Babygirl
Halina Reijn’s Babygirl is aware of the discourse. It’s read all the articles that have been passed around online, it knows what’s considered problematic in the year of our lord 2024, and it’s listened to all of Karina Longworth’s podcasts on the disappearance of the erotic thriller. It knows what people have been clamoring for as well as girding themselves against, which is the return of attractive people having well-lit, really good sex on screen. And if that weren’t enough, it devises a powder keg of a scenario that all but dares the viewer to be outraged in some manner or form by confronting traditional gender roles, female sexual desire as a driving force, power dynamics in the workplace, the dissolution of the nuclear family, humiliation as kink and, just to really troll people, the embrace of automation as a force for good in people’s lives. The film is like a 21st-century gender studies symposium that encourages a change of pants.
The film introduces us to Nicole Kidman’s Romy Mathis, a Type-A CEO of a company that manufactures warehouse robots, as she has sex with her husband, Jacob (Antonio Banderas). Nude and filmed from an all-seeing, god’s eye view, she rides him until completion (his), and then after a bare minimum of snuggling she slips on a nightie and disappears to another room of the house where she opens up her laptop to a porn site, lies on her stomach, and begins to masturbate. Is Romy a nymphomaniac or does she merely have physical desires her husband of 19 years is incapable of fulfilling (and that she is too embarrassed to vocalize)? In her professional life, Romy is a titan of industry; outwardly impenetrable and statuesque, she keeps people around her on guard simply through her chilly demeanor. But there is a foundational weakness in her, a desire to be controlled and even be told exactly what to do (likely a vestigial element of her upbringing being raised on a commune that she compares to a cult) which a woman in her position is not allowed to acknowledge or give oxygen to. While walking to the office one morning she witnesses a strikingly handsome man in his early 20s (Harris Dickinson) bringing to heel a snarling dog running wild on a city sidewalk and it awakens something in her. Tall, boyish, and wearing an ill-fitting suit, the man both looks like a child but carries himself with an almost irrational level of self-possession.
As these things in movies often go, the young man (whose name is Samuel) actually works in her office as an intern. Walked into a pro forma “meet the CEO” session along with a dozen other interns, Samuel makes a point of raising his hand and asking whether Romy genuinely believes automation is a net positive in society, drawing a reprimand from Romy’s executive assistant Esme (Sophie Wilde) and a curious glance from Romy. Who the hell is this person, fresh out of college and making subsistence wages, to interrogate the CEO on day one on the very nature of the business? Their paths continue to cross around the office, usually in some form of a micro-confrontation most people entering the business world would cut their arm off to avoid. Samuel insists that Romy honor his request for her to be his “company mentor” (she wasn’t even aware the CEO was required to participate in such a thing) holding her to account for trying to skip out on their regularly scheduled check-ins or chiding her for drinking coffee after lunch. Spotting her across the bar at the company happy hour, he has a tall glass of milk sent to her and silently urges her to gulp it down, to the astonishment of her C-level peers (as she leaves, alone, at the end of the night he whispers in her ear “good girl”). What is this dude’s deal?
The most likely answer is that he’s just an asshole and engaging in the sort of behavior that would see him bounced out of the building and blacklisted from the industry. You’ve heard about the misplaced confidence of unspectacular white men? That, except when you look like Harris Dickinson, “unspectacular” may not apply. But it’s also possible he’s instantly taken the measure of her and senses her weakness and lack of mooring and knows not only what’s required to bring her to bear, but what she secretly aches for. He invades her personal space, holding his face close to hers when they speak, dominating conversations and curtly critiquing her in ways that wouldn’t feel appropriate if they were contemporaries let alone separated by the gulf between a mountain top and dirt on a slug’s belly. He texts her at odd hours and demands that she appear at dingy hotel rooms, and the remarkable thing is, in spite of common sense and her best instincts, she does. And when he tells her to get on her knees, crawl to him and eat a piece of candy out of the palm of his hand, she of course says no… at first.
Control as both a metaphor for and prelude to sex is well-trod terrain, as is domination and masochism in mass-market crap like Fifty Shades of Grey. But typically it’s male gratification being prioritized over a woman’s desires. We’ve seen men dominate women as well as being dominated by women, but the dynamic, either through physical strength or status and wealth, typically favors the man. Whereas in Babygirl, if Samuel’s getting his rocks off in any sort of physiological sense, it’s entirely consigned to offscreen. A sexual relationship between a CEO and intern is the most textbook imbalance of power imaginable. At the same time, a CEO can be shoved out the door even by the whispers of sexual impropriety, which Samuel knows just as well as Romy does. They each hold each other’s destruction in their respective hands, and that’s the part that excites both of them (not to mention Romy has a family who would be torn apart by an affair). Reijn knows what the shape of one of these films typically is, and, more importantly, knows that the viewer knows as well. It’s taken as a given that the audience enters the film aware that Fatal Attraction, Disclosure, and Unfaithful (a not terrible film that this one is very much in conversation with) exist, and the perverse thrill of Babygirl is it walks right up to the line of being something cheap and common, only to pull up on the reins and take the material to some genuinely mature and complicated places.
