The Northman

Alexander Skarsgard in The Northman

Robert Eggers' The Northman is an action filled epic that luridly conveys the brutality of the Vikings. Loosely based on Hamlet, the film boasts impressive historic verisimilitude and a sterling cast. Eggers is successful in his attempts to evoke Norse spirituality and the Viking mindset. The sparse dialogue skirts the ridiculousness found in some medieval era film.

However, as with Eggers previous films The Witch and The Lighthouse, I found the core of The Northman to be a bit hollow. The film is an impressive technical achievement, but, beneath the gory spectacle, it is yet another revenge tale culminating in a duel to the death. It ain't Andrei Rublev, Marketa Lazarova or Valhalla Rising, folks. I was never bored and would certainly recommend the strong of stomach to see the film in the theater, but The Northman is a lot of sound and fury signifying little.

The Southerner

Zachary Scott and J. Carrol Naish

Jean Renoir's The Southerner, from 1945, is not in the top rank of his movies, but is awfully close. I would rate Renoir as one of the great directors along with Ford, Mizoguchi, Murnau, and a gaggle of others. Therefore, The Southerner, is an essential picture.

The Southerner is a rural picture much like Renoir's first American feature, Swamp Water. This genre  was in serious decline by 1945, ten years after Variety declared "Sticks Nix Hix Pix". My first exposure to hix pix were the Ma and Pa Kettle films, themselves a spin-off from The Egg and I, of the 40s and early 50s which I could not abide as a child. The hayseed humor of the films seem old hat to me in the 60s.

Beulah Bondi's Granny is the comic relief here and I found her performance, which rankled contemporary critics, to be hilarious. Like Walter Brennan in Rio Bravo, Bondi's performance is a riff on the stereotype of the crusty codger. It is an outsized act which is cognizant of its own ridiculousness. Contrast her work with that of Betty Field. Field is a competent performer, but her work here seems off. She presents her character as is she were the platonic ideal of a farmer's wife and the result is not pathos, but bathos. J. Carrol Naish is wonderful as the neighbor who lacks a communitarian spirit.

Zachary Scott delivers his best performance. His Texas accent comes in handy and he seems more relaxed than usual under Renoir's guidance. This was before the success of Mildred Pierce typecast him as an oleaginous villain and it is a bit sad to consider the downward arc of his career after Flamingo Road. He had an independent nature that did not make him a good cog in the Hollywood machine. Before his premature death at 51 in 1965, he was arrested for violating segregation laws in Louisiana and proudly sported an earring.

The Southerner's rural setting brings out one of Renoir's great strengths as a director: an ability to portray men and women as creature in their environs. Renoir shared with his father a gift for portraying the beauty of the country. This is evident in The Southerner, but so is the harshness of rural farm life. Indeed, the state of Tennessee thought it was too harsh and seamy and banned the picture during its first run. 

A good point of comparison is John Ford's work on The Grapes of Wrath and Tobacco Road. Ford mythologizes the land as a barren hell or a fertile paradise. While the two directors share a humanistic view of rural folks and their plight, Renoir presents a more naturalistic view of their environment compared to the expressionistic force Ford brought to such locales as Ireland, Africa, and Monument Valley. Ford's work is most akin to Renoir's in Swamp Water, thanks to the screenplay by frequent Ford collaborator Dudley Nichols, but there is a wonderful dance sequence towards the end of The Southerner that would fit in many of Ford's films. Ford held Renoir in the highest esteem and once attempted to remake La Grande Illusion. Both filmmakers in the 30s stood as exemplars of Depression era Popular Front humanism. 

Memoria (2021)

The 1.85:1 aspect ration foregrounds the background of Memoria

Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Memoria concerns a Scottish woman named Jessica Holland (Tilda Swinton) who, when visiting an ailing sister in Colombia, begins to experience auditory hallucinations. As in his previous features, Mr. Weerasethakul (who I will henceforth refer to by his nickname, Joe) is not particularly concerned with plot, per se. Rather, his cinema is an immersive one where Joe seeks to evoke the psycho-environmental states of his protagonists. This lands Joe's work in the realm of art cinema. Indeed, one of the more provocative threads of the film is the varieties of art Jessica encounters: installations, statues, painting, music. There is much to sift through in this film. Still, if you are a cinemagoer attached to storytelling, it might be best to steer clear of Memoria.

The film is a meditation on individual and collective memory. I just lambasted The Batman for its slow pace, but Memoria is a film that benefits from its deliberately sluggish rhythms. Most shots in the film are long takes that are framed at a distinct distance from the characters. Narrative momentum is sacrificed for a serene contemplation of man in his natural and unnatural habitats. Sound is equally as important as image in the film. A prologue, which contains Joe's design sketches for the film, is completely silent. This serves to emphasize the disjunctive nature of Jessica's auditory hallucinations. Sounds trigger both positive and negative emotional responses from people in Memoria: a bus backfiring, a jazz quartet jamming, fish scales being grated. 

Do these auditory triggers prompt an individual response or one from a collective unconscious? I feel that Joe's response would be "yes"; indicative of a refutation of an either/or schism. Memoria has many threads to be pulled that lurk below its surface whereas a film like The Batman is all surface. Memoria pictures how memory, the outline of a past that leaves traces for the future, imprints itself upon all sorts of matter: wood, rock, and, especially, the brain. 

Jessica's auditory episodes and her sister's illness continue the theme of sickness in Joe's work. Heretofore, these seemed to be particularly modern malaises in his films. In Memoria, Joe traces the roots of sickness to a more cosmic origin. (Attention: Major Spoiler Alert!) I felt that the introduction of an extraterrestrial presence slightly cheapened the film. I prefer the relative ambiguity of Uncle Boonmee... or Cemetery of Splendor to Memoria. I think that Tilda Swinton's lack of vulnerability, she is always an imperious presence, worked against the film. Still, I would urge those who value questing spirits in the cinema to see Memoria in a theater. Joe's cinema is both beguiling and enervating, but it is wholly singular.