Author: Jack Taylor Welsh

I'm from the suburbs of Detroit. Many of us Metro-Detroiters will tell you they're from Detroit—I won't. I like pretending to read books on the beach.

REVIEW: Another Round

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In the world of film, nearly every drug and substance has had its day in court. Entire films and TV shows berate a single drug that ruins our protagonists’ lives, be it meth in Breaking Bad or heroin in Requiem for a Dream. And despite how difficult to watch these stories are, they are utterly believable—even for the majority of viewers who haven’t touched anything stronger than that one time at a college party when they did cocaine and woke up with the worst hangover they’d ever had. For the outsider looking into the world of drug addiction, it just feels obvious that “hard drugs” would lead to these downward-spiraling narratives of crippling addiction, broken homes, and dead friends. But where is alcohol in the canon of addiction stories?

 

In Danish director Thomas Vinterberg’s latest film, Another Round, Mads Mikkelsen (of Hannibal fame) plays Martin, a depressed high-school teacher who bands together with three of his similarly unfulfilled and aging teaching buddies to test out a radical new theory: that human beings were born with a blood-alcohol content 0.05% too low. Thus, achieving a constant state of 0.05% BAC will lead to increased stimulation, happiness, and ultimately purpose. So, the gang begins the experiment and starts drinking at work, pushing the limits of their alcohol tolerance as well as their ability to maintain a professional and social life.

 

The film opens with a scene featuring Martin’s students participating in a high school drinking game. The setting is a beautiful summer lakeside and everyone is very happy, carefree, and young—really, it feels more like summer camp than teenage debauchery. For the rest of the film, we watch as Martin and his very not happy, not carefree friends try to find more purpose in their jobs by drinking alcohol. It’s an asinine plan that the viewer knows will only end in misery, but we watch them try anyway because there’s a bit of humor to it, and, I think, we want them to find more meaning in their lives. 

 

As Martin starts to rekindle his relationship with his wife, we cheer him on when the screen cuts to black and proclaims his BAC: 0.00%. We hope for the very best, that Martin can get what he wants from his job and from his marriage, and can still get put down the bottle. It seems obvious that alcohol can only do so much for his very cold relationship with his wife, yet when things between them explode and Martin retreats to a messy, ugly drinking session with the gang (who have all similarly screwed something up), we too feel defeated, messy, and ugly. Things look very grim in the film’s third act, and it’s hard to see any light at the end of the tunnel.

Luckily, the film ends with Martin’s renewed hope to restore his marriage, and he breaks out into dance with his newly-graduated students, impressing them with his passionate, skillful interpretations of jazz ballet. He drinks a beer, but so are all of his students and thus feels casual. Besides, his focus seems much more so on dancing than his bottle. Purpose, for Martin—via the students that love him, the prospect of getting his wife back, and his old passion for dancing—seems to not require alcohol. Though in the film it doesn’t play out in a way that sounds this wholesome and corny, love and passion are what seems to save Martin from addiction. We can only hope that these newfound purposes are enough.

 

As expected, Martin and his friends’ experiment ends in disaster and most of them lose huge pieces of themselves in the process, be it their job, their spouse, or their life. In that way, this addiction story is no different than Requiem for a Dream or (in more recent years) Beautiful Boy. Where this film stands out, then, is in its exploration of the interplay between society and alcohol, and how one is able to go from healthy-enough social drinking to alcoholism. The happy-go-lucky drinking of the teenagers in Martin’s class is depicted as a goal that becomes further and further from the reach of the gang’s experiment. As they withdraw further from society—and each other—into drinking, it becomes clear what Vinterberg is trying to tell us about alcohol: that the more we lose purpose and disconnect from our fellow human beings, the less healthy drinking becomes. Martin’s hope for the future at the end of the film is thus to reconnect with those who give him purpose, those who inspire him to dance more than he drinks.

 

Enjoy responsibly—together.

 

Another Round (2020) is available to rent on Youtube and Amazon Prime.

 

REVIEW: DNA

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Minor spoilers ahead. 

 

In her new film, DNA, French-Algerian director Maïwenn attempts to capture the generational struggle of understanding one’s cultural identity, which here locates itself within the film’s main character, Neige. Neige, alongside her Royal Tenenbaum-sized family, has difficulty coping with the death of her grandfather, an Algerian immigrant who is the unifying head of the entire extended family. His journey from a simple life in Algeria to an academic in France striving for Algerian liberation is the common myth that unites the family. When he dies, Neige is thrown into a—sometimes destructive—mission to discover the significance of her Algerian heritage.

