2024 Top Ten List #2 All of Us Strangers

Writer/director Andrew Haigh

Paul Mescal and Andrew Scott

Haigh on the set with Paul Mescal

Haigh with cinematographer Jamie D. Ramsay

ALL OF US STRANGERS                  A                                                                                 Great Britain  USA  (105 mi)  2023  ‘Scope  d: Andrew Haigh

Little things I should have said and done, I never took the time.                                                  —Always On My Mind, The Pet Shop Boys, 1987

British-born writer/director Andrew Haigh, creator of Weekend (2011), 45 Years (2016), and Lean On Pete (2017), has crafted his most mature and compelling work, a haunting meditation on loneliness that offers more than a few surprises, emotionally raw and deeply connecting, expressing a unique vulnerability that is brilliantly told, feeling very grown up, where nothing else like it comes to mind, as it really establishes its own unorthodox path, where the reflective originality is literally off the charts without using any cinematic trickery.  What truly stands out is just how achingly personal it is, where every single moment feels heartfelt, and the title tells all, poetically revealing how we all revolve around each other’s lives, like planets in alignment, reminiscent of that spectacular opening sequence in Béla Tarr’s WERCKMEISTER HARMONIES (2000), Werckmeister Harmonies (Opening Scene - GR-EN sub) YouTube (10:12).  The degree of complexity in this film is surprising, as it starts out simple enough, with nothing out of the ordinary, where the realist aesthetic becomes ingrained with viewers, setting the tone for what follows, providing the building blocks of an intense theatrical exploration of memory and identity, loosely adapting Taichi Yamada’s 1987 Tokyo-based novel Strangers, the first recipient of the Yamamoto Shūgorō Prize, changing the central character to a gay man with the blessing of Yamada (who died recently at the age of 89) and his family, who were incredibly respectful of Haigh’s vision of finding hope in dark places.  At the center of the story is Irish actor Andrew Scott as Adam, a reclusive writer working on a story that has to do with his past and his deceased parents, currently living alone on the 27th floor of a block high-rise building with a panoramic view of the London landscape below, where the clouds on the horizon offer a contemplative vantage point, recalling Sofia Coppola’s far-reaching hotel room vista in Lost in Translation (2002), or the quiet perch in Spike Jonze’s futuristic Her (2013), where the window in each case is a barrier to the world outside.  Despite the massive size of what appears to be a new building, it is strangely deserted, where it comes as a surprise that he is the only one exiting during a fire drill, an incident that allows Adam to spot his only neighbor in a window, Harry (Paul Mescal from 2023 Top Ten List #7 Aftersun), who pays him a visit afterwards in an excessively awkward flirtatious gesture that reveals his off-putting drunken state, with a half-empty bottle of Japanese whisky in his hands, ALL OF US STRANGERS | “Do I Scare You” Clip | Searchlight Pictures YouTube (54 seconds).  He’s younger and more gregarious, but Adam declines the invitation, as he’s largely a solitary figure, but has second thoughts afterwards, believing there’s something there, and a short time later the two reconnect as gay lovers, where the awkwardness of an initial sexual encounter is everpresent, yet there’s also a heartfelt connection that bonds them together, some of which comes from sharing the difficulties they each encountered from the realization they were gay.  Both are estranged from their families and share the same feeling of alienation and not belonging, with Adam confessing he lost his parents in a car crash thirty years earlier just before he turned twelve years old, with Harry sensing that kind of pain never goes away, leaving Adam suddenly flooded by memories of his past, while Harry is himself trapped by his own struggles with drugs and alcohol.  Rising to the surface are grief and loss, with elements of warmth, melancholy, loneliness, and sorrow, opening a dialogue between the past and the present, something that was previously explored in Céline Sciamma’s Petite Maman (2021), or more recently Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron (Kimitachi wa dô ikiru ka) (2023).  But this is something different altogether, a profoundly moving experience that may leave some emotionally shattered, becoming a deeply philosophical Proustian essay on the power of love and the power of remembrance.   

