FILM REVIEW: FAMILY ROMANCE, LLC

 

The German filmmaker Werner Herzog has always been interested in exploring non-Western based cultures, within his larger interest in the tumultuous relationship between nature and man. With his latest film Family Romance, LLC (2019), which is set in Japan with Japanese actors speaking in their own native language, Herzog has once again created a fascinating portrayal of a non-Western culture. Family Romance, LLC also serves as a cautionary tale about the increasingly isolating effects of modern day technology, a subject which Herzog has been exploring continuously in his documentaries and narrative feature films.

Although it is a fictional, narrative film, Family Romance, LLC has a naturalistic and almost cinema verite quality to it that resembles a documentary. Herzog cast non-professional actors, but he is able to successfully elicit from them authentic, realistic portrayals of their characters. Family Romance, LLC is about Yuichi Ishii, the owner of the business in the film's title, which rents out human companions to those who feel isolated from society and need some sort of made-up family member or social contat to accompany them. Although we see Yuichi with various clients of his family rental business throughout the film, Family Romance, LLC primarily focuses on the relationship between Yuichi and Mahiro, the young daughter of the widowed and lonely Miki Fujimaki. 

Miki hires Yuichi to serve as Mahiro's surrogate father, as Mahiro never met her real-life father. Yuichi invents a story that he left Mahiro's mother when she was young, but wants to start to get to know her as his daughter. The resulting familial drama plays out almost like a Yasujiro Ozu or Hirokazu Koreeda film, but it is also distintly a Herzog film with its unique filmmaking style. Just as Herzog filmed awe-inspiring aerial shots of the Amazon jungle in his earlier films, he shoots astonishing drone-footage of the natural landscapes of Japan. Japan is known for its technology, but Herzog still wants to point out the commanding existence of nature that still persists amidst the urbanized environment.

Herzog served as the cinematographer of Family Romance, LLC himself, using a small, non-obstrusize 4K video camera, and purposefully keeping his distance from the actors to allow them the space to create realistic characters. Indeed, all the performances in Family Romance, LLC, from the bit roles to the leading roles, feel genuinely authentic and free of all theatrical artifice. By filming Family Romance, LLC away from the constraints of Hollywood studio filmmaking demands, Herzog instills the film with a sense of liberation and new possibilities in cinema. There are very few traditional establishing shots, or cutaway shots to different framing perspectives, and Herzog does this on purpose because he is more interested in filming reality than creating an artificial studio product. We as viewers know that the images we are seeing are reflections of Herzog himself, so in a way Family Romance, LLC is the ultimate auterist project. 

The handheld quality of the images gives Family Romance, LLC the feel at times of viewing home videos, or something akin to the many personal videos we see so many times online of family vacations and social gatherings. Thus, using new technology, Herzog is creating a film that is made in the tradition of modern day, online streaming videos. Indeed, technology is very much a major theme in Family Romance, LLC, as Herzog is exploring how the increasingly isolating effects of technological advances, as we spend more times living in a virtual world dominated by our phones and tablets, has resulted in an absence of intimate, real-life contacts. Thus, Yuichi is able to have a thriving business renting out a semblance of personal interactions with imaginary family members to fill this void. At times throughout the film, Herzog will slow down the footage to emphasize the comfort that Yuichi's business brings to his clients, as in a moving scene when Yuichi stages a lottery win for an elderly woman who lives by herself, and the camera lingers on the woman's smiling face.

Yuichi's business of bringing people closer together with what are essentially false relationships is Herzog's commentary on the fragility of real family and personal ties in the modern world. The line between what are true, biological family connections and virtual relationships with people we meet online are blurred; in many cases, we feel closer to those people we communicate solely with online than those we know in the outside, physical world. Yuichi offers a sort of combination of these two experiences, since he is creating intimate relationships between people who are utltimately not truly connected with each other in real life. Herzog understands this contradiction in Yuichi's business, and the last image of the film is a haunting reminder of how disconnected we as a society are to the real world. 

From his earlier films like Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo, Herzog, to his later films like Grizzly Man, Herzog has always been interested in exploring human's tumultuous relationship with nature, and our incessant need to conquer and control nature. As a result, humans have resorted to creating their own sort of nature through technology by creating a virtual online world, in the hopes of getting instant fame or conncetions with others through our various mobile devices. In an amusing sequence in Family Romance, LLC, a woman hires Yuichi to follow her around with a fake entourage of photographers in the hopes of becoming famous online.

