The Cinematic Experience

Feb 18

No Time to Die, dir. Cary Joji Fukunaga, 2021
Cure, dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 1997
Belfast, dir. Kenneth Branagh, 2021
Mass, dir. Fran Kranz, 2021
Mayor Pete, dir. Jesse Moss, 2021
The Humans, dir. Stephen Karam, 2021
The French Dispatch, dir. Wes Anderson, 2021
Great Freedom, dir. Sebastian Meise, 2021
A Balance, dir. Yujiro Harumoto, 2020
Clara Sola, dir. Nathalie Álvarez Mesén, 2021
The Worst Person in the World, dir. Joachim Trier, 2021
Madeleine Collins, dir. Antoine Barraud, 2021
Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, dir. Radu Jude, 2021
Happening, dir. Audrey Diwan, 2021

We, the weary public, wanted to support the film industry that so infrequently now delights, or even entertains us. When the movie theaters reopened their doors, going to the theater, like ordering take-out, became a civic duty. We bought tickets to see the new James Bond because, despite not being good for a while now, it gives aging European actors something to do and it's always nice to see them on the screen. And it needs our support.

The man sitting next to me pulled out his phone to check Twitter four times, once finding it so amusing that he was on there, his screen on full brightness, for twenty minutes. A guy a couple rows in front used the flashlight on his phone to catch up on some reading. And when the lights came on, it was revealed that three patrons within a couple of rows had taken off their shoes as if this were an eight-hour international flight, and maybe a third of the patrons were still wearing their masks.

Ah, yes. The Cinema.

This all could have been worth it if James Bond running around shooting people had been amusing enough, but this film, long delayed through various pandemic lockdowns and deemed too good to go to streaming, seemed newly timely in all the wrong ways: a man who becomes physically toxic to his family and must be quarantined to avoid passing along this deadly poison circulating through his body and eventually must die while essentially FaceTiming with his loved ones — great job, everyone. Yes, release that after hundreds of thousands of Americans have died in the same way.

It's strange going back to the movie theater, a place where I have hidden and lived out my fantasies of being a little old lady with her sandwich hidden in the bottom of her bag, spending her entire day moving unseen from theater to theater, finding a way to get through yet another day until finally receiving the merciful kiss of death. But there is no losing oneself in the romantic fantasies of Hollywood when there is staff placed outside every theater to check vaccination records and when the normally simply inconvenient eating sounds from your neighbors become the menace of unfiltered air.

John Sloan, *Movies, Five Cents*, 1907. Oil on canvas. Wikiart.

I started to miss the control of streaming, the ability to check out, do the dishes during a boring bit, breathe freely. I missed the luxury of distraction. I also missed having my own reaction to a film, to sit in a silent daze after something truly magnificent. My initial excitement of seeing Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Cure in the theater was diminished significantly by the people around me. It was a room of only men — women own the uncanny, motherfuckers, where are all of my weird Philadelphia sisters? — except one woman, clearly dragged by her boyfriend, who stood up as soon as it was over and declared “I don't get it.” A few days later I watched Cure again on my couch, streaming from Criterion, needing to reclaim that catch in my throat at the final image, the evil thought thwarted re-emerging in one brief and terrifying shot. That feeling that had gotten tossed away by the idiot girl.

My growing antisocial feelings were so horrifying to me, I decided to force myself to sit through the Philadelphia Film Festival, seeing three or four films a day, simply to get back into the habit of being around people, breathing the same air, physically and culturally speaking, but processing them differently. Bad luck, then, to have my first film of the festival be Belfast, a film so sentimental and politically twisted that I had to go to the lobby to breathe and text friends about how miserable I was, before I calmed down enough to finish watching.

It’s an autobiographical passion project, the kind where some guy, usually a fire sign, mistakes his experience for the experience of an entire people. In this case, it’s the citizens of Northern Ireland during the civil war and occupation by the British army. And his experience is that of a cozy little adventure, a naive romp through centuries of colonial power and repression and structural discrimination, which all boils down to something like, isn’t it a shame these two groups couldn’t agree on religion, this really ruined my otherwise perfectly nice childhood. The wee little Kenneth plays games, goes to school, has a crush on a girl, and loves his grandparents. When the war interferes, it’s because of someone taking the conflict too seriously. The family is Protestant, but they don’t benefit from their privileged position, of course, and they respect their Catholic neighbor’s beliefs.

