The Weekly Gravy #128

Kimi (2022) – ***

Steven Soderbergh is the rare auteur who rarely writes his films; since his segment in the anthology film Eros in 2004, his only writing credit has been for the short Building No. 7. He seems to leave the writing to others – in this case, David Koepp – but from Traffic onwards he’s shot all his films under the name Peter Andrews, and from Solaris onwards he’s edited most of the under the name Mary Ann Bernard. So even if he didn’t write the actual script, his fingerprints are all over the film.

What, then, is the Soderbergh style? I can’t speak for most of his films, but those I’ve seen – especially what he’s done in the last decade – really try and put the viewer into the headspace of the protagonists. In films like the Magic Mike trilogy, he seeks to capture the exhilaration and erotic charge of exotic dancing – the excitement of performance and the thrill of being performed for. In heist thrillers like Out of Sight and Logan Lucky, the intricate structure and pacing puts us in the shoes of the crooks, who must consider every angle, weigh every risk, and try to have a little fun along the way.

And in paranoid thrillers like Side Effects, Unsane, and this film, he seeks to make us identify with protagonists struggling against shadowy external forces and their own minds. Such is the case with Angela Childs (Zoë Kravitz), a streams analyst for the Amygdala Corporation, whose flagship product, Kimi (basically Alexa) has a habit of misinterpreting what she hears – and hearing what others might not want her to hear. When Angela hears what sounds like an act of domestic violence, she’s determined to alert her superiors and get the authorities involved.

But there’s a problem: Angela struggles with severe agoraphobia, exacerbated by the COVID lockdowns, and when she attempts to leave her apartment to have breakfast with Terry (Byron Bowers), she suffers an incapacitating panic attack. There’s no issue with him visiting her for an assignation, but going out to dinner isn’t an option.

Nonetheless, Angela is determined enough to see justice done that she fights through her anxieties and makes her way to the Amygdala offices. But her efforts to bring the truth to light are countered by a very real threat to her safety – as in Side Effects and Unsane, the danger is real and pressing – for she has stumbled upon evidence which could destroy the company she works for. It’ll take all her strength of will and resourcefulness – and a healthy amount of luck -just to stay alive, let alone to do the right thing.

Soderbergh, with his tight editing, disorienting cinematography – the scenes of Angela first negotiating the outside world, with the camera sharply tilted and the film sped up just enough to feel “off,” are masterfully done – and in league with Cliff Martinez’s score and the sound design (which so well coveys the simultaneous senses of isolation and invasion), creates a film which, on a technical level, works damned well. It may have been made for HBO Max (I’m not sure it was ever theatrically screened), but it looks and sounds as good as any theatrical release these days.

And it has a strong lead performance from Kravitz, who would seem unlikely casting as a profoundly anxious shut-in – the film doesn’t pretend for a second that she isn’t gorgeous and in enviable shape (Angela exercises conscientiously) – but she embodies Angela’s determination, first to live on her own terms whatever the inconvenience (she has a bad tooth but refuses to leave to see a dentist), and then to get to the bottom of what she’s discovered, even as her life is at stake.

After a promising first half, however, Koepp’s script starts to go off the rails as the characters make several remarkably stupid decisions for the sake of the plot. Most egregious, in my book, are the efforts of the shadowy operatives trying to stop Angela, who prove to be astoundingly bad at covertly committing crimes; it’s tempting to say Koepp was making a satirical point, playing their slick appearance and threatening manner against how bungling they actually are, but sadly, I think it’s just sloppy writing.

It’s not enough to sink the film, but it’s enough to diminish the sheer entertainment value and tension the filmmaking and Kravitz’s performance are able to generate. There are worthy satirical elements in Koepp’s script – the tech-bro head of Amygdala giving a video interview in a book-lined office which is actually a bookcase in his garage, while he wears a business suit that stops at his waist – but it ends up being a fun modern B-movie that doesn’t quite hold together enough to be more than that.