The film that Babygirl is arguably most indebted to, however, is Paul Verhoven’s Elle (ironically, both Verhoeven and Reijn are Dutch), which similarly explored the problematic sexual desires of a powerful older woman who has a “complicated” relationship with consent. Elle primarily aims to provoke discomfort — for those wary of such depictions, there is no sexual violence in Reijn’s film — whereas Babygirl has lower ambitions, which is to unabashedly arouse. Reijn signals her intentions early on, setting Romy’s exacting and hugely expensive beauty regimen (botox injections and cryotherapy being on the menu) to rhythmic, almost tantric, vocalizing on the soundtrack whipping viewers into an unspoken frenzy. The film feels like it’s fucking even when everyone keeps their clothes on; for instance, in another charged moment that feels filthy without technically being explicit, Romy sneaks away alone to her office after finding Samuel’s tie left behind at the company Christmas party, draws the shades, and begins to tongue the garment. The film revels in its own impropriety, effectively arguing whether something is actually “wrong” if no laws are being broken and all parties are in agreement about what they hope to get out of it. It may position the film squarely in the realm of fantasy — for starters, the characters have siloed plainspoken sexual desire and messy emotions in a manner that’s never been achieved between consenting adults across millennia — but what a wonderful fantasy it is!
Dickinson and Kidman are performing a feature-length dance here, feeding off one another’s physical energies in a glorious give and take. The actress modulates her typical ice queen persona by willingly exposing chinks in her armor, choosing to make herself vulnerable as a means of inviting sexual actualization. The character and the film are simpatico in recognizing that something is only humiliating if it’s not willfully invited. In one of the more revealing scenes of the film, Romy attempts to get Jacob to perform a certain sexual act on her in their marriage bed and she pulls her shirt over her head, covering her entire face, before she can work up the nerve to ask for satisfaction from her spouse. By comparison, Samuel intuits her need to feel out of control and provides a safe venue where she can achieve release.
Meanwhile, the nifty trick of Dickinson’s performance is that he’s recognizably full of shit. As a domineering figure, he’s faking it till he makes it, and he’s only 80% of the way there. It’s fascinating to see the facade occasionally fall away, his stern visage occasionally giving way to a sheepish smile and a hint of uncertainty (almost as if he were thinking “is this actually stupid?”) before hardening his resolve again. The character doesn’t seem to exist outside of his encounters with Romy, and aside from brief expositional asides, we don’t get much of a sense of him as a person (at one point when the character starts dating Esme on the side it comes as much as a shock to the audience as it does to Romy). He’s a manifestation of Romy’s fantasies — not literally, we’re not talking about Fight Club here — meeting a physical need that makes her complete without bringing personal baggage into the arrangement, which is refreshing in its maturity. Maybe the lack of emotional complexity or torment is a flaw; it’s all rather convenient that nobody here has an ulterior motive, ruthless ambition, or gets their heart broken the way people who are intimate with one another do every single day. Or perhaps the film reflects an exciting shift in the paradigm where sex really can just be sex; mutually fulfilling and transient without lasting implications or emotional torment. At one point late in Babygirl, when it briefly risks becoming a much more common and formulaic thriller, there’s a confrontation between two characters, whom the film up to this point has contorted itself to prevent from falling into such an encounter, wherein share a shockingly civil exchange (after briefly trading blows). The first character says “female masochism is a male fantasy” to which the second character replies “your ideas of sexuality are dated.” Sometimes it’s nice when even the film’s characters have done the reading. — ANDREW DIGNAN
Credit: TIFF
Misericordia
Alain Guiraudie’s Misericordia begins, as so many stories do, with a homecoming. When first introduced, 30-something Jérémie (Félix Kysyl) is driving to his rural hometown of Saint-Martial, from which he has been away for some ten years, for the funeral of his former boss. Upon arrival, he briefly reconnects with the man’s widow, Martine (Catherine Frot), and his son Vincent (Jean-Baptiste Durand), a childhood friend. For the moment, though, the funeral proceedings take over. When Jérémie decides to stay with Martine for the night, and then for a few days following, however, his presence begins to upset the delicate balance of the town’s relations. By the film’s end, more than one body will be newly interned in the commune of Saint-Martial.
At least initially, Misericordia follows the outlines of a conventional backwoods thriller, following as the arrival of an outsider leads to a fateful crime and a subsequent investigation. As Jérémie stays on at Martine’s, Vincent grows increasingly agitated by his continued presence, which leads to a series of increasingly violent confrontations that culminates with Jérémie killing Vincent in the woods and disposing of the body. The investigation around Vincent’s disappearance then drives the remainder of the film. What distinguishes Guiraduie’s approach, though, is how this archetypal plot is enmeshed in a web of conflicting desires whose patterns remain ever obscure, unstable, and which gradually transform our response to the death. It soon becomes evident, for instance, that Jérémie had a more than professional devotion to Martine’s husband, that Martine, in turn, may have more than a maternal attachment to Jérémie, and that these relations feed into Vincent’s own long history with Jérémie. Thus, when Jérémie and Vincent first butt heads, wrestling in the woods, the confrontation is an ambiguous mix of genuine aggression, playful fooling around, and sexual tension. Even when the violence escalates, the ambiguity remains, such that the actual murder — which Guiraudie cuts and frames so as to suppress our sense of deliberation on Jérémie’s part — is both surprising and genuinely upsetting. This being a Guiraudie film, the characters’ desires rarely follow conventional societal expectations. What is significant, however — and also what makes the director’s films genuinely transgressive — is not simply that the film’s myriad expressions of desire violate conventional regularities (though they do), but that they point to the very instability of the imaginative framework on which those regularities are founded.
In this respect, the most useful point of reference for Guiraudie’s achievement is, however unlikely, Alfred Hitchcock’s The Trouble with Harry (1955). In that film, the dead body of a stranger is found on the outskirts of an idyllic Vermont town, whose inhabitants are uniquely unbothered by the occurrence, seeing it as little more than an inconvenience. Much of the film thus observes how the (assumed) murder is gradually assimilated by a core group, whose relationships reconfigure around the newly deceased. In Misericordia, likewise, we observe as a set of villagers — principally Martine, Walter (David Ayala), a portly loner, and Father Philippe (Jacques Develay), a nosy country priest — confront the facts of Jérémie’s arrival and Vincent’s disappearance. Although Vincent’s death is genuinely upsetting, and granted a dramatic force entirely absent from Harry, what is remarkable is how the group gradually arrives at a similar place as the one in the earlier film. All this is to say that Misericordia demonstrates the Hitchcockian lesson that every story is founded on a kind of imaginative projection — that is, an understanding of how the real and the imaginary are connected — and that precisely for this reason, the regularities we take for granted at any moment are unstable, and may give way at any moment, as they so clearly do in films like Psycho (1960) and The Birds (1963). Put differently, both films show us how one’s response to a dead body, say, can always be transformed by the relations that surround it — in the case of Misericordia, by the unstable, unpredictable undercurrents of the characters’ desires.
It should be said though, that in Misericordia, Guiraudie has set himself a higher degree of difficulty than Hitchcock has in The Trouble with Harry. For one thing, the dead body in the latter is that of an outsider, while in the former, it is someone from the town itself. For another, and more importantly: whereas Hitchcock establishes his film’s distinctively blithe register from the outset, and simply maintains it throughout, Guiraudie continually modulates the film’s tone, largely by transforming the characters’ (and our) relation to the murder. The fact that every character in The Trouble with Harry simply treats the dead body not as a source of distress but as a mere inconvenience is established by artistic fiat: we expect a world where murder is taken seriously, and the imaginative challenge of the film is that in this world it is not. In Misericordia, by contrast, Guiraudie sets himself the more difficult task of rendering the successive imaginative (and tonal) upheavals required to get to that point. And what’s more, he succeeds, finally managing to harmonize the tragic heft of a Cain-and-Abel murder with one of the funniest dick reveals in cinema history. If Misericordia thus stands not just as a novel development of Hitchcock but also as a major film in Guiraudie’s oeuvre, it is because it fuses the more naturalistic register of Stranger by the Lake (2013) with the farcical, fabulist tendencies of such films as No Rest of the Brave (2003) and The King of Escape (2009). It is the finest showcase to date of Guiraudie’s uncanny ability to not just establish a coherent film-world, but continually transform the relations between the real and the imaginary that make it possible. — LAWRENCE GARCIA
Oh, Canada
The title gives it away. Before one even begins watching Paul Schrader’s latest, the tone is effectively set by a little writerly in-joke of changing the title of Canada’s national anthem from the holy “O” (or the Québécois “Ô”) of direct address, best reserved for the Lord in King James’s English, to the exasperated interjection of “Oh,” followed by a comma lest disappointment be misread as astonishment. Yes, Oh, Canada is about a series of disappointments, though it can also be about making peace with those disappointments — the familial “oh” as in the “oh, you!” uttered when a loved one’s forgivable eccentricities appear. The second part of the title is also a joke because the film was shot in New York… — ZACH LEWIS [Read the full previously published review.]
Credit: Image Entertainment
Eden
There’s an innate novelty to Ron Howard directing a film like Eden, and it’s disingenuous not to mention it. The filmmaker has by all reasonable benchmarks — fame, box office, industry awards — had one of the most celebrated careers in Hollywood history, yet is still widely dismissed in critical circles (when Paul Thomas Anderson named Howard’s previous film, Thirteen Lives, as his favorite movie of 2022, it was treated almost as an unquantifiable quirk, akin to Terrence Malick loving Zoolander). Befitting someone of his sustained success, there’s never been a question of Howard’s talent behind the camera; he’s a classic journeyman director in the old studio mode who’s made films across nearly every genre and whose tendency to “hide the brush strokes” means his work is always in service of the material, rarely calls attention to itself. Really, it’s always been a matter of his instincts, which are unfailingly rousing, and his taste in subject matter, which tends towards the squishy (and even when he’s “gone dark” in the past, as with his lost-to-time western The Missing, it’s always felt performative). So saying that Eden, a fact-based crime drama set in the Galapagos Islands, feels “nothing like a Ron Howard film” can be interpreted as measured praise and a little unfair to a director who should be recognized for evolving as an artist (albeit belatedly).
Defining exactly why this feels so different is the tricky bit though. It’s not as simple as “the film is filled with sex and violence,” as though the director were a Puritan before now (mutilation and sexual violence hang like a dark cloud over the aforementioned The Missing, and something like Rush featured plenty of beautiful people hopping in and of bed). Rather, it’s that Eden is laser-focused on depicting the ghoulish events that befell three groups of Europeans in the 1930s who attempted to settle Floreana, an uninhabited island located off the coast of Ecuador. And, perhaps feeling liberated by the historical record, there’s little indication that Howard is searching out a silver lining to temper the tragedy. After opening with audio of Hitler under expository title cards to set the stage for the rise of fascism (an admittedly inauspicious note for a director prone to obviousness), we’re introduced to the humorless German philosopher Dr. Friedrich Ritter (Jude Law, reveling in the character’s officiousness) and his equally severe domestic partner, Dore Strauch (Vanessa Kirby, serving magnificent side-eye in an underutilized role). Believing that the government of Germany — and in a macro-sense, the world at large — is on the brink of collapse, Ritter and Dore have relocated to the tiny tropical island in the Pacific Ocean, making it their private dominion. Adamant that the tropical climate will cure Dore’s multiple sclerosis and provide the sort of isolation Friedrich demands to write his manuscript, a heavy philosophy tome that aspires to no less than saving the world from its own dark impulses, the couple has seemingly found a slice of heaven all to themselves (not that either would allow themselves to acknowledge the afterlife). Yet Friedrich’s correspondences, published in the papers back home, have inspired disaffected WWI veteran Heinz Wittmer (Daniel Brühl) and his young bride Margret (Sydney Sweeney, the only American in the cast and thus the most susceptible to mockery for her attempt at a German accent) to themselves travel across the world to relocate to Floreana along with Heinz’s adolescent son from an earlier marriage in the hopes of finding a fresh start. Expecting to be greeted warmly as fellow countrymen, the Wittmers are instead met with scorn and dismissal, with Friedrich quickly banishing them to a barren side of the island (ostensibly to be nearer to a meager fresh water source) and the expectation that they won’t be able to cultivate food, eventually starving and tucking tail back to Europe.
The final game piece introduced to the board is Baroness Eloise von Wagner Bosquet (Ana de Armas), an aspiring hotel magnate and con artist who dreams of building a luxury resort on Floreana that caters exclusively to millionaires, despite her lacking a background in construction or the resources required to execute her plan. The Baroness is a demonstrably unserious person even before the details of her dubious business venture are elucidated; the character is shown being carried in from the sea — like royalty! — on the shoulders of her engineer and bodyguard (Felix Kammerer and Toby Wallace), who also take turns sharing her bed. The film never misses an opportunity to emphasize the Baroness as a lightweight, whether that be completely missing the point of allegedly her favorite book, The Picture of Dorian Gray, or speaking largely in proto-self-help affirmations like “the only difference between fear and courage is conviction.” Her principal weapon is her sex appeal, and when she coquettishly shows up at Ritter’s makeshift cottage to try and worm her way into his good graces, he rips away the upper hand by greeting her with his penis hanging out (it’s a credit to both the actor and the film that zero effort is made to preserve Law’s modesty).
And so begins a series of triangulations and jockeying for power between forces of chaotic good and chaotic evil, with the resourceful and hardworking Wittmers stuck in the middle and unsure which side is which. And that, to be clear, is the point of the film. The principled-to-a-fault Ritter is revealed as having fairly transactional morality while his self-seriousness disguises some pretty questionable beliefs (the character prattles on that democracy invariably leads to fascism and then war, which sounds like something workshopped on a college quad before being dismissed as inane). Proxy skirmishes and psychological warfare ensues, particularly as resources become scarce in the arid summer months with incursions and raids becoming more brazen as hunger sets in (amongst her many failings, the Baroness refuses to eat food grown on the island). And all the while, Heinz and Margret prosper (comparatively at least) simply by tending to their land, keeping their heads down, and practicing a modicum of diplomacy while the capitalist and the intellectual find themselves at each other’s throats. But the center cannot hold, and the small island doesn’t have enough resources to support all of these people; at a certain point it becomes a question of how one reduces the numbers.
The most eyebrow-raising decision here is casting Sweeney, a thoroughly modern performer — more a va-va-voom screen presence than an actor — as not only a simple German woman from the first half of the 20th century, but as the moral center of the film. The vagaries of securing financing notwithstanding, it’s difficult to say Sweeney snugly fits this milieu, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a certain logic to the decision. Part of the reason the Baroness’ feminine wiles are so ineffective — de Armas is regularly costumed in loosely fastened silk robes and practically translucent blouses — on Heinz is that Margret looks the way that she does. But it’s more than sex appeal; there’s a real physicality to Sweeney, who probably does anguished exertion and delirious panic as well as any actor of her generation. Ironically, this is the second time this year Sweeney’s been asked to give birth under duress on screen (infamously, in the closing moments of Immaculate as well), and while it’s a fairly narrow lane, it’s undeniable she has a real knack for it.
That labor scene, which involves packs of wild dogs snapping at Margret’s heels and armed looters ignoring her anguished screams for help, is indicative of Howard’s overall approach to the subject matter: unblinking preoccupation with savagery. The film is punctuated with nature shots of avian predators carrying off prey and the bleached skeletons of dead animals rotting in the sun. Eden, which substitutes Queensland, Australia for Floreana — although technically an independent production, there’s incalculable production value here in shooting on location — presents paradise as a visually foreboding stretch of land, drained of color and enveloped by fog rolling down from the mountains. But the true savagery is, of course, embodied in our characters who, for all their high-minded ideals and nods to culture, are reduced to paranoia, back-biting, scheming, and barbarism. It’s a tale as old as time and would feel familiar in its shape even were it not based on actual events, but there are real teeth to many of Howard’s choices here, including the staging of a knife fight that recalls the most famous scene from Eastern Promises (yes, that one) and whipping the audience into a bloodlust that finds us welcoming one of our main characters getting their brains blown out on camera. Even its macabre postscript can’t help but twist the knife as it relates to the fate of one of the film’s supporting characters while furthering the tit-for-tat even beyond the events of the island. Is this the sort of tale of paradise lost that’s innately compelling, regardless of who’s behind the camera (and true to form, Howard is simply staying out of the way), or has the filmmaker tapped into the same dark impulses as his mild-mannered characters — and is the revelation that it resides within him what secretly gives the film its charge? However fleeting it may end up being, it feels as though a door inside the director has been nudged open and someone who isn’t hamstrung by the need to reach as large an audience as possible has walked through. For better or worse, this feels like the work of a free man. — ANDREW DIGNAN
Bonjour Tristesse
A cascading slant of coastal daylight betrays the futile dangers of vacation time in Durga Chew-Bose’s sensual, stilling, and elegiac rendition of Françoise Sagan’s 1954 novel of the same name. In this sun-soaked yet moodily cavernous adaptation, summertime sadness is a formative, virginal strain of sorrow, “a strange melancholy,” or “a silken web, enervating and soft,” as Sagan once penned in her opening chapter. Set in the moneyed and secluded French seaside, Chew-Bose’s cadent debut feature illustrates with sensory attention the entanglements of inertia, the restlessness of white escapade, the secret wounds of adolescence, and the lingering minutiae of visitation, hospitality, and grief.
