Inside the year’s most meta film
How upcoming comedydrama BLACK BEAR deconstructs the very process of filmmaking
THE PROLOGUE TO Black Bear sees a writer-director named Allison, played by Aubrey Plaza, take a seat at her writing table and begin the script for a film called Black Bear. Which is pretty much exactly how the film’s actual writer-director, Lawrence Michael Levine, kicked things off as well. “The movie is a look at the process that I was going through,” he says, “which was: I went in my office, and I looked out into an abyss and characters started talking to me. I just kind of recorded it.”
The first half of the film begins fairly straightforwardly: Allison escapes to a cabin in the woods, seeking film ideas and inspiration, where she stays with a bickering couple, Blair and Gabe, played by Sarah Gadon and Christopher Abbott respectively. An excruciating, passive-aggressive love triangle of sorts soon emerges. Levine started writing the script in 2017, when the Donald Trump era (“and I like that we can talk about it in the past,” he notes) had just begun; he was inspired by the tone of that period. “The conversations [at that time] were really terrible. You found yourself arguing with people you agreed with.”
Halfway through the film, however, there’s an abrupt and jarring gear-shift. The same actors suddenly seem to play different characters, and the lines of fiction and reality blur. To say any more would be to get into spoilers — suffice to say that it becomes a film about the very act of making a film. Levin describes this part of his screenwriting process as “spontaneous”, without a plan. “I didn’t really know where any of it was going. But I was open to whatever happened. I was pretty tired of working in the conventional three-act structure.”
As a football pundit might put it, it’s a film of two halves. But it’s never clear which half is “real”, so to speak. That’s deliberate, says Levine. “Neither [part] is real. And both of them are real!” he laughs. “I felt like keeping things in that spirit was more interesting, to not give the viewer the satisfaction of something concrete to hold on to. I think it’ll work for some audience members and not for others. Personally,
I felt like I wanted to see movies that were a little messier — that didn’t purport to have the answers.”
Not that the mind-bending isn’t rooted in the film’s themes. Just as the characters are all messing with each other in some way, so the filmmaker is messing with us. “It felt really right for this movie, which was about gaslighting in the first place,” Levin explains. “Since the movie was about people lying to each other, it seemed right to toy with the audience in the same way.” Having your head messed with has never been so satisfying.
CINDERELLA (SPRING, IN CINEMAS) BETH WEBB, CONTRIBUTING EDITOR
The director of low-key teen triumph Blockers turning Billy Porter into a fairy godmother is all the convincing
I need to watch this fairy-tale musical comedy. If you need more convincing, how about the wickedly talented Idina Menzel playing a “not evil stepmother”? Or Pierce Brosnan dusting off those Mamma Mia!worthy pipes? Porter has promised a modern shake-up of our glass-slippered gal, so if like me you could use an injection of bibbidibobbidi-boo after a hellish 2020, Kay Cannon’s Cinderella might be just the ticket.
LINE OF DUTY: SEASON 6 (SPRING, BBC ONE) BOYD HILTON, CONTRIBUTING EDITOR
I recently re-watched vintage episodes of Line Of Duty and I’m in awe of how writer Jed Mercurio keeps the formula so thrillingly fresh series after series. There is nothing else on TV quite as relentlessly propulsive and finely honed as his storytelling. Now, after a Covid-enforced interruption in production left fans sucking on diesel, the painful wait for this new sixth season is nearly over, and we’ll get to see if new guest lead Kelly Macdonald survives beyond the first episode.
THE UNBEARABLE WEIGHT OF MASSIVE TALENT (19 MARCH, IN CINEMAS) JOHN NUGENT, NEWS EDITOR
Nicolas Cage has played everything from a crack-addicted cop to a stunt motorcyclist with his head on fire — but in the splendidly titled The Unbearable Weight Of Massive Talent, he takes on perhaps his most challenging role yet: Nicolas Cage. A typically strange and atypically meta high-concept comedy, this sees Cage playing a version of himself, confronting his wilder ’90s personas, in a story that also somehow includes a Mexican drug cartel. I’ve been excited for this ever since Cage told me last year that the role involves him “‘taking the piss’, as they say, out of myself.” Pass the crack pipe — things are going to get weird.
MYTHIC QUEST: TITAN’S RIFT (2021, APPLE TV+) MIKE CATHRO, DEPUTY ART DIRECTOR
In my own quest to brighten up lockdown, I turned to Mythic Quest: Raven’s Banquet, a comedy about the fictional studio of a World Of Warcraft-like video game from It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia’s Rob Mcilheney, that answers questions like, “What do you do when Nazis love your game?” I can’t wait for the new series after the one-off Mythic Quest: Quarantine, which pokes fun at Zoom calls but also tells a surprisingly moving story about being alone during lockdown. If MQ can deliver a punch like this during these crazy times, I can’t see a global pandemic slowing them down any time soon.
WHAT I’M WATCHING... VANESSA KIRBY ON THE JINX: THE LIFE AND DEATHS OF ROBERT DURST/THE WORK (BOTH AVAIILABLE ON PRIME VIDEO AND TO DOWNLOAD)
“I love documentaries, and I want to recommend something that perhaps people haven’t seen already. If you want to watch the best documentary made, it’s probably The Jinx: The Life And Deaths Of Robert Durst. My God, it’s brilliant. It’s the best kind of crime/murder documentary thing I’ve ever seen. It’s absolutely amazing, it blows your mind. I’ve also just watched a brilliant documentary film called The Work. It’s about a four-day therapy course in a state prison, and they bring in a few civilians to join in the course with them. It’s so interesting seeing inmates going through the process alongside technically non-criminal people, and it’s really profound and so moving to watch.”