EOY #3: Blitz, Vermiglio, A Real Pain
Blitz (Steve McQueen, 2024), Vermiglio (Maura Delpero, 2024), A Real Pain (Jesse Eisenberg, 2024)
Blitz (Steve McQueen, 2024):
I think critics came at Blitz with their knives sharpened, in large part because McQueen decided to skip most of the major fall festivals, opting for a late-breaking world premiere in London and a North American Premiere in New York the day after. While I certainly wouldn’t claim this as McQueen’s strongest film, this isn’t the conventional crowd-pleaser I’ve seen it described as. While I was watching the film, I was frequently struck by how little McQueen seems to care about his neo-Dickensian plot. The separation of George (Elliott Heffernan) and Rita (Saoirse Ronan) during Germany’s Blitzkrieg offensive in World War II is a blatant device for McQueen, who just released an epic World War II documentary last year in Occupied City, to portray a broad cross-section of wartime London (just look at how comedically abrupt the ending is!). Because underground bomb shelters congregated Londoners from all walks of life, the interactions between different subcultures, as seen through two different subjects of identification (a white woman and a biracial boy) illuminates foundational cultural schisms that persist in British culture today. As such, Blitz is the rare World War II film that focuses on the evils of British Imperialism, and the country’s pervasive racism, more than Hitler.
I think audiences are observing that it’s readily apparent when McQueen decides to turn on his formalist talents. McQueen’s choreography of the film’s two party sequences, each featuring a whole company of talented black musicians and dancers, nearly derail the film in their ecstatic liberation. Similarly, the film’s opening, of firefighters losing control of a serpentine hose amidst a towering inferno, that transitions into a tracking shot over the Atlantic Ocean, abstracted such that the moonlight reflecting off of the surface of the water looks like scratches on the film, is so strong that Blitz’s introduction to Rita and George inevitably feels like a letdown. Fire is a powerful motif in Blitz, appearing in a thrilling montage at Rita’s arms factory, and as the fuel of the train that constantly threatens to take George away from his mother under the guise of safety. In Blitz, even though fires from Nazi Germany rage outside, flames of domestic xenophobia can’t just be ignored.
Blitz is distributed by Apple and is available in theaters now
Vermiglio (Maura Delpero, 2024):
Vermiglio is a remote town nestled deep within the Italian Alps. Introducing us to the extended Graziadei family that dominates the town’s population, Delpero presents a pastoral fantasy. As the sun rises, we see the family members nestled in their beds: the sisters cuddling, the brothers on opposite sides, and finally the parents, awoken from their sleep by a newborn wailing in its crib. The mother milks the cows, and serves the milk by the ladle to her children for breakfast. This tight-knit unit lives as one with the alpine landscape, their lives attuned to the seasons and their nearly monochrome blue attire cohering with the bluish gray cliff faces that dominate their surroundings.
Turns out, this symbiosis is synthetic. Vermiglio is set in the final days of World War II, and the conflict has left this family in a reclusive, if somewhat utopian, stasis. Novelistically exploring the lives of each family member in this historic turning point, Delpero explores the way time warps and life trajectories shift during times of global crisis, using a period piece to channel contemporary experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic. As isolated as the Graziadei’s are (the children’s conception of Sicily is defined by a picture of oranges they see on a map of Italy), they’re not immune from the trauma of the war. Trauma comes in the form of two runaway soldiers hiding in the family’s barn. If the film has a primary narrative, it’s the doomed romance between Lucia and one of these soldiers, Pietro. Lucia’s pregnancy and tragically curtailed marriage is a transference of trauma, a subtly deployed symbol for the war’s material impact on the Graziadei clan. Subtlety is Vermiglio’s greatest strength. Delpero displays impressive formal economy and deftly handles literary elements that would be grating in the hand of a less confident director. Most importantly, the film never strains to make a statement. Instead, it’s content to follow the experiences of its characters, echoing their uncertainty and expressing a temporal slippage that’s internalized only after the war has concluded.
Vermiglio is distributed by Janus/Sideshow.
A Real Pain (Jesse Eisenberg, 2024):
A Real Pain is a trickier film than I initially gave it credit for. Much like Between the Temples, A Real Pain takes a Sundance-ready formula, a buddy comedy starring two cousins going on a holocaust tour, and reveals the perversity of what the sentimental version of the film might look like. This is a subtle film to the point where I can’t tell if the film’s success is even intentional, with the film’s form hewing closely to Sundance tedium while the narrative routinely averts resolution. While I can’t say I found the film interesting in the moment, the more I sit with it, the more I think it’s actually elegantly and intelligently conceived. In its artificial use of Sundance affect, A Real Pain is much closer to The Zone of Interest than it would seem.
The eponymous pain, Benji, is played by Kieran Culkin, a middle-aged free spirit still living in his mother’s basement. He’s abrasive, charming, sensitive, and obviously hurting since the death of his Grandma Dory. He would probably rather explore the Poland of Grandma Dory’s youth on his own, but is dragged on a tour group by his neurotic family-man cousin, David (Jesse Eisenberg at his nervy best). They follow the tour for around a week, leaving a day early to visit Grandma Dory’s house in Poland before she was sent to the concentration camps. Eisenberg cannily uses Sundance affect, writing the tour members as caricatures of respectable affability, with Culkin as the chaotic force who intermittently breaks everyone out of their formulaic stupor.
The distance of respectability translates to A Real Pain’s formal banality, with rather mundane compositions of Polish landmarks accompanied by the tour guide’s overbearing historical explanation. While visiting a cemetery, Benji tells the tour guide to “chill with the facts and figures”, to let the group actually experience these haunted spaces. With one exception, the film never actually lets the spaces speak for themselves, pointedly utilizing guided narration and cliché Chopin cues to distract from the history Benji and David have come to witness. Perhaps A Real Pain’s thorniest choice is to use Benji and David’s tangible distance from the Holocaust as a metaphor for their own relationship.
A Real Pain is distributed by Searchlight and is in theaters now.