Fear Itself: THE BEAST

Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast is a nesting doll narrative full of resonances fit for an age of anxiety. He’s done this playfully serious structuring around free-floating modern fears before. His Nocturama is a tensely shaggy hangout with a group of disaffected young bombers hiding out in an abandoned mall after a violent protest—captured by capitalism even in rebellion. His Zombi Child is a boarding school drama wrapped around voodoo flashbacks that tie together into a double-knotted story of immigration and isolation—twice over lost to oneself even as one is drawn even deeper into oneself. The Beast is hooked into a modern sense of foreboding and unease manifesting as eerie stasis and passivity that makes dangers, real or imagined, no less possible. It’s wrapped in a bevy of sci-fi conceits. It’s 2044. Some undefined apocalypse has left the streets of Paris largely abandoned, with stray animals wandering about, and passerby wearing clear air-filtering masks. Léa Seydoux stars as a woman who submits a request for promotion to her Artificial Intelligence overlord (Xavier Dolan’s voice) and is told she must undergo an emotional purging. Hooked up to a pseudo-spiritual machine—a vat of goo and wires that’s one part Minority Report and one part Cronenberg—that’ll prompt her to relive past lives and purge her centuries acquiring human softness.

As it begins, the movie quickly settles into a romantic tragedy straight out of Henry James. It’s a flooded Paris of 1910 where a the owner of a doll factory sneaks up to the edge of an affair with a dashing stranger (George MacKay) she meets at an art show. From the near-future interludes to the birth of Modernism—she sees avant garde paintings and is overseeing her product’s transition from porcelain to plastic—she’s stuck in a period of technological and emotional transition. (It also cues ideas about the creation of art as reflection and population of interior spaces, matched in time with an embodied A.I. “doll” played with impressive impassivity by Saint Omer's Guslagie Malanda.) Seydoux navigates serenely yet quiveringly across times with a slippery double role, playing the subterranean romantic yearnings and curiosities as her stuffed-shirt husband drifts away in favor of a pretty and serious flirt. The movie kicks into even higher tension in its second half as the double role adds a third. Now we’re in 2014 Los Angeles where the period piece stylings are rawer within our modern memory. This section deals with the burbling impending violence of MacKay as a vlogging incel stalker (a sadly familiar type) while Seydoux is now an aspiring actress disaffectedly ensorcelled in the labyrinthine gig economy of bad commercials and empty housesitting, only freed from routine by lonely websites, lonelier pills, and somehow loneliest crowded nightclubs. If the Jamesian story is about the pain of denial and the dangerous sparks of new possible connection, the Hollywood one is about the creeping dangers of the lack of connection.

In each time period, Seydoux and MacKay are on a collision course, sometimes romantic, but always fraught with contemporaneous fears and foibles. What form does society give to its unanswerable conflicts, its grinding prejudices and self-fulfilling prophecies? What, after all, is the beast? (A key line has to be an advertising director on a green screen set asking his actress: “Can you be scared of something that isn’t there?”) Here are two parallel plots that play out back to back, with the futurist frame dance between. Their implications and tensions and uncertainties circle, echo, and collapse. Bonello plays each genre almost entirely straight, but their juxtapositions accumulate and resonate. At times fleeting glitches filter in, lingering oddness even before Josée Deshaies’ cool digital frames might suddenly be pixellating, or skipping, or repeating, but just rarely enough to surprise each time. (Pity anyone seeing it streaming instead of theatrically or on a disc for the doubt they’ll have about whether these intentional choices are wi-fi troubles.) Here, in triplicate, is a woman and a man on a doomed loop of trauma reincarnated. Here, human fears feed human foibles and the inevitable dooms of our own, or others’, making. All one can do is scream as old anxieties are reborn anew and expressed afresh—familiar faces in new forms, every beginning fraught with the knowledge that this, too, shall end.

