Carmen

Ah, Natascha McElhone: It’s been a long time. This wonderful actor has kept busy on TV in recent years, but I find it’s been two decades since I saw her in a movie, the underrated Steven Soderbergh version of Solaris. Now McElhone assumes the center and title role of Carmen, a gentle and attentive film in which her character loses a dead old identity and gains an exciting new one, as well as a community that values her. There are certainly less pleasant ways to pass an afternoon than watching McElhone’s Carmen find peace and joy. Best of all, it unfolds on the beautiful island of Malta, given the glow and hue of Heaven itself by its writer-director Valerie Buhagiar, herself of Maltese heritage.

Carmen has spent most of her life looking after her brother, a dour priest at an ill-attended church. When he dies, another priest is sent for, as well as his sister who will look after him; there’ll be no place for Carmen at the church any more — or so everyone thinks. Carmen hides away in the building, sneaking into the confessional box and listening to the church members’ sins. Instead of sitting in judgment, Carmen offers the people advice, and they take it gratefully. It’s not that Carmen ever leaves the church; it’s that she casts off her former thankless role in it and tries on a new persona, one that may also be capable of love with a young pawn-store owner (Steven Love).

Buhagiar is said to have based Carmen’s story on the life of her aunt, but guessing what events in the film have real-world analogues won’t do much for us or for the movie. Past a certain point, aside from a detour with Carmen on a boat with a less than gracious host, what happens to and for Carmen is what Buhagiar and we want to see happen. The overriding vibe of the film is warmth, from its star and from its setting. After watching ugly people fight each other amid junk and debris in last week’s Samaritan, I was really ready to spend time with Natascha McElhone learning to smile again with a preternaturally soothing backdrop. Soothing — that’s the word for Carmen in general. The complications in the plot (including the new priest’s sister, who shows up at the church before he does) are easily overcome. The film believes in its happy ending(s), so we do too.

This friendly daydream of a movie should be seen by some of you folks who’ve been wanting something like it — it doesn’t have a rating, but I’d put this at PG at most, possibly even G. It’s set in the ‘80s but could’ve been made in the ‘50s. If you can’t stream it later this month, it hits DVD in October. But if you can find it on a big screen within a reasonable drive, Malta will not disappoint you. Neither will McElhone.

Carmen doesn’t say much; she’s not used to speaking (which I guess is what makes her a good listener). So McElhone does much of her work with her expressive face, sometimes her hands or body language. The movie feels like a gift offered to McElhone in kindness, and she reciprocates by conveying a deep kindness herself, made deeper when Carmen finds out she deserves some kindness too. In a lesser movie, Carmen would leave the church altogether, but we see here that, although a lot of her life supporting her brother was drudgery, a lot of it engaged her and gratified her. So why shouldn’t she stay and be herself within the church, improving it from there? The movie is far from Catholic propaganda; from what we see it doesn’t matter what faith, if any at all, is practiced in the building. It’s all about the community seeking wholeness there.

The Lost City

Sandra Bullock seems legitimately depressed in the early scenes of The Lost City. She’s playing Dr. Loretta Sage, a bestselling romantic-adventure novelist whose archaeologist husband died five years ago. Since then, Loretta has barely left the house, and she’s no longer feeling the Romantic Adventure — she’s thinking of retiring her Romantic Adventurers Lovemore and Dash, which would be a bummer for hunky but doofy model Alan (Channing Tatum), who poses as Dash on the covers of Loretta’s books. Anyway, Bullock has been altogether too grim in recent years, what with Gravity, Bird Box, and The Unforgivable, so I was worried about her demeanor here until I remembered the film was following the familiar Romancing the Stone template, where the novelist must break through her emotional hindrances and embrace, well, Romance and Adventure. As it is, I don’t think Bullock even laughs until almost the end.

