January 29: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016 – Gareth Edwards)

★★★★★

When Disney bought Lucasfilm, they talked about doing some movies that were sidelines to the main Star Wars story, portraying events and characters that weren’t part of the core storyline.  They also said that these extra films would be open to more experimentation than the main Star Wars films would.

If Rogue One is an indication, this idea has promise.  The film is tightly linked to the Star Wars universe.  Its story is background to the beginning of Star Wars: Episode IV, which opens with Darth Vader’s attack on Princess Leia’s ship in search of the plans for the Death Star.  Rogue One tells us how the Rebels got the plans and ends at this attack; we see the moment that Leia is handed the Death Star plans which we know she’ll soon be hiding in R2D2.  And along the way to this ending, Rogue One nods to the world of Star Wars in ways too numerous to list.  In an early example, we see that Jyn, like Luke, is raised on a technology-assisted farm, though it’s a wet planet in her case rather than a dry one.  Jyn’s mother even prepares the same blue milk that we watch Luke’s mother prepare.  Throughout Rogue One, we see characters and technology that we know from the main series.  Most conspicuously, a digital version of Peter Cushing appears as Tarkin, and a digital Carrie Fischer plays as Leia briefly, but the weapons, aircraft and settings all call back to the original series.  Some shots even look familiar, like those of the Rebel pilots in their cockpits and the sentries stationed at the Rebels’ tropical base.  For fans, all this seems wonderfully familiar yet new as we see the familiar in new settings.

Gareth Edwards also brings strong cinematic competency to Rogue One.  Although we change locations often, it’s not hard to know where we are at each point and why we’re there.  Likewise, we know who everyone is and why they’re involved in each scene despite the large cast of characters.  And the final sequence, the battle of Scarif, is a tour de force from Edwards.  The portrayal of this battle fractures into several lines, and Edwards edits them together so each one maintains its suspense independently while contributing to an effective collective suspense for the battle at large.  Edwards fuses this suspense with marvelous CGI work in the air war above the planet, too.  Rogue One works well cinematically.

The film isn’t without its flaws, though, and the shallowness of its characters undercuts a couple of its important aspects.   For one, the Rogue One aims to address the legitimacy of doing bad things for a good cause.  We see this moral dilemma highlighted in some of Cassian’s lines and actions, but Galen, Saw, Bodhi and even Jyn confront the question also.  Unfortunately, none of these characters has the depth or psychological presence to make their questioning resonate with the audience.  We don’t know their likes, dislikes, doubts or vulnerabilities s to any real degree, and we have only the most rudimentary understanding of their past.  When such underdeveloped characters try to cope with a complex moral problem like this one, it feels more like posturing than a moral struggle.  It’s laudable that Edwards tries to use the Star Wars universe to deal with such a question, but the effort is undermined by a script that doesn’t provide more psychological complexity.

There is also a bleakness to Rogue One that could have given this film more heft that most of its predecessors.  We flinch as we see main characters perish, culminating in effective freeze-frame ending.  And while we regret the loss of characters that we’d come to like, the demise of each of them would have been even more affective if they’d had more complexity.  The more we understand about cinematic characters, the more invested we are and the more we respond to them.  So although the end of Rogue One is a strong one, but would have been devastating if we’d had more connection to the characters.

Rogue One is a worthy addition to the Star Wars corpus.  It’s not perfect, but it’s a fun experience of that universe, and Edwards’ efforts to go where Star Wars hasn’t gone before inaugurates this group of films with promise.

November 30: Death on the Nile (1978 -- John Guillermin)

★★★

November 14: Being 17/ Quand on a 17 ans (2016 -- André Téchiné)

★★★★

There’s an instability of form that adds a fascinating dimension to André Téchiné’s most recent film.  Being 17 sometimes runs realistic, but then it turns lyric.  The tone is sometimes dramatic, but then it shifts unexpectedly to the melodramatic.  The mashup of these tones reminds us throughout that we’re watching a fiction, but Téchiné’s master stroke is that a touching story emerges anyway.  We’d expect the formal inconsistency of Being 17 to take away from the film’s impact, but the story and Téchiné’s strong visual storytelling leave us moved at the end of the film.

