Can't quite reach past the edge

I'm generally an Alex Garland fan. All of his films have a very distinct visual style, embodied by sharp contrast in lighting, vivid colors, closing shots on his main characters, and ethereal imagery. He's also fond of moody and loud scores that often dictate the pace of the visuals, rather than simply accompanying them. That's all very interesting stuff and I'm glad to watch it most of the time. His writing, however, can often fall short of what he seems to be setting up. His best work, by far, is Ex Machina. Every work of his I've seen since has shown some refinements of his technique (and, perhaps, bigger budgets to play with) but hasn't really approached that level of cerebral storytelling and seems to fail somewhere in the third act that makes you think the film is running a bit long for what it's trying to say. Men is no different.

From the very beginning, we're aware that this is going to be a psychological thriller/horror film even if, for some reason, you weren't aware of that going into it, given trailers, reviews and, y'know, Alex Garland as writer and director. But the scene is set right away that our lead character, Harper (Jessie Buckley) has faced some trauma at home and has decided to escape it in the English countryside with AirBnB owner, Geoffrey (Rory Kinnear.) Along the way, she also meets an insipid and disingenuous local vicar (Rory Kinnear), a demented parochial schoolboy (Rory Kinnear), a disinterested cop (Rory Kinnear), and a devotee of The Green Man (Rory Kinnear.) The first three could easily be examples of the men in Harper's life that either won't help her, would make her situation worse, or would make it so that she'd never be willing to escape the roles that society would impose upon her. All of that plays right into the guilt trip and shifting of blame that she was attempting to escape in the situation with her husband, James (Paapa Essiedu.) But all of that seems to be (ahem) rooted in the underpinning provided by The Green Man; an ancient English/Celtic symbol of fertility and rebirth and that's where the story kind of goes awry. I guess it's all well and good to have presented this as something of an eternal problem in that men will keep seeing women as an object of desire or as simply an object to be claimed and used, no matter how many changes they affect or how many different versions of them there may be in society. But did we need the Celtic imagery to deliver that message?

This was part of my disaffectation with Annihilation, in that it was simply The Colour Out of Space with a loftier presentation. Instead of dropping into someone's well and disturbing a family, it occupied a beach and became a national security crisis. So, here we have one woman's trauma and problem with the opposite sex that is revealed to be a larger issue (it is) that is conveyed in a spiritual and mystical story (OK) but then gets overshadowed by a mythical theme that maybe didn't really need to be there...? I mean, sure, I guess it did if you're still trying to wrap up the loose ends of True Detective, season 1, but I think we've moved on by now. I would've been content just to see some weird stuff happening without any of the Celtic imagery being present at all. We'd already gotten a lot of it with the screaming creature at the end of the tunnel running at Harper (which seemed pretty clearly to be a mirror image) and the anguished face interrupting the FaceTime calls with her friend, Riley (Gayle Rankin) so we know that some spooky stuff is happening. Did it have to be the ancient fertility god which gave an excuse to use the creature effects reminiscent of John Carpenter's The Thing (which is apparently being re-released... Hey! Everything old is new again! It really is constant rebirth! ... Save me, jeebus.)

Don't get me wrong. It's not a bad film in the same way that Annihilation isn't a bad film. They're just not great ones. Again, the visual style is entrancing all on its own and both Buckley and Kinnear do some great stuff. Harper is shown as a woman who's clearly freaked out by what's happening, but also determined enough to take charge of her circumstances and begin to push back against what's happening to her, which is emblematic of the trauma with which this story began. Kinnear is weird in all of his roles (socially awkward landlord, sleazy minister, perverted schoolboy, diffident cop) but weird in a different way for each one and sells them all, which shows a really remarkable level of versatility. I felt certain that I'd seen him in something other than just his bit parts in the recent Bond films but can't recall anything and now I want to see him in something more. Guess I should watch Our Flag Means Death. But this film sold me on the cast's acting chops, not its own story. And that's why I opened by talking mostly about technique. Garland is a great director and, in that way, a great storyteller. He just doesn't seem to have great stories to exercise that ability upon. Is it worth the two hours? It's not "unworth" it, but I'm still kind of waiting for a payoff that doesn't make me feel like it should've come about 15 minutes faster.