Body Talk: MEN and CRIMES OF THE FUTURE

Screenwriter Alex Garland is steadily building a directorial career of high concept genre projects interested in showing misogyny as a social prison we desperately need to escape. There’s the tech bro compounds in Ex Machina and Devs, and the lonely toxic wilderness of Annihilation, all twisted around a need to control and objectify and watch as the victims either are subsumed or seek revenge. Chilling stuff. His latest goes one step further into making his meaning quite literal. It’s called Men. Enough said, right? It starts with a woman in mourning. She asked her husband for a divorce and he almost immediately jumped to his death. A shocking start to a movie, to say the least. She (Jessie Buckley) is off to the countryside, where she’s rented a house in a tiny village. She’s going to be by herself a while and recover. That’s the plan, anyway. Alas, the village is seemingly entirely populated by creepy men of one sort (insinuating landlord) or another (unctuous priest) or another (bratty teen) or another (naked drifter). She encounters them (all played by Rory Kinnear in a procession of wigs) one after another. This is not the trip she needs. Garland makes good use of the rural quiet and empty natural spaces. When a silhouette suddenly stands at the end of a tunnel and runs toward our lead—and us—it’s frightening. Same when the nude drifter is suddenly lurking behind her, peering unnoticed in a picture window, or when the priest somberly listens to her testimony of trauma and priggishly asks: you must ask, why you made your husband kill himself? Yikes.

The tension builds until a long, gory, completely fantastical climax. Here Garland’s tight, atmospheric little horror movie nosedives into allegory its metaphorical scaffolding can’t support. There are three great shivers-up-the-spine moments, but then it becomes a morass of soupy, bloody imagery that stretches itself in an elaborate symbolic gesture that makes a rather simple point early and often. It’s not difficult to clock its pseudo-religious folk horror intensions from the start. What happened to her husband? A fallen man. What does she do when she arrives at her rental home? Eats an apple from the tree. She’s surrounded by verdant garden imagery. So it’s a movie about sin and consequences, who begets them and who gets blame. I like all of that, but Garland never gets any deeper than the peel, leaving the core untouched. Once we’ve gotten the sense of Buckley’s emotional state, an impressively on-edge performance, and seen an increasingly unsettling creepiness in every encounter—both overtly upsetting and sinister underlying subtext—the ground is set for a fascinating freak out. Instead, Garland only provides a tedious unfolding of symbolism that’s, by the end, somehow both easy and inscrutable, as one toxic man births another and another and so on until the end of time. And then woman inherits the earth.

Leave it to David Cronenberg to make the truly upsetting, and atypical, horror movie of the moment, all the more unsettled for playing like a gross drama, never stretching for obvious scares. He hasn’t made a film in nearly a decade, and not one so overtly engaged with the body horror of The Fly or Videodrome for longer than that. This new work is a relaxed and confident idiosyncratic vision, an old master showing us how it’s done. Crimes of the Future is a sickly melancholy movie that looks about at our current states, imagines a dim, dirty, empty future, and feels queasy. We’re evolving to survive on trash, to digest garbage and call it sustainable sustenance. That’s quite a provocative thesis for this fascinating and disgusting movie, a picture of bodies in revolt, and revolting bodies cut open. In this future world, humankind has stopped feeling pain. This has led to surgery becoming a form of entertainment—“Surgery is the new sex,” one fan purrs—with performance artists willingly getting outré and novel plastic surgeries—new gills and folds and flaps and ridges—for the benefit of appreciative audiences. One scantily clad man whose body is covered in decorative ears dancing somberly to pounding club beats in a dank basement proscenium is typical of this new art scene. We meet characters who propose to shock people with an autopsy, and others who fear what all this messing with physiology might mean for human evolution. Either way, it’s a grim vision of attempting to control others’ bodies, and one’s own, and the futility of it in the face of biological inevitabilities and vulnerabilities. Maybe society is as doomed to decay as we are? How grim.

The best of the bunch in this future art scene is a performance artist (Viggo Mortensen) who is literally growing new and unusual organs inside his body, and then his surgeon (Léa Seydoux) cuts them out on stage. What an act! The surgeries, of course, happen without anesthetic, and with the use of a complicated mechanical sarcophagus that’s full of intestine-like wiring and run with a fleshy remote. The reception afterwards features the organ of the day on display. It gives new meaning to the typical artist small talk: so, what are you working on? It’s not difficult to see this as metaphor for Cronenberg himself—a master at contorting the human body for his horror films, here confronting the material that made his name, wondering if he has it in him to pull another out for our amusement. Mortensen grunts and coughs and moans, staggers and limps, is clad in black with a hood pulled low in public and a cloth over his mouth. He cuts a figure like one shambling straight out of a Universal monster movie. The sound of a fly buzzing sometimes follows him around—one wonders what this movie smells like. He’s fascinating because he’s not one simple metaphor—he’s an artist gestating new and unusual ideas, ripping himself open for an audience’s judgment; he’s an aging man whose body is changing in uncomfortable ways, a fact over which he has little control; he’s a tortured man who isn’t sure if he should change with the times. He has further entanglements that are unfolded as the movie proceeds, but the core is his artistic and romantic relationship with his surgeon. There’s a queasy scene where they bond, cuddled up, for some mutual self-harm. In a world without pain, what does it mean to feel?

