Hard Truths
Six years ago, Mike Leigh produced his first war film, Peterloo, in which domestic unrest in 1819 led British troops to slaughter protesting civilians. At first glance, Hard Truths couldn’t be any more different. It’s an almost surgical dissection of familial misery, unfolding in environments as antiseptic as Peterloo’s were mud-caked and grimy. But like Peterloo, Hard Truths is about a crisis in society and in democracy, the shrinking of the free subject who can insist on their personhood as a matter of course. In the contemporary world of Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) and her family, one braces oneself for daily assaults on one’s dignity, some of which never actually come. Each of us is so relentlessly dehumanized by a reductive, transactional world-system that, given the choice, we’d rather be the aggressor than the victim.
Pansy is a deeply unpleasant person, so much so that at times it beggars belief. The first half of Hard Truths is so extravagantly vitriolic that it keeps the viewer perplexed as to the film’s motives. Is this comedy or satire? Is Pansy a sort of Larry David figure, taking a wrecking ball to the niceties that allow society to operate? Pansy is a Black British “Karen,” on the warpath against slights sometimes real but mostly imagined. She begins the film by chewing out her aimless teenage son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett) for leaving the peanut butter out or not keeping his room clean. She bitches at her husband Curtley (David Webber) for inquiring about dinner or being generally thoughtless. But she also verbally assaults random shopkeepers or people in parking lots, accusing them of being patronizing, stupid, benignly or smugly racist. Under the pretense of maintaining her pride in a difficult world, Pansy is spiteful and hair-triggered, always scrapping for a fight.
By contrast, Leigh shows us Pansy’s younger sister Chantelle (Michele Austin) and her two daughters, joking around and generally enjoying life, despite its unavoidable annoyances. One of the only moments of respite for Pansy is when she visits Chantelle to get her hair done. Leigh clearly understands the cultural and personal significance of the beauty shop for Black women, as a site of community and a space apart from the dominant assumptions of white privilege. But even in these moments, Pansy is fitful and irritated, secretly resentful toward Chantelle’s joie de vivre. As we eventually learn, the younger woman’s happiness may have come at the expense of her big sister, who took the brunt of their late mother’s criticism and had to care for Chantelle when Pansy herself was only 14.
Gradually, almost imperceptibly, Hard Truths evolves into a heartbreaking x-ray of a woman who has always felt she had to settle for less, to struggle more, and steel herself against nonstop assaults on her humanity. Things come to a head during a family get-together for Mothers Day, when Pansy can no longer proactively lash out at the world. She refuses to eat, and Chantelle also skips lunch in solidarity with her emotionally overcome sister. Curtley, meanwhile, stuffs his face and, in one seemingly insignificant moment, clarifies just how painfully lacking their marriage has always been. (By contrast, Moses surprises Pansy with a bouquet of flowers, a small gesture that speaks volumes to Pansy.) Spite having turned to devastation, Pansy crumbles, and is forced to finally recognize that if she fails to take action against her own misery, she’ll have no one to blame but herself.
Leigh, along with his ace D.P. Dick Pope, creates a strikingly antiseptic visual environment for this highly attenuated melodrama. With its white middle-class interiors, IKEA furnishings, and Pottery Barn wall decor, Hard Truths is like a gallery space showcasing a broken family collapsing in on itself like a dying star. In many respects, this is an exemplary “late film” from an unparalleled director, someone who is not only in command of his craft, but fully trusts his creative instincts. There has been some speculation as to why Hard Truths world premiered in Toronto. Insiders have all but confirmed that the film was rejected by Venice. If we think about the politics of contemporary art institutions, there are a few things one might conjecture about this situation.
