Vampires, Assassins, and Romantic Angst by the Seaside: Takoma Reviews

Orlando: My Political Biography, 2023

Writer/director Paul Preciado works with a wide range of individuals who are transgender, gender-fluid, or nonbinary to both reenact sequences from Virginia Woolf’s novel and discuss their experiences with gender and, where applicable, transitioning.

An intriguing mix of documentary and fiction mirrors the shifts in the lives of the interview subjects.

I’m a fan of Woolf’s novel and I’m a HUGE fan of the 1992 adaptation starring Tilda Swinton as the titular character. You always have my attention by saying “Orlando,” and this was an interesting, different take on adaptation.

My favorite thing about this film, and something I think is really essential to conversations about people who are gender non-conforming/trans/non-binary/etc, is the way that it shows the very wide range of experiences and personalities of the people in those groups. For some people, clothing is how they express themselves, while other people may need gender-affirming procedures to feel right in their body. There isn’t a monolith that represents “being trans”, and it’s really cool seeing how many different types of people there are who fall under that same umbrella. I had a pleasant friction with the film where it would cut to an interview subject and I would immediately start asking myself, “Okay, is this a trans woman? Is this a non-binary person? Is this a gender fluid man?”. The need to classify is so innate.

If you’ve never read the novel, it follows a young person who has been granted immortality. Living across centuries, he wakes up one day to discover that he has become a woman. A large part of the novel is considering how the same person is treated differently---legally, sexually, etc--just because their gender changes. It’s obvious why this plot is appealing to director Preciado and his actors/interviewees. The novel gets into the idea of what it means to be in the “right” body, and it’s a great launching point for the different scenes and discussions in the film.

My only criticism of this one is that it felt a bit overlong. This might have been the result of a later-than-typical nighttime viewing, but with about thirty minutes left, I felt like the pace and spark of the film began to lag a little. I probably owe this one another viewing.

The film frames all of its sequences around ideas of sex/sexual relationships (except when it takes like 4 seconds to show that she's reading a book), and they hit all these big "woman problems" ideas: the jealous boyfriend, foray into sex work, bi-curious exploration, and finally the controlling husband. I think that the sequence with the people in poverty kind of sums up how I feel the whole movie regarded her story---just incredibly shallow.

I thought that the framing of her story and the way that it presented her conflict with the patriarchal society around her was so shallow that it actually felt like a mockery of people who experience all the things the movie glibly dances around. Taking 2 minutes for a little pity party looking down at poor people was crossing a line for me that the film never recovered from.

I did want to think for a bit about the notion of not taking the film's message (if such a thing exists) seriously, and if the movie is successful in that angle. And I think that the conclusion I came to is that the movie is so clumsy in putting "message moments" right in your face that you can't avoid it. And when you reckon with it, the only conclusion is that (1) it's just being really ham-fisted in how it's presenting things or (2) it's genuinely blind to all the ways that the film is basically mocking the plight of women who aren't incredibly privileged.

It certainly does exist. I just look at it as watching a film with your brain turned off. I found there was enough to the visual style (the opening being shot as if it's a Universal horror film, the colorful Victorian-era London, the kinds of characters who occupy the world) that I was able to fixate on the technical aspects and still appreciate the film. I'm not saying you or other people who took issue with the politics need to look at the film this way and I can understand finding the politics too hard to ignore. That just wasn't my experience, so I still enjoyed my time with the film.

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I'd have been happy to do that if only the "messaging moments" weren't so overt.

I also thought that this was the weakest film, technically, that I've seen from him. The CGI stuff all read to me as fake as opposed to imaginative, and there was a lack of cohesion in the acting that surprised me (though I thought that the actors were strong on their own) given such a great cast.

Given how positively this one was received, especially by people whose taste usually coheres with mine, it's one of the more surprising disappointments of recent memory.

