Reviews - Bottoms, Wes Anderson and more
This week's edition contains shorter reviews of three projects: Emma Seligman's Bottoms, Wes Anderson's The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar (and other shorts), and Sebastián Silva's Rotting in the Sun.
The last quarter of 2023 will be filled with new releases by the best directors working today, from Killers of the Flower Moon to May December and Anatomy of a Fall, and so many others, it’s hard not to get excited for what is coming.
Before getting to those films, I wanted to shout-out some projects I liked (that are available to stream or rent right now) and offer my thoughts on what worked and what didn’t about them. If you feel that I missed other great films from 2023, let me know so that I can review them later on.
Exaggerated to a Fault: Emma Seligman’s Bottoms
Production from the United States. Released in 2023.
The world of Bottoms is such an insane one, one where lesbians are at the bottom of the social hierarchy just for being untalented, jocks are laughably stupid, cheerleaders have no agency, principals are heavily partial to the popular kids, divorced moms have affairs with highschoolers, football matches are at the center of life and opposing teams are actually serial killers. It seems so extreme in its portrayal of high school dynamics that it seems intentional, much like Heathers which used the backdrop of high school in a completely unrealistic manner to examine sociopathy. Looking back though, don’t most high school films have some version of these characteristics? Does Bottoms satirize actual high school life, or other high school movies? Is it so self-aware that it deconstructs itself as it tells you the joke?
Emma Seligman’s Bottoms follows PJ (Rachel Sennott) and Josie (Ayo Edeberi), two lesbian best friends who start a fight club to get other girls’ attention (including stand-out Havana Rose Liu) based on a lie that they were in juvie for the summer. The traditional lying-to-be-popular trope seems to be in conversation with many other high school films, which makes way for one of the more interesting themes of the film. Bottoms also uses the best-friends-who-fight trope, and abruptly shows changes in social hierarchies in a very unrealistic fashion. So, any first reading of the film would be as a satire of classic high school films by embracing all of its usual beats and drama, further highlighting their absurdity.
However, its inherent exaggeration occurs outside of the main plot and provides much of the film’s atmosphere, from the extremely awkward fighting choreography, the very oddly specific jokes and runaway gags, and its surprising use of violence (not only through fist-fights). Its value proposition seems to be gearing toward something different from the usual high school antics shown so many times to viewers. Seligman’s ambitions with these exaggerations make her try to bite off more than she can chew, especially in the ending that, while I agreed with what she tried to do, felt that it was unearned due to the script failing to successfully build up to the event. She and Sennott, who co-wrote the script, seemed to be more concerned with using high school tropes in different ways and making very specific jokes and left little room to polish the structure.
The true value of the film is in its jokes and repetition of tropes, not necessarily to satirize other high school films, which it does to some extent, but rather to pursue the core behind Bottoms: victimhood and virtue signaling. Josie is so paralyzed by being a loser that she becomes a completely passive presence in her own life, blaming others for her faults and resigning to her fate as an untalented lesbian loser. Her change starts through lies within the fight club but she still fails to take responsibility for herself and sells the fight club as female empowerment while her true intentions and lies were completely selfish. Her journey is grounded in realizing that she does have tools to make a change for herself and the perception that others have of her depend mostly on how she perceives herself.
Is Seligman commenting on how current American society victimizes itself more and more? Should virtue signaling even be a thing anymore in her eyes? I don’t know, but maybe the ‘untalented’ part of Josie’s character is a stand-in for her identity issues. If everything is society’s fault, no one has an obligation to make their own situation better, since the ball is on everyone else's court. Seligman plants many seeds of identity politics within the film to invite the viewer to see everything as part of the system’s problem, but showing later that the true issues are within the characters’ passivities, and the fight club is an insert for taking a proactive charge in their own lives. Again, the ending did not feel earned and Seligman did not fully succeed in telling a great story, but the ideas scattered throughout made the experience fun enough. I just hope she continues to hone her talent to portray her themes more successfully next time.
