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Reviews
Past Lives (2023)
Just an exercise in narcissism
The score here betrays the this film's fundamental flaw. Just as a truly funny sitcom requires no laugh track for spotlighting its jokes, a well-conceived drama needs no score just to tell viewers what to feel. Indeed good score complicate emotional landscapes rather than doing the director's, writer's and actor's work for them.
The score rankles as much as it does because the film wears its supposed artlessness as a badge of honor. Artlessness here mean a plot supposedly so daringly slight that it barely deserves the description, but the score and also the postcard-y cinematography undermine that pretension, as they so pile on the artifice that the whole project just seems at cross purposes with itself. Perhaps at first this film seems to stay close to life, but actual life has serendipity and this film has a scream need for a diverting (but perhaps revealing) set piece or two. Instead it just checks boxes, like a dull but highly competent student.
Even on a cold viewing I just knew that the film had to be autobiographical. The standard advice "write about what you know" should never mean let your narcissism run wild and check your imagination at the front desk. Though basically a three character movie, Past Lives so centralizes the director's double that it fails as an ensemble piece. Novels have an easier time working in first-person because they bring you to the interior of the protagonist's mind, but a film in "first person" tends to strip supporting characters of dignity and turn them into mere props. Notice here how Nora's parents and sister simply exit the film, notice how Hae Sung's friends only exist as drinking buddies. The script even supports the idea that protagonist Nora sees her husband as living-breathing-Green-Card, and sees her admirer Hae Sung as a cardboard avatar of the Korea she left behind. To make myself clear, I find myself bothered by the director's, not the character's, narcissism, though one may just reflect the other (but without the self-awareness that would make the is.
Anatomie d'une chute (2023)
Too many ideas that never got worked out
Those who admire this film will say that it didn't settle for easy answers. Sadly, neither does the film seem to probe for any difficult answers. A received value holds that serious films must avoid taking easy ways out, but this reduces to a mere affectation, an easy way out in itself, in the absence of deeper digging.
I find myself struggling to pinpoint this movie's theme or project or point-of-view. While the filmmakers put many things on the table, they fail to explore anything deeply.
For example, the film can't work as a latter-day Scenes From A Marriage, not with the plot kills off one spouse right from the get go. And no, a flashback or two does not suffice for evoking a complex dynamic. Even after 150 minutes, we viewers don't come to know this marriage well or, for that matter really, either partner.
Likewise, it seemed like we might get some sort of, well, indictment of the French legal system. But in the end the system just works. A trial disturbingly filled with innuendo, paltry evidence and pure speculation finally ends with judges doing the right thing. So, not thematic.
And the script invokes disability but also doesn't plumb that thematically, certainly not from the boy's point of view. So disability functions here just as a prop, specifically for setting up the father's guilt.
That guilt concerns a random accident that occurred under the watch of a babysitter the father hired instead of picking the boy up from school himself. But the film hardly pursues the irrationality of carrying that burden.
The marriage in question involves two writers. Nevertheless, the viewer doesn't come away with the feeling of having seen a movie about writers or writing; you'd hardly even know that literature was important in their lives. One of Sandra's books emerges as a source of contention in her marriage because she'd borrowed an idea from an abandoned project of her husband's. And her husband has issues about finding time to write. And finally there's the silly idea of introducing her fiction as evidence at a trial, How To Murder Your Wife-style.
A potentially problematic choice, Sandra has a former lover represent her in court, but nothing of consequence develops on account of it.
Sandra has had sexual partners outside her marriage, but these are only off-screen characters, and we get no real sense of what they mean to her.
Sandra is a German who feels comfortable speaking English and who lives and goes on trial in France. We get suggestions that language and culture barriers present challenges, but ultimately this never gets developed.
Some anticlimactic scenes raise the question of how to pick up one's life after acquittal for a crime one (presumably) did not commit, but cannot do more than raise the question.
So finally, what do we have? Perhaps a kind of Concerto for Actor, namely Sandra Hüller, who is almost always on screen and who indeed delivers a range of emotions, albeit mostly muted. If the ending seems not fully resolved, that seems only like a buzz-generating strategy, something for viewers to argue about so that others will decide to see the movie for themselves. The suicide/crime, either way, never seemed real enough to me that I cared what "really" happened. Had their been, before the film, a true story, and had someone pitch to me making a documentary about it, I would have sent them back to the newspapers in search of better material.
Les soeurs fâchées (2004)
Portrait of a dry drunk
Huppert plays a monster. Well not a villain, but there are actual villains in the movies that I've found easier to watch. Only the light French-style early Modern musical score tips the viewer that this story won't end in tragedy (a murder or suicide, say). So the viewer indeed knows where the movie is going from the music, that self-awareness will ultimately blossom and this beast will finally humanize herself.
But that said, I felt that the ending wasn't earned. Did they tack on a happy ending for improved world-of-mouth just to sell tickets? It comes so out-of-nowhere that you can't even call it a deus ex machina. In real life you don't get to cross the bridges you burn just because you have had a change of heart. Hurting people matters It's not just not realism, the ending is sugar-coated wish-fulfillment for audience approval.
The script is mostly very light on back story, but there is an emphasis on the unseen mother's alcoholism, Martine's intension of abstinence, and what a mean drunk she turns into when she falls off the wagon. So I read this as one of the movie's themes, namely the perpetual anger of recovering alcoholic, so, jilted by the lover alcohol and now unable to feel human love (whether for spouse, child, sister or mother). This may seem like a very narrow reading, but the script supports it, and if you buy my reading, you can use it as handle for finding some sympathy for the otherwise utterly irredeemable Martine.
Catherine Frot really steals the picture. Just what she does with her face alone to show her connection to the music while listening ,at the theater, to the first few bars of an opera is acting gold of the highest merit.
Alice & Jack (2023)
Opera without arias
As a viewer, personally, I don't need relatable characters, realism, or even plausibility, but still I expect any given property to find suitable means adequate for achieving its own goals. So first here, I want to name such goals as I infer from watching. The writing generally stays on the side of saying less when it might say more, but I believe my readings have a grounding in the script if you hang on every word.
The writer wants Alice and Jack bounded by the sort of transcendental love that has no earthly explanation and cannot be truly consummated in life. (Note that in the 21st century, consummation no longer means sexual intercourse but now rather long-term commitment.) This sort of love usually forms the stuff of tragedy, think Romeo and Juliet, and especially tragic opera with its star-crossed lovers.
The writer wants to explore an unbalanced relationship. He binds Jack's character to ethical and compassionate imperatives, so Jack doesn't get much dramatic agency; he never really has interesting choices to make despite all the exploratory conversation and ensuing self-inflicted pain. Alice on the other hand gets lots of agency and but makes choices that seem incomprehensible if not cruel. But we do learn that Alice growing up suffered incestuous sexual abuse. Implicitly, this detail gives rise the fundamental conflicts in drama: that saddled with shame,, Alice cannot view herself as normal and so struggles against her own strong maternal drives and desire for love. Alice feels constitutionally unable to trust even as she finds Jack stratospherically trustworthy. Alice feels compelled to hurt Jack by pushing him away in order not to hurt him.
I've heard it said that all motion pictures are about desire, and some viewers will identify with Alice's position (if not Alice herself) as the object of steadfast, unconditional and unearned love.
But does it all work? The writer, by fiat, has sentenced both his characters to early medical deaths, foreshadowed, but still simply imposed on the plot. It's a cheap way to tie everything up. We see Jack grieve, but only for mere hours, so the real complexities of grieving go unexplored. Alice's last selfish conflict-laden demand, namely that Jack remain faithful to her even after she departs, turns out just a throwaway. It doesn't work as tragedy. The plot simply lacks the characteristic twists and ironies and brings nothing to the table in their place. No might-have-beens or what-ifs here, just pre-programmed genetic doom. Fate, yes, but not literary-level fate.
So, in the end, I did not experience tragedy-level, operatic catharsis, nor any comfort seeing the unlucky characters united finally in heaven (or at least in death). If this had been based on a real-life story, I might have advised the producers that, true, its always sad when people die young, but a story needs more than that to achieve general interest.
And making Alice an incest survivor simply as a device for staging her unbalanced relationship with Jack seems irresponsible to me. It's a big, difficult theme not a cheap plot device. I've read that 1 in 6 American girls experience sexual abuse from a family member. So as a real locus of pain for many viewers, no show should simply exploit horrific abuse as a trope.
Despite an excellent cast, I felt that the conceptual weakness of the project just left the directors at sea. This becomes most painfully obvious in the last episode with its irritating montage of clips from previous episodes. If a show puts all its chips on a satisfying climax, the climax better not turn out this shabby.