This essay was originally published at Filmmaker: Dispatch 1, Dispatch 2.
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Dispatch 1
2020 got off to a fine start. In February I made my first visit to the Berlinale, where I interviewed a couple of filmmakers and indulged in the competition lineup, a King Vidor retrospective and the 50th anniversary of Forum. Like all of my festival trips, I considered it a working vacation—a chance to see friends, explore a city and escape for a few days from my suburban, white-collar life. At the last press screening I attended, another critic asked if I was Italian before taking a seat a few feet away. Even in the cloistered environment of the festival, we were all tracking the spread of a virus from China to Milan. I’m sure I’ll never forget the way I downplayed her concerns, assuring her COVID-19 was just another media sensation that would fade away once cable news audiences got bored with the story. Earlier that week we had announced the film lineup for Big Ears, a music and arts festival in Knoxville, Tennessee. I had spoken a day earlier in Berlin with Claire Denis who confirmed, after four years of back and forth, that she and Stuart Staples were coming. That the virus might affect our plans was inconceivable. But then, a week after I returned home, SXSW was cancelled, and five days later Big Ears had no choice but to do the same.
On one of my last days at the Berlinale in 2020, as I was walking toward the Palast, I passed Hong Sang-soo and Kim Minhee walking arm in arm under a red umbrella. That night I got a drink in the hotel bar after filing a festival report and basked for a few minutes in the romance of it all. Film festivals had been a soul-restoring part of my life for nearly two decades, and this had been an especially good one. Often over the past two years I’ve thought that if things never return to normal, or if the film world returned but I was no longer able to participate in it, the sight of Hong and Kim under a red umbrella would be a fine grace note to exit on.
Hong and Kim returned to Berlin this week, as did many, but not nearly all, of the people I’d hoped to see there. The decision in early January to move the European Film Market, Berlinale Co-Production Market, Berlinale Talents and World Cinema Fund to online-only events; the cancellation of all parties and receptions; and the ongoing spread of Omicron in Germany and elsewhere inevitably affected attendance and dampened the spirit of the fest. It was obvious in the uncrowded streets of Potsdamer Platz, the half-capacity theaters, and the mostly-empty press lounge (about one-third as many credentials were issued this year). Despite all of that, the organizers of the Berlinale managed to stage an event that felt like a real film festival, and god bless them for it. I know I needed it. For press, each day began with a free stop in one of two buses outfitted and staffed for rapid tests, followed 20-30 minutes later by a second stop at a nearby tent where we showed our negative result in exchange for a colored wrist band that granted us hassle-free access to every venue. KN95 masks were required everywhere, and so were seldom commented on. The online ticketing system worked perfectly, eliminating any need to wait in queues (a rare net positive of COVID times). And while I’ve heard rumors of positive cases, the only one I can confirm by name is Isabelle Huppert, who had to cancel her trip to Berlin after contracting the virus elsewhere. If the in-the-flesh Berlinale is any indication, 2022 is off to a promising start. (I hope these will be the first and last words I ever publish on the subject of the virus.)
Hong and Kim have certainly done their part to restore some sense of normalcy to this corner of the film world. The Novelist’s Film, which took the Competition Grand Jury Prize, is a story of chance encounters, artists in search of inspiration and drunken confessions—in other words, a Hong Sangsoo film, and an especially affecting one. Lee Hyeyeong plays a highly regarded novelist, which is to say she is the type of Hong character who is recognized on the street by admiring fans and envied by less successful colleagues. When she visits an old friend who has given up her own writing ambitions to run a bookstore, Lee meets an actress (Kim) who has likewise chosen to step out of the spotlight (“I’ve been dealing with some things”) and strikes up an immediate rapport with her. Within minutes, she invites Kim to star in a film that Lee proposes to write and direct herself, and Kim tentatively accepts, both of them rejuvenated by the possibilities of this new friendship. Their conversation gives Hong an excuse to put into Lee’s mouth ideas about art and filmmaking that are familiar to those of us who have followed his career. It’s become “embarrassing” to “pretend” as a writer, Lee says. Instead, she wants to try her hand at movies: “The most important thing is an actor I can freely look at.”
