The best first. In HER, Joaquin Phoenix turns in a beautiful performance as Theodore, a lonely computer nerd, who yearns for the perfect other. He is not alone. In a gleaming Los Angeles landscape of plenty in the “near future,” all the characters, free of the need to scrape for the basic necessities, focus their attentions on achieving total bliss through love, but in vain. Material affluence has fostered commercially produced expressions of emotion; the adolescent craving that the beloved conform with every whim and caprice; and/or the unreasonable demand for an immediate guarantee of commitment. Theodore lives in a world of comfortable disconnection, earning an excellent living crafting “personal” letters for the many who have nothing to say to each other, which he too experiences in his own life.

Enter the OS lover. As if in answer to Theodore’s deep need, a personal electric called the Operating System suddenly appears on the market, a computerized artificial intelligence that “listens, understands, and knows you” and can be of whatever gender you desire. Theodore orders the OS of his dreams, calls her Samantha (Scarlett Johansson’s voice), and experiences a bliss he has never previously known. “She” is literally made for him, and she continues to strive to be even better at her job. Soon, everyone has an OS and the streets are full of the formerly broken-hearted talking happily to their personal OS partners through white rubber earpieces that resemble Bluetooth gizmos. Indeed, existing marriages break up when people begin to feel that they pale in comparison with the satisfactions offered by the tailored-to-personal-preference OS.

It is unlikely that any first-time viewer will foresee what happens next, and the surprise is so exhilarating that revealing the ending would be criminal. Just let it be said that Theodore’s sinister reliance on technologically-generated intimacy does not lead to the demonizing of science or technology. Rather a wonderfully conceived plot twist yields a cathartic termination of Theodore’s narcissistic dependencies, as well as intimations of the limitless possibilities of the universe and even a potential experience of God, or whatever name you give to divinity. It is a thrillingly original film about love.

By contrast, Only Lovers Left Alive and The Invisible Woman both lionize love connections that many may see as blatantly contaminated by outdated gender dynamics. Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive is about the eternal love of characters antically named Adam (Tom Hiddleston) and Eve (Tilda Swinton), literally eternal since they are vampires. The pair spend their undead time commuting between Detroit, where they have to deal with Eve’s obnoxious little sister vampire, Ava (Mia Wasikowska), and Tangier, where they rendezvous with Christopher Marlowe (John Hurt), the Renaissance playwright, also a vampire, who is still with us. They drink boutique blood acquired through money instead of fangs; commiserate about American boorishness; and soldier on, making do with first-class airplane seats until they lose their blood suppliers, and Marlowe dies. In the last frame, they lower themselves to using their fangs in order to keep love alive.

Unlike Jarmusch’s last film, The Limits of Control, a brilliant meditation on time, space, and language, in which action is subordinated to frame composition, this is a sophomoric pastiche that mixes static and artful visuals with weakly comic allusions. Adam, in disguise, identifies himself as Dr. Faust to a blood supplier named Dr. Watson. When Ava is sickened by contaminated blood, Eve asks “What did you expect? He [Ava’s victim] was in the music industry.” Both vampire women are defined only by what they mean to the men, who are defined by their creativity. And all of them are parasites with a giant-sized contempt for ordinary life. Jarmusch expressed love for this project at his press conference, but can the man who directed such masterpieces as Dead Man and Ghost Dog really be excited by the denizens of these “cool,” claustrophobic sets, wearing wigs made out of human, goat, and yak hair, because Jarmusch wanted them to have a quality of animality? Some would say he ended up with taxidermy instead.

Finally, Fiennes’ The Invisible Woman, based on Claire Tomalin’s biography of a backstreet affair between Ellen “Nelly” Ternan and Charles Dickens, uses Tomalin’s scholarly cache as an excuse for sprinkling stardust over aging men who discard their wives in favor of much younger women. Told in flashback, the film ostensibly honors Nelly’s decision to commit to her husband and child rather than the memory of her dead lover, Charles Dickens. However, because Fiennes sets the screen on fire with the bogus perfection of Dickens (Ralph Fiennes) and Ternan (Felicity Jones), and because Ternan never tells her husband about her secret romance, her affirmation lacks importance. What the film really celebrates is Ternan, a failed actress, abandoning her own potential and opting for a life as the delirious servant of Dickens’ needs and then, less enthusiastically, of the needs of her husband. It’s shocking to see Fiennes stuck in retro mode. Even more astonishing is that Abi Morgan, who created and wrote the inspiring, hard-edged, clear-eyed television series, The Hour, would pen this retread of the old MGM weepies.

Here’s hoping for better in the future from Fiennes and Jarmusch. For now, best to stay focused on the breath of fresh air that is HER.

More next year.

This post is part of an ongoing partnership between the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Antenna: Responses to Media & Culture and the Society for Cinema & Media Studies’ Cinema Journal.

12 Years a Slave is a groundbreaking cinematic adaptation of an 1853 slave narrative written by Solomon Northrup, and memorably acted by Chiwetel Ejiofor, a British born actor of Nigerian ancestry. It is the first slave narrative to be filmed. It is also the first film about slavery in America to be written and directed by artists of African heritage—McQueen is British-born and of Jamaica ancestry and writer John Ridley is an African-American born in Wisconsin. It is not the first to expose the savage treatment inflicted on slaves imprisoned by the plantation system, but it may be the first to convey it from the point of view of the slaves rather than that of a sympathetic Caucasian observer. It appears at a felicitous moment, when it is most needed to remind us all what it means for the wealth of the highest social class to be derived from the oppression of another segment of the population.

At the outset, Northrup is a free man, a citizen accepted and valued. Despite the indisputable fact of the plight of other African-Americans in his time, his confidence in his own security as an American makes him trusting enough to believe that a pair of men who line their pockets by drugging free black men for southern slave markets are genuine when they wine and dine him under the guise of offering him professional advancement. McQueen likens him to Pinocchio being seduced by the promise of a life of glamour by the evil slavers in that story. Make no mistake, 12 Years a Slave is about a remarkable man, his ordeal (adapted from Northrup’s memoir), and the courage and intelligence he summoned in order to survive the vicious institutions of a racist nation. But collaterally, it also reflects the blindness of individuals to the big picture.

Black and white, northern and southern, all people are but pieces of the larger pattern of the toxic slave “industry,” which rules them despite their individual intentions and situations. The scarred bodies of the black slaves and their enforced separation from their loved ones display most blatantly the tenor of the times. But slavery also takes a toll on its purported beneficiaries. The best, “Master” Ford (Benedict Cumberbatch), lives caught between his sympathies for a persecuted people and his terror that acting on such feelings might threaten his own position as a plantation owner. The worst, “Master” Epps (Michael Fassbender), wallows in the culture of domination at the price of his being as a man, only able to express sexuality and brotherly camaraderie with his slaves. The northern abolitionists hold their breath as they arrive to rescue Solomon, after an equally frightened itinerant Canadian carpenter, named Bass (Brad Pitt), alerts them to Solomon’s plight. The plantation system is a confirmation of the interdependence of all and the disaster for everyone of a legal mandate to tyrannize a specific subgroup.

The Northeastern states, though clearly imperfect, shine in 12 Years a Slave as the Promised Land. But one of the many interesting mysteries of the film is that, because we spend roughly ninety percent of the time in plantation hell, “free” New York state also glitters like a dream floating atop a possibly more innate reality of pernicious greed. Solomon’s escape, leaving thousands still in bondage, feels like a cancer in remission that might recur unexpectedly. The most astonishing individual courage can never neutralize the acid of an unjust society, and that may be the most painful truth McQueen has to offer.

In All is Lost, another individual wakens from a dream of self-determination. The film is an ocean-voyaging American “divina comedia,” and a rebuttal of The Old Man and the Sea, a book that further elaborates on Hemingway’s bedazzled admiration for macho grace under pressure. In this film, hell, purgatory, and heaven are one and the protagonist’s confrontation with the ocean is a lesson about the perils of macho worship of elite, white American privilege and can be seen as an intriguing and contrasting companion piece to 12 Years a Slave. The film features only one character, identified as “our man” (Robert Redford). Fit and intrepid, he has the time, money, and inclination to intentionally isolate himself, and sail the largely uncharted Indian Ocean alone. “Our man’s” idyllic leisure, however, soon becomes as oppressive to him as Northrup’s abduction and evokes a different pervasive cultural infection.

The film begins like Dante’s epic with “our man” stating in voiceover that he has lost his way. It ends, like The Divine Comedy, with an image of salvation. In between, “our man” fights the ocean encroaching on his yacht, damaged by the flotsam from the wreck of a commercial cargo ship. He is a paragon of individual fortitude, Thoreau’s ideal individualist, a John Wayne of determination. But unlike in the American literature of self-reliance, this is not enough. Once “our man” is cut off from others, hope rests only in the re-establishment of connection. McQueen’s vision of the tragic cultural invention of a black slave population is complemented by Chandor’s image of the grandiose cultural fantasy of a naturally heroic white elite. American hubris abounds.

