What to Watch: "'Burn" After Seeing
Reviews of "Saltburn" and "Eileen" in theaters; "Afire" plus two rock documentaries on demand.
On Demand: Todd Haynesā exquisitely unnerving āMay Decemberā arrives on Netflix today, fast on the heels of its theatrical release. My ā ā ā 1/2 review from two weeks back is here.
The German writer-director Christian Petzold has slowly and quietly been building one of the more impressive filmographies around ā tricky moral tales that weave in and out of genres like suspense (āBarbara,ā 2012), melodrama (āPhoenix,ā 2014), romance (āTransit,ā 2019), and fantasy (āUndine,ā 2020) while never losing their grip as implied or explicit political statements. āAfireā (ā ā ā, 2023, streaming on the Criterion Channel) appears to be one of Petzoldās more low-key outings: It takes place in the present day (as opposed to a war-torn or paranoid past), among doctoral students on vacation, and much of the film is made up of conversations about literature and sex. In short, it could be an Eric Rohmer movie that escaped from the 1970s. True, thereās a wildfire that is consuming the nearby countryside, but it stays mostly over the horizon. Mostly.
Every party has a pooper, though, and thatās why Petzold has invited Leon (Thomas Schubert), a human black cloud whoās in a funk about his second novel, which heās just finished and which he knows is dreadful. Leon and his more cheerful photographer friend Felix (Langston Uibel) arrive at the latterās motherās vacation cottage only to find that itās already being rented by Nadja (Paula Beer), a free spirit whose noisy lovemaking with a local lifeguard (Enno Trebs) serves to further sour Leonās already pickled mood. āAfireā settles into a gently satirical character study of a pompous young academic whoās his own worst enemy, and Schubert is a skilled enough actor to make Leon simultaneously sympathetic and unbearable. (Beer is the definition of screen charisma, but her character ā a grounded gamine ā never quite makes sense, and āAfireā suffers for it.)
As with Rohmer, the lightness of the filmās surface glides us noiselessly out of the charactersā depths and our own. There is an eventual tragedy, and the sound of a heart breaking, and the sense that art isnāt a retreat from human suffering and the worldās blind chaos but only a way to try to make sense of them, if only by pushing the pieces around on paper. Or perhaps simply bearing witness. āAfire,ā after the watery āUndineā the second in a planned āelementsā tetralogy, ends with a coda that feels rather too neatly resolved, and maybe thatās all it is. But Petzold is one of the last filmmakers Iād expect to believe in tidy endings. He knows the wildfires are almost here.
āIn the Court of the Crimson King: King Crimson at 50ā (ā ā ā, available for rental on Amazon). Iād normally recommend a rock documentary primarily to its fans, but even if youāve never heard of King Crimson, there are rewards here in dry English humor, a recognition of human loss, a valuing of perfectionism as the highest ideal in musicmaking, and an understanding of how annoying that perfectionism can be when applied to other people. Or, to put it another way: Why Robert Fripp is the most maddening of polite English geniuses.
As bandleader, solo artist, sideman, producer, gadfly, and master guitarist, Fripp has been a constant in the British music scene ā art-rock/prog-rock/math-rock/noise-rock divisions ā for over half a century, ever since ā20th Century Schizoid Manā stormed out of dorm room stereo speakers in 1969. Heās been allied with Bowie and Brian Eno, among many others and his unique guitar sound, a kind of electrified neon blue, is the rock equivalent of a lightsabre and has popped up in the most unlikely places (like The Rochesā āHammond Song,ā which Fripp also produced).
But King Crimson has been his main order of business, or, rather, the many iterations of Crimson of which Fripp has been the one constant, an eccentric professor in a three-piece suit (in the 1970s!) demanding that his bandmates execute complex algebraic calculations in their heads if they want to keep up with the music.
Some have fallen by the wayside, some are in it for the long haul, and some are exiled from the kingdom for reasons theyāll never understand. Directed by Toby Amies, āIn the Court of the Crimson Kingā is most entertaining when the many, many Crimson musicans over the years testify to the Challenge of Working With Robert, including the bandās co-founder Ian McDonald, who bailed after the first album and who offers a heartfelt if belated apology to Fripp here). Guitarist Adrian Belew, a mainstay of the anarchofunk-minimalist ā80s Crimson, is still smarting from learning he was no longer in the band by reading about it in a music magazine. And one of the latest bandās three drummers, Bill Rieflin, stays on the road with Fripp despite struggling with Stage 4 cancer, noting with mordant and moving humor that the boss manās demands are a way of living life and art to their fullest in the limited time the drummer has left. (Rieflin died after filming was completed in 2020.)
