Adaptation (2002)
After the credits rolled in 2003, I crept downstairs to log on to MSN Messenger and secretly type-rant to my boyfriend "J" about this fucked up movie I’m not sure I even liked but that I also thought might have been some bizarre kind of genius…ness?????
Minutes later, my sister declared that it was her turn with the computer (she was right, which I hated), that I was lying about doing schoolwork (still right, which I hated more), that if I didn’t leave she’d tell mom I was looking up porno and cybering with half the school (glancingly right at best, which I hated most of all.)
Of course, this is also only partially true—what I hated in her most was her proximity to me.
What love is possible between a twin whose self-loathing so viciously obsesses on physicality, and the other, his apparent mirror? Queerness softened me to myself, but Cage’s Charlie Kaufman swallowed the key to his heterosexual prison.
I was inflexibly purist about film adaptations before meeting Adaptation (then “Orchid Fever,” The Orchid Thief, Adaptation: The Shooting Script, and back to Adaptation), over and over again. 20 years later, I exalt in the fluidity of transformation; and in the home I share with J, the Kaufman brothers are prized within our Nicolas Cage library as pinnacles of brilliance—no matter how literal.
This weekend, my sister and I will brave the bright and bitter aftermath of snow to meet at Ripley’s Aquarium for our birthday. It will be her first visit, and my twentieth at minimum. I hope I can adapt, feel safe. I hope she will feel loved, by me. I hope we see the turtles in the Dangerous Lagoon breaking surface tension to breathe.
I hope we will be happy, together.
—Rasiqra Revulva edits the new Hybrid/Experimental Literature section at The Ex-Puritan.
Ravenous (1999)
It’s 1847 and Guy Pearce’s John Boyd has been shipped off to a remote fort in California, a punishment for his wartime cowardice. He arrives, still-trembling, to six inches of snow, prime territory to encounter a scenery—and then some—chomping Robert Carlyle as the mysterious soldier Calhoun and a legend about the Wendigo, an insatiable cannibal who steals the power of his victims.
Grisly bone snapping and open-mouth chewing in wet, unctuous Foley are accompanied by a tinkling Blur soundtrack and MTV screen wipes because outside of the period setting, it’s still 1999. What else could harmonize the cartoonish cruelty of relentless westward expansion, of unchecked territory grabs, of the Oregon Trail before it was Candyland-ified? Boyd and Calhoun enter a gruesome affair, an obsession with each other’s flesh and body, as they struggle against their partner. They share a hunger that cannot be sated, one which Boyd rejects and Calhoun fully embraces.
Ravenous was a production nightmare, going through a few directors before being taken over by Antonia Bird, and that fragmentation is obvious in the final film but it only underlines the brutality of every western. There’s no unity here. Militarized American greed is devouring everything, in 1847, in 1999, in 2023. The only woman in the fort warns Boyd, before she rightfully flees and becomes the only person who might escape this madness: “He must eat more, more. Never enough. He takes. Never, never gives.”
—Celia Mattison is the author of Deeper Into Movies.
The Dead Mountaineer's Hotel (1979)
It is currently -8 degrees Celsius in Tallinn, Estonia, where the film print of The Dead Mountaineer's Hotel is housed at the Estonian national film archives; and -17 degrees in Shymbulak, Kazakhstan, where the film, a detective story that takes place at a ski resort cut off from the outside world by an avalanche, was shot in 1979. Shymbulak is the largest ski resort in Central Asia where the Soviet Olympics team used to train. There is a view of the ski lifts at the resort on WorldCam; the vibe—the low-res but luscious high contrast, the cold, capricious blue tint, the untamed lens flare and the destabilizing angle—is not that different from the opening shots of The Dead Mountaineer's Hotel. Out here, anything ordinary or anything absurd could happen.
Both the original novel by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky and Grigori Kromanov’s film adaptation (also written by the Strugatsky brothers) begin with a cop who would rather enjoy an accidental all-inclusive modernist holiday than to investigate a murder at the ski resort with alien suspects and end with the cop questioning what is “human”. How do you know when the law you know no longer applies? Of course, being a cop, he spirals when he looks for order where there is none.