In another scene in Family Romance, LLC, Yuichi visits a hotel staffed by robots to see if he can start replacing his rented out family members with robotic employees. The human and the technological worlds have merged at this hotel, but Herzog continuously focuses on the eerie nature of the robotic greeters and workers; although they attempt to emulate a semblance of humanity, they ultimately are still nothing more than robotic machines. More recently, Herzog explored this concept of technological dissonance most explicity with his film Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World, which portrayed how artificial intelligence and robotics are permanently altering the human world.

With Family Romance, LLC, Herzog is examining what is possibly the next logical step in intimate relationships in an increasingly fast-paced, technologized world, as we start replacing our real-life family and personal connections with online, virtual relationships. As Yuichi, Miki, and Mahiro grow closer togeher in their invented relationships with each other, Yuichi starts to see the danger in this, as he is unable to separate his real-life relationships with his created ones. Herzog asks us to re-examine our reliance on technology and its fabricated realities, and to see what it is that truly makes us human. For Herzog, the familial love between a real mother, father, and daughter is more authentic than any virtually created connection. 

FILM REVIEW: THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL

Throughout his career, Wes Anderson has steadily developed and honed his distinctive voice as an accomplished visual stylist and a sly satirist in the tradition of Ernst Lubitsch. With The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), Wes Anderson has created his most fully realized portrait yet about the follies and joys of the human condition. With its baroque mise-en-scene and perfect mixture of drama and comedy, The Grand Budapest recalls an earlier time in cinema when a heightened sense of sophistication intermingled seamlessly with slap stick humor and inspired zaniness. And yet through all the joie de vivre of The Grand Budapest Hotel, there is an increasing feeling of melancholy and yearning for a bygone period when human nature elevated itself beyond the barbarity of modern times. 

Like many of Anderson's films, The Grand Budapest Hotel features an eclectic cast of characters who function as a sort of surrogate dysfuntional family. The film centers on the rise and fall of the once glorious Grand Budapest Hotel, located in an imaginary European country during the early 1930s. Living and working in this hotel are the two main characters of the film, Monsieur Gustave H. (Ralph Fiennes), the hotel's concierge who spends his spare time seducing older, wealthy women, and Zero Moustafa (F. Murray Abraham as the elder Moustafa, and Tony Revolori as younger Zero), the lobby boy who later gains a more prominent position in the hotel. Gustave and Zero form an alternatively dysfunctional and endearing sort of father-son relationship with each other. After one of Gustave's lovers passes away, she bequeths in her will a priceless painting to Gustave, setting off in motion a series of wild events involving secret societies, murder, imprisonment, and many other typical Anderson complications.

What makes The Grand Budapest Hotel such a fascinating and accomplished film is Anderson's complete mastery over the many layered threads of narrative construction. The film alternates seamlessly between different time periods, from modern day Europe, to the main 1930s setting of Anderson's imaginary European country, and into the more drab late 1960s and 1980s of the same location. Within each of these time periods, Anderson also employs various film stock ratios, using 2.35:1 ratio for the modern day and 1960s scenes, the Academy ratio of 4:3 for the 1930s scenes, and 1:85:1 ratio for the 1980s scenes. Each of these ratios are used to replicate the respective film stock used for the corresponding time periods The Grand Budapest Hotel is set in. 

Most notably, the Academy ratio of the 1930s is used to pay homage to the urbane comedy of manners films of Ernst Lubitsch, like Design for Living, Trouble in Paradise, and Ninotchka, as well as the classic slapstick comedies of the Marx Bros. Like the protagonists of Lubitsch's films who often are impoverished swindlers masquearading as members of the bourgeois class, Gustave lives in a small, nondescript room in the Grand Budapest Hotel, and yet he spends his time deceiving older, affluent women into funding his forays into a seemingly wealthy lifestyle. The slapstick elements of The Grand Budapest Hotel are cleverly revealed in many of Anderson's complex set pieces, highlighted by an exhilirating prison escape sequence that would have made Rube Goldberg proud.

