BRIEF THOUGHTS ON RECENT WATCHES I

Les Misérables (2019) dir. Ladj Ly

This was France's inexplicable choice of Academy Submission over Portrait of a Lady on Fire, but they got a nomination so I guess it worked out for them. It's a police-perspectives view on the relationship between police and the residents of a low-income apartment district. The synopsis suggests a shooting incident as the central plot point, but we don't get to that until very late in the film. The first hour or so is spent in a sort of plot-less exploration of the place and its "characters". The word is in quotes because they are all paper thin analogues. Good Cop (a pretty shitty cop), Middling Cop (also a bad cop), and Worst Cop, and then a collection of frustrating racial caricatures for them to butt against. Every inch of the movie is contrived, and when the plot kicks in, it's over a lion cub that was stolen. Which is a crazy thing for this supposedly 'gritty and realistic' movie to rely on. It also makes it hard to sympathize with the kid that stole it because it's almost certain the cub would die under his care.

You can see some of what director Ladj Ly is trying to put together here, but it's not working because you never see these people except for as they're seen by eachother which could be a great tool, but then they show the cops homelives, so that puts us again at their perspective. I think we're supposed to sympathize with Damien Bonnard's naif who was just transferred from the country, but there's very little to grab on to. He steps up very mildly when his sergeant (the worst cop) sexually harasses a pair of fifteen year old girls, but then lets every other abuse go, and even joins in. So what is our entry point here? "Hey, you'd rough up an eleven year old too if you were in this situation." It makes no coherent commentary about the police, it makes no worthy comment about the conditions of that lead to crime and inequality. It's just frustrating.

The Assistant (2020) dir. Kitty Green

A much more effective way of telling a story with very little plot. It's a slice of life about a loss of innocence. Julia Garner continues to be an absolute star, as this film would probably not survive without her ability to make silence and reaction so understandable to the audience. The story follows a day in the life of a recently hired assistant to a major movie mogul as she begins to suspect him of some wrongdoing. It's not riveting, but it's always interesting. It's short enough that you don't lose patience with the soft-boil conflicts. The climax is infuriating and crushing.

Gretel & Hansel (2020) dir. Osgood Perkins

I respect a lot of what Osgood Perkins is going for here. He wrote and directed The Blackcoat's Daughter from 2015, an imperfect, slow-moving, but always interesting small-scale horror film. Gretel is definitely imperfect, but always very interesting. The story is well trodden, but he adds enough around the tale to make it feel a little new. The imagery is what really stands out here, from the endless woods with only hints of civilization, to red fire-lit medieval homes, to the angular gingerbread house that isn't so gingerbread-y. I also never really tired of the hallucinatory presence of dark figures in the woods watching the kids.

The main problem the film comes up against is maintaining interest against an inevitable end. It knows that we know the story, and so it puts off the presence of the Old Woman for as long as it can because once they meet, we know the direction of the story. The weird thing is, Perkins finds a very interesting way to work against that expectation, and with it Gretel's plight becomes far more interesting. The problem is it's too little and too late. We've already had a lot of delaying by that point. The delay isn't all bad, it's a treat to look at, there's a cat in it, and the performances all around are good despite Hansel's changing accent (I mean why have him do an accent he can't maintain, while having Lillis speak with no accent? It's a weird choice). It feels patronizing to say, but it was a noble effort if not a totally successful one.