Change Your Image
cheekylix
Ratings
Most Recently Rated
Lists
An error has ocurred. Please try again*All lists are not final.
Reviews
Aftersun (2022)
But that was just a dream... just a dream
Sophie (Frankie Corio) looks up at dad, Calum (Paul Mescal), who was sitting besides her, as the cyan seawater splashes an unnamed Turkish shore. They are near-naked and facing backwards. Their faces were hidden, and no words were spoken. Before long, she turns her attention away to the water, which fills up the rest of the frame, leaving no room for the horizon.
For her, the ocean is a place of wonder and merry, like the pools and water parks at the resort. Water is joy, a reminder of life. For Calum, it is deep, and gravely so. Trying to save something sinking into its abyss could mean killing oneself with the mounting hydrostatic pressure - there will eventually reach a point when going back up would be more futile than keep diving down. It is in this hopeless struggle for certain things sunk and the uncertain things in a very blurry hereafter that Calum finds himself in danger of being devoured, torn apart by gravity. Knowing that, he would still try. He has no choice.
This shot on the beach stays for roughly 19 seconds. We could see Calum gazing out into the vastness, silent. It was his birthday, and we could hear the sea waves coming, and then going.
Aftersun is the greatest film of 2022. Up until the end, what's been shown tricks the audience into thinking that it's a coming-of-age drama. By the end, the bits and pieces that may have otherwise been a disjointed venture into a father-daughter relationship will have now been sown with a new emotional thread that links everything together. It's one of those films that only works when viewed as a whole.
The film's setting is both familiar and foreign enough to let itself works its magic. Being on the other side of the continent from Sophie's home in Edinburgh, the Turkish resort is filled with people of the same Scottish accent and skin tone. Likewise, the late-1990s (early-2000s?) time setting feels so distant that it's hard not to bump your head into a phone booth every few hundred yards, yet modern enough to wiggle your way through "Macarena" with a Girl Talk issue in your hands. It's an old print photograph, taken in the moment, gradually becoming clearer with time, almost as real as a dream. In crafting it, Charlotte Wells invents her own flavor of poetic grief.
The story follows Sophie on a summer trip to Turkey, to the company of her father Calum. We follow them through small incidents and little encounters that give us a rough picture of what it's like to recollect the distorted memories encoded by a different person that once possessed your body and mind. At some point, our past, our memories, become a sort of an abyss, so impenetrable, almost to an extent that's disturbing.
Wells is said to have not given much thought to the titling, but the techno-psychological implication of 'aftersun' is nonetheless striking. The digital home video medium had seen better days. Taking place during its heyday, it was, at first, a learning experience for the young Sophie at a time when she was caught in the crossfire of youth and puberty, as well as a sort of coping mechanism for Calum and the adult Sophie (Celia Rowlson-Hall), both pendulums between the past and the future, lost in grief and depression, similar to how aftersun is used to 'soothe sunburn and avoid peeling'. A shared feature between the two is that they are shared; the only difference being that aftersun relies more on a sharing of flesh between two intimates than a mere sharing of sight and sound. And this may be the key to understand the emotional sensibility of the film: it transcends beyond the medium, and embraces the process of healing between the two main characters when they complement each other, physically and emotionally. Through the constant sound cues of breathing and baby crying, we're reminded of the flat fact of our biological humanity. And in such juxtapositions as a chainsmoker practicing tai-chi, we see our divided selves projected naked onto screen, one trying to give up, while the other desperately fighting back. We understood, when the characters try to hide their faces away from the camera (or vice versa), and change the topic of the conversation. It makes us cry on the inside, when the ordinary innocence leaks through the screen and strikes a chord with our own sense of loss.
Taking inspiration from her own life, Wells shows extraordinary talent in the craft of imagery despite the work being her feature debut. As it turns out, that which is the personal always comes handier should its author chooses to tell it. The imaginative capital required for the positioning and the montaging to strike our psychological fibers is already there, and all that's required is to find the ways to execute that particular vision. You see it in shots that were so designed as to capture exquisitely a psychological propensity for avoidance and suppression. Things that are uneasily understood, yet explicitly implied, are expressed to us without us seeing the speakers or hearing their voices. They cry out 'DEPRESSION' without making a sound.
As for the ending... I'm not quite sure what to say, but not for fear of spoiling. I guess the feeling that it left me with can be best summarized as a quote I remember from one of the final pages of a graphic novel I read a while back:
"There came an understanding so large, it left no room for sanity."
It's a simple two shots put-together to make it look like a 360° pan. It takes only about one or two minutes, implying something of a mass that a world can not bear. It's something which our emotional instinct registers clearly and immediately, but that the conscious mind needs time to process, given the sheer weight of such a realization (if you know, you know). It's not that it left me silently sobbing in my seat at a point when I least expected it, so much as that I couldn't even begin to gather what it was that triggered me. I don't get teary easily, much less so inexplicably. This, I think, is what film can communicate so well that when you begin to rationalize it with language, the power of feeling that it gives suddenly dies off. It's exactly like what A. O. Scott wrote in the New York Times: "Wells, with the unaffected precision of a lyric poet, is very nearly reinventing the language of film, unlocking the medium's often dormant potential to disclose inner worlds of consciousness and feeling."
Written and directed by Charlotte Wells; produced by Adele Romanski, Amy Jackson, Barry Jenkins (Moonlight, If Beale Street Could Talk), and Mark Ceryak; cinematography by Gregory Oke; edited by Blair McClendon; the music is Oliver Coates. Distribution: A24 (U. S.), and Mubi (UK).
Oppenheimer (2023)
An originally-sinned masterpiece
During the Cuban missile crisis, the crew onboard B-59, one of the four Foxtrot-class Soviet submarines sent to waters around Cuba, had been out of contact with Moscow for days. Infrequently picking up civilian radio transmissions, the nuclear-armed submarine was too deep to be in sync with the outside world, to know if war had already been broke out, as it's been busy hiding from American naval pursuers. Captain Savitsky and the Political Officer Maslennikov, risking the chance that a war had already begun, decided to launch a nuclear torpedo, the authorization of which normally requires only the confirmations from the two officers. The launch, according to military estimates, would have caused a chain reaction, resulting in a thermonuclear conflict destroying the better parts of the northern hemisphere. With reputations preceding him, Executive Officer Vasily Arkhipov utilized the special circumstance requiring the confirmations of all three officers, objected to the launch, preventing the onset of nuclear war. Roughly 20 years later, a similar fate was averted when officer Stanislav Petrov at the command center of the Soviet early warning system Oko decided that the multiple reports of intercontinental ballistic missile launch were false alarms, disobeying military protocols requiring him to relay the alarms up the chain of command (at the likely cost of his entire life and career), otherwise leading to a retaliatory attack with unimaginable consequences.
These incidents were the closest that the world has ever been to annihilation. If not for them behind the scenes, we might as well be simply nonexistent. They also weren't what this film was about. But, upon learning them, one should have a different understanding of what it was trying to say.
What critics of this movie won't recognize, is that the hundred-million dollar project that puts us in the shoes of a man who can only be likened to either Prometheus, the one who brought life to humanity, or Shiva*, the one who would bring it to its demise, was destined to be flawed from the get go. Christopher Nolan, who also wrote the screenplay, had a hefty burden of balancing the different aspects of the theoretical physicist's life: by design, it's bound to overemphasize the science and the politics, because one simply can not exist on its own without delving deep into the other, thereby stretching the runtime even further. Art is not about capturing the different faces of a three-dimensional solid body on a two-dimensional plane (like Descartes wrote in his Discourse). In fact, it can't. The film wasn't trying to be a biopic, laying out that special someone's life story, dramatizes his achievements and downplays the parts that don't contribute to them. Nor is it trying to be a political documentary that confronts the horrendous and grotesque realities behind these doomsday gadgets (as a matter of fact, it barely touched upon them, unlike Mick Jackson's nightmarishly-realistic Threads, a film literally everyone must see). It's only a few peeks into certain fragments of Oppenheimer's life, those that when taken together help us define his ego, his resolve, and his ordeal.
