Call Me By Your Name (2017)

Saw Call Me By Your Name, since I'd just seen Luca and wanted to understand the jokes online.  This film was good and subtle, but I think somewhat over my head.

The plot is this: we follow Elio, a teenager in Italy where he lives an a palatial villa with his archaeologist father and mother.  His life is complicated by the arrival of Oliver, a hunky grad student.  They have a mutual unstated attraction which results in them circling each other, attracted but shy and uncertain.  The emotions are the top level of the film here and there are a few swooning moments where Elio's face is covered with flickering colors, or he lays in bed, fretting and dreaming.

The film reminded me a lot of some French new wave films.  There's the familiar European sense of ennui and possibility.  The characters' actions are not as well-explained as one might hope and there's a lot of wistful stares and indolent lolling.  There are excellent, naturalistic performances but they are portrayals of uncertainty, hope, brave faces, and other ambiguous stances.  There's a moment when Elio touches his lip, suddenly uncertain if he's done the right thing in following Oliver to town which combines such guilelessness and honesty.

Speaking of touching lips, there's a few moments where characters touch each other's lips with their fingers.  A sunken statue of a wrestler is pulled up from the ocean and Oliver strokes the statue's mouth.  What this repetition indicates beyond just strong desire is not clear to me.  There's also some other theme going on with fruits and their association with fertility, maturity.  A piece of fruit features prominently in one of the sex scenes and there's an early discussion of the etymology of "apricot" which, Oliver claims, means the "the precocious one".  Since the film is centered on Elio, I feel (not to be too crass) that he is the fruit - both in terms of being precocious and also in the sense of being desired and desirable.

Alas, there's a significant age difference between Elio and Oliver which made me a bit uncomfortable.  Elio is supposed to be 17 but looks younger and Oliver is supposed to be 23 but looks older.  It's appropriate for being set in Italy and being surrounded with statues of wrestlers and slave boys.  The relationship feels like the prototypical Greek teacher and student relationship which Oscar Wilde named as the "love which dare not speak its name."  The film portrays their relationship as being only a good thing, but I would quietly feel uncomfortable about it in real life, and doubly so when writing the above about ripe fruits and so on.

So, I feel I mostly experienced the film as an aesthetic experience.  I appreciated the beauty and class of it.  Similar to French new wave, I felt there was something deeper on its mind which I could only sense via murky symbolism, but that symbolism was not clear enough for me to interpret.  The central relationship is golden and impossible, and the film is a sort of nap in an Italian villa: sophisticated, intelligent, slightly decadent, a little dull, very beautiful.

Voyage of the Rock Aliens (1984)

Saw Voyage of the Rock Aliens (thanks, Nina!)  It was a fairly wacky rock musical in the style of those pokey old teen musicals that Grease kind of perfected.  The film contains a lot of nonsense, but primarily revolves around a love-triangle between teen Deedee, teen Frankie, and ABCD who is an alien come to Earth to research the inhabitants.  Also, there's a tentacle monster in the town lake, and also homicidal chainsaw-wielding maniacs.  The film keeps expanding and expanding in confusing directions.  It's a fabulous mess but it's the sort of film that I think is supposed to be collaborative: they provide the scenario, you provide the commentary.

I saw this solo, alas, which made the film a bit of a slog.  The film has a very wholesome and kind of sweet energy however, so it's not a bad watch, just a bit tedious.  Although it's deep in the 80s, its heart is clearly in the 50s with juke boxes and school cotillions and so on.  This was always meant to be a camp film.  There's a lot of broad acting and bewildering moments.  At one point, during a music video, the aliens arrive atop a tractor on a beach.  Everyone claps and one of the girls welcomes them to town.  Is this real?  Is this the music video?  Where did they get the tractor?  Other moments are confusing and strange, but this one nearly breaks the reality of the film.  By far the most confusing moment.

One saving grace: the people are all fairly attractive, so that's nice.

The Power of the Dog (2021)

Saw The Power of the Dog, which is one of those noir westerns: very moody, very ominous, full of ugly dirt and cruelty.  This film is divided into a few acts, however the story falls roughly into two pieces in my mind: in the first half, a rancher falls in love with a restaurant proprietress in town and marries her, much to the sinister, passive aggression of his brother, an unsmiling, cruel, loud man who begins a campaign of terror on the new, demure wife.  In the second half, the new wife's son comes home from school.  The son is bone-thin and effete, his formal language and emotional flatness indicating a spectrum disorder.  He soon becomes the target of the brother's cruelties.

The film is restrained and hypnotic.  Seemingly innocent scenes are freighted with dread significance by groaning cellos and horns.  It reminded me a lot of Meek's Cutoff in its grim, subtle ambiguity.  Midway through the film, the cruel brother's behavior to the new wife's son changes from cruel to kind.  He offer to weave a rope for the son as a peace offering.  Why this change in his attitude?  Is it real, or just a trap for further cruelty?  Or perhaps will his kindness be more damaging than his cruelty?  Even his gift is ambiguous and seems sinister.  A rope is for tying and capturing, after all.  What better symbol for the capture of the new wife's son?  The intentions of this cruel brother for the son was the most interesting part of the film for me.  The question is both fascinating and repellent and is a microcosm of the film as a whole.

And, as opposed to Meek's Cutoff, the ending of this film is supremely satisfying.  It is subtle enough that one of the first suggestions when you google "The Power of the Dog" is "The Power of the Dog ending explained" but just pay attention and you'll see what happened.  The hypnotic soundtrack tipped me off that this was a film to really watch.

I enjoyed the film.  It was essentially a psychodrama, most interested in the girl-world-style power struggles between the wife and the brother.  What the characters are up to and what they want are kept a little obscured (particularly the motivations of the brother) and this kept me worrying over the film in my mind after the credits rolled.  I did see the ending coming however which made me feel clever and smug.

Luca (2021)

Saw Luca, the film by Pixar rumored to be an animated Call Me By Your Name, but which is in fact, a sort of low-key, typically sweet and imaginative coming-of-age film about a pair of outsiders integrating into an intolerant society which can be read as a sort of queer allegory, but which is not so overt as to be unmistakable or even unambiguous.  This is a Disney subsidiary we're talking about after all, they are primarily a business and will continue to cautiously bide their time before dropping yet another First Gay Character Ever.

The film follows a boy from a race of sea monster people who can assume a human disguise when they go above water and dry out.  Ala Ariel, Luca is curious about life above the waves and follows a more adventurous sea-monster-boy above the waves.  They dream of further exploration and world-expansion in the form of a Vespa scooter.  This central yearning for more freedom and more experience eventually drives a wedge between the boys, however as they fall apart, they grow into more whole individuals.

The film is very small and intimate for a Pixar film, however it's no less touching or sweet.  There are many delightful moments and also a few heartbreaking ones.  It is a minor film for Pixar, that's a high bar.  It's a pretty great film for children's entertainment.

Lola (1961)

Saw Lola, a film by Jacques Demy, who is most famous for directing The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, a musical about a woman reuniting with her long-lost lover not altogether happily.  In keeping with that film's theme of love sort of vs life, this film is about doomed, innocent love, juxtaposed with the trappings of tawdry sleeze.

The film follows a couple of people as they meet and interact with each other.  There's the titular Lola who is a cabaret dancer, Roland who is a bored young man with nothing but time on his hands, Frankie, an American sailor in town for some fun, and young Cecile, a girl in a hurry to grow up with her single mother.  These characters - show girls, sailors, bored handsome young men, teenage schoolgirls, are the archetypes of pornography and there's even a reference to the novel Justine by the Marquis De Sade.  Despite all of this however, everything is kept mostly innocent and kind of sweet.  It may have been quite risque for its time but it's tame enough now to see with one's mother.

The theme of the film is doomed love.  The prostitute Lola hopelessly loves her one-time boyfriend.  The innocent young man Roland burns a candle for Lola, and the schoolgirl has a crush on the sailor who treats her with the restrained affection of a father who she never had.  It's all very surprisingly sweet, a sort of inversion of most of these stories involving the sex trade.  Instead of moralistically ending on a down note, the film mines sincerity and hope out of these depths.  As one character neatly sums things up: "there's some happiness to be had just in hoping for happiness."

