Recencies van critici

In the film’s most beautiful and suggestive sequence, Gladstone surprises Stewart with a night-time horseback ride that brings old-fashioned chivalry into the present tense while also flipping around the scenario’s masculine imagery and ideology until it signifies something 180 degrees from its source material. It’s absurd and gorgeous and deeply melancholy.

If Reichardt has rightly been called a minimalist—Robert Bresson and Yasujiro Ozu are also profound influences—she's a maximalist of repressed passions. Certain Women (2016) is the director's sixth feature, and in every one, she has required her actors—chosen, perhaps, for their soulful vibe and ability to emote from the inside out—to work really hard at not doing very much while implying they contain multitudes.

Having made a Western and an environmental thriller, Reichardt has come full circle to the heart-on-sleeve intimacies of her devastating Wendy and Lucy. And it's the Rancher's story, more populated by horses than by people, that will win your heart. In a closing coda that briefly revisits each story, finding Laura visiting Fuller in jail and Gina sneaking off from Ryan for a quick cigarette break, it's the Rancher and her dog who own the final shot, and you'll want to watch them forever.

What the triptych structure nicely amplifies are the women's plights and their tiredness, as they struggle with debt or loneliness, unhappy marriage or male neediness. With minimalism as an organising principle, characterisation is pieced together from scant dialogue, worn-in clothes or fleeting expressions. Reichardt shoots her actresses' faces with the same lingering attention that she gives to the landscape.

Lily Gladstone makes the most compelling case of all these emotional drifters not through resignation, but hope. The way her eyes glow with happiness, her jawline tightens ever so slightly with tense wonder and that nervousness, the embarrassment of possessing humanity that some of us can't hide.

The film never deigns to announce itself as momentous or important, but rather wraps you up in the fabric of everyday life and leaves you there to marvel at the wonder each of these women create.

Reichardt, who also edited the film, brings the textures and atmosphere of the contemporary American West—Montana, specifically—so close that you can practically smell it: the dampness underfoot, the chill in the air, the emotional anticipation of barely identified longings and thoughts just starting to form.

By the time I caught up with Kelly Reichardt‘s best film yet—and in my book, that's saying something—I couldn't help but watch it through the dark veil of this year's election results... That aside—please!—no other film this year took me back to the States so completely. And with such quiet vigor, too. Also: Laura Dern.

Each of the three discrete vignettes in Kelly Reichardt's lucid page-to-screen transfer of a 2009 collection of short stories by Maile Meloy incisively probes loneliness — most movingly in the final chapter, between Kristen Stewart's adult-ed teacher and Lily Gladstone's crushed-out ranch hand.

It's a movie that speaks to rural America with more genuine empathy and curiosity than a thousand scolding op-eds. Would the legion of Trump voters recognize themselves in it? CERTAIN WOMEN, adapted by Reichardt from a trio of stories by Maile Meloy, is not simply a film randomly plopped down in Montana to score a tax rebate. Its whole rhythm and grammar arises organically from the setting and its pokier pace of life.

Everything in Certain Women is carefully constructed and potentially deadly, but Reichardt rejects the spectacle of violence associated with the American West, replacing it with silence and dark pity.

The film is thus a delicate rejoinder to the all-American bromide of self-sufficiency and will power as routes to fulfillment, the defining thematic constellation of the western in its classical form. That Reichardt emulates the genre's components just cannily enough (expansive landscape photography, a climactic horse ride) while also subtly defamiliarizing them (plentiful dead air, unnervingly detuned ambient sound) makes her persuasions—her certainty—that much more revelatory.