The last pandemic cinema had to face was the Spanish Flu which lasted from 1918 to 1920. The film industry was not what it is today, and 100 years later, it faces the same threat. But cinema has forever existed in a state of flux – the art of telling stories will never go away. And after a blistering 2020, 2021 had to once again reintroduce audiences to theaters. From Sundance to Cannes, and Zola to No Way Home, this year delivered films from PTA, Del Toro, Campion, Ducournau, Villeneuve, Baker, Coen, Wright, Anderson, Mills, Trier, Sciama, Scott, Wachowski, Lord & Miller, Spielberg, Verhoeven, Schrader, Hayes, Wheatley, Larraín, Weerasethakul, and Hamaguchi. So as we say every year: if you didn’t think it was a good year for films, than you didn’t see enough. Here are the best films of 2021.
10. LICORICE PIZZA
Occurring chronologically sometime between Inherent Vice and Boogie Nights, Licorice Pizza returns Paul Thomas Anderson to the San Fernando Valley in the middle of the oil crisis and a mayoral election. Once again assuming the role as cinematographer, Anderson captures the back-lit, sun-drenched aura of ‘70s Southern California as a backdrop to a relationship between a 15 year-old child actor and a 25 year-old career-less girl. The film’s sporadic set pieces stack on top of one another making for one of the year’s more memorable moviegoing experiences and ended up packing select theaters when they needed it most.
9. SPENCER
A biopic on Princess Diana has been coming for some time now, and Pablo Lorrain’s portrait satisfied expectations. Focusing on Diana Spencer (Kristen Stewart) attending a family gathering following her husband’s tabloid-affair scandal, Spencer spends half the film in Diana’s face to portray the public’s suffocating view of her, and Lorrain treats her unraveling delicately. Featuring perhaps the best of Jonny Greenwood’s three (!!!) scores this year, Spencer not only subverts biopic expectations, but uses the empty purpose of the royal family as a vessel to do so.
8.CODA
The most heartfelt and tear-jerkiest film this year, the Sundance-winning Coda is just as emotionally fulfilling as it sounds: the only hearing child of a deaf family decides to pursue a career in singing at her family’s consequence. Featuring killer performances from Emilia Jones and Troy Kotsur, the film’s simple elements function so well that it feels like a whole greater than the sum of its parts, and gives a whole new definition to how “the silence can be deafening.” The protagonist’s story at first seems like its doomed for failure, but the resolve is anything but. We haven’t seen a Sundance winner this fulfilling since Whiplash.
7. RED ROCKET
Where has Simon Rex been the last 18 years? Known primarily (at least until now) for his role as Uncle George in Scary Movie 3, Simon Rex has somehow managed to come out of the shadows to actually be a serious awards contender. Sean Baker’s latest is a portrait of middle America circa 2017, centered on a male porn star who comes home to Texas City, Texas in order to make a decent living, spurring any lies and embellishments to make him appear as “successful Hollywood.” With a loose spine to it, Red Rocket could certainly be “better” in terms of being a homogenic whole, but we wouldn’t love it as much even if it was so. Upon first viewing, Red Rocket may not amount to much, but you’ll think about how much you laughed and enjoyed yourself that you’ll feel compelled to return.
6. MEMORIA
More meditative than narrative, Memoria does not work on a conscious level, but an unconscious one. The sound plays a character, even going so far as to create a symphonic piece comprised of car alarms. Tilda Swinton anchors this film as a supposed widow haunted by a deep, low, “booming” noise to which she can’t find the source of. I remember seeing several audience members doze off during the film (me included.) But, I feel if I told that to Apichatpong Weerasethakul, he wouldn’t be mad.
5.TITANE
This year’s Palme d’or winner proved to be the wild ride it was hyped up to be. Julia Ducournau’s body horror thriller has little to no dull time (despite its stakes being more grounded in its second half than the first). Regardless, its assault on masculinity is one to be studied, because of how unapologetic its tone is. And boy is it a fun ride. Despite what one thinks it may “mean,” it brought back the insanely fun time we haven’t seen in a theater since, well, perhaps Good Time. But I hate to make comparisons, because Titane’s cinematic signature is one that stands on its own.
4. PIG
Knocking Babette’s Feast off the top of the list as the ultimate movie about food, Pig doesn’t sound as appealing on paper: a perfectly casted Nic Cage as a truffle hunter going after his stolen pig. But that’s merely the surface of it. Because beneath it is a fascinating commentary on class and how we ultimately find and consume our food. The film effectively peels back its layers to reveal its bigger picture, going to show that, at the end of the day, we’re all eating the same food, but it’s how we consume it that separates us all.
3. DRIVE MY CAR
There’s something intimate about a car ride with another person. We do it all the time, but we overlook how vulnerable we often become with one another. Perhaps the film with the longest prologue this year (the opening credits come in around the 50 minute mark), Drive My Car is all about internalization. A man finds his wife having an affair, but decides to do nothing about it. She then unexpectedly passes away, with his only solace being driving his car while rehearsing lines for a stage play he is directing. However, he develops an eye issue, forced to hire a driver. The conflict that’s been internalized is then forced to be externalized, and the silence and length that are at first tricked for self-importance, then becomes necessity, as Yusuke (Hidetoshi Nishijima) and Misaki (Toko Miura) find common ground in suppressing emotions. The ice is thawed, and these emotions are then relinquished on stage. It often feels you have no way to let go of these bottled feelings, until there’s a proper way for you to access them, like the intimacy of a compact vehicle.
2. THEWORST PERSON IN THE WORLD
If you’ve struggled with regret for years, if you’ve constantly beat yourself up from something long ago, if you can’t seem to forgive yourself, then this film will empathize with you. The title says it all. It’s the feeling you have when you feel you’ve done something irreversible but had no choice, that feeling you get when it hurts you to hurt someone else. Many love stories are about the person who’s heartbroken, but this film is for the ones who had no choice but to walk away.
