Thoroughbreds

THOROUGHBREDS            B+                  

USA  (92 mi)  2017  ‘Scope  d:  Cory Finley

Not feeling anything doesn’t mean I’m a bad person, it just means that I have to try harder than everyone else to be good.

—Amanda (Olivia Cooke)

In a morbid throwback to GASLIGHT (1944), updated and revamped with a completely different outcome, this is actually one of the more thoroughly enjoyable film experiences of the year, a subversive horror comedy, a delight from start to finish, largely due to the heavy, overcontrolling style of the director that extends cinematic suspense, creating an atmosphere of dread and impending doom in every sequence, yet at the same time there’s underlying humor in just how dark and twisted it can feel, becoming shockingly clever throughout.  Essentially a two-woman play written by the writer/director, the story consists of exploring what lies underneath the veneer of their darkly disturbing characters.  Inspired by film noir classics like Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944) and Tay Garnett’s THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE (1946), but also dark indie classics like Michael Lehmann’s Heathers (1988) and Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures (1994), old school cinema is given a fresh look with some new faces, Olivia Cooke from Me and Earl and the Dying Girl (2015) as Amanda and Anya Taylor-Joy as Lily play two exceedingly bright suburban teenagers from Connecticut, but troubled, both products of privilege and the super wealthy, raised in state-of-the-art boarding schools, but tossed out for some heinous infraction that remains under the radar, protecting their privacy, spoiled and pampered beyond belief, used to getting anything they desire, where they’re actually bored most of the time, too smart for their own good, unable to process normal human behavior, instead they exist in an unfiltered state of egregious excess, existing only for themselves, plotting and scheming to get whatever they want, never allowing anyone or anything to stand in their way.  Given this fierce attitude of independence, though thoroughly dependent upon parental financial support, they have to figure out where to draw the line between utter unabashed freedoms, with no restrictions whatsoever, ignoring any and all moral guidelines, and continuing to live in this excessively lavish lifestyle to which they’ve become accustomed.  The film is a comment on how the rich have lost any sense of empathy, and how social media creates a narcissistic moral vacuum, a disregard for consequences, creating a shallow culture of disaffected teens who lack the capacity to distinguish between right and wrong, but think only of themselves, too bored to care, where the world is simply a cynical extension of their own pathetic lack of vision or concern. 

What’s immediately apparent is an obliquely dissonant musical score from cellist Erik Friedlander along with a brilliant sound design by Roland Vajs create jarring effects, heard even before the characters are introduced, foreshadowing a tone of malevolence, yet what happens onscreen couldn’t be more proper and polite, where the use of language is exquisite.  After a brief intro shows Amanda with a horse (details withheld until much later in the film), she is then seen getting dropped off in front of an immense mansion with an immaculate interior and landscaped grounds, where expensive antiques and artistic busts line each wall, greeted by another young girl her age, Lily, as the two are former friends that drifted apart after the death of Lily’s father.  The two girls are polar opposites, as Amanda has had her share of issues, been in and out of psych hospitals, evaluated by dozens of doctors, yet couldn’t care less what other people think, acknowledging she’s truly different because she doesn’t really feel anything, no joy, no disappointment, literally nothing, so she gets by pretending to show concern, but it’s mostly acting techniques.  Lily on the other hand is the perfect little protected princess, yet totally conniving and manipulating, overly concerned about her looks, dressing like a fashion model, seemingly emotionally suppressed.  Amanda is totally candid, where there’s nothing holding her back, expressing exactly what she means to say, where her choice of words couldn’t be more precise, remarking on Lily’s anxious state of mind, stripping away all pretense, cutting right to the source, disarming her with acute observations.  While Amanda’s mother apparently arranged for this little meeting, worried about her daughter after the mysterious and gruesome death of her horse, paying for the privilege of the companionship, though masking it under the pretense of tutoring sessions, preparing her for the college preparatory SAT exams, Amanda sees through all this in a matter of minutes and is much more interested in who Lily really is rather than who she pretends to be.  Lily is taken aback by Amanda’s forward nature, but also curious about her abject amorality, describing in grisly detail exactly how she took the life of her crippled horse, putting it out of its misery, but in heinous fashion, feeling no regret or remorse for anything she’s ever done, which Lily finds surprisingly authentic.  In this way, the two girls psychologically feel each other out, showing rare insight, rekindling old flames while looking ahead.           

With fluid camerawork from Lyle Vincent, exhibiting sweeping Steadicam shots that rove through the empty rooms of a gargantuan mansion, where sound suggestively sets the mood, what’s surprising is just how far under the surface this film digs, each character constantly probing the other, allowing viewers to become familiar with the discussed crimes, taking a devilish turn when Lily inadvertently reveals her hateful feelings for her stepfather, Mark (Paul Sparks), which Amanda picks up on right away, suggesting there are ways to eliminate his influence on her life, and not get caught, if she’s interested.  Initially repelled at the thought, it quickly gains traction in her imagination, utterly disgusted by his vain superiority, his domineering contempt for her, and in particular, the earthshattering noise he generates on his ergometer, with the entire house rumbling and moaning, obsessed with exercising on a rowing machine at all hours of the day and night, which she feels is done with the malicious intent to drive her crazy, where despite the gargantuan size of the estate, it has the claustrophobic feel of being closed in.  But it’s only after he decides, no questions asked, to send her to a boarding school for girls with behavioral disorders, as if to punish and humiliate her, having been expelled from her previous school for plagiarism, that she considers Amanda’s idea.  While Amanda seems like the perfect choice, free of guilt, but a pending animal cruelty trial makes her a likely suspect.  Instead they attempt to blackmail a local drug dealer, Tim (Anton Yelchin), pathetic and over-ambitious, though they’re way out of his league, leaving him exasperated and intimidated by how easily they cornered him.  No, if they want the job done, they’ll have to do it themselves, unraveling in the most unexpected fashion.  The sheer cold and calculating process is impressive, where Amanda tells Lily at one point, “You cannot hesitate.  The only thing worse than being incompetent, or being unkind, or being evil, is being indecisive.”  Staring fear right in the face, these are not the most sympathetic young girls, yet the sinister nature of their toxic methods becomes hilariously cold-blooded, where their monstrously evil behavior is so dispassionately over the top, parodying slasher films, as it apparently doesn’t take much to set them off into murderous plots of bloodthirsty revenge, perfectly covering their tracks like Leopold and Loeb in Hitchcock’s ROPE (1948), but unlike the meticulous superiority in the minds of Hitchcock’s killers, these girls simply see themselves as entitled (with the police never suspecting Barbie dolls or Stepford wives, as their perfectly pampered lives don’t fit the profile), where the lavishness of their lifestyle is not lost on them, as the world simply belongs to them.  Everyone else is just a secondary character living in it. 

Note

The film is also notable for being the last performance of actor Anton Yelchin, the Russian-accented Chekov in Star Trek (2009) who died in a freak accident just 14 days after shooting on this film ended.   

Porto

Actors on the set

 

Anton Yelchin, R.I.P.

 

PORTO                       B-                   

Portugal  France  Poland  USA  (76 mi)  2016  d:  Gabe Klinger                  Official North American site

You never know if what you’ve lost is better than what you’ve gained.

A memory piece, using cinema as a means to explore what might be the most intensely personal moments in our lives, yet just as quickly we move on from them, like a glorious sunset, gone but not forgotten, unable to sustain the emotional immediacy of that moment, where it gets lost in the fabric of what we eventually become, perhaps even exaggerated or elevated into something more idyllic over time, yet never leaving what amounts to that essential core of our interior lives.  This is a movie that starts off beautifully, offering lingering portraits of what could be any populated European city, in this case the older regions of the city of Porto, Portugal, offering impressionistic glimpses of time passing.  Perhaps embracing Manoel de Oliveira’s PORTO OF MY CHILDHOOD (2001), in a brief 76 minutes this plays like a reverie, a fleeting memory, though the press notes suggest it attempts to evoke a cinematic form of saudade (an untranslatable Portuguese word that describes a deep emotional state of nostalgic or profound melancholic longing for an absent person or place that one has loved, carrying with it an assurance that this feeling may never happen again), a common fixture in the literature and music of Brazil, Portugal, and Cape Verde, perhaps most recognizable through a unique style of singing, evoking extreme sadness, for instance, Saudades do Brasil em Portugal! (Amália Rodrigues) - YouTube (2:03) or Cartola - AS ROSAS NÃO FALAM - Angenor de Oliveira - YouTube (2:54), though one of the most infamous uses of this format may be seen in a Mexican Huapango song performed by Brazilian singer Caetano Veloso in Almodóvar’s TALK TO HER, Caetano Veloso Cucurrucucu Paloma (Hable Con Ella) - YouTube (3:44).  In much the same way Klinger’s earlier film, Double Play: James Benning and Richard Linklater (2013) revealed the influence that filmmakers James Benning and Richard Linklater had on him, this is another work that is basically a love letter to the timelessness of the art of cinema, paying tribute to the various kinds of cinematic aesthetic that have captured this filmmaker’s imagination, using different film stocks, 35 mm, 16 mm, and Super 8, and changing aspect ratios to convey different shades of memory.  Whether it’s a success or not may vary upon a viewer’s appreciation for film history, as Klinger has brought his own unique qualities as a film critic, cinema professor, and curator into his own work that is strikingly spare in content, sometimes feeling lightweight and overly pretentious, particularly some of the dialogue, which at times feels cringeworthy, where two things stand out, the eloquently spare piano music from Ethiopian nun, Emahoy Tsegue-Maryam Guebrou, The Homeless Wanderer - YouTube (7:07), but also the soaring beauty captured by cinematographer Wyatt Garfield, where the gorgeous golden hue of the lovemaking scenes in an otherwise darkened room is inspired by the matchless beauty of the opening scene in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Flowers of Shanghai (Hai shang hua) (1998), arguably among the most visually entrancing opening shots in all of cinema, flowers of shanghai first scene / shot - YouTube (8:35).  

While the film opens and closes on the same shot, it unravels in three chapters (Jake, Mati, and both together), following two people, Jake, (Anton Yelchin, the Russian-accented Chekov in Star Trek who tragically died in a freak accident following the end of production), an American drifter working abroad and Mati (Lucie Lucas), a French archaeologist, on separate paths that intersect briefly for one cataclysmic night in a foreign city, using the city of Porto to transport viewers into a different time dimension, moving backwards, like Gaspar Noé’s Irreversible (Irréversible) (2002), where the future, present, and past merge into one.  Featuring a brief outdoor exchange before winding up at the same café, the film is a labrynthian journey infused with jazzy piano interludes of Jake walking anonymously through crowds, stopping briefly at the window of a diner, then continuing past corner bars, down side streets with narrow passageways and stairways before returning to his rented room, where the overall feeling is an existential tone of wandering alone in foreign territory.  What’s immediately apparent is that he is revisiting some of these same spots that he experienced earlier in his youth, now a disheveled and forlorn figure, appearing haunted by what he sees, a ghostly shadow of what once existed.  All expressed through vague, barely audible dialogue, where the connecting pieces occur in a corner bar with the music of John Lee Hooker playing, JOHN LEE HOOKER - Shake it Baby YouTube (4:23), where she seems to be staring a hole right through him, literally inviting him to introduce himself with a knowing smile, but this moment is broken by sadder reflections of what was lost, as lone figures continue to walk down solitary streets in the night.  The same moments reoccur again from slightly different perspectives, repeating the same phrases, as thoughts repeat themselves, like a record stuck on the same note, before moving on.  These elliptical passages are intertwined throughout, mixed into the threadbare script, appearing to be haunting moments lived over again and again through what appears to be a bleak and disconsolate life for Jake afterwards, still clinging to the past, refusing to let her go, becoming something of a stalker in real life, where she is forced to purge him out of her life with the help of the police, literally thwarting his existence.  Stitching together these moments in time, we know it ends badly, all of which is presented before they even meet, where we only get glimpses of their lives beforehand.  Easily the biggest disappointment in the film is a choice the filmmaker makes to leave a scene with Françoise Lebrun as Mati’s mother in a conversation with her daughter in French unsubtitled, her only appearance in the entire film, a legendary actress from Jean Eustache’s The Mother and the Whore (La Maman et la Putain) (1973), a seminal work in film history.  This is the cruelest moment of the film, and a maddening one, as this resembles the Godardian contempt for an American audience displayed in Film Socialisme (2010), where he didn’t even bother to provide translated subtitles for the American theatrical release, suggesting instead they should learn French.  This haughty attitude exhibits a sneering elitism that is simply inexcusable on any level.

While the film is a fallout from a sensually charged night of bliss, first viewers are rather humorously treated to the morning after, as Jake awakes alone, but sticks around, so he is still there much later, only to be surprised when Mati returns home after work with the man in her current relationship, her classics professor João (Paulo Calatré), who may or may not become her husband, but he can be seen picking up their daughter later in life after they have separated, where it obviously didn’t turn out the way they hoped.  João, however, couldn’t be more polite to Jake, taking unexpected pleasure in his presence, like fresh meat to toy with, while Jake finds the man vile and overbearing.  This brief encounter leads to a more abstractly projected future, using experimental imagery that serves as what amounts to home movies, all succinctly expressed like an afterthought.  By the time the couple actually meets, what happens is a foregone conclusion, yet after meeting at the club, it starts by Mati asking Jake to carry a heavy box from her car to her new apartment, leading to the most protracted shot of the film, slightly amusing, as it becomes an endurance joke that is on him, while he politely shrugs it off like it’s nothing.  Her apartment, with a giant window overlooking the Douro River that sneaks though the city’s central neighborhoods, is essentially a mattress on the floor, only the essentials, becoming an idyllic portrait of a sexual affair, losing themselves in one another’s embrace, whispering sweet nothings, though it is visualized from a specifically male point of view, with the camera only interested in finding her body, becoming a bit ludicrous after a while, though it is an idealized fantasy of hopeful expectations, compounded by Mati assuming the Lena Olin role in Philip Kaufman’s THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING (1988), which becomes a fixated image of the young filmmaker’s idea of sensuality.  Shot on widescreen in the most luscious color available through 35 mm, the pronounced density of the texture is alluring, though the animated sexual moans and groans less so, as this might be too early in the director’s career to explore such intimacy, as what it lacks is maturity.  Because they barely know each other, it’s not so hard to understand the ramifications, building up the rhapsodic delight to make way for the inevitable fall, like Icarus coming too close to the sun, plunging headlong into a sea of indifference, much of it precipitated by Jake’s youthful reactions, going overboard, losing himself in this woman, unable to comprehend that she has a different life that does not include him.  His attachment becomes an obsessive fixation, becoming psychologically unhinged, where his personal choices only inflate the delusion, turning affection into something dangerous, becoming overly burdensome, baggage that must be left behind.  Of course, that doesn’t make Jake feel any better, unable to separate his own feelings from hers, still thinking they belong together.  By moving backwards in time, the finale avoids any emotional fallout, adding a more hopeful day after, one with positive inclinations, where it ends still living the dream, oblivious to all else.