Putting It Together

(Stephen Sondheim, RIP)

It's been a busy couple of months, and I very much appreciate your patience. Jen, the animals, and I are now settling in our new home, a three-story townhouse in Houston's 1st Ward district. I am hoping that constantly going up and down the stairs (to say nothing of the lugging and rearrangement of heavy boxes of books) will do wonders for my figure.

It was not exactly fortuitous that this move coincided with screener season, and in fact a few physical screeners are lingering at a UPS holding station, awaiting pick-up. Others are simply lost, although I am not too worried. So far, it seems that most of the discs being sent out are from Netflix and Amazon, results of their unstoppable piles of cash and willingness to waste it. But I need to do some catch-up, and there's no time like the present. These will be drive-bys at best, and I suspect most of December will be similarly brief notes from a year-end cram session. Enjoy.

Compartment No. 6 (Juho Kuosmanen, 2021)

A few years back I ended up writing about Kuosmanen's debut film, The Happiest Day in the Life of Olly Mäki, and while I admired it enough, it did not strike me as the calling card of a major international auteur. With Compartment No. 6, my lukewarm opinion still stands. Both films are undeniably stylish, and Kuosmanen has an impressive (if conventional) sense of pacing. In theory, I ought to appreciate a de-romanticized version of Linklater's Before films, since that swoony puppy-love thing has never been particularly interesting to me. But Kuosmanen replaces those films' instant-soulmate connection with a précis of the standard rom-com formula. "These people dislike each other so much, of course they will end up together (or at least smashing) in the end."

In fact, the most unusual aspect of C#6 is also its most disconcerting. Our protagonist, Laura (Seidi Haarla) is hung up on Irina (Dinara Drukarova), a slightly older Russian woman she was staying with in Moscow. Upon leaving on a trip to the Russian arctic, Laura realizes she's being ghosted by Irina, and that she was never really her girlfriend, just a convenient, temporary hook-up. While struggling to get over Irina, Laura forms a bond with Vadim (Yuri Borisov), a guy who seems to enjoy embodying the stereotype of a young Russian man, taking the precariousness of modern life as an excuse to not really give a shit. On the one hand, I suppose it is progressive of Kuosmanen to depict Laura's sexuality as being so fluid, but C#6 studiously avoids any real consideration of her sexual identity. Am I being old fashioned? Is this just how the kids roll these days?

The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun (Wes Anderson, 2021)

There was a tweet that was making the rounds last month, something along the lines of, "can you imagine a less historically necessary film than The French Dispatch?" The suggestion was that, much like Adorno's remark about the vulgarity of poetry after Auschwitz, Anderson's newest film, and perhaps by implication his entire output, is obscenely patrician, something for dandies and reactionaries to roll over their tongues like a dessert wine to disguise the ugly taste of Black Lives Matter. It was, in short, a cheap shot.

Anderson's particular brand of structuralist whimsy (and by now it is most certainly a brand) is by no means immune to criticism. As I think I've said before, it's telling that his best film, and now also his worst film, are both stop-motion animations. It kind of establishes the director's basic aesthetic as one of shadow-box dioramas and traveling puppet shows, productions in which the performers are integral parts of an overall design. Given Anderson's approach, viewers are likely to have very divided reactions when he assays some genuinely meaningful topic, like the death of journalism in the hot-take / clickbait era. Either he's seen as cheapening "the discourse," or using his almost unavoidably pleasing cinematic style as a Trojan horse.

Although The French Dispatch works quite well as a whole, its division into short segments offers something for all the haters. Following an almost studiously disposable prologue in which Owen Wilson bikes around Anderson's storybook Paris, we get the strongest of three "articles." "The Concrete Masterpiece," wherein a psychotic murderer seduces the intellectual bourgeoisie with his Rothko / de Kooningesque paintings, hits a perfect balance between straight-faced mockery of art world pretension and the genuine pathos of an incarcerated man (a gloriously laconic Benicio Del Toro) whose single-minded art permits him total freedom. 

By contrast, Anderson's snotty riff on May '68, "Revisions to a Manifesto," succumbs to the director's worst comedic instincts, essentially declaring that political desire is nothing more than sublimated horniness. It's a smug dispatch from a world of utter privilege, and while a skilled satirist like Whit Stillman might have pulled it off -- at least the conservative Stillman has his own coherent set of beliefs -- this segment is just embarrassingly out of touch, and hard evidence for the prosecution. The final segment, "The Private Dining Room of the Police Commissioner," sort of splits the difference, although it is elevated considerably by a fine performance from Jeffrey Wright, channeling James Baldwin as a melancholy ex-pat uncomfortable with his journalistic distance. 

The story itself is mostly just a riff on The Grand Budapest Hotel's portrait of courtly civility as a bulwark against anarchy. But it's Wright's representation of honest inquiry, and humanistic curiosity, that makes it far less silly than it should be. Like everything else in Wesworld, this paean presents an idealized object filtered through the enthusiasm of naive youth, and if you think a Texas kid feeling urbane by reading the New Yorker is the height of caucasity, nothing here will change your mind.

Parallel Mothers (Pedro Almodóvar, 2021)

In at least one respect, Parallel Mothers can be compared to The French Dispatch. Like Anderson, Almodóvar has made a 99 44/100% pure auteurist object. All of Pedro's trademarks are here, most notably his sense of design and mise en scène. As a director, Almodóvar understands color and light as his basic tools, and as a maker of "women's pictures," he typically prefers subversion to outright political messaging. His latest takes this tendency in a slightly new direction, employing a telenovela plot structure to explore not only family ties but the relationship between kinship and the state.

"Parallel" is the key here, since the two main characters, Janis (Penélope Cruz) and Ana (Milena Smit) meet in a maternity ward in Madrid as they both go into labor. A hoary plot device (babies switched at birth) serves as the kindling to get a very different kind of fire started. The difficult relationship between the two women places the main male protagonist, Arturo (Israel Elejalde) slightly outside the main orbit, allowing Almodóvar to explore the knotty class and age discrepancies between Janis and Ana. When the two women start a sexual relationship, these divisions are exacerbated, but with the help of Arturo, a more open-ended extended family emerges from the struggle.

And although the main parallel is between the two women, the film's true strategy emerges as a parallel between kinship and history. Arturo is a forensic archaeologist, and with Janis's help her is excavating an unmarked grave where the bodies of about a dozen men were dumped by Franco's military following a mass execution. Janis is a fashion photographer, and her personal commitment to seeing these men properly laid to rest -- one was her great-grandfather -- allows Cruz and Almodóvar to play with metaphors of surface and depth. The chilling final scene represents one of the most pointed political statements of this director's career. We must all find family wherever we can and hold on tight to it, because in the last analysis, we are all subject to the cruel whims of history.