Zama – Partial Review

La Jetée – Chris Marker’s experimental classic. I was curious to re-watch this due to my burgeoning interest in photography. Constructed entirely of photographs and voice-over, with the exception of ~3 seconds of film, this is certainly an unorthodox way to construct a 30 minute science fiction time travel story. Marker utilizes the medium he’s chosen and various visual motifs within his photography to explore how different objects or ideas – a photograph, a memory, taxidermy, fossils, history, love, a film – function as imperfect vessels of meaning through time. If you haven’t seen this gem, it is on YouTube here: La Jetée

Zama – As mentioned in the previous Week in Review, I also read Antonio Di Benedetto’s 1956 novel, Zama. Di Benedetto stated openly that the biggest influence on his career was Dostoevsky. The first part of this book is sort of like Notes from Underground set in colonial Asunción, layered with the complicated racial hierarchy of the region; like the narrator of that novel, the titular Don Diego de Zama is a conniving, neurotic type who’s overwrought inner dialogue moves the story along. As an official in the Spanish Empire, Zama aspires to a more central position of importance, ideally in Buenos Aires with his family, or better yet, in Spain. As an americano though (one of Spanish heritage but born in the Americas) his pull is weaker than any Spaniard’s and his plans are repeatedly thwarted. In parts 2 and 3, the parameters of Zama’s stasis take on a Kafkaesque quality. Questions of who he is, where he is, and what is keeping him in Asunción become more ambiguous. I found that the initial disdain I felt for Zama slowly turned to sympathy and then to something more mysterious. Very much recommended.

Hamlet – London’s Royal Shakespeare Company came to town with their wildly successful production of Hamlet featuring a nearly all black cast replete with numerous pan-African influences. Though this production had its cultural moment long before 2018’s Black Panther film, this did not stop the Wakanda Forever salute from being incorporated for good fun (and for good reason). On a scene to scene, character to character level, this show was better acted, better produced and more visually interesting than D.C.’s Shakespeare Theater Company rendition earlier this year. Part of it is talent and budget, but part of it is that the RSC show is able to go places through its cross-cultural pollination that are simply inaccessible to a majority white American cast. For example, Hamlet’s encounter with the Ghost of his late father is preempted by, what I can only describe as, a solo African dream dance featuring live drummers on stage, encircling fog machines, and flashing strobe lights. The question of whether Hamlet is really seeing his father, some other spirit, or simply going insane always existed within the text; what this production adds is a historical and cultural ambiguity that refocuses the scope of the play. To its credit, the D.C. show wisely leaned into the latent political interpretations offered by current events: Claudius as an authoritarian leader in charge of a secret police; Hamlet as a liberal hipster driven to radical protest. Here again though, the RSC production essentially runs a circle around that take, while offering larger readings. Notably, this play still takes place in a Denmark, a country that is ethnically over 90% caucasian and one of the many western European countries with a dark legacy in the Atlantic slave trade.

To The Back of Beyond – What if you just stood up and walked away from your entire life? Home, career, partner, children, everything. It’s an extreme, partially unbelievable conceit for a novel that author Peter Stamm makes not only believable but emotionally resonant. Thomas, a husband to Astrid, and father of two children, does exactly that at the start of this book. He walks away one evening on what begins as a stroll and slowly becomes a much larger choice to continue to hike through the Swiss countryside without end. The perspective alternates from Astrid to Thomas as they both slowly accept that Thomas will not be returning. Stamm’s prose, which is quite elegant but never dazzling, keeps the story within the quotidian. Thomas’s decisions to keep going, like most things in life, just sort of happen, revolving around the practical needs one would face in such a scenario. Ultimately the story is about the distant relationship between the two protagonists, and though Stamm never drifts into abstraction, the distancing itself is pregnant with more relatable interpretations. The need for freedom, space, change in a relationship are all on the table, and in many ways it’s Astrid’s, not Thomas’s, pained yet quiet acceptance of this that will have most readers reeling.

Thor: Ragnarok – In the wake of Infinity War, I felt compelled to fill in some personal blind spots in the MCU. I am also a huge Taika Waititi fan and was excited what he could do with a massive budget. I was mostly not disappointed, with the caveat that this film looks and moves like any of the magical/space operatic entries. Waititi’s unique contribution here is the comedy, which has the dual function of making Ragnarok wildly funny and of finally (3 solo films in!) fleshing out Hemsworth’s Thor into a three-dimensional character. The contrast with the piece of cardboard with the stapled blonde wig on top that plays Thor in Age of Ultron is stark to say the least. Allegedly, there are numerous Maori influences throughout visuals but I am sadly uninformed in that area. The significance these references likely have with the film’s broad post-colonial themes makes sense, but unfortunately said themes are under-developed anyway.

Face / Off – In John Woo’s ludicrous but highly entertaining film, FBI agent Sean Archer, played by John Travolta, decides to swap faces with terrorist Caster Troy, played by Nicholas Cage, in order to go deep undercover in a high security prison and learn from Troy’s brother the key to stopping a terror attack in downtown Los Angeles. Obviously, Troy wakes up without his face, finds Archer’s face lying around and attaches that face. . . If this premise isn’t enough for you, there is also a sequence where Archer, with Cage’s face, is pointing a gun at a mirror seeing the reflection of the terrorist he’s after, while on the other side of this mirror is another mirror(!) where Troy, with Travolta’s face, is pointing a gun at the reflection of the FBI agent he despises.

