Even as AI threatens to drain the last drops of creative individuality from screen entertainment’s future, there is still proof that at least some audiences crave the kinds of idiosyncratic ideas you can only get from an actual human brain. When Yorgos Lanthimos first attracted international attention (to himself, and to the “Greek Weird Wave” of likeminded emerging filmmakers) with his recently-rereleased second feature Dogtooth in 2009, he hardly seemed likely to become some kind of global…er, brand.
Yet the quease and black humor of that film commenced a following that soon led to English-language cinema (starting with The Lobster in 2015), then improbably to starry, popular movies that get nominated for (The Favourite) or actually win (Poor Things) a lot of Oscars. What’s more, he hadn’t “sold out” in the least: Those hits were just as edgy and frequently off-putting as Dogtooth in their way, albeit on a much grander production scale.
As if abashed by so much success, Lanthimos last year made Kinds of Kindness, a three-part exercise in absurdist nastiness almost no one liked. (I liked Emma Stone’s closing-credits dance of petty triumph…but have blotted out other 163 minutes, which felt more like a strained imitation of the director’s sensibility than the real thing.) Perhaps that was just a necessary artery-declogging exercise. Anyway, he’s more or less back on form with Bugonia, which does not rank with his best or worst, but occupies a pretty satisfying place in the middle.
His muse Stone is back yet again, this time as Michelle Fuller, the CEO of Auxolith, a giant biomedical (i.e. pharmaceutical) company that’s probably not among the good guys as far as ethics and pollution and stuff goes. But she certainly feels the need to pretend otherwise, possibly even convincing herself with generous employee terms no one dares take advantage of, plus a personal health regime involving yoga, meditation and such. In the tradition of Steve Jobs, she is the enlightened autocrat who could probably fire you—with relish—mid-mantra.
Unbeknownst to her, she is being stalked by two locals: Teddy (Jesse Plemons), a beekeeper who also works fulltime in one of Auxolith’s packaging plants, and his very dim-bulb cousin Don (Aidan Delbis). Well, it’s really just Teddy who plots Michelle’s kidnapping, presumably because her company had something to do with the unfortunate fate of his mother (Alicia Silverstone). But also because—as this extremely unwilling captive discovers once she’s shackled to a bed in the two men’s ramshackle rural house—Teddy thinks she’s an alien. As in space alien. An Andromedan, to be exact, and hence part of an invasive race whose “pure corporate evil” is just one facet of their overall “techno-enslavement of Planet Earth.” He wants to negotiate with her leaders, and perhaps journey into space himself.
Needless to say, Michelle strongly objects to this logic, which Don might have some doubts about, too. But Teddy is not to be reasoned with. He is a fanatic—the kind who in real life might have gone down a different rabbit hole, say that of QAnon and “deep state.” Upon realizing that pleas to rationality are useless, Michelle changes tactics. But even after “admitting” she’s an alien, she does not or cannot give Teddy what he wants. And unpleasantly, he might use means of physical torture to get it, whether “it” is actually possible or not.
It’s a testament to the director and performers that this ugly basic premise—attractive female abducted, kept chained in a basement by nutjobs—manages to side-step the almost inevitable sexualized ickiness that dominated so many “torture porn” thrillers, from The Collector to Captive to The Black Phone. It reserves the right to have a different agenda, despite sharing some outward characteristics of those films. Like so many recent releases, it has a certain end-times undercurrent reinforced by mention of climate change, capitalist greed, et al. Teddy may or may not be mad, but he’s right about one thing: Michelle Fuller is the kind of too-rich, too-powerful individual who’s hastening everyone else’s extinction. She is the problem, or at least a textbook manifestation of it. But can a person of his limited resources and questionable stability ever win against such highly placed foes, even when they’re temporarily brought to heel?
Bugonia is immaculately crafted, its humor astutely balanced between the arch and outrageous, the well-tuned disparate performance styles running a gamut from concise (Stone) to berserk (Plemons). It’s a canny mix, always on the cusp of bad taste, whose dusting of ironical commentary is greatly enhanced by the galloping orchestral hysteria of Jerskin Fendrix’s score. (He was also a big contributor to Poor Things.)
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For all its excesses of behavior and ideas, this somehow simultaneously also feels a tad more conventional than other Lanthimos joints, perhaps because it’s a remake: Will Tracy’s script (a big improvement on his prior feature, the promising but underealized allegory The Menu) is based on Save the Green Planet!, South Korean writer-director Jang Joon-hwan’s 2003 cult favorite. I vaguely recall that movie being a more broadly comedic, genre-angled enterprise.
Lanthimos does make the concept his own. I doubt Bugonia will build as much awards momentum as his most successful recent films, but it’s entertaining in a familiar yet subversive way…before going in some very surprising climactic directions. No spoilers will be spilt here, but you will emerge amused, and satisfied. Bugonia opens in limited Bay Area theaters this Fri/24, expanding further Oct. 31st.
The latest from another internationally famed auteur, Jafar Panahi, has an oddly similar central plot hook: It’s about another person abducted by parties almost certain their captive is guilty of participating in vast, conspiratorial crime. But only almost. In It Was Just An Accident, the writer-director—who’s spent much of his career officially banned from filmmaking in his native Iran—has created yet another accomplished project in secret, sans governmental permits. Its Palme d’Or win at Cannes was seen as a protest against the regime, something Panahi’s acceptance speech only reinforced. Still, he attended the festival, and the film is duly out. Is he now too famous for Iran to muzzle?
As is often the case in his movies, this one opens with people conversing while traveling on a rural road at night. (A shooting location interfering bureaucrats are unlikely to sniff out.) Eghbal (Ebrahim Azizi) is traveling with wife and young daughter when they hit a stray dog, which damages the car. Reaching the nearest garage, Eghbal’s voice and the squeak of his prosthetic leg are recognized by local Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri) as those of an intelligence agent who’d been his torturer while a political prisoner—an experience that left permanent psychological and physical scars. Vahid later tracks Eghbal down, kidnapping him for the purpose of a revenge killing. But Eghbal insists he is not the man he’s looking for, introducing enough doubt that Vadim seeks out others who suffered that agent’s abuses, to confirm his identity. Eventually they form an argumentative group of six, driving hither and yon (with the tranquilized hostage in a trunk), seeking a truth that just keeps getting fuzzier and more complicated.
More elegantly titled A Simple Accident in French (it’s a France-Luxembourg coproduction, though surreptitiously shot in Iran), this is a relatively straightforward thriller by Panahi’s standards. Yet as ever his emphasis is on discussion that is both personal and political. While much more serious in tone than prankish Bugonia, it too packs surprise twists at the end that deepen our experience. No dryly rhetorical indictment, the film finds a potent narrative means by which to make the reality of a government’s human rights violations dramatically vivid without actually having to show them. It opens Fri/24 at SF’s AMC Kabuki 8, then expands Oct. 31 to other Bay Area venues.
Other new releases this week:
Amongst Neighbors
Another context in which citizens are pitted against each other is the historical one of Berkeley-based documentarian Yoav Potash’s new feature. In some respect it’s a sort of unintentional companion piece to Jesse Eisenberg’s exceptional A Real Pain from last year—although this similarly angled look at a largely erased Jewish population in Poland has content considerably more bitter than that gentle fiction.
Jews were a huge part of the Polish population, going back centuries—as did bigotry, fear and persecution towards them. It is perhaps unsurprising that when the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, triggering the start of WW2, they not only terrorized Jewish Poles but also located many of their most notorious extermination camps (including Auschwitz) there. What remains appalling is the extent to which many Gentiles apparently cooperated eagerly with that racist purge. And the real shock here is the camera recording testimony that such abuses didn’t end with the war. In fact, some Jews who managed to survive that span—whether in hiding or in camps—returned home only to be killed by their erstwhile, newly “liberated” neighbors.
That happened to the entire immediate family of one man interviewed many decades later. Having barely lived through the years of global conflict while kept safe (albeit “like an animal in a cage”) by some Warsaw Christians, he was joyfully reunited with his parents…only to be informed of their murders when they briefly left him behind to visit their former village, months after armistice. Another major eyewitness here is an elderly woman who was also a child during the war, albeit a non-Jewish one. Daring to confirm the worst about what happened back then, she is virtually alone in doing so. Denial remains so potent that a few years ago the government passed a law “protecting the Polish nation from false accusations,” which really meant punishing any public acknowledgement of organized or individual complicity in the Holocaust.
After some pushback against such “criminalization of history,” that rule got watered down somewhat. Still, its sentiment hardly appears to be a minority stance. Potash visits Jewish cemeteries that have been vandalized, where not eradicated whole from the naked eye. There are also unmarked mass graves found where the bodies of Jews slain immediately post-war were discreetly dumped. Among Neighbors combines new footage, archival materials, and a lot of artful animation illustrating traumatic backstories. It’s a strong piece with particular relevancy at a time when our own leaders appear very interested in burying any unflattering aspects of U.S. history. The documentary opens Fri/24 at SF’s Vogue Theater, with filmmakers available for Q&A’s after each show.
The French Italian
Writer-director Rachel Wolther’s determinedly off-center first featureplayed SF’s Jewish Film Festival last year, but bypassed a local theatrical run. Releasing to digital platforms via Level 33 Entertainment on October 28, it is a consummate cringe comedy: The sort of thing that will strike you as either utterly hilarious, or a laugh-free zone. Its characters exist in the very neurotic Manhattanite mode of Shiva Baby and such, where everyone onscreen seems to be a comedian improving snappy cynical patter on the very verge of nervous breakdown.
Valerie (Cat Cohen) and Doug (Aristotle Athari) are a high-maintenance couple relating a story about their recent travails to listeners at a party. Their Upper West Side apartment was rocked by the un-ignorable behavior of a couple downstairs (John Rudnitsky, Chloe Cherry), who are as loud—in all things, from fights to sex to karaoke—as they are glam. But the duo telling this tale are so tightly wound, we wonder: Did the neighbors actually do anything wrong? Were they, in fact, flummoxed by the constant Karen-y intrusions of the crazy couple upstairs?
The French Italian is an acquired taste, to be sure, its success quite possibly dependent on your mood. When I watched it months ago, I found the first half hilarious, then saved the rest for the next day—when it somehow didn’t work for me at all. Still, this comedy of mortification might ring a few faint bells (such as one for Elaine May’s The Heartbreak Kid) yet remains its own highly original beast.