In the fourth and final installment, we watch NYFF take on love, and perhaps shed some light at the end of the tunnel.

This post is part of an ongoing partnership between the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Antenna: Responses to Media & Culture and the Society for Cinema & Media Studies’ Cinema Journal.

The film tells four stories. They all unfold against the stunning, mountainous landscape of provincial China that towers over the village through which Zhao San (Wang Baoqiang) a mysterious, predatory young cyclist, rides to attend his mother’s 70th birthday, and in which Dahai (Jiang Wu), one of the old stalwarts of Communist days, mounts a furious battle against the venal new generation of capitalists fattening themselves at the expense of working people. Sublime landscape also presents itself along the roads traveled by Xiao Yu (Zhao Tao), a pretty receptionist in an all-night sauna, to a rendezvous with her married lover and a brief visit with her poverty-stricken mother. It is visible also through the windows of the trains and vans on which the very young, increasingly desperate Xiao Hui (Luo Lanshan) travels to find work and a life for himself. The stories flow almost seamlessly into and past each other.

The opening scene sets the tone, as two of the four protagonists brush each other visually—the young cyclist and Dahai, the old curmudgeon—in the context of depersonalized violence and money that will characterize the film’s atmosphere. The cyclist is confronted by three teenagers attempting to intimidate him into giving them his money, and he guns them down ruthlessly, then casually steers his cycle past a tomato stand where Dahai and other onlookers survey a never-to-be-explained scene of mayhem: tomatoes strewn everywhere around a corpse. We seem to be in a lawless zone.

We are not. Law does exist—to protect the powerful and wealthy. As in this opening montage, the poor are battered and batter others and help never arrives. When Dahai bluntly confronts the corrupt officials of his village he is beaten bloody, and not a single objection is raised by any of the witnesses. Later in the hospital, he receives a financial reparation that, in the minds of the bureaucrats, closes the case. But Dahai and the film still have unfinished business. Human dignity is a living force for Jia, and important even if it comes in the form of grisly vengeance.

Without justifying murder in any way, Jia provides a mirror that historically documents the inevitability that individuals will fight back. As Dahai is on his way to punish the oppressive town officials, he wanders by a street theatre that has adapted for the stage an episode from the picaresque, twelfth-century martial arts epic, The Water Margin, one of the four most important works of Chinese literary history, about men who turn to crime as their only recourse in a land that offers them no justice. Fascinatingly, the epic has two different endings: one which rebukes the outlaws and another that accepts a circumstantial justification for their actions. Deftly, Jia embeds the enigmatic doubleness of The Water Margin into Dahai’s story. Both heroic and homicidal, Dahai is, at the same time, justifiable and culpable. But is he as culpable as his culture? Read on.

The stories of the cyclist and young Xiao Hui are less ambiguous aspects of a time of turmoil. Zhao is a thrill-seeking criminal, encouraged by the corruption around him. Xiao is an innocent victim of unbearable circumstances. The fourth story, though, the tale of the sauna receptionist, Xiao Yu, is Jia’s most powerful cry against contemporary mores. Xiao, worn out by her lover, his jealous wife, and the plight of her own indigent mother, comes to the end of her rope when two sauna clients mistake her for a prostitute. They assault her and, in one of the most memorable images of the NYFF, one of them strikes her relentlessly with a stack of paper bills until Xiao appears before us as an icon of suffering humanity under the tyranny of money.

Understandably, something snaps in Xiao, and all the pride expressed in The Water Margin atavistically takes possession of her soul. Assuming the posture of a martial arts warrior, she slashes at her assailant with a pocket knife until he lies bloody at her feet. She reports herself to the police, and is next seen after she has served her jail sentence, applying for a job to the widow of one of the men killed by Dahai at the beginning of the film. Her interviewer wants assurances that Xiao’s criminal days are completely behind her, but Jia is concerned with other questions, providing a new literary mirror as Xiao comes upon a street performance, this time of a 17th century opera called The Story of Sue San, about an unjustly convicted woman. After the street actress expresses the heroine’s suffering, her judge asks whether she understands the nature of her sin. Silence is the response and a wordless close-up of Xiao’s face is the film’s final image.

Jia brings depth to his stories of tension between culture and the individual by leaving open the question of Xiao’s sin—what she understands it to be and what we understand. This is liminality at its most provocative. With his literary flourishes, Jia obliquely indicts Mao for suppressing the arts, one of the few sources of illumination and comfort in times of disorientation.

Next week, in Part 3, we see NYFF go to still other dark extremes.

This post is part of an ongoing partnership between the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Antenna: Responses to Media & Culture and the Society for Cinema & Media Studies’ Cinema Journal.

Child of God is a study of of a rural Tennessee man named Lester Ballard (Scott Haze), whom McCarthy describes unconvincingly as “a child of God much like yourself perhaps” and Franco describes, also implausibly, as one of the dispossessed. This film never reaches the level of Ralph Ellison’s audacious novel about the isolated, socially ignored “invisible man”, who on the lower frequencies speaks for all of us. Unlike Ellison’s hero, Ballard has neither linguistic skills nor the ability to experience the otherness of either fellow human beings or nature. He is nothing more than a mass of clamoring urges. Nor is he the victim of social injustice in any ordinary sense of the term. True, he is an orphan too poor to claim his family’s land. But it is not his poverty that is at issue, but rather his extraordinarily chaotic energy that renders him incapable of mounting any kind of struggle to keep what is his, or to reach out for personal connection. And Ballard has as few links to nature in his mountain environment as to society. Haunting abandoned shacks, he mutters incoherently or howls meaninglessly, lacking not only human articulation but also the meaningful music of the wild. He is neither human nor animal. But Ballard does force us to examine our concept of the human, just as the train of events in the film prompt examination of the concept of story.

Franco gives us only a drifting sequence of the protagonist’s attempts to immediately satisfy his urges, which become ever more dangerous, as he discovers necrophiliac sex and turns into a threat to the local lovers’ lanes, a development that leads to nowhere. McCarthy’s book ends with Ballard’s ultimate incarceration in an appropriate institution. However, Franco’s film ends with the suggestion that Ballard will rampage on, unconstrained by the oddly incapable backwoods police and vigilante groups who seem helpless before his unfathomable anarchy. Scott Haze portrays Ballard with a dedicated abandonment of himself to the role, but to what end? Perhaps Franco is legitimately exploring the expression of the formerly inexpressible in all of us. Or perhaps he has indulged an aspect of the imagination that is pointlessly nihilistic, alien to human experience at any level.

Abuse of Weakness provokes similar questions, albeit about a very different kind of being. Isabel Huppert turns in a brilliant performance as Maud Schoenberg, Breillat’s alter ego. Maud is not an inchoate mass of spasms, but a highly articulate and cultivated woman, or she was; her stroke causes the structure of her self to thin out perilously close to the vanishing point. Breillat’s directorial choices force the audience to engage Maud’s disintegration without benefit of an authorial constructed context by means of which to understand the protagonist’s predicament. We never see Maud before the trauma. There is no way to for us to compare her at her best to what has become of her in her compromised form. We only glean that she has been successful and is rich. The film plunges us immediately into the terrifying stroke and then jumps a year to the final phase of her recovery. For a long time, it seems to validate Maud’s belief that as she improves physically, she is also moving into a new creative phase of her work and is making a movie with Vilko Piran (Kool Shen), a thuggish con man she discovers on a television talk show who she insists offers artistic possibilities that professional actors cannot.

But despite Maud’s enthusiastic talk about her new movie, there is no evidence of any production, just the progress of her odd relationship with Vilko that involves the dissipation of her fortune, not because he bilks her of her financial resources—though this is what he intends. Maud doesn’t give him a chance to demonstrate his skills as a con artist. Rather, she foists her money on him for no discernible reason. Here, as in Child of God, the events do not add up to a story. Instead, we have the convoluted logic of a mind unhinged by catastrophic physical circumstances. At the end, as Maud’s resources are depleted and she still unclear about what has happened to her, she experiences merely a minimal level of introspection at last. “It was me,” she says, “but it was not me.”

Breillat has rendered the invisible palpable, rather than visible. We have felt the experience of Maud’s illogic, which is certainly an artistic achievement. But has Breillat shed any light through fostering audience engagement with Maud in extremis? Or is this depiction of a break with reality in which the audience also loses its way an imaginative dead end?

Child of God and Abuse of Weakness both dissolve the structures of fiction. There are no characters or events as we usually think of them. These are risks that justify attention. But as they push cinema into a liminal place, some may say they don’t reward that attention with very many satisfactions.

In Part 2, we examine a very different, equally bold, and arguably more fruitful challenge to limits.

This post is part of an ongoing partnership between the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Antenna: Responses to Media & Culture and the Society for Cinema & Media Studies’ Cinema Journal.