Lee’s presence—both here and in Hong’s previous feature, In Front of Your Face—seems to have freed him somehow to be more direct in his expression of sentiment and anger. When she first meets Kim, she is with a film director (Hong regular Kwon Haehyo) who tells Kim her semi-retirement from acting is a “waste.” It’s an off-hand line, suggesting a compliment, but Lee finds it infuriating. “How can you say that to her?” she asks, her body language punishing the man for assuming the right to assign value to a woman’s choices. “How can you say that to her!” Like so many of Hong’s men, the director tries to talk himself out of his gaff and fails badly. It’s too easy to imagine Hong relishing the opportunity to dress down the type of person who would make similar comments to Kim for her decision to forego mainstream success by working exclusively with Hong. As with many of their collaborations, Hong makes his affection for Kim a subject of The Novelist’s Film, particularly in a formal turn near the end that works aesthetically (there was a palpable change of energy in the theater) while also forcing viewers to reconsider the shape and strategy of the larger film. It’s a lovely, shamelessly romantic moment, as close as Hong has come to expressionistic melodrama.
Claire Denis also took home a Silver Bear, for directing Both Sides of the Blade—her first major award at a European festival since Nenette and Boni won the Golden Leopard in Locarno 25 years ago. There’s a much longer piece to be written about how Denis’s late career has been reshaped by her creative partnership with novelist Christine Angot, with whom she first collaborated on the 2014 short, Voilà l’enchaînement, and again three years later on Let the Sunshine In. Discussing the latter, Denis said, “The line I told Christine was: ‘We don’t have much time. We don’t have much of a budget. Let’s film your words.’” That shift from the mostly silent, expressionless, gestural performances that characterize Denis’s work with screenwriter Jean-Pol Fargeau to the rapid-fire dialogue of Angot’s scripts—delivered by Juliette Binoche no less—has not been greeted with universal enthusiasm by long-time Denis fans, but I find this otherstyle of Denis’s fascinating. Her earlier work is populated with unconventional women—Yekaterina Golubeva’s self-determined, misanthropic immigrant in I Can’t Sleep (1994) and Valérie Lemercier’s searching Laure in Friday Night (2002) are two favorites—but with Angot, Denis seems to have found a comrade and confidante with whom she can sympathetically and dispassionately dissect the modern woman of a certain age.
In Both Sides of the Blade (retitled Fire for IFC’s U.S. release), an adaptation of Angot’s novel, Un tournant de la Vie, Binoche plays Sara, a radio talk show host who has for the last nine years lived with ex-con, ex-rugby star, currently-unemployed Jean (Vincent Lindon). Throughout the first act of the film, Denis emphasizes, with the subtlety of wrecking ball, that the couple’s relationship is loving, supportive and affectionate. In one especially strange sex scene, Binoche, who plays nearly every moment big, cries, “Mon amour! Mon amour! Mon amour! Mon Amour!,” gradually elevating the scene to Buñuelian absurdity. And that’s the fundamental problem with the film, which tries on several different tones but never quite succeeds in bringing them into balance. Midway through, in a miraculous sequence that evokes the sensual pleasures of Denis’s very best work, Sara is reunited with her former lover François (Grégoire Colin) and for a moment I settled in happily to what I assumed would be a Pre-Code-style romance, where psychological realism is thrown off for ecstatic passions and genre plot mechanics. (Tindersticks’s strings-and-woodwinds score certainly implies we’ve entered the heightened reality of old school noir.) Instead, Both Sides of the Blade culminates with extended arguments between Sara and Jean, in which she reveals herself to be a shameless gaslighter and he absorbs her abuse with the solid, quietly threatening resignation that is Lindon’s specialty. The film is another messy but worthy experiment with Angot’s words—made quickly during quarantine, with faces framed in tight closeups and with a spirit of generous curiosity about the crazy-making stupidity of love.
