Pavements

“The world’s most important and influential band breaks up and it’s not a big deal.” Thus begins Alex Ross Perry’s Pavements, establishing from the jump the veins of both puckishness and earnestness that will run through this atypical, asymmetrical portrait of early-’90s indie rock wunderkinds Pavement. And on both aesthetic and thematic terms, it’s a savvy approach, matching the shabby, convention-busting tenor the band embraced as their public persona. In construction, Perry’s latest project is a docufiction melange built from four distinct parts: a BTS-primed documentary surrounding the group’s 2022 reunion tour; a look at Slanted! Enchanted!, a Pavement-themed musical Perry put on (also in 2022); coverage of a museum exhibit the director curated in conjunction with the musical’s production; and a parody of big-budget musician-based biopics. In its conception of “narrative” shape and approach to (de)construction of myth, then, Pavements lands closer to Margin Scorsese’s Rolling Thunder Revue, or to a lesser degree Todd Haynes’ The Velvet Underground, than your average dime-a-dozen rock ‘n roll re-tellings that clog streaming services on a regular basis.

Of course, the predictable flip side to this quartering is that some of the film’s various trajectories work better than others. Aided by Robert Greene’s editing work, Pavements is at its mischievous best when assembling actual events from the band’s history next to the film’s fictional biopic segments, mining the faux-melodrama built into the DNA of such Hollywood productions for levity, especially when set beside archival footage that actively refutes any such conveniences of incident or psychology; most emblematic of that here might be the film’s presentation of the infamous Lollapalooza mud-slinging and its aftermath. Even the purely fictional remains actively, amiably playful: it feels like a patented Perry, purveyor of the human, moment when Joe Keery, “playing” frontman Stephen Malkmus, turns down SNL while being distracted by animal pratfall videos on the TV, while elsewhere it’s tough to imagine something more antithetical to the rocker than when Keery muses about the role in fake behind the scenes footage: “It’s good for my career. Maybe win an award.” Still, despite the obvious logical basis for this approach to telling the story of Pavement, it’s likely to remain firmly rooted in variable mileage territory. The parodical is here handled more with a bemused wink than teeth-bared cheesing, and some viewers will find only ouroboros humor in the film’s send up narrative storytelling conventions and ironic implications, especially living in the post-Dewey Cox world that we do.

And then there are Pavements’ less consistently successful elements: its coverage of Slanted! Enchanted! and the museum exhibit. The latter feels largely like an afterthought, and a concession for those who are craving more straightforward feeling from Pavements, though it does deliver a few welcomely candid moments, and gets at the genuine reverence Perry clearly holds for the band. Documentation of the Slanted! Enchanted!, however, is a little more more crudely incorporated, proving demonstrative of the dangling threads to which the film can occasionally fall victim, in this particular instance hooking viewers at first with the musical’s raison d’etre — marrying the slacker detachment of Pavement’s music and lyrical content with the dogged earnestness of musical theater — but then doing little to further explore this notion, either in its artistic process or any shifting understanding of its material aims. Instead, viewers are largely left from this point to take in talking head observations from the musical’s players (Zoe Lister-Jones among them) and glimpse bits of its workshopping that are cut into the film’s larger mosaic.

Still, there’s something mildly irresistible about Pavements’ sly and lightweight nature, which is at once wholly reflective of the band’s original spirit and at odds with their enduring musical and cultural legacy that has developed in the intervening years. Like the band itself, Perry film’s is iterative in fascinating ways, layering fiction and nonfiction in an effort to destabilize notions of either, exploring more legibly what is latent in the heart of all biography. Perry knows the essential limitations of straightforward portraiture, hagiographic or not, and so delivers something admittedly flawed but far freer. The result is a film less interested in dancing in the embers of nostalgia and mythology than kicking them up in the air in order to be awash in the experience of them. The effect is ephemeral, but Pavements understands (and Pavement understood) that it only ever was. — LUKE GORHAM

