Tag: women directors

Film by Ezekiel Yu
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A film still from Kelly Reichardt's "Wendy and Lucy," depicting the actress Michelle Williams, as reviewed by poet and film critic Ezekiel Yu for the automachination literary magazine.

Good Girl: On Kelly Reichardt’s “Wendy and Lucy” (2008)

Not every film needs to be complex in order to impress; nor is “impressiveness” a virtue one must always necessarily achieve in order to create successful art. By “impressiveness” I suppose I mean something like “bigness” or “grandiosity” or some baroque plot convolution(s) that leave a viewer struggling to put the pieces of the story in their correct order. Certainly there are many great films that operate in an almost puzzle-like manner (think of the austerely cryptic quality of Last Year at Marienbad, or Memento’s dove-tailing plot structure) but one would be remiss to forget the undeniable pleasures—and merits—of a simple story, simply told, whose only bells and whistles are certain subtleties that can be so slight one is liable to miss them on first viewing.

I was struck by this dichotomy very recently after seeing two movies, one right after the other: Bi Gan’s Resurrection (2025) and Kelly Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy (2008). Resurrection, epic in most senses of the word, bowls one over with complex film-craft illusion and a narrative so bizarre (at least to this Westerner) it borders on alienating; and though its visual language intrigues—touching the sublime, at times—Resurrection’s indulgence of unconventionality can veer into the downright silly, or is even sacrificed for the sake of some mawkish emotional beat. (A film that handles similar meta-themes and likewise explores the visual potentialities of cinema to the nth degree, but, in my view, does so far more efficiently, is Tarsem Singh’s The Fall.) […]

Film by Ezekiel Yu
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A shot from Coralie Fargeat's "The Substance", where Demi Moore's character is looking into the mirror.

Control Your Self: on Coralie Fargeat’s “The Substance” (2024)

If you could be younger, sleeker, and 10x more desirable, would you be? To be fair, it’s something of a non-question, because simply on its face, I feel that most of us would answer with a simple Yes. However, since reality is the way it is, and we must suffer its constraints, we also understand that beyond the impossibility of reversing time and age, even if some midnight daemon were to offer us this option, such things always come at a price. Wisdom, then, compels us to say No—but there is always, behind that No, the Yes which tickles our desires and pays little heed to the caution of wisdom, or the concept of constraint.

In Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance (2024), the offer comes in the form of a futuristic serum that creates, from your body-stuff, a younger, more attractive duplicate. The only price, it seems, is a somewhat tedious process in which each version, as it lives out its allotted portion of days, must tend to the vegetative state of the other. Supplied are feeding tubes and thick needles. Time, again, is split between the forms. A certain level of, according to its makers, “respect” is required. And then you get to be beautiful. […]