Tag: murder

Favorite Films of 2023, Part 1

Victoria Emily Jones4 Comments
Past Lives

I’ve seen over seventy films from 2023 (and there are still more I want to see!), and these are my top ten. My top eleven through twenty will be released this weekend in a separate post. Many are international, and what year to classify them as can be hazy; I go by the date on which the film was released in the US, which is when I have access to it.

If the film is streaming for free with a subscription service, I’ve noted that at the bottom of the entry. Otherwise, most are available for digital rental (Google Play is my preferred vendor), and a few are still in theaters. You might also see if your local library has any on DVD, as that’s how I watched several of these.

Please be aware that the following films have either PG-13 or R ratings, for various reasons. I don’t have a personal policy of “no x” or “no y” in the movies I watch, but if you do, please consult the MPAA rating descriptors or a more detailed content advisory before deciding whether to view the film.

1. Past Lives, dir. Celine Song. Kind, gentle, and empathetic, this semiautobiographical indie drama by debut director Celine Song follows Na Young, or Nora (Greta Lee), over the course of twenty-four years, from her young adolescence in South Korea to her emigration to Canada and then the US. Act 1 introduces us to Nora’s childhood sweetheart, Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), whom she reconnects with virtually twelve years later in act 2, shortly before meeting and befriending a white American man named Arthur (John Magaro) at a writers’ retreat. After another twelve years of not interacting, Nora and Hae Sung find each other again in act 3 at age thirty-six, when the single Hae Sung visits Nora, who’s now married to Arthur, in New York.

What I love about this film is how it subverts all the tropes associated with the romantic triangle. The characters aren’t possessive, conniving, or competitive. There are no heroes or villains here. The film is about bonds of love and culture, and especially about what trust, support, constancy, maturity, and love look like in a marriage. In an interview on the DVD special features, Song says Past Lives is at its core a love story between Nora and Arthur. It’s also a story of navigating a bicultural identity—living between two worlds, mourning the piece of oneself that’s lost with the adoption of a new home country, and integrating elements of one’s “past life” into one’s new life, continuing to be shaped by both.

The opening scene and closing scene are perfect. Song’s skill as a storyteller, honed over her years as a successful playwright, really shines through in her screenplay.

2. The Zone of Interest, dir. Jonathan Glazer. This chilling Holocaust drama centers on a Nazi family living their dream life in the literal backyard of the Auschwitz concentration and death camp. Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel)—who is an actual historical figure—is the commandant of the camp; having risen through the ranks, he seeks to provide his wife, Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), and their five children a comfortable and idyllic life. It’s a risky choice to tell this story from a German perspective, but Glazer and the two lead actors more than succeed. We never actually set foot inside the camp; most of the scenes happen within the confines of the villa or at the nearby river where the family goes on outings. Nor do we directly see any of the horrors; we see merely hints, like smoke rising from a crematorium chimney in the background. But even more, we hear these intimations: a train pulling into the station, a tussle, a chase, a barking dog, a gunshot, screaming. All of this happens just over the wall, while Hedwig tends to her flower garden or her son plays with toys in his bedroom. (Props to the sound designer, Johnnie Burn.)

What is so disturbing about the film is the banality of evil that it reveals. Rudolf isn’t the type of villain who sneers or snarls or has violent outbursts. He brings his kids kayaking and reads them bedtime stories; he sips coffee with his wife. He could be us. “I wanted to show that these were crimes committed by Mr. and Mrs. Smith at No. 26,” Glazer said. Sanitization is one of the themes explored—lots of scrubbing.

3. Four Daughters, dir. Kaouther Ben Hania. Blending documentary and fiction, this film tells the true story of a Tunisian Muslim mother—Olfa Hamrouni—and her four daughters, the elder two of whom became radicalized by ISIS as teenagers and ran away to Libya to engage in jihad. In 2016 Kaouther Ben Hania saw media segments of Olfa calling out local authorities for their indifference and inaction and knew she wanted to make a film about the disappearance, to understand how a tragedy like this can happen in a family. She originally wanted to do a straight documentary but soon realized it would be more powerful, and more feasible, to have Olfa and her younger daughters, Eya and Tayssir Chikhaoui (born in 2003 and 2005), reenact their memories onscreen. Because daughters Ghofrane and Rahma Chikhaoui are still absent, actors Ichrak Matar and Nour Karoui were hired to portray them, and actor Hind Sabri stepped into the mother role for the scenes that took too high an emotional toll on Olfa.

