The Mastermind

 

Director Kelly Reichardt

Reichardt on the set with Josh O'Connor

Reichardt and O'Connor at Cannes 

THE MASTERMIND            B                                                                                                        USA  (110 mi)  2025  d: Kelly Reichardt

Weird times, huh?                                                                                                                          —James Blaine “J.B.” Mooney (Josh O’Connor)

About as minimalist a film as you’re going to find, while also moving away from the filmmaker’s familiar Pacific Northwest mindset to the East coast of Boston and the Midwest of Ohio, where something is decidedly different in the water, as this has a darker edge, even going over the brink into unfamiliar territory, drenched in period detail, literally immersing viewers in the early 1970’s when America had just expanded its operations in Vietnam to Cambodia and the country was rife with anti-war protesters, so instead of a suspense-filled heist movie, this is more of an unglamorous, anti-heist, psychological study of a criminal on the lam, immersed in his own guilt and regret, mirroring the draft dodgers of the 1970’s who left the country for Canada in a time of great turmoil.  With a war still raging and a corrupt President Nixon mired in a cesspool of his own lies, circumstances that are clearly intended to be relevant today, they had to keep looking over their shoulders until the election of President Jimmy Carter at the end of the decade, offering those fleeing Americans amnesty to return home.  While all about the attention to details, showing a keen eye for what is almost unnoticed behind the everyday façades of people, in style alone Reichardt forces viewers to watch more closely, to see what’s underneath the characters, yet ultimately this is a Dostoyevskian Crime and Punishment movie, a film about wrestling with your conscience, with an art heist at a Boston museum taking place in broad daylight where security is scant, with everything going according to plan, that is until it all starts to unravel.  During the filming of the art heist scenes, an actual art heist occurred at Bard College, the college where director Kelly Reichardt teaches, and just a week before the film was released, burglars broke into the Louvre in Paris and stole $100 million dollar historic crown jewels in a daring daylight heist at 9:30 in the morning that took just seven minutes, conducting their getaway on scooters.  Inspired by the 1972 robbery of the Worcester Art Museum, where two Gauguins, a Picasso, and a painting initially attributed to Rembrandt, now believed to be the work of one of his students, were stolen (eventually recovered at a Rhode Island pig farm), shooting a security guard on their way out, the first time in history that art was stolen at gunpoint, while also borrowing liberally from Robert Bresson’s blank character in his crime study Pickpocket (1959), this is largely an introspective mood piece with little to no action, painstakingly taking us back to a time before the Internet and cellphones, eliminating any hint of thrill or suspense with the theft coming early in the picture, as the film instead defies the conventional heist genre and turns on its ear what passes for action in the films of today, offering a quiet condemnation on the rapidly growing culture of instant gratification.  More low-key and character-driven in tone, filled with quiet moments, devoting herself entirely to the dynamics of the small and inconspicuous, this may remind viewers of Reichardt’s Night Moves (2013), existing primarily under the surface, probing deeply into the restless psychological territory of a group of radical environmental activists, also reminiscent of the dysfunctional South Florida lovers-on-the-lam in her debut feature River of Grass (1994), while others have claimed it’s in the tradition of Jean-Pierre Melville’s LE CERCLE ROUGE (1970), darker and more abstract than his earlier work, yet in the tradition of French film noirs where fate prevails and the demise of the main character is established at the beginning.  This is Reichardt’s second minimalist heist film, as First Cow (2019) revolves around two friends in early 19th century America stealing milk by moonlight from their neighbor’s cow in order to bake doughnuts with it, yet even Michelle Williams in Wendy and Lucy (2008) was forced to shoplift due to her dire economic circumstance.  Bleakly funny in spots, particularly the sheer ineptitude of the participants, shot on 16mm in muted colors by longtime cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt, which provides a grainy, lo-fi charm, evoking films of the 70’s, with Reichardt co-writing and editing her own films, yet what stands out most is the extraordinary jazz soundtrack by Rob Mazurek from Chicago Underground (jazz ensemble), a jittery, propulsive-driven counterpoint to the otherwise slow moving cinema of Reichardt, becoming the underlying engine that subversively propels the movie forward, providing positively thrilling, Whiplash-like percussive rhythm and texture. 

