New York Film Festival 2019

[Chris Knipp]

BERTRAND BONELLO: ZOMBI CHILD (2019)


LOUISE LABEQUE AND WISLANDA LOUIMAT (FAR RIGHT) IN ZOMBI CHILD

Voodoo comes to Paris

If you said Betrand Bonello's films are beautiful, sexy, and provocative you would not be wrong. This new, officially fifth feature (I've still not seen his first one, the 2008 On War), has those elements. Its imagery, full of deep contrasts, can only be described as lush. Its intertwined narrative is puzzling as well.

We're taken right away to Haiti and plunged into the world of voodoo and zombies. Ground powder from the cut-up body of a blowfish is dropped, unbeknownst to him, into a man's shoes. Walking in them, he soon falters and falls. Later, he's aroused from death to the half-alive state of a zombie - and pushed into a numb, helpless labor in the hell of a a sugar cane field with other victims of the same cruel enchantment. In time however something arouses him to enough life to escape.

Some of the Haitian sequences center around a moonlit cemetery whose large tombs seem airy and haunted and astonishingly grand for what we know as the poorest country in the hemisphere.

From the thumping, vibrant ceremonies of Haitian voodoo (Bonello's command of music is always fresh and astonishing as his images are lush and beautiful) we're rushed to the grandest private boarding school you've ever seen, housed in vast stone government buildings. This noble domaine was established by Napoleon Bonaparte on the edge of Paris, in Saint Denis, for the education of children of recipients of the Legion of Honor. It really exists, and attendance there is still on an honorary basis.

Zombi Child oscillates between girls in this very posh Parisian school and people in Haiti. But these are not wholly separate places. A story about a Haitian grandfather (the zombie victim, granted a second life) and his descendants links the two strains. It turns out one of those descendants, Mélissa (Wislanda Louimat), is a new student at the school. A white schoolgirl, Fanny (the dreamy Louise Labeque), who's Mélissa's friend and sponsors her for membership in a sorority, while increasingly possessed by a perhaps imaginary love, also bridges the gap. For the sorority admission Mélissa confesses the family secret of a zombi and voodoo knowledge in her background.

Thierry Méranger of Cahiers du Cinéma calls this screenplay "eminently Bonellian in its double orientation," its "interplay of echoes" between "radically different" worlds designed to "stimulate the spectator's reflection." Justin Chang of the Los Angeles Times bluntly declares that it's meant to "interrogate the bitter legacy of French colonialism."

But how so? And if so, this could be a tricky proposition. On NPR Andrew Lapin was partly admiring of how "cerebral and slippery" the film is, but suggests that since voodoo and zombies are all most white people "already know" about Haitian culture, a director coming from Haiti's former colonizing nation (France) must do "a lot of legwork to use these elements successfully in a "fable" where "the real horror is colonialism." The posh school comes from Napoleon, who coopted the French revolution, and class scenes include a history professor lecturing on this and how "liberalism obscures liberty."

I'm more inclined to agree with Glenn Kenny's more delicately worded praise in his short New York Times review of the film where he asserts that the movie’s inconclusiveness is the source of its appeal. Zombi Child, he says, is fueled by insinuation and fascination. The fascination, the potent power, of the occult, that's what Haiti has that the first wold lacks.

One moment made me authentically jump, but Bonello isn't offering a conventional horror movie. He's more interested in making his hints of voodoo's power and attraction, even for the white lovelorn schoolgirl, seem as convincing as his voodoo ceremonies, both abroad and back in Haiti, feel thoroughly attractive, or scary, and real. These are some of the best voodoo scenes in a movie. This still may seem like a concoction to you. Its enchantments were more those of the luxuriant imagery, the flowing camerawork, the delicious use of moon- and candle-light, the beautiful people, of whatever color. This is world-class filmmaking even if it's not Bonello's best work.

Bonello stages things, gets his actors to live them completely, then steps back and lets it happen. Glenn Kenny says his "hallmark" is his "dreamy detachment." My first look at that was the 2011 House of Tolerence (L'Apollonide - mémoires de la maison close), which I saw in Paris, a languorous immersion in a turn-of-the-century Parisian brothel, intoxicating, sexy, slightly repugnant. Next came his most ambitious project, Saint Laurent(2014), focused on a very druggy period in the designer's career and a final moment of decline. He has said this became a kind of matching panel for Apollonide. (You'll find that in an excellent long Q&A after the NYFF screening.) Saint Laurent's "forbidden" (unsanctioned) picture of the fashion house is as intoxicating, vibrant, and cloying as the maison close, with its opium, champagne, disfigurement and syphilis. No one can say Gaspard Ulliel wasn't totally immersed in his performance. Nocturama (2016) takes a group of wild young people who stage a terrorist act in Paris, who seem to run aground in a posh department store at the end, Bonello again getting intense action going and then seeming to leave it to its own devices, foundering. Those who saw the result as "shallow cynicism" (like A.O. Scott) missed how exciting and powerful it was. (Mike D'Angelo didn't.)

Zombi Child is exciting at times too. But despite its gorgeous imagery and sound, its back and forth dialectic seems more artificial and calculating than Bonello's previous films.

Zombi Child, mins., debuted at Cannes Directors Fortnight May 2019, included in 13 other international festivals, including Toronto and New York. It released theatrically in France Jun. 12, 2020 (AlloCiné press rating 3.7m 75%) and in the US Jan. 24, 2020 (Metascore 75%). Now available in "virtual theater" through Film Movement (Mar. 23-May 1, 2020), which benefits the theater of your choice. https://www.filmmovement.com/zombi-child

[Chris Knipp]

OLIVIER ASSAYAS: WASP NETWORK (2019)


GAEL GARCÍA BERNAL AND PENELOPE CRUZ IN WASP NETWORK

Spies nearby

The is a movie about the Cuban spies sent to Miami to combat anti-Castro Cuban-American groups, and their capture. They are part of what the Cubans called La Red Avispa (The Wasp Network). The screenplay is based on the book The Last Soldiers of the Cold War by Fernando Morais, and it's mainly from the Wasp, Cuban point of view, not the FBI point of view. Unlike the disastrous Seberg, no time is spent looking over the shoulders of G-men, nor will this story give any pleasure to right wing Miami Cubans. But it won't delight leftists much either, or champions of the Cuban Five. The issues of why one might leave Cuba and why one might choose not to are treated only superficially. There's no analysis of US behavior toward Cuba since the revolution.

On the plus side, the film is made in an impeccable, clear style (with one big qualification: see below) and there's an excellent cast with as leads Edgar Ramirez (of the director's riveting miniseries Carlos), Penelope Cruz (Almodóvar's muse), Walter Moura (Escobar in the Netflix series "Narcos"), Ana de Armas (an up-and-comer who's actually Cuban but lives in Hollywood now), and Gael García Bernal (he of course is Mexican, Moura is Brazilian originally, and Ramirez is Venezuelan). They're all terrific, and other cast members shine. Even a baby is so amazing I thought she must be the actress' real baby.

Nothing really makes sense for the first hour. We don't get the whole picture, and we never do, really. We focus on René Gonzalez (Édgar Ramirez), a Puerto Rican-born pilot living in Castro’s Cuba and fed up with it, or the brutal embargo against Castro by the US and resulting shortage of essential goods and services, who suddenly steals a little plane and flies it to Miami, leaving behind his wife Olga and young daughter. Olga is deeply shocked and disappointed to learn her husband is a traitor. He has left without a word to her. Born in Chicago, he was already a US citizen and adapts easily, celebrated as an anti-Castro figure.

We also follow another guy, Juan Pablo Roque (Wagner Moura) who escapes Havana by donning snorkel gear and swimming to Guantanamo, not only a physical challenge but riskier because prison guards almost shoot him dead when he comes out of the water. Roque and Gonzalez are a big contrast. René is modest, content with small earnings, and starts flying for a group that rescues Cuban defectors arriving by water. Juan Pablo immediately woos and marries the beautiful Ana Marguerita Martinez (Ana de Armas) and, as revealed by an $8,000 Rolex, is earning big bucks but won't tell Ana how. This was the first time I'd seen Wagner Moura, an impressively sly actor who as Glenn Kenny says, "can shift from boyish to sinister in the space of a single frame" - and that's not the half of it.

This is interesting enough to keep us occupied but it's not till an hour into the movie, with a flashback to four years earlier focused on Cuban Gerardo Hernandez (Garcia Bernal) that we start to understand something of what is going on. We learn about the CANF and Luis Posada Carriles (Tony Plana), and a young man's single-handed effort to plant enough bombs to undermine the entire Cuban tourist business. This late-arriving exposition for me had a deflating and confounding effect. There were still many good scenes to follow. Unfortunately despite them, and the good acting, there is so much exposition it's hard to get close to any of the individual characters or relationships.

At the moment I'm an enthusiastic follower of the FX series "The Americans." It teaches us that in matters of espionage, it's good to have a firm notion of where the main characters - in that case "Phillip" and "Elizabeth" - place their real, virtually unshakable loyalties, before moving on. Another example of which I'm a longtime fan is the spy novels of John le Carré. You may not be sure who's loyal, but you always know who's working for British Intelligence, even in the latest novel the remarkable le Carré, who at 88, has just produced (Agent Running in the Field - for which he's performed the audio version, and no one does that better). To be too long unclear about these basics in spydom is fatal.

It's said that Assayas had a lot of trouble making Wasp Network, which has scenes shot in Cuba in it. At least the effort doesn't show. We get a glimpse of Clinton (this happened when he was President) and Fidel, who, in a hushed voice, emphatically, asserts his confidence that the Red Avispa was doing the right thing and that the Americans should see that. Whose side do you take?

Wasp Network, 123 mins., debuted at Venice and showed at about ten other international festivals including Toronto, New York, London and Rio. It was released on Netflix Jun. 19, 2019, and that applies to many countries (13 listed on IMDb). Metascore 54%.

[Chris Knipp]

BEN HARDY, JASON PATEL IN UNICORNS

SALLY EL HUSEINI, JAMES KRISHNA FLOYD: UNICORNS

Mechanic meets drag queen

Unicorns is a lively dramatic exploration of identity, queer culture, and the relationship between a working class, straight white, single dad from Essex, southwest of London, and a professional drag performer of British Indian origin based in Manchester. It's also an example of relliably polished English filmmaking, exhibiting the way with a few good actors and good direction, manners and accents in a British film can be used satisfyingly to convey the nuances of class, custom and region and ways they can be blended and interwoven.

