PFF33 Day One: SNAFUs and a Very Good Dog

Opening up the festival with the Munich Hostage Crisis and feral Chinese dogs

I love Festival Season. As a longtime Oscar watcher and film obsessive I’d scour every trade I could to see what the hottest incoming releases were. Once I got to college and realized that the Philadelphia Film Festival was not just a local fest but, in fact, had heavy hitters, I did my damndest to attend nearly every year I was in the city. So far, it’s been the only festival I’ve had the pleasure to go to – mainly out of location and timing concerns, and thanks to being in college for all that time. PFF is as associated with fall as my own birthday, and coming back feels like home in a way.

The point of this long-winded intro is that I consider myself a pretty plugged in person, one who’s just started going to the Opening Night showings because I both have a job and have passes that make it easy to decide whether I want to or not (also helped that the last two have been American Fiction and The Banshees of Inisherin, even if I only got to see the latter). Which is to say I was a bit surprised and confused when September 5 (Grade: C+) was announced as this year’s opener because I was pretty sure I had never heard of it until then. Turns out, I had; it was at Venice and a couple other festivals. It’s not difficult to understand why it might’ve been chosen either. Set during the 1972 Munich Olympics, it follows an ABC TV crew as they stumble upon and begin reporting on the Israeli team being taken hostage by Palestinian terrorists, most famously dramatized in Steven Spielberg’s Munich.

It’s undeniably tense and often gripping, with the added pleasures of the many analog processes needed to bring live news coverage in front of television viewers (I didn’t realize that captions had to be physically made like that), and for the most part it avoids slipping into Newsroom-style “how it should’ve gone”. But at the same time, I can’t help but focus on the fact that it reduces the Palestinians to faceless terrorists, including a very creepy black and white image catching them one on a balcony. To be fair, the film is not unaware of the biases and subjectivity around such an unprecedented event. Multiple arguments occur over whether they can show someone getting shot on live television, and there’s a recurring theme of how bad it would be for Jewish people to once again die horribly on German soil. It never quite reaches the level of soul searching needed to fully fend off whatever the bad vibes, and mostly just settles for recreations. The fact that it doesn’t ever leave the control room hampers things quite a bit too, as does the relative anonymity of most of the workers save Leonie Benesch’s Marianne. Director Tim Fehlbaum was unknown before this. He’d probably be a journyman in a functioning studio system.

Xin and Eddie Peng in *Black Dog*. Credit: The Seventh Art Pictures

This was actually the second film I saw this day, a process that took much longer thanks to some technical problems related to the print that saw us waiting for an hour before it started. Much smoother was Black Dog (Grade: B+), this year’s Un Certain Regard winner at Cannes and boy, does it ever live up to that title. In fact it opens with a whole pack of dogs running across the Gobi Desert, in the process causing a bus to crash. That bus holds our protagonist Lang (Eddie Peng), prone to near total silence like so many Western heroes of yore. He’s been paroled and is on his way back to his decaying industrial town, set to be demolished as part of a revitalization project. Director and co-writer Hu Guan makes wonderful use of the desolate and bare landscapes; even the abandoned buildings look kind of pretty under his eye. It’s at one of these abandoned buildings that he has his first encounter with the titular creature, a vicious greyhound that’s among the many dogs left behind as their owners have picked up or faded away.

In need of money to keep a vengeful gangster off his back, Lang joins up with a dog capturing team (lead by Jia Zhangke, prominent chronicler of modern China. His Caught By The Tides is winding its way through the festival circuit to great reviews) and becomes set on capturing it. Somewhere along the way, a bond forms. The two seem to sense that they’re both trapped in cages not all of their own making, creatures that aren’t bad but just need someone to care for them. It does help that it’s a very good dog and if you’re wondering, yes, the actor – Xin – won the Palm Dog. Guan’s film may not quite cohere together on a full thematic level, at least on first brush, somehow both blunt and elusive. He’s an expert at staging set pieces, and a late one featuring a zoo jailbreak set to Pink Floyd is kind of awe-inspiring. Like its protagonist, you grow to love the thing anyways, warts and all. And if nothing else it’s an absolutely beautiful looking film.

Tomorrow: Sean Baker’s much hyped Palme winner Anora, Renate Reinsve as a single mother, and the first of many Indian films, as well as After Hours.

