Through a Glass Darkly

Challengers (2024): I thought of Raging Bull, with some Liberty Valance sprinkled in – the two films probably entering my mind for their flashback structure. A punk and a dandy vie for the same woman, the latter eventually gets her but the former haunts them. This is the Ford aspect. The Scorsese aspect extends to the flashy style meant to portray the intense psychology of an athlete, the repetitive dramaturgy, and the idea of containing the film inside a New Rochelle, New York Challenger event, like Jake LaMotta in his dressing room about to recite Shakespeare to old ladies at the Barbizon Hotel.

The theme of this film, as has been well said by everyone, is a trio who inextricably complete eachother through aggressive, sexualized rivalry; "hitting a ball with a racket," as the characters repeatedly disparage tennis, is merely a convenient medium for their passions. I should say that the third, much less admirable film this reminded me of is The Substance: sex, repetition, the blaring lack of subtlety, the way it feels too fast and too long at the same time. The difference is Fargeat's visual choices and direction of actors are horribly vulgar and academic, whereas Guadagnino's are competent and watchable. 

I think I was unreservedly liking the film up to and including the scene in the motel room, where "the cards are dealt" irrevocably for the three characters, so to speak. Once the film is done building up its idea, the remainder felt like the same scene repeated fifteen times, of two characters having an interaction that is simultaneously resentful and horny. Gen. Z cinema is 'hockey romance' shot like Zack Snyder and it's beautiful.

Score: 2.5

Pearl (2022) is a young woman of German parentage living on a frugal Texas farm in 1918: her mother is a tyrant and her father is completely paraplegic from the Spanish Flu, such that he usually appears dead seated in his wheelchair. She is lonely, married to a doughboy from a well-to-do family who left her behind to enlist and fight overseas. Watching dancers in 'the pictures' is her escape from small-town banality; she pines to leave the farm and pursue stardom. Her mother disapproves and denies her her dream, along with her other private 'hobby', releases of libido and violence toward her father, livestock, and a scarecrow. The result of this is Pearl murdering her Teutonic parents, the bohemian film projectionist from France she has an affair with, and her All-American sister-in-law in the space of a day on "Powderkeg Farm." Her husband returns from Europe unscathed to find this scene.

Behind all of the psychology, which is what most people seem fixated on, the joke underlying the film is that more people died from Spanish Influenza than the First World War itself. In this sense the defining image is of a suckling pig fit for Norman Rockwell festering with maggots, or a man bleeding to death in his car with rolling green hills and a red picturesque barn in the background. Ti West is nowhere near a visual stylist, but he knows that he isn't, and films all of this with a solid simplicity that coheres with the wind-blowing-in-a-dead-cornfield atmosphere and raises him above most pretentious A24 directors.

West is a bit philistine, though, which can be rankling. His choice to ironically couch Pearl in a phony "old movie" tone is poorly executed and also historically inaccurate. The film's opening parodies colourful Hollywood fantasies like Oklahoma! (1955) and Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (1937) as a reflection of Pearl's movie star dreams, before bizarrely revealing that the story actually takes place in 1918, so the scene makes no sense. He also seems to think that silent movies are inherently scary. Definitely a minor director, but I think this has warmed me to him.

Score: 3/5