Here’s a film full of rich and puzzling characters—a grieving father with some sick plans (Scott Speedman), a bureaucrat who wants to set up a new organ registry (Don McKellar), his assistant who is twitchily drawn to this underworld (Kristen Stewart). Throughout there’s a sense of a society in flux, fluid definitions of what’s expected and where to go next. All are in some kind of discomfort. Some take pleasure in that state. It’s a film of open wounds and tumorous growths, of slippery internal organs and gooey foodstuffs, of sticky drool and singed skin. It’s a gross world. People buy skeletal chairs that adjust their spines to better digest meals. They gawk in backroom surgery shows. Their bodies are who they are. It’s matter-of-fact, though by the end it’s small comfort to know some sights will still shock them. Cronenberg’s vision here is one of a future driven by this sense of biological change, a world caught mid-shift, where new generations may be inheriting the garbage of their ancestors and irrevocably changed by their bodies’ attempts to process it. What a haunting idea of sins of the old inescapably passed on to the new, physicalized and embodied by the grotesqueries we see. But what hope we find in the beauty of the human body, and its capacity to survive even this. By the end, the story is even edging toward an epiphany—man’s capacity to make peace with his body, and embrace what it needs. The film moves with Cronenberg’s typical icy deliberateness, the better to ruminate on these themes and wonder about these characters. It’s complicated and unresolved, alive to the protrusions and pustules of messy life.

Off the Press: THE FRENCH DISPATCH

The French Dispatch is an impeccable handcrafted artifice somehow turning into the purest sincerity at the same time. It is, in other words, a Wes Anderson film. He’s a filmmaker who can make intricate dollhouse constructions over the darkest of melancholies. He’s one of our great appreciators of style and tone, able to take a gleaming picture of theatrical techniques and literary flourishes, pack it dense with allusions and yet give it surface pleasures all its own. He’s best at building out little pocket worlds—an eccentric wealthy New York family in The Royal Tenenbaums, a brotherly train tour of India in The Darjeeling Limited, a tiny New England island community in Moonrise Kingdom, or, his best, the towering, luxurious European mountain getaway in The Grand Budapest Hotel. Within he can indulge his eye for design—a blend of vintage mid-century aesthetics informed by a well-curated artistic intellect—while building up beautiful sadness and delightful serendipities. There’s no wonder the astonishing emotional power he can build—whether a gentle reconciliation between father and child, or a bittersweet acknowledgement of encroaching fascism bringing a golden age to a close—can catch viewers by surprise, if they can see it at all, beneath his dazzling, droll surface precision.

His latest takes as its conceit the last issue of a fictional magazine, The French Dispatch, upon the death of its founder, editor, and chief benefactor. The old man (Bill Murray) willed it so. One gets the sense it wouldn’t have the money to keep going without him. He expired near the end of editing the latest volume of what we’re told is an outgrowth of a weekend supplement for his late father’s Kansas-based newspaper that became, over the course of fifty years, its own periodical run out of storybook-perfect, snow-globe-pretty Ennui, France (the sly Francophilia is from the heart). It was a haven for the sort of literary journalists and essayists that flourished in the early to mid twentieth century. (The first card of the end credits lists, in tribute, several who serve as inspirations for Anderson’s inventions, from E.B. White and Lillian Ross to A.J. Liebling and James Baldwin.) The film becomes an amusing, eclectic mixture of that era’s art, music, design, and politics run through the typical Andersonian styles. But above all it is driven by evoking long, discursive, artfully poetic journalistic inquiries, some terse typewriter clatter, others honeyed descriptive detail. This kind of magazine writing has been practically driven extinct, save a few New Yorker-style holdouts, over the last few decades of rapacious hedge fund buyouts and relentless internet erosion of readership and attention.

