Drama

dir: Celine Song

2023

Past Lives, a semi-autobiographical story, is a lot of things to different people. If you want it to be the greatest film of the year, it can be. For you. It’s on a lot of film critics lists already.

The thing is, if you’re going to do that, say it’s one of the best films of the year, you’re really going to have to do yeoman’s work showing to the uninitiated *why* it’s so great.

Its charms, I would argue, are ineffable and hard to grasp. It is a really well-made film, with perfect performances. But it’s realised in such a personal way, one which doesn’t tell us what to think or how to feel about any particular scene, such that we impose our own feelings, our own impressions onto what we’re watching.

The film opens as three characters sit at a golden bar. A couple of voices, perhaps representing us, the viewers, try to theorise as to what’s going on over there. Are the Asian male and female a couple, or siblings, and who is the white guy next to them? An interloper? Why does he look so insecure and unhappy? Why does the female look so happy and energised, with those energies directed towards the other Asian guy, and deliberately physically turning her back on the other guy?

We are going to find out, but we’re still going to wonder. And yet (the woman) looks directly at us (down the camera), as if to challenge us, as if to say “you think you know what their story is, but you have no idea”.

Though it’s called Past Lives, this is not a supernatural romance about people finding each other over the course of multiple incarnations. In truth sometimes we get to live multiple lives even over the course of the one life we’re given.

dir: Nicole Holofcener

2023

Wah wah you hurt my feewings wah wah

No this isn’t the brutal takedown of contemporary morals and morays, millennial pieties or Gen Z or even Generation Alphas, and their woke sensitivities to not murder asylum seekers or torment endangered species or intersectionality bingo.

This flick is all about middle-aged white people! Being middle aged! And sensitive! With feelings!

Their feelings! Not your pathetic feelings. Their feelings!

If you aren’t familiar with the films of Nicole Holofcener, you may not be that interested in a new one of her films coming out. But if you’re a fan of her flicks, such as Friends with Money, Please Give, Enough Said, and now this one, you’re in for a treat.

Well, as much as a treat as you can expect from these low-key, subdued movies.

Enough Said was particularly enjoyable, not only for another wonderful performance by Julia Louis-Dreyfus, but also as a gentle swan song for the great James Gandolfini, who died soon after. Best known for playing a raging psychopath mob boss in The Sopranos, Gandolfini got to go out in style playing a quiet, complex man who doesn’t have to strangle people to death in order to get his feelings across.

Louis-Dreyfus, if you like her, is just the gift that keeps on giving. Best known for playing Elaine in Seinfeld, with each film role and other show that she’s done she’s consistently shown that there’s so much more to her than any of the other hacks on that terribly watchable sitcom (with the possible exception of Jason Alexander, who also always had more depth than the show allowed him to show: Jerry and Kramer on the other hand? Nothing but surface).

This is not that much of a variation on her usual films, in terms of how it feels, rather than the themes. It’s still low stakes small potatoes stuff, but that’s the inherent pleasure of it.

خرس نیست Khers Nist

dir: Jafar Panahi

2022

So, a couple of months ago, I watched and reviewed a flick called Hit the Road by Panah Panahi, son of legendary Iranian director Jafar Panahi, and made a joke about nepo babies getting gigs they otherwise wouldn’t get except for their successful parents.

Of course I was being ironic, because few directors in Iran since the Islamic Revolution have been punished and jailed more than the father of that director. Now I have a chance to review, or at least talk about, a movie made by that chap’s father, from whom all the nepo glory flows.

I think Jafar Panahi is either in jail currently or under house arrest. Last year he was sentenced to six years in prison. He has been imprisoned, on and off, for ages. The regime doesn’t like it when he makes movies, feeling somehow that their fragile totalitarian state will somehow crumble into dust if people either inside or outside of Iran see his films. But like many of his fellow Iranian directors, when his films win awards or acclaim at film festivals, the regime happily claims credit for their success bringing glory to the Islamic Republic of Iran.

A recent flick he made was called This is Not a Movie, because he was banned by the regime from making movies. So he made something that technically, sort of, maybe, wasn’t a movie, because what else is the man going to do? His son’s out now making awesome movies, so Jafar can’t sit back on his laurels anymore, even if they keep punishing him.

When this flick starts, it’s a long continuous scene, filmed somewhere in Turkey, and it eventually shows a couple fighting over a passport, and how one of them seemingly is going to fly to Europe, and the other is not. But then someone calls ‘cut’, and the actors, and another chap who was previously offscreen, start addressing the camera directly, talking to the director, Jafar Panahi.

dir: Ivan Sen

2023

Limbo. Doesn’t mean much to non-Christian types, as a concept or a ‘place’. Doesn’t mean much to most people, I think.

I think most of us just think of it as being an in-between place. Maybe a place you’re trapped in, maybe forever, maybe not.

Veteran indigenous director Ivan Sen wrote, directed and lensed this flick, and he set it in a fictional town call Limbo. It’s really Coober Pedy, in South Australia (Umoona, in Kokotha language), between Adelaide and Alice Springs, but it might as well be on the surface of the moon, considering how alien it looks in this film.

Travis Hurley (Australia’s Own Simon Baker) is a detective, who for whatever reason has been dispatched on assignment to Limbo in order to go over old information about the twenty year ago disappearance of an indigenous girl called Charlotte. He’s not reopening a cold case: there’s a chance they’re going to reopen it, but they might not. He’s in town driving around chatting tersely with the locals about what happened all those years ago.

No-one wants to talk to him, no-one has any real leads, the only legit suspect from back in the day is dead, the girl’s family don’t want to have a bar of it, so Travis gets nowhere quickly, and resolves to get the fuck out of Dodge.

Until he can’t. He’s trapped too, you see. Sure, it’s for technological reasons (someone trying to steal his car fucks up its onboard computer, which will take several days to replace). Helpfully, the mechanic loans him a cool older car, a Dodge Chrysler, which looks far cooler than the work car when Travis is tooling around Limbo.

Black, long classic car, against a white landscape. Did I neglect to mention that the flick is filmed in black and white? It somehow manages to make Coober Pedy / Limbo look even more alien and inhospitable. It looks more like a set they could use to stand in for Tatooine. Travis’s accommodation, at the appropriately named Limbo Hotel, is carved out of sandstone. Underground. A lot of people, not all, live and work underground, in these caves that are meant to recall various Biblical themes: Sepulchers, tombs, ancient chuches.

Charlotte’s family are trapped too, and have been since the disappearance. Her siblings Charlie (Rob Collins) and Emma (Natasha Wanganeen) were taken away from their mum after, on the pretext that Charlotte’s disappearance was as a result of bad parenting, which fractured them in different ways, leading to their mum’s death. Charlie lives in a caravan, avoiding the three kids being looked after by his sister, having never recovered from losing Charlotte, from being accused by the cops for her disappearance.

We wonder what Travis’ interest is in solving this crime. Well, we wonder until we watch him repeatedly shoot up heroin, and then we don’t wonder that much anymore. Travis himself is covered in mostly crude tattoos as well, and as he alludes to later on, his time undercover in the drug squad left him permanently marked by his experiences. Clearly his superiors don’t know about his heroin addiction, but this doesn’t look like a plum assignment either, so maybe he’s given dead-end scutt-work deliberately.