The Mastermind

Of Kelly Reichardt’s many talents behind the camera, historically, she is not a filmmaker you would refer to as “a trickster” — there is little in the way of twist or misdirection in her work. She is, however, a deconstructionist of genre, frequently the Western, but also the terrorist thriller, the buddy road trip comedy, and the artist biopic, stripping the sensationalist pacing and conveniences of plot to the studs and making us sit in the realities of these premises, so perhaps we should’ve known better. This did little to prevent the collective boner Reichardt gave the world of cinephilia when it was announced she was making a ‘70s art heist with Josh O’Connor. At my New York Film Festival screening, as the Saul Bass-worthy credits unfurled, there was an audible gasp and cheer at the “And Bill Camp” title card, certain he would be stepping in as a gruff foil in the joyride we were all ready for.

The Mastermind challenges viewer expectations in more ways than one. The intro is seductive and cannonshot thanks to the muted, earth-toned color palette and Rob Mazurek’s mellow bebop score in the background, playing in and out, bridging scenes through the entirety of the film and lending it an undeserved ease. We open on O’Connor, as James Blake Mooney, pacing around the museum, casting a lanky, elegant figure in fuzzy period attire, discreetly nabbing a carved and painted figure from a laughably “secured” display in the middle of a gallery room in the Framingham Art Museum in rural Western Massachusetts. It’s but a warm-up for the big score. His wife Terri (Alana Haim), also beautiful and long-limbed, smiles discreetly as their two boys, one possibly, charmingly on the spectrum, dart from room to room, providing the perfect distraction. Are they all in on it? An outfit of family thieves, perhaps, as the prospect of two light and fun hours of gorgeously shot, clever artifact-boosting entices the viewer.

That notion is quickly dashed, because the film’s title is ironic, and the cheekily stolen artifact is the outset of a long, agonizing slide to the bottom. James Blake Mooney is one of the biggest and most frustrating schnooks to grace a movie in years: unemployed, often in his boxers, loafing around the house, perpetually fucked over and operating off his back foot. The film tracks his steady descent from the gentleman thief he imagines himself as to the petty dickhead he appears to have always been, that he washes out as. Mooney is, at least in his own mind, a talented craftsman who takes pride in doing the fine labor of high-end carpentry, but has no interest in running his own crew because of the paperwork, the payroll and scheduling, and office jobs that owning a small business requires. His parents are rich — his father, the aforementioned, disappointed Bill Camp, is a judge, and he borrows the money he needs to fund the heist from his mother (Hope Davis) — so you understand his desire to stage a heist is less a matter of necessity than an escape from his ennui and the menial life he’s checked out of.

He ironically has no interest in getting his hands dirty in the heist that takes up the film’s first act, claiming he’s at the museum too frequently to get involved, but instead enlists the nearest slippery, unreliable petty crooks he can find to run a glorified smash and grab at the Museum for a few of Mooney’s favorite Arthur Dove canvases. Nothing goes according to the threadbare plan during the hilariously inept heist, but the motley crew does abscond with the contraband, and that’s when the shit really begins to hit the fan, all of it spraying on the in-over-his-head maestro.

The Mastermind is Bressonian — most overtly recalling 1959’s Pickpocket — in its exploration of a sinner, why he sins, and the consequences of those sins, legally as a citizen and spiritually as the ostensible head of his family. It’s closest to Night Moves in Reichardt’s oeuvre, another film about crime and the punishment that comes in the aftermath, and by the stirring end of The Mastermind, along with his self-inflicted stupidity, it’s as if Mooney has directly pissed off a deity, so complete are the calamities of random happenstance and excruciating indignities that befall him. Of course, the Reichardt joint is slow, patient, and procedural, played in a minor key, following Mooney’s futile attempts to cover his tracks and talk his way out of suspicion, until the house of cards inevitably flops.

