MAY 2016 REVIEWS IN BRIEF: EXCELLENT MOVIES THAT DESERVE BETTER

Being a collection of capsule reviews of movies that the blogger watched months ago, and for reasons that were completely legitimate and made sense at the time did not review them, but now his memory of them has faded to the point where he can't do better than just these half-formed collections of thoughts. Please hold him accountable for re-reviewing these before the end of the year, because they are exquisite.

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No Home Movie (Akerman, 2015)

Chantal Akerman premiered her final film, No Home Movie, on 10 August, 2015, at the Locarno Film Festival, and on 5 October, 2015, she died. It has been reported that she committed suicide. Ordinarily, I'd say it would be right to dismiss that kind of detail as prurient, salacious gossip-mongering, but as a heavily-modulated autobiographical work, it would maybe be disingenuous not to read Akerman's life and personality into the film. And speaking to my honest response to the film (and what good is the critic who isn't honest?), my first thought as the movie ended was solemn comprehension that I now understood, to some degree, what drove Akerman to her choice.

No Home Movie is about loneliness, you see; and about having someone in your life who keeps you busy and maybe fills an emotional need, but being aware constantly of the great big emptiness of everything outside of that one relationship. The title is of course ironic, but it's not ironic in the obvious way; it's "No Home" Movie, not No "Home Movie". It is about the idea of "home" being a cold comfort, and of family as the people who love most that you understand least.

It is, to a first approximation, Akerman's documentary about her mother, Natalia "Nelly" Akerman. She was a survivor of Auschwitz, who ended up in Belgium where she became a wife and the mother of two daughters, and near the end of her life, one of those daughters tried to tease out the details of what she thought about life, the Holocaust, Judaism in Europe, and womanhood (Chantal Akerman offered a tremendously insightful interview with Mubi the week of the film's premiere, and it's an essential guide to what drove her to make the film as well as being a remarkable look into the mind of one of the great insufficiently-appreciated film directors of all time). And No Home Movie is kind of that. It's also a DIY record of how the two Akermans communicate past and around each other, with Chantal perpetually trying to lead Nelly into conversations that never play out, as the older woman is constantly on edge in the most bemused, loving way about her daughter's obsession with cameras.

No Home Movie is not just a film about the impulse to try to learn something more about one's mother: it's about the specific impulse to record that process, to have every element of life filtered through digital screens. Akerman filles is constantly using cameras to intervene between herself and her mother, recording on crappy little cameras and phones their conversations in person and on Skype, making for a collection of footage that's as much about the desire to collect footage as it is to depict anything in particular. The result is a slow movie full of artless shots of the inside of rooms (with a few dreamy, detached shots of the Israeli desert), carefully managed by Akerman and her editor Claire Atherton into a focused chronological march that seems shapeless and ad hoc only once we arrive at the end and discover that the whole movie has been about the process of the director retroactively saying goodbye to the mother she deeply loved and doesn't seem to have ever understood the way she wanted to.

It is beautiful in its slow sloppiness, and it would be gently depressing even if we weren't armed with the knowledge of the filmmaker's imminent death; it is a sober, ashen-faced movie, and a very powerful one. The ingredients look so simple and raw as to be outtakes or inscrutable trash, but the film made from them is a piercing, precious, and sad depiction of the human craving for family and contact.

9/10

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Cemetery of Splendor (Weerasethakul, 2015)

A great work by a magnificent director, Cemetery of Splendor is, nonetheless, the movie that makes me wonder if Apichatpong Weerasethakul is becoming "shticky". That probably means nothing at all other than that of all his features, it's the one whose cryptic insolubility feels to me the most soluble, and in the most straightforward way. At a certain point near the end, the film more or less looks us straight in the eye and intones, "you understand that this is all a dream, right?" And maybe it is, though what "all" is in reference to is debatable, and the fact that the film is so eager to telegraph that reading probably means that it's not right.

The film is about some indefinable combination of characters, some of whom are dead, but the protagonist, anyway, is Jen (Jenjira Pongpas Widner), a nurse at a clinic on the edge of a forest outside of Khon Kaen (Weerasethakul's hometown, referenced in the film's original Thai title). Here she treats soldiers afflicted with a baffling sleeping sickness. Also spending time in the clinic is Keng (Jarinpattra Rueangram), a psychic who helps families communicate with the sleeping soldiers. One of Jen's patients is Itt (Banlop Lomnoi), who snaps into mobile consciousness sometimes, and who is stuck between two worlds: in addition to moving around with Jen in the present, he seems to be perceptually located in the long-gone past, when the location of the clinic was occupied by a royal palace, and Itt seems to be more able to identify that space around him than the "actual" one.

Cemetery of Splendor offers itself as a political commentary, one which I fully lack the context to unpack in any way, though the principle metaphor of the past being an omnipresent bugger in the present, slowly rotting out our lives, is hardly beholden to political or national specificity. Anyway, the film's sheer cumulative impact as a slow-moving collection of emotional undercurrents works regardless of one's ability to make basic narrative connections. In a career made out of nothing but hypnotically slow gestures, this might be the most hypnotic thing the director has made since the gorgeously somnambulent Blissfully Yours. It is the kind of movie so dominated by long, wide shots that the mere presence of a close-up is by itself enough to make you gasp and leap back, and in which the color palette is so carefully limited that a frame lit by neon tubes like something out of '50s sci-fi is striking not for the weirdness of the composition and concept, but simply by the aberration of having that much damn color.

I happily concede that I barely grasped a lot of it: half of it felt like a dream or hallucination while I was watching it, and the other half had joined it by the time I woke up the next morning. It's also so physically tangible but just out of reach, and so meditatively stimulating that the second that it's over, all I wanted was to watch it over again, immediately. And maybe part of that is its explosive, joyful finale, an unexpected musical sequence that the whole movie has been quietly preparing us for all along, and is just about the best scene of its kind since Beau travail. Calling the film supremely pleasurable and transfixing is undoubtedly selling it short, but as a first impression, it's absolutely enough.

8/10