The formal swings here almost disengage us.  Very realistic scenes, like those inside Damien’s middle class house and school, are juxtaposed with poetic imagery of the soaring, mountainous countryside of Hautes-Pyrénées and Tomas stripping off his clothes to skinny dip in a frigid mountain pool.  And like these visuals, the actions of the characters range in tone.  There are dramatic moments that seem like something from a realistic film.  Tomas and Damien get into a fight on the basketball court like we’d expect to see in any high school movie.  But in a flash, we’re watching a scene of Damien and his mother in tears during the drawn-out military funeral of Nathan.   It’s impossible to see Being 17 and maintain the pretense that it’s a realistic film.  Téchiné foregrounds the cinematic throughout with his whiplash shifts of tone and genre.

There is also a looseness that highlights the cinematic art.  The ending jerks from one unlikely cliché to the next to the extent that we lose causality in the last few moments of the film.  And Téchiné inserts on-the-nose exposition at more than one point.  You need to trust more, Marianne tells her son Damien as though telling us the moral center of her son's character arc.  I was scared, Tomas says, to explain to us his violence toward Damien.  On the level of imagery, Tomas is a wild nature boy, but Téchiné develops this identification only to leave it hanging without a payoff.  And even the scene where Tomas can finally feel a part of his adoptive family is borrowed from sentimental literature when Tomas holds the new baby.  It’s as though Being 17 tries to take us out of film by its many self-referential gestures.

Téchiné’s achievement here, though, is that despite the formal self-reflection,  Being 17 is still a deeply touching film with a living human heart.  Both Damien and Tomas are 17 year olds, and both are coming to terms with being gay and experiencing their first loves.  Part of the transcending power of their story comes from a script that distills the drama in the boy’s situation into a few essential coming-of-age moments.  When Damien has Tomas drive him to a tryst he’s set up online, for example, the sequence releases a range of emotions among the characters – vulnerability, fear, anger, disappointment and jealousy – that communicate through the film’s formal expression.   Another strength of the script is its reliance on visuals and movement as opposed to dialog.  Téchiné  and Céline Sciamma tell this story in close-ups and gestures rather than words, which strengthens the impact of what’s happening.  The actors, too, bring home the story's importance with their dedication to their characters.  Whether in a romantic or realistic mode, they maintain their characters appropriately through the tonal shifts.  And these shifts themselves even help us focus on the story since their frequent swings lead us to distill the truth tying these various forms together.

Being 17 is a genuine cinematic achievement with both formal brio and a touching emotional core.  It’s altogether appropriate that the soundtrack for this film of two French kids in the Hautes-Pyrénées   includes a West African song by a musician singing in Dyula and playing an acoustic guitar so it sounds like a kora.  Form doesn’t matter when we can feel hearts connected.

October 27: Gimme Danger (2016 - Jim Jarmusch)

★★★

Gimme Danger has a few nice cinematic gestures, but it doesn’t go far beyond telling the chronological story of Iggy Pop and The Stooges.  There’s ample space that the film could have investigated, but instead, Jarmusch simply says what happened when, though he dresses it up well enough to keep us engaged.

One of its more effective elements is the film's starting in media res, with The Stooges at the point of breaking up.  Jarmusch then takes us back to Iggy’s upbringing, the coming together of the band, and the early successes that led to the time that started the film.  From there, we follow The Stooges into their future of glam rock, punk and beyond.  It’s a clever way to organize the plot in what’s basically a chronologically-told story.

Although the spine of the film is Iggy giving us his account of the group from a chair, Jarmusch dribbles in interesting extras to keep us interested in the content.  He intercuts short comments by other band members, and he finds relevant clips from TV and movies that visually comment on Iggy’s words.  He also uses home videos and still images to break up the Iggy narration, and script across the screen fills in some history.  One of the more fun devices is when Jarmusch uses animation to illustrate one of Iggy’s points, even cutting to an animated figure that is mouthing Iggy’s words.  All these elements help to keep us involved in what’s happening.

