By Steve Erickson

Pepe is an immense achievement: one of the most formally and politically radical narrative films to turn up on the international festival circuit in 2024.

Pepe, directed by Nelson Carlo de los Santos Arias. At the 2024 New York Film Festival, screening on October 5, 6, and 9.

Pepe sounds like a Netflix docuseries: a chronicle of the stranger-than-fiction fate of a hippo once owned by Pablo Escobar. Thankfully, Dominican director Nelson Carlo de los Santos Arias’ approach is infinitely more adventurous. This is an immense achievement: one of the most formally and politically radical narrative films to turn up on the international festival circuit in 2024. De Los Santos Arias uses the trials and tribulations of Pepe — granted the power of speech in a voice-over delivered in several languages — as an illustration of colonialism. The hippo’s parents were stolen from Namibia and brought to the Americas. But Pepe also works at face value as an exploration of animal rights. It delves into the consciousness of beasts — and the danger of humans misunderstanding it.

The very first shot of Pepe is a white frame. Visually, the only variation we see comes from damage to the film stock; the sound of a helicopter pilot calling out to a Corporal Gonzales intrudes upon the image’s blankness. Then, the hippo introduces himself. Named Pepe, he’s confused that he has been resurrected as a ghost. Caged in Pablo Escobar’s private zoo in his Hacienda Napoles estate, he escaped to the surrounding river (as did most of the other animals) following the drug lord’s 1993 death. What follows is not a straightforward, linear narrative, but a story that takes vast leaps in time and space. A group of German tourists are seen on safari in Namibia. The director De Los follows people and animals down the Magdalena river for brief intervals, moving on to another one after a few minutes. Rejected by Escobar’s menagerie, Pepe is forced to live on his own. One section details the rocky relationship of fisherman Candelario (Jorge Puntillon Garcia), who encounters the hippo while working, and his wife Bethania (Sor Maria Rios). These scenes are the ones where Pepe comes closest to conventional characters and storytelling, but they make up a small portion of the film.

De Los Santos Arias’ style is accomplished and eclectic,to say the least. He’s fond of stationary long shots. Often, the camera position, floated in a river, suggests a hippo-eyed-view, looking quizzically at people. Drones are used for distant, overhead views. On the one hand, the cinematography can be breathtakingly pretty,but Pepe never lets one forget the animal’s feelings of loss –and the military squad that is out to kill him. The calm of an aerial shot of Escobar’s mansion and its surrounding streets, as we watch cars slowly pass, is broken by pilots’ chatter. De Los Santos Arias lets these images play out, moving the camera further back, till he cuts to white. The film’s view of nature leans towards ‘objective’ abstraction; lush shots of the river are stripped of narrative intent. Genuine documentary footage is integrated with staged scenes.

Along with its fascinating visuals, Pepe is a film about language. The hippo speaks to us as a ghost, unable to understand his ability to talk. (Four actors, each speaking a different tongue, represent his voice.) I’ve often wondered: what do animals make of the symbolic value humans place on them? Could they understand it? Would goats be baffled by their association with witchcraft and the devil? Pepe muses on these and other issues. At one point, he gazes at his own representation: he glimpses a cartoon about his life that is being shown playing on a living room TV.

Does all that sound like it could be overly didactic? Pepe might have gone that way. A few scenes are close to being lectures in post-colonial theory. The film works so well because it focuses on the threatening drama of the present moment. Pepe speaks about his own experience and the way he’s perceived: “in their story, I became a monster, an Other that scared everyone.” Brought to the Americas, he’s seen as important only insofar as his story intersects with that of humans (especially one as infamous as Pablo Escobar.) In the end, he’s perceived as a danger, with has some basis in fact, given that his presence endangered local fishermen. Pepe is never seen as a being with a life that matters for its own sake.

Pepe has yet to be acquired by a U.S. distributor. (De Los Santos Arias’ previous film, Cocote, did receive a brief release here in 2018.) American audiences will encounter difficulties with this film: they’ve grown wary of subtitles, let alone the degree of experimentation Pepe embraces with a vengeance. But grappling with its eccentricities  is well worth the effort. De Los Santos Arias described his earlier feature, 2015’s Santa Teresa & Historias, as “an anarchic rebellion of multiple narratives, colors and formats…in a drive towards permanent revolution.” Pepe continues that fierce critical critique with a rare combo of formal beauty and political astuteness.