Reichardt’s second straight picture premiering in competition at the Cannes Film Festival, it’s significant to note that this is the first film since River of Grass that was not written by source material from Portland novelist Jon Raymond, or in the case of Certain Women (2016), three short stories by Maile Maloy, so it’s fair to say Reichardt’s pictures have a literary air about them, delving into the interiority of the characters.  For the casual viewer, nothing much happens in this picture, filled with all the monotony of suburban life, as it’s an excruciatingly slow and meandering existential journey, with the camera relentlessly following James Blaine “J.B.” Mooney (Josh O’Connor), an out of work college art-school dropout and failed architect doing odd jobs as a carpenter, finding his place in a comfortable middle class family compromised, coming from an affluent family, where his father (Bill Camp) is a circuit court judge and his wife Terri (Alana Haim) has a white-collar job, raising two young boys, yet he hasn’t yet found his place in the world, seemingly existing in a state of paralysis.  We never learn how his life came to such a standstill, suggesting he has seen better times, but the title is purely ironic, as is the driving jazz soundtrack, which is completely at odds in a film using silent imagery that couldn’t be less exciting.  J.B.’s nickname is perhaps a reference to the mysterious D. B. Cooper, who hijacked a plane in 1971 before parachuting and disappearing into the Pacific Northwest woods with $200,000, never to be seen or heard from again.  While there’s a Vietnam War raging, constantly heard in radio reports or footage seen on television, there’s also a counterculture anti-war movement going on that challenges the status quo, where there’s a whirlwind of social change in the air, yet James ignores all that, exuding a blank expression on his face and is pretty much defined by his indifference.  While we see the family visiting an art museum, James seems overly detached, lost in his own little world, easily ignored and separated from the rest of the family, where he goes through a practice run, stealing a small wooden figurine, placing it in his wife’s bag, yet that success emboldens him to think bigger, The Mastermind Movie Clip - Stealing from the Museum (2025) YouTube (1:56).  Completely unpretentious and unembellished, like all Reichardt films, it’s the small details that stand out, like the cars, clothing, news broadcasts, and old buildings, feeling more like a slice-of-life picture, where a listless James is depicted as just an ordinary guy, with nothing special about him, yet with his background, more is expected of him, sort of a rumpled Elliot Gould figure from Altman’s The Long Goodbye (1973), becoming a portrait of malaise and unfulfillment.  He borrows money from his philanthropist mother (Hope Davis), seemingly for an important architectural project, yet he uses it to hire two petty criminals, Guy and Ronnie (Eli Gelb and Javion Allen) and a getaway driver Larry (Cole Doman) to steal four obscure abstract paintings by early American modernist Arthur Dove (Arthur Dove (1880–1946)) from a fictional Framington Museum of Art in the Boston suburbs, perhaps due to some misconceived belief in outsmarting the establishment.  On the day of the heist, James forgets that his kids are off from school that day, so he drops them off at a bowling alley and hands them some cash to get by, only to learn that his driver Larry has inconveniently quit on them as well, yet even with these hiccups, the plan goes off as intended, where masked thieves wearing nylon stockings grab four targeted paintings off a wall, stuff them into bags, and literally walk out the front door, except that an adrenaline-pumped Ronnie waves a gun at a young female student witnessing the event while working on an assignment from school, forcing her under a table as they simply run out of the building with the paintings in tow, with luckily no one getting hurt.  James takes the stolen goods to an isolated location, hiding them in the hayloft of a barn at a remote pig farm, where a good five to ten minutes are spent watching him perilously climb up and down on an unsteady ladder to get up there with wooden-enclosed, framed paintings, one at a time, moments that are typically left out of other movies, as we’re thoroughly expecting some disaster to happen, only to return home afterwards with the police already questioning Terri.  Outed by Ronnie, who was caught the day before, as the mastermind behind the operation, James plays dumb, using his father’s name and influence to get the police off his back, at least for the moment, but he has a target on his back. 

While we never really learn what James was planning to do with these paintings, it’s clear the dam has broken on this shoddy operation, while we’re also beginning to suspect he hasn’t a clue what he’s doing, with Guy demanding more money or he’ll inform on him as well, so he agrees to meet, only to be surprised by mob figures who simply take what they stole, casually informing him, “Honestly, I don’t think you thought things through,” sarcastically questioning his ability to put a trustworthy group together, leaving him with nothing to show for it, but now his name and photo appear in all the newspapers and TV reports, requiring that he go on the lam to avoid arrest.  This may be the least engaging of all the filmmaker’s movies, lacking the emotional impact of her previous work, as viewers may find it hard to find an entry point, something that makes all this matter, becoming an examination of male entitlement that features a frustrated, screwed-up guy who has squandered away all of his opportunities.  Seemingly an excuse to escape from his banal, bourgeois family life, it’s the aftermath of the crime that gets the most attention, as James slides into exile from his family and friends, literally dropping out of society, seeking sanctuary out in the rural countryside with old art school friends Fred (frequent collaborator John Magaro) and Maude (Gaby Hoffmann), with Fred excitedly rummaging up memories of their more youthful indiscretions, urging him to flee across the border to a Canadian commune filled with American “draft dodgers, radical feminists, and drug fiends - - you know, nice people,” but Maude is less than enthused.  In fact, it is the women in this picture who quickly see through his smokescreen of illusions, as Maude doesn’t want any part of him, while Terri has no patience left for whatever predicament he finds himself in, offering no sympathy whatsoever, left to clean up the mess he left behind, angrily refusing to wire him money, hanging up instead, where he may as well be lost to them, finding himself isolated and alone, backed into a corner, and completely alienated from a society in flux.  But what do you have left when you increasingly damage the trust of your loved ones, and what world can you expect to live in when you’re not an active participant, where your own passivity allows stronger and more malicious forces to intrude?  Set in a time when America was passionately expressing a social consciousness, when opinions on issues mattered, and people were willing to put their lives on the line to bring about change, this is in stark contrast to our protagonist who doesn’t believe in anything, a man unmoored from his generation, taking his privileged affluent advantages for granted, ultimately allowing more zealously-driven forces to prevail.  An ambiguous commentary on the responsibility of the individual in a society marked by social injustice, the parallels between Nixon’s and Trump’s America are not accidental.  Never afraid to look at the dark underside of American failures, it goes without saying that Reichardt is referencing the political maelstrom we’re experiencing today, suggesting we’re all responsible for the world we live in.  What goes through the head of James is predictable, as survival instincts kick in, willing to do whatever it takes at any given moment, even the unthinkable, like stealing a purse from an elderly lady, running off afterwards where he blends into a crowd of marching anti-war protesters, watching a few get knocked in the head by locals who want no part of them there, evidence of a moral divide in the country, but James is a man defined by an entitled arrogance who has lost any moral connection.  Completely alone and adrift, no longer a part of anything, he’s beyond redemption, and beyond disillusionment, finding himself part of a self-imposed hellish damnation as the world closes in on him.  Throughout the film, the sheer existence of activist people of color, social unrest, and the radical energy that defined 1970’s America is deliberately omitted.  That erasure conveniently reinforces the privilege of the characters’ own ignorance, where his capacity for narcissistic self-absorption and lack of depth defines who he has become, recklessly moving from one bad situation to another, aimlessly drifting through time, engulfed by the emptiness that surrounds him, eventually finding himself cornered, like a rat in a maze, with no way out.  

Dahomey

 

Director Mati Diop

Mati Diop with the Golden Lion in Berlin

DAHOMEY               B                                                                                                             France  Senegal  Benin  (68 mi)  2024 d: Mati Diop

For me, the most important gesture with doing this film was to give back – to give back a story, a voice, a language, a power, a subjectivity to these artifacts that have been dispossessed by their own story.  So the first gesture was to make sure these artifacts stopped being objectified and could again become subjects with agency, with point of views, with subjectivity.                  —Mati Diop in an interview with NPR, October 26, 2024