That doesn’t mean she isn’t entertaining, though. The Lost City is the sort of bubbly, unchallenging studio plaything that some of us may receive gratefully in these harrowed times. Will I watch it again? Maybe not; not when I can rewatch Romancing the Stone or, for that matter, Raiders of the Lost Ark. But it’s a mild mood enhancer if you just hand yourself over to it and say, Okay, movie, do your thing. There may be long stretches where you forget the official plot and just roll with the gently funny rapport between Bullock and Tatum. I liked that Loretta is still too fogged up by grief to notice that the younger, dishy Alan seems to be crushing on her; I liked the movie’s nods to LGBTQ+ representation in the persons of Bowen Yang and Patti Harrison as satellites publicizing Loretta’s book. The movie feels somewhat canned but is also good-hearted. The only significant blood we ever see is part of an abrupt joke I won’t spoil.

So this is an old-school adventure, with caves and underwater tunnels and, as advertised, a lost city on a remote island, a city that skunky billionaire Abigail Fairfax (Daniel Radcliffe) wants to discover. To that end, he kidnaps Loretta, figuring she can translate a bit of parchment that might lead to the city and its possible treasure. Wanting to establish himself as Loretta’s hero, Alan follows, and the two are soon bumbling through the jungle, doing battle with leeches and sharing a hammock that really only fits one. The awkwardness with which Loretta extricates herself from the hammock while trying not to awaken Alan is an example of the unnecessary but welcome gestures towards realistic discomfiture sprinkled throughout the film. Alan is always jumping into derring-do situations and finding himself not up to the task. This isn’t a cruelly gritty deconstruction of adventure, though, so we simply read it as comedic misadventure. 

The Lost City is the sort of amiable, star-centered bonbon that used to make modest-to-surprising profits in a more lenient age for movies. Sadly, it may not have cleared enough to call for a sequel, but it’s done well enough in the new COVID landscape to be noted as a moderate success. As an “original” story not involving superheroes that seeks only to amuse, it has its place. That it feels a little thin and forgettable may come down to the general lack of imagination that went into the action set pieces; they always seem to boil down to our heroes being chased by gun-toting henchmen, and even the climactic erupting volcano doesn’t pack as much of a punch as it should. Still, the reveal of the true buried treasure confirms the film’s devotion to tweaking dusty old tropes, and if there are no Loretta & Alan adventures in the future, I hope at least to see Bullock and Tatum hanging out again. They make this ride worth it.

 

Get Away If You Can

Both the poster and the very title of Get Away If You Can suggest that we’re in for a psychological thriller. On the poster, Ed Harris’ face looms menacingly over our protagonists, embattled married couple Dominique (Dominique Braun) and TJ (Terrence Martin). We might assume we’ll get a love-triangle thriller. In fact, it’s a drama in which the couple try to heed the title’s warning. But are they meant to get away from each other, or from the outside influences that want to pry them apart? Once you get used to what the movie actually is, it’s a low-key indie effort with a perfect, though probably metaphorical, ending. 

Dominique comes from Argentina, and has a sister there (Martina Gusman) who wants her to give up on TJ and his toxic-masculine family and come live with her on her ranch. TJ contends with his surly dad (Harris) and his chip-off-the-old-block brother (Riley Smith), who want him to give up on Dominique and come take over the old man’s tugboat business. All of this is in the couple’s heads when they set sail (on a sailboat bought by TJ’s brother with TJ’s money) for “the Islands of Despair.” Dominique wants to explore the islands. TJ wants to continue on to a warmer, less rocky environment, where he can surf and she can scuba dive. She gets out of the boat and sets up camp on the island, and won’t get back in the boat with TJ despite his pleas.

Get Away If You Can throws in flashbacks to break up the narrative (only an hour and fourteen minutes less the end credits). Each flashback does the work of establishing the angels (Dominique’s gentle but insistent sister) and demons (TJ’s selfish, hostile family) dictating the couple’s actions. A good portion of the film was shot on location on la Isla Róbinson Crusoe off of Chile, and the directors, who happen to be the lead couple themselves (they’re married in real life also), bring back a lot of gorgeous footage that makes the case for why Dominique wants to stay there. After a while, though, we understand that the island, like the ending, is a metaphor. The title turns out to be a well-meaning nudge, not a stern admonishment or, indeed, a warning.

