‘Clementine’ Film Review: Indie Relationship Drama Struggles to Be Involving
The quiet film starring Sydney Sweeney and Otmara Marrero threatens to turn into a love story or a coming-of-age, sexual-awakening drama, but it’s more subdued than that
With film festivals increasingly looking for films from underrepresented voices in recent years, one byproduct of the coronavirus-prompted theater closings is that movies coming out of those festivals from minorities, women and the LGBT community have found themselves going to VOD or streaming rather than theaters.
In the last couple of weeks alone, that has meant virtual premieres for the debut features from Tayarisha Poe (“Selah and the Spades”), Sonejuhi Sinha (“Stray Dolls”) and Andrew Onwubolu (“Blue Story”), as well as the first feature in 15 years from Alice Wu (“The Half of It”) and the first theatrical film in 24 years from Coky Giedroyc (“How to Build a Girl”).
Also up this week: “Clementine,” a quiet exploration of female relationships from Lara Jean Gallagher, a writer and director of shorts and music videos who is making her feature-film debut. The film premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2019 (the last Tribeca that actually took place) and was picked up by Oscilloscope, which is giving it a release in virtual cinemas.
As arty and distinctive as you’d expect from an Oscilloscope film, “Clementine” nonetheless struggles to be involving as it tells an uneasy story in a determinedly subdued way. It begins with Karen, played by Otmara Marrero, in bed in Los Angeles as her older girlfriend, who we know only as D., mutters sweet nothings; one scene later, D. has changed the locks and Karen is on her own.
Apparently with no place to go except properties owned by D., Karen heads to a remote cabin on a lake in the Pacific Northwest. Though it’s set in the stillness of a thick forest, the cabin isn’t woodsy or homey; it’s sparse, stylish and modern, filled with art presumably done by D.
In its opening stretches, the movie is sparse and still, too. Karen needs to use a rock to break a window to get in the house, but we just see the broken glass, not the crash. The camera moves slowly, as cautious as Karen as she explores a territory where she once belonged but is now an interloper.
She spots Lana, a teenage girl who seemingly lives nearby and is borrowing Karen’s dock to sunbathe, but quickly retreats before Lana (played by Sydney Sweeney from “Everything Sucks!” and “Euphoria”) spots her. But she can’t elude Lana for long: before long, the younger woman has flagged Karen down to help her search for a lost dog, and in short order they’re hanging out together.
Karen is wounded and wary, Lana is young and flirty, and clearly neither of them is telling the other the whole story. But Lana wants to go to L.A. and become an actress, so she’s impressed by Karen – though their dialogue skirts what’s really happening and withholds vital information, like what Karen’s doing at the cabin and how old Lana is.
And it unfolds ever so slowly, with pregnant pauses between almost every line.
“You should be careful,” Karen tells Lana about L.A.
Lana waits, then says, “Why?”
Karen pauses. “There are people out there who will take advantage of you if you let them.”
Pause. “Why would I let them?”
Pause. “Never mind.”
Pause. “You’re cool.”
The acting is supposed to be naturalistic, although it’s hard to imagine that any actual group of people this age would speak like this. This is the art-movie version of naturalism, where the actors are so casual that they don’t appear to be acting, but the weight of every utterance slows natural conversation to a crawl.
The film requires you to relax and sink into its quiet rhythms, and for a while it’s not hard to do that as Karen finds herself intrigued by Lana, then threatened by Beau, a local handyman who’s clearly been sent by D. (who knows where Karen is) to keep an eye on the house and the interloper. “Clementine” always threatens to turn into a love story, or a coming-of-age, sexual-awakening drama, but it never gets there because the filmmaker and the characters opt for restraint whenever possible.
Meanwhile, Katy Jarzebowski’s unsettling score tries its hardest to make you think you’re watching a thriller, with the echoes of plunked piano note and the scraping of bows across strings suggesting that something sinister is about to happen.
The approach is dramatic and artful, to a degree, but also so studied and stylized that you yearn for some kind of release – and after about an hour, it becomes wearying unless you’re fully submerged in this world.
But the mood is broken when Lana has a long monologue in which she tearfully confesses that the night before, she’d stripped in front of a camera for a local man who claimed to know someone in Los Angeles who could help her. It gives the film more energy, though it also leads to a sequence that seems oddly melodramatic and out of character, even if we knew something like it was coming.
(It’s hardly a spoiler to say that if your lead character opens a drawer in Act 1 and finds a gun, she’s gonna pick it up by Act 3.)
In the end, though, the story isn’t really about the gun, or about how one of the girls likes the variety of oranges known as clementines and the other doesn’t, or even about the relationship between the two. It’s about Karen figuring out where to go and who to be in the aftermath of a devastating breakup. She might not really figure anything out, but she learns enough to make the ending quietly satisfying, if you have the patience to get that far.
10 Best Documentaries of the 2010s, From 'OJ: Made in America' to 'The Invisible War' (Photos)
Facts are so often stranger than fiction: The truth can be so terrible that we struggle to believe it, or so joyous and full of life that we’re inspired or moved. The past decade has seen a boom in the documentary space as streaming platforms have invested in their production and proliferated their distribution opportunities. So many docs that could have made this list, from those that have inspired public policy changes to others that captured gorgeous slices of life often overlooked, and even a few that pushed the visual boundaries of what’s possible in non-fiction storytelling. Here are a handful of the best documentaries from the previous decade:
10. "Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry" Alison Klayman’s documentary may have been many Americans’ introduction to Ai Weiwei, the outspoken artist (whose work has found a devoted following on social media) and whose voice that the Chinese government has threatened to silence more than once. Not only does Klayman’s extensive film retrace many of the highlights in the artist’s career; she also uses his story as a case study of the pressures artists in China face when standing up to the country’s authoritarian government.
