The Favourite

As much as Yorgos Lanthimos Dogtooth and The Favourite are different - set in different time periods, The Favourite glittering with the beautifully detailed costumes that a big production can afford - the two films share a sense of profound isolation and loneliness. As much as its central characters are seeking - power, connection, influence, being lifted up from loss and shame - they are also stranded in their individual skins. Olivia Colman's Queen Anne (who gives an outstanding performance here in a film of strong performances) is the best example. She is about to become the most powerful monarch in the world, and yet is so stunningly miserable, so literally and figuratively in pain, that it is hard to believe she can suffer her life at all. She has assembled cages filled with rabbits who all stand in for children lost to miscarriages and short lives. None of them have made it to adulthood, and after her death, she will be succeeded by a king from a different house. She is in constant pain from gout, mostly incapable of walking around unaided, and yet feeding her loneliness and abandonment with food that will never fulfil her. 

The only light, the only thing that occasionally brings her moments of lightness and joy, is childhood friend and confidante Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough (Rachel Weisz, fashioned like a tumblr fever dream). She shares her confidence and her bed, and has, through political intelligence and a mind attuned to how power moves through the institutions in England, become the most influential person at court, so much so that her decision shape England's involvement in the War of the Spanish Succession. It would be easy to confuse Sarah's care for Queen Anne as something solely driven by her love of power. In fact, she seems truly fond of Queen Anne, and when she is discarded in favour of her cousin and upstart Abigail, her hurt is that of a betrayed lover who has lost the guiding light of her life.

The film is not too concerned about that War that is happening in the background, only about which side arguing for this or that next step will win the favour of the Queen. Sarah is the character who understands power, and has found a way to carve an unlikely niche for herself in which she has true influence over political outcomes (while her husband is fighting that very war), but it is Abigail who brings all the wit of a woman who has come into bad misfortune due to her father's terrible decisions. That wit wins in the end - and the film is driven by Abigail's lust for bettering her station, for winning back what has been denied for her. She, and the way Emma Stone plays her, is entertaining because she never apologises for what she wants, and that she is willing to do anything necessary to get there. She sees and understands the relationship that Sarah and the Queen have, and instead of a more expected moral outrage, or an attempt to blackmail Sarah, she simply decides to see if she can't win the Queen's favour by being a better version of Sarah - one more demure and less obviously seeking political influence, but one, in the end, that much more disingenuous in her love for Queen Anne. The thing that Lanthimos, or the beautiful script written by historian Deborah Davis, who spent decades trying to turn her story into a film, manages here is to still capture the void that envelopes Abigail once she has managed all that she set out to do. Even after all she has planned has happened, she has not truly won Queen Anne's affections, she hasn't gained any meaning, the orgies and the drinking and the unhappy husband who was just a means to an end do not provide anything more lastingly satisfying than the small moment when she gained a room of her own. 

The most beautiful, and most horrible scenes that The Favourite has to offer is after Queen Anne has exiled Sarah, and both of them stew in their loneliness and misery, unwilling to forgive each other, yet incapable of living meaningfully without each other. Sarah sets out to write a hundred letters, after being advises to repair her relationship, and whittles her pain and hurt down to one letter that would, very likely, change Queen Anne's mind. Queen Anne, promises just such a letter, waits and waits, while her health declines more and more, while new favourite Abigail abandons her and does nothing to soothe her pain, for that letter, not knowing that Abigail has intercepted it and thrown it into the flames, ending a decades long relationship between two women that will now never be repaired, and all for a powerful husband and her husband's friends's advancement in parliament. 

There are other films that show the ultimate emptiness of such total power, the loneliness of being surrounded by people who just want things, but are never willing to give themselves completely (obviously, Marie Antoinette, set only half a century later), but somehow, in this tragicomedy that sometimes ventures on the absurd (something that Nicholas Hoult accomplishes masterfully here, playing historical figure Lord Harley), the depth of sadness is more profound and pronounced, and it is so mainly because of what Olivia Colman does with a character who could so easily be nothing but a caricature of misplaced and fading power. 

2018, directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, starring Olivia Colman, Rachel Weisz, Emma Stone.

The Miseducation of Cameron Post

�The afternoon my parents died, I was out shoplifting with Irene Klauson.�

This is how Emily M. Danforth�s novel starts. Cameron at this stage is just out of childhood, and she loses her parents the same day that a dare with her best friend Irene opens up a whole new world to her. It�s an unfortunate coincidence that Cameron�s first kiss with another girl ends with the trauma of losing her parents, as the guilt of that moment, and the question of whether her parents� death was somehow a punishment by god for her behaviour, haunts her for the rest of her youth. 

Desiree Akhavan�s adaptation never shows us this moment. In fact, nearly all of the details of Cameron�s youth in Montana�s Miles City, which take up about two thirds of the novel, are missing from the film. 

What Desiree Akhavan does achieve, in spite of only focusing on a narrow part of Danforth�s novel, is still remarkable. She creates a foundational trauma that happens in a flash of quickly-paced scenes, Cameron (Chlo� Grace Moretz, somehow perfectly cast for this) and Coley (Quinn Shephard, a few years ago very impressive with a short but memorable stint on Person of Interest) stumbling, kissing against walls, stealing moments away together, in secret, until they are finally discovered by Cameron�s homecoming-date and best friend Jamie after having sex in a car. There�s no need to really hear what happens after, because we can guess, even without having read the book: Jamie, making horrified noises while Cam tries to put her clothes back on and Coley weeps in the car, inconsolable, ashamed, Cam being sat down by her Aunt Ruth, and then, Cam being taken away to God�s Promise, an evangelical conversion therapy centre. 

We don�t really know much about Cam at this point in the film, while she is well-established in the book, and it�s hard to judge how this moment of horror would play out for someone who isn�t familiar with Cameron Post from Danforth�s writing. In the book, it�s the culmination of her low-key struggle with Aunt Ruth, who comes to raise her after her parents� death because her grandmother isn�t really able to do it by herself, as kind and gentle as she is with Cameron�s identity and grief. Aunt Ruth means well, which is probably the worst part of it, because Cameron prior to that point has been raised in an agnostic household and now has to cope with a re-born evangelical Christian who thinks she is saving her niece�s soul by making her go to Church, church group, and eventually, the conversion camp. There is no ill-intent in this, or even hatred, just an utterly and horribly misguided love. 

Cameron herself is � sarcastic, stubborn, questioning. She takes what she�s learned about herself with first best friend Irene Klauson to the same place that so many other queer kids have taken their questions � film -  and educates herself via her small town�s videostore (because the book, and the film for that matter, are set in the early Nineties), sharpening her sense on classic film Personal Best. She runs wild with her best friends (so many scenes in the book are memorably set in an abandoned hospital building, and some of the allure of it comes from how free these kids are to do with their days more or less as they wish, without much parental supervision). She swims competitively and meets a gay girl who is about to move to the Pacific Northwest, and will send her dispatches in the form of letters, phone calls and riot grrrl mixtapes from a world where it seems so much easier to be gay. Cam soaks all of it up, and tries to find meaning, in a way, between her attempts to comprehend how it relates to her parents� death and to being in a small town, trying to shape an identity, until she falls in love with Coley. 

I think it�s worth knowing all of this while watching the film, I think it adds to the layers and layers, as much as the film works on its own. It adds to know how falling in love with Coley feels to Cameron like a bomb going off, an inevitable time bomb that will blow everything apart. Lindsey, her gay friend, from far away cautions her not to go after a straight girl, but Cam can�t help herself (plus Coley isn�t exactly straight, just scared out of her mind). In the book, she seduces her by using The Hunger (in the film, it�s Donna Deitch's beautiful drama Desert Hearts, in both cases it�s good they never make it to the end). Like in the film, they get caught, and Cam is the one paying the price, the one carrying the burden, the one sent off to the conversion camp. 

A lot of the complexities of Cameron at this point are hard to convey in a film that mostly relies on sparse and predominantly sarcastic dialogue between its main characters as well as facial expressions to tell its story. In the novel, Cameron narrates her own story, and she is particularly good at capturing how seasons, weather and landscape play into people�s behaviour � especially kids who are still in school, who come to life during summer holidays. When she arrives at God�s Promise she is shell-shocked � the moment when she and Coley got caught in the car replays a few times, in particular Coley�s refusal to be comforted, and Cameron�s guilt because she thinks that she made her do something she didn�t want to. Since the film doesn�t have the connection between Cameron�s realisation that she is gay and the death of her parents, it uses the guilt over having seduced Coley to turn Cameron into a character who isn�t entirely opposed to the teachings of God�s Promise. It�s the same position the occupies in the book � somewhere between the kids who are there believing deeply and profoundly that they are wrong, and require healing, and the kids who know they are only there because their parents are wrong and misguided, that they only have to survive long enough, or play the game, to be free again. It would be much easier to watch a character interrogate the teachings of God�s Promise from the start, refusing the buy into it entirely � like Cameron�s soon-to-be friends Jane Fonda (Sasha Lane, as perfectly aloof and cool as Jane Fonda is in the book) and Adam do, who have created their own little community of ditch-weed smoking survivors of Dr. Lydia�s heinous teachings. We don�t see too much of that teaching on the screen, the main part is the theory of the iceberg, according to which gayness is only the part of the problem that is obvious to the eye, whereas the majority of the kids� issues remain buried under the sea, and require (for the most part, profoundly traumatising) inspection before they can hope to overcome their SSA. Cameron is curious enough about that part that she investigates everyone else�s iceberg, trying to understand everyone along the lines of Rick and Lydia�s interpretation of their identity, trying to fill in her own iceberg to understand herself. In the novel, the iceberg fits in well with Cameron�s previous attempt at finding a metaphor for her complex inner life � after her parents� death, she starts to decorate a dollhouse from her childhood with found and stolen objects, but maybe in 2018, after Sharp Objects, it�s for the better that this detail didn�t make it into Akhavan�s film. 

Since this is 1993, Cameron doesn�t really have the same luxury of being able to just refute the claims of Reverend Rick and his much easier to hate sister Dr. Lydia from the start. As much as Jane and Adam attempt to make her understand that there are other villains in her story � Coley, for one, once she figures out that she was the one who ratted her out, not her friend Jamie � there is still a part of Cameron driven by guilt that buys into some of the thing that God�s Promise is selling, even if she isn�t as completely convinced by it as her room-mate Erin and some of the other kids are. It�s so easy for Rick and Lydia to sell the idea that being gay is wrong because it matches what the kids have heard from the people who�ve sent them there � who are meant to love them unconditionally, and care for them � and because in 1993, it would�ve been easier to argue that having a family, and living a life not burdened with adversity and conflict, is easier when you�re straight. 

It takes a while for Cameron to catch on to the fact that Rick and Lydia have absolutely no idea what they are doing, that their hack-psychology isn�t cut out to deal with actual crises, that their limited conception of self and personhood creates an atmosphere in which someone will inevitably break, even more so because some of these children weren�t sent there by loving parents or guardians who wanted the best for them, but hateful and despicable irresponsible people who want what they think is evil cut out of their children, with no regard to their mental and physical well-being. The most horrible moment in the film is taken directly from the book � it�s when Mark (Owen Campbell, absolutely remarkable in the role), the poster boy for the camp�s success, a kid who passionately quotes scripture, believes profoundly in the teachings, and is so lovable and compassionate on the phone that he brings in most of the donations finds out that his father is still refusing to let him come home because he remains too effeminate. Distressed, he quotes scripture in group therapy that makes it clear how much he has been made to hate himself. Rick and Lydia, utterly incompetent, leave him alone, and he severely hurts himself. 

It�s a horrible moment in which Cameron finally realises that these people who are meant to be responsible for the children under their care are not capable of caring for them, that these amateurs do not know what they are doing. Ironically, an investigator is sent to question the kids about the conditions in the camp (the man tells her, point-blank, that he is there to investigate practices, not judge the intent behind it). He asks if she trusts the Rick and Lydia, if she believes that they have her best interest at heart, and Cameron can�t even begin to put into words how impossible that question is to answer in the affirmative. Rick and Lydia and the culture their represent are tasked with destroying any sense of self-possession and self-knowledge, any sense of true identity, that the kids have, and Mark�s fate is only the most jarring example of what happens when those things are taken away from a person. 

A more quiet moment, and one that I�m so glad has made it from the page into the film, is between Erin and Cameron. The film, like the book, very intentionally plays Erin the Viking (Emily Skeggs doing perfect magic) up for laughs � her obsession with a sports team, her narrative of herself as being gay because she is too much into sports, and bonded with her dad over it, her earnestness in trying to become straight, her attempts to become more fit to hilarious �Blesserzise� videotapes. Cameron is so caught up in her blooming friendship with Adam and Jane Fonda and trying to make sense of her remaining feelings for Coley that she completely misses the many moments where it�s pretty clear how much Erin cares for her � until Erin literally leaps on her, after Cam has a vivid sex dream, to try and save her from having evil thoughts until she changes her mind and makes her come instead. She still insists, after, that she wants to become straight, that she wants a �normal� life, except it�s so clear, in everything she does, that she likes Cameron too much. It�s like a transformation happens in those few minutes, where Erin goes from a character played for laughs to turning into a whole complex sexual being (who responds to Cameron, after she says that she really didn�t see it coming, that it is because she didn�t think of her that way � and she sounds like she deeply wants to be thought of that way), where she gloriously triumphs over all the moments where anyone would�ve made fun of her for being too much into God. The fact that God�s Promise is trying to eradicate this spirit and passion out of her is as much proof of its failings at basic humanity as Mark�s horrible act of self-destruction is. 

This is why The Miseducation of Cameron Post is at its best when it reminds us that the kids trapped at God�s Promise are exactly that, teenagers who are trying to make sense of themselves, who become gloriously themselves when they are finally able to turn a radio to a non-Christian-rock radio station and sing �What�s Going On� together (perfect, in a way, after Sense8 two years ago). God�s Promise is trying to break them down so it can more successfully instil its hideous ideology � another horrible moment is when Lydia cuts off Adam�s (Forrest Goodluck) beautiful hair, an act of pure hatred against his identity that refuses to be shaped into evangelical Christian shapes. Rick and Lydia�s agenda ultimately has to fail because the sheer amount of life, of passion, of desire for freedom that refuses to be beaten or prayed out of Adam, Jane Fonda and Cam will carry them into a life far away from this horror. At least that�s the note the film ends on � the three of them, riding away from God�s Promise in the back of a pick-up truck, playfully and freely flirting with a real life of their own. 

It�s a much less ambiguous ending than Danforth�s novel, which, because it starts the way it does, ends with Cameron swimming the lake in which her parents perished, attempting to make sense of how her loss and her grief connect to how and whom she loves. In both cases, it would have been wasted time to prosecute the institutions we already know are evil, and it is glorious to see instead a celebration of those who successfully overcome, simply by being free. 

2018, directed by Desiree Akhavan, starring Chlo� Grace Moretz, Sasha Lane, Forrest Goodluck, Emily Skeggs, Owen Campbell, John Gallagher Jr., Quinn Shephard, Jennifer Ehle.

Annihilation

This is the most beautiful piece that will be written about Alex Garland's adaptation of Jeff VanderMeer's novel. 

The way this film now reverberates through me is the realisation that it relates to the book it is based on the same way in which its central premise works: the five women go through the Shimmer into Area X to find themselves transformed by what the meteor caused, their DNA becoming the starting point for violent and beautiful transfiguration and improvisation. It feels like the same thing is happening to the novel Annihilation as it becomes this film: Garland transfigures and improvises with the genetic material that has been provided to him, and the outcome is radically different from that of the novel. In a stunning way, form and content match. 

Some of the changes between book and novel are the result of the demands of the film. It was fairly clear from the beginning that there would need to be a different narrative perspective, considering how impossible it would have been to translate the way the readers are bound to the biologist in the novel to the film, regardless of Natalie Portman's talent. Her biologist, named Lena (everyone has names here), has a different backstory, and maybe that was the loss I felt the keenest. Lena used to be in the army, where she met her husband, Kane, who returns from the secret mission after a year - and terrifyingly changed, empty - until he starts haemorrhaging. The way that we find out more about Lena is flashbacks to the weeks before Kane started the mission that he couldn't talk about - and the most revealing moment in those flashbacks is when Lena laughs in Kane's face about the idea of pining for him while he is gone. It's the only sign left of the utterly solitary woman in VanderMeer's novels, whose backstory revealed her to be incapable of connecting with other people, and happiest when she was studying animals by herself. There was a sense in the novel that the biologist was driven by the mystery of her husband's disappearance and the return of a person she did not quite recognise, but at the same time, the way she settled into the terroir of Area X was as much connected to her history as a person who performed the best when she was left to herself, with only a very tentative link to humanity. 

I'm not quite sure if the same is true for Lena. Like the other four women on her mission, she identifies with the geologist's notion that they are all "damaged goods", but it seems to be grief for the (ambiguous) loss of her husband more than anything else, and as much as he dominates the flashbacks, his presence in her mind decides the way she relates to the other team members. Nobody except for Dr. Ventress (the psychologist, never revealed as the Director here, but played with the same stoic distance and control by Jennifer Jason Leigh, even though she is robbed of her powers here) knows about her connection to the previous mission, and Lena's decision to keep it a secret causes one of the many catastrophes that befall them as they make their way towards the lighthouse. 

This is another departure from the novel, which was so much more concerned with the subtle changes in the fabric of the character's identities, especially the biologist's. This is a horror film with a classical set-up, a cast of very different characters thrown into a situation that the audience already knows will bring out the worst in them. It's even spoken out loud at the beginning of the mission - there are two ways in which the previous missions could have come to their disastrous end, either they were killed by something in Area X, or they killed each other. It becomes an inescapable prediction regarding their own fate. Someone will snap and become a danger to the other crew members. Someone will be very willing to sacrifice everyone else for her own goals. Someone will give up. 

None of that takes away from the power of the film, and the way all of those things are realised are what makes it so horrifyingly beautiful. The Shimmer, which the mission crosses, acts like a border between the rational and a dream world in which rules still exist, but not in the way in which all of these women expect (and one of the points is that their combined attempts at comprehending what they find adds up - the biologist, psychologist, geologist, physicist and the paramedic all use what they know and they all come close, in a way). The biologist studies cells, and finds them changed, and perpetuating their change into future generations. The psychologist studies how Area X degrades the mental cohesiveness of her unit, but does nothing to combat does changes, or try to save (it's not what she's here for, and she has no intention of returning). The geologist is the first to go, but somehow manages to be the only character who breaches the quietness, who offers up theories about the human condition and the specific ways in which the team works to Lena (after she dies in the most horrible way, the main thing left behind is silence). 

Quietly and secretly, in this version of events, the person that will stay with me might be Tessa Thompson's Josie Radek, who is so very quiet, who is mainly seen through the eyes of the geologist and the paramedic, who both offer interpretations of her character to the group and Lena. She seems to be the first to truly comprehend what is happening in Area X, how whatever has landed here is transforming DNA, maybe even playing with it. She understands that the goal may not be destruction, as much as the set-up for the mission is a fear of the other, of Area X expanding to eventually encompass all of the world. She engages with it, maybe even with the surface beauty of flowers growing in new forms, reinterpretation human DNA into something else. She is more horrified than anyone by the violent part of it - when the geologist's last moment becomes forever trapped inside the bear, that part of her that was most scared surviving inside the creature that killed her, forever screaming for her life. Josie then goes on to refuse the dichotomy between the two explanations and the two choices - it's no longer either being killed by Area X (Gina Rodriguez' Anya Thorensen's death becoming the oddest visualisation of "Man is wolf to man", except with bears), or killing each other. It's not longer running back to where they entered or running towards the lighthouse, where they may leave. Instead, Josie wanders off into the beautiful vegetation, slowly becoming a part of Area X, the self-inflicted wounds on her arms transformed into fertile ground for new growth. 

There is no tunnel/tower here, no Crawler writing words on the wall in fungi, as much as that would have been such a beautiful translation of the idea that this other takes what it finds and then transforms it. Instead of asking a why, a reason, or even a motive of what has happened, and as an explanation moves further away the more the horror pervades and transforms, Annihilation becomes about the individual adapting to radical change within itself. The true horror doesn't start with the creatures attacking the group, but with a video they come across of the previous mission, of Kane and another soldier gutting one of their team mates to find his insides turned into snakes, moving on their own. This alienation from the self is what breaks Anya, once she realises that these changes are happening in her own body. At the same time it almost feels like the psychologist is safe from it until the very end because her cancer is already doing that to her, the process started before she even entered Area X and since she knows how all of this will end for her in any case, it doesn't affect her as much as it does the others. 

In the end, we are left with Lena, who has traced her husband Kane to the lighthouse. She finds a horrible set up, a dead body against a wall with a video camera pointing, promising truth. When she plays the video, she watches her husband self-immolate, brought to kill himself by a copy that has the same empty, strange eyes that the man who returned to her had. Once Lena enters the underworld created by the meteor, any remnants of a recognisable reality disappear, and what remains is a visually overwhelming sequence - a dance, the birth of a creature that seeks to become, set to music that may as well come from that place. We cannot be sure who returns from that place, and we already know that even if it were Lena, she would have been changed so much that the person returning wouldn't be Lena at all, the same way in which Kane spoke about his error in thinking he was still a man. 

directed by Alex Garland, starring Natalie Portman, Oscar Isaac, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Gina Rodriguez, Tessa Thompson, Tuva Novotny. 

