Dispatches From The Big Bear - Reviews: 'Love Lies Bleeding' & 'Crossing'
Berlinale 2024 Dispatch: A Self-Righteous Festival Brimming With Potential
It’s been three weeks since the 74th Berlin Film Festival came to a politically contentious close, with Pro-Palestine sentiments made at the closing ceremony continuing to make headlines worldwide. Israeli-Palestinian filmmakers Basel Adra and Yuval Abraham became targets of online harassment for publicly denouncing Germany’s aid to Israel in the on-going war in Gaza in their acceptance speech for Best Documentary Film on Sunday. Subsequently,the Instagram account of Berlinale’s Panorama section was hacked, displaying an infographic claiming to take responsibility for Germany’s complicity in Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people, which only added fuel to the fire. The post was hastily deleted and in an official statement issued shortly thereafter, Berlinale strongly condemned “the spreading of anti-semitic posts about the Middle East war” and announced that it would be pressing criminal charges against the unknown perpetrators. Multiple German politicians, including the mayor of Berlin, Kai Wegner, went on to deem the support for the Palestinian cause as unabashedly ‘anti-semitic’ and ‘an unacceptable relativization’ of the on-going war in Gaza. Green Party politician and German Ministry of Culture, Claudia Roth, who attended the award ceremony, went so far as to claim that she had been clapping for only one of the winners on stage during the closing ceremony. Despite the chaotic conclusion to what had been, up to that point, a relatively smooth running festival, by the end of last Sunday I'd managed to watch a total of 24 films - 22 of them being full length features - sacrificing sleep to a degree. A common thread ran through the films I’ve enjoyed the most this year: travel induced states of fluidity as a metaphor for the malleability of identity (Crossing, A Traveler’s Needs) and the overarching theme of gender as performance (Love Lies Bleeding, Janet Planet, I Saw The TV Glow) they were more concerned with capturing a feeling, encapsulating a mood than providing resolutions. With exceptions few and far between – Alonso Ruizpalacios’s La Cocina tumultuous and carefully crafted feature evocative of the abiding anxiety in the Safdies’ Uncut Gems and the ever-present chaos of working in a restaurant kitchen in Philip Barantini’s Boiling Point with a tinge of magical realism thrown in there for good measure was a blast from start to finish and kept me on my toes its entire 139 minute runtime), the majority of the films I had the pleasure and privilege of seeing aimed to push the boundaries of what mainstream cinema could be for the better.
‘Love Lies Bleeding’ Review: Rose Glass’ Queer Meditation on Love, Desire & Revenge is a Thrilling Ride From Start to Finish
Saint Maud director’,Maud Glass’, much anticipated second feature packs a tight-fisted punch, literally and metaphorically. The film features a glowing lead performance from Katy M. O'Brian as Jackie, an aspiring female bodybuilder, who falls in love with Lou (a soft butch Kristen Stewart in flannel cut offs), a reclusive gym manager with a violent past, on the deserted outskirts of Albuquerque, New Mexico. What ensues is a riveting tale of love, lust and revenge that could only be described as the lesbian lovechild of roadtrip classic Thelma & Louise and the Coens’ debut feature, Blood Simple, for its willingness to strain the pulp out of the neo-noir without losing the humor in the over-the-top kitschy glamor of its setting: the American Southwest in the late 1980s. The nostalgic insignias of a bygone era are imbued with newfound meaning through the eerie synths of Clint Mansell’s score and the neon hues of Ben Fordesman’s cinematography (who previously worked with Glass on Saint Maud). The business-in-the-front-party-in-the-back mullet Lou’s dirtbag of a brother-in-law JJ (Dave Franco) dons as an era-appropriate marker of hostile masculinity, the white slouch socks & denim cutoffs Jackie (O’Brian) wears to the open air gun range for her daytime job as if in active defiance of the small town misogyny that permeates everyday interactions, the neon marquees of the suburban strip malls that illuminate the tarmac of the barren streets at night all come together to set the tone for the scene of the crime: where passion converges with violence and knuckles wet with foreign blood are wiped away on sweaty foreheads. The body as a vessel of gender performance and identity takes center stage in Love Lies Bleeding as biceps bulging with steroids are squeezed into teeny tiny bikinis to be paraded around on stage and domestic violence victims are avenged by impetuous lesbian lovers. This violently intoxicating combination of emotional textures leads up to the emotionally-charged finale, in which Jackie leaves behind the havoc her steroid infused outbursts have inadvertently caused for the world bodybuilding championship in Las Vegas, much to Lou’s dismay. As the shiny artifice of her oiled-up torso glistens under the nauseating white of the Vegas spotlights, Lou tries to find a way out of the increasingly aggravating predicament she has left her in, which ultimately culminates in a confrontation with her father (Ed Harris), an eccentric mob cowboy with a penchant for beetles actively wanted by the FBI for his past crimes. Dead bodies pile up at the bottom of the canyon as narrative tension reaches its tipping point in a final showdown between father and daughter. Love Lies Bleeding leads you down the rabbit hole of greasy roadside diners, makeshift cowboys, vast grassland expanses with tumbleweeds blowing in the wind, and TV static filling up the background: the remaining vestiges of a dying Americana stockpiled in a hicktown surrounded by decay on all corners. But it is a queer love story as much as it is a meditation on sex, desire, and the lengths to which one would go to see through these violent delights to their violent ends. And it’s a whole lot of fun, if you’re up for the ride.
‘Crossing’ Review: Levan Akin Makes the Journey Across the Sea In This Sincere Look at the Covert Reality of Being A Transgender Woman In Istanbul
Levan Akin’s follow-up to the acclaimed And Then We Danced explores queer identity and the much-needed safe haven of familial solidarity in this touching tale of a Georgian woman’s adamant search for her transgender niece in the overcrowded streets of Istanbul. The film opens with wide shots of the wavy Black Sea, as if in anticipation of the cross continental journey our protagonist is about to embark on. We’re introduced to Lia (a mindfully droll Mzia Arabuli), a retired teacher determined to find out what has become of her niece, Tekla,who has seemingly vanished out of the face of the Earth after being ostracized out of the family for coming out as a transgender woman. In a chance encounter with an old neighbor’s son, Achi (Lucas Kankava), she is made aware of the likely possibility that Tekla has fled the country to disappear in Istanbul. Accompanied by her informant, who only offers to show her where her niece is located on the condition that she take him with her, Lia takes the long and winding road to Istanbul. Upon arrival, the pair take up in a shabby motel room in the city center and start wandering the streets in search of Lia’s niece. The ferry they take to cross the Bosphorus, aptly becomes a narrative transition point between characters, as Akin steadily diverts his camera’s gaze from the traveling pair and introduces us to Evrim (an earnestly sincere Deniz Dumanlı in a debut performance), a transgender lawyer on her way to the doctor’s office to procure the documents she needs to change her legally recognized gender on her national identity card. We follow her along as she goes about her day: taking a drag of her cigarette as she walks off the pier to meet a friend, cheekily complimenting the doctor’s haircut (who can’t feign interest long enough to look up at her face while addressing her), getting stood up by her longtime beau at a restaurant table, and flirting with a handsome taxi driver on her way home. Akin is documentarian-like in the way he lets his camera linger in between moments of narrative action and invites us into the lived experiences of these characters as the people they represent, people whom we rarely see depicted on the big screen. He toys the line between fact and fiction; the real and the imagined come to a head within the final 10 minutes. Akin’s commitment to depicting the hidden community of transgender women in Istanbul as authentically as possible, devoid of a pathos customary to Western cinema that belittles the very people it seeks to give voice to. It pervades every scene and elevates the on-the-surface sentimental story of an aunt looking for her lost niece to a touching account of the universal need for familial community in the form of a love letter addressed to its setting. Much like Evrim, who feels trapped within the gender binary that dictates how she ought to present herself to the world, Istanbul is a city perpetually stuck between two seemingly opposing sides: it is neither of the East nor of the West but an amalgamation of the two. A place, in which hedonism and faith concur, where one goes to bed hungover from one too many glasses of Raki and wakes up at dawn with the prayer call. So it feels apt to set a story centering the struggle of transgender folk here, a city that has shapeshifted throughout history and refused to be pigeonholed as an arbitrary port city. At its core, Crossing is about liminal spaces, places of transition and states of fluidity: Lia and Achi cross continents, cross boundaries both spatial and physical in search of one who has crossed the gender binary from one end to other; defying the given rigidity of established cultural norms. It is a reminder that one should not be discouraged from trying to get to the other side, even if the horizon isn’t in sight.