popsublime: jennifer ehle

I watched all the virtual feature films and documentary offerings from NewFest37 over the past couple of weeks, along with several virtual programs of short films, and the annual festival of LGBTQ+ films in New York followed the pattern of cinema in 2025 for me: for every twenty-five or so movies that I watched, only one made me reflect deeply enough to comment. Therefore, that amounted to three films on NewFest’s virtual slate that inspired me to write this post. I’ve taught college courses for nearly thirty years now, and I think the causes of the problems that are plaguing the entire field of education right now, from bottom to top, are the exact same issues that are hindering worthwhile creative generativity across most cultures globally right now, too. I don’t have the energy to expound upon any of that at the current moment (even the various sorts of faux virtue-signaling in the visual content leading into the virtual NewFest films this year was driving me pretty crazy every time I watched another movie, to be honest), so I’ll just turn to my discussion of the three films themselves instead.

Jaclyn Bethany’s In Transit, written by and starring Alex Sarrigeorgiou, is set in wintertime where I currently reside in the state of Maine. Sarrigeorgiou’s lead character, Lucy, lives in small-town Maine with her man, Tom (Francois Arnaud). She bartends at a quaint and mostly quiet establishment that she and Tom are trying to buy from the owner, so that Lucy doesn’t lose her job if he sells it to somebody else. One night, in walks Ilse (Jennifer Ehle, in a memorable performance of great subtlety), a local painter who asks Lucy if she’d like to make some extra cash as a model. Hijinks eventually and very hesitantly unfold between the two women, though it takes nearly a full hour of this 80-minute film to get to that point. (I was reminded, of course, of Lisa Cholodenko’s 1998 slow-burner High Art, which is definitely a better movie.)

A long time spent waiting for a spark to ignite doesn’t necessarily make for a bad film, if it’s handled in the right way. Unfortunately, that’s not quite the case in this instance. The character-building feels minor even if the performances feel mostly strong; still, they really need to be undergirded and driven by some kind of genuine dramatic engine. Yet In Transit is too hushed, literally and emotionally, for the drama to gain any overt traction, and so it remains almost completely internalized until it’s too late for the viewer to care very much. Hinging everything upon one moment, a sudden kiss that leads up a totally unseen hookup (with a few erratically blinking distress signals in the aftermath), gives us little sense of who these women actually are and what’s motivated them to be drawn to one another. The scene of the fallout between Lucy and Tom seems to be drawn directly from the same (far more confidently executed) confrontation scene of the lead character and her boyfriend in High Art after she sleeps with a character named (you guessed it) Lucy. At least this Lucy gets a surprise check for $50,000 from her painter fling at the end of the movie, instead of dying like the Lucy in High Art does.

And now I’ll get down to the point that I’d really like to make, aside from praising the austere cinematography and the clearly well-intentioned aims of the filmmakers. The spoken introduction that Jaclyn Bethany and Alex Sarrigeorgiou filmed for NewFest37's virtual screening of their movie really gave me pause. Sarrigeorgiou kind of makes a huge deal of pointing out that they wanted to avoid making a film in which queer characters die or undergo a “big coming out.” But this movie is both a WAY too muted coming out AND a narrative avoidance of what truly transpired between the two lead characters whom the filmmakers have created. In my view, the film sidesteps what should be its mission, and for all the wrong reasons. Nevertheless, the screenplay and performances are able to keep running on fumes, essentially, due to the commitment of the actors, especially Jennifer Ehle as the painter Ilse, who’s had more life experiences as the older of the two women. Ehle doesn’t just build a character despite the holes in the script; she also makes the connections to herself as a female artist of her own age evident in ways that very few actors could pull off, through the micro-moments of her expressions, tiny pivots and surrenders and ultimately usurpations, and those elements collectively make the film worth watching.