Score: 73

Close (2022) – ***½

Oscar Nomination: Best International Feature (Belgium)

I didn’t consciously realize I was a bisexual until I was around 18, and aside from a few close friends, I didn’t come out until I was 28, and that partly because I was concerned about being assumed to be a gay man in denial (bi erasure is a pain). Now, I was interested in girls from a much earlier age, and looking back on it, I can see how some of my friendships with other boys were, if not crushes, closer to crushes than I realized at the time. But I couldn’t imagine coming out in high school, let alone middle school; I met with support and acceptance as an adult in 2018, but as a teenager in the Aughts?

Now, Léo (Eden Dambrine) and Rémi (Gustav de Waele) are not necessarily gay. They’re just close, spending most of their time together, sharing a bed during sleepovers, sitting close to one another at school, and in general displaying great comfort around each other. But when some girls at school ask them if they’re a couple, and some boys tease them homophobically, Léo grows concerned. He starts to put more and more distance between himself and Rémi. He makes new friends. He isn’t cruel – just distant.

But Rémi is hurt, and when he finally confronts Léo about it, Léo’s denial of anything being the matter leads Rémi to attack him. A short time later, a tragedy occurs (which I will not reveal) and the characters are left to try and make some sense of what has happened. Life does go on – but events such as this cast a long shadow which even catharsis cannot fully dispel.

It’s a quiet, thoughtful, powerfully observed look at the impact of simple actions, the weight of guilt and the profound uncertainty that often accompanies it – the notion of “if I’d only done things differently” – and the ways in which we try to interpret one another, often inaccurately, just as often irrelevantly. It doesn’t really matter how Léo and Rémi felt about one another – it’s how their classmates perceived them, and how they felt about those perceptions, that drives the story.

Lukas Dhont’s script is more distinguished than his direction, which doesn’t stray far from the present social-realist tradition; if anything keeps the film from sneaking over the edge into ****, it’s the lack of cinematic flair. Not that it’s badly or dully made, but a touch more distinction, a bit more style, might’ve made it truly great.

It comes close, though, not least because of the performances of Dambrine, who gives a wholly convincing turn as the young boy (Léo and Rémi are about 13) who seems the more sensitive and innocent of the two, but makes himself – without spelling it out for us – more reserved, detached, even resentful, but never unsympathetic, and Émilie Dequenne as Rémi’s mother, who quietly navigates some very emotional scenes without striking a false note.

Dambrine rightly won the Ensor (one of the two major Belgian film awards) for Best Lead, and Dequenne was nominated for Best Supporting Performance alongside de Waele and Léa Drucker, who’s solid as Léo’s mother; the film also won Best Film, Director, Screenplay, Cinematography, and Sound, while being nominated for Best Editing, Production Design, Costume Design (not sure about that one), and Score.

So while I wouldn’t have nominated it over Decision to Leave, and wouldn’t vote for it over EO, I’m quite all right with its Oscar nomination. I probably wouldn’t have seen it otherwise, and for how much it ultimately resonated with me, I’m glad I did. I’m also glad I’m not 13 anymore.

Score: 86

Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths/Bardo, falsa crónica de unas cuantas verdades (2022) – ****

Oscar Nomination: Best Cinematography

With this, I’ve seen all the non-specialty Oscar nominees except Best Song nominee Tell It Like a Woman (and I’ve heard the Oscar-nominated song). I’m not doing as well as I did last year (when I saw everything except one Documentary Feature nominee), but I’m fine with that.

Happily, the nomination which made Bardo a part of Oscar history is well deserved; in fact, I’d say it’s the best of the nominees, as Darius Khondji’s cinematography, in tandem with Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s direction, is such a vital part of the film’s dreamy style, which drifts from obvious dreams and imaginings to possible episodes of reality which are only a few degrees less surreal, and back again. From the opening shot, which gives us the perspective of the protagonist as he bounds weightlessly across a desert, it’s an eye-filling piece of work.

