The Room Next Door
Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar’s English-language films have operated in a particularly confessional mode. Featuring The Room Next Door’s co-star Tilda Swinton, his 2020 short film The Human Voice artfully charts its protagonist’s soul-bearing degeneration. His 2023 short film Strange Way of Life sees Pedro Pascal’s Silva dig up his torrid past with Ethan Hawke’s Jake, a small-town sheriff. Characters reflect on their shattered relationships and the images of their past selves visible in the shards. Almodóvar’s filmography has a distinct thematic tapestry which these recent exploits function as a distillation of, in no small part due to their brevity. With his Golden Lion-winning outing The Room Next Door, Almodóvar now has the space of a feature-length film (his first in English) to bring the breadth of his favorite subjects to the fore.
Based on Sigrid Nunez’s eighth novel What Are You Going Through, the film stars Julianne Moore as Ingrid, a successful author who learns through an encounter at a book signing that an old friend, Martha (Tilda Swinton), is battling cancer. Ingrid visits Martha in the hospital and their reacquaintance is the gateway into the movie’s exposition-heavy first third. We learn that Ingrid has been a war correspondent and spotty mother, both through monologuing or flashbacks, some of the latter being so over-the-top they — likely inadvertently — come off as awkwardly comedic. Over time, the film’s stiff and clunky aspects do give way to a greater fluidity as the bond between Ingrid and Martha genuinely thaws. Recognizing the opportunity and already rebuffed by closer friends, Martha then presents Ingrid with a proposition that tests their revitalized relationship.
Aficionados of the director’s work will be pleased to read that The Room Next Door is textbook Almodóvarian cinema. Female heroines, a melodramatic musical score, bright pops of color in the set and costume design, stark camera angles, complex meditations on identity through maternal and familial lenses, a little dollop of Catholic sacrilege: Almodóvar — also the adaptation’s credited writer — seems quite at home within Nunez’s material. The Room Next Door has no shortage of intertextual allusions either. There are nods to Edward Hopper, known for evocative expressions of mid-century American solitude, loneliness, and resignation in his painted works. Martha has a rant that recalls Susan Sontag’s thesis in Illness as Metaphor. James Joyce’s borderline novella-length short story “The Dead” is referenced frequently, understandably so given its own focus on love, loss, and illness. While it can all feel a bit like the filmic equivalent of scanning a six-line Wikipedia article paragraph that’s littered with hyperlinked text, his allusions don’t tip over into being overbearing. Here, they function as ingredients thrown in the pot to jazz up a dish with a simple base.
The film aims to mine the profound out of a relatively straightforward approach. Gloomier, more meditative moments don’t become too bitter thanks to the breezy ballast of lightly dark comedy peppered throughout so that the proceedings stay properly buoyant. All these elements cohere neatly, perhaps too neatly to produce much that’s poignantly raw or challenging. Ingrid and Martha’s relationship lacks any expected undercurrents of resentment or guilt. Moments of conflict are precisely that: moments, blips dotting the well-trodden emotional road The Room Next Door ambles down. During the post-screening Q&A, Julianne Moore described Almodóvar’s films as being about “witnessing the human condition.” She added that “[t]he only way you know you’re not alone is when someone is witnessing you.” The film unpacks the basic, empathetic gesture of attending to another in need, softly questioning what bounds our ideas of human decency from enablement and complicity. In a sense, it can be seen as a markedly less psychologically vertiginous spiritual successor to Persona, another film where two women share each other’s pains through an unwitting transference. Unlike Bergman’s classic, not much is happening beneath the surface here. Yet thanks to the Almodóvarian touch and some earnest performances, the textures are pleasingly rich enough to be sustaining. — TRAVIS DESHONG
Credit: Courtesy of Sideshow/Janus Films
It’s Not Me
After spending his early career transfiguring the aesthetics of early Jean-Luc Godard and other works from the French New Wave’s starting days for his own freewheeling bursts of style that would be dubbed cinéma du look in some circles, Leos Carax has finally turned to what came after. 42-minute featurette It’s Not Me isn’t the first film to take cues from the late-period essay films of Godard that mashed up countless audiovisual quotations of sources alongside the author’s own commentary to form a thesis, but as the title implies, Godard is not Carax, and this film is not quite a Histoire(s) du Cinema or a Goodbye to Language. It is merely Carax taking the baton from Godard, with the hopes of passing it on to someone else. The Godard title that comes closest to summarizing Carax’s approach is The Image Book, with Carax frequently leafing through his filmography and reconfiguring it in a new context. Late periods and self-plagiarism are a consistent preoccupation throughout, most hauntingly when we hear David Bowie’s Lazarus without the backing music.
