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

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

Tár: Bittersweet Infamy

Cate Blanchett in Tár

Cate Blanchett is a titan. Whether playing a British monarch or an American actress or an elven queen, she emanates an unimpeachable authority, an innate rightness. Yet in some of her nerviest performances—as an abusive teacher in Notes on a Scandal, as a fallen socialite in Blue Jasmine, as a yearning lover in Carol—she chips away at this invincibility, hinting at desire and pain without showing any visible cracks or weakness. So Blanchett’s casting as the titular anti-heroine of Tár, the gripping new drama from Todd Field, is almost too perfect. She—by which I mean both Blanchett and Lydia, the character whose surname gives the film its title—is an avatar of supremacy, and the movie begins as a chronicle of her dominance before it gradually turns into… something else. Field reportedly wrote the script specifically for Blanchett, and he’s been rewarded. It’s not that you can’t imagine anyone else playing Lydia (Nicole Kidman? Rebecca Hall?); it’s that if you dared to suggest a different actor, Lydia would eat you for lunch.

That fluid lethality—the combination of cultured intelligence and formidable omnipotence—might not seem obvious from Lydia’s profession, though perhaps that gives short shrift to the cutthroat modern world of classical music. We first meet her at a festival interview conducted by The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik, a conversation that Field presents in multiple ways. Initially, as Gopnik’s voiceover informs us of Lydia’s estimable accomplishments—among other things, she’s won the EGOT, and she runs a fellowship that has nurtured numerous female composers (including Hildur Guðnadóttir, who provides the actual score here)—the screen provides a brisk montage, with a blizzard of crisp images (such as the precise tailoring of a suit) that evoke the specter of careerism. Field then brings us inside the auditorium and spends several minutes simply observing Lydia and Gopnik’s discussion, a curious choice that later proves to be a sly bit of misdirection. Read More

Emily the Criminal: The Ex-Con Is On

Aubrey Plaza in Emily the Criminal

It’s just a flimsy piece of paper, but it carries the weight of an anvil—a scarlet letter printed in cold black and white. The man behind the desk utters two dreadful words—“background check”—and her face drains of color, her once-promising prospects vaporizing into smoke. “I just want you to be honest,” he says with a thin smile that masks a contemptuous sneer. But what he really wants is to dupe her, shame her, usher her into a confessional where he can play the role of supercilious priest. The interview was over before it started; it was over as soon as that banal printout found its way into his hands. Really, it was over years ago, when a courtroom stenographer typed the word “guilty”—a word that’s been invisibly hanging around her neck ever since.

This is a good deal of information to process, yet it’s all concisely packed into the brief opening scene of Emily the Criminal, which finds the title character (a riveting Aubrey Plaza) squirming at the end of a fishing line cast by a smug, purportedly upright middle manager (John Billingsley). Arguably, the film’s title alone, with its blunt two-word suffix, illustrates the hill its anti-heroine has been climbing most of her adult life. A long time ago, Emily did a bad thing. Now, that bad thing is all she is. Read More

Men, Happening, and Women Under Attack

Anamaria Vartolomei in Happening; Jessie Buckley in Men

The internet is fond of sarcastically asking if men are OK, but the same question might be more seriously asked of women. Pay equity, reproductive freedom, toxic masculinity, #MeToo—modern society is aswirl with issues surrounding female safety and autonomy. So it’s no surprise that cinema, with its quicksilver capacity to reflect on and respond to cultural shifts, is tackling these concepts with variety and alacrity. It is a bit surprising, however, for the same month to produce two theatrical releases which wrestle with men’s aggression and women’s liberation so directly, even if they do so in dramatically different ways.

Alex Garland’s third feature, the coyly titled Men, is the more ambitious work, at least in terms of scope and style. Garland favors small casts and isolated locations, but his films (Ex Machina, Annihilation) possess an aesthetic grandeur, teeming with bold colors and striking images. (His television series, the frustrating but beguiling Devs, is one of the most visually enthralling things you can find on the small screen.) This isn’t merely a matter of showing his audience pretty pictures but of somehow splicing beauty with deformity. Garland is a painterly artist with the emotional sensibility of a sick fuck. Read More

The Northman: It Takes a Pillage to Faze a Child

Alexander Skarsgård in The Northman

Awesome in multiple senses of the word, Robert Eggers’ The Northman is a swaggering, delirious monument to cinematic excess. It’s difficult to select a single scene that best encapsulates its bravura decadence—the moonlit swordfight against a skeleton? the hallucinogen-aided bonding session where father and son bark and howl like feral dogs? the fiery duel at the literal gates of Hell?—but I’m partial to the early sequence where a Viking warrior fells a helpless adversary with his axe and then, having already vanquished his hapless foe, bends down and sinks his teeth into the dying man’s neck.

This unchecked, animalistic ferocity is part of what animates The Northman, which is noteworthy for its sheer frenzy alone; on the surface, it seems to have been constructed purely to inspire giddy instant reactions along the lines of, “omg u guyz this movie FUCKS.” (A quick Twitter search confirms its success in this regard.) Yet look past the blood-soaked savagery on display, and you will discover that there is something more sophisticated at play here. I don’t mean to minimize the berserk (and berserker?) quality of the film’s content, or to imply that its straightforward themes of vengeance and obsession stretch beyond the obvious. What I mean is that, for all its gonzo energy, as a piece of aesthetic craftsmanship, The Northman is absolutely beautiful. Read More