Movies: The Official "Movie of the Week" Club Thread III

[Jevo]

Mommy (2014) dir. Xavier Dolan

In an alternate timeline the Canadian government has passed a controversial law, allowing parents of troubled children to place them in hospitals, no questions asked. Die (Anne Dorval) is the single mother of Steve (Antoine Olivier Pilon) a teenager with ADHD and violent tendencies. Steve is expelled from the institution where he was staying, for setting another kid on fire, so now he has to go back to live with Die. Die is already troubled financially, and another mouth to feed as well as wanting to take care of Steve's schooling herself, things are only getting tougher for her. Die and Steve have fun and goof around, but a big fight is always around the corner as Steve is very unpredictable, and his ADHD often brings the two on collission course. The small familiy do make friends with their new neighbour across the street Kyla (Suzanne Clement). A woman with a deliberating stutter which has left her unable to do her job as a teacher. Kyla starts tutoring Steve, which leaves Die with enough time to also keep a steady job. After some initial fights, Kyla and Steve finds a system that works, and it looks like things might be looking brighter for them, when Die gets a notice that they are being sued for damages to the boy that Steve set on fire.

Mommy is so far the pinnacle of Xavier Dolan's style. In Xavier Dolan's films emotions are almost always worn on the outside instead of stewing on the inside. When have as many emotions as there are in Xavier Dolan's films, and they are always shown and reacted to so strongly, it can be a very fine line to walk, and Dolan has not always managed to find the right balance all the time in his movies. But in Mommy I think he gets it right pretty much every time. There's not one moment where I think he over does it. As a viewer I find the emotion creates so much tension, I feel like everything could explode at any moment, they don't always do, but it feels like the threat of it always around. You really feel the stress that Die lives under almost every waking moment. Tensions between Die and Steve are undeniably high, but I also feel it is undenieable that there is a lot of love between them, which makes their story so much more tragic. And it's not just Steve's ADHD which is the cause of their problems. Die does not have the psychological well being and the spare emotional capacity to properly take care of and live with someone like Steve, even though she really wants to. Dolan rarely if ever writes bad people, but he often writes these emotionally flawed people, who very much wish they could be better, but can't. Very few people writes characters like Dolan, and I don't think anyone pulls them off as well as Dolan does when he's at his best. The ending seems inevitable, but you find yourself wishing it will end differently, because you want to see these charaters have a better future. And just because you can guess how it will inevitably end, it doesn't make it any less crushing when it actually happens.

Mommy is perhaps infamous for it's choice of aspect ratio, 1:1. An usual choice, but it works incredibly well in this film, and really emphasises the claustrophobic feeling that must be present in the Die-Steve household. You never have room to breathe because you are so clumped together, if not physically then emotionally. And the viewers get this feeling as well due to the aspect ratio. And it also makes the impact of the montages/dream sequences(?) when the ratio moves out to 16:9, and you finally get a chance to breathe again, albeit only shortly. The cinematography is a huge reason why this film is as effective as it is. Personally I'm very fond of Mommy, probably one of the best films of the last decade.

 

[Jevo]

My next pick is Bob The Gambler.

 

[Pink Mist]

Mommy (2014) directed by Xavier Dolan

After getting kicked out of an institution for setting the cafeteria on fire, Steve (Antoine Olivier Pilon, a teenager with severe ADHD, is picked up by his mother Die (Anne Dorval) who is now responsible for home-schooling him. Under financial strain and frequently fighting due to Steve’s unpredictable and violent behaviour (although Die is far from an angel herself), the duo enters a period of stability when their neighbour Kyla (Suzanne Clément), a high school teacher on sabbatical due to a stuttering problem, enters their life and tutors Steve.

I was apprehensive to rewatch this film. Mommy was one of my favourite films of 2014 and in my mind one of the best films of the 21st century, but I was unsure how well it would hold up, with its gimmicks such as its 1:1 aspect ratio, or the emotions that are turned up to 11 and frequent yelling. But by the second scene where Die picks up Steve at the institution where he was kicked out my fears were assuaged. Pilon and Dorval have such a dynamic and infectious chemistry that like Kyla, it is impossible not to be trapped in their orbit despite all their many flaws and as a viewer sympathize with them. Yes, the emotions in this film are strong, there’s lots of yelling, screaming, cursing, but its played so well between the three characters and their relationships seem so genuine that it never becomes grating (like in some of Dolan’s other films). My verdict is that it still holds up as one of the great films of the 21st century.

