The many imaginary forms of cacti.
Tag Archives: Experimental
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.
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 Peter Weir‘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:
IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: MAGDALENA VIRAGA (1986)
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DIRECTED BY: Nina Menkes
FEATURING: Tinka Menkes, Claire Aguilar, Nora Bendich
PLOT: A sex worker endures a dreary, repetitive existence soliciting and servicing clients, and then is accused of murdering a trick.
COMMENTS: One ever-present danger in reviewing films is that your assessment will miss the boat because you, the reviewer, are not the movie’s intended audience. Yes, cinema is a mass media and no creator can guarantee that their work will be understood as intended by everyone, but issues of language, race, gender, culture, and the like are always out there, hinting that you may not get all the nuance you need to give a movie a fair shake. So my antennae are out for a film whose director describes it as a “hallucinogenic journey through the boundless vortex of unadulterated Female space.” It just may be that this particular film has not been crafted to reach me.
Of course, even I can recognize that the life of Ida (played by the director’s sister, Tinka) is pretty grim. We watch her ply her trade with nearly a dozen different clients, and the scenes of Ida at work are brutal in their length and detachment. Menkes shows nothing explicit, but the drudgery of the experience is awful enough. She employs a steady closeup that never leaves Ida’s deadened, detached expression. Even as we watch her endure the grunts and pants of her john, she evinces no emotion whatsoever, completely removed from the moment. On one occasion, we’re treated to the preamble to the act—two people seated on a bed, tired and unmoving and refusing to make eye contact—which is possibly worse. Another time, her partner bounces atop her so manically that she is forced to enter the moment, pleading, “Slowly!” It is a joyless existence, categorically designed to render her passive and intellectually irrelevant. Not that anyone would be up to the challenge of a conversation. At the end of one such encounter, she tries to engage: “I dream that I often long for water. I dream that when I close my eyes, I see water. When I close my eyes, I do see water. What is water?” Her trick’s vacant response: “I dunno.”
When demonstrating the dehumanizing situation in which Ida finds herself, Magdalena Viraga is potent cinema. Menkes defiantly subverts the decades of entropy that have enshrined the male gaze in the fundamentals of filmmaking. Unfortunately, there’s another layer of story that feels less like a feminist cri de cœur and more like a thumb on the scale. Ida’s tale is told in a nonlinear fashion, so we know from the outset that she has been arrested for murder. As the details of the crime and the case against her are revealed, we’re forced to reckon with a movie that wants to present facts that demonstrate the unfairness of the situation while insisting that we ignore the absurdity of those facts. It’s a heads-I-win, tails-you-lose bargain.
Some explanation: we see the murder itself (a cold act with all the speed, action, and even nudity that the rest of the film steadfastly avoids), and it would seem impossible for the crime to be blamed on Ida, especially since her explanation that the blood covering her is menstrual should be easy to establish. Regardless, there’s no hint of a trial. Instead, we get a scene where the prison warden tells Ida’s friend, hilariously, “I’m sorry, but we must execute murderers. It’s absolute policy,” as though she had been trying to negotiate the return of a faulty product. And then there’s the jail itself, with an interior that resembles a monastery, complete with a cell containing a stained-glass window, a table like an altar, bars composed of ornate metalwork, and a large crucifix on the wall. The fact that everyone in the prison is forced to attend mass in a well-appointed chapel gives the game away; Menkes is also here to call out the Church for its role in the oppression of women. It’s a reasonable charge, but the realism and the allegory mix poorly.
