Monday, 1/29
A good final day to what was a very good festival for me— nothing was transcendent, but there were no real clunkers, either, and a lot of excellence on display.
Exhibiting Forgiveness
To “forgive” is a squirmy idea, hard to pin down, as it means so many different things to different people, and there’s not necessarily an endpoint when “forgiveness” is achieved and we can point to the time before forgiveness and the time after. It’s a process, a long process, and one that may not ever actually be finished. This complexity is difficult to convey in a movie (not impossible!), which often wants something dramatic to happen and there to be an endpoint, because, well, the movie has to end. I’m not sure this is all fully explored in Exhibiting Forgiveness, but the film is sincere, with yet another exquisite performance by André Holland, and the resolution (if there is one) is murky enough that it doesn’t feel pandering, whether that murkiness is intentional or not.
The movie is directed by the artist Titus Kaphar, whose own paintings are seen in the film as the work of Holland’s character Tarell, who lives with his musician wife and their young son, and who is just being talked into having a new show by his agent (or whatever you call her) as the movie begins. Tarell is also trying to move his mother from her home to a place closer to him, and the drama of the film is set in motion as he and his family head to her house, also Tarell’s childhood home, to pack her up. Because Tarell’s abusive, formerly drug-addicted father, La’Ron, has resurfaced, and Tarell’s mother has hopes that her son and the man can connect and reconcile. Tarell understandably has no interest in this, despite his mother’s insistence that the man has changed, and that forgiveness is a holy calling.
Much of the rest of the film takes place in this struggle, as La’Ron wants to know his son again, Tarell’s pain comes to the forefront and storms inside him, and we roll around the idea of forgiveness. One particularly effective scene finds Tarell and La’Ron talking about Tarell’s grandfather, and we see how people handwave away abuse, as La’Ron describes the man as “complicated” and a “good man,” with “flaws,” all mushy terms we commonly hear that let us all pretend we’re acknowledging the complicated humanity in all people while really just ignoring the severe damage people do. La’Ron, for his own part, doesn’t appear to be all that remorseful about how he treated Tarell earlier in life, although he does seem to realize the drug use wasn’t a great idea. All of this while Tarell’s mother insists the Bible tells us we must forgive to be forgiven ourselves and continues to push Tarell toward that end. But when she says it, it seems to bypass the layers of pain and difficulty Tarell is experiencing as he wrestles with all of this. What she says feel like platitudes, easy things to say to absolve ourselves of real responsibility.
Or maybe that’s what I’m bringing to this—Kaphar is never fully clear about what he’s trying to say with all of this, exactly, and it’s even less clear whether Tarell truly forgives his father when he ultimately says he does. This is, as I’ve already acknowledged, all very unclear business, and so I would prefer it not to be wrapped up in a nice bow for the audience, but it’s not apparent if that lack of clarity is intentional, either.
These are maybe ultimately small quibbles, though, as Kaphar’s movie is also gorgeous to look at (it’s incredibly lazy to say he has a painter’s eye, but it’s also true) and he gets the power of the ghosts we can feel inside houses we used to live in. Holland commands the screen at every moment, and it’s kind of thrilling to watch him in his work as a painter, so much so that I wish we had seen a whole lot more of it. And it’s likely Kaphar’s difficulty in fully expressing what he wants to say here is due to the fact that he’s still working it all out himself, as much of the film is apparently autobiographical. These are really, really tough things to figure out, and, yes, it’s all a process.
Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat
The assassination of Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba in 1961 is a story that has been told here and there, but not one that’s nearly as well known as it should be. The man helped his country gain independence from Belgium, got labeled a communist, and was overthrown by colonizing interests, very much including the United States, leading to his murder and the ascent of Mobutu.