The film is French and filmed in the 1960s.  It's an interesting film, but was not quite what I was in the mood for, alas.  I was too young and snobby to really enjoy Umbrellas of Cherbourg and (alas) I think this one also missed me by a bit.  I enjoyed the uplifting attitude of the film, and I guess I can recommend it to anyone out there who has a hankering for 60s-era non-new wave, but was a bit dusty for me - a bit homework-ish.

A Moment of Innocence (1996)

Saw A Moment of Innocence (1996) a chilly, slow, fascinating film by Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf.  It strongly reminded me of Close-Up, another Irianian film which similarly plays with reality and make-believe in weird, post-modern way.  I feel they're leap-frogging the movies-about-movies of Fellini and Truffaut and jumping straight into a reality-television-inspired morass of reality and artifice.  A dizzying kayfabe which is impossible to untangle.  It's not the most gripping, but it's very intersting.

This film is about a ex-policeman who wants to become an actor.  So, he goes to Makhmalbaf (the actual director of this film) to ask for a part.  Makhmalbaf decides to film a re-enactment of the time when, as a young man, Makhmalbaf had stabbed this policeman.  So, they cast young actors as young-Makhmalbaf and young-policeman and start to work establishing these young actors as clones of the actual men: they have similar ideals and attitudes, they naturally fall into re-creating the conversations the real versions of their characters must have had.

The film hovers in this arch, shadowy realm of not being real and not being totally imaginary.  Scenes are re-created over and over, from different perspectives, sometimes even with the director of this film shouting instructions from behind the camera.  There's a scene early on where the cop talks with one of his friends about the film.  "Will you be a good guy or a bad guy?" They ask.  This is a natural question, but this is an autobiography - there are no good guys and bad guys, only different perspectives.

The film ends on a sublime, lyrical freeze-frame, just before the stabbing (perhaps.)  The story of what happened is muddled, complicated by the recreation.  The question of who was innocent, of what was the moment of innocence suddenly has many conflicting and reflecting answers.  I really enjoyed the film.

Love, Simon (2018)

Saw Love, Simon, a fairly heartwarming film about a gay teen navigating coming out and highschool.  I really liked it, but it was also very hard to watch sometimes.  Being gay, any time I watch a film about gay guys, it's a lot more visceral for me.  Normally, there's a bit of remove for me in romance films and I have to sort of translate in my head,  projecting my empathy over a slightly wider gap than most people.  It's not a big deal usually, but the gay films seem a little too close, uncomfortably real.  So, the romantic scenes made me cry, and the awkward scenes (of which there's many!) had me shouting at the TV, horror-movie style.  I really enjoyed it, but I'll bet it's not high on anyone's "must watch" list.

The film takes place somewhere warm where you can wear a hoodie outdoors during Christmas.  The attractive protagonist Simon goes to an enormous school where he hangs out with a clique of similarly attractive, friendly, decent, popular kids who have enough freedom to just fuck off to a house party some night.  He lives in a mansion with his dotingly permissive and successful parents and he begins the film by narrating that he's "just like you" only gay.  Ok.

This is standard John Hughes-type stuff though (and this is a very John Hughes-type movie).  It should be regarded as escapism and wish-fulfillment and as a simple way of making sure only the central struggle with sexuality is the focus.  The film is half for adult gays who want a window into a kinder universe and half for struggling teens, trying to figure themselves out and to judge when to commit publicly.  It's a very kindly world which does not actually exist for many kids, but it's there to grant wishes and to show what could be - it's not there to be a documentary.

Anyway, the film is very standard, teen-movie stuff.  There's drama and big shouty show-downs and bullies and parents who just don't understand!  And yeah, I recognize all of this, but oh my god I loved it!  It was so sweet and so nice and it just melted my heart.  I make no claims to objectivity - this movie was for me.