CineWomen: Olivia Newman gets bogged down ‘Where the Crawdads Sing’
Plus her debut ‘First Match,‘ Nathalie Álvarez Mesén’s ‘Clara Sola,’ Claire Denis’ ‘Both Sides of the Blade,’ and Kasi Lemmons’s ‘Eve’s Bayou’
Hi. It’s been a minute. Nine months, in fact. The time it takes to make a baby.
A fitting timeframe, given I was gestating something. Not a human life — goodness, no. But I like to think human lives in the pages of Exposition Review, an independent literary journal that I’ve been working with for several years but this year came on as co-editor-in-chief.
Couple that with a promotion at work, and the last few months have been … challenging. Good! But challenging.
I don’t know about you, but during the first, oh, year of the pandemic, when we were still staying home, I found ways to fill the time. All those hours I previously spent commuting to screenings and going to meetings and having dinner with friends, I used to watch a film just about every day, read about every night, and say “yes” to additional projects.
Now, though, we’re entering a new hybrid, where all those things we gave up — movies and restaurants, theater and museums, in-person readings and in-person friends — are back, with added COVID anxiety. But all those new habits and commitments haven’t gone anywhere, and I find myself busier than ever. Again, good! But busy.
Something had to give.
Unfortunately, it was this column, and at such an unfortunate time. I was so looking forward to writing about Titane and The Souvenir, Eternals and Passing, The Power of the Dog and The Matrix, and Jane Campion’s Oscar win. I still will, I hope, sometime.
In the meantime, my career and creative life aligned with something I realized a while ago: I’m less a writer than an editor, publisher, advocate. I’m less interested in producing my own words than polishing, curating, sharing others’. That’s why I spend considerable time and energy volunteering at Expo, WriteGirl, and LAFCA.
Which brings me back here. I do have to keep writing to remain in good stead with at least one of those entities. And my writers group, who are the first readers of these words.
But also: film is integral to my personal history. I worked at the Crystal Theatre in high school and St. Anthony Main in college. I went to the movies instead of my junior prom — I would have sworn it was School Ties, but IMDb says that can’t be so — and met my husband behind the concession stand. After an ill-conceived detour into computer science, I majored in film studies and worked at Boxoffice Magazine, a trade publication for movie theaters, for nearly a decade.
CineWomen helps me stay plugged in to movies beyond Marvel and DC, Jurassic World and Top Gun. It helps me flex creative muscles I want to keep engaged and continue to develop. And it, in a small way, furthers my passion for elevating work that I find interesting or important.
My inaugural issue of Expo as co-EIC features our first dedicated film section and an interview with L.A. Times film critic Justin Chang. These weren’t my ideas — credit our Film Editor and former co-EIC Lauren Gorski for that — though I did participate in the conversation with my friend and LAFCA colleague.
But I can’t help but appreciate the reverberations that movies continue to have as my interests and commitments evolve and diverge.
‘Where the Crawdads Sing’
What means to be a whodunit that leaves the reveal to the very, very end, Where the Crawdads Sing, directed by Olivia Newman, instead sucks all of the mystery out of a murder trial that offers no alternatives to the theory at hand: That (spoiler alert!) Kya Clark (Daisy Edgar-Jones), a young woman abandoned to raise herself in the North Carolina swamp, killed local football hero Chase Andrews (Harris Dickinson).
How pretty Kya came to be the outsider not-so-affectionately called “Marsh Girl” by the inhabitants of Barkley Cove, and the love triangle that leads to Chase’s death, are the subject of extensive flashbacks detailing Kya’s abusive childhood as her violently unhappy father (Garret Dillahunt) drives away her family one by one; her tentative romance with Tate Walker (Taylor John Smith), a nice boy who leaves her to go to college and never comes back; and her subsequent relationship with Chase, which has so many red flags she could hold a parade.
Instead, she’s paraded through town after a swift and straightforward investigation and put on trial, defended by kindly retired attorney Tom Milton (David Strathairn), who manages to cast doubt on Kya’s guilt despite neither the defense nor the movie offering a competing theory.
Based on controversial author Delia Owens’ novel, Where the Crawdads Sing, in the film version at least, delivers a screwed-up fantasy in which the swampy wilds produce a woman of such luminous beauty and exquisite talent that handsome townies fight over and then betray her in emotionally and physically heinous fashion while she launches a bestselling career as the author and artist of Aubudon-esque catalogs of her marsh.
It’s unfortunate that a movie so luxuriously filmed by cinematographer Polly Morgan (A Quiet Place Part II) and richly textured by production designer Sue Chan (Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings) doesn’t dig into the muck of Kya’s reality or its setting in the Jim Crow-era South, outside of the tenderhearted Black shopkeepers (Michael Hyatt and Sterling Macer Jr.) who quietly look out for the white Marsh Girl who brings fresh mussels to sell at their store. Or, for that matter, the messy entanglements that could surface a web of potential suspects.
But no. Even for those who haven’t read the book, it becomes pretty clear where all of this is going. We just have to wade through the swamp and wait for the characters to catch up.
Where the Crawdads Sing (2022), directed by Olivia Newman (theaters)
‘First Match’
The movie-of-the-week ordinariness of Where the Crawdads Sing is all the more mystifying when compared with director Olivia Newman’s nuanced feature debut, First Match, which she also wrote.
Like Kya, sixteen-year-old Monique, aka “Mo” (Elvire Emanuelle), too has been left alone in the world, in this case the foster care system after her mother dies and her father Darrel (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) goes to prison. She doesn’t know he’s been let out when she runs into him in their Brooklyn neighborhood, and spontaneously sheds her neon green nails and fuschia-dyed hair for a singlet and headgear to join her high school wrestling team in a bid to bond with her one-time wrestling-star dad.