I won’t go through the whole history here, because who wants me (specifically) to do that, but this movie lays it all out in detail, not just focusing on Lumumba, but also the addition just a few months earlier of 16 (now independent) African countries to the United Nations and how that shifted the global landscape as official global colonization was dying and Khrushchev was banging his shoe. The movie’s director, Johan Grimonprez, uses an enormous (enormous) amount of archival footage to tell the story while also tying those world-changing events to American jazz musicians, leading to a scene at the U.N. after Lumumba’s death in which Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach, among many others, yelled and fought in protest of the U.N.’s treatment of Lumumba, his country’s independence, and the independence of its new African members.
I’m not entirely convinced Grimonprez consistently draws enough of a connection between what’s happening in Africa and American jazz to justify 150 minutes, which does start to feel long after a while—this isn’t to say that connection couldn’t be drawn consistently, as the director does make it quite clear at certain times, especially as jazz musicians are sent to Africa as “cultural ambassadors” while unwittingly fronting CIA operations. I’m just not sure he actually does it enough to keep interspersing more and more musicians and songs between the historical events (it really does extend the running time a lot). But his editing is quickly paced and he keeps the whole story moving, I’m happy anytime we’re talking about jazz in its historical context, and what he’s given us is a pretty impressive piece of work that goes into much more detail than we typically see.
Dìdi
I can’t believe we’re at the point where we can have nostalgia for 2008, but we obviously are. I’m too old to be in that position myself, and if you’re the same, I suggest you watch this with someone a bit younger than you, because there’s a lot about teenage life in the 2000s that’s packed into this sweet film, a lot you’re going to miss if you don’t have someone pointing things out to you.
In the broad sense, this is something we’ve seen before, a coming-of-age story about a teenage boy trying to navigate his frustrating (to him) family, girls, and his own poor decisions (which are really just teenage decisions, they aren’t even all that poor, in the grand scheme), while also trying to figure out just which direction he wants to take. But it’s also funny and charming, and it’s important for people to keep telling these stories, because each generation’s experience is a little different in the details.
I figure at least some of this film is autobiographical, with the movie directed by Sean Wang about a kid named Chris Wang (and at one point, his name is written directly below the name of a kid named Sean) who becomes interested in camerawork and filmmaking, but the part that resonated with me the most is in Wang’s treatment of Chris’s mother, played by Joan Chen, who is always welcome on my screen. Like anyone who’s raised children, she’s set aside a lot of her earlier dreams to create new ones that involve her kids, she’s put up with a whole lot, and she loves the heck out of them. She sees her kids for who they are, even when that’s frustrating, and you can feel how generally exhausted and elated she is simply by having them in her life. The movie may be focused on Chris, but it pays enough attention to his mother that it’s a lovely addition to a movie that would have been more lightweight (if still entertaining) without her.
Sunday, 1/28
Kneecap
This is the first I’d heard of the Northern Ireland hip hop group Kneecap, so I have no idea at all whether any particular part of this movie is true, but, hey, print the legend, right? It’s not often you get a biopic made about you when your act isn’t even a decade old yet, but it’s pretty obvious why these guys did—their story (whatever the reality) is a little wild, very unlikely, and kind of important at this moment in time.
Plus, they play themselves, and you can’t wait much longer if you’re going to do that, or else you’ll have a bunch of old men running around playing 20-year-olds (not that that’s stopped anyone before, but it should have). The trio perform in Irish, the indigenous language spoken by only a relatively few people, and their rise coincided with a push to make the British government recognize Irish as an official language of Northern Ireland, a movement also wrapped up in the complicated (and deadly) politics of the region. And those politics play a major role in Kneecap’s music, too, as they rail against oppression by the British government and espouse republican ideals.
Director Rich Peppiatt gives the movie a hard-charging energy that’s consistently entertaining, and it’s often surprising how unflattering events are as the group is forming and finding its way, especially given how involved the musicians were in the making of the movie itself. They do not appear to have any concerns about looking bad, they are very much not superheroes here, and occasionally bits of their origin story have the dumbest possible explanation. But they are enthusiastic, about their music, their language, and their drugs. The three men all give great performances, too—I had no clue they were playing themselves in the movie until we got to the very end and I thought, “they’re pretty good at pretending to perform all of this music,” and then it occurred to me to look up the actors, who weren’t actors. A fun movie, this one.
