High Infidelity
Mistress Dispeller, Hedda, and the Bruce Springsteen movie you should be watching instead of the new one.
This week’s new movies include a documentary on Chinese adultery-busters, a radical re-envisioning of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler (which also happens to feature a fair bit of infidelity), and a mediocre rock biopic about Bruce Springsteen. (But there’s another Springsteen movie you should watch, which I detail below.)
Plus, A House of Dynamite is now on Netflix, of which I wasn’t much of a fan either, and Bugonia hit limited release. I’ll see it soon enough, but last night I watched Save the Green Planet!, the original Korean film that has been remade into Yorgos Lanthimos’s new film. Now I’m really curious to see the Greek filmmaker’s spin on what was a very weird, very silly ride. (I dug it.)
I am aware that I am still behind on my NYFF coverage (one more dispatch and then a post-mortem) but I had to take a break from writing because now that the festival is over I’ve been catching up with all the life stuff I had been putting off.
Mistress Dispeller
Now playing in NY at the IFC Center & LA at Laemmles Monica & Noho, with limited expansion to follow.
There may be fifty ways to leave your lover, but if it’s your spouse who has one, options are limited. The most common outcome would be ending the marriage, but maybe you want to stay together. You could tell your unfaithful partner that you know and move forward with a painful understanding, keep quiet and silently stew until the pressure breaks you, or (if you’re chaotically inclined) see this as an invitation for revenge cheating. But if you happen to live in China, there’s another choice: hire a professional mistress dispeller. They’ll infiltrate the lives of the illicit partners and convince one of them to call off the affair on their own accord, no messy confrontation required.
This odd vocation—part couples therapist, part undercover spy—has sprung up in response to rising rates of infidelity, a phenomenon explored by Elizabeth Lo in a documentary that lives up to its irresistible premise. The film follows from start to finish the case of Mrs. Li. After learning that her husband has taken up with a mistress in a neighboring city, she enlists the services of Teacher Wang to end that relationship while keeping her marriage intact.
The plan, which involves badminton practices and nail appointments under false pretenses, sounds like something out of Nathan Fielder’s playbook, but Mistress Dispeller isn’t interested in making fools out of its subjects. Everyone in this love triangle—even the other woman—is treated with empathy, and we come to understand all sides. Interspersed throughout are observational scenes that connect this one story with a wider cultural portrait of societal alienation and loneliness. In this way, the film reminded me of a New Yorker profile, and it turns out that Jiayang Fan wrote about the subject several years ago. (The magazine is given a “Special Thanks” in the credits.)
Tasting Notes: When Mrs. Li describes the nature of her marriage to Teacher Wang, she takes pains to note her husband’s positive qualities, including that he’s a great cook. (We see some of his cooking and it looks very appetizing, even from afar.) The documentary was filmed in Henan Province, and their cuisine is known for meshing “all five tastes, sour, sweet, bitter, spicy and salty.”
My friend Kathy Ou wrote a thoroughly researched review for the Brooklyn Rail (which you ought to read, it’s better than what I wrote lol), so I asked her for some recommendations on where to eat Henanese food in New York. But there seem to only be a couple restaurants and she wasn’t familiar with either of them. There is the very popular Spicy Village in Chinatown (which I think is fine) and Henan Feng Wei in Flushing (the stir-fried lamb noodles are supposed to be a highlight).
Also in Mistress Dispeller are two hot pot scenes, one at a fancy looking restaurant and another at home. It’s the perfect thing to eat now that the weather is getting colder. Kathy and I both recommend 99 Favor Taste in Chinatown (go on the week of your birthday and eat for free!), but hot pot at home is the best way to do it.
Also I really don’t know where else to put this, but the women of The View did a fun segment about Mistress Dispeller:
Hedda
Now playing in a few theaters. Streaming October 29 on Amazon Prime.
This month has seen the release of a gripping psychological drama, from Amazon MGM Studios, in which a female manipulator jockeys for power within an insulated, male-dominated society. Anchored by an Oscar-worthy performance by an A-list actress, it features parties in lavish dwellings, cuckolded husbands, and academics competing for tenure. I speak not of Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt, whose buzzy path to award show glory was interrupted once people actually saw it, but of Hedda, an exhilaratingly radical re-imaging of the classic drama.
