Seduction gets the on-screen treatment quite a bit, though I can say I’ve rarely seen it so expertly dissembled as it was in Catherine Breillat’s “Fat Girl,” my pick for the “F.I.L.M. of the Week.” This twisted tale of adolescent experimentation, which delightedly revels in its own bawdiness, spends a solid 20 minutes of its tight 83 minute runtime devoted to a single scene in which college-aged beach rat Fernando (Libero De Rienzo) attempts to get in the pants of teenaged Elena (Roxane Mesquida). He’s using just about every trick in the book to end up at intercourse, but Elena clutches the prize of her virginity with a firm grip. It’s not something Fernando would need to pry from her cold, dead hands, so, slowly, he chips away at her resistance.
All the while, Elena’s younger sister Anaïs (Anaïs Reboux) bears witness to the scene playing out from the vantage point of her bed a few feet away. She’s an odd mixture of appalled and fascinated, repelled and curious. At the time documented in the movie, Anaïs (the titular obese woman) has begun to realize and visualize herself in sexual terms. She betrays little, concealing both her jealousy and vicarious pleasure.
“Fat Girl” provides only a short window into the lives of Elena and Anaïs, denying us the chance to go on any of the traditional “journey” narratives associated with teenage sexuality. Instead, Breillat forces us to stare at sex for what it is. That’s not always pretty. Sometimes, it amounts to little more than the fulfillment of animalistic desires – even over the valid objections of another person.
As firm of a believer as I am in the transformative power of cinema, I do not believe any film contains some kind of magical power that can rid the world of hatred and bigotry. What they can do, however, is gently nudge the needle of individual opinion in the way empathy and humanity. The act of experiencing a narrative arc through the perspective of someone different can open new insights into a world different from our own.
An oft-cited dictum of Karl Marx states, “History repeats itself – first as tragedy, then as farce.” There’s a pervasive sense that living through our current time is like watching the horrors of the 1930s and ’40s refracted through a funhouse mirror, albeit with the “fun” sorely missing. By accident, Alex Ross Perry’s debut feature “Impolex” seems perfectly positioned to capitalize on the moment.
As anyone who has taken an introductory-level film theory class can tell you, the camera is not just an object. It is an organism (most commonly referred to as the eye) responsive to the impulses and instincts of the person who wields it. The majority of current cinema reflects a male gaze, and the emphasis on diversifying talent sadly does not seem to be taking strides – 
“Vicky Cristina Barcelona” was one of the first movies to teach me that it’s entirely possible for characters to go on a journey and end up exactly where they started from, learning nothing. It’s an ending that has really stuck with me over the years, and I always admire filmmakers with the guts to acknowledge a fundamental truth about humans. We don’t always learn, adapt or change. We often times remain stubbornly ourselves.
My apologies to whichever friend or professor enlightened me with the following observation; I have to give credit because it is not my own. There’s a reason why so many heated, important conversations take place in cars. The automotive space is an inescapable one for its passengers, but the tableau where all seats face forward also allows confrontations to occur with an excuse to avoid eye contact.
Ava DuVernay’s superb documentary about America’s failing criminal justice system, “13th,” does an excellent job providing a high-level overview of race relations from Reconstruction to Trump. She masterfully ties together many threads and connects many dots, although DuVernay does admit that a limitation of her perspective is that she cannot do the deep dive that many subjects deserve.
After the head-scratching experience of watch Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s “
With “
The 2016 presidential election has often felt like a daily race to the bottom with each day seemingly fighting to make the claim, “No, THIS is the worst it’s ever been.” And we still have days left to go – there haven’t even been the definitive post-mortem books where the really juicy stuff comes out! We’ve always known politics were grimy and nasty, though perhaps we underestimated the extent to which they reveled in the dirt.
Long before there was Columbine, Virginia Tech or Newtown, there was the 1989 massacre at the École Polytechnique in Montreal. Unknown to many (myself included), a shooter opened fire in an engineering school and shot 28 people, killing 14. His rationale recalls that of the 2014 shooter in Santa Barbara: an angry, entitled rage against the feminist ideology that threatens his comfortable dominance.
As someone who lives with two canine companions, I can certainly sympathize with Molly Shannon’s Peggy in “Year of the Dog.” Relationships with humans are tough. How dare they do this, but they actually want something in return from us. They make demands of our time and thought. Dogs like Peggy’s beloved Pencil simply live to please us, offering love and affection no matter our mood or deeds that day.
With the start of a new festival season, it has once again become that time of the year when I catch up with the old works of directors newly feted on the circuit. For whatever reason, a lot of acclaimed movies simply slip through the cracks for me. Gatekeepers like Venice, Telluride, Toronto and New York Film Festivals help highlight directors whose new work demands you examine their past films.
Marshall and the Movies 
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