Change Your Image
tianamarx
Reviews
My Blind Brother (2016)
Jenny Slate is a genius
If you had any doubts about Jenny Slate, if you ever thought she was a trivial comedian whose only talent lay in wacky faces and nasal impersonations, this film will set them to rest. Although the title presumes a male protagonist and refers to his male sibling, this is a deeply feminine film (written and directed by a woman) and Slate's Rose is her brilliant avatar, full of all of the doubts, the striving successes and blunt failures of modern womanhood. Rose is worried she's a slut, worried she's a bad person, worried she can't follow her heart or her instincts. She works through all of the heaped-up anxiety to do the right thing, stumbling now and then and never really overcoming a condition that still plagues women in our society. Throughout the film, she tells us she can't trust her feelings; in a climactic scene she confronts the fact that she's not really in love with her boyfriend with the line "But who am I to decide?" Slate carries this off, makes us feel the void of being a woman in what is still a man's world, with an Oscar-worthy performance.
The film itself is short, engaging, maybe a tiny bit predictable but ultimately leaves you with a smile. I saw it months ago at Tribeca, and I just can't get Slate's performance out of my head.
The Lobster (2015)
Visually stunning but ultimately unprofound
Months later I find I still can't get some of the images in this film out of my head: a figure standing on a distant scree so that it blends into the rock-face, a well-dressed couple walking down a deserted highway lined by hay bales, a dreary-sumptuous hotel interior destined to be as iconic as Kubrick's hexagon-covered Overlook. The Lobster is truly one of the best films of the decade in purely cinematographic terms: all praise to Thimios Bakatakis.
I've sat with the allegory—I won't spoil it—for those same months. I am feeling deeply uncertain about its merits. This is not a conventionally engaging film: because of its absurdities an audience will find it difficult to connect to the characters in and of themselves, and so, like the story of the ant and the grasshopper, neither of whom we yearn for or despise, the value of The Lobster must come from its protreptic meaning, what it makes us think about our own world, what lesson it draws us to.
That lesson seems to be no more than a string of ambivalent platitudes: love is greater than society, but society will win; there's no "the one" out there for you, but wouldn't it be nice if there were—well, maybe there is; human life is like a stay in a hotel, which is nice but also impermanent. I've been waiting for something more, something higher or at least something more original to crawl out of the chrysalis of this film, and now that summer has turned to autumn I've given up hope of new life. In terms of its content, The Lobster is almost irritatingly unmeaningful—not in the way great nihilist art can be, not in the way Fellini is—just grasping at a meaning far, far away from Yorgos Lanthimos' reach.
That said, it is well worth the VOD price—even better if it comes to a big screen near you—to experience the film's unique lens and the splendor of its setting. Just don't expect it to transcend the impermanent beauty of a rocky seaside resort.