This method of storytelling better reveals the story’s complex layers, as the three women are both inside and outside the scenes. They’re telling the past, but they’re also questioning it. They’re reflecting on their motivations as they discuss their memories with each other and Ben Hania—many of them traumatic, but others warm or simply ordinary, as when they talk about their first periods! Olfa, the mother, is a particularly complex character, as she is fiercely protective of her daughters but also perpetuates on them some of the patriarchal oppression that she herself suffered. The film is about motherhood, sisterhood, zealotry, rebellion, and violence, and it has left a searing impression on me.

4. Anatomy of a Fall, dir. Justine Triet. In this courtroom drama set in the French Alps, Sandra (Sandra Hüller) is suspected of her husband Samuel’s (Samuel Theis) murder. As the police investigate and the prosecution launches its interrogations, they uncover details about Sandra and Samuel’s conflicted relationship, and the couple’s visually impaired eleven-year-old son, Daniel (Milo Machado Graner), is forced to testify. Hüller’s performance is riveting—she gets my vote for Best Actress of the Year.

5. Saint Omer, dir. Alice Diop. Another French courtroom drama, this one based on the real-life story of Fabienne Kabou. Laurence Coly (Guslagie Malanda), a Senegalese immigrant to France, is on trial in Saint-Omer for the murder of her fifteen-month-old daughter, Lili, an action she blames on sorcery. Intrigued by the case as potential source material for the novel she’s working on, Rama (Kayije Kagame), pregnant, travels from Paris to attend the trial. But when Laurence’s motives prove inscrutable and mental illness is put on the table, Rama begins to worry about her own ability to mother. The testimony dredges up emotions for Rama surrounding her troubled relationship with her mother—also a Senegalese immigrant, who appears, from the flashback sequences, to suffer from depression—and sharpens her sense of cultural alienation. Rama is an analogue for the filmmaker, Alice Diop, who, as a documentarian and expectant mother at the time, attended the Kabou trial, and it forced her to face her own difficult truths.

Streaming on Hulu.

6. Dream Scenario, dir. Kristoffer Borgli. Paul Matthews (Nicolas Cage) is an evolutionary biologist teaching at a small-town college and living a quiet life with his wife and two daughters, when out of nowhere, he starts appearing in the dreams of strangers around the world and becomes instantly famous. An absurd comedy with elements of horror, Dream Scenario satirizes the fickle nature of celebrity in today’s internet age, in which even the most unremarkable people can become an overnight sensation, and the adoration of fans can turn to hatred at the drop of a hat. I was laughing out loud a lot at this one—and cringing too!

7. Fremont, dir. Babak Jalali. Donya (Anaita Wali Zada) is a young Afghan immigrant working at a fortune cookie factory in the Bay Area of California. Formerly a translator for the US Army in Afghanistan, she is ostracized by many of her fellow Afghans as a traitor, and she struggles with loneliness. But the film has an uplifting tone; it’s about survival, hope, and connection. The first full-length feature by the Iranian British filmmaker Babak Jalali, it is in English, Dari, and Cantonese.

Streaming on MUBI.

8. Monster, dir. Kore-eda Hirokazu. When her eleven-year-old son, Minato (Soya Kurokawa), starts behaving strangely and she hears that a teacher hit him, Saori (Sakura Ando) demands answers from the school. The story is told in three parts, each from a different narrative perspective: first the mom’s, then the teacher’s, then the boy’s. The truth gradually emerges with each shift, and a stormy finale brings things to a close.

9. Plan 75, dir. Chie Hayakawa. In a near future, the Japanese government launches a voluntary but coercive program encouraging the nation’s elderly citizens to terminate their lives in order to nobly reduce the burden on society. Having been forced to retire from her job as a hotel maid after one of her coworker peers slips in a hotel shower, Michi (Chieko Baishô) is considering signing up. The film focuses on her but also develops side stories for two Plan 75 employees: a Filipino migrant whose daughter back home needs an operation, and a man whose estranged uncle becomes a client.

