Thoughts on Petite Maman

   On Hulu, I watched the French fantasy drama Petite Maman, directed by Celine Sciamma, and starring Josephine Sanz, Gabrielle Sanz, Stephane Varupenne, Nina Meurisse, and Margo Abascal. It's a short movie, clocking in at 72 minutes long, and is a film about grief and mothers, and mixing in the past and present to understand one's mother more.

    Eight-year old Nelly (Josephine Sanz) just lost her maternal grandmother, and she and her mother Marion go with her father to her grandmother's house to clear it out, while Marion is still grieving. Marion ends up leaving during the night because it is so overwhelming for it, with so many memories, and Nelly, who regretted not getting to say a final goodbye to her grandmother, was asleep when Marion left and didn't say goodbye to her either.

    Nelly goes out to find a wooden hut that her mother had made as a child, and meets a little girl that looks like her twin (Gabrielle Sanz), and the two play together, becoming quick buddies. But more as Nelly plays with her, she realizes that this girl is integrally tied to her family's history, and it becomes more of a mix of fantasy and reality, exploring themes of motherhood and grief and sadness.

    I liked how this felt more like a poem than a film, like a romantic artsy poem that runs under 90 minutes, and it felt quiet and contemplative, and the Sanz sisters acted wonderfully and were compelling to watch, being very mature in well-written roles for them. 

  

 This also reminded me of the 2014 anime film When Marnie Was There, when a young girl named Anna goes to the country for awhile, and meets a young girl named Marnie, and they become fast friends, and Marnie's history is linked to Anna's as their friendship unravels. This had a similarity with Petite Maman of both being about young girls in the country who quickly become friends, and have ties to each other that blend fantasy and reality into something lovely.

    I enjoyed watching this beautiful, quiet film, which followed in Sciama's films focusing on female friendships (Girlhood, Portrait of a Lady on Fire), and just feeling soothing to watch on a Sunday morning.

Thoughts on Saint Omer

     On Hulu, I watched the 2022 French legal drama Saint Omer, directed by Alice Diop and starring Kayjie Kagame and Guslagie Malanda. It's a legal drama centering around Afro-French women, and heavily based on a 2016 true crime case in France where Fabienne Kabou was convicted of killing her infant daughter in 2013, and is currently serving a 20-year prison sentence. Diop attended the trial while pregnant, and since she couldn't bring cameras in to create a documentary about the case, she made a narrative drama instead, which was a big award winner at the Venice Film Festival, as well as a big winner and nominee at several other international film festivals.

    Rama (Kagame) is a literature professor and novelist in Paris, who is attending a trial in Saint-Omer to write a novel presenting the case as a modern-day retelling of the Greek myth of Medea, a wronged woman who murdered her children to make a statement to her partner and the world. The trial is for Laurence Coly (Malanda), a Senegalese woman who has admitted to have murdered her 15-month old daughter, Elise (aka Lili), and speaks broadly about having come from a comfortable but lonely childhood in Dakar, having complicated relationships with her parents, feeling isolated in Paris as a student and live-in nanny, and having her child with a much older man who kept her a secret from others (likely due to him being an old white man with a young Black girlfriend from an African nation), then keeping her pregnancy and child a secret from everyone, including her family, not registering her child's birth and later leaving her alone at night on a beach to be drowned at the shore, assuming her body would just be carried out to sea.

    Laurence is not remorseful about the crime, but rather presents herself as a lonely woman struggling with isolation and being cut off by her family after she chose to study philosophy instead of law, and alleges that her actions were led by sorcery and not her own volition. Her statements are countered by the prosecution, noting her vague answers to dodge questions, and her much older lover, who tries to play the innocent frail old man but is called out for denying his role as the child's father and refusing to acknowledge his relationship with Laurence in public.

 

  Rama herself is pregnant, and has had her own complicated history with her Senegalese mother, and both connects with the African French woman and cries in her hotel room, afraid that she will have mental issues like her mother and repeat the cycle to her child. Rama largely is the observer in this film, as much of the story is on Laurence on the stand giving her testimony, adding in dramatic flourishes like walking "by the moon at night on the beach, like it shined a path for me." Rama is later contacted by Laurence's mother, and the two of them have a thoughtful and meaningful moment together in a diner, not speaking much but connecting on Senegalese women in Paris and motherhood.

