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Waves (2019)
All we have is now
There's always something interesting happening in Waves. Be it visually or in the way the story unfolds, there's no doubt that this a film made with great care and thought. It's scenes are peppered with what seems like carefully chosen songs featuring an eclectic mix of artists that help set the mood and tone of the film and ensure our immersion in its world, with one of my personal favorites, Radiohead's True Love Waits finding a perfect locus in the proceedings. There's an Instagram filter-like quality to the cinematography and colors, which isn't distracting but actually quite fitting considering it's a story about Gen-Z youth. I must say I had no idea what this film was about, but after the first fifteen minutes or so, I thought I had a clue in to how things were going to play out. It starts out by following Tyler, a high school senior who is also a wrestler, the jock character with a domineering parent that we can't say we haven't seen before. This character also features in other popular Gen-Z teen depictions such as Sex Education and Euphoria (both of which I saw before this). We see his routines, get a sense of his relationship dynamics with his family (especially his father) and also get to witness the challenges that he faces being a Black youth. Kelvin Harrison Jr. Deftly calibrates his performance to bring out intensity, but also an innate likeability. There's an empathy with which he plays his character (props must be given to the writing too) that then helps us empathize with him when he behaves questionably and commits some serious blunders. There's a line that the character's father has in the second half of the film (that he delivers to the daughter) that just wouldn't work if he had made missteps in his performance. Midway through the film, a tragedy occurs, and this is when the film changes into something else...something profound and deeply affecting. That's not to say it becomes a depressing film. Sad things happen and characters do linger in a state of grief for a while, but the tone never turns bleak. The colors and some really well crafted characters help a great deal. The focus also shifts towards Emily (Tyler's sister) and she is by far the best character in the film and that is largely in part to the way she's played by Taylor Russell, who is nothing short of a revelation. If the first half of the film played out a bit like Euphoria with better characters, this part of the film plays out The Spectacular Now - another teen drama I really admired. There's an inherent sweetness in the way she and Lucas Hedges portray their characters. I wanted to befriend them. It also made me realize that it had been a while since I had seen such absolute sweethearts on screen. Their relationship, the way the meet, they way they look at each other, the way they comfort each other, the way they care for each other, and even the way they make love to each other is the definition of - and I hate to use the word - "wholesome". Not in a cheesy way, but in a deep, human way. The most charitable act a writer can perform for his characters is to write them in a way that makes it hard for us to judge them. All I could do through Waves was to see these characters, feel the love they have in them despite their actions, and truly understand them.
Portrait de la jeune fille en feu (2019)
Have you known love?
Céline Sciamma's Potrait of a Lady on Fire is a technically strong and lyrically accented film about an intimate romance between two women during the course of a few weeks on an island in Brittany. Intimate not just in the scope of how the scenes play out but also in terms of the setting. There are but a few places where the scenes unfold and apart from a glimpse or two of some other participants, the cast stays confined to four major players. The story revolves around Marianne, a painter, who is commissioned by a widowed countess to paint a wedding portrait for a suitor in Milan, of her daughter Héloïse, who is not too keen on the idea of marriage and is grieving from the loss of her sister. Her mother, during a conversation with Marianne, says the marriage will present Héloïse with an escape from boredom. How wondrous then, that as the film goes on, we see Héloïse achieve exactly that not in the act of leaving...but of someone else entering. One of the early exchanges in the film involves Marianne playing one of her favorite pieces on a harpsichord for a onlooking Héloïse, with a gentle fire burning in the background as they lock eyes from time to time. Fire, thus, becomes an important motif in the film signifying desire, destruction, tenderness, warmth, and love. During another scene with locked gazes, Héloïse's dress literally catches fire. What is easy to miss is that as much as Marianne is painting Héloïse, Héloïse too seems to conjuring up paintings of her own. There are extensive shots of Marianne carefully studying her subject's face, contours, shadows and continually working and reworking her piece, manipulating her hand and fingers to reproduce the enigmatic beauty of this lady. Héloïse seems to be employing a tactic of her own - painting Marianne with her eyes. She is as much an acute observer as her painter, paying close attention to how she touches forehead, how she breathes, how she raises her eyebrows. It's almost as if she knew, with precise certainty, how important all of it would