Drowning Dry

Pilgrims, Laurynas Bareiša’s previous feature, was an accomplished debut that explored a man’s inability to move past the senseless killing of his brother. It showed promise, but became a bit exhausting since it seemed that the director had one single idea — rage as a substitute for mourning — and was satisfied to present various representations of that idea, with the same characters, over and over. It didn’t seem to move. With Drowning Dry, Bareiša has definitely crafted a plot that goes places. But the film suggests a formal discrepancy between the script and its realization. Structured very much like a Raymond Carver story, Drowning Dry probably looks intricately literary on the page. But the film has trouble communicating the purpose of that approach.

This is the story of two Lithuanian sisters, Juste (Agnė Kaktaitė) and Ernesta (Gelminė Glemžaitė). Juste is married to Tomas (Giedrius Kiela), who appears to be in finance, and Ernesta is married to Lukas (Paulius Markevičius), who is an MMA fighter. The two couples have one child apiece: Juste and Tomas have a daughter named Urte (Olivija Eva Viluné), and Ernesta and Lukas have a son named Kristafus (Herkus Sarapas). At the start of the film, we see Lukas in the ring, winning a fight. The victory does nothing to appease Ernesta, who is terrified that he’ll be hurt or killed. After the fight, Ernesta’s family goes to stay at Juste’s lakeside cabin. An accident occurs (see title), and this changes the course of all their lives.

After nearly 45 minutes of straight narrative, Bareiša suddenly provides a flash-forward, and over the course of the remainder of Drowning Dry we move back and forth in time. The purpose of such a maneuver, particularly in a story about a tragedy, would seem to be an attempt to juxtapose disparate moments that have a direct emotional impact on one another, something that a linear plot presentation wouldn’t accomplish in the same way. But it doesn’t seem that Bareiša achieves this.

Part of the problem is that the viewer knows that something is going to happen. The skipping around in time has the effect of keeping certain key events away from the viewer, like a too-clever game of cat and mouse. Rather than deepening our connection to the family’s circumstances, it comes close to cheapening them, treating them like a salacious mystery. Bareiša’s unadorned realism helps to mitigate this. But his one bit of visual flair, slow zooms in or out of extended master shots, threatens to tilt the balance. Bareiša seems like a director who will eventually make a very good film, but thus far he hasn’t managed to get out of his own way. — MICHAEL SICINSKI

Transamazonia

The most emotionally and spiritually invigorating faith-based films rely not on proselytization or condemnation, but on abstraction. Their dramatic force comes from their characters’ tormented search for meaning in a sea (or forest) of contradictory meaning and meaninglessness; clear-eyed realization (or rejection) of faith minus this emotional and spiritual struggle is akin to achieving enlightenment without introspection. Where’s catharsis (or despair) in that?

Pia Marais’ Transamazonia is, at least narratively, positioned to be all about that. Like Martin Scorsese’s Silence (2016), a film about two 17th-century Jesuit priests who travel from Portugal to Edo-period Japan to locate their mentor and spread Catholic Christianity, Marais’ film is also about two outsiders trying to spread the influence of their God in a place where they don’t belong. Here, we have a father and daughter, Lawrence (Jeremy Xido) and Rebecca (Helena Zengel), who stumble into the business of evangelism after miraculously surviving a crash-landing into the Amazon forest. Rebecca, in particular, is recognized as a “miracle” survivor and healer, which helps her father sustain a good-faith relationship with the Indigenous people. 

However, the growing presence of illegal loggers threatening to invade the Amazonian wood and land pushes the evangelists into the center of escalating conflict between them and the Indigenous people. Which side will the father and daughter take? Are they going to expose themselves as yet another set of colonialist settlers who, as one of the loggers says, “just want [the Indigenous peoples’] souls?” Or are they going to fight for the Indigenous people? Or — better still — will this external conflict crack open the fissures in their seemingly perfect relationship, making one of them take the colonizer’s side and the other the Indigenous peoples’?

