A woman whose thoughts are plagued with chaos meets a man who would literally move the moon for her.
Tag Archives: Romance
IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: SUBWAY (1985)
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DIRECTED BY: Luc Besson
FEATURING: Isabelle Adjani, Christopher Lambert, Richard Bohringer, Michel Galabru, Jean-Hugues Anglade, Jean Reno
PLOT: Fred, a free-spirited thief, absconds with valuable papers belonging to Héléna, the kept wife of a powerful criminal, and escapes into the underground world of the Paris Métro, where he enlists the help of an entire community living off the grid.
COMMENTS: Subway gets started with a truly satisfying kick. We meet Fred in media res, tuxedo-clad and barreling down a Parisian highway in a cheap car with a load of similarly attired muscle in hot pursuit. But he even knows that the chase doesn’t really begin until he’s got the proper music, and so he ignores the impending threat just long enough to give him the chance to slam in a cassette tape and queue up Eric Serra’s punchy synth-funk beat. Once that roars in, we’ve got ourselves a bona fide chase.
It’s a very Luc Besson kind of joke that, once Fred (Lambert, only a year after being introduced to English-speaking audiences as Tarzan) eludes his pursuers in the underground, we’ll never see him in the sun again, and we definitely won’t have another thrill ride. Instead, we’ll join Fred in discovering the very different way of life taking place in the tunnels of the Métro. It may seem familiar, with commerce and law enforcement and entertainment, but it’s a very different attitude down there. It’s a laid-back, “que sera, sera” kind of vibe, and Fred adapts to it quickly; in his first night, he meets friends who give him food, new clothes, and a place to sleep; he makes the acquaintance of an incredibly strong man who can pry open handcuffs with his bare hands; and he pops into an impromptu party where he immediately starts making friends. If Fred is a natural fit for subway life, Héléna, the gangster’s wife who Fred is both smitten with and cheekily blackmailing, is a more surprising addition to the community. Adjani is stunning in a series of terrifically 80s outfits, but she is possibly most striking in a scene where she returns to her above-ground life and realizes that she can’t stomach it. She gently ingratiates herself into the Métro culture, because that’s what the good guys do in Subway.
Subway is one of the pivotal entries in the French movement known as “cinéma du look,” in which Besson and fellow directors like Jean-Jacques Beineix and Leos Carax cast aside distractions like narrative in favor of maximum style. Subway has style to burn. Indeed, logic is not anyone’s top priority. One thing may be important at one moment and forgotten the next. Sure, Fred is on the run from zealous policemen and vengeful gangsters, but that’s no reason he can’t take a quick time-out to rehearse the amazing new band he’s assembled out of the various buskers hanging out in the underground. There’s even time for him to team up with the well-connected flower salesman for a quick payroll robbery. Things just happen in Subway because it would be nice if they did. If you’re spending time wondering where Fred finds the explosives to blast open an office safe, or where the band comes up with their matching safari outfits, your head’s in the wrong place.
What’s most fascinating about Subway is how little it cares for the basics of story construction. There are a host of characters, all interesting but defined by the fewest possible characteristics, from the hard-bitten police detective who despises his junior officers, to the friendly purse thief whose primary trait is wearing roller skates, to the bemused drummer played by Jean Reno who hardly utters three sentences but still seems cooler and more relaxed than in any other role in his career. There’s a romance, but it’s conducted almost entirely smoldering looks and chill dialogue. There’s even a climactic collision of passion and violence that is tempered by a happy song to such a degree that even a corpse can’t help but nod along. It doesn’t make sense, and it’s not supposed to. Subway is made of pleasant little moments, and like the people they depict, we just take them as they come.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
(This movie was nominated for review by Gary Simanton. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)
SATURDAY SHORT: ABOVE THE CLOUDS (2022)
The thrill and anxiety of new love makes a young woman hallucinate until she coughs butterflies.
CAPSULE: LOVE ME (2024)
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Love Me is available on VOD for purchase or rental.
DIRECTED BY: Andrew Zuchero, Sam Zuchero
FEATURING: Steven Yeun, Kristen Stewart
PLOT: After the apocalypse wipes out Earth’s entire population, an AI-equipped buoy connects with an AI-equipped satellite that holds a digital record of humanity, and together they decide to recreate a human relationship in virtual reality.
