NYFF #6: April (Dea Kulumbegashvili, 2024), Afternoons of Solitude (Albert Serra, 2024), The Shrouds (David Cronenberg, 2024)
April (Dea Kulumbegashvili, 2024):
In April, Nina, an accomplished OBGYN in her Georgian town, comes under scrutiny when a delivery goes awry, leading to the death of the baby. The malpractice investigation that ensues isn’t fair, partially fueled by the rumors swirling around Nina’s side operation providing secret abortions in nearby villages. Rather than focus on the investigation, Kulumbegashvili’s film instead revolves around Nina’s insistence on continuing her practice, immersing us in the oppressive physical and emotional spaces allocated to women who fail to conform.
While Kulumbegashvili’s debut, Beginning, was broadly reminiscent of any number of Central and Eastern European arthouse styles, this follow-up has a truly singular formal range. In addition to the expected static takes, a significant portion of April is shot in handheld and POV, a formal detour that instills an unsettling, nervy possibility to a film that treats rural Georgia, and its oppressive politics, as inescapable. April also builds on Beginning’s gestures at surrealism, with interludes where Nina is portrayed as a faceless, nude monster, hobbling over painterly landscapes and haunting her empty house. Whether it’s a representation of how Nina’s self-perception is warped due to the overwhelming pressures placed upon her, or perhaps the pain lying just underneath her stoic surface, the images transcend simple metaphor.
I went to a live taping of the Film Comment Podcast NYFF Roundtable and one of the questions that was asked of the panelists was to share their favorite moment from a festival selection this year. While my initial choice, the Baby Annette sequence from It’s Not Me, was immediately mentioned by Clinton Krute, I think my next answer would come from April. It occurs right after the film’s sole abortion, a harrowing and tender sequence framed on the torso of the patient, who is holding hands with her mother while Nina operates just offscreen. Afterwards, Kulumbegashvili cuts to an exterior, a radiant pink sunset. Here, the arrival of a monumental storm rolling into the village acts as a cathartic release. What’s so surprising though is the way Kulumbegashvili undercuts this seemingly non-narrative moment of transcendence, eventually panning to the left, revealing Nina’s car breaking down in the village’s muddy roads way up in the corner of the screen, a misfortune with potentially dire consequences. The way Kulumbegashvili denies the audiovisual force of her filmmaking, cruelly imposing the confines of narrative to a moment of natural beauty, is indicative of what makes April such a troubling, visceral work.
Afternoons of Solitude (Albert Serra, 2024):
Albert Serra’s Afternoons of Solitude is a film that radiates pure evil. It’s a white-knuckle, judiciously crafted assault, whose sociopolitical resonance and emotional power is immense despite the ostensibly specific premise. The film is a documentary about the troubling Spanish tradition of bullfighting, following the renowned toreador Andres Roca Rey across six afternoons in the arena. As a subject, Rey is troublingly opaque, a man who is laser-focused on his work, who seems to exist as fragile masculine caricature as he and his team brutally and devastatingly kill their bovine opponents. Even though the film is uncomfortably stuck to Rey, it’s quickly apparent that Serra’s allegiance is with the bulls, as what Serra makes immediately clear is that Rey is far from solitary. He has an entourage of yes-men that follow him wherever he goes, fluffing his ego, and basically serving his every need, including putting on his clothes for him.
This is one of the most intense, punishing films in recent memory, in large part because of Serra’s editing, which confines the film to elemental non-spaces (the arena, the car, the hotel, the elevator). The incredible immediacy with which Serra shoots the bullfighting scenes warps the arena into a primal zone, one where the bull’s valiant resistance towards this tradition of violence, pageantry, death, and masculinity is elevated to mythical tragedy. Serra and his lackeys often call bulls good or bad. The film’s despair, and its more universal relevance, is attributable to Rey and his team’s expectation of docility from the animals, calling bulls that truly put up a fight cowards, that they’re somehow fighting dirty. In a more explicit (but still glancing) political gesture, we learn that the seemingly indistinguishable arenas we watch Rey “perform” in, where we are pointedly never shown any audiences, are not just in Spain, but throughout some of its former colonies as well, with some of the shows taking place during a trip across South America. Serra makes these dissonances inseparable from the primitive, violent experience of watching the bullfights.
The Shrouds (David Cronenberg, 2024):
Like most of Cronenberg’s films, The Shrouds is about bodily transformation. In The Shrouds, a painfully personal film inspired by the death of Cronenberg’s wife of over four decades, the decomposition of the body is treated as another stage in the human life cycle. Vincent Cassel, whose hair is styled to identify him as a Cronenberg stand-in, plays Karsh, a widower who wishes to accompany his wife Becca (Diane Kruger) as her body undergoes its final transition. He creates a startup, GraveTech, which, by wrapping corpses in electronic shrouds, allows decedents to watch their loved ones in the grave.
As foreign governments begin to meddle with the technology and a group of vandals desecrate Becca’s grave, Karsh is pulled into a series of intertwined conspiracies. Their exact nature is hard to decipher, but as the film spins wildly out of control, each new narrative strand illuminates bracing aspects of Karsh’s grief in Cronenberg’s trademark brand of perverse humor. In particular, Cronenberg is disarmingly frank about the sexual dimension of Becca’s death. As Karsh rejoins the dating pool, his romantic encounters are interspersed with dream sequences of Becca’s final years that are as devastating as they are romantic. In these scenes, the couple attempt to have sex amidst Becca’s bodily deterioration. Karsh’s desire to hold Becca, Becca’s desire to remain desirable, and the pair’s desire for intimacy find themselves violently thwarted by the fragility of Becca’s body.
In a recent interview between Kazik Radwanski and Michael Sicinski on InReviewOnline, the pair discussed what it means to be a Toronto filmmaker. Radwanski describes Toronto as a “placeless city”, one where filmmakers struggle to locate a distinct spatial identity due to its lack of history. As I watched The Shrouds, I thought about the the place of the city in Cronenberg’s films, the way he emphasizes the disturbing anonymity of Toronto through his cold, impossibly sleek images. It’s arguably an emphatic choice. As a director with a genuine belief in human connection, Cronenberg’s quasi-dystopian representation of Toronto only strengthens the romantic bonds between his characters. Many scenes in The Shrouds, especially those of Karsh and his sister in law (also Diane Kruger) conversing on apartment balconies, are visually reminiscent of Crash. While that film was about the way Toronto’s late-capital hellscape drove its characters to violent extremes to fulfill their romantic desires, here, the city, and Cronenberg’s hyper-digital visual textures, reflect Karsh’s all-encompassing loss.
As a last aside, it feels important that this is one of Cronenberg’s most resolutely contemporary science-fiction films. He clearly notes that Karsh’s futuristic car is a Tesla, and that Karsh conducts his work on Apple products. This tonal disjunction, taken in tandem with the film’s deliberately incoherent narrative digressions, create a film that’s about the limits of imagination. In other words, The Shrouds is a film whose narrative and visual construction are confronted with and overpowered by the material reality of Becca’s death.
April, Afternoons of Solitude, and The Shrouds played at the New York Film Festival, taking place September 27th to October 14th. To see the schedule and lineup, visit https://filmlinc.org/nyff2024/