Astonishing and singular – Kiyoshi Kurosawa by way of Robby Müller. Captures a time and a place so intimately that, by the end, you feel it as if you know it in your bones.
Further reading: Philip Pan's book on China, "Out of Mao's Shadow," about a quarter of which recounts the rapid deindustrialization, mass labor protests, and violent crackdown that decimated this exact part of China during the exact years when this movie is set, and which sure feels like its unstated subject.
I went into this knowing nothing beyond the poster and therefore expecting a gauzy sapphic coming-of-age period drama. So you can imagine my surprise at getting what started as a Spielberg-y friendship adventure, gradually became a Roald Dahlesque baroque dark fantasy, and ended up as Lynchian surrealist psychosexual horror. A truly fucking insane movie.
One of many brilliant choices in this absolutely perfect script (Elaine May!) is to subtly but persistently associate Armand and Albert's sexuality with their Judaism. When Albert's bustling around Miami Beach, recognized and cherished for his drag performances, the errand we see him run is nibbling on rugelach. When he and Armand are proudly out, it's under the name Goldman; when they are closeted, it's as Coleman. When Val asks his father to pass, the first thing Armand does is…
"You win some you lose some, Bob. On defense now. We've been under siege for hundreds of years."
For all that this movie excites and entertains, it's also, and maybe ultimately moreso, devastatingly poignant to me for how effectively it captures a defining feeling of this moment: that we failed.
We failed, like Perfidia and Bob in the prologue, and as Perfidia puts it in her letter to Willa that closes the film, to turn back the rising tide of…
