One of the screener’s great loners is Alain Delon in the title role of Le Samourai, Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1967 classic of existential neo-noir minimalism. Introduced lying stock-still on the bed in a decrepit room—he seems to live in hideouts—exhaling a cloud of smoke as evanescent as the man himself, he seems more ghost or specter than flesh and blood. Delon, then just past 30, is famously one of the most beautiful male stars. But there was also a frequent coldness to his physical perfection onscreen (and, apparently, offscreen) that few films utilized so well.
“Jef” is a hitman prized for his icy efficiency. But when the contract killing of a nightclub owner attracts more attention than usual—he was spied leaving the scene by the venue’s jazz pianist (Cathy Rosier)—he finds himself targeted by both investigating police and those who’d hired him. There isn’t a great deal of plot to Le Samourai, or even action. Yet it has a firm, quietly tense grip throughout, a striking atmospheric otherness achieved through minimal dialogue and music, muted colors, immaculate compositions, plus the hint of sadness in Delon’s eyes as “lone wolf” Jef moves inexorably towards his fate.
A moderate success in Europe, it didn’t get released at all in the US for five years, then only in a poorly dubbed form under a senseless new title (The Godson, simply to cash in on The Godfather). But its reputation has risen to something near-mythological in ensuing decades, providing a touchstone for filmmakers like Walter Hill, Michael Mann, John Woo, Jim Jarmusch, Johnny To, Anton Cobijin, and Nicolas Winding Refn, sometimes paid slavish homage in entire features like Thief or Drive. (David Fincher’s recent The Killer was among the most blatant such tributes, if far from the best.)
Despite the occasional op-art decor and other factors, Le Samourai’s hermetically sealed pulp objet d’art has aged less than nearly any other movie you could name from the era. It opens this Fri/26 at the Roxie in a 4K restoration.
Other arrivals this coming weekend also probe isolation and alienation, albeit in generally less lethal forms:
Challengers
The pressurized, ego-inflating realm inhabited by athletic elites (esp. those in non-team sports) tends to create personalities so single-minded and self-absorbed, they can seem like glam monsters. That is much the impact if not necessarily the intent of Luca Guadagnino’s latest—as ever, this Italian steeped in luxury-brand advertising and other rarefied pursuits seems somewhat oblivious to the preening privilege he nonetheless depicts.
Justin Kuritzkes’ flashback-laden script is a classic, even corny love triangle: Two best-bud high school tennis players (Josh O’Connor, Mike Faist) vie for a female competitor (Zendaya) expected to have a superstar career. But injury curtails that trajectory, so instead she devotes herself to being coach and spouse to the eventually top-ranked boy she’s chosen—until 13 years later, when the other lad’s resurfacing ignites old romantic and rivalrous sparks.
I both enjoyed Challengers and found it increasingly ridiculous, two feelings that are hard to separate: Is it a good movie that goes enjoyably bad? Or so-bad-it’s-good throughout? The hardworking actors impress, especially Faist in his first major role since a sensational Riff in Spielberg’s West Side Story. But the film ogles them like models on a runway, and the matches are so over-fussed in showy cinematic terms that they become absurd. Supporting characters are non-existent to the degree that almost no one else gets a syllable of dialogue.
This sure is a better tennis romance than 1979 bomb Players (a personal-worst for the reliably underwhelming Ali MacGraw). Still, it’s a bit laughable that for 131 minutes we’re expected to care about these vain, mercurial, racket-throwing lean machines, who remain one-dimensional despite their talented performers. And the soundtrack of deafening techno trash (go stand in the corner, Trent Reznor) only heightens the posefest feel.
Dearths of Dad: ‘We Grown Now,’ ‘Chicken for Linda!,’ ‘Boy Kills World’
Behind nearly every star athlete in a field like tennis, there’s a supporting/driving parent—a species almost entirely absent from Challengers, which has room only for sexy young people. But parental absences loom very large in three otherwise disparate new movies.
The most serious-minded of them is Minhal Baig’s We Grown Now, opening at area theaters including SF’s Metreon, Emeryville’s AMC Bay Street, and Rafael Film Center. Set in 1992, it focuses on Malik (Blake Cameron James), a grade-schooler raised without a father by his mother (Jurnee Smollett) and grandmother (S. Epatha Merkerson) in Chicago’s now-defunct Cabrini-Green housing complex. He and best and only friend Eric (Gian Knight Ramirez) are each other’s safety zone in an environment increasingly plagued by gang violence and police intimidation. Even their bond may need to be sacrificed for Malik’s family to get a toehold on the “American Dream,” which seems hopeless in this disadvantaged setting.
