Impossible not to read against headlines about food blockades and murdered children in the ongoing genocide in Gaza. The game of chess is less a quest for personal salvation than a wish for some semblance of justice, or at least mercy, to redeem our world, to make sense of its suffering. It's full apocalypse. Bergman, like the knight, prays desperately for the innocent — amidst apocalypse and the impossibility of mercy, this movie shows a troubled prayer, a hopeful question,…
Just when you can't handle another scene, this movie hits you with sweetness. Just when you start getting comfortable, it turns unwatchable. And just when you think it's "cool", it gets too disturbed. All while following the beats of a teenage TV drama... In the long line of hustler stories, this has gotta be the first absurdist melodrama. This movie is not what you think. It's unpredictable in unpredictable ways. It's gorgeous, cheeky, and fucking brutally upsetting.
But also, for long…
A wicked smart, playful, and uniquely strange character study. Especially strange for disguising itself as something not that strange. But it is that strange. If the surface is a palatable and witty comedy (this movie's super funny), something unsettling and large boils under it. This cooks the surface until, by the end, it is apparent the film was tainted with a harrowing strangeness all along. The world's a sham, and shams can be fun, but not when they are built to reproduce inequality. Best end credit sequence I've ever seen.
Suggested pairings: Holy Motors, Ralph Ellison, a pack of smokes, pecan pie, four small glasses of Michelob Ultra, a psychoanalyst.
