a review of 安然无恙

1st Annual Criterion Challenge Week 37: Kelly Reichardt's Top 10 I saw a lot of talk about this one during the early stages of the COVID quarantine last year. Although I'm not sure if it quite works as a metaphor for our specific current situation, it still feels prophetic of overall trends of the last 30 years, in which an increasing feeling of toxicity in our society leads to both isolation and a rejection of relevant expertise without ever actually addressing the root causes. It feels boldly satirical without ever being heavy-handed or setting up straw men, even when Julianne Moore's character goes down the rabbit hole of alternative medicine and goes to live in an isolated desert commune. It would be very easy for Haynes to directly mock the earnest hippie-cultishness of the whole operation and the people in it, but he just lets us sit with Moore and really consider why none of these extreme measures seem to help. For me the key to the movie is a line of dialogue that sounds like a clear allusion to "The Yellow Wallpaper", and its depiction of a 19th century woman experiencing a very similar mental and physical breakdown. On a simplistic level, Moore's character is sick because the world around her is sick, but looking closer it's more specifically a result of her circumstances as a suburban woman enmeshed in a patriarchal culture that encases her in material comfort without personal fulfillment.