Reichardt does the impressive job of turning Mooney from a guy you’d like to fuck at the outset to a pathetic loser you’re anxious to get away from as the world slowly turns its back on him, one family member or friend at a time. O’Connor finds yet another register that what he’s shown before, here meek, slow-witted, grinning stupidly at his fate, defiant, but it’s also hard to put a finger on what exactly he’s rebelling against. He’s in nearly every frame displaying anti-charisma, and by the end, you want to grab him by his gorgeous brown corduroy coat and shake him until that gray woolen pageboy cap falls off, in hopes that he’ll stop taking his privilege and gorgeous wife and precious boys for granted, which is his true sin. It’s indicative of the unusual use of O’Connor here, and of an unusual heist film. Which is to say, The Mastermind is another Reichardt movie you didn’t expect, or know you wanted, until she showed it to you. — ABE BEAME

Escape

In 1974, the East Asia Anti-Japan Armed Front (henceforth EAAJAF) followed in the footsteps of the Japanese Red Army by committing several terrorist acts in order to shake up a conformist Japanese society that refused to acknowledge, much less reckon with, the sins of its immediate past. Like the many leftist organizations of the 1970s (and honestly, in perpetuity), the aims and credos of the Red Army and EAAJAF were not entirely aligned and suffered from internal internecine splits. The EAAJAF particularly espoused an anti-Japaneseism that targeted Japan’s mistreatment of its minority populations (especially the Ainu and the Ryukyu) and its war crimes against its East Asian neighbors. Its main targets were the corporations complicit in Japan’s many war crimes and the symbol of imperial Japan, Emperor Hirohito himself.

While a planned train derailment plan to kill Hirohito was foiled, some cells of the EAAJAF did successfully bomb the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries headquarters, accidentally killing eight people after those inside dismissed the group’s telephoned threat. It’s no surprise that Masao Adachi, who just two years ago made a film about Shinzo Abe’s assassin, would take an interest in the story of the last surviving member of this group who managed to escape capture until his death just last year: Satoshi Kirishima.

Yet, like in Revolution+1, Adachi seems uninterested in the terrorist violence itself. Escape’s concern with Satoshi Kirishima’s (while young, played by Rairu Sugita; while older, played by Kanji Furutachi) and in his days in the Scorpion cell of the EAAJAF are relegated to the first 15 minutes of the film. A test bomb exploding in the woods, a clandestine meeting with some of the other cells, and a short segment of the long-haired radical evading immediate capture after members of the Wolf cell are arrested are the only glimpses into Kirishima the romantic radical. Instead, most of the film looks to the interior life of a man who saw his painful, necessary solitude as a continuation of his values. Avoiding capture is now his true calling, the humiliation of the state’s detectives being his final mission of the EAAJAF, so, with monk-like devotion, he faces the pain of what can hardly be called a life. If he doesn’t even live under his own name, can even this eremitic excuse for a life truly be called his own?

Shortly after the botched mission, Kirishima cuts his rockstar locks and takes a contractor job, working alongside foreigners (including one boisterous Korean-Japanese) who can also only take under-the-table money and housing. Yet, when his coworkers start a bar fight, instead of staying to defend his new minority-status friends as his left-wing values might dictate, Kirishima bolts, afraid of possible capture. Ashamed, he finds that even small friendships are not possible; he joins another contracting company and keeps a low profile for decades. Of course, temptations arise — he’s a barfly at the nearby rock club in Fujisawa, where his presence can be made anonymous and his pent-up frustrations can be relieved, yet even this safe haven contains the threat of real, meaningful love.

Adachi crosscuts these vignettes of Kirishima as Christ in the desert with a dying Kirishima in a hospital bed, recollecting his life before he admits to the hospital staff and the detectives he’s long evaded. He had lived his life as Hiroshi Uchida, a name he had made up on the spot; he now wishes to die as Satoshi Kirishima.

Though much of this film rhymes with Adachi’s previous work, the roughshod prosumer DV camerawork that defined the look of Revolution+1 is here mostly eschewed in favor of a more standard handheld realist look. DP Yutaka Tamazaki (a favorite of Hirokazu Kore-eda and Naomi Kawase, and even once hired by Adachi for his legendary AKA Serial Killer as well as his 2016 Artist of Fasting) matches Kirishima’s constant paranoia by shooting handheld, behind-the-shoulder sequences. Meanwhile, stable medium shots of Kirishima in his apartment center Furutachi and Sugita’s naturalistic performances of the nervous revolutionary — checking the news, polite but curt refusals to continue conversations, and many subtle tics that signal discomfort in social situations and in isolation.

