10 THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER13, 2021
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For more reviews, visit
newyorker.com/goings-on-about-town COURTESY KINO LORBERBruno Dumont, who has been on a tear of uproarious and politically
trenchant inventiveness since making the 2014 drama “Li’l Quinquin,”
rips furiously into the Internet-juiced mediascape in his new film,
“France” (opening in theatres on Dec. 10). The title refers both to
the country and to a TV journalist, France de Meurs (Léa Seydoux),
whose ambitious yet stage-managed reports from war zones—and
one-upping confrontations with officials, including France’s President,
Emmanuel Macron—are done with one eye on ratings and the other
on social media. These exploits have made her famous, and fame has
alienated her from her principles, her emotions, her family, and herself.
A minor accident that becomes a major Internet sensation sends her
into a tailspin of depression and into another vortex of media attention;
real tragedy hits mainly as a photo op. Amid the film’s riotous satire
involving tricked-out news and political distortions, Dumont plants a
melancholy melodrama of an identity crisis: the television star and the
nation are equally unrecognizable to themselves, and equally isolated in
the distorting mirrors of their own fabricated images.—Richard BrodyONTHEBIGSCREEN
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MOVIES
Collective: Unconscious
This omnibus film, from 2016, is composed
of five short segments by leading indepen-
dent-film directors who adapted one anoth-
er’s literal dreams; the best entries combine
hallucinatory visions with sharply critical
perspectives. Josephine Decker, in “First
Day Out,” unites impressions of incarcer-
ation and liberation in ecstatically onrush-
ing continuous takes, in which heightened
choreography and incantation suggest, with
veiled bitterness, dreams of freedom that
remain mere dreams. Lauren Wolkstein’s
film “Beemus, It’ll End in Tears” starts with a
droll tale of Mt. St. Helens erupting during a
high-school gym class to stage an uproarious
lampooning of the class’s coach, the ultimate
petty martinet. This sequence is also a cho-
reographic wonder, with its comedic stag-
ing of the crabbiest of crab walks. Nuotama
Bodomo offers, in lo-fi video, “Everybody
Dies!,” a sharply satirical parody starring
Tonya Pinkins as Ripa the Reaper, the host
of a children’s show being broadcast from the
so-called Republic of Black Death. Bodomo
avoids the pitfalls of sketch comedy, pushing
the subject to scathing, tragic extremes that
leave laughter far behind.—Richard Brody
(Streaming on the Criterion Channel.)Family Plot
For his valedictory film, from 1976, Alfred
Hitchcock rummages through themes and
details from his whole career, including the
perfect crimes of “Shadow of a Doubt,” the
erotic disguises of “Vertigo,” the possessed
voices of “Psycho,” and even the gas-station
conflagration of “The Birds,” to evoke a
rolling boil of sex and violence beneath the
bland surfaces of suburban placidity. The
story is set in motion by a faux spiritualist
(Barbara Harris) and her cabdriver boy-
friend (Bruce Dern), who have some real de-
tective work to do: an elderly woman wants
them to find her late sister’s illegitimate son(William Devane), who, it turns out, may
have murdered his adoptive parents, and
who has a hand in other ongoing criminal
schemes, aided by his naïve but willing wife
(Karen Black). Hitchcock’s self-renewing
bag of tricks includes an ingenious scene
of vehicular wizardry—in effect, a one-car
chase—as well as some brazenly on-the-nose
plotting: the amateur investigators nearly
come to grief from a street-side argument
about their love life, and the dramatic cli-
max offers proof of the practical virtues of
faking it.—R.B. (Streaming on Amazon and
the Criterion Channel.)The Host
Something is hiding in the River Han, in
the middle of Seoul. As a result of industrial
pollution, a small tadpole has grown not into
a respectable frog but into a bad-tempered
tadpole the size of a bus. Soon it leaves the
river’s waters, snatching ordinary Koreans
from the banks and carrying them off to its
fetid home in the sewers. When a young girl
is taken, her father, the hitherto hopeless
Gang-du (Song Kang-ho), enlists the aid of
his family and sets off to save her. Bong Joon-
ho’s monster movie, from 2006, is often funny
and occasionally disgusting, but rarely does it
strike you as ridiculous. By the end (which is
happy, but only just), you feel threatened and
drained, as you should after a grownup fairy
tale, yet there are moments of surprising
grace throughout—watch an apparition of
the girl sneak into the midst of a communal
meal. On the other hand, don’t go looking
for mercy from the beast; this thing would
treat King Kong like a typical bleeding-heart
mammal. In Korean.—Anthony Lane (Re-
viewed in our issue of 3/12/07.) (Streaming on
Pluto, Tubi, and other services.)Red Rocket
Sean Baker’s latest exploit of picturesque
populism is centered on Mikey (Simon Rex),
a Los Angeles porn star nearing forty who,
during the 2016 Presidential campaign, slinks
home to Texas City after a two-decade ab-
sence. The unwelcome Mikey crashes with
his estranged wife, Lexi (Bree Elrod), and
her mother (Brenda Deiss), both unemployed
crack users; Lexi has been supporting the
household with prostitution. He finds his
way into the local weed trade, and he seduces
a seventeen-year-old high-school student
called Strawberry (Suzanna Son), who works
at a doughnut shop. (He tries to recruit her
for porn films, too.) A pathological liar and
an egomaniacal blowhard, Mikey makes
trouble and enemies everywhere he goes;
the ticking clock of the drama is whether
he can lure Strawberry to leave with him
before he meets his comeuppance. Baker
films the tawdry doings in golden light and
pristine framings; the actors, except for
Rex, are mostly nonprofessionals who work
gamely to infuse the caricatural script (which
Baker co-wrote with Chris Bergoch) with
heart and the director’s incurious camera eye
with life, but their presence can’t overcome
the movie’s vain attitudinizing.—R.B. (In
theatrical release.)