Movie Detour (2025 edition)

[recognito]

Here's your annual local film festival detour, everyone 

New Group, dir. Shimotsu - This is a soft-ish horror movie about the evils of gymnastic formation…

The protagonist of the movie, Ai, is a young girl who cannot figure out how to stand up for herself. One day, people all around her city start forming human pyramids in public, compelled by an alien power (there are UFOs here) that's channeled by uh her high school principal. Individuals form couples, couples form families, families form societies, societies make up the world. Stop resisting! Join my pyramid!

Ai's had a crush on the transfer student, Yu, a young man with a sulky demeanor and an air of faint disgust for what he sees as mindless obedience to society… you can kind of see the limits of the movie here: thematically, it doesn't really go deeper than "conformity bad." The resolution of the film is also a little funny to me: Ai manages to peel people away from the giant pyramid outside her school to form a gymnastic sphere and faces against the principal's pyramid using the power of love, et cetera. I'm not sure why it's better to be united in a pyramid versus a sphere—the director held a Q&A after the movie screening and said that the sphere technically has no up or down versus a pyramid, which visually represents a hierarchy, but akfmgnnb ultimately aren't you both gigantic human gymnastic formations directed by a single figure…? No?

There's an extended bit where the movie tries to address why people might want to disappear into a larger social structure: Ai's little sister died after being struck by a car. Ai's parents continue to act as though the little sister's alive, setting a plate for her at the dinner table and talking about her as though she's still there. Is there a hole in your life that can disappear through collective reimagination? Does happiness take the shape of a circle or a triangle?

Cute, low effort as a watching experience, not that gory. Feels like it'd be a really fun movie to be apart of with loads of gymnastic stunts. A horror movie for people who don't like gore. A solid 2.5 to 3 out of 5.

 

Black Rabbit, White Rabbit, dir. Mokri - I didn't realize the Chekhov's gun quotation is framed in the negative until I saw the title card. The Wikipedia translation goes, "One must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn't going to go off," followed by a qualifier that the quote refers to a monologue and not a literal rifle. The gun in this movie is pretty literal: it opens with a man bringing a rifle to an antique shop and trying to send it to the woman he was in love with as a secret present. He tries to exchange the firing pin of the actual antique rifle with the pin from a replica gun aaaand whoops! blows his head off.

Everything after this takes place on a movie set. Two movies are being filmed, one of them a new drama about Sara, a recovering from a catastrophic car accident, and the other a recreation of a famous scene in an Iranian television show; one uses a prop gun that might be real; props are exchanged between sets; no one can find the director; confusion about what's real, what's a prop, what's in the script, and what's happening in the world outside the sound stage runs rampant. Objects have their own will and desires. Do humans?

I'm going to be real, I didn't like this movie. It look beautiful, but the use of doubles, mirrors, and doppelgangers is uninspiring, the metatextual elements don't impress… What's the ultimate payoff in a movie where the real and fake trade places? It has to be that either what's seen as fake has its own meaningful reality, or what's seen as real is a flimsy set of agreements and there's another "real" beneath the false real, or that what's real is beautiful, despite its ugliness and misery. The "mystery" the film presents us with is resolved in one strand (Sara discovers her husband cut the brakes of her car and transforms herself and her beloved stepdaughter into rabbits and escape) but there's nothing particularly interesting or beautiful about the other strand. The propmaster is frightened there'll be an incident with a gun. Great news! No one's dead…?

There are some interesting details with this movie: it's set in Tajikistan; characters speak Russian, Tajiki, Persian, and Italian; lines are repeated, misunderstood; I really do respect those super long takes, but I'm a little like, for what? Okay… Cool.

 

Bouchra, dir. Barki and Bennani (2 Lizards Production) - A queer, coming-to-terms…? animated movie about Bouchra, a Moroccan coyote, creating a film about the aftermath of coming out to her mom. Bouchra lives in New York City; she's fucking around with her ex-girlfriend in a way that made me laugh and then wince (they broke up, met up again three months later, Bouchra was like oh no uh is this a date date? I need to order some coffee then at the coffee shop the ex-girlfriend OFFERS BOUCHRA A JOB AT SONY and then they go to a bar and fuck and then Bouchra wakes up in the morning like, actually I don't want. my ex-girlfriend to be my boss. yeah, girl!!!), and is trying to figure out just what her relationship with her mother is. The film alternates between scenes of Bouchra's day-to-day life and Bouchra's film, where Bouchra plays herself within the film going back to Casablanca to visit her mother to confront her about how her mother handled coming out. During the Casablanca scenes, her mother is played by an actor; during the present day scenes and the flashbacks not set within the Casablanca film-within-the-film, her mother is shown as herself. She's the only character who gets this treatment, despite one or two other characters from the NYC-era showing up in the film-within-the-film as themselves. I was confused sometimes because lol it was not clear to me when we were flashing to a rough sketch of a storyboard because Bouchra had talked about something with her friends/family and was thinking about how to turn a specific memory into a scene or when we were flashing to the finished film-within-the-film itself, but you should be able to figure it out by the halfway point.

