André Aciman, James Ivory, and Luca Guadagnino, 2017
#3,
2017 Skandies
Yo, I’m vexed. I thought that this article would pretty much write itself. See, in 2019 I had my sophomores pick a foreign film to watch and write an essay about, and several of them picked this one—perhaps because it is not entirely foreign. (Though it is set in Europe, the main character is half American and the love interest is entirely American.) I figured I’d watch it and, if I didn’t have much to say about it, I’d pull some interesting observations from the student essays and talk about those.
As it turns out, I don’t have much to say about it. It was a romance in which I found both the protagonist and his object of desire repulsive—they’re both people I would go out of my way to avoid. The problem is that I’ve spent a couple of hours going through my files and I cannot find those essays. I thought that when I downloaded my Google Classroom before it disappeared that the student work would come with it, but that seems not to be the case. So I got nothin’.
Uh-oh. This one has the word “phantom” in the title—is it yet another ghost story? No. Instead, it is another romance between people who both repulsed me. The dynamic between these two repulsed me even more than the characters did individually. I guess that stands to reason: when I looked at the reviews I found multiple comparisons to The Duke of Burgundy, which I gave a zero. I suppose that this is one of those cases in which my practice of going into the movies knowing as little as possible about them backfired. (Though I guess I still wouldn’t have outright skipped a #2.)
I dunno. I guess that for the sake of saying something about two of the top three films on this list, I’ll say a bit more about my reaction to these characters. Film tends to work by shorthand: you don’t have a lot of running time to establish characters, so quick scenes or even brief moments within scenes have to do a lot of heavy lifting. When I first started writing screenplays for a living back in the day, the head of the production company I worked for said that a standard way to make a character sympathetic to most of the audience without taking up any running time was to have the character quickly pet a dog while doing other stuff. Or, here’s a cliché for you: the protagonist gets bullied in the hall of the school, books and papers go flying, and as the character glumly gathers up all that stuff, a voice: “Are you okay? Here, let me help with that.” Instant love interest / best friend / sympathetic character! This stuff is not hard. Now let’s take a look at these characters, the first two from Call Me by Your Name, the second two from Phantom Thread:
Oliver: Someone asks Elio for a bottle of water. Elio starts to hand one to the person who requested it, and Oliver dashes over and grabs it for himself! “Perfect timing,” he grunts. That is villain behavior! Utterly obnoxious. And basically everything he says and does is in the same vein! The rest of the movie should be about the rest of the kids taking this asshole down a peg.
Elio: The main thing against him is that he’s into Oliver, and since Oliver is despicable, Elio gets a thumbs-down by extension. He is also obnoxious in his own right—the tone of his voice in the scene where he’s playing the piano in different styles is insufferable. He also smokes. (Also, even a short way into the film, both he and Oliver have shoved hairy armpits at the camera multiple times, which had me close to retching.)
Woodcock: To me the most tolerable of these characters, though I guess Outlaw Vern, who called him “a fancypants asshole guy”, would disagree. Woodcock has to have everything just so—put butter on his asparagus and he considers it a crime against humanity—but I can actually relate to that. He’s very rude about it, though—like Oliver, to the point that there might as well be a flashing neon sign saying “VILLAIN” floating above his head. Little stunts like ordering a bunch of food at a restaurant, taking the ticket, and asking the waitress to just remember his order are, I guess, supposed to be a form of flirting, and apparently they worked for some viewers, but again, to me that was crossing lines of obnoxiousness from which it’s hard to recover.
Alma: Well, she’s basically Tablets Girl from Milkman, isn’t she? Imagine writing a romance and making Tablets Girl one of the leads. Watching these movies makes me want to retroactively bump up my score for Milkman just to credit Anna Burns for having the sense to know that Middle Sister is a sympathetic character and Tablets Girl is emphatically not.
So, 2016 made me think that I should go through these movies starting at the bottom of the list; 2017 is making me think that in the future I should start at the bottom and then stop at #4. But let’s see what #1 has in store…
This Gallic movie is divided into three parts.
