drama

A Powerful Serve

Chet Kozlowski — Tue, 25 Mar 2025 14:00:00 +0000

A Powerful Serve Chet Kozlowski March 25, 2025 - 10:00

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It’s a rare film that doesn’t just depict an emotional state but becomes the state. Such a film is the quietly devastating Julie Keeps Quiet.

Start with the poster. The title is intriguing enough, simple and direct. White type over a photo of a figure on a blue background. The photo is a contradiction: a young woman, her features twisted in anguish and rage. If a poster could talk, this one would be screaming.

This simple image captures the restraint of its protagonist, Julie, an up-and-coming tennis star in a Belgian high school. She’s headed for the nationals. Julie is a person of action, and she’s uncommonly reticent since the suicide of her friend and teammate Aline. Julie watches a video of Aline extolling the virtues of Jeremy, their coach. Aline looks bright and hopeful, not like anyone who’s carrying a weight. But she does.

And so does Julie. She has a secret, has internalized it and tries to subdue it. She goes about her mundane day. She goes to practice. She walks her dog. She eats dinner with her supportive parents and tries very hard to keep a lid on her emotions. Regret, desire, loyalty, betrayal…all are balled up inside her. She is young enough to feel but not old enough to process. The only sign of her turmoil is the ferocity of her serve: that hard twack is Julie’s release.

If you think you know Julie’s secret—we’re looking at you, Larry Nasser—you’d be right. But that isn’t the film’s revelation. It’s its state of mind. Belgian director Leonardo van Dijl’s penetrating study delves deep into Julie’s private purgatory: the film’s color palette is earth tones and light is always caught at a midpoint: no sunshine or dark shadows. Julie sees her world as if looking through a dirty windshield, grayed, smudges that blend with other smudges.

That isn’t to say it’s dull by any means. Julie Keeps Quiet is immersive, masterfully composed of empty spaces by Mr. Dijl and director of photography Nicolas Karakatsanis. For two hours, they put us in Julie’s headspace, her indecision, the guilt, and the confusion. (The film was chosen as the Belgian entry for the Best International Feature Film at the 97th Academy Awards.)

As Julie, actor Tessa van Den Broeck is astonishing. She was chosen from a host of young tennis players and projects serious depth even when still. The camera is right up on her, in extreme closeups of her face, while she stares into nothing. Her teammates suspect but Julie won’t confirm. Her conundrum is not so much Aline’s death as it is her similar circumstances with their coach, Jeremy. He’s been suspended yet still calls Julie, and meets with her, sussing out her version. Will she testify against him? If not for Aline, for herself? They speak in codes, in person or on the phone. “When you told me to stop, I stopped,” he pleads cryptically.

So much at stake for so young a woman. The finals, her team, her sanity, all get mulched together. The images grow grainier. And then the voices in her head: Caroline Snow’s score has the force of an epiphany. Try as Julie does to quell her thoughts, they break through when she least expects them: the rising voices of women, a choir of angry angels that rises as Julie’s path becomes clear. Those voices are a thrilling complement to what we’re watching.

Julie Keeps Quiet is deceptively simple. Not much happens but the everyday, but that’s the point. Julie tries to maintain order. What will break through and what will it mean? The film is an intense and cohesive vision, and a risky one: when you say nothing, the impression is that you have nothing to say. Julie Keeps Quiet, but for its silence, is screaming out loud.

_______________________________

Julie Keeps Quiet. Directed by Leonardo van Dijl. 2024. Belgian with English subtitles. From Film Movement. Runtime 100 minutes. In theaters.

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Chekov in the Pines

Chet Kozlowski — Sun, 16 Mar 2025 18:08:12 +0000

Chekov in the Pines Chet Kozlowski March 16, 2025 - 14:08

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Passions erupt in the curious new film Appalachian Dog.

Teddy's home from a war, back to his mountain home, and reunited with his wife, Marion. He and Marion run a tailor shop, and while he was away, a seamstress named Peggy assumed his role. Teddy's hands (and head) suffer PTSD, and he suspects he's been replaced by Peggy in more ways than one.

Appalachian Dog starts out as a chamber piece. The opening scene is the shop Teddy shares with Marion. Peggy's there, and Cate, a neighbor who is comically interested in the carnal. It’s all very casual and genial until Cate’s coat gets torn. Who will mend it? In that quiet way, the drama of Appalachian Dog begins.

This is writer/director Colin Henning’s first feature. He also plays Teddy as an acerbic character who tries to sew, gazing at his shaky hands, willing them to work right. Teddy is all aggravation and non-sequiturs. He grouses, pontificates, and searches for his loyal dog while his steadfast wife Marion negotiates relationships. She discreetly slips Peggy the task of repairing the coat. Teddy's first night back isn't fireworks in the bedroom, either. The best he can muster is to longingly watch his wife undress.

Domestic dynamic established, the action opens up, all the way up the mountain, and soon somebody's expressing secret love, somebody's frolicking in the barn with somebody else's significant other, mothers are dying, and a wedding gown becomes an item of contention. To reveal more details is to ruin the surprises of the movie, of which there are many.

What's striking about Appalachian Dog is its artificiality. The sets are thrift-shop. The actors sometimes veer into community theater territory. There's little attempt at authenticity. No way Teddy looks like he's been through a war. Mr. Henning plays him more like a grad student, appearing in a sports coat with a shock of unruly hair. The women are mismatched as well; Georgia Morgan plays Marion as more refined than she might be, while Cate (Brooke Elizabeth) is too delicate to be convincing as a farmer's wife toting bales of hay. Hayleigh Hart Franklin plays Peggy as a steady presence, biding her time and watching how the wind blows. Cate's husband, Andrew (Aaron J. Stewart), is a specter, seen at a distance for most of the runtime. The actors are mostly newbies, building their reels, appearing elsewhere in bit parts and commercials.

Yet… the inauthenticity works. I accepted the conceit completely and was along for the ride. Much of that has to do with Mr. Henning's filmmaking. Those sound lapses are intentional, part of his style, and happen abruptly enough to send a chill. Crucial dialogue is self-consciously overdubbed, and the sound drops out completely in key sequences. Atmospheric montages are inserted at unfitting moments, diverting the ordinary action in a different direction. Even these leave an impression, especially in one of the best orgasm-by-the-river sequences I've seen lately. Are we in Appalachia? No one's particularly bereft. Life may not look easy, but it is not hard.

Yet, as I say, it works. Appalachian Dog is inventive and original, a quirky little gem. The unreality is hard to put your finger on, but Mr. Henning is obviously in control. Themes of sexuality, desire, love, betrayal, and perfection bounce around like tennis balls. Some good lines, too. "Andrew's best left lonesome." "Velvet's spendy." "You got past the dragon."

Appalachian Dog is proudly out of sync, prim, and worth your proper attention. This first production from C.H. Squared Films, the company of Colin Henning and Chad Hylton, shows tremendous promise.

But where is that darn dog?

Appalachian Dog. Directed by Colin Henning. 2025. From C.H. Squared Films. Runtime 100 minutes. Available On Demand.

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The Male/Female Gaze

Gary Lucas — Thu, 06 Mar 2025 03:28:05 +0000

The Male/Female Gaze Gary Lucas March 5, 2025 - 22:28

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Izumi Suzuki by Nobuyoshi Araki from his book Izumi Suzuki: This Bad Girl

"I have looked on many women with lust. I have committed adultery in my heart many times." - Jimmy Carter, Playboy Magazine (Sept. 1976)

A historical if not downright heroic statement concerning the "Male Gaze," courtesy of the 1976 Democratic presidential nominee.

This comment was published as part of writer Robert Scheer's interview with Jimmy Carter in the September 1976 issue of Playboy, which nearly derailed Carter's campaign and was leveraged (unsuccessfully) in an effort to smear Carter on the eve of his campaign by such outstanding citizens as Gerald Ford and the Rev. Billy Graham.

But to Jimmy Carter's credit, he was, let's face it, just being honest here—unlike serial groper-in-chief Donald "Women, I am your protector" Trump, greasy Matt Gaetz, phony populist J.D. Vance, and other oleaginous Republicans currently strutting and fretting their hour on the stage.

(It is to laugh, but highly appropriate, that the moralistic Vance's own Hillbilly Elegy memoir—hardly salacious reading—was recently censored and removed from public school libraries in Michigan.)

As someone who, at a tender age, took a stand in favor of Free Speech while attending Syracuse's very public Hurlbut W. Smith Junior High School by often sporting a bright orange button emblazoned with the legend F*CK CENSORSHIP—I also advocated in my AP English class against the suppression of editor/publisher Ralph Ginzburg's artsy stroke-book Eros Magazine. Though relatively tame by today's standards, the publication of Eros sent Ginzburg to prison for 8 months.

Speaking of today, l look askance at the current recuperation of the late Andrea Dworkin's stentorian anti-porn pronouncements from the late '60s—still cringe-worthy after all these years—in which several contemporary literary journals are lauding her views as proto-feminist. I've always found her writing to be strident and tone-deaf, especially her unintentionally hilarious anti-heterosex harangues.

Case in point is the recent republication of her 1981 book Pornography, a book-length critique of the subject in hand (!) in which in the service of her argument Dworkin summarizes the narratives of several cheapo porn paperbacks of the Beeline Books variety that are, in her re-telling of their major plot points, dare I say even "dirtier;" i.e., more erotically charged, than the texts of the original books in question.

(She had a real way with words, our Andrea.)

But do women also enjoy taking advantage of, and is there such a thing as the "Female Gaze?"

The late Pauline Reage (who wrote under that pseudonym and also under the name Dominique Aury, although her birth name was Anne Desclos) came close with 1954's Histoire d'O, which was written to entertain her male lover Jean Paulhan, from the point of view of a female submissive.

Some years later, in 1973, Erica Jong had a bestseller with her novel Fear of Flying and its central conceit of "the zipless fuck." Jong's novel was pre-dated by science fiction author Joanna Russ's steamy The Female Man, which took only five years to publish. And recently, Miranda July has raised the female-centric erotic stakes again with her novel All Fours.

For my money, though, the absolute greatest of all female smut purveyors was my old friend Iris Owens, who, as an ex-pat in Paris, wrote some of the wildest and filthiest erotic novels for Maurice Girodias's Olympia Press under the pseudonym Harriet Daimler—classics including Darling, Innocence, and The Woman Thing—all well worth tracking down, all more than worthy of her friend Terry Southern's (himself a sometime dirty book author) Quality Lit seal of approval.

In underground comix, Italian graphic artist Giovanna Casotto wrote and illustrated fantastically explicit erotica like her Bitch in Heat collection in the '90s. These graphic novels push the transgressive envelope while celebrating the forbidden and illicit.

In cinema, Candida Royalle distinguished herself in the '60s and '70s as a sex-positive feminist and went on to produce and direct numerous erotic "couples" films.

Most recently, Dutch film director Halina Reijn certainly exercised her droit du seigneur with the recent directorial succès de scandale of her film Babygirl, which I've written about here: http://culturecatch.com/index.php/node/4404

But this expansive female sex-positive attitude has certainly not consistently enough been the case, as the infamous Frank Zappa versus the PMRC congressional hearings spearheaded by Tipper Gore attest to.

Pornography, as we all know, is definitely in the Eye of the Beholder, both male or female or intersex, pace Supreme Court Justice Potter Stevens's landmark ruling of 1964 regarding the banning of Louis Malle's 1958 film Les Amants in Ohio on the grounds that it was pornography:

"I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ['hardcore pornography'], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so.

But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that."

Regarding the Male/Female Gaze:

I adored the late Al Goldstein's Midnight Blue cable TV series in the '70s and '80s.

The very IDEA of Al Goldstein (publisher and editor of Screw Magazine)—a loud-mouthed vulgarian, a tummler, a rager, a stand-up comedian, and swaggering teller of hard truths—the living embodiment, in fact, of the anti-semitic Jewish Pornographer stereotype, which hearkens back to Ulysses's first American publisher, First Amendment champion Samuel Roth (a lifelong Orthodox Jew), and Olympia Press major-domo Maurice Girodias (half-Jewish but wtf)—always warmed the cockles of my heart.

No one essayed the role of Jewish Pornographer with a capital P better than Al.

I especially loved his infamous televised "Fuck You!" Department, a staple of Midnight Blue.

Al was a goddamn one-man Consumer Reports, mouthing outrageous take-downs of sacrosanct institutions like the high-end Hammacher Schlemmer department store, who sold him some broken-down crap, or bitching about the staggering bill for inferior food or service at some tony restaurant in Manhattan.

This segment always ended with Al's middle-fingered kiss-off to the product or person at hand deserving of his righteous scorn:

“Hammacher Schlemmer--FUCK YOU!!”

Al took no prisoners—naming names and reporting phone numbers of the folks working at these joints who'd done him dirty that he encouraged his viewers to harass!

This outrageous tactic was to eventually prove his undoing when he went after his ex-wife and her divorce lawyer and gave out their phone numbers. (Bad move.)

Yes, not everyone loved Al.

My life partner, Caroline Sinclair, f'rinstance LOATHED Al Goldstein. She found his show gross, obnoxious, and odious in extremis (all points in the show's favor, IMHO)—and she always demanded I immediately switch channels whenever the show came on over Manhattan Cable's Public Access channel.

This was true also of the other Manhattan Cable Public Access sex-centric cable shows back in the day, helmed by colorful New Yorker characters such as Ugly George, a Polish American emigre who roamed the streets of the boroughs shirt-less in silver lame hot pants with a Sony video portapak strapped on his back who specialized in sweet-talking random hotties he encountered into back alleys and secluded nooks where he (somehow) coaxed them into taking off their tops and bras for his camera—the raw footage of which he gleefully aired every week.

Also, the man known simply as "Dan" (no last name given), a bearded, somewhat portly Jewish erotic connoisseur referred to as "Rabbi" by the mainly male callers-in who watched the show.

Dan was frequently seen cavorting in the churning waters of a hot tub with two nekkid and nubile young ladies, all the while fielding on-air calls over his phone from fans watching the action live—one of whom set him up unforgettably one summer night by asking if he could personally address one of Dan's female tub consorts.

Dan passed the phone to her (all calls were heard over the air):

"Tell me dear…when you're sitting in that hot tub next to Dan...and things start getting steamy and intimate with him...(Dan and his partner both smile and nod here)…and you turn to Dan to kiss him...and you two start getting it on.

Tell me, does Dan smell??"

A faint smile played over Dan's mainly serene and enlightened visage as he hung up the phone with a cool:

"Next caller."

Then there was the Robin "Baby Let Me Bang Your Box" Byrd show, which concentrated on interviews with hot lesbians and gay male models, new ones every week, new kids fresh in town working and dancing at Show World on West 42nd Street—something for everybody!

Photo from Hideaki Anno's 1998 film Love and Pop

It is surprising to me that Caroline was so repulsed by such, in retrospect, innocent TV fun—as once upon a time in a world long ago and far away, she had been an illegal alien in our fair city until she wasn't (Reader, I married her). She had (shhhhh!) occasionally supported herself back in the days without a Green Card by working in the Forty Deuce porno film industry as a part-time editor and set decorator on a couple of films starring Al's good pal with a big schlong, the gross Ron Jeremy.

Let me backtrack a bit here:

My interest in the erotic was stoked via my random discovery at age 10 or 11 of a well-thumbed European pirated edition of Ulysses on my father's bookshelf, which it turned out he'd liberated in the '40s from the Zeta Beta Tau Jewish frat house while a student at Syracuse University.

That, and stumbling on (and eventually going steady with) my older sisters's paperback copies of Mary McCarthy's The Group, Grace Metalious's Peyton Place…and my own close encounter in summer camp with a fellow camper's copy of Roslyn Drexler's I Am the Beautiful Stranger, which we passed around in our cabin in the woods like Russian dissidents sharing samizdat literature in the former Soviet Union.

The truth, though, is that in the current digital moment, things like specifically erotic novels, adult cinemas, x-rated stores, and their like have more or less gone the way of all flesh, vanishing vapor trails in the polluted ether, with the bit-torrent of hardcore porn but a click away on your iPhone (or so I've been told. I have never availed myself of the opportunity—have you? I prefer to patrol the precincts of my own dirty mind—À la recherche du temps pair deux—and need no visual stimulation to "fire my imagination," as Mick Jagger so succinctly put it in the sensational '60s).

I bring this up in regard to a recent viewing of a new restoration of Japanese cult anime director Hideaki Anno's experimental 1998 live-action film Love and Pop, which is now playing at the IFC Center here in the West Village. It's a film that is simultaneously a critique of a porn-centric world and the virtual Thing In Itself—a real Peep Show Bible for obsessive oldsters and "nasty narrow-minded jades" (to quote Vivian Stanshall).

