⚡Lightning 〇Round 5

Outside Noise (Ted Fendt, 2021)

As I suggested on Twitter, I admire Ted Fendt's films quite a bit more than I like them. He is part of a loose consortium of younger filmmakers -- Luise Donschen, Ricky D'Ambrose and Sofia Bohdanowicz are others -- who appear to share many of the same basic influences. These include Straub / Huillet (whose collected writings Fendt himself translated), Akerman, Hong Sangsoo, and Dan Sallitt. Clearly, anyone making films within the sweet spot circumscribed by those filmmakers is going to produce worthwhile, fairly interesting work. With Outside Noise, though, I get the sense that I am observing a particular kind of experiment regarding cinematic distance. The three main characters are young women at points of uncertainty in their lives. Daniela (Daniela Zahlner) and Mia (Mia Sellmann) spend a lot of time hanging around, wandering around Vienna, and trying to figure out who they are and what they want to do. Meanwhile, Natascha (Natascha Manthe) is trying to decide whether or not to move to Vienna from Berlin.

In the midst of all this, Fendt takes great care in articulating the Viennese cityscape. Some of his compositions reminded me of Ernie Gehr, actually. On a purely filmic level, Outside Noise generates a much clearer, more forceful sense of the city than of any of its protagonists. I'm sure this is intentional; even the title suggests (along with a debt to Straub/Huillet's use of direct sound) that the larger world is more defined than the women occupying it. But this concept is easily grasped, not just because the characters are so amorphous. As with the other Fendt films I've seen, all three women and their friends dwell in under-furnished apartments, suggesting a fixation with a particular post-collegiate period of struggle. I'd like to see the next phase begin. 

The Worst Person in the World (Joachim Trier, 2021)

Although I generally like Joachim Trier's films, they are obviously, painfully the work of a former novelist. Others clearly respond to his literary exactitude, leaden themes, his focus on seemingly insignificant moments that reveal their importance later on, and in the case of this film, a chapter-break structure that allow him to present half-sketched characters as "impressionistic." As with Outside Noise, The Worst Person in the World depicts a woman in a liminal moment of her life. Julie (Renate Reinsve) is a medical student who decides to drop out, first to study psychology, then to study photography, and eventually to write, sort of. This trajectory of downward freedom might've been interesting to observe -- The Birth of the Fail-Daughter -- but Trier and co-writer Eskil Vogt dispatch all of that in a single chapter (about ten minutes of screen time).

That's because they are far more fascinated with Julie as a fuck-up, someone adrift and more than willing to subsume her personality into the men she's dating. Granted, this loss of identity, and its eventual recovery, is what Worst Person is all about. After meeting eco-slacker Eivind (Herbert Nordrum) at a party, Julie cannot get him out of her head. So she ends up breaking it off with her comic-artist partner Aksel (Anders Danielsen Lie) to give Eivind a whirl. Alas, being with someone with no ambition is just as irksome as being with someone much more successful than you. So Eivind, too, has to go.

I'm not conversant enough to say for sure whether Julie is a manic pixie dream girl, or even a Mary Sue. But Worst Person does display her as someone completely defined by and dependent on men. This is an upmarket rom-com at its heart, but Julie doesn't have a single woman friend. Or man friend, really. And while Reinsve is highly adept at conveying restless ambivalence, and mitigating the silliness of Trier's second-hand Godardisms, there's a sense that this film is considerably less than meets the eye.

Summer of Soul (...Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised (Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson, 2021)

Best documentary of the year? Sure, why not. For one thing, it's a pretty weak year for nonfiction filmmaking, although I'm sure others will disagree. And perhaps more importantly, Questlove's debut film (which has been on a winning streak since Sundance in January) is really a slice of history rediscovered. Typically documentaries are about a particular take on some known topic. It's rare for a filmmaker to unearth a historical event so crucial that it retroactively recontextualizes the history we thought we knew. The most astonishing part: the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival was fully recorded. They just had to wait patiently for someone to care.

Of course, it's not quite that simple. In 1969, 1970, 1971, and year after year until the TV producer simply gave up trying, no one was interested in a "Black Woodstock." There's surface-level racism, the assumption that Black popular culture wasn't as "marketable" as white folk and psychedelica, that B.B. King, Gladys Knight, Mahalia Jackson, and Nina Simone weren't as significant as CSNY and Sha Na Na. But beneath that lay a deeper, more pernicious racism. If Woodstock was understood as a crucible of counter-cultural energy and ideas, a Black equivalent might very well spell the end of America itself.

While I certainly admire the editing that went into Summer of Soul, trimming all that footage down into a single, digestible document, I'm also a bit ambivalent. Much of the work of Questlove's film was working with found footage, and yet there's not much in the way of cinematic exploration of the possibilities of the form. And when there are "found footage" moments, they often entail montages of Vietnam, the killings of MLK and the Kennedys, and other pertinent cultural history, plastered over jazz performances as if they were not as meaningful as soul and gospel. But then again, that's a minor quibble.

Who knew Stevie Wonder could fucking drum?!

Red Rocket (Sean Baker, 2021)

I've driven through Texas City, and Baker gets it exactly right. It's a Gulf Coast industrial town, where you can clearly see a refinery from every home and stop-and-rob on the block. Baker's broader preoccupations really clicked for me with Red Rocket. Primarily, his films are in sympathy with America's marginalized and dispossessed: the poor, but also racial and gender minorities forced to live in the background of this country's official narrative. Here, Baker shows a bisected Trump billboard in the first ten minutes, like a visual thesis statement. But at the same time, Baker is a landscape filmmaker. He continually shows the beauty and desolation of the bad parts of town, or in this case the working class town in a very wealthy state.

Without belaboring the point, Red Rocket shows that the characters onscreen are to some extent formed by the places they live and move through. This is particularly pertinent here because Red Rocket is a tale of leaving the farm and making it in the big city, showing that while it may be true that you can't go home again, the fact is you can never really leave home behind. Mikey (Simon Rex) is a fast-talking hustler who has apparently just been drubbed out of the porn business. With nothing else going on, he decides to reunite with his estranged wife Lexi (Bree Elrod), a former porn star herself. (Baker wisely allows us to read between the lines. As a man, Mikey had a slightly longer shelf life in porn, while Lexi was used up and tossed back to Texas.)

On a chance trip to the donut shop, Mikey meets Raylee, aka Strawberry (Suzanna Son), a barely-legal sexpot who is taken with the smooth talker from L.A. Mikey thinks he can market her as porn's next big star, thereby weaseling his way back into the business. Baker asks us to be fascinated with Mikey, and Rex radiates a slightly tarnished charisma that is perfect for the role. But it's also quite evident that he is a user and a narcissist, and as such an unreliable narrator of his own existence. When the locals lower the boom on asshole Mikey, it's clear that his slick, no-drawl California rap is no match form community ties and local knowledge. Still, in the perfectly judged conclusion, we have to wonder if the maxed-out dream of easy money is about to repeat itself.