Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2020)

Score: 4.5 / 5

I know this was technically released in 2019, but it wasn't available widely until 2020, so that's where this is getting grouped.

Portrait of a Lady on Fire, the new French queer romantic drama, begins with a beautiful young woman, Marianne, teaching a painting lesson to a group of girls in the late eighteenth century. One of the girls asks about an old painting of hers -- the one that gives the film its title -- and Marianne becomes visibly upset. When it started, I was a little annoyed that the film would use such a crude framing device to launch its story, for indeed we are immediately thrust into the past. Just because it's old-fashioned doesn't mean it has to be archaic. But I was soon to learn that this perfectly sets up the themes of loss, memory, and value in a romance that ends not in a pairing but in a painting. Which would, ultimately, last longer.

Previously, Marianne was hired and summoned to a rocky island on the French coast in order to paint a portrait of Heloise, a young woman recently brought home from her convent. The countess, Heloise's mother, is marrying her off to an aristocrat in Milan and has commissioned Marianne to paint her daughter's portrait. The problem is that Heloise does not want to sit for a portrait; we initially suspect she may be hopelessly spoiled or even mentally ill, a suspicion strengthened when the countess describes the death of Heloise's older sister, who fell from the cliff on the isolated island. Suicide, murder, or an accident? We never really know. The countess keeps Heloise under lock and key now, and charges Marianne with memorizing her daughter's features while acting as her companion, and painting in secret.

It's hard to know where to start discussing this film because its peaceful facade belies a deceptively complex work that deals with, I think, unusual themes for a romance. Writer and director Céline Sciamma effortlessly floats between genre here, setting up romance, Gothic drama, feminist history, and even a comedy of manners, but keeping everything clear and sensual in each frame. Much as Marianne labors to capture the beauty of her subject, Sciamma turns every shot into a work of art that draws special attention to the empty spaces of rooms, beaches, and between bodies. Art is always intimate, but art that requires watching and studying other people is especially so -- even obsessive -- and when tied with the tactile nature of painting, it's easy to imagine transgression.

Here, we don't need to imagine it. Marianne and Heloise indeed develop unspeakable feelings for each other and finally act on it while the countess is away. But despite their romantic tension bursting into sexual passion, Sciamma doesn't dive into pornographic scenes (this is, thank heaven, not the deeply troubling French Blue is the Warmest Color from 2013); in fact, this film seems a gentle but firm rejection of that exploitative male gaze. In fact, Sciamma has seemingly made the film remarkably absent of men -- when they appear, they are out of focus or shown only in part, with one pointed and unwelcome exception -- and equally of the male-dominated attempts at period romances, lesbian or not. Near the end, we learn Marianne occasionally sends her paintings to exhibits under her father's name in order for them to be shown. So much of the film is wordless, caught in looks and gestures, and there is almost no music except during a witchy dance around a beachside bonfire in the film's climactic scene from which it takes its titular inspiration. This movie tries hard to surprise you in an understated way, one that silently grabs hold of you and refuses to let go.

Portrait of a Lady on Fire might be a manifesto of the female gaze, as Sciamma has declared, but it is also a consummate work of art that, yes, dooms its characters to a broken-up romance a la Call Me By Your Name. The final scene of both films nails that point home. But we also learn by the end a lesson about art therapy and the ways in which art, encapsulating memory, freedom, ambition, tradition, and of course love, is a creative balm that will last far longer than any fleeting romance. The painting Marianne creates reminds her of her valid feelings and memories. The experience of the film, for its characters and for us, is that of female solidarity, one that never panders to its 2019/2020 audience even as it comments on abortion, queer rights, gender inequality, inaccessibility to work, etc. But it is in the film's consideration of what Heloise calls "the poet's choice" that the film works unexpected magic: tying the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice into their hearts and minds, the characters make a breakthrough realization of the central problem of that story. Doing so, they turn their own story into high art.

The Red Sea Diving Resort (2019)

Score: 1 / 5

What a disaster. I can forgive a fictionalized account of real events. I can forgive a simplified, action-heavy story if it's important. I can forgive non-representative casting. But put it all together into a boring mess of wasted talent, forgettable plot, confusing filmmaking, and irresponsible storytelling, and The Red Sea Diving Resort marks a miserably low viewing experience during this quarantine season.

The story concerns a group of Mossad agents who purchase and operate the titular coastal resort in order to smuggle Ethiopian Jews out of the country and to safety in Israel. I feel embarrassed to admit I know nothing of the plight of this population of Jewish refugees in real life, however this film does less than nothing to educate me. In fact, I feel more bewildered after having watched it. There seems to be a vague Muslim threat -- the  but this bleeds into what appears to be less-than-casual racism in which a bunch of white actors portray the Israelis and black actors play either the victims or the villains. Accusations of racism are nothing new for writer/director Gideon Raff (who is a fascinating person but has yet to make anything worth watching, at least anything accessible to Americans).

