In a period of drastically escalating media monopolies and nervous cultural retrenchments, it was no surprise to read last week that the number of major-studio features directed by women is already taking a hit, down last year from the year before. But then women have long been better-represented in experimental, documentary, and arthouse cinema than the commercial mainstream. Three influential women filmmakers are all getting tributes hosted by major Bay Area institutions this week—one of them long gone, and tragically so, but the other two alive and kicking enough to attend in person.
Abigail Child will be present for a two-night retrospective presented by San Francisco Cinematheque in conjunction with the screening venues. On Wed/11 at SF’s Gray Area there’s the six-title 1980s series Is This What You Were Looking For?, whose dizzying montages of found footage and actors in retro guise run a gamut from the all-encompassing Prefaces to pieces paying homage to the silent era or noir thrillers. The second program at Oakland’s Shapeshifters Cinema on Fri/3 draws on her later Foreign Film Series, utilizing online poetical texts and other outside elements while reworking a 1950s Mexican melodrama from Luis Bunuel (To and No Fro), a 1960s Bollywood costume epic (the very funny Mirror World), a baroque 1920s version of Salome, or just allowing a diverse modern-day cast to demonstrate the art of snogging (vis a vis).
In conjunction with the ongoing museum exhibit “Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Multiple Offerings,” BAMPFA will also be screening “Sentimental Education: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha at the Pacific Film Archive” this Thu/2 through April 9. The South Korean emigre Cha was a student at UC Berkeley 1968-78. She spent some of that time working at the PFA, and meeting some of her screen heroes when they visited that facility. This series includes works by those who influenced her, including Chantal Ackerman, Maya Deren, Dreyer, and Ozu, plus some of her own videos—1970s installations and records of live performances probing aspects of personal identity, the more observational 1980 White Dust From Mongolia, and more. Her already-extensive output in various media was cut short in 1982 when she was murdered by a Manhattan security guard at age 31. BAMPFA has been the caretaker of her archives for over three decades now. Info on the full series is here.
One of the more distinctive directors to emerge in Latin America since the turn of the millennium is doing a residency at UC Berkeley and getting her own BAMPFA retrospective. “Lucretia Martel: Un destino comun” charts the Argentine writer-director-producer’s career from 2001 debut feature La cienaga (which opens the series Sat/4) through highly praised subsequent efforts The Holy Girl and The Headless Woman, on to 2017’s period literary adaptation Zama. There will be a program of seldom-seen shorts as well, and an advance screening of her new Our Land aka Nuestra Tierra, a documentary about land disputes between indigenous activists and latterday colonialist/corporate interests that plays other Bay Area theaters in coming weeks. Martel will participate in post-film discussions during this schedule’s last days, Wed/15 through Sun/19. Full info is here.
Some other, mostly-new films also arriving this week:
Fantasy Life
As an actor, Matthew Shear has been in several films by Noam Baumbach. That influence can definitely be detected in his own first feature as writer-director-star—though this neurotic NYC comedy has more than enough of its own personality to avoid seeming merely imitative. His protagonist Sam is a 30ish nonstarter who loses his job at the outset here, is barely tolerated by his own shrink (Judd Hirsch), and has anxiety attacks at the drop of a hat. He thus seems the least likely (or desirable) possible prospect as manny to the three rambunctious young daughters of Dianne (Amanda Peet) and David (Alessandro Nivola), an upscale couple whose golden aura poorly conceals increasing marital fractiousness.
To his surprise, though, Sam turns out to love this new role—not least because it provides him the kind of ready-made “home” and “family” he hasn’t been able to create in his own rather hapless life. A problem, however, is that he can’t help getting over-invested, notably in growing way too attached to unhappy ex-actress Dianne. He sees her as a soulmate; she regards him as a convenient shoulder to cry on. Needless to say, that dynamic is going to implode sooner or later.
Flawlessly cast (other players include Andrea Martin, Bob Balaban and Jessica Harper), Fantasy Life is a very astute observational comedy with enough psychological nuance to earn the eventual tug on your deeper emotions. It’s gotten unremarkable reviews since playing San Francisco Jewish Fest last summer, but seems to me easily one of the brighter new releases of this year to date. It opens Fri/3 at Bay Area theaters including SF’s Opera Plaza Cinemas.
Two by Kiyoshi Kurosawa: ‘Chime,’ ‘Serpent’s Path’
This Kurosawa—no relation to Akira—grew a considerable reputation as a moody genre specialist beginning with 1997’s Cure, then proceeding through such variably crime and/or supernatural thrillers like Charisma, Pulse, and Creepy. Though his output has grown less frequently exported (and a bit less prolific) of late, last year’s Cloud was a reminder of his strengths, with its twisty, deadpan, paranoid suspense tale of online misrepresentation and offline retribution.
This double bill at the Roxie brings another recent work, plus a revival of one of the director’s early successes. The 45-minute Chime is an atmospheric enigma in which a cooking school teacher mulling a return to the high-end restaurant world (Matsuo Yoshioka) finds one student (Seiichi Kohinata) behaving in an increasingly erratic, disturbing fashion. The latter claims he hears a “non-human” sound, and that “there’s a machine in my head. It’s there to control me. It responds to the chime.” This admittance precedes lethal violence. But then the madness appears to move on to others in our protagonist’s circle, like a contagion. There’s no explanation given here, just a series of unsettling incidents delivered with Kurosawa’s usual low-key exactitude.
The 1998 Serpent’s Path is something else, an initially poker-faced crime drama in which both the body count and black comedy spiral gleefully out of control. Two men (Show Aikawa, Teruyuki Kagawa) kidnap a wealthy third, believing he killed the daughter of one of his captors. He denies it, even under torture. Then it emerges the guilty party really might be another person—resulting in a second kidnapping, pursuing goons, and ever-more baroque action.
Originally made on a low budget as a direct-to-video release, Path has earned minor cult-classic status over the years. Kurosawa even remade it in France two years ago. But from all reports, this newly restored version remains the one to see. And indeed, between the director’s evenhanded, unshowy treatment and his script’s contrastingly wild developments, it’s a real find for fans of inspired B-grade genre cinema. The two films (which play on one program) open at the Roxie Theater on Fri/3, more info here.
Men on the verge: ‘Space Cowboy,’ ‘Mr. Nobody Against Putin’
A pair of recent documentaries portray very different protagonists, yet they share an iconoclasm that could well cost them their lives.
Marah Strauch and Bryce Leavitt’s Space Cowboy chronicles the times of one Joe Jennings, who developed an “insane passion for dropping large objects from the sky” at an early age. Those objects eventually included himself—an enthusiasm for skydiving turned to “professional camera flying” (recording other jumpers’ descents on video), then more photography of more extreme sports, work on TV commercials, action movies, etc. Not to mention orchestrating his own specialty of high-risk performance art involving outlandish aerial stunts… such as filling a junkyard convertible with parachuters who bail as it plummets Earthward.
It is all worth it? “Here I am, 61, and have not grown up at all,” Jennings gushes, so that answer would be Yes. Will it be worth it the day that he miscalculates? Mmf. Is all this insanity just an elaborate, somewhat demented means to elude depression? Perhaps. But there is no question that his singular chosen career is very exciting to watch. Space Cowboy opens Wed/28 at Berkeley’s Elmwood, with possible other Bay Area venues TBA.
A milquetoast by comparison is the pudgy, bespectacled hero of Mr. Nobody Against Putin, which in an upset won the Best Documentary Feature Oscar last month. Pavel Talankin is on staff at the biggest primary school in Karabash, a small town (pop. 10,000) in Russia’s Ural mountain range. Here, “life revolves around the copper smelting plant,” with the result that UNESCO one called this burg “the most toxic place on Earth,” and average life expectancy is a slim 38.
Nonetheless, Talankin likes his job, his flat, and his fellow citizens, despite being a democracy enthusiast at odds with the current regime. That conflict grows considerably stronger in 2022, when the ongoing war in Ukraine generates new “mandatory lessons” in the educational curriculum that are unabashed, frequently outlandish propaganda. Suddenly the smelting plant isn’t the only toxic thing around—and worse, Talankin’s former students are getting conscripted for front-line military service.
This documentary (for which David Borenstein shares directing credit with Talankin) has a rather antic tone to a point, and risks making its maker the impishly self-conscious star of his own movie. But after a while you can’t help but be impressed by the risks he takes, given the general crackdown on dissent. Mr. Nobody attracted criticism within Russia (where of course it’s banned) for its “filming minors without parental consent.”
But then the point here is that those young lives are being sacrificed as cannon fodder for a cause few of them really understand. Accusations of self-aggrandizing ultimately also feel hyperbolic, since Talankin really did have to flee his homeland after the couple years of documentation that resulted in this film. (Since 2024, he’s been “somewhere in Europe.”)
While imperfect, the feature does vividly convey modern life in provincial Russia—where people seem to basically expect to get steamrolled by the government, but lack the information sources to grasp how and why. Though we missed its eyeblink local theatrical release, the documentary is now streaming in the Kino Film Collection, and will be released on DVD by Kino Lorber April 7.
