Matty

Minervini is an example of a hybrid filmmaker (in Italy, other examples include Alessandro Comodin, Michelangelo Frammartino and, to some extent, Gianfranco Rosi), whose films are too much in the style of documentaries to be fiction and, at the same time, have too many staged moments to be pure documentaries. As in the preceding Texas trilogy, in The Other Side non-actors perform scenes that are more or less inspired by their real lives and subsequently arranged into a relatively cohesive narrative (while the staged scenes often serve to connect them). It is thus a combination of documentary observation with collective dramaturgy (Jean Rouch used something similar, “collective anthropology”, in the past). Besides Minervini, the crew comprised only three other people (cameraman, sound engineer and second assistant camera), who attempted to communicate with each other without the use of film jargon in order not to have the effect of being foreign elements and thus to fit into the given environment. The film was shot with a digital camera without interruption (until the disk capacity ran out), without artificial lighting and without changing lenses. With his disarming straightforwardness, empathetic approach and method of filming, Minervini breaks down the notional wall between the creator and the (social) actor and lets the actors reveal themselves. His unsentimental and non-judgmental viewpoint is not subordinated to an attempt to confirm or refute any particular opinion. He also takes a neutral position in the case of two drug addicts and members of a far-right militia (their thoughts and sources of frustration are in many ways similar – just as one half of the film complements the other). The social context is not determinative for him. He mainly wants to understand the emotions of the characters and the relationships between them. Thanks to that, he offers an unpleasantly intimate insight into the world of people who live on the periphery of middle-class America, but there is an ever-increasing number of them and they are increasingly vocal and have greater influence (because they speak and think like their current president) and we obviously should try to understand them if we want to comprehend what is happening with society as such. 75%

Inspired by Němec’s Diamonds of the Night, among other films, Happy Times Will Come Soon is a narrative experiment in which Comodin develops his specific cinematic language combining a realistic approach (depictions of the present moment) with the mythological (what happened/could have happened in the past). Like his debut, Summer of Giacomo, this film takes place almost entirely in a forest (primarily at night and at dusk, not in daylight). After the fictional introduction, there is an unanticipated jump in time and we are suddenly watching the documentary testimonies of villagers relating a legend about the wolves that once plagued the forest. The film then changes direction and its nature again and we watch young Ariane, portrayed by the only professional actress in the cast, who sets out into the forest, where she meets one of the young men from the first segment of the film and more or less becomes a player in the fairy tale whose retelling we heard in villagers’ accounts of the legend. Furthermore, her story plays out before the events in the introduction of the film (while the epilogue is set in an indeterminate future). The varying approach to genre holds us in a constant state of uncertainty about what we are actually watching and how much it has in common with reality. The boundary between film types and genres is thus thematicised. Is it a fairy tale? A reconstruction of actual events? Improvisation? The film does not respect any boundaries (time, genre or spatial), nor does it adhere to any known narrative formula, which causes it to be highly irritating as well as provocative and stimulating. As a result, it is not merely an escape into the forest, but also an escape from the conventions of film narrative. I can’t say if it’s a good film or not, but I enjoyed thinking about it in any case. 65%

A Ciambra, one of the most compelling Italian films of recent years, takes place in the Romani community in Calabria and obverses the adolescence of young Pio, who appeared in two of the director’s previous films (one of which was a short version of A Ciambra). Carpignano wrote the screenplay on the basis of interviews with the lead actor and other, non-professional actors, whose world he depicts in the least distorted way possible and with whom he spent a relatively long time before the actual filming to order to gain their trust (among other things, he relocated to Calabria and adopted the local dialect). Thanks to that, the film is not an aloof anthropological study, but rather a view of the world through the eyes of characters, to whose rhythm of life the camera movement, or rather the rhythm of the narrative, is also adapted. Unlike a number of other veristic festival dramas, A Ciambra is a narratively masterful and extraordinarily dynamic film that shows that the legacy of neorealism is still (or again?) very much alive in Italy. Carpignano decidedly ranks among the emerging talents of Italian cinema who are worth keeping an eye on. 75%

