Currency of Ghosts

Phantoms in the capitalist system in Vagabond, Germany Year 90 Nine Zero & Personal Shopper A phantom, a specter, a ghost, a spirit, or what Heidegger termed as “ontological obscurity,” (Derrida, p461) is closely linked with cinema. Seeing flickering moving images projected on the screen, one must connect the question of technicity with that of faith. A phenomenon of belief, of “pretend as if,” is an inherent quality of the narrative film. The spectral dimension is neither the living nor the dead, neither hallucination nor perception. According to Jacques Derrida, “Cinema is the image grafted from the past, a spectral memory, a magnificent mourning.” (Baeque, Thierry & Kamuf, p27) It’s that mourning part of Derrida’s discussion that I want to examine and draw the correlations to the idea of phantoms in the capitalist society we are all living in, in three different films, Germany Year 90 Nine zero (Godard), Vagabond (Varda) and Personal Shopper (Assayas). Each director has a vastly different approach to cinema. But they have some common threads through all their films; mainly: changes in society, advancement of technology and its effects and cinema/personal history. But moreover, I believe there are sharp critiques of capitalism in these three films and similarities in their calls for the need of spirituality in our society.

After his Dziga Vertov Group/political film days and his collaborative period with Anne Marie-Mieville where he exclusively made political documentaries and experimental video works in most of the 70s Godard returned to feature filmmaking with Sauve qui peut (la vie) (1980). During the 80s and 90s, one striking feature of his style was the presence of nature punctuating the rhythm of his films. I view Godard’s output during this period as more spiritual than his earlier works. Nature is presented, not with any particular characters or weaved into narrative, but used in opposition to, and for criticizing a morally bankrupt, rampant capitalist society. It’s the use of nature that counterbalances capitalism and its effect on people, whether it’s a close up of setting sun or an empty windswept field in Je vous salue Marie (1985), shots of waves rolling into shore in Prenom Carmen (1983), the cloud obscuring the sun or swaying reeds in Nouvelle vague (1990), the sun in a woman’s mouth in Hellas pour moi (1993), or the foggy lakeside in For Ever Mozart (1997).

The first example from this period, and showcasing nature as something divine, is Germany Year 90 Nine zero/Allemagne année 90 neuf zéro (1991), an hour long film made for French TV, with its title mimicking his idol Roberto Rossellini’s neorealist, post-WWII drama, Germany Year Zero/Germania anno zero (1948). Godard’s take on Post-Wall Germany, after the collapse of Soviet Union, shows the onslaught of earth-churning machines and advertisements for material goods.

Godard’s film features the return of Lemmy Caution (played once again by Eddie Constantine), from the hard-boiled detective serial, and also featured in his sci-fi film, Alphaville, 25 years prior. As Caution walks through the uninhabited fields and marshland of the German countryside as the morning mists roll over them, Caution contemplates the existence of god in a voice over in an abandoned church overgrown with vegetation, “This god of nature speaks to us, educates us and gives himself to us. And if we make our beloved into such a divinity, then this is putting religion into practice.” (Godard, 1991)

Lost in time and place, the last ‘secret agent’ has one last assignment; he has to travel through Germany on foot, from East to West. We first find Caution living above a hair salon in East Germany under a different name. While there, he is contacted by a former government official whose identity or allegiance is unknown. Caution is ordered to go to the west in a fool’s errand. Godard makes literary references to Cervantes, putting Caution in a Quixotic quest as he narrates in voice-over quoting Rilke, “The dragons in our lives are only princesses who are waiting for us to act with beauty and courage.” (Godard, 1991) It was he, who defeated Alpha 60, the supercomputer in charge of the technocratic totalitarian world, with poetry and irrationality of love in Alphaville. And the dragon turned into Anna Karina. Godard uses Don Quixote to emphasize the failure of the heroic individual, as if to suggest that there is only so much that individual belief and desire can do to transform the world. Unfettered capitalism is swooping in to fill the vacuum and people are facing the prospects of wage slavery. The spirit of the 68’ was dead. Caution, a fictional character, is the perfect specter, a relic from the past, sleepwalking through now the unified Germany. Unable to change the world he once thought he did, but only to witness what’s to come from the sidelines, like a ghost from the past.

Caution encounters the same woman he met in the hair salon now working as a maid at a hotel in West Berlin. He tells her, “So you chose the freedom too, eh?” She tells him the same nazi slogan that adorned the gates of Auschwitz concentration camp, “Arbeit macht frei/Work Makes You Free.” In not-so-subtle terms, Godard is reminding us that Germany’s atrocious war past should not be forgotten. That in the year 1990, almost a half decades after the end of WWII, Germany is still haunted by its past, only this time, the haunters are not only the memories of the holocaust, but of the capital.

AgnèsVarda wasn’t didactic in her films. Nor she was brazenly literal in her political point of view like Godard was in his Marxist period. But her criticism of capitalism appears in her 2000 documentary, The Gleaners and I. With its focus on sustainability and its denunciation of colossal food waste, however the lovely portrait of the people living in the margins, The Gleaners and I remains a sharp criticism of the capitalist system.

In Vagabond (1985), the free-spirited hippie woman who dies so unceremoniously in the beginning, always struck me as a phantom. She is a manifestation of what the idea of a vagabond is, in various people’s imaginations. An idea of a rebellious free spirit literally conjured up out of the sea, into the minds of cold-hearted citizens of the global economy. Told in documentary interview style with the townsfolk of Nîmes (many who were real residents), who encounter Mona (Sandrine Bonnaire), Vagabond sketches out the picture of an enigmatic young drifter who comes into town in the middle of winter. There are people who see Mona with sympathetic eyes and those who don’t. There are people who lend her helping hands and those who take advantage of her. There are some who are disappointed by her antics and some envious of her freedom. She is an object upon which they can project their wishes, envy and hatred.

