SIFF Advance: THE SUMMER WITH CARMEN

Directing: B
Acting: B
Writing: B
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B-

There’s a lot of dicks in The Summer with Carmen. It’s largely set at a clothing-optional queer beach in Athens, Greece, where platonic friends Demosthenes (Yorgos Tsiantoulas) and Nikitas (Andreas Labropoulos) hash out the plot points of a movie script. Nikitas is directing and Demosthenes is maybe starring, and they are co-writing the story based on Demosthenes’s recent life experiences, including an ambivalent love life with Panos (Nikolaos Mihas) and a passive aggressively homophobic mother (Roubini Vasilakopoulou). We see the scenes they discuss play out in flashbacks, regularly cutting back to this day at the nude beach, where occasional hookups are playing out in the open around them, but Nikitas and Demosthenes are concentrating on their scripts, occasionally taking breaks to swim.

There is always a subtle, tongue-in-cheek presentation to The Summer with Carmen, where the story playing out pointedly reflects the plot constructions of their script, or even more on the nose, the script writing book Nikitas has with him as a reference. There’s also the unseen producer they talk about, who wants their movie to be “fun, sexy”—and so, Greek director and co-writer Zacharias Mavroeidis wants us to think of The Summer with Carmen as “fun, sexy” primarily by giving us plenty of close up shots of butts and cocks attached to generally hot bodies at a nude beach.

The metatextual approach was once something I found myself really into as a narrative device—I used it a lot in my own writing 25 years ago—but it has long since lost its novelty. What I’ll give to The Summer with Carmen is the casual way it’s used, in a very laid back, beach-stained story. I use the word “beach” loosely here, as this queer beach is mostly large rocks. I have clearly gotten old, because in one scene, Demosthenes bounds up some rocks in the nude, and rather than admiring his incredible body I just worried about how badly he could hurt himself if he slipped and fell.

There’s a fair amount of sex in this movie, but very little of it at this beach where you might expect to see most of it. The few times it does come up is as humorous asides, such as when Nikitas feels bad for an older man trying to get a “pervy peek” at two other guys who tell him to fuck off. The sex actually serving the story happens in the flashbacks that make up the scenes Nikitas and Demosthenes are writing, in which Demosthenes hooks up with guys in the wake of his breakup with Panos, all the while leaving Nikitas unattended to as his close friend.

That is what The Summer with Carmen is about, really: Demosthenes and Nikitas’s friendship. I always enjoy when a movie focuses on friendship more than romance, as it still gets sidelined most of the time, and especially when it’s between two characters that many writers would want to give some kind of romantic tension. Even in stories about gay friends, writers often throw in something about how they tried to be romantic and it never worked. There is no indication that Demosthenes and Nikitas ever had any romantic or sexual interest in each other, only that they have always been close friends and collaborators.

That said, the cynical side of me doesn’t feel that bad for Nikitas. Romance taking priority over friendship is just the way the world works, and it kind of feels like Nikitas is just pouty and doesn’t understand that. Through the course of this movie, though, we get title cards about the rules of script writing, while it identifies Demosthenes as “The Hero” (and Nikitas as “The Heroe’s Friend”), and that according to the basic rules of script writing, The Hero must learn something and change in some way by the end. In The Summer with Carmen, Demosthenes changes, to one degree or another, in both his romantic and platonic relationships. Except he very directly addresses the fact that scripts only end there and never reveal the frequency with which people just go back to their old habits.

There is a certain cleverness to The Summer with Carmen—the Carmen of the title is a dog, by the way, which Panos adopts after the breakup, and then Demosthenes becomes attached to after offering to pet sit, it’s a whole subplot with a somewhat nebulous reflection of the primary plot. It also has undeniable charm, especially with its breezy yet frank reflection of sexuality among gay men in their thirties.

There is nothing profound or deeply memorable about this movie, nor does it aspire to these things. In fact, it’s very direct about its aspirations to be simply fun and sexy—although Demosthenes and Nikitas also discuss the complications of throwing in heavy themes like homophobia and an ailing parent. The Summer with Carmen never gets too heavy with these things, though, and uses them only to give its characters a measure of weight. I felt the editing could have been tighter, the ton of this movie being more suited to a breezy 90 minutes than even the 106 minutes it runs. But, I still had a lovely time with it.

Sun’s out, plot turns out: Nikitas and Demosthenes rehash their lives in a script written in the buff.

Overall: B

SIFF Advance: SEBASTIAN

Directing: B
Acting: A-
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B

There’s a lot of gay sex in Sebastian. Many of these scenes go on longer than you might expect, and are unusually frank, it not overly explicit. It seems to be part of the point, given the title character is engaged in sex work in nearly every case, and he comments on how sex workers using modern technology regard it as a job, like any other.

As always, it’s the context that matters. “Sebastian” is actually a pseudonym, used by Max, a 25-year-old writer working for a magazine, getting short stories published, and working to finish a novel. This is where Sebastian’s premise gets particularly compelling: evidently unable to dream up scenarios for his fiction that feel authentic, Max’s “research” involves engaging in actual sex work.

