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Movie Review – Certified Copy

Certified Copy (2011)
Written & Directed by Abbas Kiarostami

James Miller, a British writer, travels to Tuscany to give a talk about his book “Certified Copy” wherein he argues that reproductions and forgeries of art are just as relevant to conversations of art as the originals. This is based on his idea that even the original is a reproduction of a model or an idea and therefore all art is a reproduction of something. He meets up with an unnamed French antique dealer who is incredibly enthusiastic about his book, and they discuss his ideas on art while on a drive to a village in the countryside. Miller excuses himself during a stop to get coffee and a barista mistakes Miller and the woman for a couple, and the woman plays along telling a whole story about her husband being so distant and never spending time with their son. Things take a turn for the strange because after the woman tells Miller about the employee’s assumption, they appear to take on the personas of a real husband and wife, devolving into an argument about long-simmering tensions. So what is the reality? Do we see a roleplay or are they a couple? Alternatively, does it even matter? Are two people who are feeling the genuine emotions associated with this type of relationship just as valid a real married couple?

Movie Review – Happy End

Happy End (2017)
Written & Directed by Michael Haneke

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Teenager Eve Laurent is suddenly thrust into the home of her estranged father and his family after her mother overdoses on antidepressants and ends up comatose. Thomas Laurent, her father, is married to his second wife who has just had their first child together. He’s also involved in an obscene affair with another woman. Anne, Eve’s aunt, owns a construction firm that has come under litigation after an onsite accident has left one of the workers on the verge of death. Anne’s son, Pierre works as the foreman on the site and appears to have emotional issues that might have led to the dangerous conditions on site. Finally, there is the patriarch Georges who is slipping into dementia and contemplating suicide to avoid what this condition will do to his mind, notably forgetting his late wife. Did I mention this is a dark comedy?

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Movie Review – Call Me By Your Name

Call Me By Your Name (2017)
Written by James Ivory
Directed by Luca Guadagnino

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Elio is the son of academics living in northern Italy. He spends his days consuming books and composing piano pieces. He is also in friendship with local girl Marzia where the beginnings of attraction are forming. Summer looks to be a monotonous season until Oliver arrives. Oliver is an American doctoral student who has come to get the aid of Elio’s father in revising his dissertation. Elio finds himself drawn to Oliver and even feeling pangs of jealousy when it appears the older man fancies a woman in town. As Elio explores and discovers himself in this formative year, he becomes aware of his feelings for Oliver. First, with some anger, he tries to push them aside, and finally, he confesses all of this to Oliver who reciprocates.

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Movie Review – Raw

Raw (2017)
Written and Directed by Julia Ducournau

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Justine has arrived at veterinary school, like her parents before her and her sister, Alexia, who is in her second year. The family are devoted vegetarians, and Justine attempts to uphold this tradition at the school. However, the hazing of first years leads to her being forced to consume a rabbit’s kidney and being doused in buckets of animal blood. Something begins to change in the young woman, and she finds herself overwhelmed with a hunger for meat, even consuming it raw from the fridge. At momentary slip of scissors beings Justine to a new precipice where she develops a taste for human flesh.

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Movie Review – I Killed My Mother

I Killed My Mother (2009, dir. Xavier Dolan)

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If you look up the many articles and interviews about Xavier Dolan, you will likely get a picture of an arrogant young artist. These would not be wrong, but I would challenge that this portrayal is negative particularly in cinema. Dolan represents a strong, re-interpretive Millennial energy that was inevitable in film. In the same way, the French New Wave and the iconoclastic American 1970s filmmakers made their mark in the form; Dolan is doing that same type of work. Does he indulge? Damn straight he does. But I challenge anyone to find a single auteur who doesn’t indulge constantly.

Dolan’s first feature, I Killed My Mother is the story of Hubert Minel (played by Dolan), a 16-year-old gay man, still closeted to his mother and who engages in the most vicious arguments and conflicts with this central caretaker. Dad stepped out when Hubert was seven and left Chantale, the mother (Anne Dorval) to raise the boy on her own. Hubert is two months into a relationship with a classmate and looking towards a career in the arts, encouraged by a supportive teacher (Suzanne Clément).

