The 59th Chicago Film Festival is officially over, but Blood Jump’s coverage is just getting started, baby. There have been movies that push the medium forward and movies rooted deep in nostalgia and tradition; movies about loss and love, good and evil, and building the horniest Frankenstein you could ever imagine (more on that in the next issue). I’ve dug my nails into my chair’s armrest to stifle tears in sold out theaters and to control my rage at incessant gum chewing. We gotta do with gum chewing in public what we’ve done with smoking, which is objectively cooler and easier on the ears than gum.
Before we dig into the next batch of festival movies, a note on Brian Cox, who narrates the introductory trailer played before each screening of the festival. Brian, there’s no way you need to keep taking these V.O. gigs. Hearing you hawk burgers over an Uber’s radio, sitting through your playful rant about the festival in the theater, and then returning to an Uber to listen to you hum the McDonald’s jingle is threatening to make a Succession rewatch kind of a drag. But I digress.
In today’s Blood Jump, we continue with the second of three installments on this year’s CIFF. Anselm. The Holdovers. in water. Let’s begin.
Anselm
If Anselm Kiefer is by any measure a cinephile, I’d bet he counts himself a fan of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. The late director spent much of his prolific career reckoning with a postwar Germany. His films find personal and political identities merging and dissolving in the shadows of global atrocities; they seek blame and responsibility and agonize over what to do when finding either changes nothing. The Marriage of Maria Braun flashes pictures of postwar German politicians after the ruin of its own heroine in a gesture as angry as it is knowingly futile; Lola and Veronika Voss transpose 50s Hollywood melodrama across a nation buckling under a nauseous brew of guilt and grief. Kiefer, a German painter and sculptor, is similarly stricken by the ways his country’s history bleeds into his own interior. His work is alternatingly furious, sullen, and full of wonder, inspired and defeated and endlessly inquisitive.
At one point in Anselm, Wim Wenders’s documentary on Kiefer, the artist speaks to his process in situ while working on a multimedia landscape of a barren German field. He pastes swathes of straw to his painting before torching it with a flamethrower; it results in remarkable depth, an eerie, gray field bearing treads of decay. “You can’t paint a field once a tank has run through it,” Kiefer says.
Wenders employs a similarly literal depth to Anselm, shooting the documentary in 6K resolution and 3D. The result is a privileged immersion into Kiefer’s work. The artist—especially in his recent career—works at a sometimes prohibitively large scale. One Copenhagen exhibition spanned 1,500 square meters, he has permanent installations at The Louvre and MASS MoCA, the latter in a dedicated building of 10,000 square feet. The depth and clarity of Wenders’s documentary lends not only a degree of access to Kiefer’s work for those unable to examine it in person but an intimacy that would not exist without Wenders’s hand. Kiefer’s art is deeply literary, and Wenders scores his sculptures and paintings with whispers of the works (most frequently by Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann) from which they draw inspiration. Stars bleed from the screen to accompany cosmogenic paintings, outdoor instillations are shot with such care you can feel a chill on your breath.
Like Fassbinder, Kiefer’s body of work is not without its controversies. Fassbinder’s films are brass and accept a bill of contradictions at the cost of their agility and impact; Kiefer’s refusal to lend narrative to his work has made collections like Occupations and Heroische Sinnbilder, a series of photos that find the artist performing a Nazi salute across France and Italy, vulnerable to accusations of xenophobia and antisemitism.
But Wim Wenders is an accomplished documentarian (this is the second 3D documentary for the director, after 2011’s Pina), and Anselm is nearly vacant of editorialization: there are no talking heads, no formal interviews. Aside from the film’s notable tech specs, the only real directorial thumbprint is a light narrative thread that casts Wenders’s son as a young Kiefer. We watch the young artist gaze quietly at a sea of stars, he pores over books that later take shape into sculpture, he lets his boredom fray into inspiration in stuffy manors. It’s a decision that’s largely inconsequential—with the exception of one sequence that carries enough spiritual grit find a good home in Wings of Desire, nothing of Anselm’s additive flourishes proves especially memorable. But a meandering sequence of interstitials is fair admission for such intimate access to a monumental body of work.
The Holdovers
Alexander Payne’s ode to yuletide academia threatens to burn up as a Nostalgia Icarus at any second. Its opening credits are pockmarked with faux 35mm film spots, its cast is shellacked with mutton chops and bellbottoms, dorm-room vinyl crates comprise a soundtrack that pulls from Cat Stevens and The Allman Brothers. On the surface, The Holdovers reads like another entry in an endless stream of bleary-eyed and backward-looking content, a half-sepia’d placeholder between Christmas dinner and passing out on the couch. But Payne sets his swing at 70s cinema apart: The Holdovers is not a return only to the film stock of New Hollywood but to the character-led, lazy-river hangouts that made the 70s a singular decade in moviemaking.
Paul Giamatti is Mr. Paul Hunham, a neither prestigious nor popular teacher at Barton Academy, a Massachusetts boarding school for boys. Hunham is God’s least favorite schlub, a walking mothball that reads as if Daniel Clowes took a pass at William Stoner. He speaks in Latin bon mots while getting day-drunk next to mall Santas, he suffers from a disorder that causes him to smell constantly of fish, we see his tube of Preparation H before we see his face. Such is Hunham’s reputation as a Major Drag that the Academy sticks him with supervising the few students with nowhere else to go over the holidays. In little time, that list of holdovers whittles down to one: Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa), a gangly smartass whose postpubescent vulnerability betrays his 5 o’clock shadow. Hunham and Tully are left to spend Christmas at Barton with Mary Lamb (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), a lunch lady who’s recently lost her son in the Vietnam war, to the delight of no one.