Boasting some of the weirdest camera angles and more outre discontinuous edits ever seen before "on the big screen" outside of certain avant-garde classics, the film is based on the book Topaz II by Japanese novelist Ryu Murakami (often confused with Japanese writer Haruki Murakami—definitely not the same animal), author of the indelibly lewd Almost Transparent Blue (for years available in English translation only in NYC at a Japanese import store on West 57th Street) and other explorations of the soft white underbelly of Japanese decadence. It is a glittering dark jewel with many facets that shimmer in its depiction of wayward Japanese youth coming of age.

It concerns a quartet of cute teenage girls living in the Shibuya district of Tokyo who are devoted advocates of "sugar dating"—lining up dates with creepy older men through a phone service specializing in connecting such erotic hook-ups, the goal of the girls being to obtain the maximum amount of gifts from their furtive male patsies without actually putting out.

(And btw, I've never seen such repulsive male marks as portrayed in this film, two of whom the main female protagonist Hiroshi has to endure in one endless long day's journey to the end of the night in the hope of scoring enough yen to purchase an expensive ring.)

The film, while exposing the machinations of both sexes in this twisted Japanese mating ritual, lingers lovingly Tarantino-like on plenty of close-ups of bare, barely pubescent female feet, ankles, legs, etc.—all the better to make the viewer complicit in the whole seedy story—a voyeur, if you will, of the film itself; a regular Peeping Tom.

We're kinda in Ghost World film territory here, but way more in-your-face and outrageous.

As an objet du cinema, I've never seen anything like this film, frankly—other than—thematically, anyway—the 2009 Polish film Mall Girls, directed by Katarzyna Roslaniec—which tells a similar tale of young Polish girls from poor families who semi-prostitute themselves hanging around in large bustling malls hoping to pick up older sugar daddies to basically "buy them stuff."

Well, it is a "mean old world," to quote Little Walter, if not a dog's life, for 98% percent of the human population hereabouts, vis-à-vis hierarchic capitalist exploitation based on the old in-and-out, top man/bottom man dialectic.

Three cheers then for Sean Baker's audacious and hilarious film Anora, which, as I write this, just swept the Oscars —and his acceptance speeches (two of them) wherein he praised the lives of sex workers.

(Although, hey, Love and Pop's bourgeois teenage Japanese girls are hardly "sex workers." These grrrls just wanna have fun, i.e., go shopping).

Love and Pop is definitely worthy of the attention of cinephiles of any persuasion, especially as the film has never had a proper release in North America (and it's been a 27-year wait).

It looks like it should be playing on and off at the IFC on 6th Avenue in the West Village for a while in any case, and it's set to open in other U.S. cities later this year.

And while I'm grazing in the "Asian Babes" section:

All broad-minded literati are recommended to check out the recent publication of new English translations of Japanese novelist/model/actress Izumi Suzuki's superb books Terminal Boredom, Hit Parade of Tears, and Set My Heart On Fire—all of which might well be filed under the Love and Pop category, dealing as they are with complicated and claustrophobic male/female relationships and romantic agony in Tokyo in an age of disposable chintzy popular music and glitz.

All were recently published by (go figure) Verso Books, devoted mainly to leftist political and philosophical writings, such as our friend Cineaste editor Richard Porton's important study Film and the Anarchist Imagination.

And Izumi Suzuki's books are decidedly not that in any way, shape, or form. Suzuki was both a brilliant writer and a stunning-looking woman (I'm exercising my Male Gaze prerogative again here—sorry!).

She achieved much notoriety in Japan as both a radical science-fiction author and film actress—as well as an erotic model for famed Japanese photographer/one-time lover Nobuyoshi Araki—but her flame burned too brightly, she suffered mental health issues, and eventually, Izumi Suzuki took her own life at the tender age of 36. Perhaps in the mistaken belief that at that point she was over the hill in a Houelllbecque-ian "Female as Commodity" sense.

Her books are fascinating, and her writing is a profound glimpse into the female psyche, like the work of Elena Ferrante.

Both Izumi Suzuki's books and Hideaki Anno's Love and Pop should be a lot better known in the world.

Hopefully, this essay is a beacon pointing you, the voyeur, in their direction.

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Somewhat Enchanted Evening

Chet Kozlowski — Mon, 24 Feb 2025 01:40:05 +0000

Somewhat Enchanted Evening Chet Kozlowski February 23, 2025 - 20:40

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Being an auteur is easy these days. Digital technology quickens and makes less expensive production and distribution. So when a first film is the product of a single sensibility that is writer, director, cinematographer, and editor, we have to consider the distinctiveness of what they choose to put in front of us.

In One Night in Tokyo, Joshua Woodcock's first feature, Sam, a 30-something American, has just arrived in Tokyo. It's Sam's first time in Japan, and he's set for a week with his equally American GF Becca, whose job has taken her there. They've been separated for six months. But something's off: Becca isn't there at the airport to meet him. When he arrives at her apartment, she seems distracted, pleads prior commitments, and gives him the key to a hotel room. Hmmm. Sam's Japanese friend Jun is indisposed as well. He suggests Sam join his girlfriend Ayaka for beers with her friends. The evening is awkward; Sam doesn't know Ayaka or the language (one of the best scenes is Sam trying to make small talk, his new acquaintances explaining references). When the friends disperse, Sam is left alone with Ayaka, who is indifferent.

An event bonds them, and Sam resolves to return home on the morning flight. The pair spends time in funky bars and neon streets, and they warm to each other. They compare favorite films (spoiler alert: his is Chaplin's City Lights; hers is Ozu's Tokyo Story). Confidences are shared and affection blooms.

Notice I don't say "love." One Night in Tokyo is not exactly a romcom. It has a conspicuous lack of passion. Its stakes are pretty low, which is surprising for a first film over which the maker has full creative control. The film looks professional; it’s not a knockoff. Joshua Woodcock writes and directs confidently, coming from advertising and shorts. He's the cinematographer and editor, too. Mr. Woodcock is based in Tokyo, as are his cast and crew.