[Bottoms is available to rent on Amazon Prime]
Diorama Delights: Wes Anderson’s The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar (and others)
Production from the United States. Released in 2023.
Wes Anderson didn’t have to bless us with two projects in one year, but here we are. Adapting Roald Dahl short stories, Anderson made four short films through the perspective of the author (played by Ralph Fiennes), around different subjects, from the humbling journey of a stingy millionaire, to bullying, professional pride and methodical rescue operations, Anderson presents these stories just as they were written by Dahl, while taking his aesthetic to new extremes. What seems most interesting to me in first regard is that the characters narrate the action directly to the screen, seeming to copy almost verbatim the text of the stories written by Dahl. Likewise, the acting style seems Brechtian, having them recite the text letting the viewer know of its artifice, and the use of props (or lack thereof) seem to support this style of the actors. So then: what is the purpose of adapting these stories? Why was it preferable to capture it in film instead of performing it on stage?
The first question is a matter of interpretation. Musical composition is one thing but the person who chooses to conduct or play that composition may bring an entirely different interpretation to it, even if the notes, chords and times are exactly the same. The same should be applied for adapting literary material, especially through Wes Anderson’s unique brand of melancholy and strange feeling through the very in-your-face artificiality, as he constructs immaculate diorama sets far beyond anything he has before and injecting every one of the four stories with a strange feeling of sadness. Maybe Dahl’s stories were only meant to show a clear moral for children to grab onto: the power of charity, sticking up for yourself, the letting go of pride and a collective sense of duty, respectively. Yet, with the exception of Henry Sugar, the first of the short stories, which chooses to end on a happy yet ambivalent note, the rest feel aimless and sad. Maybe Anderson’s interpretation provides a different meaning for adult viewers experiencing something else entirely, but its worth stays the same. The purpose of the adaptation, then, is to bring new meaning to Dahl’s stories within the themes of Anderson’s body of work, which he definitely succeeds at..
The second question is a matter of style. The actors (Fiennes alongside Benedict Cumberbatch, Ben Kingsley, Dev Patel, Rupert Friend and Richard Ayoade) deliver lines as if to an audience in a theater, and Anderson directs them similarly to how he instructed the characters to move in Asteroid City, wooden and sparing, but waiting for them to seep their own emotions through. All of them are very good, particularly Cumberbatch, Patel and Friend as they narrate their respective stories and inject their own idiosyncrasies into the tones of the stories, but the better part of what justifies the films is in Anderson’s design. It still is pastel-colored and symmetrical as many of his films, but the effort put into constructing sets that were constantly shifting and moving made it all better, from whole façades of houses moving to reveal the internal sets, to the camera moving and shifting perspectives involving stop-motion animation, it all feels at home with the children stories at the center but also surreal to the point of alienation.
Anderson also takes its time to add extreme tension to the moments that deserve it, from the train tracks and the ending of The Swan, the confrontation in The Rat Catcher, and the entirety of Poison, Anderson uses different techniques, sounds, angles, breaking his own set rules to add more feeling within a normal seeming Anderson project. The Swan succeeds the most in this even when it is mostly just Rupert Friend narrating the story, but the added value makes it impossible to be recreated in a theater, it sets it apart.
All of them were pretty good. If I had to rank the four stories, it would be something like this:
The Swan
The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar
Poison
The Rat Catcher
The end of The Swan has little Peter finally stand up to bullies in a way that feels transcendent almost like Laura Palmer’s victory amidst defeat in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. But the realization of that transcendence comes crashing down with the final words of that short: ‘what happened?’ It’s so simple, so effective and so sad. I hope to see more of these in the future, keep them coming!
[All four of these shorts are available to stream on Netflix]
Provoke and Contrast: Sebastián Silva’s Rotting in the Sun
Production from Mexico and the United States. Released in 2023.