Hunham, Angus, and Mary buzz toward and repel each other with the frantic loneliness that surfaces at the denial of fate. The academy’s empty halls impose an ironic claustrophobia to their two-week sentence. It would be easy for the three Bartonites to divvy up rations and claim their own school wing until the next semester starts; instead, they sit and bitch through makeshift family dinners like siblings who fall asleep on each other’s shoulders after a day of fighting.
Part of The Holdovers’s joy is watching this process of reluctant and cyclical need fulfillment. Hunham’s proud scholasticism likely prohibits the professor from acknowledging how lonely his protective misanthropy has left him; Angus’s tiptoes on the threshold of adulthood can’t bear the weight of the mess at home that kept him in school over the holidays; Mary’s grief is enormous but cannot distract from the race and class lines that keep her in the kitchen in a school full of jackass white boys. Still, there’s a warm, jailhouse camaraderie to the triad. Payne wisely keeps the balm of company from solving too many problems—this isn’t a movie of students teaching teachers—but sometimes just being there is enough to get somebody by, and it’s touching to watch the ice melt around three people who would rather be anywhere else.
Alexander Payne was at the helm for Paul Giamatti’s strongest performance—as the pinot-and-Prozac guzzling Miles Raymond in 2004’s Sideways—a role that helped to lift Giamatti from a career of Saturday-morning syndicated character acting. The Holdovers proves Sideways’s Paul-and-Payne collab wasn’t a fluke. You could likely tag “…as Paul Giamatti” to any entry in the actor’s filmography without catching flak, but it’s remarkable how tightly Giamatti is able to fill the vessel of Hunham without shaving off his own trademarks. And his castmates are able to punch at his weight: Da’Vine Joy Randolph is as nuanced as she is funny, and Dominic Sessa writes a check for a decade of offers with his debut here.
The Holdovers carries less acid than Payne’s previous work—maybe that’s a consequence of David Hemingson’s script, maybe the director’s worldview is softening—but not at the cost of its potency. It is as funny as Election and emotionally resonant as Nebraska, an exercise of comfort in form that, despite some occasional narrative clunkiness, still feels like a step forward. Sometimes swinging in your wheelhouse carries you further than reinventing the wheel.
in water
in water is the sort of movie your family assumes you’re seeing when you mention you’re attending an independent film festival: subtitled, threadbare in plot and action, and shot intentionally out of focus. On paper, it’s an art-school mélange ripe for parody and red-faced dads. But director Hong Sangsoo built his prolific career with these domestic slow-cinema experiments, and in water, his 29th movie, is the product of an artist comfortable enough to work in miniature. It is barely over an hour, works with a cast of three, blurry as hell, and every bit as effective as its arthouse peers.
Seoung-mo (Shin Seok-ho) is a frustrated actor who decides to try his hand at making his own movie. On a shoestring budget, he enlists actor friend Nam-hee (Kim Seung-yun) and fellow filmmaker Sang-guk (Ha Seong-guk) to help round out his cast and crew. That’s about it for in water’s plot. Tensions swell and ebb—Nam-hee and Sang-guk grow weary when they realize Seoung-mo hasn’t written a script, Seoung-mo gets jealous when Nam-hee and Sang-guk become closer—but not a whole lot happens during in water’s 61 minutes. Which is typical of a Sangsoo joint: he’s more interested in people and time as relational entities than as agents of notable events.
in water is as metatextual as any other Hong Sangsoo joint, who’s devoted the better part of his oeuvre to the lives of artists: novelists, actors, and especially, filmmakers. These conceits are often set and setting for relational dramas; here, Sangsoo digs at process. We watch Seoung-mo track how Nam-hee walks down an alley, he plans meals for three from his movie’s microbudget, he has conversations and recreates them verbatim on camera. Conversations die out between bites of pizza, ideas take shape and fizzle into the breeze in the same shot. Sangsoo is never prescriptive with the purpose of his camera’s attention to process—in water, mercifully, is not another love-letter to da movies—but there’s something almost narcotic, if not noble, to the patience he employs. Call it the Joy of Cooking: you end up sitting with these artists for long enough in their craft that you begin to suss out motives and inspirations and aspirations and watch in wonder as they take the shape of your own.
Okay, so yes, the blurriness. Shooting your movie out of focus is asking an audience to dismiss your movie. Hong Sangsoo shoots his films with an average $100k budget, and at almost 30 movies, even his devoted fans would have fair license to sit this round out in favor for his more substantive projects. Less cynically, it’d be easy to drum up sophomoric theses for what the blur means, man: maybe it’s a metaphor for the uncertainty of art, maybe it’s the lack of clarity of the roles we assume for each other. Thankfully, in water’s ending, one of Sangsoo’s best, does away with any easy answer for the Roll of Blur in favor of something more interior. And lest you fear a migraine, in water is surprisingly pleasant and often quite beautiful, almost like putting your nose up against a Monet painting. It is a wild bet of a movie that opens toward a singular serenity if you’ll lend it an hour of your time.
Sample Draws
in water was preceded by Daughters of Fire, Pedro Costa’s new musical (!) triptych (!) short film. It’s a story of three sisters separated by an erupting volcano in Cape Verde and features music by Os Músicos do Tejo. I don’t feel equipped to read much into this text, but it is beautifully rendered, and I look forward to taking a deeper dive into Costa’s work.
Thank you for reading Blood Jump. The last issue of the CIFF miniseries will slop onto your beautiful porcelain plate in a few days.