"Novel" may be a curious term to use for such a short story of a movie as Petit Maman, and a label of rare accuracy anyway, but the confluence of how the film depicts childhood and matriarchal lineage within a magical realist framework feels worthy of the descriptor. Much has been made of the difference between the brief running time and scope of Petit Maman in comparison to the period sweep of Céline Sciamma's last film Portrait of a Lady on Fire, but I found this narrative shift an inviting change, and was not quite as emotionally connected to Portrait, even though it certainly displays the same keen eye and unique attention to portraying women. And, while both films are playing with well established styles and narrative traditions, Portrait of a Lady on Fire felt bound by both it's construction as a period and lesbian drama where Petit Maman, clearly built from the scattered influences of children's literature and film, feels utterly unique. The extent to which it's been categorized as "slight" or "small" feels like a crime in contrast to the recent bloated excesses and running times of films like Everything Everywhere All At Once and The Batman.
While Petit Maman feels a bit tonally stilted at times, there is always some element of performance that surprises or lightens the film. The film is largely without a score, and one of the other aspects that sets it apart is the particularly unadorned approach it takes to showing childhood, which is, perhaps, too often accompanied by a barrage of needle drops. Sciamma is uniquely uninterested in romanticizing or artificially sentimentalizing childhood, which is another way in which the film feels new. The young actors at the heart of the film are not without their moments of childlike joy and playfulness, but those moments feel in the right proportion here, especially for a child having to figure out how to understand the death of their grandmother. Added to that, young Nelly (Josephine Sands) has to figure out how to negotiate the space of her mother's childhood home, which her mother and father are figuring out themselves, as they clean and encounter the space in the wake of loss.
And, yet, Petit Maman is far from a dreary meditation on loss, given that it takes place in a space of profound emotional loss. Once again, for a film that's been called "small," it resists being reduced by any genre label. It's more of a film about children than a children's film. But, then again, it's perhaps more a film about motherhood and lineage, and the potential barriers that life might impose on them. Without giving away the central, magical idea of the film, the folding of time at the center of it could nearly be called a science fiction premise, but the film feels owned by a much more magical and feminine energy than anything that label might suggest. Ultimately, the play with time in the film feels purely cinematic, used as a way to link generations that feels akin to those first imaginative formations a child has about what their mother's and grandmother's might have been like as children their age...or even just the mind-blowing realization that they were once their age. To be honest, young Nelly feels decades more mature than I ever was at that age, and is likely far more impervious to having her mind blown in any way by pondering the drift of time across familial lineage. And, in this sense, the film is a also a philosophical one, but one that doesn't pontificate in any way, and is never more complicated than the simple "goodbye" that completes it's looping narrative. That moment of narrative completion is devastating, a profound wholeness within an otherwise perfectly unexplained journey.
Happening is an adaptation of a novel from 2001 by Annie Ernaux, directed and co-adapted by Audrey Diwan and starring Anamaria Vartolomei as Anne, a young college student who encounters the problem of pregnancy in France, 1963. It's a powerful, unflinching, and progressive examination of a character that is so specific and unseen at the movies that it brought to mind the feminist filmmaking (for those who want to label it as such) of Barbara Loden's Wanda. While Loden's highly personal depiction of a Pennsylvania coal country gal is unmatchable in it's commitment to a character entirely uninterested in either motherhood or agency, Happening has a similarly obsessive attachment to the central, embattled journey of the character, and while it shares some qualities with the stark character dramas of the 70's, it also, surprisingly, shares some DNA with the horror genre. In fact, Happening can be read as a sort of sister film to one of my favorite films of 2021, Julia Ducournau's Titane. While I found the ecstatic risk of Ducorneau's film much richer, and feared going into Happening that it's potential as a typical "important movie" about abortion might be limiting in the overall impact, the film is so thoughtfully made and the choices so dynamic that I've found it difficult to shake. It shares this undeniable level of craft with a third film that was evoked for me--even more similar than either Loden and Ducournau--Eliza Hitman's Never Rarely Sometimes Always. The lead performance in Hitman's film is unforgettable, featuring first-time actor Sidney Flanigan, who is placed at the center of the film in a similarly claustrophobic manner as Vartolomei by Diwan's persistent and precise camera eye. But, where Hitman managed to wholly translate her fascination and attraction to Flanigan's effortless magnetism, Vartolomei is not exactly magnetic, but a bit steely and inaccessible in a way that is so perfectly calibrated to the emotional pitch of the filmmaking that they're difficult to separate.
Diwan knows exactly what she wants to show in Happening, and while it may not sound exactly like a fun night at the movies, the escalation of events and barriers to Anne's attempt to abort the fetus and stay out of prison is relentlessly compelling. And, yes, it's harrowing, and that's a crucial part of the film's effectiveness. One can't leave Happening without taking on at least some impression of the physical stress that Anne has to endure, and it's in this that the film is particularly potent--it's ability to evoke a physical response to the highly politicized realm of abortion laws, which are obviously crucial to address in their current repression, without ever presenting a single moment that feels overtly political or didactic. I often half-joke that, given my fairly insatiable appetite for movies, the only movies I don't look forward to seeing are the "important" ones, and Happening has been for me an opportunity to reassess what that means, and, I think, a valuable point of critique while movies are still seemingly having some potent political conversation, even in utterly surprising locations like Cape Girardeau, Missouri, where my partner and I saw Happening on a Monday night. I suspect that the availability of Happening in an area that cares more about sporting giant Trump/Pence signs (like the one we pass every time we cross the bridge into Missouri on the way to Cape) than promoting anything like international cinema is due to the recent supreme court decision in regards to Roe v Wade, as is the "special event" showing at the same Marcus Cinema of a documentary I noted called The Matter of Life by writer/director Tracy Robinson, billed as "an inspiring documentary about the reality and evils of abortion." While I commend Marcus Cinema on making screening room for topical movies, I can only put my money and consideration toward a cinema that is not just superficially "important," but challenging and artful in ways that potentially provide an opportunity to see something beyond the blinders of our political divides. And, no, I haven't seen The Matter of Life, but I know enough to call out propaganda over art, and ultimately don't fully endorse any film that allows one to pat themselves on the back for believing the same thing they believed when they walked in the theatre as when they walked out.