It still amazes me that Dolan released this film when he was 25 year old (and it was his 5th film too) because there’s such a maturity and confidence on display in this film in its direction. Many of his directorial choices are bold and go against rationality, but his instinctiveness pays off and it somehow works. Dolan has a low batting average for me as a director, he is the kind of director who swings for the fences and strikes out often, but when he connects, he hits a grand slam. It’s been a years since his last great film (2016’s It’s Only The End of The World; okay years may be a stretch but its relative because he was at one point basically releasing a film a year) but all his films are at least stylistically interesting even if they don’t work, but hopefully he hits another homerun soon because his last couple of projects have been disappointing - his potential is certainly still there.

This film is also a great film to learn how to curse in Québécois.

 

[ItsFineImFine]

My next pick is Bob The Gambler.

Started well but turns into the type of prototypical French film that people use when parodying or pointing out the snobbishness of French film's. Intellectualizing crime....it's a bizarre concept and this film is part of a subgenre where when I think back, they all basically blend into the same.

 

[KallioWeHardlyKnewYe]

Mommy
Dolan (2014)
“There’s not a dull moment with Steve.”

Steve is a delinquent, troubled. He’s booted from the facility that’s been caring for him after he starts a fire that hurts another kid. This throws him back into the life of his mother Die. Dad has been dead a while. She’s only barely equipped to handle this. Not much more mature than her boy is. Into their life comes Kyla, a neighbor who becomes a tutor and a friend. There are moments of calm, but it’s clear Steve’s a bomb and he could go off at any moment injuring himself or others. Die slowly comes to this realization and opts to have him committed. Steve, freed from restraints makes a break for window and freedom …

This is one of those films where many of its strengths also double as personal detriments to me. I am not going to knock the quality, but there’s several things here that just personally bothered me. The drawing of these characters and the performances are unquestionably good, particularly the two leads. Anne Dorval is equal parts maddening and sympathetic. It’s a tough balance, but she does it. Antoine Oliver Pilon as Steve is so good that he actually drove me nuts. I don’t need him to be likable and he is, for the most part, interesting, but being around him was so relentlessly unpleasant that I can’t imagine ever watching this again. He’s young. I should be sympathetic, I suppose but I really wasn’t. Just get this kid out of my life. So you see my point … very good, but also very not for me. It made sympathy hard for me at the end.

To Dolan's credit. I was drained, wrung out. So mission accomplished even if we might not be on the same page.

Dolan is a talented director. He has a nice touch adding a bit of pizzazz to a fairly straightforward, pedestrian story. It isn’t necessarily needed, but he also doesn’t overdo it. It flirts right up to that Oedipal mother-son line, but actually surprised me when it does cross it, which was an encounter that I felt was inevitable. Kudos for not taking that predictable track.

I particularly loved his hand with music. I just came of Zach Snyder’s Justice League and among Snyder’s faults is an almost comically bad hand at picking music for his movies. Dolan is excellent. The soundtrack itself is not only stellar but it’s well-deployed throughout the film. The nice juxtaposition between Counting Crows’ Colorblind and scenes of slow-motion mischief was a particular high point.

Random pet peeve: I hate it when movie characters walk down the middle of a street. At least 90% of the time there isn’t a story or character reason for doing it but rather because the director wants a nice symmetrical shot with the sidewalks framing characters. Always takes me out of the moment. This movie does this A LOT.

 

[kihei]

Mommy (2014) Directed by Xavier Dolan

Xavier Dolan has had mommy issues before. His debut feature-length film was I Killed My Mother which skirts some of the same emotional territory as Mommy, arguably his best film, though I have a soft spot for Heartbeats. A big part of the difference between I Killed My Mother and Mommy is the difference of perspective and perhaps Dolan's greater maturity as a film maker. Dolan's best subject is Dolan. When Dolan stars in his own movies, Dolan, the director, is quite enamoured, to the point of infatuation, with Dolan, the actor. Dolan is Dolan's Garbo. Who can blame him? He has the perfect photogenic face and a complex persona that gives him presence even when not speaking lines. His self-absorption is actually quite compelling. He thinks he is fascinating and he is. The egocentricity is actually part of his appeal. We may not always know what he is thinking, but he is clearly thinking something. And he knows how to play the audience's emotions expertly with his unisex persona.