Within the film, the alien is coded as the cosmopolitan West or the non-Soviet. In Venice, the capital of vacation, where I am not on vacation, reality is what’s either cordoned off or being smeared around like undried paint. I think about how in obsessing over whether he ultimately did the correct, dutiful thing, the cop doesn’t feel better, he simply becomes more and more alienated. I think about what it means to ask a question in earnest and not take “I don’t know” for an answer.
—Jaime Chu is an editor and critic from Hong Kong.
Freaky Friday (2003)
Teen girls and moms: name a more routinely maligned duo. I’ll wait. The former, the story goes, bring only drama to the table. The latter are worrywarts at best, killjoys at worst.
Growing up, I loved Freaky Friday, the story of mother Tess (Jamie Lee Curtis) and daughter Anna (Lindsay Lohan) who magically switch bodies and have to, well, walk a mile in each other’s shoes to heal their contentious relationship.
It’s obvious why the movie resonated: Anna’s righteous anger mirrored my own. Her mom didn’t understand Anna’s crush on the cutest guy in school! Or her rock star dreams! Or that her English teacher really did have it out for her! Tess’s problems—raising two kids and balancing her career as a therapist while planning a wedding—flew over my head.
Like Tess and Anna, my mom and I butted heads often. I was in high school survival mode, caustic and defensive. My mother was raising three kids and running a household; her stress level was sky high, and I felt like I bore the brunt of it. Echoing Tess, she would admonish me to “make good choices”. I’d roll my eyes. She’d become even more annoyed. You get the idea.
Rewatching the film with her recently, I was struck by how seriously it takes the characters’ struggles with the pressure of social expectations. The body swap offers a reprieve: “adult” Anna finds freedom in a spending spree, while “teenaged” Tess savours a fry after years of self-deprivation. Crucially, they come to understand each other’s perspectives, but also the pieces missing in their own lives. Tess makes space for play, and Anna expands her black-and-white perspective. This creates breathing room for their relationship, with reparative results.
Over time, my sharp edges have softened; my mom has decompressed. Slowly, we have found our way to each other. And somehow, I’m now the one reminding people to “make good choices”. Like mother, like daughter?
—jac d.b. is a writer and editor based in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. She’s the mom of her friend group.
The Boys From Brazil (1978)
There are people who wind down by watching the same reliable episodic each evening. There are people who polish off their streaming queues in a sequential, logical fashion. There are people who buy tickets to an entire repertory film series and make it to each screening, on time and with Raisinets. And while I enjoy the company of orderly, disciplined spectators, I am not one of them. Chaos defines my viewing habits; and chaos is how an episode of The X-Files led me to a Nazi hunter thriller, The Boys from Brazil.
While re-indulging in a favourite episode of the David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson-fronted sci-fi procedural, I had the hankering to know more and pulled up its Wikipedia entry on my phone. In this “Monster of the Week” episode—titled “Eve”—Mulder and Scully investigate a string of murders committed by two generations of genius, superhuman female clones: just another day at the office for the rapacious spectator. Under my thumb, the Wiki entry divulged that the ep was originally titled “The Girls From Greenwich”—a reference, it added, to its forebear, Franklin J. Schaffner’s The Boys from Brazil (1978). I clicked through to the film’s page and, with that, my viewing plans for the night essentially curated themselves.
Colour me surprised as I watched Lawrence Olivier starring as Ezra Lieberman, a thickly-accented Viennese Nazi hunter. Colour me even more surprised as Gregory Peck transforms into Dr. Mengele, whom Lieberman learns is residing in South America, where he is continuing the Third Reich’s work. Mengele’s latest experiment entails cloning Adolf Hitler and populating the world with dozens of his likenesses. The old man from Vienna pursues the infamous Nazi doctor to ensure no one else is hurt by the Third Reich’s ideology—including, he poignantly realizes, the clones approaching adolescence. This epiphany, however, is hardly sombre. The Boys from Brazil, not unlike The X-Files, couches its sombre moments in style and humour; a flamboyant Viennese waltz defines the score, and its action sequences call to mind those of Sean Connery-era Bond flicks—another chaotic viewing choice I very well might make when chaotic viewing habits inevitably lead me to them.