That protagonist is journalist/documentarian Silverio Gama (Daniel Giménez Cacho), who’s visiting his native Mexico prior to accepting a major journalism award in Los Angeles, where he’s lived for many years, having decided to raise his children in the United States. He’s ambivalent to both his native and adopted countries; in a meeting with an American ambassador (Jay O. Sanders) he mentions how the Mexican-American War was an American invasion and relates how the very building in which they’re meeting, Chapultepec Castle, was the site where military cadets, the Niños Héroes, gave their lives to defend their country.

We then see the battle playing out before Gama and the astonished ambassador, but one point in the film where the lines of reality are smudged – but in a subsequent visit to a TV studio, where he’s to be interviewed by his old friend Luis (Francisco Rubio), the over-the-top antics we see in a typically long take (it’s not Birdman, but Iñárritu loves his set pieces) suggest that reality is quite strange enough. It’s only when Luis grills Gama over his hypocrisy – his claiming to speak truth to power while seeking the approval of the wealthy and powerful, even living like them – that we wonder if what we’re seeing is happening in reality, or in Gama’s guilty conscience.

It doesn’t necessarily matter, because Iñárritu is more concerned with Gama’s psychology, with the guilt he feels over his choices, with the lingering pain of losing his first child in infancy, with his contradictory efforts to get his children to embrace their Mexican heritage while accepting the necessity of growing up in the States, and with his efforts to reconcile the turbulent history of Mexico and its complex relationship with the States with his decision to live there.

For me, I was actually more interested in the political and historical aspects of the story than in Gama’s own journey, in part because, quite honestly, I don’t know as much about the history of U.S.-Mexican relations as I’d like; aside from remembering the Alamo, I have a lot to learn, and I was quite fascinated by Iñárritu’s perspective on the matter. A scene at U.S. customs, where Gama and his children argue with a Mexican-American customs official over who can call the States “home,” is a blunt but effective illustration of the dilemma facing anyone who isn’t automatically seen as “American.”

That’s not to say Gama’s journey doesn’t hold the attention, that Cacho doesn’t give a solid performance, that Griselda Siciliani isn’t luminous as Gama’s wife Lucia (and it’s nice to see a happy marriage in a film about personal crisis), that Rubio isn’t viciously effective as the television star who can’t shake his resentments of his old friend, or that scenes like Gama’s imagined encounter with his late father (and visit with his mother, who I assumed was still living, but Wikipedia says she’s dead) don’t have the requisite emotional weight.

But I’m more likely to remember scenes like Gama chatting with Hernán Cortés atop a mountain of dead natives – which turns out to be a scene from one of Gama’s films – or to remember the amazing production design (which really deserved a nomination as well) and the beautifully crafted images more than the narrative which links them together. The script, by Iñárritu and Nicolás Giacobone, is just a bit too broad in its aims, a bit too shaggy in its structure, and a bit too vague in terms of character for the film to truly soar.

Interestingly, parts of the film feel like a retread of Birdman; the heavy conscience of the artist, the role of children in challenging their parents’ hypocrisy, the role of critics in challenging the artist (which works better here; the dynamic between Luis and Gama is rather more effective than that between Riggan Thompson and the acerbic Tabitha Dickinson), and the climactic confrontation with death, which brings the film’s title into play: bardo is a Buddhist concept, describing a state between one’s death and reincarnation.

At other points, the film reminds one of 8½ (the “flying” scenes at the beginning and end), The Tin Drum (Gama imagines his late son as wishing to return to the womb), The Revenant (the “mountains of death” imagery), The Great Beauty (the dance sequence, which does make its own fascinating use of “Let’s Dance” – but only the vocal tracks), and even Collateral (the dead/dying man left unattended on an L.A. Metro train).

A shade more depth or originality might’ve pushed it closer to my top 10, but it’s still a very good film, another **** film in a year decently filled with them, and a very worthy Oscar nominee for its rich imagery. The mixed reviews notwithstanding, it’s well worth a look.

Score: 87