Emilia Pérez

The Exhumation of the Dead

or

Careful, There's No Railing

 

Jacques Audiard's Emilia Pérez (streaming forever on Netflix) seems purposely designed to make half of America's head explode. A musical with a trans protagonist who decides to quit their life as a drug kingpin and to become a woman. It's both a practical decision—he wants out of the drug trade, which guarantees a short life expectancy and he has a wife and kids that he adores—and a personal one—he wants a clean soul and to be true to himself, and his life in the macho world of the drug-trade just doesn't lend itself to his aspirations. He wants out, both of the way of the cartels and the way he must live his life as a merciless no-nonsense drug lord. 

Easier said than done.

 

Top-lining the film is Zoe Saldaña as attorney Rita Mora Castro, who we first see writing the closing argument for a case she does not believe in, but that ultimately is won, which leaves her conflicted about her profession. She receives an anonymous phone-call that puts it bluntly "Do you want to become rich? I have a proposition for you."

She's directed to a location 10 minutes away, where a car comes to pick her up, a hood is placed over her head, and she is taken to the stronghold of the Los Cabalos drug cartel, run by Juan "Manitas" Del Monte (Karla Sofía Gascón), the man who made the phone-call. His proposition is this: he wants to "disappear", fake his own death, and to have gender-affirming surgery so that he can live the rest of his life as a woman, with his family transported to Switzerland for their safety. Rita's job is to investigate, advocate, and see to the details to accomplish these goals.

She manages to make all the arrangements and walks away a very rich woman. Four years later at a swank dinner party she meets a woman named Emilia Pérez (Karla Sofía Gascónagain) and suddenly realizes...it's her client.

Audiard dramatizes the moment by shutting off every decorative light in the room, isolating the two women, who are the only people on Earth (well, besides the operating team) who know Emilia's past. For Rita, it's a moment of horror, because why would they suddenly cross paths just four years later—she fears for her life. But Emilia has other plans for Rita; as she accomplished things so well previously, she hires her to arrange to bring his wife (played by Selena Gomez) and his two children back to Mexico, to live with Emilia, who will masquerade as Manitas' sister. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, a lot, apparently. If half the heads of America have exploded, almost all of them have in the story's setting of Mexico. Director Audiard is French and he filmed the movie in Paris. Only one of the principal actors is Mexican, and the script has been criticized for its confusion of Spanish and Mexican idioms as well as incorrect uses of pronouns, and for those "in the know" the accents are all over the place, needing to have them explained away in some expositional dialogue and for all this the movie is considered something of a pariah in Mexico. There are various controversies at the core of Emilia Pérez, but they've tended to eclipse some of the more problematic aspects to the film.

Before we get into that, the performances, however untechnical in terms of accents, are game. Gascón, a trans actor, is great in both roles she plays, and manages to garner empathy, while retaining an element that makes you suspect she could snap at any minute. Selena Gomez does well with her role as Manitas' wife, who realizes her place as a pawn in the relationship, but has just enough brio to make her own choices when given a long enough leash. But, the stand-out is Saldaña, who has done well for herself in well-established roles even if they're CGI enhanced, but here she gets to show her abilities as singer and dancer and she electrifies at it, while also going through some pretty complex emotions in transition scenes when the professional veneer she maintains drops.

Now, the downside...for a musical, the music isn't that great, for the most part taking the "Hamilton" approach of scatting between beats with lyrics that are better than the ones in, say, Annette, but far from memorable. The piece was first designed as an operetta, so the songs are just syncopated dialog revealing inner thoughts that transactional dialog is too plain to convey and the way they're presented is director-heavy music-video mode, where the camera does most of the dancing.

But, the part of the movie that irritates me is it's very old-fashioned in its way of dealing with the trans issues. To tell you why would reveal too much of the plot, but let's just say there's no such thing as redemption in Emilia Pérez. No second chances. It says, you may live a new life, but you will pay for the sins of the previous one...which, given the fact that the character tries to redeem herself with a charitable organization to provide answers to the families of victims of drug-cartels, is very Old Testament. You could argue that Manitas was a drug-lord, that he's destroyed so many lives she doesn't deserve to atone or to achieve atonement. Point taken. The crimes one then does are a forever-trap, despite secular ideas of reformation or religious ones of penance absolving them.

But, if that's so, it's akin (to the nth degree) to the faux-pas of "dead-naming" a trans person. Does blame transcend sexual identity? Does guilt? And if a person changes their life to atone for the sins of their past, to try to make it right for the survivors, is it atonement, or is it "too little too late." But, somebody just didn't have the chops to "go there." Emilia Pérez completely by-passes any deep-thought for melodrama and a conclusion for complex moral arguments right out of the Hays Code. It's annoying.