In one scene Mona and her fellow vagrant traveling companion take refuge in a boarded up, abandoned mansion. The sleeping pair is discovered by a maid who imagines a romantic notion of the free souls in love. The sight resembles almost a religious renaissance painting.

For me, more than anything, Mona’s death is a stand-in for the death of the Flower Power generation of the 60s. Born out of the resistance movement against the Vietnam War, they soon became synonymous with the hippie movement, counterculture, and drugs. Even though she was a decade or two older, the movement wasn’t lost on Varda, who experienced it first hand when she moved to San Francisco in 67’, when her husband Jacques Demy landed a contract with a Hollywood studio. She subsequently made three films in California - Uncle Yanco, Black Panthers and The Lion's Love (...and Lies). “It was a shower of freedom," she recalled in a 2009 interview. “Suddenly, everything was different. It was a peace and love time. They were trying to have sexual revolutions and colors were daring. They were eating different. I had to learn the language and we threw ourselves into the generation and we loved it so much.” (King, 2009) In this sense, Mona in Vagabond was an image grafted from the past, a spectral memory.

Vagabond is a formal, rigorous work, concentrating more on the tapestry of movement, sound and image and less on character psychology. But the project was born out of Varda’s dismay that people were still dying of exposure in the civilized modern world. So it would be important to examine what was happening in France in the mid 80s’, when the film was made. The robust post-war economy of the last three decades was slowing down. Promises of François Mitterrand and his Socialist government went largely unfulfilled. After promising start of “regularization” of migrant workers (most of them North Africans from the former French Colonial African nations), due to economic pressure, the friendlier immigration policies were mooted by 1983. There was general discontent and high unemployment. And the height of American economic and cultural hegemony was epitomized by the Euro-Disney breaking its ground in Paris, in 1985.

Godard and Varda are from the same pre-WWII generation and grouped together as French New Wave, both starting to make films in the 1950s, Olivier Assayas, a post-war generation filmmaker, moved away from the radical politics of the French New Wave of the 60s. He has been in pursuit of something different, something newer. His films divert from conventional narratives. He mixes different genres and thematic tones to reflect our increasingly complicated hypercapitalist society. His films are seen as postmodern, not only because he portrays modern phenomena, such as the internet porn, industrial espionage, and celebrity culture, but he is interested in the friction in storytelling devices, in casting and in between satire and reality. He is interested in exploring tension. He has been the chronicler of hypercapitalist, celebrity addicted society like no other, with Irma Vep (1996), Demonlover (2002), Boarding Gate (2007), Clouds of Sils Maria (2014), Personal Shopper (2016), Nonfiction (2018), Wasp Network (2019), and Irma Vep the TV Series (2022).

A good example of a disorienting yet discernable modern world is portrayed in Demonlover. It’s a formless, lucid fever dream, a corporate espionage intrigue that reflects a borderless, transient world in which the internet, globalization, and corporate mergers and takeovers have obliterated any sense of continuity or personal loyalty. In it, people are endlessly talking in business jargons awhile backstabbing each other in the confines of private jets, luxury hotel rooms and the antiseptic glass towers of their corporate headquarters. Sex is a commodity and a spectacle in Demonlover. The film is so over the top, convoluted in its narrative, and devoid of humanity, you can’t not think of it as an unfunny parody of the late capitalist system on steroids.

Personal Shopper marks Assayas’s second collaboration with American Actress Kristen Stewart, who at the time was a main subject of the tabloid and celebrity gossip. In it, she plays Maureen, a young American woman living in Europe who has a very modern job, shopping for a celebrity who doesn’t have time to do it herself. It’s a fantasy world (yet real) of the rich and famous. And it’s a vacuous world. The job is a concept majority of people can’t relate to, yet know that it exists in our consumerist, celebrity obsessed society. But ironically, with the stroke of genius in casting, it’s the presence of Stewart that provides much needed humanity in the film. Assayas said about Personal Shopper, “I think the film is totally over the top ridiculous about the fashion world or celebrity worshiping culture, but I wouldn’t say I am satirizing them. I am presenting them as reality. That there is that side of the world that actually exists.” (Chang, 2016)

Maureen is also a medium, trying to connect with her twin brother who died suddenly, from a heart condition they both share. She starts getting text messages from someone she doesn’t know. At first she thinks it’s a sign that her dead brother is making contact with her from the other side. But increasingly, the text messages become more sinister and voyeuristic. Then someone murders her employer and unexplained things start happening; objects move around by themselves, an invisible being detected at an automatic sliding doors and an ectoplasm vomiting translucent being. Is it the creepy ex-boyfriend of her dead employer who is a murderer and texting Maureen? Is he orchestrating the elaborate hoax on her? The film plays out like a thriller with some supernatural elements.

Personal Shopper features Maureen reading about the turn of the century Swedish painter and spiritualist, Hilma af Klint, first on her smartphone and then in a book on the pioneer abstract painter. Klint, after losing her younger sister at a young age, joined a circle of women spiritualists known as “the five” and dedicated herself to connect the spirits of the dead with her abstract art.

Phantoms in Assayas films- Irma Vep and Personal Shopper, are quite literal in cinematic sense. They are fantasy elements from the cinema’s past. Irma Vep draws its inspirations from the character from Feuillade’s b&w serials Les Vampires. Personal shopper’s rather shoddy, simple ghost effects resemble spirit photography of the 19th century, and a floating glass cup in mid-air is from House on a Haunted Hill variety.

