I watched 30 films this past January. Maybe it was unemployment, maybe it was a reticence to touch grass (it was covered in snow anyway) and a desire to escape reality or at least the banality of my day-to-day existence.
I think of the films I’ve listed as an accompaniment to the general depressive emptiness of winter — they convey a mix of the hollowness of depression, loneliness, a bitterness toward the world and a struggle to find meaning. Not all of them directly portray these themes. They are also films I felt much more than I fully understood. And there are obviously many more films that fit this theme that aren’t here.
There are major spoilers for every film I mention. It's probably an issue of mine that I can’t seem to write about films without spoiling them. Either way, use your own discretion.
La Mala Educación
I cried at the dining hall in Bethe House while trying to write a Letterboxd review for this film (sorry, I am the Letterboxd kind of person). Stories within stories blur reality and fiction, past and present. Every character has multiple iterations and identities. I’d try to write about this film in a way that makes more sense, but it kind of defies textual description. Enrique Goded (Fele Martínez) rewrites the ending of a story that fictionalizes his childhood because it isn’t quite realistic enough, close enough to his truth. Juan (Gael García Bernal) flits between identities in the fictionalized story and reality. The reveal that unravels Juan’s narratives and may finally get at the depressing truth mirrors what happened in Enrique’s revision, near-perfectly. Who or what controls the narrative when we tell stories about our own lives? What is the truth to come out of memory, if there is any at all? Still, the perpetrators of his and his love’s abuse in a Catholic boarding school in Francoist Spain find them both in the present. The inescapability of the systems of violence perpetuated from past to present, as portrayed, is perhaps most solidified by the letter Enrique’s love never finishes: “Dear Enrique, I think I have finally succeeded.”
Through a Glass Darkly
Every time I watch a film directed by Ingmar Bergman, I sort of forget how to exist for the rest of the day. I won’t pretend to have understood this anywhere near fully, but I do think I experienced it emotionally. Snippets of it stick with me. Karin (Harriet Andersson) talks about how she can no longer be split between two worlds in reference to her mental illness. Her father describes drawing a circle around himself to block out the reality that bleeds in anyway. Fiction is an escape, but at what cost? How long can he ignore the way he exploits Karin’s condition or neglects both his children? Karin’s long monologue towards the end also haunts me: “I saw god,” she says, and god was a spider forcing itself upon her. Minus (Lars Passgård) says, “father spoke to me,” with such reverence in the final scene. Maybe you have to believe in love as fervently as you’d believe in a god, or maybe receiving love is as far away as the existence of a god. As director Lav Diaz said about Bergman’s films: “It’s all about humanity’s condition. It’s all about … being in a psychiatric ward.”
Y Tu Mamá También
I lay down, a physical sadness thick in my chest, after watching this movie for the first time. Before I get into it, I love Alfonso Cuarón’s directorial style in this film. He uses an omniscient narrator and weaves social commentary into the film simply through what is shown on screen. There’s a ragingly horny and messy road trip that sits on the cusp of adulthood and has to end eventually. Maybe what gets me is how unforgiving the passing of time is to every character in the film and the finality of the word “never” and other endings. In this road trip, there’s a glimpse of freedom and love, and it ends irretrievably. Luisa Cortés (Maribel Verdú) goes on the road trip knowing she is going to die, so maybe, just once, she can let herself go. And maybe her death is symbolic of the death of youth, and this moment in time they can never get back. Tenoch Iturbide (Diego Luna) and Julio Zapata (Gael García Bernal) are a seemingly inseparable pair, although there are glaring cracks that end up separating them forever. I’ve rewatched the ending scene of Tenoch and Julio in the coffee shop many times, letting the narrator render that blow of sadness: “They will never meet again.”
‘Are You Still Watching?’ is a column spotlighting what the Cornell community has been streaming. It runs every Wednesday.
Pen Fang is a sophomore in the College of Arts & Sciences. They can be reached at pfang@cornellsun.com.
Pen Fang is a member of the Class of 2028 in the College of Arts and Sciences. They are a staff writer for the Arts & Culture department and can be reached at pfang@cornellsun.com.