1. A HERO
A Hero takes on the notion of preconceived identity. On parole from being jailed due to debt, Rahim (Amir Jadidi) embellishes a story about him returning a bag of gold coins to its rightful owner, which then snowballs. Stakes. Jeopardy. Tension. It’s all there. What follows is a spiraling, crippling doubt if a felon can redeem himself by doing a good deed, ending with a resounding sentiment: a good deed isn’t a badge of honor.
What makes a filmmaker exciting? It means that their best work is still ahead of them. There are amazing filmmakers coming out of the woodwork every day, each one better than the last. But if we had to bet on one filmmaker as the most exciting filmmaker on the planet, it’s Paul Thomas Anderson. Paul Thomas Anderson has traversed the cinematic spectrum, if there ever was one. But the fact that he’s still able to keep us on our toes at the mere sound of a new film, with all its mystery surrounding it, is something worth noting, and thank god we have at least one filmmaker that does so in such a mystifying fashion. In honor of Licorice Pizza hitting theaters nationwide on Christmas day, here’s our ranking of every Paul Thomas Anderson film… so far.
9. HARD EIGHT
At one point in the 90s, it seemed like if any auteur wanted to break in they had to direct a gangster drama, or at least something to that degree – Reservoir Dogs, Sexy Beast, Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels… you see what I mean. It seemed like an easy buck to bet on. Hard Eight was Anderson’s calling card. Having been developed and funded via the Sundance Lab, Hard Eight technically has two versions: one cut that its distributor released, and the other Anderson tried to push himself (even going behind the distributor’s back to submit his version to Cannes himself.) But thankfully, Criterion re-released Anderson’s cut of the film, even under its original title – Sydney. It not only launched the careers of John C. Reilly, Gwyneth Paltrow, and a career-best performance from Philip Baker Hall, but introduced the world to Anderson’s promising use of constantly rolling cameras and practices of a true cineaste. The low ranking of Hard Eight on this list is less an indictment of the film than a testament to the extraordinary films Anderson would produce in the coming decades.
8.LICORICE PIZZA
For better or worse, the jury’s still out on Licorice Pizza. But everyone’s immediate reception has been near-unanimous, claiming it as a “perfect PTA” movie. Take that for what you will, because this writer is still more or less gathering their thoughts as to where it stands in his filmography. Following a summer romance in the San Fernando valley in the ’70s between a 15-year-old high school child actor and a 25-year-old career-less but hopeful girl, Licorice Pizza returns Anderson to his wispy ways of filmmaking. The film has a looser spine to it, allowing for the film to rely more on sporadic sequences to keep the pace going. Whereas his previous films had maybe one or two set pieces, Licorice Pizza is nothing but cinematic set pieces. But this is not a review of the film. It’s a fun watch (one this writer will definitely be returning to) and definitely eclipses some of his earlier work, but one can’t help but feel the airy-ness harking underneath that doesn’t ground the film in its circumstances. The soul of his fun whacky scenarios is there. The mystery, however, isn’t.
7.PHANTOM THREAD
Every PTA film always has some sort of shade of mystery draped over its release, this one in particular when rumors started spreading that Paul Thomas Anderson was tackling a fashion stylist icon of the ‘50s who dressed royalty. Everyone’s eyes shot toward Charles James, the famous British-American haute couture stylist who was notorious for his eccentricities. However, that proved not to be the case. But one can notice some similar idiosyncrasies in Reynolds Woodcock. Phantom Thread was the next step in Anderson’s evolution of becoming the ultimate auteur, so much so he began taking the reins of cinematographer for the first time, trusting his actors to direct themselves from the page. The result is a gothic Victorian romance where one is well aware that the film’s director is at the helm of every creative aspect, much like Woodcock is over his profession and female partners.
6.INHERENT VICE
The enigma around this one didn’t necessarily revolve around Anderson (BTS photos regularly surfaced), but rather the fact that it was an adaptation of a Thomas Pynchon novel, the only one he’s ever allowed to be adapted. Even though the two aren’t mutually exclusive, one can see Anderson’s fingerprints all over the novel. Originally intending to adapt Pynchon’s Vineland, but ultimately found it too difficult, Anderson returned to the ensemble casting and took notes from neo-noirs such as the Long Goodbye, Repo Man, and documentaries such as Hollywood Mondo. With the film’s huge cast of players, one leaves the theater feeling like they just smoked a fat joint. With so many tiny moving parts, the film is best when you stop trying to understand it, and rather let yourself understand it.
5. PUNCH-DRUNK LOVE
Featuring arguably Adam Sandler’s most awards-worthy performance of his career, Punch-Drunk Love is PTA’s shortest, but sweetest film to date. Centering on a hermit novelty item salesman who doesn’t know how to be vulnerable, the film’s an idiosyncratic love story that bears resemblance to the French New Wave and musicals of the ’60s. What at first seems cryptic (the car crash, the harmonium, the airline mile scheme) eventually turns into a fascinating chain of events that knocks Sandler’s Barry Egan down, only for him to find the courage he’s desperately looking for in love. We wouldn’t see another PTA picture like this until Licorice Pizza.
4. THE MASTER
Often referred to as “that scientology movie” upon its release, The Master is perhaps Anderson’s most ambitious film, and his first without his usual cinematographer Robert Elswit, this time with Mihai Malaimare Jr. behind the lens. It’s also probably his most mysterious film to date, mainly because the public didn’t know much about it. But it was that mysteriousness that made it so infectious. Almost everything about it seemed to be pointing in the direction of peculiarity – the 70mm roll out (the first film to be shot on 70mm since Henry V), the similarities between Lancaster Dodd and L. Ron Hubbard, the secret surprise screenings in NY and LA – it all added to its idiosyncrasy. But above all that, it boasts Joaquin and PSH’s best roles to date, Jonny Greenwood’s hypnotic score, and the closest thing one can get to 3D without the 3D: it’s the 2001 of the 21st century.