The Last Dance

It may be somewhat surprising to learn that The Last Dance has become the highest-grossing (domestic) film in Hong Kong history, if only because we’re so used to the idea that the only movies which can really achieve box office success these days are franchise films or effects-driven spectaculars. Indeed, the other five films in Hong Kong’s all-time box office chart (whether foreign or domestic) are Avengers and Avatar titles. The Last Dance, though, is the kind of movie that almost never becomes a major hit (the odd Oppenheimer aside), especially not here in the U.S. — a serious drama made for grown-ups. What accounts for this success? There are a few things: the charm and popularity of its cast, led by legendary comic actors taking on dramatic roles; the handsomeness of its production, elegantly shot in the actual Hong Kong (as opposed to the virtual Hong Kong or period-piece Hong Kong of so many current local and Mainland productions); the resonance of its themes, contrasting traditional cultural practices with the crassness of modern commercialism as well as the righteousness of contemporary feminist principles. But above all, the film’s appeal lies in its caution, a white elephant approach to complex themes that nods in all kinds of directions while for the most part not really engaging with any of them, or denouncing anything but the most cartoonish of cultural villainy.

Dayo Wong, a longtime popular comedian who found little success in film until 2023’s smash hit courtroom drama A Guilty Conscience, stars as a wedding planner forced into a late-in-life career change thanks to the Covid pandemic. Weddings may not be big business anymore, but people are always dying, so he takes over the partnership in a funeral company from his girlfriend’s uncle. Dayo handles the front end of the business — customer service, flower arranging, mortuary services, and the like — while his partner, played by legendary comedian Michael Hui, handles the ritualistic aspects of the funeral. A Taoist priest, Hui performs the “Breaking Hell’s Gates” ceremony (an on-screen title before the film begins informs us that this is a piece of vital Hong Kong cultural heritage), which allows for the soul of the departed to escape Hell and be reincarnated. The inevitable clashes ensue as Dayo’s modern ideas (tacky merchandising, the Internet) contrast with Hui’s more traditional, conservative views.

These clashes are reflected, too, in the conflicts between Hui and his grown up children, played by Michelle Wai (who is terrific, delivering the best and most complex performance in the film) and Chu Pak-hong. Wai is an EMT and somewhat estranged from her father because his Taoism is of the “all women are filthy” variety. Chu works for his dad as a kind of assistant priest, but for him it’s just a job; he doesn’t believe in it all. The film’s structure is generally episodic: Dayo gets a case and screws it up and learns a lesson; Dayo gets another case and impresses Hui with his human kindness; Wai gets a case and loses her one maternal figure (a restaurant owner played by Elaine Jin). There’s a late film subplot with Dayo’s girlfriend that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense: she doesn’t even appear as an actual character until three-fourths of the way through the movie, and he’s way too old an actor for their storyline to work at all. But in the end, everyone learns important lessons in a tasteful mix of light comedy and emotional drama, and they all grow closer together.

The film’s finale confronts the issue of sexism in Taoist funeral practices head-on. Wai, unlike her brother, always wanted to follow in her father’s footsteps but was not allowed to because of patriarchal mindsets. But in the end, Dayo gives her a chance, and argues with a phalanx of angry priests about it. Hui, the voice of authority, takes her side, but pointedly only in a letter. This is indicative of the film’s approach to these complex issues: rather than see the characters themselves change their ideas, they are instead asserted, either through simple dialogue or, in the case of Dayo and Hui’s detente, glossed over by the shared singing of an old Cantonese opera song (if I’m understanding the provenance of their song correctly). It’s Dayo, the stand-in for modernity, who asserts and imposes feminism on the priests, not Hui, who merely okays it from somewhere off-screen. It’s a superficial washing away of fundamentally contradictory ideals, one that tides over the messiness of reality with comforting platitudes, slow-motion dancing, and a soundtrack of swelling orchestral strings.

