As the heroine tells her parents in an earlier scene, “I don’t want to meet interesting people, I want to be an interesting person” – and by the end of this vibrant and unpredictable charmer, she has entirely succeeded on that front. What follows is electric and improvisational in feel – down to the final shot, where Anais decides against the ending the film has in store for her, and flips the script seconds before the final credits roll. But Anais wants to be more than part of a cliche, and she sets her sight on her paramour’s life partner, a writer who is at an artists’ colony (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, Carla Bruni’s sister). (According to interviews with writer-director Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet, the quasi-comedy was inspired by a chapter of her own life.) Anais (a radiant Anaïs Demoustier) starts on familiar French cinematic ground: a devil-may-care beauty meets an older man – a book publisher, in this case – and the two strike up “ une petite histoire”. But unlike Joachim Trier’s portrait of a manic pixie dreamwaif, Anais in Love was made by a woman, and the tale feels anchored in something solid. The winner for most adored foreign film about an irritating young beauty goes to Worst Person in the World, no doubt about it. Like the world she encounters, the film is a thing of both great violence and great beauty. ![]() While briefly inhabiting the bodies of others, she learns about the horrors of the world – how men subjugate women and how trauma can curdle those who let it – but also the joys – how sex can be a form of liberation and how the act of being truly taken care of can be a transformative thing. It’s a stinging shame that it hasn’t soared in the way it deserved to because for those who do manage to find it within the streaming netherworld, it offers a strange, thrilling and poignant journey through 19th-century Macedonia, courtesy of a young recently cursed witch, like nothing we’ve been on before. But an iffy strategy (its indefinable oddness feels more suited to a Cannes bow) and a fudged release (it went straight to digital in the UK) meant that it’s been an awfully long wait, mostly met with a look of “huh, what?” confusion. It’s been almost a year now of me breathlessly rambling on about Goran Stolevski’s one-of-a-kind masterwork You Won’t Be Alone, a film I saw digitally at this year’s Sundance before excitedly, impatiently, waiting for the world to follow. It shows what woman-centered, choice-driven maternal healthcare could look like in the US, and the families fighting for it after the unimaginable. ![]() The film, available to stream on Hulu, should be essential viewing as a window into the many factors underlying such devastating disparities, but also as a path forward. Two Black mothers whose concerns were downplayed or dismissed, who died in New York hospitals months apart, who would be caring for their children if not for an extremely preventable combination of medical racism, financial pressure to perform C-sections and inadequate senses of urgency. The film, directed by Tonya Lewis Lee and Paula Eiselt, examines the roots and manifestations of dire statistics through the advocacy journeys of two grieving families. Aftershock takes a sprawling, urgent, widely publicized yet still under-addressed national crisis – the shameful maternal mortality rate among Black women in the US – and grounds it in its more personal and galling form.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |