"Au Revoir Les Enfants" (1987)

Morality isn’t something we’re innately born with. We learn it. Partly from family and teachers, but morality is most strongly discovered through experience. Au Revoir Les Enfants is a film about a friendship between two young boys at a Catholic monastic school in Nazi-occupied France. One of the boys Jean Bonnet (Raphael Fejto) is a Jew being hidden away under a fake identity by the priests of the monastery. The other boy Julien Quentin (Gaspard Manesse) slowly puts one and two together about Jean’s real identity; Julien first hounds Jean for answers before easing into a friendship after realizing how petty his actions have been. Julien is at a point in his life where he is still coming into his own, and he hides his uncertainty behind false bravado. Behind his demeanor is the personality of a sensitive soul, and his character has much more in common with Jean than he’d like to admit. But Jean is a bullied figure of ridicule due to his social awkwardness and intellectual rigor. Julien even participates in this outcasting, before it begins to dawn on him what he is colluding in. The film subtly suggests how the cruelty of humans begins at a young age in small practices of indignity and chauvinism, and it contrasts this with the small acts of kindness and connection between Julien and Jean. Director Louis Malle based the story on his own childhood experiences, and he aims for total immersion, both in the period itself and the school setting. The authenticity of Malle’s careful observation only serves to heighten the film's chilling outcomes. Julien, Malle's stand-in, will carry these lessons with him for the rest of his life; how could he not? How could we not?

Grade: A-

"The Last Seduction" (1994)

Imagine a noir told from the perspective of the femme fatale. In this situation, we’re not meant to see her egotistical, deadly manipulation as evil or wicked but as brilliant and delightful. Femme fatale literally translates to fatal female, both for the fatalism the character instills in the character she meets but for her own inevitable downfall. But noir fans have long known that this moralizing – largely due to the Hays Code – couldn’t detract from the fact that the femme fatale was a vital part of the genre's appeal. We understand that she’s a sly seductress and con-artist with ulterior motives, and we love her all the more for it. The Last Seduction is an excellent neo-noir about Bridget Gregory (a terrific performance by Linda Fiorentino); a woman who runs off with ill-gotten gains from a drug deal she strings her husband along into. Bridget’s witless husband Clay (Bill Pullman) isn’t just going to let her get away the hundreds of thousands of dollars, and attempts to find where she's hiding out in the rural up-state New York town of Bretton, just outside of Buffalo. Bridget settles down and starts plotting how she can extricate herself from the problem of her husband, while still keeping all of the cash for herself. She proceeds to set a trap upon a small town man (Peter Berg) looking to escape his humdrum existence. Part of the pleasure of watching the film derives from how much you know about noir, and how the film undercuts expectations about how this all should play out. But it also comes from the wonderfully ornate dialogue, sensuous atmosphere, and seeing how the thoroughly clever and awful Bridget outsmarts everyone around her, and the slow reveal of her well-thought out, two-steps-ahead-of-everyone scheme. When it comes down to it, Bridget is monstrous, but she lives in a world where everyone feels the people around them owe them something. She’s just better at taking advantage of this fact.  

Grade: A-

"Star Trek: Into Darkness", "Forbidden Planet", and Sci-Fi's Gender Problems

One of the many things Star Trek: Into Darkness did really poorly was gender politics. The film’s conception of gender seemed to be stuck back in the 1950’s. This might feel like an overstatement, until you actually go back and watch a piece of science fiction from the 1950’s, such as Forbidden Planet.

Forbidden Planet has one female character, Anne Francis’ Alta, whose entire role is essentially to stand around and look pretty. She’s even dressed in outfits designed solely for how revealing they are (outfits that actually aren’t that different from those of the female crew members of Into Darkness). And if that weren’t bad enough, in the film, she’s all but called a slut for the way she dresses. Oh, dear lord, there is an embarrassing amount of victim blaming and slut shaming in Forbidden Planet. The truly terrible thing is that the character has been isolated from all humans, except for her father, for her entire life and so she has no clue about social convention or propriety. But, despite this fact, the characters judge her based on cultural values that are beyond her. In one scene, a shipmate takes advantage of the fact that she doesn’t know anything about kissing, and it gets highly predatory and creepy – and if that weren’t bad enough she gets blamed for the incident, not the shipmate. When Alta isn’t around for the sake of looking attractive or being wooed, she exists to be saved in damsel in distress fashion. 

