THE MACALUSO SISTERS (A) - It would be difficult to find a movie as gorgeous and sad as this tale of five siblings dealing with tragedy at three different stages of life. Writer-director Emma Dante unleashes an epic tone poem about the sisters in Palermo, bereft of parents and ranging in age from tween to twenties, who keep doves on their roof for renting out to weddings, their main source of income.
Dante seeks to delve into the paralysis of families who get stuck in the past and their sclerotic traditions. Their grief -- tied to the death of the youngest of them during a day at the beach (and probably connected to whatever happened to their parents) -- haunts them in the form of little Antonella (Viola Pusateri), who continues to appear in her sisters' visions, having never aged beyond girlhood. Dante takes us to a second phase in time, when the survivors are relatively young adults, bickering over the house, as another of them announces a cancer diagnosis. Finally, she jumps forward to old age, when only two are around to bury a third.
The two the younger middle sisters are not fleshed out much (one is a bookworm; the other is homely and lonely), and the focus turns to vain Pinuccia, who is popular with the men, and melancholy Maria, a frustrated ballerina with lesbian tendencies. The casting is impeccable -- except for Antonella, each character will be played by two or three actresses -- and the aging of the sisters does not become a distraction but rather a selling point.
Dante is working in familiar territory -- the movie brings to mind the sister film "Mustang," as well as Sofia Coppola's "The Virgin Suicides" and the recent mood pieces from Eliza Hittman. She elides dialogue at times, going for atmosphere over direct storytelling (with an effective loop of Erik Satie's "Gymnopedie No. 1" ringing out at key moments). Some of the scenes -- like a playful, tender moment experienced by a young Maria -- can be suffused with joy, longing and a little dread.
Dante makes the steadily decaying apartment a character unto itself. By the end, that dwelling is weighted with hopes and dreams but pockmarked by bird droppings and faded wallpaper, a haunted museum. Dante unveils the fateful beach outing in flashbacks that reveal a little more of what happened each time, and she injects a montage-like scene at the end that plays out like a brain emptying its memories just before death takes hold, and the effect is both thrilling and anguished. Some heartaches never heal.
EL PLANETA (A-minus) - With a notable nod to early Jim Jarmusch and a bit of the Maysles brothers' "Grey Gardens," Amalia Ulman offers a deadpan take on a mother and daughter eking out their last days of grifting in an economically depressed seaside Spanish town. Ulman, a New Yorker from Argentina, once lived in Gijon, which hosts this cinema verite polemic touching on Ulman's common themes of class, gender and sexuality.
She stars as Leo (Leonora), a 30-ish would-be fashion aesthete who has bad luck meeting available men and is stuck with her eccentric mother in a flat with no heat and, eventually, no electricity, as the pair's economic reckoning slowly comes to a head. The women still put on airs and a confident face to the world -- Leo in funky fashions of her own creation and her mom, Maria (Ulman's own mother, Ale), in a full-length fur coat and designer handbag (convenient for carrying shoplifted items). They dine out on the tab of a local politician that Leo may have dated at one time. With little food in the house besides pastries, Leo whines, "If I keep eating carbs, I'm going to have a poor person's body."
Ulman shoots in distinct black-and-white, with long static camera shots and languorous dialogue reminiscent of Jarmusch's "Stranger Than Paradise." She uses old fashioned screen wipes for a corny retro effect. Her camera lingers on the shuttered businesses of Gijon, a town that apparently has never recovered from the 2008 recession. The women -- exhibiting that bittersweet "Grey Gardens" loopiness -- bicker over mundane household things. Maria likes to "freeze" her enemies by writing their names on scraps of paper that she places in the freezer. Leo, meanwhile, pursues relationships but can't find a man who wants anything but a side romp. (Her meet-cute with a blase shopkeeper (Zhou Chen) finds a real connection between the two actors.)
Ulman is endlessly appealing as she acts out a parallel version of her own life story. She doesn't lay all her cards on the table, and the pace of this 80-minute exercise can be a bit lethargic in spots, but she reels you in to the sadness and ennui of the mother-daughter team at this critical juncture in their lives. Ulman has a lot to say here about fourth-stage capitalism, and it's fascinating, not really knowing her history going into this (there's this profile focusing on Ulman's transition from fashion and art to film), to be introduced to her fresh voice.
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