Stories and Numbers. 1993, Five, and a Trilogy: Weekly Reel #49
This week I’m really giving the people what they want. First we go to the Catalan countryside, then to the French Alps, before flying to a galaxy far, far away.
News of the Week: I still haven’t gained my footing on the move via writing weekly pieces, which I hope to resolve soon. I’m also planning a nonfiction creative writing series based on/in Berlin, so look out for those and let me know what you think if/when they come. Thanks, I love you.
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Summer 1993 (2017, Carla Simón, Spain)
We all remember those sunbaked summers of playing with friends quite well and usually fondly. Now imagine that was the first summer in which both of your parents were dead, and you had to move to the countryside to live with your aunt, uncle, and annoying little cousin. And imagine further that you filmed this part of your life and showed it to the world for all to judge.
After viewing Simón’s second feature, Alcarràs, in a theater earlier this year, it was apparent she tapped into something with her filmmaking: rustic sensibility, childhood trauma, intergenerational strife, auto-fictitious reportage. Summer 1993, her 2017 debut feature, popped onto the now trendy scene of autobiographical filmmaking, possibly the only Catalan-language entry.
The story begins in hushed whispers with stoic-faced Frida (Laia Artigas) in Barcelona. Her parents recently died, everyone tiptoes around her, and now she must live with her neo-rural Catalonian aunt, Marga (Bruna Cusí), and uncle, Esteve (David Verdaguer), who have a younger daughter (Paula Robles). (To provide more autobiographical flair, the characters live in the same country house where Simón spent her summers as a child and work at the same pool her new parents worked.)
The film departs from Simón’s real life when Frida develops as a character, which quickly becomes her story rather than Simón’s. She spends her time unconsciously grieving and acts out phantom menaces through showing dominance via petty jealousy of toys and playtime over her younger cousin/new sister. Simón’s level of sensitive filmmaking made it possible to watch two young children act for ninety minutes without much chagrin (but I had re-watched Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace the night before, so the bar was rock “Jake Lloyd” bottom.) I really don’t understand how Simón is able to film children so effortlessly; she must have Tree of Lifed an entire summer with the two children.
In the celebratory atmosphere of Francisco Franco’s death in 1975, newly democratic and permissive Spain hit the brick wall of AIDS in the nineteen eighties, wiping out a sizable chunk of that generation. Simón is a member of their children’s generation now telling those stories from an intergenerational perspective. But Simón’s life diverged at too early a point to tell her mother’s story, as she revealed in an interview on her original intentions for this story. She faced the uncomfortable conclusion that her mother’s specter was only available through absence rather than presence, first as a child, then later as a reflective artist. It fossilized an area in her childhood that, through great casting and performances, she could reliably and truthfully excavate.
The mother figure and future mother, Marga, bears most of the rearing, which includes the parental hat trick of raising her own daughter, her sister’s daughter, and the conversion of the latter into the former. She’s frustrated, who wouldn’t be, but realizes that Frida’s stunted upbringing is more important. This leads to a longer leash than would be preferable for her own daughter, which Frida acts out on as much as possible, testing its length and tensile strength. But the more Frida tries to resist her new life, the more she unconsciously brings herself closer to her new family; she’s resisting the fading memory of her mother.
The landscape is also, sorry for the tired cliché, a character in and of itself. For the family, it’s a self-sustaining garden of protection and home. For Frida, it’s an unescapable graveyard of sorrow. While Simón has the magical filmmaking ability to film children, her strength is filming how humans relate to their surroundings. In both Summer 1993 and Alcarràs, that happens to be the Catalan countryside, a unique mixture of linguistic exchange, political autonomy, and anarcho-agrocapitalism. Before going into the politics of solar technology firms buying up farmland in Alcarràs, Simón firmly sets up her filmography on the familial connections between the land and its residents, and, if I may, argues that this needs to be well-defined before politics and economics can be discussed; moreso in a place like Catalonia, where the two are closer together than elsewhere in Europe. (Let’s not forget that Summer 1993 premiered the same year as the Catalan independence referendum.)
Simón brings it all back to square one in the end. The last scene, which I won’t spoil, was the necessary lynchpin for Frida’s story; sometimes the happiest and strongest way forward is through vulnerability.
Summer 1993 is streaming on Mubi.
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The Five Devils (2022, Léa Mysius, France) is partly a story of fire and ice, even with some Hodoresque moments, but it’s mostly about smells. Vicky (Sally Dramé), daughter of Joanne (Adèle Exarchopoulos) and Jimmy (Moustapha Mbengue), has a supernatural hyperosmia, allowing her to identify and locate any smell. In addition, she creates a witches brew strong enough to send her back in time. And then, because it’s a dramatic film, as you can guess, that ability uncovers secrets about her family that are too strong to suppress…
Vicky’s powers come in handy when her aunt, father’s sister, Julia (Swala Emati), who’s been gone for ten years, returns and stays with the family against the wishes of Joanne’s best friend, father, and everyone else in town. Over time, we piece together the history of Julia’s fiery past through accusations and Vicky’s time-travels, which ends in a more surprising and surreal place than how the premise begins.
