"Songs My Brothers Taught Me"

In the Lakota reserve of Pine Ridge, a man burns to death in his house. His memorial service gathers what seems like half the community; according to an old friend, he fathered 25 children, all of them teenagers or young adults. They discuss the local Indigenous Christian temperance movement at a bonfire, over beer and joints. Among them, a boy and his 11 year-old sister stay on the sidelines and watch quietly – their father’s death affects them just as much as everybody else, they just don’t realize how much yet.

There’s something almost mythological about Karl Winters; unseen but spoken of with wistful reverence, he’s like a deity whose death by fire lays bare the curses and sins suffered by his children. Certainly, Chloé Zhao gives their games and escapades in the badlands an almost biblical sense of majesty. Call it bucolic neorealism; where tight, handheld shots of a largely non-professional cast blend in seamlessly with imagery that wouldn’t look out of place in a Terrence Malick film – medium shots following characters walking in fields with occasional lens flares provided by the sun intruding at the top of the frame, camera swirls around an embracing couple with nothing but music on the soundtrack… And then there are the establishing shots, with their permanently overcast skies overlooking the land like a meteorological embodiment of the characters’ hopes and fears.

It would be tempting to see Zhao’s style as a means to make the pain and frustration experienced by Johnny, Jashaun and their mother Lisa that of all American Indian peoples. Indeed, Pine Ridge’s bloody history, from the Wounded Knee Massacre to the 1973 siege, almost reads like a catalogue of oppression and hardship faced by Indigenous populations of the American continent. Yet to interpret Songs My Brothers Taught Me as an exposé on the American Indian experience would be to miss the forest for the trees; the historical genesis of its characters’ condition is important, but it does not define them.

Over the course of the story, two paths unfold: That of aspiring boxer Johnny, who makes money smuggling alcohol back and forth from Whiteclay to Pine Ridge in service of his Springsteenian dream to leave for Los Angeles with his girlfriend Aurelia, and that of his 11 year-old sister Jashaun, who strikes a friendship with recently released ex-con Travis, agreeing to help him sell his handmade & second-hand clothes in exchange for a pow wow dress. As Johnny’s bootlegging activities attract the wrong people’s attention and Jashaun’s friend gradually falls back into his old ways, the two siblings’ respective paths collide in a subtly impressive editing sequence that combines Johnny’s fateful encounter with thuggish competitors with Jashaun’s ride home from a nightmarish rave accompanied by the same cop that found her father’s body.

As enunciated above, the plot seems like a pretty clear-cut tale of trying to escape one’s roots vs. reconnecting with them, but the impeccable attention Zhao pays to her actors’ every unconscious look and gesture reveals something more profound beneath: An urgent need to define oneself by our connections to others. Whether it’s Johnny usurping Aurelia’s family conversation over her departure by announcing his intent to accompany her or Jashaun witnessing Travis drunkenly rapping about his own inability to escape his condition, both siblings are trying to form connections in order to keep on existing and evolving. Jashaun listens where Johnny imposes or resists.

This understated impulse for communication and connection spans the entire film, linking Johnny’s distribution of liquor in precarious houses full of crying children and morbidly obese adults to anti-alcoholism sermons attended by his mother, and in doing so transcending any TV documentary miserabilism such scenes might evoke to reach the kind of matter-of-fact poignancy that eludes many films made by more seasoned directors.

With respectful distance – even in the closest shots – and discreet compassion, Zhao unmasks that impulse and associates it with the larger need to preserve cohesion as a family, as a community and as a people. Giving further spiritual meaning to her scenes of pastoral respite, Zhao places God – and the search thereof – as a driving and unpredictable force behind that struggle, vividly illustrated in the scene of Karl’s funeral, where traditional songs sung by Lakota nation representatives accompany mourners coming out of a lily-white Christian church; like the reeds from Johnny’s closing narration, his people bend to the wind so as not to get blown away. Rather than submission to white western cultural supremacy, Zhao suggests this conciliation of Christianity with Indigenous traditions to be a powerful system of endurance and resistance.

That isn’t to say Songs My Brothers Taught Me presents a rose-tinted vision of religion or spirituality. Further exploring the link between family and community, Zhao acknowledges the manner in which they come into conflict through Jashaun’s reaction to her brother’s plan to leave, the discovery of which (point-of-view shots of Johnny and Aurelia) curiously evokes someone spying on their unfaithful lover. But nowhere is this conflict more succinctly expressed than when, in the film’s most harshly poignant line, Lisa’s imprisoned eldest son warns her not to “make God another man you abandoned your children for”. While perhaps not exactly feminist, that single line offers a more devastating denunciation of the idea of God as a patriarch than all the trendy New Atheist slogans in the world, and Irene Bedard’s wordless reaction to it provides one of the film’s acting highlights.

One of the story’s subplots involves Johnny’s budding friendship with his aging partner-in-crime’s white girlfriend Angie. The half-repressed sexual tension lays ground for subtle callbacks to western romanticism of American Indians; when Johnny helps Angie with her dart-throwing skills by adjusting her aim while standing close behind her, their body language and positions echo and gender-flip the Avatar image of the native woman helping the white man shoot an arrow. In a later scene, Johnny removes a gutted game’s heart and jokingly offers it to Angie for eating. As she has everything he wants from her here and now, Johnny feels no need to impose his will on her. Yet when she acts by attempting to kiss him, his response is one of passive resistance. Although there may arguably be more ingredients for a fulfilling relationship with her than with Aurelia, Johnny remains faithful. Whether it is because he is genuinely in love with Aurelia or because he cannot separate her from the escape she offers remains ambiguous. It certainly supplies one of the film’s most politically evocative shots: A young American Indian man apologizing for not returning a white woman’s kiss while both stand in front of a bloody gutted animal.

Songs My Brothers Taught Me is thoroughly involving from start to finish, humble yet confident, carried by raw, magnificently unaffected performances – particularly from Jashaun St. John as her eponymous character. Like Karl Winters, the absentee father who abruptly returns into his children’s lives by dying, it affects us surreptitiously, leaves an impression that doesn’t instantly register but instead grows over time until it our connection to the world is revitalized.

"Elevator To The Gallows"

“A 24-hour Racinian tragedy:  The crime was committed at night, the murderer was identified in the morning, and he shall be captured this evening at the latest.” Such are the words used by a pompous substitute magistrate to describe the criminal case he thinks he has all figured out. The tragic irony comes of course from the fact that the man he has pegged as the murderer is in fact innocent of this particular crime but guilty of another one nobody knows took place, but there’s also an unwitting dose of truth to his words that makes them doubly ironic: Elevator To The Gallows is indeed, like so many noir films revolving around murder and forbidden passion, a 24-hour tragedy; one whose plot’s reliance on its characters making the worst possible decisions at the worst possible moments turns it into a tragicomedy.

None of these decisions are forced or arbitrary, they are all consistent with the traits of those responsible: The meticulous murderer who forgot to take the grappling hook off the balcony panicked at the unexpected phone call and naturally thought taking the elevator would be faster and more discreet; every mistake the impulsive teenage delinquent makes is an attempt to emulate adult behaviour most likely learned from the movies; as for the murderer’s lover, well, how was she to know they’d used his camera? It’s the kind of moments of credible stupidity that the Coen brothers thrive on.

On paper, Elevator To The Gallows looks like a collection of noir situations: A murder plot committed by the victim’s coworker who is also his wife’s lover; two teenage outlaw lovers driving a stolen car and stopping at a motel; a man trapped in an enclosed space and powerless to stop the unfolding of tragic events…  But from the very first shot, a memorable extreme close-up of Jeanne Moreau’s lost and anguished face as she repeatedly declares her love for her husband’s future murderer over the telephone, Louis Malle makes his intent clear: To look at familiar scenarios from unfamiliar perspectives.