These formal techniques, borrowed from postwar neorealism, would normally signal a vérité portrait of Kirishima, but not in an Adachi film. The director makes frequent use of an incredibly cheap special effect, a consumer-grade projector, which casts images of Kirishima’s memories onto the hospital ceiling and glimpses of misguided terrorism (the Aum Shinrikyo subway attack), major world events (the 2011 Tohoku earthquake), and continued struggles of the world’s subaltern (Gaza — a topic special to Adachi who faced prison time after his time in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine) adorn a younger Kirishima’s walls as he wallows in his inability to help. Adachi announces the passage of time by having Sugita pass the baton of the role of Kirishima to Furutachi in a dreamlike moment of reflection; similarly, a Buddhist monk version of Kirishima coaches himself through the worst moments of despair as even this turn to religion can’t make him forgive himself for the lives he’s taken. These are moments of casual, wistful surreality that match neither Adachi’s former intense didacticism nor the formal extremes of his previous digital works, but they nevertheless work to break away from the visual monotony of a man speaking to himself in his room.

One of the biggest strengths of Adachi’s recent works is his willingness to prod the legacies of his fellow radicals without resorting to comfortable, trite compromises about the legacy of political violence. Here, Kirishima is not simply receiving his just desserts for going “too far” in his activism as Judd Hirsch and Christine Lahti do in Sidney Lumet’s Running on Empty (1988). Instead, at all times, his escape is paralleled with religious imagery, his solitude and celibacy equated to a devotion to a greater power. If there’s suffering involved, it’s the same suffering shared by the wayward monk or the doubtful anchorite who give in to the all-too-human instinct to wonder if even this higher spiritual existence is enough to cleanse oneself of worldly sin (and indeed those dead weigh heavily on Kirishima’s mind). Escape is neither a simple valorization of Kirishima’s legacy nor a boring lecture about the deleterious effects of a life dedicated to radical politics. Adachi is concerned with the projections on the ceiling and walls; he is focused on history — his own, Kirishima’s own — as near-spectral events that continue to haunt in low-lumen light, even in a lonely apartment. — ZACH LEWIS

Late Fame

It’s a shame I had to see Kent Jones’ Willem Dafoe vehicle, Late Fame, on the Upper West Side at NYFF in mid-September. It was in the wrong neighborhood, the wrong time of year. Late Fame descends from a proud tradition of lovely films by the likes of Ira Sachs or Mike Mills that you take a flier on thanks to limited but strong word of mouth at Angelika, in the midst of a rare free afternoon in October or November, as the sun sets around 5. During another breathless, heated awards season, these indies are my pea coats, my scarves, my wool sweaters, the cozy wardrobe Late Fame is conveniently draped in. They are pleasant respites from the discourse and hyperbole, a cinematic act of listening to vinyl and enjoying a glass of wine alone in a world animated with wit and sharp observation. 

The nostalgic film is set in the unlikely locale of SoHo, in its lofts and cramped cafes and bars and cobblestone streets just south of Washington Square Park, a place I’ve never known as a vestige of the “old” New York because I’ve only lived here 20 years. But Kent Jones apparently did, when he moved to the city to briefly attend NYU film school in the late ‘70s before dropping out to become a critic, and finding his own late fame starting in 1999, first as a documentarian, and since 2018, as a narrative feature filmmaker. 

Despite being an adaptation of an Arthur Schnitzler novella of the same name — written in 1895 but ironically rediscovered and released with a new translation in 2017 — you can see traces of meta-fiction in this latest work. His protagonist Ed Saxberger came to New York at the same time Jones did, chasing bohemian rhapsody downtown as an aspiring poet. By the time the film opens, he’s given up on those dreams and lives an uneventful life, spent between home at his presumably rent-controlled apartment eating solitary tuna salad dinners and ignoring the remote family drama he doesn’t want to involve himself in, work at the post office where he’s been for 37 years, and the occasional pint (of water) with his working class friends at a dive whose idea of poetry is improvised drunken limericks. This humble existence is immediately upended by the introduction of Meyers (Edmund Donovan), a dorky lit fanboy in Victorian cosplay who has tracked his neighbor to where he lives, shared Saxberger’s lost-to-time book of poems Way Past Go with his circle of fellow university-aged writers dressed like Dickensian fops (“The Enthusiasm Society,” who presumably just graduated from Robin Williams’ boarding school English class), and wants to help revive the work, along with this lost gem of a Bukowski-esque talent in what he imagines as a symbiotic act of clout sharing, lending legitimacy to their stubborn, absurd project.

