There is a strange beauty to it all: the geometry of the almost deserted aisles, the precarious stacks of beer crates, the discrete whoosh of electric pallet carriers zooming to and fro (to “The Blue Danube”, no less!), and all of it during the graveyard shift. In the half-dark, the superstore is less of an abomination that is part supermarket, part warehouse: it is a refuge for the assorted sad sacks and losers that work there, most likely because they wouldn’t find anything else. These are the outskirts of East Germany almost thirty years after Reunification, and the reality is drab and depressing – but at night, in the aisles, you may just find something you don’t have anywhere else: a home.
Marie Bäumer has been compared to Romy Schneider for so long that it was really only a question of time that she would play her. Emily Atef’s black-and-white 3 Days in Quiberon uses that likeness to great effect, so much so that when I picked the stills for this post, I had to check twice which actor I was looking at. The movie revolves around Schneider’s stay in a rehab resort on the French coast in March 1981, where she wants to give an interview to journalist Michael Jürgs from the German magazine Stern. It seems to be shot at least partly in its original locations. There is history between her and her favorite photographer Robert Lebeck, and she asks one of her friends, Hilde Fritsch, to come and keep her company. For Schneider, any interview was a double-edged sword because she inevitably would be asked about leaving Germany for France, the suicide of her first husband and the custody battle for her son, and of course about the Sissi trilogy. On the other hand, she was eager to go on making movies. 
Tune in for episode 10 of A Damn Fine Cup of Culture, in which we look in on the Avengers & friends and a certain titan with a temper. Is Infinity War a worthy culmination of ten years of the Marvel Cinematic Universe? (Beware: heavy spoilers for Infinity War, including the ending.) Also, Mege’s looked into a different kind of infinity with Béla Tarr’s Sátántangó, and Matt wishes he hadn’t seen the trailer last year’s indie darling Lady Bird five times before watching the film, and we share our impressions of Jon Bernthal in Netflix’ The Punisher and Cécile McLorin Salvant in concert. 
Lynne Ramsay’s You Were Never Really Here could have been made in the late Sixties, with John Wayne or Lee Marvin, or in the Eighties with Russell Crowe. Ramsay’s movie is based on a 2013 novella by Jonathan Ames, but it could also be based on a story by Jim Thompson from the Fifties. I understand the comparisons with Taxi Driver, since both movies are about traumatized outsiders confronted with violence (a lot of it their own), but You Were Never Really Here is pared down to a taut 90 minutes. Everything that does not belong to the story is not in there. Ramsay’s screenplay tells a lean, mean tale that would be ruined with too much dialogue or too much exposition. Three out of her four movies have literary origins, and she always films her own screenplays. Lynne Ramsay knows what she wants to say, and how to say it.
There is a strange paradox at the center of the film. We either see Joe or we see what he sees. Lynne Ramsay films him in such tight frames that it feels like we are sometimes there with him, in the same car, in the same room, that it’s hard not to feel trapped with him, and as soon as he is using violence, the movie makes us accomplices. The other side is this: since Joaquin Phoenix gives such a good performance, Joe seems to dissolve before our very eyes. I can’t really explain why, and it is all the more surprising because Joe seems to be such a doughy hunk, folded back into himself. Phoenix has played psychologically damaged men before, most of all in Paul Thomas Anderson’s movies 
For a movie about a suicidal guy who uses hammers to free girls from brothels, there is not much violence. Some of it might not come from the blood, but from how Joe’s presence undeniably means life or death – life to the girls, death to their johns and pimps. There is a moment in the movie where Joe, in the middle of a hammer job, is lying on the floor, a dying bodyguard beside him. They join hands. That scene could have gone wrong, but here, it works. Dying seems to be a state of being that Joe understands instinctively.
