Quick Takes: March, 2022

Michelle Pfeiffer and Susan Coyne in French Exit

Scott Cooper's Antlers is a lugubrious horror film with little originality or invention. Hot button issues like opioid addiction, methamphetamine abuse, child abuse, environmental degradation, and native American genocide are trotted out for virtue signaling in the first half hour and then dropped like a hot potato when the monster starts eviscerating the gifted cast. A waste of time and talent. 

M. Night Shyamalan's Old is a typically high concept project that provides diminishing returns as it unfolds. By the time we have reached the inevitable final reveal, Old has long since exhausted its possible permutations. The film looks good and is intelligently constructed, but the performances are subpar for a Shyamalan film. The leads, Gael Garcia Bernal and Vicky Krieps, are well matched solely by their ESL deficiencies. Only Rufus Sewell is aptly cast and believable.

Azazel Jacobs' French Exit is a more than fine adaptation of Patrick deWitt's sly and knowing novel. Lucas Hedges, Imogen Poots, and Susan Coyne win the acting laurels. The only fly in the ointment is that Michelle Pfeiffer is merely serviceable as the broke socialite pondering her own demise. Pfeiffer does well portraying her character's pain, but cannot manage her character's delusional grandiosity.

Jonathan Nossiter's Last Words is a post-apocalyptic head scratcher that goes nowhere slowly. Nick Nolte, Stellan Skarsgard, and Charlotte Rampling are among those stranded in a scenario that is unbelievably mushy for a take on the annihilation of our species. 

There is a good yarn at the heart of Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Wife of a Spy, but it is hampered by some very dull filmmaking. Kurosawa's camera setups are obvious in an objectivist fashion and his blocking is overly languorous. Spy films should be a bit more exciting than this one, I think. Yu Aoi is good in the title role and I especially liked lanky Masahiro Higashide's underplaying. Kurosawa can't seem to decide if this is supposed to be a melodrama or a suspense film.

I much more appreciated the subjective power of Blerta Basholli's Hive in which sympathetic direction conveys the emotional toll of the heroine's plight. Yilka Gashi plays Fahrije, a woman struggling to make ends meets after the disappearance and presumed death of her husband during the war in Kosovo. Fahrije must cope with the festering psychological wounds of the conflict and the misogyny that greets a single woman fending for herself and her family. Despite its tale of woe, Hive has a narrative momentum totally lacking in Wife of a Spy. As in Oregon novelist Eileen Garvin's The Music of Bees, beekeeping becomes an act of both economic survival and spiritual regeneration. Fahrije, through necessity, becomes an entrepreneur, selling not only honey, but also ajvar, a pepper relish. The hive is not only where the bees work, but the social network humans need to survive.

Yilka Gashi in The Hive