Sebastian has far less to say about sex work, actually, than it does about the ethics of representation. Max is constantly telling people he gets the details for his content from interviews with sex workers; he’s not telling anyone he’s doing the work himself—and, somewhat predictably, he gets in over his head in this endeavor. Why Max doesn’t just do the actual interviewing of seasoned sex workers instead of lying about it is really never made clear. Perhaps he’s genuinely interested in sex work but can’t admit it to himself.

We never get a straight (so to speak) answer to this. There’s a memorable line during a conversation with Max about his novel in progress, another man tells him he spoke to a woman sex worker once, and asked about how she must, inevitably, find some of her clients repulsive. “She said it was never about them,” the man says. “It was always about her.”

Clearly we are meant to infer the same to be the case with Max/Sebastian. But why? To what end? This is, to me, the open mystery of Sebastian. There’s another exchange where Max complains about his own work having nothing to say. His friend retorts that his work need not always have something to say, it need only be true. The tension I constantly felt with this film was whether it’s presenting itself as something “true,” or if it indeed has something to say. I found it difficult to gauge, which kept me at a distance from it.

Which is not to say I didn’t find it engaging, if for no other reason than Ruaridh Mollica’s stellar performance as Max. There’s a moment when another character, another person in the home of one of his clients, says something that could have been the casting call description Mollica responded to: “You have this wholesome, boy-next-door look. But underneath. it’s all filth.” Mollica plays Max with a stunningly calibrated level of nuance, a guy who is eternally uneasy and vulnerable, but with a sturdy sexual confidence. I can’t think of any other character in film that I have ever seen quite like him.

Max’s clientelle tends to skew toward older men, and to Sebastian’s credit, these characters are all very well drawn, and feel like people with real-world dimensions. This film rightly doesn’t judge any of them, even as they have varying reasons for hiring a sex worker. Max has these experiences with them. and the way writer-director Mikko Makela puts this film together, it cuts mid-experience to Max at his laptop later, writing about the experience but from the perspective of Sebastian. This makes it impossible to tell how much truth there is to the rest of these hookup scenes, and how much Max is embellishing or inventing for his novel.

When Max develops a nonprofessional affection for one of his older male clients, Nicholas (Jonathan Hyde), he incorporates this turn into the novel he’s writing. Ironically, his publisher announces that this turn away from all the emotionally detached sex work is something that doesn’t work for the novel, while it’s the very thing that makes Sebastian more interesting. Max even makes reference to it being a means of handing down queer history between generations of gay men that might never have otherwise had anything to do with each other. I’d have loved for Sebastian to explore this more, but evidently the movie is as interested in that as Max’s publisher is.

By the end, Sebastian does manage to shift into a space I did find moving. But, overall, it feels like something is missing, something vital left unexplored. At least Ruaridh Mollica very much elevates the material with his performance, and I’ll be thinking about it for a while.

A perfect performance in an imperfect story.

Overall: B

SIFF Advance: MERCHANT IVORY

Directing: B
Writing: B
Cinematography: B
Editing: B+

How could I have gone this long, literally decades, without fully registering that Ismail Merchant, the producer half of the legendary filmmaking duo (and production company) Merchant Ivory, was an Indian man? I need to start paying attention! At this rate, I’ll never become a bona fide elegant gay elder of refined taste.

There was sure a lot of those at the SIFF screening of this film I just attended. This, I suppose, is one of the pitfalls of a documentary portrait of towering figures late in their lives: who else is left around to remember them? Or, at least, to remember their early days?

Ismail Merchant has been dead now for 19 years, having died in 2005, at age 68, after surgery for abdominal ulcers. Thus ended a personal and professional partnership with James Ivory—an American man born in 1928 who grew up in small-town Oregon—that lasted more than forty years. With Merchant producing and Ivory directing, much of the time also working with longtime collaborators writer Ruth Prawer Jhabvala and composer Richard Robbins, they made 44 films together.

A large number of them, of course, were British period films—the very thing they became most well known for, although they did make some films with contemporary settings. The most enduringly famous, however, included A Room with a View (1985); Maurice (1987); Howard’s End (1992); and The Remains of the Day (1993). Many years later, in 2018 James Ivory became the oldest person ever, at age 89, to win an Oscar, for his Adapted Screenplay for Call Me By Your Name, a film that really fits into the Merchant Ivory pantheon, particularly as an updated gay love story.

The gayness of it all is largely explored in this new documentary feature film, Merchant Ivory, directed and co-written by Stephen Soucy. He interviews Ivory himself extensively, inserts many clips of archival interviews with Merchant, and features a star studded array of other subjects from the duo’s storied film history: Hugh Grant, Helena Bonham Carter, Emma Thompson, a characteristically spitfire Vanessa Redgrave, as well as some of the writers and costume designers of the films, among others. There are also some notable absences, including Daniel Day-Lewis (hardly a surprise; he hasn’t given an interview to anyone in years), and Anthony Hopkins, who sued Merchant Ivory for unpaid wages after his performance in the 2009 film The City of Your Final Destination. It was the last of four Merchant Ivory films he was in.