Dolan is a filmmaker influenced by the medium. No moment in I Killed My Mother is simply a moment; they are accented by flourishes of style from Goddard-like framing (off center and with both conversants in the frame), slow motion almost from a perfume ad, black and white confessional close-ups, and myriad of other touches that add emotion to a relatively typical story of parent-child conflict. He also knows the importance of establishing character through setting, as seen in the very opening close-ups of his mother’s tchotchke-filled home. We also learn volumes about her through her hairstyle, clothing, even the manner in which she eats breakfast. And all this if before she even has a modicum of dialogue.

While Dolan is the composer and conductor, Anne Dorval as Chantale is the star player. It would have been very easy for Chantale to slip in caricature, but Dorval does gritty work to keep the character faceted and obscured. In moments of high tension, she will begin to follow the same type of script I imagine all of us remember from our adolescence, which is underscored by Hubert calling her out on this same repetition. She shuts him down in the same manner that frustrated us all and drove many teenagers to those primal, guttural ARGHs! There is a moment near the end of the film where her role as a single mother is blamed as the reason why Hubert is struggling academically and exhibits such rebellious behavior. This is the moment where Dorval lets Chantale crack through the thickly layered makeup and sequined floral outfits. Chantale’s love for her son is beyond the question of outsiders, and she makes that known.

Dolan made I Killed My Mother at the age of 20 and has not tried to hide the fact that it is heavily biographical. He has stated that this is a film he couldn’t have waited decades to make, that it needed the raw emotion of being only steps away from adolescence. And he is completely right. A forty-something making the film in deep retrospect would have let nostalgia slip in between the cracks. There is no wistful memory manifesting falsified beauty here. Through the ugliness of this relationship, we see Beauty and Love. We don’t fight and scream with this level of fervor at people we hate, the type of anger glimpsed in the film born out of intense love and need. It is the attempt to communicate love but failing to do so because the language does not possess the vocabulary to do so.

Hubert states in one of his bathroom confessionals on camera that he doesn’t love his mother like a mother, but he loves her nonetheless. During a late night conversation, Hubert fueled by ecstasy and barging home full of elation to speak to Chantale; he states, “I love you. I am telling you this so that you won’t forget.” This is the moment where the nature of the relationship changes, not profoundly, but both characters redefine the bond. Hubert is no longer the dependent glimpsed in the Super 8 home movies at the old house by the lake. He is an individual coming into his own, intellect, a sexual being, a partner in a relationship, developing complex ideas and emotions. Chantale is reticent to accept that, but by the end of the film, they come to an unspoken understanding. Their relationship will never be what they both remember and wish it could be, something new will form and in that they will find a place for their love.

Cosmos (2015, dir. Andrzej Zulawski)

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This was probably one of the most French movies I’ve seen in a long time. The final film of Polish director Andrzej Zulawski, the film tells the story of Witold, a law school dropout obsessed with writing a garishly romantic novel. He and his friend Fuchs end up at a rural inn run by a family just as crazy as our protagonist. Mrs. Wojtys is prone to outbursts of screaming only to freeze in place for a few moments after. Her husband Leon is an insane retired banker who is constantly twisting around language. Her daughter, Lena, becomes the focus of Witold’s obsession and comes to despise her pretty boy architect husband. He also holds an obsession with the housemaid, Catherette, who suffers from a lip deformity as the result of a car accident. Throughout the story is the ongoing mystery surrounding a bird found hung by its neck in the garden behind the house. The film meanders through the inn and the group all end up at a seaside cottage for the finale, chasing each other through the woods with lanterns.

To say Cosmos caused major confusion as I watched it would be an understatement. There is very little plot to the film beyond what I described. The majority of the picture consists of Witold exploding in wildly emotional monologues either while typing out his novel or lamenting and pining over the unobtainable Lena. I personally love films that challenge narrative structure and experiment, but moments of Cosmos went so far over the top it lost me. Scenes play as vignettes that don’t really add up to a meaningful whole.

