Mid90s
★★★1/2
There’s a cute moment in Mid90s where Harmony Korine makes a non-speaking cameo, a vision of the onetime enfant terrible of American indie cinema playing (as he’s now prone to do – the ‘Bria’ half of Girlfriend Experience S02 4evz!) the middle-aged buffoon. It’s a throwaway joke, and a winking bit of homage from Jonah Hill, who’s making his directorial debut.
But it’s also plenty telling: Korine’s Kids seems to have served as both inspiration to a teenage Hill and, eventually, as a model for his first-ever feature. Mid90s is a coming of age flick set determinedly on street level, whose penchant for adolescent melodrama is offset by a pleasing sense of spontaneity, a ‘realness’ that extends to its mise-en-scène, its macho posturing, and the naturality of its largely non-professional performances.
It stars Sunny Suljic — either the befallen kid from The Killing Of A Sacred Deer, or the dickhole bully from The House With A Clock In Its Walls, your cinematic experiences pending — as a slip of a kid taking his first tentative steps into teenage rebellion, his daring exceeding his tiny, pre-growth spurt frame. He falls in with a group of local skaters, a crew of dudes out to kill time and brain cells both. In these newfound friends, Suljic finds both liberation from his shitty life and a sense of belonging.
In a year that’s given us Minding The Gap and Skate Kitchen, the narrative is familiar: this gang becoming a chosen family; nurturing, challenging, emboldening, and perhaps poisoning our wayward youth. It lands somewhere between the dark societal explorations of the former and the fun hangz of the latter; Hill setting its young, naïve lead amongst a host of characters, either colourful or quiet, who roll onto screens feeling like fully formed human beings.
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This is just one of the elements of Mid90s that feels shot through with veracity. Hill has a fine eye for adolescent rites of passage, for group dynamics, for micro-scene vernacular, and for male insecurities. He also fashions a recent period piece so besotted with memories of the era, so evocative of its sights and sounds, that it earns the right to wear its broad time frame title proudly. From its vintage look — 16mm shot in boxy, 4:3 ‘academy’ ratio — to its fanning soundtrack to its youth culture chronicling to its pained portrait of coming of age, it’s a film that feels mid-’90s to its core. In someone else’s hands, a movie called Mid90s would trade in cheap nostalgia; here, Hill delivers something whose hard truths and harmful scars feel more like memoir.
The Kindergarten Teacher
★★★★
The phrase ‘American remake’ brings with it a lot of baggage, evoking an ignominious Hollywood history of financially-minded, tin-eared do-overs that turn foreign successes into All-American failures. Sara Colangelo’s The Kindergarten Teacher, however, beats back such associations, faring about as well as an essentially unnecessary English language remake could hope to.
It’s a remake of a 2014 Israeli film, of the same name, by Nadav Lapid. The set-up, and subsequent narrative, is almost exactly the same, too: a titular teacher overhears a five-year-old student reciting a poem, in a state somewhere between trance and daydream. She passes off the poem as her own in a late night poetry class to much approval, less as artistic appropriation, more to reassure her conviction: the kid is uniquely gifted, a poetic savant, whose undeniable talents need to be nurtured. When the world around her doesn’t share her enthusiasm, she doubles down on this conviction, slowly growing obsessed with the child, who — in classic stage parenting fashion — becomes a vessel for her own failed hopes and dreams, and her disappointments in her own children.
Transplanting the film from Tel Aviv to New York City, naturally, removes the greater political resonance of the Israeli original; much of its subtext and symbolism lost in translation. In her adaptation, Colangelo loses the frontal formalism of Lapid’s picture, too; her direction tending towards naturalism. This Kindergarten Teacher plays on the contrast between the naturalism of the drama, and the way the plot, here, winches tighter like a thriller.
Absent socio-political parable, Colangelo focuses on the troubling psychology of the narrative, makes her lead character someone whose obsession carries a genuine hint of danger. And she’s aided in this darker reading by Maggie Gyllenhaal, who turns in a complex, layered performance in a justly-praised starring turn. She perfectly captures her character’s mix of affability and intensity, essentially making her feel like a militant hippy, driven to terrible decisions by a world cruel, uncaring, and lacking in poetry.
Woman At War
★★★★1/2
The titular character of Woman At War is a militant hippy in her own way: a 50-something choir teacher who, in her spare time, wages an eco-terrorist assault on a local Icelandic aluminium smelter; an anonymous avenger sticking it to amoral corporate greed on behalf of disempowered citizens and the ravaged planet. This sounds like the narrative of a thriller; and, in its own way, Benedikt Erlingsson’s follow-up to Of Horses And Men is, almost, a kind of thriller. But, more than anything, Woman At War is an absurdist comedy: strange, silly, and happy to bend cinema’s familiar forms into cute new shapes.
