Our inadvertent and very entertaining anti-capitalist lock-down film festival is in full swing.
After re-screening
Scorsese’s blistering mile-a-minute “The Wolf of Wall Street”, we switched
gears to Anna Sofia Hartman’s “Giraffe”, one of the most beautiful ruminative
films I’ve seen. A young ethnologist is documenting life on an island about to
be completely transformed by the creation of a tunnel to replace the ferry
that’s served as the only available transport to mainland Finland. She observes the island’s inhabitants whose
houses and farms are to be demolished, the itinerant construction workers, a
ferry worker, and most notably a woman whose diary, scrapbook, and other
belongings have been mysteriously left behind in her abandoned house.
On MUBI for only a few more days.
https://mubi.com/films/giraffe-2019
Kitty Green’s “The
Assistant” is the first flick to tackle Harvey Weinstein’s abuses head-on, not
by bombastic sexist fireworks (the ‘boss’ is never actually seen) but by simply
going through the mundane day-in-the-life activities of his overworked
assistant, played with quiet desperation by Julia Garner. She can't ignore
what’s going on and even attempts to report the abuses at one point, but is
brushed off by HR, only to be “comforted” with: “Relax, you’re not his type.”
The bleakest utterance comes from another woman in the office who tells her not
to worry about a casting couch episode currently taking place: “Don’t worry,
she’ll get more out of it than he will.” (On Hulu.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9761kQCNWc
And we finally watched “The
Young Karl Marx”. Raoul Peck deftly juggles narrative biography with message to
emphasize how Marx grew to become a monolithic icon (and helped me overcome my
hesitations about him due to his never having experienced television). His and
Engels’ youthful exuberance, brilliance, determination, and compassion were
more than matched by their spouses, portrayed here as women of great substance,
not merely supportive plot devices. I’ll be onto Peck’s “I Am Not Your Negro”
(which Elania has already seen) and ”Lumumba’ after getting so much out of this
one. (On Prime and Kanopy)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpJ4ZJqULsc
