INSIDE THE YELLOW COCOON SHELL

Once again, I discover that the best movie of 2023 is one that I couldn’t see in 2023. It’s a first feature by a Vietnamese writer-director, Phạm Thiên Ân. It won the camera d’or in Cannes, and is so stunningly original that that it seems to have reinvented cinema on its own terms. At the same time, it illustrates Robert Bresson’s maxim that it took the advent of sound cinema to give us silence while demonstrating Raoul Ruiz’s contention that drama doesn’t have to be based on conflict. As the film’s title suggests, the struggle (or journey) of the young hero (Lê Phong Vũ) is internal, so it seems natural that his dreams and memories are often indistinguishable from his other activities.

A three-hour film that feels like a meditative bath without ever becoming in the least bit dull, Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell proposes a psychic adventure in which butterflies are able to blossom, like the baby wrapped in a yellow blanket that the hero holds, and like the hero himself when he lies down in a stream.

If the above description sounds pretentious, the fault is mine, not the film’s. The best films often turn out to be the ones that challenge whatever we might want to say about them. Read more

Hamlet

From the Chicago Reader (May 19, 2000). — J.R.

It’s fitting that the most existential of plays should function as a kind of test, and fortunate that the first Michael Almereyda picture to get full mainstream exposure should also turn out to be his best to date. But what’s being tested isn’t either Shakespeare or Almereyda but the present moment: that is, the film asks how and how much we’re capable of living in the world Shakespeare wrote about. Wittily and tragically updating the play’s action to corporate America in general and New York in particular, Almereyda is no Orson Welles, but he begins to seem like one when he’s castigated for not doing his Shakespeare like Kenneth Branagh; the censure recalls all the times square and professional Laurence Olivier was used as a reproach to Welles’s hip “amateurism.” This is gloriously amateurish, the way all of Almereyda’s best movies are, so it’s rewarding to see how Julia Stiles’s Ophelia harks back to Suzy Amis in Almereyda’s Twister, how some of the intimate interiors recall Another Girl Another Planet (his second-best movie), and how the use of video as a kind of Greek chorus to the action, an Almereyda specialty, bears special fruit in a postmodernist climate where “To be or not to be” is recited in the action section of a Blockbuster and Hamlet (Ethan Hawke, better than you’d expect) lards his video production of The Mousetrap with all sorts of found footage. Read more