Mother Mary
Dir. David Lowery, U.S., A24

In a recent conversation with his friend and peer Chloé Zhao for Filmmaker, David Lowery was prompted to explain the “origin story” of his new psychodrama Mother Mary, which observes the turbulent reunion of the eponymous fictional popstar (Anne Hathaway) with her former costume designer Sam (Michaela Coel) years after a falling out. In response, Lowery recalls the cognitive dissonance he experienced working on his prior A24 passion project, The Green Knight (2021), while simultaneously lining up his second Disney live-action remake, Peter Pan & Wendy (2023). The perceived contradiction made him question his choices as a filmmaker: “I started writing a dialogue between the part of me that could make Disney movies and the part of me that could make The Green Knight. It sounds reductive to say it that way because of course I can make both. I love all forms of cinema. But in that moment, I was confused, and that confusion—my search for clarity—became the early pages of the screenplay.” In this context, the key players in this strange, stagey two-hander come to embody an archetypal creative opposition.

That Pete’s Dragon (2016), Lowery’s first mainstream project for Disney, remains his best film is no small irony. Ditto the fact that The Green Knight’s savvy social media marketing and frictionless, screen-cap-ready contents further evince how even an Indiewood “one for me” project can smack of corporate branding and studio notes. To his credit, Lowery’s words display an awareness that these naive distinctions between commerce and craft are frequently porous. It’s fitting, then, that the two protagonists of Mother Mary seem to resist such a binary as well.

Their psychic connection is teased out in the film’s distended opening montage, which depicts the two women lurching inexorably toward each other. An introductory shot of Mother Mary, awaiting her big entrance behind a partition, finds her at the crest of a shimmering sartorial wave, panning up from ripples of scrunched silver fabric to the metallic “halo” affixed atop her head like a crown. Accompanying this elaborate shot, Sam addresses Mary abstractly in voiceover, delimiting the thin line between love and hate before proclaiming venomously, “You deserve neither.”

Ironically, the cape is cast off almost as soon as Mother Mary hits the stage, revealing the singer in an angular leotard and stilettos as she performs “Burial,” a disappointingly listless song written for the film’s seven-track tie-in album by Jack Antonoff and Charli xcx. This tentative opening number serves as a fleeting showcase for the markers of pop-world credibility at Lowery’s disposal, which he doesn’t seem especially interested in (scenes of Mary actually performing are few and far between).

Immediately after, dizzying crosscuts set to the bouncier “My Mouth Is Lonely for You” (FKA Twigs’s contribution) show Mary’s dressing-room crash-outs over costuming and Sam’s preparations for her upcoming show in parallel, rushing us toward their confrontation. (In light of the impressive supporting cast whose screentime is paltry, the film gives the impression of having been cut down from a longer version.) By the end of the song, Mary has impulsively decamped to Sam’s remote fashion house outside London, barged in past her harried assistant Hilda (Hunter Schafer, grossly underused), and zeroed in on the designer’s bedroom as if she knows the building like the back of her hand. Sam, sensing her arrival, sits up to face her just before the door swings open. Their exchange quickly boils down to: “I need a dress.” They have four days to pull it off.

Verbal standoffs abound in the film that follows, which, confined to the barn where Sam does her work, takes the form of a chamber piece. The bitter couturier spends most of their hurried collab cutting this desperate diva down to size, effortlessly establishing artistic dominance and wielding grandiloquent jibes with a preternatural sense for the weight and force of her words. Through Mary’s brittle mannerisms, we see how her evident guilt converges with the pressures of the impending comeback show––blurry footage prior to the A24 logo suggested an onstage injury that eerily resembled self-harm. As the women negotiate the details of Mary’s wardrobe––“no red,” she insists at the outset, and you’ll never guess what color the eventual garment will be––they exhume past betrayals and thumb their sores. Eventually, they surmise that these festering wounds have manifested something spectral, an occult presence that demands to be addressed.

Mother Mary is relentlessly talky, perhaps Lowery’s most writerly film so far. It is also self-aware in this regard––Mary complains that “these metaphors are getting exhausting,” in response to one of Sam’s typically lofty remarks. Their conversations lead to flashbacks, which are staged as physical extensions of the same set. While Lowery frequently struggles to stylize Sam and Mary’s tête-à-tête, his approach to the figurative spatiality and sinuous artifice of memory fares better. Multiple stand-out, long-take tableaux follow Mary through stages of exhaustion, terror, and exaltation, the most striking being a cyclical climb up and down an interlocking series of backstage staircases as she whispers repeatedly “this what I do.”

When the supernatural turn comes, the imagery does the heavy lifting. Supposedly born from the tooth Sam––freshly booted from Mother Mary’s creative team––cracked while clenching her jaw during a performance, this ghostly apparition manifests as a floating cluster of crimson fabric. Mary, who divulges subsequent encounters after Sam set the spirit free, describes it as “the idea of a she,” a telling metaphor that better describes the film’s human characters.

Mother Mary’s explorations of the psychological effects of fame are mostly decorative, frequently splitting the difference between timeless and timeworn. The argument could be made that this befits a film that dramatizes the process behind decorating a cultural icon, and once again, Lowery preempts criticism in his dialogue when Mary suggests that one of Sam’s ideas is obvious, to which she retorts that obviousness can beget clarity––Mother Mary bets big on the veracity of her statement.

Such are the bewildering pleasures and pitfalls of Lowery’s self-defeating project, an ungainly almost-horror movie filled with labored abstractions that it can’t help but acknowledge. Rather than soften the impact of Lowery’s ostentatious swings, these conceits merely undercut the disquieting images and scenarios Mother Mary frequently stumbles upon. By holding up a mirror to his own movie, Lowery obscures our view, and clarity, despite a wealth of obviousness, recedes further from our reach.

Blue Heron
Dir. Sophy Romvari, Canada/Hungary, Janus Films

Binaries can be a security blanket for the brain. How convenient, pacifying, and self-affirming to seize on a person from our past and either venerate or vilify them, to be struck by a fugitive memory and adjudge its tenor either light or dark, to rummage through a period of life and resolve that it was either conducive or detrimental to all that followed in its wake. Discarding this thought pattern is an eternal exercise, most difficult to unlearn—at least, in my experience—when it comes to considering those closest to us. Blind adoration can sustain us, but a grudge can anchor even as it enervates its holder. It is harder to make peace with indecision, to allow room in one’s heart for love and hurt and ambivalence.

Such feeling suffuses Sophy Romvari’s humbling and quietly awe-inspiring first feature Blue Heron, which could only half-accurately be described as an autobiographical coming-of-age drama. The subject matter is familiar and familial terrain for the Canadian filmmaker. Her previous short films—including 2020’s intriguing Still Processing—have largely been creative experiments in what she describes as “memory retrieval,” pivoting around relations near and far. Her practice is grounded in the understanding that the real and the merely remembered are separated by the finest and slipperiest of lines.

Romvari’s parents and three older brothers emigrated to British Columbia from Hungary in 1989, a year before she was born, and subsequently settled in the suburbs of Vancouver Island. Her film bears all the markers of a normal turn-of-the-millennium childhood: water balloon fights with the neighbors, hours slumped in front of boxy TVs, primitive forays into Microsoft Paint as dad plays his ambient German electronica from the same device. But Romvari’s youth was clouded by the deteriorating and increasingly disturbing behavior of her eldest sibling, a late half-brother produced by her mother’s previous relationship. The toll that his short and troubled life had on the family is immeasurable, her early life warping around a single member. Resentment, by Romvari’s own account, has been claimed like a legacy.

Blue Heron strikes a far more nuanced balance in its recreation of the writer-director’s upbringing during the family’s first tumultuous summer on Vancouver Island in the late nineties, a breaking point in her parents’ ability to care for her rabble-rousing brother. He is fictionalized here as Jeremy (Edik Beddoes), a lurking, lanky, close-lipped presence with a strong jaw and a pair of clunky, corrective spectacles that magnify a mutinously numb stare. “The older I get, the more I feel like I never knew him at all,” a voice intones over the opening images of a recording iPhone zooming in on hilly, tree-lined streets, the narration and composition equally signaling that the ensuing film is less straightforward and beholden to realism than meets the eye. For the next 50 minutes, Romvari places us in the perspective of her placid, eight-year-old avatar Sasha (Eylul Guven), occasionally veering away to focus on her parents: her sweet-natured father (Ádám Tompa), who is glued to the desktop on which he works from home, and her stress-ridden mother (Iringó Réti), who shepherds Sasha, Jeremy, and their very nearly indistinguishable middle brothers (Preston Drabble and Liam Serg) from outing to outing.

In these scenes, Blue Heron evokes recollections with the muted, clear-sighted precision of Charlotte Wells’s father-daughter drama Aftersun (2022), an unavoidable forerunner. But Romvari bends the time-hopping, fourth wall-breaking impulses of that film even further, not just reenacting the past but unsettling and transmuting it in order to see this past—and her brother—anew. The house becomes a stage for Jeremy’s escalating misbehaviors. He lies supine on the porch like a corpse for hours on end, arrives home in handcuffs with a police escort after getting caught shoplifting, and gashes his wrist when he puts his arm through a glass window in the dead of night. When Jeremy creeps along the house’s gable roof in another scene, what proves more unnerving than the prospect of his falling is the pleased smirk that he offers his pleading parents, as if proud to hold them prisoner to his chaos.

Incidents like these send both of them, but particularly his mother, through a rotating door of interactions with doctors, psychologists, social workers, and law enforcement, who only seem to create more confusion, pulling them down a sinkhole of reckless exploits, punitive measures, unconfirmed disorders, and life-draining despair. Finally, a representative from social services pays a visit to the house and recommends that Jeremy be voluntarily placed with a foster family. After much indecision, his mother consents and later agonizes over the decision on the phone. But there is someone surprising reassuring her on the other end of the line: a curly-haired adult woman sitting in a cozy apartment, speaking into an iPhone.

This is the present-day Sasha (Amy Zimmer), who both is and isn’t Romvari. She, too, is a filmmaker, a fact we learn as we are relocated to a conference room where she assembles and records a panel of social workers as they retrospectively examine Jeremy’s behavioral issues and muse on how her family’s thwarted attempts to help might have been bolstered by modern knowledge and practices. It is at this point that Romvari entirely upends our expectations, not so much maneuvering between the past and the present as establishing a liminal space where the traumas and uncertainties of the past reside keenly and mutably in the here and now. With Blue Heron, Romvari serves as the architect, constructor, and inhabitant of her own memory palace. As Sasha returns to the home of her childhood, she encounters her mother and father, her brothers, and herself unchanged from when we last encountered them. Through reenactment, Romvari holds an impossible intervention between daughter and parents, the former’s cautionary monologue unleashing a perpetual cycle of what-ifs. What if Jeremy had found the aid he required? What if her parents had summoned the self-preservation to give up searching for the assistance that was never to come? Perhaps all unhappy families are alike in their pattern of sorry speculation, their penchant for raising hypothetical questions without answers; they are held captive by the grim comprehension that things could have been done differently. Their gaze is persistently trained backwards.

It is enough that Romvari’s film inspires such solemn and rigorous meditation, enacted by performers working in tandem with a trusting and intuitive director. Romvari draws an especially graceful and deeply shaded performance from the Romanian-born Réti, the piercing, playful, and immensely sympathetic standout in an instantly credible ensemble of actors. But Blue Heron also announces its maker as a self-assured stylist who maintains narrative clarity while engendering a bracing disorientation on visual and sonic planes. Working again with the talented cinematographer Maya Bankovic, Romvari alights on unexpected sights that assume an eldritch power: a couple’s twinned reflections in the swirling glass frame of their living room mirror, neglected potato pancakes burning in a cast-iron skillet, the empty, fluorescent-lit hallways of an office space that could be anywhere and nowhere. These images linger, as do the jolting sensations of the sound design: at one point, the heightened thwack of a basketball ricocheting off the side of a house brings to mind nothing so much as the “rumble from the core of the earth” in Memoria (2021).

Of course, the source of this ruckus is Jeremy. And yet Romvari’s meta-segue suggests that we are witnessing the warning signs of a young man’s decline, rather than its exceedingly harrowing episodes and woeful outcomes. The fuller history remains deliberately elusive, the extremity of Jeremy’s disobedience and his loved ones’ grief more often verbalized than depicted outright. One of the most chilling details emerges during a Zoom conversation between Zimmer and a real-life support worker named Bonnie Murrell, who knew Romvari’s eldest brother and reveals that he stowed gasoline in his room, should he choose to make good on a recurring threat to burn the house down with everyone inside.

It is a struggle to summon up untroubled memories of a brother who tapped his family’s patience and vitality with vampiric rapacity; to not prioritize the residual anger of the aggrieved and willfully remember a sibling’s love of maps, bursts of clownlike whimsy, and capacity for tenderness; to allow him all of his dimensions despite the bitter regrets and destabilizing bouts of anguish that are the inheritance of the bereaved, though not its sum total. In one scene, young Sasha and her father watch with bemused curiosity as Jeremy coats his brothers with a cascade of powdered sugar. Given all that we have seen of Jeremy thus far, this moment of spontaneous levity could beggar belief. But in the midst of sorrow and strife, there it is.

Sophy Romvari’s astonishingly assured feature debut, Blue Heron, begins with a confession: “I struggle now to remember much of my childhood.” The words are Sasha’s, a young woman trying to piece those memories back together. Like Romvari, she is a Canadian-born daughter of Hungarian immigrants who moved to suburban Vancouver in the 1990s; also like the writer-director, she lost her older brother to a mental illness and is still grappling with the tragedy. Such autobiographical echoes are nothing novel for Romvari, whose previous shorts were all fueled by a desire to unearth and make peace with her own family history. Grandma’s House (2019) sent the director to Budapest to locate traces of her late grandmother in the woman’s empty flat; Remembrance of József Romvári (2020) stitched together a tribute to her grandfather, a production designer, through archival footage and photos; in Still Processing (2020), Romvari teared up while opening a treasure trove of previously unseen family mementos.

Blue Heron doubles as another personal archaeology, though Romvari here recruits two actresses as her stand-in: Eylul Guven plays eight-year-old Sasha, and Amy Zimmer her adult version. The film is a diptych, the first part concerned with young Sasha’s attempts to settle in the new turf, as well her family’s struggles with her stepbrother Jeremy (Edik Beddoes), a laconic teenager with a history of self-destructive tantrums. The boy’s precise condition is something Romvari never spells out, and her film is too compassionate to make a spectacle out of him. Jeremy remains a mystery, even after Blue Heron abandons its coming-of-age trappings to become something else entirely, catapulting us several years into the future to follow thirtysomething Sasha, now a director trying to make a film to help process her brother’s death.

Filmmaking as therapy is another prominent motif in Romvari’s oeuvre, but what’s especially remarkable about Blue Heron is the way its form literalizes the impossibility to fully remember those days. Shot by Maya Bankovic, the film is seen and told from Sasha’s perspective; time and again, the camera lingers outside windows and door frames, with dramatic zooms pushing in on the rooms the girl is barred from. Romvari makes up for those gaps with a near forensic attention to the myriad details of Sasha’s childhood—all the sounds, clothes, toys, and TV programs of her youth—and there are moments when the camera seems to move like a dowser’s rod, scanning those textures for answers. That adult Sasha finds none doesn’t stop Romvari from granting her some catharsis. As Blue Heron wraps, past and present magically intersect, an epilogue that’s all the more poignant for the emotional restraint the film embodies throughout.

I met Romvari the day after Blue Heron premiered in Locarno last August; we spoke about filmmaking as a means to heal, the ethical dimensions of digging up private family stories, and the ways in which technology can help rescue those memoriesfrom oblivion.

Reverse Shot: I’m happy I got to revisit your shorts in preparation for Blue Heron, because your debut feature strikes me as the culmination of a long and ongoing journey straddling fiction and personal history.

Sophy Romvari: You're right: Still Processing was already a culmination of some kind, and Blue Heron definitely is one, too. I made shorts for quite a while, and I think I was trying to find my voice through them. But this feature is much more exemplary of what I feel. This is my voice now. Whereas with the shorts I was experimenting a lot more and trying to find ways to get a point across quickly and efficiently. They were great lessons, and they all helped me hone my instincts, which made this film the most intentional thing I've ever made. But they were not as aesthetically driven as Blue Heron is. I find this film to be much truer to how I want my work to feel and look.

RS: Was there a specific image or memory that triggered the whole story in motion?

SR: To be honest, I think of Blue Heron as the origin story of all my films and life. My previous works were all trying to process things that happened relatively more recently, and Blue Heron in a way is what led to all those things. My brother is the beginning of our family’s stories. I tried to cover a lot of ground here: his story, my family’s, and the reflection of that now… I knew that this was a period of my life that I really wanted to explore, but I had a lot of difficulty remembering it, and I was really interested in trying to uncover and unpack that through cinema.

RS: How much of Blue Heron was scripted, and how much was improvised? I’m thinking about the scene where adult Sasha sits down with the social workers: their interactions feel so natural it’s hard to imagine them as written out beforehand.

SR: It was actually very important to me that the film was structured and scripted as much as possible prior to the shoot. I started writing the script in 2021 and was determined to understand what the film was before we went on set, because to make a feature is such a privilege, and I really wanted to understand what my intentions were. I didn't want to find out in the edit, or to fix things in postproduction or whatever. I wanted to know what the structure was. And I think the structure is what is interesting about the film. Had it just been a coming-of-age drama, had I continued with that past the halfway point, I don't know that I could have gotten much more out of it. It’s the split that I was really interested in exploring—these two perspectives, Sasha going back. That was very intentionally written. Even the scene with the social workers. I wrote what I imagined they would be saying because I’d done so much research beforehand. I’d spoken to a psychologist who focuses on siblings of people who grew up with severe mental disorders, on the impact of having been raised in that environment. I did a lot of academic research, and generally understood what was going to be said, which in a nutshell was: we still don’t have good answers. Basically, what you see in the film was already outlined and scripted. I had also shot a test version of that sequence with real social workers in which I played the lead character. All of this because I wanted to make sure the scene wasn’t just like this meandering, docu-style thing. In the end we shot with the social workers for three hours; it’s a six-minute scene so we had to boil it down to the essentials. And to have Amy play that part was such a brave challenge.

RS: Early into Still Processing, you use a subtitle to deliver what might well go down as the short’s tagline: “There are things that cannot be said aloud.” I kept thinking about those words all through Blue Heron. I was wondering about the ethical dilemmas you must have wrestled with as you worked on this new project.

SR: Still Processing was a very long deliberation between myself and my parents. I had begun my master's with my thesis project already outlined, but as I say in the short, it took a long time for my parents to understand what my intentions were. I think they felt a lot of guilt and blame and judgment over what happened; losing a child is the worst possible thing someone can go through. I’m not sure they understood how I could make a film without it being about that. But when I finally showed it to them they realized I wasn’t trying to expose anyone. If anything, the film was something closer to a memorial; it was a gesture of love towards my parents and brothers. I just wanted to acknowledge our experience. And I think I gained a lot of trust from them through the process, and that trust has granted me some degree of artistic freedom. My parents are both very creative people and huge inspirations behind the style of this movie. The cinematography and the naturalism of the performances—these are things I learned through their taste. But Blue Heron was not made in collaboration with them. They did not see the script, for one thing—there were strict boundaries around this. I flew to Vancouver to show them the final cut, and that was the first time they saw it. They were very, very moved.

RS: You mentioned you wanted to avoid turning the film into some kind of meandering, documentary-adjacent project, but there are moments in Blue Heron where your observational approach and the naturalism you draw from your actors’ performances nudge the film in that direction. What attracts you about this liminal area between documentary and fiction? And how do you feel about these labels being applied to your work?

SR: I hate all those terms! [Laughs] We actually decided not to label the film as some docu-fiction hybrid here on the festival circuit because I’d much rather allow people to imagine what it might be for themselves. It’s not my job to pigeonhole it in any way. I think that documentary, much like fiction, can be very contrived and controlled. All I do is use some documentary methods to create an environment in which you can solicit naturalistic performances. And these social workers understood the assignment. My producer, Sara Wylie, had interviewed each of them individually. She told them the background story—my family’s case, basically—about my work as a filmmaker, and how this project was hoping to uncover what my family had gone through. And they understood that this was like a role play. I think we underestimate how easily people can throw themselves into a new environment. So we gathered them all in a room—my film undergrad staff room!—and Amy conducted the conversation. I knew that the best way to get naturalistic performances from the social workers was to have them play themselves. And I wanted the information that they provided to be true and honest as opposed to just scripted. I wanted it to be based on their professional experience. Because I think Blue Heron lives and dies on the authenticity of what can and cannot be done in a situation like this. If I just went, “Oh, I did the research, nothing can be done to help Jeremy, I'm just gonna script that,” I don't think it would have had the same impact as actually hearing professionals address those issues. It was sort of like obtaining an admission from a societal structure that we all rely on. And I wanted it to come from them, and to be somewhat held accountable as a society. As if his fate was a structural flaw, basically.

RS: Was there ever a moment when you thought you might play Sasha yourself? You’d already starred in Still Processing and several of your previous shorts.