Blade Runner 2049

Freeform, many spoilers

Two moments stand out in this three hour tour-de-force, so many years in the making. Early in the film, protagonist K (either from Kafka's The Trial, or perhaps a reference to Karel Capek, or both) is questioned about what the difference would be if an android were born, rather than created, and he says, the difference is that those who are born possess a soul. Which, for a character that at that point has been confirmed to be an android himself, and one of the ones that are incapable of misbehaving, seems like an exceptionally philosophical and spiritual take on life. The film doesn't really answer, or maybe isn't particularly interested in, how K would have come to this conclusion, or how the concept of the soul makes sense in his perception of life. I like to think about this though - because maybe it makes sense from the perspective of his programmers, to give such an elevated reason for why humans may have more value than he does, and conversely, why "retiring" the old pre-schism models, who seem capable of individual lives filled with aspirations and dreams, is justified. As much as there is no more need, in this future version of the universe that Philip K. Dick and Ridley Scott created, for a Voight-Kampff test for human consciousness or android programming, the distinction between the sacred human and the dispensable machine is still essential to the workings of this world. How else to justify the killing of a man, who by our current standards fulfils every requirement of a human being with inalienable rights? The story starts with K, sent to retire Sapper Morton, a Nexus-8 replicant who subsides as a protein farmer. He kills Sapper, but also discovers a buried military-issue trunk containing the bones of a woman - who was pregnant, and died during child birth, and also happened to be a replicant. It throws K's entire worldview into chaos, because what would it mean if replicants could replicate - without human intervention? What if replicants couldn't just pursue lives of their own, couldn't just follow human burial rites (leaving flowers on graves of loved ones) but could also reach that final biological boundary between real and artificial? 

It's not just K who is shaken to the core. His boss at the LAPD, played by Robin Wright, realises the implications for society, especially in this volatile moment in time. After Tyrell Corp folded, after most of their data was lost in a world-wide EMP referred to as the "Blackout", a genius blind creator named Niander Wallace has created a class of replicants incapable of disobeying, who are constantly monitored.

This is also where a divide happens. To K, the existence of a born replicant child in the world means a radical shift of ideology and history. To Niander Wallace, it means something radically different: an answer to how to create an ever-grown slave class of people with no rights that he doesn't have to build by hand, that can replicate itself naturally. The question of consciousness and rights doesn't occur to Wallace - he isn't just removed from the replicants he makes, but all of humanity, existing in his lonely pyramids, away from society. This is perhaps the point where we remember that the existence of replicants hasn't suddenly changed the whole fate of humanity - if anything, the poor as poorer than they have ever been. If anything, there are points in this film where I wondered, genuinely, if there were even any humans left, if we hadn't be wiped out as a whole for our creations to take over, doomed to replicate the same dynamics of oppression and exploitation without any way of changing the path of history. 

In the end, it doesn't much matter if that is the case or not, if it is humanity that has spread to nine other planets, or replicants made in our image, if Mackenzie Davis affecting Mariette is human, or a replicant disguised as a human working for the revolution. It isn't a question of cause and effect. The existence of a born replicant motivates Niander Wallace to set everything at his disposal in motion to find that person - and what is at his disposal is the terrifying, unflinching murder machine Luv (Sylvia Hoeks), who never hesitates, more like a terminator than anything else that has ever existed in Blade Runner. 

For K, it means something else. The more he follows the clues down the rabbit hole, the more he manages to convince himself that he is the chosen one. He recovers a memory that he thought was implanted, but now suspects is genuine, of a childhood that he was never meant to have, linking him to the birth date of the mysterious replicant. In what is maybe the best, and likely most lasting scene in Blade Runner 2049, K meets Dr. Anna Stelline (Carla Juri), a scientist creating memories for replicants in a biological bubble to protect her compromised immune system. She accesses his traumatic memory, and confirms that it is based on someone's genuine experience, not created - which feeds in well into K's increasing conviction that he is the chosen one, the special one, the centre of his own story. The idea that he is the child - the child of Rachael and Deckard, as we soon realise, drives him beyond any commands that he may be given. This self-identification suddenly makes it possible for him to creatively interpret commands that he is given, to find freedom in a programming that should not allow him any freedom. It's almost as if the second that he thinks himself to be free, he is - even if that freedom entails suffering and unspeakable violence. 

All the more fitting, that throughout all of this, we also discuss the humanity of an AI named Joi (Ana de Armas) who loves K unconditionally, and in whose liberation he is deeply involved in even before he considers that he himself may have a soul. One of his first acts in the narrative is using his money and power to free her from the confines of his home projector, so that she can experience the world on her own terms. It's almost like the thoughts about freedom, and who deserves to be free from the bounds of their creators, is a constant consideration in the back of K's mind. Joi ends up paying a terrible price for her freedom and her insistence to protect K, but in the end, this is her choice. This whole story line is a very interesting and topical choice that maps out the fundamental difference between 1982 and 2017, where humanity is much more concerned with the implications of a super intelligent artificial intelligence than the moral rights of replicants. 

Of course, Blade Runner 2049 is about identity and memory, programming and free will. It's always about the question of whether it matters that memories are truly ours, and lived, if they shape our identity regardless of their veracity. K, stoically (because for what else would you cast Ryan Gosling, who manages stoic without, ironically, losing his humanity) works his way towards the truth. On the way there, he is shot, beaten, cut. He finds the man he believes to be his father, who now leads a solitary existence in the remains of Las Vegas, with no company but a dog and his books (and we get a hint that this is where K gets his concept of a soul from - avid reading). He finds out the truth, that Deckard and Rachael had a child, and then Deckard covered up all the traces (it's not made explicit, but there is a chance that he may be responsible for the EMP that wiped out digital information, and made it hard for even someone as powerful as Niander Wallace to be confident in his pre-2022 knowledge). 

And then the story takes another twist. K isn't the chosen one after all, but wasn't everything set in perfect motion for him to be all the more motivated to help the cause of the rebels because he believed he was? This moment feels almost like it transcends the narrative - Ryan Gosling's K believing that the story was about him this whole time, and giving his all because of it, only to realise that was nothing but a minor puzzle piece, one that isn't even bound to make it to the end. Freysa, the leader of the resistance, tells him that he needs to kill Deckard to protect the true identity of the born replicant, who will give the rebellion the moral cause to succeed. K's last act will be disobeying that order - he will leader Deckard to his daughter, who was moved to tears seeing K's memory because it was hers, this whole time. 

Of course, there is more. There is Deckard, tortured by Wallace with a cloned version of Rachael, insisting that this person isn't the same as the one that he loved, because as much as memories can be implanted, it makes a difference whether they were lived or not (he says, her eyes were green - which is an insider joke about a continuity error in the original film - that works as so much more). 

There is the inevitability of a complete catastrophe that will wipe out earth, and all those flimsy humans working their hardest to leave for a different planet - but no other planets are ever shown. 

There is the idea of a baseline, a comfort, a way for humans to feel non-threatened by the existence of replicants who are capable of comprehending philosophical and spiritual concepts, who are so much stronger, and so much more able to survive in extremes (which is really the whole masculine, aesthetic veneer of both films). The Voight-Kampff test has become unnecessary because it is no longer difficult to distinguish between replicants and humans (but why is it no longer difficult? And were any of the people in K's department ever human?), but the baseline measures if replicants still comfortably follow commands and remain predictable. 

Films of the Year

Moonlight (2016)
Get Out
Thelma
L'avenir (2016)
I Am Not Your Negro (2016)
Personal Shopper (2016)
Christine (2016)
Mudbound 
Wonder Woman

Bonus shout-outs: 

Columbus
Lovesong (2016)
Busanhaeng (2016)
Colossal (2016)
Paint it Black (2016)
Green Room (2015)
20th Century Women (2016)
Arrival (2016)
Hidden Figures (2016)
Power Rangers
Spider-Man: Homecoming

2009 | 2010 | 2011 | 2012 | 2013 | 2014 | 2015 | 2016 | 2017

Thelma

Maybe it speaks to something being in the air in 2016 and 2017 that Joachim Trier's Thelma is temporally so close to  Julia Ducournau's Raw. They utilise the same mechanism, and their power is derived from the same central twist regarding young women: both Justine's and Thelma's parents aren't so much concerned about the damage that the world will do to their daughters, but about the havoc they will wreak upon the world. This is obviously a complete contrast to the approach overbearing, conservative parents would be expected to take once their daughters leave for lives away from their control, but it speaks to their lack of adaptability that the methods that they choose to deploy are the same. Instead of recognising that the power that they fear so much belongs to their children, rather than controls them, they leave them in ignorance about their own potentials, hoping that the strict rules imbued throughout childhood will hold true even when there is significant physical distance. But anyone would know that this approach is doomed to fail, especially when it comes in direct conflict with lust and love. 