Unlike the voiceover-led and timeline-flitting character study that was Otto Preminger’s 1958 vibrant Technicolor adaptation, the sly strengths of the Montreal-based literary and personal essayist’s (Too Much and Not the Mood) nautical bildungsroman lie in its meandering present-ness. Vacationing in the south of France, cloistered, doted-on 17-year-old Cécile (Lily McInerny) and her widowed, charming father Raymond (Claes Bang) are joined by Raymond’s latest lover, the young, free-spirited dancer Elsa (Naïlia Harzoune). When disciplined, elegant, American-born, Paris-based fashion designer Anne Larson (Chloë Sevigny) — a rather close friend of Cécile’s late mother and of Raymond — pays an unexpected visit to their idyllic villa, Cécile is forced to contend with a competing flood of nascent pleasures and envies. Kinships rekindle while intimacies are put to the test.
Accompanying the opening credits with close-up shots of Mediterranean tilework, Chew-Bose’s loosely faithful retelling intimates a colorist’s ballad, in turns conceptually abstract and mundanely sublime. Porcelain grids painted in a mosaic of glossy ginger, blueberry, rose, salmon, and quetzal tones expand into sparing but decorously styled interiors. Aglow in the deft production design of François-Renaud Labarthe (Stranger By The Lake, Personal Shopper) are echoes of the false but florid utopia of Agnes Varda’s Le Bonheur and the primary-toned austerity of Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Mepris. Coveted textures of striped pillowcases, embroidered bedspreads, and lilac beach towelettes conjure the leisurely but menacing mise-en-scène of Jacques Deray’s La Piscine, encoding a touchably noirish thrill in this coming-of-age tale of filial memory and mortality.
Ensconced in Elias Ludovic’s eerily, sibilantly pleasurable sound mix is Cécile’s interior sensorium, affording an atmospheric gravitas to the writer-director’s own delectably microscopic yet vaporous prose. The result is a work of lonesome languor, which sparkles more in its conch-like sonic finesse than in its tonally consistent, if somewhat uninventive, plotting. Imbued in tasteful floral arrangements, in thickets of trails and mazes of shrubbery (reminiscent of fecund routes in Satyajit Ray’s Days and Nights in the Forest and lush weeds in Eric Rohmer’s Claire’s Knee), in intentional but sparse mirror shots, is an unnerving air, a midday longing, a faraway tide, that effectively troubles the film’s lulling luminescence. Accenting each scene is afternoon birdsong, a sedate breeze, and to be sure, the parting, cleaving, and wading of water, rippling as elemental witness to Cécile’s slight presence.
By turns pensive and peacocking, McInerny’s Cécile is adrift from Jean Seberg’s “amoral young girl.” “She’s imagining what she looks like to us,” remarks Elsa to Raymond as both gaze lovingly at Cécile, who testily dips her toe in the water, angling her hip to submerge one ankle in, and then the other, with a hesitant delicacy, “to present herself for the moment when she wants to be seen.” In writing her lead heroine, Chew-Bose integrates habitude with knowing depth: Cécile applies electric blue eyeshadow on her upper lids and takes multiple selfies before curling into a midday nap. Cécile unsuccessfully tries to take pictures of the moon from her phone. A dog-eared, pink paperback of Colette’s seminal volume The Complete Claudine in hand, she is casually introspective, observant, almost in tryst with her surrounding, motherless quietude, but verging on nervous recklessness.
It is during the sly stupors of fragile domesticity that Chew-Bose winningly crystalizes the pathos of Cécile’s innocent harms. This is partly due to the film’s nimble and absorbing distinction between the nubile heroine’s dynamics with both the grown women who capture Raymond’s and, by extension, her own complex affections. Harzoune’s Elsa (brunette, balletic, breezy) and Chloë Sevigny’s Anne (orderly, mindful, poised) could not be more different; but both encircle the orbits of this father-daughter unit, seeking some semblance of solid familial ground.