33rd Philadelphia Film Festival Coverage Starts Tomorrow

A slightly different tack for reporting on Da Movies™

A lot can change in the course of a year. For instance: last year at this time I was still employed, my uncle had just died, and my plans for that year’s Film Fest were scuttled both due to a small concert planning mishap and said death. Not to mention feeling a bit disappointed at the lineup that year – most of the high profile ones had either already released (Anatomy of a Fall, Killers of the Flower Moon) or were being held back for some unknown reason (The Zone of Interest, May/December).

Cut to this year: my job dissolves in November but wow, are the movies great. Which is all to say that today marks the official start of the 33rd Philadelphia Film Festival, aka the moment when my best of list gets filled out. This year is already an embarrassment of riches with the Philadelphia premieres of Anora and The Brutalist but factor in the new Mike Leigh, Payal Kapadia, Steve McQueen, Andrea Arnold, etc etc? Well… scheduling was a bit of a nightmare to say the least. I actually had to buy a badge for the first time this year thanks to demand which means I can now attempt to try every centerpiece plus opening and closing (a small blessing in disguise) and barring a few social events or exhaustion, my plan is once again to squeeze as many movies as I can in front of my eyeballs.

To that end, the purpose of this post. I’m gonna try something I wanted to do last year but couldn’t thanks to aforementioned personal issues, wherein I’ll do a daily recap/rundown of everything I saw in the style of The Dissolve and The AV Club‘s dispatches. The plan is to put up a post the next day with small(ish) reviews, ending with the usual top 10 or so when the festival ends. I will do my absolute best to put it up in a timely fashion – say, the morning of or afternoon – but I’m only human and, because I’m doing this on my vacation time, delays may occur.

All said, I’m pretty excited for this year. Some hard cuts may have had to happen but I’m confident those will come around sooner or later. If everything is as good as the hype has been, the year end list is going to be an absolute ordeal. I can’t wait. Hope you’ll follow along!

Review: Eileen’s Psychosexual Drama Never Comes Together

The Anne Hathaway/Thomasin McKenzie two-hander doesn’t know who its’ title character is

Note: Expanded from Philadelphia Film Festival thoughts

Eileen is the sort of movie that promises a lot from the get-go. In its very first scene, we see the title character (Thomasin McKenzie) observing a couple getting frisky in the car next to her, appearing to get turned on herself before she shoves snow down her pants. The 60s setting and icy New England landscapes would point to some sort of repression on her end; at the very least, with an alcoholic father and dead-end job at a juvenile corrections facility in a remote town, her life doesn’t seem to going great.

All this is before Rebecca Saint John cruises into the parking lot in a Mustang and captures her attention. As embodied by Anne Hathaway (doing an accent, and doing it pretty good), Rebecca is the New Woman: unmarried, unwilling to take men’s shit, handling a cigarette in the way mysterious yet alluring women tend to do in movies like this. She’s arriving to take over for the prison psychologist and begins to take something of an interest in Eileen. Is it a crush? Simple mentorship? Something more sinister? The scene seems set for a dark sort of seduction.

Unfortunately, Eileen herself never seems to snap into focus. McKenzie also does an accent and it’s rather passible, but her character is too passive and internalized. The script is an adaptation of Otessa Mosfegh’s book – written by the author and her husband – and it feels as though large portions of an internal monologue were lopped out rather than integrated. Periodically, there are supremely jarring moments of fantasy where Eileen imagines herself having rough sex with a prison guard or shooting herself in the head, and they always come out of nowhere. It’s hard to even figure out if Eileen has some sort of repressed sexuality or obsessive desire since it’s not always clear what exactly she wants. Which means that Rebecca’s background story involving a prisoner who killed his father starts to become a lot more interesting, despite it being an ostensible side show.

The film takes a sudden swerve in the third act heightened by an impassioned monologue from Marin Ireland that also raises a boatload of interesting things to explore. For a moment, it seems to get into some thorny territory that itself could make a great story, but the movie ends before it has a chance to fully examine that. It’s not an issue of direction – William Oldroyd keeps a tidy pace and a clean visual style that makes great use of dark – but that aforementioned missing bits. It might’ve needed to be longer to fully unpack the impact of the massive twist. As it is, Eileen presents a titilating scenario but can’t make its protagonist shine through it. (C+)

Rebecca Hall Self-Destructs in the Tense, Wild “Resurrection”

The second film from Andrew Semans, available on VOD

Hall gives one of the year’s best performances.