But, for me initially, the striking thing about Mommy was that it didn't have Dolan in it. It could have. Steve, a teen with a lot of very big issues, is a little too young for Dolan, and it would have been a vain choice. But it must have been a hard call, as it is a fat role with a lot of room for acting chops which Antoine Olivier Pilon has the requisite minimum of but no more. However Dolan, the director, gives the movie to Diane (Anne Dorval) and she more than rewards his generosity. She does have acting chops to spare and Dolan directs her beautifully in a bravura performance. I've always thought that Almodovar was a strong influence on Dolan and it greatly shows in this movie. Almodovar has an incredible sensitivity toward his female characters and so does Dolan. And Pedro is not afraid of big emotional displays, nor is Xavier. The result is a searing movie that is a technical wonder to watch in every frame, a virtual cornucopia of arresting images and scenes, that still packs an emotional wallop of great force. Dolan was born to make movies. I always--well, until recently as he is in a slump--delight in the images that he conjures and the emotions he unleashes. For me the best prolonged directorial touch in Mommy is the imaginary happy ending--everything turning out lovely in the end though you can't believe it for a single second even while you are watching it and hoping for it to be true. It takes incredible talent to manipulate an audience so effectively. And it takes crazy intuition to give the film a narrow aspect ratio that no other director would have even thought of employing. Mommy in the end is heart wrenching experience, and its impact is testimony to Dolan's audacious talent.

subtitles

 

[nameless1]

Mommy is great. Strangely, what I remember the most is the interesting ratio Dolan used, because it gave the film an even more intimate feel. It is definitely one of the best films I have seen in the last decade, and it showed that Quebec is a hidden gem that can compete with the best in the world. I have actually never graded it, but it is probably in the 8 to 9 range for me.

 

[KallioWeHardlyKnewYe]

Mommy (2014) Directed by Xavier Dolan

Xavier Dolan has had mommy issues before. His debut feature-length film was I Killed My Mother which skirts some of the same emotional territory as Mommy, arguably his best film, though I have a soft spot for Heartbeats. A big part of the difference between I Killed My Mother and Mommy is the difference of perspective and perhaps Dolan's greater maturity as a film maker. Dolan's best subject is Dolan. When Dolan stars in his own movies, Dolan, the director, is quite enamoured, to the point of infatuation, with Dolan, the actor. Dolan is Dolan's Garbo. Who can blame him? He has the perfect photogenic face and a complex persona that gives him presence even when not speaking lines. His self-absorption is actually quite compelling. He thinks he is fascinating and he is. The egocentricity is actually part of his appeal. We may not always know what he is thinking, but he is clearly thinking something. And he knows how to play the audience's emotions expertly with his unisex persona.

But, for me initially, the striking thing about Mommy was that it didn't have Dolan in it. It could have. Steve, a teen with a lot of very big issues, is a little too young for Dolan, and it would have been a vain choice. But it must have been a hard call, as it is a fat role with a lot of room for acting chops which Antoine Olivier Pilon has the requisite minimum of but no more. However Dolan, the director, gives the movie to Diane (Anne Dorval) and she more than rewards his generosity. She does have acting chops to spare and Dolan directs her beautifully in a bravura performance. I've always thought that Almodovar was a strong influence on Dolan and it greatly shows in this movie. Almodovar has an incredible sensitivity toward his female characters and so does Dolan. And Pedro is not afraid of big emotional displays, nor is Xavier. The result is a searing movie that is a technical wonder to watch in every frame, a virtual cornucopia of arresting images and scenes, that still packs an emotional wallop of great force. Dolan was born to make movies. I always--well, until recently as he is in a slump--delight in the images that he conjures and the emotions he unleashes. For me the best prolonged directorial touch in Mommy is the imaginary happy ending--everything turning out lovely in the end though you can't believe it for a single second even while you are watching it and hoping for it to be true. It takes incredible talent to manipulate an audience so effectively. And it takes crazy intuition to give the film a narrow aspect ratio that no other director would have even thought of employing. Mommy in the end is heart wrenching experience, and its impact is testimony to Dolan's audacious talent.

subtitles

That Almodovar parallel is right on.

 

[Spring in Fialta]

Mommy is great. Strangely, what I remember the most is the interesting ratio Dolan used, because it gave the film an even more intimate feel. It is definitely one of the best films I have seen in the last decade, and it showed that Quebec is a hidden gem that can compete with the best in the world. I have actually never graded it, but it is probably in the 8 to 9 range for me.

Not big on Dolan - though I did like Les amours imaginaires and Mommy - but in terms of bang for buck, I think Quebec is just about the best contributor on Earth in cinema, if not the arts in general. Insane what's been cranked out of here considering resources/money/population/clout.

 

[KallioWeHardlyKnewYe]

La Jetee
Marker (1963)
“Nothing tells memories from ordinary moments. Only afterwards do they claim remembrance on account of their scars.”

