Aftersun

  Like the very best art, writer/director Charlotte Wells’s film MUST be seen more than once to be appreciated, fully felt and understood. Like the fragmented family it depicts, the film requires of its viewer connection, engagement, commitment.

For example, on first viewing one wouldn’t know the dark-haired woman dancing is the adult Sophie, whose memories of a holiday with her father 22 years earlier make up the narrative. That dance montage recurs several times and at the end. On the last night of the Turkish holiday young Sophie declines her dad Colum’s invitation to dance, but we see her adult version dancing and then the girl herself. Charactreristically, even when he’s dancing with them he is dancing alone.

The ending winds back to the beginning too. The film opens with Sophie filming a playful interview with her father two days after his birthday. That scene repeats later. At their airport parting Colum films young Sophie’s playful ducking, posing and wide-grinned wave. A still of that grin freezes as a wall blow-up, from which Wells pans through the adult Sophie’s flat, showing the pensive woman on her own birthday. That pan continues back to our (and Sophie’s) last view of Colum, pausing his camera, walking back, down a hall and disappearing behind distant doors. The last-shot doors define hie absence.

Like that last long pan through three sets, the film constantly plays with time. Instead of a throughway narrative we get the discontinuity of experiences remembered, shuffled, re-examined. The memory muddle explains the frequent asynchronicity, where the sound and image are at odds. We hear Colum on the phone in one position while we see him in quite another, tucking Sophie into bed. Sometimes he wears his cast, sometimes he doesn’t.

The key ambiguity is the shot of Colum walking fully-dressed into the night sea. It’s an explicit suicide out of A Star is Born. In the next scene he’s back in the hotel room. In a linear ploy he would have returned from the shore. But in a narrative that makes jumble and uncertainty its key principle that scene suggests his suicide. Not within that narrative period, but at some point, leaving adult Sophie searching her memories to deal with it.

The film’s central irony is that in this rare extended visit the young girl proves to have the poise, character and maturity of an adult, while her father reveals the weak, troubled helplessness of a child. Frankie Corio’s performance as Sophie is miraculous. Her every look suggests a profound complexity of feeling. Freeze a frame and read. When she’s locked out of their hotel room Sophie coolly sleeps in the lobby, then tries to assuage Colum’s guilt for having abandoned her. Covering her father’s naked body on her bed, she’s the adult tucking in the kid.

Sophie is unruffled by overhearing two young girls discussing their sexual activity, the sexual play of the teens she meets over a pool game, the teens’ later heavy drinking, even her spotting two gay men kissing in a doorway. The latter may shade Colum’s “new thing going with Keith.” Matter-of-factly, she tells Colum of her having kissed young Michael. 

When Colum tells her that as she grows up she should feel free to tell him anything, the shot has them on a small float in the distance, against a wide expanse of water, hills in the background. The scale conveys the futility of Colum’s promise, his helplessness to support her.

In an early shot we hear Sophie’s steady breathing, asleep in the foreground, while on the balcony behind Colum labours through tai chi exercises — while smoking! The deeply troubled Colum is reading about meditation and tai chi. He’s at loose ends, between girlfriends and jobs. Through Sophie’s description of her fatigue the camera shifts to show his face registering a far more profound exhaustion.

        Colum is impatient with her interviewing him about his childhood. He won't think of what at her 11 he thought he might become. His family forgot his 11th birthday. When he reminded her, his mother grabbed him by the ear(!) and forced his father to take him to choose a toy.

If he's broken he's also close to broke. Just before we see Sophie gifted an All-Inclusive resort bracelet, Colum picks up a cigarette butt to smoke. He overreacts to Sophie’s loss of a swimming mask. He complains that the hotel room provides less than he paid for. He and Sophie skip out on a restaurant bill. In a rare impatience she asks him why he keeps promising things (i.e., singing lessons) that he knows he can’t afford. His purchase of an expensive carpet seems to deny that — but he buys it in a spirit of gloom, not joy. We’re glad to see it in the adult Sophie’s flat. It embodies her earlier pleasure that wherever they may be, father and daughter are under the same sky. Even if no longer.

Over Colum’s unseen heavy breathing we see the adult Sophie rise from bed, then assure her woman partner that she’ll tend to their crying baby son. A blurry montage of Colum leads to his wakeup call for the day trip that will celebrate his birthday. Young Sophie enlists the tourist strangers to serenade him. Cut from that “jolly good fellow” to Colum sobbing helplessly, naked, alone in a dark room.  

At their last supper Colum pays for a polaroid snap of them together. While Sophie wistfully wishes they could stay at the resort forever we watch the photo slowly developing, firming up to a ghostly clarity. It's a miniature of the slowly revealing montages we have been absorbing.

And so to the title. My (wise) wife Anne suggests Aftersun sounds like a catchy name for a sunguard lotion, something to treat burns. We see Colum applying protective balm to Sophie a few times. Her cascade of memories are an attempt to salve his emotional sear. Aftersun also seems an inflection of Afternoon, the halfway division of the day so by extension a pivotal point in Sophie’s complicated experience of her dad. 

