EMLILA PÉREZ

Directing: B+
Acting: A-
Writing: B+
Cinematography: A-
Editing: A
Music: B

There’s a lot going on in Emilia Pérez—some might argue too much. It’s a Mexican cartel movie; it’s a story about a trans woman’s self-actualization; it’s a musical. I kept wondering how this movie might most succinctly be encapsulated as a logline or an elevator pitch.

More than anything, the musical element is the easiest to be ambivalent about. I remain unsure as to what the point of it is. Never mind the somewhat dubious nature of Zoe Saldaña playing the protagonist when hers is not the trans character, within minutes we witness her as Mexico City defense attorney to crooks, Rita—who breaks into song while walking through the streets, providing some exposition in a fairly economical way. The crowded streets become part of an intricate ballet of modern dancers around her, with choreography that is undeniably impressive. Saldaña’s singing is competent, and this scene provides a preview to what’s to come: a film that is a musical in the most fundamental and traditional sense of the word, characters sometimes even singing lines that would make far more sense uttered straight.

Mind you, the presentation of musical numbers is the only conventional thing about Emilia Pérez. How many traditional musicals have you seen about drug cartels, or that revolve around the transition of a trans woman, let alone both? This movie has songs about gender-affirming surgery, and there really is a moment when a Chinese surgeon in Bangkok utters the line, “From penis to vagina?”—in song.

The quality of the songs, by French singer Camille (with a score composed by Clément Duco), is spotty. The singing of lines between Rita and an Israeli surgeon upon their first meeting makes little sense. But there are deeply touching musical moments too, such as the child of a post-transition parent singing about how she smells like the father he remembers.

That brings me to Karla Sofía Gascón, the 52-year-old trans actress who plays the title character and the Mexican cartel leader pre-transition. We see her first as “Manitas Del Monte,” and when we later see her as Emilia, it is a stunning revelation. Gascón’s performance as Manitas is astonishing in retrospect, an unusual sort of layered performance that skirts the boundaries of meta storytelling. She is also incredible as Emilia, filling the screen with her unforgettable presence. Gascón, as it happens, has 41 acting credits on IMDb, 37 of them from before her transition in 2018. If nothing else, we can rest assured that director Jacques Audiard cast a trans actress for this role.

Oh, did I mention that Emilia Pérez is actually a French film? As in: it’s a French production, filmed in a studio near Paris. No French is spoken, however, due to the setting being largely in Mexico City—recreated in studio. Presumably the same was done in other settings, from China to Switzerland to Israel to England. A surprising amount of the dialogue—and singing—is done in English, a logical choice given how common it is for people who don’t speak each other’s native languages to default to English in order to communicate.

I was particularly struck by Selena Gomez as Jessi, a woman convinced she has been widowed when Emilia’s transition coincides with the faking of Manitas’s death. Gomez is reportedly dissatisfied with her performance of Spanish dialogue, as she is not fluent, but for those of us watching who are also not fluent, she was excellent. Furthermore, Gomez gives a consistently flat and muted delivery of her lines in the Hulu series Only Murders in the Building, and if that’s the extent of your familiarity with her as an actor you would never expect the kind of performance you see here. I might be tempted to say she has a shot at an Oscar nomination, if not for the fact that she is given far less juicy material than her costars.

How in the world does Rita fit into all of this, you might quite reasonably be asking? Rita herself asks this, when a pre-transition Emilia has her abducted and then offers millions for her assistance in finding a surgeon who can be discreet enough not to endanger her. Rita is merely a high-powered lawyer. In the end, you could say she was tapped for her powers of persuasion.

To the significant credit of Jacques Audiard and his co-writers Thomas Bidegain, Nicolas Livecchi and Léa Mysius, Emilia Pérez takes frequent unexpected turns, is utterly unpredictable, and is always absorbing. It’s also a tad chaotic, and there is a shocking moment at the end that I truly did not see coming and am still unsure how I feel about. This film is already being met with deeply mixed responses, some finding it an incredibly original work of art and some finding it outright offensive. I find myself falling in the middle, but leaning slightly toward impressed by how well its boldness somehow actually works. This is an international feature in every sense of the phrase, and its very existence is extraordinary.

The cis-het gaze: Zoe Sadaña offers some star power assistance.

Overall: B+

Tasveer Advance: KATLAA CURRY [FISH CURRY]

Directing: B
Acting: B+
Writing: B+
Cinematography: B
Editing: B-

Katlaa Curry is only the second film ever made in the Gujarati language to tell a queer story (the first was a 2013 film called Meghdhanushya — The Colour of Life), and it happened as a stroke of fate, a quasi-accident. There is a key scene in which two characters who are destined to fall in love have a conversation over a dead fish, caught in the Narmada River (India’s fifth-longest river, and the longest one that flows through the state of Gujarat), a fisherman teaching the other one, who is very squeamish, how to get used to handling fish. The squeamish character, originally written as a woman, is meant to stick their finger down the throat of the fish—which the original woman actor refused to do. The production’s solution was to make the story a gay love story—simply because the only actors willing to stick their fingers down a fish carcass’s throat were men.

