"Surrealist tragicomedy horror" is not a genre I generally opt for, but the cast--headed by Joaquin Phoenix and Patti LuPone--was enough of lure to get me to drop my qualms. We were right about the excellent performances--and the iffy premise.
https://a24films.com/films/beau-is-afraid
No recommendation.
As we've come to expect, the small independent films shown nearby are not only relegated to the small screening rooms but also to marginal, take-it-or-leave-it, time slots. So today, we stopped midday to see one of the last showings of R.M.N. We made a good decision.
Set in a Romanian village--that has variously been under the thumbs of the Hapsburgs, the Huns, Russia, the Soviet Union, and now the EU--the film explores the ironies and paradoxes of a globalized workforce where the locals travel west for jobs and (in this case) Sri Lankans make their western journey to take the jobs the locals have abandoned. As quickly as this polyglot community shifts from one language to another, it also turns against the factory employing the outsiders.
In a 15-minute scene, we listen to the community's vitriol (often nonsensical, always familar) against the bakery owner and her foreign workers, figures whom the locals have transformed into synecdoches for the system that's abused and overwhelmed them all. The camera never moves. In the lower right corner, almost off screen, the bakery owner fidgets uncomfortably. Nearby, her manager is being harassed by one of the village ring-leaders; she fears shunning him lest he cause a ruckus.
What the young boy sees in the opening scene (we later learn it's a man hanging from a tree) and what we see in the closing scene (wild bears hovering outside the manager's home)--these frame the film and contribute to its foreboding sense of powerlessness.
Highly recommend.
My fears were misplaced.
I'd also worried the the relentlessly rhyming iambic pentameter couplets would become tedious. They did not. Smith's use of enjambment and off-rhymes buried the rhyming so well that I had to look for them.
We had a jolly group--two students, Mike, Ardis, and I--and the production was worth all the effort.
Very much worth seeing.
This first full-length film from A. V. Rockwell is a gorgeous film about damaged characters whose selflessness is not revealed until almost the end of the film. Everything about the film is meticulous.
Inez (Teyana Taylor) claims Terry (Aaron Kingsley Adetola; Aven Courtney; Josiah Cross) from the foster care system when she returns to the neighborhood after a stint in prison. She finds a steady job and keeps them at the same address (Apt #10-01) for over decade. Meanwhile, things change. Inez marries a long-time beau (who is not Terry's birth father and dies before the end of the film). Terry (using the alias Inez procurred to keep the foster system from finding him) stays out of trouble and prepares for college. Things unravel when Terry applies for an internship and provides (fake, unbeknownst to him) documentation.
Teyana Taylor is fabulous. The three actors playing Terry share the same empty-stare emotion-free affect associated with traumatized children.
Highly recommended
We will be watching for more films from A. V. Rockwell.
The Gentlemen of the Men's and Boy's Choir did not disappoint. A lovely, peaceful service that concluded with 33 tolls of the church tower bells.
Another astonishing film well worth a late night after a long Thursday. Billed as folk horror, Mark Jenkin's film feels more like a psychological horror based on personal and community trauma. What happens to when a community and its individuals have been brutalized by a system and then abandoned when they and their services are deemed no longer necessary?
The cinematography--18mm film with disorienting, unfocused, and claustrophobic closeups--evokes the 1970s. The repetitive narrative (reminds me of a Phillip Glass composition) collapses time and events and figures.
For a good interview with the director, see Tara Judah's https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2023/interviews/enys-men-an-interview-with-mark-jenkin/ .
Well worth seeing once. Even more worth seeing twice to piece together the shattered pieces.
My favorite scene in Shakespeare's Richard III is the seduction scene. Here Richard lures the widow of a man he killed into his marriage bed. A great performance also lures the audience into the seduction, and it's only after the betroyal has been sealed that we realized what Richard, Shakespeare, and the actor have accomplished. Whatever else Shakespeare did to tarnish Richard's reputation, he did establish him as a figure who's difficult to resist.
The Lost King taps into that allure. Not only is Richard's "ghost" (played by Harry Lloyd) handsome and beguiling, he grants the film's protagonist Phillipa Langley (played by Sally Hawkins) what every woman desires (per Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Tale): sovereignty--that is, the freedom to follow her own desires, hunches, and sensibilities.
And as many have pointed out, the film grants that sovereignty by erasing the contributions of other women and vilifying the men affiliated with the University of Leicester. Or, to put it another way, the amateur historian (also frequently incapacitated by a form of chronic fatigue syndrome), Phillipa Langley, is allowed to shine by showing how she triumphs over the know-it-all, image-preening, recognition-hungry professionals at the university.
The story undergirding the film is a good one. Though we weren't expecting a documentary, we were hoping for something that resisted caricature and easy storylines.
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