KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON (2023) Martin Scorsese
There was a moment around the end of the first hour, when I thought this film might work. Mollie (Lily Gladstone) the Osage Indian woman who has inexplicably married white, dim Ernest (Leonardo DiCaprio) has a voiceover. It comes from out of nowhere. We suddenly hear her thoughts, and in that moment, I thought the film might pivot, away from all its white male characters to not only give Mollie a voice, but to show us the world through her perspective. That was not the case. Eventually, the film relegates Mollie to a bed bound invalid, a saintly figure who takes on all the suffering of the Osage people for us.
After Mollie’s voiceover ends, the illusion that this isn’t just another Scorsese picture about violent white men whose pasts catch up with them ends. The film plays out in completely expected ways. It’s all very propulsive and professional. The cast is great and Jack Fisk’s production design creates a town that feels comfortable and lived in. I mean, the best names in the business are here and they all turn in stellar work, but in a picture that simply serves us the same old thing, with a reverent side dish of Indian ceremony.
Scorsese wants us to believe that Mollie and Ernest actually fall in love—this is supposed to be the central, tangible tragedy of the film, a small personal tragedy that encapsulates the larger one—yet he can’t come up with the scenes in which that might have happened. They meet and then they are married. As in another film from last year, The Leftovers, the scene in which the relationship shifts or pivots is missing; we’re meant to take it as given. In Killers, the lack of this scene or scenes makes Mollie look stupid while subtly reinforcing the idea that Ernest is marrying only for money. Because Mollie is given so few scenes and almost no purposeful dialogue thereafter, we can’t enter the relationship at all. It’s obvious Scorsese isn’t really interested in this relationship as anything other than a plot device and it shows.
Gladstone wrings all she can from the character of Mollie as written, but her character is not actually written; that voiceover near the end of the first hour is probably the most she speaks in the film. She’s given no words, and words are essential is this story. Nearly everything else she’s allowed is a reaction to something Ernest says or does. Of course, the Osage lack of agency in their lives is part of the point of the movie, but when the film glides around one of the moments Mollie presumably has agency—agreeing to marry Ernest—we’re given still another woman who lives at the outskirts of the actions of men.
Mollie isn’t given a scene where she realizes the horror of what Ernest has been a party to, principally the murder of much of her family, yet Ernest is given a scene where he confesses and explains why he became a witness for the State, as a result of which ‘his soul is clean.’ Nearly all of this scene is shot in close-up on DiCaprio, with Mollie as his confessor and, it’s assumed, the Osage who forgives his sins. Mollie has been reduced to the role of the Magical Negro.
I didn’t expect Scorsese to give us a deep exploration of the life of the Osage at that time, but I did, at the least, expect one developed Osage character in the film. We don’t get that. Instead, we get lots of evil machinations, a number of people shot in the head, the white men of the Feds stepping to bring justice, and a few soft-focus scenes of Osage rituals and dreams. It’s not exploitation or appropriation; it’s simply a lack of imagination.
FREMONT (2023) Babak Jalali
At first, Fremont looks to be another minimalist, indie picture with denuded performances from the actors, but director Jalili handles the tone of the film so precisely that gradually the characters begin to open up to us. The story of Donya (Anaita Wali Zada) a young, female Afghan translator who escapes to the US where an unfocused life and an equally displaced Afghan community awaits her, Fremont’s language of otherness and slow, awkward trust becomes aching and hopeful. Donya’s sessions with a psychiatrist (played with off-kilter unease by Gregg Turkington) are small marvels of attempts at connecting.
THE REVOLUTIONARY (1970) Paul Williams
Limp political film with a limp central performance from Jon Voight, The Revolutionary can’t decide on its tone or its take on late 60s politics. Instead, it leads Voight’s character by the nose through different ‘revolutionary’ scenarios without giving any of them weight or meaning. It does this in such a lackluster, murky way that it’s difficult to believe the film is supposed to mean anything.
THE WATERMELON WOMAN (1997) Cheryl Dunye
Billed as the first feature film directed by a Black lesbian, The Watermelon Woman is a decidedly DIY gig, written, directed and starring Dunye as a video store worker who becomes obsessed with a minor Black character in a 30s film and begins a documentary on the (fictional) actress. Intermingling themes of otherness, both racial and queer, Dunye explores her own displacement, and her quest for role models in the art around her.
THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN (1967) Jack Arnold
Alternately, funny, fun, and terrifying, this is everything a B-movie should be. Though Richard Matheson’s script eventually gives up with a sigh, the preceding minutes are full of great special effects and an intense standoff with a house cat. Somehow these films could manage to be both funny and scary at the same time—something that seems impossible for filmmakers now.
UPTIGHT (1968) Jules Dassin
A startlingly angry film about race in America, approaching it from different perspectives within the black community without becoming didactic. The film depicts both the work-within-the-system zealots and the burn-it-all-down extremists with equal acceptance, while detailing the racial oppression in America, all while remaining focused on a story and the grounded characters within that story. No small feat.
Three Shorts on MUBI
WORLD OF GLORY (1991) Roy Andersson
This short is bleak even by Andersson’s pitch-black standards. Evidently the first film in his fixed camera, tableaux style, it is relentlessly absurdist and uncomfortable, with many characters staring at us from the frame as if we could save them from their fate. Strangely, if you’re in the right mood, this is very funny.
AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL SCENE NUMBER 6882 (2005) Ruben Ostlund
Ostlund, later of Force Majeure and Triangle of Sadness, is working out his themes. A small group who we never see up close, alternately taunts and dissuades a man from jumping from a bridge on a dare. Whether he does or doesn’t isn’t as important to Ostlund as the simmering ambivalence of the group.
COPYCAT (2015) Charlie Shackleton
Is an indie film made years earlier the precursor or the looted corpse of the meta-horror film Scream? You decide.
JUST A MOTHER Roy Jacobsen translated by Don Bartlett and Don Shaw
This is the fourth volume in the Barroy series, which tells the story of Ingrid, living on a remote island in Norway. This book takes place after WW2. The real accomplishment in this series is in how the language manages to convey not only the action of the story, but the perspective of Ingrid, without often clueing us in to what she’s thinking. It has to do with voice, but the structure itself only allows for a certain entry into the events, which reflects the way they are assimilated by the characters. In the last volume, and this one, we see how Ingrid’s world gradually begins to expand, from her island to the village across the bay, and then into the larger world. It’s a slow, almost liminal expansion which, at times, brings with it more complexity than she wishes to confront.
GLORIA (1980) John Cassavetes Mubi
There’s a scene in Gloria when the title character (Gena Rowlands) realizes she’s gone too far and can’t turn back from a path she never wanted to be on in the first place. It’s played as an action scene until the camera cuts to her expression, as she realizes what she’s done. Randomly charged with caring for a young boy whose family has been murdered by the mob, she has to work out how to survive. Cassavetes keeps the film off-kilter, with an affected performance by John Adames, a kid working hard to be a grownup, who alternately whines and spouts romantic dialogue at Gloria that he’s probably heard on TV. Great location photography; we get to see lots of Brooklyn in 1980. Rowlands, as in nearly every Cassavetes film, is the real draw here, playing a tough woman who never wanted to be involved, but understands when she’s in too deep.
PRIVATE NOTEBOOKS 1914-1916 Ludwig Wittgenstein, translated by Marjorie Perloff
In 1914, Ludwig Wittgenstein joined the German infantry on the Eastern Front while simultaneously beginning to form the thoughts which would eventually become his philosophical masterwork, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which appeared in English in 1922. The Private Notebooks were written in code in the margins of what he called ‘his work,’ providing a kind of prosaic diary of the struggle between living in a dangerous and incessant world, and trying to create. For me, that’s the fascinating level of the book—we read along as the author tries to invoke ‘a room of one’s own’ from which to work, within a hellish landscape around him. It’s naïve, in the way Simone Weil is naïve, but supported by a singleness of purpose which compels him to return to ‘the work’ after every obstacle and diversion.
THE HIVE AND THE HONEY Paul Yoon
Yoon’s stories are held together by themes of displacement and alienation. Most of the characters here are living outside their native land, or so far on the outskirts as to be exiled. These are quiet, sharply observed stories of people trying to fit in, or trying not to be seen. People struggling to bring some order or coherence to their lives when everything around them in is motion. Yoon’s writing is keenly observed and razor sharp.
THE LOVE WITCH (2019) Anna Biller
Flawlessly mimicking the euro-trash horror films of the 60, The Love Witch follows Elaine, a beautiful young witch determined to find love. It’s a disorienting journey—the acting is pretty bad, intentionally or not—and Elaine never actually seems to enjoy either loving or being loved, so the story becomes about the shroud of loneliness any relationship tries to penetrate.