The Guardian review by Wendy Ide stresses how the monochrome world of Essex garage mechanic Luke (Ben Hardy) is transformed and set alight when he meets the colorful British Indian drag queen. What is it like to fall for a drag queen and then realize "she" wasn't quite the"she" you thought? Yes, it's encountering glamor, filigree, facade, then getting a shock, then, perhaps, coming to terms with the deception and realizing what he didn't understand still mysteriously, troublingly attracts him.

At the first meeting Luke takes Aysha away from a brawl. When she explains to him what it was about, he says it sounds complicated, but she answeres that it’s simply that “Everybody just wants what they can’t have.”

A key scene is where we see the excellent Jason Patel, as Ashaq, the quiet drugstore makeup counter employee by day living with his conservative family, totally making himself over to enter his other nighttime identity, hidden from his parents, as Aysha, bathing, shaving his whole body, making his skin look more glowing and glassy and smooth; then the makeup, then the wig, then the clohes, for the magic transformation. The personality behind Aysha is silky but also tough. It is a total transformation whose effort and accomplishment and magic we're shown.

There is a kiss, when the tough young garage mechanic, Luke, doesn't know he's kissing a drag queen. Then later Aysha comes to the garage where Luke works to beg him to give her a ride as he did the night they met - because as she said she does not drive - to go the gathering she wants to attend in another town. Her drag life involves these treks around the country. Luke has a boring, grimy sex life and the primary responsibility of raising a son, litle Jamie (Taylor Sullivan), who has a behavioral problem and gets called out for repeatedly kicking another boy in a school dispute.

In the case of Ben Hardy as Luke the transformations aren't elaborately physical like Jason Patel's but there are transfomratins seen in layers of emotion all reflected in his"everyday" face without makeup or glitter, with just a bit of washing up. Luke's changes are a thing of rapidly shifting emotons, a kaleidoscope of altering facial expressions, often quite subtle.

These two characters, Asaq/Aysha and Luke, who bond as she pays him to transport her to clubs or dates in different towns, make a striking combination, the odd couple, which fills the screen becaause of how fully Jason Patel and Ben Hardy realize their characters and make belieable the chemistry between the two characters they create. Through them the film has no trouble taking a deep, natural dive into the themes of self-discovery, acceptance, and fluid desire as they bond as "mates" and something much more.

Aysha is warned by her brother at one point that “people are saying things back in Manchester about you," and she she herself darkly remarks to Luke at one point that for closeted South Asian drag queens like her, “there’s only ever two outcomes, forced marriage abroad or jumping off a cliff." But the romance, the excitement, are there fror LUke and Aysha, who're both discovering something both in each other and in themselves with this affair.

True, we've seen these themes before. The tough, macho guy who becomes attracted to an exotic creature, a tough-and-tender drag queen is not new. But these actors are excellent and the backgrounds are convincing. The treatment is honest and sensible. As Angie Han points out in her Hollwood Reporter review, the film doesn't draw near defining lines around the two main characters, point some sort of trite moral, or come to any easy conclusion.

Unicorns, 119 mins., debuted at Toronto Sept. 8, 2023, showing aso at BRI London, Göteborg, later in 2024 at BFI Flare London LGBTQIA+ Film Festival, Sydney, Rio, and Seoul, and released in the UK, Ireland, Denmark and Israel. Opening in the US July 18, 2025, expanding July 25.

[Chris Knipp]

GIOVANNI TORTORICI: DICIANNOVE (2024)


MANFREDI MARINI, CENTER, WITH DANA GIULIANO AND VITTORIA PLANETA IN DICIANNOVE

Being Leonardo

Bravo Guadagnino, to have passed the torch to Giovanni Tortorici, born in 1996: to have found somehing good close at home in an assistant director of his great "We Are who We Are" HBO miniseries, which after all is a coming of age story too, like this. Except that was an American boy and girl of fourteen on an American base in Italy, and this is Italy proper, and the boy, Leonardo (Manfredi Marini, in an engaging debut) is nineteen. And he goes through some changes, while the film avoids most of the conventions of the genre. Bravo Tortorici, writer and director for this film produced by Guadagnino, for delivering a traditional genre in a way that is non-traditionally fresh and intelligent, as well as frankly autobiographical, and feels unexpected and is even radical in how deeply, historically traditional it is.

Reviews, at least American ones, comment on the use of many techniques, jump cuts, Dutch angles, and so forth, the multiiple approches to point of view. First though, this is a European, not an American, film about European experience and the European mind. There is no joking about sex and little in the way of actual sex. There is a hint of a hardon on a train where the only other psssenger in view is a large old man, whatever that means. There is a hint that Leonardo is masterbating on a moment from Pasolini's Salò. Natural enough to be turned on by perversity when it involves a young woman's perfect ass and perfect breasts. There is also a 15-year-old liceo boy with a garland of coevals of both sexes, and a brilliant smile, that Lele (a nickname he's grown tired of) flashes on over and over and tries to find on the internet. He too knows how to smile. But mostly he is trying to find who he is and what he wants to study, who he wants to be. Perhaps he is gay, but more surely he is flirting with conservtism.

