The premise of “The Surfer” suggests that it’s going to be right up Nicolas Cage’s genre-heavy VOD alley, which, from me, is a compliment. Cage plays the surfer—it’s one of those movies where characters are assigned signifiers instead of names—who returns to a gorgeous Australian beach from his childhood with his teenage son (Finn Little) in tow. Trouble arises, but not quite how you’d expect.
The surfer is on the verge of buying a house near the beach, which he says once belonged to his father. He and his wife are divorcing and we assume that he needs to go home again, literally and, of course, figuratively. Thomas Wolfe famously had thoughts on that idea, and so does Scally (Julian McMahon), who heads a group of buff thugs who inhabit the beach and chase off outsiders. Scally emasculates the surfer in front of his son on the beach, mildly, but still, and rivalry and turf war commence.
Thugs, Nic Cage, the atmospheric surf-and-beach window dressing—this sounds like it writes itself. However, director Lorcan Finnegan and writer Thomas Martin are looking to catch, forgive me, a bigger wave. They are interested in examining masculinity rather than indulging its baser impulses. The surfer’s existential quandaries are taken surprisingly seriously, and the plot frequently redefines itself.
“The Surfer” is less “Mandy” or one of its bluer-collar brethren in the Cage canon than something like “The Weather Man,” a largely forgotten Cage vehicle from his mainstream Hollywood days, in which he gave an excellent performance as another affluent professional in midlife crisis feeling adrift and dwarfed by his father. Cage has always been excellent at playing emasculated dweebs living in their own heads, as his eccentric timing and charisma shake up the self-pitying sentimentality that’s typical of such roles. Or, simply: His weirdness keeps potentially stock characters interesting.
Finnegan allows the oddness of “The Surfer” to sneak up on you. The surfer parks at the beach, has the stand-off with Scally after a strained drive with his son, the son meanders off somewhere, and gradually it becomes evident that the entire movie is going to be set on this beach with no cutaways as reprieve. The entrapment is palpable here. An old man lives in a car not far from the shore, and as Cage grows more frazzled and the sun continues to fry the landscapes and the thugs continue to bully him, we start to wonder if the surfer and the old man are one in the same. Or is the old man the surfer’s father? We’ve entered a slipstream of masculine crisis.
To spare you from asking: No, “The Surfer” never turns into a conventional revenge movie, with the surfer confronting Scally in an extravagant bloodbath. It never quite goes full-on hallucinatory head-trip either. Many cinephiles and connoisseurs of action-movie red meat alike are going to probably wish that “The Surfer” had picked one of those lanes, and I am among them even if I enjoyed and am generally sympathetic to what’s going on here. The movie hovers in the middle of the road, amused by our irritation with its refusal to declare itself. That irritation, better described as “discomfort,” is the point.
That uncertainty puts us in the surfer’s shoes, and our complicity is affirmed by Cage, who gives another superb, poignant-comic portrait of a man unmoored. The anecdotal nature of the script allows Cage room to breathe, and he has a vivid and ambiguous rapport with McMahon, who shows that he should’ve been in many more movies since “Nip/Tuck” ended years ago.
McMahon satirizes the privileged man who indulges macho cosplay on the beach or in the woods to renew his alpha bona fides. And yet McMahon and the filmmakers don’t make the characterization that simple. Scally, who, with his tan and red hood and sly moustache visually scans as an old-school version of Satan, is commanding. Menacing and full of himself, certainly, but Scally’s restraint is a refreshing counterpoint against the surfer’s desperation. If you find Scally appealing, you may wonder why you do. Why is the male vulnerability that the surfer exudes so often greeted by others with contempt? It’s that kind of movie.
The surfer’s taste for humiliation and punishment at the hands of Scally’s gang and other locals takes on a masochistic dimension. Is the surfer’s relentless zeal to surf these guarded waves part of a drive to restore his manhood? Again, it’s that kind of movie. Finnegan is a gifted director, and he makes the calm of the ocean and the sun-blasted brightness of the sand intangibly menacing. The acting and mood are worth engaging with in “The Surfer,” a midnight movie that might also be a diverting head-trip for new devotees of cinematic surrealism.
One normally wouldn’t link a Nicolas Cage movie to a new adaptation of Françoise Sagan’s novel, “Bonjour Tristesse,” but they do both involve rarefied beaches and simmering tensions fueled by gender, and both do toggle the line between operating as thrillers and more intuitive coming-of-age stories. As a writer on deadline with other jobs, I’ve certainly drawn more tenuous connections in the past.
Teenage Cécile (Lily McInerny) and her father, Raymond (Claes Bang), and his girlfriend, Elsa (Nailia Harzoune) are summering somewhere on a beach in Southern France. “Bonjour Tristesse” is one of those European art movies that is quite casual about its rarification: the beach is gorgeous and virtually uninhabited, their house is chic and spacious, and every composition is framed, perhaps with a hint of satire intended, to suggest a picture from an expensive magazine. Money, of course, is not mentioned once over the course of this film’s 110 minutes. If you have to ask about money, you aren’t living this way.
Writer-director Durga Chew-Bose has preserved from the book and the previous movie adaptation from 1958, directed by Otto Preminger, the somewhat madding and quasi-incestuous modern tenor of Cécile and Raymond’s relationship. They suggest friends more explicitly than child and father, and Cécile drinks and smokes with Raymond and his coterie of impeccably smug and privileged friends. Elsa fits in, one surmises, by knowing her place, as Raymond is clearly a man who cycles through attractive women who eventually inconvenience him, all the while thinking himself thoughtful.
Chew-Bose skillfully sets up the various psychosocial dominoes of the plot. She has a keen sense of allowing viewers to feel as if they are discovering carefully planted bits of information for themselves. Cécile’s mother is dead, and the daughter’s relationship with Raymond, whom she inevitably calls by his first name, suggests the way that even children and parents who aren’t glamorous and loaded can forge a codependency that deprives the child of childhood. This lifestyle seems like an enviable way for people to grow up, perhaps until they look back on it many years later. Into the breach comes Anne (Chloë Sevigny), an old friend of Raymond’s who isn’t as controllable as Elsa.
Rivalries and coming-of-age intrigues underscore Cécile’s subtly expanding disenchantment with her father. Raymond is charismatic but selfish, which becomes more obvious to Cécile as she enters into the adult world and acclimates to its attending powers and disappointments. Chew-Bose refreshingly withholds judgment on Raymond as well as everyone else, and she has a wonderful way of allowing your perception of characters to evolve along with Cécile’s without resorting to melodrama. The film floats along, and things that don’t seem to matter eventually do.
Tying the room together, so to speak, is one of the best performances of Chloë Sevigny’s career. This is a canny bit of casting: For a middle-aged cinephile, it’s poignant to see a former bad girl, a star of many movies that my parents would’ve loathed, as a successful woman who tries and fails to hide her growing vulnerability. Anne is a woman who is not nearly as unconventional as she would like to be, which she attempts to hide behind an icy reserve that egocentric people mistake for aloofness. Sevigny’s double vision in the role—of the ice and the heartache—is extraordinarily vivid, yet she never goes soft. Without Sevigny, this new “Bonjour Tristesse” would be a pleasant surprise, a confident announcement from a new filmmaker. With her, it has a fierce undertow.
“The Surfer” and “Bonjour Tristesse” are both in theaters.