Andrew Haigh films are known for being quiet, intimate, well-acted, and intensely real, where the root of them all is an emotional honesty expressed with extraordinary tenderness, where his eloquent use of music and camera movement feels effortlessly fluid and graceful, a bit like Xavier Dolan, luring us into an emotionally devastating fictional world that viewers are suddenly thrust into, as if we’re living it ourselves.  Premiering at the Telluride Film Festival, this is another LGBTQ story with a surreal aspect to it, bearing some resemblance to Enys Men (2022), as each is a brilliantly original exposé on loneliness, but things are expressed quite differently, conveyed largely through conversations, with regular bursts of humor in highlighting the absurdities of the situation, where it’s such a deeply personal and imaginative vision that it takes us places where we’ve never been, much of it stemming from the unique architectural blueprint from the Yamada novel.  While stuck on a page that simply reads “External, suburban house, 1987,” this film leaves audiences continually off-balance, as we question what we’re seeing, wondering just what to make of it all, taking place in a netherworld of memory and the imagination, where there’s a textured, indelible sense of pathos running through the entire film, which feels more like a metaphysical experience.  The overall weirdness may not work for everyone, but this is a director at the height of his powers pressing the artistic boundaries in pursuit of something completely different, where it’s a bit of a challenge to keep up with the dizzying turns in the road, but the place he takes us is something to be cherished.  Some twenty or thirty minutes into the film, Haigh pulls the rug out from underneath us, leaving us floating on air in a state of suspended incomprehension and disbelief, where it doesn’t matter if it defies all rational logic, as he instead creates an immensely satisfying alternative universe, with no explanation, and simply leaves us there to fend for ourselves.  While off on a long walk, Adam encounters a strange man (Jamie Bell) and follows him into the suburban neighborhood of Croydon, where we thoroughly expect an anonymous sexual encounter, but once they get to the door, the man happily introduces Adam to his wife (Claire Foy from 2023 Top Ten List #1 Women Talking), only to discover they affectionately call him their son, someone they haven’t seen in a long while, which is an alarming development, ALL OF US STRANGERS | “Hi” Clip | Searchlight Pictures YouTube (30 seconds).  Viewers are quick to think they may be stepparents, or foster parents, yet the strange thing is there appears to be little difference in their age as they immediately rehash childhood memories, which are in no way idealized or romanticized, but presented matter-of-factly, exposing the obvious discomfort that generation either failed to recognize or ignored.  As mind-blowing as this seems, blurring the boundaries of reality, they’re actually picking up their relationship where it left off decades earlier (“Is this real?” he asks), having conversations with his parents that he never got to have, where they all seem perfectly comfortable with the visit afterwards, as if it was a cathartic experience, which only elevates the emotional authenticity of the reconnection, a very unusual way to tackle the haunting memories of grief and death, like traveling through an invisible portal.  In this ghost story, however, Haigh leaves out any horror or supernatural elements, and rather than being about the dead, it’s about the living communing with the dead, tapping into feelings people didn’t know they had.  In a subsequent visit with just his mother at home, ALL OF US STRANGERS | “You Were Just A Boy” Clip | Searchlight Pictures YouTube (2:00), Adam confesses he is openly gay, which hits her like a ton of bricks, not really bringing herself to believe what she hears, as it’s not what she ever envisioned, yet this is the moment every gay kid has with their parents, and it’s completely relatable.    

