After This Death
Movies about the music industry can be a tough pitch. Selling a superstar artist as just that demands either the savviest ear for commercially viable hits and the savviest eye for popular iconography, or a considerable suspension of disbelief from the audience. Even the more successful titles in this field tend to rest on the latter to some extent — 2018’s A Star Is Born had the hits, but the dime-store wigs on lead Lady Gaga and the conspicuously modest Grammys recreation, amongst other elements, fell short of total believability. We viewers know what big-time music acts look and sound like, and one suspects so too do most filmmakers. They just tend to have a hard time replicating that in their works.
Lucio Castro’s After This Death finds a smart workaround to this problem, even if it can’t help but succumb to it anyway. Isabel (Mía Maestro) is a married expectant mother whose music journalist best friend Alice (Gwendoline Christie) tags her along to a gig for undergound experimental band Likeliness Increases. Backstage after the show, Isabel chats with frontman Elliott (Lee Pace), whom she’d previously met while hiking in the forest. She’s drawn to his brooding, mysterious charisma, just as he’s drawn to her cool intelligence and sexual directness, and an affair commences, heady and dangerous due to Isabel’s marriage to Ted (Rupert Friend), the pair’s genty bristling, clashing personalities, and the strange, sometimes threatening behavior of his band’s obsessive fans.
Likeliness Increases make pretty bad, dour music, but it’s the sort of bad, dour music that one probably would encounter in a small underground venue in the rural U.S. That the band remains a strictly cult entity thus feels appropriate, though Castro has a more sinister kind of cult in mind for the band, as Isabel finds out the further she’s unwittingly pulled into Elliott’s orbit. If he’s an intense figure, his fans are doubly so, possessing a kind of obsession that feels extreme for followers of such a decidedly low-level outfit. It’s thus that After This Death’s plausibility comes into serious question — one begins to regard the shifts in narrative direction less as purposeful deviations in and of themselves, and more as belabored excuses to wrench a psychological thriller out of material that can’t naturally support one. Castro seems to be aiming for something Jonathan Glazer-esque here, but he’s too compassionate and pensive a filmmaker, and the material here offering too shallow a plot, to pull it off.
That pensiveness, too, comes across far more deliberately than it did in Castro’s debut, End of the Century, which was characterized by a yearning wistfulness. That’s been replaced here by empty inscrutability, whether in Elliott’s distant pomposity — a projected quality, rendering him equally difficult to like and difficult to buy as a successful musician of any calibre — or in Isabel’s curious mix of timidity and irrationality. Maestro’s muted performance navigates the ostensible contradictions and occasional emotional outbursts of her character with grace, but she’s as hamstrung by these challenges as she is evidently inspired by them. Like the similarly committed Pace, she struggles to convey much of substance about a character Castro simply doesn’t want the viewer to know nor understand in much depth. Only Ted (Friend) resonates with much clarity and accessibility — representing perhaps the film’s simplest element, but also its most relatable for his simplicity.
What Castro may intend as complexity reads largely as stilted, studied distance, making his gradual shift into thriller territory feel manipulative and inorganic, just as his portrait of a would-be charismatic semi-messianic rock star feels inauthentic — the songs, by composers Robert Lombardo and Yegang Yoo, are less poetic than pretentious, and Pace’s performances of them are too internalized to truly convince. And yet, After This Death nonetheless captures one’s attention, if only in inspiring hope that the film might coalesce its many odd, disparate compulsions into a surprising whole. It doesn’t, but many of those compulsions are intriguing nevertheless. Castro is experimenting here, and the results are curious enough to justify his experimentation, even if they’re not entirely good enough to give After This Death the stamp of approval. — PADAÍ Ó MAOLCHALANN
The Travel Companion
“You sound cool talking out your ass,” Bruce (Anthony Oberbeck) quips to his best friend and roommate, Simon (newcomer Tristan Turner), a struggling filmmaker. In Alex Mallis and Travis Wood’s debut feature, The Travel Companion, Simon spends an admirably, cringe-inducingly large amount of his time explaining, to anyone who will listen or tolerate it, the vague contours of his next film project, an experimental, hybrid docu-fiction-travelogue about the cultural bridges and walls between people around the world. Bruce’s assessment is only half-correct, though — floundering for increasingly lofty, but ultimately empty, descriptors for a film he has no idea how to make, Simon in no way sounds cool.
The only reason Simon is even able to attempt this globe-trotting film project is because Bruce works for an airline and has chosen Simon as his official travel companion, allowing him free standby flights to anywhere in the world for a year. Simon inadvertently complicates the arrangement when he introduces Bruce to filmmaker Beatrice after a screening of their short films, and they immediately hit it off. Their courtship is breezy and pleasant, and Simon is along for the ride, but when things between Bruce and Beatrice get more serious, she suddenly becomes a wedge, not only between Simon and Bruce’s long-standing friendship, but between Simon’s borderline-delusional self-image as a filmmaker and the disappointing reality, and his cushy arrangement as Bruce’s travel companion.
Simon and Bruce’s friendship anchors The Travel Companion thanks to Turner and Oberbeck’s razor-sharp chemistry, which consistently buoys a film whose comedy of cringey social ineptitude and straight-guy lovability eventually gives way to heavier conflict. Oberbeck is no stranger as a leading man in micro-budget indies such as this. Two years ago he starred in Tynan DeLong’s improvised, cringe-comedy Dad and Step-Dad, alongside Colin Burgess, whose own performance in Ryan Brown’s breakout comedy, Free Time, two years ago, finds kinship in the oblivious obstinance of Turner’s.
