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.

Ghost in the Cell: PERSONAL SHOPPER

Personal Shopper, the latest beguiling film from French filmmaker Olivier Assayas, is a beautifully unsettled and unresolved picture. It’s another movie about a personal assistant to the stars, following his enigmatic Clouds of Sils Maria, in which Kristen Stewart played an aide to a famous actress spending time in an isolated Swiss village. Shopper reunites him with Stewart, who here takes center stage in another of her brilliantly low-key naturalistic acting efforts. She always seems so comfortable on screen that some mistake it for lack of craft instead of total command of her instrument. Every shrug, every nervous tick, every hunched posture is perfectly calibrated to feel totally at ease. In this film, which slowly reveals itself to be a combination character study, murder mystery, stalker thriller, and ghost story, she is most acutely living in a placid horror movie about the gig economy. Stewart plays a talented young woman whose entire existence is contingent. She lives in Paris paycheck to paycheck, buying fancy clothes for a distant celebrity whom she barely sees. She only has this job because of tenuous personal connections, luck, and good networking. When we hear she has a heart condition that could kill her at any moment and, indeed, was the very same affliction that killed her twin brother in the recent past, it’s hardly a surprise. It adds to the impression that her roots are shallow, her long-term security tremendously unsettled. 

Assayas masterfully manipulates this mood of unease radiating off the character’s cool exterior, capturing in cold yet soulful portraiture the contours of Stewart’s performance. She moves gracefully through her routine, but with fretful doubts creeping in on the sides. She juggles tasks and messages, puttering around Paris on a moped, lost in her own thoughts between stops. She tries on sexy clothes from her glamorous boss’s wardrobe, strutting confidently, privately. She hunches over her phone, biting her lip as she waits for the agonizing suspense of modern day communication – the animated ellipses denoting the possibility of a response – to resolve itself. These routines are heightened with the weight of the afterlife. She is mourning her twin, true, but she also feels a spiritual connection to the other side. Her brother was a medium. She admits to having this power, too. And yet she has doubts. The twins made a pact that whichever of them died first would send the other a message from beyond. And so she waits, like the ellipses awaiting its resolution, like messages sliding ominously in after a long signal-free train ride. That’s the most haunting scene; others involve a montage of automatic doors opening for no apparent reason, or a mug sliding off a counter. Even then, this is a movie of frozen glamor, with Parisian sights and high-class fashion navigated by a woman whose access to them remains tenuous, and with the delights of the living slim comfort when sitting on the edge of potential violence – as the movie slowly intrudes implications of a dangerous stalker – and a constant grief-numbed depression reminding of death. It attains its power by holding on Stewart’s face, culminating in a long take watching her face for clues. Assayas has made a film carefully attuned to this feeling, with a mega-watt star performance perfectly calibrated to a chilled blue glow.

Head in the CLOUDS OF SILS MARIA

Clouds of Sils Maria, the latest from French writer-director Olivier Assayas, is a beautifully textured film of austere natural beauty and complicated interpersonal relationships. Assayas films, even the bad ones, are closely attuned to the effect physical spaces have on character’s interior lives. It’s never more literal than the contested estate in Summer Hours, a space laden with memories for a family in mourning. But there are also the anonymous techie nightmare locales in Demonlover, analogue procedurals in Carlos, vintage French cinema echoes in Irma Vep, semi-autobiographical activist circles in Something in the Air, and more. His characters don’t merely play out their stories. They inhabit a space, creating a richly textured stage for their dramas.

His new film takes place in Sils Maria, a small town in the Alps where, from the right scenic view, you can see the clouds sit majestically below the surrounding peaks. They come rolling in over the landscape, with the snowy mountaintops above, a green valley below. A shift in perspective can change an overcast day to one where the clouds snake low elegantly across the horizon. The story that takes place there carries inescapable comparison to Ingmar Bergman, spending the majority of its time with two women at a small house in the Swiss countryside, dealing with their personas and how they confront the existential questions of their lives. The wide-open spaces contrast with the cramped quarters as the women find themselves stuck together while heavy ideas threaten to weigh them down.

But where Bergman finds spiritual concerns at the center of being, Assayas here deals with art. They’re not debating the existence of God. They’re wrestling with textual analysis, competing interpretations of a script that just might define their relationship, their careers, maybe even their lives. This a gripping psychological dynamic wrapped around an invigorating academic exercise. The women are a middle-aged actress (Juliette Binoche) and her younger assistant (Kristen Stewart), who are staying in the isolated town while prepping for a new project. It’s a play about an aging businesswoman and her relationship with her young assistant. The actress made her debut in this play two decades earlier, in the role of the assistant. Now the playwright has died and she agrees to be in a new staging, taking on the other role.

The connection between past and present, life and art, is made clear, then underlined. It’s a moment of professional crisis for the actress, as Binoche subtly lets showbiz fears and artistic frustration mingle with a determination to do right by the play that gave her a start. She has memories of how old the other actress appeared to her back then, and now can hardly believe that she’s that age herself. It certainly doesn’t help her state to be staying in the house of the dead man, running lines with her assistant, who Stewart plays with a congenial disaffectedness sliding into unexpected passions. Their employer/assistant relationship drifts closer to a friendship, mirroring the similar dynamic in the play, which there ended in tragedy. Assayas will often start scenes without cluing us into whether or not we’re hearing lines or what these characters actually are. In this way, the play blends with life, as a fluid exploration of what life brings to art and vice versa.

Lightheaded in the altitude, they engage in long discussions of the play, about the text as an object, while the clouds roll through a pale blue sky. There’s a sense that they’re helping each other look into the haze and pull out an interpretation. The older woman can’t stop worrying that her character is thinly drawn and pathetic. The younger woman sees the same character as containing hidden depths. They’re both right, and wrong. There’s a terrifically unsettling sequence with footage of a winding road playing over images of Stewart, a woozy abstract symbol of the film’s hazy doublings. Because the play isn’t real in our world, and because we only glimpse it through their dialogues, these scenes play out like going to a great class without having done the reading. It’s fascinating, and also easy to get a little lost.

But this only adds to the mystery and gravity of this drama, in which every character is a reflection of the actress’s past – an old co-star (Hanns Zischler), the playwrights’ widow (Angela Winkler) – or a future she can’t quite imagine herself fitting in. We meet a wild young Hollywood actress (Chloe Grace Moretz), introduced through glimpses in YouTube videos and a scene from her franchise picture, then in scenes of icy recognition of the way the world restricts starlets’ choices. There’s an undertow of Hollywood commentary, reflected even in the careers of the three actresses. But in a film Yorick Le Saux shoots with cool calm, filled with palatial landscapes – rolling mountainsides, lush green hills, still waters – and lush classical music, Assayas locates a meditative edge to what could’ve easily been All About Eve or Birdman territory. This isn’t a movie about a desperate artist trying to prove her relevance, or fending off hungrier youth. It’s merely one trembling emotional current running beneath its iced-over surfaces.

There’s an absorbing charge to the leads’ relationship, an interdependence and emotional vulnerability as their isolation forces them to confront core questions about how they see the world and where they’re headed in life. In the process, Binoche and Stewart deliver a wonderful acting duet, playing off each other in ways that break down intermingling professional and personal angst with the feeling of a complicated, lived-in, in some ways unknowable, relationship. It’s a film about fighting insecurities and how unmerciful the world can be in leaving behind those who succumb to theirs. And yet together they make it a warm, sometimes funny, often casually incisive character study about two people who fear they’ve lost sight of who they want to be, and lean on each other while trying to move in the right direction, or at least change their perspective to see something wonderful.