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The Structure of Crystal (Poland) – Contemplate Life with Two Old Friends

The Structure of Crystal Film Difficulty Ranking: 3

Be a fly on the wall as two old friends meet up after years have passed. The serene setting and conversation about the meaning of life will keep you feeling warm and calm like a mug of hot tea. Watch it here (Amazon via Mubi channel) and read more about it below.

Why watch The Structure of Crystal?

Experience life and it’s simple pleasures
Contemplate the meaning of life
Hear a beautiful soundtrack
If you’re a fan of early Ingmar Bergman (see Wild Strawberries for a perfect comparison – read more here)

The Breakdown

All we can see are two people standing on the distant horizon. They’re silhouetted against the pale sky and snow covered landscape. Their isolation is broken by a horse pulled sleigh which slowly makes it way past them. You can tell it’s going to be a slow and serene film; if that’s what you’re looking for you’re in for a treat.

The film takes place in rural Poland. The two people in the opening scene are Jan and his wife, both of them waiting for Jan’s old friend Marek to arrive. They studied Physics together at university but their paths have diverged since. Jan got married and moved to the remote countryside whilst Marek carried on studying physics and now travels the world with his degree.

The director perfectly captures the awkwardness of two old friends seeing each over for the first time in years. There’s lots of hugs and small talk, but neither of them really say anything to each other apart from how happy they each are to see each other. The feeling is perfectly captured when they all sit quietly at the dinner table not saying anything. The only thing you can hear is the clashing cutlery and the ticking clocks, emphasising that Marek’s stay is limited.

“I thought I had so much to tell you but now you’re hear I don’t know what to say”

Jan can’t break the small talk or silence, but Marek assures him their old friendship will resume. They eventually get round to talking about their past and their future. Both of them try to encourage the other to adopt their lifestyle.

Ticking Clocks and Ingmar Bergman

If you’re a fan of Ingmar Bergman, you might find some similarities between this film and Bergman’s Wild Strawberries (if you haven’t seen Wild Strawberries you need to watch it here on Amazon).

Both film’s have a similar contemplative feel and serene style. Furthermore, they both explore our search for meaning in life, which in both films becomes especially significant as the professor in Wild Strawberries feels himself getting closer to death, and in this film as the ticking clocks mark the short time Jan and Marek get with each other to catch up. Ultimately, they each reflect on their own choices and find peace with the path’s they have chosen.

Image result for structure of crystal film

Conclusion

I love contemplative and serene films, but I never feel like I can do them justice in writing. Like the early Ingmar Bergman films, The Structure of Crystal is all about the tone of the film. It’s a tone which somehow makes you calm and receptive but not sleepy. It’s just like listening to someone read you an interesting book when you’re tucked up in bed.

Watch The Structure of Crystal here (Amazon). And for more similar films, check out Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries and Seventh Seal.

Tune Into The Future – Luxembourg City Film Festival 2020

Many decades before the internet gave us nerd culture, there was Hugo Gernsback, an eccentric Luxembourgish writer and inventory who went on to become the father of modern science fiction.
Festival Scope

Tune into the Future tracks Hugo Gernsback’s life and inventions from his roots in Luxembourg and Europe, to finding his path and career in New York. It’s a story told with plenty of animations, interviews, personal anecdotes from his grandson, with references stretching from Tesla and Superman (Superman’s creator was inspired by Hugo’s publications).

Tune into the Future starts with some small square black and white footage of Hugo back in the day before the narrator interrupts the footage to tell us we’re missing the true (colorful) story. At this point the small black and white square footage expands to take up the entire screen and starts parading through images of Hugo’s fantastic speculative inventions from the future. The director, Eric Schockmel knows the inventions are the most eye catching part of Hugo’s work so he uses them to get us hooked in order to tell Hugo’s life story.

The director’s experience working with Museum Exhibits definitely shines through this documentary. He successfully manages to keep the audience engaged and interested throughout by mixing dry one on one interviews and personal anecdotes with animations that bring the anecdotes and Hugo’s ideas to life. It reminded me a bit of the educational YouTube videos made by Kurzgesagt – informative, but always engaging.

The way the documentary is presented matches Hugo’s own attempts to popularize science. He, like the director, used a mix of media to promote visions of utopia and drive interest in science across the world. In Schockmel’s case, he makes the film to rejuvenate Hugo’s efforts to popularize science in a time when experts and utopian ideas are being forgotten around the world. It’s time for the world to start dreaming again.

Son of Monarchs – The Immigrant Experience and Lost Identity

Son of MOnarchs Film Difficulty Ranking: 3

A Mexican biologist living in New York returns to his hometown after the death of his grandmother. Unlike the urban jungle of New York, his hometown in Michoacán is surrounded by the Monarch Butterflies he studies. His isolation abroad forces him to contemplate his new identity, displayed on screen in vivid magical scenes and memories.

From: Mexico, North America
Watch: Trailer, HBO Max
Next: Lingua Franca, I'm No Longer Here, I Carry You With Me

Son of Monarchs Breakdown

Mendel is fated to test gene editing theories on Monarch butterflies. He’s both named after the father of modern genetics and hails from Angangueo, the main access point for the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve in Mexico. However, the coldness of his job, working in a laboratory in New York, doesn’t match the warmth of his memories growing up at home. The many shots of butterflies under the microscope being picked apart by Mendel’s scalpel removes the majesty of the butterflies and displaces Mendel from his past. At his work, the butterflies are just instruments to test the latest gene editing technology. Whereas, outside of work, they remind him of his home.

As the film progresses, Mendel seems conflicted with how he coldly pulls apart the Monarch butterflies at work. It’s implied that their beauty inspired him to become a scientist and they also appear in some of his happiest memories, as alluded to in the film’s flashbacks. Even in the narrative, he speaks of their majesty and mythology – that they are the souls of the dead returning home, and that they can even perceive mountains that have been hidden for millennia. From the way he dreams and speaks about them, he appears to revere them, instead of wanting to change them. The microscope shots of Mendel dissecting them runs against his thoughts and words.

A few times in the film, the director shoots Mendel in bed with a swarm of butterflies sitting on his body. The image emphasizes Mendel’s affinity for the Monarch butterfly. They like him, travel across imaginary borders to foreign lands before returning home. Their secrets are also hidden, just like Mendel’s buried trauma. These butterflies come to symbolize both his personal past (as the scene pops up when his traumatic nightmares surface) as well as his Mexican identity. Editing their genes perhaps symbolizes how he is also losing his own identity in New York. He’s lost touch with his family and the brother he looked up to and longs for reconnection when he returns home after his Grandmother’s death. At home, he spends his time reliving memories with his friends and family instead of speaking of his new life in New York. When the only colleague he identifies with leaves, he becomes even more lost abroad, which reflects in his attitude – ghosting his white girlfriend and showing no pride in his accomplishments. To regain his self, he has to embrace the butterfly and revere it. So he edits himself to pay respects to the animal that represents home.

Son of Monarchs is a brilliant character study of a Mexican scientist in a foreign land. Like other film’s that focus on the immigrant experience in New York – Lingua Franca, I’m No Longer Here – he doesn’t quite feel at home, and his thoughts are conveyed uniquely through his symbolic relationship with the butterfly. The only distractions are the side narratives which feel a bit empty due to the lack of exposition. These include name dropping the Trump presidency and immigrant crisis without development as well as leaving Mendel’s family relationships undercooked. The butterflies and Tenoch Huerta (who plays Mendel) are the crux of this film.

What to Watch Next

If you’re looking for more indie movies featuring the immigrant experience in New York, check out Lingua Franca and I Carry You With Me. The latter also features a lot of jumping back and forth into the memories of the main characters. There’s also I’m No Longer Here, which follows a similar Mexico-New York-Mexico arc with more of a character study like Son of Monarchs.

Or for more small town Mexico films, you could try Nudo Mixteco, an anthology film set during the Festival of San Mateo in Oaxaca, or Kings of Nowhere, a documentary that follows the last few residents of a flooded town in Northwestern Mexico.

Lastly if you want to watch more movies of protagonists identifying with animals – try Awakening of the Ants from Costa Rica or Aronofsky’s Black Swan.

Geographies of Solitude – AFI Fest 2022

Geographies of Solitude has many impressive shots of Nova Scotia’s Sable Island, a remote island almost 200 miles off the Canadian coast in the Atlantic Ocean. It starts with one of the most memorable shots, a night sky with more stars than you’ve likely ever seen in the sky before. The sheer number of stars makes the shot appear like an impressionistic painting, and the light is so bright, you even get to see a very clear silhouette of a person walking across the horizon. It’s an almost ASMR-type experience watching the opening with its complimentary ambient soundscape. It feels like you could watch the whole film without dialogue as the images and sound lull you into a trance, that it’s a surprise when there’s speech and we’re introduced to Zoe.

Zoe has been living on the island for over 40 years, mostly alone. We follow her as she explores the 12 square mile island every day to log any changes in the environment. She carries a kit with sampling pots and a notepad to capture anything new and log anything different she might see. Some days she might find a dead bird and on others she might encounter a new insect she hasn’t seen before, however, most days are repetitive logging exercises that track very small changes on the island. Despite the beautiful remote location, Zoe’s existence feels very monotonous and lonely.

The filmmaker, Jacquelyn Mills, takes the filmmaking to similarly exhaustive levels. Almost everything is shot using 16mm film, some of which is processed with a variety of experimental methods such as with peat, yarrow, and seaweed. Mills also pushes the soundtrack to the extreme with insect inspired melodies – literally music created to the steps of the local bugs. Both fit the subject of the documentary, as the experimental filmmaking matches Zoe’s own scientific experiments. However, the experimenting feels too exhaustive. There’s so much experimenting, it feels like the point of the experiments in the first place has been forgotten.

There’s a moment near the end of Geographies of Solitude in which Zoe questions the meaning of her own life. Her answer is a little melancholic as she seems to express doubt about her choice to live on the island for 40 years. She wonders if she’s stretched her life too long on the island and spent too much time away from everything else. The film feels a bit similar. The filmmakers have gone to extraordinary levels to make something unique – soaking film in peat and making music from bugs, but like Zoe’s endless logging, what is the point. Despite the beautiful location and beautiful shots, Geographies of Solitude is imbued with a melancholy for the futility of it all.

Head to our AFI Fest 2022 Hub for more reviews from AFI Fest 2022.