Matty

The new Halloween may not be as scary as the original from 1978 or as entertaining as H20, but it is still stimulating and self-aware enough to not be an unnecessary sequel. It can be seen as, for example, a morbidly humorous argument with films and (documentary) series that attempt to understand evil (e.g. with the aid of psychology). Laurie Strode knows that sometimes it is better not to ask too much – as done by other characters attempting to encourage Myers (by whom they are as similarly unhealthily fascinated as some horror fans) to express himself (which they mostly accomplish, but not in the way they would have imagined) – but instead to simply pick up a kitchen knife or shotgun. Based on more than just Laurie’s example, Green’s three-generation horror film shows how in the past forty years women have learned to more effectively protect themselves against danger and to cast off their assigned roles (in addition to costume gender swapping at a Halloween party, an inverted variation of a famous scene from the first Halloween appears). Despite that, they still have to face mistrust and the suspicion that they are deranged hysterics, in which the film is very much in step with the times. The film’s direction is above reproach and the music by the father-and-son team John and Cody Carpenter is blood-chilling. When cult films are brought back to life, this is how it should be done. 85%

A Quiet Place is primarily an outstanding psychological drama about loss (of a loved one, one’s own voice) and the impossibility of letting go of the attendant pain (which, however, can be turned into strength, an idea on which the film’s climax is partly based). The characters have to keep all of their emotions bottled up inside, which only deepens the trauma. Their resources and manifestations of joy, which would bring them relief, are severely limited. Playing the game on which today’s society is based (because we do not want only to consume, but also to have fun) means risking one’s life. In this respect, the film is the antithesis of the dystopia of Ready Player One, which depicts a society focused solely on playing a game. The initial tragedy occurs because of a toy, the next one nearly happens while playing a board game (typically, that game is Monopoly – this is the only way that the characters can treat themselves to the pleasure of shopping). Partners can dance only while wearing headphones; otherwise the use of the technologies on which we are so dependent today is practically out of the question. Thanks to the superb actors, information conveyed in the mise-en-scène and the way the characters react in certain situations, we always understand what the protagonists are going through and what they are doing, even though there is almost no dialogue in the film. It is in this aspect that I see the film’s main element of exceptionalism. It shows what many directors have learned in (not quite) a hundred years of cinematic sound design – how a psychologically layered story can be told without words. Due to the focus on the characters, the slower middle section of the film, the woman’s decision to conceive another child (to fill the void) and some slightly sentimental moments (which, however, are disturbing only when applying a purely horror reading) find their justification. As a horror movie, Krasinski’s film is brilliantly directed and hardly allows us to breathe, even though he uses relatively well-known tricks and rarely gathers the courage to be truly silent. Not only with its content, but also its style, A Quiet Place essentially confirms that American filmmakers fear few things more than absolute silence. The film is thus not remarkable so much because of its work with silence than as a clear connection between the basic conditions for survival in the given fictional world (on must not make any louder sounds) and what the characters are going through. The fact that the film ends in the best way (without eliciting the feeling that something essential remains unexplained) compelled me to add a fifth star to the obvious four. 90%

Fashion hell done a little differently. What makes In Fabric an exclusive film is also its biggest weakness. Events do not develop, but rather repeat with the regularity of rituals (which surrealists love so much). Sheila returns to the department store, whose staff try to charm her with baroquely elaborate phrases. She goes on dates via ads. She learns details of her son’s love live. Again and again, without anything going anywhere or so that we better learn the past of dresses that cause washing machines to commit suicide or, as the case may be, we understand the bizarre laws of this fictional world, which gives the impression of being simultaneously modern and archaic. Thanks to tactile imaging of surfaces, clever work with colours and the use of avant-garde stylistic elements (e.g. overlapping shots during a love scene, when not only bodies but also layers of the image intertwine), it is seductive and intoxicating, but that is not enough for a feature-length film. Therefore, at the midpoint of the film, an unexpected change occurs, followed by a variation not of a particular situation, but of the whole first hour of the story (stylistically reminiscent of British social dramas rather than giallo films). Instead of strengthening the atmosphere, the film turns to disintegrates. It loses its momentum and cohesion, and is no longer able to say much of anything new about the central theme of capitalistic fetishisation of merchandise, to which we attribute magical properties under the influence of marketing. Throughout its runtime, In Fabric is a very stylish, likably exaggerated affair that is difficult to compare to anything else in contemporary art cinema, but next time I would prefer to see one excellent film than two passable stories. 70%

