In the total span of human existence, barely a blip passed between our ceasing to burn alleged witches and starting to explore space. But while those eras may seem aeons apart, they have equal currency at the movies this week, with two films involving witchery and two more meditating on the Space Age. There are also more cinematic-comfort-food-style looks at the recent past, British Costume Drama Dept. (Mothering Sunday), and Americana Division (The Automat).
Mention should also be made of distinctive Malaysian auteur Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s new Memoria, which opens at the Roxie Fri/1 in the first local stop in a unique “national tour” where just one print plays one US city for a week at the time. (It also opens April 22 at Berkeley’s Shattuck.) Those acquainted with the filmmaker from 2004’s Tropical Malady or subsequent features will know what to expect: A cryptic story, verging on the metaphysical-fantastical, told at a meditative pace that either enchants or has a “watching paint dry” effect, depending on your mood.
I’ll admit to finding this latest—with Tilda Swinton as a Scottish woman who begins to experience strange audio phenomena while visiting Colombia—a bit more challenging to patience, its profundity more elusive, than most of his prior work. But then I watched it on an awards-consideration DVD a few months ago, and this of all movies surely benefits greatly from the heightened attention and quietude of a theatrical screening. In a way, it’s apt to say I haven’t really seen it… properly.
Inner Space, Outer Space: ‘Apollo 10 1/2,’ ‘Gagarine’
Next week Netflix will levy upon us Return to Space, a new documentary by reputable filmmakers (the team behind Free Solo and The Rescue) that sounds awfully like a 128-minute promotional vehicle for SpaceX and Elon Musk, the latter an outstanding figure even amidst our current landscape of bottomlessly publicity-needy, very rich “entrepreneurs.” Personally, I don’t think I’ve got the stomach for it—but feel free to knock yourself out. Meanwhile, two narrative features in different ways look back to the original “golden age” of space exploration, when such things united the world in hope, and were not yet privatized.
Also on Netflix (as of this Fri/1) is Apollo 10 1/2, Richard Linklater’s latest excavation of his own youth, which he commenced while it was still pretty much going on (30 years ago via Slacker and Dazed & Confused). Even Spielberg hasn’t been this consistently nostalgic for his own childhood, and while I often love this director’s films, his latest lands very much on the slight/minor end of a substantial ouevre to date. It sets the Wayback Machine to 1969, when our narrating protagonist Stan (voiced as an adult by Jack Black) was a 4th grader in suburban Texas, “right down the road from NASA.” Indeed, his father (and just about every schoolmate’s father) works there, though in a capacity considerably less glam than that of “astronaut.” But of course that is exactly the job Stan is obsessed with, as what still stands as the biggest moment in NASA history—man’s arrival on the moon—grows thrillingly near.
The extent to which our young hero’s imagination runs away with him re: the moon mission provides the wisp of plotline here. But most of Apollo 10 1/2 is virtually plotless, filled with obviously autobiographical childhood details that were common not just in Texas, but amongst American kids in general back then. Linklater devotes rapt screentime to the dated wonders of jello moulds, “Dark Shadows,” baseball card swapping, The Monkees, board games, Raquel Welch, “Sugar Sugar,” hidden Playboy magazines, prank calls, drive-in movies, and so forth.
Viewers who grew up in a different era may find this trivia cute for a little while. But even people like me who were exactly Stan’s age and shared nearly all his fictive experiences may get bored with the mere recitation of vintage pop-culture errata. The movie’s animated (in the same rotoscope-y fashion Linklater deployed on Waking Life) only lends so much novelty. It’s a flashback to a “more innocent time” (even if we glimpse Nixon and the Vietnam War on the “boob tube”) that is ultimately no more than innocuous, an audiovisual oldies station duly accompanied by the likes of Herb Alpert and The Fifth Dimension.
More substantial, and also making more inventive use of retro-“space age” nostalgia, is new French film Gagarine, which opens at the Opera Plaza this Fri/1. Writer-directors Fanny Listard and Jeremy Trouilh’s first feature focuses on Youri (Alseni Bathily), who shares a name—more or less—with Yuri Gagarin, the Russian cosmonaut who was the first man in space, and whom the huge housing complex Youri lives in is named after. But despite his resourceful efforts to save it, the dilapidated Cite Gagarine project on Paris’ outskirts is scheduled for demolition after nearly 60 years. That is variably relieving and upsetting news for those who inhabit its 370 run-down apartments. But it’s a disaster for teenager Youri, who’s never lived anywhere else, and still awaits the day when his elusive mother will return home—or at least come to get him.
Set in the kind of poor, geographically marginalized, racially mixed community that in French movies usually signals “crime melodrama,” Gagarine goes in a different direction. We see how Youri loves his problematic home, as do friends played by Jamil McCraven, Finnegan Oldfield, and Lyna Khoudri, and how he’s used it to project his own fantasies of space exploration. When everyone else dutifully moves out before the demolition, he stays, creating a secret sanctuary that’s like the sets for a 1970s sci-fi movie. Utilizing footage of the location’s real history, this is a disarmingly sweet if also sad spin on coming-of-age territory, with a whimsical, somewhat spectral tone all its own.
Something Witchy This Way Comes: ‘Suspiria,’ ‘You Won’t Be Alone’
The warm-and-fuzzy movies noted above might run in terror from the goings-on in two horror films opening this Fri/1, both involving sorcery. The Roxie has a new 4K restoration of Dario Argento’s 1977 Suspiria, a big international hit at the time thats remained a genre classic, as well as its still-active director’s best film—the one in which his baroque style was most beautifully overripe, and in which the “whatever”-ness of the plot mattered least.
Jessica Harper plays an American student at a German ballet academy where some very creepy, inexplicable and gory things are happening. But all of them look fabulous, in eye-poppingly colorful production design and cinematography; the driving rock soundtrack by Goblin is also indelible. It’s a nasty, weird, sometimes laughable, often near-senseless film that somehow is also inarguably one of the greatest horror movies ever made. If you’ve seen Luca Guagadnino’s recent remake (which did have its virtues), trust me, you have not really seen Suspiria.
More in line with the recent vogue for “folk horror” (Midsommar, etc.) is You Won’t Be Alone, which opens at theaters including Berkeley’s Shattuck Cinemas this Fri/1. In the 19th-century Macedonian country, where life has changed little from medieval days, a woman makes a deal with hideously scarred “Old Maid Maria” (Anamaria Marinca) to spare her baby from death. But this ends up actually delivering the infant to the feared crone, who may be the enduring spirit of a villager burned at the stage long ago for witchery. The child—portrayed by a succession of actors, including Noomi Rapace—eventually grows into a young woman who rejects her harsh mistress, and is rejected in return. But she cannot easily return to the world of normal human communities; she will always be different. Indeed, she soon discovers that she has special powers, including the ability to inhabit other bodies.
Handsome, slow, and sometimes pretentious, Alone is an adventuresome kind of feminist folk fable that is less true horror (despite some horrific elements) than a use of the supernatural for allegorical purposes. I’ve found several recent exercises in this general zone (The Witch and Hagazussa for starters) more compelling than I did Goran Stolevski’s debut feature, whose lyricism heads in a direction awfully indebted to Terrence Malick. Still, it wowed a lot of people at Sundance in January, and is definitely worth a look for those seeking movies that stretch genre concepts to fit unconventional ambitions.
The Past, When We Had Nice Things: ‘Mothering Sunday,’ ‘The Automat’
Simpler pleasures are on tap in two new arthouse features. Adapted from Graham Swift’s 2016 novel, Mothering Sunday is very much in the modern British tradition of movies about yesterday’s clothes, manners, and country estates. In 1924, Jane (Odessa Young) is a maid who spends her day off in the company of her lover Paul (Josh O’Connor), the posh son of her employer’s neighbors. They may feel something like love for each other, but the boundaries of class mean Paul is obligated to marry the rather horrible debutante once engaged to his late brother, who died in WW1 service. As did both the sons of the Nivens (Colin Firth, Olivia Colman), whose grieving parents have sunk into respective pits of raging self-pity and fuzzy distraction as a result.
It is a pleasant, seemingly uneventful day in very pleasant surroundings that eventually becomes very eventful indeed, before leaping some years forward, then many decades. (That brief final epilogue provides a big-screen comeback for 85-year-old Glenda Jackson after over 30 years’ absence, a span spent mostly in Parliament.) We are meant to find it all very profound in the end, I suspect, yet this Sunday—not unlike the original novel I’d completely forgotten I read five years ago—remains more intelligently crafted than involving.
Director Eva Husson tries to spice up the tea-cosy atmosphere by including a surprising amount of nudity, but rather than actually being erotic, this has the effect of simply making the film feel like it’s trying very hard not to be straight-up Downton Abbey, or Merchant-Ivory. Yet ultimately that’s just what it is, and not in a memorable way. This decorative yet strangely, immediately forgettable movie opens Fri/1 at the Opera Plaza, then expands to more theaters around the Bay Area as of April 8.
A funkier working-class version of nostalgia for kinder, gentler times is the gist of Lisa Hurwitz’s documentary The Automat, which traces the history of the titular phenomenon—those famous, elegant yet ultra-cheap cafeterias in which customers fed nickels into slots to get dishes from little glass compartments. Though Horn & Hardart Co.’s automats only existed in NYC and Philadelphia, their novelty was so delightful and popular that they were featured in many films and TV shows excerpted here. We also get input from nostalgic celebrities (Mel Brooks, Elliott Gould, Carl Reiner), political figures (RBG, Colin Powell), historians and others.
Attractive to people of all stripes because of their low cost, respectability (which appealed to the early 20th century flood of women office workers), cleanliness, good food, and self-service (a plus for immigrants still new to English), automats were the American “melting pot” in quintessence. Partially inspired by German restaurant automation, the first one opened in 1902, and they flourished for decades, until changing tastes and population shifts towards the suburbs rendered them archaic. By the time they were on their last legs in 1975, an episode of sitcom “Barney Miller” could get an easy laugh by having cops wearily respond to complaints about a flasher at the automat.
In the mode of something like Atomic Cafe, The Automat is a fun flashback whose vintage clips and bemused commentators will entertain whether you’re old enough to have ever actually experienced the subject first-hand or not. Of course, there’s not a tremendous amount to be said about automats; not even 78 minutes’ worth, which means this documentary includes some conspicuous padding. Nonetheless, it’s the kind of pleasing diversion that’s impossible to dislike even when it overstays its welcome a mite. The film opens Fri/1 at Vogue Theater in SF, the Albany Twin, and Smith Rafael Film Center.
