'Queen of Earth' and the Films of Alex Ross Perry
Monday, August 17, 2015 at 7:00PM 
Glenn here to discuss Alex Ross Perry whose latest film opens in cinemas and VOD next week. He is a curious one who we haven't discussed much about here at The Film Experience. He's made four films, not one which is alike, yet which all feature obvious hints of the same creator. Impolex, his debut, is made with such a strong and unwavering idea of what it wants to be that it’d be a perfect calling card for a director if it wasn’t so different to the rest of his output. It is both a curious fascination and a frustratingly inert experimental concoction of a film with mumbled dialogue and absurd comedy (there is a talking octopus, if I remember correctly) that doesn’t so much predict Perry’s future career as it does suggest recurring ideas. If all one watched was the expert scene late in the film, dearly acted by Kate Lyn Sheil – unsurprisingly, a common figure in Joe Swanberg’s equally confounding and experimental genre-tripping films Silver Bullets, AutoErotic and The Zone from the same era – as she opens up to our dope of a lead character you might be forgiven for thinking it was something far less esoteric than the full film really it.
As that 2009 film was being released in the most limited of releases two years later, The Color Wheel was causing mayhem on the festival circuit. The much ballyhooed film was an Independent Spirit Award nominee in the blessed John Cassavetes category is the sort of that could bring about illusions of a particularly prickly Brooklyn-born twentysomething version of Woody Allen if it weren’t, you know, for that whole incest thing. It’s use of black and white 16mm filmstock was inspired and it was meticulously scripted with no improvisation and structural hints to classic cinema, highlighting Perry’s very dialogue-focused style that navigates in very specifically modern contexts the way people can change and challenge us emotionally and physically in ways we might not want or expect.
Listen Up Philip, Queen of Earth & Mad Max: Fury Road (!) after the jump
His next was Listen Up Philip, a polarizing film that had people debating about the cinematic politics of misanthropic films and just how well they can be taken by audiences and critics. I admired the film greatly for the way it made structural gambles and flipped the proverbial script on his visuals. It was a film that showed the director as an even more complex one that his first two features would have suggested. Above everything else though, I thought Elisabeth Moss gave the performance of the year, which was no small feat I am sure you would agree. And, thankfully, whereas one might expect most white, male, American filmmakers to go with Jason Schwartzmann for another film, he went with Moss and made his best feature yet, Queen of Earth.
Moss stars alongside Perry newcomer and Inherent Vice star Katherine Waterston as sparring former-BFFs who have communed at a summer home somewhere in New York state and whose combative friendship comes to a head as Moss’ Catherine spirals deeper and deeper into depression and potential schizophrenic unnerving madness. Queen of Earth, which I recently saw the Melbourne International Film Festival. Queen of Earth isn’t a film that, like it’s much talked about trailer might suggest, is overtly reverent to ‘70s genre pictures, although I suspect Perry is a big fan of (amongst others) Robert Altman's That Cold Day in the Park and Images. Nor is it an explicitly modern film. Rather a lot like The Duke of Burgundy from earlier this year, it has the unique feel of a movie that has appeared fully formed from some other dimension.
I suspect Perry will be criticised for making a film about two women who are at war with each other, but these women, as craven as they are vicious, represent a continuing trend in taking the good, the bad, and the ugly of cinematic minorities and embracing them in bold, expressive ways. It’s interesting to me that my three favourite films of the year all deal with the dynamics of female relationships. Neither Queen of Earth, nor Girlhood, nor Mad Max: Fury Road share much in common and it feels somewhat antiquated to collar them together simply because they have strongly-written roles for not just one actress, but many. Still, it is worth looking at them and marvelling at how an Australian action-adventure, a French teen-drama, and an American indie from a male director many consider overly privileged and hateful can all offer such rich portrayals without once falling for lazy ideas of what constitutes a “woman’s picture” or “women’s themes”.
These women are torturers and tortured, cruel and mean, but also eerily funny and never less than fully dimensional human beings whose internal struggles are externally embodied in the most frightening of ways, whether that be passive aggressive school yard digs or psychotically degenerative meltdowns that are strikingly staged. Queen of Earth is a startling work of cinema that is the culmination of all of Perry’s films so far – the experimental otherness of Impolex, the razor-sharp commentary of The Color Wheel, and the bare, open-wound emotions of Listen Up Philip. Like all of his films, some will be hypnotically captivated while just as many will be turned off in fits of repulsive disgust. I think it’s his best film yet, embracing the weird and the cinematic, the outre and the expressive. It’s not going to win him many new fans, but it is the sort of work that people will discover in 20 years time and wonder how it ever came into being.
Reader Comments (7)
I'm very much looking forward to this one. I loved Listen Up Philip and The Color Wheel. I think Perry is probably the best young American director working today.
You had me at Elisabeth Moss. And then you had me at Robert Altman. And then you had me at Duke of Burgundy.
I'm in.
Dat poster tho. So striking.
Elizabeth Moss is always gonna be a YES henceforth.
Mad Men forever.
Peggy Olson forever.
"I could've had you in my life..." forever.
That motorbike gif forever.
The final hug with Julio forever.
<3
Great write-up! I totally agree on Moss being spectacular in Listen up, Philip . Looking forward to seeing this new collaboration. After reading this I randomly googled Alex Ross Perry and read that he's been hired by Disney to direct a live-action version of Winnie the Pooh... that's an unlikely pairing!
QoE is gonna be on VOD next week? Thank you for the best news I read in a long time!
Sati, the 26th I believe.
I saw this trailer tonight and was engrossed. I love the old school feel- I thought it might be a release of a long-gestating film. I'm really looking forward to checking this one out.