Though Isle of Dogs does not excel in terms of narrative ingenuity like The Grand Hotel Budapest or of playfulness as in Fantastic Mr. Fox, it is still such an incredibly clever film that you want to bark with joy. ___ Anderson continues to refine his style, which he barely contaminates with special techniques that are atypical of him, such as the use of a handheld camera, zoom and some asymmetrical composition here and there. The enlivening segments are most frequently in the form of a change in the style of animation (for example, the security-camera footage is hand-drawn instead of stop-motion), which relates to the motif of translating meanings between various languages and cultures (for example, some utterances in Japanese are interpreted, while the interpreter’s reactions to what she hears have an alienating effect). ___ In comparison with Anderson’s other films, this one is unexpectedly and fully intentionally ugly (or perhaps better said, “not cute”) – dogs live in a huge dump among rats, are infected with weird diseases and feed on rotting garbage. Sometimes we see close-ups of a chewed-up ear or a bit of mangy fur (and a kidney transplant), but the gloomy greyness very well suits this film that thematicises (more openly than Grand Hotel) the rise of authoritarianism, the inhumanity of humans and impending genocide (or rather its canine equivalent). It is not a film for children, who might be bothered by the slower pace and the minimum of “obvious” gags (the humour is based primarily on the ironic juxtaposition of situations/objects, both infantile and adult). ___ Anderson again presents an isolated world with specific rules, from which the protagonists try to escape using a well-thought-out plan (instead of repeatedly resorting to improvisation). For western viewers, such a peculiar world to which one can flee from the ordinariness of everyday life is not just the island where most of the story takes place, but the whole of Japan, whose iconography, history and gastronomy are tremendously beneficial to Anderson (sumo wrestlers, cherry blossoms, Kabuki theatre, the preparation of sushi, Japanese woodcuts, chanbara movies, taiko drums as the foundation of the soundtrack…). His approach to Japanese culture is not always so sensitive – the resistance against treacherous cat lovers, for example, is led by an American exchange student, who shows more courage and awareness than her Japanese schoolmates – but, at the same time, he does not turn the Land of the Rising Sun into a museum of curiosities for Japanophile fetishists. ___ Like Anderson’s other films, Isle of Dogs has a block structure with a prologue, an introduction and four chapters, each of which has a different objective and all of which are interconnected by the development of relationships between the characters. Compared to the nesting-doll nature of The Grand Budapest Hotel, the narrative is linear with the exception of a few flashbacks, which, together with an excess of explanatory monologues, disrupt the smooth flow of the narrative. Though the film does not unfold as quickly as Anderson’s previous films and can be a bit more challenging for viewers who go to the cinema to have a good time, it is still broadly accessible and easily comprehensible, and actually, yet somewhat paradoxically (with respect to theme and environment), one of Anderson’s more cautious films. 80%

I said to myself that it is extremely sad to look at a woman’s life through her relationships with the men who influenced her (to each is bound a certain topic and the narrative is structured based on those topics rather than on the chronological sequence of events), but the final chapter and emancipatory point more or less legitimise the chosen therapeutic concept. The greatest benefit of the film is Fonda herself, who assesses the men in her life (her father Henry is no exception) and her past and her current selves openly and (self)critically, without the need to conceal or sugar-coat anything (e.g. she admits that her beauty and thus sexuality aided her in her career, and she regrets that she did not have sufficient courage to resist undergoing plastic surgery). With her composure, she vindicates the narrative of self-acceptance, liberation from the belief that we can be a complete being only at the side of a loved one, which the documentary adheres to. The other interviewees and even director Susan Lacy are more benevolent toward her, which is in line with the choice of words and topics. The son raised among North Vietnamese soldiers and members of the Irish Republican Army presents his traumatising childhood as a series of humorous incidents; no one who fundamentally disagreed with Fonda’s activism was given more space (except for Richard Nixon, who is even more hated in the United States than she is). Despite Fonda’s sincerity, the tone of the film is thus somewhat sentimental. In any case, it is still far from the celebratory documentary portraits that merely uninventively summarise facts that you can find on Wikipedia. It is an intellectually thorough, inspiring film that, in a very viewer-friendly manner (the use of a large amount of archival materials contributes to its liveliness), addresses issues close to every person, not just a single extraordinarily intelligent and attractive actress, political activist and promoter of VHS aerobics. 80%

I understand that for viewers requiring a strong and original story, director Barry Jenkins’ serenade may be a disappointment (if the actual reason is not a combination of low emotional intelligence, latent racism and unwillingness to meet the work halfway, learn something about it in advance and try to understand its means of expression). The best melodramas, with whose conventions the film works inventively, always told primarily through music and colours (following the example of Claire Denis, Jenkins adds human faces and bodies, touches and glances, the way people communicate with each other verbally and nonverbally), were literal, very naive and narrowly focused their attention, at least outwardly, on expressing feelings within a relationship. If Beale Street Could Talk is not about overcoming conflicts and dramatic reversals. It allows us to experience (feel, perceive and touch) various situations in non-chronological order. With its composition with a regular rhythm, cyclical recurrences and overlapping scenes, it is reminiscent of a blues song or a lyrical poem. The aim is not realism, but an almost tangible evocation of a particular moment, mood and emotions, which are frequently contradictory (love, pain, sadness, laughter). However, politics also come into the film through the feelings – because we want (to see) a satisfying love story, together with the young couple we experience helplessness and disappointment from a world that repeatedly betrays them, which appeals to them only in order to remind them that because of their different skin colour, they do not have the same right as others to be blithely in love. If Beale Street Could Talk is a spellbinding film of extraordinary fragility, rare in the context of today’s film production due, among other things, to the above-standard requirements placed on the audience’s perceptiveness (which is in part because its tactile character arouses even those senses whose existence you are not aware of when watching other films). 90%