First, Hard Truths is Leigh’s first film with an all-Black cast. There are undoubtedly those who feel Leigh is not equipped or even authorized to tell this story, in much the same way many festivals rejected the Dardennes’ Young Ahmed. Some may take issue with these characters’ delivery of Leigh’s carefully sculpted verbal rancor, and certainly Hard Truths offers breaks in verisimilitude for those who choose to look for them. But the main issue might be a lot more banal than all that. Festival programmers, like any other group of viewers, tend to make judgments about films based on their first 15 or 20 minutes, and even as they watch the rest of the film, those initial impressions can be difficult to shake. Taken at face value, Hard Truths’ opening scenes could seem as if Pansy’s venom is endorsed by Leigh, the film serving as a post-Naked rant by an angry old man but placed in the mouth of one of our greatest actresses. This would be unspeakably indulgent, were it not for the fact that Hard Truths is in fact doing the exact opposite of this. Mike Leigh, one of cinema’s last great humanists, has chosen to remind us that bitterness consumes everything, and that it is impossible to love others until you find the strength to heal. — MICHAEL SICINSKI
Credit: TIFF
The End
One of the more indelible sequences in Joshua Oppenheimer’s breakthrough documentary, The Act of Killing, features one of its subjects, the Indonesian paramilitary thug Anwar Congo, starring in a music video set to “Born Free.” During the brief scene, the cheerful, elderly man, having long since skated on the murders of allegedly a thousand Communist sympathizers, is valorized through song, and the horror for the viewer is as much in his complete lack of remorse — the video features re-enactors dressed as prisoners lifting garrotes from their necks — as it is the realization that this person would never face justice for participating in a genocide. For his narrative debut, The End, Oppenheimer appears to have taken considerable inspiration from this musical number and the feelings it inspired in those who watched it, transposing the dramatic device onto the fictional head of an energy company and his family who, having hastened a global ecological disaster that’s killed off most of the planet, live out the rest of their days in isolation and luxury in a fortified vault-cum-residence built into the side of a mountain. Still waited on by a live-in staff and surrounded by the trappings of culture and comfort, these people will occasionally pause their daily routines, turn their heads slightly skyward and break into song and dance to give voice to their inner yearnings and desires, which unsurprisingly fail to consider the billions dead or dying outside their doors. It’s an attention-grabbing conceit, no doubt, but one arguably better-suited to 2 minutes of screen time than 150.
We meet the unnamed family (all the actors are credited simply by their function in the group dynamic) a couple decades into bunker life and entirely adjusted to being the last vestiges of civilization — and, very likely, humanity itself. The youngest member of the family, a 20-something son (George MacKay, with all the wide-eyed zeal of someone homeschooled by a climate change denialist who’s also never met another person his own age), has lived his entire life in seclusion. In between chores, swimming laps in a private pool, and training exercises, he helps his former oil tycoon dad (Michael Shannon) write his rose-tinted memoir despite no one being alive to read it. Meanwhile, mom (Tilda Swinton) fusses over wall placement for her collection of classical art and crafting paper flowers with her best friend (Bronagh Gallagher, seemingly allowed a spot in the “ark” because she was a Michelin star chef as much as her role as an emotional support human). There is also a butler and doctor milling about, however we learn that when society collapsed and the family locked themselves inside to weather the end times, they ruthlessly excluded relatives, friends, and business associates (to say nothing of the untold masses desperate to survive the atmosphere being set aflame) at the expense of keeping themselves safe and comfortable. And yes, like a bunch of Disney heroines, the family will occasionally ponder the lives they once lived — or in the case of MacKay’s character, never actually experienced — and belt out original songs that qualify as the closest any of these people have ever come to examining their extraordinary good fortune.
It’s a life of stasis and habit that, for all the concern of outside threats, is never actually intruded upon. That is until, without explanation, a young woman (Moses Ingram) penetrates their security measures and stumbles into the mountain lair — which, from a production design standpoint, resembles the rebel base on Hoth — introducing a new variable and puncturing the carefully maintained bubble of ignorance to the suffering of the outside world. With opinions initially split on what to do with her — mom is adamantly opposed to letting her stay, desperately clinging to the fig leaf that their previous callousness was for the “good of the family,” while dad belatedly realizes that excluding new blood from their contingency plan has condemned them to a future without heirs — the young woman is allowed to remain in their care on a probationary basis. Despite her enthusiasm to fit in and follow the “house rules,” she can’t help but reflect on the harrowing circumstances of her upbringing in a barren wasteland, the family she was forced to abandon, and the desire to connect her sense of loss to that of her new hosts, which initially is treated with studied indifference and eventually withering — by WASP standards, anyway — reprimands (“careful, you can easily cross a line”).