Both Raw and Thelma pit a dogmatic, tightly controlled childhood (vegetarianism and conservative Christianity) against two women who discover themselves in a more permissive environment. In both their cases, their parents' dogmas are quite literally utilised to keep them in check - Justine's forced vegetarianism is meant to keep her away from the bloodlust inherent in her family, Thelma's Christianity, as is later revealed, is the parents' way of coping with their daughters ability to bend the universe to her own will. The parents exert control over their children, but the caveat is that this control naturally has to end once their children reach adulthood, and undergo the rites like going off to university, and living their own lives. Thelma makes it quite clear that it is concerned with the specific ways in which society punishes and disciplines women who do not fit into what is expected, when Thelma's research into her own condition - non-epileptic seizures - leads down a rabbit hole of institutionalisation and witch hunts. 

This is of course not to say that both Justine's and Thelma's conditions, or powers, aren't horrifying in their awesomeness. Trier slowly reveals the trauma at the heart of this family, beginning the film with an ominous scene of a father taking his young daughter hunting, across a frozen lake, into the woods - a man who, without explanation, points his rifle at his daughter before, apparently, changing his mind. The scene feels like a non-sequitur for a long while, until the film reveals, in flashback, that Thelma used to have a little brother, and that her mother hasn't always been in a wheelchair. The scenes from these realisations to the actual explanations are the most tense ones, like an inevitable catastrophe waiting to happen, yet having already happened in Thelma's past. It's a key that unlocks everything - the man in the woods, considering murdering his daughter who, with a simple nightmare, killed her brother, who caused her mother to try and commit suicide - but then changing his mind, and instead raising her with a furious, dogmatic religion that is meant to keep her away from others, from anything that might cause her to lose control. 

The film never condemns Thelma's parents for their actions, if anything, it allows the audience to emphasise with them. Their loss and grief are palpable, as is her mother's inability to love her daughter, or trust her, after. She resents her for causing the loss and drama, even though she was only a young child, with no way of controlling her powers. More than that, the film hints that the family should have seen it coming, should have prepared better but maybe instead chose to only fully embrace the son once he was born (there is no confirmation for this but it seems like whatever Thelma has only affects female members of the family). Thelma's grandmother, who feverishly told stories that sound similar to what is happening to her now, has been locked away in a mental hospital, and erased from the family history. 

But none of this -  a story about a girl whose powers scare her family so much that they do everything short of killing her to control her, instead of giving her the ability to understand herself - would have the punch and emotional resonance if it weren't for Anja (Kaya Wilkins). Thelma leaves her parents' remote house to study in Oslo, were she starts out as - and the film shows this quite literally, zooming in on her wandering forlornly admits groups of students on campus in birds-eye - a socially inept loner, who cannot figure out the social conventions that come so easily and naturally to her fellow students. In lectures, she sits alone, she doesn't speak to anyone, at night, she walks back to her puritanically furnished (until her parents visit her, and bring a table and chairs) student apartment in a concrete block. Her parents call at the same time every day, requesting detailed reports about her daily activities, including meals, and they keep a close eye on all of her social media activity, in case she befriends anyone they do not approve of. Before we figure out what is truly going on, they seem overbearing and controlling, creating a situation in which it has become impossible for Thelma to fit in with everyone else.

Everything changes when a girl sits down next to her in the library. Nothing happens between them, no word is spoken, but her mere presence, her closeness, causes a severe reaction in Thelma. She suffers a seizure in front of all the other students there, an embarrassment that she carries stoically, as if she never expected not to, at some point, become socially stigmatised. 

There seems to be no medical explanation for what happened, but once the two girls meet again - after Anja approaches her in a swimming pool, feeling responsible for the girl she's met under such severe circumstances - it becomes easier to draw a line between Thelma's feelings for her new friend and what happens involuntarily to her body. That first line of interpretation soon starts to feel like a red herring though, or at least a simplification of what Trier is trying to do here - it isn't just deeply repressed feelings that are violently surfacing once Thelma falls in love with Anja. What happens goes far beyond that - animals begin to follow her home, she has vivid dreams that bleed into reality, she moves things with her mind without wanting to. More than that, and this is maybe the central question around which this entire story turns, she seems to be able to compel Anja to do things. Before they truly know each other, because she thinks of her, Anja walks through the night to find her, in spite of never having been told where she lives. 

Once Thelma is back under the control of her parents, once terrible things have happened and she gives up on the idea of living an independent life away from them, her father will use this brutally against her. To explain herself, she talks about how they loved each other, and how true their love was, and to counter her, and to regain control over her, he responds that Anja was merely acting out of compulsion, that Thelma can bend the universe and the minds of others to her will, and therefore, no love she will ever experience will be true. At this point in the story, this argument is clearly the ploy of a father justifying to himself what he is planning to do, what his wife has compelled him to do. They are drugging their daughter to keep her in check, they are planning to wipe out their entire family because they have run out of option, in spite of never ever having tried the kindest one - trusting that Thelma, given the option, may be able to control her abilities and not misuse them. In their minds, their little girl has become monstrous, and they have to slay that monster, along with themselves, restore balance. It's a horrible moment in the film when Thelma realises what her parents have planned for her (when she sees that hatred, that decision, in her mother's face). 

Is this the central question of the film? If Anja loved Thelma willingly, if she was compelled to love her? If Thelma willed it so that Anja would break up with her boyfriend, and then love her back? I think it would be cynical to follow an argument made by a man whose entire life has been undermined and destroyed by the catastrophic ways in which he has dealt with having Thelma as a daughter. He is gentle and kind at times, but also controlling and calculating in how he treats her, so his interpretation of her life should be seen in that light. Maybe Trier is asking us to go by what we see, which is two women who fall in love intensely and suddenly - Anja seems intrigued by and drawn to Thelma before Thelma exerts any kind of control over her, and Thelma, up until her last moments with her mother in the film, seems to have no direct control over her powers (and previously doesn't have the ability to change anyone's mind about her, she can give subtle commands and compel animals and people to move, but does that mean being able to compel to love, which is so much more than mere movement?). Anja is overwhelmingly gentle and soft with this girl who is so different from anyone else, and she almost immediately makes the decision to share her life with her to the extent of bringing her along to a performance at the Opera, with her mother. She seems genuinely hurt when Thelma panics and draws away because she cannot control her powers when she wants too much. 

Anja is central to the film, even though she is absent throughout the second half, and the absence itself becomes the focus point of so many questions. Thelma seems to make her disappear, and this absence remains unexplained until the end, but it triggers her return to her parents. At the same time, the promise of Anja is the promise of having a life beyond this, beyond being drugged by her own father and being told that she will never exist on her own, that her future is mapped out to lead to the hospital room in which she found her long-believed-dead grandmother. In the end, the only way to break free is drastic, but at the same time inevitable once Thelma realises that she is not just fighting for her freedom, but her life. Her father drowns in the lake after believing himself to be on fire, but then the film takes another twist away from what we might have expected from an unsettled and freed Thelma. Instead of killing her mother as well, she gently shows her that there is another way, that now has her awesome powers under enough control to restore her ability to walk. 

