Opening ThisWeek
PForce Majeure
Opens Fri., Nov. 21 at Seven Gables and SIFF Cinema Uptown. rated R. 118 minutes.
On vacation in the French Alps, Tomas, Ebba, and their two young kids are a sleek, modern family seemingly stepped out of an iPhone 6 ad. They’ve booked a week at a trendy ski resort to escape the pressures back home in Sweden. (Tomas has difficulty ignoring work calls on his iPhone.) Things are going well until a fateful lunch on a sunny balcony overlooking the slopes. Suddenly, triggered by one of the regular avalanche-control blasts that punctuate the film, a cloud of snow overwhelms the shrieking, terrified diners. But this isn’t your usual natural-disaster flick: The frame goes white as we hear sounds of chaos and confusion; then everyone realizes that only a light dusting of snow has fallen on their fettuccine alfredo. After those few seconds of panic, there’s laughter all around. Thank God we’ve survived; now let’s not talk about it.
Ruben Ostlund’s sly, unsettling study of marital dissolution is what happens when people talk about it. Ebba (Lisa Loven Kongsli) can’t let go of the fact that Tomas (Johannes Kuhnke) grabbed his phone and abandoned the family in the face of possible doom. At first he denies her accusations (enabled by friends and red wine), but the greater damage is caused by his slow acquiescence. “I’m the victim, too,” he later sobs, “the victim of my own instincts!” Copping to his cowardice only makes him seem more pathetic to Ebba, who begins re-evaluating the whole basis of their marriage. If not for the sake of their kids (played by actual siblings), what’s the point in staying together? And if you can’t trust your partner with your kids’ survival, what’s the point of even having them? The couple has a bearded friend (Game of Thrones’ Kristofer Hivju) who uncomfortably witnesses Ebba’s dinner-party denunciations. He diplomatically tries to rationalize Tomas’ lapse in sociobiological fight-or-flight terms, which only causes a fight with his much younger girlfriend (Fanni Metelius). Men reveal themselves to be posturing fools here, while women sensibly wonder if they’re the only ones keeping our species alive.
This isn’t a fraught drama of the old Bergmanesque variety; it’s more a dark comedy of shame that Ostlund interrupts with some very odd, droll flourishes. The family has a drone that crashes into sensitive conversations. The routine of electric tooth-brushing merges with the inane vacation machinery of ski lifts, snow grooming, and funiculars: man’s futile quest to control nature. Tomas and Ebba keep locking themselves out of their room for late-night conferences, while an impassive janitor watches with disdain. We really have no idea where this movie is headed—if it’ll tip into tragedy or farce. Such uncertainty is rare during the safe pieties of Oscar season (this is Sweden’s submission in the awards derby), yet it underlines the movie’s central question: Should this marriage be saved? (And more: Is marriage itself worth preserving?)
I think any couple with children will find something to recognize in Tomas and Ebba’s teetering at the brink. Their handsome, happy union is revealed to be a construct in two scenes that nearly bookend the film: Both are put on for show—one before the damage, the second to repair it. This picture-perfect family is anything but. Maybe that’s another way of saying they’re typical. Brian Miller
Low Down
Opens Fri., Nov. 21 at Varsity. rated R. 114 minutes.
Set in mid-’70s L.A., here’s a new movie made with the texture and technology of that era: grainy 16 mm film stock and vintage anamorphic lenses that gently flatten and widen the frame. First-time director Jeff Preiss is a veteran cinematographer with a knack for retro style (he shot Bruce Weber’s Let’s Get Lost and Broken Noses), and his pianist hero is a creature from another time. The cool glamour of West Coast bebop has faded by the ’70s for Joe Albany (John Hawkes); and if there was ever any money to his trade, that’s gone, too. He’s living in a seedy residential hotel with his teen daughter Amy-Jo (Elle Fanning, never treacly or plaintive), whose spiteful alcoholic mother (Lena Headey, from Game of Thrones) has long ago fled. When things turn bad for the pair—i.e., when Joe gets busted for heroin or breaking parole—his mother (a fine, flinty, dry-eyed Glenn Close) is there as a backstop for Amy-Jo. You get the sense that Gram, as she’s called, has seen worse.
The hardships and misadventures here feel ’70s-authentic and familiar, maybe too much so. Amy-Jo inevitably has her eyes opened to the world: There’s a hooker (Taryn Manning) living down the hall at the hotel with her young son; and a shy aesthete (Peter Dinklage) living in the basement shows Amy-Jo some kindness. This is a girl with an old soul, who’ll sit for hours listening to her father’s jazz records and jam sessions. (Here’s Flea, of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, as a trumpeter falling a little faster than Joe.) Her father is bound to disappoint her in this kind of movie, but the modest, poignant Low Down is based on the memoir by Amy-Jo Albany, who loved her father regardless. And Joe Albany was a genuine jazz cat of some small renown, who played with Charlie Parker and Lester Young. (He died in 1988.)