In the Land of Brothers
The film won a directing award at the festival, and it’s the kind of movie that tells a massively important story that I, personally, rarely choose to watch (this is a personal failing). It’s about Afghan refugees living in Iran, told in three sections—one in 2001, one in 2011, and one in 2021, each focusing on a single character, though the three characters are related to each other in one way or another. And what we get is beautifully shot and gravely serious, as we see how each person’s life is always off balance, and how each is constantly doing everything they can just to keep living the life they have in Iran, such as it is.
We meet Mohammad first, a student who’s picked up by Iranian police for no good reason, mostly so they can force him to perform manual labor for them. He has a quiet, innocent romance with Leila, who becomes the subject of the second story, as she finds herself having to cover up her husband’s death just so she can avoid being deported. And her brother is Qasem, the subject of the third section, who ends up hiding his own son’s death in order to spare his wife the grief.
We see how each person has to create a reality just to the side of the one they’re living in simply in order to continue on, or to avoid something worse, and how sad and anxiety-filled each day must be, all the while knowing this life is light years better than what they would find back in Afghanistan. And we have to realize there are people living these lives every day, everywhere, and we have to do a better job of understanding.
Saturday, 1/27
Stress Positions
When Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar came out, it felt like it had been born out of, and propelled by, our collective pandemic delirium. The movie itself had nothing to do with the pandemic, of course, but I mention it here because of how much it was needed at that exact moment, and because of how it captured something indescribable that only made sense in that context, something it seems like it’ll be impossible to convey to later generations. We are, though, now trying to describe that bizarre psychological and emotional chaos, which is where we start with Stress Positions, which takes place in a New York apartment building in the summer of 2020, as Terry Goon is helping his nephew, Bahlul, a teenage male model with a broken leg who’s staying in Terry’s basement.
Terry’s obsessed with staying away from the virus, even having gas masks on hand just in case, but nothing he’s doing (well, other than the gas masks) seems all that extreme given the situation, it’s just the everything Terry does seems extreme. He’s the sort of person that does everything at a 10 when a 2 will do, he’s terribly self-absorbed, and he seems to loathe himself and most everyone else. He’s not the only one like this, either—his best friend, Karla, a trans woman, appears to be much the same, although Karla seems to hate people even more than Terry does.
The movie proceeds at more or less the level of a farce, except that we know it’s not actually that far off from how things were at that time, and the farce really comes from how the characters act in any given situation, partly because we can infer this is how they would act in every situation, whether the world had gone mad or not. Bahlul, for his part, looks to be the only sane person here, and the movie does an interesting thing, giving voiceover narration to Bahlul while ostensibly keeping Terry as the main character. (Karla gets a voiceover, too, which is maybe less necessary, but as Karla is played by the movie’s writer and director, Theda Hammel, some allowances are made). And while all of this insanity rages around, Bahlul seems to undergo a kind of profound internal journey, revisiting his past with his (converted) fundamentalist Muslim mother and beginning to explore his own identity, gender and otherwise.
The movie is often riotously funny, with John Early (as Terry), especially, giving the kind of outrageous performance this calls for, although I do admit that after a while, I got pretty worn down by the nonsense the characters continually throw at us. They’re just not pleasant people. But, then, Bahlul seems to feel the same way, and so Hammel is plenty conscious of who these characters are, and how we should feel about them, and leans hard into that. I’m not sure showing your grandchildren Stress Positions will truly communicate to them what that summer was like, but man: what a time to be alive.