Anyway, Maurice was a groundbreaking film in mainstream gay cinema, especially having come right after the success of A Room with a View. Many of the interview subjects discuss how rightly impressed they are by that accomplishment. Conversely, James Ivory himself is relatively cagey about questions regarding his sexuality—fairly frank in answering some questions, but somewhat evasive in others. Merchant Ivory is, at least in part, a fascinating portrait of a privileged sort of existence among gay men who once lived not exactly closeted, but as an open secret. Ivory and Merchant might as well have been a longtime married couple, but their relationship was not without volatility, with both of them (but evidently, especially Merchant) taking on other temporary lovers as time went on.

The thing about this documentary in particular, is it would qualify as a pretty niche interest. It’s for lovers of sophisticated period dramas, and for anyone interested in the subtle history of queerness in cinema. That does make for a Venn diagram with significant overlap. But outside of that, I’m not sure how much interest this film will hold, especially among younger audiences (and by “younger” I mean, say, younger than 50). Overall cinephiles may find it interesting.

I certainly did, and it compelled me to make a list of Merchant Ivory films I want to revisit, or see for the first time. I have only seen a handful, but of course only a select few would be considered essential in the oeuvre. That said, Merchant Ivory the documentary is fairly simple and straightforward, a compelling document but also mostly something to serve as a jumping-off point. The films they made have a sumptuousness that inherently makes them more interesting than the filmmakers themselves.

The powerhouse Hollywood couple you knew little about.

Overall: B

SIFF Advance: STRESS POSITIONS

Directing: B+
Acting: B+
Writing: B+
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B-

It’s possible I might decide Stress Positions absolutely sticks the landing if I watch it, like, five more times. That’s not likely to happen so I don’t know what to tell you. Except, I suppose, that I feel like, in the end, its narrative conceit went way over my head.

It’s too bad. Director, co-writer, and costar Theda Hammel was at the SIFF screening I attended, and in the post-screening Q&A, she very quickly revealed herself to be whip smart, and ready to answer unusually incisive audience questions with surprising specifics of intention. It’s clear that nothing that happens in this film is an accident, and the intersecting narratives and changing points of view were deeply intentional. For all I know, Hammel could find this very review (I hope not) and deduce that I am an idiot who just didn’t get her art. In that case, she’d be half right.

For a “covid movie” (a pretty reductive way of referring to it, actually), there’s a lot going on here. It’s a movie contextualized by Millennials who came of age in between two era-defining catastrophes: 9/11 and, nineteen years later, the covid-19 pandemic. Hammel finds a way for her characters to refer to this directly by saying ignorant things about Bahlul (Qaher Harhash), the 19-year-old model recovering from a broken leg in the Brooklyn apartment basement of his White uncle Terry (John Early, giving perhaps the best performance I’ve seen him do in anything).

These relationships get sort of convoluted: Bahlul’s mother is Terry’s sister, but we never see her face, only blurry images from behind in flashbacks narrated by Bahlul. There’s a pointed image of her blond hair peaking out from under her head scarf, evidently after she emigrated to Morocco and had a child with a man there. We never fully meet the sister (Bahlul’s mom) or even see Bahlul’s father; we only meet Bahlul, a beautiful young man, often casually lounging around (recovering) in bed or on a couch shirtless, or sometimes in his underwear. This becomes a frequent topic of conversation among Terry’s friends, none of whom seem like great people, which Terry is understandably exasperated by, though his inclination to hide the young man from them, evidently for fear of them exoticizing him, is less understandable.

There’s a lot of voiceover narration in Stress Positions, divided between Bahlul, and Terry’s friend Karla, played by Theda Hammel. It’s relevant to note that both Hammel and the character she plays are trans women, and Karla comes over to the apartment and brings some influence on the impressionable Bahlul. Qaher Harhash is himself an actual model, incidentally, although I cannot find anything online to indicate his sexuality—he certainly read as “queer boy” to me onscreen, but that has no bearing on Harhash himself. Much is made among the characters that Bahlul is straight; whether he is also trans, it seems, Stress Positions leaves open for discussion.

There’s a kind of refreshing irreverence to Stress Positions, sometimes to the point that some might consider taboo. Hammel treats it all very casually, from when Karla says “Tell him your friend who used to be a man says hi,” to one exchange between two cisgender men in which one refers to all the “trannies” who live in the building. It would be a lot easier to get uncomfortable with that if not for the fact that a trans woman directed and wrote the film, notwithstanding a word now widely regarded as a slur being put into the mouth of a cisgender character.

There’s certainly something fun about this depiction of a group of people who have no particularly bigoted attitudes toward each other’s fluid differences of sexuality and gender (ignorance is another story), but are still all messy. They may have no fucks to give about matters that Boomers have spent decades giving themselves aneurysms over, but that doesn’t mean they know what the hell they’re talking about at any given time either. In particular, conversations about Bahlul being a brown person has all the White characters telling on themselves, not understanding the myriad nuances of the Muslim world, the Middle East, and where the two do or do not intersect.