From the maker of Atlantics (Atlantique) (2019), a film that won the Grand Prix (2nd place) prize at Cannes, the first black woman to be invited to the Cannes competition, though she was never graced afterwards by a single magazine cover in France, Mati Diop is a filmmaker that attempts to bridge the divide between Europe and Africa, while also establishing an ongoing conversation between the past and present.  Working in both Senegal and France, her films explore exile and identity, also memory and loss, where history is always present, offering a provocative treatise on changing historical perspectives, where this is a film about recovering artifacts and archives looted by colonial powers more than a century ago, which turns out to be a time capsule of a time capsule.  Dahomey is the name of a former African kingdom located in what is today the Republic of Benin in West Africa, initially founded in the 17th century by King Houegbadja, where the reign lasted three centuries until the French army routed and plundered more than 7000 royal objects from the kingdom’s capital in 1892-94, quickly becoming part of the French colonial empire in Africa (it still retains close ties), finally gaining its independence in 1960.  For more than 100 years, the objects were placed on display at the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro (now the Musée de l'Homme), an anthropology museum in Paris, later moved to the Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, an entire museum devoted to art from outside Europe, becoming the subject of some controversy, as these collections are essentially war trophies acquired through colonial conquest.  During an African visit of the Burkina Faso capital of Ouagadougou in 2017, addressing the issue of art brought to Europe under colonialism, French President Emmanuel Macron became the first French president to acknowledge that colonization was a crime against humanity, making a surprise announcement of the return of stolen art to Benin, where he actually used the term “restitution,” a concept that set the gears of this film in motion, while also commissioning a wide-ranging 250-page report ("Rapport sur la restitution du patrimoine culturel africain. Vers une nouvelle éthique relationnelle") written a year later by Senegalese philosopher and economist Felwine Sarr and French art historian Bénédicte Savoy, making a public assessment of specific items that were currently held in France, laying out steps for the long-awaited restitution in 2021, Report on the restitution of African cultural heritage.  According to its findings 90 percent of sub-Saharan African cultural heritage is revealed to be located outside the continent.  Musée du Quai Branly, France’s largest ethnological museum, holds 3,157 other objects from Benin in its collection, while more are believed to reside in smaller museums and private collections.  Mixing the political and the poetic, with most of the film shot inside museums, the artifacts date back to the reigns of King Ghézo (1818-1858), King Glèlè (1858-1889) and King Béhanzin (1889-1894), where the specific pieces highlighted by the film were part of the collection of Béhanzin, the last king of Dahomey, who was captured in 1894 and exiled to Martinique where he lived under house arrest.  Despite a promise to right the moral wrongs, the reaction in France and other European countries has been polarizing at best, with each country devising their own plans, where museums initially drew up plans of return, but an outraged public has other ideas, where unfortunately it’s not so simple to think that stolen art just needs to be returned to its rightful owners, as the precedent-setting ramifications are enormous, not to mention expensive, like opening a Pandora’s Box, leading to a boatload of challenges that have literally stopped the process in its tracks, including the government’s recent move to the far-right, so rather than opening the floodgates of repatriation, only a handful of objects have actually been returned.  The historical setting of the kingdom of Dahomey reflects a time when Europeans felt entitled to exploit African countries by virtue of their own alleged intellectual superiority, as evidenced by the wretched example of 19th century European racism on display in Abdellatif Kechiche’s Black Venus (Vénus noire) (2010), yet the historical, psychological, and political responsibility for undoing the damage of the past remains one of Europe’s greatest challenges for the 21st century.

Just barely over an hour in length, the backdrop of the film is this ongoing debate, where the film crew followed 26 museum pieces of art as they are removed from public display in Paris, carefully boxed up and sealed in wooden crates, and then shipped on a cargo plane back to Cotonou, Benin, where the initial rhythm of the film is established by wordlessly following this meticulous process, using forklifts and gloved hands to move the heavy weight during the height of a worldwide pandemic.  We discover some works are on display, visible to visitors, while hundreds of thousands of other works are stored in basements, completely out of sight, existing entirely in the dark, so this film metaphorically brings them back into the light.  In something of a surprise move, Diop adds a ghostly supernatural element to something she describes as a fantasy documentary, giving voice to object number 26, a statue that represents former ruler King Ghézo, given a resounding, deeply unsettling, Darth Vader-like electronically distorted voice-over by Haitian writer Makenzy Orcel, who wrote this part of the script, delivered against a black screen, like the void of history, as he assumes the existential identity of the art object in question, “We all bear the same scars,” he says, “uprooted, ripped out...” Bemoaning the time he spent in the darkness, as if in perpetual exile, lamenting the loss of his name, reduced to only a number, this voice of the ancestors, which does not speak French, by the way, communicating in the Dahomean language of Fon, is outraged that he was ripped away from its rightful place of honor in Dahomey, with glowing memories of a proud African kingdom, while becoming increasing excited at the idea of returning to his homeland, saying at the very end, “Within me resonates infinity.”  Breaking free of convention in the format itself, this adds a disturbing element, literally personalizing the pain and anguish of the artifacts themselves, giving them a conscious life of their own, clear evidence of a deep historical scar that is difficult to heal, where the historical treasures become the lead characters of the film, having their own history, which becomes part of the overall story.  In this manner, Diop references Alain Resnais and Chris Marker’s 30-minute essay film STATUES ALSO DIE (1953), with its scathing rebuke of colonialism, focusing on how African artifacts lose their cultural and spiritual significance when displayed in Western museums, stripped of their original contexts, causing the film to be banned in France when it was released, not screened in its entirety until 1968, now available on YouTube, Les Statues Meurent Aussi (Sub Ita) - Présence Africaine YouTube (30:03), where the directors were struck by the fact that African art was exhibited at the ethnological Musée de l'Homme, and not in the more prestigious national art museum of the Louvre.  Shot in a cinéma vérité style by Joséphine Drouin-Viallard, while also introducing keyboardist Wally Badarou from Benin, with experimental sounds added by Dean Blunt, a British/Nigerian artist, the film was awarded the Golden Bear (1st place) at the Berlin Film Festival of 2024, the second year in a row a documentary was awarded the top prize.  One thing this film makes painfully clear is that museums have a moral obligation to repatriate questionably acquired objects from their collections, becoming part of a recent pattern of European nations returning invaluable African artworks to their rightful owners, suggesting history is ever-changing and not a fixed understanding, and just like there are new political regimes bringing in their own set of ideas, there are always new perspectives that bring different historical understandings to light.  Diop takes no side and offers no clear answers, as the film’s greatest strength may be its ambiguity.  One thing that is not in dispute is that the slave trade uprooted actual people from the African continent, with more than 13 million kidnapped Africans enslaved or transported across the Atlantic, a heinous practice that lasted more than 300 years, so it was not just art objects that were stolen, as so many lives, families, and ancient cultures were lost or destroyed in the process, yet European museums continue to celebrate the African legacy, turning a blind eye to their own nation’s complicity in the destruction of those same cultures they are publicly celebrating. 

