Where were you when electroclash exploded at the turn of the millennium? The slinky new new wave fusion of synth-pop, electro, house, and punk bubbled up from the underground to sweep across early 2000s clubs, concert stages, and CD players (if not radio), and rapper-singer, songwriter, and performance artist Peaches was right there at the forefront.
Somewhere close by, apparently, was filmmaker Marie Losier (Cassandro, the Exotico!), rolling her 16mm camera, documenting nearly every stage of Peaches’ life and career as an electroclash trailblazer, touring artist, and feminist icon propelled by her breakout single “Fuck the Pain Away.”
Released in 2000, off the artist’s second studio album The Teaches of Peaches, this club banger and dyke anthem (named one of the 10 best lesbian songs of all time by Time Out Worldwide) provides a running theme throughout Losier’s final product, the funky, fun, also wistful documentary Peaches Goes Bananas.
“Fuck the Pain Away” pretty much established Peaches (born Merrill Nisker to Jewish parents in Toronto) on the international stage. The film, which Losier shot over 17 years, uses the song well to establish the performer’s cred as a bona fide rock star, with scenes of packed venues in New York and Paris singing and bouncing along to every beat and lyric.
And, oh, what lyrics. “Suckin’ on my titties like you wanted me/Callin’ me all the time like Blondie/Check out my Chrissie behind/It’s fine all of the time.” As Peaches does in her music, the film also revels in her brazen sexuality, opening with an a cappella recitation of her song “Vaginoplasty,” and building one montage around a slow-mo shot of the singer, topless, twirling a thick gold rope chain around her neck.
Donning a variety of outlandish costumes, Peaches brings that sex-positive swagger to every performance, often backed by scantily clad dancers of various genders. Offstage, she takes her artistry and message seriously, though not herself.
However, she’s aware that both critics and fans can be blinded by the pussy, so to speak. At one point, she seems resigned to being “misconstrued” as someone who’s overtly sexual 24/7, rather than as a three-dimensional person.
The film ventures to capture her in three dimensions, spending time on the road and in the studio with Peaches and her collaborators. Most vitally, we see Peaches with one of the most important people in her life, her sister, who suffered from MS and passed away before the film was completed.
Through glimpses of their close relationship — and bits of interactions and interviews with her strangely passive-aggressive parents, who seem ambivalent about her success — a portrait of the whole person comes into view.
Losier also includes pre-fame footage of Peaches, still Merrill, looking like a Canadian girl next door, working in a daycare, singing and playing ditties for the kids with her acoustic guitar. From her appearance to the sunny song, it’s a 180-degree vibe shift from “Fuck the Pain Away,” yet the film draws a clear enough line between the two.
Losier and editor Aël Dallier Vega don’t draw the timeline of these 17 years in anything resembling chronological order. Eschewing narration, onscreen text, or many other markers to contextualize the journey, other than aging and changing hairstyles, the movie drops viewers in and out of moments liberally.
The effect can be disorienting, and the storytelling vague, but the film’s free-floating movement can also feel exciting, along with all the concert footage, not only a record of this one-of-a-kind artist but a loving capsule of a booming dance movement.
Peaches Goes Bananas (★★★☆☆) is playing limited theatrical engagements around the U.S., and is available to rent or buy on Fandango at Home. Visit www.filmmovement.com.
Everyone in the tiny riverside town in the gloomy Croatian gay drama Sandbag Dam spends the movie doggedly preparing for a potentially devastating flood that never comes.
Radio weather reports warn of torrential rains, as villagers go about their daily lives. At the same time, every able-bodied man and boy is called into action on their off-time to haul sandbags to the river's banks, building a wall to protect the town from impending disaster.
The river waters rise and rage, yet, during the film's days-long window into this provincial burg, no flooding tips close to or over the sandbag dam. The threat of a deluge remains merely a pregnant metaphor for the flood of urges and emotions the movie's teen protagonist Marko (Lav Novosel) is fighting to keep at bay.
Jodie Foster acts in fluent French but still curses in English as neurotic psychotherapist Dr. Lilian Steiner, an American living in Paris, in the urbane mystery-thriller A Private Life.
To be precise, the movie's thrills are minor -- some light action and peril in the vein of a Murder, She Wrote or Moonlighting. And the central mystery, surrounding one of Dr. Steiner's patients who goes missing, generates too few "a-ha!" revelations in its winding road to an anticlimactic resolution.
Steeped in an atmosphere of suspicion, the film, from writer-director Rebecca Zlotowski (Other People's Children), better serves as a drama exploring the emotionally distant doctor being shaken from the stasis of her lonely life. A complicated woman, Lilian Steiner provides two-time Oscar-winner Foster a chance to command the screen with subtle intensity in a context we've never seen from her in fifty-plus years as a leading lady.
The blonde, busty housekeeper Millie portrayed by Sydney Sweeney in The Housemaid brushes off several early signs that all is not as it appears inside the posh Long Island home of the Winchesters, where she has just been hired.
Some of the signs are so glaring that they play like punchlines. "Welcome, Millie. Here's your room in the attic, with just one window waaaay up there that doesn't open, and a door that locks from the outside. And be as loud as you want, because no one can hear you all the way downstairs."
Adapting Freida McFadden's bestselling 2022 novel -- the first in a series of three Housemaid books, so far -- director Paul Feig and screenwriter Rebecca Sonnenshine inject winking humor into a setup bristling with dread and paranoia. In concept, we're watching a psychological thriller, but the tongue-in-cheek tone is what usually prevails.
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