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Ulrich Köhler, 2018

#20, 2019 Skandies

Here’s another one that I was ready to give up on around the half-hour mark, not because it was baffling like High Life, but because it was dull.  We meet a German schlub as he fucks up a major assignment at work.  He then completely fumbles a hookup with a cutie he picks up at a club: she is in his apartment, about to blow him, when he botches the preliminary chitchat so badly that she abruptly changes her mind and walks out the door instead.  His character having been established, the movie then launches into what looks like the main plot, as he visits his father’s house, where his grandmother is dying.  He meets his father’s ladyfriend, he makes arrangements to visit his mother while he’s in town, and I didn’t want to watch two hours of this schlub reconnecting with his relatives while they all make fun­eral arrangements for Oma.  So I went to check some reviews to see whether it would indeed go on like this for its full running time, only for the first review to warn that this should be viewed as close to tabula rasa as possible and that even reading the headlines of other reviews was inadvisable.  So I decided to give it another ten minutes⁠—fifteen tops.  And in minute thirty-seven the movie suddenly turns into The Quiet Earth, as everyone else in the world magically disappears.  Stores and houses are empty, boats drift down the river, highways are choked with cars that have crashed because their drivers are no longer there (or be­cause they are Teslas).  The next step of the Quiet Earth / Z for Zachariah formula is to introduce a second survivor, this one of the opposite sex, so after half an hour of the schlub adjusting (first poorly, then more constructively) to his new circumstances, he crosses paths with a woman who’s been driving around the empty world with her dog.  Initially this encounter means fear and suspicion and a lot of rifle-clutching, but once they’ve each decided that the other one isn’t a threat, it isn’t long before they move on to the fuckin’.  And then… once I’d finished the movie, I read some of those spoilery reviews, and I guess they illustrate what my boss used to tell me during my brief stint as a screen­writer: that I tended to view stories through a social science lens while he focused much more on psychology.  A number of reviews fell into his camp, pointing out that despite its high concept, In My Room starts out as a European art film character study, and ends as one: it’s about how, even in these bizarre circumstances, the relationship between these two unfolds pretty much how it would have back in the Before Times, because the apocalypse doesn’t change their fundamental, irreconcilable character dif­ferences.  The woman wants to wander the globe and live off whatever she finds in her travels.  The schlub wants to stay put in the Alpine foothills, tending to the crops he’s growing and the animals he’s corraled, building infrastructure such as water wheels, and and trying to increase the population by having lots of babies.  I took this as a parable about the tension between hunter-gatherers and agriculturalists during the Neolithic Revo­lution.  I found no reviews that backed me up on that count.

Anyway, I was going to say that one of my takeaways here is that while this is a Pattern 8 movie, with its crazy left turn from one story to another, it quickly became clear that while it’s obviously an improvement for a bad story to transform into a good story, far better is for one good story to transform into another.  I get that the idea here was to firmly establish the real world before unexpectedly yanking it away, and perhaps the filmmakers thought that continuing in the vein of the first half hour would have made for a perfectly good movie as well.  But I did not, so I thought that I should probably add a proviso to Pattern 8 that the initial fake-out narrative needs to be good in its own right prior to the twist.  And then I discovered that I didn’t need to add that, because that was Pattern 9.  Hooray, my accomplishments these days are learning things I already knew once but then forgot. 

Joanna Hogg, 2019      #17, 2019 Skandies

Dull, violates Patterns 23 and 43, and pretty much instantly made me wonder why the hell my past self put this on the list.  Then I discovered the answer: the sequel, The Souvenir Part II, placed very high in the 2021 Skandies, and I figured that if I were going to watch the that one, I should also watch the original.  Anyway, I gave up on this and removed the sequel from my 2021 list.  I’ll give it a one instead of a zero because the titles are in a font called Souvenir and I appreciated the typography in-joke.

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