The man at the center of all this palaver cuts a touching figure, a natty, white-haired monk of music who still feels that any day without four hours of guitar practice has to be deemed a catastrophe. The rewards for putting himself and his bandmates on the rack of difficult time signatures are many, including a fanbase that stretches across a half century (and which numbers at least one very devoted, very cogent Catholic nun) and the songs themselves ā knotty, adventurous, and requiring a discipline that is almost, but not quite, the point. This documentary is one of those rewards, too: A paean to the pains and ecstasies of extreme music-making.
By contrast, āThe Stones and Brian Jonesā (ā ā 1/2, available for rent on Amazon, Apple TV, YouTube, and elsewhere) is for fans only, or for Stones neophytes who donāt already know the sad story of how a mercurial middle-class blues freak named Brian started a rock and roll band only to see it taken away from him by the groupās singer and lead guitarist. The way longtime rock-doc filmmaker Nick Broomfield tells it, Jones was doomed by his crippling insecurity, parental disapproval, and lack of songwriting ability, but through the cracks of the interviews with the many mothers of Brianās many abandoned children, you can glimpse a young man who was simply not very good at living life. The film is worth a Stones die-hardās time for the early concert footage and for the participation of a pleasantly doddering Bill Wyman; Mick and Keith are present on the soundtrack in archival interviews, sounding vaguely but not definitively guilty for throwing their bandmate under the bus. But only ex-girlfriend Zouzou, a one-time French pop star now gravel-voiced, elderly, and very funny, has the proper long-distance sympathy for this minor-league devil.
Oh, āSaltburnā (ā ā, in theaters), I wish I loved you as much as some of my friends and relations do. The second film written and directed by Emerald Fennell ā after the similarly polarizing āPromising Young Womanā (2020) ā is a stylish, heavy-handed drama of class resentments and comeuppance, with a slippery Barry Keoghan (āThe Banshees of Inisherinā) cast as Oliver Quick, a lower-middle-class nobody at Oxford who weasels his way into the aristocratic family of a classmate (Jacob Elordi of āEuphoriaā and āPriscillaā). There are scenes in āSaltburnā calculated to shock ā Oliver slurping the bathtub leftovers of his social betters, a seduction of the classmateās sister (Alison Oliver) that gives new meaning to the phrase āperiod pieceā ā but itās that calculation that lodges in the craw, the sense (as in āPromising Young Womanā) that Fennell prizes giving her bourgeoise audiences a ādaringā hotfoot more than narrative coherence or coherent atmosphere. So the big reveal at the end of the new movie reveals very little, since āSaltburnā has tipped its hand about Oliver from the moment he shows up at the vast country estate of the title (Drayton House in Northamptonshire, if youāre looking for an AirBnB).
Maybe itās a factor of age or a life spent wallowing in popular culture, but as I watched āSaltburn,ā my mind kept returning to earlier and better versions of this class-war fairy tale. āThe Talented Mr. Ripley,ā for one ā either the Patricia Highsmith novel or the Anthony Minghella/Matt Damon movie or both. Mervyn Peakeās truly mad āGormenghastā books and the 2000 BBC/PBS series made from them. (A new version is in the works, with Neil Gaiman and Akiva Goldsman on board as producers.) The narrative red thread that connects all these stories is that of a crafty, amoral sociopath inveigling his way into a cloistered nobility that, through their wealth and general cluelessness, is just asking to be fleeced. (Bong Joon-hoās āParasiteā is a variation on similar themes.) Weāre meant to have our loyalties split between the proletariat interloper and the upper-class twits, and āSaltburnā keeps that compact until the final act, when it takes its stand with the poor, abused aristos against the nasty upstarts. Thereās fertile ground for satire here, but that would require a scalpel, and Fennell wields a blunt hatchet.
