Connection Lost: ZOLA and PVT CHAT

Two recent indie dramas, Zola and PVT Chat, build character studies with an unusually frank, open, and realistic understanding about sex and disconnection in our modern world. They’re both built from internet culture and as such have an understanding about the ways in which modern lives can become nesting dolls of fictions and identity. Sometimes it gives you control over your mind and body; other times it cedes that control to others. Our new ways of connecting with one another can breed new disfunction and separation, even from our true selves.

This idea becomes a quasi-comic semi-thriller for director Janicza Bravo, who wrote Zola with Slave Play’s Jeremy O. Harris. The movie, a mix of lurid based-on-true events and self-reflective humor, plays as tossed off and eccentrically personal as a Twitter thread. Fittingly, just such a viral story is what it’s based on. We meet our narrator Zola (Taylour Paige) as she meets her match: an energetic young woman (Riley Keough) who becomes a fast friend. Big mistake. She invites her on a road trip to Tampa where a weekend performing at a lucrative strip club will make them big bucks. Bigger mistake. It’s the past-tense of the narration — borrowed from the flurry of vernacular tweet speak and played off with buzzing alerts and time stamps in iPhone fonts — that gives the movie a gloss of wry melancholy, while the present-tense buzz of suspense and incident keeps the episodic one-thing-after-another on the right side of compelling. The story soon grows to include a pimp (Colman Domingo) and a boyfriend (Nicholas Braun) and a host of strange Floridians in and around the sex work trade. The film is full up of the kind of off-beat detail and memorable personalities that imply dark emotional undercurrents and strange backstories simply by casting memorable faces and expert actors to inhabit them.

As Zola falls deeper into the unfortunate and dangerous events of this wild weekend, the movie remains committed to her perspective — aside from one briskly funny side-step into an alternate version of events. Through freeze-frames and overlapping dissolves, Bravo highlights the woozy confusion and destabilizing falling sensation of getting so much further in over your head than you’d ever imagine. The dance between dark intent and light comedy adds to the wobbly tone — in a good way. And then Paige’s lead performance is so breezily wounded, both traumatized and above it all in a dazzling surface of openness and charm underneath which churns a self-flagellating what-did-I-get-myself-into? mixed with a how-do-I-survive-this? Throughout, constant selfies and posts, Vines and ads, flow through the character’s lives, building images to which they can’t or won’t conform. The movie explodes outwards even as it falls inwards. And wrapping its events in its telling somehow makes Zola’s plight more bearable even as it gets squirmingly suspenseful and ends abruptly. We know she’ll make it out; and we know she’ll reclaim the story — and her body — as her own.
 

Ben Hozie’s PVT Chat is more restrained, like its obsessive lead character. He is Jack (Peter Vack) a young man who makes his living gambling on internet blackjack. Between rounds, he cruises sex chats for cam girls. His favorite is Scarlet (Julia Fox), not just because she’s attractive and good at dirty talk, but because he finds himself wanting to have normal conversations with her. In a weird way, they start to play out like awkward dates. Sure, he’s paying for her time, but his addiction to the sensation starts to get conflated with real affection. She actually likes him, right? he wonders. As we follow him through his daily life — chatting with his landlord and a handyman; attending a friend’s art show; playing round after round of cards — he becomes increasingly interested on the moments he gets an alert that his favorite cam is live. The movie captures a sense of the digital and the tangible intermingling, where the unreality of a virtual connection starts to take on qualities that feel present in his life. One can feel the erotic potential in their relationship despite the fact they’ve never met; it’s clear memories of her still buzz in his head as the handheld shots follow along behind him down his routine New York City streets. We get a sense he might be a loner, but for how engaged and animated he is talking to this girl he’s never met in the flesh. Yet when a woman he knows in real life invites him over, he remains distracted. Why focus on the one he can actually be with, he seems to unconsciously decide, when he can chat with the one he can’t.

