Movie – Loro
Bailey Holden: It isn’t hard to read Trump into Paolo Sorrentino’s Loro, especially in the centralised, hyper speed monoculture of the internet, where Berlusconi has long faded into history. But unlike the ideological and shallow American films quote-unquote about him, Sorrentino and long time collaborator Toni Servillo are actually interested in what’s inside the man.
Servillo does some his best work in the exceptional scene where Berlusconi, losing faith in his persona, that saccharine, hollow smiles, tries to convince himself of it’s reality by calling a random woman and telling her he’s building the apartment of her dreams. He slowly convinces her, not only of the apartment’s reality, but to commit to buying it. Underneath the parties and excess the film was so heavily marketed on, there is a sad, empty man. The beautiful young women are just a way to hide from his own morality, if he can seduce them — whilst ignoring the influence of his money and power — then he isn’t really ageing.
Like much of Sorrentino’s work, despite the stylistic grandeur, brought as always by cinematographer Luca Bigazzi, the films scale is surprisingly small, mostly staying in Berlusconi’s mansions once we reach them after the subverted mythologising of the films opening. But that grandeur arrives in the final scene, amongst the wreckage of the 2009 L’Aquila earthquake, fire fighters portentously pull out a statue of Christ. As much as Sorrentino wants to understand Berlusconi, he doesn’t look away from what his presence really means — a great spiritual death.
Movie – Under the Silver Lake
Jenni Holtz: Under the Silver Lake is director David Robert Mitchell’s first film released after It Follows. His new film is much weirder than the 2015 horror, but it has the same distinctive visual style and inventive use of score and sound that set It Follows apart from other horror films.
In Under the Silver Lake, Sam (Andrew Garfield) finds himself on a quest to find Sarah (Riley Keough), a woman who disappeared from his apartment complex shortly after the two met. Sam is in not in a great place. He’s behind on rent and spends most of his time alone in his apartment, deep in spirals of research on conspiracy theories about hidden messaging in pop culture. Sarah’s disappearance sparks his interest, pushing him to venture outside his home and see his the subject of his obsessions play out in front of his eyes. The movie is full of twists and oddities, making for a strangely beautiful film unlike any other.
Movie – Non-Fiction
Bailey Holden: I’m less surprised that Non-Fiction has been widely misunderstood and under appreciated, as I was when Olivier Assayas’ last film, Personal Shopper, received a similar reaction. On a superficial level, they couldn’t be further apart; Non-Fiction is a light Woody Allen-esque comedy about the love lives of costal elites, whereas Personal Shopper was a serious drama about death and spirituality.
But underneath, the films are of a piece. Both were accused of messiness because their thrusts are not narrative, but thematic. They have more in common with an essay film, with F for Fake, than they do with Annie Hall.
Assayas takes a theme, a central question, and interrogates it from as many angles as possible. In Non-Fiction, he’s concerned with the necessity of fiction, publishing in a fading literary world, and necessary fictions, how honest a relationship should really be. Tied together by Léonard (Vincent Macaigne) who writes barely disguised auto-fiction about his affairs with his publisher’s wife Selena (Juliette Binoche).
After flowing from technological progress, to political campaigning, the film ends on a hilariously dark punch-line and one of the only justified meta-jokes in modern cinema, reminding us that this too is a fiction — to talk about fictions, we must fictionalise. And Assayas proves that a light film, doesn’t have to be a minor one.
Movie – Our Time
Bailey Holden: Carlos Reygadas’ messy three-hour epic, Our Time, about the disintegration of an open marriage — the couple played by himself and his actual wife Natalia López — has largely been forgotten, occasionally dismissed as a let down, if not an outright failure.
The film is undoubtably frustrating, and not only for fans of Reygadas’ as he takes a firm step away from his previous work into this slow, unfocused realism. The film seems to run all over the place without ever moving, the couple keeps coming back to the same fight, over and over.
And seldom has a film focused on a more frustrating lead character, Reygadas’ poet, Juan, goes from hilariously pathetic to outright repulsive pretty quickly. He is the ugliest self-insert since The House That Jack Built, but played much straighter than Lars Von Trier’s provocation. Of course, all artists are painting a self portrait, it’s impossible not to, but the lack of obfuscation in that process feels almost perverse, it’s uncomfortable and raw.
But despite that strange openness, we’re never truly let into the heads of Juan or his wife, Esther. In the endless arguments as much is unsaid as is said. The resentments never get to take form as they desperately try to hold something together. Neither are quite ready to accept that it’s over, but know that it is, and it probably has been for a long time.
All the dense emotions, all the unspoken tethers that tie this relationship up into something bounded and unworkable, Reygadas compares to the violent brutality of a bull. Humans may be more complex, but we are no less defined by our animal nature. And all the films strange detours and missteps seem to come together in these final moments into something simple, pure and transcendent.
Movie – Your Body Remembers When the World Broke Open
Michael Frank: In 2019, the best piece of filmmaking you need to watch that Netflix released was Your Body Remembers When the World Broke Open, written and directed by Canadian women Kathleen Hepburn and Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers. Playing out in real time with Tailfeathers starring opposite fellow indigenous Canadian Violet Nelson, the film follows two women in the aftermath of an assault to Nelson. Tailfeathers happened to be walking by, and so the two experience the next 90 minutes together, figuring out the following course of action.
Serious, moving, and real, the story works as any coincidental relationship and any situation in life would, with arduous difficulty in making important decisions. It deals with weighty themes like assault and abuse with a tender yet firm sense of reality, deciding to let you sit with these characters instead of rush with them. This film is one of the most important of the year, and I personally urge you to seek it out.
Movie – Marriage Story
Amy Smith: Despite being a film that released on Netflix, Marriage Story is a film I hunted out at cinemas to watch on the big screen. I am certainly glad I did that, because I felt all of the emotion that Baumbach placed carefully here. There is a surprising amount of humour and musical moments placed in here, but that just added a sense of reality to this story which I appreciated.
I loved the numerous angles this film took on marriage and divorce, such as the focus on the child in a relationship and the legal aspects of a divorce. It grounded the film into a real situation and yet still contained so much emotion and drama that you still became invested in the characters and their lives.