A man is haunted by an image. It’s prior to WWIII. There’s a woman on a pier at the airport. He sees a man die. It’s memory from childhood. Now it’s post-WWIII. He’s an adult, a captor in an underground community of some sort. The surface is ravaged from nuclear war and destruction. He’s enlisted to travel back in time to find a way to avert this fate for society. He finds the woman from his memory. They build a relationship. He’s yo-yo’d back and forth and at one point into the future where he gets the solution he needs. Fearing he’ll be killed by his jailors he asks the people of the future to send him back to the past and the woman he loves. He returns to his earliest memory. The pier. The woman. The boy. And the realization that he is the man he saw die. His memory is of his own death.

Le Jetee is significant not only for the story it tells, but for how it’s told. It’s 28 minutes of still frames and narration except for one key moment, a single moment where the image moves. It’s quite the moment when it occurs (especially if you don’t know it’s coming). The magic is in the rhythmic, poetic editing. It’s certainly a different spin on the dystopian, post-apocalyptic film. Somber, sadly romantic. There isn’t necessarily any character established here, but it hits this melancholy note of loss and longing that lingers throughout. It’s quite the achievement given how sparse everything is. It's easy to see both why it's endured and also why it's not be replicated.

The black-and-white images are striking.

The story is a classic bit of sci-fi. It does so much so well in 28 minutes it puts so many other films to same. The story is sturdy enough that Terry Gilliam took it, inflated it and adapted it into 12 Monkeys, which is also pretty good! The ingredients are the same, but it’s definitely a different dish.It loses a little soul, but is a cracking bit of entertainment.

 

[KallioWeHardlyKnewYe]

As a tribute to recently departed director Bertrand Tavernier, an interesting director I don't have a solid handle on despite watching several of his movies (including four in the past four months), I pick The Clockmaker of St. Paul.

 

[Pink Mist]

La Jetée (1962) directed by Chris Marker

As a child a boy stands on the observation deck of Paris’ Orly Airport and observes a woman and then a man dying just before WWIII breaks out and Paris is bombed to a rubble. Flashforward and he is now a man in the underground of post-apocalyptical Paris where is captive as a prisoner who is undergoing experiments from scientists in time travel. Haunted by the images of his experience on the observation deck he becomes obsessed with the image of the woman and manages to find the woman from his memory in his time travels. He strikes up a relationship with her as he continues to travel back and forth between the past and the future. Eventually he completes the mission for the scientists but gets the sense he will be killed by the scientists now and with the help from the people from the future returns permanently to his earliest memory of the jetty and the woman.

Told in 28 minutes and (almost) entirely through photographs and narration proves that through simple methods and editing you can create a captivating and haunting story and has more to say about love, memory, and obsession than films four times as long and expensive. It’s certainly and unusual technique for the story its trying to tell, but the stitching together of Marker’s excellent black and white photographs aids the themes of the protagonist stitching together images from his memory hazily like traveling through his dreams. A masterpiece and one I won’t be soon to forget.

I’ve never seen 12 Monkeys but its on my watchlist now since I’m curious on how it adapted La Jetée.

 

[Pranzo Oltranzista]

La jetée (Marker, 1962) - Like most of the best Marker films, La jetée is a film about mediation. The story - as complex and interesting as it is - has no real importance at face-value and is merely an excuse to propose an extension to considerations born from earlier films. The medium is the message here, and La jetée finds its origin in three films: Alain Resnais' Nuit et Brouillard and Les statues meurent aussi, and Hitchcock's Vertigo. It's too often forgotten that Marker had important creative roles on the first two, and La jetée proposes a great allusion to the Hitchcock film. Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog) is the most obvious predecessor, with its opposition of still black and white photographies to color moving images in order to construct a memory that could not be forgotten, a bridge between a souvenir at risk of disappearing and the present - a bridge that's pictured through the railroad tracks. Les statues meurent aussi (Statues Die Too) kind of works in the same way, examining statues with still (but filmic) images and proposing through the same type of narration musings about life and death, what remains and what will eventually be forgotten anyway. These films are proposed as mediations, between memory and the recorded images, between life and death, between reality and the fictions we create to talk about it. Add to that this quote from Vertigo, at the Sequoia tree where Madeleine says: "Here I was born, and there I died. It was only a moment for you; you took no notice", and you have - IMO - the genesis of La jetée. The film complexifies through fiction the reflections Marker worked on with Resnais, and proposes in its story itself different mediations: The Man becomes a bridge between past and future, The Woman (or her image) becomes a bridge between happy times and apocalyptic ones. And death is proposed as the origin of every story, the end (his own death) being the motor of the story. It's a brilliant film blossoming with ideas, but that is still lacking in wrapping them all together. Marker only achieves that in Sans Soleil, a film that pushes these themes a lot further than anything else, and one of the best and most important films I've seen. In one of many points of junction, Sans Soleil presents Vertigo as the only film succeeding in stating the impossible memory. 9.5/10

 

[Pranzo Oltranzista]

12 Monkeys is a remake of La jetée's story. It's a fun film because it's an interesting story, but it has no real value. The only thing that stayed with me from the remake are the images from Vertigo. The allusion - that wasn't actually super subtle - becomes an in-your-face quotation, but the reasons why the link is made are vanishing...

