Magical realism is a style more frequently found in literature than onscreen, but it’s nonetheless evidenced in a number of new films arriving this weekend.
The gem among them is Argentinian Chronicles of a Wandering Saint, opening at the Roxie Fri/19. Tomas Gomez Bustillo’s debut feature starts out as a sly satire of village life, with 60-ish Rita (Monica Villa) the kind of self-righteous scold who looks down on other people’s joie de vivre, while they politely ignore her as an antisocial drudge. She has little time or patience for long-suffering husband Norberto (Horacio Marassi), so fixated is she on impressing Father Eduardo (Pablo Moseinco), whose church she volunteers at—though he’s exasperatingly even-handed in his attentions to other parishioners.
Rita hatches a harebrained scheme to manufacture a “miracle” that will secure his affections and possibly win “sainthood” for herself. But about one-third into this droll narrative, things take an unexpected, drastically fateful turn. Chronicles enters a realm that somewhat recalls Hirokazu Kore-edu’s early feature After Life (1998), with its vision of eternity as simultaneously fantastical and mundanely bureaucratic. Stuck haunting her old terrain while awaiting transit to (let’s hope) Heaven, Rita has the melancholy leisure to reassess the mortal existence she’d more or less wasted by chasing a somewhat hypocritical ideal of religious piety. This is a deadpan satirical comedy with eventual poignance and lyricism, a true original.
Also opening at the Roxie, on Sat/20, is another parable from a debuting writer-director. In Ramata-Toulaye Sy’s Banel & Adama, the titular duo are young lovers rapt in each other’s presence—a bond not necessarily approved of by others in their tiny northern Senegalese community. Though previously forced to marry another, the fiery and willful Banel (Khady Mane) is now widowed, and thus free to openly love 19-year-old Adama (Mamadou Diallo), with whom she’s always shared a mutual passion. But when he’s called upon to become the village chief, the propriety of their relationship is questioned.
Overriding all doubters, Banel demands the life she’s long imagined for herself. But this seems to alienate everyone, including the gods themselves. As if to chastise her selfishness, a drought brings great privation, with livestock dying and crops failing. Though open to interpretation, on the surface Banel & Adama seems a somewhat reactionary story about a bossy, arrogant woman whose refusal to accept “her place” brings ruin. Still, the lyricism of Sy’s presentation, and the alluringly rich, delicate color palette here, lend her movie an intriguing ambiguity.
If Banel’s childlessness makes her suspect in many eyes, maternity is anything but a virtue in veteran commercials director Niclas Larsson’s own first feature Mother, Couch, opening at the Opera Plaza. Based on a novel by fellow Swede Jerker Virdborg, it has 91-year-old Ellen Burstyn as the matriarch of a most discordant family, each of her offspring fathered by different men.
There’s earnest David (Ewan McGregor), cynical Gruffudd (Rhys Ifans), and perpetually angry Linda (Lara Flynn Boyle). All become involved, along with David’s wife Anne (Lake Bell), when a visit to an otherwise shuttered furniture store leads to Mother simply refusing to leave a sofa on display there. Taylor Russell also figures as the shop’s representative, eventually joined by F. Murray Abraham as its twin proprietors.
Though well-cast, the North Carolina-shot movie feels like an arresting premise in search of an actual storyline—we get that this curt, demanding mummy in a blonde flip wig is something of a monster, particularly once she snaps “I never wanted any children” at her own flesh and blood. But these characters don’t really go anywhere, and the overall rather tortured metaphor for “letting go” of a failed parent becomes obvious long before things take a more surreal, even apocalyptic turn. While Mother, Couch earns points for novelty of conceit, the talent employed here ultimately seems ill-used in a film whose ideas carry the whiff of rarefied literature that resists translation to a different medium.
Departing from the zone of magic realism—though fantastical in a different, more conventionally genre-bound way—is Irish writer-director Damian McCarthy’s second feature Oddity. His first, 2021’s Caveat, was a macabre and ingenious construct that struck me as near-brilliant. This sophomore effort successfully expands on many of its motifs, creating another devious mind-bender whose horror is more a matter of vividly creeping dread than graphic mayhem.
Dani (Carolyn Bracken) is a woman alone at a remote old farmhouse she’s refurbishing with husband Ted (Gwilym Lee), an administrator for a nearby mental institution. He’s away at work when she is disturbed in the night by frantic door-pounding—an escaped asylum inmate (Tadhg Murphy) demanding she open the door, which is quite disturbing enough. Even more so is that he insists he already saw an intruder enter the premises when that door was open, and has come to warn her. This lady-or-tiger dilemma does not end well.
Later, Ted is living in the now-completed house with his new girlfriend, astringent yuppie Yana (Caroline Menton). They get a quease-inducing visit from Dani’s twin sibling Darcy (Bracken again), a blind psychic who has strong suspicions that her sister’s murderer was not the person eventually blamed. She’s right about that—and karmic justice will have its day, however convolutedly, in a twisty tale that also comes to involve an unpleasant hospital orderly (Steve Wall) and equally disquieting, golem-like wooden statue.
Oddity proves Caveat was no fluke. McCarthy has a unique flair for unsettling atmospherics, a sense of the occult flecked by grotesque humor, and occasional non-cheap-shot jolts that really deliver. I retain a slight preference for the earlier film, if only because its hapless protagonist (played by Johnny French, who also gets a small part here) commanded more sympathy than anyone in Oddity. And while Caveat seemed a diabolically clever whole, you could argue that director’s screenplay this time is more a series of loosely interlocking, somewhat randomly connected scares than anything organic. But hey, it really works—even more than the much-hyped Longlegs last week, this is a hair-raisingly suspenseful walk on the supernatural wild wide. It opens Fri/19 at theaters including SF’s Alamo Drafthouse New Mission and AMC Metreon.
Meanwhile back in the world of plain old realism, there is July Rhapsody. This 2002 effort by still-active Hong Kong director Ann Hui (Summer Snow) didn’t receive as much international attention as it deserved the first time around, and is now getting a welcome re-release. It has Jacky Cheung in one of his best roles as Yiu-Kwok, a genially loud-mouthed high school teacher. His brash demeanor cloaks a general sense of disappointment that’s palled his marriage to Man-Ching (Anita Mui, who’d die from cancer at age 40 after making this). He is irked at first to be stalked by a bright but problematic student, Choy-Lam (Karena Kar-Yan Lam). Yet soon they develop a real kinship that somehow fills the void for both.
While this might sound in description like some sort of Lolita scenario—and indeed, the amount of sheer hanging out between teacher and student will seem inappropriate to most viewers—the central relationship here is not really a sexual dynamic. Instead, it’s a mutual emotional need between two people who feel generally misunderstood, and in finding one another are eventually able to move on with their separate lives. Hui’s complex yet light-footed drama deftly incorporates elements of comedy, poetic lyricism, and narrative experiment.
It’s a film whose appeal is difficult to peg, but whose sum impact is quite lovely. July Rhapsody opens Fri/19 at SF’s Presidio Theatre, and a date TBA at Alamo Drafthouse, with DVD (Sept. 10) and VOD (Oct. 1) release to follow.
