“The Matchmaker” is an edgy Saudi parable, an inverted “Handmaid’s Tale” warning the patriarchy about a mythical reckoning to come from the oppressed women in their lives.
But being Saudi, it was filmed by men and its words of warning are both directed at and told for the benefit of the men impacted when the women figure out a way to trap, torture and kill the wayward males in their ranks.
It’s OK as it is, but Margaret Atwood might like a word and a have a few suggestions.
“Matchmaker” sets up as a folk tale, of an abused girl of the desert who cries for help and “an ear…that could understand her” hears her cries and intervenes on her behalf. The story then evolves into a thriller about a bored workaholic and disinterested husband and father (Hussam Alharthi) who finds himself tempted by a woman (Nour AlKhadra) at the office.
Salma keeps her head uncovered, and is thus catnip to all the Saudis around her.
Tarak eyes her like everybody else, pretends to smoke so he has an explanation for following her into their office’s stairwell, and gets absolutely zero encouragement for his troubles.
And then she quits. He grabs a purse she’s left behind, and that’s where he finds the tablet, the iPad that opens up on an ad for a discrete marriage “matchmaking” site.
“Register now, and no one will know,” (in Arabic, with English subtitles, or dubbed into English).
Next thing we know, he’s being chauffeured into the desert, to a remote resort hotel. To Salma, he hopes.
That’s where The Matchmaker (Reem Al Habib) finishes the sales pitch, promises him his heart’s desire and initiates Tarak and other Saudi men of enough means into her and her staff’s “services.”
Of course there are “rules,” and of course he’s going to break them. But without doing that, how can Tarak get the idea that all is not what it seems, that these uniformed staff rituals and special garments he’s given are not what they seem, when what they seem is kind of creepy anyway?
Director and co-writer Abdulmohsen Al-Dhabaan maintains a chilling tone by showing us the consequences of the revenge exacted by “the ear” in the folk tale/legend that introduces the story.
He’s dabbling in “Twilight Zone” and “Seconds” (the Frankenheimer film) territory here, grabbing hold of male insecurity and wish-fulfillment fantasy and repeating the age-old warning, “Be careful what you wish for.”
This Around the World with Netflix offering isn’t anyone’s idea of a scathing indictment of a culture’s sexist mores and practices, or all that daring a film by Western standards. The film has a sappy, sentimental coda that feels like a punch that’s been pulled.
But considering its source, a land built on a patriarchal “moral” code enforced by a state that advocates Sharia Law at its harshest, a monarchical theocracy that still beheads people, “The Matchmaker” plays as a fascinating if oblique filmed acknowledgement of how things are and a soft warning to the powers that be that this is unsustainable, and that perhaps they should repent or liberate half their populace before that bell tolls.
Rating: TV-14, violence
Cast: Hussam Alharthi, Reem Al Habib, Nour AlKhadra,, Rahaf Ibraheem
Credits: Directed by Abdulmohsen Al-Dhabaan, scripted by Fahad Alastaa and Abdulmohsen Al-Dhabaan. A Netflix release.
This May 26 release from Quiver stars Lulu Wilson as our avenger, a troubled teen who has it in for American Nazis, and Seann William Scott as their Poster Boy.
“David Holzman’s Diary” is as much as stunningly-prophetic predictor of “now” as it is a fascinating artifact of “then.”
It’s a 1967 mockumentary before that term was even invented. It was photographed by one of the great documentary cinematographers of all time, “Woodstock” DP Michael Wadleigh, so it looks like what it is purported to be, a self-filmed “diary” of an aspiring NYC filmmaker, David Holzman, even though Holzman was played by L.M. “Kit” Carson and the movie was scripted (mostly) and directed by a young filmmaker who would go on to make “The Big Easy,” the Richard Gere remake of “Breathless” and “Great Balls of Fire!” — Jim McBride.
Watching this darkly-comic tale of a cinema-obsessive in the New York of the ’60s, we can see the cell phone “film” revolution to come and performative “Attention Economy” narcissism of the Tik Tok generation foretold in the story of a film student/graduate who has no ideas for a movie save for making a diary of his own life.
The old joke about budding novelists writing novels about wannabe novelits writing their first novel can apply to film, too, especially in an age where all the tools to make your own movie — an iPhone with a tripod and a little editing software — are so cheap.
Only our fictional David Holzman is doing this back when even filming something as simple as a “diary” of a week in New York when the process of making that diary is tearing your life apart is expensive.
But young Holzman shows us his NPR (noiseless portable reflex) Eclair 16 mm camera and his just-as-pricey portable Swiss NAGRA reel-to-reel recorder, so obviously he has means. Maybe Mommy and Daddy’s money is paying for the film stock (B&W), too.
Holzman lets us see his stumbling attempts to narrate his self-absorbed diary. “This is a fantasy,” he begins, then changes his mind and starts again. “EXPOSE yourself” is his credo, perhaps handed down by an NYU professor, but here sounding like the onanistic exercise this almost certainly will turn out to be.
He’s just lost his job, which means he’s gotten a draft notice in the mail, which means he’s desperate to make something that will either change his employment state or something to leave behind if he’s sent to Vietnam.
Wasting a lot of celluloid isn’t an issue.
He hopes to discover “some meaning” in what’s going on in a life that “seems to haunt me in uncommon ways.”
Or maybe they’re not that uncommon. But that’s exactly how a narcissist would see it.
His aim is to make a sort of “Lulu’s Diary,” referencing the classic Louise Brooks’ silent film “Pandora’s Box.” He quotes “Breathless” filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard noting that his camera “tells the truth 24 times (frames) a second.”
So Holzman will film his world, the streets he walks in the neighborhood (W. 71st Street) on this week in July of 1967, capturing the people along those streets, the storefronts, the historic sites (The Ansonia Hotel, the “Red House”).
He plays around with a fisheye lens, walks us down the longest park bench in New York, taking in the faces he captures as he does, takes us on a noisy subway ride where he stalks a pretty rider as she detrains.
Okaaayyy.
He introduces us to his very reluctant model/girlfriend Penny (Eileen Dietz), who averts her eyes and asks him to stop filming her out-of-makeup. When she catches him filming her nude, sleeping in post-coital repose, she flips out and storms out.
He peeps out his window at the neighbor woman across the street whom he names “Sandra” (Louise Levine) because, you know, he’s looked up the name on the mailbox downstairs — “S. Schwartz” — and decided she “reminds me of Visconti’s Sandra.” He even calls her up and figures out, in a flash, that she isn’t a “Sandra” when she hangs up before he can run through all the other “S” first names he can think of.
So yes, this guy is obsessed and inappropriate and seriously creepy and we’re allowed to laugh at him, maybe cringe a little bit and wonder if there’s a joke in the native-New Yorker McBride giving this creepy character a Jewish surname and if we’re allowed to laugh at that now.
The funniest and most celebrated sequence is perhaps unscripted and is certainly uncredited. A transvestite neighbor pulls up in her T-bird convertible (Hellooo, “Thelma & Louise”), stops traffic (horns honk, other drivers complain and gawk) and engages David — actually McBride, his star and his film crew — in a long, crude come-on of a conversation.
“David” is a a bit amused and a little rattled, and not just at the idea of a New Yorker in the ’60s having the guts to own an easily-broken-into rag-top Thunderbird.
“David Holzman’s Diary” is a lovely snapshot of Manhattan in the ’60s and a biting portrait of the cinema fanatic/film school student of the day, and indeed every day that’s followed. It may portend our current Youtube/Tik Tok “influencer” era, but it more directly inspired the “documentary diaries” of Ross McElwee (“Sherman’s March”) and Michael Moore (“Roger & Me”).
It’s all pretty much faked, and you can see the early comedies of Albert Brooks (“Real Life,” “Lost in America”) and “This is Spinal Tap” in this twist on upending and ridiculing the then-new “cinema verite” documentary conventions of the ’60s.
McBride’s Holzman even brings in an artist friend (Lorenzo Mans) to launch into a diatribe of how the presence of the camera alters the “reality” of what he’s doing, a philosophical debate that erupted when fly-on-the-wall “truth” documentaries in the cinema verite style became a thing.
“David Holzman’s Diary” may not be as funny and off-the-wall transgressive as it once was. But it’s still a marvel, a movie that one can look at now and see the building blocks for the “realistic” DIY cinema to come, and see it brutally mocked well before its “My movie is about ME” time.
Rating: unrated, nudity, profanity
Cast: L.M. “Kit” Carson, Eileen Dietz, Lorenzo Mans, Louise Levine and Robert Lesser.
Credits: Scripted and directed by Jim McBride. A Kino Lorber release on Tubi, Mubi, Amazon et al.
There’s something deliciously ironic in the notion that the “bomb throwing anarchist” of legend — 19th century leftists who dreamed of the end of states, with all democracy “local” and every workplace run by voting workers — people fanatical enough to assasinate leaders all over the industrialized world and who would literally throw bombs, were inspired by that hotbed of anarchist thought, Switzerland, and the folks who made the watches that inspired the selling point, “Swiss time.”
Wait,. Anarchism Central was Bern and the Jura Mountains valley where assorted Swiss watchmaking concerns obsessed over time, effeciency, profits and market share? And the front line troops in that “revolution” were the Swiss women of that workforce, meticulous builders of precision timekeepers who kept “The Commune” in their hearts as they supported anarchists from Europe, the Americas and Asia with their labor and their salaries?
“Unrest” (“Unruh”) is the punny title of a Swiss period piece about that late 19th century epoch, where Swiss women, or Russian upperclasswomen, would discuss “Marx and Engel” and how the anarchists weren’t satisfied with those two, but alligned themselves with the “pure” democracy of the Paris Commune.
Writer-director Cyril Schäublin (“Those Who are Fine”) leans heavily on the simple irony of it all for a seriously deadpan and dull pretty-much-by-design dive into what seems, on its surface, like a fascinating corner of history to explore.
Because really, what do we think of when we think of Switzerland? Amoral, international tax-haven banking, chocolate and watches.
“Unrest” plays like a film inspired by that self-written Orson Welles speech as the amoral American Harry Lime in Carol Reed’s “The Third Man.”
“Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed. But they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love – they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”
A Russian prologue has a gaggle of politically-aware upper class ladies of the 1880s who await their turn being framed by a Saint Petersburg photographer and bemoan the fate of “Poor little Pytor Kropotkin,” who’s taken up anarchism and gone to “the capital of international anarchism” to ply his trade.
Pytor ( Alexei Evstratov) is in Switzerland to ply his trade as a geographer/cartographer, redrawing the maps in a more “workers/peoples” centric manner. But the movie isn’t really about him. He’s an observer, an epistolary linchpin of The Internationale, reporting on what the women do there, and communicating with his fellows all over the world via telegraph.
It’s the women of an unnamed watch-making concern, bent over worktables, relentlessly-timed, quizzed and coached towards “higher productivity” so that the Swiss can maintain their edge over “New York, Hong Kong” and other locales producing the pocket watches that the world runs on, who drive, finance and inspire this movement.
It’s already a “global” marketplace, and Factor Director Roulet (Valentin Merz) knows it, even if he never uses the word “globalism.”
The women are quiet, seemingly compliant. But they are quietly organizing, with Josephine Gräbli (Clara Gostynski) as both the factory’s model employee and the anarchist’s darling, an activist at the heart of the movement.
Her specialty? She sets the “unrest” wheel (A Swiss-specific term?) in place, so that the watchspring, escapement and other wheels work in perfect sync and keep Swiss time.
Can she and her sisters change the world with their thinking and the workers’ democracy that they’d love to spread the way Swiss watches seized the global marketplace? Can they manage it without Swiss women even having the vote? They didn’t until the early 1970s, thanks to the Swiss practice of compulsory male-only military service determining who could vote.
Everything about “Unrest” seems promising — the history lesson, the leftist agitation, the political and labor “unrest” that spread around the world.
But if you’re looking for a movie with drama, confrontations, moments of sweeping emotion and action and women making history ahead of their time, “Unrest” is not that film and writer-director Schäublin is emphatically not that guy.
This relatively short film — barely over 90 minutes — is often the cinematic equivalent of “clock-watching.” We stare at blank-faced characters and conversations often seen from afar, in unemotional, character-disconnecting long shots.
The one time a character raises a voice, it’s a publican, democratically “polling” his pub about a new “anarchist” made map (by you-know-who) and whether the working class Swiss there approve of it, or disapprove.
A key moment? Not really.
The most efficient workers in the watchworks are lauded in a meeting for “saving” the company with their improved efficiencies, but noting that they’re anarchists and that the country and the company can’t have this, their dismissal is also announced.
Curiously, the ladies go right back to work, as if Schäublin is making a point about the Swiss character and “business is business” lack of follow-through. Sack their best workers? Maybe not.
The film’s recreation of its time and place includes the birth of the practice of collecting photographic prints of heads of state, and anarchists, whom all the workers in Switzerland seem to know by name — August Reinsdorf, for instance.
“I LOVE criminals,” one female collector/enthusiast gushes (in French, with Russian also spoken in the film).
But as would-be assassin Reinsdorf was never photographed, she’ll have to settle for another “criminal.” Perhaps there are shots of Pyotr?
The script, the shot-blocking and the performances combine for a most dramatically flat exercise, apparently embraced by some at film festivals (groupthink) but which, in the cold hard light of day, is just disappointing.
“Unrest” could have been a lot of things that it’s not — “fascinating,” “illuminating,” “entertaining” and even “inspiring” among them. Instead, we’re treated to engrossing details that never add up to more than watching a second hand labor its way around a clock face.
Rating: unrated
Cast: Clara Gostynski, Alexei Evstratov, Li Tavor, Monika Stalder and Valentin Merz
Credits: Scripted and directed by Cyril Schäublin. A Kimstim Films release.
“Land of Gold” is a sweet immigrant’s odyssey road picture that walks the fine line between “cute” and “cutesey” all the way from LA To Boston.
Writer, director and star Nardeep Khurmi gives us a sentimental view of America wrapped in the harsh realities of family obligations, broken dreams, racism and the plight of the undocumented.
It’s a slow-moving story with a seriously out-of-date view of long-haul trucking, here set on “Duel” southwestern backroads with constant stops and general dawdling, a lack of urgency that spreads to the movie’s central crisis and conflict. But for all that “75 minute movie in a 100 minute package” business, it’s intensely likeable.
Kiran (Khurmi) has taken over his father’s one-truck business and moved his wife into the family home. Preeti (Pallavi Sastry) is very pregnant, and was under the impression he would take the last couple of weeks or her pregnancy off to finally pick a color and paint the baby nursery, cater to her OB-GYN visits and other needs and generally make ready.
But the second baby shower that his more observant and overbearing Sikh mother (Rita Sachdeva, superb) insisted they have and worries about money have him so overwhelm that he takes on a job.
That’s what he tells himself and her, anyway. He keeps referring to their daughter in vague, theoretical terms, the last thing the woman bearing his child wants to hear. He’s made this trip decision without her, the “concept” of a baby isn’t due for several days. What’s the big deal?
Maybe he’ll look up his estranged brother on the East Coast. Maybe he’ll relish the break from a brittle marriage.
But his little “break” on the open road gets hijacked when he finds a tween girl, Elena (Caroline Valencia) stowing away in his trailer. She won’t talk or explain herself, tries to run away and maces him to manage that.
And when she faints out of exhaustion, dehydration and malnutrician, and lets bits up her story come out — she has an uncle in Boston she must get to — Kiran wishes she’s never opened her mouth.
It’s complicated. But he’s been through some trauma himself, as flashbacks tell us. And he’s Sikh, so there’s no sense even trying to turn her in to the authorities.
“She needs help. End of story.”
Khurmi lays out their budding relationship in broad, cliched strokes. She’s messing with his stuff in the sleeper, drinking up his soft drinks and ignoring instructions, which puts her in danger and has him fearing arrest. She hums “Silent Night” and makes a visit to a small Catholic church they stop near. And he introduces her to his cuisine — “Just eat it like a burrito!” “Burritos are NOT Mexican!” — and his faith when they stop at a gurdwara, a Sikh temple.
But cloying though they may be, the bonding scenes work. Well, maybe not the ones where Elena instantly connects with the grumpy Preeti and pushy granny-to-be Raveena, who soften in their Facetime chats with the plucky little girl, which rub much of the edge and potential for conflict off the story. Still, when it errs it errs on the side of “sweet.”
The third act’s surprises and resolution give this slight picture a lift it sorely needs. I had a hard time buying into anybody who’d call their baby a “concept,” even in the heat of an argument.
Rating: unrated, arrests, alcohol abuse
Cast: Nardeep Khurmi, Caroline Valencia, Pallavi Sastry and Riti Sachdeva
Credits: Scripted and directed by Nardeep Khurmi. An HBO Max release.
Running time: 1:44
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This “Columbo” styled thriller — we see the killing(s), and wonder if the cop (Hamm) or the relative (Fey) will figure out who did it, and why — co-stars Nick Muhammed and comes our way June 16.
I think it was directed by Mr. Hamm’s “Mad Men” co-star John Slattery. Yup. Just looked it up. It’s him. Cool.
Movie Nation 