Venice Dispatch - On Hitmen - AI - and Dangerous Women

Published by Reblogs - Credits in Posts, September 15th, 2023

Aggro Dr1ft (Harmony Korine, 2023)

A seasoned hitman navigates Miami’s underbelly on a relentless pursuit of his next target. A gun for hire embarks on a killing spree after his contractors threaten his loved ones. A man impersonates an assassin to put people behind bars… Ten days into my Venice trip, I started sensing a pattern. Hitmen and murderers were nearly as omnipresent as the biopics that stashed the festival’s slates, but the strongest titles I saw on the Lido all seemed to treat genre as something malleable: a means to interrogate the scope and limits of the medium, and push it toward new, exciting paths.

So it was for Harmony Korine’s Aggro Dr1ft, a film so shamelessly proud to be its own deranged thing it more than made up for all those I saw and immediately forgot the minute a vaporetto shipped me home. Shot entirely in infrared and graced with augmented reality effects and A.I. imagery that litter characters with bionic-looking tattoos, the film tracks an assassin (the world’s "greatest and humblest," per his self-appraisal) as he roams an unidentifiable stretch of Miami, the same milieu of The Beach Bum, here converted into a rainbow-bright cityscape drenched in iridescent cyan, magenta, and amber. The plot is archetypal to the point of irrelevance. Hitman Bo (Jordi Mollà) goes about slaughtering his targets all while juggling a serene family life and the threat of a satanic enemy hellbent on obliterating him (think of Cormac McCarthy’s Judge Holden armed with horns and a katana). But chastising Korine for that would be to play in his hands: Aggro Dr1ft isn’t driven by narrative so much as images, and if the arch-nemesis feels like a video-game villain, that’s because the shape of the film resembles one. Aping that game-core aesthetic, however, isn’t what Korine’s after—not entirely, at least.

As the lurid sky, ocean, and city bled into the characters’ own neon-soaked bodies in a hallucination scored to deafening techno, my mind drifted back to a brief cameo by the director’s friend and collaborator Werner Herzog in Wim Wenders’s 1985 Tokyo-Ga. Gazing at the metropolis from atop the Tokyo Tower, Herzog lamented the dearth of authentic, pure images: "images that correspond to the state of civilization and to our innermost, our very deepest." The tropes Korine tosses in Aggro Dr1ft—a violent man reflecting on the price of violence; a disciple (rapper Travis Scott) unsure what to do with his master’s legacy—are hardly original. But the film encases them within a universe that feels at once familiar and entirely novel, in a way I think approximates something close to Herzog’s radical authenticity. Herein lies its unsettling power: Aggro Dr1ft doesn’t just mimic an aesthetic that’s become ever more pervasive in our screens-infested world; it also questions its textures, opening up new avenues for what cinema can do and be. A few colleagues have already praised it as a work you do not watch but let it wash over you, which strikes me as a simplistic appreciation of what Aggro Dr1ft achieves. A feast for eyes and ears, the film’s intellectual pleasures are no less vivid than its sensorial ones; watching Korine wade deeper into his lysergic trip, Aggro Dr1ft struck me less as a provocation than an archeological feat: a film that digs up and reassembles its images to question our—and cinema’s—relationship with them.

The Killer (David Fincher, 2023).

If Korine’s hitman is a cipher, the titular assassin in David Fincher’s The Killer is possibly more hermetic still. A man with no name and no past—beyond an aborted law degree—he’s played by Michael Fassbender as an anonymous automaton, down to the German tourist uniform (khaki jacket and bucket hat) which he dons all through a quest for revenge that shuttles him from a failed job in Paris to the Dominican Republic and then across the United States. Like Korine, Fincher employs voiceover as the primary vehicle for sketching his protagonist’s personality, and the wall-to-wall monologues sometimes feel just as repetitive, with observations like "empathy is weakness" or "trust no one" that ring like self-reassuring mantras. Written by Andrew Kevin Walker and based on the French graphic novel series by Alexis Nolent and Luc Jacamon, The Killer dogs its taciturn protagonist as he forsakes those dogmas. That the pivot doesn’t get anywhere near a full-blown crisis of conscience is because Fassbender’s character, much like the other prominent figures around him, is essentially crafted as a human chrysalis (Tilda Swinton shows up as an icy villain credited only as "The Expert;" Sala Baker as a muscular thug a.k.a. "The Brute", and so on). In a thriller that reduces psychology to a series of cause-effect chain reactions, the killer’s vacuous blatherings are exhaustively descriptive of his inner world: an empty canvas.