SR: Well, Still Processing was my thesis film. And the central question there was, can you use filmmaking as a means of processing trauma? And as the traumatized person, the bereaved, I was using myself as a conduit for that academic experiment. That’s something I’d really like to teach eventually—this idea of using filmmaking as a sort of acknowledgment of grief or trauma. I think it's very powerful in its ability to allow you to accept different realities, to reflect back your own and have other people reflect on it, too. I used myself as that conduit because I felt comfortable with exploiting myself that way. The whole concept of the movie was me seeing those photographs for the first time, so I just genuinely allowed that to be what it was. And if I was able to pull it off it’s because I grew up with a camera around me all the time. But I think it does rub up against a lot of people’s willingness to accept that authenticity. I know a lot of people are like, “Why would you put a camera on yourself to cry?” I understand that’s uncomfortable for some people to witness, and I don't begrudge that as a response. But I know my intentions; I know that what I was trying to depict was an authentic experience. It was something that I just needed to do, that I wanted to do, for artistic but also emotional reasons. And when it came to Blue Heron, I also just really wanted to direct, to be honest. If I love this movie so much that’s in big part because I’m not watching myself. I could have been in this, but I’m so glad I’m not. I’m not an actor—I have limitations—and I’m so proud of and impressed by Amy’s work. I just think Blue Heron is an exponentially better film with her.

RS: Did you rehearse much with Amy Zimmer?

SR: We kind of Persona-ed! [Laughs] She had to be very vulnerable and open to some unusual work, because she had the most open-ended character and performance given the structure of the social worker conversation. Actually, both social worker conversations, because the woman she speaks with over Zoom in another scene is also a real social worker. That might not be evident in the film, but she was my family’s social worker and followed me as a child. I reconnected with her and caught her up on our lives. Last I saw her, I was about seven or eight; I told her everything that had happened to me since. She was so moved by the project that she agreed to participate in it. And she had this unscripted conversation with Amy, in which she referred to all my family members by character name. Again, people are really willing to go there if you give them a context to role play within. And the authenticity of what she was able to speak to was really important to capture as well. But Amy had to be rehearsed: I gave her lots of family documents, psychological reports. I had a sort of shared journal with her where I uploaded thoughts and videos and voice messages. I even curated a screenings series for her.

RS: What did that include?

SR: I called it Subtle Women Cinema. It was all about women who listen, document, and try to unearth things. There was Justine Triet’s Sybil [2019], Secrets & Lies [1996], Not a Pretty Picture [1976], Domestic Violence [2001], and The Eternal Daughter [2022]. It was like a very small syllabus. She watched those and was able to empathize with the experience by drawing from her own life, too. But Amy’s a sketch comedy actor—she’s worked for Adult Swim, starred in films like Problemista [2023] and Stress Positions [2024]. This is her first dramatic role.

RS: There are so many screens, so many cameras in Blue Heron, with characters zooming in on pictures as if to prod them for answers. What kind of role do these devices play within your family archaeologies?

SR: My dad studied cinematography and has an incredible eye for photographing human faces. He filmed and photographed us all the time; I think I might have seen maybe five percent of the entire family archive. He began with an analog camera, switched to video, and finally began recording on his iPad. It was like a constant documentary. I don’t trust my memory very much; I do a lot of journaling and recording so I can go back and check, because I can often twist my own memories into worst-case scenarios or whatever. It helps me to keep the story straight. And I think photographs, for me, are sort of surrogate for memories. I’m still processing all this. Susan Sontag talked about the death of an image, and how that death plays out in photographs versus video footage, when you might feel like there’s still life and possibility. And I tried to play with that in this film as well—to create these family archives within the film itself, the still photographs and the home video footage. All of which was obviously created. But in terms of the technology, I think the reason you see so many screens is because of this desperate desire to connect, remember, and hold on. A lot of my relationship with my parents has been through digital. I've been long distance from them a lot, and much of it was just talking over Skype—we speak almost every day. I just find technology as a means of connecting to be very useful and dependable. And I'm definitely not one of those filmmakers who's afraid to put iPhones or laptops in their movies; it's just how we communicate and how I feel connection to people.

RS: Speaking of other “intrusions,” I’d be curious to hear more about the films that crop up within your films. In Blue Heron, there’s a scene when Sasha watches His Girl Friday [1940] from her bathtub—but there are lots of similar moments all throughout your filmography, like when Deragh Campbell’s character watches Meet Me in St. Louis [1944] in Let Your Heart Be Light [2016].

SR: That’s all autobiographical: I get a lot of comfort from cinema, and the scene where she’s watching a film while taking a bath, that’s just something I do all the time! His Girl Friday became public domain just last year; it’s one of my favorite movies, so that was very lucky, plus in the clip Rosalind Russell is on this sort of journalistic mission herself: she’s uncovering the truth while trying to find her own place in the world. And I like to put filmmakers into my movies, but have them not just always making films but engaging with film more broadly. My entire worldview was shaped by my cinephilia.

RS: Blue Heron is tethered to Sasha’s imperfect POV. We see the world through her eyes, meaning we don’t have access to the whole picture, and the camera seems to heighten that impossibility, often lingering outside door frames and windows. Hence the dramatic zooms that suggest the girl’s desperate urge to know more. How did you and cinematographer Maya Bankovic arrive at those choices?

SR: Maya and I became one gaze, which I think is really rare… [Pauses]We did a lot of camera and lens tests, and we knew we were searching for this very organic look. We also knew we were never going to move the tripod but still wanted the image to feel dynamic. So these zoom lenses became integral to creating that suspense without the camera ever moving like a dolly. We also knew we were going to shoot digitally, that we weren't going to try and trick people into thinking it was film but would still have a nice texture to it. I’ve referenced Altman as a sort of inspiration—this feels so far away from this work, obviously! But he does use these master shot zoom lenses very efficiently. That was one of the references that we were looking at: this ability to capture so much. It became like a bit of a running challenge for us. How can we fit all this into one shot? The scene at the seaside, for instance, when the kids are sleeping in the car and the mother is on the beach and approaches through the window—we were always trying to find ways to film all that from one position without having to cover everything traditionally.

RS: Did you storyboard a lot?

SR: No, we didn't. We shot-listed and generally knew which lenses we were going to be shooting on, but we did not storyboard.

RS: Could you speak about the music? I was particularly fascinated by the inclusion of Brian Eno’s “An Ending” and Beethoven’s “Piano Concerto No. 5.” They’re both used very widely in cinema, yet here they achieve a beautiful alchemy with the film’s visuals and tone.

SR: I didn't have the songs chosen at the script level, but even at that early stage I knew that music was going to be very important to create this family’s environment. And I knew that every song would be diegetic. All the music you hear in the first half of the film is diegetic: it's always playing from the computer, from the car radio… That was a very important part of my childhood.

But it’s interesting that you should mention those two songs. To be honest, those were both picked by my dear friend and editor Kurt Walker as temp music for the edit. And then we just got completely hooked on them. “An Ending” especially was meant to be temporary, because we both knew it was such a heavy-hitting song. But then for the way we ended up editing—with these cross fades and this sort of temporal space between heaven and earth—it was just so perfect that it was very hard to remove it. Same with Beethoven’s piece. I always warn other filmmakers not to edit with music because you’ll get attached and it’ll be very difficult to withdraw yourself from it. As for the Daniel Johnston song you hear at the end, that was originally supposed to be Laurie Anderson’s “Oh, Superman.” But we could not get the rights. I went through such an unbelievable emotional journey to find the right song for the end of the movie, and I’m honestly so much happier with Daniel Johnston’s—I think it’s perfect: his vulnerability, the lyrics…

RS: Early into Still Processing, you say that it’s taken you three years to finish the film, and that you’re not actually sure it’s finished. Would you say the same about Blue Heron? Or do you think you’ve arrived at a clearer sense of catharsis?

SR: That’s a great question. I think with Still Processing, the title says it all: this is just a work in progress. And I don’t think I would change anything about it now. But when it came out, I was just so anxious to reveal that level of vulnerability that I wondered if I could or should actually release it. But it's out in the world now, and I’m happy it is. Blue Heron, on the other hand, is a hundred percent done. I watched it last night at the premiere and I am happy to say that I wouldn't change anything. Everything is intentional; if anything feels out of place to you, I meant it.

Mad Bills to Pay
Dir. Joel Alfonso Vargas, U.S., Oscilloscope Laboratories

If you live in Crotona Park East and don’t have a car, then one way to get to Johnny’s Reef, a fried seafood place at the southern tip of City Island that’s packed all summer long with Bronxites celebrating graduations or capping off beach days, is to take the 5 train from Freeman Street a few stops to Pelham Parkway/Williamsbridge Road, where you can catch the Bx12 bus and take it to Bruckner Boulevard (US 95), across the Hutchinson River from Pelham Bay Park. From there you’ll take another bus, the Bx29, the only public transit on City Island, via Orchard Beach. It takes a little more than an hour each way, but if track work or traffic holds you up, the Bx29 only runs every 15 minutes during peak times, so you’ll want to budget in some extra waiting time just in case, and if you’re coming back at night, the 5 train doesn’t run south of East 180th St after 9:00 p.m.

So, then: If a 19-year-old from Crotona Park East cannot regularly show up on time to his minimum-wage job at Johnny’s Reef, how immature do you consider him to be? This question, in a sense, is the subject of Mad Bills to Pay, the debut feature by Bronx native Joel Alfonso Vargas, an instant-classic New York Movie and a lively, sophisticated study of the interrelated imperatives of masculinity and money, grounded in the specifics of a Dominican family in an unaffordable city.

The 19-year-old struggling to hold down a job at Johnny’s Reef is Rico (Juan Collado), who begins the film with a less reliable but more entrepreneurial gig, selling nutcrackers—head-splitting home-mixed blends of sugary fruit drinks and hard alcohol—on Orchard Beach, forcing his cooler through the sand and shouting out his wares: Pikachu Lemonhead, Laguna Beach, $10 for one, $15 for two, $25 for three. He lives with his mother. Andrea (Yohanna Florentino), a healthcare worker who keeps demanding hours, and his 16-year-old sister, Sally (Nathaly Navarro), in a house whose walls are mostly bare save for black electrical cords snaking every which way. Early in the film, Sally is grounded for attending a party, but the screaming mother-daughter fight is shortly resolved, in an ensuing scene, into a tender celebration of Andrea’s birthday—mom is newly 40, with no man in her life, and the suggestive math suggests one reason for her and Sally’s tense relationship.

Having been the one to drag his sister home from the party, and joined his mother in ganging up on Sally for her racy taste in clothes and dangerous taste in company, Rico is equally, aggressively protective of his sister's sexual innocence, though he knows the score for different reasons. Soon after, Rico finally picks up the phone call he’s been ducking all morning and duly relays the news to his mother and sister: He’s going to be a father. “It’s Destiny,” he says. “Destiny who?” asks Sally.

Specifically, Rico has knocked up 16-year-old Destiny Quinones (Destiny Checo), who, having been kicked out of her own house, shows up at Andrea’s in an oversized bootleg Aaliyah t-shirt and moves into Rico’s bedroom, squeezing in past the open drawers and stacks of shoeboxes (there’s no evident room for a crib). Rico chatted her up on the beach, and incredulous Sally knows her from school, where Destiny sits near the wall in the cafeteria. Meek and sullen, shrinking herself to be as small as possible at dinner with her new family, Destiny was surely vulnerable to Rico’s attention, and, at least initially, she’s swept up by his bravado as an impending dad.

Rico’s father being absent, he is initially effusive about stepping into manhood; his hard-sell charm, honed hawking bootleg cocktails on the beach, serves him as he officiously swaps out Destiny’s breakfast cereal for something less sugary, and hand-waves away her concerns with assurances that he’ll take care of everything. Destiny, so entirely lacking in self-confidence, is eventually forced to grow up simply through her disappointment and frustration in Rico, who, it becomes clear, cannot tell the difference between a dream and a plan. He’ll get a car, they’ll get their own place; she doesn’t need to worry about anything, they have time to figure it all out. As with his repeated proclamations that the baby will surely be a boy, he defers all specifics with magical thinking.

When soft-spoken Destiny expresses that she might want to get an abortion, Rico simply shoots her down with a “Bro, seriously?” It’s emasculating, her suggestion that he’s not ready for this; as it’s emasculating when it turns out that his and Destiny’s mothers are resilient, competent, and better at handling the practicalities of planning than he is. Another big fight is sparked by his insistence that he doesn’t want his baby to be vaccinated, to the shock of Destiny and the horror of Andrea, who’s in and out of scrubs the whole movie. (Asked how the child will be able to go to school, Rico invokes charter schools, noting that they can also fire their teachers much easier.) He offers no justification, well-sourced or otherwise, for his anti-vax beliefs, which are incoherent but make a certain kind of emotional sense: there’s no dignity, it seems, in doing what you’re told, in simply submitting to the instructions of the experts who know better than you. Vargas shot the film in 2023, but one wonders if Rico was one of the many young Hispanic men in the Bronx who swung to Trump in 2024 because they identified with his oppositional brazenness and got a vicarious charge of agency from it, a brief glimpse of a life lived with real scope.

Collado has raggedy braids, sharp features, and a soft body; he gives Rico a pouty devilry and a half-faded, half-cranky weariness. He’s both immature and prematurely aged, and his options are foreclosing rapidly. His new responsibilities mean it’s time to “man down,” as an acquaintance advises him—not “man up.” His reward at the end of a day mopping toilets at Johnny’s Reef is a small drink at the bar at work, which, with a punishing commute looming and a family waiting, soon turns into another drink, and another. Rico is right, to a certain extent, to resist the indignities of labor under late capitalism at a time when upward social mobility seems ever more a mirage, but he’s also a staggering drunk. Having gathered his rosebuds and passed out in his own doorway with his keys in the lock, Rico on one occasion has to be roused the following morning by his mother, who has eaten far more shit, not least from him, for far longer, but will not be late to her own job. For all the good that’s done her.

Vargas wisely makes no effort to disentangle individual and systemic causes for Rico’s troubles, a distinction that flummoxes Andrea and Destiny, too, especially after Rico is arrested for fare evasion. He’s also roughed up, along with the pregnant and visibly teenaged Destiny, by an aggro cop—ACAB, it goes without saying, but that doesn’t mean your baby mama won’t blame you for making them feel worried and vulnerable, especially if you knew you had outstanding warrants for selling alcohol. Vargas’s deadpan filmmaking rhythm in this scene—a cause-and-effect cut pattern that takes us from a cooly observant long shot of the turnstile jump to a slapstick medium of the arrest—is, as in others, funny in how it unfolds with a logic so ruthless we might even call it carceral.

Shimmering with local color, and attentive to the all-cash accounting of outerboro life, Mad Bills to Pay would seem to slot easily enough into a New York neorealist mode—a genre that encompasses the Photo League poetry of The Little Fugitive, say, and the handheld shake of Laws of Gravity, and at its best (as in those films) takes on a documentary urgency befitting the city's overwhelming humanity. But Vargas's formal choices resist the reflexive assumption that its characters' humble circumstances should be conveyed by an unassuming style. The film is a city symphony, albeit out of tune. The first shot is of the Paradise movie palace on Grand Concourse, a 20th century monument to working-class entertainment that was accessible yet elevated—it was one of the Loew’s Art Deco “Wonder Theaters”—but one that closed in the 1990s after a long surrender to demographic change and economic decline. The atmosphere is humid, with natural light filtered red-orange through ratty blinds, and artificial light shimmering outside a bodega. You never forget where you are—or lose track of the larger forces shaping it. Eyebrow-raising pillow shots include a Bronx Community College ad on the side of a bus, the single word “Education” vague but insistent like a magic password, and the armed forces recruitment center on Fordham Road.

Vargas shot the movie in 16 days, expanding on a prizewinning proof-of-concept short also starring Collardo. To cover as many scenes as he did, he took inspiration from Pedro Costa’s locked-off camera and similarly collaborative rehearsal process with nonprofessional actors. His cast is far more voluble than Costa’s regulars, and his palette, achieved with cinematographer Rufai Ajala, swaps Costa’s deep blacks for a vivid array of blues—the rich blues of sea and sky, the almost Kleinish synthetic blue of Rico’s wheeled cooler and the tables at Johnny's Reef, the icy and artificial light blue of a Blue Hawaii nutcracker. He and Ajala shoot in single takes, with the camera usually in the corner of a room.

Especially during screaming fights, the surveillant camera gives Navarro something to play to—she makes outrageous, almost fourth wall–breaking imploring or incredulous faces as her mom drops the hammer on her or Rico pulls something. Sally is the youngest and most camera-conscious character, so it makes sense that the actress playing her is a bit of a scene-stealer. There’s still some ego and self-consciousness in the way that she presents herself to the world—she’s the only one in the movie with pride left to spare, but just give it time. With its title's unconvincing casual posture toward overwhelming financial obligations, Mad Bills to Pay is a coming-of-age narrative which shows that coming of age sometimes means making pragmatic accommodations to cyclical poverty.

Hamlet
Dir. Aneil Karia, U.K./U.S., Vertical Entertainment

Prayers are muttered over a dead man’s body at the foreboding opening of Aneil Karia’s Hamlet. Bewildered with grief, Hamlet (Riz Ahmed) looks to his uncle Claudius (Art Malik) for guidance—he is unfamiliar with the Hindu rituals of death. Almost imperceptibly, Claudius drags a finger across his throat. The gesture hovers uneasily in its double-edged meaning, as Hamlet marks his father's neck with the turmeric-infused yoghurt traditionally used in final purification rituals. The mourners follow suit, marking the sallow skin, before the body slides into the incinerator, its hatch dropping down sharply, like a guillotine.

This somber scene underlines the power of this searing modern-day retelling of Shakespeare’s enduring tragedy. Here, the tale’s royal family is reimagined as a dynasty of South Asian property moguls in present-day London. The first words spoken in the film are in Sanskrit, from the epic wartime poem Bhagavad Gita, which shares resonances with Hamlet—maybe even inspired the story—as it wrestles with the existential question of how to live one’s life meaningfully.

Hamlet had long been a passion project for Ahmed, who encountered the play as a wayward teenager when it was prescribed to him by his English teacher. He was surprised to find so much cultural resonance in it, from questions of blood debt to family duty, even the fact that Hamlet cannot marry his beloved Ophelia because she is from the wrong family. He found the perfect collaborator in Michael Lesslie, a playwright who won acclaim in 2011 for his wry stage play Prince of Denmark, a “prelude” to Hamlet that imagines the titular prince as a frustrated teenager who rejects his father’s bloodlust. Working with Ahmed, screenwriter Lesslie reimagines Hamlet in a present-day multicultural London that allows for new layers to emerge: questions of agency and belonging in a society that, as you come of age, reveals itself to be more sinister than you had grown up thinking. The process took 13 years, Karia joining the production a decade into direct the film. The story is stripped down to a taut psychological unraveling, creating a charged first-person Hamlet, tightly wound around Ahmed's angst-filled, visceral performance. Rebuffing the idea that “Shakespeare isn’t for us,” their retelling also retains the Shakespearean verse.

Shortly after learning of his mother's betrothal to his uncle Claudius, Hamlet stumbles out of the jagged lights of a drug-fueled nightclub into the concrete jungle of the metropolitan night. Alone and disoriented, he encounters the ghost of his deceased father, who addresses him in Hindi. Skimming metaphor from the surface of the father-son interaction, Lesslie’s script channels the complex bonds of first- and second-generation immigrants into the well-known words of the original text—that Hamlet's responses are less verbose intimates respect of one's elders, the words being uttered in Hindi infuse them with intimacy, underlines the discomfort of living in between cultures, and the way this is experienced differently by different generations.

The film’s casting is inspired: the expanded roles of Gertrude (Sheba Chaddha) and Ophelia (Morfydd Clark) are particularly rich. Bollywood royalty Chaddha brings elegance to Gertrude, whose discreet attentiveness to Hamlet complicates the mother-son relationship of the original text. With no Horatio in the mix, Ophelia is Hamlet’s closest friend, not merely his love interest, making their lost love and wider family entanglements more devastating. Similarly, the roles of Hamlet’s friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are amalgamated into Laertes (Joe Alwyn) so that he is not merely a rival but also a friend. His betrayal, therefore, cuts even deeper, as it entwines with that of his father Polonius (a smarmy Timothy Spall), who maintains allegiance to Claudis’s callous and violent greed—the symbol of capitalism and empire, rotten and ruthless to the core.

Karia and Ahmed had previously collaborated on The Long Goodbye, a music video for Ahmed’s track “Where You From,” which went on to win an Oscar for Best Live Action Short Film in 2022—a first for a music video. The film is bewilderingly direct, first easing you into the familiar familial rhythms of joy and bickering as a South Asian family prepares for a wedding – Ahmed’s character plays with his younger brother, images of unrest flicker on the TV in the background; upstairs, girls giggle as they paint the nails of their hennaed hands, the bride-to-be confesses to having invited “James” to her wedding to shrieks of thrilled disbelief by her cousins—before gears shift into the absolute horror of a gratuitous racist attack against the family. The neighbors watch on as the women are bundled into black vans, and the men summarily executed with a gunshot to the back of the head. Ahmed is shot in the back as he runs to rescue his brother; from the ground, having seen his family kidnapped and murdered, he spits lyrics through gritted teeth.

