Quick takes on Touch and other films

Kinds of Kindness is the latest from director Yorgos Lanthimos, one of my favorites. I’ve liked a lot of his films but his last couple didn’t hit it out of the park for my tastes. This newest film rights the course, even if it hasn’t been a homerun for others. It’s a strange film, that’s for sure. It’s a film of three sections, not really related except for one character (with initial R.M.F.); the other characters are portrayed by a group of actors who take on new roles in each section. In the first, “The Death of RMF,” Robert (Jesse Plemons) lives a life of servitude to his boss Raymond (Willem Dafoe). Raymond makes every choice in Robert’s life, from what time he wakes up and goes to bed, to what he eats, to when he can sleep with his wife. Raymond even picked Robert’s wife for him! The film deals with what happens when Robert refuses an order one day. In the second section, “RMF is Flying,” Plemons now plays Daniel, a police officer whose wife Liz (Emily Stone) recently went missing. When she is found alive, Daniel starts to suspect she isn’t really his wife, due to little things like she liking chocolate cake when she didn’t before, her feet are the wrong size, etc. Liz is determined to convince Daniel she is who she says she is, and is willing to go to extreme lengths to do so. In the last, “RMF Eats a Sandwich,” Plemons and Stone play Andrew and Emily, members of a cult headed by Omi (Dafoe). They are tasked with finding a woman who can raise people from the dead, but things go sideways when Emily visits her former husband and daughter, a big no-no by Omi’s rules. This is a very weird film, with lots of WTF moments that are meant to elicit laughs and revulsion, and it does both equally well. I loved every minute, and the cast (including Margaret Qualley, Hong Chau, Mamoudou Athie, and Joe Alwyn) are up to the task of taking on new roles in each segment. Not going to be for everyone, as the reviews show; it is either a love-it or hate-it film. I’m in the former camp. ★★★★½

I’ve been a fan of Rachel Sennott for a few years now, since her breakout in Shiva Baby, but since then, she’s usually played more quirky roles in straight-forward comedies. She gives a little more range in I Used to Be Funny, where she plays Sam, a stand-up comedian dealing with the aftermath of a tragic event in her life. The movie is told in current day, when Sam is struggling just to leave the house, and in flashbacks showing how she got there. It started when she became a nanny to a teen named Brooke. Brooke’s mom is in the hospital and dad Cameron needs help watching her. Brooke is old enough to think she doesn’t need a nanny, and Sam is smart enough to try not to be one, and becomes instead a good friend. But something happens along the way, because we quickly see that, in the present day, Brooke and Sam are not on speaking terms, and we know it has something to do with why Sam has shut herself off from the world. It’s a strong film, at turns funny and emotionally heavy, but unfortunately it heralds the big event in Sam’s life that leads to all of her problems, so that the viewer knows the big impending climax long before it is shown, which steals a lot of the film’s thunder. Still, Sennott is great and definitely shows more than she has in her last couple films. ★★★½

Touch is a deeply moving international film, the kind that moves along at a relaxed pace but which you don’t mind, because of how beautifully it is told. In 2020 in Iceland, Kristofer is an old man who is facing a diminishing mind, so much so that his doctor advises him to tie up loose ends while he still can. There’s one in particular in Kristofer’s past that he wants to revisit, so he sets out from his own country, right at the cusp of the pandemic. He first travels to London, and here we start seeing flashbacks to when Kristofer was a student there in the 60s. A socialist (as many were in the 60s), he clashed with the conservative heads at college. When he says he’s just going to quit school, his friends joke with him that he should be a true proletariat and get a common man’s job; to put his money where his mouth is, Kristofer does just that. He walks into the first place he sees, a Japanese restaurant, and applies to be a dishwasher. That spontaneous decision will change his life, as he falls in love-at-first-sight with the owner’s daughter, Miko. Unfortunately Miko currently has a boyfriend, whom Miko’s dad Takahashi obviously doesn’t approve of, so the viewer knows Kristofer may have a chance after all. This seems even more possible as Kristofer and Takahashi become friends, as Kristofer makes an effort to learn Japanese, how to cook in the traditional ways, etc. But what lead to him and Miko separating later, and why Kristofer is hunting for her now all these years later, is a mystery you’ll have to unravel as the film goes along, as the older Kristofer follows the trail of bread crumbs from London to Tokyo. Wonderfully subtle storytelling and a genuinely lovely film, it’s just all-around great moviemaking. ★★★★★

The Teacher’s Lounge is another foreign film, this one out of Germany, and tells a story of how a teacher’s good intentions can blow up in her face. Carla is a young teacher of a 7th grade class, and seems to be good at her job. The school though has had a problem with money going missing from both students and teachers. A couple students insinuate it may be fellow student Ali doing the stealing, but Carla is against interrogating the boy from the beginning, as there is no proof, and the optics of going after Ali (the son of immigrants from Turkey) are not good. When Ali is proven innocent, whispers remain, so to try to catch the thief in the act, Carla puts some money in her coat pocket and leaves it hanging over a chair, with her laptop camera trained on it and recording. When she reviews it later, she doesn’t see a face, but does see a very recognizable blouse and thinks the thief is actually fellow teacher Ms Kuhn. When confronted, Kuhn denies, even as the school sides with Carla and puts Kuhn on leave. Unfortunately that’s not the end, as Kuhn’s son Oskar is in Carla’s class, and the other kids start bullying him. Carla tries to put a stop to it, but everything she seems to do makes it worse. Eventually Oskar starts pushing back too, upset at his fellow students but also at Carla, for getting his mom in trouble. That little snowball only gets bigger as it rolls downhill, until an explosive finale. I really liked this movie, even if some of the fellow teachers were a bit one-sided and awfully narrow-minded, more than you’d hope your average teacher to be. ★★★★

I gotta stop taking movie advice from some of my friends. After being told that Conan the Barbarian was a favorite film, I decided to revisit it, as I hadn’t seen it since I was a kid and honestly didn’t remember it too well. I needn’t have wasted my time, as it is just as bad as I would have guessed. Before Predator or Terminator, this was the film that put Arnold Schwarzenegger on the map in 1982. It recounts the tale of Conan: his childhood when his parents are killed by a warlord, and his quest for revenge when he grows up and becomes a badass. For an action film, honestly I was pretty bored through a lot of it. Some boobies came out here and there, so maybe my teen or 20-something self would have a bit interested in those scenes, but a 40-something like myself, who watches a lot of art films, has been desensitized, so that even those were boring. The acting is worse than awful, and the film just feels like a glossy low budget B-movie. Sorry buddy, I’m going to stop trusting your movie takes. ★½

• TV series recently watched: Voltron Legendary Defender (season 1)
• Book currently reading: Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen