Mentioned this week: A drifter who may or may not sometimes transform into a crow
Five extremely abbreviated reviews
A lot of things happened this week and now it is Friday. But even the most fried attention span can take in the following brief Mentions. Ease into the weekend with a psychedelic toad, a proverbial mom, the concept of Canadian “national culture,” white-backed tulip chairs, and a sludge-like scallop dish.
Bird
FILM
Andrea Arnold’s latest injects her usual working-class narratives with a dose of the surreal. Twelve-year-old Bailey, who squats with her dad and half brother on a council estate in Kent, meets Bird, a drifter who may or may not sometimes transform into a crow. A story that could be mawkishly sentimental succeeds by tempering its fairy-tale elements with enough brutal, haunting, and hilarious moments (suitably scored by electronic musician Burial). By the film’s end, its titular character’s shape-shifting barely seems remarkable. How strange is a bird-man after you’ve watched Bailey’s dad (Barry Keoghan) try to pay for his wedding by singing Coldplay to a psychedelic toad?
Daniel Fraser
On the Clock
FICTION
Finally, a reprieve from the self-consciously surreal workplace novel. Instead of nudging alienated workers around outer space (Olga Ravn’s The Employees), a supernatural factory (Hiroko Oyamada’s The Factory), or a pirate ship (Hilary Leichter’s Temporary), Claire Baglin’s masterful debut, translated from the French by Jordan Stump, takes place in the terrestrial Normandy auto manufacturing districts of Baglin’s youth. One storyline, in which a child named Claire sees her father crushed by ill-paid factory work, nods to the nineteenth-century “social problem” novels of authors like Elizabeth Gaskell, who posited that industrialization prevented men from serving as good patriarchs. But a parallel narrative about teenage Claire’s fast food job pivots from the family to the individual, offering a Steinbeckian catalog of the occupational abuses endemic to unregulated temp work. Eschewing dystopia to revisit the moves of classic labor literature, Baglin asks — like the proverbial mom responding to her McDonald’s-craving child — why we make up bad jobs when we have plenty of workers’ rights violations at home.
Irene Connelly
Universal Language
FILM
If the concept of a Canadian “national culture” conjures the same kind of despair as the terms “brand loyalty” or “singles cruise,” Canadian filmmaker Matthew Rankin should be applauded for jettisoning the idea entirely from the Winnipeg of his latest film. The main character, played by Rankin and sharing his name, comes home to a version of the prairie city transformed, by magical fiat, into a neighborly Persian community. In this Winnipeg, Farsi has replaced English and Tim Hortons employees serve tea from samovars. A shotgun marriage between the poetic-realist tradition in Iranian cinema and the city’s brutalist architecture proves to be surprisingly harmonious, a genuine multicultural love match. The English title evokes the film’s utopian sensibility, but it’s the unexpectedly unmetaphorical Farsi title that catches the movie’s humor: آواز بوقلمون translates to The Song of the Turkey.
Juan Caicedo
TWA Hotel at JFK
TRAVEL
If you’re going out of town and your friends are unwilling to babysit your car on short notice, and the same car is saddled with a string of delinquent parking tickets, you could do worse than to use the long-term parking service at TWA Hotel, “the only on-airport hotel at New York’s JFK International Airport.” Designed by Finnish-born architect Eero Saarinen and constructed in 1962, when JFK was still called Idlewild, the curvaceous “head house” of the defunct Trans World Airlines is nowadays a try-hard nostalgia trap posing as a vacation destination. Across the penny-tiled foyer, enjoy the famous Sunken Lounge, done up in red and filled with white-backed tulip chairs in which you may swivel at your leisure so as to better peer through the grandiose faux-cockpit window at what is now Terminal 5 (JetBlue). But the real draw, I’m told, is the rooftop deck, where visitors can take in the timeless scent of jet exhaust while floating in an infinity pool beneath the permanent crosshatch of contrails overhead. All this, plus — I have it on good authority — the on-site garage is infrequently visited by tow trucks.
Jonah Walters
What Happened Was…
In Tom Noonan’s morose 1994 comedy, Jackie, an executive assistant at a law firm, invites her colleague Michael, a paralegal, over for dinner. Subverting the rom-com fantasy in which initial awkwardness gives way to love, Noonan’s characters remain completely unfathomable to each other — never more so, perhaps, than when Jackie prepares the main course: a sludge-like scallop dish, which she heats in the microwave before piling on Michael’s plate.
Alex Valenti
Next weekend, you can join us Sunday, September 21 from 10–6 at the Brooklyn Book Festival! We’ll be at at table 607, right outside Borough Hall, selling issues and merch at a discount. We’d love to see you there — come say hi!