FILM REVIEW: NOMADLAND

The concept of outsiders traveling away from the confines of mainstream society has been explored in cinema and literature before, from Agnes Vardas' Vagabond to Jack Keruoc's On the Road and its film adaptation by Walter Salles. Chloe Zhao's Nomadland (2020) continues this tradition, but does so from a unique perspective-- instead of the brashful youth from previous road films, Nomadland's protagonist is a wise elderly person. Zhao's moving film is a gentle, elegiac exploration of a whole generation of Americans who take on an itinerant lifestyle to deal with grief brought on by personal and societal issues.

Nomadland itself doesn't conform to traditional norms of cinematic narrative structure. Rather, Zhao unfolds her narrative in a quiet, meditative manner, letting the scenes play out naturally and without any intrusive John Williams' like music. When music does make its way into the film, it's done so in a subtle manner, fading serenly into the background like the pastoral, natural scenery that Zhao's camera unobstusively takes in. Zhao adapated Nomadland from a book by Jessica Bruder, which is the story of an elderly woman named Fern (Frances McDormand) who takes on a nomadic life on the road after the death of her husband.

Although Zhao herself is ethnically Chinese, Nomadland is an exploration of the American phenomenon of the CamperForce, a group of older, impoverished Americans working for Amazon warehouses. These elders aren't tied down to one location for their residence, and instead lead a roving lifestyle traveling from one location to another in RVs and vans. Although Frances McDormand is an established Hollywood actress, she completely embodies the more humble traits of her character, and blends seamlessly with the other mostly non-professional actors in Nomadland. Indeed, Zhao films Nomadland in an unobtrusive manner, letting her scenes play out naturally and giving her actors the space to fully inhabit their roles.

Much of Nomadland consists of Zhao's documentary-like explorations of the nomadic lifestyle of the CamperForce segment of American society, as we hear the stories of the lives of various elders and what drove them to abandon a more sedentary existence. Although there is much natural beauty in this roaming way of life, as the camera frames its various characters against the breathtaking scenery of the American Midwest, Zhao also explores the deeper grief and loneliness which is very much at the root of the CamperForce generation. This brings us to the question of what would draw a filmmaker from a Chinese background to explore such a particularly American lifestyle?

In Asian culture, there is much reverence for elders, as we respect the wisdom and knowledge they have gained throughout their lives. Many older Asians spend their lives surrounded by their family members, and they aren't thrown into isolation in senior housing in their golden years. Instead, it's common for older people in Asia to live with their adult children, or if they don't, then they are regularly visited by family members who take care of them on a regular basis. In the United States, when Americans become elders, they are often left to survive on their own without any family support. Thus, they feel isolated from both their own families and society.

It is this sense of dislocation which have led some American elders to seek out a sense of community with those of their own age in the CamperForce lifestyle which Nomadland explores. Because they are estranged from their own families and don't have a regular home they can reside in, the elders in Nomadland go on the road and are forced to travel and fend for themselves in a wider society which neglects them. It is this very Amerian concept of abandoning its elders that Zhao, an Asian filmmaker from a culture which actually looks after its older population, so sensitively explores in Nomadland.

Indeed, throughout Nomadland, Zhao uses her camera to portray the tragic stories of older Americans who have been let down by a society that should be taking care of them, as in the shock one character feels when she finds out how little money she receives from her Social Security fund. Another character finds out she has only a few months left to live, so without any family to turn to, she spends the remainder of her life traveling by herself. Essentially, Nomadland is Zhao's way of paying respect to and honoring the lives of a whole segment of the American population that has been thrown to the side as being disposable.

Near the last act of Nomadland, Zhao introduces the estranged son of one of the CamperForce members, and offers a story of redemption through the life of one particular family. This segment is a guidepost of sorts for Zhao to show how it's not too late for American society to change, as the son makes an effort to reach out to and take care of the elderly father who he has been distant towards for so long. If one family can change their ways and once again take care of an older American, then so can our whole society. This is a seemingly simple moral lesson, but one that makes Nomadland such an important and immensely moving film.

    

FILM REVIEW: RED POST ON ESCHER STREET

Before he was a prolific and widely celebrated filmmaker, Sion Sono was a member of the avant-garde, public street performance art group Tokyo Gagaga, where he protested against all forms of authoritarian control. This rebellious spirit never completely left Sono when he began making films, and throughout his career he has experienced his fair share of artistic struggles against the conventions of the Japanese mainstream film industry. Although the majority of his films have been passion projects that fully displayed his singular voice as an artist, Sono has had to fight against producers who tried to streamline his vision. Sono explores this eternal conflict between art and commerce in his film Red Post on Escher Street (2020), resulting in one of his most personal and emotionally raw films.