This is especially the case with Terry, a character who provides by far the most comic entertainment, a guy who exudes and attracts chaos (all while Bahlul hangs out calmly in his leg cast), more than once throwing out his back when something startles him and he trips or falls in the kitchen while cooking. Terry is the guy who thinks of himself as a model progressive, while often betraying his own ignorance, particularly when it comes to his nephew’s multi-ethnic heritage. (A couple of funny scenes have characters, including Terry, queuing up a YouTube video called “What Is the Middle East?”)

Terry is also deeply paranoid about covid, this story unfolding in the summer of 2020—in Brooklyn, no less, where covid cases were catastrophic in a way few other places in the U.S. ever got. I have mixed feelings about Terry’s paranoia played as excess, because he actually has a point when he says, “We wouldn’t need a curfew if you all just stayed home.” Yet, he still lets Karla in when she comes to help after he throws his back out, and keeps bringing Coco, the weirdly voyeuristic landlady from upstairs (another trans woman, played by Rebecca F. Wright), inside to fix the Internet even though he’s constantly admonishing her to put her mask on.

There’s a curious element, an odd sort of vibe, about Stress Positions taking place during the height of the pandemic. There was a period where people clearly did not want obvious covid references in their entertainment, as they preferred to use that to escape from it. Now it’s four years on, and people are still getting covid, but it’s no longer the global catastrophe it once was. The audience at the screening last night seemed entertained by the comic references to an era we’re all glad is behind us, but I have no idea whether non-festival audiences will be as into it.

I haven’t even mentioned the fact that Terry has a husband, who has found a new man and served him divorce papers. We actually meet Leo (John Roberts) later in the film, at one of the “social distanced” parties held in the apartment backyard that is shockingly large for a New York City apartment. And his presence gets intertwined with Bahlul, who has already been narratively intertwined with Terry, and Karla, and Karla’s partner Vanessa (Amy Zimmer) who wrote a book in Karla’s voice—it’s a whole thing—and even, at lest in terms of narrative structure, with Ronald the GrubHub delivery guy (Faheem Ali), who himself intersects problematically with Karla.

I’d ask if you were able to follow all that, except it’s unclear to me if it even matters. I’ll tell you this: there are countless scenes in Stress Positions with crackling dialogue, well delivered, a sequence of conversations I could have listened to indefinitely, almost as if written by Richard Linklater if he were a messy queer Millennial. I really, really enjoyed the experience of this movie. I just didn’t quite understand the layers of turns it took in the end.

You might feel like Terry here by the time the movie ends.

Overall: B+

HOUSEKEEPING FOR BEGINNERS

Directing: A
Acting: A
Writing: A-
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B+

I don’t know why, until I actually watched Housekeeping for Beginners, I thought it was a Spanish-language movie. It even took a few minutes into the beginning of the movie for it to register: this doesn’t sound like Spanish. For a hot second I thought it was Portuguese. Was this movie Brazilian? I looked it up: of all places, this film is from North Macedonia. Have I ever seen any North Macedonian films before? Apparently, I have—Honeyland, a documentary I actually felt was the best film of 2019. And while that one was the true story of a rural beekeeper, this one is about an urban, blended queer family in the North Macedonian capital of Skopje. (It turns out, I even saw the previous film by the director of Housekeeping for Beginners: You Won’t Be Alone, about a shape shifting witch in 19th century Macedonia, which I did not like nearly as much, and did not have North Macedonia as a producing country, while this one does.)

One might rightly wonder how the hell I started from Spanish to that: within a European context at least, this film could hardly be further from Spanish. Such is the legacy of colonialism, I suppose—the English are hardly the only ones in the world to have such a history. Spanish is actually the second-most spoken native language in the world (behind Mandarin), which can make it easy to forget: there are 16 times as many people in the world who speak some other language. In North Macedonia, the dominant language is Macedonian, but there are other officially recognized languages, including Albanian, Turkish, Bosnian, Serbian, and one that becomes a key plot point in Houesekeeping for Beginners: Romani. That last one is the language spoken in the neighborhood of Shutka, an autonomous Roma community on the outskirts of Skopje.

It turns out, there is a lot to learn about this small corner of the world—a country of just under 10,000 square miles (barely larger than Vermont), a population of 1.8 million (about the population of West Virginia), its capital a metropolitan population of 537,000 (about the metro population of Huntsville, Alabama). Such is the case with just about every international location you can think of, actually—but here, writer-director Goran Stolevski, an openly gay thirtysomething man born in Macedonia who grew up in Australia, finds a unique way to turn our attention to it.

It’s not often we get queer stories in global cinema that blend queer life with racial and ethnic concerns, making Housekeeping for Beginners an unusually intersectional story. When the film opens, we see what appears to be two teenagers, Ali (Samson Selim) and Vanesa (Mia Mustafi), belting out along to a song they both apparently love, using household items as fake microphones. It’s a deceptively charming and simple scene, and only moves into a portrait of a rather chaotic household.

And the home includes a lesbian couple, Dita (Anamaria Marinca) and Suada (Alina Serban), and their gay housemate Toni (Vladimir Tintor). As we just hang out with this household for several minutes, it takes a little while to fully register what all the relationships are. Vanesa, and insanely cute little Mia (Dzada Selim) are Suada’s children. Ali, just a few years older than Vanesa, is Toni’s 19-year-old hookup—the opening scene of him singing with Vanesa really driving home how he’s rather young.

But, there are several other queer teens who also hang out at the house, which serves as a de facto safe house for kids who are rejected by their families or communities. And here, in a country with no legal recognition of same-sex couples or their children who are not blood relatives, this chaotically supportive mini-community they have created for themselves is massively disrupted when Suada is diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

The first third or so of Housekeeping for Beginners focuses on this lesbian couple, how they deal with a prognosis understood early on to be hopeless, and how they drag their feet in regards to informing the family. It’s not a spoiler, per se, to say that Suada dies, because the overall point of this film is Dita dealing with both her promise to Suada that she will be the children’s mother going forward, and in particular Vanesa’s passionate rebellion against that scenario, all while navigating the legal hoops and deceptions necessary for her to stave off any threat of the children being taken away. Toni, for his part, is resistant to being pressured into playing the part of a straight father / family man type. Ali organically settles into his own position in the family, his relationship with Toni having complications of its own.

I was fully absorbed and moved by ths movie, a rare feat of ensemble storytelling in which every principal character has dimension and character development. It should be noted, also, that both Ali and Suada happen to come from the aforementioned Shutka community, a people for whom “gypsy” is considered a bigoted term, and they are people of color—making Dita and Suada not just a lesbian couple, but an interracial couple, and then Dita a White woman raising children of color. There are many references to this dynamic in the film, and when Vanesa insists on seeking out a grandmother in Shutka she hasn’t seen in several years, deep cultural differences quickly become apparent.

I can only imagine Housekeeping for Beginners would be seen in a far more intricate way by Macedonian audiences, and I would be fascinated to learn how the film was received there—it was indeed their submission for the Best International Feature award from North Macedonia, but, criminally, it did not make the cut among last year’s nominees. This is a film that absolutely deserves attention, both in its home country and abroad—even the most frustrating characters are deeply human, and the domestic situation portrayed is emblematic of evolving ideas of family the world over. I won’t soon forget this one.

Love makes a family, and so does not taking any shit lying down.

Overall: A-

DRIVE-AWAY DOLLS

Directing: C
Acting: B
Writing: C+
Cinematography: B-
Editing: C-

Here’s a protip: if you go to the movies a lot, and you see the same trailer before every single one of those movies, that’s a move that smacks of desperation. This is doubly the case if the movie in question opens in February, otherwise known as “Dumpuary,” the month when studios dump their movies they know aren’t going to work. And they they market the shit out of it (Argylle, anyone?), hoping to maximize opening weekend receipts before bad word of mouth can tank it.

Why did I even bother going to see Drive-Away Dolls then, you might wonder? Well, this one has relatively mixed, almost teetering into positive, reviews. And more importantly, it’s directed and co-written by Ethan Coen, writing with his wife and longtime collaborator Tricia Cooke. And Ethan Coen, along with his brother Joel, have long been among my all-time favorite directors—when they are working together. In 2021, Joel branched off on his own to bring us The Tragedy of Macbeth—he went highbrow, while Ethan went decidedly lowbrow. The secret to their success has historically been a unique blend of the two. It’s clear that these two just aren’t as great apart as they are together. Unfortunately, Drive-Away Dolls doesn’t quite work.

I wish I could tell you that Drive-Away Dolls were the “proudly unimportant lesbian comedy” that it was reportedly intended to be. It’s the perfect time for such a thing. This movie, however, could have been a tight, hilarious, 30-minute film short, which Ethan Coen managed to turn into the longest 84-minute movie I’ve ever sat through. How do you make a movie with interstitial scenes that feel like filler? Coen pulls off a genuinely dull magic trick. To be fair, in the end these psychedelic interludes—one of which inexplicably renders a twirling pizza with its toppings floating away—prove to be crucial to the plot. That doesn’t change how inessential and overlong they feel in the moment.

The one genuinely good thing in this movie is Beanie Feldstein, in a supporting role as a cop ex-girlfriend of one of the two protagonists. The leads, Margaret Qualley as Jamie the thick-accented Texan living in Philadelphia and Geraldine Viswanathan as Marian the repressed bookworm friend, have genuine charisma. They are also both straight women playing lesbians, and Feldstein feels a little like “legit lesbian cred” getting tossed in there for us queer audience members actually paying attention to these things.

(The original title was supposed to be Drive-Away Dykes, and then it got sanitized. And while it’s entirely possible either of the two leads could identify as queer, they are hardly the kind of out-lesbian actors that would have been more appropriately cast in the roles. Furthermore, and I did not realize this when first writing this review and am having to go back and edit a bit, Ethan and Tricia are essentially in a polyamorous relationship, still married to each other but both with other partners, and Tricia partnered with a woman. This would seem to give the film more “queer cred” than I initially assumed, but here’s the thing: it really changes nothing about how this film comes across.)

Feldstein, who was truly wonderful in Bookstmart (in which, ironically, she plays a straight girl best friends with a lesbian), really needs to be cast as the lead in another comedy that’s actually good. It’s what she deserves. It’s what we all deserve.

