MAKING THE CASE
1. Zama
Like her previous mordant and tantalizingly elliptical dissections of the bourgeoisie, Lucrecia Martel’s Zama tells a story of colonialism, this time through a Spanish functionary in a South American backwater who awaits a reprieve (return to the mother country) that will never come. In his illfitting wig and scarlet coat, Don Diego de Zama (a brilliantly inscrutable Daniel Giménez Cacho) watches, waits, fumbles, fawns, and resists in encounters that suggest but don’t explain—a voyeur of his own life. The movie is an adaptation of a superb novel by the Argentine writer Antonio Di Benedetto, the portrait of a man out of joint with his time and place—like the local fish that spends its life near the shore, fighting the water that seeks to cast it upon dry land. With her purposely disorienting mise en scène, Martel plunges us into this Beckettian limbo, a surreal satire of miscommunication between the putative ruling class and the natives.—Molly Haskell
2. Burning
Relocating an early story from Japanese superstar Haruki Murakami to contemporary South Korea, Lee Chang-dong’s most alluring film depicts a gauzy youthful ardor that foments obsession and imbues an otherwise desultory aspiring writer with a sense of purpose. A three-hander in which one character enters and another exits all within the second act, Burning is unnervingly intimate, its foregrounded concerns entirely interpersonal. Yet this slow burn incrementally swells with themes of national identity—the proximity of North Korea accentuates an air of inscrutable frontiers—the homoeroticism of two men drawn to the same woman, and, above all, class determinism. The endearingly shambling would-be wordsmith Jongsu (Yoo Ah-in) becomes a third-wheel to the kittenish Haemi (Jun Jong-seo) and the affluent enigma Ben (Steven Yeun)—until Haemi vanishes, seemingly into thin air, with Lee masterfully transferring Murakami’s deadpan approach to the uncanny into a suspended widescreen eeriness. Echoing L’avventura, the mystery of Haemi’s disappearance is eventually eclipsed by Jongsu’s quest to haunt and infiltrate Ben’s moneyshrouded milieu. Yeun has rightfully garnered accolades for the hushed menace of his homme fatale, but Yoo pulls off the more remarkable feat of tracking Jongsu’s self-actualization through righteous transgression and baptism by fire.—José Teodoro
3. First Reformed
In Paul Schrader’s , something is very, very wrong: not just with the life of Ethan Hawke’s Reverend Toller, but with the entire fallen world. In his book , then-24-year-old Schrader wrote that the, , , ), but feels like a culmination of an entire life, a return to the “transcendental style” that so moved him. The film wears its influences (Bergman’s , Bresson’s ) on its sleeve, pulsating with a rigorous spiritual contemplation rarely seen in American film. And it goes the distance with its extreme ideas. It doesn’t blink. The ending, when it comes, is not a catharsis, but an explosion of grief, wish-fulfillment, and destruction. Throughout, the film surges with anguished questions: Can we ever be forgiven? Is forgiveness even possible? My God, what have we done to our world?—
