New Release Speed Round + Best of the Year So Far
On Family Portrait (Lucy Kerr, 2023), MMXX (Christi Puiu, 2023)
Family Portrait (Lucy Kerr, 2023)
Lucy Kerr’s pandemic-set mood piece, Family Portrait, is a rare American independent film focused almost entirely on framing, blocking, and sound. Organized the taking of a family photo, Kerr’s film alternates between intricately blocked interior tableaus, and extended exterior tracking shots to conjure existential dread.
In its juxtaposition of specific interpersonal relations with surreal formal choices, Family Portrait draws from Van Sant’s Gerry, at one point even staging a recreation of its most famous shot. The film has modernist aims, stirring up familial dissatisfaction and unease through its persistent unreality. Kerr’s debut is promising, but the film’s formal maneuvers occasionally feel overemphatic, a problem exacerbated by the largely abstract sense of the central family.
Family Portrait is available to stream on Metrograph At Home
MMXX (Christi Puiu, 2023):
I was unaware that Christi Puiu’s latest film, MMXX, was about the COVID-19 pandemic, despite the roman numerals spelling out the year 2020. That, in addition to the film’s clear distaste for masking, testing, and other pandemic restrictions is probably a factor in MMXX struggling to receive distribution. I’m tempted, simply based on my vague understanding of Lazarescu, to give Puiu the benefit of the doubt, but the film feels like a reactionary screed, released a few years too late.
The film itself is four loosely connected stories. The first three are all domestic, shot in choreographed, theatrical long takes (a bit like Jancso or Sokurov, but with more naturalist dialogue). They’re each preceded by vaguely menacing exterior shots of foliage, and the film initially seems to riff on characters in trapped interiors, with COVID enabling characters’ latent narcissistic/recessive behaviors. In the first and the third stories, characters discuss the outside world in a manner that feels abstract, while in the second, a character’s inability to visit someone at the hospital is the central tension. Last story takes place entirely outside, and is a shocking policier, revealing that COVID is just the beginning of the government’s concerns. Puiu exhibits formal prowess, but I found his nonstop dialogue enervating, never transcending its theatrical artifice. The final scene could be seen as connecting COVID to a larger failure of the Romanian government, but I wasn’t convinced.
MMXX is still seeking distribution
Best of the Year Thus Far:
The Beast (Bertrand Bonello) - Available on VOD
This Closeness (Kit Zauhar) - Available on MUBI
The Shadowless Tower (Zhang Lü) - Available on VOD
Music (Angela Schanelec) - In Theaters Now
Janet Planet (Annie Baker) - In Theaters Now
Most Anticipated:
Misericordia (Alain Guiraudie)
The Shrouds (David Cronenberg)
The Sparrow in the Chimney (Ramon Zürcher)
Grand Tour (Miguel Gomes)
Caught By the Tides (Jia Zhangke)