Beach Rats (Eliza Hittman)
Available on Netflix.
Lazing on Brooklyn’s beaches, trawling the borough for weed, snagging clandestine hook-ups, the protagonist of Eliza Hittman’s movie Beach Rats, Frankie (Harris Dickson), is an exemplary shirker. Beach Rats is a stunning work of aimlessness and languor; the heat of the summer sun, and the vape and marijuana smoke add a haze to Hittman’s already indolent and largely wordless images. Normally I’m annoyed by or resistant to art-house films in which characters offer many meaningful looks but share few of their feelings, ideas, queries, and concerns; it often seems evasive, disdainful, or unimaginative on the part of the filmmakers. But the lack of talk between Hittman’s characters is a striking artistic depiction of the state of their intellectual and emotional lives: they have no expressive outlets, no communicative means at all of expression; they suppress true emotions and any hint of vulnerability; they don’t indulge aspirations or plans for the future, reflect, dream, visualise, contemplate; the silencing of their inner lives is a deliberately enacted by them, and is memorably evoked by Hittman.
And Frankie encounters distinct difficulties from this silencing. Whatever troubles of identity the other guys are evading, Frankie faces the added dimension of sexual orientation and identity: He chats with men via sex webcam sites and starts to meet up with them to have sex with them, but, as he informs one of his prospective hook-ups, he doesn’t really think of himself as gay. He also unenthusiastically starts up a romantic relationship with a girl named Simone (Madeline Weinstein). He avoids the thought of anything gay altogether, just as he avoids thinking of himself at all, and avoids talking about anything substantial with his family or his smoking companions (he asserts more than once that they’re not his friends). Hittman deftly suggests Frankie’s sensitivity and empathy, as he apologises to Simone after insulting her, and tries to hide emotional pain when considering his family’s suffering (his father is very sick with cancer). But, when given any opportunity arises to deal with his problems, such as when his mother approaches him, Frankie hardens his heart and erects an impenetrable wall of invulnerability. Hittman’s images inhere intimacy, energy, and density where her characters elude these qualities; the tension tightens and relaxes with the unease of youthful anxieties, and she suggests some of the disastrous consequences that such unease may lead to.
Lazing on Brooklyn’s beaches, trawling the borough for weed, snagging clandestine hook-ups, the protagonist of Eliza Hittman’s movie Beach Rats, Frankie (Harris Dickson), is an exemplary shirker. Beach Rats is a stunning work of aimlessness and languor; the heat of the summer sun, and the vape and marijuana smoke add a haze to Hittman’s already indolent and largely wordless images. Normally I’m annoyed by or resistant to art-house films in which characters offer many meaningful looks but share few of their feelings, ideas, queries, and concerns; it often seems evasive, disdainful, or unimaginative on the part of the filmmakers. But the lack of talk between Hittman’s characters is a striking artistic depiction of the state of their intellectual and emotional lives: they have no expressive outlets, no communicative means at all of expression; they suppress true emotions and any hint of vulnerability; they don’t indulge aspirations or plans for the future, reflect, dream, visualise, contemplate; the silencing of their inner lives is a deliberately enacted by them, and is memorably evoked by Hittman.
And Frankie encounters distinct difficulties from this silencing. Whatever troubles of identity the other guys are evading, Frankie faces the added dimension of sexual orientation and identity: He chats with men via sex webcam sites and starts to meet up with them to have sex with them, but, as he informs one of his prospective hook-ups, he doesn’t really think of himself as gay. He also unenthusiastically starts up a romantic relationship with a girl named Simone (Madeline Weinstein). He avoids the thought of anything gay altogether, just as he avoids thinking of himself at all, and avoids talking about anything substantial with his family or his smoking companions (he asserts more than once that they’re not his friends). Hittman deftly suggests Frankie’s sensitivity and empathy, as he apologises to Simone after insulting her, and tries to hide emotional pain when considering his family’s suffering (his father is very sick with cancer). But, when given any opportunity arises to deal with his problems, such as when his mother approaches him, Frankie hardens his heart and erects an impenetrable wall of invulnerability. Hittman’s images inhere intimacy, energy, and density where her characters elude these qualities; the tension tightens and relaxes with the unease of youthful anxieties, and she suggests some of the disastrous consequences that such unease may lead to.
Shirkers (Sandi Tan)
Available on Netflix.
Sandi Tan’s documentary Shirkers, produced by Netflix, features youths who aspire to the ennui of Frankie and his companions, but the real-life figures of Tan and her friends are far too full of enthusiasms, of lively sensitivity, of obsessive interests and pursuits to ever fall into that kind of inertia. Shirkers is a vibrant and idiosyncratically personal movie, humming with the youthful energies of the group of friends featured in it (even if they’re no longer young, it’s a story of their youth, and Tan has not lost that energy).
Shirkers is a movie about another movie, and about making movies, watching movies, and movie obsessions. The central story is simple, yet rich and emotionally piercing: In 1992, while still film students, Tan and her friends spent a summer holiday in Singapore making an independent movie named Shirkers. The plot of Shirkers featured a serial killer on the move, played by Tan herself, who had also written the script, and the movie would be a ground-breaking work of Singaporean independent cinema. The director of the movie was their former film production teacher and Tan’s friend, Georges Cardona; when Tan and her student friends went back to university in the fall after finishing production, leaving the footage to Cardona, he disappeared with all the footage they had shot, never to be heard from again. Twenty years later, and ten years following Cardona’s death, his widow contacted Tan to let Tan know that she had the footage in her possession, and Tan embarked on a personal journey of investigation and introspection, to find out what had actually happened to her footage, why it had happened, and what it meant to her and her friends.
Shirkers is a touching example of a first-person movie, where the filmmaker tells a story about herself, and also of a movie-centric movie, where the filmmaker tells a story about movies and in ways that reflect on the cinema. Tan’s documentary has the elements of the very best documentaries: Not only the story of how she made it, but the intimately personal reasons why she made it are built right into the movie. And her style is characteristic of the best cinephilic filmmakers: The way she has made her movie reflects on and refers to film history, to her personal history in watching and thinking about movies, incorporates movie-making methods, and adds back to that very same film history in the most enriching way. The footage she finally got back of her 1992 movie is missing any sound recordings, so she plays it in the documentary with added music tracks and sound effects, and the clips show a striking visual imagination and cinematic originality, as well as a distinct connection with specific settings and specific cultural life in Singapore. It’s the dream of developing film cultures, and the recognition that Tan’s loss of her movie was actually a loss to world cinema as well adds a pointedly emotional dimension to the viewer’s already dense experience.
Available on Netflix.
The Coen brothers’ new film, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, seems to have been made in the same vein as their recent inside-Hollywood comedy, the excellent Hail, Caesar! It’s also a comedic pastiche of classic Hollywood genre films, though this one takes off from one single genre: the western. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is made up of six short films telling stories that range from comic absurdities and Gothic horror to grim tragedy and poignant melodrama. They include musical numbers, plenty of visual gags, and outrageously big characters that could only exist in a genre film. Each of the stories also shows, or at least implies, brutal and sometimes gory violence; gunshots and other assaults punctuate the easy breeze of visual humour and old-time charm, adding a dimension of the Coen brothers’ characteristic irony. My sister, after watching a few minutes of the movie, mistook it for a new Tarantino film. But the Coen brothers succeed where Tarantino has faltered lately (but where he excelled in earlier works): In the scenes that are heavy with dialogue — where characters take what might have been an ordinary conversation to surprising new planes of psychological, philosophical, and metaphysical thought — they transfigure a multitude of text into a profusion of images; the angles, shadows, transitions, and performances (by such luminaries as Tim Blake Nelson, Liam Neeson, James Franco, Brendan Gleeson, and Zoe Kazan) all unfold to release manifold vectors of thought and emotion on the screen. There is no explicit connection between the six vignettes other than, perhaps, common inspiration in the westerns of classic Hollywood, but there is a common attitude and thread of ideas that runs throughout. While the Coen brothers are offering a tribute to movies and to movie forms that obviously mean a great deal to them, as well as a tribute to American history and the real-life people that explored and settled in the American west, they also display a critical detachment from the nostalgic content in their movie. What they offer is also a critical view of the violent and abusive power that can be found throughout American history, and a subtle critique of the genre often used to laud and even propagate that kind of violence and abuse. The western is an inherently political genre of film, and the best filmmakers have used it to develop political ideas; here, the Coen brothers offer a political critique of both movie history and American history, including the history being made right now.