There is, however, a strange alchemy between director and subject. Fassbender’s meticulous M.O. echoes the filmmaker’s own; it’s tempting to read the assassin’s quip that "execution is everything" as an apt summation of Fincher’s cinema. Like Michael Mann, the director is a virtuoso craftsman, and like Ferrari, there is an airlessness to The Killer’s perfectly calibrated amalgam of sounds and visuals that threatens to drain life from the proceedings. To be clear, the film is scrupulously sculpted. Erik Messerschmidt (who also shot Ferrari) embraces Fincher’s penchant for dank greens and blues to douse Fassbender’s routine in a moribund glow; glacial static shots give way to handheld segments that heighten the protagonist’s disorientation as his regimented lifestyle crumbles. Everything in The Killer suggests a surgical precision (even violence is meted out in careful, clinical outbursts), which makes the few ruptures feel all the more jarring, like a spectacular fight between Fassbender and Baker’s characters, which is among the best action scenes Fincher’s choreographed in quite some time. The Killer is never more alive than when it owns up to its pulpy and comic flourishes (a few sight gags, the odd needle drop), but these are short-lived interludes in a film that remains surprisingly inert.

Hit Man (Richard Linklater, 2023).

Shunted in the out of competition sidebar, Richard Linklater’s Hit Man doesn’t track an assassin proper but a man trying to pass as one. The register is a far cry from both Korine and Fincher’s; firmly rooted in the comedy camp, Hit Man tells a "somewhat true story" inspired by a 2001 Texas Monthly profile of one Gary Johnson (Glen Powell), an unassuming Houston native who helped the city’s police put dozens of people behind bars throughout the 1990s by impersonating a professional killer and framing his unsuspicious recruiters for attempted murder. Hit Man has one big idea ("seize the identity you want for yourself!"), which it telegraphs by repurposing the real-life Johnson as a meek academic lecturing his class on Freud, Nietzsche, and "the disturbances of the self," before sending him on a journey that sees him switch between different personas like toilet paper rolls. The lesson may be all too literal, but Linklater isn’t foreign to unabashed bluntness; that the film still feels nimble is credit to the star at its center, and the script he helped writing. The director has a long tradition of recruiting his actors as co-scribes (see the Before trilogy); penned by Linklater and Powell, Hit Man is peppered with zippy exchanges between Gary, his superiors, his victims, and a would-be sting target with whom the man enters a risky flirtation (Adria Arjona). Where others would have mined the affair for darker stuff, Linklater plays it light: Hit Man aims to entertain, and largely succeeds.

There is something exquisitely retro about its design. If the film doesn’t radiate the kind of nostalgia of Linklater’s coming of age forays, it still harks back to a pantheon of star-driven crime comedies that have long disappeared from Hollywood. As it was for Everybody Wants Some!! (2016), in which Powell played a philosophizing jock, this one too trades the director’s more cerebral instincts for a sensual physicality. Funny as Hit Man is, it is also refreshingly sexy, a film that relishes in the very carnal chemistry of its leads. As a study of a chameleonic figure, it lives or dies on its protagonist’s turn, and Powell is nothing short of magnetic, as convincing in his sexless Gary mode as he is in the id-propelled alpha-male "Ron" persona, the one among dozens that eventually calcifies as his alter-ego. I can’t pretend this ranks among Linklater’s best—for all the rollicking moments, Hit Man struck me as a relatively slight divertissement. But there’s a kind of audacity to its anachronistic pleasures, and plenty to admire in a filmmaker having this much fun toying with the genre—and making the fun so infectious.

Poor Things (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2023).

A few years back, Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Favourite (2018) also signaled a sudden U-turn into bawdry comedy for a director that was hitherto associated with sinister portraits of people at their cruelest. Poor Things, which took home the Golden Lion for best film, mines that same flamboyant vein. Based on Alasdair Gray’s 1992 novel, here adapted by The Favourite’s co-screenwriter Tony McNamara, the film is a Frankenstein-inspired fairytale in which a young woman (Emma Stone’s Bella Baxter) is brought back from the dead by a mad surgeon (Willem Dafoe’s Dr. Godwin Baxter) who swaps her brain with her unborn child’s. A twentysomething with the coordination and vocabulary of a toddler, we first meet her as she stomps around the 19th century London mansion where her creator’s hidden her, an ungainly waif with broken syntax and stiff gait, and follow her as she acquires a firmer grasp of the world and her place inside it over a cross-European odyssey. Transgression powers her coming of age; Poor Things posits sex as an educational force, which Bella soon discovers and indulges in with voracious appetite, aided first by lawyer-cum-playboy Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo) and eventually a streak of lovers around the continent.

