Only a short time ago, my life was one thing. Now it’s something altogether different. It seems so far away to me, and long ago; I struggle to reckon with the changes these last few years have wrought. I remember so few details of my early 20s that I wonder if they ever really existed. I’m 33 now. By the time this is published, I’ll be 34. I’m a different collection of atoms from my 20s, teens, etc. Why do I feel like I’ve already exhausted all the possibilities of my life? It was a snowy evening in March and I was wandering the streets of Lakeview when I began to get nostalgic for the past. Keep in mind, I was miserable in my 20s. But plunge deep enough into the moon-shaped pool of your memories and everything gets rosier in the murk.
The thought occurred to me that in my 40s I’ll be nostalgic for the present. It depressed me. See, I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time either living in the past or living in the hypothetical future, nourishing my soul with these ephemeral fantasies. It’s an unsustainable and dangerous diet that leads nowhere. The tableau of my memory picks and chooses not the most important things, but instead paints a portrait with colors that don’t clash with the background. I now try to be more sensitive with every action, present in every decision. It’s exhausting and difficult, and there’ve been many, many slip-ups. I’m still here.
I don’t know the specifics of how people change. I wonder what my brain looks like, how different it is now versus a decade ago. I look at brain chemistry and observe the synaptic pruning that occurs between childhood and adulthood. The shears are out. It’s a process. So I remain in the present, sitting at a busy coffee shop on a Saturday morning, people watching on Belmont Ave, listening to Big Thief and sipping on my third cup of java. I’m wearing gaudy sunglasses as the late May sun warms the bruises and scrapes on my arms and legs. I settle back into my chair, and wait for this life to reveal itself like an unread book, sentence by sentence, word by word. As Michelle Zauner notes in Crying in H Mart, “it’s up to me to make sense of myself.” Working on it.
After Yang
(Kogonada)
Naturally, I loved Kogonada’s After Yang; a film of the future that excavates the past. I’ve moved from my Lincoln Park apartment, and the ritual agony that comes with packing is shedding the contents amassed during your temporary stay in the present. But there’s also a re-litigation – will what survived a previous move make it for the next? Within one of the dozen totes that sit in a dingy, water-damaged storage room in the basement of my apartment is a museum collection from my ex; notes as high school seniors and college undergrads. A collection of paintings we made together and gifts from a decade passed. One of the last things K told me was that she doesn’t reminisce. I still do. And so with every move now, I sit with these items, look at the notes on the back of photos, and think about the past with a requisite bittersweet fondness. This move was different, because not only were there the things from K but also from S and Y and AL and M. Yet I couldn’t bear to throw those mementos out.
After Yang is about how a family moves on. Their android, Yang, is inoperable and the function that he served in their life leaves behind a tangible sense of loss. Having recently read Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun, a science-fiction novel with many of the same preoccupations as After Yang, I thought about the numerous ways in which I’ve processed grief and examined my patterns of rehabilitation. Often times I just want to move on, to not sit in the grief of the past for too long. Anything to leave the devastation behind, I just want a place to put my feet back down, to quit floating from one wreck to the next. Here’s a film that examines all the stages of grief, and dares to capture the vividness of how the memories of the past can freeze you in place. Maybe the past informs so much of my present because I never permitted myself to just sit with the pain. Like the tea-making metaphor that illustrates and informs everything about After Yang, I suppose I should trust the process. Trust has never been my strong suit. Until it is, I guess I still have the mementos.
Crimes of the Future
(David Cronenberg)
There’s a quote from José Saramago’s Journey to Portugal that I was reminded of when reflecting on Crimes of the Future, “The apple rots according to the ailment of the apple tree, and not the sickness of the Earth.” If hubris and hedonism have eaten away at a majority of Cronenberg’s protagonists over his career, then his later works have demonstrated that whatever sickness that resides within the individual is a product of their environment, and they either choose to rebel against it or become one with it. And increasingly, there’s a distinct sense that Cronenberg sees no escape from the inevitable; doom prevails, fatigue lends itself to indifference. Open yourself up to the world and whatever is new soon becomes old. Viggo Mortensen roams the ruins of Athens in a shrouded cloak and is exhausted by what he sees; banality upon banality, rip-offs and cheap imitations, to the point that we’re all embracing a facsimile of reality.
As someone confronted with the day-in-day-out bureaucracy of medicine and someone that at one time orbited around a multitude of mediocre film “critics,” Crimes of the Future often felt like my two worlds colliding. Much like Mortensen’s character, it’s easy to grow weary of the trends and platitudes, the loopholes and social graces that need to be cleared in order to get ahead. And sometimes you question if the decisions you made have compromised your integrity. Maybe Cronenberg feels like he’s taken a bite out of the plastic and accepted the world as it is, on the decline. I don’t think I’m quite ready yet for that though; the necrotic rot of the soul hasn’t taken over my flesh.
Everything Everywhere All At Once
(Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan)
At once, Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan’s film is exhaustive and exhausting, a film busting with emotion that made me feel very old and tired. At times I pined for the single-serving version of the film in the form of an episode of Rick and Morty. Other times, I was genuinely moved by the imagination and moxie of its vision. Boil it down to its essence and you’ll find a film that advocates for communication and the importance of relationships in making these rotations around the sun all the more tolerable.
It’s also an acknowledgement that parents are not always right; as the product of immigrant parents, albeit of a different cultural background from that of Everything Everywhere, I saw numerous echoes in my experience as a first-generation “American.” I’ve struggled and reckoned with how I project my identity – outwardly my brown complexion suggests Latino. But my Mexican father never instilled a sense of what that means. He’ a man without a past, I’ve never met anyone from his family, and he rarely ever speaks of his life before coming to Chicago. My mother’s Polish family resides in the suburban enclaves of the city. We’d gather for holidays when I was a child but these interactions were often riddled with conflict and tumult. I tried to adopt this Polish heritage as my own in my early teens but it would so often feel like membership into this community was revoked because of the shade of my skin. The idea of identifying as American seemed laughable as a teenager and is positively abhorrent now.
And so I embraced the city of Chicago as my home. For over a decade it was a foundational element to who Daniel Nava is and was. To articulate it seems impossible, but it was elemental, a covalent bond to my genetic makeup. But as I entered my 30s and experienced one calamity after another, an exponential karmic retribution of the highest caliber along with ostracization from virtually every community I was a member of, to say that Chicago was a home often felt like I was residing on scorched Earth. But I persevere, continuously trying to figure myself out while maintaining those relationships closest to me. There’s a timeline where I have this all figured out. But there’s also other timelines where I let the red light turn on, jumped in front of that train, and left this world. Some of these days get hard, but ultimately the Earth of this timeline provides a bounty worth living for.
Great Freedom
(Sebastian Meise)
“I choose me,” says Kendrick Lamar on the track “Mirror” off his new album Mr. Morale and the Big Steppers. When you’re stuck in a prison, I guess you have to ask yourself if life is worth living. When you’re stuck in a prison for year upon year, I guess you have to wonder if life ever had been worth living. Sebastian Meise’s Great Freedom is about a Jewish gay man in the 1940s, imprisoned for his sexuality, and the relationships he develops during his prolonged stay. Featuring Christian Petzold standby Franz Rogowski, the film is a moving study on love as a process, where men confined by patriarchal masculinity learn to open up, express themselves, and attempt to connect with one another. Having read bell hooks’ All About Love and The Will to Change over the past six months, I found the film’s emphasis on feelings, love, and understanding in a milieu known for surveillance and violence to be profoundly affecting. Part of it is about establishing community and the despair that comes from being extracted from it. Rogowski has quickly emerged as being one of my favorite working actors and this is bar none the best performance I’ve seen all year. The way he encapsulates a perpetual yearning for connection among his fellow man, in spite of his perceived defects, is an all too powerful and prescient image. The final image of the film looks in a medium shot on Rogowski, a mirror to you, to me, as he awaits the inevitable; “point it at me so the reflection can mirror freedom.”
Kimi
(Steven Soderbergh)
Few things are worse than being alone when you aren’t strong enough to face your own thoughts. It’s something I think a few of us confronted during the height of COVID lockdowns and my capacity to remain truly “alone” was short-lived. I would be with my partner at the time, every day, non-stop. We wandered the Earth, making dates out of walking through cemeteries and waiting in line at grocery stores. It was the only way. The older I get the harder it is to be truly alone. I spent so much of my 20s in solitude, becoming embittered and curmudgeonly – as selfish as it sounds, my short-lived taste of community in my early 30s were some of the best moments of my life, and I certainly wasn’t going to let a pandemic compromise that. Death, as it were, was in solitude, aloneness. I had been dead for a long time.
Steven Soderbergh’s Kimi examines that loneliness and what it takes to hoist yourself from out of that rut of solitude. It’s disguised as a thriller, in the same way other Soderbergh films like Magic Mike is disguised as a stripper film, Ocean’s 11 as a heist film, etc. But ruminating underneath is a provocative deconstruction of surveillance and observation, worthy of comparison to Brian De Palma’s Blow Out or Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation. The canines of a banality like “we’re more connected but more alone” is sharper than I care to admit and in Kimi you find a character that relies on brief moments of connection to make her forget about the crushing aloneness of her insular, digitized life. It’s the best film about what it meant to live during the height COVID so far, and more importantly, a movie about how you’ve got to make yourself believe you’re not alone, even if you are.
Wood and Water
(Jonas Bak)
2021 was about regaining control. So I travelled, frequently by myself, around the world. The breeze from the Atlantic Ocean, from either sides in Miami or Lisbon, left me with the hopeful assumption that the archive of my despair will be swept away, erased, and recalibrated. That’s not how it panned out, obviously, but I can pretend. Lately I’ve been thinking about how my memory of someone is not the same memory that they share of me. Fondness is not always reciprocated.
Jonas Bak’s beautiful debut feature, Wood and Water, details a woman’s life following her husband’s death. She leads a quiet, solitary life. I hesitate to call her lonely, because the fine line between solitude and loneliness is tested to its limit here. Bak’s actual mother plays the nameless “Mother”, where the film follows her from rural Germany to Hong Kong as she hopes to see her son after years apart. This is a gentle film reminiscent of Hong Sang-soo’s Night and Day and Chantel Akerman’s News From Home. Their power comes from their observational acuity, wherein the melancholy of wandering a bustling foreign land offers moments of profound clarity and painful reminders of our own smallness. Wood and Water conveys both senses with a tenderness that I felt in my marrow. The cacophony of city life can be anxiety-producing, to the point that opening a window can feel like getting inhaled into an abyss. This is a film that advocates for mindfulness, to take solace in the present. Fondness may not always be reciprocated, but there’s solace in knowing that.