ChiFilmFest 22: Aftersun, Decision To Leave, and Saint Omer
Reviews from the 58th Chicago International Film Festival
Aftersun:
I appreciated Paul Mescal a lot in Aftersun. I appreciated how he did not feel like any father I’d ever known, but he felt like a father. I appreciated the prickly short hairs on his head, his shorts, his lame smile, the little quivers in his voice when he is so far away from his daughter even when they are touching, a speck on the horizon of her mind, so far, a VHS tape could not pick him up.
Most of the problems of Aftersun are present in any first feature: too excited to be restrained where it needs to be, too enamored with visual gimmicks to not foreground them and not adept enough to flesh them out. Charlotte Weils’ obvious talent and craft from the jump. The vacation takes on a desperately narrativized character - out of nostalgia, out of grief - that is so strikingly mature and raw. The intimacies of these characters are unspectacular without being generic. Words and images have stuck around in my head but never as they were assembled in the film, often separated by forty minutes, acting like entangled particles with no clear metaphorical connection.
At its best, like the instantly-iconic club scene, Aftersun is the kind of humanist filmmaking you find so rarely, worthy of a place alongside Barry Jenkins or Mike Leigh. I am so excited to see what Weils makes next.
Decision To Leave:
Park Chan-Wook’s adoration for cuckoo-clock machinations of Alfred Hitchcock festers in every corner of Decision To Leave. From the obsessive surveillance (cannily modernized through a cornucopia of digital records) to the tragic love story with a sad, unknowable femme fatale, the movie moves at a delight clip through all the hallmarks of its genre’s lineage. The primary pleasure of such a film comes down to how smoothly it can hitch together its hodgepodge of red herrings and double-crosses, and Decision To Leave makes admirable work of itself as a capital-E Entertainment. I admit there’s a dimension to the story, surrounding Korean immigration politics, of which I do not have adequate grasp to properly critique. But as an outright romance noir, it falls a bit flat, despite Park Chan-Wook’s ever-excellent eye for a rousing image. Without the trademark kinks to sentimentalize in his work, Decision to Leave is pleasant but shallow, its declarations on love, secrecy, and desperate yearning as legible as they are emotionally inconsequential.
One Fine Morning:
As I was leaving my screening of One Fine Morning, I somewhat facetiously texted my friend “I love movies for adults!” As much as this is a too-broad joke about the current infantile state of cinema, it was refreshing to see a movie so astute in its observation of people’s behavior, respecting the work of the actors and the audience enough to leave arcs unspoken and unresolved. Every film from Mia Hansen-Love is a gift, a collection of small moments and interstitial scenes so thoughtfully drawn they stick in your memory long after showier films have sunk into anonymity.
For her most out-the-gate “minor” work in over a decade, Mia Hansen-Love’s signature sense of time and artistic project has yet to lose any of its pleasure or power. Her willingness to let her film’s mission remain a mystery up until the very end, to not foreground the precisions of its structure, remains an unfathomably versatile and complex formal practice that continues to evolve with each iteration.
As a film about Alzheimer’s, it is startling to see a movie that does not treat the disease with sensationalism, but rather the compartmentalized pragmatism that comes from navigating the end-of-life care racket. As a movie about being the mistress to an affair, it is nice to see a married man who is imperfect and often selfish but not cartoonishly manipulative. As a movie about a single mother navigating these two distinct strands coming ever closer together, if not narratively but emotionally, increasingly impossible to shut out as she places everybody’s needs above her own until she is brought to tears by the mere muchness…it is overwhelmingly powerful. One Fine Morning is about a tough year. The next one will probably be tough too, and the one before it wasn’t so easy either.
Pacifiction:
Albert Serra occupies a rather peculiar role as a festival circuit regular. Heretofore, his filmography has been stuffed with absurd sketches of durational comedy, like if one of the Whitest Kids U Know guys harbored an obsession with Visconti. His big joke, for nearly a decade running, has been that the high canon of art is repulsive, crude, and evil. His previous work, Liberte, feel a bit vacuous, in how its own rather stellar emulation of painterly composition brought forward how disingenuous its scatological potshots landed.
Anyway, Pacifiction is goddamn nightmare fuel. A slow-burn evisceration of European cinema’s suffocating, imperialist fixation on Polynesian life and land, as well as an old-school post-War noir. More beautiful, more evil, and more biting for its complete lack of humor. The overlord at the film’s center glows with a radioactive evil. In direct opposition to this year’s Nope, whose startling simulacrum of night-time photography is perhaps the most technically impressive cinematic feat of the year, the night shots here feel lit by the translucent glow of the moon and its tides. It is the scariest fucking movie I have seen in years.
Piaffe:
Piaffe is a thoroughly German curio of weird proportions. There is a lot of neat stuff here, which is kind of inevitable for a movie that hedges on such an extended kinesthetic game of semiotic edging. A movie where a woman fills in for her sister as a foley artist, sprouts a horse’s tail after mimicking its sounds and motions, and then begins a sadomasochistic affair with a botanist…all this sounds like the build-up to a punchline that would make even Bunuel a little ticked off. Ultimately it feels like Berghain: Too invested in claiming the dominant conceptions of the body as radical, ugly and sincere and uninspired. Its vision of abnormal femininity is frail and hysterical, bony and pale, due less to a fetishization of reactionary artistic crutches and more a general lack of imagination. To deny it is a cool movie would be stupid. To suggest it’s a good one would be just as foolhardy.
Saint Omer:
The best film I saw at the Chicago Film Festival was Alice Diop’s fiction feature debut Saint Omer. What begins as a courtroom drama about a black woman who admits to killing her 15-month-old child expands over the course of two hours in one extended, dizzying gasp. Diop’s previous documentary work here informs a style that feigns austerity before imploding into a fractured amalgam of visions and moving portraiture. The dawning realization that many of the shots from within the courtroom are POVs is only one of many jaw-dropping revelations.
To divulge more of the film’s secrets would feel tantamount to sacrilege, not that its artistry relies on surprise but that how each scene complicates and extrapolates further in every direction is just not something to take for granted. We don’t get movies like this every day, where every piece is so considered, where putting it into words pales in comparison to what Diop achieves on-screen. The standards of European cinema, the eye of justice and truth that presides over non-fiction forms of image-making, the history of imperialism in France, none of it is built to withstand or comprehend the pain of women in the African diaspora. There is too much to say here, about the continual reframing of the woman at its center, about the amorphous role of audience surrogates, a ghost story for the dead who were never seen alive. The final monologue is an easy lie, told by a white woman, to appease a sense of justice. Diop’s film, in contrast, speaks to the unspeakable, asks more damning, more intimate, more important questions.
In a time when the word is overused, Saint Omer is a masterpiece - a new, real-deal, perfectly accomplished work of interrogative cinema.
The 58th Chicago International Film Festival ran from October 12th-23rd, 2022.