No Other Choice

“It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” – Frederic Jameson

No one seems to enjoy the world we live in — in fact, everyone seems to hate it. Yet most of us accept it, see it as the only choice, play its game even if we know it’s a bunch of murderous nonsense. Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice plays out the morbid, Darwinist melancholy of our economic lives to its sickest conclusions. It’s the capitalist-realist thriller par excellence, fully working through the logic of the market and playing out its most vile fantasies.

Yoo Man-soo (Lee Byung-hun) is a company man, a factory floor manager for a paper mill, recently laid off after his company is bought by Americans. Met with a highly competitive market that treats him as disposable, Yoo eventually realizes that the only way to prosper is to take the ethics of the market to heart and dispose of his competition. Sourcing resumes through a fake job listing, he plots to kill the two other recently laid-off paper factory managers who stand a better chance of getting hired in the competitive market. He has a family to think of after all, a middle-class bourgeois life that needs defending: two dogs, his son’s streaming subscriptions, his daughter’s cello lessons, his wife’s tango lessons, plus a nice house with a symbolically large gate keeping out the lower classes.

Based on Donald Westlake’s dark-comedy novel The Ax, Westlake’s pitch-black satire of the sociopathy endemic to globalization and penchant for dry, irony-laced absurdity is the perfect stomping ground for Park’s goofy, Grand Guignol-flavored comedy. The setup is poignant and Park never fully loses sight of that, but the execution is musical, stuffed with sweeping camera movements and non-sequiturs that continually repeat, develop, and surprise as refrains across the film. Park is a rather hysterical filmmaker compared to clear genre antecedents like Hitchcock or De Palma, directors who were keen on using every little bit of narrative space to further tension, working stray bits of character business into densely structured payoffs. With Park’s latest stream of work, one finds a pure sense of indulgence: details emerge for their own sake and for the pleasure of their various cinematic textures with little need to hide beyond narrative motivation. Small character elements — like Yoo’s penchant for penning things down on his hand or his teetotaling or the way he occasionally gets blinded by the glare of the sun — are laid and out and called back to across the film like a wall full of Chekhovian guns, almost none of which ever go pop.

Park is perhaps the great arch stylist of 21st century cinema, and No Other Choice’s camera work is as consistently sweeping and innovative as in the rest of the director’s oeuvre. Every twist and turn is met with its own sweeping crane movement and whole emotional beats feel conjured up simply for the unique dissolves they generate. The murders are played out with particular bravado: one early kill oscillates between calculation and hard-scrabble brawling, as Yoo’s poorly conceived plan gets caught up in a love triangle between the victim, his wife, and her lover. Set against cascading diegetic music turned to top volume, it’s slippery, silly, and captivating — Torn Curtain by way of Tex Avery — morbidity dragged on well past the point of absurdity, tipping back into the realm of terror.

There has always been a Lang-like fatalism to the films of Park Chan-wook, a cynical sense that man is incapable of escaping the socially- and self-made systems of destruction that surround them. His characters rarely make it out alive, let alone with any sense of morality, redemption, or dignity. Turned toward an explicitly political context for arguably the first time since JSA (2000), No Other Choice lends an added potency and emotional truth to his bleak vision. Unlike Parasite (2019) and many other eat-the-rich class satires that have come in its wake, No Other Choice avoids the simple catharsis that comes from the us-versus-them perspective of the have and the have-nots. Told from a distinctly middle class perspective, this is instead an us-versus-us movie, an eat-each-other parable that feels significantly better equipped to embody the hysterical melancholy of the times and not just trade in its outrages and indignancies. It’s one last maniacal, depressive laugh of a moribund social order, and there’s nowhere to run, no worthy victim for us to identify with and escape behind. As bombastic and fluid as the film’s style is, its message is complimentarily clear and blunt: we’re given no other choice but savagery, and all we can do is cry in despair. — JOSHUA BOGATIN

Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere

Desolate, grim, and hopelessly introverted, The Boss’s album Nebraska captures a slice of America that’s as caustic and fresh today as it was in 1981. You put it on, and you’re there: sipping a Miller Lite in a lonely roadhouse, trawling a boardwalk in the dead of night, or standing on the side of an empty freeway. It’s a road trip through the dark corners of the country as graceful as it is threatening. One might even call it cinematic.

Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere — based on the book by Warren Zanes about the making of Nebraska and appendaged with the musician’s name for marketing purposes — is nothing like that. In his introduction for the film at the New York Film Festival, Scott Cooper praised Nebraska, saying “art is most valuable when it risks it all,” but his movie retains none of that risky art’s venom, gothic dread, or imagination. It’s not a persuasive Springsteen simulator, and it’s not in tune with the vicissitudes of American life. Instead, it’s generic, insincere, and in direct opposition to everything Nebraska represents.

Jeremy Allen White stars, or rather cosplays, as Bruce Springsteen, bringing a studied brutish force to the role and not much else. Timothee Chalamet was able to channel a blank slate Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown by way of puckish impression, and it worked to the degree that it did because the movie didn’t ask him to be anything more than a symbol. But Deliver Me from Nowhere is all interiority, supposedly. Enigmatic doesn’t work when you’re spending most of the runtime excavating childhood trauma.

We open in Freehold, New Jersey, in the 1950s, during which a young Bruce Springsteen’s Big Bad Dad stomps around, threatens him, and pounds on his mother offscreen. Overwrought flashbacks like this intrude on the movie like bad acne, popping out in pointless black and white and failing to lend any gravitas to Springsteen’s life. We then cut to Springsteen in 1981, performing “Born to Run” to a huge crowd. After the show, Springsteen sits in his dressing room, flop sweat pouring out of him onto the floor in an image recalling that other, better New Jersey movie The Wrestler (to which Springsteen himself contributed a co-sign in the form of a rich late-career track for its closing credits). Say what you will about Aronofsky, but his passion for pain and fragile masculinity contributed to a more compelling vision of working-class New Jersey than Cooper contrives here. Cooper depicts Jersey like a tourist, an interloper: we visit the Stone Pony, we enter Springsteen’s childhood home, and we spend time with wizened faces in the diners he frequented, but the spaces are rinsed clean and missing a sense of melancholy Americana: the milieu in which Springsteen found himself around the time Nebraska was being recorded.

Deep from within Deliver Me from Nowhere hums the faint echo (or reverb) of Love & Mercy, another music movie bifurcated between its better Pet Sounds sessions material and the wonkier stuff dealing with Brian Wilson’s so-called doctor Eugene Landy. Except here, neither half is good. The drama, in either flashback or in the movie’s present tense, isn’t remotely enough to justify the black hole pull of the record Springsteen creates by the end of it. When not in his bedroom recording, Bruce sulks around the tristate area, sparking an asinine doomed romance and stopping by New York to get his routine gassing by producer Jon Landau, for whom the movie is just as propagandistic as it is for Springsteen. Attempts to wrestle with male feelings — which can be done, just take a look at The Iron Claw, a movie that plays to White’s dead-eyed strengths — play with the cloying condescension of a Jeff Lebowski: “Grown men also cry, Mr. Lebowski. Grown men also cry.”

Cooper doesn’t do himself any favors by interpolating movies like Badlands, which served as an inspiration for Nebraska’s title track, or The Night of the Hunter, which might be the very best movie America has ever produced about its own corrupt nature. It’s dangerous to put better movies in the audience’s head because you run the risk of drawing direct comparison, and — feel free to put some money on it — in no scenario does Scott Cooper stand within 10 miles of Terrence Malick or Charles Laughton’s stature. These are full, minute-long diversions, too, not just clips playing on TV in the background. Cooper will go full widescreen into a scene from Badlands, then cut directly to his sloppy homage to it — inevitably another artless flashback. In doing backflips to show he has good taste, he underscores the severe poverty of his own style. 

Mercifully, it’s not all signs pointing to the movie this could have been. Occasionally, Deliver Me from Nowhere is actually about a quiet battle to make an honest record, and there’s an inkling of Springsteen’s inner struggle to create a work of art that matters to him when beset by professional pressures. We join him researching old newspapers at the library and reading Flannery O’Connor stories at home, doing 110 MPH listening to Suicide (whose fingerprints are all over Nebraska) and frustrated at the studio with the full-band versions of his tracks. And there’s a montage set to “I’m on Fire” that’s pretty neat: after Springsteen insists his crew master Nebraska off the cassette he recorded in his bedroom, they do so, and an analog tech fetish sets in that’s really fun to hang out with.

