Flicks with The Film Snob Chris Dashiell

Trenque Lauquen, a film by Argentine director Laura Citarella, presents a two-part mystery. First, the mystery of things we investigate to learn more about them. Second, the mystery of things that are beyond what we can fully know.
The story takes place in and around Trenque Lauquen, a small city in central Argentina. Laura, a young botanist played by Laura Paredes, has gone missing, and her boyfriend, a university professor played by Rafael Spregelburd, searches the area trying to find her, with the help of her married friend Chicho, played by Ezequiel Pierri. Chicho is at first a baffling and rather amusing character, a shaggy teddy bear type of guy, who responds to someone talking to him with thoughtful silence much of the time, hardly ever smiling, even appearing a bit dumb, but we eventually find that there’s a lot more to him.
The film jumps back in time where we see that Chicho was assisting Laura in the search for samples of different types of orchids, and that she needed one more plant to complete her study. But one day, as they meet at her favorite restaurant, she tells him that she has stumbled upon a mystery, one that has nothing to do with plants. It so happens that Laura also does guest spots on a local radio news show about women’s history. She checked a book out of the library called “Autobiography of a Sexually Emancipated Communist Women” by a Russian author (I found out later that this was a real book), and hidden between some glued pages she found a love letter. Following clues contained in the letter, she checked out other books and found more letters. A married man, who it turns out was a wealthy Italian landowner, wrote these deeply passionate and erotic letters many years ago to a local woman teacher, who then hid them all in these books that were donated to the library after she died. Who exactly were these lovers, and in what circumstances did they meet? Laura enlists Chicho to help solve the mystery.
Laura Paredes, who co-wrote the screenplay with Citarella, draws us totally into her character’s curious and imaginative world. She is the star whose presence is felt throughout the film, even in scenes where she’s absent. As Chicho helps Laura find evidence about the two mystery lovers, we can see him gradually falling in love with her. Meanwhile we still follow the boyfriend Rafael in his search, and the contrast between his rigid, uptight personality and what we have seen of Laura’s intuitive openness is remarkable.
Trenque Lauquen is a four-hour film, originally screened in two separate two-hour parts. Citarella’s style is sensuous, beguiling, and featuring many shifts back and forth in time. In part two, Laura’s discovery of the missing variety of orchid leads to a new mystery about a strange creature, either a feral child or an animal. This part becomes an increasingly enigmatic dive into questions about identity—of oneself, of women, of our being in nature without our customary labels, of that within is which is unknowable.
Trenque Lauquen is a beautiful tapestry of stories within stories, just the kind of free-spirited film that I admire.

In 1831, Victor Hugo wrote one of his most popular novels, “Notre-Dame de Paris.” In English translation it was renamed The Hunchback of Notre Dame, after its main character, a deformed bell ringer at the Cathedral of Notre Dame in 15th-century Paris named Quasimodo. The story tells of a gypsy dancer, Esmerelda, who unfortunately falls under the lustful eye of the cathedral’s archdeacon Claude Frollo. When she rejects his advances, he frames her in a murder, but as she’s about to be publicly executed, Quasimodo, whom she had shown some kindness to earlier, swoops down with a rope from Notre Dame to rescue her and keep in the cathedral under the church law known as “sanctuary.” The novel has since been made into plays, musicals, operas, and a lot of movies. There’s something about this tale that touches people; I think mainly the idea that someone shunned in society for his looks can be lovable, and even a hero.
When Lon Chaney played Quasimodo in the 1923 film The Hunchback of Notre Dame, there had already been four previous versions made. But this one, from Universal, was that studio’s biggest and most profitable production in the silent era. An astounding reproduction of the cathedral was constructed on the studio back lot, and there were huge crowd scenes. Lon Chaney had made his name transforming himself into strange characters. Quasimodo was his most elaborate creation up to then, in which he contorted his body and designed genius-level makeup to portray this scary-looking man that we ultimately grow to care about. It’s a fine performance.
However, movie technique before the late ‘20s was still often tentative. The director, Wallace Worsley, was a reliable but rather pedestrian studio hand. The film also has the melodramatic overacting, and banality of script and pacing that were acceptable then but difficult to put with now.
Sixteen years later, in the next version, from RKO in 1939, English actor Charles Laughton made a triumphant return to Hollywood playing Quasimodo. Undergoing an impressively grotesque makeup job, he brings out the pathos of the hunchback character in convincing fashion. Once having seen this performance, you won’t forget it. Laughton was smart enough to know that he could emphasize the character’s idiotic side, and his potential for menace, without diminishing our sympathy. The picture is a glorious, old-fashioned Hollywood spectacle, but he makes it seem like more than that.
Maureen O’Hara, in her American debut, plays Esmerelda. She’s stunningly beautiful, if not exactly gypsy-like. Rounding out the excellent cast is Cedric Hardwicke as the villain Rollo, who plays his part with a gloomy implacability that attains just the right tone of self-righteous malevolence.
The talented director, William Dieterle, let his impressionistic tendencies run free, with beautifully choreographed crowd scenes, dynamic moving camera, and a talent for bringing night scenes to life. The costumes, scenery, and production design represent the studio system at its finest. This is widely regarded as the best film version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and I would have to agree. The final shot, with Laughton talking mournfully to a gargoyle, is among the most moving cinematic images of all time.

