I don’t imagine a funeral, but if I did, no one is going to say that Daniel Nava was a good man.
Over the past 16 months, I’ve lived my life: sunrise to sunset, day-in and day-out. Each day, I’ve thought about quitting. You talk about red flags and all I saw were green lights giving me permission to resign, expire, and retreat to the periphery of life’s frame. Wearing a surgical mask makes the gray, fluorescently lit interior of a psych ward impossibly more stifling. I had to escape. I travelled, from the isolated beaches of Lauderdale-by-the-Sea to stumbling through the dimly lit limestone streets of Lisbon while listening to “I Know The End” by Phoebe Bridgers on repeat. From traversing uphill on the winding, rocky paths of Shenandoah National Park to covered in powdered sugar from a beignet in NOLA. I drank, a lot. Lost in forests, hiding in caves, anything to calm my agitated mind instead of pouring kerosene to the fire. I would feel invigorated, I would feel defeated, all within the span of seconds. The scars on my wrists fade but are still there. “You can’t forget,” I remind myself.
For a portion of the last 16 months, I thought that there might be some kind of alchemy, a syntax of words that could express all that I’m feeling, to communicate my remorse, to clarify without polarizing, to offer some nuance. I wrote out of anger. I wrote out of compassion. It all seemed vain and valueless. I have mentally composed some version of this essay a hundred-thousand times in my head and have erased it each time. The grooves of my brain deepen with each repetitive thought and form habitual beliefs and attitudes about myself and others, to the point where these projected images become indistinguishable from reality. That’s not you. That’s not me.
The conversations during this time have all been skull-clutchingly difficult, but the alternative – belligerence, community shunning, isolation - have been a death. Yes, I know: I brought this upon myself. Yes, I know: shunning is easier than facing discomfort. I don’t believe that you can have these sorts of conversations in a dark room illuminated by your LED-backlit screen. To quote the novelist Sarah Schulman, “Anyone who refuses to hear the details is making a deliberate decision not to understand.” This isn’t the arena to have this conversation. I know it’s uncomfortable, but if you care: take the time to have a conversation - a conversation focused on the details - with me, voice-to-voice, face-to-face. When the goal is mutual resolution and not punishment, you find yourself unclinging to anything resembling an ego.
No one could prepare for my last 16 months. I don’t think it’s the kind of thing that you can prepare for; it just has to be lived through. And so I have. I’m done sitting in a stream of critical, judgmental thought all day long. I’m tunneling out, clearing a path, fortifying the perimeter. Much has happened. It’d be a shame to stay the same. Whatever despair and self-loathing that is within me still resides there. Its home seems permanent. But I know I’m not alone. I’m not about to let myself act in a way that brings pain to other people. I may not be eligible for compassion and I’m not asking for it. Right now, all I want to do is write about the films I love. The films that have made life worth living, that have made my life worth living. This is it.
20.
Shiva Baby
(Emma Seligman)
I’ve dated a few Jewish girls in my lifetime and they’re all like this, so credit to Emma Seligman for getting it right. My first and likely last Hanukkah dinner took place during COVID. My partner at the time and I traveled to Buffalo Grove, an opulent suburb northwest of Chicago, to her childhood home to dine with her parents and siblings. As a rona-precaution, we dined in separate quarters throughout the house – a few chowing on latkes and challah bread in the kitchen, others in the dining room, others in the living room. Rather than conversing among ourselves we (everyone but me) shouted at one another. It’s a large house and it left a few people hoarse by the end of the evening. The only thing louder was the exclusively purple interior decorating sensibility of my ex’s parents. It was awkward and tense. She warned me that she came from a family of shouters.
Seligman’s film is all about the cringe. A young woman finds herself at a Shiva, only to see her sugar daddy at the event. Hijinks ensue. It’s kind of like Janicza Bravo’s Zola, insofar that it subverts your expectations of what the power dynamic would look like in a situation like that. It examines the always-tense relationships we have with our parents, and the general anxiousness associated with transitioning into a sexual being in front of them. I’ve thought about this film a lot over the past few months and can’t help but laugh, not so much thinking that I dodged a bullet, but instead contemplating if I would’ve ever had the cerebral stamina for that much yelling, that much cringe, that much purple. I’ll never know, but that was one Hanukkah I’ll never forget.
19.
The Last Duel
(Ridley Scott)
“Believe Women” is the slogan in circulation, and Ridley Scott’s The Last Duel leaves no room for speculation. Featuring a triptych narrative involving the quote unquote truths of two men and a woman, Scott resists the urge for ambiguity, instead lingering on Marguerite de Carrouges' (Jodie Comer) truth. It’s her story, the final of three. Where before, she was merely an object in Jacques Le Gris (Adam Driver) and Sir Jean de Carrouges’ (Matt Damon) narrative, it’s the actions done unto her that conveys the impossible task of a woman attempting to assert her agency. As I was watching The Last Duel, I reflected on a line from another one of Scott’s films, The Counselor: “You are not removed from the world in which you live. The decisions you make have consequences, no matter how far you’ve insulated yourself from them.” Indeed, the truth will set you free, but not until it’s done with you.
18.
Zola
(Janicza Bravo)
If Andrea Arnold’s American Honey or Sean Baker’s The Florida Project conveys a cautious refrain about the victims of 21st century capitalism, then Janicza Bravo’s Zola is the socialist yaass-ifications of those films. It’s better than that sounds. Adapted from a Twitter thread, this gonzo odyssey is all about seizing the means of production and asserting your agency within an industry dictated my violent men. Of the 148 tweets that inspired Zola, the one that registers most clearly is the brief discussion on the value of pussy: So when they finished he gave her $100. I said "jess, u sellin puss for $100??? Pussy is worth thousands." It's one of those films where nothing gets resolved and its appeal is in the cumulative absurdity of every incident that follows the preceding one; this may be the closest thing I’ve seen to a spiritual successor to Martin Scorsese’s After Hours.
17.
The Killing of Two Lovers
(Robert Machoian)
Robert Machoian’s The Killing of Two Lovers is a painful film about the kind of loneliness that overwhelms us when a life of stable truths gives way to unstable possibilities. It’s less about getting the story and more about getting to the point, which is to say that the whys and whences aren’t as important as the feeling and mood that Machoian strives for. The romantic (i.e; silly) ideations I tend to have is that a proper union lasts forever and a truly eternal bond can't be severed easily. Watching this you see that perspective mirrored in one partner but not the other. And it's fucking depressing. The compressed frame and dreary Utah scenery serves to transform a hint into a statement, and reminiscent of Aki Kaurismäki's The Match Factory Girl, we see an act of overt violence lend itself to something arguably more trenchant: a portrait of prosaic domesticity.
16.
Procession
(Robert Greene)
An unexpected companion piece to Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir: Part II , Robert Greene’s Procession is the filmmaker’s most accomplished execution of self-reflective cinema. It seemed impossible that Greene could expound on the communal guilt and toxicity of a mining town in Bisbee ’17, but his mode of reenactment-as-therapy is at its most visceral and affecting here. It’s where he, along with the help of a drama therapist, collaborate with a group of adult men who were the victims of sexual abuse by the Catholic Church. Each of the men observed are broken in their own way, whether it’s Mike Foreman, who disassociates from his trauma by rocking himself while listening to The Who’s “Behind Blue Eyes” or Dan Laurine, who has mentally blocked out the locales of his abuse, making his efforts to recreate them all the more painstaking; like an Homeric odyssey. Each man is afforded the opportunity to dramatize their grief and trauma, with Greene following their direction in producing short films.
Despite the subject matter and obvious despair it evokes, this is profoundly uplifting stuff. The victims here are provided with an opportunity to examine their traumas and confront them in a way that can offer some modicum of catharsis. It permits them with the capacity to relate to their traumas with honesty and immediacy, so as to excise it from ever being a permanent aspect of their character. And to do so through art is positively enriching – a mammoth achievement given the circumstances. Whatever excision of trauma or grief I explore in my writing seems positively minuscule in comparison but I guess that’s the point; whether it’s through writing, making a film, or talking to a therapist, our modes of healing tend to require some measure of collaboration. You don’t have to go alone. You were never meant to.