The movie is clear-eyed, and the performers trust their director and the material enough to expose themselves for the sake of the project. It’s unflinching, yet generous. It’s observant, but doesn’t exactly judge. It eventually opens up to take in Scarlet’s perspective, and seeing behind the screens from her side is a productive reminder that the connection and disjunction flows both ways. Their relationship is so transactional, despite the fact that they can push that aside in the moment. Their relationship is entirely intangible, computer-moderated, digital bits. And yet they’re in each other’s heads all the time. They share ideas about art, about life. He likes when she takes control; and yet it’s all verbal. He likes giving himself into her force willingly, even as he pries into her life and starts to think maybe, just maybe, he could actually find where she lives. That plot element dances on the edge of creepiness, and the movie knows it. The movie’s cheaply framed and presented realism underlines the blurred lines — emotional, physical, psychological, sexual — in these lives, and the actors complement the spare style with bare displays of their character’s obsessions and aimlessness. By the surprisingly bittersweet conclusion it’s clear that this is a connection that will need some distance to remain healthy, even if it means having to pretend there’s still that space where they can look and talk, but can’t actually touch.

Darkness Falls: IT COMES AT NIGHT

Trey Edward Shults is a young director to watch. His debut feature was an achingly personal one, and all the better for it. Working on a micro-budget, filming in his mother’s home, and starring his real relatives, the tense dysfunctional-family drama Krisha was deeply felt. A worthy addition to the strangely underpopulated Thanksgiving movie genre, it told a shattering story of an estranged, addict aunt coming to dinner. His confident, expressive filmmaking – a shaking, sliding, swooning camera holding tight to its characters, and deftly suggestive aspect ratio futzing - and unblinkingly harrowing emotional directness made for a most impressive film. Now for his sophomore effort It Comes at Night, he confirms his promise with a similarly claustrophobic character study. This one flirts with genre elements, telling yet another post-apocalyptic tale (we certainly get plenty of those these days) with elegant restraint, quiet intimacy, and a creeping sense of dread. Shults demonstrates a firm hand on tone and style, so much so that even the movie’s quietest moments are freighted with an almost unbearable hushed intensity. It’s a rattling, lingering experience even with almost nothing in the way of overt scares.

We find a family living off the grid in the woods. Father (Joel Edgerton), mother (Carmen Ejogo), and son (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) have just buried a beloved grandfather. The process was difficult. They donned gas masks, took his disease-ridden body into the woods in a wheelbarrow, shot him, and burned the corpse. A plague has ravaged the world, and the family does what it must to survive. They have strict routine, rigorous quarantine procedures, and cling to each other in the candle-lit darkness because they’re all they have. They are survivors. Into this precarious situation arrives another family: a young father (Christopher Abbott), mother (Riley Keough), and toddler (Griffin Robert Faulkner). Shults, cloaking the entire film in heavy paranoia of disease and despair, has made a world where the social order has apparently collapsed, where people care only for themselves and their families. Here we can clearly see how compassion can be a liability and a danger. And yet who can see these doomed stragglers and close off help entirely?

In dark, gloomy, slow frames, Shults make such pessimistic moves seem natural, allowing assistance to be proffered in tentative, circumspect, tenuous ways. These new people are never entirely trusted, but with the nightmarish scenario, the tight-lipped lack of exposition and backstory, and the simmering dreams which approach Harrison’s young man at night there’s an open question as to how much we can trust our apparent protagonists, too. This clenched, small, quiet movie rattles with suspicion and dread. The cast to a person demonstrates painful anxiety barely choked back to keep up the usual conversational friendly niceties and demonstrations of familial love and loyalty. When push comes to shove – a dog barking, a gun locked away, sleepless night terrors, and a Red Door that must remained locked adding up to the measured vice-grip tension softly pulling the narrative trajectory towards inevitable crisis and confrontation – who will endure? And what compromise or cruelty will be needed to stay alive? The film is Romero (Night of the Living Dead without the zombies) and Carpenter (The Thing without the alien) filtered through an extra layer of modern art house affect – sterile, withholding, evocative, still. It’s one of those slow-drip horror movies about how the real monsters are the inability to truly know another person’s mind, and the deep cruelty people inflict upon one another. No surprise there, but as Shults narrows the frame, pressing down ever more intensely upon these characters, the movie finds such an intense commitment to these ideas the effect of its mood is hard to shake.

