Movie Reviews
‘Marianne’ Review: Isabelle Huppert’s One-Woman Conceptual Art Project Sparks Deep Thoughts and Profound Annoyance
Well, that’s a wrap. As I look back on my two-decade tenure at Variety, I’m incredibly proud of the 2,000-plus reviews that the publication (and you, my readers) have entrusted me with. It’s the greatest privilege any film critic could ask for. And yet, I can’t shake the responsibility of what I refer to as my “guilt list”: all the films I’ve seen, but didn’t have the time to review. Most critics don’t have this problem. They have clear-cut assignments, which they fulfill in time for a film’s release. At an industry paper like Variety, however, we endeavor to cover as many films as humanly possible, from Hollywood blockbusters to relatively obscure art films and indies. And because that mission matters to me, I don’t forget the ones that slip through the cracks.
Maybe it was something I saw at a festival, but couldn’t get around to, like György Pálfi’s dialogue-free “Hen” (which ranks right up there with Cannes sensation “Eo,” but never got the same critical attention) or Jack Begert’s smart, self-questioning Sundance orphan “Little Death,” which radically pivots from jaded industry cynicism to something more life-affirming midway through. Or else a movie looking for distribution that just might have found a home if I’d only had time to review it, such as Ari and Ethan Gold’s resonant, one-shot “Brother Verses Brother,” a Linklater-esque walk-and-talk gem that shadows the pair around San Francisco. I bear the responsibility of not covering these and so many odd outliers, from fringe offerings like “Abruptio,” a serial killer thriller made entirely with puppets, to Andy Warhol’s “San Diego Surf” (thought lost until 2012), in which Taylor Mead takes an enthusiastic interest in SoCal water sports.
I reckon I have time to scratch just one of these oversights off my guilt list before leaving, and so I find myself circling back to an earnest little movie called “Marianne,” whose squeaky-wheel director, Michael Rozek, has been pestering me on X for more than a year. Rozek, who felt compelled to make his first feature late in life, describes the project as a “revolutionary one-woman film,” starring my all-time favorite actress, Isabelle Huppert. So after several frustrated attempts, I finally made time to watch it (since Rozek claims a release is coming later this year).
Looking elegant as ever, Huppert appears with script in hand, half-reading, half-reciting a long, self-important monologue, written by Rozek. It’s not so much a performance as a run-through, shot in several long takes in which the camera zooms, wobbles and repositions itself while she speaks. Alas, English is not Huppert’s native language, and though gravitas comes easy, the red-headed actress makes strange pauses and even stranger gestures, which can be disconcerting. Huppert reacts to the text as it leaves her mouth, when we ought to believe that these words are hers (or “Marianne’s”) to begin with.
How Rozek convinced the courageous French star to do this, I can only imagine, but accepting such an assignment is the kind of fearless act we’ve come to appreciate from Huppert, who’s played a demented disciplinarian in “The Piano Teacher” and a woman excited by assault in “Elle” — risky roles few would even consider, much less embrace. A few years back, I managed to catch Huppert onstage. She was performing “Mary Said What She Said,” an avant-garde one-woman show directed by Robert Wilson, which she has toured around the world. I can only assume Rozek must have seen this as well, since it was around the time he made “Marianne” (three years ago now), and yet, he opted not to emulate it.
In that piece, Huppert “played” Mary Queen of Scots (in the sense that she “plays” a character named Marianne in “Marianne,” making no attempt to embody or otherwise become a different person). The French star moved energetically back and forth, up and down the stage — it was a positively calisthenic performance — as she delivered her lines in double time. I’m no expert on Brecht, but this seems like a classic example of the “alienation effect,” whereby audiences are intended to be made aware of the theatrical artificiality of the experience.
Rozek mischievously seeks something similar. Huppert spends most of “Marianne” seated on an expensive blue couch with his script in her hands, holding what’s meant to feel like a one-way conversation with the audience — more of a lecture, really, as “Marianne” represents Rozek’s manifesto about what is “real” in a medium where every creative choice is constructed. Plots aren’t real. Stories aren’t real. Lord knows reality TV isn’t real.
“Wake up!” Huppert screams at one point, looking directly into the camera. “Be real!”