Towards the conclusion, when Dominique grows a marijuana garden and goes around sporting a headband adorned with dank nugs, while TJ seems to have come to terms with the escape he needs, the movie proposes a castaway, Adam-and-Eve existence in opposition to living according to rich relatives’ wishes, whether paradisiacal or infernal. We’re not meant to take the couple’s choice literally, or subject it to logical scrutiny. We’re just meant to go with it, and the script (also by the directors) subtly works out why certain things don’t work for the couple while other things do. It’s not until Dominique rekindles her creative flame and TJ becomes one with the waves that the door is opened for the ending we want for them.

Is it bad to reveal that a movie has a happy ending? In this case, it may help a viewer get through the difficult early stretch when Dominique and TJ, still under thrall to their influences, seem to hate each other. But it’s just that they’re trapped in a frustrating stasis. Get Away If You Can ends up as a romance, not just a psychological drama (though that, too). You just shouldn’t expect a thriller — say, Ed Harris sends some goons after the couple to split them up, or the couple go through twists and turns and betray each other. It’s not that sort of film; coming as it does from a married couple, it emerges as a personal statement. Never a slouch, Harris delivers a grouchy turn visible even when he’s not around, in TJ’s cowed eyes; Braun and Martin enact a couple in love as well as at war. See it if you can. 

The Stand In

For about an hour, I was mystified by my response to The Stand In. Was this not supposed to be a wacky identity-swap comedy? Instead I could feel my stress level rising, and the movie certainly doesn’t look like a comedy — as lighted by cinematographer Eric Moynier, it has the burgundy tone of a somber legal drama. But then the movie’s scheme clicked into place. Please don’t go by the trailer or the poster: Despite some funny bits, The Stand In is more of a drama about those who make comedies, somewhat like Judd Apatow’s Funny People. If you go into it knowing this, it’ll take you far less time to plug into it. And it boasts two terrific performances by Drew Barrymore, as shambolic low-comedy movie star Candy Black and as Candy’s stand-in Paula.

Candy is a dumpster fire of a person who screams at everyone, and Paula is a sweet wallflower who loves being close to the star’s light and heat. So for a long time, our identification shifts to poor Paula, and when she switches places with Candy we expect her to blossom under the new attention. But that would be the typical Drew Barrymore rom-com, and that’s not what we have here. (To give you an idea, the script is by Sam Bain, who co-wrote Four Lions.) Five years after an on-set meltdown that cost a co-star (Ellie Kemper) her eye, Candy is being forced to go into rehab. Her plan is to get Paula to take her place in rehab so she can stay home, drink herself to sleep, and maybe pursue her true passion of woodworking. So Paula takes over, and ends up being a better Candy than Candy herself — Candy without the drugs, attitude and decibel level.

Candy is awful and Paula is one of us, so it’s jarring at first when we sense that their trading places goes deeper and somewhat darker. Paula, an aspiring actress, doesn’t just want Candy’s fame — she wants her life, and that extends to Steve (Michael Zegen), who’s into making Shaker furniture and who has struck up an online relationship with Candy. When we realize that Paula is about to help herself to Steve, she starts heading into areas where we really can’t follow her any more; once she drugs Candy’s smoothie so she can invite Steve over to Candy’s (now Paula’s) mansion, our allegiance, too, has changed places. This all is a good deal more interesting than the taffy-flavored comedy I was expecting, where gauche Paula has the storybook ending, while rotten Candy gets her comeuppance.

As Candy, who hasn’t bothered to get her hair done in a while, Barrymore has her own features and a sloppy red mane that recalls Susan Sarandon. As Paula, Barrymore sports a fake nose and blonde bangs that make her look more like Wendi McLendon-Covey’s stand-in. Candy’s puffier, vulnerable face draws us closer, while Paula’s sharper profile, done up with Hollywood makeup, comes to seem a bit hawk-like. Candy, with Barrymore’s considerable help, becomes a real and complex woman who goes by her given name Cathy Tyler; she seems visibly relieved not to have to deal with publicity any more (these days, camera phones make everyone paparazzi), and she throws herself gratefully into building bureaus from scratch. Paula, who has only ever wanted what Candy/Cathy has rejected, grows dislikable in a different style from Candy. Paula has false values, which Barrymore highlights by establishing that Paula gets less compassionate the farther along “Candy’s” apology tour she goes.

