Kent's Week In Film #4:
After Yang - 2022, d. Kogonada - Crave
Athena - 2022, d. Romain Gavras - Netflix
Marry Me - 2022, d. - Crave
Man Hunt - 1941, d. Fritz Lang - Criterion Channel
Scarlet Street - 1945, d. Fritz Lang - Criterion Channel
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There have been many films (and TV shows and books and comics and video games) in the past 10 (20/30/40+) years that have delved into artificial intelligence, androids and sentient mechanical beings and their various states of existence and influence. It goes back as far (if not further) than the novel and film Metropolis (like 2001: A Space Odyssey, the novel and film were simultaneous products) where an android is given the visage of woman who leads an uprising of the working class into destroying the city's machines which both keep the city functioning but are also a tool of division.
One of the common questions about androids is "do they want to be human?" This question is asked about the android ("Techno", as they are called here) Yang by his adoptive father to the clone girlfriend he didn't know Yang had (or was capable of having). She laughs in disbelief, "it's such a human thing to ask... we always assume that other beings want to be human. What's so great about being human?" Instead she comments that Yang struggled with his identity in a different way. Yang (Justin H. Min) was brought (bought) into Jake (Colin Ferrell) and Kira's (Jodie Turner-Smith) family after they adopted Mika (Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja) as they wanted to make sure she grew up with knowledge of her Chinese culture. Yang was created for the purpose of being a sibling (the company making the technos is called "Brothers and Sisters Incorporated") to adopted Chinese children, but Yang questioned whether or not he was actually Chinese, not wondering about his humanity. It's just one of many resonant elements in this remarkably deep film with a threadbare plot to service them all.
After his years of service with Mika and family, Yang experiences a critical malfunction and cannot be restored. Mika is understandably distraught, even in knowing Yang is a techno she still knows him as her brother, her friend, her teacher, her caregiver. He's always there when Mom and Dad are not. Jake seems dispassionately committed to figuring out how to revive Yang, it's only as we explore the depths of Jake's efforts that we understand his dispassion, his drive is concealing deep grief over the loss of a member of his family. Yang was not an appliance, he was a son. Kira seems to busy with work to even think about her grief (or anyone else's) most of the time, but it's also a mask to conceal her sadness.
In the extensive lengths Jake goes to try and repair Yang (which seems to be much further than what most people do with their Technos) he authorizes a dubious technician to crack open Yang's core, and retrieve his memory bank (the technician believes it to be spyware). In meeting a studier of Technos at the museum, he's given an apparatus to view Yang's memory bank, brief 3-second snippets of time that start to reveal that there was far more about Yang that he didn't know than did.
After Yang sad, beautiful, mesmerising rumination on what constitutes family, what defines identity, coping with loss, and how memories are formed and triggered. It's also about our perception of others, how we see them, but not necessarily know them. It's also examines parenting and relationships, all set in the backdrop of a future society of androids and clones and self-driving cars. It's an aesthetically beautiful film, which seems to be hopeful for a better future (one changed by androids and clones and other unseen advancements, I'm sure), but one that doesn't forget there's a very human aspect that follows our society wherever we wind up, still dealing with paranoia, intolerance, money and death.
I had become aware of After Yang mid-year in 2022, intentionally steering clear of learning too much. I'm not sure sometimes what inspires me to keep in the dark about a film, when most of the time I have no problems reading review after review and watching trailers multiple times. But After Yang seemed like something I should keep a surprise, but there was nothing imploring that I do. Having now seen the film, it's not like there's any great story surprises or spoilers to be had, it's just a beautiful, deeply felt film that's one of the best films of the year.
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Unlike After Yang, I hadn't even heard of Athena at all in 2022. It was only upon listening to a best-movies-of-2022 podcast (one of many) that Athena was even mentioned. The short version was it was about civic unrest in Paris, but featured a stunning introductory single-take sequence. Although the critic was citing that "single take sequences" have been overhyped and seemed to imply there's been a critical blowback to the artisticness of the long single-take, I've always been a sucker for one, and impressed by them.
Athena, it turns out, is an absolute stunner of a socio-political action-tragedy that grabs ahold of you from moment one and doesn't really ever let go. After video is released of the death of 13-year-old Idir as a result of an apparent police beating, his brother, Abdel, a decorated soldier, pleads for peace and letting the police sort it out. Revolutionary brother Karim has no time for the inevitable lies and cover ups and has coordinated an attack on the police station (armed primarily with fireworks) that retreats to the largely Muslim populated neighbourhood of apartment complexes called Athena, a concrete jungle that serves them well as a fortified stronghold. While there, Abdel implores the young men to stop the violence (falling on deaf ears) while helping the families leave before being arrested himself with others trying to provide safe passage for the retreat. Their other brother, the drug dealer Moktar, is trying to get his supply out of the complex before any federal raids happen, and seems to find the dissension as a result of his brother's death more annoying than anything. Karim is a rather cunning strategist of the violent protest (but not yet deadly), a general navigating and commanding the different arenas of conflict. As the night shakes on and the stakes rise (and the protests spread throughout the country) word starts to leak that Idir's death may have been at the hands of far-right agents looking to light a match on the powderkeg, so Karim's demands for peace involving the immediate arrest of the officers involved may not even be a possible solution.
The film's power comes largely from its orchestration, shot as a series of long single takes (the first, an epic 12-minute sequence spanning multiple locations and a highway chase in a stolen police van is worth the price of admission alone), typically following a single character, that offers constant movement, and building tension as we see the conflict and strategising from multiple sides (so technically accomplished is it that Netflix released a sort of "how'd they do that" companion documentary with the film.)It's not operating with a conventional narrative, and as such there are a lot of gaps in understanding the character dynamics or, in some cases, motivations (at least on first viewing). But it's a relentlessly taut and constantly engaging movie, a literal edge-of-your-seat thriller, one playing with complicated themes that it handles too thinly perhaps, but never deigns to tell you that its protagonists are right or wrong (though revealing Idir's killer as a pre-credits sequence does seem a bit of a *ahem* cop-out).
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Marry Me is not without its charms but, frankly it starts with a pretty stupid conceit and never seems all that interesting in exploring the conceit with any sense of reality. It's a film not without its charms (I feel like Jennifer Lopez and Owen Wilson are charming in their sleep) but the charm of them together still doesn't make up for the real lack of exploration of the effect their very different worlds have on each other.
I mean, megastar Jennifer Lopez (or whatever her analog is called in this film) is marrying some young, hot, South American superstar in a big public concert extravaganzaa, except just before the actual wedding part of the performance, it's leaked that buddy is having an affair with JLo's assistant. So she calls off the wedding, but the show must go on. Owen Wilson is an average divorced part-time dad and middle school math teacher who is scoring points by taking his daughter to the concert thanks to his best friend, Sarah Silverman (love SS, but not understanding their friendship at all in this one). He's holding SS's "Marry Me"sign when JLo, in a very vulnerable state, pulls him on stage and they get married. Her agents convince OW to stick with the marriage in public for 3 months, but in that time they get to know each other and the usual romance things happen.
Except that JLo's character here is one of the world's biggest stars, and her crazy marriage stunt would put a blinding spotlight on OW that's so huge he'll be seeing spots for a lifetime. He wouldn't be able to go anywhere or do anything normally...well, ever. TMZ would be following him where ever he went, just waiting for him to do anything they could dis or dish on. His very average, comfortable way of life that JLo seems so endeared by, would be ruined within 6 months and this film only sort-of acknowledges that. But, whatever, it's a romantic fantasy right? But then....who is this fantasy for? The audience for these types of movies are typically women, and yet the fantasy is a Super Successful, Super Rich, Super Attractive spontaneously marries a very average guy with perhaps a bit of above average charm? How many women is this fantasy catering to? Or is this meant to be bait for women to take their boyfriends/husbands to a romantic movie and engage them with the fantasy?
There's one pretty good song, one or two decent songs, and a couple real stinkers in this, so it's a mixed bag on that front. The big stage performances are...okay, but you can tell they were filmed during COVID times with the audience camera trickery. And there's just some of the worst camera work I've seen in a mainstream movie in a long time...for as amazing as the wardrobes are in this, it's a really ugly-looking movie.
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Man Hunt was released mid-World War II, and is the first of legendary director Fritz Lang's anti-Nazi films shot in America. The story finds a notable British big game hunter scoping out Hitler with a long-range rifle only to be assaulted by security before he can shoot. He's interrogated over and over, where he assures he never intended to actually shoot Hitler, that it was just an exercise in scope-hunting, the thrill to see if he could. Of course the Nazis want a confession that the British government had tasked him with assassinating the fuhrer to incite war, but Captain Alan Thorndike (Walter Pidgeon, the Jon Hamm of the 1940's) will never sign a lie, no matter how much they torture him. So instead of beating him to death, they plan to stage an accident, that he fell off a cliff. They push him off at night, only when they go to retrieve him the next morning they discover the ground below is boggy and that the soft surface allowed him to survive. The man hunt begins.
The film has a fairly tense opening act (though a little tame by today's intensity standards) as Thorndike struggles to escape Germany, survive the hunt, and evade capture. Even upon reaching English shores he's not safe. They know enough about him to make his life complicated. But in fleeing his pursuers he happens into the home of Jerry Stokes (Joan Bennett), a lower class British woman who is completely charmed by this invader in her home. The second act of the film kind of side steps the tension of Thorndike's pursuit for, instead, a soft-touch meet-cute wront-side-of-the-tracks romantic sub-plot that is far too congenial to fit with the remainder of the film. Bennett's awful cockney accent threatens to ruin every scene she appears in (and often does). Pidgeon doesn't even attempt an accent, just stiff posture and a few utterances of "old boy" here and there to do the trick.
I did a quick scan through British writer Geoffrey Household's "Rogue Male", a novella serialized in The Atlantic in 1939, which tells the tale rather grippingly from the first person perspective and not a hint of a romantic subplot (the second act is more fraught pursuit across the English countryside). Likely the romance was an injection of the American studio system's requirements on the story, but, if not for the tonal shift, it could have still worked pretty well. The third act is rushed but makes its point well...Nazis fucking suck, which needed to be reiterated a lot in America in 1941, and, well, still does.
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Johnny coaxes Kitty into getting money out of Chris by feigning interest in him, and the turns of events get pretty wild from there. It's not often that old films can surprise me, because usually if they're of any quality they've been aped, redone, or ripped off so thoroughly that there's no surprises left to be had. But this one kept turning and I loved every minute of it, up to the point where Chris does something that seems way out of character for him. Where it goes from there deals with the repercussions of it nicely, but I'm not sure it was in his nature in the first place.
The story is good, but the characters here, Kitty, Johnny, and Chris (and even Chris' wife Adele, Kitty's best friend Millie and other supporting cast) are all very well drawn characters, who have a much more complex view of the world than we usually see in classic cinema. Kitty is the tough talking dame, but she's the epitome of all-talk, no action. Johnny calls her "lazy legs" because she just can't be bothered to get up (she spits grape seeds on the floor and flicks cigarette butts willy nilly among other uncouth behaviours), she even quit modelling because it was just too strenuous. Chris, meanwhile, is the consummate sensitive artist, a dabbler in painting but portrayed as cow-toeing to his wife, being emasculated doing dishes and cleaning up, as she harps on about the life he doesn't give her and the kind of man her dead husband was (his picture still hanging over the couch) in comparison. Even Johnny has more going on that just being an utter shit...he has dreams, but clearly no faculty for achieving them. He gets lost in his vices, and uses Kitty's obsession with bad boys to treat her poorly when he feels like it, but drop her a lump of sugar also when he feels like it. He's not a smooth operator, but smooth enough for Kitty.
This one was wild.
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