Rhythmic gymnastics is one of only two Olympic sports that are female-specific. Men do not partake, though there are men’s rhythmic gymnastic competitions outside of the Olympics. (Interestingly, it was Japan that developed the sport for males) This identification of the sport with women’s and girls’ bodies and, more significantly, feminine tropes is an important subtext of Polish director Marta Prus’s documentary about the Russian rhythmic gymnast Margarita Mamun. As with most sports docs, the focus is on how to become a champion, and Prus leads us through the grinding training regimen and the psychological strain of competition. Mamun’s goal is a medal in the 2016 Olympics, likely her last ever, and Prus, whether expectedly or not, captures the athlete during a particularly difficult part of her life. Though immensely talented, Mamun seems distracted and put off by the kind of effort she has been conditioned to understand by the keepers of the sport to be necessary in order to attain greatness, because she’s attained that level of greatness in the past. Maintaining it, however, is a different thing, and what we see, and what Prus insists we see, is how Mamun’s lack of focus and physical incapacities have less to do with the usual issues of aging and overwork than with a loss of will.
In most sports stories, the athlete’s problems are self-determined, but Prus implies, through careful editing, that Mamun’s difficulties are mainly the fault of Irina Viner-Usmanova, the head of the Russian rhythmic gymnastics program. An imposing, imperious older woman who wears ridiculous hats and gets uncomfortably close to her charges when making a point that could just as easily be made from across the room, Viner-Usmanova seems determined to not only make Mamun a top contender but a kind of uber femme. She’s just as strident in her insults about Mamun’s application of eyeliner as she is about the grace of her splits. There’s a theatricality about the woman’s bearing and speech that seems custom-made for a fiction film about the abject cruelty of Olympic preparation. Likewise, Mamun’s rivalry with a younger gymnast, seemingly engineered by the coaches, is something out of Hollywood, especially when you learn that Mamun is coping with the uncertainty of a father undergoing treatment for aggressive cancer. The only sunshine in her life is her boyfriend, but since he spends most of the movie off-camera his appearances add up to nothing more than brief lacunae of comfort.
Unlike Hollywood sports epics, Over the Limit must adhere to what really happened, and viewers may be either perplexed or overwhelmed by the film’s inconclusive ending. It’s as if Prus, disgusted by what she observed and perhaps guilt-ridden by her own contribution to Mamun’s suffering, just gave up. Still, it’s a devastating portrait of a young person pushed to the brink for reasons that have nothing to do with her own desires. “Just do it” in this case just doesn’t cut it.
In Russian. Now playing in Tokyo at Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551), Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011).
Over the Limit home page in Japanese.
photo (c) Telemark 2018
The story behind the making of this extraordinary documentary is perhaps even more fascinating than the movie itself. Filmmakers Ljubomir Stefanov and Tamara Kotevska reportedly were looking for a subject in the Republic of North Macedonia and heard about an older woman who still followed the traditional methods for honey-making, which does not require the keeping of bees, but rather relies on finding beehives in the wild and extracting just enough honey so as not to upset the lives of insects. In order to make their film, however, not only did Stefanov and Kotevska have to track down the woman, who lives in a remote valley that can’t be reached by normal transportation most of the year, but they had to follow her up steep mountains and into dense fields. They also had to somehow make camp in her village, which has no running water nor electricity save that supplied by battery.
Jim Cummings’ debut feature comes across as a piece of performance art extended beyond its original parameters, and surprisingly it works at that level consistently throughout its 90 minutes. Extrapolated from an award-winning short subject that has been reconstituted as an opening one-take gambit, the movie feels like a tightrope act, which is why you keep expecting it to fail in a big, dramatic way, but it keeps you going, and that’s because Cummings, who directs, writes, and plays the central character, seems to know exactly what he’s doing every second of the movie.
As laser-focused historical movies go, Alfonso Gomez-Rejon’s take on the rivalry between Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse over who would build the first electricity grid in the U.S. has an immediately appealing hook in that electricity is something we take for granted without really understanding how it came into our lives. The obvious pitfall in any presentation of this story is getting past the technical aspects, because, basically, the rivalry was centered on the two men’s respective favored approaches to current: Edison preferred direct current, while Westinghouse thought alternating current was more efficient, and, for sure, a good part of the movie, at least in the beginning, is a struggle to make sense of the differences in these two approaches.
In a year when world movie fans finally woke up to the consistent brilliance of Korean cinema through the vehicle of Parasite, it should probably be noted that in South Korea itself the movie that vied with Parasite in 2019 as the finest of the year, at least among critics, was the indie debut House of Hummingbird by Kim Bora. Purists will say that comparing the two films is a chump’s game, since Parasite is high-concept while Hummingbird is personal. They don’t compete on the same playing field, especially in South Korea where parameters like genre and financial backing have more meaning than they do in other film markets. But to those of us outside of Korea, the two movies have more in common than they do to people inside Korea, and having seen both in South Korea, albeit 12 months apart, I found Hummingbird more affecting and, even now, more memorable.
Romantic melodramas adapted from real-life incidents can often feel doubly phony, since the viewer’s consciosness that these things really happened makes the contrivances feel all the more stagey. Adrift, which is adapted from a memoir by Tami Oldham, has a lot of that loose feeling of stretching the truth for the sake of emotional provocation, but since the basic story is dramatic by definition the viewer allows leeway for their reactions.
Julius Onah’s 2019 American film, based on a play by J.C. Lee (who wrote the screenplay with Onah), proves, if anything, that Hollywood and its lesser lights are not afraid to address thorny issues for the sake of provocation. Luce, which tackles racism, white guilt, and aspects of the #MeToo movement, will leave most people confused as to where they are expected to stand on the matters put forth, and one can feel either edified or manipulated by the results without necessarily being wrong about those feelings.
Caveat to Sia fans: Don’t go see Vox Lux just because you want to hear your idol’s compositions. The movie does end with an extended concert sequence featuring several Sia songs written expressly for the movie, and they’re not bad, but before that you have to sit through a lot of screaming and weeping and bad feelings that no amount of angtsy pop music can make up for. In theory, the movie, about the unusual rise of a mainstream female pop star named Celeste (Natalie Portman), has an interesting premise, and for a while you seriously wonder where director Brady Corbet is going with it. As a child, Celeste was involved in a school shooting and barely got out with her life. As she recovers from major surgery, she (played as a child by Raffey Cassidy) and her older sister, Eleanor (Stacy Martin), write songs together and then perform one of them at a memorial for students who were killed in the attack. A record producer hears something in the song and has Celeste rerecord it with slight changes in the lyrics to make the pain of the incident resound in a country that is itself suffering from some kind of inchoate trauma. A star is born.
Without a doubt, zombies are the prime pop culture metaphor of our age, distilling the idea of a population zapped out on consumerism down to deadeyed cannibalism. Jim Jarmusch’s comedy is clearly in on the joke and while portions zip by with the kind of laid-back frisson he’s famous for, the theme is way too obvious. In the end, there’s something cheap about Jarmusch’s ambitions for the film.
A biopic of Harriet Tubman is way overdue, though one could make the argument that the timing of Kasi Lemmons’ movie takes full advantage of the prevailing public sentiment of Black Americans at the moment. When the movie was released in the U.S., Tubman, who helped free many slaves before the Civil War, was being touted as the only correct choice for an historical figure to replace Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill, a move that has been held up by the know-nothing contrariness of the Trump administration. In Japan, the timing is even more appropriate. Originally slated for release here in late March, it was delayed indefinitely by the COVID-19 pandemic, and now is out in theaters the same week that Black Lives Matters demonstrations have circled the globe.
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