It’s this sense of a bygone era that animates the movie’s wistfulness. As it begins with a death, it feels all the more like an end of that era. The movie is set in 1975, a time when a magazine like this still seemed almost the norm. Anderson begins with the editor’s obituary, and then dramatizes the four articles that make up the farewell publication. Each begins with the title positioned in crisp type, and is greeted with lovely pastiche prose that sounds just right for the period and style. They’re narrated by the journalists—a laid-back observational man-about-town (Owen Wilson), a snooty and secretly wild art expert (Tilda Swinton), a persnickety quasi-radical researcher too close to her subjects (Francis McDormand), and a refined, poetic appreciator of appetites (Jeffrey Wright). Each section is thus framed as a nesting doll—authors recounting stories within their essayistic impressions to interlocutors in faded color stock, bursting into beautiful black-and-white reportage that still further blooms into vivd color at key moments of artistic transcendence.

Thus these dispatches proceed as a collection of lovely little short stories told in a collage of filmmaking techniques. They mix film stocks and aspect ratios, split-screen juxtapositions, vigorous intuitive montage, miniatures, rear projection, slide-away stage walls, freeze frames made by actors standing still, stop-motion and hand-drawn animation. It’s a Whitman’s sampler box of a film: a sturdy, segmented container with a place for each bite-size bit of everything Anderson can do, every little nugget crafted for distinct aesthetic appeals and bittersweet surprises bursting when bit into and chewed over. The resulting stories are all in their own ways about the oddities of human experience and the dilemmas in which eccentrics and artists can find themselves. They’re over-brimmed with petty disappointments, deep wells of sadness, and grand attempts at connection outside oneself. First is a bicycle tour through the town of Ennui. The next takes us to the world of a prisoner (Benicio del Toro) painting his muse, a beautiful guard (Léa Seydoux). An art dealer (Adrian Brody) wants to invest. The next has a college activist (Timothée Chalamet) who wants to change the world, or maybe just find a lover, as he’s groping toward a manifesto. Then we get the tale of a taste test in a police kitchen (run by chef Steve Park and cop Mathieu Amalric) interrupted by an urgent kidnapping investigation. (That one gives new meaning to the term pot-boiler, eh?) The stories never quite go the way you’d think, and take detours into the silly, the tragic, and the profound, sometimes even all at once. Each ends back in the editor’s office as he mulls over some suggestions. His favorite is one all good English teachers should adopt: “Try to make it sound like you wrote it that way on purpose.”

That’s what Anderson does, too. He makes movies with rigorous structure and visual whimsy, together drawing out his whip-smart dry dialogue, textured thematic concerns, and layered images with clear intentionality and a crystal clear unity of form and purpose. This latest is deceptively light, the stories tossed off and slighter than the richness of his character work in other films. But as it draws to a close, it has a cumulative effect. Throughout, we see characters engaged in all kinds of artistic pursuits—painting, cooking, philosophizing, writing—and appreciations—viewing, eating, buying, reading. We see madness in pursuit of new tastes and new visions, and we see the comfort of finding those who understand you through your ideas, your perspective, your words. In these ways, the segments speak to each other, and build to a lovely epilogue that ties the larger portrait together. It’s about art’s capacity to draw us outwards and upwards toward the beautiful, no matter how fleeting. And it’s the story of a man through the work he shepherded—a true editor’s funeral. And it’s a filmmaker at the height of his powers, in total control over his techniques. One can sit and marvel: look at it go. In the list of artistic pursuits it demonstrates and venerates, it makes sure filmmaking is always one of them.

Singles Mixer: THE LOBSTER

For an intensely sad and cynical movie, The Lobster’s one good idea is awfully whimsical. It imagines a dystopian parallel world much like our own, but which takes a dementedly strong pro-marriage stance. All single people must find a mate; if they do not, they’ll be turned into the animal of their choosing. When we meet sad-sack Colin Farrell – he’s put on some weight to make his hangdog mood look extra saggy – he’s just been dumped by his unseen wife, left to trudge to a singles’ resort with his brother, who had similar misfortune and is now a dog. It’s an irresistible concept, and one sure to provoke good conversation and perhaps some honest self-reflection. I think I’d be a house cat; they’ve all the pampered benefits of dogs with none of the expectations of excitation. (And I like napping in patches of sunshine.) Sadly, the movie’s not as playful as its animating concept might lead one to believe.

