Margaret Qualley, Claire Denis, Dennis Johnson discussed on The Big Picture

The Big Picture
|

Automatic TRANSCRIPT

And there's kind of elusiveness to this story and it's meaning as there is in many Dennis Johnson books and also in many Claire Denis films. Clergy has updated the story to have a take place somewhere in Central America. I can't recall if she shifts it to Panama or I can't recall. But it's set during the pandemic. To me, it's one of the only realistic portrayals of what the pandemic was like, obviously, it was not in that country during that time. But I thought it was interesting that the amount of times where people just have their masks off, but they're around their ears. That's not something we've seen in any movie because they're trying to be careful about moralizing about mask wearing. It's a very slow, slightly confusing, deeply elliptical movie about people who are lost, like a young woman played by Margaret qualley who plays the journalist who is just desperate and a little crazy and driven mad by her circumstances and needs to get out of this country and just can not. She can't get an assignment. She can't get her, you know, she can't get her passport back from the revolutionaries. It's like I'm very confusing story. This film just hit me on a deep level watching it. I was really, really fascinated by the search for any kind of meaning, any kind of connection in a desperate time. Obviously that's like a big metaphor to swing at, but I thought it was great. You look absolutely baffled by me right now. I was just thinking about the Zoom call scene that Margaret qualley does with John C Reilly as incredible. I understand we're not searching for realism in this film or, you know, but that was that's just not how assigning editors work or talking to each other. It's very funny. Riley improv that whole sequence. Really funny. He's hilarious. There's also Benny safdie appears later in the film in a similarly kind of like menacing and creepy but also very effective turn as a significant figure in the story as all I'll say. Denise doesn't really make very many films in English. High life was her first and she has an interesting facility with it. You know, like it really felt very much like a Claire Denis movie to me because a lot of her movies that have this kind of like elliptical and emotionally intense but also distant quality where you're sort of like, what is the story of this movie? I don't really know what these characters are striving for trying to do, but by the time you get to the end of it, you're like, everything is hopeless, you know. That is how I often feel coming out of her movies. I like this one a lot. It's on Hulu now. It just came to Hulu's play just a couple of weeks in small city movie theaters.

Coming up next