Robe of Gems, winner of the Jury Prize, opens with a long duration shot that begins in darkness before slowly fading into an image of a sparsely wooded landscape. An elderly laborer approaches, stooping down and hacking at weeds with a sickle as the soundtrack becomes a fury of insects. A reflection in the image reveals it’s been shot through a window, which sets up the first cut to the reverse angle, where we see Isabel (Nailea Norvind), a middle-aged, light-skinned woman, whose breasts are being fondled from behind by her husband. It’s a transgressive rather than erotic sequence, that ends with the couple furiously breaking wooden furniture in their well-appointed home. It’s also a bold opening statement from first-time director Natalia López Gallardo that establishes the key dynamics of the film: the intersections of race, class, violence and injustice in provincial Mexico. Having edited many of husband Carlos Reygadas’s films (she also plays his wife in Our Time), López Gallardo will inevitably be burdened with comparisons to his work, but they seem justified in this case: both filmmakers are working in a similar milieu, sharing distinct formal approaches (for example, using extreme anamorphic lenses that distort the edges of the frame), and her slow fade-in recalls the memorable opening of Silent Light. I suspect the success of Robe of Gems might change the critical conversation about both of them, perhaps elevating López Gallardo’s status as co-auteur of her collaborations with Reygadas.
Isabel has moved with her family to the countryside to escape the drama of her divorce and the social niceties of her privileged upbringing, embodied by the dyed-blond hair and sun-beaten, surgically-tightened skin of her disapproving mother. “I’m sorry, but you don’t get how things work here. We see things differently,” the locals say. Rather than being only a film about a naïve, terrorized outsider (although it’s partly that), Robe of Gemsdivides its attention among Isabel and two other women of a similar age: María (Antonia Olivares), a poor housekeeper whose sister has gone missing and who has no choice but to work for the local mafia, and Roberta (Aida Roa), a police commander who accommodates corruption until it threatens the safety of her teenage son, a wannabe social media influencer and gangster. That all three stories take a tragic turn comes as little surprise; from the opening shot, Robe of Gems announces itself as the kind of contemporary art film that transforms liberal guilt and the incomprehensible brutalities of socioeconomic inequality (“As you know, we find bodies every day”) into a signature style. López Gallardo’s is marked by the staging of action along multiple planes (while two people talk in the foreground, a girl circles them on a bicycle; while two girls sit in a parked SUV, their heads turned away from the camera, an industrial belt churns in the background); by bursts of unmotivated expressionism seemingly plucked from López Gallardo’s unconscious (three gangsters move in slow motion under fluorescent light to the throbbing drone of EDM); and by aggressive sound design. López Gallardo has said Robe of Gems is about “what we carry inside after years of accumulating, in our minds and dreams, infinite images of torture.” Her style instantiates that idea by drifting between the subjectivities of her characters. At its best, the film is a disorienting and thrilling experience.
Dispatch 2
My favorite film of the Berlinale was Queens of the Qing Dynasty, Ashley McKenzie’s ambitious and otherworldly fantasia about a “queer friendship romance” between a suicidal young woman and a Chinese immigrant she meets while hospitalized. Inspired by two teenagers she befriended during the casting of her previous feature, Werewolf (2016), McKenzie first sketched out the central character, Star (Sarah Walker), whose everyday life is mediated by endless negotiations with social workers, doctors, guardians, landlords and the various bureaucracies that employ them. Star is aging out of child protective services and has been deemed unfit to live independently, so as the film begins she’s in an especially precarious state. The project blossomed when McKenzie met Ziyin Zheng, a neighbor who had emigrated from China to attend graduate school in Cape Breton, the isolated community in Novia Scotia where McKenzie lives and works, and also to more freely express their sexuality. In consultation with Zheng, McKenzie invented An, a volunteer at the hospital who is hoping to become a Canadian citizen. Star and An meet a few minutes into Queens of the Qing Dynasty—An has been assigned to her as an advocate and companion—and the remainder of the film isn’t so much a telling of their evolving relationship as a heightened, sensory-triggering experience of it. “We have chemistry, chemical connections,” Star tells An. “We’re mixin’ chemicals. I can feel it.”
