On the captain’s desk, a book that could lend its title to the film—Noam Chomsky’s How the World Works. From a near documentary first part to a clumsy Lord of the Flies, The Triangle of Sadness doesn’t add much to the trite derision of the obliviously rich, nor uses a desert island in any particularly original way. A setup, Ruben Östlund himself points out, that has been often used in literature and cinema for how it effectively reduces human interactions to a primal level, shifting the received weight of currencies, and annihilating hierarchies. But the premises are only as good as the first twenty minutes of the film. A silly interview at a casting session in a fashion photography studio, a gender squabble over a restaurant bill payment—Östlund immediately confirms to have a knack for contriving a narrative through a series of cringingly awkward moments. Like in Force Majeure and The Square, it isn’t much the social criticism that drives the story as the behaviour of people outside of their comfort zone. Except this time, his sadistic scalpel doesn’t dare as deep, or shine as much. Frustratingly, the promising vibe set by the first half soon fades away. Things start to wobble during the grotesque captain’s dinner scene and go souther once on the shore—the few brilliant passages being watered down by unremarkable jokes.
Of a similar fate seem to suffer the aesthetics. However reminiscent of The Square, there is something attractive to the stylised rarefaction of the opening. Cruise onwards, the image gets impersonally glossy and garish, the colours abusively graded. If this is supposed to be an allusion to the unreal world most of the characters are coming from or mockingly evoke cheap television shows of the likes of I’m a Celebrity, I guess I don’t find it rooted enough to buy it. Unless, I wonder retrospectively, the satire is meant to aim elsewhere, perhaps at those who are relentlessly being indoctrinated to see that world through such filters so we can desire it—us.
Although Des’ree Life brought me back to my university years giving me the exact same experience Anton Ego has when he tastes little Remy’s ratatouille, the soundtrack picks are terrible and occasionally misplaced—like the one that takes the beautiful ending scene into the credits as if to make sure, needlessly, it looks like one.

Bones and All—and grief and solitude. Behind a rugged surface and the metallic stench of blood, lies a complexity of themes so profound and layered as to give the film an almost metaphorical weight. After the screening I heard many sharing the unease of having found the story so vividly resonating despite its inhumanity. It is a very interesting point, although I am not quite sure I felt the same. I wouldn’t know how empathy could ever be disturbing. Its ravenous characters are forced into an even more excruciating kind of isolation by the unspeakable nature of their diversity but, in essence, they are just lonely souls desperate for someone to share the pain and help understand their mystery. Who, really, wouldn’t fit in this description, especially coming from a culture that is drenched with equally disquieting if less literal forms of cannibalism?
Responsible for portraying the American middle-earth in such a magnificent way is Arseni Khachaturan, a relatively emerging cinematographer that Luca Guadagnino had noticed at San Sebastian for his work on Dea Kulumbegashvili’s Beginning. Some of the supporting performances are no less than exhilarating too. I am thinking of the lady at the bus station counter played by Marcia Dangerfield and the creepy-friendly-greasy eater that Maren and Lee camp out with for an awkward night—a hardly recognisable Michael Stuhlbarg.
Some fancy costume choices would have to be considered slightly self-indulgent but who cares, they are great—and for one thing, they heavily contribute rooting the stunning aesthetics of the film. André Holland’s stylish Barbour-like coat on a pair of large denim trousers and beautiful Timberland work boots are a good example. Timothée Chalamet’s country-psychedelic shirts collection, coming from nowhere to somehow over-characterise his brilliant Lee, is of course another. Mark Rylance’s spectacular attire feels ironically quite natural, given the eccentric personality of the character.
As a minor detail, all the same intriguing, to me at least, the film is populated by many books. I could glimpse Joyce’s Dubliners on Maren’s dad’s table, The Lord of the Rings in her hands once or twice. I got to ask Luca Guadagnino about the hidden language behind it. ‘She reads Tolkien. She is like a hobbit on a journey through a fantastic land.’ Fair enough.
So what to say—yes, some left during the screening, but many, like me, gave a heartfelt applause as the end credits started to roll and Luca Guadagnino, in an all-black outfit and Prada high-top sneakers, limping from a sprained ankle, cautiously climbed on the stage to take the deserved praises, and all.

Decision to Leave proves anyone who’s ever thought that I am a bright guy wrong. A tough blow for my parents. From vertiginous heights to fairytale snowy woods—a leap reminiscent of Oldboy—Park Chan-wook throws us into an unstoppable torrent of convolutedly connected events that less daringly treated could have fed a five-season TV series easy. And yet, whereas its remarkable intricacy got me at times frustrated, it didn’t bar the joy of being enthralled, intrigued, and touched. In this exact order.
Under the toxically dense fog that envelops both visually and metaphorically the film, lies a near-Shakespearean love story tormented by a kaleidoscope of practical obstacles and ill-fated coincidences. As many have promptly noticed, the enigmatic Seo-rae takes Park Chan-wook closer than he’s ever been to Vertigo. The very idea of a man falling from a peak might even be an unwitting homage to the title he often mentioned as an early inspiration to his career as a filmmaker. As to how he seems to insistingly disorient his oblivious audience, slowly pulling focus from the narrative to the real essence of the film, I couldn’t help finding an analogy with Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice. Now, however arbitrary and boring they might be, and indeed are, the bare fact that I was tricked into drawing parallels shows that there’s a certain manneristic eclecticism to the film that is perhaps not developed enough to disappear in the narrative. On a similar note, the director himself points out in a recorded introduction that was shown before the screening how Decision to Leave has dramatic, romantic, humorous, and sad moments. As much as contemporary Korean cinema often excels at crossing styles and genres while seamlessly flowing through opposite moods, I wonder if a film really needs to always strive for the full lot. Irony is one vital thing, but maybe for once I could have lived without the silly comedy beats.
Cutting like a blade in the flash, the finale on the shore is not quite a novel idea but it’s nonetheless harrowing and quintessentially Park Chan-wook. Though what seems to have stayed with me more vividly is the scene by the pool—don’t know why, yet—and a line later in the film, another jigsaw. ‘The moment you said you loved me, your love is over. The moment your love ends, my love begins.’

While the economic boom of North Italy’s Sixties is turning most people’s stares up at the brutalist marvels of wealth and progress, a team of young speleologists goes the opposite way—south and down, chasing the mystery of an unknown abyss. While their descent slowly progresses, an old shepherd squeezes a few drops of water from a wet cloth into the mouth of a dying man. As his last breath is taken, the explorers reach the bottom of the hole. A puddle of water, and a beautiful gesture made in silence, as if the place demanded a certain religious respect—that’s the end of it.
Michelangelo Frammartino’s cinema is one of echoes and poetic connections. His sensitivity reminds me of Apichatpong Weerasethakul. The clarity of his camera language is staggering as the beauty he frames—nothing, so he says, compared to that of the actual location. Discreet, perhaps neglected, like the world he portrays is one the brightest directors of our time.

Not even once I blinked,
I couldn’t miss a single frame.

I let my breathing join the sounds
of men and beasts, the noise of stones
as they get swallowed by the earth,
the electric stillness of a time
remote in summer.

My heartbeat echo
the eternal pulse of life and death,
and nature.

Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie is addictive for more than one reason, among which strikes me how subtly the entire cast embraces its peculiar sense of humour elevating the page towards unscriptable dramatic heights.
Often said throughout the film, ‘avec plaisir’ isn’t just a polite expression of delight but also an exquisite moment of unwitting irony—pleasure being, strive as it might, the one thing Buñuel’s jolly middle-class brigade constantly fails to achieve. Relentless dinner parties are interrupted by a cascade of increasingly preposterous impediments. A café in central Paris unlikely runs out of tea, coffee, and milk—but they do have water. An extramarital love affair is not consumed as the passion is chilled by the inconvenient arrival of a friend, and husband. And yet they go, tenaciously, whether running away from dubious ancestral fears or made invulnerable by their charming form or bravery. They move from house to house beautifully dressed in compact formation—unquiet, almost comical, the clicking of their heels. Lacking an author and a direction, they only know the few lines of a part they play indefinitely, which includes petty notions such as how to mix a martini, carve a turkey, or test the purity of cocaine. Like in the iconic recurring scene that sees them walk in the heat of a sunny day on a deserted countryside road, they come from nowhere, and to nowhere they march—alone.

“Cinema is an instrument of poetry, with all that that word can imply of the sense of liberation, of subversion of reality, of the threshold of the marvellous world of the subconscious, of nonconformity with the limited society that surrounds us.”
—Luis Buñuel

So for now you just call me something personal like, Jesus Christ.
I’m not Christian, I’m sorry your children died.

The screenplay for C’mon C’mon is a pretty exciting read—the draft I have, not quite the final, but close enough. The dialogues sport the witty sharpness that only comes from the pen of a writer. Some will be nuanced by a more real if less eloquent tension, once shot. The situations are perfectly relatable, often touching—the electric feel that art gives when it seems to have reached inner places we only thought we knew. Moving from the specific to the chorus and back is strangely visual on the page, where questions are posed to diverse children letting the word improv be a clue to the world their unscripted answers will unfold. One in particular scared me, took me by surprise, made me reflect on how the world will look like after I am gone—different.
Mike Mills explores hidden ties between listening, remembering, future, and control, giving us something sensory to cling to—a sound recording gear, mobile phones, classical music. Ten-year-old Woody Norman is brilliant, in fact, inspiring. His natural performance sets the bar and the style, the other actors seemingly trying to catch up and do their best to play along. The low-contrast, bright b/w feels like a great choice to bring different cities, people, and experiences under the same silvery sky. Some aerial views of LA and street photographs of NYC are particularly stunning. I would so love to visit New Orleans!
And yet I wonder if said all this is still OK to not have loved C’mon C’mon so madly—perhaps a film that relying too much on what really is a non-exceptional extraordinariness, shows how taking life to the screen straight, even with the support of unquestionable talent, is not enough to get an exceptional film.

‘They had to evacuate the grade school on Tuesday. Kids were getting headaches and eye irritations, tasting metal in their mouths. A teacher rolled on the floor and spoke foreign languages. No one knew what was wrong.’ ¹

At the end of a screening at the Soho Hotel—the beautiful scarlet seats in a room designed, perhaps carved, as a contemporary Greek theatre in a London basement—two art deco armchairs are brought on stage, the narrow space between the screen and the front row that is. Moments later, Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach are sitting there, wearing right the stylish clothes one would expect, promptly delving into an amicable conversation and an insightful reflection on the act of making.
What did you mean to say, is the daunting question any artist will eventually be asked. Very candidly, they seem to share the feeling to have never written a script knowing exactly what it was about. It’s normally something you discover after two or three Q&As, they convene. Mike Nichols—further elaborating, now seriously—always had that clarity in mind. But to them, shaping ideas through words on paper is a different kind of journey that, even when adapting from a book, is still driven by raw intuitions. While their tone is full of genuine admiration for the mastery of their late common friend, I cross my legs the other way and reflect on whether that lack of conscious intent is actually the only key to retelling DeLillo’s layered maximalist novel without being constrained by the search for its meaning or the lucidity to articulate it. In this respect, Baumbach succeeds in finding his way through an exhilarating maze of ideas that could have been translated in countless different films—or no one at all—and a place that is loose enough from its source material to make any attempt at comparing the two an utter nonsense.
The first part of White Noise—from the sheer writing bravura of its introductory dissertation on the value of car crashes in American films onwards—is perky and hypnotically strange. Its distinct Eighties–Spielberg flavour, along with the garish colour of the vegetables on the table at home, in the canteen of a college, on the shelves of a dehumanised—or dehumanising—supermarket, even allows a slightly perverse nostalgic feeling, If not for the time, for its cinema. From there, things dip into darker psychotic matters, only to let us realise how these have been looming all over since the very first frame. The finale gets suddenly a little wacky, in an unexpected vintage cult fashion. But maybe it’s good, I am still considering. Maybe my bewilderment should find peace in what Noah Baumbach said towards the end of the evening about the inexplicable joy of things that happen in a story ‘just like that,’ without trying to be univocally intelligible or display an obvious narrative logic.
One last note. I always thought that films that end in a big dance choreography should be made illegal. I haven’t changed my mind, and yet I’ll admit that focusing on one single character at a time during the tragic coda not only made me laugh, but also think—all those people, like tiny coloured plastic figures in some scale model—what a fitting image to represent our manic new world. And come full circle.

