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      Charles Melton, ‘May December’ Breakout Star, Is Transformed

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      I’ll admit it took me a while to notice the blood, which was wet and daubed onto his right cheekbone like a birthmark. In my defense, Charles Melton hadn’t noticed it either, even though the blood happened to be his.It was an unseasonably rainy November day in Los Angeles — a place where any evidence of the seasons is considered unseasonable — and I had gone to Melton’s house with a dual mission. The first was to discuss the new drama “May December,” in which the 32-year-old actor does more than just hold his own opposite Oscar-winning co-stars Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore: He gives the movie its bruised, beating heart.And the second mission? Well, that was to make some truly excellent kimchi.“These, you have to cut really thin,” Melton said, handing me a bulbous radish. We were in the kitchen of his cozy home in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles, preparing to slice and flavor vegetables under the watchful eye of his mother, Sukyong, who was visiting from Kansas. The 32-year-old Melton keeps his fridge so well-stocked with kimchi that he often sends friends home with extra jars of it. “Just remember, kimchi is a probiotic,” he said, feeding me a piece of seasoned cabbage.Six-foot-one, shaggy-haired and easygoing, Melton has the warm glow of a Himalayan salt lamp. (He also has a Himalayan salt lamp.) Though he spent six years playing a conceited jock on the CW teen soap “Riverdale,” Melton wears his beauty and brawn as lightly as a nice jacket, and while we cut vegetables and discussed “May December,” he tried to encourage me by pointing out his own errors.With Julianne Moore in “May December.” Melton played the part as if “you were watching somebody learning how to see and how to speak and how to walk,” the director Todd Haynes said.Netflix“I’ve already messed up,” he said after one particularly inelegant radish slice. Across the kitchen, his mother turned to us, somehow able to sense the misaligned cut. “If you hear my mom saying things in Korean,” he told me, “just assume that it’s all good things.”In “May December,” Melton plays Joe, a diffident 36-year-old father married to the much older Gracie (Moore). The two have seemingly managed to fashion a picture-perfect life — three children, two dogs and a beautiful home by the water — though the original sin of their union provides an awfully shaky foundation: They met when Gracie was a married housewife and Joe was just a seventh grader. Tabloid infamy followed as Gracie was convicted of raping Joe, bore his baby in prison and, after serving a yearslong sentence, married him and had two more children.Enter Elizabeth (Portman), an ambitious actress poised to play Gracie in a movie that will exhume the scandal this couple has worked so hard to move past. In a bid to have the story told their way, Gracie and Joe agree to let Elizabeth shadow them, but as the actress peppers the couple with invasive questions, poor Joe is finally forced to confront the enormity of what he’s locked away for so long. Robbed of a normal childhood by Gracie, Joe can’t quite articulate his feelings — sentences often get lodged in his throat — but in Melton’s hands, Joe’s wounded attempt to make sense of his situation is shattering.In May, after the film premiered to raves at the Cannes Film Festival, Haynes told me that Melton was its linchpin. “It’s a consummate performance by somebody who doesn’t even realize how thorough an actor he is yet,” Haynes said. And as with “Elvis” star Austin Butler, another hunk from the CW turned serious thespian, Melton’s breakthrough role has been drawing plenty of Oscar chatter: He recently earned a nomination for outstanding supporting performance from the Gothams, heady stuff for a man whose most significant laurel until now was a nomination for best kiss at the MTV Movie & TV Awards.As we spoke, Melton met every question with enthusiastic openness; aside from the way he covers his mouth when he giggles, he’s appealingly unguarded for an actor. At 32, he’s been pondering big questions about self and purpose, and our conversation offered such a welcome opportunity to go deep that he often dropped into dreamy reveries.“I can talk to you for hours,” he said as we took a break from grating radishes to nibble on apple slices and Korean pears in his living room. “I’m looking into your eyes and I’m like, ‘Oh my God.’”As he met my gaze, I looked at his cheek and noticed the blood. When did that get there? It wasn’t until he absently brushed his hand against his face that I put two and two together and looked down.“I think you might have cut yourself,” I told him.“Maybe,” he said, grinning. Then he glanced at his right hand, where a cut halfway up his middle finger had been gushing for who knows how long.“Oh my gosh,” he said, surprised. “There’s blood everywhere.”From the kitchen, his mother whipped her head around. “Blood?” she said. “I’m coming!”When he landed the role, “I definitely felt a pressure within myself: ‘Can I go there? Can I do this?’” Melton recalled. Ryan Pfluger for The New York TimesSURE, SOME INTERVIEWS benefit from a little spilled blood, but that’s usually meant in the metaphoric sense; Melton was already so willing to be vulnerable that he hardly needed a grating accident to hasten things. He told me that last summer, when he received the audition pages for “May December,” he was similarly ready to go deep.It was not long after Melton had wrapped the sixth season of “Riverdale,” which found his mind-controlled character stabbing comic-book hero Archie Andrews with one of the ancient Daggers of Megiddo. (This is just what happens on “Riverdale.”)As he read the lines and character description for Joe, “There was this sense of repression and loneliness that I related to,” he said. Those wouldn’t necessarily be the first two qualities you’d associate with Melton, an outgoing athlete who loves to hold a game night, but Joe’s predicament reminded him of a pep talk he’d gotten when he was 11: His father, on the verge of a yearlong deployment to Iraq and Afghanistan, pressed Melton to step up and take care of his mother and younger sisters in the interim, effectively becoming the man of the house.“As an 11-year-old kid, you’re like, ‘I’ll do it!’” Melton recalled. “I would never change anything I experienced — no one did anything wrong — but in looking at that part of my own experience and then looking at Joe, it’s that similarity of the feeling of stepping into something whether you’re ready for it or not.”He kept rerecording his “May December” self-tape for six hours until he was satisfied, then sent it over. Though Haynes was unfamiliar with Melton’s work and nearly discounted him because of his model-handsome headshot — “I just didn’t see how he would fit into this world,” the filmmaker told me — once he pressed play, Haynes was intrigued by Melton’s unique take on the character.“Charles just brought this sense of somebody who was almost preverbal, who was almost prenatal, like you were watching somebody learning how to see and how to speak and how to walk,” Haynes said. “He was extremely restrained and subtle in what he did.”After another taped audition, Melton was asked to fly to New York for a chemistry read with Moore, with whom he found an unexpected connection: They were both Army brats who had spent formative chunks of their childhood living on a military base in Juneau, Alaska, a link that lent them an easy rapport and helped him secure the role.