Blue Moon

 

Director Richard Linklater

Linklater on the set

actor Ethan Hawke

Lorenz Hart/Ethan Hawke

Richard Rodgers/Andrew Scott

BLUE MOON            B                                                                                                             USA  Ireland  (100 mi)  2025  d: Richard Linklater

It’s like, well, perhaps a Rodgers and Hart song, kind of beautiful and super sad and forlorn and all those things too.  A catchy tune where you’re devastated by the end.                              —Richard Linklater describing his film

While the film doesn’t have the romantic scope of his Before Trilogy, Before Sunrise (1995), Before Sunset (2004), and Before Midnight (2013), where the first two are among the best romantic love stories of the modern era, thriving on the spontaneity of the moment, he’s also made films like Dazed and Confused (1993), 2014 Top Ten List #1 Boyhood, or even Everybody Wants Some !! (2016), which feel like anthems to childhood, as well as the mind-bogglingly funny Hit Man (2023), yet this is something different altogether, with Linklater releasing two films at the same time, an ode to the French New Wave from Godard’s Breathless (À Bout de Souffle) (1960) in Nouvelle Vague, and this 1940’s tribute to songwriter/lyricist Lorenz Hart.  Working again with Ethan Hawke for the first time since the Before Trilogy in what is essentially an elegiac character study in a film about art, artists, and meaning, this is a chamber drama revealing the dark sides of success, a biographical drama that focuses on a crucial night in Hart’s life, where what stands out is the heavily staged theatricality, with nearly the entire film taking place in real time at one location, a national landmark in Sardi’s restaurant, a historical spot in the heart of New York’s theater district, considered the toast of Broadway for more than 100 years.  Yet that’s simply the backdrop for what amounts to a non-stop, heavily-scripted discourse out of the mouth of lyricist Lorenz Hart (Ethan Hawke, nearly unrecognizable with a slick comb-over), a tortured artist who is deeply hurt by what he views as a betrayal from his longtime partner and friend, Richard Rogers (Andrew Scott), among the best composers of American musical theater, who decided instead to work with a different writing partner, Oscar Hammerstein (Simon Delaney), and lo and behold they turn out the biggest hit of Rogers’ career in Oklahoma!, a kitschy portrait of Americana that completely revolutionized musical theater in the early 1940’s by integrating songs, dances, and plot.  For Hart this is tragic, as he hates the musical they’ve created, pandering wholesomeness to overly white audiences, creating a completely inaccurate and inauthentic portrait of America, missing the humanity of the human soul, but the upbeat songs are catchy and audiences seem to love it.  Hart leaves the theater early and wanders into a nearly empty Sardi’s restaurant before the theater crowd comes crashing in, where this is a very dialogue-heavy work, as the camera remains almost exclusively in the bar, and the plot is driven by sprawling conversations and monologues that thematically jump back and forth with the bartender Eddie (Bobby Cannavale) and lounge player “Knuckles” (Jonah Lees) clinking on the piano, whose musical selections often compliment whatever the hell Hart is babbling about, beautifully evoking the era of the 1940’s.  That pretty much defines the picture, as the closeted gay Hart is a chatty Cathy, as they say, as he philosophizes and mocks, blasphemes and complains, lectures and analyzes, while catching the attention of whoever is sitting within earshot, told in a frenetic, screwball-comedy pace, where the entire film captures his every syllable, where he just goes on endlessly about everything under the sun to whoever is willing to listen, raising profound questions about the nature of art, the price of success, and the transience of fame.  But viewers may space out after a while, finding a bitterly exposed Hart a bit too much, while it can also become tedious and repetitious, with witty yet heavy-handed dialogue that doesn’t have the naturalness and light-as-a-feather airiness of a Linklater-written script, which makes all the difference in the world, and can instead feel forced down our throats, with few, if any, pauses to offer a moment of relief.  While there have been other successful musical biopics, like Mike Leigh’s TOPSY-TURVY (1999), Taylor Hackford’s RAY (2004), James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown (2024), and Reinaldo Marcus Green’s Bob Marley: One Love (2024), this feels more like a one-man play, with the suffocating presence of Hart onscreen for nearly every shot.  Linklater doesn’t sanitize Hart’s addiction or despair, yet never loses sight of the brilliance behind his pain, as snippets of his songs drift through scenes like ghosts, reminders that even as Hart’s life crumbled, his words have endured.

