Year-End Lighning Round #3 (Patreon)

I do want to apologize, not just for the highly infrequent posting, but for the shoddy viewing as well. There's just too much going on, and I can only work in brief spurts. 

Drive My Car (Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, 2021)

Drive My Car is clearly the more ambitious of Hamaguchi's two 2021 films, but I am willing to court dismay by saying that I much prefer Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy. Its looser structure felt playful and surprising, whereas the overtly literary craftsmanship of Drive My Car, sure to please the English majors in the crowd, seems overly studied to me. There's no question that Hamaguchi shows impressive skill in his use of time and narrative, introducing small details whose greater resonance is only revealed later on. In this way, he avoids overt symbolism, in favor of a loving depiction of the everyday world and the personal meanings we inevitably ascribe to it.

With its use of Chekhov and the thin line between performance and ordinary living, Drive My Car has more than enough going for it. And although this isn't a visually flashy film, Hamaguchi's use of long shots and road-ribboned landscapes is quite seductive, offering a kind of analog for the white spaces of Murakami's page -- the somewhat neutral surface onto which human relations are gradually inscribed. What I did not understand, however, is the final hour's rapid accumulation of incident, a formal version of the landslide that leveled Misaki's house. I haven't seen a murder so casually introduced in a film's home stretch since, I don't know, Eureka, maybe? And the eleventh-hour articulation of Misaki's damaged soul struck me as forced, as though Hamaguchi ultimately did not trust his own restraint. Not every drive has to get you somewhere, but Drive My Car ends so decisively, I half expected Siri to announce "arrived."

Nightmare Alley (Guillermo Del Toro, 2021)

First off, I have not seen the original, so I cannot compare. Didn't have time to watch it. Still, about halfway through Nightmare Alley, a lightbulb went off. This is Del Toro's Cape Fear: the cinephilic director applying his ample skills to a relatively faithful remake of a Hollywood B-picture, all the better to show off his chops and have a little bit of fun. Nothing much is at stake here, and although I suspect its crash and burn at the box office is mostly because Disney is actively dumping old Fox projects, this is not exactly a timely film. There's no obvious connection to the present day, no overt allegory. Whereas neo-noir usually plays up the distrust and paranoia -- evergreen emotions that they are -- Nightmare Alley exists in such a hermetic demimonde that it offers no clear way in for the average viewer. 

But I enjoyed it. While not as nihilistic as Freaks, this depiction of the carnival world is fairly compelling as a self-deluding dead end. Petty grifters talk of "marks" and devise elaborate systems for deception, but it's really just a way for society's outcasts to feel momentarily superior to the straight world, where they would be utterly unwelcome. The bland but vaguely menacing Bradley Cooper is a good fit for the role of Stan, since it's evident long before his "therapy session" with Dr. Ritter (Cate Blanchett) that his self-control is hanging by a thread. And regarding Lilith Ritter, I personally found it fascinating how, within the film's 1940s milieu, Freudian psychoanalysis is regarded as just another mentalist scam, a cheap parlor trick. If anything, this skepticism represents Del Toro's closest connection to the contemporary world.

The Souvenir Part II (Joanna Hogg, 2021)

It's odd. On paper, Joanna Hogg's films are exactly the kind of thing I like. They are austere, stippled with wry humor, and tend toward the self-reflexive. In this respect, The Souvenir Part II is the Hoggiest Hogg film to date, a "sequel" that displays the process of making the "real life" events of the first film into a movie. And although S2 plays the scenario pretty straight, using Julie (Honor Swinton Byrne) and the completion of her film-school thesis film as the diegetic rationale for the film-within-a-film, Hogg still departs from realism when it comes time to show us the final product. "The Souvenir" partakes of the expressionism and color-saturation familiar from the BFI art crowd that inspired Hogg (Sally Potter, Isaac Julien, and especially Derek Jarman), and even resurrects the dead Anthony (Tom Burke), even though a new (living) actor (Harris Dickinson) is ostensibly playing him. (Julie, meanwhile, portrays "herself" in Julie's film, even though Hogg has had Julie cast Ariane Labed.)

Thing is, Hogg's formal play is weighted down by her insistence on making Julie an avatar for any and all victims of sexism in the creative arts. She lacks a deft touch when it comes to making these points, with her all old-white-male thesis committee giving her a condescending dressing down while Patrick (Richard Aoyade), the flamboyant hack in her graduating cohort, is indulged by everyone. Perhaps Hogg means to make these points impossible to miss, but Byrne's performance does the script's didactic elements no favors. As written, Julie is maddeningly passive, and Byrne leans in to the character's inchoate sense of self, always sitting quietly and wide-eyed, hoping no one discovers she's an impostor (which of course she's not). The best parts of S2, really, are Julie's interactions with her parents (Tilda Swinton and James Spencer Ashworth), whose generically well-appointed upper middle class country house captures Little English faux-sophistication almost metonymically. 

I'd ordinarily say that Hogg is likely to evolve into a filmmaker to whom I respond positively. But five features in, I'm thinking she is what she is, and I am I.

Ahed's Knee (Nadav Lapid, 2021)

It's fitting that Ahed's Knee ended up sharing Cannes' Jury Prize with Memoria. In its own way, Lapid's film is almost as experimental, setting aside the dramaturgy and character work of his first three features in favor of a ruthless deconstruction of what it means to be an Israeli filmmaker of note. Lapid's onscreen surrogate (Avshalom Pollak) is disgusted with his nation and its reactionary culture. One could think of Synonyms as a dry run for Ahed's Knee, since in the earlier film Lapid channeled his aggression through a smug, callow character with whom we're probably not meant to identify. Here, while we may again resist seeing ourselves reflected in the protagonist -- his anger has made him a hateful bastard -- there's never any doubt that we must take his point of view quite seriously.

If there's one thing that kept me from unreservedly embracing Ahed's Knee, it's Lapid's decision to use an optimistic if hapless local arts bureaucrat (Nur Fibak) as the filmmaker's foil. She is an ambivalent figure, obviously embodying a kind of "go along to get along" sense of institutional compromise. And while we never get the idea that Lapid endorses the director's relentless excoriation of this woman, he also fails to make her strong enough to fight back. It takes the community to defend her, and the director himself to back off; she is too cowed to stand her ground. Then again, more than anything else Lapid has done, Ahed's Knee works to separate us from the dramatic action onscreen, forcefully reminding us of the real man behind the camera. The swerving, diving camerawork shakes certain scenes loose from the narrative, slapping us around a bit and reminding us that we're watching the dissolution of a certain kind of cinema, as well as a crisis of faith. Theo Panayides once wrote that Godard's Weekend was "the film of a man at the end of his rope," and the description applies just as well here.