No films are ever not political and I see Personal Shopper, however superficial it seems, touching upon a yearning for spirituality in a soulless hyper-capitalist society. Assayas said, “We live in a world that is very materialistic and we all have some sort of spiritual longing. To me it was very much of a portrait of a contemporary character with some universality to her. I went to extremes that her day job was working as a proletarian of the fashion industry. She does a superficial job that she dislikes where she doesn't find satisfaction. There is spiritual longing, trying to connect with an invisible world.” (Crummy, 2016)

In all three of these films, the directors invoke phantoms in three distinctly different ways. Lemmy Caution, a spy whose job is rendered useless in post-wall Germany, is now a tired, incapable old man, a lost spirit, mourning the death of idealism of the 60s, and of the dream of unrealized communist utopia, in Germany Year 90 Nine Zero. Based on a news article about a homeless man being frozen to death, Vagabond finds Mona, an embodiment of the Flower Power generation, whose anti-conformist ideals, dead in a frozen ditch. Maureen desperately hangs on to the idea of an invisible world while living in an absurdly materialistic, superficial world in Personal Shopper.

With the choking death of Jordan Neely lingering in the news, I can’t help connecting the dots. Times have changed. People were on the road like Mona in Vagabond by choice, not by systematic economic injustices suffered by today’s homeless population. Christian Petzold, a German filmmaker who constantly portrays the people on the road in his work, responded to a question about the differences in his characters who are on the road and the characters from the New German cinema of the 70s: “...in the 70s, everyone was rich in West Germany. We thought that we'd won 68' and we thought we could change society…. Films by directors like Wenders when they (characters) are on the road; they are on the road not because of economic reasons or pressure. They are like Novalis or Hölderlin. They are on the road because they are romantics.” (Chang, 2012)

In the shadow of material wealth brought on by capitalist system in global economy, grew a glaring discontent in those left behind. In Petzold’s films, people are on the road not by their choice, but because of economic situations that made them uprooted and spat out on to the road, left directionless, haunting the world as living ghosts.

The accelerations of the wealth gap saw explosions in homeless populations all across the US. According to Housing and Urban Development (HUD), 580,000 people experienced homelessness in 2020. According to Gothamist, 1 out of 120 New Yorkers are living in the streets. But the similarities are in the general indifferences on their death. Varda’s deliberate, matter-of-fact presentation of Mona’s death in the beginning of the film is just as inhuman as the news headlines on Neely- “Shocking video shows NYC subway passenger putting unhinged man in deadly chokehold.” (NY Post, 2023) It is equally disturbing that the choking death was filmed by onlookers and posted up on social media. Everyone cheered even for a “good Samaritan” who killed Neely for being loud and asking for food and water by putting Neely on a chokehold for 15 minutes.

The Communist Manifesto starts with “A specter is haunting Europe.” The specter in this case was communism. But idealism lost out to the capital in the end. Maybe the real specter isn’t Lemmy Caution or Mona or some malevolent entity that might or might not be Maureen’s dead brother, but capitalism itself. And the phantoms in these films are mourning the society we are living in. A specter haunting the World.

Bibliography:

Baecque, Antoine de, Jousse, Thierry and Peggy Kamuf. “Cinema and Its Ghosts: An Interview with Jacques Derrida.” Discourse 37, no. 1–2 (2015): 22–39.

Chang, Dustin. “Interview: Olivier Assayas Talks Kristen Stewart and Breaking the Boundaries of Narrative Filmmaking.” Screen Anarchy. March 11, 2017
https://screenanarchy.com/2017/03/interview-olivier-assayas-talks-kristen-stewart-and-breaking the-boundaries-of-narrative-filmmaking.html

Chang, Dustin. “I Envision All These Great Small Movies in the Ruins of Hollywood: Christian Petzold Interview.” Screen Anarchy. December 12, 2012
https://screenanarchy.com/2012/12/i-envision-all-these-great-small-movies-in-the-ruins-of-hollywood-christian-petzold-interview.html

Crummy, Colin. “The Spiritual Inspirations Behind ‘Personal Shopper.’” i-D, March 17, 2017
https://i-d.vice.com/en/article/papy99/the-spiritual-inspirations-behind-personal-shopper

Derrida, Jacques, Geoff Bennington, and Rachel Bowlby. “Of Spirit.” Critical Inquiry 15, no. 2 (1989): 457–74.

Kelly, Alexandra. “HUD says homelessness in the US has exploded, before and during pandemic.” The Hill. March 18, 2021
https://thehill.com/changing-america/respect/poverty/543868-hud-says-homelessness-in-us-has-exploded-before-and-during/

King, Susan. “Varda looks back at her life loves.” Los Angeles Times. July 3, 2009
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2009-jul-03-et-agnes3-story.html

Morgan, Daniel. “The place of nature in Godard’s late films.” Critical Quarterly 51. 3 (2009): 1-24.

Stewart. Justin. “Vagabond.” Reverse Shot. October 17, 2016
https://reverseshot.org/archive/entry/2269/vagabond

Kaleidoscopic Picture of Africa Here and Now

Omen (2023) - Baloji Omen, a new film by Belgian rapper, Baloji, presents a compendium of pan-African experience told in a vibrant palette. It addresses variety of different issues in modern day Africa: African diaspora, colonialism, youth gang, sexuality, tradition, progress, among other things. You won’t see any other films this unique and different, this year.