15 minutes into this 113-minute film, we have all the answers. Because unlike Silence (or other anti-colonialist but not faith-based narratives like Lucrecia Martel’s Zama or Claire Denis’ White Material), Marais’ film is not interested in journeying into the heart of darkness with its characters: it is content on simply exposing it. So, the moment we see the first Indigenous character in the film, we know he’s nothing more than a saintly figure responsible for saving kid Rebecca from the wreckage of the plane crash. The next moment — when we see Xido’s long-haired, slightly crazed, messianic-looking father figure unsure about accepting the hospitalized Rebecca as his biological daughter — we know that he’s one of our antagonists. 

These are, of course, just setups; the film can still complicate them through, for instance, rich characterizations or contrapuntal editing. But Marais never commits to developing the father-daughter relationship that ought to be the film’s emotional heart — Rebecca, in the hands of Zengel, always seems overly suspicious of her father’s evangelism; their relationship, from the get-go, seems corrupted. It doesn’t help that the director utilizes associative editing to underline this point further. The most memorable cut — both for its technical proficiency and lack of subtlety — equates Rebecca and Lawrence’s forceful “healing” of one of their followers inside their unnaturally lit, fluorescent navy-blue healing home with the sawing off of a tree in the Amazon forest.

The statement that settler colonialism robs Indigenous people of the tangible and intangible is loud and clear, and correct. This also explains why major film festivals like Locarno and New York have opened their doors to Transamazonia: clearly formulated ideas executed competently enough is a perfect recipe for a festival favorite. But where’s the drama? Where’s the emotional and spiritual struggle that gives weight to the point that Transamazonia makes loudly, clearly, and correctly? — DHRUV GOYAL

The Life Apart

Despite being active for roughly five decades, with a handful of theatrical and television works within his filmography — including his 1980 debut To Love the Damned and 2003’s six-hour magnum opus The Best of Youth — the 73-year-old Milanese filmmaker Marco Tullio Giordana still holds a quite minor status and appeal, at least, outside of Italy and some specific European cinephilic circles. Giordana’s films are meticulous, emotionally-charged portrayals fixed within historical and/or political contexts, and are often concerned with notions of estrangement, familial or romantic bonds, and the passage of time. His latest effort, The Life Apart, is no exception to this calculus. 

Adapted from Mariapia Veladiano’s acclaimed eponymous novel and co-scripted with Marco Bellocchio and Gloria Malatesta, the film opens, after a brief expressive intro reminiscent of Pablo Picasso’s Blue Period paintings, in the beautiful Northern Italian city of Vicenza in 1980, where wealthy couple Maria (Valentina Bellè) and Osvaldo Macola (Paolo Pierobon) are soon to have their first child around Christmas Eve — one of the occasional Catholic allusions we will see throughout the film. Their newborn daughter Rebecca (played as a 6-year-old by Viola Basso, at the age of ten by Sara Ciocca, and later as a young woman by the promising new talent Beatrice Barison), however, comes into this world with a red and startlingly large facial birthmark, which from the very beginning causes her mother to collapse into something of a depressive state, directing continuous a passive-aggressive attitude toward her daughter. But despite Rebecca’s unusual appearance, as she reaches the age of six, she miraculously demonstrates both fascination with and talent for the piano. While shunned by her mentally unstable mother, her usually absent and workaholic father, and later bullied by the conservatory students, the child prodigy has only the supportive piano virtuoso Aunt Erminia (Sonia Bergamasco) and her working-class childhood deskmate Lucilla to confide in throughout her life.

With a very keen eye for both architectural structures and psychological spaces, Giordana masterfully employs an economical narrative and neoclassical aesthetic in transforming this half-Ugly Duckling, half-Phantom of the Opera tale into a patient and passionate modern-day Renaissance tableau exploring simultaneous grace and damnation, beauty and tragedy, woe and wonder. Rebecca, unlike Brian De Palma’s Carrie, for instance, is a rejected wunderkind whose extraordinary powers simply lie in music, allowing her to find solace, confidence, and further acceptance in the world. Part of the film’s beauty and magnificence, then, is in the way Giordana constantly reflects the contrast between the inter- and intrapersonal silences and musical expressions. It’s a calmly paced and subtly composed work.

