Five Beautiful Things: Movie Recommendations from the Atlantic International Film Festival
Written by Euan MacDonald
Thumbnail & Banner image of Mikey Madison in Anora (2024) by Neon
Roger Ebert once said, “If the movie is a good one, you allow yourself to be absorbed in its fantasy, and its dreams become part of your memories.” My week in September - from the 11th until the 18th - was one spent swimming in dreams, and five specific films will live in my memory forever. I’d like to recommend them to you, all special and full of diverse cinematic spices: An epic, a horror, a drama, a documentary, and a biopic, in that order. No stone of genre is left unturned; for those willing to engage with new, sometimes provocative movies (and a turn-of-the-century classic) I promise something for everyone.
Yi Yi is older than me. Approaching 25, its re-release in theatre meant a chance to experience a definitive film as it should always be: In a sold-out theatre. The romantic nature of the space is special, holding a certain energy that lets a viewer have the grandeur and sheer mass in a way perforate them: Holes are stuck in our thin shields and we become vulnerable, at the whims of the director’s vision. This effect is non-negotiable, however compacted or freeform the picture may be: A runtime could be short and tight, a cincture squeezing the viewer, or may track an epic gamut of three hours plus, as Yang’s final film does. In such a place, the Taiwanese odyssey of circadian dramas immerses and washes over you without choice. It takes you like a strong current. This feeling - one of love in its purest form - is the lifeblood of Edward Yang’s great tribute to living, the title of Yi Yi substituted onscreen for A One and a Two. Within 173 minutes, three full, tragic, and beautiful lives are taken and given back to you. That such a film can exist so unrestrained is a miracle that loops into another miracle; this second miracle, the overt spectacle of the movie, fills you with a gratefulness by the time the credits roll. It is a rare feeling even among its other emotional peers forged deep into the work - joy, tragedy and loneliness. The theatre - packed, I noticed, with audience members of all ages and ethnicities - laughed and cried with a communal synchronicity. These feelings, while special, can be enjoyed and extracted from a great number of films. But above such sentiments, alone and without doubt loftier, it’s the gratitude that pierces you, because it ignores Yi Yi’s sprawl of mortality and makes you think about your life. Not the imitation of life we find in the theatre, or the painting, or the book. But the ebb and flow we all experience unwillingly. No great change - similar to the fate of our characters - can be promised or pledged to those who experience Yi Yi. It provides a buzz, a hum, a distant murmur. It can be found in the score by Kai-Li Peng, a soundtrack which speaks in rare intervals, for me most noticeably during a car-window liminal long shot of Taipei’s identically green-glowing office buildings. It is this scene and scenes like this, of transitional moments, things passing by: Weddings and funerals, first loves and camera snapshots, dying relatives and newborn grandchildren, draining offices and romantic vapour trails, that form the aforementioned murmur, a vibration of living that everyone has felt. We felt it not in our minds or hearts but in our soul when we committed an act that gave us purpose. Yi Yi is the birth (and rebirth) of passion. It is a theme not whispered or mumbled in the end but spoken aloud as the stoic father of the film converses with his disgruntled colleague, who can only talk business even at a mother’s funeral. “You know, NJ, I’m never happy,” he says. The father responds: “When you don’t love what you do…how could you be?” To go against desire, and its close cousin of passion - says writer/director Edward Yang, an electrical engineer previous to becoming a director - is the greatest cruelty to impose on oneself.
IT CHANGED MY LIFE. RESPECT THE BALANCE. YOU ARE ONE. Capitals in egg-white colouring assault the screen throughout this film. They retrieve the power of the short sentence, the sonnet and its terse statements. For our protagonist Elizabeth Sparkle (played by Demi Moore - and later Margaret Qualley) they are simply instructions. Blunt and frank, unapologetic or in any way deceptive. It’s only for our characters that this writing in its all-caps and bolded style represents little more than smart L.A. advertising. They are unaware of the still that has been going around since Cannes and is now being plastered on posters, of a woman with her spinal area amateurishly repaired from a gape into a thin stitched wound. This part - where the “new you” promised by the titular company escapes by ripping out of your backside - is oddly left out of the flashcards that hope to instruct Elizabeth on her journey to self-acceptance. Viewers, who know better, understand that there is a graveness to these placards. Sentences like RESPECT THE BALANCE, for us, do not seem similar to “floss twice a day” or “take your retainer out before you eat”. Both may be medical instructions, and both may be warnings. Neither is followed by a biting two-hour-plus satirical body horror pageant. And pageant is the right word: A show is put on here, in elaborate colourful costumes, and it is most definitely a “contest of beauty”, where male executives obsessed with youth and plastic and ratings (grouped into a singular persona by Dennis Quaid) judge young women to see if they can become sex objects for television. This obsession with youth, of course, creates a feminine beauty ideal that drives our mature protagonist’s search for an unattainable image. Such a plot recalls films like Elephant Man and Perfect Blue, two seminal works on beauty, objectification, and obsession with identity by great masters. Fargeat’s uber-Americana of uncanny saturation and intense close-up manages to retain at least part of their magic, and a tenfold of their monstrosity: The Substance takes choice away from the viewer. You’ll find by the third act, that your hand has begun to involuntarily reach out of your lap or popcorn to cover your mouth or eyes. Shame, disgust, fear, and laughter, all at once. The least you can do is share such a special moment with your friends: See it in theatres.