There's just enough clutziness to the whole enterprise, that you kind of wish there was a trans director (a Mexican trans director) behind it who might have been a bit more savvy, not only to the possibilities, but also the problems. Audiard has done some great work in the past (Une Prophete and Rust and Bone), but this one, he overreached and stylistic story-telling or satirical elements cannot camouflage the inherent issue of being a bit behind the curve when dealing with gender-politics. 

 

Emilia Perez is content to merely be outrageous. Well, they got the outrage. Just not the kind they were expecting.

Nyad

Leave Them Wanting More

or

"Jesus, Mary Oliver!..." *sigh* (Can You See it? Can You See It?)

 
On her 60th birthday, Diana Nyad (Annette Bening) is in a funk. She doesn't want a party—she gets one, anyway, by her friend Bonnie Stoll (Jodie Foster). It's been awhile since she was famed for her marathon swimming. For 30 years she's been working for ABC Sports and she's left with the feeling of "where's the excellence?" She has finally gone through her mother's things, collected after her death, and found a book of poetry that she starts obsessing over. She does that...obsessing.

 

One of the things that she obsesses over is one thing she didn't do in her life—swim the 103 miles between Cuba and Key West, Florida. Her attempts in the 1970's were unsuccessful given currents and unfavorable conditions; they made all of her efforts time-consuming and energy-wasting, and success is measured by strokes and calories, wasting any of them you increase the number of miles and the time needed to do it so that the goal becomes increasingly out of reach. Now, she's determined to do it...by any means necessary.

 

Despite being over 60 years old.

Nyad, on Netflix, tells the story of how that obsession takes over the thoughts and life of the swimmer, and, in turns spills over into the lives of her crew assisting in the effort. It may look like a solo effort, but that it's to be done in open ocean complicates matters. Sailors on perfectly fine boats have sunk, gotten lost, or merely disappeared without a trace in the area, and she's just one person, one tiny speck, in a big ocean. Without supervision, navigation, occasional nourishment, one person is sure to be swamped by time and tide—not to mention the predators that share the space and care more about feeding that making records. That crew needs to observe and document, as well, or the achievement won't be recognized. Going solo? That's not a goal; it's a death wish.

So, Nyad trains, day and night. At the same time, Stoll assists in looking for funding, sponsorship, and a crew, taking into account all the factors that presented Nyad from accomplishing the goal previously. Before, she'd done it swimming in a moving shark-tank. She puts the nix on that immediately. Also, the navigation she'd relied on had her swimming off-course, so she finds a local navigator/boat-runner John Bartlett (Rhys Ifans) who knows the waters between Cuba and Key West so well as to be an irritant—he's not going to make a mistake and will err on the side of caution, rather than blindly plunge forward (something Nyad would do, even if not hampered by stress-induced poor judgment). 

And for her coach, it's Stoll. No one else. Not so much for expertise on sports medicine—she can hire people for that...and does—but because she knows Nyad so well, the bad and the good. Friends for 30 years, and having dated ("for like 30 seconds") back in the past, she knows Nyad's strengths...and weaknesses—it's why they're merely devoted friends—and knows what the swimmer is capable of—endurance, obstinance, and mania—and can negotiate the rocky shoals of Nyad's narcissism and insufferability to see the right thing and do the right thing when Nyad's tunnel-vision can't. It will test their friendship, despite their long history, to the breaking point, just as Nyad's tenacity is capable of breaking her own endurance.

Which is where the actresses playing the leads come in. Both Benning and Foster are acknowledged as being legendary thespians, but their work here, separately and together, is a notch above what you already expect. Foster, for her part, plays Stoll as a long-suffering aide-de-camp, team-player and punching bag, not afraid to call out magical thinking and just BS, but manages to do it in such a breezy and utilitarian way that one can't begrudge her. One sees the paradox etched into Foster's face as she uses facial muscles that she hasn't flexed in a lifetime of performances. And her bantering with Benning perpetually feels like she's making it up on the spot. It hardly feels like a performance, practiced and perfected, as it does a free-wheeling dance of improvisation. There isn't any past fall-backs here; Foster is exploring new ground.

And Benning? You always knew she was "that" good. But, here she commits to the physical demands and the sheer blinkerdliness of Nyad's obsession. She understands that Nyad's devotion to her own physical perfection to be ready for such a feat makes her such a creature of the internal that the outside world is a bit of an irrelevance and frequently merely a road-block. She spends so much time in her own head that empathy could be a symptom of weakness and her own care-and-feeding of her ego and importance becomes a side-effect of her strenuous preparation.