What emerges is the story of the development of one stream of rock music as experienced by a band near its center, but there is material here for even more interesting stories.  For example, Jarmusch could have followed more of the connections between the music of The Stooges and other types of music and art.  At one point, Iggy mentions the Ann Arbor music scene experimentation that fed into their work, and it would have been a unique contribution if Gimme Danger had been able to look at how an avant-garde, interdisciplinary scene that went from the musical experimentation of John Cage to theater contributed to the emerging aesthetic of The Stooges.  And on into the music developments that followed.

There is also an interesting story about art, the artist and creativity in Iggy himself.  From his narration, we understand that Iggy used his body to express himself.  From his earliest days, he played drums, the most bodily-engaged of rock's instruments.  And at one point later, he talks about wanting to express an opinion but, being unable to do that verbally, he just did somersaults around the room.  We also see that in The Stooges’ performances Iggy’s body is his instrument.  He connects to the crowd with his gyrations, even to the point of jumping into it.  He also describes jamming with his guitarist by his movements, the guitar riffing on Iggy’s motion while Iggy is doing the same to the guitar.  It’s a fascinating way to see the art of The Stooges and one we might wish we'd heard more about.

What Jarmusch gives us of The Stooges here is a basic narration.  If he doesn’t go far beyond that, Gimme Danger is still an engaging chronological story that gives us insight into one type of music in it’s time.  But the film has interesting little jewels embedded throughout that would certainly warrant more attention.

October 26: American Honey (2016 - Andrea Arnold)

★★★★★

<edit>

October 24: Deepwater Horizon (2016 - Peter Berg)

★★★

Deepwater Horizon is a fun couple of hours at the movies.  Peter Berg uses the same elements that Hollywood figured out back in the 20s—heroic everyman, action, bad guy and melodrama—but he amps most of these up into 21^st century expression.  Mike Williams is a decent guy who rises to meet the challenges posed by the devastation on the oil rig, and the action has contemporary intensity with fires roaring up corridors and bits of metal zinging by people after mud explosions.  The bad guy here is BP, a soulless corporation represented by Donald Vidrine, emphatically places profit above people.  And melodrama informs the film, from the sweetness of Mike’s leave-taking of his family to his wife’s tears as she learns of the accident and on to their reunion as a family.  Along the way, one brave crew member is killed as he saves the rest of the crew, the honorable Mr. Jimmy insists on returning to the bridge despite his wounds, and Mike rescues several of the injured while gallantly trying to restart the rig’s engines.  Much of Deepwater Horizon is a silent era adventure with up-to-date elements.

Exposition here can be obvious, as when Mike’s daughter explains subterranean oil pressure by using a shaken can of Coke, but the exposition is some of the most interesting and compelling content.  We learn what fantastically complex mechanisms these floating oil rigs are, and we come to understand the risks and precautions on the them.  In fact, Berg devotes the entire first half of the movie to exposition as our dread builds since we know what the outcome is going to be.  It’s one of the finer pleasures of the film.

Deepwater Horizon has a few missteps.  Berg gives John Malkovich too much latitude as Vidrine, so we get a Simon Legree-style bad guy who is far more caricature than Kurt Russell’s Jimmy Harrell or Wahlberg’s Mike.  And the film's women lack agency.  Andrea needs Mike to give her the courage to save herself, and Felicia stays home with the kid and is left to cry and fret.  But Deepwater Horizon doesn't aim to challenge or instruct; it's a fun action film that also manages to give us an engaging sense of what goes on aboard such a huge vessel and of the colossal forces it sits astride.

October 23: The Handmaiden/Ah-ga-ssi (2016 - Park Chan-wook)

★★★★

Park Chan-wook is simultaneously elegant, clever and passionate in The Handmaiden.  The visuals here have an Edwardian feel with dark interiors, heavy woodwork and period furnishings, but these elements merge seamlessly with an Asian sensibility that includes cherry trees in the landscapes and sliding paper doors.  Park blends the two influences to create a magnificent, English-inspired Japanese mansion set in the countryside of Korea.  The same Edwardian/Asian blend carries through in costumes, which range from simple, high-collared dresses for servants to shimmering gowns for the wealthy women and tight Edwardian suits for the men.  Even the hairstyles reflect this two-world approach with women’s tresses sometimes piled on top of the head, pulled back into a bun,  divided into hemispheres or left to fall in straight cascades.  And all the while, Chung Chung-hoon bathes the settings and figures with a soft glow that takes the edge off of low-key lighting and makes The Handmaiden feel like a film version of an old photo album.  His tight control sometimes brings a figure out of the background with a narrow depth of field, and his color saturation gives hues a special richness.  It’s sumptuous movie to watch.