The most distinctive element Erlingsson employs is an old wall-breaking device usually associated with experimental cinema, rule-breaking new-wavers, or even Dogme directors bound by rules: the musicians who’re seen in the frame. At its opening, as we accompany Halldóra Geirharðsdóttir on one of her dissident operations, the camera pans to an empty expanse of countryside behind her, and we see the presence of a three-piece brass band, who’ve evidently been providing the score for the whole opening sequence. They — and, sometimes, a contrapuntal trio of female folksingers in traditional dress — turn up in the background in an increasingly-ridiculous array of locales; one comic reveal of the band in the background almost feels like it’s out of an early Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker movie.
This makes for a distinctive riff on a dark, definitive issue of our day: one person’s ability to make a difference in the face of cataclysmic climate change, to stand in defiance of our all-powerful corporate oligarchs. Essentially, the absurdist, comic, crowdpleasing tone employed by Erlingsson is a way of capturing, and conveying, the cockeyed idealism needed to confront something so vast, to wage a war that’s unwinnable. Trying to singlehandedly overthrow a multinational mining conglomerate is naïve, romantic, and a little ridiculous, and so, in turn, is the film. A work of genuine joy, Woman At War is a crowdpleasing valentine to unlikely activism and unvarnished optimism.
Transit
★★★★
Christian Petzold’s latest film marks a welcome, winning continuation of the fine form he showed with Barbara and Phoenix: this another arthouse thriller, etched through with psychological complexity and resonant themes of German history and wartime tragedy. It stars Franz Rogowski as an on-the-lam German in France, attempting to procure a visa from the Mexican embassy by posing as a recently-deceased writer.
Transit is, in such, wholly striking for a simple temporal device, which gives its narrative great thematic weight. It’s based on a 1942 novel by the German writer Anna Seghers, a moral examination of forced expatriation that carries echoes of her own experiences in exile, as a Jewish-German intellectual who’d fled from the Third Reich. Petzold faithfully adapts the story, keeping its WWII era tale in tact. But, though the film is set in Occupied France, it was shot in contemporary France, which means that Transit exists in a kind of cinematic ‘no time’, at once past and present.
This seemingly-modest filmmaking device is a sublime act of cinematic sleight-of-hand, slyly amplifying the original narrative and weaponising its themes for the contemporary climate. Here, everything we see being depicted — wartime migration, persecution of immigrants, militarisation of police, unfeeling bureaucracy — evokes both then and now; Transit, ultimately, about history repeating.
The Man Who Killed Don Quixote
★1/2
In one of cinema’s most dire ‘careful what you wish for’ warnings, Terry Gilliam has, finally, after years of trying, managed to get his long-simmering The Man Who Killed Don Quixote project off the ground. His initial attempt, in 2000, was a failure, though a success in an indirect fashion: its ‘making of’ accompaniment turned into Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe’s documentary Lost In La Mancha, one of the most illustrative portraits of the realities of filmmaking, in all its ambition and folly and tenuous finances. Now, finally, all these years on, one of cinema’s (supposed) great visionaries has finally pulled it off, bringing his wackadoo, story-within-a-story, meta-movie riff on the classic tale to screens, with no less than Adam Diver as its lead. Premiering at Cannes when its maker was 77 years old and rumoured to be in ailing health, the fact that The Man Who Killed Don Quixote finally, really, actually existed was widely celebrated, hailed as a victory for creativity in the face of economic reality.
But, sadly, Gilliam’s dream project played far better as a myth than it plays as movie. Because, um, well, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote sucks. It’s bad. It’s overly long, erratically paced, nonsensically plotted, and painfully unfunny; full of screeching caricatures and dated hijinks. Five minutes in, when you’re stuck in the sitcom scenario of a philandering man hiding out in a hotel room whilst an angry husband pounds on the door, you know you’re in for a long ride. But, given there’s more than two laborious hours still to come, you have no idea just how long that long ride will feel.
That this finished film is, ultimately, a failure is, sadly, not so surprising. In the 20 years he’s been attempting to bring The Man Who Killed Don Quixote to screen, these are the other films Gilliam has made: the cod-blockbuster misfire The Brothers Grimm, the abhorrent Tideland, the calamitous The Imaginarium Of Doctor Parnassus, and the limp self-parody The Zero Theorem. With two decades of awful movies trailing out behind him, the awfulness of The Man Who Killed Don Quixote is hardly unexpected. But, it’s still plenty disappointing.