Stranger in Strange Land: AMERICAN HONEY

American Honey is a long, aimless road trip of self-discovery. It begins with a lost, disadvantaged, impoverished young woman escaping a bad relationship by running away with a wild band of scrappy twentysomethings piling in an old van to travel the American mid- and southwest selling magazine subscriptions. It ends with her having a little bit more of an idea about what she wants to do with her life, but not so much more that there’s anything like a natural endpoint. The movie simply travels along as the group stops at different towns and cities, adding up to a portrait of a nation of juxtapositions and inequalities: rural and urban, rich and poor, young and old. British director Andrea Arnold has traversed similar territory before, albeit in a much more contained setting, in her small, powerful Fish Tank, about a teenage girl living in miserable London poverty. Here, though, Arnold expands her canvas, trying to take in a whole generation, a whole country with one massive, rambling journey. She’s in search of some overarching truth that remains out of reach.

It’s in the tradition of films that find acclaimed foreign directors making a movie about “America.” (Trace the history back further and you could draw a line to Alexis de Tocqueville.) On the one hand, there can be great observations made from an outsider’s perspective. On the other, there can be some clumsiness in what might be more a commentary on America as a symbolic place onto which filmmakers can project their own interests. Thinking of the great eccentric examples of cinematic exchange, like Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point, Wong Kar-wai’s My Blueberry Nights, and Lars Von Trier’s Dogville, it’s clear the most fascinating cross-cultural USA pictures are those which are most obviously a director’s preoccupations and pet theme’s layered over a new landscape. In the case of American Honey an anthropological curiosity tips over into an indiscriminate eye, looking for beautiful squalor, indulging lengthy sequences of its characters milling about, and failing to filter its incidents into anything like a coherent statement. It’s a grab bag of worst-case scenario Americana: convenience stores, truck stops, cheap motels, Wal-Marts, shallow suburbs, dusty highways, dirty dumpsters, and anywhere motes and bugs flit in the air.

A protracted, lumpy journey, the scraggly band of young people drift from place to place, bouncing along to thumping hip hop and shooting the breeze as they travel empty roads through wide open spaces. The lead (newcomer Sasha Lane) is charmingly inscrutable, energetic and open to new experiences but containing an essential unknowable mystery. She draws in interest, but also holds her motivations at a beguiling remove. She’s always in the moment, but her eyes betray a mind that’s always in two places at once. Others in the troupe include a guy she has a crush on (Shia LaBeouf, looking unkempt and un-showered) and the icily alluring leader of the pack (Riley Keough). The rest are a jumble of interesting faces with wild, unpredictable behaviors and personalities that blur together. You’d think spending nearly three hours with characters would let you get to know them pretty well, but this movie is interested in poses and episodic encounters – hooking up, robbing, hitchhiking, dancing, scavenging – than exposition or exploration of what makes these people tick. When it’s time to get down to business, they go door-to-door hawking their wares, telling unconvincing sob stories and hardly looking like trustworthy salespeople. It’s never clear how anyone could be buying what they’re selling.

For a long stretch of American Honey, with its tire-spinning repetitive grind of incident and Arnold’s typically claustrophobic square-framed trashy/beautiful cinematography, I felt like I’d always been and always would be watching this movie. It feels endless, content to live, and wallow, with the pretty poverty of its hard-living characters. Feinting at honesty when it’s really aestheticized and empty, the film ogles at unwashed skin, desperate situations, crumbling lives as if its act of looking through pretty filmic lenses is equivalent to having something to say. When it’s compelling, losing itself in the makeshift tribal rituals of bouncing and chanting along to mantras and raps or in stealing away moments of fleeting joy in crushing pain and poverty, the actors bring excitement and convincing lived-in feeling to the proceedings. But when it’s at its clumsiest, it’s rootless and pointless, drifting along on borrowed observations and trite conclusions. This is an ode to a lost generation, to young people who are wandering doom- and debt-laden into a world where hope and possibility have been dried out in the wake of their elders. And yet it has no real sense of why that might be or how these characters feel about their plight. It’s as lost and unaware as they are, striking to look at but with little to say.

We Don't Need Another Hero: MAD MAX: FURY ROAD

There are moments in Mad Max: Fury Road where I sat gaping at the screen in exhilaration and awe, convinced this film is the car chase masterpiece to which all of cinema has built. That's heat-of-the-moment hyperbole, but it sure is indicative of how enveloping and sustained this exhilarating action film is. I thought back to the jaw-dropping truck chase climax in writer-director George Miller’s first Mad Max sequel, 1982’s The Road Warrior, and how blown away I was as a hurtling pyrotechnic stunt display neared its twentieth minute. Fury Road pushes past its fortieth minute, then its ninetieth, racing towards two hours with no signs of taking its foot off the pedal. People careen between tanker trucks, zoom souped-up jalopies and armored muscle cars protruding jagged metal and long, pendulous spears as guns fire, knives jab, bombs explode into the desert, and vehicles crash and flip. Every rest is simply a suspenseful pause before the chased spy their pursuers roaring over the horizon.

Miller returns to the sand-swept post-apocalyptic outback he left behind in 1985’s Beyond Thunderdome, summoning up every ounce of his prodigious imagination, filmmaking prowess, attention to fantastical detail, and moral heft to create the most soulful and exciting action film in ages. The Mad Max films’ worldbuilding works wonders by staying small and specific, with stakes tactile and personal. We follow the taciturn rover Max into unique and fascinating corners of the ruined world each time out. Here we discover yet another place where water and gas are currency, and where human life has been organized in convincingly cruel and cracked ways. Max (Tom Hardy, flawlessly taking over for Mel Gibson), suffering PTSD from his earlier exploits, finds himself captured by War Boys and held prisoner in their automotive death cult in a cavernous oasis they call The Citadel.

A persuasive and disturbing dystopian society fully thought-through, The Citadel is ruled by an evil warlord, Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne), who breathes with a tooth-studded oxygen mask and has his putrid body sealed in plastic armor. He controls the water, and therefore his subjects, men covered in tumors and scars willing to die for a drink and promise of an automotive Valhalla afterlife. The women are treated as property, good for breeding with the Immortan and providing milk. These enslaved young women (Zoë Kravitz, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Riley Keough, Abbey Lee, and Courtney Eaton) sneak off with a rare free female, Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron), in her tanker. The women flee across the desert, Joe’s vehicular army close behind. One driver (Nicholas Hoult) straps Max to the front of his car, muzzled and dripping blood as he’s reluctantly pulled into this conflict.

Miller, writing with Brendan McCarthy and Nick Lathouris, has concocted a story perfect for a feature-length chase, lean and expressive. It’s a tour de force of perpetual motion, briskly characterizing its participants through actions while organizing witty, complicated fast-paced visual spectacle. Always on the move, but never exhausting, the film varies its speed in natural, and suspenseful, ways. Filming real cars barreling across a real desert, Miller finds terrific weight in every movement, a sense that violence matters. This makes the most visceral of crashes and smashes, and every moment with people crawling around and between vehicles, feel impactful and dangerous. Cinematographer John Seale’s wonderfully textured images capture the brilliant stunt work (comparison to Buster Keaton’s The General seems apt), sweeping across vast spaces and squeezing into tight corners. Editor Jason Ballantine elegantly whips up suspense and finds poetry in motion amidst the growling engines, grisly gore, saturated colors, and CGI enhancements. As new combatants join the chase, the momentum keeps things hurtling along with nerve-wracking, teeth-rattling, white-knuckle thrills.

The visual and moral clarity of Fury Road is impressive. We know at every moment what dangers confront our characters, drawn in broad strokes and colored in with Miller’s creative specificity. Wild leather outfits, bright streaks of makeup and motor oil, and steam-punk prosthetics are the ensemble’s costumes. Within them are fiercely primal performances. Theron’s the best, tearing through the scenery as an avenging warrior, bold, bald, smart, wielding a burning glare and artificial limb with deadly serious intent. The villains are grotesque men, sickly dripping disease and rot in impressively gross makeup effects. Their fleeing victims are angelic innocents wrapped in flowing white cloths (though never mere damsels in distress). And then there’s Max, in his cool jacket and affect, perhaps the last noble man left on Earth. He’s principled and troubled, is reluctant to fight, always wanting to save his own skin, and yet unable to ignore the danger faced by those around him. The moral stakes of all this turmoil is agonizingly clear.

