KWIF is Kent's Week in Film where each week Kent has a spotlight movie in which he writes a longer, thinkier piece about, and then whatever else he watched that week, he just does a "quick" (*cough*) little summary of his thoughts.
This Week:
Challengers (2024, d. Luca Guadagnino - in theatre)
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (2024, d. Wes Ball - in theatre)
The City of Lost Children (La Cité des Enfants Perdus - 1995, Jean-Pierre Jeunet & Marc Caro - the binder)
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I haven't seen any other Guadagnino film, so I have no expectations of his work. Outside of the tentpole Spider-Man and Dune pictures, I haven't seen any of Zendaya's other works, but I have a generally favourable opinion of her as a likeable and capable performer. I also like tennis a fair bit, but threesomes just seem awkward. So I assumed this would be a drama exploring the awkward emotional dynamics of polyamorous tennis players, and I was not really that enthused.
But wow! Challengers not at all that, except that it's exactly that.
The film takes place in multiple time periods, jumping back and forth between 2019 and then 2006 or 2009 or earlier in the week in 2019. Tashi and Art Donaldson are a power couple in the world of tennis. Tashi is a Art's manager, but also has a head for marketing, promotion and branding. She was, we learn, the women's junior champion at the 2006 US Open but had suffered a career-ending injury, we learn, before her professional career really got started.
She met Art and his carefree, confident best friend Patrick Zweig at the same US Open Juniors tournament in 2006. Art and Patrick won the junior men's doubles, and were set to face each other in the junior men's final. Both Patrick and Art fancy Tashi, and upon making it known to her, Tashi is intrigued. This leads to a three-way make-out session which, despite how truly three-way it gets, doesn't seem to get all that dramatic. Tashi lays down a challenge, she will date the winner of the final.
And from there the dynamics get complicated as Tashi and Art go to school, playing the college circuit and Patrick goes pro, but doesn't have the discipline to carry him. He's too confident and carefree. The dating and friendship dynamics get pushed and pulled in many directions.
In 2019, we know Art and Tashi are married, but the dynamics seem off. She's clearly pulling all the strings, and Art seems almost ok with letting her, but there's something clearly unspoken between them. Art's career is lagging, and he doesn't seem to have the will. Tashi signs him up for a "Challenger" tournament in New Rochelle when it just so happens Patrick, estranged from both of them and on hard times, happens to be playing as well. Planned or coincidence? It doesn't matter, the results are explosive.
As the film juggles back and forth, unravelling the complicated dynamics of this trio, the big finale makes clear (without spelling it out) where each character's allegiances lay, and it basically recontextualizes everything.
If it all sounds a bit messy emotionally, strangely, the emotional side of Challengers seems almost a side effect of the storytelling. Guadagnino and his editor Marco Costa cut the film like it's an action movie, with big set pieces including various tennis matches where balls are being whipped at the camera, and a wind storm that is just the metaphorical hurricane that is Patrick on Art and Tashi's lives. Additionally it's a story that is packed around, almost behind, a thumping, grinding, hyper-energized soundtrack from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross that oozes the sexuality of Renzor's Nine Inch Nails work of old without almost all (but not quite all) the sinister undertones. It's the best original banger of a soundtrack since Daft Punk's work on Tron Legacy. Marry those visceral, heart-pounding sounds with the vibrant blues and greens of the tennis court and the near cloudless skies, and the sun-soaked, sweat-drenched men that equate the one-on-one battle of swatting a ball back and forth with immense sexual tension and it all makes for a sublimely genreless head trip of a movie.
I find it impossible to classify Challengers, but it was a wholly entertaining picture that left me completely energized afterwards.
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A continuation of the modern series isn't something I was averse to, at all, even though I really didn't see the need for it. Matt Reeves created a pretty tight duology out of Dawn of... and War for... that closed out the Caesar saga pretty well and left the humans and apes with the promise of a path forward.
This new chapter, from The Maze Runner series director Wes Ball, picks up "generations later". Caesar is gone, almost a distant memory but his teachings persist. In the falcon clan of apes, who respect nature and each other, and pair bond with their birds, the teachings of Caesar are the foundation of their society and laws, without Caesar's name ever being uttered. But a human, an "echo", arrives, and causes a stir amidst that clan. Her arrival brings the Apes pursuing her, and they decimate the village, killing the strongest and taking the rest.
Noa, a chimp coming of age, survives the attack. He sets out in search of his stolen tribe and finds the echo, as well as a wise elder Orangutan named Raka who teaches Noa about the word of Caesar as well as the history of man. The echo is May, a human who speaks, who deceives, who has her own agenda, which isn't revealed until the film's finale.
They are found by the brutal apes and taken to an encampment by the ocean. May is placed with another talking human while Caesar reunites with his mother and friends. They are all under the jurisdiction of Proximus, who twists the words of Caesar to his own foul machinations. "Apes stronger together" he changes, with an arms high, knuckles together solute, repeated by the most loyal and fearful apes beneath him the pits. He dares to call himself, now, Caesar.
Proximus' goal is to break into a fallout shelter that's sealed tight. His goal is not the betterment of ape society, but rather the advancement of ape society under his rule. He knows what is locked in the vault is evolution, but only for those who wield the knowledge and power.
The film provides an intriguing adventure into a distant post-apocalyptic future where apes are the dominant species, but they seem to be constantly under threat by humanity's past. I loved the cityscape overgrown with vegetation, and watching the apes swing through it all. I loved the peaceful cohabitation with nature, and the tranquility of it all... even though it's post apocalyptic, it felt hopeful... and then the humans arrive.
May is a complicated character, who becomes more and more complicated the further the film goes on. She's so human, which compared to the apes, and even those with warped ideologies seem less scary than what May is capable of. Apes don't seem to have the ability to deceive each other, and that seems like such a noble way to exist.
I liked this movie, but it's pretty empty calories overall. It flirts with ideas of religion as a tool and a weapon, but never takes that idea anywhere. The old PotA films never flinched at extensive dialogue scenes that would find apes engaged in debate, so I'm not sure why this one never gets into one. There's monologuing but not any back and forth. The theology here really needed to be explored in depth, as opposed to just left adrift on the surface.
The ending is also underwhelming, proving this is an episode of a planned multi-part story. In this way it feels more in league with the older PotA series than the newer one. Director Ball comes from young adult fiction adaptations and this feels very much a young adult fiction interpretation of the franchise and setup for the series.
The effects are largely pretty good, with the apes faces being very expressive. And as for it feeling like a cartoon, strangely I never felt that the humans and apes were not sharing the same space (even though there were scaling issues with the ape characters throughout the film).
I'll certainly watch more of this.
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It would be almost a decade between acquiring the soundtrack and finally seeing the film, getting a used DVD copy of it at some local Toronto establishment in the aughts. By this time I would have already seen both Alien Resurrection and Amelie, so I would have had some familiarity with Jeunet's work, as well, I would have been steeped in Guillermo del Toro's respect for Ron Perlman so the film was an assured winner.
But I couldn't anticipate exactly what the film would be despite all this exterior familiarity (pretty much the opposite of the Challengers experience). I know I watched it. I loved it. I filed it away in The Binder and it would be almost two decades later before I returned to it.
Watching it again this past week there was the weird experience of having the music carry be back to a very nostalgic place, but the visuals of the film recalling only the faintest hint familiarity.
Where Jeunet and Caro's Delicatessen is, in a way, a delightful dark fairy tale for adults, The City of Lost Children is more a delightful storybook nightmare for adults. These sort of children's stories but not for children seem to the the resting place for Jeunet and Caro's ouevre.
It's a gorgeous and visually intricate film with massive sets above, on, and below the water, with building exteriors and interiors that just wow and stun with their many details. Costuming comes from Jean Paul Gaultier who really felt the vibe and worked with it. Everything is complimentary. The colour palette is rust red and fluorescent green, which are pretty stark contrasts with each other. There's a retro aesthetic to the scene, with Perlman's strongman's outfit or the Dr. Frankenstein-type lab setup that feels sort of a 1920's vibe and yet outside of time, or some alternate reality to ours.
The film find Perlman's strongman, named "One", on the hunt for his stolen little brother. Along the way he encounters pickpocket Miette, who works for the Octopus, conjoined twins who run the local crime racket. One sort of adopts Miette as his little sister and the pair work through the tangle of crime that leads them to the water tower hideout of Krank, a malicious man unable to dream. He's the ultimate recipient of the stolen children, and experiments upon them to share, or steal, or consume their dreams and ultimately their youth.
The film reminds me of a halfway point between Brazil and Edward Scissorhands without ever cribbing off of either. They all just feel of a type, and yet singular objects. Last year's Poor Things is sort of the evolution of these dark fairy tales for adults.
There are digital effects in the film (a CGI flea primarily, as well as some use of classic face morphing technology and also many, many Dominique Pinons seamlessly integrated into single shots) that somehow don't feel exceptionally dated. The film is so stylized as to feel surreal that surreal-looking special effects don't seem so out of place. Of course, it is an old DVD copy so maybe a higher resolution transfer would make the differences more glaring.
There really aren't many of these types of films out there, and I really tend to love them when I see them, it's just a wonder why I don't engage with them more often.
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