It’s that soundtrack that gives the game away: a film that truly respected the cultural importance of the “Breaking Hell’s Gate” would let the climactic performance play out in its entirety, capturing perhaps a dying art on film for the benefit of preservation and posterity. Director Anselm Chan, however, records over the ceremony’s traditional Chinese music with Western-style melodramatic orchestration. Maybe one could sell that decision as a commentary on the melding of tradition and modernity, much like the film’s attempt to merge Taoism and feminism. But to this writer, it reads as nothing more than cheap sentimentalism, an admittedly successful ploy for mass success rather than the singular expression of an artistic point of view. — SEAN GILMAN

The Things You Kill

“People are cheap, water is expensive.” So says Reza (Erkan Kolçak Köstendil), the mysterious and curiously educated drifter who stumbles into Ali’s (Ekin Koç) withered patch of garden, and who just as mysteriously transplants himself into the latter’s spiraling life. The garden is located in the middle of nowhere, mountains and worlds away from where Ali lives. It’s not clear if he’s based in Ankara, although Gazi University — where he teaches American literature on a contract basis — certainly is. It’s also never really clear why he tends to the outback’s desiccated weeds with such resolve, or where its aggressive guard dog came from. But what remains palpable throughout Alireza Khatami’s third feature, The Things You Kill, is its darkly comic unease. Embroiled in a haze of guilt, shock, and foreboding, our hapless protagonist periodically confronts dead ends, while desperation and resentment bubble up inside him. And so he snaps.

The crux of the film has been stated, somewhat overtly, in Khatami’s second feature (co-directed with Ali Asgari): in one of Terrestrial Verses’ anthological segments, a renowned filmmaker tussles with Iran’s censors over concerns that his screenplay condones and even endorses “Western culture’s” conceptual import of patricide. Engaging hopelessly with the censor’s Orwellian doublespeak, the filmmaker — no doubt a fictionalized Khatami — tears out offending chunks from his script until little remains: the father does not beat the mother; the mother does not die; the son does not kill the father, etc. By and large, this offers a summary of The Things You Kill, grafted from Tehran to Turkey in metatextual fashion. Whereas parochialism and a resolutely patriarchal attitude positioned the satirical bent of Terrestrial Verses as a chiefly national issue, the acerbic yet deeply intimate register of Khatami’s latest speaks as much to personal demons as it does to broader societal ones.

Returning home after more than a decade abroad, Ali finds himself at the mercy of several moving parts in an ongoing midlife crisis, each problem arising before he scarcely has the time to process, much less resolve, the previous one. His low sperm count is a personal source of guilt and inadequacy, which he conceals from his wife Hazar (Hazar Ergüçlü). His teaching job pays okay but not handsomely, and the university’s proposed budget cuts place him squarely on the chopping block. The pipes in his mother’s (Güliz Şirinyan) home are blocked, and its patriarch Hamit (Ercan Kesal), much to Ali’s chagrin, refuses to have them fixed. Ali’s mother is partly paralyzed, and before he can explore any restorative options, she dies. Such is the situation on the ground when Ali belatedly learns from one of his sisters that Hamit had previously struck their mother, rendering her unable to walk for two days. Suspecting his father, therefore, of some complicity in his mother’s passing, Ali reaches out to more relatives and snoops around the family home, only to catch him already with a younger, married woman (İpek Türktan).

Although rightly presented as a psychological thriller, The Things You Kill generally eschews the genre’s more derivative leanings to proffer a disarmingly earnest meditation on identity in crisis. This crisis isn’t solely the purview of a long-standing masculinity in shambles, though Ali does contend with his father’s shameful legacy and his own equally shameful inability to square up to it. Rather, much is sublimated over the course of days and weeks, mostly as he shuttles in between conversations and appointments, while his relationship with Reza takes a peculiar turn. With growing awareness of his distance from family and an increasing gulf setting apart thought from action, our protagonist dissociates, and his garden — despite its barren trappings — brims consequently with fertile psychoanalytic imagination. The dissociation arrives without warning, resists handy caricature, and juxtaposes Ali and Reza (the two halves of the director’s name) in untidy, ambiguous tension. Neither polar opposites nor muddled metaphors, they impugn the assumption of thematic and narrative coherence often ascribed to translations from the subjective to the sociological.

