Joachim Trier | Affeksjonsverdi (Sentimental Value) / 2025

the end of the struggle

by Douglas Messerli

 

Eskil Vogt and Joachim Trier (screenplay), Joachim Trier (director) Affeksjonsverdi (Sentimental Value) / 2025

 

After characterizing at least 4 of the 2026 Oscar nominees (all films from 2025) as works representing life as a battlefield, I realized that Joachim Trier’s powerful film Sentimental Value could also be seen as representing “one battle after another.” But here instead of being performed on a large-scale cultural battleground, the struggles occur within—within the self and family, not generally publicly enacted but privately experienced, often without words. Although the Borg family are all basically employed in jobs that entail the use of public language—the mother, Sissel Borg, who has just died as the movie opens, was a psychotherapist, Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård) is a noted filmmaker, the eldest daughter Nora (Renate Reinsve) a respected actor, and the younger daughter Agnes borg Pettersen (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) is an historian—they live as do so many characters of Scandinavian theater and film they live concealed lives, unable to fully express their emotions and problems to others. One might argue that condition is a given in most of Bergman’s films and Ibsen’s plays, for example.

    As surely Agnes knows better than anyone else in this film, history is hidden in this world and even the lovely red-painted Oslo home which has been in the Borg family for several generations, and in which Gustav’s mother, arrested and tortured as an underground agent during the Nazi control of Norway, committed suicide, and in which her lesbian sister* later partied, turning up the music when the neighbor’s complained, convinced that it was one of them who had called the Gestapo on her sister, is in decay.

     But it is also a house of wonderful memories for the two sisters, Nora and Agnes, who during the fighting battles between their parents—ending in their divorce and Gustav disappearing from the girls’ lives—formed a close bond of dependence. The house, in fact, almost becomes another character in this comedic-drama, as the narrative voice I presume to be Nora’s commenting, the house prefers its endless family noises to the quietude that has, over the years, descended upon it.

      Her father later paints it white and refurbishes it into a modern gray and vacuous domain.

   After a scene that establishes one of Nora’s major phobias, a terrible case of stage freight that sometimes creates almost a melodrama behind the curtain before she is able to go on for her insightful performances, quietude once more descends upon the house, as the two daughters host a respectful after-funeral party. Here we also meet Agnes’s husband Even (Andreas Stoltenberg Granerud) and another central figure to this work, their delightful young son Erik (Øyvind Hesjedal), who loves his aunt Nora so much that he even proposes marriage to her—when he grows up, an offer so innocent and beautiful that it almost chokes up the actress who, although she is having an affair currently with a theater colleague, Jakob (Anders Danielsen Lie), clearly has been unable to sustain relationships.

     Into this fraught situation, after years of absence, comes charging Gustav, who as usual given his narcissistic behavior, has missed the funeral, but is now ready to take over the home which he still owns.

     Although Agnes might have imagined that she and her family might have remained there, what most troubles the two daughters is not that he might now sell it, but that he has so suddenly bounced back into their lives after having so emptied it. Agnes, with her historical perspective and given the fact that as a young child she appeared in one of his best films, a time in which she was able to truly bond with him, has a much healthier relationship with Gustav than does Nora, a sensitive being who he has basically ignored, claiming that he cannot he bear to watch theater and accordingly has missed almost all of her performances over the years.

     But now suddenly Gustav is not only returned home, but wants to use the house in his next film, after what has clearly been a dry period in his creativity. Not only that, he has written a script, purportedly based on events in his mother’s life (the one who had sweetly kissed her child goodbye before hanging herself), but wants Nora to play her own grandmother Karin!

     Both women are angry and hurt, but Nora, in particular, not only turns him down but quietly berates him for his selfishness, for being a man whose only foci in life are the various casts in the films he is currently shooting. For his part, Gustav excuses his behavior by claiming he is, afterall, a great artist who cannot be bound by the typical familial conventions.

     It is, of course, for these very reasons why Sissel has divorced him and sent him spinning off into a world of fame, while she has remained responsible enough to raise their daughters alone.

  We can see the problems Nora and, to a lesser degree Agnes face are generational in their development, a young boy having been betrayed by a mother, the mother’s sister positioning herself somewhat outside of the general culture in sexual relationship, and the boy turned into a selfish, seemingly disinterested father. He does not even know, apparently, of Nora’s own suicide attempt.

