Year-End Cramming, #7 (Patreon)

Close Your Eyes (Víctor Erice, 2023)

About twenty years ago, academic studies of both Theo Angelopoulos and Alexander Kluge were published with the same subtitle: "the last modernist." But based on the hopeful, elegaic Close Your Eyes, it's pretty clear that Erice is the last man standing from the previous century. Everything about this film, from its leisurely pace to its bittersweet regard for the celluloid-based cinema and even its muted, burnished color scheme, suggests a tale carefully woven by an elder statesman who isn't concerned with the newfangled tools ans trends of the current industry. At the same time, Close Your Eyes avoids nostalgia, making it clear that the creation of time-based art is inextricable from a sense of loss, a void that cinema gestures toward but can never fill.

The film chronicles a search for a missing actor, and Erice shows us the shifting stakes of this quest. Miguel (Manolo Solo) was working on his second film, a vaguely mystical, Oliveria-esque project called The Farewell Gaze. His star is a well-known Spanish actor named Julio Arenas (Jose Coronado), but he disappeared a few days into shooting. (Only the opening and closing scenes were completed.) Decades later, Miguel is contacted by a reality show / true crime host (María León) who wants to milk the mystery for ratings and drama, but as Miguel learns more about Arenas, partly by connecting with his daughter Ana (Ana Torrent), it becomes clear that this story doesn't have a tidy ending, and that there was nothing romantic about Arenas' disappearance. He didn't walk away from stardom, but rather wandered off, gradually losing his sense of self.

There's no reason to assume that Miguel is a stand-in for Erice. The real life director hasn't been prolific but has had a career, whereas the Arenas incident prompted Miguel to abandon cinema, at least in the present tense. His best friend Max (Mario Pardo) is an archivist, struggling with little support to preserve 35mm films and other endangered physical media. He has kept the two reels of The Farewell Gaze safe, and this movie, virtually unseen, takes on a new life as a memory trigger, the document of a friendship that has been otherwise erased. Erice makes masterful use of his running time, offering a portrait of old age, exhaustion, and eventual discovery.

Killers of the Flower Moon (Martin Scorsese, 2023)

A lot of Native artists and intellectuals have expressed some ambivalence about Killers of the Flower Moon, and some have rejected it outright. I must admit, I see their point. It's not that Flower Moon is too long, exactly. But I take issue with the way Scorsese shapes the overall narrative of this film, even as I recognize he was somewhat committed to the facts of the true story of the Osage murders. And although we still need more Native artists telling Native stories, I certainly don't think Scorsese is somehow politically ineligible to tell this story.

No, the film seems to proceed from an assumption that we, a white audience, must be educated about the Osage tragedy and, above all, asked to feel. So we are given Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo di Caprio) as our unreliable point of identification. We follow his progress, and we soon discover that he is not a good person, and certainly not a smart one. Scorsese seems to want us (again, a presumed white viewership) to gradually discover that our narrative surrogate us cowardly and self-deluding, a slippage that should allow us to consider our own own prejudices and ignorance.

But this results in three and a half hours of watching Osage characters drop dead one after another, or waiting for them to die in the case of Mollie (Lily Gladstone), while seeing King's (Robert de Niro) good shepherd routine disintegrate. I get that the whole narrative process aims to carefully articulate white savagery and Native suffering, and the fact that characters like Mollie and Anna (Cara Jade Myers) and Henry Roan (William Belleau) are so much more compelling than our two white male leads affectively conveys the poverty of white American history and the marginalization or erasure of Native experiences. And while I in no way mean to exempt myself from learned racism, I still found Flower Moon to be a bit of a museum piece, something I regarded from a distance. I think this i partly because it offers a very specific place for the viewer, as someone who need to unlearn the codes of the dominant cinema. This film was well-appointed, but very safe.

The Practice (Martín Rejtman, 2023)

Film festivals usually don't have much use for comedy. It's not fair, but it's true. As a result, a lot of the comedies that do get noticed by the cinema intelligentsia are "funny" in quotation marks, based on subtle but ultimately rather predictable human observations. "Oh my yes," they seem to want us to mutter to ourselves, "how very droll!" (One filmmaker who mostly escapes this is Hong Sangsoo, and I suspect the soju helps in that regard.) I was quite taken with Martín Rejtman's early films, Sylvia Prieto and The Magic Gloves, works that mostly adopted a Kaurismakian mode of flat atmosphere and the wry foibles of lovable doofuses. I missed Two Shots Fired, Rejtman's last feature.

The Practice is about beleaguered yoga teacher Gustavo (Esteban Bigliardi, also seen in The Delinquents), a lanky, diffident Argentinean living in Santiago, Chile. The fundamental differences between Argentineans and Chileans are frequently remarked upon, the former said to be uptight and patrician, the latter scrappier and more salt-of-the-earth. We do see this in Gustavo's officious mother (Mirta Busneli), with her grumpy refrain of "don't 'mom' me." But mostly Gustavo is beset by chronically dissatisfied women and oleaginous would-be hipsters, leaving the Argentine as the mostly sensible straight man among inexplicable Chileans. The film's attempt to provide equal time to Laura (Camila Hirane), Gustavo's soon-to-be ex-wife, mostly fails, since we get no real sense of who she is or why she liked Gustavo in the first place. The Practice isn't a bad film by any means, but it's almost defiantly minor.