2022 Film Roundup, Part 4, Weekly Reel #46
Alcarràs, Corsage, All Quiet on the Western Front, Women Talking.
News of the Week: Oscar nominations dropped this week. **Cue terrible hot takes on snubs, awards entitlement, blah blah blah.** I have one more film roundup scheduled after this one, but if I can manage more theatrical visits, I can probably reach six parts total. (Should I do a post on the nominated fifteen short films?)
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Alcarràs (2022, Carla Simón, Spain/Italy) is a Catalonian film, both geographically and linguistically, that won the Golden Bear at the Berlinale almost a year ago. It stars a family (of non-actors) living and working on a rural peach orchard in Alcarràs. Their lives are thrown into disarray when the owner of the land dies without writing a signed agreement for the patriarch of the family to easily inherit their portion. The land is under threat by solar panel companies wanting to flatten the land and build the more profitable, and government subsidized, solar farms instead of peaches and dates. Because of their diminished returns, the family can only hire one immigrant laborer to help with the harvest and must pick up the slack themselves. While they aren’t new to this work, they nonetheless struggle with the scorching heat, typical family drama, reduced produce price from distributors, and potential for their land to be sold off at any moment.
The mood of the film sustains an emotional immersion throughout, providing a slice-of-life period-piece that never feels gimmicky or contrived. For such a small film, it balances several sociocultural issues effortlessly. It deals with the modernist progression of the countryside: the patriarch, because of how it was probably done for generations, made a handshake deal with the owner for the cultivation of his parcel of land. Now he’s too old to do more than drive a car or ride a bike into town while his three middle-aged children (the daughter moved away and the two sons raised their families on different parts of the land) are left to deal with the mess. For most of the film, we watch the five grandchildren play around the farm and help pick the fruit while their parents become conflicted on how to proceed with their shriveled returns. True to Catalonia’s autonomous position within Spain and how their regions are governed, the health of the family’s earnings is directly tied to working-class issues that are settled via collective action. This larger societal point is rendered metaphorically through the family, which works better as a collective whole. It’s only when disputes between them that they become vulnerable enough for outside forces to split them up and take their land.
Carla Simón, like with her previous film and debut feature Summer 1993, imbues this film with all the loving feelings of nostalgia without any of the cultural-aesthetic baggage. She provides a glimpse into that uneasy feeling of childhood with its vague sense of unease and adult drama, but doesn’t allow that to hinder the daily playdates with cousins and other children from the village. No doubt she pulled these feelings from her own tragic childhood. What works so effectively is her sense that these problems are larger than oneself and doesn’t need your pity. The collective character arc is minimal in the way that tension bubbles slowly, sometimes allowing plosive moments of conflict. It’s the kind of character study that doesn’t need any giant moments of Drama, which has been perfected in most countries outside of the USA. By the end, you don’t realize the two hours is up; it feels like the (fun) trips you make to extended family gatherings that end too fast. It sustains your attention throughout by pacing itself like a 3000-meter run and doesn’t allow you to take a breather until the final image of the film, which is quietly devastating.
Mubi released Alcarràs to a few theaters in the USA but hasn’t released it on their streaming service nor is it available to rent. Keep it on your watchlist and be patient!
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Corsage (2022, Maria Kreutzer, Austria/Germany/Luxembourg/France) is a historical drama about Elizabeth of Bavaria, known to Central Europeans as Sisi, who was the Empress of Austria after her marriage to Franz Joseph. Born into the Bavarian House of Wittelsbach, she moved to Vienna after her betrothal, where she became a Habsburg. She was Empress Consort from 1854 until her assassination by an Italian anarchist in 1898. The film takes place before and after her fortieth birthday, which meant that Vicky Krieps, the Luxembourgish breakout star of Phantom Thread, only had to age up a year. She’s also a credited executive producer on this multinational production, which is, to be exact, 58.62% Austrian, 21.34% Luxembourgish, 10.03% German, and 10.01% French. (The Germans paid 1,620 USD more than the French.)
Sisi’s legacy is that of a rebellious royal who fanatically kept her body in shop and suffered from bouts of depression. In the film, Krieps keeps to this regimen, suffering from a restless malaise that keeps her on the road, visiting various relatives throughout Europe. She visits her sister, Maria Sophie, in Paris, where she becomes “involved” with a horse trainer. Then she visits her cousin, Ludwig “Swan King/Märchenkönig/Mad King/GOAT King” II of Bavaria, where they take a pleasant boat ride, on the lake where he will later turn up suspiciously dead a decade later, before she tries to seduce him. This philandering stems from a dissatisfying sexual relationship with her husband, who prefers younger mistresses. These travels also keeps her away from her teen-age son, the future Emperor, until his suicide pact with his mistress removed him from the succession line, and her younger daughter.
Though director-writer Maria Kreutzer doesn’t like the comparison, Corsage is like Marie Antionette in its modernist depiction of a female monarch ultimately dissatisfied with court life, finding ways to bend the rules and run amok. But Corsage isn’t nearly as stylized. Unfortunately, the lack of plot and character development in Corsage hurts this slice-of-monarchical-life approach. The gender critique it offers is valuable, and doesn’t trivialize or diminish its aesthetic (as She Said did), but it works in a way we’ve seen before. It also doesn’t judge Sisi’s escapades and parenting from one direction or the other. It seems that her escapes are necessary for her own mental equilibrium as well as that of her children, which face similar fates as caged royals.
Unfortunately, the female-driven film is deeply controversial in Austria, where not just one or two men, but three of the actors have been accused of sexual crimes: two for sexual assault and one for possession of child porn. While the latter will go to court in a few weeks, the first two remain rumors. Though it’s too early to judge, it won’t help Corsage’s reception and legacy in Europe—in the USA, we haven’t heard much about it because of the film’s lack of publicity and theatrical release. Still, it’s important, as Kreutzer and Krieps keep reminding us, that we don’t lose sight of the film as an important female-led international co-production that tells a more nuanced story of Sisi than her legacy usually allows.
Corsage is currently in theaters.
All Quiet on the Western Front (2022, Edward Berger, Germany/USA) is about as dirty as a war film can get, and this year’s honorary super-Oscar-noms-war-film. Its nine nominations make sense for a competently made film based on a perennial bestselling novel (the finest of the anti-war bunch) and following the 1930 film that won Oscars for picture and director. Since then, the story hasn't been adapted into a German-language production until Edward Berger and producers (including Daniel "Fredrick Zoller" Brühl) crafted the $20 million project for Netflix to distribute.
The story is about a group of German teen-age boys who are hyped up for the war (the Great War) by their teachers and social elders. But once they enlist and serve in the trenches, they realize what hell is. If this "war is bad" message seems too simplistic, it's because Erich Maria Remarque's novel helped create the genre that everything else since then has copied. This 2022 film goes through the same motions but de-emphasizes the first part in favor of the second. It seems to be trapped in the post-1917 world of WW1 cinema, which favors form and style over substance. While the book and 1930 film rely heavily on creating a sympathetic group of children before they go off to war, this film spends little time on that.
All Quiet on the Western Front works well as a gritty war film, but it lacks the unique emotion the story was first infused with on the page in 1929. It also hits different in a year when European warfare is impacting much of the continent and bringing the USA even closer into the bosom of foreign entanglement. Most of us simply aren't inclined to watch one-hundred and forty-seven minutes of grueling horror. Nonetheless, the film is a valuable reminder of its anti-war message for a modern audience that can be watched by hundreds of millions of people at any time.
All Quiet on the Western Front is streaming on Netflix.
Pass
Women Talking (2022, Sarah Polley, USA) is the perfect film for the Oscar season. The cast is stacked with talent, it played well for critics at a domestic film festival, it's an adaptation of a modern bestseller, and it distills a sensitive contemporary socio-cultural issue for an audience that's already on board. For many, promoting the film allows one to shore up one's public morality points and disengage with the problems irl—something Frances McDormand did well as an actor/producer for this film, as well as the socio-politically reprehensible Nomadland.
The story is adapted from Miriam Toews's 2018 novel, which is based on real-life incidents in the aughts at a Mennonite community in Bolivia. For years, the women in this pre-technological, ultra-religious community woke up unaware that they had been raped the night before. The men, and women fellow travelers, blamed this on demons and ghosts. In real life, eight men were prosecuted and convicted. In the book, Toews sets the story in the USA after the men were arrested. A group of men, we don't know how many or if all the men in general were on board, go in town to pay their bail. During this time, the women representatives of the community meet to talk about whether they should stay or go.
While the film has an underlying diagnosis of gaslighting and what to do about it, it completely misses the point of the actual event and critique. Religion and doctrinal orthodoxy allowed the men to rape the women for years. They got away with it by convincing the women of supernatural occurrences and fostering an atmosphere of strict adherence that doesn't conform to the standards of gender relations, let alone criminal justice, in 2023. No other form of brainwashing can do this except religion. It's only when the men are convicted in a modern societal court system that justice is served, which would never have happened in the religious community where women are inferior to animals. I find it hard to argue further on such an obvious point that critics somehow fail to point out.
Notwithstanding the criticism, I really enjoyed the performances of Claire Foy and Jessie Buckley and thought Luc Montpellier's cinematography was excellent. It looks unlike any other film, even going for the resonant pastoral imagery of a Malick film. Without it, the film could, and should, have been just a two-act barnyard play.
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