Indeed, translation plays an outsized role here, whether as the subject of Ali’s university lectures, the cross-cultural shift from a Farsi script to an ensemble of Turkish actors, or in the transmutative conceit at the film’s heart. Opening with Hazar recounting her dream — is it one? — of Hamit to Ali, The Things You Kill appears to divine the inevitable violence that has seeped through generations of men and that will in turn stain Ali’s hands. But what of its closing sequence, when this dream manifests like a Möbius strip, only to go beyond and hint at further iteration? A hint of pessimism tinges the contours of this shapeshifting narrative — at once social parable, character study, metaphysical puzzle, and propulsive nail-biter — but not without forcibly dislocating the viewer beyond its otherwise neat and distinct confines. The Arabic etymology for translation, as Ali notes, borrows from the signifier “to kill,” and in the same vein, comprehension precedes some form of destruction in the film. “Did your Mom tell bedtime stories?” Hazar asks him. “No. She didn’t like stories. She loved riddles.” — MORRIS YANG

Three Friends

Boasting roughly a dozen features and a handful of short films, French cineaste Emmanuel Mouret has proven himself a peculiar taste and charm for specific circles of European arthouse enthusiasts. His rom-coms and dramas usually either follow a central figure in a series of different encounters, relationships, or situationships (Please, Please Me and Caprice) or in the fashion of a network narrative revolving around a group of characters/couples who, bored and dissatisfied with their imperfect lives, search for an ideal relationship (The Art of Love and Love Affair(s)). His most recent effort, Three Friends, belongs to the latter designation. Here, set in the beautiful atmosphere of Lyon — which, as the film suggests from the beginning, stands as a character in its own right — the film opens with the omniscient voiceover narration of Victor (Vincent Macaigne), who introduces the remaining characters, specifically the trio of Joan (India Hair), Alice (Camille Cottin), and Rebecca (Sara Forestier). Joan, an English language school teacher, is about to end her marriage with Victor, who later unexpectedly dies in a car accident. On the one hand, this lends a humorous layer to the occasional voiceover narrations; on the other, it later allows Joan to shape a more intimate new relationship with Thomas (Damien Bonnard), who also replaces Victor as the new teacher in school. Oscillating amidst all of this is the film’s depiction of the relationship between Alice (Joan’s colleague and friend) and Éric (Grégoire Ludig), who both have developed secret love affairs with other people: Alice with a well-known painter, and Éric with Alice’s best friend Rebecca.

It’s not a stretch to see how Three Friends, like most of Mouret’s other films, intricately and playfully explores the relationships of flawed characters in a manner not unlike Woody Allen — indeed, it’s possible to view the film as a unique, modern mix of Hannah and Her Sisters with the particular flair of contemporary French cinema, specifically something like the works of Mia Hansen-Løve. But apart from Mouret’s multi-layered and witty modes of storytelling, which due to the film’s colorful visual style and dialogue-heavy narrative give the impression of an illustrated novel, what stands out most here is the subtle balance that the director forms — or, more appropriately, rediscovers — between slice-of-life realism and a more controlled and refined artistic stylization. Mouret’s choreographic approach to mise en scène — frequently emphasized via classical scoring — builds itself upon physical and intellectual kineticism — we constantly see the characters in conversation as they walk alongside each other, even in a small room, or as they wander in and around Lyon’s broader cityscape — and further enhances the film’s thematic depth. The framing and composition of the interior scenes are meticulous, often using domestic architectural spaces like doorways and windows to create a frame-within-a-frame effect. A visual technique that, on the one hand, emphasizes the emotional distance between the characters and their inner lives, and, on the other, portrays them as both physically and emotionally enclosed within their spaces, is contrasted with and completed by the exterior scenes of public urban spaces (parks, bars, museums, art galleries, even a short trip to the countryside), to considerable painterly effect.

In many ways, then, Three Friends is a film about questioning and reflection. The characters spend much of the runtime contemplating and reevaluating their choices, desires, and the paths they have chosen. Whether in the form of a small chamber piece or as an orchestration of a greater urban symphony, the film catches its characters in different liminal spaces, in the personal dilemmas between what they want and what they have. This (tragi)comic tension drives much of Three Friends’ emotional weight, eschewing easy answers or moral conclusions in favor of embracing life’s fundamental uncertainty, as well as love, loss, friendship, and even benign disloyalty. The characters’ imperfections are not flaws to be fixed, but rather aspects of their humanity to be examined and understood. And as much as the trio of women tend to forgo open spaces, Mouret takes care to provide a fresh, effervescent atmosphere for his characters and viewers alike. — AYEEN FOROOTAN

Your Touch Makes Others Invisible

Sinhalese filmmaker Rajee Samarasinghe has been making exquisite short films for the past several years, works that hold out the suggestion of narrative meaning but are often more focused on the particulars of light and landscape in Sri Lanka. With his feature debut, Samarasinghe has produced something rather different. Your Touch Makes Others Invisible is both a documentary about forced disappearances during the government’s 30-year-long war against the Tamil Tiger separatists, and a hushed, often nonverbal tone poem on the themes of mourning, trauma, and absence.

If those last three nouns seem familiar in film critical discourse, it’s probably because they have been prime movers in the last two decades of international cinema. Trauma has become a touchstone for artists to explore the intersection of personal and historical meaning, the ways that both individual and national psyches negotiate the horrors of late modernity. From Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Lav Diaz to Lisandro Alonso and Kamila Andini, directors have committed themselves to plumbing the psychological scars of genocide as well as the physical traces left on the land itself.

In other words, Samarasinghe’s film speaks the contemporary lingua franca of modern art cinema. This observation is by no means a criticism of Your Touch; it merely notes that some of its more oblique elements may have a clearer interpretation than the filmmaker might expect. In an opening text, Samarasinghe explains to the viewer that the film represents his first exploration of northern Sri Lanka, the Tigers’ former stronghold and a place Sinhalese Sri Lankans seldom venture into unless they were part of the invading military. We hear direct testimony from one woman who appears throughout the film, sounding a refrain of maternal loss. Her son was kidnapped by soldiers years ago, and she continues to believe that he is alive somewhere, and that she may one day meet him by chance. While other interviewees speak of their need for closure, this mother seems intent on ripping the scabs off every day, holding her pain as a self-destructive gesture of hope.

Passages of direct address alternate with more direct, poetic imagery: a young girl bleeding profusely from the mouth, or religious rituals involving fire and the mortification of the flesh. Other segments emphasize apparent normalcy: a girl eating a popsicle in a country store, or soldiers raising their guns at children in the forest. Samarasinghe frequently uses drone shots to display the bustling market streets and semi-suburban arrangement of homes, suggesting that the recent horrors have been erased from everyday life even as they are palpably present.

There is an odd formal refusal at work throughout Your Touch Makes Others Invisible. The film toggles between the quotidian and the mysterious, the abstract and the explicit, never quite achieving synthesis. While this could be read as a growing pain of Samarasinghe’s expansion into feature length, one could also reasonably see it as a strategy of disruption. History and its blatant suppression sit side by side, refusing to cohere. This is a film of conflicting tendencies, and as viewers find themselves incapable of arriving at a definitive historical meaning, so too are the Sri Lankan people stranded in a suspended state of historical meaning. The film, then, treats montage as an open wound, two ends of a single flesh that cannot heal. — MICHAEL SICINSKI

Kajolrekha

While production houses continue to mine disparate art forms for content, the question of how to transpose the art of one medium onto another often evades their grasp. Such empty regurgitation without engagement with the source art form exists only to provide exoticizing spectacles that, more often or not, supplant or even trample the source art form which cannot compete with the film in terms of scale, clout, or funding. Measly scraps in the form of credits acknowledgements are the best they can hope for, as these films seldom attempt to deepen our appreciation for the art form, only exploiting it as a plausible holding structure to ground their extravagances.

