When I saw Lynne Ramsay's previous outing, 2012's WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN, alone in a theatre in Toronto, only one word came to mind: nausea. I knew it was great, but it tried to revolt me and succeeded. George Lucas once said that you can wring a cat and make an audience shriek, but it's much more difficult (and impressive and rewarding) to make an audience do so with a story and characters. Gaspar Noé and Darren Aronofsky belong to the cat-wringers, and William Friedkin and David Cronenberg are legends for a reason. Lynne Ramsay somehow bridges the gap between both and with her newest film, YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE, she succeeds again in what may be her best movie yet and much more deserving of Cannes's Palme d'Or than the next film I'm reviewing (which I liked), THE SQUARE.

YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE has a simple enough B-movie premise on paper. Joaquin Phoenix is Joe, a traumatized war vet turned hitman-cum-enforcer who lives in Queens with his mother and is hired to rescue children from slavery. When he rescues a New York senator's daughter, his own life unravels so violently that he is forced to reckon with his own demons. When I describe to people that it is one of my favorite films of the year (and at this point, second only to Scorsese's SILENCE), some think I've suddenly turned into a fan of Charles Bronson/American shoot-em-ups about men trying to prove their dicks are bigger than others' with guns and hot chicks. I haven't read the book the film is based on, but from excerpts and summaries, it seems like a typical page-turner: funny and twisted and tightly-constructed but throwaway. The film adaptation could not be farther from this description.

Okay, maybe "twisted" would be appropriate, and it's not without a laugh here or there. But the genius of Ramsay's film (she also wrote the screenplay) is that it uses this paper-thin premise to explore the psyche of its central character. Like what the best of psychological cinema should do, the film uses the filmic experience to study the inner workings of a human being. Not with plot or action but with images and sound. It's not so much a film as it is an audiovisual poem about violence, degradation, and trauma (as someone who's experienced it, I can't think of another film that has dealt with that third theme better). I was floored by some sequences of the film, particularly its moments of violence and the Scotswoman's perceptions of Americana, and if it weren't for the fact that I had plans that night, I would've bought a ticket to see the next screening immediately.

So I saw it again a few days later, just to verify that I wasn't just wowed by the cinematography and the score and that there was something between the lines (also, the end felt a bit abrupt to me the first time around). I realized on the second viewing that few besides Ramsay have a better control over their films. Every detail is precise and fits into the puzzle. It's not the most complex movie to understand on a plot level, but there were little moments that fit into the bigger picture that seemed nonsensical on the first viewing. Everything had been planned to a T. If I have one complaint, it's that it is a little too short at 85 minutes, and even 10 minutes more of fleshing-out could've turned the movie into a 21st century classic. But still, it's stunning to me that the film didn't win Cannes's top prize.

Which leads me to Ruben Östlund's THE SQUARE, the Palme d'Or winner this year. It's a Swedish film (with a lot of scenes in English featuring Elizabeth Moss as a reporter and Dominic West as an American artist) that revolves around a museum director named Christian (Claes Bang) over the period of a few weeks in which several strange occurrences occur. For one, he's exhibiting a (rather dumb) art-piece called "The Square," which is a neon-lit square in the ground wherein people are supposed to behave ethically... or something. The film's murkiness about it is part of the joke. In another storyline, he gets robbed and comes up with an idiotic way to get it back by tracking his iPhone down to an apartment building and threatening via mail every single person who lives there which, of course, backfires. There's also the poster image, which involves an art performance piece of a guy pretending to be a gorilla and really refusing to break out of character. Throughout it all, Christian is trying to raise money for the museum and survive as a single dad. But he's a wealthy art museum director, so of course he likes to party and womanize.

Before I go into why I didn't think it deserved to win the Palme d'Or (which is kind of dumb anyway because those awards are silly) and that it's been overhyped, I must say I liked the movie very much. It'll likely be in my top 10 by the end of the year. It had me laughing throughout. And as someone who's known (personally) European artists, painters, and their entourages, the film captures their spirit particularly well; that is, most are vain, pretentious, rich, and fucking moronic.

Moreover, it reminded me of Buñuel and his spirit of viewing the world cynically but not bitterly. Christian is vaguely dickish, but all around, he seems like a decent dude and is trying to do the right thing. What I really liked about the movie is its commentary about the art world's utter seclusion in its own bubble. Many images of beggars and homeless people are sprinkled throughout the film, directly juxtaposed against the elitism of contemporary artists. Sure, you may be exploring the downfall of capitalism and navel-gazing your pathetic life through your watercolored art installation, but hey, at least you can afford the paint.

I also like its commentary on gimmicky art, and the art world's pantomiming that it understands what the hell it's dealing with. A PR team makes a shocking viral video at one point to make people visit the museum, and it articulates clearly what I hate about the art world now (looking at you, Jeff Koons). Nobody can just be "good" anymore, there has to be a spectacle involved, like making a giant balloon dog. Because the human species is now too moronic to pay attention to the next Rembrandt, if that's even possible to see within our lifetimes. And it's also clear (from the film and in real life) that the art world is only pretending to understand the meaningless bs it's producing. I cracked up in one scene when Elizabeth Moss's character asks Christian to clarify a pretentiously worded and nonsensical essay he posted on the museum's website. As someone who's read essays about art sent to me by painters, I can't tell you how many times I wanted to vomit at their own highfalutin. My favorite writers include Dostoyevsky and Mishima. I know I can't be that dumb, but that Tumblr post about visual connections in the mindspace and its interrelation with the ultimate responsibility of artistic nature as it pertains to catalysts for human agency is utter rubbish. I just made that shit up... sort of.

And at 2 hours and 20 minutes, I was impressively never bored. (Also, there's nothing I find funnier than people in positions of power or high society acting like buffoons.) But my problems with the movie are twofold. Besides being a relateable series of stories about what it's like to be in the art world, there's no real cohesive throughline. That's not to say that the film meanders. After all, with very few exceptions, everything that Östlund introduces has its own payoff within the film's logic. But what difference would it make to take out one subplot? Or two? I found them all entertaining, but the film is terribly disorganized and unfocused. I'd have a hard time describing it to people besides as a film about a museum director's whacky adventures with some heavier dramatic undercurrents about economic inequality and male egotism.

And lastly, the film just didn't feel very cinematic. Granted, most movies made today don't feel very cinematic; hell, Ozark is better than most movies coming out now. But that's kind of my point. YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE is pure cinema, using every tool of the narrative film arsenal to plunge you into a whirlwind of emotion and thought in a small amount of time (in its case, less than 90 minutes but I could be referring to a 3 hour film). THE SQUARE is fun and interesting, but it's not much more than that. I tried to explain this to two of my friends in Madrid who saw the latter but not the former, that THE SQUARE just seemed like a competently made Netflix series.

That we've lost what it means to have a cinematic experience and that stories are being better told via television and that the two mediums (one considered more as entertainment, the other as art, but are now being switched and confused in the public consciousness) have merged, and good movies are now just long episodes of TV shows (i.e., THE SQUARE) and great movies, the ones that really explore the limits of what's possible in the still-young medium, are almost never produced (except for YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE). But I had a hard time articulating this to my friends because we were late for class and I really had to piss beforehand.