Such unfamiliar perspectives include subverting the expectations of suspense generated by the murderer’s predicament (trapped in an elevator after hours while his car is stolen and his lover is looking for him all over Paris) by concentrating relatively little attention on his attempts to get out, which end halfway through the film. The consequently greater amount of time spent on his lover’s fruitless search for him and the teenagers misusing his property brings to surface the social critiques that so often lurk at the surface of classic noirs: The respectable CEO’s wife spends the night walking the streets while her inner monologue melodramatically rationalizes his “betrayal” and “cowardice” into something noble and romantic, so lost in thought and so confident about her power that ending in the police station with drunks and prostitutes seems like a mere inconvenience.

Meanwhile, the kids’ use of the wealthy war vet’s identity and possessions to make friends with a couple of aging German tourists before carelessly killing them, aside from recalling the adolescent roleplaying from Nicholas Ray’s classics They Live By Night and Rebel Without a Cause, functions as a critique of post-WWII youth entitlement and privilege that, in light of the May 68 movement that would occur ten years later, feel eerily prescient from a reactionary point of view¹. Indeed modern French Gaullist viewers doubtlessly find the toast to Europe shared by all parties but the boy as well as the German man’s evident delight in playing along with his pretense at being an Indochina veteran respectively chilling and cathartic.

In either case, the characters’ status is temporarily and, up to a point, voluntarily hidden. They hide from their crimes in plain sight, taking on the guise of a different social status; it is paper-thin and does not stand up to scrutiny, but in the brief amount of time that passes between transformation and return to reality, it’s a kind of relief for them.

An adaptation of Noël Calef’s novel of the same name, Elevator To The Gallows was Louis Malle’s first feature-length work of fiction. He had previously worked as an assistant to Robert Bresson for A Man Escaped and the influence is quite distinct, if not overt: Scenes that most other filmmakers would shoot in order to generate suspense are downplayed just enough that tension remains without distracting from the curious beauty of the gestures and emotions contained within. The murderer’s infiltration of his victim’s floor via grappling hook, in particular, reads like a reversal of A Man Escaped’s climactic escape scene. It’s one of the many little touches through which Malle made Elevator To The Gallows a stepping stone on a new path for French crime dramas (or “polars” as we call them in France), perhaps the country’s most popular genre at the time and one that was threatening to grow stale from formula. Sadly, after decades of progress, the genre appears to have stalled once again. More’s the pity considering France’s increased social, political and religious fractures provide an abundance of material for films like Elevator To The Gallows.

¹A point of view that I do not entirely share, even if I do acknowledge its excesses – support for genocidal authoritarian regimes such as Mao’s and Pol Pot’s being the most prominent.

"Ali: Fear Eats The Soul"

If Ali: Fear Eats The Soul were simply about racism and the challenges faced by interracial couples, it would already be a superb accomplishment in and of itself. Indeed, the virtue with which Rainer Werner Fassbinder takes seemingly simple situations and characters and strips them down to expose the bare human emotions behind them puts most mainstream anti-racist cinema to shame. But the true subject of Ali: Fear Eats The Soul is really loneliness and the unbearable pressure of groups over identity, and it’s Fassbinder’s crucial understanding of the forces that shape human behaviour that makes it an unassumingly revelatory experience.

Consider the film’s opening scene, which lays out all of the film’s themes with uncommon precision and subtlety: An aging widow walks into a bar to seek shelter from the rain. The sound of Arabic music fills the soundtrack. Dominated by the line of tables that stretches all the way to the foreground on her left and the door frame above her, she appears small and isolated. In the following shot, we see the patrons, all gathered at the other end of the counter, silently looking at the new arrival with cold interest. Among them, four Arab men. Opposite axes, opposite worlds. Emmi (an astounding Brigitte Mira) is neither welcome nor rejected, just an unsolicited intruder disrupting an ordered society.