When Farrell is asked what animal he’d want to be if, after his allotted time to be unattached, he can’t find a suitable match, he has his answer ready: a lobster. The hotel’s chipper manager (Olivia Colman) finds that refreshing. Most people pick more popular animals. The fields around the hotel feature the occasional rabbit, horse, camel, flamingo, and so on. I found myself wondering who they might’ve been in an earlier life. That’s later, though. First we must trudge through a stay in this sad hotel, where Farrell meets friends like a dopey lisper (John C. Reilly) who would like to be a parrot, and a fussy limper (Ben Whishaw) who’d rather not think about that question thank you very much. There are also potential mates, like a shockingly youthful nose-bleeder (Jessica Barden), an anxious biscuit-chomping lady (Ashley Jensen), and a woman we learn has no feelings whatsoever (Angeliki Papoulia).

The film’s central premise is worked out with misanthropic deadpan. Writer-director Yorgos Lanthimos, whose breakthrough feature was 2009’s memorable Dogtooth, an equally imprisoned and methodical exploration of a locked-in system of perverse human behavior, creates the hotel as the stifling inverse of a mischievous Wes Anderson mood. It has a suffocating rigidity to Thimios Bakatakis’s static cinematography, trapping its characters with either too much or not enough head space, squirming with resigned discomfort like butterflies pinned behind glass while barely alive, wriggling but clearly doomed. The patrons spend their days forced to watch silently as staff acts out skits about the dangers of being alone, and then they get death-marched into painfully stilted dances and awkward chitchat around sad little meals. Once daily they’re driven out to the wilderness on a hunt, told to use tranquilizer darts to shoot and collect loners who’ve escaped the hotel pre-transformation and now live illegally in the woods. Each person caught buys the hunter an extra day before the coupling deadline.

This is distancing movie, slow and repetitive as it watches the sad desperate routines of its characters. A closed loop of behavior operating under cruel impenetrable logic, the rigorous framing drains the characters of agency. They’re trapped in a cruel world, explored by a cold story. It’s tedious and increasingly pointless, wallowing in misery, dispassionately nasty and mean. A dog is kicked to death. A woman is blinded. A man is forced to stick his hand in a hot toaster. For a movie purporting to have cutting or otherwise incisive ideas about relationships – the torture of loneliness, and the desperation it can breed for finding One True Love – it’s too hollow, forced, passionless. The actors speak uniformly in a flat affect, mumbling as they talk past each other, glumly focused on their fate. There’s no energy to their goals. They simply shrug and trudge, hunched over and preemptively drained. Maybe they would be better off as animals. Is that such a tragedy?

Lanthimos uses dreary colors to enhance the oppressive mood. Stings of classical music mix with self-amused straight-faced absurdism. One couple is dutifully celebrated in the hotel’s conference room, sent off to see if the marriage will stick with the encouragement that if they have problems they’ll be given children. “That usually helps,” the manager quips. We continue on, counting down the days until Farrell will be made into a lobster. The movie never progresses beyond the basics of its setup, with few complications, escalations, or contradictions to keep things moving along. Instead it just grinds on and on, a deadening effect rendering what starts as wry and shocking merely numbing. Eventually one character flees the hotel and meets a variety of characters hiding out in the woods – a group led by Léa Seydoux that includes Rachel Weisz, who has also been narrating the whole thing in a largely emotionless monotone. Alas, freedom of sorts is shot in the same stultifying icy precision as the hotel, and slumps on for ages in a tiresome slog.

This is the sort of infuriating movie that slowly and steadily drains all interest and inquisitiveness from a killer concept. At first I was leaning in, eager to see an imaginative vision. By the time it lost me, I found myself itching to leave, as one excruciating scene after the next failed to build or move or provoke. It strands charismatic performers in a flat, uninteresting style, punctuating long stretches of dead air with splashes of cruelty and depression. It creates an interesting allegory and proceeds to take care it almost never intersects with recognizable human emotions. It offers only empty futility, distended bleak glibness hoping its heaviness and pessimism get mistaken for profundity. What a waste. At one point a character asks if she could watch Stand By Me, and I wanted to go with her. Later, in the film’s final moments, a man prepares to stab himself in the eyes with a steak knife. By that time I could almost relate.

Live and Let Bond: SPECTRE

For all their reliably repeated elements – tailored suits, tricky gadgets, glamorous women, outlandish villains, M, Q, and Moneypenny – the oft-rebooted James Bond movies are one of our culture’s most reliable barometers. (Or should I say they are reliable cultural dipsticks, a more fittingly utilitarian and phallic metaphor?) The series is awfully good, for better and worse, at reading the zeitgeist’s mood and reflecting our current storytelling obsessions back at us. That’s evident in Spectre, the fourth to feature Daniel Craig as 007. His decidedly post-9/11 entries have viewed geopolitical dangers with dread and a greater interest in personal demons, threats in the business of wounding a more human Bond more closely. This latest one pushes further into the postmodern blockbuster’s main interests: being grim and dark, obsessed with backstory, and paranoid about surveillance but ambivalent about its necessity. And yet director Sam Mendes, returning from the last, terrific entry, continues to find a way to make a film both derivatively modern and classically Bond. It’s a tough balance, but he mostly pulls it off.

From the opening shot – a long, unbroken one dancing through a crowded festival, into a hotel, up an elevator, out a window, over a ledge, and across some roofs – it’s clear Mendes knows great cinematography can be as good as any dazzling special effect. With Hoyte Van Hoytema behind the camera (he who is responsible for the austere beauty of films like Interstellar, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, and Let the Right One In), Mendes crafts a movie with not a single misjudged image. (Call it cinema du “One Perfect Shot.”) The movie globetrots with Bond as he follows a series of clues on the trail of a mysterious villainous organization. Each stop is appealingly photographed, exquisite in its rendering of bright snow, crackling desert expanses, warm Italian villas, and chilly grey London streets. Handsome, expertly constructed frames find silhouettes and reflections, smooth glass and flickering flames. The movie is as well put together and aesthetically pleasing as a luxury car, a perfectly fitted tux, or a supermodel in high-fashion attire.

The look is all well and good, but what’s happening in this artful design? Well, it’s more or less a typical Bond film, but with its recent tonal habit of sustained seriousness. The super-spy is suave and flirtatious. His boss (Ralph Fiennes), assistant (Naomie Harris), and gadget supplier (Ben Whishaw) are alternately impressed and exasperated by his antics. A slimy villain (Christoph Waltz) hides in the shadows, pulling strings on an elaborate megalomaniacal plan. The antagonist’s brutish henchman (Dave Bautista) is lurking around every other corner. And two beautiful women (Léa Seydoux and Monica Bellucci) are tough, hold valuable information, and want nothing to do with Bond until he proves just too irresistible to not make out with for a bit. The plot develops in a controlled, subdued manner, the better to hide the grinding formula, I suppose. When the action arrives, it’s tough and smashing, flipping helicopters, flinging cars, smashing planes, and exploding buildings. The best is a close quarters hand-to-hand fight aboard a train, echoes of From Russia with Love.

It’s built around a need to draw connections, not just to traditional Bond elements, but most obviously to Craig’s previous outings. The screenplay (credited to John Logan, Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, and Jez Butterworth) brings back a character from Quantum of Solace (Jesper Christensen’s Mr. White), references the events of Skyfall (Judi Dench briefly appears in a message from beyond the spoiler), and alludes to Casino Royale’s villains. This is supposed to make its conspiracy-minded plot more impactful because we can recognize threads from the last few Bond films. I like it in theory, but in practice it’s muddy and forced, full of loose ends and plot holes. Besides, it puts too much faith in Bond as a character instead of a construct. It’s one thing to groove on the franchise’s persona. It’s another thing entirely to care about James Bond the man, especially when there’s not a lot of evidence pointing to characterization worth caring about.

Craig’s Bond is best at projecting unflappable competence and wounded backstory while never dropping the strong mostly silent type act. The movie’s at its best when it sends him hurtling into wordless action – it’s unfailingly sharply staged and thrillingly paced – or poses him in attractive tableaus against striking scenery and painterly light and shadow. There’s not much depth here, which makes it hard to care when the movie pretends there is. The characters, though inhabited by great actors, are ultimately nothing more than sparsely developed types. And the political interests are strictly unserious despite the gravity with which it frets over the double-oh’s future in the face of a digital dragnet, amounting to nothing more than an argument for ditching cold computerized snooping in favor of artisanal spying. And yet, for all two-plus hours, it basically works. The look is impressive, and it slides along seductively enough on expert craftsmanship. As a delivery device for slick surfaces and fun setpieces, Mendes and crew give you your money’s worth.

Love Hurts: BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOR

Step away from the controversy – over extended sex scenes, over contentious working conditions behind the scenes, and over a vicious insult-trading press tour – and it’s easy to see Abdellatif Kechiche’s Blue is the Warmest Color for what it really is. It’s a coming-of-age first-love story of uncommon patience and with a central performance of uncommon depth of feeling. Adèle Exarchopoulos stars as Adèle, a young girl in her late teens who is slowly discovering who she is, exploring possibilities. A disappointing short relationship with a young boy from school is unsatisfying. She’s still reeling from that when, out walking in her French hometown, she spots Emma (Léa Seydoux), her hair dyed bright blue allowing her to stick out of a crowd with ease. Adèle soon finds herself in a position of dating this bold twentysomething lesbian, a situation to which she feels far more simpatico, even if it leaves her schoolgirl pals behind, confused and maybe even a little jealous. It’s a story of first love that slowly fades over the course of a nearly three-hour runtime into a story of maturation, a trickier subject, to be sure, and something that benefits from the film’s length and comfortably languid pace.

The course of most first loves are similar, in movies and in life. The initial blushing friendship and attraction snowballs into romance, all consuming, and then, inevitably, the couple parts ways. Kechiche, who co-wrote the screenplay with Ghalia Lacroix from the graphic novel by Julie Maroh, views the details within that basic structure with a fussy naturalism, the camera bobbling ever so slightly as it keeps its characters in tight close-ups when it’s not floating along behind them, wandering through their lives in medium shots. It’s all very of the moment, shaky with a sense of discovery as these two young women drawn to each other through conversation about art and representation, philosophy and literature, life plans made and unmade, exploring new ideas and each other, body and mind. This isn’t just any love story. It is theirs. Adèle is self-conscious, something of an innocent, blushing, complaining one morning to a close friend about her sloppy fashion and slick hair. Emma, on the other hand, is confident, pursuing the relationship with a happy eye towards encouraging her girlfriend’s sense of excitement and discovery.

What’s remarkable about the film is hardly the filmmaking, which has all the standard at-a-remove-but-not-impartial deliberateness of the typical European melodrama, slickly restrained and tasteful, except when it comes to shamelessly appreciating the female form. Nor is it the screenplay, which has some nuance, overtly thematic conversations aside, and a generosity of length and incident, but accumulates details, like a homophobic face-off on a high school blacktop, that nod in directions it’s otherwise uninterested in exploring, and features a scene in a gay bar filled with comically exaggerated lesbian caricatures, our leads excepted. No, what’s remarkable is the lead performances, two feats of warm-hearted precision acting from two young women with wide-open expressive faces, totally unselfconscious in their every movement and gesture.

Seydoux has a nicely controlled sense of coiled energy that radiates upward out of her shock of blue hair. She’s appealingly unpredictable and yet, at the same time, a seemingly safe first love. But it’s Exarchopoulos who steals the show here, as well she should given her protagonist is on screen in practically each and every second of the runtime. She’s delivering an extraordinarily empathetic and fully felt performance, physical and emotional at once at all times. Her character is a girl of huge appetites, reading large novels lost in their worlds of words, slurping down her meals with explicit and exuberantly sloppy chewing, crying with tears and snot clumping up on her smooth cheeks, and, yes, having sex with intensity and passion in sequences that last exactly as long as they need to and then a few minutes more.

What could be standard coming-of-age doodling is elevated through these deeply felt and wholly convincing performances that play off of each other with natural complexity and ease. The directing and the writing wisely give over all the time and attention to allowing these women the space to breathe and grow and change without much in the way of embellishment or exaggeration. Because the camera sticks so close to Adèle for so long and through so much, the film accumulates a sense of her personhood that feels uncommonly fully formed. In the days since I saw the film, I’ve found myself wondering about the characters as I do people I know. I wonder what they’re up to now. I wonder if they’ve found their place. I wonder if they’ve become who they want to be.