The look and feel of The Travel Companion establishes the inherent paradoxes of artistic pursuit. One day you might find yourself helping a stranger take a cool picture for a contest, basking in the the dual glows of New York City and the joy of collaboration; and another day you’re wandering under the harsh fluorescence of LaGuardia Airport, staring out the window at yet another plane that will take you to a new country to work on a project you don’t even know how to make, or to show a film you don’t care about. Jason Chiu’s cinematography feels lush and expensive, in spite of this film’s microbudget bona fides. The preponderance of stolen shots, particularly at airports, call attention to themselves mostly for how seamlessly they fit into the film’s overall aesthetic; they’re as much a part of microbudget filmmaking as the hell of fitting creative pursuits into a schedule dominated by soul-crushing day jobs and secretly stewing over the commercial success of your peers.
It’s no surprise, then, that Mallis and Wood have a strong grasp on New York film culture. The opening scene of the film is an extended Q&A session at one of the many festivals where Simon presents his thesis. There, the programmer proclaims the importance of all the short documentaries the audience just watched, and asks them gag-inducingly pretentious questions. To the directors’ credit, they don’t let the filmmakers in this scene off the hook either, recruiting familiar faces like Joanna Arnow and Brit Fryer to poke fun at their own professions with equally lofty and empty answers. Of course, the irony of this scene is that these answers take so long that Simon, perhaps the filmmaker who has the most he’d like to say, never gets a chance to speak.
If there’s one disappointment in The Travel Companion it’s that its recognizable narrative trajectory casts a pall of inevitability over most of the runtime. The characters are extremely vivid and textured, though the dynamics between them are a little too legible. Still, Mallis and Wood execute the film’s ending cleanly and without too much reliance on sentimentality. One gets the impression through its redemptive conclusion that they wanted to honor the sense of relief that comes with a successful film premiere. Should The Travel Companion find an audience, it’s hard to imagine it not also being a success. — CHRIS CASSINGHAM
Twelve Moons
There’s much to like about Victoria Franco’s Twelve Moons, a serious-minded drama about loss and addiction that avoids easy platitudes and simplistic moralizing. That is, until it suddenly… doesn’t. As the film begins, a series of cryptic, vaguely surreal images set a curious tone: a baby lays on a shore; a man and woman embrace in waist-deep water in the middle of a minimalist fountain; a horse writhes and cavorts in slow-motion. These appear to be the dreams of Sofia (Ana de la Reguera), a 40-something architect who lives in a sleek, modernist home with her developer husband. She has an appointment and is waiting for him to come home to accompany her, but he seems to have forgotten about it. She goes on her own, and we realize that she is seeing an obstetrician for a pregnancy checkup. But something has gone wrong — Sofia has had a miscarriage. She is devastated, naturally, and begins wandering home in a daze. She buys a loosey from a street vendor, grabs a drink, and generally seems dazed. Her husband arrives at one of his construction sites the next morning and finds her passed out on the half-finished roof. He helps her to their car and takes her home to sleep it off.
There are a few things happening here, not the least of which is Sofia’s anger and frustration at another failed pregnancy. One gets the impression that her husband’s absence in her time of emotional need is a fairly constant occurrence, and that Sofia is quite eager to resume smoking, drinking, and indulging other assorted drugs now that her pregnancy is over (she tells her doctor that she had quit everything while trying to conceive, but there is no way to know if this is true). Much of the first half of Twelve Moons, then, tethers audiences to Sofia’s emotionally turbulent perspective; she argues with her husband, arrives late to a meeting with investors and berates them for changing some of her designs, and generally lashes out at those around her. Cinematographer Sergio Armstrong shoots the proceedings in stark digital black-and-white, imbuing the images with a stately, severe quality. Sofia is often framed against huge edifices as she wanders various construction sites, as if she’s wandering through a demolished landscape. Her nocturnal adventures eventually lead to a horrific accident, which prompts an intervention from her father and husband and a stint in rehab.
It must be said, Ana de la Reguera gives a remarkable performance as the troubled Sofia. It’s a difficult, physical role, and director Franco puts her through the ringer. It’s unfortunate that the dramaturgy devolves into anti-drug hysteria and overly obvious religious symbolism. The filmmaker seems to be looking for some kind of rebirth or purification via extreme suffering, but as realized here, it’s so absurd as to strain credulity. It’s as if a humanist drama a la Rachel Getting Married suddenly left-turned into the nightmarish melodrama of Requiem for a Dream — Sofia decides to flee her husband and, seemingly overnight, becomes a homeless drug addict who has visions of nursing a baby and collects doll parts while living in squalor with a community of dope fiends. It’s all very symbolic, and in this we locate the film’s ultimate, essential failure: Franco makes the baffling decision to move her material from the specificity of a character study to the vagueness of the metaphoric and symbolic. The religiosity rings false, and the severity of Sofia’s cosmic punishment comes across more like warmed-over Haneke or von Trier than an autonomous artistic voice. Let’s hope Franco’s next endeavor aims a little higher than mere arthouse miserabilism. — DANIEL GORMAN
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