Los Angeles Times - 02.08.2019

E6 FRIDAY, AUGUST 2, 2019 LATIMES.COM/CALENDAR

AT THE MOVIES: REVIEWS

With news coming in a
constant deluge, even politi-
cal junkies can find it diffi-
cult to think about anything
other than the present —
and the next presidential
election. But the documen-
tary “American Heretics:
The Politics of the Gospel”
doesn’t just look at the cur-
rent situation and the en-
tanglement of government
and religion; it illuminates
the origins of their relation-
ship with insight, centering
on a single state: Oklahoma.
Though more Americans
identify as nonreligious than
ever before, the Bible Belt
still lives up to its name in
many ways. However, not
every person of faith adheres
to the idea that Christians
must also be conservative.
The film follows Bishop
Carlton Pearson (subject of
the Netflix drama “Come
Sunday”), the Rev. Robin
Meyers and the Rev. Lori
Walke as they champion
progressive causes such as

civil rights and fighting pov-

erty, remaining true to their

interpretation of the Bible

while often coming into con-

flict with the solidly red base

that surrounds them.

“American Heretics”

could benefit from a more

structured and focused ap-

proach, but director Jeanine

Butler and her sister and

producing partner Cather-

ine Lynn Butler tackle the is-

sue with equal parts intel-

lect, empathy and faith. For

anyone interested in poli-

tics, religion, American cul-

ture or the ever-overlapping

space they occupy, this doc-

umentary has the potential

to move hearts and minds.

—Kimber Myers

“American Heretics: The

Politics of the Gospel.”

Not rated. Running time: 1

hour, 25 minutes. Playing:

7:30 p.m., Wednesday only,

Laemmle Playhouse 7, Pasa-

dena; Laemmle Monica Film

Center, Santa Monica

Abramorama

THE REV.Robin Meyers and other clergy members
in the doc champion both Christian and liberal ideals.

‘AMERICAN HERETICS’

Preaching from a

progressive pulpit

With camp grace and

bulldog ferocity, El Paso-

born luchadorCassandro

took the Mexican wrestling

world by storm in the 1990s

as its first openly gay per-

former, a popular champion

on the drag-tinged exotica

circuit whose feathered, col-

orful appearance charmed

alongside his killer, pile-driv-

ing athleticism.

Now he’s the subject of

French curator/filmmaker

Marie Losier’sloving, loose

documentary “Cassandro

the Exotico!,” an impres-

sionistic 16mm portrait in

which the now fortysome-

thing star finds grappling

with imminent retirement

much harder to process

than masked challengers.

For a gay kid in a macho cul-

ture whose growing up was

marked by targeted abuse

and substance addiction,

the thrill of lucha librewas

“like a free therapy session,”

and the gloriously coiffed en-

tertainer’s love for his art

seems inexorably entwined

with the pride he takes in be-

ing sober since 2003.

He’s as excitable in the

throes of his pre-show rou-

tine as he is dropkicking op-

ponents or executing a daz-

zling flip — he even beams

with joy leading a class of

luchador-loving fans hoping

to replicate his moves. But

the toll his profession has

taken on his body, requiring

multiple surgeries, ulti-

mately creates a different

kind of pain management —

one psychic as much as

physical — and it lends

Losier’s intimate mélange of

observation, music-laden

montage and dreamlike fan-

tasy a uniquely artful com-

passion toward the nontra-

ditionally lived life.

—Robert Abele

“Cassandro the Exotico!”

In English and Spanish with

English subtitles. Not rated.

Run time: 1 hour, 13 minutes.

Playing: Laemmle Glendale.

Film Movement

MEXICANgay wrestling hero Cassandro (top) in

action in a scene from Marie Losier’s documentary.

‘CASSANDRO THE EXOTICO!’

Gay grappler won

hearts in Mexico

Vertigo-inducing set

pieces help shape Korean di-

saster movie “Exit” and its

distinctive threat into a sim-

plistically digestible and ul-

timately predictable big-

budget outing with a slight

edge.

Blatantly broad about its

melodramatic ambitions,

director Lee Sang-Geun’s

high-stakes saga sees self-

appointed loser Yong-Nam

(Cho Jung-Seok), a single

and unemployed millennial,

evolve into a paladin when

the going gets deathly tough.

What he is missing in career

direction, he compensates

for in rock climbing prowess.

To safeguard his less

than harmonious family —

and Eui-Ju (Lim Yoona), the

love interest who previously

friend-zoned him — from the

rapidly propagating toxic

gas unleashed by your

standard mad scientist, the

heroic underdog exploits

both smarts and physical

strength to reach various

rooftops.

Social media’s wide reach

and the ubiquitous access to

advanced drones move the

plot forward in somewhat

credible fashion. Nothing to

reproach in terms of produc-

tion value from Sang-Geun,

everything is grand in the

way Korean cinema has re-

currently shown it can deliv-

er for its own market.

Stripped of the spectacle,

“Exit” is just another sappy

story of an insecure boy try-

ing to impress a girl. It’s a

trite commodity embel-

lished by genre, which is an

honorable thing to be.

Surely the destination is evi-

dent, but the adventure, like

the route finding what Yong-

Nam needs in life, offers

some amusing hurdles.

—Carlos Aguilar

“Exit.”In Korean with Eng-

lish subtitles. Not rated.

Running time: 1 hour, 40

minutes. Playing: CGV Los

Angeles; CGV Buena Park.

CJ Entertainment

YONG-NAM(Cho Jung-Seok) becomes a hero when

disaster strikes, thanks to his rock-climbing prowess.

‘EXIT’

He is aimless but

still on his way up

But her enemy is no-

where to be found. Frus-

trated in his current post,

Hawkins has left for the

town of Launceston with two

underlings (Damon Herri-

man and Harry Greenwood)

to apply in person for a new

position, even though he has

already been effectively re-

jected. The movie shows us

Hawkins’ professional fail-

ures not to complicate our

feelings toward him — there

is no chance of that — but to

suggest his banality, the

transparent mediocrity that

lurks behind his moral void.

(In this he suggests a nastier

version of the exiled Spanish

minister in Lucrecia Mar-

tel’s “Zama,” another re-

markable anti-imperialist

epic.) Claflin, in a coura-

geously loathsome perform-

ance, doesn’t just play a man

prone to mindless acts of vi-

olence; he puts a smug face

on the colonialist experi-

ment, giving flesh to its

senseless, predatory horror.

Clare swiftly plunges into

the wilderness after him,

though not before hiring the

reluctant, resourceful Billy

to guide her over miles of

treacherous terrain. It’s a

protective measure with

risks of its own: A white

you may find yourself hard-

pressed to abandon your

seat until the movie’s con-

clusion. “The Nightingale”

isn’t just a revenge thriller;

with tremendous urgency

and blunt, searing power, it

builds an immediate case for

the emotional and moral ne-

cessity of its heroine’s ac-

tions. When we see Clare the

morning after her horrific

ordeal, the remarkable

Franciosi signals that she

has undergone a kind of spir-

itual if not physical death:

The warmth and light has

gone out of her eyes, leaving

only a cold, pitiless desire for

blood.

In “The Nightingale,” an
infuriating, devastating
saga of retribution and sur-
vival from the Australian
writer-director Jennifer
Kent, the horrors of Europe-
an colonialism are etched
into every frame.
We are in 19th century
Tasmania, then known as
Van Diemen’s Land, in the
early days of a conflict that
wiped out most of the is-
land’s indigenous popula-
tion. Against a wilderness
backdrop of astonishing vi-
olence, an Irish-born woman
named Clare (Aisling Fran-
ciosi) and an Aboriginal
man named Billy (Baykali
Ganambarr) are forced into
this movie’s harsh and un-
forgiving spotlight, forging
an uneasy alliance in the
pursuit of justice.
It is justice that has os-
tensibly brought Clare to
this small penal colony in the
first place. Exiled after being
convicted of petty theft sev-
en years ago in her native
Ireland, she has more than
served her time under the
cold, lascivious eye of a
British lieutenant, Hawkins
(Sam Claflin). Calling her
his “nightingale” on account
of her lovely voice, he forces
her to sing sweet songs for
his colleagues every night,
then rapes her behind closed
doors. Clare has a loving
husband, a fellow convict
named Aidan (Michael
Sheasby) and an infant
child, but Hawkins views her
as his property — and he
doesn’t respond kindly when
that property tries to wriggle
out of his grasp.
The opening scenes of
“The Nightingale,” in which
Clare loses everything and
nearly loses her life, are al-
most unbearable in their
brutality. (I can’t recall the
last time the press materials
for a movie came with a trig-
ger warning.) Shooting in
the nearly square Academy
aspect ratio, Kent and her
cinematographer, Radek
Ladczuk, turn human faces
into landscapes of pain.
They let this early tragedy
play out in a series of can-
dlelit closeups, suggesting
not just a dramatization but
an overwhelming confronta-
tion with evil.
But if you make it
through the first half-hour,

woman and a black man are

bound to attract even more

unwanted attention trav-

eling together than they

would apart. But Clare’s de-

termination gives her no

time for caution or niceties,

especially where Billy is con-

cerned: She barks orders at

him and calls him “boy,” as-

serting her authority in

much the same way

Hawkins would.

