These Two Movies Were Glorious Antidotes to Paint-by-Numbers Streaming Documentaries

In Slate’s annual Movie Club, film critic Dana Stevens emails with fellow critics—for 2022, Bilge Ebiri, Beatrice Loayza, and David Sims—about the year in cinema. Read the first entry here.

Dear Dana, Bilge, and David,

Being a freelance critic doesn’t exactly come with a ton of bragging rights, but I do have the luxury of making “smaller” films my priority and generally not feeling obligated to watch big Hollywood movies unless I feel like it. It’s not that unpacking Avatar: The Way of Water or Black Panther: Wakanda Forever isn’t fascinating—these are major cultural phenomena, and the work of “reviewing” movies like them is only partially about what’s onscreen. With studios like Marvel and DC in particular, I can complain all I want about the scourge of tentpole storytelling and eyesore CGI, but I can’t deny the heft of, say, a global hit with Black superheroes that reckons with the ghosts of colonialism—and what that says about the commodification of radical narratives. Hell, even something as low-rent as Minions: The Rise of Gru has some extratextual meat to it, should we dare to wonder why in the world members of the TikTok generation seem to have crowned the minions their avatars of choice.

But these are, at the end of the day, just a handful of movies in a pool of hundreds in the U.S. alone. A girl simply doesn’t have the time to watch everything, even if she watches movies for a living. So, I tend to fill those hours with, well, TCM, but also European cinema, horror, and films that deal with sex and sexuality—my strong suits, and the niches in which I consider my literacy the strongest. Besides, to echo what Bilge said, my grinchy take on the latest superhero joint isn’t going to make people think twice about buying a ticket, while my championing of the little guy might encourage someone to give a movie without massive promotional money behind it a shot. Not that criticism is merely a tool of recommendation. Critics can help viewers keep an open mind by providing context that grounds films considered “difficult” or unconventional, pushing back against the idea that so-called regular people couldn’t possibly enjoy a movie with subtitles or elliptical plotting. There’s the stereotype of the snooty critic who can send a film to the box-office guillotine with a thumbs-down, and though that’s definitely not the case today, the idea that all we do is determine whether a movie is good or bad persists—and review aggregator sites like Rotten Tomatoes don’t exactly help. Maybe it’s ridiculous of me to think that the movies can be transformative, that they can help us see ourselves and the world around us more clearly and with more nuance, but I do think being a critic is partly about articulating those ideals. I’d be thrilled if my review of Crimes of the Future convinced someone to watch it, but I’d be just as happy if it also helped someone who has watched it to see it in a different light.

Among my other freelance gigs, I write weekly reviews for the New York Times, but the big dogs—i.e. head critics Manohla Dargis and A.O. Scott—generally take on the heavyweight titles. For me, that means writing on less-promoted films. This means I get to discover diamonds in the rough, though the “rough” can get a little rough—not a field of total atrocities, but something more banal and mediocre. Take the world of documentaries. You could make an argument that, given the explosion of docs on streaming platforms, more people are sampling ambitious documentaries than ever before. But so many of them look and feel exactly the same! They begin with a snappy holistic rundown, or perhaps stock footage-like images accompanied by ominous voiceover introducing the issue at stake. Then they string the narrative chronologically, using some combination of talking heads, infographics, archival footage, and title cards that indicate the next chapter or phase of the saga. Everything gets tied up with a neat conclusion, and maybe a “where are they now and what’s next?” moment.

It’s not that I come out of these films gaining nothing. I mean, I usually learn something, and their subjects can be incredibly compelling and galvanizing—like The Janes, the story of a Chicago collective that performed abortions throughout the sixties. That film is certainly a cut above something like Downfall: The Case Against Boeing or Ghislaine Maxwell: Dirty Rich, movies that don’t really care to conceal the fact that they’re pure content plays, reverse-engineered from the popular fascination with certain high-profile events. But stylistically and structurally, all three are conventional. What’s the difference between them and a podcast or a YouTube explainer video, besides jacked-up production value? And though there’s nothing inherently wrong with films that adhere to templates—isn’t that what makes countless romantic comedies so comforting?—the endless churning out of social-issue and true crime documentaries on platforms like HBO and Netflix only reaffirms the popular misconception that delivering facts is all that documentaries can do.

What’s the difference between these documentaries and a podcast or a YouTube explainer video, besides jacked-up production value?

Not the case. This year, I was particularly dazzled by the work of Alice Diop, who in addition to her much-lauded narrative feature Saint Omer released the documentary We (Nous), a sprawling portrait of French identity structured as a series of encounters along Paris’s RER B commuter rail. For the past decade, Diop has spotlighted the lives of Parisians like herself: immigrants from Africa and southeast Asia; Black and brown folks living in the working-class suburbs, or banlieues. In We, Diop doesn’t spell out her ideas about the different people she encounters—a mechanic from Mali; Diop’s sister, a nurse for the elderly; neighborhood kids sliding down hills using sheets of cardboard; Louis VXI-era historical reenactors. Rather, she relies on juxtaposition to create connections between her various subjects, and even inserts herself and her memories into the mix with voice-over and home video footage of her own upbringing. The film is marvelously heterogenous, and Diop’s formal choices follow suit—one moment, her camera is a fly on the wall, the next, it’s slightly shaking in the director’s hands as she converses with the people on the other side of it.

France is a country that struggles to reconcile its multicultural reality with the nostalgic understanding of what makes France France held by an older generation of ethnically French people. (Viewers in the U.S. will find this struggle very familiar.) To them, “we” has a very narrow meaning. But Diop doesn’t privilege one thread of experience over the other. For her, the best antidote to the exclusionary definition of “we” is to redefine it by casting the net wider—which is not to say that We is a mere celebration of diversity. I find it kind of horrifying how that term has come to signify a corporate strategy, so to watch a movie that engages with the idea of collective identity so thoughtfully—and with such attention to the historical underpinnings of identity, the way that memory plays into how we define ourselves—is invigorating.

Then there’s Three Minutes: A Lengthening, a documentary by Bianca Stigter composed entirely of images taken from a three-minute home movie of a Polish village filled, in 1938, with primarily Jewish residents. By looking at the same images over and over, zooming in on certain faces, and adding context to what seems like an innocuous glimpse of a busy street corner, Stigter gives this home movie a rich new life—and transforms it into a surprisingly dense record of a remote prewar setting whose inhabitants would eventually face Nazi violence. It’s a haunting experiment that forces us to question the very nature of spectatorship, and, from the modern-day perspective of ubiquitous screens and perpetual scrolling, it’s a startling reminder of what we lose when we give in to the mindless eye-glazing grind and fail to look closely and carefully. (As when we, say, binge one boring blueprint for edutainment after the next.) A Lengthening’s, well, lengthening, stands as rebuttal to the practice of documentary-by-numbers, and exemplifies the adage that the way a story is told matters just as much as the story itself, though I’m also inclined to say that the way the film pushes historical storytelling into unexpected and unusual territory also changes the story itself—or at least deepens it with layers previously imperceptible.

At my most pessimistic, I err on the side of cinema-is-dead cynicism, and the more I learn about film history, the more I’m attuned to how much has already been done before. So it always feels like a minor miracle when a new movie pushes me to rethink the limits of the medium. When you think about it, it’s equipped with so many tools—sound! image! time!—capable of being manipulated and flexed in seemingly infinite ways. Why should we settle for the same lazy shticks? (RIP Jean-Luc Godard!) I wonder if the rest of you have also felt unexpectedly inspired, or at least pleasantly surprised, by the appearance of something genuinely different?

Allons-y!

Beatrice

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