Year-End Cramming, #4 (Patreon)

Trenque Lauquen (Laura Citarella, 2022)

I've learned over the years that it's quite possible for a film to do everything "right" and still leave me cold. As was the case with La Flor by Citarella's colleague Mariano Llinás, Trenque Lauquen has drawn high praise from various quarters, and it's easy to see why. Like a somewhat more focused version of La Flor, Trenque Lauquen is a long and winding elaboration of the process of narration and interpretation, with twists happening not on the basis of plot (which is fairly consistent) but of meaning. The first half of the film follows two men, the academic Rafael (Rafael Spregelburd) and transportation manager Ezequiel (Ezequiel Pierri) as they retrace the path of Rafael's protege and girlfriend, Laura (co-writer Laura Paredes), who has gone missing. Near the end of Part One, we start to get more of a sense of who Laura is/was, particularly the burgeoning passions that were driving her away from Rafael and onto her own path. 

You have to admire a 4hr 15min film that has its main character announce "and here's where the real story begins" just after the three-hour mark. And it's true that the story that is literally central to Trenque Lauquen -- the letters of Carmen and the Italian -- ends up serving as more of a prelude than anything, since the final hour and change -- the lake creature -- bears very little relationship to the mysterious epistolary romance. Part of the point, I think, of Citarella's film is making the viewer feel a bit jerked around, and then asking them to pause and consider what that even means in the context of such a serpentine bit of Fantastic literature. Again, like La Flor, Trenque Lauquen is very Argentinean, in the sense that it combines the labyrinthine structure of Borges with the supernatural quotidian elements of Cortázar. 

But most of the Rafael material is tedious and seems to be there just to give us a strong impression of what Laura was rebelling against. A minor character refers to him as "a typical Buenos Aires idiot," and that seems entirely fair. The film really hits its stride in Part Two when we see Laura contributing to the radio show "A Sea of News," since it's here that Citarella is most capable of combining her interest in storytelling with a specifically community ethos, a collective rather than an individual project of meaning-making. But overall, Trenque Lauquen is a work of literary fiction that doesn't make much use of cinema's visual or sonic potentials. I admire it greatly, but it's not my thing, mostly because it's an ideal epic for the age of "content," where one's choice of medium is based on potential audience reach, rather than aesthetic demand.

All of Us Strangers (Andrew Haigh, 2023)

[SPOILERS]

This is an instance where I read the critical objections of others, cannot deny their accuracy, but finding that I don't care all that much. All of Us Strangers shows much more conceptual ambition than Haigh's last two films, Weekend and 45 Years, and so it's good to see the director stretching his capacities. But reach often exceeds grasp, and Strangers is a very imperfect film. It is indeed a "ghost story," as all the publicity takes care to mention. But the primary flaw in Strangers is that Haigh mostly allows the viewer to reach their own conclusions, and avoids a pat, Shyamalan-style resolution that explains everything we've seen. Still, while no conclusion is ironclad, a number of promising ones are ruled out, which makes me wish Haigh had made even fewer concessions to genre.

That's because Strangers is strongest when it regards the supernatural as something ordinary, asking the viewer to simply roll with it. Although it seems obvious that Adam (Andrew Scott) is visualizing the script he's trying to write, the fact that we see him board a commuter train and arrive in a version of his own past (cf. Twilight Zone's "Next Stop Willoughby") suggests that Haigh is actually using cinema to present a reality with different conditions than our own. The fact that's it's a British film daring to reject the standard mode of counsel-flat realism just makes it that much more impressive.

So of course, if Strangers resolves itself into a gay variation of Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, that's disappointing. But then again, the circumstances of Harry's (Paul Mescal) death suggest that what we are seeing between Adam and Harry, at least initially, is happening on this plane of existence. Haigh leaves enough loose ends to permit us a few different possibilities. Nevertheless, even in Adam is indeed just another ghost, this opens other productive readings even as it forecloses others. As Adam describes his experiences to Harry and his parents (Jamie Bell and Claire Foy), we see that the desire he feels for Harry has a much more profound dimension. Not enough artwork really considers the impact that the AIDS epidemic had on the subjectivity of queer people from Generation X, how it alienated gay men from their own sexuality. If Haigh is "just" giving us a look at a possible Gay Heaven, it's one that orchestrates cross-generational understanding and empathy, and does so in a poetic manner. That makes up for any thematic indecisiveness, at least to me.

Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (Radu Jude, 2023)

I've been growing to admire Radu Jude's films for awhile, but this is the first I can wholeheartedly embrace. In the final credits the director offers a partial bibliography, a list of artists and writers quoted in the film. One of them is Alexander Kluge, and I now recognize that Jude is probably the only contemporary filmmaker taking up Kluge as a model. Do Not Expect Too Much is a dialectical film, in that it asks us to understand various social and political phenomena by showing us points of difference. The most obvious example of this is Jude's appropriation of the 1982 film Angela Moves On by Romanian director Lucian Bratu. Employing this historical contrast, Jude shows us how an independent woman was understood under Communism when she took on a male-identified profession (in this case, cab driver). This permits us to think more critically about how the present-day Angela (Ilinca Manolache) understands her own situation with respect to labor, ambition, and sexuality.

Seen from another angle, Angela 2023's plight is a common one. She is subject to the gig economy, forced to hustle to make a living and promised no job or economic security. So she is abused and exploited in a very different way than Angela 1982 was. Our Angela is "free," but only in the usual neo-liberal fashion: free to be an independent contractor, free to work or starve, free to compete for scraps with everyone else in the same bracket. Jude shows us Angela's frustration quite clearly, since she is an overworked production assistant and part-time Uber driver who is dangerously sleep deprived because of the demands placed on her. But Jude also shows us that Angela largely accepts neo-liberal exploitation as an ineluctable fact, since its hegemony renders it largely invisible to her.

In other words, Angela is an intelligent and generally decent person who is making the best of her circumstances. At the same time, Jude allows us to see exactly how intolerable and contradictory those circumstances are. It's not just that her schedule only allows her to fuck her (married?) boyfriend in the car between errands. (He too is in a big hurry. Angela asks him to cum in her mouth but he misses the mark and dirties her dress.) Like anyone, Angela needs a creative outlet, and Jude demands that we consider exactly what's available to her in that area. She's a TikTokker, producing short-form content in the interstitial moments between other tasks. But more than this, Angela records herself as "Bobita," a filter-generated alter ego who is a joyfully vulgar young man, unironically name-checking Andrew Tate and referring to random women on the street as "cunts." 

Do Not Expect Too Much leaves it to us to unpack Bobita. The film clearly doesn't find him amusing, but we're left to consider whether the character is a way for Angela to channel anger and sexual aggression that her blonde, female subservience would not allow; if it's something more Freudian, a way to negotiate desires that she finds attractive and repulsive in equal measure; or if right-wing macho trolling, like the gig economy itself, has achieved such total dominance that it's just what an influenced "has to do." But when challenged, Angela defends Bobita as critique through irony, which may be the saddest explanation of them all.