Who is Rozek chiding exactly? And who exactly does this indignant idealist suspect is “suppressing” his film? (That’s the word he keeps using on X to describe a dynamic in which buyers aren’t swarming to release Rozek’s tedious disquisition on all that’s wrong with the film industry today.) There’s no such conspiracy. The truth is, nobody cares. He might as well carve it up into 30-second clips and share it on TikTok. Responding as someone who found “Marianne” too pedantic to watch through to the end until now — but who identifies with many of Rozek’s frustrations — I would argue that cinema can achieve much nobler goals than “realism.”
Consider this: A photograph captures whatever appears directly in front of the camera, but it’s still composed, excluding whatever exists beyond the frame. It’s far more difficult to create something expressionistic — that is, an entirely stylized alternate reality — that audiences still find engaging, relatable and emotionally true. Picture Jean Cocteau’s “Beauty and the Beast,” the best of Tim Burton’s films or anything brought to life from scratch by brilliant animation artists. That should be the goal: achieving some kind of communion between the audience and whoever they’re watching on-screen. That’s what Rozek (in his “revolutionary” way) imagines he’s offering with “Marianne.” But it’s also what the most bottom-line-minded studio execs most want when attempting to make a hit popcorn movie.
About midway through, Huppert-as-Marianne says, “Some will say, ‘This is not a film. This is a play.’” Why is Rozek being so defensive? Audiences aren’t as dumb as the film implies — certainly not the ones who’d seek out and watch something as nontraditional as “Marianne.” Neither are distributors and other would-be backers, any of whom can see that such a project, while not without merit, stands no chance of financial success (budgeted at an estimated $350,000, it will be lucky to break even). “Marianne” is a film, just not a very good one — it’s nowhere near as effective as Julian Rosefeldt’s “Manifesto,” in which we sit riveted as a shape-shifting Cate Blanchett recites a range of world-changing treatises, from Karl Marx to Dogma 95. The validity of his argument aside, Rozek may as well be screaming into the void.
I don’t recall Martin Luther complaining, after nailing his 95 theses to the Castle Church door, that a bidding war didn’t immediately break out among publishers to reprint his grievances. “Marianne” means well, but comes from a place of profound naivete. It’s meant to get audiences thinking about what they watch — the “content” they consume — by raising awareness of what film can be. But it hasn’t figured out the carrot that will entice them to hear its message. If even a die-hard Huppert admirer like me has trouble getting through it, why would a casual cinephile bother?
“They think that you need to escape,” Huppert says, “to forget … your pain.” The royal “they” in this case are “the suits” who call the shots and hold the purse strings. Rozek believes that he’s on to something new when he suggests that if the film industry would only “help you get to the bottom of your pain, instead of numb it,” they’d have people lining up to pay. Sounds great, but movies don’t work that way, and “Marianne” isn’t well written enough — not performed with sufficient conviction — to prove otherwise.
Sure, it can be demoralizing for intelligent adults to investigate what’s available at their local megaplex and see only prequels, sequels, spinoffs and superhero movies. But tens of thousands of films are made each year, and quite a few of them break the rules, defy conventional narrative expectations and smack us deep in our souls. To repeat Bergman (as paraphrased in the film), the greatest filmmakers capture life in a reflection. Film is a looking glass — a role it plays quite literally here when the scene changes and Huppert reads the “love chapter” from I Corinthians into the mirror.
In its most profound moments, “Marianne” alludes to mortality, to “real life.” But it doesn’t dare suggest what others have (here I’m thinking of Kubrick at the end of “Eyes Wide Shut”), that movies may illuminate life, but they can’t replace it. Now, I say this as someone who’s spent nearly as many hours in the dark vicariously sharing the lives of others — imaginary people, no less — as I have engaging with real people: In order to succeed as a revolutionary act, “Marianne” must achieve the kind of cathartic epiphany Rozek refers to, but ultimately fails to deliver. It needs to serve up an insight that hasn’t already occurred to us, rather than a Holden Caufield-callow attack on phoniness. Alternately, at any point, Huppert could interrupt herself, stare the audience straight in the face and advise them to turn off, walk out and experience the world.
That, my dear Marianne, is what it means to get real.