Avengers: Age of Ultron – I had heard that this was one of the worst MCU films, and its possible that that low bar made me mostly enjoy it despite its many shortcomings. This film is excellent at illustrating the power discrepancies between the team members, the importance of cooperation and knowing your role. Surprisingly, Hawkeye, the weakest Avenger by far, steals the show and may be the only three-dimensional character in the film. Besides that, I was unable to extract an intelligible political message, other than that Artificial Intelligence is dangerous if we don’t do it right. Ultron has an eye for the theatrical, at one point taking great joy in destroying an older version of himself, but too low an IQ to make this portrayal of the future worth thinking about.

The Time to Live and the Time to Die – Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s 1985 coming of age picture set in a remote rural Taiwanese town. Released the same year that Hou stared in, and co-wrote, Taipei Story, it feels part of the same conversation that Edward Yang is directing in that film, and later in A Brighter Summer Day. This is not an accident. Chu Tien Wen, a co-writer of Taipei Story and all of Hou’s subsequent films, is a co-writer here and these close friends aspired to forge a new Taiwanese cinema, one that dealt with the problem of Taiwanese national identity whilst exploring new aesthetic ground through film. The Time to Live and the Time to Die was a personal film for Hou, and it’s possible the events are entirely memoir; its Hou’s voice who narrates the film. Hou’s signature long takes and rural seated vantage point make this early film distinct for the time and the environment, but it never achieves the meditative focus or the thematic vastness of his later work.

Art Gallery of Ontario – A first time visit, this is a beautiful, though unintentionally funny building. If you have seen The Square and its X-Royal Art Museum you’ll know why. There were two highlights of this visit, the first being the Henry Moore gallery. It features around two-dozen original plaster sculptures, gifted by Moore to the AGO, populating a single large gallery and placed in scattered positions. The room itself is sanitized by filtered, natural light, giving the grey tones of the marble floor, off-white walls and concrete ceiling an antiseptic feeling. The aging, discolored plaster of the forms Moore created thrive like alien mutations in this atmosphere. Like the later two artists mentioned below, this was my first time encountering a compendium of Moore’s work and I was impressed at his ability to generate tension in the spatial voids of his work, often sculpting the air as much as the material. The second highlight was an exhibit called Mitchell/Riopelle: Nothing in Moderation which focused on the unique relationship between abstract expressionist painters Joan Mitchell and Jean-Paul Riopelle. The exhibit traces their work before, during and after their long romance, plotting how their work mirrored their relationship. Starting at two distinct points, their compositions slowly begin to resemble each other up until they don’t, at which point the couple were splitting apart, living on two different continents. Riopelle’s mosaic-like painting style, achieved by taking gobs of paint and then smearing them with a spatula or knife in mass geometric patterns, was a revelation for me.

Zama – This is Lucretia Martel’s 2017 adaptation of Antonio di Benedetto’s 1956 novel. I’m unfamiliar with Martel’s work, but this is a fantastic start, even though I much prefer the book (see next week’s Partial Review). The film follows the titular Don Diego de Zama, an administrator in the Spanish Empire stationed in Asunción, as he vies for a promotion to another region, ideally to his family still in Buenos Aires, or best of all to Spain. Zama is repeatedly promised these opportunities, but as the years pass unmarked, the realization of his desolation sinks in. We are never allowed to see inside Zama’s head but Martel externalizes his longing and metaphysical pain through vague illnesses, dilapidated means of living and a mesmerizing non-diegetic sound design. The tactility of the period is possibly this film’s highest achievement. Lastly, I got to see this at the TIFF Bell Lightbox, which is quite nice!

Gardiner Museum – The ceramics-only museum in Toronto was hard to pass up. The temporary exhibit was a participatory Yoko Ono “room” that involved meditating with a rock, creating string connections across walls, and mending your own broken ceramics in the spirit of community. It had the strange two-pronged effect of inducing multiple eye rolls yet endearing me to Ono. The main collection, a short history of East-Asian ceramic production followed by a much more in-depth collection detailing how porcelain production technologies and styles permeated through Europe, was most notable for its British collections. The Brits brought an entrepreneurial spirit to porcelain, standardizing popular prints and styles for mass production. This in turn enabled them to serve both a larger middle class market, while stimulating highly inventive ceramics for the elite which necessarily needed to be more impressive. Though I felt like I was looking at the beginnings of Pottery Barn, the British seemed to understand how economics and art could be synthesized in a way that the other European powers did not. The standardized pieces, labeled by the pattern number (of which there were over 500), were the most elegant as well as the most egalitarian.

Avengers: Infinity War – I liked it. . . It was fun in the way that a comic book crossover event can be, but also as meaningless. Though, even if the events of this film are likely to be undone soon, it feels like Marvel is hinting that the events of the next film will result in some permanent consequences. I’m all on board the MCU train at this point. I recommend this review for a more substantive take: Avengers: Infinity War

Partial Review

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Week in Review: April 30th – May 6th, 2018

Week in Review: April 23rd – 29th, 2018