“I definitely felt a pressure within myself: ‘Can I go there? Can I do this?’” Melton recalled. “‘I believe I can, but I don’t know what it looks like, so let me do everything underneath the sun to try to figure out what that is.’”To prepare, Melton threw himself into the role in any way he could think of. He spent hours every day consulting with his acting coach and therapist, trying to figure out Joe’s tricky, tangled internal wiring. He rewatched “Brokeback Mountain,” studying the ways Heath Ledger expressed repression in his physical bearing, and “In the Mood for Love,” observing how Tony Leung conveyed so much inner turmoil without saying a thing. And after conferring with Haynes, Melton decided to gain 40 pounds for the role, smoothing out his sharp jawline and adding a suburban-dad paunch.“The reward was me discovering my process,” he said. At his dining-room table, Melton demonstrated by conjuring up Joe for me: He curled his lips inward, setting them in a tense horizontal line, then slumped forward, defeated and deflated. “His reality is so distorted by the projections of society, the last thing he wants to do is to show himself,” Melton said, letting the bright light behind his eyes go dim. “He protects himself, even in his body.”Melton in “Riverdale.” Haynes wasn’t familiar with his work when he auditioned for “May December.”CWThe only thing that threatened to undo him was a determination not to disappoint. It all came to a head in one of the film’s most affecting scenes, where Joe and his teenage son, Charlie, share a joint on their roof. Charlie and his twin sister are about to graduate from high school and after their parents become empty-nesters, Joe will have to confront the ugly reality of his marriage to Gracie in a way he has assiduously avoided. Alarmed, Charlie tells him not to worry. “That’s all I do,” Joe replies, teary and close to retching.After a few takes, Haynes felt they had what they needed, but Melton was unsure: Shouldn’t he take this moment to go bigger, to give more, to prove himself somehow? He kept asking for additional takes, but each iteration felt strained, bringing him further and further from Joe and closer to the pernicious fear that he was a terrible actor. Eventually, he came down from the roof to confer with Haynes and burst into tears.“I think those came from selfish ideas of wanting to be at a certain place, where I forgot at the moment, ‘Hey, your job is to tell the character’s story, not yours,’” he said. What had gotten in the way of that connection? “Maybe wanting to be seen,” he said, trying to parse what exactly he meant by that. “I want to be seen, but I don’t want to be seen, right? But being seen for what you do is still a part of you being seen.”Melton paused. “I don’t even know what I’m saying right now,” he admitted, laughing. “I’m just making kimchi.”LATER, WITH THE task at hand finished and his mother retired to the couch to watch Korean dramas on her phone, Melton gave me a tour of his house. Downstairs, in a low-lit room he nicknamed the “Pavilion of Dreams,” Melton put Radiohead’s “Kid A” on the record player, slid open the glass door to his rain-lashed backyard deck, and lit a cigarette. He wanted to talk more about the idea that had tripped him up earlier, the tension between wanting to be seen and, at other times, striving to disappear.“Sometimes I feel this push and pull of, am I white enough, am I American enough, am I Asian enough?” Melton said. Growing up in military bases all over the world with a white father and Korean mother, he felt a constant need to assimilate that often left him feeling unmoored: “I remember having a dream around that time, like if you cut two cars in half and put the front ends together and one is Korean and the other one is American. Which driver’s seat do you want to sit in?”After five years stationed in Korea when he was a young boy, Melton’s family moved to Texas, where his dyed-blond K-pop bangs and affinity for taekwondo went over less well. He soon adopted the uniform there — Vans, cargo shorts and oversized Hawaiian shirts — and even when his family packed up again and moved to a military base in Ansbach, Germany, Melton couldn’t quite let go of the American boy he’d worked so hard to become, continuing to wear a puka-shell necklace and Hollister shirts shipped overseas.“I want to be seen, but I don’t want to be seen, right?,” Melton said.Ryan Pfluger for The New York TimesFor his last three years of high school, Melton’s family moved to Manhattan, Kan. “Being an Asian American kid and that not being a commonality, especially in Kansas, what was my bridge to assimilate?” he said. He found it in football: Though he began disastrously, finishing dead-last in every practice sprint and vomiting in front of teammates, he applied himself and worked his way up, eventually becoming an all-star and earning a slot as a defensive back at Kansas State University, where he was nicknamed “Kamikaze” for hitting harder than anyone else on the team.“I’m checking all the boxes, right? ‘American,’” he said. “But a big thing to process for me was, what is my identity outside of this?”Around that time, on the way to football practice, he heard a radio advertisement for a talent showcase that asked, “Do you want to be a star?” Melton had always dreamed of becoming an actor, but when he was a child, his father warned him that the only Asians who succeeded in Hollywood were martial artists like Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan. Still, he drove 45 minutes to the open call in Salina, Kan., where he was asked to read ad copy for Twizzlers, model for talent scouts and perform Ben Stiller’s airplane freakout scene from “Meet the Parents” onstage.He came out of the showcase with 20 callbacks and a brand-new lease on life. “It was so exhilarating to be seen in a way that wasn’t me being seen, but what I was choosing to do,” he said. “It seemed like there were no boundaries.” Though he was used to toggling between different identities, acting offered something way beyond assimilation — it felt, if anything, more like expansion.The entirety of what he wanted out of life shifted very suddenly, and Melton dropped out of college, moved to Los Angeles, and spent the next few years modeling, walking dogs, delivering Chinese takeout and auditioning for anything he could. Eventually, he secured “Riverdale,” which led to roles in films like “The Sun Is Also a Star” and “Bad Boys for Life,” as well as a featured spot in Ariana Grande’s presciently titled music video, “Break Up With Your Girlfriend, I’m Bored.”But after leveling up as an actor with “May December,” Melton could be at a career crossroads: Will Marvel come calling, ready to poach a hot new name with superhero looks, or will Melton throw in with the likes of Butler and Jacob Elordi, who are using their heat to help finance auteur-driven projects? “All one hopes for with an actor like Charles is that he gets roles offered to him and projects coming to him that excite and continue to stretch him,” Haynes said.The monthslong awards gantlet will surely raise his profile even more, and Melton is excited to embark on all it has to offer, though he’s lately tried to ground himself in simpler pleasures, like family visits, camping trips and accepting licks to the face from his Siberian husky, Neya. “I have good people in my life, Kyle, really good people who know me and love me,” he said. “I don’t need any more love, but if I get it, it’s awesome.”At the very least, Melton is about be seen in a whole new way, and he’ll have to wrestle with all that entails. But as we parted ways — me, with several jars of take-home kimchi and him, with a bandaged middle finger — he promised that no matter what happens over the next few months, he’ll be ready for it.“I’ll still be me,” he said. “Maybe I’ll just have nicer shoes.” More

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      Can a Rom-Com Make Sense in Dark Times? Yes, When It’s From This Master.

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      Aki Kaurismaki’s “Fallen Leaves” is both magical and despairing, born of what the Finnish auteur’s stars say is an unusual shooting approach.There’s a detail in Aki Kaurismaki’s brilliant new gem of a comedy, “Fallen Leaves,” that I didn’t notice — even after two viewings — until one of its stars pointed it out to me. When the heroine goes to work as a dishwasher at a dingy Helsinki bar, there’s a shot of an oversize calendar. The year is 2024. “This is actually, you know, like a sci-fi film,” the actor Jussi Vatanen told me in a video call.As absurd as it sounds, there’s truth in that statement. The carefully constructed, dry-as-a-bone romantic comedy (in theaters now) technically takes place in the future. However, if you didn’t notice the calendar, you might assume it’s a period piece — one from the 1980s perhaps, given the clothing and décor — except for the fact that the radio is broadcasting reports from the ongoing war in Ukraine.It’s all a bit disorienting, but it’s also part of the magic of the latest from the Finnish master. Alma Poysti, the other star of the new film, described “Fallen Leaves” as something out of a “fairy tale,” adding, “He probably suggests to throw logic out of the window.”Perhaps one reason I’m so taken with “Fallen Leaves” is that it does feel like an uplifting fairy tale despite the despair that initially surrounds the characters. It’s a love story with a happy ending — and a cute dog to boot — that nonetheless throws together two people whose loneliness is palpable, who exist in an unforgiving world, where work and joy is often scarce. To love “Fallen Leaves” is to submit to the often hilarious deadpan rhythms that are characteristic of Kaurismaki’s work but also to its unrepentant optimism.One of Poysti’s co-stars in “Fallen Leaves” is a four-legged actor who happens to be the director’s dog, Alma. Malla Hukkanen/SputnikAt a moment in the release calendar when seeing a quote-unquote serious film often requires wrestling with humanity’s ills, “Fallen Leaves” is a rom-com from a great auteur that, in its brief run time, offers a balm for dark times. It’s not frivolous, but at the same time it’s genuinely heartwarming.Kaurismaki has called “Fallen Leaves” a lost installment of what is known as his “Proletariat” trilogy: three films released in Finland between 1986 and 1990. Like “Fallen Leaves,” these relatively short works are all stories about people on the margins.This latest finds its two solitary protagonists in Ansa (Poysti), who stocks the aisles of a coldly lit grocery store, and Holappa (Vatanen), who works on a construction site and dulls his pain with alcohol. Their eyes first meet, briefly but intensely, at a karaoke bar. He’s been dragged there by a bombastic friend, even though he would prefer to be reading comics alone. “I remember in the script it said that the gaze is upsetting Holappa so much that he needs to go out for a smoke because he can’t handle it,” Poysti said, adding, “It’s this kind of electric moment.”Their paths continue to collide across Helsinki — she finds him passed out at a bus station one night — before they finally make tentative moves toward a true introduction. A coffee date turns into an evening-long excursion to see a film. (Cheekily, it’s Jim Jarmusch’s zombie flick “The Dead Don’t Die,” a nod from one art-house hero to another.)And yet the path to romance is not easy. Some of the obstacles seem to emerge from the most conventional rom-com tropes. Holappa immediately loses Ansa’s phone number, for instance, when he reaches into his pocket for a cigarette and the slip of paper blows away. Other impediments are deeper and more painful. Though she is infatuated with him, Ansa is wary of Holappa’s dependence on alcohol, and refuses to allow herself to come second to his addiction — she’s been through that before with her father and her brother.Still, without spoiling too much, this is not a dour exploration of love lost. In fact, by the end it’s downright life-affirming. And, yes, at some point during the saga, Ansa takes in an adorable stray dog, played by Kaurismaki’s real life pup, Alma. Even if it doesn’t work out between her and Holappa, at least she’ll have a companion. The dog is an immediate comfort, settling in next to Ansa on her twin bed.In interviews, Poysti and Vatanen explained how unusual a Kaurismaki set is. He doesn’t want his actors to rehearse by themselves, and he usually does only one take. If they mess up, they get a second go. Only a disaster would prompt a third. Even the pooch would typically hit her mark, Poysti explained: “She’s got intuition.”The film offers glimmers of hope amid a bleak setting.Malla Hukkanen/SputnikIt would be tempting to view the frames Kaurismaki creates as almost too exacting, since he does construct this world with a painterly quality. At the karaoke establishment, there are beats when it seems as if the bartender and the other patrons are frozen while the singers perform. An absent-minded swig of beer breaks the spell. But there’s also an energy to this precision, especially when Ansa and Holappa are interacting. You feel the expectant tension between them, this flicker of hope for two souls resigned to the idea of being forever lonely.It’s reflective of the anxiousness felt by the performers — both Kaurismaki newcomers, children of the digital age being captured on 35-millimeter film.“There is this sort of sense of nervousness, and you can’t be very prepared,” Vatanen said. “So you have to be very present in that moment.”Poysti agreed that there was something terrifying about the experience initially, but that subsided when she realized what Kaurismaki was making. “It’s so precious and fragile and honest, and as soon as you repeat it, you have to start faking it a little bit,” she said. “So if you can avoid it then you will find something very, very honest and rare and beautiful, so you start to get kicks from it and you start to love it.”And it’s not as if Kaurismaki isn’t playful. For one musical sequence, he recruited the impossibly cool modern Finnish duo Maustetytot, whose name translates to “spice girls” and who perform a song with the lyric “I like you but can’t stand myself.” The jokes elicit chuckles even if the characters barely crack a smile; Poysti said there were some moments when she had trouble not breaking. After a rough patch for Ansa and Holappa, Ansa’s friend declares that “all men are swine.” Ansa shoots back: “They’re not. Swines are intelligent and sympathetic.”That humor in the face of desperation, which ultimately leads to an ending that is as tender as any Hollywood rom-com, is why “Fallen Leaves” feels like such a gift. Poysti said she believed that Ansa and Holappa were going to be all right as they walk off into the future, a little battered but together.“I think,” she said, “throughout the film, there is a sense that caring for each other is a counter force for cynicism, and as long as you care for each other, then you have strengths and you have some power in life.”And that is timeless — no matter the year on the calendar. More