As the film begins Leonardo goes to London from his native Palermo to bunk at the flat of his older sister Arianna (Vittoria Planeta) (and she greets him as "fratelllino," little brother) where he is to enroll in business school--but wait! (And there will be many sudden shifts): before that he will immerse himself in his sister's hard-partying lifestyle for a while, pourihg down the liquor which will come back out before the night is over.

Clearly Leonardo has had second thoughts about business school and is not at home with either his sister's lifeestyle, London as a milieu, or business as a subject, because before very long he is on the internet looking up (in Italian) "best Italian universities for the study of literature," and he's getting "Siena" and Bang! he in Siena, enrolled at the university, flat-sharing with a couple of girls, a depressive law student and a fat giggly student of medicine, and preparing to study Italian literature. He eschews the kitchen because they love meat (he's vegetarian) and cooks with a hot plate in his room.

The film is a little bit of a travelogue in giving the names of cities he goes to, all Italian from now on, posted on the screen humorously in big old fashioned letters, first Palermo, then London, now Siena, later Milano, Torino, and then again at the end Palermo (where at last for once he apppars to be in a friendly social group, old schoolmates no dobut). Because we don't know where Leonardo is going next and often he seems not to know either, and he does get buffeted back and forth, starting with his bossy mother (Maria Pia Ferlazzo), this seems for a minute like it's going to feel like a picaresque novel. But eventually it's clearly much more a Bildungsroman. To the extent that except for relatives, including an important young cousin, the other key figures are elders, and Leonardo devotes zero time to making friends. That ready smile is used more to placate proessors or keep attracted girls at a safe distance than to win girlfriends, or any friends. Is he gay? It's not 100% clear. But when he gets access to wi-fi in Siena his first search is for Justin Bieber naked.

All the time there is the "formal invention," which simply means a playful use of devices, fast zooms, odd angles, slo-mo, animation, expressionistic devices to clue us in on Leonardo's POV.

Leonardo is, like most young men on their own for the first time, a messy, even dirty boy, and one of the film's memorable shots comes when his sister comes to Siena for a weekend tovisit him from London and looks around his room and we see what she sees: a great mound of expensive, ornate looking books on one side, a bed, and on the other side a chaos of unwashed clothing and junk.

The books are not at all incidental. Leonardo seeks to define himself by an eccentric focus on pre-modern Italian literature. Even befofe he leaves London he is. seen with a copy of an 1836 book, Lettere familiari by Giuseppe Marco Antonio Baretti, is a replication of a book originally published before 1836. He'sinterested in the seventeenth-century Jesuit writer Daniello Bartoli, with its descriptions he reads of mortifications of the flesh (with illustratiojs), and the nineteenth-century Pietro Giordani's Epistolario. He has squandered what is from a student point of view a small fortune on the special books to go with these pursuits. These he reads intensively on his own initiative. He goes nearly bankrupt, and is down to little more than fifty euros in his account when he calls on his mother for help, and tries pimping himself out to men at this point for soldi, not very successfully. Some rather original animations breifly flash by here. On the streeet nearby he keeps seeing the smiling liceo boy, fascinated by him, evidently.

Tortorici shows all those arcane titles without caring if anybody gets them. Guadagnino told him he should make his own film, trying to please would ruin it, and this is what makes it so unique and good.

With the Dante professor's lectures from the first Leonardo is bored to death. Considering himself a good judge, he writes derogatory squibs during lectures and finds his own supposed "errors" in his oral exam with him were trumped up (he finds the word he used for "vespers," "vespero," though archaic, means the same as the more standerd "vespro"). He cheerishes suchn quibbles because he insists on being right, even when he isn't, quite. He prepares a diatribe against this professor and has it duplicated to distribute around the university, but then thinks better of it. It emerges that squabbled with his profs even at the liceo: his father suggests it's he who's the problem. He is hard headed and egocentric. One senses that he is right, though, that Siena's literature studies, supposedly the best in Italy, may be hidebound and sensecent, the great Dante scholars all gone.

Obviously, Diciannove is serious about its intellectalism, providing onscreen shots of title pages of numerous books Leonardo reads, Gasparo Gozzi's 'Defense of Dante,' for instance, and the literary studies of eighteenth-century Jesuit scholar Saverio Bettinelli, arcane books even for Italians. Leonardo pours over these books. He is highly opinionated and self confident--and prejudiced against anything after the nineteenth century. He declares that Pasolini, for instance, did not write well, and decrees that a famous historian of Italian literature is unworthy of his bookshelf, and in lieu of throwing it out the window, he pees on the book to declare his disapproval. This may about sum up the arrogance of is attitude.

