Digital/VODebut--Alice Winocour's PROXIMA: Let's train for Mars while trashing protocol

Few films have impressed me so much at their outset (and well beyond) before collapsing into utter stupidity by their finale as does PROXIMA, the latest from Alice Winocour, the talented woman responsible for writing Mustang and writing and directing Disorder and Augustine. 

Perhaps the international space program (or what passes for this in the movie) is set up differently from other space programs -- or any rigorous government program that depends on carefully adhering to high standards in order to achieve difficult results -- because what the movie's heroine Sarah (played very well by that always interesting actress Eva Green) is allowed to get away with here proves downright dumb. As this movie continues, deal-breaker follows deal-breaker until the last ridiculous event, which trumps them all.

Ms Winocour, pictured at right, tells the tale of Sarah, her "ex" Thomas, and their daughter Stella, who is both precocious and dyslexic. Sarah is in training for space travel to Mars, and as the movie opens, she's just learned she has been chosen as part of the crew. Thomas is pleased for her and happy to have charge of Stella while Sarah is gone. 

Stella (an excellent Zélie Boulant, below) is frightened of losing her mom, for good reason of course, and Sarah is, we perceive more fully as the movie moves along, wracked with guilt about leaving her daughter. How this guilt plays out, simultaneous with the training for space travel Sarah is undergoing, forms the meat of the movie 

Winocour captures well the parent-child bond (of both parents) and shows how differently this plays out when the woman has one of those give-it-everything careers, as does Sarah, in which the needs of motherhood seem in direct conflict with that career.

There is the usual male entitlement number to endure (Matt Dillon, at right, above, plays the head of Sarah's space crew), but then come those occasions when Sarah simply breaks protocol so that she can have it both ways: motherhood and space travel. Breaking this is one thing, but then we wait for the penalty for this -- which never comes. This is ludicrous, since it becomes more and more clear that having Sarah as a crew member is likely to endanger that crew.

But, hey, there must be some kind of feminist wish-fulfillment going on because it seems you actually can have it all. There are audiences out there who will buy into this sort of very weird reasoning, but TrustMovies is not among them. I am saddened because the performances are first-rate, and much of the dialog and situations are well-handled, too. 

Back in the 1960s/70s there was a movement known as "logical consequences,"in which an action has its consequence that follows logically. (Used as a parenting tool, as I recall, it may still be in vogue, although clearly it has never been activated nor even thought about by Donald Trump and his minions.)  Any sort of logical consequence for Sarah's actions is what's missing from this movie, and that lack turns a very good film into a very bad one.

From Vertical Entertainment and running 107 minutes, Proxima hits digtial streaming and VOD this Friday,. November 6. Your move. (It might help if Vertical Entertainment listed the film on its web site -- at least in the Coming Soon section.)

In EGG, Marianna Palka/Risa Mickenberg delve into motherhood, womanhood, career and men

Marianna Palka is at it again. After gracing us with the fine, thoughtful and very sexual rom-com, Good Dick, back in 2008, she went on to give us the little-seen but one of 2017's best films, Bitch. Palka wrote and directed those two groundbreakers. With her latest, EGG, she has directed a screenplay by Risa Mickenberg (her first) that seems a very good fit for Ms Palka's interests and skills.

Bitch is streaming now via Netflix. If you haven't seen it, do. It's a difficult movie that goes places I don't think any other film quite has. It turns itself -- and will likely turn you -- inside out, moving from the most intense and difficult anger into, well, you'll see. Ms Palka consistently challenges us, and her gauntlet is worth running.

In her new film, she and Ms Mickenberg explore what "motherhood" means to three very different women (and of course to us, her audience) along with some ideas about feminism, career, male entitlement and, yes, much of the rest of the usual baggage. Yet in the hands of the these two filmmakers (Ms Palka is shown at left), nothing is quite as simple nor as obvious as it may first appear.

There are three women involved in the "motherhood" here, two of which are played by Alysia Reiner, below, left, and Christina Hendricks, right, who were "best friends" in art school a decade or more ago but have not kept up with each other much since.

