Both in life and in the movies, things are not always what they seem. The award-winning career woman may look successful, but after the celebratory crowd goes home, she’s left alone with dark thoughts and anxiety. The set of a prestigious film may sound like an exciting prospect, but behind the scenes, chaos and hurt feelings threaten to take over the spotlight. The comedian looking to charm the crowd might be a lot less funny off-stage as he fumbles through his new life away from his wife and kids.
Bradley Cooper’s straightforward NYFF closer “Is This Thing On?” opens with Alex (Will Arnett) and Tess Novak (Laura Dern) finally agreeing to end their marriage. As they start to uncouple their lives, Alex finds comfort in New York City’s stand-up comedy scene, while Tess returns to her love of volleyball as a coach. Although their lives seem to be moving in different directions, there’s still the lingering chance of “what if?” and a second shot at finding happiness together.
Although the writing of “Is This Thing On?” is not as funny as a tight ten-minute set of one’s favorite comedian (it’s much more somber than the premise lets on), Arnett and Dern are phenomenal, immediately tapping into the complicated and conflicted feelings their characters have for each other. As each partner digs their problems deeper and deeper, undoing the progress they’ve made, they capture something believable about the experience of hurtling towards making mistakes in the heat of an argument and not quite saying what needs to be said. They’re each naturally funny, yet unafraid to get serious and vulnerable. With a supporting cast that includes Cooper, Andra Day, Christine Ebersole, Sean Hayes, Peyton Manning, and Amy Sedaris for a brief “BoJack Horseman” reunion, the pair have plenty of different comedic foils to commiserate with their characters’ problems.
Cooper’s comedy of remarriage feels a bit more unpolished than his previous movies, such as the adaptation of the showbiz cautionary tale “A Star is Born” and the Leonard Bernstein biopic “Maestro.” Here, the heightened emotions threaten to overtake the movie. While the handheld camera work intensifies the whirlwind experience of a situation spiraling out of control, it ends up feeling like a double exclamation point at the end of a sentence. The stand-up scenes are almost too uncomfortable to endure, but the powerhouse team of Arnett and Dern make the best out of some rocky scenes to share the last laugh.
In Milagros Mumenthaler’s “The Currents,” Lina (Isabel Aimé González Sola) is a celebrated fashion designer who seems to have it all: a thriving career and a loving, picture-perfect family. But after accepting an award in Switzerland, Lina throws herself off a bridge, leaving herself in a state of shock after escaping the water. The lingering, uneasy feelings follow her back from the icy lake to Buenos Aires. Unhappy with her life, she struggles to acclimate to her roles as mother and wife, and her creative process also seems to have been affected. Work is no longer the escape it once was. Undergoing a rebirth of sorts out of this time of crisis, Lina must decide what her new life will look like going forward.
“The Currents” is a complicated portrait of a woman on the edge of a breakdown—or is it a breakthrough? As Lina figures out her new reality, Mumenthaler and cinematographer Gabriel Sandru follow her highs and lows in numerous close-ups, punctuated with pops of color like Lina’s bright red lipstick and a sky blue coat in the Switzerland scenes to draw the audience’s eye in to see what her lead actress is doing with the subtle movements of her face.
González Sola plays Lina with a sense of sympathy, slowly unpacking how a successful, confident woman becomes unable to speak about her darkest thoughts. She’s subtle in her movements, like when Lina carefully applies coats of bright lipstick to act as if everything is fine, but her increasingly unkempt hair is the physical manifestation of her tangled state of mind.
Mumenthaler channels the work of Lucrecia Martel, bottling up the suffocating isolation of middle-class life in Argentina, into a psychological study of one woman trapped by the pressures to “have it all.” As with Martel’s “The Headless Woman,” the jarring brush with death unmoors Lina from the rhythm of her daily life. The perfect husband seems less stellar in the face of a crisis. She’s increasingly exhausted from the demands of motherhood and her career, with no relief in sight.
Her annoyance with her mother-in-law intensifies as she senses the other woman’s disapproval of her behavior. She throws herself into her work because that’s her easiest coping mechanism, but her mind is elsewhere, and she can no longer hide behind her crumbling facade. Eventually, she visits her mother, which unlocks another piece of Lina’s life and her mental health struggles.
In the case of Ulrich Köhler’s “Gavagai,” a reimagining of a classic Greek text becomes the launch pad for a larger conversation on race, gender, and equality. Written and directed by Köhler, “Gavagai” uses a restrained narrative of a movie within a movie as a meta commentary to illustrate a variety of thorny issues, especially the power dynamics of a European film shooting on location in Africa. There are also race and gender imbalances to sort through in the relationship between the two lead actors, who, for various reasons, can’t or won’t be able to move forward in their steamy romance.
Emotions are high on the set of a new adaptation of “Medea.” Fashioned in a fictional world blending futuristic clothes and modern-day items like a modestly tricked-out boat, the scene where Medea played by Maja (Maren Eggert) shows her murderous brutality to her husband Jason as played by French Senegalese actor Nourou (Jean-Christophe Folly) isn’t going to plan, and a diminutive tyrant, the film’s director Caroline Lescot (Nathalie Richard), enters the frame screaming. The shot must be reset, and as her lead actress walks out, extras are wandering off, and Medea’s supposedly dead children have taken the boat for a joy ride.
But these are hardly the worst issues. As Maja and Nourou embark on a passionate on-set affair, it soon becomes apparent they’re not getting equal treatment. When the film jumps forward to the movie’s imminent European premiere, Nourou is left out in the cold, almost quite literally, when a hotel guard tries to kick him out of the property for smoking, something that would have happened to a white member of the film team. A silent air of discontent hangs over “Gavagai” as these microaggressions add up.
The Medea movie within a movie looks comically misguided, but that’s hardly the issue. The film’s primary focus is on how the industry treats its workers with minimal power, as it explores issues of representation and gatekeepers. There are many uncomfortable moments of yelling and disrespect towards the African cast and crew, especially from Lescot, who appears to be modeled after Claire Denis. Later, at a buzzing press conference, it becomes apparent that Lescot is clueless about how her film is perceived and relies on the Black members of the cast to defend choices they didn’t make. Meanwhile, both Maja and Nourou are coping with their own feelings of inequality, whether that’s to be seen as more than a commodity or to be accepted into the world they’ve staked their careers in.