With all due respect to the big, brash, showy, fully committed period piece accents and sci-fi prosthetics performances, real Dafoe lovers know he’s best when he is restrained, when he’s warm and gentle, when he’s vulnerable, when he takes his time and you can watch the constantly working virtuoso react, and think, and breathe, as he does in Late Fame, turning in what might be his best work since The Florida Project. One of his earlier roles that exhibits this quality is a brief cameo in Julian Schnabel’s Basquiat. There, Dafoe plays a sculptor on the cusp of 40 who works as an electrician in art galleries as a fallback gig. “I’m glad I never got any recognition. It’s given me time to develop,” he tells a young, hungry Jean-Michel. Jones’ film serves as a thought experiment, finding that electrician several decades later and checking in on whether his premise, that he was better off undiscovered young, turned out to be true. Like Schnabel’s 1996 film, addressing his far more famous and successful peer in the New York ‘80s art world, Late Fame questions the relative and arbitrary nature of success in the arts, in this case through the eyes of a poet who has given up, and has to decide whether to let young idolaters rekindle his ambition and desire for recognition. Much of the joy in this film comes simply in watching Dafoe’s face, as the artist is stunned, touched, and torn by unexpected praise, reacclimating to the pleasant and unpleasant versions of himself that kind of success could provoke. 

But this makes the film sound far more grave and weighty than its first two acts are. Jones applies a satirist’s acerbic eye to what has become of SoHo and its children as fish-out-of-water Saxberger melds into this friend group awkwardly, grappling with a city greatly changed, several generations since Saxberger has bothered to check in on it, and the result is an often hilarious comedy of manners. There’s a danger for a film like this to reach for the lowest hanging fruit, a grumpy old New Yorker banging on thin walls, swiping at his generic Gen Z neighbor/piñatas and making awkward references to TikTok and Labubus, and there is the occasional obvious joke (Surprise! They’re all trust fund kids!), but Samy Burch’s screenplay is too clever and nimble to rest on cliché. The Enthusiasm Society is a group of annoying young performative tech refuseniks who present themselves as proudly out of step with the times, absurdly romanticizing poets they’ve never heard of and allowing Dafoe to often play the straight man while his would-be protégés supply the laughs at their own expense. At one point, Saxberger refers to the kids as “Bullshit Poseurs,” and this is right, and why many of the jokes feel both specific and timeless: there have always been goofball dipshits like these guys; this is just the most recent vintage. 

It’s a near abdication of my responsibilities that it has taken this long to get to Greta Lee, who knows she has a ham sandwich on her plate and tears into it as “Gloria Gardner,” a sad, extremely hot, thrift store, manic pixie dream Vaudevillian actress/pastiche of a certain age. She keeps her personal life occluded in shadow and serves to both tempt Saxberger and as a cautionary tale for what he could become if he fully re-commits to a life of pursuing his art with these new “friends.” But this situation also leads Late Fame to turn morose and self-serious in its final act, making the understandable mistake of investing in the airless B plot between its two best performances, and asking us to care about the ultimate message of a film that lives more in its cadence than its resolution. Still, as the film meanders to its end, Jones saves his inevitable knockout for the last moment: This has all been a kind of wish fulfillment. Nobody actually reads anymore. — ABE BEAME

Pin de Fartie

Who among us can’t relate to Samuel Beckett’s post-apocalyptic word-worlds at the moment? The answer is apparently those who are too blind to see. El Pampero Cine multi-hyphenate Alejo Moguillansky grabs the Beckett play with the most appropriate title for this day and age in Endgame, whose original French title of Fin de Partie becomes his new film Pin de Fartie. (Farts and pins don’t come up at all, but other anagrams do.) This is the kind of word-scrambling that an editor comes up with, and Moguillansky’s extensive work editing several contemporary Argentinian classics is reflected in the oddball, jumpy structure of couples engaging with the Beckett play or something like it in their own unique ways. A king-like blind man and his servant-like daughter act out the play in their combative dynamic while they’re stuck in Switzerland; a pair of Argentinian actors with unspoken crushes on one another meet in an apartment to rehearse it; an old blind pianist and her son discover they have a similar dynamic to the play’s characters; and it’s all tied together by a couple in a recording studio where the woman serves as a narrator while the man sings songs and plays guitar as a sort of Greek chorus. (There’s also a pair of dumpster residents and a pair of filmmakers.) Everyone is living in a Beckettian world defined by one other person; everyone save that controlling, blind father wants out of it, and they all have their own coping methods (or lack thereof).

