Dahomey
Before making her feature film debut with 2019’s Atlantics, French-Senegalese director Mati Diop produced a series of poetic short films, all of which explored a different oblique angle on the legacy of colonialism. Some, like A Thousand Suns (2013), consider the role of filmmaking in defining and communicating the anti-colonial struggle. That film focused on the actor Magaye Niang, star of Touki-Bouki, directed by Diop’s late uncle, Djibril Diop Mambéty. Others, like the short-film version of Atlantiques (2009), explore the false promises of immigration for poor men in Senegal, for whom Europe is a dream that, siren-like, lures them to their deaths. Whether looking at the crises of today or the centuries-long context of oppression that largely defines our present moment, Diop has consistently regarded colonial Europe as a sort of shapeshifting menace, a hypnotic toxin that takes many fatal forms.
Diop’s latest film Dahomey is a hybrid documentary about plunder and return, the political and ethical questions regarding the repatriation of artworks and artifacts that were stolen from their countries of origin in the last several centuries. A sort of spiritual heir to Statues Also Die, a 1953 collaboration between Chris Marker and Alain Resnais that examined the theft of cultural and religious objects and their subsequent transformation into “art” by the European museum system, Dahomey serves as a kind of historical bookend. As France begins returning items from the Dahomey kingdom to present-day Benin, could it be too late to really make a difference?
In just over an hour, Diop provides viewers with a sharp, economical film essay about this problem, and does so within a fairly recognizable avant-doc form. For the first part of Dahomey, the film quietly observes the labor involved in removing artworks from French exhibitions and sending them back to Benin. Diop patiently watches the mechanics of crating up, shipping, and re-installing these repatriated artifacts and artworks, 26 of which were relinquished by the Macron government in an agreement with Benin’s billionaire president Patrice Talon. In a clever turn, one of the statues, “No. 26,” has the deep male voice of a first-person narrator, describing his strange, painful exile in France and trying to make sense of his belated homecoming.
But it’s in its second half that Dahomey really comes to life. Diop shows us a very contentious discussion at a Beninese conference relating to the objects’ return. It’s a perfect example of Brechtian political cinema, with the political stakes and conflicting opinions of the situation being laid bare as active concerns. Why only 26, out of hundreds? Are the Beninese people supposed to be grateful? Is this the best that Talon’s government could do? Then again, if not for this meager return, would this revitalized conversation about pillage and patrimony even be happening right now? How does the deal between France and Benin recall 19th-century Dahomey’s collusion with the European slave trade? And as these works go from a Parisian to a Beninese museum, does that make them more accessible to anyone? How much does cultural memory really mean when so many people are in poverty? Diop, of course, leaves us to puzzle out these problems.
Before each screening at the Toronto International Film Festival, where Dahomey premiered, there’s a brief trailer providing an acknowledgment that Toronto was built on the unceded territory of several First Nations tribes. TIFF’s land acknowledgment asks the viewer to consider this complicated past, and tells us that the festival is “grateful to be able to work on these lands.” While I absolutely believe that Indigenous rights, including land rights and sovereignty, are vital political matters, one must wonder what the land acknowledgment statement actually accomplishes. TIFF is hardly alone in this, and as a gesture it is mostly a way for arts institutions to feign concern regarding white settler colonialism, when there is no intention whatsoever of returning the stolen real estate or allowing disenfranchised tribes to benefit from the money their tribal lands are now worth. It was particularly ironic to see this trailer before the festival screening of Dahomey. Diop’s film strikes one as the ultimate riposte to this kind of feckless, optics-based liberalism. — MICHAEL SICINSKI
Credit: Courtesy of TIFF/Searchlight Pictures
Nightbitch
In the opening moments of Nightbitch, director Marielle Heller appears alongside her star Amy Adams, both playing frustrated mothers in a grocery store. Both Heller and Adams are themselves mothers, and Adams’ unnamed character, credited as Mother, is also an artist. Mother, though, has put her career on pause to raise Son while Husband (Scoot McNairy) works, often disappearing for days at a time on business trips. As the film opens, these days with an infant are a bleed of cooking, cleaning, and sleep training — though Mother doesn’t manage much actual sleeping herself. When she tries to break up the monotony by bringing her son to story time at the library, she can’t believe the other mothers submit to the cloying songs. But when she tries to consider her art, she can’t, feeling “dumb” since giving birth. If this seems like an extreme arrangement, at least by the standards of 2024, that’s the point. Mother’s life has become unlivable, but she can’t stop living it.
Rather than seeing Mother succumbing to depression, however, Nightbitch follows her as she begins to believe she’s transforming into a dog. Though Heller literalizes this psychosis through spurts of body horror, it’s often tangential to Mother’s actual attempts to affect change. Initially, simply considering the possibility of transformation is enough to energize her; later, it spurs a physical outlet for her frustration, as well as absurd efforts toward resocializing her son. Though this bold conceit is what the film is obviously advertising to viewers, in execution it’s a more subtle break from realism that effectively conveys her interiority. Several scenes play out twice, first allowing Adams to communicate her desperation before defaulting to submission, and it’s here that we see her flail for a solution to a problem she can’t admit she has. Eventually, one of Mother’s more violent fantasies turns out to have been actualized, and some viewers may struggle to empathize with her past this point. It helps, though, that even the reality from which she diverges is heightened, and that her desperation is so palpable.
Because, again, it’s clear this is a personal project for both director and star, beyond a generic exploration of motherhood. Adams gets across a very real sense of loss, without ever placing into doubt her love for her son. Mother struggles to reclaim not just her life, but her intellect, her femininity, her identity. The paradox, that nothing could cause her to give up this life she can’t stand, is one that resonates far beyond the confines of motherhood. As the film moves past its climax, it approaches a resolution teetering on the wrong side of neat, particularly given the lack of neatness that is essential to the preceding narrative. But it’s nonetheless refreshing to see Adams play a mother who is at various points genuinely contemptible. So while Nightbitch doesn’t get all the details right, Heller’s approach is wonderfully unapologetic, and gives both director and star the space each needs to navigate the messy path of Mother’s ultimate return to reality. — JESSE CATHERINE WEBBER
Lazaro At Night
Medium-length features; a small but consistent troupe of actors in every picture; every scene just another conversation; little-to-no camera movement; and beguiling, inventive narrative structures that make otherwise simple movies anything but — these are the artistic hallmarks that have granted director Hong Sang-soo a well-deserved cult following. But all of those characteristics also describe the oeuvre of lesser-known Nicolás Pereda, who, if it can be believed, makes even quieter, slower works than Hong. The comparisons stop there; Pereda doesn’t swap out Hong’s soju for Mexican cervezas or anything else that would lead one to imagine Pereda fully lifting or even making reference to Hong’s style. The pleasures of a Pereda film are distinct, and his latest film is the furthest he’s explored his own style… — ZACH LEWIS [Read the full previously published review.]
Credit: Courtesy of TIFF
Matt and Mara
Since his debut feature, Tower, 12 years ago, Kazik Radwanski’s tendency to foreground his characters’ inner turmoil has been matched, and perhaps maintained, by his camera’s almost magnetic attraction to their bodies. These cerebral and visceral interests meld once again In Radwanski’s latest, Matt and Mara. Radwanski’s frequent collaborator, Deragh Campbell, stars as Mara, a contract lecturer in literature (a title with little narrative significance but is nonetheless a pointed distinction), whose blissfully normal life is unmoored by the sudden reappearance of an old friend, Matt (Matt Johnson). Campbell has one of cinema’s most quietly expressive faces, a useful tool for working with a director whose mode of operation is to trace all manner of desperation underneath placid surfaces.
Matt and Mara catch up over coffee after he appears outside one of her classes. Their conversation elides the pleasantries one might expect from old friends catching up after years apart; instead, we enter the scene long into a conversation about work. Mara admits almost shyly that she is working on something, about someone whose innermost desires are unknown to themselves and who’s life could be radically transformed without them seeing it coming. Matt, the successful, published writer loves this idea, while Mara, who hasn’t been published in a long time, meekly agrees. Their dialogue steps lightly on the inherent awkwardness of an imbalance of accomplishment between people, but it’s a pointed observation on the unstable and financially unrewarding worlds of art and academia they both straddle. The sincerity of the scene is given humorous release when the rude barista passive-aggressively closes the cafe and tells them to get real jobs.
From here on, Matt and Mara’s lives intertwine almost seamlessly. She doesn’t like the new passport photos she took for an upcoming work trip across the border in Ithaca, New York, so before the reshoot Matt makes her practice smiling at strangers on the street. It’s a silly exercise, almost in the vein of a TikTok challenge; but in a sweetly awkward way it grabs the attention of passers-by, and suggests a blurring between the lines of the film and the real world. At the studio the photographer even mistakes Matt and Mara for husband and wife, which Mara goes along with unquestioningly. Their chemistry is charming, even believable at times, but there’s an unavoidable performativity to it. At times, Mara threatens to betray her own doubts about this rekindled relationship, though Campbell’s control never wavers, making her face the site of the film’s most compelling conflict.
It doesn’t take a genius to connect the subtextual dots to their textual narrative strains. Matt’s appearance is an immediately destabilizing force in Mara’s seemingly unperturbed life. Her handsome, younger, musician husband, Samir, and young daughter, Avery, make an enviable domestic setup, but we quickly see the ways Matt’s bombastic, charismatic presence trickles into Mara’s psyche. Matt is equal parts charm and smarm, an immediately recognizable type whose presence ignites passion and frustrates sensibilities in equal, often simultaneous, measure.
There’s pleasure in a kind of cause and effect pattern between characters’ seemingly banal conversations and the film’s broader themes, one that involves the viewer, makes them feel smart, and rewards them for paying attention. We see this in scenes such as a dinner party where Mara’s admission that she doesn’t like music reads as the film’s gesture toward her and Samir’s growing distance; and when Mara’s friend warns her about bringing Matt to her class because of the chaotic effect he might have, it really translates as the film’s acknowledgement of his entire thematic role. But in such a narratively spare and fleet-footed film, the transmutation of dialogue into thematic development can sometimes feel like unnecessary hand-holding.
These complaints are small, though, and as the film enters its final act, during which Matt drives Mara to the conference and proves himself to Mara in ways she didn’t want but maybe expected, the slippery nature it established at the beginning reasserts itself. Rather than suggesting, then depicting, the rocking of a relationship’s foundation, it raises questions about desire and expectation, and the disappointment when faced with the gap between the two. Matt and Mara’s finely tuned drama, breezily natural dialogue, and complimentary performers make for one of the best films of the year. It’s a refreshing change of pace from Radwanski, whose previous features delved deep into the headspaces of characters with much less enviable lives and more anxious sensibilities. Matt and Mara’s low-key register is its strength, and loosens up a filmmaker’s style so as to embrace the quotidian without sacrificing his distinct vision. — CHRIS CASSINGHAM
Youth (Hard Times)
Wang Bing films have a reputation for their difficulty, but the opening film in his Youth trilogy, Youth (Spring), managed to be surprisingly varied and enjoyable despite consisting of 212 minutes of Chinese sweatshop workers struggling to get by. It was frequently exuberant and vivacious, a movie about young people flirting and arguing and having fun with one another despite the clear dreadfulness of their surroundings. The second entry, Youth (Hard Times), has a title that doesn’t make it seem like good times will be the focus, and the ever-present background issue in Spring of the factory workers trying to get better wages from management comes to the fore in the 226-minute Hard Times. (The final entry, Youth (Homecoming), is going to be substantially shorter at 160 minutes.)… — ANDREW REICHEL [Read the full previously published review.]
Credit: Courtesy of TIFF
Escape from the 21st Century
Comparisons to Everything Everywhere All at Once seem inevitable in the early buzz on Yang Li’s Escape from the 21st Century. The TIFF program guide cites it, along with Scott Pilgrim, Tsui Hark, and Stephen Chow. None of those seem exactly right though, and Everything Everywhere least of all. Notably, Escape lacks that Oscar-winner’s star power: none of its performers are as exceptional as Michelle Yeoh and Ke Huy Quan. But while it may boast a bevy of great actors, Everything Everywhere doesn’t have a tenth of the visual imagination Yang brings to Escape. More than any of those other analogues from Hollywood or Hong Kong, Escape reminds of contemporary Japanese science fiction films like Junta Yamaguchi’s time travel brain-twisters (River and Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes) and, most especially, Shinji Higuchi and Hideaki Anno’s Shin Kamen Rider. It’s a bold mix of ideas and action, never afraid to take a tragic turn. It’s much more committed to the darkness of its world than would be acceptable in an Oscar movie, and its otherwise familiar existential solutions are more earned because of it.
One of the more interesting things about Escape is that its world is not our own. It’s set, a narrator tells us, in the years 1999 and 2019 on the distant Planet K, which are times and places very much like our Earth China, except they allow the movie to maintain plausible deniability for the sake of our Mainland Chinese censorship board. Three teen boys are doing teen boy things (climbing towers, getting in fights) when they fall into some toxic waste and learn that whenever they sneeze, their consciousness jumps 20 years into the future. The 2019 world is a depressing place — not at all like Xi Jinping’s China! — and the three boys become deeply depressed at the ways their lives have turned out. One is a hired killer for a medical company that illegally traffics organs; another is a photojournalist hanging around a badass writer who has a terrible boyfriend; and the third, a hefty nerd in the past, has grown handsome and muscled, and is dating the girl who had been the love of his friend’s life (the guilt here is colored too by the fact that she’s depressed and drifting away in addiction).