The film is shot in three parts, the first being the preparation for transport taking place in a lower level basement beneath the museum, which introduces the historical artifacts, where the director was struck by how this resembled a funeral sequence, where the underground of the museum is depicted as a prison or a morgue, reflective of the colonial gaze that has morbidly enclosed these artifacts.  This is followed by the arrival in Benin, where they are placed on display for a public exhibition within the presidential palace, prepared by a team of curators from Benin including Calixte Biah, a curator brought in by the Beninese government who supervised the transport from France, and Alain Godonou, who is arranging this new exhibition.  What were mere museum exhibits in Paris take on the mantle of being treasures in Benin, leading to an animated debate on how young people in Benin view the restitution of the treasures, which takes place at an auditorium at the University of Abomey-Calavi.  “Restituting 26 works out of 7,000 is an insult,” one student says, “What about the rest?”  Some remain skeptical, “The aim is not to make people in Benin happy.  The aim is to gratify France.”  One impassioned young woman claims it’s insulting that 90% of Benin’s cultural heritage is still in museums abroad, while another laments, “What was looted more than a century ago is our soul.”  Many seem to express the view that this small gesture is late in coming, and smacks of arrogance, part of a cynical public relations campaign led by Benin President Patrice Talon and French President Macron, as France is dead-set on keeping most of what they stole a century ago, yet they have to acknowledge the irony of having this spirited debate in French, which remains the official language in Benin since colonial times, remaining sensitive to the fact their own history has been erased by such prolonged European rule, as not everyone can even speak their own indigenous language of old Fon anymore, used by roughly one-sixth of Benin’s population.  The final phase includes the reaction from patrons at the public exhibition at the palace, reuniting the people of Benin with their lost treasures, which is an extension of the student debates, as there are multi-faceted ideas on what this means to Africans, who have a completely different view of these works than patrons of Western museums, offering an African perspective on the black experience, as these reference their ancestors, establishing a more personal connection.  Justice is disputed, questioning whether the colonizer is being benevolent or still holding power over the colonized.  The voices of youth are especially prominent, a diverse mix offering a variety of opinions whose views are typically overridden by political leaders who presume to speak for them, but their voices feel like a breath of fresh air, given a spontaneous energy the film otherwise lacks.  In this manner, Diop takes the idea of repatriation and reappropriates it in a way seldom heard, becoming the heart and soul of the film, as it’s their future they’re speaking about, where cultural heritage is an invaluable aspect of cultural identity and real independence.  Diop chose to broadcast the debate over the campus radio, as we see various people listening to it on their phones and laptops around the city, where we, the viewers, are the larger audience, a technique that was similarly used in Abderrahmane Sissako’s film BAMAKO (2006), where truth and reconciliation committee hearings putting war criminals on trial were publicly recorded, allowing the public to see and hear all the eye witness testimony.  The future management of African cultural heritage by African countries will be a challenging process, as Beninese officials say they need time to build a museum for the treasures as well as hundreds of other artifacts.  Security issues are a concern, as theft and terrorist targets are something governments have not always addressed, while storage is also an issue, as proper temperature and humidity levels must be regulated, so there's all kinds of things they need to figure out, which is understandable, but that cannot be an argument against restitution.  Diop really has her finger on contemporary issues linking the two continents together.  

Postscript

What the film doesn’t address is Africa’s own role in the slave trade, including that of the ancient Dahomey kingdom, where some of the fighters who fought the French were female warriors called Amazons, with Dahomey described in Stanley B. Alpern’s 1998 book Black Sparta: The Women Warriors of Dahomey as a highly militaristic society, perhaps more than any other African state, that “was dedicated to warfare and slave-trading,” trading slaves to the British for guns, which is how they armed themselves with superior weaponry.  The French looting was by no means unique, as African cultural heritage objects were appropriated by French, British, German, Portuguese, Spanish, and Belgian forces during 18th and 19th century, where public galleries and museums in Europe and North America, including cultural centers and academic institutions, are filled with looted artifacts stolen during the colonial wars or obtained through dubious circumstances, from the British Museum (69,000 objects from sub-Saharan Africa) to the Weltmuseum of Vienna (37,000), to the Musée Royal de l’Afrique Centrale in Belgium (180,000), to Berlin’s Humboldt Forum (75,000), to the Musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac (70,000).  It’s also clear that the citizens of Benin are hugely skeptical of multi-millionaire President Patrice Talon’s government (his family profited from the slave trade before becoming interpreters and accountants for their colonial rulers), which may have their own intentions, as they borrowed $22.5 million dollars from the French Development Agency to help fund the construction of several new museums to house the returned treasures in a bid to make culture and tourism a new economic model.  This burden of debt is the neocolonial model, as it continues to pour African wealth into foreign interest payments and away from needed public services, as Benin has a 38.5% poverty index, ranked 166 out of 191 countries, where nearly 83% of households are unable to afford a healthy diet, Benin country strategic plan (2024–2027).  African museums are by-products of colonization and are, in many ways, still exclusionary and elitist.  Once regarded as one of West Africa’s beacons of democracy following its move away from Marxist–Leninism after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the encroaching autocracy on display during Patrice Talon’s presidency over the past seven years has caused many observers to worry about the country’s trajectory (Neoliberalism and apathy in Benin | Africa at LSE).