    I really liked this film. It felt different to watch a French legal drama, and I don't know how much is accurate in the French legal system depicted vs. reality, but it felt really interesting to watch, and I did like how the film gave a three-dimensional portrait of a woman who committed a horrible crime, as well as Rama being Diop's stand-in for observing the trial and having her own personal feelings with it and her own life. I agree with Manohla Dargis, the New York Times film critic, who wrote "the story explores motherhood, race, and postcolonial France with control, lucidity, and compassion." The film was largely quiet, a two-hour drama that felt more quiet and contemplative, and was very engaging and engrossing to get into it, I'm glad I watched it.

Thoughts on Bottoms

    I went to see Bottoms, a new film directed by Emma Seligman and written by Seligman and co-star Rachel Sennott. It's a teen sex comedy starring Sennott and Ayo Edebiri as teen lesbians PJ and Josie in high school who feel like losers and outcasts not because they are queer, but because they are untalented, unpopular, and don't stand out. They want to have sex with the gorgeous cheerleaders of their dreams (Havana Rose Liu and Kaia Gerber), and after realizing that teen girls need to know self-defense against boys, and trying to avoid expulsion by accidentally "attacking" the school football star, the friends claim that they were practicing for a fight club, where it will seem like a self-defense club for girls, but really is to raise endorphins to get their dream girls turned on so they will have sex with them. 

    It's a fun and weird take on teen sex comedies that would be focused on boys trying to lose their virginities or tricking girls with bets or cover stories, but doing it with queer girls to make them be as flawed and messed-up in their thinking as the boys would be. I like that they depict PJ and Josie as awkward and nerdy, as the girls inadvertently spread a rumor that they spent the summer in juvie, and stick to that lie, claiming to have fought girls there and weathered rough times, to give legitimacy to their fight club, while in reality they are both very dorky and sheltered and have never fought before. 

    The movie is a broad, over the top comedy, that presents an exaggerated depiction of high school that seemingly only exists in teen films. The football team are worshipped, are always wearing their football uniforms with shoulder pads in them all the time, the school's reputation rides on the football team's games (who have had a long losing streak), the students run the pep rallies with seemingly no intervention from adult school officials, and the fight club is sanctioned by a schoolteacher (former NFL running back Marshawn Lynch) who stands by as girls punch each other bloody in the name of "self-defense." 

    I liked how Rachel Sennott could play PJ as being messy and unlikable, and there was a scrappiness to her that I liked, as well as seeing how much she idealized wanting to get with the obviously unattainable hot girl, like a typical nerd aiming way too high out of her league. But I also liked how Ayo Edebiri played Josie with more awkward sweetness, seemingly very young (Edebiri is barely thirty but still sounds much younger than her years), and having a lot of heart in this role, especially when she is trying to flirt with her dream girl and feeling tongue-tied around her.

    Aside from the leads, there are some great standout performances. One of my favorites was Ruby Cruz as Hazel, a queer girl with a neglectful mother who is enthusiastic in helping PJ and Josie start their fight club even if she knows what their true intentions are. She had this dry humor and boyish appearance that made her one of the more interesting characters to watch, and I felt much more sympathy for her, especially as PJ and Josie keep dumping on her and treating her like a loser, while taking advantage of her support for their club. And while the club starts out as being about self-defense and fighting, it turns into a regular social club for both awkward misfit girls and popular cheerleaders alike, connecting over shared trauma with sexual assault, crappy home lives, and bonding and becoming friends, becoming something more than just about PJ and Josie focusing on their sexual pleasure.

    Another favorite of mine was Nicholas Galitzine as the dimwitted Jeff the football star, as he was a lot of fun to watch, in just how much he threw himself into this ridiculous caricature of a quarterback star. He felt like a combination of Kevin from Daria, with his blissful ignorance of anything outside of football and high school popularity, and James Marsden as his football star character from Sugar & Spice, as being sweet but dumb and innocent. Jeff isn't really a likable character, as he is shown to be morally wrong and self-centered, but he's so stupid that he can't really be hated. And Galitzine's performance was a lot of goofy fun to watch.