She's in another world than everybody else. She has to be to endure the tortures and the distractions that will come from the mechanical rigors of moving arms forward and back and kicking for every inch of forward momentum. She may protest that the sea is the perfect place for her to be, but she works and practices and trains as if its her enemy, the more dangerous element of a world that potentially blocks her way. Only in her head is she safe, despite the pain in her muscles, the cramps in her legs, the building weariness and decomposition that she is only too aware of and fights to ignore.

You got to be crazy to do something like that, and Benning leans in to the crazy, quite recklessly, not caring that it might sacrifice audience sympathy (after all, Nyad, herself, wouldn't). It's gutsy and unapologetic and just plain fierce.

The directors, Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, need something like that. This is their first dramatic film—they've only done documentaries before this, one of which was Free Solo, so they know about athletic rigors and the discipline and the potential for mental anarchy that can ensue. Athletes themselves—they're avid rock-climbers as Free Solo demonstrated—they know about risk and discipline and distraction (a good section of Free Solo was the crew discussing how they could make their work not be a distraction for climber Alex Honnold) and they do a good job of creating the painful monotony (without over-doing it for the audience) of such a challenge while imagining the head-space that Nyad must make for herself. It's a nice "all things considered" approach that only raises the stakes and ensures audience involvement. You fret. Which means the filmmakers have done their job.

It's an amazing piece of work and it would be nice ("nice") if there was some recognition for this during awards season. But, one has to admit, that it's likely to be swamped by its considerable competition. You can't train for that.

 

Time and tide, after all...

Maestro (2023)

Learning How to Conduct Yourself

or

Waiting in the Wings ("Any Questions?")

A work of art does not answer questions, it provokes them; and its essential meaning is in the tension between the contradictory answers.

Leonard Bernstein

I have a lot of favorite composers, but the one who always made music that brought tears to my eyes was Leonard Bernstein. There are sections of his score to On the Waterfront that does it, sections of "West Side Story", a recent viewing of Bernstein's "Mass" on PBS "Great Performances" did it to me, even though the thing was going right over my head. And it happened here, in this movie, in the end-credits without an extended segment of his "Candide." 

 

There are moments of great sublimity in Bernstein's music that you wonder that a human being could come up with something like that, tones and phrases so heavenly that they punch you right in the heart. And that he was able to write for theater, film, and the concert house is another of those un-ponderables. Add that he was not only a gifted composer, but also an outstanding student and interpreter of other composers' music, creating some definitive (to my ears, anyway) interpretations. And along with being a great student, he was a great teacher, becoming known for "Young Peoples Concerts" and lectures on "Omnibus". He was a genius, while acknowledging that word is so devalued these days.

But, the thing about geniuses is you never want to work for one. And maybe you don't want to become "involved" with them. Their work, their inspiration is an insular part of that person and sometimes it is a Rubicon you cannot cross. Bernstein was a great teacher, composer, conductor, but was also a celebrity, insatiably curious and had appetites. As Bernstein's sister (played imperiously by Sarah Silverman in the film Maestro) says: "There's a price for being in my brother's orbit..." That price is an isolation, that, although he may be a partner, he will never be a constant one (not that he couldn't be dedicated). He may be loyal, but by giving that loyalty is given permission to be disloyal. Mercurial, temperamental, capricious. Reliable, certainly to his craft and his art, but unreliable in his steadfastness and his exclusivity.

Maestro tells the story of the Bernstein-Montealegre marriage, which lasted 27 years until her death in 1978 (Bernstein died in 1990). And, interspersed with it are individual triumphs—Bernstein's star-making substitution for an ailing Bruno Walter conducting the New York Philharmonic (without any rehearsal) for a CBS Radio broadcast, his work making "On the Town," Montealegre's stage career, his work on the Mahler catalog—and disappointments, the most central of which was Bernstein's philandering with both men and women, as well as Montealegre's eventual death from cancer. It's staged as three acts (naturally), shot in different formats: the early years in academy ratio black and white; the troubled years of success—academy ratio color; Bernstein's life after Montealegre in wide-screen color. Why the marriage years are in the boxy square format and the solo years in wide-screen seems to be making a comment, but I haven't been able to come up with anything that doesn't seem to be in contradiction to the rest of the movie.