This was the second film I saw at this year’s Tasveer South Asian Film Festival, which was how I learned this behind-the-scenes story, as well as some other relevant details. The cast was made up of local theater actors. Director Prajapati Rohit shot the film in ten days. And there was no particular intention of pointed progressiveness when they first set out to make the film, but once the turn to a gay love story happened, the implications for how it might move the needle of local attitudes blossomed.

Side note: Gujarati is the sixth-most spoken native language in India, with over 55 million speakers. It is the official language of the state of Gujarat, spoken natively by 86% of the population there. Prajapati Rohit pointedly leans into this, with opening titles written in both English and the Gujarati script. There is no Hindi to be found anywhere in this film, which is Gujarati first and Indian second.

Katlaa Curry moves at a measured pace, first introducing us to Raaymal (Priyaank Gangwani), a local fish merchant. This is also notable as most of the Gujarati population is vegetarian, but Raaymal takes his boat further up the Narmada River to fish, then brings what he caught into villages and towns to sell. This is how he meets Ratan (Ranganath Gopalrathnam), who has attempted suicide and gets caught in Raaymal’s fishing net. Raaymal revives him, and ultimately befriends him.

A lot of time is spent on Raaymal and Ratan just getting to know each other, and it takes a while for it to become clear why Ratan has attempted suicide—because his lack of interest in girls has left him hopeless. Meanwhile, Raaymal helps build a kind of beach shack home for Ratan to live in since he doesn’t feel he has any family to go back to. The element of queerness kind of seeps into the narrative slowly and organically, first with a confession by Ratan that Raaymal responds to with laughter and a “What does it matter?” attitude. This attitude, among the characters of this film, becomes a bit of a theme, both quiet and extraordinary in the barriers it breaks.

They settle into a routine, Raaymal visiting Ratan every day, and eating the fish curry Ratan has learned to make even though he doesn’t eat fish, and which Raaymal loves. It’s when Raaymal gets pressured into marrying a woman that things get complicated—for all three of them. Kumati, the wife, is played lovingly by Kinnary Panchal, and I was left with a lot of questions about this whole scenario. At last night’s screening, it was noted that 80% of gay men in India are married to women, and it’s very common for these women to know about it and completely accept it. What they care about, we are told, is that they have shelter and food.

It struck me that sexual desire and fulfillment for women was never part of this conversation—neither within the narrative of the film nor in outside conversations about it. And I was sitting there thinking: What about her? Of course and as always, there is a great deal of cultural context to consider here, not least of which is how devalued women are in South Asian cultures, especially if they are unmarried (to say the least of when they are widowed). And in the discussion at the screening last night, to be fair, there was a brief comment on how, if movies like this can move the needle on cultural attitudes, perhaps over time fewer women will have to settle for situations like this. Still, all the conversations about gay men (and specifically Raaymal) falling in love, and getting their physical needs met, have this glaring ignorance of any of the women involved getting their needs met. I’m a little hung up on the fact that housing and food are not the only basic necessities they should be granted. Are we supposed to assume Kumati is asexual? That she’s content never having children? It’s odd that we never see any of the characters here even mention children.

This is Raaymal’s and Ratan’s story, and it’s a warm and lovely one—if a little overdone with dreamy close-up shots of dead fish swarming with flies. But it also has a very slight unevenness to the story that fails to address the many implications raised. There’s a deeply memorable scene near the end between Raaymal and Kumati in which they come to an understanding that shocks and relieves Raaymal. And we are happy and relieved for him, as we should be. But I am left with a feeling of sorrow for Kumati, which Katlaa Curry clearly does not intend, as we are meant just to be grateful to her, as Raaymal is.

It was also striking to me how, reportedly, none of the cast of this film is queer-identified, even though Priyaank Gangwani and Ranganath Gopalrathnam have a palpable erotic energy between them and real chemistry with each other. Here is where we get into cultural differences again, because in Hollywood the conversation has moved into the space of giving queer actors the queer roles. In India, they are still in the space of queer people being grateful for “representation” granted by straight actors. And what more could they ask for? The Indian film industry, Bollywood or otherwise, is not exactly swarming with queer actors who are out of the closet. These things can only happen one step at a time, and Katlaa Curry is but one of those vital steps.

A love that dares speak its name, at just the right time.

Overall: B

Tasveer Advance: WAKHRI [ONE OF A KIND]

Directing: B+
Acting: B+
Writing: B+
Cinematography: A-
Editing: B+

In 2016, there was a 26-year-old woman named Qandeel Baloch who had gained an unprecedented kind of internet fame three years after auditioning on Pakistan Idol. She has been called Pakistan’s first social media celebrity, as she gained both widespread popularity and widespread notoriety posting funny and audacious videos. In July of 2016, she was drugged and asphysxiated by her brother.

Pakistani director and co-writer Iram Parveen Bilal, working with Pakistani trans activist an co-writer Mehrub Moiz Awan; Indian and Bollywood film editor Aarti Bajaj; and Pakistani musician Abdullah Siddiqui (who also worked on the excellent 2023 film Joyland); have made a film largely based on Qandeel Baloch’s story. I did not know this when first going in, at its Opening Night screening at Seattle’s 19th Annual Tasveer South Asian Film Festival, and to be honest, there were moments when I felt ambivalent about the narrative choices. But then, near the end of the film, Bilal includes footage of Balcoh’s actual funeral procession in 2016.