9. "The Invisible War" Years ahead of the #MeToo movement, director Kirby Dick and co-writer Amy Ziering burst open the topic of sexual assault in the military with their painfully honest and eye-opening documentary. In “The Invisible War," multiple members of the armed forces detail how they were assaulted or raped by fellow soldiers or commanders and how they felt victimized a second time by the army’s failure to take action. In addition to picking up an Oscar nomination, the documentary was so effective in its mission to raise awareness of the issue that the Pentagon responded by overhauling how it investigates and oversees cases of sexual assault.
8. "O.J.: Made in America" You can argue over whether Ezra Edelman’s multi-part episodic documentary qualifies as television show or a film (the Academy gave it a Best Documentary Oscar before creating new rules that would make it ineligible), but Ezra Edelman’s comprehensive look at the rise and astronomical fall of one of pop culture's most celebrated athletes was a riveting event for many viewers. In addition to rare archival footage and numerous interviews, Edelman's film also put O.J. Simpson’s life into historical context, connecting the dots as to why the sports star would often play down his blackness to appeal to white audiences in the 1970s and examining the various responses to the “trial of the century” in the 1990s.
7. "Hale County This Morning, This Evening" Skipping conventional storytelling approaches like using a narrator or including a series of talking-heads interviews, RaMell Ross chose a nonlinear route for his feature debut. Through evocative footage and observational shots, Ross creates a portrait of the black community of Hale County, Alabama, that’s like few other documentaries. His camera is more of a free-floating spirit through the area, quietly observing the nuances between different groups and individuals at the intersection of race and class. Even with its experimental nature, “Hale County This Morning, This Evening” earned an Oscar nomination.
6. "This is Not a Film" Forbidden by the Iranian government from making a movie, directors Jafar Panahi and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb record Panahi on an iPhone as he’s stuck at home under house arrest. At its core, the documentary is a protest film, a tool for discussing the limitations of persecuting artists in the country while defying the government’s orders by making a documentary. Politics aside, “This is Not a Film” also has a very day-in-the-life quality as it follows Panahi through stories about his previous works while as he prepares to stage future projects within the confines of his home.
5. "Dawson City: Frozen Time" In 1976, the small northern town of Dawson City unearthed an unlikely treasure trove of rare silent films in various states of decay. Decades later, Bill Morrison artfully composed fragments of these movies with other archival material and photos to tell the story of this town in a remote part of Alaska and the number of famous (or infamous) souls passed through it over its history. The found silent-movie footage from nitrate prints that survived the area’s harsh winters underground vary in their state of decomposition, but Morrison incorporates these so-called damaged works into the narrative.
4. "I Am Not Your Negro" Raoul Peck connects an unfinished James Baldwin novel about the murders of three of his friends who were leaders of the civil rights movement -- Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. -- to the present-day protests of Black Lives Matter in a visceral documentary narrated by Samuel L. Jackson. Incorporating interview footage and letters, Peck conjures up Baldwin’s insightful voice to echo the works of years ago, a haunting reminder of how far equality has yet to go in the struggle against racial discrimination.
3. "The Grand Bizarre" At no point is there a singular character to follow or voice-over narration to guide us. Instead, Jodie Mack’s dazzling stop-motion animated documentary just washes over its audiences with a fury of colors, patterns and textures of materials from around the world. This inventive documentary explores heady themes of globalization, mass production, cultural identity, travel, commerce and connectivity through the journey of several fabric swatches as they traipse around the world in immaculately arranged configurations, accompanied by Mack’s playfully evocative score. Borders and barriers fall away as the materials come to life.
2. "Cameraperson" Kirsten Johnson steps out from behind the camera to become the subject of her own moving documentary about her work and life outside the frame. Her memoir-doc includes home movies of her family alongside a number of movies she shot throughout her career, including “Derrida,” “Fahrenheit 9/11,” “Happy Valley,” “Citizenfour” and “Very Semi-Serious.” It’s a delicate balance between the Johnson audiences have come to know through her work and the person whose life exists outside the camera that’s taken her to all these corners of the world.
1. "The Act of Killing" Shocking. Stomach-churning. Joshua Oppenheimer and an anonymous co-director uncover the humanity and the monstrosity behind some of the men who led death squads during Indonesia’s war against Communists. Using the guise of creating an extravagant movie about the men’s life stories, “The Act of Killing” gets its subjects to reveal dark secrets and dredge memories so awful, it makes them physically ill. They may never face the consequences for their actions, but this wildly fascinating and disturbing documentary captures perhaps one of the strangest confessions ever on film.
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Decade in Review: “The Grand Bizarre” and “Cameraperson” rank among the highlights of the decade
Facts are so often stranger than fiction: The truth can be so terrible that we struggle to believe it, or so joyous and full of life that we’re inspired or moved. The past decade has seen a boom in the documentary space as streaming platforms have invested in their production and proliferated their distribution opportunities. So many docs that could have made this list, from those that have inspired public policy changes to others that captured gorgeous slices of life often overlooked, and even a few that pushed the visual boundaries of what’s possible in non-fiction storytelling. Here are a handful of the best documentaries from the previous decade:
