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CAPSULE: ON BECOMING A GUINEA FOWL (2024)

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On Becoming a Guinea Fowl is currently available on VOD for purchase or rental.

DIRECTED BY: Rungano Nyoni

FEATURING: Susan Chardy, Elizabeth Chisela, Doris Naulapwa, Esther Singini

PLOT: A middle-class Zambian woman finds her uncle’s dead body lying in the road, and then is reluctantly tasked with hosting his funeral arrangements.

Still from On Becoming a Guinea Fowl (2024)

COMMENTS: Returning late at night from a costume party (in a bizarre rhinestone mask and trash-bag jumper that looks weird but turns out to have a perfectly logical explanation: the outfit’s from a popular Missy Elliot music video), Shula comes across her Uncle Fred’s dead body lying in the road. She immediately puts on the same grim expression she will wear throughout the rest of the film: the look of a woman who is intensely annoyed that she will now be obligated to pretend to care. After reporting the body, she has to put her career on pause for a drawn-out funeral that involves housing dozens of mourners, enduring a lot of crawling and wailing from the women of the family, cooking and serving meals to the men, observing complicated and inconvenient taboos and obligations, and trying to keep quiet about the terrible secret about Uncle Fred that everyone knows (and which will be revealed early on even if you don’t guess it).

Guinea Fowl has a few easy-to-identify dream sequences, and occasional odd touches (the partially flooded rooms of Bupe’s college dorm.) It features an indifferent, collage-like timeline: there’s little to orient you, as Shula changes location from house to hospital room without much explanation, and the nights seem to stretch on forever so you can’t tell how much time really passes. It’s the kind of “surrealism” mainstream critics eat up: mild, restrained, tasteful, and purely decorative. What’s more interesting here than either the base drama or the absurdist accoutrements, at least to outsiders, are the funeral procedures themselves, which mix Christianity with older traditions and culminate in a trial-like meeting between Fred and his wife’s families where they angrily argue over dividing up his possessions (without any visible concern for the many orphans he leaves behind).

I’m a tiny bit baffled by the universal critical acclaim Guinea Fowl has received; I’m not surprised that most critics loved it, but I am surprised that every critic on Rotten Tomatoes loved it (not a single reviewer found themselves the slightest bit bored at times?) It’s an aggressively niche movie; as a female-centered art-house drama from Africa, it couldn’t force it’s way into many stateside theaters even with A24’s marketing muscle behind it. It sports hallmarks mainstream critics love: realist drama, feminist and ethnographic themes, an uncontroversially important subject. But, while undoubtedly well-made, it strikes me as too obvious and uneventful, with the advertised surrealism and absurdity insufficiently fierce to raise it above similarly themed dramas. But I’m clearly in a minority in confessing only a distant, cool admiration for Nyoni’s sophomore film.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“There are surreal and absurdist touches throughout Nyoni’s second feature… she has a perfect sense of how to blend no-nonsense realism with its more magical counterpart.”–David Fear, Rolling Stone (contemporaneous)

It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: THE POSSESSED (1965)

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La Donna del Lago

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DIRECTED BY: , Franco Rossellini

FEATURING: , Salvo Randone, , Pier Giovanni Anchisi, Virna Lisi

PLOT: A writer visits a childhood vacation spot at a lake and investigates the mystery of a missing acquaintance.

Still from The Possessed (1965)

COMMENTS: “It’s difficult to look inside oneself honestly, eh?”

Is this why award-winning author Bernard (Baldwin) claims to have never written anything autobiographical? His friends seem skeptical. He returns to a lakeside village to begin work on his next book, one inspired by memories of his childhood summers. But instead of writing, Bernard begins a routine of gossiping with the locals and spying on the staff of his hotel, “a hotel. . . filled with memories,” where “everything seem[s] normal on the surface.”

Moody black and white photography heightens the suggestion that everything isn’t quite normal in this unnamed locale. The cinematography emphasizes shadows; picturesque tree-lined lanes become sinister and otherworldly. The light dappling the lake’s surface could be the sun or the moon. The immersive sound design features a menacing whisper of wind which begins at Bernard’s first sight of the lake.

It’s the off-season, and characters furtively scurry about, either to escape from the cold or from prying eyes. The camera slides around corners, rendering the layout of both the town and the hotel endlessly labyrinthine. It sidles up to the cracks in doors, providing his point of view whenever Bernard’s voyeurism in the present day is intercut with his memories of Tilde, a beautiful blonde chamber maid (Lisi). As we search through the hotel and the village along with him, we quickly come to realize that, though he never fully admits it, Bernard is completely infatuated with the memory of Tilde.