You don’t hear much about the American dream anymore. From fragments of memories a decade old and through films made between wars and presidents, people of my generation can cobble together a past-tense version of a much more patriotic country where the bootstraps approach and self-made man were real, tangible things. People believed them, and, in their faith, may have actually willed them into being. For a short time. Now, it’s different. People are no longer making films like Lincoln or Patton, mythologizing glorious leaders. Or the tunnel-visioned underdog stories of Miracle. The pinnacle of this concept, the American man rising to glory from ashes, the phoenix in the shape of Rocky, has been put deep into the earth. Now, America says, we make movies like Anora. Sean Baker’s Palme d’Or winner is a film so outrageously against the notion of traditional American empowerment that it breaks the glass ceiling and innovates into new territories. Rocky can be used to put this newness into measurable terms simply because it is the ultimate thematic antithetical: Everything Rocky wants to say, Anora wishes to disprove. Rocky becomes one of the myths: Without a second thought, he rushes headstrong toward his goal of boxing domination, becoming worthy of love, et cetera. Machine-like. Anora reminds us that people do not work like that. People are not self-invented dolls, as they are not created once the camera starts rolling; a story about a real human being must face the fact that we are raised with baggage that we carry with us everywhere. Rocky is not concerned with his identity, parents, history, or mentality beyond his ultimate goal. He is, in effect, an effigy of inferior and immediate creation. He has no past, cannot look back, and exists without the lasting burdens that make us human. He lives within a vacuum of American pride, hope and glory. Anora is, in opposition, a child of America, and Anora herself (played brilliantly by Mikey Madison) is a child of all her birth country’s wrongdoings. Her great-grandparents immigrated from Uzbekistan, and she has done her best to desert her family tree to find new roots in America. She wants an identity in this dream. However, America is not as it was once promised, and Anora as we find her is untethered, lost in the big city of a million Cinderellas searching for their glass slippers, a chance to take them away to a once-promised dream. This rabbit hole has left Anora working a tenacious shift at a strip club. Part of this film is validating sex work and insisting on its validity as an occupation; the other part is using such a job’s strong ability to objectify and alienate to insist on Anora’s inability to make or identify real connections - which is boosted by Anora’s distaste for any interrelation between her present self and past family history. Anora doesn’t know who she is or what she wants. She doesn’t enjoy speaking Russian - her grandmother’s trait - it’s almost a burn mark, a branding. Similar is her choice to abbreviate her birth name of Anora to something more domestic: Annie is the moniker she insists upon. When asked about her name and its meaning by fellow past-generation immigrant Igor (who, unlike her, feels safe in his skin), her reaction spells the crux of the film: “It doesn’t mean anything. We don’t do that here in America.” And she’s right. Cultures are not invited into the USA but instead swallowed in Sean Baker’s imagining. People are lost, and the American dream that was once a trademark and advertisement has been reserved for other people: The oligarchs and royals of the world, to say, the people with names they can flaunt, ones with power. They enter a damaged country as hedonistic and irreverent voyeurs, seeping into troublesome worlds, such as Anora’s. This is the conflict that Baker’s comic tragedy centers on, the glamorous party of absurd and dramatic notions that Anora has been searching for. She is carefree, finally. From this gala, a zenith and come-down shape a dangerous thesis. What happens when it’s over? Who cleans up?