Happening isn't arguing anything, but showing, and taking risks in how it shows and how it puts Vartolomei's body on the line. It's more shocking elements aren't simply launched at audiences with the easily manipulated in it's sights, like so many Christian right scare tactics. There is no easy reduction of Anne at the center of the film, and Vartolomei's performance gives nothing away in regards to how she wants you to feel about her, and what the characterization and the performance hide is essential to what makes the film feel so vital. This is mirrored in what is obscured in the film as a "period piece," which shows great restraint in how it leans into the era it depicts; the sparse detail around the early 60's bolstering it's strength as a piece of historification, in Brechtian terms. This restraint is echoed yet again in the incredibly resonant and sparse scoring, featuring a highly particular and repeated, muted note on the piano, a painfully muffled sonic element that perfectly underscores Anne's emotional state throughout the film. Happening is evocative in ways that transcend the "important" movie, and I feel fortunate to have experienced it on the big screen--no small thing, I assure you, for those of us who don't live in cities that have multiple cinema hubs. Here's to cultivating new pockets of cinema culture that are congregating around new and foreign cinema. It's a difficult wish to attach to a film like Happening because it's a truly difficult and austere work, and commercial cinema trends tend to devalue anything that doesn't have an easy capacity for repeatability. But what of the film that only needs to be seen once? A friend recently asked me "What movie do you love that you've only seen once, but never need to see again?" Happening may fit into that category (though I'd happily see it again), but the larger point speaks to cinema culture that makes room for that type of experience in contrast to all of the movies defined only by their endless re-marketability. And, the wish extends beyond this work to all of the unexpected breakthroughs for international cinema we've seen of late (Drive My Car, Bad Luck Banging, Titane, Worst Person in the World, Petit Maman, etc), and to those venturing beyond the comfortable, the commercial, and finding a way to the kind of compassionate and challenging bond that films like Diwan's Happening offer up.
My main reservation going into Alex Garland's new film Men was that it might just be a horror film where the "horror" was a bald allegory for, you know...men. It can't be a title that plays that on the nose, right? Well, in one sense, yes, and that's one of the more unfortunate aspects of the movie. But, that's not to say that anyone will expect what's coming to them throughout the quite engaging and well-paced build-up to Garland's take on the allegorical realm of folk-horror. While Men may be regretfully titled, the film has elements I found enormously pleasurable, particularly in the first half of the film, which features our central character, Harper (Jesse Buckley), retreating to a country home in the English countryside after experiencing the trauma of an abusive relationship that culminates in her partner James (Paapa Essiedu) committing suicide. Harper is an everywoman, so to speak, in that we receive little detail about her life, apart from her friendship with Riley (Gayle Rankin) that plays out rather clunkily throughout the course of the film via phone chat. To be fair, there are a few clever and suspenseful moments built around the use of the phone as well, so Garland at least attempts to meet the modern screenwriter's dilemma of the ubiquitous smart phone in some inventive measure, but the most impressive passages of the film involve Harper's exploration of the house and the surrounding landscape, beautifully lensed by Rob Hardy who also shot Garland's previous films, Annihilation and Ex Machina.
Jesse Buckley is undeniably anchoring Men with her distinctly mannered presence and skill that has impressed across turns in some accomplished films of late, particularly Charlie Kaufman's I'm Thinking of Ending Things and Maggie Gyllenhaal's Elena Ferrante adaptation The Lost Daughter. And as for Buckely's season of the excellent series expansion of the Coen Brother's Fargo, it was clear to me that the focus needed to be recalibrated to favor her performance, and less on Chris Rock as dramatic lead (nearly the entire show's only glaring flaw). One scene in the first half of Men is a simple sequence of Buckley smelling the rain on the air, and it seems to bore a hole in the duration of the film, the kind of sensory moment you just want to stay with indefinitely. This leads to another captivating scene that involves some mesmerizing play with sound that almost seems to call forth the evil entity into the narrative. But, what is this evil entity? Oh, right...it's "men." Like in the title.
And here's the "twist": all of the men in Harper's world all look very similar, as they are all played by the same actor, Rory Kinnear. As an acting exercise, Kinnear is quite up to the challenge, though the scenes where they digitally graft his face onto another actor either don't quite work (or are perfectly eerie, depending on how into Men you are), and the way in which these multiple occurrences of Kinnear's countenance finally culminate in a visual metaphor that plays like a matryoshka doll of parturition is one of the most gob-smacking moments I've experienced at the movies of late. Normally, I relish in the unexpected, and Men has a fair share of delightfully strange and unexpected moments, but within the last half of the film it simply gets lost. It's at once too on the nose and a deeply weird and ambiguous film, which is a curious combination. Not unlike last year's The Green Knight, I admire a lot of the craft at work in Men, and the dedication to an attempt to stir something in audiences who crave something different, something operating on a different plain of vision, but, similarly, by film's end the ambiguities failed to radiate anything that felt productive or exciting. It's a head-scratcher, as they say. It didn't work for me, though I appreciate it's presence at the mutli-plex, and I think there's an audience for whom this movie might light a path to some of the great work it calls on: Robin Hardy's The Wicker Man, or the flashes of Roeg. It's far more interesting than a lot else out there, and will likely hold an ability to surprise and captivate in it's own way for a long time to come.
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