Nolan Golightly

Near the beginning of the film Agnes and the rapist guy have a discussion about a book he’s writing. Agnes says something about how it’s important we have shitty books so that we can tell when we are reading something great. While I don’t think this movie is shit, that conversation captures my general feeling about this movie. My only positive takeaway from this film is that I’m grateful it exists and that I watched it so I feel more assured in my positive opinions on actually good movies.  This is probably what people who hate A24 films think of when they think of a generic A24 movie: about trauma, minimalistic direction, more focused on vibes. It’s another one of those movies. This is a very competently put together film about trauma. It looks decent, occasionally some sequences sort of work well, but what makes this worse than your average A24 film are the characters/dialogue. Probably the most sympathetic character someone can come up with, short of maybe a disabled Jewish kid in a concentration camp, is a rape victim. The dialogue in this movie is vapid, “quirky”, and so terribly constructed it made me incredibly annoyed with a rape victim. That’s impressively bad dialogue. It’s a competently made film (2.5/5 stars) with awful dialogue (0/5 star quality), I guess 2/5 stars seems appropriate?

I already had this rated 5 stars from the first time I saw it and I still loved it more on this rewatch. This is a perfect film if there ever was such a thing.

Like Kalatozov’s other films, the cinematography is superb. There are a number of sequences that would still be riveting absent any sound just because of how intensely the scenes are shot. Unlike the other films I’ve seen by Kalatozov though, this isn’t a story that deeply affected me. The characters give you just enough to care about them and their struggle to survive but nothing more. Two of the characters are in love, one is longing to return to his wife, and the other guy….well he’s there that’s for sure. There’s a couple of scenes that build up the comradery between these characters as they struggle to find diamonds, but the focus was more so on the group struggling to find diamonds, and then the group struggling to be rescued. Their struggles as a collective was interesting, but with such a small cast, and an extremely simple story, there was definitely room to flesh out the characters as individuals. Often times, I was more wrapped up in the presentation of this story than I was in the story itself, and I did find myself wondering how much I would like this movie if it wasn’t directed as excellently as it was.  Nevertheless, it’s still an effectively intense movie and I can’t pretend like it wasn’t. I just wish I cared a little more about the characters individually.

I have a hard time rating this movie. The first 2 hours are extremely solid. It’s an easy to follow, yet layered, mob flick. It’s all put together extremely well and kept me engaged in what was going on between all these mobsters and union bosses. It’s a bit safe though. There isn’t anything in the first 2 hours that will blow you away. It’s a more quiet and mature Scorcese mob flick in the first 2 hours. You basically know what you’re getting if you’ve seen any of his other films when I describe the film this way. Then the last 90 minutes happens and it is absolutely gut wrenching. The last 90 minutes is why this movie was made and all of the emotion of the film is found there. All of the scenes that will stick with me, and have stuck with me since I last saw this 6 years ago, are found in the last 90 minutes. I was floored by how this movie ended up playing out and it’s the only Scorcese movie to fill me with this level of dread, regret, and emptiness.