Life's a Beach: OLD

M. Night Shyamalan’s Old has the simple parable power of a Twilight Zone-style conceit, the cheap one-location resourcefulness of a low-fi 50’s sci-fi B-movie, and all the potential stiffness that that could imply. And yet it has an eerie affect through nothing more than suggestion and contemplation of a genuinely horrifying idea if you approach it at the level of earnestness its filmmaker did. What would it be like to live a lifetime in an afternoon? How would your mind race and scramble? How would your anatomy betray you? What would you do with the time given to you? Seeing life dimming as sunset draws near gives you a painfully clear metaphor. The clock is always ticking. So it is with the characters here, a few families and a handful of others driven to a secluded beach by their hosts at the tropical resort where they are vacationing. Once there it’s soon enough clear that the kids are growing up right before their eyes. And then the adults start greying and wrinkling and, well, what else could be happening? They’re aging too fast! Thus goes this nutty thought experiment with Shyamalan’s usual preoccupation with creepy shivers and familial sentimentality. But he’s also here up to subtextual freakiness with squirmy ideas and twisted implications. The movie may not cohere as well as Shyamalan’s best work, but it’s gross and propulsive and never flags in its fluid focus.

On the one hand, it has the trauma of aging from the view of parents who see their cute offsprings’ entire childhoods fly by. (Don’t wish your life away, the mother ironically warns before the beach.) On the other hand is the perspective of adolescences transmogrifying youngsters in practically a blink, so that a 6-year-old mind is broiling in hormones of a 15-year-old body. That’s messed up. The film never quite pushes as far as it could into depravity — Shyamalan’s just not that kind of horror filmmaker — but it’s plenty unsettling as the paradoxically claustrophobic beachfront becomes the site of a cataloging of all the ways aging can turn your body against you: tumors and dementia and seizures and heart attacks and broken bones and blindness and so on. As the day continues, the adults are in rough shape, and the children are thoroughly rattled. (Alex Wolff and Thomasin McKenzie do good work playing stunted kids caught between ages, foreign in their own bodies.) Looking at them, it’s clear growing old is scary stuff. Sure, the movie has them behave in some clunky ways and dialogue can grow creaky and the progression of events sometimes wobbles. But one could easily hand wave that by asking if you’d handle being trapped in this situation any better. How would you even begin to reason your way out of this dilemma? You’re getting older by the second! I suspect there is a purposeful disconnect from the expected behavior. Do you think Gael Garcia Bernal and Vicky Krieps and Rufus Swell, among others, would behave this awkwardly and unnaturally, all together and in the same pitch and register, for no reason? They’re lost in the melancholy and confusion of passing time as it rushes past. They hardly recognize what they’ve had before it’s gone.

There’s something bordering on chintzy to the premise and execution, but just when I found myself squinting to comprehend its sometimes-flimsy leaps, Shyamalan would win me back by hooking into the tingling emotions jolting the odd mystery of the piece. By the end, of course there’s a solution to all this. And though it wraps up the events with a tight semi-silly but workable conclusion, it doesn’t exactly satisfy (and also clangs a bit against the tenor of the times — I wonder how it’ll play a decade hence). But the journey there is so persistently off-kilter, adrift from convention, with characters totally at a loss to describe what they’re seeing or to understand a way out. Who can’t relate? And Shyamalan matches the confusion with a sincerity attuned to that state: with long takes falling into jittery handheld shots, 360 degree pans that blur and smear, a lingering on bodies in ways that matter-of-factly clue us into shocking changes by revealing a curvier hip or a freshly bulging belly. The shot framing our group of characters through a decomposed rib cage is typical of the attention to highlighting the potential for decay in all of us, the bars that hold us captive. Even when scripts get thin, Shyamalan remains a filmmaker with a distinct visual sense and a finely honed sense of space and storytelling within the wide screen. To see a movie that could’ve easily been disposable or even unworkable on the page lifted to intriguing and compelling and downright interesting through sheer force of filmmaking makes me wish we had more directors working at this level.

Deux Thrillers de Netflix: WASP NETWORK andLOST BULLET

The new Olivier Assayas film, Wasp Network, now on Netflix, isn’t one of his better works. It’s oddly paced, and sometimes inscrutable, in ways that resist drawing the audience in. But it all draws together with a satisfying melancholic snap in the end. It’s also threaded through with Assayas’ typical interests in a setting’s specificities, and in the subtle shifts of interpersonal power dynamics. It’s a worthy effort. This based-on-a-true-story quasi-thriller criss-crosses between Cuba and Florida during the 1990s, following a Cuban pilot (Edgar Ramírez, reuniting with his Carlos director) who escapes to Miami and defects. There he is drawn into a crowd of covert operatives working to subvert Castro’s grip on their home country. Or at least, that’s what they claim. The film moves with methodical procedural tension, slowly developing the characters’ plans and plots, while also cutting back to the people left behind, especially the pilot’s wife (Penélope Cruz) who kindly tells their daughter her father is a hero, while privately nursing a wounded pride over his desertion. Double and triple crosses are patiently teased out as we get a few gripping sequences of high-flying spy missions, small bright white planes dipping and rattling against the tropical blue sea and sky, with terse cuts between crackling radios. The performers (including Gael García Bernal and Ana de Armas) sink into their roles so that the high drama plays less like amped-up movie spy-craft, and more docudrama matter-of-factness most of the time. It sparks to life best when the filmmaking leans in harder: spilt screen heist-like exposition, or elaborate shuffling of allegiances revealed with a confident ta-da. The film is a professional, sharply photographed, competently designed work fitted to the story it tells. Assayas is too good a filmmaker to totally disappoint. This one just takes a little longer for its parts to click into place.