‘4’, the opening track on Richard D James’ (Aphex Twin) self titled 1996 album is a piece of music that beautifully balances the chaotic with the serene, the oppressive and the freeing. It’s a trick that James has pulled off multiple times throughout his career and it is a huge part of what makes him such an iconic and influential artist. Many people have laid the “next Aphex Twin” label on musicians who do things slightly different and when you actually hear their music you realise that, once again, the label is flawed and applied with a lazy attitude. Why mention this? Well, it turns out we’ve been looking for James’ heir apparent in the wrong artform. We’ve so zoned in on music that we’ve not noticed that another Celtic son of Cornwall is rewriting an art form with that highwire balancing act between chaos and beauty. That artist is writer, director and composer Mark Jenkin who over his last two feature films has announced himself as an idiosyncratic voice who is creating his very own language within the world of cinema. Jenkin’s films are often centred around coastal towns or islands and whilst they are experimental or even unsettling, there is always a big heart at the centre of the narrative. A heart that cares about family, tradition, culture, and the pull of ‘home’. Even during the horror of 2022’s brilliant Enys Men you were anchored by the vulnerability and determination of its main protagonist.
This month sees the release of Jenkin’s latest feature film, Rose of Nevada, which is set in a fractured and diminished Cornish coastal town. One day the fishing boat of the film’s title arrives back in harbour after being missing for thirty years. The boat is unoccupied. And frankly that is all the information you are going to get because to discuss any more plot would be unfair on you and disrespectful to Jenkin and the team behind the film. You the viewer should be the one who decides what it is about because thematically there are so many wonderful threads to pull on. This writer’s opinions on what it is about have ranged from a theme of sacrifice for the good of a community to the conflict within when part of you wants to run away from your roots whilst the other half longs to stay and be a lifelong part of its tapestry. Is it about Brexit? Could be. Is it about our own relationships with time and our curation of memory? Could be. Is it about both the positives and negatives of nostalgia? Could be. As a side note, anyone in their mid-40s, like me, who came of age in the 1990s will certainly find moments of warm recognition. Is the film about ghosts and how they haunt families? Could be…I think you get the point.
The elements that make the film so well balanced between chaos and calm are many. It is there in the differing performances between the brilliant two lead actors George MacKay and Callum Turner. It is there in the sound design which fluctuates from being unbearably harsh and metallic, to lulling and warm. It is there in the editing where short, sharp close ups on seemingly unimportant factors are counterbalanced with shots that are held for just that little bit too long. For a film set around the sea, it is apt that it can make you feel like you’re rolling on a stomach churning storm one minute, or a calming low tide the next. Dialogue can be front and centre or blurred and buried under static. One shot is bathed in harsh sunlight whilst the next can be drowned in interior shadows.
Rose of Nevada is Mark Jenkin’s most ambitious film to date yet he has not lost a single iota of innovation, singularity of vision or his gift for telling the most human of stories. It is a film that will tell you different things each time you see it and whilst there are moments that can confuse or beguile, there is so much empathy and love that it can leave you crying tears of emotional understanding. It is chaotic. It is beautiful. It is life……
Rose of Nevada is released on the 24th April.
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Review by Simon Tucker
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‘Hen’ movie review: György Pálfi pecks at Europe’s migrant crisis through the eyes of a chicken
A rogue chicken observes the world around it—and particularly the plight of immigrants in Greece—in Hen, which premiered at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival and is now playing in Prague cinemas (and with English subtitles at Kino Světozor and Edison Filmhub). This story of man through the eyes of an animal immediately recalls Robert Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar (and Jerzy Skolimowski’s more recent EO), but director and co-writer György Pálfi (Taxidermia) maintains a bitter, unsentimental approach that lands with unexpected force.
Hen opens with striking scenes inside an industrial poultry facility, where eggs are laid, processed, and shuttled along assembly lines of machinery and human hands in an almost mechanized rhythm of production. From this system emerges our protagonist: a black chick that immediately stands apart from the others, its entry into the world defined not by nature, but by an uncaring food industry.
The titular hen matures quickly within this environment before being loaded onto a truck with the others, presumably destined for slaughter. Because of her black plumage, she is singled out by the driver and rejected from the shipment, only to be told she will instead end up as soup in his wife’s kitchen. During a stop at a gas station, however, she escapes.
What follows is a journey through rural Greece by the sea, including an encounter with a fox, before she eventually finds refuge at a decaying roadside restaurant run by an older man (Yannis Kokiasmenos), his daughter (Maria Diakopanayotou), and her child. Discovered by the family’s dog Titan, she is placed in a coop alongside other chickens.
After finding a mate in the local rooster, she lays eggs that are regularly collected by the man; in one quietly unsettling scene, she watches him crack them open and cook them into an omelet. The hen repeatedly attempts to escape, as we slowly observe the true function of the property: it is being used as a transit point for migrants arriving in Greece by boat, facilitated by local criminal figures.
