FILM
Feed Your Head
Magic plant could be metaphor for many things — but what?
BY STEVE ERICKSON
Austrian director Jessica
Hausner’s “Little
Joe” had the potential to
stun. Demonstrating her
considerable talent as a stylist, it
has a clear vision of its near-future
world. However, that world ends
at the limits of the fi lm’s sets. The
fi lm feels cramped and cheap.
Hausner attempted to create
a sci-fi nightmare with real but
opaque connections to the problems
of our present-day world.
But although fi sts fl y a few times
in this fi lm, nothing much lies at
stake. “Little Joe” draws on the oftrevisited
narratives of “Frankenstein”
and “Invasion of the Body
Snatchers” and fi lms like “2001:
A Space Odyssey,” Todd Haynes’
“Safe,” and David Cronenberg’s
“They Came From Within.” Even
so, it’s too withdrawn and polite to
come close to the apocalyptic urgency
of some of those infl uences.
“Little Joe” begins in a lab where
scientists are hard at work, developing
new species. Alice (Emily
Samaritans Racing the Clock
➤ LITTLE JOE, continued on p.31
Emergency services are a cut-throat business in Mexico City
BY STEVE ERICKSON
The person who fi rst applied
the phrase “ambulance
chasers” to lawyers
didn’t envision a world
where ambulances chase each
other to get to injured people. In
Mexico City, the government operates
less than 45 ambulances,
even though nine million people
live there. Thus, private business
is left to pick up the slack. Indeed,
as the ambulances race in the
streets, they risk crashing and
causing further injuries.
“Midnight Family,” made by US
director Luke Lorentzen over a
six-month period, shows the dangers.
He profi les the Ochoa family,
Emily Beecham and Ben-Whishaw in Jessica Hausner’s “Little Joe,” which opens December 6 at the
Quad.
who operate their own ambulance.
While they start off meaning well,
they operate in an exploitative
system that results in them asking
desperate people for money to
get a ride to the hospital. Over the
fi lm’s brief 80 minutes, it stages
a drama in which the family becomes
increasingly amoral in their
pursuit of money, without doing
more than getting by.
“Midnight Family” avoids the
perils of a tabloid aesthetic. With
one exception, Lorentzen keeps
the faces of the Ochoas’ passengers
offscreen. When they pick
up a teenage girl who has been
beaten by her boyfriend, her face
is shown in profi le. (One wonders
how he was able to accomplish
PICTURES era tracks dow into greenhouses
such careful framing under tight
and diffi cult conditions.) Given
the subject matter, it’s impossible
to avoid showing blood, but “Midnight
Family” refuses to dwell on
it. This isn’t a wallow in gore and
misery.
Lorentzen’s gaze is empathetic,
not pornographic. While the pain
of the people who need an ambulance
comes across, the fi lm respects
their privacy and dignity. In
North American culture, Mexico is
too frequently reduced to clichés
about drugs and violence; while
the subject matter might offer an
opportunity to do the same here,
“Midnight Family” dodges it.
Women don’t play much of a
role in “Midnight Family” except
Beecham), Chris (out gay actor
Ben Whishaw), and the suspicious
Bella (Kerry Fox) are overseeing a
crimson fl ower whose pollen has
the ability to make people happy
by producing the brain hormone
Oxytocin when inhaled. Alice is
separated from her son Joe’s (Kit
Connor) father, and brings home
one of the plants. But the plants,
which Alice dubs “Little Joe” after
her son, need constant affection
to pump out pollen. They start to
affect the behavior of Joe and his
young girlfriend as well as the lab
workers in troubling ways.
Fittingly for a lab working on
plant development, its scientists
wear pale green coats rather than
the standard white. But the walls
are blindingly beige. Hausner’s future
has turned sterile. The fi lm
strives to be slicker than it actually
is. It uses bright primary colors to
contrast the lab’s blandness. Beecham
was apparently cast in part
for her blazing red hair! The camMAGNOLIA
as injured passengers. The Ochoa
family consists of an adult man
named Fer, his teenage son Juan,
and his nine-year-old son Josué.
They spend every night speeding
around the streets of Mexico City.
Their work involves a degree of
racing adrenaline, and “Midnight
Family” does evoke its ebb and
fl ow as the Ochoas yell at their rivals
while rushing around Mexico
City. Josué bounces a soccer ball
while sitting in the ambulance as
his father drives around.
They serve the city’s wealthiest
neighborhoods, hoping to fi nd
better-paying clients there. The
tension between their own meager
➤ MIDNIGHT FAMILY, continued on p.31
December 5 - December 1 30 8, 2019 | GayCityNews.com
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