by
A S Hamrah
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“Cinema is an event seen through a keyhole,” wrote Jean Cocteau, which André Bazin points out in an essay from 1951 called “Theater and Cinema.” The Hotel Artemis Quad lobby situation was an event that gave my friend and me a keyhole view into the world of Hollywood film publicity in New York, but that was not what Cocteau had in mind. Les parents terribles was an important film to Bazin because for him it proved that filming a play did not have to be uncinematic. This was a theoretical argument in postwar France, where directors like Bresson asserted that the theater and the cinema were distinct media that should have nothing to do with each other. By directing his own play for the screen just as he had staged it, and with the same actors, Cocteau, Bazin claimed, had shown that filmed drama did not have to be stagey, even if the action was restricted to a couple of sets.
The action, however, was not memorable to me. It was too seamless. I lost interest in the perfection of the film’s technical achievement, which I never doubted for a minute would be anything but complete and astonishing. I longed for just one moment where something wasn’t perfect, to remind me that humans had made this study of improvised naval success. Mostly I remember the image of Spitfire pilot Tom Hardy’s face in a CPAP mask left over from whichever of Nolan’s Batman movies he was in. When soldier Harry Styles survived it all, it was as though “the enemy” had been vanquished so that the real Styles could leave the set, fly to Los Angeles, hop in a car, and drive between palm trees singing the song from Titanic on “Carpool Karaoke.”
She and the film are nice to the nuns and priests who are her teachers but who are people too, with real lives and problems of their own. One of them (Lois Smith) sees right through Lady Bird. “You clearly love Sacramento,” Sister Sarah Joan tells her, in a line I had trouble imagining a real person saying. [...]
A little girl (Dafne Keen) shoplifts Pringles and what looks like a can of Four Loko Frost from a gas-station convenience store in Logan, which takes place in the year 2029. Movies have told us our future was dystopian, but it never occurred to me that things would get so bad that Four Loko would still be around a decade from now. Wolverine, by 2029, has deteriorated, too. His claws don’t retract as quickly. Working as a limo driver in a black suit and tie, he’s slower to recover from his wounds. Hugh Jackman, who also has to play a younger re-cloned Wolverine double, plays the original Logan as a Humphrey Bogart character, world-weary and disinclined to get involved.
I’m not interested in animated feature films even though I fully understand that Miyazaki is a great artist and I have been told more than once that it is in things like WALL-E and Toy Story 3 that we will locate the zeitgeist. As a child of the terrifying Watership Down era, I am surprised anew each time a Lego Batman Movie or a Coco captures the imagination of anyone I know over 12. Once, a while ago, I was walking to a two-screen movie theater down the street from me to see a French movie called Strayed. As I got closer I noticed an unexpectedly long line of adult couples waiting to buy tickets. Wow, I thought to myself, there sure are a lot of André Téchiné fans in this neighborhood. When I got to the theater I saw that Finding Nemo was playing on the other screen.
Coppola’s restraint, her lack of concern for character development or backstory or psychology — her good qualities as a film director — frustrate critics. Winning Best Director at Cannes for The Beguiled somehow only added to her image as a dilettante. As something of a Hollywood deserter, with each new film she makes Coppola finds out that there really isn’t any refuge from the things she has left behind. The rich will always be with her, only slightly less of a problem for her than they are for everybody else. It is to her credit that she understands them, even as her elegance restrains her. If she elides the harsh truths that underpin the fading lives of her glamorous characters, her oblique approach does not save them from moral rot. Their eventual destruction is off-screen, indicated by shots of the ransacked interiors where they once celebrated their privilege.
[...] he once walked from Munich to Paris because he thought doing so would save the life of Lotte Eisner, the German film historian and critic, who was ill at the time. Herzog completed that journey, Eisner lived another nine years, and Herzog published a diary of his cross-continent trek, called Of Walking in Ice. When he’d passed through the town of Sontheim, Germany, Herzog wrote, “Spending the night is going to be difficult, the area is bad. Industry, smells of sewage, silo fodder, and cow dung.” A German Romantic but also a realist to the core, Herzog knows that epic journeys stink. He makes them because, as he told Les Blank in Burden of Dreams, “We have to articulate ourselves, otherwise we would be cows in the field.” The sentiment calls to mind the sights and smells of his earlier trip more than what he found in the Amazon. In his films, as in his life, Herzog has crisscrossed vast distances to avoid bovine complacency and its associated stench.
Before and during the festival, about fifty films are screened during the day for the press. I saw forty of them. I missed one because of a therapy appointment. (Even though I am a film critic, I hope to be able to have normal relationships someday.) I missed another because I had a hangover and couldn’t face the hour-long trip to Lincoln Center from my apartment in Brooklyn. Two I paid to see, and went on Sunday afternoons after buying tickets using the festival’s complicated and anxiety-inducing website, with its countdown clock.
Here are some facts about my mother, which also describe Dorothea in this film. My mother was an ex–graphic designer who divorced my father when I was very young. She owned a Volkswagen Beetle. She smoked two packs of cigarettes a day, and they killed her in her sixties. She would listen to my records when I wasn’t around, trying to figure out what I liked about them. She preferred Talking Heads to Black Flag. She was lonely, never meeting any interesting men in our small town, and she was always reading a book from the library. Interested in progress and concerned about the future, she tried to teach me to be decent and kind while the Dead Kennedys and Joy Division were teaching me to be insolent and moody. I, in turn, spent time at a nearby university meeting hip older girls, like Gerwig’s Abbie, who worshipped David Bowie, and sneaking out to music shows in bars where they’d let in teenagers with IDs so fake they wouldn’t have fooled a blind man.
All of a sudden I became aware, or I remembered, that there is a better world somewhere else, that being in this one, where we were waiting for The Purge: Election Year to shock us, was a waste of the time allotted to me in this life and that, if I were going to see a movie, what time I have would be better spent with a form of cinema that acknowledges something other than the bloodshed and mayhem into which the world has fallen. The image of Homayoun Ershadi as the suicidal man in Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry came to me. It shook me awake. I didn’t know what I was doing there. I wanted out. I wanted to live.
The lights went down and trailers unspooled for a bunch of other movies, each one as dumb as the next, and then The Purge: Election Year began, and we sat there and watched it. Part of the time, at least, I saw it through the lens of Kiarostami, as if I were wearing glasses that made the film uglier. The rest of the time I just gave myself over to the movie’s sardonic portrayal of an out-of-control America led by murderous right-wing kooks, where foreign tourists put on Abraham Lincoln masks and kill the poor for fun.