“Trauma” – alongside “grief” – has become something of a trend lately within culture. It comes up in interviews about Marvel properties, it’s the main theme “elevated” horror movies or a new reboot of an 80s property. None of this is new of course: horror is especially fruitful for examining loss or processing something that happened to you. But there is a sense that it’s a little sanitized. The victim is strong; they build defenses and ultimately overcome it.

In Andrew Semans’ Resurrection, the trauma of Rebecca Hall’s character manifests itself in a physical reaction. Her character – Margaret, a pharmaceutical executive – is attending a conference, looking bored. She fidgets, attempts to stay awake, turns her head and catches sight of a man sitting a few rows down. Suddenly, her eyes widen and as she stumbles out of the room, she takes off at a run that turns into a sprint. We don’t yet know who this man is but immediately we can tell he’s bad news.

As the movie starts, Margaret is the quintessential image of the high-powered executive. Steely, determined, there’s an intimidating air to her but with a hint of warmth shown as she gives an intern relationship advice. She has a daughter – Abbie (an excellent Grace Kaufman) -17, and about to head off to college. Her love life consists of calling up a married co-worker for no-strings sex that always happens at her place. Hall plays her as a woman in complete control over every aspect of her life, dominant but not domineering. Naturally, this brief moment of panic sends her spiraling as the man (Tim Roth) reappears around her, always from a distance. Something bad has clearly happened to Margaret in the past, but is it going to happen again?

Resurrection follows a similar path of woman-on-the-verge films like Repulsion or Possession by staying ambiguous about Roth’s character. In a stunning 7-minute monologue in which the background slowly fades to black, Hall details a shocking history of violence, gaslighting, and abuse that sounds too insane for anyone to make up. Her performance in this moment is a tour-de-force: completely absorbing and impossible to turn away. That she’s giving this to her intern who reacts in horrified confusion is what turns the movie on a dime. Semans puts us directly into Margaret’s increasingly paranoid headspace through some savvy camera work and an unnerving score from Jim Williams as Hall’s perfect composure crumbles throughout. It’s a gripping performance, matched perfectly by Roth. He plays David as chillingly polite, almost rational; we know he’s a madman but his reserved tone almost makes us fall for his gaslighting as Margaret regresses more and more.

Perhaps the most devastating plot point – and, in my mind, the key to the film – is through Abbie. Margaret exerts more and more control over her as a means of protection, going as far as to do whiskey shots with her to keep her from leaving their apartment. Logically, she should tell her daughter who this mysterious figure from her past is and explain herself, but she can’t. Her behavior manifests as irrational and frightening, for all intents and purposes looking like a complete mental breakdown. Semans doesn’t turn either side into a villain so much as portray how this unexamined trauma can manifest cyclically; it’s heartbreaking because Abbie clearly sees her mother is suffering but in the process is making her unsafe.

For some people, this movie may not hold together. The ending takes a gigantic leap that – although set up – shifts things into an entirely new direction that clashes with the tone of realism from before. Admittedly, there are some scenes I wish were slightly different, if only to keep it on a more symbolic or psychological level. But there’s something to be said about a movie that fully commits to its premise, logic and sense be damned. Hall is the stand-out, of course: it doesn’t work if we don’t believe her, and I believed her. This is a bold feature, a tightly coiled work of anxiety and tension up to its startling climax. When the filmmaking is this good, what do a few flaws matter?

Spooktober #4: Censor

For the good of the people?

I’ve always been bizarrely fascinated with censorship codes. Maybe it’s living in America, where we don’t have that sort of legal control over media unless it’s like, abuse material (historical examples notwithstanding). Of course, it’s not like America’s own censorship board doesn’t wield a large amount of control over theatrical releasing; think about how the NC-17 – supposedly for more “adult” movies that weren’t porn – ended up becoming near exclusively associated with sexual content to the point that it basically doesn’t exist. All this is done in the name of protection, but who is it really protecting? How does one even determine the right amount of vein slashing and rape that’s acceptable for a motion picture? It’s all very technical stuff.

