“Western”
Valeska Grisebach’s “Western” is yet another example of how our women filmmakers have greater insight into masculinity than the men. Despite being a fixture on the 2017 festival circuit and making stops at Cannes, TIFF, and NYFF, Grisebach’s third feature didn’t spark a great deal of interest at U.S. arthouses. “Western” follows a German laborer Meinhard (nonprofessional performer Meinhard Neumann, with a grizzled face and mustache ready-made for the cinema) who pursues an opportunity in the Bulgarian countryside. Think of it as an update on Claire Denis’ “Beau Travail,” swapping out the rituals of French Legionnaires for a bracingly contemporary look at the circulation of people and shifting linguistic and geographical borders in Europe. Like Denis, Grisebach’s picturesque film captures the present tense of Meinhard’s daily experience by foregrounding bodies and space; the lush cinematography by Berlin School fixture Bernhard Keller is undoubtedly one of the film’s main selling points. Modest and soft-spoken almost to a fault, “Western”—like “Beau Travail,” which has yet to take its overdue place in the all-time canon—remains ripe for rediscovery. — Bradley Warren [our review]
“Shirkers”
Arguably every documentary ever released every year is a “Film You Didn’t See,” and or, is something you may not catch right away if you’re focused on just trying to keep up with the narratives of the year. And yes, so we have a whole feature dedicated to 20+ excellent documentaries that you very well could have missed, but we’d like to spotlight, again, Sandi Tan’s excellent quixotic documentary “Shirkers” on Netflix which is a beguiling, pastel-soaked nostalgia throwback into a film that doesn’t exist: Sandi Tan’s “Shirkers.” The short version: at a very young age in the early ’90s in Singapore, a precocious, brash Sandi Tan wrote a wild, unconventional, structure-challenging, David Lynch-inspired road movie. It was shot and everything, and then her weird, enigmatic mentor and producer disappeared with the footage for mysterious reasons. 20 years later, the footage is discovered and Tan, now a writer in L.A. dives into a dreamy, impractical personal odyssey to revisit the heartbreaking creative tragedy that she had spent years trying to forget. “Shirkers” is part chimerical, collage-y memoir of a spirit, adventurous youth—and is thus eccentrically, almost infuriatingly manic at first—and then morphs into a mystery detective story, as Tan tries to solve her mentor’s motivations, but also personal critique. Tan’s-then, I-haven’t-been-crushed-by-life zest was infectious and inspiring, but also overbearing; her re-examination of the movie that never was is also a reevaluation of a younger self that many saw as a freewheeling asshole. “Shirkers” is a swirling, sometimes surreal and unbelievable trip backward into the slipstream of time, memory and broken dreams; a reconciliation and forgiveness with the past with maybe, just maybe, a fanciful eye towards the future. – Rodrigo Perez [our review]
“Custody”
Forgive anyone that calls French filmmaker Xavier Legrand’s feature-length debut “Custody,” a horror. Because while his domestic dispute drama—about a husband (Denis Ménochet) and wife (Léa Drucker) going through a nasty divorce and custody battle for their young son (an astonishingly real Thomas Gioria)—isn’t remotely like a traditional horror film, it’s terrifying and horrific all the same. Using simplicity and formal rigor that slowly ratchets up the tension, simmering anger and perhaps a barely disguised hostility on the part of the father, “Custody” eventually, patiently reveals itself to be a nightmare; a terrorizing portrait of abuse and suffering. Honestly, “Custody” is a bit hard to watch and sometimes unpleasant in this regard, but it is a fierce, uncompromising work, the actors are tremendous—oh lord, does your heart grieve for this little boy stuck in the middle of this disaster— and it’s physically imposing, intimidating grip will haunt and traumatize you like no other piece of cinema this year. – Rodrigo Perez [our review]
“Zama”
Up until now, Argentinian filmmaker Lucrecia Martel (“The Headless Woman”) had spent an entire career documenting psychic fractures and discombobulation from a feminine perspective and always with a deep undercurrent of South American class issues at work. For “Zama,” her preoccupations with class dynamics dive back into its colonial roots and explore a much more ambitious, epic, and surreal scale as she transports her proclivities for this subject to late 18th century Paraguay with a Spanish crown officer (Daniel Giménez Cacho) waiting in vain for a transfer that will never arrive. Admittedly inscrutable, elusive, and certainly not to everyone’s taste, “Zama,” a kind of dense, existential, hopeless “Waiting for Godot” without the absurdist laughs, is still mesmeric, using Martel’s trademark tricks of disorientation to dazzling, wtf-did-I-just-see effect. “Zama” is both feverish and enervating, exhausting and thrilling; it demands repeat viewings, parsing, and exploration, so get to it already. – RP [our review]
“Happy As Lazzaro”
Watching magical-realist masterwork “Happy as Lazzaro” is like mainlining classical Italian cinema. Director Alice Rohrwacher’s third feature pays tribute to the rural life on display in “The Tree of Wooden Clogs” and the holy fools from the films of Federico Fellini and Vittorio De Sica, yet this now-major-league Italian filmmaker makes the story all her own. Shifting the focus to a male protagonist after female-centered coming-of-age stories “Corpo Celeste” and “The Wonders,” “Happy as Lazzaro” steps outside of time long before the film’s critical twist reveals itself. Despite the outdating and exploitative practice of sharecropping that dominates much of the film’s runtime, “Happy as Lazzaro” is overflowing with humanist heart that slowly but surely casts a spell on the viewer. A Netflix acquisition out of Cannes meant that most audiences never got a chance to see the delicate lensing on a big screen. That said, there is something satisfyingly rebellious about grainy 16mm photography and a 1.66:1 frame with rounded corners hiding in the watch list—surely an extension of Rohrwacher’s teasing anachronisms. — BW [our review]