The film is the result of an exhibit that never panned out at the Centre Pompidou, which asked Carax to come up with an answer to the question “where are you at, Leos Carax?” Carax evades the question by scrambling up old footage while claiming it’s him and his family, operating in the same spirit as how he chose the nom de plume “Leos Carax” by anagramming his birth name of Alex Oscar. Movies and their so-called “empathy machine” status seem to get taken apart throughout It’s Not Me. Carax veers from focusing on children (including his own daughter) and their attitudes toward stories of horror, to his noted commonalities with another short-statured Jewish filmmaker: Roman Polanski. The former group is usually lucky enough to hear about Hitler through stories and can direct their own dreams so that he’s less of a threat: Carax’s daughter talks about her father being chased by a shark. This isn’t always the case, and alongside snapshots of the poor, beleaguered children in films like Germany Year Zero, we have the case of Polanski himself, who Carax notes went from fleeing the Holocaust while his family was murdered and then losing his wife in the Manson murders to sodomizing an underage girl. These are all sides to the same human, and perhaps that’s why this movie also shows one of Carax’s most famous characters in conversation with the director before defecating in a park. We all produce shit in some form or another, but whether the highs of something like Nina Simone’s “Four Women” are enough to compensate for the slavery that inspired it is a question with only one real answer.
The Carax of It’s Not Me claims to have only performed one POV shot in his prior films, and also recounts a fable about a man who killed his wife to remove her one visual flaw in the form of her beauty mark. He also provides a demonstration of “24 frames per second” with a fresh apple — “une bonne pomme” — and how it seems to imprint itself upon the eye as individual frames. Carax’s work taking such explicit influence from Godard recalls the little-known experimental filmmaker Andrew Noren and his own Godard-influenced obsession with how films are light, shadow, and “retinal phantoms,” with both self-plagiarizing their old material in their digital periods and rendering it uncannily new. They also both featured black cats and reversed footage of dives into water, and both took heavy influence from Dziga Vertov’s classic Man With a Movie Camera. What it means for a director like Leos Carax to look at the world and capture it through cinema (possibly killing it as a result) is translated through both the famous Vertov shot of the camera-eye, followed by a selection of eyepatched directors like John Ford, Nicholas Ray, and Raoul Walsh. Tracking shots used to have the weight of F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise by virtue of featuring heavy film cameras; now they have the lightweight and disposable quality of a boy stalking a girl with a cell phone. The world no longer blinks and is going blind from too many images as a result, claims Carax — hence the recent barrage of fascist politicians who claim to see the problem. It’s a great provocation to leave us with, especially when accompanied by a sequence of Carax’s Pola X featuring its two stars who died young — Guillaume Depardieu as the Carax stand-in, and Carax’s former partner Yekaterina Golubeva. The fire they sit by blinks out and the shadows overtake them, but when the credits kick in, more is promised after the parade of sources is finished, and we get the marvelous in-joke of a scene featuring three Carax films in one. It’s not a Carax scene, and yet that’s the only thing it could be described as: old images and new ones at once. — ANDREW REICHEL
Who By Fire
In the opening scene of Who by Fire, Quebecois filmmaker Philippe Lesage’s latest feature, a car pulls over along a highway for a brief rest stop. As one of the passengers, a young woman, Aliocha (Aurélia Arandi-Longpré), attempts to get back in, however, the car, driven by her father Albert (Paul Ahmarani), lurches forward just out of reach. When she walks toward the car, it drives away yet again. We see this “joke” played out at least one more time, in more extreme form, as the car drives away, around a bend in the road, out of sight. In the next scene, she is back in the car, which pulls up along the side of a lake where a seaplane is docked. The plane, piloted by Blake (Arieh Worthalter), an old friend of her father’s, will take the group, which also includes her brother Max (Antoine Marchand-Gagnon) and his best friend Jeff (Noah Parker), to a spacious cabin in the woods for an extended vacation. The earlier incident with the car is never referenced again.