As you can imagine, Prano Bailey-Bond’s Censor was catnip for me, following – as it does – a censor for the BBFC during the 1980’s video nasty moral panic. In brief, “video nasties” were extremely violent (often sexual) exploitation films that burst in popularity when VHS became popular. The credits show that they included everything from more “classy” pictures like Abel Ferrara’s The Driller Killer to infamous faux-snuff film Cannibal Holocaust; it falls in part to Enid (Niamh Algar, in the titular role) to determine if the film is releasable, and what cuts could be made to allow it in. She takes her job extremely seriously; as she tells her parents, she’s not doing it for entertainment but to “protect people”, as much a product of Thatcherite conservatism as it is lingering guilt over the disappearance of her sister. That deeply repressed guilt starts to bubble back up after viewing a film that strongly resembles the circumstances of that disappearance, throwing her off kilter and beginning a descent into mental collapse.

Bailey-Bond’s film is first and foremost about “vibes”, specifically in capturing the specific era of 80’s Britain in the midst of a moral panic. The BBFC offices here are all drab washed out lighting betrayed by the recurring screams from the women in the films the censors watch. These films themselves are shot in a squarer aspect ration complete with VHS grain to recreate that exploitation aesthetic. Interspersed are hallucinatory sequences reflecting her own fractured state of mind, awash in neon lighting, consciously returning back to the scene of the crime. Although it’s critical of the idea that exploitation movies caused a rash of violent, Bailey-Bond and Anthony Fletcher’s script doesn’t argue that they’re totally harmless. After all, the censors themselves have to expose themselves to some truly awful scenes day in and day out, fake though they might be. Enid professes to not be affected by them, treating it purely as a job, but the film suggests she’s internalized more than she wants to admit.

It all comes to a head in a brilliant final act, in which her two worlds collide and her denial comes spilling out. All this time, Algar has become convinced – without much in the way of evidence – that her sister is actually the actress in the film, and without spoiling, it becomes a cutting statement on conservative hypocrisy and the need to convince oneself that they’re the good guy here. Censor could’ve been a touch longer – I personally would’ve loved to see more of the censorship process itself – if only for Bailey-Bond and Fletcher to expand on their ideas more. Still, this is an audacious debut, one that establishes Bailey-Bond as a filmmaker to watch and Algar as candidate for Best Actress.

A Mea Culpa for The Master

When you’re too young to comprehend a film.

I didn’t “get” Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master the first time I saw it. Or rather, I don’t think I really possessed the skills to appreciate it. My first time was in high school, circa 2014 or so, which was right around when I was really getting into film seriously and checking out lists. I remember drafting an email to Filmspotting because I’d heard them talk enough about it, and asking what it all meant (they were kind enough to respond, so shoutout to them); it wasn’t so much that I thought it was pretentious but that it felt like an series of scenes disconnected from each other, without much meaning. Teenage me really struggled to put it together – and separating it across two nights probably didn’t help much either.

Perhaps it’s one of those movies you need to watch a second time. Perhaps going through college – and also watching quite a lot more films – exposed me to more similar structures. Maybe I just went in with a much open mind, not high off the refrains of “masterpiece” and “Best of the decade”. It might even be that I was mistakenly primed to expect a movie about Scientology, or a two-hander featuring a villainous Philip Seymour Hoffman. Whatever the reason was doesn’t matter anymore. Because now? I get it.

The Master is – in my mind at least – best thought of as a character study of one very specific, very damaged man, Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix). It’s a lot more linear than I remembered it being; while there are some flashbacks (and one moment that takes place solely in his mind), everything you see on screen appears to be pretty much exactly what’s occurring. At first, I actually thought it was about World War I and was going to slot it into the grand theory that “All Works Involving World War I Are About How Fucked Up It Was” before being reminded that no, it’s about the Second one; specifically, the immediate aftermath. One of the key scenes takes place just after we here the announcement of the surrenders on a radio: all the soldiers lining up in formation, traveling up some stairs to hear a speech from a commander. He essentially tells them that the war is over, and they’re going to be reintegrated into society. Civilians will not understand what they’ve been through; it’s possible no one ever will. Crucially, there is no offer of help for these men. These are the ones without prominent injuries, the “normal” ones. They have been through drastic reshapings of their entire personalities, turned into killers, and yet the military expects them to become normal functioning members of society despite having seen the absolute worst that humanity is capable of. Ironically, that’s not too far off from the treatment of veterans in World War I, or even the treatment of veterans today. How can anyone be expected to be normal when your entire state of being has been so altered?