Even a small amount of research reveals that some significant artistic license is taken with the story, which goes with the territory when the only claim is that it’s “inspired by true events”—not even based on true events, although Baloch experienced several things very similar to what the main character in Wakhri, Noor Malik (a luminous Faryal Mehmood, a Pakistani model in her first lead role in a feature film), goes through. Most critically, Bilal subverts how Baloch’s story actually ended, in a kind of empowering revisionist history. In a way, it’s an inverted version of what Quentin Tarantino did with history at the end of Inglourious Basterds.

Noor Malik is a school teacher, teaching a class of young girls she hopes to provide with better education than Pakistan can typically provide: she’s trying to secure funding for a new girl's’ school, predictably meeting with resistance from both potential benefactors and parents who believe all girls need to do is learn domestic pursuits and perhaps English, all to impress a potential male suitor. Frustrated with this, she puts on a disguise of a purple wig and a beaded veil, storms the stage at her best friend’s club, and goes on a rant that multiple patrons record on their phones and post to their socials, quickly going viral.

Noor’s best friend, Guchhi (a very charming Gulshan Majeed), is a striking presence in Wakhri: an openly queer person living their life in Lahore, completely self-actualized and experiencing both sorrows and joy—something queer audiences have reportedly expressed direct appreciation for. It’s difficult to say exactly how Guchhi self-identifies, as the film reasonably never takes pains to make clear; suffice it to say that, most of the time, they present as male, if often in makeup and unusually stylish clothing, but it soon enough becomes clear that this is due to societal pressures. There comes a moment when Guchhi gets their own moment of empowerment, albeit one that comes with dangers that are made plain. More to the point: Guchhi’s club has many patrons all over the spectrum of gender diversity, and this is depicted as a lived-in, vibrant community. There is little doubt that this is a realistic representation, but to American audiences conditioned to regard a country like Pakistan as undeveloped and unsophisticated (neither of which is true), it’s an unusual depiction to say the least.

It should be noted that I saw Wakhri in an audience of probably 90% South Asian people, from a diaspora that is both diverse and has certain distinct cultural characteristics which are very different from mine. The film was received with a kind of enthusiasm—well deserved—that might surprise Americans who would have expected a conservative response, except perhaps that these are mostly immigrants living in a very different culture from their forebears. Indeed, Wakhri received a great deal of virtriolic response very similar to that shown thrown at the Noor character—and to that which Qandeel Baloch endured. On the flip side, it’s worth noting that Wakhri actually had a theatrical release in Pakistan (albeit in the country’s very limited number of movie theaters); got a lot of positive response from people who actually bothered to see it; and it actually does not have any wide distribution in the United States.

There were certain lines of dialogue that felt a bit contrived to me, particularly when Noor is performing her rants for cameras, both at the club and later at home in front of a ring light—but, what do I know? There are multiple factors at play here, from what is inevitably lost in translation, to the English words chosen by whoever wrote the subtitles, to the fact that I’m just a White guy (a queer, girly one notwithstanding) writing a review of a feminist piece of art cinema created for an audience that could hardly be more different from me. They brought the film to the States, after all—but it was screened for a festival mostly aimed at South Asian expats and their descendants. Surely they want the film to gain a global audience that enjoys it, but there’s still little room for someone like me to criticize it with any real authority.

All that said, I still found myself genuinely impressed by Wakhri, and found many of the lines it boldly crossed—if not necessarily within its own culture, then certainly within the context of representation in South Asian cinema—to be extraordinary. The cast has infectious chemistry, and audiences quickly root for every major character onscreen. I am simply rooting for more people, both inside and outside of Pakistani, to get an opportunity to see this film.

Her disguises become less convincing as her audience still somehow doesn’t recognize her—but I suppose denial is a powerful thing.

Overall: B+

EVIL DOES NOT EXIST

Directing: B
Acting: B
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B-
Editing: B-

Evil Does Not Exist is an odd title for any movie. The word “evil” alone is evocative of horror, but the rest of this particular title negates that. Or is that ironic, in which case one might still assume it’s horror? Evil may not exist, but nihilism does! One of the many things about this film that are lost on me is the fact that it’s actually a very simple and straightforward drama.

Emphasis on simple, as opposed to drama. To call this a feature-length exercise in deadpan delivery would be an understatement. The most “dramatic” sequence would be several minutes covering a community meeting for “feedback” by townspeople concerned about the impending construction of a “glamping” site in a rural area outside of Tokyo.

This is the first time things get even remotely interesting in Evil Does Not Exist, and it felt like it was about 45 minutes in. Here’s something I have no idea about: was this just a reflection of Japanese cultural politeness, or was this scene muted by even Japanese standards? I would guess the latter, but it’s a wild, uneducated guess. All I know is that several townspeople bring up perfectly reasonable concerns, from potential pollution to their groundwater to the impact on their local economy, and the two hired hands there to listen largely deflect by saying things like “We’ll take your feedback under advisement.” The small crowd gets increasingly agitated, but I use the word “agitated” loosely: they each take a turn to deliver their concerns calmly, while everyone else in the room is dead silent. One young man in the front row finally says “What?” in response to being told not to get too emotional, and he ultimately stands up aggressively—only to have Takumi (Hitoshi Omika) force him back into his chair.

Takuma is the central character here, a guy referred to as “weird” even by others in this movie, a widowed, reclusive “odd job man” living in a cabin with his young daughter, Hana (Ryo Nishikawa). One of the odder aspects of this movie is how the two hired hands sent to the village by the company planning the “glamping site” refer to themselves as “talent agents” who work in “show business,” even though they’ve just been sent to convince this town that a glamping site in their midst is a good idea. Is this the Japanese equivalent of “paid crisis actors”?

Takahashi (Ryuji Kosaka) and Mayuzumi (Ayaka Shibutani) ulimately try courting Takuma to take the job of full-time caretaker, after being told that is something they will need in order to keep guests from the city in check, and it’s a bit of a fool’s errand. All of this runs parallel to Takuma’s live with Hana, where they walk through the forest and he teaches her the names of trees and how to identify them. The visitors keep hearing distant gunshots, told they are people hunting deer in the area. Eventually the point is made that deer are not dangerous to humans, unless they are been shot and are still alive and cornered. This becomes an apparently crucial plot point in the end, and I could not put together how it related to the story overall.

Evil Does Not Exist is getting extremely high praise by other critics, but I just could not connect with it. Its first half hour or so is particularly challenging, with truly glacial pacing—the opening shot alone is just a slow pan looking straight up at barren winter tree branches, for what seem like countless minutes. Then it cuts to Takuma outside his cabin, chopping wood, for another several minutes. Not a lot happens in most of the scenes in this movie, until the aforementioned community forum. Not much happens there either, but compared to the scenes that preceded it, it practically feels like an action movie.

And then, at the very end, things take a jarringly dark turn. Maybe there is something allegorical going on here, or something subtle regarding Japanese culture, that I just don’t have the wherewithal to grasp. Or maybe it’s something else entirely. All I know is that it took a herculean effort to get halfway toward connecting with this movie, which in the end I could only respect as something I assume exist on a level I can’t grasp.

Hey can we take turns, and you can watch me chop wood for five minutes?

Overall: B-

HOUSEKEEPING FOR BEGINNERS

Directing: A
Acting: A
Writing: A-
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B+

I don’t know why, until I actually watched Housekeeping for Beginners, I thought it was a Spanish-language movie. It even took a few minutes into the beginning of the movie for it to register: this doesn’t sound like Spanish. For a hot second I thought it was Portuguese. Was this movie Brazilian? I looked it up: of all places, this film is from North Macedonia. Have I ever seen any North Macedonian films before? Apparently, I have—Honeyland, a documentary I actually felt was the best film of 2019. And while that one was the true story of a rural beekeeper, this one is about an urban, blended queer family in the North Macedonian capital of Skopje. (It turns out, I even saw the previous film by the director of Housekeeping for Beginners: You Won’t Be Alone, about a shape shifting witch in 19th century Macedonia, which I did not like nearly as much, and did not have North Macedonia as a producing country, while this one does.)

One might rightly wonder how the hell I started from Spanish to that: within a European context at least, this film could hardly be further from Spanish. Such is the legacy of colonialism, I suppose—the English are hardly the only ones in the world to have such a history. Spanish is actually the second-most spoken native language in the world (behind Mandarin), which can make it easy to forget: there are 16 times as many people in the world who speak some other language. In North Macedonia, the dominant language is Macedonian, but there are other officially recognized languages, including Albanian, Turkish, Bosnian, Serbian, and one that becomes a key plot point in Houesekeeping for Beginners: Romani. That last one is the language spoken in the neighborhood of Shutka, an autonomous Roma community on the outskirts of Skopje.

It turns out, there is a lot to learn about this small corner of the world—a country of just under 10,000 square miles (barely larger than Vermont), a population of 1.8 million (about the population of West Virginia), its capital a metropolitan population of 537,000 (about the metro population of Huntsville, Alabama). Such is the case with just about every international location you can think of, actually—but here, writer-director Goran Stolevski, an openly gay thirtysomething man born in Macedonia who grew up in Australia, finds a unique way to turn our attention to it.

It’s not often we get queer stories in global cinema that blend queer life with racial and ethnic concerns, making Housekeeping for Beginners an unusually intersectional story. When the film opens, we see what appears to be two teenagers, Ali (Samson Selim) and Vanesa (Mia Mustafi), belting out along to a song they both apparently love, using household items as fake microphones. It’s a deceptively charming and simple scene, and only moves into a portrait of a rather chaotic household.

And the home includes a lesbian couple, Dita (Anamaria Marinca) and Suada (Alina Serban), and their gay housemate Toni (Vladimir Tintor). As we just hang out with this household for several minutes, it takes a little while to fully register what all the relationships are. Vanesa, and insanely cute little Mia (Dzada Selim) are Suada’s children. Ali, just a few years older than Vanesa, is Toni’s 19-year-old hookup—the opening scene of him singing with Vanesa really driving home how he’s rather young.

