The Year of the Everlasting Storm (2021, Various Artists) (Patreon)

57/100

Voluntarily watched an omnibus project about the pandemic (which, as I've noted elsewhere, I have zero desire to see dramatized for the foreseeable future) and mostly got what I deserved, though I have no regrets since it includes possibly the best new film I'll see this year. Guess I'll follow my Buster Scruggs template and address them in ascending order of preference.

Con

"Terror Contagion" (Laura Poitras): Plays like a 25-minute excerpt (this is the longest of the seven) from a feature doc that I'd complain assumes too much background knowledge and inherent interest on the part of the average viewer. At one point Poitras (who's often visible onscreen, it's mostly Zoom chats) responds to a couple of names—people being surveilled, I believe—with "Wow. Wow," and I really don't think I'll be alone in having no idea who was being discussed or why astonishment was in order. Visually tedious, frustratingly arcane, and only tangentially pandemic-related (contact tracing as a convenient excuse to spy on citizens, but that specific subject barely gets discussed). Some fairly impressive computer graphics, though.

"The Break Away" (Anthony Chen): My anxiety about the next few years of cinema, realized. We get "Day 1" right off the bat, followed by the gradual (Day 7, Day 20, etc.) strain on a marriage as the man loses his job (he's an auto salesman, nobody's driving right now) and the woman struggles to work from home while being constantly pestered by their rambunctious small child. I was admittedly brought up short when the date gets mentioned toward the end, revealing that this entire endless-seeming domestic melodrama unfolds before anything significant had yet happened in the U.S. (i.e., pre-Hanks/NBA), but they're in China so that was just me being a space cadet. Truly dreading the prospect of entire features along these lines. And they're definitely coming. 

Mixed

"Sin Título, 2020" (Dominga Sotomayor): At least this one's more narrowly focused than Chen's, serving up the predictably poignant tale of a new grandma forced to see the baby from a distance, standing masked on the street several stories below her child's apartment. Not much else to it; I did like the united-in-our-solitude ending, which features a choral performance recorded individually in the singers' respective quarantined homes, but saw plenty of that sort of thing on Twitter all last year. Missed opportunity here for a cautionary tale about militant anti-vaxxers titled "Too Ignorant to Die Old." 

"Little Measures" (Malik Vitthal): Like Time, this doc portrait of a dad struggling to see his kids, who've all been in foster care for the past seven years, feels strategically denuded of crucial context. We never really learn why the state intervened and has continued to deny the parents custody; Dad briefly mentions that neither he nor his wife handled the breakup of their marriage well, but that's literally all that's said. Still affecting (also like Time), and I get the desire to avoid creating the impression that people "deserve" to be miserable due to past mistakes, but even at just 10 minutes (by far the shortest of the seven), this feels sanitized for its subjects' protection. 

"Life" (Jafar Panahi): Or, "The Further Adventures of Iggy the Iguana." Very much of a piece with This Is Not a Film, albeit less overtly political in nature and with the welcome addition of Panahi's mother (or mother-in-law? not sure), a figure of absurdist caution with whom—as opposed to at whom—we laugh. More FaceTime conversations than I ever prefer to sit through (even in real life), but Panahi constantly returns to Iggy slithering around, deftly setting up a lovely closing meditation on overcoming fear. Slight but enjoyable, sadly devoid of an update on its director's DVD collection. 

Pro

"Dig Up My Darling" (David Lowery): Sixth film in sequence, first to imaginatively tackle the concept. Though set in the present, it concerns an unspecified outbreak that happened a century ago (a bit too late to be the Spanish flu, seems like; details are unimportant, though), taking an unexpected, quasi-supernatural turn that genuinely provokes thought. Gorgeously evocative, productively vague and allusive, anchored by a silent central performance (courtesy of one Catherine Machovsky, who doesn't appear to be a professional actor; this is her sole IMDb credit) that's positively Eastwood-esque. Bonus points for hiring Bill Callahan to read several ancient letters. Fairly divisive response to this one out of Cannes, but I really, uh, dug it. 

PRO

"Night Colonies" (Apichatpong Weerasethakul): Not gonna describe a damn thing, so as to let those of you who are still tabula rasa experience the majesty (I'll stand by that adjective) for yourselves, as unprepared as I was.  Will only note that the cut from the first shot (astounding on its own) to the second, revealing Joe's setup, made me gasp aloud; that this short might very well feature the most remarkable sound recording/editing I've ever heard; and that my mind never stopped racing with seductive interpretations for its inclusion in this particular project (it could equally serve as an epilogue to Cemetery of Splendour), even as my senses never stopped buzzing. How I wish I'd seen it in a theater, and especially in the Lumière or the Debussy.