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      Beyoncé’s ‘Renaissance’ Film: 4 Takeaways From the Premiere

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      The star skipped the red carpet and slipped into the celebrity-filled screening on Saturday night. But the movie pulls back the curtain — a little.Near the end of her new concert documentary, “Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé,” Beyoncé states that she’s tired of being a “serial people-pleaser.” Since she was a child, she says, she has been striving for stardom, but now that she’s on top of the world and two years into her revelatory 40s, it’s time to recalibrate.“I have nothing to prove to anyone at this point,” she says.Maybe that’s why Beyoncé decided to skip the red carpet entirely at the Los Angeles premiere of her movie on Saturday night, leaving that task to a starry list of invitees that included Tyler Perry, Ava DuVernay, Lizzo and Issa Rae. Though Beyoncé made a posed appearance at the Oct. 11 premiere of “Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour” — like that concert documentary, “Renaissance” will be distributed by AMC Theaters — she entered her own premiere only after the lights had been turned off and the movie was seconds away from beginning.Unlike Swift, who shares plenty about her life and is currently in a high-profile, well-documented romance with the N.F.L. player Travis Kelce, Beyoncé is one of our most private superstars. She has given virtually no interviews over the last decade, and any insight into her life or work mostly has to be inferred from brief statements released on social media or her website. “Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé,” which chronicles the most recent world tour in support of her seventh studio album, offers fans something new to interpret, pulling back Beyoncé’s curtain ever so slightly.Here are four the takeaways from the premiere of the movie, which is out in theaters Dec. 1.This is more than just a filmed concertSwift’s AMC film was a straightforward concert documentary that never left the stage: It was meant to feel as if you had the best seat on her tour stop, but it included no behind-the-scenes frills.“Renaissance” does things a little differently. Like Beyoncé’s film “Homecoming,” which chronicled the assemblage of her 2018 Coachella performance, the new movie often takes us behind the steel girders to see just how the mammoth tour was put together. “I’m excited for people to see the show,” Beyoncé says in the film, “but I’m really excited for everyone to see the process.”That process comes in bits and pieces as we watch Beyoncé call the shots on everything from lighting to set decoration to orchestration, sometimes getting frustrated that her notes aren’t heard. “Communicating as a Black woman,” she says, “everything is a fight.”Still, people come around to Beyoncé’s will sooner or later, she says: “Eventually, they realize this bitch will not give up.”Beyoncé also devotes behind-the-scenes segments to her recovery from a knee injury, a hometown visit in Houston, and her late, treasured Uncle Johnny, whose love of house music helped inspire the dance bangers on “Renaissance.” And there’s plenty of fan footage, too: The film often cuts away to shots of audience members in various states of ecstatic crying or frozen, religious awe.Only a little bit got left outThough the ballad-heavy prelude that opened Beyoncé’s Renaissance set list is trimmed, nearly every other song from the tour is included in the film. She even found room for “Thique” and “All Up in Your Mind,” a Renaissance double-header excised from many of her tour stops.The only egregious omission in this two-hour-48-minute movie is a behind-the-scenes bit that goes by way too quickly: Beyoncé convenes a Destiny’s Child reunion in Houston that includes not just Kelly Rowland and Michelle Williams but also two of the girl group’s first members, LeToya Luckett and LaTavia Roberson, who were contentiously pushed out. “It was like a new birth for us, and a lot of healing,” Beyoncé says in her narration, though we only see the five of them together for a second and don’t hear a single thing they discussed. I would have watched three more hours of that summit alone!The missing ‘visuals’ remain a mysteryThe “Renaissance” album was released in July 2022 without any sort of music-video accompaniment, a surprise given Beyoncé’s recent run of game-changing visual albums for “Lemonade” and her self-titled 2013 record. A subsequent teaser video for the first “Renaissance” album track “I’m That Girl” seemed to promise more to come, but none did.At a Louisville, Ky., stop on the Renaissance tour, a fan held up a sign asking where the visuals were, prompting Beyoncé to grandly tell the crowd, “You are the visuals.” (The crowd didn’t love that.) The “Renaissance” movie is cheeky enough to include that moment, but otherwise, there’s no mention of the missing visuals, nor an explanation of why they’ve seemingly been scuttled.Blue Ivy fought for her tour spotBy and large, the Renaissance tour eschewed celebrity cameos and surprise drop-ins, preferring to keep the focus on the queen bee herself. Big names joined Beyoncé onstage at only two tour stops: Houston, where Megan Thee Stallion performed “Savage,” and Los Angeles, where Diana Ross and Kendrick Lamar came out for the concert held on Beyoncé’s 42nd birthday.Those appearances all made it into the movie, but the special guest the movie is most interested in is Beyoncé’s 11-year-old daughter, Blue Ivy Carter, who often participated as one of the dancers on her mother’s songs “My Power” and “Black Parade.” I caught one of Blue Ivy’s first tour appearances last May in London, where she was still getting the hang of her choreography, but by the end of the Renaissance tour, she had everything — the moves, the attitude — down pat.Turns out, Blue Ivy’s performance was only supposed to be a one-off, and even that took some negotiating. “She told me she was ready to perform, and I told her no,” Beyoncé says in the film. Though she finally relented, Beyoncé was dismayed when Blue Ivy read comments on social media that criticized her lackluster moves. But it thrilled her mother that instead of quitting, she decided to put in the work and train even harder for future stops.Blue Ivy also pops up in much of the behind-the-scenes footage, offering her often unsugarcoated opinion on stage design, song choices and more. In a film where everyone else treats Beyoncé as a boss or a goddess, Blue Ivy is an amusingly irreverent presence: To this 11-year-old, Beyoncé is just a mom. More