COMMENTS: Love Me, the debut feature from real-life married couple Andrew and Sam Zuchero, debuted at Sundance in 2024 to underwhelming reviews, but managed to get a theatrical release a year later based on the strength of stars Kristen Stewart and Steven Yeun. The overall reaction to the film has been tepid, both from critics (who have tended to find it too obvious) and audiences (who have tended to find it too outlandish). Still, although not without flaws—including an unwillingness to pursue the most interesting ideas it raises—Love Me is original and adventurous enough to elevate it above the usual dreck that litters the romance genre.
Although the core romantic relationship inevitably falls into cliché (including the mildly offensive trope of a hysterical girlfriend who demands every detail be storybook perfect as a way of eluding her own insecurities), the film feeds off its high concept post-apocalyptic premise. The most interesting part of Love Me, in fact, is its nearly experimental opening, which shows a spinning globe briefly shrouded in a flash of nuclear flame, before zooming into the planet for a time lapse montage showing the passage of innumerable days. Stewart’s smart buoy, equipped with a scanner shaped like an eye, clicks to life and her speech module gets stuck on stutter mode as her programming resets, post-apocalypse. Meanwhile, Yuen’s satellite, a kind of eternally revolving monument to humanity containing pedabytes of data, is already fully operational. The two beings connect and, via the satellite’s archive, try to reconstruct what it means to be a human being (in the 21st century, at least).
The film’s take on A.I. remains willfully unexamined (the movie is not about A.I. at all; the characters could just as well have been aliens). The answer as to how these machines developed emotions like loneliness and curiosity is a little thing called “willing suspension of disbelief.” Love Me‘s technological focus is more on current Internet culture and social media, and the take seems positive enough at first: the A.I.s effectively investigate human behavior through YouTubes and memes, encountering genuine human miracles like baby laughter reinforcement loops. As the film goes on, this attitude develops more a satirical edge, as it becomes clear that modeling a relationship on an influencer’s Instagram feed won’t lead to an accurate simulacrum of human connection. But the attempt creates a dual romantic metaphor for the film. On a shallow level, it’s a warning about the destructive influence of the unobtainable sanitized fantasies presented on social media as model lifestyles, as the buoy slaves to in vain to perfectly recreate a spicy quesadillas/whimsical onesie/”Friends” marathon date night video she’s seen starring an Instagrammer (also played by Stewart). On a deeper level, one on which the viewer must do most of his or her own work, Love Me can be viewed as an existential parable about persona and authenticity. The buoy and the satellite can only meaningfully interact in a shared virtual reality where they are represented by their chosen avatars—which is almost a religious scenario, when you think about it.
The film’s audiovisual elements are good, for the budget. Many reviewers complained about the midfilm virtual reality section being too long and repetitive; it’s easy to see where they are coming from, even if I don’t share their level of frustration. Once the movie shifts into live action for the final act, Stewart and Yuen show real chemistry and passion (as they must, since there are no supporting actors to turn our attention to). Josh Jacober’s solo piano accompanies the film throughout, in a fashion reminiscent of a silent movie score. And the film features a one-billion year fast-forward, which sets a record by exceeding even the eons-spanning smash-cut from 2001.
While there’s no question Love Me doesn’t soar to the thoughtful heights of similarly-themed movies like Wall-E, Her, or A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, it easily exceeds the low standards we expect from the romantic movie genre. While it’s not something I’d recommend actively seeking out, if you’re a couple who finds yourself with 90 minutes to kill on an evening, you could do a lot worse on date night (for example, mail-order Mexican food and a “Friends” marathon).
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
![Love Me [Blu-Ray]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41b13K6zm6L._SL500_.jpg)
- Love Me [Blu-Ray]
CAPSULE: THE BEAST (2023)
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La bête
DIRECTED BY: Bertrand Bonello
FEATURING: Léa Seydoux, 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.
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 Seydoux 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 Harmony Korine 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:
![The Beast (Janus Contemporaries) [Blu-ray]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41nkX3+RsvL._SL500_.jpg)