Should I tell you anything about the plot? It doesn’t matter, you don’t need to see this movie, but whatever. “Drive-away” is a term for drivers for hire who take a rental car from one location to another. Jamie and Marian take a quasi-spontaneous getaway, from Philadelphia to Tallahassee, by means of such a job—and wind up taking someone else’s job by accident, thereby also making off with the horrifying and/or hilarious contents of a hat box and a metal briefcase stashed in the trunk.

Coen apparently called in a lot of favors, because the cast of characters Jamie and Marion encounter on this road trip is truly stacked with stars: Pedro Pascal in a shockingly small part; Colman Domingo as the leader of the trio on Jamie and Marion’s tail; Bill Camp as the car rental clerk; Matt Damon as a Florida senator. For some reason, this movie is set in 1999, maybe so that the many questions Jamie asks at Florida businesses about whether they support queer people won’t feel too politically charged. Except, of course, this movie still exists in 2024, and the references stick out to the point of distraction, especially considering how little it has to do with the actual story.

Which brings us back to that “proudly unimportant” bit. Even proudly unimportant movies should aspire to something better than pointless at best and tedious at worst. More than once I thought while watching this movie, What are we doing? For most of its time, it’s just killing time. And a movie that is just killing time feels like an eternity—not what you want for what’s supposed to be a breezy, quirky comedy. To be fair, it did get a couple of good laughs out of me, especially one visual gag involing a dildo. It comes along far too late, after I grew exasperated with this movie’s inability to settle on a tone.

A collective less than the sum of its lesbian parts.

Overall: C+

THE ORIGIN OF EVIL

Directing: C+
Acting: B+
Writing: C+
Cinematography: C-
Editing: C-

Here’s something I’ve never said about a movie before: The Origin of Evil might just be too French or its own good. Full of unlikably arrogant people, with an inflated sense of self. Not all of the French are like that, I’m sure; these are stereotypes. But this movie isn’t doing them any favors.

In spite of its bevy of talented performers, The Origin of Evil lost me early on. It gets progressively weirder, in less compelling ways. Nathalie (Laure Calamy) is visiting a father, Serge (Jacques Weber) she’s never met before. She progressively gains his trust, to the suspicion of his wife, Louise (Dominique Blanc); his daughter, George (Doria Tillier); his grandaughter, Jeanne (Céleste Brunnquell); and their longtime housekeeper, Agnès (Véronique Ruggia), all of whom live in a giant, overly cluttered house together. I won’t spoil the many narrative left turns that follow, even though one of the few things that impressed me about this movie is how unremarkable it is for all its twists.

I will say this: we never get a sense of Nathalie as a whole person, or what really informs her actions. I knew little about this film going in, and when Nathalie is shown dialing Serge on the phone, she appears nervous to the point of terrified—a detail that makes less sense in retrospect once the film is over. “What are you playing at?” is something she is asked at one point, and I was already asking it. There are moments early on when it feels like The Origin of Evil will be a straightforward family drama, the title notwithstanding, but things prove to be far more complex than that. Just not in any way that particularly satisfied me.

This film has many unearned pretensions, not least of which is the title—these are shitty people, basically all around, but evil is a bit loaded for what ever actually happens onscreen. Nathalie works at a fish packing factory, and the opening title card appears superimposed over lined trays of fish, with ominous music. You would think the fish, or the factory, would play a particularly crucial part in the plot. They don’t.

If there is anything to love about The Origins of Evil, it’s the ensemble cast of nearly all women, with only one exception: Serge is the only principal character who is a man. He’s an asshole, but all the other women also prove to be either assholes in their own right or sociopaths, with the possible exception of Jeanne—but given the fucked up family she’s in, give her time.

The film runs slightly over two hours, though, and the first half in particular moves so slowly, it might play a lot better with a good fifteen or twenty minutes cut out. Things do pick up in the second half, and get a bit more exciting, but for me it was too little too late. I spent more time thinking about when this movie would end than I did about what was going to happen next.

I have to mention the cinematography, because some of it just plain sucks. Why the hell is a movie like this employing the use of retro split screens, with thick black lines separating the different feeds? The first time it happens, Nathalie is just sitting at a table having dinner with Serge and his family—five people, three sections of a split screen, each of them cutting to a new person saying something or making noise, including every time Jeanne gets a text notification. Why do we care about all this? I have no answer. A few later scenes employ the split screen as well, and you get the sense that director Sébastien Marnier thinks he’s doing something clever with this material. He isn’t.

I have to acknowledge that talent went into the making of this film, particularly the cast, and the set design. I’d love to see all of these people’s work in a less tiresome movie.

It’s not nearly as fun as this might suggest.

Overall: C+

MUTT

Directing: B
Acting: A-
Writing: B
Cinematography: B
Editing: B+

I’m sure I shouldn’t be, but I’m a little stuck on the title of the film Mutt. Ironically, googling slang meanings of the word brings up, among a few other things, “stupid person,” and I feel a little stupid not getting it in the context of this film. Evidently it can also be a derogatory reference to someone being multiracial, which indeed, the film’s protagonist, Feña, is—he has a Chilean father and a White mother. Feña’s racial background is not in the least bit a driving force in the story here, however.

