Dark digital grain and hard lines of white light divide Lev Lewis’s The Intestine in two, separating the poor from the economically ascendant, the city from the suburb, night from day. But make no mistake, though these contrasts form roughly equal parts of the film’s ungainly shape, Lewis’s debut is haunted by the shadowier half; the ethos of night rules all things, even when the sun streams in through the windows.

Lewis’s heroine Maya, a twenty-something reject of late capitalism, steps out from her dingy surroundings one night and awakens the next day in an abandoned modernist money-pit somewhere in the ‘burbs. The cut that bridges the space between Maya’s evening on the town and her sudden emergence amidst bright bourgeois sterility suggests, initially, a particularly bewildering morning-after and nothing more. But things progress into stranger territory as Lewis conjures up some dreamy images—a refrigerator stocked solely with a boar’s head stands out, both for its strangeness and as a barb pointed at the foodie pretensions of the 21st century’s finer-living set. The hard-lit morning-after starts to look like a portal to another reality, a rabbit hole which unearths the phantasmagoric pleasures of the moneyed class. It’s no wonder that Maya grows increasingly unwilling to vacate her new digs.

This shapeshifting debut insists—a bit precociously—on inscrutability, but what finally emerges is a vision of contemporary young adulthood as life lived in envy of other people’s spaces. Eventually unemployed but always unradicalized, a single brush with prosperity is enough to spark Maya’s exurban aspirations (“I can’t go back to my apartment”). Maya finally makes the place her own, but as she sits on her bed repeating her name through the phone to a listener who cannot hear it, she appears to be drifting back towards the void. The light is fading, and a gleaming new home can only ward off the darkness for so long.

At the end of his life and career, Andrzej Zulawski brooked no wasted time. His Cosmos screams into existence at a howling pitch and hurtles forward unhindered. The Polish director’s final film immediately thrusts frustrated young law student Witold—Jonathan Genet, as limber and deranged as the film itself—into a warped pan-European bed and breakfast populated by cranks and character actors. A galaxy of ideas orbits Witold’s extended stay, emanations from a mind wracked by scholarly frustrations and writerly ambitions (he shares both his name and aspired-to profession with Witold Gombrowicz, author of the novel on which Zulawski based his film). The mossed old lodgings and Witold’s attempts at writing form the only real center for the strange events that unfold in Cosmos, but even that center cannot hold for long. Things break into increasingly fragmentary pieces: Buñuelian doubles appear, characters invent their own linguistic code, and the filmmaking process itself eventually takes center stage. Attempting to divine a clearer narrative path is a fool’s errand, and rather beside the point.

Continue reading “Cosmos (Andrzej Zulawksi, 2015)” →

First, a contradiction: deafening Ennio Morricone music screams in over the title card. A promise of quiet immediately dashed, the flippant tone established at the outset. And then: shirtless Franco Nero tied to a chair in a modernist flat, the colors and lines à la Mondrian, the gentle torture courtesy of a prowling Vanessa Redgrave. So begins Elio Petri’s caustic 1968 thriller, with Nero’s frustrated artist already under attack by the forces of femininity and commerce, both embodied and entwined in Redgrave’s bottom-line gallery agent, Flavia. Naturally, he’s fantasizing about killing her.

The opening fever-dream awakens to a calmer register just briefly enough to sketch out the basics. Nero’s Leonardo needs some peace to get his work back on track so Flavia can keep the upper-crust buyers in Milan and New York flush with fresh product. A country retreat is in order. But the first villa comes pre-equipped with an exhibition and the accompanying hangers-on intent on a good deal (“I admire your work…and it’s a good investment”). A second villa must be acquired if anything is to be done, though the murder of the town’s “nympho” countess 25 years prior on the same grounds proves a more supernatural hindrance to the artistic process.

Continue reading “A Quiet Place in the Country (Elio Petri, 1968)” →

In our era of endless Letterboxd discoveries and Twitter reclamation projects (full disclosure: I am part of the problem), the whiplash responses that await troubled films often operate according to a kind of critical Newtonian physics: each dismissal creates an equal and opposite reappraisal. So it’s something of a surprise that The Sea of Trees met such a vicious critical drubbing when it premiered at Cannes last year with nary a supporter in sight of the Croisette willing to take up its defense…except, it must be assumed, Thierry Frémaux. The Cannes director likes to lob a bomb or two into the competition, but, even by those standards, Gus Van Sant’s latest film appeared a baffling inclusion, and critics responded accordingly. The intervening year has brought the film at least a modicum of relief: it’s finally getting a release, sneaking into theaters thanks to distributor A24. And yet, Monsieur Fremaux’s choice to include it in the competition still seems the prerogative of a man adrift in a thicket of red carpet photo ops and star junkets, desperate to find a Hollywood production worthy of inclusion in the world cinema festival par excellence, but lacking any fellow travelers able to guide him to critical safety.

It’s rather appropriate, then, that The Sea of Trees zeroes in on the life of middling adjunct professor Arthur, recently bereft of his wife, as he heads to Japan and loses himself in the notorious and densely wooded Aokigahara forest. Notorious, the film reminds us with a bit on-screen Googling, as a favored location for suicides. Of course that’s what Matthew McConaughey’s depressed academic is there to accomplish, until a raving Ken Watanabe crosses his path and provides him a traveling companion, a mission to escape the maze-like forest, and a reason for living.

Continue reading “The Sea of Trees (Gus Van Sant, 2015)” →