The central tension of The End is when the learned compartmentalization will finally give way and whether enough cracks will emerge for these people to finally confront the evil they’ve done (or at least directly benefited from). To its credit, the film gets awfully far on audaciousness alone, with even the decision to cast actors without regard for their pipes a sly acknowledgement of the characters’ privilege (after all, they didn’t survive the apocalypse because they were the most talented singers; they sing because there’s no one else left to). The songs themselves aren’t especially memorable — there’s nary an earworm in the bunch — but they do have the appropriate shape of myopic, vaguely stirring ballads, each one more tone deaf (in a couple different senses) than the last. And whether it’s Swinton looking for someone to blame for chipped paintings while the world burns outside, Shannon comforting himself over the Nigerian orphanages he built to care for all the children of workers who died in industrial accidents at one of his job sites, or MacKay’s stunted youthful defiance arriving at the natural endpoint of wanting to run away (“to where?” one is inclined to ask), there’s no shortage of soft underbelly to attack. But the metaphor never evolves over an enervating two and a half hours, with the film never deviating from askance detachment; for all the orchestra swells and choreographed dancing, The End remains as clinical as an ant farm. Oppenheimer’s approach is so dependent on these characters remaining uninterrogated and ultimately unfazed by their monstrous behavior that it fosters stagnation. There’s something principled in eschewing cheap epiphanies and out-of-character transformations, but the self-delusion is so steadfast, the immunization from empathy so unwavering, that you can watch any 20 minutes of the film at random and get the entire gist of what it’s going for. At one point late in the film the characters gather to celebrate the New Year, and it almost feels like a perverse joke on the audience: here are the fireworks that have been promised, although almost certainly not the ones you had in mind. — ANDREW DIGNAN
By the Stream
In “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema,” André Bazin famously argued that depth-of-field marked a dialectical leap forward in the development of the artform. His argument involved two principal points. On the one hand, there was a “psychological” point: the use of depth of field, as in the films of Welles and Wyler, created a relationship between the viewer and the image, which was purportedly closer to “reality.” Unlike the “analytical editing” of a prior era, in which isolated fragments of a scene are ordered for the viewer, the “meaning” of a depth-of-field shot in Citizen Kane (1941), say, depends in part on the viewer’s active distribution of attention. On the other hand, there was also a “metaphysical” point: depth of field at least potentially reintroduces “ambiguity” into the structure of the image, whose significance can no longer be marked out beforehand… — LAWRENCE GARCIA [Read the full previously published review.]
Credit: TIFF
The Substance
Botox is everywhere, and Ozempic will follow. To voluntarily place a needle in one’s skin is no longer an image of deviancy, but one of routine self-improvement. And while pharmaceutical companies have been known to sell their fountains of youth with refillable snake oil, the products on the market today are actually pretty good. So, we’ve all become William Gibson’s amateur biohackers: some casually use fitness apps on their phones, others meticulously measure out supplement “stacks” to completely re-engineer their insides. But a few, those whose entire sense of self is latched onto the signifiers of youth, die a social death as they age — who would blame them for taking advantage of these new substances?
One of these few is The Substance’s Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), a once successful actress whose mere age (50-something) has relegated her to leading a wooden televised workout program beamed in presumably from the 1980s. Meanwhile, her boss, Harvey (Dennis Quaid, whose cartoon laugh and penchant for vitriol sets the tone for much of the film), unwittingly confirms all of Elisabeth’s worst fears about her career thanks to loudly complaining about her on the phone. By chance, a physician notices her panic and depression and surreptitiously offers her an invitation to a treatment called the Substance. The method to acquire the Substance — call this number, get this address, get a number — contains both the red flags of a bad drug deal and the exciting and mysterious exclusivity of an underground club or secret society. It’s packaged with the sort of minimalistic logo and design associated with pharmaceutical startups and contains plenty of instructions and very stringent rules. After dosing herself with what looks like flat Mountain Dew, she falls to the floor, her back slowly opening like a chrysalis to reveal the 20-something Sue (Margaret Qualley) inside her. Every other week, Elisabeth is and must be Sue — a good enough deal until Sue’s meteoric rise in popularity tempts Elisabeth into staying in the young body for longer than she’s welcome. It turns out to be a bad idea.
The film’s setup is itself a bevy of references — All About Eve, Sunset Boulevard, Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde — but none are touched upon as much as The Picture of Dorian Gray. Just as Dorian’s portrait becomes more sinister in relation to the young man’s nasty sins, Elisabeth’s body suffers from stealing time for Sue. A mild necrosis becomes severe necrosis, half of her face withers into old age, and, with enough time stolen, all of her features become comically monstrous, like the ass-creature from Society (1989) complete with the gross-out humor of a Garbage Pail Kid. And in case the Wilde reference isn’t literal enough, an actual gigantic portrait of Elisabeth that is visible in nearly every shot of her gaudy LA apartment is replaced with a portrait of Sue during the Sue weeks. And, by God, if that portrait isn’t in frame, a gigantic billboard that changes with Sue’s rise will hover outside her window. Given the over-the-top line readings from every ancillary character, this reference is knowingly, cheekily obvious, which has about as much charm as the purposeful camp, which this movie also is.
Among the other assertive references are two distinct visual styles with little-to-no middle ground. The first frames a single character at the dead center, usually in a hallway, usually from a distance, and usually with a wide-angle lens; which, combined with the bathroom set lifted from The Shining and 2001’s omnipresent white tile, as well as the use of “Also Sprach Zarathustra” and a literal Stargate Sequence, could make The Substance the first instance of Kubricksploitation. The second style is a jarring opposite: extreme close-ups are cut rhythmically to inserts of disgusting food, disgusting chewing, disgusting injections, and all the great and disgusting work of the props and effects teams. When the sound design here is unsettling, these scenes are dead ringers for outtakes of Requiem for a Dream, but an occasional noise might resemble something from the foley department of comedy radio and throw off any established tone. Both horror and comedy are serviced by the element of surprise, but for most of The Substance the setups often overshadow the punchlines.
Thankfully, sometimes the whiplash works. Moore’s naturalistic acting, driven by a constant mix of visible fear and anxiety, is made more disturbing when she’s pitted against the manic cartoon chauvinism of Quaid. While this juxtaposition is meant to play with dramatic irony and humor, Elisabeth cannot see this interaction from an audience’s perspective; that every minor character also hams up their lines hints that Elisabeth is trapped in a happy little prison called L.A.
Ultimately, the use of irony and camp aesthetics belie the tragic heart of the film. Unlike Dorian Gray, Elisabeth has committed no evil acts; instead, her deterioration came from breaking the rules in moments of desperation, much like a drug addict avoiding a doctor’s warning. There’s a brilliant nebulosity in the appropriately-named Substance itself. It could be read as “drugs,” those bad things you get addicted to and die — here, Sue is a safe week’s worth of high and anything more constitutes abuse, which further breaks the body, which calls for a more intense and longer-lasting high. While the repeated usage at the end makes that reading plausible, surely it must relate to Elisabeth’s anxiety over aging. To stress this, director Coralie Fargeat goes to great lengths to visually emphasize the difference between Elisabeth and Sue’s asses; there’s even a full sequence that plays like a commercial for Sue’s ass. As Sue, she wins an audition to be crowned the new Elisabeth Sparkle and immediately incorporates a level of twerking that Elisabeth would shy away from. Here, the Substance can be the motley of products — Botox, Ozempic, supplements, some sort of medicinal BBL — that keeps one feeling not just young but confident. But this reduces Elisabeth’s punishment to a mere fable about getting bad work done.
Perhaps the Substance touches upon what Mark Grief identified in his “Against Exercise.” It’s a culture of constant regulation led by a bureaucracy of biometrics; it’s the dream of Elizabeth Holmes’ blood tests; it’s the project of Bryan Johnson, who went viral from claims to have made his body younger through the low price of removing everything one might call “life” from his schedule in favor of constant health assessments. It will turn you into a monster. And then, that the ambiguous Substance is placed at the center of a movie that deliberately avoids subtext offers a final case of whiplash. It’s as frustrating as it is interesting, as fun as it is trite, and it’s ultimately not that gross. But perhaps it’s best we all learn to accept some blemishes in life. — ZACH LEWIS
The Damned
Across five feature films to date, most of which exist within a liminal space located between fiction and documentary narrative, demarcated with blurred lines, Roberto Minervini has engendered a number of comparisons. Sean Baker comes to mind if one is to look primarily at the subjects and subject matter that seem to preoccupy the Italian director’s mind, while Carlos Reygadas feels very much alive in Minervini’s ability to capture a place and a people divorced from our notions of modern living. The director’s latest, The Damned, which concerns a group of volunteer Union soldiers tasked during the Civil War with a patrol post in the western territories, foregoes the director’s usual mode of documenting off-kilter modernity and so at first glance offers something of a superficial pivot from the considerations that permeate his previous work… — LUKE GORHAM [Read the full previously published review.]
Credit: TIFF
Measures for a Funeral
The decade-long collaboration between Sofia Bohdanowicz and Deragh Campbell has produced a fascinating cycle of films, including features and shorts, that goes some way in shaping a quasi-personal archive of Bohdanowicz’s life and family history. Most of the films stage encounters between Campbell’s recurring character, Audrey Benac, a Bohdanowicz alter-ego, with art, history, and archives in order to trace emotionally resonant links between the past and the present. Sometimes Bohdanowicz’s own family members appear in the films, extending her self-reflexive tendencies even further. Sometimes these family members are only memories, traces of lives on pages, in images or sounds. Even more abstractly, like in the short Point and Line to Plane, the memory of a deceased loved one seems to only appear symbolically, even supernaturally.
Most of these films are of modest scale and scope, allied to modest ambitions; the features rarely crack 70 minutes, during which the memories of a loved one, the observation of a stranger, or the interaction with an old musical recording are captured on fuzzy celluloid, on handheld cameras, or in soft interiors. But despite their modest dimensions, each film has an overwhelming source of emotion, from which, over the years, Bohdanowicz and Campbell have learned to tap with ever more subtle touches.
Measures for a Funeral, the latest collaboration between director and performer, takes on entirely new scope and ambition. Just looking at the runtime is enough to know the pair is entering uncharted territory. Across this new epic scale, Bohdanowicz loses nothing of, and in fact deepens, her fusion of the personal with the imagined to tell the story of a forgotten artist, the Canadian violinist Kathleen Parlow, who was once Bohdanowicz’s grandfather’s instructor. What results is perhaps Bohdanowicz’s most transparently self-reflexive film, one that aims a direct, unambiguous gaze at the past, and even the supernatural.
The version of Audrey Benac we follow in Measures is researching an as-yet-unformed Ph.D. thesis about the underknown Parlow. Facing a time and funding crunch, Audrey is driven, as described by a friend she stays with in London, by an obsessive blindness. But rather than being obsessed with her thesis to the point of blindness, or forgetfulness, to other aspects of her life, the mode of Audrey’s blindness is obsessive, and the quality of the blindness avoidant rather than forgetful. She is so obsessed with cutting off her crumbling personal life from view because anything less than obsession would force her to confront it. In this case, her thesis is merely the object toward which she has directed her desperate attention.
Competing for Audrey’s attention is the looming presence of her ill mother, onto whom she dumps her bitterness over a scuppered career as a professional violinist in favor of motherhood. Audrey combats this guilt that isn’t hers by following Parlow’s life and career across the globe. Audrey confronts familiar thematic territory along the way: the neglected female artist, the assumed tradeoffs between work and family that women must face at some point in their lives among them. Campbell, to her credit, makes each discovery in relation to these questions feel like the very first. Her presence is singular, as we’ve come to expect in recent years across such films as Anne at 13,000 ft, Matt and Mara, and Family Portrait. An actor of immense emotional control, her strength, as seen in the three titles just mentioned, is in conveying inner turmoil through the most subtle physicalities. In Measures, like in many of her roles, she is tasked with tip-toeing the fine line between stoicism and disarray, which she makes apparent, ironically, through her ability to seemingly not make any expression at all. The great thrill of Measures is located in the moments she lets go of that control. Whether listening to a 1909 recording of Parlow on a wax cylinder in a London archive, nearly smashing her priceless 300-year-old violin, or tearfully watching the long-overdue Toronto performance of “Opus 28,” written for her by Johan Halverson, Campbell feels like an actor transformed.
Bohdanowicz’s films often eschew traditional narrative and emotional expression for something that verges on the experimental. A further tendency toward shooting on celluloid lends them an artifactual quality. As explorations into the past, they themselves resemble something plucked from an archive, like Parlow, ripe for rediscovery. In Measures, Bohdanowicz crafts something with a slightly more familiar shape, both narratively and visually. The digital wide-screen photography has a thoughtful, sometimes mannered quality that, rather than feeling lifeless, has a different kind of tactility you don’t find in her light and airy earlier works. This isn’t to say her previous films are lacking substance, but they operate in an entirely different mode to Measures, which is what makes this new film feel so exciting. It’s lost nothing of the mystery that sets her apart as one of the most thoughtful and emotionally intelligent filmmakers currently working, but gains a subtle accessibility that pays off immediately, and still rewards repeat viewings. If, like Audrey argues to a teacher at the Oslo Conservatory of Music, there is value in a minor work, the role of Measures as something seemingly more “major” is evidence of Bohdanowicz’s power in any mode she chooses. — CHRIS CASSINGHAM
Universal Language
Universal Language opens on a static wide shot outside a French language school in snowy Winnipeg. We see the teacher grumpily trudge in late. Once inside, he proceeds to take out his anger on the young Persian students, telling them candidly they won’t ever amount to anything. This scene directly recalls Kiarostami’s Where Is the Friend’s House?, but also draws to mind the more recent, similarly snowbound About Dry Grasses, in which teacher Samet (Deniz Celiloğlu) angrily tells his students they’ll never be anything but sheep farmers. This opening establishes the film’s playful tone, in which the students are less harmed by the rant and more puzzled and perhaps even concerned for the mental state of their kooky teacher. It also slyly sets up several threads that will intersect throughout the rest of the film, including one involving a glasses-stealing prized turkey… — CALEB HAMMOND [Read the full previously published review.]
Credit: TIFF
The Last Showgirl
Gia Coppola’s (Palo Alto) The Last Showgirl announces its intentions and approach from its first frame. We open on a tight shot of the film’s star, Pamela Anderson, visibly nervous and stumbling over her words as she engages with an impatient man offscreen who holds her professional life in his hands. The harsh spotlight (literally and figuratively) and absence of makeup emphasizes the creases in her face and dry lips. She’s only 57, but we immediately understand those have been hard years of too many late nights and harmful extracurricular activities. The meta-commentary is so on the surface that it practically becomes the text itself: Anderson the actress and sex symbol has similarly arrived at an age where her value has been reduced to a number, and the same men who would have placed her on a pedestal in decades past callously dismiss her as a non-person. They no longer even need to smile when they do it.
As the title implies, The Last Showgirl, is an elegy for both an artform (in the most generous sense) as well as for the sort of woman who defines herself almost exclusively by her good looks; never having the inclination or opportunity to evolve as a worldly person. Somebody who found considerable success being objectified at a young age but now the music has stopped, the lights have been turned on and she continues to dance unaware that people are starting to stare. It’s a maddeningly relatable story with innate pathos, particularly as we’re regularly reminded that male contemporaries face no such scrutiny or fear of replacement by someone less seasoned waiting in the wings. Yet in Coppola’s telling, and in Anderson’s performance, every move is obvious, every feeling is telegraphed. The film is an incomplete sketch, leaning on generalities, inferences, and Vegas iconography. In striving for something universal, The Last Showgirl undershoots the target and lands on a scenario that registers as under-conceived. It concludes itself before it starts doing the real work.
Anderson plays Shelly, a dancer at the flailing Las Vegas topless show Le Razzle Dazzle. Shelly’s been with the show since the ‘80s (they’re still using nearly 40-year old photos of her for the publicity materials), but like many of the old casino mainstays, the revue has fallen onto hard times and is forced to share the room for half the week with the “burlesque circus” Hedonist’s Paradise, a “tits and ass” show that offers up the same nudity only without that rhinestone-adorned costumes or patina of Parisian class. Despite her decades working on the Vegas Strip, Shelly’s never developed a protective outer skin. Her heart is easily broken and she carries herself like a frazzled novice, dependent on assistance from younger dancers Jodie (Kiernan Shipka) and Marianne (Brenda Song) to help her with her quick changes. The crowds are thin and the pay is lousy — and gets worse by the day — but this is all she knows, and these women are her family, as is the production’s soft-spoken stage manager Eddie (a soulful Dave Bautista under a salt-and-pepper wig). When Shelly learns that the casino is pulling the plug on Le Razzle Dazzle, the 50-something dancer is confronted with a sickening uncertainty regarding the future. While her colleagues scramble and try to line up their next jobs, Shelly clings to the past: commiserating with a former showgirl friend who was put out to pasture (Jamie Lee Curtis) and has been forced to find work as a cocktail waitress, practicing ballet in her home (signifying, perhaps, a path not taken), walking the Strip at dusk to gaze out at the old Vegas casinos, and clumsily trying to reconnect with her estranged daughter, Hannah (Billie Lourd), who still harbors resentment at being abandoned at a young age and can barely conceal her embarrassment over her mother making a living off of her body.
The analog to The Last Showgirl and this Anderson performance is Mickey Rourke’s career-redefining performance in The Wrestler, which similarly encouraged the viewer to grapple (no pun intended) with an actor’s offscreen baggage and tabloid infamy, serving as an emotional shorthand for the character. Both films are preoccupied with the fragility of the flesh as well as the toll and intoxication of performing for an adoring crowd that is no replacement for a family or simply a balanced home life. But while The Wrestler was rich in lived-in, frequently sickening details of “the lifestyle,” The Last Showgirl’s approach is glancing verging on superficial. Coppola’s made the principled decision to not depict her exotic dancer characters in a state of undress, and while showing on-screen nudity is in no way a prerequisite, it does speak to how little time we spend on the job with Shelly and these characters (who, again, are topless dancers). We never actually see any of the Le Razzle Dazzle stage show until the final, dreamy moments of the film; a curious and possibly budget-dictated choice — the entire film was shot in only 18 days — which flies in the face of the amount of pride Shelly still takes in her work and how much she’s defined by it (the irony being Anderson, having starred in the Broadway revival of Chicago, is presumably more than capable of performing the choreography). The entire film is very “details TBD,” with the dynamic between Shelley and Hannah remaining vaguely acrimonious. Interpersonal conflicts flare up without warning and seemingly resolve themselves just as quickly. The extent to which Hannah’s resentment is justified or Shelly’s damnation is deserved is danced around by Kate Gersten’s (a Coppola relative by marriage) screenplay. All we can say for certain is that Shelly is very, very sorry and wishes everything would just work out for the best.
It would be comforting to report that Anderson’s performance is a revelation, elevating the inherent flimsiness of the characterization with the kind of emotional honesty that might paper over some of the script’s threadbare qualities, but that’s simply not true. The actress —who like many bombshells and pop stars of the ‘90s and ‘00s has been the beneficiary of an ongoing cultural reckoning, particularly for the way they were exploited by the media to sell magazines — does not carry herself like a Vegas lifer, nor someone torn apart by a lifetime of regrets. It’s instead entirely rooted in surface-level responses to plot stimuli and conflicts, with the actress unable to shed her Marilyn-esque, bubbly facade even in the character’s solitary moments. Is Shelly’s naivete a form of selfishness or defense mechanism insulating her from confronting the life she walked away from? How is it that someone who’s worked as a nudie dancer since the Reagan administration is so ill-prepared for the harsh realities of living in judgment of insensitive men? How did she never see this day coming? These are the questions the actress is incapable of broaching, let alone answering. Instead, the performance paints entirely in primary colors: happy, sad, afraid, fearful, etc.