So the Barrymore we don’t expect to get the patented Barrymore rom-com happy ending gets it. That’s fair, and it gives us more to chew on. Barrymore, whose shingle Flower Films produced the movie — Jamie Babbit (But I’m a Cheerleader) directed — seems to be telling us that we wouldn’t want to be the media’s idea of Drew Barrymore. (Although I doubt she’s also telling us her true love is building ladderback chairs.) Candy is presented to us as almost a female Adam Sandler in Funny People, headlining terrible stoner comedies (Pippi Bongstocking) in which she falls face-first into cow flop and delivers her catch-phrase into the camera: “Hit me where it hurts!” Talk about self-hatred. That’s the life Paula wants until she gets it. If you can ignore the brief irritation of T.J. Miller as Candy’s agent and Lena Dunham as more or less herself (though her character’s name is Lisa, ha-ha), The Stand In is more biting about what Hollywood and its consumers want from women than it’ll probably get credit for. 

Riot Girls

Jovanka Vuckovic’s lively feature debut Riot Girls is set in 1995 and seems to be a war between the ‘90s aesthetic and the ‘80s ethos. The heroes dress like the grunge army and listen to bands like L7; the villains wear varsity jackets and blare a hair-metal anthem called “Danger in the Air.” The mohawks versus the mullets. The Southside Serpents against Cobra Kai. Riot Girls is also post-apocalyptic, which makes this an alternate-history dystopia. A strange illness has eliminated all the adults, and only the teens are left. (We’re not briefed on whether the teens will expire at a certain age.) This effectively clears the board of baby boomers and many Gen-Xers — I was 25 in ’95 — and leaves the world in the hands of late-Gen-X and early millennials.

Really, though, all this just builds a world in which teens are in charge. It’s a premise, not the plot. Riot Girls focuses on two heroes: Nat (Madison Iseman) and Scratch (Paloma Kwiatkowski), girlfriends who live on the East Side of their emptied-out town of Potter’s Bluff (the evil jocks reign over the West Side). Nat’s cocky brother Jack (Alexandre Bourgeois) has a habit of disabling West Side vehicles and raiding them for whatever supplies he can find; during one such foray, he’s captured, and Nat and Scratch ride off to the rescue. The grrl-power vibe of the piece has already been so firmly established that the script-flipping of the girls saving the boy doesn’t feel gimmicky — it feels like a necessary rejoinder. Jack goes off by himself impetuously, not listening to any of the girls around him, and the girls have to put things right.

The resemblance of Riot Girls to Riverdale in terms of emphasis and style (for instance, Celiana Cárdenas’ colorful cinematography) is most likely accidental; Vuckovic, previously the editor of the Canadian horror-film magazine Rue Morgue, seems to look to genre favorites like Massacre at Central High and Return of the Living Dead (whose signature song, “Partytime” by 45 Grave, underscores one scene). The script, by Katherine Collins, kind of proceeds from one situation to the next — the pile-up of familiar complications feels perfunctory. But Iseman’s soulful vulnerability and Kwiatkowski’s tough-girl Joan Jett deadpan (under which, of course, a soft gooshy heart beats) compel our interest and affection. Ultimately, the movie emerges as a girl-girl romantic adventure, with realistic gore that perhaps only a Rue Morgue veteran would insist upon. (The dark blood drips and spatters maybe a shade too convincingly for this teen fantasia.)

I’ve seen Riot Girls dismissed as disappointing and slight, which shows the weight of anticipation that can bog down the reception of any female-centered work. My guess is that the movie is offered as the kind of low-budget mid-‘90s Blockbuster rental that would’ve swum in the same waters as Hole’s Live Through This, Bikini Kill’s Pussy Whipped, Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures, Rafal Zielinski’s Fun, Rachel Talalay’s Tank Girl, and Alex Sichel’s All Over Me. This movie would have fit in perfectly then, and may be at the spear’s tip of the inevitable ‘90s nostalgia (when the 25th anniversary of the premiere of Friends takes over the media for a solid week, as it did recently, something is happening).

So Riot Girls is both retrograde and progressive, which fits this polarized time. Vuckovic’s direction is assured, steady and earthy; the images and sound have a pleasing solidity. We may question, after the fact, the sociological details of the milieu (has every town and city split into factions like Potter’s Bluff?), but in the moment we just accept it as the reality. The story only seems political insofar as it sees the same flaws (and strengths) continuing into the next generation. There’s a whiff of Lord of the Flies about it, as well as a passing fragrance of The Chocolate War. In brief, Riot Girls, if novelized, might turn up on school summer-reading lists (and promptly be protested by the usual bluenoses) — if not now, then certainly in 1995.

Tell It to the Bees

Tell It to the Bees is a modest, satisfyingly morose drama that tries a little too hard to be poetic and literary. (It’s based on a 2009 novel by Fiona Shaw.) In 1952 Scotland, two women from opposite paths — working-poor mother Lydia (Holliday Grainger) and doctor Jean (Anna Paquin) — fall in love, and, with Lydia’s little boy Charlie (Gregor Selkirk), keep house for a while. What sets this particular tale of repressed/suppressed passion apart are its expansively bleak milieu of Scotland and its general tone of British fatalism. Things don’t go well for the lovers or for anyone (supportive or otherwise, mostly otherwise) around them. Tell It to the Bees is a collective portrait of misery, and its refusal to crowbar in a happy ending is admirable though not especially entertaining.

Yet I was held by it, by its seriousness and its honesty about poverty and intolerance. Adapted by two sisters (Henrietta and Jessica Ashworth) and directed by rock-video vet Annabel Jankel, Tell It to the Bees is suffused with a refreshing femaleness, conveying a trust and a relaxed contentedness that can really only happen between women. Lydia and Jean don’t have a great love for the ages, with wildly ripe passages of erotic gyrating. They keep each other company for a while, and feel easier around each other. Their affair — Lydia is actually married, to a saturnine bloke (Emun Elliott) who came back from the war darker and angrier from what he saw there — is not emphatic or even very dramatic. They don’t fight about anything — they don’t have time to. Outside forces drive a wedge between them soon enough.

Some of the film takes the point of view of Charlie (and is narrated at the end by Billy Boyd as an adult Charlie), who only objects to Lydia’s relationship with Jean insofar as she isn’t truthful with him about it. For the most part he’s happy enough looking after Jean’s beehives in the back yard. Ah, yes, the bees. They listen to Charlie; he tells them secrets. They also buzz, like the gossips in town who make life so fraught for women who don’t fit in. (For good measure, there’s an abortion performed by force on a young woman pregnant by a black man, as well as rape attempted and, by several boys years earlier, fulfilled.) The bees, not always physically convincing, are probably the only special effects in this first feature in 25 years by Annabel Jankel, who in another pocket of her career co-created Max Headroom and co-directed the Super Mario Bros. movie. No evolved dinosaurs or stuttering talking heads here; Jankel finds lyricism in nature and in hushed, intimate moments between adults. But the bees are also a bit much, especially when they come to the rescue during the climax.

Even there, though, I had to ask myself, Did you really want to see the alternative? At least one horror is averted. Tell It to the Bees doesn’t strike me as a film that will become avidly beloved among its target audience, but then I thought the same about Lost and Delirious and have been regularly surprised over the years by its scattered cult following. This film might follow suit, although there’s little terribly daring about it, nothing much to compel that sort of giddy “Rage more” loyalty. It is one of many, many narratives about same-sex lovers in a time and place that rejected them. A large part of why it might work for viewers can be credited to Grainger and Paquin, who play small and subtle notes. While the bees and the buzzing get louder outside (in working-class Scotland there’s mud and disapproval everywhere you look) the women address each other in breathless whispers. The very quietude of their love is convincing; they share an oasis of calm in a town that seems to care about nothing so much as crushing the joy of its women under its masculine muddy boots.

What confuses me is that this is a film that traffics in romantic daydreams (there’s a fair amount of drifty dancing to turntable big-band records) and ascribes higher retributive intelligence to bees, but that can’t quite bring itself to give its lovers a fairy-tale ending. It’s as if the filmmakers (and perhaps the novelist before them) were saying “Bees will swarm to stop an assault more credibly than women can live together unopposed in 1952 Scotland.” Or in much too much of 2019 America, for that matter. The plotting seems punitive in a way that was common back when entertainment was required to show that crime did not pay — and homosexuality was a crime. As I say, I was held by the performances and the tone, but a narrative like this seems more at home in the era it’s about than the era we live in. We need more punk now, more stories of triumph and opposition, gobs of spit in the eyes of the buzzers, and to hell with the bees.

