Valeska Grisebach, 2017
#6, 2018 Skandies
This one is about a German work crew that goes to New
Mexico Bulgaria to build an underground meth
lab a hydroelectric power plant.
Things are tense because the Germans act like 19th-century
colonists who think they’re bringing civilization to a bunch of
benighted savages, while the Bulgarians have a bad history with
imperious Germans showing up on their doorsteps.
However, the movie is slow going, and about twenty-five minutes
in, I checked some reviews to see whether it would pick up.
The reviews, even the positive ones, complained that the movie
was dull.
I gave it another ten minutes and then gave up.
I might have given it a slightly longer leash but for this:
From Sight & Sound:
Western is allied to Claire Denis’s Beau Travail and Kelly Reichardt’s Old Joy, which observe the intimacy of all-male spaces
From the Guardian:
a parable of neo-colonial adventure and the toxic masculinity and loneliness that involves
I prefer to spend as little time as possible in all-male spaces. Old Joy was a chore. And as for “toxic masculinity”—there’s a scene early on in which one of the Germans plays an aggressive game of keep-away with a Bulgarian woman’s hat that soured me on watching much more of this movie. If the movie had sparked a flicker of interest for me up to that point I would’ve found a way past it—you have to have some ability to put up with depictions of cruelty or you can’t watch anything with a villain in it, right? But since I was already with the reviewers who called the movie “remote”, “meandering”, and “languid”, this scene was, if not the last straw, then the heaviest.
Deborah Davis, Tony McNamara, and Yorgos Lanthimos, 2018
#5, 2018 Skandies
From “all-male spaces” to a movie about three women: specifically, Britain’s Queen Anne, who reigned from 1702 to 1714, and a pair of female courtiers vying to become the most influential voice in her ear. One is Lady Marlborough, a.k.a. Sarah Churchill, 6×great-grandmother of Winston; the other is Sarah’s cousin, Abigail Hill. While I try to know as little as possible about these movies before I watch them, I did know that The Favourite was about a queen and one of her ladies-in-waiting; I assumed I was in for a stately period piece. But while The Ballad of Buster Scruggs began with credits for the cast but not the directors, this movie begins with a credit for the director but not the cast. That director is Yorgos Lanthimos, known for coarse absurdism. So, period piece yes, but stately no. I find Lanthimos’s style kind of grating, but I guess I’d rather watch a movie that is slightly too gonzo than insufficiently so. This is the sort of movie in which, when Abigail arrives at the palace, the guy sitting in the carriage seat across from her stares at her and starts jerking off like a subway masturbator. But better that than something like The Death of Louis XIV, which is two hours of an old man lying in bed.
That movie is actually set in nearly the exact same period as this one, and it’s a somewhat different moment in French history than in British history. Louis XIV was an absolute monarch. Anne was not. The Bill of Rights passed in 1689, following the ouster of James II, circumscribed the English monarch’s ability to act against the will of Parliament. This didn’t make Anne a figurehead, and in fact she remains the last British monarch to deny royal assent to a bill Parliament had passed. She still held enough actual power that having her ear could change the course of a war—enough power, in fact, to warp her mind. It cannot help but alter your sense of how reality works when, due purely to an accident of birth, everyone in the country obeys your every command. The problem for Anne is that while she can dismiss ministers, stop the music drifting in the window, or receive cunnilingus from a comely lass who catches her eye, she’s not the Beyonder and no amount of shouting will relieve her gout or bring her seventeen dead children back to life.
On the narrative front, probably the most interesting thing about The Favourite is the way it plays with viewers’ sympathies. I assume that the majority of viewers find themselves rooting for Abigail for quite a while: she’s plucky, charming, and perhaps most importantly, mistreated. Meanwhile, her opposite number is haughty, smug, and responsible for a fair share of that mistreatment. It’s pretty deft how the filmmakers are able to gradually maneuver us into switching sides. Is this what the Game of Thrones people were trying to do during their infamous end-of-series faceplant?
Alfonso Cuarón, 2018
#4, 2018 Skandies
Reading literature from before, oh, say, World War I, I’ve found it hard not to be struck by the sense that so few households back then seemed to fend for themselves. Either you had servants or you were a servant. The advent of “labor-saving” appliances like vacuum cleaners and washing machines didn’t actually save the housewives of the mid-20th century much labor—they saved them the necessity of purchasing the labor of others in order to keep their homes up to a socially accepted standard. And while the middle class in the United States may be hollowing out, even today more than 85% of households fall into the gap between those employed as domestic workers and those who pay for the services of domestic workers on any kind of regular basis; if we restrict our count to permanent, live-in domestic staff, that figure rises to 99%. And yet when I tutored in person rather than online, I spent a lot of time in those few homes that did have servants—which I suppose stands to reason, since that’s essentially what I was. I live in California. That means that the majority of the domestic workers I encountered on the job were Mexican. And here’s a movie whose main character is Cleo, a live-in domestic worker—maid, cook, nanny, errand runner, etc.—for a family in Mexico City in 1970 and 1971, which shows us the limits of the ability of the label “Mexican” to tell us much about any given resident of such a heterogeneous nation. For while both the employees and the employers are Mexican, they hail from opposite ends of the old colonial racial caste system. The family at the center of the film, with their fair-skinned blond children, might as well be Spaniards. The members of the domestic staff are almost wholly indigenous and, among themselves, speak Mixtec, an Oto-Manguean language that serves as the mother tongue of half a million people, most of them from Oaxaca. The demographic hierarchy we see in Clarendon Heights and Belvedere Tiburon has its echoes in Colonia Roma, the Mexico City neighborhood from which the film takes its title.
From what I have read, this is basically a memoir in which the writer/direction has cast himself not as the protagonist but as a minor supporting character (one of the kids); as such, it is fairly light on plot, instead following the rhythms of real life. There are three main storylines that overlap in various ways:
The family’s story: the dad has run off with his mistress, and the mom has to figure out how to move the family forward from here while dealing with her grief
Cleo’s story: she gets pregnant and the father ghosts her
The country’s story: under the administration of authoritarian president Luis Echeverría, over a hundred student protestors are murdered by a paramilitary group called los Halcones; the father of Cleo’s child is a member of this group
As these storylines progress, we also get a scattering of other set pieces: an earthquake, a forest fire, a trip to the beach. A big part of the point of Roma seems to be simply to photograph these memories in crisp black and white. But a bigger part is for the writer/director to pay a nearly hagiographical tribute to the Cleo figure in his own childhood. The problem is, the movie boils down to Fond Memories of a Beloved Servant, and the power relations underlying that story gave me the creeps. So all in all, this was not for me. But I will say that the railing of the staircase in the family home was fuckin’ magnificent.
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