After mistakenly following another woman, he discovers that Tilde died under mysterious circumstances since his last visit the year before. Determined to find out what happened to her—was it suicide or murder?—Bernard enlists the help of Francesco (Anchisi), a cynical local photographer. He willingly shares photographic evidence along with his own theories, but becomes increasingly reluctant to dig too deeply into the mystery. As Bernard becomes ever more obsessed with Tilde, he begins having nightmares about her case. Gradually he comes to suspect the hotel owner’s family must be somehow implicated.

When it was first released in 1965, La Donna del Lago (“The Lady of the Lake”) was poorly received. Italian critics lambasted its art-house style, including the use of washed out high-contrast in dreams and flashbacks, and creative editing that consistently blurs the lines between past and present. Cultural and historical baggage may also have sunk it. The screenplay is loosely based on a novel of the same name, which was in turn was inspired by a true crime1.

News of the actual case was still fresh in the popular consciousness while the film was being made, but if the filmmakers had hoped to cash in, they misread their audience. By the mid ’60s, color was in, and The Possessed seemed hopelessly pretentious and out of date. Instead of a typical crime thriller, it’s an Expressionist and hallucinatory fever-dream tour through the corridors of memory and imagination. Like Last Year at Marienbad, only with faster pacing and moments of ian suspense, The Possessed is both beautiful and occasionally confusing to watch, but it’s never boring.

Later re–branded as a giallo, The Possessed features some tropes of the genre, but even though pretty girls are dying mysterious deaths, there is no black-gloved killer (and the young women may not have been murdered at all). The writer protagonist is a familiar figure, the outsider trying to carry out his own investigation while becoming further mired in mystery. Renzo Rossellini’s orchestral score swells to ironic crescendos whenever Bernard fails to uncover any meaningful clues. There are plentiful red herrings: ambiguous photographic images, scraps of paper scrawled with obscure sentence fragments, women who wear each other’s coats so they become unrecognizable when bundled up in scarves against the wind. Ultimately The Possessed resists easy genre categorization, and for this reason its hybrid qualities make it weird-adjacent. It conjures a pervasive unsettling atmosphere, even though nothing overtly surreal appears on screen.

The fact that the screenplay was originally drafted by (Death Laid an Egg, If You Live, Shoot) may account for some of the film’s more unusual qualities, and makes The Possessed of interest to Questi completists. The original novel by Giovanni Comisso describes a writer’s journey to the scene of the crimes where he receives psychic impressions of the suspects, and Questi focuses heavily on this aspect. Cues such as the high contrast lighting and a repeated mournful bird cry provide hints for interpreting Bernard’s thoughts, imaginings, memories, and dreams, but in the end these images from inside his head all become tangled up together. Anyone familiar with the story’s background would of course already know who the killers will turn out to be, but Questi’s script isn’t a whodunit. He isn’t afraid to leave questions unanswered. As Bernard is subtly implicated as an unreliable narrator, a true crime story becomes a study of subjectivity and desire.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The story’s a feverish dream-narrative in which Bernard is often literally fevered and dreaming… For its amplified layers of bafflement within its hallucinations, I prefer [the title] The Lady of the Lake to The Possessed, but this highly polished mirror of uncertainty and obsession is a lovely discovery under any identity.”–Michael Barrett, Pop Matters [Blu-ray]

1 The Alleghe killings were a series of murders that began in the 1930s in a small village in Northern Italy, and after being interrupted by WWII, they continued, still unsolved, into the 1950s. The case had been closed, then reopened, and the killers were only convicted in 1964.

The Possessed

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It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue, List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: DREAMS THAT MONEY CAN BUY (1947)

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DIRECTED BY: Hans Richter

FEATURING: Jack Bittner

PLOT: Once Joe develops the power to observe his inner self and secures a lease for an office—not in that order, mind—he enters the dream-selling business.

Still from Dreams That Money Can Buy (1947)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: With the era’s avant-garde luminaries assembled here, you couldn’t swing a dead cat without hitting all of them as they worked on the set. One room, a mountain of oddball talent, and dreams, dreams, dreams.

COMMENTS: The title, the talent, not to mention the where…: Dreams That Money Can Buy is one of the most American movies out there. It’s behind its time—it’s ahead of its time; it bounces gaily, and turns on a dime. Calder and Cage, and , and Man Ray: devising the dreams for the money you’ll pay. Three years, seven dreams, one Manhattan loft—and anchored by Joe, with his Cagney-esque coif.

Of all the random titles I’ve stumbled across, Richter’s Dreams That Money Can Buy stands out like flower-child noir; like a Seussian corporate video; like… perhaps nothing I’ve seen before. The opening credits clued me in to the fact that this motion picture (from 1947? sure, sure) was going to be more than a little out there. It was a pleasant surprise—again, from the start—to find it such a jolly jaunt through the deep subconscious up into the luminescently tactile, with the occasional staccato of life in the ’40s.