I use "coming-to-terms" rather than coming of age because Bouchra is 35 and officially came out to her parents nine years ago by air mail. In that light, the bad case of whoops did it with the ex-girlfriend again feels like a problem in a similar vein as the mother: what does the "end" of a previous version of your life look like? In Casablanca, Bouchra flirts with the mother (sexy bear with huge boobs) of a musically talented Fennec fox and later has sex with the hot milf lawyer bear; Bouchra's mother notices the flirtation and, in an inspired scene, sees the fox son and asks him how his parents are, does he have a father, and oh, they don't live together…? Okay, does he stay with the mom every night orrrrr…? I thought that scene and the scene where Bouchra's flirting with the bear mom after the school play was super effective for the clear illustration of how parents deal with their children being sexual creatures and how troubling they find these intergenerational "transgressions," if you can call it that—surely the bear milf cannot be that much older than Bouchra! But the identifications are all muddled in the mother's eyes. Moms ??? can homosexual too…?

The film looks great: moody, dark, full animation-as-indie-film, complete with a grain effect. Nice frames and compositions, some funny transitions, nice designs. The designs were really cute, and I had a few "Sure, that's how a coyote would wear glasses!" moments. Good soundtrack, beautiful rendering of Casablanca as a modern city, a lot of great character moments that I thought demonstrated funny and sophisticated understanding of human psychology.

I went into the film with low expectations because yes, I am prejudiced against queer coming of age films for reasons I will only lightly touch on in the parentheses (the fantasy of many coming of age films is about family reunion or I guess making your closeted high school relationship Work… kill me!) but I was pleasantly surprised by both the narrative and visual quality. I do feel like lol this was more of a 70-5 minute film than an 85 minute one, but maybe that's revealing some of my own prejudices for speed and more efficient dialogue.

The directors have a production company called 2 Lizards, and I was NOT expecting my Google search to reveal that their animated short series, originally distributed through Instagram (??????), as part of the MoMA's permanent collection, but lol goes to show what I know about super contemporary art. The series, described as a surreal vision of the early days of the pandemic, went viral on some other part of the Internet in 2020; you can watch it on Vimeo here if this tickles your interest. The vibe is surprisingly similar in a fun way—the animated shorts are funnily surreal and strange, but share a similar style of line delivery and shared visual palette and uh furry women with huge tits. I have no idea if Bouchra will get a wider distribution beyond film fests, so if it's showing, show up for it!

What Does That Nature Say to You, dir. Hong - Great crowd for this one. Hong's a fascinating director, for reasons I outlined in my previous film detour. What Does that Nature Say to You is a funny film about my personal nightmare: after three years of dating, Ha Donghwa visits his girlfriend's family for the first time. The movie culminates in Donghwa getting totally wasted and angrily lashing out at Junhee's older sister, then passing out at the table. Junhee has to carry him off to bed. At the end of the movie, he walks up a mountain and lays down on a bench; next to the bench is a shed where Junhee's father and mother are smoking and vaping and drinking beers and talking shit about him. Donghwa falls down coming down the mountain and decides to leave home early in the morning before anyone but Junhee's awake. At an intersection, his car breaks down… ugh, please, fate, do not let this happen to me!!!!

I really enjoyed watching this, and especially admire the efficiency of the family encounters. Donghwa meets, in order, Junhee's father, older sister, and mother, and each encounter has three major touch points: his moustache (they like it! totally natural! he's good looking!), his car (it's so old! does it drive well? it's dangerous? how much did you pay for it?), and his career/father (a poet! making it on his own according to his own ideals… but his famous father is behind him). All the information is clearly laid out for the attentive viewer. Thinking back on the film, you can tell things are going to go badly for Donghwa once the father asks him if he can drive his car, then hops in the car and vanishes down the hill in the first fifteen minutes, but lol he has blunders at every turn.

The tensions spring largely from Donghwa's inability to reconcile his financial dependence on his father from his desire to be respected and accepted by members of his father's class as his own independent person. His father is a famous attorney who shows up on television; Donghwa hates his father and hates returning home to ask for money. Junhee, in contrast, forms a united front with her family and emphasizes the strong bonds they have. As Junhee tells him, the father bought the mountain and land for his now passed mother and made every detail in the house suitable for the family; the mother is a skillful poet who has a separate career; the elder sister is extraordinarily intelligent but burned out and lives at home with her family, yet her family still respects her, and she will not stop bringing up Donghwa's dad!! The contrast in their perceived intellect, her obvious dependence on her family vs. his badly concealed dependence on his father, makes it clear to Donghwa that he, as a bad poet (you get to hear one of his poems, and it sucks), wouldn't be seen as qualified to be with Junhee without the "glow" he gets from his father. There's no "resolution" here: the father and mother comment that Donghwa probably won't be successful in life, but Junhee will probably land on her feet no matter what. There's no reason to interfere.

I do feel like Hong is pretty sympathetic towards artists of all kinds: struggling, failing, at the end of their careers, just beginning. He's older, he's been in the spotlight both as a celebrated auteur and as a figure in a scandal, and I feel like artistically there's a point for men in his age bracket where they turn really sour and mean towards young people as they sense their relevance and power diminishing… anyway, he's avoided it with the movie. Donghwa is SDLFKM so embarrassing but in a comic way. Maybe existential if you're also a flunky.