15.
Bergman Island
(Mia Hansen-Løve)
I saw myself at a creative nadir at the start of lockdown. I find it nearly impossible to write at home. There are certainly more distractions at all the coffee shops and bars that I frequent but the simple act of changing my milieu and dedicating a new space to commit to work always tends to inspire. One of life’s great joys is opting for a bottomless cup of coffee on a bright fall day, observing the world pass by – the trees in the breeze, the café habitué sparking up a conversation with any stranger that’s willing to offer their time – and begin writing.
In Mia Hansen-Løve’s Bergman Island, she examines how two filmmakers, a couple, reconcile their divergent creative aspirations. The older husband, Tony (Tim Roth), electing to work on the Swedish island of Fårö, where Ingmar Bergman produced many of his greatest films, progresses with his new script at an unfettered speed. Meanwhile, his younger wife, Chris (Vicky Krieps), struggles. Her attempts to break out of the shadow of Bergman leads her on a sojourn with a local Swedish man while her husband embraces the tradition of the island. What follows is an examination of creative dissonance, where our capacity for creating art hinges on understanding where we’re from. To Tony, Fårö’s history permits him to continue in a tradition already paved by a titan. To Chris, Fårö’s history is an encumbrance, terrain already charted; she’s looking for the scenic route. Chris’ story, a story that Tony can barely pay attention to, provides the film with its metatextual richness, presenting a uniquely feminine narrative within the architecture of Sweden’s most renowned filmmaker. With each new film, Hansen-Løve is proving she’s not standing on the shoulders of giants, but is instead among them.
14.
C’Mon C’mon
(Mike Mills)
Mike Mills’ films are always a little difficult for me. They’re both alien and familiar. His three films, Beginners, 20th Century Women, and C’mon C’mon are rooted in the familial. I’ve never had much of a bond with my parents, and my relationship with my brother is rocky, even if we’re at a much better place now than ever before. The fixtures of my childhood fade in and out, passing satellites that couldn’t stay in orbit with my mother’s temperament. Whether it was my uncle, my godmother, or my grandfather; they came and went depending on my mom’s tolerance of them. My father, a man without a past, just watched as these people entered and exited our lives. I have vivid memories of my father, my brother and I on holidays, watching television in the basement of a suburban home that belonged to a Polish relative, confused as to whether or not the shouting going on upstairs was arguing or merely the way Eastern Europeans communicated. Somewhere in between, I decided. The holidays are always difficult for me.
My dad told me he loved me exactly once. Several decades later, after losing his job, he told me he contemplated suicide. Those are the only moments that I ever got anything profound out of him. His mind is going. He talks about living on the cross streets of Racine and Wilson when he was a bachelor with a kind of exuberance that makes it sound like he’s recounting a dream. My brother and I tease him about it behind his back. But it’s a 40-year memory that still sticks with him. If all he remembers is in black and white, the memory of that is in CinemaScope. My memories of him during my childhood are untrustworthy. He used a belt for discipline because his father did the same. And his father. And his father, etc. When he dies I don’t foresee that I’ll mourn those moments. We didn’t have conversations like the characters in C’mon C’mon. He didn’t read from a PDF to try to understand me or figure out what I was feeling. He’d beat the shit out of me and moved on. But what I see in this movie is what I want to be. Someone with a heart that’s open, someone who doesn’t let the petty frustrations of the day get the best of him. In some ways I was like Jesse (Woody Norman) as a child; petulant, bratty, a know-it-all. But I didn’t really have the kind of family or openness that Mills advocates for. Nobody knows what they’re doing, but I think talking through things isn’t an especially bad place to start, especially when considering the alternatives.
13.
Petite Maman
(Céline Sciamma)
On the subject of my mother: I’ve never been close to her. Her road is a hard one. Afflicted with polio at a young age, she lost the use of a portion of the left side of her body. She can’t use her left arm. She walks with a limp. She emigrated from Poland to Chicago in her late teens, along with her father and brothers, after her mother died. The story of how she met my father changes depending on how many drinks she’s had. Her nose gets bright red when she's drunk. Whether my parents met while learning English at Truman College or following a random hookup is unclear. She prefers the romantic version. She doesn’t share much about her personal life, especially her history before I was born. She believes in labels like “mother” and “son” and is rigid about the connotations associated with each. She had me in her mid 20s, my brother as she turned 30; an impossible thought to wrap my head around. She’s stubbornly traditional and my worst fear is to grow up like her.