But even then, Cooper misses a crucial component of artmaking — that it doesn’t have to be autobiographical in order to be personal or moving. He’s constantly searching in vain for connections between the child Springsteen once was and the artist he becomes. The link between Bruce defending his mother from his father’s hand as a kid in one scene and his switching the song “Nebraska” from third- to first-person in the next, for example, is nonsensical. Other times, the correlation will be idiotically obvious: Bruce’s dad takes him to see a mansion on a hill, and, wouldn’t you know it, the older Springsteen then writes “Mansion on the Hill.”

Bruce Springsteen is a great artist because he can tell stories about troubled Americans that give us the space to metabolize our own experiences against the expressionistic backdrop of his music. A great music movie emboldens the musician it depicts, inspiring its audience to bring them into our own lives, in our own way. Deliver Me from Nowhere listens to Bruce Springsteen for you, chewing him up and regurgitating him in a thick, wet, flavorless paste. At least we get Electric Nebraska as a consolation prize. — ETHAN J. ROSENBERG

Barrio Triste

Sympathetic portrayals of kids who’ve fallen into a life of crime have been commonplace in the arthouse circuit since at least the days of Italian neorealism, and, if we broaden our purview away from cinema to art itself, likely time immemorial. Chaplinesque tramps, Dickensian orphans, and Huck Finns of every country have encouraged us to see crime as an all-too-human byproduct of history rather than an all-powerful malevolent force. There are no depictions of Satan as a mere pickpocket or even a murderer, and, hell, sometimes we just love little scamps breaking the law if the law is thought to be restrictive to life itself (Bonnie and Clyde, or Les Misérables’ Gavroche). If Harmony Korine’s contribution to cinema could be reduced to one thing, it’s the complicating of this archetype into a being not entirely likable, not entirely reduced to the usual liberal socioeconomic explanations, but still far from a conservative’s cartoonish depiction of a lay criminal. His robbers and murderers are both relatively well-adjusted white teenage girls (as in Spring Breakers) and homeless poets (The Beach Bum), and their wanton crime sprees are hardly ever met with third-act reversals of fortune. Korine’s characters, rich or poor, ask for no sympathy. For some, that makes them worthless nihilists; for others, that makes them the best mirror for contemporary Americans.

Though Harmony Korine only produced Barrio Triste (through his skateboarding/music video-directing/AI slop-embracing/video game-producing creative factory EDGLRD), his particular brand of naughty neorealism flows throughout the picture. This story of teenage Colombian criminals who rob a jewelry store and spend the rest of the day as Thrasher Magazine versions of flâneurs is instead directed by the very young artist Stillz (Matías Vásquez). Known for directing popular music videos for Bad Bunny, Rosalía, Arca (who scores this film), Wifisfuneral, Katy Perry, and many more, the Colombian-American’s shoot-from-the-hip style and skate-video look easily fit EDGLRD’s ongoing mission of supporting new talent who simultaneously maneuver the worlds of the internet, street culture, and traditional art.

Barrio Triste (literally “sad neighborhood”) takes place in the titular sordid barrio of Medellín, Colombia, though conditions were so rough in the real Triste that the film was actually shot, with mafia permission, in the nearby Barrio Paraíso. These are the barrios bajos — similar to the favelas of Brazil in their hastily-built shanty town look — that scale the outlying hills on the outskirts of Colombia’s second-most-populated city. While Medellín has continued to be a major industrial center for Colombia (and Latin America in general) since the time of Spanish colonialism, by the late 1980s, a combination of urban expansion and political strife made it one of the most dangerous cities in the world. This is when Barrio Triste begins.

The film itself only barely moves past its initial setup. The Triste kids steal a local reporter’s Betacam, interrupting her coverage of mysterious alien sightings in the area, and keep the camera rolling if only because they can’t figure out how to turn it off. They rob some diamonds, they semi-accidentally shoot a guy, they rush back to the safe house, and they roam the barrio. Eventually, the camera operator breaks off from the pack and goes exploring on his own, occasionally pointing the lens at the caustic yet mundane elements of the neighborhood. A punk band plays in the hollowed-out second story of a crumbling building, and some teenagers set fire to a car. Abandoned buildings are adorned with graffito’d depictions of well-endowed stick figures and warnings that evil is afoot. It’s all a little casually dangerous and all a little funny. Later, a little supernatural light-creature breaks up the mundanity of penis pictographs by poofing the troupe to an abandoned mansion, and a little scraggly Cimmerian monster kills a few folks. Just another day in Barrio Triste.

