Witness for the Prosecution (1957)

QFS No. 169 - The invitation for March 12, 2025
Billy Wilder, one of the American greats, now can add another posthumous feather in his cap – three-time QFS selectee. There can be no greater honor. We previously selected The Lost Weekend (1947, QFS No. 84) and Ace in the Hole (1951, QFS 136), and this week’s selection Witness for the Prosecution has been on my to-see list for a while now.

It’s a classic that’s been overlooked by me for far too long, and it gives us a chance to once again see Marlene Dietrich, who we briefly saw recently in Touch of Evil (1958, QFS No. 160) and will watch her at length in here. And also a treat to see the great Charles Laughton, all in Wilder’s capable hands. Very much looking forward to watching and discussing with you.

Watch Witness for the Prosecution and join us to discuss

Witness for the Prosecution (1957) Directed by Billy Wilder

Reactions and Analyses:
A somewhat standard question came up in our QFS discussion about Witness for the Prosecution (1957) that revealed a surprising result – had anyone seen this before? Only one person had, and that person is not a filmmaker and happens to be the only one in our group who is old enough to have seen it in the theater about the time it was released.

For a group of filmmakers who have a wide variety of cinema watching history from all parts of the world, many of whom went to some of the greatest film schools around – nobody had seen this Billy Wilder classic before. This would be understandable if this wasn’t a good film, lost in the dustbin of time.

The accused murderer Leonard Vole (Tyrone Powell) is questioned on the stand by the prosecution in Witness for the Prosecution.

Although released in the same year, 12 Angry Men (1957, QFS No. 81) has endured in the minds of filmmakers and the public in a way Witness for the Prosecution has not.

But Witness for the Prosecution is quite the opposite. Wilder executes a nearly flawless whodunnit with his typical firm direction with a cast delivering stellar performances. So why is this film not remembered and revisited in the way Some Like it Hot (1959) or Double Indemnity (1944) or Sunset Boulevard (1950) or The Apartment (1960) or even Ace in the Hole (1951) or The Lost Weekend (1945) are? The film is not outdated, not in a way that would render it quaint or old-fashioned. In fact, in that same year there’s another courtroom drama that continues to be regarded as one of the great films that has withstood the test of time, and that’s Sidney Lumet’s 12 Angry Men (1957, QFS No. 81).

Witness for the Prosecution is worthy of that stature as well, in many ways. Lumet’s film is a classic, real-time, single-room masterpiece so it’s understandable that it continues to be studied by film students and storytellers today, so it’s no wonder that legal drama has endured. Wilder’s film, adapted from an Agatha Christie play, is a masterclass in setups, payoffs, and twists.

Sir Wilfrid Robarts (Charles Laughton), infirm and told to no longer take complicated criminal cases, takes one he can’t resist – a man accused of murdering an older woman with whom he had become friendly. Leonard Vole (Tyrone Power), the accused, of course maintains his innocent and the case is thin with mostly circumstantial evidence pointing a finger at him. But why would he kill a woman who was giving him money and attention Robarts speculates, so the case seems pretty open and shut.

Charles Laughton is perfectly cast as Sir Wilfrid, a man with serious health issues and who always seems like he’s on the verge of collapse. Just as genius is the casting of Elsa Lanchester as his nurse Miss Plimsoll - Laughton’s real-life wife. The dynamic is perfectly suited for appropriate bickering and comic relief, and also a type of tenderness between them.

That is, until the newspaper shows up and it’s revealed that the murdered woman, Emily Jane French (Norma Varden) had changed her will to leave a huge amount of cash to Leonard. Well now the case is too much to resist and Sir Wilfrid must take it, despite the protestations of his nurse Miss Plimsoll (Elsa Lanchester). The police arrive at the law offices and take Leonard into custody.

Further complicating manners – and here is another great setup – is Leonard’s wife, the seemingly steely cold Christine (Marlene Dietrich). Christine, a German émigré, appears unphased by her husband’s arrested and accusation of murder, not wailing and sobbing as Sir Wilfrid said he expected. In fact, it’s not entirely clear whether Christine’s testimony on behalf of their defense will actually be useful in any way.

The enigmatic Christine Vole (Marlene Dietrich) presents a wild card for Leonard’s defense team.

All of this is a perfect mystery setup and it’s no wonder that enough people over the years assumed this was an Afred Hitchcock film that they would go up to him and tell him how much they loved Witness for the Prosecution. You’ve got a money-based motive from a man who vociferously proclaims his innocence. Throw in a mysterious femme fatale. Toss in some question marks about crime timeline and the couple’s history. Add an ornery lawyer willing to step into the fray, and there it is – the making of enough compelling elements and twists to keep us guessing.

So we, the audience, are led to believe – with some uncertainty – that Leonard was in a “relationship” with Mrs. French, much to the disappointment of his wife Christine. And maybe Leonard was playing the long game to get at her money to fund his flimsy inventions. And it’s revealed that Mrs. French spotted Leonard with a younger woman visiting a travel agency. All of this is circumstantial, though, as Christine had provided an alibi that Leonard had come home that evening of the murder.

The case seems on track with some wobbly uncertainty but Leonard hasn’t been pinned down with any hard evidence. But then a bomb is thrown into the case. Christine is called as a witness for the prosecution, not the defense. Sir Wilfrid voices his objection because a wife cannot be legally compelled testify against a husband.

The eponymous witness for the prosecution - the accused’s wife! But wait - she’s not legally his wife!

But wait! She is not his wife! Not legally. She was still married to her German husband and had misled Leonard. Or so we think! On the stand, she says that Leonard did it, that he came home with blood on his sleeve and confessed to her. Threatened with perjury, she stands by her story and says she used Leonard to come to England and leave post-war Germany behind. The testimony is devastating and crushes both Leonard and Sir Wilfrid’s case.

The accused cannot believe his wife testified against him!

But wait! A mysterious Cockney woman summons Sir Wilfrid to a bar and provides letters that say this mysterious woman’s husband Max and Christine were having an affair and they intended to frame Leonard in order to send him away to prison so Christine and Max can be together. The letters, proven to be authentic in court, provides enough evidence for Sir Wilfrid to sway the jury to acquit Leonard.

A mysterious Cockney woman presents Sir Wilfrid with enough proof to exonerate Leonard. Or is it?!

But wait! After the verdict, Christine reveals that she was the mysterious woman in a fake Cockney accent and stage makeup with the letters that were … fake! It was all a ploy because she really did love Leonard and though it’s true he murdered Mrs. French for the money, he can’t be tried again. Leonard, free, comes and embraces Christine for her perfect execution of the plan. Sir Wilfrid is actually bested.

But wait! A young woman, seen earlier as an audience member next to Miss Plimsoll, turns out to be indeed the woman at the travel agency with Leonard and they did indeed intend to take Mrs. French’s inheritance and sail away somewhere. This twist is incredible – it even shocks Christine who went through all the trouble to save Leonard from the gallows. And Leonard is matter-of-fact and transactional about it – you used me to leave Germany, so what’s the difference if I use you? Even Steven, as they say.

Who is this random interested observer sitting next to Miss Plimsoll? It’s the young woman (Ruta Lee) mentioned in the trial that Mrs. French had seen with Leonard at the travel agency - she was real!

But wait! Christine, devastated, grabs the murder weapon, still (oddly) on the evidence table, and plunges it into Leonard, killing him in the court. As Christine is taken away, Sir Wilfrid says – cancel my trip to Bermuda, I’m taking this case.

Husband and wife in real life playing what seems like a husband and wife on screen.

All of this in a tight less-than-two-hours runtime. And this is Wilder’s genius and perhaps also why he may not always get his due on the all-time greats – his directing does not draw attention to itself. His characters are terrific, his performances are legendary, and his camera work is subtle and usually enough to tell the story with the frame. His side characters here are terrific, as they are in Some Like it Hot for example – the suspicious Scottish maid Janet MacKenzie (Una O’Connor, reprising her role in the original stage production), is a scene stealer, for one. And the exquisite married-couple bickering between Sir Wilfred and Miss Plimsoll is even more delightful once you discover that Laughton and Lanchester were an actual married couple – a wink to the contemporary audience who would’ve enjoyed seeing the two on screen as “adversaries.”

Although it might not be remembered as immediately as other films of the era, several of us in the QFS group quickly found a modern comparison in Primal Fear (1996) in which Edward Norton’s character in the end reveals he was actually the guilty “Roy” the whole time, not the innocent “Aaron,” which leaves Vail (Richard Gere) alone, stunned, and defeated.

Wilder in Witness for the Prosecution could have ended the film that way, with Sir Wilfrid losing in the end. This would’ve aligned with his bleak ending of Ace in the Hole. But instead, the story concludes with Wilfrid not giving up, not retiring, and taking on a case that’s seemingly a lost cause. (Which got us wondering – does that case seem winnable? Answer: argue Christine suffered from temporary insanity.)

Leonard is stabbed in public with witnesses. Will this case be a lost cause for Sir Wilfrid. Find out in the sequel!

Witness for the Prosecution may also have suffered from the advent of television. This type of story, though still told on the big screen, becomes a staple of procedural episodic TV – everything from Law & Order to Criminal Minds to Perry Mason – for the next half century. Is that the reason people tend to forget or not revere Witness for the Prosecution?

Whatever the reason may be, it’s clear that Wilder’s unassuming style was ideal of a seemingly simple film with complexity lurking beneath. It’s also clear that Witness for the Prosecution should be remembered and studied for its writing, characterizations, and the simplicity with which Wilder tells a story on screen.

Christine wins, but then doesn’t.

The Seed of the Sacred Fig (2024)

QFS No. 168 - The invitation for March 5, 2025
The Seed of the Sacred Fig (2024) has been on my list since I saw a riveting trailer and have read a little bit about the film. Shot in secrecy in Tehran, this will be our second film from Iran, after the terrific A Separation (2011, QFS No. 49), directed by Asghar Farhadi. A Separation and his following one The Salesman (2016) both won the Academy Award for Best International Film, making Farhadi the only filmmaker from the Middle East to direct an Oscar-winning film in this category – and he did it twice.

The Seed of the Sacred Fig could’ve made Mohammad Rasoulof the second filmmaker to do so, but I’m Still Here (2024) took home the prize this year. Still, looking forward to seeing this our second selection from Iran (via Germany) - join the discussion!

The Seed of the Sacred Fig (2024) Directed by Mohammad Rasoulof

Reactions and Analyses:
The idea of Chekov’s gun – that if you see a gun at the beginning of the story you need to see it be fired later on – is what appears to be the initial setup of The Seed of the Sacred Fig (2024). The very first shot are bullets being dropped onto the table and a gun handed to its new owner, Iman (Missagh Zareh). Moments later, it’s on the passenger seat as Iman drives away, the camera tilting down to reveal it, overtly drawing out attention to the weapon.

But for so much emphasis on the gun and the thriller-style opening of the film, the gun ends up being only a very small part of the film for the entire first half – so much so that it’s almost forgotten, the way Iman inadvertently forgets it in the bathroom until his wife Najmeh (the incredible Soheila Golsestani) discovers it one day. She’s already let him know that she’s not thrilled with having a gun around. But what we don’t yet realize is that this is all a long setup by filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof for a payoff later on. What we learn later is that the gun is more than a gun in this present-day Iran – it’s a symbol. It represents state power, and Iman will be a proxy for the people who wield that power.

To get there, the filmmaker focuses on the very real protests of 2022 unfolding in Iran with women standing up to the country’s misogynistic totalitarian regime, refusing to wear hijabs and standing up to the very real possibility of harm and death. In The Seed of the Sacred Fig set against this backdrop, Iman, an investigator trying to climb the ranks within the government, discovers in his new role that he’s supposed to rubber stamp death warrants without really looking into their veracity. He’s not thrilled about compromising his morals and is caught in a bind, and Najmeh talks him through his obligations. This, too, seems like a setup by the filmmakers about a man with a moral dilemma.

Their two young daughters, one a college student, Rezvan (Mahsa Rostami) and the other Sana (Setareh Maleki), a teenager, are firmly in the crosshairs of the forces of change roiling their city and country Najmeh tells her children that they must dress modestly and avoid any hint that they are anything other than rule abiding because her father’s promotion depends on it – though they don’t know exactly what their father does. And besides, they’ll get government housing if he’s a judge and they’ll each have their own rooms.

But the forces of the world can’t be kept out because of social media. And here, the filmmakers are very inventive (perhaps too much?) with their use of real-life footage posted online at the time. The government was able to control their people in darkness, but with the light of videos and media, it’s a different story. Sadaf (Niousha Akhshi), Rezvan’s friend, is injured at a protest, shot in the face with buckshot. Secretly brought into their home, bleeding, Najmeh – despite very vocally opposing the protests and the women involved – patiently removes each pellet from Sadaf’s face. It’s a wrenching, horror-filled scene told in two close ups with the music rising, tight shots of bullets being removed cut with the mother’s stricken face, holding back tears. This is textbook in visualizing a character’s turning point – we see it in Najmeh’s face: this could’ve been her daughter.

She’s not all the way convinced the protests are good, but she knows that even innocent women – children – are caught in the crossfire. Later, the girls find out that Sadaf is taken away after she returned to college but nobody knows where she is. And Najmeh tries to get information covertly from Iman, without betraying that it’s someone they know for fear of getting him into trouble. She seeks out a family friend, Fatemeh (Shiva Ordooie) for information through Fatemeh’s husband who also works for a secret faction of the police.

And throughout all this, Najmeh’s concern remains mostly domestic. Her husband works too much and she pleads with him that her daughters need their father, especially now. He reveals that the arrests have escalated so much that he’s up all day rubber stamping guilty confessions.

Finally, the family is able to sit down and have dinner, but it leads to an inevitable explosive fight. The girls know what’s happening through social media, through the injury to Sadaf, that the people who might be injured are innocent and their lives are being destroyed just because they don’t want to wear the veil. Iman says they are misled by people with ill intentions, by women - whores, he believes - who want to walk around naked on the streets. The fight is vicious and ends with Najmeh firing back at the girls we finally had a dinner together and you ruined it.

All this time – the gun is not even remotely a part of the story. In fact, the entire QFS discussion group forgot its existence by and large except as an accessory carried by Iman. So when the gun disappeared, it truly was a surprise as much as it was a mystery. Iman can’t find it and Najmeh scramble to locate it. The children never even knew the gun was in the house, but they become Iman’s the primary suspects.

And it’s at this point the film kicks into overdrive and leaves the outside world’s tumult and brings it inside. Consumed by paranoia and fear of being imprisoned for his negligence, it’s a riveting next hour or so – in part because we really have no idea who could have taken the gun. Several of us believed he must’ve just lost it, which is set up nicely by the filmmakers as mentioned earlier when the overworked Iman accidentally left it with his clothes on the laundry hamper.

Instead of accepting that he could’ve possibly made a mistake, Iman assumes his family must’ve taken the gun. It’s unfathomable that someone in his position could do something in error, so he turns his ire and focus on the family. He makes Najmeh search the children’s room, turning everything inside out. She thoroughly searches the home and cannot find it. Iman begins to unravel and follows his colleague’s suggestion to have his children professionally interrogated by their mutual friend Alireza (anonymous actor). When you have your children professionally interrogated, you may have gone past the point of no return.

And in many ways, he has. The interrogator is certain it’s Rezvan, the college student. But she vehemently denies it. Further escalating Iman’s paranoia is that protestors have been finding people who work for the regime in secret and posting their names and addresses online – which is what happens to Iman. His colleague suggests he leaves with his family for a few days, is given a backup gun, and decides to go to his ancestral home. But before that, he drives home in a terrific sequence that showcases Iman’s paranoia. Everywhere he looks he thinks people are following or watching him. He looks over at a young woman driving next to him without a hijab and notices her small neck tattoo – is she one of these loose women, one of his enemies? A motorcycle seems to be driving a little too close – is that someone following him or is it just normal traffic? He gets home and sees someone on a cellphone outside their apartment building – is that someone keeping tabs on him, or is he waiting for a friend?

Iman is forced to experience life the way people without power live under the totalitarian regime of the country. The filmmaker has cleverly set this up throughout the film with echoes of Brazil (1985, QFS No. 158) or George Orwell’s dystopian 1984 as unavoidable comparisons. The state can turn on one of its own; no one is safe from the state’s mindless cruelty. And all of this seems like it’s going in that direction– a story about a man who is part of the system becomes a victim of that very system, leading him to question the system itself and his place within it, to perhaps renounce or even move to transform it.

That is not what Rasoulof does. Iman still convinced that one of his family took the gun and the final portion of the film devolves into a chaotic madman, unable to love his own family any more, becomes the cruel embodiment of the country’s leadership, still convinced that one of the three women in his life have stolen the gun. And in fact, one has! The one no one suspected, the younger daughter Sana. But Iman doesn’t know that yet, which makes for more suspense. After running two people who have recognized him off the road, the family arrives at the abandoned, dusty desert homestead of his youth where he locks the family in a room until they come out and reveal who has the gun. It escalates with Iman locking all of them in the room – except Sana who has escaped with the gun.

And there it has returned, Chekov’s gun, waiting to be fired. The final chase, though perhaps longer than it ought to be and slightly illogical, is still suspense filled and in a great location that evokes the longevity of Iran and Persia – something older than the mores of the current Iranian regime. Sana has the gun and Iman, who has another gun, chases her with the two others scrambling. I found myself wondering what is the desired outcome here? I don’t want Iman to be shot and killed, but I don’t want the women to suffer either. But what then? It makes for great drama that ends with Sana unable to shoot Iman except into the ground at his feet, where her father then collapses under the ancient sand walkway and is swallowed by the land itself.

Though Rezvan and Sana are Iman’s flesh and blood, he has become unable to see them as such in this final sequence, only concerned about his own ambition and safety. He seems prepared to kill his daughter Sana, even taunting her that she doesn’t know how to shoot. The filmmakers have chosen to have Iman embody the state – he is modern Iran’s government, unmoved and unwilling to bend.

It's a choice that feels like perhaps more symbolism than rooted in reality. Would a father actually do that? Would he forsake all of his memories, his love for his wife, seeing his children grow, all of their history together, because he’s been blinded by power and control? The filmmakers seem to say, yes, this is what totalitarianism does to ordinary people. Iman is the state and the state can only be eliminated, not changed – that’s what the director seems to be saying

Rasoulof can’t be faulted for any of these choices. After all, he’s been a victim of the regime for what appears to be his entire adult life. Much has been made about the fact that he filmed this movie entirely in secret over a 70-day period, and had to escape the country to arrive at the Cannes Film Festival for the premiere. So when we criticize the excessive chase sequence at the end or the imperfections in the conclusion of the film – aren’t the women now in even more danger and will be heavily questioned about the whereabouts of their dead husband/father? –  all of this might have to be taken with a grain of salt (sand?).

What an extraordinary feat of pure will to make this film under circumstances we, living in the West, couldn’t possibly imagine. Sure there are a handful of plot holes, including how did Sana know there was a gun in the house and where it was and how did she hide it during the search, but as a group most of us found ourselves easily forgiving much of this given the larger scope of the film and the extreme lengths Rasoulof went to make it.

His filmmaking is incredibly savvy, using real footage shared on social media with even a nod to YouTube as a way to learn about all things, including how to load and fire a gun. This element of the old Iranian overlords unable to contain the new information-laden world is a fascinating additional angle to both The Seed of the Sacred Fig and the true protests that swept the nation in 2022 and beyond. For Rasoulof to pull all of this off in a contained thriller, a family social drama, and a commentary on society, the film is an extraordinary piece of filmmaking – both creatively and production-wise. While everyone might not agree on the story and ideas contained within the film itself, it’s hard not to take inspiration from the execution and commitment to telling a story like this against all the unimaginable odds to do so.

The Brutalist (2024)

QFS No. 167 - The invitation for February 26, 2025
The Brutalist will be our longest QFS film selection, a full three minutes longer than Ben-Hur (1959, QFS No. 35). That’s right, this three-hour-and-thirty-five-minute nominee for Best Picture rivals last year’s Killers of the Flower Moon (2023, QFS No. 126) for length, coming at just nine minutes longer. I’m in for it! It’s time to separate the wheat from the chaff! Who of you will ride with me off this cinematic cliff into the great glorious unknown?!

And by that I mean – watch The Brutalist this week and discuss it with us in a civilized manner.

The Brutalist (2024) Directed by Brady Corbet

Reactions and Analyses:
We’ve seen countless films detailing the horrors of the Holocaust and mass genocide of the Jewish people enacted by the Nazi regime in Germany in the early 20th Century. From true first-hand accounts to artistic recreations, the depths of human cruelty and the bravery of those who were able to survive or help others survive have been portrayed in every genre over the previous 70 years or so. In fact, a couple decades ago, Adrian Brody, star of The Brutalist, previously played Wladyslaw Szpilman, the true story of a survival and heavily influenced on director Roman Polanski’s own escape from Poland in The Pianist (2002) a couple decades ago.

Rarely, however, do films portray what happens afterwards, how someone attempts to live after surviving such horrors. The messy reintroduction into society having lost everything but his or her own intelligence and wits. One of our QFS discussion group members brought this up in our conversation, that The Brutalist chronicles what comes after. And while the film isn’t any one thing, we discovered, the aftermath of trauma is perhaps the most predominant thread of a big epic film that lacks a clear single theme.

The film begins at this point, at the what-happens-afterwards moment. In one of the more extraordinarily beautiful shots from a film filled with them, the camera finds Brody’s Laszlo Toth in the dark, awaken in second sequence of the film. The shot is handheld, messy, with lots of people in darkness and scattering of light between him and the camera as a woman in voice over dictates a letter written to Toth. We follow him through the ambiguous space – is this a prison camp? – through the chaos and uncertainty, until he bursts through a door and light floods in as the brassy fanfare from the score explodes, and Laszlo, giddy with joy, grasps a friend and they celebrate in Hungarian, looking up. It’s an electrifying way to start a film.

Above the new immigrants, as if from their perspective, looms the Statue of Liberty, sideways. It’s an angle rarely scene, evoking the arrival of the Italian immigrants to America in The Godfather Part II (1974). But this is different – the iconic symbol of freedom is askew. Perhaps the filmmaker Brady Corbet suggests that this new home will be a complicated, contradictory place. Freedom, yes, but also hardship.

Throughout the film, there is a sense that immigrants and those on the margins built America, but what thanks do they get? They are Jews and are tolerated – a line overtly stated by Harry Lee (Joe Alwyn), the wealthy benefactor Harrison Lee Van Buren’s (Guy Pearce) son. Tolerated, but barely.

Laszlo and his cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola), hired by Harry to secretly rebuild his father’s library, are thrown out when Harrison comes home to find this modernist, minimalist room Laszlo created. Harrison shouts at them, berating that he’s out front with his his mother who is sick and comes home to find the construction mess outside and, gasp, a black man is on the grounds as part of the working crew. Harrison tosses the Hungarians out. But later, a fancy design magazine deemed the new library an artistic masterpiece forcing Harrison track down Laszlo to apologies. The wealthy American hires the immigrant Hungarian to build a massive monument and center in honor of his later mother. (A woman who wasn’t fond of Blacks apparently. If only could’ve known that a Jew is building a sanctuary in her honor.)

But even then, Harrison has to hire a second designer – Jim Simpson (Michael Epp), a Protestant to appease the community – as a check against Toth’s expensive artistry and to make sure that a Christian is involved. The “consultant” second guesses the Hungarian immigrant throughout and in response, Toth belittles Jim’s work designing shopping malls.

This is only one thread of the film, the experience of immigrants in post-war America, and interwoven with it are the power dynamics between art and money, between Toth and Harrison. Harrison, mercurial but seemingly supportive of Toth, funds his massive project that Toth designs. He even introduces Toth to his personal lawyer Michael Hoffman (Peter Polycarpou), a fellow Jew who helps Toth bring his wife Erzsebet (Felicity Jones) and niece Zsofia (Raffey Cassidy) to immigrate to the US so they can be reunited.

Even there, power dynamics take lead – the powerful and connected can work the immigration system because they have access to lawyers and are valued for their creations. But the laborers who build these buildings will find no such help. Harrison trusts Toth, but also knows he can never be loved or as talented as immigrant artist. He says as much to Toth in what is probably one of the least graphic but most disturbing rape scenes. While at the stunning Carrara, a massive ancient marble excavation site in Italy, the two have been drinking and Toth has been using heroin to feed his addiction. They’ve wandered away from a party in the marble caves when Harrison rapes Toth in a wide shot, silhouetted, without seeing the expression of either and only hearing Harrision’s tauns. The scene serves as an overt metaphor of exploitation by the rich that wasn’t necessarily needed according to many in our group. The film clearly shows Harrison having power over Toth and the wealthy exploting the artist was crystal clear already. This extreme act drives it home in a way that was both over-the-top and perhaps unnecessary. Nevertheless, it's part of the story – Toth is raped by Harrison, just as the natural marble of Italian mountainside has raped by humans for centuries.

Toth is an imperfect protagonist, perhaps permanently scarred by surviving a genocide, quoted by Zsofia later in the film as having said, “No matter what the others try and sell you, it is the destination, not the journey.” Apt, for someone who experienced what we assume he experienced, as we encounter him in this what-comes-after phase of his life. We find him addicted to pain killers and eventually heroin, with which he nearly kills Erzsebet by giving her too much to help her with the pain that has rendered her unable to walk easily.

In one of the many beguiling aspects of the film, here’s another one - is this entire tale told through the eyes of his mute niece Zsofia? The opening scene is her being interrogated by unseen officers, a character we don’t yet know and are unsure of anything beyond the questions being asked of her that she doesn’t answer. And in the end, a retrospective of Toth’s work in 1980 is being narrated by an older Zsofia now speaking fluently at the Venice Biennale of Architecture. There are several aspects of The Brutalist that feel frustrating, but perhaps the end is the most glaring. Throughout, I was curious why - why was this style of art and architecture developed? The answer is given to us in this Venice lecture, not visually or through the narrative of the film. Grown Zsofia explains that Toth and others from the Brutalist movement took the grim, brutal reality of the Holocaust, of the unfeeling grey walls of concentration camps, and repurposed it, filling spaces with life and hope as opposed to death and horror. He does to Harrison earlier on in the film, this somewhat thesis:

“Nothing is of its own explanation. Is there a better description of a cube than that of its construction? There was a war on. And yet it is my understanding that many of the sites of my projects have survived. They remain there still in the city. When the terrible recollections of what happened in Europe cease to humiliate us, I expect for them to serve instead as a political stimulus, sparking the upheavals that so frequently occur in the cycles of peoplehood. I already anticipate a communal rhetoric of anger and fear. A whole river of such frivolities may flow undammed. But my buildings were devised to endure such erosion of the Danube's shoreline.”

Would’ve been nice to have Toth actually, you know, display that artistry in the film. His eloquent explanation about the enduring nature of physical buildings aside, we are only told of the reasoning behind the Brutalist style in an overt scene expository concluding seminar. For a visually stunning film this is a decidedly un-visual conclusion.

The Brutalist is not any one thing. Epic in scope – perhaps worth watching for the score and Lol Crawley’s VistaVision cinematography alone – it seemingly is an immigrant tale. Or maybe it’s a story of art versus commerce. Or maybe it’s about the building of America on the backs of the downtrodden. Or maybe it’s about the creation of Israel, which pops up from time to time. Or maybe it’s all of those or none of those. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Films can be ambiguous, of course, and the filmmaker has made it clear in his public statements that he believes film should require you to think, to engage, to find meaning for yourself. And for that, The Brutalist definitely succeeds.

Nickel Boys (2024)

QFS No. 166 - The invitation for February 19, 2025
I know even less about Nickel Boys than perhaps any of the other nominees. Which is exactly why I want to see it.

Here’s what I know about the film – Nickel Boys is based on a Colson Whitehead book, who is an author I tell people I’ve read but actually I have only had his Underground Railroad on my list for nearly a decade. And that concludes my knowledge of Nickel Boys. 

Join us to discuss this blank slate of a film (at least for me) as we continue to watch the Oscar Nominees for Best Picture this year!

Nickel Boys (2024) Directed by RaMell Ross

Reactions and Analyses:
As a filmmaker, one of the most powerful tools you can use is the point-of-view shot. The POV allows the director to put the audience in the perspective of the main character or to experience the scene through one person versus the other. Whose scene is it was the most common question asked of us in film school.

At the American Film Institute, where several of us in the QFS discussion group attended graduate film school, they hammer home this idea, that the film is told through someone. Scenes, which may have more than one protagonist (or antagonist, for that matter), must still be told to someone. These rules can be broken, of course, but the POV shot is one of the important concepts that separates film from stage and other forms of visual art.

Being stared at from the back of the bus in Nickel Boys (2024), in a pure POV where the person stares directly at “us” - the camera, the audience, the main character. It’s unnerving and feels very real.

Nickel Boys (2024) takes this idea to the extreme. The film is told entirely through a character’s perspective, through POV shots, and never deviates. There are no shots, nothing we experience in the film that is not from the point of view of one of our main characters. Even the still cutaways or stock footage-like vignettes are the imaginations of Elwood (Ethan Herisse). If you wanted to split hairs about it, there are a few moments when we’re behind our main character, seeing the back of his head. But the effect is the same - we are living this story with him.

One of the only times we “see” the first main protagonist Elwood (Ethan Herisse), who is us.

Turner (Brandon Wilson) joins nearly half way through the film and becomes our second perspective. But there’s a reason for it that is revealed at the end of the film.

The “him” changes, though. What appears to be Elwood’s story becomes also Turner’s (Brandon Wilson) story. At first, this feels sudden and not exactly with any real purpose. The addition of Turner’s perspective begins when Elwood and Turner meet, now at the brutally abusive Nickel Academy reform school, in a pretty ordinary school lunchroom scene. After nearly half the movie as Elwood, we now experience the the film through two pairs of eyes, which gives us the additional benefit of seeing Elwood and Turner instead of only through reflections.

Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Nickel Boys seem exist in the same artistic plain.

Later on in the film, the real reason to add Turner’s perspective is revealed - they become the same person. Turner, who survives and escapes Nickel Academy, runs to Elwood’s grandmother Hattie (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) and informs her that her grandson Elwood was shot and killed in a field. Distraught, Turner and Hattie embrace which kicks off one of the most overwhelmingly emotional montages I’ve ever seen on screen. Intercut with black-and-white footage that feels like it’s from the slavery era, featuring White men on horseback hunting down “fugitive” Black people, we see old footage of a young Elwood, disappearing from each shot. One moment he’s on screen, the next, in the exact same frame, he’s gone. Blinking away, like a ghost, like he never existed. This all aligns with the terrible experience of Nickel Academy itself - kids would routinely just “disappear,” the administrators of the school claiming that the children ran away. When instead they were killed and buried and forgotten. I’m reminded of Ralph Ellison’s seminal work Invisible Man in which the Black first-person protagonist may as well be invisible by a cruel and indifferent society.

But wait - in Nickel Boys’ well-timed flash-forward sequences, aren’t we with a grown-up Elwood? Didn’t he survive? No, it turns out that Turner has assumed Elwood’s identity after escaping and surviving and traveling north to New York in the decades since his traumatic childhood at Nickel. It’s a remarkable and completely unexpected twist, but it also serves as a message about commonality and shared trauma. An absorbing of experiences between the two boys. Their unity after Elwood’s death is in a way making whole something that was severed and ripped away from these boys - a normal upbringing and childhood.

Hattie (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) embracing Turner, who will eventually “become” Curtis Elwood.

One person in our group brought up the unrelenting injustice of it all, and how it felt unfair and unjust - there was no way out. Especially for Elwood, who was hitchhiking and became an innocent passenger in what turned out to be a stolen car, ends up paying for something he didn’t do. Ultimately, paying with his life. While alive, he was the one attempting to expose the brutality of Nickel, only to have his life cut down by the very people running the place. It’s all incredibly unfair, and that’s the point the film illustrates. The injustice of growing up Black in America - specifically in the timeframe of the film, but also today. One scene in particular illustrated the filmmaker’s point of view on this, it seems to me. The kids are preparing for a sanctioned boxing match for the White kids of Nickel Academy and Griff (Luke Tennie) is their big fighter. Elwood and Turner overhear the head teacher Spencer (Hamish Linklater) tell Griff to throw the fight, to intentionally lose in the third round (turns out the White administrators put money on this fight). If Griff loses, the Black kids will be subjected to a year’s worth of ridicule until the next annual match. If he doesn’t, then perhaps Griff will suddenly disappear. He certainly will face truly brutal punishment, as was portrayed earlier in the film’s most truly horrifying sequence in which Elwood is tortured by his “teachers” in a sweaty room that feels like a slaughterhouse.

In the fight, there is no victory for Griff. He ultimately, accidentally, wins the match, and pleads with Spencer that he didn’t know what round it was, all while his classmates surround him in celebration. But in the center of their jubilation, he is remorseful and horrified. It’s heartbreaking, because we as an audience know what will happen to Griff - and it does. He’s “disappeared” and becomes one of the dozens who were killed an buried in unmarked graves, only to be uncovered a generation later with modern DNA testing and investigative journalism, including work done by (what turns out to be) grown “Curtis” Elwood (who was actually Turner).

The film devastated me, as I know it did for several in our group. Why, when other films have portrayed this era, was this even perhaps more heartbreaking? The answer lies in part due to the style of the film. From the very beginning, we see the world through someone’s eyes and only through their eyes. They (we, therefore) look up at an orange, dangling from the tree, in the first shot of the film. You soon realize that the film’s aspect ratio is 4.3, which is a square and not often used in modern cinema. But its affect is to make us feel as if we’re seeing something closer to natural human vision, not the cinematic widescreen movies to which we’ve become accustomed. This isn’t a movie but someone’s life and we are living within it. We’re actually seeing life through another’s eyes. And the initial images are the very details that stick in your mind as a child - close up on a glass, a glimpse of your mother as she leaves the room, the playing cards being shuffled, tinsel dropped down onto your face from the Christmas tree. Low angles, looking up at the world.

We stay in this perspective, never seeing “us” - the person through whom we’re experiencing the film - except in reflections, such as in his (our) grandmother’s iron as it travels back and forth on the ironing board, or a storefront window. This relentless commitment to pure POV, purely seeing the story through someone’s eyes, forces us to be in their shoes. Director RaMell Ross and cinematographer Jomo Fray keep us in this exhausting, taxing world with glimpes of beauty in between the darkness. And throughout, an extraordinary attention to the detail of life.