Céline Sciamma’s follow-up to Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Petite Maman had me thinking about my relationship with my mother, especially when I was a kid. There’s this DFW quote about how you’re never supposed to trust someone’s opinion of their parent, that it’s too clouded with judgment to accurately reflect who they are. Maybe when you’re a child, you can get to something more accurate, more elemental about them. I don’t know. The film, a fairy tale that sees a young girl befriending the metaphysical embodiment of her mother as a child, humanizes without placating. This is the sort of film that could have been comprised of cliché lallations on the nature of respecting your elders, but instead examines the moment of realizing that your mother is a complex human, with a past riddled with joys and despair. We can often be unforgiving of our parents, for not being the kind of person we wanted or needed them to be. I know I have. It’s unfair. We’ll never have the best relationship, but I’ve made peace with that.
12.
The French Dispatch
(Wes Anderson)
The prevailing and ultimately useless descriptors applied to Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch has been that it’s an ode to journalism and the filmmaker’s most excessive film. It’s not really either of those things. Instead, it registers as a film cast of a different mold, concerned with a kind of ephemerality that doesn’t elicit your typical art-induced sadness, or anger, or any other well-established emotion. It’s really more of a complete abasement, a sense of humility when confronted with the passage of time and the extinguishment of a way of thinking. It’s mournful and prescient. The luxury of despair is framed in such a way as to suggest that our connection with art is often dissociative; capitalism, rebellion, and violence inform every facet of our being, threatening to become part of the foreground of our 2D lives at any moment. I can’t remember the last time a Wes Anderson film felt this cerebral and cynical. Everyone knows that Jim Jarmusch’s mantra is to suggest that the world is perfect and to appreciate the details, what The French Dispatch presupposes is: maybe not?
11.
The Power of the Dog
(Jane Campion)
In a directionless current trudging down a road to nowhere, the anomie felt when living a life that’s not the one you want can weigh heavily on the spirit. It’s a recurring thread in many of Jane Campion’s films, and the prevailing sentiment of practically every character in The Power of the Dog. Whether it’s Phil’s (Benedict Cumberbatch) perfuse hostility toward the effeminate, concealing his own sexuality or Rose’s (Kirsten Dunst) isolation driving her to the bottom of a bottle, the characters here are confined to social mores, imposed by others and themselves. Joan Didion once wrote about how self-deception remains the most difficult deception. It’s the lies that these people tell themselves that keep them confined as animals trapped in a cage. Fleeting moments of vulnerability must happen away from prying eyes, in a man-made Eden. But to indulge in that vulnerability outside of those confines will seemingly come at the ultimate price. It’s a one-sided war where we score our victories when we can, left to wander the earth as corpses dreaming of a life that we can’t have.
10.
Undine
(Christian Petzold)
It begins with a breakup. Christian Petzold’s Undine is foremost a film on German trauma, of living in the shadow of evil, recovering, and trying to start over. Akin to a film like Kogonada’s Columbus, it’s fixated on architecture, the development of Berlin, and how to forge ahead without losing sight of the traditions of the past. But it begins with a breakup. Undine (Paula Beer) is at a café with her partner Johannes (Jacob Matschenz), across from her work, where she begs him to stay to mend their relationship. He doesn’t wait. She takes on a new lover, but Johannes’ apparition haunts her.
The longer I’m in Chicago, the more landmines I set. It’s a city full of triggers. I’ve stumbled into the smoke of an old flame on more than a few occasions. At times it’s smothering, to live in a city where every street has a story, every venue has a different association with the love of your life for the moment. But like Undine, if I’m ever to move forward, I’m going to need to stop looking backward. I don’t believe in ghosts so why am I letting myself get haunted by them?
9.
