I write this with my cheek warm and smushed from the forty-seventh nap of the weekend (slight exaggeration) (very slight), which—amid an unexpected plunge in the temperature—means you would need a small forklift to get me off the couch today. Luckily it turns out you can get quite a lot of joyful entertainment beamed to your brain and eyeballs without having to do any work! Some highlights from my recent all-over-the-map viewing—not counting the appropriately incandescent Portrait of a Lady on Fire, on which I can only agree with Bong, via Indiewire:
As he breezed into Soho House, Bong spotted “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” director Celine Sciamma, who was snubbed by the Oscars but came to town for her single Spirit Award nomination. He handed her his Best International Feature statue. “You should be holding this,” he said.
Parasite’s victories made for happy Oscars viewing last Sunday. This GMT-raised girl still relishes being able to watch the ceremony in real time, sitting on the couch with T reading everyone’s repetitive Twitter jokes to each other and judging outfits. Despite all the frustrating/absurd/baffling things about it, I live for the ceremony’s combination of extreme pageantry and big-picture unimportance, and for the random documentary producers and technical experts and directors of animated shorts getting their breathless moment in the sun.
Speaking of films that should be holding more statuettes, Little Women is playing this week at Moving Image, so I went to see it again last night. I’m writing a piece about modern costume drama and female filmmakers, and while I feel the frustration of giving a women-centered film its only Oscar in the shape of the pretty-dresses-well-done award, the clothes are so important here. This time around I became particularly obsessed with the push and pull between warmth and display, with all Jo’s thick woolen socks, and her waistcoats, and those genius little wool body wraps they all wear; also with how the clothes work in different spaces—the crush of hoop skirts in the stairwell at Meg’s first ball, and the contrast between Jo in the colors of the autumn landscape and Laurie in his stark, urbane black-and-white during the proposal scene.
Speaking of costumes and spaces—I went to a screening of the new Emma. (period included) this week, a gorgeous and very funny adaptation that’s definitely more indebted to Clueless than to the novel, giving Emma more mobility and breathing room than the book does. I liked the decision to make Mr Knightley outdoorsy and rugged, and not visually much older than Emma, which some adaptations do, but plausibly in his early thirties, and also the choice to make her “accomplishments” extremely mediocre. Her gloriously crap portrait of Harriet is a lovely running visual joke. It was also fun to see half the cast of Sex Education popping up in supporting roles…
Speaking of which, I tore through season 2, screaming into the void all the while my unanswerable questions, including: Where is the backstory that explains how several hundred people from south London migrated to this one spot in rural Wales, to attend, basically, an American public high school in a castle? Why hasn’t the endlessly stylish Eric stolen Otis’s damn anorak and burned it? Why doesn’t Otis appreciate the goddamn view from his goddamn palatial breakfast deck, and where is this house and can I please have it, along with Gillian Anderson’s entire wardrobe? And so on.
Speaking of WTF: Diamantino! This was our Valentine’s Day viewing, and I’m still not sure who I need to sue at the Criterion Channel. It’s a Portuguese farce that dares to ask the questions we all want answers to, like: What if Cristiano Ronaldo were a charming naïf who missed a crucial goal in the World Cup final, then learned about the global refugee crisis, and what if the lesbian secret-service agent surveilling him for evidence of financial crimes decided to pose as his new adopted son, and then it got weirder? There are soccer fields full of romping Pekingese puppies, evil twin sisters, a Brexit-style campaign for Portugal to leave the EU, and lots of references to Um Bongo, the deeply racist fruit juice that we grew up drinking in the UK, which apparently only exists there and in Portugal. Anyway, I don’t quite know if I’d recommend this movie, but I haven’t seen anything quite like its Pierre et Gilles meets Jane the Virgin meets early Almodovar meets James Bond batshittery in a while. Here’s the trailer.
Speaking of batshittery, my beloved Magicians is back. I was very uncertain about this season after they killed off the/a central character in a brutal way that affected me far more than I expected it to, but they are doing some very interesting and honest things with grief and consequences, and giving me ideas about narrative daring and how a story and an ensemble can bend without breaking. Plus the costumes are absolutely stunning, far more so than you might expect from a random little cable-channel sci-fi show, and I wish there was a chance in hell that the designer could win the Emmy/Oscar/EGOT she deserves.