“Ibsen meets Saltburn” remarked a fellow attendee at my screening, and that wouldn’t be a terrible way to sell the movie if its studio had any interest in doing so. It’s getting an unjustly scant theatrical release, and the one New York location is two stories underground, a clear sign that Amazon is literally burying the movie. That’s a shame, because it’s one of the year’s best.
Tessa Thompson is ravishing as the titular Hedda, née Gabler. She and her new husband George Tesman (Tom Bateman) have returned from their honeymoon and throw a soirée in the enormous mansion they can’t afford to live in. The appearance of Hedda’s former lover Eileen Lövborg (Nina Hoss) and her new romantic and intellectual partner (Imogen Poots) destabilizes an already tenuous situation. Taking place over the course of one night, the wild party gets out of hand, and Hedda enacts a scheme to secure financial and societal security for her husband—and in turn, for herself—no matter the human wreckage that may result.
Nia DaCosta, freshly sprung from Marvel(s) jail, departs from the play’s text while remaining true to its themes. She shifts the setting from 19th century Norway to 1950s England, gives Hedda a biracial identity, and swaps Lövborg’s gender from male to female. These changes make the material more immediately relevant to contemporary concerns of power and sexuality, similar to how Shakespeare and Austen’s immortal works have been enriched by modern adaptations1.
None of this would work without commanding performances from the cast. Thompson relishes the many times that Hedda wields gossip like a blade, her tongue cutting through fragile psyches—male and female alike. But as her schemes become increasingly destructive, it becomes clear that Hedda is not a girlboss to be celebrated. Rather, the moral heart of this story belongs to Eileen, who could have been rendered pathetic were it not for Hoss giving her an embittered resolve. Lövborg winds up humiliated and left with nothing, and only then does Hedda grapple with the fact that her machinations has forever cost her the love of her life. You can feel that she wants to cry out: Come on, Eileen. At this moment, you mean everything.
Tasting Notes: The festivities begin with a grand dinner party. Guests are greeted with a tower of champagne coupes and smørrebrød is the first course, in a nod to the play’s Norwegian origins. It was difficult to discern the rest of the menu, but it’s clear to see what everyone imbibed afterwards: the film is awash in martinis and old fashioneds.
Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere
Now playing in wide release.
“Deliver Me From Mediocrity,” I declared after seeing this inert rock biopic during NYFF (here’s that review if you want it). I’m not alone in having this verdict: I enjoyed reading Michael Blair’s review for Film Comment, which makes the astute observation that “for a film whose plot essentially revolves around the writing and recording of an album, it can’t find a sincere way of imagining the everyday process of writing lyrics and making music.” Also a good read was Mark Asch for The Atlantic, who critiques the script’s overreliance on ascribing Bruce’s moodiness to his tumultuous father, when his work is so situated in something bigger than himself. (It’s the difference between psychological and sociological storytelling.)
If you’re looking to watch a movie that explores Bruce Springsteen’s music but is actually good, might I instead suggest Blinded By the Light. Like Deliver Me From Nowhere, it is set in the 1980s and based on a true story, but Springsteen isn’t in it at all. Based on a memoir by Sarfraz Manzoor, it is a coming of age tale about a Pakistani teenager who becomes a Springsteen superfan. Growing up in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain, he contends with bullying, racism, and a bleak economic landscape. Then he pops in a cassette tape of Born in the U.S.A. and his life will never be the same. How could a rock star from New Jersey speak so directly to Javed’s world? He becomes obsessed.
Most movies about art are told from the perspective of its creators, but Gurinder Chadha’s movie is about what it’s like to experience it wholly. It dramatizes that spine-tingling feeling of listening to your favorite song for the first time, capturing how it feels when an artist’s work enters your life at just the right time, and how specific stories can find universal resonance. It also interrogates the limits of that recognition. Blinded By the Light is undeniably schmaltzy and sentimental: lightning literally strikes when the Javed first listens to “Dancing in the Dark,” and sometimes song lyrics are superimposed onto the background giving the effect of a cheesy lyric video. But it’s that goofy earnestness that makes me love this movie so much.
For more on this feat of adaptation, see Richard Brody’s review in the New Yorker.
My parents LOVE blinded by the light (and my dad is a true bruce freak from 70/80s jersey city lol), it really does capture the feeling of hearing music that feels like it was made FOR you so so well. Def added hedda to my list!