Kajolrekha, however, does more than just acknowledge its source material, which, in this case, is a 400-year-old Bengali folk ballad from the region of Eastern Mymensingh in Bangladesh (collected in the Maimansingha Gitika). The opening scene itself features a musical theatre performance that acts as a prelude to the main narrative, and unlike some lesser directors, Giassudin Selim does not think that filming other art forms is something inherently “uncinematic.” Cinema, in his hands, becomes an essayistic medium to understand this art form, as his camera shifts between the dances of the roving narrator and his retinue of musicians. By laying bare the rules of his source medium, Selim primes us to appreciate the sequences and his cinema better, as a fairytale ballad doesn’t necessarily follow the same narrative rules as a novel, or even classical cinema.

The main narrative of Kajolrekha concerns the travails of Dhwaneshwer, who was born in the distinguished household of a merchant (Iresh Zaker). His weakness for gambling loses him his possessions and prestige and, if it wasn’t for the timely intervention of his servant, possibly his 13-year-old daughter, Kajolrekha (Sadia Ayman). His fortunes change when a saint gives him a sacred bird, after which he regains his wealth while acquiring a new bunch of slaves as well. Naturally, this also increases his pressure to find a suitable bridegroom for his daughter, though he is unsatisfied with the options. Of course, he opts for the sacred parrot’s counsel instead of his daughter’s, who in turn informs him of his daughter’s marriage to a dead prince (Sariful Razz) in a temple. Disregarding the sound advice of his wife, he leaves his daughter in the temple to tend to the duties necessary to revive the prince, only for a newly purchased slave (Rafiath Rashid Mithila) — pejoratively named Konkon Dashi — to usurp Kajolrekha’s place as his wife when the prince is revived. Kajolrekha (played as an adult by Mondira Chakraborthy), however, cannot defend herself, as she is condemned to silence by the mandates of the parrot, and the film follows her quiet suffering and the romance that develops between her and the prince.

A cursory glance at the plot itself points to the greater role of predestination over agency, and this might not sit well with viewers more accustomed to the novelistic machinations of character development. The opening scene and Selim’s subsequent handling of his material, however, remind us that a fairytale ballad is no novel, or even a standard narrative. Incident and its associated emotion take precedence over character, which is why Selim’s visuals embrace the amor fati of his ur-text. The lush verdure of the Sundarbans marshlands serves as a gorgeous backdrop for the proceedings, but the film is much more than a mere collage of pretty pictures anchored by song and narration. Vertical pans and circular tracks tinge the narrative with eerie predestination, trapping and circling his characters amidst the gridwork of their bamboo houses and the engulfing canopies of his forests. His characters might obey the dictates of fate, but they never do so silently. Words collapse into a cathartic outcry in the form of song, sending a ripple across the fabric of fate.

True to the roots of his ballads, the actors employ an array of stylized gestures befitting their character’s (or archetype’s) status and emotions, with the people of nobler bearing emoting and carrying out their tasks differently than their lower counterparts. The slave’s ascent to nobility cannot conceal her lowly origins, and this emerges as a major plot point in the film’s narrative machinery. Songs themselves are a privilege, apart from the omniscient narrator, only granted to those of noble blood, with the slaves either scheming or airing out their concerns to the nobles through mere speech. While Selim’s respect and love for the medium does translate to sympathy for the main characters, allowing us to bask in the agonizing romanticism brought about by Kajolrekha’s plight, it’s hard not to chafe at his treatment of slaves and uncritical examination of inherent nobility. Though it is indeed admirable that he did not clunkily distort his characters for politically correct respectability, one finds it hard to feel whole-heartedly for Kajolrekha or the prince without ignoring the implicit violence at play here. After all, an art form grows not only by a thoughtful appreciation of its ideas, but also by interrogating its biases and conventions that we normally take for granted. — ANAND SUDHA

First Person Plural

In Sandro Aguilar’s 2015 short film, Undisclosed Recipients, two lovers meet at the Paredes de Coura Festival in Portugal. The night is a liquid black, lights and faces and bodies moving through the space. There’s a kiss, then another. It’s a film of darkness and desire, a deepening lust that gives way to catharsis. For a moment, lovers become one, the overwhelming darkness giving way to a feeling of connection. Like many of Aguilar’s works, such as Mariphasa and Armour, Undisclosed Recipients takes place at night — where the line between the real and imagined is obscured.

