More Year-End Cramming (Patreon)

The Banshees of Inisherin (Martin McDonagh, 2022)

An essentially literary premise is given rather regal cinematic treatment by virtue of McDonagh shooting on two ridiculously picturesque Irish islands, but it's more than just visual splendor he achieves. The film takes great care to communicate the insularity of Inisherin, a place where one can literally witness the Irish Civil War taking place over the water but feel utterly safe from its dangers. There's a silly old joke about God building a wasteland and then "making people who like it that way," but the crux of Banshees' conflict is that one such provincial nobody, Colm (Brendan Gleeson) suddenly attains sentience and starts thinking about Art and Mortality and Leaving Something Behind.

This heady business is alien to Pádraic (Colin Farrell), gently referred to by a local as "one of life's good guys." But as Pádraic notes, this isn't exactly a compliment in context. It's not that he is happy just raising his crops and tending his donkey and heading down to the pub. He just never wonders about whether or not he's happy, because he takes his life at face value. His sister Siobhán (Kerry Condon) is more of an introvert, and her scoffed-at predilection for books will soon take her to the mainland to start a new life. If there's an overall point to Banshees, it may be that even if the bullheaded men of Inisherin avoid the larger world, conflict will eventually find them. The film is not so much an allegory for the Troubles as a specimen of same, roiling in a tiny Petri dish.

The Eternal Daughter (Joanna Hogg, 2022)

I've now seen six of Hogg's features, and I can firmly say that I don't get her creative wavelength. Her last film, The Souvenir Part Two, has been my favorite thus far, partly because her autobiographical / meta-cinematic scaffolding was treated as part of the problem, not a postmodern passkey for making self-regarding art more complicated. The Eternal Daughter is a notable step backward. Hogg has replaced Honor Swinton Byrne with her mother Tilda, now playing the director's onscreen avatar Julie as well as her mother Rosalind. It's admirable how not-gimmicky this is, although it was rather jarring when, at about the one-hour mark, both Tildas appeared in the frame at the same time.

Eternal Daughter has the thinnest of premises. Rosalind's birthday is coming up, and so Julie is taking her to an out-of-the-way Welse bed and breakfast that was once owned by their family. Rosalind remembers staying there with her Aunt Jocelyn, and as she recounts various details, Julie surreptitiously records her so she can incorporate her mother's memories into her new screenplay. As you might well expect, time begins to fold in on itself just as methodically as the narrative mise-en-abyme. Hogg shoots this film like a ghost story, which I suppose it is, but only in the sense that every movie is a ghost story, a lingering artifact of things past. Her approximation of the visual language of gothic horror is almost comically cliched. The many, many shots of the exterior of the house at night, as the fog comes rolling in off the wily, windy moors, made me think of the worst work of Ben Wheatley, another po-mo Brit who puts on and takes off genre like a pair of knickers.

Saint Omer (Alice Diop, 2022)

Confession time: I have tried twice to watch Diop's previous film, the documentary We (Nous), and both times I shut it off after about 40 minutes. There's something irritatingly random about the film's concatenation of disparate events, an even less rhetorically cogent version of the open-form docs that Gianfranco Rosi produces. For her narrative filmmaking debut, Diop has taken a well-known story from recent French history, the trial of Fabienne Kabou, in 2013. For her part, Diop partly fictionalizes this account, but the character of Laurence Coly (Guslagie Malanda) is very similar. A Senegalese immigrant and diligent philosophy student, Coly abandons her 15-month-old daughter on the beach, allowing the tide to carry her out and drown her.

Saint Omer employs a wraparound story that doesn't contribute very much but does suggest Diop's awareness of the crime and the criminal as fundamentally inscribed by discourse. Rama (Kayije Kagame) is a novelist who is using the Coly trial as the basis for her next book. But her similarity to Coly in certain respects is no coincidence. Rama is pregnant, worried about the affect a baby will have on her career, and shares Coly's bitter ambivalence about being a colonial subject welcomed into the higher reaches of French culture, since both women understand that this invitation is conditional.

The courtroom scenes are undeniably gripping. Diop seems to have taken some inspiration from Raymond Depardon and his 10th District Court film, refusing to leave the confines of the court and allowing Coly's testimony to comprise all we ever really know about her. This refusal of reenactment or other overtly cinematic gestures is admirable, since it demands that we see Coly as constructing herself, and being actively constructed, by available narratives. It's a very Foucaultian film, and also seems to draw on his analysis of the Pierre Riviere case.

Where Saint Omer falters is in its opening and closing "arguments," the first and final act. Although it makes structural sense for us to learn about Rama, to see her lecture on Duras and then struggle in her relationship with her more traditional mother, Diop doesn't exactly follow through on its consequences. Rama is meant to be our (and Diop's) surrogate, and we don't learn enough about her to really identify, nor is she kept mysterious enough to be a cypher. All her presence does is communicate how much Saint Omer intends to emotionally suture us into its project.

In the end, Rama befriends Coly's mother (Salamata Kamate), and at times Rama seems to behave as if she is replacing the woman's missing daughter, as though the novelist's identification with the murderer were so complete that a bond between herself and this new mother-figure would obviously be reciprocal. This is reflected, I think, in the final moments of the trial, when we hear Coly's defense attorney (Aurélia Petit) give closing remarks to the effect that her client is, in fact, all mothers, all women. The prosecutor's closing argument is noticeably absent from the film, all of which thwarts what seemed to be Diop's higher purpose. If Coly is not a monster but a "monster," a discursive production, then all available discourses, pro and con, should be considered. Saint Omer promises a kind of stark objectivity, forcing the viewer to face the unimaginable. But finally, Diop puts her thumb on the scale, offering the viewer two choices: identification with the woman on trial, or with the history of colonialism.