Handling the Undead
I’m a sucker for movies that take extremely serious approaches to ridiculous premises (or, I say I am, I’m not sure I can think of many that actually do that), and so this is right up my alley: a sober, slow, contemplative, deeply painful examination of how things might actually look if there were some unexplained electrical event that caused the dead to return to life. And yes, the living dead, the walking dead, the undead (but I thought those were vampires?), although not necessarily the kind that are simply stumbling around looking for braaaaaaiiiins. Well, maybe a little brains. I’ll get back to that part.
The event happens in Oslo shortly after we’re introduced to three families who’s lost people—a older woman whose sister had just died, a man whose wife is in a car accident just before their son’s birthday, and a mother and grandfather who’ve lost a little boy. Each deceased person returns, though it’s unclear if there’s any of “them” there anymore, or much of anything other than a husk (there’s one small indication some spark might still be in there, but we can’t say for sure). How to react to this? How can they? Their pain is real and hasn’t left, no matter what’s in front of them.
It's reasonable to ask what we could possibly do with a zombie movie that is actually interesting at this point (leaving aside whether they’re fun to watch) but grief, loss, and death will always be worth examining and will always be examined. And while we don’t get far enough down the road in this film to really explore the ideas fully, it’s quite effective at laying out these characters’ pain and expressing the reality of loss. The score (which won an award at the festival) is mesmerizing, the camera moves slowly, allowing us to feel each scene, and what we see is occasionally hypnotic.
As for those brains—the movie does eventually get to the point where it turns out, yes, these are the hungry kind of zombies, and I wish it hadn’t. Although that turn is quite late, it’s a turn that removes the film from what was making it special, and dumps it into a bin with all the other zombie movies, as we can’t really think of anything else when we’re presented with face-biting. It becomes all about what’s about to happen (zombie apocalypse) instead of the lingering difficulty of what has already happened. It’s not enough to kill the movie, which is just so good before that point, but it didn’t need to happen.
Friday, 1/26
Ponyboi
As we get more films telling stories about LGBTQIA+ characters, we’ll see more of those characters moving into genre pictures, which can only be a good thing. Movies about self-discovery and acceptance can be magnificent and are clearly important, but sometimes you just want a good, grimy crime thriller.
Here, impressively, we get both, as writer and star River Gallo incorporates elements of their own life growing up intersex, with a sleazy, dark, New Jersey crime story. Ponyboi works at a laundromat and is sleeping with the laundromat’s owner, Vinny, who is also the boyfriend of the laundromat’s pregnant manager, Angel, who is Ponyboi’s best friend. But Ponyboi is also a sex worker, mainly (though not entirely) for clients Vinny brings in to make more money while he tries to get his illegal drug business off the ground. This is all a lot easier to follow than it seems when I type it out like that. Ponyboi is, like Gallo, intersex, and, like Gallo, was surgically implanted with synthetic testicles as a child, which we learn in fever-dreamlike flashback. Vinny’s drugs are, let’s say, of questionable quality, and when one mobbed up client comes to visit Ponyboi and drops dead in the middle of sex after sampling Vinny’s wares, Ponyboi has only terrible options, and decides to pack up the huge bag of cash the mobster had with him, and go on the run.
As you imagine, Vinny isn’t happy, and neither is the dead mobster’s mobster brother, and while Ponyboi is now flush with (stolen) cash, they also need to find a new stock of hormones before they can leave town. This is a lot for one person to deal with! The movie’s director, Esteban Arango, shoots the film with a nice, neon, New Jersey energy—everything moves along tensely, and we’re very definitely in a specific place, with specific people (I saw one person describe this as “the most New Jersey movie ever,” and I couldn’t know, from here on my perch in the center of the country, but there is a duet of a Bruce Springsteen song early in the film, so this may well be true), exploring this very specific person’s story, while also being given a juicy thriller. It’s entirely true that Arango and Gallo overcomplicate the climax of the movie, there are simply too many different parts pulled together into one room, but by and large this succeeds as both a personal story and a good little piece of crime drama.
Good One
The more I sit with this, the more I think it’ll end up being one of the best movies to come out of Sundance this year. It’s deceptively simple—Sam is nearing the end of high school, and one weekend she and her father go off on a hiking and camping trip with her father’s longtime friend. They all know each other well, which we can tell both by the ease with which they talk to each other, and by the fact that they kind of snipe at each other for no good reason. And we just spend time with them as they hike through the gorgeous scenery of the Catskills, talking, remembering, telling stories, joking, and showing us who they are, as people. Sam’s father has remarried and has a small child, his friend is recently divorced and has strong divorced-man energy, and the way each person talks and behaves is so well observed by director/writer India Donaldson that we don’t just feel like we know these people, we do know these people. The rhythms of the film, with the moss on trees and the trickling water, the sounds of the land as our characters walk, they’ll remind people of Kelly Reichardt’s Old Joy (I’m far from the only person who will bring that movie up), if that movie were told from the perspective of a 17-year-old girl.
And then there’s a pretty unfortunate development, and I admit my own disappointment when it happened. I’d been having such a wonderful time with these characters that, in the moment, and for a bit after, I wished this simply hadn’t happened. But then, I realized Sam probably wished far more than it hadn’t happened. There’s no way I was more disappointed than she was. And more than that, the signs were there—I mentioned how well observed the movie is, if we’d been paying close attention, we’d have noticed a word choice here or there by Sam’s father that, upon reflection, makes it wildly apparent that what happens was always a possibility. I’m not sure our parents are all destined to disappoint us, but people will, and often without thinking much about it. This is a small story, but one many of us know. A small story, exceptionally told.
Between the Temples
Magnificently acted and written, atrociously shot and edited.
Thank goodness, the acting and writing wins.
A lot of this is thanks to the charm of the movie’s stars, Jason Schwartzman and Carol Kane, who are so delightful that even when they’re sad, or strange, we just want to bask in their glow. But writer Nathan Silver (who also directed, and I very much look forward to the next movie he writes, but less so to the next movie he directs) also tells a quirky, chaotic, sweet, warm story with such detail that the actors have plenty to work with.
Schwartzman (who is finally starting to look older, which suits him) is Ben, a cantor at a synagogue who’s recently returned to that role after quite some time off (we learn why he’s been away, eventually, and it feels like people are less sympathetic than they should be). He teaches the bar/bat mitzvah class, and one day his former elementary school music teacher, Carla (Kane), shows up, deciding she needs to have the bat mitzvah she never had. The two begin to connect—they’re both odd people, but also both searching, and each sees something in the other. This confuses most everyone around them, as Carla’s son thinks the whole situation is quite bizarre, and Ben’s family and rabbi are busy trying to set him up with women. It’s all very, very specifically Jewish in detail, though we all know the feelings involved. And it’s quite funny, especially given the charisma of the movie’s leads.
Why, then, is so much shot in extreme closeup with a handheld camera, and cut together like it was done by a toddler mashing the razor tool in the digital editing program? I couldn’t say. It adds to the chaos, certainly, but it’s really easy to imagine this movie shot a little more conventionally and working even better. There are times the visual approach throws off the movie’s rhythm and some bits don’t hit quite like they ought to, and other times it’s just all too distracting to feel entirely involved. Maybe Silver was trying something that didn’t end up working, maybe it was just a badly conceived approach, but it’s intrusive and unnecessary. But we can all be thankful it doesn’t torpedo the film. It might make it less than it could have been, but what it is is still pretty nice.
Thursday, 1/25
A Real Pain
What a difference two years makes.
Jesse Eisenberg premiered his directorial debut, When You Finish Saving the World, at Sundance in 2022, resulting in a wet thud. It was… not good. I complained at the time that nothing in the movie felt earned, the characters spoke and acted only in ways Eisenberg wanted them to, without feeling like real people, and eventually the director wanted some kind of emotional impact without putting in the work to get us there.