3. BOOGIE NIGHTS
At only 27, Paul Thomas Anderson produced what would dub him the “most exciting filmmaker on the planet.” Boogie Nights contained an exuberance fueled by the oncoming of the ’80s with a narrative and characters that seemed to shift into an era of hyper cultural inflation. It showed his command over ensemble pieces, as well as his mastery in climactic set pieces (the drug deal sequence with a meth’d out Alfred Molina). It was something so ambitious to take on at such a young age, and yet even more magnificent to pull it off effectively. It resuscitated Burt Reynolds’ career with his only Oscar nomination, and demonstrated that Anderson is truly an actor’s director.
2. MAGNOLIA
Perhaps the most whimsical of his filmography, Magnolia follows several San Fernando Valley inhabitants on a rainy day in LA, whose characters are plagued by trauma they can’t seem to let go of. It’s a beast of a movie – a 3+ hour runtime, a stacked ensemble cast, and a climax that’s Anderson’s best set piece in any of his films. And among his ensemble films, it easily ranks as his best. It’s a circular flowing narrative that’s his most poignant – by the end of it, you feel like you’ve felt something intangible. Upon first viewing, you see the story – the chance run-ins, the theme of coincidence… But upon second viewing, you see a parable: a pattern of flawed characters repeating their mistakes. Featuring Tom Cruise’s best role to date (and what would be his last Oscar nomination), Magnolia will rank at the top for most of Anderson’s fans.
1. THERE WILL BE BLOOD
Anderson’s films tend to take place in the San Fernando Valley, but this was the valley before the valley. Anderson’s epic of a drunk-with-power oil baron who takes over a small religious town and challenges faith will be the one remembered by film historians and critics. Anderson, whose previous works up until that point included the playfulness of Magnolia and Punch-Drunk Love, had produced a film that bore comparison to the likes of John Ford and D.W. Griffith. Absolutely no one saw this dark turn coming, but it was a milestone indicating that Anderson was now leaving his whimsical fanboy era of filmmaking into embracing his true fascinations – the history of California oil, the spell of scientology, and haute couture fashion of the ‘50s. TWBB will be remembered not only for introducing a protagonist that will forever haunt the history of cinema, but because it’s an echo of an echo – an evolution in how we portray the past, one whose oncoming of new technology was perched right at the forefront. When you watch it, you see the cinematography of Days of Heaven, you hear the score of The Shining, you see a John Huston western… He wasn’t your film geek’s favorite filmmaker anymore. He was everyone’s.
“Please don’t write that down,” confesses Antoneta Alamat Kusijanović. I had asked about cinematic influences on her debut feature film, Murina, which premiered in the Director’s Fortnight category the previous night at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Executive produced by Martin Scorsese, Murina follows Julija (Gracija Filipović), an athletic teenager who rejects the obedience her father expects of her when his foreign friend pays a visit. Murina rightfully won this year’s Camera d’Or for best first feature – the same award Jim Jarmusch and Steve McQueen have won in the past.
The Croatian filmmaker and I meet at the La Quinzaine beach, a cabana situated just at the footsteps of the legendary Carlton Hotel. As I’m brought down to meet Kusijanović, there’s a surprise I did not see coming when she stands to shake my hand: she’s nine months pregnant.
“Oh wow, when are you due?” I ask.
“Now,” she laughs. What if the big moment happened during this interview? I try to make this interview less laborious than they usually are. “I take my influences from theater, from paintings, from locations, mostly,” she continues on about her inspirations. “I come from a family of painters and architects, so I think that most of it was born through that. Usually when I make my story boards, they’re always paintings. But also, visually, I build. Location is very important for me because location also informs the psychology of the character. And then seeing people move in that location is also what informs how they need to be portrayed.”
“So going off that, how much did the landscape direct you?” I follow up.
“Incredibly,” Kusijanović lets loose. “Because I was looking for that landscape. It was of course somewhere in the back of my mind growing up there. But for me it was very important to find a location without any vegetation. Even though Croatia is very green, and islands are very green. I was looking for places without any trees, because I wanted the characters to be as if they were on a plate like a raw meat: completely burned, exposed, under this heat in both their desire and violence.”
“In terms of casting, what did you see in Gracija for the lead of Julija?” I ask.
“Gracija [Filipovic] is a professional athlete. She’s a swimmer and dancer. She started as a non-actress in my short film, Into the Blue, and through that experience I got to know her better and understood that I wanted to make a feature film with her. And then I built the casting of everyone else around her. We would spend weeks with actors to test these synergies.”
The casting and costume choices seem to go hand-in-hand with the choice of locale, given how natural the swimsuits are on Julija versus her disdain for other clothing, “land” clothing. “She has a mastery of not so much the land but the water,” I add on. “And the difference in costume is very much an act of rebellion by her. When she’s in dresses, they don’t really fit well on her.”
“It’s very obvious when you put a character in an outfit they don’t belong to. It’s even referenced in the film, ‘I’m not gonna wear this. It’s not mine, it’s yours.’ But it’s also so rewarding when you give a person something they really feel as their second skin. Murina is all about skin, so we also tried to metaphorically dress Julija in that same way, with her skin. And she sheds different skins throughout the movie – one is from her family, and one is coming from the foreigner. That is a new skin, an improved skin. A skin which is braver and more persuasive for [going after] what she wants.”
“In directing the physicality of Julija, what was the seed you implanted in her mind to direct her? Because I could tell she was very much a master of her water environment.”
“Sometimes you have to direct others to give the right mood for her. That’s why it was very important to have the right team around her, because certain things need to remain hidden. Especially to such a young actress such as her. And it helped to spend a lot of time – over a month – with everyone together in a house where they lived like a family. They cooked and fished together. They built this real synergy.”