Meet Joe: “Look at yourself: a real mess, you’re all mixed up; snap out of it! Get yourself fixed up. Even if poets misbehave, they always remember to shave. Say, what’s the matter, Joe? Something gone wrong? Is your head on wrong? No! It’s terrific! Here’s something on which you can really pride yourself: you’ve discovered you can look inside yourself. You know what that means? You’re promoted! You’re no longer a bum—you’re an artist!” And a businessman. He sells dreams of desire, techno-futurism, and identity. We meet a pamphleteer offering membership to the Society for the Abolition of Abolition, or Daughters of American Grandfathers. On-screen audiences mimic on-screen-on-screen performances. A full-wire tabletop circus delights and astounds. Glittering mobiles tickle light across the camera lens. Our hero disappears, briefly, after receiving a wallop from a thug demanding a lead on the races. But while you may have recovered, Joe, beware the poker-chip’s probing eye…

Dreams That Money Can Buy is jam-packed with surrealism and lightheartedness: always sprightly, but never saccharine. The sights and sounds evoke the dreamy past, and the hazy future. (The closing track, composed for this mid-’40s feature, sounds like an obscure B-side from the late ’60s.) More fun-house than art-house, Richter and his team gaily crash the dour columns of haute couture and build a wonder-world from the freshly minted tumble of rubble.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…Hans Richter, nothing daunted, has plunged into the realm of the abstract, the subconscious and the immaterial for his ‘Dreams That Money Can Buy,’ a frankly experimental picture… A critical dismissal of this picture would be unfair, since it is a professed experiment and there are some things about it that are good. Many of the image constructions, while obscure, are surprisingly adroit, and the musical score by Louis Applebaum is often more eloquent than the screen. Obviously ‘arty’ in nature, it still tries for new ways to frame ideas. For that it is to be commended.”–Bosley Crowther, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

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Capsules

CAPSULE: FAMILY PORTRAIT (2023)

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DIRECTED BY: Lucy Kerr

FEATURING: Deragh Campbell

PLOT: An extended family has gathered at a lakeside retreat to take the annual Christmas card photo, but one woman notices that their mother is missing.

Still from family portrait (2023)

COMMENTS: The good news is debuting director Kerr shoots certain scenes with real flair. The film opens on a three-minute tracking shot of a woman trying to herd a family of about 16 or so people, presumably to the location of the titular event. But everyone seems to have their own agenda: soccer balls get thrown in anger, adults keep backtracking, and of course the children all zig-zag cheerfully in and out of frame. The accompanying sound mix begins as a low rumble of wind; gradually indistinct conversations and bird chirps seep into the mix. The procession arrives at the appointed spot and the camera sticks in place, but the low-key chaos continues as everyone mulls about instead of assuming their positions for the photo. The diegetic babble of family conversation overcomes the gentle drone. This is Kerr at her best, generating subtle unease from mundane events. It looks spontaneous, but must be carefully choreographed.

Notably, there is no figure in the assembly that might serve as matriarch of the clan. That fact is the closest thing to a plot hook to be found in Family Portrait. After the opening scene, the movie changes to a series of conversational vignettes about the family and some lovely shots of Hunt County, Texas hill country. (This is the type of slowcore cinema that takes time out to watch an ancillary character silently smoke a cigarette in real time.) Most of these early scenes don’t amount to much besides briefly sketching out the assembly; a notable exception is a discussion of an old family photograph which had been repurposed by a third party, ending with the observation “you can’t always trust photographs.”  A crucial bit of information is dropped when we learn that a distant cousin has just died from a mystery illness. Suddenly, one of the family, Katy, notices that her mother is missing—-but no one else seems concerned about mom’s absence in the slightest. (Look for a couple other “lost” souls and “disappearances” sprinkled throughout the movie.) Katy’s quest to find her mother rises to an obsession, merges with her desire to get everyone together for the photograph no one else seems interested in, and funnels into a low-key panic attack. Other reviewers have emphasized the “surrealism” of the film’s finale, but this is overstated: the ending is an odd bit of alternate reality, circling back to the opening in a transformed fashion, but nothing profoundly weird pops up. More importantly, by the ending nothing has been resolved—and, in fact, precious little has even been suggested.

In many respects Family Portrait resembles Picnic at Hanging Rock, which also dwelt on a mysterious disappearance. But whereas ‘s classic presents a pastoral mystery with no solution, Family Portrait dives even further into abstraction, offering a pastoral scenario in which the mystery is whether there is any mystery at all. The acting is competent and the sound mixing and cinematography in this indie are superlative, giving some scenes a real punch; I just wish the script had provided the viewer a little more guidance. Without more perspective and thematic teasing, the is-mom-missing-or-not ambiguity was not enough for me to hang my hat on.