Steve Erickson writes about film and music for Gay City News, Slant Magazine, the Nashville Scene, Trouser Press, and other outlets. He also produces electronic music under the tag callinamagician. His latest album, Bells and Whistles, was released in January 2024, and is available to stream here.

Title: Notice to Quit (2024)
Director: Simon Hacker 👨🏼🇺🇸
Writer: Simon Hacker 👨🏼🇺🇸

Reviewed by Li 👩🏻🇺🇸

Technical: 3.25/5

In a solidly built feature debut by writer-director Simon Hacker, Notice to Quit follows a simple premise: A deadbeat dad who hasn’t seen his daughter in months suddenly finds himself saddled with her care. Said daughter, 10-year-old Anna (Kasey Bella Suarez), is distraught over her and her mom’s impending move from New York City to Florida (a “swamp,” Anna gripes). On the child’s last day in the city, she runs away to spend time with her dad, Andy (Michael Zegen).

The emotional beats of this fast-paced dramedy won’t surprise anyone. Across genres, from kids’ movie Despicable Me (2010) to the grittier Logan (2017), a cantankerous father figure is forced into babysitting a precocious young girl before softening towards her by film’s end. In Notice to Quit, washed up rental agent/hustler Andy and whipsmart Anna play their roles dutifully.

While it’s not the familiar plot that carries this film, Hacker deftly creates a bursting love letter to working class New Yorkers, in all their brash and unscrupulous swagger. Viewers find themselves thrown onto a roller coaster ride of chaos and city hijinks, recalling the punishing pace of Uncut Gems (but without the debilitating sense of dread). From finding a cockroach in a diner to arguing with your gruff-but-secretly-kind immigrant landlord, to having your financial solvency center around the city’s housing market, the movie taps into a very real New York experience—and splashes it on screen for audiences to laugh at (or commiserate with). 

Gender: 3.5/5
Does it pass the Bechdel Test? YES

Although Anna has a headlining role with plenty of screentime, Hacker clearly has his sights set on main character Andy. It’s Andy’s hectic day we follow, and Anna is simply the comet that’s come crashing into his punishing routine of showing apartments and ducking shady colleagues to whom he owes money. Anna does have a positive role as a kid who’s balanced as both street-smart yet vulnerable, but she remains two-dimensional throughout the film.

In a key role (albeit one that’s mostly offscreen), Anna’s mom Liz (Isabel Arraiza) avoids the tiresome stereotypes often applied to the exes of main male characters. Sure, she does gripe about Andy being a useless father, but viewers are given good reason to agree with her. (Andy is a mess.) So many scripts subtly chastise women for working full time, seen in Mrs. Doubtfire’s (1993) judgment of Sally Field’s career-oriented character, not to mention just about the entirety of the Christmas movie catalog. Notice to Quit never falls into the trope of suggesting that Liz is somehow overbearing, or needs to change.

But in the end, the cast is filled mostly with men. Brokers, butchers, landlords, doormen—working class New York looks like a man’s world. The only minor characters we see with more gender balance appear in expected places: caregivers such as Liz, who works as a hospital nurse, and Anna’s babysitter Maria (Feiga Martinez), plus a smattering of former and would-be tenants looking to rent from Andy. On the plus side, this depiction of the city doesn’t ring untrue; it just makes for another movie that doesn’t bother sketching outside gender conventions.

Race: 4/5

On the other hand, even with its white main character, Notice to Quit embraces the racial and ethnic diversity of its setting through supporting and background roles. This isn’t Sex and the City’s whitewashed brunch utopia, nor is this the “urban” (read: Black and Latino) hellscape regurgitated by so many movies centering around white leads from the 1980s and ‘90s. Having lived in New York City myself for over a decade, it’s hard to specify what makes Notice to Quit’s racial inclusivity so potent beyond the fact that it just “feels right.”