    While I'm not really into broad comedy, and I didn't laugh as much as others in the theater, I still really enjoyed it as a different take on a teen sex comedy with queer female protagonists and centering female sexuality and desire, while also making a movie about teen girls developing friendships and finding strength in being able to stand up for themselves and fighting back against people. I'm glad this movie did well when it came out this summer, it's definitely one of the standout comedies of the year.

Thoughts on The Craft

    On Criterion, I rewatched one of my teenage favorites, 1996's The Craft, directed by Andrew Fleming. I first saw this when I was 13 on video, and just quickly identified with it. I'm sure I connected on some superficial levels of it being a movie about high school outcasts (albeit all played by gorgeous actresses) who harness the power of witchcraft and use it for initially self-improving reasons (love, healing scars, fighting back against racism, economic mobility) that end up becoming destructive, as they abuse their power and it comes back to them times three. But it just felt like a cool movie to be that was a darker teen film, it felt more mature, it was a little weird, it was a mix of a movie about female friendship with some latent queer vibes, and it had a haunting feel to it that I really got into it.

    The film is a well-known teen 90s classic by now, and its success led to the development of Charmed as a popular series about witch sisters, and an unsuccessful sequel/remake that tried to be more inclusive with trans and WOC characters, but ended up being too heavy-ended and using MRAs as the obvious villain of the film. There are some interesting real-life connections with the original actresses and interests in Wiccan culture and paganism, as Fairuza Balk owned a Wiccan store in L.A. for awhile, and Rachel True practices Tarot card readings.

    The plot features Robin Tunney (in a brown wig that she wore on account of having shaved her head for 1995's Empire Records) as Sarah, the new girl in an L.A. Catholic high school, who just moved from San Francisco with her dad and stepmother. Sarah's mother died in childbirth, and her significance would play a part later on. Sarah has a date with Chris (Skeet Ulrich), a popular football jock, and when the date doesn't progress past kissing, he spreads gossip that they had sex. Out of anger, she is drawn towards hanging out with the witchy clique, comprised of Bonnie (Neve Campbell), Rochelle (Rachel True), and Nancy (Fairuza Balk). They quickly bond, cutting school and hanging out, talking about witchcraft, and it turns out that Sarah is the only one who has natural witch powers, as she later finds out she inherited from her mother. The other girls receive their powers through her presence and chanting spells, and all the spells they cast to better their lives and take control end up coming back to harm them for their selfish ways, especially with Nancy, who is the most psychotic of the foursome.

    The film progresses as the friendship dynamics get darker, and when Sarah is having regrets over how they abused their powers and is withdrawing from them, Nancy turns the other girls against her, seeing Sarah as having betrayed their coven, and using Sarah's past self-harm against her, encouraging her to take her own life, and creating illusions, or glamours, to terrify her into killing herself. It's an extreme depiction of how female friendships in school could get very toxic if there is a ringleader that turns others against one person, abusing their relationships and using emotional tormenting to destroy someone psychologically. 

 

  The actresses are all great in this, but Balk easily steals the movie, with the meatiest role, and looking twisted and demented and throwing her whole self into this character. I like that the film let her get ugly and weird with this role, and she ends up being the most memorable and compelling character of the group because of how eccentric and dangerous she is. 

    The film does go into some easy tropes by having the "nice, normal" girl be the reserved conventionally attractive white woman, as opposed to the outlier characters being a Black girl, a girl with burn scars, and a girl with obvious mental health issues. She is supposed to be the audience stand-in, the introduction to this group, but while she is very attractive, Sarah can come off as a little ordinary compared to the rest of the group. Though I do like how Robin Tunney has a scratchy voice and that Sarah could be a little sarcastic, as well as having had her own history of depression and self-harm that she references a little, which Nancy takes advantage of to abuse her.

    Another standout to me in this film is the fashion. The girls go to Catholic school, so they wear the uniforms, but add in a lot of accessories, hairstyles, and a look that feels very 90s alternative and Goth mixed together. It feels more unique and sexy and stylish, and it's a look that could work together in a very Y2K kind of way, and is one of my favorite parts of the film.

    I love how the finale just goes in with horror and violence, between using a lot of real animals like spiders and snakes and rats and insects, and having intense fight scenes between Tunney and Balk that were filmed laying down but presented upright in the film to look more surreal, playing against gravity, and just not being afraid to get rough for a teen girls' film that definitely pushed its PG-13 limits in 1996.