But here we are, with Eisenberg’s second movie as a director, and everything that was missing from that first film is here now, and more than that, those things are the strengths of this new one. Whatever reexamining Eisenberg did of his work over the last two years worked.
He stars in this one alongside Kieran Culkin, with the two playing cousins who grew up together but who’ve become less close recently, primarily because of life. Eisenberg is David, who’s married, has a kid, lives in New York City, and works a lot, which has given him less time to see Culkin’s Benji, who is and does none of those things, and lives a few hours away in Binghamton. Their grandmother recently died, and so the two have decided to take a trip together to her former home in Poland, to pay respects to where she was born and to absorb her story of surviving the Holocaust by going with a tour group to various Jewish sites in the area.
What we get is a kind of lovely, quite messy, funny, sad, affirming film about a lot of things, including how we regard others’ pain, whether that’s pain on the apocalyptic scale of the Holocaust, or the pain of a complicated person trying to find his way. Culkin’s Benji is many things, wrapped up in one package: he’s abrasive but confusingly charming, he’s deeply empathetic but casually callous (at one point, he sees one of the women on his tour walking alone, and he feels [correctly] that she’s in need of some human connection, and he walks up to her and says, “hey, why are you walking alone, are you some kind of f***ing loser?”), he’s irreverent and reverent, depending on the situation. Culkin plays him masterfully, he’s magnetic even as we’re not sure we’d want to spend real time with him, and his contradictions feel internally consistent, even if we’re never quite sure which way he’s going to go. A Real Pain is a real gem, and a huge step up for Eisenberg as a director.
Brief History of a Family
This is the second movie I’ve seen so far at the festival that’s able to take our preexisting experience with movies and use our expectations to tell a much sadder story than we think we’re getting (the first was Kidnapping Inc., and I think this approach is far more intentional in this film than it was in that one). With so many stories taking twists and turns, and with seemingly everyone in movies having secret motives, we’re ready to be suspicious about everyone and everything, and director Jianjie Lin exploits that to keep us always off balance while telling a painful human story without us entirely realizing that’s what he’s doing.
In China, Yan Shuo and Tu Wei are teenage students, and one day Tu Wei hits Yan Shuo (accidentally) with a basketball, sending both boys to the nurse, after which Tu Wei invites Yan Shuo over to play video games. Yan Shuo stays for dinner, and then comes over again another day, and begins to win favor with Tu Wei’s parents, all while telling terrible stories of a dead mother and an abusive father, and we, the suspicious audience, start to wonder what’s actually going on here. As Yan Shuo becomes more and more a part of the small family, and as Tu Wei begins to get more and more irritated about this, the director continually primes us to keep suspecting—after Yan Shuo helps make dinner, Tu Wei starts choking. Did the boy do something to the food? Tragedy befalls Yan Shuo’s father. Was the boy actually responsible for something horrible? We’re ready, we’ve seen this kind of thing before.
But maybe we haven’t. What unfolds is a story of a family in a country undergoing major transition, leaving behind its one child policy and moving into a new era of global influence and perception, while the family tries to negotiate all of these changes. By the end, when we realize the story we’re being told is maybe not the story we thought we were seeing, we feel blindsided in an unexpected way, and the sad complexity of the situation comes to the forefront. Jianjie Lin’s film is occasionally more overstylized than it needs to be, but he plays magnificently with our expectations. He knows what he’s doing.
Layla
What a poorly considered final minute of this film.
I was all ready to declare this to be a decent-enough, relatively sweet, nicely messy portrait of people trying to form their own identities, when a stylistic choice at the very, very end left a bad taste in my mouth, making the film feel cheap, unsure of itself, and unsure of its audience. Ah well. A good reminder to keep running all the way through the tape.
But before that: Layla is a drag queen in London who meets a much more buttoned-down gay man, and the two strike up a relationship. This appears to be a new experience for Layla, who maybe hasn’t had something quite so steady before, and this new man seems to be into them, and says all the right things about loving their boldness and willingness to put themselves out there, but it’s apparent the man is also never entirely as comfortable as he says he is. There’s push and pull, and ghosting and living together, as the couple tries to negotiate their way through their lives together, and their lives in the world outside their apartments.
It's all maybe a little muddled, but director Amrou Al-Kadhi is certainly well intentioned, and as we neared the film’s end, it was clear how much Layla and their beau were compartmentalizing and hiding aspects of themselves, and how exhausting that must be for everyone involved, and I liked the examination of just how many different parts people have all rolled up together that make them who they are, and the difficulty of covering up and exposing those different parts depending on the situation.
But throughout, I wished somehow it all had a little more energy, and part of that is the way in which the director shoots the scenes of Layla’s drag performances—they never quite feel like they pop like they ought to, with Al-Kadhi keeping the camera too close to Layla and cutting too many times. We never really get into a good, pulsing rhythm because we’re never really allowed just to see the performances take off. Whether Al-Kadhi was overthinking it or just not confident in letting the drag performances breathe, I couldn’t say, but they, and the film, never quite elevate the way they should. And when we get to the end, in what should be a joyous scene, the director insists on overlaying brief flashbacks to the rest of the film, either not trusting us to remember, or incorrectly assuming this would have a bigger emotional impact. It seems like a small thing, what a filmmaker does with the few seconds before the credits roll, but it’s drastically important, and that misstep highlights the movie’s flaws in an unfortunate way.
Wednesday, 1/24
Kidnapping Inc.
Back in college, for a time I was the smallest class on campus (yes, me, one person) as I was taking a few semesters of Haitian creole. I loved it, and I still deeply value the experience, and as a result, I feel safe in saying I know and care more about Haiti than your average white middle-aged American (I am far, far, far, far from an expert, but neither is your average American). And so this was an interesting feeling, watching a movie that generally takes the twists and turns you might expect from something like this, but knowing a lot of those twists and turns aren’t only comedy-thriller cliches, but are also reflective of some level of the difficult reality in Haiti.
We open with two guys and the trunk of a car—well, three guys if you count the one in the trunk of the car. Doc and Zoe have kidnapped a man who we learn is the son of a senator on the cusp of winning the country’s presidential election, and they’ve stopped in a secluded area to fix a tire. They’re all set to take their victim to their boss, when Zoe accidentally kills the trunk man. (Well, maybe.) This sets us off on the wild ride we might figure we’re going to take in this kind of movie, as Doc and Zoe try to figure out how they’re going to explain to their boss that their prize kidnapping victim isn’t going to be worth the $300,000 they were all expecting now that he’s (maybe) dead, and the two make all sorts of terrible decisions along the way. In fact, essentially everyone in the movie makes terrible decisions throughout. Doc, for his part, seems far more together than Zoe, and he’s intended for this to be his last job. He just has to get through it first. (Two guys getting themselves into trouble is a time-honored tradition in storytelling, and that's certainly true in Haitian folklore.)
There’s corruption all the way up and down the line as we learn who’s behind the kidnapping (and who’s behind the person behind it), and truth be told, you can probably already guess who’s pulling the strings. As I said, these are things we’ve come to expect from this sort of movie. But I’m not sure this one makes it explicit enough to non-Haitian audiences that this level of corruption is also a part of reality for Haitians right now (perhaps not this cartoonish, but still), it’s not just a movie plot. Then again, maybe it’s not director Bruno Mourral’s job to spoon-feed us every bit of what’s happening. The film does spend far too much time on the zanier aspects (a long, long stretch with a pregnant woman and her milquetoast husband is, well, long), but as it all comes together toward the end, I felt a pit in my stomach that only continued to grow, and by the time the credits rolled, I found the whole thing to be terribly sad.