end up being for her. The last shot of the film features a magnificent display of flowing emotion by Adèle Haenel. Marianne attends a play with Héloïse present in attendance too, seated at the opposite end. Marianne gazes at her, her gaze not met with reciprocation. "He made the poet's choice", opines Marianne, in an earlier scene that features a reading of "Orpheus and Eurydice" in front of the fireplace in the kitchen, when Sophie (the servant) wonders out loud why Orpheus turned back to look at Eurydice. Sophie feels as though he had no reason. We then think about, at the end of the film, the reason for why Héloïse doesn't look back at Marianne. Perhaps, she made the painter's choice, choosing to keep the image of her love alive and well in the deep trenches of her soul. . There is a third painter too though, one we never really see, whose work runs at a crisp two hours and forbids our looking away: Sciamma herself. She along with the team ensure that while you may fault this film for maybe moving with too languid and gentle a pace, what you can't fault it for is being an eyesore. The camerawork here, at times doubling for Marianne's eyes, is excellent with the frames looking beautiful despite the muted colors. As for the performances, though Héloïse is the more intriguing character, it is Noémie Merlant whose performance captivates the most. There is a deceptive effortlessness in her performance, as she very confidently navigates Marianne's many emotions - her anger, her fascination, her frustration. It's all on display here and is a delight to witness. That's not to say Haenel is far behind...that last shot alone isn't just a signifier of her ability to hold a frame but also hold our gaze simultaneously. However, in some scenes I did feel that she injected a slight masculinity in her character that felt a little misplaced. Luàna Bajrami manages to make an impression as well. It's a mark of some commendable writing that her character doesn't feel out of place or unwelcome. Technically brilliant, well written and beautifully performed, Portrait of a Lady on Fire must be witnessed by anyone who has ever felt love.
BlacKkKlansman (2018)
Some fo' real sh*t
Veteran auteur Spike Lee finds himself in fine form in this big screen retelling of real life events (some for real s**t as the film puts it) in post Civil Rights Movement 70s America. The film doesn't just play out as an infiltrate-and-investigate comedy-thriller but also as an investigation of identity and ideology. This additional layer provides for some really fine storytelling touches. There is the Jewish cop who previously wasn't privy to his cultural role and racial heritage now having to confront it vis-à-vis. Then there's the protagonist, who has to assert himself not just as a brother in the large family of people who are his own but also in his j-o-b as a cop and find a way to stay true to both those facets of his identity. A lot of the film also plays out in parallels. It opens with a scene from Gone With the Wind featuring injured Confederate soldiers from the Civil War and ends with a picture of a victim of a different (but not so different) sort of war. There is a sermon-like address to a group of students by the Black activist Kwame Ture early on in the film and towards the end there is another sermon, given to Klan members by their grand wizard David Duke. Klan members watch a racist propaganda film in celebration featuring whistles and claps. Elsewhere, Harry Belafonte makes a cameo appearance as a character who recounts a public lynching to students that respond with sighs of sadness. All these details contribute to a really entertaining, poignant, but also funny-at-times viewing experience in a period film that touches on themes and topics still very intraneous to the current zeitgeist. One just wishes it didn't need to be.
Our Souls at Night (2017)
Barefoot on the Porch
"'Cause yesterday is dead and gone,
and tomorrow's out of sight,
and it's sad to be alone...
Help me make it through the night"
Ritesh Batra crafts a beautiful portrait of old age with the help of screen legends Robert Redford & Jane Fonda. Redford and Fonda play Addie and Louis, a pair of widowed neighbors who begin a relationship that starts with the both of them sharing a bed together at night to alleviate their loneliness. The film opens with Addie's proposal and right away the scene sets the tone for the rest of the film for it is at once melancholic yet low-key and rests on the shoulders of the crackling chemistry between the two leads. Batra lends the film a tone that observes calmness with the film being shot in natural, dim light. There's no showy camerawork, no forced drama (even though there's a subplot with a troubled son) and even the romantic scenes - though one could call the entire film one big romantic scene - are handled with a quiet placidity that aptly reflects the character's ages and where they are in life. That despite this "lack" of drama the film manages to never bore is a testament to the assured direction and performances by the actors. The supporting cast - Matthias Schoenaerts, Phyllis Somerville, Iain Armitage, Bruce Dern and Judy Greer are effective in the couple of scenes that the script affords them. Our Souls At Night is a beautiful meditation on the value of companionship and connectedness. As a cinematic experience it ends up being a lot more than what's expected of it, and that is the film's true virtue.
Midsommar (2019)
Cult(ure)
Safe to say Ari Aster has a penchant for the unsettling. His second feature is yet another exploration of grief and relationships set against the backdrop of shady cults, sinister rituals and pagan religions. Where the film ends up being a disappointment is in its handling of the character conflicts and their narrative threads. The mystery of the tragic event in Dani's life, her relationship with Christian and Christian's own erratic behavior with his friends give way to a bizarre and psychedelic experience in the second half. It seems as though Aster has a tendency to take his brilliant set-ups and characterizations and have them fall prey to his love for grotesque conclusions. That he makes the second half work despite these problems is a testament to his unique and singular visual sensibilities. However, one can't help but feel like he ends up trying to marry two kinds of movies with each other but only acquires consent from one of them.
Kabali (2016)
Kabali - Rajini makes the best he can out of this uninspired and blandly scripted and directed film by Pa. Ranjith
The best parts of Kabali are the ones where the script really allows Rajinikanth the actor to take center stage and deliver one of his best performances in the last decade. He's terrific during the stretches where he hears his character being called "appa" whether it's by Meena (a rehabilitated drug addict played by Riythvika) or his actual daughter, the henchwoman Yogi (played by Sai Dhansika). If in one instance he's paralyzed by the possibility of Meena being his daughter (he even considers adopting her), in another terrific scene - in terms of acting, because the staging is atrocious - he's hypnotized and awe-struck by seeing the fruit of his loins in front his eyes in flesh and blood. He manages to convey tenderness, wonderment, elation and sadness beautifully through his eyes and body language. It's nice to see a superstar surrender to the script in that fashion in a moment where he relinquishes the savior duties to another character - a woman. Might be the first such instance for a star vehicle in Thamizh cinema. Rajini gets another scene to showcase the fantastic actor he is, and it's when his character his reunited at long last with his long lost wife Kumudhavalli (played by a really young looking Radhika Apte). They tearfully embrace after a long stare and just as he begins consoling her, he withdraws and stares at her again for just a moment as if to say "is it really you?". But that's pretty much all there is to savor in Kabali. The rest of the film - part family drama, part gangster drama - is as boring and generic as it gets. Which is a shame because the milieu isn't one that's been explored before. The film is set in Malaysia and explores the lives of Malaysian Thamizhs as they assert themselves and revolt against the oppression they have been facing. But there's an indifference to Malaysia as a setting itself that makes the proceedings and message seem limp. How are we supposed to care about these people and their lives when we see so little of their inner lives and such little of the city itself. The flashback whizzes by quickly and the time period is barely registrable. It really makes you wonder if this is the same director that made Madras, whose first half played out in almost documentary-like fashion. The lack of attention to the script is also apparent in how the supporting characters are written. There are plenty of talented actors that make up the cast list but they either serve to amp up the hero's heroism or become generic plot devices (although Attakathi Dinesh's Jeeva gets a fantastically imagined death scene). The central issue itself gets buried under an insipid gang-war drama with caricature villains that neither get good motivations nor good dialogue. Winston Chao seems more like a moving mannequin who belongs in a Perarasu movie than somebody who has a grasp on his character. One can't really fault him because there is no character. The gangster portions of the film, which were supposed to showcase "Super Star" Rajinikanth fail because the actor seems to be unable to conjure up the menace in his voice and body language to seem threatening enough. Seems like he devoted so much energy to the emotional parts of the film that there's a certain tiredness and disinterest in his approach to the more "massy" scenes. There's a dinner table scene where he stands up and delivers a "We're gonna change things" type speech but the distance the camera is at and the surprisingly shrill quality in his voice makes it seem like he's dissatisfied with the dessert. Post Baasha - which built a delicious myth around its hero - one expects the Rajini character in any film to be an almost mythic creature with a myth holding such hype around him that it makes the villains go weak at his sight and the audience to stand up and whistle. That's just a Rajini movie must. Here too, Kabali is almost mythic before he shows up. The police are considering his case and release from prison. The villains are receiving phone calls regarding the release. The movie opens with the sound of a siren. His clothes - he's almost always clad in a suit - almost seem to have superhero costume like sentiment throughout the film (the Ambedkar backstory is a great one though). All of the touches that sound great on paper but are dealt with an offhandedness on screen. Even the intro shot with the shutter doesn't register the way we want it to because we've already seen his face. And then there's the ending of the film that succeeds the messy takedown of the villains in the third act. Tiger, played by Hari Krishnan, in an assignment given to him by the Malaysian police walks up to Kabali. The screen cuts to black and we hear a gunshot. An end like that was probably supposed to make me go "what?!" but all I could muster was "dude...why?". Pretty much sums up my feelings about this Pa. Ranjith film. An overwhelmingly underwhelming entry in his oeuvre.