Spring Breakers is a film about love and anarchy. In quotation marks and with the colour palette of Skittles. Korine uniquely blends a trashy plot and hyper-stylised MTV/R&B/YouTube aesthetics with a “flowing” form of storytelling, such as that found in The Tree of Life, for example. The unvarying, hypnotising trance rhythm, the constant repetition of lines (in the style of Chuck Palahniuk’s novellas) and the recycling of shots (or, as the case may be, the ways in which they are composed), leads to a dramaturgical compression of all scenes to the same level. They do not have any particular aim, like the female protagonists as they live out their permanent vacation, nor does the film escalate (conversely, the scenes in which we would expect more action are shot in an absolutely disinterested manner – see, for example, the restaurant robbery filmed in one shot through two panes of glass). Not much changes with the arrival of Alien, since gangsterism turns out be just as repetitive as anything else. It does not matter WHEN something happened or will happen. By jumping back and forth in time, the film rather prevents us from constructing a coherent storyline. The main thing is that something is happening right now. We are constantly kept in a state of being overwhelmed by audio-visual stimuli. Reality and make-believe, high and low, raw shots and lyrical shots all merge into one. This is clearly an attempt to approximate the way in which the female protagonists and Alien experience their surroundings, as the film takes on Alien’s perspective for some time in the second half. Conversely, Faith and Cotta’s return to reality is filmed altogether realistically, without visual enhancements creating the impression of an endless acid trip, when the colours seem to be bolder and the movement slower. Another subjectivising element is the voice-over (calls home) consisting of sentences that starkly contrast with what we see on the screen. Is this really how today’s youth imagine paradise? In this matter, Korine’s frantic postmodern collage is just as indeterminate as his attitude toward the female protagonists in unicorn ski masks and bikinis and toting Kalashnikovs like some sort of commercialised version of Pussy Riot. However, political matters are unimportant to them (instead of listening to a lecture on civil rights, they draw pictures of penises), as are gender issues (they do nothing to stop Alien from turning them into more of his “shit”). They want to destroy only because they do not see any sense in more established values. There is no doubt that we should despise them, but what they do is filmed so seductively… 80%

Eliza Hittman continues in her exploration of the awakening of teenage sexuality, with which she began in her debut, It Felt Like Love (2013), shot from the perspective of an adolescent girl. Beach Rats has a more conventional structure and, if you have seen a few festival dramas thematicising homosexuality among youths, you will in all probability figure out the direction that the narrative is going to take. Also, the characters fit too easily into boxes known from American indie dramas. The film is most effective when it speaks of male bodies and faces (in which it closely resembles the work of Claire Denis), lyrically and naturalistically shot in 16 mm by French cinematographer Hélène Louvart (see, for example, Alice Rohrwacher’s The Wonders). The film is more captivating and inspiring as a study of male bodies in motion than as another intimate coming-out drama about repressed sexual desire. 70%

The Virgin Suicides is a story of girls told from the perspective of men. It is a very mature feature debut that violates multiple norms of standard Hollywood storytelling. The film de facto does not have a protagonist who would have to resolve conflicts and overcome obstacles in order to achieve a particular goal. As in the book on which the film is based, the narrator is an undefined representative of the male gender. We get only a minimum number of satisfactory answers to numerous questions, so a number of gaps remain unfilled until the end. At one point, Coppola even takes the liberty of using a false flashforward (escape by car). ___ Despite the breadth of the interpretative field, this is not vague new-age nonsense in which impressions take precedence over logic. The film is precise in its mediation and parallel shedding of the boyish/masculine perspective, thus putting at the centre of our attention the act of constructing and observing idealised images instead of the girls themselves, whom we are not allowed to get to know. The effort to understand the sisters (and their world, symbolised by the Lisbons’ home, a dollhouse in which they are locked up and that “dies” with them in the end), who began to exist for a group of boys only “thanks” to the suicide committed by one of them, is limited by adopted mental schemes and stereotypical pigeonholing. This involves a strongly generalising perception based on the assumption of peculiar female irrationality, which does not take into account the distinct nature of each of the girls, of whom only Lux gains a certain independence in the eyes of boys through her sexuality. Coppola distances herself from the simplistic understanding of complex human beings through the ironic use of expressive clichés from sillier “girl movies” (music, banal “illustrations” containing shots of picking flowers, a sunny landscape and unicorns that accompany the reading of Cecilia’s diary). ___ This story veiled in mythology (an indeterminate timeframe, bold symbolism, a timeless theme reminiscent of Picnic at Hanging Rock) about how a woman’s innocence (or the idea of innocence) deprives a man of his mental balance, the ability to be empathetic and to love thus also serves as an attack on the “appropriating” masculine perspective and patriarchal visualisation formulas. Wherever the novel allowed her to do so, Coppola expressed enough empathy for the girls to enable them to exclusively fulfil the role of mysterious and beautiful objects. Of no less importance, the inspiring and multi-layered The Virgin Suicides is a generational statement on the unwillingness to admit that “this tree is dead” (whether we substitute Cecilia, childhood or something else for the tree) and futile defiance by means of music, sex and suicide. 80%

Thanks to the casualness with which the Coens put three semi-literate simpletons in the context of the progenitor of all voyage-and-return stories, it wouldn’t be hard for me to believe that Homer was a blind black man wandering the American South on a draisine during the Great Depression. The self-assured exploitation of the fact that most Hollywood narratives are built on the model of Odysseus is bold, but that alone does not guarantee a high-quality film. Entertaining in its peculiarities and accurate in its details recalling old times, old films and a lot of old myths, the film futilely seeks the rhythm, tone and theme of its narrative throughout its runtime. The trio of protagonists, who lose control over their own story (but discover that they can change the stories of others) outwardly head in different directions at every moment, and we should probably continuously judge their actions with various degrees of seriousness (from I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang through Bonnie and Clyde to The Three Stooges). But how can they be taken seriously when the most foresighted of them, on whose outfit the inappropriately cloying final act is built, is clear about one thing above all else, which is the kind of grease he wants to put in his hair? In the end, O Brother, Where Art Thou? is consistent only its “bleached out” visual aspect (Deakins’s camerawork is outstanding) and its exploration of the roots of American pop music, which, however, does not make it a hot candidate for repeat viewing. 75%

