Capone's Art-House Round-Up with COMPLETE UNKNOWN, NEITHER HEAVEN NOR EARTH, and MY LOVE, DON'T CROSS THAT RIVER!!!

Hey, folks. Capone in Chicago here, with a few films that are making their way into art houses or coming out in limited release around America this week (maybe even taking up one whole screen at a multiplex near you). Do your part to support these films, or at least the good ones…


COMPLETE UNKNOWN
Films about what makes up a person’s “identity” often walk a tricky ledge that offers thought-provoking substance if the filmmaker is sure footed (see CERTIFIED COPY), or can result in plummeting several dozen stories into pretension and self-examination that takes us nowhere and leaves us very little to contemplate once we’ve exited the theater. I first caught director and co-writer Joshua Marston’s latest, COMPLETE UNKNOWN, at the Sundance Film Festival back in January. The screening took place on my final full day at the festival, and to say I was running on fumes at that point doesn’t even begin to cover it. What I remember from that screening was being captivated by two of my absolute favorite actors on screen, Michael Shannon and Rachel Weisz, but the rest was something of a blur, so I opted not to review it because I didn’t trust my judgment.

So cut to a couple of weeks ago, re-watching the movie with a far clearer head, and I was still so impressed with these versatile performers, playing a pair of old lovers reunited 15 years later under quite unusual circumstances. Even playing someone as normal as Tom, a man who writes agricultural proposals that may get turned into the law of the farming land, Shannon remains an oddball mystery. He’s married to the stunning Ramina (Azita Ghanizada), a jewelry designer who has just been accepted into a California arts program to learn to make her own pieces. The couple seems to be struggling, and while Ramina seems committed to making the trip from their home in Brooklyn, Tom isn’t sure he’s going with her. He seems frustrated with every aspect of his life, and this underlying dissatisfaction feels like a part of his DNA, but perhaps it’s due in no small part to his past relationship with a woman named Jenny.

In a deliberately confusing opening sequence, we see Weisz assuming many roles—a magician’s assistant in China comes to mind—before we settle in on her present job as an insect researcher in New Jersey, where she goes by the name Alice (which might be a little too on the nose, but we’ll forgive writers Marston and Julian Sheppard). Eventually, we spy her stalking Tom’s co-worker Clyde (Michael Chernus), and before long, the two begin seeing each other platonically, but seriously enough that he invites her to Tom’s birthday dinner party. Tom is noticeably rattled by her presence but says nothing at first. What unfolds over the rest of the film is essentially a two-person conversation between a pair of the finest actors of our day about what it means to become another person, or more specifically a new person.

Beginning right after her time with Tom, Jenny/Alice simply dropped out, changed her identity, moved far away, and became another person. COMPLETE UNKNOWN isn’t about going off the grid; it’s about moving to another grid because the old one hurts too much or is boring or is getting too comfortable. Alice isn’t running from anyone other than the stale person she is currently occupying. Her chosen existence makes some quite uneasy, and they accuse her of being a compulsive liar, but when they ask her questions about her many lives, she’s happy to answer honestly.

Although director Marston (MARIA FULL OF GRACE, THE FORGIVENESS OF BLOOD) is American born, COMPLETE UNKNOWN is his first English-language work, so it seems only fitting that he’s telling a story that many of us simply won’t be able to identify with, which is fine since I rarely go to the movies to see people like me on the screen. What the film forces us to do is consider the possibility (and potential method) of moving on to another life. Alice makes it look easy to simply disengage. Some may envy this ability; others might assume something is so broken inside her that she’s become a sociopath. But the film also makes us consider how many times in a day or week or lifetime we are forced to become someone else for the purposes of a job interview, for instance, or in a social interaction, or a first date. Some people take to the slight personality alterations, although Alice doesn’t really shift in that way. She just movies, changes her name, and gets a job in a field she’s largely unfamiliar with.

Just in the last year, Weisz has given us such varied and vibrant performances in film like YOUTH, THE LOBSTER, and THE LIGHT BETWEEN OCEANS (and she’ll be seen once more before year’s end in Mick Jackson’s DENIAL), but there’s something other worldly about her portrayal of Alice. She seems so open and honest that unraveling her mystery doesn’t seem all that ominous, perhaps to the detriment of the film’s dramatic core. It’s easy to see why people would be so eager to embrace her into their world, no matter her identity; she’s interesting, has great stories, and is just flirtatious enough to be captivating to men and women.