Cold War

Together with Paul Schrader’s First Reformed, Paweł Pawlikowski’s latest work of beauty Cold War reminds modern viewers how lovely and, yes, roomy a film shot in the old, squarish Academy ratio can look. Towards the end, when the film’s star-crossed lovers are dropped off by a bus beneath a massive tree, they are dwarfed by it in a way they couldn’t be in a more conventional rectangular composition. Events global and intimate weigh on the protagonists, and the images (with the help of cinematographer Łukasz Żal), with their cavernous head room, imply that the very atmosphere itself is pressing down on the people.

Cold War, loosely inspired by the story of Pawlikowski’s parents, runs a brisk 88 minutes (including six or so minutes of end credits) and spans fifteen years. The next time some hot-shot blockbuster director brings a superhero movie in at north of two (or even two and a half) hours and tries to tell you the epic length is necessary, show them Cold War, which despite its brevity allows itself plenty of breathing room for ambiguity and elliptical storytelling. The couple, singer Zula (Joanna Kulig) and pianist Wiktor (Tomasz Kot), run across each other various times over the decade and a half, in Poland, in Moscow, in Berlin and Yugoslavia and Paris. Each encounter seems to make the same point about how they’re not meant for anyone else but can’t live together either.

The film’s approach to the romance (if that is the word) is a bit distanced, as though Pawlikowski had no idea what drew and bound together his own disputatious parents. Maybe he made the movie in order to find out, but I don’t think he succeeded, if so. The movie makes better sense as a metaphor for conflicting values or temperaments; she is art, he is business, she is confidence, he is fear, she is flexible, he is rigid. Most importantly, he defects to France and becomes a peripatetic session musician, while she legally goes wherever her ensemble goes and eventually builds a solo career. During all this, the music starts with peasant-authentic folk, then shifts to state-approved odes to authority, then jazz, then rock and roll; we see the evolution (or devolution, as some at the time would have said) of pop music in the mid-20th century.

Cold War has a classical old-Hollywood chiaroscuro sheen. Its black-and-white images heighten the starkness of the European settings during the titular era (1949-1964). It has its thematic and aesthetic ducks in a row; it’s an understated achievement of great elegance and awareness of the intractable illogic of people. As cinema, it’s near perfect, but there’s many another schlockier romance that actually makes us care about its lovers. Maybe if you go too far down the road of art you have to leave the basics of manipulation and pathos behind, the narrative beats that pull emotions out of us whether or not we want them to. Cold War doesn’t do that. It leaves us with a vague sadness about what might have been, and we sort of have to climb into the movie and flesh it out — imagine the dialogue we’re not privy to, the connective scenes of standard affection and attraction Pawlikowski artfully leaves out. In brief, Cold War rings the bells that respond to a gorgeous brushstroke, but ignores the basic matinee-goer’s desire to know why the boy and the girl get together, should be together, are destined to stay together.

Signature Move

If you feel like registering a gentle complaint about the current leadership, you could do worse than Signature Move, a lesbian dramedy about the maybe-sort-of-something between a Pakistani-American immigration lawyer and a Mexican-American bookstore clerk. Zaynab (co-writer/co-producer Fawzia Mirza) meets Alma (Sari Sanchez) at a friendly bar; they drink, dance, and fall into bed. The proudly out Alma would like the fling to become something more. Zaynab, fairly tightly closeted, isn’t sure; she keeps her sexuality from her recently widowed mother (Shabana Azmi), who spends her days sitting in Zaynab’s apartment, watching Pakistani soap operas and spying on passersby with her binoculars.

