Mengedegna

I came expecting to love this one and came away merely liking it, a lot in some parts and not so much in others. During the First World War and in the years following it, two young men bond with each other over their shared love of music (specifically traditional folk ballads as performed by country people who grew up with them) - sounds like it should be great, right? And two wonderful actors who do create magic together, if not, for reasons I'll get to, with the kinds of sparks you might expect.

Along with a lot of little quibbles, two issues muted my enthusiasm. The first is the decision to have Ben Shattuck write the screenplay from his own short story. I haven't read the story, so I'm guessing here, but my impression is that he had a hard time paring down his material and adapting it for truly cinematic purposes. The result is that there's a lot of ponderous, literary, no-I-don't-think-people-really-talked-that-way dialogue, and a lot of stuffing that is too obvious, with very brief segments in Italy and England, in particular, in which incidents and characters are introduced only to serve plot purposes, showing what became of the protagonist, Lionel (Paul Mescal) over the many years that follow his separation from David (Josh O'Connor), and how the absence of the love of his life has stunted him emotionally, building up to the film's moving, if overdetermined, climax. The supposed love objects in these cases (a boy and a grown woman), despite some perfectly fine acting, come across as mere props.

My second concern relates to the first. The film opens, we are told, in 1910, with a precocious young boy (a talented Leo Cocovinis) growing up on a Kansas farm, making us aware of his sensitivity and of his unique relationship to music (he "sees", we are told, the notes). The boy appears to be 11 or so. Cut to 1917, and the boy has grown into the wonderful Paul Mescal, who is off to the New England Conservatory, where he meets and bonds (also erotically, though, in this tasteful film, not with any visible excess of passion) with Josh O'Connor. But through some freak genetic phenomenon, the 11-or-so-year-old Lionel of 1910 appears in just seven years to have drifted somewhere past his 30th birthday, as has David. There's no effort made to make these guys appear to be late teenagers or young adults, with all the fire and passion you'd expect: they're mature, guarded. In a narrative film imbued with otherwise straightforward realism, this jars. Had others taken more of a hand in the screenplay, truly adapting, instead of (apparently) transposing Shattuck's story, this could have been corrected while keeping the talent in place. Since the specific events of 1917 are critical to the tale, the Kansas prelude could have been set in 1901 instead of 1910, with the circumstances of Lionel and David's meeting in Boston adjusted accordingly, and this problem (which bothered me throughout the critical sequences showing their time together) would have been obviated.

Then there are the quibbles. Let me list just a few: while Lionel is shown to be a talented musician and likely (conveyed via one particularly nice sequence that allows Mescal - particularly the Mescal of "Aftersun" -- to show us his amazing range) teacher, the matter of his "seeing" music and integrating his sensorial impressions more generally, evoked in the prelude scenes, is completely dropped, kind of like one of those what-ever-happened-to characters.

And then smaller details intrude on the film's realism. For example. Lionel at one point sits down to a meal in what is clearly a quite ordinary middle-class household in the 1920s, and, deep into Prohibition, there's a carafe of red wine on the table, with everyone imbibing with no further comment, like we were in, well, 2025. Or, on the music side (much of which is beautiful and moving), an Edison recorder with wax cylinders is used by Lionel and David to capture the magic sounds of unvarnished ballad singing in the wilds of Maine. But, after some scratchiness when the playbacks are started, the recorded sound comes through loud and clear, with none of the well-known primitive thinness (and associated clarity) of the real thing, as anyone can hear on YouTube, as if Mr Edison had invented high-fidelity LPs on his first try at sound recording. Such jarring anachronisms, combined with the wrongness of the protagonists' apparent ages, kept jerking me out of my (usually) very willing suspension of disbelief. They're irritating and unnecessary.

Still, there is much to enjoy and be moved by in this film, particularly in the subtle interplay between the two stars, and in many of the cameos. Thankful Mary Swain provides perhaps the film's emotional high point, softly crooning an ancient ballad for the Edison as the island refuge she and her formerly enslaved community have settled on is about to be violently destroyed. Also, it's a great pleasure to re-encounter the wonderful Chris Cooper, who plays Lionel, very movingly, in old age and, as such, gives us the retrospective voiceover narration of the opening sequence. And much of the cinematography is very beautiful.

So the film, despite unsatisfying loose ends, has much to offer a viewer and should be seen. In its reticence, it embodies, in a way, how oppressive the 1920s were for two men who loved each other. I will leave to others the inevitable comparisons between Oliver Hermanus (who had given us, in his 2019 "Moffie", set in modern, mostly White South Africa, another take on similar themes - and a more powerful one) and Ang Lee. Here, in depicting a bottled-up era in the way he does, he has given us a film that is often touching, quite beautiful, and wonderfully acted by two major talents, but that is a little too passionless and a little too distancing.

This is an odd film. It builds on the real beauty of the island of Mauritius, implying a high level of realism. It's set during the period (most of the 18th century, up to the British takeover in 1810) of French domination (when it was known as the Isle-de-France) and depicts the horrors of its plantation economy, producing sugar off the backs (with a flogging depicted with sickening realism) of enslaved Africans, all of which is historically accurate. But the actors portraying the victims are from West Africa (primarily Wolof speakers from the area now known as Senegal, but other West African groups are mentioned), which is historically absurd, as the logistics of moving all those humans all those thousands of miles would have made no economic sense. (The enslaved population of Mauritius was of East African and Malagasy origin.)

These absurdities aside, and despite some outstanding acting, mainly by the two Senegalese protagonists, Ibrahima M'Bayi and Anna Diakhere Thiandoum, the plot is much too heavy-handed. Colette Cottin appears to be a fine actress, but casting her as white female hunter of escaped "maroons" is too preposterous to be sustained. Benoît Magimel , one of the finest actors in present-day French cinema, is here cast as a wealthy holder of a large plantation concession who has a few scruples about the fate of his enslaved workforce, but not too many. He has put on many kilos since he was last seen on U. S. screens in another island-based parable, Alberto Serra's "Pacification", a far superior (if often a little too enigmatic) film. Here, he is assigned a role just a step or two above a walk-on, a sad waste of his tremendous talent.

The film's intentions -- depicting the dynamics of enslavement on the many islands that produced sugar for the teacups of Europe -- are noble, and the world of those enslaved as seen from their perspective is hugely worthy of cinematic representation, but this film is too jejune, melodramatic, and uncomfortably situated between realism and nonsense. Are there really no Mauritian actors, speaking the island's form of Creole, that the producers had to bring in Wolof speakers from the opposite ends of the African world? The point may be that there are commonalities between the plantation system on Mauritius and on the Caribbean islands (where many of the enslaved would originally have been forcibly transported from Senegal and the rest of West Africa) that a bit of poetic license is permissible? But if I were from Mauritius, and a descendant from the groups that really were enslaved there (now a minority, whereas the island's current majority has its origins on the Indian subcontinent, whose ancestors were brought in by the British as indentured plantation workers) , I would feel insulted. Mauritius is a real place (of amazing beauty, as shown here), with its own specific history, and it deserves to be represented as such, not as an abstraction. The blurring of those two lines gives the film a silliness that the subject matter does not deserve, worsened by an overcooked and illogical screenplay in which the actors must struggle, with only intermittent success, to be more than gross caricatures.

I often find Soderbergh a little too pat and obvious. (Not here.

Reasons to really like "Presence":

1. The terrific cinematography (which SS apparently did himself). Even leaving aside the much-mentioned and very well-conceived POV issue, every frame has meaning and substance, and so many are of the draw-you-in kind for which I'm a sucker. The exterior shots from inside are particularly stunning, reminding me of the best of Gus Van Sant, for example. I also appreciate Soderbergh's outstanding use, going back to "Sex, Lives & Videotape") of wide angle lenses that, in this case, draw you in more than they alienate you, creating a sense that you are eavesdropping and yet, very skillfully, mostly keeping the characters central and in focus except when it makes sense not to. In contrast to a film like "The Zone of Interest", where the technique is distancing -- deliberately so, for justifiable reasons, yet in ways I found unhelpful.

2. The editing. The montage in short, sharp, telling takes, with clear indications of elapsed time, is perfect. Things move swiftly, but with more than enough substance in each clip to keep you engaged.

3. The social commentary is understated and and all the more brilliant for it. The intra-family relationships may be Bergman-lite, but they are very telling. And we are actually (quite amazingly) incited to like the unseen character. And all the acting is pitch perfect, even unto the minor characters.

4. High diversity marks. So much of a fuss was understandably made a couple of years ago about how Asian actors are typecast and marginalized. Here they are, laudably, banalized. There is one passing reference to something Korean, just to orient us, but no trace of kimchi or of anything to distinguish this mixed family from any other in its solidly American social caste.

The only reason I can think of not to like the film is, of course, that the Teenage Boy Anti-Defamation Society has its work cut out for it. (And aspects of that, in the end, I did find just a little too pat and out of character with the rest of the film.)

But on the whole, this is as good an American film as I have seen this year, surpassed only in quality and substance by "The Nickel Boys", which has a different approach, also terrific, to POV issues and is, of course, less commercial and far more direct, even brutal, in its social commentary.