In the most prominent roles for people of color, Latina Suarez and Puerto Rican Arraiza play Anna and Liz, respectively. Their ethnicities are naturally woven into the film: Whether it’s speaking occasional Spanish, to Liz’s no-nonsense but loving approach to parenting Anna, cultural markers feel neither exotified nor ignored. Hacker’s comfort level around this comes into sharp focus when Anna translates for a man speaking Spanish to Andy. It’s a small but effective bit of scripting that puts control in the hands of Latinos as Andy is left out of the conversation—a subtle power shift that mirrors how, in most parts of New York City, white people are in the minority. Even if this only happens briefly, it’s a positive (and realistic) setup that doesn’t resort to dull cliches about Latinos being potentially violent or “scary” in order for them to briefly have the upper hand around a white protagonist.

Mediaversity Grade: B- 3.58/5

For a simplistic story about a guy struggling to balance the demands of work and family, Notice to Quit stands out more for its Technicolor rendering of New York City, and the way it paints its hustlers with humor and affection. As lead actor Zegen succinctly puts it himself, “It’s not a deep movie. It’s just a good time.”

A friend texted soon after I arrived in New York to see “McNeal,” the new play by Ayad Akhtar at Lincoln Center Theater’s Vivian Beaumont starring Oscar winner Robert Downey Jr. in his Broadway debut. The message was prompted by the recently published bombshell in the New Yorker about David Adjmi’s Tony-winning play “Stereophonic.”

Bear with me for a second — there’s a connection.

My friend, an L.A.-based screenwriter, is a superfan of “Stereophonic” and was upset when he read that the play seems to recycle a number of details found in “Making Rumours,” a memoir by sound engineer Ken Caillat, who worked on several Fleetwood Mac albums. The playwright has downplayed any direct link between the legendary rock group and his play, which dramatizes the tense recording sessions of a 1970s band uncannily like Fleetwood Mac perfecting a magnum opus strikingly similar to “Rumours.” No one has taken the denials seriously. The parallels are glaringly obvious. But the New Yorker article, echoing earlier reporting, raises more complicated questions.

“Seems as if David Adjmi is a liar and plagiarist,” my friend wrote, more in sorrow than in anger. “You could say the same about Shakespeare,” I tendentiously texted back from Penn Station. The lawyers will fight it out, I added, but I “don’t think this takes away from what was [artistically] accomplished.”

About two hours later, a version of this same debate was taking place in “McNeal,” a play about an old literary lion seemingly on the brink of being canceled who falls under the spell of AI. A modern-day Faust story, Akhtar’s drama turns Faust into a prize-winning author who, after succumbing to the temptation of ChatGPT, doesn’t so much mourn the loss of his soul as wage a literary defense of his new dark arts.

A ferociously ambitious, politically incorrect writer who has been drinking himself to death after his wife’s suicide, Jacob McNeal (Downey) wants nothing more than to receive the Nobel Prize in literature. But when his dream finally comes true, he’s rattled by the heightened scrutiny that comes with the international spotlight.

McNeal has a closet crammed with skeletons. He’s friends with a group of high-profile men who have been me-too-ed and fears he might be next. His mentally ill wife took her life after discovering that he was having an affair. Akhtar sets up multiple paths for McNeal’s downfall. But the play is more concerned with abstract questions about art and originality than with the fate of one morally shady writer.

How indebted can a novelist be to the work of other people? Where is the line between creativity and plagiarism? (Were Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides guilty of ripping off Homer?) If a writer gets an assist from a machine, can he legitimately claim authorship?

McNeal doesn’t subscribe to the Romantic view of the artist as solitary genius. His thinking is more aligned with that of literary scholar Harold Bloom, who contended that poems beget other poems, in a network of influence that owes as much to Darwin’s theory of evolution as to Freud’s notion of the Oedipus complex.

In his address to the Swedish Academy, McNeal argues for a more complex understanding of artistic originality by citing the example of “King Lear.” Shakespeare, McNeal posits, did something more radical than adapt “King Leir,” an anonymous Elizabethan play that he may have acted in. He rewrote the rules of tragedy, and in the process gave a glimpse of humanity’s moral and existential predicament that has yet to be matched.

“Put that original version of Leir into any of these fancy language models and run it through a hundred thousand times — you’ll never come close to reproducing the word order the Sweet Swan of Avon came up with,” McNeal asserts, as much in defense of his own borrowings as of Shakespeare’s.

Akhtar, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play “Disgraced,” is continuing an argument he found himself embroiled in after publishing his brilliant 2020 novel “Homeland Elegies.” That book blends fact and fiction to tell the story of how America became Donald Trump-ified.