Deux au cinéma

I'm generally not a fan of French films. I've seen many and some I thought were excellent (Blue is the Warmest Color; Portrait of a Lady on Fire) but many others have left me generally unimpressed or detached. I don't find the appeal in the way I do Japanese or Mexican films, by and large. But the last two films we've seen at the Michigan/State have, indeed, been French. We saw one based on creator and the other based on topic and they again hit the range of my experience with French cinema, as one was well-done but underwhelming and the other was great and not easily forgettable.

The first was Petite Maman, a film written and directed by Céline Sciamma, who also wrote and directed Portrait. It's a quite simple but still fantastical story about dealing with grief, the scars of childhood, and the life experiences that shape one both as a child and an adult. It's a thoughtful film and Sciamma's style seems to be to minimize dialogue in favor of physical expression. That's a fine method and there are many films down through the years that probably could have benefited from that approach. I think it's a great way to convey emotion without overburdening scenes and Portrait was a fine example of that. But inasmuch as simple stories can sometimes have excellent depth, Petite Maman failed to deliver. While it remained interesting to watch the development of Nelly (Joséphine Sanz) and Marion (Gabrielle Sanz) and the film didn't feel overlong, it also never felt like any of the dramatic moments conveyed the emotion that a film like Portrait does. In a way, I kept waiting for it to reach a peak of some kind, but the whole time it pretty much stayed in its place, not disturbing anything around it and not driving the audience to feel anything except a form of blasé morbidity about what was happening and what the two girls were experiencing. In a sense, given that we start in the future-present of the characters' lives and interact with the past-present, we end up knowing everything that's going to happen. Sometimes that's a fine thing, as it is with rewatching a favorite film, as you get to pick out the little moments that are highlights and which compel you to watch again. But there weren't really any of those moments in this film and the emotion that could have been delivered was left wanting. I don't think it was a failure by Sciamma, as I think avoiding high emotion was her intent in delivering the story. But it simply didn't resonate with me and was one of those moments of detachment where I could have been half-watching and still would've gotten the same effect.

In contrast, Happening is a film that really can't be ignored or experienced without being drawn in to what's transpiring on the screen. It certainly doesn't hurt that the subject of the film, a young woman trying to deal with an unwanted pregnancy at a time when ending that condition in France was illegal, is unfortunately quite timely here in the medieval United States. Director and co-writer Audrey Diwan spares no visuals whatsoever, as the more enlightened European attitudes toward nudity (In a film about sex! Horrors.) are used to good effect to show the reality of what Anne (Anamaria Vartolomei) is experiencing, physically and emotionally. Indeed, it's the focus on her inner feelings that keeps us enraptured to the screen during every second of this piece, even when she's doing something as commonplace as walking down a rural road to her parents' tavern. As an aspiring university student, she feels as if there's no way that she can have a child, socially or economically, and she tries to find every possible method to change her circumstances. There's a quite pointed scene where she discovers that she's been deceived by a doctor who pretends to help her and instead hinders her goal because he "feels it isn't a woman's choice." I had instant flashbacks to the pictures of Fox News assembling a panel to discuss the topic, made up exclusively of older, White males.

Among the visuals unsparingly presented are those of both the procedure she finally secures and its unfortunate aftereffects. I mentioned afterwards that one of my lasting memories of the film are going to be of both Tricia and Jaime squirming on either side of me in the theater watching those scenes. But this was the reality of women at that time and will, of course, soon be the reality for even more women here in the States. I appreciated that Diwan not only told a moving and human story conveyed through Vartolomei's eyes of obvious mental anguish, but also of the harsh reality that making a personal choice about one's self and one's life resulted in because others sought to deny those decisions. As Jean (Kasey Mottet Klein) attempts to mock Anne about whether she enjoyed the sex that now might eliminate her university aspirations and tied the noose of social stigma around her neck, she responds that it was "None of your business!", which is exactly the truth. Like Maman, Happening is also not a complicated story. But it's one of great depth that brings significant impact to the viewer and one that I'd recommend to everyone; French cinéma enthusiast or no.