The director’s statement about the film give some backgrounds and hints about the ideas that were going through her head when she made Family Portrait, and may prove helpful to some who are bewildered by a movie that comes close to being an experiment in non-narrative cinema.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The art of surrealist filmmaking is one that has become a rare commodity in the modern cinematic landscape, with filmmakers like David Lynch having a more infrequent presence. With Family Portrait, however, debuting writer-director Lucy Kerr looks to revive this mysterious and ominous atmosphere through the similarly innocuous titular gathering. And while it does succeed in creating a bizarre atmosphere that captures plenty of simmering tension, it’s trapped between being a proof-of-concept short film and a feature-length effort.”–Grant Hermanns, Screen Rant (contemporaneous)

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CAPSULE: THE BEAST (2023)

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La bête

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , George MacKay

PLOT: To get a job in a dystopian future, a woman undergoes a procedure designed to dampen her emotional responses by ridding herself of past-life traumas.

Still from The Beast (2023)

COMMENTS: Surely Henry James could never have imagined that, more than a hundred years after he wrote it, a Frenchman would loosely adapt his story “The Beast in the Jungle” as a centuries-spanning science fiction story incorporating a belief in past lives. James’ protagonist suffers a certain paralyzing presentiment of obliteration (the titular Beast), which is shared by (at least one of) Seydoux’s characters; but truthfully, Bertrand Bonello’s ambitious screenplay incorporates almost nothing from the original story—just the theme of loneliness and regret for missed opportunities, and a similar European setting for about 1/3 of the film. It also throws in a metric ton of other concerns, including artificial intelligence, incel culture, and reincarnation.

As suggested by the plot summary and hinted above, The Beast tells three different stories: one set at the turn of the twentieth century, one set approximately in contemporary times, and one set in 2044. This last date is the film’s base reality, despite not being the first story we’re thrown into. The Beast sets up the rather ridiculous premise that past life experiences are encoded in DNA and traumas that lead to automatic emotional responses can be overcome through a therapeutic regression that involves being submerged in a tub of black goo while a computer probes your ear—a concept that sounds like it came out of an esoteric Scientology text. While the procedure, and the theory underlying it, are insane, it doesn’t matter whether we accept them; it only matters that the movie believes in them, and creates a world that operates according to those rules. In Gabrielle’s case, the recurring trauma is her unconsummated passion for Louis, who is a gentleman in the 1900s, a stalker in the early 2000s, and an aspiring functionary like her in his current incarnation. The future’s rationale for the operation is legitimately unsettling, tapping into fears of cybertechnological dehumanization: with so much work automated and taken over by A.I., humans voluntarily try to rid themselves of passion and emotion in order to make more rational decisions that enable them to compete with the dominant machines.

So The Beast is, in a sense, three movies in one. There’s the science fiction fable; the Parisian period piece; and a contemporary stalker drama that quickly shades into (pretty effective) thriller territory.  As a standalone film, the full-length petticoat and starched collars of the Belle Epoque section would have made for a staid and respectable period drama, with a tremendous closing image. The modern day incel story can come off as a preachy, with on-the-nose commentary; MacKay’s portrayal of a 30-year old virgin who vlogs about how he’s “magnificent” and “deserves girls” but “can only have sex in my dreams” would seem like an eye-rolling caricature, if the character were not directly based on real-life incel mass-murderer Elliot Rodger (I believe some of MacKay’s monologues were taken verbatim from Rodger’s YouTube videos). But although each section is merely competent on its own—and arguably make for a bloated picture with a lot of unnecessary fat left in—tying them together in the reincarnation format makes for a whole greater than its parts. Certain conversations are repeated in full in different eras, and recurring themes like dolls/puppets resonate across time. Both previous Gabrielles consult psychics, in radically different contexts, who are able to see through the years and reference things that occurred in other lifetimes. Looking for common threads and shared symbols across the three stories engages the mind more than any of the issues the three tales address. And Bonello sprinkles significant weirdness throughout the project, much of it justified as artifacts of the disorientating effects of the procedure, but some of it freestanding. In the latter category is the opening with in a green screen studio, apparently rehearsing a scene for the upcoming film as she takes direction form an unseen voice (belonging to Bonello). Disorienting editing, uncanny dolls, dream interludes, unexpected clips from movies, a panicky laptop pop-up nightmare, and a nightclub with rotating mid-20th century themes all contribute to the strange flavor. The end result is a challenging art-house feature that doesn’t always hit its marks, but nevertheless remains intellectually stimulating.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a weird sweeping romance and sci-fi dystopia mix that taps into so many contemporary anxieties, from AI stealing our jobs to climate disaster and the overall sense that the world is becoming unfeeling. It’s existential, yes, but it’s at its core a love story.”–Sara Clements, Pajiba (contemporaneous)

The Beast (Janus Contemporaries) [Blu-ray]

The Beast (Janus Contemporaries) [Blu-ray]
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