They ever ask you, "Where you from?"
Like, "Where you really from?"
The question seems simple, but the answer's kinda long
I could tell 'em Wembley, but I don't think that's what they want
But I don't wanna tell 'em more, 'cause anything I say is wrong
Britain's where I'm born, and I love a cup of tea and that
But tea ain't from Britain it's from where my DNA is at.

Ahmed’s rhymes are satisfyingly witty, but Karia’s storytelling brings a visceral quality to their horror. The film feels like a warning—loud, clear, sharp—that racism is deadly. Hamlet, too, holds this knowledge close and recontextualizes the legendary soliloquy, which sits at the very heart of the film. Having escaped the wedding, Hamlet recites “to be or not to be…” in the huis clos of a car speeding down the motorway; hands lifted from the wheel, eyes closed, he expresses the turbulence of his mind moments before dodging the truck he was driving straight into. This decisive move claims action as the measure of a life. The scene’s propulsion causes Hamlet to return to the wedding with a purpose.

He rejoins the celebrations via the dancers’ dressing room, having come to understand the extent to which his family’s fortune is built on blood. Draping himself in a sequined veil, a smear of vermillion on his lips, he wanders into the wedding hall defiant with the power of someone who has nothing left to lose. He mocks the newlyweds—his mother and uncle—by giving an awkward introduction to the dancers, who snake out under a sickly orange light. The astonishing ensuing dance scene, devised by the acclaimed contemporary choreographer Akram Khan, crescendos into a river of blood, mirroring the rotten history of his generational wealth. Khan had been asked to imagine a scene that would “turn the dream wedding into a nightmare” (reminiscent of The Long Goodbye); because dance and performance are a customary part of South Asian weddings, the play-within-the-play conceit in the source text is absolutely fitting. This pleasing conjunction echoes an earlier scene in which the vibrant wedding procession marches to the rousing tempo and fanfare of drummers and performers approaching a drab West London hotel; the scene quietly underlines how migrant cultures have not merely built Great Britain, they give it life.

Such fertile juxtapositions speak powerfully to our conflicted present; as Hamlet questions his own role in his family’s corruption, he is moved to act in a way that gives his inevitable death meaning. In this adaptation Gertrude’s words to her son, “All that lives must die, passing through nature to eternity” are not a pacifying philosophy but a reminder of our responsibility to the world we live in—broken and violent as it is. So how are you going to change the status quo? That is the question.

The Drama
Dir. Kristoffer Borgli, U.S., A24

As the old saying goes, per Griffith and Godard, all you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun. The Drama, Kristoffer Borgli’s latest edgy comic confection, riffs on this dictum with a morbid and determined frequency. Late in the film, Charlie Thompson (Robert Pattinson), a museum curator, finds a photobook on his desk titled “Brainrot,” which contains images of bikini-clad women posing with assault weapons. To the frazzled husband-to-be, whose wedding to Emma Harwood (Zendaya) is just a few days away, this risible catalogue is alarmingly pertinent; earlier that week, his fiancée unexpectedly divulged that when she was 15, she thoroughly planned and nearly carried out a school shooting. He’s been in crisis mode ever since.

This inciting incident enables all manner of eccentric gags throughout The Drama, but little else. As with Borgli’s cancel culture satire Dream Scenario (2023), a high-concept hook is aimed at a pressure point in the American zeitgeist and struggles to find purchase. In the aftermath of her disastrous overshare, Charlie interrogates Emma for details, but Borgli keeps them vague: stray, context-free instances of bullying from her classmates are shown via flashback, and we watch her teen doppelgänger pose in mirrors and webcams with her father’s rifle. In the present, Charlie hallucinates both versions of Emma hoisting the weapon during a skin-crawling trial run of their wedding portraits. (Emma transforming into her teenage self next to her harried fiancé is a recurring, jokey abstraction that, given Borgli’s recently unearthed essay about dating a 16-year-old in his late twenties, has a very different meaning now.)

Tinged with Borgli’s usual absurdist zest, Charlie’s paranoia gives the film its forward velocity as we’re edged closer and closer to the couple’s impending nuptials. Sparks fly, loyalties crumble, and violence hangs in the air, but through it all, The Drama is a resolute farce. Its characters squirm and squabble for our amusement, ostensibly laying bare the foibles and frailties of human relations in a world gone mad. Performance and fantasy, calling cards for the ever-trolling Norwegian filmmaker, are abundant here; Emma’s knack for roleplay and Charlie’s active imagination are a match made in hell, casting her sincerity in a hopelessly sinister light.

The film seems to hinge upon the difference between holding a weapon and actually using it; the one time a gun actually fires on screen is when the teenaged Emma permanently loses hearing in her right ear during target practice (this disability figures prominently in the mechanics of Borgli’s script). The malcontent youth doesn’t carry out the murder spree because someone beats her to the punch, shooting up a local mall and killing one of her classmates. More flashbacks show us how easily she’s lured into activism for gun control, an irony that Charlie likens to Louis Malle’s Lacombe, Lucien (1974), in which a man is rejected from the French resistance and joins the Nazis instead. What motivates Emma is never quite clear; she admits in voiceover that she was mostly “caught up in the aesthetics” of mass shootings.

It’s tempting to say the same of Borgli as well, but The Drama is obsessed with gun violence as a cultural concept, stripped of content and context; it is distinctly European in this bemused detachment from the social ill at hand, and resolutely aligned with the perspective of Pattinson’s flailing Englishman. A riskier film like Gus Van Sant’s Elephant (2003) examines and, more riskily, emulates the insidious iconographies of sadistic bloodshed, but The Drama mostly shies away from them, skirting any genuinely discomfiting image, idea, or dynamic along the way. Issues of race, gun culture, disability, and gender are gestured toward in passing but never meaningfully dramatized or satirized, merely garnishing Borgli’s banquet of food for thought. The film’s apparent aim is to engage with the trickle-down effect of such unthinkable phenomena to the behaviors and biases of everyday life, but it ignores the deeper facets of its crudely sketched characters. The delusions and doubts of its central pair are glibly italicized, their predicament drained of any real physical or emotional danger (when blood is finally spilt, it’s from the least consequential perpetrator).

In a certain light, these oversights are features of the film’s design; The Drama seems deliberate and unapologetic in its resolve to be “about” absolutely nothing. As the characters project their wildest impulses and imaginations onto the situation, the audience is invited to ascribe whatever they like onto the film’s skeletal frame, and thus do Borgli’s work for him. Like Dream Scenario, itis an exceedingly and elaborately funny movie that flattens its world and hollows out its characters one joke at a time. It’s all well and good to operate in two dimensions––at least it’s a worldview––but both of these films attempt to reestablish a sense of humanity in their final passages, building to moments loosely resembling pathos that come too little too late.

Borgli keeps his characters at a distance from the get-go. We speed-run through Charlie and Emma’s relationship as they each convey its milestones to their gendered confidantes––best man Mike (Mamoudou Athie) and maid of honor Rachel (Alana Haim), a married couple themselves––in preparation for the wedding speeches. It’s one of many clever devices in Borgli’s screenplay, compressing the history of a partnership, establishing how they present themselves to an audience, and laying the groundwork for the film’s litany of subjective flourishes. Through this framing device, we are shown their bumbling, creepy meet-cute; their first date, when Charlie quickly admits to his prior stalkerish impulse and ends up providing Emma with a turn-on; and their first kiss, which transpires between two locked doors with literal alarm bells blaring as a nighttime entry to Charlie’s workplace goes awry. More flashes of intimacy are staged and cut with a similarly ironic detachment. The relationship is built upon faulty foundations before our very eyes, and we don’t believe in this couple for even a second––we are already waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Emma’s confession emerges, around the 20-minute mark, during a menu tasting with Mike and Rachel, teased out to agonizing length as the quartet play a drunken game in which they each share the worst thing they’ve ever done. Mike admits to using an ex-girlfriend as a human shield against an aggressive canine, and Rachel admits to having once locked a child, implied to have been mentally disabled, in the closet of an abandoned RV and leaving him there overnight (she insists they “must have found him”). Charlie, predictably, cops out, grasping for the memory of cyber bullying someone “really badly.” Then Emma proceeds to suck the air out of the room. Rachel, whose cousin was disabled in a mass shooting, is especially appalled. Despite being no angel herself, Rachel becomes the main antagonizing force for the couple, disrupting Charlie’s convoluted attempts to rationalize Emma’s past and present behaviors just as much as he does himself.

Haim’s splenetic, pugnacious performance is an unmistakable highlight in a film whose expressive cast is working overtime. Pattinson, allowed his natural British accent, ably articulates the ineffectuality that Borgli seems to favor in his pathetic leading men. Zendaya, freed from the vocal tics that stifle her big dramatic roles in projects with Sam Levinson and Denis Villeneuve, relishes the chance to be batty, awkward, and occasionally menacing. Athie and Hailey Benton-Gates, as Charlie’s co-worker Misha, do hilarious work on the sidelines. The film’s pleasures begin and end with watching these performers bounce off of each other. When we are asked to care in the final stretch, however, Borgli’s anything-for-a-gag sensibility and empty-calories style––all snappy movements and arch tableaux––betray him. Whether he’s aiming for a twisted treatise on leaps of faith or prankishly satirizing the delusions that inform them, the film concludes with a preordained thud.

Despite its transparent (and already successful) attempts to court controversy, The Drama goes down remarkably easy. Its characters’ wrongdoings are obscured and cushioned, embodied with enough conviction to distract from all the punches pulled. It’s pressurized and stressful, but still offers plenty of release valves. The film’s spring-loaded skittishness is the main attraction, its emptiness the primary subject. The Drama is a comedy of manners where every laugh wears you down, a provocation where every offense flatters the man pushing your buttons.

In RoboCop 2 (1990), a messianic drug lord, biblically named Cain (Tom Noonan), is inundating the streets of Old Detroit—or the dilapidated, sordid mess, rife with violence, that is left of it—with an intensely addicting, brain-rotting drug called “nuke.” The sanguineous fluid injected into the neck offers “paradise”—one made in America. RoboCop (Peter Weller), the cyborg with the ineradicable soul, wants to stop him. But Omni Consumer Products, or OCP, which owns the cops and will soon own the whole city, is trying, and succeeding, to push cops out of the picture by sowing discord and spurring a police strike. They want Old Detroit to burn. The Old Man (Dan O’Herlihy), with his pallid hair belying the black of his heart, is waiting for his crack team of scientists to make Cain into a new RoboCop, imaginatively named RoboCop 2: scarier and more loyal to the company—more dangerous to the city it’s/he’s purportedly intended to protect—than Alex Murphy. Who better to provide the brain and soul of a law-enforcing, killing machine than a sociopathic drug lord with a God complex?

Paul Verhoeven's 1987 RoboCop was a sardonic lampoon of Reagan-era greed, gaudiness, and America's predilection for the amoral use of technology; a sincere rumination on identity and what it is that makes a human human; and, of course, a kick-ass action flick both rooted in, and a rebuff of, ’80s macho man action. It did not need a sequel, especially without Verhoeven and writers Michael Miner and Edward Neumeier. But it was inevitable that the studio would want to put one out after the original's $50 million-plus box office on a relatively humble budget. The sequel, from The Empire Strikes Back director Irvin Kershner, is undoubtedly inferior in most measures and not well-liked by critics or moviegoers—it is, as penned by Frank Miller, pulpy, lurid, and, in Kershner’s hands, Looney Tunes–silly, complete with slapstick sound effects. Yet RoboCop 2 remains fascinating for several reasons, one being the trashy and provocative continuation of the original's existential ruminations on what makes a man a man in an era of machinery, and, most significantly, the unprecedented marriage of traditional and groundbreaking special effects.

In 1985, Young Sherlock Holmes featured the first photo-realistic CG character animated in a live-action background, courtesy of Lucasfilm, a stained-glass window medieval knight come to life, totaling ten seconds of screen time, RoboCop 2’s “digital” Cain face represented, to that point, the boldest leap forward, and brought the technology—its possibilities and its corruptive powers—to a wide, mainstream audience. Cain's digital face, an ugly, malformed bastard of a human visage, is purposefully glitchy in a way redolent of Max Headroom. Our first glimpse of it is after a braggadocious slaughter of his former heavies and one child, when the screen slides out of the metal-armored “head” of the infernal RoboCop 2; set before a background the color of a light-polluted sky—or, as William Gibson might say, television tuned to a dead channel—it proceeds to gawk lecherously at his former squeeze. Moments later, he grows irate, seemingly arbitrarily, the virulent tantrum of an addict in need, and squelches her head with his industrial claw, ignobly dropping her limp carcass on the floor and, everyone now dead, stomping off for more nuke. The war machine on drugs.

Trey Stokes was the puppeteer for Cain’s/RoboCop 2’s digital face. Stokes, who had two years earlier done VFX on the remake of genre film master Chuck Russell’s technically skilled remake of The Blob, helped advance the medium of CG animation with Mike the Talking Head, a character used for semi-improvised live theater. They utilized a new program called Perform to turn the actor’s face into the live-animated Mike, modeled after host Mike Gribble. The process involved 256,000 points of data and myriad polygons to create shadows. The mouth had to be synced up for each phoneme.

Then they got the job of a lifetime. “The Talking Head team,” Stokes called it, for Cain/RoboCop 2 comprised Greg Ercolano, who did the data for Cain’s death face, Ken Cope, and J. Walt Adamczyk. Cope modeled, and Greg and J. Walt wrote code, while Sally Syberg and Anne Adams produced. They worked off renowned animator and effects supervisor Phil Tippett’s assiduous storyboard plans for the stop-motion, a persnickety process that both helped the animators and made things harder. Stokes and company got a crash course in how CG worked, but [he] couldn’t do any of it. [He] learned to call an exclamation point a ‘bang,’ but that was pretty much it.” The three-axis roll-cage controller manipulated by hand (bringing to mind the Nintendo Power Glove) was synced up to the three axes of Cain's face's rotation. In the middle was a toggle to control the expressive mouth, and for lip syncing, the joystick made “O,” “EE,” “AH,” and “EH” movements using the left hand. The face itself used very few polygons so it could move more smoothly, since Cain only has a face, not a fully formed human-ish head. And because he growls rather than speaks, they were able to bypass some of the more frustrating work involving visual animation and audio recording.

While working on a tight deadline and frugal budget, Stokes said that the crew realized they “shouldn’t approach this like animation, but as performance,” the appeal of a real-time system. According to Stokes, it took five seconds to create a five-second animation. “But ten seconds only took…five more seconds!... [They] let the recording run while [he] tried variations of each shot and even improvised some stuff. That way, Phil [Tippett] could choose a section of performance that worked best, with lots of extra head and tail frames so he could slip the timings however he needed.”

RoboCop 2 offers slightly childish but still intriguing J. G. Ballardian ideas on tech and modernity and humanity's role in the devices and systems it has engendered, whether of noble or nefarious intent. Ballard's notions of the relationship between people and technology, of the effect of advancing science on the human condition, tremble with carnality; he likens our relationship with science and technology to sex, and our attempts to elucidate and explain this relationship to pornography. He sees erotic potential in the inanimate, objects of desire that arouse parts of us intoned only in our solitary moments (or loudly and shamelessly on the internet).

Consider now another argument about the pornography of technology in cinema: David Foster Wallace’s famous claim that Terminator 2 and its ilk are FX porn, a term used disparagingly. RoboCop 2 is FX porn in the Wallace way, some of the best we've ever had, if you dig porn, as well as Ballard—prescient, in both regards, to Terminator 2. Cain/RoboCop 2 rejects his former lover, choosing drugs and murder and the tremendous power of being a machine instead, more attracted to the machine than a hot woman, while Murphy's tragic longing for his wife remains untainted, even though his machine parts have made him physically impotent, however pure of heart and soul. Murphy is the antipode of the characters in Ballard’s Crash, in which the mingling of the mechanical and the human body is lascivious; Murphy is denied love by the machine merged with his body. In many was a junky piece of high-concept, hyperviolent escapism, the film also taps into our very real existential concerns, both modern and timeless, by showing off the destruction of men by machine and machine by men.

OCP sees in the ruin of Old Detroit many sad, easily manipulated, and ultimately disposable denizens they can play, push around, take advantage of; they know that these people want safety, and will support any false promise of it. And they will not be missed when the truth crushes them. Civilized life, Ballard posited, is rooted in myriad illusions and falsities, duplicitous machinations—the unethical use of machines, for example—of con men deceiving whomever they must in their pursuit of power. The tragedy of civilization, and the many tiny and tectonic melancholies caused by it, is that we can see the truth about these charlatans, distributors of pain, and we convince ourselves that it's all a product of our collective imagination.

The benevolence of technology is the modern illusion, because tech is dangerous when used by the wrong men, who always have the means to exert such power. RoboCop represents the evils of new technologies heralded as our savior—with methods used only by corrupt humans. Alex Murphy, on the other hand, represents the very real possibility of humanity's triumph over this perfidy. In both films, Murphy overcomes the strong influence of tech and the whims of its creators and the men who control it all. “I rebel,” Camus wrote, “therefore I exist.” In his battle to do what is right, fighting the powers that be, and the self-interested system that’s created the cruel gadget, Murphy finds meaning for human existence. RoboCop 2, then, is technology's innate potential for evil, and Cain the willing collaboration of men—the damage a man with power will do. It is Murphy who wins in the end, a victory for human decency and rebellion against authority, and probably always will. An enemy we can never beat, and to whom we can never surrender.

*****

While stop-motion is a redoubtable, ageless technology, the groundbreaking effects for Cain’s face show us the acceleration of cooler and scarier technology and its attempted replication of humanity. These eyes, the smile, the scowl—all features not then associated with computers—set the stage for the digital human emulation that is now a defining technique of 21st-century Hollywood, from de-aging to the sacrilegious reincarnations of dead actors, and even pervades our quotidian lives (see face-morphing filters on Instagram). In RoboCop 2, we see Alex Murphy'sreal human face (a puppet, but still believable) exposed, clearly traumatized, in agony as his inchoate mess of a body squirms on the asphalt after Cain has him unceremoniously dismembered by his gang of goons, juxtaposed with Cain's pseudo-human digital face. Practical effects vs “digital,” man vs machine.

In the original film, Tippett got the gig of bringing to life—or ersatz life—the ED 209, a bulky, hulking, clumsy contraption armed to the proverbial teeth, an OCP invention designed for urban pacification, which will make OCP’s executives a lot of cash. The film looks so good thanks in no small part to cinematographer Jost Vocano, who used unusual lighting rigs (which Mark Erwin would swap out for more traditional lighting in the sequel, necessitating an alteration in RoboCop's body color), and Rob Bottin, who would win an Oscar for Verhoeven's Total Recall, and here handled the splattery gore effects with aplomb. But it's Tippett's work that remains most impressive, especially considering the low budget for effects. He consequently had to eschew his own groundbreaking work with Go motion, a style of animation that involves, among other techniques, petroleum jelly smeared on the lens and “bumping” the puppet, ideas stemming from Russian animator Ladislas Starevich's innovative work in the 1920s. Instead, Tippett deftly employed old-fashioned techniques, drawing influence from Ray Harryhausen, progenitor of Dynamation, using rear-screen-composited stop-motion, in which the puppet is animated against a background plate that is advanced a couple of frames at a time.

This technique is efficient, but has drawbacks, such as how the actors cannot cross in front of the puppet, limiting the compositions and depth, and the director's choices of set-ups have to work with the effects, making the puppets and props the focal point of the shot. Consider the introduction of the ED 209: the gargantuan enforcer marches toward the executives sitting around the conference table. The robot moves authoritatively in the foreground, its massive mechanical leg stomping forward at the bottom left of the screen, while the humans are in the background, scrambling backwards in their seats. It's seamless. Verhoeven knows how to direct special effects. (For his skills with CGI-heavy filmmaking, see Hollow Man.)

And yet Tippett later said that the stop-motion in the spectacular climax of the sequel remains the most intricate ever achieved. Watching a berserk behemoth and our human-robot hero grapple and exchange outlandish gunfire and smash each other through ceilings and walls and streets as cops and pedestrians drop in bullet-ravaged heaps (the film, despite its theme of humanity, has little respect for human life), it's hard to disagree. Stokes also opined that stop-motion reached its apogee here and will never be topped: “The stop-motion that Tippett Studio did in RoboCop 2,” he said, “is astounding. In my opinion, Cain is the pinnacle of stop motion as a realistic VFX technique.”

For the grand RoboCop/Cain fisticuffs climax, ridiculous and awesome, old and new technology collide. The Talking Head team would perform and record the puppetry for Cain’s face, then take the shots to another room, where a 35mm movie camera was aimed at a hi-res monitor, shrouded by a black cloth. Each frame was rendered at full resolution on the monitor, about a second per frame; they would then ship the footage to Tippett, who transferred it to Laserdisc and then onto a Sony Watchman that fed into the stop-motion puppet. For close-ups, the life-sized Cain had a regular TV screen built into it, bringing to mind ideas on the use of the boob tube to provoke paranoia and perpetuate disunity.