The film is centered by the performances of Bradley Cooper as Bernstein and Carey Mulligan as Felicia Montealegure—everybody else in the film are background characters, no matter how well-know (Comden and Green, Jerome Robbins, Aaron Copland), and the film revolves around them, sometimes literally. One's immediate impression is that Mulligan is doing some of her strongest work in years—until you realize that she's always been doing her hardest work. Cooper directed (and co-wrote the screenplay with Josh Singer) and he's given Mulligan and himself some pretty dexterous argument scenes where they're required to talk over each other incessantly and pausing only to spark off something the other person said. There's some deft timing done at high volume and dudgeon that's very impressive.

Cooper's performance is going to be the one that people will have an opinion on—as Bernstein was such a media presence that most people have an instinctive sense-memory about him—the make-up work is quite good with only moments of Cooper managing to emerge through it, and he's given Bernstein three distinctive voices for each section, products of a life-long cigarette habit and a cultivated life-style. I have the benefit of knowing someone who worked with Bernstein later in his life and they give Cooper high marks for his work citing "moments when you'd swear it was him" in postures and hand-work.* I will defer to them for any comments on his work, and will add that their impression of Bernstein—"casual" and "generous"—and that the film was far more honest than was expected.

As far as Cooper's direction, I found it interesting. He is not a great director for the poetic artistic shot, but he is a great director of sequences. After a prologue of the older Bernstein (in wide-screen), breaking down while performing a piano piece in front of the cameras ("So to answer your question, yes, I carry her around with me quite a bit"), the film cuts to black and white box as Bernstein gets his fateful call to conduct in 1943, and Cooper has Bernstein open his drapes, fly out of his room in his shorts and robe, opens a door in the hall and (wham) he opens it onto a balcony in a vast concert hall. The camera zooms out to the stage and a waiting podium, and then back to Bernstein, who turns on a dime and goes back through the door to emerge in a tux and make his grand entrance for the performance. It's very bravura (and all done to the heavy percussive part of Bernstein's On the Waterfront score).

And I began to worry: Is he trying to out-Spielberg Spielberg?** He's not—as the subsequent movie would show—it's just that he likes long "takes." In fact, it's amazing how long a scene will last without cutting away—those "argument" scenes are done in one shot.

Cooper will do a couple of other "showman" sequences during the "early days" sequences, but then he stops. Did he run out of energy? No, it's more a matter of putting the energy into the performances and letting the camera settle down as an uninvolved observer with merely a slow Barry Lyndon-style approach for comment. Those exuberant camera routines merely reflect the heady days of promising youth and endless possibilities...where you think you can do anything. And significantly, as things get more serious, Cooper's camera work gets more placid. Rather clever, that.

Oh, there's a fumble or two. A scene where a clearly cavalier Bernstein drives onto the family estate with his new lover in tow is overlaid with the sneaky opening bars of "West Side Story" and that's a little "on-the-nose." But, for the most part, the choices are good, sometimes surprising in their subtlety, and show a freshman movie-maker still learning some tricks and experimenting and seeing what the possibilities are in this train-set he gets to play with.

The film sets up a mystery with that opening Bernstein quote at the top of the page, and then, at key points, breaks a scene off with a final "Any Questions?" That's not much of a provocation, is dramatically awkward, and I'm not sure the movie fulfills its promise of demonstrating the tension between contradictory answers, so much as showing that any two human beings will have conflicts and must fight their inclination toward selfishness and ego (on both sides) in order to form a more perfect union. But, at least the movie is reaching, and exuberantly so, and Bernstein would appreciate that. He'd have hated a boring bio-pic, even if he had to look bad to get one.

In other words, the movie conducts itself well. Any questions?

* I made a remark that, unlike, say, Joaquin Phoenix in Walk the Line, Cooper's work was more imitation than performance and got the reply "Yeah, well, that's Lenny."

** Spielberg was going to direct Maestro, but an early peak at Cooper's rough cut of A Star is Born made him say "You should direct Maestro."

The Killer (2023)

WWJWBD?

or

Skepticism is often mistaken for cynicism. (Suuuure, it is...)

Stick to your plan.

 

Anticipate. Don't improvise.

 

Trust no one.

 

Never yield an advantage.

 

Fight only the battle you're paid to fight.

 

Forbid empathy. Empathy is weakness. Weakness is vulnerability. 

 

Each and every step of the way ask yourself: what's in it for me? 

 

This is what it takes. 

 

What you must commit yourself to...if you want to succeed.

Simple.