The first part is full of timestamps and cuts between intense-looking
young people hopping from one Paris metro train to another, meeting up
and synchronizing their burner phones.
Oh no—are they going to blow up a train?
It turns out that… nothing happens, and instead we see them
going about their lives.
It feels like a gotcha: “You racist! You thought they were going
to blow up the train because most of them are North
African!”
But, but, it was because of the timestamps,
spoilers start
here
and the cuts, and the
burner phones…
…anyway, they don’t blow up the train. Instead they blow up a floor of an office tower, and a floor of a government building, and a bunch of cars, and a statue of Joan of Arc. All those sequences of them going about their lives? Unannounced flashbacks. In the present, they actually are terrorists. We’re not told what they’re trying to achieve, and ultimately they’re not really achieving anything: yes, Paris is locked down for the evening and the bombings will probably be in the news for a week, but a couple of months later it’ll just be a hazy memory to most. So, on to the second part, in which the terrorists reconvene at their meetup spot, a high-end department store where one of their number works. The idea is to lie low overnight in a place they can’t be seen and to which they’ll never be traced. And they last about a hour or so before melting down psychologically and behaving in erratic ways very much at odds with any attempt to get away with their scheme: turning on the lights, blasting bad music, leaving the store and wandering around striking up conversations, inviting elderly homeless people to come in and hang out. They try on the fancy clothes, eat the fancy food, play with the fancy toys, dress in drag and put on lip-syncing shows. One of them sexually assaults a mannequin. They remain ciphers throughout all this—we hear a few names thrown around, but we don’t get to know them as characters any more than you might get to know the players a little bit if you watch a few minutes of a soccer game between Ecuador and Qatar.
Then comes the third part, in which the police kill them all. Several of them attempt to surrender, putting their hands up and clearly posing no threat—most of them look like teenagers—but the police kill them anyway. The police also kill the elderly homeless people. I saw one review argue that this sequence undermined the movie, which the reviewer had thought was great up to that point: he just didn’t buy that the police would flat-out murder surrendering kids, if not out of a humanitarian impulse then just because the higher-ups would want the opportunity to interrogate them. Hell, a tactical unit let Anders Breivik surrender, and these kids didn’t do anything on his level. Here’s what I wondered. One of the terrorists says that he isn’t worried about the police raiding the department store because, for all the police know, the terrorists might have hostages. Why didn’t they try to save at least a few of their number by pretending they were hostages? Two of the terrorists are female, and again, they’re all pretty young-looking. If the police show up to find a couple of snarling ruffians holding guns to the heads of what look to be a couple of terrified teenage girls, do they really shoot all four of them and let God sort it out? If you think the answer is yes—well, these kids seem fairly tech-savvy, so couldn’t they livestream the raid to Facebook and dare the cops to kill the “hostages” while the world is watching? Anyway, some commenters on this review countered that the point wasn’t to be realistic about this exact situation, but to make a point about disproportionate response in general; others said that the point was actually cosmic, with the police standing for the concept of death itself. I sure hope not—that would be a little too close to the cinematic equivalent of this entry from 2011 Lyttle Lytton Contest:
“Caw! Caw!” went the birds as the massacres happened (the birds represent sadness). |
But apparently a lot of reviewers thought that the movie was just this callow—an article in the Guardian called it “basically one of the more polished student films you’ll ever see”—and the mainstream consensus seems to be that Nocturama is a middling film at best. So what’s it doing at #1 here? I guess the answer lies in how it did in the other Skandies categories: nothing for any acting category, #13 for screenplay, #9 for scene… but #1 for director. These are voters I saw talking less about story than about “rhythms” and who are probably on board with the idea I’ve heard advanced in some quarters that a movie has less in common with a novel than with a piece of music. That ain’t me. I went looking to see whether any organization had awarded its #1 spot for 2017 to The Florida Project, and I found two: the San Francisco Film Critics Circle and the Toronto Film Critics Association. I see that they both selected the same film as #1 for 2018, and it is the #4 film on the Skandies list for that year. If that #4 becomes my #1 as well, I may need to change which lists I follow!
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