Like Au Hasard Balthazar and EO, Hen largely resists anthropomorphizing its animal protagonist. The hen behaves as a hen, and the humans treat her accordingly, creating a work that feels unusually grounded and almost documentary in texture. At the same time, Pálfi allows space for the audience to project meaning onto her journey, never fully closing the gap between instinct and interpretation.
There are moments, however, where the film deliberately leans into stylization. A playful montage set to Ravel’s Boléro captures her repeated escape attempts from the coop, while a romantic musical cue underscores her brief pairing with the rooster. These sequences do not break the realism so much as refract it, gently encouraging us to read emotion into behavior that remains, on the surface, purely animal.
One of the film’s central narrative threads is the hen’s search for a safe space to lay her eggs without them being taken away by the restaurant owner. This deceptively simple instinct becomes a powerful thematic mirror for the film’s human subplot involving migrant trafficking. Pálfi draws a stark, often uncomfortable parallel between the treatment of animals as commodities and the treatment of displaced people as disposable bodies moving through a similar system of exploitation.
The film takes an increasingly bleak turn toward its climax as the migrant storyline comes fully into focus, sharpening its allegorical intent. The juxtaposition of animal and human vulnerability becomes more explicit, reinforcing the film’s central critique of systemic indifference and violence. While effective, this escalation feels unusually dark, and our protagonist’s unknowing role feels particularly cruel.
The use of animal actors in Hen is remarkable throughout. The hen—played by eight trained chickens—is seamlessly integrated into the film’s world, with seamless editing (by Réka Lemhényi) and staging so precise that at times it feels almost impossible without digital augmentation. While subtle effects work must assist at certain moments, the result is convincing throughout, including standout sequences involving a fox and a dog.
Zoltán Dévényi and Giorgos Karvelas’ cinematography is also impressive, capturing both the intimacy of the hen’s low vantage point and the broader Greek landscape with striking clarity. The camera’s proximity to the animal world gives the film a distinct visual grammar, grounding its allegory in tactile observation rather than abstraction.
Hen is a challenging but often deeply affecting allegory that extends the tradition of animal-centered cinema while pushing it into harsher political territory. Pálfi’s approach—unsentimental, patient, and often confrontational—ensures the film lingers long after its final images. It is not an easy watch, nor a comfortable one, but it is a strikingly original piece of filmmaking that uses its unusual perspective to cast familiar human horrors in a stark, unsettling new light.
NEW YORK (OSV News) – Many potential brides and grooms-to-be have experienced cold feet in the lead-up to their nuptials. But few can have had their trotters quite so thoroughly chilled as the previously devoted fiance at the center of writer-director Kristoffer Borgli’s provocative psychological study “The Drama” (A24).
Played by Robert Pattinson, British-born, Boston-based museum curator Charlie Thompson begins the film delighted at the prospect of tying the knot with his live-in girlfriend Emma Harwood (Zendaya). But then comes a visit to their caterers where, after much wine has been sampled, the couple wanders down a dangerous conversational path with disastrous results.
Together with their husband-and-wife matron of honor, Rachel (Alana Haim), and best man, Mike (Mamoudou Athie), Charlie and Emma take turns recounting the worst thing they’ve ever done. For Emma, this involves a potential act of profound evil that she planned in her mind but was ultimately dissuaded from carrying out, instead undergoing a kind of conversion.
Emma’s revelation disturbs all three of her companions but leaves Charlie reeling. With only days to go before the wedding, he finds himself forced to reassess his entire relationship with Emma.
As Charlie wavers between loyalty to the person he thought he knew and fear of hitching himself to someone he may never really have understood at all, he’s cast into emotional turmoil. For their part, Rachel and Mike also wrestle with how to react to the situation.
Among other ramifications, Borgli’s screenplay examines the effect of the bombshell on Emma and Charlie’s sexual interaction. So only grown viewers with a high tolerance for such material should accompany the duo through this dark passage in their lives. They’ll likely find the experience insightful but unsettling.
The film contains strong sexual content, including aberrant acts and glimpses of graphic premarital activity, cohabitation, a sequence involving gory physical violence, a narcotics theme, about a half-dozen uses of profanity, a couple of milder oaths, pervasive rough language, numerous crude expressions and obscene gestures. The OSV News classification is L — limited adult audience, films whose problematic content many adults would find troubling. The Motion Picture Association rating is R — restricted. Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian.
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