Reiner, a relatively successful conceptual artist, is having a go at motherhood via a surrogate, while Hendricks, who gave up art but married "well," is very much pregnant and seemingly quite proud of it. Initially these two, along with their husbands, seem like the kind of hypocritical cliche-spouters who you're going to love to hate. But wait. As usual with Palka, things proves not quite so easy.

The movie is divided into sections: first Reiner's, then Reiner's and Hendricks', and finally one devoted to these two plus the beautiful blond surrogate, delightfully played by Anna Camp, above. Everyone's views -- both their pretense and their actual wants and needs -- are aired and given their due, and you will eventually find yourself having to deal with these characters as complex and very problematic people deserving of more than any easy dismissal.

The women, at least. The two men -- nicely played to reveal depths of needy narcissism and male entitlement, by Gbenga Akinnagbe (as Reiner's hubby, shown above, left) and David Alan Basche, as Hendricks', shown above, second from right) -- are mostly poster boys for, yes, narcissism and male entitlement. But both actors make the most of their duplicitous naughtiness, so that they remain fun to smirk at and enjoy.

The movie rightly belongs to Reiner, Hendricks and Camp, and all three come through quite beautifully, though in the last analysis, the film belong to Ms Reiner. A striking presence (as she was as well in Orange Is the New Black and Equity), here, she is given the chance to open up, reveal more layers of feeling, and actually touch us.

Hendricks, in the slightly smaller role, does the same and with lovely subtlety and ease, while Ms Camp, playing a lady with less on the ball, proves able to hold her own shakier ground quite well. There's a nice sense of theatricality here -- the movie is mostly shot on a single set, so the dialog counts for more than usual -- and there is also a kind of genuine modesty at work.

Egg knows what it's about and what it needs to accomplish, and it manages all this with -- along with some anger -- surprising empathy and grace. From Gravitas Ventures and running just 84 minutes, the film opens theatrically this Friday, January 18, in Los Angeles at the AMC Universal Cinema at Citywalk Hollywood, and in New York City at the Roxy Cinema Tribeca. Simultaneously, Egg will be available nationwide via VOD.

MILLA: Valérie Massadian's exploration of young womanhood opens at NYC's AFA

The movie opens on a shot of a young couple seemingly covered in something like gauze. But then, when the camera captures the two from another angle, we see that they have been asleep inside an automobile, the windows of which have fogged up by their breath. This is the first instance of how, in MILLA, the new film from Valérie Massadian (Nana), what we see and hear turn out to be something more and different from what we might expect. And yet the surprises in Milla are small and quiet, as is the movie itself. It's very slow, too. Those of you who prefer action films, take note.

Ms Massadian, shown at right, intends a study -- of a character (our young heroine, Milla) and of a class of people -- the less educated, wealthy and entitled -- that we are not used to seeing, let alone entering the lives of in any real depth, in mainstream movies. She has succeeded, too.

Though her movie begins slowly and may have you thinking, "Oh, my: another vérité look at the life of the lower class," do hold on. Milla proves something more because it does not take for granted that the life here is anything less than genuine, important and even positive -- though certainly difficult, yes.

Massadian does not cram on the crap, as do some would-be realist filmmakers. Milla's life has ups and downs, with one major loss midway, but she copes as best she can. And in the starring role, newcomer Severine Jonckeere (above and below) proves a lovely and very moving addition to the canon of near-real characters caught on film. A collection of small scenes caught at various times and in differing place, each of which makes its simple point, Milla quietly and slowly builds to something major.

Though the film is slow-paced and rigorous, once you take its characters on their own terms, just as the filmmaker has done, you watch, learn and grow along with them. The cinematography involves mostly interiors -- that car, the couple's squatter residence, a bar, hotel, vegetable stand, and eventual apartment for Milla and her son -- but the exteriors, including the sea and the fishing vessel on which Milla's boyfriend finally finds employment, are beautifully handled, as well, often in the kind of middle distance that allows us to feel for and appreciate the characters via their surroundings.

Milla is a tale of slow growth, change and acceptance: of what life throws at you, of motherhood, of responsibility. The sparse dialog seem reflective of the characters and their circumscribed lives. Once Milla's son Ethan arrives, after but a brief time with him as suckling infant, we see him as a young child. Ethan Jonckeere (below), who I presume is the actual son of the leading actress, is certainly one of the most adorable child actors you'll have seen: completely natural, never posing for the camera, and totally involved and engaged in life.

The filmmaker includes everything from a musical number to some lovely poetry, a shipwreck unseen but experienced via a dirge, loneliness and coping, and a cat ("You don't want me to pet you," Milla observes, "but you're not leaving." How cat-like). The momentary imagined return of the dead boyfriend, played with quiet grace and caring by Luc Chessel, once to comfort a grieving Milla and again to observe his sleeping son, is handled with the same finesse as the rest of this unusual movie.

Above all else, the film is cautiously hopeful. These days, that's quite a lot. From Grasshopper Film and running a lengthy 128 minutes, Milla opens this Friday, August 3, in New York City at Anthology Film Archives, and in Los Angeles on August 15 (only at 8pm) at the Acropolis Cinema. That seems to be it theatrically, but we shall hope that DVD and digital will soon be in the works.

Kris Swanberg's UNEXPECTED explores how women (and men) experience pregnancy today

One of the strengths of UNEXPECTED is that we haven't seen so much of the ways in which women experience the "idea" of pregnancy in our current times: what it might mean to their ability to continue working and still take care of their child, how it might begin to reflect a growing schism between their men and themselves (the film doesn't address lesbian or gay parenthood, though the concerns may be quite similar). Co-writer (with Megan Mercier) and director of the film, Kris Swanberg, has quite rightly, I think, swung her pendulum toward the distaff side of things, so we learn a lot about the fears and desires of a 30-something young woman who is about to lose her teaching job because her school is closing due to cuts in the education budget.

Simultaneous to this, our co-heroine, Samantha (Cobie Smulders, above, left), also discovers that she is pregnant. Another simultaneity occurs when Sam's best student, a girl she is grooming for college, discovers that she, too, is unexpectedly pregnant. The two, somewhat bonded already, now go for it big-time. Ms Swanberg, pictured at right, has a somewhat famous and quite adorable new child of her own (he's appeared in a couple of smart and funny films already), so she knows from where she comes. She also wants to open her movie up to include new mothers of other races and classes: hence the inclusion of the student, Jasmine (played quite well by Gail Bean, shown above, right, and below) into the mix.

The filmmaker has also given us two quite different men: Sam's couldn't-be-sweeter-and-more-caring white-guy boyfriend, John (a spot-on Anders Holm, below, right, and Jasmine's more typical, not-yet-grown-up-and-doesn't-want-to, Travis, played by the also spot-on Aaron J. Nelson.

If these two men, together with the situation presented us, seem to fall into that typical "whites have it easier than blacks" scenario, well, why not? This is true, with rare exceptions, throughout our country. The point of Swanberg's movie -- in addition to its take on women and pregnancy -- is how little Sam, for all the help she tries to be and offer, really understands or appreciates Jasmine's situation and dilemma.

While this rings true enough, situation-wise, how it is expressed in some of the dialog and especially how the issue is resolved do not ring true. All this unfortunately makes the move seem skin deep when it ought to be more probing. And the inclusion of a short scene, above, of a demonstration of protesting school-teachers, just adds to this sense of surface.

All this is a shame because the movie has quite a bit going for it (including Elizabeth McGovern's interesting turn as Samantha's alternately supporting and annoying mother). So tamp down those expectations, enjoy the better parts and roll your eyes a bit at some of the rest, and you'll have a pretty good -- if pretty much expected -- time.

Unexpected, from Alchemy and running just 87 minutes, hits the streets tomorrow, Tuesday, September 29, on Blu-ray, DVD, VOD and early EST -- for purchase and/or rental.