Courtesy of Mixer
“Throughout Murina, she’s always in conflict. She’s never belonging to the on-shore environment. What would you say her central flaw is that drives the story engine of the film?”
Kusijanović has to take a moment to ponder. Then, a light bulb goes off: “She is quick to conclude,” Kusijanović declares. “She’s a teenager. She thinks she knows everything. She thinks she sees beyond things. She has strong convictions. And she’s very impulsive, very courageous. Which being courageous is a very good thing to be, but sometimes maturity and wisdom is lacking. Yet, she gets slapped throughout the film, and she readjusts quickly, which is a sign of intelligence, I think.”
“Where did you meet [Gracija] originally?”
“I did a casting for a music video. It was a little Croatian band. Actually, now, a bigger band – Silente – from Dubrovnik. I did a casting for kids for that specific video. And Gracija was in that casting.”
“What drew you to her?”
“She doesn’t have to speak to tell things,” she reveals. “For me, it was mostly to say less. She has [natural presence] in front of the camera. And it’s very interesting to watch her, for me at least. So for me it was a deduction of the script. [I’m always] finding opportunities where I can deduct on a script, on a shoot, and in post.”
“You’ve attended labs at the Berlin and Sarajevo Film Festivals, attended La Femis, Columbia University… You’ve won awards at these laboratories, festivals, and institutions, even been nominated for a Student Academy Award. How does it feel to be thrown into the beast of Cannes?”
“I am very very grateful and happy to be in Cannes, especially this year. Even though we’ve been in a lack of festivals for a year and a half, it’s been very difficult for all the people in the film industry. So this year is somehow special, it’s like reincarnation year. So to be part of the festival this year is like even more rewarding than any other. And I’m very grateful.”
“Murina is your first feature, what’s next for you?”
“I’m open to new opportunities. I never liked to be bound by like a specific thing… I’m always following the characters and complex stories and open to be surprised, to change. I am writing a couple things right now and one of them is set in New York. It’s a shadow metropolis and it’s kind of a woman confronting her tribe once she realizes her husband cheated on her.”
“And you’re based in New York, yes?”
“I’m in between places. I’m in between New York, Debrovnik, and Zagreb.”
“Does New York influence your work? Especially in this movie?”
“It’s very important sometimes when you make certain films to be very local. And at other times to have distance. And of course New York gives me distance from Croatia, and Croatia from New York. So yes, both places inform each other.”
“Do you plan on going back to music videos at all?”
“Why not? I’m always open to everything, y’know? It’s a great form because you can explore. You can do things that you can’t do in film.”
“It’s not very narrative friendly, though.”
“It could be. It could be. Anything can be exactly whatever you want it to be. And that’s what’s exciting. Otherwise we’re just, y’know, working inside some types of forms, which is not exciting.”
Murina most recently won awards at the Hamptons International Film Festival and the Slovene Film Festival, and will be screening at the Rio de Janeiro International Film Festivalthis month.
Gaspar Noé always aims to divide. Enter the Void, Irreversible, Climax… The dividing line for these films lies between people who are frustrated by them and hate being frustrated by them, and those who are frustrated by them but seem to enjoy being frustrated by them. Vortex, however, will push one of these sides to the other based on how “normal” it is. Not even just normal, but also sensitive. In fact, this might be the weirdest Noé film just based on how conventional it is. Not as assaulting as his previous films, Vortex creeps into your psyche subconsciously. It’s not aggressive, rather it lets time itself do the work leading to self-destruction.
If you haven’t heard the rumors by now, Vortex follows an aging couple (Dario Argento and Françoise Lebrun) as dementia begins to set in on both of them, stumbling into madness. Struck from the original negative just days before its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival (probably why it was given a time slot at midnight on the very last day), the film has an ebb and flow feel to it, as if to show the waves of old age and dementia crash and recede. (Oh yeah, did I mention it’s all in split screen?)
The use of split screen aims to, again, divide, aiding in a sort of psychological separation in the minds of the spectator by using two plots happening concurrently – one side follows the husband, and the other the wife. There’s a prominent showing of clocks throughout the film always peeking out of pockets in the frame, perhaps to serve as the only constant between both sides of the film’s plot: the time they have that’s passing.
It’s hard to sell it as a midnight premiere at Cannes, however. At some point during its two and a half our runtime, I had the thought that this move may have originally been longer, and Noé decided to use the split screen method to make it that much shorter. (Its subject matter doesn’t quite serve as “midnight” status either, but because Noé’s a fixture of Cannes, I see it.)
Yet, the novelty factor faults from the lack of counter-conventionality. It doesn’t quite make up for the somewhat opaque external journey the couple makes. While your eyes dart from one side of the screen to the other, Vortex fools you into not thinking of it in conventional terms: the conflict, midpoint, crisis moments all become secondary. For a shorter film, perhaps this would work. But its lengthy runtime stretches itself a little thin.
Regardless, the cinema world can rejoice because we have something we rarely get: a Gaspar Noé film – a film we can debate, digest, and process. “For those whose brains will rot before their hearts,” states a quote shown during the opening (or as Noé sees it, closing) credits, and with it comes his most personal, sensitive, and vulnerable work to date.
This world is hard enough to live in as it is, but to add the limitations of pre-conceived notions about who we are, it makes it nearly impossible. Sean Baker continues his use of first-time actors (he objects to the term “non-actors”) with Red Rocket, a film about past love and old relationships, even though others might tell you otherwise. Red Rocket follows ex-porn star Mikey Saber (Simon Rex) as he returns home to Texas City, Texas to his estranged wife and ex-porn partner, Lexi (Bree Elrod) and his mother-in-law, who justifiably reject him. However, he appeases, promising them he’ll get a job and pay their rent. He then returns to his old hustle of selling marijuana, and eventually falls in love with Strawberry (Suzanna Son), a 17-year old donut shop worker who lets him sell weed to construction workers at the shop. He then gets a wild idea to convince her to get into pornography, set on the mission of making her a porn starlet.
But if it sounds like this film doesn’t have a true story engine to generate conflict, you’re absolutely right. The film falters from not centering around its protagonist, which interestingly enough, is Lexi. But Red Rocket not that kind of movie, instead choosing to follow its antagonist as its lead. But this has props in itself – a perfect casting choice for an unlikeable lead (but still interesting) who always finds a way to buy time and tell people what they want to hear: he lies about his “successful” career in Hollywood, and manages to convince Strawberry he lives in a bitchin’ mansion.
However, this stretches the narrative so thin that it loses any shine or electricity it had, with an aimless second act that drifts off to sea. There are pointless sequences that don’t really add up to anything or add to the conflict at hand. The only slimmest, bare minimum through-line of a conflict is used merely as a placeholder for the film to “function” as a narrative, almost teetering on the edge of documentary.
But did I enjoy myself? Yes, absolutely. Did I laugh continuously throughout out? Of course I did. Do I think it could be better? 100%. The film just doesn’t operate or function in a way for me to be drawn to it beautifully or emotionally, because Red Rocket refuses to be one of those films.
Red Rocket will be playing at this year’s New York Film Festival on Sept. 29.
This year’s Palme d’Or winner didn’t just “premiere” at Cannes – it burst into the festival ecosystem like a thousand barrels of renegade crude, polluting everyone and everything around it. Centering around sleaze, sex, metal, blood, and fire, Titane is almost pornography for cars. Or maybe it’s just a porno, I’m still not entirely sure. The film begins with a car crash, as a young girl, Alexia (Agathe Rousselle), becomes restricted in a titanium back brace, who upon release, develops an asphyxiation for cars. (Note: if you want to avoid spoilers for Titane, STOP READING HERE.)
This, in turn, leads to an asphyxiation for metal and fire, leading to a retribution of the people who have done Alexia wrong sexually (most of whom are male). What follows is an attack on masculinity, upheld by a metal hair stick that not only holds up her hair to hide the scarring from her youth, but also what’s expected of her as a woman, supported particularly by a scene in which she literally makes a man choke on wood. (Other viewers I’m sure will have different interpretations of the film’s theme.) During this assault via sexual revenge, she’s only able to make meaningful, passionate love to the thing that started it all – a car. Which, interestingly enough, impregnates her.
However, her violent tendencies get the best of her, forcing her to go in disguise as a missing boy while on the run from the cops. She sucks in her distended belly and physically changes her appearance in a scene so visceral, so tangible, that you feel the painful transformation she puts herself through. Miraculously, it works, when she’s taken under the care of the local fire fighter chief (Vincent Legrand) who is absolutely convinced that she is his missing son.
This writer does have qualms about the film, however. Such as, why does she kill? What is the motivation of her carnage? Against not just men, but women, too? This leads to the stakes being more grounded in the second half of the film than the first, and even so, the second act goes on just a tad longer than it needs to. But after finishing Titane, those concerns became secondary, because the product is Noé-level punk rock cinema.
And that’s as far as I’ll go. If I were to divulge any further, it would take away from the wild, insanely good time that movies today have forgotten to bring to cinemas.
Censorship is a scary thing, but it could be particularly dangerous when it involves assimilation and heritage. Nadav Lapid has been tackling these subjects for ten years now, straddling the line between sensitivity, morality, and justice. Ahed’s Knee is his latest, confronting the subject of censorship head on. Winner of this year’s Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, Ahed’s Knee follows a filmmaker named “Y” (Avshalom Pollak) who attends a screening of his previous film held by the Ministry of Culture in a remote village at the far end of the Israeli desert. While there, he befriends an officer of the ministry, Yaholom (Nur Fibak), as he’s forced to succumb to the nation’s censorship standards. Originally, we had planned to meet in person at Cannes, but a COVID scare forced Nadav Lapid and actors Avshalom Pollak and Nur Fibak to conduct this interview via Zoom where we talked about censorship, assimilation, and what it took to make a film that’s so critical of the Israeli government, especially in today’s political climate.
“I think that it’s about how to be…” begins Lapid. “…is it impossible to be normally Israeli, in a way? But I think its relevant to a lot of places. Is it possible to be normally Russian? Is it possible to be normally Brazilian? Is it possible to me normally Polish? Where do we situate ourselves… from submission and collaboration, to resistance and endless anger that in the end dehumanizes all others, and makes all others enemies? I’m always obsessed with what I see as Israeli collective soul, mainly because it’s also my soul, and with Israeli collective DNA, mainly because of the fact it’s also my DNA. But I think that, in the end, it’s a question of how do we live? How do we live in this actual moment in time?”
But Ahed’s Knee’s premise actually stems from a real-life experience not dissimilar from the film.
“All of this was a very unusual creative process,” Lapid continues. “The technical genesis of the thing was when I got this phone call from a bureaucrat at the Ministry of Culture, who was a very intelligent, nice, and curious young woman, inviting me to come to a small village in the desert for a screening of Kindergarten Teacher. And at the very end of our conversation, she added ‘Oh by the way, you must sign a form or I’ll detail the topics of our discussion,’ exactly like in the movie. She said ‘Yeah I’m not very proud of what I’m doing now,’ which was quite surprising – she totally accepted the fact that what she’s doing is wrong, and yet with no problems, she told me afterward, ‘Ok you sign the form and will send it to me by fax.’ Another thing was that my mother was agonizing and dying from cancer, and she was the editor of my movies. I was going to the desert and sending her more or less the same video messages that you see in the movie. Usually writing the script takes me one year, one year and a half, more or less like most other people. I started to write the script three or four weeks after the death of my mother, and edited in two weeks. And 10, 11 months later, we began shooting. So, everything was just like one movement, one gesture. One extremely urgent gesture. We decided to not apply a lot of financial services to shoot in very basic, hard economic conditions, because we prioritized the urgency. Because the urgency was the truth of the thing.”