 

It's the mantra by which the hired sniper (played by Michael Fassbender and unnamed except for some wildly amusing aliases on his I.D.'s and credit cards—he can't be accused of identity theft but might be in violation of the recent writer's strike) of David Fincher's The Killer (based on a graphic novel series by Alexis Nolent—ndp Matz—and Luc Jacamon) lives his life and dutifully repeats to himself after all the anticipation stops and he's actually required to pull a trigger—and only then, if his pulse-rate is hovering at 60.

It's the waiting that kills you. He keeps his body in shape with daily exercise, a light diet of protein—McDonald's...really?—and his mind focused with a steady stream of The Smiths and the aphorisms constantly scrolling through his head. 

 

He is in Paris, taking up temporary residence in an abandoned WeWork space across from a plush Paris penthouse that he constantly eyes for any sign of activity...or of a target. He's received an assignment, but the intended corpse is late. And this gun-man hates that. It's rude, for one thing. And if his intel is wrong about this, what else is off-track? Not that he knows anything about the target. He's not there to judge. "My process is purely logistical," he muses "narrowly focused by design. I'm not here to take sides. It's not my place to formulate any opinion. No one who can afford me, needs to waste time winning me to some cause. I serve no god, or country. I fly no flag. If I'm effective, it's because of one simple fact: I. Don't. Give. A. Fuck ."

But, he does, as far as the inefficiency goes. Cameras are everywhere. And though he purposely dresses as a German tourist to discourage any recognition...or interest...he can't help but think that his constant presence will gradually work against him, despite his M.O. of "redundancies, redundancies, and redundancies." On "Annie Oakley jobs" like this one, it's the details. "It only takes a few episodes of 'Dateline' to know there are countless ways to trip yourself up. If you can think of a dozen, you're a genius. I'm no genius." Later, he will get nostalgic: "When was my last, nice, quiet drowning?"

Maybe he should have waited until the guy got in the hotel pool. It wouldn't be a very interesting idea for a movie if everything went according to his plan. And little-by-little, that mantra becomes increasingly irrelevant and The Great Anticipator finds that he must improvise...a lot. The redundancies, redundancies, redundancies become complications, complications, complications. And, for once, he has to deal with the consequences as they hit closer to home. He finds it tough to be a target.

"I blame you...for having to bring my work home," he muses at one point. 

 

The Killer is fine, if you don't mind spend spending so much time with a conscienceless sociopath who has the advantage of never having to stick around for the aftermath—that's just something he never needs to calculate. But, when the tables turn and he actually has to give one of those fucks, there is no apparent empathy shift. He's still the coldly calculating death merchant with a penchant for pretense. And given his track record for playing sublimation and even mechanization, Fassbender is the perfect guy to play him. He's on-camera for most of the movie's running time, constantly in the sights of the view-finder and those types of marathons are tough to pull off. But, he does it with a seeming ease as the toughest thing his character can do is crack a smile.

Ultimately, it's a revenge movie—his clients don't like the outcome of the job he was hired for and so they go after him—and he has to methodically go up the chain, finding his contact, finding out his contacts, and taking them out one by one. He finds out "who", but the "why" is a bit of a mystery, unless you ascribe his own philosophy to their motivations: "From the beginning of history, the few have always exploited the many. This is the cornerstone of civilization. The blood and mortar that binds all bricks. Whatever it takes, make sure you're one of the few, not one of the many." And so he goes about his business. Whatever it takes.

Fincher's direction is full of his feints and slights of hand—the time-transitions in a cut, the "impossible" shots (he did start out in special effects and he's in his wheel-house in a CGI-world—see the video below), all carefully controlled, composed and edited with a distinctive *snap* to them. It all looks simple, but what it takes to achieve that effect is extraordinarily complicated. That it's in service to another "revenge" plot is a bit disheartening. That it's something Fincher has wanted to make for years is more than a little depressing.

Fincher is such a craftsman, that he shouldn't be punching down. Maybe he had an extra commitment to Netflix for making Mank. Maybe he wanted to see if he could curb his instincts for budget and length and make something spare with both. Maybe the option to the graphic novel's film-rights were going to lapse. Or maybe this is his attempt to make a comedy ( although I've always considered Fincher's Fight Club more of a comedy) with its assassin who seems to have grown his habit for internal monologue watching "Dexter." Maybe it's his way of making a "John Wick" movie (why you'd want to, aside from the absurdity of it, escapes me). But, this is more This Gun For Hire than Le Samouraï.

 

If he was looking to make art, he was aiming a little low.

"Of those who like to put their faith in the inherent goodness of mankind,

 I have to ask, 'Based on what, exactly?'"