    No matter how many times I've seen this film, I don't get tired of it. I didn't realize until recently that it's one of my favorite teen films of all time. It's a mix of horror, female friendships, witchcraft, cool fashion, a nice soundtrack with Juliana Hatfield and Matthew Sweet, and great lead performances by the actresses. I'm glad that Criterion is highlighting it for its collection on high school horror films.

    

Thoughts on Poetic Justice

  

  On Criterion, I watched John Singleton's 1993 romantic drama Poetic Justice, starring Janet Jackson, Tupac Shakur, Regina King, and Joe Torry. I had seen it once before many years ago, but all I remembered of it was Q-Tip as Janet's boyfriend getting shot and killed in the beginning, and Maya Angelou having a cameo talking about the youth of today. I had completely forgotten everything else, and thought it was a good movie, a good follow-up to Singleton's debut with Boyz in the Hood, both with keeping the theme of gun crime in L.A. neighborhoods, characters looking for an escape and wanting more outside of their neighborhood, as well as exploring more romantic themes, conflicts in Black culture, and using poetry, hair design, and hip-hop as creative expressions by Black artists.

    Janet Jackson and Tupac Shakur were both coming off of huge career highs in 1992-1993. Shakur had his debut album 2Pacalypse Now in 1991, and by 1993 was a huge rapper and social activist (according to IMDB trivia on the film, the L.A. rebellion happened during the film production and Tupac briefly left for a day to go join the protests), and his album Strictly 4 my N***** came out that year. His image would switch between chill party songs like "I Get Around" and social issue songs like "Brenda's Got a Baby," and while he appeared as a member of Digital Underground in Nothing But Trouble, he made his real debut as an actor in 1992's Juice, playing the complex and volatile antagonist Bishop. He only acted in a handful of films during his short life, but had a lot of screen presence and magnetism, especially in Juice, Poetic Justice, and Gridlock'd.

    Janet Jackson had redefined her career with the massive albums Rhythm Nation 1814 in 1989 and that year's janet., developing herself further as an iconic singer and dancer. Her box braids, which would also become iconic, were inspired by her friend and backup dancer Jossie Harris, and the idea for the styling came from Harris, Singleton, and dance choreographer Fatima Robinson, who worked with Harris and Singleton on Michael Jackson's "Remember the Time" video. Jackson had been acting since she was a child, appearing on sitcoms like Good Times, Diff'rent Strokes, and Fame, and had been on her famous brothers' variety shows, but this film debuted a more mature acting style in her as an adult, and coming into her own more as a woman reaching her thirties, with culminated more with the sensuality of her 1993 album.

    The film follows Justice (Jackson), whose boyfriend Markell (rapper Q-Tip of A Tribe Called Quest) was murdered by gun violence during a drive-in movie screening (with cameos by Billy Zane and Lori Petty in the fake movie), and struggles with grief and depression long after his passing, spending time alone in her house she inherited from her grandmother, with her cat, and only socializing at her job as a stylist at a local hair salon. She is a poet, and narrates several of her poems, which were written by Maya Angelou in real life, including the famous "Phenomenal Woman" poem.

    Lucky (Shakur) is a mailman, who tries to flirt with Justice at the salon but gets rebuffed. He avoids the violence of the streets from keeping his day job, and rescues his daughter from an unstable and dangerous home life with her mother. His dream is to have a music career, and wants to work with his cousin in Oakland, who is a budding producer.

 

  Lucky and his friend and co-worker Chicago (Joe Torry) are going on a work trip to Oakland, driving their mail truck, and Chicago's girlfriend Iesha (Regina King) makes Justice come along with them to get out of her funk and depression, as well as to work at a hair show to make connections and advance her career. Justice and Lucky recognize each other, and quickly butt heads, which often gets rough to watch, as Lucky has a misogynistic streak and frequently calls Justice a bitch, something that really made it hard to find his character sympathetic with that much vitriol towards women. Chicago and Iesha often fight a lot too, in part because of Iesha's substance use disorder with alcohol, and them using sex as a substitution to solve fights instead of talking them out.

    The film progresses as a road trip movie, and I liked how it showed the California coast along their journey from L.A. to Oakland, like the cliffsides and oceans, and there's a really lovely sequence where the group crashes a Black family reunion, with lots of Black folks of all ages in the park enjoying barbeque, finding more bonding and kinship when wanting to be a part of a larger Black community. As Lucky said, "We Black, we family."