McKenzie’s formal approach is to trap viewers immediately within Star’s subjective experience of the small and shrinking world around her. (When An scrolls through Star’s Instagram, they mostly see pictures of other hospital rooms.) The first cut of the film is to Star’s first-person perspective of her own hand, which is holding a bottle of activated charcoal; as a nurse encourages Star to drink it to counteract the poison she’d ingested, the electronic score overtakes the soundtrack, drowning out the nurse’s voice and stealing away Star’s attention. We observe Star mostly in close-up: Walker’s large round eyes stare without blinking or fully comprehending what she sees, but also without judgment or irony. One of the many pleasures of Queens of the Qing Dynastyis the emotional intimacy generated by a character who lives in a perpetual state of radical, reckless honesty. When Star and An visit the maternity ward and watch nurses swaddle newborns, pinning down their arms and legs with a knotted blanket (“I very much want to be one of those babies,” An confesses), McKenzie cuts from a newborn’s face to Star’s, reinforcing a notion I’d already become conscious of—that the film was actively situating me in a diegetic space untainted by ego. “You speak what’s in your mind,” An tells Star. “I like that.”
The only useful point of comparison I have for much of Queens of the Qing Dynasty is Tony Kushner’s Angels in America and, in particular, the first encounter between Harper and Prior—the queered attraction between Star and An, the healing and liberation they both seem to experience only in each other’s presence, and the self-consciously symbolic/poetic/camp drama they occupy. The two-hour runtime allows McKenzie room to stitch together a patchwork mythology in which Star and An play epic roles. The title of the film refers to a story An shares, of ancient Chinese concubines who manipulated men to consolidate power and avoid manual labor. “They extend their empire while keeping their nails long,” An says. Star often becomes distracted by a series of grotesque and mesmerizing cartoons that seem to stream on every phone, TV, and monitor in their strange, self-contained world. And late in the film, when Star is granted a day pass from a mental health facility, An takes her to an arcade where they lose themselves in a virtual reality world. It’s a miraculous scene, with dialogue worthy of Kushner. (That’s the highest compliment I can offer McKenzie’s script—this is one of the biggest small films I’ve seen.) “I’m no longer trapped. I like your love,” An says, as the VR game’s sentimental score swells. Star lifts her goggles and smiles. “Maybe we should kiss. We are going to conquer empires.” To borrow Harper’s line: “This is the very threshold of revelation sometimes.”
The other standout of the fest was the equally ambitious and otherworldly Dry Ground Burning, Adirley Queirós and Joana Pimenta’s follow up to Once There Was Brasilia (2017). Queirós has said of the earlier film that its Afrofuturist, sci-fi design was, in part, a byproduct of refusing to work with the standard visual language and narrative codes handed down by traditional Western cinema. “If we follow such tropes, we’ll never have a chance to actually find our own selves in the film,” he told Ela Bittencourt. His comment came in the context of a larger conversation about “the sheer impossibility of representing Brazilian politics” in the months leading up to the election of Bolsonaro and the triumph of Brazil’s extreme right. Likewise, Dry Ground Burning is a ramshackle (in the most exciting sense of the word) mash-up of genres, equal parts Western, gangster film, Mad Max-like dystopia and documentary. Like Juliano Dornelles and Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Bacarau (2019), it instantiates a world that seems to exist outside of time, incomprehensibly cruel and unjust but also imbued somehow with revolutionary potential. Even if that potential is only aspirational—wishful thinking in cinematic form—it’s nonetheless a radical method of representing the “own selves” of Brazil’s marginalized poor.
