Indie Focus: Seeing with fresh eyes in 'The Lovers,' 'Risk' and 'Buster's Mal Heart'

By Mark OlsenStaff Writer

May 7, 2017 12:05 AM PT

Hello! I’m Mark Olsen, and welcome to another edition of your regular field guide to a world of Only Good Movies.

The annual Celebration of Iranian Cinema is going at the the UCLA Film and Television Archive, but this year is given additional meaning by the death last year of Abbas Kiarostami. A transformative figure in contemporary international cinema, Kiarostami will be remembered via screenings of his 2002 film “Ten,” a 2016 short that became his final film and a behind-the-scenes documentary called “76 Minutes and 15 Seconds with Abbas Kiarostami.”

I will be on holiday next week, so the newsletter will be taking a break too. Allow me to recommend in advance “Paris Can Wait” starring Diane Lane. First, it’s a delight to see Eleanor Coppola make her feature directing debut in her 80s. Second, while I for one will not be traveling to the south of France this summer, the movie feels like a short summer holiday, as if the refreshing bite of an Aperol Spritz could be transformed into a movie.

And while we can’t announce the titles just yet, we have at least two screening/Q&A events coming up that I am very excited about. Keep an eye on events.latimes.com for more information.

‘The Lovers’

In “The Lovers,” written and directed by Azazel Jacobs, Debra Winger and Tracy Letts play a couple who are each carrying on affairs outside their marriage. Both faced with the prospect of whether to set off on something new or stay with the partner they had grown weary of cause them each to reevaluate what they want from a relationship.

As Justin Chang put it in his review for the Times, ”something wondrous and sublimely simple happens. Perhaps encouraged by the ever-present caress of Mandy Hoffman’s score, Mary and Michael find themselves falling back into each other’s arms, shocked to realize that, after years of emotional numbness, they still have real, passionate feelings for each other.”

I had a chance to sit down with Winger and Letts, and their sparkling connection and easy exchanges in the film were again on display.

“I did not know that was going to happen until the first day of shooting. That was a total welcome surprise,” Jacobs said of their chemistry. “It’s what you’re always hoping for, but it’s hard to aim for, hard to expect.”

At the Village Voice, Melissa Anderson noted, “Jacobs lets casually observed details and offhand humor advance the story. There are no grand pronouncements in ‘The Lovers,’ which smartly communicates its ideas about relationships during its long stretches of silence.

‘Risk’

Documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras won an Oscar for “Citizenfour,” her portrait of Edward Snowden that had unrivaled access to her subject. With her new film “Risk” she tackles the even trickier subject of Wikileaks leader Julian Assange. The movie is complicated by issues of access to Assange and Poitras’ own relationships to the subjects of the film, making the movie an unusual tangle that Poitras must work to unwind.

In his review for the Times, Justin Chang suggests “on some level, the real subject of “Risk” may not be Assange at all. Its truer theme, borne out by the film’s own recent transformation, might be the cruel unpredictability of time itself, its way of trapping us in our own muddled narratives. The movie’s title hints at the personal sacrifices that Assange made while playing a game that was, in many ways, of his own making. Time may yet reveal whether they were worth it, for him or for us.”

Poitras spoke to the Times’ Steve Zeitchik about ending up with a “tougher, darker film” than the one she set out to make.

In a review for the New York Times, A.O. Scott said “It would be simplistic to describe ‘Risk’ as the chronicle of Ms. Poitras’ disillusionment with Mr. Assange. … And to some degree in spite of Ms. Poitras’ journalistic intentions — though very much as a consequence of her rigorous honesty — the picture that emerges is complicated, unsettling and intriguingly ambivalent.”

At Buzzfeed, Alison Willmore focused on the film’s exploration of the contradictory power dynamics at play in Assange’s story, noting “It’s hardly a unique dilemma. Women have had to reckon with admired men who mistreat women since the dawn of time. But Poitras’ struggle to emphasize the right of WikiLeaks to exist and publish while depicting Assange’s astronomical self-regard is a particularly wrenching one. After all, Poitras herself is a significant figure in the fight for transparency and accountability in the era of mass surveillance and the war on terror.”

‘Buster’s Mal Heart’

Sarah Adina Smith is an exciting, singular filmmaker, who seems able to use genre elements as a grounding element for storytelling that can often take on a more spiritual, mystical tone. In her new “Buster’s Mal Heart,” Rami Malek stars as a solitary mountain man who seeks shelter in empty, secluded vacation mansions. His story is deftly reveled through a number of intertwined story strands, intersecting with characters played by DJ Qualls and Kate Lyn Sheil.

In his review for The Times, Robert Abele wrote, “it’s a confident weirdness that ‘Buster’s Mal Heart’ boasts as it dissects a damaged soul for signs of what’s eternal and what’s triggered when a man breaks in two.”

At the New York Times, Jeannette Catsoulis said “On some level, Ms. Smith seems to be saying, we are all Buster; we might just be better at holding things together.”

At LA Weekly, April Wolfe wrote “But funny isn’t the director’s primary aim; through a mind-bending timeline, Smith deftly explores the boxed-in lives of a rural service class, raised on a steady diet of TV prophets and public-access kooks and dwelling in one of the few American locales where people could just disappear if they wanted to.”

I also spoke to Smith and Malek for a story that should be publishing this week.

‘Take Me’

Pat Healy has long been a reliable presence onscreen, making the most of roles of any size in films such as “Magnolia,” “Ghost World,” “Great World of Sound,” “The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford,” “The Innkeepers” and “Cheap Thrills,” so it’s exciting to see him directing his first feature with “Take Me.” In the film Healy plays a man who runs a kidnapping simulation business who may have actually abudcted a woman (Taylor Schilling) through a misunderstanding. Or maybe not. The film has an offbeat energy that repeatedly wrong-foots viewers with a mischievous glee.

In his review for The Times, Michael Rechtshaffen didn’t care for the movie as much as I did — hey, it happens — putting forward that “the makings of a workable quirky black comedy are held hostage by tone-deaf execution.”

At the New York Times, Neil Genzlinger calls the film “an extremely droll parody of a male-female cat-and-mouse thriller.”

In the Hollywood Reporter, John DeFore felt more in tune with the movie, noting “Healy knows exactly the mix of comical bumbling and psychological tension he wants here, executing the premise in a way sure to please fans of his distinctive body of work (‘Cheap Thrills’ being this film’s closest cousin) and impress a few new ones along the way.”

Email me if you have questions, comments or suggestions, and follow me on Twitter @IndieFocus.