Instead of taking freedom away, she gives it freely. And she returns to a happy life, a life that appears to be normal from the outside, one where she is loved in return, so that when the camera zooms out - slowly, following the movement from the start - she is no longer alone. There is, of course, the eerie undertone of doubt, the question of free will, one that can maybe be resolved through the idea that any other person exists as a reflection in our own minds (and that the greatest danger is always confusing this reflection with the actual person, who exists autonomously). Or maybe it can be resolved if we assume that there is no true difference between the two in Thelma.

2017, directed by Joachim Trier, starring Eili Harboe, Kaya Wilkins, Henrik Rafaelsen, Ellen Dorrit Petersen. 

Colossal

I wouldn't be writing this, if I hadn't, in reading up on this film after viewing it, stumbled across an odd division in how people have received and interpreted this film. 

Or, let's start differently. This is a very good film but the thing about it that will follow me isn't the memorable concept, the way it twists the superhero movie into something new, unexpected and budget-conscious, but how Jason Sudeikis manages to portray the transformation of a romcom staple - the nice guy - into an absolutely terrifying, textbook abuser. And in turn, how alienating it was to read reviews of this film that focused entirely on Anne Hathaway's character, on her issues, on Gloria's alcoholism, and never even mentioned the way that this whole film is about Oscar being revealed as a misogynist super-villain, and Gloria finding the strength to stand up against him and rid the world of his terror. 

Colossal is a film about toxic masculinity and a very specific, American approach to catastrophes happening in distant countries, to people who are far away. And the film isn't even particularly subtle about either of these (nor is it about Gloria's alcoholism, or the fact that it lacks sympathetic characters), so that it becomes even more astonishing when this core driving force is buried beneath cliched review writing about "genre-hopping" or "romantic comedies with a twist". 

Gloria (Anne Hathaway) lives in New York with her boyfriend, played by Dan Stevens. Once, in the past, she was a writer of some sort, but she is no longer writing anything at all, and instead suffers from alcohol-induced blackouts that severely impact her memory and her temporal orientation. To get her life together, she moves into her parents' empty house (where the parents are, or what happened to them, isn't really revealed) in her hometown - soon stumbling into gainful employment with the help of an old acquaintance, Oscar, who is now running his dad's old bar. Oscar first appears as a helpful, down-to-earth guy, who according to every trope in the book has always had a crush on Gloria and is now just trying to help her out any way he can, except the disconcerting thing that soon emerges is that he also starts using her alcoholic blackouts as an excuse to weasel his way into his life (like showing up at her doorstep, again and again referencing things that supposedly happened while she was drunk). There is also a scene early on that hints at what is to come, when Oscar reacts aggressively to one of his mates flirting with Gloria. It's the small things that matter here - the way he becomes cynical and verbally abusive when he's drunk, the way he doesn't accept boundaries, the way he doesn't really take no for an answer, ever. The scary thing about this film is that it is so clearly conscious of the fact that all of these gestures, in a lesser film, would have been interpreted as romantic - that Oscar would be the romantic lead - thereby normalising his creepy behaviour. 

The twist here is that this isn't a drama film, that there is a whole other plot that starts to happen in the background - after one of her alcohol-induced blackouts, Gloria catches up with the news that she missed while she was sleeping, and realises that world history has changed while she was checked out. A giant monster appeared in Seoul, causing destruction and confusion. Gloria (and the rest of the world) becomes obsessed with that monster and follows it through youtube videos and newsfeeds. Except the twist is that she soon realises that the monster appears every time she steps on a particular playground in her neighbourhood, and that the monster mirrors her movements. Gloria - drawing a direct line from Seoul to her hometown - realises that she IS the monster, that there is a weird, spacial connection between the playground and Seoul. 

It reveals a lot about Gloria that her reaction to this realisation is to share it with her newly found, down-and-out friends, that she thinks it's particularly cool, that she doesn't even feel particularly guilty straight away when she drunkenly stumbles and the monster, across the world, wipes out hundreds of human lives, stumbling with her. It's a perfect metaphor of sorts, that a witless American on the other end of the world stumbles around a playground, causing human suffering in a place she's never been to, and it takes Gloria a while to realise the implications of it. She does, eventually, but this is also the point at which the film again turns into something else: when Oscar turns from the gentle man who protects Gloria, who helps her (who discovers his own powers, materialising as a giant robot aside her in Seoul when he is on the playground, at a particular time), into a raging monster, because Gloria sleeps with one of his friends. 

Oscar is nice and helpful for as long as he thinks that he is successfully working towards winning Gloria over - he isn't nice for the sake of being nice, but because he think she will eventually be rewarded with her love and affection. From his perspective, this is a classic manic pixie dream girl story, where he is the nice guy who, through continued acts of niceness, will eventually get the girl - except the story doesn't go this way, because Gloria isn't really romantically interested in him at all (or in anyone, really, including her actual boyfriend, who eventually pops up to try and save her from herself, which thankfully the story doesn't allow him to do). He reacts with a blind rage, the kind of terrifying, very very real violence that first turns against objects (because he is a good guy, he isn't going to hit a woman, until he does). He becomes manipulative, using Gloria's empathy against her, threatening to kill people across the world if she doesn't stay with him. Sudeikis performance is outstanding here, especially considering that he is mainly known as a comedy guy - he hits all the notes perfectly, the veiled threats, the scary body language of a man barely containing his rage, the anger of someone who feels wronged because he didn't get his prize, in spite of playing the game the way he was taught to. His friends do nothing, in spite of seeing every bit of his evilness, of the danger he poses not just to Gloria, but to the people far away on the television screen. They are hapless, ineffective, powerless. In the end it's Gloria who - with a black eye, because at some point, all of Oscar's pretence drops, and he reveals himself as the monster that he is - finds a way to beat this perfect example of toxic masculinity. She saves herself, and the world with her, except the world would have never needed saving if she had been responsible for her own actions in the first place. It is quite astonishing that Colossal manages both here: portraying Gloria as the heroine in the face of an abusive, manipulative villain who hates women, who has always hated women, but also as the emblem of American irresponsibility, which costs so many lives in this film. 

2016, directed by Nacho Vigalondo, starring Anne Hathaway, Jason Sudeikis, Austin Stowell, Tim Blake Nelson, Dan Stevens.

That Girl is Forever.

�That�s what parenthood was about, wasn�t it? Slowly understanding your child less and less until she wasn�t yours anymore but herself.�

In an interview with Megan Abbott in Entertainment Weekly, the writer explains that the driving force behind her novels, which centre on the experiences of teenage girls, was allowing them more complexity - aggression, desire, and ambition. She says "I think women are always trying to figure out their own adolescence. We never stop.", which I think is a perfect way to preface both Raw, directed by Julia Ducournau (her first full-length film) and Abbott's own You Will Know Me. 

Part of why we do constantly try to figure out our own adolescence is, I think because we are always working with limited information and skewed perspectives - the former maybe a deliberate exercise of power that tries to control what teenage girls can be and do in their lives, and the later wilful ignorance that finds comfort in cliches. The parents in both stories are guilty of both, even though the motives are different. 

