Year-End Cramming, #2 (Patreon)

La Chimera (Alice Rohrwacher, 2023)

Usually my opinion of a film is fairly consistent throughout, but with La Chimera, I found my response to it kind of yo-yoing between grudging admiration and genuine thrill. This response was more extreme than it was with Rohrwacher's previous feature Happy as Lazzaro, which I appreciated on its own terms while never really connecting with it. But this new film clarifies things for me a bit. Rohrwacher's formal strategies are surprising and sometimes mindbendingly audacious, but it's all in the service of a cultural attitude I have very little interest in. Like her compatriot Pietro Marcello, Rohrwacher seems interested in drawing not so much on Italian or European history as on the various ways in which it's been represented. This results in a hazy, plein air neo-Neorealist mode, a system wherein even the present looks like an undefined "past."

In the case of La Chimera, Rohrwacher explicitly thematizes this ransacking of the historical past. The film is about a band of tombaroli, graverobbers who steal buried Etruscan artifacts and sell them on the black market. At the center of the story is Arthur (Josh O'Connor), a British archaeologist who for some reason washed out and became a bandit. He experiences "chimeras," a  sudden brain fever that alerts him to the treasures buried below. Not for nothing is he a non-Italian, since he seems to have a bit more than a mercenary relationship to these artifacts, investing them with a spiritual or even pseudo-magical power. (Like Orpheus, Arthur is looking for a way into the underworld to reunite with his lost love.)

Rohrwacher's strategies for depicting Arthur's spells are, quite frankly, the most avant-garde effects I've seen in a contemporary narrative film outside of Gaspar Noé. She rotates the camera around his body until he is standing upside down. At one point, she edits in flash-frames of Arthur inverted, hanging onto the earth like a bat. The fact that La Chimera adopts these modernist techniques while the rest of the film is about ruins, dilapidation, and decay is obviously a conscious move on Rohrwacher's part, but to me it only muddles the film's intentions. Arthur's semi-love interest, named Italia (Carole Duarte), is horrified by the grave robberies on religious grounds: "these are not for the eyes of the living." It remains unclear whether this is Arthur's perspective, or Rohrwacher's for that matter. La Chimera sets a lot of ideas in motion but chooses to resolve none of them, and this is admirable and irksome in equal measure.

American Fiction (Cord Jefferson, 2023)

The fact that this won the Audience Award at TIFF feels a bit like an epilogue to the film itself, since American Fiction is explicitly about the narrow idea of Black culture that can find favor with the white liberal arts establishment. The fact that [SPOILERS] Jefferson ends American Fiction with a routine meta-textual ending (have we been watching the film-within-the-film the whole time?) speaks to the corner into which he and the film have painted themselves, but also represents the sort of smart but accessible art-film turn that inserts an otherwise middling satire into the year-end Best Of conversation. This is a film whose main character, Monk (Jeffrey Wright) is a Black writer whose work is ignored for not being "Black enough," and American Fiction itself adopts Monk's sense of propriety and restraint even in its wryest moments.

Put another way, Jefferson's main thesis has been explored before, but by films that were considerably less well-mannered. Bamboozled comes immediately to mind, but you could even reach back to Putney Swope or the underseen Drop Squad. In literature, Mat Johnson's Pym is a great example: a Black Poe scholar who is prodded by his mostly white colleagues to study appropriately Black topics. With this body of work preceding him, Jefferson really needed to be incisive and much more specific, and for the most part it isn't. Much of the problem has to do with Fiction's almost exclusive focus on Monk and his personal choices, when we need to know a lot more about the milieu he's operating in. Issa Rae's character is painfully underdeveloped, since she could have served as a meaningful foil. Was her book We's in Da Ghetto pandering to white audiences? Or was she a bad writer attempting to write an ethno-fiction? Jefferson's film sacrifices a lot of potential nuance by pretending that Monk lived in a world by himself, where there had never been James Baldwin, Samuel Delaney, Toni Morrison, Ishmael Reed, etc.

So in the end, there's no way to know whether American Fiction is a promising but flawed debut, or if Jefferson and company are laughing their way up the red carpet.