Poor Things wears its politics on its sleeves: Bella’s burgeoning sexuality, seen through the prism of Victorian Britain, is perhaps the most monstrous thing about her, and the film wastes no opportunities to drive home its well-meaning statements on patriarchy, toxic men, sexual freedom, and rape culture. But if its messaging can sometimes feel a little on the nose, Poor Things is nonetheless joltingly alive, a film that crackles with the same restless curiosity and lust of its protagonist. This is, in its barest terms, the story of a young woman who wakes up to the horrors of the world and decides to change it for the better, but Stone’s performance is so off-kilter, so captivating in its inquisitive oddness, that even the most heavy-handed passages in her pilgrimage accrue a certain lightness. Poor Things embraces and refracts her wide-eyed awe. Shot on 35mm by Robbie Ryan, it pivots from the black-and-white palette of the first act, often framed via pinhole cameras that amplify the claustrophobia and voyeurism of Bella’s house arrest, to a world of stupefying colors once she finally breaks free. Much of what happens away from London takes place against fully CG-created backdrops, vistas that straddle Beaux Arts and steampunk looks and bring attention to the film’s artificiality. This is all substantially new for Lanthimos, a stark rupture from his previous films’ location shoots. But he revels in the film’s hyper-unreal locales, which he populates with all kinds of inventions, like the crossbreed pets (half dogs, half ducks) and loopy machinery in Dr. Baxter’s house. Dissonances and distortions anchor Poor Things, trickling down to Holly Waddington’s extraordinary costumes, syncretic hybrids that turn Victorian-age garments into sensual visions. But perhaps the biggest novelty here is the film’s boisterous optimism. A director formerly known for his dour vivisections of humanity ends his latest on an unexpectedly hopeful note; for all its surreal detours, this is Poor Things’s most astonishing feat.

The Beast (Bertrand Bonello, 2023).

I must confess I left the Lido hungrier than I came here; if the lineups gave me something of a Stendhal syndrome upon their announcement a month ago, few things I saw lived up to the bold and risk-friendly experiences I craved. Aside from Poor Things and Aggro Dr1ft, one that came close to that feeling of revelation was Bertrand Bonello’s towering The Beast, a cinema of ideas carried through with oomph and panache. Written by Bonello, the film tackles a 1903 novella by Henry James, The Beast in the Jungle, but grafts disturbingly contemporary themes onto it. The year is 2044, and in a world where A.I. reigns supreme and emotions have been all but outlawed as obstacles to optimal work performance, Gabrielle (Léa Seydoux) submits herself to a surgery designed to clean her DNA of human feelings. In the process, she’s catapulted on a journey across her past lives, a jumbled voyage that seesaws between 1910 Paris, 2014 Los Angeles, and her dystopian mid-twenty-first-century present. All along, she keeps rubbing shoulders with different reincarnations of her soulmate Louis (George MacKay), a young man who’s also chosen to undergo the dehumanizing treatment to avoid turning into what an A.I.-ruled society now pegs as "useless people".

Pitted against its predecessors, The Beast isn’t so much an outlier as a continuation of Bonello’s leitmotifs. Like his teenage-themed trilogy (Nocturama, 2016; Zombi Child, 2019; Coma, 2022), this too follows people who are cut off from reality and struggling to make sense of it. And if The Beast marks the director’s first overtly sci-fi experiment, Bonello envisions the future neither as a post-apocalyptic wasteland nor a hyper-technological milieu: Paris looks like Paris (albeit eerily depopulated), flats and offices are sparsely furnished, the technology ergonomic; there are no screens in sight. An atmosphere of sanitized calm hangs over the film, which is in keeping with Gabrielle’s predicament; nothing about her world is more terrifying than its aseptic spell. Bonello has long toyed with the interplay between media formats, and his more recent films all wove together different moving-image sources: smartphone clips, TV programs, computer screens… So does The Beast, which exists in a metaverse that mixes celluloid and digital, TV shows and social media reels—the anemic future shot by Josée Deshaies in a fittingly constrictive 4:3 ratio, and the wistful past reveries in widescreen. For all its scathing jibes at A.I, the film is very much alive to the infinite creative possibilities opened up by the devices we handle daily: among many other things, The Beast is a perceptive inquiry into image production and consumption.

Which is not to peg it as a dry exercise in intellectualism. Bonello switches between genres with the same rebellious freedom he somersaults across formats and footage; part melodrama, part sci-fi, part horror, The Beast wields their trappings to convey some perturbing prophecies for the kind of future we’re heading toward, skirting preachy or facile lessons. There is a heart that beats beneath the synthy reverberations of Bonello’s electronic score (once again composed with his daughter Anna). Anxious as it so often is, The Beast is a love story told by a director who sees hope amid darkness—for his characters and for cinema both. Not a day has passed since its premiere that I haven’t thought back to that rejuvenating feeling it left me with; I doubt I will anytime soon.

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