 

Admittedly, this film is often pretty bland; the almost pointless use of handheld shots and blinding lens flares don’t do much for the viewer other than annoy us, and a good bit of the dysfunctional interplay between family members doesn’t amount to much more than trivial family drama. This is also a story we’ve likely seen some version of before. Whether it be Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing or a blockbuster hit such as Bend it Like Beckham, the difficulties of mediating between different aspects of one’s cultural background is a subject that has been frequently explored in the 21st century; in an increasingly heterogeneous America, explorations of multicultural identity have become ever more important stories. 

 

But what makes DNA unique, despite its shortcomings, is the structure that Maïwenn gives to Neige’s character arc. In the beginning of the film, Neige doesn’t even feel like a main character. Though the camera may linger on a bit more than the rest of the family, there’s still plenty of screen time for her brothers, as well as the whole troupe in an ensemble. It isn’t until the halfway mark that Neige begins to escape the crowd of her extended family, and the narrative really begins to take an interest with her personal experience with grieving. In fact, as the film goes on, the rest of her family begin to appear less and less, and by the end we’re watching Neige walk around alone, starve herself, or bounce between appointments at the Algerian embassy to get her Algerian citizenship. Thus, we learn that Neige’s process of getting closer to her Algerian roots is a sort of a sweet irony, that to become a part of the Algerian community she must first retreat back into herself, away from her family and into her own solitude. 

 

The film’s ending finds Neige on a solo trip (possibly even a move?) to Algeria, and it’s apparent that she’s pretty out of place as a French-passing woman in the streets of Algiers. She wanders through the crowded streets like a tourist, often against the flow of traffic. But, even though she’s left the family she’s known her whole life and has presumably become a stranger in Algiers, Maïwenn asks us to remain hopeful that Neige—as well as her viewers—can find a community they can call home: the film’s final shot is Neige in slow-motion, laughing joyously at the Algerian flag fluttering against her back. Her smile is nothing but contagious, and the cut-to-black punctuates Maïwenn’s love letter to the aimless children of immigrants in France. 

 

DNA (2020) is streaming exclusively on Netflix.

 

REVIEW: I NEVER CRY

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Spoilers ahead.

 

Isolated in the basement of my house on a Saturday night, I try to tune out the pounding music that somehow manages to penetrate the two small windows separating me from fun. The rage of the closet light that won’t turn off is getting to me, so I waste no time in beginning my foray into the Ann Arbor Polish Film Festival, by way of Piotr Domalewski’s I Never Cry.

I Never Cry is a long awaited film for the “Euro-Orphans:” the kids whose parents left countries like Poland to work in the Western powers of the UK, Ireland, France, etc. The film’s protagonist, Ola (Zofia Stafiej), is one of these kids. When her father dies in a construction accident in Ireland, she must leave her mother and disabled brother behind in Poland to retrieve his body. With only a backpack and a dwindling pack of cigarettes, the 17-year old girl bounces around Dublin, doing her best to thwart the different levels of bureaucracy that stand in the way of her father. Ola’s story is one of amusing despair, as she drinks around Dublin and desperately clings to the few cigarettes she finds (12 euros for a pack of cigarettes? No thanks). In this search, Ola finds she knows very little about her father, and the mission gradually becomes about understanding him rather than finding him.

In stories about grief, by now it’s a cliché for the characters to spend the course of the narrative soothing their loss by trying to figure out who the deceased “really was;” if I’ve lost you already with my trite summary, I’m sorry.

But where Domalewski succeeds in this film is the subversion of that trope, because for Ola, she can’t seem to find out anything about her father. From the man at the hiring agency, to her father’s boss, to his roommates, Ola gets nearly nothing of significance about her father. The most she learns about her father is from his mistress, a hair-dresser scraping by who shows him a framed picture that Ola’s father drew of her—“he likes to draw.” And that’s it. That’s the most we learn of Ola’s father. Domalewski holds the man of the narrative’s longing at arm’s length, trapping us in Ola’s feeling of ignorance, of lostness.

The Euro-Orphan does not get a conventional redemption here. Instead, after discovering that her father’s mistress is pregnant, Ola gives the mistress the money that her father left Ola for a car, with the hope that she uses it to go to makeup school and get a better job. Her dreams of a car mean an escape—but realizing there is no escape from her cycle of poverty, she defers her dreams to the next generation. Like Ola, the viewer isn’t left with much hope with regard to the story at hand. But we must hope with Ola that her gift to her father’s future child pays off. At best, we hope with Ola for a do-over, for a kid that has a better life in a better place.