In the last act following the quick visit from London of his sister (where he hides that he has no friends) Leonardo has significant male encounters. His cousin (Zackari Delmas, lively and intense) summons him to Milano to smoke and say he's sick of studying law and is "feeling more letters, more art" himself now. Another wild club and drinking passage follows whose beautiful edit must have taken a long time to get right. Back in Siena, Leonardo walks the centro storico and views one of its high-up plaques with lines from Dante that says: "But could I see the miserable souls/of Guido, Alessandro, or their brother,/I’d not give up the sight for Fonte Branda." All very specific, all very Italian. As Leonardo sits outside reading Ovid we hear a choir singing a work of the eighteenth-century composer Metestasio to show the exhlatation of this experience. (Sedate pre-ninetenth-century music us ysed as a background--except when it's hip hop briefly in the foreground--throughout the film.)

There are two key encounters with older men (not for sex!) that are grueling and precise evaluations of Leonardo's intellectual development and his moral position. One is with a professor who examines him. It's the same professor whose boring Dante lectures Leonardo has sat through a few of and complained of on the phone. He also complains of fellow students and roommates. Phone conversations serve like staccato journal entries sometimes. Right away the professor asks if he has read his book. Of course he hasn't. Zero! In fact this encounter shows Leonardo isn't as well informed as he thinks. The second more profound encounter is with an important friend of his grandmother who turns out to be very wise and perceptive, and a stern judge of the position Leonardo has assumed.

This gentleman is an imposing presence, literally large in all directions, a collector of modern art (in fact played by Italian psychoanalyst Segio Bienvenuto) who grills Leonardo on his choices of subject matter and what the intellectual, political, and moral posiitiohas been making are ns these choices imply. He suggests the conservative, retro literary choices Leonardo has been making are just what a contemporary terrorist--were he to be Italian and study literature--would have made. Leonardo's choice of "morals," he sees as a severe narrowing-down.

All this is relatively terra incognita for Americans, whose college experiences tend to take place in the embrace of a collegial "alma mater" that takes care of all our needs. In the traditional European university town represented clasically by Siena, scholars are on their own and not only have no cosy dormitory but must find their own curriculum and mentors.

But Leonardo is winging it and this is why this fllm at best is like prime Jean-Luc Godard, fresh, provocative, and unexpected. At its best moments the result is exhilarating, and at the very least, with thie appealing young actor and inventive screenplay, it's charming. But Manfredi Marini is never just charming, because he convinces as someone with intellectual ambitions who wants to become a writer and has original ideas, even though he can't always correctly answer the conventional quiz questions of dull, jaded profs. But he is also bull-headed and annoying at times and thinks he knowsmore than he really does.

Making all this exciting and cool is a surprise for a movie called "19." And it works for nearly two hours. But there's plenty of fun here, and plenty of youth of the golden Italian kind; lots of specific information neatly packed in. Guy Lodge's Variety review calls this film "vivid" and "humane," and that's just the beginning of the praise he heaps on it--with justification: Guadagnino has introduced us to an exciting new discovery.

Jordan Mintzer's Hollywood Reporter review as well as an interview there with the director also attest to how well received this film was at its Venice premiere.

Diciannove, 107 mins., premiered in Venice's Orizzonti section Aug. 30, 2024 and opened in Italy Feb. 27, 2025. It has shown in other festivals at Toronto, Hamburg, BFI London, Mumbai, the Viennale, Göteborg, and in a number of US festivals, most recently coming June 25, 2025 to Frameline in San Francisco. Released in the US by Oscilloscope July 25, 2025.


MANFREDI MARINI IN DICIANNOVE


THE FILM MAKES USE OF DUTCH ANGLES: MANFREDI MARINI AGAIN

[Chris Knipp]

LEXI VENTER IN DON'T LET'S GO TO THE DOGS TONIGHT

EMBETH DAVIDTZ: DON'T LET'S GO TO THE DOGS TONIGHT (2024)

Here is a film whose main characters are white racists, colonialists in South Africa. The sting may be lessened by having the main character an eight-year-old girl who knows no better and accepts the condescension of her elders. She's told black people have no last names, and she accepts that. We may watch with a sort of horrified curiosity to see the situation of 1980 Rhodesia recreated so convincingly. But the film is a rather a disappointment after that because it doesn't have very much to say. Nor does the life of white racists, this hardscrabble, disintegrating farm, seem an attractive environment.

Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight was written and directed by Embeth Davidtz in her feature directorial debut. It's based on Alexandra Fuller's 2001 memoir about the experiences of her White Zimbabwean family following the Rhodesian Bush War when she was that little girl. The film can be compared to Claire Denis' 2009 White Material starring Isabelle Huppert as a heedless white woman in an unnamed African country who adamantly refuses to leave when the whites are being driven out. The mother here is, similarly, quoted by her daughter as saying she won't leave but she lacks the ruthless authority of Huppert's character and seems only a stubborn hedonist. This film is from the point of view of Bobo (Lexi Venter), eight-year-old tomboyish girl whose face is dirty and hair uncombed and who roams free, questioning her black carers - and adoring her nurse, Sara (Zakhona Bali), riding a motorbike and often smoking cigarettes. Her mother, Nicola Fuller, is portrayed by Embeth Davidtz, the director. The capture of the African atmosphere is good, but the action is meandering and inconclusive. Perhaps this is one of those frequent cases where a book can do what the film adaptation cannot, because ther rich descrioption, a feast of words, is missing here. The filmmakers have selected a sngle short dramatic period from a book that roams over a number of years and life in different African countries.

