Foreign Language

Anatomy of a Fall: Death Landing

Jeremy BeckReviews
Swann Arlaud and Sandra Hüller in Anatomy of a Fall

The first frame of Anatomy of a Fall, even before the traditional procession of vanity cards, is the text of a URL: didshedoit.com. The ensuing movie, a tense and absorbing courtroom drama directed by Justine Triet, doesn’t so much investigate the answer to that question as emphasize its unknowability. Like Rashomon before so, it posits that the quest for truth is a fool’s errand, and that past events are refracted through individual prisms of memory and perspective. Initially tasked with finding guilt or innocence, it instead grapples with the notion that those terms are illusory.

The “she” of that URL is Sandra Voyter (Sandra Hüller), and the “it” is the death of her husband, Samuel Maleski (Samuel Theis). That both characters share a first name with the actor playing them is just one sign that Triet is attempting to collapse fact and fiction, though her screenplay, which she wrote with Arthur Harari, isn’t rooted in any specific true-crime episode. It instead methodically builds itself out from the film’s opening scene, when Sandra and Samuel’s 11-year-old son, Daniel (Milo Machado Graner), returns from a walk with his dog to find his father’s bloody body splayed out at the base of their ski chalet. This completes the URL’s question: Did Samuel jump, or did Sandra push him? Read More

Read more

Decision to Leave: Should He Stray or Should She Go?

Jeremy BeckReviews
Tang Wei and Park Hae-il in Decision to Leave

He’s a good cop: smart, confident, decisive. He’s looking down at a fresh corpse on a coroner’s table, asking the right questions, making the proper deductions. But when the woman enters the room, he glances up from the body, and for a split second his breath catches in his throat, and his typically impassive countenance is replaced with astonishment. He recovers his poise quickly enough—after all, he’s a professional—but that single skipped beat of his heart foreshadows a future of desire and ruin. He isn’t in control anymore; she is.

This is an early scene from Park Chan-wook’s Decision to Leave, but it’s also the latest descendant in a long lineage of Meaningful Looks; it’s Fred MacMurray eyeing Barbara Stanwyck’s bare shoulders in Double Indemnity, and Jimmy Stewart staring across a restaurant at Kim Novak in Vertigo, and Russell Crowe watching Kim Basinger stroll into a liquor store in L.A. Confidential. It firmly plants the movie in the heightened universe of film noir, with its hot-blooded gumshoes and coolly captivating femme fatales, its furtive schemes and dastardly crimes. Yet because Park is an uncommonly gifted stylist, nothing about his thrilling new picture feels imitative or traditional. Noirs were always sexy, but they’ve never been quite this voluptuous. Read More

Read more

Parasite: Out of the Basement, Climbing the Social Ladder

Jeremy BeckReviews
The family of Bong Joon-ho's "Parasite".

The underground is both a geographic location and a lowly caste in Parasite, the electrifying new movie from Bong Joon-ho. In this tonally shifting and artistically unwavering film—it’s part comedy, part thriller, all silky craft—the social order is upended with mayhem and precision, as the dwellers of the subterrane invade the castles of the aristocracy. Yet Parasite’s ravishing, blood-soaked imagery is complemented by its patience, its humor, and its observational savvy. Consider that it largely transpires in two different homes, whose contrasting layouts illuminate a crucial truth: that some basements are more equal than others.

The film’s title suggests an infestation, though Bong, who also wrote the screenplay with Han Jin-won, plays it coy, leaving open to interpretation just who’s the scourge and who’s the plagued. What’s obvious from the jump, however, is that Parasite is a movie about class. This is nothing new for Bong; in Snowpiercer, he imagined a giant train that separated its inhabitants according to their inherent station, a rigid hierarchy enforced by Tilda Swinton, who brutally reminded the steerage occupants of their lesser status with a chillingly didactic fable featuring the edict, “Be the shoe.” The stratification in Parasite may not be as linear, but it’s still firmly in place, visible to the eye and—as becomes at first amusingly and then grotesquely clear—detectable to the nose. Read More

Read more

The Farewell: Honesty Is the West’s Policy

Jeremy BeckReviews
Awkwafina and others in Lulu Wang's "The Farewell"

The Farewell might have been a minor movie, if it didn’t plainly house such major talents. With its gentle tone and delicate sense of scale, it’s so intimate, it could have verged on flimsy. But writer-director Lulu Wang, making her second feature, invests the melancholy story with grace notes of lyricism that give it some stylistic heft. She’s also found the perfect star in Awkwafina, the rapper and comedienne who here makes a seamless transition to more somber material. It’s a heavy story told with a beautifully light touch.

The movie opens with a title card that reads “based on an actual lie”, establishing both its autobiographical bona fides—Awkwafina’s Billi is in many ways a stand-in for Wang—and its cheeky wit. But the falsehood at its center does more than just drive the slender plot; it becomes the foundation on which Wang builds the film’s intriguing explorations of culture, geography, and identity. And The Farewell, despite its narrow scope and quiet bearing, ends up operating on multiple levels. It’s a human melodrama that doubles as an empathetic treatise on humanity. Read More

Read more

Roma: Maid in Mexico, Made with Beauty

Jeremy BeckReviews
A striking scene from Alfonso Cuarón's "Roma"

Early in Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity, two astronauts frantically attempt to propel themselves back to a docking station by way of a jetpack, their tiny white suits looking like stars that dot the infinite blackness of space. Early in Roma, Cuarón’s new film for Netflix, a man slowly pulls his car into a narrow garage, repeatedly rotating his wheels and pulling in his mirrors to avoid scraping the walls. As parking jobs go, the stakes here are rather less severe, given that the man is seeking to avoid minor property damage rather than trying to cheat death; it’s a scene about a Ford Galaxie, not, you know, the galaxy. But Cuarón’s camera captures the process with the same spooky intimacy, locking on the sedan’s boxy corners and bulky wheels as they swivel to and fro, searching for safety. The director’s craftsmanship never wavers, whether he’s chronicling explorers careening into space or cars rolling over dog shit.

In empirical terms, Roma is a smaller film than Gravity, Children of Men, or Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban; it doesn’t make heavy use of thriller tropes or special effects, and it doesn’t take place in dystopian or fantastical worlds where humanity’s very survival is at risk. But it shares with those movies a certain philosophical principle, the persistent belief that cinema is a tool for telling thorny, personal stories on a grand scale. In some ways, Roma is a low-key family drama, but if its narrative occasionally verges on mundane, its technique is never less than extraordinary. Read More

Read more