Bordertown

 The Finnish detective series Bordertown has a modularity of tone and structure that befits a region that gave the world component furniture. The series stars Ville Virtanen as a bewilderingly taciturn criminal investigator blessed with preternatural  deductive abilities but wanting in discernment about those closest to him. His manner matches his world -- angular, precise and dispassionate. The series is in Finnish with smatterings of English, and, for me, it is the strangeness of this language (of the same family as Hungarian and Basque) that lends the series a unique sonic imprint to match its refreshingly unconventional narrative. It's tough going but satisfying once the pieces are in place.

The Fades

I'm quite taken with this BBC armageddon / zombie / angel miniseries The Fades (2011), which stars a pre-"Get Out" Daniel Kaluuya as Mac, the series narrator-of-sorts and best pal to lead character Paul (played with impeccable understatement by Iain De Caestecker), who is a newly minted celestial warrior commissioned to stop the destruction of human kind by angry souls trapped between earth and the after life. Kaluuya's Mac has tremendous "mouthy" wattage -- he probably has twice the number of lines as his mate -- but his devotion to his changing and challenging friend in the face of the last days gives their relationship added depth.

Deadpool 2

Deadpool 2's director David Leitch and star Ryan Reynolds plow deeper into the first film's irreverence to lampoon the Marvelous Comic Universe of which Deadpool is self-satisfactorily not a part of. Propriety is MIA in the eternal rejuvenator's bloody but not entirely cynical adventure, which directs as much of its attention to the world of film as it does to the film's fictional world. In this sweeping and nonsensical tale, costumed avenger (lower case A) Wade Wilson / Deadpool loses his true love (Morena Baccarin) in a revenge attack by some bad guys and vows to join her in the afterlife. The indestructible Deadpool's powers of rejuvenation, however, keep him from achieving his goal, so, in the meantime he joins up with a motley crew of not entirely actualized mutants to save a mouthy, intemperate and dangerous kid (the hilarious young Kiwi actor Julian Dennison of Hunt for the Wilderpeople) from a time-traveling assassin (Avengers: Infinity War's MVP Josh Brolin). The body count, of course, is unchartable, and the laughs are delivered so fast and furiously that the script (co-written by Reynols) often works against itself.

Isle of Dogs

 Wes Anderson’s films are so compositionally complex that they are visually overwhelming. When combined with a satirical script that is equally as dense with wordplay, you have a work that is easy to admire but, at least for me, difficult to love. Anderson’s animated Isle of Dogs boasts all of the qualities that make Anderson’s films motion picture events. Expressively voiced by Bryan Cranston, Greta Gerwig, Courtney B. Vance and Liev Schreiber, Isle is the story of the expulsion of all canines from a Japanese city and the boy who sets out to find his banished pet. Its signature Andersonian wit is burnished with poetic passages about duty and loyalty.

Tully

In Jason Reitman's Tully, Charlize Theron is Marlo, the due-any-minute pregnant mother of an 8-year-old and 6-year-old. Though she loves her earnest but absent husband (Ron Livingston) and her lovable but challenging kids (Lia Frankland and Asher Miles Fallica) she's unraveling, rapidly. When her status-conscious brother (Mark Duplass) offers to pay for a night nanny to relieve some of the pressure, Marlo rejects the idea at first but shortly after the third arrives decides to give it a chance. The weirdly empathic Tully (Mackenzie Davis) is a godsend who helps Marlo not only get some rest but uncover the real reason happiness has been so elusive. The script by Diablo Cody (Young Adult, Juno) is soulful and winning and, quite often, hilarious.

Cinema Filings: Call Me By Your Name -- Updated

Narratively and compositionally, Call Me By Your Name offers a wealth of material for cinephiles to study. Though not a perfect film, it is an interesting and evocative one that overcomes its ambiguities with strong performances and emotional intelligence. These notes assume the reader has seen the film at least once. (BECAUSE I TRY TO DEAL WITH EVENTS IN THE FILM CHRONOLOGICALLY, SCROLL DOWN FOR NEW MUSINGS.)

*One of the film's most reproduced images is of the film's young protagonist Elio Perlman, elbows resting on a stack of books, framed by an open window in his family's Italian villa, where doors and windows are often propped open or batted by breezes, suggesting an openness to the setting and those who live there, even though some of the residents have secrets.

*Many scenes take place at a dining table set up just outside the villa's kitchen; an orchard of apricot, cherry and peach trees is just beyond. Food is ever-present as is the easy exchange among guests, who appear to be many. And this, again, lends a liberality and civility to the setting and its denizens.
   
*Among the film's many beauties is the fluidity of language among Elio, his parents and their summer resident, the American graduate student Oliver, whom Elio is drawn to. Director Luca Guadagnino stages an opening scene with the Perlmans speaking alternatively English, French and Italian. This is repeated in later scenes and is matched by the presence of Italian and French newspapers in the home. Theirs appears to be an international consciousness, probably one that is foreign to many audiences in the U.S.

*Annella Perlman is a translator, who one afternoon reads to her husband and son from a German edition of a Renaissance romance. The three are gathered on a couch in the villa's music room / study while rain pours outside. The staging suggests this is a familiar setting for them. The text, about a lovelorn and indecisive young knight, resonates with Elio and seems to light a fire under him to resolve his own matters of the heart. And, indeed, he tries in the film's next scene.

*Though celebrated for its candid representation of the intimate moments between Elio and Oliver, the film also revels in ambiguity that contributes to its in medias res tone. What had been the nature of Elio's relationship with Marzia before Oliver arrived? Where was Oliver spending his nights? How much did the Perlmans know when they sent Elio off with Oliver to Bergamo? Though not deal breakers, these questions do linger.

*And what to make of Marzia? For me, this wonderful character, played with even tenderness by Esther Garrel, epitomizes the film's commitment to peace and grace. Her "friends for life" scene with Elio was a balm for an audience left raw by Oliver's departure. 

*Like the best of film, CMBYN operates on many levels -- the visual and the auditory. Having extraordinarily attractive performers can eclipse other subtler narrative elements. For example, the tolling of bells -- town square, church or dinner -- punctuates several scenes in the film and complements the filmmaker's effort to ground the action in a time and place. These sounds, while recessed, can be as meaningful as the saying of the boys' names -- whether during introductions, lovemaking or that fateful winter phone call. They're all markers.

*Cinematographer Mukdeeprom's camera lingers on details of the film's setting and the characters' faces, hands and feet to strip away artificiality and decrease the distance between viewers and subjects. Oliver's foot floating refracted in the villa's pool, Elio's bare feet as he leaves the pool to challenge the "usurper" at picking apricots and, later, as the two men's feet find each other during their midnight tryst. These shots, while part of the film's sensuality, also disclose the humanity of these subjects. 

*It's not entirely clear in the film why Oliver was so overbearing during his first days with the Perlmans, but Elio seems the only one put off by the casual nature of the student's interactions; Oliver seems brash and self-involved. The scene at the volleyball game crystallizes this. Oliver, taking a break from his noisy display in the game, grabs the bottle of water from Elio and then gets "handsy"with him, a gesture that is misread. Professor Perlman might actually be onto something when he says in the next scene that Oliver might be "shy." Perhaps this "shyness" is unease mixed with a desire to be liked but not truly known. Of course, Elio cracks that egg -- eventually.

*Metaphors can be stretched beyond reason but one resides in Annella's peach orchard that is difficult to resist. Elio's discovery of a form of carnal knowledge with the aid of fruit does allude to the Garden of Eden and the introduction of sin to the world. Elio's response after being discovered by Oliver does reflect shame and disgrace, though Oliver himself is amused and intrigued. The shot of Elio plucking the fruit is nearly biblical.

*The short but important interlude after Elio's Bach "recital" is the scene of him scratching out scolding notes to himself about his earlier treatment of Oliver. "I was too harsh" and "I thought he didn't like me." This scene gets to some of the interior nature of the source novel, which is narrated by Elio, and reveals the vulnerability hiding behind the bravado.

*Oliver's brief comment about "hiddenness" he shares with Elio from the manuscript he was preparing strikes an ironic note, after the fact, as both men were at the time hiding, perhaps not as well as they imagined, secrets from one another. Hiddenness is also present in Elio's secret loft in the villa where he consorts with Marzia and later Oliver. And, of course, in his furtive snooping about Oliver, and his rather feral encounter with Oliver's swimming trunks (a much closer encounter was in the novel).

*When the power went out at the villa that rainy afternoon, Professor Perlman told a disconsolate Elio that he and his mother were always there for Elio if he ever needed to talk. In the next scene, during the Piave confession, Elio told Oliver he was confiding in him because there was no one else he could talk to. A truly strange reveal given what the professor said. As attractive as Elio is, the character also had more than a tinge of the callow manipulator in him -- lying to the girls and crabbing about his mother -- which actually made the character all the more believable.

*At Monet's Berm, Oliver tells Elio he likes the way he says things. I liked the way everyone spoke in the film. One of the true delights of the picture is how carefully the dialogue avoided banality. Even the raucous lunch time exchange about Italian politics was spicy and rococo, which made Oliver and Elio's fairly terse exchange after their midnight rendezvous all the more endearing. "I just wanted to be with you" is probably as lovely and honest a sentiment that can be shared with a loved one. 

*Elio's nosebleed after Monet's Berm was an elegant narrative red herring. To those who were brought up on motion pictures in which tragic figures were felled by virulent diseases, Elio's nosebleed was probably viewed as presage to a cancer diagnosis. In fact, it served to more fully awaken Oliver's suppressed feelings for Elio but also pressed Oliver into the uncomfortable position of revealing his canard with the young Parisienne Chiara. This would explain Oliver's hasty retreat from the villa when Chiara and Marzia arrive and his conspicuous absence the following day, which led to the fateful midnight tryst.

*The other passionate love affair in CMBYN is the film's infatuation with books. The famous shot mentioned at the top of this posting -- which actually does not appear in the film -- suggests not only Elio's voracious appetite for the written word but the life of the mind all of the residents of the villa embrace. Elio not only reads but he notates in the margins as he does, suggesting an intellectual maturity that early in the film may have actually outgrown his emotional maturity. By film's end, they were pretty much on par.

Elio's Bach "recital" was an obvious choice when clips were distributed for the talk shows because it shows Chalamet's "virtuosity" at the piano and a bit of the dynamic between the two characters early in the film. To my ear, it actually might be the stagiest of the scenes in the movie; it feels like both men are playing roles within roles -- Oliver and Elio were clearly trying to impress one another -- which adds to the levels of complexity in the narrative but might also feel more inauthentic than is needed at that juncture.

 

*The Lake Garda "truce" is an important moment in the film, also captured in stills (see below), that signals an ending to the sparring between Oliver and Elio, at least for the moment. Elio's earlier comment at breakfast about "almost" having sex with Marzia the night before and his fairly transparent attempt to show he did not resent Chiara's interest in Oliver did little to stanch either his or Oliver's clear interest in the other. (Perhaps that's what all the shouting was about at Garda that evening.) Sexual orientation is never addressed straightforwardly, but one would infer that Elio and Oliver were pretty "fluid" in their sexuality, even though Oliver early on would rather not talk about "those things." That declaration was followed by the kiss at Monet' s Berm. Actions and words?