The Card Counter
(Paul Schrader)
“Will God forgive us?” Reverend Ernst Toller (Ethan Hawke) asks that in Paul Schrader’s previous film, First Reformed and it informs a lot of what we see in his new film, The Card Counter. The new Man That Journals is William Tell (Oscar Isaac), a stoic poker player that had a brief stint in prison. You get the sense that he’s distracting himself, engaging in escaping the knots of his past, even as a new noose begins to tighten. When a boy from his past looks for his help, Tell provides him guidance, akin to Toller and his parishioner – they’ve both failed so many that they see this as an opportunity for salvation, for grace, from all their bad choices. That’s a recipe for trouble with Schrader substituting one façade – the mega church of First Reformed – for another in the grossly underlit and unflashy interiors of Midwestern casinos. In one of Schrader’s most stunning visual gambits, we see Tell on a date at the Missouri Botanical Garden, a luminous visual experiment akin to the suspension of gravity in First Reformed. At least Tell had his moment before the rush of reality came crashing down.
8.
Titane
(Julia Ducournau)
We don’t require dramatic or life-threatening events to wake up but, speaking from experience, they do help. The ground below our feet gives way and we reach a bottom. And that bottom is a death. Julia Ducournau’s Titane, above all else, is about transformation. It examines the annihilation of a past identity and the profound and painstaking efforts required to fit in, to change, and to acclimate to another person’s vision. It’s a brutal and exciting film that spoke to me like a confession. We find a woman with a traumatic past and a violent present, escaping the consequences of her brutality and assuming an entirely new identity. But just like her past, this new name, sex, gender, and person she becomes has their own set of baggage and history. It all comes together as a rich text on the nature of forgiveness, both from yourself and others, and the Sisyphean task of leaning toward discomfort. Hurt people hurt people; but the helped are more likely to help.
7.
Licorice Pizza
(Paul Thomas Anderson)
My idea of romance can be seen in films like the Before trilogy, Punch-Drunk Love, Modern Romance, Chungking Express, and Phantom Thread. That response has already yielded at least a half-dozen eyebrow furrows from ex-partners. What are your red flag movies?
This coming-of-age story of 15-year old Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman) attempting to win the affections of twentysomething Alana Kane (Alana Haim) fits snuggly within a pattern in Paul Thomas Anderson’s filmography of power dynamic asymmetries: the mentor-protégé dynamic in Hard Eight, the incestuous adopted family of Boogie Nights, the soon-to-be widow and her relationship to her husband in Magnolia, Barry’s arrested development and subsequent appeal to Lena in Punch-Drunk Love, Alma’s tumultuous ascension from muse to partner in the House of Woodcock, etc. But within that pattern we see a rejection of subordination and a purposeful attempt for all the people involved to be better versions of themselves. In Licorice Pizza, Gary’s at the twilight of his career as a child actor, stuck in rooms where the adults want him to either grow up or go back. Meanwhile, Alana remains at home with her parents and sisters, an adult treated like a child, stuck. She doesn’t seem to see things coming until long after they’ve arrived. In each other, Alana and Gary see the potential for something greater. And so they strive for something beyond them. The world keeps moving, an Armageddon approaches; cars line up outside of gas stations but they keep running, keep hustling, toward something meaningful that they don’t know yet until the moment when they collide with one another. I think it’s a beautiful sentiment on which to hang your heart onto. You can waste away from shreds to shards hoping to find the one but perhaps the day will come when you collide under the marquee of a movie theater, run into each other haphazardly in Hawaii, or find each other at a NYE party. At least in PTA’s world.
6.
In & Of Itself
(Frank Oz)
The parable of the blind men and the elephant is the kind of children’s fable intended to impart the wisdom that what is felt by a creepy coven, what is defined by committee, fails to capture the whole truth. We’ll seek out ways to define and label something or someone, to create paradigms that provide comfort based on past experiences, to strip away any doubt. It’s hard to look past what something looks like, so why bother with the discomfort.
