8 THENEWYORKER,M AY4, 2020
OSCILLOSCOPE / EVERETT
This year’s edition of the Maryland Film Festival, a prime showcase for
American independent films, scheduled to run April 29-May 3, has been
postponed because of the coronavirus. The Baltimore-based event has
launched many daring and accomplished low-budget films by young film-
makers, including Anna Biller’s second feature, “The Love Witch,” which had
its U.S. première there in 2016. (It’s streaming on Kanopy, YouTube, and other
services.) Biller did more than write and direct the movie; she also made,
by hand, its elaborate costumes, sets, and props, re-creating the flamboyant
styles of late-sixties melodramas and horror films—and those of pagan rites
and a giddy Renaissance fair. Amid these splashy tones, the mysterious title
character, a Wiccan named Elaine (Samantha Robinson), glides into a small
California town, in a red convertible that matches her dress and luggage, and
unleashes her seductive enticements and hallucinogenic potions on its male
population. Biller, pulling Elaine between desire and revenge, calculating
control and ecstatic abandon, brilliantly symbolizes the bitter paradoxes of
women’s lives and struggles—both romantic and political.—Richard BrodyWHATTOSTREAM
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newyorker.com/goings-on-about-townmatches the tale’s stifled horror of stifling mor-
als. Cybill Shepherd stars as the free-spirited
young American in Europe, who adapts easily
to the romantic airs of European society and
whose relationship with the expatriate Ameri-
can Frederick Winterbourne (Barry Brown) is
spoiled by her uninhibited ways. Bogdanovich
replicates the sinuous psychological intricacies
of James’s sentences with florid long takes that
follow Shepherd through the filigreed opulence
of the period décor and capture the spontaneous
choreography of her performance. The light
and the settings are reminiscent of paintings by
Renoir—though the narrow American mores of
the time lead to comedic absurdities that have
no place in Impressionism. Brown (who died in
1978, at the age of twenty-seven) displays a deft,
coruscating irony that’s both befitting of the
drama and altogether modern; Bogdanovich’s
bravura display of directorial style is as insight-
ful as it is thrilling.—R.B. (Streaming on Vudu,
YouTube, and other services.)The Day I Became a Woman
Marzieh Meshkini’s three-part feature, from
2000, set on the Persian Gulf island of Kish, de-picts—with surprisingly jubilant yet unflinching
visual and dramatic imagination—the ordeals
faced by women, from childhood to old age, in
Iranian society. The first part involves a girl
who’s banned from playing with her best friend,
a boy, with whom she nonetheless manages—in
a scene of vast allusive implications—to share a
snack through the jail-like bars of his window.
In the second story, a married woman defies
clergymen and her husband to join a large group
of female cyclists who are pedalling urgently
along a narrow seaside road—a passionate ride
of freedom with a funereal tone, a spectacular
fusion of kinetic ecstasy and tragedy. The third
part features an elderly woman who spends her
savings on a wide array of household goods that
she had been denied all her life—especially a
bedroom set, including a big bed and a wedding
gown. Throughout, Meshkini creates indelible
images of mighty symbolic and psychological
power.—R.B. (Streaming on Vimeo.)The Mule
Clint Eastwood directs and stars in this hard-
nosed, tenderhearted, rowdy, and anguished
crime drama, from 2018, based on a true story.
He plays Earl Stone, a Peoria horticulturist
who, after losing his house and garden to fore-
closure, accepts an offer to haul loads of drugs
from Texas in his pickup truck in exchange for
big cash payouts. Earl had alienated his fam-
ily—especially his daughter, Iris (played by
Eastwood’s daughter, Alison Eastwood)—by
putting his career first. Now he both enjoys his
underworld adventures and uses his new wealth
to mend fences—but federal agents (Bradley
Cooper and Michael Peña) are tracking the
cartel for which he works. Eastwood shines as
a roguish coot who, under his crusty manner, is
a master manipulator—albeit a principled one.
The expansive, cleverly plotted action has the
romantic resonance of a regretful self-retrospec-
tive, for both Earl and Eastwood; it plays like
a summing up of a life’s work and pain. With
Dianne Wiest.—R.B. (Streaming on Amazon,
HBO Now, and other services.)Stories We Tell
Sarah Polley’s 2012 documentary is a startling
mixture of private memoir, public inquiry, and
conjuring trick. On camera, she quizzes a long
list of relatives and friends, beginning with her
father, Michael, and her siblings. The subject is
Polley’s late mother, Diane, an effervescent soul,
as we see from old home movies; as the story
unfolds, however, the footage seems to be so
profuse, and so oddly convenient, that we start
to question our own assumptions about her—
which is exactly what Polley had in mind. (She is
an actor, as both of her parents were; clearly, an
acute strain of make-believe runs in the blood.)
The main secret that is dug up by Polley’s in-
vestigations is somehow more invigorating than
traumatic, although there are hints of collateral
anxiety among her brothers and sisters; the very
ordinariness of the saga, however, becomes its
strength, and, if viewers leave feeling destabi-
lized, determined to chip away at the appar-
ently fixed narratives that sustain their own
families, then the movie’s job is done.—Anthony
Lane (Reviewed in our issue of 5/27/13.) (Stream-
ing on Amazon, Google Play, and other services.)Helms stars as Tim Lippe (rhymes with “hip-
pie”), a woefully unworldly insurance salesman
in small-town Wisconsin who is having an affair
with Macy Vanderwei (Sigourney Weaver), his
former middle-school teacher. Sent to a con-
vention to deliver a speech, he’s forced into
an uneasy intimacy with colleagues who try to
break him out of his shell but accidentally put
his career at risk. The screenwriter, Phil John-
ston, invents gleefully crunchy names for his
characters, and Arteta breezily exalts the actors
who play them. Isiah Whitlock, Jr., is the nerdy
Ronald Wilkes (the Ronimal); John C. Reilly
plays the rowdy blowhard Dean Ziegler (Dean-
zie), and Anne Heche brings pathos and whimsy
to the role of Joan Ostrowski-Fox (O-Fox), a
randy mom-on-a-spree. Despite a pat takeaway,
the film delights in the comic round of venial
and mortal sins that keep America’s heartland
beating.—Richard Brody (Streaming on Amazon,
Vudu, and other services.)
Daisy Miller
Peter Bogdanovich’s 1974 adaptation of Henry
James’s 1878 novella is one of the few great
films based on a great book; its acerbic humor