     Director Joachim Trier gives Agnes a significant role in this film, particularly since she later visits the National Archives of Norway to read about her grandmother’s statements of her torture, her mother never having revealed them to any of her family members; and it is Agnes who first strongly summarizes her father’s intrusion into their life when he attempts, behind her back, to engage her son Erik to play the young boy in the movie (just as she has previously played a young girl in another film). Yet central links of this heritage of suffering are Karin, Gustav, and Nora, those whom one might describe are the true carriers of the familiar and cultural rejection and the suffering which results. None of them can fully express their pain and rid themselves of their ghosts Even visits to psychiatrists only remind the remaining survivors of Sissel’s, Gustav’s wife’s occupation. And Agnes’ role of the conciliator can only go so far.

     After Nora rejects the role of playing her father’s central character, Gustav accidentally encounters the US movie star Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning) at the Deauville American Film Festival, who has been particularly touched by seeing an earlier film, the one with Agnes as the child, of Borg’s career. What his family see as his failures, she perceives as the innate qualities of a good director, the focus only at one who is at hand and those engaged with him at moment; and when she hears of his new project, she is only too happy to take on the role of Karin.

     With her signed, Neflix is ready to produce the work, allowing Borg to imagine a new impetus for his end-career vision. He insists on using his usual cinematographer, Peter (Lars Väringer), now retired; but when he visits Peter to offer him the job he his startled by his colleague’s now frail health, and is even more frustrated by the producer’s attempt to interfere with his choices. In Peter, obviously, he recognizes what he himself may soon be facing.

     Although he works carefully with Rachel in explaining the script and setting out scene after scene, even translating the full work into English since she cannot speak Norwegian, she herself gradually begins to see problems with her abilities to comprehend and express the character he has created. Why does a woman with a young child suddenly lock herself away to destroy her and surely her son’s life? But, obviously, that is the very question for which Gustav is seeking an answer.

     She also senses that she is just not right for the role, particularly when he orders her to dye her blonde hair to match that of Nora’s. And finally, she meets up with Nora herself, attempting to explain to the increasingly prickly daughter, even more angry now that her father has seemed to find someone to replace her, the doubts about her ability to properly play the role and her frustrations in deciphering the essence of the text.

    The acting of all the characters in this work is of the highest quality, each of them given full roles to explore their characters. But what Matt Bullions, writes in the Salt Lake Film Review about Fanning is particularly telling about the artistry of Trier’s cinema:

 

“…Strangely enough, Elle Fanning delivers one of the film’s best performances as the American actress who comes into Gustav’s project after Nora has declined it. Fanning is always great, no question, but it would be easy for this script to paint her as silly or as the dumb American, but her character is awarded the same empathy as everyone else. She’s not some kind of flaky coastal flibbertigibbet, she’s a professional who’s serious about the work she’s doing. And the more attached she becomes to these people, the more that’s emotionally at stake for her, and Fanning plays this remarkably well.”

 

     After having investigated her grandmother’s prison experiences, Agnes finally forces herself to read her father’s script, realizing what Rachel has begun to suspect, that this work is not totally about Gustav’s mother Karin but about the nexus I earlier mentioned. This film is as much about Gustav’s failure to love and explain his behavior to Nora as Karin was unable to provide to her son. Just as the suicide at film’s end is an expression of Karin’s own failed attempts to express her pain and horror, Agnes beings to suspect her father sensed that his own edler daughter has attempted such an act for the very same reasons.

   Agnes, having for days been unable to contact her sister, finally visits her, bringing with her the script for Nora to read, and even demanding that together they play out a particular scene which reveals the fusion of Karin and Nora.

   The two sisters lie down in bed and hug to re-express their deep commitment to one another, Agnes finally admitting to her sister, with great wisdom, “But we didn’t have the same childhood; I had you.”

    Putting away her resentment, even her fears, Nora takes on the role that Rachel felt unable to portray, the last scene of the film, which we have seen described earlier, now performed the way it surely was meant to be: the woman saying goodbye to her son (now played by Erik) before turning back and entering into the room where she hangs herself. As Gustaf explained early on to Rachel, we do not see the act, we only hear the stool on which she stool being kicked away.

    But this time Gustav quietly praises the scene with the words, “Perfect,” as Nora looks at him with a rewarding smile. We don’t hear a stool being kicked away; of course that might happen in the editing of the film, but perhaps it has also been cut, Gustav himself refusing to repeat the terrible act now corrected by his late admission of love to his own daughter and his grandson.

   As Rolling Stone reviewer David Fear nicely expressed it, in this film we get something that can’t simply be classified as another “dysfunctional family drama.”

 

“Sentimental Value is essentially a double act between Skarsgård and Reinsve, and these two performers play off each other in a way that’s recognizable to anyone who’s struggled with paternal baggage, by which we mean everybody. It’s also using the prickly dynamic between father and daughter to explore how storytelling can both mask hurt and facilitate healing, and doing so in a way that goes way beyond heroes and villains. Not even a meta ending that pushes that idea to its logical breaking point can sour you on it. What you’re left with is one the best movies about how family means always having to say your sorry — and why, in the end, it’s better to forgive than forget.”

 

    Trier’s film was awarded the Grand Prix at The Cannes Film Festival in 2025.

    

*One of the reasons I watched this truly wonderful film was that I had heard that it featured a lesbian character. I watched this film through with complete enjoyment and wonderment, and upon finishing realized that I had absolutely no memory of a lesbian scene. At first I was convinced that the source material had simply misunderstood the sisterly hug and expression of mutual commitment as a lesbian scene. But then I remembered a narrative moment in the film describing the house’s previous tenants and returning to the scene saw quite clearly a couple of full on kisses of Gustav’s aunt and her lesbian friend. I realized that I have now seen so many queer films that I has simply not noticed it as an expression of anything but enjoyment and love, and had been totally unable to even recognize as anything out of the ordinary. Isn’t this what we of the LGBTQ community have been seeking all along? When even the gay historian becomes blind to the idea of exceptionalness or something being “out of the ordinary,” then perhaps we truly have made progress. But, I suspect, for the average heterosexual viewer this would have been greeted still with wide-eyed awareness of something odd and different is going on in this scene. I have to say, with “queerish” events occur in so very many of the Oscar nominated movies, one might happily grow blind regarding sexual difference. Perhaps I am fortunate that this year as long determined to be the last year in which I explored queer experience in film. Soon, we may see it in almost any film without blinking an eye.

 

Los Angeles, March 15, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2026).

 

 

Ryan Coogler | Sinners / 2025

one bite after another

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ryan Coogler (screenwriter and director) Sinners / 2025

 

I can’t imagine what kind of reefer Hollywood Academy Award voters were on in nominating Ryan Coogler’s film Sinners for 16 awards, the most of any film in history. Perhaps some of that voting was the product of justified guilt for ignoring so many amazing pictures featuring black stories and casts over the years. And in some respects, it was inevitable that such a well-made movie with strong audience approval, excellent acting, historical significance, including a fair sampling of blues songs as well as early American Irish music should be showered with approval.

     Indeed, the first half of this film, featuring the return to Clarksdale, Mississippi in 1932 of two World War I veteran brothers, Elijah “Smoke” and Elias “Stack” Moore (both played by Michael B. Jordan) to the Delta after work for the Chicago mob for seven years which has made them substantially rich is a fascinating period piece in which we are immediately immersed in the Jim Crow world of poor black cotton sharecroppers, hidden Ku Klux Klan members, Asian shop owners, along with a brief history of the Blues, which first found root in the Mississippi Delta. Smoke and Stack, tired of a world not so very different from the Delta, except that Chicago is filled with skyscrapers where the Delta is deep in plantations. They are also clearly on the run after apparently being involved in a heist from criminal syndicates.

     Violent as the gangsters with whom they have been consorting, they are nonetheless likable enough and made even more appealing by their desire to use their ill-gotten money to open a juke club in an old sawmill they buy from the Southern bigot and local KKK leader Hogwood (David Maldonado).

    Their first day back features them traveling around the area as they seek out provisions and a sign from Clarksdale grocers Bo and Grace Chow (Yao and Li Jun Li), and collect performers Sammie Moore, aka Preacherboy (Miles Caton), their cousin who plays guitar and sings quite beautifully and full of soul, Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo), a local harmonica player and musical legend, and Pearline (Jayme Lawson) a married singer to whom young Sammie is immediately attracted.

   Along the way Stack verbally teaches his young cousin how to properly perform cunnilingus. Meanwhile Smoke visits the gravesite of his infant daughter and nearby his estranged wife, Annie (a standout Wunmi Mosaku), a Hoodoo healer, who insists the mojo bags she has given him and his brother has protected the two them. They also hook up for a quick session of anal sex that briefly restores what remains of their enduring love. Annie is furthermore procured to be the night’s cook. A heavy-set sharecropper Cornbread (Omar Benson Miller) is paid to be the joint’s bouncer.

    Along the way Sammie also encounters Mary, Stacks’ passé blanc ex-girlfriend who is furious for him having left her and arranged for her marriage to a while man, mostly, we discover, to protect her from discovery. But the trouble is that she is unhappy in the life she leads and wants a return of their former relationship, definitely dangerous territory for a black man in the Delta.

    In these few hours we get a sense of the entire community in a nutshell, witnessing the hard lives of almost all the Delta individuals of color and ethnic difference, including the Choctaw Indians hot on the trail of a dangerous Irishman Remmick (Jack O’Connell) who has saw protection in the house of a poor Irish couple, whose lean-to house is little better than the shacks in which the black sharecroppers live.

     And when the joint gets jumping, the liquor flowing, and we witness all too brief performances of Delta Slim, Sammie, and Pearline, we are all ready to sit back and enjoy a full history lesson in the importance of music, performance, and backroom sex in the lives of Delta blacks. With this cast of interesting performers who knows what might happen?

    But already in these scenes, director Ryan Coogler seems impatient with his carefully-researched and beautifully filmed story, pushing the envelope with what I see as a far too obvious and unnecessary history lesson about the influence of Blues by weaving in performers all the way from early jazz, rock, and hip-hop along with a DJ needle drop in sampling, as if he needed to hit us over the head to make it clear just how important the Blues where if fomenting and formulating musical traditions in this country. As critic Robert Daniels summarizes on Roger Ebert.com, describing Sammie’s performance: “his music becomes a phantasmagoria of African drummers, an Afrofuturist electric guitarist, and even Chinese dancers.”

    And while Sammie, Delta Slim, and Pearline seem to be all capable performers, we want to hear more without the theatrics, to actually hear them play and sing. What we are given are momentary segments much like the dancing in musicals such as Chicago where camera is so very busy that what we get is a blur of hands, torso, and legs instead of a full performance. To know the Blues, as it is clear Coogler does, you have to be given the time to fully listen.

    We immediately recognize, however, something hokey about this; the fine-tuned history has been usurped by the historian. And almost as suddenly he has seemed to lose interest in the period piece with which he has begun, shifting quickly and quite stumblingly into a new genre as the three Irish vampires knock the Choctaws have been hunting down come knocking at the juke place door.

     As somewhat of a specialist in genre, I have no problem with a healthy mix of literary or cinema forms. But as Daniels observes in his review:

 

“Vampire movies often struggle to be inventive. The formulas and mythologies of the subgenre are tried and tested, repeated and reworded: Stinging holy water, foul garlic, burning sunrises, and firm wooden stakes through the heart are the primary tools wielded against the undead. Oftentimes, the biggest change from story to story is merely the setting, whether it’s a far flung Eastern-European country, an American urban locale, or a stifling desert. Knowing those limitations, I have to give Sinners a sweaty, gory Southern Gothic horror musical, some credit. It’s a messy picture that throws the kitchen sink at the genre and, yet, somehow, often misses.”

 

    I also have no general complaint against the genre and have written extensively about the subject from F. W. Murnau’s 1922 masterwork, Nosferatu, Tod Browning’s 1931 Dracula and George Melford’s Spanish version shot on the same set, to Carl Theodore Dryer’s Vampyr which appeared in 1932, the same year as the events in Coogler’s movie, into the several 1960s and 1970s lesbian suck fests by Jean Rollin, the 1979 Werner Herzog reconfiguration in Nosferatu, The Vampyre and numerous others. In a 2008 academic essay I even argued that just two years before the events in Sinners Mississippi writer William Faulkner wrote a brilliant kind of Southern gothic vampire work in As I Lay Dying. So I know something about the genre.

      In more recent decades, as the genre as become even more popular, it has alas often been confused and intertwined with the zombie movie, gory, bloody mass attacks that on occasion Coogler’s film seemingly mimics, even though Annie quickly perceives that the beings the survivors are facing ain’t not haints (a restless, often malevolent ghost or evil spirit), but these dead men and women still haunting their own bodies.

     I can also well understand, vampires or not, why the black partygoers at the Sawmill might not wish to easily invite in some white “friends.” As the Stack and Smoke make clear, if a black man stares too long at a white woman he will probably be subject to immediate arrest if not strung up on a hanging tree.