 

[Spring in Fialta]

Great set of reviews. I find La jetée to be the perfect fairy tale. Well, in spirit, if not in action.

 

[kihei]

La Jetee (1962) Directed by Chris Marker

If you take an introductory film course anytime in the last half century there are two things as certain as death: you will watch Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin and you will watch Chris Marker's La Jetee. I first saw La Jetee in such a situation and I remember not being terribly impressed. So the director told the story with still pictures. Cool, but what's the big deal? Marker's approach did not seem an overwhelming achievement at the time, just an interesting take on a science fiction story. La Jetee is a work that film makers admire because they see the film as a brilliant experiment that expands the vocabulary of film, an indication that the art's potential is far from full realized--it opens up a world of possibilities. Film critics love the movie because it presents a radically different approach to conventional narrative development, a challenge to standard methods of film organization. I've come to value it for different reasons. One thing that I have now that I didn't have when I first saw it is a whole bunch more memories. That actually makes a big difference to how I see this movie. As a result, the film works a lot differently now for me than it did when I was eighteen. La Jetee is on one level a science fiction movie about a man, by necessity, travelling through time. But that has a different resonance to me than it did way back when. One could argue that memory, the real core to Marker's story, makes us all time travellers as well, a position that I doubt Marker would find objectionable. I don't spend much time thinking about the past, but when I do, there are recurring scenes, even recurring images, that come to mind, and sometimes these memories seem to have the permanency of photographs. Such images from the past are associated with feelings that make the notion of identity in the present very fluid. I think one of the points of Marker's film is that being itself is not something fixed in time and what seems like separate countries--the past, the present, the future--are maybe little more than a trick of perspective. Who are we in the present without our memories from the past and how do they influence our future? These are not easy thoughts to disentangle, but it does make memory and the way we experience these memories in our mind's eye absolutely essential to our being.

Using still images to tell a story about memory now seems a much more of a genius idea than it did at the time. Photographs, by capturing a moment in time, tend to freeze the past, but they can also be more evocative than a film clip. For one thing, one gets to contemplate a photo--it doesn't whoosh by the way film does where it seems the viewer is always relentlessly moving forward even in flashbacks. To contemplate is to introduce a layer of feelings to the static image. Those feeling mean nothing really is frozen in time. We and time are constantly in flux, but that doesn't mean there are not consequences. For the character in the movie, revisiting one special moment of his past becomes preferable to salvation in the future. While that is an irrational decision that costs him his life, you can see the attraction for a man who has placed so much importance on that moment of his life and whose elaboration of that moment may not simply be a quirk of time travel, but part of a deeper, more intrinsically psychological fantasy that reflects his longing. La Jetee seems to open up a world of possible ways of seeing, maybe even calling into question conventional notions of existing in time. All this is to suggest that Marker's movie, for me, is/was like a slow acting drug. It didn't seem very powerful at the time, but it messed with my head pretty good in the long run.

 

[NyQuil]

One film that really made me think about the nature and reliability of memories and the resulting impact on one's very identity was Memento.

It's worth a repeat viewing to get past the confluence of forward and backward narrative devices that occupy a fair amount of your mental processing power during your first screening.

It ends up making you question what a personality is exactly without memories, reliable or not, and whether one can really be characterized as being part of the human condition at all without them.

Guy Pearce (on the good side of his good performance/serviceable performance pendulum) is sublime in portraying a man with complete confidence in his system, so much so that you believe it along with him at the outset.

By the end, it's nothing but shock and dread.

A tight and focused film, not surprising from a filmmaker on the verge of much bigger and perhaps more noteworthy work, but big isn't always better.

 

[Spring in Fialta]

I think memory is just about the most beautiful theme in art and human existence. It's also an excuse to share this beautiful quote about it:

'…and I remember once saying to him as I braved the mockery of his encouraging nods that, were I a writer, I should allow only my heart to have imagination, and for the rest rely upon memory, that long-drawn sunset shadow of one's personal truth.'

 

[Jevo]

La Jetee (1962) dir. Chris Marker

The world is devasted after WWIII. In the catacombs below the ruins of Paris a small group of people are hiding out. A group of scientists here are performing experiments with time travel trying to find a clue to a better future, using prisoners as test subjects. Most subjects can't take the psychological impact of the experiments. But the protagonist is a model test subject. His link to the past is a memory from his childhood on the viewing platform at Orly airport. Here he saw a beautiful woman, and he witnesses a strange event, he doesn't know what happened, only that he saw a man die that day. Going back to the past he seeks out the beautiful woman from the platform, and starts a romantic relation with her. The scientists wants to send him to the future, but he's only interested in going back to the woman.

La Jetee is a special movie. Perhaps principally because it's hardly a "movie", there's no moving pictures, only stills accompanied by the hipnotic narration of Jean Negroni. Only using stills was mainly a budgetary constraint on Chris Marker when he made the film. But the mark of a great artist is embracing these kinds of obstructions and finding crreative ways to get around it. Most people would probably have given up on their film when they realised they couldn't afford all the film needed. But Chris Marker found an alternative, and the result is a completely unique film, where I can't recall any other like it, and it is impossible for me to imagine La Jetee as a film with moving pictures. The stills used are beautiful and emotional, more than a wek after watching it I can still picture several images from the movie. The beautiful stills allow the viewers imagination to fill in the emotional blanks left from the lack of moving pictures, aided by great editing and the narration. Jean Negroni's voice is soothing and hypnotic drawing you in, and seems to fit the pace of the editing perfectly, or maybe it is the other way around. The narration certainly helps make La Jetee a special experience.

Chris Marker doesn't strike me as a person who is interested in the minutiae of how time travel works, and the sci-fi setting is mostly an excuse to explore how memories connect us to the past, and the collectice psyche in a world seemingly on the edge of an all destructive war with no winners. The short run time of just under 30 minutes means that Marker is never even tempted to start trying to explain how any of it really works, which is not a bad thing at all. Trying to come up with big explanations for sci-fi concepts often only serve to bog down a movie by grinding the story to a halt, and leaves it open to nitpick. An underexplained concept like here, is for me much easiser to get into and accept, because honestly an explanation is not needed, and it leaves more time for the important stuff. And Marker makes the most of the time he has available and has made an emotionally and intellectually rewarding movie.

 

[kihei]

Babyteeth (2020) Directed by Shannon Murphy

15-year-old Milla, contemplating god knows what on a train platform, meets 23-year-old Moses, a scuzzy small-time drug dealer, who gallantly offers his dirty t-shirt to her when she suffers a nosebleed. Moses isn't much to write home about though he does have the right kind of hangdog charms that somehow appeal to Milla who is attune to a bit of a different drummer herself. When she takes this mongrel stray to meet her parents, they are intially appalled. They stay that way for some time. And then they slowly come to the realization that Moses is the only thing keeping their cancer-plagued daughter alive. Reading that synopsis, you might guess how all this is played but you would likely guess wrong. Thanks to director Shannon Murphy, screenwriter Rita Kalnejais and actors Eliza Scanlan, Toby Wallace, Essie Davis, and, especially, Ben Mendelsohn, Babyteeth is no teenage tearjerker or anything close. Rather the movie emphasizes just how dysfunctional every one of the characters is but we can't help but like and sympathize with them anyway. They all have problems, they all make bad decisions, but somehow their collective hearts are in the right place anyway. The script has an almost subversive edge that keeps the goings-on both unpredictable but with their own wonky logic anyway. And the ensemble acting is really the best that I saw in 2020.

A special mention needs to be made of Australian Ben Mendelsohn who is perfect in this movie and, like this movie, has a quality that is hard to capture in words. Earlier in his career he made his mark playing memorable bad guys (Animal Kingdom), but with The Land of Steady Habits and Babyteeth, he has taken on more complex, likeable characters to whom he brings an extremely odd assortment of traits: intensity, whimsy, irony, vulnerability, impetuousness, intelligence, and desperation--not infrequently all at the same time. Here he plays a well-intentioned psychiatrist who thinks he can relieve everybody's pain, including his own, by drugging people into a near catatonic stupor. When he meets a pregnant woman on his block, whose dog has the same name, Henry, that he does, his reaction is a marvelous mix of humour, bafflement, curiosity and uncertainty. Whatever Mendelsohn has, it all adds up to something intensely human which is exactly what Babyteeth needs and gets from all its collaborators.

 

[kihei]

My next pick is Mr. Turner (2014)

 

[Jevo]

Babyteeth (2019) dir. Shannon Murphy

Milla is a teenage girl with a terminal cancer diagnosis. One day she meets the mid-20s homeless drug addict Moses on a train platform. Milla comes from a seemingly nice family, and Moses is the opposite of everything her parents try to present themselves as. Maybe that's why Milla falls for Moses despite them being completely opposites on the surface. She doesn't get much praise for bringing him home, and her parents are openly against Moses being there and Milla and Moses hanging out, much less being romantically involved. Her parents aren't exactly model citizens themselves though. Her father is a psychiatrist with a loose hanging prescription pad. He has his wife addicted to several different kinds of medication, and even appears to get into his supply himself from time to time. At the time Milla first brings Moses home, he's even heavily contemplating starting an affair with their new neighbour, a young pregnant woman who smokes.