But while One Night in Tokyo is endearing in the moment, it adds up to a shrug. Its characters are attractive but bland and pretty ordinary. The dearth of passion appears intentional, despite a bossy score by Topher Horn, which is designed to guide our emotions and provide whimsey that is not on the screen.

Mr. Woodcock's scenario has neither the clever dialogue of Linklater's "Before" series, or the quirkiness of Coppola's Lost in Translation. The cast works and is appealing. Reza Emamiyeh plays Sam as a likeable hangdog. Tokiko Kitagawa has an endearing smile and plays Ayaka with quiet skill: her conversion from impassivity to interest is convincing. The cast also includes Cailee Oliver as Becca and Shinichiro Watanabe as Jun.

One Night in Tokyo is an enjoyable enough Fish-Out-of-Water cum Opposites-Attract picture. But it’s pretty thin and not very unique. Even the streets of Tokyo seem ordinary: only a few distinctive locations are visited and not much is made of Sam being a stranger in a strange land. Mr. Woodcock serves up cautious helpings of emotion.

As in most contemporary films, the phone is a character. Time that could be spent considering each other is spent checking the screen. The language barrier is breached by a verbal translation app. After they use that, Sam and Ayaka speak fluently to each other.

Doesn't anybody just stare into each other's eyes anymore? In a movie like One Night in Tokyo, bells don't have to ring, but they could at least vibrate.

______________________________________

One Night in Tokyo. Directed by Joshua Woodcock. 2024. From Buffalo 8. Runtime 95 minutes.

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She Feels As If She’s In A Play

Chet Kozlowski — Mon, 10 Feb 2025 21:58:13 +0000

She Feels As If She’s In A Play Chet Kozlowski February 10, 2025 - 16:58

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The new Spanish film Something is About to Happen focuses on Lucia, an ordinary woman leading an ordinary life until she’s fired from her 20-year IT job. Her father is dying, neighbors argue through the cheap walls of her apartment, a big black bird haunts her. Luci yearns for a richer life. She gets it in the form of a neighbor, a handsome actor named Calaf who lives above her and plays a recording of Puccini's opera Turandot. She takes a chance, knocks on his door, and is swept up into his world. Then, the next time she visits, another person is there. Calaf's left the apartment without a word.

Rather than being crushed, Lucia is optimistic. She buys a taxi and drives the city (Madrid). She dresses as the Chinese heroine of Puccini's opera. She's convinced that one day Calaf will enter her cab and they will be reunited.

Something is About to Happen is engrossing but perplexing. Director Antonio Méndez Esparza is known for the features Here and There (2012), Life and nothing more (2017), and the documentary Courtroom 3H (2020). Having written the screenplay with Clara Roquet he shows subtle control and maintains suspense. Mr. Esparza is served well by Zeltia Montes' propulsive string score, which propels the action by keeping us on edge.

But the best reason to see Something is About to Happen is to watch Malena Alterio as Lucia. Ms. Alterio offers an open-faced performance, confronting the world armed with a smile. Nothing phases her. She has a wonderful profile and a bubbly view of life: gray skies are gonna clear up. Lucia is reminiscent of Sally Hawkins in Mike Leigh's Happy Go Lucky: she is almost infuriatingly upbeat. But she is not naive. She flirts with and even occasionally beds her taxi riders, sometimes as an act of mercy, as with a man freshly diagnosed with cancer, sometimes to scratch a carnal itch. Eventually, a theater producer (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón) comes into her cab, and then a scriptwriter (José Luis Torrijo), both of whom might know Calaf the actor (Rodrigo Poisón). The coincidences pile up, the narrative noose tightens, and Lucia begins to suspect their presence is not so much serendipitous as, well…scripted.

As watchable as it is, Something is About to Happen is both sophisticated and facile. The scenario is rife with symbols: the cab equals freedom, connection and caprice; the big black bird means death, the sequence of deaths lead to rebirth. The film is meant as a parable. But of what? What human behavior is it calling out? It's based on a book titled Let No One Sleep (Que Nadie Duerma), which points us in a whole other thematic direction, giving extra meaning to the nocturnal route of Lucia's taxi.

Something is About to Happen's resolution gives off a whiff of deus ex machina as if Mr. Esparza didn't know how to end it. Lucia turns mean. And, the parable turns from one of loss and love into one of betrayal and retribution. And, in place of smiles, there is blood.

____________________________

Something is About to Happen. Directed by Antonio Méndez Esparza. 2023. Spanish language with English subtitles. From Film Movement. 122 minutes.

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Rebels With a Cause

Chet Kozlowski — Sun, 12 Jan 2025 23:53:04 +0000

Rebels With a Cause Chet Kozlowski January 12, 2025 - 18:53

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The 4K restoration of Girls Town is a real treat. Originally released in 1996, the film is a fascinating look at a bygone era as well as a showcase for then-budding talent.

The plot: four high school girls roam the halls, hang out, and ponder life at a baseball field dugout. Emma (Anna Grace) is the most thoughtful and the most grounded. Angela (Bruklin Harris) is anxious to leave home and what she sees as the control of her single mother. Patti (Lili Taylor) is scrappy and has a child, whom she asks the others to watch while she goes to class. Nikki (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) is brooding and secretive.

When Nikki dies by suicide, the others steal her diary to suss out the reason for her death. In an entry, Nikki has written she was raped. One by one the remaining three consider their own experiences and conclude that they, too, had been casually raped during encounters with boys. The girls don't immediately see it as a crime. Emma considers it the way boys show love; she barely registered it when necking evolved into assault. Angela sees it as the price of dating. Patti got pregnant by a local asshole and has toughened up. They squabble: "We try to talk about it and look what happens. We fight for twenty minutes!" They pledge to avenge Nikki by going gangsta, and exact revenge on the culprits.