It comes as little surprise, in a three-hour long picture with seldom time to breath, with scenes literally bereaved of an opening and a closing, and with imageries and sounds designed either like a ticking time bomb or a chain reaction (the real Oppenheimer suffered from schizophrenia, to Nolan's creative advantage), that the two female supports never got the chance to develop into coherent personalities and make a lasting impression, that the experiences of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atrocities were almost completely glossed over, that the covert trials against Oppenheimer himself was prioritized over the public ones against the nuclear arms race and the responsible parties. These are less flaws than byproducts of this sort of structural arrangement. Like the man himself, whose legacy is as self-contradictory as peace and armageddon, the distance between which now becomes the pluck of a single lower-rank officer, the film ipso facto fails to do justice to the humanitarian consequences of the Trinity Test (just like how the author behind the first atomic bomb did). Likewise, the picture, being about something with implications that only a few could fully comprehend (much less deal with), can pay no more respect to Oppenheimer's personal life than the field equations can to Albert Einstein's acquaintance with Kurt Gödel. Given these confines that came with the material, Nolan and his team did the absolute best they could. If Memento was the proof of his editing talent, and Inception was that of his creative talent, and Dunkirk was that of his directing talent, this picture should be the proof of Nolan's audacity.
Directed and written by Christopher Nolan, based on American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin;
Produced by Nolan, his wife Emma Thomas, and Charles Roven (collaborations on The Dark Knight Trilogy);
The cinematography is Hoyte van Hoytema, who has done every Nolan picture starting with Interstellar, also known for Let the Right One In, Her, Nope, Ad Astra;
Edited by Jennifer Lame, previously collaborated on Tenet, also known for Marriage Story, Manchester by the Sea, Hereditary, Frances Ha; the runtime was so long, the cuts were so numerous and temporally all-over-the-place, that she had to 'tighten the lug nuts' of the picture for its characters not to get lost in the shuffling process, and maintain the sense of continuity;
Music by Ludwig Göransson, known for frequent collaborations with Ryan Coogler (Fruitvale Station, Creed, Black Panther), advised by Nolan to utilize violin for the central theme, going from "the most romantic, beautiful tone in a split second to neurotic and heart wrenching, horror sounds";
The thunderous sounds were designed and edited by Richard King, a longtime collaborator with Nolan ever since all the way back in The Prestige, otherwise known for his work in Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, and Spielberg's War of the Worlds.
Visual effects done by DNEG, supervised by Andrew Jackson (Mad Max: Fury Road, Dunkirk, Tenet); it is claimed that there weren't any computer-generated effects, which, if true, should render the detonation scene all the more mind-boggling;
The production set designed by Ruth De Jong; the art direction supervised by Jake Cavallo, Samantha Englender, Anthony D. Parrillo; the set decoration by Claire Kaufman, Olivia Peebles, Adam Willis; the costumes were designed by Ellen Mirojnick (Wall Street, Fatal Attraction, Basic Instinct, The Greatest Showman); the make-up department headed by Luisa Abel;
The casting director is John Papsidera, who has been with Nolan from the very beginning starting with Memento; the result speaks for itself.
Nolan's daughter, Flora, made a close-up cameo in one of the incendiary imageries where she was seen disintegrated by an imagined nuclear explosion; a direct sign of Nolan's own worries about the future.
*Vishnu was the one who remarked the famous "Now I am become Death" line, but I suspect Shiva, the deity of Destruction, is more apt for my metaphor here than the deity of Preservation.