1. An excerpt from Don DeLillo’s White Noise that I find spookily meaningful—no one knew what was wrong.

It was never on my very biopic-unfriendly list, but after having surrendered to Spencer and Elvis, it only seemed fair that I watched this too. And that will be it for a while.
Blonde is so patchy to have left me unsure of what I’ve seen or, if anything, with a series of thoughts that are equally dichotomised. Alternating notable glimpses of creativity with jarring uninspired moments, its aesthetics are messy to say the least. The image gets often overly manipulated by pointless visual effects of all sorts. Too much trying, and perhaps too cinephile a director. The freaking talking photo à la Harry Potter of Norma’s dad put me off. I resisted the temptation to give up purely because it was too early in the film to be so resolute. The elaborate use of different aspect ratios combined with the random back and forth between colour and b/w also felt a bit crafty, overthought, only bearable because of the superbly photographed shots coming through at regular intervals to save the day.
Ana de Armas is a marvel as an actor even when the script, despite appreciable efforts, doesn’t allow her to dare beyond the received notion of the icon. The interesting thing about a film on such a mythical figure is that it inevitably has to deal with the consequences of that very idea, with the established gossip, with the popular knowledge whether false or true, and with whatever publicity fed us with over the years. Where Blonde fails is in finding a voice that doesn’t necessarily say anything more or different, but does it independently enough to really intrigue. Although with a certain style, Blonde essentially joins the chorus at the likely risk of being soon forgotten.
Adrien Brody and Bobby Cannavale brilliantly portray what I guess are to be considered particularly fictionalised versions of Joe di Maggio and Arthur Miller. Shame they didn’t get more screen time. But the silent heroes in the cast are Julianne Nicholson and David Warshovsky, who turn Norma Jeane’s mum and Marilyn’s trusted make-up man into unexpectedly seductive characters.
‘I just wanna begin again from zero,’ is a line that resonates with me, but what she says immediately after, is the piece of dialogue that I shall remember. ‘In the movies they chop you all to bits. Cut, cut, cut. It’s a jigsaw puzzle. But you are not the one to put the pieces together. Oh, but to live in a part. To just be in it till the closing curtain every night.’ Which is not just Dominik’s way to bluntly state what he doesn’t seem to like of cinema—Blonde being full of highly enjoyable long takes and monologues—but also one to note how brutal the world can be in dissecting people, and how endemic their desire to escape from their own lives has worryingly become. Echoing this, the uncomfortably long shot on Norma’s feet as she lies motionless on her bed is eerie and touching at once. It should have lasted even longer.

To say that a good part of it is made of Steadicam closeups on people walking—or rather marching, frowned, mostly on their own—might sound reductive, and yet is not, nor is a lie. Romain Gavras embraces the fashionable technique of long continuous shots to give his otherwise classically conceived tragedy a contemporary, relentless, human pulse. Arms throw Molotovs, but it’s when legs move that ideas are processed. Athena advances through reflective moments tightly framed, while fancily choreographed hectic sequences populated by hordes of extras serve as bridges and provide the spectacle—one of such furious energy to evoke the crazed spirits of Fury Road. To craft his complex camerawork, Gavras avoids resorting to CG, resulting in gravity and a more physical flow. Without indulging as many directors have done in recent years in ungrounded visual or technical itches, he knows when to cut and when the narrative requires a more conservative language. His background in music videos might be apparent, but however aesthetically stylised, his cinematic vision is convincing and efficient. I don’t mind how blurry is his political take, or shallow the social insights. Athena is about the inherent nonsense of any act of violence in a world where media and devices are catalysts of escalating apocalyptic traits. And she is the woman wearing no helmet that calls her sons in the most crucial moments reminding them, and us, what is at stake—what really is being destroyed.