As a feature-length music video for Arca, the film works well. The musician’s unsettling droning score fills the cameraman’s journey with a sense of dread, especially when punctuated by digital screeches and harsh noise during the getaway sequence. Otherwise, the film’s biggest moments retread ground from the found-footage genre’s pioneers, such as the suspenseful or supernatural reveals in Cloverfield, REC, and even The Blair Witch Project. But the overall style apes mostly from Korine himself, such as the MiniDV-shot Julien Donkey-Boy, the rollicking shorts Umshini Wam and Snowballs, and especially 2009’s Trash Humpers — another film about a walk around a neighborhood that makes the mundane both uncomfortable and funny. Even the supernatural good and evil forces at play in Barrio Triste mimic Aggro Dr1ft’s hilariously over-the-top kaiju boss battle. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as Stillz’s pastiche is better than most and promises some aesthetically adventurous work in the future. But, like parodies of Wes Anderson or Federico Fellini or any other artist with a striking personal style, the Korine elements here manage to distract from the film, no matter how well they’re imitated.

That being said, Stillz does take these kids’ casual suffering seriously, affecting a tone that Korine would never attempt. Intermittently, the found footage format is abandoned for intimate interviews with the kids who often discuss suicide and feeling worthless, despite their violent machismo. The confessional is an ode to newsreel-inspired neorealism that blended real settings or real people with an “artificial” production, even if there’s no indication that these particular conversations aren’t scripted. Korine’s prankster attitude and humorous depictions of the excessive lives of Miami crypto kings and gangsters works well for the richest country in the world, but Stillz knows that mimicking this would feel out of place in the poverty-riddled, mob-controlled barrios of Medellín. Instead, here’s a neorealist portrait of troubled Colombian youth that’s nevertheless routinely punctured by Korinian antics and the supernatural. It’s a mess, sure; it’ll likely inspire a tawdry Balenciaga ad campaign, yes; but it’s so self-assured in its motley attitudes that it can’t help but impress. — ZACH LEWIS

With Hasan in Gaza

On November 1 and 2, 2001, then-28-year-old Palestinian filmmaker Kamal Aljafari visited Gaza, and left with about two hours and forty minutes worth of MiniDV footage that remained packed away for decades. Last year, Aljafari unearthed this footage, and did not even immediately recognize that he shot it: “I recognized Gaza,” Aljafari recalled in an interview, “but I still didn’t know what the material was, until I’d seen myself in this footage in a scene where I’m handing the camera to a guide named Hasan and asking him if he can film me.” While he still did not remember recording almost any of the footage, he did eventually recall that he had visited Gaza to track down a friend he briefly knew when serving a sentence in an Israeli prison as a teenager, and that he stayed with local guide Hasan Elboubou.

Struck by the rediscovered footage of this brief visit, Aljafari collated it into a documentary film with very few alterations. Aljafari noted that he removed about an hour’s worth of footage from the final cut, and he also added some music and occasional on-screen intertitles, but otherwise, he did not edit the recordings or the order they appear in. What remains is a haunting document of a city that has now been decimated by Israel’s well-documented, genocidal military campaign.

The footage, washed-out, shaky, and sometimes wavering in focus, is diligently chronological, in keeping with Aljafari’s decision to maintain the order it was recorded in. This being the case, the viewer enters Gaza with Aljafari and is guided through it by Hasan, who points out locations and landmarks as a driver escorts them through the city. The footage Aljafari captured over the next two days, some of which was recorded by Hasan, provides a window into life in Gaza at this particular point in time. The Second Intifada was underway, marring each day and night with violence and placing the local economy under enormous strain, and Israel was actively seizing land to construct settlements.

Throughout the footage, Gazans express conflicting opinions about being filmed. When Aljafari encounters people whose home was demolished to make way for settlements, they are wary, as they believe the footage becoming public would jeopardize their ability to work in Israel and may put their safety at risk. Others he speaks to are insistent that he film the effects of Israeli shelling on their homes — broken windows, shrapnel on the floor — while, at the same time, excited children ask him to film them and pose for the camera. Aljafari’s visual documentation of a city that had been occupied for decades, that was and continues to be so cut off from the rest of the world that it is commonly called “the world’s largest open-air prison,” is a matter of urgency and high stakes for the Gazans captured on camera. One woman makes a blistering assessment of her life, under Israeli shelling and the constant threat of displacement, to the camera: “My life? This is not a life!”

