Coming-of-Age

Alpha review: The Girl with the Nag and Tattoo

Jeremy BeckReviews
Golshifteh Farahani and Mélissa Boros in Alpha

She’s only made three movies, but Julia Ducournau has already built her own cinematic festival of female suffering and endurance, focusing on women plagued by peculiar conditions. In Raw, the heroine seemed perfectly normal until she was overcome with a genetic craving that compelled her to eat her sister’s severed finger. Her challenges were trivial compared to the lead in Titane, a murderess whose automotive copulations slowly transformed her internal fluids into motor oil. Next to her, the tribulations of Alpha, the 13-year-old girl at the center of Ducournau’s eponymous new whatsit, are relatively prosaic; she just got a tattoo via a dirty needle and may have become infected with a strange virus. This quickly proves to be the least of her problems.

Having seen all of Ducournau’s features, I’m not sure that I’ve properly understood any of them. This is, mostly, a compliment. Aesthetically speaking, the French provocateur is a gifted and fearless stylist, using robust techniques and bold aural and visual flourishes. Intellectually, her works tend to be ambitious and enigmatic, probing thorny ideas but refusing to neatly spell out their themes. This can be vexing, but the inherent tension—the collision between muscular filmmaking and knotty storytelling—is also enveloping. You enjoy getting lost in the labyrinth. Read More

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Indie New Year: No Other Choice, We Bury the Dead, The Plague

Jeremy BeckReviews
Lee Byung-hun in No Other Choice; Daisy Ridley in We Bury the Dead; Everett Blunck in The Plague

Christmas tends to be a big holiday for new movies, but New Year’s Day, not so much. Major studios rarely drop new films in the chill of early January, so the flip of the calendar instead becomes an opportunity for limited releases to expand slowly (sometimes glacially—looking at you, The Testament of Ann Lee). Today, we’re catching up with three independent pictures gradually making their way around the country, though viewers in some markets may be forced to wait until they hit streaming. This is why I support a national law requiring all movies to play in all theaters at all times.

No Other Choice. Capitalism is murder. You work and you work, pouring your blood and sweat into a numbing career that drains the life from you, in service of unfeeling bosses who can sack you whenever they want. (Note to any of my superiors who happen to be reading this piece: I love you and I love my job, please don’t fire me.) If you’re a CEO, they send you packing with a golden parachute. If you’re a line worker, they give you an eel. Read More

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Janet Planet: Smothering Instinct

Jeremy BeckReviews
Julianne Nicholson and Zoe Ziegler in Janet Planet

Lacy is bored. Eleven years old and marooned in her woodland home in western Massachusetts, she has no friends, no hobbies (compulsory piano lessons don’t count), and no apparent reason to live. “If you don’t come get me, I’m gonna kill myself,” she declares on the phone in a prayer for deliverance from sleepaway camp. It’s an empty threat because nothing in Lacy’s life is all that bad—her fellow camp kids and counselors seem perfectly nice—but such mediocrity is just another affront. If things were terrible, at least she’d have something to rail against. Having nothing to complain about is somehow worse.

Janet Planet, the directorial debut of Annie Baker, is an eerily persuasive piece of storytelling that understands Lacy’s circumstances almost too well. It transpires over a few sleepy summer months in 1991, and it evokes her predicament—the specific sensation of flailing against the aimlessness of youth—with a clarity that verges on lethargy. In so convincingly depicting tedium, it risks succumbing to it. Read More

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Inside Out 2: She’s Crossed That Loving Feeling

Jeremy BeckReviews
A scene from Inside Out 2

Could Pixar be growing up? The idea seems odd; from the moment Woody and Buzz debated flying versus “falling with style,” the animation laureate has exhibited a fully formed sensibility—a rich blend of buoyant imagination and piercing insight, conveyed via painstaking computerized craft. But because Disney’s most celebrated cartoon arm remains a commercial enterprise, many of their works still center on wide-eyed children and (more directly) their anxious parents. In recent years, however, the studio has gently expanded its heroes’ ages and preoccupations, telling stories about childless adults (Soul), lovestruck twentysomethings (Elemental), awkward high schoolers (Onward), and angsty kids straddling adolescence (Luca, Turning Red). Now comes Inside Out 2, a movie about a 13-year-old grappling with the chilling prospect (perceived or actual) that her actions in the present will determine the course of her future. It might not be a coming-of-age story in all respects—the notion of sexual attraction stays safely outside its youthful boundaries—but it’s not for nothing that it features a literal alarm blaring the arrival of one of life’s most horrifying rites of passage: puberty.

Creatively speaking, Inside Out 2 attempts to accomplish a similar sort of maturation, expanding the original’s vibrantly detailed universe and complicating its themes. At the same time, it suffers from a certain, inevitable stasis. The first Inside Out, which landed on this critic’s list of the best movies of the 2010s, was remarkable above all for its conceptual innovation—its vision of emotions as anthropomorphized beings that guide our thoughts and behavior while collaborating and bickering in the fashion of a workplace sitcom. Inside Out 2, by virtue of being a sequel, can’t hope to replicate that sense of unprecedented wonder. Instead, it builds upon its predecessor with intelligence and variety, even as it traffics in a degree of repetition that is slightly dispiriting. Read More

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Bottoms: Top Queer

Jeremy BeckReviews
Rachel Sennott and Ayo Edebiri in Bottoms

Justifying your own unpopularity is harder than it used to be. In the past, the ostracized heroes at the center of coming-of-age stories could take solace in the recognition that their tormentors were either stupid or bigoted; the bullying they faced was simply a consequence of the ruling class failing to perceive their true worth. But the nerds of Booksmart discovered that their partying brethren were also headed to the Ivy League, and now the losers of Bottoms can’t attribute the everyday cruelty they experience to insecurity or small-mindedness. “They don’t hate us because we’re gay,” Josie (Ayo Edebiri) says with gloomy honesty to her best friend, PJ (Rachel Sennott), as they watch a jock congratulate an effeminate actor on his performance in the school musical. “They hate us because we’re ugly and untalented.”

That assessment is unduly self-deprecating, though the wardrobe department has joined forces with Edebiri’s lack of vanity to make Josie look as frumpy as possible. (The first time we see her, she’s trying to stack multiple baseball caps atop her haywire afro.) But it’s crucial for Bottoms to establish its heroines’ putative undesirability in order to lay the groundwork for its story of improbable triumph and feminist upheaval. Directed by Emma Seligman from a script she wrote with Sennott, it’s an affirming movie that tells the tale of a marginalized sect rising up against its oppressors, claiming a measure of power and upending the entrenched social order. In related news, it’s about punching cheerleaders in the face. Read More

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