The script, by Mirza and Lisa Donato, is neatly assembled. The soap operas (Alma speaks in praise of telenovelas too) as well as a seemingly discordant note — female lucha libre wrestling — form part of the movie’s theme about acting, pretending, lying. It’s maybe a little too much of a coincidence that Zaynab takes wrestling lessons from a client (as payment for Zaynab’s legal services) and then meets and beds the daughter of a once-famed, now-retired luchadora. But I didn’t mind, because metaphorically it’s sound — the universe is conspiring to show Zaynab in ways painfully emotional and physical that she has to stop acting.

Director Jennifer Reeder, an indie-film veteran, keeps Signature Move bubbling atop a low flame, occasionally turning up the heat when the lovers enjoy each other (always clothed — save for a couple of words, this could be a PG film). It’s assured work from a filmmaker who values human-scaled awkward comedy over grand passion; the movie itself could have been handled as a soap opera, but Reeder disdains cheese (this is most welcome during the climax, at a lucha libre event). The women are agreeably paired: the warm and fleshy Sanchez matches up amusingly with the angular, neurotic Mirza, whose short swept-up hair and stoic default expression give her a resemblance to the young, imperious Camille Paglia.

One odd motif is the concept of a human being “coming out of” another human, the unlikely link mothers and daughters have despite deceiving looks. It also neatly sums up the dichotomous feeling many modern LGBT folks have when trying to reconcile their heritage with their sexuality. Sooner or later Zaynab has to move on past her mother, and so on. Signature Move packs a lot under a relatively small hood; the film weighs in at a slender hour and fifteen minutes, and sometimes feels like an extended pilot for a Pakistani-American lesbian New Girl. Join Zaynab, her girlfriend Alma, and their zany friends and family every week on NBC! Certainly there are worse things to say of a film than that we’d gladly spend more hours with its characters.

That’s probably more a result of the charm of the actors (I especially liked Audrey Francis as Zaynab’s wrestling coach, sort of an Illeana Douglas with biceps) than a reflection of the filmmakers’ goals here. Signature Move is short, but sticks around exactly as long as it needs to in order to make its point about the courage of declaring oneself (or one’s self). The abbreviated length also means we don’t have to wallow in the lovers’ temporary misery for very long. The movie is a perfectly pleasant bonbon for its target audience and its allies, and likely poison to those who don’t care for Pakistanis, Mexicans, gays, or women.

La La Land

Is the Hollywood musical worth saving? There may be a compelling argument to be made for it, but La La Land, I’m afraid, isn’t it. The movie is popular and is supposedly on track to win a tub of Oscars, including Best Picture. It’s full of music and color, but otherwise it’s a thin and glittery shell with a lot of hollowness at its center. It’s about two young wanna-be entertainers, actress Mia Dolan (Emma Stone) and jazz pianist Sebastian Wilder (Ryan Gosling), trying to make it in Los Angeles. They fall in love, but conflicts about artistic integrity threaten their idyll; during one such squabble, I thought, Jeez, I don’t know that I was in the mood to watch New York, New York again.

That Martin Scorsese musical, a flop when first released, still boasts a level of emotional ambition that seems well beyond La La Land. The story is almost offensively simple and streamlined, even though the movie weighs in at a punitive two hours and seven minutes. Sebastian, who dreams of owning his own jazz club, is set up as the white boy who alone can appreciate good music — he certainly appreciates it more than does the slick Keith (John Legend), whose successful, bland-pop band Sebastian is obliged to join to make some money. Mia shows some acting chops in an interrupted audition, but it’s a measure of the movie’s itchy impatience — and that of its young writer-director Damien Chazelle (Whiplash) — that when Mia rents out theater space and performs her one-woman show, we don’t see any of it.

No, Chazelle would rather stage elaborate musical numbers, many of which glisten with unmistakable flop sweat. In classic musicals, we didn’t feel (though we could infer) the hard labor that went into the music and the choreography. Here, I kept imagining how many brutal takes must have been necessary to nail such sequences as the meant-to-be-a-wow opener, set on an L.A. freeway. The movie keeps stopping dead for numbers that seem meant simultaneously to honor and to outdo the musicals of yore, with crescendos and fireworks; for a while, we get one climax after another, so it’s not surprising that the film burns itself out fairly quickly, with an hour or so left to go. Gosling and Stone try, but they just don’t speak the language of musicals natively or fluently. We’re put in the position of assessing their crooning or belting as talented amateurs.

