Here's Jason reporting from the NYFF on Kelly Reichardt's latest.
Think of it as Pulp Fiction's second cousin, a wallflower who stands blushing at the side of the dance-floor - Kelly Reichardt's Certain Women does command swirling depths from its three interconnected stories; you've just got to take the time and have the patience to suss them out. But man, she dances if you do...
At first, there's awkwardness. In the film's first portion Laura Dern plays a lawyer (named Laura!) who negotiates both lunch-break trysts with married men and hostage situations with calm, cool befuddlement. Tonally this section's strange, lightly comic and sad, but then we're still getting situated. But the same way you knew before you even saw it that it was genius to match Reichardt with Dern you know, as it brushes off what you thought that would be, that you wanna push deeper.
And next up you really start to find out the peculiar and individual things about your new friend, not all of them agreeable. The second section stars Michelle Williams as Gina, a woman determined to build a cabin from reclaimed materials, emphasis on "determined" - everyone around her seems a little put-off by her strong will, while she in turn seems a little put-off by the role of "strong-willed woman" that everybody is constantly trying to foist upon her. There is still awkwardness but it's baked in by this point; more importantly it's beginning to take hold, and by the time we're watching Williams dead-on, staring at who knows, we're cooked.
By part three love, terrible love, stumbles into the picture. Red-cheeked and disastrous. Lily Gladstone (where has she been all my life?) plays Jamie, a horse-rancher who wanders into town on a whim and meets Beth (Kristen Stewart, marvelously defiantly distracted), a teacher giving a class she doesn't know how to teach and that Jamie doesn't need. Painful one-sided infatuation follows, with grand gestures and stilted half-oblivious conversation - but it's agonizingly sweet. Emphasis on agonizing. And it's over before it's begun, but you'll damn well never forget it.
The film relies upon an accumulation of effect - a pile-up of character and place specifics that inform and feed off one another until you're very nearly swept up with emotion. It's a surprise really, when it comes - when you realize how you're stirring. Certain Women hasn't screamed or bounced around the room - you have to peek in pretty hard to even catch on to its profound, but buried, sentimental connectivity. It's a stretch of Montana sky and highway that you have to drive, and drive, and drive, before you feel it, but it works its way deep into your bones.
Certain Women opens in platform release on October 14th.
previously at NYFF