jump-scares and comic releases to permit grimness to overtake the film. This is both to Blackspot’s advantage and its detriment, stranding it in a middle ground between an old-school ghost story and something more ambitious. While Hawker eventually comes around to something like an explanation for all the preceding weirdness, it seems weak tea compared to the dizzying fear that swells the film’s best moments.
High-profile films that address intersexuality are few and far between—When will HBO ever pull together that rumored Middlesex adaptation?—and so it’s no small thing when a work like XXY comes along, which tackles the reality with commendable sensitivity and frankness. Director Puenzo takes her sweet time uncoiling the story of Alex, an adolescent intersexual who has been living as a girl in an Argentine seaside town. The story is a slight little thing, and it’s hard to shake the disappointment that Puenzo didn’t do a little more with the subject than offer a slice of Alex’s life at a critical juncture in the development of her identity and sexuality. Furthermore, the concessions to melodrama—a gratuitous rape scene especially—make the film less potent, not more. Still, XXY is poignant and appropriately anxious in tone, and its principal characters are full of subtly conveyed intricacies that elevate it beyond a crude coming-out story (of sorts). Puenzo utilizes a richly presented sun-bleached aesthetic and a prominent marine life motif to fine effect. The film’s emotional success, however, lies principally with a Inés Efron, who at twenty-two plays the fifteen-year-old Alex with a riveting blend of boldness, anger, and vulnerability.
Richard Wagner is name-checked in Philipp Stölzl Nazi-era mountaineering thriller, North Face, which is appropriate (and not just due to the swastikas). Towering and bombastic, often in moments when such a grandiose tone is entirely unearned, the film chronicles the attempt by two German enlisted men goaded by Nazi propaganda (and a little ambition) to conquer the north face–a.k.a., “The Murder Wall”–of the Eiger in the Bernese Alps. Stölzl’s approach is strictly Hollywood by way of Deutschland, complete with soaring orchestral gestures and a pining love interest (Johanna Wokalek, as far from her radical she-devil in The Baader-Meinhof Complex as can be.) The director frequently overplays his hand, particularly with vaguely repugnant supporting characters that have little function other than to compare unfavorably to our Aryan heroes. Which isn’t to say the North Face isn’t damn thrilling in the moment, particularly with Stölzl keeps his focus on the climbers’ ordeal and their astoundingly low-tech methods and tools. With a little CGI wizardry, the film renders the Eiger as a truly terrifying creature in its own right, seemingly more at home in one of Wagner’s Teutonic myths (or Middle-Earth) than Switzerland.
An Education is a fairly conventional coming-of-age-story that is enlivened and elevated by abundant, magnificent acting. To be sure, Nick Hornby’s screenplay boasts plenty of cheek and a canny, understated awareness of its early 1960s British setting. Meanwhile, director Lone Scherfig operates in a mode that is comfortable with melodrama and also assured enough to toss aside its emotional excesses. Scherfig permits her narrative’s most pivotal developments to unfold off-screen, but her commanding storytelling ensures that the film never misses a beat. Everything we need to know is up there. That said, An Education would probably have been nothing more than an old story–girl falls for charming cad, girl gets burned, girl moves on–told quite well. It would have, that is, if not for a plethora of dazzling performances. Carey Mulligan is almost spookily well-cast as ambitious and dissatisfied teen Jenny, but equally vital are Peter Sarsgaard in a challenging role as her creepy, oddly vulnerable, and (much) older paramour, and an engrossing Alfred Molina, proving yet again that his best characters are usually well-meaning boobs. Heck, Rosamund Pike deserves praise for lending texture to her ditsy playgirl almost entirely through sideways glances and glum expressions.
B - Antichrist is an aggressively unpleasant film, but that’s not the same thing as a bad film. In fact, the latest effort from Lars von Trier, the noted asshole and self-appointed ambassador of pretentious European film-making, is the most intriguing work from the director I’ve yet seen. I have never understood the contempt his films often arouse, but my prior experience with von Trier has been admittedly underwhelming. Antichrist, however, proves to be audacious and original. The film is suffused with unforgettable images, seemingly plucked out of a bad dream and given a rotten, mythic life on the screen. Von Trier has achieved a fresh alchemy, blending his essential cynicism with intellectually engrossing themes and a new-found instinct for terror. While a bothersome lack of emotional heft prevents it from succeeding as a genuine work of horror, Antichrist is nonetheless harrowing, provocative stuff. It seems ordained to lurk in the cellar of cinema for years to come, it noisome bellows drawing attention to our unexamined assumptions about remorse, sex, and especially gender. You are forewarned: von Trier has summoned forth an ugly, ugly beast, and staring it down is not enjoyable in the least, but there is something nonetheless compelling in its scabrous eyes.
C* - To call Spike Jonze’s bewildering, uneasy Where the Wild Things Are an “adaptation” of Maurice Sendak’s trim little bedtime story strikes me as the faultiest use of the term since David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch. While Jonze’s film co-opts Sendak’s indelible creature designs and the general thrust of his tale—a boy journeys to an untamed island, is crowned king of the resident monsters, becomes disillusioned, and returns home—it contains little else that is familiar, either from the source material or the whole history of films about children and childhood. This film is wondrous, exhausting, confused, offensive, and deeply affecting, often at the same time. Above all, it is unremittingly odd. It is without question one of the most confounding films I’ve seen in the past decade, and I’ve seen INLAND EMPIRE. The space between a film that says uncommon things in unfamiliar ways and a film that has no conception of what it is trying to say… well, that is a narrow and shadowed gap, and Where the Wild Things Are squats squarely in it. The adaptation of a beloved children’s book should be a sure-fire opportunity to churn out a crowd-pleasing mediocrity. Somehow, for reasons that only he likely understands, Jonze has refashioned Sendak’s tale into a challenging, fractured, and often frustrating work of cinema, and for that I still can’t decide whether he deserves some sort of auteur medal or a stint in the time-out corner.