Category Archives: Now Showing

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THE LEGEND OF OCHI

Producers: Richard Peete, Traci Carlson, Isaiah Saxon and Jonathan Wang   Director: Isaiah Saxon    Screenplay: Isaiah Saxon   Cast: Helena Zengel, Willem Dafoe, Emily Watson, Finn Wolfhard, Raazvan Stoica, Carol Bors, Andrei Antoniu Anghel, David Andrei Baltatu, Eduard Oancea, Tomas Otto Ghela and Eduard Ionut Cucu   Distributor: A24

Grade: B

The baby beast rescued by a determined girl in Isaiah Saxon’s oddly affecting fantasy might look a lot like Gizmo the gremlin, but there’s a goodly amount of E.T.’s DNA in the cute little critter, especially since the plot, about the child’s effort to return it to its home, shares the narrative through-line of Steven Spielberg’s classic.

But though it’s set in the 1980s, the decade of both those films, and shares with them a reliance on practical effects, including some amazing puppetry, the locale is very different—Carpathia, an island somewhere off the coast of Romania in the Black Sea.  The place is rendered, though a mixture of location shots and matte paintings, as a rustic throwback but with a mystical aura—beautifully rendered in Jason Kisvarday’s production design, Elizabeth Warn’s costumes and Evan Prosofsky’s cinematography—where the local population shares space with a species of simians called ochi.

The cohabitation is hardly friendly, however.  The humans, mostly farmers, look upon the nocturnal ochi as dangerous, even murderous.  Their folklore depicts the creatures in horrifying terms as rapacious killers of farm animals, and sometimes of people too: one local, Maxim (Willem Dafoe), blames them for the disappearance of his wife years ago. So his neighbors have understandably given him their blessing to hunt down the creatures and exterminate them.  To that end he’s recruited from neighboring families a group of boys to be his private army, trained and led by him and his second-in-command, an orphan named Petro (Finn Wolfhard), whom he’s raised as his own son.  Maxim also has an adolescent daughter named Yuri (Helena Zengel), but he relegates her to the job of checking the traps set for the beasts.

Yuri doesn’t share her father’s blind hatred of the ochi, and mourns the absence of her mother.  And when she finds an injured baby ochi on one of her nighttime inspections, her instinct is to carry it home and see to its wounds.  Though it appears cuddly, at moments of fear it can bare a set of sharp teeth.  Yet noticing a caterpillar in a wildlife case Yuri has in her bedroom, it treats the insect with delicacy.  Yuri responds by inserting some plastic vampire fangs in her mouth in an effort to bond.

All is going well until Petro hears the critter and bursts into Yuri’s room.  But the sensitive lad can’t bring himself to fire his rifle, and the girl takes the opportunity to flee with the ochi through a window.  She’s determined to take the ochi back to its tribe, though Maxim has never been able to discover exactly where they hide during the day.  His response to the news is to call his hunters together to chase down his daughter; he dons a rusty old suit of knight’s armor and, like a mad modern Don Quixote, jumps onto his all-terrain to lead the way.

Yuri, meanwhile, carries the ochi through an episodic odyssey that includes, among other stops, a wild comic interlude in a supermarket with a slapstick ride in a grocery cart and the theft of a car as its frustrated owner looks on.  Accidentally bitten by the ochi, she slowly heals in the forest and awakens to the realization that she can communicate with the critter, understanding its repertoire of screeches and squawks and being able to employ them herself.

And the duo stumble upon something she’s always longed for.  They find a reclusive shepherd, Dasha (Emily Watson), whose real identity will come as no shock.  But her purpose might: she’s made a life’s work of studying the musical nature of ochi language, and at a critical juncture the magic flute she’s constructed to replicate its effect will play a decisive role.

Yuri’s reunion with Dasha is not free of friction, but their overcoming it will have to wait: Maxim’s arrival sends the girl fleeing again.  Ultimately all will be resolved in a magical setting: a warren of caves that can be reached only through a subterranean lake.  There the confrontation of Maxim and the leader of the ochi ends with a resolution proving their common love of their children.

