it will always be good friday
desire made manifest in kill the jockey // transcendental style in misericordia // bresson, lynch, sacraments, easter
My goal with this newsletter is to write about new films as they reach general release, along with some seasonally appropriate commentary on other cinematic events and interests. This week we’ve got reviews of two MSPIFF films running into some Easter season ramblings about cinematic transcendence in David Lynch and Robert Bresson films. This newsletter comes out every Wednesday, which this week means Friday.
One of the most hyped movies at MSPIFF this year was Luis Ortega’s Kill the Jockey, a 2024 Venice debut that did well at a handful of Spanish-language festivals and earned Argentina’s slot for the 2024 Oscars. It’s a movie about desire, probably my least favorite things to talk about. I’m not sure Ortega likes to talk about it either, which is why he made a movie that explodes at the seams with longing without ever quite clarifying what it wants.
Kill the Jockey tells the story of a celebrated Argentinian jockey with a drug problem; after one too many fuck-ups, the mob decides it’s time for him to go. That barely scratches the surface of what this movie is about, and by its end the plot has become secondary to the film’s externalized core. There's not a twist so much as an element that springs loose from the storyboards, and to watch it without expectations is to be just as surprised by the revelation as the characters who experience it. I think it will be impossible to market this movie without labeling it a queer story, which will probably be obvious the moment we cut to a locker room of skinny boys stretching to a bass beat in silk and shiny leather. Is jockeying an inherently queer profession? If not in terms of sexuality then at least in its fixation on a very unconventional masculinity. The fun of Kill the Jockey is to follow where that queerness takes us.
The journey is an exploration of desire and the ways it comes out sideways in a chauvinistic culture. The unspeakable remains unspoken, revealed through garish reifications that are only possible in cinema. Hopes and urges show up as cowboys, costumes, gravitational anomalies, and magic bullets. When the script can't tell the story, Timo Salminen’s camera does it instead. He and Ortega do for racehorses what Mukdeeprom and Guadagnino did last year for tennis balls, a visceral representation of the sport that functions less as metaphor than full embodiment of a breakdown. Everything is big and bright and shocking. Ortega wears his Lynchianism on his sleeve, down to the road shots and the over-made-up ladies with big hair and cigarettes. There are a couple moments that bump against American liberal sensibilities, but the bigger issue is that the onslaught of visual ideas distracts from the film’s central transformation. Even so, they can’t overwhelm it. I left the theater not totally sure what happened but nevertheless invigorated by both journey and destination. Sometimes desires can’t be spoken. Thank God cinema can make them obvious. Is this the new literalism? Cool, I like it.
Alain Guiraudie's Misericordia takes the opposite approach to desire and ensures that the unspoken stays that way. If Ortega reveals through manifestation, Guiraudie does it through absence, skirting around the obvious so obliquely that the avoidance eventually wallops you like a rock over the head.
This is the kind of movie where a lot feels like a little, or vice versa. It’s called Misericordia, which all Catholics know means “mercy,” and since it’s Latin you can assume it’s the divine kind1. Nothing divine shows up in this film, of course - we’re grounded from start to finish in the ordinary. Jérémie arrives in autumn to the forest town of Saint-Martial to mourn the death of a baker. He overstays his welcome. His childhood friend becomes convinced that he’s trying to sleep with his mother. He forms a obsessive friendship with an older man over mushrooms. He attracts the interest of the town priest, who always seems to be lurking right over his shoulder as things start to go awry.
I don’t know enough about Guiraudie’s work to understand what he’s about, but I think he’s having some intentional fun with the Robert Bresson playbook (more on him later). Low-affect acting, constant repetition, themes of criminality/imprisonment/escape, country priests. And then there’s the liturgical title, which hints toward some sort of transcendental framework. The consecration comes near the end. Jérémie prays in church. Cut to an icon of Jesus, cut to a statue of Mary, then cut to autumn-soaked clouds high above the forest. We're on a cliff, looking out over the trees and the fog that up until this point have covered us. Jérémie is contemplating suicide, but the priest shows up over his shoulder, just as he's done ten or so times before. His talking-down words are the first time we’ve heard anyone say something honest. "Live so you can love me," he says. "You don't love me yet, but you'll learn. Just as I've learned to love everyone."2 It's not quite Claude Laydu's speech to the dying Countess in Diary of a Country Priest, but it's in the same ballpark.
Does anything transpire from this? On screen it’s the same repression, actions carried out without a clear statement of purpose. But for the viewer they’re recast in forgiveness, kindness, the understanding that sometimes humans need other humans - in other words, misericordia.
Or not. I can't gauge Guiraudie’s misanthropy. I am too much of a prude to have seen Strangers by the Lake, but my impression is that it's not particularly holy. I couldn’t connect with much in Misericordia. I didn’t find it especially satisfying. I was frequently sleepy, disconnected, lost. These are all OK things to feel; pretty often a movie that makes me tired turns out to be a masterpiece, so this one is going to take some more chewing. It ends in a strange place, and it's hard to tell if it's just sardonic fun or grasping at something beyond itself. Maybe that’s what Guiraudie wants to tell us about desire: we’ll only ever be mealy-mouthed about it.
OK, so Robert Bresson. Have you heard of this guy?? I started delving into his filmography late last year with Pickpocket, a movie that made no sense to me until Paul Schrader explained it. He points out everything that Bresson does “perversely” - redundant shots, incoherent music, sloppy edits, flat (i.e. bad) acting. It’s a great crash course in how to watch movies with an eye toward theory. I’ve been stuck on it ever since.
Schrader’s read is that Bresson is a transcendental filmmaker: his films sink the viewer into the immanent while simultaneously alienating them from accepting it, only to later split their brain open with a glimpse of the transcendent3. Bresson’s goal is to tell the story as flat as possible without resorting to any cinematic manipulation, to the point of actively undercutting any of the tricks that might convince us that what we’re looking at is real. It’s a self-defeating strategy, and it makes his films unpleasant to watch. The editing seems sloppy, the camera work is ugly, the acting is boring, the story doesn’t make sense. Nothing works the way it’s supposed to until the transcendent moment when everything comes together: music, action, editing all aligned - almost, it would seem, by chance.
The transcendental style is most effective in A Man Escaped, for my money the most perfect - and certainly the most efficient - film every made. But it’s probably most devastating in Au hasard Balthazar (Balthazar, At Random), a movie that is maybe too good for this world and now joins the list of things that make me tear up a little when I think about them. I knew that it was a sad donkey movie, and I’ve been dreading watching it because I assumed it was going to make me feel like crud. And it sort of did - but it’s also beautiful in a way that only a pervert like Bresson could make manifest. It drags you alongside Balthazar through 90 minutes of slice-of-life scenes that, if presented in a normal way, would be ripe for overwrought manipulation. Instead, Bresson directs them like a psycho, cutting out the interesting parts, tossing in incoherent musical cues, pacing everything like he has no idea what a movie is, giving the viewer no time to process what or why or how anything is happening (or, alternatively, dwelling on shots of junk drawers, or a kid pouring a bottle of motor oil onto the ground for no reason). And then at the end he gives you one of the most beautiful scenes ever filmed. No explanation, no context, just another thing that happened to a donkey: au hasard, transcendence.
Bresson has the distinction of knocking me out of the David Lynch world I’ve been living for the past eight months, another transcendence-oriented place that comes at it from a very different direction. Lynch’s world is just as ugly and stilted as Bresson’s, but it incorporates inexplicable events to manifest the forces in our lives that are cinematically and narratively unrepresentative: angels and demons in Fire Walk With Me, monsters in Mulholland Drive, robins in Blue Velvet, the Phantom in Inland Empire. Lynch is a medievalist director, one who sacramentalizes the unspeakable by smashing it into large and startling figures. Bresson, on the other hand, refuses to let the viewer get a handle on anything. He burrows into what we can see and in doing so gives us a hint of what we can't.
I want to live in Lynch's world where angels exist and where the simultaneous presence of good and evil tears a person to pieces. But I'm finding my experience of the real world to be a whole lot more like Bresson's. I am a fairly bad Catholic in the same way that Bresson seems to have been a bad Catholic, not in the sense of living a life of exciting sin but in the difficulty of accepting anything that could realistically be called faith. I know the motions of Catholicism and I follow them with some degree of focus and regularity, but they’re never backed with swelling music or moralizing tracking shots. Of course they aren’t. That’s not how life works.
Once upon upon a time the world felt sacramental and obvious, everything around me bursting with signs about what I was supposed to be doing and what I was supposed to be looking for. Now here we are halfway through Holy Week and all I see are four Masses and a dinner, all of it filled with practice but no real hope of divine intervention. Like a Bresson movie, I feel a longing for the extreme halted by an imprisonment in the normal: liturgy like film capturing nothing but the flatness of everyday life, all the sacramental artifice revealed as false, manipulative, lying. The holiday never lines up with the seasons, and the drama of the Triduum Masses are never quite what they should be. It takes a lot to pull off a good show, and American Catholics don’t have the talent or the gumption. All we have are stumbling readings, exhausted homilies, sloppy coordination of electric lights and out-of-tune trumpets. In other countries Easter is celebrated with processessions, passion plays, lighting things on fire, spectacular externalizations of the resurrection. It seems like a great time. But maybe our awkward vernacular Mass is a better expression of divinity than whips and blood and fires. I’m trying to find some grace in that.
At the end of every Holy Thursday Mass the altar is stripped and the tabernacle is cleared out, the consecrated Eucharist moved to a side chapel as all the lights are gradually shut off. It’s the only part of the Triduum service that always hits for me, the only part that seems impossible to mess up. Evelyn Waugh gets at it at in Brideshead Revisited when Cordelia describes to Charles the closing of her family’s Catholic chapel:
“[The priest] emptied the holy-water stoop and blew out the lamp in the sanctuary, and left the tabernacle open and empty, as though from now on it was always to be Good Friday. I suppose none of this makes any sense to you, Charles, poor agnostic. I stayed there till he was gone, and then, suddenly, there wasn’t any chapel there any more, just an oddly decorated room. I can’t tell you what it felt like.”4
That open tabernacle feeling - Good Friday forever - is what I get watching Bresson. Not a sacrament but an icon of emptiness, a negative presence that reminds of the necessary existence of the real thing. Whatever transcendence is, it’s outside the range of anything a church or a film or any form of art can make obvious. Against my best judgment I do believe that it exists, even if that belief can only manifest in an overwhelming sense of absence. The absence is a dull pain in the chest, but in a world filled to bursting with too many images, maybe that dullness is closer than anyone’s shot at the truth. If nothing else, it leaves the door open for - what? I don’t know. Life? At random.
Happy Easter from *life is disappointing.* If you found this newsletter slightly less disappointing than the rest of your life, consider liking, commenting, pledging me money (thanks!), or subscribing. Subscribing will get you exactly what you get here but sent to your email inbox. I’ll be back next week with an assessment of Sinners and whether or not it saved the movies. Fingers crossed.
It’s worth noting that the French title is Miséricorde, which is just the normal word for “mercy.” I don’t know why the distributors decided that the American release needed a liturgical injection, or if Guiraudie was involved in the translation.
I’m paraphrasing, I can’t read my notes. And also he says it in French. It’s something like that.
For more, read Schrader’s Transcendent Style in Film (1971). I was disgusted to learn that he wrote this foundational film theory text when he was 24 - and then, once he’d gotten that out of his system, decided to write Taxi Driver.
Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited, p. 200.