Three Films Make A Post: The Love Story is Never the Whole Story

Deep Water (2022): Adrian Lyne’s attempt at adapting Patricia Highsmith is most definitely the worst Highsmith adaptation I’ve seen. It’s not a terrible film, exactly, but Lyne, as is the director’s wont, is all about the surface level thrills, without any of the depth and insight into broken and often horrible people you get from Highsmith and most adaptations of her work. So there are many slick looking scenes of Ana de Armas being naked and Ben Affleck repeating his performance in Gone Girl, but worse in so far as Affleck mostly goes for constipation than actual acting. There is, alas, little to see on screen that ever provides any insight into why the characters here are the way they are, the way they explain themselves to themselves when they are alone; I’d love to believe the film is supposed to be about exactly that inner emptiness, but neither film nor actors do anything to convince me.

Even less well realized is the portrayal of the social connections between these bored rich people. Most of the time, you can’t even tell in whose house these bores are partying.

Strawberry Mansion (2021): There’s quite a bit of positive buzz about this twee SF indie arthouse comedy thing directed and written by Kentucker Audley and Albert Birney (who also star and act a little in here, respectively) in mid-brow critical circles (we are of course always low-brow around here). It is, admittedly, difficult to hate a film that’s so clearly made with as much blood, sweat and tears as this one is, and that has an aesthetic so genuinely its own. My problem is, said aesthetic is so unbearably, relentlessly twee (and I’m someone who loves Gondry, Wes Anderson etc), and the film’s main “they are putting ads into our dreams, maaaaan!” metaphor so simplistic and half-baked, I found myself reacting to the movie mostly with pained annoyance.

Lux Æterna (2019): This is never going to be my favourite Gaspar Noé movie. There’s a bit too much of the whiny tone particular arthouse filmmakers love to take on when speaking about the filmmaking process, not made better by couching it in irony, which ruins the middle part for me. What stays with me, however, are the early sequence of Béatrice Dalle and Charlotte Gainsbourg talking – clearly improvising – about an actresses’ life in filmmaking country and witches, and the climax, when the whole film breaks down into its director’s beloved epilepsy inducing visual and acoustic drone and the leads have rather fantastic breakdowns, swallowed by art, the shittiness surrounding it, or the whims of their director.