Year-End Cramming, #3 (Patreon)

Memory (Michel Franco, 2023)

The last thing I want to do is oversell Memory, since it is a relatively modest film and one that probably suffers under close scrutiny. One of its two main protagonists, Saul (Peter Saarsgard) suffers from dementia, and he ostensibly cannot make new memories. But when Sylvia (Jessica Chastain) and her daughter Anna (Brooke Timber) enter his life, he is inexplicably capable of remembering who they are and, more significantly, how he feels about them. I suppose one could excuse this by noting that dementia is a complex disorder and there's a lot we still don't know about it. Nevertheless, Franco's script seems to operate based on some convenient loopholes.

But Memory is a very affecting, remarkably humanistic film from a director whose previous work has mostly been smugly hateful. It's always been clear that Franco has a Michael Haneke jones, and thus far he has only managed to reproduce Haneke's cruelty and ugliness. But Memory might be Franco's Amour, in the sense that it observes two fragile, deeply damaged people and gives them the space to figure out how to love each other under desperate circumstances. Above all, in Sylvia's character, Franco considers the impact of trauma on otherwise healthy memory capacity, allowing the viewer to implicitly compare the toll of physical vs. emotional impairment. Hardly the best film of 2023, but certainly the biggest surprise.

All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt (Raven Jackson, 2023)

All Dirt Roads is simultaneously one of the quietest films of the year and one of the boldest. A remarkably assured debut, Jackson's film continually seems to be on the verge of forging an entirely new kind of film language, one based on haptics and physicality and how the sensual feeling of the material world -- mud, grass, other people's skin -- impresses itself upon our psyche. I've seen All Dirt Roads' tone compared to Terrence Malick in a lot of reviews, and that's not incorrect. Jackson articulates her lead character Mack (played as an adult by Charleen McClure) through fragmentary moments and the all-enveloping natural atmosphere of rural Mississippi. But the counter-balance to Malick's spirituality is Charles Burnett's sense of the everyday, and how we invest common acts and gestures with unconscious meaning.

In a lot of ways, All Dirt Roads is a Southern coastal version of Killer of Sheep, even using the repeated trope of catching and scaling still-gasping fish as both a kind of necessary work and an existential encounter with life and death. In her decision to skitter across various moments and ages within Mack's life, Jackson aims to show us how a human soul is formed in time, with love and grief, desire and loss. There is a lot we never learn about Mack, in a traditional narrative sense. But as we observe the aftermath of her mother's funeral, or her tentative tryst with her childhood love Wood (Reginald Helms, Jr.), now married with kids, Jackson shows us the experiential sculpting of a woman's subjectivity, in both its specificity and its universality. All of this is so complex that it's possible to miss the momentousness of Mack's single biggest decision: not to be a mother. Jackson presents this personal choice with empathy, without judgment, but also as just one more facet of who Mack is, and will be.

About Dry Grasses (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2023)

The problem with Ceylan's recent output isn't that the films are long. It's that they are rambling and unstructured. Instead of organizing the viewer's experience across time ("sculpting in time," as Ceylan's hero Tarkovsky put it), NBC just uses the protracted run times to stuff more and more into a single film, pinning his hopes on traditional dramaturgy as a means of holding it all together. Yes, About Dry Grasses provides a consistent viewpoint, that of Samet (Deniz Celiloğlu), an urban elitist and pseudo-intellectual who resents having been assigned a teaching post in a frozen Anatolian backwater. The first part of the film centers on what could be his inappropriate behavior towards Sevim (Ece Bağcı), a 15-year-old student. But in fact Ceylan uses this muted Lolita riff as a mere prelude, giving us a particular attitude regarding Samet and all his subsequent choices and behaviors.

It's a weird move, not just because grooming and pedophilia are such a global preoccupation at the moment. Ceylan just seems to want to make sure the viewer recognizes Samet as an unreliable narrator and a complete jackass. It's an unnecessary move, because Samet's repugnance is impossible to miss. When he sees his housemate and only friend Kenan (Musab Ekici) getting amorous attention (maybe) from Nuray (Merve Dizdar), a woman he'd previously been uninterested in, Samet not only sabotages Kenan's relationship with Nuray but manages to bed her after several glasses of wine and around an hour of tedious, circular argumentation. (When Nuray suggests that human beings should be useful to one another, Samet announces his commitment to "freedom," which eventually sounds quite libertarian / Objectivist.)

Look, although it is a fairly common structure, even on the verge of being a cliche, a triptych format that focused specific sections on Samet, Kenan, and Nuray would have seriously improved About Dry Grasses. Their distinct points of view would not only complicate Samet's obdurate assholery; it would have leavened the entire experience for the viewer. As is, the film's kind of a slog.