Now consider Into Darkness’ Dr. Carol Marcus (Alice Eve). She’s supposedly a brilliant doctor and a proficient fighter, and yet we rarely see her doing either. The one time she goes off to use her scientific knowledge to investigate the suspicious torpedoes, we never actually see her in action. Instead, we witness her strip down into her underwear, and for no better reason than to tantalize us. Dr. Marcus is reduced from a complex, smart fighter and a valuable asset to the Enterprise crew to a body. Similarly, the only other major female character, Zoe Saldana’s Nyoto Uhura, is diminished to the importance of a subplot where she has romantic squabbles with her boyfriend Spock (Zach Quintos). Uhura only matters as far as she can serve the story of Spock, the male character.

But these depictions of gender grow out a larger valutative shortcomings in these films. Forbidden Planet’s space crew is part of an intergalactic peacekeeping organization quite similar to the one of Star Trek (not entirely surprising since Gene Roddenberry cites the film as an influence), and yet the crews in both violate primary directives. The amount of cultural judgment placed upon the people of another planet by Forbidden Planet’s crew throws into question their ability to be arbitrators of justice. In Into Darkness, the Enterprise's crew ends up causes more damage than good. They wreck large parts of Earth in their efforts to defend it and the galaxy at large. They’ve ethically compromised themselves, and if anything, all members of the Enterprise should be put under a hearing for their misconduct, no matter how good their intentions were.

Forbidden Planet, however, is redeemed due to its thematic intentions and its groundbreaking special effects. Forbidden Planet could have worked as an episode of the original series of Star Trek if its runtime were trimmed. The film is about people with different beliefs and values at odds, and how the good intentions of characters end up causing more harm than they ever planned to. But unlike Into Darkness, Forbidden Planet’s tighter plotting actually allows it to sit on ideas and mull them over. When the revelation about what Walter Pidgeon’s Dr. Morbius has done comes through, it not only makes sense and rewards us, but it puts the film into some surprisingly dark thematic territory. This is a film about obsession and the refusal to recognize humanity's limitations. The damage wrought in Forbidden Planet is actually more wide-scale than Into Darkness but it grows from an understandable and far more intimate place, and that makes all the difference.  

Forbidden Planet had highly questionable gender depictions but they were a product of its time. What’s Into Darkness’ excuse?  

"Morvern Callar" (2003)

Some people don’t live linearly, with all the constant forward momentum that suggests. They live from moment to moment. They “live in the moment”, attempting to get a contact high from the rush of their devil may care ways. I imagine many people who live like this must have a difficult time processing guilt, grief and loss. They live to avoid these harsh realities, and if they were ever given a moment’s pause, they’d be force to confront whatever it is they’re running from. In Movern Callar, Morvern Callar (Samantha Morton) is such a person. We first see her discovering her boyfriend has committed suicide. Her response is telling. She doesn’t report his death, and proceeds to attend a party with a friend. Her escalating response -- or, rather, lack of response -- to this terrible incident, and likely deeper strains of angst from a discernibly troubled life, feel callous and opportunistic. They are, but they’re just as much reckless and self-destructive. Morvern discovers her boyfriend wrote a novel, and she steals authorship of it, sending it out to publishers. She then disposes of the body and claims he’s moved away. Morvern, as you might tell, comes off a bit like a sociopath – but director Lynne Ramsey keeps suggesting the ways that Morvern does this both out of a need to survive and a desire to forget. She seems to do it out of a need for money, which she then blows on a meandering trip to Spain, but she also does it so she doesn’t actually have to deal with the death of someone she cared about. It’s a character study of a troubled but highly narcissistic person, who’s all but destined to never change. Where an event like a death would be a moment to catalyze change in most people, it simply causes Morvern to double down and increase her impetuous nature.   

Grade: B+

"Leviathan" (2013)

It might be a very bad pun to say this, but Leviathan throws you into the deep end of the water and hopes you can swim. Technically it’s a documentary film, but directors Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel free up the film of all documentary, and even narrative, conventions. There’s no talking heads, no interviews and no voiceovers to guide us. It often plays more like a piece of abstract or avant-garde art than a documentary, and there’s certainly an argument to be made that it is abstract art. The film is about life on an offshore fishing vessel, much like we might think of from an episode of Deadliest Catch (which the film even references at one point in a deeply self-aware and bitterly ironic moment), but it doesn’t so much tell us how they survive but shows us. The camera is allowed to simply run and capture startling, inexplicable moments -- birds flying and guts tossed overboard become more strangely mesmerizing than is possibly imaginable. The camera is rigged to the side of the boat and allowed to capture whatever it can during this time. The result is imagery that’s riveting and powerful, but it's hard to really to put into words the startling effect. It’s an overwhelmingly experiential film, where you learn things through letting the film wash over you. But it’s not all completely surreal; much of the more dazzling imagery is contrasted with long stretches of mundane downtime or excruciatingly difficult and tedious work. Eventually this admittedly gets slightly repetitive, as it feels as though the film is making the same few points over and over. Freed from narrative constraints the film takes some daring, thrilling risks to get us to understand what life for these seamen entails, but the lack of conventions also causes the film to feel the need to drive home points more than is really necessary.

Grade: A-

"Tampopo" (1987)

We typically consider eating a very impersonal, uninteresting act. We eat when we get hungry and we do it because otherwise we would perish. But eating is much more than a simple act. It has various qualities - erotic, sensual, comforting - and it’s an act defined by the cultural context in which we eat. Tampopo is about the pleasures of eating, and it’s about the food culture of Japan. At its center, the film tells the story of a man, Goro (Tsutomo Yamazaki), who helps a woman, Tampopo (Nobuko Miyamoto), achieve her dreams of owning a great noodle restaurant. But the film jumps around to other vignettes reflecting the modern state of eating and cuisine in Japan, most memorably in a subplot about a fatalistic gangster finding deep connections with his moll through food. Some of the subplots are heavily sexual, finding the erotic attributes to eating. Others are about the divides in consumptive experiences, across class lines or generational gaps. But more often than not the film is concerned with the ways food connects and brings together people. Like in a scene where Goro introduces Tampopo to a group of homeless men, who she’s initially wary of before they prepare food that makes any differences between them matter little. In some ways, the film is like a western with a stoic, stetson-wearing man, coming to town, fixing some problems and walking away into the sunset, but Tampopo defies easy categorization, assuredly shifting between genres in order to examine the fullness of the consumptive experience of modern Japan. Tampopo is an inviting film; it’s involving and draws us into its world and its community, one built through a love of food and a passion for making it well. 

Grade: A

"Taste of Cherry" (1998)

Taste of Cherry often plays more like a philosophical or theological thesis than a film. The film’s simple, Sartrean premise deals with man contemplating suicide and attempting to convince various individuals to bury his soon to be deceased body. He’s hoping to take sleeping pills and lay down in a shallow grave, believing if God still wants him to live than he’ll still be alive by the time the next morning arrives. Director Abbas Kiarostami uses this concept for a deeply meditative, contemplative film. There’s a tragicomic quality to the story, borne of its existential brooding, which creates a gorgeous, haunting inevitability to what’s taking place. Taste of Cherry is largely a film about individuals at ideological impasses, stemming from the man’s unwillingness to reconsider his suicide. But the film isn’t solely interested in oblique, weighty themes. Kiarostami takes time to observe the beauty of life, human nature, and the rural landscape of Iran. The film is about a man who’s world-weary and tired of life, but it's also attempting to capture a particular slice of Iran at a given time by observing the views of different classes, ethnicities, and generations. Kiarostami watches extended conversations carried on in long car rides. He finds horror and confusion here, and divides amongst people of different backgrounds and persuasions. But he also discovers a shared sense of humanity, where individuals don’t wish to be involved in this morally and ethically questionable job -- even potentially the suicidal man himself -- no matter how high the price being paid is.

Grade: A-