It’s also a very smart film.  In the long first part, we see the straightforward story of Count Fujiwara’s scheme to use one woman, Sook-hee, to defraud another woman, Lady Hideko.  Perhaps the major surprise in this part is Sook-hee and Hideko falling in love with each other, but Park also draws us into the film by giving us a few visual teases that imply we’re not getting the whole story.  For example, why is the white rope, which was once in a box in Hideko’s closet, hanging in a tree when the two leave the estate?  In a film as controlled as The Handmaiden, such elements engage us and promise that there’s more to the story than we’ve seen.

Park’s narrative whiplash begins in Part II, when we revisit many of the scenes of Part I from a different perspective.  The big reveal is that the Count has been conspiring with Lady Hideko all along to use Sook-hee so Lady Hideko can claim her inheritance.  We learn that Lady Hideko isn’t being kind when she offers to let Sook-hee try on some earrings but rather that she’s following the Count’s suggestion to put Sook-hee at ease.  A similar reversal occurs in the picnic scene as we see it in this part.  In Part I, the couple is snuggling when Sook-hee returns from an errand, but in the same scene in Part II, we find the two pair quarreling until the handmaiden returns.  And Part II shows us that the white rope was hanging in the cherry tree in Part I because Lady Hideko had been in despair over her love for Sook-hee and tried to kill herself.  This section of the film is a smart bit of intertextuality that delights with a series of reversals, flashbacks and changes in perspective before returning to a stable, if different, narrative line in Part III..

Park also amps up the sex between the women in The Handmaiden, though he integrates it well into the film.  These scenes run long and steamy, perhaps overly so, but the genuine passion between the women comes through clearly in them.  Given that this passion ultimately undermines the Count’s initial plans, we have to believe in the intensity of the women’s love, so there’s some justification for Park’s dwelling on it.  And Park uses these scenes to reinforce the characters.  The commoner Sook-hee is more robust and aggressive in the love scenes while the Lady is appropriately tentative and discovering.  Park also uses these scenes to introduce a theme of voyeurism and to call his (male) audience to account.  In one of the longer erotic scenes, Sook-hee puts a thimble on her finger, gently holds Lady Hideko’s head and moves her finger slowly in and out of the lady’s mouth to smooth a rough spot on a tooth.  The scene is laden with erotic overtones, and Park brings the audience directly into it by putting the camera in Sook-hee’s perspective, looking into the eyes of Lady Hideko while her/our finger is in her mouth.  This daring voyeuristic gesture points to more explicit voyeuristic scenes later, when Lady Hideko reads pornography to the room of men and acts out some of the content while the men set enrapt. In this self-reflexive gesture, Park suggests that the male gaze in both settings is focused on sex, a gaze as we see later that ultimately blinds the Count to the reality of the situation he faces with the two women.  The Handmaiden gives us two women who escape exploitation by men even, ironically, with a male impersonation at its end.

With so much to recommend this film, it’s not without its drawbacks.   For all the beauty and deliberateness of Part I, this section of the film is overly long and feels like a movie in itself.  It consists of extended scenes and more than a little repetition.  The sex scenes in the film, too, are unnecessarily frequent, run overly long and risk falling into the very voyeurism they implicitly criticize.  The film doesn’t need so much passion to make its point, and while Park clearly highlights voyeurism, it’s not clear that this emphasis contributes to our experience of the movie or comes to some statement.  The Handmaiden also leaves us wishing that its characters had more depth.  The people we meet here certainly have feelings, but Park leaves us to accept their emotion with too little background or range of experiences among the principals.

The Handmaiden is a fine cinematic experience, bold and beautiful.  If the ideas don’t always hang together well and the characterizations don’t run deep, it still gives us a striking surface of visuals and story to enjoy.