Never meet your heroes, we might be told. It’s almost a maxim at this point, a proverb saved for maturity: That children aren’t lectured but rather taught about when they meet their first celebrity having a rough day. But what if you could see an edge of them beforehand? A sliver of beauty? Film can have a great power to invite us into a director’s dreams. Martin Scorsese may have actually seen the full catalogue of Powell and Pressburger films by the time he met the pair as a young director himself, which accounts for a plentiful amount of dreams and beautiful slivers. While the pictures - which Scorsese loved, and talks about emulating in his own work - most certainly raised the duo in his esteem, it begged absolutely zero questions of what they were like as human beings, as all Powell ever dreamed about was making movies. It was someone else - Emeric - who wrote them. The result of their meeting, for one of the great American directors, was a lifelong tutor and friend. Scorsese himself narrates the entirety of this broad but quick-paced documentary: A six-decade-spanning master artist in his own right, his love for the directing pair as both artists and humans is elevated by an intellectual but contained passion fed through linear narration. Slowly, the Italian-American auteur walks you through Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s illustrious career, the former a director and the latter a writer. Their duel directing credit simply signifies their shared love and labour: These movies are a direct result of their bond, and the audience, they thought, must know. This layered labour of appreciation left me feeling melancholy at the duo’s passing in time but also excited to brush my fingers across a critically acclaimed and bursting portfolio of great films by the two and their production company, dubbed The Archers. Some of their accomplishments include but are not limited to 49th Parallel, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, Black Narcissus, The Red Shoes, I Know Where I’m Going! and The Small Back Room. All and more are covered and beloved in this doc, which proves itself not only as an intimate portrait of two men moving cinematic mountains with boundless love and unreserved devotion but also as an educational tool on both film history and the sometimes unappreciated career of an auteur. They who innovate in art will always be doubted but must nevertheless persevere. As for people like Powell - their art was also their chains, as he wanted nothing else. It had to be movies. And what a gift for theatregoers that it was.
Martin Scorsese and Michael Powell in Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger (2024) by Cohen Media Group, Turner Classic Movies
To be expected, this feels off. It’s the biopic of a man currently running for president - the second time - who has been throwing himself onto media outlets since the eighties, and has built up an adamantine layer of lies to byzantine proportions to hide any truths that may lie beneath a purposefully harvested public image. Trump has encased himself in an enigma of mistruth: Nobody knows a deeper person, only the character that’s been blustering through New York with promises of Babylonian architecture and endless success since his father began slowly shaving away pieces of his own company to Donald. So, with no other choice, an attempt at Trump (portrayed by Sebastian Stan) is hollowed out to bare essentials. He wants to win - we know that for certain. So the heart of the story is not Trump himself, but instead, Trump making himself an empty vessel for infamous prosecutor Roy Cohn. Roy - played by Jeremy Strong in a performance that feels dead and inhumane (complimentary) - is everything Donald will become. Cohn lays out a set of rules that he always follows. They perpetuate the necessity of constant ego, aggressiveness, and perceived luxury “attack, attack, attack”, “admit nothing, deny everything.” But it’s the final decree that we can see would later become a commandment of the Trump mentality. “No matter what happens, you claim victory, and never admit defeat,” Cohn sternly lectures. Slowly but surely, Donald becomes his heir to the throne of new capitalist brokering and blackmail, as we watch New York evolve into the Koch era with Trump struggling to adapt alongside his numerous failing ventures, whose business models are hardwired into an older NYC. This relationship - of grimy lawyer and slowly bloodthirsty corporate merchant - is a sort of rocket fuel when it enters into a frenzied formula of manic dialogue and handheld, grainy filming. Combining it with the grooming of new American evil makes for a magic bullet of a film. It is a darkly funny romp that is unwavering in its declarations and depictions, bookended by music choices consisting of groups such as Suicide, New Order, and Beethoven. For an idea of the three major shifts of the picture, listen to those tracks - in that order. The Apprentice, in an unabashed way, is anything but subtle.
Many of these works, all the result of massive effort from crews and filmmakers, have had their hard work rewarded by garnering attention at Cannes and other film festivals this year, securing distribution deals in North America. This means that at a Cineplex or cinema near you, many of these films could soon be screened. The Substance is playing as I write this. Anora comes out in October. Keep an eye out for the rest, as there is no better way to support this art than by buying a ticket and hugging a seat in a dark-lit room. Chances are I’ll be coming back for a second viewing of some of these. The power several hold is something you should want to revisit. So hopefully, I’ll see you at the movies.