In interviews, Akhtar was routinely asked to explain his rationale for not simply writing a memoir when so much of his family’s history is in the book. Why call it a novel and raise ethical questions about the uses of autobiography? His answer was consistently the same: He was in search of a deeper truth. Conceiving the book as a novel allowed him to transcend the literal record of his life. For a creative artist, sources matter less than how they’re redeployed.

Akhtar reanimates this dialectical discussion of artistic freedom in the fraught context of AI. The problem is that the play is overwhelmed with ideas, themes and talking points. “McNeal” is swirling with things to say about literature — how it’s created, where it gets its value and why its truth can be so dangerous — but it’s as if ChatGPT had been asked to spit out the pros and cons of advanced technology on the practice of literature. The human story gets lost in the shuffle.

In scenes with his worried doctor (an underutilized Ruthie Ann Miles) and enabling agent (a lively Andrea Martin), McNeal reveals himself to be a charming literary creep. A moral dinosaur, he admits to Natasha Brathwaite (Brittany Bellizeare), a New York Times arts writer doing a magazine profile on him, that he actually envies men like Harvey Weinstein for “getting what they wanted.” She’s impressed by his reckless candor but suspects his flamboyant “transparency” is a way of throwing her off the scent of a bigger scandal.

Downey’s McNeal has the chiseled masculine swagger of such writers as Richard Ford and Paul Auster. Physically, he’s Hollywood’s ideal of the successful novelist — lean of build, coiffed like a tidied-up aging rock star and dressed with a studied casualness that would cost a small fortune to replicate.

Andrea Martin in Lincoln Center Theater’s production of “McNeal.”

(Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman)

A film actor unaccustomed to having to articulate to the back row, Downey relies on the excessive amplification of Bartlett Sher’s production. But his characterization is properly scaled for the stage. McNeal’s ambivalence is boldly handled: Unbridled egotism is punctured with regret. Downey, who plunged into tech’s moral gray zones in his “Iron Man” outings, makes it possible for an audience to both deplore McNeal and delight in the abrasive pleasure of his company. What his impressively embodied portrayal can’t overcome is the play’s lifeless set of relationships.

McNeal is continually refining the prompts he feeds his new best friend, ChatGPT, to improve the literary quality of his manuscript drafts. He asks the program to upload his collected works along with other material, including “King Lear,” “Oedipus Rex,” a smattering of Ibsen, psychiatric papers and the journals of his late wife. It’s this last item that gets him in trouble with his son, Harlan (Rafi Gavron), who has detected in his father’s latest novel a short story that his mother wrote, her one and only literary legacy.

The father-son standoff, in which Harlan threatens to expose McNeal’s literary crime to the New York Times in revenge for the way he treated his mother, is strangely unaffecting. Akhtar keeps tossing out red herrings. I began to imagine the prompt the playwright might have issued to the blinking cursor of his own computer while starting “McNeal”: “Write a Jon Robin Baitz play in the pugilistic intellectual style of Ayad Akhtar, and make it as unwieldy as possible within a 90-minute running time.”

The artificiality of the protagonist’s interactions made me wonder if the whole play might be an AI dream. The scenes all have something in them that feels slightly off, whether it’s dialogue that’s a little too on the nose or behavior that seems hollow. Are these characters, I asked myself midway through the play, or ideas of characters? Is there a core to the story or just an endless supply of plot permutations?

The production design, swooshing across Michael Yeargan and Jake Barton’s set, creates a background blizzard of technological flashes and blips. Audiences are drawn into the inner workings of the protagonist’s iPhone through Barton’s projections. A deepfake of Downey’s McNeal blends the image of his wife with historical figures from his literary output, including Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater.

Akhtar clearly wants us to struggle to distinguish between reality and its AI-generated simulacrum. The question of perception, how we filter the world around us, has been a recurring theme in his playwriting. But it’s hard to sustain interest when a drama hasn’t given us sufficient reason to care about the characters. McNeal’s belated reckoning with Francine Blake (Melora Hardin), his former mistress whom he treated almost as badly as his wife, is no more meaningful to us than his reflex flirtations with Dipti (Saisha Talwar), his agent’s attractive 20-something assistant.

The plot, hinging on whether McNeal will face the consequences of his actions, is enlivened by Downey’s antihero bravado. But the play falls victim to AI‘s chief limitation — its emotional deadness.