Girls Town takes place nearly 30 years ago: pre-cellphones, pre-social media, pre-piercings and tattoos. Rap hadn't yet become fully corporatized. By today's standards, the girls are hardly vigilantes. They limit their mayhem to vandalism, writing graffiti on the girls' room walls, and lobbing insults that seem lame today ("Go read a comic book!"). The girls delight in their rebellion: Patti exclaims: "We wouldn’t have been doing this shit a week ago!" Still, the film weighs topics as serious as abortion, class ("Patti takes car shop; you've been accepted to Columbia"), the Glass Ceiling, and subverting the patriarchy.

Girls Town sides with the girls and their acts of reckoning. Compared to, say, the Michelle Pfeiffer vehicle Dangerous Minds, which was released a year earlier, they are not tamed at the end. No adults influence the girls, no one tells them to calm down. So they merrily scorch the earth in front of them. Their brushes with authority are amongst the best scenes: Patti bursts into a classroom and preempts a teacher about to announce that Nikki has died; the girls visit Nikki's mother, realizing they are unwelcome, aliens in her pristine living room.

The 4K restoration is impeccable; the colors are bright and the images sing with clarity. Girls Town is clean: that’s to say it's set in what the show notes call "urban America" (which looks a lot like Brooklyn). The streets are not very mean and the homes not very ghetto. Director Jim McKay shoots confidently, and with a distinctive style (this was his first feature). Scenes linger on the girls' conversations, the camera often peering through windows, tracking slowly as the girls debate life and their task. The screen’s aspect ratio is a tight box: the images are packed into a frame with rounded corners that resembles an old viewfinder. It makes us voyeurs and adds heft to what we're witnessing. Mr. McKay has gone on to direct episodes of The Wire, Breaking Bad, and Better Call Saul.

The actors represent a Who's Who of aspiring New York talent of the time. Lili Taylor has been in I Shot Andy Warhol, HBO's Six Feet Under, and The Conjuring. She's a regular on Amazon Prime's Outer Range. Anna Grace was in Boys Don't Cry, and Bruklin Harris in Dangerous Minds, but both their IMDB credits stop around 2002. Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor as Nikki has had a long run and is currently in Nickel Boys. Look for Michael Imperioli and John Ventimiglia, two Sopranos alumni, in small roles. Guillermo Diaz has a cool turn as Emma's concerned boyfriend Dylan.

Girls Town is released by Film Movement, a force is the distribution of independent and foreign cinema.

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Girls Town. Directed by Jim McKay. 1996. From Film Movement. In theaters. 90 minutes.

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Babygirl's On Fire

Gary Lucas — Tue, 31 Dec 2024 21:02:46 +0000

Babygirl's On Fire Gary Lucas December 31, 2024 - 16:02

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Babygirl is really, really, REALLY GOOD.

Outstanding acting by sexy/brainy girl boss CEO Nicole Kidman (I saw her bare nekkid on Broadway many years ago, s'true. Her "apple-cheeked rear"—to quote Manohla Dargis in the NY Times review of Babygirl—was the actual USP of that Broadway play, whose name is lost to the mists of time. Oh wait, a quick Google search reveals it was David Hare's The Blue Room) and intern-on-the-make Harris Dickinson, who is a DICK with a Capital "D" here (and what's in a name?).

This A24 film signals a return to a more adult approach to adult subjects in art cinema. It's all about power plays in the boardroom and bedroom. And fer sure, 'twas not a bored room at the Village East Angelika today. Lots and lots of rapt, silent teenage girls worshipping at the shrine of Nicole and taking notes (and a few alte kaker cineaste couples—like us).

Whiz kid Dutch director Halina Reijn (educated in Maastricht, my favorite city in the Netherlands, but of course!) grabs the reigns of Hollywood directorial power here in what probably will be the most talked about film of the year (shoots to #1 on my list anyway) once the dust settles on A Complete Unknown.

A mash-up of Eyes Wide Shut (Kidman's dream fantasies in that flick are here played out in real-time), Basic Instinct, Fatal Attraction, 9½ Weeks, and let's see, what else—I could cite a whole slew of other films (the problem for me as a reviewer of anything is I am cursed with highly developed pattern recognition skills), Babygirl will do for female masturbation on the big commercial screen what has been the stock in trade of underground Paris-based ex-pat erotic photographer Roy Stuart for many a year.

The whole concept of what goes into the making of a successful marriage/love relationship is anatomized and critiqued in a very seductive and entertaining way, with helpful hints given to cuck Antonio Banderas by Dickson in a "hale fellow well met" semi-reconciliation scene near the end.

Strutting macho Latino theater director Banderas is herein reduced to tears and a panic attack at the big reveal of his boss wife Kidman's torrid, panting-and-moaning orgasmatronic affair with lowly intern Dickinson, only to have (spoiler alert) the whole sordid mess, which threatens to destroy Kidman's hegemonic control of her personal service robotic corporation—I can't really explain what it is the company actually does—righted eventually by female person of color employee Sophie Wilde, who shames Nicole into doing the right thing and patching things up with hubby so that by the end EVERYTHING IS IN ITS RIGHT PLACE.

A middle-brow movie trope I know, I know. But you forgive Reijn anything here as her whole filmic enterprise is so audacious, smart, and shiny.

The dirty little secret, of course, is that when in the course of human events, it becomes necessary, nay imperative (just ask Caroline) that neither party have the upper hand ALL OF THE TIME. We take turns—She's the Boss! No, He's the Boss!—in the cut and thrust, the basic power dialectic of all successful, non-boring, non-S&M human relationships.