—Sarah Fonseca is a writer and editor based in New York City.
Lost and Delirious (2001)
Lost and Delirious was filmed at Bishop’s University, where I studied as an undergrad. I’ve recognized other Canadian places in various films before, but watching a film set almost completely in this familiar location is a less straightforward experience than a simple “Hey, I know that spot!” and then moving on.
Filmmakers tend to splice and reassemble real-life locations to suit their needs, which can be alienating to viewers familiar with those places. Such a process happens with BU’s campus in Lost and Delirious. It’s occasionally disorienting, but ultimately more fun than disturbing. I enjoy how the recontextualization of different spots on campus gives me a chance to reflect on their meaning to me as I compare the characters’ experience of the campus to mine.
These comparisons in my mind begin from the very first scene. When Mouse crosses the bridge to campus, her anxiety mirrors mine when I crossed that bridge in my first year. Unlike Mouse, who is forced by her stepmother to go to the fictional boarding school BU “plays,” I was choosing to go to this campus. Bishop’s was my first choice. While I wasn’t heading for “the mouth of a cat,” as Mouse sees it, like her I was embarking on a journey that was unfamiliar and scary. Still, I think I might have appreciated the scenic drive a little more. In another scene, Tori and her sister have a tense discussion on the boardwalk outside Centennial Theatre, where I’ve had both serious and silly chats with friends, from reading amusing AI-generated phrases to discussing medical diagnoses and mental health.
Some other locations on campus deviate more from familiarity and surprise me in the way they appear in the film. BU’s concert hall, Bandeen, is divided into two different story settings. Its lobby is used for the entrance of the characters’ residence. I find it strange for a moment, since nothing about it strikes me as evocative of that, with my memories of filing into concerts through the entrance. Meanwhile, in another scene, the interior hall itself hosts a dramatic fencing practice. This delights me, an inspired addition to real-life classes and swing dance club meetings I’ve attended there.
The fragmentation of film editing happens even more as the exterior of the girls’ residence hall is represented by a completely different building on the outside, one where I’ve met professors in their offices and given conference presentations. Still, it’s satisfying that Mouse’s view out her bedroom window is nearly accurate, looking out onto the adjacent science building roof (though I wouldn’t know how to get up there), even if in real life it's not tall enough to have that view. Even more jarring is when the girls play soccer in the quad, where I distinctly remember signs telling us not to walk on the grass. People inevitably did, playing music, reading, or throwing frisbees around with friends. But two full teams running in cleats would have been unimaginable, and pointless given other fields that are better suited to that purpose (though you would have missed the film’s final moments over there).
This “spot-the-location” game is a little distracting, but it’s also exciting, even nostalgic. I didn’t plant roses with a kindly campus gardener or witness a girl spiral into despair, but I did participate in class discussions on literature that spoke both to the current cultural and political moment and to my relationships with others, found solace in the forested paths on the edge of campus, and broadened my understanding of the world, as Mouse does, through the classes I attended and the people I met. While slightly altered, my beloved, photogenic campus appears in Lost and Delirious in a heightened, dramatic light that is the onscreen representation it deserves.
—Katharine Mussellam is a writer and cinephile from Markham, Ontario.
Petite Maman (2021)
Mommy Issues. Little Marion, the protagonist of Céline Sciamma’s Petite Maman, says au revoir to the folks at the old age home: her grandmother is dead, she won’t be coming back to visit anymore. In the car, Marion feeds “hor’s d'oeuvres” to her mother, wrapping her arms around the head rest and placing Cheetos in her mouth.
When my dad is feeling tender, my mom is Blossom, my grandmother Big Blossom, and I am Little Blossom. Fitting, as I am a carbon copy of my mother, and she a clone of my grandmother. Three peas in a pod, three blossoms in a bunch.