For the actors, however, it was an exercise in how agile they could be in developing a character, given the limiting circumstances.
“I joined the project really late,” adds Pollak. “So after joining the project, they were quickly going into shooting. The way the character was conceived or built, it’s like… I can describe it a little bit as like making a dish… how you cook something and put different ingredients inside. So it’s like taking the text, taking the conversation with Nadav, taking my intuition into it, taking my abilities into it, taking my interpretations into it, taking my experience as a person that knows the body of a choreographer… So all of that kind of created this very unique, disturbed, powerful, fragile character in the end. Which I believe it’s also because of the people that were involved in the movie, and the way Nur and I were getting along… that’s part of the magic of creation. I think for Nur, she was on board for a longer time.”
“Maybe for the auditions,” Fibak chimes in. “But I think a month and a half before shooting or something like that they sent me the script, told me ‘you’re in…’ I think that the main thing that I worked with Nadav was to build the whole inside story of [Yaholom], and the whole moment before this story started. And I think when we arrived on set for the start of shooting, I really let go. I really just let the things happen naturally. I worked really hard to just be in the right place, like in a kind of mediation, to be in a particular point and a particular way of how I’m coming to this story. We were shooting in a chronological order, so I really prepared for this to happen naturally for me. And everything was really intense emotionally on set and the script is really, really strong, and the meeting with Avshalom and the way he’s doing his stuff, I just let myself be. And I think when you have freedom on set, things really happen. I didn’t say to myself ‘here you’re supposed to cry, here you’re supposed to be…’ I just dive in.”
His previous film, 2019’s Synonyms, another study on heritage, won Nadav Lapid the Golden Bear at that year’s Berlinale, so surely that had to help speed up financing for Ahed’s Knee.
“Yes, surely it helped,” Lapid admits. “We made the film with I think 1.2 million Euros, something like this, and shot the film in 18 days. I haven’t seen any other films in competition. I’m sure all of them are great, but I doubt any of them were shot under such conditions. Because there were very short days. Nine hours of light in a day because it was winter and the day hardly began and you’re already at the end of the day. So, it helped, but it helped to preserve, as I said, the urgency. It helped us to quickly get a certain amount of money and to say ‘okay, now we go shoot it.’ I think, for me, the main thing that it gave me was the liberty, the liberty to tell myself ‘great, I have this nice golden bear at my house, and now I can go deeper…’ deeper into this deserted, or half-deserted landscape of cinema. It gave me the capacity to tell other people in a way ‘count on me, I know what I’m doing.’ But it gave me the confidence in my own [self] doubt to free the demons.”
“In Ahed’s Knee, you play with objectivity and subjectivity a lot,” I bring up. “Usually, when we see the landscape, it’s subjective to the character, yet you kind of flip that on the head this time: we see the landscape, but it’s objective from [Y’s] point of view, and when it’s subjective from him, we see his objection to the land. But you translate it through these crazy camera movements, this swinging camera language. I wanted to ask why you choose that kind of choreography for the camera to translate that.”
Lapid takes a moment. “I have various answers,” he says. “The most general one I would say is that I find it really hard to understand how, despite the fact that people are so different, they have so many different things to say… 99% of the movies look alike. For me, someone who is writing his most personal text… personalizing the form of your movies is I think the most logical and rational step, to take it out from the 30,000 movies done exactly the same way. Especially in this movie, I’m a huge believer in what I feel is the true deep essence of the moment. As we know, the true deep essence of the moment doesn’t end in the concrete or the practical description of what’s happening. I mean, in general, especially in such a movie, you must go deeper. Penetrate the object. It goes to the mind, the thoughts, the reflection, the heart, the emotions… and it’s super hard to do it with a camera. It’s much easier to do it when you’re a painter, for instance. When you’re an expressionist German painter, when you’re Jackson Pollock who’s running and hitting the canvas. But with a camera it’s hard, because a camera is a very concrete thing. Put down the camera and you see what’s happening in front of you. Sometimes you have to battle with your own camera. You have to spoil it. And some of this movement is like tentative to make the camera sweat, to make it less confident, less distant, so that the camera won’t feel so comfortable.”
Lapid’s films, as a result, do not stem from traditional cinematic influences.
“Before shooting a movie,” Lapid continues. “I feel I can watch 15 movies a day. Not entirely, of course, but small pieces, fast forward and backwards. But I fill myself with cinematic gestures, so I have maybe 20,000 references and influences. But I think in the end, my films – you can love them or hate them – are in a way, mine. I think that they have a certain core, a certain substance that’s distinguished from others. And second, I feel that my references… prevent me from falling to cinematic evidences. Think about shot-reverse-shot: I mean, for me, it’s not logical when 99.9% of the dialogue in the movie is shot in a shot-reverse-shot. And you see one person talking, then the other talking, or maybe one talking, one listening. I mean the conversations are super different – sometimes they talk about the second world war, sometimes they talk about their bathroom, sometimes they talk about their son, sometimes they talk about sex. But they’re always more or less shot in the same way. So I think all these directors that help me detach myself from the evidence and reinvent and rethink my conventions are my kind of references.”
“There’s a line in the film,” I follow up, “that goes ‘in the end, geography wins.’ And I wanted to see how you interpret that line and what it means to you. Because it was striking when it was on screen.”
“That comes from my mother,” Lapid gets candid. “This was one of the favorites of my mother when she was talking about Israel. And as [Y] says in his short introduction, she wouldn’t say it in a positive way… It means that you can be as much as you want in a kind of position of resistance, detached. In the end, you become another detail in landscape.”
“I tend to never get a very definite understanding about anything,” admits Shalom. “I always try to keep possibilities. So it’s not one thing, in my opinion. I think it’s both geographical as it is political, or as a country, a nation, a society, and so on. But geographically, it’s also like nature. It’s the nature of what’s going on. It’s the Earth… So I think this is something that is much more… it takes you to places that are much wider than being specific about what it is.”