And while Giordana’s uniquely polished style of storytelling is unwaveringly dedicated to the gradual narrative developments and unhurried elaborative characterization through his precise mise-en-scène and lyrical sensibilities, the director also doesn’t shy away from welcoming some dream/nightmare sequences or magical intervals — for instance, when some old sculptural busts burst to life before Rebecca’s very eyes — whenever possible. Although the film draws evident inspiration from the likes of Bellocchio and Bernardo Bertolucci — the two iconic Italian cinéastes to whom Giordana always pays homage — what’s fascinating this time out is how  Giordana sketches The Life Apart’s borders with shades of Ingmar Bergman’s late-film character. It’s hard not to view this film’s emotional depth and visual splendor as something of an Italian equivalent for a combination of Cries and Whispers and Fanny and Alexander with Sarabande. The Life Apart is a superb film, as much enlivened with the empyrean forces of art and creation as it is pensive with regard to its character’s earthly sufferings and destructive relationships. — AYEEN FOROOTAN

Timestalker

In Alice Lowe’s first feature since Prevenge in 2016, which announced the actress and writer as a talented director to boot, we are witness to an epic romantic saga of unrequited love through the ages, a time loop of reincarnated passion being placed in all the wrong places. The metaphorical setup to Timestalker, playing up gendered stereotypes about the woman who can’t give up on the uncaring object of her affection, could have threatened to overwhelm the film in its simplicity, but in Lowe’s capable hands, it’s delivered with as much imagination and humor as one could hope for… — JAKE PITRE   [Read the full previously published review.]

Holy Electricity

Contemporary Georgian cinema is hard to pin down. Recent years’ most notable examples prove native talent expresses itself in disparate ways. The familiar, coming-of-age sensibilities of Levan Akin’s And Then We Danced, and his more recent Crossing is a far cry from Lea Kulumbegashbili’s harrowing Beginning, for example. Alexandre Koberidze’s whimsical What Do We See When We Look at the Sky?, whose magical shadings against urban life’s mundane alienation are baked into its foundations, seems in yet another world entirely. Tato Kotetishvili’s Holy Electricity’s brief flashes of eccentricity are less effective and call more attention to themselves than does Koberidze’s film, but it still speaks in a familiar, festival-friendly visual language of long takes, static compositions, and natural, unaffected performances. His characters, however, are the film’s real winning quality, able to draw out subtly moving drama from sometimes unremarkable images, breathing life into the film where it might otherwise feel staid and passionless.

Having found their lives inextricably linked after their brother/father’s death, uncle/nephew duo Bart and Gonga need to find a way to make money. While searching through junkyard scraps for inspiration, they come across a box of metal crosses. They decide to fix strips of neon lights in their hollow recesses, and sell them as glowing manifestations of spiritual power to the denizens of Tbilisi. It’s a smart racket in a city, like many in Eastern Europe, whose religious culture and history seems to have given way to urban secularism. Thanks to the passing interest of one man who saw their first illuminated cross, Bart and Gonga believe the alien glow of their little creations will inspire something deep within the whole population of Tbilisi; soon enough, they have a small community of customers eager to reconnect with the all-knowing.

This isn’t to suggest something sinister is at the heart of Bart and Gonga’s quaint operation. The history of cinema has far more disturbing examples of the power one can wield over people by monetizing the Lord Almighty. Frank Capra’s Miracle Woman saw the public as tragic fools at the whim of con man and his vessel, selling fake miracles to desperate citizens whose worlds had been torn asunder by the Great Depression. If we find ourselves, in the year 2024, at a similar juncture, with life increasingly difficult to live on dwindling sums of money that are fed to those already privileged with vast amounts, it’s hard to blame anyone for seeking solace in a glowing cross — after all, why shouldn’t it work if the normal solutions aren’t? It’s also hard to blame Bart and Gonga for capitalizing on it, and that’s, in part, because no one gets hurt in Holy Electricity; moral retribution is not the aim here, as much it is about identifying the ways people collectively survive hardship.