10. Killers of the Flower Moon, dir. Martin Scorsese. Based on the best-selling nonfiction book by David Grann about the serial murder of members of Osage Nation in the 1920s, Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon depicts the criminal ugliness of white greed and laments a grave historical injustice. When the Osage discover oil on the reservation they’ve been displaced to in Oklahoma, they become very wealthy, and white men from the outside move in to try to steal that wealth. The white crime boss and master of deception William Hale (Robert De Niro)—the movie uses all the real names—has ingratiated himself with the Osage over decades and has secretly been carrying out a plan to gain control of Osage headrights by killing off inheritors.

The movie focuses on Hale’s nephew Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio), a simpleton whom Hale compels to marry the young Osage woman Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone) and further manipulates to manipulate others. The movie suggests that the love been Ernest and Mollie is genuine but complicated, and I didn’t quite grasp what bound them together (was it just physical attraction?) or how much either of them knew about what was going on (was Ernest really that naive? did Mollie never suspect him or his uncle of foul play earlier on?). But I was engrossed for the full three-and-a-half-hour runtime, all the way to the gutsy final scene of the radio play and the beautiful, defiant coda.

Streaming on Apple TV+.

Read part 2.

“After the Fig Leaves, Eve Cuts Her Hair” by LeighAnna Schesser

Victoria Emily Jones2 Comments

Bouguereau, William_The First Mourning
William-Adolphe Bouguereau (French, 1825–1905), The First Mourning, 1888. Oil on canvas, 79 9/10 × 98 2/5 in. (203 × 250 cm). Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires.

“After the Fig Leaves, Eve Cuts Her Hair”

So when they bury Abel, there is no veil
between her grief and her love. And there he stands,
so like his father, his cities yet unbuilt.

His father cuts open earth with bare hands,
leaving plough and shovel, the sharp edges
and the heavy handles, apart in furrowed field.
She calls each animal he resembles: mole, badger, fox.
He named them, once, and now she names him:
father unfathered, sonless, one son less. The sun hangs
round and clear, apple-red, above the dark tree line.

Once, when Cain was the only child in the world,
their fields withered and arrows flew fruitless.
Dull-eyed by the empty fire, beside the windless cedars,
he wailed at the dry breast. Much later,
after thunder dumbed the stars,
they faced the barren, muddied vale together. Adam said,
God made paradise, and we made this—
this is all we have to give him. He struck his staff
upon the seedless ground. Cain made two tiny fists.

Abel she cannot unsee as a splintered spear
of red lightning, reduced to kindling
on the perfumed grass, the churned earth
weeping red mud. Loss escapes her in a hiss
of distant fear: this time, the choice
for death has been made for her,
despite that it was life she’d sent into the world.
Her voiceless throat swells tight, dry as scales.

Her hair is short and stiff and gray. The world is young.
There will yet be other sons, and daughters more;
the seed of man must multiply. But this grief is older
than she knows, its gaze fixed far ahead
on what, someday, must be done. The wind’s voice
keens a long lament, a parent loss,
the form of sons’ deaths yet to come.

“After the Fig Leaves, Eve Cuts Her Hair” by LeighAnna Schesser was originally published in Presence: A Journal of Catholic Poetry 2018 and is used here by permission of the author. The poem will appear in Schesser’s first full-length poetry collection, Struck Dumb with Singing, to be published by Lambing Press in May 2020.

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LeighAnna Schesser’s poem “After the Fig Leaves, Eve Cuts Her Hair” explores parental grief following the death of a child—in particular, that of our primordial parents, Adam and Eve, who mourn the loss of their second-born son, Abel. Genesis 4:1–16 recounts how Abel was murdered by his older brother, Cain, in a fit of jealousy. This is the first human death in the Bible, and it was the direct result of sin.

The poem starts with the title, which flows with unbroken syntax into the first line: “After the fig leaves, Eve cuts her hair so when they bury Abel, there is no veil between her grief and her love.” The cutting of hair in response to death in the immediate family is a ritual practiced by women in many Native American tribes and Aboriginal people groups, where the act of severing, and the subsequent absence of, a cherished part of your self serves as a stark physical reminder of your loss. Similarly, after 9/11, many non-Native women in the US cut their hair as a sign of shock and sadness at the immense loss of life; one woman said, “I felt so different internally, I wanted something to express it externally.” Schesser imagines Eve taking part in some form of this ancient mourning ritual, wanting to leave her crying face exposed.

This is “after the fig leaves,” euphemistic shorthand for that landmark event earlier in her life in which she stole fruit from an off-limits tree and then, feeling shame for the first time, went to cover her nakedness with the first available foliage. The title/opening line, between that prepositional phrase and the first clause, skips over quite a long period of time—from the Genesis account, it sounds like at least two decades passed between Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Eden and the murder of Abel. But these two events are life-defining for Eve, so the chronology is collapsed.

“And there he stands / [. . .] his cities yet unbuilt.” The “he” here refers to Cain, who, after being confronted by God, went into exile “east of Eden,” to the land of Nod (Gen. 4:17). In his later life he built up the world’s first city, Enoch.

Like the burrowing species of animals he named, Adam digs into the earth with his bare hands—elemental. For this, the making of his son’s grave, he leaves aside plow and shovel as a sort of penance: he wants to feel directly the hard dirt, his body’s full labor and sweat, the effects of the curse he brought upon the world, which he feels implicates him in his son’s death. As he digs, the sun hangs above him “round and clear, apple-red,” a taunting reminder of his former trespass.

In the third stanza the speaker goes back to the time that’s elided in the poem’s opening, back to when Adam and Eve left God’s teeming garden and entered a dead world. They struggled to secure food for themselves. Eve gave birth to a baby boy, but soon her breast milk dried up. It was then that they resolved to get down to business and fight for a life in this inhospitable land. Even baby Cain expressed defiance against the odds with little fists as Adam broke new ground.

Snapping back to the present, Eve observes Abel’s limp body, bloody and broken and reddening the earth. “The churned earth / weep[s] red mud”—an arresting poetic image to match God’s in Genesis 4:11: “The ground . . . has opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand,” he tells Cain. We are taken back again to the Fall through more figurative language, this time evoking the snake: fear “hiss[es]” in the distance; Eve’s throat is “dry as scales.” Eve, God’s child, chose death in the Garden, and now her child, the one to whom she gave life, has chosen death too. She now has a taste of the horror, disappointment, and sadness God must have felt.

“Though the world is young,” the poem continues, “this grief is older / than she knows.” Older, even, than God’s grief at the Fall. For another son, God’s “only begotten” (John 3:16), was destined to die millennia later—“the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world” (Rev. 13:8). In his foreknowledge God saw this death and mourned it immensely. His is the oldest grief.

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William-Adolphe Bouguereau’s painting The First Mourning shows the lifeless body of Abel sprawled out over Adam’s lap, and he and Eve ridden with grief. Adam clutches his broken heart, and Eve buries her face in her hands, sobbing uncontrollably. The only color in the bleak landscape is from the puddle of blood on the ground. In the background, smoke rises from an altar, mixing with the storm clouds in the sky; this is the remnant of Abel’s offering going up to God, the cause of Cain’s resentment that led him to commit murder.

By the time Bouguereau painted this scene in 1888, three of his five children had died of illness. (A fourth child of his would also die within his lifetime—twelve years later, at age thirty-two.) He knew the sorrow that accompanies such a traumatic event as seeing your kids leave this world before you do.

The iconography he uses is closely related to that of the Pietà, an image type that shows a grieving Virgin Mary holding her dead son, Jesus, on her lap following his crucifixion. The connection is intentional, as death—which Abel was the first person to experience—will ultimately be undone by the death and resurrection of Jesus. The writer of Hebrews says that “the sprinkled blood [of Jesus] speaks a better word than the blood of Abel” (Heb. 12:24), because Christ’s blood is redemptive, bringing us back to the Garden that we lost through sin.

For an adaptation of Bouguereau’s The First Mourning by African American folk artist Ellis Ruley, see http://collection.folkartmuseum.org/objects/2474/pieta.

Call to artists: I’d love to see you interpret Schesser’s poem visually: Eve shorn inside and out (her hair “short and stiff and gray”), wearing her grief openly; Adam animalistic, digging a grave by hand; Cain looking on; and the wind bearing their lament forward to the cross. If you pursue this suggestion, do let me know!

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LeighAnna Schesser is a Catholic writer and a homeschooling mom of four from Kansas, whose forthcoming book of poetry, Struck Dumb with Singing (out in May), “meditates on family, devotion, divine mysteries, and their rootedness in place.” Visit Schesser at her website, https://acanticleforhomestead.com/, where you will find, among other things, links to some of her other published poems and articles.