film reviews, interviews, features | BRWC

Author: Tyler Simeone

  • A Bird Flew In: Review

    A Bird Flew In: Review

    Review: Straight Out of the Nest, ‘A Bird Flew In’ – By Tyler Simeone.

    When lockdowns first began in March of last year, the sudden severance of a familiar routine had the effect of an old rug shaken out after decades in the attic: the loose stuff flung free, only the deep stains remained. A Bird Flew In, the COVID isolation drama from British debut director Kirsty Bell, probes at the relationship of a halted film’s cast and crew to their stains—an expecting couple’s strained home life, an actress’ maddening loneliness, an obsessive man’s voyeurism. Though often straining to maintain a balance between profound and ham-fisted, the film’s investigation into loneliness offers a welcome outstretched hand to the victims of the pandemic’s social rupture.

    The most instantly—and patience-testingly—recognizable elements of the film are the “COVIDisms” in which it steeps. The pandemic’s presence is immediate and ubiquitous, communicated through everything from the warnings of radio broadcasts to the modified quotidian language exemplified by the new congé of “stay safe.”

    This sort of overt dialogue alone (“Not like I’m going anywhere any time soon,” etc.) would not be frustrating beyond the viewer’s own weariness of corona-world language if it weren’t for the film’s consistent return to emotional hokiness. Its reliance on Al Joshua’s original soundtrack to express emotion—tenderly executed though it may be—elides the actors’ truly resonant performances, while voiceover narration of the poet Peter’s (Jeff Fahey) thoughts and cuts to flashback of his first encounter with love interest Anna (Julie Dray) at worst imply a mistrust of the audience’s ability to read affective bodily queues. 

    On the other hand, the film shines in its most quiet moments: when actress Rebecca—dazzlingly rendered by Camilla Rutherford in the film’s most poignant achievement—is left with no one to perform for, the camera watches as she talks to her teddy bear and decides to pour a little bit more into her cocktail glass. As she glides around her apartment and live streams her ranting “Weekly Whatever,” her slip into the delirium of loneliness is left mostly unscored and unnarrated. Given the space to breathe, the emotional power of these sequences is made exquisite. Where A Bird Flew In struggles, therefore, is in straddling the line between subtlety and egregiousness, its very palpable and often graciously expressed potential occasionally squandered by overexertion. 

    But perhaps this assessment is a bit too harsh: making a film at any time, let alone in the constraints of the early pandemic, is a feat worth applauding. And while it feeds its audience right from its hand, the obviousness of A Bird Flew In can be interpreted as a filmmaker’s attempt at processing and writing the history of a shock to the collective sensibility. Asserting that humans are in fact social animals, the film’s personal narratives reaffirm the need for connection and togetherness while elucidating the pandemic’s gift of relational unmasking. In other words, Bell expresses coronavirus’ destructive and constructive power: some of her characters lose their minds and their loved ones while others find new romance and rid themselves of formerly entrenched toxicities. 

    In the give and take of these narratives, the viewer is offered a reflection of the past two years in all their horrific and illuminating reality. When given the space to blossom, A Bird Flew In crafts intensely emotional validations of the pandemic’s best-of-times-worst-of-times complexities that ring fundamentally and honestly true. This is what it gives, but what it takes is patience, its maladroit writing and often maudlin beats a strain on a COVID-centric society’s burnt-out denizens. One could say more, but thankfully the film’s title offers its own metaphor: toddering out of the nest, the baby bird’s clumsiness presages a plummet, but when its little wings finally catch the air, it’s oh so graceful. 

    Images courtesy of Goldfinch Productions.

  • We’re Too Good For This: Review

    We’re Too Good For This: Review

    In We’re Too Good for This, the Heist Gets Theoretical.

    Missy Malek’s latest short We’re Too Good for This both is and is not a film “about” disability. It is neither the heartstring-pulling yet patronizing tale of overcoming—implying that one’s immutable nature is an obstacle to be surmounted—nor the touting of a proverbial token character—in which a disability is displayed for inclusionary clout but never once seriously interrogated.

    No, We’re Too Good for This is, in all essence, a heist movie, a crime thriller closer to something like Good Time (2017) with a refreshing injection of youthful joy and taunting rebelliousness. Reeling along with four friends with disabilities as they involve themselves in small-time drug trade, the film toys with both notions of accessibility and the adolescent desire for the extreme that problematize and then successfully disrupt screen depictions of disability with a free-wheeling assurance. 

    The Good Time comparison is—excuse the self-indulgence—a strong one: We’re Too Good for This exhibits a similarly erratic handheld camera and lightly pulsing electronic score reminiscent of the former film’s greatest moments of euphoric tension. In the opening sequence, Scott (Keron Day), Julian (Jayden Reid), and Anthony (Asa Hems) tear through a video game with abandon as the camera vibrates around them, Scott throwing an expression of pure ecstasy for the moment.

