Head Scratchers (Patreon)

Everything Everywhere All at Once (Daniel Kwan & Daniel Scheinert, 2022)

I will say this much: it's not boring. Part of the secret of EEAAO is that it moves at such a clip that the Daniels are able to whizz past any number of moments that, if you really chewed over them, would seem very familiar. Certain segments, like the rock sequence or many of the more banal alternate 'verses, are very much like Charlie Kaufman concepts but without his verbal wit. The overarching scenario in which Alpha Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh) created a monster by pushing her own progeny (Stephanie Hsu) to the brink of insanity, is a common enough comic book trope. And the notion that the meek optimist (Ke Huy Quan) secretly holds the key to saving the world -- love -- can be found everywhere, from Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Charles Dickens.

But EEAAO is not lazy. The Daniels worked very hard to stitch this object together from spare parts, and the result has obviously struck a chord. That's most likely because this film does what great popular entertainments have always done, synthesizing and adapting cultural archetypes within a contemporary vernacular. It's pure Lucas / Spielberg / Wachowskis stuff. No, at the risk of sounding hopelessly out of touch, the problem with EEAAO is that it exemplifies the state of play in pop culture today. It exhibits a firm belief that super-heroics are the epic sagas of our time, and bends that hegemonic template to accommodate the immigrant experience, generational trauma, and the reclamation of the cinema of physical action by some of its Asian progenitors. I fear that objects like EEAAO reflect the only options available to creative filmmakers hoping to work outside the constraints of IP. Take a family, give them a complicated backstory, explore their simmering resentments and the resiliency of parent / child love. And then put them in The Avengers. 

Grand Jeté (Isabelle Stever, 2022)

It's always an intriguing experience to watch a film straight through to the end and still have no clear sense of whether I liked it. I kept abandoning my viewing of Grand Jeté and being weirdly drawn back to it, and that certainly says something. This is the first of Stever's films I've seen, and although she is a dffb graduate and orbits the periphery of the Berlin School crowd -- special thanks include Köhler, Grisebach, Wackerbarth, and Winckler -- this is a film that abjures the chill and rigor of those folks in favor of a stark and at times unsettling corporeality.

This is a film about Nadja (Sarah Grether), a middle-aged dance teacher who got pregnant mid-career and essentially abandoned her son with his grandmother (Susanne Bredehöft) so she could continue dancing. As it happens, she failed to become a star, so the sacrifice was kind of pointless. But Stever and Grether give us a portrait of a woman whose physical discipline is a thinly veiled excuse for bitter masochism. We get unappetizing close-ups of Nadja, whose neck is covered in eczema and has a frequently bare back riddled with moles and lesions. Her demeanor calls to mind Huppert's character in The Piano Teacher, but her visual presence is more Dumont than Haneke.

Speaking of Huppert, Grand Jeté more than once reminded me of Ma Mere, although the black humor of Christophe Honoré's film is replaced by an atmosphere of utter abjection. Spoiler alert: this is a film about incest. Once Nadja reconnects with her son Marco (Emil von Schönfels), who is now in high school, she becomes enamored with his body. He works out, but he also participates in endurance contests that involve hanging weights on his genitals. In certain ways, Nadja and Marco repeatedly having sex is one of the least abnormal things that happens in Grand Jeté. When I say that I was never sure whether or not I liked it, it wasn't because Stever seemed to be engaging in cheap taboo-busting. 

It's more that Grand Jeté enters the lives of warped individuals in medias res, observes them exploring their respective damage with one another, comes to a rather logical conclusion, and just stops. Who are these people anyway? And do we really want to know? The direction and cinematography suggest that the entire universe is askew, with otherwise nondescript scenes being framed with the subjects in the margins, or from abnormally high or low angles, a bit like Rodchenko's Constructivist photography. Has the Berlin School entered its decadent phase?