Here's another dispatch from True/False. The festival's programmers don't set out to rhyme the films on the schedule with one another, but sometimes they do in spite of themselves.
I feel bad for the men at the heart of Dogwatch (2022, directed by Gregoris Rentis). The film follows three men at different stages in their career as maritime security for ships traveling through the hunting grounds of Somali pirates, a threat that has greatly reduced since the earliest days of this century. Essentially, we're looking at soldiers who don't have a war to fight. Instead, there's the ritual of training and the boredom of waiting for something to do. One of the men mangles the phrase "hurry up and wait" throughout his time on stage. To an extent that's what this film is. It's an action film waiting for action to happen. In its place are drills and simulations, going through the motions of violence. To some extent, this is an examination of masculinity through cosplay.
The filmmakers have titled the three acts of the movie with the names of their subjects. The first is Yorgos, who is new to the job. We first see him with his mother, who is lothe to let him go, and embraces him in a long static shot that might as well be a sculpture for how unyielding it is. Yorgose is young, and as a young man away from home for the first time, he lets his freak out to play. He spends long nights out on the town in Sri Lanka as he waits to ship out on his first mission. At one nightclub he is shirtless in the company of shirtless men. Is he gay? Who knows? We never see Yorgos on the job. His segment ends when he ships out. The second is Costa, who is mid-career. We watch him on the job, going through endless days interrupted only by drills in which he recruits the crew of his ship to playact victims of pirates. These scenes are filmed like a first-person shooter, which isn't an accident, given that we also observe Costa playing videogames. He's got a wife back home who he misses. The ship itself is ringed with barbed wire and seems like a microcosm. It seems lonely. Finally, there's Viktor, who is at the end of his career. He wants off the ship and into a job on land. We see him training new recruits and interacting with a family that is newly acquainted with his presence in their lives. His teen son in particular seems to be following into violence as manhood, though significantly, we see him being taught to box by his mother rather than his dad.
I don't think this film intends to act as a portrait of obsolete masculinity. It is perhaps more accurate to say that it is a portrait of the masculine identity at a crossroads where it must fulfill itself with something other than violence. Some of its war games are funny to watch, particularly the prologue before we meet our three heroes. In the prologue, the two men who are drilling with their guns can't decide which direction they need to turn when directed at an enemy at 9 o'clock. There's a Keystone Kops quality to this scene, and it suggests the ridiculousness of their profession. The filmmakers have chosen different idioms for each of their three segments. Yorgos seems to exist in a neo-noir city with neon barlights and throbbing musice. Costa's world is a ship and the chapter resembles one of those slow-cinema portraits of container ships at sea, though punctuated by war games. Viktor's story is a deadpan indie drama. In spite of the varied idioms on display, my initial reaction is that it's more akin to those films from the 1930s in which three girls go on adventures (one's in love with a bandleader, the other is in love with a gangster, the third is being wooed by a cab driver). This is a common construction in documentary filmmaking, too, and Dogwatch doesn't escape or transcend the formula. And in spite of the variety of approaches the filmmakers use, their camera technique is constant throughout, in which the men are shot in intimate close-ups that are sometimes out of the focal depth of the lens. Particularly in the first chapter, this is a film for LOOKING at men as much as it is a film about the lives of men.
This is also a film about violence, over and above how violence relates to masculinity. It's about how violence is depicted in film. Its major trick is to withhold violence. Even when Costa runs his drills with the crew, we mostly see the staged aftermath of violence. When we get play-acted violence, it's ridiculous. And well it should be were it not for the hypothetical pirates on the high seas. At one point, there seem to be pirates approaching the ship, but nothing comes of it except a scene that is an unannounced drill. It's a tease and a manifesto: you've seen violence in hundreds of films, it asks, so why do you need to see it here?
Hummingbirds (2023, directed by Silvia Del Carmen Castaños and Estefanía Contreras) starts with its directors picking out stars from the top of a car, then startled off that car when its alarm goes off. There's a sense of anarchy in this film, which is autobiography charting the end of adolescence for Silvia and Bebe, two young immigrant women in Laredo, Texas. It's basically a hangout movie. What plot there is provided by both their circumstances (they both fear being deported, Bebe is navigating the immigration bureaucracy) while being mostly irrelevant. This isn't interested in making grand statements or depicting social problems. It's mostly about two kids becoming adults. The two women bond with art. Silvia is a poet. Bebe is a musician. Both of them are activists, having both had abortions as teens (they were still teens when the movie was made). They express the anarchy of youth and the outrage of being trapped in Texas among conservative Anglo white people. My favorite part of the film finds them indulging in street art protest by creating strips of tape with words to alter those yard signs that say "Pray To End Abortion" to instead read "Pray For Legal Abortion." They have a gay best friend, who usually wears make-up and accompanies them wearing a dress. When they race themselves anywhere, they shout "last one is a Republican." This is the youth that Republicans hate, and boy howdy, do they know it.
What this film reminds me of most are the Locas comics from Love and Rockets by Jaime Hernandez, with Silvia and Bebe as analogous figures to Maggie and Hopey. The punk aesthetic is certainly there, as is the casual backround of the Mexican immigrant experience. There is even an animated element of the film that ties it to comics. It reminds me a bit of Vera Chytilova's Daisies, too, though a bit more grounded in reality and social realism. The anarchism seems similar. Really, this resembles any number of female-fronted buddy movies. I don't know how much of this was observational and how much of it has been staged for the film, given that the directors are in front of the camera. Like many contemporary non-fiction films, this is in the liminal space between truth and lies. Or maybe not. Fiction has been lying to tell the truth for centuries, after all.
It would be easy to pick this apart for its politics. The fact that the river acts as both a literal and metaphorical border would be heavy-handed in another film, after all. But anyone who listens to Xennials will realize that all of this film's political concerns are central to their generation, especially in Texas. For all that, my favorite scenes are less politically loaded. I love watching these two playing bingo while wearing ridiculous sunglasses, or having their gay best friend read Tarot cards for them even though the cards in question are regular playing cards, or loading up on supplies at Wal-Mart and discovering that Mexican pesos are accepted as tender there, at least in Laredo. The film takes its name from one such scene, following on from their Wal-Mart trip, in which Bebe inks Silvia's arm with a hummingbird tattoo. This scene and the one where Silvia reads a poem to Bebe late in the film are deep expressions of love. The film doesn't explicitly say these women are queer, but it's there in the subtext and the visuals. Even if they aren't, they definitley have feelings for each other. This is another film that a tendency to put the camera very close to its subjects and focal lengths be damned if it can capture any level of intimacy.
I don't envy these two for the world they're living in, but their optimism and resistance in the face of it is gratifying. If the world really is ending--and the world right now is already vastly different from before the pandemic when this was shot--it's a shame because these kids deserve their place in the sun.
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