    But why choose the very next to lowest rung on the horrible Southern hierarchy, the Irish dirt farmers, as the villians of this piece?

     I also realize, of course, that the vampire films and fictions were most often metaphors for something else. In the beginning, the vampire was an illicit lover who instead of inseminating his victim with semen sucked out the vital juices of the desired lover (male in the earliest vampire’s example, although when he fails with Thomas Hutter he goes after Hutter’s wife) or primarily female in Dracula’s case. Overall, we might argue, however, that early vampires were, up until Rollin’s films female on female examples, equal opportunity sex fiends, bisexual men who didn’t much care from what sex they got their necessary blood. And in Sinners that remains true, the film showing us both men and women busily gnawing on members of the same sex.

    I am quite willing to agree with The New Yorker film reviewer Richard Brody that the vampires in this film represent the white desire to assimilate and take over black music (exemplified by the young Sammie, for whom Remmick has a particular attraction). But, I still don’t quite get the necessary Irish connection; were the dirt-poor Irish whites those most desirous to incorporate, assimilate, and steal from the black arts, particularly, given as this film shows us they have their own quite dark musical traditions, as in the midst of the vampire attack the original Irish trio and all of those who have already been “turned” stomp out some lovely Irish ballads?

     This group of vampires, moreover, seems to have developed into a same-thinking community who share one another’s thoughts like the human replacements of pod-people in Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

     Unfortunately, as Stack himself is transformed into a vampire by Mary, sitting atop him drooling with impatience for his blood, Cornbread turns enemy, and even Grace’s husband Bo Chow becomes a threat ready to return home to turn their young daughter into one of them, as the  vampires now claiming welcome into the juke hall, begin to look more and more like something out of The Night of the Living Dead and Robert Rodriguez’s From Dawn to Dust, cult pop films that in my estimation lack the subtlety and artistry of the first third of this film. By the end of this sequence, the dead and the living have pretty much ended up in a huge bloody brouhaha that might be described as one bite after another in humorous comparison to Paul Thomas Anderson’s film One Battle After Another of this same year.

   As the morning sun pops into view our vampires are burned alive, finally leaving only Sammie, Smoke, and a hand full of others still alive in living flesh and blood, Sammie having gone back home to his preacher father for forgiveness without, we soon discover, any intent to give up his music. And in this sense he is the true hero of the film, and the lone survivor of his Delta world.

     In short, Coogler has not so much “transformed” his original film or even extended it, as he has dropped down another work with similar characters upon his original movie like Dorothy’s house landing upon the witch in Munchkinland, blowing the first part of the film to smithereens like an angry gifted child grown impatient with being a truly restrained and talented artist.

    Even worse, he then quickly hurtles off from Marveland, a world of comic book pop-up figures, rocketing back to his early Rocky franchise, Creed (2015) wherein Smoke pulls out his tommy guns and Rambo-style shoots down the entire KKK crowd who come looking for trouble early the next morning. Even wounded and dying he does away with the final surviving bigot Hogwood, suggesting that what the Moore brothers were really seeking all along was just to be able to repeat the American pattern of violence and revenge, not create or sustain black art.

    As a reward for clearing out the Delta from the white bastards, he is transported straight to heaven where Annie and his infant child are waiting for his embracement.

     Is this really the masterpiece we’ve all been waiting for?

    But even then Coogler won’t give up, quickly transporting us in the early credits to a New York of current times where an older version of Sammie is now performing. After the show he meets up with two vampire survivors, Stack and Mary, now dressed in semi-Hippie attire, who explain that they were forbidden by Remmick from touching Sammy, now about to die in any event. Together they agree that on that long ago day, which Sammy describes as the best day in his life, they had finally really gotten their act together. Too bad Coogler didn’t let us truly experience it more fully before he thrust us back into the violent, racist world of today.

 

Los Angele, March 14. 2006

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2006).

Paul Thomas Anderson | One Battle After Another / 2025

intentional revolutionaries

by Douglas Messerli

 

Paul Thomas Anderson (screenplay, based on Vineland by Thomas Pynchon, and director) One Battle After Another / 2025

 

As critic David Denby recently observed in The New Yorker there are two kind of Paul Thomas Anderson movies, the “big noisy” movies, ragged epic studies of human behavior such as Magnolia and There Will Be Blood, and “smaller, quieter ones” such as Phantom Thread and The Master, although it is difficult to think of the later film as either small or quiet. I argue that there is also a third kind of Anderson work, the highly political, comical, and linguistically disjunctive movies such as Inherent Vice and now One Battle After Another, both broadly based on works by Thomas Pynchon and which are neither truly quiet nor big, noisy, and ragged epic works, and I would argue represent least flowed contributions to cinematic art.

     Both of the films of the latter category, highly popular with critics, the most recent work of last year (2025) actually becoming a box-office hit, have become almost cult works given the fact that they present as semi-heroic characters, stereotypical figures of politically radical behavior that one might argue are generally unpopular with a great portion of the general public. Certainly, times have changed. It would have been almost unimaginable to experience a film like One Battle After Another in the early 1970s at the time when the Symbionese Liberation Army kidnapped Patty Hearst, who soon after joined them in their bank robberies and other assaults. Since then, however, given several horrific presidential administrations, so many of us have come to distrust authority for its racist, homophobic, socially irresponsible, and financially greedy self-aggrandizement, let alone its patriarchal obsession of the female body, that what once might have been seen as political criminals to the vast majority of society are now so celebrated that they are not only seen by a certain sliver of the US population of improbable heroes but whose cinematic exploits are celebrated as a likely Best Picture at the Academy Awards.

     The irony, given that we live now under an almost dictatorial government which we the people elected, is almost beyond explanation. Is the Hollywood establishment and its liberal-minded followers so isolated from the rest of the good ‘ole USA that it can now manage to get almost as rich as the right wing businessmen for satirically showing up their heartless, narrow-minded greediness? Apparently so.

     Welcome to a world where the villain of the piece, Steven J. Lockjaw (a wonderful Sean Penn), a corrupt military officer pursing the radical French 75 underground members, who is also so obsessed with the sexual lure of black women and who later virulently denies unspoken suggestions that he might be homosexual, is almost as much fun to watch as the powerful radical leftist Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor), Lady Champagne (more commonly known later as Deandra) (Regina Hall), and the Perfidia’s rather lost white boyfriend, the explosive device expert, “Ghetto” Paul Calhoun nicknamed “Rocketman” (Leonardo DiCaprio), along with their interracial gang who free entire immigrant detention camp detainees, rob banks, and blow up strategic imperialist enterprises.

     Strangely despite all the busy activities of the French 75 group and the attacks upon them by the corrupt police and military members, unlike Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent—which also celebrates political dissidents, but which is almost entirely dependent upon a complex manipulation of incidents of the plot—there is virtually no “plot” in Anderson’s film, merely, as it’s title suggests, one battle after another, one car chase followed by the next.

    By the time most of the French 75 group have been rounded up and killed off, and the pregnant Perfidia has escaped the public “protection” of Lockjaw and returned to Pat, what remains of the radical movement has gone so underground that it functions almost entirely through codes and paranoia,* setting up the surviving couple, Calhoun and Perfidia, in an underground safety house in Baktan Cross, California—not so different from Dona Sebastiana’s safety house in Recife, Brazil in Mendonça Filho’s film.

   Here Perfidia bears a daughter and, just as quickly, refuses to perform the feminine role of motherhood, abandoning Pat and would-be family life for Mexico, Algiers, or some other exotic spot, leaving behind what will soon become, now under the name of Bob Ferguson, a washed-up revolutionary with a growing pot of a stomach and too much pot and cocaine in his brain washed

down with wine and whisky. But one has to give him credit, if nothing else, for raising a fiercely independent, beautiful daughter Charlene, newly named Willa (Chase Infiniti) whose friends, in another US cultural shift to which this film gives voice, all identify as non-binary, suggesting that Willa herself does not see herself locked in a female-male dichotomy against which her mother so struggled. Welcome Donald Trump to the real world.

    Yet out there somewhere Lockjaw still lurks, and now, 16 years later, seeking entry into the exclusive evil old men’s strictly secret segregationist Christmas Adventurers Club. And suddenly remembering that there is a black girl out there who probably is his baby, decides to declare war on Baktan Cross, calling in the military to close down the local chicken processing plant where dozens of illegal aliens are employed and other liberal intuitions of the town, while secretly seeking to capture Bob and Willa for extermination.

    Hearing through the underground of the attack, the former Lady Champagne (now Deandra) is deployed to whisk Willa away from a school dance and hurry her off to nearby convent of pot-growing nuns.