His transness, on the other hand, is. And the story here takes place over the course of one 14-hour period, in which quite a lot happens, not least of which are his reconnection with, in turn, an ex-boyfriend, his younger sister, and his father. All of them have been estranged, to one degree or another, from Feña since he started his transition.

John (Cole Doman) is returning after a year and a half in Philadelphia, to look after a sick mother. Zoe (MiMi Ryder) has run away from school for the day to hang out with Feña in the City. And Pablo (Alejandro Goic) is flying in from Chile to see Feña for the first time in two years.

Mutt has a fair amount of exposition, all of it well integrated. Anyone with a cursory knowledge of Spanish—and Feña is bilingual—would expect Feña to be a feminine name, but Feña is actually specific about this: “It’s one of the few gender neutral names in Chile.” This film is also unusually frank about a young trans person still fresh from the transition process. Feña is revealed only to have had boyfriends and relationships with men all his life, and this desire does not change after transition—an aspect of transness not often represented onscreen. John, the strikingly gorgeous ex-boyfriend, shows no signs of his physical attraction abating post-transition, nor is there any hand-wringing about sexuality on anyone’s part, something I really respect. John also delivers the cutting line, “People don’t hate you because you’r trans, people hate you because you’re an asshole.”

I don’t know if we’re meant to think Feña is indeed an asshole, but Lio Mehiel, the trans actor who portrays him, never gives any indication that he is, per se. Maybe he was an asshole to John? In an early scene, he references how they made each other worse when they were together. Feña is so earnest and well-intentioned, if somewhat of a basket case, it’s difficult to imagine.

There’s a lot I really liked about Mutt, but I had trouble with a lot of the dialogue, particularly in the first half of the film, as it felt underwritten, not quite contrived but bordering on inauthentic. Not in terms of anyone’s background or identity, just as regular people and how people in the real world talk. If often felt just “off” from regular conversations.

This changed with pivotal scenes, both between Feña and John, and between Feña and Pablo. In the end, I was moved and I shed a couple of tears. There’s something to be said for a film which, while imperfect, offers a unique point of view.

In the process of writing this review, I came across a GoldenGlobes.com article in which Lio Mehiel is quoted as saying, “I really identify as a mutt. I got that phrase from a filmmaker friend of mine. I am a mutt in that I am of mixed ethnicity (Puerto Rican and Greek). I have mixed genders. I am also a Gemini.” Setting the dubious relevance of astrology aside, this brings the film’s title into sharper focus—particularly in terms of both ethnicity and gender, simultaneously. See, we went on a journey in this very review itself. I still maintain that a film’s title should not need external explanation.

The dialogue may not be strictly contrived, but the plotting is, a bit. We’re telling a lot about Feña in just one 24-hour period, starting late at night and ending late the next night, and the conceit doesn’t do much for the storytelling. To its credit, however, I did feel enriched after seeing this film.

Feña is a walking example of intersectionality, or so we’re supposed to gather.

Overall: B

ARISTOTLE AND DANTE DISCOVER THE SECRETS OF THE UNIVERSE

Directing: B+
Acting: B
Writing: B+
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B+

And here we get yet another charming, moving, gay coming-of-age story that just makes me wistful for what I could never have. Even if I could never have had the experience of the young characters in this story, what might it have been like for me had there even been a movie like this to watch when I was a teenager? When I was sixteen, I was alone in my bedroom, secretly lusting after the gay men in Madonna’s “Erotica” video.

There’s a bit of irony there, the means I had of tapping into dark sexual fantasy, as compared to Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe, which is almost shockingly innocent, about the blossoming of young love, of a kind the protagonist does not understand nearly as well as, amazingly, his parents do. This story, actually, is comparatively chaste, the physicality never moving beyond a couple of kisses, the holding of hands. It’s a good two thirds of the way through before it even gets to that. This movie is perfect for young kids around the age of puberty, maybe just past it. And what a beautiful thing, to get something legitimately age-appropriate that explores these themes, asserting that kids of all kinds are perfect just the way they are.

This kind of shit gets to me, it’s so far removed from the experience of my youth. Some stories work by being relatable, and others are more aspirational. I can only guess as to what it’s like to be a young person today with access to a movie like this—which, incidentally, is based on a multiple-award-winning 2012 young-adult novel by Benjamin Alire Sáenz, which I have immediately put on my reading list.

It appears, though, that this film is a pretty faithful adaptation, with many lines of dialogue lifted directly from the source text. If I have any genuine criticism of this film, it would be that sometimes the dialogue doesn’t necessarily translate perfectly to the screen—I must admit, at times, I found the script, co-written by Sáenz himself and director Aitch Alberto, distractingly just outside the realm of real-life delivery. Some of the lines feel a little oversimplified and slightly stilted.