(And then, to further complicate matters, there is always, of course, the concept of "Topping from the Bottom," as John Waters once so elegantly put it at an Alliance Francaise screening of Marguerite Duras's 1977 film Le Camion).

Quite enjoyable, all in all, very well directed, an intriguing score based on what sounds like actual human huffing and puffing by Chilean-born composer Cristobal Tapia de Veer, immaculate cinematography, editing, and sensational acting fireworks by Kidman and Dickinson on display.

You've got to LOVE it.

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Don’t Call It A Comeback

Chet Kozlowski — Mon, 30 Dec 2024 19:11:49 +0000

Don’t Call It A Comeback Chet Kozlowski December 30, 2024 - 14:11

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Pamela Anderson is a survivor. She bounded into fame in 1992 in the original Baywatch TV series. She wore a red one-piece and made quite a splash. She curated her assets and played peek-a-boo until her husband, Tommy Lee, Motley Crue member and video raconteur, shared honeymoon pictures and blew it all, so to speak. She parlayed that into a (failed) franchise, Barb Wire, and has since done TV guest shots—many making fun of her image—and stalled retreads of Baywatch.

Now, with the new film The Last Showgirl, Pamela Anderson seeks to take her place, once again, in the public consciousness.

The Last Showgirl chronicles the closing of a Las Vegas club called Le Razzle Dazzle, an old-style rhinestones-and-feathers revue (described as "dancing nudes, not a nudie show"). Closing the club will put its star dancer, Shelly, played by Ms. Anderson, out of the job she's been doing for over 20 years.

Shelly is a goddess in her own mind. She's living the dream, at least her version of it: her credo is "Night after night. Being seen. Being beautiful," even as she goes home to a tiny domicile alone. She listens to opera, practices her moves, and takes her role as a theatrical performer very seriously. At first, she's ambivalent about the club closing—"I'm old, but I’m not that old"—but that gives way to dismay.

Pamela Anderson still sets a standard for beauty. Those cheekbones, that smile. In The Last Showgirl, she's scrubbed clean of pretension and eyeliner. As an actor, Ms. Anderson runs the range of emotions with precision and grace. Her Shelly is part idol and part doormat, a shoulder to cry on for the other showgirls. She mostly plays nice until she is dissed during an audition; then, her frustration comes out in a generational clash. Yes, Pamela Anderson can act. She's a pro.

Shelly is reminded of mortality by her much younger co-dancers, most notably Mad Man's Sally, Kiernan Shipka (up for anything to shake off her TV past), Brenda Song, and Star Wars film and American Horror Story alumnus Billie Lourd as her estranged daughter Hannah. More age-adjacent actors complete the mix. Jamie Lee Curtis (also up for anything) plays Annette, the Shelly of Christmas past and a boisterous drunk. Ms. Curtis, fearless as always, tops her recent triumph in FX's The Bear by unabashedly showing off her middle-aged body, most notably in a dance scene set to Bonnie Tyler’s rendition of Jim Steinman's Total Eclipse of the Heart. Dave Bautista is another revelation. I am slowly coming around to Mr. Bautista as an actor when he's not typecast because of how he looks. Here, he plays Eddie, the club's sensitive manager, in a roadie wig that gives a mournful shape to his brutal features.

The Last Showgirl is directed by Gia Coppola, Francis Ford's granddaughter, whose credits include Palo Alto (2013), Mainstream (2020), and music videos for Halsey and Carley Rae Jepsen. She shoots this one handheld, vérité style, and pads runtime with shaky filler sequences of Ms. Anderson strolling around Vegas. But it really isn't important to be in Vegas when your story is primarily a character study. The essential action takes place inside the dressing room and Shelly's house. Come to think of it, The Last Showgirl could be turned into a minimalist off-Broadway play if Ms. Anderson was up for memorizing lines.

The Last Showgirl is a qualified success. The story is a showy late-career joint. It isn't perfect. At a critical juncture, Shelly does, after all, catch her extravagant costume in the doorway on the way to the stage.

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The Last Showgirl. Directed by Gia Coppola. 2024. From Roadside Attractions. In theaters Jan. 10.

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False Bottoms

Gary Lucas — Tue, 17 Dec 2024 22:40:24 +0000

False Bottoms Gary Lucas December 17, 2024 - 17:40

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LIE CLUB is one of the most absorbing evenings in the theatre I've spent in ages. I was lucky to catch the final performance of this mind-blowing existential conundrum on Wednesday, Dec. 11th at Studio 3R on St. Mark's Place in the East Village, which was time well spent.

An exhilarating, if not downright dizzying, two person character-driven dark drama all about the games people play and the lies we tell each other day after day after day, the play conveys a sense of crazy forward motion and jump-cut reversals of fortune in the raveling and unraveling of lies told and exposed at Liars Anonymous—a dramatic conceit of an actual therapy center in London. The play at once signifies Progress in stripping back all the layers of the human onion in revealing the Truth that Lies Beneath, and then almost immediately doubles down with yet another Lie—resulting in laughs a'plenty herein—as well as a short sharp gasp of audience surprise at every hair pin turn.

As an audience member, the experience of watching this play was like being strapped into a pleasurable thrill ride but also like being held captive on a careening out of control stagecoach to hell.

It's a disorienting experience which by the play's end, you feel as if you have actually BEEN SOMEWHERE (Heaven's Gate—or the Ninth Circle—you take your pick).

Every time the collective audience seems to be lifted into the blue empyrean with a character's philosophical peroration on this sad human amalgam, and how through the Power of Love we must all rise above the deceitful lies abounding that help self-perpetuate le condition humane tragique, the dramatic rug is rudely jerked out from under us—a reversal of circumstances/fortune which occurs over and over again during the play, as yet another lie is uttered onstage that negates the previous stab at the character in question's "truth-telling."