I'm not entirely sure how to feel about Babyteeth, and that's probably the intention. The film is clearly sympathetic to Milla and her quest to live a fuller life in the small amount of time she has left. It's perhaps less sympathetic to her choice of how to do that. Most teenagers do something stupid, some more than others. But if you are going to get involved with a homless drug addict 10 years your senior, being terminally ill with cancer certainly sets a limit on how big the consequences can be for you. That sentiment is probably very descriptive of the film. It should be a bleak movie with the subject matter it has, but it isn't. The movie is serious, but delightfully lighthearted most of the time, and has fun with itself, the situation and the characters. That doesn't diminish the weight or seriousness of the situation or the people in it, but perhaps it makes it bearable to watch. Rookie director Shannon Murphy didn't have an easy time setting the tone in this movie, but she manages to hit the mark perfectly in my opinion, and she hits that tone consistently throughout the film, and I don't feel there's any places where she misses the mark. A great job by her. Eliza Scanlen as Milla is charming and carries that weight that Milla has inside her in every scene, but for the most parts keeps in hidden. Her role isn't easy, and she does a very good job. This'll hardly be the last we've seen of her. Ben Mendelsohn as Milla's father also clearly has a field day with his role, which is really just a man you love to hate.

Babyteeth has a lot of heart and charm, and I think it's hard to not get drawn into its orbit. It's hard to point out any big flaws in it, and it will leave you with a little smile, and perhaps tear as well, but both are rightfully earned.

 

[Pink Mist]

Babyteeth (2019) directed by Shannon Murphy

A teenage girl with terminal cancer (Eliza Scanlen) falls in love with a drug addicted 23-year-old (Toby Wallace) to her parents’ (Essie Davis and Ben Mendelsohn) chagrin. There has been a lot of recent coming of age and young adult movies which involve teenagers with some form of terminal illness, in many ways it has become its own trope of the genre, in which through their illness they teach themselves and those around them what life really means and to live their life to the fullest and so on. Babyteeth leans into these clichés, however with a subversive and satirical kick. In a genre (terminal romance) which often is emotionally manipulative and schmaltzy (The Fault in the Stars being one of the worst examples), Babyteeth is a refreshing spin on the genre which explores the pains and quirks of living with illness and knowing you’re soon to die. Whereas other films in the genre manufacture emotional responses in the viewer, Shannon Murphy’s direction captures an experience which legitimately earns a laugh and a tear from the viewer. This is because the film feels honest in its portrayal of a family who is dysfunctional and trying to come to terms with imminent death but is unafraid to find humour in the tragic and messy situation, and is not afraid to put the faults of its characters front and centre without making them unsympathetic.

The ensemble cast is stellar. From her performance is this and her supporting performance in Little Women (in which she also played a dying teenager), Eliza Scanlen seems to be a star in the making. Her performance is mesmerizing and charming as a teenager with illness who goes on a hedonistic streak in her dying days. Ben Mendelsohn also deserves an honourable mention as her dad, a pill pushing psychiatrist trying to hold it all together (primarily by drugging everyone) and becomes enamoured with his pregnant neighbour (in one of the film’s funniest scenes). An excellent idiosyncratic take on the illness narrative which feels authentic without feeling manipulative.

 

[KallioWeHardlyKnewYe]

Babyteeth
Murphy (2019)
“I didn’t feel like a love story that day.”

Mila is a talented, button-cute teen. Personable. Funny. Everything going for her. Except, of course, she’s dying of cancer. Into her life comes Moses, a homeless drug addict. They take a liking to each other. Her parents — a duo who have an assortment of issues on their own — aren’t down with this. At least at first. But Moses does make their girl happy. After some ups and a few downs, they invite him into their home. A salve for their dying daughter. Things aren’t that straightforward. Moses seems more interested in the drugs than the girl. Dad helps with that. Great decisions? Probably not, but it all comes from a good place. She’s never going to outrun the prognosis, which most of them, perhaps especially Mila knows.

