San Francisco Jewish Film Festival 2022

[Chris Knipp]

ALANA WAKSMAN: WE BURN LIKE THIS (2021)


MADELEINE COGHLIN IN WE BURN LIKE THIS

Lost in Montana, a young woman finds her Jewishness

One may wonder if this congeries of youthful female American lostness, which includes whiplash-inducing flashback edits, is good material for a Jewish film festival audience. If only there were an American feature about antisemitism as intellectually startling and well made as Henry Bean's The Believer were available. But that was 21 years ago.

Alana Waksman's first film concerns a lost young woman, Rae (Madeleine Coghlan), a grandchild of Holocaust survivors wandering in Montana, who discovers her Jewishness traumatically through the antisemitism of local right wing extremists. But she is already working on other problems. She's distressed when her boyfriend drops her; then an untrustworthy older man called Wolf (Andrew Rizzo)feeds her oxycontin. Rae's best friend is another, even prettier, lost soul, Chrissy B. (Devery Jacobs), who is Native American and the object of more front and center prejudice; her boyfriend says she's not really local because she comes from "the res."

Waksman's film was long in the making and there seem to be threads of earlier elements still dangling here - see Matt Kettmann's interview with the filmmaker in The Santa Barbara Independent - while, in the foreground, though the two women and the semi-urban landscapes are beautiful, just not enough is happening. As that interview shows, Chrissy B. or someone like her was the original lead character of Waksman's six-year project.

Letterboxd can be eye-opening sometimes. wowMIKEwow says the logline of a Holocaust descendant targeted by Neo-Naxis inBilings, Montana "put me in mind of something very pulpy, very poor taste, and very, very fun." He goes on: "I was picturing some sub-grindhouse thriller about a young Jewish girl having to contend with the modern day neo-nazi movement...and dealing bloody mayhem on them." Reading the blurb more carefully he realizes it's meant to be a "very slow-burn, rambling, minimalist drama about this girl going on a very internalized journey of self-discovery."

So wowMIKEwow got what this film's meant to be - not fun pulp - but finding it more a time-waster than a slow-burn enlightener, missed the alternative: "there is real value to films just nakedly talking about this stuff." Maybe that's what The Believer is - fun pulp, but done with such skill and intelligence it's riveting. This is what We Burn Like This, alas, wasn't and isn't. One should cite another Letterboxd view here though, of Joe Westwood, who "was pretty stunned by how absolutely spellbinding a lot of the photography in this film was." It is often very pretty. But it is still a painfully slow watch.

We Burn Like This, 81 mins., debuted at Santa Barbara Apr. 2021, showing at other festivals including Deauville American Film Festival Sept. 2021, and a dozen other domestic festivals, releasing Jun. 2022 on the internet. Screened for this review as part of the Jul. 21-Aug. 7, 2022 San Francisco Jewish Film Festival.

SFJFF SHOWTIMES:
Schedule
Monday August 1, 2022
12:01 a.m.
JFI Digital Screening Room