While Elsa enacts the part of sisterly girlfriend, Anne assumes the role of surrogate mother (she sternly asks Cecile, “how did you do in your exams?”) to varying success. While one bites straight into the crunchy rind of an apple, the other carefully slices its flesh with dexterous ease into svelte slivers (not to mention, pineapple chunks, knifed into squares). Elsa’s manner reverberates in the way Cécile twirls in spontaneous dance one afternoon or sits cross-legged and barefoot on a chair or lazily spreads a stick of butter directly onto toast. Anne’s comportment similarly subsumes into Cécile’s: first Cécile practices pushing her shoulders back; then starts slicing her apples with wifely precision; she scrapes sand gently by her pointed tip of shoe; she dyes her hair blonde, wearing it in a supple, downcast bun — a spectral likeness of Anne.
The image of urbane, professional, chic Anne’s entry marks a subtle but crucial declaration, an undeniable selling point of this film. Unlike Preminger’s feature, where Cécile has the unquestioned position of lead narrator, Chew-Bose’s version affords Anne an arguably meatier participation. With an ebbing stylishness, Maximilian Pittner captures Anne’s point-of-view shots from the driver’s seat of her vintage convertible, imaging with symbolic sweep the unpredictably winding, hilly road to and from Cécile and Raymond’s summer abode. Scored by Lesley Barber’s transportive, orchestral interludes, these lush captures foretell and bookend her liminal importance, her absent presence, her careening returns, in Cécile’s life.
Nodding to the Givenchy-tailored, poppily monotoned cocktail dresses and copycat denim shirts in Preminger’s adaptation, costume designer Miyako Bellizzi’s eye distinguishes Anne from the rest by way of the prim flow and contained but mobile structures of her silhouettes. Dressed in an olive green button-down shirt, tucked behind a pleated, eggplant-mahogany skirt, Sevigny resists facial capture in her introductory shot (similarly, in a Hitchcockian nod, the back of Cécile’s lover’s head, a local French boy played by Aliocha Schneider, gazing into the horizon, opens the film).
Sevigny’s performance is a candid honing of Deborah Kerr’s self-possessed portrayal in the 1958 adaptation. Her pulsating composure and commanding warmth pack a sinuously detailed, calculating, and careful turn. She admittedly also has the best lines in the film, laden with starry impact, and bettered by her own seasoned gravitas. While flipping through the animate strokes of her cutting room drawings, chaotic and ripe with imagined taffeta and tassels and florals, she confesses to Cécile that these uncharacteristically “free, unthinking gestures” are essential to her otherwise proper tailoring. “Sometimes real love looks lonely,” she says one night, aiding Cécile in her wounded processing of her father’s rakish romances, while coolly lighting her a cigarette. “Everyone looks vulnerable in socks,” she comments like an afterthought with a felt but imperceptible chuckle. In one scene, she gifts Cécile an heirloom outfit. “Wear it in good health,” she pauses, her candor more parental than anecdotal, “that’s what my mother would say.” Sevigny’s line readings flit between whisper and order. Her Anne assumes a muted scorn, thinly veiling a desire to be a different kind of woman. When her fear of naps due to sleep paralysis is revealed in jest at a social gathering, Sevigny politely smiles, nervously adjusting her earring, craning her neck in a rare but bashful instance of vulnerability. Chew-Bose seems aware of the parasocial meaning of Sevigny’s star persona. She trades our millennial nostalgia for the indie sweetheart and runway fashion’s It Girl for a grown couturier who studies her surroundings like endless yards of embroidered cloth. Each eyeline is a smash; and so the myth and legend of Anne Larson haunts, nurtures, triggers, the scenic ecosystems of the familial premise of Bonjour Tristesse.
Seemingly an ode to the longing and loneliness lodged in the father-daughter unit of Yajisuro Ozu’s Late Spring, Chew-Bose’s paean shines more in her suturing of the mother-wound into the mind games of girlhood. It’s no surprise that the latter thematic prevails as the rousing coda of her work, enacting suspenseful surrender in the scenes shared between Sevigny and McInnerny. Here, the writer-director emerges as a historian of the maternal artifact, as it were, and ultimately an auralist, recording the lyrical within the granular. One wonders, can this obsession to momentary detail and familial gesture eat into itself? Parsing through the vacuums of Cécile’s interior worlds raises unanswered questions circling the film’s holidaying depressives — in particular, Raymond and Cécile’s socio-economic status, which enables this expatriate escapade. Unlike in Preminger’s film, there are no other visitors or occupants in their home, no help, no housekeepers, no blue-collar staff, nor migrant workers in sight, not even in conversational mentions. This bars a chance at shading, coalescing, the unknowing cruelties, the lumbering guilt, the wounded abandonment, of Chew-Bose’s lead heroine. But what the writer-director’s debut lacks in class curiosity it makes up for in precisely knotty directorial tendresse; in symmetrical, funereal immediacy; in narrating the end to an indelible summer. — AADITYA AGGARWAL
Collective Monologue
Over the course of her filmography, Jessica Sarah Rinland has demonstrated an unusually perceptive eye for the natural world and its inhabitants. Her camera’s fascination with anatomy is obvious from Nulepsy, one of her earliest shorts focused on the titular condition which describes the fictional “pathological need to be nude.” In Expression of the Sightless, a blind man explores a 19th-century sculpture with his hands, the camera only ever focused on the part of the figures where his hands are placed. Elsewhere, and featured more prevalently in her oeuvre, is the relationship between humans and nature. Adeline for Leaves explored the dynamics between a botanical prodigy and her departed mentor, from whom she learned about the “deep time” of plants and the environmental philosophy of gardens… — JOSHUA PEINADO [Read the full previously published review.]
Credit: TIFF
Daughter’s Daughter
Sylvia Chang has been one of the more under-appreciated forces in international film for almost 50 years now. Beginning her career as an actress in the mid-70s in films by King Hu and Li Han-hsiang, she moved into producing in her native Taiwan, where she was instrumental in the launching of the New Taiwan Cinema, where she gave Edward Yang one of his first TV directing jobs and lent her stardom to the omnibus project In Our Time and Yang’s first feature That Day on the Beach. At the same time, she was also an early star for the Hong Kong New Wave, leading Ann Hui’s first feature The Secret, and later serving as a Taiwanese producer for the upstart production company Cinema City, whose first major hit, the Aces Go Places series she also starred in. For that company, she also starred in key early works by Tsui Hark (she convinced him to pay more attention to his female characters) and Johnnie To. In the late ‘80s, she began directing her own films, an intermittent series of smart and meticulous comedies and melodramas, and though she hasn’t directed a film of her own since 2017’s Love Education, at the 2024 edition of TIFF, she is starring in (and executive producing alongside Hou Hsiao-hsien) the second film from Taiwanese director Huang Xi.
Daughter’s Daughter is a family melodrama centered almost entirely on Chang’s performance as Jin Aixia, a woman in late middle age juggling a mother with dementia and two more or less estranged daughters. The eldest, Emma (Karena Lam), was given up for adoption and raised in New York’s Chinatown when Jin was a teen. The younger, Zuer (Eugenie Liu), grew up with her mother in Taipei. An early prologue deftly introduces the family and their complicated relationships in 2018 before skipping into the present, when Zuer and her wife are attempting in vitro fertilization in New York. A car accident kills them both, and Jin is left to decide what to do with their one surviving embryo.
Huang spends most of the film lingering on Chang’s exploration of her character, rather than on the various moral and legal complications of the scenario. Grieving deeply over the death, Jin is an uneasy mix of stubborn and guilty. Righteous in her belief that what she did (in giving up one daughter for adoption, in being strict and demanding with the other) was correct, but profoundly regretful over her actions nonetheless. Jin’s psychological struggle plays out over a series of flashbacks, fleshing out the various mother-daughter relationships, while the debate about the present takes place in a series of discussions between Jin and Emma. Huang captures all this in warm, drifting long takes, indebted to the approach of Hou and his longtime DP Mark Lee Ping-bing, which gives the actors plenty of space to burrow into their character’s impossible contradictions. These occasionally strike a false note, as Lam’s performance veers toward the theatrical, in rough contrast to Chang’s more internalized acting. A late film revelation interestingly undermines the reality of these scenes, situating us even more inside Jin’s head than we had suspected.
Daughter’s Daughter also offers a fascinating performance from Chang, the kind of broad but nuanced work she hasn’t done in years, perhaps since her own 20 30 40 in 2004 or maybe even Stanley Kwan’s 1989 Full Moon in New York. She’s always been a five-tool actor, equally at home in romance, drama, and comedy, and she gets to flex all of those muscles here, with big dramatic outbursts, heartbreaking monologues, and silent moments of stillness, where her big expressive eyes explain the character far better than any dialogue could. Simply put, Huang’s movie would fall apart without her: the narrative is otherwise a bit too tangled and too many of the other actresses are short-changed (the role of the dementia-ridden grandmother, in particular, seems underutilized). But it’s nonetheless a promising second feature: Huang’s commitment to the study of one particular character is an admirable and somewhat unique approach. But most importantly, she’s smart enough to simply let Sylvia Chang work. — SEAN GILMAN
Anywhere Anytime
Neorealist drama Bicycle Thieves said so much about our human condition and the struggle to rise above one’s dire circumstances that its main concept of a man going through hardship in post-World War II Italy can be effectively transposed to contexts pertaining to any number of our current international humanitarian crises, illuminating ordinary people’s states of uncertainty and turmoil. Director Milad Tangshir clearly thinks so too, as his feature debut Anywhere Anytime is a re-working of De Sica’s classic that here centers on the plight of one undocumented migrant from Senegal who tries to make ends meet in present-day Italy.
Ethiopian saxophonist Tèsfa-Maryam Kidané’s soulful, jazzy track “Heywèté” provides an opening to the film, which will also feature other popular Middle Eastern and African music, framing the complicated immigratory experience of our characters while also linking them to their cultural roots as they go about their business in the foreign land. The opening sequence presents people preparing their stalls in a market in the still-dark city of Turin. The camera then cuts to the bloodshot eyes of our visibly exhausted main character — undocumented migrant worker Issa (Ibrahima Sambou) — before returning to the general scene to show the police making rounds throughout the market. This is the time for Issa to run and hide in a nearby truck, because, without his documents, he is working in the country illegally and may face much trouble. Not long after, Issa is fired as his employer fears further encounters with the police.
From this point on, the bones of Bicycle Thieves stick out everywhere within Tangshir’s narratively minimalistic, but still quite ambitious, debut. Issa lands a job as a delivery man, but he needs a bicycle to do the job. His caring, streetwise friend Mario (Moussa Dicko Diango) gives him his own phone and some money to buy one, and it all goes well, until Issa’s newly-bought bike is stolen, the subsequent search for which will force Issa to make some difficult choices. In the spirit of its inspiration, Tangshir’s film also displays documentary-style humanism, pinning an ordinary, hard-working young man against the many socio-economic obstacles of his immediate environment. There are a number of long and medium shots of Issa sitting down, looking contemplative and isolated from his environment, or moving briskly through throngs of busy, seemingly uncaring, people. While there is hardly any romanticism in Bicycle Thieves, Tangshir tries to introduce a bit when portraying Issa’s relationship with his female friend Awa (Success Edemakhiota). After she shares her own experience of homelessness with Issa, the duo bond over their hardship as the perceived pitiful of their existence transforms in our eyes into instances of warmth and compassion. And, in one scene where Issa and Awa are enjoying their bike ride together, the hard-earned, €50 two-wheeler even becomes a precious emblem of their mutual hope for a better future.
Still, the director’s approach is more observational than immersive, and does not seem to capitalize fully on all the story’s dramatic instances, such as when Issa gets fired or when his bike is stolen. The storytelling approach becomes almost monotone, perhaps intentionally so. It details Issa getting fired, meeting a friend, getting a bike, working, and then meeting a girl in one continuous, even narrative strand. The film employs any of the more interesting cinematic arsenal at its disposal, such as a change in music or additional close-ups that might single out key dramatic moments that would imbue the picture with surprise, wonder, or any stronger emotional current.
Tangshir draws some clear parallels between Bicycle Thieves’ sense of hardship and growing anxiety regarding unemployment and Issa’s own struggles. However, the bicycle metaphor itself doesn’t work as well. The bicycle, and its representation of hope lost and hope chased, works wonders in Bicycle Thieves, and it does so largely because the object’s presence/absence is strongly linked to the poverty-stricken (and product-lacking) situation of World War II-battered Rome. However, the same symbolic “bicycle” journey in Anywhere Anytime looks more than a little odd when located within a consumer-driven, product-abundant 21st-century Turin.
Moreover, Tangshir was perhaps so adamant to emulate or pay tribute to the beloved Italian classic that he forgot Issa’s primary tragedy and its source. Arguably, the main tragedy of the situation here is not lacking the means to do a job, as in Bicycle Thieves, where Antonio Ricci was just one man among many of his equally-placed compatriots, but getting a job in the first place as a result of Issa’s uncommon, uncertain position in society. The return of the bike offers a chance for Issa, but it would hardly change his clearly undesirable social status quo. Issa is not just one man among many of his age (as Antonio was in Bicycle Thieves); he is portrayed as a clear outsider in a place where jobs for him are scarce since not many employers would hire undocumented migrants. This is a small but significant difference between Bicycle Thieves and Anywhere Anytime, and by ignoring it, Tangshir lessens his own drama and also our belief in the unfolding narrative.
Hence, whereas the bicycle in De Sica’s film stood for overcoming unemployment in order not to die from starvation, the true symbol of Tangshir’s film is the one never introduced, being something that connects to Issa’s uncertain status in the country — for example, his settlement papers enabling proper employment, and their loss. Ironically, even Issa’s loss of a smartphone, a situation that would also stop his delivery work, would have hit harder for the modern audience than the loss of his bicycle. In this regard, A Better Life (2011), another film that was inspired by De Sica’s film, arguably executed a modern twist on the classic saga better by focusing on a truck instead of a bike.
However, the depiction of a larger crisis is certainly as powerful in Anywhere Anytime as it was in its precedent film, at least on an individual, psychological level. Only, it’s a crisis of a different kind. There’s a sense of alienation, loneliness, and “invisibility” that comes from Issa. In Bicycle Thieves, the nature of the problem was clearly visible to everyone, even if there was no immediate fix; not so with Issa in Anywhere Anytime. Here, the devastation plaguing the young man is completely unknown to a casual passerby taking a glance at a sweaty boy next to them. The last 20 or so minutes of Tangshir’s film, then, features many redeeming qualities, too, and almost culminates in what it should have been doing all along. The camerawork is more imaginative in this stretch, and the story induces more sympathy for Issa, unveils more of his personal history, lets his identity play a larger part in the drama, and hints at Issa’s growing frustration soon snowballing toward anti-hero tendencies.
Ultimately, Anywhere Anytime’s focus on De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves proves to be a bit of a double-edged sword, and, perhaps, more effective methods could have been employed to establish a truly potent drama about these displaced people’s inability to reach their “European Dream.” Still, the clarity of Tangshir’s vision is evident, and his savvy musical choices inject much necessary dynamism into a somewhat predictable plot. It’s also admirable to see the picture’s determination to shed light on contemporary migrants’ precarious socio-economic situation. For an Iranian-born director who emigrated from Iran to Italy in 2011, and who also previously shot one other documentary that deals specifically with the migratory crisis (Displaced), Anywhere Anytime certainly feels all that much more personal and important. In this way, despite some clear faults, it registers as a fairly memorable, resolute eye-opener. — DIANA TUOVA
When the Light Breaks
The depiction of grief in films is as variable as film form. It can be outwardly melodramatic like in Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colors: Blue (1993), recklessly self-destructive as in Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist (2009), or soul-cleansingly spiritual (see Terrence Malick’s 2011 film, The Tree of Life). But there’s one thing that binds all these drastically different expressions of grief together: their uninhibited expressivity. These films — sometimes crudely, other times sensitively — revel in displaying the pain, confusion, frustration, and anger our protagonists feel after losing someone incredibly close to them. Conversely, other films prefer to conceal. Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura (1960), for instance, does so to indict its central characters’ emotional vacuity; Michael Haneke’s Amour (2012) de-melodramatizes the grieving process to diminish the satisfaction we get from watching its glamorization on-screen... — DHRUV GOYAL [Read the full previously published review.]