Belfast acts as some kind of tribute to film as an escape mechanism from the harsh realities that surround us in our daily life. The family, driven apart by the violence of 1970s Belfast and the economic migration the father must make to England, are only really able to come together at the movies. Making it worse, the real world is made artificial in a stark black and white, the only color comes from the children's movies on the screen. I began to wonder if the writer and director Kenneth Branagh has been so distracted by screens during the entirety of his life that he failed to gain any historical or political perspective on the sectarian violence of his childhood. Belfast and Branagh have all the intellectual insight into “The Troubles” as an American who wants to go to war in Ukraine but can't find it on a map.

Plus there is the experience of watching a film where violent political protest is condemned wholly as a childish tantrum. When the young stand-in for Branagh, still in his short pants, gets swept up into a demonstration that ends in the looting of a grocery store and asks one of the young women participating what they were doing, she responds, “Whatever we want.” If I had been watching this from the solitude of my living room, this is when I would have started screaming at the screen. What kind of rich man's politics is this, what kind of elite grievance culture is this, who has the actual nerve to film a movie like this after years of sustained political protest throughout Western Europe and America? To make a movie that says it is better to be entertained than engaged, and that the fight for survival that might occasionally take unfortunate directions is merely greedy hedonism. I stayed quiet because I thought maybe, just maybe, this would be one of those moments, where the boundaries between self and collective disappear and we all stand up as one at the end of this thing and roundly reject it. We will boo and hiss and scream. Instead, everyone applauded. It will probably win an Oscar, because those people really love films with messages like, people should really set aside their differences and come together and hold hands while this Van Morrison song plays.

There are likely to be many films about the rise of Black Lives Matter and the uprising against the police in 2020, because this is how we’ve decided we prefer to digest history now. Protest is romantic when you don’t have to choke on tear gas, when you don’t have to look at what came before or after, when you don’t really have to know what the protest was about in the first place. The inevitable film about George Floyd will probably intend to be uplifting, but it’s more likely to be as fucking stupid as Belfast, and I wish I could spare the future generations what I experienced guided by Branagh’s direction.

Maybe culture is actually bad, I thought, trying to get into the opening night afterparty and questioned three times by young women who took this internship hoping to “get into film” who seem to think I'm crashing without an invitation. I have a badge, bitch, I think, as I try desperately to get drunk on the vodka that is sponsoring this festival. I don't recognize anyone here from the actual movie audience, and I find out later it's the film society's young professional networking group. They are there to get jobs, not to watch films, which I guess is why the only film conversation I overheard while asking for endless refills of the weakest vodka sodas I have ever had is about Wes Anderson's doll house version of World War II, which also depicts political protest as a cute little diversion for kids and losers but also manages to insult my home state of Kansas. “It was so cute,” a young professional who looks like she's in real estate comments.

This might be the future of American film, an audience of kids raised on Netflix, unfamiliar with anything that was made before 1985. Hell, this might be the present of American film, and this might also describe the content creators. That would explain why every American film I saw at the festival is vaguely embarrassing, like your sister showing up to the soirée in a tacky and revealing dress and cheap shoes. There was Mass, which strains to provide any insight into the phenomenon of the school shooter and kind of just lands on a vague parental guilt for not doing a good enough job raising a white boy in the suburbs. (“What does my son murdering a bunch of people say about me” is a very American response, though, as the mother of one of the Columbine murderers still pops up at TED Talks or promotions for her book where her primary concern is that everyone knows she couldn't possibly have known about her son's violent spiral downward.) There is a documentary about Pete Buttigieg, which shows him being awkward in any number of contexts, yet does not take seriously any query into why this warmongering corporate shill wants political power. He wants to do good! Sure. There's The Humans, which only really works as a story if you are invested in the American family as a cohesive unit or if you are extremely into Richard Jenkins as an actor — I am, and still I was extremely bored by the real estate problems of an aspiring composer in New York City.

*The French Dispatch*, dir. Wes Anderson, 2021.

It's difficult not to think, watching America's cinematic output every year, we are just helplessly naive, drunk toddlers let loose on the world, flattening out all nuance and diversity and anything of interest. In that way, Anderson's The French Dispatch is the representative film of the festival, one of Anderson's many fantasies of the world's turmoil and beauty and suffering just being a backdrop for Americans to go on little adventures and say stupid and obvious things about the Way Things Are. Firmly held ideological beliefs in Anderson's world are an adorable quirk, the pain of others means nothing beyond what it teaches us about ourselves, and aesthetics is just a matter of lining pink things next to green things. Mayor Pete, the IRA, and the beautiful, naive rebels of the Sorbonne are all indistinguishably revolutionary.

The festival was not really curing me of my antisocial thought process, no. I was sulky and angry, and not only because the top secret special screening was not Verhoeven's Benedetta as I had hoped but was instead Edgar Wright's Last Night in Soho. After a couple of days, festivals always start to feel like hot dog eating contests and I am just here dipping the bun in water and shoving it down.

