For this junkie, the appeal of true-crime docs is rooted in their mixture of pseudo-realistic importance with the lurid tropes of a horror film. You get a documentary, sort of, and a thriller in the same package. And they are often chopped up into tasty, disreputably reductive info nuggets—usually a mixture of interviews with dramatic recreations that are nothing more or less than direct fiction—that go down easy in between texting your friends and finishing dinner on the couch. After a boring or stressful day at work, it’s relaxing to have your worst fears of human nature confirmed.
I’ve had an awful week, and Netflix’s new true-crime blockbuster “Lover, Stalker, Killer” fulfilled the pact that we have with this genre. Newly single, I have now been reminded that it’s a jungle out there, and that my reintroduction into the wild of middle-aged dating life will most likely end in death and destruction. It certainly did for Dave Kroupa, an unassuming mid-30ish auto mechanic who moved to Omaha in 2012 in the midst of a divorce. Single and ready to mingle, Dave jumps into the dating sites and begins to enjoy himself. He meets Liz Golyar, and they drink and bowl and hook up. Quite open and honest about his in-exclusivity, Dave soon starts something with Cari Farver, a single mother who’s taking classes and looking to reinvent herself.
It’s fun and games until Cari, discovering Liz’s existence, disappears and seemingly taunts Dave with menacing texts. Cari texts Dave her knowledge of his whereabouts, threatening his ex-wife and children, and the behavior continues to escalate. Cari keys cars and breaks into homes, eventually burning Liz’s house down. A desperate hunt for Cari begins, and through texting she appears to be everywhere and nowhere at once, with Dave as the protagonist of a real-life slasher thriller. This nightmare brings him back into the arms of the equally rattled Liz.
That’s the set-up, and director Sam Hobkinson proves adept with the true-crime recipe. Contemporary Dave is interviewed, serving as something of a master of ceremonies, though his footage has of course been edited in such a manner as to obscure the outcome of the narrative until the gotcha-moment arrives an hour into the film. The twist is a doozy, though this veteran of true-crime series and vintage gialli horror films pieced it together in 20 minutes. Here’s a hint for cinephiles: Think a real-life version of the punchline at the end of Dario Argento’s “The Bird with the Crystal Plumage.”
Despite its tabloid title, “Love, Stalker, Killer” is a more elegant piece of work than Netflix’s recent “American Nightmare,” and it has the good manners to run a taut 90 minutes, rather than stretching the story out for multiple hours for maximum clicks. Hobkinson injects David Fincherian menace into the recreations, which have sleek, shadowy imagery that reflects Dave’s mounting anxiety. And the Fincher association intensifies as “Lover, Stalker, Killer” morphs into a techno-procedural, with investigators piecing together the source of Cari’s texts. At the center of it all is Dave, who makes for an amusingly unintuitive ladies’ man, a dude in the wrong place at the profoundly wrong time. This film might become an ironic Valentine’s Day classic.
“How to Have Sex” is the kind of thematic sermon that viewers of indie cinema seem to run into a dozen times a year, which means that the reviews are inevitably sensational. Writer-director Molly Manning Walker follows three British girls—Tara (Mia McKenna-Bryce), Skye (Lara Peake), and Em (Enva Lewis)—as they go about the rituals of spring break, drinking and clubbing and flirting with the goal of hooking up so as to prove their budding worldliness. They are all teenagers and very much look it, which gives the bacchanalia a sense of discomfort that’s very pointed and purposefully achieved. Walker is talented, creating a convincing and livewire aura of debauchery, from the too-loud music to the systemic pressure placed on women to become sex objects on demand. Walker emphasizes the capitalist element of sexual objectification: Without “girls going wild,” clubs would sell less booze and hotels would book fewer rooms to horny party animals. This thesis is sound, but it’s the entire movie.
Walker’s empathy proves inadvertently condescending. The girls have nothing on their minds besides partying, and while superficiality is certainly a component of teenage life, especially spring break, I came to resent the writer-director’s suppression of the girls’ identities for the sake of her preordained conclusion. Yes, Walker is alive to the vulnerabilities that exist under the girls’ braggadocio, but they are regarded as exhibits in a case for the prosecution. As the film’s designated victim, however, McKenna-Bruce is frighteningly vivid, bringing to life the unmooring confusion of trying, as a child, to wade into the waters of adult experience. McKenna-Bruce complicates and enriches Walker’s schematic, and Walker, to her credit, has the sense to recognize her actor’s talent. “How to Have Sex” is “The Royal Hotel,” among others, all over again: an atmospheric movie by filmmakers who are on the rise, which is hobbled by a schematic.
All this sex and death and violation and doom: Let’s end our time this week with something sweeter and more affirming, a little maudlin, sure, but masterfully made and comforting, the French-Vietnamese director Tran Anh Hung’s foodie romance “The Taste of Things.” It’s the 19th century somewhere in the idyllic storybook French countryside, the sort of land that you’d have to be a baron to possess, especially these days, but you don’t go to these films for class considerations. Drink in the luxury and let the existential aftertaste sneak up on you.
Dodin (Benoît Magimel) is a legendary cook and gourmand. Known as the “Napoleon of gastronomy,” he’s the sort of person that royalty fight to have over for dinner. Aiding him, but really the true master of his kitchen, is Eugénie (Juliette Binoche), who has been Dodin’s love for over 20 years. He begs her to marry him, but she must go her own way even while subsuming herself to his acclaim. Yes, there’s something contradictory and politically incorrect here, which gets at the ways that lovers enable and efface one another, a riddle that can only be understood, if at all, from a relationship’s center.
Much of “The Taste of Things” concerns process, in this case the sensory bath of creating food. In this manner, it suggests a romantic fictional counterpart to the documentaries of Frederick Wiseman, particularly his recent French culinary epic, “Menus-Plaisirs – Les Troisgros.” Vegetables are chopped, fish are boned, and veal loins are seasoned and re-seasoned. Herbs are grounded; red wine is added and sipped. All of these actions are committed in a large, lush country kitchen that is bathed in perfect romantic sunlight and rendered in intoxicating long takes. The silent communion in the kitchen between Dodin and Eugénie is a way of making love, and that sentiment and those memories translate to foodie ecstasy. But all food that must be cooked must be eaten—there is in food, as in most of life that’s worth experiencing, a fleetingness; a sense of life and of creation that must fade away.
There is a plot—pivotal meals are cooked, an apprentice learns life lessons—and there are many various episodes, but what matters is Dodin’s implicit understanding that Eugénie is to be regarded on her own terms. He’s an elegant, hearty middle-aged man, and such humility tends to come with experience and weather. Dodin has the decency to know how good he’s got it, and that every moment must be savored. It is tempting to call “The Taste of Things” a well-honed bougie bauble, and that wouldn’t entirely be inaccurate, but the film is heightened by Anh Hung’s understanding that the price of all pleasure is vulnerability to its passing. The price of pleasure, in other words, is pain.
“Lover, Killer, Stalker” is now streaming on Netflix. “How to Have Sex” and “The Taste of Things” are now playing at Movieland.