Psych 101 tells us that between ages 40 and 65 is the stage of development in which we worry about our contribution to society, to the next generation, to the things that will outlast us. But, with our legacy ever-present in the social media era of recording everything we do, I think it’s easy to find ourselves wondering at younger and younger ages, “what world do I leave my kids?” For the generation of “savers,” I Never Cry is a brutally realistic picture of what we have to sacrifice for the rest of humankind.

PREVIEW: I Never Cry

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From the ever-growing Polish film scene comes Piotr Domalewski’s sophomore feature project, I Never Cry, a story of a young Polish woman who must make a journey to Ireland in the hope of retrieving the body of her recently deceased father. Domalewski rides on the success of his feature debut Silent Night, which won Best Film at the Polish Eagles, Poland’s equivalent of the Oscars. While Silent Night comically explored the life of a poor Polish family, I Never Cry seems to be more intent on chronicling the coming of age of a woman in European society—from the “Second World” of Poland, to the highly westernized nation of Ireland. For the American viewer, we are provided an opportunity to observe life off the American island, on a continent where another country is a two-hour drive away and one has no choice but to construct their identity across the borders of a global community.

 

I Never Cry is featured in the 27th annual Ann Arbor Polish Film Festival, hosted virtually from November 6-8 on the Michigan Theater’s Virtual Movie Palace. The festival has historically provided a platform for Polish cinema to gain wider recognition in the Ann Arbor area and, ultimately, the United States.

REVIEW: BoxFest Detroit Film Festival

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It’s early and my tea is still warm. At this point in my life, waking up before 9 AM makes me feel like I’m a child again, watching the day start and letting each breath fill me with the hope of a ripe new day. The fun things happen late at night, but the beautiful ones happen just after the sun rises, when the day hasn’t yet accumulated any of the complexities that come with time. It’s also the perfect time to watch amateur films.

I click play to begin the BoxFest Detroit Film Festival, a contest that has for the last 16 years served as a platform for up-and-coming women directors. This section is “Box 3” a set of 5 narrative short films.  First up is an animated short, Chatterboxing!: it’s delightful, it’s funny, and it combines drawn animation with photographed objects to create a lively, kinetic verbal-boxing match. Chatterboxing! is a clean high compared to the rest of the films; it’s something that might be featured as a Disney short. And it lures us into a kind of false sense of security.

The other four films do not have the luxury of animation’s universal simplicity. The rest are live-action and thus much more susceptible to all the technical shortcomings of low-budget films. A Basement Film, the longest piece of the event—and the most emblematic of the low-budget genre—is plagued with distorted sound, strangely delivered lines, and no color-grading. So, what are we left with? Story. Without the traditional pleasures of mainstream film aesthetics, narrative eclipses all else. We must force our way into the narrative like a benevolent intruder, searching the narrative for any signs of life. We’re looters who have shown up to the party a little too late, and we must be content with any useful thing we find.

When everything else is stripped away, A Basement Film is a surprisingly close-to-home vignette about a girl who struggles with her mental illness during a basement hangout. The dialogue falls short and the camera lingers a bit too long after someone speaks, but we truly get a film about the culture of the basement, complete with meandering conversations about the future, awkward groping, and psychedelics. It feels honest, even if it feels rough around the edges—really, because it feels rough around the edges. Even the over-lingering shots seem to reveal the little moments of silence that make real life so uncomfortably real. So, when A Basement Film does a character well, that character feels especially done well. The stoner guy who’s actually really smart but is content working his blue-collar job and learning about drugs on the internet—that’s some variation of someone a lot of us have met. And this same sincerity applies to the remaining three films, whether we’re watching a video game possess two boys, the apocalypse test a couple’s relationship, or a group of teenagers navigate the intersection between faith and blackness.

Really, the best thing about low budget films is how little people care about them. When a student film begins and one hears the deafening roar of a camera’s internal microphone (God forbid), most people check-out. After all, film is a mixed-media, comprised of sound, photography, and story. If a movie can’t hold up its end of the bargain in providing you all those elements, why watch? We know what it takes for a movie to be entertaining, and we expect that standard to be met. But, when we go beyond our expectations to be entertained—or, more aptly, below them—we stumble upon the little kernels of beauty that often go unnoticed in a polished Hollywood film. There’s a freedom in it, to portray something simple without the control of a studio that needs to turn a profit. Rather than grimace at the faults of these amateur films, I revere them because they give me a little bit of hope that there are still young people out there doing the work of stumbling in the dark to find good art. And hey, you’re bound to stumble onto something, someday.

 

I drain my tea and look for something productive to do.