*At the end of the Crema piazaetta scene (below), Oliver rises and prepares to leave. Elio, uncertain, rises too, assuming, if we're to read his facial expression, that they're continuing on their journey or returning to the villa. As they remount their bicycles, Elio loses balance and leans into Oliver, who steadies him by placing a hand firmly on his shoulder for perhaps a beat too long, which foreshadows the later massage scene at the volleyball game.  A gesture we would discover three quarters of the way into the film that was Oliver's way of signalling his affection. The film is a festival of ambiguity -- allusion and elusion, miscues, non sequiturs, elliptical remarks that trail off. Just like life.

*The interiority of CMBYN is what drives much of my fascination. What's going on inside these people who are both open with their living space and so guarded with their interior space? This guardedness is mirrored in the "speak or die" passage from The Heptameron and in Oliver's face as he and Elio discuss it. It is not clear, and it shouldn't necessarily be, what Oliver is thinking or his intention in inviting Elio to accompany him to town that afternoon. The film's narrative is silent, which leaves it to viewers to infer motives if we are inclined to do so. However, one thing is certain from the exchange before they departed, neither welcomed the idea of being separated for the afternoon. 

 

*In a small but not incidental scene early in the film, Elio is in the villa's pool while Oliver is swimming laps. It's one of many occasions when the audience watches the watcher (Elio). When Oliver stops to ask Elio what he's thinking about, Elio is deliberately unresponsive: "I'm not going to tell you." As with so much else in the film, this exchange is ambiguous; it might be Elio's way of masking his interest or punishing Oliver for being so outgoing and charming or a way of teasing him to get attention. Whatever the case, it doesn't work because when Oliver gives up, Elio gives in.  These smartly observed moments, pulled from the novel's brilliance, are what collectively make the film so resonant and real.

*The crucial Piave war memorial scene was craftily staged but curious in its affect, as Oliver, so assured through most of the film to that point, seemed to retreat from Elio's advance. It was here that the two started speaking in code, acknowledging their attraction but not speaking about it plainly so as not to cause trouble for Oliver. Insisting that Elio cooperate seemed both sensible and weak. Of course, Oliver would redeem himself, if only briefly, at Monet's Berm.

*The promotional shot of Elio and Oliver walking bicycles down a village street does not appear in the film, although the pairing could easily be imagined in that story space. The shot does suggest to me an unsettling obsession on Elio's part (it's difficult to imagine the character being so transfixed) and a degree of obliviousness that Oliver could not credibly claim after Monet's Berm. Still, the film's hint at a reversal of the theme of Mann's A Death in Venice is framed nicely here.

*Elio's invitation to Oliver to go swimming the morning after their midnight rendezvous likely rang with deja vu for some viewers. Oliver extended the same invitation to Elio, under quite different circumstances, near the beginning of the film  / the summer. At that time, Oliver, presumably returning from a night out, found the lone Elio in his bedroom with idle hands. Elio, startled by the brash American's intrusion and puzzled by his interest, agrees to go swimming though he clearly would rather not. And it was then that the cogs of their companionship began to turn. Because so much is hidden in the film, Elio's suggestion that they go swimming might be viewed as a statement that he's ready to move on from the night before, wash it away, if you will. The next scene at the river, Elio is swimming apart from Oliver, which leaves questions for Oliver, and the viewer, about what had just transpired between the two.

*In CMBYN's story world, people have names and not labels.  Neither Elio nor Oliver self-identifies as homosexual or bisexual during the course of the film. Their "more than a friendship," as Professor Perlman describes it, doesn't seem to exist on a social or political plane. It just exists. It might very well be that what grows between them, while first stifled by Oliver's fear of discovery, is so organic to them as men, and how they choose to experience the world, that the sexual component is just that -- a component of their friendship, an intense component but a component nonetheless. That's not to suggest the characters are not gay or bi or lie somewhere else along the sexuality continuum. And one might imagine that their physical relationship might have taken off quicker had either of them been "out." But that would have been an entirely different, and not altogether interesting, journey.

Call Me By Your Name's Timothée Chalamet -- Updated

Here I post notes about Timothée Chalamet, whose work in Call Me By Your Name earned him accolades and honors around the world. These are not fandom ravings but rather random musings about this exceptional young man's craft.