Frank Oz’s In & Of Itself, a documentary/recording of Derek DelGaudio’s one-man magic-adjacent show wrecked me. The film captures several performances from New York City’s Daryl Roth Theatre, relying on cleverly-deployed echoes that convey the broad similarities and confounding uniqueness of each performance. The platitudes expressed here may all seem banal and obvious; that no label ascribed to you defines who you are. But to me that registered with profound immediacy, given that day-in-day-out I look at myself in the mirror and see my aging face hanging lower on my skull, the bags under my eyes forming luggage, my lack of kindness, my hostility, my timidity, all glaring back at me. I’ll angle myself differently in that mirror but no matter what I do, it’s a reflection that still stares back at me. As I get older, things from the past weigh on me. But I need to eschew all the self-pity and imagined pessimism. Not every moment is a rebirth into awfulness or indifference. Suffering originates from confusion and I’m awake and ready to wise up. There’s goodness in there.
5.
Drive My Car
(Ryusuke Hamaguchi)
The most recent Haruki Murakami novel, Killing Commendatore, details a portrait artist's sojourn to a mountain town where he comes to grips with the end of his life's most important relationship. It's filled with all the magical realism and surreal imagination that are synonymous with the novelist. But as you'd expect, it's the ruminations on chaotic relationships and lost love that really spoke to me. Numerous passages involving the way two people's lives can overlap and intertwine (and then extinguish) were the sort of nectar that kept me going in late 2018 and 2019 when I was getting over a significant breakup. It's that stuff that keeps me going now.
I haven't read the Murakami short story that Drive My Car is based on, but like Lee Chang-Dong's Burning, it's the kind of adaptation that seems to incorporate every Murakami novel all at once (minus a cat, I suppose). There's the sense of ennui when grieving, the quiet joys of having time to yourself, and the subsequent torrent of loneliness that soon follows. And there's the obvious catharsis found through art, the ways in which art pierces through language to communicate something useful about what is to be alive. Of all the three-hour films out there, this is one that I'd be most excited to revisit: a film about the endurance it takes to remain upright, about the series of contradictions and mental acrobatics that need to be performed to love someone enduringly, and the secrets that bottle up within us, threatening to make us explode.
4.
Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy
(Ryusuke Hamaguchi)
It’s been a weird year, like a giant bruise that won't heal, every day a freshly open lesion. Or so it was for a while. I was caught in a love triangle, practically a mirror of the first story in Hamaguchi's remarkable triptych anthology. And much like “Magic (Or Something Less Assuring),” it was one of those painful experiences riddled with fantastical delusions and a complete lack of restraint. It was a torrent of passions, leaving everyone hurt and lonely and empty.
The second story, “Door Wide Open” examines how that conceivable restraint can still lead to wounded hearts, how wanton desire cannot always be reciprocated, and how the freedom to choose doesn't mean that you're making the right choice; life provides no chooser's manual. This was the most ruminative of the three narratives, a melancholy examination on embracing the textures of life, on needing to not shy away from the awkward experiences that life presents. Consequences provide their own reward.
And the final narrative, "Once Again" suggests something akin to Certified Copy, only to lay all its cards out on the table. It's a beautiful exercise in empathy, where a case of mistaken identity permits two women to reckon with the specific grief that's haunted them throughout their lives. K, my ex partner of over a decade, left a permanent impression on my life. And after we broke up, I wondered if I would ever fill that K-shaped hole in my heart. It's a glaring omission that made me question my value. As a character in the short suggests, it's "a hole that nothing can fill."
I doubt I would've appreciated this film as much had it not been for the cumulative pain and joys of the past year. There's been a lot of despair and chaos during that time, and some moments of profound happiness. Hamaguchi's film advocates for permeance; to not cheat ourselves of the present moment. To cease being a cog and escape our prisons of guilt and regret. To embrace a world of magical thinking.
3.
The Worst Person in The World
(Joachim Trier)
At the start of quarantine, I would cycle to the Lakefront Trail and watch the sunrise. I would pile on layers during the snowy and cold Chicago winter, the tires on my road bike ill-equipped for such a ride, my bike lights never working, the streets desolate, the sky black. That’s how I would frequently begin my day, up until the city shut off access. That’s still been my preferred post-pandemic hobby, to catch the sunrise. It’s reliable, it’s humbling, and it’s beautiful, whether I catch it along Lake Michigan or on either side of the Atlantic Ocean, from Miami to Lisbon.
