Sunday, September 24, 2023

Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe (dir. Aitch Alberto, 2023)

Over the past couple of weeks, I watched Aitch Alberto’s film Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe a total of six times in cinemas, and I cried my eyes out three of those times. Between viewings when I wasn’t watching the movie, I was thinking about the movie. The movie never left my mind, and my heart remained right in the zone of the movie, too. The movie showed at only one cinema here in Boston, at AMC Boston Common, so that’s where I saw all of my screenings except for one last Sunday, which I watched from way at the top of the balcony of the gorgeous Art Deco cinema up in Brattleboro, Vermont called the Latchis Theatre, where I thanked the manager through my tears after the movie for showing it on the big beautiful screen in the historic main moviehouse. And now, before I say what I have to say about the film (which is quite a lot), I’ll make one really big statement: for me this movie is even better than Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain, which is a movie that I still adore today, and as much as I totally and unendingly love Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal in that film, the two young actors in this new movie, Max Pelayo (as Aristotle Mendoza) and Reese Gonzales (as Dante Quintana), give performances that are even deeper and more significant than those in Brokeback Mountain.

The film is adapted from Benjamin Alire Sáenz’s popular and groundbreaking 2012 young adult novel of the same title, which I read several years ago at the online suggestion of the gay novelist Garth Greenwell, who really championed its importance. The movie’s screenwriter and director Aitch Alberto, a Latina transwoman, has perfectly distilled what’s necessary to retain from the novel on every single level and translated it to film exactly in all of the right ways, stylistically and otherwise, and I honestly don’t think that the book could have been adapted any better than it is in this film. Apparently, there’s a much longer director’s cut, and although I could feel a few of the missing parts that trimmed the movie down from nearly three hours to about 90 minutes, I still felt that it all fit together admirably despite the standard commercial compromises that producers and studios often force upon directors. Aitch Alberto’s director’s cut will make its way to us someday, I’m fairly certain of that. What’s clear is that this director poured her entire heart and soul into making this movie, and into walking the slim tightrope to craft it in ways that will not only move a wide array of audiences internationally for decades to come, but will also actually help to save and reconfigure the lives of young LGBTQ+ viewers. Yes, this movie is that important.

At the film’s delicate center is Max Pelayo’s Ari Mendoza, a conflicted yet still hopeful young Mexican-American guy in high school in El Paso, Texas in 1987. He meets Reese Gonzales’ more outwardly cheerful and (semi) well-adjusted Dante Quintana that summer at a local swimming pool, where Dante teaches Ari how to swim since he’d never learned. The tenderness of those opening scenes, leading up to and including the film’s opening title card, could not be more flawlessly balanced and conceived. The year 1987 happens to be my favorite year in pop culture, and I was whisked right back to my own youth as a struggling soon-to-be-gay kid in Cincinnati, Ohio by the film’s details and specificities. All of this is done in a very gentle way, so that we’re immediately invested in the complicated interplay between these two characters. Pelayo and Gonzales expertly (especially as younger actors) set up their dichotomy, and what’s fascinating is how the relationship of the two boys in the film develops gradually and intimately but not necessarily along the definitive lines of sexuality itself, though that does eventually arise as the two boys come of age via a series of letters that they write back and forth to one another when Dante’s English professor father Sam (Kevin Alejandro, an adorable dad if ever there was one) takes his family away from El Paso to Chicago due to a university teaching gig for a year.

By that point in the narrative, Ari and Dante have already cemented their intense friendship. Dante shares with Ari some poetry and art to try to open him up. Ari’s heart has mostly clamped shut because his parents’ hearts have also closed somewhat, for tragic reasons that are revealed to us later in the film regarding Ari’s older brother Bernardo, who’s in prison. I wish that the amazing Latinx cast of older actors who portray the parents and guardians of Ari and Dante, actors who are all so excellent in finely calibrated roles — from the wonderful Eva Longoria as Dante’s caring mom, to the remarkable Eugenio Derbez as Ari’s distant yet loving father, to the touching Valerie Falcón as Ari’s deeply supportive mother, to the luminous Marlene Forte as Ari’s doting lesbian aunt, Tia Ophelia — would receive the kind of attention they so fully deserve for their performances (such as a Screen Actors Guild Award for Best Ensemble, to be honest).

