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The Uncanny Fog of ‘The Congress’

Hodge-podge, thy name is The Congress. Ostensibly about an iteration of Robin Wright played by Robin Wright who sells the rights to her on-screen persona to a big Hollywood studio, it is not really about that at all. It is part animation, part live-action; part adaptation of Stanisław Lem’s 1971 sci-fi novel The Futurological Congress, part anti-Hollywood meta-movie; part electric Kool-Aid acid trip, part anti-commercialist treatise. And if all that sounds a bit much, try actually sitting through this two hour-plus film. The funny thing is: I heartily recommend the experience.

It might sweeten the deal to know this is the brainchild of Ari Folman, the writer-director of Waltz with Bashir.  A 2008 animated documentary about his experience as an Israeli infantry soldier, Bashir grounded questions about the fluidity of memory and identity with the reality of the 1982 Lebanon War, and deserved the Oscar for which it only received a nomination. The Congress may take Folman’s big-picture interrogations much (much!) further afield but he anchors its fancies with the same sort of real-world stakes. In this case, those stakes are an actual female body, which, as it turns out, cuts through all kinds of blips in the time-space continuum. In this capacity, Robin Wright, who channeled an old-soulfulness even as a budding starlet, proves the perfect muse. But she is also far more than a muse, and it is this dance between her subjectivity and her objectivity – not to mention her objectification – that runs as the common thread through this new cinematic organism that both heralds and laments a new era in filmmaking. Continue Reading →

‘Mood Indigo’ Needs ‘Eternal Sunshine’

The following review originally appeared in Word and Film.

Let’s get one thing straight: Michel Gondry directed the best movie of the last decade. Fantastically original and unsentimentally tender-footed, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind will likely go down in history as one of the greatest romances ever to grace the silver screen. Of course, some of its brilliance can be chalked up to screenwriter Charlie Kaufman. But unlike the Kaufman scripts directed by other filmmakers (including Kaufman himself), Sunshine boasts a heart rather than a navel – and its long-faced, metaphysical interrogation of the plausibility of long-term love is uplifted by a ramshackle, lo-fi sci-fi aesthetic that’s pure Gondry.

But – and we knew there had to be a “but” after a set-up like that, right? – the French director’s work has proven an uneven lot since then. Be Kind Rewind, his 2008 paean to video stores and working-class neighborhoods starring Yasiin “Mos Def” Bey and Jack Black, is a minor delight that’s most noteworthy for its introduction of “Sweding,” a remaking of something with any available materials. And The We and the I, Gondry’s 2011 experimental drama about New York City teenagers that evolved from workshops with real NYC teenagers in an afterschool arts program, makes admirable use of his sympathetic fancies. But 2006’s The Science of Sleep, about a man enthralled by his own unconscious, is about as appealing as listening to someone else describe their dream for two hours, and Gondry’s documentaries The Thorn in the Heart and Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy? suffer from the very navel-gazing that he sidestepped in SunshineBlock Party, his 2005 doc mixing Dave Chappelle’s comedy with 1990s hip hop interludes, may be pure pleasure but it is also pure Chappelle. The truth is our French friend’s high-octane whimsy is more effective when he’s working from someone else’s material.

So Mood Indigo, Gondry’s latest, seemed a no-brainer. Adapted from Boris Vian’s feverishly creative eponymous 1947 novel, it stars Romain Duris and Audrey Tautou, the reigning king and queen of Pretty French Quirk, as newlyweds who live in a wonderland of their own devise until he is bankrupted by her mortal illness. It’s a perfect match of actors, material, and director – or at least one would think. Alas, the match is too perfect. It’s so much of a piece that the result is whimsy layered upon whimsy upon whimsy. With a little whimsy thrown in for good measure. Vian’s bio reads like a real-life version of Gondry’s characters, or, for that matter, one of his own: a novelist, poet, jazz trumpeter, singer, critic, engineer, critic, and inventor, he died of cardiac arrest at age thirty-nine while watching a Hollywood adaptation of his novel entitled (wait for it) I Spit on Your Graves. Forget about Death by Chocolate. This is, at the risk of sounding terribly flippant, Death by Whimsy. Which, equally flippantly, could also be the name of this film. Continue Reading →

2014’s Best Films (May Already Have Come)

The following was originally published in Word and Film.

Let’s be honest: In the dog days of summer, most of us crave popcorn movies that won’t tax our wilted brains. Gross-out comedies and smash-’em-up action pictures are the order of the day, and really, there’s no shame in that. Some of them, like Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, are pretty great. (Not so much Tammy or Transformers: Age of Extinction.) Some of them, like Snowpiercer, are even pretty smart.

But for those craving complicated, grown-up cinematic fare – the sort we can mull over for an afternoon while the rest of the world melts away – 2014 has already produced its fair share of memorable films. And it’s worth catching up on them before the autumn’s rush of “Oscar-consideration” movies begins. Distributors tend to release their most artistically adventurous films (that is, the ones likely to alienate the conservative Academy) earlier in the year.

Here are the five best movies of 2014 so far. Continue Reading →

"All, everything I understand, I understand only because I love."
― Leo Tolstoy