-- a selection of short-form reviews of the films I have watched this week --
Sicario: Day of the Soldado (dir. Stefano Sollima, 2018)
✭✭✭✭✩
“You got to do what you got to do,” reminds Alejandro Gillick (stoically acted by Benicio del Toro), a former Mexican hitman now enlisted as CIA hitman. It is difficult not to feel spellbound by the brutal strength of Stefano Sollima’s follow-up to the 2015 border-epic Sicario, albeit with the sore absence of Emily Blunt. Multiple suicide bombings in a Kansas City grocery store incite US government forces to forge inter-gang conflict between the Mexico drug cartels, the suspicion laid directly at their feet. It devolves – unsurprisingly – into a darker web of fierce politics, Gillick left in the Mexican wilderness to return the daughter of kidnapped, top-gang boss, Isabel Reyes, back to US soil. It is a film not soaked with masculine power, as similar additions to the genre happen to indulge, but instead intelligent, visceral and alike to the visions of modern warfare in the work of Kathryn Bigelow. A needless sequel? That is for the audience to decide.
“You got to do what you got to do,” reminds Alejandro Gillick (stoically acted by Benicio del Toro), a former Mexican hitman now enlisted as CIA hitman. It is difficult not to feel spellbound by the brutal strength of Stefano Sollima’s follow-up to the 2015 border-epic Sicario, albeit with the sore absence of Emily Blunt. Multiple suicide bombings in a Kansas City grocery store incite US government forces to forge inter-gang conflict between the Mexico drug cartels, the suspicion laid directly at their feet. It devolves – unsurprisingly – into a darker web of fierce politics, Gillick left in the Mexican wilderness to return the daughter of kidnapped, top-gang boss, Isabel Reyes, back to US soil. It is a film not soaked with masculine power, as similar additions to the genre happen to indulge, but instead intelligent, visceral and alike to the visions of modern warfare in the work of Kathryn Bigelow. A needless sequel? That is for the audience to decide.
The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeois (dir. Luis Buñuel, 1972)
✭✭✭✭✭
Buñuel claimed that the final word in the title, bourgeois, only came to him during post production revisions, and yet it is one that is impossible to imagine outside of the surrealist picture. Condensed into a sequence of failed dinner-party gatherings, Buñuel is fascinated by any disruption to the tradition and its high-minded conceits – a ritual of fragile rules – inventing myriads of excuses to see elegances flail, politeness stumble, and the relentless pursuits of his upper-class sextet readjust themselves. Satiric, outrageous.
Buñuel claimed that the final word in the title, bourgeois, only came to him during post production revisions, and yet it is one that is impossible to imagine outside of the surrealist picture. Condensed into a sequence of failed dinner-party gatherings, Buñuel is fascinated by any disruption to the tradition and its high-minded conceits – a ritual of fragile rules – inventing myriads of excuses to see elegances flail, politeness stumble, and the relentless pursuits of his upper-class sextet readjust themselves. Satiric, outrageous.
High Life (dir. Claire Denis, 2018)
✭✭✭✭✭
In a recent interview for A24, Claire Denis recalled a story of how – on the set of Paris,Texas, as assistant-director to Wim Wenders – she endangered her life wading the Rio Grande: “I am a good swimmer but the [river] […] is much stronger than I am.” High Life, her newest drama, engages with a similar, undaunted current, only here curated by the strength of its direction – an elliptical space tale of convict youths and their scientific harvest. Robert Pattinson plays Monte, the sole member of a ship headed toward a blackhole, who is also contracted as mother and father to a young, crying child. Denis slowly peels flashbacks, whilst the child grows up: we learn of the crew (headed by the dark witch, Juliette Binoche) and their one-way recruitment into outer space, slaves to the practise of artificial insemination, non-consensual sex, and the violent, narcotic desires of one another. Corridors recall the tomb-like polish of Tarkovsky’s Solaris, whilst the faux-Edenic garden reminded me considerably of Douglas Trumbull’s eco-biodomes in Silent Running, slipping between the touchstone of natural biology and that of concrete, bruising politics. It is a landscape for renewed anarchy, unintentionally, where the need to exert individual purpose gradually ruins the safety and orientation of inmate to inmate – the leaking fluids of the “sex box” (for the usage of those onboard) is quickly swept into real, sexual violence, whilst falsified reports only heighten the fever of those who wish to ensure a continued existence for mankind itself. High Lifeis a film of no conceivable freedoms – even in limitless space, memories of the past continue their haunt (the ships of dogs, scarred walls), bodies perpetually adrift, and the child herself (Willow; perhaps a reference to the broken lyric in Othello)an inheritor of such taboo – where the problem of existence is not ourselves, but how we interact with one another, understanding our faults against others. It is an extraordinary piece of filmmaking, highly unsettling and of enigmatic delivery.
In a recent interview for A24, Claire Denis recalled a story of how – on the set of Paris,Texas, as assistant-director to Wim Wenders – she endangered her life wading the Rio Grande: “I am a good swimmer but the [river] […] is much stronger than I am.” High Life, her newest drama, engages with a similar, undaunted current, only here curated by the strength of its direction – an elliptical space tale of convict youths and their scientific harvest. Robert Pattinson plays Monte, the sole member of a ship headed toward a blackhole, who is also contracted as mother and father to a young, crying child. Denis slowly peels flashbacks, whilst the child grows up: we learn of the crew (headed by the dark witch, Juliette Binoche) and their one-way recruitment into outer space, slaves to the practise of artificial insemination, non-consensual sex, and the violent, narcotic desires of one another. Corridors recall the tomb-like polish of Tarkovsky’s Solaris, whilst the faux-Edenic garden reminded me considerably of Douglas Trumbull’s eco-biodomes in Silent Running, slipping between the touchstone of natural biology and that of concrete, bruising politics. It is a landscape for renewed anarchy, unintentionally, where the need to exert individual purpose gradually ruins the safety and orientation of inmate to inmate – the leaking fluids of the “sex box” (for the usage of those onboard) is quickly swept into real, sexual violence, whilst falsified reports only heighten the fever of those who wish to ensure a continued existence for mankind itself. High Lifeis a film of no conceivable freedoms – even in limitless space, memories of the past continue their haunt (the ships of dogs, scarred walls), bodies perpetually adrift, and the child herself (Willow; perhaps a reference to the broken lyric in Othello)an inheritor of such taboo – where the problem of existence is not ourselves, but how we interact with one another, understanding our faults against others. It is an extraordinary piece of filmmaking, highly unsettling and of enigmatic delivery.
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