Like many other Argentinian films, both from the El Pampero Cine collective and not, Pin de Fartie is really about using seemingly every possible text or artistic medium for a type of postmodernist collage that owes as much to the spirit of Borges as it does to the kind of cultural omnivorousness that comes out of a major cultural center like Buenos Aires. When the pianist’s son (played by the director himself) discovers a real life tennis player who both looks like him and has a Beckett quote tattooed on his arm, it really does feel like something that was discovered in the process of constructing the project as a whole, and that spontaneity is charming. That moment of spontaneity and sense of letting the world in, however, is an exception in the overall structure of endgame after endgame, and many scenes of people listening to the circular opening movements of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata until it feels like an audio purgatory. This is one of the most self-enclosed of this style of Argentinian films — even the final train ride that’s supposed to be freeing is juxtaposed as just another case of filmmakers playing with their toy train sets. Despite a clear desire to encapsulate the mood that comes about at the fin de partie that is our current moment, the gamesmanship never quite seems to enter reality, and Moguillansky and company are just as trapped as Beckett characters in the tyranny of the story they constructed. The fact that this sort of controlling behavior is an explicit preoccupation of the film suggests a darker route to the Pampero playfulness, undercurrents of the anxiety of influence are what really linger — the sense that it’s easier to reread and reanalyze Beckett one more time than to try and create something as original. It’s both vulnerable and original, and guarded and derivative — just like its title. — ANDREW REICHEL

Romería

In 2017’s Summer 1993, director Carla Simón’s feature debut, a young girl is sent to live with her mother’s family in Barcelona after her mother’s death. The film is an autobiographical project from Simón, and received wide praise for its raw depiction of childhood trauma and Simón’s ability to capture the intimacy and perspective of a young child living in the flux of trauma. With Romería, Simón has crafted something of a follow-up to Summer 1993. This time, the film follows Marina (Llúcia Garcia), an 18-year-old who travels to the coastal city of Vigo in search of information about her father. Marina is hoping to receive a scholarship to study cinema at university, but is only eligible if both her parents died of AIDS. However, her father’s family, embarrassed by their son’s drug use, has hidden the true cause of his death and refused to acknowledge Marina on his death certificate.

Throughout Romería, Marina slowly learns more about her father from the perspectives of her aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents. Much like Summer 1993, it’s clear Simón’s writing is heavily influenced by her own experience. Interwoven with the difficult conversations of Marina’s father’s demise are excerpts from her mother’s diary, providing the context and closeness Marina has spent much of her life craving. These scenes of her parents’ life reflect the high points of Romería, as the intimate portraits of both good times (falling in love while sailing off the coast) and bad (heroin withdrawal, storms that damage the boat) give Marina the sense of connection to her father that she seems to be seeking but not receiving from his family. In a similar scene, Marina visits a nightclub, where a dance routine to “Bailaré sombre tu tumba” culminates in the ghosts of her friends and family members’ presence.

Unfortunately, the quality of these provocative flashbacks sets a standard that isn’t achieved by the rest of the film. The interactions Marina has with her father’s family come off as merely functional and expository, delivering the necessary information to support the film’s narrative arc but failing to conjure anything more intimate or revealing. Similarly superficial is Simón’s visual approach, which strives for a kind of impressionistic minimalism through its cinematography, replete with out-of-focus shots that seek to blanket the proceedings in a certain ephemerality, perhaps in an attempt to rhyme with the erasure of her father’s true life by his parents. But as with the film’s attempts at establishing interpersonal dynamics, its visuals feel more flat in their calculation, leaving little of substance beneath the sheen. All of this leaves Simón’s film with the lingering impression of a personal passion project that has failed to fully transcend its intimate genesis, despite the director’s best attempt to zhuzh the material with flits of style. And at Romería’s end, where conflict between Marina and her grandparents finally comes to a head, the film puts a bow on itself in the form of a too-tidy, feel-good ending that provides viewers with easy resolution and a hopeful portrait of familial friction and disjuncture. — EMILY DUGRANRUT