The Florida Project is based on the conflict between children’s perspective and that of adults, between two completely different worlds existing in parallel. Baker employed this conflict as the guiding element of the film’s narrative. The permeation of “adult” problems into the guileless reality of childhood creates dramatic tension, advances the plot and rhythmises the narrative. The micro-stories of adults mostly lie at the edge of interest, which corresponds to the dominant children’s point of view. However, we are sufficiently familiar with the adults’ problems to comprehend the characters’ motivations and the plot twists. ___ The stylisation of the picture also corresponds to the children’s point of view. Realistic scenes, in which the camerawork mimics the low-placed children’s view of the world in an effort to keep pace with the young actors, are interspersed with carefully composed static shots that with their colours are reminiscent of pop art. Bold colours, signs such as “Magic Castle”, “Futureland” and “Seven Dwarfs Ln.” and unusual locations transform the devastated surroundings of the amusement park into one big playground, as it is also perceived and used by the children, who have created their own magical world, which is not sustainable in the long run, and the larger the cracks that appear in it, the less the adults are able to keep their kids under the illusion that everything is going to be okay. ___ The energetic style of the film contrasts with the hopelessness of the situation in which the young female protagonist is trapped with her mother. Due to the intrusions of social drama into the magical children’s adventure, however, the film manages to avoid sentimentality, falseness and romanticisation of the characters’ misery. After all, that is not what Baker intended the film’s central them to be. He is rather particularly interested in the ability to adapt to a certain environment and the related building of one’s own magic kingdom as a means of self-preservation. ___ Instead of creating artificial dramas, Baker allows events to flow seemingly freely. However, minor misunderstandings are wrapped up in other events, separate episodes are composed in a layered form, and the story, adhering to the traditional three-act structure despite the seeming dramaturgical laxity, speeds inexorably toward the cathartic climax. The great final drama derives from a number of smaller conflicts that the narrative at least touched on previously. ___ The Florida Project manages to point out problems that need to be solved without overstating them or sugar-coating them with the small joys of life, or misusing them for emotional blackmail. This is a pleasantly matter-of-fact, compassionate and sincere approach, captivatingly magical and realistic, which, in addition to sorrow, also offers joy and arouses the desire to start doing something. 90%

“I used to steal birds, but now I'm a newspaper man.” Heist movie. Western. Bond flick. Social drama. A film about a crisis (marital and midlife). Existential comedy. There is no point in trying to pigeonhole Fantastic Mr. Fox, because A) that is impossible, and B) that impossibility lies in its fantastical nature (and its point). It’s hard to describe how specifically Anderson's first (and fortunately not his last) animated film is so unique because, for the second time, I was unable to shake off the enchantment of the animated animals in favour of sober analysis. Besides, there are so many wonderful things in the film… A well-designed mise-en-scène that suggests how emotional the heroes are (ready-made Antonioni), the choreography of the characters in front of a camera set in the ideal place (which saves hundreds of needless cuts), a visual rendering that is like a fairy tale in general but realistic in its details. Anderson’s realistically complex story of the struggle with one’s own naturalness astonishes with grand scenes, eliciting amazement (THAT scene with the wolf), as well as small details for the more attentive, when speechlessness alternates with a cry of joy (the inner conflict of civilised wild animals reflected in the idyllic landscape, always with some untameable lightning or tornado in the background). Of the few films that I would rather love than understand, this one is certainly the most colourful. And the wildest! 95%

Two Lovers is a slow, cold and in some ways very classically styled romance that deals not only with love, but also with suicide attempts, bipolar disorder and abortion. The tragedy of the characters consists in the awareness of how they are (in their own words) “fucked up”, in spite of which they want to be supportive of each other. However, it will be difficult for two unstable individuals to carry on a relationship. Gray uses long, drawn-out shots that give us enough time and space to penetrate the world of the troubled protagonists. That is not easy to do, as the film combines the linear development of the story with variations of certain situations (with one girlfriend, with another girlfriend, with Leonard in a manic phase, with Leonard in a depressive phase), so in places it may seem that the narrative is not going anywhere. I appreciate the fact that today someone has the courage to shoot mature dramas that the viewer has to meet halfway, though I also understand why there are not more films likes this in America today than there were in the 1970s. We have become accustomed to unpretentiousness and working with allusions, and it is thus more difficult for us to get in tune with such a style. 75%