In that, the play might well have been titled Chinese Boxes—or better yet, False Bottoms (pace the original title of Wyndham Lewis’s masterpiece of a novel The Revenge for Love).

What could have been a mind-numbing exercise in "No Exit"-type existential hokum is totally redeemed by some of the best and freshest stage acting I've ever witnessed by Murmuration Studios' Rachel De Fontes (the co-author of the play, whose character of a lecturer at Liar's Anonymous balances poised elegance on a knife edge with a wicked killer's instinct), and Peter Jeffries (the other co-author, a Scottish actor with preternatural boyish charm and an open, and winning personality, who struggles throughout with Rachel's devilish teasing).

This pair can do it all. They can stop on a dramatic dime, fly through the air with the greatest of ease, deliver howlers and shift gears from farce to tragedy in a millisecond. They had total command of a young East Village audience that cheered them on and loved every minute of this play. Both actors exude a natural honesty and downright sexiness of persona I found extremely engaging. You kind of both fall in love with these two, and alternately, are repulsed by them, as they spider-like spin their glib patter—mainly comedic, but with a through-line that occasionally veers into shock/horror territory. They are that good.

I thoroughly recommend this show, which was a big hit at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and which has been touring internationally with great success.

Here's looking forward to further mind-blowing collaborations from Rachel De Fontes, Peter Jeffries, and Murmuration Studios.

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Her Body, Her Choice

Chet Kozlowski — Tue, 17 Dec 2024 03:31:26 +0000

Her Body, Her Choice Chet Kozlowski December 16, 2024 - 22:31

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You'd be excused for thinking the new Czech film Her Body is something other than it is for the first hour. It's expertly shot and acted and appears to unfold as a tale of female empowerment.

Andrea Absolonová is a professional high diver who is Olympics-bound. She's been training since childhood and is in prime physical shape. Her body is maturing (her younger sister Lucie, also a diver, comments that Andrea's breasts are getting bigger) and she's on the cusp of adulthood. So if the years of training (and borderline bulimia) are going to pay off, the time is now. She is adored by fans, doted on by her parents, and standing tall and confident.

A tragic accident abruptly ends Andrea's career as a high diver. She is incapacitated, in a body brace, and still she pushes herself to return. Finally her coach tells her she's been replaced. She'll never attain her former status.

So Andrea starts to slack. She goes out clubbing. And she sleeps with a photographer who has been circling her since she rejected his advances while training. She knows that he has a "real job": he shoots porn movies and is tied in with the burgeoning underground industry (the film is set in the late 1990s-early 2000s). Andrea knows what he does and she wants in.

She throws herself into porn with abandon and is an instant star (now known as Lea De Mae). She trades a sport for celebrity or, as disapproving Lucie puts it, "fucking for cash." Andrea's parents take differing views: as the money rolls in, Mom delights in her daughter's good fortune. Her father tries to instill shame. Andrea is seduced by the wild life as her porn fame grows. She tracks her parents' estrangement and argues with her sister while partying and doing drugs.

The weight of this drama falls on Natalia Germani's able shoulders. She plays Andrea as focused and ambitious. Ms. Germani, a regular presence on Czech TV, is fit and attractive. Her demeanor suggests that what Andrea wants, Andrea will get. The actor's physical beauty and grace are capped by intelligent blue eyes that, while alluring, are steely. She simmers, giving Andrea Absolonová's quest deeper meaning.

Her Body is a solid film. Director Natálie Císarovská has a firm command of the material, giving Ms. Germani a strong showcase. Denisa Baresová as Lucie is a fine foil: young and waiflike, she gets stronger as her sister wanes. Zuzana Mauréry and Martin Finger as Andrea's parents adeptly portray the up-and-downsides of parental faith and ambition. Klara Belicova's cinematography is appropriately lush and tawdry as circumstances change. The sound design of Petr Cechák and Frantisek Sec accentuates Andrea's breathing, baring the effect of events on her metabolism; that sound is often the only thing we hear.

Warning: spoilers ahead.

The problem with Her Body is: it's a true story. The film must adhere to Andrea's biographical details. So it's disappointing that that story becomes so typical.

Porn is a stronger social force than we care to admit. It's as old as human communication. In these times it's toxic and corrupt—what isn't?—but porn's not just about human trafficking, as proven by the draw of non-pros to OnlyFans. In its purest form, porn epitomizes why we watch movies in the first place: to be aroused and to see something we haven't seen before. For the performer, it can be gratifying for its exhibition and endurance: See what my body can do? See how much it can take? For Andrea Absolonová, the experiences of diving and sexual display might have been similar: a pride in possessing a perfect physique and putting it through its paces.

In any case, it must have been more gratifying than a conventional tale of diminishing returns. And sadly, because we have Andrea's life story to work with, and she died young, we'll never know how she felt about it. The climax of her quest, and her life, amounts to an eleventh hour deus ex machina which does not grow organically out of her actions.

Ms. Císarovská's film has the potential to be a unique take on autonomy and the physicality that both sports and porn require. Andrea wants to exceed expectations and remain the center of attention. She goes from Princess to Harlot and manages to retain her dignity. While gorging on food and drink and sex, she secretly smiles. "I'm happy," she maintains. "Finally free."

So it’s too bad that ultimately Her Body’s message is trite and predictable. Andrea Absolonová’s story is interesting but not extraordinary. Director Natálie Císarovská and actor Natalia Germani make compelling drama of it until the facts demand banal morality. It's sometimes better to trust the fiction. It, like Ms. Germani's performance, reveals more when untethered from immutable "truths."

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Her Body. Directed by Natálie Císarovská. 2023. From Film Movement. On digital platforms. 105 minutes.