Fibak, however, is a little more exploratory. “I don’t really know. I think every time I hear this sentence I’ve taken it to another direction. When I only read [it] on paper, it’s not something really logical to me, but I felt something really strong about the land. And that we are all the time fighting or loving things that are connected to, in our country at least, the land, the earth, a map, boarders, and sand. It’s really connected to Israel. The whole story of desert and things like that. It wasn’t something really where I understood the meaning. And I think this is what’s really powerful with this sentence – that it’s changing all the time, and it’s really open. It’s strong because it’s…,” she scrambles, trying to grasp the right words.
“…Well there’s something very interesting now from what Nur was saying,” Pollak swoops in. “For Israelis, when they talk about Israel, most of the Israelis say ‘Ha’aretz,’ and the interpretation of Ha’aretz is ‘are you returning to the land.’ It’s a very kind of, y’know, as Nur was saying, a very important flow. Even to the Jews… they found a piece of land where they can be, where they can run away from all their problems, etc. I think the great thing about it is it’s not like something that has a straight forward meaning, but it kind of triggers something that can go and go and go and go.”
Fibak follows up, “But I think that it’s really interesting that in the movie, it’s a meeting between someone like Avshalom’s character who is living big city life… but coming to a place where all the people there are working the land. And the image of coming from the sky in an airplane to a place that is really grounded and people are not dealing with the big questions and stuff like that. I don’t know. This is for me what the meaning was. I don’t think I have an answer. But I have a lot of answers.”
Then, as the dust settled, the elephant in the room finally made itself apparent: How comfortable were they being a part of a film that is so critical of their government?
There’s a beat of silence. After the tense moment, Lapid gives in, “I’m not a political journalist, not a political expert in any way. I think that Netanyahu is a terrible prime minister, but he wasn’t worse than his period, or his time, or the spirit. I mean he was pushed by an extremely dominant spirit that existed and still exists in Israeli society. For me it’s funny that they call themselves the ‘government of change’ or something like this. I mean, where’s such a change? They are the oldest new government I’ve ever seen I think.”
“I can say about myself… that I didn’t look… I don’t know,” Fibak adds on. “It’s a really good story. And it’s really important to do really good art and tell really good stories. And to be part of art that is saying something today is sometimes not so easy… films that are trying to change or trying to do something bigger and not just, y’know, achieve fame and stuff like that. So, it was, for me, really a good opportunity to be part of something big and important. And I didn’t really think in the beginning about what would happen next. Because I’m working as an actress in this project, but… I don’t know.”
“I don’t think it’s about what will happen next, it’s about what’s happening before,” follows Pollak. “In my opinion, I think it’s irrelevant. I think it’s the wrong kind of discussion from the beginning, whether you should be careful not to criticize or go against the general opinion of the country by creating a creation or a piece of art. I listened in the press conference to this question, and I think there’s a very simple answer to that: why not? Why not give money to things which criticize? As actors or artists, people criticize us. And we’re getting money, and the people who criticize get money, and this is what they do. Because this is a part of democracy and a society that is trying to advance. So that’s a very kind of, I think, simple answer. On the other hand, for the real people who want to change something, and really oppose… they are giving up so much of their lives in order to do that. And this is also a big, big question: whether giving up your life will make a change in the end.”
In the end, it may seem daunting that governments with such power over censorship could still exist in the world, despite funding and praising art that criticizes. Because in the end, geography always does win – even with Nadav Lapid on our side.
Ahed’s Knee will make its North American premiere at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival.
A Hero begins with a long-tilting shot as our lead Rahim (Amir Jadidi) climbs a rickety set of construction stairs that look like they could collapse at any moment. This image, in essence, encapsulates A Hero, the newest film from acclaimed Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi.
Having been granted leave from prison in order to relieve his debt, Rahim comes across a bag of 17 gold coins, which he does not know who it belongs to. He tries to turn it in for money, but the gold standard that day is not as high as it usually is. He thinks of using it to repay his debt, but he knows he’d be questioned as to how he got it. So, he makes a drastic decision: he decides to set up a scene in which he makes a good deed by “returning” the bag of gold. This, in turn, leads him to becoming some sort of local celebrity. He’s featured on TV, interviewed, and granted awards, that is until some journalists begin to grow skeptical that he made his story up. What follows is a story of preconceived identity. “Nothing in this world is fair,” goes a line in the film. Regardless of whether his “good deed” was true or not, people can’t see past his identity as an untrustworthy prisoner. They believe he has other motions behind him.
Rahim’s occupation is a painter, and as he paints a picture of himself, one by one, everyone begins to fall for his scheme. His story is then framed into another story. But as he tries to defend his original story, it’s then framed into another story. And then another… bringing other individuals and establishments into his orbit. The result is a testament to how big a web of lies can be spun, and how root-less words can be based on who says them. (Well, if everyone around me believes this story, then it must be true, right?)
The film dares to ask, “What is a hero?” Is it one who does a good deed and expects a reward in return? Or one who admits their vulnerability? What makes this film function so well is how all the story elements work together – every story beat adds onto the film’s conflict. Stakes. Jeopardy. Tension. It’s all there. It’s a masterclass in screenwriting on how taught and air tight a story can be. And based on how explosive the third act gets, you’ll be seething about how peoples’ preconceived notions won’t take into account good deeds or feelings.
Bergman Island begins with our characters Chris (Vicky Krieps) and her husband Tony (Tim Roth) arriving in Fålo, Sweden. The couple’s plan is to go to Ingmar Bergman’s old home, where he wrote most of his films, in order to draw some inspiration for their next scripts. They plug in their coordinates on a GPS. “You will reach your destination in one hour and 48 minutes,” it says, which is, unironically, the length of the film. Bergman Island, however, never reaches its destination. Ten minutes into the film, there’s no conflict, no story to chisel out from this stoic film. It’s another film about writers “going somewhere to write,” as if they just “want to be” in the foreign world they’re thrusted into.
