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Member Newsletter - September Edition: Rotting in the Sun, Agnieszka Holland, and more

Published over 1 year ago • 5 min read

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This month, I'm recommending two films from Sebastián Silva featuring Catalina Saavedra, which are now streaming on Mubi; watch The Maid (2009) first to get all the meta elements of Rotting in the Sun (2023), which delivers the biggest laughs of the year. My other recommendations include: a feel-good British dramedy starring Rory Kinnear, a great Canadian doc about the Southern Resident killer whales going extinct, a Canadian black comedy, and an underseen film from one of cinema's greatest directors (Agnieszka Holland) whose new film Green Border premieres at the Venice Film Festival this week.

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Rotting in the Sun (and The Maid!), dir. Sebastián Silva

🇨🇦🇺🇸🇬🇧🇦🇺🇳🇿 Mubi (pretty much worldwide) - Sept 15

Sebastián Silva plays a fictional version of himself in his hilarious and bonkers new comedy Rotting in the Sun. Depressed and frustrated with the inability to get paid to do artistic work he cares about, Silva heads to a gay beach where he meets Jordan Firstman (and an incredibly large number of horrifying and aggressive dicks), the most annoying person in the world who also seems to be Silva's only ticket to an HBO deal.

When Firstman shows up on Silva's doorstep to flesh out their new project, Silva has mysteriously disappeared, but his maid (Catalina Saavedra, the titular maid in Silva's The Maid, which was based on his own childhood experiences) may hold the answer to his disappearance, but has many good reasons not to be forthcoming.

I haven't laughed this much in ages, and certainly not through any other 2023 film. The film is also one of the smartest ones I've seen about what it's like to be extremely online.

To truly appreciate the meta elements in the film, I recommend doing a double feature with 2009's The Maid, also new to Mubi worldwide-ish this month. It's a very thoughtful (and stressful) drama about class. Then, hit the release button with Rotting in the Sun and the heavy laughter likely to ensue.

Bank of Dave

🇨🇦🇺🇸 VOD (in 4K!)🇦🇺🇳🇿 VOD🇬🇧 Netflix

​Find it in your country​

I can never resist a great Rory Kinnear performance, and it's so rare we get one in a starring role! This is a delightful little feel-good working-class British film by the director of Fisherman's Friends (and it follows all the same beats). It's about a small business owner, Dave (Rory Kinnear), in the North who wants to open the first new bank in 150 years to loan money to working-class locals who would be turned down by the old guard banks run by posh people. Joel Fry, who plays the young upstart lawyer who helps Dave, is also a wonderful surprise.

Coextinction

🇨🇦 Free on CBC Gem 🇦🇺 Free on SBS Movies until Sept 3​

Settler filmmakers Gloria Pancrazi and Elena Jean began the making of Coextinction as a fight to protect the Southern Resident killer whales, of which there are less than one hundred left. In the process of trying to understand what threatens the killer whales, they discover the dangers of the excessive noise produced by the shipping lanes, which interfere with the killer whales’ ability to find their prey. But soon, they realize the problem is not just with being able to find the prey, but the existence of the prey at all.

Coextinction is the rare nature doc to connect multiple complex issues in order to explain how the survival of multiple species is connected and why we can’t narrowly focus on just, for example, saving the whales.

The Kid Detective

🇨🇦 Free on CBC Gem 🇺🇸🇬🇧🇮🇪🇦🇺🇳🇿 VOD

​Find it in your country​

Writer-director Evan Morgan’s first feature, The Kid Detective, takes a premise that sounds silly and bad, and turns it into a funny and emotionally resonant black comedy with a touch of noir. A never-better Adam Brody stars as Abe, a man in his thirties who never actually grew out of his childhood moniker as “the kid detective”. Initially, Abe seems like a slacker who has squandered his potential; the arrival of a teenage girl (Sophie Nélisse) asking him to find her presumed dead boyfriend is the most excitement he’s had in months. When he becomes obsessed with solving this case that won’t even pay, still avoiding responsibility, Morgan begins to unpeel Abe’s past trauma which has kept him emotionally frozen at the maturity level of a teenager. The final act of the film gets unexpectedly dark, but it’s in line with Abe’s journey. All the while, the film seriously challenges patriarchal institutions of power that, we realize, Abe’s pseudo-profession has cheekily and slyly been doing since the start.

The Kid Detective premiered in TIFF's 2020 Industry Selects program to little fanfare, but it was a festival highlight. It's slowly gaining cult status, but very few people even know it exists! Seek it out!

Charlatan

🇨🇦 Free on Tubi; VOD 🇺🇸 Tubi, Kanopy, VOD 🇬🇧BFI Player, VOD 🇦🇺🇳🇿 Beama Film 🇮🇪VOD

Agnieszka Holland has a new film premiering at the Venice Film Festival this week (Green Border), so it's a great time to catch up with her underseen but fantastic last film, Charlatan (2020), the story of Czech herbalist and healer Jan Mikolášek to draw parallels with post-war communism.

​We did a podcast on Agnieszka Holland! Head to your Seventh Row Premium Podcast feed (available to Members only) to listen (episode 93: The Films of Agnieszka Holland). We talk about must-see films from Holland, including Charlatan, Europa Europa, and Washington Square.

Happy watching!

If you have any feedback on the newsletter, please hit reply and let me know. What's working? What isn't? What could make it more valuable?

Best,

Alex Heeney, Editor-in-Chief

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Seventh Row is a nonprofit Canadian film criticism publication and publishing house. We're dedicated to helping you expand your horizons by curating the best socially progressive films from around the world and helping you think deeply about them. This newsletter is run by Seventh Row (http://seventh-row.com) but features exclusive content not found on the website.

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