With its kaleidoscopic and wide-ranging portrait of a vast array of characters involved in the making of a film, Red Post on Escher Street recalls the ensemble films of Robert Altman, but filtered through Sono's exuberant and wild worldview. As the film begins, Sono introduces his eclectic cast of characters who are auditioning for the lead roles in a new film by the fictional film director Tadashi Kobayashi (Tatsuhiro Yamaoka). Kobayashi opens the casting call for his film to amateur performers, and Sono delves into the backstory of each of the apiring actors who attend the audition. Things get complicated in Red Post on Escher Street after Kobayashi finally chooses the lead actresses for his film in the form of Yasuko Yabuki and Kiroko, but his producer forces him to replace them with popular and physically attractive, but less talented actresses.

It is interesting to note that the actors themselves in Red Post on Escher Street are also non-professional thespians participating in an acting workshop. Sono shot the entirety of the film in only eight days as a training exercise for his actors, and he is able to elicit naturalistic performances from them. In fact, some of the performances are more authentic and heartfelt than the work of more established professional actors. 

It is this turning point in the film that reveals the ultimate theme of Red Post on Escher Street-- the desire for artistic freedom in a world dominated by conformity to mainstream edicts. The last act of the film, as Kobayashi begins to unravel while he struggles to film his project with his unwanted leads, contains some of Sono's most breathtakingly liberating cinema. The film set itself becomes a microcosm of the wider society at large, as Kobayashi is forced by those above him to focus on the bland actresses in front of him, while he is more interested in the less outwardly appealing, but unqiue extras at the margins of his camera's frame. While the film shoot descends into frenzied chaos, it is within this anarchic environment that Kobayashi is able to finally unleash his long repressed yearning for complete and total liberation as an artist.

Red Post on Escher Street culminates with the protagonist running away from authoritarian control and towards what he perceives to be a symbol of his freedom. Love Exposure, Himizu, and Why Don't You Play In Hell? all culminated in a similar scene of the lead rapidly sprinting away from authority and towards an unknown future, but Red Post on Escher Street is Sono's first film which shows the protagonist actually running back to that which he was escaping from, and finally asserting his control over his oppressors. Perhaps after all these years of struggling to maintain control over his art, Sono has finally regained the passion which he has longed for throughout his career with the making of Red Post on Escher Street.

Indeed, Sono films Red Post on Escher Street with an almost newfound sense of freedom, as each frame feels as loose and energetic as some of Sono's earlier, equally liberating films like Love Exposure, Strange Circus, and Guilty of Romance. Unlike those films, however, Red Post on Escher Street is almost completely devoid of any sense of nihilism and despair. Instead, for the first time Sono embues his work with a comforting mood of ebullience. There is still a hint of darkness with the troubling incest theme of Yasuko's story, and the suggestion that she may be homicidal, but overall Red Post on Escher Street is a surprisingly optimistic story about celebrating the power of those at the margins of society.   

While the literal meaning of the film's title refers to an actual red mailbox located at Escher Street where the actresses mail off their audition applications, Sono is also alluding to the graphic artist M.C. Escher with the constantly intertwining narrative of Red Post on Escher Street. Like Escher's portraits of asymmetrical objects that are continuously merging and receding from each other, Sono intricately interweaves his multiple narratives by going backwards and forwards in time, and replaying certain scenes to view them from alternate perspectives. This is a method which Sono has employed before, most noteably in Love Exposure, and it is a way for Sono to further deconstruct and find ways to break apart traditional narrative structure in innovative ways. It's always refreshing when an artist such as Sono is able to find his voice again after struggling for years with more mainstream projects, and Red Post on Escher Street is one of Sono's most artistically accomplished and exhilarating works in years.   

BEST FILMS OF THE 2000s

The best way to appreciate the lasting power of a film is to see if it withstands the test of time. With that being said, now that more then a decade has passed since the first decade of the twenty-first century, here are my choices for the best films of the 2000s:

1. Love Exposure (Sion Sono)

With Love Exposure, Sion Sono reached a delirious peak in his already electic career. While his previous films such as Strange Circus and Suicice Club delved in the nihilistic realm of brutal degradation, Love Exposure was his first original film to offer a glimpse of hope in the essential benevolence of human nature. Over its almost four hour runtime, Love Exposure careens wildly from one genre to another, and the viewer can feel the passion of Sono in every single frame of this stunning masterpiece.  

2. 2046 (Wong Kar-wai)

2046 is the culmination of Wong Kar-wai's fruitful collaboration with the cinematographer Christopher Doyle. With its labyrinthian plot and aesthetically astonishing set pieces and lighting, 2046 takes all the thematic and visual elements that Wong and Doyle have been working on and honing in their previous films together, and brings it to a masterful level of cinematic brillance. In a way, 2046 plays like a greatest hits collection on Wong's prior films, but it works on its own as a singular vision and meditation on the elusive search for human connection that pervades all of existence.    

3. Devils on the Doorstep (Jiang Wen)

In mainland China, Jiang Wen is a very popular and successful actor, but he has also had an equally impressive career as a filmmaker. His film Devils on the Doorstep is a Fellini-esque dark comedy that was controversial in China due to what was deemed as its too lenient portrayal of the Japanese occupiers in World War II China. However, Wen didn't set out to make a one-sided propaganda war film depicting the Japanese side as cartoonish villains; instead he created a complex and caustic satire of the follies of war during a turbulent time in China's history.

4. Election/Triad Election (Johnnie To)

Although they were released as two separate films, Johnnie To's Election and Triad Election actually comprise a single, epic portrayal of the rise and fall of a Hong Kong Triad empire. In a sense, Election/Triad Election are the Hong Kong equivalent of the Godfather films, as it is the muti-generational story of the intricate power struggles within a mafia clan, and their legal and illegal business dealings. To has created a sweeping, gritty and realistic gangster epic that is not only about action set pieces and elaborate shoot-outs, but about the actual human components of a mafia family and their personal and intimate lives throughout the years.

5. Munich (Steven Spielberg)

Steven Spielberg is best as an instinctive filmmaker dealing with subject matters of primal urges, and this is reflected perfectly in the astonishingly effective thriller Munich. Taking a balanced perspective on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, Munich moves at a breakneck pace through an at times unreletingly grim story of bloody vengeance. The violence in Munich is shocking and visceral, and Spielberg portrays each death in the film in such a horrific manner to show how ultimately futile the cycle of revenge-based violence is.

6. Summer Palace (Lou Ye)

Lou Ye's Summer Palace reminds one of Philip Kaufman's The Unbearable Lightness of Being, as both films are about how devastating historical events affect the lives of a close-knit group of friends and lovers. Summer Palace deals specifically with a group of young revolutionaries whose lives are torn apart after the infamous Tiananmen Square protests of the late 1980s. Like The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which dealt with the late 1960s Prague Spring protests, Summer Palalce is a sweeping and powerfully moving portrait of how a single historical event permanently altered the lives of a whole generation. Lou Ye depicts the more optimistic and ebullient pre-Tinanmen Square protest lives of the group of young college students, and fills the screen with scenes of lively political discourse and amorous sexual experimentation. Then, the rest of Summer Palace follows these same students as they struggle to adjust to life in China in the subsequent 1990s and into the 2000s; although they have aged at this point, they still never forgot the youthful idealism that permeated their brighter, more hopeful years.

7. The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (Wes Anderson)

It might not be a perfect film as at times one gets the sense that Wes Anderson struggled to portray on-screen his intended vision, but The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou is perhaps Anderson's most ambitious and visually complex film so far. Its rogues' gallery of eccentric characters and outlaws, along with the various cladestine societies that they belong to, recalls the equally creatively labyrinthian narratives of Thomas Pynchon. It is this shaggy, filled to the brim quality that makes The Life Aquatic such an endearing and admirably Byzantine work of art.

8. On the Occasion of Remembering the Turning Gate (Hong Sang-soo)

Early in his career, Hong Sang-soo was still experimenting with the cinematic medium to explore how best to implement his improvisational style of filmmaking. His first triumph in finding his voice with was the alternately hilarious and emotionally wrenching On the Occasion of Remembering the Turning Gate. Like Hong's later films, On the Occasion of Remembering the Turning Gate deals with the eternally complicated amorous relationships between women and men. Although he would go on to make even more accomplished films, On the Occasion of Remembering the Turning Gate is still one of Hong's best films because it perfectly depicts the pathos and humor inherent within the drama of humans yearning to connect with each other, but never quite being able to do so. 

9. The Aviator (Martin Scorsese)

Although it's not as highly regarded as his other films, The Aviator is one of Martin Scorsese's most ambitous and dramatically complex films. Not only is The Aviator a portrait of the legendary businessman/filmmaker Howard Hughes, but it also an incisive portrait of mental disorder. From the beginning of the film, when we see Hughes reminiscing about his mother lecturing him about the importance of cleaning himself, to the end when Hughes is isolated in a screening room entrapped by his mental obsessions, Scorsese incisively shows how genius and insanity are intricately linked. On one level, The Aviator is a celebration of the glories of classic Hollywood, as it explores Hughes' various business dealings and his involvement in the film industry of the 1940s. But, on a darker and more dramatically wrenching level, The Aviator explores how Hughes was ultimately unable to overcome his rapidly deteriorating mental condition. This culminates in one of Scorsese's most haunting conclusions to any of his films, as we see Hughe staring uneasily at himself in a mirror, finally realizing that he is unable to conquer his own sanity.

10. Les Destinees sentimentales (Olivier Assayas)

Olivier Assayas is rightly celebrated for his more well-known experimental explorations of cinema, such as Carlos, Irma Vep, and Clouds of Sils Maria, but one of his more traditionally constructed films, Les Destinees sentimentales, is also one of his most dramatically effective and powerful films. Based on a novel by Jacques Cardonne, Les Destinees sentimentales is an epic depiction of the life of a Protestant minister who leaves his wife and career behind to seek a passionate relationship with another woman. What makes Les Destinees sentimentales such a powerful film is Assayas' focus on the everyday details of daily existence, as he focuses on the simple joy and sometimes heartbreak of the relationship between the former minister and his new lover. The film covers a vast expanse of time, and by the end of the film, Assayas has engulfed us completely in his old fashioned, but emotionally resonant film, recalling classic epic films that took their time to tell their story.