Which is not to suggest

“The Nightingale” draws a

moral equivalency between

the two: Clare is very much

the heroine of her story and,

like Billy, a slave of the

British Empire. But she is

also a player in his story, and

her role in that narrative

may be that of oppressor as

well as ally, a point that be-

comes both clearer and

murkier the deeper into the

forest they go. Here in a

primitive wilderness de-

spoiled by European invad-

ers, where black men and

women are rounded up,

murdered and hanged, a far-

ther-reaching tragedy

comes into startling focus.

Ganambarr, an indige-

nous Australian dancer

making his screen acting de-

but, won a prize at last year’s

Venice International Film

Festival for his sly, spirited

performance, which re-

shapes the picture in ways

obvious and not. Billy is an

excellent guide, calling on

practical sense and deep lo-

cal knowledge to ensure

their survival. But his most

significant achievement

may be to challenge and re-

contextualize Clare, to call

her own moral and narrative

standing into question. “The

Nightingale” isn’t one of

those complacent movies

that deigns to view black suf-

fering through a white out-

sider’s lens. It’s about a

damnably complex situa-

tion in which guilt and grief

blurand barbarism breeds

complicity even among the

presumed innocent.

This is stunningly grim

material even for Kent, who

came to international prom-

inence with her masterful

2014 horror film, “The

Babadook.” In that movie, a

shattering study of grief in

the guise of a haunted-house

chiller, she invested a story-

book boogeyman with real

metaphoric grandeur. The

phantoms she excavates in

“The Nightingale” are of a

decidedly different, more

politically complicated

breed: They hail not from

her imagination but from

history, and they cast long

and terrible shadows over a

present still eternally grap-

pling with hideous legacies

of bigotry, oppression and

genocide.

They also place this pic-

ture in conversation with a

long-standing Hollywood

tradition of revenge-themed

survival cinema: The rap-

port between Clare and Billy

inevitably recalls “True

Grit,” while the blood-and-

mud realism of their strug-

gle, punctuated by occa-

sional flashes of nightmar-

ish surrealism, suggests a

less pretentiously inflated

version of “The Revenant.”

Kent handles the grueling

physical demands of the

production with utter assur-

ance. She doesn’t just cap-

ture the visceral terror of a

spear suddenly piercing a

man’s flesh; she’s also at-

tuned to quieter, more inci-

dental terrors — the fear in

the eyes of an orphan boy be-

ing groomed in Hawkins’

ghastly image or the

stricken gaze of an indige-

nous woman who knows the

fate that awaits her.

The story’s gradually ex-

panding window on injustice

inevitably costs it some

drive and focus in the final

stretch. In ways both fasci-

nating and frustrating, it’s

when Clare and Billy draw

closer to Launceston and

their inevitable showdown

with Hawkins that “The

Nightingale’s” conviction

seems to falter, as though

the movie were second-

guessing its chosen path.

Clare’s thirst for revenge be-

gins to waver as the full

weight of her trauma, and of

the other traumas she’s wit-

nessed, finally sinks in.

In the end, a measure of

balance is restored, but Kent

is too honest to suggest this

respite will be anything but

temporary. The conventions

of the revenge thriller are

somehow both cannily ful-

filled and skillfully sub-

verted, but “The Nightin-

gale” has more on its mind

than an exercise in genre.

This is a profound and diffi-

cult film, an attempt to grap-

ple with the existence and

mindless perpetuation of

evil, and to suggest both the

fleeting satisfaction and the

eternal futility of vengeance.

Nothing about it is easy, and

everything it shows us mat-

ters.

Matt Nettheim

AISLINGFRANCIOSI plays an Irish woman forced into brutal sexual servitude in a Tasmanian penal colony.

Revenge devoid of sweetness

Violence pervades a searing tale of retribution set against European colonialism

‘THE NIGHTINGALE’

‘The

Nightingale’

In English, Irish Gaelic and

Palawa kani with English

subtitles

Rated:R, for strong violent

and disturbing content

including rape, language

throughout and brief

sexuality

Running time:2 hours,

16 minutes

Playing:ArcLight Cinemas,

Hollywood

JUSTIN CHANG
FILM CRITIC