This opening scene establishes, in abridged form, at least one central dynamic that runs through Who by Fire. On the basis of The Demons (2015) and Genèse (2018), Lesage is no stranger to extremes of behavior — in particular the way ostensibly harmless pranks can quickly shade into aggression and outright cruelty. Here, though, Lesage displays a tendency to skip over the resolution of such actions, often jumping forward to moments where the social violation has been assimilated, however uncertainly, into the larger group dynamic. Early on in the film, for example, Max tells Jeff about how he once caught Aliocha watching sadomasochistic porn, a story that the latter evinces a touch too much interest in. In a subsequent scene, we see Jeff and Aliocha talking on her bed, until the former makes a pass at her, is abruptly rebuffed, and then slaps her lightly on the face before rushing out of the cabin in distress. The next time we see them together, the two are being introduced to Blake’s friends, the actress Hélène (Irène Jacob) and her partner Eddy (Laurent Lucas), who are joining the party in the woods, and who assume that the pair are dating. Aliocha promptly corrects them, but as before, the prior event is not brought up then or any time after.
For at least half of Who by Fire’s 155-minute runtime, this dynamic proves absorbing enough. Blake, a well-off filmmaker known for his earlier fiction features, scripted by Albert, has, for a time now, worked as a documentarian. Though unremarkable in itself, the career decision has had an appreciable impact on Albert, who currently scripts animated TV shows for kids, and is an evident source of friction between the two. So when past tensions surface — not for the last time — during a lengthy, drunken dinner scene, captured in a continuous shot, we derive interest not just from how the personal spat is refracted by the rest of the table, but also from how the conflict is subsequently assimilated into the group dynamic the day following.
Eventually, though, Lesage’s decision to elide the precise details of various character interactions feels less strategic than evasive. The basic setup, which gathers a group of egotistical adults and unstable youths together in a restricted space, allows Lesage to generate any number of dramatic conflicts. It soon becomes clear, however, that Who by Fire is populated not so much by characters as by dramatic engines — figures that exist solely to inject intensity on demand. The tense relationship that develops between Jeff and Aliocha, for instance, becomes a stated source of frustration for Max. But as neither his relationship to his sister nor to Jeff is developed in any significant way, there is no context in which to comprehend his behavior, and when he later tells Jeff that it is as if he does not exist, the line resonates as unintentional meta-commentary on his place within the larger drama. Aliocha, likewise, does not do much more than stand at the nexus of two overlapping dramas, triangulating between not just Jeff and Max, but also her father and Blake. As in the female-driven half of Genèse, she exists here less in her own right than to serve a structural purpose.