This is all to ask the question - is this the best way for us as a modern audience in the 21st Century to experience life in the Jim Crow segregation-era south, artistically? I argue that it is. Film is, if nothing else, the greatest empathy device every created. You live through someone’s experience in any film told well when using all the tools of cinema in a way to enhance the storytelling. In Nickel Boys, the filmmakers chose to mostly use only one tool - the POV - arguably the medium’s most powerful one to extraordinary affect. And the result is nothing short of an immersion, a disappearing into the life of one (two) boys who live through horror but throughout are able to find beauty, friendship, and ultimately, a measure of justice.

A Complete Unknown (2024)

QFS No. 165 - The invitation for February 12, 2025
Is A Complete Unknown this year’s Elvis (2023)? No, of course not, because for one thing, it’s about Bob Dylan and not Elvis Presley. Also, this week’s film is directed by James Mangold, who is a very very different filmmaker than Baz Luhrmann is so many ways. First, they spell and pronounce their names differently, which is how you know they are different people. Second, Mangold is an American while Luhrmann is from Australia, two entirely different places. And third, Mangold is about as mainstream, down-the-line filmmaker as we get these days – which is something that you wouldn’t say about Luhrmann. When you want a film that hits all the marks but might not push the envelope too much, you hire Mangold. This generation’s Chris Columbus (the filmmaker, not the explorer), or, perhaps, Ron Howard.*

Mangold, of course, is no stranger to big name music icon biopics, having directed Walk the Line (2005), the solid film about the life of Johnny Cash. That film earned Reese Witherspoon an Oscar for portraying June Carter Cash and a nomination for Joaquin Phoenix in the title role. Fast forward twenty years later** and Timothee Chalamet is nominated for Best Actor with Edward Norton and Monica Barbaro getting nominations in the supporting categories.

So let’s continue our march to watching all the Best Picture nominees and discussing a few of them between now and the end of the month! Get out to the theater and see A Complete Unknown and join the discussion!

*No disrespect intended. Hit singles and doubles consistently and you’re in the Hall of Fame.

**What?! Twenty years since Walk the Line?

A Complete Unknown (2024) Directed by James Mangold

Reactions and Analyses:
Perhaps it only has to be about the music.

This was a sentiment shared by a few of us discussing A Complete Unknown (2024). James Mangold, a solid, steady filmmaker, didn’t fall into the standard clichés of the biopic – including the clichés to which he was susceptible in his Walk the Line (2004) musical biopic two decades ago. In that, the roots of Johnny Cash’s music are explained. His childhood, his loneliness and drug use, depression and ultimately redemption – all of it captured as a cause, a wellspring for his music. It’s the “Rosebud” effect, a childhood trauma that explains an adult’s life.

A Complete Unknown skips all of that. We know very little about Bob Dylan (Timothee Chalamet) as he arrives in the folk-rock scene of New York City in the early 1960s and right away he spins beautiful poetry as he sings to his hero, the bed-ridden Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy). We don’t see Dylan being directly inspired by the world around him except for one civil rights rally he attends and current events unfolding in the background - but he must be inspired by the world because his music speaks to the time and tumult of the era. We don’t see his writing process or how he develops his poetry, but it comes to him and he writes it without struggle. He is a conduit from on high, the filmmakers appear to be saying.

And yet, the movie is enjoyable, pleasant, and inoffensive throughout. Perhaps all you need is (a) legendary music by the only Nobel Prize-winning American songwriter in history and (b) utterly fantastic performances by great actors. Without exception, the cast is stunning and the fact that they play their own instruments and sing is even more astonishing.

Narratively though, there is no specific central tension of the film. Dylan doesn’t struggle with depression or doubt, though he does try the patience of those around him. Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) and Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning), both lovers, both find him to be kind of a jerk (to paraphrase them). He’s not a tortured artist, but he’s a selfish one - an enigma as you’d expect from a demigod. Dylan expresses the belief that music is music, it doesn’t need to be put into a category or sanctified, which is how he finds himself up against folk music establishment, including his early mentor Pete Seeger (Edward Norton).

It's that tension between innovation and tradition that is almost at the center of the film. “Almost” because it’s not overtly the driving central narrative of the film, but an undercurrent that culminates in the well-known Newport Folk Festival in which “Dylan Goes Electric.” And here, the filmmakers attempt to create a dramatic conclusion of the film, exaggerating history for dramatic effect. Which is fine – filmmakers often bend real events to fit the narrative of a biopic. But the culmination, the climax is somewhat affixed at the end as opposed to building towards it.

And they can’t be blamed. With all of Bob Dylan’s music at the fingertips of the filmmakers and all the artistry and poetry contained in Dylan’s words, a film about his life and ascent to the apex of American music and culture doesn’t have to be more than a celebration of the music and a nostalgic portrayal of a turbulent time in history. The film only spans four or five years of Dylan’s life and we know almost as much about him at the end as we did the beginning. A Complete Unknown is, therefore, an apt title – he remains an enigma and the film doesn’t strive to demystify him. Music comes to him as visions to an oracle, it seems. A telling line in the film, one of the most effective, is spoken by Dylan after getting punched in the face at a bar and arrives a his ex-girlfriend Sylvie’s home. He says, “Everyone asks where these songs come from, Sylvie. But then you watch their faces, and they're not asking where the songs come from. They're asking why the songs didn't come to them.”

This is the closest the film gets to an insight or reflection of Dylan. Is the answer it came to him because he is sent from the heavens? It’s as plausible an explanation in this narrative.

One other scene gives us an insight into Dylan as a person. It’s the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis when all of New York is panicking with nuclear war possibly looming. But Dylan, instead of preparing to flee as Joan Baez is, instead plays music in the basement of the folk bar, railing against the idiocy of global war. The world might end, but to him it’s only about the music. These two scenes are the closest Mangold gets to probing the soul of Dylan.

The scenes lack visual dynamism or real cinematographic artistry. Which is the polar opposite of last year’s celebrated biopic of another American groundbreaking legend of music and culture, Elvis (2023). In that film, Baz Luhrman uses frantic, manic, expressionistic mayhem to bring music and the Elvis Pressley experience to visual life. In that way, Elvis more about the filmmaking than it is about Elivs, you could argue. Contrast A Complete Unknown with this or something like Whiplash (2014), in which Damien Chazelle brings music and the experience of playing music to life visually. Or even 8 Mile (2002), where Curtis Hanson portrays the life of a young musician who finds inspiration for his music from the immediate world around him, and also a glimpse into how he crafts the music – writing, rewriting, testing.

Dylan, in Mangold’s hands, does none of that. He arrives in the film a phenomenon and remains one. Dylan inherits mantle of the folk masters and their tradition of speaking truth to power on behalf of the undercast, then removes folk music from the dustbowl into the mainstream and ultimately electrifies it. Is it all planned out by a god from on high? It feels that way in A Complete Unknown.

But perhaps that’s all it needs. Perhaps it just has to be about the music.

Conclave (2024)

QFS No. 164 - The invitation for February 5, 2025
It’s that time again – time to cram in a bunch of Academy Award nominees! Personally, I’m going to attempt to watch all of the Best Picture nominees before the broadcast on March 1st.

This selection was made by throwing a dart a dartboard, metaphorically. I haven’t seen a majority of this year’s Best Picture nominees so might as well start somewhere. Is Conclave the most interesting of the bunch? Who knows!

So join us in watching our first film from 2024 and discuss below!

Conclave (2024) Directed by Edward Berger

Reactions and Analyses:
For a (literal) closed-room thriller, one moment in Conclave (2024) stands out as an outlier and punctures the closed box in which much of the movie is contained. The Dean of the College of Cardinals and man in charge of the vote for the new Pope, Lawrence (Ralph Finnes), finally follows his heart and casts a vote not for himself but for Benitez (Carlos Diehz) to become the leader of the Catholic faith. The moment Lawrence delivers his vote, an explosion rocks St. Peter’s Cathedral and light finally enters the building. The scene stands out in part because it’s incredibly dramatic – the most action in the entire film – but also because it conveys a message.

A blast from the unrest outside punctures through insular sanctity of the papal conclave in Conclave (2024).

And that message from Conclave seems clear: spiritual faith does not happen in a box. Modern religion requires the leaders of that faith to be out in the world. The real world is out there and it will invade and burst through, so you might as well deal with it directly. It’s not an accident that turtles appear in the film, a creature that can put its head in its shell and insulate itself from the world.

Benitez’s stated mission is decidedly the opposite. We discover that his life as a priest has been in the trenches as a secret archbishop in Kabul and other hotspots around the world. He toiled with the people and gives a speech that states his personal thesis, which is also the film’s thesis:

No, my brother. The thing you’re fighting is here… inside each and every one of us, if we give in to hate now, if we speak of “sides” instead of speaking for every man and woman. Forgive me, but these last few days we have shown ourselves to be small petty men. We have seemed concerned only with ourselves, with Rome, with these elections, with power. But things are not the Church. The Church is not tradition. The Church is not the past. The Church is what we do next.