    This elation extends to film’s primary conflict, in which the friends—joined by a fourth, Fatima (Asnath Iosala)—infiltrate a garage to steal a hidden cache of cocaine from Anthony’s drug-dealing bully of a brother Steelo (Jude Chinchen). The camera gliding low along Anthony’s wheelchair, the cuts to parallel action outside the garage in which Julian and Scott distract the guards, the wavy and percussive score—the heist sequence carries a sense of urgency and a near-libidinal thrill for the proximity to danger. 

    Sure, an interpretation along the lines of “people with disabilities commit crimes, too” can be made. Instances that negate the perceived innocence or even juvenility of people with disabilities confirm this: in one instance, Anthony and Fatima talk their way out of custody by convincing an officer that Fatima lost her hearing aid behind the bin where the coke was stashed. In another, Scott distracts the guards outside by wailing madly, a bait-and-switch equivalent to the more classical heist film’s getaway driver clearing the way for a clean escape.

    On the other hand, the film’s conceit also asserts the commonness of youth with disabilities; like all young people, they crave adventure, performing acts of renegade disobedience with glee and aplomb. In this way, We’re Too Good for This alternates foregrounding its four burglars’ spirit and ability—the mind and the body—according to circumstance, melding the two into a more holistic and rounded view of character. 

    But perhaps these are the ways in which the film is not strictly about disability. Where it is, however, comes from a place more theoretical than scripted. Take, for example, a sequence in which the boys attempt to get Fatima on board: speaking clearly and signing simultaneously are Julian and Anthony, while Scott speaks but does not sign and Fatima signs but does not speak. The two forms of communication are used interchangeably, reinforcing one another even in instances where it is not strictly necessary to convey meaning (Julian and Anthony signing while speaking to one another, for example).

    Throughout this sequence, subtitles transcribe both the spoken and signed language, introducing a third form of communication to the mix. In this elegantly littered fusion, the accessibility of both diegetic and film-object language is placed in conversation; as Julian signs while speaking with Anthony for the benefit of Fatima, so too does the film subtitle speech and sign for the benefit of its audience. In this perhaps the film’s most interesting sequence, multiple language forms are used both within and without the film’s world to broaden the potential for understanding, bearing new syntactic relationships between content and form. 

    It’s here where We’re Too Good for This comes full circle in its negation of trope. Pairing challenged notions of character with investigations of film linguistics, the short disrupts in uncommon ways. While the film’s climactic final moments do offer a bit of predetermination in the form of a triumphant revenge—although, to its credit, that moment is similarly put on its head, albeit by an overwrought unexpected tragedy—We’re Too Good for This consistently urges its viewers to rethink their perceptions not only of disability but of its on-screen portrayals. When the credits roll, it’s good; when the film is thoroughly mulled over, as it asks its audiences to do, it’s great. 

    Images courtesy of Macpoppy Films.

  • Beyond The Infinite Two Minutes: Review

    Beyond The Infinite Two Minutes: Review

    Review: ‘Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes’ (2021) Joyously Bends Time (and Minds). By Tyler Simeone.

    Executed tastefully by Sokurov and perhaps no one else, the all-in-one-take film is a tired gimmick, drawing exclamations of “how did they do it!” from audiences at the expense of thoughtful exploration of theme and affect. Unless a film directly questions the nature of free-flowing real time, there is no reason besides the attention of its own spectacle to eschew the cut and the emotional power of editing that accompanies it.

    Thankfully, Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes does just that: under a surface that never reneges on humor, the continuous take debut film from Junta Yamaguchi and theater troupe Europe Kikaku unearths a stupefying relationship between humans and time by way of a café TV monitor that can see exactly two minutes into the future. 

    It’s a quirky little concept, a method of television time travel that can reveal only a miniscule elapse. But by establishing such a whimsical tone from its very conceit, Two Minutes denies the seriousness of other time travel films like Interstellar and the baffling Primer to play with a thoroughly relatable reaction to such newfound power. When café owners Kato (Kazunari Tosa) and Aya (Riku Fujitani) first discover their little digital wormhole, they use it to pull pranks on their friends, question their future selves, and anticipate the reaction of Kato’s love interest when he bucks up the courage to ask her out.

    As the film unfolds, the group experiments with nested TV timelines, using the Droste effect to establish futures that extend two, four, six, eight minutes forward. It’s silly, but wonderfully head-splitting: when Komiya (Gôta Ishida) is instructed by his future self to put a bottle of ketchup in his back pocket, he does so, only to instruct his past self to do so two minutes later, evoking the possibility of an endless loop of Komiyas and ketchup bottles extending infinitely through time. In this way, the film’s humor belies a more mind-bending exploration of temporal mechanics, an experience equally as pleasurable to watch as it is to dissect. 

    What’s at stake here is not, however, the pure theoreticals of quantum physics; Two Minutes uses its crafty set-up to explore its characters’ relationships to history and to themselves across the (albeit very short) reaches of time. When Past Aya asks her present self to predict the next era of Japanese history—a feat she obviously cannot accomplish being only two minutes ahead—it appears as if Present Aya is conversing with an entirely different person.