Hammered

There are few topics that will present a film with as daunting an underpinning as the Holocaust. It's a fair statement to suggest that it might be difficult to approach from a new angle or be able to say something that hasn't been stated in the many excellent films about it that have been done in the past half-century. But it's a topic that continues to resonate because of the lasting tragedy that it was and continues to be. Indeed, with the rise of fascism in many nations around the world at present, it's a story that almost demands to be told again; a story of unfathomable cruelty that begins with a simple assumption about people as 'others', rather than as humans. In this respect, The Survivor is another in the long list of those films that delivers that brutal message with hands both overt and subtle. Almost like a talented boxer, you might say.

I didn't know the story of Harry Haft before seeing it this evening, so everything that was old was new again, as it were, and I certainly appreciate that both writer Justine Joel Gilmer and director Barry Levinson apparently stuck closely to the work of Harry's son, Alan, who wrote the book that the film is based on, which in turn was based on the stories that Harry relayed to him throughout his life. In historical films like these, you often don't want to take liberties with a tragedy that still remains a living memory to many people and because the dramatic effect is already built in. You don't need to try very hard to make people react to what was done in the camps and what effects it had on the people who did manage to survive, as well as those who lived alongside them in the years that followed. All of those emotional effects are on display in this film and it's something that can and should resonate with any empathetic person. The aspect that always reaches me in films like this is the question of how these characters- these humans -deal with the mental and emotional impact, not only of things that happened to them, but decisions that they made that contributed to or altered those events.

In this case, the most obvious element of that was Harry boxing in the camps at the behest of an SS officer. In doing so, he was seen as "cooperating" with the scions of evil that were torturing him and everyone he knew because of their identity. But it was also a perfect example of a survivor's instinct (hence, the title.) Not only did he accept the path that was offered to him on behalf of his own lizard brain, as the first instinct of most when offered a route out of that hell would be to take it, but also because he was driven by the memory of his lover, Leah, and figured that the better the chance he stood of survival, the better the chance he would be reunited with her. Those are both quite self-oriented motivations. But as his friend, John, also suggests to him at one point, they can be seen as an expression of defiance all their own, in that not only would he not be killed at the hands of the butchers that treated him as something subhuman, but he would persist beyond all their efforts to treat him as something less than, so that he could return to at least some part of the life that had been normal before they arrived. In that respect, it was a personal statement that represented all those who came through the Nazi effort to exterminate them; that no matter how hard they tried, Harry and his people would survive. That SS officer suggests to Harry that it's a choice between being the hammer or the anvil, but the anvil always survives the attempts by the hammer to reshape it, even if it leaves marks in the process.

It takes an actor of a certain magnetism to carry that role and I think Ben Foster and his driving eyes was an ideal choice. He was excellent as the younger brother in Hell or High Water and also steals a couple scenes as Charlie Prince in 3:10 to Yuma, which is a personal favorite. In this film, you're never in doubt that Harry is struggling with every breath as he yearns for his lost love, who had become the driving force of his life in the camps, and with the guilt that he carried from those camps, which is the weight that drags at his every step in the decades that followed. You can see his reluctance to get close to anyone, for fear of losing them like he lost Leah, but also perhaps for fear of infecting them with the remorse that he carries for being the survivor that he is. Vicky Krieps is also solid as the woman who tries to reach inside that shell, not out of pity, but because she can see the human and the very human choices that he made in order to be standing next to her in the first place. Similarly, Peter Sarsgaard gives a good turn as a reporter who can also see something more than just the brawler that Harry presents in the ring. I think Levinson borrowed somewhat from earlier films with the decision to show all of the flasbbacks to the camps in black-and-white, but it doesn't come across as trite. Also, Hans Zimmer's score is as brilliant as ever, following each scene with a sound that never loses poignancy, regardless of what's happening on the screen.

If you've been reading these for any stretch of time, you've probably come to understand that the storytelling approaches that most appeal to me are those that ask basic questions about humanity and how characters deal with those questions and the ripples that they leave, even in hammered steel. Definitely worth a watch.