*A Chalamet / Glover pairing for Shakespeare's Two Gentlemen or Othello, Beckett's Godot or Parks' Topdog/Underdog would be singularly epic.

*2018 promises to be an even bigger year for Young Mr. Chalamet. Along with Beautiful Boy and Woody Allen's joint there's Hot Summer Nights (TC does Breaking Bad?) I didn't know this number was in the mix. https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=O5ROSS9ReUY

 

*In Pamela Romanowsky's The Adderall Diaries (2015), Chalamet was cast as the teenage son of an abusive father (Ed Harris), who grows up to be a drug-addicted and self-destructive author (James Franco). Chalamet appears in flashes of memory, recoiling from his father's temper, self-injuring and retaliating against abandonment. It's a demanding role even though it does not carry a narrative arc, and, once again, he demonstrates his readiness and willingness to commit to a challenging part.

*Chalamet's performance in Miss Stevens (2016) was hauntingly nuanced, even though it contained some histrionics (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZH8y3lky2FM). His character, the boundaries-challenged Billy, was both endearing and unnerving, walking that line between comforter and creep. For an actor so young to be able to negotiate such difficult emotional territory is quite extraordinary. 

*The mystery of Chalamet's attractiveness will probably never be solved to everyone's satisfaction -- if the attempt were to be made -- but it has occurred to me that in some photographs he bears a striking resemblance to Liz Taylor. Taylor's appeal, of course, is legendary, but Chalamet's allure is not entirely in bone structure and facial symmetry. From where I'm sitting, it's in his mien, manner and intellect, as well.

*In interviews, Chalamet has included Joaquin Phoenix among the actors he admires most. I can certainly see the affinity, if it's based on body of work. Phoenix picks idiosyncratic roles; he seems to thrive on the serious challenges. His characters are often taciturn, brutalized men who glower. One recent exception was his pained loner / romantic in Her. Frivolous and Joaquin Phoenix do not occupy the same space. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XeK0rc_9a0  I'm confident the same will be said about Timothée Chalamet in time.

*Chalamet should have won the Oscar because he was in nearly every scene of Call Me By Your Name, speaks three languages in it, plays Bach, covers everything from diffidence to passion, holds audiences in their seats without saying a word, and Frank Ocean thinks he rocks.

*I've heard Chalamet in a dozen interviews and think he's got one of the nimblest, most sagacious minds of any 22-year-old I've ever come across. And I've been teaching them for 25 years. He's unaffected and engaging, a real joy to watch.

*He will be one of the most consequential persons in cinema sooner rather than later. Aside from his outstanding screen work, in interviews he is focused, incisive and generous. If he avoids predators, Chalamet will be the Paul Newman of his generation, for real.

*Having seen CMBYN a couple dozen times since January -- alone and with friends -- I feel the film itself, due in no small part to his leading role, stands up remarkably under close scrutiny. It is scrupulously composed (I've created another posting for those thoughts) and thoroughgoing. Just remarkable in its presentation and affect. It is masterful and will endure.

*As a friend said to me after a screening, it takes real immersion into a role to enable an actor to alter their appearance so dramatically and to such powerful effect as Chalamet does in the course of the picture.

*The film societies decide who gets hardware, not how enriching the work was. Often the two are the same, not always. Challenging, stimulating work (whether film or performance) will always be prized by those who were touched, enlivened. And that's not bad. Not bad.

*I'm intrigued by Chalamet's 2014 film short Spinners (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOYMwuHJa3Q …) and its message about displaced and discarded young people. Film shorts are trickier for me to comment on than features because I rely so much on narrative that "snapshots" leave me too much room for mischief.

*Knowing that Kid Cudi's credos speak to Chalamet adds interesting levels to the actor's descriptions of what gets him going and how he's handling his fame. I suppose walking the line between the desire for affirmation and "whatever" can be tricky. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRPpLGxGNZY