Best of not-2012

A bit late this year, but here we go, as per tradition: the best films I saw in 2012, that weren’t made in 2012.

10. Little Darlings (1980)

In one of the few movies that explores the pressure to lose one’s virginity from the female perspective, Tatum O’Neal and Kristy McNichol are rivals at summer camp who find themselves in the middle of a bet to see who can lose it first. As other campers throw money behind one contestant or the other, neither girl feels she can back down, even when situations become rather complicated with the intended male “targets.” This is a very funny movie that also takes its lead characters seriously, allowing them to be weird and outlandish in the ways that best serve their conflicted, hormonal selves, not just the plot. Though some resolutions are predictable, this is one of the best teen movies I’ve seen in a long time.

9. My Brilliant Career (1979)

Speaking of headstrong teens, here we have a young Judy Davis playing Sybylla, a young woman weighing her options (not many) in early 20th century Australia. She wants to be a writer, perhaps; something that gives her independence, surely. This strong desire for independence is challenged in ways unpleasant (the family’s farm has gone into severe debt and Sybylla must work as a governess for some truly awful children) and more pleasant (a dashing young Sam Neill may just want to sweep Sybylla off her feet). Sybylla is a wonderful character, reminiscent of the great Anne Shirley, and Gillian Armstrong’s film serves her well with an ending that reflects how tough choices in life really can be.

8. Touch of Evil (1958)

I had a chance to see this film on a theater screen while I was in Paris this past November, and I’m glad I was able to finally check it off my list in that setting. No one needs to hear me explain that Orson Welles was a stunning visual director, but I’ll say that it’s impossible not to be sucked in by the world he creates here, from the opening tracking shot to the final tense, shadowy moments. Once the issue of Charlton Heston playing a Mexican man is put aside a bit (admittedly, a difficult task), it’s a great experience to bask in the dirt, grime, and sweat of this boozy border town. Plus, there’s plenty of Janet Leigh, which is always a good thing.

7. Les Bonnes Femmes (1960)

In 2012 I watched my first few films from prolific French director Claude Chabrol, and this was by far the highlight among them. The film follows four French shopgirls through their boring workdays and their dubious night lives, where they encounter a fair few hideously-behaved men. The film is observational to the point where tracing a core plotline is impossible, yet it’s also terrifically engaging as a window into a certain kind of Paris. The one development we can really grasp onto—one woman’s emerging romance with a man on a motorcycle—resolves in a way I could never have seen coming. If you’re interested in the French New Wave, this is a must-see.

6. Videodrome (1983)

I wrote a little bit about Videodrome when I had David Cronenberg Month, but a year later I’m not sure I have anything deeper to say about why I liked it so much. Someone with more expertise than I have would need to explain why some surrealism works and some doesn’t; what Cronenberg throws into his narrative of a schlock producer works incredibly. Scenes make you feel uncomfortable and confused, but in the most glorious way.

5. Marnie (1964)

Marnie was another film I wrote about while attempting monthly director-fests. For me, it might be Hitchcock’s most fascinating film, in terms of the layers of psychological complexity and amoral behavior. I still am not quite sure what to think about it, which is sometimes the best way to feel about a piece of art. I do know that Tippi Hedren’s performance is simply brilliant, and is evidence of what highs she could have reached had her falling out with Hitchcock (to use a term that probably gives him too much credit) not affected her career.

4. Le Bonheur (1965)

Agnès Varda, how I love you. But as I said in August, I’m not sure if “love” is the right word for how I feel about this film—though my admiration for it only grows the more I think about it. Le Bonheur is a story of delusional infidelity, and also a sort of parable about the way women’s lives are so often unjustly defined by their relationships with men. Watching it now, I only wish progress in that area would continue at a faster pace, because too many women are still not the controllers of their own lives. The film isn’t really an attack on men, though—more like a warning that if the world says you can have everything, there’s actually going to be a catch somewhere. This is a tough movie to explain, so I just say: watch it.

3. A New Leaf (1971)

Unavailable for a very long time, this film is now ACTUALLY OUT ON DVD!, and I urge you to seek it out. This is flawless dark comedy, and Walter Matthau and co-star/co-writer/director Elaine May play off of each other as if they’d been a long-time comedy duo. Matthau is selfish rich man who’s just been told he’s actually poor; May is a clueless rich woman he’d like to marry and then murder. I’ll actually have much more to say about this film for a piece on May that I’m preparing for The MacGuffin, so I’ll end with just urging all who like black comedies to get this one, now.

2. The Last Days of Disco (1998)

I overuse the word “delight” as a noun to describe things that bring me joy, but it’s simply the most apt descriptor for Whit Stillman’s wordy, hilarious, occasionally beautifully awkward film. I crave the kind of dialogue Stillman writes, which weighs entertainment value and true cleverness over realism, but never crosses into self-congratulatory, referential irony. I wrote about The Last Days of Disco back in April, when I was almost stunned by how much I’d enjoyed it, and not just because of all of the amaaaaazing disco music. When something can be this bitingly clever on the surface and have so much heart underneath, everyone should love it.

1. Warrior (2011)

One of the most interesting ways a film can engage a viewer is by giving us two opposing sides to root for and no way that both will win. For some reason, sports movies rarely take advantage of the fact that they’re inherently set up to make this dynamic as easily constructable as it could ever be. Warrior‘s deft handling of two brothers in the same mixed martial arts tournament wrings all of the natural drama out of the set-up, but somehow never feels cliché, even while hitting story beats we’ve all seen before: the family in desperate need of money; the husband keeping a secret from his wife; the return of the alcoholic father; the stoic man who can’t get over a loss. Co-writer/director Gavin O’Connor crafts the film perfectly to stack all of its elements in a way that feels fresh, and he pulls the viewer along breathlessly until that final fight—the one where only one brother can win. This film was a triumph for O’Connor, and a brilliant surprise for me.

Previous lists:

Best of not-2011
Best of not-2010
Best of not-2009
Best of not-2008

What to do about Godard?

At the end of the ninth month of 2012, I’m only on my fifth director for my year-long project. Oh well, no one really cares about that but me, right? C’est la vie.

Following my joyous experience with Agnès Varda, I stayed in the realm of directors who started during the French New Wave, and explored some of the work of Jean-Luc Godard. This was interesting, because he was someone whose work I thought I would really enjoy diving into, and that ended up not being the case at all. Godard has been incredibly prolific over the course of his career, but going into this, I had only ever seen Breathless (À bout de souffle, 1960) and Week End (1967). I saw both for the first time in college, and loved Breathless, while being reasonably impressed with the very odd Week End—at least from a technical perspective, appreciating its style and its infamously long tracking shot of a surreal traffic jam. But I’d not made the effort to seek out his other works until the past couple of months.

Letting my viewing life be dictated by what’s available for streaming on Netflix—as I often do, for better or for worse—I started out with one of Godard’s most recent works, Film socialisme (2010). Of course I knew that Godard has gotten more experimental with every passing decade, but I was not quite prepared for how impenetrable an exercise this was. Much of the film, which doesn’t really have a narrative to it, revolves around passengers on a cruise ship having long philosophical conversations that actually quote liberally from real philosophical works. I know this both because I speak a fair bit of French and because I paused the movie to read about it and try to figure out what the hell I was watching. Heaven help you if you can’t do either of these things, because the subtitles are just a bunch of intermittent words that don’t convey full, grammatical ideas. There was a method to Godard’s madness—something about the rhythm of the Navajo language—but that doesn’t make it any less aggravating to watch.

The film has several sections, and one that takes place off the boat at a gas station run by a family could have been very enjoyable without the dreaded creative subtitles. The reason for this is because this part of the film actually has a sort of narrative to it. Realizing how far Godard really has come from using a narrative story as the core basis for a film, I jumped way back in his filmography to one I’ve heard praised a hundred times: Band of Outsiders (Bande à part, 1964). Paying homage to elements of film noir, we follow two would-be crooks as they hatch a plan to steal a considerable hoard of cash from the wealthy benefactor of a young woman they know from English language class, who has been silly enough to tell them about it.

I really wish I’d found as much to admire in this film as so many people seem to. I did enjoy the acting, particularly from Anna Karina (even though I wanted to slap her character half the time), and there are some great sequences that let loose in an irresistible way.

But nothing grabbed me enough to really pull me into the world of the film and care about whether the characters would be able to pull off their plan or not. I mean, at some point in watching a film, it’s not going to be enough for me just to coast through scenes where the driving force is air of “cool”—I need more. Does this story truly speak to people? Or am I maybe not grasping something impressive in the physical way the film was constructed? I wanted to like it so much more than I did.

There were some things I liked better about A Woman is a Woman (1961), perhaps because it incorporates elements of a musical, and this provided enough of a fun surprise to hold my interest for a while. It tells the story of a striptease artist (the ever-present Anna Karina, on the verge here of becoming Godard’s wife) who wants a baby, her reluctant boyfriend, and his not-so-reluctant friend who could help out. This provides a potentially interesting core dilemma—although I could have done with a fair bit more exploration of Karina’s character’s internal reasoning for this desire. (Watching films made by intellectual-type men in the 1960s is sometimes an exercise in frustration for a contemporary feminist.) Here, more than with Band of Outsiders, I can look at the sum of the film’s parts and understand why it’s an impressive effort, why it’s an experiment worth studying even now. But that doesn’t erase the annoyance I developed over its insistent self-referential tone—a reaction that might mean that the whole of the French New Wave just isn’t for me in the way I might have thought it was when just seeing its greatest highlights in film classes in college.

From being merely a bit underwhelmed at times by Band of Outsiders and A Woman is a Woman, I moved on to 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (1967) and Pierrot le Fou (1965). I simply had a hard time getting through both of these movies. The characters were grating; the philosophy spouted was muddled at best, exasperating at worst. Particularly with Pierrot le Fou, no action in one scene ever seemed to have consistent ramifications for the following scenes; if you’re telling me a story and I can’t trust what the stakes are, you have lost me.

Godard has many, many other films, but this was a good sampling from his most celebrated time, and nothing was really connecting. Is he, then, just not for me? Am I just more of a Varda or Chabrol sort of girl when it comes to this era? Was I crazy in thinking that I really loved Breathless? It was clear that I had to watch it again, which I hadn’t done for a good seven years. And I was relieved to find that I still liked it, but the attachment I felt back when it was fresh for me has certainly subsided. I wonder if as I’m getting older, I’m coming to reject the sort of worldview I see in Godard’s work, the despairing, “does it even matter” questions asked by his characters. A bit of existential questioning I can understand; utter detachment doesn’t work for me. Characters who throw each other away because they realize just saying they love someone doesn’t fill a void don’t work for me. I want things to matter. I want people who care.

Am I missing something? Are there other films I should watch that might speak to me? Should I carry on a bit with Monsieur Godard, or let him go?

 

Catching up on my directors project: part one

Though I am only somewhat behind on my watching, I’m woefully behind on writing up my thoughts on the directors I’ve been exploring in my quest to greater familiarize myself with one filmmaker per month in 2012. Waaaaay back in April, I decided to focus part of the year on French New Wave directors, and of course Agnès Varda was at the top of my list. I’ve written several times about my adoration for her film Cléo from 5 to 7, but the rest of her filmography was still on my to-do list. To the Netflix I went!

For no reason at all other than that it was streaming, I started with one of Varda’s later documentaries, 2000′s The Gleaners & I (Les glaneurs et la glaneuse). In it, Varda creates a meandering and entrancing exploration of bits of French society, including her own life, by discussing the concept of gleaning—taking from the leftovers, whether from a harvested field or a grocery store dumpster. The subject certainly matters enough in a contemporary Western society that wastes incredible amounts of food and other resources to provide content for an interesting and important film. What elevates this film beyond just being informative and thought-provoking is the presence of Varda herself. I know that many people dislike documentaries where the filmmaker inserts his- or herself in the proceedings, but I have never been bothered by them. After all, it seems more false to pretend that the filmmaker is not there. And when we are talking about the utterly charming and witty person who is Agnès Varda, having her around bests not having her around, hands down.

Another of Varda’s documentaries, the earlier work Daguerréotypes (1975), might have benefited a bit from having her personality be a greater part the mix. She is more observer than explorer in the film, which focuses on the neighborhood where she lived at the time (the Rue Daguerre, named for the inventor of the first commercially successful photo process—a neat coincidence for a photographer and filmmaker). Still, the stories of the shopkeepers on the street of Varda’s home eventually captivate on their own. Many of them have been running their shops—a bakery, a butcher’s, a parfumerie—for decades, and the rhythms of life are well-set. The patterns of the customers’ comings and goings become a bit hypnotic; I, at least, could have contentedly watched the action in the butcher shop for quite a while. This intimate system of commerce drives the formation of a community; while the film’s participants do discuss their personal lives and tell stories of how they met their spouses, all of that is intertwined with how the couples now run businesses together. Watching from the vantage point of 2012, and knowing how so many of these businesses no longer exist in the same way, out-performed by large companies, adds a layer of sadness to the proceedings. These are not people leading very big or exciting lives, but their lives work—their way of doing things works. And it will inevitably fade away.

Varda’s documentaries move the viewer because of their strong use of symbolism in everyday moments, and her narrative works show the same sensibilities. Her first full-length film, La Pointe Courte (1955), uses the backdrop of the daily workings of a small fishing village, juxtaposed with a long conversation between a couple teetering on the edge of either breaking up or recommitting to each other. Though the man is a native of the village, he has been away, and it’s visually clear that, though he’s welcome, he no longer quite fits in—certainly his companion does not, in her smart, dark suit walking in the wild grasses.

As better described in this great Criterion essay than I ever could, La Pointe Courte deserves the title as the first film of the French New Wave. Watching it, I felt I could truly understand why the films of the movement command such attention in a way I hadn’t before. The way the physical filmmaking techniques call attention to themselves while the “sets” are real locations; the way the emotional tone stays steady whether it’s a long dialogue scene or a glimpse of the sometimes wordless rhythm of working life; the structure that comes from instinct over storytelling rules—it was all here in Varda’s film, before any of the male filmmakers got to it.

Ten years later, and after Cléo from 5 to 7, Varda made her third feature film, the impressive and maddening Le bonheur. Though I know that I truly admired this film, I must admit that I have no actual idea how to talk about it or interpret its message. In a Parisian suburb, François and Thérèse raise their two tiny children. He works in the family carpentry shop; she’s a seamstress working out of their cute and tidy home. They are happy—until he meets someone else, another woman he could be happy with. But to François, this is not an either/or propostion; it’s not a real choice to be made. Aren’t two things that bring happiness better than one? Shouldn’t he now, simply, have twice the happiness?

One needn’t take even a second to realize that François’s way of thinking isn’t based on any sort of reality the rest of the world is living in. And though the fact that this won’t work is obvious, the way the aftermath of François’s delusion plays out can be interpreted in many ways. (I won’t describe the particulars of that aftermath here; “watch this film” is my advice.) Just before second-wave feminism would come along and women would fight for their equality, Varda made a film that captures the sort of preposterous nature of women having to define themselves by their relationship to a man. However one interprets the ending, it can’t be denied that the characters react as they do because their lives, in the amplified world of the film, with its brilliant color, are part of a system where men’s relationships to women are vastly different than women’s relationships to men.

I have yet to see a film by Varda that I wouldn’t recommend as worth watching. Her legacy seems to grow in small waves, and I hope that that continues until she is consistently championed as one of the true greats. My still-to-watch list includes one of her most famous narrative films, Vagabond, and her most recent, autobiographical documentary, The Beaches of Agnès. I can’t wait to see both of them, and to hopefully find some of the many shorts she’s made in her decades of impressive work, as well. I’d also just really, really like to have dinner with her—I’ll be in France in a few months, Ms. Varda, how about it?

A few male directors who should consider female protagonists for future projects.

This post is not meant to shame any of the following directors, or to serve as any sort of a definitive list. These are just a few thoughts I had today about some men who are very successful making Hollywood-type films that I often enjoy, and whom I would like to see ask themselves why they feel they can’t do that with a woman for the core, central character.

*Paul Thomas Anderson: has never made a film with a female protagonist. Fascinating explorations of dark emotions need not be limited to men, PTA.

*Steven Spielberg: has not directed a film with a female protagonist in 27 years, since 1985′s The Color Purple. He had only one other before that, The Sugarland Express. How about an adventure film with a woman taking the lead, Mr. Spielberg? 27 years is a long time.

*Wes Anderson: has arguably never made a film with a female protagonist. A case can be made for Suzy as a co-protagonist in Moonrise Kingdom. I see it more as an ensemble piece (with many, many more male characters than female, as is the case in all of his films). I would love to see him do more with exploring female characters, and not just through the lens of being a male character’s crush or mother.

*Danny Boyle: has arguably never made a film with a female protagonist. Perhaps one could make an argument for co-protagonist status for Cameron Diaz’s character in A Life Less Ordinary. (I would say that McGregor’s actions/perspective most drive the film, but I haven’t seen it in a while. Shallow Grave, which I have not seen, seems to have a woman for 1 out of 3 co-protagonists.) Certainly since he has rocketed to A-list status, his focus has been on projects with male protagonists. Given his range and willingness to dabble in lots of genres, I hope he’ll branch out further.

*Martin Scorsese: has not made a film with a female protagonist in 38 years, since 1974′s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. If anyone wonders why I’m not a Scorsese junkie like so many film buffs: there you go. 38 years, and he never saw a script with a female protagonist that interested him? Never heard a female-centric idea that piqued his interest? No wonder his sensibilities don’t always entrance me. Way to be a bro, Marty.

What other beloved dudes could use a reminder that women are interesting, too?

Nora Ephron: Thank you.

In the opening act of Nora Ephron’s semi-autobiographical Heartburn, the main character, Rachel, spends an extended sequence crippled by fear before the ceremony of her second wedding. Her doubts do not lead her to a magical epiphany; she does not ride away on a horse. No one gets off quite that easily in a Nora Ephron movie. Those epiphanies take some work.

Because Ephron was an incredibly honest writer, and unwavering in her feminism, she created female characters we need more of: ones who can be scared and make mistakes but still not lose their dignity; ones whose doubts will not be magically erased upon meeting “Mr. Right”; ones who were weird because people are weird and not because “quirky” is in this season. She has been one of my biggest role models in writing and a vision of how a woman could make it in Hollywood not just as a writer, but as a producer and director and a person with a real seat at the table.

And she was so fucking funny.

I’m extremely sad right now, and I hope that, at the least, Ephron’s passing will be a time when casual fans will examine her career beyond When Harry Met Sally… (no matter how justified we all are in counting it among our favorite films). Let’s ask ourselves how many women who could be contributing on the level of Nora Ephron are not being let in the room yet. Those of us who are women with ambitions to make it in Hollywood, let’s all write something tonight for her.

Happy birthday, Agnes Varda

If I had one of those fantasy dinner parties where I could invite any five people in the world, Agnès Varda would be on my list. She is someone I admire as a filmmaker, as a woman who made incredible work in her field at a time when few women were doing so, and as a person who just seems to be an utter delight. (Seriously, just watch her 2000 documentary The Gleaners & I…the moments when she enters the picture to contemplate what she’s learning as she makes the film are so warm, smart, and endearing. She’s great.) Agnès Varda turns 84 today, and is still making work that is varied and beautiful.

I’ve written once before about my admiration for Varda’s 1962 film Cleo From 5 to 7. I found this clip today of her speaking sometime in the mid-1960s about her early career, up to and including Cleo. I love what she has to say about its viewpoint:

I actually have not seen much of Varda’s early work, which seems the perfect motivation to have her be a Director of the Month. No, I haven’t forgotten that little project….just got overwhelmed the last couple of months. To make up for April and May, stay tuned for a French New Wave triple-whammy in June: Varda, Godard, and one more I haven’t decided on….Chabrol, maybe? If anyone has a strong opinion, please say so in the comments! There are SO MANY things I haven’t seen yet.

A Whit Stillman Fan is Born

Because of the tyranny of the New York/Los Angeles release, some lucky people will be able to see Whit Stillman’s new film Damsels in Distress this weekend, but I am not one of them. I suppose that I can wait a bit, seeing as I’m only a very recent fan; while some have been patiently waiting for more Whit Stillman since his last film came out in 1998, I only discovered the pleasures of his style this past December, when the MacGuffin crew watched his first film, Metropolitan, for a Christmastime roundtable.

“There’s something a tiny bit arrogant about people going around feeling sorry for other people they consider less fortunate.”

Although from my perspective just about any film that incorporates the ennui of rich white dudes in its themes starts with one strike against it, the undercurrent of gentle irony in Metropolitan saves it from veering into the abyss. The story is of a group of friends home from college for the holidays, dressing up to lounge around each other’s Upper East Side apartments or go to fashionable places in Manhattan for no real purpose other than that’s what people do. They are at the time of their lives when stress about pairing off into couples is only just starting to creep in, but the rules of dating are growing wearisome. They perceive, somewhat accurately, that they’re the last of a certain kind of generation, when debutante balls matter and ingrained social status is everything. They speak a lot about what sorts of changes to society the future might bring.