Coppola yanks away anything which might serve as a security blanket for Anderson: building every scene around her performance, scrubbing the actress’ face of beauty products and seemingly finding every unflattering angle from which to film her from, all while surrounding her with an accomplished ensemble of supporting players. But never is the gulf so evident between what the role demands and what’s actually delivered as it is in Shelly’s scenes with Billy. Appearing opposite Anderson, Bautista, who likewise has had to combat prejudices about his viability as an actor based on his previous “low” profession, is incapable of delivering a line or gesture which doesn’t come across as genuine. There’s nary a moment of the performance which isn’t internalized, conflicted, or weighted by shame — over Billy’s past with Shelly and his guilt at so quickly landing on his feet while his friend struggles to find a liferaft — and a desire to be a standup guy in a profession that rewards schmucks. It is everything that Anderson’s performance needed to be; speaking volumes while saying little, and turning any preconceived notions of who this performer is against us. You can sense the physically imposing yet outwardly gentle actor trying to help along his costar, encouraging her vulnerability, perhaps recognizing some kindred connection that Anderson simply can’t draw upon. The Last Showgirl should have been the perfect union of subject and subject matter, something truly wrenching or revelatory, but there’s little here beyond the attention-grabbing hook and what amounts to stunt casting. A peak behind the curtain only works if there’s something substantive to locate back there, not simply more smoke and mirrors. — ANDREW DIGNAN
Mr. K
Crispin Glover has long been a fixture of eccentricity and intrigue in Hollywood, carving out a niche for himself with a career — and personal life — that revels in the outre and offbeat. Even in more traditional roles like George McFly in Back to the Future, Glover brings a certain off-kilter verve to the proceedings. In the real world, his avant-garde books and infamous appearance on Late Night with David Letterman would seem to prove that the strange isn’t limited to his on-screen presence. In other words, idiosyncrasy seems to be the name of his game, full stop. The oddball actor’s latest, then, Tallulah H. Schwab’s Mr. K, is something of a departure from this known standard, in which Glover plays a straight man located within an increasingly inexplicable and surreal scenario.
In the film, Glover is the titular Mr. K, a traveling magician who checks into a dilapidated, labyrinthine hotel. The film opens with the eponymous character’s narrative musings on loneliness, quickly establishing Mr. K’s focus on existential dread. Initially seeking only a place to rest, Mr. K quickly discovers that the hotel is far from ordinary. As he navigates the winding hallways, which seem to shift and close in on him, he encounters a series of increasingly bizarre characters, including a brass band, elderly women in matching attire who refuse to leave the hotel, and a chef with dictatorial control over the kitchen staff (who only seem to cook variations of eggs). As it quickly becomes clear, there is no way out of this hotel, and each encounter pushes Mr. K further into a chaotic, blurred world. Tension builds, tempers flare, and pandemonium ensues.
All this havoc certainly could have paired well with Glover’s particular vein of peculiarity, but his talents are woefully underutilized in Mr. K. This is perhaps intended; Glover certainly wouldn’t be the first to attempt self-reflexive adaptation of a career-long persona. Unfortunately, as the film strives further for absurdity and tension, it only becomes more clear how a more conventionally Glover performance could have supported Mr. K’s tonal aspirations and elevated it beyond mere indie affectation.
In that absence, Schwab’s film struggles to balance all these attempts at surreality with a coherent narrative. The film certainly succeeds in establishing a palpable sense of dread and unease, with the uncanniness of its shifting hallways and unpredictable encounters working overtime, but as the plot moves toward its endpoint, it can often feel as if Schwab is more interested in laying out a series of gonzo set pieces than in tying them meaningfully together. Of course, coherence may not and doesn’t need to be the goal with something like this, but its lack would need to be utilized toward productive ends, especially considering the film’s meditations on loneliness that are introduced early on. Exploration of existential angst is ripe with potential, and especially within the confines of the sensibilities aspired to here, but in execution these ideas often feel muddled by the inconsistencies that define Mr. K — Schwab seems more intent on bewildering the audience than on delving into the emotional landscape of Mr. K’s isolation. And an over-reliance on visual style, while often captivating when taken in a vacuum, instead works to reinforce a prevailing sense of thinness elsewhere. For a film so clear in its intent to break out of the ordinary, Mr. K seems not to know they way and instead traps itself in a maze of its own making — one that’s ultimately more exhausting than exhilarating. — EMILY DUGRANRUT
Credit: Boku No Ohisama Production Committee/Commes des Cinemas
My Sunshine
The Cannes Film Festival has a reputation (not entirely undeserved) for skewing its selections toward the more abstruse, audience-unfriendly end of the international cinema spectrum. So it’s perplexing to encounter a film like My Sunshine, the sophomore feature from Japan’s Hiroshi Okuyama. Although the film ends up in a rather somber place, it’s a wholly conventional coming-of-age tale that could reasonably be called Billy Elliot on Ice... — MICHAEL SICINSKI [Read the full previously published review.]