Women Talking

  Two stories in this morning’s paper. In Vancouver BC a young woman police officer killed herself, frustrated at how the department “handled” her complaint that a superior had extorted her for repeated sex. In Alberta the multimillionaire leader of a religious cult is charged with at least four cases of sexually exploiting female members. These stories have nothing to do with Sarah Polley’s masterful film.

Yet everything. Miriam Towes’s source novel was based on a Mennonite cult in Bolivia. The men routinely drugged and raped their women. Imperviously. But this shameful oppression is global, especially in the sexual victimization of women. In cultures with a patriarchal religious authority, their abuse extends into the afterlife. And silences them in this one.

By just presenting “women talking,” the film grows even more radical. The women start sharing their secret torments. They start supporting each other. Worse: they start thinking. They begin to imagine fuller lives for themselves. They realize they cannot entrust their men with the care and education of their children. They debate whether to stay in their community to fight or to leave it.     

Polley’s script is richly circumspect and emotionally realistic in its exploration of women’s options in their restrictive community. As ours are. As Ona remarks, “Hope for the unknown is good. It is better than hatred of the familiar.” So, too, another woman’s concern that “forgiveness” may lead to “permission,” only to perpetuate the evil.

The “action” is the women’s debate on bales of hay in the commune barn. The odd outdoor shots of the women or the children at play barely attenuate the claustrophobic atmosphere, the constriction upon such reined-in women. The film teems with eloquent compositions: a mother and her son walk through a field, touching, together, but separated by a fence.

In this community women are treated as cows — figuratively in their use and literally in their rapists’ tranquilizing. Aptly, one leader draws her lessons from her girl-named horses, who even under harness properly trust their instincts not their driver.

So stark is the treatment of the issues that we can often forget this so dark film is in colour. The women’s debate is intense, the characterizations vivid. Every position has its check and qualification, so that their final decision rings not just proper but inevitable. 

Two male figures refine the film’s ethic, reminding us that “men” don’t have to be “like that.” The community teacher August, appointed to take the meeting minutes, is a soft, sentimental man whose rebellious mother was excommunicated by this colony. Clearly sympathetic to the women, August innocently oversteps his recording function once to give unsolicited advice. He is sensitive to the point of openly weeping. August returned to the colony after university because he probably couldn’t handle the social world outside. He kept a gun for his possible suicide. Here he pledges to try to teach the boys to be proper men, not like their forefathers.   

A more marginal character is even more deeply expressive. The apparently mute “Melvin” pops in and out, helping with the children. But their birth name is “Nettie.” They have  implicitly been traumatized by the men’s response to the character’s true sexual nature.

Tellingly, the film’s best-known star, Francis McDormand, has a minor role —nevertheless compelling. With a facial scare emblematic of her profound submission, she defends the established way to the point of trying to prevent her daughter’s and her little granddaughter’s liberation. 

Much of this film’s beauty lies in its closeups on unenhanced women’s faces, that provide a human landscape of compelling suffering and resolve. These desert faces contrast to the billowing crops. 

So much starts with women talking. 

Babylon

  Like Hamlet’s dumbshow regicide,  Damien Chazelle opens his Babylon with a miniature of the overall film. An exotic monster (i.e., an elephant) is introduced to the desert that will blossom into Hollywood. When the inadequate civilization of truckage fails, the elephant releases a colossal excretion upon the workers.  

The film proper — so to speak — opens upon a Hollywood orgy of gobsmacking variety and vice. Think Bosch on Cialis. In range, indelicacy and volume that is an equivalent to the elephant’s bestowal of bowel. Despite the party appearance of the bare-chested USC football team, this ain’t the Rose Bowl.

At least two other such dumps ensue. In one, Nellie Laroy — her Wild Child career defunct — kills her pretence to newly cultured elegance with a bestial assault upon a buffet and a heroic upchuck on both carpet and host. Finally, one of the film’s concluding montages is a concentrated survey of global cinema — from Muybridge through Bergman through Brakhage concluding with the soulless proto-graphics of AI. At the latter point one might yearn for the porn.

If the film plot draws on Kenneth Anger’s racy history, Hollywood Babylon, its spirit evokes Blake: “The roads of excess lead to the palace of wisdom.” 

Or not. Here the overriding arcs both of the characters and of the mythic setting find excess in the excess rather than wisdom. When the gambling mogul complains of the new Hollywood’s dullness he takes Mannie into an underworld cave of rat-eating monstrousness that leaves us yearning for the earlier disgust.

We follow the rising arcs of Nellie, Mannie and the jazz musician and the fall of Jack Conrad from drug-addled superstar to pathetically recycled has-been. Nellie self-destructs when her wildness outlasts her childishness. The black musician survives but only by enduring such insults as having to cork-face himself to be as black as his bandmates, at his white masters’ insistence. 