What I found most striking about Babyteeth is how it never becomes maudlin. It’s dryly funny in parts, which I’ll credit to Aussie comedic sensibilities. It’s a story rife with melodramatic potential and has certainly been done that way in other versions, but not here. The handling of Mila’s inevitable death was a masterful bit of acting and staging between us and the three characters involved. Moses knows first. He says it without really saying it. Then us. Then her father and we wait as the realization slowly comes to mother. Devastating scene not due to what has happened, but how it’s revealed. To a smaller degree a late-in-the-movie discovery of a lump has a cooly calibrated dramatic build.

But it also doesn’t become too arch or cute. There were stretches that reminded me of stuff like American Beauty. Suburban angst. A charming, but also grumpy, doomed kid. Disconnected, chemically enhanced parents flirting with extra-marital shenanigans as escape from their lot in life. It was also hard for me not to draw lines back to Mommy, having recently watched it as well, as an at least tangentially tied tale of troubled children and suburban cages. I liked the steady rhythm here versus the at times manic nature of Mommy. Not that it’s a competition, but the thoughts were there.

Beyond that climactic scene I think my other big take away would be the performances of Eliza Scanlen as Mila and Ben Mendelsohn as her father. You feel the tragedy in part because Scanlen is so well balanced between winning ebullience and resigned realism. It’s not exactly “real” but it’s not weepy, generic sainthood either. Meanwhile Mendelsohn is an actor that I always make time for. Typically a go-to for all manner of degenerates and losers and “edgy” types, it’s nice to see him here as a relatively normal bloke, well meaning but almost tragically comic in his bumblings around the people in his life. That the death scene spends much of its time focused on his silent face as the other characters talk is a testament to his gravity.

 

[Jevo]

Bob The Gambler (1956) dir. Jean-Pierre Melville

Bob is a former bank robber who's been straight for 20 years now, and who makes a living as a gambler in Paris. He's well liked both in the underworld, and by the police inspector Ledru, whose life Bob once saved. But Bob is in a rough patch, he's losing money and he's almost broke. It doesn't affect the way Bob handles himself however, and he meets a young prostitute named Anne who he takes in to keep her away from Marc, a pimp he hates after he confessed beating his wife. Instead he gets his young friend Paolo to set his attention on Anne. Marc's wife beating gets the attention of the police, but he gets out on the condition that he becomes an informer. Bob hears of a possible big score at the casino in Deauville ripe for the taking for a dedicated crew. Bob's money problems leads to follow this lead despite being otherwise determined to be a lawful citizen. He assembles a team to assist him in the meticulously planned job.

An American in Paris, that's Melville. Hopelessly obssesed with American and American movies, partcicularly gangstar movies. His own gangstar movies, and particularly Bob the Gambler are heavily influenced by American gangstar movies of the time. But Melville adds something else to them. Not something particularly French, at least not something that would be deemed French at the time. Maybe 10 years later when most of the French New Wave had adopted many of Melville's tricks it would be considered French. But what Melville most of all adds is a sense of cool, that the American movies he had watched just didn't have. And he pulls off this cool with such mastery you would think he made several movies of this kind already to perfect the style, but he hadn't. His earlier movies were dramas, even romances, but gangstar movies. But he has a natural talent for getting cool on the screen. Often this involves not having his characters say more than absoloutely necesarry, in his later movies this became even more pronounced, getting them a cool wardrope, and an actor with a good face. This sounds easier than it is, and easily ends up with something that tries too hard to cool, instead of just being cool. But Bob just is cool all the way through. Bob knows he's cool, and the way other people treat Bob means they too know he's cool. But Bob is mostly a man from a by-gone era trying to stay alive in a new world that doesn't appreciate his kind of man anymore, and in the end him trying to take 1930s gangstar sensibilities and applying them in the 1950s leads the failure of the heist, but in a comedic twist Bob comes out the winner anyway.

If the viewer needs to understand the intracies of the heist, and in turn the genious of the heist mastermind, we need a good explanation of what is going to happen. The classic way to do this is an intricate chart showing the heist and an accompanying explanation. Melville isn't satisfied just doing it like that. Instead he transfers the field to a big open field with chalk drawings on the ground showing the layout of the Deauville casino. As Bob explains the plot we are also transferred to an imaginary casino where the heist members walks around in the casino as they would in the real heist. A nice way to evolve this element in a way that is very Melville.

I don't think it's a secret I'm a big Melville fan. He just does cool gangstar movies better than anyone else can. His main characters are often stoic and quiet, and their actions most often speak louder than their words. But he often manages to give a surprising amount of character depth to them, and we sense a much more complicated inner life in these characters than they show on the surface. And Bob is no exception to this, in fact he is probably the prototype to this kind of character for Melville. Bob The Gambler is not my favourite of Melville's, but I still like it a lot, and it's very interesting to see how the style he shows here evolved by the time he made Le Samouraï and Le Cercle Rouge.