The Plough (Philippe Garrel, 2023)

Though hardly a perfect film, The Plough is compelling and more than a little odd, which leads me to wonder why the new Garrel is being memory-holed here in North America. It differs from most of his recent work, and not only because it's shot in color. Where much of the director's post-Regular Lovers work has functioned like permutations on the same basic doomed-love template, The Plough is about the twin responsibilities of family and art, and how both can represent traditions can eventually lose their gravitational pull as grown adults struggle to find their own way. In its often jagged editing and use of temporal ellipses, this is probably Garrel's most Pialat-like film to date, and it's disappointing to see programmers and distributors lose interest when a great director goes off-brand.

The family's father (Aurélien Recoing) is a classical Punch & Judy style puppeteer, and has raised his three children to carry on the tradition he himself inherited from his own father. Naturally, the crowds for such work are diminishing, and money is tight, but the family soldiers on. When the patriarch dies, it offers the kids the chance to ask themselves if this is something they really want to do. The son (Louis Garrel) leaves the company and becomes a successful actor. The older sister (Esther Garrel) wants to preserve the puppet theater as it is, and the younger daughter (Léna Garrel) wants to modernize by adopting new scripts and characters.

It's clear that The Plough is Garrel pére's late career self-examination. Casting his own children, Garrel considers his own work as a niche filmmaker creating artworks for a dwindling audience, and tries to imagine what, if anything, he will leave behind in the way of a legacy. By way of comparison, The Plough features a non-family member (Damien Mongin) who gets involved with the company, only to abandon them, and his infant son, to live out the bohemian fantasy of being a destitute painter. This intractable, ultimately destructive figure could be Garrel's way of offering the least flattering self-portrait possible, a consideration of the thin line between integrity and violent insanity. Although a bit too unfocused to serve as a true valediction, The Plough is very much of a piece with Resnais' You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet and Rivette's Around a Small Mountain, so all you diehard auteurists know what to do.

NB: Steve Erickson alerted me to the sexual harassment and assault accusations against Philippe Garrel, which surfaced a few months ago. I had not heard about this, and while it does not change my critical opinion of The Plough, it certainly changes my opinion of the director, and how his work should be approached going forward. I mention this only by way of saying, being a great artist excuses nothing. In a life where more films exist than I could ever hope to see, I've decided not to devote my time to Woody Allen or Roman Polanski, and I suspect Garrel may join that list. 

Forms of Forgetting (Burak Çevik, 2023)

Although I watched the same version of Forms of Forgetting that screened in Berlin, there were various markers indicating that this was still a work in progress. However, it's possible this is simply how Çevik conceives of the entire project. At one point, the film's two conversing speakers (Nesrin Uçarlar and Erdem Şenocak) mention that the filmmaker told them he does not intend to show Forms of Forgetting in Turkey for twelve years -- a move not unlike Oliveira's withholding of his 1982 film Visit or Memories and Confessions until after his death. Is Çevik hoping that either he or the film itself will be forgotten, so it might reemerge in a very different world?

An essay film of sorts, Forms is organized around various conversations between Uçarlar and Şenocak, two actors who used to be in a relationship. They have differing but vague explanations of why they broke up (something to do with Erdem's strident Marxism), but as the film unfolds, we see that the couple's own past is but one example of how human memory seems to want to be erased, how it is forgetting that may be the defining trait of human subjectivity. Çevik explores the topic systematically but in a Cubist manner that asks the viewer to draw connections that are less than obvious. For example: a shot of ice fishermen possibly trying and failing to pull in a catch; shots of the harbor in Istanbul that, we learn, was once the site of slave and prisoner flotillas; and the eventual dissolution of human life altogether, courtesy of an extended passage from Brakhage's The Act of Seeing With One's Own Eyes. Attentive viewers will detect echoes of Borges and Frampton in the couple's discussions and Çevik's own visual patterns. Taken as a whole, Forms of Forgetting is a work that asks us to connect the dots, even though some of the dots may appear only after the fact.