Behemoth!

Alex Serian has been away for a long time. At the start of Tony Gilroy’s Behemoth!, the gifted cellist (played with great commitment by Pedro Pascal) has just returned to Los Angeles and is sitting in his first recording session after years of gigging across the country in symphonies and informal quartets. The mood in the room is warm, as if he were returning to summer camp, but tempered by a mournful reminder of how quickly this fickle business has left behind or spit out its dedicated practitioners to make room for new faces. He’s caught in a current of ongoing dramas and frustrations, some interpersonal, others aimed implicitly at a changing (some might say dying) industry. 

Los Angeles, as the movie capital of the world, is a shell of its former self — we all know this, perhaps no one more so than Gilroy. He’s been out of the feature film directing game since 2012, when he helmed a rather poorly received reboot of the jet-setting Jason Bourne series, for which he wrote the screenplays for the original, Matt Damon-starring installments. Afterward, he turned his focus toward (or was confined to) streaming television, including writing 28 episodes of House of Cards, and creating and writing (but not directing) the hit Star Wars TV show Andor.

By setting his return to filmmaking in the world of film scoring, Gilroy establishes its synecdochic relationship to the movie business writ large, which also works in unpredictable, halting rhythms. Behemoth!’s own mysterious rhythms quite literally stop and start with the conductor’s baton, whereby music’s inextricable power over memory generates a series of dramatic flashbacks into Alex’s life. Suddenly, we have the opportunity to learn how he may have found himself in his current position, when a gig with the Chicago Symphony unravels before the wild, possessive threats of his then-girlfriend, Carole (Olivia Wilde, hewn just as sharp and angular as the emerald that inspired her silk dress), and a disastrous, near-fatal car crash while trying to escape. His cello in pieces, Alex returns to Los Angeles to care for his ailing mother and assemble the similarly shattered pieces of his personal life into something playable. 

To do that, he takes a holistic view of his past, from the trials of selfish, hard-charging artist parents, to a string of seemingly failed relationships, a too-early initiation into sex, and an unspoken, one-sided rivalry with his older brother, to arrive at the clarity required to do something different when given the chance. Music is the vehicle to that clarity, and Gilroy deploys a murderer’s row of film composers, including long-time collaborator James Newton Howard, as well as Alan Silvestri, Michael Giacchino, and Michael Abels, to get him there. The spy chase, the love theme, the comic relief — all quintessential elements of movie scores — play as checkpoints in Alex life, shepherding him and the viewer across major milestones, from his early gigging days in Dallas, where he meets Nadia (Eva Victor), a talented violinist with whom he engages in a passionate but brief affair, to Los Angeles in 2016, when he attends her memorial service and discovers her six-year-old musical prodigy daughter, Viviana. It’s in these and other moments that the role of movie music is clearest: to jolt Alex out of his persistent passivity and into a kind of action, both literal and metaphorical.

Behemoth! could have played like a sappy paean to the power of movie music — and in some ways it does. The fake-but-real scores that act as scaffolding for the film are a touch hacky, relying on cues and progressions that the average moviegoer has heard before in countless minor variations. But their cliché hues are also part of the point. Gilroy treats Alex’s trips down memory lane and his present-day life with both clear and misty eyes (although a montage of previously seen flashbacks at the film’s emotional crest misses the mark entirely, and ends up as pure corn). 

Both Behemoth! and Gilroy’s directorial debut, Michael Clayton, reconstruct the dramatic crescendos to their characters’ lowest points in life. They both also ask the same essential question: “How did we get here?” But Behemoth! has a soft, raggedy quality that stands in sharp relief to the grit and callousness of Gilroy’s first film. Part of this could be due to the simple passage of time, which makes us more sensitive and permissive; the later work of many filmmakers adopts similar forgiving curves and textures. Further consideration directs the viewer to the film’s driving force. Pascal’s performance, while clearly studied (his cello playing is remarkably accurate and bears a deep knowledge of how emotion flows through the wrist, fingers, and through the tilt of the neck), rustles like a deep breath, weary and exhausted. He lacks the cutting edge that made someone like Clooney’s Michael Clayton both subvert and surpass its actor’s “Movie Star” limitations; Pascal merely suppresses, rather than subverts, his public teddy-bear persona and megawatt smile. For some, that will suggest the perfect match between star and material; for others, it might be a sign that this otherwise excellent film could have reached a higher key. — CHRIS CASSINGHAM

