The Woman King - Directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood
Viola Davis stars as Nanisca, the leader of the Agojie, a fierce all-female army from the historical West African Kingdom of Dahomey. She carries the weight of the kingdom on her muscular shoulders, alongside some pretty nasty scars. As the film opens the Agojie are looking for new recruits which is good news for Nawi (Thuso Mbedu). The first half of the film focuses on Nawi’s initiation into the Agojie, following her and her fellow recruits through the boot camp-like training designed to transform them from undisciplined girls into polished warriors.
Prince-Bythewood films the set-pieces with an eye for kinetic action, with fight choreography that’s split equally between MMA-style grappling and the swinging of heavy, curved machetes. But the real star of these scenes is the sound design, which adds heavy, crushing impact to the otherwise bloodless violence. Gunpowder and horses play secondary roles in the battle sequences, fitting for a film whose focus is on its people.
The Woman King is a more human type of blockbuster than most of what turns up on screen in the summer months. This film has a fire in its belly. But more importantly, it also has a heart full of love: love of life, love of freedom, love of Black people and culture, and love for its ferocious, complicated, brave women.
The Woman King is available to rent digitally.
Benediction - Directed by Terrence Davies
Terrence Davies broke through as a filmmaker by creating autobiographical, montage heavy films like Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes. Instead of continually looking inward, Davies has made the focus of his newest feature someone else. The poet Siegfried Sassoon. The two men did not have similar upbringings. Sassoon was an aristocrat, even if he was cut off from the centuries-old Sassoon family fortune because his father married outside the Jewish faith. Davies grew up the son of a violent drunkard in a working class Catholic family with nine older siblings. And yet they share an artistic sensitivity, a bone-deep nostalgia that dips into hot rage directed at time’s incessant march forward. Though Davies’ last film, A Quiet Passion, was also a poet’s biopic (with Cynthia Nixon as Emily Dickinson), Benediction feels, in a weird way, like the 3rd film in a trilogy he began his career making.
The film is very clearly a Terrence Davies work from nearly the outset. Though beginning with Siegfried and his brother Hamo about to attend Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring the film abruptly cuts to a collage of black and white WWI footage, then stylistically lit images of boys going off to war. Here’s the Davies touch. Dropping the narrative form to make sure his point lands. It sounds ham-fisted on paper but ever one of Davies’ images work in concert with each other creating a singular vision of antiwar feelings.
The film doesn’t ever stop and let you catch up as a viewer. In Davies’ classic approach the viewing experience is more about the feeling the images elicit than in knowing the dates and names of everyone involved. There’s nothing about this film that is uplifting, but Davies’ handling of the material is so exquisite that the overbearing melancholy becomes, in the end, a work of poetry.
Benediction is streaming on Hulu.
Broker - Directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda
Hirokazu Kore-eda has devoted much of his career to waxing lyrical on makeshift family units and the pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps resolve of those living on the margins. Song Kang-ho, most memorable as ne’er-do-well types in Parasite and The Host, plays Sang-hyun, a dry cleaner facing steep gambling debts. He also moonlights as a pastor at the Busan Family Church and dabbles in human trafficking with infants left in the church’s baby box. Dong-soo (Gang Dong-won, Train To Busan Presents: Peninsula), an orphan who has grown up to work for the church, serves as Sang-hyun’s accomplice, erasing surveillance footage of the baby box.
So-young (Lee Ji-eun, better known as K-pop superstar IU) leaves her child at the baby box one night during a downpour, only to return the next day seemingly with a change of heart. Dong-soo feigns ignorance of her baby’s whereabouts at first, but ultimately leads her to Sang-hyun for fear that she may contact the authorities. Once she learns of their plan to sell her child, So-young wants in on the action and to ensure he’ll end up in a good home. They all hop into a beat-up van and drive off to meet prospective buyers in Yeongdeok. Meanwhile, two cops in the female youth division (Bae Doona and Lee Joo-young) are hot on the trail and waiting to catch the titular “brokers” in the act.