The boys try various schemes to improve the past, but nothing seems to work. The evil corporations that rule 2019 only grow more powerful, and the women in their lives fall ever more apart. The journalists are being hunted by the assassin’s partner, a nigh-unstoppable killing machine, and the bad guys have figured out a way to take advantage of the kids’ time-leaping abilities, which will result in the end of civilization as we know it. The apocalypse is nigh — but then again, it always is. Everybody dies sometime.
Yang packs all this with quick cuts and bright colors (toxic waste swirling in the water like a lava lamp, bright red and orange sunsets), shifts to anime-style animation (making explicit the film’s debt to Japanese sci-fi, while also recalling Hong Kong films like Gallants and Tai Chi Zero), terrific action sequences, and bold soundtrack choices (perhaps the best use of Bonnie Tyler in a Chinese-language film?). It’s dizzying in all the good ways you’d expect from this kind of thing, while remaining deeply pessimistic about China’s (errr, “Planet K’s”) future and its recent past. The kids know things are bad and getting worse. Everything Everywhere gives them platitudes about family and forgiveness. Yang Li knows there’s no real way to escape the 21st century. Best to just kick its ass or die trying. — SEAN GILMAN
Seeds
In a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter, actress Kaniehtiio Horn speaks about the lack of leading roles coming her way after successful stints on TV shows like Letterkenny and Reservation Dogs. Kudos to her, then, for going out and doing it herself. Even better, the resulting film, Seeds, which Horn wrote, directed, and stars in, is a low-key charmer, freely mixing hangout comedy, anti-corporate sentiment, and gentle ribs at Reservation life (Horn is Canadian-Mohawk). It’s not all fun and games, though, as the film eventually takes a turn toward darker subject matter. For Indigenous peoples, heritage must sometimes be protected with violence.
Seeds begins with Ziggy (Horn) announcing to her Instagram followers that she’s just become a paid influencer for Nature’s Oath, a seemingly benign multi-national food service corporation (think Monsanto). She’s excited to finally quit juggling multiple gig jobs and focus on her burgeoning Internet fame. These early scenes have Horn speaking directly to the camera, occasionally utilizing a split screen to show the online interface, and she’s a vivacious, winning presence. But no sooner is she preparing her first sponsored post than she is summoned back to the reservation by her cousin, Wiz (Dallas Goldtooth). He needs her help, and assures her that the data connection is strong enough for her to post the daily content required by her contract (spotty reservation Internet access becomes a recurring gag). It becomes clear that Ziggy left for Toronto for a number of reasons, and that her ability to assimilate into off-res life has been bumpy, at best. It’s Wiz who informs Ziggy that Nature’s Oath isn’t exactly on the up and up, and that she’s essentially taking blood money from them and selling out the land and her people. The film doesn’t waste much time on Ziggy’s moral decision; she decides very quickly that she’s done the wrong thing, as a litany of her followers start posting negative comments about the true nature of the company’s bio-engineering and genetic tampering.
Eventually, the other shoe drops. Corporate fixer Drake (Patrick Garrow) shows up, determined to find sacred, ancestral seeds that have been passed down through Ziggy’s family for generations and now sit unprotected in her aunt’s home. Drake enlists amiable reservation doofus Nookie (Dylan Cook) to help him, and begins terrorizing Ziggy just as she’s rekindling things with ex-boyfriend Bandit (Meegwun Fairbrother). It’s here that the film switches gears from loose, observational humor to something resembling a thriller. Ziggy has ominous visions where the specter of actor Graham Greene (ostensibly playing himself) warns her of impending catastrophe, and Drake escalates things considerably when he attacks someone close to Ziggy. The tonal rupture doesn’t totally work; the film is more successful in its earlier iteration as a lark than it is as a suspense piece, and sudden jolts of extreme violence feel especially jarring following the brevity of the early going. Formally, the film is what might be generously called “tele-visual,” despite occasional bursts of lovely landscape photography. Still, Horn’s performance ultimately carries the day, and her final act of retribution against the forces aligned against her and her tribe have a sort of righteous fury that’s wholly invigorating. As a writer, it’s hard not to argue that Horn packs too much into her film’s fairly brief runtime, but as a bold declaration of purpose, Seeds is a modest success. Hopefully her first film isn’t her last. — DANIEL GORMAN
Credit: Cannes Film Festival
The Village Next to Paradise
In Western countries, the dailiness in those “lesser developed” ones has long been abstracted by a dearth of artistic and cultural diffusion from one to the next. This has, in part, created a certain impressionistic distance from those living oceans apart, one transported by the communications of nonprofits and conventional media; one that has often functioned in harmony with military campaigns and foreign affairs that have reduced the deaths of innocent people to the disembodied “collateral damage,” which has for so long minimized calamity in a soothing, passive voice... — CONOR TRUAX [Read the full previously published review.]