Murphy’s stalwart vestigial soul resists the allure of technology’s evil applications and that distinctly American amorality. He has an indestructible sense of right and wrong and retains human empathy. Cain the monster-man uses tech to augment his desire for rampant, rampaging destruction, his unending fusillade of bullets shredding everything the camera sees. He causes chaos, which is what we want him to do, glorious, grandiose chaos, as long as he loses at the end. Murphy defeats Cain by removing and smashing his brain—big clenched-fist clubbing, silly and gross, chunks flying, pulverizing it into a pink, goopy, chunky mess of deranged consciousness, the final destruction of a mind poisoned by American-made nuke and lost long ago. The technology is nothing without the man behind it.

Chime / Serpent’s Path
Dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Japan, Janus Films

Kiyoshi Kurosawa studies social contagions—which often manifest in his films through violence, but also sometimes through minor unsettling irrationalities. The lead of his new short Chime, a cooking instructor named Matsuoka (Mutsuo Yoshioka), “catches” a homicidal impulse from a student whose off-putting behavior ramps up until he calmly sinks a knife behind his own ear. As Matsuoka’s behavior spirals into professional self-sabotage and murder, one wonders whether his wife and son’s tics are evidence that they have also caught the virus, or if the wife obsessively crushing discarded cans and the son gormlessly playing video games while fingering a fidget toy are simply symptoms of everyday malaise.

In a review of last year’s Cloud, I wrote that Kurosawa captures the “persistent tinnitus-like hiss in your mind, the background radiation of unease” in contemporary life. That quality is literalized in Chime, since the vector for the violent compulsion (or perhaps its herald) is a sound only the affected can hear. Matusoka’s student is the one who describes it as a chime, but when we hear it through Matsuoka’s perspective, it’s more of a bassy thrum. Rather than self-consciously creepy, the sound is actually somewhat soothing in an ASMR sort of way, lulling the infected to sleepwalk into violent attacks on others or themselves. Grasping for logic is pointless, but it does seem salient that the student stabs himself after Matsuoka instructs the class in slitting bread dough to let air escape, and that Matsuoka later kills a student who asks him to demonstrate carving a chicken. Hearing the chime accelerates the defamiliarization of normal alienation; suddenly, you can’t tell apart different kinds of meat.

Kurosawa’s films tend to observe this kind of context collapse as people, groups, communities, or even the entire world spiral. Think of the seeming imminent apocalypse of Cure, the suggested one of Charisma, or the fully realized one of Pulse. Chime fits this full arc into a mere 45 minutes, demonstrating how finely the director has sharpened his approach. It deftly weaves in details gesturing at the spread of the chime. In one terrifyingly discombobulating scene, Matsuoka’s job interview in a restaurant abruptly veers off course when an unrelated bystander attacks a woman. In an interview with Paula Costa, Kurosawa describes the protagonist’s arc in terms of crossing three lines: of social taboo, personal morality, and his own conscience. Once they’re transgressed, a person is capable of anything—a disquieting prospect.

Chime itself was conceived as a kind of virus, produced by the Japanese blockchain-based platform Roadstead to be distributed as an NFT. There are at present no plans to make the film available online or on home media, though it is fortunately showing in theaters. In the U.S., it is playing on a double bill with the 4K restoration of Kurosawa’s 1998 feature Serpent’s Path, originally made to go direct to video and not previously released here. The movie proves a suitable companion to Chime, as it also tracks the personal degradation inflicted by perpetuating violence. It follows two characters who, at the outset, have reconciled themselves to crossing the legal, moral, and personal lines Kurosawa references. Miyashita (Teruyuki Kagawa), a former yakuza grunt, is out for revenge against his former comrades for the torture and murder of his daughter. Helping him is Nijima (Show Aikawa), who despite being a teacher, is much more adept with the logistics of kidnapping, interrogation, and killing.

Produced on a minuscule budget, Serpent’s Path at first seems appropriately stripped-down thematically, with almost archetypal characters: a vengeance-seeker, his sidekick, and a gallery of anonymous rogues. But their attempts to pursue satisfaction instead mires Miyashita and Nijima in an ever more complicated web of complicities. The first goon they capture immediately names other yakuza as the true culprits, and they in turn implicate others. So too does the crime in question become labyrinthine: not only has one girl been murdered, but there surfaces a whole underground industry of snuff films. The details of the daughter’s death become grislier and more upsetting as they are clarified—Miyashita recites it to his captives as a kind of badass litany, but he’s ill-suited to the role of a righteous punisher, sputtering more with each attempt.

If Chime is an inward spiral with hints of outer chaos, Serpent’s Path is a vortex destroying all in the orbit of its main characters. The film’s most distinct image is of the duo dragging a sleeping-bag-wrapped victim through a field of grass, which suggests the animalistic quality of the title. The killings are brutal but conveyed in a detached, matter-of-fact way that leaves them bereft of the catharsis expected from revenge pictures. The expanding sphere of violence also recontextualizes how we understand both Miyashita and Nijima—the former is not the bystander to his associates’ crimes that he pretended to be, and the latter gradually reveals himself as the true protagonist of the story.

Alongside Cloud and Chime, Kurosawa’s third Japanese release in 2024 was a France-set remake of Serpent’s Path. What’s most intriguing about that film is not the more polished production or the relocation, but how it updates the details of the crimes its characters are reacting to. Now they are no longer fighting mere snuff-film-making yakuza but an Epstein-style conspiracy of European child organ traffickers, a nefarious “circle” within a greater “foundation.” That the rest of the plot fits so well within this framework testifies to how well Kurosawa speaks to the manifold anxieties underlying life in the 21st century.

Kontinental ’25
Dir. Radu Jude, Romania, 1-2 Special

Two years after a white vigilante murdered Jordan Neely on the subway, little has changed for New York City’s homeless population. Rendered killable for being Black and visibly distressed, Neely revealed the brutality of a system in which property is more valuable than the lives of the vulnerable, and whose ruling class would rather disappear the homeless than house them. Even in death, the state deemed Neely worthless, acquitting his murderer of all charges a year later. This case became a flashpoint for the local and national discourse on the homelessness crisis, but there is tragically little unique in the cruelty that Neely experienced. What kind of society simply copes with such regular horror? How can anyone live with the abandonment of so many of their neighbors?

Shot concurrently with his more ostentatious feature this year, Dracula, Kontinental ’25 is Radu Jude’s quiet but piercing meditation on these questions. The film follows a bailiff named Orsolya (Eszter Tompa) as she goes around the rapidly gentrifying city of Cluj desperate to find someone who will alleviate her all-consuming sense of guilt. When we first meet her, she is in the process of evicting a destitute man named Ion (Gabriel Spahiu) from the boiler room of a building set to be demolished by a German company constructing the eponymous Kontinental boutique hotel. Brilliantly, Jude does not open the film with this scene, but with roughly 20 minutes of Ion wandering the city, searching for food, recyclable plastic, and money. And so, by the time Orsolya arrives to execute the eviction notice, we do not think of Ion as symbol or trope but as a fleshed-out human being: he curses at robot dogs downtown, interrupts an open mic to ask if he can borrow money, and pisses on a trash can with a Bitcoin sticker on its side.

But to the state and the corporation that bought the building, he is nothing more than a nuisance to be removed. Surrounded by a terrifying posse of armed and masked gendarmes, Orsolya insists to the bewildered Ion that she is being as humane as possible, a statement that is as twisted as it is somewhat credible. On the one hand, Orsolya convinced the company to delay the eviction and has provided Ion with transportation to a shelter. On the other, she is depriving a man in an already horrific situation of heated housing in a country with famously deadly winters. In what world is Ion supposed to be grateful?

Of course, he isn’t. When Orsolya “kindly” grants him 20 minutes to gather what remains of his possessions, Ion smokes his final cigarette and wordlessly ties a wire around his neck to the radiator, choking himself to death. Jude quickly cuts from this grim sight to a close-up of the eviction notice, which we linger on as we hear the poor man’s final cries of pain. Meanwhile, Orsolya has coffee and pleasant conversation with the gendarmes as they wait for the 20 minutes to pass. Ironically, they too are anxious about their housing situations, asking Orsolya about the quality of life in her suburban enclave on the outskirts of the city. Upon their return to the boiler room, only she seems genuinely distressed by the sight of the lifeless man. The gendarmes quickly accept that there is nothing to be done.

Through this tragedy, Orsolya becomes the reluctant star of the story, spending the rest of the film in desperate search of absolution: from her husband, her mother, her boss, her friend, her former student, her priest—literally anyone who will listen. Though it bears much of the video-essayistic flair of Jude’s recent work, particularly in its careful use of montage to deconstruct Cluj’s cityscape, Kontinental ’25 is a chattier film, and for good reason. Like in much of his oeuvre, Orsolya’s self-involved conversations with her community reveal the barely repressed antagonisms animating Romanian society—from its refusal to reckon with its fascist past, to its unresolved ethno-territorial tensions. But with regards to homelessness, these characters also speak the universal language of a middle class at once terrified of its precarity and unwilling to shake the status quo. As grounded as the film is in the political and economic discontent of Cluj, these conversations could be happening anywhere from New York and Buenos Aires to Istanbul and Johannesburg.

When we learn that Ion used to be a star athlete, but descended into alcoholism and homelessness after an injury, Jude reminds us of the collective vulnerability of all of us who do not belong to the ruling class, affirming the axiom that most of us are closer to being homeless than being millionaires. But admitting as much risks militant class solidarity and sacrifice, an unimaginable development for Orsolya’s orbit. Instead, they all insist that she was “more than humane” and could not have possibly acted differently. She obsessively repeats: “Of course, legally I’m not at fault.” Again, in a twisted sense, both statements are true, especially because if Orsolya had not executed the eviction someone else would have. But that is precisely the folly of her own guilt, her failure to look beyond herself as an individual. She questions whether she should keep doing the job—never if the job should exist at all.

This stifling individualism is also what digs up a latent fascism in virtually all surrounding Orsolya. Her boss mockingly compares her to Oskar Schindler, crying: “If I’d only sold this pin I could have saved one more little kike!” In the lengthiest and most revealing of such conversations, her friend Dorina (Oana Mardare) shamefully confesses her wish that her own homeless neighbor would simply die so that she would no longer smell him from her window. Both women appease their guilt by donating to charities, specifically by signing up through their phone carriers to have two euros a month automatically sent to various international “tragedies,” from Ukraine to Gaza. When Dorina also mentions a charity that helps Roma people in towns around the city, she hilariously bemoans that they are not participants of either Vodafone or Orange’s (the phone duopoly in much of Europe and the Middle East) autopay charity program. Orsolya transfers her 500 euros and calls it a day.

It is also in this lengthy conversation that Kontinental ’25 registers as a sober companion piece to Jude’s Dracula. Cluj lies in Transylvania, which Romania annexed from Hungary in 1918. Orsolya belongs to the region’s Hungarian minority, the largest ethnic group in the country after Romanians, a fact that Dorina awkwardly brings up when she apologizes to Orsolya for both the historical discrimination against her people and the present online hate campaign against her. We learn earlier from Orsolya’s husband that as soon as news of Ion’s death leaked to the press, journalists and commentators seized on the fact he was ethnically Romanian to reframe a classed act of state violence into an individual hate crime on the part of Orsolya, as though her Hungarian identity is to blame. The press and online trolls thus cynically appropriate Ion’s tragedy as a rallying cry for their chauvinism, rather than a call for economic equity. Despite the flimsiness with which Dorina brings this up, she takes this moment to astutely reflect upon how rightwing Romanian discourse erases the Hungarian heritage of Cluj despite its obvious imprint on the city and region’s architecture. This observation implores the viewer to pay attention to the scattered shots across the film of classical churches and municipal buildings. The nativism which attempts to erase ethnic difference becomes clearly intertwined with the classism that erases the homeless.

But Jude is smart enough to not assume that one’s mere belonging to an ethnic minority engenders a radical political positionality. Orsolya’s conversation with her mother quickly devolves into a tirade of slurs and vitriol, as the latter blames the episode not on the brutality of the social order, but the “stupidity” of the Romanians, whom she labels “serfs,” “peasants,” and “gypsies”—a seamless blend of classist and racist imaginaries. Orsolya eventually storms off, especially after her mother begins praising Hungary’s own fascist leader, Viktor Orbán, but she too reveals a racist stream running underneath the shallow surface of her politically correct liberal talking points. When discussing Florești, the affluent suburb in which she resides, she describes new (more affordable) developments derogatorily as resembling “Chinese” housing. She speaks of the less-affluent newcomers almost as though they are invaders, which is ironic given that the globally recognizable sleek modern design of her house marks it as a new build.

Over the course of the film, Jude’s static long shots of the city gradually move away from the glamorously antique downtown to areas like Florești, contrasting the gates of exclusive communities with dilapidated shacks, abandoned cars, and unpaved roads. In between these, we see a hokey mural with the words “enjoy capitalism” drawn in the Coca-Cola font. Ironic critique or genuine celebration? This confusion is central to the characters’ inability to dream a political solution to their most immediate crises. The fact that the company building the hotel is German emphasizes how destructive the expansion of the European Union has been to poorer countries on the West’s periphery like Romania. Orsolya and those around her are so obsessively hateful of their socialist past that it clouds the horror of their present. In a particularly disturbing scene, her former student Fred (Adonis Tanta)—with whom she is about to have an affair—gleefully shows her snuff films of Russian soldiers using grenades to commit suicide to avoid maiming by drones. He cheers on this carnage beneath a garishly imposing anti-communist memorial, ignoring Orsolya’s discomfort.

For these characters, the past and the faraway become convenient displacements for their surrounding horrors. They ramble incoherently about Stalin and Putin, but they can’t seem to face their own regime—not even rhetorically. As such, responsibility, or the lack thereof, can only be an individual matter. Racists can politicize Ion’s tragedy, but the well-meaning “humane” liberals cannot, for doing so would risk unravelling the liberal order that gives them their comfortable homes. Like any good middle-class parent, Orsolya just wants a backyard and a good school for her children. There’s a world where she gets that without needing to evict Ion. But that is a world without transnational companies building boutique hotels on demolished lives. We won’t get there with charity.

Dry Leaf
Dir. Alexandre Koberidze, Germany/Georgia, Cinema Guild

It is a basic requirement of watching nearly any movie that one be capable of not just identifying but also reidentifying objects, places, people. To count as having viewed a film, that is, one must generally be able to say, from shot to shot or scene to scene, that some character or location is the same character or location, perhaps at different times or under different circumstances. Throughout cinema history, filmmakers have challenged this: consider Buñuel’s use of actors in That Obscure Object of Desire (1977) or Godard’s tendency to frame figures with their heads cut off. Experimental artists, for their part, have engaged this capacity by reflecting on the possibilities and limits of various media, as in Nathaniel Dorsky’s investigations of silent speed 16mm or Sadie Benning’s use of the Pixelvision camera. But whether narrative or experimental, such filmmakers draw attention to the basic markers of continuity that we so often take for granted in our viewing. Through varied formal means, they confront our fundamental ability to apprehend relations in space and time.

Dry Leaf, Georgian director Alexandre Koberidze’s audacious and frequently astounding third feature, stands out not only for its 186-minute runtime but also for its use of a format that no other artist has explored at such length: a Sony Ericsson phone camera. Like his debut feature Let the Summer Never Come Again (2017), which was shot with the same camera, the film accordingly comprises footage that would not even qualify as lo-fi by present standards. Faces are difficult, if not impossible to make out; human and animal figures frequently blend into the background; ordinary spatial relations are distorted to the point of incomprehensibility. At times recalling the impasto intensity of late Godard, its images are vibrant and smeary and altogether beautiful. What distinguishes the film from other digital experiments, however, is how Koberidze capitalizes on the specifics of his chosen format: for instance, the way that silhouettes register with a uniformity and flatness that would be more difficult to achieve at a higher resolution, or the way the camera responds to changing light conditions with a noticeable lag. Another conspicuous difference from other digital formats is how the image visibly “refreshes” at a steady frequency, creating a hypnotic pulsating effect. At times, it’s as if the image itself had a kind of heartbeat.

Dry Leaf does have a wisp of a narrative, following a man named Irakli (David Koberidze) as he goes in search of his daughter, Lisa, a sports photographer who has disappeared. Apart from a letter instructing her family not to find her, Lisa leaves behind an unfinished project to shoot a series of football fields for a sports magazine. With no other clues, Irakli thus sets off on a voyage following the trail of these fields, making Dry Leaf a road trip of sorts. But unlike certain films of Abbas Kiarostami, such as And Life Goes On (1992), Taste of Cherry (1997), and The Wind Will Carry Us (1999), all of which serve as visual reference points, it differs in that the trip is not meaningfully elaborated in terms of psychology. Even more so than in his previous feature, What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? (2021), Koberidze here proves far more casual about integrating his varied pictorial play with a nominal plot. Over the film’s extended runtime, the countryside journey mainly serves as a pretext for a series of intensive investigations into the possibilities of his chosen medium.

While there are certain tonal limitations to Koberidze’s approach, Dry Leaf nevertheless astonishes for how it forces us to effectively relearn how to watch movies. We are continually compelled to translate the formal film grammar we expect, conventionalized over roughly a century of cinema history, into an entirely new register. The possibilities of the match cut, for instance, are at once expanded and contracted by the shooting format: the lower resolution means that visual connections from shot to shot become more prominent, but at the same time it becomes more difficult to differentiate objects and locations from each other. The camera’s peculiar responsiveness to light also means that our usual cues for distinguishing day and night are thrown off. Even our capacity for orienting ourselves within a landscape becomes destabilized, as in a dazzling image of a sunset perfectly reflected on a lake, where the texture of the water is momentarily indistinguishable from that of the sky.

Indeed, we are often unable to reliably identify characters. Early in the film, voiceover narration introduces Levan, a colleague of Lisa’s at the sports magazine, who accompanies Irakli on his journey. But if one is confused about the nondescript, apparently empty shot that accompanies this information, this is because Levan, as the voiceover continues, “like many others in this film’s reality, is invisible.” Not so much a magic realist gesture as an object lesson in cinematic perception, the line is a playful acknowledgement of the extent to which our ordinary film viewing, too, is built on the perception of ostensibly “invisible” phenomena: as when voices emanate from offscreen space, or compositions are so dark that shapes and figures meld into each other, recalling Hegel’s phrase about the “night in which all cows are black.” Often in Dry Leaf, the search for Lisa digresses into depopulated landscape shots of the Georgian countryside. But even calling them landscape shots is perhaps saying too much—for who’s to say whether or not the film’s invisible beings are present?

In considering the artistic force of Koberidze’s decision to shoot on the old Sony Ericsson, it is useful to recall Lisa’s job as a sports photographer, for it is a profession with a marked tendency toward higher frame rates, more resolution, 360-degree capture—in short, to the sort of technological perfection that Dry Leaf refuses. Indeed, it is in perhaps in sports photography that one today finds in its most intense form what André Bazin called the myth of total cinema—the drive to develop a technology that would completely reproduce reality, rendering all its details without remainder. In choosing to make Dry Leaf the way he did, Koberidze clearly rejects the myth. But more than that, he also denies artistic interpretations which tacitly assume it, such as those of viewers, for instance, who see in the Impressionists and post-Impressionists only a willful abstraction from a pre-given reality, and who would see Dry Leaf, also, as no more than an artfully hazy approximation of our natural perception. The appearance of two bowls of apples inevitably calls to mind the paintings of Cézanne. And if the reference is apropos, this is because Koberidze, like so many modernists before him, rejects the idea that art ought to be measured up against the representational norms of our everyday vision.

Since his first film, Colophon (2015), Koberidze has established himself as a contemporary filmmaker with a deep interest in the expressive possibilities of silent cinema. Both Colophon and Let the Summer Never Come Again make ample use of intertitles and onscreen text, the latter also including sped-up footage in the manner of a silent film gag. His 2018 short Linger on Some Pale Blue Dot offers a kind of Vertovian play with scale and rapid montage, while What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? uses a bevy of techniques—voiceover narration, elimination of ambient sound, profusions of music, and so on—to reveal, so to speak, the silent film “beneath” the sound film. With its intense pictorial play, Dry Leaf extends these investigations into the expressive resources of a prior era, principally by estranging ordinary relations of image and sound. In addition to the fact of voices emanating from invisible characters, the indiscernibility of faces means that dialogue is firmly decoupled from facial expression. Likewise, whereas conventionally shot films tend to privilege the human voice, Dry Leaf by contrast manages to place music, noise, and dialogue on the same plane. Koberidze’s project is not an anachronistic attempt to simply return to the silent era. Rather, it is an effort to recover, or to rediscover, the unbounded formal curiosity of a time where formal experimentation had not yet calcified into convention.

By the end of Dry Leaf, Irakli’s search for Lisa does in fact resolve—though like so much in the film, this resolution remains offscreen, invisible. Lisa remains to us just a name. Rather than a meeting between father and daughter, what we see visualized are a set of instructions from Lisa to Irakli, conveyed by letter, about how to find her. The instructions include, of course, spatial directions. But in addition, they also include precise variations on what to look out for depending on what time of day he is to arrive and hence what available light conditions there are. In case there was any lingering doubt, it confirms that Dry Leaf functions principally as an adventure in perception—an invitation to look, and look again.

Annemarie Jacir’s historical epic Palestine 36 transports audiences to a time and place most of us have rarely ever seen on screen. Melding archival footage and a tense story of resistance under colonial tyranny, Palestine 36 follows both Palestinians and British characters as the colony reaches a breaking point over oppression, land loss, and abuse. As a revolt forms in opposition to colonial rule, characters question their capability to bring about change and wonder if they should join the revolution. Looking to squash dissent, the British military responds with cruelty as tensions rise on both sides.

Jacir painstakingly captures a sense of the past—a sense of memory for a time that has been systematically suppressed by the forces of imperialism. In reintroducing this chapter of her country’s history for others to discover, she reclaims it from the confines of history books and scholarly journals.

Jacir spoke with me about her research into Palestine of the 1930s, recreating the past, and bringing this nearly forgotten history to audiences today.

Reverse Shot: What inspired you to tell a story about Palestine in this particular period?

Annemarie Jacir: I was inspired by that critical moment of the revolt which began in 1936 and ended in ‘39, and which was really the first mass revolt against British colonialism. It was an incredible moment in the history of Palestine and really the beginning of an organized national movement for liberation. I was always interested in this period, and I'd read a lot about it. There's something really modern about it—people's lives were changing everywhere in the world in the '30s. I wondered why there was nothing ever made about it, and that's what started the whole process for me.

RS: Could you tell me a little bit more about that research process, digging deeper into the details about the period and what was going on at that time?

AJ: I heard about it a lot from my parents and my family [who were] always talking about how the British did this and the British did that and cursing the British. I only realized as an adult the really violent side of the British presence, not only in Palestine but also in most of the countries they colonized. Part of the story that was left out was the Palestinians talking about the revolt, how we organized the longest strike in history, and we did this without talking about the trauma of it. I went down a rabbit hole of reading Palestinian accounts, academics, British, and Israeli writers talking about this period.

The final part of the research was the archives, the photographs, and the film reels that the British were making. They colonized what was happening. To see images of my country before it was destroyed was very intense. To see places that don't exist anymore and to see people before they became refugees, those images had an impact. I consider that part of the research because they really implanted something in me, and that stayed with me in the writing. I also used that archive very much in the production of the film. Working with my costume designer, my art director, and production designer, we were always referring to the archives [because] we wanted everything to be correct.

RS: When did you decide that you wanted to incorporate the archival footage into the film itself?

AJ: When I wrote it into the script, it was always meant to be in a way that was not to show this is what it used to be, but more that this is the world of the characters. This is what Jerusalem looks like. This is the way the village looks. This is what soldiers look like doing pat-downs. I don't have the kind of budget that I could fill the streets of Jerusalem and have VFX and do all the things to create this, but it's so important to see that world. I insisted that we would colorize it, but in a way, I didn't really know what it was going to look like. I just blindly insisted with the producers because after October 7th—it was a financial disaster for the film. So they said, "I don't think we're going to be able to afford to colorize the footage." I said, “No, that's one thing that we have to do.” If you see black-and-white footage in the middle of the film, you will be taken backwards. The audience will think, “Oh, we're going back in time.” Now that I think about it, colorizing the footage was also a way to reclaim it. That's us, that's our land, those are our people, those are our grandparents, our relatives, that's our lost country. I feel when I show it to Palestinian audiences, everybody is like, "Oh my God, I didn't know this is what Palestine looked like. That's our Palestine."

RS: You mentioned the research also informed your approach to production design and costumes. How did you achieve those period details on a budget?

AJ: We all live in Palestine. I'm here, I live here, my production designer lives here, my costume designer lives here, my props master, the location manager, we're all here. That meant we could take time to find all the locations. It was more than a year of actual prep. We had to restore that village, and we did it in a way that villages were built then. We're not going to use concrete. We're actually going to do it as if we are building a village in the ’30s. We are doing the farming terraces as they used to do. We got a bunch of men who build terraces, and they’ve been doing that for generations and generations. This was our chance. There is no film about the ’30s in Palestine before the Nakba in 1948. There's some kind of responsibility in that.

Every village in Palestine has a [specific] costume. You could tell where somebody's from based on the dress. We created a village that was a mix of two different villages. We took traditional things from a village in the north and traditional things from the village in Jerusalem, the actual villages, and we created something that is in fact fictional but based on the real story of the dress and the embroidery on the dress that has a meaning to it—the colors have a meaning, the design has a meaning.

RS: Filming Palestine 36 became incredibly different as you navigated the war and got your production back on track after a long pause. How were you able to recover and finish the film?

AJ: It was like everything fell out. We lost everything. All of that work was gone, and it was really, really devastating. We felt unable to talk about it because what was happening in reality was so much worse than trying to make a film. All our preparation was in the garbage, but there's a genocide going on now. What's there to say? I didn't talk about it for many months, except to keep saying, "We're going to get back on track. Let's just wait, let's just see, and eventually we'll be able to do this the way we wanted to do it.” Months went by, and it became clear that we were not going to be able to do it. We'd lost the location, that village that we restored, there was no way we could film there anymore.

Six months have gone by, people are going to ask for their money back now, people are going to pull out. I was lucky that none of the financiers ended up leaving us because that would have been more of a disaster. On the other side of it, it was like, we have to do this because this is what we do, we're artists, and we believe in this. We've been working for years to tell this story. I think all of the team felt very strongly that it was important before, and now even more important, that we do this. It was something to keep hope and a way to insist that we will try to do what we set out to do, no matter what.

RS: While the film is set many decades ago, it feels just as timely today. Were you thinking about the past and how it relates to the present when writing the script?

AJ: We make period films, but we're never living in the period. The audience knows and has the hindsight of what we know today. Some people tell me the very beginning of the film and the archival footage [makes them] cry because they know that all changes ten years later. When I wrote the script, I felt like this was the beginning of the revolt, and it never really ended because Palestinians are still struggling to be independent. Yes, the revolt was crushed in ’39, but then there's ‘48 and then there's a revolt in ’67 and then ’69, and then ’87 there's the new uprising.

I say it never felt like something of the past; it felt very relevant. It feels like my daily life living in Palestine, all the systems of occupation that I live in, none of it is anything new or original. It's all set up by the British. It's one of the first things that I saw when I was looking at the archives: all the endless images of Palestinians' bodies being searched at checkpoints, their books being checked, their fruit baskets being opened, their hats lifted, and their hair checked. I felt really depressed when I saw it because that's my everyday life, that's the life of my parents, that's the life of my grandparents. When has it ever ended?

Miroirs No. 3 is a softer film than Christian Petzold has ever made. The German director’s latest foregoes the outward audaciousness of such works as Phoenix and Transit. Its slipperiness comes not from the unknown but from the unacknowledged.

The film follows Laura (Paula Beer), a collegiate musician whose boyfriend crashes their car in the German countryside, killing him and leaving her shaken and alone. Betty, a woman who lives down the road from the accident, invites Laura to stay with her. The two fall into a fast domestic intimacy, though Betty’s husband (Matthias Brandt) and son (Enno Trebs), local car mechanics, meet Laura with more trepidation. Miroirs No. 3 is a film about mourning and futile attempts to conjure an unreachable past. Petzold, famous for obfuscating his characters’ desires and histories, allows these people to be seen for who they are from the second they appear onscreen.

The result is deceptively haunting. The audience may spend the film convinced that there will be some unexpected reveal to reframe the preceding events. No such relief comes. Instead, we are made to sit in a spiritual stillness. The present is an unavoidable and terrifying thing in Miroirs No. 3, but it is restorative, too. The cumulative effect of such an ostensibly small film is overwhelming; even weeks later, memories of its images still greet me when I awake each morning.

I sat down with Petzold last month during the Toronto International Film Festival. We spoke in a sparse hotel room. The walls were beige and there was a skylight, though I could not see a window nor could I imagine how a room in the middle of a massive hotel must be shaped to allow for such a feature. The man is kind and unpretentious and attentive. He is funny, too; he claimed he could not speak English well because he had earlier forgotten the word for “anklet.” Nevertheless, he spoke with clarity and wit about the movie, his practice, and the political realities facing Germany.

Reverse Shot: Your work often hinges on moments of surprise, but what I found most surprising and refreshing about this film is the real lack of revelation. There is the assumption, implicitly, that we understand what has happened, at least enough. How do you feel revelation has factored into your work, and does it feel different in Miroirs?

Christian Petzold: Previously, I have made these films about the past; Barbara and Phoenix and Transit are period pieces. In the last two or three years, I’ve had the feeling that the people who live around me in Germany don't believe in the future. They’ve started to build up caves for themselves, where they want to survive. This feeling, that one’s story is a story of survival, is new for me. Once, when I was at the Venice Film Festival, Claude Chabrol had an interview like we have now, and I was sitting there five meters away. They asked him, “Why are you always shooting with women as main characters?” And he said, “Men are living, women are surviving, and cinema is about surviving.” This is a good answer. We have to make movies about surviving and repairing. It's not a world where young people can just get into a car and drive the road. This future, they don't have that anymore. We have to think about what happened, how we can repair souls, minds, and societies. I wanted to show a group in one house, with one car, with one fence, with one kitchen, and how they try to survive, and how they try to repair the things which are broken. So this was the idea. This was the political situation for me.

RS: You apply the same approach that you once applied to climate catastrophe or mermaids to blue collar workers. What compelled you to show them in this almost fable-like quality? What do you think compels you to approach this aesthetic at this time, especially given encroaching fascism within the country?

CP: You know, in Miroirs, there is a song by Frankie Valli, “The Night.” And the last scene of the movie is like the scene from The Deer Hunter by Michael Cimino. The song in that movie is also a Frankie Valli song. In the ’70s, the American cinema, the cinema after Vietnam, is the cinema of a totally broken country. They are not the “good ones” anymore. The steel mill workers of Pennsylvania were sent to Vietnam because the country didn't need them anymore. The workers were not needed. Therefore they could go to Vietnam and get killed. Nowadays Trump is in Pennsylvania saying, “I want to revitalize the mills, the coal.” The workers are alone in this world. They can go to war, or they can elect Trump. In both situations they will die. This was my thinking. The fascism is coming because our world is completely complicated, and the fascists want to give very simple answers. And they are lying. And these broken people in the movie I made, they have found themselves, based on a lie.

RS: You have spoken before about your dissatisfaction with the original ending to your film. What initially drew you to that conclusion?

CP: I'd seen a movie by Claude Sautet [Cesar and Rosalie]. In this movie there are two men who have fallen in love with Romy Schneider and they’re fighting over her. So she vanishes, because she can't stand them anymore. Then a year later she comes back. She's standing at the fence of one of the guy’s houses, and she can see through the window that these guys are friends now, they don't need her anymore. And this was a fantastic final scene. So when I wrote the script [for Miroirs], I had a scene where the family is on the porch and they're eating eggs and drinking, like in the Cimino movie. And then they're shocked because she [Paula Beer] is standing at the fence. And then I had the sentence, “She opens the door of the fence and she enters the world of the family.” This was the last sentence. And I was so pathetic about it. I sent the script to all the actors. Paula came to me and said, “Are you really sure that this is the final ending?” Then in the editing suite, Bettina Bruder, the editor, said, “I don't like it so much.” I was totally depressed for two weeks. I stopped editing. Because they were right. You can't tell a story of a dead girl who is reborn, and in the end, she makes the same thing again. The first daughter died because the house of the family killed her. The second girl can't come back there. What kind of movie is this? Then we had the idea to go back to the first scene, when she's in her apartment with the curtain. And now, it's the same curtain. It's the same apartment. But something has deeply changed. It's her life now. She's independent. And the family is also independent, in a way.

We made the film in October, and I wanted to reshoot the ending in January. Paula gave me a call and said, “You can only shoot my face, because I’m eight months pregnant.” And the shot, because she's pregnant, she looks beautiful. Something is new in her face. So this was good luck.

RS: These actors have worked with you for years—not just Paula Beer but also Barbara Auer, Matthias Brandt, Enno Trebs. What are the benefits of working with actors across multiple projects?

CP: I'm from Germany. We pretend to have film production, but we don't. We have television production, and some money for movies. Harun [Farocki] and I said to ourselves, “When we start to make movies, we have to have a group. We have to work outside of the capital.” When you're working in small independent groups, you have to be strong and find an ensemble. Barbara Auer has been in seven movies of mine, Paula Beer in four, Nina Hoss in six, Matthias Brandt in six. Some of my friends are painters, some of them are writers. They are working by themselves. But I love, in cinema, the collective work. You need a group of people to talk to, and you have to work with them for a long time. So I have this group. Sometimes I need refreshment, but I love them all. Absolutely.

RS: Many pivotal events, like the car accident or the dishwasher explosion result from malfunctioning machines. Was this a deliberate motif?

Petzold: You know, in American movies, there is the feeling that they don’t throw their garbage away. These things happen now in Germany too. Especially in the German Democratic Republic. The infrastructure doesn't work anymore. There's no bus coming. They have just one supermarket 25 miles away. So everybody has to have a big car. It's little bit like America there. And they're voting right-wing at the same moment.

There are cities there with American names: Philadelphia, New Boston. Because historically, it was Prussia. It was a military state. And the military state Prussia needed young men as soldiers. And their dreams were American dreams. They wanted to go to the USA for a new life. But they stayed in Germany. And so they called their villages Philadelphia. But nowadays, America is garbage. Philadelphia is garbage.

RS: That's where I'm from. And it's all deindustrialized. Everything is run down. It is the only place in the country where there are old buildings, which is nice. I don't know how much time you've spent in America, but there are no old buildings.

CP: I have a friend in California who rented a house. The owner showed him the bathroom and said, “Look, the toilet is from 1962!” Like it was from the 17th century. Capitalism is not interested in repairing things. They don't want to renovate a house. It's cheaper to bomb this house and build a new one. What happens to people when their environment doesn't tell a history?

RS: Where did you find the house where the film takes place?

CP: This house doesn't exist in this form. It's a ruin. Someone I know bought it. But I liked the atmosphere there. All these things, like the fence, the porch, didn’t exist. Later on, everybody from this village said it looked beautiful. But someone made a phone call, and the owner of the house had to take down everything we had built there. It’s horrible. They are jealous. There are so many people who don’t know what beauty is. They want to destroy it. It’s always the same.

RS: Of course there is a lot of music throughout Miroirs. But there was one Chopin piece that Paula Beer plays. I knew it because I learned it as a child. What drew you to these compositions?

CP: That particular piece is very popular, because when there's a young student, and their mother says, “Can you play piano for me?” You don't play avant-garde. You play something for a good mood. Here it's a little bit like this. In that scene, the piano is placed so that they don't see her face. And the notes on the piano are the notes of the dead daughter. So, for this moment, they start crying. Because for one moment of Chopin, their dead daughter is in the room. That's very beautiful.

There’s no shortage of shadows in Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein’s 1949 stage musical South Pacific. The work begs of its audience un-hypothetically—and without an answer—to make sense of what constitutes a less believable reality: that two people could fall into immediate, life-alteringly true love, or that the raw material of hatred, passed down baton-like through generations of white Americans, might prove more disruptive to that love than even the Second World War. Based on James Michener’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Tales of the South Pacific—itself based on his own experience as a lieutenant commander in the Pacific Theater—South Pacific spins the love affair of U.S. Navy nurse Nellie Forbush and French planter Emile de Becque on an unspecified South Pacific island during the late days of the war. She’s an ingenue from Arkansas, he’s a middle-aged man with two children by a previous marriage (to a Polynesian woman to boot)—the immediate intimacy they feel, coupled with the distance between their worldviews, is a handy figurative stand-in for South Pacific’s crisis of conscience over race relations in the U.S.

The story’s eternal poles—love and hate, life and death, consummation and war—form the spiritual architectures of all of R&H’s musicals. Definitionally, that musical form sets the unknown to music and lyrics. The technology of the American musical (written into existence by Rodgers and Hammerstein, perfected by Sondheim, and strangely deserted by most other writers) stipulates that when a body enters into the unknown space between knowable poles, song supersedes language. “I know it’s only two weeks,” Emile says to Nellie of their whirlwind courtship, of their creeping mutual feeling that this quick severe fling is truly true love. Logically, Emile reasons, “That is the way things happen sometimes, isn’t it Nellie?” And, illogically, he opens his mouth as if melody will accompany his soaring voice. It does, and he sings “Some Enchanted Evening” and it is true.

In Joshua Logan’s 1958 film of the musical, Rossano Brazzi, lip-synching to the ghost-voice baritone of Giorgio Tozzi, performs “Some Enchanted Evening” across five mostly stationary close-up shots, the favored unit of the single camera Todd-AO (“Cinerama outta one hole!”), the widescreen format South Pacific was filmed in. Each shot is smudged at the frame’s edges, unnaturally tinted somewhere between the goldenrod printer paper and the pissy sepia indulged in the early aughts to signal a film landing in Mexico, the Middle East, or some other similarly dangerous locale. Unlike the post-production color grading used there, South Pacific’s color treatment is distinctly more tactile: the result of hand-painted filters, deployed—sparingly, sometimes chaotically—as a membrane between the camera lens and the musical’s action. In “Some Enchanted Evening”, the coloration doesn’t begin, as one might assume, as the song does. It indicates a musical choice, which is to say it reorganizes real air into something more, but its timing is hard to predict. After flanging on a few numbers earlier as Nellie (Mitzi Gaynor) observes “that yellow sun,” the gold tint lingers through her performance of “A Cock-Eyed Optimist,” reduces back to “natural color” (if a little smudgy) for the book scene that follows, and fades in again during the instrumental climax of “Twin Soliloquies.” There it remains, through “Some Enchanted Evening.”

This tint fades laterally across the screen like a floating mist, suggesting that the colored filter is being rotated slowly onto the lens, rather than applied between cuts. I belabor their timing only to suggest that Logan’s insistence that cinematographer Leon Shamroy use these DIY filters suggests the kind of half-cocked idea you see in some local community theater productions: half-abandoned once it becomes apparent the tech isn’t cooperating with the desired effect, half-maintained out of a desire to still achieve the effect, even on inching spectral terms. Colored filters were not entirely new to either party: Shamroy’s work on the Zanuck bonanza The Egyptian (1954) sported subtle filtering over that film’s Cormanesque ‘House of the Dead’ sequence, and Logan persuaded no less than James Wong Howe to rosily soften the colors during William Holden and Kim Novak’s “Moonglow” dance in Picnic (1955). In these films, though, the use of filters is a grace note. They are frequently applied between cuts to not call attention to their use. If South Pacific’s own daffy colored filtering lingers in the cultural memory, it’s usually recalled in terms of its failure. Logan hoped that the filters would provide a theatrical counterweight to the film’s practical (and practically stunning) locales.

Recounting his proposed explanation to Shamroy in his dishy second memoir, Movie Stars, Real People, and Me, Logan articulates how changes in stage lighting prepare a spectator for poetry: “A mood has been created that allows spectators to concentrate on the words and music and the emotions of the singer’s performance.” Not entirely convinced by their own plan, Logan and Shamroy shot the bulk of South Pacific’s early scenes twice, once with their rotating filters, and then again without. Producer Buddy Adler, of course, had notes for this expensive practice. He assured Logan that “the lab can cut out the color if you don’t want it later.” The end of the story is familiar to any artist laboring under the twin cloak of inspiration and the clock: the rest of the film was shot solely with the color filters. Logan wasn’t happy with the results and wanted the footage de-colorized. Adler’s proposed leeching process would have taken three months to complete, a detail he hadn’t shared. And South Pacific, booked in theatrical houses months in advance road show-style, had to open before the process could have been completed. It premiered in full, deliriously rotating color, often to befuddled audiences. “I wanted (and still want),” Logan wrote, “to carry a sandwich board in front of every line at the box office, saying, I DIRECTED IT AND I DON’T LIKE THE COLOR EITHER!”

*****

The persistent perception that Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II composed a slew of creaky, conservative stage musicals is emboldened by the slew of creaky, conservative films adapted from those musicals. Yet a little patient reattunement to these sometimes boring, often downright weird adaptations reveals a consistent turbulence humming in the source texts. That the composer and lyricist were nominally social liberals in their time was a point of personal pride especially for Hammerstein: he co-founded the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League and, because of contributions to organizations like the Southern Negro Youth Congress and the American Committee for the Protection of Foreign Born, earned himself a hefty surveillance file with J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. Textually, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musicals very often fit—sometimes awkwardly—narratives wary of racism, fascism, domestic violence, and other myriad other postwar American cruelties to forms that depend upon the spontaneous bursting out of characters into song and dance. Therein lies the major contribution of Rodgers and Hammerstein to the American stage: their vision for and revision of the book musical suggests that the form did not exist to merely distract a worried, war-struck world away from their troubles. Rather than avoid reality in favor of a more ecstatic fantasy, the fantasy world itself becomes a terrain for grappling with that reality on distinctly fantastical terms.

Like Stephen Sondheim—whom Hammerstein mentored, and in whose whip-witty, pleasure-centric lyrics we find the echoes of Hammerstein’s chiseled poeticism—R&H’s musicals were largely popular with their audiences. It’s no wonder that a money-eyed mid-fifties Hollywood saw an opportunity to adapt them into big budget fantasias, beginning with 1943’s positively boffo, form-inventing Oklahoma! in 1955 and culminating a few years later, with South Pacific. A classical love story that moves like a revue, placing different characters’ different treatise on desire in the round and following each to its logical conclusion, South Pacific is fundamentally about how the human species has nearly let its myriad obsessions with color ruin its chances at connection, camaraderie, and love.

Logan’s verve and willingness to mix a little spit-shine risk in with the stoic bombast was not matched by his contemporaries in adapting R&H to the big screen. It’s perhaps unsurprising that the contemporaneous Hollywood studio executive displayed basically zero interest in the textual tension cooked into R&H’s plays, in how they set national horror and sentimentality opposite one another in a sequence of gruesomely beautiful pas de deux. Adaptation is the trickiest technology, and one inseparable from the dramatic arts. A writer constructs a text, and then a troupe must adapt it into blocking, bodies, and breath. Fundamentally an act of revival, adaptation attempts to render in practical terms all the impractical ephemera that sloughs off a cultural object in translation. A song adapts a feeling in degrees of melody and silence, as a voice adapts a song in breaths, enunciation, and timbre.

If a little over-cheesed (that substance most anathema to Rodgers’s symphonic moving sidewalks and Hammerstein’s chiseled consonance), the film of Oklahoma! maintains an unhomely sense of blood-red wrongness amid its balletic shapes. Fred Zinnemann’s clarity of blocking and dreamy use of space is an altogether different set of adaptive technologies than the DIY-directness employed by Daniel Fish in his 2019 stage production. No contemporary R&H revival has been as critically lauded (and reactionarily pearl-clutched at) as Fish’s production, which merely had the gall to mean the words on the page. Despite protestations that the director had nudged Oklahoma! into territory foreign to its original intentions, anyone who saw the ensuing work on stage could confirm that, if anything, this rendition was even more faithful to Hammerstein’s words, Rodgers’s melodies, and the national implications that result from their collisions. Fish and his collaborators played the frontier apocalypse for what it was, rather than the box fair it had become in the imaginations of many, matinee crowds and historians alike.

Perhaps the most egregious of the R&H film adaptations is Henry King’s Carousel (1956), which comes perilously close to not only misunderstanding but reforming that show’s wrenching domestic violence storyline. Jack O’Brien’s 2018 stage remount attempts to grapple with Carousel’s terrifying ontological ask: what happens to our collective spectating body as it experiences the most gorgeous score ever composed for the American stage while soaking in America’s unmitigated violence towards women? O’Brien sought, by realist instincts and a de-emphasis on the confusing cosmos of Carousel, to problematize in good faith the often-unchallenged parochial sentiment of “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” Indeed, tracing recent revivals of R&H back from Fish’s haunted, vaunted Oklahoma! yields a constellation of curious 21st-century re-approaches that form a laboratory for experimenting on the country’s speculatively better angels and the forms most (in)appropriate for adapting them. Bartlett Sher’s 2015 revival of The King and I granted the titular King dignity on his own terms mostly by ceding authorial control to Ken Watanabe, an actor historically relegated to boring supportive work by Hollywood’s lack of imagination and inborn prejudices. Aid the King and help the court: Sher’s willingness to make Mongkut more than a montage of charisma—as the great and occasionally coasting Yul Brynner does in Walter Lang’s 1956 film adaptation—lent a similar care to Kelli O’Hara’s more dynamic Anna and the ensemble itself, no longer merely a collage of types.

Sher’s steady, unapologetic reentry into The King and I (a work not exactly unencumbered by orientalizing urges) inspired, in Ben Brantley’s review, “shadowy emotional depth to churn up a surface that might otherwise seem shiny and slick.” Sher’s similarly reverent 2008 revival of South Pacific—the most productively troubled of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s collaborative work—feels as if it belongs to a different world when considered against Fish’s punk-dark Oklahoma! It opts for literal periodisms over speculative timelessness, historically accurate enunciations over confrontational honesty, and the proximity of opera over the way American country music swings, occasionally into pitfalls of despair. Yet these are merely different technologies of adaptation. Despite the cockeyed optimism with which we look back at the Golden Age of American Musicals as a period when American hegemony was reboldened, Sher and his collaborators show the lengths to which R&H were cognizant of and horrified by the specter of American racism and the long-gnarled tail of colonial occupation. Guerrilla-like, Sher’s careful choreography kept the Black members of the plucky Seabee ensemble semi-segregated in their own lines, even as they sang, smiling. When Nellie confesses her racist horror at the prospect of the French Emile’s mixed-race children (“It isn’t as if I could give you a good reason. There is no reason. This is emotional. This is something that is born in me.”), Sher and O’Hara insist on the confession as the focal point of the play rather than an unfortunate bit of dated characterization to be hastily apologized for by a subsequent musical comedy number.

*****

South Pacific’s swirling, mutant color changes in-frame make it look like no other American musical film. The golden wash of “Some Enchanted Evening” is so gallingly unrealistic that it both covers and highlights the discrepancy of the fantasy. Having a voice that doesn’t quite match the mouth feels dreamy instead of dreary. Improbably, the totalizing romanticism of Rodgers’s sweep and Hammerstein’s verse feels—in this color-discombobulated world—Romantic, an Occupied Polynesian Gothic. “Bali Ha’i” sports the most severe coloration, a deep violet pall that clings to the lust-struck Seabees and so renders Bloody Mary (Juanita Hall) like Vincent Price in one of Corman’s Poe freakouts. Hall was born to an African American father and an Irish American mother. She became the first Black woman to win a Tony, for her performance of the Tonkinese Bloody Mary in the original Broadway production. Here, she plays Mary in exactly the kind of broad, outrageously orientalized English that mid-Hollywood demanded. It’s disheartening to watch Hall forced to perform these stereotypes and lip sync to another actor’s voice. It’s unsurprising and disappointing that the voice belongs to Muriel Smith, another Black performer historically ignored by Hollywood, here literally shunted to the offscreen space like a phantom beamed in from Julie Dash’s Illusions (1982). “Happy Talk”—Bloody Mary’s winking ode to foreplay—illustrates a text at odds with its own form of expression. Hammerstein’s lyrics are typically cutting in how they span the bridge between the dream space and the lusty human one. They’re well affixed to Rodgers’s plinking melody, revealing the composer’s ear for playful, nearly punny melodic structures. But watching Hall perform it in the gold-eyed Technicolor, we grimace.

Wasn’t that always the point of the play? To grimace? “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught” isn’t pat polemic because it’s a fever being sweat out. Performed by John Kerr—and dubbed by Broadway/Disney voice actor veteran Bill Lee—the song has all the twisting tension of a mouth struggling to mean the words it’s singing. Like Sher after him, Logan treats the revelation of Nellie as, appropriately, not merely cola-fizzy but discombobulated by her unexamined racist urges as a scene of melodrama. This is a world wrecked by our perceptions of the world. Gaynor cannily plays Nellie’s meltdown with a Brontëan height of emotion, not a tacit recreation of Hollywood’s hysterical woman type but a reaction to it. The dint of blue pressing down on her actions literally signals that it’s nighttime, an effect on loan from Nosferatu (1922) and, more broadly, reminiscent of silent cinema’s hand-colorized tinting. If there is a rule over when the color filters are applied and when reality looks “real,” it might be that the cinematic world woggles when a character is presented with the sublime.

Whether Logan and Shamroy truly intended the colored, smudgy visual flourishes to elicit fantasy or nightmare is irrelevant; the footage indicates both, simultaneously and filmically. South Pacific becomes, then, an ideal adaptation of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s work. It feels dated, sometimes in untraceable ways but then—and sometimes subconsciously—goes beyond our good-taste desires to fully comprehend our most monstrous or romantic urges. It indicts us, and it indicts itself. That no film has since opted to use such starkly reality-warping colored filters surely indicates something about our culture’s gravitational pull towards literalism. There’s a strain of liberated poesy in Logan’s colored filters, which both are and aren’t a statement about color, which both are and aren’t merely a theatrical, musical signal. How ruinous and fitting to watch a South Pacific and feel that the color is wrong, that there is something unresolvable even to Rodgers’ string whorls and Hammerstein’s picky grace.

The Bride!
Dir. Maggie Gyllenhaal, U.S., Warner Bros.

Walking into Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride!—the director’s reimagining of Frankenstein’s monster and his bride as Bonnie-and-Clyde-esque outlaws in the American 1930s—I assumed the film’s most obvious contemporary interlocutor would be last year’s adaptation of Frankenstein by Guillermo del Toro. Instead, that dubious honor goes to Emerald Fennell’s take on Wuthering Heights. Both projects are master classes in the failure of adaptation, stifling their ideas beneath a misguided and contemptuous interpretation that is not merely unfaithful to the source material and its author but also actively insulting. Just as Wuthering Heights’ most compelling imagery amounted to little more than visual fodder for trailers and TikTok fancams, so too is the style of The Bride! a flimsy shell barely holding a poorly conceived and executed narrative.

The story’s basic setup is certainly compelling. Frankenstein’s monster (Christian Bale), who now goes by Frank, has been roaming the earth for more than a century. As he had once demanded of his creator, he is still seeking a companion, a fellow undead who will accept him as he is. His search leads him to Chicago, where Annette Bening’s Dr. Cornelia Euphronius has been researching reinvigoration and revitalization. Out of sympathy for Frank’s plight, and in pursuit of scientific glory, Dr. Euphronius agrees to help him and the two dig up the body of a recently deceased poor woman. Played by Jessie Buckley, Ida was a sex worker spying on mobsters for the Chicago police who had been dumped in an unmarked grave by the goons among whom she had been embedded. She loses her memory in the revival process, and Frank takes advantage of the situation to deceive her into believing that they were already betrothed before her “accident.”

Their tranquil courting is cut very short by an altercation in which Frank is forced to kill two men to protect Ida from violation. Fleeing Chicago, they set out on a cross-country tour and visit iconic sites from the Fred Astaire-like films with which Frank is obsessed. Their exploits become news sensations and inspire women across the country to mimic Ida’s iconic hairdo and smeared lips and take up arms—though it is not particularly clear against what or whom. Hot on the couple’s tail is Penelope Cruz’s Myrna Malloy, a plucky undercover Chicago detective posing as a secretary. When the mobster on whom Ida had been spying gets word that she is alive, he sends Clyde (John Magaro), one of the goons who buried her, to finish the job. He follows Detective Malloy to the couple and fatally shoots Frank, prompting Ida to lug his corpse back to the Windy City and plead with Dr. Euphronius to revive him. Before she can, however, police arrive at the scene and shoot Ida. Pitying their fate, Detective Malloy uses her authority to dismiss the cops, giving the doctor the chance to revive the couple. As the lab surges with electricity, the film ends with a close-up of the couple’s hands reanimating and embracing one another.

In outline, these events may have been adequately dramatized, buoyed by Gyllenhaal’s intended maximalist gothic style and darkly comedic tone. But the film’s potential is immediately squandered by an obscene choice of a framing device: the literal specter of Mary Shelley, who opens the film by saying, “Knock, knock. Who’s there? It’s me, Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein.” Also played by Buckley, Shelley seems to be trapped in a purgatory of her own grief and dissatisfaction. Facing the camera in monochrome, she monologues about how the book “wasn’t the half of it,” and that she had always desired a sequel. She ostensibly authors this sequel by taking possession of Ida. It is specifically that possession which gets Ida killed, as Shelley immediately begins exposing the mobster in public the second she takes over. The film’s irresolvable contradictions are laid bare; Shelley is presented as a symbol of all wronged and silenced women, but intentionally silences a woman and gets her killed. Once Ida is revived, Shelley is cruelly disinterested in helping her recover her memory when she is the only person who could actually do so. “What’s my name?” Ida keeps asking, and Shelley never answers, but nonetheless regularly takes over her body to deliver vague diatribes against an ephemeral patriarchy. It is a “critique” of gender relations that is divorced not only from any historical framework of class or race but also from the very lives of its fictional characters—to say nothing of the real woman whose name and spirit the film cheaply parades.

The film’s investment in Shelley’s legacy is incurious and egregiously cynical, interested only in her recognizable name and not the least in her actual life. By flattening her bitterness and vengeful desire into an ahistorical and essentialized “feminine” disposition, Gyllenhaal’s portrayal of Shelley at once diminishes the author’s stature in literary history and fails to address any of the documented ways in which she has been wronged—like the ostracization she faced for her political beliefs—whether in life or in scholarship. Shelley is reduced to the unpleasant trope of the maniacal woman, cackling to herself at no discernible joke. When she takes over Ida, a possession Buckley represents by suddenly responding to random words with an exhaustive and alliterative list of their synonyms in overemphasized Queen’s English, she ironically has nothing to say—at least as it pertains to her own experience. Her grievances are not those of a historical figure about whose life and times we certainly know a decent bit, but of a wronged woman who is psychically connected to all women’s pain, and therefore speaks for none.

This is not the only instance in which the film’s desperate yearning for feminist credentials backfires and reproduces misogynistic tropes. When Ida is harassed and almost assaulted by two random men, Frank’s decision to resort to violence to save her is foregrounded over her experience. When we finally learn her backstory and courageous infiltration of the mafia, it is not Ida who gets to tell her own tale but Detective Malloy’s malepartner, a sad attempt at comedic relief and pathos played as well as could be by Peter Sarsgaard. Ida is the protagonist of a supposedly feminist reimagining of The Bride of Frankenstein who does not even get to drive her own story, though she does drive Frank around everywhere. The setting’s lack of social texture ironically dates the film itself as the product of a mid-2010s bourgeois feminist discourse that has no real purchase today, even among the liberal American intelligentsia. In a hokey scene in which Shelley possesses Ida in a room full of rich people and lists off the abuses of the powerful men present, the monologue devolves into her literally screaming “me too! me too!”

Like Fennell’s work, the film’s thematic and political incoherence is exacerbated by its referentiality. The obvious problem with Gyllenhaal drawing so much from Bonnie and Clyde is that her film invites—insists upon—a comparison that torpedoes the heft and coherence of her own narrative. We are led to think of Ida as an undead Bonnie, but then we might wonder: why would Ida’s violence stir up a revolution when the historical Bonnie’s did not? But more importantly, who are these women and what are they fighting for? Why set an ambitiously political adaptation in the 1930s if you are apathetic to the contours of life in the Great Depression? Besides the generic marginalization of professional women—and it is telling that she specifically focuses on a scientist and a cop—The Bride! is uninterested in the specific struggles or debates of the time, even those which intersect neatly with its own plot: for example, the setbacks to the Suffragette Movement during the Depression or women’s increased and exploitative participation in the growing entertainment and telecommunication industries.

What is lazily shown in montage as a national women’s revolt therefore degrades women’s historic role in sociopolitical resistance, including armed and militant ones. Moreover, the fixation on professional mobility, and especially that of a cop, is brazenly at odds with a contemporary American society that is happy to let women lead and participate in institutional violence, whether it’s running the Department of Homeland Security and the New York Police Department at home, or flying bomber jets that carpet bomb civilians abroad. In a decade of never-ending crises, there is no time to humor upper-middle-class aspiration masquerading as women’s liberation. We do not need a Bride whose climactic achievement is severing her groom's name from her own. We need one who knows where to aim her gun.

In 1993, in Birmingham, England, neurophysiology professor Graham Harding codified something medically significant about moving images and luminance—luminance being a measure of visible light and its physical power. Harding posited that if the estimated luminance of a large swath of a moving image goes through rapid increasing-decreasing cycles (at some fiendish rhythm of three-to-thirty times per second) then this moving image has the potential to induce seizures in viewers with photosensitive epilepsy. Harding also proposed that changes in high-luminance-contrast spatial patterns, like stripes or grids, come with a similar risk. Thus was born the Harding test, which is to this day the international broadcast standard for approving programs for epileptic viewers.

Why 1993? And why in England? The website for HardingFPA, the proprietary software version of the test, offers some clues: frames of the late comedian Phil Hartman’s mugging face backgrounded by erratic-looking fluorescent patterns. These frames are from a British instant noodle advertisement from 1993 that reveled in its own stupid psychotropics. In the advert Hartman sits suited up like a news anchor and spouts half-sequitur lines: “At the end of this commercial break we’re gonna ding-a-dang-ding our ding-dangs. Intense! What goes better with an intense snack than an intense film? Watch this!” Hartman then turns around to watch a frenetic video projected behind him: a barrage of strobing color patterns that, upon the commercial’s airing, provoked seizures in a significant number of home viewers. The noodle commercial was promptly banned from the air, and the British Independent Television Commission promptly reached out to Professor Harding to assist them in screening future media for seizure risks.

Less noted in this curious story is the original source of the seizure-inducing imagery. The video excerpts shown behind Hartman were snatched from Eurotechno, a twenty-six-minute ‘videola’ by the mysterious media collective Stakker, released on VHS in 1989.

Let’s pop that VHS into focus for a second. The faintest tape glitch loops on the soundtrack as a woman’s hands sway rhythmically in front of her inquisitive face in close-up, her skin and hair reduced to a saturated tropical two-tone palette (aqua and mauve). This image and palette intermittently burn into heat-vision color clusters as though they were clashing with interlaced video signals, all framed inside a lopsided rectangle of a screen skewed in black space. A metallic three-dimensional spiked-star shape spins in front of the frame before a prismatic rotating plus sign, itself imbued with frenetic color clusters, takes the fore, metamorphoses into a sphere, then into a trihedral mirror, and ushers in a beat-synced soundtrack of crunchy acid techno as multiple newly overlaid screens (featuring the woman, colorfucked patterns, etc.) begin gyrating and melting into spinning shapes. Twenty seconds have passed, and more than twenty-five minutes remain. Through the next 25 minutes the soundtrack swoops in and out of the danceable—flirting with a textural headiness that was largely unexplored sonic territory in 1989—as syncopated strobing layers of Kool-Aid-video screens and polyhedra dance in synchrony. Multiple watches of Eurotechno will cause any non-epileptic to question the fortitude of their non-epilepsy—is that my first ever migraine aura I feel coming on?—but if one can get past this well-warranted concern there’s a lot to love in the mania. In 2026, well after an intervening ’90s when all of Eurotechno’s image manipulation techniques became the vapid language of broadcast bump transitions and computer screensavers, it’s remarkable how fresh the work still feels—fresh in its air of confidence, fresh in its technological deftness, but, most presciently, fresh in taste. After ten or 15 minutes of rave-rainbowed shapes liquefying into gyrating video frames to the strobing beat of the music, the thought occurs that this may be, for better or worse, the MTV generation’s smartest answer to Paul Sharits.

Stakker consisted of British video artists Mark McClean and Colin Scott, along with electronic musician Brian Dougans, though the lines between these video-versus-audio roles seem to have blurred, with McLean and Scott (along with a DJ named Simon Monday) contributing extra sounds and overdubs to Dougans’s original techno-adjacent scores. ‘Videola’ is a Virgin Music marketing term loosely defined as a work of video art in which the sounds and images are created simultaneously—a decidedly experimental alternative to the music video—and Virgin Music is responsible for releasing Eurotechno on VHS via its short-lived Videolabel imprint. Stakker was a bit of a late-’80s flash in the pan, and their non-Eurotechno body of work consists solely of two other highly similar video curios: firstly, Stakker Humanoid—an assaultive symphony of saturated colors, geometric tilings, and two-toned dancing women, backed by a now-seminal acid house track (called “Stakker Humanoid” by Humanoid) that Dougans whipped up to accompany the visual style, and which happened to top the UK dance charts—and secondly, the first 30 minutes of visuals for the VHS-released acid house DJ-set-with-visuals The Evil Acid Baron Show.

McLean, Scott, and Dougans built Stakker primarily on the backs of two affordable pieces of ’80s consumer tech: the Fairlight CVI (Computer Video Instrument) and the Roland TB-303 (Transistor Bass-303) synthesizer. The 303 synth, when tuned just so, emits an irresistibly liquid tone whose allure has drawn listening moths to the acid flame for five decades now. This delectable churning synth sound is—famously, in house music lore—the years-later upturn of Roland’s bad luck after the Japanese company’s failure to sell the 303 as a budget replacement for studio bass guitar sounds. In a rhyming fashion of failure, a perusal of vintage Fairlight CVI walkthroughs on YouTube demonstrates a laundry list of quickly dated video sillinesses: from chroma-key freeze frame stenciling effects to distortions via gridded textural overlays to on-screen painting and kaleidoscoping. It’s truly a wonder that McLean and Scott had the sans-hindsight taste to avoid almost every ’80s (and ’90s) VFX pitfall and focus almost solely on the CVI’s secret weapon: direct color channel manipulation (i.e., digital reassignments of red, blue, and green levels). And this they did with a rapid-fire spectral bravura that should have made Toshio Matsumoto jealous.

Virgin granted Stakker £56,000 (about $200,000 today) to make Eurotechno, and this mostly paid for studio time to access pro-grade effects equipment by British company Quantel and California’s Abekas, with which they projected their Fairlight schizophrenia onto the surfaces of platonic solids and made their rectangular frames twirl around and fold in on themselves. Strangely, or perhaps fittingly, these far more expensive effects are the ones most at risk of exiling Eurotechno to a misfit drawer of dated unartful frivolity. (Quantel and, to some degree, Abekas remained broadcast effects leaders for many years; Quantel products were crucial in constructing the shiny layered geometric transitions of the likes of CNN and SportsCenter, and Brass Eye’s brilliant spoofs thereof.) Dougans undoubtedly used further Roland drum machine products (my ears think they hear prominent TR-606 beats) and quite probably an Akai sampler and synths by Casio and Yamaha—Japan was, by all technological accounts, the secret muscle behind the international house and techno revolutions—and McLean and Scott worked painstakingly to strobe and cut their video onslaughts to the ever-changing BPMs of Dougans’s eventual end result.

The immediate legacy of Eurotechno, before it brought about an epilepsy diagnostic, was twofold: firstly, its images were projected for added spasmodic ambience at clubs and raves worldwide and undoubtedly played a hand, for better or worse, in general EDM aesthetics; secondly, its sounds caught the cortexes of the young soon-to-be Warp Records vanguard of Aphex Twin, Autechre, Squarepusher, Luke Vibert, and many other primarily British musical rabble-rousers. Aphex Twin’s record label released, in 2003, archival compilations of all of Dougans’s recordings from the Eurotechno and Stakker Humanoid sessions, and Vice celebrated the Eurotechno compilation as an “acid lover’s paradise.” But as flattering and hip as Eurotechno’s forked audio/visual legacy may be, it is rare these days that anyone watches the work as an audiovisual whole. This is partly because only lucky VHS collectors or private torrenters can access even a half-decent copy or scan of the original video, and this inaccessibility rhymes with so much of the history of techno and dance music, a history written on forgotten bathroom stalls during a collective molly comedown. Eurotechno, though, is a marvel that deserves placement in a far greater cinematic lineage than ‘half-remembered glitchy wallpaper for ravers.’

Half a century before Stakker, and also working out of London, Len Lye breathed dazzling life into a barely birthed avant-garde mode of cinema. Lye was working loosely in an idiom whose co-innovators included Oskar Fischinger and Mary Ellen Bute, the latter of whom dubbed each of her many (eventually color) image and sound synchronization works to be a “synchromy,” a zippy term later readopted by fellow traveler Norman McLaren. Lye’s synchromy experiments with the subtractive Gasparcolor process, notably 1936’s Rainbow Dance and 1937’s Trade Tattoo, bear striking similarities to Stakker’s ’80s output: strobing tessellated patterns (whose interactions with film layered in coats of cyan, magenta, and yellow Lye manually attended to frame by frame); stenciled dancing bodies (whose “trail of colored silhouettes” were likened to Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase in some Harvard program notes); jittery floating shapes that fly in front of, and often swallow, the action on screen; and, in Rainbow Dance, a woman in medium close-up rhythmically looking this-way-and-that rendered in shuffling tropical negatives. Also, ironically, but self-evidently, Lye’s film work lives on in higher definition than Stakker’s videos. But these Lye films don’t quite trounce Stakker even if they very impressively predate the team’s efforts. Lye’s stenciled people register to a contemporary eye like clumsily done early video effects, and his overlaid Gasparcolor-processed films of patterns and tradesmen working feel, at their worst, like watching a bad ’90s VJ set. This hindsight-cheapo quality is the price of working too close to the cutting edge (and it is why Lye’s most indelibly sublime work will likely continue to be his hand-painted and stop-motion creations). Even Stanley Kubrick and Douglas Trumbull’s Star Gate sequence for 2001 (also developed in and around London) has its small share of hindsight-cheapo coloring effects. And Saul Bass’s marriage of John Whitney’s Lissajous-curve stencils with a woman’s red-tinted pupil and iris in Vertigo (the overture that walked so Star Gate could run) veers clunky for at least a split second.

Eurotechno is, decidedly, far guiltier of clunkiness than either of these latter two master sequences, but a meticulousness of electric activity surrounds its ever-morphing layers with a certain forcefield of gusto, and its core embrace of video qua video seems to champion its rendering limitations as badges of honor. Also, who among Sharits, Matsumoto, Lye, Kubrick, or Hitchcock helped to usher in a new subgenre of music alongside their cinematic bona fides? In any case, the march of time will continue to stamp and unstamp cheapness on erstwhile cutting-edge innovation, and so, lastly, on the music front, I think it’s worth revisiting Birmingham in 1993, where we first found Professor Harding at work. A ten-minute drive west from Harding’s lab would have brought us to the apartment office of Downwards Records, an underground techno label cofounded that same year by an ever-punkish Brummie named Karl O’Connor, whose better-known alias is Regis. If Downwards’ founding was quaint, its effect on the world of techno was seismic. Its legacy is the ‘Birmingham sound,’ and this sound was an uncompromising rejection of all the silly bells, whistles, and funkiness of the acid house and techno that predated it. Undecorated, blown-out loops of industrial punches and creaks and were the Downwards credo, and 30 years on this is still the core credo of many techno purists. Speaking in 2013, looking back on acid house, its adherents, and its cheapness, O’Connor called it all nonsense: “I definitely felt something passing when acid house came along. Electronic music was really sophisticated in the mid ’80s, but then it just seemed a bit cheap. Dungarees, men with ponytails, it upset me quite a lot to be honest, that’s why I stayed in for quite a while.” Stakker flirted with a lot of this derided cheapness, and it would be hard to begrudge viewers who feel Eurotechno, for all its merits, ultimately fails to transcend the silliness of the scene. Alas, there’s rarely any winning in the war of aesthetics.

There is, however—perhaps—a way to win in the British-born war on luminance. Pure blue is the color with the lowest inherent luminance. A film made solely of an unchanging blue screen would be about as eye-calming as they come. And how about a soundtrack in which British experimenters from all the best corners and eras are mixed together in calming resplendence? The Muses had this one covered, and in 1993 England no less. Seems there’s always another shade to that dim little island.

Pompei: Below the Clouds
Dir. Gianfranco Rosi, Italy, MUBI

Much like American national treasure Frederick Wiseman, Italian documentarian Gianfranco Rosi consciously eschews that collection of formal tics that has, largely for the worse, overrun international documentary practice in recent decades. His films generally avoid subjects speaking to-camera, whether in a formal interview setting or vox pop (his 1993 debut, Boatman, and the creepy, disquieting, single-subject El Sicario, Room 164, notable exceptions); nondiegetic music; flashy graphics and animation; rapid-fire montage; facile archival intrusions; voiceover narration. Like Wiseman, Rosi seems fully committed to working the fundamental units of cinema—the shot and the cut—to create meaning. Both filmmakers have a predilection for parking themselves in circumscribed spaces and patiently letting their movies reveal themselves before the lens. Their choices of boundary can be geographical, institutional, metaphorical, or all of these layered atop each other.

For Below the Clouds, Rosi spent three years in the shadow of Mount Vesuvius, looking and listening, searching the neighborhoods of Naples for the appropriate scenarios in which to introduce his locked-off camera (he again serves himself well acting as his own cinematographer), here set to capture images in lustrous black-and-white. If a mammoth Wiseman location epic like, say, Belfast, Maine, gives one the feeling of a bricklayer laboring, piece by piece, to construct the filmic edifice, the result all spackled with meanings and stories for the viewer to consider, Rosi’s leaner, fleeter geography movies (Sacro GRA, Fire at Sea, and Below the Clouds) function more like roundelays—the filmmaker establishes a handful of disconnected scenarios and then cycles through them, returning to each with rhythmic regularity. Sometimes this cycling reveals progressions, but, also like Wiseman, Rosi is a filmmaker unconcerned with the traditional movements of narrative. Why bother with contrivance when you can put the stuff of actual life on screen?

Below the Clouds, though set in a relatively small area hunkered uneasily between the Phlegraean Fields to the West and towering Vesuvius to the East, is populated with incidents that invite the viewer to contemplate a broader, global apocalyptic moment. Present-day climate instabilities cannot be far from mind during Rosi’s scenes with an aged antiquarian rummaging through vaults filled with relics from Pompeii, the lost city that once rested about a dozen miles from modern Naples and which was destroyed by the Earth in an instant. A team of Japanese archaeologists from the University of Tokyo continue a decades-long excavation of what is believed to be the Villa Augustea, and their discourse on ages-old regional conflicts, cultural intermingling, and commerce touch the open wounds left by 21st-century neoliberal globalism. Humanity’s evergreen ability to prioritize profit above all, even to the point of erasing its own history, is evident in sequences following a local prosecutor and special investigator through the ancient tunnels running underneath the city where there has been plundering by tomb raiders (like the antiheroes of Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera). Rosi risks tipping away from metaphor into outright commentary via the inclusion of a handful of charismatic Syrian exiles who operate massive frigates transporting grain to Europe from war-torn Ukraine.

The world may be burning all around us, but what’s the use in worrying when you live in a city where an actual volcano could eradicate your home at any moment? Rosi’s visits to the Naples fire department’s emergency call center suggest the citizens of Naples feel this threat acutely. He returns to this crammed room repeatedly in Below the Clouds, capturing dispatchers as they field call after call from Napoli young and old demanding to know if they’d just felt a tremor, if there was a need to evacuate, worriedly asking if something even worse is about to happen. Veteran callers offer their own estimations of the seismic activity—that last one had to be at least a 4, no? The dispatchers handle these calls with a bemused humanity that stands in sharp contrast to scenes set in the deathly still headquarters of the Osservatorio Vesuviano, the oldest volcanology center in the world, in which banks of impersonal monitors track the local volcanos for any slight changes all day, every day. It has the feel of a mad scientist’s laboratory, or perhaps an ICU, where the patient being fretted over for signs of danger is an entire city.

Unlike his somnolent, murky Notturno, in which it was, at times, unclear where Rosi was and what he was looking for, there’s a pleasing clarity to Below the Clouds. His metaphors are compact and graspable; his sequences interlock better than they have since perhaps Sacro GRA. Though this tidiness can result in such scenes as one in the catacombs where the prosecutor, clearly well aware of what the man behind the camera is interested in hearing, declaims for a while on the tragedy of the city’s plundered cultural history, Rosi hasn’t sanded his work smooth. A curious and charming set of scenes involves an older man running an antique store that doubles as a study hall for local youth after school. This thread scans as a touch tangential, but somehow the man’s kindness with his wards comes to suggest there might be things the world would miss were humanity snuffed out. The filmmaker also makes space for a long, dire interlude in the call center where a frenzied woman remains on the line with a dispatcher as she hides in her home from a drunken abusive husband—it breaks the comedy of this grouping of scenes and introduces a more individualized strain of human violence into the mix.

Though Rosi’s synaptic, non-narrative nonfiction can provide a viewer ample rewards—most importantly freedom from the heavy hand of “story”—there are risks. The absence of traditional narrative momentum, that altogether familiar feeling of the rise and fall of action, can leave a film sputtering, stalled, or straining to justify its length. Rosi’s film, also like many of Wiseman’s, feels like it has several endings—at one point late in Below the Clouds, the antiquarian and an interlocutor discuss the concept of “suspended time,” a neat phrase which refers to the relics they’re examining, but which cannot help but evoke a feeling that anyone who has paid glancing attention to the world in the last half-decade will be familiar. What a note to end on! Yet, after cycling through all his scenarios, and offering us similar moments that suggest winding down or closure, Rosi returns us to the antiquarian, again talking about time, and then undertakes yet another rotation. Rosi’s magic as a filmmaker lies in his selection and ordering process—his ability to create complex webs of meaning through editing is what sets his films apart from the glut of tripod-bound landscape films that coast on vibes and the occasional remarkable image. But toward the close of Beyond the Clouds it feels as though he’s adding scenes to complete a symmetrical design that the real lives on display haven’t demanded.

Rosi does allow himself one contrivance in Below the Clouds: in several sequences he stations his camera in a broken-down cinema. The seats are overturned, moldings crumbling, refuse is everywhere—it’s clear this structure hasn’t been operational in quite some time. Yet, somehow, images suddenly flicker on the screen. Though we later see an old projector aglow, humming in operation, I can’t help but suspect some digital trickery helped bring the theater back to life—a perfectly acceptable bit of chicanery. Most notable of the snippets Rosi has curated is drawn from the climax of Voyage to Italy, perhaps the greatest film set in Naples, in which estranged husband and wife Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders tour a Pompeiian excavation site. They meet a researcher who calmly describes his most recent work: a plaster cast of two lovers, locked in their death embrace for 2000 years, which shatters the couple yet ultimately helps bring them back together. It’s one of the many scenes from that crucial film that conjures vast ideas and timespans via simple, emotional means. The formal choices in Below the Clouds work toward similar ends. Like Rossellini (an admitted influence), Rosi is a searcher who has chosen a highly artificial process—filmmaking—as a tool to break through artifice and allow us to surface what's been buried right in front of us, all along.

What Does That Nature Say to You
Dir. Hong Sang-soo, South Korea, Cinema Guild

Having spent the better part of a decade paring down narratives to their essentials, working with increasingly minimal setups and decidedly spare scenarios, Hong Sang-soo has recently changed course. While keeping to similar production methods—in every film since Introduction (2021) he has served as writer, director, producer, DP, and composer—Hong has decided to reintroduce recognizable, even conventional dramatic stakes into his cinema. Last year’s By the Stream (2024), which follows a blacklisted actor who returns to his alma mater to direct a controversial skit, stood out from Hong’s recent period for its unusual plethora of incident. And with What Does That Nature Say to You, Hong offers yet another dramatically charged scenario, one that’s practically Aristotelian in its unity of action. A young man accompanies his girlfriend for a visit to her home to meet her family; at dinner, he gets extremely drunk and embarrasses himself; the next day, he leaves. It is a mark of Hong’s unassuming radicality, however, that what might otherwise be a straightforward scenario becomes a much stranger affair.

Take the opening scene, which cuts from a shot of a middle-aged woman in a kitchen to the interior of a sedan, where a couple sits and watches as another car pulls out onto the road. From snatches of conversation, we learn that the couple, thirtyish poet Donghwa (Ha Seongguk) and his girlfriend Junhee (Kang Soyi), have driven from Seoul to the latter’s childhood home. We learn that despite having been with Junhee for several years, Donghwa has neither visited nor met her parents, and that he has no present plans to do either. We also learn from Junhee that the car that just left, though its driver was unseen to us, was that of Junhee’s mother, Sunhee (Cho Yunhee). And although Donghwa only meets her much later, over an hour into the film, we surmise that the woman we saw cooking was Sunhee. The nondescript cut from kitchen to car interior thus gains formal and narrative motivation, linking the two images both spatially and dramatically. But it is characteristic of Hong’s approach that this relation is not given in advance and only becomes intelligible in retrospect. For a while, the opening image of a woman cooking just hangs there—a floating event that’s only later assimilated into a concrete progression.

If such effects are characteristic of Hong’s cinema, this is because of how he has, over the course of three decades and 33 features, gradually developed an approach that estranges us from our assumptions about conventional film grammar. Hong’s bifurcated breakout, Right Now, Wrong Then (2015), for instance, plays the encounter between a filmmaker and artist twice, each isolated iteration comprising some repetition of dialogue and setting. But accordingly, when Hong conspicuously repeats dialogue and staging across scenes in other films, as he does in The Day After (2017) and Walk Up (2022), we are not immediately inclined to read those scenes as chronologically following each other—that is, until conversational cues finally allow us to realize that what we are seeing is not overt structural play but simply the result of a character’s memory lapse or force of habit. His recent In Our Day (2023), to take another example, alternates between two stories whose relation to each other isn’t concretized: Despite a number of coincidences that appear in both stories, it never becomes clear whether the characters in each segment are related, whether the stories are unfolding at the same time, or even whether they occur in the same universe. But consequently, when we are confronted with that initial cut in What Does That Nature Say to You, we are not inclined to assume a fixed relation between the two spaces. That we are eventually able to confirm the spatiotemporal connections across these opening shots, about halfway through the film, does not diminish the fact that in Hong’s films, we are continually asked to consider—or to reconsider—the various assumptions that such basic chronological ordering presupposes. What his latest offers, then, is the prospect of seeing this dynamic in the context of an apparently unified dramatic scenario.

What Does That Nature Say to You is notable, then, not because it eschews dramatic material but because it withholds the usual means of discerning which details are relevant or irrelevant to the nominal drama. Thinking that no one is home, Junhee ventures to show Donghwa around the house, only for them to run into her father, Oryeong (Kwon Haehyo), who invites him to stay for dinner, thereby setting the film’s plot in motion. In the course of this somewhat awkward encounter, which unfolds in a single shot, Oryeong also expresses interest in Donghwa’s older car, a 1996 Kia Pride, and even asks if he can sit in it for a bit. After receiving permission, he then hops into the car alone and—still without a cut—quickly drives out of view, leaving Junhee and Donghwa somewhat bewildered, waiting in real time for him to return. It is a hilariously unexpected fillip to a familiar sort of interaction. But whereas another director might clearly underscore its plot function—perhaps to establish a character trait that will later become important, to highlight the narrative significance of the car, or even to indicate that it serves no larger purpose—Hong denies us any such cues.

It would be possible to see this scene, like others in What Does That Nature Say to You, as mere violations of narrative economy. Yet what Hong’s direction demonstrates is the contingency of making such judgments based on assumed criteria of what is and is not of importance. The result is a film dense with details that float free of their ostensible dramatic scaffolding. After Oryeong invites Donghwa to dinner, he insists the couple and Junhee’s sister, Neunghee (Park Miso), go for lunch and then visit a nearby Buddhist temple. Viewed in relation to the impending dinner, these passages, which play out at length, would seem to be mere digressions on the way to the climactic meal. But as with the opening shot of Junhee’s mother cooking, these scenes retain an independence that’s irreducible to their narrative function. A tense conversation between Donghwa and Neunghee at lunch takes no precedence over their leisurely jaunt through the Buddhist temple during which the former tries to write notes for a poem. Donghwa’s drunken tirade at dinner, during which he fails to recite a poem he has written, is undeniably of central significance. But even here, it is notable that the question of Donghwa’s suitability as Junhee’s partner does not receive markedly more emphasis than his poetic aspirations, and that what we are seeing is an artistic crisis as much as a relationship one. Due to his penchant for long takes and minimal camera setups, Hong’s dramatic emphases tend to be conveyed through duration rather than composition. With this in mind, we might notice that following the disastrous dinner, Donghwa’s nighttime stroll through the family’s garden property after he sobers up, takes up as much time as his hasty goodbye to Junhee before he leaves the next morning. By the film’s end, we might thus wonder whether it’s entirely accurate to describe the film as a meet-the-parents drama in relation to which Donghwa’s various nature walks would be merely reprieves, detours, and diversions.

In fact, these plein air peregrinations provide something of a clue to Hong’s enigmatic title. Such scenes are not new to his work: think of the mountain vistas of The Power of Kangwon Province (1998), Namhan Fortress in Nobody’s Daughter Haewon (2013), Changgyeonggung Palace in Our Sunhi (2013)—really, any of the locations through which Hong has spun his seasonal variations. But in Hong’s earlier films, especially, these locations mainly serve as stable backdrops against which to view the changeable romances and fickle fortunes of his characters. In What Does That Nature Say to You, by contrast, we are not able to so easily separate foreground and background, to assume a naturalized landscape against which some human drama is meant to unfold. From this perspective, Hong’s title suggests that the artist’s principal imperative is to take nothing for granted, and to find new ways of making nature speak.

Silsila screens Sunday, March 1, 2026, at Museum of the Moving Image as part of a special Holi-eve celebration.

In the early 1980s, my sister, my parents, and I were living in Queens. My parents, like many Indian immigrants at the time, bought a VHS player so they could watch the latest Bollywood films from back home—mostly pirated copies rented from local Desi grocery stores for a dollar. Every Friday evening after dinner, the energy in our living room shifted. For a few hours, we were transported elsewhere. Garish pastels. Maximalist orchestrations with the piercing vocals of Lata Mangeshkar that bordered on cacophony yet somehow worked. Melodramatic performances and elaborate dance sequences that were staples of Hindi cinema.

After school, while my parents were at work, my sister and I rehearsed what we had seen. We synchronized our movements, lip-synced songs. Though I was ten years younger, I played her romantic lead. We repeated gestures of longing and desire that we did not fully understand.

Most Indians at the time, including my parents and their parents before them, had arranged marriages. They married people they did not know. Love, as Bollywood presented it, was fantasy—a fever dream one could not shake, a force that pushed against safety and tradition. The films almost always ended happily; the parents relented, the lovers prevailed. Yet no one we knew had acted on love, even if they privately felt it. It was contained to the movie screen.

Then came Silsila, a film unlike any we had seen before. Released in 1981 and directed by Yash Chopra, it centers on the love triangle of the playwright Amit (Amitabh Bachchan), his wife Shobha (Jaya Bhaduri), and his former lover Chandni (Rekha). The film deals directly with adultery, a subject rarely handled so openly in mainstream Hindi cinema. Its emotional frankness—which included premarital intimacy, lovers in bed, and the open acknowledgment of desire—caused a stir.

The impact was heightened by rumors that Amitabh Bachchan and Rekha were involved off-screen while he was married to Jaya Bhaduri. Chopra cast all three actors in the central triangle, intensifying the sense of psychodrama and blurring the boundaries between performance and speculation. Gossip magazines went into overdrive. It seemed, for once, that life was imitating art. In Queens, we read those magazines at the Indian grocery between shelves of rice and spices. Bollywood did not feel distant. It felt personal, as if it were working through how complex love, marriage, and commitment could be.

What distinguished Silsila was not only rumor but also tone. The film treats desire seriously. The affair between Amit and Chandni is not framed as simple moral failure, nor is it romanticized without consequence. It is allowed to exist alongside marriage, obligation, and social expectation. The spouses are aware, and yet they remain together. In a cinema tradition that often privileges melodrama, the performances here are restrained and unexpectedly poetic. Especially Bachchan, whose work until then had been largely defined by his “angry young man” persona. Here, he is sensitive and vulnerable, a shift that revealed a different register of his talent.

The song and dance sequences around which Hindi films are structured are often abrupt and sometimes perfunctory. In Silsila, the songs feel integral to the emotional arc. Rekha’s performance conveys visible ache and longing. In “Yeh Kahan Aa Gaye Hum,” Amit and Chandni stand close but rarely touch. Much of the scene unfolds in hushed tones, as if proximity itself were dangerous. In “Rang Barse,” set during Holi, intoxication and ritual permit a different kind of contact. Colored powder becomes an excuse for touch; celebration creates plausible deniability. Even as children, we sensed that the film operated differently from others we had seen. Where many films simplified love into triumph or punishment, there was complexity here, marked by doubt and restraint.

Silsila ultimately resists a radical reimagining of relationships between the sexes. It acknowledges desire but returns to the safety of tradition. That decision was debated at the time. Some felt the lovers should have followed their hearts. To this day, many see Rekha—an icon in her own right—as a tragic figure who never ended up with the person she truly loved. For viewers raised within arranged marriages, the question was not abstract: what does one owe to feeling, and what does one owe to commitment?

A few years later, my sister married. It was arranged. Soon after, she moved away from Queens. I lost my dance partner. Yet we continued our Friday night screenings. The tapes kept arriving, and the songs kept playing. But I watched differently. The films felt formulaic again. The performances did not move me in the same way. We watched more quietly. I can’t recall when the ritual ended. But I remember Silsila clearly. It was the first film that allowed desire and duty to occupy the same frame.

"Wuthering Heights"
Dir. Emerald Fennell, U.K., U.S., Warner Bros.

At the very start of Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights,” all we hear are creaking noises, panting, and strained gasps over a black screen. If the salacious bath water scene in Saltburn and the cynicism of Promising Young Woman were any indication, what follows should be an image of attempted sexual transgression. So it is: a close-up on a hanged man’s postmortem “stiffy,” pointed out by one of the many children observing what turns out to be a public execution. Indeed, those were still a regular occurrence during the period Emily Brontë’s eponymous novel is set (18th-century England), yet Fennell’s script values spice over historical accuracy. As soon as the last quiver has left the lone, dangling body, the crowd goes wild with touch, kisses, and sexual advances; the camera whizzes past numerous couples, each in their own bacchanalian daze, making sure the message is loud and clear: the spectacle of death is nothing more than an orgiastic prompt.

But the point of view of this Wuthering Heights belongs to Catherine (Cathy) Earnshaw (played by Charlotte Mellington as a child and Margot Robbie later) who, as per Brontë, opts for a life of riches over love and ends up regretting it on her death bed. A long tracking shot follows the young girl as she flees the opening death/sex scene, haunted by the drones and heavy bass of Charli xcx and John Cale’s song “House.” At home, Cathy is reprimanded by her stern, tippler father (Martin Clunes), who calls her a “sourpuss” for crying over what she saw at the town square. As exacting as Mr. Earnshaw is, he seems to have a soft spot for strays, bringing home a scruffy-looking boy. “I’ll name him Heathcliff, after my dead brother,” declares Cathy. “He shall be your pet,” her father responds, introducing the submissive vernacular that will heretofore define the relationship between the Miss and the stable boy. It’s true that Brontë’s novel relies on sex and death as driving forces and its Victorian setting makes it (nearly) impossible for them to sublimate their sexual feelings for one another in adulthood. Perhaps this is why Andrea Arnold’s adaptation of Wuthering Heights (2011) pulled the viewer down to the squelchy ground, rolling side by side with its young protagonists, to remind us that child’s play is always, in some way, inherently erotic.

Sigmund Freud, who published his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality in 1905, wrote of “libido development” and “psychosexual stages” related to erogenous zones in children, which exist until social norms insist on channeling the libido into more fixed forms. Even if psychologists today deem this theory empirically unverifiable, its sociocultural value stands, reminding us that children do not exist in a sexual vacuum, like they do in Fennell’s film adaptation. Young Cathy and Heathcliff are cherubic, with the occasional glimmer of sad purity in their mischievous eyes, but when they play, they play grown-ups: Heathcliff lies to spare Cathy from her father’s whip, she then nurses his wounds. He swears he will protect her at all costs, love confessions follow. If the children are already acting like (chaste) adults, then childhood in Fennell’s Wuthering Heights is just a prelude, a mandatory act one of three—a neat way to signpost “sex begins here,” in adulthood.

In the scene signaling the shift, Cathy finds herself a voyeur, witnessing a racy encounter in the stables, with elements of consensual non-consent, BDSM, and pony-play. Afterwards, her gaze imbues trivial acts like the kneading of dough with libidinal energy; DP Linus Sandgren moves from painterly, long shot compositions to shards of handheld cinematography. Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi), who’s never far away, implicates himself in her arousal by watching her masturbate on the moors. Afterwards, he even sucks on her index and middle finger with pronounced delight, declaring that now he’s tasted her, he can find her anywhere, “like a dog.” (Later in the film, there is a scene of puppy-play, but it doesn’t involve Cathy— she’s too good a girl for that.)

As a model adult, Cathy plots her future—leaving her alcoholic father behind and trading the alarmingly handsome help for the wealthy Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif)—and succeeds with aplomb at becoming a miserable wife. With the corsets, gowns, and ribbons aplenty comes a sister-in-law, a playmate. Isabella (Alison Oliver) enjoys braiding Cathy’s hair and dressing her up, when they’re not playing on the swings out in the garden. The childish modes of entertainment don’t end here—the Linton mansion looks like an extravagant dollhouse, with its naked walls and bare wood floors, and it also has an actual dollhouse that’s a perfect, scaled-down copy of the place (and the dolls have human hair). Childish touches reduce even the stylized amor vacui (regard for empty spaces) to a gimmick. The (aesthetic) spirit of Barbie haunts Wuthering Heights, and no wonder—they share a costume designer, Jacqueline Durran. But there’s more in common here with the two period films she won Oscars for, Anna Karenina and Little Women. Anachronistic fabrics like leather (for corsets), latex (for gowns), and cellophane (for robes) tend to lean heavily on what the look symbolizes, but as part of a mise-en-scène that’s childhood-coded, we only notice the surface.

There’s a certain infantile regression to the adult Cathy that’s more pronounced than that of her younger counterpoint. Try as she might to carry on Mellington’s charming petulance, Margot Robbie’s acting comes across as uncalibrated and histrionic, and the icy beauty of her features prevent her from embodying a protagonist that’s sensual as she is jejune. In place of the defiant, desiring Cathy the film desperately tries to conjure, we find a woman whose extramarital affair upholds the status quo. Admittedly, Fennell’s decision to include sex scenes instead of simply alluding to or allegorizing sex, as other adaptations have done, may be somewhat transgressive. But her "Wuthering Heights" so insists on a clean break between libidinous and infantile that the film neuters the ambivalent eroticism fueling the novel. What happens when you unload all of your erotic charge at once? Postcoital depression.

Chris Wilcha was the exact right age to see the world through the viewfinder of a Sony Hi8 camcorder. He received the camera as a college graduation gift from his parents in May of 1992, three years after Sony introduced the 8mm videocassette format to compete with Super VHS. Its increased picture quality and compact size made it perfect for amateur filmmakers like Wilcha, who brought his camera into the offices of Columbia House, America’s most prominent record club, every single day for two years. He was 22 years old when he started as an assistant product manager in the marketing department; he left the company as a full-fledged product manager to attend CalArts film school. The 200 hours of footage he shot became the bones of his thesis film The Target Shoots First (1999), a first-person documentary whose short festival run occurred right around the time that mail-order music clubs began their slow descent into extinction.

Wilcha’s film never received a theatrical release. Instead, it was licensed to TV networks like HBO and the Sundance Channel in the early 2000s before slipping into relative obscurity. Target would eventually find its way on the Internet, where its charmingly unrefined style helped it fit in with the plethora of amateur video diaries, but it crucially exists within and beyond its particular early-to-mid-’90s moment: a time when a booming economy could facilitate existential crises around personal integrity, when filmmaking became even more democratized, when technology was a source of optimism, even as it began its inevitable encroachment towards the permanent collapse of public and private spaces.

Target chronicles Wilcha’s tenure at Columbia House, where he’s hired in no small part because of his age. His familiarity with Generation X taste makes him an asset to the company’s fortysomething staffers, who are trying to catch up to a cultural marketplace significantly altered by Nirvana’s unforeseen mainstream success. (The film largely takes place between the lead-up to the release of Nirvana’s final record, In Utero, in the fall of ’93 through Kurt Cobain's suicide in the spring of ’94.) He becomes Columbia House’s “resident alternative consultant,” tasked with everything from editing Beavis & Butt-head–related copy to explaining to the woman in charge of merchandising that Bad Brains is a rock band and not a rap group.

Wilcha constantly tapes while he's on the job. He films inane company meetings and interviews with coworkers. He documents a Columbia Records factory tour, a San Diego music industry convention with David Hasselhoff in attendance, and an Aerosmith autograph signing. (“Such a deal!” Steven Tyler exclaims when asked about his thoughts on record clubs.) Wilcha particularly excels at recording the idle stretches of downtime built into any nine-to-five job, like puttering around an office or goof-off sessions with his cohorts. Taken as a whole, Target casually captures a snapshot of Clinton-era white-collar corporate environments. Contemporary viewers too young to remember the period will likely be stunned by the sheer tonnage of paper every room contains, or that a company was ever flush enough to hire such an enormous staff to produce a sales catalog.

No one at Columbia House seems to mind Wilcha’s camera in their face; in fact, many are charmed by its presence. The consumer-grade camcorder was still a specialized object in the early ’90s, so it wasn’t exactly commonplace for someone to carry around a video camera into an office setting without an explicit agenda. Much like in James McBride’s landmark metafiction David Holzman's Diary (1967)—where the eponymous character brings his 16mm Éclair everywhere on the streets of Manhattan, allowing him to have impromptu conversations with strangers enamored by the sheer novelty of a man with a camera—Wilcha’s camera provides him with remarkable access within his Boomer-dominated workplace. Wilcha and McBride’s films spring from the cinéma vérité tradition, in which new technology, specifically portable cameras with improved sound, not only generated new filmmaking techniques but also more intimate expressions of truth. In Wilcha’s case, “truth” meant the banal realities of office culture that implicate so many people, like the particulars of offboarding paperwork and elementary school-style fire drills.

*****

Target admirably resists neat categorization, which might explain some of its limited commercial prospects upon completion. In interviews, Wilcha has described his thesis film as “The Office before The Office.” That characterization makes sense as an elevator pitch in that Wilcha edits the film with punchlines in mind, but its origins are more filmic and rigorous than its unpretentious style suggests.

Target owes considerable debts to the work of Ross McElwee, who helped pioneer the autobiographical documentary with films like Sherman’s March (1986) and Time Indefinite (1993). Wilcha developed Target while studying under experimental filmmakers like Thom Andersen and James Benning, with the latter suggesting that he construct the film in 60 one-minute sequences. He drew superficial comparisons to Michael Moore during Target’s brief festival run, most likely because of his wry voiceover and the film’s quasi-fact-finding approach.

But Wilcha’s film never feels like a Roger & Me-ish exposé. Instead, it more closely resembles a memoir, embracing elements of the personal essay film that emphasize mundane absurdism as a means of social commentary. It’s easy to draw a line from Target to the creative nonfiction work of John Wilson, and it presages the lo-fi aesthetics of the early mumblecore films set in white middle-class environments. In an age when people post personal video diaries on Instagram and TikTok, Target no longer feels quite so anomalous.

In retrospect, HI8—analog video’s last stand—was the only form that could reflect Target’s emotional core, which is one of the final, honest Gen X statements about “selling out.” Sony introduced its first digital camcorder in 1995, and MiniDV became the standard format for con- and prosumers by the late ’90s, with the larger film industry quickly following suit. The film’s primary throughline involves Wilcha’s anxiety about working for a mass market corporation as a punk rock acolyte, whose principles embrace a strong opposition towards working in corporate America. Columbia House’s success was premised on negative option billing, which places the burden on the consumer to actively decline their offerings lest they be charged. Internet subscription services now freely deploy this tactic, even while the FTC has made it more difficult to conceal these policies from consumers. “Punk rock has always been about saying ‘No’ to exactly the kinds of commercial systems that exploit bands like corporate record clubs,” Wilcha correctly muses in voiceover, referencing his employer’s casually deceptive business practices.

Wilcha serves as the de facto liaison between “creative services”—the in-house staff of twentysomething copywriters and graphic designers who produce Columbia House’s sales catalogs, with whom he has more in common—and the more “adult” marketing department where he works. In an effort to collapse this divide, he helps spearhead a relaunch of the company’s alternative club catalog alongside a group of like-minded coworkers from both departments. Together, Wilcha’s team successfully shapes the previously dry brochure into a SPIN-like music magazine. On the catalog’s pages, they disclose hidden costs and company sales tactics, sneak in music criticism, and even include their names and photos in defiance of Columbia House tradition to use hacky pseudonyms, for instance a collection manager named “John Savant.”

The previously impersonal-by-design sales tool suddenly feels handmade and knowingly self-aware. Wilcha accomplishes this by imposing, rather than concealing, his team’s personal taste all while eliminating distinctions between departments. His “radical” efforts elicit the ire of upper management, who hire an expensive outside ad agency to “support” Wilcha’s team by ultimately taking credit for their success. (In one galling scene, a long-haired ad exec who resembles a “cool” youth minister condescendingly explains Gen X’s obsession with credibility to management.) Despite the success of the alternative catalog, the company eventually eliminates its personality and, per Wilcha, “things return to just being for sale.”

Even before Columbia House exercises its power, Wilcha’s pride in the catalog sours when he realizes the obvious: for all of the catalog’s so-called subversiveness, he ultimately just provided a way for Columbia House to profit from his generation. Letters pour into the office from teenaged and college-aged kids enthusiastically responding to their feeble rebellion. “We not only convinced the kids that consuming was cool, we made it seem like an act of defiance,” he concludes.

*****

In 2026, it’s probably easy to roll your eyes at this existential handwringing. Wilcha would be part of the last wave of kids who would ever be able to afford a semi-bohemian life on the island of Manhattan—in fact, Wilcha himself said that he could barely afford to live there when he returned to the city after film school—so I can’t really blame anyone who might scoff at his affected unease about taking a corporate gig to pay his meager rent, or find his desire to live a life free of any compromise to be unrealistic.

In Flipside (2023), Wilcha’s autobiographical semi-sequel to Target, he reflects on how he used his camera to distance himself from his Columbia House job in his first feature. He gently pokes fun at his pretensions as someone convinced that he wasn’t selling out but rather “sneaking in,” and incorporates previously unseen footage of him interviewing coworkers about their relationship to work and identity, which he describes as an attempt to be “some kind of grunge Studs Terkel.” At one point, Wilcha features a tape of his early-twentysomething self earnestly addressing his camera about his desire to live a professionally meaningful life despite capitalism’s chokehold on society. (“This is painful for me to watch,” the older Wilcha admits in voiceover.)

“Looking back, I realized I was asking these questions because I couldn’t figure out how anyone makes a living doing work that is meaningful,” Wilcha says in Flipside, a film that largely chronicles his two-decade journey from being a young, ambitious documentarian to accepting his unplanned profession as a freelance commercial director. Using Wilcha’s desire to document his fledgling hometown record store as a jumping-off point, Flipside itemizes his numerous unfinished projects about subjects as varied as the White Stripes to a garage sale–obsessed psychotherapist, all of which fell apart because of a lack of resources or were scuttled by the subjects themselves. Wilcha was forced time and again to put potential features aside to take well-paying, oft-anemic commercial gigs to support his family. Advertising, the job that made him so uneasy in his mid-twenties, is now how he makes a living.

Instead of depicting these incomplete works as ill-fated loose ends, however, Wilcha and editor Joe Beshenkovsky tie the digressive strands together into a portrait of a life that, for all of its frustrations and disappointments, is defined by an abiding love of creative processes. The format of Wilcha’s camera may be constantly evolving, a development that Flipside thoroughly captures, but the director’s disarming perspective remains constant. The flat, low-res quality of Wilcha’s Hi8 image—along with his inchoate, yet energetic cinematography in Target—reflects the candor of his youthful searching. Meanwhile, the crisp digital photography and his seasoned eye demonstrated in the present-day footage from Flipside reveals middle-aged resignation and ambivalence, along with some hard-earned wisdom.

*****

Wilcha’s apprehension about being complicit in a corporate scheme was borne out by 21st-century social and technological “progress.” Record clubs may have died out, but Columbia House’s fat-cat business practices have thrived under streaming services like Spotify, which has all but eliminated the middle-class artist by passing on the metastasized next-gen version of “8 CDs for a penny” to consumers. Wilcha’s identity crisis in Target, brought on by his thoughtful curiosity and catechistic sensibility, strikes me as neither embarrassing nor naïve. Identifying the ills of consumption may be quaint, but that doesn’t make its passive normalization any less unsettling. It’s hardly juvenile to meditate upon the value of labor in the face of capitalism’s demand for moral concessions, even if it means using a video camera to rationalize it.

For all of Target’s ’90s cultural context, it somehow lives in a generationally liminal state. Wilcha taped, edited, and released his film in a pre-surveillance world, where photography was neither entirely democratic nor an inherent cause for concern. (Any comparable business nowadays would put the kibosh on Wilcha’s directionless recording purely for liability concerns.) Wilcha’s coworkers likely had little idea that his footage would ever see the light of day; their lack of self-consciousness on camera arguably dates Target just as much as its Gen X angst. A decade after Wilcha leaves Columbia House for grad school, YouTube would emerge and the era of endless performance would ensue.

Somewhat ironically, YouTube is currently where Target resides. Wilcha admits its limited availability can be attributed to his own underestimation of the film; he saw it as a grad school project whose surprising popularity on the festival circuit was a fluke. Once the TV licensing deals expired and physical media waned, nobody was ever motivated to provide it with a home. (He’s reportedly working to restore it now.) When Target is viewed on YouTube, its nostalgia factor multiples—the analog image and handheld camerawork only amplify its archaic, home movie-esque aesthetics. Yet its critique of capitalism and email-job concerns contribute to Target’s contemporary feel, despite its worn image.

For a short period, I edited Downtime Magazine, the online publishing arm of my friend’s apparel company Jambys, which specializes in unisex loungewear. I was allowed to commission 800 to 1200–word recommendation pieces about streaming titles from freelance writers with minimal oversight; these articles were often read in promotional email blasts sent to subscribers, presumably while they wore or bought the company’s clothes, which reportedly charmed the company’s investors. It was a way of getting me and my colleagues paid a decent rate for culture writing sans the burden of topicality in a diminished media environment, and it worked for a while before financial realities reared their ugly head.

I went into Downtime with complete awareness of the publication’s supplementary nature; there was no confusion that it existed in service of selling elevated athleisure. I’m proud of the pieces I commissioned and the money I helped redirect, but it still made me think about the spectrum of concessions and forfeitures required to produce good work under the best of circumstances. Shifting economic realities have made “selling out” an unfortunate inevitability, but I’ve always resented my generation’s flippant dismissal of the anxiety. What are arts publications but a compendium of corporate propaganda with some original writing to space them out? How much shady bullshit have we accidentally or purposefully swallowed in the aim of quality?

When I interviewed Wilcha in 2023, he communicated gratitude for his commercial career, but he also expressed misgivings about some of the gigs he’s taken, and bemoaned the all-too-familiar feast-or-famine fear that arises from freelance life. In short, he’s still questioning everything, still moving through an imperfect world with concern, in the same way he was when he was lugging around his camera around the office as a kid. The personal and generational insecurity in Target couldn’t have been depicted on anything but videotape, but the age-old questions it probes, namely “Are we what we create or whom we serve?”, thrives under the technology from any era, even if the question might one day permanently be moot.