Generational hand-me-downs are multiform. Some are objects (a silk scarf to braid into your hair), some genetic (the lump in the middle of a nose, an identical snore). Then there are intangible things whose origins are hard to determine... Self-doubt, bad habits, trauma. My mother picks at her body, calls herself “thick-boned”. I look in the mirror and wonder: is this heaviness the weight of my shoulders? Or the weight of hers, transferred down a generation?
In the flaming autumnal forest that surrounds her late grandmother’s house, Marion meets her doppelganger, Nelly, who, in a fantastical (yet understated) snag in time, turns out to be her own mother when she was Marion’s age. They are twins but they are also each other’s past and future. Marion knows who Nelly will turn out to be, and Nelly will make Marion who she is.
What would it mean to talk to your mother as a childhood friend (before the shame and pretense that stunt our abilities to speak bluntly)? But more, what would it mean to talk to someone who is at once part of you (your past) and other (more than just your past, your mother, your predecessor). Would you ask your twin-mother the question I might: How did you become afraid of your own nakedness? Or, as Nelly asks her future daughter: Am I happy? Did I want you?
When I sit between my mother and my grandmother, I see a fragment of my future and I wonder at the fear/pain/shame/care/love/joy/sweetness that is often shared, gifted. But sometimes it’s mine, and mine alone.
—Emma Dollery is a chill guy, pool shark, fan of the Big Screen etc.
Fire Island (2022)
I’m glad that Fire Island doesn’t ask me to believe that Bowen Yang isn’t hot even though his character Howie believes he’s undesirable.
On his podcast with cast-mate Matt Rogers (Las Culturistas), Bowen recounts how in one scene he was directed to look in the mirror and ask himself “Am I ugly?” The first time I watched the movie I watched for this moment the way I watched every movie that “might be gay” as a chubby and effeminate pre-teen convinced they were too ugly for romance of any kind (especially the ones that ended in tragedy).
I’m glad that Fire Island doesn’t ask me to believe that Bowen Yang isn’t hot even though one of Joel Kim Booster as Noah’s main obstacles is his vow to get Howie laid before he can have sex himself.
Looking in the mirror today as an athletic and tattooed 30-something I imagine looking back at my chubby teenage self swiping a palm through the post-shower haze of my family’s shared bathroom and pressing down the flesh of the chest I considered oversized to try and glimpse the thinner version I believed would be worthy. From where I am now, especially as a white dude, I could easily cast my “transformation” from less-than-desirable to desirable as deserved rather than manufactured, but, as I experienced when I was treated like I was ugly, understanding desirability and its accompanying kindness as something that can be “achieved” justifies the mistreatment of those who haven’t “earned it”. This includes those for whom access will only ever be partial.
I’m glad that Fire Island doesn’t ask me to believe that Bowen Yang isn’t hot because how? As Noah points out, he knew he had to find a love interest that was “good enough” for Howie and not the other way around.
—Ky Capstick is a queer writer and web developer. They live in Toronto with their basset-shepherd Moira.
Ballet Mécanique (1924)
Somehow in the 2.5 years which have spanned my Visual Studies undergrad so far I’ve seen Ballet Mécanique seven times. That’s an average of 1.4 times a semester. So now it feels valid to claim that “I AM THE OFFICIAL EXPERT ON THIS EXPERIMENTAL FILM FROM 1920s FRANCE WHICH EXPLORES THE EXCITEMENTS OF LIVING THROUGH MODERNITY! STOP CHARGING ME THOUSANDS IN TUITION AND JUST GIVE ME MY DEGREE!”
For some, this abstract work may inspire thoughts of all the artistic possibilities which filmmaking possesses. For me, it’s a frustrating reminder of where it all went wrong, that is, the industrial beginnings of late stage capitalism. The rotating fractals, the spinning machinery, the repetitive cycles of imagery are all threats that I will have to be back here next year, sitting in a lecture hall with the lights dimmed. Words, images, and philosophies being hurled at me faster than I can keep up. And I’m the camera. Sitting by idly, just hoping that I can keep up with it all.
In a way Ballet Mécanique managed to write the thesis of my post-secondary education a hundred years ago. Like contemporary life, academia consumes and overwhelms. And it just gets more annoying and means less the longer you have to deal with it.