Following her debut feature Ava in 2017 (and on a similar timeline with Carla Simón), Léa Mysius, like Mia Hansen-Løve, Rebecca Zlotowski, and Céline Sciamma, is another contemporary female French director/writer with the ability to craft sensitive films about women in their thirties. Mysius is the more fantastical of the group, preferring references to the mystical as a method of externalizing concepts like family history over time. One question that Mysius asks over and over in The Five Devils is, how can events from the past possibly presuppose the present? Vicky asks her maman the poignant question: “did you love me before I was born?”
But the film has one too many loose ends and confusions to become fully engrossing. The name, coming from the five mountains in the region where it takes place, isn’t connected to the story besides from the five main-ish characters—which is more like four. The time-traveling bits, which are better unexplained, don’t make sense on a practical level, especially when the school bullies also ingest the smell and pass out. While the paranormal need not make sense to work, they still need to hold up logically in the story world. (I would provide examples if they didn’t totally give away the ending.)
Dramé plays a wonderfully sassy and quick-witted Vicky, but her character quickly reverts into a series of plot points without an arc. This similarly happens to Mbengue’s character, who, though having some of the best facial acting on the European continent, is more stock than individual. The script saves the real character energy for Exarchopoulos first and Emati second. But really, it’s Exarchopoulos receiving the César Award scenes. Her acting career is currently arching to a peak in which she can play struggling stewardess one year and mother of a ten year old the next. Blue is the Warmest Color showed her potential a decade ago but she’s now getting the acting vehicles worthy of her performance level, along with Blue co-star Léa Seydoux.
Nonetheless, Mysius brings up interesting points regarding whether mistakes and/or divergent points in the past actually change the present to the degree we’d expect. Families, which we regard as stable, fixed, and continuous, are paradoxically both flimsier yet more solid than we think. And when or if they are divergent, will or can an equilibrium ever bring them back together? But for all the interesting questions it brings up regarding a family’s trajectory over time, there’s an equal number of questions about the plot mechanics and story world that don’t allow you to fully engage.
The Five Devils is currently playing in theaters in limited release.
Pass
The Phantom Menace Trilogy (1999-2005, George Lucas, USA) is now further away from us than the Star Wars trilogy is to The Phantom Menace. Since then, another trilogy emerged (2015-2019) via the evil empire to correct all of George Lucas’s mistakes. Those include: directing/writing from one visionary and without studio control, a narrow focus on one uninteresting character, evil winning in the end (spoilers!), bad acting, toy rights sold beforehand, 20th Century Fox. Who needs that shit!
Now having some distance from the Phantom Menace trilogy, it’s interesting to look back on that trainwreck, especially after the Disney trilogy and recent announcement for more Lucasfilm feature film projects. In particular, the difference in their methods (who, why, when) and consequences.
George Lucas held firm control over the Phantom Menace trilogy from beginning to end through self-financing the films with a solid 20th Century Fox distribution deal. His producer and right-hand man, Rick McCallum, insulated him from every objection that arose, whether they were criticisms over the shit scripts or reliance on cgi for 97% of everything. Kathleen Kennedy, co-founder of Amblin along with Lucas’s buddy Steve, became the Lord over all thing Star Wars when Disney bought Lucasfilm while she was co-chair. When she received her orders to convert Star Wars IP into a Marvelesque assembly line, she created a trilogy of films to continue the main Skywalker story through the visions of multiple directors and writers. As well all now know, Kennedy would freely fire and hire top-rated filmmakers, which created a confused trilogy of events.
It appears Kennedy received the hint after The Rise of Skywalker and Disney+ Star War shows (“The Mandalorian” most notable) that the Star Wars universe contains more than just a couple Skywalkers and the people around them. This was also, reportedly, the direction Lucas was taking when Disney (aka the “white slavers,” in his words) bought the rights. Kennedy did what Lucas had done to his own IP baby: mine it for merch and box office tickets through cheap nostalgia and fan service. Although the Phantom Menace trilogy hasn’t aged any better, even with that pop culture shot of nostalgia, it’s too early to tell what kind of legacy the even more mediocre (and therefore forgettable) Skywalker trilogy will have.
It seems that no matter what way they sliced the IP (singular visionary v. franchise committee), they turned out an equally shitty and unremarkable product.
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