Long before he was selected for the Cannes Main Competition, Rodrigo Sorogoyen became an Oscar nominee with his MOTHER short film.
The race for the Palme is heating up… is what you’d assume we’d be saying by the time half the Main Competition had screened. However, this year isn’t like most years at Cannes. Or maybe, it’s an edition where issues that have prevailed for years are finally becoming too noticeable to politely ignore. Thierry Frémaux’s favorite auteurs aren’t bringing it, and most of the biggest critical darlings are showing in parallel sections – think La Gradiva, Kurosawa’s first jidaigeki, Clarissa’s transposition of Mrs. Dalloway to Nigeria and various others. Indeed, Hirokazu Koreeda is receiving the worst reviews of his illustrious career for Sheep in the Box, while Rodrigo Sorogoyen can’t stop drawing depreciative Sentimental Value comparisons because of his The Beloved. Finally, James Gray’s Paper Tiger is proving divisive, which is business as usual for the American auteur.
With those cineastes in mind, let’s revisit Koreeda’s Air Doll about a sex doll magically come to life, Sorogoyen’s agonizing Mother, and one of Gray’s best films, the fraternal melodrama We Own the Night…
AIR DOLL (2009) Hirokazu Koreeda
If you thought Sheep in the Box was the first time Koreeda bestowed life upon an inanimate humanoid object, think again. Over a decade before that Cannes-competing flick, the Japanese auteur had tried his luck at another Pinocchio narrative. This one was adapted from a Yoshiie Gōda manga, telling the story of the titular Air Doll, a masturbatory aid who comes to life every day, while her owner’s at work. Alone in the big city, the doll named Nozomi wanders aimlessly, learning to be human, whatever that might mean. Perhaps, she also seeks a purpose that’s not just to be a substitute for some unavailable warm body, a tool to satiate men’s desires in a plastic compromise, complete with a removable pocket pussy for easy cleaning.
It’s a sordid premise that this director approaches like the unashamed sentimentalist he is. That doesn’t mean Koreeda pulls his punches. Right from the start, when he first introduces us to Nozomi and the sad man who treats her like a store-away girlfriend, he shows the indignity of such an existence. There’s frankness in the depiction of artificial intercourse, as the soundscape foregrounds squelchy foley work and the take goes on and on and on, like an assault on the senses for the queasier spectators. But, even then, the director’s tendencies blossom in their sorrowful suggestions. Here, that means rain streaming down an open window, projecting shadows over the communion of plastic and flesh. The screen weeps for these lost souls.
In fact, the whole thing is a meditation on urban loneliness, often expanding its purview beyond the doll and the man to contemplate a constellation of other lives, shining insularly in the night-sky ocean of the city. Everybody’s alone in Air Doll. Everybody’s yearning for connection, and the camera itself seems to reach out in pursuit of an unreachable touch, always moving. Or maybe it’s a show of curiosity in tandem with its protagonist’s restless need to know more about what it is to be a person, to be real, to recognize herself in others, be they girls or dolls, to grow old and have a heart that beats for something other than the physical satisfaction of men.
Inching toward lofty reflections on a woman’s role within patriarchy, Air Doll often stumbles between proto-feminism and outright fetishism. This Toy Story through the incel lens can construct a dialogue scene around the painful echoes of a bug’s life cycle and a woman’s presumed biological imperatives as easily as it stops on its tracks to showcase a fully nude tableau ripe for the consumption of inflation kinksters. Everyone behind the camera seems to struggle when negotiating these tones and ideas. More even than Koreeda’s direction or his calamitous inclusion of voice-off narration, the score by World's End Girlfriend alternates between active liability and brushing the sublime.
Only one element remains steady throughout, never failing nor falling into the traps set up by Air Doll’s basic premise. She’s the great Doona Bae, playing Nozomi with such grace that the entire enterprise seems better, smarter, ever lovelier whenever her performance is front and center. It’s not so much that the actress humanizes an inherently dehumanizing role, but that she finds an almost balletic intentionality in the challenge of conveying the plight of a doll given the gift of sapience. So much of her work is that of a mimetic agent learning of personhood through mirroring, like an acting exercise, mayhap an experiment, stretched to feature length.
