THE TASTE OF THINGS

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

It’s been said that you shouldn’t watch The Taste of Things on an empty stomach—and that is precisely what I did. And then I sat through this lengthy, gorgeously shot, expertly choreographed opening sequence of an elaborate dinner getting prepared in a large, late-nineteenth-century French kitchen.

Here’s the thing. If you are a carnivore, you might have greater need to heed such a warning: there is a lot of meat and seafood prepared in this movie. I am, however, a vegetarian—I don’t even eat seafood. I could appreciate the vividly shot food, clearly actually cooked on set, on a purely aesthetic level, but it certainly didn’t have me salivating.

Here’s what it did do. It made me think, a lot, about the way we eat our food. It made me long for a meal prepared with such intricate care, from ingredients sourced from the garden right outside the door. The film’s opening shot, in fact, is of Eugénie (a luminescent Juliette Binoche, still a genuine stunner at age 59) harvesting produce straight out of the dirt. We throw phrases around like “farm to table” as though it’s a marketing concept, and then we witness it occurring onscreen in this movie, almost in real time. And here, in the real world, 140 years after the setting of our movie, we pass our days eating food made quickly or cheaply or, in most cases, both.

The Taste of Things is populated with characters for whom flavor is more important than anything. I marveled at the technical proficiency already achieved by the 19th century, the myriad combinations of ingredients and cooking techniques, and the amount of time that it takes—and took—to master all these dishes.

As I said, the meat based dishes—beef, veal, fish, you name it—still failed to make me salivate, in ways I am certain it will most audiences. And then Eugénie whips up this Baked Alaska dish and I nearly cried with desire: Holy fuckballs that looks amazing! And I don’t even like meringue. The men Eugénie serves this dessert to discuss the physics of how the ice cream stays frozen inside, and I was rapt. This was one dish with meringue I could imagine using as skin cream. I wanted to bathe in it.

The Taste of Things is about much more than vividly shot food preparation, of course. At its heart, it is a love story, between Eugénie, a longtime cook, and Dodin Bouffant (Benoît Magimel), the restauranteur Eugénie worked for for many years. They now live together in a kind of perpetual romance, Dodin regularly proposing to her, and Eugénie regularly insisting she prefers things as they are. Their love and affection is quite overtly represented in the deeply rooted history and skill in the food they share. This includes both cooking and eating it, although Eugénie does most of the cooking.

There is a bit of sadness thrown in, and I won’t spoil exactly what that is, although it gets alluded to pretty early on, in the middle of the aforementioned, extended opening sequence. It’s easy to focus on that sequence, because of the incredible blocking and choreography and camera work, but most scenes in this film involve cooking, and without exception the food is shot with a cozy, loving eye. Beyond the focus on the food, the story is deceptively simple. But it stays with you.

There is a somewhat curious separation of genders in this film, and the heavy focus on Binoche notwithstanding, I kind of wish there were more women in it. Besides Eugénie, the only significant female characters are two younger cooks who work with her: Violette (Galatéa Bellugi), who evidently has relatively mediocre still; and Violette’s niece, Pauline (Bonnie Chagneau-Ravoire), who has an astonishing, precocious talent for gastronomy. Dodin, for his part, has a group of about five men friends who populate many scenes, often to pontificate on the prepared food or to provide support to Dodin, as needed.

But, it all comes back to Eugénie and Dodin, every other character serving their story. One of the great many things I love about The Taste of Things is the way it naturally veers away from any of the typical film tropes. Just because of the way I’ve been conditioned by decades of movie watching, I kept expecting one of the apprentice cooks to trip while climbing the many staircases in the house, or for one of the men to creep on young Pauline. But, nothing of the sort happens in this story, which is only about two character who are, as Dodin puts it, “in their autumn years,” and their earnest devotion to each other. Sometimes the simplest stories are the most moving and beautiful, and this is certainly one to savor.

Don’t insult this movie by eating cheap popcorn while you watch it!

ALL OF US STRANGERS

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

How do I adequately convey how much I loved All of Us Strangers? How do I even explain what it’s about? Except, perhaps, to say it’s a beautifully melancholy, queer love story with an emotional through line that cuts deep?

Mind you, I say this as a gay viewer, and this is incredibly relevant. I can’t help but wonder how the response to it might be different among audiences that are not gay men. I am certain anyone open to the experience of this film can be deeply moved by it, and even have an intricate, nuanced understanding of what the characters are feeling. But for me, in a way few other movies ever have, this story wrapped my very soul into a warm embrace.

Will I love this movie as much upon rewatch, I wonder? There’s only one way to find out.

In the meantime, I must say there is plenty of All of Us Strangers that evades straightforward understanding. That is beside the point. You need only to feel it. And boy, did I.

Adam (Andrew Scott) and Harry (Aftersun’s Paul Mescal) are two gay men, living in the same London high-rise apartment building. It must be a new building, very few other people living in it, as they discuss how distractingly quiet it is living there. We really never see them interact with anyone else in the building, only each other. When a fire alarm has Adam exiting the building, he sees Harry’s silhouette in his sixth-story window, looking down at him. After Adam returns to his unit on a much higher floor—with spectacular, panoramic London views—Harry knocks on his door, drunk, and introduces himself.

Adam and Harry’s steadily blossoming relationship expands beyond that first meeting, which is tentative, cautious, a bit shy. They don’t hook up immediately. They do a bit later, though, and it’s some of the most beautifully shot and tender, gay sexuality I’ve seen onscreen since Moonlight (2016). It’s both highly erotic and genuinely moving—a feat of narrative execution that has me tempted to call director and co-writer Andrew Haigh a cinematic magician.

And All of Us Strangers is indeed magical, even when it defies logic, and quite deliberately so. The story of Adam and Harry runs parallel to the story of Adam and his late parents, who died in a car crash when he was twelve years old. And yet, he takes a train across town to his childhood home—and finds his father (Jamie Bell) and his mother (Claire Foy) there, the same age they were when they died, somehow unsurprised to find their son coming home, now a grown man they had never actually gotten to see grow up.

Mum and Dad have an understanding that about 35 years have passed, but have no knowledge of what has transpired in that time. Their knowledge and relative ignorance remains stuck in, we can only estimate, about 1988. And as premises go, this is a little out there, because All of Us Strangers never makes explicit exactly what’s going on, and there’s a physicality between Adam and his still-young parents during their visits that negates any idea of them as conventional ghosts. It’s a little more like they exist as flesh and blood, but in a different dimension.

What it does allow for, however, are conversations Adam never had a chance to have with his parents otherwise. He comes out to them both, in separate conversations. It’s notable that his mom has a more complicated, slightly more negative reaction than his father, who is much more quickly accepting—a scenario that defies the stereotype of gay experience, and is likely more common than many realize. This, among many other conversations Adam has with his parents, packed a unique emotional punch for me, and so far as I could tell, I was crying before most of the rest of the people in the theater.

All of Us Strangers features gorgeous cinematography, and is edited with unparalleled finesse, transitioning between Adam with Harry, and Adam with his parents, with seamless grace. There’s a sequence in which Adam and Harry go out dancing, do some drugs, and then proceed into a sort of montage of domesticity, with the club music continuing uninterrupted through it all. It’s beautifully executed.

There is a bit of a twist at the end, very directly related to Harry, which ultimately had me baffled. It calls into question a great deal of what has been seen beforehand, but then, there is even a moment when Adam asks his mother, “Is this real?” The answer, evidently, is that if it feels real, then it is. And All of Us Strangers is all feeling, which therefore makes it real. Adam tries to introduce Harry to his parents, and for most of this sequence, Harry seems to be the only one existing in a grounded reality. This is now a film that will allow things to be that simple.

This is a movie I will be thinking about for a very long time, maybe for years to come. I haven’t been this in love with a mood-piece queer love story since Moonlight. Indeed, that film and All of Us Strangers would make for a spectacular double feature. From end to end, it is beautiful and sad and cozy and charming and erotic and mysterious and bewildering. It would seem there is no end to the riches it has to offer.

Nowhere to go but up: together,

Overall: A

MAESTRO

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

There’s a scene somewhere in the middle of Maestro, when Leonard Bernstein has an argument with his wife, in a large Manhattan room with the door closed. The camera remains distant, so we watch both of the characters in a wide shot, for the duration of their argument. There are no close-ups of either one of them, in the manner you would typically expect of a scene like this. It’s actually much closer to the real experience when you witness people arguing in person: you don’t get close into their personal space, and yet the tension in the room reaches you as though there were no distance at all. It’s a very unusual style of shooting, and it works perfectly, punctuated at its end by a sort of visual gag, an overture—if you’ll forgive the term—toward the heightened experience of moments like this.

It might be my favorite scene in the film, one of countless great scenes. Honestly I’m not sure I could even count the ways I loved the experience of watching Maestro. I expected to like it, and to say it exceeded my expectations would be an understatement. I’m gushing so much over it now, I fear it may make readers set their own expectations either impossibly high, or with an unfair amount of skepticism. I can only speak my truth: I loved this film.

I have said many times how seldom I like biopics that cover decades in a person’s life. It’s just not possible to distill someone’s life story within the space of two hours. Along comes Bradley Cooper, to whom I can only say: I stand corrected.

Thus, perhaps more than anything, Maestro is a triumph of editing. It begins in 1943, when Bernstein was working as an assistant conductor but had to fill in at short notice when the conductor came down with the flu; and it ends just one year before his death in 1990—which means the story spans 46 years. And yet, every single scene has much to say about Berstein and his life, and fits together to make a holistic picture of a man’s life.

Without focusing on just one moment in the man’s life, Bradley Cooper, who directed and co-wrote this film, instead focuses on Bernstein’s relationship with his wife, Felicia. More specifically, how his bisexuality affected their marriage. And the thing is, before watching this film I knew very, very little about Leonard Bernstein, but hey, wait a minute, he was queer? Well there’s the perfect doorway for me to leap right through—suddenly I’m very interested.

There has been a fair amount of coverage and discussion about Cooper’s decision to cast himself in this role, playing a Jewish man, wear a prosthetic nose, also playing a man who was queer. These are the things that increasingly invite crticisim: why not cast an actor who was actually both Jewish and queer? I still have no answer for that. I can only say this: Cooper’s performance is so astonishing, all of those concerns just fluttered right out of my head. I suppose it helped that he cast Matt Bomer, an openly gay actor, to play one of the objects of his affection.

Cooper is hardly new to making movies that left us wondering why we needed it, only to find it surprisingly accomplished. A Star is Born (2018) was the fourth version of that story on film, and in my opinion, turned out to be second only to the very first one, released in 1937. It also signaled to the world that, as both a director and an actor, audiences had long underestimated his abilities. Maestro goes even further, and cements Bradley Cooper as one of the great actors of his generation. I spent my time watching this film alternately marveling at Bradley’s incredibly lived-in performance, and being practically unable to believe it was really him. There’s “disappearing into a role,” and then there’s Bradley Cooper in Maestro. The fact that he did that while also directing the film is arguably the most amazing achievement I have seen in film this year.

And yet: we must not glean over the stellar Carey Mulligan as Felicia, in a performance without which Maestro would simply not work. She may not make the same kind of dramatic physical transformation as Cooper, but she stands as every bit his match onscreen. Her top billing, above even Cooper himself, is wholly justified. I have long loved Carey Mulligan as an actor, and she has never been better, in a part that in lesser hands may have been pitiful. Here, she strikes a fascinating figure, as a woman who goes into a marriage with a man whose proclivities she is perfectly aware of, and then, over time, discovers she overestimated her ability to tolerate them.

The scenes depicting the early years of Leonard Bernstein’s life and career are shot in beautiful black and white, and I think I may need to watch again to get a better sense of why the point at which it switches over to color was chosen. At the moment, I am unsure about that, and it’s the only thing about Maestro I can even come close to being critical of—except that, everything else works so well, I simply don’t care.

Maestro was edited by Michelle Tesoro, whose previous credits are mostly in television (including the spectacular limited series The Queen’s Gambit), and I am fully convinced she deserves the Oscar for Best Editing—setting aside roughly ten minutes of end credits, this film ends at an even two hours. And, with so much of a man’s life to convey, Maestro employs several unusually clever visual transitions from one scene to the next, a character walking through a doorway and suddenly they are on a new set. In every case, it’s an organic transition that propels the narrative forward, always serving the story.

Before today, perhaps the only thing I might have known or remembered about Leonard Bernstein was that he composed the music for West Side Story—as it happens, he also composed the score for On the Waterfront, for which he received his single Oscar nomination (but did not win). He’s also credited as the composer of the score for Maestro, which is indeed scored with many of his compositions. One scene even features a section of the West Side Story overture, and these musical choices are also consitently, expertly chosen.

Leonard Bernstein was the first American composer to receive international recognition, something I learned merely by virtue of watching this fantastic film. To have Bradley Cooper tell it, however, the most interesting thing about him was his marriage to Felicia, something unconventional especially for the time: they were married from 1951 until (spoiler alert!) Felicia’s death in 1978. They had three children, who don’t get prominence in this film and yet they are given appropriately vital presence, all of them in some way a reflection of the consequences of how Bernstein chose to live his life.

In the end, however, at least as far as Bradely Cooper is interested, it was about his genuine love for Felicia. I don’t have a clue how true to life the events in Maestro are, which I don’t see as especially relevant—we’re dealing with ideas and themes here, conveyed through immensely compelling characters. It does go to a very sad place toward the end, which only left me marveling at the man’s emotional—and romantic—range. Whether or not Leonard Bernstein was a good man is not really something Maestro is concerned with, which is to its benefit. He is a deeply fascinating, towering historical figure, and all we can ask for is that a biopic like this do him justice. Mileage among viewers may vary, but for me it all came together in perfect harmony.

This is actually Bradley Cooper, if you can believe it.

Overall: A

THE HOLDOVERS

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

It would seem that director Alexander Payne and star Paul Giamatti are a reliably magical combination. I loved their last collaboration, 2004’s Sideways, and two decades later I love The Holdovers just as much—if not even more so.

I can’t remember the last time I saw a film so thoroughly heartwarming. There’s something about the script, by first-time feature writer David Hemingson, with its characters who are cynical and wounded, but we only get to watch them work through those challenges. Where other writers would give their characters a sudden, renewed hardship or mistake to overcome or get past at a prescribed point in the story, in The Holdovers you only continue growing more fond of them. There is nothing flashy about this movie, and yet its storytelling is deceptively unconventional.

Payne does like to give his movies odd little flourishes, as in this one, set in the year 1970, and given utterly 1970s-style production company logos at the start of the film, complete with visual graininess to make it look like a film that was actually shot fifty years ago. At first I thought this was a little unnecessarily cutesy, but Payne successfully plants you into the fully realized world of this movie.

Paul Giamatti is a peculiar movie star, a guy with a storied career, and an undeniable charm and screen presence that belies his longstanding frumpy look. Now at the age of 56, he’s perfectly cast as a longtime rural private school teacher with a lazy eye and a penchant for solitude. This is the kind of part we have seen a zillion times in movies, and Giamatti manages to make Paul Hunham utterly his own. Paul has a warmth to him that surfaces naturally, under the right circumstances.

In particular, the circumstances here involve him being roped into chaperoning the “holdovers” of the movie’s title: five kids who are unable, for various reasons, to go home for Christmas break and have to spend it at the otherwise abandoned school. One of these kids is Angus Tully, played by impressive newcomer Dominic Sessa. The school these kids attend has a lot of students from very rich families, and when one of the “holdover” kids gets invited home for a ski trip and invites all the other kids, Angus is the only one whose parents can’t be reached, leaving Mr. Hunham and Angus to themselves, alongside grieving school cook Mary Lamb (Da’Vine Joy Randolph, currently more likely than anyone else in this film to be nominated for—and win—an Oscar).

It’s difficult to put into words how wonderful I found The Holdovers. It filled my heart. I tried to think of other descriptors that could work. There’s an element of sweetness, I suppose, but that’s not really what the movie is. Maybe “wholesome” is the right word. Yes, I think that’s it: many “feel-good” movies of the 21st century are self-consciously bawdy with a “wholesome” subtext that just rings false. The Holdovers is the kind of movie that is never bawdy although it can be slightly vulgar when it wants to be, and it gets its tone of wholesomeness exactly right. It brings to mind old family dramas like Terms of Endearment—except movies like that are what I would call “comic tearjerkers,” and The Holdovers is neither as comic (although it’s often funny) nor nearly as much of a tearjerker (although I did cry a little).

It would seem that Alexander Payne is in a class of his own. His movies are about the people who connect in spite of familial challenges of almost pointed specificity. These characters are expertly drawn, complete people. The best I can tell you is to watch The Holdovers and see for yourself. Maybe it won’t bowl you over, as it’s not designed to be. But it spoke to me at a deep level.

An unlikely trio make for a cozy found family of wounded souls.

Overall: A

ANATOMY OF A FALL

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

Anatomy of a Fall is a spectacular specimen of cinematic craftsmanship. At 151 minutes, it does seem at first to move at a somewhat labored pace, and between that and the fact that the dialogue is in three different languages, this film won’t work for everybody. I would argue that it works for anyone with an appreciation for cinema that is elevated to high art through writing, editing and performance rather than dazzling visuals.

Mind you, the visuals in Anatomy of a Fall should not be underestimated. There’s a tracking shot early in the film that had me thinking, Why the hell are we suddenly going through the house from the point of view of the dog? Much later, during the second half of the film that is dominated by a trial, seemingly out of the blue we hear a clear recording of a recent argument between the woman accused of murder and her dead husband—and, at first, all I could think was, How is this happening? Who the hell recorded this?

I learned quickly enough that no matter what questions arise in Anatomy of a Fall, I need only to put my trust in the filmmakers—co-writer Arthur Harari, and especially director and co-writer Justine Triet. The early scenes in this movie seem to skirt the edges of inconsequential, but later prove important. This isn’t a “whodunnit” so much as a “did she do it?”, but in any case all the details we see onscreen are important.

As the title refers to, everything hinges on the discovery of Samuel (Samuel Theis), husband and father, dead in the snow outside the family home in Grenoble, having evidently fallen from the third-floor, attic window of the house. The key players in this mystery are wife and mother Sandra (Sandra Hüller, incredible); 11-year-old son Daniel (Milo Machado Graner, excellent); and of course, Samuel himself. Although a fascinating element of the storytelling here is how little we actually see Samuel onscreen. Aside from two scenes in which we see his dead body, he has only two flashback scenes, only one of them with his own audio—a visualization of the aformentioned argument, which ultimately cuts back to the courtroom when the audio becomes violent but ambiguous. In the second, Daniel is recounting a conversation with him in the car, and we see him, but his lips match Daniel’s voice quoting him as he tells the story. Beyond these spare examples, Samuel exists only in the abstract, as we follow Sandra and Daniel as they face Sandra being put on trial for murder.

I feel compelled to mention the dog, Snoop, again. I don’t want to get too close to spoiler territory here, but Snoop ultimately becomes one more key player, a pivotal part of the final days of the trial, the details of which make that earlier tracking shot from the dog’s perspective make sense. I’ll tell you that Snoop is fine in the end, but there is still a scene in the film involving him that is arguably the most horrifying in the movie, and if you love dogs, watching it might prove tricky. Side note: I can’t speak to any such intentions on Triet’s part, but this sequence is also provocative in regards to the notion that, when push comes to shove, people are more important than animals.

Broadly speaking, the genius of Anatomy of a Fall is how it skirts any of the details that might give us concrete answers about Sandra’s guilt or innocence—we are left to struggle with the same questions as the prosecutor (Antoine Reinartz), or Sandra’s old lawyer friend brought in to defend her (Swann Arlaud), or the judges, or the jury, or indeed even Daniel. There’s a moment in the film when Daniel is told that sometimes, when there are two possibilities that seem equally plausible, but it can’t be both, you just have to make your own choice. Such is the case with Anatomy of a Fall, which answers all the right questions and the right times, but also has just the right amount of ambiguity, leaving just enough questions unanswered to keep you guessing.

If you have limited patience with subtitled foreign films, Anatomy of a Fall might be a workable compromise: because Sandra is German and Samuel is French, but neither has mastered the other’s language, they speak to each other at home in English, making that the spoken language roughly half the time—even though it’s technically a French film. Rarely do you see films in which so many characters so casually switch back and forth between languages, sometimes from sentence to sentence. Here, it also proves to be a pertinent plot point, a source of resentment between Sandra and Samuel, as is the decision to relocate the family from London to Samuel’s hometown in France.

What this brings us back to is how, in Anatomy of a Fall, every detail matters. Sandra Hüller’s performance in particular is stellar in its ambiguity, easily gaining empathy but with an undercurrent of doubt, obstinately stoked by the prosecuting attorny, and indeed the inconclusive evidence itself. When all this ambiguity is the result of such deliberate intention, the result is a masterful achievement.

There’s a lot more to discover beyond the margins.

Overall: A

A THOUSAND AND ONE

Directing: A
Acting: A
Writing: A
Cinematography: A
Editing: A

The film industry has such a long history of churning out mediocrity and retreads of the same tired concepts, there are times when one wonders if it’s even possible for anyone to come up with anything original anymore. And then, every once in a while, a film comes along with such a singular vision that it can restore faith in the power and potential of cinema.

A Thousand and One is one of those films. Rarely does such a vividly drawn portrait so effectively occupy the gray areas of life and history. In this case, writer-director A.V. Rockwell proves to be such a talent with a first feature film that I can’t even say she has potential. She’s already realized it. I can only say that I already breathlessly await whatever she makes next, and if she doesn’t have a vastly accomplished career ahead of her, we will have all been criminally deprived.

I loved everything about this movie, which is set in New York City in three different parts: 1994, 2001, and 2005. Rockwell isn’t so much interested in specific pivotal moments in New York historty—no mention of 9/11 here—as she is painting a portrait of a city in flux, bringing changes that do no favors to the characters on whom she focuses. A Thousand and One, whose title refers to the apartment number where young mother Inez (Teyana Taylor, a revelation of rough screen chemistry) and her son Terry live, is packed with establishing shots of Manhattan and Harlem, many of them high drone shots, for once never used to show off. Each shot serves the story here, giving us a sense of place, along with carefully curated clips of mayor speeches of the time. We hear pontifications on so-called “improving people’s lives,” while we see, for instance, a young teen Terry become subject to the city’s infamous “stop and frisk” program.

It’s rare that I am this impressed by a film’s overall casting, but it must be called out here. Terry is depicted by three different young actors: Aaron Kingsley Adetola as him at six years old; Aven Courtey at thirteen; Josiah Cross at seventeen. Each actor has a distinct manner and presence, and yet they perfectly complement each other as the same character at different ages, different stages of his development as a quiet, withdrawn young man, almost embarrassed by his own intellect. I was deeply impressed by all of them.

Still, Teyana Taylor is the star performer here, from the jump as a young mother who, instead of leaving her son to the foster care system, takes him home with her shortly after her release from jail. We learn she is 22 years old, and as an older woman gives her a break and rents a room to her, she admonishes her to “act like an adult.” All I could think about is how young 22 really is. Inez makes decisions that are very bad on paper, but are easy to empathize with.

And then: while we rightly expect the abduction of the young boy to bring quickly tragic consequences—we actually see Terry grow up with her. Over time, the building begins to crumble with age. The single White character with any real lines is a new landlord who is deceptively helpful at first, ultimately telling Inez she’ll need to “clear out” for a month or two in order for the necessary repairs to get done.

Near the end, A Thousand and One takes a shocking turn that I truly did not see coming, and which poses a sudden challenge to that aforementioned easy empathy. Things aren’t quite as surprisingly simple as it seemed to be, for eleven years. It’s rare that a film covering such a time span is so precisely well told, but editors Sabine Hoffman (Passing) and Kristan Sprague (Judas and the Black Messiah) are masters of their craft.

This film features characters audiences never get to see in cinema, lived-in neighborhoods of Black communities with multidimensional individuals as compelling as they are flawed, earnest and uncertainly principled, both products of and transcendent of their environments. Terry finds himself with a stepfather who is clearly much older than Inez, named Lucky (William Catlett), who makes some very common mistakes but is never villainized. He is only ever nurturing toward Terry, and you can’t help but root for the relationships between all three of these characters to work out in one way or another.

Out of everyone, it’s Inez who comes closest to being a villain, and yet we seem to understand every decision she makes, even potentially dangerous ones. A Thousand and One isn’t quite a tale of redemption, but rather one of hard-won love and affection. “Damaged people don’t know how to love each other,” Inez says to Lucky. “That’s all.” Except there’s more love around her than she realizes, and plenty to go around for films like this one.

Broken people try to keep their creations intact.

Overall: A

CLOSE

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

Close is very subtle, deeply relatable, and wholly affecting. It has a naturalistic style, in both performance and execution, so penetrating that it’s hard to shake.

It’s almost not worth mentioning that its director and co-writer, Lukas Dhont, previously made a film about a trans girl whose depiction was wildly controversial. Almost. As a cisgender gay man, Dhont is tackling nuanced themes in Close that he is far more qualified to explore—and in this case, he does it very successfully.

At first glance, Close is about intimate, but platonic, friendship. It’s the kind of movie I have long wished there were more of: telling stories about close friends, particularly among men or boys. Léo (Eden Dambrine) and Rémi (Gustav De Waele) have the kind of friendship I never had but have long wished I did: one that is not sexual, but comes with it a casual physical intimacy. Léo and Rémi share a bed when Léo frequently spends the night. When they lounge in the grass, one will use the other’s torso as a pillow.

The thing is, these two boys are thirteen years old, a fraught time of adolescence indeed, and the slightest deviation in a relationship’s seemingly perfect rhythm can upset things catastrophically. I did not realize, going into this film, that the inciting incident would be a subtle form of homophobia: Léo and Rémi are just starting the school year, and it is immediately clear to their classmates that they are inseparable. A couple of girls casually ask if they are “together,” and Léo immediately reacts defensively. And in the ensuing scenes, we see him slowly, but unmistakably, distancing himself from Rémi.

One of many things Dhont deftly handles in Close is the way adolescents experience feelings that have no tools to articulate. Something is definitely happening between these boys, but neither of them knows or understands exactly what. We, as observers in the audience, are the ones who understand: Léo is afraid of being misjudged by his peers; Rémi is deeply saddened and doesn’t know for certain why. It’s heartbreaking to watch, and will make you recall your own cherished childhood friendships that fell apart without explanation or warning.

One night when Léo is spending the night with Rémi, he decides he wants his own separate bed, and when Rémi tries to get into the bed with him, they get into a physical struggle that stops just short of turning into a fight. On the grass at school, Rémi lays his head against Léo, and Léo scoots out of the way.

Close takes a fairly shocking turn about halfway through that I did not see coming, and drastically changes the nature and tone of the film overall. I’m still trying to decide how I feel about it, because it becomes about something more than, or maybe even different from, just the idea of a close adolescent friendship drifting apart. A film about only that would have been deeply relatable on its own. Furthermore, so little occurs in the first half to offer any sense of the turn of events that’s coming, I wonder if the story even justifies the shift. On the other hand, one could argue that is part of the point: how deeply emotions are felt by adolescents, in ways not easily clocked by the adults around them. Particularly when they are boys.

Regardless, the story sunk into my psyche with startling effectiveness, aided to a significant degree by Frank van den Eeden’s dazzling cinematography, and stunning performances by the two young leads. Eden Dambrine, incredibly, was discovered by Dhont on a train ride, and wound up getting the part and carrying the film with an incisive understanding of a character experiencing a range of difficult adolescent emotions. Gustav De Waele has every bit as much onscreen charisma, and his shorter amount of screen time left me hoping I would soon see him in something else.

There is a moment when Rémi’s mother asks Léo, '“What happened between you two?” This is the crux of the conflict in Close, because the answer is complex, and a thirteen-year-old just doesn’t have the vocabulary to explain it. Only gradually do things like love, guilt, or regret become clear even to oneself. For this to be the road taken toward self-actualization makes for a cathartic experience.

Questioning innocence can have tragic consequences.

Overall: A

SIFF Advance: SEDIMENTOS

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

There’s a moment in the Spanish documentary Sedimentos, the scene that gives the film its name, in which the six trans women who are the subjects of the film visit a geological formation, sort of cross section of land revealing the difference of colors between layers of sediments. It becomes immediately clear that this is a metaphor, for the endless depths of these six women, with a wildly varied range of perspectives, attitudes and experiences. It does appear that all of them are white, and an intricately intimate portrait like this would be even richer with other racial backgrounds included, but that aside, this group, even among only six, is unusually diverse.

It’s almost astonishing that this is even a documentary, the editing is so spectacular, creating a narrative that makes it very easy to mistake this for a narrative feature. Even the cinematography is quite good, which is unusual for documentaries, particularly of the sort in which the director and crew just sit back and disappear into the backgrounds of these ladies’ environments, giving us as an audience a unique sense of being a fly on the wall.

Indeed, I do think it’s useful to know beforehand a little bit about how Sediments was made. I found myself wondering, is the director trans, or even a woman? Nope: he’s Adrián Silvestre, a Barcelona-based director who connected with Spanish trans organization I-Vaginarium, which provides information and resources for trans women considering vaginoplasty. His intent was to create a documentary film portrait of trans women that stands apart from the longstanding cliches of trans representation in other films.

And boy, does he do it here, with stunningly intimate results, finding six women who were comfortable with cameras being present, and possibly recording, during any and all moments of a group trip to the rural town in the Spanish province of León. Starting with workshops before filming began, to get them comfortable with the filming process, ultimately they become so completely comfortable with the presence of the single camera Sylvestre is using, you would never know they were even conscious of it while watching the film. This is precisely why it’s useful for us as audiences to know how the production came together.

So, with this objective separation, the camera never judging or commenting, we are subject to six unique individuals who are solely themselves, who have moments of both joy and tension, and yield moments of deep intimacy both emotional and physical (not in terms of sexual activity, but certainly some frank nudity). These women are unafraid to express themselves and to confront each other when they feel it necessary, but they also don’t hold any grudges. Getting to know each other like this is bound to be messy, particularly with the range of backgrounds, experiences, and crucially, stage of transitioning.

One woman, Cristina, is in her fifties only only recently began her transition process; she’s the only one consistently wearing an obvious wig. Yolanda, on the other hand, never reveals her age but can’t be far from Cristina, yet she’s a seasoned veteran of the trans experience, having paid her dues in youth in a way the two twentysomething young women present can’t quite directly relate to. She even has a gravelly voice and a tracheostomy in her neck from an earlier cancer surgery. There is particularly protracted tension between Cristina and Yolanda, as Yolanda tires of Cristina’s oversharing in a way that that attempts to separate herself from the others; Yolanda calls her an egomaniac and Cristina dwells on this for a long time, asking the opinion about it in turn from all the other women. Another woman often sits back quietly, drawing portraits of the others. Ultimately, though, Yolanda helps Cristina make her bad wigs . . . a little better.

Sediments has a quality to it that is reminiscent of Robert Altman films, with its focus not just on dialogue but on overlapping conversations. Except in this case, they are real, neutrally observed and recorded. Whether this is compelling is a matter of taste, I suppose, but in my view the context alone makes it deeply so. It’s not so much just recordings of ordinary conversations, as the editing creates a rich narrative of six women from as many walks of life, bonding with each other.

We’ve had the privilege in recent years of seeing films and television shows that revolve around the lives of trans characters. But, this may be the first time I can recall where all of the characters are trans, and even though they still clearly move through a world of cisgender people—we meet the parents of one of them—they are all comparatively incidental, none of them quite even making it to “supporting character” status. This about these six trans women and these women only. The closest we come even to meeting a boyfriend is a blush-inducing moment in which one of the elder women asks a cute waiter at a restaurant if he’s single and attempting to get him to connect with the clearly embarrassed younger woman at the end of the table. These woman talk about the other people in their lives, and experiences from their pasts, but with the brief exception of the aforementioned pair of parents, we never see them.

For one weekend, Sylvestre’s camera follow just these six women around, and the results are moving and profound. It’s difficult to imagine a film like this getting done with such great success in the U.S., at least not one directed by a cisgender man. Maybe in a few years, but it doesn’t feel like even progressive Americans are quite ready for the kind of frank intimacy on display here. Yet, anyone who sees this film will be enriched by it.

An intimiate weekend well worth spending.

Overall: A

WHO WE ARE: A CHRONICLE OF RACISM IN AMERICA

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

More than once as I watched Who We Are: A Chronicle of Racism in America, I thought about the many Black creators I follow on social media, particularly on TikTok, who put in the work to educate white Americans—and white people around the world, really—and regularly note that they accept donations for their labor. They are certainly well within their rights to accept compensation for offering education for people who are perfectly capable of finding the information themselves. And so, I wonder: how much was writer, activist and lawyer Jeffery Robinson—who is also Deputy Legal Director and Director of the Trone Center for Justice & Equality at the ACLU—compensated, both for the TED Talk-like presentation he gave in New York City on Juneteenth 2018, and for the adapted film, largely consisting of footage from that talk, now in theaters? I certainly don’t personally need to know exactly how much he was paid. I’m only saying I sure hope he was compensated handsomely for this work.

Because it isn’t work he has to do, or even that he should have to do. Lucky for all of us, somehow, he still feels compelled to do it. Who We Are does not spend very much time with Robinson’s interactions with those who disagree with him, but early on in the film, there is a sequence in which he has a brief debate with a man in Charlotte, North Carolina, who is waving the Confederate flag and insisting the Civil War wasn’t really about slavery. Robinson quickly has enough of it, but walks away on cordial and friendly terms with the guy—later reflecting on how he doesn’t know if he can ever get through to such people, but if he doesn’t try, “he’ll definitely never change.” And my immediate thought was: why should you have to try? Other white people should be putting in the work to change that Southern white man’s mind.

Evidently, Robinson doesn’t have to do this work; he wants to. And it’s clear throughout this incredible and enlightening film, he’s really never talking to any fellow people of color here, or certainly not other Black people. I can’t fathom recommending this movie to any Black people, who, sure, almost certainly will learn specific details about American history that they didn’t already know, but who won’t walk away with any new information about the role of racism in America that they didn’t already know. This is a movie written and presented by a Black man, and made for white people. And they only way America will truly move forward is if more white people pay real attention to things like this.

Robinson talks a lot about symbolism, and how it is either used by white supremacist systems as a means of oppression, or to downplay the impact of such systems. A lot of images are brought up on the screen behind him onstage, which have deep, often disturbing meaning in context: the 1859 Slave Patrol badge, widely seen as a precursor to present-day sheriff badges. In one of the documentary segments away from the stage, when Robinson is traveling to other parts of the country, he presents us with images of the “Steps to Nowhere.” These are the many staircases to houses destroyed in the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, but which were never rebuilt. They are now just concrete staircases that go up to grass.

It would be easy to assume Who We Are is just preaching to the choir, as happens so often with films like this. It’s striking that this film even got a theatrical release given the current financial climate of the film industry: granted I went to a very early showing just after noon on a Sunday, but I was the only person in the theater I went to. Good for Covid safety; bad for getting this movie in front of more eyeballs. Nothing about this movie demands that it be seen on the big screen, so hopefully it will be available on a streamer soon. Because it is indeed vital viewing, regardless of the size of the screen. And it won’t be preaching to the choir, far from it—Jeffery Robinson takes the Chronicle part of the title pretty literally, tracking the major “tipping points” of possibly moving toward racial justice in this country, from its founding to the present day. You won’t just be hearing things you already know, and you certainly won’t just be told what you want to hear.

That said, Robinson certainly knows who his audience is here—again, it’s white Americans—and he comes to us with a level of understanding and empathy far too seldom afforded Black people in this country. And although this feels very much like his movie, Who We Are is co-directors Emily Kunstler and Sarah Kunstler, who happen to be both white women. While I often openly wish movies that are about people of color were directed and/or written by people of color as well, in this case it feels appropriate, given the very specific conversation happening here—and, again, given that Robinson is the credited writer. These three have clearly collaborated very effectively, without ever falling into the common trap of centering whiteness in conversations about race. Not even when Robinson meets with a close childhood friend from Memphis who is white, or when he learns about white family friends who helped his parents buy a house the realtor would not sell to his Black parents.

Such scenes help illuminate who Jeffery Robinson is as a person, and how he came to where he is today, but they are far from the most impactful scenes in the movie, which is as it should be. The broader message of Who We Are is right there in the title, with example after example of America refusing to reconcile its elevated vision of itself with the darkest parts of its history and legacy—most specifically, slavery. Early on, Robinson tells his audience that the history of slavory is not their responsibility (a particular point that is up for debate among many), “but it is our shared history.” White America isn’t even comfortable with that idea, but Who We Are is a film that will help them take the tiniest of steps closer to it. And tiny or not, every step counts.

Only when we come to terms with how far we haven’t come, do we have any hope of getting much further.

Overall: A

THE WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD

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

I love pretty much everything about The Worst Person in the World. I can think of no real criticisms. No notes!

No, wait! I just thought of one thing. The main character, Julie, is constantly pulling shirts on without pulling her hair out from under it. She’s regularly just walking around with her hair stuck under her shirt, which drove me crazy. Pull your hair out of your shirt, Julie!

Also, I do have a complaint about the marketers of this movie—which is not a criticism of the movie itself, even though it does result in seeing a movie slightly different from what was expected. People are calling this a “romantic comedy,” and that’s really not at all what it is. It’s an alternately charming and moving romantic drama that has two or three chuckles. Don’t go into this movie expecting hilarity.

Once past that, though, it’s hard not to love it. My love for it grew over time, even as Julie progressively came to terms with the aimlessness of her life. But also, I found things to love from the opening shot. As in, I have to mention and compliment cinematographer Kasper Tuxen (who also shot the also-fantastic Riders of Justice), who gives The Worst Person in the World a kind of visual artistry seldom seen in movies of this sort.

It’s easy to go into this film think of it as minor or slight, but director and co-writer Joachim Trier infuses this story with a unique depth and nuance, bucking nearly all the conventions of romantic films. Rather than a story about a woman and a man finding their way to each other, this is about Julie finding a way to herself. She has relationships with two different men in the story, both of equal importance and significance but for different reasons.

I love that this is the woman’s story. I love that it also sidesteps the expected trajectory of “girl meets boy, girl loses boy, girl gets girl back.” I love that the cinematography is noticeably good from the opening shot. I love the sequence (or “chapter,” as this is presented as “twelve chapters with a prologue and an epilogue”) in which Julie meets her second love interest, Eivind, where they talk about and straddle the line they would have to cross before they would consider it “cheating.” It crackles with erotic tension and settles into a casual hang, simultaneously.

I love the performances, particularly of its three leads: Renate Reinsve as Julie; Anders Danielsen Lie (also seen recently in Bergman Island) as Aksel, Julie’s first love interest; and Herbert Nordrum as Eivind. We are given multiple close-ups of the faces of all three of these actors, in every instance offering both subtle and great detail of expression: a nervous smile, the movement of the eyes that betrays a lie.

I love that Joachim Trier gives us the time needed to see how Julie’s relationships organically develop, in very different ways, the second one beginning, as so often happens, before the first one ends. In both cases, these men offers Julie what she needs in some areas but fall short in others. Julie is just turning thirty while Aksel is in his forties and puts undo pressure on her to start a family. Eivind is so environmentally conscious he doesn’t want children, but he is not very well read and cannot provide the kind of intellectually stimulating conversation that Aksel did. I think the breakup scene between Julie and Aksel will be deeply relatable to many, from both sides of that particular exchange. Conversely, a sequence in which Julie runs weaving through citizens of Oslo frozen in time so she can have a clandestine meetup with Eivind is uniquely charming.

Much like Drive My Car, The Worst Person in the World very briefly acknowledges the pandemic in its final sequence, showing people wearing face masks, this time while Julie is on a job as a photographer. I’m not sure what the point of that is, exactly, except perhaps to convey the passage of time: we are now in the present day, when the ubiquity of mitigation measures cannot be avoided or go unacknowledged. I don’t mention this as a complaint, just an observation. The way art deals with the reality of the current world situation is sometimes fascinating, and in this case, it gets fairly quickly gleaned over by—spoiler alert!—what I would consider a happy ending, just not a conventional one.

And that gets to the heart of why I loved The Worst Person in the World: it succeeds on every level, and on every level it does so unconventionally. All of the characters ring true, as do all of their behaviors, offering a fundamentally realistic portrait of romance and humanity, with a subtly artistic visual flair. Hanging out with Julie is an eminently pleasant experience, even though she’s as flawed as anyone—arguably more so even than the men she gets with. Perhaps this film’s most impressive feat is how it never puts on airs of high-minded art and still winds up being a fine specimen of artistic accomplishment.

If Julie can be relied on for anything, it would be getting to know people in uncnoventional ways.

Overall: A