If all this were played for drama, I’d probably get fed up. But we are in smart comic territory, and the storylines involving who likes whom and who was slighted when and who’s worthy of this or that are all set-ups for continuously flowing, highly amusing dialogue. As a movie fan I fall most squarely into the category of dialogue junkie, and I have no issues with dialogue that isn’t naturalistic. I want it to be clever and profound and funny and distinct, not sound like any random people chatting on the bus. In a Whit Stillman film, I’m awash in everything I want from characters speaking to each other.

“You mean it’s a complete cliché? All women recent college graduates drink vodka tonics, or something like that?”

After deciding to make Stillman one of the directors for my year-long director-of-the-month blog project (he was for March; not shockingly, I’m behind), I rented The Last Days of Disco and Barcelona, his other two films. I watched The Last Days of Disco first, and found it to be completely delightful. Once again, he’s exploring the end of an era through the eyes of a group of young people. Young professionals Alice (Chloë Sevigny) and Charlotte (Kate Beckinsale, in perhaps the first role I’ve ever actively liked her in) are sort-of friends trying to make progress in the publishing world by day, and going disco dancing/guy hunting by night. They frequent a club where lower-level manager Des (Stillman favorite Chris Eigeman, ever the blowhard of the group) constantly gets in trouble for letting friends in for free. We follow the pairings- and breakings up of a loose network of friends and acquaintances surrounding these three, set to a bounty of awesome dance songs of the ’70s.

In Metropolitan, it seemed that all of the characters took themselves and their ideas too seriously. Here, that type of character comes up against another type: Alice doesn’t take herself seriously enough. Her journey toward realizing she really deserves better than the friends and potential lovers she’s got provides a throughline that anchors the film, and elevates it above Metropolitan. While Alice can hold her own in the crossfire of Stillman’s dialogue (that’s her line I’ve quoted above), she often chooses to mostly just listen. Because Chloë Sevigny is a remarkable actress who can convey a lot through just the way her character listens, we never miss how Alice is always key to a scene, even if she’s being quieter than everyone else. She is the character the audience can latch onto. This character arc I really cared about, the consistent intelligent humor, and the sincere appreciation of the disco scene combined to make a film I thought was truly great.

“Oh, shootings, yes. But that doesn’t mean Americans are more violent than other people. We’re just better shots.”

Doubling back, I visited Stillman’s second film, Barcelona. Though set in Spain, it is still about a specific type of American life, as well as the way the outside world sees America—both in general, and at this specific time, as the Cold War is ending. Ted (Taylor Nichols) is a salesman of some sort stationed in Barcelona for his Chicago-based company, and he takes his job and the philosophy of sales quite seriously. His cousin Fred (Chris Eigeman), a Navy officer and world-class freeloader, shows up to stay for a while. He’s apparently on assignment scouting out the area for an upcoming shore leave. This may sound like a fairly cushy gig, but Fred is the type who will always manage to get into trouble. Incapable of maintaining a low profile or keeping his mouth shut, he soon has many lefty-types angry at him and has deeply complicated Ted’s already struggling social life. Eigeman is a master at playing this type of sincerely obnoxious character, but it’s Nichols’s earnest and committed Ted that holds the film together.

Barcelona doesn’t work quite as well as Stillman’s Metropolitan or The Last Days of Disco, because as it nears its end it seems to lose the sense of deliberateness that is felt even in the unconventional structure of the other films. The ending feels unearned. Its female characters are also comparatively undeveloped, representing ideas of what Spanish women are like more than fully-formed individuals. Actresses Mira Sorvino and Tushka Bergen do their best, but the point of view of the film is more about what the men think of them than what they want for themselves. Given the dynamic female characters in The Last Days of Disco, that was a disappointment for me. But it makes me all the more eager to see the decidedly female-centric Damsels in Distress, Stillman’s first film in 14 years.

Stillman’s first three films begin with characters surrounded by people they haven’t really chosen for themselves—the friends society and circumstance thrust upon them, or the relatives nature dictated. Through that, some characters will and some won’t succeed in forming more meaningful relationships. I’ll be interested to see if and how this theme comes up in his newest work. Whether or not it ends up falling in line with his earlier films or representing a departure, I’m very glad he finally made another film.