AFI Fest 2025: Day Two

Kontinental ’25 (Radu Jude): 50

Oh good, an opportunity to make myself look like an unfeeling asshole. I just don’t think this film’s protagonist (beautifully played by Eszter Tompa, who I see had a small role in The Duke of Burgundy as one of Evelyn’s fellow lepidopterists) merits the dry scorn Jude heaps upon her. Some (many) social problems are genuinely intractable, and pretending otherwise accomplishes very little; in this case, Orsolya fought to get the homeless man a month-long extension from eviction, arranged to have him accepted at a shelter, hired a van to move his belongings (“Where?” is admittedly a fair question, but that’s what the extra month was for), and then felt wracked by guilt at what happened despite her efforts. Not good enough, the movie implicitly insists, though it’s unclear to me that things would improve for Cluj’s homeless population if Orsolya quit her job (which seems to be what we’re meant to think she ought to have done—or simply not accepted the job to begin with), likely to be replaced by someone less compassionate, or whether allowing people to inhabit basement boiler rooms indefinitely is a viable solution. When someone refuses the help offered to them, what then? I don’t believe that’s so morally clear-cut as Kontinental ’25 claims. Jude’s eye for absurdity remains exemplary (the dinosaur park!), and he doesn’t browbeat, which is why I keep using words like “dry” and “implicitly.” But this still felt to me like Bluesky’s most obnoxious leftists pouncing on anyone who says they did X and querulously demanding to know why they didn’t also do Y and Z and let’s circle around to the beginning of the alphabet and keep going.

Young Mothers (Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne): 42

Here’s a reference virtually nobody will appreciate: Remember when Jocelyn Moorhouse followed up Proof with How to Make an American Quilt? Maybe Van Sant signing onto Good Will Hunting is a better corollary, even if this film reminded me much more strongly of Quilt. In any case, it’s dispiriting to see the Dardennes abandon their strengths (however weak those have been over the past decade) and create something that’s distinguishable from a Lifetime movie only in form, not at all in content. Young Mothers builds an ensemble story around four teens who’ve either recently given birth or are about to do so, all occupying the same maternity shelter, each with her own designated Issue: There’s the one who was given up for adoption and remains traumatized by the abandonment, the one who wants to give her baby up to be adopted but has a nightmare mom who insists otherwise, the one who’s terrified to be a single mom after the baby’s (also teenage) father bails, and the one who’s a recovering drug addict prone to relapses. As ever, Jean-Pierre and Luc get fine performances from various non-pros, and they generate a little of the female solidarity in trying circumstances that made House of Pleasures so moving. But they don’t move among the four main characters with any grace (it’s a plodding, repetitive rhythm), and there’s precious little about Young Mothers that you can’t anticipate after the film’s first 15 minutes or so. I sometimes forget that they started out making documentaries; this feels like it really wanted to be one.

The Currents (Milagros Mumenthaler): still 78

Saw this at TIFF last month, wanted another big-screen viewing. It’s far and away the year’s most sensual film (that I’ve seen, duh), inspiring unease from e.g. a shot of the protagonist’s hair spilling over the back of her armchair, as seen from behind. My reservations remain the same, but I also maintain that for a movie that needlessly over-explains certain things, it does so with admirable subtlety. Noticed this time that Mumenthaler starts building toward the lighthouse sequence earlier on, with preliminary interludes/visions accompanied by Holst; have also now confirmed that said lighthouse sits atop an actual Buenos Aires building, the Palacio Barolo, in which Mumenthaler once had an office herself. So the daughter climbing up there from Mom’s office isn’t as bizarre as it seems to non-Argentine viewers. (I’d actually wondered whether that object with a crank that Lina constructs, the nature of which I don’t think we ever learn, signified building the penthouse and its rotating beacon in her mind.) Kudos to NYFF for selecting this dazzler, but demerits for burying its sole press screening at festival’s end, where it appears to have been seen by just about nobody. Calling Neon!