A review of the original memoir from the Guardian eleven years ago by Anne Enright shows how rich and dense with details Fuller's memoir is. Here were shown things that Bobo only partly understands, yet this is a crucial political situation, the very moment (we hear the announcement on the radio) when the Marxist indigenous leader Robert Mugabe wins the democratic electoin and the white colonial government is over. Wikipedia articles on Rhodesia and Southern Rhodesia help explain what was going on during the time frame of the film.

Davidtz is good at reproducing the South African atmosphere on the famaily farm, with the cattle, the black servants, the many dogs and cats, the horse ridden with style by Bobo's mother, who as played by Davidtz looks stylish, if sweaty and a bit haggard, but is drunk a lot of the time. Bobo is cared for by Sara, whose husband Jacob (Fumani N Shilubana), a leftist, is very disapproving of the little white girl's free ways and makes clear by his subtitled words in his own language that he doesn't expect the whites to be on for long.

Caryln James in h34 Hollywood Reporter review, thinks it was a shrewd choice to rest to much on the little girl's shoulders, because the child actress is so good. Yes she is good, but she is taking us on a tour of the surroundings, the blacks, the whites, the civil war, the constant danger combined with a strangely sleepy feeling heightened by the mother's frequent drunkenness. It's hard to comment without reading the memoir, but it's been suggested that there is material in the admired book for more adaptations.

The cinemtography of Willie Nel captures both the hot sun and amiable disorder of the scene and the limitations of Bobo's vision, because often only closeup glimpses of people and scenes appear to us. The climactic moments mix the maudlin and risqué, with Bobo and her plump older sister singing Chris de Burgh's "Patricia the Stripper" as they speed away from the farm that has been sold by the father (Rob van Vuuren), and their mother cannot face it at first, pathetic compared to the strong if wrong-headed Clair Denis character in White Material. With the attempt to reenstate the black characters at the end that Robrert DAniels in Screen Daily has called "hamfisted," we cannot but realize that we have seen a racist world filtered down through the naiveté of a child, as we see when Bobo try to start grooming black children to be her future servants. Perhaps this has been a "bold swing with difficult materials" as Daniels suggests, but it ends by leaving us just as uncomfortable as it did at the outset.

Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, 97 mins., premiered at Telluride Aug. 30, 2024, also shown Toronto Sept. 6. It is released by Sony Pictures Jul. 11, 2025.

[Chris Knipp]

AUSTIN BUTLER IN THE BIKERIDERS

C H R I S__K N I P P'S__2 0 2 4__M O V I E__B E S T__L I S T S

FEATURE FILMS
All We Imagine as Light (Payal Kapadia)
Anora (Sean Baker)
Beast, The (Bertrand Bonello)
Bikeriders, THe (Jeff Nichols)
Blitz (Steve McQueen)
Challengers (Luca Guadagnino)
Close Your Eyes (Victor Erice)
Conclave (Edward Berger)
Goldman Case, The/Le Procès Goldman (Cédric Kahn)
Real Pain, A (Jesse Eisenberg)
Sing Sing (Greg Kwedar)

RUNNERS UP
The Damned (Roberto Minvervini)

BEST DOCUMENTARIES
Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressberger (David Hinton)
Merchant Ivory (Stephen Soucy)
New Kind of Wilderness, A (Silje Evensmo Jacobsen)
No Other Land (Basel Adra, Rachel Szor, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham)
Sugarcane (Emily Kassie, Julian Brave NoiseCat)

UNRELEASED FAVORITES
Afternoons of Solitude/Tardes de soledad (Albert Serra)
Caught by the Tides/ 风流一代 (Jia Zhang-ke)

NOT SEEN YET
Babygirl (Halina Reijn) Dec. 25 release
Complete Unknown, A (James Mangold) Dec. 25 release
Misericordia (Alain Guiraudie) (also unreleased)
Nickel Boys (RaMell Ross) Dec. 13 release

LESS ENTHUSIASTIC ABOUT THAN SOME
Brutalist, The (Brady Corbet)
Civil War (Alex Garland)
Emilia Pérez (Jacques Audiard)
La Chimera La chimera (Alice Rohrwacher)
Megalopolis (Francis Ford Coppola)
Queer (Luca Guadagnino 2024)
Room Next Door, The (Almodóvar)
Substance, The (Coralie Fargeat)
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COMMENTS (Dec. 1, 2024)

Just a first draft; a work in progress. But I can guarantee that "Best Features" is a list only of new movies I have watched this year with a lot of pleasure and admiration and think you would enjoy. I'll be working on it. I tend to forget things, and there are late arrivals. I also may make it numerical but for now it's alphabetical. I'm expecting a lot of Babygirl, and as always there are buzz-worthy 2024 films I have not yet seen, notably Nickel Boys. I stive to focus on movies available to everyone to watch, but that's less a problem now that there are so many eventual releases on platforms. As for the "Less Enthusiastic" list, I recommend that you watch them too, because people are talking about them - a lot, especially The Brutalist, The Substance, and Emilia Pérez.
And then there's Megalopolis. Whether or not they are as great, or for that matter as awful, as some people are claiming, they will be talked about during awards season.