In First Person Plural, Aguilar’s latest film, his characters step into the light, but they’re still moving through a dream. A figure in a suit, their face hidden by a sheer white cover, traverses a maximalist space that brims with hints of a deep love. He writes a letter, the light from a music box illuminating the blank canvas of his covered visage. Even while solitary, the figure evokes René Magritte’s painting The Lovers II, a surreal image of two lovers kissing beyond their veils — intimately connected but deeply alienated.

As lovers meet for the first time in First Person Plural, Irene (Isabel Abreu), pulls up the veil of her husband, Mateus (Albano Jerónimo). They kiss. Their voices are deep, relaxed, and sensual. We aren’t in a real world, but a heightened one, ruled by the drowsy influences of sickness. The movie moves in waves of emotion: melancholy and whimsy, security and uncertainty, capturing a sense of familiar relationships still touched with unknowability. Wavering between romanticism and deep loneliness, the film uses absurdism and dream logic to interrupt the comfort of modern life.

Although its narrative is about a couple on vacation with their teenage son, First Person Plural is built less on narrative incident than it is on sensations. The frame often overflows with things — plants, objects, trinkets — and its overwhelming fullness inspires a hyperrealism in tension with the film’s aloof structure and characters. Cinematographer Rui Xavier’s camera moves softly, with a languid smoothness that doesn’t inspire clarity so much as it does a passive strangeness. The film builds on this movement with a quietly romantic score, a whispering soundscape, and indulges in slow crossfades that reinforce a sense of dreaming.

As we move through the space, it becomes more tangled, like a kudzu vine overtaking an environment. Intentions, traumas, and desires become increasingly confused with one another, and the relations between different characters more complicated and uncertain. Rather than moving toward clarity, First Person Plural moves away from it. If we begin the film with a sense that, despite our connections with one another through blood or love, we are all on our own solitary planet, the depth of that loneliness becomes complicated by the tightening grip of the weed that overtakes and overwhelms our existence. The film’s atmosphere, then, gives the sensation of being strangled. Despite romantic and comedic interludes, the movie deepens towards a profound, alienating melancholia. Characters often speak of various ailments and sickness; the side effects of vaccines, tumours, and disappointments. It’s as if the line that separates the interior world from the surfaces of the exterior has been irreparably broken, as the inner thoughts flow outward and the poisons of the surface world flow inward.

There are often moments here that the audience can feel as though the film is escaping them, and if First Person Plural maintains interest throughout, it’s largely due to the performance of Albano Jerónimo. His performance as Mateus is spontaneous and unpredictable, charming and frightening in turns, as he seems more and less human than anyone else in the film. In one scene, as a phone is ringing, he becomes entranced by his own reflection. He blows hair out of his face. He seems adrift and defamiliarized, as if he’s unsure of his own place in the world. Not long afterward, as his son comes to the door, Mateus behaves once again as if he’s in front of a mirror. As the two of them speak, he reaches out to touch his reflection, increasingly unsure of his own reality. One even senses that he’s moving through an afterlife, as if he’s long crumbled under the weight of history.

The pleasure of his performance seems rooted in the heart of the film’s tension: how do we find meaning and connection in the modern world? Set in a bourgeois environment heavy with the echoes of colonialism, dictatorship, and privilege, the movie interrupts and subverts expectations. The absurdism undercuts the comfort of the characters’ lives, exposing the empty satisfaction of their existence. Their humanity isn’t exposed through their materialism or conformity, but through their playfulness and strangeness. First Person Plural captures a sense of alienation endemic to modern life, while also undercutting it by revealing through a sense of play, pleasure, and ambiguity the inventiveness of the human spirit. — JUSTINE SMITH

