First of all, I want to really thank you for the love that you showed to this story's first part: it received a great number of visits and a lot of positive Facebook comments. I hope that you find part 2 as entertaining.
Today we start off with a movie from Chile, called Una Mujer Fantástica (A Fantastic Woman). It is nominated for Best Foreign Language Oscar and is considered the favorite to win. It won three awards at the Berlin Film Festival, the Goya award for Best Iberoamerican Film (Mejor Película Iberoamericana) and has also won/been nominated for various other prestigious awards.
Anyone who has seen Sebastián Lelio's previous film, Gloria, knows that: a. he is a very talented filmmaker and b. he has a handle on the female psyche as firm as Almodóvar. Guy Lodge of Variety gave the film a stellar review:
"Multiple mirrors abound in frame after frame of A Fantastic Woman, repeatedly reflecting the woman of the title - young, beautiful, headstrong Marina - in all her, well, fantastic glory. It may seem an obvious, even clichéd, visual trope for the resourceful Chilean director Sebastián Lelio to fall back on until it dawns on us that its very obviousness is precisely the point: We're given every conceivable opportunity to see and perceive Marina for exactly who she is. So why do so many of those around her struggle to do the same? In this exquisitely compassionate portrait of a trans woman whose mourning for a lost lover is obstructed at every turn by individual and institutional prejudice, Lelio has crafted perhaps the most resonant and empathetic screen testament to the everyday obstacles of transgender existence since Kimberly Peirce's Boys Don’t Cry in 1999."
"Stylistically, A Fantastic Woman is a cooler, trickier object than Lelio's previous film Gloria, a marvelous human comedy of middle-aged rebirth that deserved greater crossover success. The light hot-and-cold shiver that characterizes his latest sets in from the first, head-turning notes of the score, a stunning, string-based creation by British electronic musician Matthew Herbert that blends the icy momentum of vintage Herrmann with spacious gasps of silence. This disquieting soundtrack plays enigmatically over the film's opening image of cascading waters at the spectacular Iguazu Falls on the Argentine-Brazilian border - a projection, we come to learn, of a romantic vacation that will never take place."
"Everything in the film's opening beats is fashioned as a fine bone in the skeleton of a mystery, as divorced 57-year-old Orlando (Francisco Reyes) is introduced frequenting a shadowed sauna in downtown Santiago, later searching in vain for some missing, crucial paperwork, before meeting his glamorous, far younger girlfriend, bar singer Marina (the remarkable trans actress Daniela Vega), for a birthday dinner. That evening, Orlando suffers a fatal aneurysm out of the blue, sustaining grievous bodily injuries as he tumbles down the stairs; once Marina notifies Orlando's brother Gapo (Luis Gnecco) that he died on the operating table, she makes a panicked dash from the hospital, high heels clacking into the city's sodium-lit night before the police give chase. We soon learn, however, that all this genre-implying cloak-and-dagger has been but a lithe directorial red herring, indicating nothing more than the unjustified suspicion with which Marina is viewed by others."
"She may look fierce in oversized shades and a tight leather pencil skirt, but Marina is no femme fatale: Nothing about her identity or her relationship to the deceased is disreputable or disingenuous. Yet as she struggles to keep a lid on her own lacerating grief, she finds herself treated as an impostor: by the immediate respondents at the hospital, who insist on addressing her by her birth ID; by a female detective (Amparo Noguera) from the senselessly enlisted Sexual Offenses Investigation Unit, who subjects her to a humiliating physical inspection; and finally by Orlando's own family and ex-wife Sonia (a chilling, corrosive Aline Kuppenheim), who claims primary mourning rights and labels Marina a 'chimera' to her face. Barred from the wake and funeral, with almost no one willing to hear her own emotional turmoil, Marina must forge an independent way to say goodbye and start anew."
"As he did in Gloria, albeit to very different tonal effect, Lelio employs a rich range of visual and sonic devices to foreground and lay bare the inner life of a woman all too easily disregarded by mainstream, patriarchal society. Cinematographer Benjamín Echazarreta devotedly frames and lights her in a series of sympathetic tableaux that range from scrubbed naturalism to smoky artifice, the camera's varying gaze reflecting not just her divided identity in the eye of the public, but the still-conflicted ways in which she views herself. In one ecstatic dance sequence at a gay nightclub, a bejeweled twin of sorts to the finale of Gloria, her image is mirrored and refracted and decked in glitter to the point of sheer fantasy - a fleeting, idealized vision of the woman that, in her mind’s eye, Marina still dreams of being. Music, too, is ingeniously used to define her from either side of the looking-glass: Lelio pulls off a daringly literal song cue in Aretha Franklin's (You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman at a point when his protagonist most requires such blunt self-assertion, while the character's own high, ethereal rendition of Handel's Ombra Mai Fu later on amounts to an act of regenerative grace."
"Among its manifold virtues, A Fantastic Woman will be most vigorously embraced by factions of the LGBTQ community for its trans-as-trans casting - a detail which many recent works on this growingly prominent social issue, including The Danish Girl and TV's Transparent, have taken flak for sidestepping. Yet Vegas tough, expressive, subtly anguished performance deserves so much more than political praise. It's a multi-layered, emotionally polymorphous feat of acting, nurtured with pitch-perfect sensitivity by her director, who maintains complete candor on Marina's condition without pushing her anywhere she wouldn't herself go. At one point in her mortifying police examination, a photographer demands that she drop the towel from her waist. She reluctantly complies, yet the camera respectfully feels no need to lower it gaze: A Fantastic Woman is no less assured than its heroine of her hard-won identity."
I fully agree with Mr. Lodge. I will add that what impressed me the most was Marina's quiet dignity - her main response to one too many infuriating and dehumanizing conditions she kept being subjected to. And in the film's final scene, the Handel recital, we are left with the feeling that no matter what she had been subjected to, her amazing strength saw her through. A fantastic woman, indeed!
This is the movie's international trailer:
This is the post-screening Q&A at the AFI FEST 2017, with the director and the star of the film:
We leave Chile and travel to the north, to New York, to Brooklyn in particular. That's where Eliza Hittman's sophomore feature film takes place. I have already given a full story to Beach Rats: (here), so instead of presenting my own thoughts today, I have a very interesting review by The Playlist's Andrew Crump:
"Beach Rats, the second feature from director Eliza Hittman, is at once sexual and unsexy - a thoroughly eroticized movie meant to encourage dread. It's a summer film set in New York City in July, focused on hormonal teenage boys as they engineer ways of killing time and entertaining themselves; they are, for the most part, douchebags out for their own gratification at the expense of decency and the contents of strangers' wallets. They're awful. Less awful is Frankie (Harris Dickinson), Hittman's clammed up protagonist, so much like the average teen in that he takes after mollusks (just try squeezing more than a handful of words out of his mouth at a time), and yet so unlike his peers thanks to a surplus of personal tumult."
"This is, of course, Hittman's MO per her superb 2014 debut, It Felt Like Love, in which she negotiated the gap between girlhood and womanhood with startling honesty. Beach Rats is the spiritual cousin to that picture - a narrative about adolescence in flux over the unpredictable and predictable operations of life: Frankie's father is seen at home dying in a bed surrounded by monitors; he struggles to work through his increasingly strained relationships with his mom and his sister; and, as a budding young man, he's dealing with feelings and lacks the necessary tools or guidance to reconcile them. Frankie appears to like girls, born out through the flirtation he pursues with Simone (Madeline Weinstein), but he likes men more, borne out through the secret rendezvous he sets up with guys through a Chatroulette-style proxy."
"Unsurprisingly, he can't tell anyone about that facet of his life, either because he has no idea how to or because he knows what the consequences will be if he does. Both of these options have zero appeal, but we see him weigh the pros and cons of telling his friends and family about his secrets anyways, even though, in the end, he never actually does; he toes the line of opening up but finds reason to withdraw inside himself every time. Through Hittman's lens, Frankie's confinement of self is tragedy at best, horrific at worst, and by the invocation of both, Beach Rats finds itself at a crossroads between the macho posturing observed in Barry Jenkins' Moonlight, and the youthful, anarchic spirit of Elizabeth Woods' White Girl, which is a pretty good place to be for your first or second feature."
"Like Chiron in Moonlight, Frankie adopts a tough guy front out of necessity and under duress, a mirrored surface for deflecting suspicion about his sexuality. Like Woods does in White Girl, Hittman locks her camera on Harrison and all who float into his orbit, creating a hectic intimacy that turns proximity into suspense. Beach Rats is front-loaded with subliminal boners, and so we expect a certain amount of carnality to burst forth upon Hittman's frame, but the sex here is tainted by shame, perhaps even fear; the catharsis of physical love never relieves Frankie of the emotional burden he carries on his shoulders. The
explanation of why doesn't provide any sense of closure, either. Frankie is his own burden."
"Is it too simple to describe Beach Rats as abidingly sad? Movies so rarely impress sensation on us with the urgency Hittman generates from the director's chair; she keeps her viewers cramped up against her subjects, such that any bead of sweat, any wisp of smoke, any dusted up oxy that's captured on screen notifies our sensory faculties. Frankie parties on a boat; we feel like we're on board with him. He and his friends crush up pills to get high; we can smell the medication as it's crumbled into powder. Vape clouds billow before Hittman's eye and we wonder if we might just reach out and touch them. And Frankie fires up the Brooklyn Boys website, trawling for sex with strangers, we're sitting in his basement with him, and thus also with his soul-crushing isolation. We are Beach Rats' captive audience. If the film is tender, it's merciless at the same time."
"Many a man's belt is unbuckled in Beach Rats; many a man takes his pleasure as Frankie is stuck in this dynamic, desperately trying to figure himself out while the people he has cultivated as components of his inner circle choke his attempts to do precisely that. Tentatively, he wonders aloud if Simone thinks two men making out is hot; she corrects him, plainly, cruelly, flatly, asserting that girls making out is hot, but guys making out is merely 'gay'. It's the movie's key scene, the first of two critical sequences of emergence where Frankie takes one step forward to liberation, and immediately takes five more backwards after reading the room. Your heart will break for him once in the moment, and once more as the credits begin rolling and we're left with a sobering thought: That Frankie, like the fireworks displays that bookend his story, will remain the same as he did last week and the week before last. That realization alone is enough to snatch the breath from your lungs, assuming Hittman’s craftsmanship doesn't do the job beforehand."
This is the film's trailer:
This is a short interview with the charismatic lead of the film, Harris Dickinson:
We move to the south again, this time to South Africa. Inxeba (The Wound) is the first feature film by South African director John Trengove, who has done a lot of TV and a few shorts in the past. The film was shortlisted for the Oscars (made the top 9) in the Best Foreign Language category but failed to proceed to the final 5. It won many awards, including Best Foreign Film at the African-American Film Critics Association and Best First Feature at the London Film Festival and was nominated for many more.
The Wound revolves around Xolani, a lonely factory worker, who travels to the rural mountains with the men of his community to initiate a group of teenage boys into manhood. When a defiant initiate from the city discovers his best-kept secret, Xolani's entire existence begins to unravel.
The initiation in question is the traditional Xhosa initiation into manhood, which involves circumcision. All actors cast were first language Xhosa speakers with direct experience of the initiation.
Watching the film was a fascinating experience - I was, however, rather disappointed by the ending. Not that it didn't make sense to the film's narrative - nor did it upset the film's tone - it's just that the boy in me really wanted a happy ending of sorts. I won't say more, so as not to spoil it for you.
Rogerebert.com's Peter Sobczynski has this to say:
"The Wound is set in a remote rural community in South Africa and is centered on a cultural ritual that will no doubt strike most outsiders as being barbaric. At the same time, however, it is also a film that deals with issues of masculinity, sexuality, and community that will strike universal chords with viewers of all stripes, regardless of where they are from or where their beliefs may lie. The result is a dark and stirring variation on the standard coming-of-age narrative that, much like its central characters, does not follow the path one might expect."
"The film is set within the Xhosa community of rural South Africa and takes place during the period of Ukwaluka, an annual rite of passage for young male teens to symbolize their move into adulthood. In it, the boys are taken up to the mountains where one of the elder tribesmen circumcises them one by one, imploring them to yell out 'I'm a man!' while he makes the incision. The boys then spend the next couple of weeks out there fasting and having traditional notions of masculinity drummed into them while their wounds heal. (This ritual used to be a secret but after word of it began to leak out, most notably when Nelson Mandela made reference to it in his autobiography, it has become a topic of heated controversy amongst the community.)"
"Having undergone the ritual himself when he was a teenager, Xolani (Nakhane Toure), now a lonely warehouse worker in his mid-30s, returns every year to serve as one of the 'caregivers' to one of the new boys, but his interest in the ritual is halfhearted at best. No, what brings him back is the opportunity to, however briefly, reestablish his sexual relationship with childhood friend and fellow caregiver Vija (Bongile Mantsai). Although Xolani dreams of the two of them running off together, Vija, who has a wife and family in town and projects a hyper-masculine pose to everyone, clearly does not feel the same way. It is clear that Vija regards him as a convenient tool for gratification and nothing more."
"Xolani's charge this year is Kwanda (Niza Jay Ncoyini), a young man who lives in Johannesburg with his mother, who has been brought there by his father, a tribesman made good, who fears that his son is 'too soft.' Far more sophisticated than the other boys undergoing the ritual, Kwanda alienates his peers and elders alike with his diffident attitude and his piercing questions about why the Ukwaluka rite even exists at all. It doesn't take Xolani too long to figure out that, in addition to everything else, Kwanda is also gay, just about the biggest no-no of all in this particular community. What makes this even trickier is that Kwanda not only realizes that Xolani is gay as well but has a fairly good idea of the true nature of his relationship with Vija. Before long, tensions begin to rise between the three with Xolani and Vija beginning to crack under the pressure of trying to be something that they aren't and Kwanda, for all of his smarts, not realizing how much danger he is now in."
"At first glance, a film like The Wound might seem fairly alien from a cultural standpoint to a lot of viewers - the mass circumcision sequence seen (and especially heard) in the early going will almost certainly horrify the majority of them in ways that infinitely more graphic scenes of carnage in conventional scare films could not even begin to approximate. As the film goes on, however, it begins to capture and examine in intriguing ways any number of universally held truths and fears, such as the shame one oftentimes feels as they force themselves to live a lie and the sense of rage that those same people feel at those who have managed to stay true to themselves. As a result, a story that might have played out as an ordinary coming-of-age scenario is given a darker and more dramatic spin that leads the story into unexpected areas before arriving at a finale that is legitimately surprising while still coming across as the plausible end result of the events we have seen."
"The screenplay, which was co-written by John Trengrove (also making his directorial debut), Thando Mgqolozana and Malusi Bengu, does have a couple of moments in which it hits the dramatic points that it wants to make just a little too hard - at one point, Kwanda tears into Xolani with 'You want me to stand up and be a man but you can't do it yourself' and later wonders 'How can love destroy a nation?' However, those moments are few and far between, and, for the most part, it takes an intelligent look at the subject at hand without degenerating into pleas for tolerance straight out of the Screenwriters 101 handbook. Trengrove's direction is strong and sure in the way that he captures both the rhythms of the Xhosa and the ways in which their increasingly outmoded ideas are crumbling all around them and he elicits powerful performances from his three lead actors as well."
"A film befitting its title, The Wound is a rough and unsparing film that offers an unflinching look of how once-traditional notions of masculinity can grow increasingly toxic in the hands of those who cling to those outmoded ways rather than accept that things have changed. It is not a film with easy answers to the problems that it depicts and there are moments that may simply be too painful for some viewers to endure. However, those who are in the mood for something more challenging than the usual multiplex fare or even the typical art house offerings are likely to find it to be an ultimately rewarding experience."
This is the film's trailer:
This is an interview with the film's protagonist, Nakhane Touré:
In case you haven't noticed, I have already presented Nakhane Touré (he's also a very gifted musician): here. As a bonus, this is Clairvoyant, a song of his that was released after my presentation of him:
You are probably already dizzy with our constant spatial zig-zagging, but I'm afraid that we have to go north again; as north as Finland. it's a biopic of Touko Laaksonen, known to most gays (and progressively to straights as well) as Tom of Finland. This is also the film's title. It was directed by Dome Karukoski, born in Cyprus of a Finnish mother and an American father. It was submitted for the Foreign Language Oscars by Finland but didn't make the cut. It has won, however, the FIPRESCI Prize at the Göteborg Film Festival, as well as taking part in the Edinburgh, Palm Springs, and Tribeca Film Festivals.
It is the story of Touko Laaksonen, a decorated officer, who returns home after a harrowing and heroic experience serving his country in World War II, but life in Finland during peacetime proves equally distressing. He finds peace-time Helsinki rampant with persecution of the gay men around him. Touko finds refuge in his liberating art, specializing in homoerotic drawings of muscular men, free of inhibitions. His work - made famous by his signature 'Tom of Finland' - became the emblem of a generation of men and fanned the flames of a gay revolution.
The film is very good at depicting those times - in fact, I was quite surprised by the degree of persecution that gay people faced in the post-WWII era in countries like Finland and Germany. It was a far cry from what we were facing in the 70's and 80's, the time of my own personal experience. However, the film failed to engage me in a meaningful way either emotionally or intellectually. I've enjoyed watching it, but I wouldn't make a point of watching it again. The following is San Francisco Chronicle's G. Allen Johnson's opinion:
"One can imagine that when Touko Laaksonen finally arrives in Los Angeles and realizes the full impact his work hath wrought, it went down much the way it did in Dome Karukoski's biopic Tom of Finland."
"Operating in near secrecy in Finland during the 1950s and ’60s, working on nights and weekends around his gig in a Helsinki advertising firm, Laaksonen's drawings of fearless, strong gay men captured the worldwide imagination of a culture in the closet. It's not a stretch to say he helped create the leather culture - he was particularly fascinated by motorcycles, muscles, and leather. (He ran a motorcycle club in Helsinki 'without the motorcycles' - a.k.a. an underground gay nightclub.)"
"The effect was self-empowerment, confidence, and strength of a culture viewed by mainstream society as 'sissies.' And yet, as portrayed by Pekka Strang, who deftly handles playing a character across five decades, Laaksonen was not much like, say, his comic book alter ego Kake. He was a mild-mannered advertising executive who lived with his lover, Veli (Lauri Tilkanen), and sister Kaija (Jessica Grabowsky), also a talented artist who works at the same firm. The brother-sister dynamic is especially well-developed - she is a homophobe who loves her gay brother."
"The film starts during World War II when Touko is a lieutenant in the Finnish army. In Karukoski's vision, Touko is affected most by a platonic relationship with a fellow officer, married and in the closet, and his killing of a Russian paratrooper on the field of battle. (He later assuages his guilt by imagining the dead Russian as a magnificent, leather-clad hero in his drawings.) Laaksonen tries peddling his drawings in the gay underground of Helsinki and Berlin at a time when not only was homosexuality illegal, but possession of such relatively benign (by today's standards) drawings was as well."
"- It’s just a drawing, Tuoko says to his old war friend, now a diplomat, after a run-in with authorities in Berlin.
- It's not just a drawing, his friend replies. - It's an atomic bomb."
"It's not until he sends an unsolicited envelope full of his work to Bob Mizer, the Los Angeles editor of Physique Pictorial magazine, that his career takes off. He signs his work 'Tom', as an Americanization of Touko, and Mizer had the genius stroke to create the rest of the pseudonym, Tom of Finland."
"Tom of Finland is a good, strong movie, but never threatens to be great. One salivates at the adventurous directions the film could have explored. Karukoski is obviously trying to appeal to the masses here. His re-creation of the 1940s and '50s Finland is top-notch, and Strang's sensitive, dimensional portrayal relies on not so much words but presence - and that's a really good thing."
"Besides, it's high time Tom of Finland becomes more known to the world. He was essentially the first gay manga artist, and his work was so influential and accomplished that many of the world's great museums - including SFMOMA and the Berkeley Art Museum - have his art in their permanent collections."
This is the film's trailer:
This is an interview with Tom of Finland himself, Touko Laaksonen. The video contains a lot of Tom's erotic drawings, so, if you are prudish, you'd better not watch it:
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