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ellieellieoxenfree · 6 months ago

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52 weeks, 52 movies: may

more catchup. watched some great stuff this month and some real fucking garbage.

a radiant girl (france) — 19-year-old irène (rebecca marder), a jewish girl, dreams of being an actress in 1942 france, blissfuly unaware of the horrors breathing down her neck.

okay, i know what this movie is going for. i get it. i know what point they’re trying to make, juxtaposing irène’s carefree joys against the encroaching nazi regime. except the nazis barely even register in this movie (until the very end), and the vague hints that occasionally pop up throughout don’t really register. there are mentions of surrendering radios and bicycles, and a few of irène’s classmates disappear, but she’s so self-absorbed and shallow that none of these things register to her on any level. she comes off as less a head-in-the-sand dreamer and more of a willfully obtuse ignoramus.

nor is she a particularly interesting character, nor is her story particularly interesting. she wants to be an actress. she flirts with boys. she has a weird quasi-incest moment with her brother that gave me the actual creeps. it’s all very pedestrian and dull and i could only stomach so many scenes of her giggling with her friends about acting or hatching schemes to get the cute optometrist to notice her. (she concocts an entire plan to get glasses she doesn’t need to get his attention. it is dreadfully boring.) by the time we got to an admittedly chilling ending — her boisterous singing in a cafe catches the eye of a nazi soldier, who cruises over to her with shark-like focus, right before the screen goes black — i was long past the point of giving the remotest fuck about her. she’s as shallow as a puddle two days after rain. she’s unable to conceptualize of the world or people around her, so watching her got very, very tiresome very very quickly. at no point does she put deeper thought into the things that are happening around her. her jewish faith feels equally like an afterthought and barely shows up in the movie. the only thing that seems to matter is having her flit around like an empty-headed simpleton declaiming monologues in pursuance of her dream. even the classmates around her don’t register as people. irène’s entire world is irène and everyone exists to orbit her.

this was absolutely one i finished because it was for the challenge. i cannot recommend anyone do the same, regardless of the reason.

girl picture (finland) —three young women (aamu milonoff, eleonoora kauhanen, and linnea leino) navigate adolescent dreams and hardships over a handful of weekends.

oh, girl picture. oh, you. i wanted to like this more, and there were parts i liked. but the longer i sat with it the less settled about it i felt, and ultimately i concluded that it didn’t work for me. ultimately, it seemed unwilling to fully commit to following the story all the way through, so none of the storylines quite ever satisfied properly. they didn’t quite feel like i was voyeuristically dropping in and seeing a snapshot of a life, either; things artificially ended or resolved so abruptly that i felt a bit of whiplash.

for example, two protagonists, mimmi and emma, fall in love. there are tantalizing plot threads here with both characters; mimmi has clearly unresolved family issues, feeling out of place, replaced, and abandoned by her biological family, while emma is a figure skater struggling with the demands of competitive athleticism. their romance is so whirlwind as to be headache-inducing — this might be the fastest quasi-enemies-to-lovers speed run ever — but its ending is what truly sours it. mimmi, who wrestles with emotional honesty, becomes a relationship saboteur and throws the relationship in emma’s face, then grinds their affection into the dirt by ostentatiously going off with someone else at a party in front of her. they resolve this, but it’s less ‘resolving’ and more ‘emma is a doormat who just apparently takes her back and there’s no communication about it.’ it felt, quite frankly, rather unsettling and more than a little gross. i suppose a scene prior to their resolution, where mimmi tearfully calls her absent mother and has a bit of a cry with her, is meant to be shorthand for her growth, but it feels utterly inauthentic. we, as viewers, have no reason to believe in mimmi’s change of heart. emma just comes off as a weak-willed fool.

separately, their arcs could have been interesting. emma’s heart isn’t in skating; mimmi’s relationship issues clearly come from the parental abandonment she feels. but the film doesn’t dig into that in any meaningful way, or doesn’t dig enough, so it lacks a ton of the power it could have.

similarly, rönkkö, the third member of the trio, has intriguing notes to her characterization that both don’t add up and don’t bear fruit. she seeks sexual pleasure, which manifests as a series of ineptly fumbling encounters with teenage boys little more than moronic brutes, but the storyline doesn’t ever really seem to land in a satisfying way. i’ve read that she ultimately settles on asexuality, but everything is vaguely and hazily defined and the word never gets brought up. (it doesn’t necessarily need to be, although asexuality is still so underrepresented in media that the film’s unwillingness to commit to this story beat alongside the others gets more and more frustrating.)

the actors are capable, and some of the landscapes are simultaneously beautiful and hideous in their winter frigidity. but the longer i went on, the more i asked myself, what are you trying to say? and found the answer was nothing at all.