As with the characters in Shoplifters, Sang-hyun, Dong-soo, So-young, her infant, and Hae-jin (Im Seung-soo), an 8-year-old from the orphanage who stowed away in the van, form a surrogate family that’s quite functional in practice. As they contemplate ways to keep up the charade, there’s tacit acceptance that their happy time together is running out. Though Kore-eda began his career as a documentarian, his positions on social issues are far from neutral. He reveres the resilience of those who have been dealt a bad hand in life, a sentiment that certainly shines through in Broker.
Broker is not available for streaming at this time.
Corsage - Directed by Marie Kreutzer
Corsage opens with Empress Elisabeth (the incomparable Vicky Krieps) entering her fortieth year. Adrift in her husband’s world and wallowing in the grief of a lost child, the Queen of Hungary herself is prone to bouts of melancholy. It’s not just that her royal duties bore her, though they do; it’s why she’s mastered the act of fainting on the spot to get out of public appearances. Or that she’s mournful about the way her marriage is now utterly devoid of sexual intimacy; the emperor, it turns out, has found apt ways to cope. It’s that she continually stares out into the world around her and she finds little that comforts her. There’s horseback riding, yes. And shameless flirting. And the occasional visit to wounded soldiers. But overall, she’s dissatisfied with what’s become of her.
As Krieps allows us to see, though, the Empress’ sullen expression—that dazed and glazed look that seems so self-revealing—offers but a glimpse into her existential crisis. There’s depth to what looks like insipid vanity, layers to what appear to be simple requests. The Empress’ inner world is awash with insights into her own slowly self-effacing impulses. “Nobody loves nobody,” she notes at one point. “Everybody loves what he wants from others. And we love anybody who loves in us that which we would like to be.” There’s a nihilism to the Empress’ actions and multi-lingual words. She may be a cipher to those around her (“She’s like a book to me,” one of her attendants writes, “A riddle on each page.”) but, the more time we spend with her, the more we realize that she’s more self-assured and self-reflective than most. She both blooms and withers in equal measure, making us wonder if one can truly occur without the other.
Though the film takes place in European royal halls Krieps’ protagonist feels out of time, her sardonic, dry wit a balm against the staid world she’s forced to live within. By the time Kreutzer guides us to the film’s climactic conclusion, Corsage establishes itself as one of 2022’s most ravishing cinematic experiences, a treatise on boredom that’s as electric as it is energizing.
Corsage is available to rent now.
EO - Directed by Jerzy Skolimowski
Jerzy Skolimowski's EO about a donkey wandering through modern Poland, is a rare animal picture that's not aimed at kids. Like Robert Bresson's 1966 donkey-centric parable Au Hasard Balthazar— which provided the storytelling template for many other ambitious dramas that focus on animals who are just animals, and don't talk or sing or otherwise attempt to entertain us. The main goal is to create a fable that reminds the viewer of humans' connections to the natural world and serves up situations that have metaphorical dimensions beyond any physical actions that happen to be taking place at that moment.
We first meet EO in the center ring at a circus. His sweet and doting trainer Kasandra (Sandra Drzymalska) leads him through the tricks she's trained him to do. Then EO is separated from Kasandra when the circus is dismantled following a bankruptcy notice at the same time that animal rights activists are protesting the show for animal cruelty. And the odyssey begins. There are times when the framing of the tale suggests that we're watching a shaggier version of one of those family-friendly animal pictures where a heroic creature, usually a dog, is separated from its owner and travels hundreds of miles to reunite, surviving a series of mini-adventures through sheer ingenuity. That's not where Skolimowski and his co-writer Ewa Piaskowska are taking us. This isn't even a picaresque narrative that puts EO at the center of every scene. Sometimes he's not onscreen and the movie shows us the geography of Poland and the way that humans and their buildings and roads and cars have claimed and in some cases disfigured it, while remaining largely indifferent to the natural world they've trampled and the animals they've tamed, displaced or destroyed.
This is not the kind of movie that tries to convince viewers that animals are "just like us," even though quite a few scenes depict humans confirming that they, too, are animals, by intimidating and terrorizing individuals and groups in order to assert dominance or claim territory. At least EO escaped the circus. Humans built it and are the main attractions as well as the audience, and don't realize that they're running through the same routines, day after day.
EO is currently in select theaters