Enjoy - and try to get out to see all you can in a movie theter!

[Chris Knipp]

ALEX ROSS PERRY: VIDEOHEAVEN (2025)

The rise and decline of the video store, as told in film clips

This is a film about video stores, which has been done before. But this one is notable for its many amazing film clips. The phenomenon of video stores, Maya Hawke's narration says, began in the seventies and ended in the 2010's. The narration sees this as a kind of heyday, and when we think of, say, Quentin Tarantino, we can only agree. Didn't work in such a store give birth to this marvellous film-buff filmmaker in a special way, providing a library and a film school? The narration points out the video store era was a time when getting a movie to watch at home was a "face-to-face, hand-to-hand process," a person-to-person social transaction (and imagine talking to Tarantino in choosing and taking out your pick). There is a nostalgic cult of the VHS among film buffs, with a place for the video store in it.

Why did video stores predominate in America more than Europe? The film doesn't give a good explanation, but assumes it's because they were places mostly for Hollywood products. Does that matter, and is it even true? My favorite video stores were all ones where lots of foreign films were on offer. And yes, I watched this film because of strong memories of a dazzed, blissful period when I myself rented, brought home, and watched videos in one format or another nearly every day.

The film concentrates on showing and talkling about clips of video stores from movies, starting with Ethan Hawke's Hamlet, where a hertbreakngly young Hawke wanders wide-eyed and pale-skinned through a videos store in knitted cap and plunging neckline whilst a soft voice-over of his voice recites the "to be or not to be" soliloquy. We see a richly decorated store in the 1989 Speaking Parts. There will be many, many more.

Next comes a focus on the topic of VCR's, which, starting in the late 1970's, quickly becme a staple in Ameican homes: video cassette recorders, used primarily for playing videotapes. Some of us had two machines, one for playing the rented videotape, the other for copying it while watching it, fof future re-watching, which rarely happened, after the tape was returned to the rental store. There were those of us who accumulated thus hundreds of putatively illegal copies, in one's own private library. Who watches them now? But there still are a few video stores, which mostly might have the DVD's that replaced the tapes, but the tapes too. I find from a search that "Seattle's Scarecrow Video is one of the world's largest physical media collections, with over 130,000 film titles available to the public to rent on DVD, Blu-Ray, and VHS. The institution's VHS collection is comprised of around 15,000 items." And it's current. The importance of this survival is that, as with 78 rpm to LP, and LP to CD, many titles in one format never get transferred to the new one.

VHS tapes first appeared in the US in 1976 (in Japan a year before) and interest in the wonder of independent home viewing (not relying on what came over your TV channels) rapidly grew. Over the course of the 1980's, the narration tells us, there was "a profound change in American movie culture," signalled by the growing dominance of home video-watching over movie-theater-going. Not a happy development, I might say; but then, it meant people could watch lots more films. Videos and video stores were the main conduit through which new movies got seen. The chain stores like Blockbuster took over from the little, dark, ideosyncratic stores with their film buff staffs. They instead were "family-friendly," large, brightly-lit, uniformly laid out, organized, but lacking that je-ne-sais-quoi that made the little video stores places with a vibe and more of a cult feeling and following. Those of us who were video fiends and buffs never really warmed to the big chain video stores, but we had to resort to them as the cool ones were overwhelmed or gave up - though a few powerhouse indie stores remained like the famous Scarecrow Video in Seattle, Beyond Video in Baltimore or Movie Madness in Portland. The force of change of course was technology. This film doesn't much go into that, but people continue to watch videos at home, ideally on blu-ray, probably on much bigger and nicer screens than were common in the heyday of VHS. But they must have to buy them rather than rent them.

I remember videotapes. They coild let you down, as when you got stuck with a bad copy or a broken or damaged tape. But with a high quality VCR it was possible to watch segments of a film in slow-mo, and even frame by frame, to pick apart how a sequence was made. Apparently this is still possible with high-quality players. It is I who have fallen off. Though over the past 20 years I have watched a lot of new films in the Walter Reade Theater at New York's Lincoln Center, which is as good a sound system and big screen as you can find, I've also myself to become largely reduced to watchiing online screeners on a laptop.

That way, something is lost - the physicality of the movie-viewing experience. When we are no longer getting access to the thing in a physical form, and it's robbed of its thing-ness, it also loses an essential element of its value. Think of the difference between wearing a diamond necklace and looking at a picture of one. An online screener, a blu-ray DVD, or a VHS tape all provide an image on a screen, but the disc and tape deliveries have a physical, artisial quality.

Alex Ross Perry's film, as I've suggested, is most notable for its many short clips of movie scenes set in video stores. A brief one from Juice (1992) simply shows the behind of a very fetching female video cleark in rolled up denim short shorts - and long black stockings. Next there immediately comes Hélas pour moi (1993), where another female cleark proffers a video of Cannibal Man to a tall blond young French guy with a top knot, who sets the video aside and says, "Pour que le mal existe, il faut justement la créature" (For evil to exist, the creature is necessary).

