Hey folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. I have at this point established perhaps a month worth of buffer in terms of film reflection pieces, and hot damn is today’s crop a good one. I don’t know what exactly inspired this week in past-Nick film screenings, but he was clearly on a roll, charging through psychosexual drama and epic Hollywood spectacle alike. In more recent news, I’ve been gobbling through my commissioned episodes of The Legend of Vox Machina, utterly seduced by the fun of tramping along with a well-balanced D&D crew. It’s been a satisfying week in film and television alike, and I look forward to sharing my future fiction-versus-game design ramblings with you all. But for now, let’s power through some films!
First up this week was a bizarre mix of horror and psychological drama, as we checked out Possession. The film stars Sam Neill and Isabelle Adjani, a married couple on the verge of separation. The reasons for their separation are ambiguously framed – Neill has been long away on a nebulously defined work project, while Adjani has been unfaithful, but refuses to say how. What we know, what is real, is the tempest between them: the hot coals of resentment and the fiery explosions of guilt and rage, as they destroy each other and themselves in their cacophonous decline.
There is so much going on with this movie! First off, writer/director Andrzej Żuławski has a clear and unerring vision of marital decline, likely informed by his own ongoing divorce. There is no common feeling and no hope for redemption for these two; seemingly written from a position of spite, hopelessness, and paranoia, the film exudes these qualities in its every aspect. Possession is set in early-80s Berlin, and the imposing wall with its ever-watching guards is a permanent feature of the landscape. The only colors in this world are blue and gray, and when the camera isn’t finding itself lost in labyrinthian corridors, it’s frantically panning around characters, like a reporter hunting for a crime-scene statement. In this stark venue, Neill and Adjani offer performances that stretch far beyond naturalistic grief and anger, painting their fury in expressionistic colors closer to kabuki or Bollywood.
Also, it’s a horror movie! About halfway through, bodies start piling up, and we’re introduced to a set of prosthetic monstrosities that would make Cronenberg proud. I’m frankly not sure Possession is better for being a horror movie, as its second half is a lot messier (in a variety of ways) from its first, but it certainly fits the film’s themes of corruption, metamorphosis, and divining the true self. You could poke at the film’s thoughts on duality and faith, but to be honest, I’m not sure a work composed from a position of such immediate grief and rage could begin to transcend it. Ultimately, Possession is an articulation of that moment, that incoherent feeling of the walls falling down, and god damn does it convey that collapse to us.
After that we checked out another classic hollywood epic, screening the imposing Spartacus. Spartacus was actually directed by Stanley Kubrick, but his lack of total directorial control led to him disavowing it – and indeed, Spartacus feels more defined by Hollywood’s mid-century production model than Kubrick’s austere touch. But regardless of its precise lineage, Spartacus is brimming with top shelf actors and setpieces of astonishing scale. The battle scenes in this film would make anyone mourn what has been lost by the preeminence of CG; there is nothing like hundreds of actual actors clashing in beautiful harmony, and there probably never will be again (well, at least in Hollywood).
Charting a journey from the slave mines of Syria to the summit of Rome, Spartacus is a clear template for future epics like Ridley Scott’s Gladiator. But what sets Spartacus apart from its genre kin is its focus on a man who genuinely came from nothing, rather than a noble who is brought low by circumstance. Many epic dramas essentially take the geopolitical conditions of their era as a given, as their drama is centered on the back-and-forth of the upper class. In contrast, Spartacus is a story shot from the perspective of born slaves, meaning the very order that defines their lives is a yoke that must be shrugged. This shift in perspective adds a jolt of honest ferocity to its main story, while at the same time, Spartacus manages the difficult feat of building an equally compelling Rome-centered political intrigue. Impressive in its scale and exceedingly generous in its casting, Spartacus fits neatly into my “damn fine time at the movies” category.
Next was a relatively recent crime feature, wherein Johnny Depp plays an FBI agent who goes undercover as Donnie Brasko, befriending local mobster “Lefty” (Al Pacino), and eventually having his loyalty tested by the demands of his double life. Donnie Brasko is a confidently structured film, and Pacino puts in a reliably excellent performance as a man who believed he was working towards something, but has found himself thirty years older with nothing to show for it. I think that’s the kind of character that Pacino does best; he’s obviously well known for his most fiery performances, but there’s something even more impactful in his washed-up characters, where the inherent nobility of his proud posture clashes with the debased conditions of his everyday life.
Johnny Depp is also quite good in this one, evoking a sharpness and wary energy that makes him both a convincing protégé for Lefty and a suitably frazzled double agent. The chemistry between the two is genuine, and that’s crucial; the film hinges on Depp slowly realizing that Lefty is actually his closest friend, making every last-act victory for the FBI feel like a knife in the gut. I also welcomed Brasko’s genre-savvy sense of humor; while Lefty’s story is a tragedy, the material around him is frequently a farce, including standout scenes like Depp’s explanation of “forget about it” and its vast preponderance of wise guy meanings. An altogether sturdy and effective film.
Next up was one of my last unwatched Bong Joon-ho features, Okja. Okja stars Tilda Swinton as the penitent daughter of a notorious industrialist, who is planning to rebrand her father’s company as an eco-friendly producer of beloved family meals. To this end, she has commenced the “super pig” project, wherein specifically selected farmers all around the globe will spend ten years raising the nutritious meal of the future. Cut to ten years later, and Korea’s superpig “Okja” has formed a family with its young caretaker Mija (Ahn Seo-hyun) and her grandfather. And when Swinton’s company arrives to collect Okja, Mija will have to square off with a multinational empire to keep her family together.
In spite of being a jot more family-aimed than his usual fare, Okja is Joon-ho through and through. Taking a break from his usual process of depicting how capitalism turns humanity into cattle, Okja sees him addressing how actual cattle fare in global capitalism, with all the staggering inhumanity that entails. The resulting film is one of the most tonally discordant of his catalog, finding time for both poop jokes and devastating slaughterhouse visits. It is also, like every Joon-ho film, both stunningly beautiful and utterly heartbreaking.
The film’s first act does a phenomenal job of establishing the love and trust between Okja and Mija. Okja herself is a carefully designed miracle of aesthetic engineering, simultaneously evoking the features and mannerisms of a dog, a pig, and a hippopotamus, while also remaining sufficiently “cattle-shaped” that later scenes still call to mind the mass slaughter of industrialized food production. By the time Okja throws herself off a cliff to ensure Mija’s safety, I would also have died for either of them – and when the two are separated, it’s a short hop-step to believe I’d kill for them, too.
As a propulsive action/adventure film, Okja is littered with chase scenes and gags that seem designed to keep young audiences entertained. At the same time, Okja features scenes of such unmitigated cruelty to animals that I can’t imagine showing it to kids – in fact, there’s literally a plot point regarding an environmentalist urging Mija to “look only at me,” so as to avoid witnessing the outright rape and torture of her beloved Okja. As a result, the film feels in some ways disjointed, with Mija’s journey feeling awkwardly divorced from characters like the off-the-wall Jake Gyllenhaal, and bits like the repeated poop jokes seemingly existing for an audience too young to be in the theater.
That said, tonal discordance is no stranger to Joon-ho films, and there is so much good in Okja that it’s easy to forgive its clumsier moments. It is filled with characters doing their best to embody principles greater than themselves, while also acknowledging that when you’re dealing with true capitalists, appealing to principle is a fool’s errand. It nails the uniquely pernicious insincerity of “woke capitalism,” and expresses the grotesque inhumanity of industrialized meat farming with an unflinching gaze. In light of that, perhaps the sentimentality of its personal narrative is intended as a balm against the horror of its subject matter; all I know is, when two of the superpigs conspire to smuggle their child out of the gulag, I couldn’t hold back the sobs. Damn you Joon-ho, why do you always do this to me.
Our last film of the week was an analytical feast, Ingmar Bergman’s acclaimed Persona. Bibi Andersson stars as Alma, a young nurse assigned to take care of Elisabet Vogler (Liv Ullmann). Though she does not appear to be afflicted by any physical or psychological ailment, Elisabet has suddenly stopped speaking altogether, and has essentially renounced her previous life. Alma is sent to live with Elisabet at a remote beach house, where her habit of constant communication with her mute partner eventually gives way to something more ambiguous and sinister.
Persona is one of the holy grails of cinematic interpretation, rich as it is in philosophical threads, psychological portraits, and narrative ambiguity. Alma and Elisabet’s lopsided relationship is one of the great character dynamics in film, with Persona’s brief eighty-five minutes seemingly revealing more about each than most films could manage in three hours. Persona lays each of them bare and then goes further, scraping through bones and organs, seeking something vital and true about our nature with such ferocity that it succeeds only in tearing its characters to pieces.
Both Alma and Elisabet are fascinating characters in their own ways, and the film does a marvelous job of balancing the audience’s sympathies for each of them. Early on, Alma feels much like a plucky heroine from a romance novel, speaking gaily of her hopes and experiences as she tends to the silent Elisabet. Alma tells Elisabet that “no one ever listened to me before, so it’s lovely to hear the sound of my own voice” – but eventually, it becomes clear that Alma simply does not possess enough selfhood to exist without observation or response. Alma left all the substantive decisions of not just her life, but her very personhood, to the schemes of others, and being forced to confront Elisabet reveals the void where her face should be. In time, Alma shifts from our trusted companion to a terrifying interloper, seemingly intent on destroying Elisabet purely for the crime of revealing her own true self.
Meanwhile, Elisabet seems driven by a philosophy that closely mirrors the art discussions of My Dinner with Andre. Like Andre, Elisabet seems to have decided that the modern world is so distant from authentic experience that the idea of theater is absurd; if we are all performing all the time, how could a second level of performance reveal a more authentic self? For a time, Elisabet seems like she might actually be replacing her initial faith in art with a humbler faith in humanity – but the moment her true thoughts are revealed to Alma, a wall goes up between them that cannot be broken. Ultimately, Alma’s grand “victory” over Elisabet involves debasing each of them to their most fearful and fundamental instincts, revealing that Elisabet’s ostensible fear of inauthenticity is thinly stretched over a fear of the opposite, of seeing her true nature and hating what she sees.
You could write essays about virtually any element of this film’s formal structure, characters, or themes, and many critics already have. Persona is a feast for the senses and the mind alike, grappling desperately with the questions of personhood, connection, and self-expression that define the greatest works of artistic achievement. It’s a film rich enough to articulate an entire philosophy of human interaction, and confident enough to shatter that philosophy into a thousand fragments of resonant ambiguity. You may look to Persona for answers, but the face in the mirror is your own.