Bardi

There is a certain expectation that comes with a film’s selection for the Currents section of the New York Film Festival, not least because the festival presents the assorted titles as “films that expand the possibilities of the form, reminding us that contemporary cinema is an ever-evolving terrain.” In many cases, such cachet can act as a validator, but for Bardi, the centerpiece of this year’s Currents and the second entry in Tala Hadid’s projected trilogy, it proves to be a weighty burden. After House in the Fields, which followed two sisters and their Amazigh community in the Moroccan High Atlas Mountains, Bardi — the word derives from the gunpowder used in the equestrian Tbourida ritual and is nowadays used to designate the eponymous horsemen — centers on two brothers and their fraternal community of horse riders traveling across central Morocco. Thus working, at least pro forma, in the ethnographic tradition, Hadid, who spent three years among the horse-riding fraternity, chooses neither Rouchian meta-reflexivity nor the immersive style of the Sensory Ethnography Lab and its disciples, but rather a docu-drama hybrid form that supplies a few of her protagonists with voiceover narration. It is one of many regrettable choices in a film so eager to honor its subjects that it suppresses its own curiosity.

Let us step back for a moment and remember one of the key distinctions David MacDougall, following the tradition of Bill Nichols, drew between fiction film and documentary. There is, MacDougall posited, “a fundamental difference between films about living people, who belong to the world regardless of any film that might be made about them, and people imagined by a scriptwriter and played by actors. There is far more to the person in documentary than what one films, but there is no more to a fictional character than what is in the film, however richly it is evoked.” A voiceover — an addition and superimposition of speech onto an already shot scene — holds the potential to destabilize such stringent conceptions. It can intensify the interiority that is otherwise to be inferred from and projected onto a person’s countenance, their gesture, their action. And it can heighten the audience’s awareness of a film’s constructedness by splitting up the temporalities of the video and audio tracks, e.g., through a commentary on what is depicted.

In Hadid’s Bardi, however, the voiceover — performed mostly with the gravity of a whisper — is used merely to supply generic and artificial comments. When the viewer hears the chief horse rider, the moqaddem, think: “The boys are like my sons” or “So many people under my responsibility, no time to rest,” it is difficult to imagine him thinking this without an audience in mind. His daughter later sends him an equally improbable telepathic message: “God bless you, I am proud of you, you are a fantastic bardi.” At another moment in the film, this relationship seems to be on the verge of renegotiation, when the teenage girl announces her wish to become a horse rider herself. But as her father declares the equestrian practice of the centuries-old Tbourida martial ritual to be exclusive to males — “Riding is war. It’s jihad” — the subject is dropped without further friction. The scene is hyper-stylized, featuring an impossible shot-reverse-shot succession that may point toward the mere performativity of patriarchal masculinity. Even if that were so, there is little tension — let alone critique — to Hadid’s portraiture. Going back to MacDougall and his makeshift definition, one feels impelled to ask what the point is of voiceover narration and dialogue that, rather than pointing outside the realm of fiction, seem to suggest that there is in fact no more to the people you see on the screen; that their actions and overall outwardness are a lossless representation of their being.

Perhaps matters would stand better if at least the visual level took into account the complexities of performance that are central to any given ritual. Alas, several of the human interactions appear so openly staged that they inadvertently diminish the potential for ambiguity, which is all the more baffling considering the director’s express wish, stated in the press notes, “to allow the viewer to move through the film without always knowing whether a moment had been observed, invited or invented.” The fact that the presence of Hadid and her camera remains virtually unacknowledged in the particularly performative scenes only compounds the problem. The camera, for the most part, inhabits a privileged — at times superhuman — position favoring center stage rather than peripheral perspectives. Mid-shots and close-ups are customarily captured with the kind of autofocus one finds in contemporary smartphone cameras, which yields occasional glitches of recalibration. For someone as deeply invested in the instability of the digital image as, say, Radu Jude — think of the compressed EarthCam footage in Sleep #2 or the iPhone-shot Kontinental ’25 — such aesthetics may do. But for a film purportedly concerned with the exploration of and immersion into a community little known to many in its audience, it seems a strange choice to constantly blur the backgrounds and thus isolate the protagonists from their environments. Rather than expanding the possibilities of the form, such choices merely reproduce the predominant images of YouTube and social media.

The scenes that stand out, unsurprisingly, are those committed to capturing the texture of the horsemen’s life: a horse’s hoof to be filed, a wound to be tended, the sharing of a large tagine dish, a biker providing a spectacle as he circles through a quasi-globe of death. Even the several drone shots — initially tracing the waves of the Atlantic coastline before later hovering over the vast campsites — add to the viewer’s sense of scope. And yet, until the end, the narrative structure remains clumsy at best. Perhaps the most jarring among Hadid’s decisions is the evocation of the 2023 Al Haouz earthquake that awaits the viewer near the end, a catastrophe that took more than 2,900 lives and caused a national trauma. Given the little time that is spent on the subject, its inclusion feels anything but organic. Eventually, as the film, in desperate search of a bookend, shifts to a scene that echoes its very beginning, featuring the two brothers and their horse, one is left wondering if a conventional form might not have better suited such conventional longings for closure. — PATRICK FEY

The Loneliest Man in Town

It’s taken a while for cinephiles (including this writer) to catch up with the Vienna-based filmmaking duo of Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel. Their profile was raised a bit on these shores in 2023 when their most recent feature, Vera, got a small commercial release. That film, about the middle-aged daughter of Italian actor Giuliano Gemma, played a bit like a Dardennes version of a Real Housewives episode, as it followed its subject through the remnants of a charmed life that nevertheless led to bitterness and dissatisfaction. A faded diva down on her luck, Vera would be an easy target for lesser filmmakers to mock. But Covi and Frimmel’s great talent is their ability to convey constant respect and curiosity about their chosen subject, looking past the surface affectations to locate Vera’s essential humanity.

Like all their films, Vera was a docu-fiction that the pair built around a real person whose everyday persona involved some degree of performance. They have adjusted the formula a bit with their latest film, since its subject, Alois Koch/Al Cook, is a quiet man very unlike the flamboyant Vera. But like her, Al is a performer whose time in the spotlight is largely over. This is the story of an elderly Viennese bluesman whose life is upended when a development company buys his building and evicts him. At first, The Loneliest Man in Town seems like a fairly predictable David-and-Goliath story about gentrification, along the lines of Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Aquarius. But Al is a practical man, and when he realizes he has no choice but to leave, the story takes on a somewhat wider scope.

It seems nearly impossible to watch The Loneliest Man in Town and not think about the films of Aki Kaurismäki. After all, this is an urban tale of a man who has devoted his life to blues and rockabilly music, wears his hair in a nostalgic pompadour, and has curated a private existence that is fundamentally out of step with contemporary concerns. Add to this Covi and Frimmel’s boxy treatment of interiors and generally locked-down camerawork, and Loneliest Man seems like a kind of meta-commentary on Kaurismäki and his lovable losers. The thing is, Kaurismäki’s films are defined by community, the way that social problems can be fixed through an almost instinctual tendency toward utopian thinking. Al, however, is stuck in the very real world.

Cook’s specific relationship to the Delta blues is also a sort of sidelong riff on Kaurismäki, who, like Wim Wenders, is fascinated with American pop culture, especially when it’s filtered through European sensibilities. Loneliest Man finds Cook not only in the twilight of his life, but at a moment of crisis and finality. He is literally the last man remaining in his apartment building, and the owners’ thugs force him out by turning off his electricity and water, breaking into his flat, and threatening physical violence. Cook neither beats them nor joins them, deciding instead to sell his belongings and finally take a trip to America, a pilgrimage to Mississippi where he probably always belonged.

This is interesting for a few reasons. First, Covi and Frimmel seem to understand that the “America” Cook means to seek out is long gone. When he tells people he’s done with Vienna and means to emigrate, they look at him askance. Who’d go live in America now? But Cook is a living embodiment of 20th-century culture and values, with his Dobro, his old Super 8 and VHS recordings of his blues performances, piles and piles of vinyl albums and CDs, framed memorabilia, and a modest home recording studio. All the cultural artifacts that the U.S. is so desperate to discard in favor of fast capital and AI slop, Cook holds onto, curates, and protects. So in a way, Cook has the potential to bring our own culture back to us. We took it for granted, but for him, it was everything. — MICHAEL SICINSKI