Though Aljafari did make aesthetic decisions in preparing this footage as a film, to make qualitative judgments on the aesthetic qualities of With Hasan in Gaza would be beside the point. With 24 years of hindsight, Aljafari’s presentation of this footage takes on an elegiac aspect — the society he documented, which was already under siege, has largely been obliterated. When children smile at the camera, one cannot avoid the wrenching question of whether they are still alive. For his part, Aljafari has shared that he did not locate his friend, and that today, he does not know whether Hasan himself is alive. A sober presentation of a nearly forgotten archive that briefly vivifies what has been irretrievably lost, With Hasan in Gaza is a vital and mournful work of preservation. — ROBERT STINNER

Last Night I Conquered the City of Thebes

Coming to NYFF by way of the Giornate degli Artori in Venice, Gabriel Azorín’s debut feature is a bold swing for the fences, the sort of challenging and ambitious film that ought to be more common from first-timers. To say that Azorín’s reach exceeds his grasp is no condemnation, and in fact Last Night I Conquered the City of Thebes shows the kind of promise that suggests Azorín has the makings of a major director. He has a lot of good ideas, and even if they don’t all pan out, it’s still worthwhile spending two hours in his company. The action, such as it is, is centered on an ancient Roman hot spring, and in the first two-thirds of the film, we are mostly invited to hang out with five young friends whose travels have brought them to this spot.

As we see in the final third, however, Thebes is less focused on the what than the when. After a quick fade to black, Azorím takes us back to ancient Rome, where tired, disillusioned soldiers are bathing and contemplating their next move. What unites these two sections of the film, apart from the location itself, is a sense of youthful masculinity at a crossroads. In a recent Internet meme, it was suggested that the men of today think about the Roman Empire several times a day. But if that’s true, those men are undoubtedly imagining a regime of bravery and honor, the kind that Hollywood has constructed for entertainment purposes. (“Are you not entertained?!”) What Azorím shows us is something a bit more transhistorical. Men have always loved each other, and have always had to contend with exhaustion and self-doubt.

After a lengthy prologue that shows the five friends hiking to the hot spring in the present day, the film eventually focuses on two of the men, best friends Antonio (Santiago Mateus) and Jota (António Martim Gouveia) settle into the baths side by side for a lengthy conversation, which Azorín depicts in a single 20-minute shot. The sun goes down in real time, and as if our eyes were adjusting to the light, visibility returns to the shot. We learn that Antonio is studying medicine in Porto, and for the most part he patiently listens as Jota explains his feelings toward his friend at length. Jota admits that he has always idealized Antonio, and that as he has watched him grow more cynical, it has shaken his own sense of self. Antonio, understandably, doesn’t quite know what to do with this disclosure.

In the final scene, Azorím shows us some wounded soldiers at the baths, including one man with an infected amputation wound. We then repair to the same side-by-side baths from the previous story, as Aurelius (Oussama Asfaraah) and Pompey (Pavle Čemerikić) contemplate deserting from the military. Although they do not state it outright, these men are in love and they are trying to imagine a future in which they can be together, without fear of one or both of them being killed in battle.

There is a conceptual throughline connecting the two stories, one that goes beyond a shared location. While they hike and after getting to the baths, Antonio, Jota, and their friends keep referring to an online role-playing game in which they fight with various armies during the Roman Empire. The title phrase is uttered fairly early on, and some astute viewers may recognize the reference to Gus Van Sant’s own male-bonding hiking film Gerry. In that film, Casey Affleck mentions in passing to Matt Damon, “I conquered Thebes.” Azorín, quite impressively, takes this throwaway line and all it implies and expands it to a feature-length consideration of role-playing as a fundamental component of masculinity, and in particular love between men.

If Thebes doesn’t ultimately exceed the sum of its parts, it’s because unlike Van Sant, Azorím is intent on telling rather than showing. There is pleasure to be had in simply hanging around with these guys. Much like Eduardo Williams’ Human Surge films, Thebes is at its best when it trusts us to tag along on an uncharted adventure. It is extremely difficult to take this kind of durational formalism and marry it to narrative concerns, and what Azorím offers as the film’s showpiece actually brings it grinding to a halt. Having said that, Last Night I Conquered the City of Thebes is a sincere and uncompromising work, and it will be interesting to see if going forward Azorím is willing to keep paring the language away and let his images do the talking.  — MICHAEL SICINSKI