Sandi Tan’s documentary Shirkers, produced by Netflix, features youths who aspire to the ennui of Frankie and his companions, but the real-life figures of Tan and her friends are far too full of enthusiasms, of lively sensitivity, of obsessive interests and pursuits to ever fall into that kind of inertia. Shirkers is a vibrant and idiosyncratically personal movie, humming with the youthful energies of the group of friends featured in it (even if they’re no longer young, it’s a story of their youth, and Tan has not lost that energy).
Shirkers is a movie about another movie, and about making movies, watching movies, and movie obsessions. The central story is simple, yet rich and emotionally piercing: In 1992, while still film students, Tan and her friends spent a summer holiday in Singapore making an independent movie named Shirkers. The plot of Shirkers featured a serial killer on the move, played by Tan herself, who had also written the script, and the movie would be a ground-breaking work of Singaporean independent cinema. The director of the movie was their former film production teacher and Tan’s friend, Georges Cardona; when Tan and her student friends went back to university in the fall after finishing production, leaving the footage to Cardona, he disappeared with all the footage they had shot, never to be heard from again. Twenty years later, and ten years following Cardona’s death, his widow contacted Tan to let Tan know that she had the footage in her possession, and Tan embarked on a personal journey of investigation and introspection, to find out what had actually happened to her footage, why it had happened, and what it meant to her and her friends.
Shirkers is a touching example of a first-person movie, where the filmmaker tells a story about herself, and also of a movie-centric movie, where the filmmaker tells a story about movies and in ways that reflect on the cinema. Tan’s documentary has the elements of the very best documentaries: Not only the story of how she made it, but the intimately personal reasons why she made it are built right into the movie. And her style is characteristic of the best cinephilic filmmakers: The way she has made her movie reflects on and refers to film history, to her personal history in watching and thinking about movies, incorporates movie-making methods, and adds back to that very same film history in the most enriching way. The footage she finally got back of her 1992 movie is missing any sound recordings, so she plays it in the documentary with added music tracks and sound effects, and the clips show a striking visual imagination and cinematic originality, as well as a distinct connection with specific settings and specific cultural life in Singapore. It’s the dream of developing film cultures, and the recognition that Tan’s loss of her movie was actually a loss to world cinema as well adds a pointedly emotional dimension to the viewer’s already dense experience.
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (Joel Coen, Ethan Coen)
Available on Netflix.
The Coen brothers’ new film, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, seems to have been made in the same vein as their recent inside-Hollywood comedy, the excellent Hail, Caesar! It’s also a comedic pastiche of classic Hollywood genre films, though this one takes off from one single genre: the western. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is made up of six short films telling stories that range from comic absurdities and Gothic horror to grim tragedy and poignant melodrama. They include musical numbers, plenty of visual gags, and outrageously big characters that could only exist in a genre film. Each of the stories also shows, or at least implies, brutal and sometimes gory violence; gunshots and other assaults punctuate the easy breeze of visual humour and old-time charm, adding a dimension of the Coen brothers’ characteristic irony. My sister, after watching a few minutes of the movie, mistook it for a new Tarantino film. But the Coen brothers succeed where Tarantino has faltered lately (but where he excelled in earlier works): In the scenes that are heavy with dialogue — where characters take what might have been an ordinary conversation to surprising new planes of psychological, philosophical, and metaphysical thought — they transfigure a multitude of text into a profusion of images; the angles, shadows, transitions, and performances (by such luminaries as Tim Blake Nelson, Liam Neeson, James Franco, Brendan Gleeson, and Zoe Kazan) all unfold to release manifold vectors of thought and emotion on the screen. There is no explicit connection between the six vignettes other than, perhaps, common inspiration in the westerns of classic Hollywood, but there is a common attitude and thread of ideas that runs throughout. While the Coen brothers are offering a tribute to movies and to movie forms that obviously mean a great deal to them, as well as a tribute to American history and the real-life people that explored and settled in the American west, they also display a critical detachment from the nostalgic content in their movie. What they offer is also a critical view of the violent and abusive power that can be found throughout American history, and a subtle critique of the genre often used to laud and even propagate that kind of violence and abuse. The western is an inherently political genre of film, and the best filmmakers have used it to develop political ideas; here, the Coen brothers offer a political critique of both movie history and American history, including the history being made right now.
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