Maps to the Stars (David Cronenberg, 2014)

 

David Cronenberg’s Maps to the Stars ranks in the lower half of his work, Hollywood’s empty materialism and drained humanity seeming basically like too narrow and obvious a topic to fully engage him. Julianne Moore plays Havana Segrand, a career-challenged actress who engages a new arrival in town, Agatha Weiss, as a personal assistant; Agatha’s teenage brother is the (wantonly unpleasant) star of a “Bad Babysitter” comedy franchise, their father a lifestyle guru who counsels Havana. The film has a broad vein of vicious satire, exemplified by how Havana giddily celebrates the death of another actress’s little boy (an event causing the actress to withdraw from a role that Havana covets), but that’s familiar territory, albeit more sharply executed than average. Of greater interest are its multiple instances of doubling: two (at least) quasi-incestuous relationships between siblings, two characters visited by visions of dead people, two name actors beset by career anxiety, two case histories involving fires, two instances of drowning, all of which contributes to a sense of proliferating stasis, a perception that Hollywood stories are essentially just all the same (of the two movies foregrounded in the narrative, one is a franchise sequel and the other a remake). At the same time, the gradual revelation of so many interconnections between characters creates an ultimately savagely implosive quality: Cronenberg goes relatively light here on the “body horror” (mostly displaced into conventional concerns about appearance, and to skin permanently marked by earlier calamities), but the film ultimately feels no less invasive and destabilizing (conspicuous by its absence of course is anything close to lush cinematic pleasure). Still, Hollywood mythmaking isn’t entirely absent: an early scene has Agatha bragging in seemingly transparently bogus manner to a driver she’s just met about her connections with Carrie Fisher, all of it turning out in short order to be true!

The Grapes of Death (Jean Rollin, 1978)

 

In a way, nothing in Jean Rollin’s The Grapes of Death penetrates as much as the opening images of weary agricultural labourers trudging through the vineyards, their heavy breathing prominent on the soundtrack (the film’s feel for rural landscapes and textures makes the title’s evocation of Steinbeck more apposite than one might expect – it’s also sometimes been released under the far more prosaic title of Pesticide). One of the labourers complains of feeling sick, his concerns brushed aside by the boss, and from there it’s a short hop to Living Dead territory, with a young woman, Elisabeth, jumping off a train to escape a murderously demented passenger and thereafter wandering through a rugged landscape which appears challenging enough even in its usual state, let alone when populated by zombies (although, intriguingly, the contagion takes radically different forms, for example affecting one conniving woman’s mind while leaving her body unmarked – in the film’s most ultra-Rollinesque moment, she obligingly takes everything off to demonstrate). Even when at its more conventional, the film has an intriguing sense of remove, starting from the oddly under-populated train; an exchange about the distinction between those who fought during the war for an unexamined notion of patriotism and those who specifically opposed Fascism in all its forms hinting at festering cracks that only needed slight prodding to split open (it’s amusing that two of the primary characters avoid contagion because, being solidly of the working class, they drink beer rather than wine). It all winds its way to a suitably bleak, un-celebratory conclusion, seeming to portend a bleak future for Elisabeth, perhaps for all. A minor mystery concerns whether the “Francois Pascal” cited in the credits refers to Francoise Pascal of Rollin’s The Iron Rose, even though she’s not in the film: at least one online site says that it does, and that her scenes were cut, but I think I would have more faith in Rollin’s spelling ability, if nothing else.

After the Hunt (Luca Guadagnino, 2025)

 

Many reviewers responded to After the Hunt as if Luca Guadagnino had temporarily forgotten how to direct, and the film certainly lacks the seamless, sink-in stylishness of Challengers or Call Me by Your Name; possibly indeed seeming at times (noting for example its lurching, too-close close-ups, indifferent framings and peculiar fixation on hands) downright shoddy. But greater reflection and open-mindedness suggests a sly strategy on the director’s part, indicated early on by the precise use of Woody Allen-style opening credits, and at the very end by an audible “Cut,” both making small contributions to a foregrounding of artifice and provocation that’s evident in everything from the chaotically piling-up narrative to the barely-controlled performances (the question of whether the actors are “good” hardly seems relevant). The film initially teases us with the promise of a cozy institutional saga, immersing us in a Yale philosophy department characterized by strong, flirtatious collegiality and spiky banter, soon disrupted by a student’s accusation of sexual assault against a teacher; from there it’s consistently expectation-defying in its treatment of the core premise (for example making little real attempt to engage with the facts and perspectives underling the allegation, let alone to resolve them), along the way snatching away points of certainty, throwing in much that’s mainly bewildering, ending up in a place that seems barely explicable on its own terms, let alone as a logical outgrowth of what preceded it. One certainly registers at the end though how the initial warmth and sense of connection has been replaced by distance and isolation (the final scene takes place in a diner that we previously saw bustling but is now deserted, and with snow outside yet!), seemingly suggesting that the kinds of stridently entitled machinations depicted in the film, however all-consuming at the time, are ultimately detrimental to one’s social positioning and basic contentment.

Annette (Leos Carax, 2021)

 

Even by modern-day standards, the closing credits of Leos Carax’s Annette feel unusually prolonged, especially as the film sticks in the mind as a relatively “small” and intimate one (notwithstanding its splashes of grandeur), an impression cemented by the opening (the most straightforwardly enjoyable part of the movie) in which the two principals of Sparks, the three leads, the director and his daughter Nastya and a few others march out of the studio and into the street while singing an opening song. The real-life father-daughter presence seems to promise autobiographical revelation ahead, but if so, it’s fairly depressing in nature given what transpires, a downbeat story of a romance between Henry, a comedian/performance artist (Adam Driver), and opera singer Ann (Marion Cotillard) that generates a child with an ethereal singing talent, even as the family becomes mired in tragedy and murder. The film often seems most audacious in its withholding quality, its refusal to straightforwardly entertain (summed up by the scene in which singing prodigy baby Annette is booked for the Super Bowl half time show and then refuses to do anything, except to denounce her father for his crimes). One registers one aspect after another in which the fabric feels defiantly dour: Henry’s act is at best angry and abrasive and often downright audience-hostile, the clips of Ann’s performances sterile by comparison; the device of having Annette played by a puppet counts for surprisingly little (the manipulation of Annette’s strange talent by her father is hardly made more resonant by such a distancing device), and her replacement by a real girl in the end only confirms the wretched isolation lying ahead for Henry). The closing credits return to celebratory mode, the cast and crew inviting us if we liked the film to tell a friend about it, or failing that to tell a stranger, but the camera’s slow journey up into the beyond seems to embody the faint hope of soliciting too many such recommendations.