Following a politically eventful, star-studded takeoff, the 75th edition of Berlinale, one of Europe’s major film festivals, continued in the same outspoken, quirky fashion. On Valentine’s Day, actor Timothée Chalamet sparked pandemonium around the Grand Hyatt at Potsdamer Platz, where hundreds of fans and accredited personnel swarmed, then moshed to get a piece of their idol. Chalamet knows exactly what he’s doing, and so does Tricia Tuttle, Berlinale’s new director, who made it her mission to revive the festival’s dwindling status in Hollywood.
Mischievous grins, pop culture references, and innocent remarks that he’s in the game just looking for good scripts, not wanting to have someone “see him talking pretentiously on YouTube” and say, “fuck this guy” (direct quote), all make Chalamet currently the biggest film star on the planet. It seems that not a soul working there could resist Timmy Tim’s charm – the queue for the press conference started two hours in advance. Seeing “elderly” journalists stampede over one another to film the young Chalamet lazily leaning against the microphone for 30 minutes to promote his Oscar campaign for A Complete Unknown is a unique experience, but that’s what the hype is there for.
Considering Tuttle’s fantastic PR, Chalamet wasn’t the only one to move tectonic plates this side of the Atlantic. Actor Robert Pattinson, who arrived with director Bong Joon-ho to finally present their much-delayed sci-fi Mickey 17, fared just as well, and so did Jacob Elordi, the star of Justin Kurzel’s miniseries The Narrow Road to the Deep North.
The talk of politics, typical for this politicized event, toned down somewhat around the red carpet but not the program itself, which kept pushing the narratives of collective dispossession and individual depression. You know, the stuff Europeans get off chatting about while sipping $6 cappuccinos packed like sardines in crammed tourist spots.
Mickey 17 – Director: Bong Joon-ho
Blessed be the nuance and the enormity of heart that comes from Bong Joon-ho’s (and most Koreans’) rightful rage toward the debauched, parasitic, colonizing, and murderous “elites”. As a sociologist from a family of scholars, Bong, like his philosopher compatriot, Park Chan-wook, nurtures the profundity of distrust in our abominable globally capitalist establishment while maintaining a deeply humanistic empathy, if not hope, for his protagonists.
Fortunately, his long-awaited, i.e., endlessly postponed by Warner Bros, new feature, Mickey 17, is typically Bong-ers but also profoundly optimistic in the most delightfully cinematic way. A loving space sonata and somewhat of a subversion of the science fiction genre, Mickey 17 is an obvious amalgam of Bong’s previous features in English, Okja, and Snowpiercer but ends up being plenty more than the sum of its inspirations, elevating itself to the enviable status of revolutionary satire with a concrete message. The message is that people shackled by diabolical overlords can only assert their worth and integrity through radical love… and violence.
Based on the novel Mickey 7 by Edward Ashton – in which Bong changed to 17 because he “wanted to kill more versions of Mickey” – Mickey 17 follows the incredible, intergalactic story of one Mickey Barnes (a never-better Robert Pattinson in a dual role). Mickey is a placid, Earth-bound simpleton whose little life spins off its axis once he and his best friend Timo (a hilariously irritating Stephen Yeun) are confronted with the fact that their business selling macarons will never take off. They also owe loan sharks a ton of money. The mob boss swears revenge, and no nook or cranny on this planet will help Mickey hide.
Conveniently enter Kenneth Marshall (an uproariously despicable Mark Ruffalo), a now-not-so-outlandishly-dystopian politician looking to colonize a nearby planet and create Niflheim, a human colony to his own liking. Mickey is thrilled with the idea of literally shooting off to another planet and joins thousands of desperate Earthlings waiting on their chance in outer space, mostly for similar reasons of financial and ontological woes. There’s just one problem: unlike those thousands applying for a myriad jobs, Mickey has no skills or talents.
However, capitalism hasn’t brought us all the way to zero gravity only to tell us that we’ve run out of ways to exploit the human body, so Mickey becomes an “Expendable”, that is a worker whose job is to repeatedly die in the most gruesome ways, on his boss’ whim and for the “advancement” of society. The technology is now so advanced that a deceased expendable will easily be “reprinted” within hours, with their memories intact, continuing their “original” identity. Thus Mickey Barnes embarks on his grisly journey, where only his love of Nasha (a fierce Naomi Ackey), a stubborn security agent, can bring him any joy.
As Marshall and his wife Ylfa (a devious Toni Collette) obsess over inventing new “sauces” and spicing up their privileged lives, Mickey and the rest of the underlings will be struggling to show their lives have meaning. This task of self-actualization becomes especially hard for Mickey, who, after being presumed dead for the 17th time, gets reprinted into Mickey 18, only to find out that Mickey 17 is still alive. As doubles are prohibited by Marshall’s laws, in all likelihood, both are heading for the space gallows (a massive incinerator).
Ludicrous both by design and execution and propelled by wonderfully fearless performances unafraid to stretch the human condition to the maximum, Mickey 17 is both genuinely funny and terrifying. Its striking visuals and skilled direction fully honor the $118 million budget, but it’s Pattinson’s unhinged, quirky performance (made complete with Mickey sounding like Steve Buscemi in Fargo) of a simple man trying to obtain a morsel of joy in a horrendous life that hits the film’s philosophical nails on their head.
By substituting the unremarkable, silly dude for the typically cerebral, deity-complex sci-fi hero, Bong fosters relatability in otherwise utterly alien living circumstances, positioning Mickey 17 as a considerably more political feature than it would have been if the Niflheim colonizers were prestige scientists alone. Without spoiling any major plot points, its slightly uneven but heartfelt third act comes together marvelously as a parody of power that takes only love and revolutionary ideas seriously enough to give them a second thought. A uniquely inspiring watch for cinephiles of varied preferences, Mickey 17 will likely enter the science fiction canon as an accomplished allegory of the horrors of colonialism and exploitation from those in power.
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You – Director: Mary Bronstein
A film rarely surpasses the clichéd technicalities that come with the “shock” or “bizarre” territory to floor you with an honest-to-god knockout delivery. Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is a rare, fine example of a viscerally gripping work that operates on an affective level beyond simple explanation. With Rose Byrne landing a Silver Bear for Best Leading Performance, the latest A24 concoction, which had already taken Sundance by storm, is shaping up to be the breakout indie hit of the season.
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is a hard film to “recommend”, but one executed so well it’s impossible to ignore its lingering effects. A story of a mother struggling to care alone for her ill daughter while working and maintaining the household, it is presented as a deadpan black comedy with various elements of Lynchian psychological drama, but the end result is sheer horror. Mothers especially beware: If I Had Legs I’d Kick You will rip your insides to shreds.
Byrne stars as Linda, a psychotherapist whose whole life is unraveling quickly, emotionally as well as physically. Collected and thoughtful on the surface, inside, she is reeling from the hardships brought about by her daughter’s (Delaney Quinn) mysterious illness. As her captain husband (Christian Slater) is perpetually absent, she is forced to take constant care of her preadolescent child, who is being fed through a tube inserted directly into her stomach.
Linda clearly loves her daughter and wants the best for her, but in one scene after another, we find that she is, understandably, incapable of juggling motherhood and nursing duties with her own career or any semblance of personal identity. Loneliness, exhaustion, a judgmental therapist (a solid Conan O’Brien), an overly curious motel superintendent (a hilariously confounded ASAP Rocky), a stalking patient, a missing person, and an inexplicable, growing hole in her apartment’s ceiling will send Linda spiraling to the edges of reason. There’s also the matter of an aggressive hamster.
At turns prosaic and A24 “quirky”, the plot is elevated to storytelling greatness by Byrne and Bronstein, whose go-for-broke commitment to the protagonist’s distress ensures we never lose sight of her humanity or relatability. Byrne is on fire, feral and in agony as Linda, a woman whose every waking moment is characterized by a nerve-wracking “absent presence”.
In a quasi-Derridean play on the metaphysics of presence, Linda is continuously forced to endure and mediate her life through others, whom we often don’t even see. Her nameless daughter, who is with her at all times (unless Linda is binge-drinking at night outside while the child sleeps), is never seen but is always heard, her presence felt through feeding tubes and hospital corridors.
