The latest film releases include Anatomy of a Fall, My Love Affair with Marriage, Silver Dollar Road, and The Mission. Weighing in are Katie Walsh, film reviewer for the Tribune News Service and the Los Angeles Times, and Shawn Edwards, film critic for FOX-TV in Kansas City.
Anatomy of a Fall
This French courtroom thriller is about a German woman who’s accused of murdering her husband, starring Sandra Hüller. The only witness to his death is the couple’s 11-year-old son who is blind. It won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival.
Edwards: “Wow. It's just a stunning, massively executed film that works at every level. The acting is superior, from the humans to the dog. And at its core, it's a whodunnit, but the director isn't playing Clue. ... It's much more nuanced, way more sophisticated than that. … They leave it up to the viewer to figure out the central question. Did she actually push her husband out of the attic window? And how did he actually die? How did this fall happen? What caused it? What led up to it? And then it becomes this courtroom drama. And I know when people hear courtroom drama, they’re like, ‘Oh, no. Not another one.’ This is completely different. It becomes this whole examination on their relationship.”
Walsh: “[Sandra Hüller is] like the Meryl Streep of Germany. She's just an incredible performer. … A lot of what this film is about is professional jealousy between spouses, creative jealousy between spouses, the kinds of give and take that go back and forth between spouses. … The film is called Anatomy of a Fall, but it's really anatomy of a marriage because in this courtroom, they put her on trial, essentially, for not conforming to social expectations of what women are supposed to be as wives and mothers.”
My Love Affair with Marriage
Latvian filmmaker Signe Baumane’s animated musical focuses on a woman’s decades-long quest to find the perfect love. Set in Eastern Europe, it’s also about the myths and fairytales that tell women they must conform to certain feminine ideals to find love. But those messages conflict with the science of love.
Walsh: “It's a really funny, interesting way to look at all of this stuff about sex and love and biology. And there's this voice that’s describing all of the chemical things that are happening in her brain and why she's in love with someone or goes back to them or is attracted to them. Signe Baumane took seven years to animate this, and she animates things on small sets that are covered in paper mache. So they're all 3D-animated, done by hand.”
Edwards: “I thought the musical numbers were very interesting and different. … But it felt like one of those old educational films I was forced to watch in middle school health class, but you’re saved by the moody animation style that is, in some aspects, cold and slightly off-putting, but very highly creative. It's a very lofty and ambitious film that is strictly for adults.”
Silver Dollar Road
Directed by Raoul Peck, this documentary follows a Black family’s fight to maintain ownership of their coastal property in North Carolina. Peck earned an Academy Award nomination for his 2016 documentary I Am Not Your Negro – about James Baldwin.
Edwards: “The emphasis is always on this family. It's a painful story that's even more painful with the use of the music, which is primarily blues and gospel. They accentuate the struggle the family's going through and the hopelessness that set in on the family as they fight the court system, as they deal with all these issues to set them back. You're dealing with the issue of land-grabbing. You’re dealing with the issue of incarceration, institutional racism.
The strength is in the straightforward narrative and just allowing his family to tell its story, without narration, without taking sides. It's a part of American history. And I think something that everyone should watch because this is America.”
Walsh: “At the center of it is this horrible, wrongful incarceration of these two men for over eight years, because they simply did not want to leave their land. I was craving a little bit more information about that. I was like, ‘Who's the judge and who's this company? And I want to know more.’ … I trust Raoul Peck implicitly because I think he is a genius filmmaker. And he kept resisting that sensationalism of storytelling and just wanted to present a portrait of this family who is stewarding this land through incredible racism.”
The Mission
This examines the 2018 death of an American missionary named John Allen Chau. He was killed while trying to reach one of the world’s most isolated Indigenous peoples on North Sentinel Island in South Asia.
Walsh: “I was very frustrated with John [Allen] Chau for going to North Sentinel Island as a Christian missionary and feeling compelled to speak the gospel to these people who have repeatedly expressed, via violence, that they do not want to be contacted. And so it's a really fascinating, complex story because you're like, ‘Oh, God, why is this guy doing this?’ But then you also realize that there's a lot of other things going on.”
Edwards: “I was frustrated going in because I've never understood the goal of missionaries, and why they want to contact people who don't want anything to do with them and convert them over to Christianity. … This documentary really never fully explains that. And it only exacerbates the problem with John Allen Chau because they didn't give me enough reason to be sympathetic or understand his cause or get inside of his head to rationalize why he wanted to do this.”