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      France Scoffs at an Englishman’s ‘Napoleon’

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      French critics considered Ridley Scott’s new biopic lazy, pointless, boring, migraine-inducing, too short and historically inaccurate. And that’s just to start.The French do not like an Englishman’s rendition of Napoleon.Or at least, the French critics do not.Looking grim and moody from under an enormous bicorn hat, Joaquin Phoenix glowers from posters around Paris, promoting the film by Ridley Scott that offers the latest reincarnation of the French hero whose nose — as one reviewer deliciously wrote — still rises in the middle of French political life two centuries after his death.Yet while British and American reviewers glowed, French critics considered it lazy, pointless, boring, migraine-inducing, too short and historically inaccurate. And that’s just to start.The critic for the left-wing daily Libération panned the film as not just ugly, but vacuous, positing nothing and “very sure of its inanity.” The review in Le Monde offered that if the director’s vision had one merit, it was “simplicity” — “a montage alternating between Napoleon’s love life and his feats of battle.”The right-wing Le Figaro took many positions in its breathless coverage, using the moment to pump out a 132-page special-edition magazine on Napoleon, along with more than a dozen articles, including a reader poll and a Napoleon knowledge test. The newspaper’s most memorable take came from Thierry Lentz, the director of the Napoleon Foundation, a charity dedicated to historical research: He considered Phoenix’s version of Napoleon — compared to more than 100 other actors who have played the role — “a bit vulgar, a bit rude, with a voice from elsewhere that doesn’t fit at all.” All of this was to be expected.British and American critics praised the film, but their French counterparts panned it, to say the least.Quentin de Groeve/Hans Lucas, via ReutersAs the French writer Sylvain Tesson once famously said, “France is a paradise inhabited by people who think they’re in hell.” How else would you expect a country where the perennial response to “How are you?” is “Not bad” to respond to a historical film about itself?But to have that film be about a French legend — even one whom many detest — played by an American actor and directed by a British filmmaker?L’horreur.“This very anti-French and very pro-English film is, however, not very ‘English’ in spirit,” said the historian Patrick Gueniffey, in Le Point magazine, “because the English have never compromised their admiration for their enemy.”“It’s hard not to see this hasty approach as the historical revenge of Ridley Scott, the Englishman,” assessed the satirical weekly Le Canard Enchaîné. “An Austerlitz of cinema? More like Waterloo.”Bracing under the waterfall of negative reaction, you begin to wonder whether the criticism reveals more about the French psyche than the nation’s taste in historical cinema.“When we talk about Napoleon, in fact we are getting at the heart of our principles and our political divisions,” explained Arthur Chevallier, a Napoleon expert who has published five books on the Corsican soldier who seized power after the French Revolution, crowned himself emperor and proceeded to conquer — and later lose — much of Western Europe.“The common point among all French people is that Napoleon remains a subject that influences our understanding of ourselves, our identity,” Chevallier said.Phoenix and Ridley Scott, the film’s director, at the premiere of the movie in Paris this month.Stephanie Lecocq/ReutersMore than 200 years after his death, the smudge of Napoleon’s fingerprints still liberally decorates the country and its capital: along the streets and metro stations named after his generals and battles; from atop the Arc de Triomphe that he planned; in the gleam of the gold dome of the Invalides, under which his giant marble tomb rises.Lawyers still follow an updated version of his civil code. Provincial regions are still overseen by prefects — or government administrators — in a system he devised. Every year, high schoolers take the baccalaureate exam that his regime introduced, and citizens are awarded the country’s top honor, which he invented.Last Sunday, before the film hit theaters here, a French auction house announced that it had sold one of Napoleon’s signature bicorn hats for a record 1.9 million euros, or $2.1 million.In recent decades, Napoleon’s record for misogyny, imperialism and racism — he reimposed slavery eight years after the revolutionary government abolished it — has come under glaring critical light. But that seems to have simply reinforced the weight of his legacy.To many, Napoleon is the symbol of a France that has come under assault from what they consider an American import of identity politics and “wokeism.” The latest front page of the weekly far-right magazine Valeurs Actuelles declared him “The Anti-Woke Emperor.” (Its reviewer also panned the film: From the first scene, the viewer knows that “historical accuracy will suffer the guillotine,” wrote Laurent Dandrieu.)In a national poll conducted this week, 74 percent of respondents with an opinion on Napoleon considered his actions beneficial for France.