American Fiction is, on the surface, a film satire on how African American stories are marketed by the publishing industry. But more than that, it’s about the representation of race in popular culture, and how Black Americans are forced to deal with such misconceptions in their lives. With such a weighty subject, you might not expect the film to be funny, but it is. It’s based on a 2001 novel by Percival Everett called “Erasure,” and first-time director Cord Jefferson has adapted it with only minor changes.
Jeffrey Wright plays Thelonious Ellison, nicknamed “Monk” doubtless because of legendary pianist Thelonious Monk. And the last name, Ellison, is surely meant to invoke the great Black writer Ralph Ellison. Monk is an English professor in Los Angeles, and the author of several works of literary fiction. Monk’s novels are intellectually complex and subtle in style. The critics praise his work, but not many people buy it. Frustrated by this perceived failure, he responds to a comment in class involving race by lashing out. The university makes him take a break to go to Boston for a seminar. Boston is his home town, so it’s a chance to connect with family as well.
At the seminar he attends an interview with a black woman author whose new novel, which has done very well, panders to “ghetto” stereotypes such as poor illiterate unwed mothers and such. This really bothers Monk, who then writes a short novel, in an exaggerated “ebonics” type language, about a black criminal in the ghetto, signs it “Stagg R. Leigh,” and sends it to his agent as a joke. As it turns out, the joke’s on him. The agent, genially played by John Ortiz, asks if he can publish the book under the pseudonym. After some hesitation, Monk agrees. Surprise! A major publishing house offers him a $750,000 dollar advance, and the novel goes on to become a best seller.
This then is the comic premise, from which the film gets a lot of mileage. The absurdity just keeps building, with the white publishing executives depicted as farcical empty-headed culture vultures, and although we know this is an exaggeration, it’s still funny.
Besides all this, however, is the story of Monk’s family, with which he reunites on this trip: his aged mother, played by Leslie Uggams, a supportive sister, and a gay brother who has had issues with Monk in the past. He also meets a potential romantic partner, played by Erika Alexander.
Here I think the film is gently poking some fun at another African American genre: the middle class family drama. But the picture is also meant to be sincere, and Jefferson, the director, makes it work—most of the time. A native of Tucson, he’s had success as a writer on TV, and this is his debut film, so there are bound to be rookie mistakes. But there aren’t many people who win an Oscar for their first film, and Jefferson deservedly won it for his adapted screenplay.
Then there’s Jeffrey Wright. He’s one of our best living actors. Here he ably carries the movie, vividly conveying Monk’s isolation and alienation, which causes him to push people away, but at the same time Wright convinces us of his basic decency.
American Fiction ends with a very clever and funny meta-narrative offering multiple endings. It’s the one major detail that wasn’t in the book, a highly original flash of brilliance from Cord Jefferson.

For the majority of movie history, the directors have been mostly men. In Hollywood’s silent era, women played key roles as screenwriters and editors, and in some cases, as directors. But after the studio system was developed in the sound era, when big business finally saw that there was a lot of money to be made, men moved in and took over most of the positions, with women being discouraged in society at the time from being in the work force at all.
During the so-called classic era, from the 1930s through the mid-‘40s, there was literally only one woman director in Hollywood: Dorothy Arzner. And I invite you to look up Dorothy Arzner and watch some of her movies, which had the stamp of an individual style. In the late 1940s through the ‘50s, Ida Lupino, who’d started as an actress, made a series of important films that demonstrated a new kind of realism in American cinema. They’re both getting the attention they deserve, finally. But male dominance has still been the default condition in film, not just in the U.S., but worldwide.
Well, there’s been some progress since then. Agnès Varda in the French New Wave, followed by Chantal Akerman, Larisa Shepitko in Russia, Mai Zetterling in Sweden, Věra Chytilová  in Czechoslovakia, Margarethe von Trotta in Germany, Lina Wertmüller in Italy, and Márta Mészáros in Hungary, among others, achieved breakthroughs as movie directors. We started to learn some of what we had been missing. Traditional films were largely about men, with women as romantic objects or otherwise in support of the male narrative. The point of view portrayed in most films failed to show women as their own protagonists, or convey the sensibility of women outside of their relationship to men. The emergence of female directors meant an enrichment of experience, a widening to include a fuller spectrum of human events, feelings, and ideas.
A few of the women directors working now that I admire are: Claire Denis, who has given us 35 years of excellence, in boldly experimental films like Beau Travail and White Material, interrogating the inner lives of men and women characters in provocative and challenging ways. Lucrecia Martel, the brilliant Argentinian director, whose films such as La Ciénaga, The Holy Girl, and Zama display a sophisticated multilayered style in stories dealing with family conflict, religious yearnings, class differences, and colonial history. Jane Campion from New Zealand and Gillian Armstrong from Australia. Kelly Reichardt, artist of real life, whose film Showing Up was one of my favorites from last year. Ava DuVernay, whose recent film Origin continues her career explorations of social justice. Debra Granik, Sarah Polley, Céline Sciamma, Greta Gerwig, Kathryn Bigelow, who was the first woman to win an Oscar for directing, and Chloe Zhao, who was the second.
These women are making great films. It seems like a marvelous new era in cinema, and yet at the same time, it’s not enough. We need more women not only as directors but in every aspect of film production, not merely for the sake of inclusion, but because it revitalizes film.  Progress has been too slow. The struggle continues. And in the meantime, take the trouble to find films made by women, and watch them.