Thoughts on Someone Somewhere, Shirley, and Tommaso

 I rented some movies on streaming in June, to support some arthouse movie theaters and check their stuff out, here’s my thoughts:

Someone Somewhere: a new French romantic comedy from Cédric Klapisch. I liked this one a lot, it was sweet and cute and not contrived. A young man and woman are neighbors in Paris apartments who don’t meet until the very end, but live parallel lives as single people dealing with their own anxiety and therapy issues. I liked how the movie was largely about their individual lives and figuring out their own issues and self-defeating problems and being more confident and comfortable with themselves by the time they finally meet and are both ready for a relationship. It felt more unique, and it fell in line with me liking Klapisch’s movies for years for being sweet and funny and relatable. Plus, his movies usually show a more racially diverse depiction of Paris, so I like the realism there.

Shirley: Elisabeth Moss plays a fictionalized version of the writer Shirley Jackson, directed by Josephine Decker, in which she and her husband take in a newlywed couple as boarders in 1950 (this is from a novel adaptation). It’s a psychothriller mostly focusing on Jackson’s antagonistic relationship with the young wife, who resents that her husband gets to have a teaching assistant job at the local college while she’s stuck doing household chores so that Jackson can write her next book off of the success of “The Lottery.” I couldn’t get into this one much, because aside from liking Moss’ tightly wound performance (in which her inner mental breaks are always seen behind her eyes), I didn’t find the story or dynamic interesting, and just couldn’t care much. It was fine to watch, just more of a C level for me.

Tommaso: Abel Ferrara’s new movie, starring Willem Dafoe as an ex-pat director living in Rome with his wife and daughter, teaching acting classes, going to AA, and having marital issues with his much younger wife. It was pretty good, the protagonist being a blend of Ferrara and Dafoe (Ferrara as the director who has issues with women; Dafoe as the actor married to an Italian artist and who lives partly in Rome), with really beautiful cinematography of their spacious apartment and everyday street life in Rome. I did get annoyed whenever the protagonist would reprimand his wife like she was a child (29 to his sixty-something year old self), and both thought he was a good father and a selfish husband, so I was mixed on him. The ending was also a little confusing to me, as to whether it was fantasy or reality. But overall I thought it was a good film and liked its rich texture.