The emotional layers — between Mo and her father, Mo and her best friend/teammate Omari (Jharrel A. Jerome), Mo and her teammate/unrequited love interest Malik (Jared Kemp), Mo and her coach/father figure Coach Castile (Colman Domingo), Mo and the “Spanish lady” who takes care of her (Kimberly Ramirez) — are delicate and deep. And Newman slices into them with the precision of a surgeon’s scalpel to excavate the tender vulnerability underneath Mo’s tough exterior.
The handheld camerawork here by cinematographer Ashley Connor is close up and intimate, delivering the viewer to the interiority of Emanuelle’s performance as she navigates her father’s fickle affections, portrayed with twitchy charm by Abdul-Mateen.
First Match is a confident, sensitive debut in a gritty, real milieu that’s worth seeking out.
First Match (2018), directed by Olivia Newman (Netflix)
‘Clara Sola’
“Coming-of-age” isn’t usually a genre applied to stories about forty-year-old women, but director-cowriter Nathalie Álvarez Mesén’s feature debut Clara Sola embraces the challenge with an intimate portrait of a sometimes difficult protagonist with a dash of magical realism.
Clara (Wendy Chinchilla Araya) lives with her elderly mother Fresia (Flor María Vargas Chaves) and teenage niece Maria (Ana Julia Porras Espinoza) in a remote Costa Rican village, where they eke out a living in part by renting out Clara’s beloved white mare Yuca. She may be middle-aged, but Clara is very much the little sister in her relationship with Maria, who, approaching her quinceañera, is more worldly than her aunt — an adult with the mind of a child. The disparity in their experience flares with the arrival of Santiago (Daniel Castañeda Rincón), a sweet, charming horse-hand, who catches both their eyes.
Meanwhile, the family’s other source of income comes from granting audiences with Clara, who is believed to have been visited by the Virgin Mary and thus possesses her healing powers. These events are painful for Clara, who is dolled up in frilly white, trussed in a girdle to straighten her curved spine, and surrounded by outreached hands that threaten to touch her.
Whether or not it’s divinely inspired, Clara does seem to have some kind of gift that connects her to the natural world that’s muckier — literally and figuratively — than her mother would like, especially as Clara explores the urges overwhelming her body.
Stubborn, impulsive, and explosive, Clara tests the patience of her loved ones and her viewers, but it’s these qualities that will heal her — and free her.
Clara Sola (2021), directed by Nathalie Álvarez Mesén (theaters)
‘Both Sides of the Blade’
The relationships at the heart of director Claire Denis’s Both Side of the Blade, make up less a love triangle than, as the title suggests, a double-edge sword — one that cuts all involved.
At the center is Sara (Juliette Binoche), a public-radio host in a passionate love affair with Jean (Vincent Lindon). We know they’re in love because the film opens with the couple frolicking on vacation in crystal-clear turquoise waters to composer Stuart Staples’ soft, simple plunking tune, Jean caressing Sara’s face as she lies in the tangle of their limbs.
Back at home, between the concrete walls of their small, modern Parisian apartment, real life clutters their romance like the mail littering the floor inside the door. A former pro rugby player struggling to find his footing after a mysterious stint in prison, Jean is unemployed, navigating French bureaucracy to get an undefined project off the ground and filling his days with domestic errands and chores he needs Sara’s credit card to pay for. What he’s not doing is making much of an effort to connect with his teenage son living with Jean’s elderly mother in the suburbs.
Enter François (Grégoire Colin), Sara’s ex-lover and Jean’s ex-friend who reenters their lives with plans to start a sports agency. His abrupt reappearance sends Sara reeling with desire and Jean with hope. Suddenly they’re no longer honest with each other or themselves, cinematographer Eric Gautier’s tight closeups capturing the nuanced machinations of complicated histories playing out in the present as they navigate confused residual and renewed emotions.
The rivalry is not evenly matched. François is a wild card that the film holds at arm’s length, his attractiveness a bit of a mystery for the viewer. What’s clear is the hold he maintains over Sara and Jean through manipulation and mind games that brings out the worst in them, individually and as a couple. “You had the angel. Now you’ll get the devil,” Jean says, elucidating Denis’s portrait of masculinity.
Co-written by Denis with Christine Angot, based on the latter’s novel Un tournant de la vie, Both Sides of the Blade ends on an ambiguous note, with the universe intervening because our heroine can’t.
Both Sides of the Blade (2022), directed by Claire Denis (theaters)
‘Eve’s Bayou’
Twenty-five years ago, Kasi Lemmons made her feature directorial debut with Eve’s Bayou, a steamy family drama as steeped in hidden dangers as its 1960s rural Louisiana setting, starring a who’s who of Black cinema.
Samuel L. Jackson, in one of the few titles in his prodigious oeuvre that he also produced, stars as Louis Batiste, the patriarch of a rural Louisiana dynasty descended from a Frenchman and an enslaved woman for whom the titular town is named. A doctor and a charmer, Louis is known around town as a man who can “fix things,” especially for lonely women — a reality that his daughters Cisely (Meagan Goode) and namesake narrator Eve (Jurnee Smollett) are old enough now to begin to understand.
It’s not their beloved father they lash out at, though, but their long-suffering mother Roz (Lynn Whitfield), the two girls bristling with attitude. Still, Eve’s Bayou pulses with feminine energy and the paranormal realms they tap into, from their aunt Mozelle (Debbi Morgan), gifted with sight, to a prickly local fortune teller (Diahann Carroll).
When appearances deceive and memory is slippery, these relationships — between sisters, with mothers and aunts, among women — are the ties that bind.
Eve’s Bayou (1997), directed by Kasi Lemmons (various digital)