Even when togetherness is difficult — Bart gambles away his and Gonga’s meager savings, and has creditors chasing him — our parted duo finds connection: Bart to a loving community of trans men and women who live happy lives within their small bubbles, and to whom he introduces Gonga, whose incorruptibly precious face takes in these new and wonderful people with bashful innocence; and Gonga to a scattered crew of seemingly rootless teens, including a young Roma woman who sells coffee on the street, that offer friendship and the hope of something more. But if their faith in hard-won bonds forms the sturdy foundation of Bart’s life, it’s spontaneous community-building that gives him, and Gonga, momentum, and ultimately what makes Gonga the film’s source of hope. When the world has nothing better to do than antagonize, at the heart of Holy Electricity abounds a series of seemingly impossible miracles of communal spirit that seem to trump just about anything a glowing cross could ever conjure. — CHRIS CASSINGHAM

Foul Evil Deeds

For theists, the problem of evil has presented a nagging counterpoint to unchallenged belief in God, though sometimes it is precisely the challenge of proving that bolsters the act of believing and allots evil its due place in the order of things. For atheists, or those in-between, the question takes on a more matter-of-fact slant. Evil exists, it is everywhere, and it is undesirable, sure, but also inevitable. Psychology and innately biological traits influence one’s tendencies and proclivities, but social life — and the moral language that issues from it — provides the ultimate arbiter of our capacity to comprehend and reject ethical norms of right and wrong. So say the constructivists at least, and their legitimacy stems from the fact that, irrespective of whether ethical norms are metaphysically universal, their adoption is by and large anything but.

In Richard Hunter’s provocatively-titled first feature, Foul Evil Deeds, moral relativism over the question of evil is taken to the limit. We’re witness to a gamut of disparate, everyday lives, strung together in a multi-person narrative set in modern Britain and shot through the grainy lens of mini-DV. Most belong to archetypes of contemporary capitalism: a vicar and his wife living under suburban routine; an ex-con out on parole and cleaning toilets for a living; three male youths hanging out after, or during, school hours; an immigrant family; a lone accountant; a wealthy lawyer and his son. With the exception of the immigrant family, they are all white; other than the lawyer, they all appear to inhabit the same lower-to-middle class world. There is, in essence, nothing special about our sample size, in the same way that there is nothing special about the evil they do.

But the term evil is a stretch here. Foul Evil Deeds plays like a riff on Michael Haneke, whose clammy themes and clinical editing tend to culminate in a broader thesis against bourgeois rot. In Hunter’s case, however, the narrative arcs of his different characters never quite intersect, even as their shared existence under an impersonal contemporary landscape is made plausible by the camera’s steady indifference. The vicar shares a dead bedroom with his wife; he’s got a porn problem, while she’s plagued by maggot trouble. The cleaner’s case worker, a hijabi no less, refuses with “the same condescending face” his request to see his children. The immigrant father, working at a laundromat, inappropriately touches his co-worker while giving the latter a massage. Throughout most of the film, the tension threatens to boil over into something unspeakable, awaiting a trigger or sign, or simply the inevitability of latent evil manifesting in taut, metallic form.

Disappointingly, the film lacks the conviction of its form, settling for superficial illustrations of human desire and boredom that can’t quite be categorized as evil or, indeed, even foul. Provocation comes to a head when confronted with simple banality, of which Foul Evil Deeds indulges plenty in. In a way, it works better as sociological cross-section than philosophical rumination, insofar as the subconscious wants and obscured inner lives of everyday Joes are brought under closer scrutiny. That being said, closer doesn’t equate keener: with neither further background to lend the film’s characters greater verisimilitude nor an authorial imprint upon its ethical canvas, Hunter’s intentional amoralism quickly reveals insipid apathy beneath. Just as the main promotional still, of vicar and wife grinning eerily, is nothing more than a trick of the editing table, so is context everything. — MORRIS YANG