Bleak Week: Despair Feels Good in a Place Like This

A change of pace today as last week I spent almost every evening attending the world's greatest film festival—Bleak Week: Cinema of Despair from the American Cinematheque. Lots of experiential horror for sure, but less genre horror. I wrote about La Cérémonie previously, but below you'll find thoughts and reactions below about all the rest of my Bleak Week screenings. Some spoilers below.

◆ Elle, dir. Paul Verhoeven, 2016.

Elle tells a story about a violent attack, a stalking, and a slanted kind of revenge. It’s all quite intense and disturbing and, watching it again, I realized that this central thread had crowded the rest of the movie out of my memory. It's only one element in a work of cinema dense with moving parts. This is due to the source novel certainly, but Elle isn't weighed down by all that it carries—blossoming instead, perhaps because each storyline chews on related, overlapping ideas. These are all stories about control and about male violence, forming a layered, interlocking tangle of dramas, more rich than messy.

◆ Sweet Country, dir. Warwick Thornton, 2017.

Thorton's grim, gorgeous western about race and criminality in Australia ends with a shocking act of violence—an act of violence with no identifiable perpetrator. Although this isn't quite right. We can't specify an individual perpetrator, but the crime is far from anonymous. We know who's responsible. The responsibility here is collective, and, given all that we've seen up to this point, it should be.

◆ Come and See, dir. Elem Klimov, 1985.

Come and See will always be remembered first for its depiction of the unspeakable atrocities committed against Belarusian villages by the Nazis during the Second World War. It’s also one of the great renderings of wartime disorientation and dislocation. Misty dense forests. Crowds of desperate refugees. Air clouded by smoke. Viscous, treacherous bog. When the invasion starts, the environmental transformation is drastic—what was plain and pastoral turns chaotic, murky, labyrinthine.