Boyhood: BELFAST and PROCESSION

In Belfast, Kenneth Branagh returns to the time and place of his younger days for a movie based on some boyhood impressions. And that’s what we get: impressions, fragments, glimpses, scenes warmly bathed in childlike innocence against the backdrop of sectarian strife that sets his parents’ minds toward leaving home and moving somewhere new. The movie is set in this obvious state of reminiscence, as the movie starts in clinical digital color and slowly fades to shiny black and white. He remembers some discussions of Catholics against Protestants and some cultural friction between Ireland and Britain. But above all else he remembers a cozy feeling of being surrounded by loving family. The movie finds the boy (Jude Hill) tromping around their working-class neighborhood, never more than out of earshot of his dear mother (Caitriona Balfe) calling him for dinner. He adores his father (Jamie Dornan), too, though the man is often away at work. He generally gets along with his moodier older brother (Lewis McAskie). He interacts with a swirl of cousins who’re always scampering about. He looks up to his grandfather (Ciarán Hinds) and grins at his grandmother (Judi Dench), two sweet old folks who give him lovely advice and good food. (His grandmother also takes him to see a play, reflected in full color in their eyes, a poignant moment from a director best known for his passionate Shakespearean adaptations.) Why, it’s just too bad that The Troubles had to mess with their perfect little world.

As the movie bumps along episodically, scenes don’t always feel complete or follow logically. It lingers in some moments and elides others, seemingly for no rhyme nor reason. It skips ahead, shifts to montage, or dawdles in minutiae. The result is, a handful of riots aside, a mild-mannered movie, gentle, soft, slight, and a little scattered. However, that feels true to its aims—not capturing a story so much as a collection of childhood memories, details, moments, conflicts, relationships, people. The sociopolitical implications are firmly background color and plot mechanic, while many supporting characters who appear and disappear sometimes at random remain at the level of surface impressions. Isn’t that just the way it is with a jumbled child’s-eye view of one’s own past? It may not build in scope or arrive at important revelation, but it’s ultimately a sweet movie about how much a grown man remembers being a little boy who loved his family with all his heart. No wonder he remembers them in gleaming black and white artifice, where his grandparents are wrinkled wisdom personified, and his father and mother are youthful and beautiful, singing and dancing, trying to do right by their little boy even as their world falls apart behind them.

Boyhood memories are much more fraught in Robert Greene’s Procession. His career as a documentarian has been concerned with performance as a way of processing reality. His Fake It So Real was about pro wrestling, while Actress and Kate Plays Christine dig deep into a performer’s process of building a role, and his Bisbee 17 had a small Arizona town reenact a 100-year-old massacre. (His work as an editor on sharply-written fictional character studies by Alex Ross Perry further bolsters his filmmaking’s psychological acuity.) His new film takes those ideas further into harrowing territory. In it, he collaborates with a group of men who have spoken about their past abuse by Catholic priests. Their stories are decades old now, but the pain is still fresh. Greene, working with a drama therapist and a lawyer, invites these men to script scenes that explore this element of their past. The documentary, then, is about filmmaking: writing, casting, location scouting. Yet every step is a journey into their pain. The men have long brainstorming sessions that double as a support group; they open up in heartbreaking ways, plumb the depths of their anger and betrayal, and share in the camaraderie and openness that only fellow survivors of such unimaginable violation can. The project gives them a way to orient their sharing toward a positive outcome. To share their stories, they think, is one more undeniable way to make a case for themselves and to give light and hope to others struggling with this burden. They talk of various court cases and legal wrangling with the Catholic Church, which, in each man’s case, has elements, if not entire claims, obfuscated, criticized, dragged out, downplayed, or ignored. Together they might be able to make art an act of grace, memory and truth an act of justice—grace and justice being two things Church officials seem slow to grant, or are unable to provide to these victims’ satisfaction.

We see the making of the men’s short films and the eventual final products—by turns testimony, nightmare, condemnation, explanation, reanimation, and act of self-forgiveness and letting go. They’ve explored their traumas, gone hunting for ways to represent the after-effects, literally retracing their steps in some cases. It’s difficult. But Greene films this so tenderly, and so plainly. He draws out their creative sides and, with professional assistance, makes art as a form of therapy. To do so, Greene doesn’t flinch from the heavy details; nor do the men hold back, though at times they pull away in self-preservation as they pick at emotional wounds that linger. A potentially upsetting variable, and yet so lovely in its act of protection and care, is the casting of a tween actor to play their stand-in. The scenes they’ve written have no explicit abuse in them, dealing more in implication, but are frank about the relational, spiritual, and emotional abuse that deviant priests inflicted upon them. (Some of the men even agree to play an abuser in these scenes, an obviously challenging prospect.) The young actor, surrounded by supportive parents and a generous crew, approaches the task with respect and care. The men bolster him, too, though all involved feel the seriousness on set. On the last day, the boy shakes the hand of a shaken older man and says in total sincerity: “I tried my best to tell your story.” That’s a powerful moment, and image—the present willing to attempt a healing of the past through the power of witness. The film finds its subjects excavating and exorcising their tragic pasts. It’s an unfailing honest and perceptive work. And it feels like nothing less than a personal reckoning that reverberates outwards and upwards towards a potential healing breakthrough.

Interiors: QUEEN OF EARTH

If you hear there’s a new tiny character drama about a woman who, mourning the death of her father and having left her boyfriend, rents a vacation home with her best friend, you’re probably already imagining a treacly little indie going through the same quirky life-affirming motions. Luckily Queen of Earth, the movie in question, does no such thing. It imagines an entire psychological world for its characters, and commits to following their complicated emotional drivers to intense and uncompromising places. We open on Elisabeth Moss’s face, makeup streaked after what must’ve been a tremendous cry. She’s breaking up with her partner, who remains off screen as we’re pinned mere inches from her face, taking in every jagged breath and spit of anger. “Don’t look at me,” she snaps. And yet we can’t look away.

This is an Alex Ross Perry movie, a designation we can now, after four films, start to identify as marking a project that’ll start with recognizable territory and take us somewhere unexpected. He’s a terrific writer-director who seems to have made it his mission to take on projects which are in broad strokes overfamiliar types, and then coloring them in with a whole interesting palate all his own. His 2011 sophomore effort The Color Wheel was on the surface a brother/sister road trip movie shot through with mumblecore plotting and fumbling banter, but it was photographed in gorgeously textured black and white and built to a tremendous scene that caught its characters in close sustained crescendo of messy feelings. Then there’s his previous feature, Listen Up Philip, which was a prickly man-child relationship comedy that allowed its characters unusual room to be themselves, following various members of the ensemble down wandering paths of lovely character moments rich and tender.

What sets Perry apart is the thought and intentionality behind his creative choices. He’s not simply showing off his chops – although he is – or making movies that’ll get him studio paychecks – though he will. He’s telling cinematic stories, taking the raw material of any indie drama and making of it self-consciously literary dialogue and overwhelming visual precision. So when the opening title card of Queen of Earth stomps in with fancy red cursive popping against the stark grey sadness of the opening image, it’s clear we’re in the hands of a confident filmmaker. We follow Moss into a lake house chamber drama where her friend (Inherent Vice's Katherine Waterson) finds herself moving cautiously, walking on eggshells, as her friend grieves over her intersectional heartbreaks. Perry uses slow dissolves, sharp cuts, and icy silences to simmer with suspense. With glacial horror pacing and a needling thriller score, it’s less Your Sister’s Sister, more an American Persona done up with hints of Repulsion.

With editor Robert Greene’s methodically precise cutting, the mood of the film is intoxicatingly deliberate and unblinkingly disorienting. It will cut back to the previous year, where we see a much happier Moss in the same rental house. Watterson is there as well, a little grumpy because her friend’s boyfriend (Kentucky Audley) is along for the vacation. Serving as an ironic counterpoint to the sad present, where the presence of what Moss perceives as an interloping neighbor (Patrick Fugit) seemingly reminds her of what she’s lost, these glimpses of happier times cut into long pushes in on intense emoting. It is uncut psychological pain artfully rendered, where even good memories are jabs in the side. Social interactions become a nightmare, others looming over. Precise blocking, smooth surfaces, and dramatic lighting highlight the air of tension even in mundane moments. Acutely misophonic sound design heightens chewing, swallowing, choking.

A tricky two-hander, the film captures the stultifying balancing act of trying to support someone in their time of emotional distress, a period of psychic suffering that’s difficult to be around, and yet hard to avoid for those who care about their loved one. As a portrait of depression, it’s the most soul-draining, nerve-jangling one since Von Trier’s Melancholia. But unlike that film, which was so drunk on melancholy it left me sick to my stomach – a compliment, by the way – Queen of Earth maintains an icier tone, a clinically sympathetic eye on Moss’s elusive, slippery performance. She’s called upon to play a double-edged emotional high-wire act. In flashbacks, she’s sunny. In the present, she’s on the bleeding edge of stability. Waterson, meanwhile, has an even slipperier role, filtering layers of grumpiness and wariness through an exterior that’s trying not to compound her friend’s problems. It’s rare to find a film so concerned with and attuned to friends’ interdependent emotional support systems. In doing so, there's warmth, even some laughs, underneath fraught feelings.

Shot on film by cinematographer Sean Price Williams, the film’s cold touch and sharp blocking keep the characters pinned in together, caught in adjacent headspace even when not physically together. They can hear muffled sounds through walls. They can take phone calls in the yard, leaking one-sided conversations into the house, though they can maintain mystery with a brisk “Don’t ask.” One striking shot captures both floors of the house in the same frame, perched on the stairs in such a way that we can really feel the disjunction between the figure leaning against a kitchen counter downstairs and the one upstairs slowly dragging herself out of bed. Perry shows equal interest in the character’s mental states as he does the filmmaking techniques he so adeptly manipulates. This is a difficult and finely sustained work of psychological observation, diving into miserable depths of pity, ego, and insecurity with a shifty but unblinking thriller’s eye for dread.