—Nara Wriggs does most of their writing between serving lattes.
Adaptation (2002)
After the credits rolled in 2003, I crept downstairs to log on to MSN Messenger and secretly type-rant to my boyfriend "J" about this fucked up movie I’m not sure I even liked but that I also thought might have been some bizarre kind of genius…ness?????
Minutes later, my sister declared that it was her turn with the computer (she was right, which I hated), that I was lying about doing schoolwork (still right, which I hated more), that if I didn’t leave she’d tell mom I was looking up porno and cybering with half the school (glancingly right at best, which I hated most of all.)
Of course, this is also only partially true—what I hated in her most was her proximity to me.
What love is possible between a twin whose self-loathing so viciously obsesses on physicality, and the other, his apparent mirror? Queerness softened me to myself, but Cage’s Charlie Kaufman swallowed the key to his heterosexual prison.
I was inflexibly purist about film adaptations before meeting Adaptation (then “Orchid Fever,” The Orchid Thief, Adaptation: The Shooting Script, and back to Adaptation), over and over again. 20 years later, I exalt in the fluidity of transformation; and in the home I share with J, the Kaufman brothers are prized within our Nicolas Cage library as pinnacles of brilliance—no matter how literal.
This weekend, my sister and I will brave the bright and bitter aftermath of snow to meet at Ripley’s Aquarium for our birthday. It will be her first visit, and my twentieth at minimum. I hope I can adapt, feel safe. I hope she will feel loved, by me. I hope we see the turtles in the Dangerous Lagoon breaking surface tension to breathe.
I hope we will be happy, together.
—Rasiqra Revulva edits the new Hybrid/Experimental Literature section at The Ex-Puritan.
Ravenous (1999)
It’s 1847 and Guy Pearce’s John Boyd has been shipped off to a remote fort in California, a punishment for his wartime cowardice. He arrives, still-trembling, to six inches of snow, prime territory to encounter a scenery—and then some—chomping Robert Carlyle as the mysterious soldier Calhoun and a legend about the Wendigo, an insatiable cannibal who steals the power of his victims.
Grisly bone snapping and open-mouth chewing in wet, unctuous Foley are accompanied by a tinkling Blur soundtrack and MTV screen wipes because outside of the period setting, it’s still 1999. What else could harmonize the cartoonish cruelty of relentless westward expansion, of unchecked territory grabs, of the Oregon Trail before it was Candyland-ified? Boyd and Calhoun enter a gruesome affair, an obsession with each other’s flesh and body, as they struggle against their partner. They share a hunger that cannot be sated, one which Boyd rejects and Calhoun fully embraces.
Ravenous was a production nightmare, going through a few directors before being taken over by Antonia Bird, and that fragmentation is obvious in the final film but it only underlines the brutality of every western. There’s no unity here. Militarized American greed is devouring everything, in 1847, in 1999, in 2023. The only woman in the fort warns Boyd, before she rightfully flees and becomes the only person who might escape this madness: “He must eat more, more. Never enough. He takes. Never, never gives.”
—Celia Mattison is the author of Deeper Into Movies.
The Dead Mountaineer's Hotel (1979)
It is currently -8 degrees Celsius in Tallinn, Estonia, where the film print of The Dead Mountaineer's Hotel is housed at the Estonian national film archives; and -17 degrees in Shymbulak, Kazakhstan, where the film, a detective story that takes place at a ski resort cut off from the outside world by an avalanche, was shot in 1979. Shymbulak is the largest ski resort in Central Asia where the Soviet Olympics team used to train. There is a view of the ski lifts at the resort on WorldCam; the vibe—the low-res but luscious high contrast, the cold, capricious blue tint, the untamed lens flare and the destabilizing angle—is not that different from the opening shots of The Dead Mountaineer's Hotel. Out here, anything ordinary or anything absurd could happen.
Both the original novel by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky and Grigori Kromanov’s film adaptation (also written by the Strugatsky brothers) begin with a cop who would rather enjoy an accidental all-inclusive modernist holiday than to investigate a murder at the ski resort with alien suspects and end with the cop questioning what is “human”. How do you know when the law you know no longer applies? Of course, being a cop, he spirals when he looks for order where there is none.
