Another round with our latest favorite, Renate Reinsve, then a truly bad new release, followed by a palate-cleanser courtesy of our favorite analyst of French kids, Celine Sciamma.
ARMAND (C+) - Renate Reinsve literally and figuratively stomps all over a slow-burn suspense film from Norway about a parent-teacher conference from hell, but neither she nor the workmanlike supporting cast can make this debut film makes sense. It drags its mysteries out to nearly two hours, about a half hour too long.
Halfdan Ullman Tondel -- the grandson of Ingmar Bergman and Liv Ullman -- pays homage to his grandfather with claustrophobic visuals inside a school and a narrative that is wrapped in several mysteries. Elisabeth (Reinsve), a harried and disgraced actress, is called to the school because her 6-year-old, Armand, has engaged in "sexual deviancy" with another boy. The accusers are the parents, Sarah (Ellen Dorrit Petersen) and Anders (Endre Hellestveit), who happen to be her in-laws -- Sarah is the sister of Elisabeth's dead husband, Thomas, who also had been a student at the school and apparently suffered some unexplained accident or form of abuse as a child.
Reinsve ("The Worst Person in the World," "A Different Man") bigfoots the sessions with administrators like the deflated diva she is supposed to be. The heels of her boots terrorize the corridor floors, and she wields an overcoat like a toreador's cape. She carries the film and provides a key centerpiece (excerpted in the trailer) in which she has an inappropriate laughing fit that devolves into maniacal sobbing. It's an extraordinary few minutes of cinema, but it's just not enough to make up for the fact that Tondel has a thin story that he stretches out interminably.
The teacher and administrators cultivate a fascinating bureaucratic subplot among them -- Sunna (Thea Lambrechts Vaulen) is the green instructor, Jarle (Oystein Roger) is the put-upon principal, and Ajsa (Vera Veljovic-Jovanovic) assists him when she's not dealing with bizarre nosebleeds. Tondel certainly has an appealing visual style -- he turns hallways menacing and crowds his characters into an intimate first-grade classroom. But his reveal is not very convincing in the end, and the expiation at the climax feels unearned. He could use a good editor.
HIPPO (D) - The less said about this creepy mess the better. The bizarre debut from director Mark H. Rapaport wallows in the breakdown of a broken family, in which the mother has lost her mind and the step-siblings have the hots for each other.
Co-writer Kimball Farley stars as Hippo, a socially stunted young adult partial to crossbows and video games as he celebrates his 19th birthday, and Lilla Kinzlinger plays Buttercup, his step-sister who was adopted from Hungary and who is eager to both lose her virginity and have a baby. Of course, Hippo is her top choice for that; but when he declines, she goes online to find a much older weirdo, Darwin (Jesse Pimentel), to come over for dinner and do the deed.
However, Darwin seems more interested in the mother (Eliza Roberts), who quickly gets tipsy and flirty, and when Darwin and Buttercup do end up in her room, things go horribly wrong. (Roberts' husband, Eric, provides clunky narration.)
It's not clear which parts of this are supposed to be funny, even if just a little. I did laugh at a few of the one-liners. But in the end, there's little humor, black or otherwise, to be mined in this depiction of disturbing mental instability. There's nothing amusing at all in home-schooled teenagers belatedly getting the birds-and-bees lesson from their mentally ill mother. Other things simply don't make sense; for example, if Buttercup was adopted years earlier as a teen, why does she have a thick Hungarian accent as if she just stepped off the boat?
Rapaport's effort here is as derivative as it gets; it is equal parts David Lynch, Wes Anderson, Jim Jarmusch and early Yorgos Lanthimos ("Dogtooth," "Attenberg") but not nearly as clever or thoughtful as any of those directors' efforts. It's just a bad movie.
TOMBOY (B+) - An early film from Celine Sciamma ("Water Lilies," "Girlhood," "Petite Maman") explores a gender-neutral child trying to fit in with peers after moving to a new neighborhood.
Ten-year-old Laure (Zoe Heran, above right) has a girly little sister and another sibling on the way, and when she meets new kids in the neighborhood, her short hair and stick frame read as male. As summer lazily winds down, she plays sports with the boys, and when a cute girl named Lisa (Jeanne Disson, above left) asks Laure's name, she identifies as Mikael, and everyone then assumes she is a boy. Her parent, of course, are clueless.
The final two-thirds of the movie follow Laure/Mikael as they walk the tightrope between genders, juggling family and friends. How do you navigate the swimming pool? How do you pee in the woods when others are around? Should she reveal her gender to the crushy Lisa? And what happens when school starts in the fall?
The freckle-faced Heran captures the innocence and confusion that dominate adolescence. Disson brings nuance to the concept of puppy love, and Malonn Levana makes for a pretty sophisticated 6-year-old as the suspicious little sister. Sciamma is a master explorer of the childhood experience, whether she is reveling in a soccer game or conveying the tenderness between siblings. The questions of sexuality in "Tomboy" are secondary to the universal narrative of a child finding themself.
No comments:
Post a Comment