In Raw, we meet Justine's parents as they stop on the way to dropping off their daughter at a prestigious veterinary University (where their other daughter is already studying), grabbing some food for the road. In a scene that gains a different meaning later, Justine's mother is horrified to find that her daughter has been served a piece of meat with her potatoes, even though the whole family is vegetarian. She goes and complains loudly to the staff, and the viewers assume that she is just a particularly outspoken vegetarian, making a scene - an overbearing parent, still controlling what her daughter can and can't eat now that she is old enough to go to University. Later, we find out that the control that she exercises in the family is overbearing, but for an entirely different reason. 

In You Will Know Me, the protagonists are the parents - it's the story of Devon, a gymnastics prodigy on a highly competitive track that is meant to eventually lead to the Olympic team, but we follow Devon's parents, Katie and Eric Knox, and the way that their lives are revolving around Devon's schedule of endless training sessions, booster meetings and injuries. As much as Raw is defined by something that happened before Justine's birth, the seed from which everyone grows in You Will Know me - a terrible accident in which a very young Devon lost two toes due to Eric's carelessness, is something that inevitably charts Devon's life now. The book circles back to the question of how Devon became the prodigy, which takes as much talent as it does focused, complete ambition, which the parents and her teachers feel comes from her (while the other kids around her, the mediocre ones, are constantly driven by their parents, require encouragement and discipline, Devon does all of this to herself, single-minded). Is it because or in spite of her deformed foot? Does the foot hold her back, a constant reminder of Eric's guilt and shortcomings as a parent, or is it somehow imbued with the ability to give her a certain edge, an opinion that Eric voices throughout the narrative? 

In both cases, the control at the beginning of the story - the mother taking care that Justine sticks to her vegetarian diet, Eric and Katie presiding over Devon's schedule (while often forgetting their other child, Drew, how starts to become a prescient, constant observer in part because their parents don't let him be anything else) - falls apart, which leads to a catastrophe. At veterinary school, Justine is immediately thrown into the chaos of a complex hazing ritual that new students have to survive to be accepted, during which she is forced, both by the older students and her own sister, to eat a raw rabbit kidney. Her first contact with meat first leads to a terrible rash all over her body but then seems to trigger something much worse, a craving for raw meat that, in the course of the film, turns into cannibalism. 

Raw is unflinching body horror, but the way that it uses the images to chart Justine's transformation from a shy student trying to disappear in the masses, to not stand out, to a predator who deliberately transforms herself so that she may attract prey (in a central scene, taking the lyrics of plus putes que toutes les putes literally, as an education), is magnificent. Like Ginger Snaps, the bloodlust is profoundly connected to Justine's sexuality, her awakening cannibalism tied to her sexual desire, with the threat of mauling hanging over every encounter she has. Eventually, her sister reveals the family secret: Alex has transformed as well (and found a brilliant way to capture prey - running into traffic to cause accidents, then devouring the victims), and we start to realise that the mother's attempts to keep her children away from meat was a very insufficient way to try and control a genetic predisposition to cannibalism. 

This twist: that the helicopter parent has a very good reason for what she is doing, but that the decision to keep vital information from her daughter backfires dramatically, leading to a lot of bloodshed and victims wheeled away on stretchers with pieces missing. The transformation of the meek girl that we meet in the beginning into the predator desperately attempting to keep her best friend safe from her own cravings seems inevitable, especially once Justine leaves her parents' control into the very different environment of the veterinary school, one that demands exactly the kind of transformation that Justine just takes to the next level. After the siren sounds three times to indicate the end of rush week, not everyone has survived. 

Justine's parents assuming she will still follow their guidance, that she can be kept from this simply through the rules that have been established in her childhood, speak to neither of them realising what it means when children become their own people. The same happens to Eric and Katie in You Will Know Me - they start out with seeing Devon as this single-minded, driven girl, who needs nobody else to feed her own ambition, even though she is the hope of the entire community. They see her as an extension of the community's ambitions, and while they focus entirely on that goal and lose themselves in the sheer finance- and time-consuming schedule of raising a star athlete, Devon becomes a person of her own. The book shows this perfectly in what Katie encounters when she secretly reads Devon's diary, at first only finding a detailed chart of her athletic progress, then later completely misinterpreting more personal entries because she cannot even think of her daughter as a person with desires beyond the Olympic team. The single-mindedness of that goal works like a parasite, constantly drawing resources out of the family, attention, care, time. Everybody is constantly too tired to pay attention to changes (while in the background, Drew develops Scarlet fever, and that fever becomes a weird sort of heat source for the entire novel, "we are a sick house" Katie says at one point, wondering about her own phrasing almost immediately after). Then, a boy is killed in a car accident and the entire community is shaken up, the routine is disturbed, a rock is thrown into the so tightly wound mechanism, and everything starts falling apart. As much as Devon is the focus point of the story, she suddenly turns into a stranger, someone who has developed into a complex person while everyone else was just focused on that one aspect of her. She is grappling with that as much as her parents are, but since the book focuses on Katie's experience over everyone else's, the main feeling that remains is one of an unsettling, disturbing strangeness, the unknowability of a teenage girl who has started to have secrets. 

Grave/Raw (directed by Julia Ducournau, starring Garance Marillier, Ella Rumpf, Rabah Nait Oufella, Laurent Lucas, Joana Preiss).

You Will Know Me, written by Megan Abbott.

Personal Shopper

The easiest entry point into Personal Shopper is through Olivier Assayas previous films, which have one thing in common, in spite of being set in many different genres. They all portray different kinds of border crossings, of transgressions, of walking a fine line between two things. Some of them fluctuate between the literal and the figurative border crossings of criminal activities, terrorism and freedom fighting (and all the ways that the three become muddled), some follow straight-forward criminals, some, like the masterpiece Clean, a musician who is struggling to get her life together for the sake of being able to care for her child. These films take place in the most literal in-between places, when their characters cross country borders, or seamlessly switch from one language to the next - Assayas always expects his viewers to be polyglotts of sorts, able to follow the characters without getting confused, while still feeling with them that sometimes disorienting feeling of crossing into a new space, and moving within new parametres and rules. 

There are some literal border crossings in Personal Shopper, which like many other films by Assayas is carried by a singular performance by one actress. Kristen Stewart's Maureen crosses the channel between Paris and London. She listens to documentaries about artists in Swedish, while navigating a Parisian landscape, while speaking English to everyone she meets, while her boyfriend does the same kind of border crossing thousands of miles away in Oman, on the other side of a shaky skype conversation. The woman who employs her is of undetermined nationality, but played by Vienna-born actress Nora von Waldst�tten. 

The less literal border that the film is crosses is into the paranormal, and unlike many other recent offerings, it is as straight-forward about that corssing as it is about its more literal ones. There is no question here whether ghosts exists, and whether they haunt Maureen. There is pictoral evidence of their existence, as they hover and drop glasses, and leave marks - the remaining question is what their identity and intention is, which is where Personal Shopper leaves the interpretation to the viewers, and refuses to answer questions. We know that Maureen is stuck in Paris because her brother, who lived there, passed away - and since they were twins, and both mediums, and both suffer from the same heart condition that cost his life, they made a pact that either of them would contact the other from the afterlife. So she is waiting for that exact contact, but the fact that she does end up being haunted by ghosts may only be a correlation, not necessarily causality. We never get definite evidence that the ghost or ghosts that we see on screen are in fact Lewis - we only get a sense that whoever haunts her is angry, not tender, at best playful and at worst vindictive and careless with her life. Some kind of ghosts manages to haunt her phone (and Personal Shopper does a rather fantastic job at incorporating Maureen's mobile phone into the story, the way a phone may in fact dominate the life of someone stranded in a foreign country working a very unique and alienating job), and leads her straight into what turns out to be a short-lived crime story regarding the eventual fate of Kyra, the person she works for. 

And this is perhaps the part of the film that worked the best for me - where the idea of Maureen trying to be contacted by her brother and trying to find clear evidence of that contact collapses into her identity as a personal shopper for Kyra, a model, who she barely ever meets. The way that Maureen exists in that role, in that job, is almost like a ghost - she visits stores to pick up clothes for Kyra, that she might or might not wear, or even insist on keeping, and then drops them off in her ridiculously expensive apartment, only to go home without really seeing much of the person that she guards so closely. One whole scene of avoided contact takes place when Maureen is desperate to talk to Kyra about a piece of clothing the latter has to return but ends up being shrugged off, like an annoyance, something that also happens to what turns out to be the eventually vengeful ex-boyfriend. There is something undeniable ghostlike about Maureen's entire existence in this city that she is stuck in, in a barely-lived in cheap apartment, around her brother's girlfriend who is ready to move on, and her brother's home, which seems to always have been a very hauntable mansion. 

In many ways, Assayas was more effective in some of his previous films - more emotionally haunting in Clean, more devastating in Demonlover, engaging in Boarding Gate, historically interesting in Carlos and conventionally intellectual in The Clouds of Sils Maria - but there is a very specific, quiet quality to Personal Shopper that I feel will age very well, along with this truly outstanding and very personal performance by Kristen Stewart. 

2016, directed by Olivier Assayas, starring Kristen Stewart. 

Lovesong

I�ve been thinking about this film a lot since seeing it, in spite of the fact that I didn�t particularly enjoy it while watching it. There are probably a lot of ways to get into this � writing about how conventional storytelling dictates a certain structure to a film, which Lovesong very much leaves by the wayside, how the best thing about this film is how much it relies on faces telling stories, which both Jenna Malone and Riley Keough pull off perfectly, how this isn�t just a film where a lot remains unsaid but really a film about things remaining unsaid, a film where two characters dance around each other for a good portion of their lives, and never quite get to the point where either of them names what their relationship is, except maybe that�s not even necessary. 

But --  maybe a better way to start this is to show how far out of the conventional canon of films about two women who very much love each other Lovesong is. The two options � the romantic comedy, perhaps never more perfectly realised than in Ol Parker�s Imagine Me & You (where the gender of the two main characters was an afterthought late into the game, but one that one presumes had a part in how tame this film is, even by romantic comedy standards), which in this case ends happily for everyone involved, even for the poor husband whose wife pretty much at the altar discovers that love should be more than a fuzzy feeling of friendship for your best mate. One assumes that historically speaking, a few husbands and wives / boyfriends and girlfriends have seen the dark underside of societies and families not allowing women and men even think about the possibilities that their lack of fulfilment in their relationships may be connected to not being straight, but in Imagine Me & You, Hec�s pain isn�t the focus, which is a good thing, as in the long canon of films about women who love other women, the ones that don�t end in death and destruction are in the considerable minority. Which brings us to the other category of possibility, one that is still so prevalent that a good chunk of 2016 was dedicated to debating it. More often than not, the people most hurt by societies and families not allowing individuals to express who they truly love used to end in despair, both in film and in real life, and when it comes to the depiction in media, the line between making a point and just profiting from the tragic possibilities is very, very thin. You could for example say that it wouldn�t really have been possible for the film The Children�s Hour to end the way that Patricia Highsmith�s / Claire Morgan�s then pulp novel The Price of Salt (or Carol) ended, because of who starred in it and where it was produced. The question of whether the film ends the way it does because someone made a calculation about what would make the most emotional impact, and didn�t even consider the option that both characters surviving, or finding happiness, could be an answer to the that question, isn�t exactly raised, because of context. It is however a question that will always be raised now, so many more years later, after so much traceable progress and maybe especially because of all the stubborn, disgusting holdouts for the radical idea that our dignity is just as worthy of protection as that of straight people. You killed Lexa, and more than that, you killed Poussey for one reason: because you could not imagine that any version of their lives where they get to survive would have more of an emotional impact than their death. I sometimes think that claiming that this is just a lack of imagination and not something deeper and more twisted would be incredibly na�ve. 

Taking both of these tangents into considerations, there are two ways of approaching So Yong Kim�s Lovesong. One is to consider that characters can exist without the entire baggage of history and expectations bearing down on them. These are two women who have known each other forever, who share a deep, profound connection, who don�t have the words or the concepts or the possibility in their minds to clearly define what it is that is between them, who have nothing but the word love to resort to in order to explain how they feel for each other, which isn�t enough to set them on a path where they share their lives. This is the tragedy of the film � they are clearly deeply and profoundly in love with each other and throughout the film, through the two episodes set years apart, skirt around their desire, around the almost of a kiss going further, or a burning look being carried through more eloquently, or a fleeting comment leading to the conclusion that is so clearly outlined. There is no version of this story where Mindy (Jenna Malone) and Sarah (Riley Keough) aren�t in love, and haven�t been in love since whatever previous historical version of themselves first met, but there are many versions of this story where this fact alone doesn�t suffice for them to get their happily ever after. Sarah had a kid and got married young � the marriage is distant, alienating, unhappy, and finally terminated. Mindy is a force of nature and probably more afraid than she would like to admit of ending up like her mother, so the man she eventually marries comes from a family that is nothing like her � but none of that changes the fact that they both know exactly that this other path that neither of them ends up choosing exists. This is where the beautiful, tangible chemistry and tension throughout the film comes from. A path not chosen, knowing that they are missing a moment in their life, that at some point in the future, they won�t get that choice again, because the more choices we make in life, the fewer we end up with. 

The irrefutable fact is that when Mindy comes to visit Sarah and doesn�t need to be told a single story about her life before she realises how trapped her friend is, she imagines a future together, and she leaves abruptly when she realises that Sarah isn�t ready for it, that she is still dedicated to trying to make a broken marriage work. She, in the intervening years where they barely talk, presumably goes off to distract herself, knowing she�s missed one of those decisive moments in her life where everything could have been completely different. The same happens to Sarah, in the later episode, where she helps to arrange Mindy�s marriage � Mindy gets increasingly more anxious about it, her doubts becoming clear, and Sarah�s steady reliability if anything helps the ceremony along. They are trapped in what good, dedicated best women friends should do for each other (Sarah is trapped with sisters-in-law or other friends that she has no connection to, both because of how she feels about Mindy and because she has a tangible responsibility for her now almost teenage daughter). I can�t pinpoint when the moment came where I realised that the film wasn�t working towards some kind of great escape, that the closest we could ever possibly come was a mutual acknowledgment of love after a spiral that, somewhere in the middle, had a kiss that was anything but a drunken mistake (even though the context in which it happened so very much allowed for it to be construed that way, because we have always suffered from the double oppression of not being taken seriously in our desires and being forced into heterosexuality). 

The other reading � a less generous one, one that still recognises the incredible acting, the beautiful camera work, the way everything relies on these faces telling an unspeakable story � is that nothing much will stay behind of this film, because there are too many almosts, too much frustrated expectations and build-up towards nothing. Other audiences will read this relationship as more ambiguous than it is, as another example of an unclear straddling between friendship and desire, which this isn�t, really � it�s love, subsumed into something that is easier, more acceptable, but at the same time so unfulfilling and unhappy that the future of these two women is in serious doubt. 

2016, directed by So Yong Kim, starring Riley Keough, Jena Malone.