What’s subtle and tucked away in the corners of the film is equally as powerful as those actors who are front and center; for instance, the smartly timed reappearances of a pair of birds high above in flight that Dante remarks look “so free” when he first sees them overhead during a scene with Ari early in the movie. Several other intelligent stylistic details it took me all six viewings to finally notice, such as the subtlety with which some Christmastime scenes are framed. Unlike most mainstream movies that make a big to-do about Christmas scenes, mainly for releases later in the year, here we get only a brief “Merry Christmas” in a letter from Dante to Ari, along with a magical faint blue glow at the very edge of the screen during a scene inside Ari’s home, which I finally realized were Christmas tree lights around a silver (and intentionally slightly out-of-focus) ornament nestled in its branches. Some of the El Paso landscapes and multicolor sunsets were clearly influenced by Robby Müller’s seminal cinematography in Wim Wenders’ now-legendary 1984 film Paris, Texas, a great visual touchstone for Aitch Alberto and the talented cinematographer Akis Konstantakopoulos to refer back to.

There’s also a short but pivotal scene in which Ari, who’s sixteen, finds a way to get himself a six-pack of beer by having an older guy buy it for him at a local convenience store. The older guy (precisely portrayed by Marcelo Olivas), who’s clearly gay and playfully says that he’s 45 when Ari asks, has a few moments of interaction with the teenager that reveal more about the deep complexities of intergenerational issues in the gay male community than just about any other scene that I’ve ever seen on screen. The important aspect is that this is accomplished in part through great acting and minimal dialogue, but it’s conveyed even more through mood, as well as through some small yet knowing glances and tiny gestures, something that felt vividly real to me (while bordering on a kind of magical realism) each time I watched that scene again. The subtle intensity of that brief exchange between the two characters captures something that many, many other films have tried to achieve before and never quite accomplished. This scene, in its backlit sense of mystery, as seen from Ari’s younger point-of-view, totally does.

Of course, since Ari and Dante are high schoolers, we get a good serving of nostalgic details that align with mid-’80s John Hughes classics: upturned shirt collars, constant teasing about who fits in and who doesn’t, neon-toned clothing and bangles, plus a beautiful Latina leather-clad goth girl temptress (Luna Blaise’s sweetly realized Elena Tellez) to lure Ari just a bit while Dante is away with his family in Chicago. I will mention only vaguely two more abrupt and violent scenes later in the film, on which the entire narrative depends, and on which its grounding in harsher realities and truths about our world firmly rests. We would not be able to arrive at the film’s cathartic conclusion in a desert landscape outside of Ari’s old 1957 pick-up truck without those more difficult scenes, so it’s important that audiences of all ages endure those two scenes, in order to understand their key purpose in the film.

I haven’t seen a more gorgeous or moving ending to any film in several years now. Though it’s culturally complex in a number of ways, I’ll try to explain why. After Ari kisses and briefly rejects Dante until a tragic turn sends him back into Dante’s hands, the two young men are then forced to confront what their relationship to one another actually is, and with the loving support of both of their families, what it might mean to their futures. Ari Mendoza is the film’s protagonist, tortured and shifting from his closeted adolescence into his more liberated adulthood. To hear him finally express, in so many words, that he was afraid of being gay himself (and therefore also afraid of Dante), and that he won’t be afraid to love Dante Quintana, is a transcendent moment that also cuts two ways, not because it isn’t earnest since it clearly is, but because I think, in the real world outside of transformational fiction, it’s probably incredibly rare, especially between two young men. I’d like to see a mainstream film in which the protagonist is the more openly gay and more outwardly effeminate Dante. Where is his story? And why is this essentially Ari’s story instead? I think it’s because the people who really need to see this film and benefit from watching it are the young guys like Ari all over in the greater world, though of course, they’ll be the ones least likely to watch it in a cinema. Every audience of the six I viewed the film with were nearly all teenage girls, or young women who’d recently been teenage girls when they’d read the book that the film was based on. The guys like Ari out there in the world may be more likely to find and watch the movie a bit more privately when it's streaming online, or at least that's my hope. Our world will change if they see this film and its core message reaches them.

Masculinity and its inherent social expectations entrap both Ari and Dante, along with entrapping the other young men in the film. The movie’s open-hearted, climactic finale (as well as its cosmically beautiful denouement) gives a solid and loving push towards toppling those unfair, damaging, and compulsory gendered expectations. While I have no doubt that there are young gay male romantic couples out there like Ari and Dante, some of whom actually do commit to one another and make it happen together, I’m not convinced that it’s at all widespread amongst the gay male population, though I’d also like to believe that it’s more than just a mere fantasy. Those young men out there who do find any kind of love like Ari and Dante should count themselves very lucky.

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Sunday, September 3, 2023

The Unknown Country (dir. Morrisa Maltz, 2023)

This past week, I drove north to Rockland, Maine, and then also took the ferry out to Provincetown on Cape Cod to watch Morrisa Maltz’s film The Unknown Country on the only two screens on which it was showing in all of New England. The film stars Lily Gladstone as Tana, a young Native American woman who, in the wake of her grandmother’s death, takes a long road trip to return to the reservation on which she grew up, from Minnesota to South Dakota, reconnecting with people and places from her past along the way. After finding a photo album of her late grandmother’s own road trip off the reservation when she was a young woman herself, Tana decides to trace her grandmother’s footsteps and visits the places in her photographs, extending her travels south to Dallas, Texas, and the desert wilderness in the surrounding landscape there. Not only is The Unknown Country my favorite film this year, but I think it’s also, after my two close viewings of the film, one of the most important movies to be released in the past decade.

Most of the figures whom Tana encounters on her picaresque journey aren’t actors but real people portraying themselves in the film, so it’s a smart fusion of fictional framework with a documentary heart. Tana attends the wedding of her cousin Lainey Bearkiller Shangreaux to her husband Devin in a moving scene during which the couple exchange their heartfelt personal vows because of how their family had tried to keep the two of them apart when they were younger. Their solution was to “get pregnant” in order to have even more of a reason to stay together. Tana also crosses paths with a man who runs a motel, a woman who owns a local dancehall, and a group of like-minded young adults during a freewheeling night of fun out in the city. These side stories throughout the narrative become the film’s focus in the same way that Alma Har’el’s film Bombay Beach did with the longtime denizens who live around the Salton Sea in California. Through hearing about the lives of these diverse individuals, we’re given an authentic collective snapshot of America, our sprawling country that’s otherwise nearly impossible to succinctly summarize or explain to those from outside of our culture.

That The Unknown Country is a Native American woman’s story goes a long way towards redeeming a particular strand of American life that often gets completely ignored. Lily Gladstone’s performance in the film is for me among the finest in cinematic history, to be honest. Her consummately expressive face gives her an ideal opportunity to show her complete emotional range throughout the movie’s 86 minutes. The power of her performance is the exact opposite of most powerhouse performances in that there’s no trumpeting of any kind, just pure raw honesty. Yet the film’s tactics and parameters are also poetic and elliptical. We’re not given details about Tana’s journey and her past in any outright ways, but rather through subtle implications and shadings of emotion. In two separate scenes, we can sense that something violent may have happened to Tana in her relationships with men, given her look of fear and potential panic when a few men linger near her in menacing ways during those two scenes. The film doesn’t rest on those moments, however, but rather incorporates them into the flow of the rest of the movie.

Accompanying Tana’s journey on the film’s soundtrack are stunning songs by Neil Halstead of the shoegaze band Slowdive, as well as intermittent radio broadcasts with carefully selected and edited commentaries from across the American divide on various talk shows. Through our hearing and being reminded of those divisions, the film builds deeper connections to the history of genocide of indigenous people in this country, the still-open wound that we should all be more aware of living with on a daily basis in our capitalist country that’s built entirely on stolen land. An older woman from Tana’s tribe tells her how the land itself will heal her, advice that echoes vastly across the film’s mesmerizing and engrossing landscapes, thanks to Andrew Hajek’s brilliant cinematography. We as a culture will never be able to move beyond that wound of our ignored, shared history unless we can fully acknowledge the effects of that violent past on our present and future lives. The current trend of making “land acknowledgments” is only the very tip of the iceberg in that regard.

The film excavates this most effectively through its main thematic focus on individual and communal grief, past and present. As Tana carries her grandmother’s memory across the countryside, we witness her grief up close, sometimes in quick downward glances, and at other times in fully exposed ways when she breaks down in tears in bed late one night. I think the film asks some important questions. What exactly is grief? How do we navigate it, both by ourselves and as a culture? What effect does grief have on us over time? Does it permanently change us? Many widescreen shots in the film show Tana threading her way through snow-covered fields and roadways in an older car that kind of resembles a white hearse, so in that sense, I felt like Lily Gladstone’s character is carrying the collective grief for all of us.

When Tana visits her grandmother’s brother, Grandpa August (beautifully portrayed by Richard Ray Whitman), he gives her a small blue suitcase packed with some of her grandmother’s belongings, including a vintage white cotton dress with a simple print. At the film’s quietly climactic finale, Tana ascends to a windy mountaintop vista wearing that dress, recreating a photograph of her grandmother’s as she stood in the exact same place. That moment and image flawlessly open up the floodgates of the past, connecting Tana not only to her grandmother, but also to the deep well of time itself. She’s now the fountain through which that healing and empowering tributary can flow. The Unknown Country is that rarest of things: a perfect and seamless film.

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