La La Land is being predicted (even by its detractors) as the big Oscar winner because, like the equally meretricious The Artist of a few years ago, it pays loving, moist-eyed tribute to The Magic of Movies. (A clip from Rebel Without a Cause provides a few seconds of reprieve from this movie’s faux-classic scheme.) It’s comparable to old Hollywood in at least one significant way: its vision is blindingly white, with John Legend brought in to play a black music star who just isn’t as serious about black music as a white man is. This, apparently, is the sort of thing that passed muster over the six years of writing and revising that it took Chazelle to bring La La Land to the screen. For all that, for all the time and effort the movie took, very little passion comes through. Technically it’s whiz-bang — sometimes it unavoidably comes off as “Hey look Ma, I’m a director!” — but it’s an empty truffle, all sweet surface but nothing inside. A white-chocolate truffle, at that.

Accidental Incest

In the affably filthy sex farce Accidental Incest, the title tells the tale: the libertine couple Milton (Johnny Sederquist) and Kendra (Elyssa Baldassarri) both feel like soulmates to each other, but that’s just because they’re technically brother and sister — the separately sired results of their mutual father’s sperm-bank donation. They discover this about a third of the way into the film, and then the plot deals with the consequences, going deeper and darker though no less outrageous. Providence director Richard Griffin, working with a script by Lenny Schwartz based on Schwartz’s play, takes this taboo and good-naturedly manhandles it into service as the premise of a romantic comedy. This, heaven help us, is the ever-transgressive Griffin and Schwartz’s version of a Hollywood meet-cute.

Filmed mostly in microbudget-artsy black and white, Accidental Incest could be described as a boxing match between Kevin Smith and John Waters, with Waters handily winning and then going off to fuck Andy Milligan in a bathroom. The movie has the raffish sexual candor of Smith’s best early comedies, the prankish perversity of Waters, and the all-encompassing hostility of Milligan. Griffin keeps things jumping visually, especially in the sex scenes, edited and rhythmed for comedy rather than eroticism (which, contrasted with the usual po-faced treatment of carnality in American film, just serves to make the festivities more erotic).

The movie signals its stage origins by having the lead characters address us directly, a useful way to cut to the chase. Milton and Kendra have been leaving relationship wreckage everywhere they go, and it becomes clear that the reason is that they hadn’t met the right person yet — i.e., each other. Sederquist, a manic Griffin Dunne lookalike, and Baldassarri, whose smile has a hint of Anne Hathaway innocence, dive into the deep end of sin and hysteria and passion, with Griffin’s eager encouragement. Because these characters start out so scummy and irredeemable, we paradoxically believe that much more in their redemption via taboo.

Griffin’s roots are in disreputable genres — horror, sci-fi — and he and Schwartz throw in some fantasy here; there are angels and a hipster God (Aaron Andrade) who performs a rap. Accidental Incest is partly a musical, and there are some comically bitter or obscene songs here, though not enough to dominate the narrative. They’re essentially what Roger Ebert used to call semi-OLIs — semi-obligatory lyrical interludes; they’re smoothly performed and a welcome way of changing up the tone. The cast is fiercely game, and I confess I laughed hardest at Jamie Dufault’s near-psychotically closeted Alex (Kendra’s ex) and Josh Fontaine (whose comic timing is flawless) as the Gimp-like Adam. Many of the actors are Griffin mainstays, and once again he brings in Michael Thurber, who photographs so beautifully, especially in black and white, and emotes so dead-on satirically that if John Waters ever makes another film he should look to Rhode Island.

If the title Accidental Incest puts you off, truthfully Griffin and Schwartz don’t do much to win you over. It’s as cracked as it sounds. Those who respond to the title with an amused, curious attitude of “Oh, this I gotta see” are probably better-prepared for the party. It’s more sex-positive and less hung-up than the other incest comedy you may have heard of, David O. Russell’s debut Spanking the Monkey. And if it sounds like your cup of iniquity, it could use your help: the movie’s DVD distributor has been gun-shy about it due to its title — and it’s not something you’ll find in a Redbox in any event — so if you’d like to support Griffin and his brand of happy degeneracy, your best bet is video on demand or amazon.com.