BEFORE: After tonight there will be just 8 films until the start of October, and thus the horror chain begins. BEWARE, for it may curdle your blood and give you the shivers! Seriously, there are Halloween decorations up on my block already, and it's not even fall yet. Candy is in the stores and so yeah, it looks like this is happening again, Halloween deja vu, right? I'm seriously considering lowering the number of horror films from 25 to 24, I know, big deal but then I'll have to find another film to add down the road, maybe even after Christmas. I've got some options built into the chain, but I know if I drop one of the droppable films then I also have to add one of the addable films. There's just one horror film that I can drop that seems like it MIGHT be needed for the linking next year, or even the year after that - so I have to think that far ahead, maybe. Dropping a film for a reason like that could also be a bad idea, like I may then never get to it, so I have to be sure that I'm OK with that possibility, and I think I am. It's going to be a tough month, I'll be out of town for 8 days, so right there, mathematically I should only watch 23 movies, but of course I've cheated and watched one already, so maybe I'll be OK. Anyway if horror flicks are your jam be sure to swing back here starting October 1.
Emma Stone and at least FOUR other actors carry over from "Poor Things". Well, you can expect this sort of thing when the director carries over as well. People tend to keep on working with the people they like, after all.
THE PLOT: A man seeks to break free from his predetermined path, a cop questions his wife's demeanor after her return from a supposed drowning, and a woman searches for an extraordinary individual prophesied to become a renowned spiritual guide.
AFTER: Again, it's amazing - what a difference a day makes. Two films from the same director, with a lot of the same actors, and one piece is a metaphorical masterpiece, while the other one, I just can't make heads nor tails of it, I have no idea what exactly the director was going for here, what was he trying to say, to get me to understand? I suppose this might be consistent with two films presented in an absurdist style, perhaps the problem here is me expecting things to make sense, and well, that's not guaranteed with absurdism, now, is it? Let me get some thoughts down and then read the reviews to see if other people were just as confused as I was.
This film is really three short stories put together, and let me be clear, there IS a through line, the title of each short is a very big clue as to where you should put your attention if you want to try to understand what connects the three stories. And many of the same actors appear in three (or at least two) of the stories. Beyond that, man, you're really on your own, I can't help you because I'm still trying to understand what took place here. Of course, I can't take any of this at face value, not any more that I could take a story about a dead woman getting a brain transplant and being re-animated at face value. Last night's film was about relationships, though, and so I took it all as a metaphor - not just "don't get into a relationship with someone who got a brain transplant and got re-animated", but, you know, recognize that some people are psychopaths and will break up with you for no reason to date someone else. So be wary.
But what's the message, or advice HERE? I can't quite wrap my brain around it. The first story is about Robert, a man who's in a weird relationship with his male boss, Raymond - like, it's implied that they're lovers but they never state that explicitly. His boss has told him over the years how to dress, who to marry, when to have sex with his wife, when to drink alcohol, etc. and given him a high-paying job and a bunch of extravagant gifts, mostly sports collectibles. And it seems like this has all been a multi-year set-up for asking Robert to do one specific thing for him, to crash his car into the car of a man with the initials R.M.F., I guess essentially to kill that man. Yeah, that's a big ask, sure, but it's also hard to believe that anyone would pay a man for years in an attempt to obsessively control that man's life JUST to have someone on the payroll used to following his instructions JUST so he'd have a trained killer when he needed one. And there are so many questions, like why does Raymond want R.M.F. dead? And what are the odds that Robert would NOT kill R.M.F., get fired for that, have his whole life collapse and then start dating a woman who is ALSO... well, I don't want to spoil things. Let me just consider this short story some kind of metaphor for any boss-employee relationship, and move on for now.
I guess "control" is the sort of running theme here, because the second short story is about marriage - Daniel is a police officer whose Liz, a marine biologist, disappeared at sea and is believed dead. Daniel goes about his life and tries to grieve, but then one day he gets a phone call to tell him his wife has been rescued, and will be returning to shore soon. (The mysterious figure R.M.F. is the helicopter pilot who flew her back from wherever...). However, his wife acts unusual after being rescued from that island where many of her co-workers (?) died, and there's a flashback that suggests that maybe cannibalism was involved, but again, absurdist comedy so it's unclear if that's just a fantasy or actually part of the story. That might explain why Liz is acting so weird, but also she didn't remember what Daniel's favorite song is, and also her shoes don't fit - so Daniel starts to suspect that this is NOT actually his wife, but some kind of impostor. A twin, a look-alike, an alien? It's unclear, because it's entirely possible that the time they spent apart has caused Liz to act differently or caused Daniel to be paranoid. Things kind of spiral out of control from there, again no spoilers, but Daniel puts his wife to the test. Again there's a weird vibe that maybe nobody anywhere can be faithful to their spouse, there seems to be an implied history of Daniel and Liz wife-swapping with another couple.
The third story is also about control in that it involves a cult of sorts, and two cult members, Emily and Andrew, are going from town to town searching for their prophesied Messiah, who will be able to raise the dead (another common Lanthimos theme?) and she will be a certain age, a certain weight and have a twin sister who is deceased. Emily and Andrew stay at motels, are only allowed to drink water they brought with them, and believe that most people are somehow "unclean", and when they get back to the compound, if they have remained pure, they get to have sex with either the cult leader or his wife. (There sure are a lot of open relationships in these stories...) On their next trip, a woman approaches them in a diner and says that her sister is the person they've been looking for, and feels they should check her out. Emily has been having prophetic dreams about finding their healer, however when she visits her ex-husband and daughter, something happens and again, no spoilers here. But it kicks her search into overdrive, and...well, it doesn't end well.
None of this really ends well, or does it, kind of? I mean, story #1 kind of ends on a positive note, but it's not positive for everyone. Is that the point to all this, that nobody can be happy unless there is another person somewhere who is sad, or disappointed, or dead? Is that the engine that drives the universe, equal parts success and failure, misery and happiness, life and death? I was reading recently about something called the "burnt toast" theory, that if you look at things big picture-wise, everything that happens in sequence happens for a reason, even if you were to burn your toast one morning, that might seem like a small disaster, but maybe that made you leave the house five minutes later and maybe that helped you avoid a car crash or running over somebody. We'll never know because only what happened happened and we can't see all the different things that didn't happen, but if you want to think of the burnt toast as an event that somehow saved somebody's life, who's to say that's not correct? A minor setback could lead to positive outcomes, for all we know - and this assumes that life is linear, which it usually is, although sometimes it's not all cause and effect. If you have a career path in mind, like a long-term goal, of course you may expect progress to occur if you fill out job applications, answer classified ads, search for job openings, and one little setback may not prevent you from getting a job long-term, so it would be hard to say that success didn't come from that setback, especially from burning the toast.
But characters here certainly encounter some setbacks, little ones and big ones, and sure, I can see how everything in a movie is sequential so therefore we can trace any character's path to disaster and note all the little steps along the way that brought them there. Still, I think it's easier to say that people tend to make the best decisions they can at any given time, but since nobody can see the future, they are unaware of how those seemingly good decisions manage to put them in places where they are forced to endure terrible things. Like maybe you join a cult because it seems like this cult leader is making some sense, he seems to be very sure about the way the world works and the fact that the UFO is hidden behind the comet, and will be arriving soon to take the chosen people to a better life, however this puts you in the position where you have to wear the white robe of salvation and drink the juice of clarity, and well, you've stepped in it now, haven't you?
I will admit that the whole piece has a sort of "Magnolia" or "Pulp Fiction" quality to it, especially since the three stories would seem to be slightly out of order based on what happens to R.M.F., and I can't help thinking about John Travolta's character in that Tarantino film where he was killed in one segment and then seen alive in a later segment, which really therefore occurred first. So is this Mr. Lanthimos' attempt at making an homage to "Pulp Fiction"?
Jerskin Fendrix, however, is my new favorite name seen in any credits, it's way better than any of my old favorites, like Fonsworth Bentley or Izzy Skenazy.
Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos (director of "Poor Things")
Also starring Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley, Yorgos Stefanakos, Jerskin Fendrix (all FIVE last seen in "Poor Things"), Hong Chau (last seen in "The Whale"), Tessa Bourgeois, Kencil Mejia, Mamoudou Athie (last heard in "Elemental"), Joe Alwyn (last seen in "The Brutalist"), Thaddeus Burbank, Suzanne Stone, Nikki Chamberlin, Lawrence Johnson, Ja'Quan Monroe-Henderson (last seen in "Nickel Boys"), Ivy Ray, Nathan Mulligan, Dominique Shy, Hunter Schafer (last seen in "The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes"), Harold Gervais (last seen in "The Big Short"), Merah Benoit (last seen in "We Have a Ghost"), Kien Michael Spiller, Krystal Alayne Chambers, Jeffrey Riseden, Julianne Binard, Emily Brady
RATING: 4 out of 10 bodies in the morgue
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