(Another note: we wouldn’t know this from watching the movie, but a statement from Mourral in the press kit describes both how his father was murdered in Haiti in 2005, and also how members of his production team were, themselves, kidnapped and taken hostage by Haitian gangs during the filming of the movie.)
Never Look Away
We can't know about the horrors of the world unless someone documents them, but the people who are willing to do that are so far out of my conception of the world that I've always had to regard them with a bewildered (though grateful) fascination. We owe an enormous, probably unpayable debt to those journalists who will put themselves right in the middle of what may well be the means of their own deaths.
They're people I'll never personally understand, and it appears Margaret Moth was so much so that she was someone even other war journalists had trouble understanding. Which is to say, she was so dedicated to the work, to its importance, and to the people involved, that even those doing the same thing marveled at her. Moth was a camerawoman for decades in war zones (she died in 2010 from colon cancer), and this documentary about her from director Lucy Lawless (that Lucy Lawless!) tells her story through a ton of Moth's own footage and interviews with people who knew and loved her. And while I can't say I came away with a complete understanding of her (how could I?), we do get a dedicated, engrossing portrait of a woman who simply overwhelmed the world around her.
For those not familiar with Moth's story (I wasn't), I won't spoil the events of her life here, to the extent we even know them, but Lawless does a fantastic job moving the film along as she takes us through Moth's days just getting started in the business, through her most harrowing times, and to the end, as told to us by her colleagues and her lovers, all people who appreciated the woman's complexity and drive, even if it baffled them, too. The footage Lawless uses that was shot by Moth herself is (unsurprisingly) tense and gripping, showing devastation in Bosnia and Iraq, but not just showing us bombed-out buildings— Moth was deeply interested in the people affected by all of this misery, and she made incredible efforts to get their faces on camera, to show the people experiencing what can often otherwise be turned into action-movie scenes. There are other people who do what Margaret Moth did, and without a doubt they have their own stories, but it's clear that Moth was a singular person, unlike any other, even among the people who take the same risks she did. This is gripping, heartfelt, and a little bit astonishing.
Sebastian
Frustration, primarily, is what I felt watching Sebastian, a movie that gives itself plenty of opportunities to follow a road to somewhere interesting, but refuses to go very far down any of those paths. At some point, the road not travelled can't be every road.
Max is a writer in his mid-20s who's also a sex worker, using a website to connect with usually older men who pay him for sex— he seems quite good at both jobs, though he seems far less comfortable (and maybe relatively new?) with the sex work, even if that's what helps him pay the bills while he does freelance work for a journal. But he's also published a set of short stories to some acclaim, and he's working on a novel that's already got a publisher, the novel being about a young sex worker, drawn from his own experience, even though he tells everyone he's just interviewed people to get the information.
I remember reading Dave Eggers's A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, and how he initially says we can more or less skip the section of the book when he's in his 20s if we want to, telling us something about how people that age generally aren't that interesting anyway. It's meant to be self-deprecating, though on some level it's cruelly dismissive, and also quite accurate. I thought of this watching Max go through his days, and how no matter the passion of the sex, or the excitement of his writing career (he's building up to a big interview with Bret Easton Ellis, which, ok, I guess so), nothing he was doing was all that intriguing. And this was only made more apparent when he meets an older man with whom he finds some kind of real connection, and it was clear how much more I wanted to know that man's story, because we could see he'd lived a life, he had a story to tell. And that was the only time the movie felt like it started to sing.
Max can quite obviously tell this is the more interesting story, too, because he begins to incorporate his relationship with this man into his novel, which his publisher balks at, because it's pretty apparent they just want the juicier stuff. And so then Max has to make a decision about where he wants his book and his life to go, and whether one has to reflect the other, and the movie opens up a fantastic opportunity to examine this tension between life and art and what takes control, an opportunity it then passes up. Just as it passed up any real chance to take the lives of sex workers seriously, or the lives of frustrated writers seriously, or any number of other possible deeper stories. And we sort of just end up somewhere, wondering why we took the time in the first place.