It’s this strong, simple core that makes the action of Mad Max: Fury Road so particularly intense. Not only does Miller stage spectacular crashes and explosions, communicating an invigorating sense of pain and drive, but he quickly makes it matter. I was drawn into the fascinating world he created, cared deeply about the characters in peril and what becomes tenderly moving about their relationships. The movie charges forward, asking an audience to lean in and catch up. How exciting to enter a fully drawn world with an immediately gripping scenario of emotional and thematic weight, and find absorbing chaos. This is popcorn filmmaking at the highest level, a master filmmaker proving relentless noise and fury can be artfully shaped, and carry a genuine, meaningful wallop. Miller considers his characters' choices as carefully as he choreographs their cars, in both cases as exhilarating for what they do as how they arrive there.

Quick Looks: ARBITRAGE, THE GOOD DOCTOR, and SLEEPWALK WITH ME

In Arbitrage, Richard Gere plays a hugely wealthy banker in some serious trouble. He’s become embroiled in a complicated financial deal that’s threatening to sink his company if the funds don’t get moved around quickly enough to cover his assets. And that’s not even the worst of it. He sneaks away from his wife (Susan Sarandon) to drive upstate with his mistress (Laetitia Casta) and ends up flipping the car. When he comes to, he sees that his mistress is dead in the passenger seat so he flees the scene of the accident. (The pointed intent couldn’t be clearer: the rich flee catastrophe on instinct.) So he’s dealing with financial trouble and legal trouble, skulking around large boardrooms, spacious offices, and fancy apartments, trying to avoid the consequences of his actions.

Writer-director Nicholas Jarecki has created a phony fantasy of a character study that feels altogether too calculated a guesstimate of how the one-percent lives. (Not that I have any experience with that income bracket, but it can’t be as simple as it’s made to seem here.) To put such material in a standard thriller (the kind with dramatic turns that make it play like an episode of Law & Order from the suspect’s point-of-view) only cheapens what was sparsely drawn to begin with. It should be juicier and with more of a bite; it’s all strangely toothless. That said, Gere gives a persuasive performance of a man crumbling under the burden of keeping up appearances. I also appreciated the work of Nate Parker, as a working-class man Gere debates scapegoating, and Tim Roth, as the investigator who is frustrated that the legal system seems rigged in favor the rich. Would that these performances were in a movie that would be able to better show them off.

Director Lance Daly’s The Good Doctor is a squirmy thriller about a lonely young doctor (Orlando Bloom) who falls in love (no, obsession) with a pretty patient (Riley Keough). He decides to tweak her medication in order to keep her in the hospital under his care. The script by John Enborn follows this situation to its predictable conclusion and the talented supporting cast (including Taraji P. Henson, Michael Peña, and J.K. Simmons) fills out the plot convincingly enough. It’s a shame, then, that the whole experience is just a sad, slow circle down the drain, completely without tension and devoid of emotional interest. This is a thinly imagined thriller that manages nothing more than a queasy feeling once or twice. It’s most unfulfilling in its flat visual style and ploddingly obvious script. As someone who sort of enjoyed Daly’s similarly slight first feature, the kids-in-puppy-love romance Kisses, I’m especially disappointed to see that this is where he’s gone next. He’s a director of potential and maybe someday he’ll live up to it.

Stand-up comedian Mike Birbiglia has told the same – very funny – story in several mediums now. If you’re anything like me, you may have managed to hear several times over (in his stand-up, on This American Life, in his memoir) about his intense sleepwalking problem that caused him to, say, dream about a jackal intruding in his bedroom, which would result in him fast asleep shouting at a hamper, fully convinced he was confronting a wild animal. This is obviously a problem, but his career seemed to be taking off and his relationship with his girlfriend was growing complicated and one thing leads to another and he’s in a deep sleep while jumping out a second-story hotel window.

This story’s latest telling takes movie form in Sleepwalk with Me and it’s perfectly fine, though I did wonder if it would have worked better on me if the novelty was still there. Birbiglia, here the writer, director and star, has a loose, casual style that pumps up dream sequences with off-hand discombobulation that is undercut with silly shifts to reality. To fill out the rest of the semi-autobiographical movie, it follows Birbiglia’s relationship with his girlfriend (played by Lauren Ambrose) as well as his growing stand-up career that takes him from hotel to hotel, crummy gig to crummy gig. Altogether it plays like Woody Allen lite, warm and sweetly small. This is a minor, but often charming movie, mostly because Birbiglia is so likable. But the thing of it is, you’d have just as good a time listening to the original monologue, so I have a hard time recommending this movie outright.