There is a scene late in Dev Patel’s directorial debut, the ferocious and ferociously entertaining Monkey Man, where the filmmaker, star, and co-writer rips a guy’s throat out. In the realm of action cinema, that is of course nothing new. However, the way it occurs here is. When Patel’s Kid finds his hands otherwise occupied, the feral protagonist improvises by catching a switchblade between his teeth and slowly unfurling its knife. He then drags its nasty end from ear to ear across the neck of a man he is wrapped around. The moment is intimate, drawn out, and very, very red. For its mastermind, it also must play like vindication. – David Crow
My Dead Friend Zoe
There are more than 16 million veterans living in the United States today. That roughly amounts to one in 20 Americans. And yet, the stories of those who came back from Iraq or Afghanistan in this century remain silent on the big screen. These conflicts are instead largely relegated to either action spectacles or simplistic, inarticulate hagiographies. Actual Iraq War veteran Kyle Hausmann-Stokes has changed this with his feature debut and one of the great discoveries of this year’s festival, My Dead Friend Zoe. Revealing a sweet, funny, and deeply human portrait of veteran culture (as well as the pain and PTSD that is also pervasive there), My Dead Friend Zoe reconfigures a story of trauma into a generational conflict about service, sacrifice, and regret.
Among the participants are Merit (Sonequa Martin-Green), a recent college graduate who served her country in Afghanistan in the 2010s, and Dale (Ed Harris), her laconic Vietnam era granddad who both inspired her service and now resents her inability to process it, especially after losing her best friend from over there, Zoe (Natalie Morales). Not that Zoe ever left Merit. Morales even steals much of the movie as a veritable trauma-ghost who materializes before Merit’s eyes like an invisible BFF bunny. She might be a manifestation of Merit’s own past regrets and unresolved survivor’s guilt, but that doesn’t mean the ghost cannot have jokes.
The chemistry between the two leading ladies obviously evokes a different type of veteran experience than what we usually see onscreen, particularly in regard to women who served, but so does an entire film which speaks to the traditions of honor, service, and patriotism—subjects usually absent from film festival circuit. Hausmann-Stokes tackles these obviously personal causes with clarity and confidence, revealing a deft hand that cuts between reality, fantasy, and the elusive middle ground we call memory. It’s a strong debut that should generate a lot of buzz beyond festivals. – David Crow
Música
Writer-director Rudy Mancuso mines his own life (and the dream lives therein) while crafting this charming if slight romantic dramedy that also works as riff on the 21st century movie musical. Playing a thinly veiled version of his younger self, Mancuso frames his twentysomething persona as an indecisive and vacillating dreamer who cannot even decide between the three women of his life: Haley (Francesca Reale), the wealthy and WASPy girlfriend he had all throughout college, Isabella (Camila Mendes), a fellow Brazilian-American he’s just met during one of his and Haley’s breaks, and Maria (Maria Mancuso), his overbearing mother.
The tortuous romantic triangle Rudy’s indecision invites provides the general dramatic momentum of the film, but its charms lay in the specificity of Mancuso’s interpretation of his upbringing. A real-life artist who played with puppets on the subway before transitioning to cinema, Mancuso incorporates internal conversations he’d have with puppets into the film and likewise heightens the artifice of the picture by alternating from shooting in his childhood home to instead filming on obvious soundstages that warp the viewer’s sense of reality. This is done because, at least in his version of events, Rudy is never able to keep his head in one place; he is forever mentally straining and adjusting the aural chaos from the city around him into melodic harmony. The film is likewise a visual cacophony that somehow makes sense.
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