    Choices made and questions raised by the characters two minutes earlier appear completely illogical with the passage of time, raising the possibility that one can be a radically different person than one was in the very recent past. Their decisions—Komiya’s to take the ketchup bottle for example—become faits accomplis, each character beholden to the future they know is coming by fear of opening a paradox should they choose to deny it. In one evocative exchange, Tanabe (Masashi Suwa) tells Kato to ask his future self how he should season his eggs; Kato replies, “That’s my choice.” The present’s binding by the predestined reality of the future, however, would seem to indicate otherwise.

    Beyond the implications of futurevision on self-identification and free will, Two Minutes raises metatextual questions on the nature of film time. Because of its continuous take (the organizational gymnastics of which are no small feat of cinematic engineering), the passage of diegetic time in Two Minutes is equivalent to the passage of both real time and “reel” time. The film thus permits the viewer to experience the shock of being in two interacting timelines through the unfolding of actual cinematic time, likening the projection of a film to time travel itself. In other words, by watching a film, one can experience the past in its unfurling, traveling in time by way of a screen much like Kato and Aya do. 

    I evoke all of these ideas—the characters’ relationships to their past and future selves, the consequences on decision-making, the notion of cinema as time travel—to highlight the thoughtfulness that belies Two Minutes’ lighthearted (and decidedly not gimmicky) presentation. By framing such common cinematic tropes as time travel and the single take with a spirit of curiosity and self-aware frivolity, the film is able to gently guide its viewers’ minds deep into the recursive quagmire in a singularly delightful manner. The film screen housing an endless succession of nested Droste TVs, the viewer of Two Minutes can tumble into the depths of a funny little future, smiling all the way down. 

    Images courtesy of IndieCan.

  • Social Hygiene: Review

    Social Hygiene: Review

    Review: ‘Social Hygiene’ Is Alienating and Disruptive. Revel in It! By Tyler Simeone.

    The roving acting troupes of Central Park can be caught with a little bit of luck: dare to take a bucolic mid-afternoon stroll and you may find yourself trapped midway in an on-the-grass production of The Importance of Being Earnest, realizing why it was you saw a man in full period dress skulking through the trees like a Victorian sasquatch.

    Social Hygiene, the most recent experiment from Canadian agitator Denis Côté, plays out much like this—Antonin (Maxim Gaudette), a petty thief and arrogant man-child—is laid into by the five women in his life who’ve found his antics too much to bear: his sister (Larissa Corriveau), his wife (Evelyne Rompré), his lover (Eve Duranceau), a tax collector (Kathleen Fortin), and one of his victims (Éléonore Loiselle).

    In extended vignettes, Antonin argues his case to each woman in turn, both partners in the verbal brawl bedecked in 18th century garb, standing at least 15 feet apart in a Québecois field. The result is alienating but ultimately quite playful and profound, a society’s dirty laundry shaken out en plein air. 

    A film that can be easily criticized for its pretensions (the film really is people yelling at each other in a field for 75 minutes), Social Hygiene vaunts a curiously unconventional presentation: an immobile camera draws attention to the landscape, but a set of smudges on the lens draws an oppositional attention to the film object itself. Antonin and his detractors trade insults at full volume, competing with a truly cacophonous ambience of shrieking insects, crying birds, howling wind, and the bangs of an unplaceable construction site.

    Their Central-Park-theater blocking sees each character with feet planted, facing the camera; paired with the affected projection of their voices, the film’s vignettes recall a stripped-down stage performance, forced outdoors as if interrupted by a fire alarm. Against all odds, this peculiar set-up is ultimately quite enjoyable; freed from the rational and expected presentation of interpersonal discord, the viewer can bathe in Social Hygiene’s bizarre pleasures, from the comedy of its verbal combat to the ease of passing clouds illuminating and obscuring the fields’ depth of space.

    With each cheeky surprise—including the introduction of a truly kick-ass tragic wave track by Lebanon Hanover—Côté offers an experience both charming in its bewilderment and profound in its disruption. 

    “Profound” is not a word to be used lightly, but Social Hygiene’s subversion of expectation reaches beyond the level of novelty to touch on something truly thought-provoking. By stripping down the arguments around which the film revolves, the film exposes them in their most elemental form as speech and the people who carry it. Like simmering a sauce down to a sticky reduction, the film simplifies relational and social strife, placing its very heavy burden less on the characters’ contexts than on the space—the physical distance, the pauses in their words—between them.

    This is about more than just Antonin and his grating idiosyncrasies: robbed of its systemic framework, the “question” of the social-order outcast—embodied by the archetypal thief—is framed through his relationships to others, ultimately unveiled as a cruel and absurd performance of blame. This may be the titular “hygiene” in question: how, Côté asks, does individualized spite perpetuate societal alienation?

    Audacious as always, he turns the question right back around on his critics: how does filmic alienation perpetuate individualized spite? Judging by the film’s spate of Letterboxd detractors, outrage against subversion is a surprisingly easy trap to fall into, an obstacle to mutual understanding that Social Hygiene seems all too familiar with. 

    Images courtesy of GreenGround Productions.