A- | A Tunisian family tells their story, aided by two actors who play absent sisters. Directed by Kaouther Ben Hania Review by Jon Kissel |
Some of the best documentaries of the 21st century have incorporated some kind of meta element into their storytelling. The Act of Killing got its Indonesian government-backed murderers to consider their actions through filmmaking, while The Witness and Tower took innovative approaches towards recreating infamous events from the 1960’s. Dick Johnson is Dead and Procession got their subjects involved in acting out their own fears and traumas, or those of the director. Kaouther Ben Hania’s Four Daughters is in this tradition, breaking up a standard talking head format by casting actors as two of the four titular women. This serves to make the subjects more vulnerable in telling their complicated and affecting story of patriarchy, abuse, and fundamentalism in pre and post revolutionary Tunisia.
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There’s a certain kind of black pilled 20/30-something that I come across on Twitter every so often. It’s not a new phenomenon that unseasonably warm Februaries, ocean temperatures that approach that of a hot tub, and looming environmental catastrophe make people contemplate what the rest of their lives are going to be like. Combined with a difficulty in imagining the big adult milestones of home ownership, marriage, and children, there’s a distinct strain of pessimism in our cohort. In 2021, Bo Burnham received raves for his fatalist lockdown standup special, in which he resignedly sang the lyric ‘20,000 years of this, seven more to go.’ With that kind of built-in mindset, there won’t be movies like The Eternal Memory up for awards at the 2055 Oscars. Having spent their youth contemplating suicide and when it isn’t worth it to continue, everyone who might’ve suffered through Alzheimer’s would have plugged into the euthanasia machine at the first signs.
A podcast that has shaped a lot of my thinking over the last few years is You’re Wrong About, where two journalists examine some piece of cultural ephemera and unpack the many ways it was misunderstood in its time. Your Tonya Hardings, your Lorena Bobbitts, your Satanic Panics. They occasionally do survivalist stories, like the plane crash of a Uruguayan rugby team in the Andes. I don’t particularly go for these kinds of stories when they’re at their most harrowing, as in movies like Jungle, The Revenant, or Rescue Dawn, and this is a particularly harrowing story of survival. However, what made the Uruguayan rugby team into a good podcast episode was the difficulty of what happened to them after, where a media circus spun around them when it was discovered they had no choice but to resort to cannibalism. This is what I was hoping would be offered in Juan Antonio Bayona’s Society of the Snow, as its name suggests a kind of brotherhood that would only be understood by those who made it through together, plus a complicated survivor’s guilt that gets exacerbated by the media. Instead, what Bayona offers is boredom, turning this story into little more than a series of struggles endured by barely distinguishable characters.
One of the eureka moments to come out of the MeToo Hollywood revelations was that so much of how the public approaches male-female dynamics is informed by the creations of sex pests and rapists. Hollywood romances seep into brains, convincing people that they’re the protagonists in their own sunny representation of love lost and found on the sidewalks of a Canadian city masquerading as New York. Once it’s discovered that the executives, producers, and directors who sculpt these stories have exploitative approaches to women in their own lives, one has to consider what they’ve been putting into the world for popular consumption. Richard Curtis does not belong to the gross fraternity of MeToo villains, but the depiction of women and the male pursuit of them in his movies could easily have come from the jaundiced mind of a serial abuser. The sentimental drivel of his films combined with aw-shucks protagonists whose clumsy obliviousness doesn’t stop them from getting the girl makes him one of my most hated writers/directors, and his high-concept About Time is yet another example of what makes Curtis such an irritating figure, albeit not a criminal one.
Movies used to be weirder. The highest-grossing film of 1985 centers on the lead accidentally making his teenage mom fall in erotic love with him, up to the point where he finds himself in a car with her during a high school dance. Several years earlier, Luke Skywalker made out with his sister. These kinds of moments would never make it past Vin Diesel, Tom Cruise, or Kevin Feige, obsessed as they are with franchise management at the cost of anything potentially alienating. Director Robert Zemeckis wasn’t afraid of risks when making Back to the Future, a film with mass appeal that still has the confidence to mess with its audience. Zemeckis has fallen far from his 80’s and 90’s heights thanks to a 21st century obsession with heavily CGI’d messes that no one asks for and few remember, but there was a time when he could really make a mom horny for her son. |
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