Within the film, the alien is coded as the cosmopolitan West or the non-Soviet. In Venice, the capital of vacation, where I am not on vacation, reality is what’s either cordoned off or being smeared around like undried paint. I think about how in obsessing over whether he ultimately did the correct, dutiful thing, the cop doesn’t feel better, he simply becomes more and more alienated. I think about what it means to ask a question in earnest and not take “I don’t know” for an answer.
—Jaime Chu is an editor and critic from Hong Kong.
Freaky Friday (2003)
Teen girls and moms: name a more routinely maligned duo. I’ll wait. The former, the story goes, bring only drama to the table. The latter are worrywarts at best, killjoys at worst.
Growing up, I loved Freaky Friday, the story of mother Tess (Jamie Lee Curtis) and daughter Anna (Lindsay Lohan) who magically switch bodies and have to, well, walk a mile in each other’s shoes to heal their contentious relationship.
It’s obvious why the movie resonated: Anna’s righteous anger mirrored my own. Her mom didn’t understand Anna’s crush on the cutest guy in school! Or her rock star dreams! Or that her English teacher really did have it out for her! Tess’s problems—raising two kids and balancing her career as a therapist while planning a wedding—flew over my head.
Like Tess and Anna, my mom and I butted heads often. I was in high school survival mode, caustic and defensive. My mother was raising three kids and running a household; her stress level was sky high, and I felt like I bore the brunt of it. Echoing Tess, she would admonish me to “make good choices”. I’d roll my eyes. She’d become even more annoyed. You get the idea.
Rewatching the film with her recently, I was struck by how seriously it takes the characters’ struggles with the pressure of social expectations. The body swap offers a reprieve: “adult” Anna finds freedom in a spending spree, while “teenaged” Tess savours a fry after years of self-deprivation. Crucially, they come to understand each other’s perspectives, but also the pieces missing in their own lives. Tess makes space for play, and Anna expands her black-and-white perspective. This creates breathing room for their relationship, with reparative results.
Over time, my sharp edges have softened; my mom has decompressed. Slowly, we have found our way to each other. And somehow, I’m now the one reminding people to “make good choices”. Like mother, like daughter?
—jac d.b. is a writer and editor based in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. She’s the mom of her friend group.
The Boys From Brazil (1978)
There are people who wind down by watching the same reliable episodic each evening. There are people who polish off their streaming queues in a sequential, logical fashion. There are people who buy tickets to an entire repertory film series and make it to each screening, on time and with Raisinets. And while I enjoy the company of orderly, disciplined spectators, I am not one of them. Chaos defines my viewing habits; and chaos is how an episode of The X-Files led me to a Nazi hunter thriller, The Boys from Brazil.
While re-indulging in a favourite episode of the David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson-fronted sci-fi procedural, I had the hankering to know more and pulled up its Wikipedia entry on my phone. In this “Monster of the Week” episode—titled “Eve”—Mulder and Scully investigate a string of murders committed by two generations of genius, superhuman female clones: just another day at the office for the rapacious spectator. Under my thumb, the Wiki entry divulged that the ep was originally titled “The Girls From Greenwich”—a reference, it added, to its forebear, Franklin J. Schaffner’s The Boys from Brazil (1978). I clicked through to the film’s page and, with that, my viewing plans for the night essentially curated themselves.
Colour me surprised as I watched Lawrence Olivier starring as Ezra Lieberman, a thickly-accented Viennese Nazi hunter. Colour me even more surprised as Gregory Peck transforms into Dr. Mengele, whom Lieberman learns is residing in South America, where he is continuing the Third Reich’s work. Mengele’s latest experiment entails cloning Adolf Hitler and populating the world with dozens of his likenesses. The old man from Vienna pursues the infamous Nazi doctor to ensure no one else is hurt by the Third Reich’s ideology—including, he poignantly realizes, the clones approaching adolescence. This epiphany, however, is hardly sombre. The Boys from Brazil, not unlike The X-Files, couches its sombre moments in style and humour; a flamboyant Viennese waltz defines the score, and its action sequences call to mind those of Sean Connery-era Bond flicks—another chaotic viewing choice I very well might make when chaotic viewing habits inevitably lead me to them.
