Digital Week – August 27

Spanish director Victor Erice has only made four films in a career stretching back a half-century—his latest (and most likely last) finds the 84-year-old auteur spinning a yarn about an actor gone missing while making a movie decades earlier and the attempts by his colleagues, daughter and interested journalists to track him down. It’s a not very subtle exploration of the power of cinematic images and of the past in our lives, although there’s some clever use of a film-within-a-film and the always haunting eyes of Ana Torrent, who plays the missing actor’s daughter and who was unforgettable as the little girl in Erice’s debut film, the overrated “The Spirit of the Beehive.” By the time, its ponderous 170-minute running time is finished, the film has played out as a sort of shaggy-dog story that’s both too literal and not literal enough, climaxing with an obvious and too casual visualization of its title.

In their latest absurdist feature, Belgian duo Dominique Abel and Fiona Gordon spin an offbeat web ensnaring a bartender, his double, his ex, and a hitman—all of whom are at the daffy mercy of their creators . Like Aki Kaurismaki and Quentin Dupieux, Abel and Gordon create deadpan, goofily improbable worlds that can only happen in the movies; but like Kaurismaki and Dupieux, Abel and Gordon often stuff their films filled with precious, fey, even enervating material that mitigates any pleasure gotten from their unalloyed gems of visual or verbal humor. And—as here—when the entire film stops dead in its tracks so the cast can perform an incongruous happy dance, you’re in dire straits. 

How two women who were friends as kids but fell out over bullying and abuse get together to kill one’s husband is the unlikely plot of an overwrought and progressively more irritating drama written by Morgan Lloyd Malcom, based on her own play. Guillem Morales’ film is basically a two-hander set mainly in one room, but opened up a bit and with others flitting by—including a nosy young neighbor who improbably peeks into windows at just the wrong times. Viewer interest in the women’s plight depends on tolerance for contrivance and clumsy symbolism (even the title is literalized early on). Naomi Harris and Natalie Dormer, troopers both, give intense performances but are defeated by the heavyhanded material.

Danish composer Rued Langgaard (1893-1952) is anything but a household name in music, yet his lone opera—despite never being produced in his lifetime—has gotten much attention over the decades, and this eye-opening 2023 Berlin State Opera staging shows off this fierce 1920s’ drama as an unsettling and staggering work of musical theater art. Ersan Mondtag’s colossally realized staging comprises his own brilliant sets and costumes (the latter with Annika Lu) transforming several singers into the demons that Langgaard calls for. The cast is uniformly superb throughout, and the orchestra and chorus play vividly under conductor Stephan Zilias. There’s excellent hi-def video and audio; too bad there are no contextualizing extras or interviews about Langgaard’s work  and this production.

One of the classic comic operas, Figaro contains some of Mozart’s most sublime music and beautiful arias, all at the service of Lorenzo da Ponte’s near-perfect libretto. This 2023 Salzburg Festival production, staged adroitly by Martin Kusej, is crammed with talented singing actors who give wonderfully funny but meaty portrayals of these cunningly conceived characters—Krzysztof Baczyk’s Figaro, Sabine Devieilhe’s Susanna and Lea Desandre’s Cherubino are the best of a superb cast. Leading the Vienna Philharmonic and Vienna State Opera Chorus with aplomb are Raphael Pinchon and Jorn Hinnerk Andresen, respectively; both hi-def video and audio are first-rate.

As a father desperate to treat his young daughter’s rare form of cancer, C. Thomas Howell gives a formidable portrayal that’s the heart of writer-director-star Jake Allyn’s well-intentioned if cliched character study. Allyn himself plays Howell’s rootless son—his driving while drunk caused an accident that badly injured his sister, although her hospital stay led doctors to discover her cancer—a rodeo vet hoping to earn enough to pay for her treatment. The always underrated Annabeth Gish is on hand as Howell’s ex-wife, Allyn’s mom, and the local sheriff, who’s investigating a theft and shooting that just might involve both of them. It’s all very soap-operaish, but the excellent acting and Allyn’s flavorful directing are major assets. The film’s hi-def transfer is crisp and clean; extras are actor interviews.