If Hart ever imagined his life as a stage play, hurling words like thunderbolts, or exploding bombs, then the rest of the cast are just silent extras.  Often feeling like we’re in the middle of a Woody Allen movie, packed with textual cross-references, self-deprecating jokes, and sardonic commentaries, and just a touch of self-reflection, with wall-to-wall piano music of American standards and screwball comedy dialogue spewed fast and furiously, Hart is an alcoholic plagued by self-doubt, yet is recently sober, attempting to retrieve the essential purpose of his life that he feels has been dumped on the curb, already considered a has-been, as Rogers has found himself another successful partner, who’s much easier to deal with, by the way, making him the odd man out.  Nonetheless, whether he’s raving about the best line in the movie Ingrid Bergman Tribute: Casablanca (1942), Bogart’s “Nobody ever loved me that much,” another wartime film about two men and a girl, sharing many of the same thematic connections of a bar, friendship, dashed hopes, and a melancholy finale where the protagonist is left behind, or whether anyone else knows just how terrible Oklahoma! is, with its ridiculous use of an exclamation point to draw attention to itself, Hart is a force of nature waxing eloquently about the unequivocal allure of Elizabeth (Margaret Qualley as a blond, a baffling choice, since she’s a decade older), a Yale art student who just turned 20, hoping for a career as a production designer.  After months of correspondence and a mysteriously beautiful (for him) yet unconsummated weekend, he believes this may be the night to finally win her love, where he’s planning a grand soirée afterwards, hiring a string quartet, and even inviting the delivery boy in what he promises will be a memorable evening.  Eddie is confused (as are we), believing Hart prefers the company of men, but Hart defies all expectations, claiming he is “omnisexual,” with the film all but ignoring any hidden homoerotic tension, which CASABLANCA was filled with, by the way, if you believe Hart.  For a gay figure, the film strangely and mysteriously devotes a considerable amount of time to a heterosexual relationship, which may reflect the depths of his own existential loneliness.  Describing Elizabeth as his protégée and muse, suggesting she’s too sexy and smart for boys her own age, he goes on a rhapsodic rant about how much she means to him, suggesting it might be love, despite their age difference.  It sounds like a pipe dream, one of those long-winded alcoholic excursions of prosaic virtuosity in Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, as Hart is a man who wears his heart on his sleeve, where his alcohol-fueled tirades are a mask for his deeply repressed insecurities, basically an open book for anyone to read, yet reality rarely lives up to those long suppressed hopes, which are so easily dashed in an instant.  Off in a corner he spots E.B. White (Patrick Kennedy), a fellow writer who also has a clever and witty way with words, where their dialogue together is an endless stream of carefully calculated phrases where every word is aptly grandiose, filled with underlying meaning, as the two effortlessly hit it off.  Nonetheless, Hart singlehandedly holds court for the first half of the film, sneaking a shot of bourbon every now and then to bolster his courage, tossing off philosophical maxims like “How can you give voice to the whole world if you don’t have the whole world inside of you?,” gearing up to meet the eye of the storm when all the theater well-wishers show up in an entourage surrounding Richard Rogers, all offering unanimous praise, claiming it’s the greatest musical of all time, with Hart forced to offer his own disingenuous congratulations in this chorus of effusive praise.  Probably the weakest aspect of the film is the digital cinematography by Shane F. Kelly, a Linklater regular since A SCANNER DARKLY (2006), but it lacks spatial depth, never really capturing the claustrophobic, closed-in feeling of the room, often having the artificial staginess of a filmed play.  

Having worked together for more than 20 years from the 20’s to the 40’s, writing 28 stage musicals together, along with over 500 songs, Rogers can see through Hart’s obvious disdain for Oklahoma!, yet he’s willing to set that aside in the interest of being magnanimous, having put up with all of Hart’s emotionally insecure mood swings and alcoholic doldrums for all those years, where he was simply a pain in the ass to work with, always flying off the handle, something of a drama queen grabbing all the attention, while he was left with doing the hard work.  Nonetheless, he offers him a chance to write a few new songs for a revival of A Connecticut Yankee, their successful musical from 1927, but Hart is more interested in his delirious idea about creating a grand musical spectacle around adventurer Marco Polo, which sounds like an exotic journey into the strange and undiscovered lands of King Kong (1933), filled with the same kind of extravagance.  “It’s the thrill of a lifetime,” which he believes is infinitely more interesting than the homogenized and overly predictable Oklahoma!  “Who wants inoffensive art?” he exclaims at one point, but the war years may have taken a toll, with a weary nation preferring something more safe and conventional.  While the ever-eccentric Hart is stealing his limelight, Rogers calmly returns to his party of well-wishers, reminding him to think about the new songs.  While Ethan Hawke’s deliberately showy performance of Hart is the centerpiece of the film, breathing life into the role, something should be said for the saintly grace shown by Rogers (Scott won the Best Supporting Actor Award at the Berlin Film Festival), and the endless patience on display, shown through a myriad of changing facial expressions, where it’s clear their paths are on different trajectories, as he looks so effortlessly polite in such an obviously uncomfortable situation, moving his way upstairs to an afterparty that leaves Hart behind.  As an aside, Hart also meets a young Hammerstein prodigy dressed in a tuxedo named Stephen (Cillian Sullivan), a foreshadowing reference to Stephen Sondheim, who would go on to redefine Broadway musicals with his virtuosic wordplay while also introducing darker themes, becoming theater's most revered and influential composer-lyricist of the last half of the 20th century, and just happens to be the subject of Linklater’s next project, MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG, which will be filmed over the course of the next 20 years, with actors aging naturally, not to be confused by the upcoming holiday release by the same name.  By the time Elizabeth shows up, Hart is all aflutter, his nerves on edge, yet his manners are impeccable, as he curiously gives her all of the attention, wanting to hear everything since they last met, as he’s all ears, literally hanging on every word.  While she’s flattered by his near-obsessional infatuation, coming from a man who is more than twice her age, she makes it clear her interest is “not in that way.”  Perhaps the title of the film says it all, as this is not some sunny remembrance, but is instead a collision course between the high-wire act of being a celebrated artist who may already be on a downward spiral, but just doesn’t realize that yet, and the inescapable success of his ex-partner, who along with Oscar Hammerstein would go on to become the greatest writing team in American musical history, leaving Hart behind as yesterday’s news.  It’s a savagely despairing story written by Robert Kaplow, whose novel was the source material for Linklater’s Me and Orson Welles (2008), adapting the material from Hart’s letters that he wrote to an unidentified woman named Elizabeth, which Kaplow bought at an estate sale, accentuating the ups and downs that occur in the ever-evolving life of a melancholic artist, becoming a mournful tale of a man whose career was cut too short, with Ethan Hawke capturing the contradictions of his character, where everything is secondary to his performance, whose heightened mood swings have a profoundly dark emotional impact. Described at the beginning of the movie as “the saddest man I ever knew,” one of three quotations from companions who draw a picture of a sociable but devastatingly lonely person, within seven months Hart would drunkenly collapse in a rain-soaked back alley and die (which is actually the opening sequence, with a radio broadcast obituary playing over it), with Linklater deserving credit for generously reviving his spirit in this Irish wake-like, tragicomic sendoff, where, perhaps coincidentally, the film was actually shot in Ireland, specifically in and around Dublin, recalling, of course, John Huston’s The Dead (1987).            

Miroirs No. 3

 

Director Christian Petzold

Petzold with actress Paula Beer

MIROIRS NO. 3                   B+                                                                                           Germany  (86 mi)  2025  d: Christian Petzold

Another striking film from Christian Petzold, the maker of Yella (2007), Jerichow (2008), the first part of the Dreileben Trilogy, Beats Being Dead (Dreileben 1 - Etwas Besseres als den Tod) (2012), Barbara (2012), 2015 Top Ten List # 3 Phoenix (2014), 2018 Top Ten List #3 Transit, 2020 Top Ten List #6 Undine, and Afire (Roter Himmel) (2023), all films worth recommending, and this is no different.  No longer working within a historical framework, or a mythical tone, scaling back the ambitions and complexity in a smaller framework, offering a simpler, more minimalist premise, resembling the shortness and lightness of a François Ozon chamber drama, or even one of Éric Rohmer’s moral tales, with few characters, and the settings reduced to the bare essentials, yet this is told in a completely different manner, more distanced, introspective, and cleverly ambiguous, remaining emotionally dense while sustaining the interest throughout.  Some have described this as a Gothic fairy tale, a compilation of fantasy, imagination, and tragedy, much like 2020 Top Ten List #6 Undine, but this feels more like an odd encounter with grief, approaching the subject in an original way, turning a late summer film into a ghost story, as the film is haunted by ghosts of the past.  Once again writing his own story, premiering at the Director’s Fortnight section at Cannes, this accessible and extremely well-acted project is simply not like other films, where what starts out as one story morphs into a completely different story, adding even more interest and allure, as all the lead characters are likeable, where the audience is drawn into what will happen next.  A drama full of open secrets and the difficult search for healing, shot in the Uckermark, part of East Germany after the war, primarily using just two locations, and the linking passageway in between, where this is a portrait of people in transition, and about losing someone, as the way people deal with trauma and grief is decidedly different, yet extremely individualistic, where what works for one may not work for another.  In this case, the film views these aspects from different perspectives, like a collective community, though they all revolve around a self-absorbed central character who is our eyes and ears into what we’re seeing, offering no contextual backdrop information, yet mixing moments of absurd comedy with bleak tragedy.  Meet Laura (Petzold regular Paula Beer in their fourth collaboration), a university piano student from Berlin, who is out on a countryside jaunt with friends on a work/vacation trip when things take a tragic turn, as her overbearing boyfriend, Jakob (Philip Froissant), who she says “isn’t a proper boyfriend,” seems to be getting on her last nerve, as he’s reminded that she didn’t really want to go on this trip at all, irritated and upset that he’s forced to drive her back to the train station, until the red convertible car he’s driving suddenly swerves into an empty field and is killed on the spot, like the tragic car accident in Yella, while she is thrown away from the vehicle and is basically unharmed, but clearly in distress.  It’s a startling way for things to begin, but even more surprising is that she doesn’t wish to be taken to the hospital, but prefers to be cared for by a local woman she saw on the side of the road from the car, Betty (Barbara Auer, who starred in Petzold’s 2000 debut THE STATE I AM IN), who helps her up and walks her to her nearby home, curiously looking after her, where the two quickly become friends.  In something of a foreshadowing, it was Barbara’s face that Laura saw as they whizzed by just seconds before the crash, which takes place offscreen.

Even earlier, Laura is seen on the railing of an old bridge looking down at the water below, eventually making her way down to the river’s edge where she quietly takes in the natural sounds of birds and the trees rustling in the wind, staring silently as a man standing in a canoe slowly paddles by, like an image from Arnold Böcklin’s painting Isle of the Dead, Isle of the Dead (painting), suggestive of the ferryman Charon on the River Styx transporting bodies to the underworld, and much like Chantal Akerman’s use of Rachmaninoff’s The Isle of the Dead symphony in The Captive (La Captive) (2000).  This all happens quietly, with no explanation, allowing viewers to soak it in and decipher what they’re seeing, but an image of death haunts this film from the outset.  Laura appears to be a shadow of herself, and everywhere in the film hangs a similar dark mood, where even before the accident she seems to have been lost in a deep void, remaining something of an enigma through the entire film, but she is simply the vehicle through which Petzold tells his story.  Unlike Nina Hoss in Yella, whose character is already dead, but doesn’t know it, Betty essentially gives Laura a new start, two women from different generations, offering her own room, a fresh set of clothes, and a supportive ally, where they make a kind of special connection, showing her how to paint a fence, and providing her own bike to ride as they roam through the countryside together, MIROIRS NO. 3 Clip | TIFF 2025  YouTube (1:24).  Rather than feel remorse, Laura is surprisingly unaffected by the loss of her friend, indicating, “I should be sad, but I’m not.”  Yet what she does do is completely disassociate herself from her past life, retreating from the world to a place where life in the countryside is more peaceful and calm, more in touch with the basic everyday realities, where there’s literally no pressure on her, perhaps feeling a little too comfortable too quickly, until it becomes clear that this family is keeping a dark secret.  She’s surprised to learn that Betty has an estranged husband Richard (Matthias Brandt) and son Max (Enno Trebs) living a short distance away, working together in a garage, as both are handymen who work on cars and can fix just about anything, which is significant as Betty has a dripping faucet, a broken dishwasher, and a few other items in need of repair, but she’s hesitant to ask them, as they’ve grown apart recently.  Nonetheless, they all get together for a meal of potato and dumplings that Laura prepares, which goes well, like a peace offering, but the men are extremely reticent, as if remaining suspicious of Betty’s newly discovered friend, where what they all have in common is an inability to express their feelings, which leaves much unsaid and unexplained.  Repair appears to be a metaphor for broken families, with the drama focusing on the various ways a family can recover from its losses, as there’s something lingering under the surface, a common theme in multiple Petzold films.  Repairing the damage we see all around us is becoming more commonplace in the modern world, as so much is being destroyed right before our eyes, yet what’s interesting is that the filmmaker makes viewers aware of each new character’s point of view simply by the way scenes are shot by his longtime cameraman Hans Fromm, who has worked with Petzold since the beginning, creating a formally concealed world founded purely on carefully calibrated gazes and nuanced actions.  Christian Petzold is a skilled storyteller, and these multiple perspectives provide what amounts to subjective feelings and objective truths, establishing a rhythm of their subsequent interactions through a precision-based choreography of motion.

One of the best contemporary filmmakers, Petzold belongs to the Berlin School of Films, distinguished by the clarity of the places the characters inhabit, a house, a garden, a fence, the sun-kissed fields, a country road, a garage, where every detail reveals the feelings of the characters.  Music also plays a prominent part of the film, where the entitled impressionistic piece from Maurice Ravel is often heard in the background during the many travels through the countryside, Adriana von Franqué: Maurice Ravel - Une barque sur l'océan (Official Music Video) - MIROIRS NO. 3 YouTube (7:46).  One of the small moments that stands out in the early scenes is that Laura possesses a rare gift, as within seconds she can easily recognize what key a song is in that happens to be playing on the car radio.  We only later learn that she’s a piano student, with Betty expressing an interest in hearing her play, choosing a very recognizable Chopin piece, Prélude Op. 28, No. 4, considered to be one of the most famous of the Chopin preludes, which was played in its entirety by Jack Nicholson in Bob Rafelson’s FIVE EASY PIECES (`1970), five easy pieces - the chopin scene YouTube (3:13).  Laura’s level of comfort reaches a peak with a song playing in the garage when she arrives, sharing a beer with Max as they listen to an oldie but goodie from 1972, Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons - The Night (Official Audio) YouTube (3:25), with its infectious rhythm and beat, both seemingly swooning with happiness until she gets too close, where he violently pushes her away, knocking her to the ground, causing her to run away in utter fright at seemingly having unleashed a monster.  While the film contains many silences, smoking a cigarette in the evening light, or Betty standing at the front gate in the middle of the night when she can’t sleep, as if waiting for someone to arrive, the film slowly fills in the blanks, where Laura’s presence reminds this broken family of Betty’s daughter who tragically took her own life, with Laura situated in her room, wearing her old clothes, a constant reminder of what the family has lost.  With possible references to Otto Preminger’s Laura (1944), Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), or even Aki Kaurismäki’s THE MAN WITHOUT A PAST (2002), Laura offers a kind of identity substitution, yet she is no substitute for the family’s unending pain.  While the source of Laura’s anguish is unknown, Betty’s torment, on the other hand, is more clearly defined, as her family is carrying a recognizable trauma that visibly affects her life.  While both women have lost something, this film is not a tragedy, revealing instead how silence, restraint, and subtle emotion can make a deep impression.  It’s an interesting scenario, as it starts out being about Laura, but quickly turns into the dysfunctional family dynamic of Betty, where viewers can only imagine what they all feel.  That violent moment in the garage, however, seems to have awakened Laura from her reverie, as this little excursion into the countryside has made her painfully aware of everyone’s deficiencies, deciding immediately to return back to her life in Berlin, leaving without so much as uttering a word.  While remaining a quintessential women’s film, like Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows (1955), essentially this is the tale of a return to life, with all that entails, the perception of a new light, or a positive wind, which translates into moments of absolute tenderness or even carefree joy, but also the hesitations, the uncertainties, and the embarrassment of those who must learn to feel again.  In the end we see Laura back at the conservatory playing her graduation piece, which is a return to the evocative Ravel piece, the third movement (A Boat on the Ocean) from a larger five-movement suite entitled Miroirs, filled with imagery and mood, yet what it evokes is the exact moment when the broken figures are reassembled, bringing the film full circle with an unconventional finale, offering no real revelation, instead conveying transcendence through art, though not quite having the same impact as the utterly sublime Debussy piece played at the end of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s TOKYO SONATA (2008), Tôkyô sonata - Kiyoshi Kurosawa (2008) - ending. YouTube (7:13).