Even structurally, though, Who by Fire finally fails to cohere. It is unclear, for instance, why the film, though ostensibly an ensemble piece, spends so much of its runtime following Jeff. The late-breaking death of a minor character, likewise, brings Who by Fire close not to tragedy, but plain incoherence. Indeed, the film does not end so much as deflate in multiple directions, including about five different endings — all portentous, none convincing. In a film-festival environment where artistic novelty is often defined in terms of surface stylistic difference, it is on some level refreshing to find a film that falters on the more prosaic terms of script and character. But whereas Lesage’s Genèse impressed despite such flaws, Who by Fire leaves much more to be desired, its drama failing to go beyond the merely schematic. — LAWRENCE GARCIA
Credit: Film at Lincoln Center
My Undesirable Friends
In the intro to My Undesirable Friends: Part 1 – Last Air in Moscow, director Julia Loktev states that none of the subjects or herself could have known what was about to happen in the coming months. It’s Moscow late in the fall of 2021, and Loktev has arrived to research how her dissident journalist friends are now getting labeled as “foreign agents” by the Russian government. Loktev first meets up with Anna Nemzer, who shows her around TV Rain and brings her into the broader Moscow counter-cultural scene. Rain is a well-organized operation, a full-fledged news network that even has guests playing poppy protest songs. It seems like the liberal order is a permanent one. But, as we the audience already know, that will not be the case. There’s a classical dramatic tension to My Undesirable Friends — with us the viewers aware of the documentary subjects’ destinies before they are. It makes it all the more haunting how quiet the slow build over the near five-and-a-half-hour runtime is.
Loktev keeps her camera close to her subjects, almost too close for comfort. She shoots closeups with wide-angle lenses, achieving an extraordinary intimacy while always showing her characters as subject to their environment. There are two really striking aspects to this approach, the first being that it was essentially organic. In a post-critic’s screening Q&A, Loktev explained that she had planned to work with a cameraman, but at an initial meeting being hosted at one of the journalist’s apartments, they told Loktev they would feel more comfortable if it was just her. Loktev began filming on her phone and didn’t stop, keeping her phone close as the women’s precarious journalistic situation deteriorated before anyone could believe it. The discrete nature of Loktev’s camera lent itself to security as well, but that is not to say that Loktev herself becomes a fly on the wall. The director creates the kind of intimate portraiture that is usually more reserved for fiction here.
The second really extraordinary thing about this unflinching intimacy is it becomes clear just how young most of the film’s subjects are. Most of the dissident journalists and pundits at TV Rain are in their 20s, clawing against a system that is trying to keep them from taking control over their own future. That becomes a complete impossibility by Chapter 4 of the film, when Russia launches its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, shocking even the closest of observers. What first was a creeping feeling that something was changing, the feeling that brought Loktev and her camera to Moscow in the first place, turned out to be an all-too-real omen. The world had changed forever, and everyone’s lives were now completely upheaved. In the last two chapters of My Undesirable Friends, the characters’ youth that was hidden behind the professionalism of their news recordings but revealed by Loktev’s intimacy completely slips away — even if they are still literally young, their youth is gone, and you can see it on their faces. The journalists are forced by circumstance to no longer have lives of their own and still, incredibly, they keep reporting for as long as they can before it becomes clear that they only have hours left to flee the country entirely. Even in the collapse of optimism, their drive never falters. — ALEX LEI
Eephus
At first, Eephus holds the potential to make one quite sad. For this writer, the effect did not seem intentional and was more about my response to the film. It’s a movie about men playing their last amateur baseball game on their local field before it gets torn down for a school development. It’s a confident debut, where director Carson Lund is enthusiastically staging his ensemble in a wide, intricate mise en scène, which is refreshing in a time when that art seems to be in crisis. But in some ways it also feels like it was for its own sake, as if every camera movement or snappy piece of editing is there because the people behind the images are just happy to be making them. This is not a bad thing in and of itself, but it does make one aware that they are watching a debut feature. The jokes don’t always land, and it can make the viewer feel like they have become one of the men sitting in the dugout, tired enough to just give up on the game when the umpires leave. In reality, this writer was sitting in a press screening for a dying industry in a declining medium watching men play a game of baseball for practically no audience and increasingly no point when the game isn’t even being officially sanctioned anymore.
In the twilight of their game, things start to get dark, literally and figuratively. There are no lights shining on the diamond, and the sun has gone down. The greens of the field turn to black, faces of the players sink into blue hues, and the sky is barely defined against the tips of trees. They can’t see anything, yet they’re still trying to play. The game becomes an apparent impossibility, but in that moment is an opportunity for creativity. What starts off as a banal game — if tinged with the particular sadness of knowing it’s the last one — becomes a revitalizing experience, where the men in their refusal to give up on their ostensibly pointless game find new ways to keep going, and Lund finds new images out of the entropic void of cinema.
Eephus is ultimately a success, then, though a qualified one in some ways, as its elevator pitch as a last-day-of-school-hangout-movie dressed in baseball uniforms ends up proving what a balancing act and how subtly driven a film like Dazed and Confused (1993) actually is — perhaps it’s not much of a criticism to say that Eephus comes up short in trying to match it. But it’s motivation to refuse to move on is thrilling, as are the ways Lund breaks out and creates a genuinely unexpected final two acts just by continuing the logic with which he opens the film. It may not rise to the hallowed ranks of debut masterpieces, but that’s okay — it’s a work that proves Lund’s considerable potential as a director, and that he’ll continue to keep on with cinema no matter how small, niche, or pushed-to-the-sidelines our beloved medium becomes. At the end, this writer felt less like the men on the field wondering why the hell they’re still trying to play this pointless game, and more like the old man on the sidelines, still keeping stats regardless, for the love of it all. — ALEX LEI
Credit: Courtesy of A24
On Becoming a Guinea Fowl
Shula (Susan Chardy) makes an early impression in Rungano Nyoni’s newest film, On Becoming a Guinea Fowl. Driving home from a fancy dinner party, adorned in a rhinestone headpiece and Missy Elliot-esque jumpsuit a la “The Rain,” she stops her Mercedes with a sigh. Her Uncle Fred (Roy Chisha) is lying dead on the side of the road. Rather than being upset, she’s composed, almost annoyed. She makes a few calls, but never cries. What brought her to this place?
True to her costuming in the very first scene, Shula is the antithesis of her Zambian surroundings. Unlike the rest of the aunties and cousins who are prepping for Uncle Fred’s days-long funeral, Shula wants out. She books a hotel room almost immediately after her mother’s home is turned inside out, looking for some peace. But, of course, the aunties in their chitenges find her. They interrupt a Zoom call where Shula’s British accent is fully on display, crowding her hotel door with deadpan, judgemental gazes. Snooping around the hotel like a group of detectives, one of them sniffs the shampoo, only to ask, “Did you bathe?” During some funerals in Zambia, you’re not supposed to bathe until the procession is over. This sign of disrespect establishes a specific dance that Shula is avoiding. Knowing Shula is not hitting her marks, the aunties check her, and they have a very clear sense of the choreography of where and what she should be doing.
The generational divide continues throughout On Becoming a Guinea Fowl. Shula’s duty is simple. She must take care of her Mother (Doris Naulapwa) and provide for her entire family. Shula accepts begrudgingly, but despite almost exclusively being surrounded by women, Shula does not connect with most of them, except for her riotous cousin Nsansa (Elizabeth Chisela), who she initially shuns for her theatrical behavior. But soon these two begin to slip away into the pantry to drink beer and talk shit. Much younger than the aunties, they share a sense of disillusionment with their family that unspools overtime. Wanting to multiply their numbers, both Shula and Nsansa go to pick up their younger cousin Bupe (Esther Singini) from school. When they arrive, Bupe is nonverbal and sick. They take her to the hospital rather than home, where she reveals the truth about Uncle Fred via a pre-recorded video. While watching, Bupe’s voiceover is adopted by Shula, suggesting their shared experience. We never get to fully hear Bupe’s confession, but like Shula, we already know what she has to say.
Bupe’s illness, or suicide attempt, which happens almost halfway through the film, works as a reality check. Until this moment, On Becoming a Guinea Fowl has contained dream-like sequences that land as surreal, sometimes even funny when Nsansa is involved. They reflect Shula’s headspace, which is never 100% on the ground — going through the motions of Uncle Fred’s funeral has left Shula in a dissociative state. She doesn’t react to much, even when she sees younger versions of herself floating around from time to time. But Bupe’s hospitalization changes the tone of the film. The ironic thing, then, is that everybody already knows about Uncle Fred, either through experience or whispers. Shula shows the video to her Mother, who shuts it off midway, stating, “we just keep quiet.” Everyone compartmentalizes their pain before moving on. This is how Uncle Fred’s sexual abuse has always been treated and allowed to endure.