sapphire (uk) — when a young woman (yvonne buckingham) is found murdered, a number of secrets spill over and shake loose the casual racism and bigotry of the predominantly white community around her.

this was a tidy little treat of a movie from basil dearden, who, as criterion tells me, was known for his kitchen-sink realism. (two years after sapphire, he’d make britain’s first sympathetic film about homosexuality.) this packed a LOT into a short package — while i generally spoil a lot of the plot points in my movie reviews, i think this one’s worth discovering all the secrets on an actual viewing, other than to say that this tackled race relations head-on. it’s incredibly progressive and daring for 1959, covering a lot of topics that the american production code would have had a stroke over. most shockingly, the murdered woman isn’t demonized, despite what i will delicately term indiscreet behavior. it’s nice to see something from the 50s that’s more openly unvarnished; it’s not that the behaviors didn’t happen, but censorship shut down their mere mention in popular culture, so this is an incredibly interesting time capsule. obviously, there’s no shortage of more modern stories about scandals of the period, but this has the immediacy of current values and beliefs uncolored by future ways of thinking.

it was also particularly interesting to see depictions of black culture in 1950s london. i recently watched small axe, which was a modern take on many of those cultural landmarks and touchstones, so it was interesting to contrast what steve mcqueen was doing in his depictions versus what dearden did in his. (dearden was a white man, so did not have the intimate knowledge of the community, and some black critics have commented negatively on his depiction of race relations. as a white woman, i certainly am not qualified to speak over them, but i do applaud what dearden was doing within the context of the time period. for its era, it’s progressive. by modern standards, it may not be as progressive or speak to things as skillfully and thoughtfully as mcqueen could do in small axe, but for my money, it was still an incredibly bold feat of filmmaking. engrossing and highly recommended.

baby assassins (japan) — two high school girls (takaishi akari and izawa saori) who moonlight as assassins face personal crises when their bosses order them to share a living space.

i’m waffling about this one. (this was not intended originally to be a joke, but could be construed as one for other viewers of this movie.) the concept is great, as is the fight choreography (izawa saori, who is the most precious thing alive, is a former stuntwoman), and much of the cast works well together. on the other hand, it bears the hallmarks of an amateur director who isn’t quite sure of themselves or their vision or voice, so it doesn’t quite gel as well as it could have, and it tends to meander at points. when it’s on, it’s on; when it’s not, it’s just frustrating. as with many of the movies i’ve seen this year that didn’t quite live up to expectations, the bones are good. the bones are there and could be fashioned into something superlative. but it just doesn’t quite get there.

a lot of what i seem to keep criticizing is tone, and this suffers from some awkward tonal shifts that don’t always work. it veers from comedy to bloodthirstiness — there’s a gory scene where a yakuza member tortures a shopkeeper for a joke he doesn’t like, which seemed to belong in a darker movie — and the two things don’t always marry well. the movie is overall pretty gory at spots, with some setpieces of large-scale shootouts, but the torture scene feels deliberately cruel in much more grounded and realistic way than the over-the-top nature of the other fight scenes.

it’s also a bit thinly written at times, and i could have used some more beefing up to the script to better establish our characters, their jobs, and the world around them. due to the lack of connective tissue, it can get confusing regarding motivations and logistics, and another pass at the script to add in some connective tissue would have gone a long way.

but it is fun a lot of the time as well. the girls have an easy, natural chemistry, and director sagamoto yuko takes advantage of that to just showcase them in everyday situations — lounging around their apartment, eating together, lightly bickering. again, stronger/tighter writing would have done a lot to help give a better sense of who the girls are (chisato, played by takaishi, is the bubbly, giggly one, whereas mahiro (izawa) is the perpetually exhausted one who’s just done with a lot of this nonsense), but they do their best to carry the material anyway. given chances to shine, such as in a scene where they both need to get day jobs at a maid cafe, they perform admirably. in another scene, they argue over who’s responsible for finishing a job, while the bound and gagged hostage panics in the background. i really wanted the film to lean into the everyday absurdity in more scenes like this — again, a stronger director and writer could have coaxed out the inherent hilarity of the premise.

there is a sequel to baby assassins, which i unwisely picked up on a sale before watching the first one, but the longer i thought about it, the happier i was that i did. i don’t think the movie is a flop or unsalvageable, and i think that there’s enough potential in the material that sagamoto has the chance to learn and grow from his fumbles in the first one to make the second a stronger, leaner machine. we’ll see if i’m booboo the fool.

other viewing

polite society (uk)

willie dynamite (usa)

oh, god! (usa)

uhf* (usa)

borders of love (czech republic)

my fake boyfriend (canada)

the first wives club (usa)

street gang: how we got to sesame street (usa)

smarty (usa)

yomeddine (egypt)

chico and rita (spain)