Drama

dir: Lila Neugebauer

2022

A movie about a depressed Afghan War veteran and a depressed mechanic being a little less depressed when they’re hanging out together? You’d be fighting other audience members to get into the cinema.

This flick could not be more low-key if it tried. It could not be more low-key if it drank a herbal tea with three Ambien while taking a bath. I don’t mean it’s sleepy, I mean just that this flick isn’t big on histrionics or people yelling stuff or changing their facial expressions much.

It’s appropriate to the story being told. It’s low-key, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t stakes. I mean, there aren’t any, but it doesn’t feel aimless.

The curious reality about people who go to war, and get wounded, and come back “home” is that dying in war is seen as a mercy, and that surviving brings with it its own dangers. The terrible statistics about suicide amongst veterans at least to me indicate that surviving a war is only the first step in many, in terms of staying alive.

Lynsey (Jennifer Lawrence), at film’s beginning, is pretty wrecked after surviving an explosion. Even though outwardly she has healed, she suffered a traumatic brain injury which means she walks with difficulty, balance being the issue, but also has difficulty with her arms and hands, with all motor function skills. There’s pain, there’s confusion, there’s the shame of needing help, there’s also the loss of inhibition. When she first meets her patient, saintly carer / nurse (the great Jayne Houdyshell), and hears as to why she got into this line of work, she says to her without thinking “That sounds like a miserable life.”

She thinks, without questioning it, or thinking about the social niceties, that looking after people like her, wounded people like her, would be hell on earth.

It takes a few seconds after she says it, where she looks quietly stunned at what she’s just said, to realise that one shouldn’t tell their carers such things upon first meeting. You should wait a few days at least before you entirely devalue all their life choices.

dir: Noah Baumbach

2022

I kinda hated this even more than I imagined I would?

I have generally been on board with Noah Baumbach’s bullshit since seeing his third flick decades ago, being The Squid and the Whale. The main reason is that reading “Great” American novels for much of my life means I’ve been programmed to enjoy stuff the vast majority of the world happily lives without. It means I can find amusement or entertainment in rarefied and wry tales of (white) privilege, excess and regret, and the struggles of middle class people wrestling with their own insignificance.

It’s how you are programmed to enjoy reading New Yorker articles or to find their single panel cartoons amusing without ever provoking something as vulgar as an actual laugh. It’s what makes you read Bellow, Mailer, Roth, Pynchon, Foster Wallace, Caddis, Updike, Franzen and, yes, DeLillo without ever questioning what you’re doing with your life.

It’s why you tell yourself you like Wes Anderson films or the twee aesthetics of Frankie magazine without ever questioning why.

I’ve only ever outright hated one Baumbach flick, and it was called Greenberg, and it starred Ben Stiller as the single most irritating fucker ever committed to screen (until Adam Sandler played Howie in Uncut Gems). By some strange coincidence Greta Gerwig was in that horrifying movie. I think it’s also a coincidence that she’s making babies with the director in between directing and starring in movies.

She’s here as well. Playing a middle-aged woman in the mid-1980s. With a massive perm. Another character calls it “important hair”. Very important.

Adam Driver also plays a middle-aged, paunchy college professor here, also in the mid-1980s. I’m not saying they shouldn’t play middle aged paunchy people, but c’mon, taking objectively beautiful people and making them look like the rest of us is just cruel.

To us, not them. They think it’s a guaranteed path to credibility and awards success.

(Μήλα)

dir: Christos Nikou

2021

This. Is a Greek film. About a guy. And he really likes apples.

That’s about it. There’s not a lot of subtext going on. Just really likes apples.

Doesn’t, like, love them to the exclusion of everything else. But he does seem to enjoy eating them more than he seems to enjoy eating anything else.

He doesn’t spend the entire film eating apples. That would be absurd, even for an odd Greek film.

But the film is called Apples. So you could be forgiven for thinking the apples are somehow important.

There is a guy here (Aris Servetalis), but I don’t think we find out his name? I don’t think he knows his name, or at least that’s what he tells the people that find him on the bus.

There appears to be, for a film made during the goddamn pandemic, or just before the pandemic, an epidemic, not of people coughing themselves to death with the spicy cough, but an epidemic of sudden onset amnesia. One moment people know who they are and where, and the next they seem to have forgotten everything from before a specific moment in time.

Our sullen guy here is taken to a hospital, and tested and looked after for a while, but there’s no treatment and no cure. People are basically warehoused at the hospital until someone comes to claim them, like they’re lost property. If no one comes, well, they have a program for that.

Our sullen bearded guy is set up in a modest apartment, has some clothes given to him, and a polaroid camera, and money occasionally and physical cassette tapes regularly are delivered to him for his listening pleasure. Of the few things he has, he also has a tape player. How delightfully retro!

He has to listen to the tapes, go out into the world and do what the tapes said to do, and take a polaroid as proof. That polaroid is put into a photo album, and perused by the doctors who seem to break into the apartment whenever they feel like it, admiring their handiwork.

The first task involves going out and asking to borrow someone’s bike, pop a wheelie or two, and then have a photo taken of you on the bike. The guy asks a teenager for his bike, and of course the jerk says no. So he asks an even younger kid, so that he can ride around on an absurdly little bike like he’s Krusty the Clown.

But he gets the photo. The taskings from the cassettes get more complicated, more involved, and start to include other people more. Go to a fancy dress party they said. Go to a strip club, they said. It’ll be fun, they said.

(Zgjoi)

dir: Blerta Blasholli

2021

Hive is based on a true story about a woman just trying to get by in this world. The problem is: this fucking world in which we live.

Some parts of this world seem to be easier to live in that others. For Fahrije (Yilka Gashi), the reality is she lives in a part of the world where seemingly the entirety of society is stacked against her, for no good fucking reasons.

I guess it helps to set the scene as to where and when. The where is Kosovo, the when is after the Kosovo War in the late nineties, and the reality is that Fahrije, like a lot of other women, hasn’t seen her husband since the massacres began.

There are a lot of mass graves waiting to be excavated, still. I had hoped there would a time in European history when new mass graves would stop being dug, and yet when you see what the Russians are doing AGAIN in Ukraine…

I despair. I am not as strong as Fahrije. She doesn’t despair, she just keeps moving forward.

She is a Kosovar Albanian. She has two kids to look after, and her wheelchair bound father-in-law. I don’t know why, but she is not allowed to get a job. The society, the community doesn’t tolerate women working or even really spending too much time out of their homes.

This community doesn’t even like the idea of women getting their licences and driving cars.

So, she has no husband to work and provide the family money, but it is also frowned upon for her to work and support her family. Clearly the best thing to do would be for them all to die.

Fahrije is not alone in this predicament. A group of women whose husbands similarly haven’t returned or whose remains haven’t yet been identified, also have no means of support and stop themselves from doing anything that would draw the ire of the menfolk.

It’s paralysing to watch this kind of thing. Someone offers them driving lessons or work, and the women tell themselves and each other “I cannot do these things, they will all call me a whore”. And true to their word, random men call Fahirje and any other woman whores for daring to support themselves and earn a subsistence living.

Everything is slow and agonising in coming, but Fahrije is persistent. Where the other women fear what the community will say, Fahrije sees that lack of choice they are being offered (this charity set up for the women barely has any money for their day to day lives, and there’s no widow’s pension or government help, apparently) as giving her all the more motivation to succeed in her endeavours.

Because she’s got no other fucking choice.