This film makes me sad. Not because of its content, which goes to such extremes that it loses its persuasiveness, but due to the fact that Nadine Labaki squanders her talent by presenting two gruelling hours of shots of sad (often crying) faces of emotionally and otherwise destitute characters (often children). It is basically just a pile of evidentiary material explaining why twelve-year-old Zain decided to sue his parents for conceiving him. I hope that was not the intention, but the film, which borders on poverty/misery porn (it crosses that line in scenes underscored by sentimental music) throughout its runtime, gives the impression that poor people, whose motivations are not in any way clarified, should not have children at all. The system represented in the film by the judiciary and the police by all accounts seems to work, and the complicity of the upper class is not taken into account at all. The final “corpse” is apparently supposed to refer to The 400 Blows, but Truffaut’s adolescence in difficult conditions did not deprive him of all joy and he did not make such a terribly didactic and one-sided film that basically goes nowhere, but rather only clubs us to death with misery, loneliness and suffering and more and more unfortunate twists of fate. 40%

This damned hot summer can’t be over soon enough. But in the case of Kirill Serebrennikov’s Summer, I’d be happy for it to last longer. This is despite the fact that it basically consists of a story-less series of musical performances by obscure Russian bands and partially animated musical sequences (which, conversely, feature hits by famous Western musicians). The burgeoning love triangle has a certain dramatic weight, but due to how loose the relationships between the characters are, it cannot have very painful consequences. Nor does the apparatus of the state put any serious pressure on the artists. The bohemian rockers encounter officers only once and deal with censorship easily and with humour. Despite that, we are constantly aware of the danger faced by the free environment that the protagonists have created around themselves in a country that is not free and the tone of the narrative gradually changes from the initial summer contentment to a melancholic premonition of an impending downfall. The final scene, which sums up this fleetingness of life with the aid of two blunt titles, is unbelievably powerful and timeless. ___ Summer is a film in which, as in Russia (or, for that matter, Czechoslovakia) almost nothing happens in the early 1980s. Just repeat the official government actions and speeches, always captured here somewhere in the background on a television screen, with which the regime shapes its (self-)image and maintains the status quo. Rock music, whose lyrics are about free love, alcohol and rebellion against the system, naturally disturbs this order. While musically it mainly involves (progressive and indie) rock or New Wave, the film is a somewhat punkish affair in terms of narrative, which adheres to most of the principles according to which drama should be structured. The rhythm is set by the songs rather than by plot twists. When the film loses its breath, one of the characters, who communicates with other inhabitants of this fictional world as well as with the viewers (to whom he continually announces that what we have just seen never actually happened), helps it get a second wind. However, it is seductively easy to get carried away by the narrative thanks to the film’s tremendous spontaneous energy, catchy songs, numerous outstanding and probably labour-intensive audio-visual ideas (the film’s highlights include the covers of cult records “coming to life”) and, of no less importance, the black-and-white camera work, which shifts from character to character in long shots with a superb intra-shot montage and, together with the songs linking the individual scenes, contributes to the impression of a smooth flow of events. ___ I realise that the film borders on being too dramaturgically lax, that it does not have to so thoroughly take on the cyclical repetition of certain situations that were typical of socialism, that the characters do not undergo any fundamental development and that the end could occur at virtually any given moment (it would have made perfect sense to me if the credits ran after the film appears on the screen and immersion in the sea). I therefore understand that Summer can be an arduous experience for viewers who do not see it from the first few minutes. For me, who had goosebumps even during the opening song (and then several more times after that), it was a totally liberating experience and one of the most accurate cinematic depictions of everything that I associate with summer. I would like to experience a summer like this every year. 90%