Benitez (Carlos Diehz) preaches to the other cardinals: “The Church is not the past. The Church is what we do next.”

Conclave on its surface is about religion – and, yes, it is of course because it takes place in the highest realm of the Catholic church. But in essence, the film is about politics. Without squinting all that much, you can see the film is speaking to our time, right now, in this world. Petty men and power, feckless liberals trying to hold off a radical conservative takeover, someone who wants to make the church great again, when meanwhile the world is burning outside. Tedesco (Sergio Castellitto), the Italian cardinal, decries the liberal march the church has taken over the last 60 years. If the clergy were all still speaking Latin – which they were before the Vatican II reforms from 1962-65 – everyone would be united instead of going off to seek their own countrymen or language groups, as they do in the Vatican cafeteria, he points out. And also, for good measure, in the next breath he exposes his personal racism and bigotry by stating to Lawrence that he couldn’t possibly imagine the disgrace of having a brown or black Pope (though, one would argue, people in populations with mostly brown and black people are often the strongest Catholic countries so that is indeed the face of the faith…).

Bickering and fighting is at the heart of the conclave in a film that’s as much about politics as it is about faith.

But even the middle-of-the-road cardinals can’t get their act together, unable to find a leader to satisfy all tastes. The moderate, Tremblay (John Lithgow) is proven corrupt, having bought votes which is a grave sin for a priest in the Catholic tradition. Ultimately, it’s Benitez, an outsider with a pure heart who convinces them that he’s the true voice of the people, in part by saying he doesn’t want to become Pope or the trappings of power. If anything, Conclave is a story about dysfunctional political systems.

It’s also a story the distance between lived faith and institutional faith. With few exceptions, there is very little discussion about religious doctrine. And the men, for the most part, don’t appear to be running to be the next Pope for any honorable or noble reasons, but a need for power or to prevent someone else from obtaining it. Lawrence himself states repeatedly and openly that he does not want to be Pope and very nearly left the clergy. But his homily in which he extolls the virtue of doubt just before the conclave begins inspires several cardinals to vote for him instead of Bellini (Stanley Tucci), which throws the plan of the liberal faction into disarray. As someone in our QFS group put it, these are not gods or special people, just ordinary people put in positions of power.

Lawrence’s moving speech about the dangers of certainty and the power of doubt, for that is wellspring of faith, inspires some cardinals to cast their votes for him.

And what ordinary people do can sometimes be messy, which is in part why this film is so thrilling. Edward Berger, who directed the excellent All Quiet on the Western Front (2022) is an exacting filmmaker. His percussive score helps drive the suspense, but Berger’s visual framing that enhance the film. The compositions are stately and tightly composed, very little camera movement except when absolutely necessary. The rigidity of the framing reflects the rigidity of the Vatican, one of the world’s great seats of power. And with it, the lighting at times evokes the great Renaissance masters including Caravaggio. There’s lovely synergy between the visual references this film suggests and knowing that the Roman Catholic church was perhaps the greatest sponsor of art in Europe and likely throughout the world.

Stately grandeur, captured and framed thusly.

The lighting in several scenes evoked Renaissance paintings, religious in nature, often commissioned by the Roman Catholic churched.

Bellini (Stanley Tucci) calls this war, not a conclave.

For all of the pomp and global interest in selecting a new Pope, the film feels small and therefore thrilling. Lawrence breaks into the deceased Pope’s quarters, breaking a wax seal, to investigate Tremblay’s possible malfeasance. The scene had me on the edge of my seat and really all the scene consists of is one man breaking a rule in order to weed out a larger problem. But even here, Bellini breates Lawrence and commands him not to reveal Tremblay’s problems because they need to vote for him, because this is war – and the conservative Tedesco will win if Tremblay is eliminated. Lawrence takes a principled stand and, with the help of Sister Agnes (Isabella Rossellini), prints out the documents for all the cardinals to see. And here again, the film is not about religion but about politics. About doing what is perhaps expedient but morally questionable versus doing what is noble and right but perhaps could lead to bad consequences.

Benitez ascends, breaking ground in more ways than one.

In the end, it’s Benitez, the outsider who earns the most votes and becomes the new Pope. And the twist is he is neither man nor woman – someone who is as God made them. He’s the first Pope (as far as we know) to have female reproductive organs. Is this the way the Catholic church will finally have female clergy? And here is another statement by the filmmakers, and arguably this is the one that contains the most spirituality. Perhaps the best person to lead the faith is someone pure of heart, who knows true suffering and what humanity needs in organized religion. That faith is in the world – someone who is neither man nor woman, not from the old world but something new. That the church has to live, as he says in the film, in the future.

Lost Highway (1997)

QFS No. 163 - The invitation for January 22, 2025
David Lynch, one of singular, most unique directors in American movie history sadly passed away this past week – a lifetime of cigarette smoking finally catching up to him. Graduate of the American Film Institute’s first-ever class, he was, of course, America’s only even slightly known surrealist or avant-garde filmmaker. Even then, Lynch could never be put into a single category. The Straight Story (1999) is literally a Disney movie and earned him and the film several Academy Award nominations. He was seriously considered by George Lucas to direct Return of the Jedi (1983)! This is the same man who made what is one of the most bafflingly unique fantastic insane film ever made, Eraserhead (1977, QFS No. 22), a film we gleefully watched and discussed back in 2020 when we first started this group.

Lynch pulled off the incredible in his career, perhaps never to be matched - to create his own movies on largely his own terms. What an amazing feat, to be able to tell his completely off-beat and non-traditional films and often got studios to pay him to do so. He came up at a time when unique filmmakers were all the rage and there was a willingness to see what they could do. And he rode that wave the rest of his career – I mean, he made a surrealist television show … on ABC … in the ’90s! That’s truly incredible.

Though he was from Montana, Lynch was able to capture some kind of strange essence of Los Angeles in several of his films, notably Mulholland Drive (literally named after a notable LA street). So perhaps it’s appropriate, as LA undergoes a cataclysmic firestorm event, we turn to the city’s great surrealist. I haven’t yet seen Lost Highway which I’m ashamed to admit, but in Lynch’s honor we’ll remedy that and discuss.

Lost Highway (1997) Directed by David Lynch

Reactions and Analyses:
David Lynch’s enduring gift to me is surrender. I know this is a somewhat strange thing to be grateful for, but I am. Watching a Lynch film requires surrender. His films take on a bizarre meditation if you let them in, which makes sense when you discover that the filmmaker followed and practiced transcendental meditation. Lynch’s gift to many of us is this practice of surrendering the active part of your mind trying to make meaning all the time.

Early on in our nascent Quarantine Film Society group, we selected Eraserhead (1977, QFS No. 22). Many of us in the QFS group were once classmates at the American Film Institute, a place where Lynch had an outsized mythic presence as its more celebrated alum from AFI’s first graduating class. And Eraserhead is a direct product of his time at AFI, having started it while he was a graduate student (“Fellow” is what we’re called). Sheepishly, I had still not seen Lynch’s landmark work even though I had been out of AFI for a couple of decades.

Eraserhead (1977, QFS No. 22), began while David Lynch was still a graduate fellow at the American Film Institute, a member of its first graduating class.

So in 2020, we selected Eraserhead for QFS. And while watching for maybe the first half hour, I found myself attempting to figure out what is going on. It was uncontrollable, the urge to piece together narrative and meaning. I was flustered and perhaps upset at myself – why wasn’t I enjoying this seminal work? And then I made the decision to let go. Release myself from understanding. I let the imagery wash over me, allowing my brain to quiet and just observe. It was a remarkable viewing experience for me – and after that, I was able to see something in the story, in the film, make connections that came to me without even trying. It was, oddly, bizarrely, Lynchianly transcendent.

Renee Madison (Patricia Arquette) has black hair in the first half of Lost Highway (1997) - that much is clear. The rest? A little less so.

I was reminded of this practice with our current selection, Lost Highway (1997). Without even trying, as the movie began I attempted to make meaning of the story in the first portion of the film - knowing full well this is a film directed by David Lynch. But then, five years removed from finally seeing Eraserhead, I relented and just observed. Lost Highway is a different viewing experience and a different narrative structure of course than Eraserhead, a film Lynch cobbled together with scraps of money, sleeping in a barn near AFI, just making what can be called an elevated student film through his imagination.

The partially visible highway motif Lynch returns to throughout Lost Highway.

