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TIFF18 REVIEW: Un ange [Angel] [2018]

2018/08/222020/04/02 Jared Mobarak

I’d rather consider myself a gazelle. Two lost souls struggling to reconcile their image meet in Senegal by chance. One’s a prostitute—although she rejects the label and the registration card that’s as much a means to procure wealthy clients as a permanent brand upon her skin. The other is a world famous cyclist just recovered from a devastating accident that brought unsavory questions to light thanks to the hospital finding cocaine in his blood while there. Desperate to escape the limelight of fame and the spotlight of infamy, he flies…

REVIEW: Irma Vep [1996]

2018/06/212020/04/06 Jared Mobarak

Have you sex with girls? If you’re going to poke fun at the film industry, you might as well go for broke. Take Olivier Assayas‘ Irma Vep for example. Hot off the success of his acclaimed Cold Water, he was recruited for a project about foreigners in Paris with Claire Denis and Atom Egoyan. When this attempt at recreating Louis Feuillade‘s silent Les vampires fell through, Assayas decided to continue with that thematic idea while also adding some “meta” behind the scenes chaos that could (and probably did) occur. With…

REVIEW: L’eau froide [Cold Water] [1994]

2018/06/072020/04/06 Jared Mobarak

Extravagant maneuvers. Originally envisioned as a 52-minute chapter of a television anthology series with strict thematic and contextual rules, Olivier Assayas‘ L’eau froide [Cold Water] eventually found itself as the much sought-after 90-minute Cannes debut that cemented the auteur’s style, acclaim, and promise without ever reaching American shores due to lapsed music rights. He would revisit the characters almost twenty years later with Something in the Air‘s more overtly political depiction of his semi-autobiographical youth mired in the turmoil of May ’68, but his earlier work still lingered as a…

REVIEW: Un beau soleil intérieur [Let the Sunshine In] [2017]

2018/05/232020/04/07 Jared Mobarak

Being a backstreet lover is just unbearable. Is love all consuming? Or disposable? If you discover it’s one above the other, how do you know you’re right? The answer is simple: love is whatever you need it to be for yourself. Don’t compromise your happiness or comfort. Don’t allow your beau to walk over your feelings to pretend what you have now is enough despite your needing more. Leave yourself open to change and—as the title to Claire Denis‘ latest film states—Un beau soleil intérieur [Let the Sunshine In]. Because…

REVIEW: Le Redoutable [Godard Mon Amour] [2017]

2018/05/072020/04/10 Jared Mobarak

I was lucky enough to admire my lover. We’re introduced to Emile (Marc Fraize) halfway through Michel Hazanavicius‘ Le Redoubtable [Godard Mon Amour]. He’s a local Frenchman with a car and the means to procure enough gas to drive an argumentative Jean-Luc Godard (Louis Garrel), his wife Anne Wiazemsky (Stacy Martin), and their friends (Micha Lescot‘s Bamban, Bérénice Bejo‘s Michèle, and Grégory Gadebois‘ Michel Cournet) home from Cannes. His inclusion moves the film forward from place to place while also providing a stand-in for we the viewers caught watching Godard’s…

REVIEW: Hannah [2018]

2018/02/222020/04/11 Jared Mobarak

He’s not coming. To see the titular character (Charlotte Rampling) at the start of Andrea Pallaoro‘s Hannah is to see someone like any other. She rides public transportation to her eccentric acting class, cooks dinner, and enjoys a quiet evening beside her spouse. The film’s start is ostensibly a silent one with only the noises of her journey and the sounds of her teacher permeating the calm serenity of a life lived in routine. We think nothing of it. I personal wondered where things would go. I knew Hannah’s story…

REVIEW: La passion de Jeanne d’Arc [The Passion of Joan of Arc] [1928]

2018/02/162020/04/11 Jared Mobarak

His ways are not our ways. The history of Carl Theodor Dreyer‘s masterwork La passion de Jeanne d’Arc [The Passion of Joan of Arc] is almost too perfectly attuned to the subject matter itself. Here was a renowned director hired to craft a movie about France’s most famous Catholic despite being neither French nor Catholic. Dreyer became a sort of pariah, helpless as the Archbishop of Paris and government officials demanded edits out of his control. His original cut then burned in a studio fire before a second created with…

BERLINALE18 REVIEW: Les rois mongols [Cross My Heart] [2018]

2018/02/142020/04/11 Jared Mobarak

They’re good guys doing bad things. While you can debate the success of politically motivated events like 1970’s October Crisis in Quebec, Canada, you can’t question their danger removed from the cause. The media reports the carnage whether terrorist bombings or kidnappings and murder. They provide an objective account of what’s happening—in this case the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ) wreaking havoc to force secession from the country and become an autonomous nation—and leave it to their viewers to understand the context. Adults can handle this because many already…

REVIEW: Ava [2017]

2018/01/192020/04/13 Jared Mobarak

They won’t spoil our summer. Knowing your sight will leave you prematurely is a tough pill to swallow. Being told at age thirteen that the process had sped up to the point where all night vision would be gone by summer’s end is nothing short of devastating. Unfortunately this is the news Ava (Noée Abita) must cope with as vacation begins. It’s a sobering reality she confronts with steely resolve as her mother Maud (Laure Calamy) cries on the car ride home. The hope, however, is that these next few…

REVIEW: 120 battements par minute [BPM (Beats per Minute)] [2017]

2017/12/232020/04/17 Jared Mobarak

You can’t split responsibility. At one point during Robin Campillo‘s 120 battements par minute [BPM (Beats per Minute)] a high school girl tells a group of ACT UP Paris members that she doesn’t have to worry about AIDS because she’s not gay. It’s a horrific glimpse at the unconscionable lack of information sexually active teenagers were provided at the height of the disease epidemic during the early 1990s. To see her confident incredulity is to see the danger of ignorance and the importance of self-made, self-educated, and unfortunately mainly HIV-positive…

REVIEW: Nocturama [2016]

2017/12/212020/04/17 Jared Mobarak

It was bound to happen. What if a devastating act of violence was committed without purpose? Does it still have meaning? The answer of course is “yes” since such an attack leaves victims whether dead or psychologically scarred. Consequences reverberate well past borders of the town, country, and continent in which they occur because of the inherent fear they conjure. We wonder who will be next, dread the realization it could be us, and let paranoia seep into our very soul. This is why it’s called terrorism. It disrupts the…