     Bob/Pat, whose brain has shed almost all ties with the radical underground, cannot remember the code word to be given the location of his daughter’s whereabouts. Escaping through an underground tunnel, Bob rushes off to Sergio St. Carlos (Benicio del Toro), the local karate sensei and community leader who also houses many of the town’s immigrants—who he sends off through a hidden passage—and his own students, who take flight with Bob across several rooftops, from where he falls before being arrested by the local police. They interview him, insisting he is a diabetic in need of insulin, and transfer him to a local hospital where a nurse suggests he enter the next room to take the nearby fire escape to safety.

     Meanwhile, Christmas Adventurers Club member, Tim Smith (John Hoogenakker) is called to the Club and told of Lockjaw’s activities, including the closure of the chicken processing plant owned by one of their own members. Miller is sent to do away with Lockjaw, Bob, and Willa.

     Accordingly, we now have a trio of confused and desperate men on their way to the convent.

   Predictably, Lockjaw reaches the destination first, capturing Willa and, in a truly painful comic moment, forcing her to undergo a DNA test to see if she is truly his child. If the machines aligns with three straight markers, her future will be death, otherwise she will be freed. He proves he is the biological father and now must rid himself of his evidence, his own daughter.

     Arriving just in time to see his daughter taken away by Lockjaw, after his hired murderer Avanti  refuses to kill the girl because of her young age. With Avanti at the wheel, he drives Willa to a far-right militia who will do the job.

     Yet, as Avanti sees the men meet in preparation, he refuses to drive off but returns with gun in hand, killing them all, as Willa escapes in his car.

 

     Following Lockjaw, whom Miller is chasing, Ben witnesses what appears to be Lockjaw’s murder, finding the car and body in a small gully. But also remembering another car speeding past him going in the other direction, turns back to find Willa herself, after killing Miller, afraid even to meet up with her own father without the proper code. He begs her to stand down, which she finally does, collapsing into his arms in relief as they return home.

     Lockjaw, miraculously does survive, and is greeted at the Christmas Adventurer’s Club as a new member. Shown into his new office, Lockjaw sits back in utter joy behind the desk, as the doors as closed and gas becomes to fill the room for a ceiling vent. Once he is dead, a person comes to carry him off for cremation—a series of events that perhaps all too vividly call up the Nazi gas chambers and cremation plants.

     Before I close, however, perhaps I need return to the missing link in all this, the “rat” as Willa herself describes her mother when she discovers the truth, Perfidia Beverly Hills, whose sexual relationship with Lockjaw is at the heart of later father-daughter dilemma and near-murder. Some critics felt strongly that the character was, as Wikipedia describes it, “was overly sexualized and a sex criminal.” Yet describing Perfidia was herself being overly sexy, or as one commentator put it, horny, entirely misses the point. Yes, she is fetishized by Lockjaw, but she begins their relationship by putting a gun to his head and demanding he get an erection that she refuses to put to rest. She uses him in an almost sadist-masochistic manner to keep him from overtaking her, from turning her into a black whore of a slave.

     Throughout the early part of the film, this central character, prepared at any moment to be raped by the men in power, attempts to convert their attempts at over-powering her to regain her own empowerment until finally, faced with complete defeat and years in prison, she once again is able to use her sexuality as a device of escape.

      Even when she is freed, however, she must still face a heteronormative and patriarchal demand, that she convert her political energy and activities to motherhood. Her refusal to even play that role speaks to the integrity of her position, whether or not one agrees with her choices. As the actress playing the role, Teyana Taylor herself argues, her character weaponizes her sexuality against her enemies, explaining that the decisions Perfidia makes through the film are done out of her struggle to survive:

 

“It will never be a moment of judgment, because a lot of her mistakes have come from her being in survival mode dealing with postpartum depression and the title of being a strong woman—a strong Black woman. We don't get the same amount of compassion as everybody else. We don't get the same amount of grace as everybody else. Everybody just assumes we're okay.”

 

    By taking gender out of the picture, her daughter Charlene/Willa opens up new possibilities of a non-binary identification that might permit her to survive not simply as a woman, but as a human being worthy of survival in the fact she represents herself primarily not in terms of sex.

    It is not coincidental that the Trump Republicans began their attack on the LGBTQ world, a world that lies generally outside of their patriarchal hierarchical constructs, by attacking transgender figures, not only because they are a small, underrepresented minority, but because their very transformation symbolizes the collapse of their system, in which a fluctuating sense of sexuality no longer permits them steadfast control. The fact that a woman can become a man, a man a woman threatens their very notion of a permanent, inflexible reality. Who knows who you might wake up to be?

    Finally, I believe we should perceive Perfidia as a remarkable escape artist, a Houdini of sexual definition. A radical beyond all the political issues of this film.

    And it is little wonder that there have been attacks of Anderson’s film from right-wing commentators that see it as a sympathetic portrayal of volent anti-fascist revolutionaries. I joked at the beginning of this essay that the work was ironic given the Democratic / Republican gap of our times. Yet the concerns of this film are not all established as “left-wing” activities, even though members not only of the political right but the left have seemed to support this reading. The issues brought up in this film, however, just as in The Secret Agent, are about battling authoritarianism, fascism itself, which should be an American concern, not simply one a liberal political party. The entire establishment of our country was based on these very principles, and we see in the Brazilian film just what happens to individual liberties when they are taken away. This satire seemingly exaggerates them to outright murder, but then the histories of authoritarian and fascist governments have almost always taken away life along with the hard-fought liberties.

    As I wrote of Mendonça Filho’s motion picture: “The film was written for our times.”  

 

*Codes and coding are particularly important in this film, the former becoming so impregnable that they keep out the very people the codes were created to protect. Oddly enough, many years ago in 1993, without having read Pynchon’s 1990 fiction, I wrote a prose poem titled “Existentialism” about the French underground using just such an elaborate coding system that they finally couldn’t communicate. I do not like to intrude with my own creative writing on these essays, but I do think it quite relevant to this work:

 

“There was a moment in which anything might have, should, did occur to us as potentially an act that carried with it risk, danger, and yes, we understood, destruction of all we had known, knew, and would know as something to be cherished, loved. Yes, we were cautious, crossing streets forward and back again, and darting into establishments which we had never visited before, out a side door into an alleyway and over a wall or through little lanes at back to those streets again where we might walk calmly or furtively and quickly cross. Still we were certain to be seen, followed, felt the eyes upon our back, turned entering another house of flats, and sat, perhaps, on the little leather settee for a time before we tried a door at the back and took to the streets once more. Then we might return home or stop by a bar for Pernod, sitting all afternoon at an obvious table, or sometimes hidden, racing out of the place and posing as prostitutes do by the loo on Rue St. Germain or into a hotel where we would try to rent a room. Sometimes we saw them pass, so we thought, and double back, and passing us once more, becoming alarmed that we might recognize them, change women or men, so that the first follower might fall away to be replaced ty the second who might be the clerk who asked how long we intended to stay. So we said very little, were non-committal, were so uncertain of our plans, even if we dared to be seen in one another’s company, we could not make dates, could not declare, for certain, if we would be at such and such a place on a particular week or day. So it, we, the organization we had in courage and faith begun, began, had begun actually before we felt each footstep was a cause for fear, a trace to be followed to our houses, children, spouses, to fall apart. For if one of us found his or her way into a place where another of us might have met her or him, he or she was probably not around. If we did meet, it was by chance, an accident, as when I met Paul on the pier, one afternoon, Pierre met my mother at the marketplace. But even here, at the marketplace or pier we were so afraid to speak to one another, to say anything others might overhear, that we concocted a code, quite complex, of rhymes, numbers, and associations the might hide what we really said. For example, if I met a man who was once one of us—for we could no longer trust everyone who once joined was serving yet—I might say “Hello, Mr. Jello,” which meant, “Are you trembling, in trouble, nervous, upset? If he said “Good day Mr. Marshmallow,” I would quickly turn about and leave the place; while if he reproved with a “Harsh fellow” I might speak a little lower, supposing we were being watched. If, on the other hand, he addressed me as “Mr. Bellow,” I might assume I could shout, and in a natural voice answer him, “Well, Sir, what about the Bastille then?” If he responded, “It’s been liberated,” we might meet—by accident again—in another blank—depending upon the number of letters in the word—months, weeks, or days. If, on the other hand, he told me it was a prison, I could presume that he or she was being tailed so continuously that he or she would have to hole up for a period commensurate, I might never see her or him again. So I might respond, “Adieu,” or “Auf Wiedersehen” or “So long, to indicate the movements of the Americans, the Germans, or the French. And he or she might respond, I do or don’t like lager, beer, wine, or whiskey, depending upon the nationality with which she or he did or didn’t have contact.

     Consequently, we did little for the underground effort and against the government had no effect.”

 

Los Angeles, March 13, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2026).