Cultural Mining

Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.

This week, I’m looking at three very different movies, all opening this weekend. There’s a Russian media  whiz climbing a political ladder, scientists in Germany flirting with sex and plants, and a lovesick American who turns to magic to fulfill his desires. 

Obsession

Wri/Dir: Curry Barker

It’s a small city somewhere in the US. Four young friends — Bear, Nikki, Ian and Sarah — who have known each other for years, work together in a music store. Bear (Michael Johnston) is a cute but insecure young guy, full of passion but too self-conscious to let it some out. Nikki (Inde Navarrette) is a talented aspiring novelist, both outgoing and beautiful. Ian (Cooper Tomlinson) is a bit of a bombastic, self-centred douche, but also best buds with Bear who frequently turns to him for advice. And Sarah (Megan Lawless)  is trying to get into a good college (and is also the daughter of the owner of the music store where they all work.)

Now Bear has a major crush on Nikki, but can’t bring himself to tell her; are the feelings mutual? He’ll never know if he doesn’t ask her. But instead he turns to magic — the One Wish Willow, a cheap-ass toy in a retro cardboard box that he bought at a new age store. The label says if you break the stick it will grant you any one wish, but you can’t undo it, you can’t change it, and you can’t use a new one, no matter what happens.  

Well, he snaps the twig and gets his wish — Nikki is now madly in love with him, above all else. He is ecstatic. Great sex and true eternal love with his lifelong soul mate. What could possibly be bad? Lots. She starts acting weird, dressing strangely in public, and, if she is ever left alone — away from her boyfriend for even a moment — watch out. What will Bear’s ill-begotten wish lead to next? And can he ever somehow get it to stop?

Obsession is an entertaining comedy/horror movie about magic gone wrong. It’s also filled with unexpected and shocking violence, gore and all-around disgustingness. Sort of a date movie… from hell. It’s written and directed by Curry Barker, who is better known as a YouTube star alongside Cooper Tomlinson (who plays the obnoxious Ian).  The rest of the cast is unknown to me but pleasing to watch.  The plot never drags and is full of increasingly horrible surprises. What’s really unexpected is the production design: the characters all exist in a simulacrum of the 1970s and 80s, with everything from cars to clothes to furniture is pulled out of the distant past… Except, of course, their phones, because, seriously, how can you have a movie about teenagers if they can’t text each other?

Does Obsession work? I quite liked it. It neatly blends dating and relationships with comedy, horror and the supernatural. While it has a bit too much blood and horrible violence for my taste, I get why it’s there: it keeps the shock value on high. 

I like this one.

 

Silent Friend

Co-Wri/Dir: Ildikó Enyedi

It’s the turn of the previous century at Marburg University in Westphalia, Germany, a venerable institution dating back to the middle ages, and Grete (Luna Wedler) is its only female student. The all-male faculty was forced to admit her after an oral interview they put her through, filled with greek and latin sexual innuendo, designed to trip her up or at least make her blush. But she was unflappable and passed with flying colours. Now she is studying plants and how they reproduce.  

Hannes (Enzo Brumm) is a farm boy at the same university but in the 1960s He is adjusting to the academic environment dressed in a suit and tie, but soon realizes he is surrounded by half-naked, pot-smoking hippies who spend most of their time rutting in the grass or staging a sit-in. Luckily, he does meet someone who interests him, a young woman named Gundula (Marlene Burow). She’s a botany student into plants; Halles says he saw enough plants on his farm to last a lifetime. Sparks fly and eventually she convinces him to take care of her beloved, potted geranium while she goes on a camping trip with her current hippy lover. Halles stays behind to record the plant’s emotions and reactions to the sensors attuned to it.

At the same college but in the 2020s, Tony (Tony Leung Chiu-wai) is a Hong Kong neuroscientist who specializes in the difference in brain patterns of adults vs babies. He has developed a series of pads and wires that fit over the human head and record brain activity, which is then converted into colourful, constantly-moving images on a computer screen. He is there to teach a course about this, but when the pandemic strikes, the university is completely shut down and everyone sent home, leaving only Tony (stranded in Germany) and a grumpy groundskeeper. Tony starts communicating in Zoom calls with a French scientist (Lea Seydoux) who convinces him to use his invention to study the thoughts of a gingko tree instead of humans and babies. 

What will these three scientists — who are generations apart — discover about sex, the human brain and plants? And how it will it affect their own lives and loves?

Silent Friend is a tryptich dealing with psychic communication between humans and plants across a century. It follows all three characters chronologically, but jumps back and forth between the eras, using distinctly different looks for each time period: pre-WWI is in B&W, the 1960s has the look of grainy, colour film, and the contemporary period emphasizes bright, intensely-sharp detail. The whole film is peppered with intense sex scenes — not of human bodies but of germinating plants.  The camera also sensually caresses both human skin and tree bark with equal degrees of enthusiasm. Indeed, this is the first movie I’ve ever seen that lists not just the cast in the closing credits, but all the plants, too! This is a strange but gently captivating film that defies all genre and convention.

Silent Friend is a lovely work of science and art

The Wizard of the Kremlin

Co-Wri/Dir: Olivier Assayas (reviews: Something in the Air, Cold Water, Late August, Early September, Personal Shopper, Clouds of Sils Maria)

It’s Moscow in the 1990s. The Cold War is over and the Soviet Union is no more. Chaos and crime rule the streets and the government corporations that used to control oil, gas, transportation and media —have all been snapped up by a small group of oligarchs. In this world is an ambitious, young play director named Vadim Baranov (Paul Dano). He loves the excitement of the infamous parties and nightlife where he meets Ksenia (Alicia Vikander), a beautiful and glamorous performance artist. He casts her in a dystopian production of Zamyatin’s We, and they start appearing together. They two of them make friends with a young oligarch Dmitri Sidorov (Tom Sturridge) and their social circles widen. Next  and come to the attention of another one. Next Vadim is noticed by Boris Berezovsky (Will Keen) a  fabulously wealthy oligarch who, with Vadim at his side, wrenches control of the national broadcaster in exchange for re-electing the chronic alcoholic Boris Yeltsin. Vadim moves on to produce absurdist reality TV shows, until he is convinced by Berezovsky to go for the biggest fish of all: controlling the presidency! And he has the perfect candidate, a stodgy bureaucrat named Vladimir Vladimirovich.

The bureaucrat has no interest in entering politics; he hates dealing with the media and prefers backroom decisions. But Vadim and Berezovsky are convinced he has what it takes: the demeanour of a man ready to take charge and fix Russia. His last name is Putin, and he doesn’t trust Berezovsky but takes on Vadim instead. The young man is now part of the inner circle of the Kremlin, and handles communications and strategy in the turbulent years to come. But how long can he survive in this byzantine world of death, deception and betrayal?

The Wizard of the Kremlin is a cautionary tale about one fictional character’s rise and fall in post-Cold-War Russia. It includes the monumental upheavals there, like the wars in Chechnya and Ukraine, terrorist attacks, the oligarchy, the sinking of a submarine, and Putin himself (well-played by Jude Law) — as well as popular culture, Pussy Riot, and the rise of the far right and the orthodox church. The entire fast-moving, decades-long story is held together by a narrator’s voice, Paul Dano as Vadim, being interviewed after the fact by an American journalist (Jeffrey Wright) at a remote, windswept dacha, somewhere up north. It’s based on a French novel that combined actual events and characters with fictional ones. The acting is generally excellent, though Paul Dano is either wearing a rubber mask or had lots of botox, because his face looks artificial and unbendable. As does his voice. Maybe it’s intentional, since director Assayas loves making movies about rich, famous and powerful people, and how opaque they are. I love the exotic and opulent locations and settings, and its fast-moving, multi-textured images. 

The Wizard of the Kremlin is an exquisite exercise in cynicism.

The Wizard of the Kremlin, Silent Friend and Obsession all open this weekend in Toronto; check your local listings. 

This is Daniel Garber at the Movies, each Saturday morning, on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website culturalmining.com