CINEMANIA:

Black Bear (USA, Lawrence Michael Levine, 2020)

Ben Livant begins:

A bit of a head scratcher. I mean, in a very sweeping sort of way, I can take away that the exercise is a study in personal falsehood in the circumstance of professional (Part 2) or wannabe professional (Part 1) artistic creativity. You know, fabricating fiction as a vocation comes with its own occupational hazards. So, if making make-believe is how you mean to earn a living, might want to arm guards along the border of your actual identity to ensure that you don't bring your work home with you to ruin your domestic life. Easier said than done, it would appear Black Bear is out to show.

And with a demented sense of humour at that. Part 1 is pretty creepy and quite witty at the same time; as if Woody Allen wanted to make a serious psychological thriller, but just couldn't stop himself from writing dialogue with a dark comedic attitude. Part 2 departs from being vaguely ominous, the mental abuse is blatantly obvious. So blatant, in fact, the whole affair has the tone of lampoon. After all, the emotionally manipulative film director is a trope tried & true. Or is that tired & what's new? Black Bear is fully in touch with the latter perspective; which is to say, the whole business is ironic in the extreme.

Not that I found the film especially funny. It was for me oddly engaging, but overall, it struck me as yet another meta-reflexive cinematic self-observation. The back-to-me of it just a tad too much on the nose, eh.? The three leads were well cast and did good work, especially Aubrey Plaza, who definitely has a Morticia Addams quality that fit perfectly. And as I have already acknowledged, the movie is smart. But there's the rub. The thing is too cleaver by at least half. I comfortably get it that there is no direct connection between Part 1 and Part 2 beyond the faint suggestion that both are just script mock-ups jotted down by the character who is the kinda-protagonist. Even so, sigh, I also irritably get it that there is no deeper conceptual link between the two that makes the film coherent as a whole, Ursus americanus sightings notwithstanding . This non-comprehensiveness is methodological goodness itself according to po-mo but as you are all too aware, I regard the intentional abandonment of holistic thinking to be terribly misguided.

And Dan:

It reminded a little of some latter day Kiarostami, like Certified Copy, which is not my preferred Kiarostami as it too suffers too much from the disease of post modernism, but that said, I REALLY liked Plaza’s performance, enough so that I recommended the film to you knowing that it ain’t your cuppa tea. The film hits home for me as an exploration of the multiple dangers of using one’s personal life as fodder for one’s creative expression, with a dash of method actor-y meta-commentary added for flavor.

Still not sure what the black bear symbolizes.