Two Black Boys in Paradise, a nine-minute animated short film directed by Baz Sells and adapted from a poem by the British poet Dean Atta (who was born to a Greek Cypriot mother and a Jamaican father), might well be one of the most beautifully rendered short films that I’ve ever seen. Atta’s poem was re-treated with a handful of judicious edits in the screenplay, and at least one key two-word addition: "They fuck," which allows the sweetly clever device of a curious onlooking peacock fanning its feathers to coincide with the two Black boys' shared orgasm. That bold maneuver earns the short its sexual racing stripes in a medium where sex between two men, even in our modern-day world, too often gets drained of its actual sexuality. The film's animation seems to be a hybrid of visually augmented stop-motion and perhaps Claymation, focusing as it does on the two Black boys of its title as a pair of slim yet muscular puppets. Every aspect of the two puppets and what surrounds them is gorgeously crafted, in order to thoroughly evoke the colorful paradise in which Atta’s poem skillfully places them.

Atta’s poem, which is featured on the Forward Arts Foundation’s website for anyone who’s curious to read it, makes stylistic and thematic nods to several formidable poetic predecessors: Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Walt Whitman (particularly his poem “We Two Boys Together Clinging”). Nonetheless, the poem is utterly contemporary and functions on its own daring and dignified terms, which is further highlighted by the English musician and actor Jordan Stephens’ deeply moving narration; I doubt whether anybody else could have read the poem as perfectly as he does for this film. The short’s framework finds the two Black boys floating unclothed in a wooden rowboat on an idyllic lake, an idyll that they’re jolted out of by some disruptive police intervention back in the unidyllic everyday world that we all inhabit. Tying the alternating harshness of racism and homophobia into the dreamworld of the cartoon itself is just the right move, one that makes where the short goes in its final minutes all the more profound.

I was close to tears by end of the film but kind of too moved to even cry. Its authentic open-heartedness and equanimity in showing how far we’ve come as LGBTQ+ people in a homophobic society, and how far we still have left to go, is truly admirable (“Maybe it will be two Black girls in paradise next time. / Maybe they won’t have to be / boys or girls”). What really made the short work for me as an adaptation of a poem was how it set its own distinct pace with plenty of gaps and pauses and silences, all of which are filled with specific, precise visuals that let the film do what it needs to do, in order to bring the poem vividly and bracingly to life. The filmmakers generously have in mind every kind of viewer of every age and from every generation: “Maybe it will be you in paradise / with that person, / you know, that person you’re thinking of / right now.” I still get chills all over again just typing that barrier-spanning ending.

Finally, Omer Ben-Shachar’s super-cute short film Houston, We Have a Crush imagines life on a deserted Martian planet, in the form of a lonely, saucer-eyed Big Bird-like extraterrestrial named Ditto (Sam Humphrey). Ditto finds the lost cell phone of a very hot blond-haired, blue-eyed, scruffy astronaut (Ben Rigby), who realizes just a few minutes too late that he dropped his cell phone on the terrain that he's departing; "Oh shit," he mutters to himself inside his space helmet, right after his rocket launches off of Ditto’s dusty empty planet and back into outer space. The short’s impressive widescreen cinematography amply captures Ditto’s home and daily scavenging walks across the orange-hued dunescape.

The playfulness of the short is what makes it a good fit for a NewFest shorts program, as Ditto surfs through all of the pics and videos on the hunky astronaut’s cell phone day and night, until its battery eventually gives out. It’s never made clear what gender Ditto might be, if any, which is part of the short’s appeal. As an alien life form, Ditto’s outsiderdom all by itself convinces the audience that having a crush on the crush-worthy astronaut makes Ditto a candidate for queerness, especially since the crush remains bluntly unrequited upon the astronaut’s return to retrieve his dropped cell phone (though too late since Ditto already cracked the phone’s screen with his big beak while trying to re-start it after the battery died). In our age of Grindr and Scruff, Houston, We Have a Crush feels like a timely commentary on longing for that elusive, interplanetary (and obviously str8 & handsome) Mr. Right.

Wednesday, August 20, 2025

East of Wall (dir. Kate Beecroft, 2025)

I was grateful to breathe a sigh of relief last weekend while watching East of Wall, the first film I’ve seen at the cinema so far this year that didn’t feel either like a total bore or a letdown to me on some level. It’s reassuring to see a movie that not only holds together well and very intentionally inspires the viewer, but that also looks unsparingly at difficult but important topics such as poverty, suicide, and how women’s lives fit against the widescreen backdrop of the sprawling (and typically overly masculinized) American West. An impressive hybrid of fictionalized documentary filmmaking written and directed by Kate Beecroft, East of Wall brings to mind several other recent films that I enjoyed just as much: Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland and The Rider, Morrisa Maltz’s The Unknown Country, Max Walker-Silverman’s A Love Song, and Andrew Haigh’s Lean on Pete.

