Contagion (Steven Soderbergh, 2011)

 

If Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion is any kind of tour de force, the viewer may assess it primarily as one of research and organization rather than of artistic imagination, and yet it holds up remarkably well when viewed with the hindsight knowledge of how our subsequent real-world pandemic played out. In particular, the social media agitator played by Jude Law, who seemed rather shoehorned into the film at the time, snappily foresees a future deluge of false information, of supposed miracle cures pushed by financial self-interest; the character’s remark about not knowing that the vaccine won’t cause autism in ten years eerily anticipating a whole administration’s worth of regression. Inevitably, Soderbergh’s choice to survey such a wide landscape within an almost overly concise running time involves much elision: for example, we see Matt Damon’s everyman character lining up in a food line which turns violent when supplies run out, and apparently witnessing a shooting in a nearby house, but we never gain a broader sense of the scale of economic and social chaos (which we understand to be considerable, the cited infection and mortality rates being much worse than those of Covid), and at the end normality seems to have reasserted itself with improbable ease. And the use of so many stars (including no less than three best actress Oscar winners) in small roles can be an impediment to sinking into the narrative, giving the project the feel instead of a displaced, quasi-celebratory caper movie. Soderbergh chooses to end the otherwise linear chronicle by circling back to the start, to track the virus’s (in this case entirely natural) origins; by then the information’s importance seems supplanted by what we know of the subsequent global upheaval, and yet it’s a pointed reminder of the inherent fallibility of global supply chains and infrastructure (and that’s without even getting into the lab leak theories).

Sur un air de Charleston (Jean Renoir, 1927)

 

It’s tempting to write off Jean Renoir’s silent short Sur un air de Charleston as unworthy of attention: Renoir apparently made it in just a few days, and some of its key elements are frankly painful to observe now. Still, a little background reading, and one’s deep regard for Renoir’s later work, suggests not so much that there’s more there than meets the eye, as the phrase goes, as that a modern-day eye may find it hard across a hundred-year distance to distinguish the mildly subversive from the cringeworthy. The use of an African-American protagonist (Johnny Hudgins) is fairly remarkable for the time, undermined by the use of minstrel get-up and blackface; learning that this was at Hudgins’ initiation rather than Renoir’s makes that aspect of the film more complex and perhaps knowingly provocative, but not enough so to neutralize one’s basic antipathy. Still, accusations of condescension are somewhat tempered by the fact of the film being set in a post-apocalyptic future where Africa is the new hub of civilization, the protagonist traveling in his futuristic craft to a decimated Europe seemingly occupied only by a scantily clad woman and her companion ape; the woman shows off her dancing skills, in scenes that were reportedly once considered erotic (the actress, Catherine Hessling, was Renoir’s wife at the time) but now seem largely grotesque. Much about the film is puzzling and contradictory: the premise sounds visionary, but the use to which it’s put feels static and imaginatively limited; it uses slow motion to deepen our engagement with Hessling’s dancing, but in other respects (like the ape suit) feels wantonly shoddy; Renoir includes a couple of inventions which suggest magical powers on the part of the woman, but it’s hard to see how that relates to the broader scheme. Still, one may find it oddly lingering in the mind, albeit in a way that’s not necessarily all welcome…

Megadoc (Mike Figgis, 2025)

 

About halfway through his record of the making of Francis Coppola’s Megalopolis, Mike Figgis comments that the best such documentaries all record disasters, and that as such there’s part of him that celebrates when something goes wrong on Coppola’s project. It’s a sign though of Figgis’s ultimate reticence, if not of his outright passivity, that one wouldn’t know from his own film that Megalopolis was indeed a failure by most measures, losing at least $75 million of Coppola’s own money, the critical response at best mixed: Megadoc leaps from the end of shooting to the Cannes premiere with the obligatory standing ovation and then abruptly ends without further comment. Among other omissions, it also gives little sense of what Megalopolis is actually about (albeit that even many of those who worked on the film seem unsure on that score), and due to varying cooperation from the actors, gives a rather skewed impression of the experience of watching the film (one might think it’s mainly a chamber drama starring Shia LaBoeuf and Jon Voight, with Adam Driver hovering on the sidelines). But for all of that, Figgis’s film barely has a dull moment, fascinating in the portrayal of the immaculately turned-out Coppola (a different suit and tie ensemble every day) often at odds with the monster he’s unleashed, mystified that everything involves so many people and takes so long, as if he were a mere hired hand himself; budgetary numbers occasionally flash up on the screen, all of them staggering. Perhaps it’s fitting that one of the most charming passages is an improvised conversation between Dustin Hoffman and Aubrey Plaza as they arm-wrestle, Hoffman doing his (edge-of-creepy) best to push things in a flirtatious direction; it’s a moment that shows up the paucity of such spontaneous engagement amid so much care and diligence, even if it relates to nothing in the finished movie.