One accusation often lobbied towards Anderson's films is that his elaborate attention to set design and detail often leaves the actors feeling stiff and theatrical. This was most noticeable in The Royal Tennenbaums, which was Anderson's dress rehearsal for The Grand Budapest Hotel. While the mise-en-scene of The Royal Tennenbaums was executed to perfection, it often left the actors feeling like puppets that weren't quite brought fully to life. The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou was an improvement over The Royal Tennenbaums' rigid performances, but at times even that film fell into puppet theater territory. Maybe this is why Anderson's animated films, Fantastic Mr. Fox and Isle of Dogs, felt much more naturalistic. In these animated films, Anderson has full control over every little detail of his animated characters, as opposed to trying to elicit his desired performances from human actors who may not be fully privy to his vision.

However, with The Grand Budapest Hotel, the acting finally feels completely natural and in synch with Anderson's unqiue sensibility. Every turn of phrase and speech tic of the actors feels perfectly in tune with the equally idiosyncratic set design, color scheme, and overall mise-en-scene of each of Anderson's sequences. We are no longer seeing actors being awkwardly pulled by Anderson's puppet strings, instead each performance feels seamlessly aligned with the universal vision of the film. A great example of this is the seamlessly choreographed "Society of the Crossed Keys" sequence, in which Anderson uncovers each member of the film's secret society through an impeccable blend of visual cues and exquisitely modulated performances.

Indeed, one can list scene after scene of masterfully constructed sequences in The Grand Budapest Hotel, which at times almost resembles a live-action animated film. Anderson even employs animation at some points, such as his introduction to the hotel near the film's beginning, which we can clearly see is an elaborately designed scale model of a hotel. All of this visual eye candy would mean nothing if there was no deeper meaning behind it all, and The Grand Budapest Hotel is ultimately a yearning for decency and a simpler way of living, as the more brutal realities of society start to incringe upon Anderson's almost Edenic paradise of the hotel. 

As the film progresses, there are hints of darkness and cruelty, such as a shocking scene where a character gets his hand maimed, but through it all we delight in Anderson's lovely recreation of a time period when a respect for humanity reigned. As The Grand Budapest Hotel reaches its ending, hints of facism start to creep in as we see armed soldiers take over the hotel, and even threaten death and violence at one point. The celebratory mood of the 1930s is over, and with it the Grand Budapest Hotel starts to fall into ruin, until it's just a drab shadow of itself by the 1960s. 

This is both an allegory for the degradation of society as a whole, and the natural growth from youthful idealism to the more realistic and grounded stage of adulthood. Zero is no longer the bright eyed bellboy he was in the 1930s, instead by the late 1960s he is a bearded, older man wandering the now empty halls of his once grand hotel, reflecting on more colorful and vibrant times. As Gustave himself says near the film's end, "There are still faint glimers of civilization left in this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once known as humanity." For Anderson, as our society descends deeper into darkness and hopelessness, he makes films to point our way forward for toward a brighter, and hopefully more enlightened future.

FILM REVIEW: THE GLORIAS

Although she is mostly known for her visually extravagant and surreal Broadway theatrical productions and film work, Julie Taymor has created a more conventionally structured biopic with her film The Glorias (2020). The result is one of her most emotionally resonant works of art, and a further evolution in Taymor's increasingly accomplished cinematic projects. While Taymor's earlier films like Frida and Across The Universe were hallucinatory fever dreams that used flamboyantly constructed set pieces to tell their stories, The Glorias takes a more traditional biopic approach to tell its equally fascinating narrative.

The Glorias is about the revered political activist and writer Gloria Steinem, covering her youth traveling the country with her adventurous parents, along with her own journeys in India as a college student, and up through her rise as an important voice in the womens' rights movement from the 1970s and into the modern era. Portrayed by Julianne Moore as the older Steinem, and Alicia Vikander, Lulu Wilson, and Ryan Kira Armstrong in her younger years, The Glorias is for the most part a conventionally constructed biography. However, Taymor still employs her more fantastical visual motifs throughout the film, creating some visually astonishing set pieces to portray the inner thoughts of Steinem throughout the years.