    I thought it was a really nice movie, though I wasn't really rooting for a romance between Justice and Lucky. I liked him more once he chilled out and was quieter and more centered, but it took too long into the movie for him to get to that place, even refusing to step in when Iesha gets hit by her boyfriend in front of him, acting like the domestic violence was too private to get involved with. I appreciated how he cared for his daughter, even if his mother did call him out on not wanting to be her primary caregiver, pushing for him to be a mature and responsible parent for her. I did like how Justice was able to get to know him to get to his sensitive side, but I didn't want her to really date him, more like she could be casual friends with him while focusing on her artistry as a hair stylist and poet, and moving out of her grief and depression to enjoy her life more. I wanted her to be happy and successful, and not just happy with a man, as her friends seemed to keep pushing for her to have.

    I really liked Tyra Ferrell as Jessie, Justice's boss at the hair salon. She had this mature, sophisticated beauty to her that I liked, and really stood out to me outside of the main cast. I also noticed Khandi Alexander, Clifton Collins, Jr., Jenifer Lewis, Tone Loc, and Michael Rapaport in minor roles.

    I was happy to re-watch it and understand it more on a second viewing. I had remembered the film when it came out, but was too young for it at the time, and only knew of the song "Again" by Janet Jackson, which was in this film and her 1993 album, and hit #1 and was Oscar-nominated. It's a nice song, though not one of my favorites by her, but it was huge at the time. I'm glad Criterion added it for the 50th anniversary of hip-hop culture.

Thoughts on Flirt

  Criterion is doing a collection on Hal Hartley's films, and I really do like his style of deadpan humor in his comedies, my favorites of his films being Trust and The Unbelievable Truth, mostly for Adrienne Shelly's performances. I'm also a Long Island native like Hartley, so his early films have a hometown feel to it, being set on Long Island and featuring a lot of local actors from L.I. and NYC.

    I wasn't sure if I had seen Flirt (1995) before, and if I had, I hadn't remembered it. I liked how it felt like an experiment, taking the same story and telling it three times, in three international cities (New York City, Berlin, and Tokyo), switching up the genders and sexualities of the protagonists, and showing three people going through the same motions and dialogue, where a lover has to decide whether to commit to a partner going away on a business trip, and they are also seeing a partner who is with someone else in a steady relationship, showing how similar strangers can be when dealing with matters of love quadrangles, infidelities, and jealousy. 

 

  The New York City segment I thought was OK, but more notable for Parker Posey's one scene as Emily, Bill's (Bill Sage) lover, who is leaving for Paris for a business trip. Bill is a "loose flirt" who cannot commit to a relationship, and thinks him being with Emily for six months is an achievement for himself. The segment features Michael Imperioli, Martin Donovan, Robert John Burke, and an early role by Harold Perrineau. The story ends in a clash involving his other lover's husband in a diner.

 

  The Berlin segment I liked a lot, mostly for giving a lead role to Dwight Ewell, best known as Hooper X from Chasing Amy. He also had minor roles in Amateur and Party Girl, and just always stood out as a gay Black man in 90s indie cinema with a quiet, chill vibe to him. In this segment, he's living in Berlin and seeing a man who is going on a business trip to New York, and is also accused of being a loose flirt and unable to commit to anyone. Like in the first segment where Bill is waiting by the phone booth as it's occupied, so does Dwight in Berlin with a woman using the phone, the difference being the currency a quarter in NYC and a phone card in Berlin. The story ends with a confrontation with his other lover's wife.

    The third segment I didn't find as interesting, but liked that it had a female lead after the first two had male leads. Miho (Miho Nikaido) is a dancer whose lover (Hartley in a cameo) is going to Los Angeles for a business trip. Like the first two segments, she is also accused of being a flirt who can't commit. This story takes more of a different turn, as the ending is more her self-destruction than inflicted upon her by others.

    I enjoyed watching this, more as like a series of short films with the same dialogue and themes, as a slice of 90s indie film, with an international flair a la Jarmusch's Night on Earth.