1960 was a banner year for cinema, closing off an amazing run from Alfred Hitchcock with Psycho, and marking the beginning of another amazing run from Michelangelo Antonioni through L’Avventura. What do these two films have in common? If you know the answer and respond enthusiastically, you will probably enjoy what Rotting in the Sun has to offer. If you don’t know, prepare to be surprised with a twisty meta dark comedy about online celebrity culture and its vanity, homosexual promiscuity, suicide, drug use, language barriers and ultimately, class dynamics, centering around a social media influencer, a depressed filmmaker and his housekeeper.
The meta aspect lies in the fact that Jordan Firstman and Sebastián Silva play versions of themselves in the film, being the social media influencer and the depressed filmmaker, respectively. Silva’s character in the film is living in Mexico City, depressed, constantly thinking about death, paralyzed by his own discomfort and prudishness. He decides to go on a trip to Zicatela, a gay nude beach where he meets Firstman’s character, who is the polar opposite of Silva: out-spoken, sex-positive, unconcerned for the faults of the world. Silva finds Firstman extremely irritating but somehow always keeps him around and responds to him, as if his loneliness makes him crave human contact or somehow his contrasting energy gives Silva some will to live.
The first act in Zicatela contains a lot of nudity and drugs, and is provocative to a fault, working to reduce stigma around sex and drug use. The camera never shies away from it, but within Silva’s perspective, it's all so disorienting it almost feels contradictory examining what the filmmaker was trying to say. The provocations add to Firstman’s character, who Silva chooses to portray as extremely vain. His appeal is still his worst flaw: his concerns are all very superficial and he constantly lies and convinces himself of his lies and projects them onto social media, which he sells as his ‘real life’. For example, he claims that he and Silva fell in love in his instagram stories but that was never the case, and when he gets the chance, starts flirting with everyone else. It’s the constant need for validation and pleasure that stop him from advancing, and it is when he has a crash with reality in the third act that he decides to be more thoughtful of his social media presence and his relationships. Firstman, as well as Silva, also serve as a representation of upper middle class life, where they can afford to either only be concerned with simple pleasures or be depressed about wanting more.
This is where the housekeeper Vero, played by celebrated Chilean actress Catalina Saavedra, comes into the fray. Rather than depressed, she is constantly in fear of losing her job, while Silva never explicitly wants to fire her but never gives her reassurance either. Her concern is fully one of economic stability, if we can even call it that. As the only prominent character of the working class, her presence and actions contrast so much from the rest to see that her poverty makes her feel unsafe with any institution. She is the only character with a moral compass, and she does bad things only for the need of self-preservation, never because of unconcern for what might happen. Her role comes to prominence in the second act after being very much in the background, but she gives by far the best performance of the film, injecting her sense of reality within a character that, much like Firstman, is full of contradictions, but in contrast seems deeply disturbed by them throughout.
The final conversation of the film sees Vero and Firstman trying to bridge the language barrier by having a heart-to-heart. She meekly gives a monologue talking about everything that had happened until that moment, making it seem like a genuine moment of connection, but the effort ultimately falls short. That language barrier seems again like it has another purpose, maybe they could directly communicate if she spoke English or Firstman spoke Spanish, but as they are from very different worlds, there would be no chance for them to truly understand each other. The barrier is not based on language, but rather on the deepening social divide that Silva sees occurring in Mexico City, where Americans participate in its gentrification and leave the rest to carry the scraps in a city that does not care for them anymore. Maybe his focus is not only Mexico City but a reflection of the globalized world that makes countries de-prioritize their own. I may or may not agree with his position, but the way Silva chose to portray this theme was so interesting and unexpected, it kept me hooked.
Towards the end of the film, the viewer understands the name of the film because of something that happens towards the end of the second act. However, though it is a direct plot point, maybe the title is more a reflection of its themes surrounding the social divide and peoples’ inability to bridge it. Its biting social commentary is subtle and effective, let's hope more filmmakers embrace the moral ambiguity, subtle commentary and biting dark comedy that Silva amalgamated with this film.
[Rotting in the Sun is available to stream on Mubi]