The film starts with Koffi (Marc Zinga), cutting his sizable afro off as he prepares to travel to his home country with his pregnant Belgian wife, Alice. They are expecting twins. He is seen practicing his Swahili. It will be a tense trip for him because he hadn’t been back home for many years and now must present their biracial marriage to his family and get their blessings. Also, they need to give $5,000 dowry to his parents as it is a custom.

It is a total chaos when they get to the unnamed African city (the film is shot in bustling Kinshasa, in part). His very busy sister Tshala (Eliane Umuhire of Neptune Frost) doesn’t pick them up at the airport and the young couple must navigate the crowded city in their rental car. They first drive out to the coal mine where Koffi’s father works but it turns out that it’s his day off. It becomes a running joke that Koffi’s father is never around every time he wants to see him.

No one, in their extended family, including his stern mother, Mujila, seems to be happy to see them. Things get a lot worse than they anticipated at the family luncheon, when Koffi accidentally nosebleeds (due to stress) on one of his sisters’ new baby. Born with a large purple mark on his face, Koffi is known to be a sorcerer from his mother’s side of the family. The religious elders, practicing a mix of Christianity and shamanism, perform a gruesome ritual on him in full costume that involves a head mask and nails, to lift his curse while Alice helplessly protests.

Koffi and Alice cross paths with a pink dress wearing street gang, Goonz, headed by Paco (Marcel Otete Kabeya). Still mourning the death of his little sister, Paco is in a fierce turf war against a rival gang. They have to fight out their differences in the makeshift wrestling ring under the mountain of coal.

With multiple storylines and characters, Omen introduces a different kind of storytelling that the Western filmmaking is not used to. Much like Anisia Uzeyman and Saul Williams’s Neptune Frost couple years back, the film is not bound to a straightforward narrative. Presenting a multicultural society in flux, where things clash with each other for dominance, the film’s colors and texture vie for your attention. It takes everything from everywhere – from the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Africa, and multiple other African nations, even from the Creole culture of Louisiana.

The film is mainly told through sensations and visual poetry. It’s in Mujila’s breastfeeding the river in the beginning of the film with purple milk as purple milk slowly spills out. It’s in a decrepit school bus full of pink dress wearing street urchins violently being towed. It’s in a group of women mourners crying until the floor of the house is ankle deep with their tears. It’s in witch doctor trying to exorcise a couple with sexually transmitted disease by painting their bodies and pelting them with a tree branch soaked in palm oil.

Omen is a truly unique experience to be had. Using the magical realism and symbolism steeped in tradition old and new, the film is a kaleidoscopic picture of bustling Africa that is here and now.

Omen plays as part of Cannes 2023’s Un Certain Regard section.

New Wave Noir

A case of mistaken identity in Claude Schmitz’s The Other Laurens plays out like a neo-noir directed by Aki Kaurismaki or a Belgian Big Lebowski with New Wave aesthetics.

In the center of all the convoluted plot twists and turns is Gabriel Laurens (Olivier Rabourdin), an unkempt, sad, middle-aged, private investigator specializing in lurid marriage infidelity cases whose mother is dying in the hospital. It is pretty clear that it’s his more flamboyant twin brother François, who has always been his mother’s favorite... and everyone else’s, it turns out.

Gabriel’s uneventful life gets turned upside down when his sexy niece, Jade (Louise Leroy) shows up at his doorstep, informing François’s death and suggesting there might have been a foul play in his accidental death. She doesn’t trust the local authorities and insists Gabriel to investigate. She also feigns that she is being followed by a dangerous man on a bike. Gabriel reluctantly agrees to accompany Jade to her home in the south.

When they get to Perpignan, A town in Southern France bordering Spain, Gabriel is coldly received by François’s American wife Shelby (Kate Moran of Yan Gonzalez films) and her entourage of aging biker gang, headed by Valery (Marc Barbe) living in her opulent white mansion. Shelby says drily of Gabriel’s appearance, “like seeing a ghost, the same but out of focus.” Even though Gabriel is eager to get back to Brussels, things keep getting in the way of his departure every time. And he begins to doubt that the car accident that resulted the death of his brother. Someone’s hiding something.

With theatrical lighting and primary and neon colors, The Other Laurens has the look and feel of highly stylized 1980’s New Wave aesthetics. Think of Jean-Jacques Beineix’s Diva or Luc Besson’s Subway. It’s in the yellow of the sports car, Jade’s tight blue jeans and black leather jackets and neon signs of a nightclub.

Rabourdin’s accidental hero, skulking around like 80's Gerard Depardieu is a charming mess caught among shady side of his brother’s dealings, Shelby’s scheming, the Spanish mob, and Jade’s affection.

While snooping around Spain with Jade, to find out what François was up to there, Gabriel attempts to leave everything behind once again, denouncing François’s gaudy lifestyles and how his bad taste permeates everything around him. It is revealed he has never got over the fact that his twin brother stole away the love of his life- Jade’s mother, from him. Gabriel and Jade exchange some hurtful truths to each other.

Then in an act of revenge, Gabriel hooks up with François’s Spanish mistress, whose affair started the whole mess in the first place, by pretending that he is his twin brother. Then he figures it all out.

It all builds up to the final shootout between the Shelby’s biker gangs and the Spaniards, resulting a daring helicopter escape involving Shelby’s American pilot.

The Other Laurens is an enjoyable deadpan noir with visual flair resembling the cool era of filmmaking.

The Other Laurens plays as a Director’s Fortnight selection at Cannes Film Festival.

Frightening Female Sexuality

Creatura (2023) - Elena Martin Gimeno A subtle observation on female sexuality by Catalan director/writer/star Elena Martín Gimeno, Creatura examines a childhood sexual repression manifesting in physical form on the body of Mila (played by the director herself).

The film starts with Mila and her mild-mannered boyfriend Marcel (Oriol Pla) moving into the house of Mila’s parents, Gerard and Diana, as the old couple moves out. It’s the house by the sea that she grew up in. Mila is always horny, but her demands are met with Marcel’s frustration because he doesn’t know what Mila really wants. Mila in turn, gets hives all over her body because of the stress. She says to him she got the condition from her childhood.

The lengthy flashback in the middle concentrates on Mila as a 15-year-old girl. With her more promiscuous bestie Aina, they discover boys and explore sticky situations, as well as anonymous internet messengers for voyeuristic sexual encounters. But it’s still all normal stuff that teenagers are into.

Mila experiments with a hunky boy that she has hots for, but it doesn’t end well. She finally hooks up with a neighborhood boy whom she has known all her life. But when she asks for permission for a sleepover at his house, her father, usually very calm and loving, angrily rejects the idea. Again, Mila breaks into hives all over her lower body.

Creatura is an interesting film about how the female sexuality frightens men. The word 'uncomfortable' gets repeated twice with both Mila’s father and her boyfriend who can’t handle it whenever she expresses her desires.

In a patriarchal society, the idea that girls are either sluts or virgins, depending on their level of curiosity in sex, is embedded early on, while boys grow up expecting, at least, to get a handjob from a girl who shows even the slightest interest in you.

Martín Gimeno goes even further back to find the origin of Mila’s physical conditions with her as a pre-pubescent child, spending the summer days with her parents on the beach. She develops a strong attachment to her father, as he gives her a piggyback ride and giving her swimming lessons in the ocean.

It’s a man stroking his female companion’s bum on the beach that sears into little Mila’s head. She asks her parents to stroke her bum so she can sleep. At first, the parents are not alarmed about her clingy behavior. But her display of learned behavior frightens her father deeply, as it is not ‘normal’ for a girl to behave in what can be construed as sexual in any way.

Her father gets upset when little Mila barges into their bedroom demanding to see him naked. She breaks out in hives and it’s her mother’s turn to console her and wash her in the sea, because sea water cures it all.

After the adult Mila’s role-playing sexual game gets too uncomfortable for Marcel, he leaves. Then Mila gets to spend time with her parents alone, as they come back to console her. Now a grown woman, Mila asks her dad, who is still uncomfortable around her, if he ever felt physically affectionate toward her. This talk is a revelation to him, as he never thought about it in his life.

Creatura delves into a difficult subject to many men: female sexual desire and its brutal suppression early on. Martîn Gimeno gives a committed, bracing performance and bares it all in a film with a difficult subject matter, taking a nuanced yet frank approach, without sensationalizing its subject.

Creatura is a selection in The Director's Fortnight at this year's Cannes Film Festival.

Changing Times

White Building (2022) - Neang Kavich Neang's White Building is a beautiful elegy for Phnom Penh's checkered past, observed by a young man full of dreams and hopes. The old, crumbling, leaky white building of the title is the multi-household urban slum for its longtime residents. Samnang and his friends Tol and Ah Kha dream of TV stardom by entering a dance contest. When they are not practicing in front of their small camera, they drink and talk about losing their virginity until the wee hours of the morning. The vibrant Phnom Penh's colors and sounds through the eyes of these youths on their motorbike at night are very much like the early films of Hou Hsiao Hsien and Tsai Ming Liang. But things don't pan out for the youngsters as they hope. Ah Kha's family are moving to France to join their relatives and their dreams of becoming dance stars fizzle out.

In the meantime, government officials are offering residents of the building to move out, offering crumbs to relocate. Residents are split between taking the settlement money or stay put to renegotiate the terms. The idea of renovating the building on their own is not feasible anymore. The building is decaying with them living in it. Things are getting progressively, intentionally worse. The city officials are cutting off the water supply to the building. The Monsoon season is coming, and the ceilings are leakier than ever. Samnang's dad, the chief of the building on behalf of the residents, is conflicted on the matter. And his diabetic conditions worsen as he refuses to go to the doctor and must face the possibility of a leg amputation.

All things must pass. The residents can't compete with the rising tide of progress. And Samnang's family relocate to the countryside. His mom laments that despite her wishes to live as a family, all her children are leaving and going back to the city.

Gentrification happens everywhere in the world. But the building, which was a subject for Neang's 2019 documentary, Last Time I saw You Smiling, has been home for more than 400 souls. And his family was one of the those who had to relocate before the building was demolished. The director actually lived through that change. The film is soaked with melancholy, and it's all captured with crispy digital cinematography by Douglas Seok (Minari) - it's in the nighttime scooter ride, it's in the clothes lines hanging in the building, it's in the growing big moldy stains on the ceilings, it's in the empty apartments with the remnants of past lives, it's in the silhouette profile of Samnang's dad under the mosquito nets at night. Contemplative and full of longing with its characters witnessing the progress replacing the memories of its inhabitants with glass and metal skyscrapers in real time, White Building serves not only the filmic record of lives from not so distant past but also reflects on youth and their resilience and optimism in the face of change.

Gen-Ziety

Coma (2022) - Bonello We still don't know the full effects of the last two and a half years of Covid-19 pandemic as it plays out in front of our eyes. WHO declares it is over but who knows? Who do we trust anymore? The economic impacts, the long term mental and physical health concerns and all that, we just don't know. We didn't even have enough time to grieve for those we lost. Bertrand Bonello, perhaps one of the best chroniclers of our crazy hyper capitalist society after Olivier Assayas, comes up with the best Covid lockdown era movie yet with Coma, a slim, multi-media father-to-daughter straight talk. And it's great.

The film concentrates on a button-nosed teenager (Louise Labéque, from Bonello's Zombie Child), as she spends most of her time in her room during the lockdown alone. Most of the time, she is glued to her computer or phone. Her constant companion is an internet celebrity Patricia Coma (Julia Faure) who exudes certain authority as she dictates every aspect of her viewer's life during lockdown - cooking lessons, language lessons, daily advices, etc. Coma also sells Simon color pattern memory gizmo called the Revelator that our teen girl is addicted to. And for some reason, however elaborate its blinking buttons game gets, she always wins. It's because she subconsciously knows what comes up next, Coma says. It's the sign that no one has free will as everything is predetermined.

Then there is her Barbie dolls and the doll house that coming back to life in stop motion animation - plays out some daytime soap scenarios, repeating the lines of our teen girl's, or anything that's on the news, like Trump courting Kim Jung-un, obviously a manifestation of the girl's regurgitatation what she watches and hear.

It's only in dreams that the teen girl is free. Shot in day for night, the dream takes place in a dangerous and dark forest where everyone's face is smoothed over and constant screams are heard from nearby. She encounters and interacts with dead people in her life there in the forest, including a friend who just got killed, by some home invader, while talking in a google hangout.

Bonello also uses rightfully hallucinatory clips from Henry-Georges Clouzot's Inferno, also Deluze's television lecture where he (or rather the close-up of his mouth, somewhat menacingly and cynically) says he wishes us not to be in the dreams of others, especially in a teenage girl's because it will frighten us.

From 9/11 to Iraq War to major economic crisis in 2008, to global warming then now to the pandemic, Generation Z has been through a lot in their short semi adult life. With its crazy kaleidoscopic images and sounds, the short film is an amalgam of what the short-attention-span generation has been going through psychologically and emotionally during the lockdown. But more than anything, Coma is a compassionate love letter to Bonello's daughter Anna who just turned 18 and her generation. We do not know what the future will bring. He ends with spectacularly frightening images of natural diasters- giant ice shelf melting off, abalanches and volcanic eruptions- some anthropocene and some not, either cases we have no control over anyway. Coma is more like Bonello saying, "Sorry kids, but at least I understand what you are going through, but sun rises again tomorrow."

Missiles

Return to Seoul (2022) - Chou Freddie (Park Ji-min) is a young Korean born French woman in Seoul. She is staying at a hostel for couple of weeks. She is outgoing, impulsive and makes mousy Tena (Guka Han), whom she just met at the hostel and has been acting as Freddie's interpreter, very uncomfortable. It is slowly revealed that Freddie lied to her French parents to come to Korea to find her biological parents. Through the adoption agency, she gets a prompt that her father is willing to meet her. But no words from her mother. He lives in Gunsan a port city in the South West Korea, with his new family. And their encounter is pretty typical and cringey - Father and his family are extremely apologetic and eager to reconnect. Father insists that she relocate to Korea permanently and live with him. He will even find her a good Korean man to marry! It's all guilty conscience, over compensation and pure sentimentality. Freddie, irked by the experience and regretting her impulsive decisions, cuts the trip short and comes back to Seoul. But her father won't stop drunk texting her, apologizing and demanding. She has to put a stop to it.

Two years later, and still living in Seoul, Freddie, now 27, is working for a French company while having amorous relationship with an underground tattoo artist and having wild parties. She meets an older French arms dealer too through a dating app. She has picked up some Korean as well. But there is always a sad side to her in quiet moments.

Another five years pass by. Freddie is a smartly dressed arms dealer now, selling missiles to the Korean National Defence Force. More confident now, she can bring her French boyfriend to meet with her father. She can even let her doe eyed father touch her scars on her collarbone who got in a trip to Thailand. Her mother finally contacts her through the agency. And we can guess that this has been the reason why she stayed in Seoul for the last 7 years, away from her French family and friends. The reunion is a tearful one.

Park's performance is a revelation. She makes Freddie a strong willed, fascinating young woman in search of herself. Her magnetic presence makes her always watchable. Seeing from the perspective of an adoptee and a modern woman in a still very patriarchal society, Return to Seoul is a visceral journey toward self-discovery and finding identity. The quiet ending reminds me a lot of Drive My Car. Return to Seoul has that novelistic quality about it that I liked a lot.

Of Mountains and Men

Le otto montagne (2022) - van Gronigen, Vandermeersch Based on Paolo Gognetti's book of the same title, Belgian filmmakers duo Felix van Gronigen and Charlotte Vandermeersch (The Broken Circle Breakdown)'s The Eight Mountains is an affecting epic tale of male friendship that is quite rare to see in films these days.

Shot in fitting full frame by Titane and Raw DP Ruben Impens, highlighting the majestic alpine peaks of Northern Italy, van Gronigen and Vandermeersch go on unhurriedly, telling the life-long friendship of Pietro (Luca Marinelli, Martin Eden, The Old Guard) and Bruno (Alessandro Borghi).

Narrated by an older Pietro, who would eventually become a writer, the film starts with him as an 11-year-old city boy from Turin spending his summer vacation with his parents up in the rural mountain regions. He befriends Bruno, who describes himself as the only child left in the region, because everyone has left to look for work in the city, including his father, as farming is a dying profession. Pietro's father, an engineer from the city, who secretly dreams about living the care-free life in nature, brings his family back to the mountains year after year. And the two boys' friendship grows.

The scenes where two boys forge their friendship -- swimming in the pristine alpine lake, playing in the field and hiking in the stunning mountain vistas -- are really something to behold. And these are innocent times, when children are less aware of their position in society and class differences.

Because of their budding friendship, Pietro's parents ask Bruno's guardians (uncle and his wife, who are cheesemakers) to take Bruno with them to Turin to get educated. In young Pietro's mind, it doesn't make sense: why do they want to take Bruno into the city life they always complain about? And why would Bruno even want to leave these heavenly, carefree surroundings? The move doesn't happen when Bruno's father, a brick layer who's rarely around, refuses the offer. And they stop going back to the mountain for vacation, partly because Pietro is now a teen and going through a rebellious stage, and resents his father, who is a salaryman, married to his work.

After the death of Pietro's father, their friendship re-emerges, now they are both bearded 30-something men and supposedly all grown up. Pietro finds Bruno waiting in the mountain village and takes him straight to an abandoned ruin of a cabin that they once stayed as children, while they were hiking with Pietro's father. Pietro learns that his father and Bruno kept in touch all those years. It turns out that his father had been helping Bruno, and sharing their love of the mountains, hiking together. That it was his wish for them to rebuild the cabin. And it dawns on Pietro that Bruno became a surrogate son to his father.

He finds his father's journal on the top of 'Grana,' one of the mountain peaks they frequented, detailing his thoughts and wishes, and how he wanted to live more freely. Pietro, who has not found the path in life and struggling, accepts the challenge, and the two men work on building the cabin together that summer. It will be their summer house. It is one of Pietro's girlfriends, who hooks up with Bruno upon visiting there and eventually starts a family with him in the mountains. Pietro laments how Bruno has found his path in life and he himself has not. But now Bruno has to contend with a struggling cheese-making business & a family to care for. The mountain life is not as carefree as when they were children.

In the meantime, Pietro, searching for the meaning of life, finds it in writing and the Himalayan mountains in Nepal. But their friendship continues, as he comes back, time and time again to spend his summer days in the cabin. It is Bruno who calls Pietro for help when life gets to be too much. Pietro comes back to the cabin from Nepal without hesitation. They argue about how to live life and say hurtful things to each other. And Bruno decides to spend the winter in the cabin alone.

The strength of The Eight Mountains is its complex depiction of a male friendship. It speaks volumes in their knowing glances and silences as they spend time together up in the mountains. Our circumstances change but the mountains don't. It illustrates men's ultimate desire and to retreat from the human world and finding it futile.

As they grow older, Pietro and Bruno understand this connundrum, and take refuge in each other's company. This all sounds corny as hell in words, but van Gronigen and Vandermeersch's earnest approach works beautifully, with awe-inspiring views of nature and superb, stoic acting by the two leads. Swedish singer Daniel Norgren's soulful, melancholic soundtrack does here what Leonard Cohen did for McCabe & Mrs. Miller. The film is one of the year's best.

The Eight Mountains opens Friday, April 28 in New York at Film at Lincoln Center and Angelika Film Center, with a national rollout to follow. Visit the official site for more information.

A Temple

Hilma (2022) - Hallström Hilma af Klint, a pioneering Swedish abstract painter whose work predates Kandinsky and Mondrian but forgotten in history until recently, gets a biopic from a fellow Swede, Lasse Hallström with his wife (Lena Olin) and daughter (Tora), playing the titular heroine young and old. And the seasoned director zeros in on the injustices she had to face because of her sex in a male dominent, still very patriarchal society in late 19th century. It starts with the death of her younger sister, which haunts her for the rest of her life as she becomes involved in spritiualism and the life-long friendship with 4 other women (known as 'the Five'). Hallström rightly suggests the painter's lesbian tendencies as she was never married and had close correspondences with Anna (Catherine Chalk).

Hilma soon finds the writings of a popular new age German philosopher of the time, Rudolph Steiner (Tom Wlaschiha), and meeting with him and getting his validation of her work becomes her life-long obsession. In telling her story, Hallström makes Hilma a proto-feminist, trailblazing artist, but at the same time, a victim of patriarchal society. She was an artist who wanted to find a meaning of life through art. But with her stunning work, she didn't need a validation from any men.

I personally got to experience af Klint's work at Guggenheim, aptly titled Paintings for the Future in 2019. Seeing her largely abstract work, in person, was an overwhelming experience: their enormity, geometric shapes and colors make long lasting impression. Her work- I could describe them as somewhere between colorful scientific charts and abstract celestial maps. Hallström connects the dots with af Klint's spiritual journey through her background - a curious, rebelious young woman who was interested in math and science, moving into painting in the hopes of communicating with the spirits and mapping out the universe to make sense of the world. Looking at her gigantic painting in one place, you really get the feeling that you are in a temple of some sort. And this is the fact that the film drives in with older Hilma (played wonderfully by Olin) trying to get a funding for a temple that she herself designed (which happens to be the spiral shape, like Guggenheim!) to exhibit her work in her later life.

Tora Hallström gives a great performance as a strong willed, spiritual woman who thought her abstract art was the result of the spirits working through her. Chalk's also great as Anna, who becomes a benefector/lover who finds Hilma's belief and spirit irresistable. Hilma the film is not revolutionary or anything. With its typical linear plot and timeline, it is rather an old fashioned, standard biopic. It does have some visual flaires with flashbacks and underwater scenes. But the most intriguing part of the film is definitely af Klint herself.

Grey Zone

Twilight/Szürkület (1990) - Fehér Hungarian filmmaker György Fehér's seldom seen 1990 masterpiece, Twilight, gets a 4K restoration treatment by Hungarian Film Institute and distributed by Arbelos, the LA based distribution and restoration company, known for their 4K rerelease of such classics as Dennis Hopper's The Last Movie, Matsumoto Toshio's Funeral Parade of Roses, Wendel Harris's Chameleon Street as well as fellow Hungarian master Béla Tarr's Satantango and Damnation. Fehér who only directed two feature films during his lifetime, but was a close collaborator on number of Tarr's films and shared similar aesthetics. Shot by Miklós Gurban (Werckmeister Harmonies), the film is composed only of some fifty long tracking shots. And it is stunning.

A retiring police inspector (Péter Haumann) is called in to investigate a murder of a little girl in rural town deep in the forest. The local police suspect a traveling salesman who found the body. But our inspector thinks otherwise. From the descriptions of the girl's classmates, the killer is a 'giant' in a black coat who lured her with hedgehogs- chocolate balls that resemble the spikey creature. But even before the investigation concludes, a professor ominously warns our inspector that the murderer won't get caught. He even questions the existence of the murderer.

After the suicide death of their only suspect, the inspector sets up a trap, using a little girl and her mother in a remote cottage in the forest as a bait to lure the killer in. But it only exposes the crippling inability to protect the innocents and a man's violent nature.

Based on an existential crime novella, It Happened in Broad Daylight (also a basis for Sean Penn's The Pledge) by Swiss writer Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Twilight paints a morally and physically murky netherworld where innocents gets punished and criminals never get caught. You can't pinpoint the time frame in Twilight: The description of the suspect's 'old styled automobile' turns out to be a Volkswagen Beetle. The apprehending police officers wear long decorative swords on their waists while the inspector is in his fedora and long raincoat. In its stunning black and white tracking shots in constant rain and fog, the film creates a gray inter-zone, where bad things happen repeatedly as if time stands still.

There are some show-stopping, memorable long sequences in the film, including one taking place in a classroom full of children looking at the camera as it dolly past them back and forth, foreground/background use of a suspecting luring in the girl playing with a ball, and the inspector confronting a suspect as the camera wraps around them 360 degrees. You can instantly recognize that Fehér was in the same school of filmmaking as Tarr. With sparse soundtrack by Popol Vuh, it's arresting and hypnotic.

Werckmeister Harmonies, released in 2000, was a cornerstone for many cinephiles to experience the art of slow, contemplative cinema. Sure there were other films with long creeping dolly shots in the past. But Werckmeister was the first one that we really could clearly tell that the director's intent on holding each shots, forever. The masterful compositions, oblique dialog, political subtexts all had hypnotic power. It was an amazing cinematic experience and great introduction to Hungarian cinema. So the question is, some 30 years later, how does Twilight hold up in the world where people watch films on their phones and streaming platforms where you could pause and/or fast-forward at any time? I believe Twilight makes a great case for seeing films in theaters again. With 4K restoration, the black and white film is gorgeous to look at. Its pacing is so refreshingly different than Adderall induced modern cinema. Let Twilight wash over you. It's blissful.

Legionnaire's Disease

The Human Flowers of Flesh (2022) - Wittmann "When you have no home, a round world is the best you could have," is one of many poignant phrases uttered in Helena Wittmann's sopomore film The Human Flowers of Flesh. Just like her debut film Drift, Wittmann's preoccupation with being at sea continues. "A woman from Marselle who lives on her sailing ship with her crew," turns out to be Ida (Angeliki Papoulia of Dog Tooth). Most of the film we see Ida and her crew doing chores and living on the ship - cleaning, cooking, reading, exchanging annecdotes and stories and swimming.

We see forever undulating sea on the deck and through the round windows from inside the ship, the horizontal sea level bobbing up and down as the ship sails through the waves. Just like Drift, the long stretches of these scenes has its own hypnotic rhythm. The crew converse in many different languages - English, German, Arabic, Portuguese, Greek and so on, yet nothing is explained about their background. Instead, Wittmann concentrates on the film's visually blissful moments - the shimmering sunlight reflected on the waves just below the deck, a piece of reef Ida brought from Antigua being passed around the crew, a dance party on the deck at night with colorful flags and lights gleaming and the blue sea as Ida swims back and forth. There are some show stoppers like the camera plunging into the blue depth to find a wreckage of a downed WWII plane at the bottom of the ocean floor. The film's full of sensual images that recalls Claire Denis films. But I think the aime here is different. In Wittmann's hands, the gleaming water and the sun are the subjects. They are vital to human life and we see that in Ida and her crew's uneroticised browned skin.

Speaking of Denis, Wittmann touches upon the legacy of colonialism and French Legionnaires in Mediterranean world and North Africa. As the ship lands on the shores of these parts, we see Ida walking past the military ports. At times we hear the military choir singing a legionnaire's hyper militaristic song of sacrifice. Then we see paratroopers jumping out of the planes, dotting the frame against the blue sky in Corsica. It's Denis Lavant's presence that accentuates this historical context cinematically. As we cinephiles are aware, Lavant played a lovelorn dancing French Legionnaire in Claire Denis's masterpiece, Beau Travail, in 1999. Lavant, almost a quarter decade older but still very much a physical presence, shows up at the end of the film in the streets of North Africa, and invites Ida, who's been following him, for some scrambled eggs in his flat. Is this Wittmann's way of commenting on the colonialism or what's left of it? I'd like to think that it's more of a kinship between two people who understand not having a home and its loneliness.

Poupolina, also starring in any less enigmatic A Little Love Package (by Argentine Gaston Solnicki), rises as a big supporter/collaborator of new talents who are pushing the cinematic boundaries into uncharted territories. And I very much welcome it.