But, there are several other queer teens who also hang out at the house, which serves as a de facto safe house for kids who are rejected by their families or communities. And here, in a country with no legal recognition of same-sex couples or their children who are not blood relatives, this chaotically supportive mini-community they have created for themselves is massively disrupted when Suada is diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

The first third or so of Housekeeping for Beginners focuses on this lesbian couple, how they deal with a prognosis understood early on to be hopeless, and how they drag their feet in regards to informing the family. It’s not a spoiler, per se, to say that Suada dies, because the overall point of this film is Dita dealing with both her promise to Suada that she will be the children’s mother going forward, and in particular Vanesa’s passionate rebellion against that scenario, all while navigating the legal hoops and deceptions necessary for her to stave off any threat of the children being taken away. Toni, for his part, is resistant to being pressured into playing the part of a straight father / family man type. Ali organically settles into his own position in the family, his relationship with Toni having complications of its own.

I was fully absorbed and moved by ths movie, a rare feat of ensemble storytelling in which every principal character has dimension and character development. It should be noted, also, that both Ali and Suada happen to come from the aforementioned Shutka community, a people for whom “gypsy” is considered a bigoted term, and they are people of color—making Dita and Suada not just a lesbian couple, but an interracial couple, and then Dita a White woman raising children of color. There are many references to this dynamic in the film, and when Vanesa insists on seeking out a grandmother in Shutka she hasn’t seen in several years, deep cultural differences quickly become apparent.

I can only imagine Housekeeping for Beginners would be seen in a far more intricate way by Macedonian audiences, and I would be fascinated to learn how the film was received there—it was indeed their submission for the Best International Feature award from North Macedonia, but, criminally, it did not make the cut among last year’s nominees. This is a film that absolutely deserves attention, both in its home country and abroad—even the most frustrating characters are deeply human, and the domestic situation portrayed is emblematic of evolving ideas of family the world over. I won’t soon forget this one.

Love makes a family, and so does not taking any shit lying down.

Overall: A-

PERFECT DAYS

Directing: B+
Acting: B+
Writing: B+
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B+

I guess you could say Perfect Days is a mood. In which case, your mileage may vary widely, depending on your frame of mind when you approach this film—if you approach it at all. This is another one of those movie where critics predictably adore it, and I know many people who would never have the patience for it.

Director and co-writer Wim Wenders focuses on Hirayama (a wonderful Kôji Yakusho, who is in nearly every frame of the film), an older man who spends his work days cleaning Tokyo toilets. The company he works for is apparently very literal when it comes to their business name: Hirayama’s jumpsuit is emblazoned with the words, in English, The Tokyo Toilet.

And to be clear: we spend a lot of time following Hirayama around, cleaning public toilets around the city. A more conventional film would spend a fair amount of time following him on his routine for, say, one day. And then the next day, maybe some variation. But Wenders really wants us to settle into Hirayama’s world, and we follow him around for multiple days, seemingly nothing of note happening to him. Any small variation that does occur—places he goes to eat, for example—prove to be just as much a part of his regular routine, just not necessarily on a daily cadence.

Watching this movie, I found myself thinking about the surprise #1 movie on the 2022 Sight and Sound list of the best movies of all time: Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. Both movies exist to make us feel as though we are living a person’s life with them. The key difference between Perfect Days is that we follow the character outside his home. He spends a lot of time driving through the mass of steel and pavement that is Tokyo—with a great many angles on the 2,080-foot Tokyo Skytree—and even more time cleaning toilets. But, many of these toilets are in city parks, small urban oases of lush greenery. And, in sharp contrast to Jeanne Dielman, whose point of view is ultimately bleak, Hirayama is a deeply contented man, living a simple life to which he is utterly suited. He is a man of so few words, he utters almost nothing in the film’s first 45 minutes.

And, over time, small details creep into notice. Other people passing through his orbit, using the toilets, indicate in very subtle ways how they think of him as dirty. When Hirayama finds a lost little boy and takes him by the hand to find his mother, the mother pays no attention to Hirayama and immediately disinfects the boy’s hands. I must admit to some ambivalence about this depiction, myself. I would also want to wash my hands immediately after, say, shaking the hand of a guy I knew just spent all day cleaning toilets.

Granted, there could be a cultural difference here. Hirayama cleans an astonishing number of single occupancy public toilets, and at least as depicted here, they look remarkably clean even before he gets to them. Whether this is typical of Japanese society or just a contrivance of this film, I have no idea. I just know that if these toilets were in the United States, they would look like a sewer exploded inside them within hours.

Hirayama indicates a tendency to notice and appreciate small pleasures, often while he’s doing his work. He takes photos, with an old camera that uses film, of branches overhead from his lunch bench in the park. He appreciates colorful reflective light under an overhanging roof of a toilet next to a busy street. The point is, if you are receptive to the specificity of what Perfect Days has to offer, it takes on a warmly compelling quality.

And, eventually, certain character details emerge. Hirayama’s young niece, Niko (Arisa Nakano), shows up unexpectedly, having run away from home. Hirayama is a man of so few words, he accepts this stoically, although he does call his sister soon enough. If this were an American movie, the niece would show up on day two. Here, the movie must be half over before she appears, interrupting Hirayama’s comfortable routine, but in a way that he accepts with passive grace.