Well, at least Keoghan gets a lead role out of it, one that carries echoes of his malefic turn in āThe Killing of a Sacred Deerā (quite literally in one party scene), and there are good performances by Elordi, Oliver, Rosamund Pike as the castle matriarch, Richard E. Grant as her husband, and, in and out of the movie in a sloe-eyed flash, Carey Mulligan playing āPoor, Dear Pamela,ā as the credits put it ā possibly the best joke in the movie.
Two final thoughts. First, looking at Keoghan, I see an actor preparing for a long and high-wire career (and also an uncanny likeness to the young Ian McKellen). There are worse cart tracks to follow. Second, if any young viewer is prompted by āSaltburnā to visit Richard E. Grantās majestic star-making debut performance in 1987ās āWithnail & I,ā then it will all turn out to have been worthwhile.
Speaking of Highsmith, when I reviewed āEileenā (ā ā ā 1/2, in theaters) at Sundance in January, I suggested that āit plays like [Todd Haynesā] āCarolā if one of the characters turned out to be Tom Ripley.ā A comparison with āSaltburnā is instructive: Both films provoke more than convince, but, as directed by William Oldroyd (āLady Macbethā) and scripted by Otessa Moshfegh from her 2013 novel, āEileenā messes with an audienceās head in stranger, funnier, and less predictable ways. Itās more genuinely uncomfortable than Fennellās movie and, for that reason, closer to the bone of what both are aiming for. From my review: āAt first, you think youāre getting a prototypical Sundance movie about small-town wasted lives: Mousy young Eileen (Thomasin McKenzie of āLeave No Traceā and āLast Night in Sohoā) lives in a wintry mid-1960s New England town with an alcoholic wreck of a father (Shea Whigham ā who else?) and works as a secretary at the local juvenile prison. With the arrival of a new prison psychologist, the glamorous, blonde, and seductive Dr. Rebecca St. John (Anne Hathaway), the movie gets a little bit āMarnieā and a little bit āCarol,ā and then things actually start getting weird. The fine stage actress Marin Ireland gets off an unnerving monologue while her character is tied to a post in a basement, and both Mackenzie and Hathaway are at the top of their games here, the former playing deceptively meek and the latter deceptively wildā¦ Bonus points for dialogue that precisely captures the bred-in-the-bone bleakness of the native New Englander (āYou look happy ā whatās wrong with you?ā) and for a shooting gallery of Boston accents that mostly hit their marks.ā
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Iām curious why you think the Paula Beer character ānever quite makes sense.ā I thought her role was coessential to the movie - she was the counterweight to Leon - or his conception of her was. When he thinks sheās an intellectual lightweight he dismisses her opinion, and he never bothers to ask her about herself - his editor does. Which is why we donāt know any more about her than Leon does, since we see everything through his eyes. When he finds out she is a literature scholar heās furious he gave her his manuscript. He reacts to her at every step in the movie. Not to her overtures, but rather to who he thinks she is.
And, having been an impecunious graduate student who did stints stripping wallpaper and moving furniture, it didnāt strike as at all odd that she was scooping ice cream for the summer.
After watching it we watched Ondine, and I would say the character she played in that movie didnāt quite make sense. It starts with her threatening to kill her boyfriend for breaking up with her but she almost immediately forgets him for the new one. Itās a beautiful movie but that was a bit jarring.
I didn't review MAY DECEMBER (though I did write about it in my NYFF coverage). I'm not surprised Charles Melton won NYFCC's Supporting Actor--he's the best thing about the movie and I am sure it's not his last critic group award. I liked it, didn't love it. I should have reviewed it this week instead of the repugnant SILENT NIGHT. And how many more ROLLING STONES docs are we going to get? There are other effing bands to make crappy docs about, people! As for The Banshees of Penisherin, I mean SALTBURN, I finally saw it and felt guilty I had to ask Mr. Feeney to review it because I couldn't make the screening. That was bad. I don't know what our brethren sees in that, or saw in PROMISING YOUNG WOMAN. That director's idea of shock value wouldn't faze my retired parents. I am reviewing EILEEN in the paper next week. I read the book. It's funny that a movie that's supposed to be set in Massachusetts was shot 30 minutes from my house (which ain't in Massachusetts). Don't think for one second that I'm leaving out of the review the fact that New Jersey played Massachusetts. I'll devote 9 paragraphs to it! Ten best list also drops next week. Looking forward to seeing yours if you run it here.