Daniels vision for this DJ Snake/Lil Jon beat involves people crashing through ceilings, crotches shattering concrete blocks, and independently dancing DDD cups.
CONTENT WARNING: Not explicit, but sexually suggestive.
All posts by Gregory J. Smalley (366weirdmovies)
CAPSULE: MOTHER MARY (2026)
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DIRECTED BY: David Lowery
FEATURING: Anne Hathaway, Michaela Coel
PLOT: A pop star seeks out her estranged seamstress to make a new dress for an upcoming performance.
COMMENTS: Mother Mary is a pop singer known for her elaborate costumes featuring halo-styled headdresses (a motif she may have recently abandoned). Now, I don’t know modern pop music from Tuvan throat singing (not quite true—I own a Hun Huur Tu album—but you get the point). But I gather Anne Hathaway’s Mother Mary is supposed to be huge, the type of singer whose trysts with NFL stars get featured on TMZ. The Catholic nomenclature obviously recalls megastar Madonna, while her costuming suggests Taylor Swift by way of Bjork. Critics more familiar with this genre than I am often trot out Lady Gaga as an analogue, along with a number of other names that sound vaguely familiar (vague familiarity being the essential currency of popular music). Jack Antonoff, Charli XCX, and FKA Twigs (who also appears in the film and, coincidentally, also has a Mother Mary role under her belt) supply the generic pop soundtrack.
At any rate, Mother Mary is secretly a wreck. Her last big public performance ended in an embarrassing and concerning platform malfunction, and she’s apparently been in a bit of a slump since. OK, creative crisis, got it. After an unsatisfactory wardrobe session sends her into a crisis of insecurity, she flies off to see her old estranged seamstress, Sam (Coel). What follows is a long sequence of the two women warily circling each other; Sam is not at all happy to see her old friend, but nevertheless passive-aggressively agrees to make her the new dress MM hopes will reignite her creative spark. The film turns into an extended conversation as Sam takes measurements, selects fabrics, and asks her client to do an interpretive dance (without musical accompaniment, because she has sworn a vow to not listen to Mother Mary’s new work). The designer pokes at old resentments, while the idol she helped create desperately (and pathetically) attempts to mend fences. The supernatural twist is divulged about halfway through, but it’s less hauntingly mysterious and more a disappointingly literal metaphor for the women’s shredded relationship. What began as a talky two-hander suddenly turns into In Fabric, but with no humor whatsoever.
It’s no knock on the two principals, who turn in excellent work, but Mother Mary never really finds anything interesting to say about its subject. The best produced parts are the concert clips—which convey a degree of spectacle that suggests why people might actually flock to see the otherwise vapid Mother Mary—and a few ethereal sequences with a flowing red spirit. But the story itself never approaches the profundity of a good Lana Del Rey single. Pop stars are bland, so maybe, by definition, movies about pop stars should be bland—-even when they try to spice things up with bloody symbolism.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
LOS HUESOS [THE BONES] (2021)
A girl conducts a necromantic ritual in 1901 to re-animate the bodies of Diego Portales and Jaime Guzmán, the architects of Chilean authoritarianism.
SATURDAY SHORT: CREATIVITY FOR AVAM (2014)
The extraterrestrial archangel Uriel invites us to partake in worlds of cosmic inspiration; incorporates clips from the Unarian Educational Foundation’s The Arrival (1980) and interviews with Uriel’s physical incarnation.
APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: RESURRECTION (2025)
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Resurrection is available to purchase on-demand.
FEATURING: Jackson Yee, Shu Qi
PLOT: We follow five dreams of a “Deliriant,” a man who chooses to dream despite a futuristic ban on the practice.
WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Bi Gan dreams better than you do.
COMMENTS: According to Resurrection, the secret to immortality is to stop dreaming. Dreamers, the prologue explains, “bring pain to reality and chaos to history.” Yet despite the obvious benefits of ceasing to dream, some rebels—“Deliriants”—continue to do so, secretly. They are tracked by “the Big Others,” agents who can see through illusions, enter dreams, and gently bring the Deliriants back to reality (i.e., death). Resurrection tracks the dreams of one such Deliriant, who somehow hides inside film, and the Big Other who gently guides him towards fatal reality.
Our Deliriant’s dreams glide through movie history. After intertitles explaining the premise, Resurrection opens with the viewer traveling through a hole burning through a celluloid membrane, that opens onto a cinema whose occupants stare in wonder at us intruders until policemen roughly usher them out the exits. The line between us and the dreamer thus blurred, we travel through five dream stories. Each is organized around a different sense, and each is set in a different cinematic era, floating from silent movies to film noir and ending in 1999’s millennial panic. Some (especially the first) are exceedingly strange. As we travel we will encounter opium addicts, hard-bitten theremin-playing detectives, former monks, con men, gangsters, and vampires, with opening and closing doses of the mysterious Big Other and her esoteric rituals. It’s like a universalized version of Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams, and less uneven than most anthology films. Bi Gan’s style benefits from shorter formats. His previous slowcore stories sometimes drifted too far from their narrative anchors, but with the longest entry here being only about 30 minutes, it’s easy to focus on each tale in its entirety before resetting our attention on the next.
But we do not watch Bi Gan movies for the stories anyway. We watch them for the masterful visuals and the “how’d he do that?” camerawork. Although each installment has its own charm, the director puts the fireworks right up front, with a mysterious cinematic prologue which, like the opening of Holy Motors, nods at the movieness of it all. It segues seamlessly into the first dream: having spied an opium poppy hiding in the Deliriant’s eye when examining at his photograph through a microscope, the Big Other wanders silently down Caligari stairwells and past Metropolis machinery and through a storeroom with a Méliès moon until she uncovers the Deleriant, looking like Max Schreck suffering from the plague, offering up a plate of poppies that bloom in stop-motion. Stylistically, this sequence is more avant-garde than anything Gan has tried before: Guy Maddin by way of Andrei Tarkovsky. The other fantastic sequence comes in the last dream, which is another of the director’s celebrated, complicated single takes, following two lovers from a harbor through busy rain-slicked city streets into a karaoke bar and then back to the harbor, where they board a boat and sail off to sea. The shot takes up 30 minutes of screen time, but there’s a time lapse inside the sequence that means the camera actually filmed for much longer.
When is a dream not a dream? When it is a metaphor. Bi Gan’s dreams in Resurrection are metaphors, most obviously, for cinema; the Deliriant’s reveries progress chronologically through different cinematic eras. But falling deeper into them, they are also a complex symbol of the human spirit, that spirit of individualism, imagination, and chaos that opposes religion, politics, and often good sense, yet remains essential to our being. Resurrection is a quiet act of rebellion. Nothing in it directly challenges the status quo, so it is not only acceptable to the ruling party, but even useful as a global prestige item. But the Deliriant’s tragic soul is forged in defiance. And though he must die for it, even the Big Other must honor that spirit.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
![Resurrection (Criterion Premieres) [Blu-ray]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41Mo0j9AJXL._SL500_.jpg)