Of the three films playing at a/perture cinema this weekend in Winston-Salem, I’ve seen two of them and recommend both!

Ethan and Joel Coen’s latest film, A Serious Man, is a 1960s retelling of the Job story.  The film is fascinating (as the Coens are wont to be) but not wholly satisfying.  The cultural context and cinematic detail throughout are rich, and the terrible things befalling our protagonist are also clever and, at times, slyly amusing, but it is that character who needs a bit – just a bit – more of a response to these events to draw the viewer more fully into the film.  Michael Stuhlbarg plays physics professor Larry Gopnik as an appealing but ineffectual man.  That’s okay so far as it goes, but I want more.  Probably I’m just looking for larger meaning where none is intended – and I do not expect the filmmakers to answer all of the great questions about human existence and theology – but it would be nice to have some clues about Larry’s interior life.  All of that aside, the film is still worth seeing.  Go and judge for yourself.

The Chilean film The Maid is less predictable (I mean, we pretty much know what’s going to happen to Job), less glossy, and much more intimate.  The video look of The Maid is not what we’ve come to expect from HD images, but the story is so subtle and surprising and the performances are so fine that the limitation imposed by the way the images have been photographed is overcome.  You could argue, I suppose, that the home video quality that infuses the film is “realistic,” and I did think this while watching, but as I look around my den where I sit writing this on a dreary day, there is more color saturation here than in the entire film.  But, I quibble.  Ten minutes into the film, I moved beyond the aesthetics because I was so intrigued by the characters and completely uncertain what would happen next from moment to moment.  This is a wonderful character study of the primary maid (there are three others introduced) and the mistress who understands her better, I think, than the audience can up until the very end of the film.