End-of-the-Year Ketchup

I had to watch a lot of films in a short amount of time, and not all of them stuck in my memory in any profound way. Some of them don't really merit a full review, and need to just be dealt with. My apologies for this rather mercenary TCB mode.

Diane (Kent Jones, 2018)

This is a very promising debut film, but let's face it: it is being overvalued in the critical community because of who made it. Too often it resembles a sophisticate's view of what "ordinary people" are like, with stilted conversations about the do-not-call registry and a notebook full of half-formed poetry. The real skill in Jones' direction is in his control of pace and mood. Diane (Mary Kay Place) is frantically moving from one good deed to another, upholding far too much emotional labor for her own metal health. Diane succeeds in conveying this relentless, thankless shuffle. But the gradual emergence of Diane's "secret," a younger life of bad decisions that may have in some ways influenced those of her son Brian (Jake Lacy) feels, for want of a better word, writerly, the sort of U-turn that one negotiates in order to produce events that will register with audiences as a "third act."

The Last Black Man in San Francisco (Joe Talbot, 2019)

It's strange. Here's a film that is so rooted in a sense of place that much of it is fixated not just on San Francisco but a particular house on Golden Gate Avenue. And yet, The Last Black Man in San Francisco is all over the place, touching very heavy-handedly on issues of black masculinity, gentrification, family birthright, the struggle to create, and the need to believe in myths in order to find our place in the world. Talbot made the film in collaboration with his friend Jimmy Fails, who stars as a fictionalized version of himself, and apparently much of what we see in the film is based on his own life experience. But this degree of proximity to the material requires an all-too-rare objective eye in order to give it shape. Instead, Talbot and Fails have made a film that is so concerned with stuffing in every conceivable idea and incident that it feels unfocused and, to be honest, exhausting. The core of Last Black Man is the relationship between Fails and best friend Mont (Jonathan Majors), but this easy camaraderie gets sidetracked by "themes," which are then resolved. It's earnest, but compare this to a season of Atlanta and you'll see those same good intentions much better realized.

Atlantics (Mati Diop, 2019)

Another highly impressive debut feature, Mati Diop's Atlantics has the trappings of something highly mysterious but is actually built from readily identifiable parts. A Senegalese filmmaker who has frequently collaborated with Claire Denis, Diop has done something admittedly original here, but hardly confounding. Atlantics combines the swoony, neon-lit romanticism of contemporary French film -- Denis and Assayas, especially -- with the gritty African realism associated with Francophone Senegalese cinema, in particular Ousmane Sembene and Diop's own uncle, Djibril Diop Mambety. 

The result has a twofold effect. For one thing, it creates a stylistic clash that is actually adequate, in a social and political sense, to depicting what much of postcolonial Africa looks like today. So part of Atlantics is not simply the disparity between the rich and the poor, but the "Westernized" and the traditional. Diop shows us men working their lives away to construct a postmodernist hotel / office tower that they would never be able to set foot in. And Ada (Mame Bineta Sane), the main protagonist of Atlantics, is expected to behave as if she has won the lottery because a rich young businessman, Omar (Babacar Sylla) want to marry her and set her up in his tacky white mansion.

Diop introduces a supernatural element to her story as a rather blatant way to allegorize the historical co-presence of the traditional and the modern, the rich and the poor. The impoverished dead come back to exact revenge on those who stole their labor and their lives, but also to consummate an interrupted love affair. It's curious that the dead men possess the bodies of the local women. Are they the only ones left? But Ada's dead lover takes on the guise of the police detective (Diankou Sembene) who is investigating arsons related to the ghosts' vengeance. This honest cop discovers he is his own quarry, which seems more obviously significant than the men's possession of the women. The law is its own transgression.

Like many films this year, Atlantics articulates a point of view quite clearly, not leaving a great deal of room for interpretation. By most measures, it is a better film that Bertrand Bonello's Zombi Child (which it superficially resembles), but Bonello's film has stuck with me longer.

The Golden Glove (Fatih Akin, 2019)

Lambasted far and wide when it premiered in Competition at the Berlinale early last year, The Golden Glove was declared by several critics to be a possible career-ender for Fatih Akin. Not being much of an Akin fan, I didn't give it a second thought until last month when John Waters placed the film on his year-end top 10 in Artforum. So I gave it a look, and I'm glad I did. A true crime adaptation of a book about 1970s Hamburg serial killer Fritz Honka, The Golden Glove is extremely difficult to watch. Not far into its running time, we see Honka (Jonas Dassler) sawing the head of a dead woman, and the snapping and popping of sinew is amplified for maximum disgust. Honka's attic apartment is a cesspool of filth and feces, plastered with nudie-mag cutouts and inexplicably strewn with baby dolls. The film depicts Honka's violence and misogyny with dead-eyed clarity.

But Akin certainly doesn't condone Honka's behavior. More to the point, Honka is depicted as a human insect: hunched, cockeyed, drunk, abusive, physically and emotionally rancid. And unlike the typical, bourgeois fascination with serial killers -- think Hannibal Lecter, or the series Mindhunter -- The Golden Glove affords Honka virtually no internal psychology. We are never supposed to be compelled by him, or even curious as to how he became what he is. (We learn his father was in a concentration camp, and that he came from a large, poor family in which several siblings died. But none of this is ever advanced to "explain" Honka.) Instead, we watch an utmost specimen of toxic masculinity, angry because he feels entitled to women's bodies and they won't capitulate. So he punches, rapes, and kills them.

The Golden Glove's closest cinematic cousin is Lars von Trier's The House That Jack Built, although as a sort of allegorical self-portrait, that film hedges its bets. We are intended to take its murders and misogyny as symbolic expressions of von Trier's self-hatred, or his persecution complex, or what have you. Both films employ dark humor, but The Golden Glove always has Honka in its crosshairs. Well, there's also a rich kid (Tristan Göbel) who hangs out at the hellhole St. Pauli district bar of the title, because he thinks it's cool and appealingly  déclassé. He is a stand-in for a certain kind of spectator for whom Fatih Akin has nothing but contempt. And his ironic detachment toward violence and misery is, in its own way, as dangerous as Honka himself.