Thoughts on Le Samouraï

   Following with my Pale Flower post, I also checked out another recommendation from Patton Oswalt's Criterion Closet video, the 1967 French film Le Samourai, directed by Jean-Pierre Melville, starring the icon Alain Delon as a quiet hitman in Paris named Jef Costello who lives a solitary life, carries out a hit in a jazz club but is seen by several people as he leaves (including the pianist [Cathy Rosier] and the hatcheck girl [Catherine Jourdan]), and is one of many being held as a suspect by the police station. His employer (Jean-Pierre Posier) who ordered the hit is trying to figure out damage control, and the police investigator (Francois Perier) strongly suspects him but can't get the witnesses to identify him or get Costello's girlfriend (Nathalie Delon, who was married to Alain at the time as a superstar glamourous couple of 1960s Paris) to recant her backing of his false alibi that he was with her. 

    It's an interesting and stylish film, mixing it as a crime movie with some French New Wave hipness. I hadn't ever seen any of Alain Delon's films, and I can get how he was an icon, with these light blue/green eyes that look icy and stark, but despite his outside handsomeness, I couldn't find him attractive, he just came off as too cold and remote to me. Like there was a removed feeling to him that fit well as a hitman, but I couldn't get into him as a movie star. 

    I also found it funny how not only the police just round up every guy who vaguely fits the description (of mainly being young white men who look very similar), but also would parade them in front of witnesses, no one-way mirrors or barriers, with no protection for the witnesses' identities, and having the suspects switch around hats and coats for better identification. Naturally, the witnesses who saw Costello don't want to ID him right to his face, especially the pianist and hatcheck girl, likely for fear of retaliation, so it looked ridiculous that the police were doing this very public way of trying to identify suspects.

    I thought this was cool to watch, and it was making me think of Jim Jarmusch's Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, with similar themes of a quiet hitman who lives a solitary life and follows the samurai code. Checking the Wikipedia page, I wasn't surprised that Jarmusch was influenced by it, and took some nods from the film, like Costello having a huge ring of keys so he could steal any Citreon DS car, so would Ghost Dog, having an electronic "key" to break into luxury cars. The film was also noted as an influence on John Woo's The Killer, Nicholas Winding Refn's Drive, Johnnie To's Vengeance, among others. It was a good pairing to watch after Pale Flower, watching two 1960s foreign gangster films that are very different, but both featuring hitman characters and share a moody stylish vibe to their worlds.

Thoughts on Pale Flower

   I watch the Criterion Closet YouTube videos, where guests (usually filmmakers and actors, sometimes musicians, writers, and other celebrities) peruse through the DVD closet of Criterion and pick out movies to take home, explaining their choices and backstories behind their interest in the films. The latest one has Patton Oswalt, and I didn't know that he's a major film nerd, with a lot of interesting taste in old foreign films. One of the films he recommended was Pale Flower, a 1964 Yakuza gangster romance film directed by Masahiro Shinoda. I've never seen any of the old Yakuza b/w films, and based on Oswalt's enthusiastic description of the film, I decided to check it out on Criterion, 

    And it was a great selection! It's a mix of being noir but having a 60s New Wave feel to it. It stars Ryo Ikebe as Muraki, a Yakuza hitman who just got out of prison after serving three years for murder, and gets right back into his gangster scene, finding out how gangs formed alliances and had a truce since he's been away. He returns to the underground gambling world, and meets a beautiful well-off woman named Saeko (Mariko Kaga), who is the only woman gambling in the parlor, and stands out in a pristine, ladylike way. They share a bond of both being attracted to gambling (her because life is boring and predictable) and feeling out of sorts, and begin an affair, him feeling like he can be redeemed through her seeming sweetness. But she's mysterious and has a shady background, with an attraction to drugs, which then only attracts more heat around them through his gangster circles.

    It's got a cool vibe to it, with his noir narration, her glamour, mixing in gangs and drug abuse and being very stylish to watch, with a great score by Toru Takemitsu. There was a subplot I wasn't as into, where he had a girlfriend who had been sexually abused by her dad, and had been waiting for Muraki all the time he was in prison even while casually dating a normal, average guy. Muraki encourages her to forget him and marry the nice guy, but she's still drawn to wanting the sexy gangster. I couldn't get into that subplot as much, and found it kind of boring, just feeling like the main romantic relationship and the Yakuza underworld were enough without bringing some superfluous relationship into the mix. 

    To conclude, I will agree with Oswalt that this film is gorgeous, gorgeous.