Perfect Days is somewhat long, particularly at the pace it unfolds, at two hours and three minutes (counting the credits). But two key scenes occur in the last quarter of the film, and I am unconvinced that their impact would be quite as effective if we hadn’t spent all that time with him beorehand. One of them involves his sister, and one involves the ex-husband of the lady who runs one of the restaurants he frequents. Neither of them are major surprises—nothing in Perfect Days is jarring—but neither of the scenes that unfold are quite expected either. In a way, they just further enrich Hirayama’s world, whis is explicitly described to Niko as wholly separate from her mother’s. I found them to be unexpectedly, almost sneakily moving.

They don’t particularly change the mood, either. Perfect Days takes on a tone that evokes those days you spent out and about in a solitude you find yourself particularly enjoying. Hirayama has made that his way of life. We’ve just been granted the privilege of a brief visit into his world.

It’s a lovely day in the park. And in toilets.

Overall: B+

THE TASTE OF THINGS

Directing: A
Acting: A-
Writing: A-
Cinematography: A
Editing: A

It’s been said that you shouldn’t watch The Taste of Things on an empty stomach—and that is precisely what I did. And then I sat through this lengthy, gorgeously shot, expertly choreographed opening sequence of an elaborate dinner getting prepared in a large, late-nineteenth-century French kitchen.

Here’s the thing. If you are a carnivore, you might have greater need to heed such a warning: there is a lot of meat and seafood prepared in this movie. I am, however, a vegetarian—I don’t even eat seafood. I could appreciate the vividly shot food, clearly actually cooked on set, on a purely aesthetic level, but it certainly didn’t have me salivating.

Here’s what it did do. It made me think, a lot, about the way we eat our food. It made me long for a meal prepared with such intricate care, from ingredients sourced from the garden right outside the door. The film’s opening shot, in fact, is of Eugénie (a luminescent Juliette Binoche, still a genuine stunner at age 59) harvesting produce straight out of the dirt. We throw phrases around like “farm to table” as though it’s a marketing concept, and then we witness it occurring onscreen in this movie, almost in real time. And here, in the real world, 140 years after the setting of our movie, we pass our days eating food made quickly or cheaply or, in most cases, both.

The Taste of Things is populated with characters for whom flavor is more important than anything. I marveled at the technical proficiency already achieved by the 19th century, the myriad combinations of ingredients and cooking techniques, and the amount of time that it takes—and took—to master all these dishes.

As I said, the meat based dishes—beef, veal, fish, you name it—still failed to make me salivate, in ways I am certain it will most audiences. And then Eugénie whips up this Baked Alaska dish and I nearly cried with desire: Holy fuckballs that looks amazing! And I don’t even like meringue. The men Eugénie serves this dessert to discuss the physics of how the ice cream stays frozen inside, and I was rapt. This was one dish with meringue I could imagine using as skin cream. I wanted to bathe in it.

The Taste of Things is about much more than vividly shot food preparation, of course. At its heart, it is a love story, between Eugénie, a longtime cook, and Dodin Bouffant (Benoît Magimel), the restauranteur Eugénie worked for for many years. They now live together in a kind of perpetual romance, Dodin regularly proposing to her, and Eugénie regularly insisting she prefers things as they are. Their love and affection is quite overtly represented in the deeply rooted history and skill in the food they share. This includes both cooking and eating it, although Eugénie does most of the cooking.

There is a bit of sadness thrown in, and I won’t spoil exactly what that is, although it gets alluded to pretty early on, in the middle of the aforementioned, extended opening sequence. It’s easy to focus on that sequence, because of the incredible blocking and choreography and camera work, but most scenes in this film involve cooking, and without exception the food is shot with a cozy, loving eye. Beyond the focus on the food, the story is deceptively simple. But it stays with you.

There is a somewhat curious separation of genders in this film, and the heavy focus on Binoche notwithstanding, I kind of wish there were more women in it. Besides Eugénie, the only significant female characters are two younger cooks who work with her: Violette (Galatéa Bellugi), who evidently has relatively mediocre still; and Violette’s niece, Pauline (Bonnie Chagneau-Ravoire), who has an astonishing, precocious talent for gastronomy. Dodin, for his part, has a group of about five men friends who populate many scenes, often to pontificate on the prepared food or to provide support to Dodin, as needed.

But, it all comes back to Eugénie and Dodin, every other character serving their story. One of the great many things I love about The Taste of Things is the way it naturally veers away from any of the typical film tropes. Just because of the way I’ve been conditioned by decades of movie watching, I kept expecting one of the apprentice cooks to trip while climbing the many staircases in the house, or for one of the men to creep on young Pauline. But, nothing of the sort happens in this story, which is only about two character who are, as Dodin puts it, “in their autumn years,” and their earnest devotion to each other. Sometimes the simplest stories are the most moving and beautiful, and this is certainly one to savor.

Don’t insult this movie by eating cheap popcorn while you watch it!

THE ZONE OF INTEREST

Directing: A
Acting: A-
Writing: A-
Cinematography: A
Editing: A
Music: B+

The Zone of Interest is a film that challenges you to pay attention, then makes you uncomfortable, forces you to sit in that discomfort, and regularly reminds you of the ease of complacency. It is within this context that I found how it ended to be one of the greatest endings of a film, perhaps ever.

Jonathan Glazer, who co-wrote the script and directed this film, previously gave us such wildly disparate films as Under the Skin (2014), Birth (2004) and Sexy Beast (2000), certainly takes his time between feature films, and has evidently honed his craft over time. Under the Skin in particular, a film now a decade old, is similarly subtle in both its profundity and provocative themes; it definitely has something to say. And, while it is imperfect, its ideas, its visuals, and especially its tone has me returning to it every few years.

The Zone of Interest is a bit more direct in its challenge, a slight irony given how it shifts nearly all the horrors of the Holocaust outside the borders of the frame. This is a story focused on Rudolf and Hedwig Höss (Christian Friedel and Sandra Hüller), and their children, living their seemingly ordinary, every day lives in a home literally on the other side of the fence surrounding the Auschwitz concentration camp. Rudolf is the commandant of the camp, Hedwig is his wife, and in their minds, they are living the dream: everything they want in a home, with an elaborate garden, and a loving family.

The Jewish people loom large in this film, in that to the German family we are following—as well as the rest of their family, friends and colleagues—Jewish people are entirely incidental, no more or less worth considering than generic cargo. Their conscious thought about Jewish people is limited to questions of whether the few of them being used as slave labor on the grounds should be allowed inside the house. Occasionally an unusual consideration punctures their idyllic existence, such as when the ashes of human remains float down a nearly river and reach them while obliviously fishing or swimming. (That image of the ash flowing down the river toward them is not one I will soon forget.)

Glazer is a master of tone, particularly of the deeply creepy sort, but in The Zone of Interest, he quite intentionally does away with tone altogether. The proceedings are generally very matter-of-fact, the same approach the Höss family has toward Rudolf’s work. This only changes in sporadic fits, with Mica Levi’s truly nightmarish score, which reaches occasional crescendos over seemingly mundane images, like flowers growing in the garden. But, there is always something insidious under the surface of any particularly domestic image: those flowers are grown with human remains in the soil.

I might be tempted to call The Zone of Interest the 21st-century answer to Schndler’s List, except Jonathan Glazer is far removed from the kind of populist director that Steven Spielberg is. Even a film like Schindler’s List, which I would still regard as essential viewing, is similarly pointed in how it challenges its audience, but would never have reached the same number of people without the Spielberg name attached to it. Glazer, by contrast, is a longtime critical darling whose films just don’t get widely seen. Even with The Zone of Interest fairly likely to become his most-seen film, it’s never going to get genuinely mainstream exposure.

It’s too bad. The Zone of Interest is the kind of film you don’t particularly want to watch, but which you’ll be glad to have seen. I would hesitate to call it “homework,” but plenty of people would likely see it that way. For those who actively seek it out, and you absolutely should, it is likely to be seen as a profound work of art.

Is it a masterpiece? It’s too soon to tell. I was deeply impressed by almost everything about it—including Sandra Hüller, who also gave a spectacular performance recently in Anatomy of a Fall—but was left with mixed feelings about that jarringly severe score. I could feel differently after some time. And that is a specific thing The Zone of Interest plays with, time: nearly all of it is set in the last couple years of World War II, and that changes briefly only once, in a way that is incredibly effective.

I left this film thinking a lot about “the banality of evil,” and how easily it become part of our day to day existence. Rudolf recounts to Hedwig over the phone how he spent a party thinking mostly how he would gas everyone in the high ceilinged banquet room, and those were all people ostensibly on his side. This is a portrait of people far more concerned with logistics than humanity, and the casual way it invites us into their world is the most frightening of all.

The Banality of Evil: The Movie

SOCIETY OF THE SNOW

Directing: B+
Acting: A-
Writing: B+
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B+
Special Effects: B+

Fifty-one years ago, in 1972, a chartered Uruguayan Air Force flight, carrying a rugby team alomg with many of their family and friends, crashed in the Andes mountains on its way from Montevideo, Uruguay to Santiago, Chile. There were twelve initial fatalities among the forty passengers and five crew onboard, a number that steadily grew larger during the seventy-two days the survivors spent stranded in the mountains.

This has long been a story widely known around the globe, and I haven’t even yet mentioned the most notorious aspect of it, the very thing that made those who ultimately survived able to do so.

I’m old enough to remember the 1993 film Alive, starring Ethan Hawke, and how riveting and harrowing the crash sequence was near the beginning. It was long ago when I saw this film, and I don’t remember much of it—although I certainly remember the passengers flying out the back of the torn-open plane after it hit the mountain ridge. I also remember the dramatic drop to the knees after the first time one of the survivors takes a bite of human flesh.

This might be the key difference between Alive and Society of the Snow, which does employ some fairly typical cinematic emotional beats, but doesn’t lean much into those kinds of rote dramatic moments. Curiously, the two films were based on different books: Alive was adapted from Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors, which was published in 1974, only a couple of years after the actual events, but was written by British historian Piers Paul Read. Society of the Snow (La Sociedad de la Nieve) was written far more recently (2008) and thus without the event as fresh in anyone’s memory, but it was by Uruguayan writer Pablo Vierci.

It’s easy to see the potential pros and cons of these two literary accounts, but the disparity becomes wider when we look at the adaptations, with Alive coming straight out of Hollywood, and Socity of the Snow being directed and co-written by Spanish-born J.A. Bayona. Ideally, of course, Society of the Snow would have been made by an actual Uruguayan director. And there is some irony in the fact that Bayona also directed the 2012 film The Impossible, about the 2004 tsunami in Thailand—which cast Naomi Watts, Ewan McGregor and Tom Holland to tell a story based on a Spanish family’s real-life experience.

Socity of the Snow, at least, is a Spanish-U.S. coproduction, told in Spanish, based on source material that came from a Uruguayan voice. By all accounts, although there have been many adaptations of the 1972 Andes flight disaster, this one is the most accurate and the most realistic. In fact, there is a sequence well into the film in which one of the survivors takes out a camera and starts taking photos. It made me think: surely there are real life photos that were taken, then, of survivors posing around the wreckage? Indeed, there are—and Society of the Snow recreates them with impressive accuracy.

This is, indeed, a very harrowing film to watch. Thirty years makes a big difference in filmmaking capabilities, and the plane crash sequence in this film is rendered in far greater detail, on a comparable budget (in adjusted dollars). There is clear CGI at work in this movie, but it is put to good use, as the scene is no less jaw dropping for it. In just a few moments, what we see is very violent and horrifying.

The thing to remember about this whole experience, though, is that the crash was only the beginning. It happens about 12 minutes into the film, and the notorious cannibalism doesn’t even start until about 45 minutes in. Another major incident occurs well after that, which is just as harrowing as the initial crash itself. Even though I should have seen it coming, I was so absorbed by the film, it scared the shit out of me. Beyond that, many attempts are made at finding help, a nearly impossible task in the middle of the Andes mountains, unknown miles and miles from civilization.

This entire ordeal is a stunning story, and one could argue that, in motion picture form at least, Society of the Snow has done the best job of it. Everything about it is amazing, even how long many of the people who survived the initial crash lasted before later dying for various reasons. Only 16 of the 45 onboard that plane made it in the end, and this is the story of how those few made it—and many of those nearly didn’t. The film’s runtime is two hours and 24 minutes, but a solid 15 of those minutes are the end credits, which makes this film a solid, standard length, all of which is impossible to look away from. If you have even cursory survivalist interests, this movie, currently available streaming on Netflix, is definitely one to watch.

It wasn’t as much of a party as it looked.

Overall: B+

FALLEN LEAVES

Directing: B
Acting: B
Writing: B
Cinematography: B-
Editing: B

Fallen Leaves is reveiving virtually universal acclaim, and I’m over here thinking: I must be missing something. It’s fine, but with all due respect, it has yet to strike me as being something particularly special. This is a very simple, surprisingly short (81 minute) tale of two middle-aged people awkwardly falling in love.

This film is being billed as a “romantic comedy.” Romantic, I can get on board with it being. I got a light chuckle out of it maybe three or four times. Otherwise, I’ll concede that Fallen Leaves has a unique sort of sweetness to it. This is about two people who lead very solitary lives, one a little more content with the solitude than the other. They meet at a karaoke bar, and in this particular scene, I did enjoy the furtive glances back and forth between a man and a woman who seem subtly taken aback by how attractive they’re finding each other.

We never learn the names of the characters, but Ansa is played by Alma Pöysti, who is 42; and Holappa is played by Jussi Vatanen, who is 45. Curiously, the story seems to be set over-so-slightly in the future: after getting fired at her supermarket job for taking expired food, Ansa is seen in the kitchen of a bar where she’s hired as a dishwasher, and a 2024 calendar is seen hanging on the wall. This might seem an insignificant detail given how close we are indeed now to 2024, but for the many scenes in which Ansa’s radio plays news reports of Russian attacks in Ukraine.

I had difficulty ascertaining the point of these news clips, in the middle of a love story between two people in Helsinki, Finland. Granted, Finland is the scandinavian country—indeed, the European country—with by far the longest border with Russia. But, there is no political element to the story here otherwise, and if there were supposed to be some symbolic element to these news briefs of war, they sailed right over my head.

Furthermore, the performances across the board are rather flat, muted, almost monotone. This was clearly a deliberate choice, something that happens in a lot of independent and/or foreign films. I wonder how this film is playing in its native Finland. Critics in America are loving it. Am I just jaded after being in my own relationship after twenty years? I’m inclined not to think so, but I’ve been known to be off base about things.

Holappa is a heavy drinker. Ansa doesn’t much care for it. Before they confront that issue, far more minor things occur that result in persistent missed connections: Ansa’s written phone number falling unnoticed out of Holappa’s pocket. Ansa’s playful but ill-advised decision to wait until their second date to tell Holappa her name. They both get fired from their jobs, although Holappa’s drinking is a good reason for it.

That’s not especially a spoiler. There aren’t any major plot turns in Fallen Leaves, which is appealingly unsophisticated in its execution. There’s not a lot to unpack here, really. Nor is there much in the way of emotion. Some movies are wildly emotionally manipulative; Fallen Leaves is the antithesis of that approach. Some might argue that this beautifully underscores the very simple love story at play, one about two people finding love much later in life than most people do. I would argue that this is just a pleasantly simple, straightforward love story and there doesn’t seem to be any more to it than that.

Yep. That’s about all that’s going on here.

Overall: B