Ultimately, it’s a small quibble—there are just so many other things to love about this movie, not least of which is the very specific universe in which it exists, about Mexican-American families in 1987 El Paso, Texas. Aristotle (Max Pelayo), or Ari for short, is a solitary boy who is unaware of his own abiding loneliness. He’s been faltering at swimming lessons, and then meets Dante (Reese Gonzales), who volunteers to teach him how to swim. They become fast friends, and maybe the first third of Aristotle and Dante is just a lovely, leisurely paced portrait of the evolution of their friendship. Nothing more is even suggested until Dante’s family moves to Chicago for a year thanks to his professor dad’s job, and in one of Dante’s letters he slightly scandalizes Ari by bringing up masturbation (this is the most frankly sexual the movie ever gets).

During their year apart, both Aristotle and Dante pursue relationships with girls, presumably because that’s all that occurs to them, and it’s just what’s expected. It’s great to see that, unlike many other films about gay people, the interactions with girls stay healthy and never end in any melodramatic heartbreak. This is much more about these boys slowly realizing who and what they are.

The truly unique element here is Ari’s parents, who are giving him knowing looks largely from the start. Ari has a beloved aunt who visits and when she tells him “You are perfect just the way you are,” it feels incongruous to him, and to a degree, even to us as viewers, that early on. I wasn’t even sure at first whether we were meant to understand that Ari’s parents know he’s in love with Dante before Ari does. I found myself thinking of the deeply empathetic father played by Michael Stuhlbarg in Call Me By Your Name. The key difference here is that these parents are not as articulate, maintaining a family secret about Ari’s incarcerated brother that keeps them, and especially his father, largely silent.

Perhaps most notable is how Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe avoids stereotype at every level—quite plausibly because both writer and the director are of Latin-American descent, telling a story about Mexican-American characters. There is a uniquely heartwarming mix of specificity and authenticity here, while also avoiding any of the cliches of toxic masculinity in parenting. Ari’s parents are clearly imperfect, just like anyone, but their love and concern for him is never in doubt.

We don’t get as much about Dante’s relationship with his parents, perhaps because they are portrayed as progressive intellectuals and we are meant to assume they’ll be fine. Dante does worry in one of his letters about their reaction to him, but the narrative never revisits that thread.

I suppose you could say that, had I been a producer of this film, I’d have had notes. On the other hand, sometimes imperfections add to the charm. While I found myself debating exactly how good I thought this movie was in its first half, it really came together for me in the end. I was both charmed and deeply moved by it, practically weeping by the time these boys finally come around to their inevitable fate. That’s not a spoiler, because you should know that this is a coming-of-age love story and not a tragedy, and that’s how they go; besides, the value is in the journey, the experience, both for them and for us. This is one movie I will likely seek out for a rewatch.

Sometimes a connection becomes an opportunity for discovery.

Overall: B+

MONICA

Directing: B+
Acting: A-
Writing: B+
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B

Monica takes subtlety and understatement to new levels. There’s never a moment that explicitly states that the title character, who is returning home after many years to look after her estranged, ailing mother, is a trans woman. She’s played, however, by trans actor Trace Lysette, previously seen as a regular supporting character on the rightfully acclaimed Prime Video series Transparent. A lot of times it’s said—a lot of times by me—that going in cold would enhance a movie watching experience, but I would argue that, in the case of Monica, these are details that are helpful to know going in.

Monica’s mother, Eugenia, is played by Patricia Clarkson, a reliably welcome screen presence. Here, at the age of 63, she plays a woman deteriorating from a tumor. We learn that she doesn’t recognize Monica, who has come at the invitation (or maybe pleading) of a sister-in-law she’s evidently never known, as the family needs help. Eugenia’s first assumption is that Monica comes from the hospice care she insists she doesn’t want.

Again, something Monica never makes explicitly clear is when Eugenia figures out who Monica really is. There’s no dramatic apology, no speech. There is a bit of a speechless, tearful breakdown, which perhaps stands in for an apology. Over time, Monica and Eugenia inch toward an emotional connection.

It really must be noted: “time” and “inch” are key words here. As directed and co-written by Italian filmmaker Andrea Pallaoro, and particularly as edited by Paola Freddi, Monica moves at a truly glacial pace. This element alone is likely to turn off a lot of viewers, even as it moves critics—including me. Monica is quality work, but hardly populist. It is far more artful than it is entertaining. It has a strangely unusual aspect ratio, nearly square in shape, with very long shots that stop short of being mundane.

That said, I found this film to be deeply memorable and affecting. The acting is excellent, and it’s wonderful to see a trans actor so well cast in the leading role of a trans character. Trace Lysette is more than up to the task, and I’d love to see her cast in more roles that are more widely seen. She’s one worth looking out for.

This is rarely an effective selling point, but by the end of Monica, it felt well worth the quiet, meditative experience. It’s not a slog; it’s just slow. And in this case, the editing is deliberate, almost pointed. You live in Monica’s world with her, experience highs and lows, none of them borne of the kind of trauma that history has taught viewers to expect. One might suspect that was the intent. This is the kind of skilled subtlety that offers you some space, a kind of distance in which the effects seep into you. It’s a uniquely impressive achievement.

A different way of facing each other.

Overall: B+