Shannon’s brooding Tom is equally interesting but for different reasons. Something is missing from his life, but he hasn’t been able to put his finger on it until this night. As they are walking and talking, Tom and Alice come into contact with an older couple (Kathy Bates and Danny Glover), and Tom is guided by Alice into pretending he’s a doctor to help Bates with foot and back problems. He’s hesitant at first, but it comes to him readily and it gives him a rush like he’s never had before. Alice’s invitation to join her on her adventure is tempting to say the least. COMPLETE UNKNOWN is all about that temptation, which is there every day whether there is an Alice in our lives or not—to abandon the stress of our day-to-day living and start anew. And as a glimpse into the alternate version of our lives, the film succeeds quite nicely.


NEITHER HEAVEN NOR EARTH
In a work that manages to find the micro-thin intersection between war and faith (and I don’t mean the “There are no atheists in foxholes” type of faith), the debut feature from director Clément Cogitore is a bizarre but highly engaging blend of authentic military behavior and tactics used to address something approaching supernatural phenomenon. Set in Afghanistan in 2014, NEITHER HEAVEN NOR EARTH follows a small French NATO patrol in its final days before leaving a base on the border with Pakistan. Relations with a nearby peaceful village that they are meant to protect are strained, and the threat of the Taliban is constant and quite real.

The primary peace of land being protected is an expansive valley, over which the troops keep 24-hour watch from two guard posts. Then without warning or reason, the two guards occupying one of the posts vanish, triggering a massive search and rescue mission by the entire group, led by the baffled but level-headed Capt. Bonassieu (Jérémie Renier), who already knows that it’s only a matter of days before the valley falls out of their control as Taliban forces close in. They assume the disappearance is a kidnapping. Soon after, another man vanishes into thin air, seemingly in his sleep. Things get so desperate, the French soldiers have a cease fire with the Taliban, who, it turns out, have also lost men in the night, assuming the French took them, and a strange alliance is formed when it becomes clear that an outside force is at work.

Director Cogitore’s frequent use of the soldier’s high-tech gear, most especially night-vision goggles, adds a great deal to the film’s real-life aura, which in turn compounds the mounting creepiness of the whole affair. We assume a plausible explanation will come to light eventually, but when a young boy from the village offers up a far more ominous possibility, the soldiers sink deeper into paranoia and genuine fear, unable to allow reality and this level of the unknown to exist in the same space.

Be warned: the filmmaker doesn’t feel compelled to solve all of the mysteries that are brought up during the course of this nerve-wracking piece. In fact, that’s essentially the point of NEITHER HEAVEN NOR EARTH—it’s about the fear of the unknown. In war, such fear can drive you insane, so to have to deal with something this baffling is more than some of the characters can take. The ending is far from what I was expecting, if only because it seems so practical, but far from neat and tidy. Count me as curious what this very capable filmmaker has next for us.


MY LOVE, DON’T CROSS THAT RIVER
Well, I was not expecting this one. From an isolated location somewhere in South Korea comes MY LOVE, DON’T CROSS THAT RIVER, a commentary-free documentary chronicling the final months of the 76-year marriage of 98-year-old husband Jo Byeong-man and his 89-year-old wife Kang Gye-yeol. The film doesn’t attempt to explain the deeper meaning of love or romance or the components of a life, but that doesn’t mean those elements aren’t a huge part of this deeply emotional and strangely hypnotic portrait of this playfully sweet couple.

Giving us only the smallest bits of information about their decades together, and leaving the audience with so many questions that will never be answered about their life together, MY LOVE is all the better for what is missing. We learn how they met and how they suffered great tragedy when half of their 12 children died from disease many lifetimes ago. We meet their grown children who come to visit the couple infrequently and end up squabbling about who takes better care of their parents. Again, there is clearly a long history of family bickering, but the specifics really don’t matter; the fact that these near-violent fights upset the parents a great deal is all we need to know.

Director Jin Mo-young composes each shot beautifully and with a great deal of elegance, beginning with a static shot of Kang in the middle of a barren, snow-covered field on her knees sobbing. So it’s no surprise, when the film jumps back a bit from that moment, to find out that Jo has a terrible cough, about which doctors have already told him there was nothing they could do. MY LOVE recently became South Korea’s biggest-grossing independent film of all time, and with the culture’s reverence for older generations, it’s not surprising that a work that shows us the depths and beauty of a long-lasting love that seems to only grow stronger as death approaches gained that standing. This is a delicate, almost fragile film that is as full of joy as it is heartbreak, and it’s with a doubt unlike anything else you’ll experience this year.

-- Steve Prokopy
"Capone"
capone@aintitcool.com
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