After the shapely young bartender explains her clientele’s taste in music – “They prefer the stuff from back home” – as well as her choice of drinks, we see one of the Arab men, Ali (El Hedi Ben Salem, dubbed by Wolfgang Hess), reject a white female patron’s offer to take him home – “Schwanz kaput” he explains in broken German. Jilted, the woman changes the Raï music to a slow Bohemian folk song and playfully dares Ali to dance with the old lady. Nonchalantly, he accepts. So far, the bar has been diegetically divided into two spaces: Emmi’s table and the patrons at the counter. Only in the subsequent shot, after Emmi accepts Ali’s proposal and follows him to the dance floor, are these two spaces united by the camera’s synchronized movement with the characters.

Through diegetic music, sparse dialogue, still shots and composition choices that emphasize vertical lines and thus static positions, Rainer Werner Fassbinder subtly conveys the discomfort and sense of defamiliarization felt by many white Europeans – particularly older folk – when faced with otherness in their surroundings. More importantly, his choices also put a different light on his characters’ words and actions, which would appear fairly straightforward in mainstream films: Ali’s rebuffed would-be lover’s act of provocation (replacing “his” music with “hers”, daring him to dance with the little old lady) has a tinge of genuine curiosity that she herself may not fully acknowledge; Ali and Emmi’s dance, during which they exchange personal information, comes across both as romantic table-turning so much as an experience in re-acquainting oneself with familiar customs – Emmi notes she hasn’t danced in 20 years – in strange and unfamiliar circumstances. Throughout the entire film, these two individuals struggle, resist and negotiate with various groups over their identities, habits and desires in an endless psychological maze that separates, reunites and blocks them from each other depending upon circumstances.

This struggle is visualized through various scenarios in which Emmi’s relationship with the much younger Arab man makes them the subject of racist comments from her friends, neighbours and children, and others in which their relationship finds itself challenged by their own feelings of alien-ness. But Fassbinder isn’t content with merely illustrating the grade-school humanist platitude of everybody being somebody’s stranger; he explores it in intimate detail that belies initial impressions of broad strokes.

Like in his previous theatrical film The Bitter Tears Of Petra Von Kant, Fassbinder makes considerable use of deep-focus shots to create meaning. Shots in which one or both of the main characters are isolated by the décor, framing and positioning of other actors are legion, as are shots in which all or part of the important actions are seen through an opening, a filter or a reflecting surface. Even when the camera’s point of new is neither subjective nor semi-subjective, our attention is drawn to both our own gaze and those of the people we are watching. Consequently, we empathize even with those whose words and actions make out to be either one-dimensional bigots or, in the case of Ali, a seemingly patronizing “noble long-suffering immigrant” stereotype.

That is what makes Ali: Fear Eats The Soul so miraculous: With purely visual means, it reveals complex human mechanisms behind commonplace attitudes and aggressions that most movies would either treat as self-evidently evil or dissect via thorough examinations of individual characters. Through Ali and Emmi’s relationship, all the obstacles and compromises people impose upon each other and themselves for the sake of happiness are gradually unveiled to us. Racism is thus dissected to appear not as the abstract evil that most of us would prefer to imagine, but more as a frighteningly natural expression of the human instinct to feel safe and validated by being part of a unit of similar people, whether they share the same skin colour, the same ancestry or the same drinking establishment.

"Ricki And The Flash"

I often find that an actor/actress’s lead performance represents a film at least as much as it carries it. While the overall quality of the performance and that of the film are neither necessarily proportional to nor dependent on each other, the former will often be a kind of distillation of the latter’s traits; not just the film’s themes and tone, but rather the little things, good and/or bad, that give it a specific identity.

Meryl Streep’s portrayal of a divorcee whose rock star dreams never left the bar in Ricki And The Flash is one such performance. Its occasional flourishes, semi-fulfilled promises and questionable notes mirror the film’s uneasy tonal changes and narrative compromises, but the earnestness that motivates them is such that they also prevent both from being disappointments.

Directed by Jonathan Demme and written by Diablo Cody, Ricki And The Flash bears both creator’s hallmarks for better and for worse. Its plot and structure resemble those of Young Adult with a touch of Rachel Getting Married: A female protagonist with multiple unresolved personal issues returns to a hometown that has moved on without her and finds that she is no longer wanted. But whereas Young Adult was a cynical tale of successful upward social mobility, whose dark comedic value rested mainly on the dissonance between its anti-heroine’s delusions and the plain reality, Ricki And The Flash is a more traditional bittersweet crowd-pleaser: Unlike Mavis’s desperate attempt at stealing her happily married ex-boyfriend back, which viewers knew as a lost cause from the get-go, there are hints of lingering attraction between Ricki/Linda and her ex-husband Pete (Kevin Kline) but Cody and Demme explore that idea just far enough to reveal a modicum of pain without making too many people in the audience uncomfortable. The character who really cares for the anti-heroine and serves as a voice of reason – brilliantly played in Young Adult by Patton Oswalt as a mirror image of its protagonist – actually manages to help her get back on track and be her boyfriend. By the film’s conclusion, Linda has managed to reintegrate her family unit and it all ends with a dance party.

In summary, Ricki And The Flash attempts to cross the kind of snarky domestic dramedy typically aimed at teenagers and young adults with a feel-good redemption story adult families can enjoy, and for the most part it succeeds. Diablo Cody’s customary biting repartee and semi-orthodox social observations (the Linda/Ricki contradiction is personified by her right-leaning libertarian politics contrasting with the abandonment of her Midwestern American nuclear family) bring cathartic laughter while defusing any discomfort caused by the topics at hand. Tension is relieved through familiar techniques that include catty maternal insults to the man who broke her daughter’s heart and the requisite “In Marijuana Veritas” scene so typical of modern middle-class-set comedies.

All fairly well-marked territory, but saved from the clutches of triteness and overt sentimentalism by a balanced screenplay and Meryl Streep’s aforementioned lead performance. Streep has received criticism in recent years for what some perceive to be calculated, over-mannered performances, and it’s not entirely without merit. Like many actors of her generation, her performances are rarely bad but it has become equally rare to see her do something new and unexpected with a role. As Linda, a person who is only in her element when performing on stage as Ricki, she occasionally exaggerates a movement or infection more than she should and sometimes gives the impression of holding back from exposing too much of herself, yet there is not a second where her commitment is in doubt. Correcting Mamma Mia’s false notes, Streep makes Linda’s arrested development look as much a disguise as her lad-ette persona, lending an undercurrent of pathos in her more histrionic moments that feel more genuine than they might have otherwise. Like Cody’s script, she may not be as much herself as a more daring project would have allowed her to be, but she manages to make the necessary concessions without losing herself in the process.

The other real star of the film, of course, is Streep’s real-life daughter Mamie Gummer as Linda’s suicidal freshly-dumped daughter. The role of the sarcastic sick person is one that has been pummeled to death by countless hipster pseudo-indie impostures like Garden State and The Fault In Our Stars, but Gummer carries out each snappy one-liner with imploded pain that makes the early pre-conclusion of her character arc all the more underwhelming.

Indeed, the film’s second half, with its inspirational pep talk, happy musical sequences and bourgeois-bohemian wedding (vegan food, seed paper cards) that recalls the titular multicultural wedding of Rachel Getting Married brings on the happy feelings with an industrial efficiency that, at times, make it look like Jonathan Demme seamlessly edited two short films starring the same protagonist together. While not jarring, the shift in tone cannot help but remind the viewer of how relatively little time he has spent getting to know this family and its baggage.

While not as honest as Rachel Getting Married nor as astute as Young Adult, Ricki And The Flash is a heartfelt little film that settles for above-average likeability with adroitness. It would have benefitted from further exploration of its secondary characters’ perspective on the situation – as well as fewer zooms/forward tracking shots of a character’s face/torso when faced with an important/dramatic moment – but like Meryl Streep, it dares just enough to let the viewer leave with the satisfaction of not having wasted their time.