With its story of a Caucasian woman who is exposed to and shows geniune concern for women from other cultures beyond her own, The Glorias is also the story of Taymor herself. Like Steinem, Taymor is a Caucasian woman who left the United States during her youth and college years to explore and immerse herself in non-Western culture. While Steinem travelled to and lived in India as a youth, Taymor spent time during her youth in Sri Lanka, India, Indonesia, and Japan to study the arts and culture there, which would go on to influence her own work as an adult. 

Steinem's years in India exposed her to the inequities and prejudice in the culture towards women and members of different castes, which would inform much of her own political activism in the United States to fight for both the women's rights and Civil Rights movements. However, Taymor also shows how Steinem was aware of her own priviledged position as a White woman in American society. Although she still had to fight to break the glass ceiling for women in regards to reproductive issues, career prospects, and the general perceptions towards women as sex objects, Steinem was careful not be a lead spokesperson for African-American and other minority women in their own battles.

Taymor shows how Steinem genuinely cared for the rights of female minorities, but she wanted to let them tell their own stories in their own voices, and not impose her voice as a White woman into their campaigns. This is why we see scenes of Steinem encouraging African-American, Asian-American, as well as Native-American women to fight for their own causes during the 1977 National Women's Political Caucus. By doing this, Taymor is avoiding the trap of having a White savior in her film, a category which Steinem herself tried hard to avoid throughout her own career as a writer and political activist. For Steinem, her role was to empower others to discover and have their own unique voices be heard.

Indeed, the subject of finding a voice is a constant theme throughout The Glorias. In this way, Taymor's film recalls Jane Campion's An Angel At My Table, another searing portrait of a female artist embracing her unique talents as a writer in a patriarchal society. Taymor examines how due to male-centric prejudices about her as a woman, the young Steinem struggled to get her voice as a journalist heard. While Steinem wanted to write and report about the Civil Rights Movement, her male editor instead wanted her to write about more feminine topics like models, fashion, and dating. After Steinem finally finds her voice as a writer, she later struggles to find her voice as a public speaker, but with the help of the African-American political activists Dorothy Pitman Hughes (Janelle Monae) and Florynce Kennedy (Lorraine Toussaint), Steinem develops into a powerful orator for the rights of women and minorities.

Taymor also explores Steinem's relationship with her parents and how they shaped her into the feminist icon she later became. Steinem's mother Ruth Nuneviller (Enid Graham) was a former journalist who gave up her writing career to get married to Leo Steinem (Timothy Hutton) and raise Gloria. This revelation causes Steinem to avoid marriage until much later in her life, and focus on her writing and political activism career, as she didn't want to fall into the same trap as her mother. Steinem was trying to redefine the role of women as the primary caregiver for their children, which oftentimes resulted in them having to sacrifice their life goals and ambitions. Throughout the film, we see male interviewers question and criticize Steinem for never getting married, but for her the more important goal was to get her voice heard as a strong and independent woman.

Steinem's father Leo is portrayed as a hustler of sorts, who was always trying to come up with elaborate schemes to strike it rich, but more often than not his endeavors ended up as fiascos. However, Leo was also an open-minded and adventurous person, which influenced Steinem to be the courageous and strong-willed woman that she later became. Her father's spontaneous travels across the country would encourage Steinem to explore India as a young woman, and give her the curiosity to empathize with and try to understand cultures outside her own. This is why Taymor explores the lifelong friendships Steinem had with the Mexican-American labor activist Dolores Huerta (Monica Sanchez) and the Cherokee activist Wilma Mankiller (Kimberly Guerrero).

With The Glorias, Taymor has created an epic and complex portrait of an extraodinary historical figure. While Taymor for the most part holds back on her more extravagant cinematic techniques, the few occasions when he see the usual Taymor theatrical flair are wonders to behold, including a breathtaking sequence where we see Steinem transition from a young woman to her older self during a talk show, all against the backdrop of a Wizard of Oz inspired visual montage. 

Like Spike Lee with Malcolm X, Taymor uses a more traditional narrative structure to tell Steinem's story because she wants to emphasize the importance of Steinem as a historical figure, rather than bombard the audience with extraneous visual cues. In the process, Taymor has created one of her most dramatically powerful work of art so far, one that succeeds as both an examination of a society overcoming prejudice and hate, as well as a moving homage to a woman who changed the course of American history for the better.