Her nameless husband, who is away for work, keeps calling and accusing Linda of not being upstanding enough for their child. Her therapist and patients, all ephemeral presences, create lasting consequences for Linda through their words and actions that haunt her (and us). More than anything else, the fantastical hole that opens on Linda’s apartment ceiling, flooding the apartment and forcing her and the daughter into a motel, keeps growing, changing, and “beckoning” Linda without a clear explanation.
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is not at House of Leaves magnitude of spatial conundrum. Still, it’s enough to make one see how this woman is trapped in a spatio-temporal pressure cooker, where only infinite iterations of the same exist, except the same keeps getting more infernal with every repetition. Byrne, however, invests every new hurdle with a fresh bout of anxiety and rage, building up to a devastating climax.
Bronstein is also in monster form here, controlling the heart-stopping rhythm of audiovisual tachycardia with Benny Safdie, even Rob Cohenesquef-lare, but indie-Steven Soderbergh zeal. Effortlessly swerving between the hyperrealistic and the surreal, she knows when to throw in an absurd joke or a humanizing soliloquy to help the viewer release a bit of steam.
A film as unhinged as If I Had Legs I’d Kick You isn’t supposed to work as a black comedy or a horror, let alone a metaphysical drama, but Bronstein is fully in command of the tone and context, making it a wholly cohesive accomplishment. This film looks and feels too in-your-face and overwhelming to succeed, but it conveys its messages elegantly and with surgical precision. By the time Linda really loses it, you will be gone with her, too.
The Thing with Feathers – Director: Dylan Southern
Max Porter’s works are mostly considered “unfilmable”. The writer, whose highly experimental novellas merge corporeal experiences with the elusive inner thoughts of his fractured heroes, relies on his characters’ imagination to bring the story forward as a mix of poem and prose – a devilishly hard task to pull off in terms of narration and visualization.
Nevertheless, Irish theater maverick Enda Walsh pulled off a spectacular stage adaptation in 2018-2019, with a striking Cillian Murphy pulling double duty as a bereaved father of two boys and the Crow, a monstrous creature who forces him to confront his grief (and his shortcomings). In the play, Murphy would astonishingly switch between the wounded, reticent Dad and the prying, verbose monster with a mere flick of a portable voice changer, condensing the entire spectrum of thought and emotion in this one tense body. It was a monumental achievement, made overwhelmingly complete with Will Duke’s wild wall-to-wall projections and Jamie Vartan’s expansive set.
Following up on this would scare most, but Dylan Southern, a prolific music video and documentary director, boldly took his chance. The Thing with Feathers, its name alluding to Porter’s book and Emily Dickinson’s poem “’Hope’ Is the Thing with Feathers”, stars Benedict Cumberbatch as Dad and follows the novella quite closely to mixed effect.
Cumberbatch, the undisputed performance giant of his generation and beyond, draws water from the stone as the verbally stunted mess of a man, but seeing his otherworldly voice acting talents not used to bring Crow (Eric Lampaert) to life was a disappointment. Cumberbatch, who voiced the likes of dragon Smaug in The Hobbit trilogy, the Grinch, and even Shere Khan in Mowgli: The Legend of the Jungle, would have been a killer fit for the sonorous cackle of the devious Crow, but all we get in that department are a half-assed man-size costume and some play with the lighting to signify nightmarish hallucinations.
On the narrative side, Southern does a good enough job laying out Dad’s path from the shock of finding his loving wife dead to a morsel of stability for him and his boys through grief and acceptance. He turns a high-voltage psychological drama into a mostly lackluster, cliched tale by neatly and realistically untangling the timeline. Cumberbatch is flawless in his portrayal of Dad, conveying with his expressions and posture the delicate nature of hurt the screenplay couldn’t, but it’s unfair to rely on his talents alone to deliver a story this multifaceted.
Newcomers Richard and Henry Boxall are also solid as Boy 1 and 2, easily shifting between childlike wonder and profound sadness, but the Crow, by all means the key element to The Thing with Feathers’ success, falls flat. Instead of a bone-chilling, haunting spectral entity, the embodiment of the Crow lands as just a pesky, borderline comical creature nobody can get rid of.
Ultimately, The Thing With Feathers is a well-enough-made feature about grief, made moving by Cumberbatch’s hugely instinctive, intimate performance. Still, given we have all experienced grief, those looking for a path forward will, apart from a tear-jerker or two, find little of use here, unlike with the novella or the play.