After more a quarter century later and Lynch’s ascension to becoming the only known American mainstream surrealist, Lost Highway exhibits the sheen of a Hollywood film instead of the scrappy grad student AFI cycle project. Movie stars, evocative cinematography, period vehicles and car stunts. But it retains the flavor of an elevated student film – and I mean this as praise, a testament to Lynch’s integrity as an artist. Lost Highway possesses the familiar devil-may-care, this-is-my-vision-deal-with-it feeling of a story that doesn’t have to explain itself or justify its worth or try to be hip and stylish. A confident film student, unshackled by the need to turn a profit on a film. And the actors perform in the way you find in so much of Lynch’s work – they’re not quite behaving as normal humans behave. Long pauses between very simple reactions. The performances feel very film-school like (speaking from experience).

Performances are often a little off kilter in a David Lynch film.

Mystery Man (Robert Blake) - deranged vidoegrapher? Angel of death? Unsettling at the very least.

But then again, nothing is “normal” in a Lynch film, which is entirely the point. The first half of the film I found to be a terrifying nightmare. Just about one of the most unnerving movies I remember seeing, especially when the Mystery Man in black (Robert Blake) shows up, pale faced and wide-eyed, maybe the angle of death. Many in the QFS group brought up that the movie doesn’t exist in traditional logic, but in fact dream logic – so the “nightmare” comparison is perhaps apt.

And suddenly, this is Pete Dayton (Balthazar Getty) and Mr. Eddy’s (Robert Loggia) story, a young hoodlum and his gangster friend, who really really doesn’t like tailgaters.

For example, halfway through the film, Fred Madison (Bill Pullman), convicted of murdering his wife, is in prison. But then, the prison guards look in and they find a completely different man inside the same prison cell (Pete Dayton, played by Balthazar Getty). The perspective change is striking – everything up to this point is being told through Fred’s point of view. But now we’re outside of his body and even his cell, so is this actually happening? It’s such a shift, but if you think of this as dream logic, that perspective changes and people transpose from one person to the next, then you can accept that these prison guards and officials are now dealing with a fantastical phenomenon without missing a beat. It only causes a minor stir – Pete Dayton, a low-level young criminal, is set free and sets off the second half of the movie that seems like a completely different storyline. But… is it? Alice Wakefield (Patricia Arquette), looking very much like a blonde twin of Fred’s murdered wife Renee Madison (also Patricia Arquette) shows up at Pete’s garage as Mr. Eddy’s (Robert Loggia) girlfriend – the two halves of the film relink.

Alice Wakefield (Patricia Arquette) looking very much like Renee Madison but with blonde hair shows up in Pete’s story, linking the two halves of the film and giving us a window in a connection. Or teasing us with one at least.

Delving further into this plotline goes against what was written before about surrendering and resisting attempt to make narrative meaning, but for a moment, let’s speculate that Fred did indeed kill his wife Renee – haunting, but murky. Then perhaps, perhaps, this second half of the film is a dream-life, Fred’s alter ego of some kind while he’s in prison awaiting execution. A projection of his youth. There are unexplained mysteries throughout, but the stories begin to overlap as if the dream is ending or merging.

Stepping back outside from the attempt to make narrative meaning, one member of group suggested that perhaps Lynch is telling a story about what happens when you repress your shadow. The deep, dark, evil that lurks in all of us, something that would drive us to kill our spouse and behave as if we haven’t. A thing we can repress, in the way that say a murderer can kill his wife and the next day be golfing as if nothing happened. Is Robert Blake’s Mystery Man then the imp that brings out the darkness? (Let’s leave aside the real story of Robert Blake and it’s grisly connection here.)

Mystery Man, playful imp who brings darkness with him.

This idea, that it’s a story about the evil inside and the ability to live on as if it didn’t happen, and if you follow that logic and believe that Fred is also Pete and in the Pete story all of the characters are part of Fred’s inner dream life, then you can squint and see logic forming. Which is not exactly what Lynch wants, but it’s the tantalizing thing, the question of what is it all about that surfaces until we push it back down and quiet it.

Sergei Parajanov (The Color of Pomegranates, QFS No. 130) forces you to let go from gleaning meaning directly, just as David Lynch does a decade later in the West.

Which is why it’s important to inject an analysis of movie viewing when talking about Lynch and what we can learn from that in watching movies made by other filmmakers. Some filmmakers lead you straight to the meaning, as clear as a shopping list. And others force you to let go, as Sergei Parajanov does in The Color of Pomegranates (1969, QFS No. 130) and as Lynch had done throughout his life as a filmmaker. Letting go is probably useful in watching any movie, but particularly essentially for Lynch and others including Parajanov.

And yet, Lynch does this all without coming across as condescending in a way many artistic filmmakers tend to. This notion that you’re too obtuse if you don’t get it like the smart ones among us. Lynch doesn’t come across that way in his work. The haunting imagery, the unclear connections, the inky darkness of night, the playful naivete of many characters - crucially the playfulness, which takes the edge off of any feeling of snobbery, is perhaps the director’s masterstroke in these complex dreamscapes he creates.

Lost Highway contains it all, as do Eraserhead and Blue Velvet (1986) and Mulholland Drive (2000). Lynch’s work just stands as it is, forcing you to observe and take away from it what you will. To surrender.

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010)

QFS No. 143 - The invitation for June 5, 2024
There are a lot of great things about Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010) even if you don’t know about it at all, just as I don’t. First, look at that title! It’s our second longest QFS selection title after Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975, QFS No. 98).

Second, the director’s name – Apichatpong Weerasethakul – is the longest of any directors we’ve previously selected. Between his name and the film’s title we’ve now got the longest filmmaker+title combo yet for a QFS selection. And third, this is our first selection from Thailand. As you can see, the selection process here is rigorous!

I’m very excited by all of these facts. I know almost nothing of the film, other than it has its share of critical accolades and it might be very, very weird. Or it might be just a simple tale of a man who can recall his past lives and that’s that. I’ve come across Weerasethakul’s work on the BFI/Sight & Sound list – this film is No. 196 in the extended Greatest Movies list and Tropical Malady (2004) is tied on the 100 Greatest list with Black Girl (1966, QFS No. 141), Get Out (2017), The General (1926), Once upon a Time in the West (1968), and A Man Escaped (1956, QFS No. 9). Also, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives* won the Palme d’Or at Cannes back then, in case that sways you. And thus concludes all I know about the film and filmmaker.

Anyway, do watch with us and let’s find out about Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives!

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010) Directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Reactions and Analyses:
The first impression I had of Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives is that of a fable from India. Though the film is from Thailand, I was reminded of fables I heard from my parents or read from the land of my ancestors. Thailand, of course, is its own country with its own set of traditions and legends and mythologies. But it shares quite a bit with nearby India, from Buddhism to Hindu mythological traditions to its language which has Sanskrit origins just as most of the languages in India do.

So in a film which blends the stark realism of its filmmaking – locked off camera, long takes and very limited first-person perspective of scenes – the interweaving of fantastical elements into that tapestry makes it feel like it’s less a film and more a tale or folklore.

To be more concrete about this, here’s an example: the first fantastical thing we encounter is Huay (Natthakarn Aphaiwonk), Boonmee’s dead wife, materializes out of thin air at the dinner table. It’s mundane, done in a wide shot, as she fades in suddenly during the meal, just sitting at the table. Everyone reacts with surprise, but not supreme shock. Then, they talk to her and are amazed she’s there but it’s all folded into the normalcy of the scene.

And then, to top it off, moments later a demonic creature with red eyes that pierce the darkness appears. He emerges from the darkness into the light and we learn that this is Boonsong (Geerasak Kulhong), Boonmee (Thanapat Saisaymar) and Huay’s long-lost son who disappeared into the jungle one day ten years ago.

Just your regular dinner but with a ghost in Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010).

But then, another mysterious figure appears.

Boonsong (Geerasak Kulhong), the long-lost son, has returned. And there have been changes!

All of these beings are materializing in part because they know that Boonmee is dying of kidney failure – at least, I think that’s why they’re coming. Boonsong disappears in the next scene but Huay hangs around until Boonmee’s final end later in the film.

In our QFS discussion, I found myself trying to grapple with the narrative. Not all films have to have a strong narrative – of course, many great ones rely upon a feel or a mood or emotion above a direct storyline. But Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives doesn’t have a straightforward narrative trajectory, but it also isn’t totally abstract. We know he is dying so are these family members visiting him as he slowly drifts away?

That sort of end-of-life visitation by ghosts is of course known throughout the world (in some ways similar to England’s A Christmas Carol). And though it’s a familiar setup, this is not what the filmmaker attempts. An entire middle section of the film is its own short film – a tale of a princess (Wallapa Mongkolprasert) who is aging and saddened by her appearance, but is lured into the water by a catfish who loves her and finds her beautiful and then makes love to her. Again, I found myself returning to fable-like storytelling. The princess first sees a reflection of herself as young in the water’s reflection, but soon it fades away and she knows the catfish (or lake spirit perhaps) manifested the illusion. There are numerous stories from Indian folklore and Hindu mythology of interactions between a human and an animal or a spirit of the lake or river, and they are not considered unusual but rather from some divine providence or hand of fate. That’s how this scene and sequence felt like to me. But … what is it saying about the rest of the film? It has almost nothing to do with Boonmee’s story.

The princess storyline tangent was fable-like but unclear to a lot of us its narrative purpose.

Unless… the catfish was Boonmee in a previous life! We have no basis for this, but someone in the group thought perhaps that’s the case. The film offers no real clues, so we’re left speculating and reaching for meaning.

Is this a negative? Depends on your perspective. So I asked the group – are we capable of rendering judgment on something like this? Are we tied to Western narrative semi-linear storytelling and incapable of evaluating a slightly opaque artistic film from the East for what it is?

Someone, helpfully, pointed out that we’ve seen The Color of Pomegranates (1969, QFS No. 130) and This is Not a Burial, it’s a Resurrection (2019, QFS No. 124) and were able to evaluate those films as both art and visual storytelling. The Color of Pomegranates is a series of vignettes with meaning that are hard to decipher but they are there, telling the story of Sayat-Nova and his life. Whereas This is Not a Burial, it’s a Resurrection has a central story point – the old lady and everyone have to leave that land before it’s turned into a lake. The narrative is concrete but thin, and the film relies on a feeling, but it’s not totally abstract as there is a premise and a deadline that This is Not a Burial is inching towards.

The structure and story of Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives is looser than that and falls somewhere in between those two films on the narrative spectrum. There’s the story about Boonmee’s remaining days for sure, but that’s only a small aspect of the story. He tells Jen (Jenjira Pongpas) he regrets all the Communists he’s killed and he’s being receiving karmic retribution now. And there are these encounters and interactions with his family who have passed away or departed, but they don’t seem to offer meaning and the film doesn’t feel like it lives up to a “recalling of past lives” necessarily. Or at least not in a way that’s easy to decipher.  

Some of the really evocative imagery of the film appears in the penultimate chapter, as they trek through the night and ultimately to Boonmee’s end.

The glittering caves give the appearance of the infinite celestial heavens.

The creatures - or ghosts - come to witness Boonmee’s final moments.

And then, in the end, the film tails off with a very long coda after he dies. It’s a bit of a headscratcher. Boonmee died in the cave, and we’re witnessing final rites in the Thai Buddhist tradition at the temple in a city. His sister-in-law Jen and her daughter (who we haven’t met until this point) and Boonmee’s nephew Tong (Sakda Kaewbuadee), who is a monk too (that surprised us all), are spending time in a hotel room. Tong and Jen experience a sudden and nonchalant out-of-body experience where they watch the others transfixed to the television while the other Tong and Jen go to a restaurant with karaoke. The film ends this way, in the restaurant, with somehow appropriate abruptness.

Perhaps the most mundane out-of-body experience depicted in cinema.

In which they end up at dinner with karaoke, but don’t do karaoke and we never see karaoke.

As in all films, I try to find something that will stay with me. When I was watching Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives I felt that every time my attention started to drift when the narrative felt like it was losing steam, something unusual or surprising would happen. Huay’s ghost appearing, or the Boonsong creature coming out of the darkness, or the middle interlude with the princess and fish love, or the end night journey where it’s truly unnerving and it’s shot handheld and they’re in the jungle with monkey ghosts and then they’re in the glittering cave – all of it adds up to a haunting series of imagery that will remain in my memory. Perhaps that’s what I will recall when remembering Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives – that movies aren’t always a roadmap from point A to point B and don’t have to be clear to be compelling.

This is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection (2019)

QFS No. 124 - The invitation for October 11, 2023
I know this will come as a shock to many of you, but this will be our first Quarantine Film Society selection from Lesotho. The country has about 2 million people – which is, I believe, still smaller than what the population of Los Angeles would be if the San Fernando Valley succession happened in 2002. Lesotho is completely surrounded by South Africa and the country’s motto was “No, not Swaziland – the other one.” (At least that’s what I assume it was before Swaziland changed their name to Eswatini.) Lesotho remains a really great answer in geographic trivia. That’s about all I know. The fact that there exists a film from Lesotho (pronounced “le-SUE-to”)* that’s available for us to see it pretty terrific and I want us to see it.

Also, this is our first film from anywhere in Africa since our seventh ever selection way back in 2020, the obscure Air Conditioner (2020, QFS No. 7) from Angola. This is a shameful tally, I admit, and it’s mostly due to me and the QFS Selection Committee knowing almost nothing about films that come out of Africa. It’s also true that very few films from Africa are being widely distributed in the US. Nollywood – the moniker given to Nigerian films, the most prolific filmmaking nation outside of India – is still completely obscure to me, but I hope to select a film from there in the future. Regardless, three years is a long time between films from an entire region of the world. The QFS Selection Committee Member responsible for this digression has been reassigned.

As for This is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection** – this is not a movie I know a whole lot about, other than it was featured on the Criterion Channel which got me curious to read a tiny bit about it earlier this year. Enough to get me interested in seeing it. As you all know by now, I firmly believe in film’s ability to transport you into a person, a being, or a place completely and utterly unknown to you and, if done well, can take you on a journey that is extremely unique and specific to that world but touches on something of a shared humanity we have with people unlike us. I hope this week’s selection is able to do just that.

Either way, it will be pretty fun to take a trip to Lesotho for a couple hours. Join me in watching This is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection and we’ll discuss!

*Believe it or not, I have actually been to and stayed in Swaziland for a week, back in 2010 (before it was renamed Eswatini). I was helping a friend shoot a documentary in Swaziland and South Africa. It is here were I learned, crucially, how to correctly pronounce “Lesotho.”

 **This is one of our few QFS selections where the title could also be a complete sentence. The others: Knives Out (2019, QFS No. 6), A Man Escaped (1956, QFS No. 9), Dolemite is My Name (2019, QFS No. 15), The Lady Vanishes (1936, QFS No. 24), You Can’t Take it With You (1938, QFS No. 47), Escape from New York (1981, QFS No. 61), Flee (2021, QFS No. 69), Enter the Dragon (1973, QFS No. 73), One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975, QFS No. 75) and though it might be not intended this way, How Green Was My Valley (1941, QFS No. 121) could be an exclamatory sentence or a question. True, Knives Out, Escape from New York, Enter the Dragon and Flee all would have to be commands (imperatives, if you will: “Flee!”), I think it’s hilarious that someone could order you to “Enter the Dragon” in a non-ironic way. This is the important high level analysis you can expect from the crack team here at QFS.

This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection (2019) Directed by Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese

 Reactions and Analyses
I can safely say, this is my favorite film from Lesotho. The best way to describe this movie is that it is a visual poem. Everything is lyrical, from the narration to the vistas and the composition. There’s quite a long time until a plot device appears, and when it does it has a familiarity to it - a simple person fighting for tradition and standing up to “progress.” A faceless march of time that will literally wash away this place.

The pace is languid and so much rests on the window Mantoa’s face. Portrayed by the late Mary Twala Mhlongo, her face tells so much of the story. She is the strength of the story as much as the visuals are. This is Not a Burial is more fable than movie.

The unforgettable face of the late Mary Twala as “Mantoa” in This is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection (2019) does much of the heavy lifting in a languidly paced film.

Pace is such an fascinating thing in film. This movie isn’t that long as a matter of real time, but it feels long. In part because the plot is thin but it also makes sense because it feels like the pace of village life. The pace of the film mimicking the pace of the locale.

The “burial” in question is her own - she prepares for it and asks a fellow villager to dig a grave for her. She ends up having to do it herself, covered in sweat, under the cover of darkness. The “resurrection” - here’s where the group had some disagreement about. Not that the resurrection as such doesn’t happen, but it’s very subtle and at first I didn’t quite grasp it. Mantoa decides to stay on the land and not leave with her fellow villagers who are being relocated to the capital Maseru (yes I had to look up the capital of Lesotho), moving towards … soldiers? Government workers at the very least. And she disrobes, moving towards them to a certain death.

But - how does it, her death, happen? Do they shoot her? It doesn’t seem like they’d concern themselves too much with one 80-year-old (naked) woman to actually kill her - they could just simply work around her. Perhaps it doesn’t matter, what matters is that this is her death or it will be soon. Her “burial,” and her “resurrection” is the little girl who watches her in this act of martydom - yes?

Mantoa (Mary Twala), digging her own grave (literally, not figuratively).

To me, that felt a little thin. To others, it made sense. For a film that’s a visual poem and rests on lyricism, concrete answers are not necessary. The film is a tone, a mood, and on that alone it’s really quite lovely to watch and explore its meanings. The film’s title could easily be This is not a film, it’s a fable - a lyrical visual poem that feels as if it’s a local legend one would share with a friend. A fable that’s bittersweet, hopeful and a cautionary tale of indigenous peoples facing the unreleting march of time and modernity.