De Idylle

Writer-director Aaron Rookus’ film De Idylle (Dutch for Idyllic) presents an interconnected menagerie of death-haunted people — like all of us, they fear death, crave it, avoid it, and are forced to confront it even when preoccupied and unprepared. Rookus is serious about his existential subject matter, but carries it off lightly, with a precarious tonal balance of mordancy and warmth dominating the film. To his credit, he gamely delves into a topic uncomfortable for many using an unconventional narrative structure, while still applying an audience-friendly sense of humor throughout. The film’s intersecting narrative threads, though, are never balanced effectively, and an unexpected venture away from the film’s base reality into alternate-universe fantasy causes disorientation and distraction rather than shedding light on the film’s conflicts.

De Idylle introduces its central characters through a series of seemingly-disconnected scenes that crystallize their current quandaries. Annika (Hadewych Minis) is an opera diva who receives a terminal cancer diagnosis, which she struggles to disclose to her loved ones; Victor (Eelco Smits) is a recently-out gay man dating for the first time after divorcing his wife of 10 years; Joke (Beppie Melissen) is a bitter elderly woman who wants only to die. Incrementally, the film reveals that these three are related: Annika and Victor are sister and brother; Joke is their grandmother. A separate thread concerns Musa (Nabil Mallat), a nihilistic high school teacher contemplating suicide, Timo (Isacco Limper), his young son who is convinced he’ll die in a week, and Hannah, Musa’s dissatisfied wife — who is also played by Hadewych Minis.

Rookus treats these character’s narratives with care and interest in their individual personalities and conflicts, and he directs a solid ensemble cast, each of whom turn in sensitive and smart performances. Yet it gradually becomes clear that Annika and Victor are the most essential, narratively speaking, and the focus on them clarifies Rookus’ central insight about death: the middle-aged siblings, one of whom is facing death herself and the other who must deal with the imminent death of numerous family members, must learn to accept the simultaneous inevitability and unpredictability of death in order to see clearly the lives they want to live. The other characters are comparably underdeveloped because of this consolidation of narrative focus, however, leading the film to drift when neither are on screen — although Melissen still manages to deliver a blistering performance as a hardened matriarch; she simultaneously grips and startles in her limited screen time.

The subplots relating to Hannah and her family are a curious case. Rookus does not take any meaningful steps to physically distinguish Hannah from Annika, and Minis likewise does not make any readily apparent choices in performance that would distinguish the two. The characters, then, have no clear boundary at the film’s outset, suggesting that Rookus intended to create ambiguity as to whether the characters are separate or the same (in full transparency, this writer did not realize the characters were meant to be two distinct people for much of the film’s duration). The truth of the relationship between these identical women is incrementally revealed when Annika, who has been noticing Hannah in public places, finally sees her face, and later confesses to Victor that she feels like she personally knows her doppelgänger. Hannah also confesses to a clandestine date that she dreamed of being an opera star as a child, but pursued a career in human resources instead, making apparent that Hannah is a mirror-universe version of Annika had she chosen a different path in life. Confusion remains nonetheless: is Hannah an actual person whose life has coincidental parallels to Annika’s, or is she solely a product of Annika’s imagination? If the latter is true, then what to make of Musa and Timo, who have individual plotlines separate from Hannah’s? This jump into the speculative, akin to Lynchian doubling, is not supported by the film’s baseline genre of realistic dramedy. Rookus does not prime the audience to experience this drift into the speculative, and thus creates more narrative confusion than thematic illumination.

De Idylle’s multivalent ambitions ultimately prevent it from coalescing into a fully effective work — its large cast of characters feed into a narrative that is scattered at times, and the mishandled subplot surrounding Hannah damages the film’s overall coherence. Its more successful components lie in Rookus’ achievement of a delicate tonal blend of earnest emotion and ironic humor, and his consistent insights into how anxiety around death permeates lives and relationships. Ultimately then, while uneven on the whole, De Idylle at least proves refreshing in its unsentimental humanism and emotional honesty. — ROBERT STINNER