For Freddie, this may have been an impossible task even if he hadn’t been on the frontlines. His first on-screen appearance sees him mimicking sex with a sandwoman, discussing how to get rid of crabs; during a psych eval, he sees every single Rorschach image as genitalia. Soon it will become apparent that he is likely not joking about that. Even if you don’t fully connect with the film as a whole, Phoenix’s performance is still a wonder to witness, with his peculiar way of talking out the side of his mouth, his jerky movements. As charming as he’s capable of being, there’s always the feeling that Freddie is just moments away from violence. This – combined with his habit of borderline poisoning himself – gets him fired from one job and chased off of another.

He quite literally stumbles across salvation in the form of Lancaster Dodd, who’s daughter is getting married on a boat Freddie drunkenly runs to after accidentally poisoning a farmworker. While Dodd – of course – is based off L. Ron Hubbard, I think going in with that knowledge may warp your understanding of who he is. Philip Seymour Hoffman’s performance isn’t menacing, per say, nor does it appear to be overly indebted to the father of Scientology. On some level, he’s performing, yes. But watching it again, I feel that Dodd isn’t anything less than completely genuine about his beliefs, or at least his desire to help people. Does he really believe he met Freddie in a past life, as he claims? Does it necessarily matter? Either way, Freddie’s addition to their party comes not from a desire for conversion, but rather because Dodd wants more of his noxious concoctions.

None of that means that Dodd isn’t also an extremely harmful and manipulative presence. The much praised initial Processing scene shows Freddie subjected to a series of questions that soon begin falling into disturbing and highly personal details (much like the way Scientology collects blackmail material). It’s perhaps telling that Freddie at first finds the process “fun”: at first they merely consist of odd questions like “do you linger at bus stations for pleasure” and “are you thoughtless in your thoughts”. In their article proclaiming it the best scene of the year, the AV Club describes it as “designed to break down a subject’s psyche and offer a kind of euphoric relief from his or her problems.” That part comes when Dodd starts asking him about where his parents are (dead and institutionalized), if he’s killed anyone (Japanese in War and possibly the worker), and – most shocking – if he’s had sex with any of his family members (his aunt, 3 times). At the end, Freddie’s crying, perhaps finally having gotten the burden of his sins off his chest. It’s telling that Dodd doesn’t offer him judgement on any of this; he doesn’t ever bring it up even in the climactic jail scene fight. As questionable as these methods are, does it really matter if people find a sense of healing through them?

As great as this scene is, there’s actually a later moment that I found to be the key to unlocking the film for me. The Cause is at a house in Philadelphia (owned by Laura Dern!); Freddie’s “therapy” has begun in earnest through an exercise in which he walks across the room and touches the wall, describing it, then walks to the window and repeats. Dodd makes him do this over, and over, and over. This is about when Freddie has begun to disturb other members of The Cause including Dodd’s wife Peggy, and his daughter Elizabeth through sexual overtures and violent outbursts. Doubt seems to be spreading within Freddie as well, even though he remains devoted to The Cause. The exercise stretches on as Freddie gets more and more frustrated, until the members break for lunch and he ends up slipping into describing the conditions of the frontlines with each pass from the window to the wall. In this moment, it becomes clear that The Master is pretty much all about the various traumas Freddie has been repressing to his overall detriment. It’s the start of when Peggy begins to seed the idea that Freddie is beyond the help of The Cause, maybe even beyond help in general.

That’s the most fascinating idea in the whole film, the thing that keeps it from being a straight up Scientology take down. Lancaster’s efforts are genuine – even if he claims that they can cure leukemia, among other things. He can see that Freddie is in turmoil. But even a sketchy pseudo-religious movement has to recognize when to cut their losses. In the rapidly changing society of post-war America, people are fumbling around for any sort of authority, any meaning out of the violence that’s been done to them. But how do you move on from this trauma when violence and dysfunction is the only thing you’ve ever known?

The world has changed a lot since 2014. I’ve changed a ton. I wasn’t fully aware of how much the military is about forcing someone to change their entire socialization. I hadn’t yet learned about how traumatized WWI left everyone. Perhaps most relevant, I hadn’t experienced films that were content to let you puzzle out their meaning, extract symbols from shots, let the explicit be implicit. The Master, more than anything, asks a lot out of you simply by following it’s own rhythms, its own psyche of sorts. It’s a mood that can feel impenetrable at first, but reveals a wealth of substance once you open up. I have a feeling I’ll be revisiting There Will Be Blood soon. Having acknowledged they’re both character studies rather than battles – and without the latent contrarianism – feels freeing, like a new period of growth. I can’t wait to experience it.