WEREWOLF (2016) Ashley McKenzie MUBI
There are no inspirational monologues in this story of a former meth addict trying to get clean and break from her addicted boyfriend. They push a lawnmower around, offering to mow lawns, to pay for their methadone and his drugs. The film begins in the midst of a destructive relationship and follows Nessa as she struggles to take small steps toward sobriety. This means working a boring job in fast food, living with her mother, struggling to pay her bills. There’s no kindly mentor, no loving parents (they been burned too many times)—she’s in it on her own. A stark presentation of trying to change your life against all odds.
Three Shorts
A SHORT STORY (2022) Bi Gan
A cat (in a trenchcoat) sets off on an adventure that takes him far from home. Lovely images and a relentless forward motion often seen in Bi Gan’s work; it’s not necessary to know what this means to enjoy the flow of the film.
NIMIC (2029) Yorgos Lanthimos
A man discovers anyone else could take his place—at work, at home, anywhere. Full of uncomfortable silences and awkward interactions, it’s the kind of jagged satire Lanthimos does best.
ALL THE CROWS IN THE WORLD (2021) Tang Yi
A shiny, pulsating short set in the clubs of Hong Kong, follows a young woman as she is approached by and rejects men. Constantly surprising and vibrantly alive, this film is like a musical without the music.
ON COMMUNITY Casey Plett
Community is a word that’s taken on a sort of soft focus glow in recent years, a cure-all for nearly everything. The idea of building community, nurturing community, being a part of. Plett takes on both the affirming and destructive aspects of community in this Biblioasis Field Notes entry, drawing from her experience in the transgender world, as well as her early life with the Mennonites. Balancing her personal history with research, she explores why and how we bond with others and the ways in which these bonds both enlarge and restrict our world.
THE DEVILS (1971) Ken Russell (Criterion)
Perhaps the best marriage of Russell’s hysterical style with subject matter, The Devils takes on religion, sexuality, and the State in an intentionally lurid and provoking manner, full of naked women and sensual Christ-like figures. From the events detailed in Huxley’s Devils of Loudon concerning ‘mass possessions’ at a 16th Century convent, Russell constructs an angry, damning film. Astonishing sets by Derek Jarman (!), great atonal music by Dennis Russel Davies, and a sly, nuanced performance by Vanessa Redgrave create a world both real and stylized. Russell never really knew what to do with actors, but Redgrave has her own thing going here, and it makes the film.
POOR THINGS (2023) Yorgos Lanthimos
Emma Stone is remarkable as the lead in Lanthimos’ storybook telling of a young woman awakening to herself, much to the chagrin and hostility of nearly all the men around her. She embodies a childlike hunger for experience, a joy and curiosity unbound by morality and social mores. That’s Lanthimos’ territory and he mines it here, creating a lush, Grimm’s Fairy tale world for Stone’s Bella to navigate, then setting her loose.
MANDERLEY (2005) Lars von Trier
A sequel to von Trier’s Dogville and the second of an incomplete trilogy that takes the knives to America, Manderley finds the first film’s Grace (now played by Bryce Dallas Howard) coming across a plantation in Alabama where slavery still persists in 1933, and she goes to work setting the situation right, as white saviors do. Von Trier’s satire can be both blatant and remarkably subtle simultaneously Filmed on a nearly bare soundstage, as was Dogville, it cheekily references a production of Our Town gone terribly wrong.
FELLINI CASANOVA (1976) Federico Fellini
I hadn’t seen this film since it’s original release, yet I always remembered it as visually beautiful, and it often is. Filled with Fellini’s circus grotesques, alternating with ravishing scenes, all filmed on soundstages. Donald Sutherland’s Casanova traverses Europe, seducing and proving his sexual accomplishments. Decidedly unerotic and unromantic, it’s a film about performing and performers, and their fear of being left with nothing in the end. Sutherland is pretty great, as a man who can never imagine anything outside his range of vision.
THE POTEMKINISTS (2022) Radu Jude
Jude’s politically incisive satire continues here with a short discussion of a new monument to Romanian history which slowly morphs into something neutral and ahistorical.
THE NIGHT (2021) Tsai Ming-Liang
My response to Tsai’s films often take the form of interest-boredom-immersion, and I really appreciate the slide they allow into a kind of bemused reverie. A series of night scenes with no plot of characters, it gives us a chance to simply see things we’d pass over in real life
BLANK NARCISSUS (2022) Peter Strickland
Gorgeous images from a supposedly forgotten film are overlaid with the fictional director’s commentary on his disintegrating relationship with the actor. It’s achingly sad and funny at the same time.