I can imagine a version of Magdalena Viraga where Menkes commits entirely to a presentational, Brechtian style. Tinka Menkes’ delivery of her lines is uniformly flat, a fact the film leans into by staging scenes where she and her fellow sex workers stare directly into the camera and intone resigned koans. Much of the impenetrable dialogue in the film is actually drawn from the poetry of Gertrude Stein, Mary Daly, and Anne Sexton, meaning our characters literally have no words of their own. In this version of the film, Ida isn’t a person at all, but symbol of all the women who quietly suffer the indignities heaped upon their sex. The efforts to make her relatable, to lend credibility to her as a character, only shortchange the message. I guess what I’m saying is, I wish that Magdalena Viraga wasn’t quite so concerned with being crafted to reach me.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
(This movie was nominated for review by Laurie B. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)
SATURDAY SHORT: BONOBO – ‘CIRRUS’ (2013)
Cyriak puts his talents to animating Bobobo’s chill electronica, adopting a mid-century retro aesthetic in which children multiply, sedans stretch, and everyone becomes a cog in a kaleidoscopic consumerist machine.
CAPSULE: NUDE TUESDAY (2022)
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DIRECTED BY: Armagan Ballantyne
FEATURING: Jackie van Beek, Damon Herriman, Jemaine Clement, Ian Zaro
PLOT: A middle-aged European couple goes to a New Age sex resort in an attempt to rekindle their passion.
COMMENTS: Although it’s a romantic comedy, Nude Tuesday is also, more importantly, an experimental film. Unfortunately, in this case, the experiment amounts to nothing more than a gimmick. The idea is that the actors rehearsed the script in English and then, when it came time to turn the cameras on, delivered the lines in vaguely Scandinavian-sounding gibberish. Two sets of writers who were unfamiliar with the original script then watched the film and provided subtitles. (The one created by Julia Davis is the default track in the US region; one presumes the alternate track from Ronny Chieng and Cecilia Paquola is also available on the Blu-ray, although I can’t find confirmation).
Woody Allen once infamously re-dubbed a Japanese spy film to change the story to the search for an egg salad recipe. But it quickly becomes apparent that Nude Tuesday‘s constrained scenario doesn’t lend itself to such a dramatic reinvention, and nor will the writer try for the sort of meta-comedy (e.g. a narrator recapping the plot, fourth-wall break addresses to the audience) that Allen occasionally fell back on to liven things up. Without that, the result is that there is almost literally no line the dubber can write that couldn’t have been written in the usual way. In creating the new dialogue, Davis faces a lot of constraints: who’s in the scene, the length of the spoken lines, contextual requirements (is the character naked? Bleeding? Chasing a goat?) This means that the dialogue is always a slave to the demands of the scene as it’s been set up, and Davis has little actual freedom besides word choice. (She can, for example, make a preening Bjorn say the absurd line “I’m an eagle pimp with a bit of a grudge,” though a regular scriptwriter could have inserted that line anyway). Every reaction is so strictly dictated by the demands of the dialogueless script and the actor’s performances that there’s almost no margin for surprise; I can only think of one gag Davis was able to set up that wasn’t strictly set up by the situation (a joke regarding the bean supermarket aisle). To be fair, there’s also the fact that the finale is constructed somewhat ambiguously, so that there could be multiple outcomes (I wasn’t overly fond of the one chosen here.)
So, while it may have been a stimulating writing exercise for the dubbers, there’s no possible payoff for the audience. What we’re left with is an offbeat-yet-predictable sex comedy. The main attraction is Clemens, playing yet another narcissistic jerk deserving of a hearty comeuppance. The sex retreat’s rituals can be amusing, with orgasmic breathing exercises, strange loungewear and banana hammocks, lots of awkward overplayed sensuality, and of course, nude Tuesday. And the script throws in a mushroom trip for funsies. But none of it is anything you wouldn’t expect to see in a relatively competent indie sex comedy. It’s a bit like being sold a ticket into something that was promised to be a freaskshow, and passing through the curtain to find one lonely dwarf and a bearded lady who just needs a quick pass-over with an epilady.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
![Nude Tuesday AMAZON EXCLUSIVE [Blu-ray]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41+B8mdylHL._SL500_.jpg)
- Amazon Exclusive!
- Contains an Amazon exclusive postcard.
- Behind the Scenes of Nude Tuesday