Only Manny survives. He rises steadily but accidentally as random opportunities befall him. He falls in love with — and rescues — Nellie at first sight, then ultimately tries to save her career and her life but she thwarts him. Faced with her assassin, Manny saves himself by abandoning all Hollywood pretence and retreating to essential Mexican. We last see him as a happy NY family man, visiting his Kinescope lot with a young daughter who prefers ice cream and a wife who’s humouring him. 

When Manny weeps at the screening of Singin in the Rain he’s moved both by the memory of the period the film records and his having survived it. His career was boosted by the arrival of sound, as Jack’s was killed by it. The film’s revival revives Manny’s memories of his first great love and her loss. It recalls the energy and excitement of his lost career. But it also validates the gossip columnist’s consolation of Jack. Though his career is finished, she assures him, his image on film provides a kind of immortality few mortals achieve. Not outside cinema, anyway. And what is that worth, in the comic cosmic scheme of things?

The film explores the Babylon-like lost empire that was recreated in the wildness of the Hollywood west and in the American empire it reprtesents. Its dreams, disillusionments and eventual displacement Hollywood came to perpetrate and embody, both in its rise and in its fall. 

        Also, as Kara Hagedorn suggests, Babylon may also be a film of its moment. The orgies are a release from the lockdowns. So, too, the oddball orgy in Glass Onion, supposedly of the hostess's safe "pod," while Dr Fauci appears helpless on a TV screen in the background. Like Triangle of Sadness, Babylon also speaks to the post-Covid awareness of the gap between the fatuous privileged elite and the massive afflicted underclass. Further, the lavish scatology coheres with our renewed sense of our physical nature and limitations, its embarrassment and mortality. Babylon is a film for our time in its excess as much as in its wisdom.

Knives Out

  As one might infer from the title, this film is about knives — and their outing. When detective Benoit Blanc recites the mystery’s solution he’s backed by a huge halo of poised daggers. In Blanc’s parlance, that halo is the donut of the mystery, whose innermost donut core he penetrates. Like Marta’s winning strategy at Go, he’s “trying to create a beautiful pattern” by plunging to the center of the knives/donut. 

The portrait of the freshly killed patriarch Harlan has him posed with the scimitar by which he will die — if at whose hand provides the mystery. Indeed the entire whodunit plot pivots on that crime-novelist’s observation about the importance of distinguishing between a real knife and a theatrical prop. The murderer fatally incriminates himself when he stabs the main suspect with a stage knife which, like Marta’s confession, proves retractable. So, too, it was the murderer who anonymously hired the detective, in effect unwittingly turning his fake knife real. Thus Blanc’s “Physical evidence can tell a clear story with a forked tongue.” 

The film itself carries that ambiguity. As a theatrical construction, the plot presents an Agatha cozy family of corrupt, self-serving, vicious members pretending to innocence. Meanwhile, the purest member of the household, caregiver Marta, acts guiltily as she fears for her undocumented immigrant mother’s security. To solve the crime Blanc has to undermine Marta’s confession as well as the killer’s (ie., his employer’s) profession of innocence. For once the cop proves right in the conclusion to which he jumped: “I mean, the guy practical lives in a Clue board.” 

The dialogue teems with such theatrical references. Ransom rejects Blanc with a classic cartoon allusion: “Shut up with that Kentucky Fried Foghorn Leghorn drawl!” So too Blanc’s description of the typical will reading: “You'd think it'd be like a game show, but think of a community theatre production of a tax return.”

For all its theatricality, however, this film has a sharp contemporary political point. The prop knife turns real. The vile family embodies the American right’s assault on the immigrant since Donald Trump’s ascent to the presidency. Trump is the unnamed reference in this exchange:

Joni: You don't like him cause you love him.

Richard: No, I don't like him, he's an asshole but maybe an asshole is what we needed.

Joni: Oh, God, yeah, and an asshole is what Germany needed in nineteen thirty whatever.

The particularly targeted Trump policy is his cruel crackdown on illegal immigrants. As Joni objects, “They're putting kids in cages!” 

Richard: I'm not saying that's not terrible, but the parents share some of that blame. 

Joni: For wanting a better future for their kids? Isn't that what America’s….”

                Richard: For breaking the law!” 

This family hardly lives in respect for the law. In one sequence Richard summons Marta over as a demonstration of her place within their family circle. A replay reveals she’s just a prop in his condemnation of needy refugees. He reduces her humanity to a legalism. 

Hence their attack when they learn Harlan has made Marta his sole heir. Walt uses Marta’s mother’s vulnerability to pressure her to resign her inheritance so the family could deploy their resources to legitimize her mother’s stay. That Marta sensibly concludes she could do herself. His condescension defeats him.

For all their protestations of affection and respect for Marta, the family members continually mistake her national origin. They make excuses for excluding her from her charge’s funeral. For this family “America is for Americans.” Indeed even Ransom’s claim to “our ancestral home…” is undercut by Blanc’s “That is hooey! Harlan, he bought this place in the 80's from a Pakistani real estate millionaire.” Even in this racist microcosm America is built on the immigrant.