The rapid, entertaining onrush of clips throughout is sometimes ironic; repetitive; not always selective. Some quirky or violent moments occurring in video stores appear after the statement that they had become a dull and ordinary feature of ordinary life. But the point is made that, in the 2010's, video stores in movies became routine, "unremarked-upon." And meanwhile a big format shift had come, from videotape to DVD (laster disc isn't mentioned, and true, it's only a blip, though I had them), which further downgraded the indie stores that might not have had the funds to lay in a full stock of DVD's. Partly this is a history not just of video stores so much, but of video stores on film, and the point is repeatedly (rather reduntantly) made that now, such images are historical only, because despite a few lingering stores, they have vanished from daily life.

Videoheaven's history shows that at first in movies video stores were shown a lot as associated with violence or porn. In the later 1980's they started to become more routine background with no special associations. The narrator also recounts how the stores themselves changed, as has been mentioned already, but also with the addition of small video rental sections in electronics stores or supermarkeets, etc. Again the dizzying number of short clips continue, showing how often video stores appeared in movies, in their day. We also see a dizzying array of bad male hairstyles.

In fact video stores were partly associated with violence and porn in real life, because one thing at least some of them did was make available movies that couldn't be shown in movie theaters or on television, B movies, slasher movies. Some of them actually had a little room with porn curtained off from the rest. But now the internet has no curtains.

Sometimes Videoheaven seems more like a doggedly thorough academic paper than a thoughtful documentary film. It doesn't seem to care about the quality of most of the films it shows clips from, which becomes obvious when it shows clips from Nicole Holofcener's 1996 Walking and Talking, where the passing affair of a female character, Amelia (a young Catherine Keener) and a "scruffy video clerk named Bill" (Kevin Corrigan), even if only a subplot of the film, seems more interesting than any of the films briefly glipsed so far. Were there no interesting movies involving video stores before 1996? This film goes back and forth in time, attaching immportance to the difference between the 1980's and 1990's, and then seeming to merge them together.

A point of interest arises when video clerks (finally!) come up as a topic, and the two clerks who became famous directors, Kevin Smith and Quentin Tarantino. A clip of Tarantino himself shows he revisited the store where he worked for five years to clelbrate his film's coming out on video, while Smith's Clerks is described because he alone of the two made a film set in a video store. Obviusly clerks are the human element in the video store, and important in movie representations of these places, and they play lots of different roles: potential date, mean S.O.B., smart guy, know-it-all snob, or "sympathetic outsider."

The film goes a bit overboard when it calls negociating a film rental from a clerk "a sacred transaction." Transaction, yes; but sacred? An interesting twist is scenes from bigger, more mainstream video stores where the clerks aren't so much rude, like Randal, in Kevin Smith's classic Clerks, as super-dumb about movies, like the one in Terry Zwigoff's 2001 Ghost World, who doesn't even know 8 1/2 from 9 1/2 Weeks. Basically, compared to small or independent video stores, the big chain ones in real life sucked, even if they had a lot of videos, because they lacked the individual touch or clerks who knew and cared.

It's nice, and logical, that this film gives special attention to Michel Gondry's 2008 Be Kind Rewind, with its fanciful tale of a video store that becomes, however implausibly, a center of interactive community creativity by fostering artisinal local remakes of Hollywood films. The narrator cites as the last film to be set in a video store is Marianna Palka's 2008 Good Dick, about a store clerk (Jason Ritter) who falls for an unnamed woman played by the director. The narrator is only interested in the fact that this was shot in a real video store that actually survives today, L.A.'s Cinephile Viideo. Is it a good movie? This documentary doesn't care. Tim Grierson concluded his review of iGood Dick in the Village Voice: "It feels provocative but inconclusive—brimming with intriguing ideas about love’s dark underbelly, but not quite confident enough to pull them off." Notes like that, about which of thsse movies featuring video stores are actually worth watching, would have made this a better, more useful film. It is interesting to be reminded tht Francis Lawrence's I Am Legend (2007) has a video store Will Smith visits after the apocalypse, shot in a store thatf actually went out of business shortly thereafter.

It's not germane to this film specifically perhaps, but in my mind I find the images of video stores are now replaced by videos of Criterion Closet Picks (I love the one by Mark Ryance, whose "perhaps" favorite is mine too, and what he says about it is beautiful) and the French counerpart, where ten-best picks in a similar cube packed with DVD's can be found on YouTube.

Videoheaven provides much more detail than can be mentioned here. I've left out dozens of films that are briefly cited with an identifying clip showing a video store glimpse. Indeed, the seeming comprehensiveness of this documentary - in its discssions of films, in its slightly repetitive orgnization - is a feature that can tend to make it seem at times more wearying than entertining. We deserved for the filmmakers to show us a more interesting, clearer path through all this detail. Perhaps Perry's taking ten years, as reported, to make this film contributed to a loss of perspective. Nonetheless, a feast and a record for VCR fans.

Videoheaven, 182 mins., was watched for this review on an online screener: the way a lot of us watch movies at home today. It premiered Feb. 5, 2025 at Rotterdam, according to Deadline, as part of "a Focus strand entitled 'Hold Video in Your Hand', celebrating the community spirit of VHS culture," which included other films. It was also featured at Groningen, Nyon, Jeonju, Sydney, Tribeca and Oak Cliff. US release July 2, 2025.