One of the unlocking keys to the film is viewing the album cover of Welcome to the Pleasuredome by Frankie Goes to Hollywood, a pivotal 1980’s album that exploded onto the music scene in a wave of controversy, where the blatant sexuality was groundbreaking, dangerous, and exciting, along with its immersion into gay culture during the AIDS epidemic of the 80’s which took so many innocent young lives.  This film is caught in a time warp, carrying the distinct experience of a specific generation of gay people growing up in the 80’s, battered by the relentless homophobia of the Reagan and Thatcher era where they were meant to feel ashamed and abandoned, as no one cared, where it’s not nostalgia, which can often hide the truth, but the burden of alienation and self-loathing still carried around by generations of grown-up gay children who have been traumatized from the harm done by an unsympathetic mainstream that was not inclined to question or reshape the world around them but simply accept the status quo.  Moving away from the traditional ghost story of the novel, Haigh creates something more psychological and distinctly metaphysical that is intentionally abstract in its revelations.  While the film takes place in a contemporary setting, the sequences when Adam returns to his childhood home to see his parents returns us to a 1980’s version of their world, where time has literally stopped, which has the effect of stepping into a dream, or a hazy, nostalgia-induced memory, where one of the more haunting sequences is a Christmas they spend together, with his mom humming along to an old Elvis tune as they decorate the tree, yet the cover version heard on TV with a gay lead singer has a completely different, more heartbreaking connotation for Adam, Pet Shop Boys - Always on my mind (Official Video) [4k Upgrade] YouTube (5:12).  In order to accentuate the realism and deep personal connection, these scenes were actually shot in Haigh’s childhood home, beautifully expressed on 35mm by cinematographer Jamie D. Ramsay, with rich colors and evocative lighting, exacerbating a feeling of being out of time, or in spaces inhabited only by the mind, while the eerie, mind-altering electronic musical score was conceived by Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch.  Haigh explores the complexities of both familial and romantic love, with Harry and Adam, in a moment of joyous abandon, heading out into the world together as a couple, where one of the film’s memorable sequences takes place in a nightclub, shot on location at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern, an iconic queer London institution which is entrenched with local history and culture, where the neon-lit color scheme immerses viewers in the richness of a drug-induced experience, ALL OF US STRANGERS | “Will You Look After Me?” Clip | Searchlight Pictures YouTube (55 seconds), which is a dizzying and terrifying turn, set to the music of Blur’s Death of a Party (2012 Remaster) - YouTube (4:33), where their loneliness mirrors one other, two men adrift, lost souls brought into each other’s lives, trapped by invisible scars that continue to inhibit their ability to connect with others.  Easily one of the more original and important films seen in a while, as it speaks to something that simply isn’t being told elsewhere.  There are wow moments in this film, achieved through exquisite writing and tender emotional restraint, where some of the most stunning moments come from quietly intimate deliveries, where the vast majority of the film’s complexities rest firmly on the shoulders of Adam, where much of the emotional punch comes from the tender, heart-wrenching, and healing bond between Adam and his parents, leading to one of the more powerful finales in recent memory, exemplified by a moment of infinite beauty and the majestic quality of Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Frankie Goes To Hollywood - The Power Of Love - Remastered - 4K - 5.1 Surround YouTube (5:05), suggesting that more than anything our lives revolve around the transcendent importance of relationships and the power of love.       

Andrew Haigh Answers All of My Burning Questions About ' ...  engaging Evan Ross Katz interview from Shut Up Evan, November 7, 2023

Lean On Pete

LEAN ON PETE                    B+                  

Great Britain  (121 mi)  2017  d:  Andrew Haigh             Official site [UK]

It is true that we are weak and sick and ugly and quarrelsome but if that is all we ever were, we would millenniums ago have disappeared from the face of the earth.

—Journal of a Novel, from letters written in 1951 by John Steinbeck about his longest novel, East of Eden, published a year later, also quoted in Willy Vlautin’s 2010 novel

British-born writer/director Andrew Haigh, creator of Weekend (2011) and 45 Years (2016), is known for making naturalistic relationship movies, probing character studies that intimately explore the human drama at different stages of life, both young and old.  What’s different here is the film was not written by Haigh, but adapted from Willy Vlautin’s 2010 novel Lean on Pete, set on the backroads of Oregon, exploring people near the bottom of America’s social and economic spectrum.  Vlautin doubles as a singer/songwriter/guitarist for the Portland indie band The Delines, where this film, at least, resembles an oddly beautiful portrait of the kind of people who have been left behind in the American underclass, ordinary people affected by the downturn in the economy, who live day to day, with little thought about what happens tomorrow.  Deluged in personal turmoil, the film reaches for territory explored by Oregon filmmaker Kelly Reichardt, particularly Wendy and Lucy (2008), exploring a world of hard knocks.  At the center of this universe is Charlie Plummer as 15-year old Charley Thompson, a River Phoenix kind of role in a coming-of-age story about a troubled kid living with his alcoholic father Ray (Travis Fimmel) in a run-down house on the outskirts of Portland.  Charley’s mother abandoned him at an early age, just left one day and never came back, most likely due to Ray’s drinking and carousing, always cheating with somebody else’s wife, just like Paul Newman in Martin Ritt’s Hud (1963), a guy with questionable moral ethics.  Charley, on the other hand, is a good-natured kid, honest and hard-working, proud of being on the high school football team with friends back in Spokane before work led them to Portland.  Now he can be seen running through a myriad of streets each morning, which is the way he begins each day.  Cereal is kept in the refrigerator along with beer, as they’ve got roaches.  In hearftfelt, man-to-man talks, Ray’s fatherly advice is that the best women were all waitresses once, supposedly words to live by, but it may simply mean Ray spent in inordinate amount of time in diners chasing after skirts.  While it might seem peculiar to have a British director express the open frontier spirit of the American West, like many European directors before him, Antonioni with Zabriskie Point (1970), Wim Wenders with Paris, Texas (1984), Paolo Sorrentino with This Must Be the Place (2011), though this one may have more in common with British director Andrea Arnold’s American Honey (2016), a wrenching vision of throwaway kids in America, Haigh provides what amounts to a landscape view, beautifully shot by Danish cinematographer Magnus Nordenhof Jønck, as the enormity of the country eventually engulfs Charley, who embarks on a personal odyssey of heartbreak and misfortune.

Spotted on his morning jogs is the nearby Portland Meadows racetrack, asking around if there are any jobs, where he runs into an unscrupulous character, Del Montgomery (Steve Buscemi), a gruff, world weary horse trainer with a gutter mouth who seems perpetually down on his luck and embroiled in a world of trouble, but prefers keeping the kid out of it, racing quarter horses for a living, where he follows the circuit.  Using the kid as cheap labor, he brings him along to look after the horses while he drinks and commiserates about his fate, racing two horses, neither one any good.  Overjoyed that he’s finally got a few dollars in his pocket to buy food, as he’s perpetualy hungry, like most teenage boys, as his father can disappear for days on end.  This job takes him on the road, where he sleeps on the back of the truck underneath the stars, but feels grateful, as despite everyone’s warnings, he develops a close relationship with one of the horses, Lean on Pete, who’s probably too old to keep racing.  Along with a veteran female jockey Bonnie (Chloë Sevigny), who’s been through the business, with Del being one of the few offering her a chance to work, they comprise a temporary family filling a void in his own life, which takes a downturn when a man breaks into their home and assaults Ray for sleeping with his wife, ending up with a bullet in his belly, along with broken glass in his intestines when he fell through a glass window.  While there are indications that he might survive, he’s in intensive care, eventually succumbing while Charley is on the road, leaving him in a state of flux, where he moves into the horse stable next to Lean on Pete, telling him his troubles while sleeping at the racetrack.  This allows him to escape into the racing circuit where Del resorts to unethical methods, injecting drugs or using an electric buzzer, selling one of the horses while overracing the other, literally running him into the ground, where he’s fated to be sold to Mexico where he’ll be ground into horsemeat, the same fate that awaits the wild mustangs at the end of The Misfits (1961).  Disgusted by this, Charley seeks another option, but has no leverage in the situation, so instead of pulling the horse around for Del, he just keeps driving into the night, with no plan whatsoever, just running on fumes.

Short of cash, Charley can only get so far in a truck that runs on gasoline, getting into a few touchy situations where he orders food, including something to go for the horse, but gets caught trying to escape without paying.  While held for the police, the manager gets distracted, allowing Charley to escape, but this is a sign of what lies ahead.  Eventually the boy and his horse trek across the country on foot, with Charley telling Pete the story of his life en route, stopping from time to time for food or water along the way, knocking on doors.  While some reach out with a helping hand, others are so caught up in their own lives that they barely notice his existence, including a pair of returning war veterans who are more addicted to their video games than hospitality.  But they keep Charley around out of curiosity, inviting him to dinner with their racist and demeaning uncle, routinely describing some of the gruesome horrors they witnessed, hardly appropriate for dinner conversation, but it is a portrait of life on the margins, where cruelty is an everyday existence.  Slipping out in the night, he continues his journey, by now setting his sights on an aunt in Wyoming, but when he calls, she’s moved away from her last known address.  The journey becomes more grueling, wearing the same clothes across a hot and dusty landscape, where his endless stream-of-conscious narration feels like a metaphor for the life he’s missing, becoming more perilous when the film descends into bleakness and criminality, breaking into homes, becoming ever more desperate, eventually hanging out with drunks and dopers on the city streets of Denver, finding free meals at a mission, picking up any available work to put money in his pocket, but his cut-throat existence is a precarious one, surrounded by petty criminals and thieves who’ve been at it much longer than he has, taking advantage of his youthful naïveté, respecting absolutely nothing, taking whatever they can, caring nothing about him.  Smartly written, told in a realist manner, it’s a tragic turn of events without an ounce of self-pity, literally immersed into a world of skid row, with damnation and starvation in every direction, seemingly with no way out.  It’s a tale of redemption, though, however hard-earned, where the trauma incurred along the way gets its hooks in him, leaving him a broken version of his former self, visibly imperceptable, perhaps, though internally he’s a million miles from where he was, reflected in the stripped down acoustical refrains of an R. Kelly song that leads to the end credits, The Worlds Greatest - Bonnie Prince Billy - YouTube (2:26), transformed by the artist formerly known as Will Oldham from Old Joy (2006).