But there were things that kept pulling me back and convincing me to stay. There was Franz Rogowski, usually cast in otherworldly, sylph-like roles, as the earthy and sexually alive Hans Hoffmann in Great Freedom. There was the shocking ending to a beautiful Yujiro Harumoto film A Balance. There was Clara Sola in Clara Sola getting her hands dipped in chilis to prevent her from touching herself and her deciding to go ahead and do it anyway, the pleasure worth having to run the water from the hose between her legs later. There was Anders Danielsen Lie and his great face in The Worst Person in the World. And there was Virginie Efira in Madeleine Collins, and the way she is truly becoming our chronicler of the woman spinning out of control, our patron saint of the oh fuck it, our vessel of disturbed and obsessive thought patterns. She is a monster and I love her.

*Clara Sola*, dir. Nathalie Álvarez Mesén, 2021.

Something of a theme to the films I was loving emerged. Blessedly only one film, Radu Jude's Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn seemed to be set in our pandemic world, with its constant threats and ever-shifting restrictions and freedoms. And yet in the same way that even a James Bond film written years before we all learned the word “coronavirus” seems to be hideously about us and this moment, everything seems to be about right now because Kenneth Branagh is wrong, there fundamentally is no escape from the world and everything we consume just puts a slightly different, mostly dumber, filter over it.

If part of art's job is consolation, I felt consoled by all of the stories of trying to ward off an inevitable calamity, trying to incorporate terrifying new information into your view of the world, and struggling to start over after you've lost the ability to imagine your future. Emi in Bad Luck Banging manically tries to contain the damage in her professional and personal life after a clip from a private sex tape she made is uploaded and goes viral. Judith in Madeleine Collins swings between two identities, two nations, two identity cards, two families, two partners and children, and is frantic to keep the lies going and the two lives separate. We know the breakdown is coming, but she will keep pushing it to the end of the film. Hans in Great Freedom has had his life put on pause through multiple stints in prison for being gay in post-war Germany, and the collision between his incarcerated reality and a society that has kept on moving without him is a nasty thing to watch.

*Madeleine Collins*, dir. Antoine Barraud, 2021.

It was maybe A Balance that stayed with me the longest, though. Yuko, a journalist working on the story about the ramifications of a sexual assault — the suicides and social ostracism and harassment campaigns that followed — discovers her father has exchanged free tuition for his after school tutoring with sex from an underage and disadvantaged student. The more she digs into the story she is reporting, the more of a mess it makes. There are not bright and clear dividing lines between victim and predator, there are scapegoats being made so institutions can evade taking responsibility, and the attention placed on this case from the media makes everyone's lives worse rather than bringing truth and justice. In the same way, the more she tries to cover up her father's crimes, the more of a mess she makes, revealing the same problems in her own life. Whether to bring attention and the intermediaries of press and police into private problems, or whether it is best to handle things discreetly and personally, well, it turns out nothing works, the hurt just keeps spreading, and Yuko cannot get control of any of it. I want to save this movie from the inevitable think pieces about cancel culture that will follow its wide release, it deserves more than that.

*A Balance*, dir. Yujiro Harumoto, 2020.

There was one moment that made me happy to have returned to the theater, to be around my fellow man, spending all day indoors in the dark during some of the final nice weather days of the autumn. It was an early morning viewing of Happening, an adaptation of Annie Ernaux's memoir about getting pregnant and trying to access an abortion when it was still illegal in France. Audrey Diwan filmed Happening with a kind of fury. At some point Anne's switch from “I have to do something about this pregnancy” turns into a focused “I am going to fucking kill this baby inside of me” and you are with her the whole way. It was scarier and more tense than most horror films I've seen.

The lack of access to phones, the total removal of distractions bless films like these. The camera follows Anne closely, very little of the world around her emerges, you are connected to her and this thing inside her intimately and relentlessly. And in the film, there's a moment when it is revealed that the first of many doctors (not to mention friends and lovers and teachers) she turned to for help betrayed her. When he gave her an injection, telling her it was going to bring on her period, it was actually medication to prevent a miscarriage. A simultaneous and collective involuntary gasp ran through the theater. Me too, I couldn't prevent the noise that escaped me. And for a second I thought of Ernaux, her beautiful book and this beautiful film and all of this attention and energy and concern that filled the room, directed toward her and her story, all of it years too late to help her at all. But it does, I think, go somewhere, this feeling, pulled out of us and into the world. It made me happy simply to participate.