Slightly more lowbrow, and all the better for it, is a few clicks away from the Assayas: the terrific actioner Lost Bullet. This debut feature for French writer-director Guillaume Pierret is a tense B-movie, so lean and satisfying that it features a handful of exciting action sequences in a compellingly simple plot, wrapped up nice and tight in just under 88 minutes. Its lead is a prisoner (Alban Lenoir) allowed to work souping up the cars of a special cop brigade so that they can more effectively chase down high-speed criminals. These cops turn out to be mostly crooked, and, as one thing leads to another, our lead is on the run, framed for a murder he didn’t commit. The rest of the film is in a mad dash to find the eponymous lost bullet before the bad guys do. There are sensational car stunts on the regular, culminating in a great, crunchy symphony of squealing tires, revved engines, and vehicular destruction that literally tears cars apart and leaves them trailing glass, bleeding oil or even bursting into flame as they continue to race to their final destinations. It’s not non-stop car chases, as it pauses for just enough characterization to care about, and the occasional well-staged shoot-out or hand-to-hand combat. Meanwhile, the good apples back at the station don’t believe the only cop who knows what’s actually going on. (That she’s a woman of color (Stéfi Celma) plays potently in this summer of reckoning with police prejudice.) The action is portioned out perfectly, and the connective tissue is taut thriller plotting. There’s not a wasted second or spare shot to be found. It’s filmed in clean, bright, frames cut with quick, legible montage. It’s a blast. Pierret may be a first-timer, but he knows what he’s doing. It’s exactly what you’d want this movie to be.

Ad Men: NO

Like Spielberg's Lincoln, the Chilean docudrama No is a procedural about political power. Set in the late 1980s, a time during which the country's ruling regime, after much international pressure, agreed to hold an election, the film follows an ad man (Gael García Bernal) who agrees to help run the opposition's television advertising campaign. Where Spielberg's film focuses on a 19th century American political hero going face to face winning over votes for his cause, No takes place in a time when mass media allows political persuasion to be taken to the entirety of a county's populace. By the 1980s, technologies have changed the nature of political argumentation. The election's rules allow for 15 minutes a day for 27 days of televised arguments for voting 'Yes," keeping Augusto Pinochet in power, or voting "No," and potentially toppling the military dictatorship. This will be a battle of persuasion not fought at gunpoint or in smoke-filled rooms, but out in the open on the screens of the nation’s television sets.

The ad man's idea for the "No" campaign boils down to selling not a political movement or dissent, but happiness and freedom. He creates vibrant, modern, fast-moving pieces filled with smiling faces, catchy songs, and good feelings that stand in stark contrast to the serious lectures and manufactured exaltations that are the pro-Pinochet advertising. The "No" spots look closer in spirit to the humor and music of the taped segments of Saturday Night Live or bouncy asides on Sesame Street in America at the time. My favorite bit in all the ads finds an off-screen voice asking a man "What would you say to a dictator?" The man thinks for a beat, and then sticks out his tongue, upon which is written "NO!" Also good is a scene in which a man begs a woman “Yes?” while she responds “No!” until he gives up and shouts “No!” too. They may be in bed, but they’re talking about voting. One socialist comrade grumpily says they look like "Coca-Cola ads." But, though it takes some convincing on the part of the ad men to let the campaign they envision go out over the airwaves, the ads eventually start to work. Powered by a hugely catchy jingle, the “No”s are gaining traction. Slowly, their efforts shift the conversation and the forces of the status quo feel the need to fight back.

No becomes a film of dueling campaigns that gets great humor and tension out of strategy meetings, shifting motivations, questioned allegiances, and disputed best advertising practices on both sides of the political conversation. It's a film of high-stakes meetings behind closed doors that then explode across the country on television screens, ads that are by turns exciting, hilarious and troubling. Director Pablo Larraín shoots the entirety of No in a square, washed-out, lo-fi style that accurately reflects the kind of video technology that would have been available at the time. This creates a sense of fly-on-the-wall verisimilitude, a convincing approximation of what we might've been able to see if there was a crew of documentarians around the principal figures. I found the visual style distracting at first, but was quickly swept up in the fast-moving tick-tock plotting, involved and invested. It grows only more gripping, picking up momentum and pressure as it goes along.

A talented cast of actors playing mostly men in suits with varying positions and points of view, but some select family members and friends as well, act out a vibrant screenplay by Pedro Peirano (from a play by Antonio Skármeta) which charges forward with a fine sense of purpose and drive. It delivers a sharp critique and celebration of media power in the political arena, both focused on its effectiveness. After all, the "Yes" campaign can spread a distortion as fast as the "No"s can agitate for hope. The film is bookended by scenes of Bernal doing his typical ad man job and everything in between shows him putting his skills to work for what comes to be seen as a higher purpose. The pen may be mightier than the sword, but here's a film that says TV is mightier than the machine gun.