While Nozomi is the “born yesterday” archetype taken to an off-putting extreme, Bae almost neutralizes its potential for perversity. Or maybe I was just so besotted by her choices that the actual text of the flick became a blurry abstraction in the background of the actor’s showcase. Consider the inevitable confrontation between object and consumer, when the dialogue seems almost pointed in how perfunctory it sounds, yet Bae’s delivery foregrounds how Nozomi seems surprised by her own emotions, feeling them internally but externalizing them with a mixture of awed discovery that undercuts the whatever outrage she’s verbalizing and deepens the moment considerably.
Though we enter the world of Air Doll by following her proprietor, this meditation on loneliness smartly shifts focus the moment it can. The story shapes itself around its leading lady, with everything, from the rhythm of cuts to the aforementioned camera movement, attuned to her picaresque and sentimental journey of fantasy made imperfect truth. If only this precarious balance could have held on till the conclusion. Sadly, Koreeda doesn’t stick the landing, swerving into existential horrors too bloody not to come off as needlessly cruel. It seems that, in the end, Air Doll cannot conceptualize its protagonist’s humanity without framing it through pain, through brutalization, finding meaning in tragedy. By that point, such devices taste like bitter clichéd, if not a bland copout. I don’t even know what’s worse.
Air Doll is streaming on Amazon Prime Video, Eternal Family, Kanopy, Metrograph, MUBI, and OVID. You can also rent or purchase it on Amazon, Apple TV, and Fandango at Home.
MOTHER (2019) Rodrigo Sorogoyen
In 2017, Rodrigo Sorogoyen premiered a short film called Mother at the Málaga Film Festival. Reactions from critics, audiences and programmers were immediately rapturous, propelling the 18-minute stinger through the fest circuit where it continued to gather acclaim. By the following year, Sorogoyen had an Oscar nomination for Best Live-Action Short Film, and work soon started on expanding this miniature breakthrough into a full-on feature. Not that 2019’s Mother is a reinterpretation of its same-named predecessor. Instead, it posits the short film as prologue, situating its main action ten years later, in the aftermath of a never-ending parental nightmare.
It all starts on one summer day, when Elena is at home with her mother while her ex travels to Spain and France with their six-year-old son. On this occasion, what was supposed to be a quick pit stop to change clothes between engagements is interrupted by a call from little Iván who’s alone at a beach. The phone’s battery is low, dying quickly, and a panic starts to surge between the two women, who feel powerless. And that’s all before a strange man shows up, beckoning the boy to him, chasing him as he runs and tries to hide. By the time the call cuts off, Iván’s been spotted, his fate decided. A decade later, the missing child is yet to be found and Elena spends her days suffocating in sorrow.
She’s relocated to that French beach where her boy once was, potentially in hopes of one day seeing him again. Not that anyone, not even herself, entertains that thought with any seriousness. That is until the grieving mother crosses paths with a teenager who bears a striking resemblance to her son. Or, at least, that’s what we’re meant to surmise since Sorogoyen opts to never show us Iván’s face. The most one gets is a photograph stashed away with other mementos, barely glimpsed in wide shot as Elena’s boyfriend confronts her with the reason behind the peculiar attachment she’s formed with a stranger whose eyes shine with adolescent infatuation whenever they settle on the older woman.
Over the next few days, they grow close, with the youth starting to display a worrying codependence that could be overplayed to rebel against his parents or genuine. Whatever the case may be, others who may have stood passively by at first gradually start to intervene. Or they try to, with little success. If Jules Poirier is an open book as the boy, Marta Nieto lets her Elena be more mysterious, both to her observers and to herself. If she truly believes this is her long-lost son, the attraction she’s allowing to blossom from him isn’t only pedophilic but incestuous in thought, almost as if it gave shape to what a mother might have feared for the boy once he was taken. It’s a sick proposition whose ambiguity foments the transgression at hand.