In Dry Ground Burning, a gang of women from Sol Nascente, a sprawling favela on the western edge of Brasilia, have commandeered an oil processing facility and are selling gasoline on the black market. When Queirós and Pimenta first conceived of the story in 2015, oil was nationalized under Lula; by the time they went into production, Bolsonaro’s extractive profiteering seemed to the filmmakers to be an act of war against his own people. “All of this is federal land now,” Caca tells his sister Léa (Léa Alves), as they look out over the dry valley beneath his home. Léa has just returned from prison, like a time traveler discovering a new and different nation, and joined up with their half-sister Chitara (Joana Darc), who leads the gang. Dry Ground Burning pulls on a number of fascinating narrative and thematic threads—one woman runs for office, soldiers in an armored vehicle threaten to attack, there’s documentary footage from an actual Bolsonaro rally, Alves (either the character or the actress, I’m not sure which) is arrested for selling drugs, there’s music and dancing and a queer carnivalesque energy to much of it—but the film works primarily because of Alves and Darc, whose riveting screen presences reminded me of the thrill of meeting Ventura and Vanda for the first time when I saw Colossal Youth in 2006. Pedro Costa’s influence looms large here, not only in Queirós and Pimenta’s use of non-professional actors but also in their attention to the systemic exploitation of laborers who build our cities and cultural institutions, only to be excluded from them. Brasilia, which Queirós has called “a postcard city, a holographic projection,” is often visible on the distant horizon, like the museums and monuments of Costa’s Lisbon.
Dry Ground Burning premiered in Forum, which since 1971 has run alongside the Berlinale, with independent curation by Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art (previously the Friends of the German Film Archive). From its inception, Forum has been committed to spotlighting smart and politically engaged work that pushes film form, with little regard for commercial potential. Alain Gomis’s new essay film, Rewind and Play, exemplifies the best of that tradition. While researching another, larger project on Thelonious Monk, Gomis discovered two hours of unused footage from the taping of Jazz Portrait, a television program recorded in-studio one afternoon in December 1969 before Monk’s Paris concert. In the aired version of the episode, Monk answers two mundane questions from host Henri Renaud, in between solo romps through a selection of songs, but the found footage reveals a tense and disturbing production. To start, Renaud, a bandleader and music producer by trade, wasn’t prepared for such a difficult interview. Within two years, Monk would leave public life due to increasing mental health problems; bassist Al McKibbon later recounted, “Monk said about two words [on the last tour]. I mean literally maybe two words.” The Monk we meet in Rewind and Play offers direct answers to Renaud’s questions—why did he put his grand piano in the kitchen? “That was the largest room in the apartment.”—but is unwilling or unable to engage in chat-show banter. It’s an old cliché, I know, but late-1960s Monk epitomizes the troubled artist who would rather communicate through art than words. And goddamn could he communicate at the piano. Rewind and Play would be worth recommending if only for the extensive footage of Monk performing song after song—flat-fingered, perspiring, humming to himself as he tears through his signature glissandos and reinvents harmony.
I suppose simply acknowledging my use of a cliché isn’t enough to let me off the hook. I’ve already fallen into the same rhetorical trap that Renaud and the makers of Jazz Portrait leapt into without conscience, framing Thelonious Monk as an exotic type, an Inspired Genius or Idiot Savant, and holding him up for display rather than engaging the actual man at the seat. “The archive is never neutral,” Gomis has said of Rewind and Play, and the brilliance of the film is the efficiency with which it exposes the racist power structures that framed much of Monk’s career, and by extension the careers of so many Black musicians. In take after take we watch Renaud finetune his telling of a story about the trip he made, a decade earlier, to visit Monk in New York. The point of the telling is that he, Renaud, is the true hero of the story, the elite tastemaker who recognized Monk’s talents before he found wider acclaim. (That Monk had already been playing in America for 20 years before being “discovered” by Renaud is one of many unspoken ironies running through the film.) When Renaud asks Monk about his first concert in Paris, Monk, who is patient and accommodating to a fault, becomes more talkative, explaining that he was frustrated at the time to see his face on the cover of local magazines, all the while knowing he was the lowest-paid performer on the bill. Renaud’s expression turns dour and he cuts him off. “That’s not nice,” Renaud says, every bit the stereotype of a paternalistic villain. Monk expresses a lifetime of canny disappointment with his whispered reply: “It’s not nice?” Gomis designs the sequence so that Monk’s line really lands—finally, fifty years too late—while Renaud and crew reset the shot for another take.