The exceptionality of La Flor consists in far more than its runtime, which is equal to a full season of an epic series (after subtracting numerous intermezzos and the forty-minute closing credits). It is a work that is unique on so many levels that dissertations could be written about it. Or you can simply enjoy how well made it is and how it can surprise viewers with something throughout its runtime and create subtle connections between individual segments, the result of which is that you do not feel as if you are watching a miniseries or anthology. ___ The prologue, in which the director introduces the structure of the entire film and sets forth the central theme of “what can still be told today and how?”, is followed by six episodes, each of which plays with the conventions of a different genre (a B-level horror movie, a melodramatic musical, a spy thriller, a film about film, a black-and-white remake of Renoir’s A Day in the Country, an experimental anthropological pseudo-documentary) and, as in a sweeping novel, frequently branches out into numerous subplots. Aside from viewers’ expectations, which of course are not fulfilled due to the fact that, for example, almost none of the episodes has an ending (thanks to which we also realise that we are primarily watching the actual storytelling process, with all of the vacillation that goes with it), and waiting itself becomes relevant during the individual episodes. For example, the third episode is based entirely on a Tarantino-esque delaying of the final confrontation between two hostile groups of secret agents. That delay, directly thematicised in individual flashbacks, does not take thirty minutes, but five and a half hours, which is done ad absurdum. ___ Thanks to the layered narrative, the polished style, the strong self-reflective dimension (which is strongest in the fourth episode, where the crew deals with how to continue further) and deviations from the established concept, watching La Flor is never dull or predictable for even a moment. It is not slow cinema requiring an extremely patient viewer, but a dense and entertaining multi-genre experiment with the possibilities of a long, jagged narrative in which more and more stories are constantly layered on top of each other (from what I saw, it is most akin to Gomes’s three-part Arabian Nights). Therefore, one of the most emotionally powerful and, in a certain aspect, purest and truest sequences is that from the fourth episode in which the female leads do not appear in any story, do not play roles, but only freely improvise in front of the camera (just like during the closing credits). ___ Despite the impression of an epic narrative freestyle work, piling up ideas originating on the fly, La Flor is a maturely crafted and inventively structured film whose individual parts organically interconnect certain stylistic techniques (e.g. refocusing between various action plans), well-developed motifs and (primarily) a quartet of astonishingly talented and photogenic actresses, whose acting art Mariano Llinás pays tribute to (and, at the same time, allows him to stand out in every nuance, as required by the various genres and acting in multiple foreign languages). As an expression of thanks for being involved in the filming, which took roughly nine years without breaks, the director gives the actresses a gift, which is the film itself – it is not a coincidence that his narrative scheme, which Llinás sketches out at the beginning, resembles a flower, la flor. ___ Whereas you merely watch other movies, you can experience an unforgettable weekend with La Flor. 90%

Soon after Lazzaro Felice comes another film, at the end of which I had the desire to escape into the wilderness and spend the rest of my life among wolves. Although these films are fundamentally different, Leave No Trace is, for example, far more intuitive, as events simply follow one another in a time-lapse documentary without being exposed in advance (conversely, the entire first half of Lazzaro Felice is preparation for the second half), the plot flows freely and undramatically, we are not made aware of some essential information, the narrative does not come back to many of the characters and situations (for example, the only thing that we learn about the mother is that she liked the colour yellow). The protagonists have to overcome obstacles mainly in order to get to know each other and themselves better, rather than to achieve a particular objective. Upon closer viewing, it is possible to uncover in Leave No Trace, like in Lazzaro Felice, a web of motifs connected with the theme of man’s relationship to his own nature. Both pictures turn our attention (back) to nature (and to that which is generally good and unspoiled), or rather it compels us to think about man’s relationship to nature. I think these films are more successful in this regard than are “pure” nature documentaries, to which it is more difficult to connect emotionally due to the absence of a human element. In Leave No Trace, this is aided by the fact that the film does not contain a single negative character. It is purely a clash between the system (towards which Granik is not explicitly critical) and people who want (need) to live outside of it. We understand their situation, but we are not didactically guided to accept the opinion that Walden’s way of existence is the only correct way. In a similarly ambivalent manner, the film addresses the issue of freedom. Though civilisation establishes binding norms (connected here with Christmas trees, which must all look perfect) and tries to somehow categorise everyone (as Tom places shirts in drawers in a new house), but the main female protagonist is in the forests under the ceaseless patronage of her father and cannot rely on basic life security. For better or worse, they are reminiscent of a pair of seahorses, brought to mind by a girl's pendant or an orange peel reminiscent of that animal, which mates for life and whose offspring develop in the abdominal sack of the male, rather than that of the female. Giving someone freedom can be the greatest expression of love. Though the film raises the visibility of certain issues through its story, it leaves it to us to decide what is better. Will provides similar freedom in raising his daughter. He does not lead her to accept a single dogmatic worldview (he responds with a smile rather than disapprovingly to her remark that God created frogs, as she had read in a leaflet distributed by the local Christian community), but he stimulates her curiosity. Thanks to this freedom that the film gives us, the opinion at which we arrive has even greater weight. Leave No Trace thus continues to reverberate after the disarming, maximally simple penultimate scene. 85%