Year-End Cram: Two Kinds of Disappointment (Patreon)

Frybread Face and Me (Billy Luther, 2023)

While Luther's debut film is nothing if not watchable (it clocks in at a scant 82 minutes, after all), it's the sort of film that might've benefited greatly from some additional workshopping. It must be acknowledged that we live in a rapacious "content" market, and a number of Native artists and storytellers whose work has been too long neglected find themselves having to capitalize the very myopia that has kept them out of the spotlight for so long. Companies like Netflix can only think of cultures and ethnicities as trends, which is of course obscene. And the filmmakers who are finally able to get their projects made are acutely aware that this newfound interest in First People's media cannot last. 

Seen in this broader context -- let's just call it American racism, corporate style -- a film like Frybread Face and Me is laudable for all the choices Luther didn't make. There's an unavoidably personal angle to this film, with details so left-field (the broken Cabbage Patch doll, the Starman VHS) that they could only be autobiographical. Yes, Frybread Face employs the tired "the summer when everything unexpectedly changed" template, and it doesn't matter whether Luther felt more comfortable in that well-worn groove or if it was a capitulation to dimwitted funders. But the film also trusts its viewers to fill in a lot of subtext that many debut features would circle with a pink highligher. This is a promising debut, and I do hope Luther is able to go somewhere from here besides series television.

Saltburn (Emerald Fennell, 2023)

Where Fennell's Promising Young Woman was actively offensive, all the more so for its smug attitude of taboo-busting and shameless #metoo bandwagon hopping, Saltburn is merely stupid, a film whose writing and formal organization feels like a final project that was slapped together in the final week of the semester. The talented Barry Keoghan, who projected genuine menace in The Killing of a Sacred Deer, blusters through Saltburn like Tom Ripley in weasel form, or a perverted Thom Yorke. His Oliver latches his polymorphous lust onto aristocratic bohunk Felix (Jacob Elordi, who acquits himself as well as he can), and then proceeds to insinuate himself first into the guy's social circle and then his entire castle-dwelling, peerage-holding, dysfunctional family.

So yeah, it is kind of a riff on Pasolini's Teorema but pitched at the aesthetic and moral level of Pretty Little Liars. And don't get me wrong: that might've been fun, were it not for Fennell's lumbering pretension and unwitting identification with Oliver and his middle-class parvenu longing. It's not just that obscene wealth is displayed without criticism. It's that Fennell's gaze upward at the British elite is every bit as pornographic as her protagonist's. But then, just to make sure we don't mistake Saltburn for a full-throated endorsement of the landed gentry, she makes Oliver's fascination truly viscous. As he freely admits, he's a vampire, but by making Oliver a monster Fennell seems to think she absolves herself. After all, she could never do what crazy Oliver does, which is to quite literally rock out with his cock out.