20 minutes into the film, still no story or conflict. The film is almost comedic at times. It doesn’t quite know who its protagonist is (we assume it’s Chris, but still in the first act, there’s no way to discern that as we see her enjoying herself with one of the museum’s employees.) I guess it’s supposed to act, operate, and pay homage to a Bergman film?
35 minutes in: still no conflict ensues, but it turns into somewhat of a film geek’s fantasy. The characters are so self-indulgent in that they “need to go somewhere” to write, that there is no externalized conflict, ending up a waste of the actors’ talents.
45 minutes in: look! Finally some rejection and conflict like this movie could go somewhere! Oh… but it’s just Chris suffering from writer’s block (ok, still something.) But it then shifts into an unnecessary frame narrative that totally detours from the character’s bare kernel of a story. Fiction then blurs into reality and reality blurs into fiction a la Day for Night, as characters from different timelines appear in others, not in an effective way, however.
Mia Hansen-Løve once said, “All of my films are my version of Heat.” I just wish some of that love and passion went into this film. There’s a line of dialogue that goes “if you look at something long enough it becomes interesting.” This film, however, never does. One hour and 48 minutes later, we never reach a destination, having veered wildly off course. “There’s a world outside your own asshole,” Chris says in the film. Yes, indeed there is.
Biorhythms are an essential part to how humans move. It’s passed on through genetics, generations, and nurtured by the environment we’re born into. Clara Sola explores such a subject matter. Premiering in the Director’s Fortnight sidebar category at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, Clara Sola follows Clara – a rural Costa Rican woman who’s an outcast in her family as she rebels against the behavior expected of her at her niece’s quinceañera. She has a hunchback, walks as if she has a lemon in her shoe, and is at one with the nature around her. So, when I met with the director Nathalie Álvarez Mesén and actress Wendy Chinchilla Araya atop the Scandinavian pavilion on the Croisette, I of course had to delve in about the physicality of the human body, Mesén’s history of being a mime, and how much the environment of Costa Rica directed the film.
“I like to work physically, maybe it’s my interest in the body, and how the body can say more honest things than words a lot of the times,” Mesén goes in. “The idea of the character comes from different paintings and pictures, but the theme actually comes from my co-writer Maria Camila Arias and me growing up in Latin America, and then taking some distance to see what we had been through: the community, the love, but also what restrictions and expectations there were – what we inherited from are mothers, our grandmothers, and how patriarchal norms were reproduced even if men were not there.”
The table over from us at another interview sat Wendy Chinchilla Araya, the lead actress of Clara Sola. One could tell from her presence she was a performer, but not necessarily an actress. “I wrote the script for a younger character,” Mesén added. “But once the casting process started, I wanted to work with a dancer. We weren’t looking for actors, but either performers of some sort or martial artists… something that had to do with awareness of the body. And I knew about Wendy from my teenage years because Costa Rica is a small country, and I was also in the physical theater scene. I kind of saw Clara in her, even if she was doing something very different. There was something in her performance and I wanted to get her to an audition. She was the second one we saw.”
“I’ve never performed in a theater, or a play, nothing,” states Araya. But Mesén trusted her in directing herself from the page. “Everything came from me, but from the images Nathalie gave to me. She’s a mime, so she knows this vocabulary of dance, the vocabulary of the body. She was very clear in giving me images, so I looked into my possibilities and my tools and we just found Clara.”
From watching the film, one can tell Clara is very much in command of her body, but how much of that was physical direction, and how much of it was coming from Wendy herself?
“We worked with a lot of internal images,” answers Mesén. “I give inputs of images and she interprets them in her own way. She’s an incredible dancer and can also choreograph very small movements. Like she said yesterday at the Q&A, ‘I’m always dancing on the inside.’”
“I had to change [my body’s] position,” Araya continues. “But of course I was using a special prosthetic. So I had to prepare before every day. I had to do some exercises for my back so it would be in shape. And after the work of the day, I had to do some stretches and be very physical because I knew it would be very challenging for my back.”
The landscape of Costa Rica very much plays a character in Clara Sola, and one can tell it served as a second director. “You can’t direct nature,” Mesén states. “You have to go by what nature is saying. If it’s raining, it’s raining. If the river is very powerful, you have to be careful with your humans. If the horse doesn’t want to go this way, it doesn’t want to go this way. So you have to adapt, listen, and in the end I think we got the hang of it. And then the wonderful work of my editor, Marie-Hélène Dozo, chose what moments to keep and propose. The nature sometimes played with Clara’s emotions… sometimes it was almost magical.”
“It was so intense, it was impossible not to react,” Araya follows. “I think it helps a lot to build and to understand Clara, Clara’s imagination and Clara’s world. Because we were living in this little country in the mountains, we didn’t see many people. So I think all this nature that was very wild and very present helped a lot to get to Clara.”
Clara has a particular type of posture, but also dons a specific use of costume design in terms of how ill-fitting the costumes are on her. Based on that, would you say that Clara Sola is ultimately about obedience?
“Yes….?” Araya has to ask herself even. “She has a nature that is very opposite to what’s around her in terms of limits. So [these clothes] are also a limit the family puts on her. They tell her what to wear, they tell her how she must look. So it was all a limit from the external world of Clara.”
There’s a moment in the film where (and I don’t want to give it away) we see a crucial body transformation. It almost looks like CGI, but was too real to be real. Could you talk about that?
“Umm,” Araya hesitates. She points to Mesén across the way. “I’m not allowed to tell. But she was very specific… we were rehearsing all the time.” Araya begins to demonstrate, “She said ‘try to feel it from the furthest point down your back, and then it’s better when you go down with your shoulder…’ We tried everything. It was dancing.”
