Still More Year-End Cramming

There There (Andrew Bujalski, 2022)

As I said on my now-deleted Letterboxd remarks, this is a film that I admire in theory, because it shares some DNA with the structural-experiment films of people like Hal Hartley (Flirt) and Todd Solondz (Palindromes, Storytelling). (I didn't like the Solondz films at the time, but I should revisit them since I've warmed up to him.) Anyway, if you know anything at all about There There you know it's a Covid-19 experiment, in which no actor ever occupies the same space at the same time. A roundelay of two-handers, the film is literally constructed entirely through editing. And although this is fairly obvious if you are looking for it, it eventually stops being a distraction. Bujalski successfully Kuleshovs the hell out of the thing.

Still, a film that mimics the structure of black-box theater the way There There does is a film that stands or falls on its script. And I found it dramatically unconvincing, but in an odd way. The scenes that felt most "realistic" (the tricky chat between Lili Taylor and Lennie James in the morning following a hook-up the Taylor character subsequently speaking with her AA sponsor) were also the least compelling, while the most "dramatic" sequences (parent vs. teacher; tech asshole firing his lawyer, Jason Schwartzman; said lawyer visited by the ghost of a dead mentor) bore little resemblance to actual human behavior, seeming much more like the theater exercises that I suspect were their point of origin. I guess my point is, the most interesting Bujalski films (Mutual Appreciation and Computer Chess) were not really script-driven, so if you were really keen on Results and Support the Girls, this may work for you.

One Fine Morning (Mia Hansen-Løve, 2022)

A film I admire quite a bit more than like, One Fine Morning is the French version of "the kind of film they don't make anymore." It's a quiet, rather literary piece about love and family, time and change. In its highly reserved visual style, this could be from the late 70s or 80s, like minor-key Téchiné. To be honest, the thing that bothered me most about One Fine Morning is an element without which it simply wouldn't be what it is. Centered on Sandra (Léa Seydoux), a single mother approaching middle age, Hansen-Løve's film toggles back and forth between two complications in her current life. On the one hand, she must deal with her father (Pascal Greggory) who has a degenerative disease and must go into care. On the other, an old friend (Melvil Poupaud) has come back to Paris, and Sandra feels amorous stirrings for the first time since her husband died five years earlier.

These two circumstances are not of equal interest, partly because the boyfriend, Clément, is a two-timer who strings Sandra along with promises of leaving his wife. This would be bad enough even if a child (Camille Leban Martins) weren't involved. And apart from sexual chemistry, it's difficult to see what Clément's appeal for Sandra really is. Alas, Hansen-Løve is fully committed to Sandra's emotional turmoil, and not whatever judgments it may provoke in the viewer. But to be clear, the fact that the ailing-father plot is closer to my own reality, while no doubt playing a role in my reaction, is hardly the main issue. Sandra's father, a former philosophy professor, is the most fascinating character in the film, frequently poetic in his broken verbiage and struggles against his own limitations. And Greggory delivers what may be a career-best performance. So if One Fine Morning sometimes feels like half a film, that's just because Sandra's maddening situation is in fact very real. Things happen when they happen. It's seldom convenient, and in a way Hansen-Løve has made an inconvenient film.