—Sarah Fonseca is a writer and editor based in New York City.
Lost and Delirious (2001)
Lost and Delirious was filmed at Bishop’s University, where I studied as an undergrad. I’ve recognized other Canadian places in various films before, but watching a film set almost completely in this familiar location is a less straightforward experience than a simple “Hey, I know that spot!” and then moving on.
Filmmakers tend to splice and reassemble real-life locations to suit their needs, which can be alienating to viewers familiar with those places. Such a process happens with BU’s campus in Lost and Delirious. It’s occasionally disorienting, but ultimately more fun than disturbing. I enjoy how the recontextualization of different spots on campus gives me a chance to reflect on their meaning to me as I compare the characters’ experience of the campus to mine.
These comparisons in my mind begin from the very first scene. When Mouse crosses the bridge to campus, her anxiety mirrors mine when I crossed that bridge in my first year. Unlike Mouse, who is forced by her stepmother to go to the fictional boarding school BU “plays,” I was choosing to go to this campus. Bishop’s was my first choice. While I wasn’t heading for “the mouth of a cat,” as Mouse sees it, like her I was embarking on a journey that was unfamiliar and scary. Still, I think I might have appreciated the scenic drive a little more. In another scene, Tori and her sister have a tense discussion on the boardwalk outside Centennial Theatre, where I’ve had both serious and silly chats with friends, from reading amusing AI-generated phrases to discussing medical diagnoses and mental health.
Some other locations on campus deviate more from familiarity and surprise me in the way they appear in the film. BU’s concert hall, Bandeen, is divided into two different story settings. Its lobby is used for the entrance of the characters’ residence. I find it strange for a moment, since nothing about it strikes me as evocative of that, with my memories of filing into concerts through the entrance. Meanwhile, in another scene, the interior hall itself hosts a dramatic fencing practice. This delights me, an inspired addition to real-life classes and swing dance club meetings I’ve attended there.
The fragmentation of film editing happens even more as the exterior of the girls’ residence hall is represented by a completely different building on the outside, one where I’ve met professors in their offices and given conference presentations. Still, it’s satisfying that Mouse’s view out her bedroom window is nearly accurate, looking out onto the adjacent science building roof (though I wouldn’t know how to get up there), even if in real life it's not tall enough to have that view. Even more jarring is when the girls play soccer in the quad, where I distinctly remember signs telling us not to walk on the grass. People inevitably did, playing music, reading, or throwing frisbees around with friends. But two full teams running in cleats would have been unimaginable, and pointless given other fields that are better suited to that purpose (though you would have missed the film’s final moments over there).
This “spot-the-location” game is a little distracting, but it’s also exciting, even nostalgic. I didn’t plant roses with a kindly campus gardener or witness a girl spiral into despair, but I did participate in class discussions on literature that spoke both to the current cultural and political moment and to my relationships with others, found solace in the forested paths on the edge of campus, and broadened my understanding of the world, as Mouse does, through the classes I attended and the people I met. While slightly altered, my beloved, photogenic campus appears in Lost and Delirious in a heightened, dramatic light that is the onscreen representation it deserves.
—Katharine Mussellam is a writer and cinephile from Markham, Ontario.
Petite Maman (2021)
Mommy Issues. Little Marion, the protagonist of Céline Sciamma’s Petite Maman, says au revoir to the folks at the old age home: her grandmother is dead, she won’t be coming back to visit anymore. In the car, Marion feeds “hor’s d'oeuvres” to her mother, wrapping her arms around the head rest and placing Cheetos in her mouth.
When my dad is feeling tender, my mom is Blossom, my grandmother Big Blossom, and I am Little Blossom. Fitting, as I am a carbon copy of my mother, and she a clone of my grandmother. Three peas in a pod, three blossoms in a bunch.
Generational hand-me-downs are multiform. Some are objects (a silk scarf to braid into your hair), some genetic (the lump in the middle of a nose, an identical snore). Then there are intangible things whose origins are hard to determine... Self-doubt, bad habits, trauma. My mother picks at her body, calls herself “thick-boned”. I look in the mirror and wonder: is this heaviness the weight of my shoulders? Or the weight of hers, transferred down a generation?
In the flaming autumnal forest that surrounds her late grandmother’s house, Marion meets her doppelganger, Nelly, who, in a fantastical (yet understated) snag in time, turns out to be her own mother when she was Marion’s age. They are twins but they are also each other’s past and future. Marion knows who Nelly will turn out to be, and Nelly will make Marion who she is.
What would it mean to talk to your mother as a childhood friend (before the shame and pretense that stunt our abilities to speak bluntly)? But more, what would it mean to talk to someone who is at once part of you (your past) and other (more than just your past, your mother, your predecessor). Would you ask your twin-mother the question I might: How did you become afraid of your own nakedness? Or, as Nelly asks her future daughter: Am I happy? Did I want you?
When I sit between my mother and my grandmother, I see a fragment of my future and I wonder at the fear/pain/shame/care/love/joy/sweetness that is often shared, gifted. But sometimes it’s mine, and mine alone.
—Emma Dollery is a chill guy, pool shark, fan of the Big Screen etc.
Fire Island (2022)
I’m glad that Fire Island doesn’t ask me to believe that Bowen Yang isn’t hot even though his character Howie believes he’s undesirable.
On his podcast with cast-mate Matt Rogers (Las Culturistas), Bowen recounts how in one scene he was directed to look in the mirror and ask himself “Am I ugly?” The first time I watched the movie I watched for this moment the way I watched every movie that “might be gay” as a chubby and effeminate pre-teen convinced they were too ugly for romance of any kind (especially the ones that ended in tragedy).
I’m glad that Fire Island doesn’t ask me to believe that Bowen Yang isn’t hot even though one of Joel Kim Booster as Noah’s main obstacles is his vow to get Howie laid before he can have sex himself.
Looking in the mirror today as an athletic and tattooed 30-something I imagine looking back at my chubby teenage self swiping a palm through the post-shower haze of my family’s shared bathroom and pressing down the flesh of the chest I considered oversized to try and glimpse the thinner version I believed would be worthy. From where I am now, especially as a white dude, I could easily cast my “transformation” from less-than-desirable to desirable as deserved rather than manufactured, but, as I experienced when I was treated like I was ugly, understanding desirability and its accompanying kindness as something that can be “achieved” justifies the mistreatment of those who haven’t “earned it”. This includes those for whom access will only ever be partial.
I’m glad that Fire Island doesn’t ask me to believe that Bowen Yang isn’t hot because how? As Noah points out, he knew he had to find a love interest that was “good enough” for Howie and not the other way around.
—Ky Capstick is a queer writer and web developer. They live in Toronto with their basset-shepherd Moira.
Ballet Mécanique (1924)
Somehow in the 2.5 years which have spanned my Visual Studies undergrad so far I’ve seen Ballet Mécanique seven times. That’s an average of 1.4 times a semester. So now it feels valid to claim that “I AM THE OFFICIAL EXPERT ON THIS EXPERIMENTAL FILM FROM 1920s FRANCE WHICH EXPLORES THE EXCITEMENTS OF LIVING THROUGH MODERNITY! STOP CHARGING ME THOUSANDS IN TUITION AND JUST GIVE ME MY DEGREE!”
For some, this abstract work may inspire thoughts of all the artistic possibilities which filmmaking possesses. For me, it’s a frustrating reminder of where it all went wrong, that is, the industrial beginnings of late stage capitalism. The rotating fractals, the spinning machinery, the repetitive cycles of imagery are all threats that I will have to be back here next year, sitting in a lecture hall with the lights dimmed. Words, images, and philosophies being hurled at me faster than I can keep up. And I’m the camera. Sitting by idly, just hoping that I can keep up with it all.
In a way Ballet Mécanique managed to write the thesis of my post-secondary education a hundred years ago. Like contemporary life, academia consumes and overwhelms. And it just gets more annoying and means less the longer you have to deal with it.