“The Legend of Ochi” sometimes stumbles—Paul Rogers’ editing is occasionally off (the supermarket sequence, for instance, is rather a jumble), while Dafoe’s manic intensity is at times overbearing and Watson’s diffident air can feel affected.  Wolfhard is underused, given little more than the opportunity to play awestruck surprise.  David Longstreth’s score, like John Williams’ famous one for “E.T.,” can be overbearing too, though overall its soaring strains make a similar impact.

But ultimately Zengel’s marvelous turn as a determined tomboy, catching every change over the course of Yuri’s journey, and the amazing animatronics, resulting in creatures with such tactile immediacy they actually seem real, carry Saxon’s debut feature over the rough spots.  This is an impressive act of cinematic imagination, bringing a world as recognizable yet fantastic as anything in the Grimm Brothers’ fables to vivid life while filling it with warmhearted human emotion.

Now Showing

ON SWIFT HORSES

Producers: Peter Spears, Tim Headington, Theresa Steele Page, Mollye Asher and Michael D’Alto   Director: Daniel Minahan   Screenplay: Bryce Kass   Cast: Daisy Edgar-Jones, Jacob Elordi, Will Poulter, Diego Calva, Sasha Calle, Kat Cunning, Don Swayze and Jason Kravits   Distributor: Sony Pictures Classics

Grade: C

Love’s a gamble, but one worth taking despite the risk of loss and heartbreak  That’s the basic message of Daniel Minahan’s glossy but heavy-handed adaptation of a 2019 novel by Shannon Pufahl, which emerges as something that Douglas Sirk might have produced had he attempted a gay love story on one of his bad days.  Visually artsy—plenty of sunlight reflected on the lens and other similarly distracting flourishes—“On  Swift Horses” is a lush period melodrama about sex in the 1950s that requires you to swallow a bushelful of coincidences on the way to an ostensibly, if unconvincingly, hopeful ending.  It’s a tale that might work in a book, where the implausibility is diluted by being spread out over hundreds of pages, but in two-hour screen form it comes across as a crock, albeit one handsome to look at.

“Handsome” is an adjective that can also be applied to all the major actors, beginning with Daisy Edgar-Jones, who plays Muriel, the partner of Lee (Will Poulter), with whom she lives on the Kansas ranch she inherited from her mother.  As Christmas approaches the couple have an unexpected visitor, Lee’s free-spirited brother Julius (Jacob Elordi), recently released from the military service in the Korean War that on-leave Lee is shortly to return to.  There’s an immediate emotional spark between Muriel and Jacob, but both are seemingly devoted to Lee, and during his brother’s stay Muriel finally accepts Lee’s marriage proposal.  They all agree that after Lee returns from the service, they’ll move together to California.

But that’s not to be.  Afflicted with wanderlust, Julius winds up in Reno, where he finagles a job at a casino where he works with Henry (Diego Calva) watching the floor from the attic to inform the bouncers when they suspect cheating is going on; those they accuse will be very roughly shown the door.  Before long the two men are lovers living together in a shabby motel room—Julius’ early departure from the service was no accident.  But Henry, a Mexican whose mistreatment has fostered a simmering resentment, wants to use the knowledge they’ve acquired to get ahead by cheating in minor, private venues.  Julius agrees, but the relatively small potatoes they make convince Henry to aim higher by taking their act to larger ones.  When Julius demurs and Henry goes it alone, disaster follows, and the two are separated. 

Meanwhile Muriel and Lee do move to San Diego, though she refuses to sell the Kansas house so they can buy a new one there.  Instead, working as a waitress, she discreetly collects inside information about upcoming horse races gleaned from customers like loudmouth Wayne (Jason Kravits). Then she dresses in her best and goes to the track, where she becomes a regular at the betting window, accumulating a stash of winnings she hides from Lee.  But she does use some of it to let them buy the house in a brand-new development her husband wants badly, telling him she finally sold the Kansas place.  At the track, moreover, she meets Gail (Kat Cunning), an enigmatic woman who passes along a matchbook with the name of the hotel where she works.

But her most important new acquaintance is Sandra (Sasha Calle), a neighbor living in an older house near their new one.  Sandra is lesbian, and before long the two women are sharing time together, with Lee none the wiser.  In time Muriel will also visit the hotel advertised on that book of matches, which turns out to be a gay meeting place subject to periodic police raids.  There she reconnects with Gail, who delivers a line that lands with a thud:   “We’re all just a hair’s breadth from losing everything, all the time.”  In time Muriel will actually bump into Henry there and share a dance with him.

Of course Julius doesn’t know his lover’s whereabouts.  He makes a brief stop at Lee and Muriel’s San Diego house, bringing a horse along with him.  But soon he’s off to Mexico in search of Henry, getting himself in a predictable jam from which he extricates himself through Henry’s indirect agency—using a small gold pistol Henry had left behind, which Julius had intended to return.

Meanwhile Lee has found out about Muriel’s relationship with Sandra and they’d broken up.  Julius, returning from Mexico, winds up at the same hotel Muriel had visited, and, glancing at a board where people pin notes to lost lovers, finds one from her addressed to him, with an addendum from Henry attached.  He mounts the horse he’s reclaimed and rides off, presumably to the Kansas spread where Muriel’s relocated.

The title of “On Swift Horses” has a Biblical pedigree—see Isaiah 30:16—but it’s been coopted to serve multiple metaphorical purposes here, from the horses that Muriel wins with at the track to the one Julius rides into the sunset at the close.  They all relate to the need for gay people to move fast to escape the forces of convention and bigotry that always pursue them.  Like so much in the story, the image—like the motif of gambling—is an obvious one for staying a step ahead of those who want to forestall gay people’s reaching freedom and love despite the danger of losing both.

The thematic bluntness is made all the worse by the schematic nature of the narrative, in which pieces fall into place from moment to moment as if in a precisely designed puzzle.  This is a story that ignores the messiness of actual life, preferring one in which the episodes fit together much too comfortably through the glue of unlikely coincidence.

The lack of messiness is found in the visuals as well.  Erin Magill’s production design, Jeriana San Juan’s costumes and Melissa Licht’s set decoration are meticulous in their recreation of the period, but the result fails to capture a fully lived-in look; as caught in Luke Montpellier’s cinematography, the images have the appearance of staged magazine photos rather than real life—even the scenes of passionate sex have an overly calculated feel.  Matters aren’t helped by the languid pacing favored by Minahan and editors Robert Frazen, Kate Sanford and Joe Murphy, which carries over into Mark Orton score, interrupted by the predictable sort of period needle drops.

As for the acting, it too suffers from the emphasis on affect.  Edgar-Jones goes through all the right motions while never seeming to inhabit Muriel’s inner life, while Elordi falls back on the raffish Elvis-James Dean mannerisms that are becoming his go-to approach.  Poulter can’t do much with Lee, who’s pretty much an agreeable, if ambitious, dunderhead—though his pompadour is probably the best effect in the movie. And while Calle brings a welcome brusque steeliness to Sarah, the real wild card in the mix is Calva, whose seething intensity makes Henry seem a real person rather than a literary device following a preordained pattern.

In sum, “On Swift Horses” is lovely to look at, but despite all the vicissitudes its characters go through in their search for happiness, it’s rarely emotionally wrenching.

A decade ago Todd Haynes proved with “Carol” that a story about gay longing in the 1950s could be both elegant and deeply moving.  But he was, of course, working from a novel by Patricia Highsmith, who could deliver her points with devastating subtlety.  On the evidence here, Pufahl is not—or at least not yet—in her league.