Interesting. And I think shallow might be the right word for me but with a different connotation. Which is to say that I didn't think this was every woman's story, I really thought this was her story, the story of this one very unique creature, whose unusualness turned things upside down. In her case it was a total liberation from sexual mores normally placed on women as well as total liberation from social limitations placed on women's education and intellect which is also explored very clearly and often on-screen, and her perspective that reliance on men, or anyone but herself, is simply illogical and makes no sense. The sex is the most up front of them because it's sex and it always draws the eye but lets not forget the frustrations over her intellect and self-education and how whatshisnames big problem is really that she simply will not come to depend on him.
One wonders if sex wasn't such a hot and touchy and still visually taboo-breaking (which remains a shame) topic among us if we'd be focusing on it over all the other ways she was liberated in this film. I mean, in the end, she is simply the boss. I do think sexual liberation, in the real world because of how much that is the most challenging thing for both men and women, is an important piece but I know I didn't come away from it feeling like that was the only thing the movie or the character was focused on. Like, to me, the most memorable "message moment" if we want to call them that, in the whole movie, is when he throws her book overboard and her friend hands her another one. That was the one that stuck with me.
But again, I also think this was her story and not the story of all women.

I know I had a lot of negative things about Poor Things when I thought back on it, so don't quite know what to make of my 4 star ranking on letterboxd. I'm almost certain that I initially gave it a three, but it's possible I bumped it up at a later date because I just sometimes feel I should give extra credit to any mainstream movie that feels like it's own thing. And Poor Things is sorta that.


But I remember finding much of what I felt it was saying very confusing and muddled. And at times I know it seemed like a movie that leaned into its quirkier elements kinda too hard for me. It felt very 'look at me, look at me, aren't I such a marvelously strange little flower', and I generally find this guy's movies do this kind of thing with a little more finesse.


But, four stars it is. I think sometimes that's what I give anything that at least wasn't boring, but I definitely don't think it deserves what is essentially a pretty high mark from me. It's possibly my least favorite Lanthimos. Maybe by a wide margin

That's fair

Right, but her "total liberation" is a liberation of attitude, and something she is only able to accomplish through (1) incredible financial privilege and (2) the fact that the movie just glosses over all the ways that ignoring social mores would/could come with serious consequences.

I think that the movie has something interesting in the way that her more liberated attitude about sex drives her Lothario boyfriend off the deep end, but it has to put so many invisible guardrails around her that it ends up being pretty limp.

Having lots of sex is a focus because the movie spends so much time on it. I'm honestly not sure you can even say she was "liberated" in this movie any more than any other woman who had independence and money would have been liberated at this time. And it's super convenient that her rich dad basically owns his own hospital because good luck getting into medical school or getting a medical license no matter how much you say "clitoris".

And I also can't fully let go of the fact that she is a child. At the moment that Ruffalo's character puts his hand down her pants, she's, what, 5 or 6? Children not being aware of sex and sexuality and consent and other things is what makes them easy to abuse. A lot of her liberation and "don't care" attitude is due to the fact that she's a kid. So . . . gross!

And what does she do with all her learning and liberation and privilege?

I guess this is what I come back to: I think that she was always going to end up educated and having a bunch of sex and being a doctor. Given her home life, how was that not going to happen anyway?

You remember her being handed a book, but I remember her looking down on a pit full of suffering and poverty, throwing a coin-purse at the problem, and forgetting all about them. It's her story: the story of a rich kid who sleeps around in Europe, gets a crash course in socialism, dabbles in sex work, and then takes over the family business. I just don't think that this film has any inner life, something I find shocking coming from both the director and the lead actress.

Mrs. Hyde, 2017

Marie (Isabelle Huppert) is a high school science teacher who faces daily disrespect and disinterest from her students. One night, she is struck by lightning which electrifies her---both literally and figuratively---and transforms her relationship to her job and her students.

A fascinating premise doesn’t capitalize on its main character’s transformation.

I absolutely cannot believe that I didn’t care for a movie that can be described as “Isabelle Huppert is struck by lightning and gains electric powers that also make her a better teacher”---and yet here we are!

Huppert is very good in the film as a woman who is trapped in a job that brings her no joy. A fundamental misconception about teaching is that being good at a subject means you can be a good teacher of that subject. It does not! A subject in which I have a college degree is actually one of the hardest things for me to teach, in part because getting in the mindset of not understanding it is challenging. Marie strikes me as someone who has fallen into this trap. She is clearly a very intelligent woman who has a passion for science . . . but she is not a good science teacher. And Marie doesn’t know what to do about being trapped, so she just suffers and suffers day after day.

I also liked the film’s portrayal of Marie’s complicated and sometimes problematic relationship with one of her students, Malik (Adda Senani). The film does a good job of showing just how fraught a relationship between an adult and an almost-adult can be. Senani is good in his role, and his experience in high school mirrors Marie’s feeling of being trapped.

But the crux of the film---Marie’s job as a teacher---doesn’t find closure in a satisfying way. This is a huge nitpick that I have with movies about teaching: good teaching is not just about doing something outlandish in the classroom. I did like a part where she talks to her students about what the results of her demonstration will be and why, but a moment that the film clearly means to hold up as cool teaching made me cringe. Marie uses her power to humiliate a student she dislikes (I mean, I also dislike this student character, but she is a child and Marie has authority over her), making her think she could be injured or killed. It gets the students’ attention, but like, of course it does!!! Making someone think they could die is a very attention-getting act! But good teaching? Nope.

I can’t help thinking that this film is too subdued for its own good. It has these outlandish elements---again, an electrified glowing Isabelle Huppert!--yet plays many sequences in a way that I found far too muted. It’s one of those movies that doesn’t seem like it knows how to end.

Certainly some interesting parts, but didn’t come together for me as a whole.

Well, I won't argue with anything you've said it just sounds like you would have preferred if it was a completely different movie or that it just didn't exist. And I get you feel her happiness and success is justified because of her privilege. Which is a problem we run into with movies all the time. I admit sometimes I myself just say, "I really don't need to sit through two hours of the problems of privileged people," so I get it. I admit, as I've said, I didn't spend too much time thinking about messages when watching this movie, I was just wrapped up in the cinematic artistry of it. It's a bit like Asteroid City to me, I honestly could not tell you what that movie was about, and I mean I couldn't even describe the plot if you needed me to, but I enjoyed the hell out of it.

I think that I would have preferred if the movie was more thoughtful about how it was going about stringing together its little sequences. It's not inherently a problem that she has privilege. And I'm not saying that people with privilege don't deserve consideration or to have stories told about them.

What I don't care for is the framing of her story as a journey of discovery and liberation, when I think that she wasn't ever actually constrained in the first place. And further I think that it's actually pretty insulting to women who are in controlling/abusive relationships or who have to do sex work to survive.

And the more I think about it, the more it bothers me that everyone is okay with multiple grown men having sex with a child just because that child is walking around wearing an adult woman's body, something that no one who likes the film seems to want to reckon with at all.

Anyway, when it comes to a powerful lady Frankenstein putting her foot on the neck of men in Victorian England, Penny Dreadful did it better.

I'm not surprised people really like this film, nor am I that annoyed that people do. But boy what a letdown.

Well, I never thought of it that way. I'll chew on this.

is it bad that while watching this my only thought was " yeah, men would be all about this situation, that tracks" lol.

I appreciate that.

And just to get ahead of this in case anyone is reading my remarks in a certain light, I am NOT implying that if you liked the film you're endorsing pedophilia or child rape. But I'm bothered by the fact that it's a key element of the film that just gets glossed over by the film itself and by people who enjoyed it.

Also, the two men in the film who KNOW she .

"I like . . . younger women with . . . less experience."

"How about a child in Emma Stone's body?"

There's a common thinking in football/soccer, too, where the best players rarely make good/elite coaches and the reasoning is that they can't understand why the players can't/don't do what they could/found easy. The have/had the knowledge and ability but can't/don't understand how to get that across to players who had/have less (and a lot less in many cases) and so they're usually seen as 'failures' because the expectations for them are even higher because they were so good as players.

There's a lot more ex-players now going into coaching at higher levels, but I''m not sure if that's because they do courses now and learn to coach or because they're often at clubs with elite players who can do/get closer to what they could?

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5-time MoFo Award winner.