I saw only a handful of new films from the Forum program this year, but all are worthy of a quick recommendation. In Camouflage, Jonathan Perel documents author Félix Bruzzone’s investigation into the disappearance and murder of his mother during Argentina’s Dirty War. Rather than following the standard protocols of the genre—it’s easy to image a Netflix-friendly version with expert talking heads, an affected voiceover and montages of scanned photos and archival documents—Perel focuses, instead, on Bruzzone himself. The opening shot is of his bare, running feet, and as the film evolves the images of Bruzzone’s relentless motion and expressionless face come to embody the traumatic legacy he and so many of his neighbors have inherited. After buying a home nearby, Bruzzone began jogging around Campo de Mayo, a century-old, 20,000-acre military facility in Buenos Aires that, from 1976 to 1982, housed four secret detention centers. Still an active, walled-off base, Campo de Mayo is also an overgrown nature preserve in the heart of the city and an object of fascination for some in the community, while others seem resigned to its presence and unaware of, or uninterested in, its dark history. Much of Camouflage is built from staged conversations between Bruzzone and other locals, who share with him what they know of the base, rounding out his understanding of his mother’s final days. He wanders through the ruins of buildings where she likely lived and died. He and the crew have a brief, uneventful encounter with soldiers. And in the final sequence, he participates alongside a large group of runners in an obstacle race through the property. On paper, it reads as too on-the-nose, but I found myself overwhelmed by a point-of-view shot of Bruzzone firing at a target with a military-style rifle. The noise of the gun and the casual violence of the context make the shots physically present, and terrifying, in a way I don’t recall experiencing before in a film.
Not surprisingly, Forum included a few titles that could be loosely described as COVID films. During the first lockdown, Tyler Taormina, the writer and director of Ham on Rye (2019), returned for a few months to his family home in suburban New York, where he and cinematographer Jesse Sperling rounded up a cast of friends, neighbors, and family members to make Happer’s Comet, a 62-minute experiment in tone. And it really does feel like an experiment as if Taormina challenged himself to see how long he could sustain the strange sensation of walking around your home in the early morning hours, not quite recognizing long-familiar objects illuminated by passing headlights, or noticing for the first time the machine hum of your refrigerator. There’s no plot to speak of in Happer’s Comet; rather, the majority of the film is a montage of isolated night-time incidents that Taormina gradually assembles into a portrait of an isolating community. When his tonal experiment begins to strain, he wisely wraps the project with a subdued but satisfying and mysterious climax that suggests the necessity of human connection—or at least a good romp in a cornfield. I have a weakness for films in this mode. The sound design, which was constructed entirely in post, recalls David Lynch, and the observational style reminded me of José Luis Guerín’s In the City of Sylvia (2007) and Stéphane Lafleur’s You’re Sleeping, Nicole (2014).
In their directors’ statement, Alejo Moguillansky and Luciana Acuña emphasize that The Middle Ages is a film made duringCOVID lockdown but that it is not a film about COVID lockdown. I’m not convinced the distinction is as important as they make it out to be, but the film itself is tightly constructed, tenderhearted, and fun—another small movie with big ambitions. The co-directors and their daughter, Cleo, play versions of themselves, isolated in their two-story flat, getting by as best as they can. All three spend much of their time in front of screens: Alejo attempts to direct a play by Beckett, Luciana teaches dance classes, and Cleo makes some effort to keep up with school and piano lessons. Watching The Middle Ages in 2022 actually made me a bit nostalgic for the early months of the pandemic, when the madness of the situation still had an edge to it. Cleo wants to buy a telescope, so she begins smuggling items out of the house and splitting the profits with a friend who sells them. It’s a clever plot device that foregrounds the general anxiety of the moment, the very real fear that economic and social structures are collapsing, especially for people who make their living in the arts. The Middle Ages is a comedy concerned with life’s most persistent and absurd question: “How should we then live?” I told a friend after the screening that I enjoyed the film so much because Moguillansky and Acuña capture how overwhelming and joyful it can be to love a child, which is one approach, I think, to answering that question.