The acting was wonderful due in part to how free and insane the characters were meant to be. Sebastian Genet as Witold did an incredibly convincing job of portraying a comically angsty poet/philosopher. He even made the stranger moments captivating enough to keep me engaged. Early in the film, he has a moment where he faces the camera and repeats the phrase “The savage power of stupid thought” over and over in a Donald Duck voice, looking like he is both on the verge of tears and bursting out laughing. In many ways, that phrase serves as the thesis statement of the film.

The film was packed with references to authors and figures of note in the arts. This becomes part of the word play with Witold referring to Sartre’s Modern Times, only to have Fuchs mistake it for the Chaplin film of the same name and proceed to perform the waddle of Chaplin’s Little Tramp. The crazy old man Leon overhears a conversation about films and chimes in with “Spielbleurgh” (bleurgh being an expression of disappointment) which leads to a sort of pun competition between the man and Witold to plug bleurgh into a litany of other names (Bleurghman). I seem to recall another of Leon’s bizarre turns of phrase being “When an icicle mounts a bicycle it becomes a tricycle”. *Shrugs*

I was never bored by Cosmos but I was pretty strongly confounded for 90% of it. It is a movie that has a very strong forward momentum, that momentum is just leading you to nowhere, but that is on purpose. By injecting things like the hanging bird mystery into the film Zulawski almost seems to be daring you to try and make sense of this absurdity. The film does manage to capture the chaotic nature of creativity through Witold’s mad outbursts of typing as his novel becomes more and more about recording his angst. Most definitely a film that does not have wide audience appeal, but then not all films should. If you are wanting to be challenged and confounded Cosmos is certainly up to the task.

Tom at the Farm (2015, dir. Xavier Dolan)

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Frenetic strings screaming. The sound of cornstalks furiously rustling. The blur of figure bursting through them. He enters a clearing in the field. We cut to a tight shot of his face. His bleach blond hair is a tangled mess. A thin line of blood travels from the corner of his lip diagonally down to his chin. He is suddenly thrown to the ground by a man exploding from the corn.

This sort of explosive moment is what Tom at the Farm is all about. It spend the majority of its run time letting tension crank up until the rope is tightly wound. When the tension is allowed to release we’re met with moments of raw brutality that are confusing and upsetting.

Brought to us by Quebecois director, Xavier Dolan, Tom at the Farm follows a young man (Dolan as the lead) as he journeys into the Canadian version of the Midwest. He’s headed there to attend the funeral of his boyfriend, Guillaume. Upon arrival, he quickly learns that Guillaume was keeping a lot of secrets from him and his own family. He meets Agathe, the matriarch, who was lied to about her youngest having a fiance and Francis, the psychotic older brother who believes he can beat Tom into submission about keeping these lies going.

The first time Francis assaults Tom it is shocking and unexpected. But as their aggressive relationship continues it begins to take on a twisted psychosexual tone. At moments, Tom seems to become submissive and seeks out this continued violent treatment from Francis. And even Francis seems to desire Tom despite his protestations. When Tom finally attempts to leave he finds his car dismantled in the barn, stranding him in this desolate farm country. However, he finds himself comforted by the pastoral lifestyle, helping the birth of a calf, and then finding a moment to break down with emotion of what he participated in. In the midst of this tense psychological battle, Tom and Francis end up in an embrace after the latter reveals he took ballroom dancing lessons for a long lost ex.

The tone of the film is balanced somewhere between a lesser Hitchcock picture and The Talented Mr. Ripley. As the film nears its conclusion we discover a secret about Francis that illuminates his virulent anger and rage over Guillaume’s sexuality. The final shot of the film lets up contemplate the consequences of a moment when that rage overflowed. We don’t know what Tom believes about this revelation but we know it will inevitably shake up his world. While as unreal and absurd as the choices are that Tom makes when we, the audience, are likely shouting at him to just leave, these quiet final moments bring the film back to some semblance of a grounded reality.