There’s no place like home
Ste. Anne, I Was a Simple Man, Oscar movies, and sauce
I. Comfort food
II. Ste. Anne
III. I Was a Simple Man
IV. Short takes: Oscar edition
An improbable comfort food: baked ziti. My mother, discipled in the ways of sauce from a former fling, used to simmer ribs, sweet and spicy sausages, the works, in a vat of canned tomatoes until the piquant red turned into a russet, spoon-coating, slow-moving sauce before layer it with noodles and ricotta.
I was surprised to hear Scoreses’s mom calling the red stuff “sauce” and not “gravy” in his homey, low-fi doc Italianamerican. The food in there doesn’t look particularly appetizing so much as it does real. Catherine Scorsese, like my mother, probably didn’t try to source San Marzano tomatoes the way people like me do today and their cooking is better for it. Tell me what foods you’re nostalgic for.
STE. ANNE
Rhayne Vermette
Experimental filmmaker Vermette ferries you in and out of a dreamy adventure in her feature length narrative debut. Watching Ste. Anne feels akin to sitting in the passenger seat of a car with your eyes closed, letting the sun, filtered through the crown of the trees, warmly flickering on top of your eyelids. It’s easy to lose the narrative thread in this medley of indelible images that dance on the screen. Renee, played by the filmmaker herself, arrives in Manitoba to collect her young daughter Athene from her brother and his wife who have been raising the girl as their own. Renee (and Vermette) are of mixed indigeous and European ancestry, categorized as Metis, but the moniker doesn't have a tidy, legally recognized definition.
And as such, Vermette explores this ambiguity through the film’s formal experimentation, transcribing the dislocation of Metis into the visual and sonic landscape. It’s a sumptuous panoply of lensflared sunsets, private parties in cozy rooms, all awash in the chirping of crickets, the whoosh of the train, the sounds of country and city intermingled in one. Even if you don’t always know what’s going on, the scrum of images and aural cues offers a soothing turbulence suffused with the intimacies of family life. The filmmaker says she took editing cues from Madlib and J. Dilla in an interview with Joshua Minsoo Kim of Toneglow. Streaming on Criterion.
I WAS A SIMPLE MAN
Christopher Makoto Yogi, 2021
A man-facing-his-own-mortality schema invigorated by fresh ideas and sweltering lyricism, seeded with ruminations of island history and its colonialist past.
Technically it qualifies as an Asian American film, permissibly grouped under some reductive heritage month collection where eventually some average moviegoer may be disappointed at how much this film does NOT draw attention to the shape of its actors’ eyes and that the characters barely speak to each other at all. Yogi, with his second film, prefers poetic monologues, but strikes a balance between mood piece and character study.
That non-whiteness only dawned on me halfway through, as I was much too busy being swooned by the images — bits of Night & Fog, and Lynch-mode dreams, the Taiwanese New Wave, the tropical cinema of Apitchatpong, and even a little Fellini— rather than thinking about diversity. Subtly declarative, it’s perhaps one of the first Asian American entries into the world of American Indie this side of the century.
Recently diagnosed with cancer, old man Masao (Steve Iwamoto) neatly bronzed by sun and creased with regrets, lives his last days in solemn languor, watering his plants, scooping a mango from the tree, disobeying health directives. A few family members pay him perfunctory death-bed visits, while others sneer at the intra-time zone spanning phone calls that interrupt their lives.
When we look away, ghosts of the past materialize in corporeal form (as his dead wife, Constance Wu), the same as if they’d walk through the door. This alleviates the need for traditional flashbacks, braiding memories into the here-and-now, edited down to a steadfast even primordial pace, that of a roll of thunder, the waves breaking over the shore, the sound of your heart beat. It’s an elemental rhythm, though dying isn’t simple as the spirits keep intoning.
The spectral film benefits from the use of non-actors. Their lines are gentle embossments, extrusions of unpolished delivery that heighten the liminal discontinuum of time and space, memory and reality, as experienced by Masao. When he tells his grandson “don’t get old,” not exactly a revelatory instruction, the line wrenches in your stomach like a cinder block. Streaming on Criterion.
Last month, my partner and I ordered a slew of birria goodies from Nene’s Deli Taqueria in Bushwick, which specializes in this slow-cooked beef and ox-tail, extending its uses beyond the usual taco and into the likes of ramen and pizza. The pizza is less a pizza than it is a torta or souped-up quesadilla concealing a centimeter of cheese.
What the pie lacked in diameter, it made up for in weight. My arms got a workout carrying the box, which helped me to rationalize the fact that we procured enough food for five. We had done so purposely under the guise of an anti-Superbowl party, only to learn, days later, that the Super Bowl had not yet happened.
Oscar night is a Superbowl of another kind for a portion of the country, though the awards show pulls in 80 million less viewers. I’ll use Sunday as an excuse to snack on lard bread and mozz, port salut, and the dry crackers my dentist pleads me not to eat. To top it off: a pet-nat so bubbly the rampaging carbonation shoots off any recorking measures.
No one puts the Oscars on blast as well as A.S. Hamrah, so here I offer a few of stray observations on some of the contenders.
BELFAST
The film opens with generic drone footage of the city that I mistook for an extended production title credit. Kenneth Branagh’s depiction of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, from the perspective of a wee lad, favors broad sentimentality and blatantly forgoes political controversy, or commentary. The studiously general snapshot mostly made me think of my grandmother, who passed away last year. I sobbed for like thirty minutes, so I guess in some ways the film is a success.
DUNE
More than anything, a fashion capsule: resort collection for mother and son. A film of fabric and surfaces, undulating copper, rammed earth. Like other Villeneuve movies there lies a keen melancholy beneath its costly tricks.
NIGHTMARE ALLEY
Compared to the startling bleak original, Del Toro’s take is like the Universal Studios ride version: even more tawdry but well-oiled.
BEING THE RICARDOS
Part of being an adult is not having enough hours in the day and realizing that time is limited. I’ve shed all desires to become a completist and abandoned books and movies that I can’t consume with at least some interest. This doesn’t necessarily mean they’re bad; they’re just not for me — and I don't mean like that. I lasted about twenty minutes through Sorkin’s manicured artifice.
FREE GUY
Director Shawn Levy has a knack for turning out earnest mediocrities that are elevated by their unabashed feelgood-quality. If a TBS movie still existed, anything in his oeuvre deserves a prime three hour viewing window. (Once, channel-surfing, my brother and I landed on Date Night to just check it out and sat through the whole thing.)
In Free Guy—part Russian Doll, part Matrix, and thoroughly a superhero movie without a superhero—Ryan Reynolds plays a video game character who gains sentience and disrupts the fabric of gameplay when he learns he can break from his programmed routine. Having Reynolds play the naif tempers his boisterous spirit, and his bloviating clamor becomes a source of endless amusement intentioned by goodwill and not an attempt to be witty.
It’s so easy to be taken with his newfound capacious optimism, in fact, that I almost forgot that the female character (Jodie Comer) who brings it about is quite literally the definition of a manic pixie dream girl.
Previously covered: Power of the Dog; The Lost Daughter; Don’t Look Up; Worst Person in the World (MUBI); Drive My Car (BLARB)