The opening sequence makes my case for me. With no explanation or context whatsoever, a bunch of Ethiopian villagers are fleeing gun-toting Ethiopian (or perhaps Sudanese?) soldiers. As they pile into waiting trucks, a mother cries out for her missing child, who is obliviously playing in a nearby field. Help her, Chris Evans, you're her only hope. Enter the hero himself, who grabs the boy and makes it to safety in the nick of time, as gunfire rips the air apart in his wake. Leave it to the white savior to save the little brown baby and get this movie off to a jump-start.

After some bizarre scenes of Chris Evans -- a Mossad agent who has returned to Israel to debrief with Ben Kingsley -- sleeplessly angst-ing about his friend and the other Ethiopian Jews who need his help, he is directed to assemble a team of avengers. Oh, no, I'm sorry, that's wrong. He gathers a group of other (possibly former?) Mossad colleagues and they go to the titular resort on the coast of Sudan, purchased for them by Israel. They plan to use the resort as a front for their operation: housing refugees and shipping them to an Israeli ship off in the Red Sea. It's all very Underground Railroad of them until tourists show up actually wanting to use the resort for... resort-y things.

Scenes like this that could be funny or tense are squandered by a truly confoundingly stupid screenplay. Characters describe each other and their situations, motivations, and explanations in point-blank terms, proving that the writer didn't think real people could emote or an editor could make sense of the action. What could be compelling characters become dullards, played blankly by actors who are otherwise beautiful to look at (Michiel Huisman and Alessandro Nivola can get it, to say nothing of Haley Bennett). Chris Evans proves again that he's a waste of an actor (excepting his turn in Knives Out), if a brilliant action movie star.

And then there's Chris Chalk, who is actually quite chilling as the movie's villain, because of course there has to be one in an action movie. A historical drama this most certainly is not. He plays a Sudanese soldier who torments the Ethiopian Jews waiting to flee his grasp with a menacing presence, but even he is undermined by Raff's bizarre storytelling. The film's midpoint is a lighthearted sequence of the Mossad agents revitalizing the dusty resort to better disguise their covert operations. It's inspired by a mostly naked Chris Evans waking up on a sunny morning and seeing the resort tenants doing tai chi on the sand before chatting nonchalantly with a speedo-sporting Michiel Huisman. It's funny and cute and sweet, feeling like it belongs in a very different movie altogether, spliced together in a retro montage underscored by Duran Duran's "Hungry Like the Wolf" (did I mention this movie takes place in the '80s? Because it constantly reminds you of that). It cuts abruptly -- and unearnedly -- to a scene of Chris Chalk murdering Jews while he interrogates them, a tasteless and offensive turn that pulls you so far out of the movie it is impossible to get back in.

The story might be wonderful, but I need to look up the historical record. This movie taught me nothing about what really happened. It turns real-life heroes into caricatures, and then attempts to make them into action movie heroes. It's not memorable, educational, inspiring, or even entertaining. Well, except the beautiful white heroes in their beach-wear.

Clemency (2019)

Score: 5 / 5

Perhaps the greatest cinematic tragedy of 2019 is that this movie was not widely released and its was all but ignored during awards season. Clemency tells the powerful story of the dangerous balance of a woman's soul whose duty is to watch over the incarcerated and put them to death. Few movies have the conviction or clarity of vision to attempt a character-driven drama about an executioner, and even fewer find a starring actor able to carry that weight with insight, honesty, and dignity. And then there was Alfre Woodard.

She plays Bernadine, warden of death row, who at the start oversees her twelfth execution. In a chilling opening sequence, the procedure is clinical and cold, almost silent in cool efficiency, with Bernadine hovering nearby like the Angel of Death. She simply watches, but it's clear she's in control of the situation; until, that is, the execution goes horribly wrong. The camera and editing views it all with a level, uncaring method we're meant to experience in terms of the rigid institution; it's hard, too, not to equate Bernadine with the almost sociopathic lack of humanity as blood spurts and the dying man writhes and she calmly controls the increasingly worried staff. This technique forces us into the atmosphere of traumatic, emotional horror we'll be experiencing over the next two hours.

And yet, from the outset, writer/director Chinonye Chukwu makes sure we know that, mechanically routine as Bernadine has become, she is not without hope of redemption. The opening sequence shows her walking down the hall of death row alone, and the barred gate shuts behind her in the foreground. She is as imprisoned as her wards, and her home life does little to help her fractured state of mind. She bolts upright in the night and cannot explain her emotional torture to her husband (Wendell Pierce); he tries to rekindle some affection and romance but is repeatedly rebuffed (she even recoils from his touch in one scene). Little wonder that she has probably had an affair with her deputy (Richard Gunn), an otherwise standard melodramatic turn that is expertly handled by Woodard's impossibly beautiful ability to nonverbally tell an entire backstory with a shrug, a smile, and those big wandering eyes. We get the idea that she is trying to protect her husband from the horrors of her reality, but she cannot communicate that to him. She tells him, "I am alone and no one can fix it," and we're not sure if she's articulating her soul to him or if she's reciting her self-imposed duty.

This revelation allows us to understand Bernadine's character as a double for the central character in this stage of her life. Anthony Woods (an amazing Aldis Hodge), imprisoned for a homicide years before, at first seems to be the plot device that fuels this otherwise static character drama. It is telling that both characters are black, and though little is made of race in this movie, there is a fundamental horror to the reality of black men automatically and unjustly shipped to prison for lengthy terms. Doubtless, part of Bernadine's tormented experience in this movie is due to her attempted justification of her complicity in his terminal punishment. Further, as Woods's tired, aging lawyer (Richard Schiff) continues to recite, there is plenty of reasonable doubt in his client's case. Woods is very probably innocent, and so the film focuses not on legal details but on his profound optimism: he decorates his cell with drawings of birds flying to safety in an image that reminded me immediately of To Kill a Mockingbird.

And yet the tragedy of his doom breaks him first, and we see him weeping and in the throes of shock as Bernadine coldly describes his impending death. She's just doing her duty as she asks him what he wants for his final meal and which family members should have access to claim his remains, impossible questions no human should have to ask, much less answer. And then, in a brief and shattering scene, he meets with his estranged wife (Danielle Brooks), who is also framed in such a way that suggests her own imprisonment. This scene contextualizes, for the first time, Woods as he was a free man, as he is a captive, and as he will (hopefully) be remembered. His legacy, though won't only be with his son but with the crowds of protesters outside his jail, people he cannot and will never see but who are using him to fuel their righteous rage.

In the end, it's Woodard who steals the show as she watches over the state-sanctioned murder of Anthony Woods. In a grueling long take, we experience his execution through Bernadine's face and nothing else. We watch her heart and brain battle and her facade slowly crack. We can see the poisonous dosage being injected not into Woods but into his warden; the twelve prior deaths she has witnessed finally devastate her soul until it too flies away from her body as Woods flatlines. It's the iconic moment of death, but this time it's of someone who is still alive.

If this movie had been released sooner or widely, I'd have added it to my Top 10 of 2019 list. Give Woodard all the damn awards already.

The Silence (2019)

Score: 2.5 / 5

I tend to favor horror movies even when I shouldn't, and this one definitely tested my mettle. The Silence is one of those unfortunate flicks that has the right recipe, tasty ingredients, a few shocks for spice, and ends up collapsing in the middle. It leaves you feeling hungry instead of satiated. It made me want to switch over to another, comparable, movie called A Quiet Place; I did not, because then I would have been even more distraught over the delay of its sequel.

But The Silence is remarkably similar to John Krasinski's 2018 major horror success story. It features a deaf girl and her family -- especially her father -- fighting to survive in a post-apocalyptic world overrun by monsters that hunt using heir sense of hearing. This movie is based on a Tim Lebbon novel from 2015, so I guess you could ask which came first; the more crucial point is that Krasinski's film feels more intentional, more polished, and less problematic than this one from John R. Leonetti.

After a nauseating bit of handheld nonsense in the prologue -- a spelunking team opens a cavern filled with the monsters -- we cut to a teenage girl named Ally and her family in Pennsylvania. Ally became deaf after a car accident that killed her paternal grandparents; she lives with her parents, maternal grandmother, younger brother, and dog. Apparently the monsters, called "vesps", are so numerous, fast, and deadly, that they are quickly devastating the eastern seaboard. The government declares a state of emergency and orders people to stay quiet and indoors; the media goes underground before anyone really knows what exactly the threat is. Ally and her family decide to head out of town and into the less populated, quieter country.

Of course, the vesps follow them for unknown reasons (are all the cities destroyed already, driving the predators to more rural areas?), and we finally see them shortly after the family attempts and fails to travel off-road, resulting in the death of their traveling friend "Uncle Glenn." The vesps -- small, bizarre mixes between a pterosaur and a xenomorph -- swarm overhead, attracted to the sound of the car wreck and the dog barking, and in what may be the film's most tense sequence, the family sacrifices their dog and escapes on foot.

This is about where my interest in the movie faltered, for multiple reasons. It's annoying to have a hearing actress, Kiernan Shipka, playing the deaf girl Ally; it's nearly unforgivable that Shipka seems bored and uninspired the entire time. The plot itself dully follows suit with the many post-apocalyptic / road / monster movies that have been released in recent years with almost nothing to show for it. Stanley Tucci and Miranda Otto are utterly wasted casting choices, as they play the parents and are given almost nothing to do. And then there's the bizarre finale, which introduces the Hushed, a cult of tongueless thugs obsessed with abducting Ally to procreate with her in the hopes that her deafness will save the human race. At least, that's the impression I got. There is not much by way of explanation, and the logic at this point has been thrown out the window. The climax devolves into a weird home invasion that mixes The Strangers with The Birds during a dark and stormy night, and thank goodness the movie was almost over.

I didn't hate the experience of watching this movie, and a few moments were genuinely chilling. Leonetti seemed to be trying to make things work by adding a few grisly scares and some surprisingly cruel violence. But when all you want to do is move on to another movie in the same genre, you can't help but feel disappointed and annoyed at what might have been. If A Quiet Place is temporarily out of the question, Bird Box would be a viable option.