“You have the impression that when we talk about him, he’s a living politician,” said Chevallier, who has already seen the film twice and counts himself among its few unabashed French fans.A reincarnated Napoleon and Imperial Guards welcomed viewers to a screening of the film in Ajaccio, the city in which the real Napoleon was born, on the Mediterranean island of Corsica.Pascal Pochard-Casabianca/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWhat he liked, he said, was its different take on Napoleon and the revolution that birthed him and modern France. Instead of a regal leader with insatiable energy and ambition, Joaquin Phoenix portrays a regular grasping mortal who is the product of a bloodthirsty, barbaric upheaval — something that some find “very destabilizing,” Chevallier said, but that he considered interesting and instructive, “because you understand why Napoleon inspired such hate” among other European powers at the time.He predicted that his fellow citizens who were more cinema fans than history buffs would like the film, which opened to the public on Wednesday.Some 120,000 people went to see it across France that day — a strong opening, but not a blockbuster like “Asterix & Obelix: The Middle Kingdom,” which drew more than 460,000 on its opening day early this year, according to figures collected by C.B.O. Box Office, a firm that collates French box office data.Moviegoers streaming out of a theater in the Latin Quarter of Paris on Thursday night were not enthused.Augustin Ampe, 20, said he was all for demystifying Napoleon, but this was just too much. “Here he looks like a clumsy man focused only on his wife,” said the literature student, breaking for a moment from a fierce debate over the film’s failures with his friends. He preferred the mythical figure offered in the books and poems of Chateaubriand and Victor Hugo, he said.Waiting for her movie date to finish his post-film cigarette, Charline Tartar, a librarian, assessed Phoenix’s rendition as too moany.“It’s too bad Napoleon looks like a loser,” said Tartar, 27. She thought a French director would have paid more attention to historical accuracy.“The French,” she added, “are very jealous of their history.”Juliette Guéron-Gabrielle More

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      Disney Rejected Her a Few Times. The ‘Wish’ Director Just Kept Trying.

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      After she was finally hired by the studio, Fawn Veerasunthorn worked her way up the ranks, and has applied that lesson of perseverance to her new film.At the turn of the century, a young medical student in Thailand mailed a handwritten letter to a Disney animator in Florida.The student, Fawn Veerasunthorn, had attended a guest lecture by this visual effects animator, Paitoon Ratanasirintrawoot, years earlier at her Bangkok high school (his alma mater). She’d since graduated and was miserable in her first year of med school. But, she wondered, might he have advice on how she could switch careers, move to the United States and follow in his footsteps at Disney?He wrote back with his email address and they struck up a correspondence, as he answered her questions, which ranged from “What is a portfolio?” and “Where did you go to college?” to “Do girls really work in animation?” and “Is this safe?”At the time, the animation industry in their home country was small. “Not many people from Thailand even have a dream of working in animation, let alone at Disney,” said Ratanasirintrawoot, who counts “The Lion King,” “Mulan” and “Lilo & Stitch” among his credits. “But she was really determined.”Spurred by that determination, Veerasunthorn dropped out of med school, moved across the Pacific for art school and pushed past multiple Disney rejections until she eventually got her foot in the door in 2011.She’s spent the past 12 years climbing the ranks of Walt Disney Animation Studios: serving as a story artist — visualizing and sketching out how a script will translate onscreen — on “Frozen,” “Moana” and “Zootopia,” and leading a team as the head of story on “Raya and the Last Dragon.”Now, Veerasunthorn is making her directorial debut alongside Chris Buck on “Wish” (in theaters), a tribute to the company’s legacy on it 100th anniversary.The musical fairy tale follows 17-year-old Asha (voiced by Ariana DeBose), who makes a wish to improve the plight of her people in Rosas, a fictional kingdom ruled by the tyrannical King Magnifico (Chris Pine).A scene from “Wish,” with Ariana DeBose voicing the 17-year-old Asha.Disney“Everyone keeps talking about, ‘Aren’t you stressed? It’s 100! How do you uphold that legacy?’” Veerasunthorn said. “But at some point, I felt like, ‘Oh, we can turn this energy into excitement.’”During an interview last month at the studio’s headquarters in Burbank, Calif., the 41-year-old director — wearing oversize magenta glasses and baby pink-accented sneakers — laughed frequently and verged on tears more than once. Not unlike the characters she brings to life, her energy was infectious.That capacity for emotion, said Disney Animation’s chief creative officer, Jennifer Lee, became a hallmark of Veerasunthorn’s storytelling early on.Lee first took note of Veerasunthorn when they worked together on “Frozen.” Both women had only recently arrived at Disney, but Veerasunthorn carried herself with confidence in chaotic production meetings, where team members jockey to have their ideas heard.“She would always cut through with something that was so clear and to the point,” Lee said. “If I could see her nodding, I’d be like, I’m in a good place because I can see that Fawn’s on board. She’s a great barometer.”On “Zootopia,” Veerasunthorn oversaw the poignant goodbye scene between Judy Hopps and her bunny family at the train station. For “Moana,” she worked on the opening village song, when Moana dances with her grandmother. And on “Frozen 2,” she helped actualize the climactic scene when Elsa realizes she’s been hearing her mother’s call.“Wish” employs a different style of animation for Disney, combining the look of traditional watercolors with modern computer animation. The blend is meant to invoke the art of hand-drawn films like “Sleeping Beauty,” and there are numerous references to Disney classics throughout.“We’re celebrating the legacy, but I think if Walt were to be alive today, he wouldn’t want to do the things that he had done,” Veerasunthorn said. “He would want to do something new. That was important to us.”Development on “Wish” began in 2018, and Veerasunthorn joined the project as head of story two years later. But after the first internal work-in-progress screening, the film was at an impasse.Star, a character that, as its name suggests, is a celestial body, originally could speak. But a wishing star that provided direct guidance didn’t allow Asha the space to figure out her own journey. Veerasunthorn offered solutions.Lee recalled of that period: “She was the one who said, ‘This is never going to come together if you can’t feel that what we’re ultimately saying is that this is not just about celebrating wishes. This is about really showing the importance of you working hard to make your dreams come true.’”Veerasunthorn applied repeatedly for jobs at Disney but kept getting turned down: “I’m like, that’s OK, it’s becoming a hobby.” Alex Welsh for The New York TimesIt was a proactive path Veerasunthorn knew well.She grew up in a small seaside town in Thailand’s Chonburi Province, where she said her only exposure to animation as a career came in the form of the local artists who hand-painted posters to announce new movie releases in the town square.At home, she and her younger siblings would watch the 1941 Disney animated film “Dumbo” on repeat. The movie’s fantastical nature and its message of persevering against the odds resonated with her as a young girl.Also, she said wryly, “Maybe that was the only VHS we had.”Her parents ran an auto parts shop in front of the family home, and Veerasunthorn used their industrial cardboard boxes and a wall in the kitchen as her canvases. But she had no formal training, and art was just a hobby.When she was 15, she left home for high school in Bangkok, where she chose a computer science track, hoping to learn to write emails. And after graduating in 2000 with the expectation that she would pursue a practical, lucrative career in her home country, she enrolled in medical school.But Veerasunthorn “did not love” the idea of becoming a doctor, and during her semester break, she began taking art classes and writing to Ratanasirintrawoot, who recommended her to the president at his alma mater, Columbus College of Art & Design in Ohio.Her parents were supportive but nervous. No one in Veerasunthorn’s family had pursued a career in the arts. “I was leaving behind something that, to a lot of people, family and friends, is a very solid career to do something that is unknown,” she said.Before moving to the United States, she asked her parents if she could take English lessons to improve her conversational skills. That was too expensive. Instead, her father bought her a subscription to HBO, where she watched “Forrest Gump” and Todd McFarlane’s “Spawn” on repeat.“Initially, I was like, even if I don’t communicate very well, my work speaks for itself,” she said.But Disney wasn’t listening at first. While she was in college, the company shuttered its Florida animation studio, where Ratanasirintrawoot had worked. So Veerasunthorn pivoted, applying at Pixar instead. Rejected. She applied for other jobs at Disney in California. Multiple rejections followed.“I’m like, that’s OK, it’s becoming a hobby,” she said with a laugh. “‘Oh, it’s a new year. Is Disney Animation hiring again?’”Scenes from a career: Veerasunthorn worked at Illumination on “Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax” and “Despicable Me 2,” top, before joining Disney and taking on scenes in “Zootopia” and “Moana.”Universal Pictures (“Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax” and “Despicable Me 2″); Disney (“Zootopia” and “Moana”)After stints in educational Flash animation and as a contributing story artist on Illumination films, including “Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax” and “Despicable Me 2,” she tried Disney again in 2011. This time, she got in.And a decade later, after that “Wish” screening, Lee — who also served as the film’s co-writer and executive producer — offered Veerasunthorn a directing role alongside Buck in early 2022. It was similar to the transition Lee herself had made on “Frozen,” when she joined Buck as a director midway through that production.“Talent is universal, I always say, but access hasn’t always been,” Lee said. “If you give people a chance, they’ll rise to the occasion. That happened to me.”Historically, Disney animated films have been the domain of male directors. Lee became the first woman at the studio to direct an animated feature with “Frozen” in 2013 and “Frozen II” in 2019. Since then, only Charise Castro Smith, a co-director on “Encanto,” and now Veerasunthorn, have joined the ranks. (At the Disney-owned Pixar, Brenda Chapman was replaced by a male director before the completion of “Brave,” in 2011. Domee Shi became that studio’s first solo female director on a feature, with “Turning Red” in 2022.)For Buck, who made his directorial debut on the 1999 Disney film “Tarzan,” forgoing solo duties again was a welcome reprieve.“These movies are such monsters that, hats off to someone who can do it by themselves. I can’t,” he said, adding that he needs the support. “I love the collaboration.”Away from the studio, Veerasunthorn and her husband, Ryan Green, whom she met in college and who also works in animation at Disney, share a daughter, Kina, who is 7. She’s one of the “production babies” listed in the end credits of “Moana,” and she provided valuable input on “Wish.” When Kina first watched the film’s ending, she was left bawling. Further test screenings would lead the directors to alter the finale to be less traumatic.Lee remained tight-lipped when asked if Veerasunthorn would be working on Disney’s announced third and fourth “Frozen” films or “Zootopia” sequel, but the studio executive said she was eager to see her lead an original project from the start. And for now, Veerasunthorn is reveling in her work on “Wish.”“The journey that a person takes toward a goal, that is what this movie is about,” Veerasunthorn said. “It took me a few tries to get here. If I were to be discouraged the very first time, this would never have happened.”She added, as tears brimmed in her eyes, “This film is saying that the choice is always yours, no matter what the situation.” More

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      ‘Terms of Endearment’ at 40 and How It Helped One Writer

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      A writer remembers bonding with her mother over the film’s unusual mix of sorrow and laughter, a blend that helped immeasurably through painful loss.Anyone who remembers the heft of a phone book or the twist of a landline cord probably has some memory of watching Aurora Greenway (Shirley MacLaine) climb into her baby’s crib to make sure her peacefully sleeping daughter is still alive. Or maybe your mind goes to the scene in which the pearl-clutching Aurora and her Lothario-with-a-heart-of-gold neighbor, Garrett Breedlove (Jack Nicholson), speed down a Texas beach in his convertible, hair tousled and libidos charged.I’m not sure if there is such a thing as a perfect film, since one person’s “Jaws” is another’s “Rules of the Game,” but I would argue that 40 years after its release, “Terms of Endearment,” directed by James L. Brooks and based on a Larry McMurtry novel, comes pretty close.McMurtry’s 1975 book received mixed reviews, although a Times critic wrote that he “can write up a mess and still win you over with it.” The story, available on most major platforms, hinges on the relationship between Aurora, a wealthy Houston widow, and her rebellious daughter, Emma (Debra Winger). It moves swiftly from that now iconic crib scene to Emma’s troubled marriage to the pretentious, adulterous Flap Horton (Jeff Daniels). Thanks to his job (and his ego), Emma is forced to leave her beloved Texas for Iowa and then Nebraska. Flap is a guy who uses words like “quisling” and blames “pregnancy paranoia” for his wife’s cheating accusations. Those two things alone should explain why Aurora despises her son-in-law.Jack Nicholson said he signed on to play the retired astronaut Garrett Breedlove in part because the script made him cry.Paramount PicturesThen there’s the unexpected turn after the halfway mark. I first watched “Terms of Endearment” as a teenager in Houston sitting at home with my cinema-loving mom. I had never seen a movie with scenes about a lump in a woman’s armpit, or a cancer diagnosis, or a desperate, grief-stricken mother crying out for medication for her child. As wrenching as those moments were, the comedy and the tears blended in a way I had never experienced as a viewer. Even years before deep loss came into my own life, that delicate balance of pain and humor seemed right. It felt true.We watched the movie together repeatedly over the years, and each time my mom and I bonded over our love of Aurora’s hilarious brand of cantankerous Southern belle (even though the character had originated in New England). We related to the mother-daughter dynamic of wanting to murder each other one moment, and cuddling in bed giggling the next. Since we knew the neighborhood Aurora lived in, the affluent River Oaks, we felt a kinship with the characters, as if they existed within our universe. We also agreed that you would never drive along a Texas beach from River Oaks to go eat at Brennan’s since they’re about five miles apart and the only nearby water was a bayou, but we let that cinematic cheat slide.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.We are confirming your access to this article, this will take just a moment. However, if you are using Reader mode please log in, subscribe, or exit Reader mode since we are unable to verify access in that state.Confirming article access.If you are a subscriber, please  More

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      ‘Against the Tide’ Review: Tales of the Sea

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      Sarvnik Kaur’s breathtaking documentary about Indigenous fishermen in Mumbai brings to life an ecosystem wrecked by corporate greed and climate change.“Against the Tide, ” Sarvnik Kaur’s breathtaking documentary about Indigenous fishermen in Mumbai, India, dispels the myth that cinematic beauty has to do with the power of the camera or the glossiness of the image. Shot by Ashok Meena, the film finds beauty, simply, in perspective.The camera looks down from above at a baby held gingerly between the knees of a grandmother as she rubs oil on his skin. It tilts gently upward on a boat that ventures into a roiling sea in the dark; it peers into a bucket of fish crowded by hands holding cash, as a seller barks his prices. In each frame, the right vantage point yields a revelatory view.Kaur tells the entangled stories of two fishermen from the Koli community. Rakesh, who lives in a cramped house with his wife, mother-in-law and newborn child, struggles to sustain a living with ancestral fishing practices. The more ambitious Ganesh employs giant deep-sea boats and LED lights (banned in many parts of India) to attract fish, but is still besieged by debt. As the two friends navigate work, manage their households and argue over late-night cups of tea, the camera stays close and loose, more like a quiet listener than a voyeur.The film avoids easy binaries of tradition and modernity, and instead brings to vivid life the ecosystem that encompasses both Rakesh and Ganesh — one that has been wrecked by corporate greed and climate change. Their only choice is between bad and worse, and if this makes the film rather bleak, the two men’s prickly yet undying friendship (centered by Kaur in another keen perspectival decision) warms the movie like a fire.Against the TideNot rated. In Hindi and Marathi, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Smoke Sauna Sisterhood’ Review: Women, Uninterrupted

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      In Anna Hints’s bewitching documentary, Estonian smoke saunas beget a sweaty purification process — one that’s revealed to be more than skin deep.In Estonia, the smoke sauna is an 800-year-old tradition carried out with regularity — to this day — by the Voro community in the southeastern part of the country.Singled out by UNESCO as one of the world’s great cultural heritages (like the baguette in France or shadow puppetry in China), the Estonian practice begets a sweaty purification process — one that’s revealed to be more than skin deep in Anna Hints’s bewitching documentary, “Smoke Sauna Sisterhood.”Hints, whose grandmother introduced her to the smoke-sauna ritual, uses the documentary to speak volumes about what it means to be a woman, even as the focus remains fixed on a single location: a cramped sauna-cabin located in a forest.Inside the womblike sauna, Hints simply lets the women, who are primarily middle-aged and older, speak freely among themselves, just as they’re accustomed to doing; she doesn’t bother with title cards or other forms of contextualization. The women talk about their bodies, their relationships with men and the difficulties of growing up in a patriarchal society. One woman, her face obscured by her arm as she lies on the sauna bench, shares a horrific story about being raped as a teenager. The others listen attentively, providing the speaker with the compassionate audience she never had in her youth.Most of the subjects have chosen to remain anonymous, so Hints and the cinematographer Ants Tammik film the nude women from the neck down or using disembodied close-ups. Contrary to what one might expect, the focus on bare chests, perspiring backs and stretches of glistening skin doesn’t feel provocative.Instead, these raw bodies exhibit an organic kind of beauty, real and uninhibited as they commune with the swirling smoke from burning wood and the clouds of steam produced by moistened rocks. It’s no wonder the women tend to open up under these sweltering conditions. To feel fully aware of one’s own body is to acknowledge its scars, too.Smoke Sauna SisterhoodNot rated. In Estonian, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 29 minutes. In theaters. More