Julie (Renate Reinsve) watches the sunrise a few times through The Worst Person in the World’s runtime. She stops in place, examines where she’s at in the world, and is overwhelmed. It’s a feeling I sympathize with: a confrontation with your own smallness, an acknowledgement of time lumbering on, pausing for no one. Trier’s film, an episodic narrative detailing a millennial eking out a living in Oslo, reminded me so much of myself and my past relationships that it’s embarrassing. It’s about the subtle ways we fall into things and how if you’re not careful, you won’t so much live your life as much as have life live around you. The film’s crescendo moment, where Julie flicks a light switch, pausing the world around her, to pursue another man that offers her the promise of something new and exciting, is the sort of thing that I felt in my marrow. Sure, it’s wish fulfillment. A fantasy that can never be. Instead we learn the hard way. History has no Command-Z. But that’s what makes Trier’s film so beautiful – you briefly have that moment where you can live vicariously through people that remind you of you, and remedy the mistakes of the past. As Don Hertzfeldt put it, “now is the envy of all the dead.” I’m grateful for every sunrise now, and I’m grateful for this film.
2.
A Hero
(Asghar Farhadi)
What makes you eligible for compassion?
I know the liberal account would suggest that the answer is: everyone. But in practice - in the Twittersphere™ - perceptions of accountability and toxicity have degenerated into meme status, rendering any sane conversation on the matter to boil down to petty bickering; to shun instead of talk. It's the modern malady, to drown out and deny people the complexities of their lives.
Asghar Farhadi's filmography has specifically observed our relationship with institutions and the negotiations we make to participate in an inflexible society. A Hero sees someone who has already been shunned by society, a prisoner, attempt to reacclimate. He traverses, uphill, literally and figuratively. Efforts are made to heal. Things never unhappen but with time and effort, to permit room for grief, relief, and misery, you'd hope to mend. But two people in a situation means two experiences, two points of view, two sources of information, two voices. And that's not to mention the orbiting people around, those that support their sides, and those that demonize the other.
I haven't encountered a better film that articulates this modern plight, the contemporary Call-Out Culture, and the profound ridiculousness of how individual projections of past experiences end up informing every detail of the present. It's a frustrating, fist-clenching film that made me feel seen. What if we cared enough and took the time to have a real, genuine conversation, one centered on details and not aiming to produce dichotomies of victim/perpetrator. Maybe then our compassion wouldn't be filtered through a funnel of asterisks and prerequisites.
1.
The Souvenir: Part II
(Joanna Hogg)
In my 20s I would frequently suggest that if I didn’t accomplish anything meaningful by the time I was 30 that I would kill myself. I’m 33 now. I haven’t accomplished anything meaningful, but I do have things to say. Maybe that’s enough. I’m naïve, perhaps hubristic, to believe that whatever regressions and failures I’ve endured will give way to a leap forward. All this cold hostility and tumult has to lead me to warmth. And so I write, get some of it out, and breathe for a moment.
The Souvenir: Part II isn’t about excision or catharsis. It’s about working your way through grief and trauma, about the impossible task of trying to communicate a feeling into words. It’s compassion through reenactment, about mentally and physically going through the graveyard, the hall of mirrors, the memory museum, etc. of the past to clear away the fog of the present. S, an ex, mentioned to me how she returned to Promontory Point after our breakup to eat a sandwich. It’s a place where we shared a tender moment, but it’s also a place where she ate a sandwich. Joanna Hogg’s film is that – about ownership of a memory, about striving for some measure of clarity. We have memories that shape our idea of our partners, and when we cease to see them again, our memories become increasingly less reliable. You’re permitted to mourn, you’re permitted to miss them. And while I have had every intention of wallowing in despair forever, it turns out that there’s work to be done. Sandwiches to eat. Movies to see. Concerts to attend. Countries to visit. Errands to run. As much as I intended to remain in ruins, life has to be lived. I’m a human being with life to live, that’s my job. I’ll raise a glass of champagne to that.