This isn’t another boys-in-the-hood tale, however. Baig is more interested in emphasizing the joys and wonders of childhood, which our wee protagonists experience as much as anyone their age. The writer-director sometimes overdoes the slo-mo visual lyricism (nor do we need grandma flat-out announcing “There’s poetry in everything”). Her script can also wax pretentious, handing Malik and Eric dialogue too precociously self-aware. Still, We Grown Now has very good performances and an overall assurance that together achieve a poignant, substantial cumulative effect.
Rendered a bit high-strung by a father’s demise in her infancy, the titular child in Chicken for Linda! goes nuclear when accused of stealing the wedding ring she’s always coveted. When mom realizes that’s a false charge, as apology she offers to make her daughter’s favorite dish. But this coincides with a widespread strike, making the promised meal’s ingredients almost impossible to assemble. Traversing the whole of Paris and beyond, they turn pursuit of dinner into a convoluted slapstick chase a la The Triplets of Belleville.
This animated feature by Sebastien Laudenbach and Chiara Malta is a joy to look at, with painterly swaths of vibrant hue. But even at just 76 minutes, its plot grows wearying; Linda (voiced by Melinee Leclerc) is a brat, mom Paulette (Clotilde Hesme) something of an idiot, and the situations they let spiral out of control are often less funny than exasperating. Some musical numbers provide welcome relief, but Chicken (which is opening at the Roxie) is perhaps best experienced like last month’s imported ‘toon They Shot the Piano Player—as a kind of hot-color eyebath, with your brain turned off.
Sillier still and just as visually busy is the live-action Boy Kills World, in which a nameless deaf-mute hero (Bill Skarsgard) lives to wreak vengeance on the autocratic clan (led by Famke Janssen, Brett Gelman, Michelle Dockery, and Sharlto Copley) who killed his own family, and who rule over a dystopian near-future society. This South Africa-shot action phantasmagoria starts out as an amusingly over-the-top spoof of superhero formulae that spares no extravagances of production design, fight choreography, or cartoonish gore.
Yet director Moritz Mohr’s first feature soon wears us out, the incessant high energy made grating by snarky juvenile humor and potty-mouthed dialogue. Then it commits the worse sin of starting to take itself seriously, making the later laps in a nearly two-hour runtime truly drag. Boy (which opens in area theaters on Friday) will probably delight diehard comic-book-movie fans, but is likely to exhaust the patience of any adults in the room.
Offering a tonic after that ADD frenzy is Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus, a farewell concert showcase for the late Japanese composer (and sometime actor, of Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence fame) in which he performs alone at the piano for 100 minutes. There’s no talking, no onscreen text identifying the pieces, no audience even.
You might think such a large dose of his melancholy, Satie-influenced compositions—drawn from a full career’s breadth, from Yellow Magic Orchestra to solo albums and celebrated soundtrack work—might grow monotonous. But they don’t, with discreet assistance from director Neo Sora’s elegant B&W presentation. This music has a solitary quality, and the film (which plays the Roxie Fri/26-Sun/28) succeeds in making you feel like you are its sole spectator.
More alienating than comforting in their effect—though that, too, has its appeal—are some other new films we’ll just mention in passing. Joanna Arnow’s The Feeling That The Time For Doing Something Has Passed (whose local venues this Friday were unconfirmed at presstime) is a droll sad-sack comedy with the writer-director as a single New Yorker whose closest attachment is a BDSM relationship with an equally bored older man (Scott Cohen). It plays through May 10 at the Roxie.
For a more broadly-applicable masochistic experience, you have two immediate options. One is Other Cinema’s showing at ATA on Sat/27 of Australian mashup duo Soda Jerk’s extraordinary Hello Dankness (more info here), a found-footage assembly that manages to weave excerpted Hollywood features into a devastating (and hilarious) commentary on the United States’ ongoing journey from complacency to trainwreck. We previously covered it here, when the filmmakers presented it at the Roxie last fall.
That laughter might die in your throat watching the new Bad Faith: Christian Nationalism’s Unholy War on Democracy, a Peter Coyote-narrated overview of the clusterfuck we have been methodically driving straight toward for some years now. Required viewing before theocracy gets any closer to reality this November, Stephen Ujlaki’s documentary is a terrifying wake-up call that provides all the accusatory political specifics some folks complained was missing from Civil War. It releases to streaming platforms including Apple TV, Amazon, and Google Play this Fri/26.