What distinguishes East of Wall from those other films are its stars, amateur actors who are also a mother/daughter pair, Tabatha and Porshia Zimiga, whom Beecroft met incidentally while traveling through South Dakota on the 3,000-acre horse ranch that Tabatha oversees. Tabatha has a rebellious, upstart personality and a mane of blond hair with a buzzcut on one side of her head, as well as a quiet, intuitive understanding of her horses and their needs. She possesses an entrepreneurial insight about her horses’ strengths and marketability, using TikTok videos of Porshia and her friends riding the horses at local rodeos, in order to sell the horses at auctions. During that pursuit, she meets Roy (Scoot McNairy), who offers to purchase her ranch and make her life easier in the wake of her husband’s sudden death. Tabatha takes care not only of the horses on the ranch but also her children and a gang of teenagers who’ve landed there over time, which increasingly made ends somewhat harder to meet. Roy has a personal investment in continuing to train Porshia as a horse rider, too, having lost his own daughter to suicide. Tabatha will ultimately safeguard her own interests, naturally, from being overridden by those of the wealthy intruder.

Porshia narrates portions of the film in a voiceover style that’s reminiscent of Linda Manz’s classic child’s-eye-view narration in Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven. Those spells of Porshia’s reflective thoughts about her family and the geological origins of the dramatic landscape on which she was raised have a cumulative power that forms the emotional framework of the film. We also watch her galloping briskly on her horse at speeds that can almost keep pace with cars on a highway, in visuals that are a direct homage to the very first motion picture: the sequential images of a galloping horse by Eadweard Muybridge from 1878. Is that kind of referential connection lost on an audience at the multiplex these days? Probably, but I also sense that the historical bridge to it remains implicit. We are treading on territory that has primitive value and meaning, especially regarding the inherent and inherited violence of both the American landscape and the American enterprise. It’s a particular brand of violence that persists just as it always has, yet continues to shapeshift and take on new forms in the present day.

Perhaps the main reason to watch East of Wall on the big screen at a cinema is to see how finely it showcases the Badlands of South Dakota via breathtaking aerial drone footage. We hear in Porshia’s narration about how the Badlands’ canyon-like structure was carved by an ocean that used to flow right on top of it and the intense speed with which the water drained away millennia ago. That ancient natural force is just one of many ghosts that haunt the movie. Another is memorably depicted by the always excellent English actress Jennifer Ehle, who portrays Tabatha’s ne’er-do-well mother Tracey as a livewire of compressed yet jaded energy, serving as a sort of humorous release valve and ballast to Tabatha’s forthright attitude and stoic seriousness about her own responsibilities to protect her family. Tabatha rarely ever smiles or laughs in the film, in part because she realizes how much everybody who surrounds her at all hours of the day and night, including her mother, is relying on her to keep all of them going, though she takes it all in stride with a measured sense of ordered chaos, from her eldest son Skylar (Wyatt Mansfield) to her semi-adopted son Jesse (Jesse Thorson), right down to her little blond three-year-old son Stetson (Stetson Neumann), who’s inherited the horse ranch from Tabatha’s late husband John.

And John, of course, is the main ghost who haunts the film. We see the family at his gravesite early in the movie, and then we finally hear the full story of his suicide in graphic detail from Tabatha later in the film, at a fireside gathering of the community’s women in celebration of her mother’s birthday. After the women bond over some drinks in a circle around the amber glow of the campfire, the conversation turns quieter as each woman recalls point-blank a harrowing memory of trauma or heartbreak that they’ve endured. I’m certain that Tabatha Zimiga’s unadorned delivery of her monologue during that scene will be the most riveting moment by any actor in a film this year, and she should absolutely receive recognition for her performance during next year’s awards season. East of Wall and Tabatha Zimiga’s subdued powerhouse performance are unique cinematic rarities.

popsublime

Wednesday, October 22, 2025

Three Films from NewFest37 (October 9th - 21st, 2025)

Wednesday, August 20, 2025

East of Wall (dir. Kate Beecroft, 2025)

Blog Archive