For his part, Sorogoyen doesn’t seem especially interested in the taboo-breaking aspect of the story. Instead of sensationalizing Elena’s slow-motion discombobulation, he watches it at a distance. The camera may pursue her, predator-like, in more of those same long takes that defined the short, yet it never probes. What’s conveyed isn’t so much the dark truth of her afflictions, how grief has transformed the woman, as much as it is the powerlessness of watching her go down this rabbit hole unable to stop it, unable even to understand the full extent of this volatile despair. In that regard, Mother goes beyond a portrait of loss to become a study in the paralysis one feels when the world is falling apart and all we can do is pay witness to the horrors.
Threats of sexual violence and the implication of an actual molestation tip the scale a bit toward shock and awe, but Mother regains some restraint going into its final passages. If nothing else works, Nieto is always there to sustain Sorogoyen’s experiment, articulating a tricky character without ever hinting that she can be solved, whether by the performer or the spectator. It all makes for a mildly frustrating watch, with Mother circling around notions of catharsis without ever committing to either their fulfillment or their denial. For a film of such bristling style and provocation, this sort of half-gesture can seem more damaging than it would in a less promising project.
Mother is available on Kanopy and the Strand Releasing streaming channel. You can also rent or purchase it on Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV and Fandango at Home.
WE OWN THE NIGHT (2007) James Gray
The Immigrant might be James Gray’s best film, The Lost City of Z his boldest stylistic experiment, Ad Astra his bravest twisting of genre, and Armageddon Time his most personal work. However, if asked to select which film best summarizes the artist’s oeuvre, which title would make the best intro into his cinematic universe, I’d have to go with We Own the Night. By the time he arrived at his third feature in 2007, Gray had already made clear that his would be a vision of American film looking back towards its own past, reviving New Hollywood for a new millennium while also recuperating traditions of old vintage, like classic crime pictures, westerns of quasi-biblical resonance, silent melodrama.
For all intents and purposes, all this can be found within his first three features, but only the third executes them to such a sharp level of perfection that, rather than feeling like an echo of the past, the work stands tall as a surmounting of it. Accusations of pastiche or even nostalgia feel foolish in the presence of We Own the Night, for the work’s final form is closer to myth revisited and retold, an opera like those Wagner wrote about old German legends, becoming their definitive version. But of course, Gray isn’t pulling from those folkloric heritages. Instead, he’s diving back into that pool of cinema, into the mythology America burned into celluloid in the 20th century, the anxieties and self-images it contained.
The story couldn’t be more archetypical, pitting brother against brother, one who defied the father and another who honored him by dutifully carrying out the older man’s mission, his purpose, his mark in the world. Only, the black sheep proves more reliable than sharp tongues would say. The shady nightclub owner in a family of New York cops turns out to be the only one capable of saving those from his clan who proudly wear the blue. Sometimes, the only way to combat the shadows rising from the underbelly of our seedy cosmos is to mingle among them, know their ways, their weaknesses, their dark purposes. Perhaps the two brothers aren’t so different after all.
It’d be so easy for these narrative shapes to feel stale, derived from so much that came before to the point they feel redundant, but Gray has that magic that makes the old seem new again. He paraphrases yet never quotes, as one can attest in images that acknowledge the ghosts of Gordon Willis without miming them. Or a car chase that could be a faded photocopy of The French Connection if not for a writer-director intent on contradicting the individualistic fervor of that classic with a broader spectrum of family interests and a melancholic downpour that makes poetry out of an action set piece. Or a vaguely defined, glamorous paramour that could be like so many femme fatales of yore, yet haunts the viewer long after the credits roll.
How can something feel so sprawling, so epic, yet so intimate? How can a film draw so evidently on recognizable references and still feel original? How can something fit so well within a tradition harkening back to Poverty Row pictures and the grandest forms of Hollywood prestige filmmaking? These last two paragraphs extoll a number of paired concepts that should spark contradiction, yet they live harmoniously within this miracle of a film. Oh, how I love the constantly misunderstood cinema of James Gray, who, if all was right with the world, would be considered among the pantheon of the most essential filmmakers in contemporary American cinema. Looking at the magnificence of We Own the Night, it should be self-evident.
We Own the Night is available to rent and purchase on Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV, and Fandango at Home.
Have divisive reactions put you off these directors’ latest efforts, or are you excited to check out Sheep in the Box, The Beloved and Paper Tiger?