Now, Shula’s trauma is twofold. There is the abuse itself, but also of the silence of her family, the aunties primarily, who choose to prioritize in memory the good facets of Uncle Fred rather than the ill. Stuck between a rock and a hard place, Shula’s dissociation and composure now make sense. Speaking up is very much not on the agenda — just look what happened to Bupe. Even Shula’s father, who wasn’t related by blood to Uncle Fred, defends the man, asking Shula if she wants him “to dig up the corpse and ask it what happened?”
Still, despite these uncompassionate circumstances, we also find ourselves witnessing a transformation in Shula, Bupe, and Nsansa, who also admits to suffering from Uncle Fred’s abuse, one that begins with acknowledgement. During one of their pantry hideaways, the aunties circle Shula and Nsansa. Unsure of what’s about to go down, one of the aunties speaks up. “If it was in my power, I would stop anything bad from happening to you.” This expression perhaps comes a little too late, the abuse having already been inflicted, but it does point toward the future. Shula and the gang will be the next group of mothers and aunties, and they will most certainly speak up. — CLARA CUCCARO
No Other Land
From the summer of 2019 to the winter of 2023, Basel Adra — along with co-directors Yuval Abraham and Handan Ballal — documented how his village in Masafer Yatta in the occupied West Bank was being systematically cleared by the Israeli government to make way for a military training ground. There is a morbid irony to Israel’s legalistic logic, in that it is not as if the Israeli military has to build anything there to train, as their purpose is in large part the displacement of peoples. Largely over the course of Israel’s history, and most horrifically in the last year, that displacement has been the ethnic cleansing Palestinians and their genocide in Gaza at the hands of the IDF. While the total annihilation of Palestine was not in the world’s eye in 2019, those who had their homes ripped down by bulldozers and who were shot with American-made rifles tried desperately to get people to pay attention. As Adra says in the opening, “I started filming when we started to end.”
No Other Land is an activist film through and through, both necessarily in its content — trying to document the destruction of one’s home — but also in trying to prevent it through media. It’s a terrible part of reality, but it has an effect. In the middle of the film is an archival clip of Tony Blair walking around the village for seven minutes, which stopped the bulldozers for a short while. When the villagers go to protest their forced relocation multiple times a week, it too results in pauses to the incursions by Israel. Even when people get arrested or brutalized by the police, it keeps everyone else on the land for just a little longer. Yet as the film progresses, the film always feels more dire — not because of some futility (although audiences will necessarily sense some inevitability as they know that Al-Aqsa Flood and Israel’s genocidal response are right around the corner) — but because the violence constantly escalates. Not just the police and military, but armed settlers start to appear, even shooting locals with impunity. By the end, a mob of masked settlers descends Masafer Yatta, with even Adra getting hit by a thrown rock while filming. This is one of the last straws for many in the village, and so many at the end leave to never return, another modern Nabka unfolding faster and faster right before the viewer’s eyes.
These images, of course, already flood the media sphere, but No Other Land goes further than just presenting the issue at hand, instead trying to investigate the humanitarian conundrum of outsiders trying to journalistically document it. The co-director, Yuval Abraham, is Israeli, and although he is obviously sympathetic to the cause of a liberated Palestine, Adra makes a difficult point in one of their conservations, telling him, “You come here from the outside, you can leave, you have a job.” To Adra, there is no separation between being an activist filmmaker and living — to be an activist filmmaker is to try to save his and his family’s way of life. Abraham, no matter how sympathetic, still has all the freedoms of the oppressor. That is not to knock Abraham, or any other filmmaker/journalist/activist that gets involved with a cause that is not their own, but it is an essential matter to keep in mind. And while Adra may have stopped filming in 2023, the awful history in progress marches on: on the day of No Other Land’s screening at NYFF, Adra’s activist father was arbitrarily abducted by soldiers. — ALEX LEI