This gives Low Down an additional haunting verisimilitude, however episodic the writing. Also, Hawkes certainly looks the part—a pompadoured and oddly positive relic from the postwar Los Angeles of Bukowski and John Fante. He’s a gentle guy doomed not by smack but by the popular indifference to his art. Though, trying to be a good example, he refuses to be bitter about it. He tells Amy-Jo, “See, our luck is changing,” but absolutely no one here believes it. Brian Miller
PPulp: A Film About Life, Death & Supermarkets
RUns Wed., Nov. 19–Wed., Nov. 26 at Grand Illusion. not rated. 90 minutes.
When Pulp hit it big with Different Class in 1995, reaching #1 on the UK charts and winning the Mercury Prize, the band was at the leading edge of the Britpop movement. Seven years and two albums later, it would all be over. But Pulp didn’t get to say a proper farewell, says lead singer Jarvis Cocker in Florian Habicht’s new documentary. This film is that proper farewell.
Set in Pulp’s hometown of Sheffield, the film finds the band at the tail end of its 2011–12 reunion tour. Instead of covering earlier, bigger tour stops, Habicht has a tight focus, training his camera on the group, the people of Sheffield, and the relationship between the two.
The result is a charming portrait of a band and its hometown, and the hometown often steals the show. Pulp fans, it seems, come in all shapes and sizes. Among others, we are introduced to a bald, grinning newspaper salesman who likes the way Cocker dances; a young musician who found inspiration in a Pulp album; an older woman with crutches who is curious about what motivates the band; and a young girl named Liberty, whose childish excitement over appearing in a movie is belied by her wisdom in matters of art and parenting. It’s a testament to the depth of the group’s music that it inspires such thoughtful appreciation.
It’s a unique view Habicht gives us—not the fan worship of most music docs. Cocker is a hero to these folks, yes, and definitely famous, but you get the sense that these people know him and his bandmates. This is a product of the location—some of the interviewees likely watched Cocker sling fish at the local supermarket as a teen—but also there’s something in Pulp’s music that creates this connection. After all, the band’s biggest hit is “Common People,” and these are the common people.
So this is a fond farewell, but also something of a redemption. As the band recounts, Pulp said farewell to Sheffield once before, with a disastrous 1988 club show, before moving to London. Now the plan is to recreate that show on a massive scale at the 13,500-capacity Motorpoint Arena, says Cocker. In footage of that concert, dispersed throughout, they appear to succeed. Cocker, once a reluctant performer, has turned into one of pop music’s most memorable front men. Even nearing 50, he is unafraid to hump a monitor or two while the band plays “This Is Hardcore.”The crowd eats it up and sings along, knowing every last word. Mark Baumgarten
Through a Lens Darkly
Runs Fri., Nov. 21–Wed., Nov. 26 at Northwest Film Forum. Not rated. 92 minutes.
There are a lot of commendable ideals in Thomas Allen Harris’ essay film, which parallels the history of photography with the African-American experience. That a few free blacks ran photography studios before the Civil War was certainly news to me, though subsequent images of circus freaks, lynchings, and racist advertising are numbingly familiar. At a certain point, post-emancipation, blacks had to take charge of their own depiction, and Harris was lucky enough to be born into a family that carefully constructed its photo album. Eventually he became an artist and photographer himself (and also a protege of Tongues Untied director Marlon Riggs), which provides a bridge from the dignified poses of the Civil Rights era to our postmodern age. Through a Lens shows the work of some contemporary artists, including Carrie Mae Weems and Glenn Ligon, but it’s never quite enough. Likewise, the proud portraiture of Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth (who sold her photos to help support her abolitionist work) launches a tradition of image-conscious leadership that really merits its own separate study.
Harris acknowledges his film’s basis in the 2000 book Reflections in Black by Deborah Willis, one of many scholars he interviews here. Yet his dull, didactic film is burdened by the seeming intent to correct all 150 years of misrepresentation—from slavery to the present moment. No one man, no one documentary, can do that. Harris has simply bitten off more than he can chew in this historical survey, and the project isn’t helped by his overripe voiceover musings on identity (both his and his people’s). Settling on a single era or artist, like the street photographer Roy DeCarava—whose The Sweet Flypaper of Life was such a revelation in the ’50s—might’ve given more focus to Harris’ good intentions. Brian Miller
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